Wisdom to Know the Difference
Rebecca Kell
I was just a kid. All I knew was that Dad came home shortly before my sister and I went to sleep, played with us, and then went to bed. My sister was always four years too cool to want to play with me, but Dad was always there. We had a trampoline in our backyard. He would sit on his hands and knees underneath it while we bounced. He pushed up against the floor of the trampoline when our jumps landed near him. He always played with us.
Once, we had bought Frosty Paws ice cream at the store, which is only meant for dogs. Mom was out of town. It came in little cups, like the bulk ice cream my grandma always had at her house for us. Dad thought it would be funny to trick my big sister and give her some. I followed him down the hallway to her bedroom, trying not to giggle. I stayed behind him and listened, safely away from the incoming wrath of my sister. It wasn’t long before she was screaming, running to the phone to call my mom and tell on him. She was so mad at him. I thought it was harmless. When my mom heard about it, she was furious. I’m sure she thought, “I leave the house for one day and he feeds the kids dog food”.
***
When I was old enough to put the pieces together, I realized that he came home late because he went to his best friend’s restaurant, the Three Pigs Barbeque, after work each night. He went for drinks. And, when he got home, after playing with us for a short while, he drank some more. And he would drink until he fell asleep.
My mom explained to me that it started with one drink to fall asleep. But, after a while, one drink just wasn’t enough. The trend continued.
***
I was eleven years old. My mom came and got my sister and me from our rooms. She said her and Dad had something important to talk to us about. We followed her down the hallway to our family room, where my mom and Dad would sit in separate chairs across from our couch. My grandma sat in the middle of the couch, motioning for my sister and me to sit at her sides. She held us each in her arms, anchoring us for what was to come. I’m sure more was said, but all I remember is my mom saying, “Daddy and I have decided it will be best for us if we aren’t together anymore.” She told us that we would go see him every other weekend, and spend odd-year Christmas’s and even-year Easters with his side of the family. That would be fair.
My mom came to the couch, and held her crying daughters in her arms. She told us everything would be alright. I didn’t pay attention to what my dad was doing. He may not have even been there.
***
I was awoken to the sound of my grandma throwing my sister’s door open and yelling “What do you think you’re doing?” It’s the middle of the night. Her room is next to mine, my grandma’s across the narrow hall from me. I got up to see what was going on. She was trying to cut her way through the screen on her window. Grandma must have heard the knife cutting through the screen. Though our windows open, the mesh screen isn’t removable. I guess she was trying to run away. It didn’t make sense to me. We already lost someone.
***
Last year, my sister and I saw Blink 182 together in concert. They played an old hit of theirs from when we were growing up, “Stay Together for the Kids”. She told me that she blasted that song on repeat during the divorce. Their lyrics are burned in my pre-teen memories: “If this is what he wants/ And this is what she wants/ Then why is there so much pain?”
On our way home, we reminisced about our childhood. She told me that she felt like she had to take care of me. She said that, when we were younger, if she hadn’t cleaned up my toys by the time Dad got home that he would yell at her. I wasn’t old enough then to pick up my own toys, and he would blame her for the house not being tidy. I wondered what else I didn’t know. What I was too young to pick up on.
***
I never looked forward to the weekends with my dad. We had dinner at the Three Pigs on Saturday nights- always a quarter chicken to share and the best garlic bread you could ever have. Then we went “grocery shopping”. We could pick out anything we wanted, as long as it was cinnamon rolls and Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. That was all he bought for us. At his condo, he had an old bowl of candy on the counter, sometimes popcorn, and an occasional leftover Dorito bag in the fridge.
After a few visits like that, my mom sent us with a bag of food to eat. She reminded us to call her if he had a drink and then got in the car with us.
***
On a weekend visit, he leaves my sister and me in the car while he goes into a casino. We’re alone for hours. The window is cracked.
***
When I was in middle school, I was always so confused when I would stay at a friend’s house and both their parents were home. “Your dad is coming home?” I would ask, confused. “Of course,” my friend replied, “he makes us dinner every night.” Families cooking dinner together and eating at a dinner table every night. A mom and dad. For the longest time, it was just my mom, sister, grandma, and me. That was what a family was. Having a man in the house seemed like such an alien concept.
***
After my sister turned 18 and I was 14, my dad said it was up to us if we wanted to come every other weekend and that we were old enough to decide for ourselves. My sister didn’t want to go anymore. I went some weekends, but only if I could find a friend to come with me.
One weekend, my best friend and I went to his condo. He was always in his bathroom when we were over. I didn’t know what could be so interesting in there that he would spend his time there instead of out with me. I told him that I thought I left my iPod in his car and asked if he would go get it for me because I needed it to fall asleep. He resisted and insisted I go down to the garage myself to get it. I convinced him and he went out to get my iPod. I didn’t leave it in the car. I asked my friend to keep a look out and I went into his bathroom. It reeked of a smoke that was unfamiliar. I opened all of the drawers and cabinets. On his side table was a lighter and something that looked like a cigarette. Under the sink, I found at least four empty bottles of Corona Lite, and another full six-pack.
I walked out onto his patio and sat in a chair and looked at the stars. My friend followed. Tears were in my eyes but she didn’t pry for answers. I thought, “So that’s what he’s been doing”. Dad came back from going to the garage, opened the door to the patio, and said he couldn’t find my iPod. I told him that I found it in my bag. This annoyed him. He went back to his bathroom. He didn’t notice my teary eyes.
My friend and I talked about school and anything else to fill the silence. My mind was uneasy. I got up and walked a few feet to the railing of the balcony. Dad’s apartment was on the third floor of the complex. I climbed up on the railing, my back leaning against the corner of the apartment wall for some support. I looked down at the grass field that lay below in the middle of the units. I thought about what it would be like to fall. My friend stood behind me and asked me if I would get down. I was swinging my legs. I was being careless. I was making her nervous.
***
One day, my mom told me the story of how and why she divorced my dad. She told me that she wanted to be a good Christian and didn’t believe in getting a divorce unless it was absolutely needed. Dad verbally abused her and yelled at her and sometimes would try to push or hurt her. She stayed anyways. She was putting up with his behavior because she thought she had to. She thought that he would get better. Eventually, it leaked into being mean to my sister, and she said she drew the line when he sent me off to the bus stop in tears. When I asked her what he said to me, she said, “If you don’t remember, I’m not going to tell you.”
She told me she was going to therapy, and her therapist asked her, “If this was happening to one of your daughters, what would you want them to do?”
She said, “I would tell them to leave now.”
Her therapist responded, “Then why is it different for you?”
Finally, she gave him a last chance to get sober and stay. He didn’t. We went on to have a long conversation about how women accept what they think they deserve and tend not to question it. In my relationships, I was accepting what I felt I deserved. She didn’t want me to get stuck in the same thing that she was. She wanted so much more for me.
***
Two years ago, my father got his first DUI. He was no longer being a functioning alcoholic. His work told him that he would be let go if he didn’t seek treatment. Customers were complaining that his breath smelled like alcohol. He’d been there for 25 years. His boss and his wife attended my grandma’s funeral. Because it had the shortest program and didn’t deal with the emotional side like AA, my dad went to Schick Shadel Hospital in Seattle. It was $13,000, ten days long, and not covered by insurance. He used the money he got from my grandma’s passing a few months prior. Now that both of his parents were dead, he had more money to spend. My grandma would have been proud of the use of the money.
Schick Shadel specializes in aversion therapy. There, patients are given Antabuse, which makes them throw up whenever any alcohol is put into their system. Their treatment consisted of what my dad called “barf sessions”, where they forced patients to drink different kinds of alcohol and then throw up. This alternated with “truth sessions”, where patients were given the “truth serum” drug, hypnotized, and asked questions. Answers given during therapy were compared to answers given off the drug, to see if the patient really felt that way.
24 hours after his admittance, he managed to escape the hospital. He was found walking down the streets of Seattle in the middle of the night by his brother, who was notified of his escape. He had to stay at Harborview for three days before he could go back to Schick. The lack of alcohol in his blood system was a shock to his body. He had delirium tremens, which is defined as “a rapid onset of confusion usually caused by withdrawal from alcohol”. He said he was at work when asked if he knew where he was. He tried to drink from his shoe. He was out of his mind. My uncle said he had never seen anything like it.
***
This April, I took a boyfriend to meet my dad and me for dinner at the Three Pigs. It was their first time meeting. Dad had been out of treatment for two months and had remained sober, at least to my knowledge. I told my dad about delirium tremens because I had just learned about it in my abnormal psychology class. I said, “I finally found out why you freaked out when you went into treatment.”
“Oh yeah?” He replied.
I described to him what it meant, and he denied it. He said, “No, I went crazy because my vitamin levels were so low.” I agreed for the sake of peace.
For small talk we discussed his crazy druggie sister and his experiences with LSD in high school, among other things. Dad talked almost the whole time we were there. When my boyfriend and I walked to my car I said, “Well, that’s my dad.” I apologized for his inappropriate conversation starters. He doesn’t think before he speaks. He doesn’t have a filter. I get that from him.
***
He went into treatment the same week my sister had her baby in an emergency C-section three months before her due date. I was hopeful that maybe my nephew would get to grow up to have a real relationship with my dad, his grandpa.
Dad called me almost every day he was in treatment. He would tell me about his day and that the cook would make him anything he wanted, even pancakes for dinner (his favorite). He would tell me about his treatments and how he was never going to drink again. It was weird to hear from him so often. He said, “I know I’m never going to drink again because that would be a thirteen thousand dollar beer. I’m spending too much money here to waste it.” He sounded very convincing.
While he was there, I learned the true extent of his drinking. This would be the first time I would ever see him sober, the first time in my life. He said he would even drink a beer if he woke up in the middle of the night. He drank a beer during his lunch hour at work. He drank when he got home. He told me that, in order to wean down before treatment, he had two tall boys at night instead of a six pack.
***
On my twenty-first birthday, I met my dad for breakfast at Denny’s. It was the first time I had ever had a meal with him alone. It was new and uncomfortable. He took photos of me eating and a selfie of us together for him to post on Facebook. Like always, he gave me a $100 bill. The same gift for each birthday and Christmas for as long as I can remember. It’s the only thing I could ever count on from him. Up until now, that was all our relationship was. It was awkward to be rushed into having a real relationship with my dad. To have someone who always wants to take selfies. To have someone who calls me and will remember in two days what I said on the phone.
On that birthday, no one believed that I had never drank before. I spent the evening with my two best friends, seeing Marvel’s “Civil War”, and having a blended drink that would be my first alcoholic beverage. All throughout high school, no one believed me either. I would tell them, “My dad chose drinking over my family. That isn’t something I’m going to jump into.”
***
Now that my dad is sober, he offers money to my sister and me when we need it. He visited us this Easter and gave us each $100 because he had won at the casino that day. He gave my sister and me each $13,000 when he got his inheritance and the money from selling his parent’s house. It was originally $10,000 but my sister asked for more and he agreed. He said that we deserved some of the money too because they were our grandparents. Though my sister takes advantage of his recent generosity, I don’t feel I have the right to ask my dad for money. He more than owes us. He more than owes my mother for raising us herself.
***
Last weekend, my mom and I went shopping and to lunch at Panera Bread. We ordered and walked to a table with our buzzer. I heard my mom’s phone vibrating in her purse- something she always misses- and told her she was getting a call. She handed me her drink while she searched her purse for her phone. We found a table near the windows as my mom answered the phone. I ate my raspberry thumbprint cookie and played with my phone, half-listening to what she was saying. It was a conversation with my uncle. He was calling to let her know that my sister asked my dad for $150 for car repairs but he knew it only cost $50. He was worried she may be using the extra money for pills and thought it was suspicious that she lied about the price. My sister had just gone to inpatient treatment for the fourth time. She was going through the motions of her outpatient AA program. My mom said she would follow that up with her and see what’s going on.
My mom told my uncle that when my sister asked my dad for a ride to pick up her car, he told her, “It’s Cinco de Mayo and I can’t blow in my car.” After my dad’s DUI, a blow-and-go was installed in his car that will make it so it won’t start if he has alcohol in his system. My mom thanked my uncle for telling her about my sister and hung up the phone. Our food had come and she started to pick at her salad.
I asked, “Does that mean that Dad is drinking again?” She said she thinks so. We went on with our meal.
***
My 22nd birthday was in two days, May 13th. I hadn’t heard from my dad, so I called him to ask if he wanted to get together that weekend to see me. His speech had a slight slur- like he was a little drunk but not quite wasted. His thoughts were disorganized and he repeated himself often. In response to me asking to meet for dinner, he told me that he was planning on surprising me with a trip to visit my boyfriend in Los Angeles, who is currently there for school until October. He said, “But now you’ve ruined the surprise.” I told him that my boyfriend was coming back home for Memorial Day weekend, at the end of the month, and I wanted to plan my trip to visit him sometime in July or August, closer to when he came home. He asked, “I forget- is your birthday before or after Memorial Day?”
“My birthday is on Saturday. Memorial weekend is two weeks from now.”
“Well let’s get you down there for your birthday.”
“Dad, I think it’s a little too last minute for me to go see him for my birthday. I’d rather go this summer when it’s closer to when he comes home.”
“Well alright then, but I was planning on surprising you to go on your birthday. That was my plan. But just know that, whenever you want to go, I’ll pay for your trip. Don’t worry about how much it costs.”
I thanked him and told him I would let him know when I knew the dates I wanted to go. He thanked me for calling, and then hung up. The sound of his voice hung in the air. After the call, my mom asked me if we were going to get dinner together. I said “He didn’t answer the question.”
***
His blow-and-go has now been removed. He has fulfilled the 12 month requirement from his court date. He can now drink with the security of knowing his car will start.
I had a dad for a year. It was exciting to feel like I was getting a father like everyone else had, but it was also uncomfortable to be forced to have a relationship with this person that I really didn’t know very well. I am disappointed that I don’t get more time with him. But, in a way, it is comforting. It is expected. Of course he’s drinking again. It was an illusion and a dream that I knew couldn’t have lasted. It is almost a comfort to have this dad back, the dad I know.
I know that my dad has good intentions. I know that he suffers from pain that I can’t imagine and that he doesn’t want to imagine either. I know that offering money is the only way he knows how to show he loves my sister and me. I am not upset with him anymore. I know that he doesn’t see alcohol, marijuana, and his prescription medications as addictions. I know he doesn’t see his drug use as a problem.
My sister is now in inpatient treatment for her opiate addiction for the fifth time, and the second this year. This is what she gets from our dad. He cannot understand why she can’t kick her habit. Before her admittance, she called my dad to tell him what was going on. He expressed his confusion to her. He told her that they could make a promise and that, if she could kick the pills, he would buy her all the weed she wants.
It doesn’t work that way. A drug is a drug is a drug. I have gone through enough family weekends at treatment centers to know that. There is no using just a little bit to her. Addiction is a disease, and it is all or nothing.
His ignorance frustrates her.
I repeat the Serenity Prayer to myself. It is recited before every AA meeting. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” This has to be far more ingrained in her mind, but she doesn’t put it to use.
We cannot control the dad that we are given. I cannot control anyone’s sobriety but my own. I can be thankful that my dad is still alive. I can be thankful for his embarrassing Facebook posts, in caps lock and ungrammatical. I can be glad that he still wants to take selfies with me, even if they are a little out of focus now. I can be thankful for that sober year I got with him.
|
About Rebecca Kelly (2017)
Rebecca Kelly is a senior at Central Washington University. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Professional and Creative Writing. She spends her time looking for dogs to pet and trees to climb. Writing is her catharsis.
|
Temple
Johann Sam
I am an old and ancient temple about to crumble.
Eons have passed.
The walls crack.
The beams bend.
The bones are old.
An ancestral grave.
I am a tomb.
|
Looking forward
Fabrice Poussin
Fixed to an image yet unseen,
the pupils focus and shrink to a pin,
the observer must remain steady,
to discover the secret he seeks.
As if a heartbeat had been silenced,
the body is still, the skin barely shivers,
only sight is yet capable of perceiving,
as all energies are thus focused.
He must not allow his soul to flutter,
for the moment may be lost forever;
nothing can be allowed to interrupt
a dialogue without words, or scents,
or sounds, or touch. Sole the image
will provide the story in need;
participant to the tiny dimension,
he prepares to disappear within.
For thousands of years he may so be,
exchanging a vocabulary of pulses,
small and large, directly to his heart,
eternally to the soul being born.
Stranger he will cease to know that which is,
or seems to be, to enjoy simply being
what he once felt, though he not lived,
leaving behind a shell, paper thin to the breeze.
A puzzle to those lagging in their falsity;
should they dare attempt to waken him?
Into a mist this body will vanish into a cloud
of dust, not unlike that of a comet.
Essence completed, he is now immortality,
one with the atom, his faithful accomplice,
his teacher, his master, in fact his father,
the cord has once again given breath of life.
|
About Fabrice Poussin
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry and the advisor for The Chimes, the Shorter University award winning poetry and arts publication, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and dozens of other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review and more than 250 other publications.
|
Melody
Fabrice Poussin
Only yesterday
I saw the end of time
tomorrow it is
its beginning I will encounter.
A mile away I traveled
through you
and when I awoke
you were light.
At the top of the mountain
in the darkness of the cave
below the ocean
flowing with stream.
Upon a gentle leaf
carried by a soft breeze
rolling in the hurricane
I slept with eyes open.
A million voices
so many melodies
I touched the symphony
in the eighth dimension.
In one single beat
eternal in the infinite
my heart listened
and was revealed in all.
|
About Fabrice Poussin
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry and the advisor for The Chimes, the Shorter University award winning poetry and arts publication, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and dozens of other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review and more than 250 other publications.
|
Soul
Doug Hawley
All of the following news articles appeared in the Daily Northwest News.
February 10, 2043 Copenhagen, Denmark. Using new detection equipment built by Nobel Prize winner in physics Magnus Albreck, Frank Smelling and the staff at the National Physics Laboratory has discovered electromagnetic waves previously detected nowhere in the universe. The wavelength of these newly discovered waves are shorter than any previously observed.
The discovery excited physicists around the world. At this time, the source of the waves is unknown and there has been no independent verification of Albreck’s and Smelling’s results. The practical use of the results is unknown at this time.
February 27, 2043 Copenhagen, Denmark. In a follow up to an earlier discovery, Magnus Albreck and associates at the Denmark National Physics Lab have identified the source of previously unrecorded electromagnetic waves originally discovered in late 2042. The waves originated from lab technician Helga Stein. Stein was in close proximity to measuring device, Extended EMW, when the waves first registered. Whenever no one was close to the Extended EMW, no S (for Stein) waves were recorded. Subsequent experiments recorded S waves for other laboratory personnel with slightly differing wave lengths and amplitudes.
March 1, 2043 Nashville, TN. Chester Ogilvie, leader of Baptist USA claims that Danish scientists have discovered the human soul. After years of religious and spiritual claims to a distinctly human soul as an unmeasured driving force in all humans, he sees the S waves discovered at the Denmark National Physics Lab in late 2042 as proof of the soul’s existence. “They have not found S waves anywhere but in humans, so I think that it is obvious that the human soul has finally been quantified. Those who have never taken religion seriously now have scientific proof that we uniquely have souls and are not just more atoms in a materialistic universe.”
Neither Magnus Albreck nor Frank Smelling of the Denmark Lab were immediately available for comment. Bhati Nempali of the Halide Institute of Chicago responded that “A new form of electromagnetic wave may have been discovered. The Danish Lab work has not been peer reviewed at this time. Whatever they discovered is just another physical phenomenon, not the basis for superstitious claptrap.”
March 3, 2043 Chicago. Professor Bhati Nempali of the Halide Institute of Chicago, who two days ago questioned the nature of S waves, and indirectly cast aspersion on religious leader Chester Ogilvie of Baptist USA in Nashville, TN, apologized saying “In my earlier remarks I did not intend to offend anyone of any religious belief.” Mr. Nempali’s contract with the Halide is up later this year and congressional hearings are scheduled next month on Federal research funding.
March 5, 2043 Interactive Listing - Today at 5PM on Channel IA4322: Daytona Brown will moderate a chat with guest experts on the S waves. Are they real? Do only people have them? Are they a manifestation of the soul? Are there any commercial applications?
Daytona Brown – Let me introduce the participants. We are honored to have the discoverer of S waves, Magnus Albreck, imminent theologian Chester Ogilvie, Jeremy Atkins of PETA, abortions rights supporter Sue Feldman and biologist and well-known atheist Roger Sawkins. Do you have opening statements?
Albreck – First, let me spread the credit around. The waves were discovered coming from Helga Stein, a very important colleague. Many at the Danish National Lab have worked on the equipment that did the recording. I’m just the first among equals. Second, we have lots of work to do before we can draw hard conclusions.
Ogilvie – I say it is not too early to draw conclusions. Do S waves come from coffee cans? Do they come from lab rats? No, I don’t think so. Despite some of the negatives I have heard, we have evidence of the human soul. Now, I’m not saying my particular brand of religion has all the answers, but I think that Professor Albreck’s work has proven that there is a spiritual plane of existence beyond the physical.
Feldman – Before anyone suggests that this in anyway invalidates abortion rights, let me remind everyone that some abortions may still be best for society and for women who are not prepared to give birth.
Atkins – If we have a spiritual existence, I think that we will find that our animal brothers are on the same plane and deserve the same respect that humans deserve. We need to test chimps, dogs, cats and other animals to see if they have S waves.
Sawkins – Let’s go back to what Professor Albreck said. It is too early to draw conclusions. Can we all just keep an open mind and go by what is proven rather than conjectured.
Brown – Hypothetically, let us say that S waves are exclusive to humans. What does that mean?
Ogilvie – Why, clearly we will have scientific proof that man is God’s crowning achievement and is uniquely suited for a heavenly paradise after death.
Feldman – It doesn’t change anything for me.
Albreck – From the point of view of physics, I don’t think that we are prepared to conclude anything.
Sawkins – I agree that we will not know exactly why only humans have S waves, if that is in fact correct, but I could suggest that it relates to some unique human feature. There are subtle, but real differences between the human brain and those of other animals.
Atkins – Regardless of the presence or absence of S waves in non-human animals, I think that all animals deserve our respect. In fact, if indeed we are different from our animal brother, that implies that we should show them the treatment that our greater consciousness allows us.
