The El Portal, a vaudeville relic on my right, the paint faded and peeling under a relentless sun, had seen better days. Not so long back, in the late 19th century, where I’m walking was nothing but scrubland in the San Fernando valley, tumbleweeds, skipping, stochastic, in the desert wind, black stones and the ruins of a Spanish mission. And I think about the first of us. Singers and dancers, whiskey, and a piano from the old world, bullet holes peppering the dark stained wood, discordant notes drifting through time, and then the railroad came, and then Hollywood, and then nothing would ever be the same. I take one last drag, flick the butt into the side alley, yeah, fucking arrest me, and walk into the belly of the force that rules the world.
5 Sentences.
14 Verbs.
had seen, am walking, was, skipping, think, peppering, drifting, came, would be, take, flick, arrest, walk, rules.
New to the game, haven't posted much on my substack yet and haven't posted any fiction. Here's the first paragraph of a short story I am working on.
"Neon purple lights dimly lit an otherwise darkroom of filthy bed sheets kicked into waves and mounds of narcoleptic sleep. Patches of faded stringy nylon carpet suffocated under stained clothes from the mostly emptied 3D-printed poly-carbonate containers of rotting fast food discarded in nonchalant negligence of easily accessible and not at all nutritional sustenance delivered via AI agent-controlled drones who made up the largest percentage of the country’s GDP. During these 60-floors of deliveries from the well-orchestrated dance of rotors on metal frames were promotions for many brands of material goods, services, and high-end pink slime masquerading as food, all able to materialize in an occupant’s room via the consumers choice award winning body fuel automatic replicator. Of most concern to the not-so-young and not-so-old short blue haired girl whose eyes bled in the fuzzy omnipresent concentration of blue light imprinting flashing images into her psychoanalyzed, depressive, ADHD riddled grey matter of thought were the luminescent promotions imprinted directly into her mind via AI chip integration, for chemically modified, FDA and CDC warnings filled hyper energy drinks, whose aluminum carcasses were strewn about the dark-damp-faint neon purple room."
The day of my brother’s funeral, the sun beat down like a cosmic heat lamp. I felt like an insect beneath it, too dumb to know I was being cooked.
In the movies, funerals are always accompanied by rain. The hero stands at the lip of an open grave, staring with smoldering pout at the glistening oaken casket within. When he looks up and into the distance so the camera can show him reflecting on memories past and those never to be forged, water drips carelessly from his flat cap and there is hard-won wisdom in his eyes. The love interest stands behind a wrought iron fence some yards away, watching him grapple with his pain in a way distinctly masculine, crying the tears he cannot shed himself.
That day, we all sweated and shifted—no rain, no camera, neither masculine nor heroic. I squinted up at a sun angry to see me below it as perspiration dripped from my nose and fogged my glasses. Mourners stood in black suits and ankle-length dresses, absorbing more heat than they deserved. Cicadas buzzed. An engine whirred. Twin birds took off from the pines to my left, their flapping loud and desperate. The one in the lead flew straight over our heads. The one behind thought better of it and turned back, roosting where it had come from.
They still haven’t come up with a decent secular funeral on a budget. Maybe you have to be a true believer in something to experience real closure. Funerals are supposed to be the final page of someone’s life. You drop them in a hole, throw some dirt over them, close the back cover, and feel a certain sense of finality. Imperfect, sure, but something. Is it the mindless droning of a black-robed virgin parroting God’s will, God’s plan, God’s shopping list that turns that page? Or is it just that we’re programmed to respond to that kind of cadence, lulling us into believing fairy tales about meaning and purpose? I saw a documentary once where people chose to be buried without a casket, beneath a tree or a landmark. Maybe that would have been better. To bury my brother beneath a soccer field. Or a fucking opium field.
I shook my head and bit my lip in self-chastisement.
My father didn’t wear a jacket. He wore the same cologne he always had, from the same bottle he’d always owned. I hated that the smell, which once reminded me of family parties, laughter, and my first taste of beer, now carried the weight of two funerals. He stood in the sun in a white short-sleeve shirt and an old brown tie. He hadn’t shaved either, and the scruff and sweat made him look more like a dockworker waiting for a job than a father at a young man’s funeral. His frown and quiet desperation were thick and palpable, but no tears fell from his eyes, no pleas to God came from his lips. Those had come and gone when his wife died.
That day, he had jumped into the hole and gripped the casket like it was the last thing he could hold on his way off the cliff. I suppose it was. His words, his cries, that awful desperate ululation still preyed upon my sleeping mind. But for my brother, there was nothing.
