.

Edwidge Danticat opens “Without Inspection,” for which I must thank a text-featuring e-mail from the trusty New Yorker, by introducing a character who is plunging to his death. The author then proceeds to elaborate on the character’s mindset, with little anecdotes like Arnold’s (the main character’s) aversion to having too many material possessions, things which would prevent someone from feeling “free.”
In what I found to be a curious passage, then, Danticat specifies that such a freedom is “As free as this fall, which he had neither intended nor chosen,” a fall which at the start of the story we learn involved taking “six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet.”
In general, Danticat’s technique in “Without Inspection” is one of shock and awe, complete with his enumeration of mental images in the Arnold’s mind during this brief fall (his son, his wife trying on dresses, the elementary school graduation ceremony), but the “neither intended nor chosen” line reveals something darker stirring the lurid underbelly of Danticat’s message. This is the increasing extent to which the presence of suicidal thoughts is a foregone conclusion in all who create or handle literature in the 21st century.
A couple of months ago I received a rejection notice from a flash fiction contest and got a free viewing of the winning story (the maximum word count was 800, that the only guideline of the short stories). It was for the Ginosko Literary Journal and the winner was “Sparks” by Chris Connolly, in which the main narrator witnesses a drowning victim and the last sentence of the piece is “You might say she was my first one.”
Somehow, in other words, this garish presence of an almost juvenile infatuation with death and suicide has fully saturated our literature of the world today. I read all of “Without Inspection,” not even so much because I was enjoying it, but because I knew Danticat was just so crowd-pleasing that his story here would end up benchmarking what we’d come to think of as literary “normalcy” within the next couple years or decade. Sure enough, he does things in trend and by the book: much of the prominently featured imagery is urban and cosmopolitan (“a guava pastry and a cup of coffee from the Lopez brothers’ food truck”) and the characters at the stories forefront are even immigrants sodden with a checkered travel back story, hence theoretically making it easier for us to sympathize with them.
But all this, unfortunately, is because we no longer sympathize with the American everyman, and nothing in life, anymore, is magical: he**, it takes a droll underdog noble savage minority to even garner sympathy during a fatal fall.

You will see
How the adornments of life
Are complex
But how the heart of man
Is simple —
.
You will see
Why
We
Have all these
Neon lights and
Why we have
This life in general
Of masking and
Subsuming in sound buzzing,
Smiling coyly under fathoms of clothes,
Fully glimpsing all this everything that is
Nothing, with blinders on

While game two of the 2018 College World Series Finals was going on I was busy sitting in front of my TV and watching it, continually eating massive mounds of chicken wings and working on a 12 pack of Blue Moon bottles, which I’d eventually finish. In playing, in little league, I had a couple of good years in baseball. It is, though, certainly a mental game, and I found myself going into slumps from time to time, where my hitting or fielding form would develop glitches.
It was funny — the other game I’d watched was Minnesota vs. Oregon St. (now Oregon St. had advanced all the way to the final from said Super Regional and was playing Arkansas for the crown) and I try not to hate people in life, in general, but I couldn’t help but notice that this one sort of half-Mexican half-Cambodian looking dude (who you could pretty much tell played for the Northwest team and not the Ozarks crew by his complexion) had this smooth, shapely face of incredible vapidity, motionless with cold, dark eyes that seemed to probe, to gnash, to be willing to kill if killing, in life, were called for. He was on first base in the Minnesota game. Oregon St. ended up coming back and winning in that game.
Arkansas had never won the world series. They, though, had a chance to — in the bottom of the ninth with two outs their pitcher forced a pop-up out of the Beavers (OSU) hitter, near first base, and the first baseman, second baseman and right fielder all went over, with a chance to make the grab. Neither one of them made the play. The ball landed dead, the game went on, and that same killing-faced Chicano hit the game winning homer for the Oregon St. Beavers.
Except, I have a confession to make. I filled with dread when I saw that ball up there. I filled with dread at the thought of “hope,” which Aimee Bender might cite. I filled with dread at the thought that “Our greatest fear is not that we’re powerless… Our greatest fear is that we’re powerful beyond all comprehension.” I saw the stillness of a provincial restaurant. I saw Grandma Betty’s prize-winning blueberry pie from 1982 resting there in a two-foot-wide frame on the wall, I saw that same old grizzled dude who’s in there every night drinking and looking straight ahead, cracks on his face like craters on the moon. I saw fat-faced lawyers congratulating me, a blind eye turned to the wrongly accused criminals. I saw the bevy of lights — the camera flashes, the newspapers churning in warehouses as they printed my picture next to killers.

