RORY SMITH
Rory is 26, married for 2.4 years, one dog, Seamus (sheltie), and lives in California. He has two degrees in English and Literature. Received an Accomplishment of Merit award from Creative Arts & Science Enterprises in 1992. Competed for the Amherst Society's Dickinson Award for 1993, and his poem, Imagination at play, is published in their 1993 American Poetry Annual. Included in the American Literary Press's short story collection, Ten Top Short Stories of 1993, for his short story, Just Part of the Package. His short story, Thirst, published in 1994 by ESC! magazine. In 1995 two of his works accepted by Internet web sites, Alsirat & The Writer's Gallery, for posting to online readers. In 1996 his short story, The Determined World, accepted by The Rain Dog Review in San Jose California. Currently he is looking to continue his formal education with an MFA in Creative Writing.
Where some people are very wealthy
and others have nothing,
the result will be either extreme democracy
or absolute oligarchy ,or despotism will come 
from either of those excesses
                        -Aristotle 'Politics'

. . .Somehow we are all writers trying frantically
to tip the scales so the reservoir bathes the silent masses
for a moment at a time in something like voices that empower,
enlighten, and transcend our common differences.  Writing
isn't about proving oneself in monetary standards or relative
success. I write to see whats on the other side of the paper,
and who knows what you'll find. . .

                                   -Rory Smith
                              'Explorations in Fiction'
What I call a performance piece; something like poetry but the medium is better suited to be read/performed in front of a live audience...I have done so a few times, in front of friends, but never anything larger, as I would like to do some day soon...I just need to work on my voice. Anyway, this is like poetics, as I mentioned, but the flow is developed for reading aloud, rather than by someone. A group effort, like acting, visuals allowed.

Seventeen

.....Sitting here in the dark next to the fan that doesn't turn any more, feeling the way my guts reminded me I still have a problem that three hundred dollars didn't cure, I reach for the green bottle and swash down the urge to vomit.

It has been a long time without sleep.

Sleep has become the one thing I can't get enough of any more. It's like sex used to be. The thrill, the anticipation and finally the slow flesh on flesh sound that never quite puts things into perspective until you're lying there thinking about what you've done.

Maybe it's all like getting older and dying by the mouth full, the fact you're not a teenager any more and when you bump into something in the middle of the night it hurts the next day. There aren't the little thoughts that used to fill up your big thoughts, the getting over to the boy's house for beer and pizza, the five bucks for gasoline so you can get to her house on Friday night, or the temptation to run off somewhere so no one can find you and blame you for something you can't remember.

Getting old means you find new things wrong with you, things that inhibit, ways that prevent you from running to beat the train, from hanging from the bridge that was built before you were a thought. Old age means there isn't anyone else looking at you the way you look at the kids, eyes like dimes against worn out carpet, lips that can't ever feel the way they did. You look in the mirror and death wrinkles grimace and move away in a stare that says more than you want to hear.

Old and worn out you must stand before the bullet, accept the responsibility of your actions and never lie to your mother that you didn't steal from her to buy beer when you were at home.

Old and worn out you do not regret the change, the movement away, the becoming that means you can vote, you can die for your country, and you can buy a lottery ticket for a dollar a throw. Not all aged regret or think this way, but in time you feel something wrong with you and at that time you wish you were seventeen.

Yet it is so much more than old age, the tender expression of youth becoming, the quickening that surmounts the early stages of senility. Forgetting becomes remembering the way you wanted to be forever, but price tags are not cheap and the grease pencil numbers only smear but never really rub off.

It's what you have upstairs that paves the way for crippled feet and a lounging attitude. When you stretch out in the sun beside the pool next to the chest of cold bottles, there are moments that you would trade for a taste of the experience.....

but only a taste.


IV XVIII MCMXCVI

I was just all screwed up inside, my head and arms, the back of my throat like a fuzzy nickel was lodged between breathing and choking and just when I started to calm down I saw the clock and it all went tohell again. Sometimes the craziest thing about confinement is the solice of knowing no one else can see your face. Time they told me was just something you had to get used to passing you by. It doesn't pay to get upset. That's what they had written on my placemat. My name and this proverb written with a magic marker so it wouldn't come off right away was what I had to look at morning, noon, and night.
It doesn't really pay to get upset, though, to stay awake when you shouldn't, ignore the routine that only yesterday they said you could have, and go your own way because that way doesn't exist any more and you'll only get into trouble.
Pain like ice down your back, voices carrying on the same old song and what do you have to show for it but a complaint here and a sore gut there when all you really needed was the patience to let the sun come up tomorrow.

Vignette, very short short story, also called a slice of life. Usually 5-700 words, the emphasis being on the moment, the significance of revealing a person or persons 'moment' in time and space amongst all the really larger things like Big Macs and Novels.

