from "The Boat House" (Scenes 1 and 2)

Prologue/ Scene One

(As the scene opens, the stage is dark enough that the set can barely be seen. CALVIN is sitting alone in the center of the stage, dimly lit as if by the weak beam of a flashlight. He holds in his hand a chunk of wall, which he picks at, crumbling sand over his lap. )

CALVIN

The old boat house was what any good abandoned building should be to any bad kids.

The word is haven. Or sanctuary. Paradise wouldn't be a stretch at all.

I couldn't get in on my own. Tom was as good at opening doors as he was at opening girls' legs. He said there's nothing to it. Simple as sesame. The only trick, according to Tom, was to bring a chick along, because chicks always keep a bobby pin in their hair that you can borrow to jimmy the lock. Well, that was easier said than done. Some of us didn't know any girls. Some of us didn't have three lean sisters who brought home their friends in droves.

Some of us lived alone.

Beat. CALVIN looks down at the piece of wall in his hands. Laughs a sad little laugh, and then throws the piece of wall away from him, preferably into the audience. He pulls himself awkwardly to his feet, begins pacing in his small pool of light.

But there at the boat house, after we did get in, thanks to Tom and his girl and her beautiful hair, it seemed that even I had a family, even I a home. And oh, this was the home as home should be. Such freedom, such ease. We smoked whatever, wherever, whenever we pleased. We ate mealy apples from the feral trees that grew right inside our home. And maybe we got sick off the damp and fruit gone to rot, off the cold that climbed into our makeshift beds like a lover in the middle of the night. And maybe we ached in the morning, if we stayed till the sun.

Another beat, another laugh of maybe acceptance, maybe defeat.

And maybe it wasn't much of anything, really. And maybe Tom was a fuck up, and a jackass, and maybe he always will be. But certainly, there was a moment, in that creepy still, that boat house dim, when none of these hypotheticals mattered.

BLACK OUT. Brief but complete.

Scene Two

Morning. There is a silver quality to the air, the feeling of coolness in the colors of the world on the stage. In the chill early light, the canoe house can be properly seen. The boat house is old, the stones of its walls grown smooth and sandy from time, glass either thick and foggy or missing completely from the few small windows. Light pours in through a gaping hole in the right half of the roof. Through this gap stick the branches of a bold but scrawny apple tree that grows right from the floor, reaching roots out and tearing up the stones of the floor in every direction. SAMMY, the kind of cold-hot fierce-fine girl who every boy dreams of fucking but not a one dares to fuck with, leans against the apple tree’s trunk, eating a sad looking apple. Across the room from her is TOM, a lanky boy with an athlete’s easy grace, lies in an old canoe that has been padded with ratty blankets. He, too, holds an apple; but unlike SAM he is not interested in eating it, but only in tossing it from hand to hand like a sport’s ball.

TOM

You know how some words get to be their own plural?

SAMMY

Bluntly, even aggressively.

No.

TOM

Like buffalo.

SAMMY

Huh.

Sammy takes a loud bite of apple, then holds it out in front of her to look at it. A look of horror crosses her face. She spits. Straight on the floor.

Fuck, that’s nasty.

The are worms in my apple.

She throws the apple away from her. It bounces off the wall, and rolls to rest not far from Tom’s feet.

TOM

You’re not listening to me.

SAMMY

There. Are. Worms. In. My. Apple.

TOM

That’s sick. Spit that out.

SAMMY does not dignify this with a response. She gives TOM a pointed look. Beat.

Where was I?

SAMMY

Bungalows?

TOM

Shit Sammy, you really don’t listen to a thing I say, do you?

He shakes his head in mock awe at her insolence.

Buffalo.

I remember now. I was saying how it’s all the same. You say, “I saw a buffalo at the side of the road the other day,” or you say, “I saw a dozen buffalo trample a man to death.” Don’t matter if you’re meaning one buffalo or one hundred. It’s all the same. Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo.

SAMMY

Why you gotta be rambling on about buffalos anyway?

TOM

Buffalo, Sammy. No ‘S’. And I’m not talking about buffalo. I’m talking about plurals.

SAMMY

Sounds an awful lot like buffalo to me.

TOM

The point is how the single’s the same as the plural. I want to be like that. I want to be my own plural. I want to be fifty big men in one body, fifty million menaces and wars and powers in one little name. One word. Tom. But it won’t just mean Tom. It’ll mean Tom times infinity.

SAMMY

That’s cute. You should write an essay or something. Ms. Ricky would like it.

TOM

Fuck Ms. Ricky.

SAMMY

Like that, wouldn’t you?

TOM

Shut up.

