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Fortune Favors the Bold

I am slouching on the couch. A pillar of Oreos rests on my sternum, and behind them, Sandra, Dave, and Beverly introduce themselves to Pat Sajak. This is perhaps not my most dignified moment, but work today I am feeling self-indulgent, so here I am with chocolate crumbs in the creases of my shirt watching Dave with his second chin and Hawaiian button-down spelling his way to prosperity as the crowd applauds.

Duke, my dog, is watching me with an expression of terrible pathos, because he sees that I am eating Oreos, and he wants to be eating them too, and while I am moved by the intense longing in his eyes and can empathize with his concupiscence, I do not give him my Oreos because I read once in the newspaper that dogs lack the enzyme required in the digestion of chocolate, and so to allow Duke even a taste would sentence him to certain death.

I consider getting him a treat because in his agitation, Duke is swinging his tail perilously close to the lamp on my end table, but I hear a great clamor behind me, the sound of breaking wood and shattering glass and angry invective, and for one strange moment I am pleased, because although Duke is a superior specimen of his kind and a fine companion, I sometimes long for the presence of another human, but Duke is not pleased; he is angry, and bares his teeth, teeth that have so far done nothing but masticate dog food and unattended slices of American cheese, and I know that something has gone terribly wrong.

There are two men and they are in balaclavas and they are in my living room and one of them is holding a gun. Duke jumps up at them and I feel hopeful that he will resolve the situation, with his ferocity and sharp yellow teeth, but the taller balaclava man, the one with the gun and the broad shoulders, points it at Duke and there is a metallic coughing noise and an unfamiliar smell, sharp and mechanical, and Duke tips over, and I am alone.

I watch Duke dribble out of his own body as Sandra completes the bonus round. Pat Sajack gives her a hug as she screams and screams and screams, not like she won $56,293 before taxes and a trip to Madrid but like she just saw her dog get shot and there’s a man waving a gun in her face, and I get angry, because this is a woman who is lacking in perspective, she should be happy, and I get angrier because the short slender burglar, who moves with the ungainly gait of a young man, is sneaking peeks of Vanna White and scratching his butt with gloved fingers, and even here and now there are expectations and protocols, and it is difficult to be properly intimidated when he is doing these things. I choose to be angrier still because these strange people have taken away my dog, and I would rather be angry about him dying than think about him dying, about him getting colder and stiffer as the carpet around him turns all red and clotted.

The tall burglar sits down next to me on the couch and pushes the gun against my ribs. There is a commercial playing now, a preview for a movie wherein a square-jawed hero exacts bloody retribution against his enemies. I cringe at the explosions. He puts his hand on me knee and pushes his face up close to mine, and I can see that his eyes are brown and wet and friendly, like the eyes of my dog Duke, who is now soaking into the carpet and missing an important piece of his head. I wonder if, like Duke, he is missing something important, something that would have saved us from him acting this way, but then I see his smile peeking out from the hole cut from the black cloth of his ski mask, a smile of unfunny serious teeth, each one marble white, like a mausoleum nestled into a pink field filled with other mausoleums, and I can tell that he knows exactly what it is he is doing.

He says to me, “Don’t move. Don’t talk. If you can help it, don’t think. If you do what I say and just sit there, no-one will have to shampoo pieces of you out of this nice carpet.”

He digs the barrel of his gun into my side. “Got it?”

I would like to dismiss him as a thug, but his voice has a patient timbre to it, like he is  a member of the service industry and wants me to have an excellent home invasion experience, and there is something about his closeness, the gun against my side and his breath against my face and his hand on my knee that makes everything go cold and vitreous, and as much as I would like to tell him that no, I do not understand, that I will struggle mightily against him, the words slip from my grasp as if they were coated in glass and I just nod.

