The Park Avenue Hovel, page nine

    Ray's letter, in substance, was not unexpected; it was the particulars that Michael had to know, and couldn't face. Funding for the shelter was always tight: the counselling center kept above water fairly easily, an obvious community resource the city couldn't excuse cutting off, but the night shelter for at-risk and homeless youth had a harder time staving off crusading law-and-order councilmen who called it criminal coddling and tried to shut it down. Ray had a few choice things to say about the last mayor, whom Michael knew, and the new one, whom he only dreaded, but reported happily that the new Social Services director was not the kind of bleeding-heart idiot the last one had been, instead willing to take suggestions and favor experience over ideology.
    They were still, always, fighting a losing battle out there. Ray didn't need to tell him that, and he didn't, focusing instead on particulars, details and progress on cases he'd been working on before Michael left, some he'd taken on since. There was hardly any mention in his letters of Michael's old cases, an omission of either tact or the opposite, and Michael went back and forth on which he thought it was. If Ray wanted to think the worst of him, he had good reason: Michael had run out on those kids, abandoned them to the monsters he was supposed to fight. If he was just trying to be kind, to shield Michael for a time from reports of the things that had driven him away, give him time for his own wounds to heal, then Michael could appreciate that; Ray knew him as well as anyone, too, and knew that his guilt would make any news harder to hear. In any case, he kept writing, and Michael kept reading: it wasn't much, but it was something.

Strychnine Over(ride)

Thursday

    The sigh behind him as Adam's feet landed square at Michigan and Vallejo could have come from those feet, or hands or eyes or elbows that swung, or shoulders as the job drained from them: only the exhaling bus doors closing, though, that breath fitted in, the last part in his working day. Adam kicked heels after toes and walked away, letting the job with its myriad petty headaches and tyrannical urgencies drain away, sheepish shadows filling cracks and stormdrains in his wake. Down a block and then left, then up four flights and it was almost gone: lights up over his furnished one-bedroom Adam swung the door behind him and the decided slam shut the office out. Door closed, all else was forgotten.
    Fallen on the floor, his backpack slouched beneath the table there by the door, supporting spare keys and a week of mail; his shoes Adam kicked further into what might have been a breakfast nook in some other life and carried on, leaving the red button-down across a convenient chair. In the kitchen was a refrigerator, in the refrigerator was a beer: Adam pulled one up by its neck and swung with it toward the living room, the television there lurking something he's bought when he discovered he had the money. The remote he unearthed, found beneath a growing pile of books and papers on the couch, and, shoving them to one side, he brought it to bear and turned on the news.
    Adam immediately changed the channel. His beer and interest levels both subsiding, he spun the dials, once, twice, wading through the hysteric weariness of prime time. Sighing, he left the remote to fare among the cushions and padded over to the built-in bookcase, its sullen shelves bearing up under his mixed media, flipped a few movies over, checking discs for cases and vice-versa. Finally he found one he wasn't altogether familiar with, something his last girlfriend had left behind her, like the tampons under the sink or the bicycle pump, and threw it in the DVD player. It was one of those movies full of conversations, people talking earnestly, endlessly: it might have had Meryl Streep in it, or Woody Allen, and he thought he might be in the mood for it. He set it to play and returned to the kitchen, letting it find its feet while he tried to marshal thought and appetite into one concerted force, the joint effort resulting in three kinds of leftovers going together into the microwave. When they came out, he took a fresh beer and them back to the couch.
    Adam ate in silence: the people in the television, with their long, intense discussions, sometimes escalating to hysterics, talked enough for both of them. Another landslide from the unstable periodicals beside him revealed the stereo remote and Adam grabbed it, flipping on another source of noise, and under this assault he kept his head down and ate his rations. Dinner done, he left the two devices to their conversation, abandoning them for the other room with its bed and desk and closet and cable modem. Spilled across the desk Adam ignored more papers, shoving to the side bills and junkmail and the occasional grocery list; an inch of beer left Adam pulled the slumbering computer up and sent it out in all directions. He sorted through the things he had to check, personal email, his bank account, the balance on those student loans now nearly gone, all things he couldn't do at work: the thought wormed its way in and he clamped down on it, flinging it out of his mind with the rest of the office, changing to political gossip and comics.
    Skimming the shallow end Adam was comfortably unsurprised at the level of discourse and lack of substance; he distracted himself with them, sorting through the eye-catches and bad headlines, ignoring opinions and hackneyed analysis whose like had prompted him to rant at nearby friends or lovers. A cursory glance was bad enough, and soon he disengaged from even that solitary pursuit. There were others available, however, and Adam lingered over his history, considered pulling up a good hardcore site and getting himself off before going to bed. He closed the browser without opening his zipper, though, and crawled between his sheets on the rented mattress, electric guitars and impassioned vapidity mingling to attend Adam as he slept.

