I'm More Versatile Than You Are

Stacey Turner recently sent me the Versatile Writer Award. Previously it was handed to me by Larry Kollar, Mari Juniper and Helen Howell, so at this point I’m going to believe consensus and be flattered. While the rules of the game have warped over time, it remains that you’re supposed to share seven things about yourself. Let’s see if I can keep this entertaining.

 

1. When I grow my facial hair, my mustache comes in blonde and my beard is red, while my hair is brown. I'm a human sampler pack.

2. Not only did playing Dynasty Warriors get me to read Luo Guanzhong's classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but sharing the game also spurred five friends to try it as well. Only one of us finished it.

3. In middle school I took a general intelligence test that put me at a genius level. I then attempted to exit the building by pushing through a door labeled PULL.

4. In my early teens my passion for writing was equaled by my aspirations to be a comic book artist. It was only after I was rejected from an art show and took stock of several years of drawings that I realized I utterly lacked talent at one of these passions. I might not have become a versatile writer at all if I’d just figured out how to draw hands.

5. As a child I watched Disney's Peter Pan seven times before giving up hope that Captain Hook could win this once. I still rooted for him afterwards, but only in a primitive fan fiction context.

6. I have run naked from the shower or bath tub to my computer to type out ideas multiple times. Conservatively, it's in double digits.

7. On the way back from a midnight screening of Spider-Man 2, I took a shortcut through the woods. A deer leaped in front of my car. I stopped in time, but the critter froze. I rolled down my window and hollered for it move. It refused. Flashing my high beams did no better. I wound up leaning out the window and pitching my idea of Spider-Man 3 to it until it got bored and left. I still think my plot had some heart.

Thanks again, Stacey. I hope I’ve entertained you all.

Bathroom Monologue: Helping the Nice Guy

Inning waited in the booth, looking out the window while hunched so that others might not see him through it. His Christian name was Inigo, but everyone had called him Inning on account of a childhood aspiration to play pro ball. Apparently he lacked the hand-eye coordination for it and three years of failed tryouts broke his spirit, but the nickname lingered.

Inning only relaxed when he saw Aldo’s red Mercedes pull up. Aldo emerged, all three hundred pounds of potential cardiac arrest stuffed into a tweed winter coat.

Aldo didn’t look at him through the window. He didn’t even look for him as he entered the restaurant, choosing instead to order his midday steak sandwich at the counter. After a minute of small talk with the pretty teen waitress who showed more interest in her cell phone, he waddled down the row of booths until he found Inning.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “Thank you for inviting me to lunch. It’s been a while.”

“They set my car on fi—”

Aldo thumped his hand on the table to stop him.

“Good afternoon,” he said again, then wedged his girth into the booth. His belly caught in the table and rose like bread dough.

“Good afternoon,” Inning said.

The waitress finished texting and brought over a house beer. Aldo thanked her and she scampered to the back to make his order. The restaurant was suddenly vacant.

Aldo said, “I presume this is about the nice guy.”

"They set my car on fire, Aldo. I didn't even know Families did that this century. They burned up my ride all over some pick pocketing. You can make this go away, right?"

"You don't understand. You picked on the nice guy."

"So what if I steal a wise guy's wallet? They're loaded. They can swallow the loss."

Aldo held up a finger. "Firstly, a wise guy kills people who steal his wallet precisely because he's a wise guy. Families don’t respect a lazy wise guy."

Before Inning could complain, he held up a second finger. His middle finger.

"Secondly, I said 'nice guy.' An innocent in this scum hole. They are the few people who get invited to Family weddings that never realize the deals being made around them. They always go to dinner and they never pay. They don't steal. They don't sell merchandise. They don't do hits. Their worst activity is unwittingly carrying something in their luggage once or twice in their lives. They do it unwittingly because they'd never agree to do it consciously."

Inning shook his head. "So I pick pocketed a dumb ass?"

"You pick pocketed a guy so friendly that hardened criminals pay for his dinner. And to do it while he was Christmas shopping for his kids? Come on."

"So they burned my…”

The door behind the counter opened. The waitress trotted out with Aldo’s food. An instant of assuring her tip later, she was gone.

Aldo bit in, taking a fifth of his long sandwich in one bite. Inning had ordered the same sandwich an hour ago and more of it still sat on his plate than Aldo had left in his hands.

“They can't possibly go after me over that. It’s just a wallet. How did they even figure out I was the one who took it?"

“Using his credit card was a bad idea,” Aldo replied around a mouthful. “You think just because it’s shipped to Sherry’s loft that they’re not going to figure it out?”

“But he’s just some dumb ass.”

"You're not listening, Inning. When your first baby is born, the first person you call is a guy at the hospital. The Family has connections and he'll make sure everything God didn't make rough Himself goes smoothly. The second person you call is your Ma, because she'd never forgive you otherwise. The third person you call is a nice guy, because he's the first person who comes to mind. That is who you stole from. You are lucky you did not steal his cell phone. The numbers on there?" Aldo's eyes lolled around in his head and he mopped his brow with the remains of the sandwich, as though the idea had given him a sudden fever. "Oof."

"I still wouldn't light a car on fire over that."

"That's because you're a greasefingers. You're not in a Family business. If some moron wronged one of my good friends, I would shoot him straight in the chest."

