Bathroom Monologue: Death Becomes They

People have died for as long as imagination has existed. Death is a franchise that services every religion and spirituality, but it's more of a commerce thing. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died, he became a set of box seats at an undisclosed opera house. When Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup died, he became a song – I can't tell you which because of afterlife copyright issues, but it's a good one. Underrated, actually.

Many artists become works. Ella Fitzgerald became a tune that homeless children in Hudson, New York used to entertain each other, while Rodney Dangerfield became a Yo Mama joke. It's hard to become your own eulogy, and thus it's a prized afterlife.

But it's not the only option. William Penn became a doorstop, which seems blasphemous to some, unless you were privy to some of the conversations he let drafts into.

Albert Einstein became an equation, and not the one you'd expect. He became "2 + 2 = ?" on the first test that a young boy was taking. That boy is a physicist now. There's a bureau looking into whether that's permissible.

Lao Tzu became a road, but one that cannot be walked.

You don't have to be famous for your death to mean something. I'm fairly certain the telegraph, electric battery and iPad were built out of people you've never heard of. A funny kid who never did more than sketch clouds became the kite Benjamin Franklin flew to test his theory of lightning – or he turned into the folk tale about it. I'll have to look that up.

Often the living do the dead wrong. A river of starvation victims became an ocean of grain – though because there is no reincarnation, live people must harvest and deliver that grain in this life. They must or they dishonor what the dead become.

Many people die angry or hurt, which is why there are so many bullets in the world. Every modern war has been a thunderstorm of the deceased yelling about their unfair shake. Anyone would rather become vengeance, but you can't become an intangible. That's just not possible. Your physicality begets a physicality, and it's your lot to become a bullet fired at the wrong person. The living don't even know how unhappy murder makes the world.

You can make the dead sing in sowing a better world from their contributions, or you can make them regret they ever existed. It is all in how you use their memory.

Bathroom Monologue: Anton and Anton

Anton sits on his knees before the grave of Anton. For a while, Emil and Yulia's son holds Anton's left hand and does his impression of prayer; at three years old, he no better understands prayer than he does who is buried beneath his soles.

"Amen," Emil and Yulia's son mutters, releasing Anton's hand to rub at his eyes. The drive here has made him drowsy, and Yulia stoops to pick him up. She bows a quarter of the way she normally would, dipping herself and her child toward the headstone.

Instead of 'Amen,' she says, "Thank you for saving my husband, Anton." She says nothing more, and ends her bow. She did not think much of Anton, the drunken shadow of her Emil. She is two paces behind Anton when he checks her, her gaze already on the car.

It is four years to the Saturday since Anton Behrs was blown up pulling Emil from a foundry. That is what everyone knows. They commemorate it on Saturdays because Emil Behrs has never in eleven years missed a day at the exchange, and Anton will not let Emil fail now. He misses absinthe.

Bathroom Monologue: Refugee Camp Regrets, Redux

"I don't regret why I'm in here. They can starve me, beat me. Call me a traitor. I'm not one. What I did was for the good. I was a General in name only, put in charge of the children and the lame. A sea of starving, helpless people, with less than a dozen armed guards, all of whom were routinely called away for more glorious service. I couldn't lead my charges to safety. The raiders would find us in any cave or stronghold I managed to reach. We were ransacked weekly. We lost our supplies and the youngest starved. When the raiders returned to find no more food, they took the near-pubescent girls as slaves. No number of missing or dead on a report changed the minds of those in command.

"I remember the fifth attack most clearly. The smoke from tents they burned out of malice. The lamentations of young and feeble. A crippled mother crawling after them escaping raiders, barking for them to return her daughter. I watched her legs drag in the sand behind her, like a split fishtail. It didn’t even flop around. Other men would have found it heartbreaking. I found it inspiring, and I am not sorry for the idea it gave me.

"I took arms. Only one per child. I took a couple of hands, but that wouldn’t be enough. I took no legs – every one of those children would grow up to walk. I even mailed them one of the limbs along with the reports and testimonials from children who could no longer write themselves. I packed it in salt. Six mutilated children and one arm were somehow harder to ignore than thirty dead parents.

"The next week we had a brigade defending our camp. The raiders were rebuffed by bronze shields and long lances. Able-bodied men did their duty by the meekest.

