they don't sing in captivity

It was a winter of disconnection, loaded and heavy, and we were finally coming out of it, heads held like something had changed, hands held like something was different. It was a winter where people realized their prosperity was a joke, their ideology a lie, their work meaningless, their children ugly, their country broken, and their fears wasted on petty things—balloon animals, termites, cannibals, the flu. There were prophets and presidents and pariahs all shouting their prescriptions from pillars they personally placed on every street corner but no one was there to listen.

And then there was Rose, standing on my corner. She was a girl who lived down the street from me, only I didn't know it. If you went to the end of the block and made a left, her house was right there. We spent some time analyzing our similarities, half-joking and half-astonished. We were both relatively new to the city, both had spent unproductive, demoralizing seasons of unemployment before landing our current jobs, both of which were in publishing. We were the same age, both had bright yellow bikes and lived with roommates who had cats. We liked similar music, the same books. I asked her if I should be scared, if she was about to pull a "Single White Female" and try to become me and take over my life.

"I think you'll be disappointed with it," I said. Because I was.

"I'll wait to decide," she said, smiling over bright red glasses. "You’re a single white male though.”

“Am I?”

“I think so. I’ve never seen that movie.”

“Neither have I.”

But when we found out we lived in the same neighborhood, on the same block, I did get a little scared. We were either characters in a romantic comedy, marionettes on cosmic strings, or else she was a goddamn spy.

We started to see each other every day and I learned things about her, over tea or Thai food, things that scared me more. I learned she played guitar. I learned she tried to decipher her favorite songs, singing along in a soft, uncertain voice over shaky chords that were never quite right—female singer-songwriters, '90s rock bands, girl punk bands, and '50s rockabilly. I learned she tried to write short stories but left them largely unfinished or unstarted. In her career she wanted to work with fiction, with long novels, important epics of surrealism and absurdity that made statements about contemporary society. Mostly she worked with pet guides and novelty titles.

She was short, well-proportioned, her light brown hair chopped and sprawled in an adorable way, bangs uneven, but perfectly so. She had slender hips and copper-colored lips. She was small but small in a cute way, like something out of woodland folklore—a mischievous elf or a sprite, the kind that would lure unsuspecting medieval children into the woods, never to be seen again—or something more perverse. She wore bright colors, mostly: turquoise coats, red glasses, aqua t-shirts, pink leggings, gold scarves, orange knee socks. The colors she chose should clash but they all seemed to go together, all the same shade of different primary colors, and they made her glow and glitter, visible in a crowd, sun-drenched in grey winter.

Stuffed on tea and Thai, she walked me home from her house. We turned the corner and went the 115 feet down the block to my house, staring at the tops of the houses, at the roofs of our neighbors, comparing the peaks in silence. We walked through the gate. She pushed it closed, letting it click behind us. She stood about shoulder-height with me, neck craned up, watching me, perfectly motionless—legs, fingers, eyes, all painted in stillness—only a thin stream of steam escaped from her lips, drifting up and untangling slowly.

"Well," I said. Fumbling for my keys.

"Well," she said smiling.

The downstairs neighbor turned on a lamp inside, casting a bright rectangle around us. The light played across her neck, sliding down her temple, her chin, her throat, touching her soft skin.

"So, I—" I said and coughed.

Her eyes, framed by those big red glasses, were locked on mine.

"Uh huh," she said, waiting. One hand was squeezing the other. She bit her lip.

My palms felt hot. Her skin looked like it was carved of white wax or soap. I leaned in a little. She closed her eyes but didn't move. I stopped, uncertain. She opened her eyes, saw me paused, suspended, right in front of her. I didn't realize I moved but there it was, a warm rush as our lips touched. Her eyes were still open. So were mine. Her lips felt soft and humid, like bathwater down the spine, like clouds of tea suspending in glass—soothing, scalding, delirious, and caffeinated but solid too. Her eyes closed and I put my hand on her hips, felt the glide, the bend, the ache of them pressing gently, pulling closer, her body against mine. Her mouth gained confidence and power and she seemed certain, more certain of the kiss, more certain of her chest pressing against me. She bit my lower lip, soft but insistent, pulling me closer. I felt her leg rubbing softly on mine as she grabbed my coat, pulling me down and into her mouth. My heart felt hard and huge, like it was eating my chest.

I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. Sensation rushed back in, sharpening and flooding, lucid but bent and warped. The light in the house was off now but a man with a dog walked by and he turned his head and stared directly at us as he passed without breaking his stride. Rose noticed him out of the corner of her eye.

I was confused watching the dog walker, watching the little dog sniff at the edge of the concrete, confused because it was almost midnight and really, who walks a dog at midnight. I turned back to her. "So do you—"

"Yeah?"

"Do you want to come in?"

Her eyes flicked to the ground and then back at me. "Maybe. Maybe just for a bit."

I smiled. "Ok," I said, head spinning, heart pumping hard.

"Ok," she said.

We walked up the stairs and into the dull house, down the dark hall to my room, plastered with old posters and maps of places I'd never been, scattered with scratched records and books I hadn't read yet. Our coats came off as the door closed, her shirt came off as the lights went off. Glasses on the floor, her tongue in my mouth, hand under my shirt, heavy breath in my mouth. My hand was down her pants feeling rough and soft skin, feeling elastic and cotton and stubble. She pulled back and looked me right in the eyes, took a deep breath and said, "I can't. I just. This is, this is too much." She touched her face.

Her skin looked soft in the dark, like there were feathers hidden underneath; her breasts young and uncertain. They looked like they needed hands on them, around them. My fingers were still in her underwear, her pelvis in my palm. She closed her eyes, pushing her hair off her forehead. I tried to catch my breath as she got up to leave—picking up her glasses from the floor, untangling her bra strap from my shoulder, finding her coat and her shirt and reaching for the door.

