The two extraterrestrials went to a diner near the entrance to Manhattan’s Lincoln Tunnel to try classic earth food. They took a booth. The waitress, whose name was Florence, and who would refuse service to anybody who called her Flo, gave them a couple of menus and said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Hons.”
“Does she think we’re Hons?” one extraterrestrial asked the other, in their own language, of course.
“I don’t know why she would,” the other replied. “We don’t have scales or wings.”
They perused the menus, and soon Florence returned to take their order.
“So, what can I get you?” Florence asked.
“I’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich,” one said.
“I’ll have a hamburger,” the other said.
“How would you like your burger?”
“Probably very much,” the extraterrestrial said.
“No, how would you like it cooked. Rare? Medium? Well?”
“Rare sounds expensive, so I guess well sounds good.”
“All right, one grilled cheese, and one burger, well. I’ll be back shortly with your orders.”
The two extraterrestrials looked around the diner and commented on how funny all the diner diners looked. Then Florence returned with their food.
“Thanks,” both extraterrestrials said in unison.
“Can I ask you folks something?” Florence asked.
“Sure,” the grilled cheese extraterrestrial said.
“Where are you folks from?”
The burger extraterrestrial told her the name of their planet.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
Burger extraterrestrial repeated the name of their planet. It was nothing like Florence had ever heard before.
“Don’t know it,” Florence said. “Must be in Jersey.”
Peter Cherches’ latest book is Everything Happens to Me, an episodic novel about the misadventures of a Brooklyn writer named Peter Cherches.
At the end I lived in rented rooms. Desolate side streets. No elevator. Creaking steps. Paint chips in the water glass. Cockroaches in the bathtub. Bed by the wall. Dark convoluted mattress stains like an inkblot ghost. No hot water. Smell of old blood in the closet. Home for a week, home for a month. Then another city. Another room. Another name on the newspaper. Another set of identification letters for the television stations.
If he was in the South, I traveled south. When he ventured West, I followed west. The moonlight shines behind his fingers as he picks up the knife. The shadows unfold as I raise my hand. I wipe my forehead. I close my eyes.
I feel the wounds. I hear the screams.
Is this the room where the pregnant girl perspired during the hasty abortion that ruined the cheap bedspread? Is this the closet where the old watchman hanged himself, unable to hear the sound of his own voice? Maybe it is the place where the weary salesman raised the revolver to his temple. At that moment, a child sitting in a train on the elevated platform just beyond the salesman’s window put into his mouth a hard candy shaped like a bullet. Or could this be the last room for a killer? A deranged man? A monster unable to refrain from the dark urge, deliriously craving the final peace of his own destruction? Every room has a death story. Every room is another museum filled with the irremovable or unnoticed traces of someone’s fatal moments.
There was the vigorously applied razor blade left imbedded in the chunky soap bar. Dark flakes of hemoglobin were scattered across the white rectangle. They blew away as I raised the bathroom window with a bang. Three greasy fingerprints on the dull grey fuse box panel prefaced an outline of feet scorched on the shabby wood floor. Shards of a broken iodine bottle in the hallway leading to the toilet. Soiled grasp marks on the matrix of jaundiced damp sewage pipes. Nylons twisted into a noose lying like a coiled snake in a heap by the fire escape. An iridescent scabrous square of rat poison in the center of the loop. Crusts of rancid vomit in the Bible drawer. Maggots pinching through the Revelations.
A symbolic image, no doubt. The kind of thing that might appear in some controversial film about damnation, or the dissolution of religious belief. Dearest father, I did not forget your lessons. Everything I have seen throughout my life has been viewed within my own personal frame. Without really knowing why, the importance of a thing always depended on its visual content. I never understood the world, or its people, or its objects, unless I was making some kind of visual conclusion about the relationships between things. I could never resist what I must call a supreme demand, from somewhere within my nature, to establish and construe elaborate connections between all that my senses digested. It is as though my subconscious was engaged in some kind of esoteric archaeology, as though everything that could be depicted and suggested, especially all things that seemed destined to have a relationship, that somehow all this was already so, had been so, and now it was the duty of my mind’s divination to uncover what was, to reconstruct and display it, like a great structure or artifacts uncovered in a dig. It was as though my imagination had inherited some kind of perverted obligation from the teachings of my father, or perhaps my imperfect soul had made it perverse. Now I feel a great shame in all this, I can see the great reluctance that prevented me from true communion with others, yet I cannot deny the great understanding that depended on the power of the imagination, the interiority of consciousness, the relativity of perception and cognition. Did I unwittingly turn your wisdom into a comedy of errors, dear father? Did I somehow turn your spiritual warnings about the dangers of illusion into a rationale for the processes of illusion? I know you were genuine in your heart. You never gave me a stone when I asked you for bread. You never gave me a serpent when I asked you for a fish. Somehow the light of my body depended upon an evil eye, the false camera eye that filled my body with light that is darkness.
Shotgun blast blood outline, contours like a hologram fixed upon the wall after the trigger was pulled. Here the body remained too long, and there was too much heat, too little maid service. Gas mask swinging on the knob of the cellar door, hollow eyes sunken deep like a desert bone animal face. Cracked plastic tube of the hair blower in the empty stained fish tank once filled with water. Eyelashes brittle next to the coral house on the bottom, evidence of a successful electrocution long ago. Hysterical suicide confessions scrawled in lipstick across the large pages of the telephone book still in place atop the decrepit wooden stand by the lobby desk. Stench of the manager’s fingers as he flips through the book in search of a clean page. Monotony of his practiced gestures as he hands me the key, looks over the desk to be sure I have luggage, places the pen in the center of the decaying registration log, sits back on his stool, lighting another cigarette as he watches me ascend the stairs, wondering if I will become another suicide, another body carried out on the red rubber stretcher. A large cockroach does not escape the trained assault of his shoe. Its inner matter bursts with a gush as I turn the key to my room. Slowly the bent dusty blades of a fan turn about. The cockroach antennae twist a few times. I shut the door.
Peter J. Dellolio
The Confession is available here from Barnes and Noble.
Lan graduated from the Faculty of Philology in the branch of Albanian language and literature in Prishtina, from Republika of Kosovo. He is a professor of the Albanian language in the Gymnasium. Lani is the Editor-in Chief of the international cultural and artistic magazine ORFEU, which is published in many languages in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. He is also the editor of the cultural show ORFEU on TV Jupiteri7 channel on YouTube. He wrote poems, stories, drama, novels in Pristina. He has written in many newspapers, portals, Radio, TV, and Magazines in the Albanian language and in English, bangu, Romanian, Francophone, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, Greek, Swedish, Hindu, Spanish, Korean etc.
