FireVaney

This thing won’t stop beep-beep beeping.   The “attendants” are apparently unconcerned.   They can hear it.   The door is open.   Their desk--I can see it--is feet from this room.   But, as I am not the only one here, these “attendants” may have more “important” things to do.   After all, there are many other invalids up and down the corridor; many who behave as if theirs is the only room in the joint.   I am not such an individual.   I am not The World, I am of the world; and I am proud to say so.   True, I could , once again, press the button to summon an attendant.  When I summoned one before, with the appropriate button, they were, it must be said, admirably prompt in responding, and in their promptness, admirable in silencing the beep-beep beeping.  However, they left only minutes ago--two minutes, forty-three seconds ago, to be precise (I’ve kept count; I’ve little else to do; the view offers nothing but a dirty brick ...

A young woman sits cross-legged in a grassy field.   She is set--aside from a single, dispersed contrail--against a pale blue sky.   A notebook computer is flipped open in her lap; its make is unknown.   She is wearing a white and blue cami with spaghetti straps, a scoop neckline, and a hieroglyphic pattern; her blue jeans appear to be cut out of van Gogh’s The Starry Night ; her flip-flops are aqua-blue.   Black hair curls down to her bronze shoulders.   She sits frozen, her arms and fingers stretched all the way out, palms up.   Her face is tilted skyward.   It is, however, difficult to conclude whether she is thankful, or incensed; whether she is worshipping the sun, or cursing it to Hell.   Below this photo, the card Veolia Environmental Services sent reads:   “Help us help you.   Enroll now!”

* No matter how hot it gets, never buy a Wexford Portable 2-Speed, 6-inch Table/Desk Fan. Without warning, and for no reason at all, it will start screaming at you --much like a caged feral cat in heat-- in the middle of the night; and it will continue to do so no matter how much WD-40 you squirt at it. (At approximately 2:30 a.m. last night, this was the situation at the FireVaney residence.) *

The man tried to express himself.  He failed.  “Bloated,” he wrote. “Vegetables,” he wrote.  “Bloated with vegetables,” he revised. He then continued with: “Trouble spelling ‘vegetables.’”  He misspelled “vegetables” at every attempt to write it.  Then autocorrected every instance.  Why?  Because “vegetables,” he rationalized, must not be misspelled.  “No,” he told himself.  “Not true.  A lie.”   But who posited it?  A liar did.   He did.  The truth:  He autocorrected out of fear.  “Autocorrected, fearing scorn.  Unarticulated scorn.  Your scorn,” he concluded.  “ Your scorn is sensed.”  He wrote it down, too.  “Before you’ve read this, your scorn is sensed.”  He refuses to take responsibility.   “Blame vegetables,” he wrote.  “Go ahead.  Blame ‘em.”  And then this dawned on him: “Vegetables provide no salvation.”  He proceeded to cli...

Willard grabbed the tennis ball and lobbed it at the window.  When the ball struck, the windowpane cracked.  Willard picked the ball up and lobbed it again.  This time, the windowpane shattered.  One down, twenty-six to go.  Willard grabbed another tennis ball. Hanna was upstairs in her room, reading Tartuffe by Molière, when she heard the first crash of glass, and then the second.  She grrr-ed, scraped her chair back, grrr-ed at the tear the chair’s legs had made in the carpet, stood, grrr-ed at the crick in her back, limped out to the staircase, grrr-ed at the limp, and leaned over the rail.  She shouted, “Everything alright?” After lobbing yet another ball to smash a third windowpane, Willard replied, “Yup!”  Twenty-four to go. By the time Hanna managed to limp all the way down the stairs, and then hobble all the way back to the sunroom, grrr-ing every step of the way, Willard had smashed all the windowpanes in the northernmost wall.  ...

You imagined it clean, orderly, brightly lit; rooms full of yelping puppies, purring kittens and even, perhaps, chirping birds.  They all plead for your attention.  You hold the keys to their sustenance and to their freedom.  At home, no one needs you; for practically all intents and purposes, you are invisible; your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, the goldfish, they pass right through you--unless you fail to take out the garbage or forget to wash the dishes or inadvertently leave the toilet seat up.   But, here , amongst all the furry quadrupeds, you are in the spotlight, you are the star of the show.  Some of them would like nothing more than to curl up in your lap for a nap.  They even want to lick your face!  Here, the spotless linoleum aisle that cuts through the stretch of stacked cages is your Red Carpet; every woof, every meow, every tweet is, essentially, an audible camera flashing in your direction; every grow...

SETTING POP'S bedroom. AT RISE It’s 9:30 a.m. on every morning since the Earth shook Japan to pieces.  POP is lying on his bed, hissing out of sheer boredom.  FIREVANEY enters with a glass of water and a dish of pills. POP Good morning. FIREVANEY Good morning! POP So.  The world’s still here? FIREVANEY Last I checked. POP Last you checked.

She knocked on my door.   Just now.   Her door faces my door.   It’s three, maybe four footsteps away.   Maybe four and a half.   Spitting distance.   That’s it, her door is within spitting distance of my door.   When I heard her knock, I got up, took a step, maybe two, I don’t remember, and I peeped through my peephole.   I wasn’t expecting a knock.   I’m never expecting a knock.   But this lovely young woman had knocked on my door.   What luck!   I’m sure I never would’ve knocked on her door.   If a fire broke out, maybe then, I would, but otherwise, I’d feel too creepy about it.   So she knocked, and I peeped, and in clumsy haste I unlocked and pulled open my door and I say “in clumsy haste” because perhaps I was about to discover that there is a God after all--or, as the case may be, for me, a Goddess, after all.  That’s right, I wouldn’t open the door for just any old deity, certainly not for Jesus or Muh...

Charney found himself lying on his back in the middle of the street.  He was pretty sure he hadn’t been shot, but his ribs didn’t feel right, and the back of his head throbbed from having thumped it so hard against the blacktop.  At least the drizzle felt good on his face.  He thought he could see the moonlight breaking through the clouds.  Moonlight, or a jetliner’s landing lights, or maybe, hopefully, angels were descending to collect him…  Whatever it was, Killdare’s blur blot it out when he stepped into view.  He chomped on his Hubba Bubba and grinned down at Charney.  “Hey, Char,” he said, stooping into a linebacker’s two-point stance, “how many fingers ‘m I holdin’ up?”  His hands were on his knees.  Charney tried to speak but the best he could do was puff out a groan.  Breathing was hard; thinking was harder.  All he could really feel was the patter of drizzle dampening his skin, his hair and his clothes.  Because...

Eight years ago I found myself growing weary of City Life.   The congestion of all that humanity, packed-in like sardines, left me gasping for space.   Many people are invigorated by all of that condensed kinetic energy.   Those are the lucky ones, I suppose.   And I envy them.   But I could not emulate them.   I was already too old.   Everything raced faster than my own untreated hypertension.   So I slunk back to suburbia, where the only recurrent annoyances came from lawnmowers, leaf-blowers and bird droppings. And then, like the irrepressible progeny of every cockroach I’ve ever crushed or poisoned, bits of my past crept back into view… We worked out at the same gym.  I don’t remember her name.  I probably never knew it in high school.  We never spoke.  She wasn’t unattractive, but she wasn’t exactly my type.  Back then, I was chubby and zity and exactly nobody’s type.  I nevertheless had standards.  My st...