Track Mangoes

Earlier that day Bruce had been sitting in a cafe reading Justine when a classmate approached him (an obese socialist who loved to talk about metaphysics and wear tee shirts, on which were vaguely creepy sayings referencing a mental illness [schizophrenia perhaps] which, of course, he did not have) and asked whether or not he was going to vote.

Bruce laughed. "Oh," Bruce replied, taking his coffee mug in his hand and tilting it forward, only to find that it was empty. "I guess I forgot that that was today." The fat philosopher laughed and stood in the middle of the cafe twirling his hands in the air and spitting all over Bruce's table, going on and on about how a society free of coercion would not need the right to vote. Bruce took this to mean that a citizen could simply intuit a leader. As the boy spoke the heads of the people in the cafe turned like wind vanes on a balmy day. Bruce's brow began to furl.

The boy's diatribe ceased when he announced, loudly, that he was going to take a shit. He retreated into the cafe's bathroom, not having bought anything and Bruce seized the opportunity to get up from his table and head to class early. As he exited the cafe, ringing the bell on the swinging screen door, he looked back in through a large glass window at the table where he had been sitting, at his empty white coffee mug, and at the expression of the woman who was sitting next to the bathroom on her Macintosh laptop: it was one of distress.

After he left the cafe, Bruce ambled past the church and noticed a sign on the window that read "VOTE NOW!" He stopped on the sidewalk, holding his copy of Justine close to his breast, and starred at the sign. He could see his own reflection in the window, and past it several old people with graying hair and coke bottle glasses sitting behind a table while people from the adjacent neighborhood milled about filling out forms and sliding them into red, white, and blue counting machines.

It was at this time that Bruce caught an unpleasant odor that upturned his nose and caused him to look behind himself. The fat socialist was walking towards him, taking tiny steps with his thin legs that jutted out from his body like toothpicks from a potato. Not owing to anything, Bruce entered the church and decided to vote.

A diamond in the rough:

The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, "You have forgotten -- mine?"

Scribbled in a notebook O'Connor kept during her first year of college, about two years after the death of her father. She was seventeen.

Bruce sat on the edge of his bed in his dimly lit room with his head in his hands and no pants on. The girl was laying back on a pillow. She picked at her nails and periodically reached her arm in a strange contortion behind her body in order to position the overhead lamp clipped to the bed frame to point towards her hands. She had to, at least, be able to see them.

"I don't really know what happened," Bruce said finally, running his hands through his hair.

He turned to face her, but she promptly turned off the light and rolled over onto her side with her back facing him.

They help me gaze at my shoes.

Can't wait for Wednesday.