Ghosts in Brian County, repeating their worst mistakes over and over again.

[unburiable]

Negligent writing became a sore spot on the schedule, which in itself had already turned into so much of a mess that it seemed almost ridiculous to avoid the standard awful daily reflection, which was as absent as the expression on a mirror’s face that is locked in a tiny dark closet. Nobody wanted to say anything about it either, but everybody

Comments

Persuasion is a delicate matter.

[unburiable]

SCENE FROM AN EMPTY HALLWAY, CIRCA HIGHSCHOOL, IN OREGON, 1993.

Actors:
Paul Mission, as high school English teacher Donald Erum.
Vinny Parson, as 17-year-old ruffian Chorus.
Hugh Cunningham, as 17-year-old ruffian Benny.

Scene One: The Hallway.

MR. ERUM (seeing two ruffians fooling about in the hallway after the final bell has rung for class): “Hey you two! Where are you supposed to be?”

BENNY (hardly looking over his shoulder): “Class.”

CHORUS: “Yeah. Class.”

MR. ERUM: “Well get along, then, and clear the hallway.”

CHORUS: “No way, man. Fuck that.”

MR. ERUM: “Excuse me? Hey, get back here!”

BENNY: “Bye, teacher.”

MR. ERUM: “Get back here. Where are you two going?”

BENNY (still walking away, hardly looking over his shoulder): “Pterodactyl.”

MR. ERUM: “Tera who?”

CHORUS: “Dactyl. Pterodactyl It’s a bird.”

[anonymous]

Your apprehensions confuse me, dear.

I keep hearing a tapping sound.

[unburiable]

Souther has been asleep for hours now, but I'm not too sure I can get to that sort of place myself tonight. I tried taking a few sleeping pills but that isn't working, even though I swallowed all five of them with individual shots of whiskey.

There are polaroids littering the floor. That Abigail girl is really beautiful, but I have the awful feeling she's quite dead by now. He keeps getting polaroids in the mail, though, so maybe that's a good sign.

My hand hurts really, really bad.

Signed,
Stanley Keyes

[anonymous]

Burn the polaroids. Call me if you need an extra hand to light the match.

A note penned in splotched ink.

[unburiable]

Whomoever you must be or wherever it is you're sending notes to me from, I'm sure you know I cannot do that.

Stanley.

12 messages on my voicemail. All from Robert Redford's niece.

[foreignpetals]

Yasmin Bleathe was my 3 o'clock this afternoon. We met at this new restaurant off Palomino called Estradi's. Real boring stuff

The fight that cost me my dessert.

[unburiable]

Dear Louis

[demedulce]

That . . . that picture is just evil. Evil, I say.

I don't understand what's happened tonight.

[unburiable]

“I could never actually stomach the creatures. Which is why, I suppose, she had this thing with sending them to me sealed in plastic envelopes. But I’m not taking any of this well. I’m staying at a motel with no name, by the side of the interstate. It’s run by an old lady who calls herself Beatty, and she keeps saying ‘not like Warren, but like Boop.’ I told her twice I couldn’t give a fuck what her name was just so long as I could make collect calls from the room telephone, but she’s even coming here now as I write this, and I have this sick feeling at the base of my spine that she’s going to repeat what her name is and how I’m supposed to be going about pronouncing it. Like I haven’t just been calling her ‘look, lady’ since I got into this go-nowhere shell of a wasted town. Maybe one day I’ll get to where I’m going and I can be safe again. I placed the octopus on the dashboard of a rented vehicle and snapped a photograph of it so she’d know where I was. Behind the octopus was a postcard dated 18 November, that I had shipped to Megan

it's not the girl.

[demedulce]

not this one, anyway.

Measure.

[unburiable]

"She's always saying that, too."

- The Autobiography of Stanley Gabriel Keyes (a diary Gabriel never finished, from 1984).