---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “What Remains” Down in the Dirt, v143 (the March 2017 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Study in Black the Down in the Dirt July-Dec. 2016 collection book		get the 418 page Jan.-April 2017 Down in the Dirt issue anthology 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Breaking News

Gregory D. Brown

    Mark Mooney slid a slice of peppermint chewing gum over his tongue to cover the smell of cigarette smoke on his breath before he opened the driver’s side door of his mom-bought SUV. A gust of wind grabbed tight onto the door and pressed it into a white Mercury parked on top of a faded line in the news station parking lot. It left a dime-sized dent in the smaller car’s urethane-covered steel. Mark looked over his shoulder to make sure no one payed any attention to the audible thwack, caught his reflection in the window, and used his fingers to pull strands of hair back from his face. Blue splotches stained the gaps between clouds as they darkened like the ink from every half-assed story had evaporated with the rain and puddled up in their center, ready to fall to the earth with honest mediocrity.
    Mark’s wing-tipped feet carried him across the parking lot in a series of slow-falling clops. Damp air grabbed the mint taste on his tongue and pulled manufactured cold down his throat and deep into his lungs. He eyed a cheap vodka bottle smashed flat against the pavement, shards of plastic splitting at its neck. Construction tape cut him off from the sidewalk, so he paced through a laurel-hedged garden area in front of the news station and walked over its woodchip flowerbed and yellowed rows of giant coneflower as he moved toward the door.
    “You’re a brave one,” said a construction worker standing across tape. Another hard-hatted fellow tossed down blown-over bits of tree from the top of a signal tower.
    “I like to take risks,” said Mark.
    “That’s for sure.”
    Mark walked through the door and ducked under a second line of construction tape. He fumbled for his keys and dangled a fob in front of a gray sensor pad. It beeped twice. Mark opened a second set of doors and stepped into the newsroom. Reporters looked over the tops of their waist-high-when-standing cubicle walls, which were drab and (some, mostly former employees, would say appropriately) shaped like swastikas when viewed from above. The meat locker thermostat was contrasted by the visual buzz of soap opera and family-appropriate gameshow programming shot up on dozens of television screens lining the east wall and the aural excitement of police scanners blasting happenings into the assignment desk booth set in the center of the semi-cubicled newsroom. The entire “news” portion of the station was washed in grayscale, save a meteorologist lounge space called the “green room.” Oddly enough, the “green room” was actually a yellow room with a large blue painting centered over a brown couch. Mark assumed the room was repainted after it had been named.
    He looked down as he passed Melinda’s office and settled into the chair at his cubicle. Its armrests were split, and bits of foam bled onto Mark’s gray speckled desk. The cubicle was shadow-hued when vacant. He dusted crumbs from his office chair before fingering for the power button on his desktop computer. Two screens glowed blue as the machine powered up. Real-time site visit stats jumped over one another on a third screen hung just above the computer monitors. Mark laid his keys and phone out to the left of his keyboard. Otherwise, the desk was bare. Mark opened his email, searched his name, and found that none of the 359 unread messages crowding his inbox were meant exclusively for him. He then keyed in Melinda’s email address to find a warning telling everyone to avoid the door behind the construction tape.
    His hands were sweaty as he typed a list of the day’s assigned stories. A controlled burn had gone out of control in Osage County, two brothers were in court for stabbing their family to death in the suburbs, construction was causing backups in midtown, and two high-ranking deputies lost their jobs for sharing sheriff’s office secrets on Facebook. Mark deleted a swath of emails from viewers seeking their lost uncles, daughters, and dogs.
    “And nobody’s able to help you.”
    “What was that?” asked Kathryne from the next cubicle.
    “Oh, nothing,” said Mark. “I was just reading through the viewer emails.”
    “A psychic said she knew where the blind horse is.”
    “Thank God. Spirit’s coming home.”
