CEREAL AFTER SEX

Episodes of the Ephemeral Green Ego

I went to the library to do some research on what it means when one loses one’s marbles. I can imagine my mind as a cluster of marbles – the colors being emerald green, earth blue, cherry red, tiger orange, a hazy gray, a ghost white, a mauve mouth, a yellow memory in stone, aluminum silver, gaseous pink, lonely brown, Sand People taupe, leprechaun rainbow gold – and they were clustered there like I said, in a chalk circle and the shooter was cocked and knocked and rolled like circular glass and the marbles scattered like the thoughts in my own head.

Crack, palooey, brainwaves wobbling, dreams unremembered, love at times cumbersome, love at times more delicious than any life anyone ever had, palooey, the marbles move like a spiral galaxy, arms spitting glass balls, eyes tumble and roll, the pupils all gyroscope and nonsense like buttery grape jelly in a spaceship.

I unhinged my laptop, set up my mouse, plugged in my earbuds so that I could listen to third eye activation music. It helps me think and glow and be bulbous in thought. I started going through websites about marbles and psychiatry because my own psychiatrist told me it would be helpful to do my own research on my own condition. He called it something like getting in touch with my inner self. What the hell does he know about my inner thoughts? Everything, I suppose.

I reached into the pocket of my light navy-blue jacket and retrieved my pack of Russian red Camel cigarettes. I didn’t even think about being in the library and so I just put it in my mouth and lit it and started smoking. It didn’t take long for the young skinny hippie guy at the circulation desk to come over and start yelling at me – but in a quiet way because we were in the library – and he said to me, “Sir, there’s no smoking in the library. You have to take that outside immediately.”

I looked at him and then I looked at my Russian red Camel, the tip glowing and a swirl of grayish white smoke coming off of it like a genie coming out of a bottle. “Oh,” I replied. “I guess I didn’t realize what I was doing. Habit, you know.”

“Yes. A bad habit at that. And I must ask you again to please take it outside.”

“But I just sat down and got my computer all set up… Can you watch my stuff then?”

“I can watch your stuff, but please make it quick.”

I was sitting on an uncomfortable, stodgy couch in the office of my psychiatrist, Dr. Infinity. I always told him I thought his name was made up because he was hiding something from a past life.

“No,” he would tell me. “It’s not made up. It’s my real name.” Then he’d point to all his framed degrees that hung on the wall that had his full name printed on them in black calligraphy: Dennis M. Infinity.

“What’s the M stand for?” I asked him once.

“Mikael,” he answered.

So, Dr. Dennis Mikael Infinity sat across from me with his notepad and sharpened pencil and he wanted to know how I had been.

“I had a really strange dream that has me concerned.”

“Why are you concerned about this particular dream?”

I hesitated to tell him because he had a bad habit of being overly judgmental. “I dreamt about the Jolly Green Giant.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his expensive IKEA chair. “The Jolly Green Giant?”

“You know, the giant green guy who makes vegetables.”

“I don’t think he actually makes the vegetables. I believe he just oversees the process. Nature makes the vegetables. Life makes the vegetables.”

“Okay, Doc. Whatever you say… But in this dream, I was watching him from a short distance, and he was walking among the cornfields and the squash vines and the bean poles and the rows of peas and beets and carrots…”

“I get the picture. You don’t have to mention every vegetable known to man.”

“Well, he stopped walking and was just standing there looking across the land with pride and he had his hands on his green hips and then all of a sudden his underwear fell down.”

“Underwear? I don’t think the Jolly Green Giant wears underwear… It’s a leafy tunic as I recall.”

“Well, in my dream he was wearing underwear.”

“Was it green underwear?”

“Yes. Everything about him is green. Can I finish telling you about my dream now?”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Like I was saying, his underwear just fell down and then he started…”

Dr. Dennis M. Infinity leaned forward with growing interest in my story. “Started what?”

“He started making pee on all the vegetables.”

“Making pee?”

“He was peeing on all the veggies!”

“That’s disgusting,” the doctor said, and he made a notation on his pad with his pencil. “Are you sure he was really peeing?”

“Yes. He was peeing all right. And he wasn’t even holding his big green thingy in his hand. He was just letting it go on its own, and he was laughing about it, like it really made him happy to be peeing on all those vegetables.”

My psychiatrist removed his glasses and pinched at his eyes like I was causing him great distress.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“You’re dream. It’s very strange. I’m not sure what to make of it.”

“It has to mean something.”

“Have you recently had any bad experiences with vegetables?”