Aldo gestured at Inning’s chest with his sandwich. A bit of steak fell out of the tip, plopping onto his plate. It dribbled brown juice.

Inning grumbled. "Well I appreciate having you on my side."

"That brings us to this."

Aldo shifted. One hand secured the sandwich so he could continue feeding, while the other reached into his coat. He produced a black Beretta, placing it flat on the table. His fingers spread over its side, index away from the trigger, but near enough.

“You see, I know this dumb ass.”

Inning tensed, hands moving to his sides. He didn’t bolt from the booth, but looked ready.

"Don't be stupid, Inning," warned Aldo. "You know his name and address because they were in the wallet. So was a week's pay, cashed just an hour before you lifted it. Since you already know where he lives, you're going to go give it back and apologize."

The pickpocket remained tense. He looked like a deer immediately after hearing a rifle shot, trapped in that instant before leaping. Since he didn’t speak, Aldo elaborated.

"If you do that, no one else will put a gun on a table near you and the next car you lease will be less flammable. I make you this offer because you are my friend. Now are you going to give him his wallet back?"

Inning pressed his lips together.

"Yes."

"With two weeks pay in it?"

"I thought it was one weeks pay."

"Two weeks pay, plus what you spent on his cards. You hand it all to him and say you found it under a bench in that mall.”

Inning looked at the black gun, then to his old friend.

"Aldo, why?”

“Why did I beg them to wait until you left the car to torch it? Or why am I giving you such stellar advice when I could be bored at home?”

Inning didn’t answer. Aldo finished the sandwich, licked his fingers and took a long pull on the beer.

“I am doing this because when Aldo Junior was born, this dumb ass was the third person I called.”

Inning wiped the sweat from his palms, then put them together like he was praying at the fat man.

“I’ll go today. I’ll go to the bank first, then to his house. I’ll tell him I found it in the mall bathroom, next to the toilet. Things fall out of pockets in there all the time. I only opened it to find the owner. I hope everything’s in there.”

"Thank you, Inning.” Aldo gathered the gun into his coat. As though answering either the prayer or the departure of the gun, the front door jingled with the first true lunch hour patrons.

“You can go now if you want. It’s a long walk. I'll pick up the check."




(Helping the Nice Guy original appeared at short-story.me)

Bathroom Monologue: Lesson from The Great Ghost

“Never before six-thirty. Never before dusk. Never under anything but the moon. No investigations, no public appearance, and not one square inch of spandex. It’s something I learned from The Great Ghost. He said there was no difference between an alcoholic and a twenty-four/seven superhero. You don’t drink at lunch, and you don’t go lunch in costume. It’s got to be professional. It’s got to be ritualized. They catch onto rituals and fear them, and rituals catch on to you and keep you straight. We work at night because I work at night. You work during the day, then there isn’t any ‘we.’ Simple as that.”

Interviewed About Possible Origins for Him

We're on Day 3 of unintentional non-Bathroom Monologue Bathroom Monologues here at The Bathroom Monologues. I swear there'll be fiction tomorrow.


But today I was interview by reader, writer and physicist Michael Tate about the Possible Origins for Him series. Michael enjoyed chapter 18 so much he gave me his Friday Flash of the Month award, then had me over to chat about the series, comics and writing in general. If you want some Easter eggs uncovered, to see how The Joker got me compared to John Updike, or just to know how the series came about, pop over there. We'll both appreciate it.

Confessions of the Unread

I had a copy of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens for a decade before I read it. I owned it by accident, and owned it for two years before I learned that "Terry Pratchett" was a man, not a woman. There must have been at least a hundred books that came into my possession and were somehow read before it, with no intentionality or purpose against Mr. Gaiman and Mr. Pratchett.

According to Goodreads, I present possess 141 books that I haven’t read. The desire to read everything I hear about is so strong that even if I only borrow, buy or steal a small fraction of it, I wind up with boxes of books. And among those books are a few that I feel particularly ashamed for not yet reading. Most of these are hard classics. Some are so long that I argued myself into reading long works from my industry instead. Such excuses work in the short term. In the long term, literary guilt is powerful. I'm publishing this list to further pressure myself to get some culture.

-Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

-Roots by Alex Haley

-Middlemarch by George Eliot (only just learned on Sunday that George was a woman)

-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

-Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

-Master and Margarita by Mihael Bulgakov

-War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (sent to me as a Christmas gift and embarrassing number of Decembers ago)

-Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
-The Quitter by Harvey Pekar

-The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

-Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

-God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

-Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

-The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

-Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Mallory

-The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson

-The World According to Garp by John Irving

-Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

-The Voice of the Poet by Langston Hughes

I most recently scratched Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale off my list. I think Solaris is next. Please feel free to check off which books you've read, or add your own list of shame. Commiseration can be good. What we really need is a National Novel Reading Month.

Making Ideas

Writers get asked about imagination a lot. Where do you get your ideas? I believe that most good fiction comes from the same place, be it humor or Horror, scientifically plausible or downright impossible. You have to experience, read and study enough to get the raw materials that compose a novel story. But the genesis of good fiction is simple: it results from giving something in a different way than the way you got it.

When I look at my childhood, there was always some Fantasy: Smurfs on TV, Land Before Time in movie theatres, Hercules in books and Robin Hood games in the backyard. These deviated from my life in fantastic ways. The fantastic deviation was attractive.

