The Next Chapter of Lena: Confession

aren't you getting tired of seeing no updates? yet you return, day after day.


depression feels like desperation, and I refuse to submit a dishonest post.


Lena: Return.






Lena walks back to a place she has been before. A scaled-down Babel pierced the sky. A sound came out of the rip - bells. A woman in an ugly hat walked out. The church.


Entering the confessional, Lena walks back again to a place she has been before. 


"When was the date of your last confession?" the virgin asks her.


"Age fourteen. A requirement before Confirmation."


"And how many years do you have now?"


"Twenty-Four. So ten. Ten years since my last confession."


The virgin says nothing. Lena decides this silence is the least offensive prompt of all possible prompts which are directed as instigating one's admission of vulnerabilities.


"My first sin is that, when I was younger and forced to participate in this sacrament, I made up sins," Lena says. "I never felt as if I had done anything wrong."


"And now, you feel you have done wrong?"


"No, not really."


The virgin says nothing, and then says, "Why don't we continue anyway?"


"Why not I suppose. My second sin is not believing in God."


The virgin automatically responds, "Mother Theresa was plagued with doubt until the day she died. She wrote of it every night in her journals."


"I guess I don't see what that has to do with me, because I don't give a fuck if God exists or not. I write about interesting things in my journal."


The virgin clears his virginal throat. He reswallows the virginal mucus he has just worked so hard to dislodge, virginally. "Perhaps confession is not the right step for you at this moment."


"Jesus man. I'm getting there. I'm just fucking around right now."


"So you do have something to confess which burdens your soul?"


"No, but one of my characters does. Do you mind if I read a part of her confession to you?"


"I'm not sure I understand." Virgin clears his dumb virgin throat again. 


Lena clears her own de-virginized throat. "Her name is Aletea. She is conflicted right now because she is having an affair with her cousin. They played the 'show me' game when they were young, and now, their paths have mysteriously intersected again many years later. Their attraction is magnetic and natural and mutual. Yet of course it is wrong."


"Is this you? Are you talking about you?"


"No, Father. This is Aletea. She is one of my characters. From my journals."


"Ah - I think - "


"Anyway Father, may I please read you her confession? She is quite a devoted Catholic and I need to know what penance you would give her. For contextual accuracy."


"Er, alright then."


Lena opens her purse and removes a small red notebook from one of its compartments. She turns to page 17 and begins reading. Slowly.


"When he finally touched me it was how I remembered touch felt. It was bare sex, elementary sex. Everything else has since him, a footnote. Like I tapped into the center of a system. Its maxims. Its gears. At one point I said, as he was cautiously reacquainting himself with me, I said, in a last attempt to salvage my ethical self, to squander his carnal appetite, I said, 'Don't do this to yourself.' He said, 'But I'm doing it to you.' And god. I just fucking let him."


"Is that it?" the virgin asks after a few moments of dead air.


"Yes. What are the damages?"


The virgin merely swallows. "15 each Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary."


"Is that really it?"


"And a tremendous effort to change."


Lena frowns. "But if she changes the plot will be ruined. I have many more pages after 17."


"Well, then I guess she's not really sorry."


Lena ponders this a moment. 


"I guess you're right."

quotation marx.

Dear Reader,

This blog dun gid neglectified.

?

Because I have been working on dialogue. Boy, is that shit hard to pull off.

The nice thing about dialogue is getting to use fun, lively things like cliches guilt-free, and also spelling out words phonetically.

To practice&learn, have been attempting provocative conversation with library patrons. So many characters. Book-stalking people. I know everything you've ever checked out, and how much you've contributed to your own debt when you fail to return the materials within 1, 3, or 12 months.

So far, the character that generates the most genuine-sounding lines is myself. The challenge is to not make everyone else sound like myself.

This challenge leads to the inevitable hypothetical - what if everyone on the planet was a personality-clone of me?

Thus the world of my little stories is so far rather ambivalent, and hopeful, and at times so isolating.

gentleLena pt.II: the autobiography

gentleLena pt. I

* * *

Have I ever loved one? Lena thought once. She counted her lovers on  fingers and toes (a few times over.)

Her first lover she most certainly had loved. He was from down the street, not across the ocean.

Yes, I must have loved him I thought. Lena thought this too. I prefer dark hair and he had dark hair. This must be because of his inital influence on my sexual appetite. Such a realization inspired Lena to graph a multi-variable analysis of her lovers.

I must include all of the most important characteristics, I thought. Lena thought this also. She could deduce her true love from statistical pattern. This all made perfect sense to Lena and to me as well.

Lena wrote all of the most important and favorite features of her lovers. Here is her list.

1. agreeable fetishes

(some of Lena's fetishes narcissism and voyerism. She could only feel pleasure by witnessing pleasure. This is why she would do anything to catch a man touching himself.)

2. ability to make her cum

(Lena only came for a partner when it was deserved. Many men do not deserve to see a woman in such an ecstatic state; many women are fools for revealing themselves too soon. By principle Lena had never fabricated an orgasm.)

3. the width of their cock 

(Lena had realized long ago that length mattered little in comparison with this vital feature of the male sex organ. Coincidentally, she learned from a Chilean lover that a woman could, with startling accuracy, estimate the abilities of this organ by the shape of its owners' nose.)

4. a favorite flower

(Her mother had been a florist. A man with an eye for beautiful things could never be faithful but always be trusted.)

5. time spent thinking about them after, during, and before.

(This was difficult, but because Lena lived in her mind as well as her body she had to think about it. Some lovers, she hardly recalled how they felt but she enjoyed to fantasize about them, imposing her own version of the reality that occurred. Others were fantastic but at once forgettable. Lena was looking for a holistic mind-dweller.)

Documentation took much longer than Lena anticipated. She delayed the final result by composing many silly schoolgirl side-competitions, such as softest-to-hardest and fattest-to-thinnest. Finally she tallied the results.

By god, this cannot be, Lena thought. I am in love with Umberto Eco.

Poem about My Handwriting

Pent-up manship. One-upped on internet
evangelists. Submitting curves and lines,
define your i’s with strokes that imply
even pressure, even blots won’t remain
blots for long.

Exert control!
o’s too round and you risk deflating
t’s too tall and fall replacing
b’s without backhanded regression
into clean, free, space.

Clean, free, space to contain the wicked
expressions of my lust and hate, church and
state. Swirled disguised maintained angles
so pretty and unpredictable they just fall
right into place.

I look at the ugly scrawl
scrawled on my desk-neighbor’s loose-leaf
thinking I have her beat but she raises her
hand and asks the doctor to repeat the
third-to-last thing he said and script
completely lost its potency that day for me.