I glanced up at the ceiling and thought about it. “No. Nothing comes to mind.”

He looked at his watch and happily sighed. “My, my. We’re already out of time. Thank goodness.”

“But what about my dream?”

“Let me think on it for a while and we can talk about it more next week.”

“All right then. Bye,” I said, and I got up and walked out of his office feeling like the biggest tool in the world.

Dr. Dennis Mikael Infinity sat at a round Formica table in the fancy, clean breakroom at the office where he worked with all the other mental specialists. He pulled a sandwich out of a brown paper bag, unwrapped it from its wax paper and bit into it. He washed it down with some Coke in a red and white can.

One of his colleagues, a bastard named Brett Walker came into the breakroom and joined him at the table. He set down a white foam comtainer and eagerly opened it. Dr. Infinity craned his neck to see what he had to eat. It was Chinese food. Vegetable lo mein. “Looks like I have a better lunch than you,” Dr. Walker teased.

“Vegetables,” Dr. Infinity mumbled.

“What’s that about vegetables?”

“Oh, my last patient was telling me about the most bizarre dream he had. It involved vegetables.”

“Oh really? Was this patient a woman? Did it involve a cucumber?” the other doctor chuckled oddly.

“No, no, no. Why does everything have to be sexual with you?” Dr. Infinity protested.

“What can I say. I’m a very sexual guy. Do you know how many women I’ve slept with in the past week?”

“No. And I’m not sure I want to know.”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve!? Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” Dr. Brett Walker boasted, and he took a big steaming bite of his veggie lo mein, and then suddenly made a face as if he was extremely grossed out.

Dr. Infinity took notice. “What’s wrong?”

These vegetables taste funny. Like nasty funny. Ugh.” Dr. Walker tossed down his white plastic fork and closed the lid of the food container.

“You’re not going to eat it?” Dr. Infinity asked.

“No way. It tastes like…”

“Jolly Green Giant urine?” Dr. Infinity curiously probed.

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

Dr. Infinity sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Nothing… But would you mind if I took your container of food?”

Dr. Brett Walker looked at him like he was really weird, stood up, and pushed the lo mein in his direction. “Be my guest. But why?”

“Research,” he replied.

“Whatever Infinity. Hope it doesn’t kill you.” Dr. Walker scooted away from the table, stood, walked to the door and went out.

The psychiatrist opened the lid to the lo mein and peered inside. It didn’t look bad, he thought. He sniffed at it. It didn’t smell that bad, maybe a little off. Dr. Infinity looked around the breakroom to make sure he was truly alone. Then he reached in with a hand and scooped up a big sloppy plop of the lo mein and shoved it in his mouth like a starving caveman from the Paleolithic Age. He chewed slowly, swallowed, and then repeated the actions until the entire container was empty and licked clean.

The doctor drained his can of Coke, got up from the table, disposed of his lunch trash, and went back to his office. He sat there at his desk in the dim quiet and looked out his big window at the world. Far off in the distance, beyond the streets and the buildings, past the highways and the dams, nestled up against purple mountains were great farm fields of golden green, and that is where he saw him, the Jolly Green Giant watering the world with revenge for what the unnatural made him.

END

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Chronicles of Anton Chico (Low and High)

Getting Low on the Pecos, Getting High in Colorado

There’s a feeling of strangulation that does not make me choke. I felt it this morning. Every thought boiling in my head was negative. Negative power and my heart raced and my stomach churned and my whole body rattled with an overall feeling of exhaustion and nervousness. I feel sick the second I wake up. Drag my feet across the stained carpet of my apartment. Shuffle slow like a crippled old man with head bowed down and my vision catatonic. Hating every second of it now. Hating to breathe, to stand, to walk, to move, to sleep. Peeling my own skin off. Biting my own lip off. Chewing my nails, dabbing at tearless eyes. Screaming at the slightest mishap. A crumb falls onto the kitchen floor, and I scream! A drawer opens awkwardly, and I scream!

Don’t touch me!

Don’t talk to me!

Don’t look at me!

Don’t you dare take my picture!

I went down to the river. The mighty Pecos River that wasn’t so mighty. Maybe like me. I stood on the edge looking down at the slowly swirling brown water, the color of melted milk chocolate with maybe some blood in it. I saw my black shadow staring back at me. The ripples of the water were burning through me. I could simply fall in, but I wondered if the water would be deep enough to even come up over me. With the drought and incessant sun, all the rivers were drying up and slowly crawling now through the desert. You could see the sandbars sticking up in the middle in some places. I probably could have walked across the Pecos. Walk across like some mad magician or deity from another century. But I was too worried of the things that may live down in the water, in the sand at the bottom. Oozy, stingy things that would surprise and shock me with a pinprick of poison, or worse yet, attach themselves to me like the leeches I saw in the natural pools at Sitting Bull Falls.