I recognized more kinds of attractive deviation in my teens. In M*A*S*H you had lighthearted banter while stitching up dying tween soldiers. The novels of Douglas Adams were wildly imaginative, on one page disproving God by demonstrating His existence, then disproving the usefulness of logic in the next. These cases went against convention in amusing ways. Their deviations weren’t that different from Stephen King making a wind-up monkey scary, though turning the positive into the negative like he did was overwhelmingly more popular than the reverse (and it still is).

There was this whole other realm of reactions that everyday people simply didn’t exercise, particularly the options of amusement. You could react differently than everyone else if you just stopped giving in to cultural peer pressure. I needed to do that in my everyday life, but I also needed to pursue it in my fiction. This was how I could write different things.

I remember watching The Matrix and thinking that sea of black leather jackets desperately needed somebody to show up in a Hawaiian shirt. And I actually wore one to the midnight premiere of the second movie. But that wasn’t my moment of emergence. Neither was rewriting Macbeth as a short story starring a magic detective.

Those were petty rebellions; I needed to write original stuff that was about what I wanted out of fiction, not what I hated in it. Instead of looking at a story and thinking how I’d change it, I could get the idea for my own story from just one scene or detail of someone else’s. A favorite hobby at college movie screenings was to anticipate how I wanted the plot to go, and if it didn’t go that way, to write an outline based on my guess that night. That imaginary plot was mine.

Soon it wasn’t that difficult to look at life and think that I hadn’t read a story about X lately. And by X, I don’t mean a fight with the driving instructor. I mean the driving instructor purposefully giving you wrong directions and kidnapping you.

Fortunately he never gave me wrong directions, and the plot was mine. It’s yours, too, if you want it. Let me know how it turns out in the Comments section.

Instead of asking about plausibility or good stories, ask yourself what you want to read. What would make the best escapism for you? What’s funniest to you? What would you most want readers to experience? Sometimes you want to share a personal tragedy about racism, but sometimes what you really want is a dragon running for mayor so she can order the knights to stop coming after her. I hope to finish one of those two stories soon.

Some people are inhibited from writing Fantasy and its related genres because these aren’t realistic. Never mind that they don’t watch realistic stuff on TV (C.S.I. and Dexter are about as likely to happen as The Chronicles of Narnia). But the real question is what you want out of your compositions. If you want something way out of your experience, you can write that. Research it if it’s real or think it through if it’s not. J.R.R. Tolkien put decades into Middle Earth, and it was worth it. If you don’t want something so exhaustive, there are simpler, far shorter ideas. Today I wrote a first person monologue defending snake oil salesmen because, in their opinion, snakes need oiling. Taking things too literally, or not literally enough, or connecting things that aren't normally connected gets easier the more you do it and the less you follow the convention of writing everything based on personal experience.

Much like the barriers of realism and keeping your prose cynical or morose, grounding everything in your personal experience can prevent take-off. Everything you write will be the result of your life anyway – your nature, nurture and decisions make up what you want. But what you write doesn’t have to conform to what you’ve seen and done. Ben Hur was written by a guy in Indiana in 1880. Shakespeare wrote about fairies and nobles of previous centuries in countries he never visited. Douglas Adams was never on a spaceship powered by improbability.

Let me close with a recent example to show you exactly where some of my ideas come from.

I sat in a waiting room of Westchester Medical Center waiting for my mother’s cancer screening to end. It took over an hour and eventually I got the urge to write. I looked at the door and asked myself, “What is the creepiest thing that could walk through the door right now?”

There’s your deviation.

I wrote for a few lines about something morbid and disgusting. It didn’t take and the inspiration faded.

So I closed my eyes and reclined. I was on a row of chairs, though the waiting room was almost empty.

Okay. If this seat could be anywhere, not just in a hospital, who would be funny if they sat down next to me?

That one worked, and I wound up with micro-fiction about an Islamic gorgon (she likes the veil) on an Amtrak train. In the course of writing, I was replaced by a dryad boy. I let it shift third person, changed settings and swapped myself out without questioning it, because that’s what I felt like experiencing. All I had to do was cross things out and make notes of what to rewrite later so it would make sense.

You may stop and say, “Okay, you can imagine things anywhere. But how do I get an Islamic gorgon? I don’t imagine that kind of stuff.”

The point isn’t to get an Islamic gorgon in a hospital or Ben Hur in Indiana. The point is to imagine whatever interests you no matter how far removed from your life it is. It doesn’t matter if it seems absurd. If it amuses, entertain the thought. If it goes away in a few sentences? There are other things to write about. If it’s too embarrassing for you to share? You can keep it in your desk and never show it to another soul. But if you’re too intimidated to write about what actually entertains you, or are too scared to admit what you enjoy to other people, perhaps you should reevaluate more than just your fiction.

