Espresso Stories of December!

At that moment he felt more uncomfortable than a Jain in a Purell factory.

‎"Someday," He told her, "I'll paint this wall." It was only now that she realized that at that time he had already known that he would be the paint.

“I’m still going strong,” She said at her final AA meeting, “Because the show goes on. And it isn’t my death scene, yet."

Jesus, Jesus, please, give me a sign!"

And thunder smashed and the clouds billowed above her head as a booming voice shouted out, "I AM A SAGITTARIUS"

Are you sure you don't want a cat?"

"No, I am absolutely horrid with animals,"

"Now come on, I'm certain you aren't that bad,"

"I had a pet rock once. It died."

‎"Look, I used to have a cactus. It died in nineteen days. I'm poisonous, and you'd better get out."

And it's true every time: I come for you but I stay for me.

Don't tell me how far I'll go until you know how far I've come.

‎"You know, you really taught me how to believe in love." "Yeah, well, you really taught me how to believe in reality."

I don't need to break in to see inside; there's only so much in that glass mind.

“You’re leaving the Brazilian summer to go to a Chicago winter?” “ Yeah, but where I’m going is so much warmer"

I’ve never really gotten over anyone, especially myself.

She had 5 hours of testing in front of her and she spent her time preparing in the back of a bar getting wasted.

every sunday they stole their parents liquor cabinets and bathed in the alcohol content, listening to spanish opera all the while

Her mouth mouth said no, and her body continued this notion by punching him in the face repeatedly until he fell to the floor unconscious.

It spent her 5 hours, and in the end all she had to show of it was, "Plants are nice. They are often green. In conclusion, plants."

She named her child Manifest because everyone deserved a destiny.

‎"Is love supposed to hurt?"

"I wouldn't know, I've never been in love. I have been hit by a car however, and that hurt."

‎"I'm leaving." His sudden announcement metaphorically bodyslammed her into the wall, right before her mixed martial-arts training literally bodyslammed him into the wall. Either way, he could've had the decency to stick around and help pick up the pieces.

‎"TANKS!"

"Don't mention it."

She was the kind of girl that walked through the zoo thinking, "We all want to be free"

She spent her life reaching for rainbows, and she died in the arms of a man dressed like a unicorn.

She stayed up till 5 in the morning watching and re-watching The Notebook, and she wondered if she had an addiction to helpless love stories.

‎"It smells like weed in here."

"Weed. Like, as in grass? Like freshly cut grass? Well then, I don't really know because we weren't cutting grass at all."

He's the type of gay who woke up one morning, said, 'Shit, let's try liking dick today!' and never looked back.

He knew he had trouble falling asleep when he tried to imagine sheep jumping over a fence, and they ran head first into the fence instead.

She was 94 and one/eights years old, and her will stated she wanted all of her items and possessions to be put into storage forever, because she was a dick that way.

She signed all her cards XIO; kisses, boners, and hugs.

---Lynn, Patti, Christie, Julie

Expresso Stories of November

"i remember" he always said but he always never knew what he was supposed to remember

every promise he made was over a bottle of beer, so it really wasn't a surprise when he died from alcohol poisoning.

When she got the phone call that her mother was dead she really didn’t know what to expect, let alone the voice over the receiver telling her that she died attempting to stop a burglary with a sack of bagels and a sharp-wit.

the smell of sharpie never fades away, though the locker has long since been cleaned and painted over.

His hugs felt exactly how love should feel, and she couldn't help but laugh at the irony as she wished her ex-jail mate well before they carted her off to the death sentence.

Peter realized his day would be off-kilter when he was complimented on what a wonderful Drag Queen he would make.

It was a cold day - a Sunday - as she promised everything in the world to him, but she never ate a morsel, and he never ended up with what he wanted.

He - she? - existed only through google searches and even then the right answer wasn't always found.

A mixed chorus of "awww"s and "ewww"s echoed behind him as he leaned over the car door to kiss his boyfriend. He couldn't care less.

With a sort of dislocated interest she realized she grew up with these girls and on her better days she couldn't even remember their names, let alone any withstanding memories before the accident.

On 11:11 of 11/11/2011, she wished that she would live to see another 11:11 11/11/11 come along. She died one century later at 11:12pm.

Her legs were shaking as she walked to the door, but her hand was steady as she flipped him the bird.

