VAMPIRE CONFESSIONS – SUCKING HELL

Copyright © 2009 by George LaCas – All Rights Reserved

I confess that, as I held her warm throbbing lifeblood-filled body in my arms, this panting animal she was that—in my fevered obsessed mind, at any rate—dominated my reality like a massive marble statue of a goddess … I confess I couldn’t decide.

Not in the sense that my decision was a rational one, a carefully-reasoned one.  There was no planning, but as my mouth opened, as my canines unsheathed like something out of a horror-show, four fangs brought forth from a foundation of aching, needful gums, I knew I had to decide what to do about Juliana.

Should I make her a vampire? and saddle her endless days with a curse, the ultimate addiction, the age-old taboo? the drinking of human blood?  Should I make of her mortal human beauty … a horrid huntress?

Or should I drink her dry, slake my vicious thirst and drop her cold dead meat at my feet, to shrivel and shrink and desiccate away, even the bones turning to dirt and dust, before the corpse could even begin to stink?

In the end, I flipped a coin.  Metaphorically speaking.  Or did I listen to whatever human nonsense it was that she whispered, something like:

“I only wish we could live forever, Alex, both of us, live forever in just this moment.”

Whether she actually said that or not, who can say?  Imagine your every move being dictated not by one fully erect penis or clitoris, but by four of them.  I speak now of my teeth, the ones that unsheath themselves when I am about to feed.  As do all such teeth for all vampires.  Imagine the fate of another being dictated by such nodes of lust, for my teeth are the nodes, the nerve plexes, of my vampire nature.  Imagine your every sensory organ made suddenly irrelevant, dark and blurred, and having instead four lusting teeth come to the fore of your reality, while the overpowering scent of hot human blood, hot healthy woman’s blood still teasingly within its skin, wafts up in your face like the odor of a rare steak to a starving man, straining against his chains.

And then imagine those chains being broken.

I took her.  I drew her down, enfolded her in my arms—which she could never escape even if she had tried, which of course she did not—exposed the warm fragrant mobile fruit of her throat and plunged all four of my fangs through her skin.  I could have bitten off her head had I chosen to.  Perhaps, for a moment, her body tensed against mine, which was like stone, cold stone, a terrible evil statue … perhaps some tiny futile part of her quailed against the hideous immortality she’d just come up against.

I drank.  I sucked her down, and though she’d dropped her arms and beat briefly against my biceps with the effectiveness of a hummingbird, a tiny moth, soon her hands came up again, and by the time I called forth my own power of restraint—newly nourished, at least—she’d placed her hands on my face, on the back of my head, to draw me in closer, to encourage my suckling, like a woman made shameless by privacy and passion will grasp her lover’s head and draw him forcefully closer to the mucous and musk of her sex.  How she shuddered when I retracted my teeth from her carotid artery, as though she would rather I’d stayed and suckled there forever.

Time enough for Juliana to taste what forever was really like.  And taste it she would.  Because I knew that, within minutes, her full powers would come over her and there remain, till the end of days, I dressed with hurried economy of movement and, like a fleeting gray shadow in evening’s mirror, I flitted and fled from there.

We’d be meeting soon enough.  My only hope now is to postpone that meeting, until Juliana’s rage has cooled.  Until, perhaps, she’s gained a measure of perspective, which is as close as our kind can come to what humans call forgiveness.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Sneak Peek: VAMPIRE CONFESSIONS – SUCKING HELL

Copyright © 2009 by George LaCas – All Rights Reserved

Her body, so beautiful, an absolute wonder of Nature! She had the form and attitude of a trained Tango dancer once her clothes were off, her movements languid yet with fluid force behind the grace.  To lay her out flat, as I did that night, and look upon her was to see a product, a honed tool, sculpted by the swooping questing movements of her lovemaking, her walking around, her every silly everyday movement.  She was movement, preserved in a form.  Maybe I should have just said that in the first place.  Still I struggle with this language in which I must express everything, because you mortals can’t see the rest of the message, behind the words.

