Timothy Gager is fiction editor at Wilderness House Literary Review. A social worker in the Boston area, he is the host of the Dire Literary Series, and a frequent contributor to e-zines and print anthologies. Timothy Gager is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry. He lives on www.timothygager.com His work may be found through Amazon.
Two Stories (March 20, 2011. Issue 26. The SLAM & FLASH Issue!)
The Recital
They sit next to each other at their daughter’s first violin recital, Jake and his ex-wife Allison, her voice a comparative squawk.
Beforehand he drinks with Leslie. She would ever cheat on her husband. They used to talk about his tongue sliding around her labia.
The music is anxious and jagged; but nothing snaps—all stings are attached. Jake would feel lucky to have a hand saw bowing through Allison’s pale white neck.. Allison leaps up for the standing ovation.
Divided
When my room began to fill with smoke, I turned the music up. Ian Curtis should always be louder than a smoke alarm.
"It's all o-kaaaay. I'm cooook-ing," Lance called up from the kitchen.
It was then Sasha told me that I was killing myself but I countered by saying, if it were the end of the world, we'd have no choice but to grab each other and make love, one last time. "What about…" she said nodded her head toward the first floor, "I don't know what to do."
Sasha and I had snorted a table of cocaine and I had her trapped inside my Joy Division bedroom. We were upstairs in our pajamas for two days. The record played over and over, the same way life tended to work repetitively for me. Sometimes when I reached the end of the grooves, I scratched my way against the hard sounding endpoint.
I didn't want her to leave. There was two feet of snow, huge snow banks, plus the last time I went outside I noticed ice towers on every corner stained with ugly yellow dog piss. I realized how much dogs peed and that so many basic day-to-day realities were hidden like Lance downstairs.
Most days, when he wasn't cooking, he was busy with Sasha planning their wedding. "I'm not hungry," she said softly.
In a few months I'll be forced to leave this room but when Sasha lifted the needle, flicked the dust off and restarted Unknown Pleasures, I knew I still had some life left.
Four Poems (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)
Unwelcomed Guest
hello demons
found in the dark corners
of my lifetime, welcome back
so you can latch onto me
to remake me the man I was,
before I can kick you away
you led me to drive down
a one-way the wrong way,
I blamed the scotch
started earlier when
it was still dusk
but then blackness rose
up from below, I recall
I used to imagine Hell’s address
was somewhere between my basement
and the center of the earth
but I know now different;
Hell is in something
I’ve ingested, life as ugly
as I knew it
swarming all around
stabbing and punching at me
for now,
demons
I’ll let you win,
I can’t fight you any longer
I’ll never quit.
We Are Not Talking
because I want to tell you
that I got fucked for
the first time since
we'd been together,
that I replaced your
love with hate
just so I could feel something.
I want to tell you
I am not proud;
that it felt like the time as a kid
I had forgotten to feed the neighbor’s cat,
then the next day I found it dead—
it wasn’t my fault,
it didn’t starve
but that day, I was getting high
it was something I had to do,
I had to tell someone
something bad happened
to be honest
I didn’t come with that other girl
while we bumped
in the backseat, I was
thinking of you on top,
at the same time, worried –
if the car’s suspension
would hold up from that…
I didn’t plan to go home
and break my hand,
but it felt good
for a split second after I hit the stud,
and I heard the bone snap
immediately
I wanted to shout at you
that I still cared
if yelling those words
didn’t make me hate myself
or change the fact
the world is flat
or least of all
didn’t make you feel
how easy it is to say nothing
new at all.
at eleven-fifty-nine
put on Miles Davis
if you’re not sleeping
or not nothing... milling around
on your notes,
what are we
anyway, there are times
we say we care about
each other far away
drifting.
drifting.
in and out of
love, we do this
as empty people
do. the pillow says
sink, quit
when it talks--
it's only talk
About Alison
when we walked I said
that you looked like a movie star
dumbly, that’s what I came up with
as your hair flowed softly
in the light against
your sundress, I imagined
taking off, on the question:
Could I ever want
a friend, could I
ever not want something
as sweet as this walk
on a sunny day?
You told me you’re kind of a prude
though you look the part of
the mid-western farm girl
whom I make giggle. Your
father wants to stab me
with a pitchfork.
That’s the movie! Yes,
I wanted a movie star, you wanted
to move back home where we
cannot take these walks,
and months go by
before you
call yourself an asshole,
for being out of touch
then say, you think
of me often.
Table of Contents
Diary of an Angry Psychologist: Wednesday’s Appointments
(August 20, 2009. Issue 8.)
--Alarm clock, 7:22 AM
Hit snooze button three times.
Wake up.
--Kate, 40, 8:45 AM
I don’t know why Kate sees me. She says she solves her own problems sitting in the woods. Kate tells me she is a sexual animal and wants to make love everyday under the canopy of trees. She thinks she is a tribeswoman and would like to mate with all the tribesmen. Sex makes her angry when she’s finished. She twirls her hair when she tells me that, tells me she thinks we should go to the woods together. I suggest her seeing a female therapist and her response is, “I’ve had a few intimate relationships with women.”
