The Heart’s Dogged Squeezing
A smiling, triple-chinned man with a golden combover and baby blue suit smiled on a square television set, the only light in the room, mere inches from which a teenage boy, with perfectly trimmed eyebrows, a fresh taper fade, and a sterling silver dangle earring watched with open mouth, breathing and heartbeat sickly with excitement, tightly clutching an enormous pink teddy bear, who had the same dangle earring attached to its right ear.
"And for our last segment today we'd like to present something very special. Here in Dodge City, we're always happy to report about the superlative achievements of our local young people, but the young man we'll be featuring today didn't hit any home runs or clean up any parks. Instead, his special talent is… poetry. That’s right, Dodge City local, Johnny Freshman, has been writing verses and ditties since he learned to hold a pen, and recently, his hard work finally paid off when he was chosen as the winner of the Kansas Young Poet's Contest."
Johnny, awaiting his own appearance, put his teddy bear down and moved closer to the TV, his nose touching the smiling anchor's face.
"We have been sent a copy of the winning poem here today, and I'd like to read a little excerpt from it for all of you viewers at home. But I want to warn you in advance: this is no Longfellow.”
The anchor read sing-song, emphasizing the rhythm and diction, looking up and smiling at the camera at key points.
"The meadows burn and the poppy flowers
Release their potent smoke for hours,
Til sparrows, humming sprightly tunes
Are by dread vapors whole subsumed
The rustic farmer and his pipes
Do choke on ash and fumes alike
Til living things, soulless and souled,
Are to oblivion swallowed whole."
The man blew from this mouth, chuckled and shuffled his papers.
“Well, I don’t know about you Linda, but they didn’t teach me how to write like that in high school.”
Linda laughed in her red, shoulder-padded suit.
“No, me neither, Jim. At my school I don’t think there were even any boys who could string two words together!”
“I know I couldn’t…”
The whole studio mildly chuckled before Jim continued.
“We were so impressed by this work that we decided to invite the young poet himself to the studio today to talk a little bit about the inspiration behind his work, as well as about what lies in his future.”
The camera slowly panned out while the studio applauded to reveal Johnny, wearing a flounce-sleeve, see-through black frilled neck blouse.
“So Johnny, obviously you have an amazing imagination, but there’s a lot of really scary stuff here. Why all the darkness?”
Johnny took a deep breath and turned his gaze up to heaven, his face seeming to hold back tears. Johnny, watching this on TV at home, unconsciously mimicked his own expression.
“My poetry has been called a lot of things... juvenile, hurtful, vulgar, pointless, boring, and nonsensical… but I have to write what comes from my heart."
He bent his face toward Jim’s, his lower lip quivering. The news camera panned to Jim, scarlet and sweating, gulping, adjusting his collar, gaze fixed on a small stream of spittle dripping from Johnny’s lips.
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Jim pushed Johnny into the reporter’s breakroom as the two lurchingly kissed and drunkenly grabbed at each other. Jim grasped Johnny’s face by both of his cheeks, pushing it into a scrunched up expression. Johnny unblinkingly stared upwards at Jim, mouth agape and tongue waiting for spit, which Jim provided in mucus-y sputters.
Just when Jim had moved in to sniff and lick Johnny’s armpit, the sound of high heels started to echo in the hall.
Jim immediately panicked.
“Fuck, get under here!” pushing Johnny under a desk, which, noticing his own lip-stick-stained and torn up shirt, he soon also jumped under.
“You stay quiet or we’re both fucking dead!” Jim whispered to Johnny, both of them watching the door with anticipation.
Linda walked in the room and started to fill a Styrofoam cup with coffee, not seeming to notice the two under the desk.
Johnny, breathing onto the back of Jim’s neck, started to caress Jim’s nipples.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jim whispered, as Johnny intensified his attack. Jim’s breathing intensified and he struggled not to squirm, his erection smashing his body into the desk.
“Stop… stop it!”
Linda stopped pouring the coffee and cupped her hand to her ear before beginning to prowl the room, slowly, cautiously and sternly looking for what it was that she’d just heard.
Jim’s mouth and eyes turned to an O, his fat chin merging into his face.
