the model part 1

Mark walked across the bridge over the frozen river to the campus. He was beginning college mid-year, or a semester late as his mother, who worked in a Tampax factory, would say.

He was not going to work at a Tampax factory.

His hands were in his pockets, both for warmth and effect. His clothes were black. He curled his lips and exhaled steam, imagining smoke rings flowing from those flesh pillows that had not yet graced the flesh of a non-relative female. This was no matter. He carried a paperback of The Stranger in his back jean pocket; his legacy began now.

He finds himself in a classroom. It looks suspiciously like a room in his highschool and thus took on the same warm, putrid association in his memory. But what did he expect? This was a state school. He had just expected it to be more...salon-like. This was a symposium and he was a young Plato at the feed of the Sophocles--for philosophy was his major--who should walk into the room any moment now. He glanced at the clock. He had never had a teacher who was late before. It had always been the other way around. This made him suspicious. He looked around the room at his fellow philosophers-in-training. The class was Intro to American Politics. He looked eagerly at the mouths flapping. He was in college? What were we all to discuss? Surely, the injustice of the world! The Iraq War had begun less than a year ago. We are up in arms! We refuse to be cannon fodder! We don't want to be part of this system of rapacious conquest for oil and endless war! We are young and brilliant and righteous and...

"...living in my dad's attic. Yeah, it's not so bad. Got my privacy."

This enlightening discussion between knowing baseball jerseyed boy and solemnly nodding gum chewing girls was interrupted by the abrupt arrival of the professor. He was wirey, thin, balding and wore a bad tie.

"Sorry, traffic. Now..."

Then the words came. Empty, everyday words. Syllabus this, assignment that. Textbook, textbook, textbook. Mark felt his soul float up through the top of his head and edge towards the window. It was just about to leap, when--

"Erm, sorry."

A new voice. Foreign. Eyes look.

Black hair, blue-black, the blackest he had every seen. And those eyes! Freakishly green, like emeralds encased in glass. She moved swiftly, with the gait of one who wishes to be discrete, but in her case this was impossible. He took in the sheer form of her. 6 feet tall? Or maybe it was just those heels she was wearing? God, they were sexy. Shiny black fuck-me boots laced all the way the way up to the shapely thighs, encased snugly in pink leggings, revealed beneath a black and white striped tunic that showed that, yes, she was impossibly long and intimidating, but also delicate, graceful, breakable. She was in short, his goddess. And, suddenly, he was no longer a philosopher. The universe was pointing him in the direction of mythology.

kids by the tracks, 1997

Was it a dream you had?

Somewhere, from an open window, you look down on them in the abandoned lot by the quiet railroad tracks. Sunday afternoon. You don't remember how many; an army of boys and girls. Tanned, thin. Alive. The girls wear shirts with smiley faces on them that reveal supple junior high bellies. They all wear baggy jeans. A girl with an infected naval piercing shares her discman headphones with the girl with braces, and they sing along with the music together, screaming when they come to the obscene parts. One of them, a small boy, the kind who compensates for his stature by being best friends with the girls, rides in in a shopping cart pushed by the others. Someone suggests putting a penny on the tracks. The small boy leaps out of the cart to accomplish this task. The others giggle, both at him for his comical acrobatics, but also with him, because they are being bad. The girls feel a little heat rise in them, and they think dreamily of the Lucky Penny, the empty slate, the erased president. One does a cartwheel. You see the ragged concrete chafe her hands. You see the aqua sky fall to the ground and rise to the heavens again in an instant. You are wild with joy. You are more complete now, in this scene, than you ever will be in your life. All is one and good.You are among friends. You are sick with health. Every molecule is imbued with connectedness to the world outside.You are on the cusp of something.

But you are not them.

You missed it.

citi/zen/ship

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

- Bill Hicks

daughter of eve part 2

She indicated, with the chapped brown hand of nails bitten to the quick, the obstinate curve prodtruding through her college sweatshirt that bore the logo of the school she had just been accepted to. She pulled the fabric up, revealing a round firm mass of foreign flesh already lined with silver stretch marks; it bore, thought Sarah, a stunning resemblance to a basketball.