"Okay," my father said, turning to the crowd, lifting his hands above his head. The sweat stains under his arms were prodigious. "Back to the house."
Matter-of-fact. Surgical. Systematic. There was nothing he could do. The boy was dead.
He stepped through the growing shadows cast by gravestones, and people filed behind him. As he passed, he patted me once on the back without looking at me and continued on. I leaned against the shovel in my hand as more faces walked past, more hands found my back.
If Travis had died a few years ago, the sea of people flooding past me would have been torrential. Now, maybe a dozen had come to pay their respects—some begrudgingly. Most who knew him had long since mourned. His real death was as symbolic as it was physical.
"You good?" Olivia looked up at me with crystal-blue eyes and perfectly maintained blonde hair—the doing of which had nearly made us late for my own brother’s funeral. She wore a tight black dress and a dark gray cardigan. The first time I saw that dress, it was at a cousin’s wedding. It had looked fantastic crumpled on the floor of our hotel room.
Did nothing stay good?
"Yeah," I said. Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. I felt bad thinking it, but I was relieved it was over. Olivia wasn’t the kind to take my tear-streaked face to her bosom anyway. She was a buck-up kind of woman.
I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands, so I stuffed them in my pockets. They felt like toaster ovens.
"You want me to stick around till you finish?"
Of course I did. I didn’t want to be alone with that wooden box and the yawning chasm it lay in, knowing the decaying corpse inside once overflowed with so much life I thought nothing short of a full-speed freight train could ever slow him down.
But I didn’t want to have to ask her.
Because I didn’t want to be the kind of man who asked? Or because I didn’t want to be in the kind of relationship where asking was necessary?
"No, you go back and get out of the sun."
We kissed quickly, and she was lost in the crowd.
Before long, I was alone, standing on grass that was too green while my brother slowly decomposed. Part of me had a hard time believing it. I kept expecting him to poke his head out from behind a gravestone, ask if everyone had left, and laugh like he just got away with something.
He had a smile that featured prominently in the adolescent sexual fantasies of most of the girls we went to high school with—the kind of smile that could charm a grandmother out of a fresh pie, a teacher out of a failing grade, a cheerleader out of a new skirt.
That smile died long before he did.
When the last breath finally escaped him, all that was left was a pained grimace or a desperate oval where he could shovel in methadone in quantities that mattered less and less and less.
When they found him in an alley in Charlestown with a needle in his arm, he was smiling, but it was nothing like it was when he was a boy. This smile was wan, lacking any glitter or flash. It was the smile of a dog happy to go unkicked for a day.
It wasn’t relief, not really. Not the assuaging of the white-hot need of addiction. It was the smile of a ghost who had died long ago, at the first taste of a bitter pill.
I grabbed the shovel beside the grave and stuck it into the pile of dirt. Earth. Sweat. Fertilizer.
To my right, a worn granite gravestone wore an abundance of flowers. The date read 1912.
My brother had no flowers at all.
The date read 2025.
The first throw scattered dry earth over his cheap casket. Almost all of it fell from the sides, slipping into the bottom of the grave in a way that felt deeply dismissive.
By the third shovelful, I was drenched from head to toe. I breathed as though the air had congealed. My jacket lay discarded in the grass beside me. By the sixth throw, I could barely keep myself upright.
I wanted to be the one to bury him.
I told my father I would, and he didn’t fight me on it.
I hadn’t gone to my mother’s funeral. It had been too much. Too real.
I regretted it ever since.
The lack of closure.
She had died before we got to the hospital. The last thing I said to her was a lie.
I did my homework.
I hadn’t. I rarely ever did my homework.
Did she die thinking her son was a liar?
Did she believe it?
I couldn’t remember the last thing I said to Travis before he died.
Something anodyne, something meaningless, just to keep the peace as I pushed him and his neediness out of my life?
Did I tell him to fuck off? To go away? That no one cared anymore?
Why did it feel so much worse not to know?
When did I start crying?
I told myself this was closure.
The sun began to sink, and I hated it for that.
The last light my brother’s body would ever experience, and even it was calling it a day. Only me to witness.
Did no one care?
Or had they already forgotten the boy that was?
The smile. The laugh. We threw pumpkins at mailboxes. We stole candy from the Wiffle Tree. We rode bikes until the streetlights came on.
My hands were dirty. My breath was heavy. I felt an immense weight pressing me into the earth. Into the hole with him. I drowned on dirt. I wished he could drown with me.
I cried, wiped my eyes. Dirt streaked my face. I could taste it.
2.8...
