The Atomic Man Part 5: The Third Egg

He cracks the third egg rudely on the side of the pan, noticing a small flake of shell fall in, promising an unappetizing moment later on. Charlie isn't worried about moments, only the ruling hunger in the pit of his stomach. He grows more impatient for the eggs to cook, turning up the flame.

The condom is held between two fingers as the rest are busy unclasping her bra. He can feel the ribs in her back with the sensitive parts of his wrists and it's slightly unnerving. He feels he's playing an instrument. It doesn't want him. It's only performing a function.

He starts to resent her, this mysterious woman who turns off the lights and who is such a quick draw on the prophylactics. She's just---he can't remember her name. Becky? Katie?

Probably not her real name anyway. Probably a fake name she uses on the weekends when she's looking for a fuck. A fake name for a fake woman.

The unopened condom is crushed under her chill bony back as she falls receptively onto the bed with sheets too dark to see but probably filthy.

The eggs sit dry and overcooked in the hot skillet. Turning off the heat, Charlie scrapes the turgid lump onto a not-entirely-clean plastic plate. A brown and grey remainder sticks to the pan like moss.

"Fuck it," he thinks as he puts the pan under the faucet, filling it with water to let it soak and be cleaned tomorrow, or the day after.

Plate in one hand and coffee in the other, he returns to the sweat-damp sofa where his day began to shovel down breakfast in front of the Saturday morning cartoons. Finished, he scratches his scrotum through the flap in his boxers, stupefied.

"Christ, I needed that."

The Atomic Man Pt. 4: The Second Egg

Searching for the light switch, they find it and reveal the drab severity of their furtively adopted surroundings. She tells him to turn it off.

Just like that. It's not a request. No endearing "dear" or "babe" attached to the end, because he wasn't any of these things to her. He was the tall guy in a striped shirt who outside the bar in between sets had offered her a cigarette, making a flat joke about British slang, calling it a "fag." She had seemed sweet to him then, laughing softly.

She pushes a condom into his hand, not even asking if he'd brought his own. He thinks then that she must be used to situations such as this. The etiquette of strangers meeting in strange rooms. He wonders whether she's into it as much as he is, whether she's putting on a well-rehearsed show whose intermission they had just reached.

Two yellows sit in a viscous pool of translucent liquid which has begun to congeal around the edges. Charlie's stomach churns but anyway he thinks maybe that's hunger and decides to pluck another egg from the carton, thinking "Christ, I need it."

The Atomic Man Pt. 3: The First Egg

A familiar rotten taste in his throat and an uncomfortable humidity in his crotch tells Charlie immediately upon waking that he has slept in his clothes. The fierce midday sun glowers at him through his living room window where he is sprawled on the couch. Rising, he attends to his first drugs of the day. A tall glass of water, cigarettes, coffee's on the brew. Stronger coffee than the last time because each time he makes it these days he decides to put more grounds in, thinking, "Christ, do I need it."

The first egg feels soft and malleable, like muddy water in his palm. The tips of his fingers caress its shell as he moves it between his thumb and index finger, and cracks it against the lip of the skillet.

The neon lights revealing chipping plaster on the walls of a motel that charges by the hour, a consignment for hormonal burdens. Passions in faded rouge and teal walk drunkenly down a dingy hallway. The lights in their room are off and they stay that way as the door shuts.

The Atomic Man Pt. 2: Charlie In Love

Charlie remembers how the wan fluorescent lights in his kitchen struck her face and revealed acne scars like moon-craters. He'd never been so turned on by someone's forehead. It was explosive.

The powdered ecstasy prickled the back of Charlie's nostrils and he felt his toes lift off the ground. He wanted to grab her just then, dig his fingertips into the small of her back, and draw their bodies together tightly, like blood between glass slides. He'd observe her closely and magnify everything.

Without touching her, he felt their erogenous zones light up like Operation. Her breast in the hollow of his chest, his thigh against her crotch. His lips scraping the thin tendons in her neck.

