Hissing Of Summer Lawns (Novellette? opening)

2020
The moment my skin separates from material, fingertip from ceramic, I struggle against an overwhelming sense of regret. I’ve done it, of course. I’ve thrown the plate at him. It shatters into pieces uncountable, missing him by an inch. His face isn’t shocked, exactly -- I’ve done similar things before -- but shows a queer expression of anger, some sort of how-dare-you.

 
“I didn’t mean to”. Even from inside my interiority, I am uttering my worn catchphrase. Didn’t mean to. But I must mean it. Because I’ve done it, it actually happened: an airborne dinner plate at the man I love. There is a period in which I wish with every fiber it would hit him, kill him, maim him. I can’t reconcile my intentions, I suppose is my point.

 
But I’d spent the last two years painstakingly learning that my intentions mean nothing. And I imagine Donald feels similarly, with dinnerware flying through the air at him at speed. My intentions, maybe pure as driven snow, doen’t mean an airborne set of dinnerware haven’t just eclipsed his face.

#

2018
I am sucking a guy’s dick under a foot-bridge on the northside because he’s shown me a one-use syringe, full of about one ml. of a burgundy liquid. He says it’s clonazepam; I buy the one-use syringe and I'm supposed to empty it into a drink to consume. He says this to me as if he thinks I may attempt to shoot it up, which I never would.

 
Sometimes when I meet drug dealers I want them to know, desperately, I don’t shoot up.

 
I don’t have to blow him, but it feels owed. I’d actually intended on buying eleven oxy from him, which I did, but he offered the clonazepam as a freebie. He’d told me, as we approached the footbridge, he works in I.T and dealing is something he does for extra money. He rolls a smoke after cumming because, he says, if his wife catches him smoking she’ll kill him. I want to joke about his wife’s wildly out of tune priorities, but I don’t, because the contents of his fanny pack make him very powerful to me at this moment.

 
I ask him if it’s easy to get back to my car from where we are and he offers to walk with me after he finishes his smoke, but I decline and get lost immediately. I come across a playgroup with a single dad and his kids trying to make the most of a court-ordered weekend visit and I want to tell them, “Hey guys, I’ve got a bunch of pharmaceuticals in my waistband!!”. It’s the same part of the brain that forces your desire to plunge a salad knife into your veins or drop a red-faced baby on tiles.