TOM throws his apple roughly at SAMMY. SAMMY catches it in one bored grab without even looking up or turning her head. She throws it back to him, still without turning.

SAMMY

Eat your apple.

TOM

Eat yours.

But he takes an obedient bite. Swallows. Takes another. Closes his eyes. Speaks with his mouth full, around loud crunches. Swallows.

Mmmm. That’s good. Nothing better ‘n a good apple in the world.

Another bite. His chewing slows. Suddenly, a look of horror crosses his face and his eyes spring open. He rolls over and spits over the side of the canoe in which his lies.

There are worms in this apple!

SAMMY

Were in mine too.

TOM

Why didn’t you tell me?

SAMMY

Mockingly, her voice forced an octave too low:

Shit, Sammy, you really don’t listen to a thing I say, do you?

At this moment, the door opens. It swings wide and crashes into the wall, causing both SAMMY and TOM to startle. CALVIN stumbles into the boat house. His right hand is cupped gingerly under is left elbow. His hair is wild; his clothing wet, his jacket hanging open over a bare chest decorated with a few choice bruises. SAMMY and TOM seem unfazed by his condition; it is evident that this is nothing out of the ordinary in their world.

TOM

You make an awful lot of noise for such a little man.

CALVIN

The door--

SAMMY

Yeah, it’s broken.

TOM

Can’t just go slamming it around like that.

CALVIN

Calvin is examining the door, fussing with the hinges.

I’m sorry. Someone could have told me.

SAMMY

Meant to.

CALVIN

Okay.

TOM tosses his apple to CALVIN. CALVIN fumbles to catch it-- and does, just barely, clutching it nervously to his chest in both hands.

Thanks.

He takes a hasty bite. Swallows. Beat. His face contorts. Tom chuckles.

That’s not funny, Tom.

TOM

Just a little.

CALVIN

I’ll get sick.

TOM

Relax. Not my fault you swallowed.

CALVIN

How was I supposed to--

TOM

Now, Sammy. Sammy spat. Every smart girl knows to spit.

SAMMY

Guess the same don’t apply to smart boys.

CALVIN

What?

SAMMY

Sammy nods in TOM’s direction.

Tom swallowed.

Gave him fair warning, even; and he swallowed anyway. How stupid do you gotta be to go and do something like that?

TOM

Unfazed.

Tsk tsk. I trusted you.

SAMMY

How stupid you gotta be to go and do something like that?

TOM

Ouch, Sammy. Good point.

CALVIN

Calvin takes off his jacket, slowly, wincingly; there is something strange about the gesture. Then the reason for the tenderness of his movements is revealed: his right elbow is caked in dried blood, and long lines of dried blood reach down his forearm like fork tongs. In places the blood has adhered his coat to his skin, and as he pulls the coat off he gasps in pain and the wound, reopened, begins to bead pink with fresh blood. He starts towards the canoe-bed in which TOM lies, and goes to sit on the end of it, but just before he can, TOM, grinning mischievously, flings his long legs out flat over the rest of the boat, leaving no room for CALVIN. For a moment they stand there, locked in a staring contest. Finally, CALVIN speaks.

Really, Tom? Please?

TOM

Nope!

CALVIN

Even though--

TOM

Don’t want you bleedin’ all over my bed.

CALVIN

Your bed, since when is it---

SAMMY

Jesus, Tom, let him lie down.

Beat. TOM glances at SAMMY and sees that she isn’t fucking around. A look of penance (although questionably sincere) crosses his face. He sighs dramatically, rolls his legs over the boat on the floor, and moves into a sitting position. CALVIN sighs in tired relief, and collapses into the boat, careful to keep his feet from falling into TOM’s lap.

TOM

That better?

CALVIN nods.

Good. Hope you’re happy.

CALVIN

Not sure I’d go quite that far.

He closes his eyes. Props his good arm behind his head. Awkwardly shifts his bad arm between positions, unable to find one that is both comfortable and not likely to get blood somewhere it shouldn’t be. At length:

Well?

SAMMY

Well, what?

CALVIN

Well? Isn’t anybody even going to ask me?

TOM

Coyly

Ask you about what?

CALVIN

About the arm, stupid.

TOM

Woah there little brother. No need to get sassy with me.

CALVIN

You’re not my brother.

TOM

An enigmatic, infuriatingly dapper smile.

But you know I love you like one.

CALVIN

Is that so? Good thing you don’t have brothers, then.

TOM

Well I love you like a sister then. That’s more accurate anyway.

He snorts.

CALVIN

But you don’t even care what happened to me?

TOM

Tom shrugs.

Figure you’ll tell me if you feel like it.

CALVIN

You’re not curious?

