Girl of Steel w/ Magnet

Theirs was barely a love story. And the attraction? Unfair. She was the Girl of Steel, and he was a magnet. She never bent, she never broke, but she couldn't let go of him. They met in the middle of a Chemistry exam: an alloy plus an object possessed of a magnetic field equaled true love. Neither were consulted about the affair they'd never stop having. They were merely equated, as romance tends to work.

It hurt the Girl of Steel's self-esteem. She was used to resisting, to withstanding, and at her favorite times, upholding. But this boy walked by and she instantly zipped to his side, and she never minded it. She minded that she didn't mind. She minded what others would think, too.

The world still needed her to build cars and skyscrapers and specific models of cans. They needed her for frying pans and satellites. There was not a country on the planet that didn't view her as a one-woman industry. Not a country on the planet that wouldn't judge the affair with this boy with his lopsided electrons.

He didn't see her as an industry. The magnet didn’t even see her as industrious; she got no work done around him. They looked into each others' eyes, studying the ripples in electron behavior, and watching countless hours of The Food Network. It was stuff the other major materials made fun of – the stuff she'd made fun of until that fated exam. The stuff she'd thought was cliché without having ever considered how clichés established.

He said that perhaps clichés were an industry. Was not all industry repetition?

That was trite, and she knew it, and she couldn't help liking it anyway. Not giggling, certainly not giggling like he did at her slights and insights. He was so enthusiastic, despite never having been asked to love her, to always be there, to, in his own way, always zip to her side, which, when she paid attention, she realized he did, being less massive than her. Sometimes bites of him chipped off on impact. The Girl of Steel collected those bits of him, and turned them into earrings, since they were clingy. He called her industrious. She called that trite, and she was right, and she didn't care, and that ambivalence bothered her, and she didn't care about that either.

Soon they went on public dates to every Friday exam at the lab, to see what other couples Science would pair up on paper. To see what else would come out the other side of equations. It was difficult to understand, and the magnet never really understood, but it felt nice. That was the Girl of Steel's reasoning, too, not that she ever said it. It was easier watching the inexplicable when the explicable didn't work. Love and the Friday exams were exasperating.

Bathroom Monologue: Coldblooded Body Image Redux

“I try not to talk about it because it's unfashionable for men to have body image issues. Society is acutely aware of how unrealistic their demands are on women's appearances, but you never think how much pressure you put on a man. I spend hours in aerobics classes, arms behind my back and undulating on my belly. I've paid thousands for skin creams and mud treatments without a single scale to show for it. There's a surgery to bifurcate your tongue if you want to half-ass it. Truth is, science won't ever give you a reptilian mouth. The funding isn't there. It isn’t profitable enough. Now you're going to tell me I'm silly, that I'm too hard on myself, that nobody expects me to become a snake. Ride the rails in my shoes for just one day. How they stare at me while I’m trying to coil in my chair. They're all thinking, "What a worthless cobra he makes." But none of them are willing to help me become whole!”

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: Fuzzy Kind of View

The bandages on my wrist itch, and I'm scratching them for a while, for so long that my chin gets comfortable on my chest. For a while I forget whether my eyelids are open or closed, until the bed creaks and I slide left, into Sherri's side. She sits down beside me, you see, which I don't see because these new drugs retard my system. That's what Carlos said they'd do, and he'd know, and he was right.

Sherri puts an arm around me like Carlos was never allowed to in the hospital, tucking my shoulder into her flabby armpit. She feels like dough taken out of the oven too early, and she smells like sea salt and basil, and I dread what she's been cooking while I've been in the hospital.

"Getting drowsy?" she asks, or prods. I can't tell which. I used to be able to. The differences used to annoy. Before these new drugs.

"Nah," I say, shaking my head briskly, trying to wake myself up. I get more tired with every swipe of my head. Dr. Preisblatt's drugs have reversed the way my body wants to act. "I'm good. I'm great. I'm the best." I repeat things more often now.

"Because you look drowsy. It's about time you slept."

