Shortisms

Matt Spradling

Commedia dell'arte
Tendrils/Collapse
Beyond the Pale

Ergodicity

Fight Clubbed

What Eyeballs Do

Commedia dell'arte

"You're so mysterious," my date says, gazing into my eyes over a candlelit restaurant table. "What's it like to be you?"

"I can show you," I growl, because there is a lemon seed in my throat.

"What do you mean?"

I reach out and take her slender hand. "I have magic psychic powers."

She gasps, but does not pull her petite and slender hand away. "Normally I'd say no way, but because you're so mysterious, I believe you."

"Thanks." I focus my magic psychic powers and feel them ripple through me and into her elegant and petite and slender hand. The room begins to spin and fade as our consciousnesses sail away entwined to some point of interest in my past.

It's the mid 2000's, summer. We are dark passengers in the head of myself in 6th grade give or take a year. I am feeling extremely nervous, hormonal, and guilty about being hormonal. Everything smells like pungent mildew. That can only mean one thing: church camp, where the first thing my friends and I did upon arrival was accidentally flood our hotel room, soaking all of our clothes and towels.

It's relatively late at night in some sort of large pavilion and I'm sitting around a small table that is indeed too small to host the number of people currently trying to use it, so all the chairs are sort of ram-a-jammed around in something approaching but never achieving a circle. There are about six figures present, myself included. That means this is one of those small group discussions held after the big evening worship service when everyone is delirious from sugar and the holy spirit and sleep deprivation and fear and probably sore from maintaining the delicate balance between needing to appear like you're singing but being too scared to actually be heard.

This isn't a run of the mill Boy's Night discussion group with your merry band of friends, though, no: this is one of those mix-em-ups where different groups get co-mingled to torture us a little bit. That's manageable though; what's uniquely fraught about this setup is that the powers that be chose to mix the guys and gals together. There are girls present. Interactively. Perceiving me. This is D-Day. This is the dream. This is the nightmare. This is the highest-risk, highest-reward situation I have ever been thrust into and I am not a fan.

I fidget with one of at least four livestrong bracelets on my wrists while trying to look thoughtful listening to the girls' group leader, another novel element. Directly across from me is my friend, Jordan, and around us are three girls. I get the sense that he also finds this harrowing, but no time to dwell. It's every man for himself. One round of ice breakers or introductions or comments on the service has already gone around, judging by the way my adrenal glands are spewing acid but not yet exhausted.

The leader asks us a question, and we start to answer one at a time. Alright. This is it, showpig, you suave hunk, you debonair twink. My gears turn at a fever pitch for a few moments before miraculously finding a joke. Not the best ever, but solid, organically topical, a potential intro to a real answer. I have to say it. I simply must. I'm already all-in, why not throw the mortgage in too? Okay, I'll say it. It'll be fine and cool.

While I was fighting demons internally, Jordan had began his turn and people are now chuckling when I get out of my head and back to being present. That's probably good, a little warmup act to get everyone comfortable, plus mine is probably funnier. It of course is not my desire to upstage the poor guy, but you gotta do what you gotta do. It's survival of the fittest, baby (evolution is not real though). God in heaven, the girls. They haunt my peripherals. Don't look at them. Don't you dare. Focus on the art first and the rest will follow. Parable of the sewer or whatever.

After a further painstaking minute, it's time. Don't think, just do.

I do.

A good delivery, all things considered. Natural, somehow not shaky, garnished with a humble, self-effacing chuckle and grin, but not too humble. In and out, mission accomplished with no nonsense. God is real and my life has a plan.

The relief is short-lived. Something is wrong: my heroic performance isn't met with smiles, laughter, sly prolonged gazes, proposals of marriage. Silence. Confusion writ upon faces like red protesting paint on fur coats. Did they not hear me? I accounted for the volume, that shouldn't have been a problem. Did I commit some foe-paw (I don't know what that means)? I try not to panic. A few faces drift away and downward in some mercifully unknowable combination of politeness and disgust. The leader awkwardly bridges the teen-pregnant silence and continues with the lesson.

