"Writer "
The Transformer
We used to be free then they
planted us in high school and jobs and said this is how you fit. It's
important to fit but not in the ways they tell you. You have to know when to
listen and when to shut them out.
I collect transformers. You
know those plastic robot toys you can bend. The autobots are the good guys.
They bend into trucks and cars. The decepticons can be almost anything. They
have names like Star Scream, Omega Supreme and Jazz Inferno. I like them
best. I have almost a hundred in my collection.
For me they’re like flowers:
the same purple, red and orange colours. When you bend a transformer in the
right direction, it clicks, it pops, it fits. You can force it the wrong
way. When I have the anger in me, I have broken pieces. Not that I’m
particularly proud of that.
I have some college and I’ve
taught myself human anatomy.
In high school, they called me
Turtle because I'd walk bent over, real slow, looking down at the ground.
The girls were always laughing
at me and playing jokes like sticking phony love letters into my locker. One
time the entire track team surrounded the school and wouldn't let me out.
In the shower, I'd turn myself
into a rock when they threw eggs at me.
I live at home with my mother
and sister on Long Island. A place called East Meadow. Father died six years
ago. Not my real parents. I was adopted.
The factories around here are
rusting. An orange-red bleeding down their sides. Windows are boarded over,
high fences surround the buildings.
In the parking lots, crab grass
and dandelions grow in the cracks in the asphalt.
That's where I go with the
women I pick up in the city.
I pay them for sex, and then I
kill them.
I like brunettes not blondes.
Prefer Americans to foreigners. They can talk but not too much. I really
could care less where they’re from or how they will get back there.
One night, I picked up this red
head. I pulled my part out and she sucked it, moaning like she actually
enjoyed it.
I put my hands around her neck
and tried to twist her into something else.
She didn't become something
else. She just went stiff, resistant, made it very difficult to work with
her. Then I had to stuff her into a green garbage bag to keep her out of the
way.
I decided to plant her in the
ground like a flower. Two weeks later, I saw a hand sticking out that an
animal had gnawed at.