TOM

I bet I know just want happened. You were riding that goofy-ass bike of yours to the store to get me those cigarettes you still owe me, and you saw some fine young thing-- or no, you saw Ms. Ricky, more like, all done up in that skinny skirt and heels, and you damn near went right out of your head! Next thing you knew, you’d lost your balance and were skidding across the street on your side, screaming like a cat in heat for mercy mercy please please please. And then, you lucky thing, Ms. Ricky’s bending over you and asking all sweet if you’re okay, and you can’t speak cause your mouth is full of blood and you’re taking in the view. That’s when the car that almost hit you stops, and the owner gets out, and comes over, and it turns out it’s Ms. Ricky’s lover, and he don’t like when he see. So what you do then is--

SAMMY

That some sick sort of fantasy you drum up at night, Tom? Sounds like one. Only I imagine the hero ain’t Calvin; it’s you. And I imagine you give yourself a fly-ass moped, not a goofy-ass bike.

TOM

What you on me about today, Sammy?

SAMMY

What you on Calvin about today?

TOM

Tom ignores the question.

Besides, babe, you got a detail wrong.

SAMMY

Did I now?

TOM

Ain’t Ms. Ricky I dream about; it’s you.

SAMMY

Ha-ha.

She isn’t laughing. But she is, to CALVIN’s visible horror--smiling. Just a little.

TOM

Ain’t no wussy moped, neither. That’s weak. It’s a bona-fide harley davidson. And I don’t have a helmet, cause fuck that, so when I hit the road it’s a miracle I survive. And I’m bleeding something nasty from my head, but to you that’s just sexy, now isn’t it?

CALVIN

You’re incorrigible.

TOM

You’re just jealous.

CALVIN

You’re--

SAMMY

You guys. Kill it.

TOM

Don’t have to worry about me, sweet thing. I can take care of myself.

SAMMY

Not you I’m worried about.

CALVIN blushes. SAMMY gives him a look that almost looks like an apology, but a little too ambivalent for one to be sure.

Fine, Calvin. Tom’s not playing. But I’ll ask you. What happened to your arm?

CALVIN sits up with an effort, and turns towards SAMMY. He begins to speak, but the instant he does, the wailing cry of a police siren begins, drowning out his words. TOM gapes at CALVIN incredulously. Pitching his voice loud to be heard over the sirens he asks:

TOM

Calvin, you gone and gotten us all fucked over now? What the hell you do that for? What the hell happened?

CALVIN

Might have had time to tell you if you’d asked earlier.

The three continue talking, increasingly panicked, but the sirens grow closer and louder, until nothing they say can be heard. The three fall silent, and drop as low to the ground as the can. SAMMY crawls across the floor so as to be better hidden from view of the door/ window. The three lie very still. Still, the sirens rise. At the climax of their noise, the stage abruptly goes black, and the sirens cut out. End Scene Two.

Just A [read:some] Thoughts [read: madness]

1) I believe I should be a victim of literature.

Art at its best holds you in its grasp like you and it are a pair of binary stars. Art should grab you and pull you to it with all the ardor of a lover, and, in its lustful grasp, you should be unable to pull away. The books that you have to make yourself read are not worth your time.

2) This is a fever. A dream-fever I’ve got to work and sweat and scream out of me. And this is what all such efforts should be. They must be a matter of life and of death. They should be urgent as the night before my lover catches a nine A.M flight to the other side of the ocean, where he will live in an alternative reality a quarter day in the future of my own.

3) And then one night I watch a movie about Allen Ginsberg with my oldest friend. We fail to find each other at the theater, but in the absence by my side I read her thoughtful, rolling revelry. I get to thinking about many things, about art and social injustices and various wrongs, and heartwarmingly heathanous heroes like Ginsberg and Keuroac. And afterwards, something has changed for me. No; that’s not it. There has been no change-- these thoughts have been so long fermenting that they must be worth a million for their dizzying vintage. I have said these things so often that I know the ins and outs of them like I know the ins and outs of breathing: know them so well that I cease to think of them-- indeed; in a way I cease to know them. It is only the resolve that is new, reborn like a long stifled passion awakened by someone you thought you would never meet again.

3.5) Ginsberg, if all that you did was for the love of Keuroac, whom you watched over the lithe shoulder's of his dancing girl, a man who who would never-- for all your words-- fall into your arms, then take heart, my friend; for in your stead have come a hundred evoking their love for you in every word, with every jazz-shoe turn. This isn't the perfect circuit click and flare you were hoping for, but that's the way our mad and damning dance is done.

4.)Don’t back down. Whatever you do, make sure it scares you.

