Foreign Films and Modern Plays

Prophet

Prophet

By Danny Hatch

So what happens is — you still with me? Okay. So what happens is I’m riding my bike and I’m miserable but that isn’t really true. I mean, in a general state, yes, I am miserable. But in this exact, you know, moment? And for the last half hour or whatever? I feel good. When I ride my bike I’m powerful. Nobody can fuck with me. I’ve been hit by a car. I got into a fight with a dude in a truck. I even broke both of my wrists (minor fractures) once. But none of that shit stopped me from riding my bike, because the feeling when you’re going, when you’re soaring, when you’re not having to stand up on the fucking pedals and work your ass up a hill, is untouched. By anything. Seriously. I’ve had sex. Not a ton of sex, but whatever. I’ve had it. Doesn’t come close to this. You feel like you’re flying. Going downhill on Ayers, that hundred yard stretch of pure acceleration? It’s…you can…you become it. You just become the wind. And I know how stupid that sounds but it’s true. I even yank out my earbuds when I go down Ayers because I want to experience as much of it as I can. I want to close my eyes and see the future, uninhibited, and feel like that’s what I’m riding into. Which, technically, is true but that’s not the kind of future I’m trying to aim myself into. And I can never keep my eyes shut for too long because I get nervous. Wiping out on that road, going at that speed, without a helmet…that’ll kill you, easy. And I guess you can take it as a sign of my evident self-worth that I do not want to die like roadkill, leave this world as a fried egg mess on the pavement.

So anyway, yeah. I’m riding my bike. And I feel this weird tugging sensation. Like something is lifting me and pushing me forward at the same time. So I guess it’s not really a tugging sensation, then, is it? A tug is a pull, right? I don’t know. I always thought of it as a tug. I can’t remember that part so well, but that part isn’t really that important to, you know, to the core of the story.

Excuse me. Sorry. I’ve been getting a little sick. Sorry. So. Yes. This tugging feeling, right? It’s like something is accelerating me from behind, and I’m starting to get nervous. I’m approaching the light and it’s turning yellow. It’ll be red by the time I get there and I don’t want to go screaming through that intersection, begging to get creamed. Begging to become the new hood ornament on somebody’s Hyundai.

So I start to squeeze the brake a little bit, but nothing happens. There’s no resistance — the little trigger just goes all the way down without slowing. My brake line’s out. Shit, right? I’m only picking up speed now, right at the bottom of the hill, the fastest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I am a blur. If you took a picture of me, you’d think I was a vampire or something. There’s no way you’d catch me in that picture.

And I’m reaching the intersection now, and it’s very busy. I’ve sort of resigned myself to my fate and even I’m a little surprised at how quick that took. I’m not even nervous. My brain is working on autopilot, like, maybe I can weave in between cars or something, become Frogger, but I’m not concerned in the least. It’s like I know I’ll be okay.

My front tire passes the crosswalk without fanfare.

I close my eyes.

And then I’m gone, even though it takes me a few minutes to notice.

Just like that. Poof. Vanished. No smoke, no trail of flames like in Back to the Future. I’ve dried up and disappeared like water in the desert. No trace of me.

I don’t know if anyone saw it. They had to have, right? Nobody just, you know, disappears like that.

When I open my eyes again, I’m not where I was when I shut them. I wonder if I’m dreaming, or if maybe I was dreaming when I was going downhill, but that feels like such a hollow explanation. It was five in the evening in August in Oklahoma when I left (left?) Now it’s, I don’t know, it feels like midnight. It’s cold and dark, the exact opposite of where I was. Tiny little dots of hail rain down upon me. In the distance I can hear ocean.

I know, right? I can see from the look on your face that you don’t believe me, and that’s fine. I wouldn’t believe me, either, but just let me keep going. I promise you’ll see by the end of this.