Whenever he said goodbye, he walked backwards because he knew whatever he was leaving was beautiful and he couldn't take his eyes away.

"Am I destined to die?"

"We're all destined to die, you know. Whether it be from gunshot or cancerous tumor."

"I never expected it to be both,"

"Me neither."

Her favourite flowers were the Winter Wildflowers because they bloomed at midnight and she liked the adventure.

“It’s just algebra,” He said, steadily taking off his pants.

She turned to leave, “I don’t remember learning that one plus one equals one in math class.”

He took out a condom, “At least it won’t equal three."

He was a one man circus, always on the trapeze, the audience cheering for him to fall.

She could only kiss when drunk, because nobody intoxicated her enough to do otherwise.

Once a month she could use tampons as swords; she could fight off an army of dicks just by claiming she was already stabbed.

If I said all I need in life was you, that would be a lie, cause it takes a lot of food and water to keep me alive enough to love you this much.

She knew she should stop listening to Adele when depressed because breaking down into sobs on the school bus was not only awkward to explain, but extremely embarrassing.

‎"When I said I wanted the love of my life to elbow their way into my life, this wasn't what I expected," She cried as she held her broken nose carefully in the hospital waiting room.

Their bodies were huge but their love was skinny.

"I'm an asshole with a low IQ, an addiction to drinking and cigarettes, and the largest sex drive this side of the Mississippi. I know what true love is."

The music was loud but their screams were louder as the shower head turned on.

We’re a fairytale, but I’m no princess.

Home was a cramped apartment filled with the violent sounds of dreams being shattered--so even though she was reduced to a crawling, dancing, self loathing “professional” every night around her pole, she did anything not to click together her bright red pumps.

they told him that no one should have to bury this parents alone but he wasn't sure if their presence was comforting or suffocating.

All I wanted was to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving, thought Bob, laying on the table as the Turkeys laid out their silverware.

The rope was 60 feet, the fall 45, and she wondered which would kill her first.

Her grandmother used all the oxygen in her lungs to blow out her 89th birthday candles, and she died face-planting into the cake.

Their hats had fake curls attached at the sides, but the jewish-side of his family at least appreciated the gesture

The marching band spelled out the four-word phrase as he dropped down to one knee, she knew band-geeks made the best husbands

Every argument they ever entered into was settled with a game of beer-pong, with the loser having to go out to buy aspirin the next morning.

Looking into his eyes was like staring down a shed cicada shell. He was dead, she was empty, it was over.

I love you the way the buttered side of the toast loves the ground. Maybe it's messy, but it's something I can always count on.

Her bruises took weeks to heal, but he was still the cutest source of domestic abuse.

--- Julie, Christie, Patti, Lynn

espresso over a long time.

Richard considered running to the bathroom to vomit when, after coming out to his elder sister as gay, she offered him various types of gay porn magazines.

I know i'm in love this time."
"what makes this any different?"
"i don't have butterflies in my stomach. i have fireworks."

I wonder if the physical distance between us is inversely proportional to the togetherness of our hearts.

It didn't matter how many perfect six-packs or smokin' hot man thongs I had seen in my life-- when the boy with the hipster glasses pulled out The Grapes of Wrath and read behind his cello in rehearsal, I knew he was the HOTTEST man I had ever seen.

keep your drink just give me the money.
sorry bud. just you, your hand, and a bottle of your own self-pity tonight.

As she pushed her hips back against the body behind her, she realized with a neutral opinion that she didn't even know his name.

it doesn't matter to me how I've never met him, how i've never talked to him, how i've never even made eye contact with him. I know I love him with all of my soul, and that is what matters.

Normalcy sat in the corner sipping his tea, while insanity poured more vodka into her Coca Cola. Both of them knew that their waltz would soon become a salsa.

God, space, time, math, light, dreams, imagination. The list goes on and on. With no end and no beginning. We’re trapped in infinity, baby.

She guilt tripped her way into college, and into his life.

He gripped the grass underneath him with all his strength, willing himself not to go off flying off into the sky like a murderous Peter Pan.

Mary ignored the giggles as she walked to the front of the church. After seventeen years of the most normal name imaginable, she was proud to be confirmed as Sexburga Euclidia Hedwig.

She wondered plainly if her end of life flashbacks would come in the form of a quickly scrolled through Facebook newsfeed.

