Small Stuff.

For some weird ass reason that I can’t even begin to fathom, all day I have been writing stupid little throwaway stories. Not prose poetry exactly, more like the micro-narratives of Ben Loory or Alex Epstein, with a little Lydia Davis thrown in for good measure. Except that those writers are pretty good at these things and I’m just terrible.

Due to their brevity, stories of this sort often lack traditional narrative devices. Things like characters, plot, dialogue, quality, good sense, decency - you know - stuff like that. But who needs all that stuff anyway? Not us.

All that being said though, I genuinely had fun writing them throughout the day while I should have been doing more important things.

The day’s haul is all below. Enjoy!

.

.

.

Necessary Lovers.

Necessary Lovers

by james bezerra

The lying swagger of the bees when they come. Their furry, sticky legs dangling. Our air shaking with a Flight of the Valkyries vibrating buzzzz. They act like its their own pollen they're bringing. As if they’re delivering the future. They are interlopers at best. Necessary lovers and nothing more. Busy, hurried, rushed, a tangle of sharp legs. Graceless. We tolerate them when the breeze isn’t strong enough to set our pollen sailing. So we tolerate and we wait. We wait with our petals and pistils naked to the sky. We wait to evolve and we envy the ingenuity of the dandelion and the determination of the burr. We wait like pine cones for a fire.  

.
.
.

The Interdependent Independence of My Future Subaru.

The Interdependent Independence of My Future Subaru

by james bezerra

I am a comma splice. I tell the Yoda-looking lady at the bodega that I am thinking about buying a Subaru Outback. She rings up my coffee and has nothing to say about my future Subaru.  Her bodega does not sell auto parts, only air fresheners shaped like trees that smell like strawberries. “Because it seems like a reliable and all-around car,” I tell her, “all-wheel drive, you know?” She unfurls her reptilian alien finger and her yellowed nail points toward the air freshener aisle as if to say that is all she has to offer me.

I join independent thoughts, often incorrectly. I can sleep in the back of a Subaru Outback, after I buy it and drive it out of the city headed west where the sky is so big and blue and endless that it just rolls along like that story of the one long endless sheet of paper on which Kerouac wrote On the Road while on a three week bender in 1951. The sky rolls like that above me as I cross deserts and sleep on the sides of the roads in the back of my Outback out there in Utah or Wyoming or the Dakotas. The American outback and its wide smattering of stars that wait for me to see them.

Because I fight back the imposed loneliness of the city by pulling down on myself the voluntary loneliness of the empty roads out west.

I jam together those things which are incongruent. I can’t possibly afford a Subaru. I paid for this coffee in change. I go back to the bodega to ask Yoda how much the air fresheners cost, but I don’t buy one - just feel the cellophane between my fingertips - because trees don’t smell like strawberries. They’re incongruous ideas. Each is a whole on its own, but they don’t belong together.

.
.
.

The Appalling Strangeness of the Inconspicuous Presence of God, or Possibly Just the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The Appalling Strangeness of the Inconspicuous Presence of God, or Possibly Just the Second Law of Thermodynamics

by james bezerra

A priest, a rabbi, and a Baptist minister walk into a bar. It is a very large bar and they all used different entrances. They all three order martinis, each from different waitresses. The bartender makes three separate martinis and thinks nothing of it, though his arm is a little tired by the end of it and his hand very cold.

The three separate waitresses deliver the three separate martinis. The priest, the rabbi and the Baptist minister all drink, sigh, pay, and leave out different exits.

The bartender’s cold hand is the closest thing to a sign of the presence of God and no one noticed it.

.
.
.

Improbable Things Which Didn’t Happen.

Improbable Things Which Didn’t Happen

by james bezerra

The newly fingerless graphomaniac has had some trouble channeling his energies since the letter bomb. His deaf typist opens his mail now - for the thrill of it, and also - because there’s nothing else for her to do.

-

Dostoyevsky and Ted Kaczynski met in a bar.

They drank vodka with cubes of machine-made ice.

“My work commands me to create it,” D said, “I have no control over it.”

“Me too,” K said.

They ordered another round, exchanged information.

“Mailing my work will require many stamps,” D said.

“Me too,” K said.

-

The typist was standing near the open window when the package exploded, tuning the radio on the sill. One moment the curtains were billowing in on the breeze. The next, they were billowing out.  

.
.
.

She is What’s Operative.

She is What’s Operative

by james bezerra

Metaphor is a substitution. It is like this: she is the pearl of the world. In the sweaty hungry ugly folds of the world. Metaphor is a switch being pulled. Three card word monty in the park.