    Mark opened a file cabinet and produced a wide-ruled notebook with a Tulsa-area semi-professional soccer team logo on the cover. He flipped through the notebook, found an empty page, and wrote down reporter assignments and the week’s online trending content to read aloud at the meeting. None of the other digital producers handwrote notes before the meeting, but the visible lists left Mark feeling like he did more than dick around on social media for a living and gave him a wall to hide behind when he had to speak in front of his coworkers. He opened the station’s social media pages and started reading through posts. A woman asked if they would investigate her apartment complex’s mold problem. She said her son was sick from the stuff and the landlord refused to look into it. Mark typed “thanks for sharing” and sent the message to the trash folder. He saw a manager wheel a whiteboard into the conference room and walked to the meeting.
    Mark sat in the first pale chair near the room’s pressed plywood door. He pulled out his phone and brushed through web articles while producers went over the particulars of the next ninety minutes of newscast. Occasionally, he would sit up and look at Melinda as she talked to let her know she was worth his time and attention and that he deserved a raise. He was reading an article on Camus when he realized she was, in fact, talking to him.
    “How can we tie the Supreme Court rulings to the web?” she asked.
    “I planned on posting a localized story on the rulings, relating them to the recent bills pushed through state legislature,” Mark said. He looked up from his phone and wished he could force blood back from his cheeks and ears. “It’ll be up by six”
    “That works. We really need to tie in the local impact,” Melinda said. “Viewers are turning away when they see big national stories that they can find anywhere online.”
    Mark felt guilty for letting himself grow comfortable in the meetings, though he was satisfied with his manufactured, on-the-spot response. Regardless, he was embarrassed by the way he had been caught off-guard. He pocketed his phone and stared at the notepad. One of the evening anchors, Roger, rushed in the room and sat cross-legged on the geometrically-textured, commercial carpet near the door. He leaned onto the wall just beneath a poster hung to remind the staff of the simple and albeit obvious steps necessary for a better, faster, and more entertaining newscast. A producer was talking about the way an area oil executive had burned to death in his car only a day after he was charged with embezzlement. The man drove into a bridge at 78 miles per hour and his fuel tank exploded, charring his suit-bought-by-misappropriation and leaving his newly-bastardized daughter with at least one less birthday present the next spring.
    “A bit ironic isn’t it?” Roger asked.
    “I’ve been waiting for you to show up and make a joke about the whole ordeal.”
    “It’s not too soon?”
    “In this business, it’s never too soon.”
    “Well, what can I say? The oil industry is exploding in this state.”
    The giggles grew into an Om. Mark looked up from his notepad and flashed Roger a smile. Melinda, covered her mouth, cleared her throat, and read numbers from a chart showcasing the station’s recent rating progress. The nightly reporters filed in, each giving up a joke or a compliment as an offering to the management staff and midday workers already sitting in the conference room. One said something about Mark’s shoes. Another sat next to him as if it didn’t make them both uncomfortable. Her oil-based, spiced rose scent was just strong enough to make Mark constantly conscious of it. The reporters started in on their pitches. One of them was assigned a police fraud case in a rural county about an hour and a half’s driving time from the station.
    “Well, after last night, I can handle whatever Oklahoma has to throw at me,” he said
    “What happened?” asked Jennah, the night-side assignment desk warden.
    “You didn’t hear about the racist rabbi?”
    “A racist rabbi? Was this when that 10-year-old crashed his dirt-bike into a pick-up?”
    “Yes. I guess the pick-up driver was also black, and the paramedic who took the kid into the back of the Life Flight copter was black too. So, this rabbi comes up to me and said, ‘You know, this is really something. I don’t mean to be crass, but we don’t see a whole lot of you out here.’”
    The room bounced along another laugh.
    “A rabbi in rural Oklahoma said African Americans were rare?”
    The crime reporter next to Mark quieted the group with a glare. She needed to finish her pitches and head out to a three p.m. interview with a rape victim. Mark took at least ten minutes to return to olfactory stasis after she was gone.