So anyway. Once my eyes adjust to the dark, I can sort of make out that I’m on a cliff. I guess I’m lucky I figured that out before I walked off of it. Beneath me is the sea or the ocean or a big lake or something, some huge, churning body of water, but that’s way beneath me. I mean, this cliff is high up, man. You know? It’s the highest I’ve ever been, easy, and by this point I’m starting to freak out. The numbness of transition’s starting to wear out and I’m now looking at this reality where I’m way-the-fuck high up and way-the-fuck alone. And with no clue as to how I got there or how to get back?

And then, way off in the distance, I hear something that makes me freak out even more.

It’s large, that’s all I knew then and all I really know now. I feel like my brain sort of shut most of the details out, even though they’re right there. I can see it clearly. My brain’s just telling me it’s not real, despite, the…you know, despite everything else.

What my brain is trying to tell me that I didn’t see God, but my memory is telling me that I obviously did.

And what I’m about to tell you, Officers Kent and Downey, is going to make you believe me too.

Officer Kent, you were born in 1979 in Chickasha. Your parents divorced when you were twelve, and you had a delinquent phase as a result of that. You graduated high school a year later than the rest of your peers and had to take extra entry tests to convince the Police Academy to let you in. You lost your virginity when you were nineteen, and you regret how it went, and I’m not going to go into the details out loud with everyone here but if you really don’t believe I can show you in private. You woke up this morning with a headache and you stubbed your toe on the way to the bathroom and you thought about drinking for the first time in seven years, which is making you more and more nervous.

Officer Downey, you were born in 1974. You spent a few years in New York City, specifically Manhattan, more specifically the Lower East Side. You were briefly a part of the art scene there before you ran out of money and moved back here to Edmond to live with your parents, whose only provisions were that you had to go to school if you were going to live under their roof. You tell people you took the entrance exam to the Police Academy on a lark but you actually studied very hard for it for months. If people knew anything about the exam, they’d know that you can’t just take it on a lark, and they would’ve called you on your bullshit, but they don’t so they didn’t.

Something out there, that big thing that I heard in the distance, found itself face to face with me and looked me in the eye and imparted me with this curse of knowing everything about everything I see and I don’t know how to get rid of it.

So the thing, this dinosaur looking thing, it cranes its giant neck down and stares me in the eyes, like I said. They were as big as I am, those eyes. This thing was giant, and as soon as we locked eyes, I understood, I knew that this is the thing responsible for the entire universe. For you, for me, for everybody. It created everything and now it just wanders around in this vast expanse of nothing—or, almost nothing—and just fucks around. Ruins things. Ruins me.

And then I was back here and I was upright for a second and then something big hit me and my point of view went all sideways.

And then I woke up again in here with people whose personal histories and most fucked-up secrets I know everything about telling me I’m lucky to be alive and that a car hit me, which it obviously would, because I rode my bicycle into the middle of a busy intersection like an asshole.

And I guess that’s it.

And also God wants you to know, apparently, that the world’s going to end in three days.

Tourist Trap

“Tourist Trap”

by Danny Hatch

1.

It was a beautiful day. Even Tim, who hated the heat and the sun, was happy.

“It’s nice out, huh?” he said to Sarah, but she didn’t answer. She just stared out of the car window, jealous of everything she saw.

“We have to do this, you know,” Tim said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”
“I don’t think we do.”
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”
“I’m not getting out of the car when we get there.”
“Fine,” Tim said. “I’ll crack the window for you.”
Leave it to Sarah to ruin his good mood, to try and sabotage the day. He made himself promise that he wouldn’t let her.

They drove for a long time in silence. The radio stayed silent, because there was always the danger of a song saying something you were thinking. Communication drips out of every possible thing. It drove Sarah mad.

She hated this. It wasn’t just stupid and a waste of the day — something about it was, on some deep, angry level, very debased. It had a metallic taste of evil that she couldn’t shake and that she didn’t like. But did Tim care? No, of course not. He had to experience everything he could, try out all the new things he could get his hands on. He lived for life and not for her, and that’s probably what she’d tell him if it ever got to the point where they’d find themselves sitting with two divorce lawyers.

