Jack: My, my, you’re incisive today.
Buck: I have to be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be very useful, don’t you think?
Jack: The least you could do is stop being a prick.
Buck: It’s the nitty gritty of reality.
Jack: Well, reality hurts.
Buck: There’s no pixie dust, no royalty to transport. That’s fantasy. This is the next best thing, believe me.
Jack: I don’t need reminding. Well, that fantasy is one of my favorite stories. Thanks for ruining it.
Buck: Why am I not surprised?
Jack: I’ve had quite an influence on popular culture.
Buck: The same is true for me, but I’m cutting edge.
Jack: (sighing) What are you going to do, gut me?
Buck: That’s the idea.
Jack: (toothily) I don’t mean to be square… but why are you doing this?
Buck: (indifferent) It’s necessary. The circumstances demand it.
Jack: …
Buck: Uhh. Who knew you had a seedy underbelly! Thought that only happened in crime fiction.
Jack: (self-absorbed) It’s not fair.
Buck: That’s true, but when I’m done, you will be.
Jack: Huh?
Buck: You do have a nice grin…
Jack: (warming up) I do, don’t I?
Buck: …but your eyes are a bit bent out of shape.
Jack: And here I am, thinking you were being nice for a change.
Buck: I don’t mean to slice and dice your feelings.
Jack: It’s your nature, huh?
Buck: Yes. (sharply) It’s not like I can help it.
Jack: (despondent) At least you don’t stab my back.
Buck: …yet. (stabs Jack’s back)
Jack: What was that for?!
Buck: Dunno. More light, maybe? You sure can hold a candle.
Jack: I sure can, don’t I?
Buck: (sincerely) Yes you can, and it’s brilliant.
Jack: (happily) I’ll forgive you. You know not what you do.
Buck: Yeah. I’m just glad I won’t be turned into pie.
Jack: (miserable) I knew it was too good to be true… once a prick, always a prick.
Buck: It can’t be easy being a pumpkin. Rotting, forgotten in the compost.
Jack: At least I bring joy. What do you draw but blood?
Buck: Blood and meaty orange pulp. Good knowing you, Jack.
Jack: Well, fuck you, Buck. (sarcastic) It was nice while it lasted.
Tag Archives: light
Deus Ex Machina
She walked in the middle of the road, trying to know her own name.
Her world was slathered with broad strokes, with just enough detail to expose a bare minimum of information. She felt unfinished, like a badly developed photograph, as if, when her story ended, everything else would be sucked into her wake and just disappear.
She was a genie in a bottle.
A thunderstorm crashed the air above with alarming rapidity. Lightning flung their light among the green eaves of the oak-lined street. Hail raced across the asphalt. She turned and ran, determined not to scream like a b-movie extra. The tattoo of her frantic steps led her up the drive of a house she knew to be hers. The world had melted into a strobe of shadows. She pushed through the front door and rushed into the livingroom and threw herself onto the green velvet couch. Why wasn’t it so strange that the room and the house, but for the lamp on stand and the couch, was bare? She huddled in horror on the green leather couch. She imagined cackling deities straddling the electric arcs of thunderbolts swarming into her life like so many hornets. How wrong she was!
There was only one god and he watched her in his mind as he crafted her story. He hadn’t decided whether she would be a blonde or a brunette. She clutched at the cycling hues of her hair and sobbed, “What is happening?!” Perhaps it didn’t matter. Was she plump, or is anorexia her way of life? She knocked the lamp over in her panicked oscillations of mass. Haphazard silhouettes camped and leered across the livingroom wall in a precession of devils. She collapsed in a heap on the lush carpeting and, as soon she saw her skin shifting through the ethnicities, sobbed some more. She felt like a flesh-colored prism, no—did she really think that? “Stop it!” she screamed, knowing she wouldn’t be heard, but told. “Stop it…”
She slept the ragged sleep of exhaustion that those teetering at the brink of death or madness welcome. She awoke on a floor smooth as marble and lay for some time in a bare and cold cone of light. She could see nothing in the absolute darkness ahead. Tears sprang from her eyes and pooled on the floor. Her livingroom flickered into existence, then a local pub with regulars laughing through foam flecked lips, then the house of the parents escaping fluid memory, and it was quickly like a rolodex thumbed through at an incredible speed whirring through scenario after scenario until she started screaming.
A river of obscenities churned through her larynx like a niagara, pummeling her own eardrums. Did he want her to say that? Did he hate her—no, himself—so much? He felt uncanny pity for the figment. He soothed her tears, closed her eyes, and when she came to she was seated in front of a warm fire. A mug of hot chocolate steamed on the coffee table and a novel lay splayed on her lap.
“I must have fallen asleep,” she murmured to herself as she watched through a window the snow whitewash the land.
He smiled and clicked save. He would leave it at that.
driving
In the night rain light melts on asphalt, blurring reality.
Earlier today:
I suddenly experience a pseudo-flashback that is subtly but compellingly of psychedelic persuasion. The scene, stark and startlingly illuminated, is blanketed with the sun’s bright relief. I blink involuntarily down a river of steel and plasticine which radiate sheaves of bright colorful frequencies into the cerulean expanse above; they scurry forward apprehensively into a flood that holds and swells until a generous green smear replaces that baleful red glare. The jangle of glint-light rivulets into thinning color and intensifying brightness.
Constant motion concretely reigns in this verdant vista. The trees wave and sway aggressively as their branches, feathery in the heat-haze that simmers in the distance and coarsely bright at a stone’s throw, surge with some unseen force that frolics about, shifting leafy hues to subtle shade after shade into a faux phosphorescence: a patchwork of life and light, moved by a force that is unseen but not unfelt.
Its sweet smell of cut grass, for once strong enough to mask the stink of exhaust, buffets me through the driver’s side window as I coast down this rolling hill of Kansas. This slope penetrates deep suburb, into a congealing glut of apartment complexes and condos, and as it parabolas upward, know it is one of many that wrinkle east toward the higher wilds of Missouri. My brakes clatter but the bright moment doesn’t shatter; it instead imperceptibly deposits me once more to a halt on a hot street that waits for the green signal.
A thirst finds me and I grip-crackle my empty water bottle.
vignettes 