Movies. They take your fullest attention so bad I sometimes think it’s wasted time. I mean, you can read a book while listening to some Ra Ra Riot or something. With movies, you can’t. They’re attention whores that way. Gawd, I hate myself after watching a movie. I smoke (it’s becoming a habit, again) right after a movie, or even between it, or just the scenes where the characters smoke. I can’t help but be affected–be drowned with the ending, or the course of the story. With books, it’s a different case. I don’t remember plots that much. The characters, well yes, but maybe I’ve read a lot these years (in my standards, I mean) all the characters just mix up like Hester Prynne with Marla Singer stuck in a Tokyo Subway Gas Attack.
With movies, which are fucking vivid enough for your brain to remember the scenes, the lines, everything, well, you can’t just forget them. Movies are stuck in your mind forever.
I shall undergo a lobotomy session.
This entry was written by , posted on September 30, 2009 at 10:47 pm, filed under Stress ball narratives. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Whose Autumn
Kevin Moses Bautista
Overhead we can hear the silent hums of the pipes-the ventilation probably-and see, through the fog of darkness, the backs of aluminum-cased fluorescent lights suspended by stiff cables, an army of floating trays of light illuminating the entirety of the grocery store. We focus on a certain head in the produce aisle in a red shirt which seems to nod in agreement with the crowd of vegetables. His hair is quite disheveled, his hands feeling bell peppers, green and red ones. Behind the shelves of juice cartons we can see his face; the light film of mist a blur, unfocused. His eyes are born for eyeglasses and at one point his eyeglasses gleamed with colors-similar to the spectrums we see in a puddle of engine oil.
In his tray we can see a vacuum-sealed tofu, a tray of eggs, parsley, spring onions, a bottle of teriyaki sauce and a carton of milk. It was the calmness of a Tuesday night which puts him to this state of close inspection; he was not in any hurry. After having decided what bell pepper to put in his tray, he made his way to the counter.
He was staring at the cashier’s name tag. It says “three months” printed below the name “Hannah”. It was a much welcomed distraction for he was about to think-one more notch and his head will hit loneliness-of his troubled relationship with his girlfriend, for these past few nights his blank stares suddenly emanates into a trenchantly reflective stare. Three months, he sighed. It seems to him as if the grocery store was labeling their salesladies with expiration dates, for their lives depend on their contract, and when they rot they are to be, like any other perishable good, disposed. “Like they’re about to die or something,” a friend had said few days back. In his head he hears his cat endlessly purring in the middle of a hazy night. Meow, it says. Meow, meow, meow, a repetitive curse, and all he thinks of is death, the inevitable end of life boiling down to nothingness–yes, he said, nothingness, and he is afraid of it.
Something beeped–the kind of beep which spells error and readily summons impatience–which jerked him away from the strings of his abstractions. His credit card was rejected, the cashier says. It was, in her technical terms, tampered.
Tampered?
“Look, that can’t be tampered. I even used that last Saturday-” and something struck him that made him lose track of his argument and his composure altogether. Silence. The cashier was quite unnerved by his tone of voice; it wasn’t exactly piercing, but it was quite shocking for a calm-faced twenty-something. “Try this one,” he said, another credit card landing on the edge of the saleslady’s patience. It was after an unintentional block of the cashier’s fingers–she probably attempted to crush the credit card–that we can see the name Aki Matsuyama embossed in the credit card.
Aki Matsuyama, she probably noted in her mind.
Another beep.
“Look, it’s probably your machine’s fault, goddamnit”, he said, surprised of his hot-headedness. The cashier swiped it again but it still couldn’t read the credit card. Sensing that he needed to explain, “I’ve been using it every single transaction in this grocery store and it always works.” Overhead we can see him a red-hot spot in the middle of the whiteness of the cashier’s uniform, a furnace searing the bleached tiles.
The cashier was feeling the telephone handle with her free hand, tentative in its move, considering whether or not to call the supervisor.
“Maybe,” he said, now patiently, “I’ll probably just pay this with money”–his fingers swiftly getting bills from his wallet–”and get out of here.” He gets his credit card and silently puts everything he bought in a plastic bag with a blue Mitsuwa print on it, heads of parsley bobbing out of it as he walks out of the scene.
–
“Can’t you just *slam* buy a *slam* new charger?” Wednesday is writing night yet he had to answer Mike’s insistent phone call.
