welcome to volume 132 (the October 2015 issue)
of Down in the Dirt magazine
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Janet K., Editor
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hello goodbye
goodbye hello
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New Years’ Return
Liam Spencer
The Alarm smashed my dream at five, and I went from making sweet love to a beautiful woman to falling off the couch. Hardwood floors are almost as unforgiving as the alarm clocks that tell you that it’s time to go to hell...err...I mean work.
A third cup of coffee told me it was Near Years’ Eve. 2014 hadn’t been terrible, but wasn’t all that good either.
I faced another day of getting bitched at. The only thought I was capable of was “Fuck!”
My car was still at the body shop due to insurance company bullshit. That meant freezing my ass off waiting for the bus again. There weren’t as many attractive women on the bus. They had jobs that allowed them such days off.
I barely made it in on time, and braced for hell. My face was drawn. I was sick of it all. I knew I would catch hell for things that I had no control over. I was still injured, so was not carrying my route. There wouldn’t be a vehicle for me to use, so I would be stuck. A whipping boy.
The new acting manager was worse than the old one. We had gone through eleven acting managers in sixteen months. Only two had been good. They were all sent to our station to beat us into shape, despite our performance in such a horrible station. Anyone sent to our station viewed it as the punishment it was intended to be.
Before I was injured, I could fly under the radar. I would fly through my work and sneak out for the day.
“Out of sight, out of mind.” That means you need to stay out of sight of those who are out of their minds.
Now I was stuck. I got yelled at for all kinds of things, most of which I had nothing to do with. It was as if I was being trained to be married again.
I cased quickly, throwing mail into the right slot with intensities, quietly cussing the whole time. Convo surrounded by old timers, comparing paychecks and gloating about how much they made. It was good distraction. Supes came around getting commitments for time. Old timers argued. Supes walked past.
“Mercer! One person and one hour for another.”
“Ok. Thank you.”
The Supe walked to the next case, over to Don.
“Don. An hour from Mercer! You’re Mondo’d!!”
Don leaned over my direction.
“You know which hour.”
Don was a friendly older guy who was smart enough to humor people, but stayed distant. Others picked on him for having been divorced too often. He’d humor them too. He at least seemed a genuine nice person, and quick with a laugh. He didn’t bitch people out like the others.
At least with just Don and a newbie doing my route, the usual regulars wouldn’t bitch so much at me. I was usually getting it from all sides. I grew to absolutely hate being there.
I raced through the casing, numbered parcels, and got everything ready very quickly. My injured foot and ankle screamed. I went faster still, limping a bit. People were counting on me.
The newbie who would take most of my route was under fire. He was not yet fast enough. Management constantly threatened his job. As usual, when a newbie was under fire, management sent him my way. I could usually set things up and give pointers that would send their times climbing.
The pointers weren’t always such inside information. Rather, it could be things like not spreading out parcels in the parking lot and trying to sort them. It takes too long, and gives management the impression that they’re slow. Rather, because the parcels are already numbered by swing, simply put the higher numbers toward the front, and lower number nearest the door, and quickly shift through them before each swing, while out of sight of managers. Street time.
Newbies just were not trained well. Nor were they treated well.
Don had his hour’s work, and was gone. The newbie had his and was pulling away. I went back in and began getting my stuff ready. The acting manager ran around yelling. I raced around as I hobbled. He glared at me. I rushed passed, silently cussing.
Everything was ready. Now came the dreaded moment; finding a vehicle. That meant asking management. Here we go.
Chad was a newer supe. He was fairly friendly to an extent, but would turn on you in a flash. I asked him first. He was puzzled. There was a blank stare on his face. I went out with a pad of paper to pretend to write down vehicle numbers to keep out of sight of the acting manager.
“MERCER!!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
It was him. All five foot one of fury and hate. Fuck.
“Looking for vehicles so I can get my work done.”
“YOU DO NOT DO THAT! ASK A SUPERVISOR!”
“Ok. Ok.”
He followed me in, bitching the whole way. I hid anger.
“CHAD!! WHERE IS HIS VEHICLE?! YOU SUPERVISORS SHOULD KNOW WHAT VEHICLE HE WILL BE TAKING.”
“Maintenance took two vans, and another one is broken.”
“WHAT?! FIND HIM ONE!”
“We are trying to.”
“MERCER! IS EVERYTHING DONE? GO GET EVERYTHING DONE!”
“Ok.”
Everything was done. Twice. All I needed was a van or truck. I had to look busy. I raced around, checking hot cases, sneaking to sip from the fountain, rushing to the supply room, reorganizing my drop-offs again and again.
I wheeled the drop-offs outside to seem busy. Chad was having a smoke. I joined him. He was cold again. I was unwanted company, but I needed a smoke too.
Shortly, the acting manager ripped supervisors, and came up with his own idea. He would send a different newbie with me to be trained on my stuff. The poor guy was overloaded with his own work and did not have a vehicle either. He would be late, and be in serious trouble. It was a really stupid idea. Why burden him with my work when he had too much of his own, and not enough time to do it?
Nonetheless, he and I stood there, listening to really dumb ideas. Neither of us had a vehicle anyway.
Suddenly, a breakthrough. Maintenance had arrived to fix one vehicle. Just as that was settled, a supe named Shane got more news. A different station said we could use one of their vehicles, but were pissed about it. Their supes were blasting ours on how the truck BETTER be back by five thirty. The shouting match had been settled.
I immediately gave the newly repaired van to the newbie, and forcefully stated in front of the acting manager that the newbie would be late and needed to go as soon as possible, especially with the hellish traffic on New Years’ Eve. I repeated that point, stressing it and staring into the acting manager’s eyes. I meant it. He was silent.
Shane pulled his new Jeep to the dock. We loaded my stuff into it and went to the other station. The plan was for me to go do my drop-offs then directly return the vehicle to that station. I’d call for a ride back from there.
On the way, Shane bitched and bitched about the other station. It had been hell to get the vehicle. I was eager to get away from everyone, and looked forward to stopping at a food truck before returning.
We pulled into the parking lot. Shane told me to go get the vehicle, as he did not want to even look at their supe. I got out of the Jeep.
“Wish me luck.”
“Yeah.” He smiled.
I walked in, and carriers looked me. Was I a turncoat (management)? Corporate? Why was I there?
A large, intense woman looked at me. She smiled a smart assed smile.
“Shane sent YOU in? Oh, this is rich!”
She led me to the key box, handed me a single key, then walked me outside to show me what truck it was. She stormed inside.
Shane was friendly as we loaded the truck, then he was gone. I lit a smoke and went to do my stuff. Six hour restriction. Thankfully. Six hours seems like thirty eight when in such hostile situations.
I zipped through it all, then hit a food truck for butter chicken and a Mexican Coke.
Upon my return to the “enemy station,” the heavy supe waved to me with smoke in hand. She gave the thumbs up. I called my station as soon as I parked. There was no answer. I was six hours in.
I went over to stand with her, and lit a smoke.
“You got back early! I like that.”
“Yeah, I’m on limited duty. Six hour maximum. I’m supposed to be off now, but I’m stranded here. They’re not answering the phone.”
“Oh. You’re name is Liam, right? You just made career a month ago?”
“Yeah.”
Her face lit up.
“I’ll give you a ride back. It’ll be good for me to give them some shit.”
A carrier came out to smoke. He was a short little guy. Older. Intense. He bitched about earlier starts, taking the conversation. She argued. He argued more, blathering. She put out her smoke and went inside.
He looked at me. Intensity. He began bitching about carriers. And bitching. And bitching. All about how superior he is. To test him, I answered back about running too fast and getting injured. My story. He blasted slow carriers and excuses. Uh huh. Apples. Oranges. Power trips. How they want him in management. As if that is of pride. Really.
I got sick of fantasies of such sort, and went inside. There stood Martin.
Martin had been a Newbie that management kept sending me to help. He turned to the dark side. A new supe. Suddenly he wore suits every day.
He now greeted me like an old friend. Uh huh. Now it began.
“Man, it is so much better here than there! Much lower key. You ought to think about...”
“Well, I don’t know...”
He turned to the heavy woman.
“If you can get HIM. Man. Even when he can barely walk, he is fast. I mean fast. You’ll have to slow him down.”
She looked unfazed.
