Sometimes it does seem that we are bursting at the seams. After about four hours of sleep, Josepher has now returned to display-making duties on the day shift and seems vaguely upset about something. The unsettling conversation with Robie and the sight of his young co-worker opening his vein seem to etch furrows into the edges of his eyes. He seems to have a harried self-consciousness as he glimpses at the wrinkles on his dry hands that make them seem old and out of congruency with his youthful face. He seems to have not so much eyes as ocular slits; the floaters return to his eyes' vitreous body with a kind of recurring myopia, periodically blurring his otherwise near-perfect vision. He seems perplexed by his self-sacrifice for a company where he works overtime but won't get paid it as he lifts unwieldy shelves into the top notches while standing on a rickety step ladder. Countering this confusion is a grasp on a freedom that is almost unseen in the other young men around him with their irrationally hostile expressions that move in a wisp around the ladder, which seems to buckle and creak under a mind whose pensiveness makes his welterweight heavy.
He was so preoccupied with these thoughts that buckle his ladder (his because the sure-footed manner by which he balances himself on the rickety object gives him a command that makes it his devoted servant) that he doesn't notice the young woman behind him standing before the checkout counter, looking at the apex of his head; then to the back of it, where his dark hair curled in elegant little rings; then to his giraffe's neck, somewhat long but thickened with his sturdy and straight posture; then to his back where the shirt curved over his back muscles that tunnelled and pulsed with the labour of his work; then to the slope of his posterior, just where his gluteus was adjusting to meet the shifts of his body to make balance; then she rolls her eyes back upward, skipping the parts she eyed before but acknowledging the entirety of his body, because the movement of her eyes, up then down, clearly divulged a holistic interest which moved past a check out action that evaluated only single parts. She's continuing her eyes on their travels toward his head again when, upon turning his head, they meet his.
Now Josepher's eyes are no longer merely ocular slits. They are in fact clearly eyes now. And the seams of gloss that had engrossed them with shimmering stolidity have vanished; the seams have burst—his gaze is purely clear, far clearer than the stock he had blurrily seen being placed by his own hand onto the shelves; his stalk is now clearly only to grow. A vein wrapped in smooth silky flesh ran up his neck past his chiselled jawline as he craned it to meet her gaze. He did not look at her body at all though, perhaps it was because she was staring directly at him and would know where his view would lead, but more likely he did not have to. He was for a few seconds transfixed by the flourishing of gazes and the dancing of eyes between them: each their gazes moving from one of the other's eyes to the next. He could see all that he needed to see just there. But he does briefly now look at her hair and notice the long and dark single braid, accentuating her equally silky white skin, and whose end snuggles the curvature of her left breast, as it posed itself pleasingly over her angular and slender shoulders. His eyes move down her braid now, each corner and line of each plait all in a few seconds. Then back to her swerving, angular eyes; he imagined her briefly as Eve pinching out a single tear when she cried in Miltonic Eden and him wiping it away only with his own hair and not with her elegant braid, which was not to be used as a napkin. After these quick and eternal seconds had passed, he cracked his cheek with a smile, revealing a dimple. A product fell to the floor.
"Ooh...let me get that for you! I'm sooo bored. I'd love to help out...I'll do anything."
Josepher accepts the item she hands back to him. "Thank you," he says to her. She pushes the tubular product back into his hand.
"You're welcome," she responds in a mellifluous voice that did sound genuinely welcoming—but now the seam is re-sewn. Josepher seems to slightly grimace and cruelly turn away with undue and unaccountable haste. He puts the tubular product back into the box, but then realizes it does not belong there so removes it and puts it unto the shelf he had by now put in place. Kath continues to look at him, also with a (perhaps not unreasonable) slight grimace on her own face, until her concentration moves to the customers approaching the check-out, where she goes to scan the products' UPCs. Maybe it was this action that, on some unconscious fold produced in her head, commanded her to re-check the slender young man: a codice to be decrypted. Josepher moves to the side of the display and looks at her with a painfully straight face, almost foreboding for some inexplicable reason. But Kath bursts these seams again. A coquettish smile builds upward through her cheek, a half smile that provides a counter action to the uncertainty and curiously foreboding look by Josepher. Perhaps such a smile from her was all that his previous look in fact fore bore. A warmth entered his chest and spired up to his face, and so warmed it too. A smile erupted momentarily but momentously that cracked his face into soft furrows, as though he wanted that warmth to reach Kath. When one describes another one as glowing, it is an instance such as this that must have been the original memorat for such phenomena. He did not look at her in the eyes though as he did this. His eyes are again slits staring at the floor, and not so much the true eyes as they were before.
