With bad eyes you can see just a little.

9:45am.

At some curse, or some speed, I pulled the door wide and almost tumbled into the elevator, crumbling up a small lady with a cane. I righted myself soberly, tossing off the indifference I truly felt with a fake smile that I did genuinely believe might have been worth a thousand dollars if not for the terror of the shock of the end of life's lessons that had weighed heavily on the sagging skins of this terrible old birdlike little lady. She gasped and swung the cane at me, pricking my shins like a lithe little thorny branch in the wind. I was momentarily astounded at the look on her face, which told awkwardly and so assuredly of mistrust and misgivings in spectacular abundance, and then I smirked, ready, so completely ready, to just let go and give her the hardest punch I could muster, right in the mouth. She had no right to hit me with her cane, I reasoned; crazy or old or whatever, she simply hadn't the right to inflict this upon me.

But the urge to strike her was only a passing fancy, as most violence surely is, and I smirked again as she huffed and pressed the same button for the ground floor once and again and over and over. Like singing along to a pleasant old tune drifting out across the room from a small transistor radio, I hummed along to her angry sighs and bobbed my head, entirely unsure about myself but somehow properly composed nevertheless.





When we hit the ground floor and the elevator began to settle, she filled up the doorway of the elevator with her spindly little bone-body and pressed the cane length-wise into the frame like she were expecting a tide of attackers once the door finally opened. But she wasn't meaning to prevent any such entrance. It was my exiting before her that she guarded the doorway against. The rage in me felt hotter than the awful need to let it slide. And so I narrowed my eyes toward the back of her witchy scarecrow head.

The sheer nerve of this son of a bitch old little mummy, I thought.

I could have struck her in the back of the head. Almost - I did feel the fucking urge - I almost spoke into the back of her wiry gray head, "Are you a widow? Are you lonely now that your husband has left you for a much better place than in your old, fractured arms? You are alone, old lady. Alone."





But of course she was. Old fucks like this always were, weren't they? Widows, lonesome crazy widows. Of course they were.

But I let the bell sound, and I stood back while she carried her fragile dusty body out into the lobby of the hotel. And she sure did shuffle slowly. If I doubted for a second the intention in that aged, crippled march, then I was a fool when she turned her head and sneered at me. The nerve. How calculated is the heart when it turns to such mockery of civility?

Suddenly I wished her husband would come back from the dead and hit her in the eye. I wished he would crawl into the lobby, smelling of his grave, and strangle her in front of me and then drag her out to the gutter and let the leaves in the wind cover her.





But I said nothing, only held the dry scentless flower in my hand that I'd plucked from the bedstand and I whisked past her as if she were no more than just another potted plant along the corridor, and I paid the morning's due at the counter.

Carolyn was at the counter. Dressed smartly in her purple hotel blouse, with her name stitched in pink over her small, purposeful breast, igniting in me some kind of minuscule reluctance. Her effortless beauty seemed to sink me. She smiled and typed in my information, accepted the cash and peeled the bills away with fingers so exacting that it was like a spider wrapping up a fly in silk, and once the bills were in the right slots, she smiled approvingly to the open cash drawer and snapped it closed, then looked up and thanked me.

I took my eyes away from her hands, and the name over the breast on her blouse, and the thin, painted lips of her pressed smile, and never felt as cold in my life as I did then, when I realized the barrier of client and hostess would never be crossed.

Behind my back, I stuffed the colorless ill-attended flower into my back pocket where she could never know that it had ever existed, hearing it crumple in dry cracks and raspy scratches.

"Thank you, Carolyn," I muttered, staring blankly into her eyes, filling no void in the ensuing silence. And I stood there for a bit, unalarmed at all, feeling my body lose heat and pressure while my head in turn expanded like a balloon. I closed my eyes for a bit and pictured that decrepit old lady from the elevator and how I prayed for her pain in a hospital bed to be unlike anything another human being had ever suffered, and I passed gently over a thought as to what her dead husband must have been like in his prime, and I pictured him making love to the old lady when she had been in her prime, too, and the motions they would set underneath the brittle, starched woolen coverlet of the hotel bed, like young snakes awaking from womb of the serpent mother.



