Waiting in Line

I was at the far end of the grocery store, following the long frozen-food trough that split the wide aisle into two lanes. It was early, and there weren’t many people shopping at that time of morning. The pace was slow, and still a little sleepy.

A tired looking woman on the other side of the trough squinted to read the small print on a package of seafood as her cart began to slowly roll away from her, toward the front of the store. Seemingly unmanned, it drifted a surprising distance of several feet. But as I came closer, I could see that the cart was actually being pushed by an impatient little boy of no more than 4 or 5, too small to reach the handlebar—or to even be visible from the front of his vessel.

I chuckled at the illusion, and told his mother I’d thought her cart was rolling off on its own. She looked over at her son. “That’s funny,” she said, and resumed her study of the frozen scallops.

Noting the brief exchange, the boy abandoned the cart to dash to his mother’s side. (Small as he was, even short distances meant sprinting.) Standing not much taller than the low freezer in front of him, he gave me a quick, close study—partly assuming the role of tiny protector, but mostly out of an instinct for not wanting to be left out of any possible fun.

“What’s up?” He shouted to me fearlessly across the trough.

“What’s up with you?” I replied.

A bright smile bloomed across his face. Kids—particularly kids with a lot of energy—are accustomed to having such bits of nonsense ignored entirely by grown-ups, so my acknowledgment alone was plenty.

By then his mother had already tossed the scallops in among the rest of her groceries and moved on. He skipped to catch up with her, climbing aboard the side of the shopping cart and riding merrily along as they pushed past the long procession of freezer doors.

I had everything I’d come for, so I made my way to the checkout line. There were only a few people, but the guy ahead of me had a full cart. A moment after I took my place in line, the little boy and his mother passed again, and he ran to me like a long-lost friend.

“Hey,” he said, a great big trickster’s grin on his face. He seemed to think he’d surprised me by turning up a second time. 

“Hey yourself.”

“You wanna play with me?”

“Well, I’m playing ‘Waiting in Line’ right now.”

He jumped to my side and stood straight, feet together, at a kind of attention. “Now I’m playin’ Waitin’ in Line with you.”

Unamused, his stoic mother promptly summoned him back. “Come on, June. We’re not ready to check out yet. We still have to find a few things.”

He looked up at me, maybe hoping I’d try to convince his mother to let him stay put.

“Junie!” She called firmly, raising her voice only slightly. “I said, let’s go.”

Obediently, he ran to her as she pointed their cart back down an aisle.

Ahead of me, the guy had split his groceries into three groups and was digging for a different credit card to use for the second portion of his purchases. There was only one cashier open, and the line behind me had begun to lengthen.

Suddenly, the little boy came rushing back into view, halting at the mouth of the aisle he’d just disappeared down, a few feet from the checkstands. Once he saw he had my attention, he began dancing in place at me, enthusiastically throwing down his own variation on the cabbage patch. He tossed his head back and started happily chant-singing,

“Waitin’ in line...waitin’ in line….”

Until, from a distant aisle, the impatient, disembodied voice of authority rang out:

“Junie!!”

© 2017 Wyatt Doyle, all rights reserved

Wyatt Doyle's latest book, I Need Real Tuxedo and a Top Hat!, is available now from New Texture. Buy it HERE.

In a dream I had last night

I was on a high floor in a small skyscraper when what seemed like a tremendous gust blew the top floor off the building. There was a large group of us in a big, open room a few floors down. We were trying to figure out what had happened when the whole building felt like it was knocked over in one piece. Somehow it didn’t affect our equilibrium, but we all knew it was the end. From a corner, Bob Dylan took out a guitar and started to sing; a presumptuous gesture, I thought. Maybe there were people there who didn’t want Bob Dylan to be the last thing they ever heard. It occurred to me then that the whole thing may have somehow been Dylan’s plot, and I considered the idea that we were in a high-tech video game or virtual reality he had authored.

The building fell through the air for some time, as if from a great height. Inside, we awaited our demise. But looking out a window, it appeared the building might land in the middle of a wide river, and that’s exactly what happened. The impact will kill us, I thought; but it didn’t. The building will sink and we’ll drown within minutes, I figured; but we floated easily, following the current. I climbed out a window, and walked to the top of the building, the prow of our ark. I took a seat, my legs dangling.

At once I could see we were closing fast on the ledge of an enormous, surging waterfall, five or more times the height of our building. The current guided the prone building across the waterfall’s threshold cleanly, the top floors of effortlessly gliding into the open air, projecting over the drop like a diving board. The view was dizzying. As our vessel began to tip over the falls, I raised my arms rollercoaster high and at the top of my lungs yelled, “YAHOO!”


 
text/photo copyright © 2015 Wyatt Doyle

Josh Alan Friedman's "The Elevator Ride"

Gus was an elevator astronaut, perhaps, soaring, soaring through the 35-story heavens high above, driving his Otis car on its vertical route, o’er electrical cable and chain...

"The Elevator Ride," a short story by Josh Alan Friedman. Click here to read it now at Black Cracker Online.

Requiem for a Del Taco

We note the passing of the infamous Del Taco at Santa Monica and Highland with an encore presentation of a work it inspired: "Taco Mouth" by Wyatt Doyle.

To read it, click here.


© 2010 Wyatt Doyle

SEE: FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF by Andy Biscontini

She didn’t remember Todd the broker saying anything about the place being radioactive. In fairness, he probably didn’t know.

But the fact was that the windowless single-story cinderblock building which had sat unmolested for nearly a century at the back of the muddy lot upon which “the Nines” now stood had, in 1907, been the laboratory of a fearless and visionary amateur scientist with fantastically greasy hair, large goggles and elbow-length rubber gloves, as reckless as he was entrepreneurial, who, under the patronage of a consortium of Lithuanian financial pioneers anxious for a toe in the patent game, had dispersed a grain of un-named radioisotope into an ionic quantum field bisecting space and time in an ill-advised attempt to fuse the lesser developed theories of Nikola Tesla with the work of the Curies.

