This Is How You Write a Story

Headless in Midcity

I am trapped inside the head of another man. A man I do not know. I look at the face each morning. At the work bathroom sink. Washing his hands before a wall of stall doors. I see him in the warped metallic base under the lamp shade before he goes to sleep.

I try to remember the transfer. Who I was in last. Was it me? Or have I done this once before?

He washes his hands an awful lot. Last time, I thought he saw me. A recognition suddenly lifting an eyebrow. Then a nonchalance he couldn’t summon even with Nancy.

I’m starting to get used to her. Took me a while but I suppose people grow on you when you can’t get away from them. She’s a selfish human being. But her tastes do not vary. They simply linger. Drenching the air between them nasally sucking in each other’s audible exhalations. She’s quite ugly. Even with the right light. An eyebrow reaches up awkwardly before meandering down like a failed branch. Her skin is pale and nearly transparent. But where a blush of red should show beneath there is a mossy green discovering each shallow capillary and crevice. Mixed with the early morning whiting her out, I watch and he sleeps.

I wonder if he knows I do this. I wonder if he knows I think this.

They look quite okay standing next to one another before the waiting elevator door.

He is a simple man now. And this explains it. There’s an exhaustion in here. Some remnant malaise of an over spent era some time before me.

Still, I feel it. In the extremities mostly. Swinging into motion with a memory. The way he sits in a chair when no one else is around. I can feel the muscles give way a moment or two before they really should.

I want to stand up. Take hold. But I do not belong here. And I don’t think I have that kind of power.

We hate what we do. The desk at work is squat and thin like a sofa console. And it’s wrapped with a speckled formica of disastrous colors. The rest of the office is okay, though. In between the punctual a/c soundtrack, a light jazz plays softly through the office PA. Something Mr. Johnson set up, said to boost morale, but really to drown out his masturbation sessions on Thursday afternoons. No one else knows this but me.

I know I was planted here falsely. But I don’t know what else to do but wait. I try to do what I can. I can almost infer things. Relationally imply a detour route to the water fountain. I get better at it especially well caffeinated. Focusing hard on the desk nameplate k and yellow plush alien that sits perfectly upright against it in Ms. Dubuke’s office.

I get worse when he’s tired. Plopping into chairs I can’t help it. I lose consciousness altogether when he comes. A ripped vacuum cord and I am unplugged. Only to be blinded by the open hatches as we come to under the lamp light. I try to remember where I go. But I’m slowly learning there is no where.

I’m not sure what he wants from me. I try to ask him but I don’t get far. I’m beginning to wonder if I can do anything else, if he knows at all. Oh to run away.

How long must I wipe his ass? Pop his zits? Slip a digit into his provoking cunt.

...I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called her that. Something came over me. She’s a very adequate human being. And so is he.

We go out the next day, he and I, to the park. A place you go when you have kids. But you don’t do you?

We left her behind, but I find him peeking at his mustard reflection in the shop windows. A pencil like body squeezed sharply down into graphite shoes. And he meanders back and forth scrawling down the sidewalk as if unhinged.

I forget what awaited him there. The weather or the muddy canals or the unimpressed crowd. He must’ve had some excuse. I hadn’t noticed him stop but he did and looked up at a crooked telephone pole reaching up above to the black perpendicular lines cutting through the sky.

I try to bend his attention away from it. It was one of many in midcity. The area had this false organic nature, like sticks that had grown into maturity and only used then after.

I don’t know what he wants with this particular one. This is a man who counts his weeks in bars of soap. He keeps a stockpile behind a windowed cabinet door. People don’t know how to live their lives.

At the next pole he does it again. Only this time I notice something. A weathered shard of a flyer with a single steel staple keeping it fast. There was just enough faded ink left to make out the text.

Jude.

He stuffed the paper into his pocket before I could make out the rest.

Now he walks in straight lines huffing and bloating commandingly across the street to a bank.

I feel his back pocket. A thin sliver of leather raised the cotton, thickened recently by a tiny, bungled parcel from a fortune cookie left blank. We pass the square hedges and pristine stucco. We pass the glass doors and cut across the short grass yard before coming to another street. On the other side of that street kept a building with windows that seemed boarded up but were merely tinted and matched its dark matte wall. It sucked in all the light of the day, that building, and if you weren’t looking, you wouldn’t see it. Its doors were recessed down a shallow, makeshift hall. He slowed as he came to it and passed it hurriedly in the first direction available before turning around after some distance and waiting.

I feel his pocket fill. Feel the thin deteriorating paper between his fingers. Now that I noticed the building, it felt imposing. A black three story cube without windows above the first floor. I reeled back when he grabbed the door, or he did, I don’t know, but we were in.

The hall continued on inside the narrow lobby. A large man in black slacks and tight tshirt with a belt to contain him flashed a magnum in our eyes.

Can I help you?

He already had the flyer revealed and stuck it out into the small space between us and the fashionable behemoth. Jude. Was the only thing I could catch.

