BLOGGO

While sleeping maybe?

That’s when your “counter world”, the one that mirrors beneath, stride for stride, thought for thought, seeps in, making dreams feel real but fake when you wake. Having you more than a little suspicious about it all. The worlds pantomime well for the most part, harmonic themes and exchanges, big to little, the changes. But there are breaches, occasionally. Like the goose I caught, thrusting through on a quiet street in leafy Vermont. Several nervous seconds later, she was gone. The grass spread a green patch over the hole. I waited a few minutes. I heard a honk, but it was a car. I heard a bark, but it was a smiling dog trying his best to sound like a goose.

“The photo shows Joseph Bernazard crouched in the supermarket vestibule in a black-and-gray baseball cap, his upraised right hand pressing the point of a serrated knife against a woman’s neck, his left hand pulling her to him by her hair so as to make her a shield.

“Kill me! Kill me now! I want to die!” his captive remembers him shouting.”

–

After the crime scene tape came down, the Met manager, Pumsu Kim, had his men wash the blood and tissue from the vestibule. Kim cut up boxes and lay a carpet of cardboard over the wet pavement as a woman came up with a very healthy looking toddler in a stroller.

“Are you doing deliveries?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Kim said.

The street again filled with people going to the restaurants and shops.

NEWSPAPER GUY TELLS ABOUT IT 

I don’t know what photo he’s talking about in the above excerpt.  Police evidence?  My photo is taken from behind yellow tape that obstructed a morning coffee stroll with a friend.  Later I read what felt like a cliché. A man is treated at the hospital for hearing voices and ends up “escaping” from the hospital. The next morning he runs around my neighborhood doing dangerous things to others, eventually inviting death to be part of his life. “Death by cop”, I’ve heard it called. Bait the police into killing you.

You walk past the store front now and there are posters wrapped around the light pole out front that pay tribute to the troubled guy who wanted to die. One scrawling message is from someone who signed off as “your future wife”.

And some clichés are dodged. I presided over a wedding that steered clear of the typical matrimonial elements, allowing the event to be theirs, tatooing their personas to the day.  “you may kiss the bride” was the exception to the cliché-free ceremony. But in the end, derivative as life is, it is tough to kill the clichés.