“I know about him. I couldn’t believe they’d leave him here like this.”
I stood not knowing what to make of it really. I do not take kindly to ass kissing. One can never tell what is what or who is who. I trust no one, generally, and question my own judgment. Frying pan and fire.
The trip back to my station was all recruitment. I was amazed how the work day had gone. I had gone from getting bitched at to being praised and recruited. I had things to consider.
It turned out that all the supes had been in a “meeting,” which meant they were getting screamed at. The heavy set supe made rounds talking with people as I rushed to finish up and sneak out. She started talking with the know everything and everyone janitor, Kevin. As I attempted to rush by, Kevin got in my way.
“You know...” He continued on, pretending to be talking with her “If someone can make it here, at this station, they can make it far easier anywhere. I mean, anywhere in the country. Really. This place chews people up man. Look at what they pull with him.”
I stuck around for some inside information. I suddenly had much more to think about.
As I went to leave, at last, the heavy supe called to me.
“If you ever want help with the bidding process, call us. We will find you a great route.”
“Ok. Thank you. I certainly will.”
The bus was on holiday schedule. Homeless guys yelled at cars and people who gave them nothing. Nervous working class people stood together at the bus stop, depending on strength of numbers while staying distant on their phones. An attractive woman brushed me aside as I asked if the D line had already passed. I sighed.
The ride was short. Few were working. By the time I got home, I had to shit, bad. I rushed inside and sat down. Within a minute, my phone rang. It was a work number.
“Fuck! Now what am I going to catch hell for?!” I thought. I answered anyway. It was Shane.
“Hey. I just wanted to apologize for leaving you at the other station. I didn’t forget about you. We had a meeting so that we could all get screamed at.”
The new acting manager started yelling in the background “Is that what you thought the meeting was ABOUT?!”
“It’s alright. I got a ride back and made it home.”
“So, you will be in Friday, right?”
“Oh yeah, I’ll be there.”
“Umm....just so you know, we can find you a better route here. We’ll help you with bidding. Just let us know.”
“Oh, ok. I’d be open to that.”
“Ok. Good to know. Happy holidays!”
“You too! See you Friday.”
I cracked open a beer and checked email. My attention turned to the beautiful woman I was making sweet love to before the alarm. Could it become reality? It was New Years’ Eve after all, and I was going out for the night...
I showered and got ready. Out the door I went. Excitement and drunks everywhere. The bar was having its’ last night before closing forever. Landmark.
Possibilities.
None would be realized. Not one.
The couch awaited my return. As did my station.
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Don’t Do Dishes
Lisa Gray
I don’t do dishes. I never have. But Carlo does. He insists upon it.
“You no do dishes. You no be tied to kitchen sink,” he’d said. “You leave dishes to me.”
I’d been glad to.
I smiled as I pressed the button on the television remote control. Carlo would do them when he returned from his night shift. A real new-age man.
Though he hadn’t always been.
I remembered when he first moved in and we’d had our first meal together.
“Who’s doing the dishes?” I’d said.
Carlo had looked at me surprised.
“I no do dishes,” he’d said. “That’s women’s work.”
And he hadn’t.
And neither had I.
The dishes had lain there for a whole week before I could stand it no longer.
Not that I minded doing them once I got started. I could watch the trains go by. The fast ones racing with their cargo of commuters and the slow ones sliding by with their half-empty carriages of slumbering suburbans. Sometimes one even stopped, stuck at some solitary signal and then you could see right into the carriages. I pointed this out to Carlo. Like I pointed out it was his turn to do the dishes.
“Don’t do dishes!” I said.
It took a while but he came round to my way of thinking. I was surprised. But then you never really know anyone.
Now he did all the dishes. And I did none.
I was so lucky. Except for the night shift.
I sank into the brown plush sofa and turned up the volume on the television.
“Police are hunting a man suspected of murdering a girl on the Gatwick Express.”
I shuddered. The news was always depressing. Murder on a train. You weren’t safe anywhere nowadays. And the Gatwick Express. It passed right by my flat.
A train roared by and drowned out the rest of the news broadcast.
That was the only thing that annoyed me about the trains. I’d often thought if anyone was being murdered in the flats, no-one would hear a thing when the train passed. But I didn’t know that when I bought the flat.
“Don’t buy a flat near a railway line,” my friend Jo had said.
“Why not?” I said.
“Noise,” she said. “Danger!”
“Danger!” I laughed. “What kind of danger?”
“What if a train gets de-railed and runs slap bang into your flat?”
I laughed.
“Now your imagination is running away with you,” I said.
“And you’ll get all sorts of undesirables hanging about railway tracks,” she went on.
Of course I’d ignored her. Trains didn’t frighten me. Quite the contrary. I found the roar of them rushing by strangely comforting, particularly at night, when I lay in bed. Alone.
I was suddenly conscious that I was spot-lit like a light-bulb in a dark room. I crossed the room and pulled the curtains. As I did so, there was a movement in the bushes outside.
The wind? More likely a squirrel, I thought.
I remembered Jo’s words.
“You’ll get all sorts of undesirables hanging about railway tracks.”
And now there was a murderer on the loose.
I moved into the kitchen and switched on the light. My eyes were drawn towards the huge pile of dirty dishes by the black window.
I knew I should have got a blind or curtains months ago, I thought.
It was then I saw it. The face at the window. I screamed. The face dropped from sight. I rushed over to the window and looked out. A lean, brown fox was slinking off, his foray for food unrealised.
I laughed at myself.
Now whose imagination is running away with them, I thought. That’s what comes of having a job working odd hours for an airline.
I looked around to see if there was any message from Carlo. No. Just the usual one. I laughed looking at it stuck to the fridge door!
DON’T DO DISHES!
It was his idea of a joke. It had been from that day! Every time I came home from a trip, it would be there. Though I knew he meant it.
I went through to the bedroom, slipped out of my uniform gratefully and wended my way wearily to the shower, trying to force the thought of the next day’s three day trip from my mind. Still today had been a bonus. I’d been on standby at the airport and hadn’t been called.
Carlo will get a surprise to see me, I thought.
I’d tried calling him on his mobile but it had been switched off.
Probably busy at work, I thought.
I looked again at the pile of dirty dishes when I re-emerged from the shower.
Maybe I should help him out, I thought, guiltily.
Then I remembered the last time I’d tried to.
Carlo had got quite angry.
“Don’t do dishes!” he’d said in his funny European English.
I must have looked surprised.
“You no do dishes!” he laughed, his stern expression dissolving instantly.
And I laughed back.
How well Carlo knew me!
I walked into the living room and was about to turn the television back on when I heard the rustle outside the patio door.
That fox returned, I thought.
I pulled back the curtain.
The shadow was taller than a fox.
I pulled the curtain back across the window.
Someone was out there. Prowling around.
If only Carlo were here, I thought.
Then I heard the tap. Quite softly on the patio door.
I froze, praying he would not spot my shadow through the curtain.
There was another tap.
I ran for the phone and dialed my upstairs neighbour.
“There’s someone prowling outside my patio door!” I almost shouted down the phone.
She laughed.
“I know there is,” she said. “It’s my husband!”
“Your husband?” I gasped.
I dropped the phone and rushed to the patio door.
“I hope I didn’t give you a fright,” said a familiar voice, as I opened the door. “I just heard someone prowling around in your flat and, as you’re always away, I thought I’d better check on it. You never know who’s around these days.”
I should have felt comforted, glad that I had such good neighbours. But I still left the light on when I went to bed. I only switched it off when Carlo was there.
I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the trains. I found the noise of them racing by strangely comforting. They reminded me of Carlo and me. The fast ones like me dashing frantically about all over the place, unconcerned with details like dishes and the slow ones like Carlo, sliding steadily along, swaying to a stop and waiting for a change of signal. But we were both on the same track. Weren’t we?
As I lay in bed, I wondered. At a signal from me, I knew Carlo had changed. But me? I was a selfish, thoughtless individual.
I had to be if I expected a man to come home from night-shift and do all those dishes, I thought.
But I could change too. I didn’t need to wait for a signal from Carlo. I got out of bed, padded through to the kitchen and switched on the light.
I don’t do dishes. Never have. Since that night. I don’t watch the trains either. Trains frighten me. Not the fast ones with their cargo of commuters or even the slow ones sliding steadily to a halt with their slumbering suburbans.
