Tick

The clock is mocking you. Daily it glares down at you, challenging your optimism. You turn to look at it and it cackles back, providing evidence that barely two minutes have passed since you last gazed at it. It knows its winning. It felt like hours. Every time you spin your chair around to engage in war with it, it's poised for attack. And with one slow ebb of the second hand it's launched, sent puncture wounds into your already battered psyche. Tiny lesions where your ambition can seep through. You've been bleeding for years. Ever since you left university. Before then you were titanium. Failure an impossibility. Then the rejections came, so many of them endlessly streaming from corporation after corporation. 'We thank you for your application but we're afraid we are not hiring currently' Yeah, right. Your back's to the clock now, but you can still hear it, every tic another assault to your raw injuries. The first hits, they hurt the most, the first steps away from your dreams, they stung with a power like you couldn't comprehend. But back then you believed you would heal. They were only obstacles and you'd recover, right? Yeah, right. You kept the dream in sight. But you were getting further and further away, more and more hurt. You started to substitute your ambition in lay of money. That's all work became to you then, money. You lost that edge that you held throughout education, your lust for debate and knowledge. So much so that by the time you were shown to your seat behind the glass here, you could barely even remember what your dream was. You were so hardened by rejection that your skin was thick, layers upon layers of scar tissue protecting you from the pain of the world. Even the clock didn't really hurt anymore, transiency was ripe in this wool padded chair facing the station. You remember what the wizened guard had said to you after your orientation, after you were taught how the ticket machines worked. 'I think you'll enjoy it here'. Yeah, right. That was twelve years ago. Even in your own mind you're not sure why it's been that long, you blame the economy, unemployment, but truthfully it's you. You got so comfortable here, and you were so afraid of failing again. Terrified, even. Despite your thick skin you're a coward. A worthless servant. You don't even lie to yourself in the mirror anymore, whisper to yourself in the dark. What's the point? Every time your mind adopts its peppy cheerleader status and tries to restore morale you scoff. You tell yourself it'll get better, you dust off that old dream and you swim in its glory. You'll quit tomorrow, you'll do it, you'll chase that dream and you'll catch it and ravage it so hard it'll be limping for weeks. Yeah, right.

You're impotent. Your dreams limp. Worn and old, nothing but sinew and pain. Bleeding, bleeding, bleeding - the tick of the hand just waiting for you to clot. But you'll be okay, right?

Boring

It's healthy to want to fuck yourself. That may seem like the stupidest thing you've ever heard but I have the evidence to back it up. Stats and research, a whole bunch of it in a power point on my laptop. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about. If you wouldn't even fuck you then how do you expect anyone else to? They probably have higher standards than you too. I think it was J LO that said 'If you don't love yourself, you can't love anybody else' and that's true for fucking too. This may just seem like an elaborate way for me to tell you to go fuck yourself but I'm talking about it in the metaphorical sense. Basically, self appreciation is a good thing. You’re probably wondering where I'm going with this, and honestly I don't know if this was the best way to start but I'm writing in ink and I don't have any tip-ex so it'll have to do. But really I want to tell you about Mr Candy.

I suppose I should start from the beginning, but there was no beginning. Mr Candy was my English teacher last year. We'd gotten on well, as students and teachers do, joking conversation and stuff, but nothing more than that. So when he killed himself and referenced me in the note, no one was more confused about it than I. The way Candy had seen it was we were in love. He stated in vivid detail being tormented by dreams of me and my "perfect form". Now I'm not gay. I don't think I am anyway. I'm sixteen years old so I haven't really had time to decide yet as I live in a town where everyone's in a relationship with God until they pass the baton on to their spouse in marriage. But as far as I knew, I liked girls. I don't have anything against Candy's preference, and in actuality I suppose I was rather flattered; no one ever likes me like that ordinarily. But it's difficult to not be a bit angry at someone when they've unlawfully outed you to your entire town. Even if they are dead.

I'd be a lot more appreciative of the attention if it wasn't for this place. I can safely say that the temperature I am currently sweltering through must be the hottest since records began. Of course, I said that last summer, and the summer before - and I'll probably say it next summer too. It is often easy to forget the former year's discomfort in the new, pressing existence of ongoing unease, and it's really hard not to wallow in self pity when your exterior somewhat resembles slow roasted pork.