The El Portal, a vaudeville relic on my right, the paint faded and peeling under a relentless sun, had seen better days. Not so long back, in the late 19th century, where I’m walking was nothing but scrubland in the San Fernando valley, tumbleweeds, skipping, stochastic, in the desert wind, black stones and the ruins of a Spanish mission. And I think about the first of us. Singers and dancers, whiskey, and a piano from the old world, bullet holes peppering the dark stained wood, discordant notes drifting through time, and then the railroad came, and then Hollywood, and then nothing would ever be the same. I take one last drag, flick the butt into the side alley, yeah, fucking arrest me, and walk into the belly of the force that rules the world.
5 Sentences.
14 Verbs.
had seen, am walking, was, skipping, think, peppering, drifting, came, would be, take, flick, arrest, walk, rules.
New to the game, haven't posted much on my substack yet and haven't posted any fiction. Here's the first paragraph of a short story I am working on.
"Neon purple lights dimly lit an otherwise darkroom of filthy bed sheets kicked into waves and mounds of narcoleptic sleep. Patches of faded stringy nylon carpet suffocated under stained clothes from the mostly emptied 3D-printed poly-carbonate containers of rotting fast food discarded in nonchalant negligence of easily accessible and not at all nutritional sustenance delivered via AI agent-controlled drones who made up the largest percentage of the country’s GDP. During these 60-floors of deliveries from the well-orchestrated dance of rotors on metal frames were promotions for many brands of material goods, services, and high-end pink slime masquerading as food, all able to materialize in an occupant’s room via the consumers choice award winning body fuel automatic replicator. Of most concern to the not-so-young and not-so-old short blue haired girl whose eyes bled in the fuzzy omnipresent concentration of blue light imprinting flashing images into her psychoanalyzed, depressive, ADHD riddled grey matter of thought were the luminescent promotions imprinted directly into her mind via AI chip integration, for chemically modified, FDA and CDC warnings filled hyper energy drinks, whose aluminum carcasses were strewn about the dark-damp-faint neon purple room."
4
"Lit, kicked, sleep, suffocated, emptied, rotting, discarded, delivered, materialize, concern, bled, riddled, imprinted, integration, modified, strewn."
2.1 Apologies for length
The day of my brother’s funeral, the sun beat down like a cosmic heat lamp. I felt like an insect beneath it, too dumb to know I was being cooked.
In the movies, funerals are always accompanied by rain. The hero stands at the lip of an open grave, staring with smoldering pout at the glistening oaken casket within. When he looks up and into the distance so the camera can show him reflecting on memories past and those never to be forged, water drips carelessly from his flat cap and there is hard-won wisdom in his eyes. The love interest stands behind a wrought iron fence some yards away, watching him grapple with his pain in a way distinctly masculine, crying the tears he cannot shed himself.
That day, we all sweated and shifted—no rain, no camera, neither masculine nor heroic. I squinted up at a sun angry to see me below it as perspiration dripped from my nose and fogged my glasses. Mourners stood in black suits and ankle-length dresses, absorbing more heat than they deserved. Cicadas buzzed. An engine whirred. Twin birds took off from the pines to my left, their flapping loud and desperate. The one in the lead flew straight over our heads. The one behind thought better of it and turned back, roosting where it had come from.
They still haven’t come up with a decent secular funeral on a budget. Maybe you have to be a true believer in something to experience real closure. Funerals are supposed to be the final page of someone’s life. You drop them in a hole, throw some dirt over them, close the back cover, and feel a certain sense of finality. Imperfect, sure, but something. Is it the mindless droning of a black-robed virgin parroting God’s will, God’s plan, God’s shopping list that turns that page? Or is it just that we’re programmed to respond to that kind of cadence, lulling us into believing fairy tales about meaning and purpose? I saw a documentary once where people chose to be buried without a casket, beneath a tree or a landmark. Maybe that would have been better. To bury my brother beneath a soccer field. Or a fucking opium field.
I shook my head and bit my lip in self-chastisement.
My father didn’t wear a jacket. He wore the same cologne he always had, from the same bottle he’d always owned. I hated that the smell, which once reminded me of family parties, laughter, and my first taste of beer, now carried the weight of two funerals. He stood in the sun in a white short-sleeve shirt and an old brown tie. He hadn’t shaved either, and the scruff and sweat made him look more like a dockworker waiting for a job than a father at a young man’s funeral. His frown and quiet desperation were thick and palpable, but no tears fell from his eyes, no pleas to God came from his lips. Those had come and gone when his wife died.
That day, he had jumped into the hole and gripped the casket like it was the last thing he could hold on his way off the cliff. I suppose it was. His words, his cries, that awful desperate ululation still preyed upon my sleeping mind. But for my brother, there was nothing.
