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. 

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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.  

NSTF Prompt II

Writing club's prompt of the week was to use these eight words in a story of 300 words or less: dinosaur, red wagon, nymphomaniac, red velvet, spray paint, architectural, battleaxes, fingernail. After five minutes, I only managed three, but whatever.

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Mary who towed her Fisher Price red wagon continuously around the block on Friday afternoons when her mother entertained her very important gentlemen clients liked to chew bubble gum as she skipped. Friday afternoons on her block, the men who worked night shifts routinely reclined on the stoop before their houses like architectural fixtures. They looked at Mary and, thinking of her nymphomaniac mother, wondered if her thundercloud afro and large almond eyes and big white smile could have been their own. 

John Shurna (24) made history yesterday as NU's all-time top scorer, helping the Wildcats beat Minnesota 64-53.

Excerpt

Archetypal city scene-setting, based largely on this Hyde Park/Shanghai hybrid of my imagination. 

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Bensonhurst was an analogous neighborhood as ever there was one. Along the route they walked each day, Roman recognized the residences of politicians and movie stars, gangbangers, university students and corporate warlords all situated within sugar-borrowing distance of each other. Where one red, white and green-clad street ended, another overlaid with idiographic signs declaring dim sum availability began. And while homeless peddlers of progressive rags lay sleeping in the alleys behind five-star restaurants, gated communities stood downwind of El Burrito Palace. Down in Bensonhurst, the squirrels and the pigeons had more meat on their bones than the people.

Roman inhaled the carcinogenic air of his home, exhaled noxious particles of himself. He recalled when he was younger, he would feel his way about Brooklyn in the dark, roaming the streets on Saturday nights binge-drinking, pot-smoking, painting ideological murals on the sides of cargo cars until the early hours of Kubla Khan. Consequently, he would spend most Sundays in bed with the curtains nailed shut, moaning and groaning to the ravages of pickaxe psychedelic organists on his nerves.      

But then once he had grown up, had rebuilt his damaged synapses and experienced sufficient heartbreak, Roman woke before dawn most days and started recognizing the city for what it really was without cover of the euphemistic dark.

It was then he started to take notice of the layers upon layers of dust clinging to the sides of iconic skyscrapers, waterlogged American flags heavily hanging on their posts. He started seeing construction scaffolds on every corner, industrial backwash running in the gutters, factory emissions bleeding a graded wash into the empty expanses of the sky where webs of telephone wires, public transport cables, street lights and neon signs coiled like a great wire cage. He liked the idea of it all being a cage—the premise thus implied that people could fly if they wanted to. 

Parody of my relationship with my Irish boyfriend.