Rebecca was not only naked, she was also in an extremely compromised position when Buddy burst into their bedroom. Ramon, equally naked, was compromised as well, though less so than was his physically constrained lover. Ramon‘s surprise was immediately apparent, though his attitude changed quickly and naturally from shocked disbelief to defensive self-preservation. Rebecca’s initial reaction, oddly enough, was not surprise at being caught, but was a misplaced anger at Buddy’s unannounced intrusion into the bedroom... as if a man should have to knock before entering his own bedroom. “What is he doing here?” Was the first question that came to her mind, rather than, “what am I doing here?” Why was he not at work, where he belonged? And why didn’t the dumbass knock on the god-damned door? After all, was a vulgar scene with the mother of Buddy’s children as the starlet of the sordid play what he really wanted to stumble in on?

But, Buddy being Buddy, Rebecca wasn’t about to get too rattled, even though she was tied to the bedposts. After all, Rebecca’s primary weapon was her tongue, and that weapon was still free to be yielded at will, though the rest of her fortress was openly indefensible. Her tongue had, in the past, chastised, reasoned with, and sometimes even manipulated Buddy, though her husband was nothing if not level-headed and rightfully so, as the man had a lot to lose. And believing she understood the risks of doing what she was doing in their home in broad daylight, and having done similar things successfully many times prior, Rebecca had played this very scenario out a hundred times in her mind, a thousand times maybe; what she would do if he caught her? What she would say? The risk of getting caught was half of the excitement anyways. Besides, after nearly twenty years together she knew very well how to pull Buddy’s strings and how to push his buttons, so what was the worst that could happen? That he would ask for a divorce? Sadly, divorce would probably be the best thing for them both. She was even ready for it. She wouldn’t mind going back to work now that the kids were a little older. It would get her out more, allow her to meet new people. It might even be fun, especially as she would keep the house with half of what she and Buddy had built together in it, which was quite a lot. So although the initial shock of Buddy crashing in on her and Ramon had been unsettling, Rebecca actually felt a thread of hope, despite how things had gone down. It was almost a relief that Buddy knew her secret, and that a ball which she fully expected him to fumble was now in his court, as Buddy was so simplistic in his nature that it was likely he would barely understand the game that was being played here. That is not to say that Buddy was stupid. He was not that at all. Predictable was the better word.

Now then, if only he would come back, she thought. It had been… what? An hour now? She couldn’t see the clock which had been knocked to the floor during the scuffle. She was actually quite proud that her husband had put up such a fight. Who knew Buddy had it in him, to kick a muscular and younger man like Ramon’s ass so handily? Of course, he’d had an advantage from the start, having burst in while Ramon hovered over her with his own dick in his hands. It had not been an easy thing for Ramon to go from such an attitude and position directly into fighting mode, so the poor kid had gotten his ass kicked pretty much straight away. Still, who knew her Buddy was even capable of such speed and brutality? She certainly hadn’t. Perhaps she didn’t know Buddy as well as she thought she did? And wasn’t this the absolute worst time for her husband to start revealing hidden talents to her?

Yes she’d displayed anger after the initial shock, demanding that Buddy untie her, but her cursings had gone ignored. And now her legs were cramping, the muscles in them tightening high-up around her hips from being outwardly extended like this for so long. “Where the fuck is he?” Her frustrations boiling over she fought at the ropes, jerking as hard as she could this way and that, but her efforts only tightened the knots until her feet were numb and her wrists bloody. It was an absolute emotional roller coaster for her, being left here alone on the bed to wonder what was happening while being incapable to act. Where had Buddy taken Ramon off to? The kids would be coming home from school soon, and the thought of Austin or Callie walking in to find their mother like this began a new round of flailing from her, one that never-minded the numbness or the blood, but it was no use. She could not break herself free. “Fucking Ramon and his bondage shit!“ She screamed! “Ahhhhgggg! Shit! Shit! Shit!” But none of that did any good.