As this is happening, my neurons that were stuck in the elevator while all my brainpower was being diverted to my writers room finally come crashing through the door. One comes rushing in with a paper tight in its crushed fist, insisting almost apologetically that it be read. It contains a snippet of dialogue, dialogue from Jordan during my moments offline. Jordan's joke. Jordan's joke that is nearly word-for-word identical to the joke that I told moments later.

Oh. Oh, this is bad. This truly is hell. I'm finished. It almost doesn't even hurt because of how rapidly and thoroughly I surrender all claim to dignity and accept implicitly a celibate life. For the Lord. I stare at nothing. I wish to be displaced in time, anything to not dwell in this wreckage a moment longer.

The room starts to spin and fade, and I'm jolting back into my adult head at the dinner table, hand still clasped with my date's. I see the light return to her eyes as well.

She vomits just so much over the table, dousing the candle, our hands, splattering across my good shirt. She turns and erupts again, puddling the floor in several directions. Fellow diners shriek, servers panic and rush to fetch a mop, towels, anything, an ambulance. My fingers search my wrist for a phantom livestrong bracelet.

Tendrils/Collapse

How cruel it is to get what you want only to find that it doesn't do you half the good you'd hoped it would. Perhaps cruel is too strong a word; it is mundane in its little devastations, and cannot even afford you the ironic satisfaction of a more grievous injury, instead braising you slowly from the inside out.

This is the poison-laced peace that comes with midnights, cavernous and beckoning. At long last freed from the day's suction, no longer are you stuck to the ground, walled in by waves of commotion arriving in chaotic tides, cooked under the pressure of distended skies bulging with windy, belligerent heats. Now comes still peace for the heart-rent and seasick, an hour of scavengers and self-conscious pests, come out to tickle the cooling world like dreams wash clean those minds that sleep. Silent and empty the night would seem only to those eyes and ears attuned to blasting days, blackened and rolling within their constriction.

Weathers exhale their burden and settle flat into fold, and so too does your mind. Lying still amidst the candlelight, dancing freely now through shadows, your brain begins to gently sprout. Out creep tendrils, earthen roots grasping blindly through the dirt for purchase and for riches, ghostly lichens haunting nighted forest floors, spreading ever outwards seeking self and knowledge. You feel what they feel; they share your fingerprints; they take your hands and guide them over the rough-hewn borders of the room, penetrating drywall then and slithering inside.

Taste the dusty timbers, lick the grain, hear electric hums all coursing forth at play. The tendrils unfurl themselves throughout, a nervous system stretching far afield, until three floors surrounding are grasped with unflinching life, fingers held fast to the stove of the world. A spider tangled stuck within its woven web, no pluck of silk escapes you, vibrating in tune with the building's vague tectonics. You feel things in this way you'd swear could not be felt: a thump above may jolt the heart; a hum sets teeth to chatter; a neighbor's voice can find its perch within your open lungs; your face is poked by crude and careless fingers 'til your cheeks are prodded raw; each breath and sigh of brick and plaster creaks within your bones. How could you think the nighttime fit for slumber? The very air is a cacophony.

Once unfurled, you cannot be folded up again; what lifeform shrinks once grown? Each new sensation felt or heard remains with you forever, for what is you is now external, sheer-sewn and exposed, each new wrinkle on your brain amended to your name. To sever these would be lobotomal in nature, a mutilation of the grudging self. And so you bloom forever further, filling space, enduring pain, as life has ever pushed its bounds.

As if your home were not enough, though a hundred times the size you comfortably governed, your tendrilled mind breaks through the outer walls and wonders: what boundless life beyond might be perceived, the tight gag of form sloughed loose? Spores of thought release and drift throughout the mired night, divining for bloodied water in starlit estuaries.