I smiled to myself, forgiving the old lady her trespasses. Age was awful lonely, after all.

All things must end. So too would I. And Carolyn would be dead one day as well. And the mortician would pop open the buttons of her blouse, take the shirt down past her shoulders and remove the bra, then insert a scalpel blade vertically down her middle and witness the bones of her and the stillborn heart and he would never know the desire that I once had in my little life for this speechless hotel counter girl.



When I opened my eyes, Carolyn was staring at me with distress and confusion, and when she asked very politely, with a properly somber concern, if I was feeling ill today, of course I said yes, and that it was just a mild head cold, but enough to leave me a bit out of sorts of course, and I smiled nervously at her and pretended every bit of the way that it was just a cold. Only a passing cold.

But it's not just a cold. It's a cold life, but not just an affliction that will be passing any time soon. I might stay at the hotel indefinitely. And in sleep might I dream of being the perpetual mortician, and would I too dream of her tonight, on the steel bed, lit up by hard fluorescent lights, saddled dreamily with the task of preparing this beautiful girl for the sleep of eternity.

My cold, loveless hands on her cold, lifeless stomach.

Yours,
JARET.

The lines in my hand don't go anywhere.

2:27am.

At the end of the dock road there is a vast horizon of flat sea with an overbearing sky lying prone above it with a sexlessness that confounds me. There is no penetration; it's just the sky above and the sea below, pressed against one another without thought, and it goes on forever in either direction. I look out there and wonder about a couple of things that have lately been weighing heavy on my mind. There's not been work for the past three days since our crew finished early up. The faster and the better you get at things, the money's still the same, so you end up with more free time than you know what to do with.

But I don't get bored. There is too much to look at in this town. Next to the motel there's a graveyard. It's not very expansive, but I felt it would have been rather easy to become lost in the people buried out there if I'd taken the time to read each of their headstones and then really took a moment to think of what it was like when these people were still alive. Some of them I judged by their weak names, while others' names I held in regard for how they rolled off my tongue with a sort of dignity that I didn't enjoy myself when sounding out my own name. I wondered how many of these people I'd not have gotten along too well with, and too, which ones were better than me, or had been anyway. Which of those I might have actually looked up to, admired or even shared of life of friendship with.

By their epitaphs alone to go by, it was impossible to deduct which of these buried sort had grown up minor criminals, or minor peacemakers or unforgivable fuck-ups or unaccountable fuck-ups or humorous, gentle and reliable people. In death they always died too soon, yet gave so much while they were around.

On the other side of the motel was the sea.

I took a mile walk up the coast and down the dock road to where the furthest you can get to sea is paved outward in beams and boards and I nearly lost my balance a few times because the open space was like nothing I had ever experienced back home. The world is so much larger than the town I grew up in. It stretches out into the abyss, like this sea does.

At the very end of the dock I sit at the edge of the wooden rails and hang my legs out over the waves, which are too far below me to touch. People die all the time out there. They sink to the bottom like whales do. Or they float back ashore like whales do, sometimes. I don't know, it's a big place out there. Trying to take it all in without moving my eyes along the horizon from left to right is nearly impossible. I can't even begin to conceive its true volume as a whole from the edge of this little dock, which if cast into the waves would be like a fraction of a splinter stuck into to the skin of the sea.

It's just water, though. I know that. The edge of the world too, maybe. I could drown out there if I started swimming straight out.

Yours,
JARET.

Present an excuse that will stick to the sky's wall.

4:39am.

That girl at the front of the line, behind the register, the one with the same haircut hanging over her head like a halo, the same haircut she's had since I spotted her two years ago: it hangs down in these effortless locks that are so short they might not even be referred to as 'bangs' depending on who you're discussing it with. I'm pretty alone, though; discussion concerning just about anything is a long shot. I might as well be lowered onto a tight rope suspended between two cliff faces. Wearing a dozen water-soaked blankets balanced like clumps of rubble on my shoulders. I might as well dream it up, my day.

