A Choke and Chair

A choke sat in my chest and throat. It had been there for hours. Since waking. The power had been shut off. I didn't have the money for it. I sat in my chair, one of the few things I had left around the house. It was ugly. I couldn't sell it. It was green and torn and I loved it and I was glad to have it. I sat in it and stared out the window. The sun had set and the world was a deepening blue and gray and rain fell everywhere and I was silent.

The choke sat in me. A pressure had built up behind my face and behind my eyes but I was done with all of that. I had promised myself. I was done with all of that. I sipped at the cheap beer I had bought with my last six dollars and as much as I told myself to let it go I held tighter. The pressure built. The choke tightened. The house was dark and everything was dark.

I had no money. No work. Nothing to keep me distracted. I had a half filled notebook filled with terrible things and a skeletal library. I had a useless fucking television and a guitar with three broken strings.

The windows were open and the cool air and fresh breeze came in and it said 'remember me? I go on. We go on.' It was a lie and I ignored it.

The choke began to rise up my throat. It was a rock. A mountain. Rising like a cork from the bottom and behind it all of the terrible things I had sworn off. All of the thoughts and words and the mess with it.

The choke rose and rose and it was in the back of my mouth and the pressure behind my face grew stronger and harder and I tried to swallow it all back down, staring out the window, and I couldn't. I sipped my beer and swallowed and when I breathed again, the choke escaped. The pressure dropped. I remembered. I sank. The world blurred and my eyes stung and I remembered. I had no choice.

I swore I was done with this.

Night came and by then I was dried up. I finished the beer. I sat in my chair crumpled and bent and stared now at the black and listened to the world die down until the morning. People would wake. Shower. Dress. Kiss their loves goodbye. Go to work. Stress. Laugh. Come home. Kiss their loves hello. Live. I would stay in this chair and wish all misery upon them and know that nothing was changing back. And that was fine.


None of this matters, I thought.

A Comment Deleted from the Post Star.

It was getting late. I didn't know what to do with myself so I paced back and forth on the sidewalk outside of the local dives. I couldn't go home if I wanted.

It was warm and the smell of pizza haunted the air. It stirred me. Taunted me. When I passed I couldn't help but glance through the window and covet.

"You got a smoke man?" some drunk asked. I didn't. I kept to myself and walked on, back and forth, back and forth.

I wondered if I would find a bed for the night. I wondered if some other man had found mine. My bed. My home. My family. That all seemed imagined now. It might have been. It wasn't now.

I was hungry.

That goddamned pizza.

i gave up on it and leaned against the brick.

"Hey man," the drunk said again. "I asked you a damn question."

"I don't have a cigarette."

A couple was walking up to us. No, eventually passing us. They smiled. Laughed. Hand in hand. I was so hungry.

It had been days.

The couple came closer. I was so damned hungry.

I needed to eat.

"Excuse me ma'am," I said, "do you think you could spare a few bucks so I could just grab a bite?"

She recoiled. I sometimes forgot what i looked like now. "Ewww, f**king gross!" She said and dug herself into her boyfriends armpit. He wrapped his arm tight around her.

"Hey buddy, back off the lady."

"I'm just hungry. I didn't mean any..."

He stepped toward me releasing the girl safely behind him. "I said back off scumbag."

He shoved me. I fell back against the wall. My pockets spilled. Fifteen cents. A safety pin. My pocket knife.

"He's got a knife!" the girl said.

The man jumped back. "Whoa, whoa! Calm down buddy! Police!" The man looked up and down the road, then to his girl. "Babe, call the cops! This guy's lost his damn mind!"

"No, I said, trying to get back to my feet and holding everything I owned in the world. "No, I'm just hungry. Never mind, I didn't mean..."

"Drop the weapon!" a voice said behind me. "Drop the weapon and get on the ground!"

Police.

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Bad Dreams

Bad dreams woke me most nights. Booze soaked dreams of loss and emptiness. Dreams with no form, only emotion. Dreams of vivid color and shape and Marie and never me. Dreams haunted me. Fucking pestered me. I'd wake up, sweating and exhausted. I never got more than a few hours of sleep a night and I began to see it in my face and behavior. 

It was a little after three and I was sitting on the edge of my bed staring at the air conditioner and telling myself "it was only a dream." Lingering madness and sadness bore through me and I tried to push it away. I wondered if it was imagined at all, or realized. I sat and the cold air spread across my body and made the sweat cool and disappear. Marie was asleep next to me and shuffled a bit as I stood up and left the room, opening and closing the door as quietly as possible.