The initial explosion blew the roof off the lab and transported the scientist, his pinhead assistant, his talking cockney test rat Milo and the occupants of the Catholic orphanage next door into a strange and frightening future continuum along a twisted, distant ribbon of the multiverse.

Todd was a nice guy. An actor. She hoped he made it.

For one hundred and three years the lot remained hidden from view of the sidewalk by a corrugated metal fence, later plywood, later hurricane fence threaded with PVC and topped with a wild coil of litter-strewn razor wire.

It had passed through eight owners, scores of leases and countless escrows before being snatched up in ‘03 by the first in a series of twelve smallish legal entities. In the subsequent years it bankrupted six General Contractors, confounded thirty-seven bankers and eighteen lawyers, and provided shelter for dozens of crusty punks from the Pacific Northwest until finally, after nineteen months of more or less contiguous bouts of construction, it was deemed complete enough to hit the market in October of ‘08.

“999” sat between “664” and “668” on the grid. The limited liability entity now stuck with it, a cautious and optimistic bunch, were determined to break the cycle of ruinous whammies that had befallen each of their predecessors and paid the borough thirty-nine thousand dollars to get “999.”

It was worth a try. Like all bad numbers, those sixes had kept coming up, year after year, never twice alike in manner, ever inexplicable in circumstance, all financially devastating, occasionally lethal. Even after the re-numeration, anyone who knew the history prayed to their faith each time they passed it by.

They moved into their unit in February ’09. But they didn’t buy. They were renting the Nines! as the bus-stop posters said. She guessed it was cheap in relation to what people were paying, but it was hard for her to call it cheap. Bertie still brought home a trickle of ad money through the S-Corp he made with his college clique but lately they seemed to be spending most of their time interviewing interns. His contacts gave her some coding projects she could do at home with the baby, whose nap patterns synched comfortably with her intervals of JAVA and yoga. There was some money left from selling the condo in Minneapolis, but month-to-month more was going out than coming in.

The first floor stayed empty: flexible retail. The second, intended for commercial use, was now being converted. The third and fourth were occupied, but it was unclear who had purchased them and difficult to get an answer as to from whom: there were zombies living on the third floor, the fourth hosted a succession of discreet European partiers whose wee-hour subsonic resonances sometimes awoke her. The fifth floor had been sold but was as yet unoccupied.

Theirs was one of three occupied units on the sixth floor, which was being sub-leased from the scion of a once-eminent family of arms dealers who was tied up off the grid in the marijuana trade. Their rent checks went to a management company with a Bayside address.

They had the southwest corner. They could see the water and the bridge. The windows were big but they didn’t open. At night the skyline bared its electric teeth at her.

The air conditioner filter clogged easily. The timer of the exhaust fans on the roof had been incorrectly set and produced a draw only once a day through ducts hazy with gypsum from the unfinished floors above.

The quantum field had a different effect on everyone. On the third floor it had atomized mold growing between the wallboards, hence the zombies, who were usually polite but occasionally let slip on the elevator that they wanted to eat her brain. They were slow and weak and she wasn’t afraid of them.

There was no mold in her apartment: their side of the building had already been clad in Tyvek, windward on the night last autumn when the spores were in the air.

But Bertie was having a tough time of it. The peculiar charge of the bosons in the field penetrated one’s being, permeated the connective tissue of the mind. It disrupted the bonds of molecular synaptic transactions, it curdled electro-chemical cognition and warped the exchanges over which interstitial perspective was defined. His rigid struggle against it kept his perception locked in trembling, narrowly split double, closely separated perfectly dissonant stereo channels of everything, all the time, immobilized and torn apart, feeling compelled to make virtue of waste and loathing himself for it, losing healthy weight and wearing skinny jeans. She’d tried to explain to him what was happening, but couldn’t guess what he’d heard. He spent little time at home and she didn’t mind.

She was getting stronger every day. Her yoga practice evolved to bring her chakras into a ringing diminished harmonic interval with the energy of the field. She didn’t need him anymore. She vibrated. A coil of gray hair grew in from above her left temple. She wouldn’t dream of touching it.

Lauren Ann was a beautiful and amazing baby. She could bake a potato in less than a minute with her bare hands. Such beautiful, tiny hands, lifting the fist-sized organic Yukon Gold from the shopping bag and holding it out to her like an offering, her downy crown a halo in the polarized afternoon window light, hazel eyes aglow. Her daughter’s psychic voice was clear and calm, strange but wise:

Mommy. Potato.

It was hot to the touch. She passed it between her fingertips and put it on a plate. Wisps of steam rose from the fork’s rupture in the skin. The inside was perfectly flaky, light and delicious. She consumed it reverently under Lauren Ann’s patient and encouraging smile.

Today, the howling wind called her to the roof.
She carried Lauren Ann with her.
The storm came on fast from the east, an inverted ocean overtaking the city.
The last of the sunset burnished the steel, glass and brick-face around her in gold against churning billows of blue-black and gray cloud.
A cataract of newspaper and deli bags spiraled skyward down the block.
Her hair rose along her scalp.
Lauren Ann levitated and hovered above her left shoulder, aloft in shimmering aurorae, squealing with joy.
Lightning spread across the sky from a point beyond the needle of the Empire State Building.

Her scream bent light.

Not a scream of terror, but of beautiful and wrathful Becoming.


© 2010 Andy Biscontini

Andy Biscontini's film EVERY DOG'S DAY available here.

New story by Wyatt Doyle

Roadmaster. A new short story by Wyatt Doyle.

Click here to read it.

New story by Wyatt Doyle!

"Taco Mouth," a new short story by Wyatt Doyle, now on New Texture.

To read it, click here.

"Sweet Water Pools" by Donnie "Doc" Gillespie

Fire trucks and rescue squads blaze by the Museum so often they hardly raise an eyebrow. Somebody fucked up…again.

The Museum is a stone's throw from the raging waters of the James River. People park in our lot to go over to the river, or to go Belle Isle to swim, picnic or hang out. Kayakers occasionally get themselves in trouble and rescue teams get called out to what? Upright them? I don't know.

