Preparation and Harvest (excerpts)
By Jeremy Hopkins

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become like sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing."
- I Corinthians 13: 1-2

"The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad."
- Salvador Dali

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"Thomas," she began quietly, "It seems like you're trying to seduce me." She was right. She stood distantly submissive, a figure S. She was tall for a girl, but it was evident that at that moment, she did not wish to be. Her gaze moved up from my shoelaces, passed under my belt buckle, and came slowly to rest on my eyes. I looked away. I couldn't; that is, I could, I was able, but I would not allow it. Instead, I reacted with my usual emotional response: a ritual lamentation on the pains one endures having an uncompromisingly negative association with anything and everything one desires. At that moment of course, I could think of nothing I wanted more.

"I was," I replied at last. She stepped towards me. "I think you left your keys in my room."

My friends, in their only slightly more authoritative wisdom, had all told me that she was ready. "Thomas buddy, you're in. And you can't get anymore in than 'in'." They were right; it wouldn't have been difficult. After she left, I sat up for a while, my hand snugged into my trousers, contemplating why she wasn't in my bed at that very moment.

I knew why.

I enjoy being sought after, a girl wishing and trying for my attention, some response to let her know she is desirable, and seeing how long she will keep it up. This is mildly masochistic, I know. I don't enjoy cruelty itself, but the rewards it can bring; an evening's attention from a young can provide the fuel for a week's ego. I suppose this makes me some kind of emotional mercenary, choosing my battles, eking out a bread-and-water existence; well-trained but foolishly selective.

The girls, of course, could never know this. I imagine they go away either depressed or convinced of my stupidity, bipolarity, or sexual misalignment. Good for them; such a conclusion nimbly avoids the arising doubt in their own sexiness, a tried and true mental parlay. "Let em think," I said as I unzipped my pants. "They'll learn soon enough." It was already halfway there.

"This is the thing," I started out loud, utilizing the most scholarly and self-assured tone at my disposal. "It is the very fact that I, with no doubt in my mind could have had her, that gives me my pleasure and following through with the actual performance becomes secondary. That is to say, she was as good as fucked, and to have carried it out would have simply afforded me a small right to brag, which I would have never taken advantage of anyway. In this way, I have maintained my integrity and my self-image receives a firm shot in the arm. That was good, I should write that down."

At that point I came. It landed on a blank page of my open notebook, vaguely spelling out my initials. "What a joyful trial it is to be me," I sighed comfortably as I closed the book. It spread like white mercury and stained the surrounding pages.

It did not occur to me until some time later that I should produce my whole journal in this way.

*^*^*^*^*

She was more an acquaintance than a friend, which is to say we spoke regularly without any need for lying, a professional relationship in which profession never entered the picture. She was killed by an unknown, probably a man they say, carrying a club. There were no wounds of any kind on any part of her body except lumps on her head on left cheekbone from her hall to the concrete floor of the university parking garage. Despite this, the authorities insist that a murder had been commited, and that a club was the murder weapon.

"How could that be?" I asked an officer vaguely familiar with the case.
"Apart from fatal blunt trauma, the cadaver showed all the signs of a brutal clubbing," he responded.
"But what signs besides blunt trauma would suggest a clubbing? I don't understand."
He pushed his hands out and up, "All I know is what they tell me. Ask the guys forensics. Do you realize that your car is parked illegally?"

He wrote out a ticket. I went inside and paid my fine. As it turned out, the guys in forensics weren't available for a comment.

(I heard the news last week sometime and am just now getting around to writing with any sort of focus. The jumble of thoughts I have scrawled here and there over these days give me little to go on. The following is the only bit that is at all coherent. For most of the time, I have no idea what I was thinking.)

The sounds of reality beginning: squish, smack, scream
ending: smack, scream, squish

It is with a squish both in and out of this world. I am sure of it, though I cannot remember the moment of my birth and rarely that of my death. But I stop and look around, allowing the pool into which I gaze to ripple around the edges, and I see myself standing at the apex of a bridge arching out a immeasurable steaming marsh. The bridge is far from complete, but is obviously meant to curve down again, back to that from which I must have come: the wet, the warm percolating squish.

The marsh's smell is almost appealing. With some effort, I may yet like it.

*^*^*^*^*

It was advertised as the most realistic cat toy to ever be made, and a bargain at eight dollars. Shaped very much like a bird, it was designed to rip into several edible pieces after a good, solid thrashing by the cat, then empty itself of its "blood" (water dyed red and fortified with an irresistable synthetic catnip derivative.) I stopped at Wal-Mart on the way home and bought one for the cat that hangs around my apartment building.

