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[fuller-writing]

a meeting

The boy sitting in the back of the taxi measures his breaths. The goal is to inhale as little of the air within the cab as possible. The car smells of gasoline from the engine, smog leaking in through the windows, coffee breath that curls from the wide jaw of his driver.

Inhale, a shallow breath. A dump truck’s next to them on the highway and he almost chokes on the smell of decay.

Wrinkle the nose. Exhale slowly, dread the next breath.

Another brave attempt at respiration. His eyes dart from the car window to the rear-view mirror. He accidentally makes eye contact with the driver and grimaces.

The driver is friendly enough. He’s a squat man with more hair on his face than on the top of his head, and yellow teeth spaced unevenly in his gums. He’ll glance into the mirror every so often to offer his passenger a smile or ask a question.

“Where are you from, you say?”

A pause. “California.”

The driver whistles. “Long way away, innit?”

The boy nods and rests his head against the window. The driver hits a bump in the road. The boy’s teeth rattle. Trees and traffic pass outside the window. He counts cars.

He has travelled a long way. How many cars have passed him, and how many has he passed? 

It started quite by accident, when he found a name and a timeline that matched his. He came to the end of a lifetime search he never knew he’d been on. From that moment of realization, a thousand hypotheticals filled his head: what if she had stayed? What if he could find her?

What if he did? 

Action was easy when the longing in his chest could spur him nowhere else but forward. A hundred miles spun out from under the wheels of crowded buses. He fell asleep standing upright in a train that smelled of cigarettes as the border of one state broke into another. He carved makeshift homes for himself: in the vinyl seat of a seedy diner in El Paso, in the greasy café in Savannah, on the park bench in Richmond. Weeks—maybe it was months now, time has since dulled and become meaningless—passed like the faces of people around him. Dogs have chased him, he has got caught in the rain, he has missed his first taxi. But the address written on the slip of paper in his pocket—that has stayed, miraculously, safe.

Thousands of minutes and thousands of miles conspire to bring him here. To this taxi.

The paper on which her address is written also has her name. Kimberly Park. Age… she’d be in her forties by now. Does she look like him?

“Great weather, innit? Bit warm, though.”

Does she remember him?

He couldn’t find a phone number. He hadn’t looked. Calling her would’ve given her a chance to say no.

“I suppose you wouldn’t mind warm weather, bein’ from California and all,” the driver says.

The boy lifts his head. “Wha—oh, yeah.”

“You ever seen trees like these before?” the driver laughs. “The leaves… they’re gettin’ real beautiful now. Turning all sorts of colors. Nothing like you’d ever seen.”

“Dead leaves are great at being dead,” the boy agrees.

The highway has since melted into the slow-winding street of a suburban neighborhood. Cookie-cutter houses sit in the center of well-trimmed yards. Beyond one perfectly groomed lane lies another, and another. The cab drives on. The driveways lengthen; the yards grow wilder. 

They pull up to a red mailbox with black numbers printed on its post. The mailbox sits at the foot of a hill; wildflowers tangle around it. The boy checks the mailbox, squints, checks the slip of paper, checks the mailbox again. His throat tightens. 

“This is it,” he says, his voice hoarse. He ruffles in his bag for money, pulls out a crumpled wad of cash, dumps it in the driver’s hands— “keep the change.” He forces the door open. Cold air gusts in, and he gets out.

Her driveway slopes upward and winds away into a forest that hides her house. He follows the curve of the asphalt first with his eyes, then with his feet. As he walks he mumbles the same sentence over and over. 

Do you remember? Eighteen years ago.

The driver calls something out the window—goodbye, good luck. See you around, son.

I just wanted to meet you. 

His throat closes up. Greet her, tell her why he’s there, that’s all he has to do. It won’t be hard. He’s practiced the same lines over and over again: wrote them out in a journal, when he still had a journal and a home in San Diego. Recited his speech in the bathroom of a McDonald’s in Texas, and again in Georgia, and again in Maryland, and again in Massachusetts.

I think you’re my….

A sentence, a word, half a word. That’s all he needs. 

Mother.

Mom?

The words taste bitter. His tongue stumbles over the syllables as he sounds it out.

The house draws into view. Three stories, brick walls, a garden. A gate, a real yard with grass and a playground. 

His body falls out of sync with itself, running in two dimensions of time: feet dragging ever slower, heart skipping in his chest.

Tunnel vision. The world is cropped around him. A glimpse of the front door, pumpkins flanking the porch. The asphalt beneath his feet turns to cement of a walkway to the door. Porch steps, lamps in the wall. The forest around him filters the sunset into an orange haze. He emerges from the shadows to the pool of light before the door.

He stares. The chill of the night freezes him in his place.

Take a deep, measured breath. 

I just wanted to meet you.

He rings the doorbell.

For a horrible handful of seconds, nothing happens at all.

Then—there. The front window. The curtains twitch. It’s too late to run.

The door opens, and it’s her.

He stares at her and she at him. Matching eyes blink unsynchronized. He takes in the sight before him as if he can look through her, through her years.

“Hello?” she asks. Her head tilts to the side the way his does when he’s thinking. Her black hair is pinned back from her face so he can see her sharp cheekbones, the curve of her nose, the freckles beneath her eyes. Those are things he thought were only his. The longer he looks at her the more he sees himself.

“Who’s at the door?”

A man looms behind her. He’s tall. His dark face freezes, halfway between a smile and a confused frown. The smell of dinner wafts in from the kitchen. Feet thunder across linoleum. A high pitched giggle rings out, then a squeal. 

“Eugene, give it back!”

“Boys—” the man turns, his gaze on the stranger rips away.

The boy has his mother’s attention, and hers only.

“Can I help you?” she speaks again. His stomach knots. Her gaze burns into his face. Recognition flickers behind her eyes.

“H—I, uh, I…” he steps back, drawing out of the porch light. “I, um—I’m sorry, I think I have the wrong house.”

“Wait—” she straightens up. Her eyes blaze. Her knuckles are white against the doorframe. She reaches an arm out and brushes a stray moth away from her face. 

He’s drowning in the heat of the porch light. He takes a jerking step backward, another one, another one, stumbles off her porch. His feet hit the smooth asphalt of the driveway and he turns. 

“Sorry,” he says again. His voice catches in his throat. She can’t hear him. His spine is straight, his neck tingling as if he’s being watched. He walks briskly down the drive, splashes in a puddle. The trees hide her house from view and he runs.

He measures his breaths again. 

Inhale, exhale. His arms pump. Humid air coils in his ribcage, liquefies, drowns him. 

Inhale, exhale. His chest tightens, his throat tightens. He smells coffee, gasoline. Spices. Flowers. Rain. The decay of leaves and acorns—it is sweet.

Inhale, exhale, inhale—he shudders to a stop. His breath fails him. His heart hammers against his sternum and hot blood rushes to his face, and his head spins, and his eyes burn, and he smells flowers. She smelled like flowers.

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Retch. Double over. Gasp for breath. Lose said breath. Exhale again. 

He straightens up, looks around. He’s alone in the street.

He paces the sidewalk. Two steps per damp square of cement. Dead leaves lie plastered in the street. Autumn is beautiful because it is dying.

Head down, hands in pockets. He stares at the pavement and nothing else. One last papery leaf rips away from its branch and spins into the street. 

He walks around another loop, another cul-de-sac, until he memorizes the name of every street, every sidewalk crack, every string of lights ornamenting every pristine house.

Perhaps he will stop circling. He will set his toes in the right direction, and they will steer him towards the house that radiates warmth and bright lights, to a stretch of backyard that belongs to childhood. He will take a deep breath, and his heart will tremble and the minutes will fly in confusion around him, a flock of scattering doves peppering the sky. His head will swim, his chest will burn. He will stumble over his practiced speech. He is imperfect and stuttering.