Brown – How has the discovery of S waves changed any of your opinions?
Sawkins – I am now open to the belief that humans are a unique form of animal.
Albreck – I am just amazed at the progress we are making in understanding ourselves and our universe. I did not think that this big a discovery would be made in my lifetime.
Ogilvie – A lot of people, including myself, have thought that science and religion were at odds. We now have a case where science is now clearly supporting religion.
Atkins – I now accept the possibility that humans may be unique, but it does not change in any way my opinion about the treatment of animals.
Feldman – The existence of S waves convinces me more than ever that we need to do research on the physical and emotional aspects of abortions and find ways to make most of them unnecessary. Much as we eliminated smoking, we have the technology to avoid unwanted pregnancies. I would much rather stop unwanted pregnancies than debate abortion.
Brown – Closing statements?
Ogilvie – I hope all of those who have rejected religion in their lives are now open to the real possibility that they were mistaken.
Atkins – Whether we are the equals or stewards of non-human animals, they deserve our respect and humane treatment.
Albreck – I think that we have just scratched the surface of S wave research, and I look forward to continued research and new revelations.
Sawkins – I hope that the physics research from the Danish National Physics Lab is married with biological research to fully explore the implications of S waves.
Brown – I think that this discussion has just started, but we are out of time. Perhaps we can reconvene in a year and talk about progress in the study of S waves. For now, I’d like to thank all of the participants for a respectful and insightful panel on the beginning of a new era.
|
Soul 2
All of the following news articles appeared in the Daily Northwest News
March 15, 2044 Copenhagen, Denmark. A little over a year ago, S waves were discovered at the National Physics Laboratory by Magnus Albreck. Originally they were only detected in humans, leading some to claim that they were a physical manifestation of soul. We just received news that weak S waves have been discovered in chimps.
The same panel that discussed the original discovery has been reconvened to discuss this revelation.
Daytona Brown: As we indicated during the panel of March 5, 2043 which I led, we are now having the follow up discussion of S waves. The timing is great because of the news that S waves have been found in chimps.
We have a panel with some of the original members and some new ones. Unfortunately, Chester Ogilvie, leader of Baptist USA died recently and abortion supporter Sue Feldman is unavailable, but we have Jason Evans of the Los Angeles Universalist Church and Mary Proctor from Planned Parenthood to replace them. Biologist and atheist Roger Sawkins, Magnus Albreck the discoverer of the S Waves and Jeremy Atkins from PETA are back from last year’s panel.
Brown – Opening Statements?
Evans – I don’t know how Mr. Ogilvie would have felt about these results. Maybe that there are many mansions in the Lord’s heaven? Chimp mansions and human mansions? I don’t think that these waves necessarily represent soul, but I’m keeping an open mind.
Sawkins – No matter how many animals or objects give off S waves, I don’t believe in God or heaven. However, finding another source of S waves is intriguing.
Proctor – This has no effect on me. We don’t get much call for chimp abortions.
Atkins – I think that we have more evidence that higher apes are our brothers and sisters and should be treated with respect equal to humans. In fact, that respect should be accorded to all non-human animals.
Albreck – I was amazed at the discovery of S waves in humans. Now that they exist in at least some animals, I wonder what will find tomorrow.
Brown – In what way do these later results affect your thinking?
Sawkins – Before when S waves were only found in humans, I believed that there was a qualitative difference between humans and animals. Now I have to questions that. What will we find with more sensitive machines?
Evans – We Universalists are divided about a supreme being. If we can identify S waves as representing the soul, I believe that will tip the debate.
Proctor – Until S waves are confirmed to exist is fetuses, I think that the majority of the US will still favor allowing abortions as now permitted by the law. If S waves are found in the fetus, we have a whole new ballgame.
Atkins – It doesn’t change my thinking at all, it confirms what I thought all along
Albreck – It makes we want to see if we can refine our EMW machinery to find any S waves anywhere else, perhaps with lower amplitude than those presently detectable.
Brown – Closing statements?
Proctor – Regardless of whom or what has S waves, let’s use science and education to keep abortions safe and rare.
Evans – Whether or not you believe in God, any person or animal with S waves is special.
Atkins – I concur with Mr. Evans.
Albreck – I’ll be back in the lab. I’m elated to be living in these times with the progress we are making.
Sawkins – I hope that Dr. Albreck will collaborate with my fellow biologists to see what the implication of S waves is in the animals that have them.
Soul was originally published in Wi-Files and Soul 2 in Oblong.
|
The Heart and Soul nebulae,
NASA’s WISE
(Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) infrared mosaic
Your Imaginary Soul
Weighs 21 Grams
Janet Kuypers
2/25/17
Different cultures
call it different things.
Your spirit. Your soul.
I know that we creatively
believe there’s something
special we possess.
But this elusive
imaginary creature
that lives within us
causes much debate.
Does it even exist.
Is the soul real.
So I found it funny
that a doctor
100 years ago
wanted to measure
the weight
of a soul.
He found people
sick, dying,
and he weighed them
just before they
were about
to die —
and he weighed
their corpses
right after death.
And what do you know,
there was a difference
in each person —
the doctor found
that each person
was about
a quarter ounce lighter,
which is about
21 grams.
And, this didn’t
prove anything,
but it makes me wonder...
is 21 grams
the weight we carry
for our soul,
or do some souls
carry more
from the weight
of the world.
Is that why
we’re forced
to share our stories,
to lift our burden,
so our invisible soul
won’t weigh
us down
anymore.
|
 
See YouTube video 2/25/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” and “origin, from the macro to the micro” for “Poetry Aloud” at the Georgetown Public Library (this video was filmed from a Canon Power Shot SX60 camera).
|
See YouTube video 2/25/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” and “origin, from the macro to the micro” for “Poetry Aloud” at the Georgetown Public Library (this video was filmed from a Canon Power Shot SX700 camera).
|
See Janet Kuypers’ YouTube video 2/26/17 of her reading her poems “Unscathed”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” and “Gary’s Blind Date” at the Austin “Kick Butt Poetry: Spoken and Heard” open mic (filmed from a Canon Power Shot SX60 camera).
|
See Janet Kuypers’ YouTube video 2/26/17 of her reading her poems “Unscathed”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” and “Gary’s Blind Date” at the Austin “Kick Butt Poetry: Spoken and Heard” open mic (filmed from a Canon Power Shot SX700 camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Elephants Carry the World”, “Eyes are Blurred to the Battlefield” and
“Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” @ Austin’s Recycled Reads 3/18/17 (this video was filmed from a Canon Power Shot SX60 camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Elephants Carry the World”, “Eyes are Blurred to the Battlefield” and
“Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” @ Austin’s Recycled Reads 3/18/17 (this video was filmed from a Canon Power Shot SX700 camera).
|
See YouTube video 8/22/17 of the Janet Kuypers show “This Just In”, with her poems “Protecting Peace can Put you in Prison”, “Original Snowbirds”, “Ultimate Connectivity: a bird in the hand”, “erasure poem: A Poetic History”, “Just One Book”, “Newspaper Ink’s the Blood of a Dying Species”, “Elusive Imaginary Creature”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “Yearning to Break Free” and “Just By Holding His Hand (extreme 2016 sestina variation)” (Lumix)
|
See YouTube video 8/22/17 of the Janet Kuypers show “This Just In”, with her poems “Protecting Peace can Put you in Prison”, “Original Snowbirds”, “Ultimate Connectivity: a bird in the hand”, “erasure poem: A Poetic History”, “Just One Book”, “Newspaper Ink’s the Blood of a Dying Species”, “Elusive Imaginary Creature”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “Yearning to Break Free” and “Just By Holding His Hand (extreme 2016 sestina variation)” (Sony)
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ September 2017 Book Release Reading 9/6/17 from her book “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems”, with “Verge on Meditation”, “Elusive Imaginary Creature”, “Newspaper Ink’s the Blood of a Dying Species”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “The Truth is Out There”, & “Visions Were Justified” in Community Poetry (Sony camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ September 2017 Book Release Reading 9/6/17 from her book “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems”, with “Verge on Meditation”, “Elusive Imaginary Creature”, “Newspaper Ink’s the Blood of a Dying Species”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “The Truth is Out There”, & “Visions Were Justified” in Community Poetry (Lumix camera).
|
See YouTube video 10/1/17 of Janet Kuypers singing her song “Victim” as an industrial song with John on electric guitar (and added percussions), then her reading her poem “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” from the cc&d 10/17 book “Forbidden” before inviting contributors to read their poems from the book, at “Kick Butt Poetry” in Austin (Sony).
|
See YouTube video 10/1/17 of Janet Kuypers singing her song “Victim” as an industrial song with John on electric guitar (and added percussions), then her reading her poem “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” from the cc&d 10/17 book “Forbidden” before inviting contributors to read their poems from the book, at “Kick Butt Poetry” in Austin (Lumix).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ “December 2017 Book Release Reading” 12/6/17, where she reads from the book “Negative Space” her haiku and short poems “coincidence?”, “translation (2014 haiku)”, “oceans”, “behind”, “out there”, “opposite”, and “addiction”, her micro prose “Driving By His House”, and her poems “Earth was Crying”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “Just by Holding His Hand”, and “Only an Observer” in “Community Poetry @ Half Price Books” (Lumix T56 camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ “December 2017 Book Release Reading” 12/6/17, where she reads from the book “Negative Space” her haiku and short poems “coincidence?”, “translation (2014 haiku)”, “oceans”, “behind”, “out there”, “opposite”, and “addiction”, her micro prose “Driving By His House”, and her poems “Earth was Crying”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “Just by Holding His Hand”, and “Only an Observer” in “Community Poetry @ Half Price Books” (Lumix 2500 camera).
|
See YouTube video from 12/14/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “X-rays and broken hearts”, “Over the Cracks (I Don’t Need You)”, and “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” from her book “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems” @ “the Hole in the Wall” in Austin for AIPF’s pre-party reading (filmed from a Panasonic Lumix 2500 camera).
|
See YouTube video from 12/14/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “X-rays and broken hearts”, “Over the Cracks (I Don’t Need You)”, and “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams” from her book “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems” @ “the Hole in the Wall” in Austin for AIPF’s pre-party reading (Lumix T56 camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers at her 1/3/18 “January 2018 Book Release Reading” feature through “Community Poetry @ Half Price Books”, reading her poems “Years, Centuries, Eons”, “violation”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “unbounded”, and “quarrel” from the cc&d 9/12 2017 issue collection book anthology “Language of Untamed Spirit”, before reading her 3 haiku poems “eventually”, “enemies” and “blood” from the 2017 Scars Publications poetry and prose collection book anthology “On a Rainy Day” (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix 2500 camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers at her 1/3/18 “January 2018 Book Release Reading” feature through “Community Poetry @ Half Price Books”, reading her poems “Years, Centuries, Eons”, “violation”, “Your Imaginary Soul Weighs 21 Grams”, “unbounded”, and “quarrel” from the cc&d 9/12 2017 issue collection book anthology “Language of Untamed Spirit”, before reading her 3 haiku poems “eventually”, “enemies” and “blood” from the 2017 Scars Publications poetry and prose collection book anthology “On a Rainy Day” (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera).
|
Dark Endeavor
Cecelia Burton
Do they go on forever,
These star points in the shadows of my night?
No, not forever:
The moon and morning sever
Earth from heaven in an expanse of light
That might go on forever
Did it not fall heavier
Than the banished stars dropping out of sight.
But no, not forever.
I feel that I am tethered
To the star points visible tonight,
Longing to go on forever
In my dark endeavor
To unite my earth and heaven in the twilight
Of not yet forever
Understanding whether
It is darkness I desire, or light.
Do they go on forever?
No, not forever.
|
It rained today
Cecelia Burton
It rained today
And I smelled the fall
Of near-ripe apples green and garnet.
The poison oak is changing red
Winks of color through the vines
And soggy leaves hang yellow-brown
Between the soggy clumps of berries.
Grasses are the gold of Midas
Queen Anne’s lace a string of diamonds
Curved like pearls on thick jade stalks.
The wind is still
The air is new
The sky still newer, fresh to break
The clouds in two and four
Then many wisps
That settle down on the horizon
To part at sunset
From a hot dry world.
|
The Moon Shot
Mike Sharlow
On April 21, 1972 Apollo 16 landed on the moon, and although the excitement of going to the moon was waning it was still broadcasted on TV. Three days ago, on April 27th it returned to Earth. When I walked outside to the alley behind the apartments, I saw Steve with a tennis ball cannon. Steve wanted to be an astronaut, so I think he was inspired by the recent moonshot to build the cannon.
The cannon was made from pop cans. In the early 70’s pop cans were made of tin. They were rigid like soup cans. The top and bottom was removed with a can opener. The cans were then attached end for end with duct tape. A hole was punched a about a quarter inch from the bottom of the cannon with a nail. Then the same nail was driven through the middle of the bottom can, so that when you dropped the tennis ball in, it was stopped at that point. Lighter fluid was used as fuel and squirted into the hole at the bottom. Then you shook the cannon dispersing the fluid and filling the lower part of the cannon with vapors, primarily the section just below the nail. Not wasting anytime, you dropped the tennis ball down the hatch before all the fluid evaporated and the vapors dispersed too much. Then you lit the cannon (a lighter worked best) at the hole where you squirted in the lighter fluid. And if all went as planned, the vapors exploded with a WHOMP! and the tennis ball shot two to three hundred feet into the sky.
I came out just in time to see Steve light his cannon. Even in the daylight I could see the flash of ignition, as the tennis ball shot into the pale blue sky. The wind forced it east on its decent, and it bounded off the apartment complexes carport roof it bounced down the concrete alley with Steve chasing behind, the plastic soles of his cheap K-mart tennies cracking on the pavement.
I stood next to his cannon and examined it, waiting for him to come back.
“You see that!” he blurted excitedly. “If I built a bigger cannon, I could shoot a tennis ball into orbit, maybe the moon.”
At thirteen I was no rocket scientist, but I was sure there were all kinds of reasons why that wasn’t possible, but I didn’t want to say anything to dampen his excitement.
I watched Steve squirt lighter fluid into his cannon, loading it for another launch. I was holding the tennis ball for him. It was singed from multiple launches and smelled like lighter fluid. Steve shook the cannon, and I noticed that the duct tape was unraveling a bit.
“How many times have you shot it?”
“Five.” He dug into his pocket for a book of matches like he was digging a hole.
“I have a lighter,” Billy said. I didn’t see him walking up behind me.
By this time Steve had found his matches with the Mini-Mart ad on the cover in red lettering. The Min-Mart was across the street on Cuyamaca. I had taken those matches too.
“Here we go.” Steve struck a match against the striker until the match head wore off, so he tossed it. “Damnit!”
“Take my lighter.” Billy reached out, but Steve ignored him. Steve didn’t like him very much. I knew this, and knew why.
Steve tore another match from the book and placed his index finger directly on it to get more friction. The match ignited but stuck to his finger. “OUCH! SONOFABITCH!” He shook his hand, but the match still stuck until he rubbed against his jeans. Then he stuck his finger into his mouth to suck away the heat. Steve was Yugoslavian, fair skinned with white blond hair. His face was pink with anger.
“Dumbass!” Billy laughed out loud.
I began to laugh, so I turned around and dropped to a knee to re-tie my shoes, even though I didn’t need to. It took a few seconds to get a straight face before I turned around. “You get burned?” I knew he did. He held up his dirty finger to show me. He had a burnt black spot the size of a matchhead on the tip of his finger. It was as black as the dirt under his fingernail.
“Use Billy’s lighter.” I took the lighter from Billy and handed it to Steve.
“You probably need more lighter fluid. The other stuff probably evaporated up,” Billy said and placed his hands on his hips like often did when he had a point to make.
“I know.” Steve shot a couple more squirts into his cannon, shook it up with the tennis ball in it, and flicked the lighter at the hole.
It happened so quickly. Even in the brightness of the day, there was a flash, then a WHOMPF! BANG! And the cannon blew apart in three places where the duct tape held the cans together, likely where the duct tape had begun to unravel. Steve fell back, scrambled to his feet, and ran to where Billy and I had retreated. He was blinking wildly and smelled like lighter fluid and burnt hair. His eyebrows, eye lashes, and bangs were singed.
“Ay caramba!” Billy said. He was Chicano, and occasionally, he spoke in Spanish. I learned all the curse words from him.
“My mom is gonna kill me.” Steve examined his shirt and pants, as he sniffed, wondering where the burnt smell was coming from.
“The tennis ball’s on fire.” Billy pointed, as it slowly rolled away, emitting a curl of black smoke as the rubber burned. A tumbleweed had rolled down the hill next to the alley, and was in the path of the flaming tennis ball. The ball rolled into the tumbleweed and quickly ignited it. With the westerly breeze the tumbleweed began to roll again, a fiery ball heading towards a carport filled with cars.
“What the hell?” Steve put his hands to his head and grabbed fistfuls of hair and bolted after the tumbleweed. Billy and I chased after him. Steve jumped on the flaming tumbleweed with both feet, causing it to break apart. I stomped on anything trying to get away. Billy danced around, every now and then stepping on an ember. The tumbleweed was crushed into charcoal spots in the alley. Steve and I now smelled like a campfire, Billy not so much.
We hadn’t noticed, but Steve’s little sister had been watching us. “Karen! Come here?!” Steve yelled, but she ran off towards their apartment. We all knew she was a tattletale. I wasn’t worried about myself, and I’m sure Billy wasn’t worried about himself, but Steve was ready to panic. “My Mom is gonna fuckin’ kill me.”
“Your mom is puta loca,” Billy said.
“Huh?” Steve didn’t understand, but I did.
“Your mom is fucking crazy.”
Before we got back to the pieces of Steve’s smoldering cannon, Steve’s Mom had come out to the alley. She yelled at Steve in broken English with a thick Yugoslavian accent. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but the message was clear. As she yelled, she pointed at him and then the direction of their apartment. “I have to go,” Steve said. He grabbed the remnants of his cannon and his lighter fluid, and made a wide girth, as he walked up to her. She lunged at him and slapped him on the head. “Ma, enough with the hitting!” he held up his arm, and what was left of his cannon, to deflect her blows.
Billy and I spent the next couple of hours constructing our own cannon. We dug in a couple of apartment dumpsters to get enough cans. Billy got the lighter fluid from his house, and I got the duct tape.
We launched the cannon eight times, with varying success. We didn’t just shoot the cannon to the sky, we also aimed it at things like the dumpster. Billy shot at people, his neighbors in his apartment complex, Eddie and Donnie, the eight and nine-year-old street urchins. The dirty neglected boys giggled with delight as they ran barefoot from behind a dumpster into the open across the alley than back again. If Billy hit one of them, the impact would have blown weeks of filth off them in a cloud of dust.
On my turn, I loaded the cannon with an extra squirt of lighter fluid. I dug out my Zippo from my pocket (that’s why I had lighter fluid) to light the cannon. I got? on my knees, reached from arm’s length, and turned my head. As I lit the cannon, I prepared for it to blow. thought the cannon might blow, but it didn’t. The cannon let out a loud WHOMP-FUMP! And blasted the tennis ball in a flash of fire, leaving a momentary vapor trail. The tennis ball shot higher than any other launch. I wish Steve could have been here to see? it He might have been as awed and inspired as I was the first time I looked through his 40x refractor telescope last October and saw the mountains and craters on the moon. I went home and asked my Mom and Dad for a telescope for? my birthday. I got a six-inch reflector. It was cheap, made? out of a cardboard tube and plastic lenses, but it was 150x. The mountains, craters, and seas on the moon appeared as if I could reach out and touch them. I saw the rings of Saturn, the giant red spot on Jupiter and four of its moons. Mars was a red dot, but I easily imagined the lines of the canals.
The tennis ball landed in the Flying Hills Elementary School playground adjacent to the alley. Billy and I ran it down with Eddie and Donnie chasing behind. We retrieved the scorched ball. It looked like the Apollo re-entry module’s blackened heat shield.
“We should put bugs inside to see if they survive,” I suggested.
“We could catch a couple of flies by the dumpster.” Billy pulled out his pocket knife and stabbed into the ball.
“There’s bugs in there?” Donnie leaned forward to get a better look.
“No stupid,” Billy said, as he began to slice into the ball.
“Just cut out a small hole.” I showed Billy by making a circle with my thumb and index finger, as we walked back to the alley.
Eddie and Donnie were excited about helping us catch a couple of flies. Both climbed directly into the dumpster which disturbed a minion. This wasn’t necessary; there were plenty buzzing around the outside, but it did give? Billy and me more opportunity to catch some, and Eddie and Donnie looked and smelled about the? same climbing out as they did climbing in.
“Here,” Eddie opened his hand and dropped a dead fly onto Billy’s palm.
“It has to be alive, stupid.” Billy threw the fly into Eddie’s face.
Donnie snagged one and plucked the wings off. “Here, it won’t fly away.”
“Leave the wings on. We can get them in the ball with wings on,” I said.
When we caught three flies and had them inside the tennis ball, we replaced the chunk Billy had cut out and duct taped it back on. We poked a few small holes for air. We had no idea how much air a fly needed to have to live, but we did know that if we put bugs in a jar and didn’t poke holes in the lid they would die a lot quicker than if we did. Of course, they always died. Apparently, bugs weren’t meant to live in captivity, but the three wouldn’t be in there that long. If they survived the journey, they would fly out of the hole once we unsealed it.
I fueled the cannon, even gave it an extra squirt. Billy got on his hands and knees to light it up.
“Let me! Let me do it!” Eddie jumped up and down.
Billy grumbled something in Spanish and handed him his Zippo.
“Be careful,” I said. I knew how much lighter fluid I used.
Eddie got on his hands and knees and flicked the lighter. He couldn’t get a spark to light the wick. Impatiently, Billy snatched the lighter from his hands, flicked the lighter once and got a flame. At first, I thought he was going to light the cannon himself, but then he handed it back to Eddie. “Don’t let it go out.”
Eddied clutched the lighter in his left hand with dirty sticky fingers, and he shielded the flame with his right hand, which to me appeared to close to the flame, close enough to burn his hand. A layer filth was probably insulating his skin from the heat.
“Hurry up!” Donnie blurted at his brother.