Waiting at the checkout line now after his latest shift had ended, Jos notices his friend Robie eyeing the male clerk. "You look like you're giving him the evil eye."
"Negative." Robie continues unblinkingly staring at the clerk. Josepher laughs at this facetious robotic rejoinder.
"Alright there Ro-bert."
"Look at him just looking at me like that. What is the meaning of such a glare?" The cash clerk flexes his jaw as he looks at Robie, as though he actually is performing an act of intimidation.
"I can tell you that he probably doesn't consider the meaning of it."
"Oh you don't think so, Jos? He considers it inasmuch as he considers it the appropriate way to look as a man. He probably uses about three facial expressions altogether—a blank stare, an angry look, and a mockingly and derisively grinning look. There are no good socializing agents for their toxic enculturation."
"Pssst." Josepher gives a demeaning cat banishing sound to Robie. He looks at the vaguely angry countenance of the male clerk, and notices that he is now looking at him with said expression. "I think I recognize him. He usually works in the meat department, I think." He squints at his nametag, which reads, "Danny At Your Service."
"And you know it probably only exacerbates it," continues Robie, "that he is working as a cash clerk." Robie was staring directly at the cash clerk as he spoke. The vaguely angry young man now almost glowers at Robie.
Josepher tells him to quiet down: "I think he can hear you you noob."
"Ejaculate!" Robie actually yells. "Sorry man, I got a bit a Tourette's." Robie spoke to the beefy cash clerk as he approached him with his product. The clerk smiles—mockingly and derisively, actually—and shakes his head.
"I think he wanted to kill me," Robie opines from on the street, walking fast and waving his arms erratically in many directions, as though challenging cars to hit him. Josepher remains on the sidewalk.
"Why are you on the street asshat?"
"Really," his friend ignores him, "I think he wanted to kill me—it wouldn't be surprising you know. So much of history is used up by men maiming, beating, slicing, and hacking up men in every demeaning manner you can think of, but you know that's not all history there is..."
"Why would it be." Josepher interrupts. "History is merely what is recorded, far more is unrecorded."
"Ah yes—far far far far far more is unrecorded, I mean just look at this event that transpired today."
"You mean happened?"
"Don't nit-pick me words you I-lush."
"I don't even drink, and I'm only half Irish you big brown excretion..."
"Oh! Oh, you did not!"
"Imagine if we actually cared about race?"
"Race isn't my problem these days. I'm trying to figure how it came to be that that guy in the store wants to kill me."
"Well, he could be racist."
"No—well, I guess that's possible, but I think he just perceived me as a free thinking, smiling, happy, optimistic young man, and young men aren't supposed to be that way according to him and those who are programmed like him. They're supposed to be stolid and walk like bipedal gorillas swinging their arms like doors with broken latches, have your shoulders looking as square as possible, your body looking as stiff as a medieval statue, and a cork in his ass to be used as a preventive against loosening it—and as a device for brain dead scatological jokes later on with his other pseudo men friends—cuz that's what a man is supposed to do."
"First of all, you're about the unhappiest son-bitch I ever met."
"Why did you have to call my mama a bitch for, whiteass. I'm the one that's weird, not her." He turns to his friend and prepares his plush lips to state, "You leave my mama alone or I'll kill you."
"She's fucked for having you."
"No no Jos, I thought I explained this to you. She fucked, and then had me."
"No, she had you, and then she fucked."
"That's enough with this terrible language. My ears aren't trash cans."