Walking into that store and saying Hi. She says Hi back.

Dreams. Fucking dreams.

That girl with the white supermarket button-up, the nametag I still haven't honed in on. Her two year smile. That girl's been hovering about the front entrance at the cash registers since I came here first. She never has looked a day older than that first glance. As for me, I must be as unrecognizable as shadows in a dark room. I found that fairly telling. Also, reality too. I found reality awful telling. A boy can be pretty stupid sometimes. Pretty awful fucking stupid.

What does it take, really, for that to happen in one's life? Some kind of miracle? You'd fucking die if you saw her, I say, to no one, in the frozen foods section, while I ponder the individual prices of microwaveable pizza versus a bulk purchase that will fuck me over in no time flat come midnight when my tapeworm belly growls out the chorus of a pack of wolves. My body will yawn and I'll eat bricks and mortar, suck up the tiles in the kitchen and the spots of tomato sauce spattered on fragments of crumpled foil. I'll kiss the mere scent of toast that may have still been lingering from the morning's breakfast. I will dig graves and fill them with my big plans. And I'll eat dinner made of plastic cups, shitty pizza from the microwave and droplets of dew from the morning-wet ears of the demon John who crawls from the carpet just like the sun crawls into the horizon and stains it orange with that really very particular swagger of a slightly drunk worker preparing for a full day's work and the all-too-near eventuality of sobriety.



I fucking stare at that girl at the market and pick at the bubblegum on the aisle rack. I pick at the options and put down some batteries, a tight little pocket-sized fucking book of crossword puzzles, two chocolate-covered cherries and a car-key light and a packet of fresh-breath tablets and two copies of the same gossip magazine.

It doesn't matter what you buy. She still smiles and laughs. She doesn't care at all, and I am so drawn to that. Her smirks posit the banner of "a life," and I know she has that in abundance the moment she clocks out at shift's end and disappears into the town. Leaving me in line forever and ever, in my stupid head.

I want to say stuff like, "Oh fine, things are great," in response to a general question. And then ask, "How are you?" I just want to hear her say FINE, ignoring any semblance of real conversation. FINE. Who is ever fine? I deserve so much less than that response, but I crave it. I fucking crave it.

But I've never heard her voice up close. Not once. Just from a distance. Certainly not speaking to me. I couldn't just stand there and have her ask me about my bank card. I'd sound as stupid as could be. Like the time I caught that kid's kite from crashing to the park grasses before it was demolished and his mother practically shoved her eyes into mine, and that goddamned grin, and how I said "no problem" and how I know she used her kid to just crawl onto to some guy in the park, out of loneliness or whatever, and how much I didn't care. I understand a lot when I don't care.

But when I do care, I don't understand a frigging thing.



And I could not bear to prod the cattle of my scared wandering thoughts into such a conversation with the girl at the register. Fuck no could I stand that.

Eternal cashieress, I'll just hope I always see you. That's what I will do. I can't ever talk to you. And it's not because I feel that you would not care. But seriously, my parents both died when I was yet a teenager, and my first sexual experience was with a blind girl in a hospital flower garden. She called me by my full name, like she was sounding out words in braille. It felt like that game where you enter a closet with some girl whose name was picked from a hat, and everybody waits outside the closet door and listens to just how much isn't going on behind the racks of coats.



I spent three years in the county jail for assaulting a bank teller. In the parking lot of a downtown bank, after closing hours. I spent two years on the payroll at St. Gibbons as a caretaker, but I was really just an assistant to the maintenance crew who knew more about buildings and upkeep than I did. I spent three years tracing my fingers in the obituaries, trying to feel something for people who knew so many people who saw fit to feel something when they'd passed.

That girl in the supermarket makes me wish I could finally kill myself and get it overwith.

Yours,
JARET.