Eddie was startled, and as he lit the cannon, and he bumped it. When the cannon ignited it was leaning about thirty degrees in Donnie’s direction. A thirty-degree angle had the top of the cannon at approximately the same height as Donnie. Donnie had long thick light brown curly hair. It was almost an afro. I think it was probably only brushed or combed for special occasions. Most of the time it was left to its own devices and allowed to grow something like a Chia pet.
I had never seen anyone’s hair on fire, not in a ball of flames. The ball hit Donnie in the head and knocked him off his feet. The blast of the cannon was like a flame thrower.
Eddie screamed, “Head’s on fire!”
Donnie was stunned for a second, then he leaped to his feet and bolted towards his apartment. Billy and I chased. I caught up to him first and tackled him?. I slapped his head, patting out the flames. Billy helped when he caught up. Billy lit one of his sister’s doll’s hair on fire. Eddie looked something like? that; a victim of apocalyptic fire bombing. Fortunately, Donnie’s hair was so thick, there were? only a couple of spots where was singed down to the scalp.
“I’m going home,” Donnie walked towards home. “I’m telling Mom, Eddie.”
“I didn’t do nothin’.” Eddie whined.
“You shot me in the head!
Billy and I laughed. Donnie had yet to see himself in the mirror.
“It’s your guys fault too, and your stupid cannon. I’m tellin’ my Mom.”
It then must have occurred to Billy what Eddie and Donnie’s Mom would say and do, so Billy decided to follow Donnie home to do damage control. Being neighbors, Billy felt comfortable doing this. I followed Billy. I wanted to watch him bullshit Eddie and Donnie’s Mom. By the time he was done talking to her, she would be blaming her sons for what happened to Donnie.
The apartment door was open a crack. Billy peeked in then quietly pushed the door open just enough to slide into the apartment. He quietly waved me in behind him.
“My Mom doesn’t want us to have anybody in the house.” Eddie stepped forward.
“Ssh!” Billy raised his hand, and Eddie flinched and cowered.
I followed Billy through the door? into the dark apartment?. The brown curtains were shut, successfully blocking most of the light of day. A small streak of sunlight leaked through a? part in the middle of the curtains. Once my eyes adjusted I could see the clutter. Dirty dishes were piled on the counter. Clothes were scattered on the living room carpet. A layer of dust covered everything like fallout. All homes have an odor. This one had a funky smell combined with the sourness of booze and beer and stale cigarette tar clinging to everything. I turned and saw Billy by the couch. Eddie and Donnie’s Mom was splayed out on her back, passed out. Her long dark hair was disheveled. She was wearing a purple vinyl jumpsuit. It was unzipped beyond her crotch. One dark nipple was hanging out. Billy was studying the dark moss between her legs. She was a beautiful woman, despite the sad state of mess she presently was. I felt excited but also Catholic shame. I stepped closer to get a better look. Titillation overcame guilt. I needed to impress this image to memory. Billy put his face closer to her muff, close enough to smell. She murmured and groaned, probably felt Billy’s heavy hot breath. We panicked and bolted out of the apartment. Behind us, as we ran, we heard Eddie and Donnie’s Mom yell, “What the fuck happened to your hair!”
We hid under the carport for my apartment complex, as we caught our breath. Billy laughed and stared at me wide-eyed. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah,” I said. I was still processing it, and when I was finished I would never forget it. We talked about it in detail, wishing we had had stayed for more. We wanted more. We wanted it all.
I wish we could have shared this moment with Steve. As he had revealed and shared the close-up beauty of the moon with me through his telescope, I wished I had been able to share the close enough to touch intimacy of a woman with him. The lunar landscape had inspired me to explore more of the heavens. The landscape of Eddie and Donnie’s Mom’s naked body close enough to touch fired a desire in me to explore, to touch. Aspiring to be an astronaut, Steve would understand and appreciate this need for discovery. It gave purpose to building cannons, and sneaking into Eddie and Donnie’s apartment was like walking on the moon. Like an Apollo moon shot, I know Billy and I would find a way to return, and I would bring Steve.
|
Everything Happens for a Reason
Martina Comorkova
Bill believed everything happened for a reason. He was currently mulling over this very thought when he saw the tip of a waving thumb on the side of the road. The thumb was attached to a young man, no older than twenty. Bill believed in fate more than anyone, and figured this was a fated meeting. He slowed his car down, and pulled over to the side of the mostly empty road. Hopefully the whippersnapper wouldn’t mind the loose sunflower seed shells, and stains of his well-loved truck.
“Where are you heading off too?” Bill asked the boy who had stains of his own all over his clothes. It was clear he was out on the road for a while with all the dust he dragged in.
“Anywhere,” the boy replied. “I just want to be far away from here.” The boy crossed his arms and zoned out as if to withdraw within himself.
Bill paid the boy no mind as he tried to hide away, and instead prodded the boy to talk, “I believe everything happens for a reason, and I believe our meeting happened for a reason.” A car whizzed by them as he said that, going well past the speed limit. Plenty of dust got kicked up, but thankfully the doors were closed by now.
“Maybe that car would have hit you had you not been in my truck,” Bill said. The boy scoffed, and pulled the hood of his russet stained jacket over his head. Bill started up the truck and began driving. He was heading to his sister’s. She wasn’t doing very well, and he wanted to see her in case anything happened to her. She was quite a bit of a drive to get to, so the two were going to spend quite a bit of time together.
“Do you like music?” Bill asked the boy before turning the muffled radio up to a recognizable volume of pop music. It might have seemed uncharacteristic for a man like Bill to be listening to pop, but that’s what the radio was set to. The boy didn’t respond.
Blue and red lights flashed ahead. There was a terrible crash. All four cars involved were totaled. Bill figured that if he wasn’t in the car with the boy, he might have gotten caught up in that mess. “Boy, I believe our meeting was fated. You saved my life.”
The boy pulled out from his hood, and looked at the mess outside and realized it was very well likely that Bill could have gotten into the harrowing crash that was now holding them up. “My name’s Dan,” he said simply.
“Dan, I’m Bill.” He extended a work worn hand to Dan and offered it to him to shake. “Let’s get you something to eat and you can tell me your story.”
“Sure,” Dan said sheepishly. Bill turned around. It would be a while before they cleared the road up. Everything happens for a reason, Bill thought to himself.
|
The Mother’s Chain
David Turton
I awoke to a searing pain in my shoulder and ribs. My memory quickly came into focus, as if someone had adjusted a pair of binoculars in my mind, making everything clear. My ship had gone down, a problem with the thrusters. I had been spiralling off course, towards a large, green planet. I remember entering the atmosphere and then shutting my eyes. Then darkness.
It was still dark here, wherever I was. I shuffled to my side and felt the surface below me move. I grabbed the ‘floor’ below and, when my fingers gripped a rough, thick piece of wood with thin twigs protruding from it with attached leaves, I realised I was lying on some kind of tree. I looked across and squinted, in an attempt to adjust my eyes to the dark. The mellow twilight from two moons in the night sky afforded a little light, allowing me to assess my surroundings.
I was lying on a branch of a huge tree, as big as any skyscraper I’d seen on Earth. As tall as any building in New York, London or Dubai, before the war tore them all down in a storm of anger and death. I must have been hundreds of feet in the air.
Where is my ship? I thought to myself. And where is Jackson? Jackson, my co-pilot, had been sat next to me when the ship went down. I shouted his name but no sound returned across the dark sky. Holding my painful ribs, I put my head down and, either out of shock or fatigue, fell immediately to sleep.
#
I woke slowly to the loud but cheerful sound of birds singing. I yawned, smiling at the sound, which reminded me of home. Life, I thought. There is life here. That was a good sign. I looked over from the huge branch that had been my home for the last few hours and saw a large expanse of green. Huge trees, all as big as the giant one I was lying in, lined the landscape in front of me. A massive lake gleamed in the shining light from a nearby star. For an alien land, it felt pretty nice to look at. I pulled my suit up to look at my ribs and saw a huge purple bruise on my side. They would take some time to heal.
I looked to the top of the tree. I was about half-way up. The ground was thick with green shrubs and long grass. I jerked backwards as a huge bee buzzed past, the sound loud and low. The bee was around the size of a Labrador and skimmed the air less than ten feet away. I could see every hair on its black-and-yellow body. It flew away after what felt like an hour and seemed to glance at me before it left. I would need to be careful. If the bees were this big, what size could the other living beings be on this planet? I laughed to myself at the irony; we were moving to a planet where humans could live and rebuild their lives after the destruction of Earth, and I had stumbled upon a different planet altogether – one that was even more like home.
I scanned the floor and felt a pang of relief as I spotted my ship. It had flipped onto its back, its dark grey metal poking out of the luscious green undergrowth around two football pitches away from me. I had been lucky. The auto-ejector must have kicked in as the ship fell towards the ground and thrown me into the tree, cushioning my fall. I scanned the horizon again, looking for a trace of Jackson. I shouted his name again, but once more there was no reply. I heard a loud, rhythmic pounding noise and looked up. A huge bird flew across the sky, the flapping of its vast wings causing a stiff breeze to rustle the large branches of the tree. I gulped. The bird, which looked like a woodpigeon, was around the size of a Range Rover.
#
I stood gingerly on the branch, holding on to the edge of the tree’s thick trunk. I needed to get back to the ship, to see if I could salvage it. But that wasn’t the only reason I needed to move; my stomach was rumbling with a low, intense gurgle. As I stood, I pulled down the top of my suit and urinated onto the ground, around half a mile below. My urine was dark and strong-smelling, a sure sign that I was dehydrated. Whatever was waiting to greet me at ground level could not be as bad as sitting still and waiting to die of thirst or hunger. I began my descent, using the strong branches to hold my feet and hands.
At around fifty feet I turned away from the trunk to take a break and froze with shock. There was a large circular structure, constructed with twigs and straw, sitting right next to me in the tree. It was around the size of my living room back home and the same height as me. I jumped when I saw a bird’s head peer over the edge. I was looking at a gigantic sparrow’s nest in the tree.
The sparrow hopped onto the edge of the nest and my heart rate increased. It felt like I had an old-style locomotive running across my chest, gaining momentum, pounding faster and faster. I locked eyes with the over-sized bird. It was around seven feet tall. It’s beak alone was the around the same size as my arms, and its eyes were like two black bowling balls. I saw its feathers part in the morning breeze, disrupting the attractive brown patterns on its wings. Then, even in this strange new world, I experienced something that blew my mind. The bird sang. The sound was high pitched and loud. It carried across the breeze and it was beautiful, like a symphony performed by an entire orchestra in one of the great theatres on Earth. But there was something else. Amongst the beauty of the sparrow’s song, I understood what it was saying. Something wonderful inside my own head translated the song into words. I heard both the fantastic music that it produced and I understood the message contained within its notes.
“Get out. Stay away. Go.”
I looked back at the sparrow, confused. Would it understand me? I raised my hands to show I was peaceful.
“I mean no harm. I landed in the tree. My ship landed over there.” I pointed to my ship but the sparrow’s gaze was still locked on me. A sudden breeze brushed against me, so strong it nearly knocked me backwards, and another sparrow landed in the nest. This one was larger, with a grey chest and a large brown bib below its beak. It sang with the same melodic beauty of the other sparrow, which I now realised was the female. It dawned on me as I noticed an egg protruding from below the female; the sparrows were nesting, protecting their unhatched young. The male hopped over the edge of the nest and was now right next to me. His sharp beak was inches from my head as he looked down at me. I could smell his breath, a warm, earthy aroma.
“Are you here to harm us? To take our eggs?” The male sparrow asked.
“No. No. I just want to find my ship and leave.”
“Your ship?” The male asked.
“I came by accident. I landed down there. On my way to a new planet.”
This time, the sparrow looked around at the ship. “Yes. I saw you fall. You come from elsewhere? Not here? You come from the place above the Mother’s sky?”
I breathed in, deeply. Is this really happening? I thought to myself, beginning to panic. I was stood on a giant tree, talking to a seven-foot-tall sparrow. Is this some kind of afterlife? I had heard of planets that held eco-systems and life, but they were all tales from adventurers who had heard the story from others. There had been no evidence. And I had never heard a tale of an over-sized planet full of car-sized bees and towering birds. I composed myself and answered the sparrow’s question.
“Yes. I suppose I am. But the place above the sky – the Mother’s sky as you call it - is a big place. I come from another planet. It’s a lot like this one but smaller.”
The sparrows looked at each other. Without human faces and with their black eyes it was hard to judge their emotions. Silence passed for a few seconds. Had they understood me? I opened my mouth to repeat it again, but the female sparrow sung once more, the words forming in my head to interpret her lovely chiming tweets.
“You come from another place above the Mother’s sky. Why did you leave there?”
I gulped. “We had to leave. There was a war. It got out of hand. Weapons were used that destroyed our landscape and scorched our skies. Diseases wiped out a lot of humanity-”
“Humanity?” the male sparrow interrupted.
“Oh yes. That’s my kind. Human beings.” I looked at the sparrows again, looking for some kind of reaction but again I couldn’t interpret their body language or their eyes. “Do you have my kind here? Humans?”
“No,” replied the male. “I have never seen your kind here. You say your kind destroyed your planet. Why?”
I sighed. “My kind are creators. We built amazing things. Structures that reach high into the sky, as tall as this tree. Ships that can reach other places – travelling above the sky as you say – and medicines to cure disease and prolong our lives. But we are also destructive. People crave power and control. They kill in the name of their God and their country.”
The sparrows stared back with their large black eyes. “It is a sad story. May we ask your name.”
“They call me Kitson. Richard Kitson.”
“Kitson. Do you come here with your destruction? Do you bring it to us?”
“No. No I come here peacefully. I come here to fix my ship and leave. To see my family again, my children.”
“You have young? Then you will understand our cautiousness, Kitson. I am Lothar and this is Lemir. Our eggs are due to hatch soon. We can take no risk of a stranger from an evil place disrupting us.”
The sparrows suddenly jumped backwards and crouched their bodies down in the nest.
“What’s going on?” I asked, confused. But then I saw what they were hiding from. Descending from high in the sky was a hawk, dropping at a fast rate with its large talons outstretched towards them. I acted quickly, jumping over the edge of the nest and heaving myself up over the side. I snapped a twig from the circular nest and held it up at the oncoming attacker. My heart jumped as I saw how big the hawk was– each leg was around the size of an industrial crane, with claws as sharp as Samurai swords. I held the twig - which in my arms felt more like a large plank of wood - behind my head like a baseball player waiting for the pitch. As it came close I swung, knocking the humongous predator off its stride and into the side of the nest. The sparrows continued to huddle together over their eggs in the middle of the nest. I looked on in horror as the bird’s talons found their way around Lothar and swung the wood again, the impact causing the hawk to let Lothar go. I heard Lemir shriek as the hawk crushed one of the three eggs. Using my final surge of strength, I hit the hawk across its breast. This blow was enough to cause the hawk to abandon its attack and it fled, the flap of its giant wings causing a gust so powerful it knocked me off the feet and into the side of the nest, causing fresh, hot pain to explode in my ribs.
“Thank you,” Lothar said.
“Sorry you lost an egg. I would have killed the evil bastard if I could, would have stuck this right in its heart.”
“No,” Lothar replied. “That is not the way, Kitson. Ranchett is hungry. He needs to eat to feed his own young. This is the way of our world, Kitson. We live and we die. We produce young and hope it is enough. But sometimes we must give way to others. We are part of the Mother’s Chain, Kitson. And we thank the Mother for being here at all. We thank her for our survival and we thank her for our death, when we are chosen for the Chain. We are all part of her plan and we are thankful.”
I looked at the sparrow again and this time the lack of emotion, the absence of body language, made me angry.
“How can you say that? How can you not hate something that tries to kill you? Tries to eat you? And you even know its name? Ranchett? It’s crazy?”
“You come here with tales of your world. Scorched skies. Disease. Death. Destruction on a level so great that you cannot live in your home any more. Look around, Kitson. Do you see that here? And you say we are crazy?”
I slumped back against the side of the nest, exhausted. I had helped these sparrows escape certain death by this hawk and they were willing to accept their fate like it was something trivial.
“I think we need to agree to disagree, Lothar.” He looked at me still with his black eyes. I shrugged and stared at the wreckage of my ship. “Can you do me a favour?” I asked, turning back to him.
#
It wasn’t a particularly comfortable ride. Lothar’s talons, although much smaller and less threatening than Ranchett the hawk’s, gripped tightly and dug into my flesh. It only lasted under ten seconds but I was glad when he dropped me in the long grass next to the ship. He perched on the edge of the ship’s bonnet as I stood and dusted myself down. The sparrow’s size looked surreal on the ship, a vision that would have looked out of place anywhere but on this strange land.
“Lothar, is there anything I need to look out for down here? Anything dangerous?”
“Danger is everywhere, Kitson. Ranchett will still be around and he will be hungry. The foxes may be around here somewhere. I will warn you from my nest if I see anything approach. And you can return the favour if you see a worm. Soon I will need to feed my young.”
I thanked the sparrow and inspected the ship. Immediately I could see what had happened to Jackson. His body was slumped against the windscreen at the front of the ship, his head twisted unnaturally to one side. He’d broken his neck in the crash, his ejector must have failed. I climbed inside and dragged his dead body out of the wreckage. I looked at his face. It looked at peace, and I thought back to Lothar’s words about the Mother’s Chain. Jackson had died trying to find a new home for the human race. Maybe he had given his life for something bigger, the human version of this Chain.
My thoughts were broken by a movement below my feet that caused me to stumble. I looked down and, to my horror, I saw a huge, pink worm burst from the ground. Its skin was translucent and I thought I could see the blood flowing through its long body. I froze with terror as the worm wrapped around my foot.
“Lothar!” I shouted, looking towards the tree. “Lothar, worm!”
I felt the light around me dim as Lothar’s shadow swamped me. He swooped and grasped the worm in his break, before throwing his head back so his entire body was at a one-hundred-and-eight-degree angle. The worm slipped down his throat and I could see the its bulk slide down his body. Lothar looked back at me and without a word, flew back to the tree.
I climbed back aboard the ship and inspected it. The electrics turned on but there was a problem with the thrusters. Without the thrusters, I’d not even get off the ground, never mind travelling beyond this planet’s atmosphere. I was stuck. With my head in my hands, I sat in the ship and sobbed. I would be gobbled up by a arge predator within days, weeks, months. I would be part of the Mother’s Chain whether I liked it or not. Images of my painful death in the talons of a hawk or the mouth of a giant fox consumed me and my sobs grew louder.
#
Days went by. I placed Jackson’s body back in the ship which, after a strenuous effort, I had managed to turn the right way up. I didn’t want one of this planet’s huge predators to eat him, like he was a piece of tasty roadkill or rotting carrion. I lived on a diet of food from the ship, but I only had two weeks’ worth. Then I would need to find something edible in this strange world.
Four days in, where I spent my time sobbing and moping, I decided to search the ship for any extra supplies. My heart raced as I found an engineer’s manual. Although I only had basic engineering knowledge, I was pretty handy when I had a set of directions in front of me. I flicked the manual to the page about the thrusters and immediately broke out into loud laughter, until tears filled my eyes. I punched the air with delight. Page sixty-eight of the manual gave instructions on how to install the spare thrusters.
It took me three days to install them. When I finished, I was exhausted, but I needed to test it, to see if it worked. I started the engine and it began to thrum. It was a beautiful sound. It immediately felt like home – although after leaving Earth, the word home was a pretty fluid concept. To me, home meant seeing my wife and two girls again. It meant a new start. It meant safety. The new planet for humans was as earth-like as you could get. Luscious and green, with half of the planet’s surface covered in seas and oceans. And there would be no over-sized predators ready to rip me to shreds. I looked over to Lothar’s tree and smiled. The emotionless sparrows wouldn’t mind that I hadn’t said goodbye. They would barely remember me. I laughed as I thought about how I would approach telling this story to others. Sparrows that spoke my language. Well, they didn’t exactly speak my language but I could understand their songs. People would think I’d gone mad, that I’d hit my head after the ejection. Maybe that is what had happened? Who could know? It would become one of those stories that passed around the travellers, one that would morph and twist to something different entirely.
My smile dropped as I flipped the levers for take-off. The engine spluttered, the ship lurched forward and stopped dead. I tried again but once more the ship lurched forward and failed to take off. Panicking, I grabbed the manual and turned to page sixty-eight. I read it and re-read it and couldn’t see any other instructions that would fix this problem. Then I turned the page. There was one line, in bold, block capitals.
PLEASE NOTE REPLACEMENT THRUSTERS SHOULD ONLY BE INSTALLED IN MID-FLIGHT WHILE AIRBORNE. THRUSTERS WILL NOT HAVE POWER FOR TAKE-OFF.
I threw my head back and brought it back on the ship’s steering wheel, causing a flash of heavy pain on my forehead. I let out an anguished scream of despair and pounded my fists on the dashboard. I was stuck in this place after all. With my head throbbing and my body exhausted, I slumped in my chair and forced myself to go to sleep.
#
The next morning, I climbed out of the ship. A shadow covered me, blocking the light from above and causing the light to firstly mellow and then dim in a sheen of darkness. I looked up to see a hawk circling above. Ranchett? I wondered to myself. The hawk glided hundreds of yards above, taunting me. I raised my fist and yelled at the bird.
“Come on then! I’m right here. Come and have a go, you big bastard!”
The hawk continued to glide, but I saw his head lower, as if to look in my direction. He then flew across and behind some distant trees.
With a strong gust, Lothar landed on the ship next to me.
“Don’t taunt him, Kitson. He is hungry, looking for a meal. What is bothering you today? It sounded like you had made progress on your machine last night.”
“Waste of time,” I replied. “I can’t get it going unless it’s already in the sky. Great luck, eh, Lothar? Looks like I’ll be here fetching you worms and hiding from hawks for the rest of my natural life, which is probably going to be a few days at most with all the overgrown beasts in this hideous place.”
“You do not speak kindly of our home,” sang Lothar. “You must understand this place. There is the Mother’s Chain and the Mother’s children live according to its command.”
“I don’t want to be part of your Chain, Lothar!” I yelled at the sparrow, looking into his black, cold eyes. I hung my head immediately. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. It’s just, we come from two very different places. Humans look to survive. Anything that threatens that survival needs removing. I suppose that’s the difference between our kinds. You live with your threats and respect them. We can’t live with them so we remove them.”