And she will listen. And she will tilt her head the way he does when he thinks, and she will smile while tears spring to her eyes. Her arms will open. She will hug him, the house will reel him in, they will be together at last. For as imperfect as the son is, the mother is doubly so. And they, in the broken, jerking steps of one relearning how to walk, will learn how to love.

He rounds the corner. Or.

Or he will walk farther than any life has walked before. He will circumnavigate the world, if the world is contained in these clean suburban streets. His bones will bruise as he paces the distance of the farthest star, though his feet will not leave the pavement.

Or.

Even better: suppose he catches a bus, rides to the city and gets lost in a sea of neon lights and fluid chatter and bowed heads. He will spend his days chasing taxis and pigeons. He’ll buy hotdogs from the vendors and burn his tongue on expensive coffee. And, when he has grown tired of the lights, or chased the last bird, he will catch another bus, this time to another city. He will hitchhike, he will sail, he will fly. The tree-lined streets, he’ll trade for deserts, for oceans, for skyscrapers. He will leave this life and live a thousand others.

The boy rounds the corner. From here he sees the world: the hill, dotted with wildflowers. The red mailbox. The weeping trees, their boughs bent and bare. Purple leaves slick the driveway. The house—her house—rests deep in the woods. Its chimney peeks out between spindly branches of dying trees.

The house is luminous against a backdrop of cold decay. Orange light pours from its windows; smoke curls from the chimney. In the house, she sits with a man and their children. They eat every meal together and discuss their days. Winter will come and they will have sweaters to wear, and snow to build forts out of, and cookies to bake. If he draws towards the house, like moth to a flame, the life will envelop him. His portrait can rest inside their family album.

Outside, the wild forest awakens. When it gets cold out, the trees will sleep. Haggard animals will curl up beside the house and dream of the other side of the wall. Then they will rise, run through the moonlight, and forage for something of their own to steal from the snow banks.

The boy stops at the corner of the sidewalk. The light drains from the sky. Evening has sunk into night, suddenly, and the boy must strain his eyes to discern the chimney from the trees around it. Streetlights flicker on.

He stands on the corner and watches the night envelop her house.

[fuller-writing]

The Great Equalizer

It was a refugee camp for flies. They were the only living organism, besides E. Coli and various viruses, that were not starving. They populated outhouses, lovingly laying their larvae into the depths of the latrines like cradles.

The humans lived in the crevices that the flies kindly allowed them. The insects beating wings and octagonal eyes were just another drone flying overhead, another watchful neighbor ready to sacrifice them. The children played with the flies because there was nothing else. The girls swatted them and stole their carcasses for dolls; the boys chased them and pretended to fight a gallant battle against the insects. There was a roaring trade of particularly unique dead flies among the refugees ages five to ten. One girl, Anna, was the envy of the rest. She had found a fly with a forest green head. She claimed to have felt a sharp bite in the middle of the night and sleepily swatted it. It had been the best day so far in the camp.

The parents were grateful for the flies as a distraction for their children. Their days were filled with danger, hoping, and lines. The lines were everywhere. Standing in lines became their new occupation. Men and women who had been surgeons and teachers and businessmen learned a new trade. One of their elbows posed to strike, alert eyes, and slow, monotonous shuffling. They snaked back and forth across the tiny camp so no one was quite sure where one queue ended and another began. There were silent processions for food and drinking water--silent until a fight broke out.

Grown men risked their lives for soggy root vegetables. Men who used to reach into arteries with precise metal tools now reached without tools into the watery soup and brought it to their mouth before it could run through their fingers.

Adrian dodged in between the milling refugees. He did not lift his shining shoes above the delicate layer of human fecal matter that covered the entire camp, like freshly fallen snow. He ducked into one of the larger tents, bedecked with the symbols of permanence-- splints of wood covering holes, pieces of makeshift furniture marking high class. Five women sat on the edge of their throne-like, broken plastic chairs.

Adrian smiled curtly at them. “I will not lie to you, I’ve traveled quite far for this.”

All five of the women nodded. They were all sitting up very straight, hands folded delicately in their laps, faces the perfect mixture of interested and pleasantly smiling. Adrian wasn’t fooled: these women were warriors. Somebody had come in between their babies and happiness, and as any animal example in the animal kingdom would attest, this made them the most dangerous people in the refugee camp.

“Most of you will not make it through this process. You will not be willing to commit. But the few who do make it will not regret it. We will begin by learning the customs of America, the country where I have found you homes. You have heard of it, I’m sure.”

The women nodded again. All of their television was from America and American soldiers had invaded-- “helped”--their country. It was the capital of this world, the land of the free that had trapped them in this camp.

“We will start with language. You all speak English, of course. Now you have to master the accent. I expect every single one of you to teach your children and husbands everything you learn here. Otherwise, I will ask you to leave this tent right now.”

The women seemed to lean forward, and Adrian began teaching.

New York City, The Bronx

The Carver family had only one child. Jeremy was fifteen, loved guitar, hated math, and knew nothing about a refugee camp on a different continent. Of course, these weren’t the only details Adrian knew about Jeremy Carver. Adrian knew every number associated with the boy--social security, home address, telephone, student ID. He knew every thought that crossed Jeremy’s mind--how angry he was at his parents for making him move away, how guilty he felt about the fact that he didn’t want to help his severely Alzheimer’s affected grandmother in her retirement home in Philadelphia. Yes, Adrian had made it his year’s work to learn everything about the Carver family. Any good assassin would have done the same.

The refugee family came over in a crate inside a cargo plane. There wasn’t room in the crate to bring their language; only English syllables would fit. There was no place for their religion, with its beautifully complicated customs and decadent clothing. There was no space even for their names. Those were left those behind as well. For a terrifying twelve hours, the refugee family had no names or identities.

But when they landed and extricated themselves from the cargo plane, the wife smiled at her fifteen year-old-son to conceal her fear and called him “Jeremy”, and the husband put an arm around her waist and handed over the passports with the last name “Carver.”

Later that day, the new Carver family visited the retirement home exactly on time. Mr. Carver’s mother screamed that she didn’t know who these people were and that they were imposters for her son and daughter in law. The nurses smiled sadly and naively soothed the distressed, demented woman. The plan had gone off without a hitch.

Jeremy didn’t know where he was. His heart was pounding out of his chest, and he thought he might pass out. He certainly wasn’t getting enough oxygen to his brain, as he could only stand to breathe through his mouth. Even then, he could taste the fecal matter and rotting bodies and grime. Behind him, his mother was sobbing, her head whipping around like a trapped animal. His father was furious, bellowing to the smoky sky, stopping passersby and shaking them, yelling at them to give him an answer. Jeremy didn’t know what to think. Even after the dark plane ride and the long walk across the sand with a bag over his head, he couldn’t shake the thought that he was dreaming.

Some of the people around him whispered and watched them. A few women tried to comfort his mother, but she was too hysterical to notice. Most were too afraid of his rampaging father to approach the newcomers. Then a man stepped into the range of fury, and Mr. Carver seized him by his t-shirt and shook him.

“What the hell is going on? What’s happening?”

The man remained entirely calm and pointedly looked down at Mr. Carver’s death grip on his t-shirt. Apparently, he wouldn’t speak until Jeremy’s father let him go. With immense will-power, Mr. Carver did.

“Hello, Mr. Carver and Mrs. Carver. Hello Jeremy. My name is Adrian” Jeremy jumped at his name. He racked his brain to remember if he had ever met this man before.

“Where are we? I demand to be taken back to my house! Otherwise, the police will hear about this!”

“To answer your question, this is a refugee camp thousands of miles away from Philadelphia. It is a refugee camp from a war that you didn’t pay attention to.”

Mr. Carver’s jaw opened and closed like a broken marionette. Mrs. Carver collapsed to the muddy ground and beat at it like a child. Jeremy could only look at Adrian.

“But,” Jeremy spoke and his voice was tremulous and small, “I don’t get it. We didn’t do anything wrong. We don’t deserve this.”

