The Fifth

Day one said we didn't have to wear shoes

Bone white toes curled in shallow cold

water sloshing from a pail.  Now

We don't go when the tide is out

So we don't go at all

bound up in books, careers

Water still there though no

one is looking.

On the second day we donned black ties

Polished like our hair. Jostled 

a resume with clammy palms for hours on end and then

your mother heard you cry for the first time in a while. While 

I sobbed for four years straight.

On the third day we crawl.

Age has not treated us kindly. The

Return is slow, we envy even 

Barnacles, creeping 'cross the dull shine. 

The common blight of dawn breaking

Oceans on our skin and bleeding

Out or bleeding in.

The pill is sour, it tastes of death. Metallic

on the fourth day. You 

are gone, wriggling in the the morning sun. We 

say we are young and hold each-others tongues 

with our teeth. 

On the rocks or underneath the tide

somewhere in the pools brimming with life. 

Your shirt was red, I remember

But day five brings nothing.

Forgotten prose from late August

Summer passed. I lost the last tendrils of it today, trailing off with packed up books and the things my life doesn't have room for anymore. Time dragged June out of me like a splinter, quarantined with the neat outline of my past, printed on a fraction of the map I know like a woman you buy a drink but never sleep with. July was about the same until anxiety pumped my eyes wide open to the coyness of time's glacial slip, and I was surrounded by dry land for miles, where there used to be towers of ice. After that I slowed down a little, kissed my parents, bought a few books, and somewhere between Salter and Hemingway summer swelled then expired.

Last night I dreamt I got into my car only to find a dead woman, her discolored skin hung on a skeletal frame sagging like it would melt off. For some reason she didn't alarm me. I buckled her seatbelt for her and drove the corpse around town, as if it were typical, though I was slightly concerned with the smell of her decomposing flesh. I only remember the dream because today, when I sat in my car, I panicked briefly once more about the fictional odor. 

It's funny how things come back to you. 

There's this Croatian band that I used to listen to, wandering along the cliffside's teetering rocky paths that crusted the Mediterranean island where I spent summers as a child. Recently I played one of their songs and was disarmed by the distinct sense that everything is temporary, so chronologically shackled to fragments of the things we used to experience. I feel that summer in my bones sometimes; the abandoned elementary school and cola with wine, walking home in the night to sails clanking and swaying and just swaying along with them. Now it's gone like this one, rotting still, with all the poems I hid in places I don't visit anymore. 

dream 1

In November we walk the short span of the wall that stands white 

and divine that sometimes it's a flag 

so we climb it instead

I know you're good at climbing because I've seen you in pictures

I just kind of hang

There's this telephone a ways up in case of emergenc y

your hand on the receiver 

your fingers not lost upon me

pushing H-E-A-V-E-N  in numbers

[dial tone] "I thought so,"

you laugh and we go 

on towards the billowing sheet

When we get high enough

its all wind,

pulling hair from my eyes and mouth

you smile as my teeth fall out I smile 

at your eyes but I can't quite 

remember them 

until you let go

of my grip

(Someone must have heard it crash

because it did)

the car collided at midnight

then silence stretched for days.

There were three dead, maybe four.

Names lost to us along with the toxins 
found in their post-mortuary bodies.

We only remember the silence that followed. 

t h e  s i l e n c e 

became an entity,
swallowing the island whole with its unrelenting fog.

It leaked from houses like smoke,

filling the lungs of villagers 

until 

masts clanking in the bay became a hymn of our mourning

playing while last traces of teenage flesh were scrubbed clean from the rocky facade 
by thunderstorms, 
fleeting, and common on the coast.

Even the children hushed themselves,
took a break from their barefooted sand wars to stare out at the tempered sea,

eyes wide with ignorance.

Still, they felt ripples from the collision, 

stirring in their beds

like animals before a storm. 

Mother Tomb

I think you want to be crucified, sometimes,

bobbing my head down for an apple amid the squeals of some

stillborn love child's indigo lips.

You never asked so you don't know 

how six weeks I counted his curls backwards 

until there were none.

Father's surname feather soft

In a cradle of death.

A fawn shot down,

Bright bullet hole hot springs

Spewing out

On a bed of baby's breath.