This place feels to me as if it is full to the brim with people who missed their escape, who are hereby entrapped here in dire contentment. But mutually I also feel the town holds ghosts, long gone whispers of those who had managed to liberate themselves from it's crushing hold, and go on to thrive outside it's borders. Constant reminders of my ineptitude in the fight against monotony. It is easy to say which bothers me more, because even as the ghosts strike me, remind me of a life I doubt I’ll ever experience - it is not them I am stuck interacting with day to day. No, instead I am forced to coexist alongside throngs of people in denial, repressing their feelings of a claustrophobic deadlock and instead plastering on their 'Little Miss' pageant smiles and politely continuing to fight the suicidal urges. 

'An exciting place to call home' it reads across the border sign welcoming you here, right underneath where 'Boring, Oregon' is printed in an oppressive grey font. I dare never link the two within an utterance. I know the rest of the people in this town are accustomed to adopting a false pride with their situation. And pride, as a result of a cold denial, can imbue in people a very protective rage and I am not about to suffer another beating due to unimaginatively noting the comedic correlation between the name of my home, and it's most accurately descriptive adjective. 

As a child I'd cherished this land, basked in the wide open spaces for running and jumping and pretending. But as my imagination fades and all I am left with is a bitter sense of tedium, I can't help but curse the endless advance of fluctuating greenery. I am living a ground-hog existence. The only difference between today and any other day is this essay. The title, as you know, is 'un-knowable truths' - I suppose most kids in here will be writing about God or, whether or not child birth hurts more than a kick to the gonads; but I thought it was about time everyone knew my truth, because that is knowable. Even if some of the explanations aren't. 

The expression 'I remember it like it was yesterday' is grossly overused but I can definitely sympathize with the truth in it - because I do. Most poignant days in our lives are more profound in our memories than the insignificant ones so I suppose it's a logical statement. No one ever says 'oh that day I sat on my ass and did fuck all, yes, I remember it like it was yesterday.' No it's all first kisses, graduations, weddings, and in my case teacher suicides. Listlessly gazing out the window I saw the police car first. I was allowed a few more minutes of blissful ignorance and meagre curiosity before the mousy receptionist scurried into the room flanked by two officers and I was asked to join them out in the hall. At first I thought maybe my parents were dead, or my dog. But other than that I couldn't fathom what I was being requested for. The officers were looking at me uncomfortably. They started mumbling about sexual assault and my eyes widened in fearful shock thinking about all the girls that could have accused me of assaulting them, all the girls I’d ever gotten close to; the list was very limited. 

'I'm sorry but who am I supposed to have assaulted?' I rasped, my throat bone dry. I swallowed loudly as they looked awkwardly through me. 

'No son we're referring to your assault, we're referring to Alan Candy.' 

Things got weird after that. I had to be checked for signs of sodomy because despite my insistence that I had never been touched inappropriately or otherwise by Mr. Candy no one seemed to believe me. Everyone these days is so knowledgeable about the infinite amount of psychological ailments a person can hold that instead of believing my virginal status they preferred the deduction that I was repressing the incidents. I was forced to sit through hours of scrutiny by countless numbers of 'professionals' who all seemed to be arriving at the same conclusion; I was gay, gay, gay. They kept telling me it was nothing to be ashamed of. I kept telling them I was aware of that. It was an infinite tedium. I think the worst of the bunch of sympathetic adults was my mother, she was distraught at first, naturally, but in time she began to adapt to my suggested sexuality in an unnecessarily obnoxious way. Her bumper sticker that previously read 'My child is a BA High honor student' now declared 'Honk if you support marriage equality' in an aggressively rainbow font. She slipped countless pamphlets, with titles such as 'What does it mean to be gay?' and 'Am I normal?', into my clean washing. I stopped trying to argue with her and instead begrudgingly accepted my situation. I'd seen my dad hide his fitness magazines from me, I suppose so I wasn't tempted. He wasn't speaking to me that much. I wondered if maybe I could do it. I mean I'd always appreciated the beauty of Johnny Depp, maybe that was something to go on. One night, clad with my laptop I attempted to explore the depths of the internet and try and assess my suitability for a homosexual lifestyle. It didn't go well. At the first glance of cock I slammed my screen down angrily and decided people could think what they wanted but I am categorically not attracted to men. 

Life went back to normal mostly thereafter. I carried on being secluded, but I was no longer invisible. What had been inferred between me and Candy wasn't exactly confidential - and even if it was nothing stays that way in high school. People stared at me as I passed in the corridor, girls giggled behind their hands, the reaction from the guys differed; one had pushed me against a locker as he passed snarling 'queer' as he did so, a few others had 'innocently' asked me over for study sessions. About a month passed before I received the letter. 

