Thursday, March 22, 2012

Moku


Moku
By Nicholas Becher
 Written: 2012 for English 1500 at HPU



It's an island
where everyone dies
still. In sunlight
water falls
from mountains forming
rainbows of tears
Would they cry for anything less
than an honest days' work

Vultures


Vultures
By Nicholas Becher
The desert sun is melting me. I woke up here with my hands bound and my legs bleeding. I am pretty beat up. I’m here laying on my side with a black and white flannel button up shirt. Completely unbuttoned and ripped at the armpit. My black ADIDAS sweatpants allow a gentle breeze to flow through a hole in the back of my right knee. Barely enough to distract me from the sweltering heat.  The sun, as I mentioned before, is blistering. And these fucking pants are just making it worse.  I’m not sure exactly where I am, but I know I am somewhere in Nevada. I know this because I remember why I am here. I remember how I got here.

Two days ago, my fiancés father found out that I proposed to her and she accepted. This man, a police officer in the great state of Nevada, was not happy. I was sitting in my apartment when my buzzer rang and I got off my squeaky rusted futon to press the button on the wall by the door. Hello. Yeah come on up sir. When I said this, I made sure to sound condescending. Snide. Rude. Almost obnoxious. I unlocked the door and he punched me with a heavy fist right in my abdomen. I was breathless for a moment. And at that time he threw me by my neck, sending my head through the vanilla white wall that my fiancé had just coated a few weeks before. As I hit the wall I pushed my head out of it and fell limp onto the floor. This man is a monstrosity. Bald head with a policeman’s mustache. Six and a half feet tall. Hands that felt like splintered wood and years of manual labor. He tied my hands with a bungee cord and threw me over his shoulder. Because I am only 120 pounds, he was able to do this very easily.

The desert sun is relentless. I open my eyes and see a snake moving sideways at me. He comes close to me and looks at my hands. He slithers and hisses and rattles his tail, moving closer to my face. He must know I am hurt. And that I need help. I would ask him, but I have staples in my lips, and when I move my mouth I feel them clinging inside my skin. So I peer into his eyes and hope that he will not bite me. But I see a sense of caring in the beady black eyes on the snake’s face. As if he is concerned. Telling me that I am not alone in this after all. And I start to drift off into a memory.
Four years ago I met my fiancé at a party. A real cluster-fuck of a gathering. The way I remember it, or more so the way I don’t remember it, was that we traded phone numbers and fucked the entire night. Through all the distortion in this memory, I can still see the shadows behind her as she moved up and down on top of me. I can still see the way her hair became an ocean on the walls and made me forget about time and space for a few moments.  This was ultimately the reason I am here today. In this God forsaken desert.

After he carried me out to his truck, he told me in a burly old man voice, that he is not fucking around anymore. I could tell he was pretty serious. But when he looked in my eyes I made sure that I did not appear afraid. In fact I recall raising my eyebrows, as if to tell him to go fuck himself a few times. He drove me somewhere hot and dry. Like I said it could have been anywhere. I was pretty disoriented seeing as my head went through the drywall in my apartment. When he pulled me out of the truck, an SUV the size of a military tank, one of those oversize Hummers that I can’t believe fit into parking spots, and that I resented this man for owning, he punched me twice or maybe three times in the stomach to make sure I wouldn’t try to run away. I was slung over his shoulder and carried into a garage that I did not recognize. A place that I was terrified of the moment I looked at it. The door was shit brown from the years of dust being thrown against it. The outside walls of this garage were missing slabs of siding exposing the skeleton of the building. Exposing the sick twisted mind that owned the place. Exposing everything about the upcoming events. I looked at this building and knew that Death himself was inside waiting, smoking a cigar and sharpening his scythe.


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