Carbine: Stories

Weather

0 Weather = He claimed someone at the office pushed the political button on him. The competing claim he’d pushed it on himself. And why would anyone do such a thing to himself but to clarify his continuing failure? Away, he was alone. Alone in his room, he feared God might not be protecting his home and his people as he wished God might. Outside his room, the hills and the trees. The forest and farther off, he believed, the water. As though he had been placed here in the middle of all this nothing. Or forest. Or land. Or water. The others had gotten out of it and he was left in his room to wait until he could get out. He knocked over the bottle. Crack of it hitting the table loud—echoing as though the room were empty. The bottle did not break. The terror one could be alone here for all the time he had. Forest as far as he could see. Every second relentless. Dull ache in the whiskey. She lonesome somewhere as he was here. His city experiencing an increase in dementia. The ever-aggressive senior drivers. Depression on the rise, hanging like despair over the yards and family rooms. The food in the stores appeared as other—as normal—food. The exhausted love of the now in the cul-de-sacs. The place itself suspect. In his fantasy life, he was already in Thailand. His daily life a slumber of responsibilities. He was supposed to take things as they came and accept things for what they were. He contemplated, as the desperate man will, the varieties of lust. Delayed here against his will. Everything was going backwards or everything was winding down. And what was the difference and how could he tell it. No reason to know. Looked out and saw an army of greasy starlings on his front lawn. Week ago. Aggressive winged vermin. Sometimes it was sunny. Sometimes it was raining. His long absence followed by his long silence. His motives, he knew, were not pure. As that Wastrel Prince from that what was it story. Not that it mattered. Sometimes it was cloudy; he needed to remember that. The one life. His. The one and only life. This. Everything now could be expressed in a song. What other inefficient narrative worth pursuing? He kept the lights off at home so he could see into the dark cul-de-sac. A world neither true nor false. He had nothing to do. Intentionally, he was given nothing to do. They were waiting for him to go, of course. That was why. He like a guest that would not leave, exasperating, then annoying, then despised, finally hated. Sometimes he saw something flit like a little bat on the periphery of his vision. A little bat that lived only in his head. Why the Vampyre now? A person could withdraw into himself though not permanently. Correct. At the meeting, he was asked to perform in the little piece. Nonsense. What was one to do? Pitched neither above nor below its audience but directly at it. As this little exile. Weather  ...