Go on.

We walked down the doorless hallway that did not open up but close down into an area that appeared to be a closet in the masked light. I tried once again to reel back. To turn. But forward we went.

He wakes up brushes his teeth ignoring the trauma. I try to remember. I am trapped inside the head of a man. A man who believes he can do anything he wants. Without regard for himself. For others.

She smells like sunlight. He bends down to her and her eyes twitch back and forth below a calm brow. The room goes dark and he sniffs her in. She moans lightly and we breathe in the soundwaves. He puts a hand over her eyes and another over her mouth.

She does not waken. I keep quiet and unheard. Enthralled. I feel his fingers give way to palms and apply the firm pressure. Her eyes go haywire below. Searching. Her mouth goes moist. Spitting. The lips pucker and.

Smile. She grabs at his cock and fumbles for the shaft before squeezing it tight and I scream. The hard little acorns stop shifting and go straight and his hands fall away from her thin skin. She reels up tearing away the loose grip. A small fist I make out just in time out in the periphery. The blow catches the nose and a chunk of lip squeezing it in between two teeth.

We fall back into the dresser and the just opened drawers all slam shut at once.

I watch her unphased and emotionless in his direction before she reaches into the night stand and plucks a cigarette from its case.

She smiles when she looks down to light her smoke and her brow throws up a gnarled shadow.

In the shower, the fog wreaks of wet smoke and I find her thick, lathered hair sitting upright atop her. A long ash falls finally in a clump. Get gobbled up in the tiny current below. I get in with her, and she jerks me off with the soap from her hair. She eyes me with a straight face as the motion sways her head like a tall cypress in the breeze and I begin to fall away. I touch her breasts and the myriad of moles there. I touch her dead face and she puffs hard on the cigarette and—

He wakes up brushes his teeth getting all the crevices and back molars. He reaches for a specific spot on his lip but there’s nothing there.

The streetcar drifts into the city, its stops all slow and smooth until we ease out onto the building’s sidewalk. The vacant elevator is light and safe and goes straight up. His office is large and airy. The day stretches out and up into the far corners above.

What does he want from me? Why am I here? He kicks his feet up onto the desk as if he had the room. His thoughts flash before me in reverie. Her wet smile. The humid smoke glazing his throat, stinging the back, too thick to get down. His hand fills with her. Flesh and he closes it around her. She cries out and bites at the air before his nose.

A knock and a fumbling. The door opens and a suited man walks in and stands before the desk waiting for us to speak. I remember suddenly what he wants. Shit, I’m sorry, Joe, I did finish them.

That’s okay. He feigns a quick search over the tiny desk. You got ‘em?

Yea, yea. We don’t have them. The proposal is sitting unfinished on the chair next to the dresser at home. We look around anyway over the colorful formica before opening a series of drawers to complete the ugly magic trick of a lie.

It was just here.

End of the day, he says quickly and knocks on the desk twice.

Today?

Well, yea. I need them tomorrow morning for the managers’ meeting.

Oh. I didn’t think-

We talked about it just last week. Remember. I reminded you.

Yes. Of course. He turned to leave.

It’s just that. I may need to go home to get it.

He exhaled loudly before squeezing his temples with a single hand by way of his forehead. What’s gotten into you? Last month you were a week early.

It’s done. I just need to go get it. You see I brought it home to work on it there and-

Don’t. He paused and dropped his hand. If it’s done just go get it and bring it back by 5.

He waited before turning away again towards the wide opened door.

It’s not like you’ll be busy then, right?

He kept walking.

"Today is Thursday."

He stopped. Mid-stride, exhaled quietly and began quickly again as if by some mechanical force.

Why did I do that?, I thought.

At home, I grab her by the hip and pull it to my own.

Her face stays straight and I can almost see her. Like trying to catch the surface of a clean mirror. She finally pulls back slowly not with her body but with her head and a new face emerges.

What do you want from me?

I want you.

I’m right here.

I thought about this. No. You’re not.

I thought you were done with me. The sentence rolled out of her like a relic.

We turned it over and examined it. Maybe I was.

And now? The words were hot against my cheek. Now I don’t know, I thought but I didn’t say. Instead I looked around. This. All this. In between the kitchen and living room, we stood under the wide, molded entryway separating the two rooms. The dishes piled up in the sink. The table had a chair overturned upon it like a closing bar. The den had blankets tumbled in bunches in two of its corners. Opened books spread out atop the coffee table.

Now I’m here.

You’re always doing this. Another relic.

Doing what?

She searched the space before us for the word.

Repeating.

What do you mean?

How many times do I lose you?

...

Weekly now? It seems.

...

Where do you go?

...

It’s just- Our timing is terrible... And I’m growing tired.

Of me?

Yes, she turned her face away. I want you. I do. But you split me in two. You make me age.

...

You understand me, she said mean and tore her hip away.

I watch the flesh colored droplets fall away from me and down into the clear current before the drain. I get out dry the rest off and head to