Imagine a creature, a sexual and shameless creature, who could fly, or swim, or run faster than a cheetah, or whisk up a tree like a squirrel, or dance like a ballerina, or argue calmly with a Doctor of Philosophy until he lays down his diplomas and immolates himself on the suttee bedding of his own ridiculousness, and that creature would be Juliana.  And with great wild black hair, and a mouth on her like a cursing sailor, when she’d had too much to drink.  But usually just the aforementioned beautiful parts.

To look upon her, naked, was to gaze upon Perfection, an athletic Renaissance woman, somewhere in a karate ether between waif and warrior.

So imagine how scared I was that night, that designated night in which I would embrace her nude form in the dark of a strange room under false pretenses and drink her blood from her double-punctured carotid, because I’d weeks ago chosen to suckle the rich breathed-in blood, the hot hearty oxygenated blood rather than the tired and tragic jugular blood … imagine how taken aback I was when she said:  “You know, I love you.”

We stood just inside the room, beyond the threshold, and I swung the door closed.  The sound of its closing, the electronic lock engaging, was that of a prison door.  I had an image of a smiling bridegroom in a black tuxedo carrying his blushing white lace-clad bride as if she were a sack of laundry.  Would her drop her on the bed?  Deposit her in the lavatory with instructions to bathe, first?  Take her through the room and through the French doors of the balcony and drop her over the edge, so that she would die a virgin and thus undefiled by his sex, and all his subsequent demands down the years?  I shook myself to wave away the image, like a hand through cigarette smoke.

“Do the words make you nervous, or what?” she said.  “You don’t have to say it back.”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then.”

“Is it cold in here to you?”  I pulled at my collar though it wasn’t tight.  My gums began to ache and throb, as they would if four large ice cubes, one lodged at each canine tooth, were held to my mouth by an invisible hand.  I cleared my throat.

“It’s nice,” she murmured, and grabbed me through my pants.  She shoved me toward the bed.  “Why don’t you stop with the Grandma bullshit and fuck me?” she hissed.

“All right dear, Grandma is ready,” I said.  I was, too.  By the time she’d undone my zipper she could barely work the trousers down over my erection.

“I think you’re the big bad wolf, sir,” she said.

The ache in my gums was making my mouth water.  My jaws felt big and strong, like a saber-tooth tiger’s.  I was going to …

“You might be right about that, Red,” I said.  Little Red Riding Hood.  Now there’s a whole metaphor in and of itself.  The virgin lost, the seductive male, the dark and looming woods.  The fairy tale is just the Made For TV version, you know.  You wouldn’t believe what really happened.

“Will you take off my hood, you big bad wolf?” she whispered, and she shot her bra at me like a rubber band.  Her smell came to me, sweet sexy pheromones … and the dark promise of her blood.

“Oh, God,” I said.  My face was on fire, and O what my eyes must have looked like, to her, at that final moment.

Her own eyes, from half-lidded bloodshot desire, now sprang open in shock.

“Oh my God … what big teeth you have!”  she said, and she would have screamed but I placed a cold finger to her lips.

“Just relax,” I told her.  “It’s too late for all that now.”

TO BE CONTINUED …

Full Stop! Punctuation Police!

Let me tell you a little bit about myself.

I’m a man who works in a dark room, surrounded by stacks and stacks of books, with two or three limp plants in the window that generate barely enough oxygen for me to live on, and I spend quite a lot of time in various online forums discussing things like:

“Should there be two spaces after a period, or only one?” Really.  Seriously.  I kid you not.  This is a hot topic for some of us.  Imagine two giant-sized Books of Style–one from Oxford, one from Chicago–squaring off against each other like Behemoth vs Leviathan, or like the Hulk vs Godzilla.

It gets hairy out there.

At the risk of labeling myself an anachronism, I confess that when I learned to type, it was back in the days of Two Spaces After the Period.  I can’t even use being self-taught as an excuse, because while the other young men were on the football field, or in shop class learning a trade that actually paid off down the road, or smoking pot packed in the ends of their cigarettes in the smoking section … I was sitting in Typing Class.

