Dark bits.

It's 6:45 a.m. A gritty, mundane sort of magic pervades the air at "Valentine's" in the Hamilton Hotel. The silver troughs are already filled with thick wedges of French toast, pounds of flattened, cardboard-like bacon, mounds of shiny sausage links, and piles of other artery-clogging goodies. Urns of strong coffee stand guard over the holy of holies--the omelet station. The priests, disguised as waiters, carry pitchers of iced water and cold pewter creamers to their individual altars and stand ready.

Sylvia, the matriarch of the Weissman family, is the first to arrive. She rolls in, older and dustier than the pharaohs and flanked by two Sumo wrestlers dressed as tired tourists.  This morning she is decked out in powder-blue sweat pants and a faded yellow blouse. Behind the wheelchair, her son staggers as he pushes her majesty further into the room; a zombie stumbling toward coffee and salvation.  Everything about the first family screams "buffet veterans."

"Make sure the tea isn't so strong this time. It's always too strong. No one knows how to make tea anymore," she declares. The zombie rolls his eyes further back into his head. Since forever, he has been serving her "tea" consisting of a cup of hot water with a dry tea bag on the saucer. Always she complains that it is too strong.

The two Sumos break off from the procession and attack the omelet station, shouting out their demands while the zombie manhandles Queen Sylvia into position at the table. He collapses into a chair while she mutters something disparaging about the air-conditioning.

Royalty seated, the audience wanders in. A small army garbed in shorts, sandals, and mismatched socks. A few sport t-shirts with pithy sayings like "Obamanation," and "I'd trade gun control for bladder control!"

A family with three noisy children burst onto the scene, descending on the cereal station like crows on a battlefield. Eventually, everyone settles in and the familiar music of forks on dishes and clattering ice cubes against glass precedes the main event.

No one actually stops eating, but there's a familiar flavor of anticipation in the air. The waiters move just a little faster in, replenishing the troughs and re-folding those magical beige cloth napkins that refuse to absorb or clean.

Lee enters the room, filled with equal parts of desperation and determination. A large man just starting to turn to fat, he moves as if he is perpetually walking against a strong wind, sometimes dispensing his own. Today he wears slightly grimy blue jeans and a black Izod shirt, which hides a small gut, the foreshadowing of years to come. He is alone, armed with a dog-eared Dean Koontz novel (the one about a child in danger and a pet dog). There's less than a full day's growth peppered across his face. Whatever hair he sports is hidden under a faded Yankee's baseball cap. He has stayed in many different hotels but Sunday mornings from 7:15 to 9:00 am are always the same. For Lee, every breakfast buffet is a personal challenge.

Valentine's buffet is $15.95; about $5.00 more than breakfast would cost him at the Broadway Diner just down the road. He knows that he can hit the breakeven point by the second serving if he loads up on the bacon, but he's unsure of the quality of today's pork. It glistens with the promise of smoky satisfaction, but Lee has been fooled before by buffet meat products. He could pile on food, ignore it, and get a second plate, but it would be a hollow victory.

Instead he chooses a cheese and onion omelet and three pieces of French toast. This is also not without risk. While more satisfying, they are more filling and always make him feel sleepy.

"This tea is too hot," her highness announces.  Mummified, shaky hands, replace the cup.  Some hot water splashes over and the lonely tea bag finally achieves its life's purpose, darkening the small puddle in the saucer.

Across the room, Lee takes his seat and digs in. In a concession to culinary preference over economic interests, he piled the eggs on a toasted bagel, strings of cheese hanging over the end like Spanish moss. He alternates between the omelet and French toast, and by the time her majesty is satisfied with the temperature of her water, he is up for seconds. He is already full and a little tired, but he knows he is still about seven dollars in the hole. Lee, the Rainman of the buffet circuit, throws caution to the wind and loads up on the bacon and Danish. He knows this will ruin his day, but he also knows he'll finish this morning in the black. 

He piles the bacon so high that even the Sumo wrestlers take notice. Frick and Frack are on their 3rd plate already, but their portions are smaller and they are not members in good standing of the clean plate club. Amateurs.

Lee opens his Koontz novel and reads about the damaged but cute doggie. He quickly takes a chunk of bagel and eggs, then folds over a piece of bacon and sticks in the corner of his mouth like chewing tobacco. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he repeats the process until only the Danish remains.

A waitress glides over and refills his cup with hot, black lubricant. He gratefully takes a swallow and then attacks the pastry. His blood sugar has spiked to a little under 400 and he's having difficulty concentrating.  He keeps rereading the same sentence over and over, and his vision is getting a little blurry. But he has the presence of mind to know that he's eaten close to $22.00 worth of breakfast. He pauses to gently massage his chest. After a few moments and another large swallow of coffee, the pain recedes and he pops the last bit of Danish into his mouth.

Finally, he can breathe easy. The anxiety and tension disappear, the pain in his chest recedes and the caffeine kicks in. He is rewarded with that false sense of immortality that surrounds all hotel people. Mission accomplished, Lee gets up for some window shopping at the cold cereal and yogurt parfait table.

"This grapefruit is sour," Sylvia announces.

It was a dark and stormy night when Mister Anderson strolled into the Demanding Dom.

     "MA!" Everyone in the bar cheered. Anderson was a regular at the bar these days. The Demanding Dom was a men's only club, a place where a Dom could come to have a drink and just relax among the other alphas. And when it came to alpha males, no one was more alpha than MA. This was partly due to his commanding presence and mostly due to MA being the author of this story.