They tear apart my living room. There is not much for them to take, except for the television, which is still on, thanking sponsors for this night’s broadcast. They finally get to the cabinet next to the television and find my niece’s paint by numbers felt posters, all Technicolor unicorns with wings and expressions of idiot rapture, the posters that she gave to me two years ago, but I don’t have the heart to throw them away, not even now when she would be embarrassed to know that I still have them, because when I pull them out I remember her expression of shy pride when she handed them to me. But the tall one, who still has his gun pointed towards me, throws them aside, because they aren’t cash or diamonds or pieces of consumer electronics or whatever it is he is looking for, and one of them falls into the red patch of carpet where my dog is lying.

Pat Sajak is applauding the end of another episode with Vanna when the big burglar turns to me with his gun.

“Nothing. You’ve got nothing. I didn’t come here for nothing. What else do you got?”

He pushes the cold gun barrel into my neck and while I understand that what I do in this moment and in this place determines whether I perish or survive, I can only think of how if he kills me, I will be cold, too, so instead of fleeing the scene or performing a citizen’s arrest or executing summary justice I clench my teeth and try not to move, not even to breath. Like many people, I grow fearful in the face of finality.

But not the boy-burglar. He pulls off his ski mask, and I am surprised because I expected his face to be acne-scarred or dirty or deformed. I expected his face to alert me to his malignancies, but instead it is youthful and querulous and fringed with a patchy beard.

“You told me no killing,” he said, “You told me we wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

The taller removes the gun from my neck and points it at him.

“Fired,” he says.

This gunshot is not like the other one, because I am expecting it. I see it coming, all of it. I see him deliberate; I see him decide. I see him brace his arm and pull the trigger. The sound is an assault, an imposition. I feel it in the cavities and soft spaces of my body. But perhaps I am the one lacking perspective now, because the boy-burglar is crouched over and panting wetly and I suspect that he is in far worse shape than I am.

“Oh my,” he says, and I think that maybe he does not appreciate the gravity of this particular situation, if that’s all he has to say, but he grabs at his chest like he’s trying to scratch his heart, like all the bullet did was give it an itch, and blood blooms around his hand, sucking his shirt against his skin as he closes his eyes and stumbles to the ground and starts soaking into my carpet, too. He does not look at all upset, just nonplussed, like he heard a joke he didn’t understand and wants someone to explain it, please. And I think that maybe there is a sameness in death, because the boy-burglar now reminds me of Duke, and I wish that I had told him that I wasn’t angry he had broken into my house. There are worse things.

The man-burglar pulls off his balaclava, and I feel a surge of fear, a frisson as I heard someone say this morning on NPR on the way to work, and while thinking about public radio is not really relevant to the subject at hand, I am in the company of a man who shot my dog while I was watching television, which wasn’t relevant at all, so maybe we are outside the boundaries of relevance at this point. I am in trouble, because he just committed murder in front of me, and if he doesn’t care if I see his face, then I am probably going to be depressing value of this house as a memento mori.

I have nothing but an IKEA couch to protect me from a murderous gunman, and I am entertaining serious doubts about the ability of even the finest of Scandinavian engineering to save. I feel betrayed by the television that now lays broken on the floor. It offered me analgesic, but one hundred thousand numbing re-runs cannot help me, and this is no action movie. I am no hero in a leather jacket, who can walk calmly from buildings as they explode, thus providing a photogenic silhouette. I have at best a lamp, if I can retrieve it from my end table without acquiring any bullet holes. But as a burglar with a gun violated my home and killed my pet and threatened me with death, I sat on my couch and watched. And the boy who was just shot like a dog, like my dog, specifically, cared more about me than I care about me. I let a man with teary eyes and stupid tombstone teeth frighten me into glassy silence, so I stand and tear my lamp from the wall. The man-burglar just blinks at me, and I feel queasy because even when he has me cornered he does not think I will fight back and do what even rats and wolves do when they nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

But even now I hesitate, after all that he is done, even when I can feel my veins curling like telephone cords and it feels like my lungs are filled with packed sand instead of air just by his mere presence in my home, but I remember Duke and the boy-burglar and the gauche unicorn poster sodden with blood, so I throw the lamp, and it traces an elegant arc right into his chest, where it blooms into an angry spray of glass, and then I am running for the door.