Adrian threw his head back and laughed from the belly, so long and loud that Jeremy felt immensely uncomfortable. He stopped so suddenly, that Jeremy knew he had never really found it funny at all.

“My dear boy. Do you really think that anyone deserves this?”

[fuller-writing]

A Story of a Girl, From the Point of View of a Wristwatch

On the Christmas morning when she was seven, she wanted to wear me on her right wrist, but her mother persuaded her otherwise. Some kids suck their thumb, some carry a security blanket; she checked her left wrist and I would happily show her the time. We were a pair, one is never seen without the other.

I have five settings and five buttons. I tick endlessly forward and weigh on the pliable skin beneath. The skin that I know hasn’t seen the sun in years. The one bound by the constraints of my girth and swaddled in my protective skin. Nothing can get to that skin. I would sooner shatter; I would be the canary in the coal mine. My screen would implode, my last sputtering clicking dies out, and my boxy numbers fade to the grey-green background.

But how can I protect my home when it prays on itself? When the thrumming of blood beneath the albino strip where I sit releases from the pressure. I sit here on my nest of eggs and cultivate them. Sweat accumulates. Still, I sit and protect. Vigilant, counting the seconds. But I fly off without any choice of the matter and I come home to a massacre.

Whereas once I was a mother, now I am an accomplice. Hiding my shame behind the blue of my band, feeling the sickening crunch of a scab and the subtle drip of a wound reopened. The police never come. I am a good accomplice. I hide the secrets that I loathe and keep the pulse of the warm wrist beneath. Just a couple more days now, and I want my message to seep through my plastic casing into her bloodstream, flashing a message of hope in her dark brain like the nuclear bomb.

For a year--31,500,000 seconds that I marked with digital transitions--there is always another cut. And I am nothing but an un-absorbent bandage: useless, hopeless, desperate. As she falls, I fall with her. I churn through the moments and embrace the wrist beneath, holding it and congratulating her for surviving each second. And like a miracle, she survived.

But she does not survive without scars. the wrinkled tissue hurts worse than a fresh wound because now I am her shackle. my harmlessly counting down serves as a mask she doesn't think can be taken off. So when she next leaves me behind, I worry and resign myself to serve as a band-aid, friend, and tear catchment once more.

When she returns, the skin is warm. But strangely dry and perhaps less luminescent. The scars fade from pink to white, the disgusting white canvas to a healthy tan. Now the secret I hid for so long isn’t a secret to those who matter. it came out slowly, not like a magicians reveal, but in pieces like curdled milk.

It doesn’t get recognized often. I extrapolate this only from the fact that we don’t talk much anymore. When we do, it is with stilted pauses of ex-lovers or ex-criminals. There is too much pain between us. There was always pain sandwiched there, but now the hurt is too far flung to hide beneath my wingspan. I don’t mind watching, catching glimpses from my new cold pedestal on her desk.

She smiles now, something I could never see from my previous vantage point. Yes, there are scars often in need of awkward explanations--or lies--that I could always save her from having to stutter through. But she’s learned to shrug and ignore the comments.

There are those who wish to share in her pain as I once did, to connect with her over a shared experience, but they are mistaken. She was alone in that experience, alone except for me, and now the only experience she wants to share is joy. Her pain is concentrated in molecules beneath those thin white lines, and all the secrets that led to them are safely stored within my infinite permutations of numbers.

[fuller-writing]

The Flooring Design of Rudy Veira

The Flooring Design of Rudy Veira

There are many great things about being a plumber. Constant jobs for one–people will never learn to plunge their own toilets, and as long as they don’t, The Plumber would never be unemployed. Intense job satisfaction for another– every war with a toilet or sink could be won.

But most of all, The Plumber could follow his dreams for the theatre in a way he never thought possible. Every townhouse…

[fuller-writing]

On Searching and Sledgehammers

On Searching and Sledgehammers

A well-acknowledged fact about sledgehammers is that the activity exponentially decreases in fun. The first slam of the hammer into plaster is euphoric. Fault lines form and you are a 7.9 on the Richter Scale. Another hit and a hole forms. Another one, this time raised with scientific accuracy, and the hole widens. After a minute or two, it is work.

As the saying goes, there are many ways to skin…

[fuller-writing]

My First Love

My first love was dangerous. You rode on the back of motorcycles without a helmet and imitated the shape of the wind. You sat with me in a cocoon of blankets while my thoughts drifted away like helium balloons and then you used them for target practice. You danced with me to give me hope and fought with me to take away my dignity. You gave me the power to compare myself to gods and I sat on your shoulders to clutch desperately at their feet, a million miles above.

You were infinite and uncontrollable; I was close-minded and neurotic. When I took you home to meet my mom, she smiled and giggled at your jokes. Then, when I closed the door behind you, mom stayed my hand from the deadbolt. She looked me in the eyes and said “We can fix it.”

You were my first love, fiction writing. We started off as just friends, then I began to admire you. I found myself staring at you in the library, casually meeting you in the bookstore, and asking you to read me stories until I fell asleep.

I saw you at your worst, and blamed circumstance; and saw you at your best, and blamed intrinsic goodness. I fell in love with you, writing, long before our first date-- as horrifically awkward as any first date has the right to be, which I titled ‘Journey to Dreamland’.

Now, we are suspended in the limbo between just dating and marriage-- between writing as a hobby and writing as a career. We are far from either option, yet I find myself perusing through wedding magazines, my imagination always running twenty steps ahead of me. There’s always an excuse--I have to finish school and make money to provide for us; it probably would never work out anyway; weddings are expensive and hard to plan; If only we had more time.

Time has always stood between us, the great unforeseen albatross, wider than rejection letters or nonplussed comments. I always walk past you on my way to write my assignments-- the urgent always takes precedent over the important. I’ll see you slump with disappointment as I ignore you for another day and I know that our story grows stale every hour I could be spending with you.

You, fiction, do not like to be ignored. By the time you’ve forgiven me and we’re back into our regular routine, I have to leave again. Everytime I come back, I’ve forgotten how you are supposed to fit in my arms, and we endure an uncomfortable embrace with too many elbows as I remember how the words should form. The words come too structured at first, argumentative and condescending--the tone I use in essay writing. Then I lower my voice and the characters come out flat and passive when they should be bursting off the page and haunting my dreams. I shorten my sentences. I vary the length, carefully adding adverbs and tossing action verbs to further the plot.

Then I describe something slowly, relishing in the poetry off it. It feels like sticking my hands in pizza dough and pressing down with my fists; I don’t knead it, just enjoy the feeling of the goo around my wrists. Sometimes the dough is too wet and my hands come away covered in the residue. Other times there is too much flour, rendering the dough rigid and unyielding.

Characters are always the best part. At sixteen, I should have given up imaginary friends, but we've both invested too much in these people to realize they're all in our heads. We mold them at the kitchen table out of marble and paper, always too perfect or too flimsy. Then, seemingly without my help, they grow skin and stitch bones. I release them and they get hurt-- they fall off their bikes, they entrust their love to the wrong person, they fail and give up. But when they come back to me, they have scars and hair and birthmarks and translucent veins in the crease of their eyelids. They become, in short, human. I feel like an odd mixture of parent, friend, and deity as we watch them from our front porch, you always with your hand on my shoulder.

Sometimes, I feel as if I’m only loving you out of habit. I’m only trying to prove someone wrong--maybe it’s me. But then together, we flip through our old photographs. I laugh at my bad haircuts and how awkward we fit together, our hands clasped around clumsy characters and misused adjectives. Then we’ll take a picture together, marking our story, and add it to the album to endure ridicule only days later.

And so it is to you that I make this promise, a vow that I can't save for a wedding. Writing, you are my final destination. You are plan A-Z. Whether I keep our love always between the pages on a notebook, like a perfectly pressed rose, or declare it on a 40 foot billboard in Times Square, I am forever dedicated to you. I promise to keep writing far too many beginning and endings and always forgetting about the in between, but you know I’ll go back if the story was meant to be mine. If I have to rewrite every word a hundred times, I promise to relish the journey. I’ll try to be proud of you; I’ll hold your hand in public and show you off to my friends without making excuses. Writing, I have been yours since my first story and will be till my last.  