It was bound to happen, really. She was unhappy more than she wasn’t. She glanced over at Tim for a second. He was tapping the steering wheel to the beat of some song playing in his head. She hated when he did that. She hated when he did a lot of things. He probably hated a lot of things she did, too. But they’d fucked it up by having children, and then they’d fucked it up some more by having more children and how do you get divorced with three kids? And with the church breathing down your neck? What did you do then?

The window was warm against the side of her head. Sarah brushed the hair out of her face and fell asleep.

Tim glanced over at her when he was sure she was out. Sarah hated when he looked at her for too long. It made her feel squirmy. He tried not to press her about her upbringing – she instantly clammed up whenever he brought it up. Something must have happened. The way she reacted to everything he tried to do…it was so hard.

I deserve a break, Tim thought. I deserve to see this, to experience this. I am a good man. I am a good man. I am a good man.

Supposedly, they wouldn’t let you in if they didn’t think you could handle it. And really, who could handle it? But all week long, Tim had been practicing, steeling himself for the deepest of their scrutinizing. Ever since Ted from work had told him about it.

“It’s awesome,” he said. “Seriously. But I wouldn’t want to, you know, live there.”
“How long were you there?” Tim said.
“I don’t know. It felt like a long, long time. But Shellie told me it was really only a couple of hours. Things don’t make sense there like they do here.”
“Yeah? Was it busy?”
“Not at all. People aren’t ready for it. It’ll close in a year, I guarantee. There’s no way that place is making enough of a profit to last.”
“Maybe it’ll catch on.”
“No way. Go as soon as you can. Seriously.”

So now here he was, following Ted’s advice. Regret began to creep into his head, and he considered turning around and calling the whole thing off. What did Ted know, anyway?

But he didn’t turn the car around. He wouldn’t. He put up with enough of Sarah’s shit, the craziness, the deep sense of unrest that only began to show itself after they’d wed. After she’d tricked him.

Stop it, Tim. Don’t think like that.

Sarah turned in her sleep a little bit.

Tim sighed.

Just try this one little thing for yourself, just make it through this, and then let her win everything else. It isn’t worth it. Just let this be your last hurrah.

Yeah. Yeah, okay. His last hurrah. He could get behind that.

He increased the speed on his cruise control.

He could get behind that.

2.

The change in velocity stirred Sarah out of her sleep. They were slowing down.

“Good morning, you,” Tim said.
“Hi, sweetheart.”

They were in Tim’s little beater car. She was surprised they had even managed to get it on the highway.

“She’s hanging in there pretty well,” Tim said and clapped the dashboard like it was a shoulder.

The picnic basket bounced around in the backseat, jolted by every little chip in the road.

I should grab the wine glasses before they break, Sarah thought, but she didn’t do anything.

She was young and at the start of something good and the vision looking into the tunnel of her future was sweet. The wine glasses wouldn’t break.

And if they did, they’d take turns taking slugs out of the bottle. Like they’d done the other night, because Tim didn’t have any cups at his apartment.

“How do you have nothing?” she’d said.

He’d only shrugged. “I had some plastic cups, but those ran out a week ago.”
“Do you even care about yourself?” she asked.
“Yeah, I…yes. Of course.”
“You live like an animal.”
“I get by,” he said. “And most of the time I eat at the student center. Where there are cups.”
“I just don’t get it.”
“Well, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

She pushed the memory out of her head. He was twenty-two. He was afforded some leniency in the acting-like-a-human-being department. Nevermind the fact that she was twenty-one and wasn’t afforded any of it.

You had this fight already, Sarah. Leave it.

She closed her eyes.

“You okay?” Tim asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just a little groggy.”
“Sure. We have a few more minutes to go. Take your time waking up.”
“Mm,” she said and grabbed at his right hand, leaving him to drive with only his left. She knew it made him nervous, but she also knew that he could drive just fine with one hand.

