Lulu’s Loose Screw

This is new. Images of sunken ships scare me.   When I was a little girl I remember being fascinated by pictures of the remains of the Titanic. After the movie came out, where I was first introduced to the tragic wreck, I spent weeks looking up images of the submersion.    Imagine the ship, surrounded by a dark dense oceanic water, the rails and floors of the decaying boat dried with a dripping icicle of rust.   I was   taking baths around the time, because let us face it, baths may be slightly disgusting because of the whole soaking in your own filth thing, but they are just so darn relaxing.   I had always loved swimming when I was a kid so the tub was the closest thing to a pool when I was at home in my apartment. I would sink my head under the water, blowing bubbles out of my nose.   And the image in my closed lids, which usually projected a somehow familiar tiled-floor—somewhere I still cannot place—became the image of that dynamic ship...

They stand by the water of the wave pool, staring as the shallow tide slides through their toes. The little girl in the one-piece swimsuit wades forward. One foot splashing the water like ice chipping from a climber’s cleat. And then the rest of them dissolve. There is something bulbous rising in the water. Swimming rapidly forward with torpedo speed. Static absorbs like an orb around the little girl in the one-piece swimsuit. She is desolate in her bubble, her ears bursting to emptiness. She can feel the surge of the oncoming water, how the thin lines of the tide have gotten stronger and shifted from low to high. Surging onward, a plastic orange head with cancer spots juts out of the water like jetsam from a shipwreck. She thinks the thing in the water must be stranded, could be hurt, but she does not move a muscle, and cannot. The head plunges down and a stringy, spongy tentacle whips through the air. The tentacle suctions to her ankle and pulls. The sphere around her ...

Since when do people not know how to wait on line?             Imagine if you will: it is 7:30 in the morning, you are tired and cranky, and certainly not a morning person. You arrive at the bus stop where people appear to have forgotten the fundamentals, not to mention the common courtesy, of waiting patiently in an orderly place on line. No! Let’s do away with lines , I think they think as they cluster-fuck together in a clump (or a crowd as some people call it) so that there is no rhyme or reason­­— and just so I can piss the fuck out of all the other passenger-people . Maybe if you would wait on line you could be lucky enough to stand next to me and hear me bitch about how people do not know what a line is anymore. Here is a line:  Here is a line of people:  Here is a bus line:  Here is a clump (or a crowd—a clumpy crowd):  I am just short of snapping and holding a sit-...

*For Halloween, but mainly for Dan, without whom this story would never exist, because it happened to him (with a few of my artistic embellishments). Like I said, worked real hard on this. Hope I did the vision justice.                 A driver drives southbound-east in a car, shoving crusty chips in the corners of his cheeks. The bag of grease lounges on the passenger’s seat and the driver dips his hand in periodically, licking vinegar crystals off his fingers from the sea-salt snack. His other hand padlocks around the steering wheel, drives onward. His glasses fall to the point of his nose; eyes fixated on the pulsing potato chips and not the road ahead—those circular discs of caloric pleasure. The fatty deposits at his sides expand his smallish figure. The groan in his belly growls deeper. The radio dial flickers neon blue and reverberates off the lens of his frames onto the road before him. He watches as...