Giving Up The Tyrant by Ricardo Calzada

My life has revolved around a vision I developed in my childhood. A
mature boy, I made my vision objective and devoid of overly
speculative details. The wider the target, the straighter the arrow.
The future me and how he would form my life was well envisioned. This
formulation was an escape from bounds suggested by my predecessors.

As I steer towards becoming the man I created, the vision gets grainy.
The surety that helped me bud in the poorest soils is no longer there.
The tyrant that propelled me beyond life’s joys is no more and I am
free.

Honesty

Ok, here’s what you need to know. I’m from Kansas and I went to Harvard. The most influential people in my life are people I’ve known only for brief periods. I’m young in that I’m idealistic, and I’m grown in that I’ve got a better grip on life than people 10 years older. I smoke cigars, like my dad, but we’re different in most ways, so I get along better with my mom. I’ve always had a girlfriend, but I know I’ve never been in love. I think you’re beautiful, and all I want right now is to kiss you.

Dispirited

“Did I hear you say Marc Jacobs?” shouted Dauntay Shalom. His cultured, effeminate, horrified voice rang out from the cigarette-littered front porch of a brick house in Chico. “I don’t give a shit!”

Only Dauntay was on the porch, his angular eyebrows casting streetlight shadows over a lean face. Partiers stumbled past below.

“Keep having your beer conversations about Marc Jacobs! I don’t give a shit! I’m a diva! I’m a fashionista! I don’t give a shit! Report cards? Students? Fuck that, I’m a diva!”

He fell silent and took a long pull from his cigarette, his manicured hand shaking.

Trendy

The restaurant was bustling. Hardwood floors and old infrastructure made for plenty of noise and not much else to hide behind.

“Want to split the truffle gnocchi in brown butter and sage?”
“What?”
“THE TRUFFLE GNOCCHI IN BROWN BUTTER AND SAGE.”
“SURE, THAT SOUNDS GOOD.”

The prospect of yelling at each other all night wasn’t appealing, but this was one of the trendiest restaurants in the city right now. It was sure priced that way, anyway. And now, they could afford it. They looked at each other.
“Wanna get outta here?’
“What?”
“WANNA GET OUTTA HERE?”
“I’LL GRAB MY COAT.”

Come Find Me

If you want to know where I am you can ask the man smoking cigarettes in the Elks bowling alley in Casper, or the Iowans holding hands on the boardwalks in Thermopolis, or maybe the dinosaur excavators, or the signs that say you’re on the trail of the Sand Creek Massacre. Just look out in the mystical sculpted barrens of the West my sandstone sojourn look for bullet casings in creeks or tumbleweeds blown in Morse code from Owens Valley. I’ll be out there in the fungus forests the birthplace mesas of America the myths and tractor-trailers, come find me.

I Imagine my Idea for New Theater Being Very Edgy and Popular for a Period of Time Before it Becomes Imitated and Played-Out.

A performance where the performer goes on stage silently. The medium-sized audience begins raising hands and asking questions, and he answers each one. Through this process, a story is revealed. The story, which the performer knows ahead of time, is a prewritten work of fiction, and, as such, the performer is bound to a predetermined universe of answers. In this way, each performance unveils the same story, but through a new lens, unique to the particular audience and particular showing. Audience members leave whenever they want, and the show goes on until no one has any questions left to ask.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

When I was thirteen I started stealing the decals off of expensive cars. I would make them into long chain necklaces and sell them to my friends for fifteen bucks a pop. Sometimes more if it was a really nice car like a Porsche or a Mercedes.  I don’t look as unassuming and innocent as I did when I was a little kid in a private school uniform and a cookie monster lunchbox. Now, people just expect these kinds of things from people that look like me. But the irony is, I don’t do that shit anymore. I just steal cars.

Four-Month Anniversary

Oscar took Jaime to dinner on the observation platform of the Space Needle for their four-month anniversary. After they finished eating, she wiggled a photograph out of her wallet.

“Look, it’s me when I was five,” she said. “I’ve never even shown a boy this.”

He peered at the tiny image. “Why not?”

“I’m giving it to you. It’s…it represents the most innocent part of my life. I think the core of me is still like that picture.”

He silently examined it, never looking up to see how different Jaime now looked. He pocketed it and signaled for the bill.

Alligator Purse

At Goodwill Outlet World, great blue bins of secondhand junk were hourly wheeled onto the floor. A cadre of retail buyers, bored and shabbily dressed, filled their carts in bursts of searching.

His first time there, Marcelo found an alligator-skin purse buried in one of the bins. He tucked it under his arm with the strange feeling that the other customers, the regulars, wanted it and had their eyes on him.

That night he spent hours at his kitchen table trying to determine if the purse was actually made in Paris from alligator or if it was just a fake.

A gathering

With cheers they all smiled and hunkered down, comfortably cradling their hot cocoa or zealous masala chai. The room was warm with the heat of their eager bodies and a shy breeze brushed through the screen door.
Skin prickled.
“Who’s going to start?” asked Sarah, the most enterprising from day one.
“I will,” Matt offered after a tingling pause.
“Who with?”
Matt glimmered. “You?”
Sarah’s cheeks darkened like the crepuscule and her cool confidence wafted away. Silently she offered Matt her hand and he led her to the private room at the back, all the others’ eyes watching them, sparkling.