Stories
Rosencrantz & Joshua
In a contemporary re-telling (not really) of Romeo & Juliet by email, ROSECRANS BALDWIN and JOSHUA ALLEN find their love with gratuitous profanity. Note: Contains very bad language.
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THE FOOTNOTES TOO
Infinite Summer
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Dear Rosecrans,
I heard about your engagement to Rebecca the other day and the tears have finally stopped long enough for me to type this congratulatory message. You know I’m not an emotionally demonstrative person, and flinch whenever somebody touches me or looks me directly in the eye or says my name, but coming across the announcement in the Penny Saver really unlocked something deep inside my heart and I’ve been a basket case ever since. Sobbing uncontrollably, a box of Puffs Lotion-Infused Facial Tissues covering my throbbing erection, watching animated DVD menus for hours on end.
It’s the overwhelming beauty of publicly declared love, I think. It’s the old-school ballsiness that I’ve come to expect from R. Baldwin. It’s thinking back to all the times when you called me in the middle of the night, weepy-drunk—‘Josh, she cut up all my clothes with the pinking shears,’ ‘Josh, I hate how peevish and emasculated I’ve become,’ etc. Even then I knew it would all work out in the end. The bile of the dowry negotiations, the engagement ring stolen from the finger of a stabbed meter maid, the girlish fistfights between you and your father-in-law-to-be, all that is in the past now. We can finally look to the future, bright and antiseptic, powered by pumping pistons of l’amour.
Yours,
Josh
* * *
Josh,
You cat-eating son of a bitch. How dare you write this. Rebecca meant it when she said no to you and yes to me—try explaining that to Amy instead of beating off in my in-box.
I hope your children strangle themselves in the womb.
Yours,
Rosecrans
* * *
Rosencrantz,
You know the mimes that clog the sewers of that execrable metropolis in which you quote-unquote live? How they pretend to be trapped in an invisible box, slowly suffocating for tourists’ amusement? That is how I imagine you, except the striped shirt is from Prada, the invisible box is a thing called Sweet Sweet Denial, and the teardrop falling from your eye is not painted on.
Sincerely,
Josh G. Allen
* * *
Josh,
I remember when I met Amy for the first time and wanted to choke. It wasn’t on bile, or even something coming up from my lunch, but the pure revulsion I felt for the first time in my life, for something so inhumane, so monstrous and shitcaked and chewing its own hair.
That’s what it takes, I guess, to be the type flattered by your engagement proposal.
How dare you write me that first letter—how dare you! At least your most recent note reeks of the fermented corpse fluids that flatter your natural odor and offend living creatures—but your first, to be so sweet, even dandy! You are no flower—you are what eats the flower, then eats what remains when the flower is completely digested and passed, cilia-over-cilia, through the digestive system, onto the floor.
It is a terrible parody to watch the world’s cruel and stupid strive for higher than what they deserve. That is Shakespeare, idiot, and you better get what it means.
You do not know the pain I still suffer, constantly. You once had power over me; now, it’s waned, even extinguished. The idea that you succeeded in convincing Rebecca that you were something but pure filth, rank from self-abuse, then dining her at Chuck E Cheese (that I would go there!), and gorging her on sweetbreads and stuffed pizzas—this holds my mind in two pieces, like the noble atom, split for evil means.
That she liked it, a hell in my heart. Not Shakespeare, dipshit. My own pain.
She and I have changed. You can’t hunt us any longer. I hope you and Amy find peace in Maine, though peace must not apply to the sub-man, he is incapable of anything so simple, transcendental, and pure; so I wish you hell, the hell I inhabit in daylight, and hope it finds you miserable.
Die,
Rosecrans
* * *
Dear R—,
I have FedEx’d (Ground) you a package of prescription medication that I’ve found to be useful. The paranoia, the impotent rage, the purple prose—it will all fade to a warm blur with just two of those babies every other hour.