I get up at 4:45 AM every morning to run, and all day long I never stop running.

Every day she bought blank CD's, cans of oranges, and a set of coat hangers and never before has Christian been more interested.

The Christian traditionalist laid down his rifle as he watched the new generation aim their M-16s at a flamboyant hedonist demise.

‎"Sexy and I know it"? Hate to break it to you, but it's more like "sexy and you think it", sweetie.

I’ll lie to you and lie to you until I think you’re finally ready for the truth.

Until that day I got hopelessly lost in the woods, I never even thought about finding myself.

"You look like the underside of a dirty couch cushion." "Excuse me?" "I mean, I really wanna shake you out."

Zombie butterflies. Just when I think I’ve killed all those stupid bugs that make my heart beat faster when you look at me, they come back. And this time they’re after my brain.

she resigned to the fact she would spend the entire night awake, and stripped to her underwear, opened the psychology textbook, got out that small stash of weed in her underwear drawer, and prepared to go to town.

The awkward silence around the dinner table after Maria spoke left her with a sudden urge to lift her arms and declare, 'And the Lord said, Let there be silence!'.

‎"Love..." he said, squirting the Purell gel on his almost rawly clean hands, "Has never seemed very interesting to me..." he rubbed his hands together obsessively, "...or very sanitary."

‎"Here's the thing," she said, taking her first step into the pool of color, "I don't want to make art. I want to drown in it."

In that moment of pleasure he forgot that he was a homophobic christian, and the hands running down his neck belonged to a boy in his english class.

They always tell me my shirts don’t match my pants, and I always say their actions don’t match their religion.

He acted different, he talked different, he looked different. He hung out with different people. But I didn't realize my best friend had become a stranger until the day I first noticed him typing with capital letters.

--Patti, Juliana, Christie, Mark, Lynn

agnosticism.

religion.

what is it?

why is it?

and how can i believe?

people like having religion around. it's something to which they can hold. it's their hope that gets them through tougher times. it explains the afterlife or lack thereof. but i just can't see what this faith is founded on.

it would be an oversimplification to say that i think god is to man merely as imaginary friend is to child. faith is more complex than that. i think a less offensive analogy would be to say that god is like language. you grow up surrounded by a presence of particular vowels, a given set of consonant combinations, and those are the ones you learn to recognize. and the older you get, the harder it is to add new sounds to that familiar set of phonetics. of course, it's possible to embrace the new sounds later in life, but it's harder. it happens less often. that's why there are chinese-speaking people who spend a lifetime trying to learn the difference between r's and l's and w's--liquid consonants, the linguists call them--but to no avail.

it's just that for me, god is that difference between those liquid consonants. i get by just fine without understanding and embracing the concept of him. it's not like the lack of god is creating some gaping void in my soul, like something's missing. but i'll confess:

i tried to believe

i can't believe

there's no way to believe

not when i have questions and i'm not buying the answers that organized religion offers.

i mean, there's the whole question of whether or not a god/higher power/supreme being even exists, and since there's no proof (and yet, maybe faith is the only proof necessary), i remain thoroughly agnostic in regards to that issue.

no, what bothers me is death. heaven. hell.

it's accepted that the body decomposes into molecules and atoms and ATP particles for use by small organisms. or it turns into ash. whichever one is chosen for the dead. but what happens to the soul?

the consciousness is life. it feels like an intangible tangle of energy, and you know what they say about energy--that it can be neither created nor destroyed. it's bothersome to not know where this consciousness goes after perception in the physical body fades from the third dimension to the zeroth dimension, where there's nothing at all--no space, no pain, no color. even the word nothing probably doesn't fit quite right, because there's no perception of absence. no existence at all. or at least that's how i imagine it.

so where does the consciousness go, anyway? one would think that it has to go somewhere. heaven doesn't really make sense to me and neither does hell. why? maybe i'm too worldly. maybe i'm too dependent on logic and proof. but the whole idea of collecting souls into two ever-increasing groups as individuals die each day just seems too inefficient to be true. i'd like to believe that when i close my eyes to die, my consciousness will leave my body and be placed inside the being of another, and when i open my eyes again i will begin a new existence. souls could be immortal that way, making experiences anew with the same ageless bundles of breath and spirit time and time again.

but there's no way of knowing if that's true, so i guess i'll never know.

and yet

there's a part of me that wants somebody to come along and prove me wrong.

anaphylaxis

He had dusty freckles

and tree bark hair that stuck out behind his ears

with glassy eyes like washed-out perrier bottles,

translucent skin like incandescent light bulbs in the dinosaur lamp in his bedroom.

