excerpt from a new ‘short story’ by walter mackey

You see, the best part of working in a photo lab is the feeling you get that you are not alone.  You know people.  You know entire families.  You share their intimate moments and details with them and you become part of their family.  You celebrate their birthdays, their weddings, their new pets, their old pets, their sex games, their 50th wedding anniversaries, their fishing trips, their trips to Cancun, their trips to nowhere at all, their pictures of their feet, their pictures of their hands, face, eyes, lips.    It feels easy to blend into their photographs and become a little snippet of their 4 x 6 lives.  Most people don’t realize that their film will tell a story, paint a picture of a stranger to a stranger.  We’re not supposed to really look at the photos, we’re supposed to be fast, efficient, develop the product and get it to the customer in less than one hour.  But I look.  I stare.  I make friends with the nameless faces.

There’s Mrs. Cavour, who only manages to take pictures of her cats—Emily and Charlotte, named after her two favourite writers, of course.  It’s clear that she was never married, or maybe she killed her husband.  I’ve never seen her hair not in a messy bun.  She reeks of cat piss.  I want to tell her it’s okay, but I don’t think she understands human words.  Once, I swear I saw her open a can of cat food in the pet aisle and taste-test it.  I had a nightmare once that Mrs. Cavour stopped coming in with her cat photos because she had died and her dead body was being slowly consumed by her starving cats.  I can see this becoming a reality in the next five-to-six years.

click-through the photo to read a new short story by me published over at #imgaypress

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How I Got Engaged in the Second Grade

There was this girl named Brittany Kelly.  She was in my class since kindergarten but then moved away after the second grade.  She looked kind of native.  Her skin was tan and she had dark hair and beautiful brown eyes.  It seems like I can only picture her smiling while wearing a pink one-piece tracksuit.  I am ~95% certain that she owned one and wore it daily.

Brittany Kelly fell in love with me.  She told me she loved me one day.  We used to write notes to one another from across the classroom.  She would sit on one side of the classroom and I would sit on the other.  She would pretend that she was going to the garbage can but really she would walk over near my desk and slip a note in my lap.  It was really sweet, now that I think about it.

One day she came to school with a big smile on her face.  She handed me a large plastic ring that was emerald green and had a fake diamond glued to the top.  She gave it to me and said ‘okay, we’re going to get married now’.  Next, Brittany Kelly took me by the hand and we hid away behind a bookshelf.  She gave me a kiss on the forehead.  This was my first kiss.

After the second grade ended, Brittany Kelly moved away.  As I grew up, I heard stories that she had joined the witness protection program, died under mysterious circumstances, was abducted by extraterrestrials, changed her name to ‘Missy Elliott’ and moved to New Zealand.  She was actually just really poor and had to move away because her family couldn’t survive on the amount that the social assistance program was providing them with.  My friend Tiffany said that she went to Brittany Kelly’s birthday party once and one of the ‘pass the parcel’ prizes was a sponge.  My other friend named Brittany said that Brittany Kelly had a bowl of pennies on her coffee table that her mother saved up for cigarette money.

I don’t know where Brittany Kelly is at this exact moment in time but the last time I heard about her she had eloped to California with an obese man and she now has three kids.  She is twenty-one years old and lives in a trailer in Western Arizona.

I Was Born Inside Of A Toaster

It was a really cold morning.  It was sometime around November.  Or maybe it was in January—nobody really remembers the specific date or time.  A person woke up and the person felt very hungry.  A person decided to go into the washroom and wash their face and hands.  Another person came into the washroom and decided to wash their face and hands.  Both of the people looked in the mirror at their reflections and frowned.  One person frowned more than the other person.  One person went to the bathtub and turned on the water.  Another person left the bathroom.  The person filled up the bathtub and got inside the bathtub.  The person washed their body parts.  The person scrubbed there, under there, over there, and inside there.  The other person was busy in their bedroom trying to find an outfit to wear.  The other person showered before they went to bed and decided that it would be foolish to wash their body parts again.  The person got out of the bathtub and dried off their body parts.  The person put on a pair of underwear.  The person put on a housecoat.  The person met the other person in the hall to the kitchen.  The people said something to one another.  The person went into the kitchen and took a raisin bagel out of the freezer.  The person said something to the other person.  The other person did not hear the person.  The person spoke a little louder.  The other person said something and the person put two bagels in the toaster.  The person watched the raisin bagels turn brown.  The person took the raisin bagels out of the toaster.  The person put butter and cinnamon on the raisin bagels.  The person gave the other person a raisin bagel with butter and cinnamon on top.  The people ate the bagels.  The people did not say anything.  The person took off the housecoat.  The person put on a dress.  The person grabbed a purse and left the house.  The other person grabbed a briefcase and left the house.

