Short Story Excerpt

This is an excerpt from a short story I was writing, and which I've now abandoned temporarily (gotta pay the bills). It takes places as a journal entry from a freshly independent (sort of, he's been orphaned) guy who's hesitant of everything and suspicious that everyone he's ever known has been lying to him about everything he's ever heard. I just haven't posted anything in a while, and to those 2 or 3 of you who actually read my blog, thought you might be interested. I'll try to finish the story soon, possibly for this writing contest I'll probably lose.


Dream Journal Entry 64: Suicide by Spider
I'm in a bathroom. I fumble around the medicine cabinet for a while before I find them, reading labels, deciphering elongated physicians' babble and looking for just the right touch of morbidity to splash in my hand and throw down my throat. I was hoping for something red because I thought that if I took enough of the stuff, I'd start to foam at the mouth and that crimson might offer up the most shocking hue to fit the mood...but the pills were white, like most pills. I didn't know this, and didn't really care once I realized the fact; but regardless, ever since I could remember, I always hated taking pills anyway, white or otherwise. This seemed to be the genius with this course of action. To say that I was attempting this abhorrent cry for help purely for my own bizarre experiment — to analyze whether or not I had the stones to cast the first stone on myself, for the purposes of forging a new path toward identifying the lengths I'd travel for my quasi-suicidal obsessions by subjecting my own brain and life to them — well...it seemed to me, logically, a stroke of pure Einsteinian poetry. It appeared to me, theoretically, as the kind of thing that garners the bestowing of some international prize for brilliance. It was going to be the cornerstone of my maturity into a devious but respected career, one that would seem to critics and colleagues in the field of non-licensed psychology as, technically, "risky," but ultimately hugely beneficial to the evolution of the school of human emotion. Or maybe it was, actually, just a kid in a medicine cabinet with a broken heart. (Why does my heart heave?)
I knew that my girlfriend at the time (who was she?) would have had some kind of capsule to aid her in sleep. I am about 18, I guess, in the dream, and wrestling with the silent slings of sorrow found within someone who's walked in on his lover — at our shared apartment, on my bed — banging guts with someone else. It's a vivid image, but I'm sure it's happened. You'd think I'd have encountered this fabled scenario later in life when I was a middle-aged, hair-plugged desk jockey for a crumbling insurance firm with a Porsche parked in the lot; but alas, sometimes life speeds things up. I couldn't have blamed her. I've been known to bother zombies with the lawnmower pull-cord ritual that passes for my nightly respiratory activities. Dreams don't care how old you are.
I find the cylinder that espoused the longest ingredients and purported triggering of pharmaceutical wizardry, decode the hospital jargon (though I didn't read anything, I just knew...) that professed that the pill would make me drowsy, and then suddenly feel myself hesitate. There seemed to be a chink in the armor, a rabbit-like trance ensuing like when danger's near and instantly there's no direction to run that seems absolutely safe.
Looking around the bathroom, I begin to take note of my surroundings, sort of acclimating myself, I suppose, to the weight of the gift of free will on human boys fresh out on their own with a gal pal in tow. Could it be all that bad? Could she have simply been confused and drunk in this mirage, and thought that she was actually riding me like Barbaro in a mad dash to the finish line at Churchill Downs?
So go the hazes of a man gut-shot by a woman, even in dreams. So focuses my eyes to trivial things on the wall. (There's a rustle behind the drywall, like a trapped rodent beating its head against the studs.)
I see the seashell pendant that I'd given her, which my mother had given to me to give to her, which my grandmother had given to her to give to someone, anyone else, really, as long as it was out of her bulging ruby- and pearl-bulged jewelry boxes. I see a sloping claw foot bathtub. I hear my dog (I don't have a dog...) snooping its sniffity snout all along the bottom crevice of the bathroom door, begging with weak, bitchy whimpers for me to open up and pet her, probably sensing that I was doing something ill-advised and hoping her preciousness and innocence might rouse me from my ruse (that or she was scoping out a brand new corner of the house to shit in). Corners...
I thought of the time that I'd cornered my lover by the sink while she brushed her hair before the Christmas party; she was wearing a glittering turquoise party dress, the seashell pendant swung tenderly across her collarbone and dangled neatly between her breasts just above the low-cut neckline of the gown. She was about to affix an equally marine-colored corsage hair clip to the up-swirled do flanked on the left side of her mane when I stopped her to tell her how much I loved her. She smiled in the mirror at me, never turning around, never saying anything (with her mouth, anyway; I don't remember her face), just staring into the reflection of my eyes, blushing and looking more vulnerable and capable of submission to the love I'd paraded in front of her. She was capable. She knew it. She knew I could be the one who would take care of her, who'd caress her when she was somber, and who'd admonish her when she'd done something wrong to me; I could be the one who stuck it out and battled through this fork-and-knives life for a shot at some spoons on the other end. But she looked afraid. (I see a black widow now, descending down a silken thread from a new hole in the wall...that hole wasn't there a second ago. My chest hurts...) And behind that mirrored stare of hers, into the eyes of my reflection, was this bottle of pills resting even then, which I was now about to imbibe. To crush her. Finally. To make her feel. Forever.
I blink a quick daydreamer's blink (it's a nightmare... I know it now), winking out a swift and lonely tear that drizzled down to die on my bottom lip. (The spider is now the size of a small cat, swelling with an unknown bulge, hooked up in a lonely web next to the medicine cabinet...) I stare at myself for about five minutes into the mirror (five minutes in dream time, which felt more like an hour). Do nothing more than admire and repulse myself. Another two tears descend from my bottom eyelids and join the still-salty reserve of the first, creating a kind of crybaby bridge between my top and bottom lip. (The red hourglass on the belly of the beast is opening up like a pod, expelling smaller arachnids that form a line into a tiny opening in the frame of the medicine cabinet...marching like black-death brigadiers...why am I not reacting to them?...) I’m not necessarily sad or depressed, just ushering in that kind of apprehensive pout inherent in all the facing of new experiences; like swallowing a lump down your throat when you meet someone new — I'd never met this bottle before. (The host spider sits in stoic meditation, with thousands of eyes reflecting my furrow-browed gaze at it. I could swear it's smiling...)
When I figured I was ready, I shut off the light, light a candle (the mother spider squeals at the flame...) and turn on the faucet of the bathtub so if someone comes home, they'll think I’m indulging in a late-night soak. (There are noises, like keys on a typewriter coming from within the cabinet...) I write a note. It’s a list of the people I'd miss if I didn't wake up (from the pills in the dream, anyway), and a reasoning for why I think this was such a monumentally inspiring thing to do. (The cabinet begins to shake and pop with what sounds like popcorn, blackened ooze, syrup-thick, seeps from the cracks in the door of the cabinet...) I pop the lid off the bottle, up-end it into my mouth (the bottle was nearly full and consisted of about 40 or so pills) and crunch down the drowse-riddled devils. Their bitterness mixes with the salty rim of my lips and reminds me, briefly, of opening my mouth in the ocean for the first time and tasting all the fish. (A torrent of tiny black widow offspring shoots from the exploded door, some halved as if they've been given live autopsies. They lunge in one huge black cloud of terror right into my face, and I claw and gnash at them with what I come to realize are long, razor-sharp fingernails. Their black blood and my blood mix together and my face begins to erupt into plumes of acidic smoke. I try to scream, but my mouth is filled with them. I look into the empty cylinder of the pill bottle and see only little black legs, spider parts, black ooze, sour smells.)
I stare at myself for about five minutes into the broken mirror, my face contorted like a splintered Van Gogh, rivulets of purple goo road-mapping an otherwise calm visage.