“And without threats your race has thrived? No. Your kind’s biggest threats are yourselves. And yet you still apply your logic, wiping out yourselves. You could learn from the Mother’s Chain, Kitson. I implore you take it back to your own kind. Spread the word of the Mother’s Chain.”
“Lothar, I’m never making it back. Didn’t you listen? My ship won’t work unless it’s in the sky.”
“I heard. But you may be able to get some help with that. What if something was to lift it into the sky and release it high in the Mother’s sky?”
I looked at Lothar. He was big, but the ship was over twice his size. There would be no chance he could fly with the ship in his feet. Even if Lemir was to help him – and there’s no way she would risk leaving their eggs.
“But Lothar, you couldn’t...”
“Not me, Kitson,” he replied. “There is only one bird big enough to carry it.”
I looked into the sky and saw Ranchett gliding high above the colossal trees. I laughed and looked back into Lothar’s emotionless eyes.
“Are you crazy? He would kill me. He would eat me and feed my body to his chicks.”
“That may be. It is certainly a possibility. But hawks are intelligent. They have grace and skill and they can solve problems. They are blessed with the Mother’s empathy and integrity. You must try to appease him. Offer him a substantial meal and he may see fit to reward you.”
“How can I find a substantial meal? Surely eating me would beat one of those worms I’ve been getting you?”
“That’s true. So, you need to offer something else. Something as substantial as you.”
“But where -” I stopped, realising what Lothar was talking about. Jackson. He wanted me to offer his body up to the hawk. “No. No I can’t. I can’t go back to Jackson’s family and tell them that a hawk ate him. That I gave him to a hawk as an offering? They would put me in prison.”
“I’m afraid I do not understand your arguments. It is important to the hawk that he eats. Your friend would surely be pleased at his part in the Mother’s Chain. And he died elsewhere. He has no use for his body now, he should be happy that it will be donated back to the Mother’s Chain.”
I leant my head back and cried. Back home we buried our deceased. Dead human beings were treated in a sacred way. I really couldn’t contemplate giving his body to the hawk, in the hope that the bird would somehow agree to lifting my ship up to the sky. But it was my only option. I looked back at Lothar.
“Okay. I’ll do it.”
#
It would have been easier if Lothar could have acted as a translator, but he couldn’t risk being close to the hawk. His family needed him. Me on the other hand – I had nothing to lose. I said my goodbyes to Lothar, feeling emotional and thankful that this strange, peaceful being had come to my aid. Lothar said goodbye and I heard Lemir calling from the nest. As expected, there were no emotion in their farewells.
I stripped Jackson naked and placed him on top of the ship. It didn’t take long for Ranchett to swoop down. He glided from above, his body almost motionless, his talons protruding like weapons at the bottom of his long, stalk-like legs.
As he came closer I shouted: “Ranchett! Please help me. I offer you this food for your help. Please take my ship and drop it as high as you can in the sky. Help me get home.”
The hawk grabbed Jackson’s body, his razor-sharp talons piercing Jackson’s dead flesh and hooking into him. He soared back to the sky and beyond the trees in the distance. Is he coming back? Did he understand? My head was full of questions but I took the chance, jumping in the ship, sitting behind the controls and starting the engine.
After a few minutes – which felt like hours – I heard a commotion from above and felt the ship lift upwards.
“Yes. Yes!” I shouted and punched the air. “I’m going home. I’m going home.”
I looked out of the window and over to Lothar and Lemir’s tree. If I made it back to my family I would never forget this pair of wonderful beings. Maybe I would hear their sweet chirps in my dreams, beautifully translated into human speech. Or maybe over time I would forget their chiming songs, their poetic outlook on their world and the Mother’s Chain. I didn’t need to even ask them about the Mother. I understood it was their God, their creator. The creator of us all? I wondered. There was something beautiful in their beliefs, something profound and innocent, respectful and resolute. Tears formed in my eyes as I looked over at the sparrows for the final time. “Goodbye, my friends,” I said looking at the distant nest in the tree as I soared higher and higher. I heard a chime on the wind and roughly translated it to say “Remember the Mother.” Or maybe I had imagined it within the confines of the ship. I smiled and looked across the sky of this strange place, lifted higher and higher by the flapping of the hawk’s gigantic wings.
|
Brenda
Kevin Z. Garvey
By force of habit, Brenda turned towards the men’s room entrance at the mall. Then she caught herself. Smiling, she moved past it to the ladies’ room, happy in the knowledge that she no longer had the equipment to use a urinal.
At the entrance, she heard a voice behind her.
“You had it right the first time, freak.”
Brenda turned and saw two young men standing there, glaring at her. “Excuse me?”
“The men’s room is that way,” one of them said, the taller of the two, gesturing with his thumb.
The smaller one snickered. “You tell him, Donnie!”
Brenda ignored the two idiots and went into the ladies’ room. To her surprise they followed her in.
“You don’t belong in here,” she said.
Donnie cackled. “Hear that, Mike? He says we don’t belong in here.”
“I’m not a ‘he,’” Brenda said, feeling her face flush at the thought of having to identify her gender.
“You ain’t no she,” Donnie said. “Look at your hands. So fuckin’ masculine.”
Brenda didn’t say anything. She wished there was someone else using the facility, but she and the two thugs were alone.
“You got man hands and a man face,” Donnie said. “Who you trying to kid?”
Feeling a growing sense of alarm, Brenda told herself to relax. This was nothing she hadn’t experienced before. In her youth, when her name was Brendan, she’d endured worse bullying. She’d been teased relentlessly for being an “effeminate” male. Now she was being accosted for being a “masculine” female. In a ladies’ room, no less. Would the torment ever end?
“If you don’t leave, I’m calling security,” she said.
“You ain’t calling jack shit, mister,” Donnie said and took a menacing step towards her. Mike stayed where he was, snickering.
Brenda had to get out of there. Things were turning ugly. But the only way to get to the exit was to walk past Donnie. Still, what choice did she have?
She moved towards the door. As she passed Donnie, he reached down between her legs, pawing at the crotch of her jeans. Brenda pushed him away. “That’s assault,” she said. “I’ll have you arrested.”
“You grabbed her by the pussy, Donnie!” Mike exclaimed, laughing hysterically. “You grabbed her by the fuckin’ pussy!”
“It didn’t feel like pussy,” Donnie said. “I felt something hard down there. This bitch got a dick!”
Brenda tried to push past Donnie, but he pushed back. He grabbed her crotch again. Reacting instinctively, Brenda threw a punch at Donnie’s face, a straight shot to the nose, the way her dad had taught her when she was a kid.
Donnie’s head snapped back. He rubbed his nose and looked at the blood that came away on his fingers. “You fuckin’ cunt,” he said. “You’ll pay for that.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife.
“Stick her, Donnie,” Mike said. “Stick her good!”
“You got a dick,” Donnie told Brenda. “I felt it. Now get the fuck out of the women’s room.”
“It’s not a dick.”
“Then what is it?”
“This,” Brenda said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out an expandable baton. She extended the baton to its full length, took a step forward and swung it at Donnie, cracking him on his knife hand.
Donnie yowled and dropped the weapon. Brenda swung again, but Donnie was already out of range, moving toward the exit.
“I’m calling the cops,” he said, hurrying out of the bathroom, his bravado gone.
Brenda turned towards Mike, who was cowering by the sink.
“Not so funny now, is it?” she said.
“No,” he said. “No, ma’am.”
“Get out of here,” she told him. “And don’t ever let me see you in this mall again.”
Mike slinked away. Brenda picked up the knife and pocketed it, along with the baton. She didn’t believe Donnie was really going to the police, but she certainly would be.
Just then another woman entered the bathroom. She smiled at Brenda. “How’s it going?”
Brenda smiled back. “Just fine, thanks. Now.”
Then, still smiling, she selected a stall, sat down and did what she’d come to do, which was to go about her business. In peace.
|
A journey
S. Clay Sparkman
I walked into the jungle
only to find that there was
no jungle.
And since I’d gone
to a place that didn’t exist
I could not return.
So I stayed where I was,
which was nowhere,
and lived with snakes
and leeches and things
too large and too beautiful
that flew and sang in the night,
and I lived just as I had
before I turned and walked
into the jungle.
And then I thought about it
for a long while, and it occurred
to me that it wasn’t possible
to journey from a place that existed
to one that did not. And so
I understood that I must
have lived in a place that
didn’t exist, before I turned
and walked into the jungle.
Knowing this, it was easy to return.
I walked out of the jungle
back to my non-existent home,
and I now live
just as I had before
I turned and walked into the jungle.
only no! It is different now.
I am grateful--bone deep
grateful--for the understanding
which I have found.
|
about S. Clay Sparkman
S. Clay Sparkman was born in Portland, Oregon. A book of his poetry was published as A Place Between Two Voices (by Tabor Hill Press). He has spent much of his life bouncing back and forth between a more conventional existence in Oregon and a less conventional existence exploring and living in an eclectic smattering of places upon this orb. He is married to a Chilean woman, and considers Chile to be his second home—maybe his third. He currently lives in Nicaragua, with his wife, Veronica, his 12-year old son, Javier, his dog, Lola, and his cat, Torcha—along with many geckos, snakes, scorpions, and things that go “bump” in the night.
|
Point Break
Allan Onik
Lazar stopped dead on the highway and flashed his high beams. The black bear stood on its hind legs on the interstate and looked straight at him, then tramped off into the burned Cerro Grande. “Goddammit,” he said. He continued into town and headed for Tech Area 55, flashing his clearance card at the security booth in front of the drab, brick building.
He used the red, green, and then blue key card to descend to the plutonium holding lab. He then took out his Attikah cigarette pack and removed the C4.
“With all the millionaires in this town you’d think a-Obaidi’s physicists wouldn’t make it past our city’s vetting process.” Chen leaned against the room’s wall in his white lab coat. “I suppose Oppenhiemer and Bethe can’t save us now. You could detonate that long before the 30 seconds it would take for our security teams to reach you. The Geiger counters along the routes will be crying for mercy, and everything within 100 miles will be waste. I suppose there’s nothing I could say that would change your mind?”
Lazar smirked. “As it turns out we don’t need our own bomb when we can bring the pain to you with yours. I know about the hidden vault under your MacDonald’s with the Omega Plan. But we simply didn’t have the time or recourses.”
“I saw one detonate out in White Sands back in 2011. It was actually quite beautiful. Timeless. Like a wilting flower. Brought a tear to my eye.” Chen flicked open the pen knife in his golden montblanc and chucked it at him. Blood sprayed out of his neck in a quick spirt. Lazar fell to his knees and gripped the wound, gagging. “The bad news? There won’t be any virgins to fuck in hell.”
|
Ducks in a Row
Allan Onik
The Aurora Saucer lifted to just below cloud cover. 14783 opened the retracting door, and frigid air burst into the chamber. Pyongyang glistened below, and Un sat in a circle with his bodyguard and top generals.
“I hope you all feel welcome in my ship. Used by The Greys and recovered in a forest in Otradnenskoye, Russia—refurbished and given to me as a present by my good friend Putin on The Day of the Sun. I will watch the fireworks from up here.”
“Fireworks, your graciousness?” A general asked with an unusually wide grin.
Un held a small black box in his hand and opened the lid. A red and wispy glowing button lit up the chamber. “Yes. 60 of the world’s largest cities will be decimated in less than 10 minutes. After New York and London fall, along with retaliatory measures from my enemies, 4,400 cities will lay in radioactive ruin. It will be the start of a new era. There have been 5 mass extinctions in The Biosphere’s history, and Earth is currently in the stage of a human caused mass extinction, known as the Holocene extinction. Due to overconsumption, in 100 years half of all plant and animal species will be extinct.” Un took a bite of pepperoni pizza. “I’m just speeding up the process.” He nodded. 14783 began to throw the generals out the door one by one. When the last one fell, screaming, he took his last bite and pointed a golden PP7 pistol at the top Supreme Guard. “Now fly.”
|
Dear Reader
Stefanie Bennett
In pursuit of the Common Touch
They wanted to know
If I’d stake
My life on it...
Vive la difference!
What I’m most curious of is,
Would they then raise
Defiant fists
If I didn’t?
|
About Stefanie Bennett
Stefanie Bennett has published several books of poetry, a novel and a libretto and worked with Arts Action for Peace. Of mixed ancestry (Irish, Italian, Paugussett-Shawnee) she was born in Queensland, Australia.
|
The Woods
Shane Ryan Bailey
Things happen out there in the forest. Bad things. Please stop asking me to go camping with you all. Insisting I go. I know all of you care about me. But I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I just can’t do it. I will go with you guys on some other trip, but I won’t go camping out there in the woods, especially those woods. Remember what happened to that one kid who went walking around out there in the woods last year? I think the media said his parents had let him go out there by himself to do some birdwatching. He was thirteen. An Eagle Scout or something. Old enough to be by himself, they said. And then what happens? He steps into an old, rusty bear trap concealed underneath a bunch of leaves. They said the trap must have been there for years, probably forgotten about by some hunter. The boy stepped into the trap and it snapped shut on his leg. His parents got worried when the boy didn’t return home that night. There was a search party organized and they found him nearly dead, with one skinny leg stuck in the jaws of the trap, all bloody and nearly severed. It is a miracle he didn’t die from blood loss and exposure. The doctors weren’t able to save his leg, but he at least survived the ordeal. And remember that young couple a few years back who had been out there fooling around, having sex under the trees? A wild boar came upon them, charged at them, and drove its tusk into the man’s scrotum! Don’t roll your eyes at me. I’m not making this up. It was all over the local news. You can do a search on the Internet for these stories. You’ll see what I’m talking about is true. Look, my mind is made up. I’m staying here. I ain’t going with you all. I am just going to stay here this weekend. I have things to do. I have a paper I need to write for class. Plus one of my girl friends has been wanting to go shopping with me. I might do that. I need some new dresses and I value her fashion advice. I will do something with you all another time, just not out there in those woods. Why? Seriously? Isn’t it obvious? No, I suppose not. Look at my skin. Don’t you know this area’s history and what used to happen out there in the woods? What used to happen to folks like me? I’m talking about the Klan. You know, the KKK. They used to roam those woods for decades. Had their secret meetings out there, walking among the trees in their white hoods and sheets. Doing the Devil’s work. That’s what they were doing. The Devil’s work. Look, I like you, Jay. I really do. You’re very sweet. You’re the first white boy who ever took an interest in me. I like the others, too. I’m not trying to snub any of you by not going camping. I am grateful to have friends like you, but I have to respectfully decline your invitation. I know you all see this weekend trip as something fun to do and an opportunity to get off campus, get out of the city, and be immersed in the natural world. I get it. I do. It’s been a tough semester for most of us. I also like trees and streams, mountains and hillsides—all of God’s creation. I do. Remember how much I loved Walden by Thoreau? But if I were to go camping out there with you all, I will be scared. Scared for my life. I know the times have changed, but the Klan still has a foothold in this area. For all I know, they are still out there, hiding. Even if they are not and it is all perfectly safe, how can I enjoy myself, sitting by a campfire, toasting marshmallows, laughing and having a good time, with the knowledge that people like me were shot, lynched, and set on fire in those woods? When I picture myself sitting by a campfire and having a good time with you all and looking up at the stars, I see something in my mind. Something that bothers me deep down. I see the spirits of all those innocent men and women who had been killed decades ago by the hands of white men. It haunts me. I see their spirits watching me from the shadows of the trees, passing judgment on me for laughing and having a good time on what is essentially their burial ground. Who knows how many of them have their bones scattered across those woods, never having received a proper burial! It’s like I’d be trampling upon them. How can I do that with a clear conscience? I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t.
|
Olivier Schopfer bio
Olivier Schopfer lives in Geneva, Switzerland. He likes to capture the moment in haiku and photography. His poetry has appeared in numerous online and print journals and anthologies, and his artwork is featured in After the Pause, Die Angst Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Former People: A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers, Gnarled Oak, Otoliths, Peacock Journal, Sonic Boom, Streetcake Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly and Window Cat Press. He also writes articles in French about etymology and everyday expressions at: olivierschopferracontelesmots.blog.24heures.ch/.
|
Apocalypse Then
Drew Marshall
The Ziegfeld Theater opened in nineteen sixty nine. It was located on Sixth Avenue and Fifty Fourth Street, in the heart of the Broadway theater district. The Ziegfeld was one of the last, single screen movie palaces built in America. It was a showcase theater for world premieres.
The premiere of Francis Coppola’s epic, visionary film on Viet Nam, could only take place at the Ziegfeld. The legendary problems encountered while making the film were well known and documented. The man’s career was on the line.
The director stood in front of the entrance, handing out programs. Once again he was defying convention by not showing opening or closing credits. As he handed the document to me, I thanked him and told this icon how much I was looking forward to seeing his film.
My movie mate for this evening was Ben, a man I met several weeks earlier. We worked alongside each other as shipping clerks for an electronic parts store. The normally gregarious Irishman was strangely reserved. He was ten years my senior and had done two tours as an Army medic in The Nam. He arrived there just in time for the Tet Offensive and fought in the city of Hue.
Ben insisted we sit as close to the screen as possible. Normally I sat back toward the exit doors. This close, the huge screen set to show a 70mm print and the six track Dolby sound system, were intimidating. The electric buzz in the air was palpable. Expectations and anticipation were at a fever pitch.
The place was packed. The majority in this crowd were my fellow baby boomers. Audience conversation was at a minimum and silence ruled once the film began. A mesmerizing journey had begun.
The silence continued when the film had ended. We were drained. Ben and I slowly rose from our seats. I looked at him for a moment.
“That’s the closest you’ll ever get to Viet Nam,” Ben pronounced, in a dark, edgy voice that mirrored that of star Martin Sheen’s off camera narration. As we slowly exited the theater everyone in the crowd looked at one another. We knew we had been through a unique experience. Something that needed time to sink in and one we would not soon forget.
The film went on to become a commercial and a critical success. Considered by many to be a masterpiece of filmmaking. The director himself said this was not a film about Viet Nam. It was Viet Nam.
Ben and I were a bit disoriented as we hit the open night air. We decided to head downtown for a bite to eat. We got to know each other that night.
He told me his war story. Nothing unique. Unfortunately, this was a common tale to be told by many veterans. During his second tour, his unit was ambushed. Ben was shot several times. Everyone else had been killed. He survived by burying himself under the dead bodies of his buddies. When the enemy left, he managed to shoot himself up with morphine.
He wanted to die, to end the pain and suffering.
Ben woke up in a Saigon hospital. He was shipped back home and did time in the Bronx Veterans Hospital. In the summer of nineteen seventy, Ben moved to Woodstock, in upstate New York. I was having fun at a summer camp, about ten miles away. I was closing in on sixteen. We would not meet for another eight years.
In December of nineteen seventy two, I turned eighteen and registered for the draft. I can’t remember a damned thing about it. On the way home, I stopped off at Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand, in Coney Island. I sat down ready to devour a jumbo cheeseburger. I lifted the bun to drown it in ketchup. There was a huge, industrial size staple, resting comfortably, on top of the cheese. I called over to the middle-aged man behind the counter. I lifted the staple up into the air, so he could see it. This world weary soul threw me a dirty look, and returned to what he was doing, before I so rudely interrupted him.
As history would have it, the war was over several weeks later. American forces were being withdrawn. The Vietnamization of this conflict had begun. I wound up getting a 3A deferment. Registrant deferred because of hardship to dependents.
I was working in a grocery store and living with my mother. My father had served in World War Two. He was a psychologist, stationed down south. My dad interviewed soldiers returning from Europe, before they were discharged. He died a few weeks before my fifth birthday. I was an only child.
Ben was a fighter and survivor by nature. The youngest of ten children, he grew up on a farm in rural, southern Ireland. He ran away from home in his early teens. Ben worked odd jobs in Dublin and Belfast, saving enough money to come to America.
He lived by his wits. Ben was handsome and charming, exceptionally intelligent and fearless. He owned deep dark brown eyes to match his hair and thick, but neatly trimmed beard. When he flashed that killer smile, you couldn’t help but love him.
Ben was possessed with a righteous zeal. He always stood up for the underdog. He became an activist, while living on New York’s lower East Side. By nineteen sixty eight, his luck had run out and Ben found himself unemployed and without a roof over his head. He enlisted in the army. He would claim that decision was a tragic mistake.
Ben always referred to the war as a nightmare. His dark side was never far from the surface.
He suffered from respiratory ailments and was always breaking out in rashes. He blamed this on his exposure to Agent Orange, one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military, as part of its herbicidal warfare program, “Operation Ranch Hand.”
Ben and I remained best friends for twenty three years. At age fifty three, he returned to school. He fulfilled his dream of becoming a Physician’s Assistant.
He had trouble finding a job in New York and finally took a job at a small clinic on the West Coast. Towards the end of his first year out West, we lost touch. By the time I did get around to contacting Ben, his phone number was disconnected. Letters came back, stamped; “Return to Sender. Address Unknown.”
In 2016, The Ziegfeld closed its doors to the public. The theater had been losing money for years. It will be renovated and reopen as a banquet hall, serving corporate events.
After hearing the news, I couldn’t help but think about that special night, thirty eight years ago. A nerve was struck in our collective consciousness. I also wondered what I would have done, had the war not ended when it did, and I had been drafted.
|
Bedouin of the Jungle
David Lohrey
The young man said he was Brazilian
But I knew he was lying.
He spoke some nonsense about mixed
Parentage, some shit about a black father
And a mother who is white. I simply can’t
Believe - this black and white mix – fully
Explains why he looks Arab.
He has an 8 inch tattoo of a blue and green
Lighthouse covering his arm. This image,
He explained, beckons; it shows the way.
It guides and welcomes, but demands nothing.
It announces accessibility. It does not
Prevent escape. This lad, I realized, as he gives
This explanation, wishes to be this lighthouse,
To host and celebrate arrivals and departures,
To be a beacon to his fellows.
This youth from the tropics looks to be
A Bedouin from Arabia. His olive skin
And black locks give it away. He admits
He can’t fool the ladies. They love his
Exotic curls. Once they get their hands on him,
They know they’ve met a wanderer.