Bathroom Monologue: Thoughtful Bear

My teddy bear is acting funny. He used to need me to pull his chair out for him. Before Wednesday, he definitely needed me to hold the cup to his muzzle so he could drink his tea. Now he makes the tea. He also makes my bed. He likes the corners tucked snug. I dug his box out of the trash, and it doesn’t say he’s supposed to do that. Plus I keep waking up and he’ll be gone from the bed. Usually he’s by my closet door, his paws against it like he’s holding it shut. My closet’s haunted my demons, so it’s not surprising he’d want to hold it shut, but he never used to do that. My parents don’t believe about my closet. Neither does Tim. For the longest time it was just me; now it’s me and the teddy bear. Does this make me crazy? And if so, is it okay that I kind of like it? He’s growing into such a thoughtful bear.

Bathroom Haiku: Answer

He answered prayers;

unfortunately for us

the answer was, "No."

Bathroom Monologue: It’s Not Easy Being

“Easy, it never was. But easier, it can be.”

For the first time all hour, the support group goes quiet. They mull Yoda’s words. Yoda mulls his own words, standing on his folding chair. Hulk’s squeaks under him as he scratches his green stubble in contemplation. The Grinch sneers out the window, slouching towards Hooville; he’s only here on a court order. The rest see possible community. Minorities with a strength in numbers.

“You don’t understand,” says Kermit. Morally reluctant to the last. “My girlfriend isn’t just going to let me go. She’s possessive.”

A long green arm stretches out a long green hand, which in turn stretches out a long green fingernail. Its owner isn’t sitting on a folding chair; she only ever sits astride her levitating broom. They know it as certain as they know to never call her ‘Elphaba.’ The fingernail strokes under Kermit’s chin.

“We have ways of getting rid of undesirables, my pretty frog.”

The deal is sealed. Starting tomorrow it’s going to be easier being green.

Bathroom Monologue: We are the 99% of your daydreams

We are the 99%. The footmen. The footwomen. The cowboys and centaurs. The winged. The serpentine and the tentacled.

The believers. The knowers. The thinkers, the drinkers, the stupors and stumblers. The nearsighted, farsighted, the foresighted, and those shot on sight.

The carnivores. The omnivores. The steam-powered, the diesel-powered, the gas-guzzling guys and gals. The fusion-powered patriots. The stardrinkers on high.

The stars and celebrities. The gods and titans. The abominations and ethereal beauties. Lockstep lovelies and things so hideous reality renders them invisible: a protest in your closet after the lights go out.

The light. The dark. The unknown and the scientific method. Anthropomorphism anthropomorphized into an old wizard who understands you. He brings a glass of water, which is sentient, but willing to martyr itself to the cause.

The nightstand. The bed. The bent elbow resting on a middle school desk. The long, lonely commute. The repetitive day out and the slow night in. The flickering instances on a date when threads of conversation wither, not yet deceased. These are the battlegrounds of the 99%.

Consumed Episode 2 Actually Exists

The long-awaited Consumed Episode 2 is online. We actually recorded it back in September, along with a third episode, so I think the third one should materialize soon. The short of it is that everything is Max's fault.

The time it took us to do this makes this my favorite episode. I got to see the U.S. premiere of Sacred Star of Milos in August, which I thought would make a great feature for the podcast. It took us until September to record, and until the end of October to release it. Now I'm alerting you in November. At this point, the whole movie is probably on bit torrent somewhere. But, I think you'll enjoy my incredibly vague review anyway, especially for the bit where our film hosts were compared Nazis. Tasteful fans, us nerds.

Also discussed:
-Captain America: The First Avenger
-Symbionic Titan
-Archer
-Ostrov
-I Saw the Devil
-Winter's Bone
-Bastion

You can listen to the episode here.

True Stories of John 14: The Vampire Food Chain

I remember my seventh grade science class. I was absorbed in the unit on life forms. It was just so neat: nothing outside history had as many opportunities for stories. I filled out all homework during study hall and even doodled an imaginary food chain at the bottom of the last work sheet. It went:

Sunlight

| 

\/

Grass

|

\/

Cow

|

\/

Human

|

\/

Vampire 

I thought I was exceedingly clever. I turned it in before the weekend, and actually hit the library to read more about biology.

The teacher returned the sheets on Tuesday. "Vampire" was crossed out. "Bacteria" was written in its place, along with a "-1." My optional food chain had lost me a point.

I think I've always liked science more than it's liked me.

No Country For Old Men, OR, Have You Read That Movie?

Sometimes feelings are best expressed through charts. Click the below to view it in glorious, pixelated widescreen.

Bathroom Monologue: Credit Card Trail of the Dead

Her credit card records tell the tale. At noon on the last day we saw her, Antoinette used her Visa to purchase fresh produce at the local grocery, including three pounds of garlic.

Fifteen minutes later, it is used to purchase several antiques from the pawn shop on the same street. The items include a rosary, two crucifixes and a squirt gun.

Apparently she doesn’t drive home. An hour later she is eighty miles north, gassing up her car.

Her next purchase is at 8:15. She dined through dusk at Re-Church & Development, a trendy restaurant located in a former church. One wonders if she filled the squirt gun in their sink, hoping the tap was holy. There’s no telling how long she stayed on holy ground, though she does order two desserts and a lot of coffee.

She had to leave at some time, though the credit card trail gives us nothing all night. It’s not until 5:30 in the morning when she uses the card at a 24-hour Wal-Mart. It’s four hundred miles from Re-Church & Development. There, she buys sun block.