    In the morning he retraced his steps back out to the office, avoiding the eyes of the advertisements on his way, first right and then up. Adam scuffed rubber against concrete, treading on his shadow's toes as they slunk toward the bus stop, his eyes tracking along    the sidewalk and halfway up the street. He checked his watch, still in good time, and let a passing bird, all swooping arcs and underbelly, catch his eye upward, following it diving under awnings in the early air. Adam registered the sound of the cross-town shifting gears around the corner, remembered the difference between a starling and a swallow, and took one extra step, off of the kerb.

News Post

   Thanks for reading. Having come to an important decision about what I really want to write, I'll be back by the end of the week with something that's pretty new but has its roots in something rather older. Mysterious? I guess. Suffice it to say that some times you have to go through hard to get to easy, and in order to write something anyone else can read or understand, I've first got to finish writing something that I can read and understand. Stay tuned: this promises to be interesting.
C/McN

Further, from "Artifacts"

    When the phone rang, she let the machine answer it.     "This is a message for Rebecca Mulroy, confirming your ten o'clock appointment with Dr Ostler on Wednesday the seventeenth. If you are unable to keep this appointment please contact our offices to reschedule. Have a nice day." Her physical therapist's receptionist was at least concise; her calendar, on the wall beside the fridge, corroborated. Without sparing a glance to the book, she made lunch, chopping vegetables with irritated care.     The rest of the day went by without incident; she checked her mail, took her medication, and put her left ... (read more)

The Park Avenue Hovel, page eight

    Ten years ago, or fifteen, or five, or even six months ago, she had thought that people didn't just wake up and not love each other anymore. It wasn't possible, she thought, to simply not love someone: it had to slip away or drain out somehow, giving notice before it left. She had thought that right up until one morning, twelve weeks ago, when it had happened. Now, listening to faint music filtered through two walls and the plumbing stack, she couldn't identify where or how it had gone, and certainly had no way to follow it down and get it back.     She didn't hate him. She filled out another form, signing her married name ... (read more)

The Park Avenue Hovel, page seven

    They ate in the second kitchen, tucked by the back stairs, originally for the servants' use, being half the size or less of the main galley behind the dining room. She watched Gwen move from fridge to cabinet to table, fully at ease in the small space, admiring her hands and feet as she pulled a decent meal out of raw materials. Lunch cleared away, Adrienne left Gwen to get on with her errands and returned to her own room.     One of the two on the top floor, her bedroom faced a long, narrow room that held a billiard table and bookcases, the full bath between her and the quiet woman, going through a divorce, whom she could ... (read more)

From "Artifacts"

    She was waiting for him to come back, content in the knowledge that he would not. She was waiting because it gave her an excuse to not do anything else, and so that, later, she could say that she'd waited. Watching headlights come over the hill, she wondered how much longer she had to wait, until she achieved plausible deniability. Until she could say "I waited half the night, but he never came back," and everyone would nod and frown and not ask questions. She was waiting because it would seem too strange not to, later, explaining it. Idly, she wondered where he was. It was his business, of course, but she couldn’t help ... (read more)

The Park Avenue Hovel, page one part 2

This goes, straightforwardly enough, between page 1 and page 2.     The house had been built on cattle speculation money, Horace Aloysius Yarbough's second fortune, after the railway came through in 1886. He'd won and lost his first fortune living out of cheap rooms south of the stockyard, but when he made the money back he'd built a cattle baron's house and transported his wife and children down from Chicago to live in it. Three floors not counting basements or attics, it included servant's quarters, two kitchens, and a set of stables and carriage-house behind it which Horace's son had converted into automobile garages and an indoor ... (read more)

The Park Avenue Hovel, page six

    Michael had spent half an hour that morning getting the blood stains out of the pillowcase. The nosebleeds worried him, he couldn't deny it, but there were other things that occupied his attention: the question of whether the stain had come out or the whole pillowcase was simply a uniform shade of near yellow had finally driven him out of the room. Returning in late afternoon, he couldn't remember what color the linen had been before the nosebleeds had started; in a saner light, the pillowcase looked untainted, safe to sleep on.     The emptying aspirin tube, no more a refuge, demanded a decision of him: let it run dry or ... (read more)

The Park Avenue Hovel, page five

    "I seem to recall asking you a question, earlier." Head at the foot of the bed, Gwen wiggled her toes in the pillows and propped herself up on one elbow, casting her eye up toward Adrienne, whose hair was silk against her feet.     "Well, yes, but then you distracted me and I forgot my answer. And the question."     "Oh." Gwen walked her fingers up the instep and calf stretched out beside her, "Well, let me remind you. I asked what your plans for today were."     "Oh, is that what it was? Let me think." She swung her legs away, tucking them ... (read more)