[fuller-writing]

Date plan:

1: Take them to an art gallery. 2: Spend entire time making funny captions for each painting. 3: Pray they cross the line first with their jokes. 4: Smile and laugh.

@jarfidd

[fuller-writing]

Why They’re Called Wisdom Teeth

Nitrous Oxide feels too cold in my nostrils. I imagine it is like the steam of a freezer in some horrid heat, condescending and twirling in cold clouds as I unwillingly inhale vapor into my lungs. The steam wants to pull me up into the sky with it, but I don’t want to drift. I want to stay down here with the bite of the needle and the nurses’ careful small talk. I want to watch the blood pool in my mouth and watch the tip of that crooked, white tooth appear, like an untended gravestone.

I want to have enough sense about me that I remember everything. I don’t want the lap belt and the IV strapped to my arm and the bib held for me by a curious dental student. I imagine my head lolling helplessly into the knife, splitting open my tongue and bubbly saliva dripping down the left corner of my mouth before a nurse wipes it with a cloth and a grimace. I know that somewhere in the recesses of my unconscious brain, I am screaming. I am asleep, but in the worst pain of my life.

And that’s the first lesson you learn from removing your wisdom teeth. That someday, life will become a necklace of surgeries, but don’t stack those beads too proudly.

Now it feels as though only seconds have passed when someone shakes me awake. In a haze that could be a dream, I place both feet on the ground and almost immediately topple over. Muttering incoherently around two pieces of gauze, I float through.

Somewhere in this haze, there is the snap of a picture, a nap in the backseat of a car, mumbled and unanswered questions, and a desperate thirst. I have never been so thirsty. My whole mouth has metamorphosed into the quadrantal gauzy material and no amount of saliva can dampen it. I lean over the sink, but arms pull me back. They’re right, I suppose. A glass, that’s what I need. But they take the glass from me also. They are laughing at me, and I am dying of thirst.

“Straw!” I say through my desert of a mouth.

Why don’t they understand me? I need a straw. I need a glass. I need liquid! I repeat myself, tottering dangerously until they understand. They give me the glass, but my mouth cannot form around it. How are lips supposed to clasp around something circular? The water I desire dribbles down my chin and onto the counter. What little liquid I do manage to swallow tastes like blood and latex gloves.

“Maybe you should stop,” Sarah says, chuckling--she wouldn’t be laughing if her mouth were as dry as mine. If she were as thirsty as I, the only words she would be able to say would be “straw” and “water.”

The second lesson you learn from losing your wisdom teeth is that you don’t always have to do everything yourself; let others take care of it. Let your sister sit you down and hand you the straw and the glass of water, instead of bumbling around like an idiot. Treasure the moments when someone cares about you enough to take your responsibility, even for your own health, onto their shoulders.

I regain lucidity in increments as I lie on the couch. First, there is a sudden self-awareness. I grasp onto my own thoughts, pull them up to my frame of vision and discover they make no sense. The noise on TV is just material for my rampant mind, and then suddenly, it is a storyline with characters and coherent images.

The pain won’t set in yet, although that will be the lesson that you are most apt to give, the one that you will remember. You will remember the first mistake you make in crunching down on some cereal and the immediate stabbing pain. You will remember vowing to never eat pudding again. You will remember the dreaded process of cleaning the new holes in your mouth-- cold water on sensitive skin, shrivelling like a raisin.

That is why they are called wisdom teeth. The removal of something you don’t really need and never really asked for, but it still hurts. Getting your wisdom teeth taken out feels like learning something important all at once, and how naive would we be to think that wouldn’t be painful. There was wisdom within those rebellious molars, but only after extracting and examining both the tooth and the hole left behind.

There is something to be said for loss. I had never much noticed my back gums until they were hollow. The stitches will dissolve, and that is a loss. My immune system will pile in cartilage and blood to fill the areas, and that too is a loss. We are forever losing, falling apart, dissolving like stitches in a long surgery of agonizing entropy. And replacing those moments in the only true currency the universe can offer, is wisdom.

[fuller-writing]

Love was stored in the liquor cabinet. I could have a taste-- just a dip of my tongue into the bitter promise of forever.

fuller-writing.tumblr.com

[fuller-writing]

Crying in the Cafeteria

My teacher is crying in the cafeteria. The teacher who is over six feet tall and wears stylish black heeled boots and winged eyeliner and leather jackets with extraneous zippers everyday. 

The teacher who prances exuberantly in front of the classroom waving Julius Caesar and riling up the students into caring deeply about a play written hundreds of years ago. The teacher who snaps her gum to get your attention and grades papers with emoticons. She is crying into her hand as the Social Studies teacher wards off concerned and interested students.

Rumors spread, of course. We guess everything we think a twenty-something middle school teacher could have to cry about– her boyfriend broke up with her, her pet died, she found out she is pregnant, a family member is sick, a student told her she was a bad teacher. If we had made a list of a thousand items from most likely to least likely, we still never would have guessed the truth. Seventh grade was a time when we never would have guessed that only a couple miles away, a man had killed 20 little babies. Seventh grade was the last time when a school shooting seemed a remote possibility.

There was talk of going home early, although none of the students knew why. Outside, there was no sign of snow. In the end, we stayed for the entire day, although the teachers, still the only ones in the building who knew the truth, just drifted through the remaining hours. Every teacher set boring tasks to be completed in silence, much to the complaints of the students. I know now why the teachers couldn’t bear to stand in front of us and act as though it were any other day. They were busy watching the door, their eyes sometimes drifting to cabinets and closets. They were busy wondering if they could protect us. If their quick thinking and altruism could be enough to stop the bullets of an AR-15 assault rifle.

I only heard about it at 2:50 on the bus ride home that day. My best friend had received a text from her mom, but none of us had been allowed to check our phones during school. I remember that she had to explain it to me several times. I asked questions like, “How many did he kill?” and “But how did he kill them?” And she gave me answers like, “I don’t know, my mom says about 20 and a couple teachers” and “With a gun.”

But those weren’t the answers I was really looking for. I didn’t want a death count. I wanted an estimate of the number of years of life lost. I wanted a numerical answer to how many times over the next forty years their parents would stare into the smiling eyes of their five year’s school photo old and try to imagine them with acne or facial hair or wedding dresses. I wanted a hypothesis at the number of prescriptions filled out for PTSD from the other students. I didn’t want to know the weapon. I wanted to know how he had come across it. I wanted to know how their lock down drill had failed as naively as a duck-and-cover method from the atomic bomb.

I acted cool, of course. I was 45 miles away from Sandy Hook Elementary School, I was 7 years older than the students killed, and I went to a school with only around 500 students. These numbers were a thin barrier between me and something unthinkable. There was no real reason that I was alive and these 26 people were dead. I callously shrugged it off because I was in seventh grade and I was trying to stay calm for my friends and I didn’t want to go to school thinking about it every day. I don’t think, at that point in my life, I ever expected our lawmakers to take the same apathetic stance.

My mom hugged me that afternoon, even though I was in the stage of life when hugging me was like hugging an extremely embarrassed prickly pear cactus. “Every parent across America should be hugging their child and telling them that they love them today,” my mom said. I returned the sentiment without much thought. I didn’t think how much those parents would pay to hear their child say ‘I love you’ one more time or how the phantom feel of their baby’s chubby arms around their necks would haunt them.

December 14, 2012 was a day of endings. The ending of lives and my own innocence. I learned that day that in our constitution, the 2nd Amendment–the right to own a gun– came before the 1st Amendment–the right to life; that my safety was dependent only on the whims of the adults around me; that my government cared more for the NRA than their own children.