"Which of them gave me away? I don’t know. From the looks, I think it was some of the same children who had sworn by my testimonials. You can’t trust children, even parentless ones, to keep up your stories. I can understand the juvenile mind begrudging me my work. I don’t blame them. But I’m not sorry. Those one-armed children will live behind shielded camps because of me. If my story is spoiled and Command withdraws the brigade, then I’m still here, in a prison twenty days away from whatever carnage happens, with nothing but the story that they are safe. I have no regrets."

Bathroom Monologue: "Why can't the computer just take the novel out of my brain instead of me having to write it?" –Anonymous Friend

Soon it will! With the march of progress, the innovations of neuroscience and tidy monthly fee, you too will never type again. You'll be jacked in to an industrial word processor, an air tube running up one nostril and a food tube down the other, fed a steady drip of chemicals to stimulate the parts of your brain that crank out ideas. You'll be held in an eternal sleep of pre-selected, pre-programmed dreams, free to enjoy them without the pesky freedom to recognize they're happening, all while your unconsciousness is milked of stories by the latest Microsoft Notepad, which will translate your imagination into immaculate blocks of text and tropes. You'll never have to worry about writing again. You won't be allowed to, either.

Bathroom Monologue: Suspect

The story makes no sense if you look at the whole picture – the land lady's perfect bill of health, the suspect holding the knife, the ex-husband everyone thought would come after her. That stuff is distraction. If you had been in the car with me on the ride to the station, you'd know. Our suspect is something unreal.

Our suspect suffers from something weakly diagnosed as high-functioning autism. That he lived alone with such an acute condition was unfortunate, a failure of the system. His father should have been there, but he died in Iraq. His mother should have been there, but two years after her husband died, she had a catastrophic psychotic meltdown, seemingly out of nowhere. The suspect's sister took care of him for a year before she had a catastrophic psychotic meltdown, also seemingly out of nowhere. This family had no history of mental illness before the last decade. He got extremely close with these two people before they lost their minds.

It was the sister's apartment where the suspect was living, occasionally looked in on by the land lady. According to another tenant, she didn't want him to go homeless.

You need to take the week of March 3^rd as Week One. That's probably when the land lady leaves a book in his apartment, or somehow he walks off with it. That is The Portable Jung. I've fingerprinted it, and he read this thing. He even tore some pages.

Week Two, he purchases four books on psychology. He can't talk or write, but apparently can read and browse for books. Tell me how that works. I'm going interview the bookseller tonight. Of these books he bought, it appears only three were ever opened. Passages were torn from their bindings, mostly relating to one subject that makes sense in Week Three.

Week Three: he purchases six books on neuroscience. He reads the first half of two of these, again tearing out sections, making the collage that covered up his bathroom mirror. It's all about brain chemistry.

Week Four: he buys eleven books on chemistry. He tears passages relating to cell structure from all of them and collages his shower walls.

Week Five: nine books on molecular physics. It's as though he read a couple of chapters out of four of them, but removes nothing. This is the same week his land lady has a psychotic episode, out of the blue, and kills herself. And he's in her apartment when she does it.

I'm not saying he stabbed her. That theory was always bunk, and the two tenants who discovered him say the knife he picked up, he was trying to turn on himself. That's what he says, too.

Driving him to the station, I heard him. I turned around at a stop light, and his lips weren't moving. The guy can't talk with his mouth, but he was crying inside my head, so loud that tears were spilling down my cheeks. He kept apologizing and begging me in this garbled nonsense, and I actually ditched the car for a few minutes just to get my bearings. I thought my head was going to burst. I had to radio another officer to take him the rest of the way, and when I call her, she hasn't answered any of my messages. I bet she had a wild ride.

Look. He started with Jung, then he went from psychology to what made up our brains and how, skimming the whole thing because none of it was new to him. He only needed missing bits/ He didn't have to read that much because he'd always intuited it. He cracked our code because he's desperate to talk to someone, but his voice is dangerous. I'm pretty sure what he kept asking was for help.

So either this is some kind of horrible telepathy case, or I've gone crazy. And given the history, if I've gone crazy being around him, that's just more evidence that he's the real deal, and he definitely needs someone's help.

Interview with Chandler Klang Smith

Chandler and I met in the Lit classes of Bennington College. She's been furiously pursuing fiction ever since, and her debut novel has just come out with Chizine Publications. It's unusual take on circuses called Goldenland Past Dark. I'll let her tell you what it's about.

