Effortless effigy; they stuffed newspaper into the fireplace, lighting it and—quick! Rushing outside to watch the coal colored smoke heave itself from the chimney with a straining puff, creating creatures in the ink clouds and making stories of the shapes. They lay on their backs in the lawn and argued softly about which noun-cloud subdued which constellation and how many adjectives were honestly necessary. When they ran out of smoke, they’d race back inside to set fire again to the details and excuses of everyone they’d never known.

Spark! Light! Flame! Rush! Point!

On each visit to the inside they would take the smoldering ashes and soot from the munge of words and spread it out on the floor by the door with their hands and fingers. And as they ran in and out they would leave footprints of warm ash, making it easier to find their way back and forth and, should they leave, giving anyone who might come before the storm—and it would storm— a good idea of what they had done there and what it meant; what it looked like to take a culmination of negativity and excuses and churn it into childlike joy and deep breathes of cool summer air.

“I think maybe it’ll rain,” she said.
He said, “I think it’s definitely going to rain.”

And it did.

The Gods gave the green light to rainfall, their cheerful applause reaching mortal feet in a distorted sort of anger at the distance required to share the beauty. Our creative couple—newsprint natives—were swept away in a current fashioned from the raining down of god-thoughts of what’s what and who’s where and why this is different.

They found their feet eventually—and don’t we always?—, but continued to follow the stream because, “we’re where we need to be, I guess, and we’re what we’ve worked towards. Right?”

Right.

With some help from Nick.
I love collaborative stories.

The allure, and to some, the frustration of loving is something best explained with:

Impromptu drives to secret places; where we both hum to keep time with the windshield wipers and press our faces against respective places (side windows) to bring closer that conscious-keeping condensation. Got to keep up, got to keep awake, got to keep on keeping that driving face that you love so much, so much so that your face breaks, too, into that tiny smile. That little victory.
Look. Outside.
A bird.

It’s coming towards us in the sky, a soft spiral in the air. Catching bugs shaken up by passing cars, scars, promises—ours? It’s hard to say the size or shape of it though it’s possible to make out colors. Brown, bright red, black, and gray dancing forward, the lightest being ever to grace the sky. It’s tough to tell whether it’s falling or flying, but both of us are caught in awe as its pursuit of dinner brings it towards the windshield at an ever-quickening pace. One moment, beak wide and straining for an unseen insect, the next moment bouncing from the clear pane of glass. In the space of several seconds losing freedom without ever even having its dinner.
How horrible to die hungry.

I pull over to the side of the road instantly. You climb out of the car and survey the ground until a ball of feathers is located. It sure isn’t breathing, but it’s the only proof we’ve had in the last 40 miles that anything is still alive. We look at one another, shocked and taken aback. The bird—poor, crushed creature— suffered a broken back: a shriveling spine that has twisted and curled, throwing the head back as if having a good laugh. Or cry.

A new veil of somberness falls over us and we’re silent. What could we say? In the car, a new passenger has joined us, a casualty of our adventure. I want to pull the car over again and hug you but I don’t know if that is appropriate. It’s just a bird, right? But I feel the burden of unexpressed sadness welling up between us and I know that in this moment I can either strike hard enough to bring your feelings tumbling out or I can forever keep my peace.

So I kept my peace and you kept yours.
Love is the lightest thing, the easiest thing in the world until it isn’t.

In progress, etc. w/ Amanda. Stay tuned?

I don’t know much ‘bout psychology, he says, and I ain’t so good at no mindful talk.

She nods.

So I guess that makes me an expert.

Hmm?

Expert at diggin’ right big holes. Right here, and he taps his chest with a wry smirk.

What’chu talkin’ bout, you foolish boy? She smiles, takes his hand, and kisses the tips of his fingers. Hush now, you can’t rightly make no holes in no one’s heart with tools like these. You ain’t even got no nails, they all been bit down.

I thank ya’, cuteness, but you ain’t gotta have no nails to dig yourself a hole. No, ma’am. Alls ya gotsta do is think ‘em there- the holes, I mean- with thoughts having much to do with sadness.

She just stares.

When her daddy died, he killed her, too.

A big man of smoke and saddles, her daddy would spend a little part of every morning packing his home made bullets with bits of gunpowder and drinking self-loathing straight from the bottle. He was a good man, by associated sadness.

As his baby girl, though, she missed all the warning signs. Love is a cliché and is by the sight and by the years; those years over, in an eddy wind of admiration and idolization were swept hard with her unconditional love.