But it was a preponderance of fire related and rescue vehicles today, and it just never seemed to stop… Every ten minutes, more fire department, cops, and now news vans. Then a hazmat vehicle. Now THAT was different. What did THAT mean? Body in the water. Some poor woman, washed down, finally caught on a rock, dead for some time. Not a good thing. I've found dead people underwater; not exactly a pleasant experience, especially when you're not expecting it. They ingest stuff...not by their choice...water, sand, whatever... Makes ’em heavier to lift. Now if there for a number of days, well, you don't want to know the details. The James River is a dangerous place, and people don't realize just how dangerous. Though there are the little places, closer to shore, that are quiet and serene.

I trust lakes over rivers. Or at least small lakes. No current.

Will wait for more info on this unfortunate victim of whatever. Another sad story, so close and nearby, floating down the river.

text copyright © 2008 Donnie "Doc" Gillespie
photo copyright © 2008 Wyatt Doyle

New story by Wyatt Doyle

"Interpretations" by Wyatt Doyle, now on New Texture.

Click here to read it, or click on the image below.


photo copyright © 2008 Wyatt Doyle

New story by Wyatt Doyle!

Now on New Texture:

"My Name Is Joe" by Wyatt Doyle

Click on the title to read it, or click the Hydrant of the Free, below.


(URL: http://www.newtexture.com/content/view/336/54/ )

photo copyright © 2008 Wyatt Doyle

Your Majesty, You've Done It Again!

There is a real-estate guy standing outside my window. He’s taking pictures of the building across the street. It’s for sale. It is an ugly one-story garage building. He envisions a cheaply constructed ten-story glass-and-steel ant-farm full of rich people rising in its place.

I'm not sentimental, but when that building is erected, it will block all of the natural light to my little first-floor apartment behind the garbage cans that I'm currently struggling to keep up with the modest rent on.

And I don't look forward to looking out my window or stepping outside every day with no choice but to look into the 1,000 square-foot lives of the poor suckers, eyes wide with optimistic hip urban home ownership, who've mortgaged their future to keep up with the cool kids as every month their income stagnates, their Ikea furnishings fade from fashion and their flat-screen goes on the fritz, the poorly riveted steel frame of the building begins to buckle and the half-inch thick caulk joints around the windows begin to peel until they sell it at a loss or rent it out to hard-partying college kids bankrolled by their parents.

That might sound pessimistic, but it isn't unrealistic. This is New York City, after all. It's not like it hasn't happened.

The real-estate guy doesn't waste time on such thoughts.

He doesn’t realize it, but he bears a striking physical resemblance to his paternal grandfather’s great-grandfather, who was personal valet to Ferdinand Bourbon, King of Naples.

His ancestor had made his fortune by stealthily taking a gold coin from atop His Majesty’s dressing table every morning, and through sleight of hand creating the impression that he'd just removed it from the freshly used Royal bedpan declaring, “You’re Majesty, you’ve done it again!” before carrying the steaming tray of Royal crap through the echoing baroque marble hallways and emptying it into the water closet.

Every morning for ten years.

Ferdinand, an appreciator of both flattery and innovative fecal humor, adopted the habit of allowing his faithful manservant to keep the coins as a tip until the summer of 1820 when, as the pressures of the revolt by Pepe and his Carbonari , with his own army mired down in Sicily no less, and his exclusion from the Congress of Troppau led to the erosion of both his fortunes and his sense of humor he responded one morning by growling, “Clean it off and put it back.”

Sensing the end of the party, within months the real-estate guy's ancestor had abandoned his family in the dark of night with a ticket in his pocket for first-class passage to New York, where he changed his name, reaped a bonanza in the stock market and married into High Society.

We'll see if this douchebag manages to cash out in time.



copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

We Hack You Because We Love You And You Never Take Our Calls

Over the past several months, an undisclosed number of Americans estimated to be greater than the combined fan bases of four average large-market major-league sports franchises may have received an email disguised as spam containing a version of the following encrypted message:

We are writing to inform you that you have been hacked.

We have been aware of you for quite some time, and have taken an interest in your activities.

Please be advised that we have made numerous attempts to make contact with you via traditional avenues.

We have approached you in public and, while seemingly uncomfortable with small-talk, you have on occasion been exceptionally charming and we’d like to see more of that please.

Some of us have attempted to befriend you, but you have become guarded and make yourself socially unavailable.

We have repeatedly sent inquiries into your well-being by post, but you have discarded them as junk without so much as reading between the lines.

On more than one occasion, we have sent you messages in Fortune Cookies, which some of us consider to be pretty darn creative and an impressive logistical accomplishment.

We have crammed your bills and statements with exorbitant fees in an attempt to get you on the phone just so we can hear your voice but, after we dedicated valuable time and resources tapping your land-line you never use it anymore and we have been unable to access your cell because someone else is hogging it. We miss hearing your voice.

On several occasions, some of us have tried to send work your way, but we are unsure what exactly it is you want to be doing.

There are those of us who still think you might be up to something shady. They have been responsible for withholding your paychecks in the mail and delaying your bank deposits in an attempt to see where you really get your money because they find it hard to believe that you make as little as you do.

They have also been intercepting the resumes, job applications and queries you’ve been sending out and responding with those clever rejections. Based on the way they talk about you, we think it’s because deep down they wish you'd come work for us. And some of them are jealous.

For there are those of us who are simply wild about you, and we believe it is better for us to continue to admire you from afar lest we go mad. We’ve been down that road before and know it could only ever end in tears.

You should be aware that your friends, neighbors and co-workers have been instrumental in keeping us informed as to your whereabouts at considerable profit to themselves and expense to us and we don’t think they really love you.

We know you’re having a difficult time, and we want you to know that we believe in you. Hang in there!

FYI, the view from your webcam goes from the window to the couch.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

The Teslacolonic

For the most part, I think I've come to do a fairly good job of maintaining a positive attitude, but I can no longer deny that for the last several months I've been feeling somewhat out-of-whack.