5.) I am writing all of this so that in a million years, when we are nothing but a figment of a calcified planet’s fevered fancy and irreverent imagination, we can look back on all this and say: “Oh, but I lived! Oh, but I fought! I lived and I loved and I fought and I fucked and I failed, but really it’s the striving that counts.” We were the Kings and Queens of Phosphorescence. Our minds glowed like cum under black-light. We made a habit of anything that burned. Anything bright. Anything that excited the blood still blue in our veins.

5.5) These were our manifestos: Love, Scream, Fuck, Sing, Run.

These were our manifestos, and we adhered to them as surely as sailors adhere to the directions of the north stars.

6.) In a million years, these manifestos will still purr in our vanished bones. Even then, the dust of me will say: This is still our world. Of rust, of rubble, of ruin-- yes.

But it remains.

from "The Prospect" (Which by the way, you should come see at 10 Minute)

JAY

You know what I did today? No? You’ll never guess. I talked to her. Yeah, that’s right; to mother.

Mother on the phone and I could tell that she was drinking; don’t ask how but I just know, okay? Scotch and water. Little sips between sentences. Oh it was silent as a ghost but I could hear it. The ice must have melted cause it made no sound-- but I could feel those cubes click anyway. Little men with little hammers in my skull.

Beat.

Do you know what she said to me? I can’t believe she had the nerve. She said, “Jay, Nathan is in town, and you’re going to have him over.”

Seems a little presumptuous, huh? But she insisted. “Nathan’s your brother, Jay.” She said ‘brother’ the way religious people say ‘Jesus’. Said it like meant something special.

Brothers? What’s so special about brothers? I had four of them, always running around with their ding-dongs out, demanding things. And sisters, three of them. Not so special, neither. They had to get fierce since they were outnumbered. They were all teeth, the sisters. Teeth and claws and sass, like a little posse of cats.

There comes a knock on the door.

I gave in in the end though. Said he could come over. And that’ll be him now.

At a shout:

Come in!

Boat House

The old boat house was what any good abandoned building should be to any bad kids.

The word is haven. Or sanctuary. Paradise wouldn't be a stretch at all.

I couldn't get in on my own. Tom was as good at opening doors as he was at opening girls' legs. He said there's nothing to it. Simple as sesame. The only trick, according to Tom, was to bring a chick along, because chicks always keep a bobby pin in their hair that you can borrow to jimmy the lock. Well, that was easier said than done. Some of us didn't know any girls. Some of us didn't have three lean sisters who brought home their friends in droves.

Some of us lived alone. 

But there at the boat house, after we did get in, thanks to Tom and his girl and her beautiful hair, it seemed that even I had a family, even I a home. And oh, this was the home as home should be. Such freedom, such ease. We smoked whatever, wherever, whenever we pleased. We ate mealy apples from the feral trees that grew right inside our home. And maybe we got sick off the damp and fruit gone to rot, off the cold that climbed into our makeshift beds like a lover in the middle of the night. And maybe we ached in the morning, if we stayed till the sun. 

And maybe it wasn't much of anything, really. And maybe Tom was a fuck up, and a jackass, and maybe he always will be. 

But certainly, there was a moment, in that creepy still, that boat house dim, when none of these hypotheticals mattered.

excerpt from "Kevin Number One"

//Have you ever noticed how stories always get told by the nice one? Always the wallflower. The sweetheart. The one that don't do much, mostly watches, but is probably in the right.

Well fuck that.

Just cause you're gentle don't make you honest. Don't mean shit. Except maybe fear. And scared people are the worst. Scared people are pussy faggot bastards and all they do is lie. Only thing a scared person give a shit about is staying alive. And pretty if they can help it.

I'm not scared.

You can say a lot of things about me, and you probably do, but scared ain't one of them. Not unless you want to start something, in which case, go ahead.

Say it.

I've got all night. A beer or two buzzing in my belly and only the yellow kind of bruises anywhere on my body. That means they're a good week old and I'm getting itchy.//

// There's some commotion behind me. 

I turn and see two scared people standing by the door waiting to get in. They are arguing with the bouncer, Mr. Holes In His Ears. He's not a scared person, but he is certainly an asshole. Also I don't even understand his tattoos. If they are supposed to be ironic or if he is just stupid. Mostly naked girls with purple skin and snake tongues or else wings. Bat, not angel. Go figure. His ears really are something to look at though. Or rather, look through. Gauges so big they only make sense if they're for spiritual purposes, which the purple girls tell me with sly little shakes of their heads is not true.

Suddenly I do not want to be in this bar anymore. I want to be anywhere else. The night is not young, but so what? Old is best for a night to be. I slam down some coins and sling myself to my feet. And then I head to the door. Push passed the scared people and out into the streets, into the old, old night.

