#and the room like rippled and the girl wasn’t Normal and instead had a psychotic smile and scraggly hair and looked horrifying

[the-broken-pen]

I just had the most screwed up black mirror kind of vibe dream, and I am permanently reminded of why I’m good at writing horror. Cause like man. How does a brain have that good of a plot twist? And not have it be nonsensical?

[lcdm]

The Burning Man

Joaquin woke up to the sounds of the Pacific Ocean lapping at his toes, which were numb. He was naked. This is why I don’t do parties, he thought, and then, why do I have a cactus? Because he did indeed, unambiguously, have a cactus. It was sitting in the sand right next to him, with a poorly drawn smiley face on the side of the mud-clay pot in black sharpie. He sniffled, and sat up, the insides of his nostrils burning with salt. His hair was waterlogged. The mystery of the cactus set aside, he primarily concerned himself with locating his piece, both the shooty one and the marijuana one. He was sure, as he lurched to his feet, that those would be integral in tracking down his car, and perhaps also his clothes.

“Say goodbye to eternal life you son of a bitch,” he muttered, kicking the potted plant and being forcefully reminded of his lack of footwear. He collapsed back down into the sand in agony, but noted that his right foot at least had some feeling again.

I’m too sober for this, he thought, before noticing a rather fortuitous bottle of Jack Daniels half buried in the sand to his left. Joaquin extracted it and took a swig, and then he noticed a bonfire farther down the beach, past the Jack Daniels. His private investigator senses tingled at the back of his neck, and he climbed to his feet to go investigate. He left the bottle of Jack in the sand next to the overturned plant.

Some other poor family is going to move in here. Suckers who will have no idea what they’re in for, he thought as he trudged past the line of seafront houses towards the glow of the fire. He didn’t have his glasses, so the fire appeared to him as a warm, inviting blob, like a gummy or a cream-filled donut. He heard the voices of a conversation from the fire, belonging to two fuzzy shapes, draped in a blanket and facing away from him.

“Being dumped sucks. But being dumped and like, seeing pictures of the person who dumped you, with the person they dumped you for, sucks even more,” the boy said, sounding miserable. The girl bumped him with her shoulder.

“No one made you look at them, doof,” she said quietly.

He wondered about them, the two blurry shapes. It was his job to wonder about people. People’s intentions, motivations, why they’d cheat, why they’d hide a body up a tree rather than dig a damn hole… These two shapes were, refreshingly, much less opaque. The boy had driven them to the beach, but it was the girl’s idea to come out here. They were both past their curfews, and she was liable to get in more trouble, but he was the one that was actually going to get in trouble. They had been friends for a long time, by circumstance, maybe neighbors. She was comforting him, but was glad he was broken up, because she clearly thought his ex was a bitch. She would never have told him that.

“I know that,” he responded. “It’s just… I don’t know. It’s only been a week. it makes you feel like you were never important in the first place.”

“Hey,” she said reproachfully. “Who the hell said you weren’t important?”

Joaquin felt a turn, a slight tingle in his lower back that creeped outwards around his waist and up his spine. He thought about what to do, resisting the mental image of himself leaping his naked ass in front of the two teenagers with a boogie yell and sending them screaming down the beach. He swallowed a chuckle, and with a twisting half-smirk wandered towards one of the shiny, boxy houses lining the seafront instead.

It was clearly new, the floor to ceiling westward windows reflecting the quarter moon and rippling ocean crests below it. He scoffed. An ocean view, Joaquin knew, was the great, dirty secret that accompanied a few million dollars to spend and people to impress. He didn’t know why no one ever figured it out before they bought their prize house, that the ocean is, of course the most boring view on God’s Green Earth. It is unequivocally, excruciatingly flat, usually a dull grey reflection of low hanging, salty clouds, with not a single identifying marker besides the occasional boat, if you’re lucky. Primarily it’s obnoxious teenagers playing volleyball in what should be your backyard and leaving their sticky beer bottles stuck against your seawall or tossed vengefully onto your patio to shatter. Even what humbling effect that might be imbued by the ocean’s vastness is lost into mundanity, after around fourteen-and-a-half days, by Joaquin’s best reckoning.

He slipped through the cast iron gate in the seawall of the house and peered around the patio. It was late November, so there was a solid chance the occupant wasn’t even here. One’s beachfront house is only as good as one’s winter chalet in Tahoe, after all.

