Submissions

1. Command Psychology

Throw everything into your mouth, wear patches of all you've ever done and embroider 50 out of 512 friends' comments onto your sleeve. From your bed pretend. Make pretend plans with pretend friends. Pretend rock, pretend sing songs sung in keys of kitsch and irony. Live in a pink punk bubble floating above your head. Go get around. Pour more and more into your open maw until your brain must reconsider what normal conditions are. Keep pretending. Every night, until you are doing nothing if you're not pretending. Have fun in fat times. Run a hoop along your waist, sunglass smiling cokebottle love. Roll in the sand. Shave your hair into cute shapes.

Learn how to write. Just learn how to write I don't care what it IS just learn how to write. Know more than you let on. Memorize up to 700 digits immediately. Tell me about prosody and pertinence. Tell me about 20th century fiction masters. Tell me if you're getting off. Do you like the way that feels?

Don't you like the way that feels in your mouth?? Rolling around in its natural juices your face is smiling. Your brain's shooting bolts that say more more more. At the same time it's saying faster faster. There is a small voice that's muted in the fray coming from somewhere in the space between your head and your heart, from an island in a lake. Is he looking at me...

Elegant circles, not quite infinite since terminating but ever-growing, add you among their numbers. Are you loving it?



2. The Unknown Becoming Louder and Louder

There is no enemy if you must see to believe. That is the invaluable source of power for all things invisible. It helps never to personify the various forces you perceive to impede your set path. Leave them forces, natural but not insurmountable barriers to progress. You are born, you spend your time and you are gone, all within a compact hundred-mile radius. This is the fact, despite heretical claims to the contrary. Stay skeptical. Never dare to drop your guard, never be so rash as to assume this or any other thing has been afforded you by your own efforts as much as by the will of some benevolent mover. You have at times felt enmeshed. You’ve spent all your time until now on the surface, disregarded and overlooked, and you’ve managed lasting contentment with that fact, the same contentment holding all things in their proper places, the invisible lines keeping the surface from suddenly moving. All is maintenance. The rock, when peered beneath, becomes an insidious obstacle rather than a pleasant intermediary between the known and the unknown. You say you’re motivated by Truth, a capital abstraction clashing with the vainglorious half-truths peddled in the smiles and gestures of each new person you meet. Truth is at the bottom. The underground calls you. You begin to see. You hear the wail of grinding gears rising from the street. You feel the thin electrical and magnetic waves keeping things in their proper locations, keeping the machine running smoothly—in an important way, directing the course of the universe as each day unfolds on the rigid schedule of indomitable time. Your ear is to the ground.



3. No Note

He’d always imagined that at this moment he’d be hailed with some triumphant flourish, a fierce string section blazoning his personal sense of worth in service. As he packed thirty-six years down into the single box they’d given him to transport his property out of the building, no such flourish echoed in his mind. On top of the box he placed a mahogany case containing the commemorative firearm and six silver bullets he had received an hour ago at his retirement ceremony. His name sat impressively on a small silver plate lining the gun handle’s spine.

That night he went walking in the city; in every man he saw a monster. He knew this was unfair, but the years had made him hard, necessarily harder, if only by force of law, than the hardest-boiled criminals in the state. To last a week in that place, you had to learn to see the worst in a person first. Thus he’d been rung dry of every shred of sentimentality. He stopped suddenly in front of a music store and addressed his reflection in the window. He saw a monster.

At 65 he was an old retiree, but still in good physical condition. You could last forever in that job if you were cut for it. Up until his last day he was looking strong, one of the best men there.

On his last morning at work a thick murmur surrounded him, the kind you hear when there’s been a suicide. He sighed at the prospect of having to begin his day by lifting a two-hundred pound corpse off its wire hanger. As he searched for the body, he noticed that the atmospheric murmur had a different character than he was used to; today there was a malevolent glee behind it, and though he’d gained the hard-earned fear of each convict in that institution, he could sense a carefully restrained sneer behind the silence each prisoner adopted as he passed. Finally, in the last block, the sight of a gaunt man slumped against the bars of a cast iron prison bed ended his search. On the dead prisoner’s shirt was pinned a note reading: “Behind every great man’s a greater woman.” When he went to pull the note off the shirt to read it, a mock wig fashioned out of the blonde-grey straws from the prison mattress fell to the floor.

Later that day, he was stabbed. The prisoner didn’t make it far, but the stabbed guard fell to the floor apathetically, and for some inmates that sight alone was more of an escape than they’d ever imagined themselves experiencing. Now the guard couldn’t walk without a limp, which for him meant retirement.

He put his keys on the counter next to the monster. Six silver bullets stood in the line he’d made of them earlier.

He adorned the small shelf above his fireplace with the impressive steel commemoration of his service to the state, the sum of a celebrated career of mental and physical submission to a strict, stern end, a piece representative of his entire life’s terminal direction, his bullet course. He stood and admired it from a distance. For the first time in thirty-six years there was no one who would listen to him talk out his anxieties, no one to make feel what he felt, no one to unload upon. He needed someone to take it all off him. The new realization that so pained his moral sense was that it took the complete subjection of another to make him feel human in such an inhuman place. He made men less than men to aid his own survival. He stood there a while more, his eyes glued on a giant piece as thirty-six years weighed down on the mantle with all accusatory intensity of a forgotten anniversary.

He unwrapped the package of guitar strings he’d bought that evening and hung himself with no note.