My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.
A man walks from a house to the edge of a lake. The house he leaves behind is white, so it blends in with all the snow. It’s modern and elegant. Straight edges and lines, levels, elevated, lots of windows, and even now someone looks out one after him.
His breath screams out like a chemtrail as he stands by the edge of the partially frozen lake, his hands stuffed in his coat pockets. The air is eerily still. He hears ice crack and snow fall from a limb, hitting the white ground with a muffled thud. Deep winter it is. Deep like the trials of his heart. He never meant to go crazy. He had been high on drugs.
He tilts his head and looks up at the blue winter sky. A white sun looks down at him. There are a few stray clouds, but the rest is a clean blue. He turns to look back at the trail. He steps toward it and begins his daily hike. It cleanses his mind to walk outside in this seemingly endless refrigerator. Mountains in the distance. High. Snow-capped. Looks like Norway. But it’s Canada. He thinks of riding his motorcycle. The speed flashes through his mind. The helmet. The throttle. The curves. Straightaways. The sound of the engine. The flash of the landscape. Now it’s in the garage. Silent and still, waiting for spring and the power of his crotch.
He’s surrounded by trees, and a cascading forest. The foothills slope upward, he walks along their legs. The man picks up a walking stick, drives the point. His boots crunch through the snow. His breath is like dragon fire. He reflects on all his mistakes. And now he sees how people look at him. They don’t say anything, but they think it. He can read minds, eyes, and gestures. They pretend he is part of them, but he knows he’s not. Not after the family gathering where he lashed out at her. The upturned table, the yelling, the crying. It didn’t really happen. He was there, but he wasn’t. Then the sudden kiss. It wasn’t him. She had been making banana pudding. He ran upstairs and locked himself in the bedroom.
He stops to catch his breath. He’s at a point where he can look down and see the lake spread out like a misshapen icy bruise. He finds a rock that serves as a chair. The muted air soothes him. Someone had wanted to call the police. She protested even after all of it. Let him cool his jets. Let him be alone. He had climbed out a torn window instead and ran away to the center of town.
He smacked his boots together to rid them of snow before he went into the house. She had coffee ready for him. The house was warm and quiet. It was a Sunday in early February. He sat there in the kitchen with her. She looks at him with concern. “How are you feeling?” she asks. “Better,” he replies.
“You’ll behave when they visit?” she aches to know.
“You can always lock me in a room if you’re that concerned.”
She scoots her chair away and goes to the sink and dumps her coffee.
“What did you do that for?” he asks.
“You make me so uncomfortable,” she says.
He swipes a hand at his own coffee cup, and it flies from the table and smashes on the floor. “There’s the door,” he says with steam. He gets up and goes to his office and closes himself in. He hears the garage door open, and a car engine start. He peers out a window and watches her drive away, again.
She could fill the entire house with crap, and I was expected to keep my mouth shut.
That’s how it was back in the days of evil love. Junk mail would be piled to the moon. Boxes filled the floors to the point one would have to carefully dance around them to avoid tripping. Laundry would be stacked high on a chair waiting to be folded or hung up. And that was our life. Piles of things everywhere. I had no space of my own. Everything was hers. If I wanted to enjoy something, anything… It was postponed indefinitely. My feelings, thoughts, desires, wishes, goals, and dreams were all crushed down into a coffee can and shut away in a dark corner of a closet. I was never allowed to be human, and it felt like it. It was suffocating and painful to the head and guts.
I’m worn out from worry. I worry about everything, every speck of dust. And here we go with the storm countdown again. 50 minutes until Armageddon. Rooftops torn open. Watermelon-size hail. 612 mph winds. Torrential rain that will lead to catastrophic flooding. Power outages that will last for weeks. Trees falling onto houses. People crushed in their beds. Lives ripped apart! You will lose everything!!
The weather people are so very over dramatic. And it makes me worry.
