Story 1

2 HOURS - Morning

The boy had an idea last night. He decided he was going to start blogging once more. For two hours every day for as long as he could muster. He also decided to do this in third person, to make things I dunno spiffy!


The boy does this with the intention of making his blogging experience kind of like one of those "based on a true story" movies. This would be on an everyday basis. "Based on a true day", if you will. He grinds his teeth, anxiously hoping that he can at least keep this habit up until the last day of summer. Will plane trips deter him? One cannot tell.

So now he sets the stage for this story that he shall write for two hours. TWO WHOLE HOURS. Alrighty then.

This morning the boy was on hand and knee. No he was not being attacked by another human or an animal, nor was he cleaning... well he was, but not like the orphan Annie. The boy was on the floor of his dorm: hand picking the most miniscule pieces of trash that had accumulated over the past academic year. All this because he was too lazy to find a vacuum and the Resident Advisors in all of their authority had the power to fine him... Well, his parents... The boy figured his parents are in enough pain enabling his preference for delivered food over cafeteria nonsense: not to mention the whole paying a private institution over ten thousand dollars for his diploma. But who can blame them, the boy will have a better life for it according to statistics!

The boy freezes as he is cleaning. There is a dark red blotch on the floor that at first glance once would assume is simply catsup. The Resident Advisors will never know that it's goats blood. Being that it was a solidified liquid, the boy could not pick it up with his lenghy, pointed digits. He figured he would leave the bloody stain: it's not like they can fine him over one stain, right? One measily stain of goats blood? Right??

The boy remembers the day of the goat stabbing quite vividly. At first, it started with a benign miscommunication. The boy enjoyed observing normal human behavior because none of it is normal to him. He views himself as a strange being among stranger beings. There he was sitting on the bus, attending an early morning recitation, (a class to make sure you know what's going on in class. I know, it's absurd, but the graduate students need some kind of busywork I guess.) and he was watching the people mingling and silently eavesdropping on their misadventures. Normally, he would have his headphones in loudly and proudly displaying and enjoying his rather obscure musical recipes.

But not today. He left them at home. Friday mornings were musical enough as is anyway! Tales of pillaging and complaints and hangovers. All were fun things to hear! Even the woman who was casually speaking Latin was-wait? Latin? On a school bus? The boy had to take a look!

The woman looked about his age. Early 20's. She had long black hair that had an edge like uncooked spaghetti strands. She was lackadaisically slouched all the way in the back of the bus, staring at the ad for the abortion clinic that headlined certain buses at the time. Her hands were in the pockets of her baggy neon green sweatshirt... and she was speaking the Latin in a low hum... almost a whisper...

The boy recognized the language only because he was both literally and metaphorically a choir boy in high school. In Europe they wrote a helluva lotta Latin songs about that Jesus guy. Granted, they were some pretty lit songs. But this girl in the green sweatshirt... He was infinitely curious. What the hell had happened to her to put her in a Latin-atonic state? And why was she staring at the poster for the abortion clinic? Latin was in a lot of Jesus music, so does this mean she was pro-life? But Latin was also in a lot of Satan music too. The boy was super confused, so he kept silently watching to find out more.

Then his stop came, and there was no shift in position or change in behavior from sweatshirt girl whatsoever. Boring ol' recitation was in five minutes, and the boy had to go and endure it for attendance sake.

By the end of the rather unnecessary hour and a half, he came back to his dorm room to quite a surprise. A dead goat to be more precise. A dead goat with a small stab wound that was oozing out a rather small amount of blood for such a large goat, making the stain he noticed this morning.

The first thing the boy did was move the dead goat into the neighboring dorm. This seemed like a wise decision because

A) The door was always left open.
B) He had very good rapport with the neighbor.
and
C) He was used to playing pranks on the citizens of his floor. He even got a couple of them to believe he was a Satanist during the first week of school! So the boy knew his neighbor would not be surprised in the least to find a dead goat in his dorm room. A little bit peeved, maybe, but it was a forgivable offense, so long as there was no evidence of its happening after the fact.

The boy used the first aid kit his parents gave him the day he moved in and placed a large waterproof bandage on the stab wound. Before dragging the dead goat into his neighbor's dorm, the boy dragged it into the bathroom. He had an unreasonably large number of bars of soap, so he figured why not wash a goat corpse today. Getting the goat in the shower was no big ordeal for him: he was used to being called by his dad to help him carry furniture around the house. His slender arms were deceptively strong... This goat was nothing.

He had his Crocs on because he did not trust the floor of a shared shower, and he was gently washing the corpse of a goat, in a manner that an anatomy intern would wash a corpse for dissection. The goat's fur absorbed a surprising amount of the water, and for a moment the boy felt a comical twing of envy. It would be so cool to have skin that could absorb fluids he thought. I could drink soda by pouring it on my knees he thought. Wow, what a weird thought he thought.