It’s the people on them that do.
The pretty blonde girl in the last empty carriage of the train that had halted outside at some unseen signal didn’t frighten me. It was the man who was thrusting the long carving knife into her breast that did.
But then Carlo had always been very insistent.
Previously published in The Aputamkon Review Vol. 1V.
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untitled (aromatic)
Donald Gaither
aromatic fume
purple footprints on sidewalks
mash of mulberries
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136 Wicker Lane
Allan Onik
Julie unpacked the final box. Things were getting in order—:her glass vases, her lamps, her grandmother’:s china set, and just about all the items she had hauled up the old hill at the edge of town.
“:Mommy Mommy wanna come play?”: Her daughter ran into the Master Suite holding a stuffed rabbit.
“:Mommy has to dust now, Katelyn,”: Julie said, “:Why don’:t you play with your coloring books?”:
“:I’:m playing hide and seek,”: the girl said.
“:Oh, you’:ve made a friend already?”:
“:Of course, Mommy. His name is Sam. But he’:s a bit sad.”:
“:An imaginary friend? Well, have fun then. Mommy’:s tired.”:
Julie picked up the sack of potatoes and put it in her shopping cart. A young woman with brunette hair wearing a leopard coat rolled her cart next to hers.
“:Aren’:t you Julie, the resident of 136 Wicker Lane? That old Victorian?”:
“:As a matter of fact I am—:got the house for a steal, actually. Why do you ask? I’:m new around here. Just got in from Philly for a teaching gig at Dairy High School—:I’:m an English Teacher.”:
“:Are you? Well there’:s something the realtor didn’:t tell you. The townsfolk believe that the last resident of your house was a witch. It was said she dabbled in Purple Magic, making pentagrams and summoning evil spirits. She never left the house—:she grew her own food in the back gardens. It was the buzz of the town having a mystic doing her conjuring and spells up on the hill. But then it got serious. A young boy went missing. No older then 7 years—:one day there was just no trace of him. Everybody suspected the old witch, but the sheriff left her alone due to lack of evidence. One night a crowd gathered at her doorstep with torches, demanding to speak to her. When there was no answer at her door, they broke in—:but they weren’:t prepared for what they saw. Intricate pentagrams lined every surface of the walls, floors, and ceiling. And when they entered even further they found an anomaly in the basement. A void/portal that lead to a nether world—:what some suspected was an alternate dimension full of daemons and evil entities. The witch, whose name was Abatha, was nowhere to be found. The townsfolk believe she entered the portal, and sacrificed the boy for her gate.”:
“:Oh my god,”: Julie said, “:I was wondering why the house was so cheap, with so much fresh paint. That’:s quite an elaborate tale. And my daughter’:s at home watching cartoons by herself!”:
“:My suggestion—:move. Some properties are beyond redemption. Many in town think the old house should have been demolished. But when the bank took it back it was just business as usual.”:
“:Mommy Mommy Sam likes SpongeBob!”:
“:We’:re leaving this house in the morning,”: Julie said when she walked in the door, “:and we’:re going to start repacking our stuff.”:
“:But why Mommy? Sam was beginning to cry less! He likes me.”:
“:You can make a new friend when we move back to Philly. Come on now, get your stuff together.”:
The two packed late into the night. “:Evil spirits? Daemons? I’:m not so sure. But this town is creeping me out,”: Julie said to herself as she finished wrapping a chair with laminate. She paused and pondered. “:Well, I suppose it wouldn’:t hurt.”: She crept down the stairs from the Master Suite, listening to her daughter pack her room in the distance. When she reached the door to the basement she opened it a crack and peered down—:beneath her it was pitch black. She used her cell phone for light, and descended the stairs. When she reached the bottom she smelt a crisp smell, like fresh rain. Suddenly a purple arc formed from the floor. It was the size of a large doorframe and full of fluid black ether—:surrounded by an aura that bent the dim light around it. An omniscient voice spoke to her:
“:Curious are we? There is nothing to fear from a concentrated imbalance in The Field. You know, there is really nothing that can hurt you. There is no such thing as Hell, Daemons, or evil spirits. They exist only as a break from the natural. The Witch knew this. There is Pure Love watching you and every old soul within the bounds of eternity, Space, Time, and any dimension an old hag can conjure. Don’:t be afraid, sweet child. Step in. Let me help you.”:
Julie paused. “:I don’:t know if I should,”: she said in the dark. But she felt drawn to its spectacle, as if her life was on a track that she couldn’:t control—:the spectacular meeting reality with a brush of fate. She walked into the gate.
Suddenly Julie was in her English Class in Philadelphia. Her hand was on a piece of chalk. The freshman stared at her. And before she knew what she was saying she said: “:Don’:t forget to read your Lovecraft this weekend, essays due on Monday.”:
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Choppy Water
Allan Onik
Tab stepped higher onto bridge’s railing and looked out onto the water.
“It’s easy,” Tab whispered in the darkness. “Just a quick thrust and then...nothing. It’ll all be over.”
He prepared himself on the Birmingham but noticed the Monongahela’s white caps. The water was choppy, and he faltered.
“You know, you don’t have to do that,” Tab looked to his side to see a girl in a Steelers hoodie standing under a street lamp. “You don’t deserve to die tonight. Why don’t you step down and we can talk about it?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Tab said. “This is the end of the line. I have nothing to live for anymore. My parents died years ago, and I have no friends or family. There’s no one looking out for me. I feel cold and alone. It’s just me and this city I grew up in—and the cold and clouds. I want to go back to my early days.”
The girl smiled at him. She had brunette hair, and Tab found her pretty.
“Well, I don’t know you. But I do care. I’m not gonna call the cops or anything. You should get to decide what to do. But will you do something for me? There’s a psychic on East Carson Street near The Beehive Coffee Shop. She’s new in town, and rumor has it she’s one of the most powerful mystics on the planet—if you believe in that sort of thing. Will you go see her? I saw her, and she seemed pretty legitimate to me. Maybe she can help you say goodbye? If that’s what you want.”
“I don’t believe in that shit,” Tab said.
“But this one’s real! If you’re going to go, maybe she can help.”
“Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” Tab said.
“Tab. I can see everyone that’s coming years before they come in. That’s how it works, you know. For me at least. All of us are different. And some of us are fakes. Though I can assure you I’m not.”
The psychic wore a blue tunic, and emanated a faint blue light. In her den Tab noted crystals and roses, tarot cards and unique candles.
“I came to talk to you about something—someone to me to....”
“Yes child, I know. In God’s eyes you are held in very high esteem—despite you sins. The Creator has always looked on you with infinite love, like a Divine Mother for a Cosmic Child. Your expression on this planet and in your current body may seem a bit pained right now, but it is important for you to recognize that you are never alone, and were never alone. There is a Field of Love that feels nothing but joy in your creation. And there’s something I was meant to tell you. Now is not the time to leave your body. You have too much living to do! When the sun rises tomorrow, it is a new day. So enjoy Bliss, and live within the planetary alignments The Creator has meant for you—in the places you are meant to be.”
“Maybe it isn’t so bad after all,” Tab said.
“Yes, darling,” The mystic countered, “I can see your aura shining bright. And I can feel your Love. Now, go find a place to rest.”
Tab paddled in a canoe and stared up at the Birmingham Bridge. The sun shined in his face and he smiled. It was a breezy day, and the water was choppy.
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The Interview
Allan Onik
Tab arrived from McCarran International Airport and stepped off the Janet. He immediately began walking to S-4. He passed latest Russian Mig, a camouflaged OXCART, and a hangared Aurora Saucer.
When he arrived at the site his retinal scan passed and he took the elevator 20 stories down. When the door opened he shook hands with The General and his assistants.
“So, you’ve read the document?” The General asked.
“Of course,” Tab said.
“So it must be obvious then. This is far more important than SDI, weather control, “Project Blue Book,” Time travel, or Teleportation technology. This interview could be more important than the meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill during The War.”
“I’m aware of my position,” Tab said.
“Then It’s waiting for you in the observation bay,” The General said.
The door sealed behind him and Tab stood face to face with The Grey. It had a large elongated head, large black eyes, small skinny limbs, and a petite body.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” The Grey thought. The words echoed through Tab’s mind.