Series of Omissions

Norman O’Connor died May 5, 2012. He was a proud Albany native and New York University alum. He will be remembered fondly by his friends at the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and the Knights Columbus.

He is survived by a wife, a daughter, two sons, and a quantity of appalling pornography hidden beneath the toolshed and dozens and dozens of intricately painted model planes that he labored over his entire life, but never showed anyone, though if anyone happened upon one of them, as visitors did from time to time, he would offer it up with both hands, a young boy proud of his handiwork.

He is survived by memories of dreadful silence and What did you just say to me? and the impact of the belt, or The Belt as they thought of it, against the backs of the children, even when they weren’t children, not really, they were practically out of high school and he was still doing it. Whenever they talked back or did poorly in school or were out past curfew, he pulled it down from its shelf, so that nearly every memory of a first kiss or night on the beach or camping trip or humiliating report card is punctuated by the terrible smack of the belt and the same flat dry face he always wore when he struck them. You will not behave like this.

He is survived by two sons who, not three hours after his funeral, beat the ever-loving shit out of each other outside of the bar closest to the cemetery. They cried and cried and cried as they scrabbled on the ground and pounded at each other with their fists and soiled their rented suits with parking-lot gravel and tears and snot until finally, finally, someone managed to pry them apart, but by then the fight was out of them anyway. They had gotten what they wanted. The eldest drove them to the emergency room, where they discovered they both had broken noses. Neither apologized. There was nothing to forgive.

He is survived by a loving wife. The week after he was diagnosed he came home one afternoon with a fur coat just like the one she had when they first married, and a tuxedo and two opera tickets for the best seats in the house, and even though she knew that nice people didn’t wear fur anymore, the weight of it on her shoulders made her bones heavy and sharp and fine like spars of quartz, strong enough to hold up the both of them. And though he shook from the medication with the sort of side-effects that made her feel queasy when she thought about them, he lifted his chin up when he saw her watching, like he was daring her to say something pitying. She took his arm, and that’s how she remembered him for a long time: fierce, proud, a little scared.

He is survived by La Mer, the fine French restaurant where he and his wife once sat, waiting for their daughter to come back from the bathroom, though she was sitting in a stall wearing heels and hiccupping out tiny sobs of rage because of when he hadn’t been there, not since that singular, terrible night when he told her just what he thought about her degree in Music and her black boyfriend and that kind of people she spent her time with. He had not been there when bronchitis had left her in the hospital for a week and the bills nearly left her homeless, not when her neighbor followed her to work and left raging messages on her phone and she had to move because of it, not when her mother called late at night and promised to wire her just a little extra money. But those were old hurts, long since scabbed and calloused over. The real reason she was smearing teary makeup onto toilet paper in a fine French restaurant was because Norman O’Connor, who would die in five years, surrounded by his loving wife, daughter, and two sons, who was here now, had showed up to the hall with a potted cactus instead of flowers because he knew it would make her laugh, and when he hugged her and told her that she was the best musician in the whole damn place, he meant it.

He is survived by doubt. Years ago, when he and his loving wife were arguing over something absurd, like money or the house, something they could lose in an instant or replace far easier than each other, when they were howling at each other, young and angry and filled with fire and spit, he raised back his fist. This is why she always thought of this fight as the one that started it all. It placed something ugly between them, a pane of dirty glass that did not go away, not when he lowered his hand, not when he apologized, not when he took her to the beach the next night and she could see why she married him all over again, because she knew that he had it in him to hurt her. Years later, she remembered it, when medication and illness made him spiteful and confused and he cursed her as she led his shaking body to the bathroom or spooned food into his mottled lips. But even when he was at his sickest and most confused, when he spat out the most hurtful things his drug-addled mind could produce and she had to wonder if this was the truth, that he had not given into delirium but was delivering a death bed confession, even then, as long as she was in reach, he did not let go of her hand, not once.