We still pull over to examine the wreckage,

Bruises blooming in the reality where I fitted 

on your bathroom floor

And death shook my shoulders 

While you frantically struggled to catch and steady them.

What's in the blood, really?

It rained hard its coagulated tendrils all through the night,

And I

Just wondered what sunrise looks like in Berkeley. 

Photos by Chema Madoz

I first met her grieving on the bathroom floor
the peeling sea-green paint revealed an ashy grey wood and
her too,
wide open in the house that smelled of pipe tobacco, stale beer.

It was funeral March and May as well,  
When her feet hurt her mother would yell
and I watched her blank stare strangle some guttural shout but
all I could do was wring my hands

There's a gentleness to mental disorders
makes them so hard to catch –Comely women letting their hair loose and then
recoiling from a slapped hand or
me cowering in a pool of my own blood
and something to do with yellow wallpaper.

There were evenings in Europe,
the sun still hesitant to dip into the Mediterranean at half-past nine
she was young enough to be a stranger,
skipping stones and pouting with her belly pushed out like a wild thing

She doesn't remember it now,
She asks us to forget it too,
and we all do in our own way.

Last year she arrived, suddenly
flooded with emotion, indigence, and thought
but then
it all went south,
frothing at the mouth, I saw no gleam inside her eyes

Instead the days burst out like playing cards and in them I was still running down Cambridge Drive at 3 a.m. stomach aching from laughter, in the car listening to music uncomfortably loud with all the windows down, blowing past our house until a fraction of the love,
the lead weight in my gut,
might make like dust picked up by a street sweeper that passed
on the morning I was holding someone's hand
and
when she asks me if it's ever going to get any better I say
well, yes
and no

Ms. Entropy

Got signed up for classes today, so there's that. Just another solidification, another reminder of some paramount changes in a future that's approaching quickly as it is hurdling away, as all things are until there's nothing left. Time is of the essence, so when I say I'm writing a book I mean I'm staring very hard at those first four lines and contemplating how to write a believable passive martyr character. I've also been watching lots of some cheesy nineties alien t.v. show called Roswell, which would be an indulgence save for all the brain cells driving off in my teal Z3 convertible with a younger man and flipping me the bird. It's a good show, though. I like it. I still haven't received my housing information, which troubles me because I submitted my application late and requested a single room after realizing I'm devolving into a misanthrope. It's unfortunate but at the same time I picture myself as some unkempt madman and I just have to laugh. The dreams have been alright, lingering on the benign familiarity of everyday life. Friends' faces decomposed and then resurfacing in household objects. Always smoke and laughter, and music. Once I felt my tooth come loose in a red and gold theater with my parents. I tongued it in my mouth for a while wondering if I was awake, but then the dream shifted and I was someone else entirely.  I'm not doing them justice. Some were particularly fantastic, bits of stories I moved through to pick up the patterns with which I should maneuver my real life. But they were all dead, flat-lining in the morning when I tried to summon them to memory. Lost to the NyQuill which covered me with heavy black tar for 14 hours a night. It clung too, through the days I kept slipping into my imagination as easily as I had in my youth. I forgot to mention I was sick; I was. Just a common cold that hit me pretty terribly. I took long baths with all sorts of oils, salts and candles, ate little, and slept during the day in a large white bed. All the while everything blurred together and when I finally emerged I felt as though I had taken a trip or come home after a night at a carnival. It's so bright here, it's so blinding. The kaleidoscopic array of poppies, avocados, mountains and the pacific spinning 1,040 miles an hour in universal silence.
It's okay that I write without purpose because there is none.

vultures on somerset drive

I've decided to sit and write something down now because I probably should. It's been a while, and I can feel the leisure slipping away like a dream cut short that comes wailing out of your stupid head in the morning and leaves you thirsty through the week. I had one recently. Some stage version of our old shit climaxed in its mediocre plot and left me sitting on a couch with a giant vulture, dead on the floor. For some reason I think that means I've won this battle, but it doesn't make me happy.

After the dream I dug myself a hole, got in, and stayed comfortably for a few days with my whatifs, nursing a bruise. Most of the time I just tried to conjure the images back but sleep kept bringing something new. I didn't have a say in the matter at all and that seemed to say everything.
Meanwhile, I got a meningitis shot and celebrated my father's 47th birthday. I completed a plot outline for a novel; attempted to create a plausible scenario for an earth that's hundreds of years older, drowning both physically and within a dichotomous economic situation.