Picture a scene:  Catholic School, circa 1987.  In a well-ordered classroom full of future secretaries, I sit with my hands poised over a keyboard, but I can’t see my hands because there is a paperboard shield hiding the keys.

“Do NOT look at the keys!” announces Lay Sister Agnes, the obese typing teacher.  She has made this announcement 13,819 times, and it has the power of incantation, nay, of the Rite of Exorcism.  Though she no longer has to make the announcement–it announces itself in all our heads, and will forevermore–she booms it out anyway.  Lay Sister Agnes smells like a filthy car ashtray full of cheese balls, but she knows her shit.

“With your eyes on your Typing Primer,” she booms, “please begin Typing Lesson #306, which begins How do I love thee.”

And then, like forty straight-backed monkeys in an experiment that would never be allowed to go awry, I and the future secretaries type.  Often in hammering unison.  Lay Sister Agnes peers at us from piggy eyes.  Rumor has it that she had escaped from a Home for the Criminally Insane … or that she had been a drill sergeant in a women’s prison.

One day, I glanced at my hands while typing … or rather tried to, for the thick white disciplinary paperboard shield, like a disembodied nun’s wimple, blocked my view.

“No no, not like that,” said Lay Sister Agnes from right beside me.  I had to shift in my seat to keep my lunch in my guts.  I could smell a half-eaten cheeseball, covered in crushed nuts, with cigarette butts ground out in it, and with bright blooms of blue mold sprouting all over its foul hemisphere.  Like a banquet in Hell.

“But but but but but,” I said, as reasonably as I could.

“Hold your hands out straight, not bent at the wrists,” she said.  “That there will give you the carpal tunnel.”

“Oh no, oh no, oh no …”

“Hold them out.”

Nowadays, when I want a four-hundred-pound dominatrix to whack my knuckles with the metal edge of a heavy wooden ruler, I have to make an appointment and then (of course) pay for it.

Looking back, I don’t think Lay Sister Agnes ever did that to any of her other students (one of whom tied a typewriter around her neck and jumped into Lake Erie, but was pulled out in time), and I think the reason she did it to me was that, A) she didn’t like me, and thought I should have been playing football or learning how to use a drill press, or B) she really wanted me to … well, actually, I think it must have been reason A.  Or some other reason.  Who the hell knows?

But I know this much.  In the first few weeks of class, the following mantra was hammered into our collective Typist Unconscious with the force and volume, if not the friendliness, of a televangelist:

“Word word word period SPACE SPACE shift-to-capitalize-first-letter word word word.”

Not one space, but two.  Lay Sister Agnes had her own Book of Style, and I ain’t about to go lookin for another one.

###

Goodbye, Mr WIP! *waves*

I don’t have any kids as yet, so I can’t dance to the poorhouse while sending them off to college.

What I can do, as some of you may have read in my previous posts, is write a book … some would call it a manuscript, others a 90,000 word descent into madness, still others a crackin good read … make a few preliminary adjustments, and send it off to an editor.

WIP Walking

Yes, you heard me right.  You can do that.  In fact, writers have been doing that since the days before computers.  Hell, the days before electricity!  For that matter, you can be sure that, when the first cavemen stood up inside the communal cave, and kicked aside dinosaur bones with all the meat chewed off, and the caveman grabbed a lump of charcoal from the communal cave fire (or maybe with a hunk of half-digested caveman fecal matter balled in his fist), began to etch pictograms on the wall of the cave … you can bet your bronto-burgers there was some dude over in the corner who said something like:

“You know, Krog, if you bring that glyph from the third line there? And put it right up front, in your introduction? You’ll engage your reader right from the get-go, and his family will want to hang out in the cave more often … wait! wait! why that pictogram there? What the hell is that? Are you just MAKING UP LANGUAGE AS YOU GO???  Look, Krog, if you let me suck the marrow out of that pterosaur wing you have, I’ll clean that up for you.  I’ll make that story move. And what is that you’re writing with, anyway?”