I stayed behind.  I am a raisin that fell out of a bagel.  Nobody knows that I am here and nobody will remember the exact time that I was born.  I will die over a period of time.  I will die by being burned to death.  Other bagels and pieces of toast will visit me from time to time but I will be in the bottom of the toaster forever.  I will scream.  I will be burnt to a crisp.  I will turn to ash.  I will cry.

Irreplaceable

You know, it’s been about one whole year since I last saw you and even then you felt like a ghost to me. It’s so incredible to think of all of the time we spent together. One and a half years together. I know that you are really bad with numbers so let me do the math for you. We have spent 270 days apart even though we were in a relationship for 548 days. If we had a baby girl in the time that we spent apart she would be almost 365 days old. In 1825 days she would be starting kindergarten. She would be drawing pictures of two men holding hands and her friends would point and say ‘why are two men holding hands’ and she would say ‘because I have two daddies’ and they would say ‘oh weird why do you have two dads’ and she would say ‘because two men can love each other and that’s okay’. But, we didn’t have a baby girl. We didn’t get married. You didn’t shave your beard and you didn’t take out the garbage when I asked you to. You didn’t fairly divide our furnishings and I am pretty sure you own over half of my underwear drawer. I own half of your underwear anyway. Remember those black boxers with the skeletons on them that you had since you were fifteen and emo? Yeah, I’m wearing that pair right now. Everything you own in the box to the left. Beyoncé was right. But I still miss you so much.

You were buying soy milk at Price Chopper and I was buying brussels sprouts. I wanted to run over to the dairy section but you know how lactose intolerant I am. I wanted to brush up against your shoulder and say ‘oops’ and then look at your facial expression when you recognize your voice. No, actually, I wanted to run and karate chop your red plastic basket out of your hand and scream ‘this is the man that broke my heart’ and maybe throw a prime rib steak at your face.

I don’t even know why I am writing this. I shouldn’t even waste my time. I guess I am only writing this because my psychologist says that it might be therapeutic to ease my anxiety associated with my post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from our failed marriage plans and my failed suicide attempts. My psychologist also told me to keep a ‘dream diary’ but I feel too embarrassed to keep one because I keep having the same recurring dream where you are fucking me on the orange shag carpet in your living room and I wake up at 4 AM every morning with carpet burns on my knees and this really weird urge to play The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask on your broken Nintendo 64 that you left behind after you moved.

Remember that time that you saw me at that Indian Restaurant? Myself and Mark went there and I said ‘let’s split the bill’ because I had been there previously and I knew how expensive it would be. He insisted on paying. We ordered six to eight various dishes and I splurged since I wasn’t paying and had alcohol as a beverage instead of water. The meal was genuinely good and I had to teach him a lot of things about ethnic cuisine. He was given chopsticks and I told him that he could ask for a fork because he was having visible difficulty and he said that he thought that Asian or Middle-Eastern places that had chopsticks just didn’t have forks to begin with. I remember laughing a lot. I think I felt mostly disgusted when he poured milk and sugar in his green tea. The little Indian woman stared at him with a shocked facial expression when he poured the milk from the mini jug on the table into his teacup. I feel like she was screaming inside. I was actually screaming both inside and outside. I felt like I was going to die when you walked through the doors. You took off his coat in the porch and then took your new boyfriend’s coat from his shoulders and hung it on a cheap plastic hanger. The nylon and the plastic reacted like two negative poles on a magnet and the jacket slid to the floor. When you picked it up you looked into the dining room and our eyes met. Your eyes immediately went to Mark’s back and I looked at Mark and thought ‘Daniel’s eating dinner with his new boyfriend’ and I knew that you were thinking ‘Walter’s eating dinner with his new boyfriend’. It’s so rare for two people to share the same thought in a room unless they are given a prompt to do so. ‘Okay, I want everyone to think about a purple elephant’ and then everyone thinks about a purple elephant. I knew you were thinking the exact same thing as me because you made a beeline for the men’s room and washed your hands. You always washed your hands when you were anxious. I don’t know if this was an obsessive compulsive thing for you or if the lukewarm water was just soothing on your dry knuckles. You had the roughest hands.

