Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

And then it was over. Or almost over. The rest played like a quick rill of notes, sense impressions flitting past rapidly as a video cassette locked on fastforward. The sky darkened. The air warmed. The planet lunged. Sharon disappeared and Itty gained sight of a sparsely populated rectangular parking lot, a gray shoeboxish building in its center, a bright silver set of gas pumps on a nearby cement island, a large sign (red letters on white) warning no more gas nor food for eighty miles, and, in his last dizzying reeling wink, this also: two tall monitor lizards in ski masks black as bowling balls sprinting from the entrance followed a split second later by a squat lump of bread dough wielding a broomstick, shotgun, or baseball bat (it was hard to tell which at this speed) whom Itty, despite his most ardent last gestures to the contrary, including a quickly mouthed prayer to the effect that if he survived this seemingly final tribulation he swore, swore , he would become the human his middle name had always implied, targeted with unintentional ease and actually pile-drove two feet through the sidewalk just out front of the glass doors pastiched with polychromatic ads for mouthwatering beef jerkies, delicious corndogs, spicy buffalo wings, day-glo sun-visors, orangish marshmallow peanuts, cheap wristwatches, rattlesnake paperweights, inflatable neck pillows, cartoon-character key-chains that lauded the sexual prowess of their owners, and sweatshirts saying things like MY PARENTS VISITED THE BLACK MOUNTAINS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID SWEATSHIRT that led into the Iron Lightning-Faith IttyBigMan’s, or IBM’s, for short.

SEATTLE: BARBIE: OMEGA

Alexis, split ends of her dyed candy-apple-red hair tickling her elbows, bright white undershirt flashing beneath her unbuttoned baggy burgundy flannel shirt, sack of groceries balancing precariously in each thin arm, tripped over herself (those glossy black combat boots of hers two sizes too large and yet the smallest the store she visited carried when she decided she desperately, desperately needed a pair) as she entered the door of her multi-latched second-floor apartment in the artsily grubby if fringily dynamic Capitol Hill section of Seattle ten minutes late (the express line at the corner market being these days slow as a fat mucousy slug on a cold morning floor), took one look at Flynn slumping in front of the tv in his shredded underwear and yellowish socks, alternately channel surfing and working to free something potentially interesting he’d just discovered atop his shaved pate, and saw when he turned to welcome her with a reflexive plaque-filled smile in mid-pick, not the guy she had happily moved in with two years ago in a typhoon of lust after meeting two months earlier at this finger-gnawingly wild party (which, if the truth be known, she only dimly remembered these days) at a gallery-loft on gray-and-brick Tenth Street where she was just then showing the first triptychs from her Barbie series ( Barbie Meets Charlie Manson on Speed, Barbie Meets Alien Shortly After the Death of Her Really Special Babies at the Hands of Sigourney Weaver, Barbie Meets Kurt Cobain in Drag When He’s In a Very Bad If Not Heroin-Induced Mood ) and where Flynn, once adorable Flynn, was trying to pocket this dead bird he’d recently discovered in a corner behind an assemblage involving tiny cages, glistening dentures, and various other minuscule thingumabobs, a sparrow or something, Flynn not especially good at naming anything that didn’t with some regularity appear in cities and have a metallic component or hard drive, thinking maybe he’d caused it somehow to fall from said assemblage, one of the most genuinely vulnerable and bewildered grins on that five-o’clock-shadowed deliverer-of-cigarettes-to-various-vending-machines-around-town face of his you are ever likely to see, but rather someone who’d gone rosy and pudgy around the middle, thin and shiny along the widening widow’s peaks, and lazy after work to an almost vegetative degree in that fuschia futon in front of that fucking tv beneath that rad poster of Blackwater Scabies, the technoguerre band he played in with decreasing frequency, if still lip-service passion, originally intent on creating the-first-on-their-block mixed media extravaganza fusing computer-enhanced industrial noise (you should have seen Flynn at his Macintosh keyboard in those early days, fingers fast and graceful as Glenn Gould unfurling his rendition of Goldberg Variations ), performance art (many ball bearings and clouds of what might pass for diesel fuel becoming airborne in the general direction of the generally stoned audience), and recitations of free verse so disgusting and caustically arch (“let me chew your tumor, babe,/ and watch it bleed/ all over my nice new Van Heusen shirt…”) that it would redefine the very concepts of chic cynicism and flip irony, now content instead to blip from one tapeworm of jazzy images to the next until he fell into a chin-spittling sleep around ten, when the local anchor people opened their mouths in unison — and so Alexis just set down those groceries in the cramped kitchen smelling vaguely of onions no matter what air freshener she employed and returned to the cramped living room where she suggested maybe a little too strongly (“Get the fuck out of my head, Flynn”) that they spend some time apart, beginning in another twenty minutes or so, and (here was the thing she’d always relive from that moment like a very bad case of flashback blues) Flynn, without so much as a snort of surprise, clicked off the remote control, stood, stuck his right hand down his underpants, itched his incrementally more cellulited butt, and said: “So did you like get the munchies or what?”

LOVE IS A BULLET

The thing that just pissed the everlasting daylights out of her was that, no matter how much she pleaded with her memory of him, no matter how much she begged that warty green neckless ogre drooling in the dark slimy corner of her psyche, double-jointed thumb exploring its left nostril, to leave, she just couldn’t get even an eyebrow-flick of its attention. God knows she tried. She really did try. Except, of course, for those weak-spirited spans so late at night that the sky beyond her curtainless windows began ashening toward dawn, and Alexis’s bladder sloshed, saturated and awash in an ocean of urine, and she grumpily struggled from that fuschia futon and shuffled into the bathroom, and then upon her return to bed couldn’t no matter what she did skate back into the serene carpeted corridors of sleep because nostalgia bustled in with its big noisy bag of party favors and hunkered at the foot of her mattress in this huge, ugly, hunch-backed, slobbering, carbuncular sort of way. She had to accept the progressively obvious fact that love was a bullet fired pointblank by some cosmic Mark David Chapman into her solar plexus, that it just lodged there, upsetting her biorhythms something awful, and that, even though its main charge might have been spent during that first instant, hot fragments of its remains shifted uneasily among her soggy organs as she bent to untie her combat boots every evening, extended her left hand to mix two dabs of pungently colored acrylics every morning. Because, if the truth be known, she had after all just spent the last two years, the last twenty four months, the last one hundred and four weeks with a guy who knew exactly how to tickle her hard enough so she almost wet her pants yet tenderly enough so that things never turned really malicious, a guy who remembered at least one out of the two birthdays they spent together, brought her that duet of roses when she got so sick with the flu she furled up under a burial mound of quilts, blankets, and pillows, and waited to expire. Who even the most die-hard skeptic had to admit at least once upon a time possessed the cutest little buns, the sugariest little boyish smile, the raddest patchouli scent behind his earlobes and beneath his jaw. Not to mention some major, major genius with respect to sexual stratagems and music-making. And yet and yet and yet: Flynn was just a guy, okay? He had that male pouty-disarmingly-helpless manipulation business down to a kind of high art form. And his deportment had pretty much evaporated in most matters worth talking about. Save for those hand-slapping-walls sexual stratagems, which once, damn it (but only once), drove her back to his bed this single exceptionally existentially shitty night three weeks after their initial breakup, and ended with him asking her, Alexis’s head resting upon his chest, “So does this like mean we’re together again or something?” And, heck, she told herself: she had had other guys in the past, she would have other guys in the future, some worse and some better than Flynn (afraid of course with each union of what sort of infectious disease might ring her up half a decade later to say hiya, sweet thing, we’re thinking of you), and that’s just how life worked itself out.