The house was black and hot and I imagined this, this environment, this feeling, was the alcove of hell. I wasn't going to the kitchen to pour a drink. I wasn't going to the computer to write. I was next in line for damnation and isolation. Emptiness and loss. I couldn't shake my dreams.

I took a glass from the cabinet, a bottle of Chianti from above the fridge, and sat in front of the computer, small cursor blinking against the hard white light, saying "well, Mr. Writer? What now? Fucking impress me."

I poured and swallowed a glass and stared at the cursor a bit longer. Then wrote:

"I think I'm dying. Bit by disappearing goddamned bit."

I deleted it and went back to staring at the blinking fucking cursor over another glass.

Nothing came. I finished the glass and poured a third.

In the dream I was alone. It was warm out and I was walking the busy sidewalks of Lake Henry. Marie had been there and she was with someone else and she had emanated a great hatred for me and in my dream I deserved it. I didn't know why. In the dream, I had done it to myself and Marie was right and my great cosmic emptiness was somehow justified to the universe.

I wrote.

The night is warm and the sidewalks shift in tides and sway unevenly around me...

I drank.

The bottle had only a few pours left and my head had become light all at once.

I see faces and they are all strange and strangers and a deep regret weighs on my chest, though I don't understand it. I seem to be walking against the people. Upstream. I look at my shoes and back at the people flowing endlessly around me and into me. When again I look up, it seems as though nearly every face and body slows and melts into the background. Nearly every face, except hers. Time stops.

I drink, finish, pour.

I try to say "Hello," but nothing comes out. She smiles and it is a smile like gunfire. It pierces my skin, my muscle, my soul. Her eyes are dark and deep and abyssal and the entire universe is coming down around us in crushing hatred and terror and I know, I KNOW, I am the reason. I am the end of all things. The great destruction. It was me. 


I want to look away. My chest burns and swells and I can feel some last bit of warmth drain out of me and I try to look away but I can't. I can only look a little to her left. Her shoulder. Her arm her hand. The hand in her hand. His arm. His shoulder. His face. Strange and massive. His smile. All encompassing and together their faces grow and are everything. Their smiles. Their happiness. Their thanks, for if not for me, they would not be. 

I drink, finish, pour the last of the Chianti.

I sink into the ground and the last of me is swallowed by her eyes and the darkness of the night and blame and loss and truth. I am the black. I am the great destruction.

From behind me, I hear the bedroom door creak open.

"James?" Marie says coming down the hall.

"Did I wake you?"

She comes out into the living room and I look at her. Nude, beautiful, and my heart sinks.

"No," she says. "Not really. I didn't feel you next to me. I was just worried."

"Oh. I couldn't sleep."

"Bad dreams again?"

"Yeah."

She bent down and kissed my forehead. "What were they about?"

"Nothing," I said. I saved the file and closed it out. "End of the world stuff, I guess. I'm fine now."

She kissed me again. "Come to bed."

"Okay." I got up and she took my hand.

"I love you, monkey," she said. "I'll fight those bad dreams away for you."

We went back to the bedroom and I laid on my back and she curled up into my side. She was asleep fast and I stared at the water stain on my ceiling and waited for dawn.
 

The Fish

There was an art show in the park. A few white tents lined up on either side of the stone path. Paintings and crafts depicting horses, jockeys, and other tourist trap garbage. Michael and I passed the wine back and forth, making fun of the "art" and the "artists" just loud enough so they'd hear us. They deserved to be mocked. They were all that was wrong with Springer. Using their talents and abilities to whore themselves out, all the while claiming to be artists, starving for the cause. They sell their identical paintings for hundreds of dollars, with the pretentious sweep of a signature at the bottom, as if it meant anything at all in the midst of all of the other trash around them. One fucking horse painting? Fine. One artists doing a series? If they have to. Every so-called fucking artist in the city painting the same goddamned thing? This was bullshit, and these were not artists. They were hacks. Sell-outs. Cunts of the lowest caliber. The punk rock in me boiled up to the surface.

It must have been nearing the end of the show, because some of the tents were packing up. A lady was putting away a case of handmade stone jewelry. A man in a tent next to her packed up birdhouses. These were the most original things displayed.