I never get mail. I think I signed up to a free trial of some gym which I never went to and they occasionally send me letters generally telling me i'm fat and I can't survive without their service, but aside from that the only letters my house gets are for my mum and dad. That's why when the envelope arrived with 'Nate Astera' scribbled on the front my parents were suspicious. I tried to act blasé when they handed it to me but I ran to my room with it clutched tightly in my sweaty fist. Originally hoping one of my rich removed relatives had died and left me all their money, I was more initially disappointed than confused when I realized it was a letter from Candy's girlfriend. I had to read it multiple times to confirm it. Girlfriend. Surely there was something awry in that. She was asking me to meet her at her home that coming Saturday. She said she'd be there all day and if I could 'pop over' that would be great. That was it. No mention of Candy other than to reference who she was. No agenda. No anger. She invited me over like she was a friend's mother, or a potential date. Against every howling warning brewing in my mind, I knew I had to go. 

The house was like every other house here. Small, one storied, chipping paint and dead bugs liquoring it. I took a moment to assess myself in the blacked screen of my phone before tentatively knocking on the panelled door. The door opened instantaneously, as if she'd been waiting on the other side, eye to the peep hole, for hours. That however was not what stunned me. Long red hair falling in cascades over ample breasts, freckles, the kind you long to kiss, dotted over a perfect nose and across her angled cheeks, eyes of a deeper blue than any ocean on the planet, widened and fringed with lashes of a delicate impression. She was beautiful. This confirmed it, or at least the rush of blood to my crotch did, I definitely liked girls.
'You must be Nate' she smiled, but as she surveyed me tears came to her eyes and creases formed in the area between her eyebrows. She really was lovely. 
'Yes' I said, 'Trista?' she smiled sadly as confirmation and gestured for me to follow her inside. The interior of the home was flawless. Everything matched accordingly, the pallet one of both soft hues and rich colors. Even the lighting seemed to compliment the furnishing. 'You have a beautiful home' I added, manners were not alien to me. 
'Oh, Alan designed it all, i'm useless with things like this - not the creative type.' she sighed. I looked at her apprehensively, not daring to be the first to address the subject. 

She sat down on a red leather love seat positioned to the left of the glass coffee table. So as not to imply anything, I sat on a separate leather foot stool opposite her. 
'Being gay in this town isn't a crime.' her face flushed as she looked at me, then she turned her gaze towards her hands, now cupped in her lap, and continued; 'I've actually looked into it. You can't be married, obviously, but you can be in civil partnership. There's even a whole section on Oregon.com about gay-friendly hotels and stuff. I think that just means you can share a room with your partner, without discrimination - I doubt they have gay themed activity nights or anything that flowery. I don't mean flowery, I just mean...' she trailed off, distracted by a dislocated section of the thumb nail her hand had been trailing, she began to pick at it. The silence became unbearable, with just the methodical ticking of nail-against-nail. 
'I'm not gay Trista.' she continued to pick at the hardened skin beneath her nail, it had grown raw and flushed as darkly as her cheeks when I spoke - it took a further minute of silence for her thumb to start to bleed. 'Trista?' I enquired, flinching at the sight of her mutilated cuticle. She looked up at me again, her expression one of desperation.
'Please don't lie to me Nate.' I began to argue back, a tedious feat I'd grown accustomed to of late, but she cut across me; 'I have HIV, Nate, he gave it to me. You probably have it too. I don't know how it happened. I remember being really sick, I just thought it was flu, about a year ago, and then it was gone. I didn't think anything of it. But I didn't know about Alan then, about you... I just didn't think anything of it.' She began ripping at the fly-away skin, she pinched it between the thumb and forefinger of her opposing hand and began to drag it towards her. The skin tore easily, like a rake through sand. She didn't flinch. Her eyes were fixed wide onto me. Her breathing was jagged. 