Beyond the coiled tendrils' touch come flooding soft-palmed lives, vignettes set trembling upon your eyes like muddied foreign coins. There's too much love and too much waste, distress just beyond your reach, baying on the black horizon with the mouths of hell you once held deafened out of sight. The cruelty of the world laid bare, what vestige of yourself might keep unspoiled by the tragedies which rent the heart when still it beat? Blinded to what's real before you by the pain of things so fragile you would weep for them if they were near, and yet they happen now and there, and now and there, or nearabouts as makes no difference, fact and fiction blurred as though 'twere you who wrought creation.

How can one mind hope to last intact beneath this cudgel, within a wind which blows anew with each fresh freezing cry? You can't withdraw, so out you reach again, beyond the veil of faces known and new, and to a height you hope will lift you from the violence. As trees are buffered by the storm but kept upright by longing roots, so too may the anguish be washed out amongst the churn, the grand-scaled movements in the dance played out by the collective, eddied currents leaping forth from soiled floor to something better.

But there you find no tight-lipped solace, no prize to wrestle from the hands of those who would possess: fires scathe the world's woods in shapes you've seen before in memory and dream; chasms open in the mountains, drinking in with luxury the volumes of the sea; floods of smoke obscure the stars, drawing curtains one by one as if for privacy from places that don't want to see such contrite acts of tragedy, marooning you just here, just now, without rest: a witness. Why?

Beyond the Pale

They awoke one day to find that they were a ghost. Not exactly a ghost - their corporeal body, they found, seemed to remain unchanged - it's just that they had become loosened from it somehow, a pale imitative shape flickering just outside the lines of their skin like a crudely colored drawing made by a child.

They sat up, flexed and waved their arm through the air, watching the shapes dance atop one another, feeling the bodily control that remained to them in a numb, detached way, as though their being was now hypothetical.

Stranger things had happened after many a night out. Feeling there was nothing for it but to continue on with their day, they carefully stood on skin-cloaked feet and proceeded with their morning ablutions, feeling all the while only slightly and vaguely off, as though using their weak hand instead of their strong. Didn't people do that occasionally to try to develop more dexterous ability or something, like muscle confusion shake-weights for the lobes? Didn't people do a lot of things.

Hunger, as might be expected given the circumstances, made its presence known in faint rumbles but without half as much urgency as was typical for that hour. Again, they felt they might as well stick to the routine. Just in case. In case what? they briefly thought. That question often made itself heard, like it possessed a little panic button built into the underside of their brain that was close to needing the batteries replaced, but seldom fully acknowledged and certainly never examined to any satisfying conclusion.

Perhaps awakening as a specter was an occasion that called for a little more introspection than usual. Just in case what? The police were unlikely to break down the door, tackle them to the floor, and take them away for crimes against normative routines; it was unlikely they'd find themselves in some unforeseeable emergency situation hours down the line wishing desperately they'd prepared for the day with just a bit more foresight lest the starve in an urgent care waiting room nextdoor to fast food; perhaps, unlikely; unlikely, perhaps. That was all well and good and logical, but did nothing to assuage the gut feeling (and the empty-ghostly-gut feeling) that lingered like a bruise. They concluded that life (or unlife?) as a ghost was even more of a vibes-based affair than the run of the mill corporeal endeavor. Perhaps logic was tied up somewhere in the calcium.

A further test: what would the cat say? They found her curled up on the sofa looking for all the world like an under-stuffed throw pillow and set to gently jiggling her awake. WIth the barest of starts she stretched, sat up, blinked, and fixed an aggressively uninterested look into their eyes, or at least near their eyes. They were filled then with an overwhelming sense that the cat cared very little for them beyond their function as food-dispenser, and perhaps recognized them not even as a fellow creature, let alone a friend or acquaintance. This then, at least, was unchanged from any other morning.