Unable to free herself through anger, and with nothing else to do, Rebecca began to cry. What the fuck? How had she gotten herself into this position, anyway? How had she allowed it to happen? But she knew the answer. Boredom was how, and Ramon had satisfied it. It was her friend Trish who took her to the gym when she hadn’t really wanted to go, dragging her there as though she knew that Rebecca would meet Ramon there, or someone like him; someone young, hot, and aggressive. Ramon’s come-ons had been fast and furious, his confidence magnetic, all of it together creating a delicious whirlwind inside her that demanded release. His lovemaking had also been fast and furious; full of games, tricks, and surprises, unlike Buddy’s ritualistic fumblings. But that wasn’t really fair, was it? Buddy wasn’t bad in bed, just different… respectful. And what woman fantasizes about respectful? Buddy had satisfied her when she was younger and knew no better, but Ramon demanded things of her that Buddy would never, ever think of; dirty, degrading things that Rebecca found she craved once exposed to them. Ramon‘s deviancy led her onward from tea-bagging, to anal, to bondage, to threesomes, the surprises neverending. Sex with Ramon was nothing short of a super-hot adventureland after eighteen years of doggy-style and sixty-nining with Buddy.

It had been wrong. But while she knew it was wrong, she was also powerless to stop it.

Her tears brought another round of spasmic jerking, this one delivering new waves of discomfort to her wrists and ankles while at the same time increasing the cramping in her hips. If only she could close her legs she would be ok, so she fought to close them, to pull the ropes binding her ankles to the foot board loose, or even to break them, but nothing happened except that her cyclical tears started again, and the convulsions, and the worry. Where the fuck could Buddy have gone? Her next prayer was actually spoken aloud, “Please, please, please let him come back before the kids get home! Please, God!”

Her prayer said, she quit fighting and succumbed ever-so briefly to the situation. But submission brought no relief from the pain in her wrists, or the ache in her hips. If only she could close her god-damn legs! “Where the fuck are you, Buddy!” She screamed it this time, as loud as she could, hoping the neighbors might hear it, or anybody else for that matter, anyone who might free her before Callie walked in and saw her mother this way, spread-eagled atop the covers, sticky and stinking, dried cum on her breasts and stomach.

Where the fuck were they? Where could Buddy have taken Ramon that was taking so long? She’d heard the garage door open when they left, and then heard it close again, so they’d obviously gone in the car. Could Buddy have taken Ramon to the police station? For what though? For fucking his wife? Maybe he took him to a lawyer’s office? They could certainly have gotten plenty of DNA evidence of her infidelity off of him. Jesus, if Buddy did file for divorce he could wind up with the money, the house, the kids… everything! Wouldn’t that suck! She had never contemplated that scenario, but here it was, right in front her!

She might have, metaphorically of course, really screwed the pooch this time.

But Rebecca knew better than that. She knew Buddy Carpenter better than she knew anyone in this world, better even than she wanted to know Buddy Carpenter... and the Buddy she knew would never do all of that. He was not devious enough to imagine it. Even in the furious state Buddy was in as he led Ramon from their bedroom he would not have been thinking that way. Divorce done properly is a calculating and malicious undertaking the likes of which Buddy did not have in him. Divorce is a means of destroying one’s enemy without that enemy even realizing it is involved in a war. The subtleties of a successful divorce must be worked out over time, secretly and manipulatively, which makes using divorce as a resolution a woman’s way, does it not, a man being too plodding and direct for it’s success? No, a man catching his wife in this way would not be thinking about how to win the divorce as he drug her lover from his bedroom, would he? “So then,” Rebecca wondered. “What would a man be thinking as he did so? Or rather, what would her man be thinking?”

A memory surfaced then, a distant one from long ago, from way back before she and Buddy were even married. It was the memory of a promise made in the dark of night as she’d held up her new diamond ring, the better to see its sparkling promise in the soft light of a dim harvest moon. “Remember this.” He’d told her as she’d barely bothered listening, lost in the dreams of a suddenly extant wedding day, “leave me if you no longer love me. I’ll be ok with that. But if you ever, for the rest of your life from this point forward, fuck another man while we’re married, I swear to God I will kill you both. Not because you didn’t love me, but because you didn’t respect me enough to cheat on me.”

“Oooh,” she recalled thinking at the time. “Such a tough guy in his cardigan and loafers!”