“How did you know you would be interviewed, and not autopsied like the others?” Tab thought.
“To me, Time is like one of Earth’s flowers. I experience the spectrum holistically, and can open each petal cohesively—with one peel. I already know when I will pass into The Field, what you will think now, and the information I will relate to you today. It is similar to the reason I don’t need vocal chords, as your kind does.”
“Then lets begin,” Tab thought, “help me.”
Tab closed his eyes and floated up into space. He felt an overwhelming sense of Love, and calmness. He looked down on Earth peacefully. The sight was awe inspiring, like looking at priceless gem.
“Although your planet’s ruling species’ evolutionary status has improved since The Dinosaurs, you still have a long way to go in The Cosmos. Most of your kind struggles with lack of proper resources, and psychological imbalances that prevent the development of Higher States of Consciousness. Without Unity with The Creator, your evolutionary makeup will always be sub par. And it is as simple as the proper vibration on a singe atom! There is a Field of Love synonymous with your text’s heaven—I’m sure you can feel it now. When your species can feel it on your planet then you will become more like my kind. Your Einstein scientist would agree that humans have a long way to go. But why don’t you soak it in for a while, and enjoy the view?”
The clouds on the planet rolled over The United States of America. In his silent Bliss Tab thought back to when he was a baby, playing in the sandbox at his preschool.
“I suppose we have a chance,” Tab thought in his ecstasy.
When he reentered his body he was laying in a hospital bed in Las Vegas. His vitals were being measured on a monitor next to him. The General patted him on the shoulder. “We have a lot to talk about,” he said.a
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Vows
John K. Graham
Our vows spiraled skyward
in the warm Summer afternoon
it’s unclear how
the hornet’s nest was dislodged
we straddled a fence
while guests ran pell-mell
“For better or worse,” became manifest
before we said, “I do.”
I don’t remember kissing the bride
Is it true there’s a reason for everything?
We played the hand we were dealt
but I don’t know who won
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art Hemmings Peace, art by Kyle Hemmings
Planned Vacation #2
Chad Newbill
As he closed the door,
he pulled his jacket up around his neck and delicately maneuvered down the icy front porch
His steps grew longer, higher and faster, as he plunged his feet into the deep snow.
His eyes were fused to the car that was covered with salt from the winter streets.
The countless shades of gray smothered him!
The color represented his mind; his mood; his life.
Still humming from his six pack of beer, he headed to the corner party store to grab a pack of cigarettes.
The wheels of the gloomy car slid slightly as he parked.
The neon beer signs from the store flashed in his eyes.
He had been in this store a thousand times before,
but he and the owner had never held a conversation;
only head nods and the counting of his change.
Brushing the snow flakes from his sleeves,
his squeaky shoes made their way to the cooler of beer.
A quart of Pabst.
He set the sweating bottle on the counter and picked up a pack of gum.
The owner put the beer in a narrow, brown paper sack and mumbled his total.
He began to pay when he realized what he had come for.
His mind was thinking of something beyond his purchases.
He quickly asked for a pack of cigarettes.
?Soft pack Marlboros.
?The owner turned his back and stretched out his short torso to grab the cigarettes from the top shelf.
The owner unknowingly, or maybe knowingly, brandished his hand gun that was tucked in the back of his slacks.
?Without saying a word, he picked up his merchandise and hunched over as he readied himself for the arctic blast that was waiting for him on the other side of the door.
As the door shut, he heard the register ring for the man in line behind him.
?He threw the cigarettes and gum in the passenger seat and squeezed the packaged beer between his legs.
The bottle top cracked open and he swigged the beer until he could no longer hold his breath.
He put his car in reverse to back into the
unplowed parking lot.
The snow crunched under his tires
like fingernails on a blackboard.
He put the car in “drive” and inched forward before he gently pushed the brake peddle at the intersection.
He looked down both ways of the street.
But it wasn’t for safeties sake.
His mind raced as he thought of going to work in the morning; his wife, his kids, his life.
The longer he sat in the parking lot,
the more hurried he felt.
He clicked on his turn signal and headed away from his home
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Lucille Ann
Janet Kuypers
3/26/15 haiku, on twitter
her existence makes
trees take root, flowers bloom, so
nature’s beautiful.
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hello goodbye / goodbye hello
Fritz Hamilton
They open the schools in Monrovia to
let ebola back in/ the
students embrace it &
get reinvolved with sin/ little
African children dying again/ their
evil fate forsaking love for
death & hate, but
we all die in time to
begin as primordial slime suffering
our mortality & offering ourselves
back to the earth, going from
death back to birth repeating an
incessant cycle & recycle
round & round with a
laugh & a sigh
hello goodbye
over & over
goodbye hello
round & round
round & round
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questions the powers of any of these things
Fritz Hamilton
Kenya burns piles of elephant tusks to
discourage poachers from killing elephants for
the ivory they believe is an aphrodisiac with
other mystical powers as well/ one of which was
not to keep my son alive/ he died recently after
preaching Christianity in Nairobi, the capitol of
Kenya, to the Muslim children/ one
questions the powers of any of these things, but
when death calls one must obey/ now
I have no son, but I’ve just celebrated my 79th
birthday, & it’s getting grim/ soon I’ll join my
son Todd/ nature will prevail as always,
tusks or no tusks/ Muslim children or not/ Christian
preachers or none, &
don’t let the ice cream melt at the party . . .
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scattereth
Fritz Hamilton
One skidrow denizen sits in his
wheelchair downing his pint of Thunderbird/ another
lies passed out in the gutter as a rat nibbles his
bare toes/ a third rips the bandage from his
belly to allow the open sore to bleed down over
his groin as fat Madame Marlene with her
legs spread in front of a port-a-potty takes
on another toothless filthy trick for 5 dollars as
mad Rastus preaches the word He that is not with
me is against me: and he that gathereth not with
me scattereth. &
Rastus vomits in the Good Book &
all who are standing too close to him
scattereth . . .
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diabetes
Fritz Hamilton
“Why do you have those holes in your arms, Hector?”
“When you have diabetes, sores take a long time to heal.”
“How long have you had those holes?”
“Over a yr maybe, Orlando.”
“So what can you do about it?”
“Have a sugar free diet, take medications, & be lucky.”
“& if you’re not lucky?”
“You can die, Orlando.”
“Sounds tough.”
“Not for me, I died a long time ago.”
“Is that why you smell bad?”
“No, I never take a shower.”
“Is that good for yr diabetes.”
“When you’re dead, you don’t care.”
“That disgusts me, Hector.
“How do you think I felt when Achilles was chasing me around Troy?”
“You would have won that fight if the gods hadn’t decided differently.
“But they didn’t. Furthermore I had diabetes.”
“If you had it to do all over, would you?”
“Not with diabetes.”
“You should have stuck with sweet ‘n low.”
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Zip Code Revoked
Craig Watts
Well, the first I heard about this whole pathetic thing was when Jake down at the gas station stuck a thermometer into the gas tank. God damn it if the temperature of the gasoline wasn’t 172 degrees. It was practically boiling. This thing has damn near ruined everyone in town’s life, but I can tell you one thing, though. I would have loved to see the look on the Jake’s face.
To be totally honest, I had seen some strange things around town, but I hadn’t paid much attention to them. Maybe I actually chose to ignore them, who knows? There was the time on Route 61 when I saw smoke coming from a crack in the pavement, but I managed to explain it away in my mind. Then there was also the fact that no snow would accumulate in certain parts of town. There’d be six inches of snow on Main Street, but the asphalt would be bone-dry two blocks away on Elm Street. The guys who drove the snowplows were pretty pissed. Those guys get paid by the hour, you know. As for me, my snow shovels have been getting rusty, and god damn, but my lawn is a crying shame in the summer. Yellow and crumbly, like walking on potato chips.
So how about this? Imagine a town meeting where the Mayor is burdened with telling his constituents that their town is on fire. Permanently. But they usually won’t be able to see it. That was one for the ages. You should have been there.
So, the long and short of it was that some guys were burning trash near the mouth of the old coalmine. This is twenty years ago, mind you. A vein of coal caught on fire somehow, and it’s still blazing away below ground. They tried everything: digging, pumping in water, voting out the Mayor, but nothing worked. There’s a fire below the ground, and our town is no longer safe for occupancy.