They drove the rest of the way to the park in silence, with only the clinking of the wine glasses in the back for company.

3.

“We’re almost here,” Tim said as Sarah rubbed the little grains of sleep out of her eyes.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked.

Tim glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “I don’t know,” he said. “Forty-five minutes, maybe. An hour, tops.”
“Mm.”
“Do you feel any better?”
“No, Tim, I do not feel better.” The nerve of him. “I am very much against this, and you won’t listen to me.”
“Can’t you just let me have this?”
“No! Not this one! It’s wrong, Tim! It’s…it’s fucked up!”

Tim breathed in slowly, through his nostrils. He held it for a long time before he exhaled.

“You are going to let me have this,” he said, “and you are not going to say another word about it. Because I deserve it. And that’s it. That’s the end of this conversation. You don’t have to go in with me, but I’m not going to listen to another fucking word about it. Understand?”

He’d never spoken to her like this, but God knows he’d wanted to. She stared at him with an expression of pure pain and then unbuckled her seatbelt.

“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m going into the back. I want to lie down.”
“Be…god damn it” — swerving out of the way of a squirrel. “Be careful.”
“Like you care.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘like you give a fuck.’”
“Bitch,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I said, ‘cunt.’”
“Oh, fuck you, Tim.”
“Grow up, Sarah.”
“You grow up. You’re like a frat boy. Just one thrill after the next. Nothing but pleasure-seeking.”
“Nothing but…are you listening to yourself? All my life I devote to you and your…your…what’s the word that stupid fucking feelings-doctor used, your…quirks! All I do is provide for you and for our children and you call me a ‘thrill seeker’?”

Sarah didn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” Tim said. “I fucking thought so.”

He checked the map he’d printed out and made a left turn.

“We need to do something about this,” he said after a few minutes.

Sarah laughed from the back seat, a sad, one-note ha.

“I just…I need to see this. It’s going to eat at me forever if I don’t. I promise this is the last thing. I promise.”
“It doesn’t matter, Tim.”

“We’re here.”

They pulled into a gravel parking lot. Sarah closed her eyes and relished the crunching sound. She wished they were her bones.

The parking lot was mostly empty. Tim parked the car and closed his eyes, scratching his head until the spot he was scratching felt numb.

“Are you coming?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Fine.”

“Tim, if you go in there, I am leaving you. It’s over.”
He didn’t say anything, just opened the door and shut it very gently once he was out.

4.

Tim walked unsteadily on the gravel.

Tim, if you go in there, I am leaving you. It’s over.

He deserved this, remember?

There was an admissions booth, a run-down little shed with peeling, cracked paint. This place was supposed to be brand new. How did it already look this bad?

“Hi,” Tim said as he approached the booth.

“How many?” said the attendant. She didn’t look like any age in particular. Plain and ageless with brown hair and a blank face.
“Just, uh, just one.”
“Do you know what you’re getting into here?”
“Yes.”
“By entering, you absolve this organization of all responsibility in the event that something should happen to you in there.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think you can handle this?”
“I deserve this.” He hadn’t meant to say that. He’d just meant to say “yes” again, but there you go.

She stared at him for a second.

“Okay.”
“How…um…what are your, uh, what are your rates?”

She handed him a piece of paper.

Please let them be too expensive, he thought. Please give me an out here.

He looked at the paper. They weren’t too expensive at all. They were extremely reasonable.

“How do…how do you guys make any money here?” he asked.

“That doesn’t concern us.”
“Oh.”

He looked out past the admissions shack. Beyond it was the unthinkable, a significant chunk in the story of human history. A portal past the end of the world, down into what they warned you about. Pure debauchery. Pure enlightenment and pleasure and freedom and otherworldly perfection. Nothing he’d been taught in Catholic school had described this place as anything like this.

