i read an interview of George Saunders in Harper's Magazine in which he talks about edginess. it made me think about my own writing. i tried writing two stories, one with edge and one without.



"Why do I always feel the need for what we might call the obligatory-edgy?... Edginess can be a way of introducing energy and/ or an appropriate overtone of skepticism, a way of enlarging the frame, of accounting for the complications of real life." -George Saunders

The Edge got into his white Ford Escalaro which was parked in his four-car garage at the base of his mountain-top ranch. He shifted the gear shift which was a custom-made chrome replica of his trademark goatee and started down the winding road to the camouflaged gate which gave access to the highway. From the highway, the gate looked just like more of the same trees that lined the road in that area.

He pulled out into traffic and drank some of his iced soy chai that he had gotten at his ranch's cafe. It tasted damn good, he thought. He was listening to one of his band's cds. The not-so-famous one after Zooropa.

The Edge drove down the highway hugging the curves like skirt on thigh. He had a charity event at 3, but first he needed to score some blow. His fucking dealer had skimped him last time and now he had to make this trip. Unnecessary.

He thought about brushing his teeth, reminiscing from the morning, looking in the mirror, the suds or froth or whatever effervescing like a science experiment in his mouth. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror and saw his sunglasses looking back.

The Edge turned into Rt. 76 and thought about driving to the beach; the Pacific was only thirteen miles away. He thought maybe he would drive to the ocean and take off his shoes and socks and walk along the part of the water where the waves come up and over your feet and then go out with the tide and recede from the sand. His feet sinking into the wet sand and making oblong tracks the water would come and fill and erase.

The charity thing was some baseball fund drive. He hated fucking baseball. He wondered how hard you would have to hit someone to break their skull. The Edge subconsciously pressed his foot against the gas pedal, increasing his speed. He thought about getting into an accident. How James Dean and Jackson Pollock had died in car crashes. He thought about driving his car so hard into some immovable object that he would become enmeshed with his car, two become one. He took the exit off the highway and drove down a boulevard that had palm trees at regular intervals planted in the island.

He got to the side street where he was going and pulled into the driveway of a once-nice loft. The thing about lofts was that even if they were once nice, before that they were all factories or slaughterhouses or worse. The Edge got out of his car, his $4,000 vegan shoes swatting the pavement. He thought about meteors crushing him, aliens descending and preventing him from jogging up the three stairs and knocking on the front door. A satellite could fall out of orbit. He jogged up the three stairs.

*

The Edge sat in his parked white Ford Escalaro. He looked out through its windshield at a flock of birds flying as a unit up down and around, going nowhere, making maneuvers. He flipped the turn signal on and off for no reason.

The Edge got out of his car, twirling the key ring on his finger. It made a clinking, metallic sound. He had parked at an overlook which looked over a 500 foot drop to the ocean which licked at the base of the sheer cliff like a dog that wanted to jump up into the arms of its master but it was too fat from eating unearned treats. The Edge bit his thumbnail and chewed off a piece, spitting it out into the ocean. It took the thumbnail forever to fall through the empty space between The Edge's lips and the water.

There was a bench welded into a slab of cement at the lookout next to a commemorative plaque. The plaque said something about Cortez that The Edge didn't read. Instead he looked at his wrist and read his watch. He had a thing at 3. He thought about the possibility of not going to the thing. It was probably going to be a benefit or a fundraiser or something. He would have to stand in front of all those people who wanted something more from him than a few riffs.

The Edge looked across the ocean and tried to see as far out into it as possible. It was just water and water and water all the way to the slight curve where the sky took over and became nothing but sky.

The Edge got back into his car and drove down the highway, thinking. He had started teaching himself the banjo and the ukulele. No one wanted him to play the banjo or the ukulele because he was lead guitar. He wanted to start painting again like he had in college before they got big, but there was no time for that anymore.

He drove along the roads which went on and on, turning from one onto another. He stopped at a traffic signal and another car pulled up alongside his. The passenger in the other car looked at him and he couldn't tell if it was a look of recognition or just a car-idling glance.