"Okay," my father said, turning to the crowd, lifting his hands above his head. The sweat stains under his arms were prodigious. "Back to the house."
Matter-of-fact. Surgical. Systematic. There was nothing he could do. The boy was dead.
He stepped through the growing shadows cast by gravestones, and people filed behind him. As he passed, he patted me once on the back without looking at me and continued on. I leaned against the shovel in my hand as more faces walked past, more hands found my back.
If Travis had died a few years ago, the sea of people flooding past me would have been torrential. Now, maybe a dozen had come to pay their respects—some begrudgingly. Most who knew him had long since mourned. His real death was as symbolic as it was physical.
"You good?" Olivia looked up at me with crystal-blue eyes and perfectly maintained blonde hair—the doing of which had nearly made us late for my own brother’s funeral. She wore a tight black dress and a dark gray cardigan. The first time I saw that dress, it was at a cousin’s wedding. It had looked fantastic crumpled on the floor of our hotel room.
Did nothing stay good?
"Yeah," I said. Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. I felt bad thinking it, but I was relieved it was over. Olivia wasn’t the kind to take my tear-streaked face to her bosom anyway. She was a buck-up kind of woman.
I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands, so I stuffed them in my pockets. They felt like toaster ovens.
"You want me to stick around till you finish?"
Of course I did. I didn’t want to be alone with that wooden box and the yawning chasm it lay in, knowing the decaying corpse inside once overflowed with so much life I thought nothing short of a full-speed freight train could ever slow him down.
But I didn’t want to have to ask her.
Because I didn’t want to be the kind of man who asked? Or because I didn’t want to be in the kind of relationship where asking was necessary?
"No, you go back and get out of the sun."
We kissed quickly, and she was lost in the crowd.
Before long, I was alone, standing on grass that was too green while my brother slowly decomposed. Part of me had a hard time believing it. I kept expecting him to poke his head out from behind a gravestone, ask if everyone had left, and laugh like he just got away with something.
He had a smile that featured prominently in the adolescent sexual fantasies of most of the girls we went to high school with—the kind of smile that could charm a grandmother out of a fresh pie, a teacher out of a failing grade, a cheerleader out of a new skirt.
That smile died long before he did.
When the last breath finally escaped him, all that was left was a pained grimace or a desperate oval where he could shovel in methadone in quantities that mattered less and less and less.
When they found him in an alley in Charlestown with a needle in his arm, he was smiling, but it was nothing like it was when he was a boy. This smile was wan, lacking any glitter or flash. It was the smile of a dog happy to go unkicked for a day.
It wasn’t relief, not really. Not the assuaging of the white-hot need of addiction. It was the smile of a ghost who had died long ago, at the first taste of a bitter pill.
I grabbed the shovel beside the grave and stuck it into the pile of dirt. Earth. Sweat. Fertilizer.
To my right, a worn granite gravestone wore an abundance of flowers. The date read 1912.
My brother had no flowers at all.
The date read 2025.
The first throw scattered dry earth over his cheap casket. Almost all of it fell from the sides, slipping into the bottom of the grave in a way that felt deeply dismissive.
By the third shovelful, I was drenched from head to toe. I breathed as though the air had congealed. My jacket lay discarded in the grass beside me. By the sixth throw, I could barely keep myself upright.
I wanted to be the one to bury him.
I told my father I would, and he didn’t fight me on it.
I hadn’t gone to my mother’s funeral. It had been too much. Too real.
I regretted it ever since.
The lack of closure.
She had died before we got to the hospital. The last thing I said to her was a lie.
I did my homework.
I hadn’t. I rarely ever did my homework.
Did she die thinking her son was a liar?
Did she believe it?
I couldn’t remember the last thing I said to Travis before he died.
Something anodyne, something meaningless, just to keep the peace as I pushed him and his neediness out of my life?
Did I tell him to fuck off? To go away? That no one cared anymore?
Why did it feel so much worse not to know?
When did I start crying?
I told myself this was closure.
The sun began to sink, and I hated it for that.
The last light my brother’s body would ever experience, and even it was calling it a day. Only me to witness.
Did no one care?
Or had they already forgotten the boy that was?
The smile. The laugh. We threw pumpkins at mailboxes. We stole candy from the Wiffle Tree. We rode bikes until the streetlights came on.
My hands were dirty. My breath was heavy. I felt an immense weight pressing me into the earth. Into the hole with him. I drowned on dirt. I wished he could drown with me.
I cried, wiped my eyes. Dirt streaked my face. I could taste it.
I buried him. God damn it. I buried him.
I buried us both.