It was hidden past a shroud of grey, a veil of deep fog that stretched as far as Tim could see in every direction.

He turned his attention back towards the counter and paid his meager entrance fee, then turned around. Sarah was sitting upright in the car. He’d forgotten to leave the window open. Well, she’d figure something out. She was staring at him intently, her face slack, but her eyes steely.

He turned back around and approached the fog. He could feel the grey licking at his skin.

Tim, if you go in there, I am leaving you. It’s over.

What did he deserve?

What was desire?

This was desire. This right here, pure desire. He breathed heavily, open-mouthed. Pressed in between two forces, he was stuck without a decision. Pulled in two directions, but that was a cop-out, because he had his own will. This was his own call, entirely.

Tim turned around again and looked at Sarah from the car. He thought about what Ted had said. How perfect it was in there. How fulfilled he’d been.

Ted was a glorified data enterer. He was an idiot. But this seemed pretty universal, and even with his back turned toward it he could feel the fog as if he was face to face with it.

I know what I’m doing, he thought.

Tim walked forward.

Sarah felt nothing.

I don’t know what this is, so now you have to define it

This is either a complete little short story or the beginning of a longer thing. I saved the document under the name “Spirit in the Night” on my computer, because it’s about teenagers being sad and drunk at the lake, just like the song. I don’t know what to actually call it though. So for now, it’s nothing. You can read it below the jump. It was my first time writing in third-person in a long time, and it felt kind of unnatural to me. I hope it isn’t overly trite or whatever. Thanks. I just finished writing it, like, four minutes ago.

***

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Poem at 2:27 P.M. on March 29, 2013

July in Oklahoma,
riding home from work on my bike.
Shirtless in the thick summer air,
beautiful and dangerous.
I let the warm, angry midnight land on my tongue.
Sometimes it festers.
Sometimes it melts.
Thinking of all the possibilities,
all of the greater goods
that don’t exist in Oklahoma.
Twenty years down,
a thousand years to go.
Pure angst.
Unearned.
Blood from my nose dripping down my face as I make myself a blur,
a smear of red and bicycle spokes.
Unable to be caught on film,
I am a vampire. 

Some poems, because woe is me, right fellas?

Here are some poems because it’s Sunday and I wrote them. You do not have to enjoy them. I understand that poetry is the worst. I completely understand this. Actually, this probably doesn’t even count as poetry. None of it rhymes and it’s not very rhythmic. But go in with an open mind, you philistines.

“Painted Man”

I am a painted man

A stain

A sham

I have seen things

you will never see

and you should think yourself very lucky.

I have listened to the albums

and read the books

and felt all the feelings

I’m supposed to have felt

But still I am nothing.

Still I am searching.

I am a pair of eyes

and a great big lying mouth.

Broken skin

I’m a whisper

I am a shout.

I am the prickling feeling in your nose

right there at the top

the one you get when you think

of how alone and how apart and how alive you are

and you start to tear up a little.

I am fostered by champions of art

by professional talkers

and encouragers

I have crossed my fingers so much

that they are beginning to get sore.

That’s what this will do to you.

“Abstract Expressionism”

She leaves her windshield wipers off

when she’s driving through the rain

she says likes the way the water

makes the world look like a painting by Monet

or Manet.

Either one.

We’re going too fast now, and I can’t see

everything is just a blurry smear of colors.

Red from the traffic light we just ran,

green from the neon sign selling us a better life.

She won’t slow down.

“Isn’t it kind of dangerous?” I ask.
“Thinking like that? Driving like this?”
She won’t answer. She’s lost in the road

and I’m lost in what we used to be.

And for one brief, beautiful second,

I see what we are.

And she sees what we are.

And we look at each other.

We have become abstract expressionism.

“Razor”

The ceiling opens up

and out tumble the razor blades.

They shred us to ribbons as they fall

and tie us up in neat little bows

and it is only once the blood has dried

and the clinking has settled

that we look at them

and realize that they are only family pictures.