Because it was 1978, the sliding door was unlocked, and Joaquin found himself on a plush rug in a livingroom with white walls, white cabinets, white countertops, and white stools at a white bar. He looked down, confirming the rug was also white. He frowned. The room was fairly dark, but he was pretty sure it was beige. As he slid the door closed, he realized how cold he’d been outside and squeezed his muscles appreciatively. He scratched his ass, and sand rained down into the recesses of the rug below.

Joaquin walked across the living room and into the kitchen, where he was drawn by intuition to the drawer stuffed with bills. It was the same in every house he’d ever been in. Look around any kitchen, and you’ll find that there are only two drawers that look like they matter. One’s got the cutlery. The other’s got the bills. His grubby fingers ruffled through the credit card statements and invoices from gardeners and assistants. He felt a flash of guilt. Granted, rummaging through people’s private lives was kind of his job description. He just generally had some a priori reason to do it first.

Joaquin didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he knew the moment he’d found it. It was the precise moment, in fact, that the kitchen light flicked on, and he spun around to find a woman staring at him with an offensive degree of disaffectedness.

“Honey,” she said, tapping gentle wrinkles in her cheek and raking her eyes down his torso intrusively and gesturing, “I don’t remember ordering that package, but if I did, I was being a little stingy.”

“Don’t be rude,” he frowned, “I’ve been outside, in the cold.”

The woman shrugged and turned, waving at him to follow as her words trailed over her shoulder like the draping silk white robe she wore. “Where you’ve been is outside in the sand, and you’re about to get in my shower before you track it all through the damn house…”

Joaquin stood frozen for a moment, his eyes darting at the sliding door across the room and the freedom on the other side. An image of himself flayed and piked on the flagpole above the woman’s house flashed through his mind, and after a moment’s hesitation he grabbed the wad of bills and sprinted across the living room, clutching at the sliding door and throwing himself onto the patio without shutting it behind him. He raced across the patio, leaped the gate, and only stopped sprinting when he neared the water, afraid of the icy chill against his feet. He stood panting. He looked at the stack of papers in the moonlight. “Julianne Davidson,” the invoice read. “Psychotic murderer,” he added as a subheading.

He then noticed, the way one notices a lack of any cars in a normally-busy street at midday, that he was being watched. Joaquin turned to see the two teenagers staring rather rudely, from the other side of their fire, evidently roused by his sprint across the beach. He waved jovially and started walking towards them, thoughtfully covering himself with the sheaf of papers. When he was still about twenty feet away, the boy cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted,

“Was the sex that bad?”

The girl broke in immediately after, “Or did she find you screwing someone!”

Joaquin didn’t respond, just waved again and ambled over to them.

“Evening, kids,” he said as he reached a hand forward and felt the happy glow of the fire licking at his fingertips. He saw himself darting his hand into the middle of the flame, skin peeling away in the heat, and shook his head to dissipate the thought.

“She caught you in bed, didn’t she,” the boy said nasally. “Should I be worried about some broad running out onto the beach with a shotgun?” The teenagers laughed.

Joaquin considered it for a moment. He glanced nervously over at the house, which remained dark and dead as before. He shrugged. He didn’t really have anywhere else to go.

“If she does, I’ll run,” he said, allowing them their fantasy. Meanwhile, he was thinking. He tried to reconstruct the stark white interior, but only saw the lair of an evil villain, shark tank embedded in the wall and Julianne Davidson lounging on a sofa with a white, fuzzy cat nestled in the folds of her negligee.

It was Joaquin’s job to wonder about people, and for some reason, Julianne Davidson was as opaque as the fog rolling in from the bay.

His hand wandered a little too close to the flames and he yanked it back.

“You okay there?” asked the boy, or the girl, since he wasn’t paying attention.

“Okay…?” he murmured in response, fixated on a different flame, a candle flickering in his mother’s eye.

It was her routine, every day, at four in the morning when she got home from work. Light the eight candles dotting the apartment; take a bottle of wine from the cabinet; collapse onto the flotsam couch, springs squealing, staring fixedly into the tiny flame until the bottle had emptied itself into her fatal understanding that driving yourself to exhaustion doesn’t require a will to live, not really. Joaquin would wake up to the infusing scent of warmth, of cedar pine or vanilla or lavender; he’d blow the candles out one by one, and he’d leave his mother strewn on the couch where she lay. He knew, of course, that his mother gave up every morning. And that every night she convinced herself, fooled herself, into believing that there was a reason to do it again.

One day, she had reached down to hold his jaw, and tipped his chin up to face her bloodshot eyes, and said “Boy, you go out into the world and find yourself something that matters.” Her face twisted in a way he both understood, and didn’t.  “And if you can’t, then don’t bother.”