From that day on, lockdown drills were never as much fun. Now, there is no giggling. We scrunch ourselves into tighter balls and, just like my seventh grade teachers, plan our escape. My last one, I hid under a grand piano with five of my best friends and we all trembled as the assistant principal checked the door. A lockdown drill is not a safety precaution; it is a memorial service. As the lights dim to nothing and the shades are drawn, we are all dressed in black. The loudspeaker blares like the officiant at a funeral: We are now going into lockdown. We bow our heads and imagine, for half-an-hour, how it must have felt to be a five year old staring down the barrel of a gun. They never tell us if it is a drill.

This is the best protection the United States government can offer us: a piano canvas and our backpacks clutched to our chests. In school, the only lesson you ever need to learn is how to get really good at hide-and-seek.

There is another one now. Another ‘anomaly’. According to some estimates, it’s around the 18th ‘anomaly’ this year. I wonder how many ‘anomalies’ it will take before they admit it is a pattern. I hear about the latest shooting on the radio while passing through the kitchen. Now, five years after Sandy Hook, I am not confused. My first thought when I hear the word ‘school’ on the news is “another one”.  I am not shocked. I am a girl raised in a country where school shootings are a part of life. I am a girl desensitized to the massacre of children fifty minutes from my house. I am a girl who had her first kiss on a playground built in memory of a murdered five year old. I am a girl like every other child in Connecticut who was in school on December 14, 2012; ever since that day, we have all wondered ‘why wasn’t it enough?’ I am just a tiny part of the state that had a school shooting back when school shootings were still news.

I am a girl who is going to be a teacher. Teachers don’t take an oath to protect and serve, yet they are the front lines in a battle that America is losing. There isn’t a single teacher–or student–in America who hasn’t wondered what they would do in a school shooting. I’d be willing to bet that most of the teachers, administrators, and security guards around the country have come to the same grim conclusion: that there is a unspoken clause in their job description.

What do I want to be when I grow up? Anything but a statistic; anything but the mother of a dead child; anything but a human shield; anything but canon fodder in defense of a murderer’s right to murder;  anything but a teacher crying in the cafeteria.

[fuller-writing]

The refugee germs settled there, fell in love, raised their children to be stronger than themselves. Viruses rarely have trouble achieving the American Dream.

The Four Horaces of The Epic Relax, fuller-writing.tumblr.com

[fuller-writing]

The Four Horaces of the Epic Relax

The Beast cantered in a rumbling, sputtering, whining orchestra of engine problems. 

The cellophane wrap covering the windows strained toward the four yawning mouths, sheets of frothing saliva. The black paint chipped away in places to reveal the red muscle and white bones of the Ford, the words LAST JUDGEMENT emblazoned on the rear windshield. The front tires were deflated almost to the hubcap; with every tortured revolution, the Beast appeared to nod its head: the confused consent of an animal under the lash of the whip.

The driver tapped his foot on the gas, revving the engine until his metal-toed boot reached the floor, then releasing to a slowing coast. He fiddled with a plastic watch over the wheel and stared more often at the watch than the road. He wove slightly, toeing the guidelines on both sides of the road, sometimes falling onto the rumbles and scratching the guard rail, but never letting a second slide by without his watchful eye. None of the other three men noticed as sparks flew past their flimsy windows or as cars on the opposite vector swerved and honked their displeasure.

“Almost there,” the man sitting behind the driver muttered. He had a voice permanently distorted by the copious amount of mucus clogging his sinuses.

The driver nodded, and skidded across a turn, narrowly avoiding a fatal crash with a silver punch buggy. The turn had not been apparent from the highway, as the cement entrance to the dirt road had decomposed into gravel and thick, prickly plants from years of neglect.

The Beast galloped down the barely-there tire imprints, rearing up over the bumps and diving down into the ditches. The driver took his eyes away from his watch just long enough to slam a foot on the brake and instinctively pull back on the steering wheel. The Beast sighed in relief as the driver turned the key in the ignition.

Suddenly, without discussion, the brother sitting in the backseat behind the driver swung his legs out of the car. He was a stout man with papery skin, pockmarked as though someone had spent their time poking through the yellowy parchment with a pen knife. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief carved from desert sand. He walked with small, shuffling steps toward the front door of a blue farmhouse.

With the same shuffling movements, the man scraped his knuckles across the door. The house awakened, stirring like a hive of bees. A mumble of voices moved closer to the front door, scuffling, shouting. The door banged open, hitting the interior wall and then rebounding off the back of a woman standing in the doorway. A sluice of children surged forward. They pushed and crowded around the doorway, standing on tiptoe to see the visitor but not daring to cross over the threshold.

“Hello,” the woman smiled, both hands gripping the t-shirts of two of the more precocious boys.

“Good afternoon. Are you Sarah Moore? My name is Peter Horace. Would you like to sign up for an unforgettable vacation on ‘Epic Relax tours and cruises?’” Peter clicked a ballpoint pen threateningly, brandishing the clipboard and pamphlet at her.

“Erm, no thank-you,” Mrs. Moore said, already pushing the door closed, “I don’t think it’s in our budget right now.”

Behind them, the Beast’s door slammed as the second Horace brother emerged from the passenger seat.

Peter waved a grimy hand toward the monstrosity of a man, “My brother, Warren Horace.”

Warren shared nothing with Peter in face or body. Large and brutish, he expanded out of his shirt like an overstuffed sausage. He didn’t speak, only nodded curtly at Mrs. Moore. The children shrank back, their chattering dying away like an audience before a play.

“That’s quite alright,” Peter Horace said pleasantly, carefully folding the dusty handkerchief, then swiping at an enormous booger in his cavernous nostril. “Would you be so kind as to offer us something to drink? We have had such a long drive.”

The family had little choice but to scamper out of the way as Warren barreled through the door. The children dissipated into alcoves and corners to watch the adults’ interaction. Sarah Moore led the retreat into the kitchen and strategically placed herself behind the island as the two Horace brothers took seats across from her.

Warren tapped a rhythm on her distressed-wood table and she winced in time to the beat. Long-short-short. Long-short-short. Thud-thwack-thwack.

“Epic Relax tours and cruises offers an installment plan of payment.”

Thud-thwack-thwack.

“Is that so,” thwack-thwack.

“Yes, on the cruise you’ll find five-star chefs, fascinating entertainment, and full service.”

Thud-thwack-thwack.

“I see,” thwack-thwack, “but we are really not interested.”

“Of course, you wouldn’t think so,” thud, thud. Warren ended his pattern abruptly, and somehow Sarah felt as though she had lost an argument.

“Well if that’s all…” she trailed off.

“Then I suppose we’d better have a glass of water. It was rather rude of you not to offer,” it was a new voice. A high snide buzzing, like a gnat eating away at your ear. Mrs. Moore jumped as a third man hobbled into her kitchen. Man, or more accurately, skeleton. Even through baggy clothes, every one of his bones protruded grotesquely, from his bulbous knee caps to the point of his shoulder to every mountainous vertebrae. Every part of him that wasn’t bone—his eyes, his thin skin, his hair—receded into the bone. The bone devoured it, greedy for any sustenance.

“Who are you?” Mrs. Moore asked. From the corner, her oldest girl stared in horror at the skeleton. Mrs. Moore would tell her not to gawk, but felt that would have been hypocritical.

“Farley Horace,” the skeleton said, the corners of his mouth hugging his teeth amorously as his lips moved.

The wooden kitchen stool looked obese next to Farley Horace. His brothers—Sarah didn’t see how any of them could be brothers—scooched down so Farley could rest his pointy elbows on the table. “Is Mr. Moore home?”

“No,” Sarah Moore lied.

Farley Horace may have attempted to raise his eyebrows, but the skin of his forehead so loved his skull, they could not break the embrace.

Proving her lie, just then, Isaac Moore came bounding down the stairs. A boisterous man with a permanent smile, he contrasted with his wife as only two miserably married people can.