    Frozen yogurt was set out on the assignment desk after the meeting. Mark ignored the police scanners’ roar as he dug a small carton of it from the bottom of a cardboard box and walked to his desk. He pulled a plastic fork from his file cabinet and ate the yogurt while he typed out the evening’s social media plan. Kathryne was crying.
    “The court released the transcripts from the Bixby brothers’ trial,” she said
    “Is it rough?” Mark asked.
    “They stabbed their mom like 87 times and cut off their brother’s head with an axe.”
    “Any reason why?”
    “They wanted to start some kind of religious revolution.”
    Mark finished his frozen yogurt and tossed the cup into the trashcan beneath his desk.
    “I’ve only cried three times over work in the last 13 years,” Kathryne said. “When the drive-in theater burned down, I cried. When someone shot at grade school kids on the east coast, I cried. Now, reading about teenagers slaughtering their family for their imaginary friend is making me cry.”
    “Yeah, that’s pretty rough,” Mark said.
    He started scrolling through Facebook again.
    “I think I’m going to go home early to drink wine and see the nephew,” Kathryne said. She wiped black stripes across her face from the corners of her eyes and looked a bit like the first stroke of a 1951 Pollock. She pulled an un-popped bag of gluten-free popcorn from under her desk and walked into the break room. Mark checked the station’s Facebook page again.
    Someone had sent in a message about their missing teen turned up dead. Mark read through the description and took a second to look at the picture. The kid’s white arms hung from massive holes in a black, off-brand t-shirt. A sweat-stained Texas Rangers cap kept the boy’s curly red hair tame (or at least domesticated) for the picture that would memorialize him to Mark Mooney. The boy had gone missing from a local rock festival earlier that summer. He was autistic and had trouble socializing, at least, according to the post. He was found drowned in a 1985 red Ford pickup truck alone. At least the Bixby family died in the comfort of their own home, surrounded by those that loved them the most. This kid just had b-list rock and roll and a tank full of diesel.
    “Maybe you should have developed a healthy relationship with your kid,” Mark muttered as he deleted the message.
    Kathryne came back to her desk and Mark started telling her about a dream he’d had the night before while she ate her bag of popcorn. Someone noted the popcorn’s smell from across the newsroom as if the salt and butter scent didn’t rise from the desks of dieting television bodies every other day. Kathryne laughed at Mark’s dream and told him she was going to send him the details of the Bixby killings so he could transcribe them and she could go home. Mark said that was fine as if a dissenting opinion would have spared him from reading more courtroom notes. She sent him the email, left her jacket in a wad on the top of her chair, and left the station.
    Mark opened the email. The brothers had wanted to stop their family from shooting their neighbors and bringing the kingdom of heaven to the Tulsa suburbs. Mark was glad they’d done it. The last thing Oklahoma needed was another spirit-filled shooting. Mark was also satisfied with the brothers’ swift arrest after he read that the younger of the two wanted to become a god himself. Oklahoma didn’t have a whole lot of room for new gods. The one they had was causing controversy with a statue at the state capitol, and legislators didn’t seem to like the idea of housing any others in the Sooner State. The boys had slit their sister’s throat. She ran outside afterward, and it probably saved her life. Mark was glad she survived, but he couldn’t imagine her future being too incredibly bright. The kids didn’t have any friends to begin with, and Mark had never tried to strike up conversation with a person who had scars on their neck.
    Mark found ways to omit some of the more violent bits of the story from his article as he worked his way through the document, sliding his eyes through each noted stab and running a finger along every typed-up serration. Once the story was posted on the station’s website, comments started pouring in from people demanding the brothers be hung. Mark didn’t think there was grace enough to deny the mob their request. One commenter asked if any of the others had seen her missing horse. It was blind.
    “If there isn’t mercy for these boys and their families, how can you expect someone to grant you the grace to find a horse?” Mark typed. He erased the response and substituted it with, “Thanks for sharing.”
    Mark stood up and walked over to one of the late show directors who smelled like tobacco every time he popped in for a newscast.