'He brought me soup Nate.' She began crying, silent tears cascading down her flawless skin. Her jaw was clenched in hostility but her tragedy shone through. 'The man I loved, as I lay in my sick bed. He brought me soup and watched as I drank it, possibly aware that he was essentially sitting by my coffin - the pistol that shot me concealed beneath his jeans.' She edged along the loveseat, edged closer to me. Her manic expression was distorting her doll-like features. She was a horror movie embodied, the sinister transformation of innocence. I was ashamed to see her like this, this woman I didn't know, in this moment of emotional nudity. I looked away from her. She rose her voice, demanding my attention back - I complied. 'That's not even it though Nate. I hate what he's done to me. What he, did to me. But that's not it. I don't hate him for killing me, I hate him for killing himself - for leaving me. I don't hate him for you, I don't hate you either, more than anything I hate myself for not being good enough.' she began shaking, her sobs erupting from her chest and hitting me like ejaculated rocks from a live volcano, her fiery hair a symbol of that flame. Like a broken record, an obedient parrot, I sang my familiar song;
'I'm not gay.'. She rose to her feet in a flurry of anger and launched herself at me. I squeezed my eyes shut as I felt her weight on top of me, her fists colliding with every part of me she could reach. I felt her teeth sink into me roughly and tear at my flesh. I felt her sharp nails across my skin, I felt her hands tangle through my hair - pulling it roughly - I felt her furry, but more than anything I felt her grief - for the lives Candy stole from her; for his present, and her future.

I waited until her fit died, she slumped over me and sobbed as the fury drained from her, replaced instead by a heavy despair. She crushed me with her delicate form, the way she lay across me tense and awkward. Our bodies not made for that kind of jigsaw. I couldn't bare to move her, worried that dislodging her would also dislodge her repressed rage, force it back onto me. Not that her punches hurt, but the pain of her misery bruised me deeply. The weight of her was paramount because of the added mass of her loss. She rolled from me and turned in on herself, like a flower wilting in an unforgiving heat. She lay there shaking, a pill-bug in the path of a predator. The only other time I'd seen a woman cry was when my grandfather died. I hid when mum cried though, excusing myself with homework and deadlines - I even went walking alone simply to pretend I was out with friends so I didn't have to be around her sharp mourning. 

I decided I couldn't do that to this woman. I lifted my arm, and extended it shakily to her shoulder. But just before I could make impact I froze. My quivering limb osculating above her trembling body. As if I was controlling her anguished convulsions. What a cruel puppeteer. I clenched my fist painfully. Turned on my heel, and ran out the house. If I'd ever been to a gym in my life I probably could have run all the way home, but instead I collapsed in a burning sweaty heap about a block from Candy's place. I started regretting not keeping that gym subscription. That's when the guilt set in. I suppose it never really left either. 

But that isn't why I chose this as the subject of my essay. I suppose it won't be long now until the symptoms set in. The doctor who tested me said it usually takes about a year or so after infection and I ran away from that house roughly this time last summer. So before I'm tarred with the same old brush, this time with a more acidic and condemning poison drenching it, I thought i'd make it clear for once and for all; I never slept with Alan Candy - but thanks to his frivolity, and his debauchery, I'll probably now never sleep with anyone. Because, as I said it's healthy to want to fuck yourself. But no one wants to fuck someone unhealthy. 

Typhoon

There was a general electricity to the air. It crept up on me slowly with each step I took further from my home. I’d been lost in an unyielding despair since she left and it was only after abandoning my own company that I really managed to shake the rejection off me. The evening was warm, that kind of sticky humidity that consumes your oxygen as it filters through rested lungs. I’d forgotten what spring felt like. The months that winter claimed had been colder to me than I thought imaginable. No woman to wrap herself around me in the blanketed haven atop my bed sheets.  No hand to hold mine and fend off frost. No happiness to thaw the ice from my heart. She had breathed a storm into those months, her absence the thing that gave it force – her name the sound that replaced thunder, my tears a constant rain. I’d never felt a typhoon as terrible as that which she created for me as a parting gift.

Then one day I awoke to the kiss of sunlight. That hand of warmth that cascades from white ethereal clouds stretched thin across a blinding blue sky. It touched me softly, through my thin mesh curtains and carefully stroked my eyes, coaxing them open with a defiant oath; I will not let you fester. So I followed its guiding reach, out into the world and away from my tormented bed. Every step I took away from my cavern of depression shed a further regret from my shoulders. ‘I should have begged her to stay’ left me at the first step out my door. ‘I should have been kinder’, abandoned my mind as I rounded the corner. ‘I could have changed’, was cast away at the first lights in the junction by the park. With each step I lost a bar in the prison of insecurity I had trapped myself within for months. The sun broke through the darkened clouds her abandonment had forged and it shined upon me triumphant as I ventured towards its source.