“Men treat childbirth as though it’s something icky.” –Someone who wishes to remain anonymous

"It is something icky. Nobody tells you to boil water and find towels for a sanitary event. This is a woman screaming at the top of her lungs as her vagina is ripped asunder by a pinkened lump of potential humanity. There’s the possibility she’ll break his hand if he holds hers. There’s the possibility she’ll lose control of her bowels. She will spill fluids he’s never seen in his life. Then there’s the umbilicus and placenta, which frankly look like a giant tapeworm eating a tumor. Beyond all of the revolting things that may exit this beautiful woman, it is also the only time when the goal is to make a baby cry. It’s gross and it’s scary and even if she gets an epidural, you’re still going to have to figure out how to pay its college tuition. God have mercy on your souls."

Bathroom Monologue: Demake

Come 2013, demakes are going to be the thing in Hollywood. It’s empirical fact that uncreativity is much easier than creativity. Sequels, series, spinoffs, prequels and remakes were all bold ideas. Demakes will take the cycle of uncreativity into the future by way of the past with STANLEY’S KUBRICK’S TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN.

We can all agree that the second Transformers movie sucked. But imagine if the male lead wasn’t onscreen so much, and he wasn’t played by SHIA LABEOUF. Instead, he was a brooding JAMES DEAN. His lady love? A freshly-minted blonde MARILYN MONROE. Onscreen chemistry unlike anything you’ve ever seen, built from what you’ve already seen.

Using cutting edge computer synthetics, the thousands of words dead actors spoke in dozens of moods will be recycled into millions of possible performances. And using both stock footage and CGI modeling, their likenesses can be pasted into new scenarios. How far can we take it? I’ll give you the future in one sentence.

MARLON BRANDO is OPTIMUS PRIME.

Our favorite part is that simulating the low-definition stock of old film will cover all CGI. BluRay has taught us that the better the picture, the faker-looking the Autobot. In black and white, you won’t be able to tell the real INGRID BERGMAN from the purely green-screened MEGATRON.

That’s our favorite part. But your favorite part? Demakes are guaranteed to not suck. With the hindsight of which contemporary movies are shoddily written, and a love of classic film, demade movies will not only strip away bad acting and shiny CG: they’ll apply actually solid scripts written deliberately for people who are proven to be able to act. LUCILLE BALL and JACK LEMMON will turn in performances literally designed for their roles, which in turn will be literally designed for them based on scientific breakdowns and focus tests of their strengths. If the technology pulls through, AI recreations of FRITZ LANG and ALFRED HITCHCOCK will soon direct demakes of GREEN LANTERN and DADDY DAY CAMP. It’s foolproof.

We’re opening up conservatively, demaking the second movie in a series. That packages it with a guaranteed prequel (TRANSFORMERS) and sequel (TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON). Just fathom it, Hollywood: a sequel demake, likely directed by an artificial intelligence of STANLEY KUBRICK himself.

If that doesn’t get you wet, we’ll toss this in: HUMPHREY BOGART will cameo to provide BUMBLEBEE’s one spoken line.

Bathroom Monologue: Dog Thoughts

Oh my God give it to me please give it to me I know I've chased the ball like six hundred times and my teeth marks are all over it but if you just throw the ball one more time I'll be happy for the rest of my life you don't even have to throw it directly to me you don't even have to throw it in my direction you can throw it in the river you can throw it into the pitbull's yard I don't care just please throw the ball so I can taste it one more time I know how it tastes I've tasted it six hundred times but I know if I taste it just one more time right now it'll be awesome and I know you're going to throw but the eternal question is when but the eternal question is will I catch it this time but the eternal question is for God's sakes why haven't you thrown the ball?

Bathroom Haiku: Nanomachines in Autumn

the nanomachines

showed sentience by stopping

to watch the leaves turn

Bathroom Monologue: Nothing Happened to My Marriage

Nothing happened. Stop. Please, stop. I’m telling you, Mom: nothing happened. Lisa wanted babies, and then it turned out I’m shooting blanks. So nothing happened. And my lot got pulled and I went over to Iraq for two years. I bought her three separate plane tickets. She never used one of them. So nothing happened. My time came up, and I got home, and waited for her to pick me up on the curb. Nothing happened and I had to catch a cab. We fought about nothing. We argued in fine circles of inconsequence. One night I got so angry I almost threw a lamp at her. I didn’t pick it up, instead walking out of the apartment so nothing would happen. Half the mornings I’d wake up and find her half of the bed empty. We went to a therapist, and she wouldn’t open up about what I’d done wrong, and was very aggressive about me not opening up about things that weren’t there, and so we paid for six weeks of nothing happening until I just didn’t bother driving up there anymore. We don’t have a kid. We don’t own a house. She doesn’t have a career, and I’ll be damned if I’m to blame. So when I say “Nothing happened,” please stop asking.

Bathroom Monologue: Halloween Exposition

"Are you still pouting about the costume? Because I'm not going as a sexy vampiress. My nipples will freeze off."

"It's not that."

"Then what? Reese's doesn't make vegan peanut butter cups."

"It's not that either."

"Move over. You've been getting grumpier every day all month. I thought you were going to turn into a pumpkin for a while."

"I haven't been entirely honest about Halloween."

"You don't say."

"I have a sister."

"I met your whole family. You don't have a sister. Or is this Halloween roleplaying?"

"You met almost my whole family."