    “Hey, do you smoke?” he asked.
    “Yeah, why?”
    “Can I bum a cigarette?”
    “Sure.” He shuffled a hand into his shirt pocket and produced a Marlboro.
    “Thanks. I’m out, but today calls for nicotine. Kids killing families, Jesus killing neighbors, and people asking dumb questions on Facebook.”
    “I heard that,” the director laughed.
    Mark slipped outside and smoked his cigarette alone. He watched the top of the sun wink as it fell behind the skyline. A flock of birds filled a row of dogwood trees. They called together to mock Mark as they shit on his car. He finished his cigarette while walking to the nearby liquor store to buy a bottle of cheap bourbon. His shoe grabbed the glowing butt and pulled it out against the sidewalk without really affecting his pace. He opened the fingerprinted glass door to the liquor store. The woman leaning hard on the cash register was wearing a blue sweatshirt with a cartoon bird on the front. The print was chipped like she had dried the shirt without taking time to read the tag. Mark couldn’t decide if the woman was in her fifties or if she too had been dried too hot either in a tanning bed or at the back end of decades of Virginia Slims. Her lips were chapped and seemed to crack open when she asked him to show her his driver’s license before he paid for the bourbon. He couldn’t help but stare into the little canyons and wonder how they weren’t red with blood.
    When Mark got to the parking lot, the sky was dark. He threw the bottle in the backseat of the shit-covered SUV. He hid it beneath the passenger’s seat and found a half-smoked pack of cigarettes there. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Evelyn asked if he wanted to come over to her house after work and have a drink with “some people.” He didn’t reply.
    Mark drug his feet against the carpet when he wandered back to his desk. He put in earphones and let the two late shows fly by without incident, quickly hammering out the reporters’ stories with little detail or care. He quit checking the social media page, left any cries for help to the morning shift.
    As soon as the final show’s credits started rolling across a monitor at his desk, Mark slipped out the door unnoticed. He neglected to say goodbye to Jennah at the assignment desk and ignored the security guard’s well wishes as he walked to his car. Two women were walking across the station’s parking lot from one of the motels across the street. Even in the dark, the older woman’s thick skin glowed brown. She haphazardly held a baby. The younger woman waddled in her sweatpants as they crept down legs. She called to Mark.
    “Can you give us a ride? We live just down the street.”
    It started sprinkling in the parking lot.
    “Sorry, I’ve got somewhere to be.”
    “What’s your problem, man? It’s how we look isn’t it.”
    The car started. Mark drove away. It had nothing to do with how she looked. He had somewhere to be. The younger woman’s pants sagged lower down her legs.
    Mark was the last of his friends to arrive at Evelyn’s house. She lived in an older house in midtown. It was just on the edge of the cool part of town and the old part of town. Mark lived around the corner in a newer apartment complex. He parked his car along the street and hobbled up to the door. It had stopped sprinkling. He knocked. Josiah answered the door. Patrick and Anne were already inside. Mark said hello and walked over to the kitchen sink to open his bottle of bourbon. He poured himself a glass of the stuff and drank it down without taking a breath. He poured another and wandered into the hazy living room where Patrick and Evelyn were smoking weed through a marbled stone pipe. He started in on the second glass and began telling his friends the not-safe-for-news details of the Bixby brothers’ murders. Patrick decided religion was likely the cause. Mark couldn’t find it in himself to argue with that. Josiah fell asleep on the couch. Mark finished the bourbon in his glass and walked to the fridge and took a beer without asking. Eventually, Evelyn and Patrick decided they wanted to go smoke a cigarette, so Mark picked up his beer and followed them outside. His shoulders tilted under the weight of the bourbon he’d already drunk and he stumbled across the porch.
    Patrick asked about work as if Mark had at any point talked about anything else.
    “They’re all pretty fucking hopeless,” Mark answered. “All these helpless sadsacks send us the same, mundane, bullshit questions. It’s like, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you find your kid. Thanks for sharing.’”