The goat was clean now. It did not smell of the pasture anymore. He turned off the shower and dragged it out of the bathroom only to be spotted by the architecture major from down the hall. There was a stunned silence. The boy was holding his breath and his heart was in his throat.

"What are you doing?"

"I cleaned the goat."

"Why?"

"The abortion clinic."

The architecture major's eyes widened. Then, she chuckled, shook her head, and left the building, using her legs to pole vault over the goat corpse in the hallway. The boy knew she would give up her line of questioning at this point. Everyone on the boy's floor was well aware of his cryptic, yet pointed way of speaking. For a moment he thought about how that was how it has always been, and felt comfort in the fact that he accepted how that was pretty much how it was always going to be. In situations where speech adjustment was necessary, he could do it. But he doesn't feel the internal need to elaborate much. In fact, he normally has trouble elaborating exactly what he's thinking because none of his thoughts are all that exact to begin with. It's what makes his sense of humor unique as well. He tells the end of the joke and lets everyone else connect the dots on their own. If they don't get it now, they will figure it out next month.

He tests the door to his neighbors dorm, it's open, per usual. He pulls the goat corpse in, first propping the door open with his foot and dragging the body through the entrance. Nobody's home. Good. He leaves the goat corpse in the center of the dorm room. It looks especially comical here, because the center of the dorm room is the least cluttered space in the room.

Around the edges he sees a speaker system and extension cables and a microwave and a mini fridge and an Xbox 360 and game cases for the Xbox 360 and men's shampoo and books and posters on the wall and one of those rainbow plastic disco balls and the whole perimeter of the room just seemed like one long run-on sentence. One could tell two men lived here. Maybe that's the reason why the center was so clear.

The boy hears footsteps on the stairs. Someone is clearly climbing them or else the tempo would be increased. The boy rushes outside the room hoping to the Greek gods that it wasn't his neighbor. Luckily it wasn't. It was the animal lover from across the hall. Her face had an expressionless quality that allowed for her deadpan humor to make the boy laugh at every non-verbal comment she makes.

"Okay, that is not your room, wwwwhat are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure? You're looking hella guilty right now!"

She was chuckling. The boy's look of guilt, at least when it came to his antics, was a cheesy, cheesy smile and a tentative glance to the bottom corner of the room. However, this was an ordeal, the boy would have to play his cards right, or the animal lover would become willful and demand to see what he was up to.

"You'll see."

The point was so that she wouldn't literally see the goat corpse. She would simply hear the story second hand. The boy knew that as an animal lover, seeing the corpse of an animal would be too intense for the girl, so he decided to deliver the premonition instead.

There was an uncertain pause.

"Well, I'm gonna go study for my test soooo see ya later."

Crisis averted. It was the early afternoon and the animal lover had just gotten back from class, so she wasn't feeling particularly willful at this time of day. Had it been 11 PM or later, it would have been a different story entirely.

The boy sighed, he knew he had gotten away with murder. No, wait, he didn't do the killing. He just tampered with the crime scene, which required breaking and entering into his neighbor's abode. The only explanation that he could come up with was the neon sweatshirt girl on the bus. How could she have noticed him, he thought. She was staring at the abortion poster the entire bus ride! Did she notice him in the periphery? The boy couldn't tell, she was staring pretty intently.

He was laying in bed racking his brain about the incident. The boy couldn't help but think of this episode of Lost Tapes he saw when the show was on Animal Planet. The episode was a found footage mockumentary, like all the others. The actors were playing a Mexican family, attempting to cross the American border. But they get abandoned by their smuggler, then it gets dark, and they get attacked by the chupacabra. This action was interrupted by interjections from smart professor people talking about the harsh realities of the US-Mexican border alongside the legend of the chupacabra. It's a combination of liberal messaging and goatsuckers. Now that's some quality TV content right there.

"Goat sucker" is the literal meaning of the word "chupacabra". The boy didn't know what to think about this. He's seen pictures of the supposed chupacabra attacks on animals, but there is no physical evidence that the animal truly exists. The boy was laying in bed pondering this, and he thinks that girl on the bus in the sweatshirt was probably a chupacabra. This realization did not scare him like one would think. In fact, he thinks it's pretty cool that he saw one in the flesh. He didn't know if the wound on the goat was actually a stab wound cuz he's never seen anyone get stabbed in his life! The boy wondered of everyone who notices the girl in the green shirt gets a goat corpse in their dorm...

Perhaps a more logical explanation would be that she's a mob boss? The boy has also seen The Godfather. Maybe she was trying to scare him because the staring was seen as an insult to her character or something. If so, it didn't work. But she doesn't need to know that, the boy thought.

"WHAT THE FAWCK!"

That Long Island accent was undeniable. The boy heard shocked laughter from adjacent room. Then a pause.

"Only one person coulda fuckin done this."

The boy smirked.