I find myself thinking about you more and more each day. The smallest things seem to spark memories of you. Like, just now, my mother’s friend arrived and she has the loudest voice known to man. She doesn’t know what an indoor voice is. I hate her guts. Once she asked me how I was doing and I said ‘oh, even worse now that you are here’. She knows that I hate her. Every time she visits my mother (which is less and less occasionally now that she knows I don’t want her here) I tend to wall myself up in my room until she leaves. She looks and acts almost identical to Jerri Blank—you know that chick from that movie, ‘Strangers With Candy’? I remember your face lit up and you giggled when you saw that movie on my external hard drive. But, getting back to my original point, little things remind me of you. I decided to put my headphones on and listen to music on my MacBook and I turned on the ( ) album by Sigur Rós and I remember that time we fucked on that cold winter night at 6 Bolger’s Lane. You looked out my window and saw the snow piling up on the windowsill. I told you that you should just sleep over tonight because the roads were too horrible and I lived downtown where snow clearing doesn’t really start until 6 AM. You obliged and we played Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers on my Super Nintendo console. You kept making weird remarks about how hot Kimmy’s ass looked in those pixelated denim shorts. I told you that the Pink Power Ranger was my least favourite because she was slutty. You said that I was slutty but I didn’t deny it. I remember arriving at a stoned epiphany that the Yellow Power Ranger was Chinese and the Black Power Ranger was African American. It seemed like a horrible racial reinforcement and I stopped talking for around thirty minutes after I turned it over again and again in my head. Your eyes started to become heavy so I took off your shirt and laid on your hairy chest while you sat against the wall. Your started to snore and I felt comforted by your wolf-like growls. In a way, I felt like little red riding hood in my red American Apparel hoodie. I think a part of me wanted you to wrap your arms around me and never let me go and another part of me wanted you to pretend you were my grandmother and lay in my bed and try to trick me and then savagely rip me into shreds; devouring my flesh— limb by limb. But, of course, none of this happened. You told me to turn on ‘sex music’ so I looked through my CD and vinyl collection and thought that Elliott Smith would be too depressing and besides we had already fucked to Either/Or more times than I can count on both hands. I grabbed ( ) by Sigur Rós and immediately opened it up to look inside at the note that Sean Gray had left me. It read: ‘To Walter, I’m sorry this is late, but I tried my best. It’s a small token of our friendship. Enjoy the CD! Love you man! From Sean’. I kind of laughed when I realized I didn’t know where Sean Gray was and I hadn’t seen nor heard from him in three years at the least. I pressed ‘play’ on my CD player and we began fucking to bracket-bracket. I told you to stop fucking me when we got to Samskeyti because it brought back sad memories of being so alone in Iceland and feeling like I should throw myself into the nearest non-active volcano, just hoping it would erupt just as my toe touched the lava-filled mouth. I started crying and you held me in a sweaty, furry embrace and I knew at that point in my life that you were the only one that could make me feel whole.

The last text message you sent me was on July 19th, 2011. I didn’t reply to the text message. I think I am going to wait until July 19th, 2012 and send you a reply saying that it took a year for me to formulate a response. I had to find my emotions and my feelings and my thoughts and my heart because they had all somehow gotten all mixed up and locked away in the wrong boxes over time. I just hope that you won’t take a year to respond because I just want everything to go back to how it used to be. I just want you and me and my bed and some good weed.

condiments

once i saw a girl on the bus and she was wearing a pink coat and listening to ‘the weepies’ and she was smiling and waving at the cars when we arrived at each red light but the cars didn’t wave back even though she waved frantically

i decided i wanted to sit closer to her and i sat in the seat directly behind her pink coat body and her iphone died so she took out her earbuds and sighed and i whispered in her ear ‘do you know there is a world condiment shortage’ and she said ’did you say condoms’ and i said ‘no condiments’ and she said ‘huh’

she got off the bus at the mall and i got off the bus at the mall and then i saw her stealing ketchup packets from kfc because there is a world condiment shortage

she looked suspicious and i laughed to myself and thought that she was a ‘dumb bitch whore slut blonde bimbo ass freak retard’ but then again i thought that if someone told me there was a condiment shortage on a bus i would believe them and maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you hear because people lie a lot every day

maybe everything you ever read is all a lie

maybe i am a lie

today i sent various poetry/prose submissions to:

• metazen
• alice blue review
• the pyramid press
• elimae
• diagram
• snow monkey

now i just have to wait to receive rejection e-mails i guess