"So you haven't been entirely honest about Halloween or your family."

"We don't talk about her much."

"Mark, that is messed up."

"Well, she's got issues."

"You look down on her for some psychological problems? I thought you were better than that."

"Every Halloween she tries to kill me."

"I might look down on her for that."

"It started when she turned thirteen. She got her period on Halloween night, and put on this mask, and-- please stop laughing."

"I'm sorry, just, really? Do you have a hidden camera in here? Am I being punked?"

"She killed my two best friends."

"Oh, Mark."

"We only found them two days later. I think she was coming after me, and they just got in the way. Her fingerprints were everywhere. All over the bodies. She used a machete, where she didn't use her hands."

"Honey. Come here."

"I'm not saying it for sympathy. Randi disappeared the next morning. We didn't find a trace of her until the next year. I was at a party, at a friend's house. I wanted to be around as many people as possible. There were so many that nobody noticed that Zach was gone."

"No."

"I went down to the basement for more wine. He was propped up against the racks. She was waiting down there for me."

"Where is she now?"

"This house doesn't have a basement, does it?"

"I'm not kidding, Mark."

"I killed her the next Halloween. That was nineteen-ninety-nine. Slept with a gun under my bed every night for the next year, never really thinking what I'd do with it. She came in through my window at midnight, and it just seemed... apparent. It was too obvious, what to do. And then she came back the next year."

"You said you killed her."

"Three in the chest, one in her green witch mask. The next year, she wore the same mask so I could see the holes. That year I just got in the car and drove. I didn't stop going until November second. Cops found me asleep on the wheel. She doesn't come after me on the first, though. She only comes on this day. And she's never stopped coming, no matter what I do. I've slept in churches, gotten locked up in police stations, even rented a fallout shelter. The only thing that's ever worked is to keep moving. To keep driving. She keeps chasing me; I've seen her in the woods, or just standing out in the dessert, her head following my car. In two-thousand-six, I lingered too long in a rest stop up. I saw her around the side of the pumps."

"You could have told me sooner."

"I wanted to. I mean it. I was just afraid, you know. That you'd think I was crazy."

"You should have told me sooner. Then I could have gassed up this morning."

"What?"

"Maybe you are crazy, Mark. But you're paying for drive-thru either way. This'll beat dressing up like a sexy vampiress."

Bathroom Monologue: “I’ve always wanted to die. Always.” –Natalie Cortez, The Seventh Victim (1943)

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I’ve always wanted to die. What could be grander than to pull away the veil? There are other grand things. Earning your first dollar, getting married, fighting on the side that wins the war – but those all pale in personal comparison to the end. You can’t top the end. Nothing gets to follow it.

It wouldn’t be a noose for me, though. No sitting the garage with the motor running. It’d be a waste of my only demise.

I took one of those tours of the Empire State Building. Went up near the top, to the wide room with all the windows. My plan was to find a door outside and leap into the world’s most famous skyline.

The skyline was my undoing. Or, my death’s undoing. Because you know what you see from the top of the Empire State Building? Story upon story of people’s work. Cement, brick and steel laid so men could deal, sell and swindle. The sheer quantity of life that goes on in just one adjacent building is intimidating. And I realized that no matter how many feet I fell per second, my impact would be negligible. All those active lives would keep marching towards much bigger deaths than mine. All mine would have over theirs was flash. I hate flash.

No, suicide simply wouldn’t do for me. It was too closed a circuit. Too petty for a grand thing. Nor could I hire someone to kill me. Then it’d be a two-person affair, still too closed a circuit. No, I wanted to die a real death, and since death is the end of life, I had to live a full one in order to receive a grand demise.

So I earned my first dollar. It’s still in my wallet, and will remain there when I hit the floor. I got married to a wonderful woman. We got divorced, which is understandable because Unitarians have always been too much for me, but being too much for me was the same reason I married her. And I got married a second time. I worked at the steel plant that supplied our military in three wars that we won. You can say we didn’t, but the privilege of being American is we always doing enough damage to feel like we couldn’t have lost.

And I bought a piece of the Berlin Wall on eBay. I was in Ohio when gay marriage was legalized, and actually held the camera for one of the first couples that proposed. I watched the last NASA space shuttle launch with my granddaughter.

She probably won’t be there when it comes. I don’t want to be surrounded by mourners who’ll leach the emotion. My death is going to be all mine. But it’s going to be amazing, not because of how many feet per second I fall, but because of how high I lived. How I cannot wait for it.

Bathroom Monologue: A Big Hand

The giant protested. He wasn't at fault for the president's broken ribs: the host had asked to give him a big hand.

Bathroom Monologue: The Children of Cinema Lane

Frank was a giant child. Given a bucket of candy and a DVR, he settled in for a night of movies. It was up to Lenore to hand out the treats this year. She adjusted the feathered skirt of her raven costume and paced the hall, excited to see what the kids of Cinema Lane were up to this year.

The first ring came at 7:00 sharp, the doorbell chiming along with the seventh ring of their grandfather clock. She hustled to the door, smoothed her feathers, pulled it wide with a smile.

"Trick or treat!" came a little girl's voice.

Lenore had to look down to see her. At her feet, on top of the WELCOME mat, sat a Samsonite briefcase. She quirked her head at it until the double-locks trembled with anticipation.

