I went looking for America and found Maldova

Ever since the Maldovans found out I went four days without speaking, they treat me like someone who is very sick or very sad. The truth of the matter is I am an extremely healthy horse, inexorably more so than them because my lungs are still pink, and I do not feel sad although some times I think I should. When the days stretch like this between work and snow and sleep, all that one needs to be happy is food and the ability to be warm and dry. This I have, even though some times I am too lazy to get up and put a fire in the stove. I'd rather lay there and shiver. But you cannot be made sad by your own personal shortcomings, if you do you will become a Fucking Ridiculous Moron, which I do not myself claim to be.

"Sit with me," they say, words leaded with the mystique of their accent. "You sit here now. You been okay?" They regard me as if I am some troubling painting. For lack of a better thing to do I am more than happy to play the part. "Oh, you know," I sigh, "I've been alright." What I don't tell them is that I am currently choosing a new life in the same manner one chooses a piece of candy from a vending machine, and pretty soon I will pull the lever, take my selection and walk away. I don't know yet who I will become next, so for the meantime I sit back and wait for my next move like a chess piece, drumming my fingernails against the counter.

As soon as I finished my shift for the morning, Milla appears out of nowhere in her dark make up and gold studded pants. She directs me to sit down with her and then vanishes outside with Elana, where they stand in two clouds of smoke under the dripping awning. Outside the sky has let loose a tantrum of sleet and rain, decimating the snow and slaying the schedules of schools. Life seems pretty grim even though I know better.

Earlier on in the morning, Elana informed me in the empty dining car that I would never have sex again until I learned to wear two socks of the same color. I told her that sounded okay, because sex never led to anything particularly good in my life. "This I am not so sure of," she said, pointing her chin at an angle. But her tone was thoughtful, as if the subject was still up for debate. Later on she told me a long and complicated story that kept twisting, about a boy who loved her (and was stalking her it sounded like, but she didn't seem too concerned, and to be honest I could only understand about a third of her words.) We stood there talking for a long time, she holding an empty tray at shoulder level, me holding a rag in position against the counter, in case the manager should come in and see us. "I went home, to Maldova, and he was calling me and calling me. But then I got sick, and had to sleep all the time, and got so skinny, and still he was calling me." How did you get sick? I asked her. "Oh, you know, witches. They look at me a certain way and I get sick. Very sick, my cousin take care of me." I asked, well...why? Why would the witches curse you like that? I was stuttering, wondering if there was a less draconian manner in which to ask the question. There wasn't. "Because they jealous, I am so beautiful and I have money, because I work at Mcdonalds in West Leb when I am in America. So they curse me, and all I can do is sleep, and sleep and sleep, and can't call him back because I am sleeping so much! So he gets new girlfriend." How, I managed to ask, did you get over being cursed? We see the manager walking out from the kitchen, the door swinging behind her, so Elana starts to walk away. "Water from the church, what you call this?" She asks over her shoulder. Holy water? I try. "Yes, holy water, I drink holy water. This cures me."

Milla returns from her cigarette break to find me hovering over my telephone. "What is?" she asks. Well...I start, wondering how to go about explaining. See, our friend Charles had a dog named Moon who was lost and it turned out he was stuck in a hole for three days. And I haven't heard from Will is a long time so I wrote him and asked, why haven't I heard from you in a long time, are you stuck in a hole with Moon? And he writes me back now and says, 'yes I am in a deep hole but I can still write.' So I am wondering what he means and how I should respond. Milla leanS forward to study his message herself. Then she asks, "Is this deep hole a hole of love?" What? I start laughing. Milla starts laughing. Is this a love hole? I'm not sure, I don't think that's what he meant, I tell her. "Well, you never know, until you ask him." The way she says it, it has the clarity of ice. So reasonable, that everything complicated in the world could be boiled down to this one thing: you never know until you ask him. I almost tempted to write Will back and ask, did you mean you are in a deep hole of love? Is this perhaps what you mean? But I don't. I figure he is in a hole because he is very depressed, because he is forced to take a computer science class in order to graduate. I write back instead: is this a hole caused by computer science? do you need anything? and his response: send down the geek squad.

