i will listen to your mix cd and enjoy every song unironically

2009-08-23T10:29:00.001-07:00

i will listen to your mix cd
and enjoy every song unironically

microfiction by michael doherty

when the storm is over all we have left is the wreckage

2009-08-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

there were glow-in-the-dark plastic stars on your ceiling. you told me that when you were on acid they looked incredible, like you were god and they were tiny galaxies you had created. galaxies filled with small things.

i told you about the time i saw a dead duck in the road, and lost my virginity. i said i wasn't sure which was more important, but you said that obviously the duck was more important because that was a life, however tiny, taken forever from this small galaxy, carelessly. you turned on belle & sebastian and we were very quiet.

in the two seconds after 'the stars of track & field' ended and before the second song that no one knows started, i asked if we could go for a walk. you waited a few moments and silently agreed. we slipped out the front door and i tried to hold your hand, but you snapped it away quickly. i didn't ask why.

outside the sky was very clear, when i looked up my mind was swimming through tiny stars. i looked for the north star but i didn't remember enough from ninth grade earth science to find it. i asked you and you said you didn't know and asked why i cared. i said i didn't, i was just curious, i was always just curious. we passed strip malls and 7-11s and i leaned closer to you, frightened by all of the fluorescent light.

my head was a galaxy filled with small things. i thought everyone was like that, living more inside themselves than outside, never completely sharing themselves with other people because the time just never felt appropriate. it seemed impolite to bare your soul at a dinner party. i looked up at the sky again.

there was a long pause as we passed into a stretch of sidewalk where no other people were out, and i couldn't hear any cars in the distance. a small bright spot was flying across the sky. i pointed to it and said it was a shooting star. you said it was just an airplane. i said we should wish on it anyway. you agreed in a bored voice. i closed my eyes and wondered if we made the same wish.

an ocean, or a desert

2009-08-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

oh god, eric thought, what if i'm going to be alone forever? eric was on his mail-route the way he was every morning. he drove his small u.p.s. truck across the ocean of his small city's suburbs. it felt less like an ocean, though, and more like a desert. he looked at his surroundings and felt terribly discouraged, or shitty. he felt like a pigeon nested in the top of a grocery store, conspicuous and trapped. he felt this way often.

last night eric had gone to jared's apartment, to his tiny kitchen and his bedroom. they kissed twice, with their clothes laid out hastily on the floor, and eric felt unsatisfied, or frustrated, because jared's face seemed so perfect in the small line of light coming in from the hallway, but kissing or sex or anything didn't feel like enough to express it. eric had felt that way before about other people, but he had always thought sex would express it. eric found sex disappointing most of the time. jared looked at his eyes and said, "let's kiss like penguins," and they pressed their noses together for a long time. "igloo," jared said.

"igloo too," eric said.

eric came back to reality in a stilted, half-there way. still slightly in a daze, eric got out of his truck to check the mailbox of the next house. he took out a small, messily put-together package, the address on which read:

GRANDPA
HEAVEN

eric looked at the handwriting, it seemed to be a young child's. eric looked around and then opened the package, containing a letter and a few very old photographs of a young woman. the letter read (with spelling errors corrected):

dear grandpa, i have been getting much taller this year, mom says i am going to get even taller though! i haven't seen you in a very long time so i wanted to write you a letter. margie has been barking very much and sometimes throwing up, so we think she is sick. dad is still away, i miss him all the time. i'll send some pictures of grandma too, because she misses you very much. when will you be coming back home? everyone misses you. WRITE BACK. love, melanie

after finishing the letter, eric looked at his shoes for a little while. eric looked at his truck. eric wasn't sure what he was thinking about. eric held the letter tightly to his chest.

in the grocery store with my estranged brother who lives in portland, oregon

2009-08-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

i'm in the chain grocery store with my mother and my estranged older brother. i struggle to think of what to say. i look to the middle-aged housewives, carts so filled with processed food. i can't imagine what it must feel like to need so much.

"look at the woman with the chips ahoy cookies," i say to my brother. he keeps walking. the air is tentative, or awkward, but not like a scenester 'awkkkkwardddd', an actual tense silence that i can feel deep in my stomach.

are the shoppers happy? or does the lady in hall monitor jeans feel resentment toward the three boxes of wheat thins stacked in her cart? my brother lives in portland. do they have chain grocery stores in portland? it feels stupid to ask.

my mother grabs a carton of organic soymilk and i take it out and put in rice milk.

