something wrong

there's something wrong with me. eating makes me hungry. and sleeping makes me tired. i'm not dysfunctional. my friend says i am dysfunctional but i don't have any friends. i can do things. i do things. i'm a person. i have a face. i can smile. i do. but smiling makes me think about smiling and i wonder why sometimes i don't smile. it makes me angry. it isn't right. other people aren't like me. i'm sitting on the train and here we go. right past that other train. right over there on that other track. it's going in the same direction as my train but much much slower. there are people on that train but not one of them look at me. if i was on that train i would look at me and wonder why i got to go much faster than me. being on the fast train makes me think about people who are not on the fast train. why are they on the slow train? and why are they so happy? it's maddening.

with a gun

her husband killed himself.

he held the shotgun between his feet and pulled the trigger with a string. or it might have been a pistol. he held it in his mouth and got off three shots before he dropped. and there was a tooth stuck in the door across the other side of the room. that's what people say. he did it with a gun. or he sat in the car in the garage with a hose connected to the exhaust pipe. she was there. or she was working late that night. or they'd had a fight and she'd gone out for a drive. but not in the same car that he did it in. unless he did it with a gun.

and now here she is. laughing and working and why isn't she sad. she is sad. she cries. she hates her son because he reminds her. his face. her son moved to alaska. to escape. or he's off at college fucking sluts. he's off the rails. drugs. or he's coping okay. he's getting married in the fall. to a nice girl. he's closer than ever with his mum. they go to the movies on tuesday nights because it's half price on tuesdays.

he did it because they were having money trouble. she cheated on him or he cheated on her and he was ashamed. he beat her. he had a history of depression. they were so good together. always happy and they used to kiss sometimes right there in the street. they were still in love. why him though? he was the strong one. always there. and funny and he smiled and never would you suspect. he'd talked about it before. joked or he was serious. he asked her for help. she didn't help him. they went to see someone together. he went to see someone. he was taking something. he was getting better. he didn't drink. no drugs. not even prescriptions. he was a gambler.

his insurance policy covered it. she's all set now. or it didn't. she's moving back in with her dad. he has a drinking problem. or a broken hip. he's moving in with her so she can help care for him. she got fired from her job. embezzlement. or she kept crying in the meetings. she quit.

she uses her job as an escape. she's a workaholic. a promotion and now she is somebody. how long has it been? she's already seeing someone else. fucking him. they were together before. now it's in the open. they're just friends. he's helping her get through it. they talk and drink coffee. like friends.

the boy found him. there was no note. or she found him. there was a note. one word. sorry. or it said i tried. i love you. or it was rambling and he hated her.

they are selling the house. can't get the blood out. she has kept his things exactly as they were. it's creepy. she's moved on. painted the house and planted daisies. she sits on the porch and waves. she smiles. or she's angry. hateful. she can't understand why.

her husband killed himself.

never clone a clown

there was one clown. now there's two. i know. i have a little explaining to do. it started, well it started back in 7th grade. science class. we never did get to shank any frogs but one time fatso randazzo distributed pigs eyes to me and all my classmates. from a big sloppy bucket. and scalpels. and we were shown how to remove the cornea. step-by-step. we were not shown how to bash and mash the eyeballs with our textbooks. eyeballs are rock hard by the way. they do not squash. they do shoot out sideways from under your smashing instrument. anyway, that's when i decided to become a scientist. or roundabout then. i put a pig's cornea in my eye like a contact lens. it hurt pretty bad and i couldn't see anything. but it felt good. emotionally.

so a few years on i was at the university trying to invent time travel and robots and i couldn't quite figure it out and i should also mention that there was this girl. this girl was actually a woman. a woman of profound intelligence and she wore a lab coat and i wanted to squeeze her in the squeezy bits. i talked to her. this girl, this woman, and she talked to me and she told me that she wanted me to take my pants off, which i misconstrued for love.

