Ego Fine, Thanks for Asking....

Okay. So you folks petted my ego enough yesterday. Today, I figure I'll share a short clip of my writing with you again for being so good and tolerating my whining. So far, most of the fiction does fall into a fairly melancholy mood; I'm sure eventually some happy stuff will come out, but if it doesn't, hey, there's a market for melancholy too. :) Right now I am just writing the things I think about, not shaping past the basics, not really purpose-driven. That should come eventually, I reckon.

Gulf

Once, living in another slum nearer the Gulf of Mexico, within walking distance from the salty warm water; it is a trashy apartment, paint peeling, hallway carpet smelling of piss and mildew. I gather hermit crabs from the beach. I place them in a bowl of salty sea water with rocks and sand. But there is not enough dry land and the hermit crabs drown. I am inconsolable as the crabs begin to smell and my mother tells me to throw them away. At the same time the crabs die, someone who has been staying at our house and is ostensibly babysitting me constantly leaves small plates covered in sugar, with deep gouges in the sugar from where he has been rolling something around to coat it with the grains of sweetness. I keep putting the sugar back in the canister. He sits in the living room on the couch with his shirt off and I sneak into my room to read the porno book titled Fran I found in the dumpster next door-- purple cover and naked woman with her ankles and wrists tied up. I come to the kitchen to look at my dying hermit crabs and put another plate full of sugar back into the canister. I do not remember his name but he is not one of my mom's boyfriends. I still do not know what he was using the sugar for.

I have a birthday; we go to Pizza Hut and I am having fun. I get a blue bike with my grandmother's birthday check, and I have a tank full of neon-striped fish. The kids who live across the hall are weird; they like to play "Mommy and Daddy" which entails lots of deep throat tongue-kissing between the two older sisters. I always have to be "baby" which doesn't require kissing, so I'm happy about that. But as weird as they are, they are my friends. They do not come with to Pizza Hut, but my mom has a friend with us. The two of them share a pitcher of beer. Or two. I don't count them, but I am happy-- with pizza and the aura of "going out to dinner". I get a couple of dollars to play the jukebox. Just around the time it's getting close to the end of dinner, the man begins to choke on some pizza. He thrashes with his hands as he tries to clear his throat, knocking over the last of a pitcher of beer with his panic, soaking the last of the pizza and making a mess. He clears his throat, but my mother is angry with him. She scolds him as we walk home for ruining her birthday. I pout, and we walk along the street in the thick fishy salty-aired darkness.