When he was two his mother gave him a peanut butter cookie and a glass of milk.

An hour later the doctor told her over his hospital bed

that maybe the cookie wasn't such a good idea.

His life was swallowed up by

no no, you can't have that

and

are you sure you can eat that? check the packaging, the packaging!

He liked to joke to his friends that he learned how to read the ingredients list before anything else.

While his mind day-dreamed about chocolate and crackers and tooty-frooty jelly beans, his stomach would grumble like a falling bridge, a jarring reminder of that if he isn't careful, a crumb could send him tumbling into unconsciousness.

Somehow over the years, the

watch the ingredient list

turned into

watch the road

better not try that monster drink

and

stop doing that, you'll overtire yourself

His mother was unable to bear losing him

so she strangled him with her love.

Her love was touching, at first.

a motherly-reminder of keeping him healthy

but soon that affection turned poisonous.

Her helicopter-hovering was trapping him in the mixed dimensions of

don't play football with the others, just sit and watch, i don't want you to get hurt!

and

i don't think you should be hanging out with that peter boy, he seems like he could be trouble.

So, like every hormonal, angst-ridden, parent-suffering normally-obedient upper-middle class suburbia-living boy of the 21st century, he acted out.

This afternoon, he propped himself up on his wrinkly, unmade bed. His knees stuck out as he examined a palm-sized package of M&M's, peanut-filled. His fingers flicked around the paper corners.

An itch already tugged at the back of his nose, but his nervous system was dying to know how they would taste melting on his tongue. The yellow packaging was too jarringly bright, as if they mocked his childhood years smelling of flu medicine and isopropyl from germX, a lifetime of can't touch, can't try. The voices in his mind were rising tremors, urging no no no no no

yes yes yes.

it will be sweet and there will be nothing like it.

you're done letting other people turn you into nothing by telling you you're not allowed to try

so start trying now, for fuck's sake

His fingers hesitated but did not tremble as they tore the goldenrod paper packaging and felt for a colored piece of chocolate, and on second thought, he took two. The walls of his mind were tense, shaking, screaming as he raised the candy to his lips. They fell between his teeth, ripe apples from the tree passing through the branches on their way down to the earth.

Slowly, the seismic noise in his mind calmed and faded to silence.

--Lynn and Christie

cassandra (a last appearance).

you see, it was my problem. i was the one crying all morning because i forgot about rule number six and took myself too goddamn seriously. i was the one who finally snapped underneath all the stress and the pressure after the proverbial last straw of a bad test grade. it wasn't her business or most people's business for that matter. it was mine.

i suppose that being in the same room as a crying person is never comfortable, and most nice people at least try to provide some comfort. it's a natural reaction. but when you're on the other end of the scenario and you can't hear the words "are you okay?" without the tears starting up again, unstoppable, all you can think about is how much you hate being like this. vulnerable. weak. out of control. and you can't stand the thought of anyone seeing you at your worst besides the people who already have and still love you anyway.

the problem was not that cassandra tried. it wasn't that she made the usual promises that she would always be there for me, even though i pushed her away with repeated "i'm fine"s. it wasn't even that she offered me a hug (goodness knows i didn't want one from her). no, it was that after about ten minutes of silence, she looked up at me and said, "christie? you know, it's okay if you don't want to talk to me. i understand that. but you should at least talk to somebody, maybe somebody closer to you. i'm sure you didn't do anything bad; i know you're a good girl. but you need to talk to someone."

need? she was telling me that i needed to talk to someone? all i needed was for her to stop telling me what i should and shouldn't be doing, because right then i felt so goddamn vulnerable and and all i wanted was to regain my foothold on my life. this may have been my one moment of weakness, but she had no right to infringe on my power to make my own decisions. it didn't matter whether she was right or wrong. she had no right to me.

maybe i was overreacting. maybe that was too mean of me to think so harshly of her. i don't care. to place confidence in another person is to give that person power, and every ounce of sincerity i produce puts me at a greater degree of dependency because then i owe mutual human connection. that's how friendship works, right?

goodness knows that it's supposed to be beautiful. human connection is something that everybody is forever searching for in intertwined hands and intertwined lives, hoping to feel some transfer of empathy from heart to tangled heart. all i really wish is that she would see what i see, and what i see is that between the two of us, it doesn't matter how much she strives to make that connection. there will always be a short circuit somewhere, in some place where her memory in my cortex is meant to spark with the beating of my heart.

take a leap.