Here is another new short story

I guess my new thing is hammering out sad short stories and immediately putting them online at absurdly early hours over the weekend. This one is very sad and is an idea that’s been in my mind for awhile. I’ve tried writing it before but it’s never really amounted to much. This is probably the best that’s come of it and it’s still very rough, but I’m proud of it. It even has a happy ending. I don’t have a title for it, though, so call it No Name No. 8. Okay, I have a title for it now.

“No Name No. 8”

Holly is crouched over on the bench, her neck and head spilling out past the perimeter of her knees and into the aisle of the train. She stairs at the speckled floor, looking at its red and white dots, scattered across the ground’s black canvas. The train screams along underground. The carriage bows and sways to the engine’s velocity. Her heart is thumping, her skin feels uncomfortable. It hangs on her like an old coat, back from the days when she felt bigger, fuller, happier. Her head hurts.

Her mouth still tastes like semen, despite the Pepsi she guzzled down as soon as she could. It used to get rid of the taste; now it seems like her body’s becoming immune. Her mouth feels like an enemy agent, working against her, proudly bearing the mark of her desperation. Holly wonders if she can smell it on her breath. She can’t tell.

How did you end up like this, Holly? Just like poor, stupid Fantine? Didn’t you dream a dream, too? In her pocket is a lump of cash that feels dirty and ugly pressed against her hip through the welcome wall of her jeans. In her head is a vision of where she was supposed to be at this point, and it is certainly not this. She was supposed to be climbing the ranks, making it big, fulfilling every goal her mind had come up with for her. Instead, she’s riding the subway home well after midnight after trading sexual favors for money just so she can prove a point, so she can lie to her family about how well she’s doing in The Big City.

The train picks up speed and then almost immediately slows down as it pulls into a station a million miles from her home. Holly looks up and sees the slight reflection of her face in the opposite window, but doesn’t dwell on it. She can’t, not right now. Instead, she focuses her attention on the giant, offensively happy advertisements hanging from the wall beyond the window.

Every stupid, smiling face in the ad. Every life that isn’t hers, every out-of-reach product or treatment or lifestyle. All mocking her, all looking at her stupid, gasping face and laughing.

She stands and gets off.

I’ll wait for the next one. I can’t be on this anymore.

After some time, the train pulls away from the station.

Holly paces up and down the platform, feels the hard little bumps of the yellow strip at the edge. The place you’re not supposed to stand.

The bumps dig into the soles of her feet. They feel good. They feel like freedom, even though she knows that makes no sense.

She is standing completely still, staring into the dark of the tunnel, waiting for the next train. That was stupid to get off. Fuck. Now she won’t be home until that much later. Fuck. Fuck.

Never again, Holly tells herself, but she told herself that last time, too. And the time before that. There is no never again. Never again is a pointless thing to say. It will always be this way.

That’s not true.

It’s very true, Holly. It’s very, very true.

Get home safe.

stop it

i dreamed a dream i dreamed a dream i dreamed a

The train lurches to a sudden stop. Bodies are thrown forward, people crumpling to the floor. The air conditioning stops, its presence made all the more huge by its disappearance. The list of stops overhead blinks out. Everything shuts down.

Stunned silence begins to inflate the train car like a balloon. Nobody talks, because everyone knows something bad has just happened, something very, very bad.

The intercom crackles to life.

“Uh, folks, brrrrzzzppt nd by, we seem to have bbbrrrsssppzzzt uck something, waiting for the bbrrrrzzzssshhhttt patcher.”

Somewhere below them, the rats whine and stare at the crumpled body, waiting for the coast to clear so that they can make their move. The train means death; they will wait until the train is gone.

For one last, brief second, everything matters and then nothing matters anymore.

Somewhere above them, Holly smiles.

Here’s a new short story

Sorry it’s been so long since I updated. This is me trying to do the Hemingway-style extreme minimalism and using only dialogue to set the scene. It is very hard to do that, and that’s why this is so short.