Milla says she likes to sit in a car when someone else is driving, because it relaxes her. So when I leave the diner to do my errands I take her along. Sometimes it is nice, when the road is a sheet of ice and the weather is shit, to have the radio playing and a Moldovan half asleep in the passenger seat. I go to the bank and then to put gas in the car. I can't think of anything else to do, except go to the post office in White River, which would require getting on the highway, and that is too dangerous in this deluge. Besides, I didn't want to go to the post office just yet because I received a pink notice that there is a package waiting for me. I like to think it is from all of my friends who lived in Seattle who had combined efforts to send me an early Christmas. Of course I know the package is not going to be for me, I get my aunt and uncle's mail by accident all the time and they are big mail-order people. I don't want to go pick it up just yet, so I can keep thinking that it might be something nice for me. I don't want that little dream to be smothered so soon. (You see why I sometimes think I should feel sad?)

So I turn the car around and start to negotiate my way on those slippery roads back to the diner. A few minutes into the return trip Milla lifts her head from the window and casually announces she is getting married. "Not the boy from Oklahoma," She says. "Not him. But Mike, he lives right ere." She points out the window at a nondescript white house sitting directly on the road. By now what I have learned about the Moldovans is a) they say whatever they want, and b) they mean everything they say. So I respond, great, when is the wedding, can I come, I love weddings. "Of course!" She says brightly. "It will be some time before or after New Years." I think, the same could be said of every day there ever was except one. "It will not be December 2nd." Good, we are narrowing it down. Why not December 2nd? "Is his Court Date. Got caught with Mar-a-hoo-wanna." I said, lucky you, you're getting married! And she shrugged. "Is complicated. He was going to marry Elana, so she could get green card, but I start to like him so I say to her, I think I start to like him. And she says, so you must marry him."

This is how the world falls into place for Milla. She needs a green card and so she will marry the 21 year old from down the road who smokes mar-a-hoo-wana and lives with his super lazy and angry (for no apparent reason, he is a Fucking Ridiculous Moron it seems,) brother. What a catch for Milla. The thing is, if she wants to marry him, she will. Snap her fingers and that little stoner will make the trek to the courthouse and give an exalted whisper: I do. My eyes leave the road as they turn to her in wonder. I can't even get a boy to crawl out of a phantom hole and make a return phone call, and by all standards I am prettier than she is. I think, I am missing something. I am missing something that she has. I used to have it but now I've lost it.

Prelude to the Lunatics

I'd like to start by apologizing to the two lunatics in my life. All I can say now that you've both left me is, how I wish you two could have met! If you think you loved me, if you think we got along, well then you two would have just blown each other out straight of the water. We could have had us a time, just the three of us. How I wish we could have lived together as three souls who are locked in devotion to one another beyond rhyme or reason and I'm sure in one of those infinite universes where everything is the same only slightly different, we are.

To the first lunatic who lives in the wilderness: I am sorry for leaving in the manner in which I left. A goodbye would have been polite, a brief explanation would have been helpful, and hiding your car keys was regretable. You've more than made peace with the situation by now but for my own score-settling purposes may I add:

1) goodbye and so long, sianara, adieu, see ya later alligator & ciao
2) I caught a wild hair. Like a lightning bolt that's picked up by a breeze and carried far away from the storm, I no longer fit in. And then there was that business of the other lunatic writing me love notes with his blood for ink upon sheets of paper made from his own skin that he sealed with his own tears. I was haunting his dreams!
3) your keys are buried in the flower pot in the kitchen, to the right of the sink, the petunias.

To the second lunatic who also lives in the wilderness: I am sorry that I raised the hair on your arms. Please excuse me for being in the habit of running my index finger across your lips: first the bottom, then the top, the little divot. I feel terrible that you find the scent of my hair to be intoxicating. I am remorseful of the slight curvation of my spine and that it has captivated you. If I could erase from your brain the memory of my eyelashes fluttering against your cheekbones, I would. When you wake up from dreams (release me!) to find two lovely hands around your throat, forgive me.