Linda seemed to have identified the desk as a problem area, and slowly started squatting to investigate underneath. Just as her line of sight was about to register the tip of Jim’s shoe, she heard a crude shout from the hall.
“Linda, get your ass over here, pronto!”
Linda immediately lost interest in her search, stood, rolled her eyes, and huffed.
“Yes, Mr. Dickmore!” she said with mock acquiescence, chucking her cup of coffee at the wall, leaving a massive stain in the shape of a screaming skull.
“Can’t have a fucking break here…” she mumbled, exiting the room.
Jim turned around as he wheezed, hyperventilating onto Johnny’s face.
“You motherfucker…”
Johnny laughed and lapped at Jim’s neck.
“I will show you another world,” Johnny slowly whispered into Jim’s ear, curling his lips in a strange, cursive way, tugging at Jim’s tie. Jim noticed how long, white, and thin Johnny’s fingers were.
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Johnny, wearing a maid outfit and star head boppers, was ironing Jim’s olive green suit, while Jim gulped from a coffee cup full of vodka, standing in front of the television.
“And now, from the channel that delivers the morning news an hour before everyone else, this is Channel 20 News Hour, Prester Hamilton reporting.”
“That motherfucker Prester! A complete dick since reporter’s school! I always hated that motherfucker!”
Johnny, half-assedly steaming creases out of Jim’s shirt, had earbuds in, so couldn’t hear Jim.
Prester shifted a few papers until he began reporting the first story.
“Until now most kids have had dreams of being soccer stars, astronauts, and CEOs, but more and more boys, as well as girls, are saying they don’t want to live in this world at all. As part of what seems to be a disturbing new trend, The Merlin Research Center recently revealed that 80% of young Dodge City residents would rather live in another world. We went and hit the streets downtown to find out why.”
Jim spit his vodka onto the TV screen.
“It’s these little shits that are ruining this city! Stupid little fucktards! I’ll show you another world when I drop you in the grave!”
The screen switched to a pre-recorded clip of Prester gripping a mic on the sidewalk as some grannies walked around him.
“When we were kids, hitting the streets downtown like this, fighting to become the baddest dude in the block, was the thing to do on a Friday night. But today, there are much fewer young people here on the streets. In fact, we’ve had to search up and down the block for two hours to finally find one.”
The camera panned over to reveal a kid with yellow-green skin and pointy ears in an oversized, T-shirt with the logo of the local restaurant Lobster Dump printed small on the right breast and large over the entire back. His sharp front teeth jutted out of his open mouth as he stood there next to Prester.
“Studies have recently revealed that 80% of young people would prefer to live in another world. Do you feel that way? Do your friends feel that way? Why do you think that is?”
“Well, a lot of kids are trying to become master poets, like, they’re trying to come up with prodigious rhymes, so don’t have time to focus on anything else. I just came up with this one this morning and I want y’all to hear this.
"Laura Bush walks a hungry demon down a street
that's crowded with a throng of bones without meat
while a wound from Christ’s side pours blood in the mouth
of a pigtailed little girl from the antebellum South.”
“Wait, wait, wait now. Let’s break this down for our viewers. So, you’re saying that kids are so busy writing poetry that they want to escape from the world?”
“Yeah, like we call the world ‘the hellpool,’ and we all are trying to become, uh, angels of light, is, like, the word we use for it, like, we’re trying to break away from the world, and become the most popular poets.”
“And for those of us who don’t have a PhD in poetry, what were these verses of yours all about?”
“You know, I just write from my heart. That’s all it is man.”
“And why do you think this has become such a widespread phenomenon?”
“I think a lot of it probably started with Johnny Freshman. We all look up to him and want to be like him…”
“What the… what the fuck! Johnny! They’re talking about you on TV! Hey, Johnny!” Jim said, his shaking hand stupidly pointing at the TV.
Johnny continued his sloppy ironing with his earbuds in, so could near neither Jim nor the TV. Jim threw his mug at him, but missed. The mug shattered on the wall, leaving a butterfly-shaped splash of vodka. Johnny pulled his earbuds out.
“What the fuck…?”
“They’re talking about you on the news bitch. They say it’s your fault that our town’s turned to shit.”