I rode a bicycle for the first time since the crash that blossomed permanent scars on both my knees and somewhere inside me, I'm sure, though I don't think about that anymore. My defense has a brilliant gleam. But this week it was all that dream, mostly that dream, some of that dream. I watched it slip out of the frame, like a balloon shrinking into the sky as I biked down streets that have already forgotten you.

The White Fire

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning. 

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I know a few good things about fires. California's coast knows them even better, secrets no living thing can fathom, forming in the smoke you breathed in too when the particles found their homes in our bodies' rooms.

I know one good thing is Echoes by Pink Floyd, and Dillon's mass of two foot long curls lolling down in the seat before me when Ethan starts taking the turns too hard and I yell something like "fuck dude slow down." He does so, laughs and we just go along until the song ends and the spell is broken by the smell of burning grasslands.

Tonight we got fed up with sitting in Ethan's garage and aborted the plan of marathoning Seinfeld until our eyes and lungs were sore. I suggested we should go hunt down the White Fire, which was burning in the hills above Santa Barbara, as I had done earlier in the day, but the roads had been blocked in an attempt to keep the adolescents from flooding in with their cameras and indignation. 

We decided instead to drive north, chasing some metaphorical flame in place of the real ones, hoping to smoke out the livelihood that had retreated into abscesses of some great abandoned estate we bartered in exchange for our youth. 

We reached Pismo and drove down to the wharf then parked, momentarily, before spotting three cops and turning straight around back up the way we came. Unfortunately,  it was a one-way street and soon there were blue and red flashes in the rear window,"Ah, shit" all around. At first my heart pounded so that I could hear the blood sloshing through in thick glutinous pumps. Then reason kicked in and we composed ourselves to behave like the upstanding young folks we were (or hoped we were, or in some ways were not).


"Are you students?"
"I need to see your IDs."


He took a full 9 minutes to look over everything while we sat and laughed and chatted in the car, more than we'd spoken on the whole ride over.
The cop returned, gave us back our things and asked what the hell we were doing in Pismo anyway. 

I said, "Our town is so boring, the only thing we can do is escape it."

"So you chose to drive from one large boring beach town to a smaller even more dull beach town?" He said.

"Yeah I guess," nervous laughter all around.
"Alright you kids get on your way then. Goodnight."

Pulling away from the flashing lights everyone was re-learning how to breathe and Dillon took ages to put on some music so we sat with our adrenaline in silence.

That's enough adventure for the night. Dillon cracked the window, lit a cigarette, and Ethan got on the highway while I wrote this all the way back to Santa Barbara's burning hips.

The White Fire started at 2:30 p.m. today and reached 1,000 acres by nightfall, born to carelessness and the Santa Ana's, blowing in hot from the south. The wind was so strong that planes were grounded within the first hour while flames jumped across mountain ridges and 3,000 people packed away their summarized lives into cars.

I went to see it, earlier today, before all this nonsense happened. I've always had a fascination with fires. Once when I was young, my parents drove me down the bluffs in the backseat of my father's tar black sports car and my mom thought we should bring soda and snacks to the firefighters so we did and she laughed with them while I stood and watched the flames.

Fires remind me of you and you remind me that I don't think I like being reminded of you anymore. But I do like fires, their brevity, and destruction. The closest I've ever been able to describe the curtain of loneliness that swallows me still is in a burned orchard I once saw as a child.

I'm standing in it now, right in the middle, surrounded by bleached ephemeral figures. The ghosts of trees look beautiful in their frozen screams, rising like tombstones from the dirt.

It's a bit frightening, but not nearly so much as the abandoned suburbs near the nuclear plant in the valley at night. When we drive by it, Dillon says his dad thinks squatters live there, cookie cutter houses leaking sewage and poor life choices at the seams. I imagine them and their charade of normalcy and realize it's not so different from the inhabitants before. Anyone can hide their corpses behind a job or a house or a car but they all start reeking with the passage of time. 

Global Warming and a Bioaccumulation of Guilt

Today while absent-mindedly making flash cards for my impending failure of an Environmental Science final, I found myself staring blankly at the television, entering its fourth hour of blaring CNN, if only to perpetuate my knack for over-empathizing.