I don't know if it's Seasonal Affected Depression, Clinical Depression, regular Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Frieswith Disorder, Restless Leg Syndrome, ants in my pants, low barometric pressure, Mercury going retrograde or the drying-up of my already meager freelance income on the brink of hard times, but lately I've been feeling it, and having a tough time focusing my energy productively.

Acupuncture has helped me in the past, I do a little yoga from time to time for general physical alignment, and the Neti pot once knocked out a persistent sinus infection that a brutal regimen of antibiotics couldn't lick, so I'm always open to alternatives to pharmaceutical treatment, especially in psychic crises.

A friend referred me to an elderly electrician in Woodside who, in his youth, had worked briefly in Thomas Edison's labs before becoming disillusioned and taking up as an assistant to Nikola Tesla towards the end of his career. He'd worked with the aging Tesla on several projects concerning the application of electrical current to personal health, and was now the sole practitioner of these techniques. This man could straighten me out for a reasonable rate, my friend told me.

So a couple of days ago I paid him a visit.

He lives alone, a widower, on the first floor of a trim split-level semi-detached on a quiet street a couple of blocks off Roosevelt Avenue and keeps a small workshop in the basement.

Sitting next to me on the crisp plastic-covered couch in the living room his niece, a cute pear-shaped girl with large almond eyes and thin hair tied into a whispy ponytail explained the procedure to me.

I would be asked to remove my clothes. Oppositely charged magnets would be placed in each of my hands, and I would be asked to make a fist. I would be asked to bite down on a negative lead connected to an AC modulator, and the positive lead would be placed in my rear.

"Don't worry," she reassured me perfunctorily in her thick Queens accent, "It's very non-invasive. You won't even notice it's there."

I followed her into the kitchen, signed the release waiting for me on the kitchen table and paid her twenty dollars which she tucked neatly into a small gray cashbox on the counter behind the toaster. She gestured towards the cellar door and told me to go ahead down, he was waiting.

Her uncle was a small, angular octogenarian, sad-eyed and quiet in a chin-to-ankle waxed canvas smock and rubber gloves that fanned out around his elbows, which poked sharply out from under his rolled shirtsleeves. He was barefoot, and I noticed that his feet were in excellent condition for a man of his age. Thick healthy nails, gently arched bridge, and expressively articulated toes, each crowned with a tuft of white hair at the knuckle.

He gestured vaguely for me to undress and began powering up a series of switches and ballasts as I disrobed and hung my clothes over a nearby vinyl-padded metal chair. A constellation of old-fashioned glass transformers and vacuum tubes glowed to life in the darkness behind him. He pointed to a rubber mat in the middle of the floor and I stood on it.

From the pocket in the bib of his smock, he produced two egg-sized magnets and put one in each of my hands, then made two fists with his own hands to demonstrate what I was supposed to do. I squeezed the magnets and held up my hands to show him I was squeezing.

He nodded and took a thin copper rod out of a beaker full of antiseptic solution, stripped the insulation off of the tip of a length of 14-gauge wire with his front teeth, twisted it onto the copper rod and placed it in my mouth, baring his own teeth as instruction. I bit down on the copper and waited for the positive lead to be inserted. While that really isn't my thing, his niece was right, it didn't feel invasive at all.

At that point, he turned on the juice and gradually increased the voltage.

It's difficult to describe how it felt. Having been bitten by 12-volt car batteries, I'd say that the voltage he ran through me peaked at about 8 or 9 volts and was raised so gradually that I hardly noticed I was being zapped, but at a certain point I lost all awareness of my body and was overcome by the tangible sensation that the universe and I were one, flowing into each other at a quantum level.

As to whether or not it cured my blues, that's also difficult to say. But I've had an erection for the last seventy-two hours.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

The Thoughts Out Her Head by Andy Biscontini

On a Sunday evening in early May, Jeanine Wiecznewski accidentally knocked all of the thoughts out of her head.

She’d just picked up a half-cooked sliver of onion from the worn parquet floor, stood up, and banged her head into the corner of an open cabinet door in the kitchenette of her $2,975.48/month East Village studio apartment that afforded neither the proper entertaining of guests nor the preparation of any but the most rudimentary of meals for herself, a scant privilege not exercised for several weeks.

Things had been busy. Work had taken from ten or eleven a.m. to six or seven p.m. officially five days a week but really more like six, and she’d been allowing her suitors to court her liberally with dinners, drinks, and foreign movies –- the Koreans! Holy shit, who knew? -- about which she conferred with her friends over dinners and drinks or her lover over sex for the remainder of her evenings, and was determined to at least whip together a simple goddamn omelet for Chrissakes on a Sunday springtime freakin’ evening.

The apex of the front edge of the laminated high-density fiberboard custom-ordered Ikea door punctured her skin just in front of the scalp; the combined upward movement of her body and outward swing of the cabinet door wedged a trough through to her skull, which cracked like a red-dyed Easter egg tapped hard with a spoon on impact.

The pain cut a screaming knife through the evening.

Her knees flexed and her calves absorbed the shock of the recoil. She grabbed the countertop to stop herself from tipping backwards.
She swore once through blue sparks and stood up slowly.

Adrenaline pumped her heart hard.

Her respiration shimmered like dim film grain on a twilight screen.

Her neighbors’ music, televisions and arguments bounced gently off of the stone houses across the street, through the leaves of a lonely old and generous Sycamore, through the mesh window screen, and trembled against her eardrums.

Myriad radio frequencies intersected each of her chakras and created a buzz in her neck that became a hissing flare which rose straight through her mind, resonating high D minor in her jawbone and becoming a burning white diamond behind her eyes that bled through and widened the fractures in the bone.

Blood pooled in the scooped flesh above her forehead and spilled out in a single long globule that burst into a corona on the grease-specked porcelain stovetop.

Her first thought tumbled out into it, next to the sizzling pan.

It staggered to its feet and wiped the blood off of itself and calmly took its bearings.