“What’s this?”

The three Horace men gave their spiel again, Mrs. Moore’s mouth tightening in displeasure at every word. The family ushered them out of the door only by force of numbers and a battering ram of polite refusals.

“No luck?” the driver asked his brothers as they slammed the Beast’s doors.

“Not yet,” the other three replied, their distinct voices harmonizing with the Beast’s engine.

Pestilence

The sickness came months later, long after Sarah Moore had forgotten the Horace men of the Epic Relax tours and cruises. It came like ants, marching purposefully, attacking in numbers, learning from their mistakes, and resurging once again.

It burrowed through the skin of the children, barging into their open sleeping mouths, biting into their tonsils and sinuses. The refugee germs settled there, fell in love, raised their children to be stronger than themselves. Viruses rarely have trouble achieving the American Dream.

Their hosts started off pleased. They lounged and drank warm soup provided for them by Sarah Moore. At night, they took a dose of cherry-flavored medicine. It was not a bad way to live.

But as the viruses overstayed their welcome and the farm house filled to the rafters with sick, the Moores began to worry. The diagnoses from a shocked doctor was the final straw—smallpox.

“The United States hasn’t seen a natural outbreak for seventy years. The CDC has been notified,” the pediatrician did not disguise the terror in her voice.

The flock of Moore children with their bubble-wrap skin and weak whimpering migrated behind glass walls, their only companions faceless strangers in yellow hazmat suits and breathing tubes, like astronauts. Sarah Moore, declared clear of smallpox, but still quarantined, visited them once and then never again.

She did not feel guilty for her disgust at her children’s affliction. Who would not run at how their ballooning facial features drooped from the weight of the puss; how their emancipated limbs splayed like a body at the bottom of a long fall; how their near blind pupils vibrated. She forced herself to hold her eldest daughter’s bumpy hand and shout comforting words through the welding mask on her face.

“He was here, Mama,” the girl whispered.

“Who, honey?” Mrs. Moore said, although her daughter more resembled a honeycomb at the moment.

“The cruise man.”

Famine

Sarah Moore analyzed each smile of the gorgeous women; yes, she decided, they were happier than she. The magazines bragged of their elation in the lift of their smiles, the straight angles of their visible molars, the flat planes of their stomachs, the sharp peaks of their collarbones, the ridges of their esophagus visible on their necks stretched back in frozen laughter.

Sarah examined her own legs, and still clutching the magazines, pressed her hands to her hips and did her best to press her pelvis together like a trashcompacter.

“Miracle foods! Find out how she lost 40 pounds in a month!” read one cover.

First she drove to the grocery store, hating every cell of adipose and whatever architect had drawn up her bone structure. At the store, she piled her cart up with promising food items she could not afford and compared herself to every customer. In the checkout line, she ran into Farley Horace, although through her haze of self-hatred, she never would have noticed him had he not announced himself.

“If it isn’t Sarah Moore!” The cruise salesman said jovially in his unxious way. He steered an entire shopping cart with only one Weight Watcher granola bar sliding back and forth along the expansive bottom.

Mrs. Moore couldn’t answer him through her revelation: he was beautiful. Every skeletal joint and precious exaggerated indentation. He should pose for those magazines that had recently begun to pollute her doorstep: “How I reached my goal weight of 65 pounds!”

She smiled—her smiles would feel more real when she became thin, she promised herself—and exited the line to return every item of food in her cart, except one Weight Watcher granola bar.

War

It was one of those rare places in the universe where everything moved at half speed by the sheer will of the inhabitants. Glasses skated across the nut-casing strewn bar in a manner that defied the laws of physics; patrons raised their drinks to their lips and closed their jaw around the rim at sloth speeds; their smiles slow, their conversations slovenly, the drone of the television a metronome.

Isaac Moore perched on a bar stool with his elbows pointed to either side and his head hung— perhaps by the weight of his preoccupations—over his glass of bad beer. The bartender, a familiar woman to Isaac from his frequent visits, but as yet nameless to him, continually pushed tarnished bowls of pistachios toward Mr. Moore.

On the other side of the room, two flies buzzed sleepily, circling each other, resting periodically on the screen and embedding their pretarsus claws into the wire. Then, the bar door opened and a draft soared through the room, almost visible by its sheer intensity, a mist spread through the bar. The flies’ wings beat faster, their sectioned eyes staring intently at each other. Then, as if drawn together by magnets, the insects pounced on eachother, clamping their lavolas in a battle against their nature.

Following in the wake of the draft was Warren Horace. He scowled and ignored Isaac Moore so thoroughly that the man, previously immersed in thought, noticed that he was being ignored.

“What?” Mr. Moore growled even though growling was not in his vocabulary.

“Did I do something to you?” Warren growled back.

And then they were nothing but animals, like the flies, drawn together by hate at first sight. A man interceded and both animals turned on him instead, baring their fangs and allowing their saliva to dribble into pistachio shells, sinking the tiny boats. The smaller creature lunged at its prey. It clawed until it could bathe in the blood, then moved onto another target.

That is how Isaac Moore remembered it. Just flashes of euphoria and then, of course, the aftermath. He remembered emerging from his anger as though waking from a dream and finding a broken barstool in his hands and a massacre of near-alcoholics surrounding him. A wail of a siren and the tremulous instructions of a local policeman, completely unprepared for this kind of violence; then the pressure of handcuffs and the air freshener of a police cruiser; some time later, the bang of a judges gavel; before the end, a prick of the needle and the sweet release from the hatred and anger he hadn’t been able to shake since the second time he saw Warren Horace.

Death

Sarah Moore did not have the strength to answer the knock on the door. Starving herself had become easier once she physically could not stand for long enough to buy food. Every waking minute, she ran her hand over her stomach and thighs and waited for her body to finally digest the rest of her fat stores.

“Come in,” she called weakly and propped herself up on the couch. If it was the women from church, she wanted them to notice how much weight she had lost. Then she would smile mysteriously and swear to never tell her secrets.

It was not the church ladies, but a man she had never met. He crouched in front of her and took her bony hands in his. She suddenly became very aware of her fingernails and how they had grown brittle and cracked in places since her diet. He looked upon her with the kindest face imaginable, a face both concerned and proud. She felt a tear leak from her left eye.

“Hello,” he said gently, “my name is David Horace. Would you like to sign up for an unforgettable vacation on Epic Relax tours and cruises?”

Sarah Moore stared at him through blurry vision, both from tears and from her minute of sitting up straight, and then smiled, finally as happy as a woman in a diet magazine.

“Please,” and as she signed in blood red ink, she couldn’t stop laughing.

The world ended that day in a way no one ever expected. In fact, most everyone kept on living after the end of the world. But the name Isaac Moore disappeared from the news as did the reports of a smallpox outbreak. Sarah Moore’s gym membership was obliterated. After all, when the world ends, no one will remember it.

Epic Relax

The Epic Relax cruise ship is alive from every rusty washer to each screw and rivet. Every square inch of hull a waking nightmare, ready to pounce at any passerby. The decorative ropes seem snake-like as they wave back and forth in the blasting, hot wind. The putrid smell of humanity mixes with undertones of iron and bile rising in 100,000 throats in anticipation of the pitching, miserable hell of the cruise. Sarah and Isaac Moore stand on either side of their line of children on the docks and stare up at the rotting carcass.

The port side of the boat glowing red from the tiny flickering ship lights and the setting sun, reluctant to cross the horizon, sets everything aflame: dizzying mirror images of a sun leering at these sinners’ pain. Hands reach down to wave to loved ones, clawing at the naked summer air as the heat oppresses them. There are captains and mates swimming in the brimy crowd of passengers, their hats ironed and starched to rest jauntily, forming parallel creases that point to the sky on either side of their heads. They smile with their eyebrows drawn in and their chins down, crooked and missing teeth on full display.

