Riley Tolbert

Deux Contes

 

 

The Sea Opens Its Mouth

 

A lonely vessel out to sea, sailing the stormy arctic. We listen in upon the soliloquized thoughts of the vessels’ captain, whose mind is as stormy as the sea he sails upon:

 

“The body opening, blood spilling, like ice melting...diffusion, concession of form and order...a return to liquid origins; all life on earth connected like water; all life is liquid; all life together is a sea, and to swim is to be happy, and to lay down in bed with sadness is to drown...buoyant in my ship, years innumerable bouncing along the ocean waves, I have thought much of water and liquid, the substance and forms of life, and most specifically, what it means to be solid on the liquid planet, to be tossed around in the wash of your opposite form, rather than to flow, but to be still within the flow...a rock in the stream...

 

“In the ethereal court of the Arctic, where the world is crystallized shimmering whites-to-blue, sparkling transformation of life from loose beauty to solid majesty, with mature glaciers towering above me I feel a child lost in adult consortium. Wonderment glazes my eyes as I gawk over the expanse of life at icy peace as I flow under and around it in my youthful churning, heating my brain with experience until it can cool down and solidify into the glacier of maturity, where all of life's experiences are kept together in their composite snowflake form which shall be skated along for the rest of life with ease. Remaining on the path of your mature and familiar, crystal form, you avoid the changing heat of youth, avoid the resultant diffusion of allowing into your mind a force powerful enough to reconstruct the entire molecular structure of your experiences’ sum.

 

“Can we ever really avoid that, though? Can we really remain cold and crystallized like ice forever? Of course not, and that's why I have shipped myself out to sea, to eschew stability for the rest of my days, to allow myself to float along the liquid flow of life without ever becoming still or comfortable enough to freeze, to crystallize, to become satisfied with what life has offered me and retire to inactivity, when activity is the very thing that drives existence, the very thing that originally kept life from consisting of free floating particles. Activity is the force that moves particles, brings them together to heat, to combine and create new elements, and I am the seed of this eternal activity, the true seaman. I am Captain Liquid, and my first mate is the Iceman; the sea opens its mouth when we approach, to scream and yawn, to swallow us whole into its dramatic ebb and flow.”

           

“You need to calm down,” Iceman tried to console the raging waters over the decks' rails, giving the boisterous captain a good laugh as he rocked left and right, up and down through perspective, tossed about by the water's violent volition, grinning and shouting with hallowed manly joy as the ocean took him along for its inexorable ride.

 

“Storming waters are discontent: the need for constant excitement in its purest form”, the Captain thought to himself.

 

“You are going to hurt someone if you don't slow down there, partner!” Iceman advised.

 

“Ah, but are you only fearing for yourself being that person? Selfish, thickheaded Ice-y bastard,” playful tones bounding from his clownish bearded cavern maw and about the deck. A monumental wave rises from the blue glowing water, foaming white at the tips, showering salty morsels onto the Captain’s rugged, windblown face, and dripping down to his joyously gaping maw. The shadows of dozens of narwhal could be seen looming in the icy blue wave that was luminous with the profound chill of the Arctic.

An occasional tusk poked out of the wave as a preemptive apology.

 

The thrill of adventure surged through the Captain’s body, which locked in place at the wheel, all of his muscles tightening as he steered the ship right for the rising wave, at least thirty feet tall by now.

           

“I have a genuine feeling that we are in for some real trouble with this here liquid, ur-captain; it is angry with this vessel; I think it blames us for something.” The Captain had never heard Iceman so dire before, but before he could take concern, a narwhal was thrown onto the deck, bouncing in a straight trajectory for him.

           

“You must replace that superstition with a sense of  adventure if you ever want to live, boy,” the Captain jested as he moved slightly to the right, grabbed the targeting tusk of the projectile narwhal, and moving further into the left with horn in hand, increasing exertion, gaining momentum until he was spinning in a blurry amalgam with the tusked whale, and once peak velocity was attained, he released the aquatic mammal and sent it careening back into the wave, which grunted and shrugged at the miraculous force of the whale toss.