"it's better for you," i explain. i try to smile a little bit.

my mother shrugs and keeps shopping, walking through the frozen food section. i haven't been able to eat frozen food for a long time, longer than i haven't been able to watch t.v. because it feels so depressing. it's a very specific kind of depressing, eating food that was made in a factory. food that comes out of a box.

my brother is a freegan and he plays the acoustic guitar. he dropped out of philosophy school to leave albany. i feel like we should have more to talk about, because we have a lot in common. i desperately want to be best friends with my estranged older brother. i try to think of what to talk about. the days we used to play gameboy and catch grasshoppers in the backyard?

i have to try harder, i think. i approach my brother and ask him about portland. he laughs and asks what i want to know. i ask about dumpster-diving and he tells me it's cool. just that. it's cool.

i sigh and wonder if i am thinking too hard. a boy who used to go to my high school passes by me. i feel like a large grey cloud blanketing portland, oregon, blocking out a small pale moon.

a field guide to the native plantlife of albany, ny

2009-08-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

if you look in tiny places, you can see tiny life. and life is best in miniature.

scene girl is watching a caterpillar crawl across a leaf. scene girl thinks of umbrella girl. scene girl thinks that maybe, vaguely, umbrella girl appreciates tiny life in the same way she does. the way she walked straight through the parking lot with her umbrella, not looking at any of the cars. scene girl was sure of it.

scene girl had always had an interest in plants, ever since she was very young. she thought grass was beautiful. she still thinks that. she's never loved flowers the same way as other plants. they seemed too perfect to her, almost suspicious. she would rather sit under the old, old oak tree and fall asleep reading "a primer on the native plantlife of new york state" and feel content as tiny ants crawled onto her body.

scene girl made a loose plan to create a field guide to the plants of albany, new york and give it to umbrella girl. her friend button-up shirt boy had told her that umbrella girl would be at the acoustic show in the vegan cafe next week. she made a loose plan to be there, too.

when scene girl was fourteen she had her friend give her a tattoo. it was a tiny clover on her ankle, but she had to think for a long time about it. she was a little bit high when she got it, but she does not regret it. thinking of it now, watching the tiny caterpillar meet a tiny millipede, she touches her ankle. the clover has three leaves, because scene girl thought having a four-leaf clover tattoo would be 'totally fucking hackneyed'.

scene girl draws a sketch of a small fern in her notebook. she looks dreamily at the sky and it seems more like a very high-up ocean. she pretends it is an ocean, and she feels light, like she could think something relevant, or irrelevant, and it would be perfectly cohesive. because scene girl is a dadaist at certain times, and she doesn't believe in real cohesion, or something else to make her sound interesting at a party. scene girl closes her eyes and falls into the grass.

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scene girl approaches the vegan cafe like it is an angry dog. cautiously, but trying to look like she knows what she is doing. scene girl puts her cigarette to her mouth. button-up shirt boy waves at her and tilts his head toward where umbrella girl is sitting.

scene girl waves back tentatively. she looks at umbrella girl. umbrella girl has a tattoo on her left arm. the tattoo is a nearly bare tree, with long stick figure arms and one or two brown leaves on the side of a few of the branches. scene girl feels a sudden desire to write a very long poem.

there is a thin handmade book in scene girl's hand. she begins to walk over tentatively, trying to seem detached without seeming like she is trying. scene girl is not good at hiding her nervousness.

scene girl sits down at umbrella girl's table, straight across from her. the two of them are the only ones at the table. umbrella girl begins to say something but doesn't. she just looks at scene girl and then looks at the book and it seems like she knows exactly what's going to happen.

like some species of shitty, retarded swan

2009-08-08T18:35:00.000-07:00

this was the year that it became unfashionable to smile in photographs.

girls would change their faces to look as sullen as possible whenever a camera was around. it was championed by vogue, elle, everyone. 'frown yourself thin,' read magazine covers in chain grocery stores across middle-america. people gradually began to forget what dimples were.

i remember you wanted to be a model very badly. you would blink slowly and try to look glamorous, like some species of shitty, retarded swan. it really was beautiful. you wanted to be a model but you wrote poetry too.

you got so frustrated trying to get a break that it scared me sometimes. you would scatter your portolio all over the floor, play three angry chords on your mandolin, and scream into a pillow. i was afraid of you mostly, but also curious. what was going on in your head? what were you thinking about when you frowned for the camera?

i asked you once what you thought about. you said when you looked into a camera you thought about floating. you tried very hard to float, put all of your energy into it. but you could never float, and that made it hard not to cry. not crying was the real work of being a model.

when you wore a scarf you looked like a cross between a bulldog and a ladybug. i was never afraid of the bulldog part, that was the part i liked. it was the ladybug that scared me, so small, fragile. i was afraid of crushing you with the weight of my little toe, breaking your tiny bones.

once i was looking at my facebook near midnight and you called me and said, uhm can we talk, really fast, no punctuation. i said of course.

you told me that you went on a trip when you were very young and there were all of these larks, and a mountaintop! there was a mountaintop. you weren't making any sense at all, so i said, what are you thinking about? you said you were thinking of larks. there was this old retarded man and it was raining hard and he held his umbrella above the larks and they flew away and he cried. you said that was what you were thinking about.

i felt very confused and sad, and asked if we could talk tomorrow. you said yes, we can talk tomorrow but it sounded blank and filled with the desire to be everything at once. you said you had to go work on your frown anyway. as you hung up the phone, i knew i would not hear from you tomorrow or ever again.

going to american apparel is not going to make you feel happier.