It had been an empty threat, hadn’t it? Spoken to frighten a giddy girl only twenty years old into obeyance? It wasn’t something Buddy would actually do, that he could actually do, was it? In her time with Buddy he had never shown any sort of bent towards violence whatsoever, absolutely no inkling of it to the point that she had begun to find him almost sickeningly docile and weak, what with him bending to her nearly every wish and want... nearly. She tried to convince herself that it was “always” so, but that was a lie, wasn’t it? Buddy did put his foot down on some matters, and when he did so, that was it. He was at those times frustratingly inflexible, and it was doubly annoying that he was almost always proved right on those matters in the end, despite her hissy-fits to the contrary.

But murder? Buddy was far too kind and gentle to go that far.

Ramon now? Ramon looked like he could kill. His wildness was part of her attraction to him; what with his testosterone infused muscles, and his dangerous looking tattoos and piercings. Ramon seemed almost eager to kill, or at least he had appeared more likely to be a killer up until the moment when Buddy stomped the shit out of him right here in front of her very eyes. She’d found out quick enough that Buddy was not weaker than Ramon, as she had thought and expected him to be. Not even a little bit.

Shit-fuck! What was she thinking? No one was going to kill anyone, were they? But what would she do if Buddy did kill Ramon? Would she turn him in? Could she? How could she do that to Austin and Callie’s father when this whole thing was her fault to begin with? But on the other hand, how could she not? In fact, the thought zipped across her mind as quickly as a shoo-fly at a picnic, that turning him in might be an even better way than divorce to be rid of Buddy. She would get everything! But the thought soured as quickly as it came, as it would come at the cost of her kids hating her forever… unless she could think of a way?

The tears were just about to start again, the whole emotional cycle to begin again, when there came to her from the very wall’s themselves the distinct rumble of the garage door opening. He was back! Oh shit, he was back! But how to greet him? What to say? How to act? Her instinct was to fix herself up a little, to wipe away the mascara that surely stained her face and the dried cum that had her feeling sticky and stiff all over, but that option being unavailable to her, the only other one was to wait here spread-eagled, naked, and to attempt to exhibit a look of shame, even if she did not feel it.

The wait was a long one, too. She could hear him downstairs rifling through drawers and cabinets looking for God knew what. Rebecca thought to call out to him, to find out what he was doing down there, but she did not. She did not call out because suddenly, for the first time in their seventeen years together, Rebecca felt a cold apprehension toward a man who had ever and always been good to her; who was good to both her and their children, who was a good provider, and a good example of what a man should be. How was it then that she had stopped loving him? That she had become unhappy? That she was unfulfilled? How had it happened?

Unfulfilled? Shit! As though Ramon was fulfilling anything at all inside of her other than her vanity. And the unmanly way he had cowered naked before Buddy disgusted her, although even she had to admit that today she’d seen a strength in her husband that she’d never seen before, or at least that she’d never noticed, and would never have believed existed.

Those thoughts left her when came a squeak from the stairwell. He was coming up now, Buddy was. She could sense his weight on the steps, slowly and heavily, one by one, tromping as a young boy will tromp toward some disdainful task. She saw his shadow first, and then his form in the doorway, a countenance so sad upon him that she would not have believed it was him had she not known better, having rarely ever seen him visibly unhappy. Odd it was… to see that her husband actually had feelings. He’d never bothered showing them to her before, had he? Maybe if he had things could have been different, but he stopped there in the doorway not looking at her, the melancholy look on his face unchanging, though his eyes wore an icy expression.

Rebecca began in that same annoying, instigating voice she always assumed with Buddy. “Are you going to untie me before the kids get home? You don’t want them to see me like this, do you?” Even now she failed to notice the condescension in her own voice, probably because it was always there when she spoke to him. Over the years this had slowly become her “Buddy voice.”

He stepped into the room without answering. She noticed then that there was a piece of paper in one of his hands and a pistol in the other, that old revolver of his that he never pulled out since the kids were born. She’d nearly forgotten about that old thing. The idea that the gun was so old that it probably wouldn’t fire anymore gave her some confidence. He set the gun and the paper down on the dresser and walked over to the bedside. Anger had once again replaced Rebecca’s attempt at shame. That pitiful look he was wearing was the very embodiment of why she was cheating, wasn’t it? She softened a bit, however, when he began untying her right hand from the headboard. Thank God!

”Hurry up… please.” She might yet manage to get decent before the kids got home, if he fucking hurried. And she would need to hide Ramon’s things, seeing the pile of his clothes on the floor reminded her. “Where is Ramon? Where did you take him?”

