Oyster City

The Ex-boyfriend:

            Alberto served three tours of duty in Iraq. He understands chaos theory better than most mathematicians.

He understands how a bullet chooses its target by chance. How an increase or decrease in speed results in or prevents a soldier’s death, expunges the children that soldier would’ve produced.

Alberto always wanted to join the Army, to protect his countrymen back home.

Then, the day came when his government identified him as damaged goods. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Thank you for your service. We don’t need you, anymore.

He saved up enough money to coast until he decides what to do with his life. He never before considered any non-military direction. He feels adrift.

PTSD gives him occasional shakes . . . among other problems. His sex drive remains, but twenty-percent of the time, he can’t perform.

He lost girlfriends. They said they understood, but they always took it personally, blamed themselves, assumed that they had failed to arouse him.

After a night of failed sex, his partner would assure him that she didn’t care. She would attend exactly one additional date with him, and then break it off for a clearly bullshit reason.

Alberto put sex on the backburner, decided to build a strong enough relationship that it wouldn’t matter, later, if he couldn’t deliver the goods.

His plan backfired. His last girlfriend, Jenny, offered him a late-night cup of coffee in her apartment. He knew she plotted to keep him until morning.

He fought off the temptation to accept her offer, feigned a headache, and headed home. She had felt so rejected by his refusal that she never called him again.

The Ex-girlfriend:

            Jenny wanders across the shopping mall. She cannot spend another day alone in her living room. Meals appear so miniscule on her long, dinning room table, which she bought long ago for the family she would’ve surely raised by now.

            Whenever Jenny goes to the movie theater, she purchases an extra ticket, just so the booth operator won’t know she arrived alone.

            She hates, most of all, the nights. People should sleep in twos. Her bed feels cold without the extra body. She feels so hollow while she awaits sleep.

            She becomes a caffeine fiend. The more energy she drinks, the less she has to sleep, and the fewer hours she must face her hateful, chilly bed.

            She just wants someone to hold her while she drifts into sleep, but the price of such company always remains: sex, an issue for which she holds no stomach.

            While Jenny attended tenth grade, her mother entertained a new boyfriend named Phil, who “hung out” at Jenny’s house while her mother worked.

            Phil forced himself on Jenny every day when she arrived home from school. Jenny’s mother never believed her. She accused Jenny of trying to wreck the relationship “for attention.”

            Tenth-grade Jenny eventually made it a habit to receive after-school detention, so she had an excuse to stay away from home until after her mother arrived from work.

            Adult Jenny faces a constant, contradiction-filled frustration. She has sexual needs, yet sex continues to scare her, to open old wounds.

            Jenny had, a week ago, offered her then-boyfriend, Alberto, a sleepover. She hadn’t wanted to fuck him. She just needed someone’s arms around her.

He refused her request, claimed he had a headache, a bald-faced lie.

Jenny could only conclude that he hadn’t found her attractive, and hadn’t the heart to break off the relationship. She made it easy for him. She never called him again, and he, apparently, accepted the opportunity to slide from her hook.

Jenny wanders the mall, spots an old man at a bench.

The Success:

            Daniel’s resume looks respectable. He spent twenty years in the Air Force, started his own business, married (and eventually buried) a wife, and raised a daughter. He retired with more than enough money to coast in comfort.

He misses his wife. He misses the daughter who won’t return his phone calls. Why won’t Carole talk to him? Had her life grown so full that she forgot him?

Daniel, an old, outdated man, spends his days seated at a bench in the mall. He watches people float past him, wonders who will notice when he sits here no more.

The Failure:

            Carole’s father calls her. She selects the “ignore” option from her cell phone’s screen. She cannot face him, even over the phone. She’s too ashamed.

            Her father used to hold such high hopes for her.

            After Carole’s second miscarriage, her doctors suspected something amiss with her reproductive system. Further examinations confirmed their fears. A baby would not grow inside her.

She wonders if she may still technically consider herself a woman.

Her husband never forgave her. He swore he didn’t care, that they could adopt, but his hunt for an excuse to end their marriage couldn’t have proven more obvious. He eventually found his exit.

After the divorce, Carole channeled her energy in a new direction. She liquidated everything she owned, used the capital to start her own business, one that would help children who struggled in school.

Carole’s efforts yielded nothing. Not one of her students passed their classes. Her former clients saw no reason to recommend her.

She filed for bankruptcy and moved to Alaska, where she wouldn’t have to face her father’s disappointed face.

She walks down a lonely, icy road, and overhears the unfriendly barks of a dog, one that belongs to a recluse in a log cabin.

Local legend holds that the recluse spent time in prison, after he raped a child. The denizens of Carole’s small town avoid this man. She does not blame them.

The Recluse:

            Tony’s parents won’t talk to him. He suspects that they never even talk about him, except to each other in the most hushed of humiliated whispers.

            He had once stood a lonely fool with a teaching certification. Today, he sits the same, minus the certification. His career rests in ashes, collateral damages of his piss-poor plans.

            He once worked in New Jersey as a math teacher. His weight had tipped the scale for all forty-five of his years. He had spent each of these years a social coward and a virgin.

            He had only come alive in front of the classroom, fueled by genuine enchantment towards the concrete, reliability of numbers.

            She had called herself Kitty, the adorable blonde who sat in the second row of third period. He cannot recall her face, but he remembers her legs, smooth and carved from milk.

            She offered him sex for extra credit, enough to pass her algebra class.

If she hadn’t made the offer and fled his office immediately, if she hadn’t granted him time to reflect on her proposal, he would have refused it off the bat. She gave him time, though, and he had reflected.

He had dreamed that someone might take pity on him, show him the world of warmth from which he always remained unwelcomed, a social miscarriage of the most shameful sort.

To spend a night with a girl as young and pretty as Kitty . . . he accepted her proposal.

She blabbed about it on Facebook.

He lost his teaching certification, his reputation, even his freedom.

He discovered, after his release from prison, that the law required him to introduce himself to all his neighbors. “Hello. I’m Tony, and federal law requires me to inform you that I raped a child.”

He moved to an isolated portion of Alaska, where he would face the fewest number of neighbors.

His desperation for companionship coaxed him to purchase a rescue dog, but the mutt won’t allow Tony to touch him. The dog lives in Tony’s backyard, where it growls and foams with hate.

The Beast:

            An old fear feeds his every snarl. A life with a former master, whose fists often cracked the poor mutt’s jaws, pulses at the forefront of his memories.

Every human presents the threat of abuse. He barks and snaps at them, terrified that he will live and die this way, untouched, unloved.

He wants only a scratch behind the ear, yet he’ll bite anyone who attempts to grant his wish.

His frustration with himself proves incalculable.

He smells the solitary dinner his new master makes. Oysters and beer.

The Oysters:

            They sit stacked upon each other, but they never truly touch or see one another. They remain hidden, imprisoned within their tough, jagged shells. Many possess a beautiful pearl that shall never see the light of day.