"Noob—by the way, I thought you were against violence and now you're going to kill me?"
"Haha...see it's that easy too—it happens just like that," he snaps his fingers. "We get into name calling arguments, essentially just childish name calling arguments, then just beat on each other. It's upsetting that there's this culturally propagated misperception that women were somehow more victimized when it is overwhelmingly evidenced that men face more violence."
"Aaah come on, this again?—what overwhelming evidence?"
"You come on! Even a cursory look at history would tell you that. De Beauvoir called what women went through a holocaust; it's actually much more deliberately true that what men went through was a holocaust—millions of young men, dead before they got a chance to vote for the rich men that sent them forcefully to war, deluded into being actually enthusiastic about being meat bags—burnt to crisps by fire blasts and exploding shrapnel."
"What about witch burnings..."
"Yes, well that's true, but the gendered focus on witch burnings actually makes people think that men weren't burnt too. In fact trial documents of England dating from as far back as the 15th century will prove that there were more men who were executed by that manner. Men like me and you—burned. Men who wanted to do something other than the monotonous and tedious tasks that most men fulfilled and were unfulfilled with. Faggots is not just what they call gay men, it's what they call any man who doesn't do something that might be fulfilling on some higher level. You're stigmatized as a fag, a bunch of sticks tied together to be burnt, and same goes today—remember when we were called faggots by some hintless asshole just yesterday? Well, would you like to fuck that guy Jos?"
The latter laughs incredulously. "But the word could have referred to women too then, right? Anyone who was burnt at the stake or whatever for being something they weren't 'supposed' to be."
"Well maybe, but there must be some kind of etymological or semantic bias that specified male otherwise why would it only be in reference to men now?"
"Hmm—well....everybody got burned."
"What?"
"Everybody got beaten. Everybody got burned."
Robie laughs, "Haha, yeah! That's good! Everybody got beaten. Everything can be beaten!" Robie throws his open hands into the sky with alacrity. He lowers them and looks into Jos's eyes. "But I think men got it more."
"Well...I don't know about that, especially when you include rape as violence, and of course it is."
"Rape is a mixture of violence and sex, sorry, it's not just violence."
"Man, you must be unpopular at your liberal arts university."
"Well I don't see why—I am liberal! Before the '70s or so, being liberal also meant showing a concern for men. Now, despite any kind of evidence, it's a strict rule NOT to show concern for men."
"But I think originally it only meant showing a concern for men."
"That's debatable—but even if it did, why should two wrongs make a right? Anyway, certainly now it means only showing a concern for women—and the token minority men, I guess."
"Well then what are you whining about?"
"But I'm still a man, and what about my white boy friend here?" He pats him on the back.
"Don't you call me boy!" He smiles. Robie keeps patting him on the back, smiling fixedly as he does. "Aahhaah?" His voice quavers. "Anyway, men were always that way though. They always were violent in the way you describe. It's not like that's new." Josepher crooks his back under Robie's increasingly heavier pats. "It's innate—would you stop that noob." Jos looks perplexed and exhausted with Robie but decides it would be less exhausting to try to back out of the conversation with him now.
Robie takes his hand away. "Innate? Well that's debatable. There weren't nearly as many mass murders just thirty years ago as there are now—I think they average like one every three months now, almost all done by increasingly desperate males. Male suicide rates increased over twenty-six percent in just the last thirty-five years alone, while the female rate has decreased. If that's just the way it is as a male, then why would all this increase in such a short period of time? Obviously something decidedly unnatural is occurring. It's nurture, not nature, and they have been fooled into thinking it's natural. I mean sure at one time the biologic of male violence was functional. It worked before, in other words. It made more sense historically. Men just basically did what they had to do to impress potential mates—I suppose....at one time. And they still do now, without realizing that what they always did is no longer functional, and so naturally what follows is dysfunctional behaviour. And it's an increasingly bizarre host of activities that are required to impress a mate. Hurting or killing other males and getting various parts of your body broken or scarred was always a tried and tested way, but now in addition there's like this whole acting like a jackass thing, throwing themselves down stairs, going over a ramp on a bike to, maybe, land on a roof, burning yourself..."