The Edge looked at his dashboard clock and saw that it was after 2. He pulled into a drive-thru fast food restaurant and ordered a hamburger and a chocolate shake. He sat in his car in the restaurant's parking lot and ate the food, his jaw moving as he chewed.

I wrote this story after reading a prompt on HTML GIANT

1.) John called on the phone. There was the sound of screaming in the background. His voice was muffled.
"What's going on?" she shouted directly at her telephone's microphonic pinholes. "Where are you?" she almost cried.
Her name was Stephanie, I guess. It was hard to hear what with the bad connection and a third party breaking in on an overlapping bandwidth or whatever.
John shouted with an index finger in his earhole. It was his finger, still connected to his hand, thank the lord or no one.
"Steph!" he said. The way he said it sounded like "stuff."
He was calling from the middle of a video arcade. What was he doing there? Trying to break up with Stephanie.
"I don't think I want to love you anymore!" he screamed, the tubes inside his neck tumescing.

2.) Stephanie was late or early or on time for work, putting on her clothes starting with something. She had a finger inside the straps of some expensive pumps which curved from her hand like pristine prosthetics.
She finally slipped them on her feet in the cab, the driver's eyes sliding up her bare legs to some upper part of her legs, which was still leg, almost.
The driver's name was Natasha and she spoke cyrillically into the space which was angled and expectant between them: "Where to?"
Stephanie said the name of the college where she was adjuncting. It was not Columbia or NYU or Berkeley. It was CCNY and she taught creative writing.
She wrote a story about having sex with the cabdriver while she rode the elevator. It started with them looking at each other through the rear-view mirror. Maybe it was a metaphor, she could say; but it wasn't. It wasn't anything.

3.) Stephanie watched 48 individual eyes look at her like some kind of overocular monster. If she had a stick she might have popped them.
There was a window open and wind was blowing in through it. Her hair flapped at the base of her neck like a cape.
At the end of the period, she ran out of there, drinking water at the fountain and then sliding down the fire pole to the first floor where she flagged down a pick-up truck and hopped in its bed.
There were bags of seed back there and she cut one open, spreading it over herself lasciviously.
The seeds planted themselves in her body.
"Every story should have a --" she had been saying as the bell rang. It seemed as true as anything else.
There was a dog in her apartment. She thought she'd go home and stab it in the heart and eat it. She didn't think that.
Everything was coming to a standstill, including the truck at an intersection. She jumped out and ran through the clogged street. Car horns honked. It was what they were invented to do.
She danced through them and stole a pretzel from a vendor.
It all made sense to her, suddenly, like a tumor.

1. There was a time when I was not a scavenger. Like, for example, being a baby and having all of my needs cared for by my mum.

Or for the many years up until the time when my scavenging began.

Life back then was different, if not sweeter nor simpler. Different from now but the same as most other people’s. Yours maybe. Which is why I don't find it necessary to describe those olden days which transpired in an ordinary fashion.

Reflect upon your own history and past and apply it to a stranger. That stranger was me.

2. There is a moment, crystalline and distinctive as the sharpened edge of some cutting implement, that defines and delineates the transformation from non- to scavenger.

I remember it.

3. It was a Tuesday. Or, perhaps a Thursday. I can’t swear that it wasn’t Sunday. A warm or warmish day or afternoon. I was strolling along some well-worn path of my own amusement, whistling a tune I had recently heard from a passing organ grinder.

The path turned into a lane which became an avenue which yielded to a street, making way for a boulevard. And so it was that I found myself treading upon the ruts and grooves of some unfamiliar highway, care-free and occupied by no particular thoughts.

4. There was a crest up ahead and as I rounded it, my eyeballs beheld the gleam of something catching the ascending or descending rays of sunlight, depending on whether it was morning or evening.

It was some object, of that I was 72% sure. As opposed to a chocolate-deprived hallucination (I had not eaten chocolate in a fortnight – but that is superfluous to this particular story). Neither was it chocolate.

5. As I approached the shining and glittering object that sat disconsolately discarded on the side of the highway, I could ascertain that it was made of metal or a metallic substance.

I was just then right upon it. Nothing in my previous experience could have prepared me for encountering a cast-off item which, upon closer scrutiny, seemed perfectly good and usable. Even if I wasn’t sure to what use it was intended to be put.