Kate says she was there the other day and spoke to a squirrel. What did it say? All it said was, “Hi.” She told the squirrel she loved it and placed it on her lap. Why can’t people be like that squirrel is what I ask her. Seems like she related to the squirrel better than she did people. She dreamed that she and the squirrel were lovers. Then the hour ran out.
--Thomas, 47, 10:45 AM
I’d like to kill Thomas. Thomas can’t commit to anything. He’s lonely yet he pushes people away. He’s funny, yet he has a mean streak. He gasps for love the way he gasps for air. He has asthma. Thomas only wants women he can’t have. Thomas should live in a protected box. He feels that if he makes love to a woman every three months he’ll be fine. Thomas doesn’t realize that women might develop emotional attachments. During sessions, Thomas says, “fuck it” or “fuck me” a lot. I can see why Thomas has scars over his eyes; he's been in a lot of battles. Sometimes he confronts me about his lack of progress in therapy. Thomas doesn’t realize that it should all come from within. Thomas doesn’t realize that within him is a soulless black hole. He always uses phases like “when I finally hunker down”. I’d like to kill Thomas.
--Lunch, 11:30
Cold sandwich.
Pulpy Apple.
Juice Box.
--Bradley, 56, 12:15 PM
I feel that Bradley tossed his life into the gutter in his twenties because it was easier than focusing on a job or an education. Bradley wanted to be a helicopter pilot, an unrealistic expectation from someone who was only selling pants at Tello’s and spending his paycheck on booze and heroin. At the time, according to him, he had completely recovered, made it to an entire year without the stuff, but he never made his goal of flying choppers—so he relapsed. Bradley tells me his parents hate him. Hated him all the way to their death, but that’s what you get when you burn your bridges, steal and fuck with a person’s trust. You end up at a homeless shelter in your forties. You end up here with me in your fifties. It’s too damn late for Bradley.
--New Patient: Pearl, 48, 15:00 PM
Pearl is not her real name. Her real name is Stella. Pearl used a fake name to get past the intake screeners. Pearl is my ex-wife. She is taking this hour to speak to me since I’ve not returned her calls in months. She needs a favor. This summer can I take the kids and the dog for a few months? She bought our kids a dog. The dog is driving her crazy. I can take the kids but not the dog. She stomps her foot. The kids tell me it ate the television remote. The dog needs it’s own therapist. It is crazy. The kids are in their twenties, they should be able to be by themselves AND take care of the dog. “If you had only...then....and they’d know responsibility…dog…and…blah…blah...” I’m thinking about my current relationship. Now that one is a sweet, sweet pacific island. Pearl is going away on a honeymoon. I tell her to call me soon.
--Ethan, 14, 16:00 PM
Ethan is the youngest patient I’ve ever had. He is bi-polar. He has been ordered to see me because he told his teacher he thinks about suicide. He is very specific in his fantasies about flying and jumping off bridges. I am helpless to prevent this. There are bridges in Boston and his private school is very close to them. His parents come in the last fifteen minutes. Usually one of them cries.
Ethan reminds me of my own brother. When my brother was a teenager he took a handful of my mother’s valium and washed it down with some Old Crow that was in my parents liquor cabinet. When the ambulance came the red lights rotated through our living room every two seconds. I know this because I counted the time. With Ethan, I just want to grab him and either hug or shake him---tell him not to do it, please don’t do it. Sometimes I cry too.
--Commute, 17:15 PM
Extra hour of traffic,
Listen to Jay-Z,
Home.
Time Away (July 20, 2009. Issue 7.)
We spent the weekend at the shore and watched children build sandcastles that would be knocked down. “Do you love me?” I asked her. She curled her toes into the sand, pulled up her feet, and let the grains drop. It had been the first time I’d been sober since I’d buried my son two days ago. Now, all I felt was dry.
“You’re my friend,” she said when she finally stood in front of me. “I wanted to go to the funeral but people would have thought it wasn’t right.” She touched my back close to the scratches from a week ago.
He Is All Mine (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)
I had my cherry busted in the back seat of Rip Tandall’s sporty Mazda. It was small, and uncomfortable, but Rip’s dad was rich, his mom good looking and I became easy that summer.
His real name was Herman but he’s been Rip since the second grade. He’s been an asshole ever since then as well, my older brother yells to me over the high revving engine of his 1980 Firebird. I sit in the back seat and the eagle barely holds onto the hood.
Rip works at a gym. Every week last spring I’d stop and look at him from the lobby through the glass. When he looked back I felt like a puppy. By the summer we were talking, but not about much. He showed me how he stretched people, moved their limbs, and made them limber. I told to him about the kids at school and the boys my age, told him I felt a tingle when I made their peckers stand up beneath their corduroys. I didn’t know much more than that but Rip said that’s all there was to know.
My brother is still driving fast, and Rip sees us and sprints across the parking lot to his Miata. I try to wave as he leaps through the open car window. The doors only would slow him down and I know what I know, that Rip can’t wait.