When the commercials finally hit, I realized I had accidentally jotted down "bioaccumulation of guilt," rather than the actual answer: "bioaccumulation of toxics in marine life." Now, the word "guilt," had not been mentioned nor written anywhere on the program during this time, so I couldn't exactly place why my pen-holding-hand had so chosen to put it there for me.

Despite a lack of reason for its existence on my index card, the concept of bioaccumulated guilt is somewhat fascinating.

My guilt comes in many different forms: a broken sibling, the bags below my mother's eyes, a slice of birthday cake, the mistakes I made with you, and all reflections. It sits in a cabinet below my ribs that I unlock only on nights I can't sleep and am feeling self-sacrificial.

When I do venture to find the key, I can hardly open the drawer; it's so full.
Faults escaping like air from a balloon, screaming as they stream out. I guess I'm a hoarder, a hoarder of guilt. I like to adopt it from others and give it a different name. I bathe it, feed it, put it to bed. But I'd be lying if I said I don't wake up sweating at three, its muzzle bearing teeth inches from my neck.

Last night the beast was a girl I once knew, who crashed her car and walked, leaving three friends dead in the wreckage. It could have been me. All those times I've looked away to change the music or drink some coffee or catch your eye in the rear-view mirror. It could have been you amongst the smoking steel. I don't think I cope that well; even fantastical vehicular manslaughter makes me want to kill myself.

The planet's guilt must be a heat, that ricochets off of everything and cooks us slowly like frogs in French pots. It must hang like a yellow, hazy cloud, suffocating us without a sound. Because the individual's guilt is not his own, rising from his clothes in fumes unseen, permeating lungs of children who don't know what guilt means. We all make it, we all kick it up, but nobody says a thing.

unrelated prose

In Santa Barbara, summer doesn't come on the first of June. Instead, it shatters across the seasons, tiny filaments glinting even in the darkest months, and casts a facade from their prisms.  People are hungry for it. In June, tourists spew out of taxies, cruise ships, trains and planes like a tidal wave of vomit. Couples hold each other and their shopping bags  pretending for the day that they too are part of this coy escape from the rest of the country. Surely someplace so akin to heaven is exempt from the corruption of consumerism and politics. People come here to forget. I've seen them, with their laughter. Families strolling down State Street dressed up, sun drunk, flushed cheeks pushed back by their smiles. I always thought it strange how all animals bare their teeth at each other for one reason or another.

Kepler-62e.

A planet with the potential to host life was discovered in the constellation Lyra, which I think is quaint and somewhat poetic, but the potentials won't know it, and when we tell them, they wont care and, most likely, laugh, however they do. Kepler-62e circles its star in 122.4 earth days. It can take much less than that to die from cancer and much more to realize someone stopped loving you long ago. In Greek Mythology, Orpheus, a musician poet prophet, was killed at the hands of those who could not hear his music. His head and lyre, still playing, floated down the to the Mediterranean shore where winds and waves brought them to the Lesbos islands before his lyre was carried to the skies by muses to spend eternity (or, the road to complete entropy) as a constellation. Sometimes I wish American politics was being strangled by mythology rather than monotheism. At least the Greeks didn't pretend any god made in the image of man was exempt from his flaws. 

"How To Be a Great Writer" by Charles Bukowski

you've got to fuck a great many women

beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems.

and don't worry about age
and/or freshly-arrived talents.

just drink more beer
more and more beer

and attend the racetrack at least once a

week

and win
if possible

learning to win is hard -
any slob can be a good loser.

and don't forget your Brahms
and your Bach and your
beer.

don't overexercise.

sleep until noon.

avoid paying credit cards
or paying for anything on
time.

remember that there isn't a piece of ass
in this world over $50
(in 1977).

and if you have the ability to love
love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat
seems right or wrong -

an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.

stay out of churches and bars and museums,
and like the spider be
patient -
time is everybody's cross,
plus
exile
defeat
treachery

all that dross.

stay with the beer.

beer is continuous blood.

a continuous lover.

get a large typewriter
and as the footsteps go up and down
outside your window

hit that thing
hit it hard

make it a heavyweight fight

make it the bull when he first charges in

and remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.

