Craig was a good-looking man. One day he went shopping for groceries and saw a woman. He immediately thought: "I'm going to fuck her even if it means a future commitment." Because of Craig's looks the courtship went off without a hitch. But during the wedding ceremony his best man suddenly fell down, suffering a severe epileptic seizure. Craig looked around surreptitiously at the wedding guests as they crowded around the convulsing man. Craig thought that such an occurrence immediately before the vows were to be exchanged was a bad omen, and while the concourse discussed what might be done — raising the possibility of the need for a doctor, whether one might be around and what should be done to alleviate the poor epileptic's suffering until one was found — Craig used the opportunity to hightail it out of there and come stay with me for a while. One night we went to a strip club, and it wasn't long before, thunderstruck, we saw that we were both drunk. Because I was less drunk than Craig, the duty of driving was conferred to me. Unfortunately, I drove us both into a ravine, where he died and I lost a leg.
The feeble old man crawled up the hospital corridor and saw through the crack of a door that he still had time to be examined — the Doctor hadn't yet left the clinic and was still in her office.
"Please examine me," the feeble old man cried, pushing open the office door and approaching timidly.
"Oh, OK," the Doctor said, taking out her stethoscope nonchalantly, and putting it to his chest.
"Ouch!" She concluded, stepping back.
"I knew it!" He said. "Just kill me! Just kill me!"
"It so happens you have come at a time of day in which the secretaries and bureaucrats are gone. You didn't make an appointment, did you?"
"No," the old man cried.
"OK. But part of your body will have to go to science," the doctor said flatly.
"Just make it quick! Please!"
The Doctor stepped forward, undid the old man's pants and underwear and, with almost divine strength, tore his scrotum off. He doubled over as blood soaked his pants and pooled on the floor. Suddenly, however, he felt himself borne aloft, floating on a rowboat. He saw two large golden gates opening in the distance, and realized that he was heading toward that magical destination. A magical stream was bearing him toward those gates, and he heard celestial music and tree-branches in the wind, which breathed their musical fragrances toward him invitingly, filling his ears with joy. He drew nearer and nearer, anticipating joyfully, and finally went through the heavenly portal, ecstatic to live again, this time without pain.
The Doctor looked at the bloody scrotum and paused. She brought it to her nose and sniffed it a few times, thinking "not bad," and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.
OK: I am re-sending the cd I sold to you to this address.
Billy Lodine
6100 Highbluff Rd.
Pleasantville, CA 94331
If it is returned to sender (that is, to me) again I will assume you have another address. (Perhaps you have moved?) If that is the case, we can discuss a new method in which I can again send the package. I see that you ordered this a long time ago; you shouldn't have had to wait so long. I think it is because, initially, instead of printing your address out, I simply copied it from my father's computer onto paper (I don't own my own computer) and then proceeded from there (i.e., upon returning to my apartment, I cut your address out of the paper upon which I had copied your address and then taped it to your soon-to-be-sent package). However, perhaps (and this is assuming I didn't make a mistake when transfiguring the address from the computer to paper) the added authority of your address in the printed typeset we have now agreed on will inspire the mail carrier to look a little harder for your residence, huh, Billy? Now, to stay in the present, there is one further alternative: Today, when I called my mother to compare the address on the package I had shipped to you and which had just come back to me to the address on my Amazon seller account, just having read the first part of your address out to my mother might have immediately been enough corroboration right there — I could have read, say, Pleasonville, NJ, and by that time her mind could have been somewhere else entirely. (If this was the case, she would have told herself: "this must be the person he means," before proper verification of the address in its entirety had taken place.) This is my present concern: If it wasn't Ricky who ordered The Rolling Stones, Sarah who ordered Aids Wolf, Jesse who ordered Lake of Drakula, Tom who ordered Radiohead, Jeff who ordered Neil Young, etc — she could have found your name an indication that her job in making a connection had long been done, in which case I needn't now bother you in such length, explaining beforehand, as it were, any potential problems. On that note, if only my father's printer had been working correctly from the very first, you, Billy, would most likely have added Tom Waits to your CD collection a long time ago. On the other hand, if the package I am presently sending out is returned to me yet again, I am increasingly inclined to say that I won't try a new method of conveyance, and you can fuck off.
David Thomson
There is a man at the gym that always has a sneer on his face — a disdainful snarling that is terrible to me. It is always on his face when he passes me — specifically me.
My neighbors at my apartment building never look at me and I don't like that but I don't take their lowered gazes as them snubbing me — because the thought that they fear me makes me forgive them. But this guy...Maybe I am too sensitive. I remember hearing somewhere the phrase "when life laughed louder than we did" or "at those times we couldn't laugh louder than life." When I saw him in the gym I kept inverting that phrase like a punctilious, adamant linguist.
But the look on this man's face — that look on his face — so terribly mocking. And the strange thing is that the sneer has so many translations that are audible to me and the atmosphere around us. It says: "Is this guy for real?" "Get a load of this guy!" His eyebrows contract and the way the upper corners of his mouth spread sideways alarms me. I check under my nose for snot; I look at my shirt to see if there is some terribly dubious stain. What does he tell the other people in the gym?
"What does he know about me?" I wonder. If he knew my history of violence it seems so odd that this preppy little man — this man with his cloying manner of complacent suburbia and his pseudo-gentry gym outfit — would dare sneer at me like that. I look at him — or better said gaze around him — with docility but that docility turns to dumbness in the context of his sneer; "Get a load of this guy!" How can a blank look at someone stay blank in the context of such brazen mockery: "Is this guy for real?"
I only see him twice a week when our hours at the gym congeal like cells — like coalescing tumors greedily digging, digging into the flesh. And every time his sneer throws me off. Me! With a history of violence! Me! Who now is taking out a kitchen knife stowed in my gym bag and finally, involuntary as birth, grabbing his throat, putting my strong fingers around his tanned neck, suffocating him. And then the knife sliding into his stomach, irrefutable and strong, with an obvious purpose.
I felt his wet blood on my wrist, the knife's hilt the only solid thing I felt against his wet blue polo shirt. I heard the cries of the women in the gym. I looked at his face. It wasn't the same. His eyes were locked upward, as if a trance state had overcome him.
I wondered what compulsion made me even return to the gym and I realized I never had a choice and, like an avenger in a novel, I had to get that sneer off his face.
After all, ever since leaving jail I have felt as if I were hoisted in the air, exposed, alone, and alienated: And this guy's mockery was simply excessive.
On the other hand, I have been off my meds for quite some time these months, and that guy might have gotten stabbed for nothing.
Martin Jones lives in West Virginia. He likes easy crosswords, literary critiques of Proust, and fuckin'.