Writing Samples
Excerpt from Sunny and Dawn:
SUNNY
On our wedding day, Dawn was crawling to the edge of our bed (she crawls to
demonstrate) totally naked and I said, Sunny says this next part in tandem with the radio
DAWN'S VOICE
Every morning I'll get to wake up with the Crack of Dawn. (they laugh)
SUNNY
And then she came over and sat on my face and said
Sunny is on her back, going through the motions as if Dawn were with her. She says this is tandem with the static as well.
DAWN'S VOICE
And you'll get to fall asleep to a full moon.
Sunny laughs. The radio laughs for a while, then fades into static. The more the laugh over the radio fades away, the more hysterically Sunny laughs. When it's totally faded, she is in tears. They are real tears now. This should be a mania. Once it's hit a peak, she speaks again during the come-down.
SUNNY
She wasn't normally funny. She was normally very serious and practical. To a fault. Like robotic-like rationalism. And so I believed her. I believed her when she told me the aliens wanted her to join them. I believed that she was hearing some message I couldn't decipher. Sometimes, when I'm really trying to drive myself crazy, I'll go back and listen to the recording of it.
Sunny walks over to the radio upstage, this time, a path of light shows her the way. Once she arrives, she fidgets with the controls. It takes a minute for her to set it up. Like she had hid these recordings from herself.
SUNNY
Here, listen.
Excerpt from 274 Days:
I want to tell you a secret. Partly because I’m bad at keeping my own secrets and partly because I think I got a glimpse at the universe and I want you to see it, too…Imagine you’re on a bridge. It’s dusk in late July. The word “golden” keeps circling around your head. Golden, golden, golden. Someone laughs behind you. You see they are taking photos with their friend in front of a giant aging statue of a man whose penis sort of looks like a cauliflower. They find it fucking hilarious. And behind them is an endless expanse of river, sparkling with the setting sun. And a seagull flies overhead. And a violinist plays his final song. And a bike bumps over the cobblestones under its tires and you suddenly realize you are standing on cobblestones laid by men who lived an actual thousand years ago. And the world hums around you. And you, you in a sundress that hitched around your hips so blissfully. You, sore from walking all day amongst the ruins. You are the happiest you have ever been. (edit: You are lost and alone)
I don’t know how to talk about love. I don’t know how to show you what it felt like to have a perfect moment. I just wanted to share it with you. Give it away like a glass dove. Because if I can hold onto it, maybe you can, too. Maybe we can just…
Elongated:
A Short Story
It didn’t matter how many times he patted down his butt and front jean pockets: he couldn’t find the goddamn list. He moved through his apartment, praying his heart would stop keeping time to the music. At the end of the hallway, his room had been overtaken by people. His heart continued to boom and race and he wondered if his buddy had laced his weed with coke. The party pressed around him, his sweaty friends holding onto plastic cups and half-full bottles. As he made his way to his room, an aggressively long-haired man grabbed his arm and shouted, “Barry, when’s the surprise?”
He patted Mr. Hair’s arm and replied, “I’m working on it.”
Now he shuffled through the drawers of his bedside table. His hands ghosted over condoms his girlfriend bought him during her study abroad which boasted labels like Eat my Baguette and The Only Sausage Roll You Need. She had pulled them out of her bag like an afterthought, tossed them on the bed, and both of them promptly forgot about them. He shuffled them away during one of his frantic cleaning episodes. A completely spotless bedroom lay underneath the layer of people currently packed around him. Nearly spotless: His fountain pen exploded months ago and left a black inky residue all over the bedside table. The notes he was taking in his Complete Works of Shakespeare dripped away with the ink of the pen. He had to throw out the book. Thirty minutes of scrubbing his bedside table down with a magic eraser didn’t yield any results and he left it forsaken to the mess. There was that stain and no fucking list.