Bathroom Monologue: No More Starlight

She can't paint. She can't imagine what she'd paint. She can't imagine which side to start from, what stroke or shade to apply, or what to feel. All that's making her heart rattle is other people's feelings, hypothetical reactions to creations she's too afraid to try. The world is prying the roof off her house and reaching in to strangle her imagination.

There is only one thing to do on foggy nights like this.

She visits the door of her one-room apartment. It is closed. She opens it as deliberately as you can open a door. She closes it as deliberately as –

-          not as deliberately as you could,

-          not as deliberately as Pierre-August Renoir could,

-          not as deliberately as Corinne Vionnet could,

-          not as deliberately as the unmatchable and far too young Amy Shackleton could,

– her Freshman art teacher could, but explicitly and precisely as deliberately as she could. This makes the world go away so quickly that she leaves the drapes open.

Leaves losing shades into a singular dark green, and then to utter silhouette. They waver against the overcast sky, some clouds thickening, grey on grey violence hiding where the moon might be rising. No starlight to bother her, and soon no grey-on-grey, only a thing that feels black. Her windowpanes become plastic white outlines on a ceaseless void.

There is no lamplight. There is no starlight. No cars backfire, no distant bridges cajole, and there are no stars in the sky because they are all too far away to reach her. To reach here. The world goes away. Her apartment doesn't rest on it; she lives on her own asteroid hurtling through a private bit of space. Would Renoir have liked The Next Generation?

Space abides no sound. It abides no neighbors, no debtors, no family angry at her for things she never wanted or intended to do with her adulthood. Her little apartment and perfect studio is so far away from any celestial body that gravity has to give up, and with it, the weight of all things social drifts and evaporates. A physiological metaphor plays across her shoulders and she feels that lift that's supposed to be cliché and that is actually so welcome it stirs tears. She dabs at them with a paintbrush, because then –

-          then she can stalk up to the canvas and look it in the eyes she's yet to birth.

-          then she can work without thinking of the verb.

-          then she can sleep the way the verb out to work.

– then she can open the door and face the world. She paints the knob first. It'll be avocado green.

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: Sleep in Your Mother

He slept in his mother. She held him safe and stiff until the Devil came. God was always there in a square of incognito, but you couldn't see Him all the time. Only when the Devil came. He shone through the gap and illuminated all. His fingers got into the boy's eyes, and he shrugged off his mother for the day ahead. He never abused her. He stayed in her arms no longer than he was asleep, and always reset her sheets. Respect was important in the room.

He had twenty-one guards. Three were horizontal, and eighteen stood vertical. They were cold, standing near enough that no one could slip between them. Not even when the boy was first born and thrown into the room was he small enough to escape. The guards only stepped aside when his meals were brought. Afterward, they always they swung back to cold attention.

There was firma and incognita. He spent most of his time on firma, allowing his mother to slumber while he stared at the guards. Firma was supportive. It never shifted or sent him away. It was always cool beneath his bare feet. In the winter it grew bitingly cold, but not of its own volition. It had no more choice in its temperature than incognita did of its ungraspable height. Some days he looked at incognita, high above and housing the square that was God. Some years he wondered when he would grow tall enough to touch them. No year yet had he gotten tall enough.

As much as he enjoyed the sight of God, the ability to regard the guards and fathom incongnita, he loathed the light. If he sat in it too long his skin ached and burned. It was sent of the Devil. The Devil illuminated all and woke up the others. In the halls beyond his guards, mad men screamed nonsense. They threatened, fought and murdered each other - always in the presence of the Devil. Never in his absence. Never when God was alone, when it was dark and when mother welcomed him into her lap.

He showed the Devil his strength. He showed him that he could clean his mother and keep her straight, and showed him that he did not need her. He spent hours laying on firma with his bare skin. He would sit up over and over, or climb the guards and suspend himself. Every day he exercised his body, not until it was sore, not until the veins in his limbs stayed out, not until he was so tired that eyes quaked - but until the Devil ran away. Then it was dark. Then he lay there in his mother's grip and whispered to her how brave he was. He promised into her down that if the Devil came back, he would do it all again, and show that beast he was strong. The Devil always came back.

Bathroom Monologue: S-

Story cut for possible publication! Thanks for all the comments!