"Cutting yourself." Jo speaks as though waking from a meditation.
"That too probably. And you know what the worst of it is? This is what women want from men. They like it when they act—act—that way toward each other. Men get points from women the more they can show they are snared in these acts. It's a sign that indicates to them that you are willing to do some pointless harm to yourself or some other man just to even get a girl to look at you. Imagine how you could manipulate someone as duped as that. I'd say the vast majority of men had their own forms of dis-privilege and oppression that they had to deal with as women did—only we still have to deal with most of them now. Just look at how quick a man with the alpha male syndrome would be to thump you by even the most minor slight against him or even worse against 'his woman'. Wow, what a privilege, eh Jos?
"I wonder if that has anything to do with what this kid I worked with did the other night, last night."
"Who? A kid who works with you?"
Josepher pauses, as though reluctant to respond. "Yeah, he seems to think that a way to impress and get girls is to commit violence onto himself."
Robie doesn't question what exact violence Reely committed on himself, but only responds jadedly, shrugging his shoulders, "Violence on themselves, violence on other males, whichever—yep! It gets the girl. If you're not buff and good looking, and you have no money, then you better do something that is either going to cause harm to your body or harm to your mind. If you don't fulfil that increasingly narrower insane criteria of what a woman wants in a man, then you're likely to see something desperately awful happen, and such desperation is becoming increasingly apparent. The most recent mass murderer killed five women at a fitness centre—you heard about him right? He said something about women constantly snubbing or ignoring him and how he could never find anyone who would like him. When these terrible things happen, most people don't even, can't even, understand how this has to do with a critical state of desperation that is in equally desperate need of change having to do with the dismissal of men's needs due to women's narrow wants, and only continue to participate in and foster the same system that leads men to such an act. But just because women have the obvious upper hand doesn't mean they are satisfied. They'll be eaten alive too by their own parochial outlook and self-imposed limitations on what they only think they..." A car speeds by Robie causing him to thrust his body onto the sidewalk, pushing into Josepher. "Jesus." Robie looks visibly shaken.
"Fuck outta the way loser." A woman's voice calls from the driver's side window.
"Fuck you! You're in MY way!"
A mixture of a baritone masculine voice and a shriller feminine one call out: "You better watch who you're talkin' to bud!"/ "Have fun with that hand tonight loser!"
"Have fun being filled and unfulfilled!" Robie calls after them. The car stops, skidding. For a few seconds, the two young men hold their breath, until they notice that the intersection light is red. The light turns green, but the car remains still. Josepher turns away first and begins walking fast on his way; Robie lingers for another few seconds staring at the unmoving car at the green light.
"You shouldn't walk on the street," Josepher yells back, looking at the sidewalk, frowning.
"What that hell is this? What's that supposed to mean? I'm getting tired of this and I've got to do something about it!"
"What do you mean?" His address to his friend was fruitless though.
"Check ya later—I mean, see ya."
Josepher carries off on his own, still looking down, frowning, ruminating, his pace quickening. Walking towards him is a young woman. She has sunglasses on, attractive, thin but curvaceous with bouncing long dark red hair. She turns her head away as she passes him, coughing as she does. Josepher was looking down as the woman passed, intentionally avoiding eye contact. Now as the shadows of the evening grow so too does his face, dissolving to and fro in wistful turns of mind; he breathes uneasy breaths. The blurred faces resulting from his returning temporary myopic vision doom him to not view them even he wanted to. He walks on a long street with a long mind and heart: a mind of long and brooding thoughts with each passing face, male or female; a heart of long sighs and short breaths. A long tedium whose shuttle is unthreaded but the wheel keeps spinning.
Stephen says, "I graduated from the University of Prince Edward Island in 2007 with a degree in English and a mind in the clouds. Ka is my first completed novella, which has yet to be published. I am currently employed part-time as a research writer for Premium Writing (and another menial job which will go unmentioned)."