If you think they didn't go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you're doing now

without women
without food
without hope

then you're not ready.

drink more beer.
there's time.
and if there's not
that's all right
too.

I had a lie but I don't remember

It's too bad I've lost my way with words

The poems escape me now in some horrible

Con I brought about then forgot;

an awful drought of thought

God must have cast upon me since I stopped believing

Or

Rejected his meaning in the grand scheme of things

Maybe I just loved you until my blood ran dry

Who knew a phone call could make my stomach fall through

Like I did, when I was clumsy as a kid 

and forgot the Speck's tree house had a trap door so I
tumbled to the whims of a ladder lying below,

Twisted little limbs bent between its rungs

Knocked down and dumb and then,

Bruises bloomed on the sides of my hips and all across my back.

For weeks I carried them 

As I carry you still.

OBGYNius

I am a lamb alive on a spit,
roasting with each foot in its respective stirrup
This paper hospital gown covers nothing.
Not that it matters anyway; we're far past a point of discretion
and I'm supposed to be alright with that.

It's not like the thought of a doctor examining my genitals freaks me out
It's just that she
Takes so long to walk in the door
and insists on making nonchalant small talk
though mine seeps through clenched teeth like a sieve

THE WEATHER'S FUCKING GREAT ISN'T IT

I tell her I want to be a journalist
And she,
peering deep into my pussy,
says
Yeah,  I could see you on tv.

oh, something good tonight make me forget about you for now

Won't you just eat me up already?

My heart can beat out the last of its disoriented rhythm

While I

Try to emulate Bukowski's

rotting fruit demure

Like

Everything's fucking rotten

And everything's fucking

To the sound of a cock crowing 

obscenities 

in the morning

I woke up yesterday and didn't feel a thing

Today I've got leprosy, small pox,

Black plague

Tar clotting up the veins in my legs

"You're just a little anxious.

"No, you're just a little crazed"

Tired of being quirky, pathetic, insane

Maniacally depressed,

albiet, well dressed

so they drop the interrogation after

"Are you ok?"

The interactions we don't want but have anyway

Get the oven going

board up the windows and doors

Someone's name is ringing out

I've heard it before 

And so long as the doctor says I'm in good health

I'll fantasize making love to you then killing myself

It's just about as numb as I can get

Caught up on some rage you stuck inside my head.

two short poems

I lead a man's life, mostly
spend free time smoking pot
spitting sophomore existentialism in church parking lots

I'll use coffee to wash down the melatonin
then read Bukowski when I can't fall asleep
Old man says he laughed watching his bones crack under love's weight
but I can so much as muster a groan,
I wake up alone
since I lost my lust to a love that howls as it comes
tearing through the hole where my heart should be

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few nights ago, Sean, Jake and I
drove out to Butterfly Beach and stared at the ocean/mist gradient
marveling how one didn't have to end for the other to begin

We stood there a good 20 minutes
until darker clouds rolled in and rain began falling fat and heavy on our heads
Then, the homeless started their midnight sand shuffle
and I tasted death's metallic prick on my tongue watching them.

Got sensible, though,
pushing wind down the 101 at ninety-five,
rationalizing that everyone has to die sometime
and
even the best of memories will waver then fade
like a vagrant in the fog

Depression burns like the barrel of a gun
and shoots like hydrogen across the sun
I listened all day but I didn't hear from you
I called through the night
but you didn't come.

to do

today

• Finish tracing matches onto carbon paper
• Etch matches into copper plate
• Study through biodiversity and ecology (guiding questions: biodiversity, evolution, and ecology)
• Call Patino again for interview. Pull quotes from Board of Trustees meeting.
• Call Rob Morales.

tomorrow

• Bathe copper plate in acid.
• Print 4 images. 
• Study through populations, livestock  and agriculture (guiding questions: populations and agriculture)
• Review all guiding questions for exam.

Listened to Romulus driving home
had to
slow down to a crawl because it was no where near finished
and I was pretty certain that
I was having a
profound moment

I was you in the depths of it

After Jake and I talked about love for so long
and things were brought up
I assured him its going alright for me
and we got in our separate cars
and made faces at each other before we forked off

Then, it had to be Romulus
ostending the hollows love likes to leave

For two minutes I was driving half the speed

Would you respect that?
or just
tell me to grow up
like Jake does when I say

you are me in the depths of it

swimming in circles round that
hideous little pit
I tried to so hard dig you out of my abdomen

In the driveway, tugging at my stomach's skin
the song ended
and you didn't dream of wild horses
for the first time in months.

