Author Archives: Sarah

The Criminals

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Here is something I wrote a few years ago. It took a lot of elbow grease to straighten it out! I guess it’s proof that I really have learned some things since then. I still would give it another… six revisions if I weren’t so tired.

This one’s for Tom, author of Slumdog Soldier. If you guys want to read some addictive action and make a nice friend, check out his site.

 

 

Walking alone in the park was foolish at the best of times, but tonight was Mardi Gras. People were especially rowdy and dangerous.

Still, there were things she needed from the store. If she didn’t get something for her lunch tomorrow she would be stuck with convenience store food.

She wasn’t comfortable on the street with all the dancing, jostling, vomiting drunks (any one of them could be a criminal) so she decided to take a shortcut through the park. Tucking her purse safely under her arm, she headed down the path toward the dark trees.

She had made it nearly halfway through the park when she noticed a man following her at a distance.

Maybe the park hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

Clutching her purse even closer, she quickened her pace.

There was a rustle in the woods, and a second man emerged from the trees just ahead of her. He brandished a pocket knife so small, she had to wonder if bringing it to the mugging had been an afterthought.

The first man wrapped a cool metal wire around her neck and pressed himself against her back.

“Are you robbing me?” She said, aghast. She’d never been in a fight before.

“Shh,” the man with the knife said. He buried his face where her neck met her shoulder and inhaled deeply. He still held his knife, but he was distracted and it was loose in his hand at his side. His neck, dark with stubble, stretched in front of her as he took his first taste of her skin. He was so close that she could see the jugular veins throb beside his esophagus.

She had spent her whole life trying to be gentle. But these two were clearly a lower class of human, undeserving, uncivilized. Criminal.

Just this once, she gave herself permission to join their level.

With one hand, she batted the knife from his distracted grip and let it fall onto the leafy path. With the other, she grabbed the back of his neck and brought his throat toward her open teeth. She sank in with a crunch of gristle. Metallic blood welled into her mouth.

The man didn’t scream; he couldn’t. He brought both hands up and tried to push her away, then stopped when he felt the increased tugging of her teeth at his still connected flesh. So she did it for him, with a well-placed kick to the groin.

He staggered backwards, pouring blood black in the moonlight.

Her victory came at a price: the man behind her tightened the garrote around her neck. She couldn’t breathe. Her decision to fight tonight could very well cost her her life. The sharp wire cut through her skin, and deeper.

She was ready. She would take any damage necessary, if it meant she could deal equal damage to her attacker.

With that resolve, she stomped as hard as she could on the top of his foot once, twice. She heard more than felt his metatarsal snap, but it didn’t make him let go. Fine. She drove her elbow into his gut with everything she had, then fell backwards into him. They hit the ground together, which caused him to slacken his grip just long enough for her to work her fingers under the wire.

She could run out of air at any second, but she still hadn’t done this man any significant damage. Her survival was secondary to that.

He would not let go of the garrote, but her fingers prevented him from killing her outright. He lay on the ground and she was almost atop him, on her side. How could she hurt him? His grip was unbreakable, and he had good pain tolerance…  but he had reacted to the belly blow. His gut was his soft spot.

She drove her elbow into his stomach, then again, repeatedly, until she felt a small bone under his ribcage snap. This wasn’t enough. He wouldn’t die from this, and he knew the surest way to win was to hang on to his weapon just a little longer.

Her lungs burned, her eyes saw pink. Was that from the garrote or something else? She pawed the ground for a weapon, but there was nothing. Only solid rock. Solid rock…

She ceased her assault on his diaphragm and grabbed his hair with her free hand. Quickly, before he tensed up, as fast and as hard as she could, she raised his head by the hair and slammed it into the concrete path, then again, then again. Each blow weakened his grip on the garrote. The sounds of his skull hitting the cement got wetter, until he didn’t have any fight left.

She stood up, unwrapping the wire from her neck.

The first man’s Adam’s apple was still in her mouth? She spat it out and wiped her lips with the back of her sleeve.

