Secret Stories

by Dwight Peters

I would want to love you. I would rip all the shark teeth out of my face and head and neck, forgetting the stray teeth scattered in different wounds until later, glue myself up just enough to live, and stride over with ragged, bloody strength and hold you, bleeding on and slightly stabbing you.” This is what the one person said to the other.

  The other said, “You are sweeter than a bear covered in a barrel of honey that fell into a Montana grassland out of an airplane and broke apart in a massive splash right onto the bear. Yet you are more wildly free than the bear and tough enough to beat the bear in a fight (not that I think you should or that I would want you to fight bears). What I mean to say is I love you.”

  Then, as they kissed in the city streets, as the passersby looked on mostly in either envy or joy, if they could stand to look at all, a twenty foot bear that was carrying a shark in a backpack type baby holder modified for fins ran up to them and hugged both of them tightly. As they were passing out, before they died of lack of oxygen, they heard the bear say to what seemed to them to be both of them but may have been only one of them, “You have intricacies of your personality that are endless mysteries, as if the sky was made of tens of thousands of different flower petals, which I could discover one color and shape at a time.”

  The Smite Of The Melted, Smitten Smiths

  There was someone who loved another. This someone had been together with the other person for six years. This other person had stopped loving the someone and began loving someone else. This other person was going to tell the first someone but died before the chance to do it under desired circumstances became possible.

  The first someone never learned that the other person loved someone else. The first someone spent the rest of what was life in love with the other person who had stopped loving and living.

  Seems, Stitches

  On an evening sometime in the early summer, there was a couple on a city bus. They had lived lives that made their actual ages a guess. Fifty maybe? Thirty maybe?

  There was another couple, both about twenty-five, sitting behind the first. They were off to a friend’s apartment and then to an event of some sort.

  The first couple were not only drunk but seemed so incoherent when they talked to each other that it would be hard to imagine that there could be anytime, sober or not, when it would be reasonably expected that anything they said would be able to be figured out. This couple talked in near shouts with no half moments of silence interrupting, only persistent, howling hysterias in slurred, laughing rhythms there were louder than their talking.

  The second couple laughed softly to each other at the couple in front of them. They did not want to judge the people in front of them and tried to laugh with them, but they couldn’t make sense of what the couple was actually saying; the first couple to them became comedic in every noise and movement. The second couple’s laughter built up to a degree where the first couple turned around, each of the first couple looking into each of the second couple’s eyes, causing the feeling within each of the second couple that what they thought they felt was comedy was really a feeling of horror—and that these people, these broken strangers, seemingly incoherent, could know this, could know what they couldn’t.

  When it was the second couple’s stop, the first couple stayed on the bus. Stepping down the stairs of the bus to the concrete sidewalk half-full of other people walking past, near their friend’s apartment, the couple took a few steps, then stopped, both examining for several intensely focused minutes a single crack in the path in front of them. As they moved forward again, they held each other’s hands—they then looked briefly over at a tree off to one side of them by a large building, noticing the evening light through leaves close but not completely together—looking at each other for a full minute to two minutes before they entered their friend’s apartment.

  Art Tune

  “I want to create” is said. A person is sliced in half from one side of the abdomen through the other by a large floating blade. The person had been at the top of a spiral staircase, so the upper-half of the person tumbled down the stairs. The lower-half stood still at the top of the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, the upper-half of the body screamed every vowel up from the gut that had not leaked out. “I want to create” again is said. The lower-half of the person walked all the way down the stairs. The upper-half hopped with its hands up onto the lower-half and then they were again one.

  Someone somewhere else laughs. In this other place, there is someone seemingly doing nothing. This person is an artistic person of some kind, with the passion to create something. The person feels a particular inspiration moving into and through the person’s body. The person in this period of apparent nothingness opens up to what feels like infinite openness—an execution—attuning to possibility beyond the person’s usual living self where even the wanting of creation is dead but where there is a birth. While all of this happens, the person continues to seemingly do nothing.

  Intimidate. Intimate.

  A person attempts dating. Is painfully unsuccessful. Doesn’t know why. The person is caught in a web of critical examinations that spins from every known possible detail positive and negative about any current or potential date through a perspective that rearranges and misinterprets the information because it is searching and desiring for an unknown ideal—so in a way that intimidates the person and the date: the person is quickly eaten by the person’s own spider. “This possibility is perfect for me” is said, without knowing any of what is, without being present within a conversation when it is, without considering was is based on or could lead to a real relationship—so ending the date by showing up for another date that never existed. “I could never see myself spending any time with this possibility” is said, closing off any possibility for any direction of what could be.

  After some years of this, the person begins to know that there are problems and acts differently. The person discovers a perspective of the world and through that an essence of self, sharing this so that it allows a coming together with another; the person feels and is aware of the communication of another through which their essence is then known, responding to the subtle possibilities that is another, being present within the sensuality of the interaction of action.

  All The New/Old Rage

  In large blotches of color covering his whole body, he turns purple and orange, with light lime-green looking as if finger-painted throughout the whole suit of his skin, the light lime-green breaking up the blotches of purple and orange. He is yelling at things, at people, at any thought or sensation. His flesh is quaking with violence. The rage lasts an hour then goes away. This has happened many times.

  He has a family, a wife and three teenage children, and they all make fun of him. The transformation happens when he loses his temper in one of these terrifying rages—but his family has grown callused to these outbursts so make jokes about how he needs to write the accounts of each of the happenings down because the comic book people are waiting for their stories. His family laughs, but he feels their growing separation from him and increasing coldness towards him. He knows that even when they laugh they are cautious of him—that they have talked in private about what to do if the situation gets worse, that they are hurt by the person who he is.

  The man can’t figure out how these incidents of his changing happen, but he knows the rage within him causes them. He feels helpless in his attempts at discovering why he is ever upset at all. He knows he is terrifying everyone around him, everyone he loves, wondering how it will affect his children later in their lives, unable even when the question arises to really engage in what it means for the love of he and his wife. He knows he needs to do something.

  He is glad that there has never been a time when complete control has been lost while in the transformed state, that he has never seriously, physically harmed anyone. And he is glad that he can at least see slightly, even if he can’t understand, what is within himself so he can work on making it stop.

  Modern Medicine<
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  On a Sunday afternoon, she read a book that describes the experience of a character who travels to a place where people still live as they have there for thousands of years. There is a woman whom the character meets in this place who knows all the medicinal qualities of all the trees and plants within hundreds of miles of her.

  This woman who the character encounters seemed, as she read, to communicate with her, knowing her as if she was completely free and wild, an herb naturally growing on a hill above where the woman might have slept. She kept reading. Pausing briefly, she wondered how this woman knew all of what she knew about nature. She thought for awhile that it seemed it must be that before the woman in the book could know what the woman knew, that so many people had first died by ingesting things unknown, and even after learning a large amount must have died by mistaking something as harmless. She, while still paused, realized that this must have been the end of so many lives of people—that this must be true in many ways for real people; she considered what it means and what it takes for people to learn and how long it takes for what is learned to be passed onto others