If you two are wondering what has become of me, I will tell you. But first, I firmly believe we should march through the events that brought us here one more time. All we all know, nothing is certain. I'm not even sure if this is really the end or not, which is why I demanded that we start here. When we get to this point in the story, we will have caught up with ourselves, and when we continue beyond this point we will have lapped ourselves. Let this be a point of reference. Another reason I wanted to begin here is to tell you where to locate your car keys, because you live all alone up there, 17 miles from town uphill both ways, where the snow never melts, and also I threw away the spare.

Let's be Honest

it takes money, fast light, and devotion to keep something like this alive. And when you stop and think about it, that city where he lives- more of a town, really,- is a long way away.

Love is forever, love is true, and nothing gets in the way of love.

Except for bad weather, a broken alternator, little vacation time in all the wrong months, and no money.

These things can really mess with even the hardiest of love, when it is spread as thinly as ours is, across the country.

baby bones

found this from a few year's back. what a gem.


Baby bones didn’t eat anything. She hadn’t eaten a meal in five days. She just kept thinking about bad things. Like yesterday’s jewels and the end of the world. She thought about what it would be like to lean over and lay on top of Virginia. But then Virginia smokes cigarettes and has sex in the bed next to her and she can only lay there, listening, biting the sheets in agony, not breathing so she won’t miss a single moment.
This is something that’s much more real, much more raw, and forgive me for being pretentious. They were taking a car trip together which was really nice, at first. Then after a few days they got very tired of one another. Virginia got tired of her anyway, but it was harder for Bones. Much harder, because each passing day was like a wheel and every mile was like her face getting closer and closer to that wheel. And very soon she was going to fall into the gears and destroy the system, not to mention her body. They called her baby bones because she didn’t eat anything. It was her way to strike out against the world, and the others cared, mildly. Virginia cared temporarily, and then she got angry. She plonked sarah in front of a cheeseburger and said, God Fucking Damned it. Jesus Christ. Just eat. Then she lit up a cigarette and it burned between her fingers and she watched Bones sit there and sulk. What could be done?
Virginia was sexually compulsive but she tried to steer away from the directions of her friends, particulary short tired skinny ones with no curves and no energy for sex. She imagined. In actuality, yes, she was skinny, too skinny to be too much fun, but when she got going she got going. For Virginia, she would get going. She would be off and so far ahead Virginia would have to hire a jet to catch up. Yes, that’s right, she’d have to fly.
But of course, they had their good moments. One night at a party they were dancing and Virginia was drunk enough and Bones wasn’t, but she didn’t have to be. They were dancing so close and hot that they got a crowd, a very appreciative crowd, and Virginia and Bones liked that. Eventually the crowd asked them to kiss, and between them they raised 88 dollars, that they would split between bones and virginia if only they would make out for a minute or so. So Bones laughed b but she was nervous and she didn’t know what to say. Virginia put one arm around her friend’s waist and said, put the money on that chair. I want to make sure I get it. Then she said, we’ll be right back, and she pulled Bones away and onto the back porch, where she pushed her roughly against the wall and kissed her. Deep, hard, miraculous. It tasted like alcohol but it had the effect of speed on Bones. Then she whispered saltily in her ear, ‘I didn’t want to be payed for our first kiss.” Then they went back inside and kissed in front of the crowd, who were very appreciative, and Bones and Virginia liked that. They kissed all night long and many people speculated that they would probbably go home and do it, and Bones was secretely hoping for that too. But they didn’t it turns out, a friend of theirs drove them home and Virginia went downstairs, fell face first onto her bed and didn’t wake up till past noon the next day. And Bones sat idly next to her for a while and stroked her hair but that felt useless after a while. So she lay down next to her and whispered for her to wake up, but she was too hard asleep. So Bones fell asleep right there next to her hoping to wake up together, but Bones woke up at nine and eventually gave up, got up and made breakfast. For both of them. That got cold, so she had to start her day and they never talked about it again.

from The Church of Supernatural Science and Money Pursuit

this is an excerpt from the Project at hand.

