"You wanna help me with this," he says, "ya gawkin' fool?"

You reel back, at even the thought of walking closer to the edge. "Fuuu-no!" you manage to belch, and then you submerge back down into the house, looking desperately for a kitchen sink or a bucket or something and it's lights out for you again.

This is all quite familiar, in a strange way. Familiar in the same way you remember some sort of office, some sort of VP of Communications sort of thing. But right now the bathroom is here, and whatever sort of services you once provided are lost in the thrum as you notice someone standing above you.

"Are you alright?" she says gruffly, and there's no doubt that you've slept in her bed. There's some sort of tube top thing happening there that both attracts and repulses you. You manage to sit up, faltering and surging at the sight of her. It must be love. You wonder if she's going to smack you or kiss you, and then she kisses you and everything is alright.

I'm crouched on the floor facing the stairs I just came down. Each one is pointed a different bright color. It feels sad- like a feeble attempt at rebelion. One stuck in someone's basement on the back stairs. I feel a faint feeling of nausea swell and then subside. It strikes me that my whole life has been a feeble rebelion stuck on someone's back stairs.
"Fucking or pancakes and sausage at IHOP?" she is saying, pinching off the last edge of her pinky nail with her front teeth adn spitting it accross the pile of clothes wehre it hits the washing machine door- making her thought process strangely audible. "I could go either way," she says. She's pulling her bra strap back up from her shoulder where it had slipped and I can tell she wants an answer.

Hey guys. I'm not sure if this is how i'm supposed to do this... but here's another story part :

She is sitting in a huge recliner that, to her, is just comfortable. her hair is braided and tied on top of her head with a red bandana. It's raining outside and soon the tail lights on the other side of her window will be stretching themselves out over the black river of pavement and inching along toward home.

she'll be thirty tomorrow. This house must be turning a hundred and thirty soon. When Jacke and Mark Harner lived here, Jackie came home to Mark with no head, blood and pieces of bone stuck to the uphostry and puddles of blood collecting on the carpet. I wondered what she had to do to herself to forget that scene. I never saw it and still I couldn't stop seeing it.

they (well, Jackie anyway) moved out. I think she moved to the coast. Mark was burried in the Millwood cemetary. That's where he's stuck. I'm sure Jane Hawley is not sitting in the same chair that mark Harner shot his head off in. I'm sure someone replaced it since then. There was a whole other family living here after that. I can't remember their names but their teenage daughter died. Her name was Rebecca. She was propelled out of the sunroof a classmates car and then crushed when the whole car rolled over her. They were drunk. Her dad was an alcoholic priest of some indistiguishable sort. The mother divorced him and i'm not sure what happened after that. The only thing I do remember is seeing that poor mother at a restaraunt in the same neighborrhood a couple days after Rebecca died- knawing on a chicken thigh and absently staring out the window.

Why did I think of it? I think it was raining that day too and it was about this same time when the tailights were turning the asphalt to a dark river of red nail polish- leaking toward home.

She is sitting strangely still in the recliner- staring out the window- her fet folded under her. She whips her head toward me, one of her braids falling out of the red bandana contraption and hitting her on the side of the neck. "You know I don't believe in bad luck. Everything that happens- happens for a reason. So how can that be bad or luck? It isn't bad or good.. it just happens and it happens for a reason, so its not luck.

The light is small for the size of the room and jane looks like she's sitting under a spotlight. Maybe she planned it that way. The couch I'm sitting on is positioned far enough away to be the stands for the audience and come to think of it- I haven't said one word since I got here. i've been drifting in and out of what she's saying like a real audience... half attentive and half just noticing the venue.

"Remember that time we were at the Gallery under the Maple Street Bridge and that bus crashed into the top of it? People kept saying what bad luck that was- and of coursed it wasn't bad luck at all. Right? You see what i"m saying, right?

"YOu mean it happened for a reason?" It wasn't hard to guess what she meant.

"Yeah! Exactly! That's what i love about you! You always know where I'm coming from! "

"What was the reason?" I ask, slinging my left leg over the arm of the couch.

"How the hell should i know? Maybe the bus driver who died diving head first into a sculpture of mangled wind shimes was about to kill his mother in law. Maybe the guy who shot him was living off of diet coke and popcorn for three days too long. That's a reason. It doesn't matter. But that week is the week I took the "shit happens" bumper sticker off my car. Remember?" She took a long swig of sticky cough syrup and smacked her lips.