Her second, third and fourth thoughts followed in quick succession, landing in a tangle of confusion. The fifth leapt gracefully down, landing on its feet, and along with the first organized the others into a team.

She stared in dazed and helpless bafflement as her thoughts continued to pour onto the stovetop.

The sixth through twelfth thoughts rained out in a heap, with the thirteenth landing comfortably on top of them, and were promptly placed under the supervision of thoughts two through five by thought one, whose authority to do so was quietly questioned by thought five, who preferred not to quibble when there was work to be done. Together they stirred the onions, then red pepper and broccoli until they were finished then slid them into a bowl with the spatula.

It was agreed that the fifth thought would hold authority over the subsequent dozen thoughts and be responsible for the return of the vegetables to the pan once thought one had succeeded in supervising the first dozen thoughts in breaking and cooking the eggs and melting the grated parmesan, and that everybody would work together to get the flip just right.

After it had all gone well, the first thought was amused to overhear the thirteenth thought taking undue credit for the curve of the egg in conversation with the twenty-eighth.

She was proud of her thoughts for working so well together, as more and more continued to leave her head and join the effort. Within moments there were enough to take a plate from the cupboard, a knife and fork from the drawer, and lay out a simple place setting on the gently uneven tiles of the counter while another group cleaned up the splash of blood with Fantastick and a paper towel, and a third group sat her on a stool in front of it, next to the window, by which time they had organized themselves into a functioning cooperative democratic system allowing her to thoroughly enjoy her meal.

Yet still her thoughts left her head. They were more independent now, climbing out of their own volition, shimmying through the cracks and reaching back to hoist others through.

By the time she finished her omelet, so many had evacuated that she began to feel dizzy, and deep factions were starting to develop among them which were rapidly becoming more and more difficult to reconcile.

The school under the aegis of her first thought posited that she should be put in bed to sleep.

The fifth thought and the smaller but active organization around it believed that the thoughts should keep her busy washing the dishes and making phone calls, perhaps inquiring of a friend as to the potential seriousness of her injury, the latter motive being carefully kept out of public discourse for fear of causing undue panic. Word of the concern circulated in official circles, however, and was soon seized upon by the thirteenth thought and used as a rallying cry for what proved to be a large and urgent contingency of alarmist thoughts in favor of calling an ambulance.

She sat quietly staring out the window while her thoughts held a general election, in which the first thought was narrowly carried into power. It was widely speculated that the fifth thought could have won if not for the abstention of the thirteenth thought’s contingency and the loose anarchistic collectives that gravitated around her most independent thoughts.
A half-dozen motorcycle enthusiasts on a tour passed along the street with a roar through the subsequent legislative battles. Light car traffic cruised by. Deliverymen on bicycles rolled past with twinkling spokes.

By the time action could be implemented by her thoughts, the sky had gone dark, the streetlights had come on, and the maple leaves rustled in yellow sodium-vapor light.

She would be taken to bed and put to sleep, but as a concession to the fifth thought (whose social engagement remained invaluable), she would do the dishes and tidy up the apartment beforehand, and as a concession to the loudmouths around the thirteenth thought, she would examine the wound in the bathroom mirror.

In the harsh overhead fluorescent bathroom light her body became a dumb vehicle for her thoughts.

Her inner self, so quiet beneath the interlocking matrices of petty thought and gossipy identity for so long, suddenly radiated in sovereign glory.

Her thoughts removed her clothing and put them in the laundry. The vibrations of the breeze through the open window skipped across the surface of her skin. She was lay on clean blue sheets, naked beneath a white comforter.

The last of her thoughts rose from her skull as she slept. Together with the others it flourished and grew through the night.

The apartment was soon insufficient to contain them, and by daybreak they were leaving in droves.

The regretful ones, bold in their desire for a second chance, led the exodus followed closely by the independent thoughts, anxious for the opportunity to pursue their own agendas unfettered by the others.

The remaining thoughts logged onto the Internet and opened a wireless telephone account through which they could remain in close contact with each other via unlimited in-network minutes and, pledging to never grow apart, spread out into the world.

When she awoke, sunlight seeped through the window into an otherwise empty apartment. There was warmth behind the cool morning breeze that carried the faint scent of diesel belched from a semi truck rumbling down nearby Second Avenue in low gear.

The wound on her head had healed.

Her sinuses filled with breath that suddenly seemed to have more room to circulate. The sunlight traveled along her optic nerve and into her brain, direct and clean.

She felt whole and fully herself, relaxed and aware, without a thought in her head, and burned brightly the rest of her days.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

"Happy New Year from the MTA" by Andy Biscontini

Shortly after moving to New York, I spent a day wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I still enjoy doing.

During the warm-up to rush hour, I got on the 5 express train at 72nd Street to take it to Union Square to go home. The car I got onto was somewhat crowded, but one bench was empty except for a homeless-looking guy at the end. It quickly filled up with tired commuters. I noticed that the standing riders who had already been on the car were exchanging glances.

As the door closed and the motor started up, I noticed a foul smell. I wasn't the only one.

The homeless guy looked up and around the car. His mouth curled into a broad smile and he shouted at the top of his lungs, "Heeeere we go!"

…And commenced to crap his pants loudly. Really loudly. The sound of his diarrhea was louder than the clacking of the train.

The people immediately next to him stood up right away. One by one, the other occupants of the bench all stood and moved away.

This was the express train, mind you, so there was plenty of time between stops.

Only one person remained on the same bench as the homeless guy, a Spanish kid who was staring at his sneakers defiantly and holding his breath. The homeless guy stared him down, grinning and willfully crapping his pants.

Finally the Spanish kid gave up and stood.

"That's right! That's right!" The homeless guy shouted triumphantly at the stoic commuters, who were clearly prepared to prove that they could put up with anything. "I'm gonna CLEAR THE CAR!"

By Union Square, although no one was willing to share the bench with him, he hadn't yet succeeded—and like a real New Yorker, I had toughed it out alongside them.