To catch you up to speed, the girl has recently lost both her parents (heart attack, picnic accident) and is living in a house in the very small, antiquated town of her mother on the rugged coast of Maine. As an outsider to the town with plenty of money but little to no desire to do anything (at all), she spends her days in almost complete isolation until she gets sick during the winter with pnemonia.

Marlow is the young attorney who is dealing with her parents' wills and the finances of the estate she has recently aquired.

What follows is an OUTLINE of what happens. If you don't think the writing is very good that's because it's NOT, but it's the general idea and you really just have to start somewhere, don't you.


By the time Marlow visited, I had pneumonia. The winter outside was violent, but it was nothing compared to what was inside my house, inside my body. My fever bounced up and down like the flight path of a hawk over water and my ribs buckled under the gale force strength of wracking coughing fits. It was all I could do to lie in my bed, first burning, then ice, and drink from a glass of water on the nightstand, which, once empty, remained so until I could summon what felt like inhuman reserves of energy to walk to the bathroom sink to refill it.

It was this condition that Marlow found me in. At first he said nothing, but propped me up with an afghan and brought me a glass of near boiling water. Then he left, and returned a half hour later looking grim, and carrying with him a bottle of cough syrup, twelve cans of soup, a box of Tylenol, and six boxes of lemon tea. After heating up one of the cans, he sat next on the edge of the bed and fed me the broth, spoonful by spoonful. Any other time I would never have allowed such an activity to go on but now, barely aware of what was going on, I let him hover over me, as one would over a wounded animal.

“I’m going to tell you a story now,” he said, after some time. “Don’t interrupt me. Don’t speak. Just listen to me.” At that point I lay back down, exhausted to the point that even being fed was too much for me. I could feel the fever smoldering in my forehead, and I hard to grasp his words as they floated in and out of my head.

“When I was growing up, I went to school with a man named Edward Nolen. Since we were little kids. We never got along all that well, but you could say I knew him pretty good. As much as anyone could, anyway. Ed was a real Northerner, one of four sons from family that has been here forever. He was built like a tree, solid. It was like the man was made out of wood. He didn’t smile much, didn’t hardly say anything. He was blonde like his father, dark blonde, the kind that looks gray. He dropped out of school even before he was sixteen, but nobody bothered trying to change his mind because we’d all expected him to do it long before then. He started working with his father and some of his brothers as a boat detailer down at the docks. Apparently he had a real talent for it.
He was making a pretty decent living, and at a real young age, too. But then around the time he was twenty one or twenty two, he left town. He straight up disappeared. Nobody knew where to find him and we were pretty surprised, because nobody in his family had ever left the town like that. People talked, but nobody got the real story from his dad or his family, I geuss they figured it was a private affair, which it was.
Ed was gone a little more than a year, and I had stopped thinking about him completely. And then one day, in the middle of winter, he’s back. And the shocking thing is, he’s got a girl with him. Someone no one has ever met before. The two of them moved into a little house over on Jericho, and sort of hole up there for a week or so. And still no one’s talked to them. I remember I was at the post office and Mr. Nolen was in front of me, and the postlady behind the counter asked him about Ed’s return. She asked all brightly because it was good news, him coming home, and because she is always cheerful it seems. And I remember Mr. Nolen just nodded. I think he smiled, but he just nodded and took his mail and didn’t say anything, and then I stepped up and the post lady looked at me and raised her eyebrows, but I pretended that I hadn’t heard anything. Because I didn’t really care one way or another, why he was home. Like I told you, I had stopped thinking about Ed altogether.
But then, only a few days after that, Ed goes and gets married. They got married in the Congregationalist church and most of the town came out to see it. The whole church was packed with Ed’s people, his family and all of us, I don’t think his bride had one familiar face in the whole church. I mean besides Ed.
Caroline. That was her name. I still don’t know anything about her, but I remember what she looked like. Everybody does, I’m sure. She didn’t look a thing like the girls around here. She was somewhere far away and it showed. The woman looked just like a swan, I swear to heaven. I can’t describe it. She was beautiful though, in that wedding gown and her pale skin. She was very tall. She was nearly as tall as Ed.
Ed, he looked really happy at his wedding. Didn’t smile much, but you could tell anyway. Something had changed about him. He was gentle with her, the way he moved around her. He didn’t take his eye off her once. He was probably thinking, Jesus, how in hell did I manage to get this girl. That’s what we were all thinking.