Suddenly everything started to make sense: the percolating gas at Jake’s place, the random plumes of smoke coming out of the ground, the mysterious disappearance of snow once it his the ground. But not only was the fire impossible to put out, it was getting progressively worse. Not only would the pavement crack, but it would buckle, making roads impassable. Not only would smoke come out of the ground, but carbon monoxide. That’s the stuff people use to kill themselves when they leave the car running in their garage, and now we had clouds of the shit springing up in our back yards. Let’s just say that real estate prices dropped. Seriously, how could you sell a house here? “Welcome to Centralia, where every swimming pool is a heated swimming pool!”
Eventually the government came up with money for relocation. I think it was around $40 million. I know that sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t. Once it was divvied up, most people still took a loss when they moved. The town emptied out almost overnight. You can’t even mail a letter from here anymore.
Living here now is downright surreal; it’s like being on the moon, or maybe in purgatory. I’ve had to change my route home several times because roads have become unusable, one by one. Either there’s been an eruption in the middle, or a pit has formed. Nobody will be coming to fix them. My own lawn still won’t grow, but other parts of town have grass three feet high in what used to be people’s front lawns. Abandoned houses are slowly collapsing into themselves like wet cardboard boxes.
I’m getting older, too. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to leave. There’s something in me that wants to decay along with this town, and eventually die with it. I guess we’ll see each other through to the very end. Some nights I’ll lie awake, and I swear I can hear cracks forming in the earth, or geysers of poison bursting through the old school yard down the street. And somehow, alone in the dark, I decide that there’s no place I’d rather be.
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Visakhapatnam
Janet Kuypers
1/19/15 (from the India haiku series), on twitter
destroyers, frigates
swarm Visakhapatnam’s bay
patrolling beaches
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Waiting to Pull the Trigger
W. Scott R. Brownlee
Bugs chirped in the coolness of the night. Socrates held his brother’s .303 Royal En-field rifle between his legs. Streetlights of the suburban neighborhood gave Socrates an adequate line of sight on both sides of the street. Yawning, he opened the bolt to gaze upon the long bullet in the chamber. The scent of gun grease came into his nostrils. Sliding the bolt quietly closed again, he slid his fingers on the clip as he looked at a stucco building, two stories high. Similar looking houses were on either side of the street, tightly clustered in together and now claustrophobic, Socrates felt an uncomfortable tenseness building in his muscles.
“Use your anxiety as a tool,” he whispered. “This uncomfortable glob of massive amounts of people living right on top of each other like bees in a hive will keep your senses sharp. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. You are in mission mode, Marine.”
A car went by. It seemed so loud in the quiet night. The basement light of the stucco house where his brother was at remained lit and upstairs there was television light coming out of the front windows. The house on the left had television light emanating out of the windows as well. Completely dark was the house on the right and all three driveways had cars parked in them. Socrates scanned each of these houses repeatedly. He glanced briefly at the houses directly across the street. A sudden burst of adrenalin filled his body.
“The license plates,” he whispered.
Hands trembling, Socrates reached up to open the door but then he stopped himself.
“Don’t have a screw driver. Fuck.”
There was movement in the driveway of the house that his brother was in, coming from the back yard. Two white males opened the side door and casually walked into the basement. Socrates fumbled with the rifle until it was hastily in his shoulder. He raised the rifle up. The barrel hit the side of the door. He slid his buttocks backward to lift the weapon up as he kept his eyes on the basement window. Realizing that his window was still shut, Socrates leaned the rifle down quickly so that he could hastily roll the window down. Once done, he rested the tip of the barrel on the door.
Ten minutes passed. His hands began to cramp. Soreness was mounting at the base of his spine. A slight throb grew in his eviscerated gums. Socrates shook the cramp from his hands and then ate another pain pill, swallowing it down his parched throat. He glanced at the basement window. Nothing. Deftly, he reached up and over the front seat, flipped open the cooler top, grabbed a can of beer, opened it and gratefully drank a quarter of a can down as he kept his eye on the basement window, panting the whole time. Beads of sweat were on his forehead. The dryness of the aging wooden stock absorbed some of the sweat from his palms and fingertips.
The basement door of the house opened up. Anthony and Ziggy came out into the driveway smiling as they bid the people in the basement a good night. Socrates took a deep breath as the basement door was closed. He lowered the rifle and put the safety back on as his cohorts came upon the vehicle. Socrates threw Anthony the keys once he sat down in the driver’s seat.
“That was fucking horrible!” Socrates exclaimed as Anthony started the car and drove away.
“What?” Anthony asked.
“I saw those two guys just fucking materialize out of thin air and I was freakin’ the fuck out!”
“It’s cool, little bro,” Anthony said reassuringly. “Dat’s why we were there so long. We were waiting for them.”
“I was thinking about shooting them.”
“I’m glad you didn’t because they had your money,” Anthony said. He threw a bundle of cash over his shoulder at Socrates. “Enjoy Woodstock, little bro. Want some cocaine?”
“I am so full of adrenalin right now that I don’t need no cocaine. I never did cocaine. After tonight I might not never need to do cocaine. I am fucking wired to the hilt. Goddamn!”
“Somewhere over the rainbow,” Anthony started to sing as he was laughing with Ziggy at Socrates’ exclamation. Anthony’s smile of bad teeth looked like golden sunshine under the streaming city lights to his little brother’s shaken, soulful eyes. “Drugs are free.”
Several months later on the same NYC streets...
It was very cold outside. The stars in the night sky were quite bright, shining past the streetlights of the city. They walked the first block without event. Alertly, the brothers passed through the dilapidated section of the city. Frosty panting breaths formed little clouds in the frigid air around their heads. They saw three young black men on the other side of the street. Each party walked quietly in opposite directions. Socrates felt his heart beating faster than usual.
Downstairs and inside the house, Socrates witnessed the Pagan motorcycle gang world of his brother. A small party of heavily tattooed bikers was gathered together delightfully. Most of the bikers knew Anthony and merrily called him Hippy. Half of the bikers wore long hair, a couple were bald and one had a buzz cut but with a long blond beard thrusting out to his chest. Socrates felt his heart beating fast inside his chest. He awkwardly shook hands with some of the Pagans as he was introduced to them by his brother. Each time he said hello he felt an electric shock going off inside his brain, shooting straight through him to his toes. It seemed to rattle back up into his teeth as his heart pounded harder and harder. An incredible urge to run wildly away overcame him. A shot of electrocuted adrenalin went through him. As he opened his can of beer and took a sip he saw that his hand was shaking. The beer went down fast. No one really spoke to him for a little bit which was assuaging to his fractured nerves. Another beer went into his belly. His brother waved him over to smoke a joint with a few of the Pagan bikers.
“Oh man, I can’t,” Socrates stammered. “The whole blow job scenario, Anthony.”
“What?” One of the long haired bikers asked.
“My little brother’s giving up pot so he can get head from his girlfriend,” Anthony explained.
“That must be some pretty good head!”
“Apparently,” Anthony laughed with the raucous laughter of the biker crowd. “C’mon little bro, she won’t know a thing.” Anthony grabbed a hold of Socrates playfully in a headlock and whispered into his ear: “You’re at a drug deal, Socrates. Don’t make the Pagans suspicious.” Then to the gathering Anthony asked with a beaming smile: “If my little brother smokes pot with us, do all of you promise not to tell his girlfriend!”
The crowd of tough, wild, white men laughed.
Socrates smoked weed with the Pagans. His anxiety intensified. Everyone was laughing and talking. He steadied his shaking hand to light a cigarette. The electrocuting waves of anxiety were still shooting through his system. He couldn’t look anybody in the eye, instead concentrating his gaze above their heads. Socrates smoked swiftly with hard, fast drags on his cigarette. The alcohol was beginning to sedate his nerves. When he lit another cigarette while he was in the bathroom he studied his hand and now it didn’t shake as much. The marijuana was really good as well, Socrates realized, as he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror.
“You can do this, man,” he said to himself. “You’re nerves are shot. Can’t help what you’re born with. But there are drugs to help balance it out. Know this, Socrates, this is the last time you put yourself in a freaky environment like this. It might be easier to have gone to war than to hang out in this nest of criminals. Some scary motherfuckers past that door. Pagans. Glad they are on my side.”