”To the Mason County Bridge.”

”To the bridge? Why?”

”I told him he might survive the jump, but that I was surely going to kill him if he didn’t try it.”

When Buddy didn’t elaborate, she had to ask. “Did he jump?”

Buddy’s answer sounded bored. “Yep.”

Her mind raced. That bridge was pretty high, and the river pretty shallow beneath it. She wondered if the jump was survivable? “Did you see him?”

”He was floating.”

He picked up the paper. “Sign this.”

”Not until you untie me.”

”I’m not untying you.”

”Oh yes you fucking are!” She said it, but he was speaking in that unbending tone he sometimes used, the one that always pissed her off so, the one that told her he was done arguing.

He held the paper up to her so she swatted at it with her one free hand, knocking it away. “What does it fucking say?”

”It says that Jeremy and Lilly are going to assume custody of Austin and Callie. They already have control of their trust, as executors.”

”So you’re going to shoot me?”

”Yep.”

“Jesus, Buddy. You can’t let the kids find me like this.” She played along, not really believing he would do it.

”I called Lilly. She’s picking them up from school.”

”What’ll you do… after?”

”I haven’t decided. I might shoot myself after, I might not. Prison might not be so bad. I guess I can always kill myself in my cell if it is that bad”

”Buddy, you can’t do this. Think about the kids.”

”Me? You wanna put this on me? You think I should be worrying about the kids? Maybe you should have thought about the kids, Beck?”

”All I do is think about the kids.”

”Oh, so now you’re going to put this on them? The kids have caused you to miss your chance at a good time? Is that it? Because of them you can’t be tied up and jacked-off all over whenever you want to?”

”He has a kink.”

”Had.”

”What?”

”He had a kink.”

”Whatever.” She was busy trying to reach the ropes tying her left hand with her free right one. Letting her struggle he picked the paper and pen off the dresser.

“You gonna sign this?”

”No.”

Setting them back down, he picked the pistol up next. There was nothing left to do, or to say. Sensing a new resolve, she stopped struggling with the ropes and leaned back against the headboard. “Go ahead,” her anger flared. “You don’t have the balls. I dare you to do it.”

So he did.

Amazingly, her eyes open, Rebecca saw the blast at the barrel’s end, and she felt its hammer blow. She even heard it’s echoing report, though from someplace far, far away.

Being around you means learning to read again.

But instead of sounding out letters, I'm puzzling over the tilt of your head.

I'm watching the corners of your mouth.

I'm trying to understand the word scribbled in the shape of your brows.

Why is it so hard to understand the meaning behind the slope of your shoulders?

Can you explain why your laugh seems to rhyme with when you cry?

What kind of vowels are your hands making?

Are those signals in your tone platonic, phonetic, or romantic?

Please write your body language in CAPITALS, because I keep skipping over the consonants and silent E's in your gaze.

The first thing I remember is darkness, glowing faintly red. Back then, I was an amphibian, a human being who could breathe in my mother’s amniotic waters. I remember the light, the fear—and then a slap.

Yesterday, outside my five-story apartment building—a typical one for the country now “unspeakable,” the supposed threat to all humanity—I overheard a conversation between some local guys. One of them said,

“Where everyone sees a problem, I see opportunities.”

A perfect motto for the years when I lived my early life. The 1990s in Russia, a country that had just shed its red uniform. A ruined, violated land where gangsters and oligarchs tore apart the remnants of the motherland.

From a young age, I knew three rules for survival. My grandmother, who had been a radio operator during the Great Patriotic War, taught me these:

Never get into a car with strangers.

Be home by four.

Never open the door to anyone.

And I also remember my mother’s breath.

The rest of my memories are scattered. Here I am, pushing a stranger’s stroller with a little boy through my small ghetto. Mothers stroll with their children, the streets are still green, untouched by the ever-present dust from the steppes. It’s different now.

Then, it’s like a void: nothing until my grandfather picks me up in his arms. That memory is vivid. He had grown up in a village and drank heavily. My father said my grandmother died from the stress he caused when my dad was 16. But I only learned this when I turned 20.

At that moment, I was just a baby. My grandfather held me, smiling. In his kitchen, there was an aluminum basin where he soaked apples for winter. My mother told me he passed away two days later.