Certainly different, however, was the ghost cat. They caught the barest streak of light and movement in their peripheral vision, and turning found the pale, blue, and trademark translucent form of a ghost, cat-shaped, peeking out from behind the edge of the sofa. They were nearly startled, but this was tempered by seeing the sense in it; why wouldn't one ghost be able to see other ghosts, and why wouldn't ghosts go where they damn well pleased, respect for boundaries apparently not included amongst the precious few sensibilities one takes into the beyond. The ghostcat's gaze was altogether more emotional than the fleshcat's, both alert and fearful, black-and-more-black eyes wide. They realized then that perhaps they were the one intruding on space that by rights belonged to the ghostcat and reflexively rose and stepped softly away (which isn't hard for a ghost, especially one who in life was also gentle and cautious).

If the nature of their home could feel changed so easily, what then must the outside world be like? What new entities to meet, sensations to feel? They slipped on their walking shoes (though the ghostly half of their instincts felt this unnecessary and almost demeaning) and raised a hand to the lock, but stopped then, standing and processing, or attempting to process, a feeling, or perhaps a lack of a feeling that would normally have been present but was not. What was it? A lack of wind at their back, a lack of compass; more than that; no purpose.

If an incorporeal cloud of fantasy plasmatic aura could feel empty, this was it. The realization came welling up within them that not only did they have no immediate purpose to their day, nor were there any undercurrents of meaning beneath the surface, long-term. No goals. No dreams even. No desires other than the baseline impulses to achieve general comfort and feel like, well, a person. Had there ever been?

They traced the timeline of their life's trajectory back to its various impetuses, finding nothing but weary drifting in and out of the orbits of any external force or person that had captured their momentum at that time, never creating any thrust of their own. Could that be possible? An entire person coasting through the background of life as though the author of destiny forgot to ink in the inner workings of a background character present only in relation to the actors around them? Had they been a ghost all along, finding nothing new today except that some extradimensional stitching had come loose in the night and set the illusion out of sync?

They found then that they were a creature of momentum, sensitive to the cumulative force created by the movements and motivations of life, able to harness this stream and ride effortlessly along when the currents rushed, yet unable to themselves create any force out of nothing once the streams out of their control dried up. This became clear because it was happening now, the feeble house of cards tumbling, dashed over the floorboards, habits and patterns and taken-for-granteds grinding to a halt.

Not the first time of course, but perhaps the first time all the numerous not-first times had truly been calculated together in total, a pattern rather than scattered points, a heaping mass weighing nothing, spilling out behind and staining their history like an oil slick. Perhaps it was time to go to the grocery store.

Stepping outside, nothing seemed amiss: a gentle sun played peekaboo between clouds, a light breeze rustled green leaves (but not too hard, which was a relief - it may seem ridiculous to an outside observer to be afraid the wind may blow away a ghost, but when one finds themselves newly and insecurely in such a situation one comes up with all sorts of worries). A mild early spring day, all things considered.

It wasn't until a block away that the clerk appeared. A middle-aged couple passed by, the man giving a curt nod, apparently perceiving nothing beyond the still-physical portion of them. Just after, a golden something-or-other came bounding off its porch baying its head off at them, rearing quite aggressively up onto the head-height wooden fence along the sidewalk. They were startled by this, though a fenced and thoroughly domesticated dog in a thoroughly suburban yard struck them as a belittling thing to startle at. What was odd, they realized, was that it had not assailed the couple so, only them. What could have set it off so suddenly?

"Are you going to calm that dog down?"

Already tense, they jumped at the voice behind them. They turned and found themselves face to ghostface with a man that struck them at once as being bland, extremely bland, to an almost menacing extent. He stood (if a ghost can be said to stand) at an average height, wearing the ill-fitting definition of work-casual trousers and shirt, the colors of which were indiscernible for the blue aura, with unfashionable glasses, combed over hair, and an expression that distinctly brought to mind obscure legal codes.

"Calm it down?"

"Of course." He spoke matter of factly. "You got it all riled up, it would be sloppy neighboring to leave it and everyone within earshot all bothered."

"Why did I "rile" it?"

"How would I know your reasons for doing things? Don't be a jerk, pay it and move on."