John: For newcomers, what is the plot of Goldenland Past Dark? 
Chandler: Goldenland Past Dark starts out as a coming-of-age story of sorts, about a sixteen-year-old hunchbacked clown named Webern Bell who runs away to join a ramshackle circus lead by his friend and mentor, the ringmaster Dr. Show. Despite his successful escape from home, though, Webern is still haunted by memories of his dark family history, which become creative fuel for the surreal clown acts that come to him in dreams. But when heartbreak, grief, and the reappearance of his sinister sisters send his life into a downward spiral, the already thin line between fantasy and reality blurs, and the world of his imagination threatens to consume him completely.

John: What attracted you to a traveling circus for this novel? Did it start with them, or with a character idea who wound up fitting in one, or something else entirely? 

Chandler: It was a bit of a combination.  Originally, I started out writing stories about Webern Bell's childhood (some of which you can read on my website here), but I always knew I eventually wanted him to become a clown; I just didn't know that part of his life would become the subject of an entire book.

Circuses appeal to me as the subject for fiction because they're families of misfits -- people held together more because of their shared status as outsiders than because of any real commonality with each other. Writing about one gave me a great license to create a variety of characters, and to put them in conflict. I also wanted to explore the practice of a dying art form -- in the 1960's, when the novel is set, the circus was no longer as important to a culture increasingly gravitating toward television and the movies for entertainment.  As a writer, I suppose there's something I identify with about that.

John: There’s a deal of fiction about circuses. Are there any tropes or traditional representations you wanted to explore or subvert? 

Chandler: The big thing I wanted to get away from was the cliche of the creepy clown. John Wayne Gacy and It by Stephen King have created an indeliable impression in people's minds, and that's understandable, but clowning/mime is a form of artistic expression that dates back to the earliest forms of live entertainment, and when you look at performances by greats like Emmett Kelly, Marcel Marceau, and Charlie Chaplin (just to name a few who are easy to find on YouTube), you see that they're able to convey a whole world of expressive emotion within its time-honored constraints.  It strikes me as so dismissive and wrong to look at all that and just say, flatly, "Clowns scare me."

What I do think is spooky about clowning is the same thing that's spooky about any imaginative endeavor: the way it offers escape into an alternative persona and an unreal realm that may seem seductively more appealing than the artist's real life.

John: What is your favorite thing about the book? 

Chandler: I like Webern's clowning dream sequences; I feel like some of my strongest prose is in there.  I also like his romance with Nepenthe the Lizard Girl, and where it ends up going, but I'll stop there for fear of spoilers.

John: That's fair! So how did you come to work with ChiZine? They’re fantastic. 

Chandler: They are fantastic!  I actually discovered them on the Poets & Writers small press database, and as soon as I started looking at their website, I realized that their aesthetic was right up my alley.  It was a real eureka moment.  For folks reading this at home, I highly recommend checking out any of their other titles, especially Hair Side, Flesh Side by Helen Marshall, The Inner City by Karen Heuler, Chasing the Dragon by Nick Kaufmann, and Sarah Court by Craig Davidson, just to name a few of my favorites.

John: How is ChiZine helping you promote the novel?

Chandler: I've been doing a bit of a blog tour, and they've been great about getting advance copies to reviewers.  So far I've been reviewed in Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, so I'm pleased about that.

John: Were there any key influences on you in writing Goldenland Past Dark?

Chandler: The most important was easily Steven Millhauser; I'm consistently blown away by his ability to translate visual images into luminous, breathtaking prose.  And not just static images either; he can show you a magic trick, a knife-throwing act, a Saturday morning cartoon, all with a grace and eloquence that feels just effortless. 

I was also definitely influenced by Angela Carter, particularly her stupendous novels The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus.  And I owe a debt to The Tin Drum, with its similarly stunted protagonist.

John: This is your debut novel. I'd love to wrap up asking: do you know what’s next for you?

Chandler: Another novel, about an alternative reality version of New York City under constant attack by dragons.  You can read a short excerpt from it here.

In addition to bringing an excerpt of her next novel, Chandler is also running a giveaway for Goldenland Past Dark. You can enter for free right here.