I am reaching out to you here, a friend to a friend, because I hate seeing what you’ve become. OK yeah, I’ll admit your lunatic rants have provided hours of entertainment for Amy and myself, and we’ve printed your missives out on quality resume paper and added them to the little Rosencrane shrine we keep by the cat box, but it is a hollow, specious sort of joy.
What you and I both deserve is authentic, unblemished joy, am I right or what. And maybe, with our upcoming nuptials, we’ll finally claim that kind of joy. The kind of joy I felt that night at Chuck E. Cheese, the kind of joy everyone felt that night—the Skee-Ball machines and plastic ball-pool exulting in the love that was emanating from the table where Rebecca and I sat, too full of love to eat the pizza, too thunderstruck by passion to sing along with the animatronic band.
‘Disembowel me here and now,’ I said, or words to that effect. ‘For I shall never be happier than I am at this moment.’ The ensuing makeout session was both sacred and hottt.
The pills I sent you were not poison. Enjoy them with my blessings. I hope they will help you get through the intervening months before your wedding, when you may, at last, get a hint of what went down at that Chuck E. Cheese. And then later that same week in a storage closet at the Target on Frontier Ave.
Get well soon,
Josh
* * *
Josh,
This letter is being transcribed by Luis Arias, the night-nurse in my wing of St. Vincent’s. He is an able transcriber, he says, and has done similar things for other patients, so I trust this will reach you in English, and not some mangled Mexi-talk.
I should have seen this coming. I should have been smarter, drunk a few nights ago, when I opened your box and my bedroom filled with a noxious red gas and seconds later I saw my parents, made up as mimes, lobbing Skee balls at my crotch.
Two days later I wake up with tubes in me, and the kindest doctors smiling, sweet Luis holding my head, even the hospital’s chef behind me, washing his hands before he prepared my lunch. They tell me I will survive, maybe, but I don’t believe them. Knowing the foul spirits that invaded my apartment, and my head, currently swaddled, I taste death.
But I am not without some base pleasures. I have become close with another nurse, Anita, and though we may not speak the same language, we have found other ways to communicate. Each morning I wake to find her massaging my feet with emory boards. Did you know I would find such kindness, when you tried to collapse my lungs?
I am dying, and it is your hand that bears my blood. Hot, red spots you can’t wash off, even with Amy’s open sores. You evil queen, I am dying. You will know this forever, toad.
mr. allen—he is not dying and he is the worst patient we have ever had. i hate him and so do the doctors. the cook pees in his hair when he naps. at night we sand down his feet so when he leaves, he is a foot shorter. he asked my wife anita if he could smell her ‘cooch.’ please, send more boxes—luis
I offer one last chance. Renounce you ever knew Rebecca, and move to Taiwan. Then, I will accept your apologies.
With spite, also hope,
RB
Luis, that’s it. No I’m done. Stop writing! Sto—
* * *
RC 100,
Seven months of planning down the drain. Yippee. I had it all worked out, and even my under-the-counter therapist, who helped me with the psychological profiles, thought it was foolproof. I built a little shoebox diorama of your apartment, pretty much to scale, with a little Rosecranz I carved out of Irish Spring, a little Rebecca made by gluing sumptuous breasts onto a Lego figurine (a ‘minifig’), and a little FedEx delivery-person, saucily performed by my index finger. The test-runs all went flawlessly.
Everyone agreed that Rebecca would open the package, not you. There was no doubt. Her natural curiosity, her pushy me-first attitude, her absolute authority over you—it was a no-brainer.
But now I realize how wrong I was. Of course you’d open the box, of course you’d have the courage, the will, the spirit—the very things that drew me to you in the first place!!! The very reasons I wanted Rebecca out of the picture!!!!!