This was Rudy Giuliani's New York.

Two weeks ago, at the height of the Christmas tourist season, I was riding an Uptown A train and a young black kid raised his voice at the far end of the car I was on and announced, "Ladies and Gentlemen Happy Holidays! I am currently homeless right now, and am asking if any of you have any spare change, sandwiches, or gift cards so I can get myself some Armani and some Versace..."

He weaved through the car, soliciting loudly and publicly, then dropped his voice as a rail-thin old man with one leg rolled himself along in a wheelchair with the steady "chink...chink...chink..." of coins in a tin cup.

This is Mike Bloomberg's New York.

copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

"The Eleventh Guest" by Andy Biscontini

.

By the time this is over, the rug will be ruined and Ron will be dead. I will eventually own another home, but I will never throw another dinner party.

My name is Amanda Andersen. I am thirty-seven years old and my previous dinner parties have contributed to two divorces (one of them mine), the dissolution of eight friendships (four of them mine), and two career-ending humiliations (not counting tonight, neither of them mine).

One could say I should have learned a lesson. One could also kiss my ass.

I owe these people something, don’t I? After all, I hired them into a company that’s never been anything more than a saleable asset that’s about to sell. These people have spent two years of their life as pawns in a game that I, as a partner, stand to make a lot of money off of, and their severance packages are like nothing.

The least I can give them is a nice dinner.

I mean what the hell? Right?


I’m hiding in the backyard behind the shed smoking a joint with Bobby Fuller under the trees and the moonlight. Bobby is nineteen but I like to think of him as seventeen. He is an intern. I traded the entire marketing department a day at the spa for him. I enjoy giving him jobs that involve him picking up file boxes and putting them on high shelves. I like to stand close to him when showing him how to use the copy machine or fax machine and I like to think that he’s only pretending to still not know how to do it. I wear short skirts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays because I like it when he checks out my legs. I have very nice legs.

And I like to see his blue eyes go starry as he passes me the joint. I brush his fingers when I take it. I haven’t smoked weed in years but I take a deep hit. My lungs burn and my loins tingle and my head starts to unfold. Oh, Bobby.

He’s saying something but I don’t care. He’s been talking since we came out here, going on and on about something.

I stroke his thigh and run my hand over his teenage boner. He doesn’t stop talking. I run my hand around his ass and pull him towards me. I clamp his lower torso between my legs and I pull his face into my cleavage. He doesn’t stop talking. What’s wrong with this boy? I’ve seen him looking at my legs. And he’s just talking. Where are his hands? Where’s his tongue? Why else would a seventeen-year-old boy schlep out to the suburbs on a Friday night for a dinner party at his former boss’s house if not for a piece of her, right? When I was seventeen, a boy knew how to bust a move.

Christ. I have guests. I don’t have time for this crap.


I leave Bobby mumbling away in the grass, brush myself off, and cross the yard to the warm lights of kitchen.

Ron is at the sink doing the dishes.

“There you are,” he says.

“Don’t do the dishes,” I tell him.

Bobby comes in the door behind me with his shirt untucked and his fly down.

“XYZ champ,” Ron says.

Bobby smiles dumbly and zips up, giving me a daffy grin. The kid’s an idiot. I can no longer pretend he isn’t. He goes into the other room.

Ron gives me a look.

“What?” I don’t say it, I just give him a look.

“Are you stoned?” he asks me.

“No.” I had an obvious affair with Ron last year to help facilitate the breakup of my marriage. He has had a difficult time accepting the fact that that’s all it was and my fucking him was not an invitation into my life.

“Things can’t go on like this,” he says, drying his hands with the dishcloth. Is he fucking serious?

“Ron,” I say, then I can’t think of what to say next, so I just say, “…fuck.”

He doesn’t know what it means, but he thinks it means something because that’s the kind of guy he is and that’s why he and I will never have a relationship.

The Ghost does me a favor and smashes a lamp in the other room.

“What was that?” Ron asks.

“I’ll take care of it. Just do the dishes.” I tell him, and head back into the living room, where my blue Adler lamp is smashed on the floor and Pam is trembling.

“It just flew off the table…” she says, “All by itself!”


I had known the house was haunted when I moved in. The Realtor had warned me that it had driven the previous owners out. But I figured what the hell? How bad could it be, right?

And it really wasn’t so bad.

The Ghost opened and closed doors, but didn’t slam them. When it turned the T.V. on in the middle of the night, it kept the volume low. It took the cap off the toothpaste, but I didn’t care about that. And when it rearranged the kitchen it always did so according to an easily decipherable logic.

The Adler lamp is the first thing it’s broken. Which is cool because it got me away from Ron and not cool cause that lamp cost a lot of money and now Pam is totally freaked out.

Pam is my age. She wears soft pastel-colored sweaters and beige rayon skirts and considers herself open-minded because she describes things she doesn’t understand as “funky.” Pam once said she likes me because I’m “funky.” I don’t like that because I associate the word ‘funky’ with the smell of athletic undergarments.

My little brother puts his arm around her to comfort her. He’s trying to get laid. I can tell. It’s slim pickings at this party, but my little bro’s unstoppable. In high school he had sex with every one of my friends, which made me jealous. I have always wanted to have sex with my little brother.

Creepy William is standing over the lamp, stroking his stringy beard. William wears bad brown shirts, has joggers’ man-breasts, smells like a health-food store, and spends all his time in the office composing ranting internal emails about new ways to approve office efficiency and minimize environmental impact. He once told me he considered me his intellectual equal. He found out about this party by accident.

“It seemed to lift off the table before it fell,” he says.

Bobby Fuller sips a glass of wine and sits on the window sill. He stares at my legs as I bend down to pick up the pieces of the lamp, pie-eyed and smiling softly. I have no respect for his generation.