A morning in her mid twenties brought gunfire, though, and we found him sallow and unremembering in the hospital bed. I had to call and threatened her integrity should she not come see him.
She was furious.
She was grief-stricken.
She died.

Now she falls asleep in her bathtub with the water running. Washes her hair in vodka and juice; to keep the color, she smiles. I came to visit and made a point to stay up late enough to turn off the water. Her neighbors don’t need another flood, and neither does she. I left her in there most nights, though, because I’ve learned that fighting her limbs and tooth just isn’t worth it.
I want to shake her; scream at her until she comes back to me.
I want to scoop her up; love her until she comes back to me.

In the mornings, I tell her to wash her face, but it’s whiskey in the bottle and she tells me that she’d need soda, but the sugar gives her cellulite and she’ll just live with a dirty face.
In the mornings, I sigh.

We drove down to see her soul assistant, but there was a train wreck off the highway and it was smoking real bad. We pulled up in time, coincidently, to watch him, her love, park his own car and rush towards the wreckage. He’s in possession of the arms and back to save some folks, I thought. But instead, he climbed, burned his hands, and seated himself on the high debris and took one deep breath after another until, after a few hours, his teeth started falling out.

I had forgotten she was in the car, despite her repetitive drunken songs outlining the importance of new things, poker faces, and rough risks. I’d forgotten she was in the car because she’d sang herself blue and had fallen into sleep’s own arms. I’d of worried, but such happenings were so commonplace that I’d just rolled my eyes and untangle her hair with my shaking fingers.

You are here, and I love you. So glad you’re here, and I love you. I repeated this over and over, hopeful that through some intoxicated osmosis, she’d wake up hung-over and lucid of how she’s a slow suicide; she’d wake up and realize she’s a treasure and not trash and start treating her heart and her body with respect and reverence: with some sort of respect.

She groaned and pushed my hand away in a sleepy fit. I looked back out at the man smoking on the train wreck.

Come down from there, I shouted.
I want to, he shouted back but didn’t move.

I felt suddenly beside myself: so frustrated, disappointed, and livid with them both.
I kicked at the windshield.

We’re all in this together, you fucks.

In the ancient Catawampian Kingdom corruption spewed from every exposed orifice, living and inanimate. This near constant ooze was most gimping the few progressive Catawampians that craved change; it wasn’t important if said change was for better, or for worse because at least the change would be for something.

The kingdom was littered with trash; half of which were advertisements for gumballs developed by Catawamp Inc. The laboratories at Catawamp Inc. had assembled a team of scientists that specialized in implementing addictive properties in the edible food stuffs they produced, which with their previous creations led to population composed of obese and malnourished Catawampi. Though needlessly cruel, the profits of Catawamp Inc. were unmatched. The incentives based on the gross sales done by the company made the scientists fat pigs as well.

There was one Catawampi in particular that despised the blatant exploitation of the Catawampian people and his name was Mr. Catawa. He was a bastard mixed with the blood of a long forgotten Catawampian tribe that had been assimilated in to popular and modern Catawampian culture. Though one might strain to call it that. A culture, that is.

To avoid the addictive properties of the food in the supermarkets Mr. Catawa would let the food spoil before eating to that the bacteria would garnish and destroy anything that could possibly have a negative effect. If the food became too spoiled to eat, he would put it in jars; let it ferment, then drink it. This is when his ego would inflate to a point where he didn’t mind throwing the now empty jars at innocent passerby’s while shouting a variety of obscenities somehow always included “som’beetch!”

He wasn’t so special that he was the only one who opposed the oppressive free market system that exploited the populous. There was a group who was so anti-government, anti-system, and anti-Semitic that they developed their own systematic group to oppose “the man” in very politically correct and non-confrontational ways. They called themselves something, but the name was always forgotten and is, therefore, probably not very important. Anyway, their efforts brought only suffering and mass delusion; a sort of “brain-wiping” which gave them a false sense of actually making a difference.

They didn’t.
I digress, readers. My apologies.

Mr. Catawa made an effort to actively hate these anti-activists. He murdered members of the nameless anti-group and made them into fertilizer, thus finally making them useful.

Mr. Catawa loved making things useful.

He dreamed of creating a utopian internment camp for the obese citizens of his foul city and beating them with switches until they conformed to his ideals. The whole thing was, well, pretty ideal. It was only a dream though. The citizens of the Catawampian people were destined to rot their shallow fat asses waiting to die in front of cancer-producing machines.

