Excerpt

Excerpt

This is the beginning of a yet-untitled novel about the lives and loves of a few hell-bound people in Brooklyn, including an excommunicated man trying to prove himself worthy of adopting his own son and a dominatrix sex worker prone to fits of homicidal rage. 

***

One

It was 4:59 a.m., New York City in September, as Roman Hayes lied awake in bed, staring up at the mottled ceiling of his Brooklyn flat. And as he lied there with his blankets kicked off to the floor and his t-shirt plastered over his chest, where a great stain of perspiration had spread like blood over a gunshot wound, Roman breathed tentatively.

He looked over at the alarm clock on his nightstand. It read 4:59 in seedy little digital figures. Ante Meridiem. He switched off the alarm before it was due to detonate at five and sat up at the edge of his bed. Pulling his bloody shirt off over his head, he sat there with it in his hands, his hands tremulous with sweat, his head numb with a sense of misplacement. As his eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, Roman ran a hand through his hair, over his neck and shoulders and arms, and was relieved to find himself the same twenty-eight-year-old man he had been before he fell asleep.

He sighed. He had had such an explicit vision just prior to waking of being cut out of the womb. In his dream, he had been a fetus sleeping in amniotic comfort when suddenly he was brought out of darkness and exposed to fresh air, the cold and all the forces of the world bearing down upon him at once — gravity and normal and the like — pulling on him in every which direction, contorting and compressing his features to resemble that of a human being. Though in his dream state Roman had felt inexplicably invested in that painful process, he was relieved to find he was not, in fact, a fetus.

The premature grey light of daybreak seeped through the cracks in the blinds, reaching toward the hardwood and plaster surfaces of Roman’s room with reticence. Sensing his master was awake, an ancient Doberman rolled over in his cot on the floor and glanced up, his drooping eyelids giving him an air of perpetual world-weariness.

“Morning, Captain,” Roman muttered as he stepped over to the window and peered out.

At 5 a.m., the sky was pink and layered with wispy cumuli. The streets of Bensonhurst were empty but for a few stragglers — a bald man in a bathrobe checking the air in his tires, a dog circling a lamppost, some kid sneaking back into the upper story window of a condo down the street. A flock of pigeons abandoned a nearby rooftop to perch in a stand of rustling aspen lining the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the first commuter of the day pulled into nearby 71st Street Station, glowing with a telltale halo of radiance as it halted before the rising sun.

Captain came up behind Roman and gave him an affectionate nip on the hand. Old as he was, the dog possessed a resilient devotion to routine, and pawed impatiently at the doorknob while Roman grabbed a change of clothes and donned his running shoes.  

NU Wrestling 2.17.12 against Indiana

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this more than I expected to.

NSTF Prompt

Every week at No Stranger To Fiction, we finish our meetings with a short prompt. This week, our president picked a random paperback romance from the shelves at Barnes and Noble (where we meet) and requested the story behind the title. 

The book was "Undeniably Yours" by Shannon Stacey, and this is what I came up with in five minutes. 

***

“Undeniably Yours,” was what she signed most of the letters with, followed by his name, Covington, printed in small letters spaced very far apart from each other. That had been his style in the past when he still wrote to Mrs. Covington personally. For years, he had been unaware of how she liked to add that small flair, had been completely oblivious to the way she started the letters with “My Darling—,” that she interlaced his unfailingly somber dictation with the occasional slip of sincerity and always, always sealed the envelopes with a kiss.  

***

In my head, it's an Edwardian lesbian romance in which a man discovers his secretary and his wife have been staging an illicit love affair through him.

“…and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.”

Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Because the truth is: this is not about children. And when you strip away all the layers and you get to the seed, this is not about children. If it were, these people would go to the sewers in Columbia, they’d go to AIDS wards. There’s millions of babies—they’re thrown out like trash on the streets, like cabbage. Nobody cares about the children once they’re on the planet; they don’t care. They walk around with guns and blow each other up. They have no food, they have nothing. Nobody cares about that. This is not about children. This is about having control over a woman’s sexuality. And some women don’t want to claim that power because they feel ashamed, they feel guilty, they’re torn—love and lust. Christianity has nothing—absolutely nothing to do with that. Nothing. And it saddens me because these people—the anti-choice people could be doing so much for the children that are on the planet.

Tori Amos (via pacify-eris)

Super old high school AP English video made with Windows Movie Maker, marked by very, very rough editing and very strong convictions. My editing skills have definitely improved since. As for the beliefs, I sort of wish I still felt as deeply about things.