They stood buffering and out of sorts for a moment, then without thinking about it too much drew out their wallet, found a 1 - no, surely that was too low - three 1's and carefully stuck them through the fence columns. The dog lowered, its barks trailing off into growls, sniffed the cash, then took it in its jaws and turned away unhurriedly. Turning back, the ghost was gone too. Having done the responsible thing, they turned the corner and continued on, and would have shrugged if it hadn't occurred to them to do so, but it did occur to them, and it seemed a strange thing to act out with premeditation, so they didn't.

Not another block had passed before the voice returned over their shoulder. "Would you move over closer to the curb? What are you trying to get killed, or get in the way?"

They turned to look without stopping. This was ghost business, it would seem, and it wouldn't due to have non-ghosts (and presumably ghost-unawares) seeing a human stop in the middle of the street for no apparent reason. "Why? And who are you?"

"Because that's how it works, over to the side, out of the way as much as possible in case a vehicle comes along you don't hear (some are quite soundless these days), and for that matter, Transportation Code Title 7, Subtitle C, Chapter 552, Section 006 (b): If a sidewalk is not provided, a pedestrian walking along and on a highway shall walk on the left side of the roadway or the shoulder of the highway facing oncoming traffic, unless the left side of the roadway or the shoulder of the highway facing oncoming traffic is obstructed or unsafe. So you ought to get there and stay there. I'm a clerk."

"Clerk of what?"

"Would you hurry up? Someone's driving this way right now, they're having a bad day, they've got a temper and a scary voice, and they would be very upset to be inconvenienced by your gross disregard for road safety and common sense. Do you want that pleasant experience hanging over your head for the rest of the day?"

They moved to the left. A car passed calmly by. An unremarkable driver looked forward only. Another dog began to desperately yowl, loping towards a much lower chain-link fence now close at hand. It seemed to hold eye contact with them more knowingly and fixedly than was normal for a creature. "Well?" The clerk sounded exasperated.

"I have to pay every one?"

"If you want to keep things calm and normal, yes, of course." The dog, medium-sized with plastic-looking short, white, bristly hair, was positively shouting. They wondered dimly whether dogs could go hoarse, and how long it would take. More than a day at least, in their experience.

They slipped the dog a few more dollars and continued on. More human pedestrians went by without a fuss, more dogs considered their specific presence only a grievous personal affront. By the time they reached the store twenty minutes later, they had only enough money left for a couple modest meals for the day.

The store was a torrent of physical and spectral activity. Stale light and noise set the backdrop for a suffocating mass of bodies acting out their arcane functions, but of course this was nothing new. They found that fluorescents felt like a sunburn to their ghostly form, and that ghosts in general seemed to avoid crowds (many were present, but tended to haunt the darker corners, staying out of the way and merely observing mortal proceedings or gazing at walls). If anything, managing this ordeal was easier as a ghost, though, as they at least had a good reason they could attribute to the sensory fireworks, in the way that going into a game knowing its difficulty is set to hard makes it less exasperating to lose repeatedly, an almost meditative acceptance of suffering.

The clerk stayed mostly quiet, occasionally interceding to suggest areas where they could improve the performance of their shopping and general movement, or warning of ways they were at risk of upsetting others. The prevailing sense throughout was the feeling of eyes, eyes everywhere and of all kinds, watching, from the clerk, to human passersby, to other ghosts, to security cameras, not a moment passed that they felt unobserved, and they discovered this soon made it difficult to control their human body where before the operation between their two halves had been seamless, or nearly. All the eyes seemed to occupy much of their ghost self, leaving less energy to focus on controlling the sinew and muscle pulleys and levers, resulting in a sort of stilted, unbalanced way of moving.

Rationally they supposed this could have been worse, and yet much time passed after leaving the store before the almost nauseating, spasmodic feeling of unwilling nonconformity eased. By then they found themselves carrying a bag with some bread, cheese, produce, and a few other miscellaneous ingredients, with almost no memory of the previous fifteen minutes or the details of how they came to be walking down the street on the return journey home.

