VOL 1. A collection of bizarre stories

Past Walls I See

FRANCESCA tried to ignore the memories, but they kept coming back. There was no way for her to escape the nightmares and the dark thoughts entering her mind.
     "It was dear." It depended on an evil, but that evil was in her. "I know somehow." It entered her soul. Her soul was empty, her body was an empty shell."
     Lexington was travelling with his mother; she was driving a gray Jeep.
     "Lex . . . tell me."
     No, Lex thought, disturbed, number eighteen, number eighteen.
But they numbered Lex's Jersey eighteen, the same number of his age.
     "Ma, where are we going?"
     "We are going," Susan said. "You got that, Lex?  You ever read Swan Song? . . . 'take one step in the next one gets you to where you're going'."
     His mother studied the road. She saw a light up ahead. Susan turned the wheel, trying to pull into an old country gas station.
     She looked over at Lex.
     "We need to get gas," she said. "Why don't you pay the man."
     Susan was preaching to her son.  "We can leave forever, never come back." He agreed, but felt sorry for his mother.
     She smiled - not out of spite, Lex thought, but because it was nearing the New Year. "Sure mom . . . it will be okay . . . I promise."
     "So the teen boy? Do you remember what happened to the teen boy?" she asked.
     "I forgot-"
     Then his mother knew the rest of the details. Sad story. "Get . . . out . . . pay the . . . gas man. The gasman. You . . . know. The guy that pumps the gas."
     Three months before stopping at the gas station, Francesca got robbed. The mother was in her early thirties- meeting a guy from Japan- in your thirties "cowards." Because he knew Susan wanted him. "We liked wondering in the night," the Japanese man said. They had dated for months. If it wasn't serious by now, then the first thing you would notice is her change. But the Japanese man, who smoked a long black pipe, (hung out at Rotten Chain) walked weakly, something he was used to doing growing up in Japan. Was it a time to explore different Japanese men? He thought in the early days of 1945- which was when she was an American teen, when she was homeless during the air raids of Tokyo (things couldn't have been any worse for her, as the city was getting bombed), the conditions confirmed by his bad condescending didn't hold up. But he felt too excited to care. She knew it was only through a narrow, smelly corridor . . . and the two had walked together through it many times. The corridor led to a small room. It was a room of horror . . . killing your dignity and everything else along with it.
     Outside, rats crawled over the dead body, they made horrifying sounds. They strewed the bodies over the corridor. Around other wrecked sites were more bodies. The clothes on lines were shreds of rags. "Blow it, wind," Susan said. "In the wind, Indians."
     She was speaking out loud, but not to Lex.
     "There was a man hung over."
     Lex was unsure of his mother's mental health.
     "Out a window . . . the old ford truck.
     "With his head missing," Lex said. The guy, crept into her mind- as it helped her to recognize the mistakes- far-fetched mistakes. Keeping her company wasn't safe, it wasn't good company and, it wasn't a big enough shelter for the two of them.
     For a while, he kept her company. But through the night, as the bombings continued, he vanished. He never returned again. If it was her, she wouldn't have either. Francesca couldn't stop seeing him in her mind's eye. Driving away from the old gas station in the middle of nowhere, she realized one thing; she was stupid. Whatever the hell drove her with the first Japanese guy drove her to be with the second. They stopped at a place called "Albert's Diner." By this time, her mind wasn't clearing, but changing channels. She could hear the voices of the Japanese men, which were controlling her.
     She didn't want her son to witness what was going on inside her body. The waiter came to pour water and set food on the table. It looked like blood being poured in the glasses. To her, the waiter was the old American pilot that flew the B-29's that bombed Tokyo. On the table, on her son's plate, were the Japanese man's bloody genitals. 
     "Mother, why do you stare at me so?"
     "Boy, let's go! we are getting out of this place forever." She took him by the arm and left the restaurant.
     "Every new town.  It is the same thing. We are getting out of this place forever."
     On the receipt she wrote: "Self-deception - self-dignity = self-sabotage.