Read Something in My Eye: Stories for Free Online

perched on my eyelids. They adore me out here.
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    You might like this town. There is just so much room for development.
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    My last fortune cookie: If you don’t believe us, raise the blinds. I didn’t eat the cookie.
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    The title of the children’s book I am writing is “Where the Flames Reign.”
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    This is me keeping my chin up, by the way.
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    I buy a lot of fancy ties. Not to wear. To run the silk through my fingers, between my legs. A nice tie is a nice tie, as far as I’m concerned.
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    Another lover, he was cold as a fish, but his skin was beautifully blue. He told me his love would change me, would prickle unknown zones. He fell asleep in my car one night and never woke up.
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    If all of history is held within the present, I don’t think it’s unfair to assume I will be failing the future.
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    I put an ad up for myself, selling my potential. Nothing fancy, just a picture of me in a jacket looking vaguely bored, threateningly curious.
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    It’s only you I miss, you know. The people here don’t do anything for me.

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    It’s not that I don’t agree with your decision to leave the world. This is not a judgment. At the same time, I do wish that you had finished the job.
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    I visited a psychologist only once. He tried to get me to remember a time when I was tickled as an altar boy. I told him there was no altar, and I was never a boy. Then I told him that people were meant to live bottled up, rubbed raw. Until the Great Ventilation, of course. On that day, it’s our earned right to leak as we ascend.
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    I think I really knew what I was talking about then.
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    I accidentally had an orgasm while watching footage of a dictator being hanged. I hadn’t meant to watch it; I’d simply flipped on the news. Oceans away, he swung something through me. To each his own special goneness, I suppose.
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    I received a message from your father today, telling me, perhaps you are already aware, that they plan on sending you on. Life support isn’t the bargain it used to be, apparently. After I heard the message, I fell fast asleep. Then I woke suddenly again, and thought with a strange, panicky hope: I’m going to be happy amid all this soul-robbery, you fuckers. One bright morning, I’ll stand above the herd and make my voice heard. Then I wrote a spiritual I will never sing:
    I’m thankful you gave mankind its brains,
Its ability to breed.
I’m accepting my words are all for naught,
For I know you cannot read.
(trumpet solo)
    It was then I wished you could carry my body back to the West, where you are. I’d be alive. I’d keep myself alive—I promise—I just want to be carried, that’s all.

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    Here are some final recommendations: Always keep to the middle of the road, always stop for the freights, always keep a sharp lookout, always keep a blade in your pants, always wear shoes you can run away in, always write your will before traveling, always thank the buzzards as they carry you off, always leave a little for the next day, always say goodbye with your face already on the other side.
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    I’ve been getting steadily drunker, and I’m now going to tell you a story: Once, a man and a woman had a conversation on a stone bridge. The river beneath the bridge was green, polluted, and toxic, but the water had some place to go; it ran swiftly through the city on its way to somewhere else. As for the two people, the lady was sickly and pale, and the man was not so sickly or so pale, but one could not say, upon seeing him on the street, “That man is healthy.” Although they had not met before this afternoon, both had ruined their health looking for things that they were unable to find. The woman, whose speech was often interrupted by a raking cough, had lost her child, a boy, who had fallen off this same bridge when he was young, which was many years before. The man, his loss less