It’s called “Trial Separation.” Here’s a direct link, but it’s the post right below this one, so I guess this post was pretty redundant.

I love you.

http://dannyhatch.tumblr.com/post/43878987361/trial-separation

Trial Separation

Trial Separation

“What is it?”
“Look.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Look.”

“I’m looking.”

“Do you see it now?”
“No.”
“Jeez…okay. Follow my finger. See? Look where my finger’s going.”
“I still don’t see it.”
“It’s the Big Dipper.”
“I, yeah, I mean I know what it is, I just don’t really see how it looks like a big dipper.”
“It…see? There’s the handle, that star there, and then…see, there’s the actual cup.”
“Okay, I guess. It’s kind of a stretch.”

“I guess, maybe. Jesus, I’m cold.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“This isn’t going very well.”
“Wow.”
“I mean, isn’t it, though?”
“I thought it was going okay.”
“Really?”
“Well…no. I guess not. I mean, not great, but not…’not very well.’”

“Sorry.”
“Yeah, well.”
“I, yeah, I’m getting really cold. Let’s go to the car.”
“Actually I want to lay here for another second.”
“We can’t stay out here for much longer, seriously.”

“I know. Just, humor me.”
“Okay.”

“You’re so warm. I miss you a lot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That you miss me.”
“Don’t you miss me too?”
“Yes. I just…I’m sorry I’m making you miss me. It’s not my…I don’t mean to.”
“I know. I know.”
“It’s just…a trial separation? Really? I mean, Jesus.”
“I thought it was what we needed.”
“Do you still think that?”
“I don’t know.”

“God. God.”

“I’m sorry.”
“I mean, the retreat, the…the counseling…I just…”
“I know.”
“And still.”
“Still.”
“And then we do this.”
“It’s nice, though, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s nice, of course it’s nice, but…”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That sighing thing. I hate when you do that to me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It makes me feel stupid.”
“I said I didn’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
“Maybe this is a bad idea. I’ll take you back to the house.”
“No, no, just…stay here for a little bit. Please.”
“It’s so cold out here, though. Can’t we sit in the car and talk or something?”
“We have the blanket. We’ll be okay.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Thanks.”

“Thanks for wanting to be with me tonight.”
“I’m sorry I’m doing this to you.”

“I’m sorry I’m doing it to you.”
“We’re hopeless, aren’t we? Why did you flinch?”

“No reason. I’m fine.”

“Are you uncomfortable?”
“No, why?”
“I don’t know, just the way I’m lying on you. I don’t want your arm to fall asleep.”
“It’s not. I’m good. Are you comfortable?”
“Yeah.”
“I still love you, Emily.”
…

“Did you hear me?”
…

“I said I still love you. I want you back.”
…

“Emily?”
“We should probably go.”
“Come on, Emily.”
“I need more time.”
“This is hell for me. Please don’t do this to me anymore.”
“I’m sorry.”
“God. Fuck. Fuck.”
“I need more time.”
“I just want you to be happy, I guess, but oh my God. I can’t hold on anymore. I’m falling apart.”
“Please, let’s go.”
“Yeah. Okay. Fine.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You already said that. I’ll get the blanket. Let’s just go.”

“I just don’t know what I want right now.”
“Yes you do.”

…

“Yes you do.”

So…

Transit, part eight (let’s get metaphysical)

Hey guys, sorry about the delay. Last night I wrote a really fun long intro but then I lost it so I got discouraged and decided to put off Tumblr until today.

SO HERE IS THE EIGHTH PART OF MY STORY! IT IS VERY WEIRD AND METAPHYSICAL! It was fun to write.

Click here to catch up on previous parts of this ongoing story. And listen to me on Keith and The Girl here!

Okay, so sorry this intro is lame. I’ll write the fun intro next week, I promise. Thanks, as always, for your continued love support.

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