The Place Called

I know a place

Where no one else goes.

This place is lovely,

Without prejudice or

Oppressive tendencies.

Few people have ever been there,

But signs of them remain

Forever imprinted

In the landscape.

This place may scare some,

Others may call it just

A piece of the heavens.

Aye, I know of it,

But I don’t think I’ll take you there.

I can’t even take myself, yet.

Some day,

I’ll go to this place.

I will revel in the silence

And beauty of everything.

I will look at everything else

So far away,

Such a comfortable distance.

To look at it,

You would think that

This place changes every day,

But it truly stays the same.

Tricks of the light,

Are still tricks just the same.

Always keep that in mind.

For all this build up,

You may be disappointed.

I never was much of a salesman,

But I can’t hide my love

For this place, in particular.

This place is called Moon.

Now I’ll take me away.

About A Letter

            As Jesse walked back inside from checking his mail, he leafed through it to see if anything was actually not related to bills. “Bill, bill, bill, Bill-wait, what?” Jesse stopped right before entering his front door, staring at a letter addressed to someone named Bill Parsons. Not ‘William’, as most Bills are called when letters are addressed to them, but ‘Bill’. He checked the address to see if the mailman had made an error there. No, whoever had sent this thought that Bill lived in Jesse’s house.

            He had always heard of this happening to other people before, but it had never actually happened to him. Jesse realized that he was putting more importance into the event than was called for, and finally asked himself the important question: Should I open it? There was no way of knowing where this ‘Bill Parsons’ actually was, since even the person trying to contact him didn’t know, apparently. Was it right to open people’s mail, though? Didn’t that violate some rule of privacy, or something? At the same time, it was addressed to his house, and wasn’t he entitled to read whatever mail came his way? The government reads my mail all the time, shit. I shouldn’t be stressing much about this, they probably read his mail, too, Jesse concluded. Reaching for letter opener, he asked himself (as he did every time he reached for the letter opener) why letter openers looked so much more deadly than was necessary. Every letter opener he had ever seen looked like an unusually ornate knife. Did people in other houses stab their letters until they opened? Did people do that in the past? People in the past did some strange things, he knew, like making kids work in factories, or wear wizard-y hats to spook people into thinking they were wizard-y people. But then, Jesse knew a kid like that down the street, and this was present day, wasn’t it? He supposed that people did weird things regardless of the time period in which they lived, sighed, and tried to stab the letter open, just for the hell of it.

            It didn’t work. Jesse soon figured out that the letter opener just wasn’t sharp enough to actually stab through an envelope without a lot of force, which would rip the paper inside. He switched back to using the letter opener as he assumed normal people did, and the envelope proved much easier to open.  He was somewhat surprised when he took the paper out to read it, finding this:

            “You are not Bill Parsons. Shame on you for opening his letter. Who are you to stick your nose into other people’s private matters like this? The fact that you have even read this far appalls me. Good day.”

            “What an odd thing to send. Who sends a letter to someone addressed to the wrong place, simply to tell the person living there that they aren’t the person to whom the letter is addressed?” Jesse said to himself. Out of habit, he flipped the paper over to make a paper airplane out of it. He found more writing on the back, which increased his surprise even further.

            The back said “Ah, good old Bill, always reading the backs of letters. How I love the way you always do that. It never made any sense to me, but it keeps other people from reading what I write to you. This way, I know that only you will read this. Now I may continue.

            How are your kids? Do you have any kids yet? I know last year you mentioned trying to make some, but I don’t know if you ever got around to that, and I was just curious. Cloning is not something one usually just takes up on a whim, you know. It isn’t an easy task, and if you actually managed to accomplish that feat, I would be very interested in knowing. I gave up years ago, as you know. My wife never really recovered from the experience. She hasn’t looked at me the same since then. Sox still loves me, but she’s a dog. Dogs just love things, you know. That’s why I have one. I give her bacon a few times a week, and she thinks it is the most glorious happenstance in the world. Sometimes I long for such simple wishes. What if our lives were so simple as to be made infinitely better by the addition of a few bacon strips? It could be paradise; it could be hell, Bill. Who’s to say? I’m thinking about a new experiment, one that includes bacon of some variety or other. That is the only detail I have at the moment, I was hoping you could fill in some holes for me. If you could, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,

Stevenathon”

            After careful consideration, Jesse thought the entire letter was nonsense, and made himself a bacon sandwich as he threw the letter away.