“Well,” Takeshi’s head adjusted the mouthpiece of the cordless telephone as he slams his laptop’s charger on the floor, both hands busy holding the ends of his charger’s cords–the strings of a puppet-charger limp from the pull-and-drop motion, “I’ve been *slam* running out of funds *slam* these days.”
“Aren’t you tired *slam* of slamming it on your *slam* goddamn floor?”
Silence.
“No. See, it works this way.” He altogether dropped the charger and the cords on the floor and sighed in surrender. “I just have to slam it someplace.”
A pause.
“How’s work, anyways?” He can sense his friend grieving over today’s predicament.
“Pretty neat, though I have to say I’m in a state of destitution for two months and running.”
“You can always get an advance from your publishing–”
“Well, I dunno… Lately, I just can’t seem to put down my thoughts.” The fact that his charger has mood swings-an interruption he greatly admires for its timely occurrence; it’s “very helpful”, Takeshi would say-makes his writing susceptible to oblivion. His four year-old laptop has an amazing battery life of four minutes; without plugging the charger his laptop can’t even boot for chrissake.
“Really.”
“I can’t seem to think of an idea.”
“You know what? You should get yourself a day off from work or something. I mean,” we can hear the shifting of a telephone handle from the other line, “you’re self-employed in a way. You’re lucky you’ve got all your days devoted to some grant and all, but it’d be nice if you’d go someplace and just stare at the sky for hours. Might help you collect yourself. Reconstruct yourself. Know what I mean?”
Silence.
“Takeshi?”
–
We can see a receipt posted on the fridge with a palm tree magnet. “MITSUWA GROCERY (044-711-0825), May 23rd, 2009: parsley, tofu, teriyaki sauce, eggs, bell pepper,” and a scribbled note which says “inconvenience” on pencil. It’s a peaceful night, Sunday perhaps, for Aki rests during weekends. A shadow came past from the apartment window, then a crisp, shuffling sound of boots to leaves. The fridge clicked and hummed louder. Everything else didn’t budge. Then we can hear a brief knock on the door.
“Good evening,” said the voice frigid at eight o-clock in the evening. Aki opens the door.
–
In the curbside a pile of leaves are being bulldozed by Takeshi’s loafers, the stems and the warm-colored leaves crackle and snap, the smell a whiff of something stale. He was soul-searching again, wandering throughout the city park, noticing in his weary eyes shimmering lights of the city, the black broccolis that were the trees, the emptiness of the place.
He sits in a waiting shed, a man in his own glass house. Pitch dark at two o-clock in the morning and he is still alive, sipping coffee out of a paper cup. “This is it,” he said to himself. “A writing break is all I need.” He brought with him a pocket notebook and a pencil, a tandem for intuitive nights of creative ruminations. In his mouth was a freshly lit cigarette, his mouth blowing sibilant streams-the stress from his body-leaving his body now warm, his senses somewhat enlightened.
–
“Mr. Matsuyama.” The voice was flat, dead certain.
“Yes? May I help you?” In the periphery of the peephole was a rather distorted figure of a woman with a brown paper bag held in her chest; the brick wall behind swallows the figure’s silhouette, and if not wincing or using the other eye could we get a better grasp of her figure. There was a momentary pause. No one spoke.
“I’m Hannah.”
He opened the door slowly-just like everybody else who opens the door for polite-looking strangers or shadows at least-and was quite disconcerted at first when he saw a familiar face.
“That’s right. I’m from Mitsuwa-I’ve already finished my contract.”
“Wait-” he said. “Wa-wait, why are you here? How did you know my address?” She was still at the doorstep.
“You left your name and address to our supervisor and… well,” she sighed.
With a pained wince he said, “Come in.”
Wearing a black trench coat and a gray dress with paisley prints on it, Hannah, compared to the Mitsuwa cashier she had been, was from a different world. She was beautiful even without jewelry.
A cat meowed and went straight to Hannah’s boots. With a thoughtful hand she strokes the cat’s furry body. “You live alone?”
“Well, yeah,” Aki’s voice can be heard in the kitchen as he slices brie cheese to match with grapes and crackers in the kitchen. He gets a tray of desserts he bought just recently. “I’m sorry for an unannounced visit,” Hannah said, putting the paper bag in the kitchen counter, “It just so happened that I remembered you yesterday… I don’t know how or why, but something tells me to at least pay a visit and apologize for-” and she stopped.
