Decent.
-
Napper
A man comes home from work and surveys the living room. “Hmmm,” he muses. “Think I’ll take a nap.” He lies down on the couch, pulls a blanket up around his chin, and immediately falls asleep. His wife throws the closet door open and enters the room. She looks at her husband, napping, snug in his covers, a trickle of drool running from the corner of his mouth, and a look of worry crosses her face. She pulls a chair beside the couch and stares at her sleeping husband. He naps for hours. She wrings her hands in her lap and mutters, “I can’t live like this.” Her worried look turns into one of fear. She stands up and kicks the chair over. She grabs her husband and shakes him violently. “I can’t live like this!” she screams. The man continues napping, dead to the world. She uprights the chair, placing it beside the couch. Again she sits down and stares at her husband. “One day,” she says. “One day you’ll get yours.”
She decides to turn the television on but every channel features a close up of a man sleeping. She stares at the remote control held tightly in her hand and then at the television, her face wrinkled with terror. She hasn’t slept for years. It makes her think of death. She wanders around the house and turns all the lights on. She retrieves her cell phone, held hostage by an angry houseplant, and systematically calls the rest of her family, all of them suffering the same affliction as her. They meditate on their sleeping spouses and devise complicated plans to eradicate sleep from society. She hangs up with the final family member and just when her thoughts turn to the lonely night ahead, her husband wakes up and says, “Ah, that was a damn fine nap.” She asks him if he wants to go out and fuck shit up. “Of course,” he says. “Of course.” He knows that’s the only way he’ll ever get to sleep tonight. With baseball bats, blowtorches, and high powered flashlights, the couple head out into the cold night.
-
Vampire
Yesterday, I discovered that a vampire lives next door. His name is Bernard Watkins. He wears a host of garish sweaters and a thick, neatly trimmed mustache. I wouldn’t have taken him for a vampire upon meeting him.
I’ve broken up most of the furniture in the house and am upstairs grinding stakes on the lathe. I don’t know how many people in the town he’s already turned into vampires. After grinding all the stakes, I figure I’ll lie in wait, forming the perfect game plan.
Mother calls up the stairs for me to come down and meet the new neighbor. Instinctively, I know she has unwittingly invited the vampire into the house. I pick up a stake and head downstairs.
-
Dick Beer
There’s a hippie who lives in a van on the other side of the street.
I’m aware of him but assume he pays no attention to me.
I drink.
I stay up late.
I scratch my balls when I don’t think anyone is looking.
I’m surprised the next day when scrolling through my media feeds and seeing one of the top things to pop up is me, scratching my balls—skin-on-skin, beneath the underwear, digging deep—and opening the refrigerator to get a beer.
And then it’s me in the upper right corner of the screen and the hippie in the van across the street filling the screen with his bearded face and saying, “Enjoy your dick beer, dude,” in what has to be the douchiest voice ever.
I immediately pull all the blinds and stop answering the phone.
I’ll be in public and people will shout, “Enjoy your dick beer!” or “Hey, it’s dick beer guy!”
I stop going out in public.
Now it’s the grocery delivery person going, “Hey … man, I don’t want to bother you but I gotta know … are you dick beer guy?”
If I stop ordering things, I don’t know how I’m going to stay alive.
I hate the hippie across the street. Is he happy watching me squirm? Is he watching at all? Maybe he’s laughing it up at all the attention he’s getting … at the expense of me.
I rationalize.
Who doesn’t want to be famous?
Who doesn’t want to be rich?
I start answering the phone. I go out in public. I hear it all the time.
I’m dick beer guy. I’m rich. I’m famous. I live so very far away from that hippie in the van across the street.
I do whatever I want all the time, but occasionally I’m reminded that I am and always will be dick beer guy and can’t believe how much better my life has gotten.
-
The Wise Man
The wisest man in the world comes to my door. He has a very long white beard and wears a series of richly textured and flowing robes. He, more or less, lets himself in. I know he’s the wisest man in the world and I plan on having him answer some questions.
He strolls to the middle of the living room and reaches down, trying to push my heavy wooden coffee table up against the couch. He labors for nearly a minute.
He looks at me. “Some help?” he asks.
“Oh, of course,” I say and help struggle with the coffee table.
By the time we finish, both of us have worked up a pretty good sweat.
The wisest man in the world stands in the middle of my luxurious white carpet. He looks at me and raises a finger of proclamation.
“These are the days,” he says, “when everything has value.”
Then he squats down a little, grunts, and defecates on my carpet.
“Ah,” he says, “that’s done with.”
Instead of staying in the room to ask him my series of important questions, I quickly go to the hallway closet and retrieve an abundance of cleaning supplies.
I return to the living room. The wise man is gone. He has accidentally stepped into his mess and tracked it all the way to the door.
-
Architecture
The architect climbs to the roof of his tallest building and looks out over the city. He’s built all the buildings here. Some of them are small—two or three floors. Others are towering skyscrapers. Like this one. He has to build just one more. It’ll be his greatest construction and then he’ll retire and allow some other architect to move in and build structures that shame his. But he wants to do something different with this one. All the other ones, while his design, were built by construction companies. He will build the next one himself.