Bathroom Monologue: Give Me Your Daughter

Everyone in the camp knows at this point. This thing, this monster is going keep attacking us every night, killing a new victim until we give it my daughter. I thought you’d get it last night, but this morning there’s a new widow, and I hear people murmuring that he died instead of my girl. That’s not an exchange a father ever wants to hear murmured under breaths while he’s taking a piss. Now I hear you might consider giving Cornelia over.

Understand that you’re not giving that thing my daughter. Give it me instead.

It goes for stragglers. People too near the perimeter, or who don’t think there’s safety in the group. It’s never killed a group, has it? So tonight you build fires, and you set traps, and you sharpen all the fucking pointy sticks you can make. And you get everyone into a single group. You scare them with stories about what’s been happening – what happened to that pardoner who thought he could do better alone last night. You tell them his bloody tale so they get theirs into camp.

And an hour after dusk, when no one’s left the campfire, and everyone’s armed, I’ll start an argument with you. I’ll shove you, and you’ll hit me, and I’ll storm off towards the conifers. I’ll piss on them, and complain to myself, and pray like I’ve been doing, none of it too far from you. I’ll be the only easy prey the monster sees. It’ll have to kill me eventually to make good on its threat.

You wait until it’s eating me. Until I’m screaming in pain. Then you bring everyone down on that thing and you kill it, cut off its head, tear out its lungs, so that it never bothers anyone again.

Then you don’t have to worry about it killing us in the night anymore. Then you just got to worry about raising my little girl.

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 5

This is Part 5 in a weekly serial. You can begin at Part 1 here.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

They know he’s here. The trunk that came this morning was full of ashes from his house – from the very estate you served in, Cecil. They burned the bed he was birthed on. The mariners know he’s here, they see it from their ships, and they think he’s causing the plague that consumes the continent. Thousands upon thousands dead that he could cure if he’d go out there, and then they’d know what we’ve turned into a way of life. It is worse than an affront to keep him on this wretched island. We’re squandering him.

We need only to tell him something, and his heart will bring him to his feet. So why not tell him we found the Arab? Ruth and Hansel found an Arab hanged for heresy. It could be him. And your Young Master’s been practicing so long in cemeteries. Let him go raise his personal Lazarus and ask his identity. After that, we’ll never have to deal with these ships or assassins again.

This isn’t my notion. None of these are words original to my mouth; this is everyone’s notion, but yours, and the crone with her printing press. Everyone thinks we ought to spur him into manhood, save you, and that little gardener, and your Young Master himself, who only believes such because he’s so obsessed with these arcane books, so possessed of his own origin that he ignores his destiny. This is his time. A plague is the perfect time for the man who is the cure.

I attest this of sound mind, for once I was mad and fretted over the sensations of an arm that had long left me to gangrene. Your Young Master took my ghostly limb and ghostly anxiety, but if you shut him up in this little safe isle any longer, he’ll never know all the limbs that are truly at his command. You’re raising a bull to be ignorant of his horns, a lion ignorant of his voice. There are eight ships in the bay, and they’ve brought cannons, Cecil. They brought the trunk of ashes. They haven’t thrown a dead mariner overboard in a week; they circle to find the safe distance from your Young Master’s reach. Do you want to wait to find out the reach of their arms?

So let us tell him we found his Arab, and get him into the world. You can go to him this morning, speak one sentence, and he’ll believe you, because you’re the one he grew up trusting. Or, so help me, I will lock you in a cellar and find another way to convince him.

We need lions, and they need the cure.

Continued with Voice of the Lion

Bathroom Monologue: She'll Come Around, Redux

She fell in the puddle in front of his house, and he fell in love. He got his Pa and they helped her dry off. While her folks came, they played with his anthill.

The next day, she said ‘Hello’ passing by him in the hall. She’d never done it before. He beamed all the way through Algebra.

A week later, she’d forgotten he existed. His brothers elbowed him to do something about it. Go ask her out. Go ask if she’s started that ant collection. Go pretend to bump into her.

He did none of it. “She’ll come around,” he said.

She did great in Math, so he tried hard and made it into Advanced Placement with her. He’d watch her from the other side of the room and struggle to figure out the number of degrees in a pentagon. She never offered to collaborate when they assigned group work.

“She’ll come around,” he said.

She liked puppies, it seemed. She got a summer job at the Hearth Animal Shelter, the one with the uncomfortable location across from a cemetery. He lit right up and got a job as the assistant groundskeeper. She never came over to chat.