Novella, Chapters 1 & 2

001.

I'm tired of this wine. You'll have to finish it for me.

Eloise and Marcus, her devoted husband of two years, were languishing in the shade of a cafe they liked to frequent that stood exactly two and a half blocks to the left of their minuscule flat. Their flat had two stories, the lower of which consisted of a staircase's beginning, umbrella rack, and card table. Water damage lines on the outermost wall of their building served as reminder of the city's annual two millimeter sink.

Sometimes, while returning home in the town's public ferry, Eloise would watch the tide slap, peeling rose colored paint off the Venetian architecture. She thought of her grandmother's kitchen wall where her height (and that of five siblings) was recorded and compared year after year, accounting for the passage of time. The tradition died along with her grandmother, and the seaside house, which sold for less than it was worth before it burned and the wind scattered its ashes to the whim of the Mediterranean.

Now, time passed without measure and viciously fast. Half-way through her twenties, Eloise felt blindly for the brakes but only grasped handfuls of sand.

Marcus stuck out his arm and grabbed the wineglass from her pale hand.

He made eye contact with his young wife and felt a momentary static shock before she looked into her teacup. He took a swig, considering the deep purple and green bags that hung below her eyes.

You sleeping all right? he asked.

Marcus, I sleep next to you every night, of course I'm sleeping.

Her voice was muffled by the edge of the cup. She eyed him over the rim before realizing there wasn't any tea left in it. Marcus' expression became frustrated as she examined the tea leaves, feigning curiosity.

I said, are you sleeping all right? he said.

She looked out from under her hair sheepishly.

Is there anything else I could bring you? Their waitress asked, cutting air like a knife.

Eloise's shoulders slumped in relief and Marcus peeled his eyes off her then said, Just the check.

Please, Eloise added.

Marcus nodded, briefly scanning the waitress from head to toe. She was heavier than his wife, with full breasts that formed a very small slit between her blouse's middle buttons. How heavy would her breast be, resting in the palm of his hand?

Marcus looked down at the tablecloth and closed his mouth. He cleared his throat.

Not only is the city drowning, he said. But scientists say, they say it's heading out to sea. You know, from whence it came.

He laughed fully.

I can see why though, I mean, doesn't everything go home to die? 

002.

When they returned to their flat that evening, after spending the day ambling through town silently because Eloise was in a mood, there was a note on the door. 

It read:

I KNOCKED BUT NO ONE ANSWERED

      -l.t.

Eloise immediately snatched the note up and scrutinized it for thirty seconds before handing it over and asking, Well, what does it mean?

Marcus didn't respond, fixated on the small slip of paper. Just then the humidity of the tiny hall in which they stood overwhelmed the girl and she began swaying a little at the knees. 

What could it mean Marc?

Glancing at his wife he felt a profound sadness because he couldn't answer her question. She had stopped asking him things when she realized there was nothing he could say to make her happy. 

Communication, save for  the necessary and insignificant, was virtually non-existent now. 

When they had first met, in the spring of their second year at university, Eloise would spend the night lying with her head on Marcus' lap and just talk for ages. Within the first month, he thought he knew everything about her. 

Don't ever make me jealous, she had told him.

I go mad. I can't take it. My heart starts rattling and rattling and all my ribs splinter and break apart. I bust open from the inside.

She had said it all with a smile, but something in the way her lips were stuck with him. 

Her lips were like that now, so he crumpled the note and tossed it down the stairwell.

I don't know what the hell it means, he said.  Doesn't matter, they probably stuck it on the wrong door anyway. Let's go inside. 

At dinner Marcus tried to stimulate conversation, but was dejected by her irresponsiveness three times before resorting to relocating himself and his dinner plate onto the couch. He proceeded to turn on the news and began increasing the volume an increment for every second Eloise refused to speak. The television was screaming before Marcus even realized she had gone. 

Fuck, he said, inaudibly as a sigh. 

He got a beer out of the fridge and sat in Eloise's empty chair staring at the untouched food. He sat there until six more beers had gone and the news was on it's third cycle.