On my way, I pass lots more scared people. On my way to where? On my way to the house of another scared person. The reason I came back to this sorry place at all. Since I've been here last, more letters have fallen off of more signs and more plants have grown up wild and wide and a few new buildings have been built but mostly the buildings have been torn down, or been condemned but then left to swell with squatters and quietly rot. So the house should be hard to find, but it isn't, because my legs remember what my mind's forgot.

There's an aloe vera plant in the yard that reaches long barbed dragon tongues up as high as my thighs. But it's dying. That's the problem with everything here. Everything is almost something good but nothing ever quite makes it. Like how the nice thing about this place would be the open, the calm, the space. But sooner or later, you see the machines in the background and that ruins it. The oil rigs go up and down like drinking birds. And they never stop.

Inside the house, which is actually three houses pushed together into too little space, it's not much better. The windows are after thoughts, tiny and awkwardly placed. Most of the furniture came from the curb.

The scared person on the couch looks like she came from the curb too. Like maybe someone saw the couch and wanted it so bad they just said, fuck it, why not? So what if it comes with a woman?

The scared person's dress is the color of a dirty window, and through it I can see boxer shorts and a plain white bra. Her hair is also almost beautiful: orange and cut shorter than mine. That's new. Last time it hit her shoulders. 

I admit I stumble a little coming in. I admit I do not knock. I admit to the bulk and aggression of my shadow.

Yet it still slams me in the gut how she looks at me, wild and frail. And then she says, "Is that you, Kevin?"

And I don't talk. 

And the scared person says, "What do you want from me, Kevin?"

"I'm not Kevin."

The scared person squints at me like maybe it really is her mistake, not mine. Like maybe it could be that I'm a stranger with a gun breaking into her home at four in the morning to steal the cash from her underwear drawer. (Top left, cabinet under the mirror, if anyone's interested.)

The scared person says, "Kevin, aren't you on prohibition or something?"

I laugh. Not because it's funny, although it is. I laugh because it's sad.

"No," I say to the scared person. I call the scared person mom. I say, "No, mom. You mean probation. And I'm not even.  Did Kevin #2 tell you that?" 

"Kevin number?"

The scared person is confused.

Sometimes a scared person is like a pop song. They just keep saying the same stupid refrain over and over like if they sing it sexy it will mean something. But it never does.

This scared person's song is: "What do you want from me, Kevin?" all we need is some auto-tuning and snap that's it, we're on the radio, and the rest is a matter of static.

I don't answer. That's the best way to get a scared person to talk. But I don't even want this scared person to talk, I just don't have anything to say. 

She talks anyway. "What have I even got that you could want?" she makes the same move with her hands as a king or a gangster saying, all this is mine. Only it's nothing. It's mildew and bottles. It's bullshit.

She's right.

"You must have something left to lose."

"Well, at least I'm still pretty." She smiles like a miracle or a joke and picks a bottle off the floor. "I'll drink to that," She says. And the bottle is empty but she drinks anyway.

What did I say? Scared people are liars. There is still a scroll of bills saving spot backs for her breasts in her favorite blue bra that she says is from Paris. The Paris part is another lie.

And this is why it shouldn't be Kevin telling the story. It should be me. Because I'm never in the right, but I'm always right.

To the scared person I say, "Good night." //

excerpt #2 from Cold Light

My roommate is somewhere around my mother’s age, though she’s such a rougher sort that I thought she was older at first. Her hair is deep-fried from too much peroxide, and her eyelashes are massacred with too much mascara. `On her pillaged pores, the glow reads as neither illness nor magic, but instead as gaudiness. It is as if she has smeared sparkly make-up on herself in a wild attempt to draw attention to the place where the glow is most pronounced: her round arms and her long breasts.

“You dick,” She called in the cross-hatched, nasal voice of a smoker, “Where was my Vicodin this morning, hmm? You bringing it now?”

“You haven’t been on Vicodin for weeks.  And there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

“Another one? God, the turnover for my roommates is worse than the turnover for MacDonald’s employees. How long you think this one will last?”

“Maxine, please.”

“What? I just asked you a question. No need get all huffy with me.”

Nurse gave me a look somewhere between panic and apology. “She grows on you,” He said.

Maxine laughed.

“Maxine, this is Claire. Claire, this is Maxine.”

Maxine looked me up and down, smacking her lips as if she was chewing something. It would not be long before I learned that she is always chewing something. If it’s not tobacco, then it’s gum, and if it’s not gum, then it’s her own lips.

“I like Max better,” She said at last.

