Like so many times before, I find myself walking up the rickety flight of stairs that lead to what used to be the attic in our old house. It’s dark and I can’t see anything except for the light that creeps out from under the door at the top. Way, way at the top.
Clackclackclickityclackclack
All of my movements are slow and deliberate as I reach for the doorknob. I can hear my breathing, my heart – laboring under the strain.
Clackclackclickityclackclack
There’s a rusty, rattle-CLINK as the door creaks open. Across from me, is a large, circular window – the front of the house -- through which I can see a field of luxuriously succulent, impossibly green grass that stretches forever in every direction and out across the low-slung, sweeping hills in the distance.
Clackclackclickityclackclack
There are boxes neatly stacked in regimented groups throughout the room. In the shadows, they become threatening and gigantic like the city during a blackout. The light from the window casts a bright spot on the floor in which a young boy sits cross-legged in a pool of his own shadow.
Clackclackclickityclackclack-TING!
He is hunched over a black, antique typewriter, furiously pounding at its keys. What are you writing? I have to find out so, I move towards him, decades of dust swirling like a heavy mist around my feet. It’s when he turns to look up at me, his eyes dark and punched out, that I realize it isn’t his shadow he’s sitting in but blood. It runs like a torrent from gashes on either side of his throat. His face has the waxy, sunk in paleness of a science lab cadaver and it only takes me a second to realize that the kid -- is me.
His voice is dry and raspy but clear and accusatory; “It should have been you.” With that, the wall behind him erupts into flame and that’s when I wake up screaming into my pillow.
Every goddamned time.
Before I let myself do anything else, I reach under the mattress, fish out my second oldest journal, flip open the cover and enter a new hash mark to my tally. Four rows times five columns make twenty groups of five or, a hundred times I’ve watched my childhood burst into flames.
Awesome.
There are times like this, as I lie shuddering between my crumby old comforter and the two large futons that serve as my bed, when I wonder if I’m actually capable of having other dreams. I’m sure I must, but for the life of me I can’t seem to think of a single one and this mess… just keeps lingering on like a nagging, persistent cough.
Well, at least I finally managed to get some sleep, right?
As shaken and disoriented as I am, the cacophony of squealing brakes, rattling sound systems and cursing, angry pedestrians wafting up through the only window of my rink-a-dink, twelve foot by twelve foot fortress of solitude tells me three important things:
* It’s about four o’clock.
* Rush hour is just beginning.
* It’s time for me to get my ass in gear and start the day.
…
C’mon Kiddo, you can do this: beat the odds, survive… you’ve done it before. I’m standing in front of the full length mirror that the previous tenant had thoughtfully left nailed to the wall for me, running my fingers over and around the raised, perforated bite marks that rest just above my shoulders on either side of my neck, remembering.
Thanks to that stupid dog, every time the weather changes or turns suddenly cold, the scars flare up, turn red and itch. And itch and itch and itch and itch and itch and itch until I think I might snap and then, out of spite, they go ahead and itch some more.
Goddamned bastard came out of fucking nowhere.
Two big steps and I’m back on the other side of the room, rolling up the blinds to reveal my spectacular view of the neighboring brick wall. It’s so close that if I were to reach my hand out, I could touch it.
Luckily, (insert a double thumbs up from the doctor here) Adolph had just barely missed tearing through the major arteries that go up and down either side of my sternocleidomastoid or jugular or throat and clamped instead, through the trapezius and onto my spine.
“Mio piccolo miracolo,” Mom had said.
Ha. Some miracle. I meander back across the room and past the bookcase, which is actually just a long row of recycled, double-stacked milk crates carefully crammed with every book I’ve ever read – to the small utility sink, hot plate and mini fridge that the building super jokingly refers to as an “efficiency kitchen.”
(Insert me choking on my own laughter here)
If you and I were sitting in a café somewhere nursing our emasculating coffee drinks and, while waggling your finger at my pair of connect-the-dots, you asked me about the attack, all I’d be able to do is parrot back the police report and try not to be annoyed by your pity, because the thing is: I don’t remember it.
And that would be true… but not entirely.
What I wouldn’t tell you and what I’ve never told anyone before, happened in the ambulance on my way to the emergency room while one paramedic pounded on my chest and the other one forced air into my lungs…
I was hardly conscious.