And the screaming. Children shrieking and writhing through the ship’s railings, grotesquely leering at the newcomers. The adults’ pain is mute. Dull conversations, laughs with drooping eyes and a desperate note, hands clasping one another as though joined by handcuffs as they enjoy themselves under the threatening gaze of the crew. It is back breaking work.

The children cling to Sarah Moore until the last minute when the cantankerous sailor pries off her fingers, now restored to their plump shape, from their shoulders and leads them to the children’s section, where ugly seven-year-old contortionists scream and age endlessly.

Sarah shuffles down the gangplank, the metal under her heels clinking like threatening chains. One of the sailors nods at her cordially. The red light illuminates his face so the shadows of his mouth and nose form a dark mask over his eyes.

From the parking lot by the docks, David, Warren, Peter, and Farley lean against the purring Beast, now guzzling gasoline after another good days work.

“My decision is to gather nations. To assemble kingdoms to pour out on them my indignation, all my burning anger, for all the earth will be devoured by the fire of my zeal,”1 David says conversationally.

The other three brothers nod as the boat drifts away with its screaming, burning, tortured cargo. On a clipboard in front of him, David crosses off the name ‘Moore’ and considers the next.

[fuller-writing]

Knowledge is Power

The grainy surveillance footage was from the 7-11 across from Kalela Jones’s house. The policeman pointed at her dot sprinting towards her front door and then to the man following her, Tony Albeniz.

On the screen, Dr. Jones seemed to trip and almost topple over. She paused for a second, and then continued running. Later, Martin identified her expensive high heels that she had been so proud of lying forgotten in a snowbank. The right shoe had a broken heel, and Martin knew that while she ran from her attacker, nothing else had mattered to her except escape.

The video showed the man approaching Kalela as she frantically tried to unlock her door. At first, he only shouted and pleaded with her. Eventually, he grabbed her arm and Kalela shrieked and kicked out her leg in his direction. He jumped back and her bare foot scraped uselessly across the ice of her driveway. She redoubled her efforts to open the garage door, strange sobs escaping her throat.

“Please, Dr. Jones, just tell me. I swear, no one else will find out. You have my word,” Tony Albeniz had told the police later that he’d said that.

Kalela shoved him away and managed to lock herself inside her house. For a moment, the video surveillance seemed peaceful as Albeniz seemed to be walking away.

Inside, Kalela pulled out her cell phone and dialed 9-11.

April 2, 2020. 11:15 EST

Martin had worked with Dr. Jones since they were both in college and he had never seen her lose control like this. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, which practically vibrated with fear. If her emotion hadn’t been a huge factor in their experiment, he wouldn’t have cared. On his worse days, he might have relished in her stress.

Martin exchanged a look with Andrea, who held Dr. Jones’s right hand. For a second, they battled silently about who should comfort Dr. Jones, and in the end, he lost.

“You’re ready,” He said. Martin knew Dr. Jones would appreciate the succinctness of his compassion. As it was, she still glared coldly at him, just will less energy than usual.

“I am,” Dr. Jones agreed.

When she stood, she looked as statue-like as ever. All traces of doubt left her figure and she began placing the electrodes on her forehead and heart with admiral detachment. When she was ready, she nodded once to Martin and Andrea, before calmly striding to her execution chair.

Martin, Andrea, and the twelve assistants took their places, none of them sparing a glance at Dr. Jones. Now, she was just another practice dummy. The beats of her heart echoing through the chamber sounded no different than the simulation.

It seemed to Martin as though the team worked to the beat of Dr. Jones’s heart. On the diastole of the beat, he engaged the program. On the systole, he typed in the first command. On the diastole, the fourth in command administered the first shock. On the systole, another shock. After two more, Dr. Jones’s heart beat one last long diastole and gave out.

Without her heart to guide them, the work felt more chaotic and terrifying. The worst part was that there was nothing left to do now except wait and monitor for four full days. As the team began to turn their computers to autopilot and discuss the experiment in low voices, Andrea clapped Martin on the back. The pat felt more like she was trying to dislodge a piece of food from his throat than encouragement, but he smiled wanly at her. He doubted he would sleep for the next four days.

April 6, 2020. 11:15 EST

Life went on while Dr. Jones turned grayer. The machines kept her cells from rupturing and releasing the enzymes that would decompose her body. For all intents and purposes, Dr. Jones was dead; Her brain and heart no longer sent signals through her body. But the team kept enough of her body fighting that bringing her back would be possible, even after four days. The hardest part was maintaining her consciousness throughout the procedure.

For years, Dr. Jones and Martin had researched. Well, Martin thought ruefully, Dr. Jones had researched and Martin, a Harvard graduate, had brought her take-out. Finally, three years ago, Dr. Jones created ‘the thinker’. This machine didn’t really think, but used a tiny part of Dr. Jones brain to channel conscience streams onto its hard drive. When she woke, Dr. Jones could examine ‘the thinker’s’ conscience as though it were her own.

Martin wasn’t worried about waking Dr. Jones. Her body was in optimal condition for resurrection. All day they had worked slowly to revive her organs and remove some waste products that had built up. Now it was as simple as restarting her heart with the defibrillators.

“Ready?” Martin whispered into the intercom.

A shock went through the body. Then another one. For ten whole minutes of terror, Martin thought it might not work. But then the assistant at station 8 announced that she was breathing. Four doctors approached Dr. Jones and their fiddling obscured her from Martin’s view.

“We have to download the memories now, before she can make true sense of the real world. Otherwise they might be tainted by her experiences now,” Andrea reminded Martin.

Martin commed to the 8th assistant as much. One of the doctors pressed the ‘eject’ button. It took only a second for Dr. Jones to process her new memories, but in that time Martin could tell something was terribly wrong. Her eyes screwed up like she might sneeze, and then she screamed and didn’t stop until her voice gave out.

August 29, 2020. 18:12 EST

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Kalela Jones, Nobel prize winner for physiology and medicine and the scientist that recently discovered the answer to humanity’s oldest question: what happens after death.”

Kalela squeezed Martin’s hand once before she stood. He didn’t start when she made gestures of affection like this anymore. This new and softer Kalela had taken some getting used to, and even more surprising was that Martin actually quite liked her when she wasn’t so stuck-up. The audience clapped politely, although they stopped quickly, too eager to hear Kalela talk.

“Thank you,” She smiled graciously, “Thank you New York City for inviting me to this incredible dinner. I must be completely forthright with you: my decision has not changed. I will not now or ever release the contents of my fifteen year investigation. I will take this secret to the grave and it will die with me. I have found the bounds of science. More than anything else, I have discovered a branch of science that should never again be investigated. There are some things that humans are not meant to know. Not yet, although you will find out eventually.

“I have discovered the power of knowledge over and over through my years, but this is the most conclusive evidence I have ever found that humans are slaves to curiosity. My team and I are most guilty of this. We sought power over our curiosity. We achieved that power, and now I must wield it wisely. There is no higher responsibility in my life than ensuring that no one else ever repeats this experiment or endeavors to understand death again. If you looked at the ramifications of this knowledge logically, you would agree with me.

Religion would become extinct or else transmogrify into a horrible cult-like imitation. Without the fear of the unknown, murder, war, and suicide would increase. Everything that once was beautiful because of the immediacy of death will dim: music, art, laughter, family. No amount of grandieur or money’s worth the collapse of society.

That being said, my various patents and notes on the subject have been destroyed. Anyone wishing to know the answer will simply have to wait, or waste years of their life recreating my inventions.”

Kalela’s voice dropped in volume and she spoke tenderly, as if to a child.

“I can tell you this. There is nothing so important as life. You’ve heard it all before, but cherish every second and especially every person. Something I’ve realized is that the thing we call power which humans crave with every fiber of their being is truly a craving for love and admiration. With love comes responsibility. A responsibility to our loved ones and to that which we love. A promise that we will not destroy each other for personal gain. A promise that we will be loved and love as many people as possible. I swear to you that if you do this, you will feel powerful.”