Nurse rolled his eyes. “Don’t bother,” He said to me, “I’ve never heard her call anyone by their own name, let alone by whatever name they like better. Women are always ‘Doll’ and men are always ‘Dick’. You’ll get used to it.”

Maxine glared boldly at Nurse and said, “Thanks, Doll.”

Nurse just nodded and took his leave, shutting the door firmly in his wake. Maxine was watching me, her gaze unerring and unnerving.

“You know I didn’t mind it,” Maxine said, once we were alone. “Not at first, I mean. Not when it was just Willy. Served the sorry son-of-a-bitch right if you asked me. Don’t you agree?” She reached into her pocket and produced a lighter and a cigarette as long and skinny and pale as a supermodel. 

“Yeah, fuck Willy,” I said loudly. I sat down on my bed, stood up, sat down again. I thought about opening my suitcase, which Nurse had already brought into the room earlier in the day. But I knew that as soon as I unpacked it, everything would become real. I wasn’t ready for that. I also wasn’t ready for what Maxine was about to tell me, but I didn’t know that at the time.

“And I knew my sister was never going to leave him,” Maxine went on, “Not even when she started talking about how bruises can sing and screams have colors if you look hard enough. She got good and crazy there after a while. Ain’t never seen nothing else like it, except on T.V. Poor little Ghost Girl. I bet if you took off all her clothes it would turn out she was invisible. No, never mind, I don’t even want to think about her naked. Seems wrong. She’s just a child. Don’t matter what dirty things she did with Will or how many hours she clocked down at the shop. She used to call him Prince William. Isn’t that repulsive? Prince Fucking William. Sounds like a derby horse or some shit, one of the second-rate ones with gimp haunches. Jesus! The things children come up with. I would have put maggots in his crown. I would have put wasps on that god damned faggot’s throne.”

I cringed. Couldn’t help it.

“What? Too much for you? Yeah, yeah. Watch your tongue, Maxine. Watch your mother-fucking dick-licking tongue. Damn fucking straight I will. I’ll mind my mouth.  You don’t even know what kind of world you’re living in, do you, Doll? You’re just like her. You and Ghost Girl should have a tea party, you know that? You can invite every teddy bear you know.”

“Did Ghost Girl glow?” 

The question left me before I had even realized it had formed. Maxine gave me a look that delivered more poison than the cigarette sizzling between her weather-marked fingers.

“That’s not why I called her that,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t--”

“Her name’s Elizabeth. She never went by Lizzy.”

I nodded. Maxine took a graceful drag, the way an aristocrat might smoke. Head back and so slow. Poise. For an instant I was able to overlook her excessive makeup, her tan-wrecked skin, the bright corner of some tattoo I couldn’t quite discern peaking out from the shoulder of her outlandish eighties-style blouse. She closed her eyes and arched her back and let out a low, almost carnal moan. I turned away. I thought, with a rush of illicit relief, that Maxine’s monologue was over. 

“Elizabeth told me that Will had started speckling,” She said. The gravel had gone from her voice, and she spoke now in a silky, slippery tone.  “I had to pretend to be scared. After she left I started laughing. And I kept laughing, and laughing-- so much laughter. It was like being at the theater. A very good show. I was so happy that I could have cried, if I ever cried. Which I don’t. You should know that about me, Doll. I don’t ever cry.”

There was a pause. I think she meant for me to fill it, but I declined. She opened one eye half-way and regarded me out of the corner of it. She looked like a cat pretending to be asleep, secretly watching its prey.

 “I told Elizabeth not to touch him anymore, and that no matter what she couldn’t let him touch her either. It was my way of keeping him from laying a hand on her again. She wore bruises like other girls her age wear necklaces. Scared the shit out of me. But she wouldn’t hear a word against him. That girl.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I didn’t think it would work though, you know?  I didn’t really think that just telling her so silly a thing as that if she touched him she might pick up the sickness-- that she might even die-- would stop her. But it did. Oh, it did! Can you imagine my relief? You would have cried.” Maxine turned to me and asked,  “You do cry, don’t you?”

I swallowed. Said, “I cry.”

“Good. I thought so.” The cigarette wobbled a little in her hand. A cluster of sparks fell onto the bedspread. Maxine looked at them indifferently, and made no move to extinguish them. After a moment they winked out, as if they had fallen asleep. 

That’s a soft way of saying as if they had died.

“But Doll, it didn’t end with Willy. Because Elizabeth kept good and clear of Prince Harming until the day he died. But then. Well. She cried. So long and so hard that it took the buzz right out of laughing, and I even said I’d go to the funeral with her. So we went. And there was the body in the open casket, glowing like another kind of ghost. Elizabeth was such a sad sight to see that day. I remember I got scared that her tears were going to flood her eyes right out of her face. Thought those pretty blue things were going to roll through the church on a wave, until someone put a toe down and crushed them. That didn’t happen, thank God. But what did happen was a million times worse. Do you know what happened?”