Everything felt detached as though I were a voyeur in my own life. Mom, who was still wearing her gardening gloves and big floppy hat, was sitting next to me, weeping and praying hysterically. Next to her, towards the back and completely out of place, stood a very pale woman in an even paler dress with her fingers tangled into a delicate knot that hung at her pelvis.
She smiled at me. Hello little one.
The paramedic who had been punching me in the heart yelled something to someone, somewhere but I couldn’t make any of it out over the din of the sirens and the alarms and then something pinched my hand and everything started to blur and fade and then; nothing.
Nothing that is, except for a light, gentle breeze.
Pouring myself a tumbler of orange juice, I can’t help but marvel at the supreme power of simple cause and effect. More than anything else, this is what keeps me up at night.
The glider.
It seems so innocuous that this cheap, piece-of-shit, balsawood glider could be the harbinger of such misery. Sometimes I’ll ask myself; “What if I hadn’t gone after it? Would things have turned out differently or would the glider have merely shown up again as something else?” This, I’ve decided, is exactly the line of questioning you should never ask yourself: “What if?”
WHAT IF Dad – in a fit of patriarchal rage hadn’t left the emergency room that night, sped home, gotten his service pistol from his old footlocker, stormed into the neighbors’ yard and B-BOOM: put Adolph down?
WHAT IF our neighbor hadn’t gotten drunk the following night and out of some sort of child-like revenge, set fire to the new seats that Dad had gotten for the Pontiac and had stashed on the rear porch?
WHAT IF the propane tanks hadn’t been there, would the fire still have gotten out of control so quickly as to totally engulf the house? Would our good neighbor have thought twice if he’d known that Mom and Dad were trapped upstairs, passed out on their bed after waiting all night to hear back from the hospital about me? As far as I’m concerned, “What if” is a question better left unanswered...
...
Clackclackclickityclackclack
All of my movements are slow and deliberate as I reach for the doorknob. I can hear my breathing, my heart – laboring under the strain.
Clackclackclickityclackclack
There’s a rusty, rattle-CLINK as the door creaks open. Across from me, is a large, circular window – the front of the house -- through which I can see a field of luxuriously succulent, impossibly green grass that stretches forever in every direction and out across the low-slung, sweeping hills in the distance.
Clackclackclickityclackclack
There are boxes neatly stacked in regimented groups throughout the room. In the shadows, they become threatening and gigantic like the city during a blackout. The light from the window casts a bright spot on the floor in which a young boy sits cross-legged in a pool of his own shadow.
Clackclackclickityclackclack-TING!
He is hunched over a black, antique typewriter, furiously pounding at its keys. What are you writing? I have to find out so, I move towards him, decades of dust swirling like a heavy mist around my feet. It’s when he turns to look up at me, his eyes dark and punched out, that I realize it isn’t his shadow he’s sitting in but blood. It runs like a torrent from gashes on either side of his throat. His face has the waxy, sunk in paleness of a science lab cadaver and it only takes me a second to realize that the kid -- is me.
His voice is dry and raspy but clear and accusatory; “It should have been you.” With that, the wall behind him erupts into flame and that’s when I wake up screaming into my pillow.
Every goddamned time.
Before I let myself do anything else, I reach under the mattress, fish out my second oldest journal, flip open the cover and enter a new hash mark to my tally. Four rows times five columns make twenty groups of five or, a hundred times I’ve watched my childhood burst into flames.
Awesome.
There are times like this, as I lie shuddering between my crumby old comforter and the two large futons that serve as my bed, when I wonder if I’m actually capable of having other dreams. I’m sure I must, but for the life of me I can’t seem to think of a single one and this mess… just keeps lingering on like a nagging, persistent cough.
Well, at least I finally managed to get some sleep, right?
As shaken and disoriented as I am, the cacophony of squealing brakes, rattling sound systems and cursing, angry pedestrians wafting up through the only window of my rink-a-dink, twelve foot by twelve foot fortress of solitude tells me three important things:
* It’s about four o’clock.
* Rush hour is just beginning.
* It’s time for me to get my ass in gear and start the day.
…
C’mon Kiddo, you can do this: beat the odds, survive… you’ve done it before. I’m standing in front of the full length mirror that the previous tenant had thoughtfully left nailed to the wall for me, running my fingers over and around the raised, perforated bite marks that rest just above my shoulders on either side of my neck, remembering.