seven and half minutes

there is a hospital across the street for young girls. it's a mental institution but parents pay a lot of money to have their little darlings housed there, more often than not to save them from the state penitentiary, or worse. Most of the girls are very sick, a few are just plain criminals. Psychotica, sociopaths, sadists, anoretics beyond hope. From my bedroom I can see the barred windows and the faint blue light that eminates from within. this is the first place where I've lived by myself, and the women and girls who live across the street, the blue light and the distant shouts I sometimes here at night, keep me grounded. They are not unlike roomates, except for that they keep to themselves.
I've noticed that at nine thirty exactly, the lights in the rooms begin to shut off for the night, starting at the very left of the building and moving steady as clockwork down the building, a silent cascade of blue institutional light becoming black. there are some times when a curtain might be pulled back, as if someone inside is trying to look out onto the street, but just as many other times the rooms are still.

It takes, from the first light out, to the last, seven and a half minutes. Exactly, to the very second. There is never a moment's deviation.

This came to my attention during certain evenings, when I would be standing over my bed with a number dresses laid out in front of me, deciding which to put out. I used to go out in the evenings, with a number of friends, play aimless games of shuffleboard at the quiet bar a few blocks away. I drank too much and too quickly, but so early in the night that I would be sober by midnight, and restless.

Each morning I would dress for work with the lights off, so early in the morning it was still solidly dark out, darker than it was when I went to bed a few hours before. I felt sick and dizzy, finding less and less things every morning to entice me out of bed, feet on the cold floor, sweater over my head.

It was only a few months ago that I felt differently about things. As if everything that had ever happened in the world had happened for the sole reason for preparing the universe for my arrival, and everything that would happen in the future was just for the sake of sustaining me. Everything was perfect, just as if should be. Life came easily to me then, things jumped into my open hand as soon as I pointed a finger, I knew the answer to the riddle before the joke had even been asked.

A few months into my new life in the new apartment, across from the hospital full of girls, I began making excuses to stay in at night. We all know the excuses that we make when we no longer want to go out at night, and I made every last one of them. And then I stopped making excuses, and gradually people stopped asking.

During this time I would make it a game to have dinner made, the kitchen cleaned, my work prepared for the next day, my clothes laid out, as much as I possible could do, before nine thirty. Then, at nine thirty, I would lie on my bed and watch as the lights began to snap out down the side of the building. Seven and a half minutes later, the building was dark.

one night my friend Shane came and visited and watched me do this ritual. Instead of asking the obvious questions to me, he asked, 'i wonder what you have to do to be put in a room at the left of the building? you're the first one to be in the dark each night.'

It's only seven and a half minutes, I told him, from the start of the building to the end. Seven and half minutes exactly. 'But that is only for one night,' he told me, studying the little dark windows. 'that is fifty two and a half minutes each week. that's probbably more than some of the girls get on their own during the entire day.

And after that, I had a new game. I lay in my bed at night and closed my eyes in thought. if I was a good girl at the institution, and I had taken my meds without hiding them beneath my tongue, and watched television without screaming at the set, and not sent the other girls lapsing into their episodes, and controlled my rage, would I be given a room at the right of the building? If I had used the dull scissors handed out each wednesday afternoon by the orderlies to cut out paper chains instead of using them against the soft skin of my inner arm, and if I had talked to my therapist instead of spitting, and chosen dressing on my salad instead of eating the transluscent shredded lettuce dry, and made my bed in the evening and folded my clothes in the evening, would I be given my seven and a half minutes of freedom, a privelage that no body else received, not even the girl in the room directly next to me?

