It’s that time again.

Noir at the Bar NYC, held at Shade on the corner of Third Street and Sullivan in the heart of Greenwich Village, a neighborhood with a deep literary and musical history that now mostly functions as a place for children on their first drunk to vomit in the gutters and for young men with overabundant of testosterone and lacking social skills to shove each other and scream because no self-respecting woman would let them near the vaginas.

So it’s a perfect place for this event, attended by scumbags and rousabouts of the highest level, some of them reading, some of them listening and ALL of them drinking.

Come one, come all. I’ll be reading from my story “One More Day Can’t Hurt,” now available in Issue Five of Thuglit, the web’s most awarded crime fiction website.

Even when it was still open my feet sometimes left tracks in the dust between the shelves of that little used bookstore downtown. It’s gone now, don’t bother looking for it, but before it closed I found what follows written on a piece of notebook paper. It fell from the pages of a heavy book I as looking at, I don’t remember the title, something about gardening or cooking, and at first I took it for a page come loose from the binding. I opened the book to put it back, looked at the top of the piece of paper for a page number and instead saw blue lines and handwriting.

Dear Susie,

Do your collarbones still taste like the stars?

Has anyone ever told you that? Because it’s true and has been for all the empty years in between here and there. I wonder if you even still live in that big house at the end of Sparrow Lane, its white sides and lattice guarded by a line of oak trees. Those hours spent slicked with sweat and ignoring mosquitoes in your room, summer hours between noon and three in the afternoon. Your mother left for tea at noon, your father got home from the office at three and you tied that red scarf to the rail of the balcony outside your room to let me know the coast was clear.

I still have the scar on my knee from when I spilled racing to you on a backway street. You gathered me inside and cleaned it with something from the medicine cabinet and I tried not to wince. We fell upon each other afterward, my still-bleeding knee staining your bedspread, clumsy and eager and younger than I can imagine looking back now.

I hid my bike in the bushes behind your house and you balanced a heavy book on the edge of a table by the door with a teacup on top of it.

An early warning system. We thought we were very clever.

Today when I visited my knuckles fell shy of the door. I am not a boy any longer like I was the day when the door opened and the book fell and the cup shattered on the kitchen floor. You flew into your clothes, I flew out to the balcony and over the side, landing rough and tumbled toward my Schwinn.

I never saw your red scarf again that summer or any after.

Are those sheets still stained with my blood?

At a bookstore in town I bought a heavy book, tucked this note between its pages and left it on the porch of your house. Susie did you find it? Did you read it? Will I ever see you again?

I could find my old bike, you could find that red scarf and we could do our damndest to charm away the afternoons and make three hours seem like a blink.

Love,
Aaron.

I slipped the note back between the pages and put the book back on the shelf. Maybe Susie found it.

The shoe shine man haunts Galata like a thousand others, each anonymous as an individual drop in a June rain storm. The box was metal and wood, gold-colored and shining bright against his herringbone jacket and dull brown hat, the swerves of polish under his fingernails.

He begins by asking for a cigarette, then your name, climbing his way up to a handshake.

“Please.” He gestures to his shine box. “For the cigarette.”

His smile is bright, lent a certain honesty by the crinkling around his eyes and his crooked teeth as he shakes the hand of a stranger and holds on too long pulling them to the front of the box and placing their shoe upon the stand. They expect a scam, a sob story, an angle, a robbery. Some pull loose and leave, either polite about it or curt, but it doesn’t matter.

Only the handshake that lasted a few seconds does.

What are a few seconds measured against a life, against courtesy, against one cigarette or a dirty pair of shoes, against the weight of ages in each stone in Istanbul?

A few seconds is the last time one lover kissed another before leaving town, a glance across a crowded room, the bridge between innocence and guilt. A few seconds is a dropped ice cream cone or the steam rising from a cup of coffee, a life snuffed out or moment of boredom, a mother’s embrace, the sharp stubble of a father’s kiss or a sip of water.

A few seconds is a priceless artifact or nothing at all.

A few stolen seconds drifting from one hand to another, their life to his.

They only see one shoe shine man of a hundred, he only sees one cigarette in a thousand, one pair of sparkling blue eyes or dusty walking shoes, one polite or rude refusal. A few seconds is a few grains of sand that drift up his hourglass instead of down. Would they miss those few seconds even if they knew they had lost them?

He doubts it as he shuffles off, always just between one tick of the clock and the next.

“Please. For the cigarette.”

