home archives guidelines about

November 2008

Comet Press open for submissions

Our print division, Comet Press, is currently accepting submissions for horror, suspense, and dark crime novels and novellas. Visit www.cometpress.us for details.

Available for order from Comet Press

DEADLINES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR AND DARK FICTION, will be released in November of 2008! Visit www.cometpress.us

A Rainy Night of Density with a Reckless Neurotic
by Richey Piiparinen

I am willing to be submerged into the collective order of the infinite. I just want to do so consciously, wearing whatever pants I had on when I was brought across time.

I am inside, next to my bedroom window. Outside, the church bell of St. Pat’s rings through the dark, causing the rain surrounded by it to echo in the foreground of its distance. The blinds are drawn in front of me. I see nothing. I only hear what's out there.

Perhaps, then, the noise is being given its voice back—or is being graced with a faceless quality, much like feeling the soft hands of a woman in a mask. But whatever, so what, beauty rubs both ways—that still doesn’t change the fact that I like to know when I’m being touched.

Suddenly, I turn from my stomach to my back. I then lift my right hand, begin poking the side of my neck, going deeper in flesh. I am looking for lumps and have been doing it incessantly since the last accident. You see, I was hit by a car riding my bike. I have a large fleshy X and a divot on my head. My bad thoughts have increased ever since. I know better than to fight these, and so I try to welcome them-like killing a killer with kindness-but I can’t help the hunch that there’s something out there to get me.

Carpe diem and Robin Williams, yeah, yeah, yeah, I fucking know. I saw it too. But it’s not that easy, because I try not to be distasteful and worry about the inevitable, but the broken illusions already started, and when you open that box and roll around with your own ugly, it’s like trying to re-shut a door with a river waiting on its other side. Besides, I once read somewhere that if you teach a man to die you teach him how to live—that’s beautiful! And so I’ve taken heed:

Q: How does someone get rid of the fear of death?
A: You don’t. You just die trying.

Q: How, then, does someone live in the face of the truth that they will die?
A: You have three options. First, don’t think about it. Second, believe in God, or in your own personal afterlife. But this can’t be just any belief. It’s got to be a fervent belief. In other words, KNOW that Laura (your wife) and you will never separate, that you’ll only be apart for a cosmic minute, and then once your back together you will have everything you couldn’t have on earth: kids, non-worry, sex in the air, a huge house with your own yard, and Caesar (your dog) with the delightful addition of wings. Third, get rid of yourself. Know that the world neither began with you nor will it end with you. Of course, that doesn’t take the pain away from the fact that you have collected your own virtual scrapbook of experience: your laughs, cries, and reminisces; then, couple that with your ongoing hopes and wishes-your goals-and still further your desire for the sensations that you seek-either in the beer and potato skins, the Browns games, or the walk in the park-and it all in practice becomes impossible to give up. For the question remains, what do I care if the world goes on and I can’t experience any of it?

Q: So, in practical terms, my options are what?
A: Your options as outlined above are as follows: (a) drink yourself silly, laughing all the way, (b) believe that some people actually talk to god and the neighborhood priest you befall happens to be one of them, or (c) tear the film from your eyes while crying silently in peace for the natural duality of our existence.

Q: How do I do the last one?
A: I am not sure

Good grief…

I mumble before popping to my feet. I then open the blinds. The wind comes up to the window, rattling it. I touch the glass, trying to stop it from shaking. Further out, the rain continues to fall, soaking the pavement and the small front lawns.

I turn back toward the inside of the house. The wife is out. The dog is rolled silently in the corner, breathing in his happiness the way sleeping dogs do. The house is quiet. I need to leave…

The night is like others: wet, pretty. The rhythm of the rain makes the sound of noise machines hate their electric flavor.

I look around at the glistening light. I then get stuck gazing, watching street lamps hit off car windows to see reflections shifting slightly as drops cling to glass before falling down steel toward earth. I feel a lessening of the mess I have made of myself. Being outside with these other things does that.

I keep on. The streets are full of light and shadows but the only one moving is mine. Everything else is an object. I open my mouth. Breathe. The air has a brisk taste and hits my lungs like wind whipping up dead leaves. Quickly then, I pick up my pace, soon breaking into a slight jog before an all out run. While I move, there are no worries, only a certain hands-off feeling dictated by one’s willingness to be dictated.

Still jogging, I then veer from the sidewalks and towards the edge of the street. Cars pass, and I can only see the motion of the boxes but not the beating liquid-filled people inside. No matter. I don’t need to see them to know that they are in there. In fact, it’s better not to see them. It’s comforting to know that they’re just in there.

I am running to a neighborhood coffee shop that is popular with the locals. I go there because inside and alone and inside with others is not the same thing. At least with others you have the smell of humanity around you. I like that. When I am alone, I often smell nothing. It’s like my right to have functions is turned off by my right to have thoughts.

The coffee shop is called Beans. I walk in. Behind the register stands a girl with large white eyes. She wears a bandana and laughs after every other word. From what I can see, her smile is not particularly causal; instead spraying her emotion randomly, emanating it only because she can and has the right to do so. I get an urge to touch her cheek. Maybe give her a wet willy. But I don’t. Instead our hands bump while I exchange coins for the handle on a mug.

I go and sit by a large window that stretches along the front wall. I grab the paper and begin reading the sports. I sip tea, holding the flavor on my tongue before passing its warmness down into my body. The feeling of being a citizen again, being out and about, it legitimizes me. I am rebounding outward from the abstractions my head carves on the cave wall.

Instants go by and I stare out the window to try and see them. There’s the sidewalk and the staple-ridden electrical poles; between them, Clevelanders with dark-colored flannels stroll by, collecting the cold rain with the blue collar images that adorn their mediocre bodies.