Getting Ready

Kelley blearily came into consciousness at the incessant yearning of her alarm clock. Again? She asked herself, I have to get up and do all this crap again? As she tossed the comforter to the side of the bed, she reached for the glass of water at her bedside table. She took a long drink from the glass, set it back down, and blacked out immediately.

When Kelley came to, she was frantically looked around to see where she was, realizing that her drink had been drugged. Once she found out that she was still in her room, and nothing had even been touched, she was a bit puzzled. Who would go through the trouble of drugging my water, and not even do anything? I mean, thank God they didn’t, but is something wrong with me? Was I too ugly to rape? Omg, I’m going to kill whoever drugged me and didn’t rape me! Musing about the possibilities of people who would have known her, and then drugged her, she got dressed. Wait, she thought, I didn’t shower. Need to do that first. So she undressed again, and showered. She almost forgot about blacking out, until she walked back into her bedroom and saw the glass on the floor, where it had fallen out of her hands. She shrugged, got dressed anyway, and went outside to kick the neighbor’s guard guinea pig. That thing’s horrendous squeaking had kept her up for at least 3 hours last night. She had asked Mr. Joberto last week why he needed to keep a guinea pig chained to a tree outside, seeing as it wasn’t a guard dog or anything, and he simply smiled, patted her on the head, and told her she couldn’t understand the guinea pig spirit until she had one of her own. In a way, he was right. She didn’t understand at all. It took the kicking like a champ, though, and she felt all the better for it. If the day was going to start off like this for her, why shouldn’t it start off like this for the damned midget piglet thing? Her friends thought it was the cutest thing in the whole world, but it didn’t keep them up at night. Now smiling, Kelley made her way to Starbucks, so she could really wake up.

White Roses

            They came through town last night, burning through some sort of plane no one really thought was there.  I’m afraid no one remembers exactly what happened, except for me.  I asked a few of the clerks about it, and they thought I was crazy. Go figure.

            The sky had looked a bit different that morning. Almost like it was on fire, but not quite. I’d seen that happen before, but it still came with a kind of ominous feeling you only get once in a lifetime.

            At 7:13  last night, the town lit up with the overwhelming lamentations of every single, sad motherfucker in the town.  My mind was full of fire, singular demons of incense, ancient Coptic incantations sang by inside out raccoons, and a chain reaction of things that never made sense. There aren’t any words for some of the things we saw, or I think we all saw.

            What else would have caused that screaming? They all matched my fear. Everyone in the town. It was glorious, in its own way. I don’t know if that is even believable, though. I wish I could tell you more about it.

            The only thing I found that could have been any evidence of their awful visit was a crystal vase full of white roses. They were dead, of course. My mind scarcely survived their presence; the roses didn’t stand a chance.

Four Letters

            “Are you fucking kidding me?” Joan screamed into the receiver.  “All time I’ve put in, and you’re pulling this shit on me?!  Wait until Jeb hears about this, your ass is gone!”  She was starting to pull out her hair again.  This kind of shit was why she was reduced to wearing hats almost everywhere she went.  What the hell was this kid thinking? Their operation had been running smoothly, bank robbery, extortion, black mailing, the whole works. Then this new recruit comes in thinking he knows how to do things better than everyone else, and wound up getting sexually assaulted by a mall cop. “I just remembered, why the hell were you even IN THE MALL?!”

            “Look, it’s not my fault, ok?  I had to stop by the mall to pick up something for my roommate, you know? He wanted some new shorts, so he gave me some money for ‘em as I was goin’ out the door. Only thing was, the security guys are supposed to be stupid, right? This guy wasn’t so stupid.  He saw me wearin’  the shorts on my way out of the store. Next thing you know, I’m a fuckin’ volunteer in a public porn exhibit! How the fuck was I supposed to see that coming?”

            “You were supposed to see that coming by not going to the fucking mall and doing your job!” Joan couldn’t believe this kid.  Now he’d be plastered all over the news, denied entrance to almost any public event, and so many more bad things. They didn’t need someone calling this much attention to the operation.  No, no, this kid had to go.  She took a deep breathe, and decided to cut this loose end off, herself.  “Ok, kid. Ok. This can be fixed. I have an idea.  In about half an hour, check your P.O. box, you’ll have some instructions on how exactly we’re gonna pull your ass out of the fire.”

            “Thanks! I owe you one, Joan! Seriously, I think everyone else would have beat my ass to a pulp and left me on the curb. I won’t let you down this time! See you when I get done!”

            Joan hung up, chuckled quietly to herself, and whispered “No, you won’t.” That was the last anyone would ever hear from that kid.