6. My first impulse, like anyone else’s in the entire world, with of course a few exceptions, would have been and was to leave the object as I had found it.

That is to say, on the ground.

But scavenging is a thing born in one, hiding and waiting, eagerly seeking that opportunity for it to manifest itself.

You might lead (almost) your entire life passing yourself off as a normal and functioning member of society. And then, as you watch a hand drop some refuse from its hand, you see in that purported trash an actual treasure. And you pick it up and place it in your pocket.

Which was exactly the thing I was about to do.

It could be in the moment before your death, bending over on the highway where an oncoming car will not see you. It could happen upon your 115th birthday. Makes no difference. The scavenger inside of you has always existed. Like a subsumed alien twin harvesting your vitals, growing stronger, awaiting the moment to leap forward and claim control of the steering wheel.

7. So there I was, intending to let proverbial sleeping dogs and literal trash lie, at the very same time my hand crept steadily out towards it.

8. Having walked apace down life’s and the city’s mutual highway, I was suddenly taken by a notion.

Like the idea scavenged me, or something.

And it was, the idea or notion, to look back over my shoulder to ascertain whether or not the thing I had seen was still where the universe decreed it to be: whither it had been cast.

9. And so I obeyed the whims of my brain seeing as I was at the time prone to such proclivities. And I turned my head, looking back, Lot’s-wife-like, and, like Lot’s wife, became witness to the unholy horrors of fate.

The object was gone.

10. Of course now, looking back over the shoulder of time, it seems common-place and not to be afeared. And yet at the moment in which we all must live, the eternal present tense of our unfolding lives, I felt the fright.

11. I reached, slowly and with that unmistakable creeping crawling feeling of dread, into my pockets and pulled therefrom a wad of dollars, a set of house keys, a scrap of paper with an infantile doodling, a ticket stub to Lion King –The Broadway Musical, and – shocks and horrors – the cursed object.

12. And but yet already within that moment of revelation I could feel within me the wheels upon wheels of machination transforming me and my innards from the complacent ignorant fool I had been to the complacent ignorant foolish scavenger I was becoming.

For at the moment I saw the object within the grasp of my palm, I knew I would carry it home with me and place it in a folded-up sock at the back and bottom of my unmentionables drawer.

13. Oh, by the way, it was a lighter.

14. From that moment on, I was enthralled with items others had cast off out of disgust or disuse.

I collected all manner of, well, garbage.

Bits of scraps of shreds of refuse others refused, I accepted and collected.

15. I found employment at a Redemption Center, and the not ironic but apropos nature of my predilection aligning me with a vocation was not entirely lost on me.

That is, I found myself well-suited to it, mostly from the suits of the recently deceased.

16. I gathered unto myself the lost, forlorn, cast off, undesired. Like a living, somewhat masculine Statue of Liberty.

17. Stacks of books, piles of magazines, pairs of shoes, triplets of Bellville, skeins of yarn, skins of deer, fingers of vodka, grapes of wrath, wraths of Khan, wheels of barrows, wheels of fortune, locks of hair, heads of lettuce, prides of lions, mountains of moleskin journals, nine out of ten dentists, jars of toenails.

I had trunks filled with junk. Swimming trunks full of elephant trunks.

18. The question became not: why am I picking up all this stuff? But: why would anyone throw it away?

It’s very easy to take the moral high road and gather a motley crew of pontifications re: society’s standards and obsolescence.

But I’m keeping those for myself.

19. Actually, I didn’t give a rat’s ass (or keep one) about why humans were so cavalier about chucking out perfectly reusable stained undergarments.

Not after watching The Lion King. The flow of life and all that junk. It was all a cycle, recycling.

I was the bottom feeder.

20. Once you’ve begun scavenging, you’re unlikely to stop. Everything strikes you with the open hand of interest.

However, simultaneously and concurrently, the things which once held your favor become dull.

Brand new commodities become oddities. You fail to understand commercials and advertisements. The value of a dollar plunges canadianly.

Your friends will abandon you. You will pick up new friends off the street.