    “Yeah, that would get on my nerves,” Patrick said.
    “You don’t understand, man. At the shoe store, people were asking you to fulfill a specific task. You put shoes on people’s feet, they pay for them, and they walk out. At the news, I’m just supposed to find information and report it, but people insist that we fix all Tulsa-area atrocities, most of which they caused themselves by moving into a mold-riddled apartment or buying drugs from strangers. The problems they didn’t themselves cause are so fundamentally rooted in the human condition that there’s no hope anyhow.”
    Patrick dragged hard on a cigarette and Mark sucked on his beer.
    “That’s the thing, man,” Mark said. “We can’t fix anything. God can’t fix anything. Those kids still stabbed their parents. Some moron’s blind horse went missing. It happens.”
    It started sprinkling again, and Anne came outside with the rest of the group. She asked Mark for a cigarette, and they all stood on the porch and watched the drops darken the sidewalk. Mark felt heavy. A car drove by. He wanted to jump in front of it. He finished his beer instead. It started raining harder. Anne and Patrick woke up Josiah and went home. Another car drove by with its lights out. Lightning cracked behind it as it passed.
    “It’d be nice if someone cared like these people want,” Mark said.
    “I think people do care, just not you heartless bastards at the news,” Evelyn replied.
    “I mean, sure, but the only people that care are the ones that you expect to care. What’s the use of caring at that point?”
    “I think you’re drunk.”
    “But do you care?”
    “Of course I care.”
    Mark leaned over and tried to kiss her. She turned and his lips smashed against the soft part of her cheek.
    “Mark, you’re drunk. I’m calling someone to get you.”
    “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I’m going home.”
    Evelyn ran inside the house to get her phone. Mark smashed his beer bottle on the porch. He left orange-brown glass on the step and threw the remaining half of the bottle into the street. He got in his SUV and slid his remaining cigarettes back under the seat before Evelyn made it back outside. The rain crashed hard against his windshield. He navigated the two turns it took to make it to this apartment complex as fast as he could. Mark parked in the spot nearest his door and pulled himself up the stairs and into his bedroom. His clothes fell off his body like a rack of ribs held too close to hell for just the right amount of time. The bed was cold against his bare skin.
    Mark set an alarm for noon and closed his eyes. He rolled around beneath the chilled sheets. He slid along the line of sleep until he heard a growing moan. Mark woke up when he realized it was his own moaning. He walked into his bathroom and fished through pill bottles for Xanax he had been prescribed in high school. He couldn’t find any. He fell back on the bed and shook himself to sleep.
    Mark woke again at 9 in the morning, sat up, and put on shorts, a t-shirt, a black cap, and his running shoes. Crisp air stabbed at his face when he started to jog the sidewalk. Oxygen poked holes in his tarred lungs and the flames from every cigarette he’d smoked in the past month relit on the gray-pink tissue in his chest. Mark started thinking about the Bixby brothers. He imagined their knives breaking their mother’s flesh. He thought about the entry, exit, blood. The boys demanded their mother’s parental power over and over and over again when they stabbed her in Mark’s head.
    A man and his two kids sat on the side of the concrete path, and Mark did his best to look away from their sloppy cardboard sign. Eventually, he couldn’t help himself, and Mark read what he assumed were the father’s words in the children’s handwriting. “Help, we’re sick. Need change.” Mark didn’t have change on him, anyhow, so all he saved the trio was a pitiful apology when he passed them. It’s not like any number of coins could save them. There was not enough grace to keep kids from killing their parents or their parents from killing their neighbors or their neighbors from killing their kids’ dreams or their kids’ dreams from killing the harsh realities they would someday have to face. There was not enough grace to keep Mark from wishing he were dead, nor was there enough mercy to let him forgive himself, Evelyn, or any number of kids, murderous or Sara-McLaughlin-commercial-ready or otherwise.