Amnesia, Sometimes

I mused in sobriety, silently and secretly praying that I was alone. The windows were dark between the stained gray drapery, no sight of my children's children or the annoying doctors who were waiting for me to die so I could prove them right. For a minute I had peace looking through the blue black blur of glass, the whispers coming and going from all the hidden mouths, the way air might meander unobstructed in a room full of people. Yet, I could not get the sound out of my head, the wheezing in and out sound of air that got caught in a constricted, worn out throat. The doctors had said six months. Six months for her, a year for me. They didn't prepare me for what I had to do. No one told me.
"Harvey," she would cry in between fits of hacking and choking. Her broken voice would shake the bed like tiny tremors that never seemed to subside.
I pretended not to hear sometimes. I would hide in whatever closet was furthest away, tucked behind clothes that no one wore, holding my ears like my brains were going to come out of the openings. She called me nevertheless, at all hours of the day and night, throwing whatever was near her good hand, cursing my name and apparently talking directly to Jesus. "Harvey, damn you, Harvey. Damn you to hell. Yes, he will, yes he will."
All I could say was no. "No, dear."
I never knew what time it was except when she was awake. Her voice would carry through that old house as though it were empowered by secret speakers I couldn't ever find. She had a voice like a withered claw, scratching the sides of the bed, the walls, the air, calling my name over and over and over.
"Harvey."
My head floated, freely, heavy like the soured milk in my mouth, the stale flavor of non-dairy creamer or whatever I could find to make the a.m. coffee bearable. It would seem that whenever I tried to find my own space to eat or read or sleep, her voice was there, reaching out from her bed and through the house. I went to sleep with her voice in my head and awoke to it cursing my birth.
Sometimes I didn't know what day it was. She said my name 87 times, once, I counted and I never missed one because I kept a record with two decks of cards that I tossed on the floor. She would call me and then be still for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, but when she said my name again it was louder and more desperate. That was how I kept track of time.
"You're nothing but a damned liar and you'll pay for your sins, Harvey. Do you hear me, Harvey? Jesus is watching me, Harvey, Jesus' watching."
Every now and again I would escape into insanity. I didn't call it that, though you might. Whenever she forgot about me for more than an hour, which was rare, I would slip away into my head and watch the scented smoke of a vague room distill and change color the way a child's face finds amber in a sunset. It was in this safe room in my head that I hid, that I breathed fast and slow with the understanding that I wasn't hungry and I wasn't making food for the garbage can outside the porch.
"Harvey."
But it wouldn't last. No matter how congested her lungs sounded or to what extent she cried my name with blood freckled lips, I went to her side and listened to the way she forgot who I was and scratched my face when I got near.
"Yes, beloved. Yes."

"Dad," my son said moving into the room from the hall. "We're going to go now. Did you need anything?"
I turned away from the window and looked at my son.

"Amnesia, sometimes."
Another vignette, same as before, brevity is the key to understanding the little things in life, like seconds, mortality, and debts. Perhaps these vignettes could serve as little intro pieces, something to get the feet wet...

The Flame that Burns Twice as Bright Burns Half as Long

When I think of you, not your face or the way you whisper my name when you want to fuck, just the parts that hurt me, I can not sleep. I take pills, sometimes, a handful of aspirin or ibuprofen cause I want to pretend to be normal again. I drink the cherry flavored wine we bought for special times that I keep hidden under the sink next to the cleanser, and it is these nights especially, that I see you in the kind of pain that I know.
It is what every woman wants, a strong love, like you and I had, the kind of partnership that means you share everything, but pain. You made me feel whole when I looked into your charcoal eyes, like parts of me had been dormant and you woke them up. My family didn't even know about us until they heard my drowsy, liquored up voice, half crying to them at two in the morning about killing, and you.
I lost my job because of you. Eventually everything bad that happened to me was your fault. There was nothing for me to do but watch my life, like so many dominoes tumbling, and wait for the last double twelve to click forward onto its face and stir me like the end of a very long game. I couldn't help myself. Whenever a man came in my store, somewhat like you with curly brown hair and a smooth, sharp face, I cried and sobbed and went to pieces.
So here I am, on the couch that we bought on payments, the last one in the mail, and I don't remember when I slept or dreamed I slept well. The paper has started to pile up outside the door, the mail box no longer capable of holding another lube and oil certificate or the last catalog to a company I can't remember subscribing to.
I have no phone because of you. They turned it off when you left without a payment. Now my mother is alone and I can not call to tell her that I am sitting in the same darkness. Sometimes I read by a forty watt bulb next to the window where I watched you become a street post and then nothing at all. I think I can hear the phone below me, or the one that no one answers next door. I hear the phone and it makes me think you are on the other end, breathing, waiting somewhere in the building for me to answer before hanging up.
I hurt and you don't know it. When my stomach burns and my eyes won't open any more, I see your hands at the knuckles, then the wrist, your thumb goring my eyes, your fist in my belly. You wear a tuxedo in my head. Black with tails, or none at all, bare.
I want to have the chance to tell you I'm over you, to look you in the eye and smile away the feeling to choke on your name. So when I bleed and I cuss, I know you are there, on the phone across the room, just out of touch of my voice, my eyes, my jagged fingers that claw your name in everything that I touch.

Copyright 1996 Rory Smith - All Rights Reserved


ALEXANDER CANDIA


Stats:
My name is Alexander Candia, I am 31 years of age, born on December 9 1964.
I am a Sagitarius and as far as I can tell, I fit the profile of one to a "t".
I am a student in Calilfornia in pursuit of a degree in Physical Therapy.
I am of Spanish and Italian descent.
REBORN
As i look out on this wintery day
the snow falls gently
covering. . . . it creates the sence of purity
all is wholesome
and nothing can spoil it's newness

I dare not tred on it's virgin surface
to disturb it would be unjust
to scar the holy beauty is to be damned
the snow covers the impurity of the land
and makes all things new again

The snow's coldness is a reminder that
we grow close to death
yet are reborn in a cleaner and brighter place
        I love the snow
for it's white blanket is security

And as I leave my work to tred home
the snow covers me in her cool caress
and I sit on a stump bewildered by her
                beauty
My life force becomes one with nature
I leave my earthly shell and fly as one
                REBORN


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