The cat reacted just as the package had promised. Wild eyed and nearly rabid, the cat pounced upon the dummy bird and in seconds had the thing in bits. It was thrilling watching such a display of savagery right in front of me. I can only imagine what the cat felt as it gobbled up the tiny roast chicken flavored thighs and breasts; she swallowed every last bit of it. After its snack it rolled around in the blood, its hair matting, it tongue lapping, a sound rising from its throat, such ecstasy as I'd never heard. It began to drfit into silent complacency, and I left it alone and content.

Periodically I would the cat something to play with. Before long however, real dead birds and real blood starting showing up around the complex. It turned out the chemicals in the toys instilled such a strong pleasurable association with the slaughtering and devouring of birds that the cat became willing to put in the effort to hunt live game rather than wait for gifts. And so the cat lived out its days in a constant and ever-growing bloodlust, never fully satisfied, the experience hollowed by the absence of scientific enhancement; man's hand nowhere near this kitty. I wondered how the fake I'd offered could've meant so much.

*^*^*^*^*

I stood there expecting an answer. The kid (Roky, according to his coveralls) just sat on a stack of old tires, staring straight up the highway, his skin marbled by grease ond oil, yet without any hint of wear in his countenance, as if he'd never had to work too hard at anything. I was becoming impatient, the heat wasn't helping, and I was supposed to already be at the cafe. A freind was waiting.

I began again, "What's wrong with the pumps? I've tried everything short of..."
"Blue," he interrupted. "Nineteen seventy something. T-top. Off." He at last lit the cigarette which had been soaking between his lips for the past few minutes.

I drove a white sedan, which was the only car anywhere in sight. For what I intended to be the last time I said, "There's something the matter with your fuel pumps."

"What's wrong withum?" He coughed and spat onto his own shoe while at the same time exhaling his last pull of smoke; he looked like a dragon with a cold.

"They won't pump." Without a word he rapped on the shop-front window he'd been using as his backrest. After a time more than long enough to have justified a second harder knocking, another attendant popped out of the office. His name was Kit and he looked like he just came from the shower.

Without acknowledging me he said, "Yeah, what?" He held out his first two fingers in a V. Roky pressed a cigarette between them. They closed reflexively around it like a flytrap flower. "The pumps arnt working." Kit lit his cigarette and moved over to fiddle with the pumps. I went inside to get some shade.

I bought a soda from the machine (old enough to still show Tab as an option) and sat down in the broken chair, the only chair. A magazine on the table next to me headlined "Mysteries of Faith: Secrets of the Bible Revealed." All the pictures in the article on Hell had been cut out. I read a portion concerning the archaeological finds proving once-fictional cities to have been real. I got very little out of it.

I went back outside. Roky and Kit were standing by the pumps. Kit stood still while Roky was obviously disturbed. He was shouting, furious at something. I stayed by the doorway. He approached with a screwdriver in hand, gripped tight as for a stab. Stopping next to me, plunged it hilt deep into the tire stack.

"...we're...out," he said, managing to regain his composure in just two syllables. He began fumbling for a cigarette.
"You're out. Of gas?" He nodded. "Completely?" He spat and nodded. "You don't have any gas?"
"No goddammit, we don't! We don't have any gas!" Kit was hanging a sign announcing the same. "Anything else I can do for you?" His tone intructed me that there wasn't.
"No, I'll be alright. I've got a can with a gallon or so in the trunk."
"Lucky you." He seemed envious. I couldn't imagine what good one gallon would do for a gas station.
"That should get me to the next fuel stop right?"
Hands now clean of me, he ignored my question and began his lament, "Jesus, what the Hell am I doing at a gas station with no gas...Christ-on-Christmas..." He continued muttering as he returned to his shade.

I went to the rear of my car and reached for the handle. Before I could open the truck, a blue t-top convertible pulled into the station. More than a little shocked, I turned around quickly to see Roky leaning against the trashcan, curse-finger in the air. As the t-top came to a stop, Kit laid across the front, face down, and writhed lewdly upon the hood. I emptied my gascan as quickly as I could.

Once I'd cleared a half-mile or so, I saw the same convertible speeding towards me, heading back the way it had never come.

The gas I had got me far enough.

*^*^*^*^*

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