--what's the point in faith?

--i'm sorry?

--well, i thought i'd ask someone who'd know. i mean, you go to church and say your prayers every sunday, right? what i was wondering was, do you ever question why you do it every week? or what god has planned for you? or even what god is? how do you know he's there at all?

--sure i question, sometimes. but then i think, what's the use in that? he has given me so many good things, so many good people in my life. i think he just wants me to live a life full of love and personal growth, and so i thank him every sunday for the opportunity he has given me.

--he has given you many good things, but what about other people? how do you explain poverty into his grand plan? and disease? 

--i don't think he means for everything to be perfect. i think he just hopes every person tries to be the best person they can be...

--and the way he lets people be evil to each other, like in war. or crime. or lying. or just...shutting out someone who loves you.

--...

--i just don't see how he could let these things happen, if he was there and he loved us.

--i think he does love us. i think he loves you. 

--for what reason?

--just...have some faith.

--faith in him? in people?

--try it.

--i can't.

--not even try?

--i am trying. but no matter how hard i think it through, i don't believe in it.

--well, what do you have faith in?

--...

--let's try this. who do you have faith in?

--...i don't know.

--there's got to be someone.

--nope.

--well, i have faith in you.

--do you?

--of course i do.

--i wish i could say the same.

--christie

the candles of saint mary.

there we are, gathered before a corner of the college campus that is alight with rows and rows of candles on racks.

this is saint mary's place, the tour guide says. this is where students can say a prayer and just let go of all the worries in our lives.

or at least something along those lines. i'm barely listening.

she invites us to each light a candle, if we like. she assures us that even though the school is catholic, it's okay if we're jewish. it's okay if we don't even reflect about god if we don't want to.

i follow all the other girls to the crate of unlit candles,

watch each of the girls in front of me take one.

but when it is my turn to take a candle, i start to reach for one and pause.

i know the light is supposed to symbolize hope and spirituality and all, but all i can think about is the not the light, but the candles. there are hundreds of them burning in this place. hundreds of candles made of tons of wax. and as i stand there, i can't help but question. if there's a god, then why is he letting all of this candle wax be consumed by college kids and visitors for a symbolic manifestation of prayer when there are other places in this world where symbolism is useless because real warmth and comfort is so impossible to come by?

i can't keep standing here for much longer. there are people waiting behind me who want their candles too. a small part of me still wants to take that lump of wax, just to experience lighting its fresh, unburnt wick and seeing the little flame blossom from nothing. but it seems pointless now. i put my hand back into my coat pocket and step towards the racks of candles. i watch the other girls light theirs with wooden sticks provided for that purpose, placing them in empty places in the rows. each candle in this array of illumination is meant to embody a different person's hopes and prayers. can a candle really do that?

as the other girls kneel at the gate and pray, i stare for a while at the sight before me. it feels like so much human emotion is put into these dots of flickering light, but the candles themselves are solemn. they themselves don't feel a thing. for some reason it reminds me of the vietnam memorial, with all those names on a stone wall expressing loss. no matter what it's supposed to represent, the engravings in the stone are cold. silent. nothing more than a tool for man to help come to terms with himself. that's all it really is, in the end.

continuing to look at the candles seems useless now. standing apart from everyone else, i turn to face the night sky. it's silent, starless, indifferent, and the air is quivering with the chill. but i have more faith in this than i have in the countless candles flickering behind me.

it's time to go. the girls are wordless as they rise from their prayers. there's no sound as we gather around our chaperones. and as we slowly walk out of the place with saint mary's candles, we don't say a thing.

chivalry.

is it still worth it?

it may not be dead

but it's ebbing.

chivalry is good because most of the time

it just means a level of respect that isn't seen that much anymore.

besides, it is absolutely adorable when a guy holds the door open for a girl

or when he offers to carry her books.