Thanks to that stupid dog, every time the weather changes or turns suddenly cold, the scars flare up, turn red and itch. And itch and itch and itch and itch and itch and itch until I think I might snap and then, out of spite, they go ahead and itch some more.
Goddamned bastard came out of fucking nowhere.
Two big steps and I’m back on the other side of the room, rolling up the blinds to reveal my spectacular view of the neighboring brick wall. It’s so close that if I were to reach my hand out, I could touch it.
Luckily, (insert a double thumbs up from the doctor here) Adolph had just barely missed tearing through the major arteries that go up and down either side of my sternocleidomastoid or jugular or throat and clamped instead, through the trapezius and onto my spine.
“Mio piccolo miracolo,” Mom had said.
Ha. Some miracle. I meander back across the room and past the bookcase, which is actually just a long row of recycled, double-stacked milk crates carefully crammed with every book I’ve ever read – to the small utility sink, hot plate and mini fridge that the building super jokingly refers to as an “efficiency kitchen.”
(Insert me choking on my own laughter here)
If you and I were sitting in a café somewhere nursing our emasculating coffee drinks and, while waggling your finger at my pair of connect-the-dots, you asked me about the attack, all I’d be able to do is parrot back the police report and try not to be annoyed by your pity, because the thing is: I don’t remember it.
And that would be true… but not entirely.
What I wouldn’t tell you and what I’ve never told anyone before, happened in the ambulance on my way to the emergency room while one paramedic pounded on my chest and the other one forced air into my lungs…
I was hardly conscious.
Everything felt detached as though I were a voyeur in my own life. Mom, who was still wearing her gardening gloves and big floppy hat, was sitting next to me, weeping and praying hysterically. Next to her, towards the back and completely out of place, stood a very pale woman in an even paler dress with her fingers tangled into a delicate knot that hung at her pelvis.
She smiled at me. Hello little one.
The paramedic who had been punching me in the heart yelled something to someone, somewhere but I couldn’t make any of it out over the din of the sirens and the alarms and then something pinched my hand and everything started to blur and fade and then; nothing.
Nothing that is, except for a light, gentle breeze.
Pouring myself a tumbler of orange juice, I can’t help but marvel at the supreme power of simple cause and effect. More than anything else, this is what keeps me up at night.
The glider.
It seems so innocuous that this cheap, piece-of-shit, balsawood glider could be the harbinger of such misery. Sometimes I’ll ask myself; “What if I hadn’t gone after it? Would things have turned out differently or would the glider have merely shown up again as something else?” This, I’ve decided, is exactly the line of questioning you should never ask yourself: “What if?”
WHAT IF Dad – in a fit of patriarchal rage hadn’t left the emergency room that night, sped home, gotten his service pistol from his old footlocker, stormed into the neighbors’ yard and B-BOOM: put Adolph down?
WHAT IF our neighbor hadn’t gotten drunk the following night and out of some sort of child-like revenge, set fire to the new seats that Dad had gotten for the Pontiac and had stashed on the rear porch?
WHAT IF the propane tanks hadn’t been there, would the fire still have gotten out of control so quickly as to totally engulf the house? Would our good neighbor have thought twice if he’d known that Mom and Dad were trapped upstairs, passed out on their bed after waiting all night to hear back from the hospital about me? As far as I’m concerned, “What if” is a question better left unanswered...
...
2 comments:
I thought I already posted a comment on this excerpt. Maybe I just commented in my mind . . . anyway.
This is thick with imagery and visual candy. I can see your art, comicbook, and literary background culminating into a fantastic piece.
Sorry if this puts a damper on your novel enthusiasm, but I think this would be a FANTASTIC introduction to a comic book.
But it makes a beautiful scene in a novel as well.
I'm eager for more, David. You gotta post another before our time's up.
There are some great ideas in your script. I like the description of the dream. I must admit, I thought that the 'Clackclackclickityclackclack' referred to a train at first but I got it eventually.
There is plenty of character history introduced quite quickly which helps build and establish the character in the mind, while giving possible contexts for events in the unfolding story.
I really get a sense of the gritty, hardened-but-vulnerable Bouncer, and his thought patterns.
I have heard it explained that a writer should 'show, not tell', and that's exactly what you've done. Pretty darn good for the length of time you had to write it - well done!
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