With her gone, I could finally blot out that awful night at Chuck E. Cheese, when she arrived with three ‘guy friends’ who fondled her shamelessly and drank an entire pitcher of my root beer before calling me ‘little dude’ and heading out back to the dumpster to do who-knows-what. And I could finally fire Aleisa Shirley, the actress who’s been playing ‘Amy’ all this time—a total drain on my finances, by the way, and completely unable to cry on cue, so good riddance if you ask me.
With them out of the way, I could finally stop all the lies and finally, finally make my move. But no. Instead, I’ve succeeded in giving smallpox to the one person in the world I totally WOULDN’T want to give it to!! I feel like a grade-A heel right now.
Sorry,
Josh
* * *
Josh, are you there? Josh pick up. Joshua? Fie. How much we are like Romeo, I your Juliet, you Ariel & I that little red crab Caliban. They’ve given me one phone call [cough] and I waste it on an answering machine. So the fates work, and they give us our last breaths to breathe alone. That’s that Shakespeare again. But this time, sweet Josh, I wish I had picked different passages. How I might have saved us both…
They say my smallpox is uncurable. There is a cure, but apparently the hospital is ‘all out.’ [cough; hack] So I die.
If only I had been smart enough, to see your loving plans! In a way, my prince, my sprite, I imagine a part of you will die also, probably a part you could do without, like a kidney, or a toe, but still, it will be living tissue that once was part of your life, and you loved just as you love your ears or nose—deeply. [hock; loogie]
I can see Luis eyeing me from the hall, I think he’ll claim me soon. To be honest, I’m not sure they have my best interests at heart. Even Anita avoids me, no longer perfumes my room with her sweet nectars.
I am already dead, J-baby, and if I had one wish given, it would be to see you standing by me, a kiss on my forehead, a kind word.
I’m almost finished Luis, you thieving catfucker
I must go, for I am ailin,’ my Allen. Please rehire Amy for your conjugal needs. And know this: I may have proposed to Rebecca, but it was only to slowly kill her, for having you before I could.
Back off Luis, I swear [thud]
There. I have killed Luis. No decent play ends with anything but death. For I must also die. Remember, you were always my Joshua tree, my Allen wrench when the IKEA of my heart arrived. I would trade my kingdom now for another hoarse whisper, for you to clear the bong and pass its tender neck. Adieu. [die]
I heard about your engagement to Rebecca the other day and the tears have finally stopped long enough for me to type this congratulatory message. You know I’m not an emotionally demonstrative person, and flinch whenever somebody touches me or looks me directly in the eye or says my name, but coming across the announcement in the Penny Saver really unlocked something deep inside my heart and I’ve been a basket case ever since. Sobbing uncontrollably, a box of Puffs Lotion-Infused Facial Tissues covering my throbbing erection, watching animated DVD menus for hours on end.
It’s the overwhelming beauty of publicly declared love, I think. It’s the old-school ballsiness that I’ve come to expect from R. Baldwin. It’s thinking back to all the times when you called me in the middle of the night, weepy-drunk—‘Josh, she cut up all my clothes with the pinking shears,’ ‘Josh, I hate how peevish and emasculated I’ve become,’ etc. Even then I knew it would all work out in the end. The bile of the dowry negotiations, the engagement ring stolen from the finger of a stabbed meter maid, the girlish fistfights between you and your father-in-law-to-be, all that is in the past now. We can finally look to the future, bright and antiseptic, powered by pumping pistons of l’amour.
Yours,
Josh
Josh,
You cat-eating son of a bitch. How dare you write this. Rebecca meant it when she said no to you and yes to me—try explaining that to Amy instead of beating off in my in-box.
I hope your children strangle themselves in the womb.
Yours,
Rosecrans
Rosencrantz,
You know the mimes that clog the sewers of that execrable metropolis in which you quote-unquote live? How they pretend to be trapped in an invisible box, slowly suffocating for tourists’ amusement? That is how I imagine you, except the striped shirt is from Prada, the invisible box is a thing called Sweet Sweet Denial, and the teardrop falling from your eye is not painted on.