He thinks like a nomad, not a farmer.
The girls can see he is of a clan of travelers,
Not a tribe of settlers. He was born in Sao Paulo,
But has adopted the mentality of the sands.
The Bedouin of the Amazon like those of the desert
Show bravery when attacked. They are not afraid
But, not unlike their sandy brethren, prefer to recite
Erotic poetry, to sing and dance around the camp fire.
This youth of mixed heritage may be black and white,
But his state of mind not his blood lines defines his race.
The tribe to which he belongs dwells in harbors
Of river water not burning sand, but like the Arabs
He welcomes strangers with open arms.
|
David Lohrey
Christina Kosch
It’s all about the money, not the population.
Let’s revert to the camp fires.
We’ll take up flints and arrows.
We’ll make spears and pierce the heart of this so-called art.
Smash it all; shred it; throw it into the sea.
My friend Keisha McCormick took one look at Mark Rothko’s Void #3
And wanted to vomit. She redoubled her gaze. “I look at this painting
But can’t find my people. I only see you.” Where, she demanded,
Are my African-American brothers and sisters?
This is not part of my people. We’re not at the center;
We’re not even at the side. Why must I study this perverse style?
This is not Mississippi. The sexes may be mingling, but the races are splitting.
In future, Kanye West must be shown at the side of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
We are radical practitioners of right thinking, determined to destroy
Western Civilization. We must step back to move forward:
first go the arts and the decorations, then the courts, the laws and institutions.
By the time we’re through, they’ll be nothing left
but vaginal jelly and sawed-off shotguns.
If I can’t see my people, I want to get rid of it as Genghis Khan
And the Taliban dynamited Bamiyan. We’ll destroy the offending statuary.
Why should a museum be a sanctuary? We are determined to enact our purity.
There can be no beauty without justice.
You give us our cut. 13% or we’ll burn the art, set the museums on fire.
We’re kind-hearted, loving and caring, but you give us the sculpture
or we’ll cut your necks.
Oprah goes right up on that Sistine Chapel with Louis Farrakhan and Michael Jackson.
Until that day, that’s nothing but another ugly ceiling.
Guernica? The Prado, what’s that got to do with it?
Why’s that horse’s neck cut in two? Picasso use a guillotine?
He’s as much a sadist as an artist. I’d call that horse a gelding.
How can the symbol of human suffering be depicted by animal mutilation?
It is not just about renaming Yale after Malcolm.
We must demolish the Washington Monument.
We burn with righteous resentment. My parents only make $229,000 a year.
They can afford to send me to college but can’t buy me an Audi.
Put this shit in a vault, send it to the university archives. Who
wants to see Chippewa or Oneida paddling bark canoes?
Subservience to white settlers is offensive. This art depicts a race-based view.
Those offended have declared it harmful. The First Amendment is racist.
This country needs new style of art. How about renaming the Grand Tetons?
Or Michelle and President Obama, both nude, placed in a golden chariot?
They’d look cool next to Lady Liberty. That’s what I’m saying.
Where is the people’s eternal flame?
It’s all about the money, not the population.
|
On: A Relit Cigarette
Christina Kosch
And you’ll get to his apartment and he will tell you to sit down and make yourself comfortable. And so you do, but not too comfortable because you are at his apartment and you’re vulnerable. He will offer you something to drink and you’ll say coffee, hoping he remembers your first date. You’ll immediately regret it because who wants to kiss a girl with coffee breath? So he will pour you a cup and fix it with cream and sugar even though he should know you like it black. It will sit there untouched.
So you talk about things like family and work and you’ll tell him how proud you are of him for graduating college. He will make an awkward, uncomfortable smirk, spit out a “thank you” and you’ll know you’ve gone a little too far. You will be tiptoeing on the border of “mom” and “girlfriend” and you will need to remember that you hold neither of those titles.
And after you run out of generic things to talk about, an eerie silence will fall on you both and you will wonder why you were even ecstatic to be here in the first place. So you’ll suggest a movie because the silence is unsettling. You will suggest a movie that isn’t too serious just in case your conversation blossoms. So you will decide on a piss poor horror film where you know the hot blonde is the only one that makes it to the end. You won’t get to the end though because your clothes will be on the floor about 23 minutes in. The skin to skin touch will fill the void that has been unfulfilled for far too long. About half way through, you’ll remember that this isn’t what you want. Sixteen year old you dreamt for this chance and here you will be— lips to shaft in front of a glowing tv screen. This isn’t what you came here for—you came for love, even when you knew you wouldn’t get it.
So you will continue because now it feels too good to stop. And when you finally collapse on his chest, you’ll know. He will stretch his arms across the sheets instead of around your curves and you will wrap your arms around his neck.
At this moment, you should be leaving.
You will lay there for a few moments and he will suggest that maybe you should get back to that movie. You will want to just lie there and tell him that when you see someone with beady eyes, they remind you of the galaxies in his and that you think of him and the way that he played with your hair in that coffeeshop. You will finally mutter a measly “I miss you” and he will stop you dead in your tracks with “don’t do this to yourself”.
So you’ll pull on your sweatshirt and shorts and stuff your bra in your bag because now you just want to cover yourself up as quickly as possible.
He will tug on a pair of shorts and lean in the doorway and say that “this was fun” and that “you should do this, and only this, again sometime”. This will remind you of your ninth grade geometry teacher and the “if and only if” clauses. Who would’ve guessed your sad and destructive decisions would relate back to those?
You should not do this again, ever.
And so you will be leaning on the arm of the love seat devastated by the fact that he won’t love you the way you love him so you make the conscious effort to leave. You will grab your bag and your phone and he will be grabbing a beer from the fridge and you’ll turn around and hope to god that he is there, asking why you’re gathering your things to leave, but he will not.
You really should have been gone by now.
So as one final saving grace you will apologize to him for leaving so soon, giving him one last chance to beg you to stay and he will rattle off “that’s fine, don’t worry about it” and you will close the door and think about that untouched cup of coffee still sitting on the end table.
|
About Fabrice Poussin
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry and the advisor for The Chimes, the Shorter University award winning poetry and arts publication, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and dozens of other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review and more than 250 other publications.
|
The Captain
Adam Kluger
“Come on KIRK—get it up and down already or we are going to miss the time slot,” the agitated TV Executive yelled into the edit-room. “You are making it difficult for me to do my job correctly,” he said as he stormed away confident that Kirk would be replaced by a better, younger and hotter free-lance producer by next show and that there would be other folks still in need of a firm kick in the pants before the end of this LIVE show.”
“Come on it’s my Birthday, buy me a drink.” The two old high school frenemies, soccer competitors at the same position, sat at the bar and ordered tequila. The Birthday boy wanted his chilled. It had been a long night. As he turned to his right he greeted a snaggle-toothed gent who he immediately recognized as a middle-aged version of the high school Drummer. Apparently he had purchased the trendy dive bar that catered to all the young cool folks. Suddenly, a beautiful co-worker with freckles and wide eyes said “there you are —here’s your birthday present.”
She stuck what felt like a small straw in his mouth and lit it. “It’s really good pot from Germany,” she whispered. She pressed her soft lips against his, he opened his mouth and she sucked some of the smoke back into her lungs as well. “Cute friend,” the suddenly jealous frenemy whispered.
The three men were walking briskly down the street.
“I’m going to get back into cage fighting—it’s been too long.”
“So this guy whipped it right out on the yacht and he’s like “check out my friend Gamera!”
“Oh shit,” “How did the girls react?”
“Everyone was laughing and totally wasted— it was a crazy scene.”
They all had come to his birthday party—even though he was busy with a video project and totally preoccupied. They had seen him in action first-hand guide the lifeboat through the marshes past the flames and deadly snakes. He taught them all how to eat the organs of the dead and survive and then toss the bodies overboard and keep going. He was a battle-tested and he taught his young charges to find their own inner beast. To let it out and go forth in the jungle, killing and running and howling always at the moon. Plus it sounded like free beer.
So what if he had let the young guys order the beer and the place tried to charge his credit card $700 for a keg? A quick discussion with the bartender would fix the matter.
“No keg—just pitchers—and where’s the food?”
“You know that there are people lined up around the block to get into your party and you’ve got to feed them, right?”
“Alright pizza and those salty pretzels.”
|
Wait Until Tomorrow
Marc McMahon
I don’t know what to do anymore Mr. Santos, I really am at a loss as to how I am supposed to grow up in that house and be happy. Mr. Santos if you only knew of the things that went on behind that nice front door of my upper middle-class home, you would be in shock.
You have overheard me in fits of anger explain to your son some of these horrors, but never have I sat you down and explained the full magnitude of my situation to you. The problem I am having sir is that the things I would be telling you are so atrocious, so horrifying, that I simply do not think you would believe me. Especially since I never have any visible bruises and am only 13 years old.
Did you know my house has a basement? I did not think so you know why? Because my fucking mom does not even know we have a basement. At least that is what the no good, two timing, sleep with your husband’s friends, lying, let my dad take my friends to the basement parasite that she is, says!
Sir, you know your walking into trouble when your father leads you by the hand down a set of stairs you did not know existed under the work bench in his garage that meanders down a narrow staircase and as you walk down those stairs the light dims with each passing step, while the amount of blood spatter on each step begins to grow.
The warmth of your childhood home quickly becomes the frigid, cool air of a turn of the century meat locker. The swing set you played on in the back yard now becomes a swing of the adult nature in daddy’s secret basement. A place where childhood games are played like, Doctor, and Mailman, sometimes daddy even plays Masseuse if I have been really good.
For a long time, I always thought it was just me until one night while my older brother was sleeping in the bed by the window in the room we share. By the back door of the house that leads to dads garage. I heard my brother mumbling one night and thrashing about in his bed when he sat up, eyes still closed but crying as he screamed, “No daddy it’s too dark down there” then I knew. And at that moment, when he opened his eyes and looked into mine, without a word being uttered. He knew I knew, as well!
Do you know how that makes a girl feel Mr. Santos? As Mr. Santos reaches into his pocket to pull out his handmade silk handkerchief to lend Jupiter as a temporary dam to stop the flood of tears that have now busted through the child’s flood gate he also pulls out his cell phone and begins to start to type.
It makes me feel like my parents never loved me at all. As a matter of fact, the more I analyze my situation I wonder if they did not have me just to be daddy’s little play toy. Mom said she had a little girl before when she and dad first got married but apparently she ran away and was never found so the police closed her case after the statute of limitations ran out 10 years later. But it makes me wonder, I mean where did all that blood come from on the stairs Sir? At a loss for words and with a noticeable bead of sweat beginning to form on his brow Mr. Santos fumbles with his phone in hand as he is trying to press the send button to email the text message he just typed, as it drops at the young teen’s feet. As the naive’ little girl reaches down to pick it up and return to the man she catches a glimpse of the text. It in all caps said, “She’s telling me of the basement damn it, shut her up today or else!” As Jupiter hands the phone back to him with one hand while the other hand pushes her up out of her chair she starts to head for the door. “Thank you for stopping bye Jupiter and you can rest assured your secret is safe with me.”
Almost out of the room she begins to swing the door closed behind her when door stops swinging and Mr. Santos appears whispering “by the way sweetie, your dad said to make sure that you hurry home, now run along.”
|
Mistaken Identity
M.C. Rydel
I am always mistaken for someone else.
People walk up to me and call me names
Nowhere near my own.
I’ve been Bill, Bob, Ray, Eddie, Pete, and Swede.
Once a woman thought me her Senator
As he and I do, in fact, look alike,
But a Senator would not travel without
Three staff members, a security detail,
And maybe a reporter or two. Think it through.
Once, taking a short cut through campus,
A Muslim woman in a hijab
Mistook me for her brother’s academic advisor.
Another time, some little kid followed me
In line for a roller coaster ride
And held the hem of my jacket as if I were his father.
Last night, a stranger face timed me by mistake
Thinking I looked like his cousin,
Insisting I still owed him something.
I spend my life looking like someone
Who looks like me.
Subway rides, coffeehouses, benches by the beach,
These settings present opportunities for confusion.
How can I avoid being in public?
I can’t, and I really don’t want to.
I’ve even been detained for eight hours in a small room
By customs agents at Chicago O’Hare
Because I looked like a Russian named Joseph,
I have been blamed, praised, lectured,
Loved, challenged, cajoled, dined, dated,
And married to people who mistake me for someone else.
People see the person they want to see in me.
Total strangers will eventually show up to my wake.
Two squads of gravediggers will meet at Plot 549.
The saints will make me wait a year in Limbo
Until they can verify exactly who I am,
And send my reincarnated soul to a completely different planet.
I am always mistaken for someone else.
Sometimes I carry my DNA sample
Just to make it through another day.
Even that does not convince the certain:
Certain that I am who they think I am
And not the person that I really want to be.
|
A Confederate Flag
Daniel David
A confederate flag snaps, a shifting wind demands attention,
an incongruent sentiment “the south shall rise again,” but this far
north, along the shore of Erie? I almost see Canada. He’s stuck
this banner in the back of his truck, brandishes his ideology, drives
this around town as if giving his dog a ride. From a window where
I get my car fixed, country music droning in the garage (I’m sick
of this twang) I see he’s parked in the lot. I’m curious, who’s
waving stars and bars. Just a thoughtless kid, not much older than
my son, comes to get a tire fixed. Who taught him to articulate
this language of hate? I wonder, if offered, would he don
a brown shirt, pull on jackboots, sieg heil, sieg heil, sieg heil?
Suddenly a shudder, my jaw sets, then my rage, here, here is my
rage, I shall not deny this rage, no longer dormant, finally lava
forced to surface, no longer tolerant of intolerance, no longer
a gracious diplomat, no longer a monk of the Middle Way,
no longer circumspect, absorbing opposing points of view. I’m
furious. Now I pace a sickroom where I grieve the loss of love,
the loss of compassion. Simply a silly boy, this is where I fear
it begins, the tyrants, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin, come again,
and again. Name them! Name them! In stone, in bronze, we list
our dead, our beloved, but our memory is faulty, our amnesia
of indifference. Where is the monument to murderers, this edifice
we must skirt, an inconvenience, each day? The boy has this flag.
As he passes, I turn my back to him, only malevolence for him,
not even a nod for this neighbor. This, this is the onset of tragedy.
|
Brief Biographical Information
Daniel David is a writer, artist and professor living along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. His poems have appeared widely in a number of venues across the United States, in Canada and the United Kingdom. His publications also include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior; chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha; and his novel, Flying Over Erie.
|
Art History
Daniel David
The rapist sat there, right there, in art history, beneath
my dimmed ambiance, my droning lecture on antiquity.
He was any other kid, a wiry, bony-hide he-goat Pan,
tanned from landscaping Ohio Arcadia, a young man
finding his way, a bit squirrely, surly at times, certainly
harmless, right? who chatted up, charmed the girls around
him, his small-talk harem. The sly bad-boy played the pipes,
and for an instant, as a man, I liked his swagger.
But I wondered, my instinct nagging, What was it, his
obsession? Dear women, had I known – your peril, your peril.
Then came his mug-shot, his arrest, his victim, his news.
My scholar advanced, cum laude, finally his distinction,
from mere voyeur at the mall to an intimate brutality.
I wondered, was it the Greeks? It must have been the Greeks.
The curves of Aphrodites enticed, smooth marble ravishing,
the chiseling, the polishing, the chiseling, the polishing.
Pergamum’s lecherous satyrs were his validation. Ogling
Poussin’s Sabines, Ingres’ seductive Odalisques, came to mind.
Do not romanticize his violence. Did he go directly
from art to her condo? Was there a knife, a pistol, a fist,
a powerful grip around her neck? Witness her tally of bruises,
her horrific array of hues, the garish photo flash, the swabs,
his sticky violation, her kit, her kit, her kit. Dear woman,
I regret a paucity of beauty, a dearth of aesthetics.
|
Brief Biographical Information
Daniel David is a writer, artist and professor living along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. His poems have appeared widely in a number of venues across the United States, in Canada and the United Kingdom. His publications also include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior; chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha; and his novel, Flying Over Erie.
|
Giant
Christopher O’Halloran
Living in the shadow of a giant is a double-edged sword; it’s nice to have some shade on blistering August days, but a single misstep can leave you flat as a dime.
I briefly lived in the shadow of a literal giant. This isn’t a metaphor or a simile or hyperbole or even humanization. The giant wasn’t a very large house or a famous family member. It wasn’t a lazy cloud passing in front of the sun for far, far too long.
The giant was real, and fifty stories tall if he was a foot, his feet themselves the size of big SUVs. If he had decided to terrorize a big city, he could’ve done some real damage. In rural Manitoba, however, he was left with only fields to trample and barn houses to crush.
He smushed trees, big and small, before meeting the flock of sheep. They didn’t stand a chance. When the shepherd found the bodies of the three sheep felled by the galoot, he didn’t know what to think. Their broken bodies indicated a huge downward force, as if a collection of wayward asteroids had landed directly on them.
If he was a smart shepherd, he would’ve put two and two together, what with the giant footprints tracing out a path from the forest to the main road. Alas, this is rural Manitoba, and if we had any common sense we would’ve ran somewhere better a long time ago, and not just because a giant was invading.
It took three whole days of destruction for word to reach everybody. We have social media here, but the social aspect is lacking; our population hovers between 500 and 600. That means status updates are few and far between. I never saw the far off photos posted on Facebook by my neighbours. By the time I knew about the giant, he was upon me.
I was lounging in my favourite smoke spot: a ratty old couch behind a tool shed on my parent’s property. The day was hot, and the shed provided shade from the sun that had beat down on our small town for the past month and a half. Smoke curled up over the lip of the tool shed in expanding rings like targets. Ring-blowing was a habit I had learned off a wandering hobo. He had a wooden pipe he made himself, but smoked different plants than me. I thought the pipe looked pretty wicked, so I fashioned my own. My current apparatus was a gnarled and sloppy thing, but it got the job done.
I was lying on the couch, one pipe balanced on the arm behind me and one in my right hand. I was whittling away at the new model, scraping off shavings in a delicate procedure much like a doctor performing open brain surgery when I heard the cracking of wood. It wasn’t slow like the sounds sheds made when they fell apart under the weight of their own roof, but fast as if a bulldozer was flattening the shed that protected me from sun-burns and age spots.
It startled me so bad that I jumped up and knocked over Pipe 1.0, spilling its contents onto the dry grass! That pissed me off, but when I turned around to confront the source of the noise, I was greeted by a huge, hairy toe. It stuck off the foot, surrounded by the ruin of my family’s shed. There was a broken two-by-four sticking out of it.
My eyes followed the foot to the tree-trunk legs to the water-silo torso to the mountain-shaped head and met up with the bowling-ball eyes. His brows were furrowed, but not at me. He lifted his foot up, craning his leg at an awkward angle and held it in one hand while pulling the splinter out with the other.
His balance wavered. I thought he was going to fall right on me, and considered running. When I looked behind him to identify a viable path, I saw my brothers running off with my parents. I thought about following them, but feared that the giant would topple right over on me. So I figured the next safest place, besides being far away from him, was being right next to him. After all, if he fell left, I could circle around right. If he fell right, well you get the picture.
Instead of falling over, he righted himself. He placed his foot down, and it sunk into a mud puddle formed where the water hose I drank from used to live. I took steps away from him, carefully watching for signs of impending stumbles. When I was out of the blast zone, I turned to run, but before I could take a step the sound of frantic yipping startled me into stasis.
I looked back at the giant, just in time to see Mrs. Shultz’ corgi fly away on a foot being lifted into the air in another step in the direction of town.
Now I’ve always been fond of animals, but my parents would never let us have one on account of them believing we would never take care of it and the burden would fall upon themselves, adults with too many responsibilities as it was. It was a point of contention for years. This fondness for animals stirred something in me. Only a coward would let this poor, little dog be carried off and possibly stomped without trying to help.
I mustered all the courage I had and sprinted after the giant, pocket knife in one hand, pipe in progress in the other. I remember smelling smoke behind me, the dank kind mixed with the regular, burning kind.
I caught up with the giant pretty quickly, despite my decreased lung capacity brought on by years of smoking. The big guy moved slowly in a lumbering gait, and I caught sight of a scabby heel raising up, carrying the barking dog off again into the sky. When it came back down, I steeled myself to jump on.
He was wearing cloth pants. Where he got them, I had no clue. I guessed they must have had a secluded village somewhere. Giants need to come from somewhere, a mommy and a daddy giant, and where there are two giants perhaps there is a community of giants, and where there is a community of giants there must be a giant tailor. All those giants walking around in the nude would be plain indecent.
I lifted my arms to jump on, but realized my hands were full. I jammed my pipe in my left pocket, my knife in the right, and leaped into the air just as the giant was bringing his foot up again. I grabbed a handful of cloth in both fists and was lifted terrifyingly high into the air; the giant’s steps had looked shorter from the ground. I screamed, the dog barked, it was an event.
My hands got sweaty. I knew if I didn’t make my way to solid footing soon, I would fall to the ground. If the landing didn’t kill me, a misstep from the giant would.
His foot completed the step, falling gracefully to the beloved ground. I thought about jumping off and legging it the other way, but my conscience got the better of me once again. I adjusted my grip and held on tighter. The next step brought me high up again, but this time I was ready for it. I began to circle around the giants pant leg, grabbing handful after handful of dirty cloth.
When I reached the foot, the leg was pumped up in another step, high above the ground. The corgi saw me and was backing away. Its stubby tail was over the edge of the foot. It wasn’t barking at the situation anymore; it was barking at me!
I placed a tentative foot onto the surface.
“Good doggy,” I said in a calming voice.
“Bark, bark!” It shouted at me, clearly agitated.
It backed up even more. Its rear legs fell off the giant’s foot, and it began to slip off, its front paws scrambling for purchase.
I leapt forward and grabbed the little dog by its chubby body just before it lost purchase.
It wiggled and tried it’s best to get away from me, but I held on tight.
“Quit it, asshole, I’m trying to help!” I said to it from behind clenched teeth. The dog was heavier than it looked. I wouldn’t be able to hang onto it forever.
As the giant completed its step, lowering its foot to the ground, I tossed the corgi as far to the side as I could. The dog rolled once, then began to scurry away as fast as its tiny legs would take it. It didn’t look back.