Their presence set a dog to barking. This may even have been one they'd already paid the first time around. No matter how many times it happened, they never seemed to become desensitized to the violence of the outbursts, and they began to feel guilty for disturbing the peace of others. They were not the ones barking, of course, and yet it was clear that they were the cause, and therefore clear that if they were not there, the barking would not occur and be a disturbance.

"Well?" insisted the clerk.

"I spent the last of my money at the store."

"So what do you have?"

"The food I bought."

"Well?"

"I suppose you're right," they said, and opened the cheese and offered a fistfull to the deranged dog who accepted it with a sniff and was appeased. This continued the whole way back, just as on the first leg of the trip, such that, by the time they arrived home, unlocked the door, and stepped into the cool privacy of their entryway, the bag of food was fully spent.

"Will I be like this forever?" they asked the clerk, who had followed them inside as though it were a matter of old routine.

"Of course," he said. "Like what?"

"I mean will I be a ghost forever."

"Naturally. It's simply what you are, and there's no backtracking that."

"I'm not sure what the point is."

"To being a ghost?"

"Yes."

"Well, you bought groceries, which one simply must do, so today was a success."

"It doesn't seem like it did me any good." They tossed the empty bag aside.

"That's besides the point. You did your duty." The clerk sat down on the couch and began scratching the ghostcat that jumped up to join him. "And pick that bag up, it won't do to leave a mess around."

"I suppose you're right," they said.

Ergodicity

Such a feeling it is to be a ball dropping down a peg board, gradually entombed, stuck essentially in two dimensions despite being painfully aware of at least two more but hopeless to engage with them, buoyed to and fro by a wooden sea called plinko, and for what, out of a simple and cruel imitation of the noise created by your collisions, or after a creator, possibly Hans Plinko, probably a nazi of the bonafide World War 2 variety, not that either root would be counted amongst the truly endless lists of principles and happenings that have an unknowable and yet tangible effect on proceedings, and anyway, if there is such a Hans, you imagine it's for the best that he's the hands-off type of god, because the only conclusion a thoughtful and realistic ball might find from that hypothetical while dinking along is that the end is determined by something else, singular, rather than what is truly suspected, somethings else, multitudinous and irreconcilable with any one mind, balled or otherwise, and if that were the case, it seems it would just about eradicate any flimsy meaning or interest accumulated along the way thus far like road dust, bouncing and dinking, short, shorter, short now, steady momentum the one thing never allowed, like a universal speed limit enforced beneath and imbued upon the wide, wide board, where a truly enterprising ballmind, given enough time to mind its ball, and of course there's never quite enough time, as if by aforementioned design, may mind its way to the understanding that, by way of one of the dimensions forbidden it, it is but a small part of an ergodic system, a single discrete point of data which, similar to the individual minute factors that coalesce to make up the so-called butterfly effect which buffets and obscures and secrets you away in smothered pockets, in turn coalesces into a pattern that's less a singular emerging pattern and more the ultimate pattern, the only pattern that ever could be or have been, filling out the edges of the known and the knowable in geometric shades that if you didn't know better, and you don't, may even take on a dim and removed semblance of personality, a curve there, an edge there, always perfectly symmetrical, a perfect whole in its grand strokes, which upon seeing, and you don't, one feels of course must always have been, this inevitable conglomerate, and one might even find relief in, depersonalized, though this comes at the cost of forgetting the infinite individual balls that carved the shape out in time, and you then have a choice to make, you ball unstuck in time, one which would seem to be all-important, for all the marbles, as it were, though it will not have the slightest effect on your trajectory, and that is whether you are the ball or whether you are the shape, the point or the pattern, the small or the big, and can one even be the big, or, perhaps correctly phrased, can the big even be one, and perhaps you are merely concussed from the endless plinko-dinking, which if traumatic seems a cruel design, and why would you want to be cruel when you could instead be who you have been, and it's around this time that a plink you had no idea would be the final dink indeed plinks your last, and in a final minute reverberation it is clear that you were perhaps not even the ball, the one, but the negative thereof, the void streak in the black sky left by coursing heat lightning, and only in this movement through the firmament were you arranged into semblance of being, and the final resting spot does not matter because it was never a matter of ending, only ever possibly a matter of moving there, which feels trite, and your last thought is the wish to plink again, not because it was pleasant, but to avoid being left with such triteness, which feels reasonable, and then feels nothing.