He remembers as he sits, naked, on the end of his lonely mattress that night. His lust for the alabaster-skinned girl whose name he has already forgotten is grown cold and stale as the pepperoni pizza, three days old, which he prepares to eat. The bone-dry cheese peels from the crust like burnt skin and he looks out his window at a quietly smug moon.

"Sooner or later," he thinks, "I'll lose my mind."

Bones of Macchu Picchu Pt. 1

Jorge de Castenada chewed a hanging bit of flesh on his chapped lower lip idly. Having ridden since the now-setting sun was only a promising glow on the horizon, Senor de Castenada had succumbed to shallow contemplation. He was unconcerned with the unsure mountain path ahead. His thoughts lingered, like the hanging strips of dead skin on his lips, on the cacophonous trampling below him; the sauntering listlessness shared with his fellow riders like a jug of intoxicating wine passed wordlessly.

****

Manuel's shin bulged obscenely near his ankle, the shattered bone which he had tried to straighten with vines lashed around a tree branch flexed outward with every torturous step he took. He gasped in agony, and fought the urge to lie on his stomach and crawl the rest of the way up the rough shale. The open sores which wrapped around his bare torso like a torn shawl were a constant encouragement to stay on his feet. As he labored, he grabbed at exposed roots and resilient shrubs, drew comfort from them, feeding his own stoicism with theirs. The air was thick with tropical humidity and he sucked it into his lungs with difficulty; breathing warm syrup. The limestone dust hanging around him seemed to collect in his wounds and weigh him down.

In the suffocating tranquility a Rudyard Kipling fable intruded upon Manuel's thoughts. It involved a rhinoceros, a fearsome armored beast he had never seen. The rhinoceros, an arrogant and vain beast, removed his skin once to take a swim. A man put cake crumbs inside the rhino's hide so that when he re-donned it, the itching was maddening. In his efforts to scratch at them, he rubbed off the buttons which would have allowed him to remove his hide. So the beast was doomed to a life of wrinkles and irritation, which is why, Kipling wrote, rhinoceroses are such violent and cruel creatures.

The thought of a world where such fantasies took place uplifted Manuel. A blithe, saccharine land where pains such as his would only irritate and no one, animal nor human, knew to fear death. As a heron flew overhead Manuel amused himself by calling out to it:

"Hola! Fellow creature of the mountain, might you be so kind as to lighten my load a bit? My pack is heavy with firewood, and I would abandon it were it not for my fear of the coming night which even now creeps up behind the sun with murderous intent. Surely, if any of your relatives are nearby, you could carry a log between the two of you? I will meet you at the top, where we can share the succulent berries which I have gone to such pains to gather, and tell legends around the fire!"

The Atomic Man Pt. 1

(The other day sitting in class I thought I overheard someone say "atomic nights." This is the beginning of a story built from that phrase.)

Charlie couldn't get his bowl lit. He sat on the bare mattress in his bedroom, holding a purple lighter nearly out of fluid, trying to smoke the little bit of dope he picked up from his cousin last weekend. It would have been hard enough with the piece of shit lighter, but the ceiling fan was on, dousing every feeble flame he managed to coax from the sputtering lighter.

Charlie was getting angrier. Like idling at a green light. Nettles and stinging sweat.

He was tired of fugue days and atomic nights, blazed into fecklessness, nuked to sleep only to rise and face another inscrutable morning.

"Ahh, fuck!" said Charlie the Atomic Man, the housing contractor aging at quantum speed, 28 going on 40. He flung the lighter across the room.

An Abridged List

Must remember to stretch when I wake up.

Must remember to say "Bless You" when strangers sneeze.

Must remember to keep practicing my whistle.

Must remember to shave that weird hair on my nipple.

Must remember that it's all so funny.

Must remember to be grateful for misery.

Must remember the way the stars looked when I was drunk, like falling tears.

Must remember how happy that woman was when she found five dollars on the street.

Must remember: Mountains.