"I'll walk you home," I said, grabbing my shirt and feeling like something was missing.

"But its so far," she said. I smiled, not sure if she could see in the dark.

We walked the 115 feet down the block and turned the corner to her house, staring at the fences of the houses, at the gates of our neighbors, comparing the hedges in silence. We stopped in front of her door.

"Well," she said. Fumbling for her keys.

"Well," I said and smiled. We kissed again, our breath mingling and rising up. Her nose felt cold on my cheek. It was difficult to stop, hands groping, tongues touching, blood pushing.

"I'll call you," she said, pushing away. "Ok?"

"Ok." I could feel saliva streaked across my cheek.

"Just to warn you, I tend to like guys that ignore me," she said. "You should wait till you hear from me." The door closed behind her with a slap.

She called the next day.

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of writing and of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

the key to survival--in a factory, in an office, in a boardroom or a classroom or the bedroom--is to dream.

all of a sudden and for the first time, I felt my body moving from inside.

"Plans for Impossible Cities"

"Stewart Stevens and His Fabulous Bird Whistles"

"Vessels for Baal"

She touches the bruised spots
and wasn't it fun?
curiosity undiminished
she resets the horizon

He writes of avoiding his desk when inventing, avoiding the connotations of serious endeavor, of earning a living. “I wish instead,” he writes, “to be irresponsible, rash, associative, dreamy, impish, brainy, intuitive, and stupid.”

-Steven M. Johnson, inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner.

A Proposal on Taking Your Newsmagazine to the Next Level, 2

I spend my days at work staring at computer monitors and shuffling papers, trying to pretend like there's some desperate, important reason that these papers need to be reordered, very loudly, right now. They've been on the desk for over a month; I no longer know what they are.

I spend my days at work staring at my coworkers wondering about their lives, wondering what sequence of events could have possibly led them to Talking Drum, wondering why they would need to slum it so low and filthy. Imagining their secret lives, their private follies and vices, wondering what kind of people they were when Mr. Charles's back was turned, when his eyes were away, when they breathed free air and lived on their own time. I see Fate prowling libraries and comic stores, bike shops and online dating sites. I see Jerome drunk and stumbling, puking in an alley, holding a stereo over his head outside some girl's window in the 1980s. I see Kittie Lee draped in leather, flat on her back singing murder ballads to a mirror hung on a stone ceiling.

I spend my days at work composing tiny stories, stories that fit neatly onto single sheets of paper. Stories about roses growing from the top of a mother's head; about fish pouring from a priest's mouth; about young boys living in subway tunnels, living off dog meat and day-old doughnuts, tattooing each others with images of crows circling five-spointed stars; about the hilarious fate of the Collosus of Rhodes; about urban trolls selling hot dogs and prophecy; about a man whose social life is impeded by his enormous beard which is perpetually and permanently on fire; about a company marketing taco-flavored pizza and, six months later, pizza-flavored tacos; about psychic hospitals and seahorses; about postmodern novels sitting on the burning shelves of the ancient Library of Alexandria; about men with holes in their chests filled with nothing but tiny moving creatures and spreading black ink.

I take these single-sheet stories and distribute them one by one, leaving them in people's deskdrawers, in the bathroom, in the mailslots of other businesses in the building, taped up in the elevator, folded under the wipers of random cars in the parking lot, in Sammy’s Super Sandwiches, in the Subway or the Chik Fil-A, at Father and Son, at Algino's, maybe at Baja Grill or the Kitchy Kitchen. Anywhere, really. I take a stack of every story I've written, the complete works of me, I take them up on the roof and let them blow away in the wind, to the four corners of the city, to the bottom of the lake, to burn up in the center of the sun.

Then I go back to my desk, back to work, back to staring at computer monitors and shuffling papers.

Maybe you can read them some day, when we're together again.

* * *

"What the fuck?" says Jerome.

"What?" Kittie replies.

"Someone left something in my desk again. Something about seahorses having sex in living seas of tea. This shit doesn't make any sense," he says, shoving the paper at her. "The last one was about a kid with no eyes being abandoned by his mother behind a Dairy Queen shaped like a Disney castle."

"Hey, I got one of these too," she says. She looks over the sheet. "Where do you think they're coming from? The janitor?"

"What janitor?"

"Wait. We don't have a janitor?" She pushes her glasses up on her ridgeless nose.

"You think this building would have a janitor?" says Jerome. "Does anything in here ever look like its been cleaned? Do you think Mr. Charles would ever spring for cleaning service?"

"Who then?" says Kittie, kicking at a dust bunny.

"My guess is the white guy, " he says.

I look up from my desk and swallow. They're on to me.

"The old man that's always in here to tutor Mr. Charles' daughter. Guy creeps me out. He's always asking me about the mall and web design and cartoons. And he's always got a stack of papers with him. All hunched over carrying that briefcase. I bet he's the one leaving his perverted weird stories everywhere. I bet he forces them on Alise."

"Oh come on," says Kittie. "I wonder where they're coming from." She took the story and pinned it to the wall, under a framed cover of Talking Drum with a picture of the president of Ghana on it.

"Who knows, but I'm gonna beat the crap out of them when I find them," Jerome says, turning back to his computer. "What was yours about? The story you found."

"A perverted old man who gives weird stories to a little black girl."

"Whoa. Seriously?" Jerome looks up and looks worried. He touches the back of his head.

"No, it was about a day in the life of a lynching tree in the deep south. When the tree rustles its leaves, it's trying to scream the word 'no.'"

people prize what they don't understand almost as much as what they do.

there is a sea within the sea that holds perfectly still