My throat was aching at this point. Maxine was breaking me apart. I shook my head.

“Say it out loud,” Maxine said. “I want you to ask me what happened to her.

“What happened?” My voice was brittle with held-back tears. In fact, it sounded an awful lot like Maxine’s smoker drawl.

Maxine snapped her fingers. Ash everywhere.

“She kissed him,” She said. When I said nothing, she added, “His corpse. I think even with tongue.”

I was appalled, but I folded my hands in my lap, squared my shoulders, tried not to let it show. “She wanted to say goodbye.”

Maxine vehemently shook her head. “No. She wanted to die. And she got her wish. The glow went right into her and ate her up from the inside out, not like most people where it starts with their skin. I think her pain was worse, too. But it went faster. Before we’d even accepted that she was sick at all, she was gone.”

Maxine flicked the cigarette out with her thumbnail. It got very quiet in our room. At length, she asked, “Now, doll, I’ve got a test for you. Just one question, nice and easy. How do you think I got sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Think about it.” A pause. I tried to think of nothing at all. Then Maxine said: “I kissed her. No tongue. Just on her forehead. And you’re right, I just wanted to say good bye. I didn’t want to die.”

“You’re still here,” I said.

“For the time being. You on the other hand. I don’t figure you’ll last the week. Girls who live with me never do. Doctor told me once that she thinks that my ‘incessant rambling expedites the process.’ What do you think about that?”

“Well,” I said, “We’ll see.

excerpt from "Cold Light"

When I first came here, they took my blood pressure. The blood pressure machine closed around my arm like a killing snake. The pressure was great. It hurt a little, tight and strange, but it was the closest I had come to being held since the on-set of the disease.

Then the machine began to ease off. Soon the screen flashed. My numbers read: 

Systollic pressure, 100.

Diastollic pressure, 53.

Pulse rate, 0.

Nurse made a joke about me being dead. He turned to the doctor and said, “Pulse Reader’s jammed again.” He spoke in a way that made me imagine him chewing a toothpick. He didn’t seem like a nurse at all. I wonder what shape his mouth made under the gruesome gray surgical mask that he wore. That they all wear.

Doctor wrote down 100, 53, Not Applicable. 

Nurse shone a light into my eye through a small plastic funnel. Then shone the same light into my ears, pausing only to change the tip in order to ensure sterility. Then down my throat. Nurse left and Doctor got out a clipboard. Started to ask me about all manner of sins. Do you drink? Do you smoke? How often? What about marijuana? Street drugs? Needle use? 

And then there’s the how’s your sex life section. 

And so on.

 I knew the drill. I answered an emotionless stream of mostly ‘no’s, a ‘yes’ thrown in here or there for variety. After that we moved on to more specific questions, questions targeted at what the doctor called “my unique condition.”

Not that glow is even remotely unique, these days.

Doctor asked when, how, and by whom I had first encountered glow.

I said it was Green’s fault. I said it in those words.

“What’s green?”

“Lots of things,” I snapped; “But what you mean is who’s Green.”

“Alright. Who then?”

“He’s Green. That’s all. That’s not his real name, though. My mother made me call him that when we were little, because we couldn’t say his real name right. He’s Japanese.”

“And this man was sick?”

“No,” I said. Then: “He took me fishing.”

Doctor set her clipboard on her knees to look at me. “Tell me,” she said.

So I did.

About how Green was a family friend, the son of a colleague of my father’s. Green was an angular man, with more corners than a tetrahedron. I thought he was terribly brilliant, which I had once commented on to my mother when I was quite young. She had pursed her lips and replied, “Funny how that doesn’t make you trust him.”  At the time her reply had mystified me, but in later years I grew--unfortunately-- to know exactly what she meant. 

He was six years older than me, enough of a difference to make him exotic while still maintaining the appealing familiarity of being a ‘young’ man. When my father would go to Japan to visit Green’s father, I would come along. For the ride, for the “cultural experience”, for the smell of salt in the streets leading up to the sea--and, in no small way, for Green.

He humored me. I liked that. Once I asked him if we could go down to the water, and he said yes. I was fifteen and I’d never been fishing before. I’m not sure I’d ever eaten fish before, to be perfectly honest. My dad had told me when I was a child about how if moisture gets into food you are keeping in the fridge it will grow mold, and that that’s why ziplock bags were invented. I’d thought for years that that meant that all fish were moldy, because they’re food and they’re in water. Obviously I didn’t think that anymore when I was fifteen, but by the time I had realized years earlier how flawed my theory was, I had already avoided seafood for so long that it had been solidly established as something disgusting. 