As you can imagine, things have changed somewhat.  I just read an article in a widely-distributed American newspaper that my lawyers tell me I’d better not mention the name of again, and there was a piece about the grand old days of publishing.  There was a picture of a happy lady with an overflowing ashtray, sitting at a desk talking on a rotary phone to someone.  She did have a nice electric typewriter.  That was what agents used back in the old days before they started sending out impersonal rejection notices via e-mail and intern.

Historical note: That was what they invented the carrier pigeon for, you know.  Not for generals to send messages (“please kill Huns on left flank LOL”) or from the Sistine to the Pauline chapels (“His Holiness could use talcum powder, and more extra-virgin olive oil”) … but for rejection letters.  In the olden days, when a writer saw a blackbird land on his windowsill, he would fear rejection (and death, thus the memento mori also came into play) and if he didn’t keel over clenching his chest and die on the spot, he would then write a poem that included “Nevermore.”

Or self-publish.

The Rare First Novel

But I digress.  Yes, to put it in a nutshell:  I sent off my WIP to my private editor, who is a very nice, intelligent lady who no doubt has editing tools (a machete, a flamethrower) that I can only dream of.  For you see, I am the caveman in the metaphor.  I thought I’d point that out, since I no doubt lost what clarity I started out with by including unnecessary embellishments.  To my credit, I didn’t send her the first draft I talked about in an earlier post.  I’m sure there are postal regulations about sending out fiction that sloppy.  No, I sent her the fourth draft, in which I try to solidify my unnecessary embellishments in the uncertain concrete of symbolism, and the sketchy glue of postmodern wankery.

It also has sex scenes that will curl your hair.

###

The Editor

I made the decision to hire an outside editor.

I won’t reveal who she is, or how much it costs.  The first because, though some of you might be impressed, it would be indiscreet; and the second because … well, that would just be tasteless.

So I’ll speak in general terms about why I’ve reached this decision, and why I think it will be a good thing.  If you follow me on Twitter, you may have kept up with the cliffhanger saga of George and his WIP:  “WIP 56,000 words … WIP 67,000 words…” and so on.  That was the first draft being written, or being poured like cement or concrete.  Or thrown up like a shanty, if you like the building metaphor.  Many of us know what first drafts are like.  They can be thrilling (or agonizing) to write, and while they often turn out OK, they can also turn out like … like … that’s right!  Like shit!

Which some of you may recall from an earlier post, in which I plagiarized Hemingway’s “All first drafts are shit” axiom and spewed it all over the Internet.

All along I had, and still have, a structural vision for my new book, and every day I read, and consider, and take notes in my notebook, and make changes here and there, and form mental plans for future tweaks.  Sometimes I’ll even move a section around, or write a whole new scene, though I try not to mix up the writing with the editing.

But I noticed something.  As freely as the first draft poured forth, when I’d reached that point I was working on the second draft, I began to see the need for changes.  As in, Major Changes.  I won’t give examples because I’m not ready to discuss this book publicly, at least not yet, but I’m talking about character, dramatic tension, writing style versus narrative structure, story development ….

Sounds like the kind of stuff an editor does, doesn’t it?  And it’s a damn good thing there are some good ones out there, because sometimes you need to call in a pro.  Sometimes just your own head isn’t enough.  And sometimes a writer is not the best editor for his or her own work.

Even though I knew this book would need rewrites, everything from story changes down to line editing, some part of me saw the possibility that I might ruin the book by trying to do the whole editing job myself.

So I signed on with a pro.  They’re out there.  Make sure you do your homework and get a good one, if you decide to use one.   I did.

Basically what’s going to happen is that the editor will read and analyze my book.  Does the story work?  Is the hook sharp enough, as it were?  What about the characters?  Does the writing style fit the rest of the book?  And lots more, I hope, because I need all the help I can get.  I need an instruction book on how to rewrite my book, and I need a pro’s eyes on my words.

Not only will this help me produce a better, stronger, and more commercially viable book, it just may help me write the next one better.