"I hate this town," Michael said.

"You should move then."

"I don't really hate it. I just hate horses."

"Me too."

We walked along the path to a lesser visited section of the park, surrounded in tall dick shaped pine trees twenty feet high. They were planted in a circle, outlining a small fountain and four statues. Two of a Pan creature, and two of some generic topless female crying, or moaning or some other emotion meant to be intriguing and exciting, I'm sure.

"The Pans are odd. Why are they here? Is it a garden, midsummer's night dream thing?" I asked.

"Fuck if I know."

I walked around in a circle. Pan, woman, pan, woman. I couldn't figure it out. Mist from the small fountain cooled me as I walked around it. Michael sat on a stone bench and nursed the water bottle.

"Almost time to refill," he said.

I walked over, took the bottle, finished it and unscrewed the top. I handed it over and dug around in my bag for the wine bottle. While I poured, he held it still and screwed the top on afterward.

The bottle was empty now.

"What do we do with the bottle?" I asked.

"Give it to me."

I did, and he threw it into the bushes. "Solved," he said.

We passed the bottle back and forth a couple of times, staring at the uncertain statues, and walked the path out of the garden. We followed a stream that ran the southern end of the park, filled with mud and frogs and plants unidentifiable. My head swam. The wine was letting me know it was there. I welcomed it. No, that isn't right, I was downright relieved. Quitting my job and having to face the very real possibility of taking another that I absolutely didn't want was a very troublesome thing. It weighed on me. It stuck in my teeth. It was a hole in my chest. Perhaps I was over-reacting, but certainly, I needed that fucking wine.

We walked along the stream, not talking. Both of us in our own worlds. Michael's parents weren't doing well, and despite his twenty-four years, he was having a hard time with it. Most people would try to talk him into happiness. They would be wrong though. What the man needed was time to think it out, and someone nearby just in case. I worried about him.

The sun got hotter, and the "artists" had all left as we meandered. Now, the park was only populated by people like us. People looking to kill a little time, to relax in the sun, to be happy for a few moments.

"I tried heroin," he said.

"Why?"

"I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't know what it was until they told me."

"They who?"

"My friend Ted and his cousin. They just gave me this little pill and told me to take it, so I did."

"You're a fucking idiot," I said.

"I know."

We walked on, until we came to a small concrete circle, about ten feet deep. It was filled with water and weeds, and was surrounded by a steel railing. We stopped and looked into it, passing the bottle back and forth, back and forth.

"Used to be a fish pond," he said.

"I only see one in there."

Michael looked in. "Yeah, looks like just one."

I stared at it. The one fish. The lone brown creature, swimming in endless circles. A part of me was sad for him. How long had he been here? From birth? Fish-childhood? Would he die here? Were there plans to put more fish in? How long would this fish know only solitude, and the same ten foot concrete pond? Could fish be miserable? Look up toward the surface and wish? Could fish long?

"What if this is his afterlife?" I asked.

"What?"

"What if this is his heaven, or hell, I suppose."

"Who's?"

"The fish. I mean, I saw a video online once of a goat at a farm that sounded like he was saying 'help', and was trying to get some girl's attention. What if that goat had once been human, and something happened to him? Some fluke of reality, as an afterlife surely would be? What if that goat had been a man, an evil, or a mistakenly evil man and that was his punishment, to live life as a goat?"

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

"I don't know." I watched the fish a little while longer, and in my head as we left, said my good byes and good wishes to him. I hoped it was his heaven.

We walked across the park. A girl, young, brunette, slim, came walking in our direction.

"Michael?" She asked from a distance.

"Hey," he answered.

"I tried to call you." As she came closer I noticed she looked Greek.

"Phone died."

"Oh."

"Nadine, this is James."

"Hi," I said.

"Hi James. I've heard a little about you."

"Okay."

"So what are you boys up to?" She asked us.

"Drinking and walking," Michael said.

"Cool. Can I join you?"

We were almost out of wine. I finished it, and put it in my bag. "We're out of wine."

"Oh," she said.

My head was floating. My skin tingled. My heart had sunk. Michael was smiling for the first time all day. I decided to leave him to his lady.

"I'm going to go home," I said.

"Okay, why?"

"I still have some shit I have to do today."

"Okay. Well, see you later man."

"Bye. It was nice meeting you Nadine."

"You too."

We all waved as I walked out of the park.

I hoped the fish was okay.