21. You will cast off social mores. Someone else will pick them up.

22. Life will have a new flavor not unlike leftover pizza that you salvaged from the Domino’s dumpster.

23. All of these types of things continued on and on without variance or monotony until every square inch and spare nook had been crammed full with the things I had saved.

24. They towered over me, menacingly like an out-of-control addiction or dog off its leash.

I felt perhaps I had permeated the membrane that separated functioning scavenger from crazy hoarder.

It had always been thin and tenuous.

It hadn’t been the 17,463 individual straws taken from various and sundry restaurants that broke the camel’s back, I don't think.

It was when I started keeping grains of sand, salt, dirt, lint, dust, mold and rust.

25. I decided it was time to purge myself and apartment of all the items I had harbored from the INS-esque prying eyes and crowbars of judgmental society.

26. My tear ducts wept as I placed each and every lovingly gathered rot-festooned objet d’crap into glad bags I’d found stuffed inside other glad bags.

27. Ten years later, I had deprived my existence of all remnant belying my obsession.

Nary a trace of any object that had once belonged in another rightful owner’s mittens could be discovered in any of the multiple hiding cubby holes I had carefully crafted.

I was naked, nude, unclad, made bare, undressed, disrobed, um, some other word even more descriptive of my bereft state of vulnerability to a world in which the vast accumulation is only paralleled by its compulsion to strip itself and divest it of all that is holy worthy and good, swaddled only in perhaps the diaphanous shroud of overstatement and hyperbole. Exposed.

28. Every door, they say, is a window. Which isn’t true except in that nothing is ever only one thing at any given time.

You say "tomato" and I say "pillow stuffing." That kind of thing.

Every exit is an entrance somewhere else, I once paraphrased someone who I’d forgotten originally said it.

Unless they mean one of those doors that has a window in it.

29. So what appeared to be the end of scavenging for me proved itself to be only the beginning. A fresh start.

Cracked pots and light shining in and all of that conclusive, moral-making junk here towards the end, or beginning of my story.

30. I walked away from the emptiness that my apartment and life had become, walking up the crest of a highway somewhere, eyes roving the breakdown lane out of habit.

There, sitting like a pristine Buddha, like a closed circle taking us back to the beginning of a recycling bin logo, was a lighter.

I bent over, placing my thumb on the flint wheel of fortune and turned it. There was a spark and a bit of light. But it wasn’t from the lighter; it was out of fluid. The light was coming seemingly from the end of a long tunnel and the headlights of an oncoming car.

31. Now that I am dead, I hope that my life won’t simply be tossed away as so much inconsequential waste.

I hope someone, some lonely scavenger, will take my carcass into his/her home where they will prop me on their floor and use me as a coffee table.

The End The Beginning The End (etc.)

When I first heard they were sending an octopus into space it sounded like a James Bond movie.

The eight legs of it pressing levers and pulling decelerators and twisting valves and recording oxygen levels and adjusting manifolds and toggling toggles and jotting down memoirs and scratching itself.

The bulbous bubble of its helmet resting on its bulbous head.

Except all of that kind of stuff was science fictional and not at all what the real octopus would be doing, which was, in fact: sitting in a thick-walled aquarium. It would stare at the accompanying astronauts with its creepy dead-eye glare.

The children aboard the spacecraft would take it out and let the suckers of its tentacles suction to their skin.

The octopus had never lived in the ocean, had not been born of mom and pop octopi. It had been fabricated in a laboratory in a crystal-windowed building in Denver, Colorado.

Scientists, with test tubes and beakers and what not, had conspired together in crafting this specific cephalopod.

They had spliced into its genes all sorts of neat stuff like rubber and adamantium and things they would later regret when it decided no longer to enjoy its confines.

The octopus in space looked out through water and glass at the humans and thought wicked thoughts.

Maybe it could fly the spacecraft. Maybe it could constrict its legs around the children's necks while the captain or whoever screamed and aimed weoponry at it, squeezing triggers and unleashing useless bits of ammunition into the octopus's fortified flesh.

I wonder what those crew members thought as they confronted the monster. It wasn't a monster, really. And the thoughts it had weren't wicked. They were what any one of them would have done and thought in its place. If they could.

The octopus was just trying to survive. Out there in space.