She is what’s operative here. Replaced by a pearl. Like when she’d worn a strand of pearls that night at the restaurant with a view of Vltava. The strand of pearls, the only jewelry she’d packed; in a ziplock in the bottom of her backpack. I try to remember her the way she was that night. I call her Pearl now in my memories, because she was wearing pearls. That’s metonymy.

When she left, Pearl left an empty space. In me. Between the sweaty ugly hungry folds of my brain. An empty space that’s irritated. That I closed in upon. That I formed a shell around. That I tried to expel. A glistening sphere. A whole tiny world with a nucleus of nothing. That’s what metaphors are like.

.

.

.

Debt, A Parable.

Debt, A Parable

by james bezerra

Due to a childhood misunderstanding, the Anglican Scrabble Player believes all phones to somehow be payphones and that she has run up a terrible bill with some public utility somewhere on account of the weekly calls back to her mother back in East Anglia.

Her fear of this presumably massive debt keeps her from sleeping the night before the Scrabble championship. She asks her tax preparer if this debt needs to be declared in some way or if she sound contact someone about it. Curiously, he does not reply to her.

She begins to save obsessively, out of apprehension. She ceases buying the newest dictionaries and her Scrabble game suffers as a result. She has difficulty completing crosswords. She takes a job as a school teacher to earn extra money. She saves all of her changes and washes her clothes the deep sink in the kitchen. After years she has grown skinny and is accidentally virtually wealthy. She still can’t sleep. She has stopped calling her mother, who lives alone in an old cottage near Winterton-on-Sea.

Her mother wonders about her. Wonders what she did to drive her daughter away. Her mother sleeps always near the phone, which never rings anymore. Her mother shuffles into town each day to the single internet cafe, so she can keep up with the latest news from the competitive Scrabble circuit, but her daughter’s name no longer shows up in the updates.

.
.
.

The Anachronistics.

The Anachronistics

by james bezerra

Socrates never had a donut. Jesus couldn’t work a telephone. Helen Keller never played Tetris. Moses never saw a penguin. Winston Churchill didn’t even have an email address. Charlemagne couldn’t dunk. Karl Marx didn’t use credit cards. Galileo Galilei had never even heard of New York CIty. Thomas Jefferson couldn’t parallel park.

.
.
.

How to Buy a Car.

How to Buy a Car

a short play

by james bezerra

LIGHTS FADE UP from black. VINCE and STAN are sitting in two folding chairs on an otherwise bare black stage. They are successful but aging musicians. STAN is wearing a denim vest with metal and patches on it. VINCE is wearing black leather driving gloves. It would be great if they have mohawks, but that’s really not required.

There are some musical instruments. There is pushbroom on the floor.

STAN: I know that we’re a famous punk rock band but now that I have kids I am seriously considering buying a Volvo and a house with a two-car garage.

VINCE: I don’t know man, a Volvo doesn’t sound very Punk Rock.

STAN: You drive a BMW.

VINCE: What’s wrong with a BMW? It has heated seats.

STAN: I’m just saying that a BMW doesn’t seem terribly Punk Rock.

DELBERT (enters): Hey guys, sorry I’m late. What did I miss?

VINCE: Well Stan here is thinking about selling out.

STAN: That’s not cool!

DELBERT: Selling out? How much are they offering you?

STAN: I said that I was thinking about buying a Volvo because I have kids now and it just doesn’t feel right to drive them around in the back of a windowless van with no seats in it, you know? It doesn’t seem safe.

DELBERT: Oh, sure, well I understand that.

VINCE: No! No! That is selling out to The Man.

STAN: Dude, you have a house with a swimming pool and a jacuzzi. You have a guy who works for you whose only job is to clean the pool and the jacuzzi.

VINCE: What’s your point?

DELBERT: Oh wait! I think I get it! See Vince, the point that Stan is trying to make is that we have all gotten rich and famous by embracing a certain amount of discontent, aggression and social non-conformity, but that by simply becoming rich and famous we have engaged in the same social power structure and economic ladder-climbing that we got famous by being opposed to. And, as an example, Stan is pointing out that while you still write songs about rebelling against the class system, you seem to be hypocritically enjoying the benefits of being at the top of it.

STAN: Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant. What he said.

VINCE: Well that’s not true at all. In fact, I think I know what this is REALLY about; you guys are both just jealous that I got invited to P. Diddy’s place in the Hamptons for New Years.

STAN: No. No, that is not what this is about.

DELBERT: Yeah, I think you have basically misunderstood everything I said.

VINCE: You know what, I don’t have time for this. I have a tee time at the club. I’m playing with some movie stars and investment bankers. At least those guys are Punk Rock. They don’t give a fuck about anything. Or anybody. Not even their own kids, or puppies, and certainly not humanity in general. Yeah, so fucking Punk Rock.

STAN: No. No. Look, there isn’t any way that investment bankers can be Punk Rock. It is antithetical to the fundamental ideology of Punk Rock.