But then I remember letting go of swim trunks at Laguna Beach. Where the sand is made of silver switches. And the sandwiches are made with golden bread. I remember hanging there in my green Ocean Pacific tee. That’s when I had a hard body, muscles. I was lean and firm. And I stood on a rock above the sea and the music poured out of the cantina, the waves were crashing, the California sun was beaming like an eye from Oz. I put on shades to be cool. Then the long, murderous crawl back to the basin as the sounds swam to the sky.
To an empty apartment. A refrigerator in the living room. No oven. Hot plate. No bedroom. Couch. Palm trees outside. People looking in my windows. Bad bottle dreams and a typewriter on a table. Hot electric love among the natives. No wishing stars, only the dome that traps all the light pollution. Police helicopters in the sky. Their beams searching, seeking, never surrendering. They caught me nude at the curtains. One has to duck from the light before they laugh like the Joker.
The world wishes us well but how well can we be when the world dishes out depravity. Here I am what seems like 400 years later from anything else I have ever known. I sit in a dark room with the things in my head. The news is obscene. The rampaging stupidity now swarming the globe. And it makes me worry. I don’t understand the blind acceptance of utter buffoonery. I want to shake people until the rocks fall out of their heads. And then these godly claims. They kneel upon dead boxes and pray for love but practice hate. And then they stand and applaud the butchering of a once great nation.
I want to be on a high mountain in Colorado. I just want peace and quiet. I want to look out and see the refuge. I want to taste the air and swallow forgiveness. I want to see the armies of rocks and the soldiers of trees. I want to hear the sound of a mountain stream and smell the void of people. I just want to breathe.
Then I’m in the grocery store and the aisles are clogged with people. I can’t get to what I want. Ever. There’s always somebody in the way. I need space to… Breathe. I can’t get it. I hate it. I need to fill my cart with expensive food that wasn’t going to be expensive anymore. Orange lies all the time. It’s all congregated chaos. Two cashiers work the lanes. Two more stand by the self-checkouts on either end staring into space while the ding-a-lings try to do their jobs. It’s a nuthouse, man. I’m getting hungry. The eyes blink. The lights go out. The storm of evil love has crushed us, but not forever.
By
Aaron Echoes August
My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.
I sat on the corner of Hectic Street and Blasphemy Lane, waiting, swamped in the neon gasses of Hotel Hectic and purely beyond, and checking my watch every two minutes and wondering if your train has arrived or if you just said “fuck it, love is a waste of my taste.” And I evaporate near the rails so pounding against the land. And everyone gets off to greet another being, to jump into someone else’s arms, and I watch all this while sitting alone on a bench drinking a whiskey sour from a big whistle… And you decided not to come, decided I was not worth the effort or the pulse or this place on Planet Love Me Tender, and I smoked a cigarette with head bowed and soul cracked, all around the background full of cheers and laughs and I could even hear the kisses… Until the day dropped away, and I stayed, reckless and abandoned, once again, to fuck a world left unseen by the real.
And it was broken bar time once again, and “maybe that is the reason for it all,” some mad chick all fucking drunk said to me, belting me in smoky, neon midnight glow rope, you starless wonder, you beautiful, cracked lyric staining the wall of everlasting grace, in some downtown place, where the beggars and the whores ache for decapitation, in starlit clock towers, your heartbeats wasted away, losing it, trembling it, wishing for it… To be nothing but a quiet shore, for fucking once, I wish they would leave me alone to just think… To just enjoy my raspberry drink until the fire gets too high and the body finally rejects the abuse and puts you on tubes in some Manchester hospital in Angleterre, where the walls and the sounds are all too damn sterile, and in the middle of lonely night, you have nowhere to turn but inside out and upside down, reaching for a marmalade viceroy that isn’t there, because they took it away from you, replaced it with their medical voodoo, and you look back on your life, way far fucking back, and you have to close your eyes, because it just isn’t there anymore, and you know no one cares, they are all out there, with destinations in their heads and they write letters to the deads, but think nothing of you now… Crashing.
Flatline faux pas. The lighter flicks flame in cold winter dark. I am still here all you wombats. You all didn’t kill me yet.
By
Aaron Echoes August
My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 