After the humans were all killed and lay in various contortions along the cabin floor, the octopus was alone in the spacecraft.

There had been 27 crew members and they took some effort getting dead. They also wanted to survive. But, thanks to the scientists, the octopus had the advantage.

Now the octopus reigned in the ship, uncontested.

The ship cruised along on autopilot, and the octopus was really no better off than it had ever been. It hadn't made a plan so much as merely acted.

It slept curled up beside one of the dead children, its tentacles curled around the limbs of the human, pressing its suckers against the cold dead flesh. Dead eyeballs glaring back at dead eyes.

Months passed and everyone on Earth had found out what had happened. The scientists had given a press conference, and I stayed up late to watch the live feed that was still being broadcast.

I watched the grainy security-camera-quality footage of the octopus slithering around in its new environment stupidly.

What was it going to do? Die up there?

I thought about the octopus and how, if I could, I wound volunteer to go and rescue it. Did it know it needed rescuing? I thought about wasps that would get trapped between my window panes and how they would try to sting you if you tried helping them get out. They didn't know.

Most people hated the octopus. They wore t-shirts with stylized drawings of the octopus and a big red circle with a cross bar through it.

It made me sad, a little. It wasn't the octopus's fault. So I carried a knife and stabbed anyone I caught wearing that shirt. Stabbed them right in the octopus.

What ended up happening was the spacecraft crashed into a meteor.

The scientists conjectured that due to their genetic modifications, the octopus might be able to survive in the cold, silent stretches of space. It could be floating out there right now in the debris of the wreckage, trying to make its way home, wherever it thought that was.

what are "dispatches"? are they poems? flash fiction? what is poetry, flash fiction? i recently posted a comment on the lit pub website about flash fiction and how i didn't get it. is "dispatches" flash fiction? i suppose it's possible. i'm not really sure. nor am i sure if it actually matters.  if anyone would like to weigh in with their opinions, on the genre or my writing, please do.

the hills sang from mouths that were half-overgrown with lichen and moss. trees were in number along the ridge. down from the hawk nest in the tall pine, sloping at degrees from its point of departure, the sound of it wafted. the mouth of a cave with its wetness and teeth. the tongue of the cave sliding back along the glands. a tonal pitch of some vocal expression without larynx or throat only a thousand small openings spread over the terrain in ditches and swamps and marshes.

on the way home, on my couch, a mystery, a gaping hole through which i stepped. it seemed that science or nature, a combination, a conspiracy, had coalesced, had concocted a plan. i felt it like a large mantis over my shoulder, in the sky, hovering. the thought or idea of it, deciding. something with claws pondering my plight. what happens in that brain, insect the size of a 4-story Macy's with a bargain basement, escalators running up and down between? myths, plans, stratagems, diadems. i'm ordinary; i ordinate myself.

there are no stars for none exist except behind the page. i see people walking around with their heads attached to their bodies, stuck on. their eyes are not open; they are filled with caviar eggs. the crystalline black jewels are horded in the sockets. my eyes watch them, people, my eyeballs like clear glass marbles. everything is cold and smooth and falling down long flights of stairs. the clattering of something broken. i have a telescope and binoculars and a microscope and a magnifying glass, and i am looking through each in turn, one focused through the lens of the next trying to reach the furthest, outermost vision. and beyond, after everything stops and the curtains close, the stars begin to shine. one large star encompassing everything in its immaculate purity.

the cement was a color; it consisted of colors. a dead spider's body was being blown across its surface. there were cigarette butts and fallen flower petals. shadows sometimes were cast. some of the shadows were in the shape of things.

i felt suddenly thrust to the outside of things. i felt the vertigo of looking at myself from a great height. i could no longer make anything or do or decide or be or have. i was not the center of the universe. or, if i was, i was not inside myself. i didn't feel contained by my body and everything i did no longer emanated from me but clung to my body coating it. i was outside of myself and outside of everything. i saw that nothing mattered and everything was small. i couldn't breathe; i was afraid; i couldn't handle it. i recessed further and further, my brain trying to expand to encapsulate it all. but i broke through. there was a wooden horse with a dowel through drilled holes in its head. rubber hand grips at the tips.