I watched children play by a glistening canal. Their laughter dancing across the water. Playing the roles of mothers and fathers, kings and queens, victims and murderers – unaware that all these things were too adult for them to truly comprehend, unaware that one day they would be forced to, unaware of the importance of their precious, ignorant youth. Too eager to grow up. Too naïve to know what it meant. Ducks slid across the liquid advance, chasing scraps – a violent selfish hunger destroying the calm of the scene with every crumb that rippled the water. Through my squinted eyes I caught a glimpse of white. A conditioned swish of a long swell of hair. I gripped the edges of the metal bench on which I sat. My knuckles clicking with the strain of my panic. Was it her? I felt myself sinking, the judge’s gavel had struck and I was condemned back to my prison. But as the girl lifted her head I saw her eyes weren't the ones that betrayed me, her lips not the ones that had spoken my sentence. She was merely a phantom imitation of my demise.

I began to rise slowly from the bench. I was not free of her, I never would be. No amount of sun could shine through her cruelty. I sauntered past the canal in a desperate haze. The children’s laughs once so melodic to me now stung me like nettles, whipped me like vines. The happiness of others, such a dreadful reminder of the melancholia of oneself. I felt the first specks of rain as I reached the junction, and as my skin accepted the moisture, my mind accepted the anxiety. It flooded into me like a tsunami, destroying every rational thought in its path. ‘She never really loved you’ – my voice hissed at me as I ignored the ‘DO NOT WALK’ sign. ‘It’s because you let yourself go’, was fed to me as I ran to the corner. I gorged on the venomous words, unable to fill my nervous stomach sufficiently with their poison. ‘You’ll never be happy again.’ my head spoke these words as I reached my front door. Shaking with defeat I fumbled for my keys. ‘You’ll never be happy again.’ It repeated, to reiterate the blow. I sunk down to my knees, a fighter knocked out in the first round. And as the reality of the words sunk in, I got further drenched in the dismal rain; unable to tell which drops were mine - and which were her.

She

She never felt like she fit in. She was a jigsaw piece without a puzzle, never completed - never even attempted. She was a lost toy at the bottom of a box, not touched since the move as the kids were too old. She was the skin on top of the milk, thrown away before the beverage was consumed - disgusting to all that encountered her. She was never appreciated, but unlike a forgotten work of art from a niche era, she never would be. She was the last breath taken at the end of a day, before the clock struck twelve and a new one began, not even noticed - foiled by slumber and replaced before consciousness. She was a broken glass, damaged and useless, kept in the cupboard to be grabbed but resented, scoffed at for her ineptitude and abandoned once more. She was a story without an ending. A narrative with no beginning. A trend that never caught on, or even began. A star without a glimmer. A cloud without any rain. A nothing. A loser. A ghost floating through life.

She was a child of no home and she stayed that way. Never finding a salvation in the arms of another. Never finding a purpose among the attempted feats. Lost in the throng of existence she couldn't bear the maze, the entwining of paths she could not follow. That was the way she stayed, from her start to her end. The end that would appear to have come too soon to anyone but her, but could not have come soon enough from where she lay.

Not even abandoned as she never was held. Not even rejected as she never offered the chance. Not even forgotten as not quite remembered. Not ever the victor. Not ever a pro.

She held on to the hope of a future for as long as she could, but it disappeared as she realized she was barely alive.

She was a poet of sorts, an artist of kinds. Forging the picture of a life she did not understand.

And then, as insignificantly as she was here; she was gone.

Incipient

[The following prose was written using a collection of ridiculous words provided to me on facebook. They appear in the order by which I received them, beginning with the title of this piece.]

Everyone has a beginning. Most lives start with the chaos of birth, the kicking and screaming of both mother and child, all sickeningly ignored once a cry is produced. That wail an adrenalin shot to the soul, awakening the maternal instinct. A necessary cappuccino for that naïve wench as she begins her first shift. Creation, a forgotten horror, lost in a hormonal haze of cooing and suckling. But I wasn't created there. I slid out of my mother's chlamydia riddled cunt into a life of begrudging acceptance. My childhood a conga line of meagre meals, neglect, belittling, fear - and ultimately poverty.

My mother was a crack-addicted cliché. She would slip a bottle into my mouth as a pipe slipped into hers. In her cloud of addiction she could barely see me. It was only in between hits she managed to differentiate me from the upholstery that engulfed my delicate form. In some sort of sick cosmic joke however, I survived the initial pandemonium. I can't remember growing up, but it happened fairly quickly. I remember having to clean vomit off my mother's face before I knew how to tie my shoe laces. I evolved, I grew able to deal with her capricious fits. Her crying, her declarations of love. Her screaming, her acrid hisses of loathing. I was her punching bag, taking hits from the rage and depression that came with her comedowns. I was her carer, there to watch her while she flew transcendent, her mind riding the cloud each puff of her pipe produced. I always made sure she landed safely, guiding her back to reality gently. I was too afraid of what I'd do without her to notice how cancerous she was. She was human aids, attacking the immune system of my life. Any bit of sadness I felt outside the walls of our rented hell floored me. I was far too crippled to withstand further third-party beatings.

