The screw

You’ve been out of work for a while, unemployed because of layoffs. Your wife is getting on your last nerve, pressuring you to do something productive, maybe fix the broken slats in the fence, or set up the vegetable garden she’s been asking for since Desert Storm…anything that shows a bit of initiative, maybe impressing the neighbors. You know, keeping up with the Joneses thing.

So, she finds this prefab gazebo at the home improvement store; excited by the sales pitch of a quick and easy install, she says, “Even you can do this, hon! The sales guy said it is a very quick and easy assembly.” Despite being a thinking kind of man, rather than a hands-on, can build anything kind of guy, like every husband on your block, you go ahead and purchase the gazebo.

After assembling the gazebo, you notice an extra screw in the plastic bag that held the other screws. You check and recheck the assembly directions and screw holes several times. Nothing seems to be amiss. Every screw is screwed into a screw hole, except for this extra screw.

What is with the extra screw? you think to yourself.

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Dystopia #3: Street justice

A well known horror film actress—The Queen of the Scream—whose real name I should not mention here, is dead at 75. She died last week. And now the terror of lawlessness has arrived in my nightmares, played by her, screaming nightly since her demise, merging with my own screams.

My streetwalker pal shakes me at the scream’s climax and says, “Isaac, WAKE UP, it’s almost time for the movie,” and then soothes me without solicitation; a morning affair in exchange for chips and a 6 year old expired med. She tells me, “You can’t afford my fee, not now, Isaac. Chips and the sugar pill are good enough, and I’ll share.”

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Dystopia #2: The hills

Traded my bus ticket for an old phone with a journal app. No service or WiFi. The bus ticket was useless; where could I go on the remaining $4.72? I’ll travel by foot from now on, journaling as I move along, from place to place, kind of like Marco Polo in Invisible Cities.

So, today, on my way to nowhere, I passed a scraggly looking man in a stained white T-shirt, torn jeans showing too much like a flasher, and a cap with “Sinner” on the front. He was sitting on the sidewalk curb with an old tattered bible by his side, pointing a finger towards the city limits.

I pretended to fiddle with my phone, when he said in a trembling voice, “Fella, watch out for the girls in the hills over there, they’re not fully human.”

He repeated the same to a straggler passing behind me, my curiosity was piqued.

“What hills?” I asked him.

“Down yonder, over there, beyond the city.” His crooked finger still pointing and appearing frozen in place, catatonic like.

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Final hour

Blood is everywhere on this final hour of my final night. The ground gurgling from it; denuded trees drizzling with it—like red maple syrup; and strewn body parts being drained of it—gravity at work. Nature’s dramatization of the end in progress, a mental spectacle of death’s metaphor.

Red streaks the sky with a neon fluorescence; plumes of black smoke twisting into funnels, crisscrossing the expanse, headed eastbound along invisible rivers of wind. Concussive blasts multiply along the horizon, shattering my brain; the last stands of the living, dying, and hanging in limbo; the resilience of mind over matter, to observe one’s mind on self-destruct—its last hurrah!

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Dystopia #1

Hey Jack,

The hospital discharged me this morning. They pushed us out, padlocked the doors, and boarded up the windows with wooden planks. I’m sitting on a cement step outside the locked facility. There’s just enough space for my frozen butt, the bitter wind whipping spits of snow at my face, hard as beach sand. I borrowed—without permission—a defunct script pad for this letter. I’ll read it whenever I locate you, whatever state of existence you’re in, dead or alive. How many years has it been? How is your mom, Mrs. Rizzo? I had a crush on her early on. You knew that, right? Sorry if you didn’t. Got into big trouble over my crushes and mother complexes, even as a kid.

So, my phone is long gone, confiscated at the start of my commitment here. My excuse for not keeping in touch. I wonder what the smart phones are like now? Doesn’t really matter. I don’t know where anyone is living or if living, nor their situation or phone number. Everything has changed.

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