jarhead3

alt.gossip.celebrities

Subject: Elsa Finch

12th July 2004 10:21:23 pm

What a cockwhore! Elsa Finch is so disgusting! She's a nasty bag of bones and she just just starve her stupid self to death so maybe she can finally fit in those gawdy fashion outfits

Read the whole story so far: Untouchable

Characters and Places: Elsa Fibocin, Internet Noise, letters

A new vibration is behind his eyes—a leftover buzz of having been missing in the darkness—the unconsciousness of being unconscious. Something is pinched in his neck, tugging at his shoulders. Black slowly becomes gray and the vibration recedes. There is no pain, though his neck is at an odd angle as though he were standing on his head and then fell asleep. His feet are suspended beside him. A new feeling comes over Allen: an urgency to open his eyes. Everywhere cold objects are pressed numbly against him, or rather warm objects are pressing the cold that is him. The shift stick is pressed into his thigh. The steering wheel is wrapped around his left arm like a paperclip. His back is still against his seat.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, Frank Frederick

As the two crows move from the ground to the sky with heavy long flaps of their wings, a raindrop disturbs an ashen grass blade. Another drop falls, and then another. As the minutes pass, and the crows become small black points in the gray furrowed sky, the rain steadily increases. More and more raindrops fall until the sound of a rush is upon the field. It rains heavy until the crows are far out of sight and then for several minutes more.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Animals, two crows

The sky overhead has crushed all movement. Even at sixty miles per hour he is going nowhere. And he is lost in his head. The horizon is always “out there” and far away, until low clouds roll in and cover you and quietly the world becomes a bowl at the bottom of which you sit. You do not so much contemplate the distance as just the gray of what is near. It is never harmful to ask on such a day, “Why do I bother?” as the sky pulls you under. He is looking at this world covered over until he sees the brilliance of the red brake lights in front of him. Is he okay? He’s stopped! Shit! He grabs the wheel to pull hard right. The rearview mirror: nothing but a truck grill. Fuck! Hold on… Oh God, I love you, Jodie.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, Gary Travers

ca ˙ fé (ka-fey) n. a coffee-house; a restaurant, usually licensed for the sale of light refreshments only.

“Well, there you go,” Allen says and sets the dictionary back on the bookshelf. At 3:12pm, the pressure system had gotten to him and he decides to leave. And then he decides to get a dog. No matter the kind of Allen-logic it was because he was going to be in Atlanta an hour before Jodie got off work, he wanted go to the humane shelter and get a dog. Allen had been meaning to get a dog for a while. But every time he went to Atlanta, it only ever occurred to him to go see Jodie. Whatever she wanted to do, they did—not that Allen minded—Jodie was the native. She knew everything fun in Atlanta to do.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, Animals, James the Dog

The attendant turns around with his back to the counter and asks Allen without looking at him, “What color?” “Oh. Uh… black, I guess.” The attendant turns around with the black lighter in his hand and tosses it to Allen. Leaving the attendant’s calloused and oily hand, the lighter begins its arc twisting in persistent rotations as it moves through the air and over the counter, its black color like a hole against the white of the counter, the lights, the colored packs of cigarettes. Moving upward and outward the lighter makes its way across the counter and continues up past the smudged and dirty glass where beyond and out of focus, Allen’s Buick sits waiting. With each one hundred and eighty degree rotation the lighter moves both up and forward, blurring it’s oblong shape into an out-of-focus circle, spinning rapidly and persistently. A semi drives past in the window behind the attendant’s head. The truck rushes by in a seventy mile an hour blur, wind invisible and all around it pushing backwards from the cab in tight pulled lines and dispersing at the end of the truck spiraling and flying off in a thousand chaotic directions; noise vibrating behind a thin black line bent into the infinite single side of a circle turning and spinning and hurling at Allen.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson

Shit. Allen had completely forgotten to check the gas before he left town. As luck would have it, the gas gauge was down to the last quarter. Of course, he was relatively sure that the next station was only a few minutes away, but still the sudden realization had jolted him. He had noticed just in time. The stations along 316 got sparse before Atlanta. If he had missed the next station, he would not have made it to Atlanta; that much was for sure. Allen could see himself standing along the side of the road, leaning back on the trunk of his car, staring up and watching the wrinkles and creases of the clouds. He would wait for help but not with any sense of urgency as the sky moved over him. His mind would wander.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson

As he looks at stars, he imagines photons in a mad race to pound his eyes. Each photon coming from not only vast distances, but vastly different amounts of time. He shifts his vision from one star to another, knowing that all the while they seem a lightbright of the sky; they are wildly—millions of light years apart—and so wildly different in ages. Light takes time. In this night sky, the night before he returns to a metropolis where he will no longer see them so brightly, he desperately tries to accept their age—the only sound near him, the pounding waves of Montauk. The waves are of great assistance. Though he cannot hear it, the light must be just like that he thinks. He must see the light from one star in waves only to turn his foveal view to another desperate pinpoint in the dark in order to receive some different amplitude from a different part of the universe—well, the galaxy he thinks. But he stares up at the night over Montauk, the ocean encouraging, knowing that up in that black, there is no decimation, war, famine, poverty, disease, and murder. The human eye is made to be perpendicular to gravity at best. But of so many creatures on this rock—Jason looks to the sand, briefly—so many animals; humans look up. There are no tigers in the sky; no reason to fear it, no reason. Once upon a time, the night sky was a picture show. Jason stares with generations of knowledge that drags him through the recognition that those pinpoints are not that at all, but orbs of fire drifting in the almost nothing.

And he is witness.

Read the whole story so far: Brain->Wash

Characters and Places: Jason Gunn

“Thank you. Have a nice day,” Jodie says and brushes her hands on her apron to get the dirt off.

The customer nods politely and takes his newly acquired fern out of the shop with him. Jodie leans on the counter with her head cradled in her hands and smiles after him because he seems so tickled to have bought a plant. He was older, maybe sixty, and she wonders if it is a plant for him or if he bought it for his wife—mostly because she wants to believe it is a gift. And she wants to believe that they are an old married couple and that the gift has no occasion, no anniversary or birthday—he just bought it for her.

Ron Jameson taps Jodie on the shoulder and she comes out of her daydream in front of the cash register.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m getting out of your hair.”

Jodie is relieved but smiles. “That’s okay.”

“Honestly, I just feel like I’m in your way when I’m here.”

“Oh, you’re not,” she pats him on the shoulder.

Jameson laughs. He preferred to just use the shop as a place to dicker around—someplace other than his house. He was glad to have Jodie running things, even though he knew he irritated her with his constant futzing and he really was just trying to help or at least not feel useless. The two of them did what they could to accommodate each other. “Well, at any rate, I’m leaving.”

“Okay.”

“You’re all right?” Then, he feels stupid for asking.

“I’m fine. Git.” She giggles and gives him a light push on the shoulder.

“All righty. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Have a nice day.” Jodie smiles as Jameson leaves through the back door because she is halfway tempted to tell him that customers aren’t supposed to use that door, or something like that.

She spruces the stock a bit, waiting for the next customer. Despite the weather, a number of people had been in and out. Then again, maybe it was the weather making people want a little bit of color. Glancing out the shop window to the street, she looks at how gray everything is. At least the temperature was nice. It had stayed around sixty-five all day. Looking to the phone, Jodie has the sudden urge to call Allen now since Jameson is gone. She wants to tell him that everything is okay and that she was just upset and was missing him. He could be so nonchalant, like it didn’t matter if he was coming down for the weekend. She’d told him not to come, hadn’t she? But whatever. When he got here he could “help” her in the stock room. Jodie stares at the hot pink azaleas as she smiles.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Jodie Copeland