So I became angry instead. As I grew I stopped being the timid child from that broken home and I started to break children. At home I was a runt, a forgotten mongrel cast to the shadows - the ill-favored brother to a fix born decades before. One off-spring of my mother's frivolity enslaved her, the other she enslaved. But on the days I was allowed to leave her, by orders from the council, I could be any one I wanted, do anything I wanted. Her darkness could no longer breed with me. But it had laid eggs within me; I wanted to hurt.

My performance deserves a toast, I was a convincing villain, frightful even - the role of terrorizer was one I played impeccably. Twisted serendipity meant I'd seen my fair share of terrifying people. Men who beat my mother against walls, bouncing her like a yo-yo from their fists to the brick. Men demanding money we could not give, using their chocking grip on me as a bartering chip as she frantically fished coins from her purse, jewellery from the cupboard, her stash from my room. She always told them not to touch 'the boy' - it made me wonder if she remembered my name. Or if perhaps my latest attempt at giving myself a haircut had made me unrecognizable to her constantly fluctuating lucidity.

She called me Asher to mean happiness - an ironic stab at the religion she abandoned when she ran away from home. She branded me with her rebellion, tarred me with the brush of it so that the only real blessing I ever received was on the day she died. Her organs stagnated within her. She didn't even feel it coming, so unaware of anything beyond her own mind. The air she breathed was always so toxic, a mixture of drugs, smoke, farts and sweat. We shared the air, but the production was all her. She lived in a midden of her own making. If it wasn't for me no one would ever have known she had died. The smell of her rotting corpse would have made no difference to the repugnant burn of the building we lived in. No one would have come looking for her. She would have just, stopped.

I noticed of course, when her lungs ceased and her pupils blew. I noticed. I screamed as loudly as I could, repetitively for hours, trying to wake a neighbour to come find us. No one came, and we didn't have a phone. I was forced to abandon her where she lay. Her eyes fixed, paralyzed in a bulging shock. Her hand coiled around the child she treasured above me - the pipe lived for longer than she, burning beyond the time I turned my back on them both and left the flat.

That was the day I was born, from the crusted excrement of someone else's not-quite existence. The eleven years prior; a prenatal incipience.

I pretend to others that my mother died in a car accident. She had dropped me at cello practice and she was just going to go pick me up a treat for afterwards when a lorry slammed into the side of her at a busy junction. I've told the story so many times, for so many years, that I almost forget the reality. In the engaging sonder I experience away from her I forget our abysmal existence, shocked instead by the diversity of life. But my mother's lies have not left me, they seep into my dreams at night; 'I don't do that much', 'I can quit any time', 'It's not my fault', 'I fed you already', 'I'll get help tomorrow', 'I'll come home tonight', 'I won't let him hurt you', 'I won't let anyone hurt you', 'If you don't help I'm going to kill myself', 'I love you'. They swim through my mind like ghosts that she left, hatchlings of the darkness that raped my psyche for the decade before I was born. A frustrated onism convulsing through me, fed by a crippling fear of my own DNA.

The ghosts are so often there I'm beginning to wonder if they're really my own. Children of my own darkness, not hers. I just want to make them go away. To confuse them, just for a while so I can clear my head. Maybe i'll give them something to make them leave, to make them stop. Just a little bit. Just once.

Kiss

I play movies behind my eyes. Walking on auto-pilot, the reels play; step by step, scene by scene. Some would call it daydreaming, but these are not dreams, these are memories. It's like as soon as I plug in my Walkman the video begins. My eyes the projector it shoots from my brain. My rucksack hits against the groove of my back as campus crawls past me. I'm obligated to stay for the whole showing. After all, I am the host.