If for some reason
You were to lose all your love,
All the magic and then just exist
As one more of these forms
In constant competition,
In constant, pointless struggle,
Trying as something separate,
Unrelated and dead
Toward the same things
As those others sames around you,
That would certainly be a tragedy

The one girl eyes something
That is not quite the camera
Her gaze oozing out in symmetrical blue spheres
Toward something 30 feet back and five to the left
About which she feels no disposition,
.
To mirror a bandmate
Who sits with a foot up on a seat
In shorts,
All faces
Suspended across there
On pale bodies and shoulders
In dissonant disarray to
Materialize before one or several of many forces around them
As if to say, “Let’s do this,”
Anything,
They make surf rock and
Everything is ok.

When you say that the day is going by slowly and that you are bored,
You are hoping that what comes next,
The night,
And the next day,
Will be full of some renown which exists in the back of your mind as an ideal,
But is actually the opposite of this life in which you’re immersed,
With the owls perched slowly,
One atop the tree and one below it,
Sneering like they talked to those other people,
Or something like that.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, which was the first news source to pop up under a June 30 search for “montana machete,” late on June 22, 2018, police in Great Falls, Montana “received a call” from a man who “had come home to find his ex-girlfriend hiding behind his bedroom door, wielding a machete,” which is “a large heavy knife used for cutting sugarcane and underbrush and as a weapon.” The article continues in saying that “Police say she forced her ex-boyfriend to have sex with her at machete-point.”
The woman has been named as Samantha Ray Mears and now faces six criminal charges, among which are “aggravated battery, assault with a weapon, unlawful restraint, partner family member assault and two counts of criminal mischief.”
In charging with “family member assault,” then, the state of Montana presumably differentiates from general “assault” or “assault with a deadly weapon,” assuaging the accused slightly for being closely associated with the victim in everyday life. Mears, though, is said to be the “ex”-significant other of the assailed, and not the current one. No charges of “sexual assault” were apparently brought against Mears.
In the booking photograph, Mears is shown wearing a baja jacket, a slang term for “Mexican Threads Hoodie” with a “single large pocket and vents on the side” [1]. The style is similar to a “Tribal Woven Shirt Jacket,” which pops up under the search for “native american jacket.”
In appearance, Mears looks part American Indian, which I’ve heard is the preferred term to “Native American,” that is if the nomenclature of the specific tribe isn’t apparent. According to areaconnect.com, “American Indian and Alaska Natives” compose 5.09% of Great Falls’ population. It has not been affirmed or speculated upon as to whether Miss Mears as Indian blood in her heritage.
Another thing noticeable in the booking photograph of Miss Samantha Ray Mears is that on the front of her neck, where on the man would like the Adam’s apple, lies a large skin protrusion the approximate size and shape of a vagina. Bright, penetrating and purposeful brown eyes become emergent. On her faced is perched an aesthetically uncomfortable yet satisfaction and achievement indicative smile similar to one that Strokes lead singer Julian Casablancas would often wear in photo shoots in the band’s early days.
.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baja_jacket.

Without you I would have been about the same as the rest —
Empty, alone, probably residing somewhere
On the west coast to laugh slowly in
Cautious bars, a median liberal
Snowing himself toward a death that seemed toward the bottom
Of a hill draped with trailers and bulldozers
And just enough ill will
To finally to me under,
.
But I met you.
You stuck me with your blood,
The opposite of what a mosquito does,
And all the while I’d grown up with all this nothing,
Thinking, I’ll fight anybody,
And finally people are getting fleshier and their
Necks are getting wider,
My eyes so narrow and
Useless with you.

In this town in this one bar
They put the girls in this spandex underwear
And really my favorite one I liked because of her face
And hated because of her a** and t**s —
.
They there they are —
Half the town goes to Friday’s every night
Which cheats and rolls out a whole craft beer menu
Despite the corporate policy otherwise,
.
And always you can cut the silence with a knife
There’s an extreme awkwardness as the girls
Always in two-somes
Sit there from the skanky bar,
Just drinking their drinks and
Wondering what to say,
Or worse,
Why they were befallen of this life when
There nothing is to say.
.
With clothes on,
They’ve now been deprived of their very identities —
Somebody has snuffed out their pilot lights and
They are amputated pistons of the worst kind of death
As I look for some sports on and solve people’s problems,
The ones I can.

The feeling hangs in the air
Like joints being passed
Of the air being mutual with your bone marrow
And everything you see then usurped
By the “hardness” in you when they’re
Ready to cut you up any day, the
Real
Criminals
The ones
Who take their bibs off
And step out of their house
To feel the warm sunshine.