           

“Sir!” Iceman exclaimed in wonder. “I've never seen such a feat of strength!”

           

“It's all my sense of adventure, bucko: you replace those primal fears with some ineffable, leader-of-the-free-world level confidence, and you'll approach any situation, regardless how daunting, with the fearless momentum of the wolf, the tiger, the killer whale and the grizzled bear. You shall be as inexorable as the wind and as ferocious as the shark as long as you release hold of those premonitions and give up to your intuition: unfurrow your brow and unfetter your mind!”

 

Feeling the power of his own speech, the Captain lurched inexorably into the wave, wrestling it from within and wresting its iced heart from the cold cavity of structure-less flux as tentacles, fins, pincers and tusks alike slapped and grabbed at him in an endeavor to retain the pulse of their chilly chaos.

 

“This is mine now!” the Captain blustered, words bubbly in the wave. “I have mastered the nautical so that I may tame the tide! For all of my effort and dedication that amounts your life's worth to the microscopic level, you shall let me finish my conquest!”

And then, the heat of his re-youth maritime experience culminated and erupted, the wave crumbling asunder in risible droplets as the Captain ascended from the oceanic midst with arms raised in a freezable pride, feeling that right now, flying from the retreating wave and its tumbling sealife, that he could find himself comfortable in maturity, satisfied with his experience as he collided headfirst into the oak deck of his beloved vessel, getting a good last glimpse of an astounded Iceman before his neck snapped and his story ended with a turbulent smile.

           

Iceman is left to gawk over the fall of both the monoliths of the wave and his captain. “Oh, captain. The storm you have chased all your life has finally claimed thee. If only life had gone your speed, then maybe we may could have had time enough to properly enjoy thee on land. Farewell, my captain!” Iceman lifted his lifeless captain over the bulwarks and tossed him into the grand azure where he had always belonged with a final, fatal splash, and then Iceman took helm of the ship and sailed on for greener pastures, singing out as he floated off,

           

“A warning to all who take to the ocean gladly,

Seeking adventure, high glory, and prosperity,

While within your eye surely there lay a mad gleam;

Know deep down inside of thee,

That the sea opens its mouth just as gladly,

To swallow adventurous men,

Happy and laughing.”

 

 

 

Pregnant Confusion

         

“Brittany's pregnant.” Cold, stale voice.

         

“With who, I mean, with whose baby, y'know?” Confused voice, probably stoned.

         

“Marijuana.” She couldn't stare anywhere but straight, eyes unblinking behind thick rim glasses, dark hair pulled back tight in a scrunchie that stretched her paper-thin and pale skin so taut that she was more spooky-skeleton than human, so skinny it bothered people.

         

“Who's that?” He who is so ready to question for the progression of a story to continue, too confused about what could happen next to ever meditate long enough on one detail to understand what could have caused this story to progress this way in the first place: he willfully allowed himself to be dragged along, to let her do the talking and wonder what she was talking about without ever actually knowing exactly what.

 

He had banged the Brittany she spoke of behind this very cold girl's back, even though Brittany was ugly and he hated her and loved this girl in the car with him, but regardless, he banged the foul Brittany because one night, when this girl in the car passed out early, Brittany and him were stuck on the couch together, and her eyes gave the go ahead after three beers. He drunkenly rammed Brittany like a disoriented bull, not thinking about it, not thinking about this girl here now, somewhere else asleep, maybe dreaming something nice about him, while he was in the other room humping her homely best friend into the folds of the couch in an attempt to smother her screams that he found too loud and too hoarse.

         

“Marijuana is a flower that makes you feel like a child; you're smoking it right now, kid.” She exhaled cold frost even though it was a warm night and she had inhaled nothing, fogging the driver side window and writing, “What do you love about other people?” with her finger for a security guard to see and snicker off with a shrug and a shift of the folded arms; the question confused him.