have you ever noticed that girls in the lab always smell nice. it might be on account of how everything else in the lab smells like scorched nostrils or it could be that girls in the lab don't want to be the one girl in the lab who doesn't not smell like the boys in the lab. she smelled like licorice. black licorice and i wanted to taste her in the face. the reason i mention all this is because i spent a lot of time with her. this girl, this woman her name was doreen. that's another thing. girls with ugly names. i don't know what. maybe it's just the contrast between how awful their names are and how not awful everything else about them is.

anyway she was a cloner. tomatoes and ants and not dogs. the dogs are another story but actually the dogs are what ended her. and us in a way. there was a scandal and she moved and she left me standing there by myself. in the lab. cloning. just me and the science and okay there were a few other girls who smelled nice like i said but they didn't talk to me much. or they talked too much. you know how it is when you don't not like people but you also don't want to chat about things or tell them there is something in their teeth.

other people were cloning. in russia they cloned a polar bear. there was pressure. from the university and also there was a pharmaceutical company that gave me a grant and they said hey we are not paying you to eat girls in the face (i told them about doreen. i shouldn't have, i mean why would i, but i couldn't not). so i had to go big.

and just at that same time, a time when i was not good, things started to look up. my advisor heard about a lady who went to bali and came back with a mound of moving spider babies embedded in her cheeks. it wasn't true. an urban myth i suppose. but the guy who told my advisor about the lady with spiders in the face, he himself turned out to be a promising candidate. he was a clown. one of those clowns that you can hire for kids' parties and he wasn't good at it because he had this horn and it was way too loud and really irritating and all he did was blow the horn and say something and then blow it again.

anyway, the clown guy had twin girls and i guess both girls were dying from kidney disease and he was a match and so he gave each girl a kidney and they turned out to be just fine except for the fact that they had a clown for a dad and also their dad didn't have any kidneys anymore.

so the plan was to clone the clown and then, well i figured he would die anyway because what else can happen when you don't have any kidneys. but the plan was to clone him and make a little clown baby with the same dna and then it would maybe be a way for the twin girls to feel okay about killing their dad because they could raise their new dad as their son. or one of them could at least.

anyway it all worked out perfectly. we even injected the clown baby into one of the clown;s daughters and she grew him all up inside of her.

but this other girl in my lab, who admittedly did smell nice, i'm not lying about this phenomena, she snuck around behind my back and really put me in a tough position. for two reasons. firstly, it turns out you are not supposed to clone actual people. so there was that and i had to go to court and everything. but worse, she went and cloned one of the clown's kidneys from inside his daughter (the other one) and then gave the new one back to the clown. don't worry if you don't follow. cloning is a lot like time travel with all the paradoxes and everything it is nearly impossible to figure it all out.

so now the clown is all honking his stupid horn all over the place, healthy as a clown with one good kidney, and that damn lab girl is getting all the press. then of course the clown's daughter doesn't want the new clown because why would she when her dad is a-okay and also she liked to play tennis and kind of wanted to turn pro and thought a baby might be a bit of a hassle in that regard. so actually maybe a kid would be good for me in my life so i called the child protection agency and said oh hey and then i hung up on them because i realized that kid is going to turn out to be a clown just like his old man and i don't even really like clowns.

so now i have a lab in my garage. unaffiliated. unfunded. trying pretty hard to figure out time travel again. and robots.

connecticut

i'll sniff the petals

and stem the tide

then ride the wave

and say goodbye

she had an idea

she had a job. and a boss. and an idea to tell her boss. at her job. it was a good one. the idea. and the job. and she was excited to tell her boss. she was nervous though. about sharing the idea with her boss. not because it wasn't good. because it was. the idea that she had. but to tell her boss. about the idea. was a little bit awkward. she had never told her boss anything. at her job. never asked a question. or raised a point. but now she had something to say. at her job. to her boss. and it was about this idea that she had. she would tell her boss. at her job. about the idea. first thing in the morning. or if her boss was busy then maybe after lunch. she liked her job. and her boss. and was proud of her idea. so she would tell her boss. as soon as she could muster up the courage.

short story

his story was too short. this is not a metaphor. this is not about a man who died too young. this is literally about a story that was too short. it was intriguing and intelligent. and funny of course. as far as it went. but it was over before it began. or since i am being literal, it ended before it was over. and the man who wrote the story, he had a beard.