by Jay DiNitto
against the porcelain as he taxied to a table.
Martha ordered a medium Americano. “Ah,” the owner said. His bristling facial hair sensed our nationality. “You get wheep of cords. Ess good choice.”
She received her drink and draped the whip over her shoulder carefully to avoid self-mortification. The whip gave her blonde, short-haired head the look of an off-center, discolored ponytail.
“Ah,” the owner repeated with a proud demeanor and brightening Arab eyes when I ordered a large Americano. “You the first. I grant wheep of scorpion.”
It wasn’t the first time I knew I had a rex regina-complex but it was after we downed our beverages and fled the cafe that I resolved, in a world of republics and symbolic regencies, to actively pursue the monarchy after graduation.
The Pickup Line
She arrived at the bar with her friends, and he made his emerald-envy eyes peel away her self-security like an onionskin. It didn’t bother her because she expected him.
After an hour he approached her but his words flew out like bullets aimed straight down. She rolled her eyes and ignored him while he burned in stunned silence.
She left, alone and prematurely, knowing that he would follow soon after. As she purposely entered a dark alley a few blocks down he grabbed her from behind with his sharp voice. She turned around and opened her clutch. He started with some excuse and she began to pull out the snub nose when the hammer got caught on a hook of fabric and discharged.
A grin on her face replaced a flinch of her shoulders. He was shot in the foot twice in the same night.
Reese and the Recliner
Gordon waddled and heaved his overfed frame onto his usual park bench. The painted wooden slats, already curved from weeks of scheduled weight, creaked under the returning stress. Without wasting another labored breath Gordon delved into his expansive lunch.
Out of the corner of his eye he spied the new hire on his floor bouncing through the field and onto the pedestrian path that snaked through the park. What was her name? Ruth? Irene? He couldn’t recall but it was something of a shock to see her in a tank top, running shorts, and sneakers, the shell of business casual clothing sloughed.
She was moderately attractive and slim, the sinews in her thighs and shoulders creasing and tightening with the tiniest of movements she made. Any prurient interest Gordon entertained at that moment dissolved on the sight of her unnatural bleached-blond ponytail. Her hair bobbed in front of a colorful mosaic of a chaotic aquatic scene etched into her skin, a permanent mark of artistry of which he had only saw hints in the workplace.
Gordon tended to his lunch, besetting the warmed contents in his large bag with a focused fury. He kept an eye on her even during the moments of intense concentration and subsequent pleasure, as when he ripped into a cheeseburger or stuff a tortilla chip into his mouth. She stretched and did a bouncing warm-up trot then began her sprints – speeding down a straight away section of the concrete path, slowing down as the path began to curve, then jogging back to her starting point.
By the time he started his second cheeseburger she had finished close to a dozen sprints. Gordon could sense in his viscera the pneumatic flush in her cheeks and the strain of her breath all the way from his perch, and it drew out a similar response from his respiratory system.
He belched to shake away the sympathetic reaction and lit up a cigarette – his preferred digestive aid. By this time it seemed that she had reached her limit as halfway through a sprint she slowed her pace and trailed off the path into the grass.
She collapsed onto her hands and knees and began to heave, and with an uncontrolled retch she vomited, spreading the contents of her stomach between her hands. When she finished she sat back on her haunches with one palm on her furrowed brow as if forcing back tears.
Gordon summed up her doctored hair, the array of tattoos spreading like a disfiguring virus across her shoulders, and the humiliative composure and position of her body.
“Why would someone do that to their body?” He cast the question to rid her from attention. He reached into his breast pocket for another cigarette and patted the hanging obesity of his midsection.
Epilogue: Ecumenopolis
Ida and Jim, speeding along in her crude compact, crested the hump in the highway and marveled at the emerging jagged pattern of buildings so many miles away. The late spring haze shrouded the concrete panorama in mist, and with each successive hill the pair conquered the mist would relent and reveal the expansive sprawl with increasing clarity.
The highway stretched out into a straight run up to the grand wall of a low, long mountain. The satisfying exercise of depth perception created between the buildings behind the mountain and those situated on the mountaintop was abandoned once they approached the tunnel entrance. Hewn straight out of the rock on either side of the tunnel stood a pair of faceless angels, each holding up a miniature globe; twin Atlases affording tribute to a mythical divine androgyny.
But even those statues, too, disappeared once in the darkened canal of the tunnel. It was a short time in the gradual curve of the mountain’s womb before they were released out onto a street running up its side. To their right the city gleamed like a single jewel among the crude valley landscape.
They reached the top and parked somewhere to watch the countless white nimbus clouds sailing slowly above the top, like a fleet of victorious ships returning to home ports. Somewhere, in the middle of the teem of millions of people making their own way, tucked away in a corner of one of those structures built by the common majesty of human hands, was their new life and a new purpose. There would be a season of toiling for its uncovering but everything now was so far removed from their despair mere months ago that they foresaw it would become a glorious labor just to seek it out.
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About the Author
Jay is a web designer and freelance writer living in the Pittsburgh area. He currently writes for indie music blog Buzzgrinder, and has written for Noisecreep and various print zines of past times. Besides being active in his local church he rides his steel-frame Trek bicycle almost every day, is smitten by Austrian-style libertarianism, and lives off of coffee more than oxygen.
At the time of this e-book’s release he is finishing up a manuscript for a full-length novel, A Season Underneath, about a young woman who isn’t a prostitute.
Jay is married with two children. He can be contacted via email at [email protected], or on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/jaybreak.