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog and I can hear the rain on the corrugated metal roof overhead, tiny vibrations like a sound that ran down my lips, caught in my beard like whiskey, each drop a tiny fire I could taste as I licked my lips and stared into my own eyes in the mirror behind the bar. So many hours on this stool, staring into those same eyes muted by the dim light of the bar. I don’t remember what color they are, I can never look in the mirror except in the bar’s dim light through an amber film of whiskey.

But I do remember that this vision isn’t real anymore, that it doesn’t mean what it used to, but is instead a head that I inhabit, a door or a basement hatch in my mind that I swing open against the rusted protest of its hinges and drop down into the dim light when I want to write about you. When I open the boxes that I keep down there and blow the dust off these memories, pieces of things I used to think about that broke during the move from the forfront of my mind. Moved is an exaggeration, a kindness really, I did not wrap these memories of you in last week’s newspaper and tape the box shut so that nothing would shift or shatter, I just tossed them inside and threw them down the stairs.

I wanted to hear them bang and break.

But they remain, these memories now cracked and broken, and I don’t even remember the way this china puzzle used to fit together. They’re better broken, more useful and do you think its strange that I get more out of you now that you’re gone? You’re a resource now, a rich vein of something in a tunnel rife with coal dust and canaries. These days I bring the birds out of the darkness and free them from their cages, I don’t wait for them to stop singing and die so that I know something is wrong, I don’t mine the tunnel anymore, and I’ve since coughed the black from my lungs.

Now even the least amount of dust seems too heavy to waste even a sneeze on, but sometimes I need to remember and to write a thing so I drop into the dim.

Now I leave the canaries up in the sunlight so that I can hear them singing. I’ll follow their voices back up into the light and away from these broken memories.

I’ll follow them out of the tunnel.

Travel Arrangements

Istanbul and then Athens, it’ll be my first trip abroad in a country where I don’t have word one of the language, not even the ability to say hello in some way other than nodding my head. I remember the way my hands shook in Switzerland when I wandered the town surrounded by smiling people with whom I couldn’t even ask the location of the nearest bathroom or how to buy a pack of smokes.

My hands didn’t even shake that much before a fight, or maybe they did but that felt like it made sense. You’re supposed to be afraid in the moments before your appointment to try and knock the shit out of another human being, not at the prospect of failing at:

“Good morning, where’s the nearest place to take a leak?”

So it’s audio language courses and pocket guides. I downloaded a quick traveler’s language program for Turkish, but had to go to Amazon for one on Greek and the pocket guides. I’ll keep the majority of a browsing history as private as I can what with this being the internet and all, but under recommendations were several pairs of brass knuckles in different colors, even rainbow.

Who the fuck buys rainbow-colored brass knuckles? Remind me not to tease the next Phish fan I meet.

But maybe I need a pair of brass knuckles as much as I need a pocket guide. I feel like a fistload is probably just as useful as the phrase I use to get myself a coffee and a pastry.

$11.99. Apparently it dodges its blatant illegality by being sold as a belt buckle.

Seems reasonable when you think about it. Who doesn’t need some brass knuckles in their life? Nobody, that’s who. Maybe creatures without fingers and thumbs… Perhaps do not purchase brass knuckles for your pet octopus.

Get him a really heavy thimble instead.

And these brass knuckles got a five-star review.

Wait… What?

Who reviews brass knuckles on Amazon? They’re brass knuckles for Christ’s sake. It’s not like that pocket knife that’s black, has five serrated edges and is called “Captain Hannibal’s Extra Special Murder Friend,” and people tell you they use it to cut up apples and open the mail. They’re brass knuckles. They only have one purpose in life and that’s to meet jaws and ribcages at high velocity.

“I really love my belt buckle.”

“What an amazing belt buckle.”

“This is the best belt buckle in the world.”

“I take my belt buckle with me everywhere. It’s a fantastic conversation starter.”

“These would be illegal if they were real brass knuckles, but they’re not. It’s just a belt buckle. For novelty purposes only.”

Methinks Amazon’s reviewers doth protest too much.

“I thought it would be too small as a belt buckle, but no it’s just perfect.”

Okay, Goldilocks.

“This is an amazing paper weight and let me tell you, they keep all my papers in order. None of my papers get away when I use it.”

If this guy’s your accountant pay him well and be very gentle if you decide to fire him.

I decided to skip the “belt buckle.” Seems a bit over the top. However “Captain Hannibal’s Extra Special Murder Friend,” should arrive in a couple of days. I wonder if they’ll let me carry it on the plane if I tell them it’s a comb?