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Wednesday Words – Facebook

By tobyscales on February 8, 2012

He clicked the loopy arrow at the top of his screen to refresh the page again. Her half-open mouth, sheathed in deep red lipstick disappeared briefly. His eyes flicked to the bottom of the window: “Waiting for www.facebook.com, Transferring data from profile.ak.fbcdn.net, Waiting for static.ak.fbcdn.net…” and then she was back again, frozen mid-sentence above his image, a repeating pattern of captured moments alternating down the page. He wondered briefly what the chances were that their two pictures had been snapped simultaneously, long before they met each other but no — his picture was from years ago and she looked basically the same.

At the bottom of the page were two copies of his picture in a row, and to see them there filled him with shame somehow. He’d made a pass at her, a vague suggestion of sexuality which he’d instantly regretted.
maybe without your clothes on

When he didn’t hear from her for a minute or two he’d tried to cover it up with a joke,
nah that would b cold and freezing LOL

and he’d been staring at the cursor blinking dumbly for a full five minutes since.

In the background, the soporific voice of Ira Glass opined nerdily about the “Google-ization of the mind,” some scientist’s notion that an increased reliance on technology and instantly-accessible information devices were having an adverse effect on long-term memory. He felt sort of “well, duh” about it and hadn’t really been listening for a while, though he had casually mentioned the topic in his initial mesage to her.
hey great to meet last night. I just saw that you like This American Life – funny cuz I’m listening to it right now! Anyway good to meet you, lmk if you want to get a drink sometime.

He’d been surprised when her reply popped up so quickly
hey! great to hear from you! I love Ira Glass would probably marry him if he wasn’t already :)

And suddenly his night had gone from blasé and lonely to a really great flirtation, the moments of which he recalled as he scrolled through the rest of a conversation that had been going on now for what, an hour? 9:20pm to 10:13pm and 10:15pm. A pretty good run. He typed the words even as he thought them
what happened to you?

but as soon as the third picture of him appared he instantly regretted the query. His stomach sank with desperation and he felt suddenly alone behind his screen.

Outside a reveler passed and he remembered that it was Saturday night, a night when pretty girls like Rebecca were typically out having fun. In all likelihood this is exactly what had happened — a chat with a stranger is all fine, but the moment a real offer crossed her table she would be out the door. Or maybe she had just been killing time before some Saturday date, dressed in those same incredible pumps she’d been wearing on Friday, long legs rising naked to the world and her flesh showing goosebumps as the sun dropped out of sight at Travis’s leaving-work party.
Travis was the guy all the girls said was a genuinely good guy and even marriage material, so some of that light would shine on him by association wouldn’t it?

In another window he pulled up youporn.com and searched for “legs.” He spent the next twenty minutes both forgetting and remembering her, at first looking for a porn starlet with long legs in high heels but finding that too depressing, going limp in his hand even as he tried to match the red lips on the screen to the frozen mouth of the image he’d been talking to for the last hour. Finally he rolled his mind back to high school and that first incredible girl, finding her proxy by clicking TEEN and masturbating to a video called “Babysitter loves anal with Dad!,” finally orgasming with his eyes closed and the faint taste of skin on his lips while the starlet grunted and groaned dramatically in the background.

When his climax subsided and he had washed his hands, he returned to the screen and closed several pop-up windows to get back to the Facebook chat. Each window now filled him with disgust at himself, these sad young women posing for him, their pleasure so clearly a performance.

Worse still was the feeling when he finally returned to the original chat and saw her face repeating on the page:
sorry i just found out my father died
i know that’s heavy. i don’t know what to say.
want to get a drink right now?
hello?

He wrote
oh my god. I’m so sorry. I’m here.

but was informed that she was offline and would receive his message later.

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Wednesday Words – Elevator

By tobyscales on February 1, 2012

The sad old demon sat in the corner of the elevator hunched over his knees, face in hands. Thick leathery skin, no longer the vibrant red of youth but purplish with age. His wings twitched and closed around him, their fine silk shredded now by the arrows of countless do-gooders.

Across from him, his charge — Ernest Trimble, a professor of English who cared nothing for his job and less for his life — swayed back and forth uneasily.

The elevator stopped and a passenger boarded: Mrs. Wells in 410. She nodded slightly and sadly at Trimble, who did not offer her assistance with the cart she dragged in behind her and which forced the demon to his feet by virtue of its size.

The demon hated Mrs. Wells with all the charcoal burning in his heart. Sure, she seemed a sweet old lady but he saw delight in her eyes the moment she smelled the booze on Ernest’s breath. Ernest couldn’t see it. He was too drunk. And anyway by the time he’d slurred out “Nice night, eh Mishuz Wells?” she’d managed to transform that gleam into self-righteous pity. She fixed him with it now, holding his blurry gaze for too long as if she were searching for something in it.

“Christ,” the demon thought to himself, “Can’t wait to get off this elevator.”

Then Mrs. Wells wrinkled her glaucomous eyes into a pitying smile and nodded quietly. “Yes. Nice night.”

The demon’s stomach filled with hot bile and suddenly the depression which had filled him moments before — the creeping in his spine that had told him he was getting too old for this and that Ernest Trimble of Apartment 401 would be his last charge because he simply could not find the strength to take another soul — suddenly all that worry slid away from him and he felt glorious rage creeping up his spine as he leaned over the cold, frail body of Mrs. Wells to whisper hotly in her ear: “You’re next.”

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Wednesday Words – Fathers and Sons

By tobyscales on January 18, 2012

I regarded my father from across the table – his moist, soft eyes deep-set among the folds of skin dripping from his high forehead. I had watched his eyes retreat beneath these folds and his forehead stretch into a vast expanse of pale flesh since I was a child, and studying both now (mottled freckles chart the constellations of a distant galaxy, silver arthropods extrude from the furrows of his brow) I know he has seen my face grow from newborn-soft to the half-hewn stubble I wear these days; indeed, that is part of the problem.

“This is my work, Dad.” I hear my own voice as if at a distance, the emphasis on work and not the stronger possessive, yet still relieved to note that I’ve outgrown the adolescent stressing of the last syllable.

He makes a sort of grunting noise and rolls his lips away from his teeth several times rapidly, giving the appearance of chewing but I know it’s to work saliva in between his lips and his gums. The dentures dry him out.

And now he looks over my shoulder, those sparkling eyes seeming to notice something in the distance yet not so focused as that. It’s a tiny gesture I’ve seen him make a thousand times, this off-centered glance which used to startle, then intimidate, and finally frustrate me (startle when I thought he’d really glimpsed someone or something approaching, intimidate when I would try, as a teenager, to argue with him, and frustrate when as a young man I decided it was a calculated dismissal of my presence).

Nowadays I understood that he was merely thinking of what to say. It was a stalling tactic, useful because of the contrast it offered to his frequent and deliberate eye contact. That it destabilized his conversational sparring partner was merely a happy accident. This train of thought led me to my grandfather, the boxer, who would have appreciated the analogy. He was spry and thin like me, and I imagined him dancing around an oafish lumberer like my father on the balls of his feet, bouncing his weight easily from one side to the other, always in motion, always seeking the easy jab.

Fights are never won in single blows, my father had explained to me. A good boxer waits for the right opportunity before he swings, else he risks tiring himself in the early rounds. In point of fact there is the slightest of distinctions between the right opportunity and the wrong one. When a boxer sees the right opportunity he must be instantly and totally committed to the swing; rare is the man who can so readily shift between patient observance and purposeful attack.

My father’s eyes found mine again. “Well…” he began, “I don’t have to like it.”

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