Sincerely,
Josh G. Allen
Josh,
I remember when I met Amy for the first time and wanted to choke. It wasn’t on bile, or even something coming up from my lunch, but the pure revulsion I felt for the first time in my life, for something so inhumane, so monstrous and shitcaked and chewing its own hair.
That’s what it takes, I guess, to be the type flattered by your engagement proposal.
How dare you write me that first letter—how dare you! At least your most recent note reeks of the fermented corpse fluids that flatter your natural odor and offend living creatures—but your first, to be so sweet, even dandy! You are no flower—you are what eats the flower, then eats what remains when the flower is completely digested and passed, cilia-over-cilia, through the digestive system, onto the floor.
It is a terrible parody to watch the world’s cruel and stupid strive for higher than what they deserve. That is Shakespeare, idiot, and you better get what it means.
You do not know the pain I still suffer, constantly. You once had power over me; now, it’s waned, even extinguished. The idea that you succeeded in convincing Rebecca that you were something but pure filth, rank from self-abuse, then dining her at Chuck E Cheese (that I would go there!), and gorging her on sweetbreads and stuffed pizzas—this holds my mind in two pieces, like the noble atom, split for evil means.
That she liked it, a hell in my heart. Not Shakespeare, dipshit. My own pain.
She and I have changed. You can’t hunt us any longer. I hope you and Amy find peace in Maine, though peace must not apply to the sub-man, he is incapable of anything so simple, transcendental, and pure; so I wish you hell, the hell I inhabit in daylight, and hope it finds you miserable.
Die,
Rosecrans
Dear R—,
I have FedEx’d (Ground) you a package of prescription medication that I’ve found to be useful. The paranoia, the impotent rage, the purple prose—it will all fade to a warm blur with just two of those babies every other hour.
I am reaching out to you here, a friend to a friend, because I hate seeing what you’ve become. OK yeah, I’ll admit your lunatic rants have provided hours of entertainment for Amy and myself, and we’ve printed your missives out on quality resume paper and added them to the little Rosencrane shrine we keep by the cat box, but it is a hollow, specious sort of joy.
What you and I both deserve is authentic, unblemished joy, am I right or what. And maybe, with our upcoming nuptials, we’ll finally claim that kind of joy. The kind of joy I felt that night at Chuck E. Cheese, the kind of joy everyone felt that night—the Skee-Ball machines and plastic ball-pool exulting in the love that was emanating from the table where Rebecca and I sat, too full of love to eat the pizza, too thunderstruck by passion to sing along with the animatronic band.
‘Disembowel me here and now,’ I said, or words to that effect. ‘For I shall never be happier than I am at this moment.’ The ensuing makeout session was both sacred and hottt.
The pills I sent you were not poison. Enjoy them with my blessings. I hope they will help you get through the intervening months before your wedding, when you may, at last, get a hint of what went down at that Chuck E. Cheese. And then later that same week in a storage closet at the Target on Frontier Ave.
Get well soon,
Josh
Josh,
This letter is being transcribed by Luis Arias, the night-nurse in my wing of St. Vincent’s. He is an able transcriber, he says, and has done similar things for other patients, so I trust this will reach you in English, and not some mangled Mexi-talk.
I should have seen this coming. I should have been smarter, drunk a few nights ago, when I opened your box and my bedroom filled with a noxious red gas and seconds later I saw my parents, made up as mimes, lobbing Skee balls at my crotch.
Two days later I wake up with tubes in me, and the kindest doctors smiling, sweet Luis holding my head, even the hospital’s chef behind me, washing his hands before he prepared my lunch. They tell me I will survive, maybe, but I don’t believe them. Knowing the foul spirits that invaded my apartment, and my head, currently swaddled, I taste death.
But I am not without some base pleasures. I have become close with another nurse, Anita, and though we may not speak the same language, we have found other ways to communicate. Each morning I wake to find her massaging my feet with emory boards. Did you know I would find such kindness, when you tried to collapse my lungs?