'My uncle says it's called a kiss' she breathes with excitement. That girl, the movie star of my memory, materializes in a blue haze. 'He says that mum and dad give them to each other all the time.' Beside her is conjured the frame of a boy, my recollection of myself - perhaps taller than i really was. I look down at my scuffed trainers. I didn't have the heart to tell my mum that they were too small as we'd only got them on the day before I started second grade and barely three months had passed at this point. My toes press against their edge, struggling to burst through to freedom. I am wittingly aware of the throb of my biggest nail.
'Does it hurt?' I ask, shuffling my feet into the orange dirt of the field. Our breath rises in murky flourishes as we speak. On another day we'd be holding twigs to our mouths, pretending to be our fathers on Christmas, or the teenagers we pass at the arcade. Inhaling the dirty scent of the twig and blowing it out again in a giggling rush, congratulating each other on how grown up we looked. But today was the day of the kiss. She'd told me last week that she'd show me. She had cried all day in class. Only I noticed, only I ever noticed her. I asked her at recess what was wrong but she said nothing, tears cascading down from her eyes. The wind whipped her faded golden hair, swirling it around her head like a tornado. Where it collided with her tears it stuck, making abstract artwork across her damp cheeks. I reached to a strand of it, partially attached to her blond lashes, and with all the delicacy my stubby hands could muster - brushed it away. At this she smiled. Faintly and sadly her eyes met mine.
'On Monday I'm going to give you a kiss.' Her eyes burned with a fury they shouldn't have possessed. It aged her. I was afraid of it, more than I was afraid of the kiss. Beyond the eyes her chubby cheeks flushed pink in the cold. Her mouth so small between them returned to it's frown. It wasn't enough of a move to be active, it seemed today her face just fell that way.

I was a sensitive boy, raised only by my mother I'd never learnt the skills necessary to engage with the other boys, to run, to climb, to punch. It was instead this girl who taught me these things, as best she could, the knowledge acquired from her brothers. She was too male to be one of the girls, I was too girly to be a guy - we made the perfect pair. We were all each other had, all each other ever needed. She was my salvation, the thing that saved me from my awkward disposition and social disabilities. I assumed we'd have each other forever. I didn't ask her what a kiss was, I didn't want her to think I was naive. Well, more accurately, I wanted her to think I was cool. I just blindly agreed. She said she'd meet me at our place at midday. The holidays had begun that week in preparation for Christmas. The winter day meant we only had a few stolen hours of sun to enjoy together before darkness fell and our parents required us in the light of our homes, away from the sinister night. I thought about the kiss over the weekend, between meals and video games it plagued my mind, as much as anything can plague the mind of a child with a three minute attention span. Our place was the field between our houses. I shuffled through the loose plank of my garden fence, she scaled hers - we met in the middle. It was tradition. We lived in a suburban haven, chosen specifically by our parents for it's low crime rate and high school results. Freedom was a given in the liberal age of 1980, our parents too busy trying to hold on to their lost youths to notice us endangering ours.

On the day my mind replays the field is eerily bare, no longer occupied by hundreds of thousands of wheat blades waving to us with the gentle breeze. Extra friends with whom to play hide-and-seek, concealing ourselves between their shielding hands. Now instead it is just us. Her, a dot on my horizon, and me, a blemish on hers. I am screamingly aware of the isolation of the moment. Even with her approaching. She is what makes me alone, her necessity to me, a necessity she is now exploiting with alien promises. When we meet after our brief exchange we say nothing more, just sink down into the dirt beside each other, our gaze set on the road at the edge of the field. Occasionally on other days we'd count the cars. It was a tedious game, what felt like hours spent awaiting the arrival of a vehicle just for the satisfaction of confirming we knew another number in the sequence we'd been taught. Where we sit the rain has collected in puddles before us. They stretch across the dirt like fluid dreams, creating floating lakes. Solid like mirrors they seem, reflecting the stretched sky above them. Clouds swirl in the stagnant water, trapped there, unable to escape to the desperate sky that is calling them home. Liquid mercury punctuated by blades of dying grass. I want to jump into the worlds those pools hold, be trapped amongst the sky within them - fester there eternally.

She turns to me, fire lapping at the edges of her irises. Hesitantly I turn too, my eyes telling the story of innocence, a story she no longer knows. She asks if I'm ready and I can smell fruit on her breath, a cocktail of multivitamins. She was always the queen of thieves as she stole them, smuggling them in the pockets of her pinafore, unaware of the good they do for her - deceived by the bright colours, the smiling characters, the fruity taste. She pops in another as I nod to her, unsure of why I do so as I've never been less ready for anything in my entire short life. I wince as she reaches to me, my thoughts trail to jabs at the doctors office - the only fear I'd ever known until this point. She places her tiny hand on my hot face, my cheeks flushing as the cold skin of her palm makes impact. Then her hand travels from my face to the front of the cord trousers my mum makes me wear.
'What are you doing?' I squeak, startled. She looks hurt as she reaches for me again.
'It's a grown up kiss. Do you not want one? You promised.' tears prick her eyes as she reaches for me again. I stand up abruptly and stare down at her on the ground. She is kneeling, dirt smudging her pudgy legs, mingling in with miscellaneous scrapes. Her eyes are hungry for something, cohabiting with a sadness that challenges the famine within them. She reaches a hand for me to take. It hangs there sadly, begging me for rescue.