He slammed the drawer shut and moved to his window, crawling over his bed to the fire escape. Only two people sat on it and he easily prompted them back into the party. He chilled on the metal platform next to his favorite worldly possession. Before he moved to the city, his oldest friend, Pepper, gifted him the strange alter: it was a vintage mirror he had found outside their city limits that was broken in two places, causing the shards to reflect slightly different versions of the same image. Pepper had filled the cracks with an iridescent blue cement and written the entirety of Hamlet in white sharpie onto it. The whole creation had a melting effect. Time and weather had dulled the reflection but Barry could still see himself in each small refraction. His brown eyes searched. He could make out the words in the cracks and see the city staring back at him. Like every little shard was a changed view of the entire universe.
This above all: to thine own self be true.
Down the fire escape he went, following some jostled instinct. The sidewalk met him halfway and ran like a treadmill under his feet. Someone in a high window played drums and he found himself beating with it. His legs stretched out and out before him, elongating grotesquely until he was taking up entire blocks with each step. His belly bloated beyond his knee caps. The chin on his face protruded and his nose hooked over the tip of it. The whole neighborhood looked blue and hazy in the nighttime smog. In his new body, he lumbered toward a memory:
$20 stuck in the black Velcro wallet. Her sticky fingers pulled it out and tucked it into her bra. She tossed her long extensions over her shoulder and sneered a smile at him, “Thank you, baby.”
He nodded and watched his entire savings saunter away with the greasy woman. None of his friend followed through and he ended up alone in the club on the edge of town. The four of them made a pact. After weeks of walking by the wooden barn turned gentleman’s club, he turned to Pepper and asked, “what are the odds you and I sneak in here tonight?”
The odds: out of 10. Both boys said four. The agreement was to meet at Pepper’s house and bike to the club together after sundown. When he showed up as the sun sunk under the tree tops. Pepper answered the door red-nosed and wheezing. The scared-shitless-shakes had taken him. Thus, Barry biked by himself.
He didn’t even have to sneak in, the owner practically dragged him. Inside the barn was one room with a centrally located bar and many poles on platforms. Of course, the women were a disappointment. A few sad men sat on wooden barstools around the poles. No one questioned his zitty face and awkward gait. Finding his way to a rickety seat, he watched the black haired woman dance and take his money. Broke and lonely, he decided to get out of the damp room. Neon dancers lit the porch, kicking high in their designated pattern. He stood on the fading wood as a bearded man lit up next to him. The cigarette faded with every puff. The beard caught the ash from the glowing end. And, before his very eyes, the man’s entire face went up in flame. Despite the raging inferno, the man remained calm, looked at Barry and said, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't,” and walked directly into the club.
He was peddling fast to the police station when the club went up in smoke. Once he arrived, the police laughed at his frantic speech. No one believed the man caught fire, no one remembered the strip club at the edge of town. That’s when he started to write everything down on a little flip book legal pad he could fit in his back pocket. In his adolescent scrawl, he recorded everything he knew to be true and every way it contradicted with reality.
The treadmill sidewalk slowed down under his feet. His nose tucked back to its regular position on his face as his tummy tucked into his waistband. The legs noodled to their typical length and his chin sucked toward his face. The ocean lapped before him. The memory brought him to the edge of town, the edge of the night, to the water.
Swimming toward him was Pepper.
“Hey buddy,” one of them said, who knows which, “You look different.”
The two men stood on the shore, rocks piled up next to them. Pepper took out a lighter and flicked it on and off, wasting the light.
“Did you happen to find my list?” Barry asked, after the tide changed and the sun began to dawn. Pepper reached into his pocket and pulled out the dripping notepad. Flipping through it best he could, Barry saw his words blended together and faded.
“Sorry I didn’t take better care of it, I figured you wouldn’t need it anymore,” Pepper said. Then he patted Barry on the arm and went back into the ocean, swimming deeper and deeper until he disappeared. Barry watched. Soon, the sand wore away his feet until he was standing on his knee caps on the ocean. He dropped the list and listened to the waves. They seemed to chant, to be to be to be.
The next day, hordes of sweaty people poured from a too cramped apartment and wandered down to the beach. They waited for the sunrise amongst stacks of rocks. They finished the drugs they brought the night before and talked about existence.
“They say if the sunrises and you see a green flash, that’s a soul going to heaven,” one said. Someone corrected, “That’s sunset, dipshit.”
The sun rose pink and orange against the smog. Someone decided it was time to go home. No one remembered why they were there in the first place.