“You’re welcome!” I shouted after it. “Ya ingrate.”
Climbing the giant’s leg and wrestling with the worm-like dog had really taken it out of me. I sat back on the hairy foot, resting my back against the giant’s leg. The big guy didn’t seem to know I was hitching a ride, so I figured I could catch my breath before making a dash.
Digging into my pocket, I pulled out a half-full Ziploc bag and the pipe I had been carving. The pipe was far from finished, lacking the decorative flair I was cultivating. There were no dragons, no sick flames, and no busty women. It was plain, but hopefully functional. I packed it, placed it between my lips, and lit it from a matchbook I had found in my brother Aaron’s desk drawer.
The smoke filled my lungs like a clogged toilet. I sat there on the foot, puffing away, blowing rings of smoke as I was lifted high up into the air and brought back down with each step. It was, as far as I knew, the world’s first organic Ferris wheel.
I stuffed the baggy back in my pocket and examined the matchbook. It was from a local motel, not a chain but a small time business. The Stay EZ.
Aaron had been courting lately, but the women he brought home were usually turned off by the fact that he still lived with his family, so he had begun taking them to motels for reasonably priced privacy charged by the hour. I didn’t blame him. Our family isn’t the most welcoming. They were as abrasive as steel wool, picking at any small flaw they could find, sometimes not even waiting for the poor girls to leave before they began. The house made me feel like I was living in the middle of a swarm of gnats, hence my frequent escape to the couch by the shed.
I thought about the couch and its welcoming cushions, springs poking through in only one area. We were only a couple miles away from my house. If I jumped off then, I could’ve made it back before nightfall.
I finished up my pipe (rough and a little jagged at the end, I would have to work on that) and tapped it out from high up in the air. The burnt leaves floated to the ground, peacefully unaware of the gigantic disturbance brought upon our small town.
The foot fell to the ground once more. As I prepared to jump off, a whirring caught my attention. It was coming from behind me. When I turned around to examine it, I was greeted by a drone, held aloft by four rotating propellers. It swayed back and forth before me, seeming to try to get my attention. A letter on top was attached by a strip of scotch tape.
“For me?” I asked the machine.
It bobbed up and down.
I shrugged, reaching out and plucking the letter from the copter. It floated off, proud of a job well done. I sat back down, intrigued. I couldn’t remember the last time I got physical mail. The novelty of it briefly made me forget I was riding a giant.
I ripped it open clumsily, and something fell out. It was a plastic device with a little hook to go over your ear. It bounced on the giant’s foot and almost slipped off, but I nimbly reached out and snatched it up before it could travel any further.
It was one of those Bluetooth headsets. I checked inside the letter for instructions, but the only thing inside was a card that read ‘PUT ME ON’. I put it on.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello, son,” a voice greeted me. It was deep and gravely. A man’s voice, strong and authoritative.
“Dad?” I asked.
“No, son.”
“Mom?”
“Don’t you know what your own mother sounds like?”
“She- I mean you could have a cold or something. You called me son.”
“It’s a term for a man considerably younger than yourself, you friggin-” He interrupted himself, flustered. “Son, you realize where you are right? How can you be so blasé about it all?”
I looked around from the apex of the giant’s stride. A sparrow fluttered by, confused. “I self-medicate,” I explained. “I have anxiety.”
“You don’t sound too anxious.”
“Probably due to the medicine, sir.” I stretched out my legs. “How can I help you?”
The man on the other side cleared his throat. “I’m about to ask you to perform a service for our fine city. What’s your name, son?”
“I don’t know if I feel comfortable divulging that information, sir. You could be anyone, and I have no clue as to your character or motivations.”
There was a sigh on the other end. I wasn’t looking to be difficult, but I’ve always been wary of stranger danger since the invention of chat rooms and catfish.
“My name is Don Beer; I’m the chief of police here in Banbury.”
The name rang a bell, but I had always tried to steer clear of Johnny Law. You never knew how low the war on drugs was going to sink. There were people in jail for self-medicating. Considering the elevated circumstances however, I decided giving the Chief my name wasn’t too dangerous.
“Well chief, my name is Lyle Hogan. Pleased to meet ya. How may I help you?”
“Son, the giant holding you hostage is on its way to the city common. We think he’s got destruction on his mind. He’s been weaving a trail of mayhem from Mount Vincent southward in a straight line. We need you to bring him down, son.”
I gulped. “Me? Why can’t you guys do that? Don’t you have weapons for this sort of thing?”
“Not really. We have rifles and such, but something that big needs more firepower than what we have. I mean, the drone that delivered this headset wasn’t even department property. I had to borrow it from my son.”
“Are we talking birth son, or son as in a man considerably younger than yourself?”
“Birth son, you damn-” He cut himself off once more, spluttering his frustration away from the receiver. “We just need you to take him down. To get anyone else that close would be too dangerous.”
“Why don’t you guys call in the military?”
“We tried. They won’t touch it. They say bringing out the big guns to attack a minority would be a PR nightmare in this current political climate.”
“Minority?” I asked.
“How many Giants do you know, son?”
“Lyle, you up there?” The sound came from somewhere off to the side near rows of corn.
“Hang on, Chief,” I said, “Let me get back to you.” I peered over the edge of the giant’s foot towards the endless rows of corn.
Useless vegetable, very little nutrition.
Walking along the edge of the field was my brother Kyle. At some point last year he had fallen in with the ‘gangsta’ crowd, and as a result adopted the attire of his people.
He wore a flat-billed baseball hat with the sticker still on it, a basketball jersey two sizes too big, and baggy jeans that seemed to defy gravity as they hung halfway down his ass. He held his phone up in front of him, staring at the world through his screen.
“Kyle,” I shouted to him, “What are you doing out here? This isn’t a very safe place to be right now!”
“Man, you know I gotta put this shit on the ‘gram. I got followers that want to see the giant! Besides, you’re up there!”
He had a point.
“He doesn’t know I’m here!”
“He doesn’t know I’m here either!”
“Kyle, go home man. You’re gonna get squashed.”
Kyle put his phone back in his pocket. “Mom wanted to know if you’re gonna be home for dinner.”
“I don’t know. I’m kinda in the middle of something!”
“You want me to tell her that?”
I thought for a second. “No, tell her I’ll be there.” Cold dinner would be better than no dinner.
“Aight.” He turned to walk away, but stumbled as his pants fell down to his knees, displaying his polka-dotted boxers to the world.
“Pull up your damn pants, you idiot. You’re apt to get crushed, tripping over yourself with a giant traipsing about!”
He pulled his pants up with a hitch and walked back down the road. His swagger made him look like a big dumb ape.
Useless boy, no nutrition.
“Are you still there, son?” Don Beer was still on the line.
“I’m here. I still don’t know what you want me to do. I have no training, no fighting experience, and the biggest animal I’ve ever dealt with is a Jersey Cow. They’re about as docile as this big dude seems to be, but they are also a magnitude smaller. I don’t know if this guy will be led astray as easily as them.”
“You are authorized to use lethal force if need be. Just make it look like an accident or something.”
Here was a fine example of big city thinking invading the minds of our small town’s finest. “I suppose I should sprinkle some crack on his body too, eh? Plant a gun on him?”
“Son, there are lives at stake here! Our town is booming. Do you really want to see it destroyed before it gets a chance to develop and grow to its full potential?”
“Of course not, but-”
“Then find a way to take him down. We’re counting on you.”
With that the connection was severed. There was no dial tone, but the silence in my ear sounded just as definite.
So I was tasked with taking the big fucker down. Me, a 19 year-old stoner with nothing better to do than sit in a field and whittle away at chunks of wood. I didn’t know what to do. The biggest thing I had tried to take down had been a cow, and let me tell you, cow tipping does not work like it does in the movies. Those things just get ornery and start hoofin’ it. If I tried to take down the giant, would it start hoofin’ it? Could it even run?
All those questions started to weigh on me, so I decided to self-medicate once more. I reached into my pocket for my baggy, but found nothing. In a panic, I started emptying all pockets. I took out my pipe, the book of matches, my whittling knife, but still couldn’t find the bag. I turned my pockets out, and to my horror found a hole in the bottom of my right front pocket. It would have fallen out, left behind who knows how far back.
“Shit.” I sat on the foot, my back against the clothed leg and my inventory laid out before me. Knife, matches, and pipe. Somehow I would have to take down this creature with a knife, matches, and/or a pipe. It was a real David and Goliath situation, though Goliath didn’t seem too keen on fighting if he even knew I was there.
We crested a hill, and before us was the city. It sprawled out like a growing amoeba, construction sites dotting it here and there like zits on a pubescent’s face. Their cranes jutted into the air, waving at us. When the sun went down, the lights would pop on. City life, or close enough to it.
Knife, matches, pipe.
I didn’t think I could use the pipe to beat the giant, so I put it away.
Knife and matches. Knife and matches. Matches and Knife.
I could just start stabbing at him. His skin looked thick though, so I dismissed the idea for the time being.
I could start a fire at the bottom of his pants, but if he could pull them on, logic said that he could take them off. Then he would be pissed. Then I would get to see if he could run.
He tramped over dead grass, crunching it beneath his feet.
Knife, matches, dead grass.
Fire.
Pants.
Kyle!
I thought of my ‘gangsta’ brother, tripping over himself as his pants fell down. I looked up at the giant. His cloth pants were tied up at the top by a long length of rope. It seemed as if the giant community hadn’t discovered leather or conventional belts yet.
Knife, pants, matches, fire.
The plan came together in my head, and thinking of the safety of all in my community, I began climbing the pants.
It was hard going; there were no holds to place my feet in, so it was all upper body work. I pulled myself up, grabbing patches of cloth in my hands, one after the other. The sun beat down on me as I climbed. When I reached the bottom of his ass, sweat ran down my forehead and into my eye. I had to wince and blink rapidly, stopping my climb. When I looked down, I noticed how high up I was. My hands started to shake, and I had to hug myself close to the giant’s ass.
When my vertigo passed, I climbed the rest of the way, finally reaching the top and wrapping my hands around the giant’s makeshift belt. I almost shouted in triumph, but stopped myself for fear of being noticed. Hooking my arm over the top of the giant’s pants, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my whittling knife. It wasn’t huge, so I would have to work fast. I began to saw through the rope.
I worked at it for what felt like twenty minutes as the giant made his slow, lumbering way towards the city. I kept expecting us to come out of the dry fields and into some fertile land, but each field we entered was dead and yellow.
The rope was hewn almost to the end. I grabbed the cloth at the seat of his pants with my free hand, ready for the drop. I didn’t know how far his pants would slide down, but I prepared myself for the worst.
I kept sawing. I watched the fibers split.
With a sudden snap, the rope came apart. I held on tight as the pants began to slide down the giant’s legs, revealing a large, pock-marked ass with a crack the length and depth of the Grand Canyon. It hitched at the giant’s knees, and he began to stumble. I shuddered in the air as his pants caught. His rear foot remained on the ground, his calf creating a convenient slide. I let go and slid down it.
When I got to the giant’s heel, I sprang off, rolling on the ground. I came to rest a stone’s throw away from him, looking up just in time to see him fall. The ground shook with the thud. It took a couple seconds for it to stop.
The giant just laid there. I thought maybe he was unconscious or something, so I figured it would be better to get it over with. ‘Twere well it were done quickly and all that. I took the matches out of my pocket, cautiously stepping towards his body. I lit one and held it up, ready to drop it to the dry grass.
The wind blew it out.
I was getting ready to strike the second match when I heard the sound of soft sobbing. I looked around for the source before I saw the giant’s shoulders shaking. He held the sides of his big head with meaty paws and cried into the earth. There were deep sobs as if God himself were weeping.
He slowly rolled onto his back and I dropped the matches, dumbfounded. Tears rolled down his face making big streaks on his dirty cheeks the size of table runners. He sniffled loudly and screwed his fists into his eyes.
“Why would you do that?” He cried, his voice booming like a cannon.
“I uh-” I started before feeling heat baking off the ground at my feet. When I looked down I noticed a patch of grass on fire, my pack of matches shriveling up in the center of the growing flames.
The embers, I thought, memories of my youngest brother, Danny, and his early obsession with trashcan fires coming to mind. Once he had set a bundle of newspapers on fire in the backyard. I had stomped it out, but charred bits of the paper had spread to a pile of dry wood we had stored for an upcoming bonfire.
The fire was growing before my eyes. I brought a foot down on the flames in an attempt to stomp it out, but they were too fast for me, chewing up the dead grass. I backed away. It crawled along in the giant’s direction.
“Hey, fire!” I shouted, not knowing why. Why would I try to save him? I had tripped him up with the intention of killing him!
I was going to kill him.
The severity of that hadn’t hit me before seeing the flames heading towards the giant. I was going to kill someone. Some people would see him as a beast, as a monster hell-bent on destruction, but laying in the grass he just looked like a big kid to me.
He sat up. When he saw the fire, his eyes grew huge. They looked like two swimming pools, deep and dark. He shrieked, his deep voice rising to an octave that would’ve been funny in other circumstances. When he tried to get to his feet, his pants tripped him up again and he fell, landing with another tremendous thud. He rolled onto his front and began trying to crawl away. His knees shuffled up like the back half of an inch worm and his balls hung out behind his thighs. I tried to look away, but they held my gaze, mesmerizing me like a horrendous accident.
His whimpering broke my spell. I ran around the fire, pulling the knife back out. When I got to him, I climbed onto his legs and ran up to where the pants had caught. I began sawing through the cloth. It parted easily.
When the rip was down to his ankles, he started shaking out of them. The movement threw me aside. I rolled and rolled before stopping myself. I looked up to see him shambling out of the pants. He got to his feet and began to run away, his footsteps shaking the ground.
“I guess they can run.” His head was down, his arms were pumping away, and his balls were bouncing between his legs like two boulders in an oversized potato sack. He would be someone else’s problem now.
I turned to walk back home but saw a carpet of flame making its way towards me. I did a 180 and found more fire. There was fire left and right. Heat baked off, making me sweat. It came in waves, hot and dry like an oven opened at the peak of its cooking. Blinding, orange light stung my eyes, making me wince. Harsh smoke filled my lungs, making me cough. I felt my skin growing hotter and hotter, panic taking hold of me. There was only one way out.
“Help!” I shouted.
The giant stopped.
“Please,” I pleaded.
He turned around.
The flames encroached, the heat rising. The giant furrowed his brow, his mind conflicted.
“Man,” he said, dejected, before running towards me. If the sight of his giant bouncing balls wasn’t terrible enough, his huge flaccid wang was. It swung to and fro like a tree caught in a tempest. I cringed and looked away, closing my eyes tight in an attempt to forget the sight. I felt the giant come close, his steps shaking the earth beneath my feet. Part of me wanted him to just step on me so I wouldn’t have to think about his junk any more.
Instead, he swept me up and lifted me to his chest. He trotted over the flames, wincing. When we stopped, I opened my eyes and looked at the blaze. We were safely on the other side of the road. Both of us were mesmerized by the dancing flames.
“Will it spread?” The giant asked.
“Not far,” I answered. “These fields catch fire almost every summer.”
He put me down on the road beside him and we watched the fire lick at the sky.
“You tried to kill me,” he said, shock in his voice.
“Are you surprised?”
He hung his head. “A little. They told me up in the village that your people would try. I didn’t want to believe them.”
“Sorry.” I kicked at the dusty road, feeling pretty shitty.
“It’s alright.” He began to walk back towards Mt. Vincent.
“Wait, where are you going?” I asked, hurrying after him.
“Home. I’m obviously not wanted in your society.”
“Oh come on, maybe it’s just me who wanted you dead!”
“I heard you talking to the man on your ear device.”
I reached up to my ear. The plastic Bluetooth must have fallen off while I was climbing the giant’s pants. I hoped that wasn’t Chief Beer’s personal model. “You knew I was there the whole time?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you do something about it? Why didn’t you kick me off?”
“I guess...” He stopped and stared at his feet. “I guess I enjoyed the company.” He sat down and hung his hands over his knees. Sweat beaded on his forehead and ran down his face in fat drops. He was obviously exhausted.
I sat down next to him. “Where were you going?” I asked.
“Your town,” he replied. “I hoped I could do some work for you. I see those big metal devices moving things and I think, hey, I can do that, I can move things!” He began to drag a huge finger in the dirt, absent-mindedly. “There isn’t much for me to do on the mountain.”
“You can’t move things up there?”
“We don’t need things moved as often as you people seem to. My people just relax most of the time. We like to swim. We don’t feel so heavy in the water.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. Why did you leave?”
“Because I’m bored!” He threw his hands in the air, frustrated. “I want to do something; I want my life to have purpose! I’m tired of just sitting around, doing nothing, ticking off days until my heart eventually bursts in my chest.”
“I feel you,” I replied, taking the rough pipe out of my pocket. I turned it over in my hands, examining the hard edges and the sharp mouthpiece. A work in progress. Just another way to kill time.
I tossed it overhand into the flames. It send up sparks where it landed, disappearing in the fire. It popped and crackled. I got up, dusting my hands off on the seat of my pants.
“C’mon,” I said, beginning to walk in the direction of the town.
The giant scrambled onto his feet. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get you a job.”
“How?”
“I know a guy.”
We strode up to the roadblock just as the sun was beginning to set. Chief Don Beer had set it up just outside of town. Two vehicles flanked a police saw horse. One was a standard issue police cruiser, the other was an SUV with Police Chief stenciled on the side. When they saw us, they raised their guns, taking aim at my new friend.
“Woah woah woah,” I said lifting my hands to the sky. “We came to talk!”
The giant raised his arms, imitating me. The blue tarp he had been holding around his waist came loose and fell to the ground, giving the officers a show. Good, I thought. If I have to live with that image, so should they. They cringed away, groaning and gasping. It was quite unprofessional in my opinion.
“Cover yourself, beast!” The police chief was pointing a large, double-barreled shotgun at my new friend.
The giant picked up the tarp again and wrapped it around himself.
“His name is Klunja,” I told Chief Beer.
“He is a danger who needs to go back to where he came from.”
“Come on, Don, what kind of attitude is that? That doesn’t sound very accepting.”
The chief looked flustered. “You know what I mean. This is not about PR, this is about public safety!”
“He’s gentle, chief. Watch.” I lifted my arms up and Klunja lifted me into the air, as delicate as a proper girl at a tea party. He held me out and I stood on his palm, arms on my waist. “See? He could crush me, easy as cake, but he doesn’t.”
“Put the boy down!” The chief pumped the shotgun in his hands and I got nervous. Klunja did too, and he began to lower me down.
“No, Klunja!” I ordered him. “Stand your ground. You are not doing anything wrong.” I turned back towards the officers. “We have every right to be here!”
“We can’t have a giant in town, Lyle. It just can’t be done.”
“Put me down, Klunja.” He lowered me to the ground and I hopped off. I walked towards the chief. “Come on chief. The guy just wants a job.”
“He’s dangerous!”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“Look at him!”
I did. “You see a big, dangerous monster because you don’t know him. You think that even if he doesn’t hate and want to destroy, he’ll cause ruin accidentally with a few clumsy steps. You don’t know that he takes great care where he steps now because he hurt a few sheep along his way and now feels tremendously guilty.” I turned back to the chief. “Klunja is not a monster. He has the capacity to learn, to feel. He just needs purpose.”
“What will the people say?” He lowered his shotgun, then began to rub at his brow. He was a heavy man, sweaty in the heat.
“They’ll admire the small town, so open and welcoming that they let a giant integrate into their society with open arms. They’ll be in awe of your acceptance and our diversity. In a world so obsessed with being politically correct, you’ll be a tier above them all! This is beyond affirmative action, man; this is unprecedented on a spiritual level!”
The big chief sat on the bumper of his car. He peered up at Klunja who looked down, sheepishly.
“What can he do?” The chief asked.
“I can lift big, heavy things,” the giant explained.
“He can swim, too,” I told the chief.
“So he can work in construction, or be a lifeguard?”
“The city is booming, chief,” I said. “Plenty of buildings need to go up.”
The chief examined Klunja, looking him up and down. “Your name is Klunja?” He asked the giant.
“Yes, sir.”
“You think you can get yourself a pair of pants before the weekend is over?”
“If I get the material, I can sew a pair myself. I’ll need a big needle though...”
“I think my wife has some lawn darts in storage. You make yourself some pants and meet me at the station Monday morning.” He got in his SUV, placing the shotgun in a rack above the front seats.
Klunja’s face lit up. “You hear that Lyle? I got a job!”
“That’s great!” I told him.
“You meet me Monday morning too, Lyle. You’re going to be working with your pal.”
I looked at the chief, perplexed.
“You’re going to have to pay me back for that Bluetooth, son. Those things aren’t cheap.” With that, he closed the door and drove off, leaving his deputies behind to clean up the roadblock. I turned to one of them.
“Do they drug test in construction?” I asked.
“They don’t drug test in small towns,” the guy explained, carrying the saw horse to the back of his cruiser. He loaded it in and they drove off, windows rolled down. Smoke came out in wisps, and the smell that trailed their car was not of tobacco.
|
About Christopher O’Halloran
Christopher O’Halloran has taken his formal acting education and done little with it aside from creating “Living the Dream,” a currently unproduced TV show. After studying for two years at Vanarts, Chris realized that telling stories was at the heart of his passion, so he started using written word to do just that. His shorts have been published by Heater, Fabula Argentea, Under The Bed and others. You can reach him at facebook.com/ChrisROHalloran or on twitter @Chris_Roman_O.
|
Stool Fool
Douglas J. Ogurek
My crap looked like an A one night. I showed my wife. She said, “Weird. I’ve made lots of Is, Js, and Cs. But an A? That’s unique.”
“We should take a picture,” I said. “Call the paper. I can see the headline: ‘Honorable Discharge.’”
We laughed. Thought nothing more of it. Until the next night: I got a B.
“You’ve heard of alphabet soup?” she said. “Well this is alphabet poop!” We laughed.
I said, “My GPA has dropped.”
“GPA?”
“Grade Poop Average.”
“No matter what grade you get, it’s always going to be crappy.”
“And no matter what grade I get, I’m expelled.” We laughed.
We chalked up the A and the B to a fluke. Shit happens, right? But if I had known those letters were the beginning of what would plunge our relationship into the toilet in less than two weeks, I never would have shown them to her.
