Published Fiction: Mary Faces Reality

A quick piece of flash fiction here, 152 words, published online my EXFIC. I hope you enjoy.

Mary Faces Reality

            At sixteen, Mary’s butcher knife sought to spew a potential assailant’s blood, her cellphone to announce and capture her sexuality one photo at a time. When she turned eighteen, her twelve year old silver Accord served as an escape pod from parental torment, plowing through imaginary municipal barriers, over hills, and down red clay roads. No matter how far Mary drove, no matter how often, she failed to evade the earworms of her father’s voice, his grating commands. At twenty and drunk, she wanted to trim roadside wild flowers with a stolen nine iron. Each swing slow and lopping, like her dad hitting a drive after his tenth Saturday morning beer while uttering misogynistic blabber, Happier than a two dicked dog, he’d say, and so did she as she tried to smack the petals into cars. Now, at twenty-six and pregnant, she only wanted to seem sane enough to nurture her child.

Published Fiction: Move to Florida, They Said

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.

The TPQuadballer: A Product Review

Trigger Point Performance Self Myofascial Release and DeepTissue Massage Quadballer Roller (TPQuadballer). The name in itself says a lot, but basically this product represents another in a long line of recovery products, but a product that has been purchased and deployed by many of the runners I coach. We have dumped the standard foam rollers—they get dirty, torn up by the groud/road/track, and lose density over time. The TPQuadballer does not, it holds up and quite possibly does a better job.

The concept is simple enough, two wheels on the outside, almost like wheels for a roller blade and a hard, fabric covered surface in between. What strikes you about this product is just how hard it is. While foam rollers compress, the rolling surface here does not. It remains stiff, firm, and delivers more bang for your buck than a standard foam roller. The surface is suspended, and while you may muddy the fabric with residual sweat, the surface remains clean. This means you can roll on a track, a field, in your driveway, anywhere really, without damaging the roller or soiling it. This particular model is about the length of a standard ruler, meaning I can toss it in my bad and carry it around during cross country or track meets.

That said, the roller’s density digs in. When I use it, it feels as if I am getting manual therapy, Graston and such, the type of work that relieves muscle adhesions and loosens up the legs. As an individual who suffers from calf tightness, the TPQuadballer can release the pain, set me to run, and then alleviate discomfort post workout. While rolling isn’t for everyone, I recommend giving this model a look as it retails for around $50 on Amazon, given the day.

Book Review: Francois Lelord's Hector and the Search for Happiness

I discovered Hector and the Search for Happiness  upon viewing the theatrical trail for the now recently released film when I went to see an independent movie over the summer. The book itself is rather simple—something clean, pleasant, and almost antiseptic. Francois Lelord scripts a journey in which Hector, seemingly disaffected by life as a psychiatrist within traditional western society, ventures out and explores the world in search of well, happiness. The text has pace, but beyond the idea of happiness: finding it, understanding it, and questioning it, the plot is almost nonexistent. Thus, it is part self-help, part mysticism, and part social commentary, all rolled up into the premise of a novel (and now a successful series of them). The novel is successful, but not through tension, but the journey itself (think Walter Mitty but toned down).

Written with prose that is clean and simplistic, the text takes you around the world, landing in China, Africa, and what one assumes the United States, all in an effort for hector to grasp and understand the secrets of society and man. Lelord opts for minimalism more often than not, eschewing country names, product names, and even alluding to but not naming sex. Hector strives for happiness and his journeys are the vehicle to get there. In the end, we cannot truly know the answer, but we learn from his journey, we come to understand what life is and what it could mean to many, if not just ourselves. Such a fact makes the time spent reading the text and subsequently the film adaptation, more than worth it.