on the other hand

if it's my books that are offered to be relieved from me

i've found that i'll get offended

even though the boy probably means well.

but i happen to be both smallish and proud and pseudo-self-reliant

so my immediate thoughts will be "YOU THINK I'M HAVING TROUBLE CARRYING MY OWN DAMN BELONGINGS".

and that's the type of attitude that doesn't mesh too well with the concept of chivalry. :3

arbitrary labels.

girls have annoyed me since middle school.

not to bash all of my relationships with fellow females--some of the people closest to my heart are girls. they were my first best friends. we make scrapbooks, we make music, we plan study groups and homecoming logistics. we can talk about silly personal issues like clothes and periods and the superficiality of boy drama, and it's something all of us are concerned about sometimes, no matter how tomboyish some of us might say we are. on the other hand, patti is right. girl talk in excess becomes petty. shallow. often manipulative. like her, i'm fairly quick to grow tired of it.

hence my male friends now probably outnumber my female friends. probably. it's not like i've bothered to decide who in my life deserves the arbitrary label of "friend" and systematically count them all up. anyway, i'm still with patti here. generally speaking, guys don't constantly second-guess other people's motives. they don't need flattery. they'll take you as you are if you just return the favor. i've sat with them just doing chemistry homework, staved off boredom during math class by playing the mirror game with them, squabbled with them over violas during orchestra camp. have i had petty squabbles with guys? sure, but those problems are few and far between compared to how often i find myself disagreeing with other girls.

and now let's address this little thing in life called love. relationships. boy/girl drama.

i get sick of it. mostly the gossip and the girls' squeals and the guys joking about getting laid. relationships shouldn't be impersonalized like that, but that's a different rant for another time. and it's sort of funny walking up to couples during a dance and telling them to keep it parallel, but it's not that funny when you're in the couple. it's supposed to be a special moment.

the way people address love and relationships, you'd think that teenagers are out there for sex and the right to say that they have a boy-/girlfriend. the high school relationship is characterized by flirting, cheesy ways to ask her to homecoming, facebook officiality, and angsty breakups. obviously there's truth to the stereotype, but who said that's all it is? i guess it bothers me that patti fails to address the "friend" part of "boyfriend", because the relationships that last aren't the ones that are founded on physical desire--those would be the "five minute beaus" she was referring to. the ones that last are the boys and girls who've known each other for over a year before deciding to use the labels "boyfriend and girlfriend". the ones who hold hands but also laugh about parents' follies and the typos in news articles and everything else they've always laughed about. the ones who are, in the end, friends.

so yes, there can be platonic friendship with the opposite sex, sans romantic complications. (oh my god, patti, you just put into my head the hypothetical situation of becoming romantically infatuated with all of my male friends. ewwww -.-)

but sometimes it seems as though people need a reminder that relationships can be so much more than a mess of hurt feelings and complications.

cassandra (a second appearance).

there is a boy in cassandra's life.

no, she is not in love. her parents have succeeded far too well in conditioning in her a profound disinterest in romantic relationships--she is a student, she doesn't need to waste time with boys, she has better troubles than that. she has gone so far as to tell me that she doesn't want to get married when she grows up.

he is her partner in dance class. the others dismiss him as a class clown, but to her, he is polite. decent. intelligent in conversation. clever enough to win arguments with the teachers if he tried, she says. i've never met him, but knowing her, she's probably polishing the truth. i nod my head and within two minutes, i have forgotten about him.

one day, she tells me he has been put in jail, and he will be transferred to a military school soon. although i'm studying the wall directly to her right, i know her eyes are full with empathetic disappointment for him. she is upset that he is throwing this comfortable suburban life away just because of one mistake too many. she is upset because he is smarter than that. she doesn't understand his passive unconcern for his predicament, which he accepts without a fight. "i'm more worried about him than he is," she says, "and that worries me."

and for the first time during this conversation, i stare directly into her eyes as a thousand thoughts flash through my mind.

i don't know this boy's story. i don't even know his name. what i do know is that i cannot judge him until i can perceive him sans the filter of cassandra's views. perhaps he's wasting opportunity like she tells me. all i see is a girl who cares hopelessly more than she should for a boy who's already come to terms with his own future.

maybe i am a cold, impersonal bitch who cannot appreciate a noble cause because the people in my world are ultimately concerned not for others, but themselves. perhaps this sort of caring for another person should be appreciated since goodness knows it doesn't happen often enough. but ultimately, no matter how strongly cassandra feels, she cannot help him see the opportunities that she does. she cannot do so because she cannot touch him in that part deep down where the mind and the heart are connected. that truth manifests itself in the tone of her voice, the expression sculpting her eyebrows.

for a long, selfish moment, i want to open my soul and tell her all of this in a torrent ofwhys and nos and understands. in the end, though, i never do.

balloons.