It’s taken this long for Ryan to spring into action. “Is there anything I can do?” he asks, “Can I get some sort of dustpan or a broom or something?” Ryan is from somewhere in the Midwest, one of the states that begins with ‘I’. He is thick and earnest and serious to the point of being a little spooky. I have visions of Ryan showing up for work everyday long after the office is gone, sitting patiently among the empty cubicles as newspapers and tumbleweeds blow past him, then going home and punching a hole in his refrigerator door out of frustration. His mousy pear-shaped bug-eyed girlfriend whose name I’m not going to remember is sitting in the corner eating a wedge of brie with a fork as if it were a piece of pie.

Todd and Amy aren’t paying any attention at all. Todd is the only other partner who came to the party. Amy was hired as his secretary and he promptly seduced her on a bet, after which they settled quickly into an impressive cycle of misery with which they both seem very happy. When apart, they bitch incessantly about each other. When together, they drag some poor third party into a conversation in which they lay out each other’s shortcomings and compete for the listener’s sympathies.

Tonight their victim is Mokimbe.

Mokimbe is African and I’m proud of myself for hiring him because I’m intimidated by black people. His accent makes me feel very international. He watches Todd and Amy go back and forth, genuinely entertained. He catches my eye and smiles.

For a moment I feel like I see the party through his eyes. The bunch of us, hanging in this haunted room like wayward atoms in a dysfunctional molecule that will never find a bond.

Then Ron comes out of the kitchen.

Everything begins to move slowly.

The ten-inch knife comes flying out of the kitchen in a straight line after him.

It enters his back and pokes through his shirt.

He doesn’t know what hit him.

Nobody knows what hit him.

He tries to talk and chokes up blood.

He craps himself loudly.

Pam screams and clings to my little brother, whose hand closes over her left tit.

Ron pitches forward onto his face. The knife pushes up through his back.

His blood soaks into the carpet.


I’m lying on my back in the grass behind the shed, under the stars and the trees smoking Bobby Fuller’s joint.

I wonder if the homeowner is liable for the actions of the home.

I think I hear a roller coaster.

I feel a free-fall in the pit of me.

It feels alright.



copyright, © 2006, 2007 Andy Biscontini

"Javier and the White Duck" by Andy Biscontini

.

Javier and the white duck had finished their chicken salad sandwiches, and Javier quietly worked up the nerve to ask his question. It was unpleasant to ask the duck anything. Once, Javier had asked the duck if it was at all disturbing to eat chicken salad sandwiches, knowing that the chicken had once been a living fowl not unlike himself.

“Fuck you,” the duck had told him, “If it was him sitting here instead of me the two of you would be sucking me out of noodle soup.”

They sat next to each other on the green bench in the middle of the garden that Javier had landscaped and cultivated over the last twenty years on a lot where seventy years before a crowded tenement had burned to the ground.

They sat quietly as the sky above them darkened to blue green and the streetlights flickered orange. The air was thick with salso music and smog and the spicy smell of dinners simmering inside windows.

“My friend,” Javier said, finally ready.

“Cigar?” the duck produced a box of Garcia Vegas from under his wing and offered them to Javier.

“No thank you,” Javier said, tapping his chest, “It’s no good for my health.”

The duck rolled his eyes, “Jesus, Javier. How many cigars have you smoked so far this week?”

“Two,” Javier said.

“Well three cigars in a week ain’t gonna kill you.”

Javier smiled and shrugged and took a cigar.

The duck lit it with a dexterous flip of his zippo, then took a Cuban out from under his other wing and puffed it to life. He leaned back, exhaled a ring through his bill, and said, “I’m definitely a summer person.”

Two young women in scant dresses walked by, on their way to a night on the town. The duck watched them walk away.

“I do love the city in the summer,” he said.

Two winters before, the duck had come up from Florida to visit for New Year’s Eve. He stayed with Javier and his family. It was a disaster. The duck and Javier’s wife wound up hating each other, and he didn’t like the way the duck leered at his daughter and terrorized his son. Nobody was sorry to see the duck get on a southbound Greyhound. Javier accompanied him to the Port Authority. “I’m just not an inside person,” the duck had said.

Their cigar smoke curled up into the night.

“My friend,” Javier began.

“How’s that cigar?” the duck asked him. “You enjoying it?”

“Yes,” Javier said.

“Hey,” the duck said, “I ever tell you about the friend of mine who died?”

“I don’t think so,” Javier said. The duck told him so many stories, and never seemed to mind that Javier didn’t enjoy hearing them.

“So this friend of mine,” the duck said, “His whole life, his policy for everything was ‘Just a little bit.’

“Drugs? Just a little bit. Booze? Just a little bit. Fried food? Just a little bit. You name it, he’d have just a little bit of it.

“So one day he drops dead. Boom. All of the sudden. Terrible. So, being a generally good guy, he goes to heaven. And he asks St. Peter, ‘What was it? What did me in? Was it drugs? Booze? Fried food?’

“Saint Peter checks his chart and tells him, ‘A little bit of everything.’”

Javier looked ruefully at his cigar.

“The moral of the story,” the duck said impatiently, “Is that you’re gonna die one way or another, so you might as well enjoy yourself.”

Javier disagreed with the duck’s interpretation, but didn’t want to argue. Besides. He had something to ask the duck. He gathered all his nerve.

“My friend,” Javier began, as he had rehearsed so many times; in front of the steamy bathroom mirror as he shaved, in the side-view mirror of his delivery truck, in the darkened television set on sleepless nights, after everyone else had gone to sleep.

“My frieind,” he finally said to the duck that evening in the garden, “Things are not good.”

The duck agreed. “These are troubled times,” he said.

Javier, emboldened, continued, “My landlord wants to raise our rent by a thousand dollars a month. He wants us to move out so he can bring in wealthy young people.”

“The neighborhood’s changing,” the duck said.

“My wife,” Javier said, “She cannot work anymore. The carpal tunnel syndrome is so bad in her hands that she can’t sew as fast as she used to, and the arthritis is so bad in her knees that she can barely climb the stairs to the factory every day, and there is no elevator.”

The duck shook his head, “Does that woman do nothing but complain?”