So Mr. Catawa devised a plan to sneak into the Ovarian Office of their Chief and Commander of Catawampia and remove the guts from his bone house: eviscerate him.

The following morning, Mr. Catawa woke up and had himself a steaming cup of ambition: fermented random food product. Following this, he made his way to the Ovarian Office. He wore all white so as to blend in with the sunlight. There was no need to dress in sun clothes, though, as the guards had grown so lax and addicted to consumable products that they could hardly breathe, let alone stop a deranged maniac (and Mr. Catawa certainly was that!) bent on destroying that which had become the enemy.

The Chief and Commander of Catawampia had a gold-plated nameplate on his desk that read simply, “Slogar the Sloth”. He was the lagest and laziest of the Catawampians as it was his duty to the Catawampian people to demonstrate how lazy and disgustingly obese one can be, should one dedicate his or herself to putting everything into nothing.

Mr. Catawa was disgusted. He didn’t appreciate this mollified mentality. He stabbed Slogar with a bottle of fermented, spoiled liquid-food that he had only partially consumed earlier in the morning. It broke conveniently on the Chief and Commander’s placard, but unfortunately Catawampian blood (particularly Slogar’s) shares enough properties of liquid nitrogen, primarily the temperature, that it froze Slogar’s wounds shut just as each stab was completed.

This enraged Mr. Catawa and he stormed home to plot and pace in his basement.

Hours later, however, it was announced that Slogar, Chief and Commander of the great kingdom of Catawampia, was dead.

He had died due to a complication involving the bacterium that lived inside the jar of Mr. Catawa. Since the food had been so fermented, it actually turned to alcohol and after being exposed to Slogar’s bloodstreem it gave him a strong sense of euphoria as well as giving him an escalated alcohol level in his body, poisoning him, and resulting in a slow and painful death.

The Catawampians found and crucified Mr. Catawa’s ass.
Like Jesus, except nobody liked him later.

______________________________________
From the mind of Robert Duran; edited and added-to by yours truly.

Their relationship, if you can call it that, started over a compass misunderstanding; so while she could tell direction, he was left moving in circles. She would never agree to this description, of course. Instead, she would insist that they were just on different paths with different destinations.

At least he’d occasionally appreciate, re-realize, that their compatibility wouldn’t be ruined by any boredom-induced likenesses. Sometimes he’d paint for her the personal growth that he foresaw for their future selves, should they both commit to the work of love. Write her poetry.

She had a wall full of paintings—a closet full of poetry.

I guess, she’d think, I should respect his opinions more. Him more.
I guess, she’d think, I should couch my pragmatic, rigid nature and give in to my inherent hypersensitivity.
I guess, she’d think, I should be more gentile. After all, she’d remind herself, the world is rough for realists.

To be honest, though—for as far up in the clouds as her head was, she was an equal distance withdrawn. It’s possible that they were both too distracted to notice or care, as often is the case when two people stop talking and start touching. Ashamed as she was to admit, her side of the relationship failed to advance past a sexual attraction. She defended herself in reminding her family—her friends, her cats—that he was just as focused on a forced sense of whimsy and romance.

And this was how their relationship proceeded, with the exception of a few memorable moments where they were able to see eye to eye.

[big thanks to Amanda for writing half of this. <3]

It could certainly be said that he handled her with care when care was called for, and otherwise moved her with a forceful knowledge that left love bruises on her hips and shoulders. He was patient and playful, knew to lay low on days she, undermining her own sense of forced maturity, threw hollowed angry down hallways and up stairs.

Heart hobbled and weary, she would always, eventually, apologize.

And he’d answer simply, “well, this happens.”

While choice grandiosity was certainly his hallmark, he considered himself pathologically down to earth and chronically on the wrong end of nonsensical betrayal. His idealization of romance stood in almost constant juxtaposition with his contemptuous disregard for dating and other delicate, lady-related activities. Moreover, his few female friends were occasionally targets of subtle derision as he sought to establish a sort of lasting control in order to counter the shame and fear triggered by his otherwise shy and insecure demeanor.

He’d been in love once, sure. A baroque, lumbering sort of love; one which suffered many frayed edges and so much patchwork he’d eventually lost sight of the girl he’d originally fallen for.
Or had she lost sight of him?

Let it be said that surrogate love, however gallantly sought, is an elusive and often disappointing endeavor. He’d found this out the hard way over many, many years of heart and headache.