Could I fall asleep in seven and a half minutes? Hold my breath and keep it held? How many pages of a book could I read, how many times could I write my name in cursive? If I touched myself, could i come, in seven and a half minutes? How many times? could I seduce someone, an old friend, my old boyfriend, his best friend, his brother, his father? If a stranger entered my bedroom at nine thirty, could he be naked and gasping for breath and begging me for one more, by nine thirty seven, halfway to nine thirty eight?

Because I've been good, and I've bitten my teeth down hard against my rage and I moved out of the apartment I shared with ben and into this new house without a sideways word to him about what he did.
Never letting him know that for nearly two years the tricks he put me through were enough to have him committed into the bleak house that stood across from mine? That the glittering secrets he thought he kept from me were never really secrets at all? But I, being too polite to bring it up, thought I'd let it go-

while we were living together, eating together, talking, fucking, kissing, crying, reading, walking, saying the names of objects outloud, filling up bottles with warm water, spitting into sinks, stacking plates, reading directions, turning thing off, begging. Him to me that I let him go, me to him that he give me a shred of something inside, and he told me there was nothing. that he was sick.

but he was lying. he had it, and he sent it away. for a long, long time.

and this is when i bring back the idea of lying next to someone, and having them being so deep inside of themselves that they do not see you. the inches between you becoming miles of empty roads, of city bridges hung with rotted metal and packed with strangers in cars who never want to know you.

and this is when I introduce the idea of lying on my back, happily accepting the blame for everything, and being so pleased with myself for keeping up the fight that I felt like the world was working like the making of a giant clock, and I alone was the one to hear its chiming.

and this is when I escape from the story, and it's no longer fiction, and i emerge from the story like someone raising their body out of the river where they have been drowning in. because I'm running out of time. If i could say it outloud, what I've been afraid to say now for so long. If I could say it I would. That I belonged in a madhouse during that time. that he convinced me I was crazy, such a subtle architect of well constructed lies and manipulations.

i know he lied about many things and that to the girl he left me for, months and months before we broke up, he was as open as a heart transplant patient to a surgeon, and while I put on my white gloves and scratched around in the dirt for a cure for a disease he somehow made me believe I was infected with, he kept me like a glass cage in an aquarium they kept together. Every time I see him I am reminded of that time, and I'm sick of being reminded. that the little wounded animal of our friendship is lying dead on the side of the road I want him to please, please get the hell out of my life.

And that I wrote this in seven and a half minutes.

Poem for the Makatu

body language speaking
and body language screaming
trying to recall what we knew while we
were dreaming, remembering our hands
they were open in the sand
fingers counting five,
four, three, two,
one below, two above
one is watching two in love
two together, one apart
crashing rhythms, beating hearts
waves explode and tide pulls in
under water, under skin,
striving beating breathing yearning
waves that battle, earth
that's turning
counting on your fingers as they beat upon my chest
matching out our rhythm to the ocean swell and crest
counting five, four, three, two
one forgotten
two entangled, ocean's surf is silent strangle
bodies splayed like kelp
to dry, sweat and salt and tears they've cried
the falling tide is not denied
nights is lifting, stop pretending
never fully comprehending the galaxy the soul
collide, falling helpless side by side
hands together, fingers ten, counting over
and again ten, nine, eight and you wake
just to see the sun is rising and the seven seas
surviving and the six, five
foreign to us all is this desire and the dousing of the fire
and the three, two,
one is waking
then demanding, have they lost their understanding?
buried ocean black abyss
closing hearts and breaking fists
this body, it's a vessel and i'm taking out to sea
and the rythym that's dividing seperating
you and me is growing wider, and water
and what are we to do but cast our eyes away like anchors
watch eachother walk the plank
and see the tide is retreating, understand that it
was fleeting from the start.
But there again on the horizon, your silouhette is rising
waving me away into the wind:
five fingers waving five, four, three, two
one aboard
one beyond
one moving forward
on sailing on.