         

“I know, but who is named Marijuana that got her pregnant?”

         

“Who pregnant?”

         

“Whoever you're talking about!”

         

“Whomever? Her name is Brittany, and it's nobody named Marijuana, just marijuana in general: she's having a weed baby.”

         

His confusion had formed legs with which it pushed and kicked at the walls of his skull until he felt his head expanding and creaking like an old house as it settled into its mature permanency. “What the hell is that?” he asked, wide-eyed, exhaling smoke and confusion.

         

“A weed baby, you don't know? It's when you smoke so much of that stuff that you lose track of the time, days, you get fired for not showing up, forget what people are talking about mid-conversation, feel the isolated solipsism of intoxication making you function only on your primitive sensations, incapable of reason; you overdo everything: smoke too much, watch too much, play too much, talk too much about silly nonsense, worry too much, sleep too much, and especially eat too much, eat and smoke so much that you start to look to be in a bewildered state of unexplained pregnancy whose major side effect is paranoia: animal fear, and nine months later, you experience a suicidally painful discharge that feels like your entire organ system is being emptied out of your ass. It’s supposedly so painful that even though it comes from the opposite canal, you feel this must be some kind of birth, and in a way it kind of is, just like in a way every stool passing is a form of inanimate birth (or animate, if you consider parasites), and what comes out is one solid chunk of stomach hash formed over three-fourths of a year that is not just very much so smokable and very potent, but also incredibly valuable, weed babies having been sold anywhere from two-thousand to two-hundred-thousand dollars; it all depends what market and what country you sell them in.”

         

He couldn't speak for two weeks after learning about the weed baby, so confused was his mind that he couldn't structure thoughts or sentences properly, and so when he tried to speak it was only in indecipherable jumbles like, “heh, um...square coma scrawl hubby aghast wall...heh, ho-ummmmmmm....marketing flap under hover grocery corner...um, slimy, helping ding dong...”

 

He saw Brittany one day, who did look pregnant, and he said to her, “Great niece can always find you,” and tried to touch her invaluably inflated paunch, but she smacked him away and told him to, “Suck my dick, pervert.” She was obviously, like him, very high, with bloody eyes and slightly unstable walk as she stumbled into a movie theater to see a children’s cartoon.

 

Seven months later, when Brittany had an actual baby that she claimed was his instead of the prized heaping of hash feces he had been eagerly expecting, he never understood what had happened, and thus was a terrible, resentful father who blamed his inevitable alcoholism, weed dependency, and parental negligence on the girl in the car he had banged and thought he kind of possibly loved all those years ago, the one who had been so cold as she told him about the weed babies and asked him, “What do you love about other people?”, and for the first time he now pondered that question, fat and stuffed into a mildew recliner with a beer in each hand, not much hair left, face and belly saggy in his pajamas in the dirty cockroach living room lit only by a television he and his weed child sat watching for bright color spectacles of pretty women and violence, pretty women who looked like a different species than Brittany, now begrudging mother and wife.

 

“What do you love about other people?” the phrase repeated in his head through the years.

 

“Silence,” he grumbled morosely as he punched the television till it sparked and then went black, told the weed child to hurry up and get to bed before shit got real, and then violently intercoursed with the fat and in need of a bath Brittany on a small table in the kitchen while they sloppily shared a thirty-six pack, hitting her and calling her bitch, and when it was all done, telling her how while she cried how much he loved and needed her big soft body before they passed out on the small kitchen table, the day's cycle complete.

 

“What do you love about other people?”

 

“What the fuck is a weed baby?”

 

He would never know.

 

 

 

Riley Tolbert: “I am a young and aspiring writer whose body has suffered much to breathe nothing but prose. I specialize in all matters post-midnight and beyond normal. I am also an unemployed community college student living out of his car, sending this to you from a Starbucks, but that is only the role I currently play.” rtrommebearre@wordpress.com