“She’ll come around,” he said.

She left town for college. He went to the bar when he knew her sisters were there, to overhear things about her. She switched from Mathematics to Education. She was a teacher. She got her own house. She got tenure. She got cancer. She beat cancer. She still got letters from that first year of kids she’d taught. She was thinking of writing a book.

In time, she passed. Her remains were shipped back to the town where she’d grown up. There was a big service with her sisters and cousins. A lot of crying and nice stories. He stayed out of the way, listening and offering the occasional box of tissues.

After the service, he came up and filled in the grave. When he finished, he patted the dirt with his shovel and said, “I knew you’d come around.”

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 2

This is the much-requested second installment of The Only Thing Worse is the Cure. For the first chapter, click here.

For the entirety of my adult life, and for whatsoever of my immaturity I can recall, I have been observant to a perpetual war the angels and demons in every wall and fiber of our world. They are here now, in the bricks of this cell, in my mattress and pillow. They are in my hair. They are my hair. They compose the very door that protects you from me. Their battles are legion; they are infinite and infinitesimal. The demons circle around the angels in band of increasing number, as though waiting to strike, while the angels circle around something more central, the nature of which I have never determined. Perhaps it is The Lord Himself, or the Gates of Paradise. Yet they never battle over Him; in any case I have observed, demons leave their flocks for other shores, emitting sparks, static heathens.

I still perceive these miniscule wars, yet for the first time in memory, they do not terrify me. Strange how they ever did; I do not know the nature of the trick. As soon as you pushed that pram down this hall, the emotional reaction has simply severed. I see plainly now that they will not attack us, or undo our world; they merely are. Circles around circles around a neutral enigma.

As my neighbor now realizes he is the splendid Saint Augustine, and his neighbor professes to no longer crave human flesh, I am to puzzle on the meaning of delusions.

Perhaps it is the will of The Lord Himself that insists I see into the matters angelic and demonic, and thereby render unto you this: I see nothing unlike in the boy as to any other boy. He has no excess of angels or demons. Anyone in this house who sees magic in his constitution is still possessed of madness. He is a plain child who would, under other circumstances, require no more than baptism and proper diet.

Yet I appreciate that we are not under other circumstances. Should the manic paralysis of my wardens pass, they will be most cross with your young master, as will any authorities pursuing him. The mind lurches with your devotion to him.

Get him to Jerusalem, or unto any island in the south where the infectiously sick are banished. Upon the latter there will be no healthy jailers for his presence to harm, and I know of one colony that has a printing press with obtuse reputation. Perhaps that is where you can inquire as to your former mistress’s book. I would not have advised its immolation, yet can hardly criticize a man’s hysteria at matters uncanny. How I would have liked to study its demons.

How can such a boy operate? He breathes, his flesh is pink as dawn, his angels and demons no quicker or crueler than those in your hands. What about him could render this clarity unto me, or that copious vomiting unto the wardens? It is perplexing in a fashion I have never felt – that which must be normal confusion in the rest of human history. You have granted me the privilege of feeling what any Christian would consider confusion, and thus made me one with every other thinker on the earth. It is a sore unity. Thank you for the privilege, even if it should be counterfeit.

If you would do one more kindness: take me with you. Take as many from this house as you deem trustworthy, for your pilgrimage in any direction will require fidelity of numbers. This boy, innocent as I claim him, will be pursued. Any sane mind here is in gratitude to whatever gift you carry in that basinet, and even if I were still in mean fate, I would wish the best for a child. Will you let me guide you to that southerly island printing press?

Click here for Part 3.

Bathroom Monologue: Investing in Tomorrows

"Benjamin Franklin is quoted saying that a single today is worth two tomorrows. Now the board of directors defrauded me of thirty-one years of pension time. That amounts to 11,242 todays that I put into a retirement. Where did it go? They say the stock tanked, yet they have golden parachutes.

"I lost over eleven thousand todays. How many did you lose? How fair would it seem if the board spent twenty-two thousand tomorrows in a dungeon somewhere? Fair trade by the reckoning of a founding father.

"I have a very nice basement. By that I mean that it has a black mold infestation and some kind of mammal keeps breaking in through unknown holes. I think they’re raccoons, but they bite more than raccoons are known to.

"Now, I’m a little old to go around kidnapping. I'm only proposing this to our... board? Our Board of Owed Parties. Yes, I like that, don't you?

