She thinks hard about men saying wonderful things to her like, frankly I love you. Men like Humphrey Bogart. Men like her father, and even men that she thinks her mother likes. All kinds of men. Because she is a young girl who hears a different romance in every song, and whenever she looks into the eyes of a man, she allows herself the possibility of love with him. She looks at him like the women do in the material that inspires her fantasies, like the movies and romance novels. The men look back plainly, unable to comprehend. She pities men for their manly inhibitions. She pulls back the vale over her secret fantasy life.

You may find your headquarters to be a shack in the woods. You sitting smartly at your desk. Outside the shack a line of visitors. Each one comes in and asks to see a different person. The young blond man is here to see Mr Russel and the girl is here for Dr Rossenburg. You are him each time. You give them ambiguous orders across your desk. Sometimes they conflict. Sometimes you go back on your word. Sometimes you give the order to kill the visitor who sat in the chair last. They do your bidding. You the puppeteer of this chaos.

Young men are taken in before their final act of betrayal, not afterword. You can fantasize about rehabilitating a traitor all you want. You can take him on a walk on a deserted beach, and instead of placing a bullet in his brain, you may think to place this thought: one day you will ask yourself if you’ve lived your life honorably. Your answer to this question will be more important than you understand right now. You will ask it of yourself, and because of what you have done to me, you will not be able to answer honestly. Therefore I sentence you to a life of self hate. This your final punishment. Now go and never betray me again. But because the boy is forever a traitor, he can only offend you again, you see. You leave him no choice in the matter. He can never be an honorable person again and he will betray you out of bitter jealousy of your unwavering integrity. It is cliche and heart breaking, but every subversive boy must die.

The crucial minutia of the world apparent to her from her bedroom window. The way the pigeon takes off from the ground. To anyone else there is no significance, but to Yee-Wong this was everything. Imagine if you will, a pigeon taking flight in extreme slow motion. Watch exactly the way its wings expand and contract again. Watch every feather. Watch ever follicle of every feather. In these seconds the pigeon makes a thousand minute adjustments. Each particle plays a role. No one pigeon takes off the same and one pigeon never takes off the same way twice. In the grey paranoid streets men are picked up and shuffled roughly into black cars by mysterious men in trench coats and fedoras. Where they are taken nobody knows. Miss Yee-Wong can divine where they are stolen away to in the feathers left behind after a pigeon’s ascent.

He looks out from his world. His bulging eyes, his neglected physical appearance, his lack of regard for others. His empty glare. This soul's journey that will not be documented for scrutinizing after the end. His lewd thoughts that come and go that never end. When he walks down the street he sees through you. You will not remember his face. His mother remembered him, until she died. With her all evidence of his existence was gone. His point of view was never acknowledged. The minutia of his personality transparent like a ghost's. In his memories proof that he once walked in and out of your life, that he indeed played a role outside of his imaginations. See the man as a boy among the other children like a ghost. You don't remember him being there.

His understanding of things and his point of view. In his class picture where his face was barely visible his intellect took up the whole room, metaphysically speaking. He knew you better than you thought. He came equipped with a world his own. He knew your strengths and your weaknesses, too. Thank God for the secrecy of his fantasy life.

charlotte

We join Charlotte, our tragic heroine for this passage, as she begins to dance in front of her television to the tune of a commercial. “Have a very merry Christmas,” she sings along and repeats long after the commercial ends in a cigarette-ravaged voice with much vibrato. And she really means it, with her hands clutched at her chest in sincere good will. Her weight shifting from one foot to the other as she sways drunk beyond belief, Charlotte wishes you a truly wonderful Christmas. But lets not dwell on poor Charlotte, for she never stood a chance. Her determination this morning was something unstoppable, and there she lies now in classic film noir fashion, her lovely (if a little old) figure prostrate in a natural position, her hair dramatically draped over, and here comes the lettuce-green vomit with little white pills inside that will prevent her from ever taking another breath and us from calling her death graceful.

Pirates of the heart

The boy took the girl in his car to the place he knew lovers go. Her in his car under his gaze. She and her shy femininities exuding from her like vapor, surrounding them in the night. He thought to himself, how lucky is he to be here in the atmosphere of her love this night. Her mind beat against the inside of her skull. He took her hand. His content gaze out over the city and the stars through the windshield and her crazed animal mind not coming through her skin to him.


Little did the boy know the spirits that gathered outside his car conspired with the girl against him. They circled outside the car and saw the boy's innocent love-aspirations and what it was that he saw in the girl and regarded it like pirates of the heart. They swung open the door and pulled the girl out of the car. The boy tried to hold on but he really didn't stand a chance and the spirits carried her to where they wanted her and lifted her up and held her and did those things to her. More spirits held the boy down and made him watch. The girl whaling in the trance of the will of the spirits and the anguish of the boy like a very tragic faerie tale that night.


The girl looks back on the night later in life in the all's fair way that every woman looks back on the memories of her heartbreaks. The man who sits in the chair beside her's who was the boy in the story reaches over and takes hold of her hand. The woman's pretensions that a man can't understand and the story of her life like she wanted it. He holds her hand and they look out from their porch. The man sitting there more content than ever in the role he has played in her life and the woman's mind working hard on her next fantasy.