She’d never committed a crime, so they wouldn’t be able to match her fingerprints or dna. If she just walked away now, there was a solid chance she would never get caught. She would have to rinse off in the dark pond before going back into the street.

Fortunately, it was Mardis Gras. Everyone looked criminal at this hour. She would blend right in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Quitting a Bad Coping Mechanism

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I’m not an expert blah blah blah.

 

 

When you first stop yourself from doing the bad thing
(Disassociation, denial, self-harm, drinking, addiction, etc.)
You think you’re going to explode and scream and have an aneurysm.
You cry and shake and wonder if this is what it’s like, riding it out
And if so, how the fuck do normal people do it every day?
You’ll go through three months to three years of instability
Where you snap at your friends and perplex them with your choices
As you desperately seek an outlet
Trying every possible vent that might give some release
(Art, talking, exercise, diet, therapy, meds, religion)
It doesn’t happen quickly
Not in most cases.
You have to heal
And healing takes time.
Once your bad coping mechanism is, not gone (never gone),
But under control
You find you need to make some major life changes
(New spouse, new job, new gender, new friends, etc).
As your current situation is intolerable
And was only rendered tolerable by your overwhelming self-distraction.

Slowly

The desperation fades.
The world comes into focus.
The people you once despised
Become people you respect.

Every once in a while
You’ll run into remnants of your old self.
You’ll know them through but they’ll look like strangers
And you’ll see right through their bullshit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gardening Against the Future

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“DON’T TOUCH THE MYOPATHIC SYCOPHANT PLANT!” The sign read.

The plant was a sickly purple-green. It had wobbly knobbles everywhere, broad leaves, and a great big flytrap mouth. It grew in a cowering shape, looking up at her from its position on the floor.

The little girl wanted to touch it.

She touched it.

It opened its mouth and screamed in pain. Then it collapsed. Upset, the child kneeled and cradled its head. Once this attention was received, the plant immediately started complimenting her and begging for money for its gardener bills.

The exasperated gardener approached. “Who touched that damn thing!” She said, one fist balled angrily on her coveralled hip, the other leading a hose.

The child screamed. She collapsed. She started complimenting the gardener and begging for money.

“You want to act like a plant, you’ll get treated like a plant,” the gardener said. She took the little girl by the shoulder and watered her thoroughly.

The girl stopped complaining and made gurgling noises instead.

When she considered her lesson well administered, the gardener pushed her back in the direction of her mother. “Learn to read,” she said. “Save you a world of trouble.”

The child tottered away, coughing and gasping.

The sycophant plant had seen what just happened. It huddled obscenely at the gardener’s feet in fear until its stem gave out and it collapsed completely.

“Oh, oh, oh,” it said. “You’re so strong and patient, won’t you help me up?”

“Ugh. I’ll get something to help stake you up,” the gardener said. As she headed toward the supply closet, she questioned her life decisions. Plants were getting to be too much like people. Why couldn’t she just garden roses? Roses were beautiful. They didn’t whine or moan or beg. They didn’t even think.

Sure, there were roses in this garden. But they had to be defended by increasing measures from the floral predators. Genetic engineering had gotten really out of hand here. The garden was a noisy place. The plants got into a lot of arguments.

She unlocked the shed and popped the door open. A slight resistance and then a tear. Oh no.

One of the plants and migrated into here and was rooting across the door. She knew which one it was before she even saw the tattered ficus leaves.

“Wandering Masochist! How many times do I have to tell you. You have a home.”

“But I like doorways,” the Masochist said.

“You don’t have to torture yourself like this. You have a home. Go where you belong. You have supportive friends there.”

“I don’t want to.”

“If you don’t want to… then isn’t that all the more reason to do it?”

The ficus’s leaves turned upward cheerfully at that, and it wandered off. Hopefully it would go where it was supposed to be, but she doubted it. It was sure to find a new doorway to root across and wait for the tearing roots again. That thing…

She grabbed a stake, a few ties, and a towel, then locked the door behind her. She stuffed the towel under the crack in the door. That might keep it out, for a little while at least.