"So, I’d lease my basement to the Board, if there was interest. How many tomorrows do you think these people owe you?"

Bathroom Monologue: Virtues Bug, OR, It’s What’s Inside That Counts

As dusk whisked over their cave, Mummy Nine-Legs ascended to the ceiling and unfastened a few spools of humans for supper. Little Bug had never had his own human yet, being so young, and danced on all nine of his legs in anticipation. Yet when Mummy Nine-Legs handed him his bundle, and as he split it open, he dropped the fermented cadaver to the floor.

“Mummy, I want a good human,” he whined. “This one is covered in warts and moles, and she’s got an overbite like she’s all teeth.”

“No one is all teeth,” said Mummy Nine-Legs, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

She took Little Bug’s prey and slit it down the belly for the babe to see. And indeed, inside the cadaver was as lined with lipids as any thin girl, and her liver was ripe and swollen. Her lungs popped in his mouth. By the end of their meal, he even found he relished the way her teeth settled in his gullet, and he realized how foolish he’d been. It really was what lay inside people that counted, and particularly when they lay digesting inside him.

Bathroom Monologue: I hope my death inconveniences people.

"It was only this morning that I realized. I always thought I was more easy-going, just bury me and chat, think about the good times, and please God, let someone tell a joke during a eulogy. If you’ve ever been at a funeral, you know jokes during eulogies are the greatest public service west of clean water.

"But I was driving down the turnpike to work, and it kind of bubbled up in me. I wasn’t behind a funeral procession or anything. The morning was orange, and I was tired as every day I ever drove into the station. It simply stirred up in me.

"I hope my death inconveniences people. Not necessarily that an aneurysm makes me plow my pick-up into a fruit stand, but my family. I feel I’ve put enough hours into my life that I deserve to really shake up the people I leave behind. Let them cry and gnash their teeth and feel uncertain how the world will be without me. Not me to contribute to the household budget, or shovel the driveway, you see, but the uncountable, unquantifiable shitstorm that is the loss of a guy who worked really fucking hard and deserved you to feel like hell now that he’s gone.

"Never realized how badly I wanted to be mourned. Kind of fucked up."

Bathroom Monologue: Evidence of a Dream

I've never had the grasp of days. It could have been four weeks ago, or perhaps six, that the dreams began. Perhaps it was only two, but it surely feels a deal longer than that. I've never been the sort to reckon my dreams, and that is why the same ones recurring nightly struck me. It seemed every time I put head to pillow, I was visited by a young man with grey hair, in an ivory suit. He usually brings a switchblade with a pearl handle, like my father used to own.

Sometimes he throws acid or scalding coffee in my eyes. Sometimes he lurks by the stairs and seizes my ankles. Every night is a little different, whether I try to escape through a window and fall into a garden of thorns, or hide under the bed and he finds my ankle sticking out, or I simply charge him and have my tendons slashed. Every night it's the same end. The same pearl-handled switchblade.

After a week, I took to writing down what happened, to record, to perhaps show a psychiatrist. Evidence of a dream is a troubling thing. Also, it’s ridiculously hard to find one who’s taking new patients this time of year.

Now you might tell me to disregard the dreams. Yet three days ago, I saw him in broad daylight. His ivory suit, his grey hair, his utter lack of wrinkles. He was having demitasse at the cafe across from where I always eat lunch.

He has been to the cafe every day for the past three days. Those I’ve counted. He has demitasse and nothing else, and never looks at me, at least when I’m looking at him. Today he brought his mail with him; he opened the envelopes with a switchblade. I nearly threw up when I saw him pull it from an interior pocket. That was no letter opener, though he applied it to four letters, and read them studiously. Three he tucked into his ivory jacket. The fourth he left on his table, with a hundred dollar tip, weighed down by his cup.

Whatever you'll say of me, I'll hear nothing against my venturing to his table after he caught his cab. I had to see the scene. It was a need.

The demitasse was unfinished, still steaming in the mid-day gloom, smelling faintly familiar. I could have sworn that drink had been thrown in my face some night. I took the envelope as his waitress came over. She nearly called the police on me, but I insisted that I knew him and had to return the letter for business.

