INTO COLLAPSES

Originally appeared in Broken Pencil and collected in Can’t Lit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine.

Apparently, kids are skateboarding, playing video games, having sex.

An informal study was presented on television depicting The Greatest Atrocities of Modern Times. An array of bar-graphs gave further insight as to the criteria which determined the study’s selection, i.e. geographic extent of havoc wreaked, estimated rate of accidental-casualty vs. meditated torture-ritual, blitzkrieg vs. sustained politically terrorism, ethnic vendetta, ecological devastation, generational repercussions, etc. The bars in the graphs looked like rainbows of teeth, filed to squared planes.

10/08/88. BOY, 14, DIES IN AUTO ACCIDENT. Insert b-w photo of two policemen in long coats lurking somberly around a severely-damaged Ford Taurus wagon. Surfaces are slick with rain. Dots of ink confirm nightmarish possibilities. Look closely: a shred of torn material is trapped in a bend of metal. A sleeve of sweatshirt, an outline of a logo. A region of a gurgling skull, shakily penned.

Two kids are sitting on a curb. The sun above is slowly burning the backs of their necks and the ridges of their noses a bold pink. A third kid approaches on a brand-new skateboard, his face glowing with pride. Lance Mountain deck, brand-new, unscuffed. There is a discussion. Minutes later, the newcomer exits, near-teary. The seated two snicker, watching him go.

3:30 a.m. The Commodore 64’s screen depicts a crude computer-rendering of something flesh-coloured, something vaguely rod-like, moving into, then out of, something resembling a dark puddle. German text flows along the bottom of the screen in binary stutters. The boy in front of the computer giggles, jiggles joystick, then yawns.

Eventually all the coffins in the graveyard across from the radio building downtown will have to be dug up and reburied, so they are saying. A complete re-plotting. At the current rate of soil-erosion and deterioration of the crest of its marshy slope, an already problematic quantity, the entire cemetery will eventually collapse, so they tell me, falling into the adjacent gorge, which is currently occupied by train-tracks. They say utmost respect will be assured for the wishes of all parties. Measures are being undertaken to prevent an uproar. People are very sensitive in matters of exposure.

Two boys are skateboarding in the hospital parking-lot. One of them has just, as of the previous evening, lost his virginity. The other has been preparing to lose his own status thereof by practicing donning a Durex Sheik Sensi-Thin Lubricated condom, then slipping it off, while he watches television.

There is no grudge here.

One of the boys had a letter published in Thrasher magazine’s Mail Drop letters column this month, the May ’88 issue, expressing his disgust with the police in his community. He recounted his own several run-ins with law-enforcement officials, as well as relaying the sordid tale of his cousin’s current incarceration (possession), a degree of sentence made harsher for his ‘History of Disobedience’ in dealing with local officials, particularly in defiance of legislation forbidding Skateboarding, or similar recreational activity, on private or semi-private property. The author of the letter managed to express genuinely emotional ruefulness and desperation in the letter’s brief and decidedly terse prose; the letter was quite eloquent for a kid.

Both of the boys have stickers on their decks declaring: ‘SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME’. 

‘insert quasi-fascist quote here’

News breaks and diminishes. Time favours achievement, distinction, bravado. Atrocity. Haywire. In the drunk tank they were ordered to take the shoelaces out of their shoes and their belts out of their belt-loops. The two young guys were nervous, trapped behind those bars with a crew of growling drunks, but everybody seemed to accept their communally sour fates, and most of them just quietly slept it off.

A decal wore a skull, a ribcage, a lesion. Pus, celebrated. Tissue, glorified. Borders of neon-pink and neon-green trailed in flames around skateboard wheels, sizzling. Scabs waited to be picked. Bones toppled into a bulldozer’s maw. Days went by, years.

‘punchline’

Apparently, Atrocity means Large-Scale Loss.

We all had terrible haircuts that made us feel better about ourselves. In our youth the sun went ignored, things went assimilated to the Now. Some of us we were too fat to be elegant; some of us were too pale to be bold. Some people fell off the conveyor belt before deciding whether they even wanted to be manufactured.

Everything was unfixed.