Fear. So much fear and uneasiness. Scared of everything now. Scared of walking to the mailbox. Scared of unlocking my car door. Scared of staring at the sun and petrified to go to work. People will look at me when I come through the door. Stare, whisper, laugh at the fool I am. I am not normal you see. I am odd. I am Fran, Bling, Space Monkey. An alien in London. A lightning bug in New Orleans. A spirit in the sky who knows no lies other than his own shattered existence. I am Anton Chico, and I might be a lunatic.

Me, fumbling for a stick of dynamite in some far away dark away alleyway on the wrong side of this universal tide; the blue, explosive eyes running down now, running down now with an ample amount of wet tear grooves forming in the canyons of yonder young face and the tide of tornadoes and the forest lawn so brown, brown from all the pine straw littering the ground like a flagship mattress of comfort laid down for the hobos; for the animals; for me in silent, hurtful prayer; oh, the silent hurtful prayers sent up to God’s mighty throne on a bleeding arrow, I try to pierce Him in the heart with my troubles, my bitches, my complaints, my worries, my fears, my wishes, but I must have stabbed him too deep, too deep in God’s own hurtful heart that he cannot relay a message back to me down here on Earth, he is wounded, but reaching out from his hospital bed, you know they got him on a respirator up there, up there beneath the covers of angels’ dark and sinister eyes. Is there really love in Heaven or be it all a hoax for money?

I was walking through a blizzard in Colorado. Everything around me was white and I could taste the heavy flakes of snow on my tongue. Like stale water, dirty water, coated with the grime of the atmosphere before floating down so softly, so treacherous to the earth. The going was slow. The snow was so deep — at least eight inches now. My feet were soaked, but strangely warm, maybe numb as I trotted on. There’s a brown, dilapidated barn ahead. Some shelter from the wind and the cold for a bit I was hoping. The door had a chain and a lock, rusted, old, not touched for years I thought. I pulled on the door, rattled and shook it but it did not give. I did not want to hurt myself anymore. I reached into my coat pocket and withdrew the marijuana cigarette, put it between my dry-by-winter lips, retrieved my lighter from another pocket, shielded it from the wind… And then there was flame. Flame set to joint. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale. A rush of blood to the head. A rush of hollow, rubbery sensations. Time flowing all nonsense now. I was so alone in the world.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Bite of the Oven Salesman

To Better the Bread

In a previous life I had been an oven salesman in Omaha spending my livid, blank days doling out shiny appliances and extended warranties to unsuspecting innocents who believed all their dreams would come true if they just had a beautiful new stove. But it wasn’t just stoves I sold. I peddled refrigerators, washers and dryers, microwaves, vacuums, dishwashers, and on and on and on. You get the picture. To sum it up in two words: Home Appliances.

And the customers weren’t all unsuspecting innocents, most of them were assholes who thought they knew more about appliances than I did. Fucking electrical conspiracy theorists, because you know, everything is a conspiracy. I did my best to take advantage of those fools and I was rewarded for it by the Prophets of Profit, the ones who ate bloodied birthday cakes in corporate board rooms with fancy tables and cushy chairs and big glass windows that looked out upon the steam and the pain of any American city.

But the masses, anyways. I could lump them all into one big… Lump. It’s ding-a-ling city everyday as I wait for them so elegantly on the highly polished tile floor of Snow White tattoos, her upper lip bruise, winter gown torn all asunder. There I am, taking my cool lean position against a $7,000 stainless-steel refrigerator that talks to you, makes your grocery list, and shows you pictures of your wife screwing the milkman when you’re out at work. You won’t need any milk today, Todd, that base has already been covered, and covered quite well… But you may need a fresh mop for the dirtiness that got spilled on the floor.

Ha. Back to the shopping, bopping zombies. The gullible pea pods consuming and consuming and consuming more. Petty transient beings filling their castles with multi-functional plastics and metals and glass so they can wake up every day, put a pot on the stove to boil some water and feel as if they had finally arrived at Shangri-La… And I brought it all to them. I was the deliverer of kind goods to make their lives simple and fulfilled. That was me. Dressed in crumbly, cheap pants and a sterile polo shirt with my name on a little plastic rectangle pinned to my breastplate; just another retail machine in a huge army of retail machines, the Profit Prayer Warriors, doing the dirty deeds of the corporate cyclopsos who looked down upon us from the mighty throne of the control room in the fortress of fortune knitting together greed and broken souls with pairs of very pointed and bloodied needles.