Socrates was playing chess with a frightening looking bald biker covered in tattoos that seemed to dance on the man’s flesh as his muscles moved the tiny black pieces.
“Ever been to prison?” the bald man asked.
“Only boot camp, it was like prison,” Socrates responded nervously “You?”
“Yep. That’s where I met your brother.”
“Which one?”
“Which one what?”
“Which one did you meet in prison?”
“How many of your brothers been to prison?”
“All of them.”
“No shit,” the bald man laughed. He took a hit off of a joint handed to him and then handed it to Socrates who took a hit and then he tapped someone with long hair behind him to hand off the joint. The bald man blew out his smoke. “I met Hippy there. So did you break the family tradition?”
“Tradition? Oh, you mean going to jail tradition, yeah; I want to be the one son of my mother not to go to jail.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Socrates laughed a little. The bald man looked at him funny. “I’m laughing because I’m going to say good luck to you because I’m taking out your queen.”
“Fuck, you are good. You know I could never beat Hippy in jail. We played at least once a day for twelve months.”
“I’ve never beat him either. For my whole life. Sorry about the queen, man.”
“It’s cool. All fair in love and war and on the chess board. Your brother told me that. You two don’t much look alike.”
“Different fathers,” Socrates said, concentrating on the board as he waved his now steady hand around his face. “And I don’t have a beard. Came from the same womb.”
“I’m putting your knight in the tomb,” the bald man said. “All’s fair...”
Later on that night Anthony and Socrates were stumbling down the street with the lunch bag full of cocaine and marijuana. Socrates was happy that he had beaten the Pagan at chess. They went past the block with the dilapidated houses. Anthony pointed his middle finger at them. Around the corner they walked to a safer block. They passed a house with very large holly bushes rising over the sidewalk. Neither of them noticed a black man sitting on the nearby stairway.
In an instant he was on his feet with a knife at Anthony’s throat. He pulled at the bag of drugs in Anthony’s hands. Anthony wouldn’t let go of the bag. Socrates jumped back into the street. Two other black men popped up from behind a parked car further up the street. As they sauntered into the street toward Socrates he instinctively walked backwards with his eyes on them. Massive amounts of adrenalin shot through his system. Socrates pulled out his buck knife and held the blade low near his right thigh.
“Tell dat cracker to stop movin’, yo,” the black man with the knife said. “And let go of dis muthafuckin’ bag!”
“Don’t cut me, man,” Anthony said. He still clasped the bag in his hand as the knife pressed into his throat. “Don’t cut me, man.”
“Let go of da muthafuckin’ bag, cracker!”
“Tell dis bitch to stop, white boy,” one of the other black men said.
Socrates went behind a car in the shadows. The two black men on the street with their hands in their coats split up. Closing in on either side of the car, the black men watched Socrates leap onto the hood of the car and then scamper with bare hands onto the roof of the car. It sank in a little as Socrates stood straight up in a cloud of his own panting exhalation. He could scarcely perceive the two black men with white eyeballs and white teeth. They weren’t moving anymore.
“Don’t cut me, man.”
“What da fuck is dat cracker doin’ on dat car?”
“Don’t cut me, man.”
“Crazy white muthafuckas, let go of dis bag and we be gone, white boy.”
Anthony let go of the bag. The black man lowered the knife, called to his cohorts and the three of them began to run away around the corner. Socrates leapt onto the pavement, did a tuck and rolled toward his brother. Anthony pulled the pistol from beneath his coat. He sped for the corner. Rounding it, he lifted his pistol and fired five times.
Crack
Crack
Crack
Crack
Crack into the night. The black man with the bag collapsed just two parked cars up from them. One of the others cut back to help up his wounded friend. The bleeding man got onto his knees. Anthony came closer. The healthy black man ran at them, causing Socrates to jump back. Then the black man swiftly plunged his hand around the bag of drugs. He pivoted but Anthony was on him, tackling him. The pistol fell onto the asphalt. Anthony and the black man struggled with each other on the frozen surface. Socrates retrieved the pistol. The third black man continued to run down the street. The wounded black man was crawling away from them. In the streetlight Socrates saw one of the bullets stuck in the black man’s winter cap, protruding out of his skull. Blood streamed down the man’s neck.
Socrates kicked the black man wrestling with his brother. A large black hand was curled up in a knot in Anthony’s beard. Socrates pulled on the black man’s coat with his free hand. The black man let Anthony’s beard go yet he went for the bag again. Socrates grabbed the adversary’s coat collar and yanked hard, straining the muscles in his arm. Anthony scrambled onto his feet, bag in hand. He ran over to Socrates, switched gun for bag as his opponent ran away. Anthony strutted over to the wounded black man. He bent over him, flipped him onto his back and the man gurgled blood from his mouth. Anthony put the pistol on the center of the wounded man’s forehead. He was panting clouds in the frigid wintry night air.
“I am a white man,” Anthony said to him. “Not a boy.”
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It Wasn’t Hatred
A.N. Block
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told this Diane I’d been messing with for a good few weeks.
Up till then it was fun and games, she was easy to be around, pretty cool looking, beautiful actually, with her long blue black hair and dreamy green eyes, but tonight the chick had some chip on her shoulder, she was on this kick and she wouldn’t drop it, how she could accomplish anything she set her mind to, how she pulled herself up from nothing, a single mom, taking classes, getting all A’s, waking up at 5 to bring her babies to day care, then heading over to start her shift at South Shore Mercy, so I figured once she finished buttoning herself up and got around to asking, “Where do you work?” that would be pretty much it.
“I don’t have a job,” I told her, “okay? Now you know.”
She’s like, “May I ask why?”
“Well,” I said, laughing a little, although having to explain went up my ass sideways, “the way you are, it’s definitely not my outlook. I’m kind of against this whole society, see, the way it’s organized. Into economic classes. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
“So what did you used to do? Before losing your job?”
“A little of this. You know, a little of that. Did I say anything about ‘losing my job’ though?”
“Well,” she said, “just because the economy’s bad___” but I interrupted.
“Whoa!” I raised my hand. “Got nothing to do with that. Nothing at all.”
She looked at me sideways, put on her sunglasses, turned away, said “Bye,” and I waved to her back.
The truth is, what’s so great about having a job? Like this is some big accomplishment. Every jackass has one, most of them you just have to show up on time, so what does that prove?
Walking over to Smiley’s on the corner, I told myself, she’s got broad shoulders covered with freckles and I love how her hair drapes all over them, but this one’s no different than all the rest.
Believe it or not though, Diane called the next day.
“Sorry if I over-reacted,” she goes. “My uncle’ll hire you. Doesn’t pay much to start, but you could work your way up.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t want to work my way up. Did you somehow not get that? I don’t want to work, okay?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m lazy,” I said. “What they used to call a ne’er-do-well.”
Stone silence on the other end. Then what sounded like a sniffle.
“Hello?”
“Nothing’s free, asshole,” she said. “Nobody owes you a goddamn thing. You don’t get anything if you don’t do anything!”
This time she waited for me to say something but I just hung up. Then I called her back.
“Who’re you to judge? I’m opposed to this capitalistic society. It kills the soul. What part of that don’t you actually get?”
“Don’t call me anymore,” she said.
“Fine.”
I mean, you can’t feel good about scrounging like I do. Living off your disability from the service, these constant deficiencies in your two digit bank account. Doing odd jobs for cash. Am I saying everything’s cool, the way things are? Not even a little. Mainly though it’s because Diane’s reflective of the female of the species, how they all think. One look at me and they see No Future emblazoned across my chest. A fuck up who can’t get his shit together. Can’t though is different than won’t. That’s the part that shakes people up. I don’t care about clothes, about cars, about possessions, I’m free of all that. All I crave is Diane, those long fleshy arms. Being the same size, the way our parts fit together, it’s perfect.