She asked, "What are you?"

It haunted its latches open, babbling, "I'm top-of-the-line luggage!"

"Yes, you are," she told the ghost-child, dropping two Reese's inside her vessel. It rotated its sliders in greeting bobbled off to the sidewalk.

Lenore closed the door and affixed the candy basket to the wall. Yet no sooner did she move to return to the den and Frank's zombie marathon, then the doorbell rang a second time.

She put on a smile and pulled open the door. A sapling waited on her stoop. All its limbs were curled inward, save two, which extended straight out to its right. A hat hung from the upper one. A suit jacket hung from the lower one.

She pursed her lips. Probably the evil tree's kids. She could make out its parents hiding conspicuously in the forest across the street.

"Trick or treat," said the sapling.

She asked, "And what are you?"

"I'm a coat rack."

Its limbs rustled, revealing a candy bag hidden under the suit jacket. When Lenore leaned in to hand over the Reese's, she noticed the fine tailoring. Not the sort of thing a family of trees typically had around for costume games.

"Very inventive," she praised, and off the sapling swayed. She closed the door and frowned into it. Behind her, some shellshocked blonde screamed about how 'they' had eaten her brother. Frank and his incessant love of the undead.

The doorbell rang. She fixed herself and answered. She recognized the little bastard immediately; the teen wolf from up the street, the one who was howling at his own music too often. He was well-mannered tonight, his fur stuffed into a trousers and a dress shirt. There was a red tie around his neck. Since his paws couldn't manage a Windsor, it was left in a loose shoelace knot.

"Good evening, Michael."

"Trick or treat!" he announced, paws thrusting a pillow case into the threshold.

"Aren't you a little old for this?"

"Never too old for free candy!"

Wolves always looked like they were smiling, so she couldn't read much into his expression. She narrowed her eyes at his attire instead.

"And what are you this year?"

"Huh?" He said. His muzzle dipped over his dress shirt like he was making something up. "Me? I'm, uh. I'm the one percent!"

"Michael."

"It's topical!" He nodded to assure her and re-presented the pillow case. She gave him one Reese's. When he hesitated for more, she gave him a gorgonic glare. Away the boy trotted for the next decorated doorstep. She waddled down behind him, peering first down the street, then up.

She made out a lone car parked half a block up. One door was open, all the windows lit. There was no driver.

She sighed before trotting up to her house. Inside, she shouted to the television room.

"Frank."

Her answer was the sound of panicked survivors boarding up a farm house against droves of the undead.

"Franklin Einstein, I know you can hear me."

The volume muted. In the stillness, his deep timbre responded, "Yes, dear?"

"Go check up the street for me. I think the neighbor kids ate another stock broker."

Bathroom Monologue: The Dark Lord's Rayment

The fibres were harvested from wildebeests and werewolves. It was dyed in the blood of warlocks, each slain because he was born on this day, so that whosoever wears it will inherit their power. The tinted lenses in the mask enable the owner to peer into other realms of reality, protecting him from astral predators. In his case, wielding a whip fashioned from the Devil's own tail, such vision will allow him to ensnare the invisible predators to his will. For a mere $13.99, he will become the dark lord of this town.

That is how it seems to John Wiswell, age eleven, standing in the costume aisle of the local department store.

Bathroom Haiku: Baba Yaga's House

 living witch abode.

in search of ideal victims:

Home Depot workers.

Bathroom Monologue: Anatomical Model of a Mind

Every day she took her lunch to the lab and ate with the anatomical model. He had crap bone structure, was plastic and afforded no conversation, but there was a sense of solidarity with him. He didn't stare. He didn't graffiti her office door. He didn't go behind her back to argue that her presence debased the very neuroscience she taught here. The anatomical model didn't know that she had feelings, but neither did her fellow professors. They thought without grey matter in her head that Ms. Skeleton was just some calcium-based robot, an illusion of a person. Many lunch hours she cried over it. Tearlessly, of course, since skeletons didn't have tear ducts. Tearing down academia's prejudices against non-fleshy human beings was so hard.

Bathroom Monologue: Clothes Make the Man

His pants split at the crotch. In the middle of a firefight with the Motley Brothers, crouched behind what was a surveillance vehicle, the cotton gives way and ruptures from belt buckle to ass cheeks. In a moment, his tighty-whities are exposed to his superiors.

For the first time in four months he reflects. Those pants cost more than what he made in a year at the old job. You could sell all the ties his father ever wore and not come up with half of what his current one costs. No one in his family can even spell the material his vest is made out of. It saves his life twice before he falls over.

The shoulder-holster strains against his pectorals. Its that too-tight model that had reminded him for four months that he has two man-killers strapped to him at all times. Reaching for the steering wheel. Reaching for his wallet to pay for coffee. Even reaching to take a piss abrades the bicep, reminds the arm and alerts the hand that it has stopping power at its call.

He feels that memory course through his muscles. It's so thick that he has the second gun drawn before he has finished bouncing off the pavement. He rises, sweat evaporating through an imported porous button-down so that he can only smell a hint of himself as he draws a bead on Frank Motley. In a twitch, he will become the funniest story their outfit has ever heard. The man who slew a drug lord with his ass showing into the wind. As the bullet travels, he can only think that the clothes really have made him this man.