On her way back, she tripped over the Deciduous Package Hauler, who, for lack of a job, had grabbed a handful of Panic Pansies and was attempting to haul them to the other end of the garden. She stopped to free them from its clutches, then gave it the stake to deliver to the Sycophant. Package Haulers were working plants, bred for factory life. They struggled in a lush botanical environment.

Letting the Hauler go ahead, she paused to take in an abundant overgrowth of peaceful pink blossoms. Beautifully formed, quiet, unassuming plants. She hung her fingers on the chain link fence before it, careful to avoid the electrified wiring. The fence couldn’t keep out their perfume.

Life used to be simple, back when she gardened with her grandfather. They would pull the biting weeds and spend a guilt-free evening watching them writhe instinctively on the burn pile. They would give graham crackers to the Ghost Cactus. It loved chewing on graham crackers. And as for the roses, all you had to do was plant and water them.

When she sighed and let go, she turned back to work and saw with a shock that the Orange Lynx Fungus had been watching her. Its eyes were dark spore holes, its teeth black drips. It knew the fence was electrified and had been staying away, but now that it had seen her touch the weak spots in the fence, it was sure to figure out a new way in. This thing’s life ambition, it would seem, was eating roses.

Along with everything else in the world.

So what if roses were things of the past. So what if they could no longer hold their own against a rapidly changing environment. She would remain a gardener here as long as they, too, remained. She would protect the roses, even if she could only ever see them through an electrified chain link fence, through razor wire, through impact-resistant terrarium glass if it came to that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Awkward Thrift Store Adventure

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I know I’m supposed to tell you about my trip but ehh. I never do my blog the right way, anyway. Instead I’m going to tell you this:

 

I met an old lady at the Salvation Army thrift store the other day. She was very sad because their house have been flooded out. She told me all about it. When she got to the desk, she was told (after some confusion; the woman at the desk had a thick Russian accent which hindered everyone’s communication efforts) she was in the wrong area and she needed to actually go to the Salvation Army church, not the thrift store. She left with a phone number crumpled in her hand.

Next came my turn at the desk.

I wanted to buy a little decorative glass jar, but all I had was a twenty. The woman looked at me and said that she couldn’t break a twenty, which left me flummoxed. All I had was… another twenty. Was this too much money for them? Did I really not belong here so badly that my money was actually no good?? For some reason, returning the item did not come into my mind. I stared at her, and stared at the money, and stared at her until the customer next to me said, “That’s okay; I’ll pay for it.” And she did. I gave her a hug.

As the other customer, probably poorer than me, paid for my stupid bauble, the cashier said, “All day, people give me fifties, twenties, fifties, I cannot make you the change.” So that kind of explained it.

As I left, I felt embarrassed, but also very grateful. I was looking at my car when the old lady appeared behind me and said, “Will you give me a ride?” I wanted to pay forward what I had just experienced. I gave her a good looking at: she had a limp, overweight, late sixties at least. I figured I could take her, if it came to that. So I said yes, and she labored into the passenger seat of my car.

As I pulled the car out of the spot, she told me, “I hope you’re not offended, but I see the grace of God upon you.”

It was so unexpected and nicely phrased, it went straight to my head. I laughed prettily. Me? The grace of God? “Thank you,” I said. What else could I say in the face of such high-flying, hallucinatory, kindly old lady compliments? I’m not even religious.

We only drove about six feet before her husband pulled into the lot with his car, so I pulled up close and tried ineffectually to help as she painfully trundled out of my car and into hers.

I started to walk away, a little disappointed that I hadn’t been able to pay forward my good deed. Then I remembered the $20. It had been spared for a reason! I ran back and pressed it into her hand. “If this helps,” I said.

“It does, thank you,” the old lady replied.

I got back into my car and headed out. I felt decidedly wall-eyed after the compliment and the good deed (or was I just paying her for the compliment?), and literally drove 30 minutes in the wrong direction.

Maybe what she was detecting was my low blood sugar. I hadn’t yet eaten that day and my mind was loosely hinged. Old people can sometimes confuse the grace of God and low blood sugar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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