Kalela nodded to the silent audience. It was the first time in Martin’s memory that an audience did not clap. Some were obviously angry, while others looked thoughtful. Everyone was too absorbed in their thoughts to notice Kalela’s quiet descent from stage.

August 29, 2020. 21:47 EST

“Please don’t make me walk home alone,” Kalela said, her hand hovering over her seatbelt, her eyes pleading with Martin.

Martin glanced at the bus, where the driver looked pointedly at his watch.

“Sorry ‘Lela, I really do have to get going. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, yeah?”

Kalela looked like she wanted to storm off, and six months ago, she would have. But tonight she only smiled her forgiveness and hugged Martin with one arm. Martin watched her head of enormous hair disappear and boarded the bus again.

September 20, 2020. 14:47 EST

Later, a combination of the police, Tony Albeníz, and security footage helped Martin piece together what had happened on Kalela’s fateful walk home.

Albeníz, a desperate, sad man, had followed her all the way from the dinner in the City. Neighbors reported screaming for minutes before the first gunshot, which had shattered Kalela’s patio door, but missed her. The second bullet shattered part of her rib cage and ruptured her liver.

In her case, it didn’t matter at all that Kalala hadn’t suffered much. All Martin could think of was her horrible drawn out scream after she woke up after her experiment.

He turned the small leatherbound diary over in his hand. It was the only record Kalela hadn’t destroyed, although he didn’t understand why she hadn’t. Or why she had left it to him in her will, but Martin knew what he had to do. She was giving him the option to know information that Tony Albeniz had been willing to kill for. He supposed it was her way of saying…he didn’t know. Maybe ‘sorry’ for treating him so poorly for most of their time together. Maybe as a sign of respect to him for standing by her side for so long. Maybe. But he couldn’t help thinking that, knowing Kalela, it was probably a test. Did he trust her enough to heed her last warning?

He stuffed the book under the fold of the ridiculous dress the embalmers had stuffed her into. “I guess you really will take this secret to the grave,” he murmured. Martin thought that Kalela would have liked his attempt at humor. He took one last look at the body, so much like how he’s seen her for those four days before everything changed.

As he walked away, he remembered one more thing, “Thank you.”

[fuller-writing]

Images of Cabarete

Behind the street bustling with workers and racing motorbikes, and through the string of tourist resorts planted thick as corn in autumn, lies the coast of Cabarete. 

The rain pours down in sheets so thick that even the most experienced kite boarders dare not test the waters. On the shore, only tiny oases of un-submerged sand islands of the wide beach remain, but the visible ocean is almost calm, protected by the reef; raindrops pelt the ocean relentlessly—they ripple, splash and then peacefully accept the water to its swelling depths; and the only evidence of the storm is the mountainous, untamable waves crashing fifty meters out beyond the reef. The roaming beach dogs that usually garner the affection of the kiters are cowered under any available shelter. The unlucky ones crouch near walls, which provide little protection from the torrential rain that seems to come from no set direction at all.

The palm trees usually bleached from the sun appear darkened to a cedar brown. The coconut pickers refuse to admit defeat and still pillage the swaying trees for the chance to earn a couple of pesos. The only change in the city locals’ persistent routine is that the motorbike riders hold pieces of cardboard or plastic over their heads in a fruitless attempt to keep dry. The vacationers hunker down in their hotels, the pessimists complaining about the loss of beach time and the optimists making jokes about how ‘at least it isn’t snow’ which becomes exponentially less funny at each telling.

      The only human evidence was the pieces of glass and garbage left on the beach. Everything else had been eaten by the tempest. Logs and driftwood blew like tumbleweeds on the beach, never halting in their march downwind. The sound of laughter at first blended into the whistling wind but became more distinct as it drew nearer. The soaked and miserable dogs perked up their heads at the sounds of humans and squinted into the rain to find the source. The figures seemed to appear as though conjured by the rain.

       They ran sporadically, in circles and over debris. They were similar of face and both held worn shoes in their hands. The girl wore a chartreuse bathing suit decorated by splashed sand. She was short and squat, even for her young age. Every part of her was soft edges: round eyes squinted against the rain, button nose, full cheeks, twists of charcoal hair pulled tight against her scalp, a small mouth missing teeth. Her remaining teeth were blindingly white in contrast to the gloom of the night and her equally dark skin.

       Her companion trailed behind, only a few years older than the former, adorning a shirt advertising a beer, barely covering his lanky figure. He carried a box the size of a chessboard against his side. Pointed cheeks framed the same round features as the girl. His hunched, bony stance, even in running, was reminiscent of a bird, walking cautiously, delicately.

       The girl caroled the boy into tagging her by yelling “¡Topame!” The one of willowy stature complied, taking short, hesitant steps, letting the younger child run ahead. He ended the game easily despite his cumbersome load, letting the girl feel as though she had almost beaten him by sitting down, panting in the ankle deep puddle that was the beach.

He grabbed a hold of the little girls hand to stop her from racing ahead.

“Adriana, we should go home. Mama will be worried.” His thick Dominican accent slurred his words together, but Adrianna understood and pouted at his suggestion.

       She rubbed at her arms as though only now that she was standing still she registered the cold rain. Her toe picked at a fresh footprint, disturbing the water that had already gathered there.

       She said something almost unintelligible but it was obvious from her tone of voice that she was protesting.

       He knelt so that he was looking up at Adrianna sincerely.

“I have work tomorrow morning and it’s already late.” He said with reluctant finality, swallowing a mouthful of rain as he did so.

       Adriana glumly accepted his excuse. Without a word, she began to retrace her footsteps. Her head hung low and even her hair looked soaked and dejected.

       Her brother gave her a lopsided grin that didn’t change her stubborn composure.

He perked up at the sight of a group of Europeans braving the rain and deftly opened his box.

He shouted in accented English. “Bracelets! Only 250 pesos! Very cheap, very cheap!” The group of foreigners shied away, and the boy didn’t pursue them.

He lowered his voice. “See, Adrianna? It’s not a bad job. It’s fun.”  

“Sure, Jesus.” Her voice was small, tired, as if from the lips of a much older person.

He closed the box, signaling the end of the conversation. Adrianna continued to toe the growing hole in the sand without looking up at her brother. For a long moment, they stood as if rooted to the spot, the conversation clearly not over, despite Jesus’ intentions.

“You could still be in school.” Adrianna finally suggested, the wind almost drowning out her words.

Jesus wrinkled his nose like a dog that smelled something off. “I don’t want to go to school like all the girls.” He scoffed.

Adriana looked insulted for another silent minute before Jesus terminated the conversation. He kicked sand into the hole that Adrianna had dug and pulled her, mule-like, towards the edge of the beach.

“¡Topa!” He yelled, and tapped her gently on the shoulder.

Adrianna’s smiled, her dimples on coffee skin looking like the hole in the sand. She chased after him, tripping over her feet as she ran up the dunes.

       The storm and the dogs were once again left alone to wait out the night. The palm trees bent to an even steeper angle, and the tide crept up the beach, as if waiting until the children left before unleashing it’s full torment.

[fuller-writing]

And that’s the first lesson you learn from removing your wisdom teeth. That someday, life will become a necklace of surgeries, but don’t stack those beads too proudly.

Why They’re Called Wisdom Teeth 

(drawing is not mine)

[fuller-writing]

Step 1: tell yourself you will never love again. Not ever.

How to Fall in and Out of Love in Six Days

[fuller-writing]

A History of Rubia - Chapter One: The Girl in the Cabinet (on Wattpad) Reader, I cannot tell you how far I have travelled to bring you this story. This is the story of an alien life form that you wouldn't be able to imagine with endless words. Describing them would be equivalent to describing colors to a blind man. But this story needs to be told. And so I have translated it, not only from its original Rubian text, but also into human terms you can understand. And so, Reader, enjoy this story of Torrin Kaiserman as if it were fiction.