So yes, I sold ovens and other things in Omaha. That’s in Nebraska. Flat. Corn. Wrapped tightly around the finger of Mr. Mighty Capitalism and taking the bus home every night, breathing out the cold from my lungs I wondered why I was so miserable within the confines of my own existence. Wasn’t it obvious? I sold ovens and other things in Omaha.

I wasted my life on that shit, the precious time allotted to me on Earth, off and on for roughly seven years. In between I worked various odd jobs like cleaning buildings, or washing cars, or shoveling out driveways in the winter. As you can surely understand I grew weary of the lifestyle, and it became obvious to me that I needed a change and needed it quickly before I fell dead like a red wasp smacked with the thorny branch of a rose bush and then stepped on.

One night, in my basement apartment on the evil end of Omaha, I was studying a map of New Mexico. That’s in the United States. And you will probably find it hard to believe, but some people don’t know that. There’s a lot of idiots out there.

New Mexico, USA, the Land of Enchantment. I had been to the state before on mini-vacations and the place always struck me as so out of the norm. Almost un-American, but in a very good way. New Mexico, the land where you can breathe and stretch your wings and get lost for days on end without any sign of human scathings and scratchings. New Mexico. Wide open, blue, red, golden, big. New Mexico. A gaping gap of landscape chiseled by one of God’s angry, yet beautifully creative claws. I can smell the juniper now in the scent memories I have. The pinon, the pine, the dust, the cactus, the brackish water, that gut-wrenching sun like Halloween harvest mallow, the blazing white-hot eye of space god number one beating its flaming lashes down upon the hard, ruddy ground.

The topography of that wild place is so varied. Dips and hollows of ever-changing highs and lows. Hills and valleys. Forests and desolation. One big city and some historical markers, but mostly tiny villages where the ancestors of the land have carved out existences for hundreds of years. Generation to generation. The same land, the same way of life, but always with the threat of the new man encroaching ever further upon their homesteads all too willing to plop down another 20-gas-pump convenience store for the white wealthy zooming through in their hopped-up roadsters. Crawling like ants down from the big cities they come to spill over the beautiful wasteland, to spill out their green dough and suck up all the empty spaces just to fill those empty spaces with things that really do leave a person empty. Those Eartheaters of the Metropolis. Those bastards who carry credit cards in holsters and smile at you with their professionally polished teeth and wave the national urchins away from the side of their freshly waxed roving machines. Blah! No sensibility and no sense of history or genealogy or anthropology. Build more and build it big and the happy white roadsters will come to buy and buy and buy. Sell and smile little clerkie. Smile and sell.

I packed up my life, waved goodbye to the grinding ways of Omaha – and its headstrong appliance culture – and headed West, because like Jim Morrison said: The West is the best.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Empire of the Sun

The sad, the hopes, the fear that runs through the veins causing me to shake like a young leaf in Autumn. The rattle of the heart on the doorstep looking out at the falling sky; the heartbeat rose gallantly shattering like glass on stone. Ice storms in the furnace of the Empire of the Sun.

Skin shaking, bones growing, the call of the magnificent WILD… Wild and stern and crisp and calm yet full of tortures and blessings and deep blues and blazing oranges. I caught a glimpse of a young girl hunting romance in the hills, hunting passion as empty as a gaping cave and what do I know anyway … simplicity … fleeting dream and lonely tick of the clock from up there in my imaginary tower of wood and glass and sacred ass hung tightly like a cloak in a set of denim pants crisp with dirt and fresh with the fragrance of some innocent outpourings … WILD … tempting and behavior like honey and sand and the eyes of some god are upon us all as we sleep and weep and cry for kingdom come along the shaft of an arrow, along the sleeve of a bruised and oily shirt.

The mathematics of the cactus are all a conflagration, graduation to a higher pot and seed and someone please, shoot the editor inside of me … don’t look, don’t stop, don’t struggle in the web; let it simply fall away from you as you lie still and quiet in your unending struggle of life … the life, the strife, the compass and the mirror and the magnet call for you to jump out some thirty floor window and holler out loud as you plunge toward the earth helplessly and superbly to splash down like a watermelon SPLAT!