Jimmy the Traveling Novel – Brugge, Belgium

Jimmy in Brugge

Cracking my WIP: About My First Draft

First, a disclaimer: I’m not one of those publishing gurus you see everywhere these days, nor am I a writing teacher, nor a writing expert of any stripe or description.  In fact, if you asked most people (I almost typed Most People, like the name of a theme park), they’d say: “Oh, that guy?  He doesn’t even have a real job.  Writer!  What’s that — some kind of glorified bum?”

In my imagination, “Most People” is played by a former-military, disciplinarian grandfather type.  I used to work with an old dude like that.  Back when I had a real job.

Anyway, getting back to the topic of my WIP.  First, a fistful of brass tacks:  WIP, in this usage, is an acronym I use to mean Work in Progress.  As in, a novel that is somewhere in a production-stage between notes written on bar napkins (a cliche we are, I fear, stuck with, mostly because it’s true), and what we pack carefully in a manuscript box and send off to an agent, or publisher.  That version, by the way–for anyone not intimately familiar with the world of publishing–is the one loaded into recycling dumpsters in New York City.

So WIP means Work In Progress, to cut (back) to the chase.  As in “this BOOK I’ve been writing” or “I’m on Chapter 4 now, in which Titus Harmonica rides a magic carpet back to London and defeats Jack the Ripper … you’ve heard of Steampunk YA, right?” or the ever-popular “Have you heard I’m a WRITER?”  The latter being a Line us guys use sometimes on women, who smile and nod and then go talk to the guy with a Real Job who has turgid, throbbing credit.

the WIP - Sneak Peek

Let’s face it, writers.  At some point, that book we all envision as being a masterpiece, and complete, and (we hope and pray) displayed prominently in bookstores all around the globe, right at the entrance, in its own four-color cardboard display bookcase with a five-foot-tall blow-up of the highly-recognizable book cover design on it … at some point that book must start out as a few scribbled lines that, through a pathetic and ugly metamorphosis, become what is commonly known as a Piece of Shit.

Yes.  That’s right:  a Piece of Shit.  That’s the goal, writers.  That’s what we’re shooting for:  to take our effervescent, neon dreams of stardom, of the New York Times Book Review … and through diligent effort (i.e., typing) cause these visions to percolate … until they precipitate (think rain, if you don’t understand chemistry) down from the brilliantly-colored skies of our ambitions, and once these dreams rain down on the real world, splatter down all around us, all over us in fact, in the form of … well, shit.  Like bird droppings, only the kind that pterodactyls used to dump out of the sky.

Hemingway said it best:  “All first drafts are shit.”  I can only agree with this, since he was after all Hemingway, of The Old Man and the Sea fame, who caught two-ton fish that could slice you in half with a thrash of their … marlin spikes? snouts? bills? have to look that one up … and, though he later ran into some problems with alcoholism and depression, knew what he was talking about.  All first drafts are terrible, Papa Hemingway told us.

Don’t you see what freedom this gives us? It doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer if your first draft is not, in fact, the flawless and tightly-prosed and stately Pride and Prejudice that you thought it would (must) be.  It means you’re a good writer, or at least one who understands that there’s a Process going on here.  Think of it like digging iron ore out of a mountain.  Do you bitch and moan that you can’t find a seam of 99.9% pure tempered steel?  Do you sit and look at all the piles of rubble you’ve amassed, and then cry a river (and shame the hell out your Muse, who will take that opportunity to kick you to the curb, at least until you grow a pair) that your tongs of genius have not plucked out nuggets of gold THE FIRST TIME?

I look at it like this.  If you can imagine it, you can make it.  But there is a Process involved.

MY PROGRAM: For one month (it may have taken me 5 weeks), having decided to write a second novel, and having sketched out a premise and a few major characters–all of which I did very quickly, and this time using crowd-sourcing, which I’ll talk about in a later post–I forced myself to follow one rule:  Write Every Day.  That’s all there is to it.

Now, keeping the first thing in mind–the freedom to write a bad first draft, which ideally should help you relax and let you tap your creativity instead of having a case of, well, the literary equivalent of ED–and combine it with the second (write every day), if only for the first draft, try it, and see what you come up with in a month, or two months.