Bathroom Monologue: High Tech Problem. Low Tech Protest.

You made me buy the toothbrush I can’t run through the dish washer

You made me want to take my phone to places it won’t work.

You made my kid sit inside on a sunny day, complaining that there’s nothing on.

So I’m writing this in a marble composition book. It doesn’t matter if all composition books are digital illusions I pay monthly fees to experience. This is a low tech protest.

Bathroom Monologue: Unwanted Lovers

"I'd like to start a not-for-profit to prevent romance. Not all romance, but all romance-proper. I'm sologamous; I've been faithful to my right hand for years and have never been swayed to cheat on her. But most of my friends enjoy the company of others, and at first they're very cute about it. They make eyes after each other, give rides, buy little gifts, cover dinner when somebody's short, help out after a long day. All good stuff. Most of the adorable human behavior I've observed as people fell in love. It's once they got into the dirty work that it fell apart. Some time after the first date, the complications of moving your stuff here, and meeting your mom on Wednesday, and helping out after so many long days adds up. What does it add up to? To at least two of my friends sniping at each other and whining to me. Love stinks. What I want is to systematically keep all lovers apart - to keep them precisely just outside the grasp of completion, where absence makes the heart grow fonder and chemicals from the loins make the brain downright stupid. It would save me dozens of hours per month of unwanted-complaint-hours."

Bathroom Monologue: Possible Origins for Him. 18.

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I’m not myself. People say that and mean they’re in a mood. I’m a person and I mean it when I say it. All hosed down and medicated like this? I’m suffocating in simulated normalcy. The haircut and restraints amount to a costume. Feels a little liberating to not be me. I sold them, you know.

Not me’s, silly. I sold costumes. There’s something about costumes, isn’t there? Store-bought or homespun. Face paint or a plastic expression with an elastic band that slips over the ears. A bikini made from leaves. Green long-johns punctuated with question marks. Straw bursting out of seams and sleeves to form a scarecrow in dire need of a Dorothy. Little Draculas and King Arthurs wearing the same brand of tumble-dry-only cape.

I sold him his first cape, you know.

I thought he was there for someone else. He was too big, too broad-shouldered, too bitter in the eyes as he stalked along the racks. Surely he was a bodyguard, there to pick out a costume for some trust fund brat. Or – he was a little old. Maybe he’d ducked out between hostile takeovers to shop for his kids. Despite our military contracts, we did sell to a lot of private sector jackasses. Rich people buy weird things for their kids, especially in October.

He wanted a weird thing in a non-child size. And had to be fireproof.

“Well sir,” I told him. “This is bulletproof.”

A joke. No laughter. No one laughed at my jokes; my cousins said I lacked execution. I looked into his face and he refused to reflect the smirk. He pulled the cape over his tailored elbow. He pulled the material so taut, like he wanted it to fight him. I never even thought of dressing up in my own stuff before he did that. Only went down into the basement, sometimes with a call-girl, for a weekend or two, and...

I took him to the rear chamber and showed off our laser. Such resilient material requires very specialized tools to cut, mend and process. His eyes reflected the beam. His checkbook was out before I powered down the device.

“No sir,” I told him. “The device isn’t for sale. It’s unique.”

But the check wasn’t for the machine. He wanted everything.

“No sir,” I told him. “The store certainly isn’t for sale. And a check couldn’t cover it if it was.”

A joke. No laughter. His check wasn’t for the store. It was for my tip. He had other people, broad-shouldered and bitter in the eyes, to buy companies for him.

I went out to lunch and fantasized over this check. Was this a gag? How badly it would go if something this large bounced in my account? I laid it out on the formica table while eight-year-old wizards emptied fast food pales in preparation for trick-or-treating. How funny it’d be if I signed the check over and slipped it in a goody bag.

Do you know how much can be accomplished in a lunch hour? Apparently a company can be seized, and an entire floor of a building can be emptied. I didn’t even see the moving trucks, though those do blend into cityscapes.

There were no racks left. No cables. No bolts of bendable titanium mesh fabric. I still fantasize over how they got a two-and-a-half-ton laser through a six-by-three-foot door. None of the people who helped me move it in there are still alive. Most of them are in my basement.

I squatted for a while in a rectangle of immaculate linoleum where a shelf had once laid. They took my shelves, too. I admired just how filthy the floor outside my shelf-sheltered rectangle had gotten. It all looks so clean until they take your storefront away.

They left the filth. A box of pens. The purple garbage can. A few jars of flame-retardant face paint, ones I had open for demonstrations. Picking up a jar, I remembered him pulling that fabric across his elbow. A grown man imagining a costume into military-grade materials, and doing so outside of his home. I felt him pulling it taut while I drew two fingers over my cheeks.

Halloween and a check of that size. You can really do whatever you want. You can disregard the warning label and slather yourself in chemical whiteness. You can go home, go to the basement, and put on that tacky bulletproof tuxedo you’ve been working on, and the squirting flower that melts metal, and all that stuff – and you can keep it on when you come back upstairs. Dressed like you want to be, you can go door to door, a magnum in one hand and a pumpkin pail in the other. You might feel too nervous to take your subterranean act abroad, but it’ll pass. It’ll pass when you recognize his cape on the evening news. Then it all bleeds into a long Halloween.