The envelope bore my address. My specific P.O. Box at the towers, and for several minutes all I could think was to throttle the manager for giving this ivory-suited stranger a double of my key. It made me feel positively insane, too much be a hideous dream, and I drew out paper to write everything down, because in dreams you can’t make time work so neatly. Because I needed record and evidence that this was happening.

But the letter. The letter inside the envelope, one sheet of paper, folded three times in the way I've done since third grade. Even the handwriting was familiar. How my a's and o's look the same. How I forget to dot things.

The letter in the envelope was the one I’m writing now.

My palms broke into a sweat and I nearly crumpled the thing up. I want to incinerate it, but my hands wouldn’t let me. They had to preserve evidence.

What’s crazy is that as I’m writing this, I can’t think of anything else to say. The letter’s words, its statements, its facts are all my mind can conjure. It’s as though his stolen mail is all there is. I can’t invent anything else. My imagination turns on me. Every sentence chronicling what I’m thinking is another step down what this sheet of paper says. I couldn’t even avoid going home, even though I read on and knew better.

I’d write more. I’d start scribbling, draw something since the letter has illustration, just to deviate from its ugly omniscience. I’d like to invent who you are – to find out who I’m writing to. Why haven’t I dreamed you? Or have I, and I can’t remember? But there isn’t time for that question, or to invent an answer.

I don’t have the time, for I saw him outside, just as I read that he’d be there. He was across the street a minute ago. Now someone is buzzing my apartment. It’ll be worse when he stops buzzing and stops waiting. I’ve dreamed what happens then.

I need some place to be, some place to hide or defend that I haven’t dreamed him in before. I’ve latched the windows, unplugged appliances, thrown away all the heavy objects he’s ever wielded, and what do I find? There’s no corner of this apartment he hasn’t killed me in before.

There’s someone knocking at the door. Have I ever let him into the apartment before? I can’t remember how he gets in. I’m no good at remembering dreams.

Bathroom Monologue: Tears For Wishes

Polly knelt in her single circular window sill, trying to think of an appropriate prayer. A pillow was tucked under her swollen left knee. He’d be home tomorrow and she still hadn’t recovered. Everything she knew was about honoring thy parents, so how did you ask the sky to stop them from hurting you?

Asking God the Father felt wrong, but so did asking His son. Tears rippled up in her little eyes until she spied an orange streak in the sky. A shooting star, she thought, a message. A chance. She clasped her fingers together and wished, and wished with all her heart, that Dad would stop yelling at Mom, stop grabbing her, and just, just, just stop.

Polly was a very lucky girl, for that orange streak wasn’t a shooting star. It was her father’s plane crashing.

Wishes come true.

Bathroom Monologue: Star Wars Episode VII - Genocide of Ewoks

The Empire was not long on Endor before it fell. The Ewoks had never had much contact with the outside universe, and so never saw the foreign plagues coming. Every cuddly creature that Luke, Leia and Han danced with that night was dead within a week of the Death Star’s destruction – not from combat, but from highly predatory diseases their immune systems had never seen.

Overburdened by suddenly having to run an interstellar government with numerous pockets of skepticism and resistance, Princess Leia and her freedom fighters can hardly divert many resources to help the Ewoks. Yet those who do venture to Endor bring still more suffering, swarming with their own planetary diseases, or have come to Endor only to make a profit under the auspices of the new “democracy.” When the Ewoks fight back against mercenaries who abuse them, the local settlers are quick to label them savage. They did defeat the Empire, after all.

C3PO ventures into the plague-stricken Ewok masses with a message of peace, hoping that its lack of biology will spare them further infection. Their only salvation is to move off of their ancestral grounds and head west, where new legislation swears they will always have domain. Supplies seem to come in equal number to the raids, and orders continually push the Ewoks off their reservations, until their previous way of life is but a tall tale that even their most optimistic children doubt ever existed. Their numbers are plummeting, their lands are strip-mined, and no one remembers how to dance.

This is what you guys wanted when you bitched about Return of the Jedi, right?

Bathroom Monologue: Wreck-It Ralph 2 - Exit to DOS

Between Jack Thompson’s crusade against videogames and the home console depleting arcades, the shop where Ralph and Vanellope live is about to close. Times have simply passed them by, though only one character knows it. Fix-It Felix Jr. is on his rooftop to witness the store manager lamenting the death of the arcade.

Very Biblical.