Just don’t stop until you have a First Draft.  And one other point:  your first draft takes precedence over the Internet – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, everything.  But that’s such a biggie, I’ll make that the topic of yet another post.

Thumbing Through the WIP

###

George LaCas is the author of The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue – click the link for the Amazon page

A Writer’s Daily Nutrition Log

Is this thing on? taps microphone

No, looks like we’re text-only. That’s all right. I can work with that. No pictures, though … wait, here’s a picture!

Unmoored

Isn’t that nice? I’m selling that for $10,000, and please don’t waste my time with counter-offers, nor should you approach me (the artist) without a licensed art broker. I don’t talk to just anyone.

Anyway, getting back to the subject of this blog post: the Nutritional Needs of the Modern Author. Let’s see. Today, after getting out of bed at 2PM, I struggled against ennui, made it to the communal kitchen here at the homeless shelter, and after directing Davey away from the blazing flames of the gas range (Davey has a full beard, looks like a deranged Santa, doesn’t smell good on fire), I poured myself a cup of black concentrated stale leftover coffee–with a caffeine concentration that makes amphetamines look like OTC–shoved it in the microwave, then while it was heating up I ate two freckled, speckled yellow-black bananas. Not quite soft, just starting to fill the homeless shelter with the tropical liquor of their putrefaction.

So: coffee, two bananas … oh yes, a cup of grape juice (Davey yelled at me for finishing it, but Fortune favors the brave) … and back in my rack, my cubbyhole, on my just-sprayed mattress, I unlocked my broken footlocker and took out my secret stash: premium-quality vitamins. That’s right! That’s the key. You can write a novel IN A MONTH if you have the right vitamins, and in my case I have MegaMen vitamins from GNC [this is not a paid advertisement], as well as high-potency sustained release Vitamin C (to ward off the effects of scurvy, from when I was a sailor, and we got lost in the Azores, or was it the Bermuda Triangle, but in any event we ran out of fresh fruit, and it left several of us snaggle-toothed, if not dead).

You see, anyone can go to her/his local grocery store and steal cheap store-brand vitamins. Or buy them. But if you’re serious about this writing kick, which many of us are (way too many)…partly because many if not most of us are unfit for any other occupation…you need the good stuff. In my case, I’m a strappingly handsome man in my (ahem) early 30s, with big pecs (chest muscles) and arms, few if any tattoos, the kind of dude for whom high-performance vitamins are made. The women thank me for it, believe me. But that’s a whole nother barrel of monkeys.

In all seriousness, though. Your body needs the stuff, all the vitamins and minerals…but so does your brain. It’s all part of the same package. And writers (at least in theory) need full use of their brains. For many of us, this process of rough-sketching and early drafting and outlining and first drafts and structural edits and revisions, and draft after draft thereafter, require vitamins like the B-complex group, E, etc. It helps you think, and helps keep you stable.

Now, usually, I don’t start off my day with just coffee and two rotten bananas. Around 5AM, for example, I ate a two-egg omelette with low-fat cheese and a bran muffin (yes really). You have to keep the nutrition coming in. But vitamins, particularly B-complex, help you think, help your body metabolize energy, and keep your heart ticking as it should.

Garbage in, garbage out. Think you’re up for the competition on a diet of soft drinks and chips? Think again. Chances are your fiction sucks even worse than your diet.

In this world, you MUST take care of yourself, and Wielders of the Pen are no exception. So pour in the good stuff, and good stuff comes out. At least you’ll have more energy to work on it.

###

Jimmy the Traveling Novel

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2008535&id=1477792566&l=94083e8288

the Traveling Novel in Madrid

As you can see from the 15 pictures in the Facebook Gallery, Jimmy the Novel gets around.  So far he’s been in Spain, Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands and back home in New York City!

Soon, Jimmy will travel to Sweden and Italy, and hopefully we can track down his whereabouts in Brazil.  Stay tuned!