He wasn’t really surprised on the bright, dusty morning in October when he woke up for school and smelled only the musty stagnancy of his perpetually unwashed linens.

Joaquin looked up over the flames at the two teenagers facing him, staring at him. Purposeless. Happy, even.

“What are you looking at?” he demanded, feeling a gross bile welling in his stomach. “You think this is some sort of game?” He took a step back. “Do you even know what you’re doing?” He pointed. “You. Do you know what the fuck you’re doing?” He was shouting now, “Do you? Or are you just here to find out if I do?” He turned on the girl. “Why are you here? Huh? What do you want from me? You want me to give you something? A story? Something to tell your friends in the morning? Did you hear about the loser we found last night? Oh, you should’ve seen it, he was so pathetic. Lonely ass detective with no reason to investigate! It was a riot!”

He seethed toward the teenagers over the fire, only to realize blurrily they were gone. He sat down heavily in the sand, hand pressed against the tightness in his chest. He saw himself stepping forward into the flames, saw himself running down the beach like a flaming torch against the darkness of the beach. He saw himself, reflected like a candle flame against his mother’s cornea. He closed his eyes.

* * * *

By the time the sun rose, most of the night had become a blur. He poked at the charred remains of the fire with an exploratory toe. He had been up to something, he reckoned. Probably trying to find his clothes, wherever they went. He saw the now sandy and crumpled stack of papers to his left, had a sudden memory, and instinctively looked to his crotch. Rude, he thought. He stood up.

As far as he could tell, there was no sign of his shirt, though he managed to find his jeans and belt wrapped up in some seaweed and kelp a few hundred yards down the beach. He tried to put them on, but they were too cold, and too wet, so he set them out to dry in the sand and finished off the bottle of Jack Daniels, which he’d re-discovered in his search. He was slightly concerned about the revolver, and hoped that, if it was anywhere, it was at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He hated the damn thing. He hoped he’d never have to actually use it. He didn’t much like cops either, and didn’t fancy his registered piece coming up in some other investigation. As he wandered up and down the beach, he hoped that someone, not Julianne Davidson, was trying to enjoy some scrambled eggs in their million dollar kitchen with its two million dollar view of his sandy ass rummaging through garbage piles and seaweed for any sign of a revolver or pipe.

He didn’t find either, but in a stroke of good luck he found a joint nestled, unlit, between some rocks by the highway bridge going over the inlet. He tucked it behind his ear, disappointed his benefactors hadn’t left behind a lighter or two. Damned kids, he thought. You either pick one, or the other. He huffed.

He wandered along the highway in his semi-dry jeans until he happened upon his Chevy parked haphazardly next to a port-a-potty, seemingly abandoned on the highway’s edge. Makes sense, he thought to himself. He climbed in―the door was never locked―and found his shirt and holster sitting on the passenger seat. No revolver, which in the back of his mind he knew would become a problem at some point. He popped the glove box and fumbled till he grasped a lighter, then lit the joint.

Reaching under the dash, he pulled the key he instinctively knew he’d stashed there, and started the old Chevy’s engine. It sputtered to life and he pulled onto the highway, rolling down the windows as he cruised down the coast feeling, all things considered, remarkably composed.

Along the highway, he passed the occasional groovy van parked on the shoulder, side doors open, hawking fruit or woven baskets or, he blinked, cactuses. He frowned, and, brakes screeching, pulled to the side of the road by the van. A head popped out, and then grinned.

“Duude, welcome back!” the man said happily. He wore circle-rimmed glasses and had braided hair hanging down to his waist. “You here to pick up another friend?” he asked, gesturing to the miniature potted plants around him. Joaquin felt his heart thumping suddenly and violently against his chest. He slammed on the gas, pulling back onto the highway and almost merging into an unseen Ford Pinto, which honked viciously and veered into the oncoming lane to get around him. He drove wildly as his vision blanked in and out of rediscovered memories -- the cactus, the beach, the Jack and the rushing, encroaching water -- jabbed jarringly against his consciousness.

It was another ten or fifteen miles before his heart descended from his throat and he felt he could breathe again. He took a drag on the joint to steady himself. His eyes wandered around the serene morning, the ocean dazzling his eyes in reflected sunlight. He could hear the girl’s voice in his head, to her friend from the night before; Who said you’re not important? He pulled the Chevy into a scenic overlook and left it running as he stepped out, and took in the rocky cliffside and choppy water below. He kicked a pebble over the edge and then didn’t watch it fall. Who said you’re not important? He thought about it.