Felix is horrified at the coming genocide, but overhears one glimmer of hope: Noah’s Big Game Hunter, the oldest game in the arcade, has the highest score anyone has ever gotten on any such machine, and will be adopted with a power supply by a fanatical gamer. Felix realizes that if he evacuates all the characters into Noah’s Big Game Hunter, they won’t have to be powered off and euthanized.

But the citizens of his apartment building are too complacent to their existences, sure their hero will just fix it. His wife, Sergent Calhoun, fears for his sanity, and all the other machines in the arcade think he sounds like a madman. They’ve only ever seen machines deactivated for malfunction, and they’re all in top shape. Vanellope von Schweetz is hardly about to relinquish her newfound kingdom. The Street Fighters toss Felix out on the street.

With nowhere else to go, Felix desperately explores Noah’s Big Game Hunter itself. Not since the early arcade wars have outsiders visited, and they native hunters and beasts are quite militant to outside incursion into their homeland. If Felix does evacuate the other machine-populations here, it will mean decades of war. He narrowly escapes the machine-world to discover that Calhoun had a vision of her own, and believing in Felix, has victoriously marshaled her game’s soldier population and his own, in a sunny show of unity, to “re-settle” Noah’s Big Game Hunter.

How can Felix Jr. fix this? His father would have known.

This would be a bold direction for the Wreck-It Ralph series. It’s a liberal re-telling of Noah's Ark, The Book of Exodus, and a parable about Israel and Palestine. It will also introduce many new characters so we can sell toys.

Bathroom Monologue: Monologue of father talking daughter out of suicide

"Sweety, put down the screwdriver. I miss Mommy too, but that’s not good for you – that’s not going to help. Can you give it to Daddy? Come here, or – okay, okay, stay there. It’s alright, you can stay there, and I’ll stay right here. But can you put it down for a minute? Daddy misses Mommy, too. He… I miss her so much, I understand, but that’s not going to let you see her any sooner. She’d wouldn’t want you to cut yourself like that. Don’t you remember how upset she’d get whenever we messed up our clothes? No, Sweety, she’d hate it if you hurt yourself. She loved how brave you are. Don’t you remember that time she was out in the blinding rain, and you leaned out the window and got all soaking wet, and never stopped calling for her, so she couldn’t hear her way to the truck? That, she was proud of. That’s my girl. Just put it down for a second. I won’t move, but you can if you want. Would you like to sit in Daddy’s lap for a little while. We can go over by the window – that’s good. That’s perfect, Sweety, here you go. You’re fine. You’re fine, I know, I know. What—no, I don’t think she’s coming back, Sweety, but we can wait by the window tonight if you want. I’ll put it open a crack, but only a crack. She hated when you got your clothes wet."

Bathroom Monologue: Devil Gone Missing, Redux

Pat shot out of his chair when Conner finally came home. The boy’s clothes were crusted in brown grime and he was breathing with heavy excitement.

“Where you been, boy? Gone for four days without a word!” Pat said, pulling him inside. Conner followed his old man’s lead to the kitchen with such a smile that Pat could barely bear it.

“You look devastated. Like you found Jesus.”

“Is he missing, too?” The boy sucked in air in little bursts, like reverse laughter. “I just spent days finding the devil. You’d have been so proud, Pat.”

He reversed-laughed some more and bent towards the sink. When the water ran over his hands the brown turned a little red and circled the drain. Pat’s eyes widened at the change of color.

“You did what, boy?”

Conner beamed at him from over his shoulder, scrubbing his hands with lava soap. “Finally cornered him at the dump. His tail stuck in an old box spring, and he’d dropped his pitchfork.”

“Boy?” Pat moved nearer to the door. “Boy, what did you do?”

Smoke began to rise from the sink.

Bathroom Monologue: Hole of Evil

“The President says evil will always be a part of the world. We can intervene, arrest, try, analyze, medicate, rehabilitate and execute. No smart person is saying you can't do anything about any of the evil in the world. The President and I both recognize evil, and what you can do about it, which is why he hired me.

“Evil will persist, because it's a part of us, and its causes are so often so easy. That's where I come in. Where you can't eradicate it, socially and chemically, legally and ethically, I will dig my hole. I will dig deep and long, and erect walls thick and unyielding, and wrap their bonds around the vile. They will not see daylight or innocents. It will be my life's last work. The President’s work is to send as few souls to me as he can. My hope is that you will keep him honest.”