It’s strange that I remember this—I was only one year old. I think my childhood ended when I first learned about death.

I remember that moment. I was three, and my mom was putting me down for a nap. She lay beside me, wrapping her arms around me. Her voice was soft and soothing, almost like silk. She was half-asleep, and I stared at the golden curtains swaying gently in the breeze. That glow—it still comes back to me when I need to feel happy.

Because happiness is a choice. Even then, I understood that.

I heard our neighbor—a hunched old woman named Zhenya—open her door. Suddenly, I asked my mom,

“Why does Grandma Zhenya look so different from you or me?”

Half-asleep, she murmured,

“She’s old. She’ll pass away soon.”

“What does ‘pass away’ mean?” I asked.

Mom opened her eyes and answered gently,

“Sweetheart, we all leave one day and never come back.”

I lay there with my eyes wide open while Mom drifted off to sleep. And then I burst into tears, sobbing loudly:

“Mom, I don’t want to die! I don’t want you to die!”

Mom hugged me tightly and said it wouldn’t happen for a very long time, and that she’d always be there for me.

Now I’m 34, and my mom is 68, but I still hope that what she said is true.

My childhood was a good one—good enough, considering how bad things were outside, on the streets. My parents worked in the theater, and I would climb around the stage, hide among the props, and watch adult performances.

But that’s another story, and I wouldn’t want to bore you.

What surprises me most is that this is the first time I’ve written about myself.

I keep waiting for noise.

My ears ring with its absence,

like phantom limb pain

for a sound that's gone.

The neighbor's wind chimes

still make me flinch.

But there's only breeze now,

no distant thunder of shells.

My tea grows cold

while I watch clouds.

They're just clouds now,

not signals or signs.

Sparrows have returned

to nest in broken eaves.

Strange how ordinary songs

fill spaces bombs left behind.

My hands remember

the weight of a rifle

but hold garden tools instead.

The dirt accepts them both.

The kids next door play war.

I want to tell them

they're doing it wrong—

too much laughing, too much joy.

But their peace is real,

not this quiet I wear

like borrowed clothes,

still stiff with tags.

At night I count heartbeats,

not casualties.

The numbers mean nothing now.

Nothing needs counting.

Sometimes I catch myself

planning escape routes

through my own garden.

Old habits die harder than people.

The silence stretches,

thick as armor.

I'm still learning

how to laugh again.

The neon buzzed and flickered against the wet asphalt, and Martin watched it pulse with the steady determination of a fading heartbeat. The sign was old now. Everything was old here. He stood in the rain and listened to the sound of water hitting his shoulders and thought about how time moves in only one direction.

Inside the Main Street Diner, chrome surfaces reflected fractured light that danced and spiraled across the walls like lost memories seeking their owners, while the linoleum floor bore the patient scars of ten thousand footsteps, each one carrying its own story of arrival or departure or both. The bell rang when he entered. It was a clean sound. A true sound.

Tommy sat at the counter. His shoulders were broad and heavy with years of manual labor, and his hands were scarred from wrenches and engines and the countless small betrayals of mechanical things. He did not turn around.

"Figured you'd show up." Tommy spoke to his coffee cup. The coffee was black and still steaming. "Read about your mother in the paper."

Martin sat. The stool creaked. It was the same sound it had made twenty years ago, when they were young and the future was a bright coin they thought they could spend forever.

"Hello, Tommy."

The waitress came. She wore a nametag that said Dorothy, but she was not the Dorothy they had known. That Dorothy was dead now. Everything dies eventually. Martin ordered coffee because it was the only thing to do.

"Still drinking it black?" Tommy asked, and his voice carried the weight of decades spent watching others leave while he remained, anchored to this town like a ship that had forgotten how to sail. "Some things don't change."

"Some things do."

Tommy's laugh cut through the diner's measured silence like a blade through old rope. "Yeah. Like you becoming the big Boston lawyer while I stayed here fixing engines that keep getting older while the parts get harder to find."

The coffee came. It was hot and bitter and true. Martin wrapped his hands around the mug and felt the heat seep into his fingers. The diner's air conditioning hummed with mechanical persistence. It had always been too cold here.

"You chose to stay," Martin said.

"Did I?" Tommy turned then, and his face was a map of years spent wondering about roads not taken. "Or did you choose to leave?"