But that day I wanted to go fishing, and Green said I could. He gathered bait and rods and took me down to the docks, and we sat on the edge with our feet dangling into the water. I was fascinated with the delicacy of the fishermen’s implement of death. My fishing rod was long and limber and lithe. The fishing line was thin and tight as a tendon, and it was so translucent that against the water, it disappeared. There seemed something almost sensual, even sexual, about the way the rod bent, buckled, held. About the tautness of the line. About the held-breath still of the waiting. And then: the jerk. The pull. The tenuous test of tug-of-war. The shiny body flying through the air. Gills flexing under my fingers. Blank little eyes. Lips like cartilage with a new little tear, the perfect kind, it seemed, for a lip ring to slip through.

I wasn’t familiar with death. (Yet.)  I wanted to throw my fish back into the water instead. I liked the way his skin changed from yellow to green to gray depending on which way you looked at him. But Green said no, that he was big and healthy and we were hungry and that to not eat the meat would be such a waste as to be criminal. 

“But I don’t even like fish,” I said.

“Should have thought about that before you asked to go fishing.”

Green’s own bucket was as full of jumping bodies as a dance floor. He dropped my fish in with the others, gestured as if to recast his line, but then caught some weakness in my eyes and stopped.

“This is plenty,” he said, “Let’s go home.”

I loved him for that. 

It was when we were gathering up our supplies to head out that the big boat came. It had been looming on the horizon for quite some time, but suddenly it was there. It rolled towards shore and the whole world trembled with its approach. Green squinted at it uneasily. “That’s funny,” he said, in a voice that held no humor at all, “Shrimp boat. Not supposed to dock here.”

Even I could have told you that. A boat that size needed something monumental and modern to hitch to. The dock we were on looked like a toy dock next to the shrimp boat. Even our fish looked like toy fish. I imagine that Green and I looked like toy people. 

“Do you think something went wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Green said. This was the only time I had ever heard Green say those words in my whole life. It terrified me. “Don’t think a storm’s coming,” he added. 

Men began to get off the boat. They were shouting in Japanese and making wild gestures with their arms.

“What are they saying?” I asked.

“Something about angels.”

I couldn’t think of a single more ominous answer that Green could have given. “Is someone dead?” 

“Halos...” Green frowned, then shook his head. “I have no idea what they’re talking about.” 

On the deck, other men were pulling ropes and dragging a great net into the air. The net was filled with a mass of something that I knew to be hundreds and hundreds of shrimp, although their numbers and their distance from me made them look entirely alien. As we watched, the net was lowered onto the land. The men from the boat began to swarm around it, still waving their arms, still shouting.

I saw it.

The shrimp were on fire.

“What the--” I said.

Green grabbed my arm to stop me from running to them. Hard. Later there would be marks on my biceps, but at the time I didn’t even feel his fingers there. 

I stared. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How was this even possible? Fires couldn’t happen on a fishing boat, but there couldn’t be any other explanation for what I was seeing. All throughout the net were points of light. Embers or sparks or something, I figured. It looked like the fishermen had been raiding the skies instead of the seas, and had brought home stars instead of shrimp. 

Green watched for a while longer, then looked down at me and started upon seeing his hand around my arm. It was as if he had forgotten it was there. He let go and said, “It’s a bacteria, I think. I’ve seen this before.”

I studied the net once more. After Green’s word of explanation, the light I was seeing did seem to be more of a glow than a burn, but I still wasn’t entirely sure I believed him. “There’s bacteria that do that?” I asked. “Glow, I mean?”

Green nodded. “Looks like they lost the whole crop,” he said, almost indifferent now. I couldn’t believe how little the strangeness before us was affecting him. “That’s a shame.”

He bent down and picked up his bucket of fish. Then he turned and began towards home. For a moment longer, I stood by myself, letting the glow map itself across my retinas. I felt tingly and clammy and excited. I believed that what I was seeing was of the utmost importance.

Now how I long that I was wrong.

I didn’t tell Doctor about how Green had taken me down to the docks at night when no one was there and first split me open like a fish to be cleaned and gutted. The same wet, the same writhing, the same insertions. It was the simplicity of the procedure that surprised me most. Green bent my knees up under his chest.  “It’s like origami,” he said; “There’s an art in the folding.”

So the whole time I was thinking about fortune tellers. Bring the corners in to the center. Bring them in again. Flip it over. Bring those corners in. 

No, Green wasn’t sick. Green was strong. 

There were other things the matter with Green, but glow wasn’t the one.