***
The next day, we went out for dinner.
I said, “I dropped off a letter today.”
“To whom?”
“To me, I guess.”
“You wrote yourself a letter?”
“No, no. I dropped a letter in the toilet.”
“Ha ha.” She rolled her eyes. “What letter?”
“Oh, maybe you don’t care.”
“No no. What letter is it?”
I said, “It sounds like you don’t really want to know.”
“Please. Just tell me.”
“Guess.”
“Don’t tell me it’s a C.”
“No.”
“Well, what?”
“What do you think?”
“Jerry, just tell me.”
“Fine. It’s an S. A-B-S. I think this could mean something. Maybe it’s spelling out a longer word. Like ‘absent’ or ‘abscond’ or ‘absolute.’ Maybe even ‘abstemiousness’ or ‘abstruse.’”
“How about ‘absurd?’ I think your A-B-S theory is just BS.”
“How do you know?” I said. “You with your occasional Is and Js and Cs?”
“All of a sudden the toilet’s some kind of crystal ball?” she said. “Jerry and his crystal bowl. All signs point toward a shitty future.”
The next day, I thought more about what ABS might mean. Was it an acronym? Anti-lock brake system? Stop? Stop doing something? A-B-S. Was it talking about abdominal muscles? Somebody’s initials? Or maybe some complex code, some message that would change my life.
***
When I received a T the next night, I elected to refrain from telling my wife. A-B-S-T. BATS? STAB? Abstruse?
***
The following evening, I peered into the receptacle. What I saw resembled a massive boulder beginning its descent down the left side of a mountain peak. This time, I decided to show my wife. “Last night, I made a T, but I’m not so sure about this one.”
“I guess that’s it,” she said. “Sorry. A-B-S-T. Looks like an end to your streak, besides the one at the bottom of the bowl.”
After she walked away, I looked in the mirror, and what I saw in the bowl was no longer a massive boulder commencing its descent. Instead, I observed the next stage of the masterwork I was gradually unveiling, for the mirror revealed an R.
“It’s not an R,” she said. “You’re making a mountain out of a dunghill.”
“I think that you’re envious because you were incapable of interpreting the next piece of the puzzle.”
“You’re right. Let’s see . . . A-B-S-T-R. Perhaps we should rearrange the letters. BRATS maybe? Or STAR then a word that starts with B. What do you think?”
STAB R is what came to mind. “Oh, I have begun to catalog my thoughts. However, my preference is to patiently await the next component.”
“Let’s hear your thoughts now. Maybe we can figure it out together . . . make a game of it!”
“This is not a game,” I said.
“Oh, right. This is some serious shit. Let’s tell some of our friends about it. Maybe ask my mom. Perhaps we can start a spiritual movement . . . travel around the world preaching the good news according to your butt.”
“Our friends are far too sophomoric to even conceive of something this profound. And your mother?” I chuckled. “She got squeamish when we revealed that the mushrooms she was eating were shitake.”
“Oh, right. This is a special message just for the two of us.”
“We are the elite,” I said. “Presently, the only ones capable of grasping its meanings. Our unequivocal calling is to interpret these works and share their philosophical implications among the elite.”
“Works? So you’re an artist now?” She looked at the backwards R. “I hate to say it, Jerry, but your work stinks.”
“Don’t fall prey to the idiot machine.”
“I’m tired of your shit.”
“Please try to understand . . . understand that there is something beneath what is floating on the surface . . . some profound truth. Perhaps this whole experience is challenging us to reach into the infinite.”
“Into the infinite? Come on! The only thing about it that’s infinite is its stench.”
“Well, I’m beginning to think that your stupidity is also infinite.”
***
During the succeeding three days, the chasm that parted our aesthetic sensibilities widened significantly. However, I had also emitted and, through an acute awareness of geometrical variations and a knowledge of the distortion and violence apparent in varying shades, interpreted three more letters. The first consisted of one elongated line, which could have been interpreted as an I. Instead, I determined that it was actually a one, which inevitably led me to the first letter of the alphabet.
The next expulsion was so profuse that it smothered the surface like algae. After photographing the work and hanging it in my study, I contemplated it for two hours. I was struggling to unveil, struggling to see. See. That was it. Clearly, the next letter I was seeking was a C.
A murky contortion of splotches and fragments submerged in strident browns and smears of raw black formed the next letter. I spent the remainder of that night studying the implications of this furious conglomeration, and finally, I discovered that it was not so much about what was there, but more about what was not there. I had my word: “abstract.”
I was studying my latest creation when she interrupted me by jiggling the doorknob. “Jerry, what are you doing in there? Why is this locked?”
“Please, love. I’ll be out in a minute. Patience is a tree with bitter roots, but sweet fruits. I’m merely–”
“Patience is the virtue of asses.”
“I’m merely enjoying the latest of my works.”
“What letter is it this time?”
I flushed.
***
The next night, I went beyond the finite; the work I produced transcended time. She pounded on the door. “Come on! You’ve been in there two hours!”
I took a sip of my cocktail, then allowed her to enter. “My sincerest apologies.”
“There’s no letter in there. It’s just a bunch of slop.”
“You need to spend at least two hours with this piece. Then you will unveil its meaning.”
“You want me to stare at your shit for two hours?”
“You’re thinking too mainstream,” I said. “You’re only looking at what’s on the surface. Try looking beyond that. Don’t you see? This is not about a specific thing that is painted there. It’s about a mood that it evokes.”
“What? You’re nuts.”
“This is an emotional conquest. This is art . . . art that is to be enjoyed solely by me. It is not meant for any market; it is meant for me. I am elite.”
“You’re nuts. That’s not art. That’s a pile of crap.”
“You’re a fool,” I said. “Does everything have to be dumbed down for you? It is art because I say that it is art! I am the emissary in darkness. Why don’t you join the rest of the idiotic masses with your immediacy?”
***
I thought I knew, but now I am miserable. She has gone, and I am alone. Every day, I look into the toilet and strive to unscramble what occurred. One thought dominates: abstract art is shit, and shit is abstract art.
|
Acrophobia
Bekah Steimel
My fear of heights
has kept me off the highroad
and middle ground
is not my style
the scum of the earth
is always stuck to my shoes
just another addict
to look down on
from the safety of elevation
but I know how to rise
without the luxury of wings
and I know how to crash
without the safety of landing gear
so today you hover and shine
while my filthy habit
gets me messier still
but we all end up
under six feet of dirt
First appeared in Thirteen Myna Birds, 2014
|
About Bekah Steimel (2017)
Bekah Steimel is a 37-year-old writer living in St. Louis whose poems have been published globally. Her pastimes include flirting, drinking whiskey and making people unconformable. Find her recent work in literary magazines such as Oddball, FIVE:2:ONE and Crab Fat. Visit www.bekahsteimel.com and follow her on Twitter and Instagram @BekahSteimel.
|
Backfired
Bekah Steimel
I was baptized in gasoline
and taught to play with matches
I was told everybody burns
Even so
Burn in silence
No show and tell
it is impolite to speak of the flames
it is improper to reveal the scars
But the arsonists miscalculated
when they lit me
because instead of burning me
into defenseless ash
they actually ignited my voice
First appeared in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, 2016
|
About Bekah Steimel (2017)
Bekah Steimel is a 37-year-old writer living in St. Louis whose poems have been published globally. Her pastimes include flirting, drinking whiskey and making people unconformable. Find her recent work in literary magazines such as Oddball, FIVE:2:ONE and Crab Fat. Visit www.bekahsteimel.com and follow her on Twitter and Instagram @BekahSteimel.
|
Labyrinth
Bekah Steimel
One person, one hundred perceptions
or maybe I’m one hundred people
casting a single shadow
only glimpsing my own transparency
in a puddle of black ink
When I’m not performing a strip-tease
on blushing paper
I’m dropping acid and milling through a labyrinth
of fun house mirrors
trying to guess the riddle from the answer
I am the fangs and soft under-belly of a tiger
I prowl, I stroll
through jungles and studio apartments
I am an angel with track marks
pawning my halo to fund my habit
I find comfort in your similar confusion
we are all at odds with ourselves
and only in death do we break even
only in death does the compass stop spinning
assemble my manual of words
Discover my black box, the still truth
and then record your own.
First appeared in NOUS, 2015
|
About Bekah Steimel (2017)
Bekah Steimel is a 37-year-old writer living in St. Louis whose poems have been published globally. Her pastimes include flirting, drinking whiskey and making people unconformable. Find her recent work in literary magazines such as Oddball, FIVE:2:ONE and Crab Fat. Visit www.bekahsteimel.com and follow her on Twitter and Instagram @BekahSteimel.
|
The World According to GOP
Jon Wesick
Getting our kids to school in the morning is always chaotic. There’s Ayn Alice crying in the bathroom because of her braces and pleading with Shirley to let her stay home. Ayn Barbara bounces her basketball in the hall while Ayn Claire reads Jane Austin by the door. Shirley is always dragging sleepy-headed Rand Andrew out of bed at the last minute. And it seems I have to break up a fight between Rand Bruce and Rand Charlie every other day. Even though Shirley is a stay-at-home mom, I’m always amazed that she manages. It’s a wonder I ever get to work on time.
The day my life changed started out just like any other work day. After rounding up the kids, Shirley pecked me on the cheek at the door. I hopped in my Porsche, sank into the rich leather seat, and shifted the five-speed transmission into reverse. As I backed down the fifty-foot driveway past Shirley’ silver Bentley, I wished I could have gotten her a Rolls but with the kids in private school and hospital bills for Shirley’s leukemia the Bentley was all I could afford.
It was a beautiful day in Rancho Santa Fe. A Santa Ana had come raising the winter temperature to the high seventies and the jacarandas were in bloom painting the landscape indigo with their falling blossoms. Before I got on the I-5, I tuned the radio to Rush Limbaugh for a little inspiration. That morning he was mocking the Occupy protestors’ complaints about income inequality. At the on ramp I stopped behind a blue Prius to wait for the light. When it went from red to green, I stomped on the accelerator, cut the wheel to the left, and zoomed past the earth-hugger. Sun on my face, warm wind in my hair I weaved around trucks and minivans. The German-engineered suspension practically glued my Porsche to the road. In fact, the car almost drove itself giving me time to reflect Rush’s deep wisdom. The Occupy whiners didn’t seem to understand that only lazy moochers fail in America. Instead of complaining they needed to start at the bottom, even if all they could find were service-industry jobs, and apply themselves. Then the rewards would come. That’s how I made it and I’ve never been sorry that I left academia for industry after getting my master’s degree.
Engrossed in these insights I almost missed my exit. At the last minute I jerked the steering wheel to the right and fit my agile sports car in front of a honking SUV with six inches to spare. I pulled into the lot five minutes before my shift, parked in back, and killed the motor. I was a lucky man and I owed all my success to the free enterprise system. After locking my car I entered through the loading bay, passed through the kitchen, and was behind the cash register in time to greet the first customer of the day.
“Welcome to Wombat Burger! How can I help you?”
“I’d like an egg-scramble sandwich with coffee and an orange juice.”
“Would you like hash browns with that?” My fingers danced over the keys with a skill that came from years of practice. I took the customer’s money, made change, and handed him his receipt. “Thanks for choosing Wombat Burger.”
Morning passed in a rush of sugar, carbohydrates, and saturated fat. Our crew was a well-oiled machine having toiled for years to perfect the delivery of a consistent product within three minutes of a customer’s order. That morning we did not disappoint. The breakfast rush lasted until 10:00 AM. During the lull I mopped the floors, cleaned the bathrooms, and moved frozen burger patties to the refrigerator to defrost. I was back at the register by noon. For some reason the lunch crowd blurred into the dinner crowd without ever thinning out. At 6:30 PM I hung up my apron with pride at doing a good day’s work for a good day’s pay.
“Steve, you got a minute?” My manager Al led me into his office.
Al sat behind his desk and sighed. He was only a few years older than me but the strain of running a business had aged him prematurely. His hair was falling out in tufts and he had to wear glasses with thick lenses to compensate for all the government regulations he read. Thankfully he still had the body of an Adonis from eating all that healthy food we cooked at Wombat Burger.
“I suppose you heard the government is banning trans fats,” he said.
“Yeah, typical liberal hysteria.’
“Jim, I don’t know how to deliver the bad news except to come right out and say it.” Al fiddled with the pens on his desk to hide the tears in his eyes. “I’ve run the numbers and with these new regulations I just can’t afford to keep you on.”
“Damn government!” I pounded my fist on the desk. “I’m not worried about myself. I’m a hard worker who’s sure to quickly find another high-paying job but what about the company? If we want to feed the public trans fats and not tell them, it’s our business not theirs. What’s next? High fructose corn syrup? Sanitation regulations?”
Al turned away and dried his eyes on a Wombat-Burger napkin. His shoulders shook with grief for a few minutes before he put on a brave face and turned around.
“I wish it could have been different, Dave.” He stood and shook my hand. “On your way out, would you ask Angie to come in here?”
I didn’t want to take the exorbitant government handout but Shirley starting talking about how she couldn’t let her kids live in a world without free enterprise. Fearing she’d do something desperate without a distraction, I collected the unemployment insurance and used it to take the family to the south of France for the summer.
After we returned I began my job search in earnest. Rather than merely mailing resumes to potential employers, I did what the experts recommended and made personal contact. I began by phoning the CEO of MacDougal’s. His assistant answered.
“Mr. MacDougal’s office.”
“Is he in?”
“Who may I say is calling?”
“I’m a hard-working, food-service-industry worker from California who’s looking for a job.”
“Mr. MacDougal is meeting with the president and CFO but I’m sure he’ll want to talk with you. I’ll go get him.”
I waited a few minutes before he came to the phone.
“Jim MacDougal.”
“Mr. MacDougal, I’m Walter Fitzgerald Buckley and I just lost my job at Wombat Burger. I’d consider it an honor to work for MacDougal’s because food service is not only my career but my passion. I’m willing to do anything, even entry-level work, as long as I can provide for my wife and six kids.”
“Thanks for calling, Walter. Even though I was negotiating the billion-dollar acquisition of Buenos Dias Tacos, there’s nothing more important to me that interviewing low-level hires. I know you’re thinking that this deal could net me a twenty-million-dollar bonus but damn it, I didn’t get into food service for the money. I got into this business to provide well-paying jobs to people with limited education like you. You’ve got pluck, son, and I admire that. Ordinarily, I’d hire you on the spot but those damn trans-fat regulations have got me in a bind. Sorry, son.”
Never one to be easily discouraged, I cold called the CEOs of other fast-food companies such as Abbeys, Burger Bunny, Cupcake Cellar, Drumstick Dungeon, Excellent Enchiladas, Fantastic Fajitas, Great Gumbo, Heavenly Hummus, Incredible Ice Cream, Jake’s Jerky, Kale R Us, Lovely Lasagna, Marvelous Meatballs, Nancy’s Noodles, Oscar’s Octopus, Pretty Good Pizza, Radical Reubens, Stupendous Smoothies, Terrific Tofu, Ultimate Udon, Very Vegetarian, Wonderful Waffles, eXciting Xantham Gum, and Zero-Calorie Ziti. Despite spending hours encouraging me, none of the CEOs could offer me a job. It seemed the job-killing, trans-fat regulations had a more far-reaching effect than I could have ever though.
I was having a serious discussion with Shirley about changing careers from food service to retail when a Ms. Pelosi called and asked me to report to the unemployment office and review my status so I showed up the next morning at 9:00 AM and reported to the receptionist.
“Ms. Pelosi is on break. Please take a seat and she’ll see you when she returns.”
The dingy walls in the waiting room were the color of a Planned Parenthood user’s unclean underwear. I sat on a folding chair and studied the pathetic losers gathered for their government handouts. The guys had tattooed faces and needle marks on their arms while the women had apparently never heard of bras. No wonder they couldn’t get jobs.
I got tired of waiting and walked around. Past the men’s room I entered a door labeled Employee Lounge and found myself in a crowded bar. Swirling drinks in their hands women in designer gowns and men in tailored suits chatted around brushed-steel tables. The bartender was a shirtless Tom Cruise lookalike in bow tie and silk shorts.
“What can I get you?” he asked. “I have some fifteen-year-old, single-malt scotch. Might as well drink the good stuff. After all, the government is paying.”
“It’s a little early for me,” I said. “Have you seen Ms. Pelosi?”
“Her Pilates gets out at 10:00. Say, if you don’t want scotch, how about some hashish? Opium? Sex with an underage prostitute?”
Suddenly red lights flashed and a klaxon sounded.
“Unauthorized personnel in the employee lounge!” a voice said over the loudspeaker. “Unauthorized personnel in the employee lounge!”
Patrons scattered. A steel barrier descended from the ceiling blocking the bar from view and a woman in yoga pants and a leotard top entered from the hallway.
“Mr. Buckley, I’m Hillary Pelosi. So nice of you to come in.” She took my hand in her sweaty palms. “Why don’t we go back to my office?”
She was a well-preserved woman in her forties and judging from the muscle definition in her back and arms, she spent a lot of time at the gym. When we entered her office, she sprawled in the chair and adjusted the framed picture of Ho Chi Minh on her desk.
“Mr. Buckley, you’re obviously a man who takes initiative, which makes you a perfect candidate for our environmental-engineering training program.” Pelosi searched her desk drawers. “It’s tuition-free, runs for four months, and best of all comes with a cost of living stipend of ten thousand dollars per month. To enroll all you need to do is sign this nondisclosure agreement.” She handed me a document and a pen.
I hold anything labeled environmental with the same contempt I hold government handouts but I had to look out for my family. Ten thousand dollars a month was almost as much as I had earned in my lucrative, service-industry job. And with new jobs scarce due to onerous, government regulations I had little choice but to sign.
“Congratulations, Mr. Buckley.” Pelosi shook my hand. “You won’t regret it.”
I expected the environmental engineering class to be a hotbed of liberals and tree huggers but it was worse than I thought. The women were either lesbians in hiking shorts that exposed their hairy legs or angry feminists in overalls who bragged about their abortions. Several male students carried huge backpacks. One had a kayak paddle and another was accompanied by a Malamute that growled at anyone who got within six feet. Only one student seemed normal, a short-haired man in a three-piece suit whose intelligent, blue eyes gazed at the world through steel-rimmed glasses. I tried to make contact but the teacher began talking.
“Welcome to environmental engineering. I’m Roosevelt Chavez.” Chavez was over six feet tall, wore a plaid shirt with suspenders, and had a bushy, Karl Marx beard. “The purpose of environmental engineering is to tie up business with needless regulations. Our field began with the Endangered Species Act. Who can forget our early successes with the spotted owl and snail darter? And with the coming regulation of carbon to control global warming, I see a bright future for all of you.”
I sprung to my feet. “I don’t have one of your fancy Ph.D.s in atmospheric physics. I’m just an unemployed, food-service worker with a master’s degree but I’m calling bullshit, sir. Bullshit! Both the oil and coal industries have said global warming a hoax. Why would they lie? They have nothing to gain. No, sir! I say the scientists are lying. Everyone knows no one holds truth in less regard than a scientist!”
“Silence!” Karl Marx pointed his finger at me. “How dare you impugn the integrity of the liberal media! If you do not recant at once, I shall have you thrown out of this classroom!”
“I don’t care if I have to eat grass. I won’t kowtow to your phony liberal agenda!” I stormed out of the classroom. The man in the suit followed and we shook hands in the hall.
“I like how you stood up to those libtards back there. I’m George Madison.”
“Yeah.” I ran my hands over my face. “I never wanted to take this class in the first place but I lost my lucrative, service-industry job due to government regulations.”
“I hear you,” Madison said. “I used to be the best computer guy on Wall Street where I modeled all the credit-default swaps until the Dodd Frank Act cost me my job.”
“Computers huh?” I stroked my chin. “I have a way to strike back at the parasites sucking the life out of the federal budget. Think you can hack into a government database?”
Wearing gray coveralls and a false mustache I carried a tool box up the walk and rang the doorbell at 352 Pleasant Avenue. An elderly woman in stretch pants answered. Living on the government dole had clearly stifled her initiative. A spider had built a web in her knotted, gray hair and there were red wine stains on her loose blouse.
“Mrs. Cuomo, I’m from the alarm company. I’m here to service the faulty window sensor.” I showed her a form on my clipboard. “352 Pleasant Avenue. See. It’s right here. The monitoring center detected a fault at 9:42 last night and generated a service call. They were supposed to call you.”
“They didn’t.”
“Mind if I take a look, anyway?” I moved forward and she stepped aside.
Once inside I busied myself holding a voltmeter to the sensors in her windows. Mrs. Cuomo parked herself behind a large bottle of Chianti in the living room and turned up the sound on the same-sex porn on her big-screen TV.
“No problem here,” I shouted. “I’ll check the kitchen.”
I entered the kitchen, looked in the cookie jar, and felt inside the flour bin. I found some amphetamines and heroin but no valuables so I helped myself to a piece of pie before scouting the rest of the house. A large photo of two men kissing decorated the bedroom wall. A frilly bedspread and a half-dozen throw pillows covered the bed. I felt between the mattress and box springs, searched the dresser drawers, and rifled the medicine cabinet. Nothing. Still there had to be some jewelry or gold bullion here. How else would a Social-Security recipient spend her excess cash? I had to focus. How would a liberal think? Of course, she’d hide her loot in the most obvious place! I touched the picture and found swung aside on a hinge to reveal a safe. I took the acoustic sensor module from my tool box, attached its magnetic container to the safe’s door, and twisted the combination dial until the light turned green. A few more turns and the safe opened. Jackpot! I transferred the hundred-dollar bills, Krugerrands, velvet bag of diamonds, and bearer bonds to my toolbox. I had just closed the lid when Mrs. Cuomo interrupted me.
“What the hell are you doing?” She shook an aluminum cane in her angry fist.
“Just as I feared. Last night’s fault wasn’t a malfunction. You were burgled.” I handed her the acoustic sensor. “They used this to get in. I have to get back to headquarters and report this immediately. Stay by your phone. The police will call any minute.”
After I got back to my car, I peeled off the fake mustache and slipped out of the coveralls. Careful to obey all traffic laws I made it to the freeway in five minutes and was gone with a hundred-thousand-dollar haul.