I am dying, and it is your hand that bears my blood. Hot, red spots you can’t wash off, even with Amy’s open sores. You evil queen, I am dying. You will know this forever, toad.
mr. allen—he is not dying and he is the worst patient we have ever had. i hate him and so do the doctors. the cook pees in his hair when he naps. at night we sand down his feet so when he leaves, he is a foot shorter. he asked my wife anita if he could smell her ‘cooch.’ please, send more boxes—luis
I offer one last chance. Renounce you ever knew Rebecca, and move to Taiwan. Then, I will accept your apologies.
With spite, also hope,
RB
Luis, that’s it. No I’m done. Stop writing! Sto—
RC 100,
Seven months of planning down the drain. Yippee. I had it all worked out, and even my under-the-counter therapist, who helped me with the psychological profiles, thought it was foolproof. I built a little shoebox diorama of your apartment, pretty much to scale, with a little Rosecranz I carved out of Irish Spring, a little Rebecca made by gluing sumptuous breasts onto a Lego figurine (a ‘minifig’), and a little FedEx delivery-person, saucily performed by my index finger. The test-runs all went flawlessly.
Everyone agreed that Rebecca would open the package, not you. There was no doubt. Her natural curiosity, her pushy me-first attitude, her absolute authority over you—it was a no-brainer.
But now I realize how wrong I was. Of course you’d open the box, of course you’d have the courage, the will, the spirit—the very things that drew me to you in the first place!!! The very reasons I wanted Rebecca out of the picture!!!!!
With her gone, I could finally blot out that awful night at Chuck E. Cheese, when she arrived with three ‘guy friends’ who fondled her shamelessly and drank an entire pitcher of my root beer before calling me ‘little dude’ and heading out back to the dumpster to do who-knows-what. And I could finally fire Aleisa Shirley, the actress who’s been playing ‘Amy’ all this time—a total drain on my finances, by the way, and completely unable to cry on cue, so good riddance if you ask me.
With them out of the way, I could finally stop all the lies and finally, finally make my move. But no. Instead, I’ve succeeded in giving smallpox to the one person in the world I totally WOULDN’T want to give it to!! I feel like a grade-A heel right now.
Sorry,
Josh
Josh, are you there? Josh pick up. Joshua? Fie. How much we are like Romeo, I your Juliet, you Ariel & I that little red crab Caliban. They’ve given me one phone call [cough] and I waste it on an answering machine. So the fates work, and they give us our last breaths to breathe alone. That’s that Shakespeare again. But this time, sweet Josh, I wish I had picked different passages. How I might have saved us both…
They say my smallpox is uncurable. There is a cure, but apparently the hospital is ‘all out.’ [cough; hack] So I die.
If only I had been smart enough, to see your loving plans! In a way, my prince, my sprite, I imagine a part of you will die also, probably a part you could do without, like a kidney, or a toe, but still, it will be living tissue that once was part of your life, and you loved just as you love your ears or nose—deeply. [hock; loogie]
I can see Luis eyeing me from the hall, I think he’ll claim me soon. To be honest, I’m not sure they have my best interests at heart. Even Anita avoids me, no longer perfumes my room with her sweet nectars.
I am already dead, J-baby, and if I had one wish given, it would be to see you standing by me, a kiss on my forehead, a kind word.
I’m almost finished Luis, you thieving catfucker
I must go, for I am ailin,’ my Allen. Please rehire Amy for your conjugal needs. And know this: I may have proposed to Rebecca, but it was only to slowly kill her, for having you before I could.
Back off Luis, I swear [thud]
There. I have killed Luis. No decent play ends with anything but death. For I must also die. Remember, you were always my Joshua tree, my Allen wrench when the IKEA of my heart arrived. I would trade my kingdom now for another hoarse whisper, for you to clear the bong and pass its tender neck. Adieu. [die]
—Published October 9, 2002