"Look!" repeated Mary, and then she was in tears. "It's almost three months. I know I still can, but it's like I already chose the other way, you know? And last night I showed Alex and..." Here, her voice became a high-pitched squeal, and, combined with the crying-mucous in her throat, it reminded Sarah of that time her father found her fugitive hamster on the roof dying in a rain gutter. She grasped Mary's hand without thinking.

"And?"

"Nothing. He didn't care."

"He wouldn't give you the money?"

"Oh, he gave me the fucking money." She suddenly sounded very far away. It was awhile before either of them spoke, and when Mary once more broke the silence, it was like an alarm clock to Sarah.

"You want a bucket or what?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Her father was sealing envelopes at the kitchen table when she got home, the newfangled sort that you don't have to lick.

"So how many babies did you save today?"

Her father continued his work as before, no response.  Sarah went to the sink for a glass of water. She had shared a deathly sulky dinner of fried chicken with Mary and was now desperately thirsty--for water, for conflict, for truth. A desperate flame licked her insides like a devil's pitchfork.

"Why do you care so much?"

"I care about protecting human life."

"But it has nothing to do with you."

"Nothing to do with me?"

And suddenly her father was no longer the meek servant licking envelopes, but an angry, red-faced prophet. Sarah felt the bubble rising in her belly again, rising and rising, until it finally reached her heart and burst. And then she was drowning under his words. His screams.

"I don't have a right to have an opinion about murder? In my own country? In my own neighborhood? How about my own house? Don't you have to do with me? What if you got pregnant? What if you killed your baby?"

Sarah had shrunk to the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. Crying.

"Oh god."

And then he was on the floor with her. "There, there," he said. "There, there."

daughter of eve part 1

"Mary's pregnant," announced Sarah to Carlie, her dough-faced, bespectacled Baptist colleague. "But," she added in a sly tone. "She's not keeping it."

Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah could see Mr. Magwan ("Mr. Magoo" his beloved students called him) flinch over his half-graded stack of papers. She felt a little anxious bubble puff up in her lower belly, that point where you throw your hands up at the top of the roller coaster. The classroom was empty except for the three of them.

"Right," said Carlie. Her eyes had the glazed look of a person whose autopilot switch has just clicked on. She hurried out of the room and Sarah followed, not daring to look back at Mr. Magwam, who had returned to his normal shuffle of grading papers.

The sun was setting over the abandoned building of the old factory town. Sarah stood outside the school smoking a clove cigarette. She wore a t-shirt that bore the name of her band, "The Lillith Plan"--an outfit she hoped would revive the Riot Grrl movement on the East Coast. She planned to begin learning to play an instrument along with the other girls that weekend.

Mary's car pulled up by the curb. She wore a black wool sweater. Her black hair was greasy and disheveled. She looked out the window, her face hidden. Sarah got in the front seat.

"What took you so long?"

"You know I wasn't in school today."

"You were supposed to be here at four."

"I was at Alex's." Here her voice cracked and Sarah realized that she had been crying. The grotesque black veil still shrouded the delicate figure hunched over the steering wheel. Sarah could imagine the puffy eyes and tears rolling down the pock-marked face. Mary was almost nineteen--she had started school a year late after spending her sixth year in a refugee camp--and she still had the worst case of adolescent acne Sarah had ever seen. For her last birthday, Sarah had bought her a copy of The Beauty Myth and a free facial at a spa in the capital.

"So he has the money?" she offered tentatively. Mary worked twenty hours a week at her family's dry-cleaning business and Alex, who had just turned 20, worked full time at a gas station.

"I'm hungry." Mary swerved right into a KFC parking lot. Sarah stared up at the colonel's stark white face against the red of the billboard. Mary finally turned to face her.

"Look at this," she hissed.