I am no clock, I am no oven, I am no star-spangled wannabe, I am simply suffering inside of me, quietly fading, baking, shaving, correlating every mystery that abounds behind my eyes and what lie am I when I cannot speak because I am all shuttered up inside like a tender doll house in the direct path of a hurricane and to create what vision for what reason and in what season; the blues come rolling in like hot waves of wonder and puzzling jaunts through another circus day of wandering and piracy and misdirected lust and the cucumber just lays there like a slaughtered calf and we are all so different yet so much alike; all of us just piece of matter and genetic code and surprise and secrets and lies and lovers in the night hollering emotions through a megaphone whilst some other hover lover peacefully sleeps like a dragon roll in some mountain of silver and put me in the coal cart, shove me off to the mine, watch me sail down the shoddy tracks, down deeper into the belly of mother earth and she swallows me whole like a banana on a wedding night belonging to some jeweled princess who believes in the makeshift power of love and a fast, expensive car and a heartbeat that blips softly and with eventual end.

Hurtling toward the poppy nose and the tender dip upon her cheek, the round room speaks volumes and tributes to the yachts skimming through the dry desert sand outside her window; the flags are rattling in the flatlands wind, the canyons calling, howling through their gated veins and open pores of rocks and shattered guts of steel and light, the green and tan skin of its narrow slit seething with a peace and tranquility and religion all about it; one could sit or kneel upon a mat or the dirt itself and go deep down inside one’s soul and for once – just LISTEN, to the nurtured call of baby’s soul wrapped around the banister of a steep stairwell to heave and all the baked canvas light eagerly bathing my eyes in a warm mallow ray calling out for one more piece of peace and in no pipe so strangely do I carve another chimney in China out of rock and red red blood and cement spit yellow golden ties of leaf and kief and the typewriter jet lands at another international airport where the well-dressed groovies count compass and watch and jet lag tear tears and the mice go scurrying about the kingdom of sweatsuits and pressed suits and shined shoes and a great burger with a slice of heavenly sweet tea to slooosh it all down with: SLOOOOSH, the juice runs through the body pipes, soaks bones and muscles and flesh and organs and settles in a pool in the belly stagnating and fornicating with the acid and the hoppers and the bunny men all boiled up in the bowels.

Cohesive paste not here, not this nochy, oh my brotha.

I spun the little silver wheel of yet another cheap cigarette lighter while looking out the window at laughter… What are you feeling anyways?

Doldrums and doll parts. Synergy and the cycloptic hard on. Cordial Campari and warm butterscotch on my acid-tainted tongue. Rubies. Opals. Black eyes and black pearls. Lust, fever, hate, greed, hidden tears and body parts. Blonde locks and warm thighs, soft skin and big sad eyes. Crying and crying like some whimsical robot on aspirin. Bullets and magnets. Pulling and pushing. Upside down and right-side up. Confusion. Malaise. Tender wishes and bitter dreams, Coal. Diamonds. Needs and wants. Religion and secular demands. I got it all wrapped up in a hard-boiled egg called brain and soul and the tortuous roll. Spider veins and spider monkeys on Judas Island down by the shore where fat men sail monkey boats and swallow big gulps of cheap American vodka. Swallow the burn, swallow the distaste, swallow the Valentine voodoo. Witchy haunts and goblin hills, fog rolling over the swamp and all is said and done good night to the knights and their knots and their restless, shivering sleeps upon the waves of cold wind Himalayan spot. Stop pressing the wrong buttons.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Refrigerated Dreams (Act 10)

A Conundrum on a Bridge

Adam Longo stood on the edge of a high railroad bridge that cut through the thick woods on the outer edge of Grainer Falls. He looked over the side and down into the deep cut of the rocky gorge, dense with gray trunks and limbs and the tethered leaflets sprouting bright colors. Water crawled along the bottom, briskly rushed over smooth stones on its journey to the horizon and beyond. Some of the stones had been spit out by the river and formed uneven, stumble-prone clusters along the shoreline on each side.

The boy wanted to end it all right then and there, he thought to himself. He wanted to fall away into the misty ether and be gone forever. The thoughts hurt his mind, his still pulse, his limbo soul. But then he thought, what good would it even do if he jumped? He would just float down like a blossomed parachute and slip into the cold, rushing water as if he were simply lying down to sleep. And even if he floated downstream and over the falls, the ones Grainer Falls is named for, he wouldn’t drown. He would still be alive because he was already dead. He could breathe through anything.

Adam Longo realized he was trapped in a life he didn’t want, and he didn’t think it was possible to go back to the life he once had. But why would he want that? What a conundrum. Conundrum. A new word he had just learned in his English class. It meant a confusing and difficult problem. That’s what his life was all the time now, so he believed.