The bar was a dimly lit refuge for MA. It smelled faintly of whiskey and English Leather. The soft lights shone upwards from plaster sconces shaped like mermaids kneeling in supplication.  It never occurred to MA that mermaids couldn't actually kneel, but then again, he never bothered to give much thought to sconces or other lighting fixtures. The Jukebox was playing Cherry Pie, again. 

     'Big surprise,' he thought.

MA easily found an empty bar stool two down from another dom. The Demanding Dom was always empty on Monday nights because Monday was the one day the subs didn't spend yakking in Chat all night so most of the doms tended to run home after work for playtime. But MA was an Alpha's alpha and his sub would have to wait.

MA nodded to the dom sitting to his left. The gentleman returned the nod and lazily raised his glass. MA noticed he was drinking a flaming phoenix - fireball whiskey, Dr Pepper and a splash of Bailey's Irish Cream. The drink got its name from the tendency to rise up from the ashes and return to the back of one's throat.

The bartender, the only submissive male in the joint, crawled over to where MA was sitting.

     "Whad iddle free?"

MA frowned. 

      "Take that damn rubber hood off, for fuck's sake."

The bartender obliged and, not without some difficulty, rolled the latex mask up from the neck until his mouth was visible.

       "What will it be," he asked breathlessly.

       "The usual," MA snapped.

       "Whiskey and Apple Pie coming up." The bartender crawled back behind the bar to make the drink.

MA turned to the other dom and smiled. 

      'My sub screws up this drink all the time. I finally told her I'd be taking my drinks out and that she wasn't ever to make me another drink again."

The other dom nodded and downed the rest of the Flaming Phoenix.  MA waited a few seconds, and when nothing came back up, he continued:

     "You know what she said?  She said Yes Sir. That's what she said."  MA gave his best 'damned straight' stare to emphasize his dominance.

The bartender came back with MA's drink. 

     "Two bits."

     "Put it on my tab. And what the fuck is two bits, anyway?"

The bartender didn't answer and that was okay with MA, as he was merely a background character for this story.  

SensualSubGirl is sweet, caring and always adds to the cage experience and never detracts.

Wheee!

Chim made a space for people to be kind this week. She is the Cage person of the week, IMO.

Chin is talented and taloned.  But she's sweet and has done a great thing.

Thank.you chim!

 The warmth of the sun -                                                                                         no

The fresh abandoned sheet.

Nothing colder.

a kiss a slap a scream a sigh

The silence which follows, enticement or chasm?

slippery like dropped punctuation

candlelight and the promise of torches

Chihuly glass perched on Jenga of moments...

the back of her head, leaving or lust

the grasp of air or hair

taste of promise, sweetness of lie

our world a cheap waterbed on shaky foundation.

I made you a playlist,

how cliché, how sappy, how sad is that?

Then I listened to all the songs.  

All the words I knew you loved, the notes that moved you.

(My competition.)

 I tried to pick out all the lines,

the rhymes,

the phrases that touched upon who you are.

How lame is that?  

It gets worse.

I imagined giving you the playlist,

Imagined you'd melt at the gesture,

fall into my arms and never leave,

the both of us dancing under your music.

Two bodies drowning in song, lost and saved in the night.

A desperate fantasy,

pretending these songs might make you mine.

I am not a love struck kid mooning over the class beauty.

But I am not quite ready to abandon this dream.

Not at all.

Truman sits in his car on an early Tuesday morning. He rolls both front windows down. Despite the infusion of fresh air, the car still smells of stale meat and sickness. The ghosts of countless meals delivered from drive-thru windows has seeped into both his fingertips and the car's upholstery. He's cleaned the car just that morning. Truman has become fastidious lately for reasons he does not understand. But some scents, like certain memories, refuse to be banished or buried.

The rifle is propped up on the passenger seat and ignored for the moment.

There is something exceptionally peaceful about an empty parking lot on an early autumn day. To Truman, it feels like white space — a page without a story. Uncluttered. The soft whispering of wind in the trees flanking the parking lot lulls him in and out of a light doze every few minutes. There are days when even the most urgent of thoughts or actions are insufficient to keep one awake.

The first car is a silver Honda, not that it matters. It parks at the opposite end of the lot. No surprise, as Truman is parked far back from the building. Even before the Honda's door opens, he can make out the noise of children arguing, but the sounds are so small they don't interfere with the wind and the trees.

Never a man of words, he knows there is a, a poetry to this moment. A sublime pause wraps itself around Truman and his world as they wait for everything to change.

He closes his eyes again and thinks how odd the world is. A man can commit a horrible act and then later do something wonderful, and people will say, "Would you look at that? Look at all the good he's doing now." But if that same man commits the exact same acts in reverse order -- something wonderful followed by something terrible -- people say "The monster! All this time and we never knew!"

Only perception changes.

There is the thing that happens and then there is the story we make up to explain the thing that happens. One is real, but the other is important. Truman thinks about all the terrible things that have happened, and the terrible things that are going to happen. He has lived with these thoughts for a long time. At first they would keep him awake at night and shadow him through the day. Sometimes he would cry; sometimes shout. But now, at this moment, they hold no power over him. He drifts off again and when he opens his eyes, four more cars are in the lot.

Three children get out of one of the SUV's, backpacks slung over their shoulders, and walk/ run to the school. A steady stream of cars find their way into the lot, as well as the first in what will be a caravan of yellow buses.

He's so tired, always tired these days. Even his ex-wife, not the most observant of people, has remarked on this. She wants him to see a doctor. Truman promised he would.

The parking lot is almost full now. A line of buses forms a barrier between the cars and the school. Truman gets out of the car, stretches. He walks around to the passenger side and opens the door, stifling a yawn.

The world will want to know why. But this isn't that kind of story.