So, he’d given up.
He’d been the one to leave, anyway, right?
Hadn’t he?

Regardless of his current and crushing loneliness’, he was successful at least at sustaining his own sense of personal fragmentation and this kept him from, most of the time, falling to literal pieces. Every so often, though, he’d wake up inhuman and devalued and spend an hour or so willing himself to the other side of the bed, to his phone, just to call in sick, so sick, to work. These days plagued him more often in the winter, when the days grew shorter and the sunlight that warmed his eyelids and roused him most mornings grew cold and lazy and old.

Today—that day—that Tuesday—that cold, wet, dreary Tuesday—was one of those days.

He thought of her often, but didn’t miss her because he knew that she knew he needed this. Deserved this, even.

Didn’t he?

It was a dark, industrial place. The sunlight had abandoned us in light of brighter opportunities, but before entirely departing our town council had made a deal of sorts. The sun didn’t leave entirely; the only daylight our town saw was inside the multi-story library and greenhouse. The air was thick and smelled of animals and old books, though the only animals were us. There were bakeries inside, but their foods were concocted only once a week and were devoured in hours. The building rarely smelled of baked goods.
What a shame.

Down the highway a bit, where the bridges’ demolished edge stood wavering, a massive Lovecraftian creature lived. Its enormous tentacles flailed restless in the river water, and it’s shrill cries pierced most mornings; a breathing alarm clock. No one really had any accessible memory of how the creature got there, where the bridge went, or if the folks on the other side of the river were even alive anymore. No one really questioned anything. No one really cared.

There was simply a monster in the river that we all worked to placate so we could live miserable a little longer.

But then people started disappearing.
They’d wander off, often mid-conversation, and stumble towards the river in a sort of sullen trance. We’d find their bodies bobbing in the river days later, which our local coroner examined and determined that they’d merely drowned; no familiar tentacle marks, no signs of trauma or self-defense.

Mass suicide, it seemed, was our new epidemic. Another epidemic.

My niece, who I now, awake, I recognize as my old neighbor, came to stay a while with us in our dank, moldy, nooked apartment. On the third night, though, she crawled out of bed and fought with the door chain until, after successfully waking me, she careened down the stairs and made fast pace down the highway. Towards the river.

I followed her. I had to see where she was going—if she was next.

After we walked for what seemed like forever, we came to the bridge. It stood a very respectable height above us and swayed with a regal sort of creak. A moment’s admiration, and my little niece began to scale the structure. I leapt towards her. My few additional years lent me additional weight, also, and I worked to stay on top of her, to hold her body down. She fought me though, passionate, shouting at me that she no longer possessed a reason to live and, if I had any love for her at all, whatever that meant, I’d let her die.

And I did.
Maybe I’m deranged.
But when someone wants something so bad—wants something that bad—why would you keep them from it?

I ran.
I ran for an indiscriminate distance, an unknown amount of time.
I ran until he caught me.
Held my face and hushed me.

Then he, so faceless and so familiar, and I set forth a plan.

He and I wandered around the daylight building eating the half eaten donuts and warm champagne. I was uncomfortable and tense, a feeling I woke up with. I had two tiny air supplies, like Bianca canisters, taped between my shoulder blades and had drilled a wire through my throat and led it down and ‘round my neck. A makeshift breathing apparatus would, hopefully, keep me alive in whatever it was I planned to do.

Whatever it was.
(Not die?)

And then I woke up.
Damnit.

They tore down the ceiling. Dust served as temporary war paint as they broke the panels with their feet. The delicate bodies of the long, fluorescent lights were swept up in a sea of loving arms; placed aside and kept safe from the skyward warfare and they trudged onward. It took them all night, but they’d destroyed it. Completely torn down the school-type paneling to reveal the wooden skeleton that held the above floors in place and, well, above.

“We can’t stay here.”

Impulses had changed dramatically in the time they’d been there.

Upon arrival a declaration of permanency was issued only to be followed, albeit it weeks later, by a childish desire to get back home. They’d spend their evenings on the porch despite the heat (or was it because of it?), watching the flat landscape step slowly into its bedtime bathwater. While all the green was nice, she preferred purple to scrape her skies. Who’s the sun to make blush upon waking if not the mountains?

During the days, when the heat would become unbearable, she’d sleep.
He lived a secret life while she slept, she was sure of it. But while she slept often, she was never concerned.

It was lovely, sure, but routine.

“I can’t stay here.”

So she left.
So it goes.