This piece landed in the top 25 of The Molotov Cocktail's Flash Monster contest before being published online in the Maudlin House. It remains one of my favorite written pieces lately. Enjoy.
Move
to Florida, They Said
Move to Florida,
they said. Enjoy the heat, walk on the beach, bask in the sun. The sun gave me
freckles and squamous growths that became jagged scars
memorializing missing flesh. The sun led to white creams and fake beach smells
haunting my existence, marking my hours. Sixty minutes of exposure, reapply,
repeat, repeat, repeat, a cloud of mosquitoes hovering in coconut-flavored
scent.
I
bought a rocking chair and basked in the shade. It was my idea. I was tired of others laying claim to my existence. I hid
and I stared, becoming the guy who watches, the one who sometimes waves from
behind shaded glasses with dark frames. Joggers, walkers, crapping dogs—these
were my days and my stories. Much better than newspapers full of articles on
crazed zombielike people attacking dogs while high on drugs. I watched and
watched and watched. My front porch transformed into a land of solitude, a
place for slow creaks and random snoozes on faded, blue wood.
Naps
bled into complacency, complacency into bleeding. One day I awoke to the pain
of mastication and mutilation. A man
chewed my face, rivers of steaming blood rushed down my right cheek. I wailed
in fear, I screamed, the chair rocked. I was saved by a Taser. My assailant
became incontinent as he was jolted; with teeth still digging into my cheek, he
released his waste, soaking my lap. The police said he was high, in a trance,
bath salts or something of the like. It didn’t matter. He had eaten my face,
swallowed my sagging dimples. He turned me into a circus act, a sideshow
marvel. I thought about the dogs, I wondered how they felt, if they had lived.
I
thought about my friends. Move to Florida, they said.
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