We could hear their conversation in the hushed ambience of the living room, beneath the cold, white clapboards and the lampshade which dimly lights the room. Her lips are relishing the lightness of a cranberry-and-cream affair while he gathers his apologies about his “lower-than-usual boiling point” that calm Tuesday night. “It’s okay-I mean, really, it’s okay, I understand,” she insists. “It’s probably the machine’s fault, after all.”
“My girlfriend and I… well, we broke up three months ago-actually, we broke up five or six days after my credit card malfunctioned.” He took a swig from a glass of sake, its bitter taste can be seen in the crumples of his expression.
“So it’s been malfunctioning, after all,” she said, massaging the temple of the cat sitting on her lap, the purrs like an already exhausted voice, like someone relieved and was about to exhale her last breath, her death rattle.
Their eyes met and locked at each other.
–
A foot was dangling at the edge of the bed, its toes coming out of the comforter. The snake of a belt can be found lying on the floor together with the spoils of an intimate war. Aki opens his eyes slowly, looks at the digital clock which beams in devilish red the time: 3:58 AM. He stood up and found himself trampled upon by a maze of a collapsed lampshade, picture frames, among other things. He yelped in pain as he finds his way in the dark.
Where’s Hannah?
–
How’s things?
“I don’t… know,” Takeshi said and heaved, “I… must have… been uninspired lately.”
Are you sure you’re okay?
“Not exactly. No.” We can see Takeshi hitting the backspace keys, typing letters, the rattles a series of an unending parade of fired bullets. “This isn’t supposed to happen.” He was frantic. “Subway station–yes, the subway station, then he’d go to Mitsuwa again, and then–” he paused, catching up with the rapid beat of his thoughts. He deletes Hannah’s part. The empty bowl of ramen shook-jumped, actually-as his table bears the weight of his fingers against the laptop, pouring the burden he feels with Aki’s newly-found woman, the intimacy, the sex that happened, the disillusionment of love. “This couldn’t happen,” he hears himself murmuring. His ex-girlfriend suddenly appeared in his mind, naked probably, or an irresistible image of her, so lovelorn that he started tossing everything but not his four year-old laptop. We can hear the crack of a vase, the upturn of a desk, the amputation of his sanity as he wrecks everything in sight, now screaming, now ever-vulnerable.
–
Aki noticed the brown paper bag Hannah left at the kitchen counter. It was the same thing he bought in Mitsuwa: bell peppers, a tray of eggs, a bottle of teriyaki sauce, a carton of milk, spring onions and parsley, a vacuum-sealed tofu–only that it wasn’t bought in Mitsuwa; the paper bag tells him so.
This is my short story, please don’t copy-paste it and publish it as yours. Thanks for reading. Comments, suggestions and reactions at the comment section. :)
This entry was written by , posted on September 25, 2009 at 9:11 am, filed under Fiction. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I’m an applicant of UPLB PANTAS (Pandayan ng Talino at Sining), a writing/reading organization here in UPLB for almost two, three months now. As an applicant, I am required to submit two short stories (8-10 pages) and it would be criticized in our weekly workshops.
I must say it was really hard to make a short story out of scratch. It requires three or even four days of constant plotting, character sketching, crafting the writing style, endless conflicts with the plot, and the constant grammar-checking (especially the tenses!). Sometimes my eyes would strain at the screen for a while, tears accumulating, eyes wanting to rest from the fatigue. I thought writing short stories are easy, but lately I’ve been thinking about it as one of the hardest things to do in life.
It’s birthing something into existence. The concept is born and it is playful, it is full of excitement for the author to write, write, write, like a child wanting to do something (in this case, with meaning). But the midlife crisis also works in this case, wherein the author has to decide what to happen, which direction to take, and then comes confusion.
I’m currently in the middle of the story and it’s really hard. It really is. My first story, entitled Whose Autumn (which I am planning to post here) took me three days to finish. I always have a pack of cigarettes with me whenever I have to call a break from writing, maybe two or three minutes of thinking over and over again. I always thought it wasn’t easy, of course, but I never thought it would be this hard.
My second story’s deadline, still untitled, is on Wednesday. I have to work it out.
This entry was written by , posted on September 22, 2009 at 10:47 am, filed under IRLs, Life at UPLB. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.