That's the image I hold of her. The last image. I turned from her and sped back to my house. I keep that memory a secret, growing more angry with myself. When I saw her at school the next day she did not speak to me. I tried to plead my apologies but the ice on her shoulder would not thaw. She did not speak to me for the rest of the year, and then I moved, and she didn't have the opportunity to ignore me anymore. Equally I never again had the pleasure of being ignored by her. From what I heard she grew up too fast. She got used to being on her knees, not just in my memory but in her living life. The twigs we played with became real cigarettes between her lips, poisoning her lungs. Her fondness for vitamins became a fondness for narcotics. Her kiss a currency she used to get them. She died at the age of nineteen, in the derelict basement of a house no one lived in.

In my mind though she died that night, I dug her grave with every step away from her I took. When the memory ends, the curtains close briefly then a new feature begins. The life we'd have had if I'd taken her kiss. We fall in love clumsily, not quite sure what we're doing until it's too late and we're already enamoured. When I move we write letters, correspondence of commitment - in some pictures I don't move at all, maybe with a reason to stay I convince my mum not to take that job, not to marry that guy, not to leave my girl. She's unyeildingly happy, and we grow old together, never knowing the hunger for drugs and sex and numbness as she did when she died. If I'd kissed her I could have saved her. But I couldn't. I was just too young.

Push

It isn't a practised art. Just the right pressure to get the job done, not enough to be misconstrued as aggression. It didn't take me long to pick it up, and I've been perfecting it ever since. Years and years stood on this platform, the air unnatural and artificial, any breeze generated hot and unsatisfying. But my obedience is feigning, boredom taking its place. As I enter the tunnel each morning, the light blinding me in waves - corresponding to each step I take - I feel a hush press about me. It constricts me. Embracing me in a forced silence, hundreds of feet below the organic sounds of surface life. My undeniable authority originally apparent in my attire, challenged by the mandatory quiet. A uniformed conformity to my meagre responsibility. The people all look the same now. I've begun to wonder whether the pattern of commuters has caused me to grow accustomed to faces I see every day, or whether I now don't recognise individuality. It's hard to appreciate it in a crowd like this. Body parts being pressed against you from every angle in a desperate necessity to surge forward. As the train pulls up to the station the edging begins. A communal glance behind separate shoulders and then a step. Anticipation mixes in with the hot damp sweat in the air as each person fantasises about the seat they may claim for the journey ahead. The odds are against them. Shuffling methodically like corpses in rapture they rev for the race. Competition screams from every face and as the doors announce their opening - the battle begins. They start alone, no need for encouragement. I stand with my back to the wall and my cap pointed down. The panic that gripped me when I was first employed doesn't faze me anymore. Instead a new excitement is born, somewhere sadistic in the depths of my exhausted, humiliated mind. As their struggle announces my requirement I step to them, arms outstretched in preparation. They thrash and squirm like cattle heading for slaughter. Their bodies half constricted in a confused conflict between the want for freedom, and the need for transport. I place my palms flat against the jumbled heat of their clothed skin, and I push. Beginning with a soft nudge and progressing to a desperate heave, I push. As they edge inwards, past the automatic door and onto the carriage, I realize my chance will soon pass. I remove my key from its strap around my neck, and slip it between my meaty fingers. Closing a fist around it I begin to jab. I watch the faces of the people it impacts. Their confusion and their pain expressed abashedly through their generic features. Men's gasps indistinguishable from women's, both alike in collective suffering. Before they can respond I pull back my assistance and the doors close on them, symbolizing the end of my responsibility. Confusion plauges them and as their gazes fall on my twisted features, contorted with unquashable ecstasy - acceptance leaks in and occupies their resolves. Through the glass their eyes accuse, pounding against the smudged divide. Unable to escape, unable to catch me, to punish me. Their focus is torn, dragged away and ripped from me. And in that moment I forget that I wanted to be a lawyer, that I am impoverished - hindered by a meagre salary- presented only with a fabricated title, supposed comfort for a glorified herder. Paid to touch but leisurely never allowed to. In that moment, as my sinister eyes fall back to the floor; I smile.