September 14, 2015 | Occasus | Issue 5 | Fiction
Et Tu Babe
i.
terminal beach
family vacations at discount hotel destinations somewhere off the gulf coast where terminal beaches of granulated sucrose sit beneath tropical ale sun, diabetic pale moons, and oceans a very bright blue. the midday air hangs heavy with coca-cola and coconut suntan oil burning off fat, reddened american flesh with all heads nodding in the coastal breeze. upscale open bar ballrooms play hits of the 1980s for husbands, grown tired and bald, wives with the reworked facial asymmetry of a late period Picasso, to dance the love shack, the electric slide, the robot, the horror. my sister and I have a room, our parents connecting. my sister and I sleep separately, as do they. we sat on the edge of our beds, with legs outstretched still too short to reach the floor, the television drowning out the raised voices next door our mother’s rolling hymnal thunder crying I don’t love you anymore. hotel visual brochures, the default channels children’s cartoon reruns, game shows showcase big highs and cavernous lows and sports highlights ad nauseam late summer baseball pennants being clinched like fists balled in sweaty palm trees lining the kitsch décor: sand pipers, sunrises and oil rigs barely visible offshore outside at the break of the tide we remove the plastic bags and beer yoke gags from sea life awash up shore where a tall slight and sharply dressed man calls attention from a podium dug out in the sand. the man informs the audience that it is moral to eat animals because animals feel no pain - “you can tell by their expressionless little faces” he gestures towards an assembly line of badly sunburnt locals dragging a long chain of warped shopping carts from the sea filled with blackened bass and fishbone necklaces like glittering backbones beneath the endless trembling sky because while you are here relaxation is all business, all the time. ii. mayfly mayfly, you are beautiful I know too few words to tell you why our sun now sets in the east. they tell me barren they can fix a heart as sure as they can break one so I hung my head and leaned against you. you said look out the window out the window, everything is green green means life you know? I know that mayfly, I do. I look and see only parking lots and dying grass. coming storms and empty houses. a farmer cannot sew his seeds on hollowed land. you are beautiful, mayfly and I am leaving. iii. young adult fiction You are young and in the way of the unstoppable force that seems to steamroll us like clay: beneath the weight of hydraulic pressure, grasping to piece together whatever is left. Passed over, like spoilt fruit at the market, like milk on the wrong side of an expiration date. The golden years are losing their shine as you dedicate more time to a mindless wander through labyrinthine department store bedroom displays, finely arranged like the personal purgatory of an obsessive futon-fetishist. A life that once seemed so colorful and loud becomes dull and hushed. Gradually graying, losing its features one by one, so you do anything you’re told, buy anything that’s sold to pull blankets over ancient wounds. Overfed and yet still starving because baby, flattery will get you anywhere. And so you buy books for new lovers who do not read, dark roast for uninspired writers who can never sleep, worship your beauty only to die a thousand deaths by the day it leaves, to be left with little but a hasty screed, reading: maybe the things you thought you’d want were never the things you’d really need. iv. large, chain bookstore the sky was green that night and she looked sort of beautiful when we took the stairs up to the first floor. we decided to go to the department store so we went to the department store and sat down. she pointed at the things that made her feel empty and i fell in love with her there, reclining backwards in a sandpiper brown leather loveseat chair as she sang in an A-minor key, leaving long, trailing white scratches on my surface that i could never buffer out. ‘i am going to touch you very, very hard,’ she said. and she did. we decided to go to the book store so we went to the book store and sat down. she pointed at the things that made her feel whole and i told her she was a genius, a gentle beacon that made me less meaningless as she sang in a D-major key, echoing evenly through corridors of condominiums where people would always wither out. ‘i am going to take you very, very far,’ i said. and i did. v. twenty-something the alarm clock goes off, it is six a.m. I am already awake to a morning of cold floors, warm windows, and a citywide view of blacktop plains obstructed by garish parking lots and condominiums with reflective muse en abyme Plexiglas siding, compressing and stacking people like Russian matryoshka dolls. Small gears crank and dwindle as I rise to find the building’s maintenance staff spraying the awning beneath my window with water. I watch as it rains down mud and little Broken bird eggs onto the sidewalk. The subways pass by playing the saddest music in the world – short staccato bursts of breaks harshening and alleviating with each momentary stop. a glazed look of suspicion passes over a tentative rider assemblage with something that glimmers like hope. a man has fallen asleep in the newfound body warmth of the underground metal tube transit system, somewhat but not severely overweight, he is mustached with a hot pink face and estranged, clumping, thin hair resembling something of an unkempt bird’s nest, his scalp now a sacren jest of various hair augmentations (née: transplants) that his body has begun to callously and unpredictably shun. The man in his half-sleep inhales and exhales simultaneously, choking and slumping forward as I make a mental note to not look directly at my own reflection far past my late-twenties. I step into the hot, wet heat and then to the air-conditioned coolness of a fluorescently lit labyrinthine housing amenity store. A middle-aged woman, birdlike and rail thin stares deeply into the fine wood graining of a large cabinet set to consider its prospective feng-shui within a studio apartment, her eyes big pale zeroes honing in on the adjustable shelf heights she will calibrate while exploring the medicinal qualities of good scotch. I sit to eat in front of a television and feel strange without turning it on. I am told on numerous occasions that my future is in domestic hatchbacks with five star safety ratings and watered down pilsners. I feel doom. I turn the lights off. I turn the lights on. I think about the people that I have loved and if they are also awake to share in the same twenty-something suckerpunch crises – that we believe us immortal, exempt from all known laws of physics and likelihood of statistical averages that so flatly iron down the mortality of everyone else and I am now too old to possibly die young. I wonder if the historical imperative has vanished. I wonder if we are really opening big cracks in the sky. I wonder if my tombstone will be engraved: here lies a once promising man. the alarm clock goes off, it is six a.m. |
TRAVIS WELOWSKY is a student in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. He is the Editor-in-chief of Openwide vol. 15 and a member of the FIMSSC. His first film, Debt Sentence, debuted at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2014.