I love them from here to the moon, don’t get me wrong, but my family’s no prize and never has been. Being the disreputable one, I hardly go see them anymore. Guess they’re proud of my brother Jay with his three kids and fancy house. The oldest. In high school we’d hear him come home three, four in the morning, then he’d be sitting at the breakfast table in his ratty velour bathrobe sipping coffee before anyone got up. “You guys,” he’d say, winking, “you getting laid yet?” Football player, bigshot, fraternity boy. Jimmy was next, he’s the tough guy, pack of Camels rolled up in his tee-shirt, always in trouble, got busted dealing and now he’s some kind of salesman. Same difference, right? Then comes Joe: poor kid never had a chance, couldn’t get his emotions in check, he’d have these constant delusions. Ballooned up to 300 pounds, wears these half inch thick eye glasses, and Mom used to cry over him every day, giving in to his every whim. Me, being the youngest, I guess I’m some kind of reaction to all three. Jay the bullshitter, his con man routine, Jimmy, how he tries to sleaze off everyone too, and Joe, being in this group home, eating downers all day. Everyone’s got their little job they do though, including him. So that makes them better than me?
Got into a major blow up the last time we’re all home, in December.
“You’re happy like this?” Dad shouted at me. “You need some kind of therapy. That or a good boot in the ass.”
“I’ll pay you to go see a psychiatrist,” Jay said to me on the side. “Hey, I don’t want Pop getting excited like that, it’s bad for his heart.”
“Give me a call some time, I’ll fix you up with beautiful girls,” Jimmy said when he got a hold of me, outside of his wife’s hearing. “They’ll make you feel like a man.”
“You could room with me,” Joe offered, tears rolling down his cheeks. “At the home. People are nice there. Nobody yells.”
So is it any wonder I cut out of upstate New York? It wasn’t the weather made me leave, tell you that much. Why here? Maybe I just liked the sound of the name: Boston. Maybe I just wanted something new. Bigger city, hipper people, supposedly anyhow. More politically conscious. Stay anonymous. Meet somebody. Find love. Find Diane.
Oh, I’ve tried various things in this town, I’ve tried to change it up, from working retail, to cooking, to pumping gas and some shady things too, guys I met in the pubs, my home away from home. I’ve collected paychecks on a routine basis till it finally sunk in, this is not me. Being a wage slave. So, it’s my fault? Of course, who’s else would it be?
The last straw, I was with a mover. I’m not that big and strong though, they must’ve been desperate. Didn’t last. It couldn’t. Lugging couches and dressers for all those rich BU kids was too much for me.
Truth is though, I kept thinking about Diane, how it was before class warfare turned her against me. Something about her vehemence, I mean this chick was the real deal. Went back to Allston, the place we first met, it was my third stop of the night and there she is wearing her high strapped red “Fuck Me” shoes, she’s like a magnet, three or four clueless dirt bags crowded around her, she gives me this look, it’s not hatred, it’s pity.
I walked right up, butted in on the conversation.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” I said, interrupting one of the assholes. “I’m doing great. Okay?”
So this big nosed hulk in a cardigan sweater puffs his chest out and points at me. “You know this guy?” he asked her.
Before she could answer, I said, “She knows me. In the true Biblical sense. What’s it to you?”
He lowered his head and squinted. “Are you serious, shorty?”
“Deadly,” I told him.
“All right, let’s go. Outside.”
I said, “Fuck you, sonny. Make your play here.” Cause I knew he wouldn’t, see? Don’t ask me, I just knew.
The guy’s twice my size, ten years younger, probably some kind of fitness addict who bangs the bags every day. He’s like, “You got a serious problem.”
“Yeah, same one you got,” I told him. “I’m going to die one day. So what?” Then I turned to her. “Nice to see you, Diane. Glad to see you made some nice new friends.”
I walked to the bar and got a beer, started up a conversation with this sports nut who bought me a couple more, we traded war stories, I told him about my track and field exploits in high school, “fastest white boy in the county,” how it helped me out overseas, and by the time I left the joint she was gone, so were her new boyfriends, the T wasn’t running anymore, so I hoofed it home. Stumbled is more like it. Good thing they took my license away.
The sports nut was very cool. I told him about her and he slipped me something he said would take the edge off. For free. That was some trek. Kept seeing these monstrous looking freaks along the way, a soft rain started falling, stared a wild dog down, after the thing stopped barking and tried to shake itself dry we made friends and walked together for a while, parted ways, and right after I said my ABC’s heard a voice coming from somewhere, calling out, I know you! commanding me to Get a job.
“Shut up,” I remember saying, “you ugly mutt you! The hell do you know?”
I called Diane the next day to ask if the offer from her uncle was still on the table.
She laughed and said, “Really?”
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poor
Janet Kuypers
1/19/15 (from the India haiku series), on twitter
employ poor — make them
hand-paint curbs, tie fronds to lights
so streets look nicer;re woman
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Man’s Best Friend
Scott Morley
When I was eight I wanted a dog for my birthday. I was a sullen and solitary kid, totally antisocial. I didn’t like my peers because they were always mean to each other. I wanted a friend that didn’t try to belittle me or put me in my place. Dad told me that what I needed was a dog. He said that the nicer and more gentle and tolerant I was with a dog, the more it would love me in return. The prospect of having a doting canine companion seemed ideal.
I begged my parents for a puppy. Dad, raised in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by my forest ranger Grandpa Hanson, was giddy with the prospect of finding a four-legged friend for my journeys over field and stream. Dad is also a swimmer, and raised me to be a swimmer. So he wanted me to have a dog that was a swimmer too. He decided on a Golden Retriever; the ultimate family dog.
Days later we arrived at the house of a Golden Retriever bitch with 7 pups. We knocked, and the bitch was at the door to greet us, smashing against it, howling, slobbering and showing her fangs through the window. “It’s just protecting its puppies,” Dad said, “Goldens are docile family dogs.”
“Actually,” said the owner, “This bitch is aggressive, especially with other dogs, but with people too. Make sure you understand how to dominate the dog if you buy one of these pups,” She said.
Dad said, “I was raised with a little rat terrier. Golden’s are good family dogs.”
“If you get a male, make sure to get his nuts clipped. That’ll settle him.”
“No no, that’s animal cruelty.”
“Suit yourself,” the lady shrugged. Then she let me into the kennel; so many cute puppies in that kennel, little fuzzy balls of Golden energy, all rolling around with each other, pissing and shitting on each other, pinning one another down by the ears and throat, and sitting on each other’s faces, attempting to rape their siblings even at three months old. I didn’t know which one to take. They were all perfect. But then, out of the doggy din, one came running into me. He knocked me down and playfully chew my face and neck. I decided this was the best dog. Dad agreed. He pulled out his wallet, more excited than I was.
I named him Barney, after Barney Google. Because he had big brown droopy hound dog eyes. We dragged him upstairs. Or rather he dragged us. He was four months old, and already a handful. The owner shook her head and said to my dad, “Are you sure you want this one? He’s a big dominant male. You don’t want the first dog that tackles you, you know. That’s the alpha.”
“No no, this is the one for us” Dad said forking over the cash, “He loves Sonny already - look!” Barney was humping my leg, aggressively knocking his balls against me so hard that even at eight I understood, the dog was trying to fuck me. Meanwhile my dad was scratching Barney’s ears and encouraging him.
***
We had a septic drainage pond in the back of our house, full of pungent black muck. Dad didn’t like the idea of leashing Barney, “It’s not right to leash him,” he’d say, “This dog has natural urges, and it’d be wrong to repress his spirit,” and he sent me off to the pond with Barney.
Barney loved that pond. He spent hours each day rolling in the mud, or anything dead that was in it. Lots of times there were big dead snappers and rotting raccoons, gooey and from decomposition. Barney loved to cover himself in that goo and then come home and cover mom’s new white carpet and sofa in it.
“What the fuck did you do to that dog Sonny?” Mom screamed, jumping up and down, “God dammit! Do you know how much this carpet cost? Asshole! I’m taking away your allowance and your bike! You’re grounded until you figure out a way to get rid of those fucking stains!”
Although Mom didn’t like Barney’s dog shit, his crap was rarely cleaned up. It remained in the yard, right next to her garden, if not in it. Mom would come in from the garden, shirt caked with topsoil, shoes caked with dog shit, screaming at me I should put away the books I’d left on the bookshelves. She liked to keep her plastic flowers up on the booksheleves, and my books took up space. But Barney solved that problem for me when he chewed on the flowers up and ate them. “Shit! how many fucking times have I told you to train your damn dog! And find a place to put all these books – not on my bookshelves dammit!” She screamed.