Norman O’Connor did not survive. He can no longer sneak candy to his grandchildren when their parents were not looking, or surprise his wife with newly planted sunflowers outside their bedroom window. He will no longer construct exquisite hot breakfasts every Sunday morning or fall into the kinds of blind rages that could barely be attributed to a sane man. He is gone. He is hated. He is missed.

Evening Broadcast

I come home alone to a series of dark rooms. I fashion an easy supper of sufficient nutrition. I sit on the couch and turn on the television. A square jawed man in a suit tells me to have a good evening, America; tonight on channel seven we hear from authorities concerned with a new drug concocted from table sugar and acrylic paint and abused by middle school students. In other news, the Federal Drug Administration has detected exotic bacteria causing numerous and excruciating symptoms in spinach, chicken, ground beef, peanut butter, chocolate bars, tapioca pudding, and other foods, more details at eleven. I set down my dinner.

Locally, several witnesses have observed a lamp-eyed creature with the gait of a wolf mauling pet dogs in a nearby subdivision. Expert cryptozoologists believe it to a distant relation of the Jersey Devil. It may have a taste for human flesh. A serial killer yet to be apprehended by spotlight-bearing helicopters and K9 units (as recorded by the indefatigable Channel Seven News Team) was seen in the area yesterday. Police say he favors crawling into residences through unlocked windows and murdering his victims in gruesome fashion with his signature circular saw. I wonder why I have not yet purchased a dog.

The inoffensively attractive anchor leans forward and says that a gentleman with long pale pianist’s fingers and feverish eyes will sprinkle anthrax spores onto a Luddite manifesto (wrathfully composed on an antique typewriter) before mailing them to victims too thoughtless to purchase gas masks and rubber gloves. He says that a strange new disease, incubated in the fecund backwaters of rural China has made its way to the United States of America, where it is has hospitalized hundreds. His muddy eyes and neutral expression and Midwestern accent suggest that he thinks I have little chance of survival. He tells me that scientists believe that an asteroid the size of the African continent is now approaching Earth. Impact is imminent and ineluctable. Here comes the end.

Response to "The Flicker in the Night"

I’m pretty sure that you implied the mother died in the last draft.  It seems like you didn’t here, and I think it is more effective. Just giving us a piece of their relationship is enough.  You also give us the right details. The smell of the mother’s perfume and the description of the family’s routine gives us insight in a small story.

Sometimes, your word choice didn’t feel quite right. Saying that someone “always found her way to my bed” seems a bit like a romance-novel euphemism, and the line “The smell of her lingers” was a touch suggestive.

Response to "From Me to You"

“From Me to You” describes a Thanksgiving dinner that occurs the day of the narrator’s uncle’s death. It deals with how families react to loss.

I like how the sour smell of menudo reflects the embittered holiday. There are many details that make this story believable, such as Debbie’s nose stabbing into the narrator’s shoulder, the yellowness of her teeth, the simplicity of Debbie’s and Albert’s wedding, and the fact that Albert was an overweight car salesman. Even outside of the central conflict, the world in your story is an imperfect place. You also give the right amount of detail. Centering the wedding around the cake, the dress, and the narrator’s dance with Debbie gave us an understanding without being overwhelming.

In a broader sense, you do a good job of conveying a sense of disorder and unhappiness. The focus on garbage and the sour smell of food is particularly effective. I really liked the ending. The parallel between Debbie’s teeth when she smiles and her teeth in the end is very effective.

The narrator did not feel like the main character. It seems like Debbie experienced the most change; the narrator, while upset about Albert’s death, doesn’t act much throughout the story. I think that most people would intervene if they saw a family member have a breakdown like Debbie’s, particularly when she wore her wedding dress to the dinner table. Though you integrate your summary and scene well, sometimes it feels like you are telling us too much. For example, when the narrator says that, “my father should be singing one of his stupid ditties,” I would like to see what he is doing instead. How does the family react on an individual basis to Albert’s death?