VINCE: No, these guys are pretty cool.

DELBERT: You know Stan, it is possible that Vince makes a good point. If the real nature of Punk Rock is simply nihilism, then it would be possible for investment bankers to be Punk Rock. In fact, by holding onto an outdated idea of what Punk Rock is, it would then be you who is not being Punk Rock.

STAN: What?!

VINCE: See? What he said.

STAN: No, that is ridiculous. I am wearing a jacket with a bunch of metal stuff on it and patches safety pinned to it; I am clearly the Punk Rock one.

DELBERT: Oh, I don’t know. That seems like a pretty superficial way to define what something is.

VINCE: Yeah! See Stan? The new Punk Rock is driving a BMW to my private club and playing golf with bankers before going into the studio and recording a song about being anti-establishment. What about that is so difficult to grasp?

DELBERT: Actually, I’m pretty sure that isn’t Punk Rock either ...

STAN: Wait, if both of us are wrong then how do I prove that I am more Punk Rock than Vince is?

VINCE: Not by buying a Volvo …

DELBERT: Well, you know, it might be possible that this entire conversation is pointless because the very soul of Punk Rock has been dead for decades, seeing as how it was really just a teenage social and musical movement in parts of Great Britain after World War II. And maybe what we all think of as “Punk Rock” is really just an aesthetic that has been packaged and marketed to us over the years; almost as though the entire anti-establishment philosophy has been commoditized and sold to us like any other kind of branded product.

VINCE: That is a really interesting idea, but all of this talking has made me really thirsty. Stan do you have any Coca-Cola?

STAN: I only have Pepsi. Is Pepsi okay?

VINCE: No. I only drink Coca-Cola.

DELBERT: Guys, they’re both just syrupy carbonated beverages. Most people can’t actually even tell them apart.

Both VINCE and STAN: BULLSHIT!

DELBERT: Its true. In blind taste tests most of the population can’t tell the difference. The brand loyalty you feel is just because of a hundred years of marketing.

VINCE: Do you think I’m stupid? Is that what you’re saying? That I can’t make my own decisions?

DELBERT: No, but I think that the people who are trying to sell you things think that you’re stupid.

VINCE: See? You just called me stupid again. Questioning any of the things I believe in is the same as calling me stupid. I’m not a status-symbol whore! And you’re lucky that I’m really looking forward to playing twelve holes with my new Titleist clubs today, because if I wasn’t in such a hurry I would take off one of these new leather BMW driving gloves that I am wearing and smack you across your lying face.

STAN: Wait, wait! Don’t get violent. Maybe he is just saying that most of the things in our lives that we think we need, we only think we need because we have been convinced by advertising and society that need them!

VINCE: That’s ridiculous.

DELBERT: I think that maybe we would all be a little bit happier if we stopped buying things in order to define ourselves.

STAN: That is a very interesting philosophy and I will pay you to tell me more about it.

DELBERT: I think you’re missing the point …

STAN: Well now I’m just confused; should I buy a Volvo or not?

VINCE: Don’t buy it unless you can put rims on it and a tow package for your boat.

STAN: I don’t have a boat.

VINCE: You can borrow one of mine.

DELBERT: No, look, guys, I’m just saying … Stan you should buy a Volvo if you think that is the car that is best and safest for your family … and Vince I think that you might need to deal with the fact that you really like buying shit. And that’s okay, if that’s what makes you happy, but perhaps you should really look inside yourself to figure out why that is so important to you.

All are quiet for a beat; thinking.

VINCE: Did I mention that one of my boats has a pirate flag on it?

STAN: Ooooooh, well that IS totally Punk Rock!

VINCE: I know, right?!

STAN: You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy the Volvo, but I’m going to put a Black Flag bumper sticker on it.

VINCE: Yes!

DELBERT: Guys …

STAN: And one for The Locust, if I can find one.

VINCE: Even better!

DELBERT: Guys …

VINCE: And instead of a Volvo, you should get a Ferrari.

STAN: That just makes sense to me!

DELBERT: Guys …

VINCE: You know what? Why don’t you come golfing with me? I’m playing with these multi-millionaire businessmen who used to be a band called Metallica.

STAN: Sounds good.

STAN and VINCE exit.

DELBERT: Guys … GUYS! … (Turns to the audience) They don’t ever listen to me because I’m not in the band. I’m just in charge of finding all of the six thousand dollar guitars that they break onstage during the shows. I’m also the janitor because that’s the only way I could get good health insurance (picks up the broom and begins sweeping the stage). We’re all done here ... the play is over ... I have to finish working though. (After a beat he turns back, sticks his tongue out, hisses and throws the devil-horned rock-out hand gesture.)

BLACKOUT

.
.
.