Using the information supplied by George Madison I continued targeting Social-Security recipients for burglaries and brought in even more money than I’d earned from my lucrative, service-industry job. There was so much surplus that I made substantial contributions to several political action committees and social welfare organizations. It seemed that nothing could go wrong. Then one day while I was relaxing at my Rancho Santa Fe home, there was a knock at the door. My visitor was a six-foot-tall man with Barry Goldwater’s glasses, Clint Eastwood’s pulsing forehead vein, and John Wayne’s swagger..
“Mr. Buckley, I’m Detective Bush Reagan.” He showed me his badge. “I’m investigating some burglaries in the area. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
I should have been on guard but some instinct made me trust him. I showed him into the living room.
“Would you care for a drink, Detective? I have coffee, soda, tea, beer, wine, hard cider, gin, vodka, single-malt scotch, bourbon, rye, brandy, schnapps, kirsch, pisco, rum, slivovitz, mescal, tequila, rum, absinthe, and several liqueurs.”
“I’m not supposed to drink on duty but rules are made to be broken. How about some distilled water and grain alcohol?”
I went to the wet bar and returned with his glass.
“That hits the spot.” Detective Reagan finished his drink in one swallow. “Now, where was I? Oh yeah. It seems that someone they call the Entitlement Avenger has been burgling the homes of Social-Security recipients. In my opinion these gray-haired parasites who rob the younger generation to pay for their degenerate lifestyles deserve what they get but I’m required to investigate this hero who is only evening the score with these low-life scum who take advantage of a Social Security system that is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme and don’t seem to realize that if they’d put their Social Security taxes in risk-free stocks that consistently yielded ten to twenty percent dividends, they’d be much better off. So do you know anything about these burglaries?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” Detective Reagan set down his empty glass. “Thanks for your time.”
Wearing a black turtleneck and watch cap I crouched on the hillside overlooking the mansion that held my biggest score yet, peered through the binoculars, and surveyed the grounds. Truman Boomer and his wife were still nude in the outdoor hot tub reenacting what could have been a simultaneous commercial for Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra. They’d been going at it for hours, first her on top, then him from behind. Then Mrs. Boomer dove under the water. For someone her age she could sure hold her breath a long time. I was cold, stiff, and hungry. As president of the AARP Mr. Boomer was the biggest threat to American freedom since Al Qaeda. Taking him down would send a powerful message but I’d have to try another night if his orgy didn’t end soon.
Just before I was ready to give up and go get a hot meal, Mr. and Mrs. Boomer dragged their saggy flesh out of the water. I lowered my binoculars but was too late. The sight of their full frontals would scar me for life. I wanted nothing more than to go home and down a fifth of bourbon but I had a job to do. They returned minutes later thankfully clothed and drove off in his red Miata. I set off, metal tools in my backpack rattling as a sprinted down the hill and ducked into the shadows outside the wall. I took my grappling hook, tied the free end of the rope to my backpack, tossed the hook over the wall, and pulled. It came loose and fell back. I retrieved it from the bushes and tried again. This time I felt a satisfying resistance when I pulled. The hook had caught. Hand over hand I climbed. It was easy going due to the endurance I’d developed from a decade of healthy lunches at Wombat Burger. Once on top of the wall I hauled the backpack up.
Two Dobermans with fangs bared waited for me inside the wall. I took a cheeseburger and fries laced with Phenobarbital from my backpack, tossed them to the dogs, and rested atop the wall until they fell into drugged sleep. The guilt I felt about giving chemicals to innocent animals was assuaged somewhat by the knowledge that I’d at least fed them healthy meals. After reversing the grappling hook I lowered the backpack to Mr. Boomer’s back yard and climbed down after it. Now wearing night-vision goggles I scouted the houses’ walls paying close attention to the foundation until I located the cables that connected the alarm to the outside world. Using wire cutters I stripped the insulation. Then I connected the electronic bypass by simultaneously attaching its two alligator clips to the bare wires.
With the alarm disabled I made my way to the sliding glass door, attached a suction cup, and used a glass cutter to etch a circle near the latch. A slight tap broke the glass circle free. I froze listening in case the noise had alerted the neighbors. No lights came on any nearby windows. I removed the glass circle, reached in, opened the latch, and stepped inside.
Relieved to be out of sight I took a breath and waited for my pulse to slow. Relying on the night-vision goggles I navigated the Boomer mansion. One room had a pool table and sailfish mounted over the fireplace. The kitchen had a professional stove and the entertainment room had a wet bar and big-screen TV. No doubt, further exploration would have revealed illegal aliens having babies in the guest rooms but I had limited time. I climbed the stairs and paused outside Boomer’s office to study the floor safe inside. I was about to step through the doorway when some sixth sense urged caution. I removed a can of deodorant from my backpack and sprayed it through the doorway. A laser no doubt connected to a secondary alarm illuminated the mist with a sharp, red line.
“Very clever, Mr. Boomer.” I stepped over the laser beam and entered the office.
Keeping close to the wall to avoid tripping a pressure plate, I inched toward the safe. I checked my watch. My burglary was taking longer than I’d hoped. The Boomers had been gone for forty-five minutes, not long for a restaurant dinner, but I needed to hurry. When I reached the safe, I set the backpack down and retrieved the acoustic receiver module. I attached it to the door with its internal magnet and reached for the safe’s combination dial.
Two thousand volts shot through my body. My arm tingled with pain as if I’d grabbed Jane Fonda’s vibrator. I willed my hand to open but could not let go. My vision went black as the current shorted out the night-vision goggles. I tried to catch my breath but the muscles in my chest refused to work. There were spots before my eyes and a roaring in my ears. I grew dizzy and blacked out.
I woke flat on my back with a pounding headache. When I tried to get up my arms and feet didn’t move. I lifted my head and saw that I’d been manacled spread-eagle atop a table saw with the circular blade between my ankles.
“So you’re the thief who’s been robbing all the retirees,” a high-pitched voice said from somewhere behind my head. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Truman Carter Boomer.”
Boomer stepped into my field of vision. He had a thin, cruel mouth and a scar under one sightless eye.
“When I learned of your activities, I set a trap I knew you could not resist. No use worrying about your friend, Mr. Madison. He died begging for mercy after I forced him to feed you the false information.” Boomer gave a maniacal laugh. “Once you’re out of the way, no one will stop my coconspirators and me. Instead of taking the plentiful, high-paying jobs from employers who are eager to hire people over fifty, we’ll sit on our asses and bankrupt the young. You know what else? We love going to the hospital. Why, sometimes we’ll get two or three colonoscopies a day just to make Medicare pay. Goodbye Mr. Entitlement Avenger.”
Boomer flipped the switch. The electric motor hummed and the circular saw squealed as it bit into the plywood I lay on.
“I think you’ve made your point, Boomer. What do you want?”
“I want you to die, Mr. Entitlement Avenger.”
The saw moved closer to my groin.
“Look, I have gold bullion and diamonds I can give you.” My words sped up. “I’ll even do TV commercials for the AARP.”
“Not interested,” Boomer said. “We already have Betty White.”
As the blade got within inches of my manhood, I strained against the manacles to move my body as far away as I could. Tensing in preparation for the jagged metal’s bite I realized that what I would regret losing most was the challenge of naming my next child. A shot rang out and Boomer’s head exploded in a spray of blood and gore. The saw stopped when barely touching the fabric of my Banana Republic slacks. Then Bush Reagan was there freeing my hands and feet. After helping me stand, he placed the pistol in Boomer’s cold, dead hand.
“Another tragic suicide or at least that’s what the police report will say.” Detective Reagan handed me a handkerchief to wipe Boomer’s blood off my face.
“Thank you,” I said, “but why?”
“Some well connected people like your style. Let’s just say that they convinced me to watch out for you.” Detective Reagan looked around. “We’d better get out of here before the neighbors get nosy. Can I give you a ride anywhere?”
“No, I’m parked around the corner.”
“Okay, but there’s something you need to think about. You can keep doing what you’re doing and rob retirees one at a time or you can go into politics and rob them all at once.” He gave me a business card. “Give me a call when you’re ready.”
|
Eleanor Leonne Bennett Bio (20150720)
Eleanor Leonne Bennett is an internationally award winning artist of almost fifty awards. She was the CIWEM Young Environmental Photographer of the Year in 2013. Eleanor’s photography has been published in British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Her work has been displayed around the world consistently for six years since the age of thirteen. This year (2015) she has done the anthology cover for the incredibly popular Austin International Poetry Festival. She is also featured in Schiffer’s “Contemporary Wildlife Art” published this Spring. She is an art editor for multiple international publications.
www.eleanorleonnebennett.com
|
Paper Cheerleaders
Anna Kander
fair-weather friends—
cut-out paper dolls unfolding
from white paper
cheering triumphs atop pyramids
overlooking sturdy shoulders
and bruising practice falls
you start to look the same
row after row
flat and colorless
strung between triangles of air—
pieces of you, missing
that harsh hands snipped away
crinkling and wavering
i see through you
i want to crumple you
pile you in the corner, without care
as missed shots at the wire basket
beneath my desk
because i have other shots to take
with more weight
than paper
(first appeared in Wanton F*ckery)
|
Natural Light
Anna Kander
The desire to be seen
transforms me.
Slide a mirror to me
under the door,
here in this dark room,
and I will find a way
to flash semaphores.
(first appeared in Gnarled Oak)
|
Priceless
JD Langert
Louis’s hand blurred as he stabbed at the face on the canvas. Torn and unrecognizable, the man’s smug expression taunted him. His knees burned from how long he had been kneeling on cold stone of the museum floor but he continued his assault.
“Louis! Stop!”
A hand grabbed his shoulder and he spun around, knife raised until a familiar pudgy face registered. Shadows poured in from the windows of the Dutch Room in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, signifying that time had passed since Louis and Scott had first arrived.
“What do you want, Scott?”
Scott glanced at the tattered remains of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait before looking back at Louis. “... I’m done with mine. What’s next?”
“You clean this up. There’s only two more here.”
As Louis walked away, he watched Scott place the pieces of the Self-Portrait into a thick wool bag with the other paintings. While leaving evidence would be a problem, Louis couldn’t help the satisfaction he felt as strips of the canvas threatened to fall off before being crammed into the darkness. He could think of no better fate for the wretched thing.
He walked up to The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. He stared at where Veronica had pointed out Rembrandt’s face among the disciples. She hadn’t known why the so-called artist had painted himself in, but theorized it to either be a matter of self-pride or a desire for protection.
Louis grinned as he jaggedly cut the painting from the frame, sneering at Rembrandt’s face. “Not so protected or prideful now are you?”
He moved on to Rembrandt’s A Lady and Gentleman in Black. As he stared, it morphed before his eyes. The man, who had been staring listlessly at the viewer, turned to his wife, his expression now one of pleading. The woman remained sitting but now had her face buried in her hands as tears streamed down. The man consoled his mourning wife, but she refused to look at him. Instead, her tears bled into the painting and warped it. No matter how Louis squinted to see her face, the painting blurred more and more.
Then, the man disappeared.
Now, the woman hung from the ceiling.
Louis let out a cry of agony and slashed at the painting. As it clattered to the ground, a flood of tears and black paint sprung from it and spread outwards. He tried to leap backwards but fell, watching in horror as the polluted water threatened to swallow him—
“Louis!”
Louis snapped to reality and felt Scott shaking him. “Are you okay? You just fell, what’s wrong?”
Louis looked back at A Lady and Gentleman in Black. The original image of the man and his wife had returned and it laid deceptively innocent upon the floor. He scooted away from it, unwilling to see if the wretched piece of work would attempt to devour him once more.
He brushed Scott off once again. “I’m fine, let’s go.”
Instead of listening, Scott pursed his lips. “Louis,” he said. “I don’t know if we should be doing this.”
Louis snorted. “Afraid to be arrested?”
“I’m not talking about how this is illegal. I thought this would help you, let you get over her death—”
“Her murder!”
“Louis, no one murdered my sister.”
Louis sneered, gesturing around the art gallery. “Oh? Really? She might not have been murdered but it was this place, these paintings, that caused it!”
Scott didn’t say anything to this and Louis rose to his feet, his knees wobbling as he steadied himself upon the concrete. “C’mon, we need to finish this. For her.”
Leaving Scott in the Dutch Room, he walked out of the Dutch Room towards his final destination. There were no lights on as he crept through the shrouded hallways of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Shadows crawled the walls before finding their homes within the paintings that covered every inch of space.
His shoulders tensed as he tried to ignore the thousands of eyes watching him from the walls. No doubt they were searching for signs of vulnerability and weakness. A chance to attack. While he had only come to rid the world of the paintings that had destroyed his life, no art could be trusted. Licking chapped lips, his eyes quickly darted around in search of signs of on-coming danger as he briskly pumped his legs back and forth.
Once, he had thought that art could be good. When drawn with the gentle hands of the woman he loved, he had even considered it beautiful. Yet, that same art had betrayed him. Had failed its creator and driven his most priceless treasure to her fate. Now, he was here to seek justice from Veronica’s worst offenders.
He arrived at the wall where the Degas sketches resided, moonlight falling from a nearby window and lighting up the charcoal drawings with an ominous glow. It was him, not Veronica, who had pointed out these messily drawn pieces. He hadn’t understood how such crudely drawn things could become so famous.
At the time, Veronica had laughed.
Later, when she cried his same words, he would regret ever saying them.
Unwilling to linger any longer with the eyes upon him, he ripped the Degas sketches from the wall and returned to Scott to depart. On the way out, Louis swiped some sort of ancient cup and a bronze eagle. He considered it to be a lenient punishment to the museum for housing these abominable paintings and rejecting his wife’s. They, too, were responsible.
They arrived at the cemetery without issue. Louis grabbed the bag, the wool scratching at his sweaty palms, and a can of lighter fluid before making his way down the familiar path.
They arrived in front of a polished stone. Scott threw down the bag and, without another word, dumped the lighter fluid. He lit a match and flames immediately erupted. It consumed the pile, an orange glow lighting up the name upon the stone.
“It’s done, Veronica.”
|
Queen of Multimedia
for a reason
Janet Kuypers
1/11/17
When people are offered
a 10-minute time slot to perform poetry,
most people call them
poetry readings.
But I call it a show.
Why? For instance,
I incorporate music any way I can
(when it can’t be live,
I’ll settle for recordings
from my musician friends).
For years I used PowerPoint
for huge screens of my art
to coincide with my poetry,
or else I’d display videos,
either by making videos to display
or by filming me while I read
and showing my show live on a big screen.
And no, I didn’t play with props
to distract people from my writing,
but to incorporate different senses,
so people could remember my poetry
with both sights and sounds.
And sure, they might have granted me the title
“queen of multimedia” and “multimedia diva”
back in Chicago, but, it’s more than that.
It’s more than throwing technology
into poetry performance art shows.
And I’m not trying to be the poetry shock jock.
I just look for different ways
to get my message across
and hammer my poetic point home.
And you know, sometimes it’s fun
to use more than just words.
Once, when I did a show
of poems about other countries,
I displayed on a screen
A giant drawing of a tv
while my photos slide show scrolled
on the “screen” of my drawn tv,
while I sat in a drawing of a giant chair
and clicked on a giant mock remote control...
Because if the world doesn’t match
what I want sometimes,
then at least I can draw the world
just as I want it...
And yeah, I can be all about the props
by creating a Wink Mattindale long thin
game show host microphone,
but that mike was perfect
with my Warhol wig and ‘50s jacket
when my poetry feature became the
“Poetry Game Show”.
Other poets each read a poem of mine —
and after I borrowed a sound pressure meter,
I awarded the poet with the loudest applause
with a paper Burger King crown, adorned
with “Poetry Game Show Winner” flags.
I did a show about conflicts with cops
by wearing prison orange,
removing the hand cuffs for my feature
and standing in front of a height ruler,
like I was getting my mug shot taken.
I did a show like I was on my cell phone,
reading poems like they were conversations,
because how many times
have you been able to listen in
to someone loud mouthing,
in their own world, on their cell phone.
I wrote a poem about being an open book
and read it in a show after using novel pages
to make a paperback jacket, because really,
you could guess a thing or two about me
by listening to what I care to share
Because yeah, I’ve done a lot of shows
standing on a stage just reading poems.
But when it comes down to it,
those aren’t the shows people remember.
Because if you can incorporate people,
or props, or music, or video into a show,
and it’s something that people remember,
well then, all that makes me think
is that being a poet is one thing,
but when it comes to poetry shows, maybe...
maybe being the queen of multimedia
isn’t such a bad thing after all.
|
See YouTube video from 1/14/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poem “Queen of Multimedia for a reason” at “Poetry Aloud” open mic at the Georgetown Public Library (this video filmed from a Canon Power Shot camera).
|
See YouTube video from 1/14/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Queen of Multimedia for a reason” at “Poetry Aloud” open mic at the Georgetown Public Library (this video was filmed from a Sony camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ “December 2017 Book Release Reading” 12/6/17, where she reads from her book &“(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems” her poems “Jumping from the Mausoleum”, “origin, from the macro to the micro”, and “Queen of Multimedia for a reason”, in “Community Poetry @ Half Price Books” (video filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera).
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ “December 2017 Book Release Reading” 12/6/17, where she reads from her book &“(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems” her poems “Jumping from the Mausoleum”, “origin, from the macro to the micro”, and “Queen of Multimedia for a reason”, in “Community Poetry @ Half Price Books” (video filmed from a Panasonic Lumix 2500 camera).
|
everyday objects equal performance art
Janet Kuypers
1/12/17
About a week before I did a poetry show,
a copper pipe sprung a leak outside my back door.
The repairman said copper pipes won’t stretch
when the weather is freezing in the winters here.
(Yes, it’s true, it can get that cold in Texas,
even if winter only lasts for less than a week...)
So they stopped the water flow, and started hacking
the copper to replace it with something that stretches.
Once they removed the copper with the faucet,
they sit it down. I picked it up. Twisted the faucet.
So I asked, “Hey, are you throwing this out too?”
Well, they didn’t have any need for it, so I
told them I would throw it out for them. I brought
it in and thought: I will use this when I read poetry.
*
So as I advertised my feature, I said the poems
would be flowing like water, so don’t miss the show...
And I printed a poem, cut and taped it into a long strip
and stuffed it inside this copper tube...
So on the big day of my show I asked for someone
to pull on the poem as I turned the faucet and read
my poem to the live audience as it came out
of a copper water tube. The host of the event
even wore my paper strip poem for the rest of the night,
because if you can wear a poem, then why not.
*
I don’t know where creativity comes from.
I don’t know if it’s a gene that you’re born with,
and I don’t know if it only surfaces when we’re faced
with new challenges we have to contend with.
But I don’t think it’s something you can switch on
like a faucet; you can’t say, “excuse me, I must
start my shift in my office and be creative.”
It doesn’t work that way. It never does.
But it might not be that only a select few are creative.
It might be that all of us have the capacity for creativity —
it’s just a matter of understanding that some of us
learned how to turn on that creative faucet in us
so we could really get our creative juices flowing.
|
|
Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images. Starting at this time Kuypers released a large number of CD releases currently available for sale at iTunes or amazon, including “Across the Pond”(a 3 CD set of poems by Oz Hardwick and Janet Kuypers with assorted vocals read to acoustic guitar of both Blues music and stylized Contemporary English Folk music), “Made Any Difference” (CD single of poem reading with multiple musicians), “Letting It All Out”, “What we Need in Life” (CD single by Janet Kuypers in Mom’s Favorite Vase of “What we Need in Life”, plus in guitarist Warren Peterson’s honor live recordings literally around the globe with guitarist John Yotko), “hmmm” (4 CD set), “Dobro Veče” (4 CD set), “the Stories of Women”, “Sexism and Other Stories”, “40”, “Live” (14 CD set), “an American Portrait” (Janet Kuypers/Kiki poetry to music from Jake & Haystack in Nashville), “Screeching to a Halt” (2008 CD EP of music from 5D/5D with Janet Kuypers poetry), “2 for the Price of 1” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from Peter Bartels), “the Evolution of Performance Art” (13 CD set), “Burn Through Me” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from The HA!Man of South Africa), “Seeing a Psychiatrist” (3 CD set), “The Things They Did To You” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Hope Chest in the Attic” (audio CD set), “St. Paul’s” (3 CD set), “the 2009 Poetry Game Show” (3 CD set), “Fusion” (Janet Kuypers poetry in multi CD set with Madison, WI jazz music from the Bastard Trio, the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and Paul Baker), “Chaos In Motion” (tracks from Internet radio shows on Chaotic Radio), “Chaotic Elements” (audio CD set for the poetry collection book and supplemental chapbooks for The Elements), “etc.” audio CD set, “Manic Depressive or Something” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Singular”, “Indian Flux” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “The Chaotic Collection #01-05”, “The DMJ Art Connection Disc 1” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Oh.” audio CD, “Live At the Café” (3 CD set), “String Theory” (Janet Kuypers reading other people's poetry, with music from “the DMJ Art Connection), “Scars Presents WZRD radio” (2 CD set), “SIN - Scars Internet News”, “Questions in a World Without Answers”, “Conflict • Contact • Control”, “How Do I Get There?”, “Sing Your Life”, “Dreams”, “Changing Gears”, “The Other Side”, “Death Comes in Threes”, “the final”, “Moving Performances”, “Seeing Things Differently”, “Live At Cafe Aloha”, “the Demo Tapes” (Mom’s Favorite Vase), “Something Is Sweating” (the Second Axing), “Live In Alaska” EP (the Second Axing), “the Entropy Project”, “Tick Tock” (with 5D/5D), “Six Eleven”
“Stop. Look. Listen.”, “Stop. Look. Listen to the Music” (a compilation CD from the three bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds & Flowers” and “The Second Axing”), and “Change Rearrange” (the performance art poetry CD with sampled music).
From 2010 through 2015 Kuypers also hosted the Chicago poetry open mic the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting weekly feature and open mic podcasts that were also released as YouTube videos.
In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc&d hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed. 2017, after hr October 2015 move to Austin Texas, also witnessed the release of 2 Janet Kuypers book of poetry written in Austin, “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems” and a book of poetry written for her poetry features and show, “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 show poems” (and both pheromemes books are available from two printers).
|
this page was downloaded to your computer
|