Breathless

Breathless, she looks at him and looks away, and she wonders if this is what college is really for, this delightful manic-electric jolt, the hot excitement of falling in lust.

“I thought you were about to say something,” he says, smirking.

They stand on the steps of the library, contre-jour against a setting Arizona sun, a sun that says Oh yes, I’ve roasted the desert all day long, I’ve stripped the air of moisture to make your nose bleed in your bed, your eyes to become white raisins and fall from your head … but now it’s time for my repose, my well-earned rest.

Breathless, she tries out her coolly dismissive smile, her maybe-smile, and to it she adds the accessory of her newly-acquired come-hither eyes.

“I was,” she says, “but thought better of it.”

He laughs a little too knowingly, like there was humor in her words, like he was really capable of understanding it anyway.  He places his large warm hard man-hand on the small of her back, and she thinks of how many tramp-stamps he must have Brailled at the frat house.  But she has no marking there, and hate him as she does, she knows she’d go to the dirtiest dodgiest tattoo parlor in Tucscon, if he wanted her to, and have his name (or whatever he wanted) emblazoned on her haunch, branded on her ass, her love letter to him tatted round and round her tummy and back in sticky-sweet script like the incision on a spiral-sliced ham.

“Too bad that ain’t always the case,” he says.  “Hey baby, you like Chinese food?”

She smiled and pressed coyly against him – God he was so big – and she pictured vomiting half-chewed Egg Foo Yung into a metal trash barrel after her thirteenth birthday party.  Her brother Jake had laughed at her and called her a stupid bitch.  Soy sauce flavored chow mein streamed from her nostrils, and she tried to snort it out of her nose before Daddy could see.  But he had seen, he’d held her shoulders, and on the day Daddy died she had stood there and cried, recalling how the sweet man had moved his face away from the smell of her Chinese restaurant puke.  Had turned his face, stoic, into the swollen red Arizona sunset, and called her his baby girl.

“Love it,” she says.  Her turns and takes her small oval face in his big cowboy hands and pulls her in, as he would a porn-filled computer flatscreen, for a kiss.  Which she accepts, yields to, as she glares and stares with unsquinting eyes into the bloody red half-sun, squatting behind the Physical Sciences building, sending out awesome beams and girders of rusty red light, where the Science building meets Psychology, and she chokes back a cry as she tongues his hot mouth and hopes he can’t taste her tears.  Over his shoulder she watches a lone girl, a plain-Jane freshman with a magenta high school book bag, walking alone down the path between the two buildings, and she kisses the frat boy some more with one of her sneakered feet on the step below, and she wants to call out from out of this boy’s greedy experienced mouth:

“Excuse me, hon, but you just keep on walking into the sunset there, you be the cowboy, let your feet be your horse, and if they say you can’t go home again you call them a dirty damned liar!”

But soon enough it’s dark, or their library embrace comes to its logical end, Leviathan though it seemed, and there comes a tiny beeping, some crafty ringtone.  He holds up his finger like he’s already on the phone, and then he is.

And he turns and walks down the steps, like she wasn’t even there, like she never was at all, talking into his cell phone, smiling, dissembling, as the sun’s rust-brown red beams skim over his head and touch the tops of the trees that line the paths of the quad.

Soon, breathless, back in uncertain darkness (did I ever leave it? she wonders), and refusing to cry though she’s sighing, she goes into the building, the glass doors slipping open ahead of her, apologetically, like a diffident Enterprise.  As she stands in the vestibule while the uniformed guard goes through her backpack, as he will when she leaves to ensure that what’s in the library stays in the library, a different feeling comes to her, an older feeling she thought she was free of.

And then, breathless, she’s in the bathroom down on one knee with her arms wrapped round a wastecan in the corner, balled-up paper towels tickling her bare knees, no feet below stall doors thank God, and the old hurt comes and comes, as tears wrench from her, as vomit tears out her guts, and she spits and gasps and chokes chow mein and chewed-up egg rolls and rank oolong tea and pukes it into the garbage, where maybe the mess will stay for another eight years.  Before Daddy turns away into the sunset again.