Outside, the neon sign kept its vigil against the darkness. Pink light, then darkness. Pink light, then darkness. A rhythm as steady as regret.

"Remember that summer we were going to drive across the country?" Tommy's voice was soft now, dangerous with memory. "You had that AAA atlas. All those red marks showing where we'd stop. Like droplets of blood on a paper dream."

"We were eighteen."

"And then Harvard called, and suddenly the whole world got bigger for you and smaller for me at the same time." Tommy's fingers traced patterns in the condensation on his coffee mug. They were a mechanic's fingers, thick and strong and honest. "Funny how that works."

The silence between them grew like shadows at sunset, long and deep and full of things that could not be said. The coffee grew cold. The neon kept its rhythm. Pink light. Darkness. Pink light. Darkness.

"I never meant to leave you behind," Martin said. The words fell between them like autumn leaves, beautiful and dead.

"Doesn't matter what you meant." Tommy's voice was flat and hard as the surface of the counter. "You left. I stayed. The rest is just details."

Martin remembered summer afternoons in Tommy's garage, the air thick with motor oil and possibility, their hands black with grease as they rebuilt engines and futures with equal determination. Now the air smelled only of coffee and time.

"I miss you sometimes," Martin said.

"Miss what? The kid I was or the man I became?"

"Both. Neither. I don't know."

Tommy nodded slowly, understanding everything and nothing. "That's the thing about ghosts. They're always what we need them to be, not what they are."

The bell rang again. New customers entered, their voices carrying the light certainty of people who had never lost anything that mattered. Martin reached for his wallet.

"Don't," Tommy said. His voice was gravel and rust. "This one's on the house. For old times."

Martin stood. The vinyl seat exhaled beneath him like a final breath. "Take care, Tommy."

"You too, Marty. Try not to wait for the next funeral."

Outside, the rain had stopped, but the sidewalk held its wetness like a memory. Martin walked to his rental car, each step a small betrayal. Through the window, Tommy sat motionless at the counter, frozen in time like a photograph of permanence, his hands still cupped around a coffee mug that had grown cold with waiting.

Pink light. Darkness. Pink light. Darkness.

The neon kept its rhythm, and the night held its secrets, and some things changed while others remained as constant as gravity, as relentless as time, as eternal as regret.

war is always within and against the self

I.

the first War is against imposed order

from the cradle

of civilization

to the grave

of the soul

II.

the second War is against perceived other

a processing

of elimination

to iron our

difference

III.

the third War is against the internal org

neutralizing

of operation

to pin a

dying flesh

IV.

the fourth War is against the imagination

12.12.2024

War I, II, III, IV challenge @dctezcan

When two

join hands

one turns left

the other turns right

and impossibly,

they meet the middle

and make a promise

becoming one

War is the deliberate choice against compromise. Hate at its great(est).

We the people with what power?

Power(less) to choose our paths,

our leaders.

A flawed system,

we are living towards our future ruins.

One by one all great civilizations fall and for too long we’ve turned a blind eye, ignoring the impending self destruction.

War is simple, stewardship is for the deserving.

The Irish Child gathered rocks to fling at the English soldiers in the streets of Belfast.

Fire, from molotov cocktails made from bottles filled with petrol, launched at tanks rattling in the streets.

The Irish Child only knew war, not caring about political affiliations or even the reasons why.

Or even knowing anything about the conflict itself, only that his parent's were against the soldiers, and he would protect them with his life.

The Irish Child grew a scatterwag in the streets, banging bin lids in cobblestone street at the approach of soldiers.

Burning bottle, rock, glass, wood and finally bullet, though that was a game the adults played. The deadliest game of all.

Vale the Irish Child, weep the Irish child,

Cry for innocence, all for the Irish child.

With varying degrees of intensity,

my internal war rages on.

Freedom of choice vs. obligation to others,

a conflict that’s been fought since time’s dawn.

The battle requires a decision to be made

that personal responsibility must mediate.

Choosing a position to take is juxtaposed

to choosing a position to abdicate.

The skirmish renews each morning,

since the tempest percolates whilst I sleep.

There’s no option that involves fleeing

because the repercussion would echo too deep.

I long for a palatable solution,

which could usher in welcomed peace.

But my internal war will continue raging on,

'til I find an existential release.