“My daughter,” Javier said, “She is pregnant. The boy she’s dating told her that he loved her and wanted to be with her, but when she became pregnant he re-evaluated his priorities and has gone away to college to improve himself. He doesn’t return her letters anymore.”

“That little prick,” the duck said, “You ought to track him down and kick his ass.”

“My daughter is only sixteen. I don’t want her to have to go through an abortion, but I cannot afford to support a baby and I will have to find a way to pay for the operation.”

“Well,” the duck said, “Maybe from here on out she’ll know to wrap the package before she sticks it in the mail.”

“My son,” Javier said, “He is doing terribly at school. He is tormented by the students and ignored by the teachers. I am afraid he is beginning to take drugs. It is difficult to talk to him anymore. But I cannot afford to send him to a good school, and his grades are slipping so much I’m afraid soon they won’t even accept him. He is a sensitive and intelligent boy.”

“He’s a pussy,” the duck said.

“Please,” Javier said, “My friend,” it was the moment of truth, “Will you lay an egg for me.”

The duck sighed and stretched his neck out from side to side. “Javier, Javier, Javier,” he said, “Is that the only reason you hang around with me?”

Javier didn’t think that was a fair question to ask. It made him feel guilty, and in the twenty years since he’d known the duck, he had never asked anything of him before, while working hard to maintain the garden so the duck had someplace to spend his summers and defending him to the other men in the neighborhood, who didn’t like him.

“Heese noah why dock,” Alvarez the barber had said when Javier tried to explain that the duck had meant no offence when he compared Mrs. Alvarez’s ample thighs to a pair of dancing seals, “Heesa why deek!”

Javier began to resent the way his friendship with the duck had isolated him from his community.

The duck read the frustration in his face.

“Javier, look,” the duck said, putting his wing on Javier’s knee,“Do you remember the first time I laid an egg?”

Javier remembered it well.

It had been the first year after he had planted the garden. The duck, who had been seen around the neighborhood, but hadn’t made any attempts at conversation with anyone, lingered by the garden gate while Javier worked. The duck told Javier that while his knowledge of horticulture was limited, he had an interest in urban gardens. He asked Javier who owned the property.

They went to the hall of records and found out that the lot was owned by a Hassidic Jew named Fleischstein. Later that day, Javier and the white duck and first sat down for chicken salad sandwiches. The duck asked Javier what he wanted from the garden.

Javier told the duck about a dream he’d had shortly after making the decision to move his young family to America. In his dream, he was an old man, strolling through a lush green garden with his grown children, dressed in white linen, singing and laughing and eating fruit from the trees.

The duck told Javier to contact Fleischstein and arrange for a meeting.

So it was that on a cool June morning twenty years before, Javier, the white duck, and Fleischstein the landlord met in the young garden and the duck, under considerable strain, his bill twisted, his brow furrowed, crapped an egg the size of a bocce ball made of solid gold.

Fleischstein had the egg appraised and papers were subsequently drawn up, transferring ownership of the lot to Javier. The duck had declined being named in the paperwork, due to problems with the IRS, but told Javier, “All I want is your solemn promise that I’ll be able to come up and use the garden at my discretion indefinitely.”

Javier remembered how bright the future had seemed in those years, when the garden was young. He looked up past the streetlamps and marveled at how far away such hope now seemed.

“Javier, listen,” the duck said, “Do you have any idea what this lot is worth on the open market these days? Millions. Have you been paying attention to the commodities market? The biggest egg I can crap isn’t going to bring you millions. With that money, you could buy land, Javier. Land. You could have a real garden. You could have an apple orchard. Hell, Javier, you could have a white fuckin’ picket fence!”

“But my friend,” Javier asked, “Where would you go?”

“Don’t worry about me,” the duck said, “I got lots going on. All I ask is a fair cut of the sale due to the fact that it was my egg that you made the initial investment. Say twenty percent.”

“Of course, of course,” Javier said, as the future suddenly brightened again.

“We’ll make some phone calls in the morning,” the duck said.

Javier shook the white duck’s wing and thanked him. That night, he dreamed of a white picket fence surrounding a lush orchard, through which he strolled with his children, dressed in white linen, singing and eating fruit from the trees.

copyright, © 2006, 2007 Andy Biscontini

New story by Wyatt Doyle

Now on New Texture:

"In America" by Wyatt Doyle.

Click on the title to read it, or copy and paste the URL below:

http://www.newtexture.com/content/view/298/54/

"The Dog Baby" by Andy Biscontini

.

Somebody put a curse on my neighbors and turned their baby into a dog.

I heard it happen through the wall.

It took half an hour and sounded painful.

In the fuzzy green light between daybreak and dawn, my neighbors’ baby began to cry. The father tried to comfort it with soft parental coos, but the crying got worse, and worse, and worse, interrupted by guttural baby-barks.

The father called the mother. Her footsteps were punctuated by a gasp, terrified and confused.

I heard my neighbors’ baby’s cradle tip over and smash against the floor.

I heard my neighbors panic.

I heard my neighbors’ baby thrash around the floor in a fleshy interzone of half- dog half-babiness.

I heard my neighbors cry.

Then I heard my neighbors’ dog that was their baby bark and sprint around their apartment with all the novelty, surprise, and curiosity of a human, suddenly graduated from its mortal vessel of limited physical capacity into the somewhat more capable body of a mid-sized terrier.

A couple of days later, coming home with my groceries, I ran into my neighbors in the hallway, taking their dog who had been their baby out for a walk. They all looked happier than I’d ever seen them.

My neighbor’s dog greeted me with the same vague, friendly familiarity with which my neighbors’ baby had always greeted me.

I looked at my neighbors. They looked at each other.

They told me, “He’s had his shots. He’s licensed with the city. He’s popular among his peers at the park. Beautiful women stop him on the street and scratch him under his chin. We’ll likely endure the pain of his death before ours, but we’ll know that he had lived a good life, because we had given it to him.”

I don’t know.

Maybe it wasn’t a curse.



copyright, © 2006, 2007 Andy Biscontini