My attention goes back into the coffee shop where a black girl enters wearing tight denim, causing the geometric bellow of her booty. She looks at the chalkboard menu. She does this as I stare at her, reasoning that the imprints of humanity can be found in just one cell. I get a warm feeling that transforms the cold ones of earlier. My soft visions fade, however, as Jay-Z brings noise out of the black girl’s coat pocket. I become disappointed as she yells into her phone.

Seconds later, behind her, a line of women carrying shopping bags enter. 66% of them have on blue jeans, 100% of them have large white eyes. They stare above the girl with the bandana while chirping about what kind of warmness they want entering their bodies. “I want coffee with cinnamon” says a blonde with hair that looks like coiled springs. “I want mocha,” says another with a torso decked in checkered black and white. “I want chocolate cake and coffee with whip cream,” says a thicker one with eyes torn between the menu and the window, the latter displaying a clear reflection being filled by the night images of a wet outside. I can see that neither of them look at each other when conversing despite the fact they all have blood running on their inside. Rather, they talk to the chalkboard menu like house cats howling at a paper moon.

I turn my attention back outside to the street. I see an old man gingerly walking by on the sidewalk. He’s got a slick jacket, a wicked-cool cane. Under a Derby, I imagine his face is wise: the wrinkles a map of all of history and of history’s forewarning. But his distinguished look doesn’t lead on, because when I look downward I see his pants drooping down his legs, creating the continual drag of his cuffs toward the paste of the wet cement.

I forget my eyes for a moment, trying my luck with my ears instead. But the conversations around the coffee shop are underwhelming. “Oh, no…what’s going on? There’s been a plane crash. Only one survivor,” begins a middle-aged lady using a tone where what’s being said doesn’t match the intentions of saying it. The lady is staring above her at a TV with smoky graphics being sewn to the melodramatic voice of a clean-looking broadcaster. Beside the middle-aged lady sits a grandma (her mom?) who has been expelling a cigarette-style voice to grandpa over the phone for several minutes now: “Well, what do you want? I don’t know. You tell me.” Upon hearing this, the middle-aged woman snatches her eyes from CNN, interjecting: “Does he want a peach pie? How ‘bout a peach pie?” Grandma relays it. Meanwhile, the middle-aged woman goes back to reassuring herself in slight undertones, “Oh, shoot. A girl was killed on Christmas Day while riding her bike. It says, ‘The…driiiiver…was cited…but noooo charrrrges have beeen brought…”

I turn back to my tea and take a sip. It has turned cold. The newspaper holds old news and the girl behind the register is gone. You could say, then, the enthusiasm is dead. But I’m not surprised, because the shadows of repeatable patterns are magnetic. And the bodies around me don’t stand a chance.

Besides, even though I can become agitated with how I am, you know: the anxiety, the doubt, the guilt…I still tend to miss myself. In fact, I even tear a piece of me off if only to hide it from the commonhood of man, sheltering it instead behind the black stone of silence that enters in the middle of feeling terribly lonely...

I decide to leave—I’ve wasted this place up. So I get up, walk outside and into a sticking rain. I then head for the curbs. In fact, I often walk on curbs at night. I tell myself the closer I am to the headlights the far less of a chance I won’t be seen and get hit.

Granted, my vigilance is perhaps unwarranted; especially on the particular street I am on now-Detroit Avenue-because it is usually empty and has no traffic, the scene instead filled with boarded buildings. It wasn’t always like this, though. The area used to be more substantial. Like a fat man before he got sick. But now: emptiness, one that strikes the looker, because the thing about vacant buildings is that they’re structural memories, with brick and wood that can’t be tucked away so easily. So the street sits here like a big thick bone. One that that’s lost its flesh through the vacancy of its history.

To build it back would mean admitting failure, reliving the past. And that’s just the city planners I’m talking about. You still need families, residents. But people don’t usually return from where they started, especially if the memories are bad. They’d rather move on. S p r a w l O u t. I would know. I was part of the leaving. You see, I grew up in the neighborhood but none of my family lives here anymore. My Dad is dead (an accident). My mom is in a suburb. My sister is in a development near the sticks. You could say the innocence has split. Yet still, memories remain, pulling me apart like a train whose engine is really its tracks.

And despite what anyone says, it is not easy to think back. What is done is done. You have the remembrance of a better time. A time when neighbors knew neighbors, the city flourished—a time when the houses around you were filled with the same air you just breathed in with your tight little lungs. But getting back there is impossible. For you remember something else.

Of course, you hope to get at it, as a part of you tries—a part with good intention. But there’s a part of you with it, a part of you that doesn’t want to be let out. But it comes out anyway—it’s why I tell myself I hate accidents and I hate disease…

I get back to my house. I walk in the door. My wife is there and her hair is dry. I wonder how she did it.

“Where were you?” she asked, her face growing uneasy.

“I was at the coffee shop. Where were you? It’s pouring outside. How aren’t you wet?”

“What are you talking about? I was here the whole time.”

When she says this, I am hit with a genuine feeling, like something you’d get while staring from the side of a receding boat. I want to walk up to her and shake the rain from my inside, letting it fall into her skin so it can join the rest of the liquid in her body. But some part pushes me and I can’t sit still.

So I walk into the bedroom, take off my outdoor clothes and put on my warm ones. I sit by the window. Dead poets again…

As I poke at my body, I stare outside. The blinds are open, allowing the night sky to show off its colors: a filled-in gray, a faded black. The clouds and sky blend in seamlessly, like a whistle dying out its sound into silence.