He didn’t know what to do, and that made him angry. The anger grew and he wanted to be cruel to Rude Rudy like he had been cruel to him. He hated Rudy for pitting the entire school against him like he did in the lunchroom, for turning him into nothing but a target for everyone to pierce with their hate-minded arrows. He wanted to be cruel to all of them. He wanted to bring that school down and make them hurt for hurting him. And as his visions grew harder and deeper in scope, something soft came upon the air and touched him like maybe the tip of a wayward branch would during a walk in some far away forest. Like some tree gently reaching out and tapping you on the shoulder.

Then the sound came again, stronger along the span of the bridge, the air grabbing it and carrying it to him. A voice. “Adam!?”

He turned to look and there at the far end of the bridge stood the girl, his girl, at least the girl he hoped would be his. Veronica Genesis was there, his beacon in a glossy blue jacket over her clean school clothes, and she was waving an arm in the air and pulling the wind-tossed hair away from her face with the other hand. “Adam!” she called out again, and then she came running toward him.

She came upon him breathless and wet with the leafy autumn air full of tender chills and fire smoke spewing from leaning red brick chimneys poking out from the old homesteads nearby. Those rickety shacks in the hills were still clutching to life somehow, still sheltering another branch of a generational tree with deep roots knotted in the damp, wormy ground below. Self-appointed saviors preached away from the frames of crooked windows and the women cooked in fire-stained dented pots and the people who often had cold bellies were warmed for mere moments under the mystified gray light of day. And those people there sit upon faded and bowed porches rocking and talking and crying and deeply dreaming and even damning the whole of the world that swirled around them at times.

The girl reached out and gripped his arm from the veranda of it all. With his senses so heightened now, Veronica smelled like candied school to him. She smelled like the hallways, the wax on the floors, and the books and the paper and the glue and the paint they used in art class. She smelled like the chalk, the pencils, the erasers, the plastic lunch pails. She smelled like the bananas in the wicker basket on the cafeteria line, the cold rolls, the orange gelatin, the chocolate pudding, the green beans, the buttered corn, the mystery meat. She smelled like the whole of life and he wanted to wrap his damaged sooty wings around her and drop off the side of that bridge and together they would fall to wherever she wanted to go, and they wouldn’t crash, and they wouldn’t burn, and they wouldn’t break. Not ever.

She shook him out of the daze. “What are you doing here? What were you planning to do? Were you going to jump?”

His eyes fluttered open, and they were a different color now, a crisp golden hue, like an apple that wasn’t fully red. He looked at her with those newly baptized eyes. “How did you find me?” he asked in nearly a whisper that could have been so easily lost in the place where they were, snatched up by a screaming cloud on its way to Heaven or space. “Why did you find me?” he asked with more punch.

Veronica looked around at the vapor, the yawning blue sky, those clouds slipping through the atmosphere, the trees with their leaves crayoned golden, green, orange, and red, on the precipice of shedding the season completely. “I followed you the whole way. I wanted to see if you were okay.”

He roughly pulled away from her and he didn’t know why. Everything in him, around him, was turning inside out. “You should just go back to school. I’m nothing but a freak. Why would you want to be around a freak?”

“You’re not a freak.”

“Yes, I am. The whole school thinks so. I’m never going back there ever again. No one can make me.”

“Then what are you going to do? You can’t just hide out in the woods for the rest of your life. Someone will notice. Someone will come find you, I’m afraid. Because of the boy in the old factory.”

“They’ll never know it was me. I leave no trace of myself… Anywhere, anymore. And nobody cares enough to find me.”

“That’s not true.”

He suddenly turned to her, his simmering anger starting to rattle the lid off the pot. “Why do you do that?”

Sensing his rage notching skyward, Veronica stepped back away from him. “Do what?” she struggled to say.

“You always have an answer for everything. I’m not this, I’m not that, that’s not going to happen… Why are you so damn sure about everything! You don’t get it at all. Not me, not my life. Why don’t you do both of us a favor and just leave me alone!”

Veronica wasn’t sure what to say. She just looked at him and he was changing before her very eyes somehow, not in any distinct way, but subtly, like a slow evolution. She bit into and swallowed that moment, like taking a photo, that burning look on his face, and she felt it crawl down her insides and into her warm guts and it scared her far too much. All she could do was turn and run away from him, even as hard as that was.

MORE TO FOLLOW

By
Aaron Echoes August