A post in which it becomes clear that I need to purchase a new Louisville Slugger

The nights are too hot for anything except regret. We slip out of our clothes and lie in the dark not wanting to touch each other. At 2 A.M. a car alarm starts blaring, and I run to the window, pull up the blinds, and stare down into the street. "It's not ours," I say, sliding back into bed, pushing a wayward foot onto the assigned side. The truth is, I don't even know what our car alarm sounds like, or whether we have a car alarm. But every time I hear the noise I stand up and look out the window into the dark, at our car bathed in sickly yellow light to see if it is being stolen as if that look could change anything. "I have the license plate number," I could say, "it's definitely ours."

Years ago now, when I was ten or so, I would walk home from school by myself. And even though I was old enough to do so in our small Northern California town, I would always sit in the brown wide-backed chairs, now pockmarked by the claws of cats, dead and returned to life, with a baseball bat in my hands, watching cartoons and waiting for an intruder to appear. The mind is a strange thing. Fear will have nothing to do with rationality. Even on the best of days they sleep in separate beds. Strangely, those distended afternoons, the sun a virulent yellow, cracking dirt and wilting grass, and me, watching cartoons with the door open, afraid that someone was already in the house and that I would need to run out into the street. I am certain that an open door through which a main character always wants to escape should be used as some sort of metaphor. I don't use metaphors.

Occasionally I would stand up and walk across the white linoleum floor, streaked with grime and dirt from years of playing football in the back yard, and look out the back door expecting to see a face to meet my face. The door was made of a thick double paned glass, but I feared every time that I would look out the window and see someone. A person specially created for the express purpose of ending my life. After I had quelled my fears I would open the cupboard and pour cinnamon sugar into my mouth and screw back on the top so that no one would ever know.


After an hour or so had passed I would cross the room and close the front door. I knew that my older siblings would be returning home soon and would find it strange that I was sitting in the living room with a bat across my knees watching a dressed up duck foiling crimes. Eventually, I would end up on the floor eating cinnamon graham crackers and starting raptly at the screen. Those years I didn't have any sort of guilt complex associated with watching television. My mother doesn't even keep her television plugged in anymore. Every time I see my family they tell the story about how I threw a knife at my brother and my sister is quick to chime in with the ruler incident. Man is not peaceful it seems, unless peace is thrust upon him. It's strange the stories they don't even know enough to tell. Those endless afternoons waiting for someone to appear so that I could run and the sweet rush of cinnamon sugar.

In the evening she wakes me up with a push. "I think I hear someone downstairs," she says. I sit up, try and tell her that she's crazy, and that we'd be better served to go back to bed. "If neither one of us moves," I say "he'll never know we were here. This is probably the best way to avoid getting killed."
She tells me that I need to check the house. And as my feet hit the warm hardwood floor, I think back to childhood, how I used to carry a bat across my knees in preparation. I walk downstairs empty-handed, hoping that someone has just stopped in for tea. It is dark downstairs, and I keep the lights low. I stand in the living room, warm light pushes through the blinds from the front porch, and I notice that all of the doors are closed. There is nowhere left to run. I wish I knew how to use metaphors, doors seem to make such good ones.

Kafka: "Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us"