Mister Gibson

Long Term Parking - Part 4

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:36:56 -0500

She laid her bike in the tall grass next to his hoe and cracked glass jar, and he led her several rows into the hip-high soybeans and she noticed that they were a deep, deep green and that the soil was a rich coffee, and as they lay between the plants on the damp and musty soil, and she watched his blue eyes as he smiled up at her, she realized this wasn’t making love, of which she had read so intensely in Vogue and Cosmo and Seventeen. It bore no resemblance to her stepfather, sweet Ted, and his grubby little dirty finger-nailed assaults, which began when she was six, began shortly after he had married her mother and moved into their house, and ended when she was thirteen, on the morning when he died so peacefully among the bright reds and purples and yellows and oranges of the flowers in the garden, when he fucked her in his spider-infested and dusty workshop next to the house, under her bedroom window.

No. This was the rutting of animals. This was National Geographic. This was nature. It was wild and animalistic, and she and the young man ravaged the remainder of the summer.

Long Term Parking - Part 5

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:36:36 -0500

Before she left for college, he smiled as she opened the gift he had so inexpertly wrapped. It was a tote and it smelled like a new pair of very expensive shoes from Neiman-Marcus, made of a shiny, deep brown leather and purple paisley-patterned canvas. He loved paisley, particularly purple paisley, and said it would compliment the yellow she was so fond of wearing. She surprised him the following day with a pair of silk paisley boxer shorts. Purple. She laughed as he strutted around in them in his bedroom, like he was a New York City model.

Long Term Parking - Part 6

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:36:11 -0500

She sat on a high stool in a boisterous bar of clinking glass and the hum of conversation, and of a bad local band butchering cover songs. The place smelled of stale beer and sweat and vomit and urine, which wafted from the bathrooms that never were cleaned. It was a small and dimly lit college dive bar, five blocks from her apartment. She watched a boy she hadn’t seen before, who reminded her of the young man of summer, her man of paisley. She stood and walked to him, and left her drink on the bar. He turned as she approached him, alerted by his friends, and jabbed out his hand and had begun to introduce himself, when she swiftly interrupted him.

“Stop.” She said.

Long Term Parking - Part 7

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:35:50 -0500

Her apartment was dark and cold, it was winter, and her bed was piled with quilts, and the faint light from the street cast her bedroom in a sickly orange glow, which made them appear as zombies, as walking corpses. She didn’t mind. It was better than the honesty of a well-lighted place. He pulled his clothes off with more rapidity than if he had been on fire, then proceeded with hers, but his fumbling fingers seemed to have forgotten how to operate buttons and zippers, and seemed to have had no knowledge of intricacies of the delicate removal of a bra. She assisted. Once naked she opened the top drawer of a dresser, partially hidden in the shadows of a corner, then turned to the boy.

“Wear this.” She said.

She walked to the bed and climbed in under the thick warmth of her quilts onto her soft mattress, while he paced in the orange darkness, and she reached toward a spot on the wall, darker than its surroundings, and suddenly the room blazed with the searing light from bare bulb in the ceiling, and he smiled under the harsh brightness of interrogation, and he wore a pair of fine silk paisley boxer shorts. Purple. She told him to pace and spin and pose, then she snapped off the light and the room was black and they had sex and it was over and she lay quietly staring at the ceiling and he remained still.

“I had a boyfriend. Last summer.” She said. “He killed himself. Committed suicide.”

She listened to his footsteps as they crunched in the cold snow and watched his breath as it frosted the air under the street light, as he made his way hurriedly from her apartment, and he rounded the corner and was lost from sight.

Long Term Parking - Part 8

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:35:14 -0500

She had been in college for nearly a month when his mother had called. She had been in a hot shower and the small apartment was full of steam and it smelled of scented soap and shampoo, and as she raced to phone she was eager to hear his voice. They hadn’t spoken in seventeen days. He had been busy. But it was his mother’s voice she heard, and she could tell immediately that something was wrong.

He had taken his .22 caliber rifle, his rabbit gun, and stood in the living room of his parent’s house, where he had still lived. He was next to the jagged, hand-carved stone fireplace, when he placed the barrel of the small rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger and a bullet ripped into his brain. He did not say why, now could not say why, and had not left a note.

She went with his mother to the Holdstedt Funeral Home to see his body. He was in the back room of stainless steel brightness and glass and gauze, and it smelled the same as she remembered, of rubbing alcohol and something else, something sweeter with more depth, she would later learn from Mr. Holdstedt to have been formaldehyde.

Her boyfriend was naked and dead on the metal autopsy table. He looked as if he had been beaten severely by something heavy and jagged, which had smashed his nose and shattered his teeth, and gouged deep gashes in his scalp and face, arms and body, peppering his body with monstrous wounds. He had been cleaned but no attempts at repair had been made, and none would be made. His parents were ashamed, his father could not even utter the boy’s name, and his would be a closed casket and a small funeral, at a cemetery several miles outside of town, in the midst of fields and flanked by a tall grain silo with a red and white checkerboard pattern on its top third, lonely and abandoned.

Long Term Parking - Part 9

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:34:47 -0500

In spring, under the warm amber light of a late afternoon sun, farm boys would cruise slowly down the narrow roads in an old, beat-up pickup with a giant “CHEVROLET” stamped into the sheet metal tailgate, laughing and drinking beer with their rabbit guns hanging out the windows. Some would ride in the back of the truck, and with all the rifles it looked like an angry and hairy mole on an old and bitter woman’s chin. They would patrol the fields of young corn and wheat and soybeans and clover, hunting rabbits, which multiplied furiously to dine on the vastly increased supply of food. The boys would shoot the rabbits in the head, and often, not always, but often, the rabbits would jump as if jolted by electricity, as if the main spring of their life had sprung, and their bodies would bounce and flop madly, until the shredded synapses in their brains quieted, and the boys would whoop in complete satisfaction.

Long Term Parking - Part 10

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:34:13 -0500

She helped his mother clean the living room the next day, and she noticed that the spiral blood stains on the walls reminded her of paisley, and she thought that he would like that. They scrubbed and scrubbed and emptied buckets of dirty pink water, but were not able to completely rid the room of its stains of guilt. In the end the carpet was replaced and the walls repainted, and the living room was able to mask the death and appeared normal.

Long Term Parking - Part 11

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:33:01 -0500

The woman studied herself in the dark wall of glass, and stood and walked down the long hallway toward the automatic doors, and walked into the night beyond. She looked regal in her yellow dress and pearls, with her old but well cared for tote, made of a deep brown leather and purple paisley-patterned canvas. She crossed to a dark and cavernous doorway, which led into a solid concrete building marked with a dimly lit sign, which read “Long Term Parking.”