    He threw up on the side of the trail. Mark walked back to his apartment. He took a shower and brushed his teeth. He typically ate lunch with Evelyn before heading back to work, but he didn’t feel up to it, and the previous night’s events didn’t seem to yield an ideal setting for lunch dates. He got dressed and ate a quesadilla at a nearby Taco Bell before he scuttled off to work. He fished out the nearly-empty pack of cigarettes from beneath the passenger seat in his car and smoked his way to the station.
    The newsroom was empty when he rolled in. The managers were gone to a conference, and a few of the producers were out on their late-summer vacations. No one was at the assignment desk, so Mark sat there and listened to scanners. People beat their wives and drove too fast on highways. They got too drunk and dealt drugs and touched their kids. The phone rang. Mark answered. A thick voice on the other end of the line asked him to take a picture off the news site. The man had driven his car into a house and flipped off the cameraman. Mark told him he’d pass the information along. He sat silent after the guy hung up on him. He walked to the vending machine and bought a bag of chips and a soda. He went back to the desk and listened to the scanners again. Someone shot at strangers through their car door, but no one actually ended up bleeding over it, so Mark kept it to himself.
    The phone rang again. Mark answered it after just one ring. A man on the other end of the line went on about his dying.
    “... and I went to all the churches in town. You know, the big ones. The First Baptist Church, the Presbyterians, all of ‘em. And do you know what they told me? They said they only give out food. Now, I’ve worked every day of my damn life, and I can’t afford these prescriptions. I had two strokes, and they just want me to lay down and die?”
    “I can see why that would be stressful,” Mark said.
    “Well, what am I supposed to do? I can’t afford the medication, but the doctor already called for the prescription. These churches are supposed to do the work of God, but they couldn’t care less about people like me.”
    “I’ll pass your story along and see if any producers want to pick it up,” Mark said, hanging up the phone as the hands and feet of God had before. He turned toward the scanners and heard something about a wildfire. He called the responding fire department, but no one answered. He sent out an email telling the fill-in producers about the blaze, pushed the old man from his head, and waited for Jennah to come relieve him at the desk.
    When Jennah did come, it was dark out. Mark headed home for his break. The cool air pecked at his cheeks. He walked into his car and pulled out a cigarette. He lit its tip and started toward his apartment for a sandwich. The whole way back, Mark kept his music louder than it should have been to keep him from thinking about much of anything. He imagined two teens stabbing their parents to death, their knives slicing through the cheeks they kissed when they were toddlers, the eyes that had made sure to care for them looking through them sightlessly. And there would be blood, like, the whole floor would be stained red, and it would stink like hell in a couple days. The brothers’ hands would have little nicks and cuts along their fingers where their hands slipped down on the knives as they collided with the solid floor beneath their parents butchered bodies. Mark thought of their church, just days after the murders, preaching love and acceptance, and, of course, refusing to help a sick old man. When God chose to kill people, it was His will, though the congregation would sometimes much rather do it themselves. Mark decided to stop at a gas station and get a pack of watered-down Oklahoma beer for after work.
    He settled on a suggestively named joint just north of his apartment complex. Mark walked into the Kum and Go, and overheard the clerk telling an old, tattooed man in a blue and gray pearl snap that her father had patented an engine for Tesla and more recently contracted some sort of heart disease that left one of his feet dangling in a six-foot hole in the ground. Mark wondered which was more important (the engine or the heart disease) as he grabbed a pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He took maybe two steps toward the cash register before he realized he had to pee. He set the beer on counter and walked into the bathroom. He finished his business and went back to the counter to pay for his beer. A white man in a black hoodie walked into the convenience store. He put a gun in Mark’s face. Mark looked deep down the barrel, imagined the lead waiting in the chamber, and almost smiled.
    “Get the fuck on the floor.”
    Mark politely kneeled down next to the counter. The guy grabbed his cash and was out the door in less than a minute, hardly a crime, really. Mark looked at the clerk crying behind the register, picked up his case of beer, and wondered what kind of jokes he could make about the robbery when he got back to work as he walked out the door.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...