He does not ask for permission from the sleeping balloon stand man as he silently presses latex necks to the mouth of the helium tank. He does not say thank you as he fumbles with the balloon ends, struggling to tie them and attach them to strings. He does not say anything at all as he limps away with his helium-filled loot without paying. Such thoughts do not occur to the boy's mind as he makes his way down the street, this child with an oversize bouquet of carnival colors.

The need to ask for permission is not felt when one is a runaway left to fend for himself, living temporarily in a rusty, steel-and-concrete nothing of an elevator shaft with only his wits and the meager pittance he snatched from The Mommy two nights ago, which he uses for food from the 7-Eleven. The need to thank the world is deemed obsolete when one twists his right leg from tripping (of all things) over the base of a lamppost two hours after removing oneself from that nightmare called home, inhabited by The Mommy--not that gentle, loving Mommy of the cookies-and-hugs comfort he used to know, but a perpetually drunken Mommy who ruled the household with an alcohol-swayed fist and actions he must not think about...

In the lobby of the abandoned apartment building, he passes the stairwell, an option from which he has closed his mind ever since leaning on his right foot became too painful, deeming stair-climbing impossible. Above him, the balloons jostle and shift like so many marshmallow peeps bouncing around in a plastic bag; he adds them to a considerable quantity of balloons he had stolen yesterday. Yes, they would be sufficient, he thinks. With the entirety of his strung-up helium, he steps into the elevator shaft, a rectangular column of dingy, ashen-gray darkness braced with dust-coated steel bars lined with bolts, and he lets the stale mustiness fill his lungs. This is the last stop to his only hope.  The eleventh story. Words run through his mind as he appraises the light-filled portals that lead to each floor, mantras that make the freight train rounds insistently. Daddy is waiting there. Daddy said so.

A slight push against the floor using his functioning foot and he is rising slowly, balloon strings in fist, in a manner not unlike the way Mary Poppins uses her umbrella to sail skyward on the breeze. Five empty elevator doors pass beneath him--he is on the sixth floor, the seventh floor, the eighth. Somewhere along the way he discovers the ascent is made easier when one pushes himself up using the beams in the metal structure that cover the walls of the elevator shaft. Above him, some of the balloons silently deflate as the air seeps out through the inadequately tied knots; at first he is unaware, but by floor nine his lack of speed surpasses that of a dandelion seed sinking in still air.  The eleventh story, he thinks fervently as he uses his good leg to launch himself from the door to the ninth floor to the tenth floor. The eleventh story. Daddy is waiting there, Daddy said so.

Fingers trembling, he helps himself to his feet on the frame of the tenth floor, and at that moment, he glances up and sees the rotting fruit of his fatal mistake, already drooping earthbound. Despite the tight, dizzying storm of panic provoked in his chest, he cannot let this stop him.  Daddy is waiting--Daddy is waiting--have to get there--the eleventh story--he said so...

With pure strength focused to the future and unfettered by the past, he miraculously leaps to the eleventh story, and his fingers curl around the edge. Instinctively, his legs flail, scrambling for a foothold so he can climb to safety, and his right foot finds a supporting brace.  Daddy is waiting. One shift of his weight and he is secure--just as his wounded leg crumbles underneath the pressure and pain. The balloons, no longer brimming with helium, cannot support him now. Daddy is waiting--the eleventh story--Daddy is waiting...

His fingers grasp air, and he plummets, a bird shot from the sky.  Daddy said so...

No one sees the dead balloons, slowly descending like the last snowflakes of winter.

No one mourns for the boy's still form, sprawled brutally against the bottom of the elevator shaft with face bloody, legs askew, and ribs broken beyond mending.

No one sees the single white balloon that creeps toward the top of the dim tower of emptiness, nosing its way through the doors to the eleventh story.


--Christie