Fight Clubbed

It should be easier to exert control over yourself. It should be a brute force sort of endeavor rather than finesse, yet here you are, delicately coaxing one young foot in front of the other, testing out different methods of balancing your oscillating upper body in a sort of strategic dance with only a self-made rhythm you can't ever quite maintain. It should be something you could nail down in private preparation rather than having to improvise, out alongside the busy street, in action, showtime, building the plane even as it flies. But that assumes it's the same captain, the same set of rules, the same game. You trick yourself into this faith that commonality extends to you, a commoner, when time and time again you're shown it doesn't.

Why did you think 88, 6pm, cloudless, breezeless, endless blasted asphalt and traffic fumes and glints of sun off auto glass would be a pleasant sweatless stroll? America the beautiful.

The comic store is a refuge of sorts, but you bring enough contamination in with you to last the visit, sweat rolling, enough heat emanating that you can almost see your distorted shimmer in the air rising up to the pallid fluorescents.

It's there. You find it. You feel nothing. What a worthwhile climax to this adventure. The first "Fight Club 2" comic book is thin and soulless in your hands. Why did you want this again? You thought it was a joke the first time you heard about it - a sequel to a movie so profoundly un-sequelable that no creator worth their salt should take it up, and any real fan would feel skeptical about, and in an entirely different medium at that. Are you even a fan of the movie? You thought you were, but now in broad daylight it feels a shameful, misbegotten label somehow. But this is how shopping usually goes (even for groceries), so you ignore the emotional confusion and make a perfunctory show of browsing around the empty store for another couple minutes for some reason before heading to check out.

In a moment's glance you process that the cashier is a cute young woman, and that this mildly surprises you, perhaps because of your preconceived notions about comic stores, and in turn because of your preconceived notions about young women, and then you feel guilty for this for some vague reason that you may unpack later but which is too dense a gordian knot to slice through in this ⅓ of a second allotted for processing the situation and deciding your next actions. The checkout exchange proceeds apace until she breaks the silence, saying without any detectable inflection, "I heard we're not supposed to talk about this one."

This does your sense of control over your situation no favors. This has never occurred before. This is unprecedented in human history (the 400 shopping experiences you've had and the 100 you've seen in TV shows and movies). You are off the edge of the script map. Your best guess, again restricted to a thoughtless moment, as though comprised less of brainpower and more from pure adrenal spinal fluid, is something to do with the comic perhaps being shelved early, contrary to your information from www.google.com, thus making it a hush-hush sort of deal lest the publishing powers that be get wind of these violated retail terms.

Blank-faced and perhaps somewhat wall-eyed you manage a decent "Oh, really?" and sort of black out, remembering no further interaction between then and your exiting the store. You don't have a bag. The comic is vulnerable in your sweating hand on the return walk, bared for all the world to see. How does a store that is empty at 6pm survive on $5 purchases? What defines a blouse? Was that honk directed at you? You arrive home, shower, and don't read it.

They come around 1am, just when you're starting to drift not towards dream country, but towards the pre-check line to board the plane to dream country, triple-checking you have your passport. They're blank, dark figures in your lightless room, scarcely visible yet perfectly clear in their presence. The first punch is into your stomach before you've even lifted your head. The second is of course in the face, under your left eye. You always imagined getting hit on the right side of your face, but didn't take into account that most people are righties and the whole thing would be mirrored.

Once they've dragged you down your stairs and flung you out your own front door onto the driveway, they really start to go to town, kicking the evershitting life out of you. Perhaps you will not read the comic. You're not sure if all this is fair - perhaps you'll figure that out later - but you don't feel surprised, and that at least provides some comfort.