Not knowing where else to begin, he goes to the brick store and buys every brick they have. He has them brought to a vacant lot next to the sea. He places the first brick on his back. And then another one. It quickly becomes painful—his arms do not want to move in that direction—but, after a while, it gets easier. The brick store continues to bring him more bricks as they get them in. He continues stacking them on his back. Yes, this is what he wants to build. The tallest building in the city with himself as the foundation. He wants it to be a movable structure but, already, his legs are starting to buckle with the weight and he doesn’t know if this will be a possibility.
Eventually, the building becomes taller than his arms will reach. Each day he stretches a little farther. And his arms stretch with him. The bricks sink into his back and become part of him. This goes on for years. He becomes bent and twisted, his arms a hundred stories long. He doesn’t know what to do with them when he isn’t using them so he keeps them in the lobby. Contrary to his previous belief, he is still able to move around. While his torso has nearly disappeared under the crush of the bricks, his legs have thickened with rippling muscles as hard as brick themselves. Not bad for an old man, he thinks. With his current construction on his back, he wanders over to his previous skyscraper to see how he’s measuring up. It’s close. Only a few more floors, maybe.
Once finished, he is so thoroughly enmeshed with the skyscraper he can’t distinguish himself from his building. His arms remain absurdly long. He raises them into the air and uses them for antennas. His legs are only about a fourth their original length and, while they can support the structure, it becomes dangerous to move, lest everything topple over.
As with the ending of all his previous constructions, he is eager to climb to the top of it. Since he no longer has any body to climb with, he puts his head in the elevator and shoots it up to the roof. There he watches the evening and the fog roll in, the distant ships out at sea and, in the other direction, the twinkling lights of his previous constructions. He feels the cool damp breeze and hears the distant drone of airplanes transporting their sleeping cargo away to another city, careful to avoid the steady blinking of the architect’s fingertips.
-
Parenthood
I’m on my daily walk. It’s a nice day. Early summer. Birds are chirping and the air smells great. I check the curbside at the end of people’s driveways for treasure. Ours is a thrifty village and only trash goes out with the actual trash. Everything else is up for dibs. The next driveway over, I see what looks like a sizeable collection of children’s toys. As I draw closer, I see there’s an actual child—probably around one—playing amidst the toys.
The child reaches their arms out to me. It’s wearing a burlap sack, so I’m not sure if it’s male or female.
There’s a middle-aged woman doing some gardening around the house.
“Is the kid part of it?” I call up to her.
She turns, still kneeling down over the flowerbed.
“Yeah,” she says. “You can take him.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
“He’s been too hard to look after since I lost my hand.”
She fully rises to her knees and brandishes her stump. It looks reasonably fresh.
I take the kid home. I tell him we’ll take the wagon back to get some of his toys, but we never do.
We get drunk that night and the kid gets sick. He’s also really bad at talking so the night kind of turns into a bummer.
The next day he seems sluggish and not very fun at all. Plus, he apparently doesn’t know how to go to the bathroom.
I take him out to the curb along with a broken vacuum cleaner to make it look more enticing.
They’re both gone within two hours.
-
This Tattoo Burning Over Your Wasted Heart
Unsatisfied with my job, I go to a bar and drink until I black out. I wake up in a strange bed with a strange tattoo on the left side of my chest. Looking down at it, I can’t even tell what it is. There’s no one else there to describe it to me. The apartment I’m in is curiously devoid of mirrors. I put on some pants and knock on the door of the apartment next to this one. A haggard old man answers. I point to the tattoo and ask him what it is. He plays with his glasses, screws up his face, and gets really close to me.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a walrus. Maybe he’s standing in front of an American flag or riding a tricycle. I can’t really tell.” He pauses, moves away from my chest, stands up straighter. “Looks like he’s having a lot of fun.”
I mutter a quick thanks and wander back to the other apartment but the door’s locked. I knock and there’s no answer. I go out to the street. I visit a store to buy a shirt and go back to my miserable job.
I’m unable to really tell what the tattoo is until it heals completely. It’s definitely a walrus. And it definitely looks like he’s having fun but everything else about it is unclear. Why a walrus? Why now?
Over the years, I discover how much people hate mystery. They want to know why I have a walrus over my heart and when I tell them I don’t know, they get furious. Many of them think it’s a joke. They want to know why I would do something so permanent on such a lark. Others tell me it’s not permanent. They tell me I can and should get it removed. But I grow to like it. I learn to invent stories for it.
“My mom loved walruses.”
“That was my first wife. She had cancer.”
“I worked as a walrus trainer.”
“I’ve always liked walruses. Ever since I can remember. Ever since I was a kid.”
“I made a pact with my friends. We all have walrus tattoos.”
Eventually I fall in love with a sex worker. I feel terrible lying to her but I do it anyway. I have trouble keeping my lies straight and eventually she asks me why I’m lying. I tell her. I tell her about people hating mysteries and that I understand that because it’s even a mystery to me. I don’t know why it’s there. I can only tell her the day I received it. There’s no real context. And that’s the part she doesn’t understand. She wants to know how I’ve lived so long with this hideous thing on my chest. I tell her I just got used to it. I tell her how much I like it now. When I propose to her, she laughs. She tells me there can never be anything other than sex between us. She tells me my insides are cracked and broken. She tells me there’s nothing there. She says the tattoo’s really just an expression of the void in my soul.
And each time she asks, “Why a walrus? Why there?” I can only shake my head and say, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