2009-08-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

you feel sad. you read proust with this terrible feeling in your heart like nothing will ever be enough. you're sitting on your bed, and it's almost 3pm on a saturday and you are at home reading proust by yourself. you shut the book very slowly and put your head on your pillow. you kind of wish you could sleep forever and not have to wake up at 6am to go to school every weekday.

you feel like your life is ruled by capitalism and you do not want your life to be ruled by capitalism. when a friend wants to hang out with you, they always say, "let's go to the mall!" and that's just how things are in america. you want to lay on a rooftop with someone and make up names for stars. you check your cellphone very quickly. nothing.

you feel vague and transient a lot of the time, irrelevant or something. you feel like you are in a play that doesn't have any human characters, a play about a time when no one is around, where the actors act as trees, or blades of grass, or the ocean. but you've only seen the ocean a few times, so you find it hard to visualize.

you listen to music for an hour and fall asleep at 4pm.

2009-08-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

about the author

michael doherty is a sixteen-year-old poet from albany, new york. his work has been published in rumble and graffiti magazine as well as various other publications. he is an intern to tao lin and he writes for the website 518 reviews about diy music in albany. his email is michael.poems@gmail.com.

eleanor and the magical casiotone

2009-08-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

on friday night, in the largest wal-mart in north america, eleanor looks at acoustic guitars. she puts her hand on one of the guitars and it feels smooth and sleek, like the marble on fireplaces. a very young-looking preteen girl walks into the aisle quietly. the girl is wearing a white hoodie and the kind of baggy jeans that every girl eleanor didn't get along with in high school seemed to wear every day, if they weren't wearing sweatpants. eleanor wears a plaid shirt and skinny jeans. eleanor feels vaguely superior to the preteen girl, then catches herself and feels bad about this. eleanor's eyes meet the preteen girl's eyes for a second and a half and move away very quickly. eleanor leaves the guitar aisle feeling awkward.

the employee at the electronics desk is blonde and wears dorky metal-frame glasses. eleanor wonders if he feels good about himself. this is a game eleanor plays often, estimating the happiness of strangers based on only their appearance. eleanor thinks the employee is probably not very happy. a woman with a small child at her legs talking eagerly about super smash brothers approaches the employee. eleanor walks aimlessly through the electronics and music section. eleanor feels 'incredibly depressed' and puts her hands in her pockets.

eleanor comes to a deserted aisle with keyboards and cell-phone accessories. there is a keyboard on display for anyone to play. eleanor plays three notes over and over and tries to make something beautiful. nothing beautiful comes out of the keyboard.

eleanor walks over to a small display of casiotone keyboards. they are on sale and eleanor picks one up. a casiotone seems like something i should want to buy, eleanor thinks. she brings it to the electronics desk and waits for a large couple in matching baggy jeans to buy a point-and-shoot camera. the employee with the glasses takes the casiotone box in his hands. he rings it up. eleanor thinks of the small patches of grass in between highway lanes. she wants to have a picnic on one someday, she decides. eleanor then realizes she doesn't know anyone who would want to have a picnic on a highway with her.

----

eleanor reads the wikipedia article on casiotone. wikipedia asks "did you mean, 'casiotone for the painfully alone'?" and eleanor says no, wikipedia, but thank you. it is important to thank the internet sometimes, eleanor thinks. eleanor gets very bored with the tiny wikipedia article and decides to vandalize it. she does this in a very small way, because she does everything in a very small way. she changes the sentence "casiotone keyboards come in three distinct families, seperated by method of synthesis," so that it claims there are only two families of casiotone. she feels like this wikipedia article is 'fucking pretentious' and closes the window.

eleanor runs her hand over the new keyboard. it feels very smooth, smoother than a new acoustic guitar. she plays the highest note and nothing comes out. she plays the lowest note and nothing comes out of the keyboard.

oh, it's broken, eleanor thinks in a very neutral way. she puts her hand on her face very briefly. eleanor hears rustling outside, and turns around to look out the window of her apartment.

outside of the window there are more birds than eleanor can count. she smiles very hard, grabs the broken casiotone, and walks out the door, to the street outside, toward what she thinks is the way to the ocean, if she can remember it right.