“What the fuck are you talking about…?” Johnny said, cocking his head and rolling his eyes.
“Don’t you talk back to me you little bitch!”
Jim stomped across the room and tore off Johnny’s star head bopper, which he snapped under his shoe, and ripped his earbuds out of his ears, tearing the cord in two.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’ve had it with your bullshit! All this stupid shit! And this piece of shit!”
Jim picked up Johnny’s pink teddy bear and tried to rip it apart with his hands, and failing, took it with him to a nearby desk and started ripping it apart with scissors he took out of the desk.
“No! NO!” Johnny screamed and tried to tackle Jim. JIm responded by threatening to slash him with the scissors, which Johnny recklessly jumped into, cutting a gash across his cheek.
“No, no, noooooo!!!!”
He screamed as he held his shredded teddy bear, mascara running dirtily down his face, as if he’d been dragged through tar. Globs of rain began to pound the window and deep claps of thunder rattled the bedframe, lighting up the predawn sky.
Johnny screeched and weakly punched Jim, who was already putting on his suit and tie, seeming slightly embarrassed at perhaps having gone too far.
"I'm sorry! Listen, I've done what I can to help you. But it’s your fault for living an unhealthy lifestyle!I have to go now!"
"No! No! NOOOO!"
Johnny swung the lamp by its power cord and smashed it against the wall. Jim got enraged all over again.
"Listen, listen, you son of a bitch! I have to go to work! I have to go to work! You don't understand the world! You have to accept things as they are! Wait! Wait and I'll be back!"
Jim stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Johnny screeched while reaching into Jim's closet, ripping up all the suits with the same scissors that had slashed his teddy bear.
Finally he collapsed on the ground. The walls of the room collapsed into the darkness of the universe, through which a storm was ripping, a tiny disturbance in the KBC Void.
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“Hahahahaha.”
“Yes, that’s right Linda. Well, now it’s time for our rapid news hour, where I’ll introduce some of the big events going on in our world today, rapidfire style for an hour.”
“Don’t mess up,” Linda said to him jokingly.
“We’re going alllll around the world here, so we’ll see if I can pronounce everything right,” Jim returned with a chuckle.
“Starting off with some news from the other side of the world, a bomb was set off in the Backworld Mall today in Geelong, Australia at 7:13 am local time. So far 800 casualties have been confirmed and the bomber is still at large. Jumping back to the US, the first annual Curd Eating Championship was held yesterday in Little Rock, Arkansas. The event began with 400 challengers eager to see who can eat the most curds in the one hour time limit, but quickly turned to tragedy when many of participants started to choke on the curds they were stuffing down their throats. So far 48 deaths have been confirmed, while many more are still in critical condition. The state of Maine’s once thriving lobster industry has met hard times this year, with not a single lobster having been caught, and now it’s clear why. Dr. Gerald P. Woodsworth, renowned poison master, has confessed to dropping several tons of a lobster poison of his own concoction into the Atlantic Ocean. He is currently in custody and being questioned as to the motive of his crime. It’s suspected that the lobster population will never recover. Moving on, the historic Kingly Doctrines Temple in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was burnt down this morning, in what is being investigated as an anti-Buddhist hate crime. Hooded baseball bat wielding youths have continued terrorizing the suburbs surrounding Memphis. The Indonesian government has officially declared war on Micronesia. The suicide rate among the elderly has quadrupled since yesterday...”
Jim’s voice slowly faded away as it droned on for hours.
Under everyone’s clothes is a layer of skin called the epidermis, made of water, protein, and fat. Under it is the dermis, full of collagen and elastin, and still deeper, the hypodermis, an oily layer that cushions our bones.
Our entire bodies are run through with veins, a system of tubes made of tissue and fibers, collecting deoxygenated blood inside us, overloaded with carbon dioxide slowly circulated back to the center, through the coronary arteries, flushed into the entryway atrium, from whence it is squeezed to the right lower ventricle, up and down the left atrium, into a thick vessel called the aorta. The blood, made new with a fresh dose of oxygen, once again begins its journey through the body, animating every extremity, until, again in need of fresh oxygen, it is called back in by the heart’s dogged squeezing.
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