“What do you want me to do with them if not put them on bookshelves?” I asked the dumb bitch.
“Don’t you get snotty with me you little son-of-a-bitch!” I didn’t.
I could’ve trained Barney, and I knew how. Charles’s dad Derek loved aggressive macho dogs. They owned a racist black Chow named Nikki. Nikki used to come at me, fangs bared and sneezing, and grab me by the elbow. Charles would grab Nikki by the scruff of the neck and slam her against the wall. “That’s how to train a dog, pussy,” He said, “You have to let them know you’re boss, just like you know I’m yours.”
I tried it with Barney, grabbed him by the scruff and he just roared at me, scaring me half to death. “What the Hell are you doing to that poor dog!?” Mom shrieked, “You’re hurting him!”
“But mom, Charles told me that’s how you train a dog.”
“What does he know?”
“He owns a Chow that listens to him,” I said.
“He’s a brute! That poor dog must be terrified! And besides that, Chows are notoriously vicious!” She said.
“Well, what do I do?”
“You have to be polite. Ask Barney please, like this... Please come here Barney.” Barney lifted his leg and pissed on her new chair. “God dammit Sonny! Get him trained or I’ll sell him to the knackers!”
“What’s the knackers?” I asked.
“Just go get the vinegar!”
Fortunately for me there was not a whole lot Barney wasn’t allowed to do. He got the couch for example. When I tried to take it back from him he’d growl. When I mentioned the growling Dad said, “Then don’t sit on the couch - use the floor.”
Eventually Barney moved beyond the pond to wander for blocks and blocks. Dad let him out the back door and he’d swim across the pond and go up the street, where he mauled a little Spitz owned by the nicest lady. She never realized Barney had tore all of the hair off of her dog and left those bleeding holes. She thought it was from buckshot from a neighbor that’d threatened her because his garbage cans had been tipped over and torn up. It wasn’t her dog that’d torn up the garbage either, but Barney.
Once we started getting calls about Barney mauling neighbor dogs, dad decided to let him free after dark. Dad let him go around ten. He’d return the next day around noon, caked in mud and blood, carrying old chicken bones or some toy dog’s amputated leg. Dad thought it was cute.
Then finally the doggy cops got him. They threatened to take him if dad didn’t keep him leashed. So I took him on leashed walks. He was full size by then, and blast out of the door like a greyhound on a rabbit. I’d slam chin-first into the ground, sliding across the yard and down the hill, too stubborn to let go. I’d turn around, crying for help, and there were my parents, giggling and waving, pulling out a camera, “They’re having so much fun!”
I always took him to the woods behind the Scalbarino’s house to play Old Yeller or Rin Tin Tin. I’d cut through their yard to play with their Collie, Tinker Bell. Barney loved Tinker. He raped so frequently. Tinker was tolerant at first, and it was a relief to me, because it kept him from raping me. But she got sick of it and hid behind me. I tried and save her, which pissed Barney roff. But I was prepared, “Please Barney, It’s not nice to rape Tinker. Thank you.”
Whenever that big dog growled it shot a liquid chill through me, made me quake. I looked at the size of him. He was nose-to-nose with me, and way more aggressive. I knew only too well that if I truly pissed him off he’d tear my face off. Nonetheless, with some coaxing I always managed to get him out into the woods, where he followed rabbit trails while I filled my head with visions of adventures gleaned from Call of the Wild, and Where the Red Ferns Grow. I imagined my own sledding team, about 20 different breeds I’d harness. I even attempted to harness Barney to a sled once, but he growled so menacingly it took me an hour to get close enough to untie him.
This was when I had my paper route. I took Barney every morning on my paper route because I was worried about getting attacked by some sicko stalker. Barney must’ve trusted me to take care of myself, because he never stuck around. He’d disappear, so that after delivering papers I’d spend the next six hours on my bike, wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of him. I enjoyed searching. I never really wanted to find him, but it was an excuse to get my bike back and not return home, and to visit Charles so he could show me how to train a dog by smashing it against a tree.
While reading Call of the Wild and White Fang, I was struck by the fact that London claimed that dog packs sometimes tear one another to pieces, and wolves eat people, and even noble Indians actually club the shit out of the half-wild huskies. I went to dad to ask him if this was true. “Of course not, Scott. It’s fiction. It’s analogy. Wolves don’t attack people. People attack people. Wolves, on the other hand, shy away from people. They make a conscious decision to avoid the establishments of man.”
“But Dad aren’t wolves predators?”
“Yes.” He said.
“Don’t predators go after the easiest prey?”
“Yes.”
“People are slow, and we don’t have sharp teeth or claws. We make easy prey.”
“No no - they go after wounded caribou - not people.” He said.
“Why would they distinguish man from any other prey, dad?” I asked.
“I don’t know why, Sonny. But they do. Wolves have never been documented attacking people.”
“Jack London documented it.” I said.
“It’s fiction. Like The Big Bad Wolf, or the Three Little Pigs. Are you gonna believe that pigs build houses made of straw, or that wolves dress up like Granny?”
“No.”
“Well, then there you go.” He said.
“But Barney - I saw him throw the neighbor’s Pekapoo into the air, and catch him in his teeth!”
“They were just playing.” Dad said.
“But the Pekapoo - it screamed!” I said.
“That’s how Pekapoos bark.”
“It was bleeding around its neck!” I said.
“So Barney plays a little rough.”
The older he got, the rougher he played. But there was one dog in the neighborhood that he never played rough with, a female Pit that he allowed to try and rape him. This was Sheba, owned by the only other black family in the neighborhood besides Charles’s. This was Marcus’s house. My mother had warned me that all Pitbulls, a hundred percent of them, are insane man-eaters. “It’s not whether you train the dog or not,” she told me, “It’s the breed.”
“But mom, you’ve always taught me that people are all the same beneath the skin - so shouldn’t all dogs be the same beneath the skin?”
“No! Pit Bulls are killers - and Golden Retrievers are gentle! Go clean up Barney’s mess.”
“That’s the shit you tracked in on your shoes.”
“Shut up asshole!”
I cleaned up Mom’s shit tracks, tied Barney up, and went up the street to Marcus’s house. I was greeted at the door by a Pitbull on her back, wagging its tail and begging me to rub its belly, Sheba the man-killer. “Marcus,” I asked, “How do you get a bloodthirsty Pitbull to behave so well?”
He grabbed Sheba by the throat and lifted her into the air, “You establish dominance,” he said, slamming Sheba to the floor and sitting on her. “Here,” he said, still holding the waggling time-bomb by the neck, “you try it.”
“I can’t Marcus.”
“Why not?”
“Mom said it’s cruel.”
Marcus’s mom was there, and she heard what I said, “Cruel? Does this dog look abused? Look at her wagging and kissing you. Your mom is a crazy white woman! That dog is gonna hurt somebody besides a Pekapoo, and you’ll be sorry Son!” This was not the first nor the last time I heard this. I heard it when I delivered the papers, from Charle’s mom Aretha, from Mrs. Scalabrino, and from kids I barely knew.
One day, while “playing,” with a neighbor’s Dachshund, I tried to call Barney on a time-out, as Mom had instructed. He turned to me, the Dachshund playing dead between his teeth, dropped the weener-dog and went for my throat. Thankfully he missed and chomped on my face instead, until I managed to get my arm between us. Then he chomped on my arm, “Please Barney - it’s not nice to tear my face off!” I allowed him time to think about it, just as mom had suggested, allowed him time to consider his options. Eventually he decided spare my life. I went home to ask my parents what to do, and Barney followed behind, quite proud of himself.
My dad looked at me. I was still covered in blood. He said, “I’m not sure what to do... What do you want me to do, Son?”
I knew exactly what I wanted him to do, “Kill him Dad! Shoot him! Let me shoot him!”
“I couldn’t live with myself, doing that,” Dad sighed, shrugging, wiping a tear from his nose, “poor dog.”
“Well then,” I said, “the lady said to cut his nuts off!”
“Son, you know I can’t do that. It’s inhumane. Barney has his rights you know.”
“Well, then what do we do?” I asked.
“I’ll let you take Barney to a trainer.” Dad said.
My mom agreed, and I took Barney to a trainer, right after going to get eighteen stitches in my face and twenty-five in my arm.
Once Dad was gone the trainer said, “What kind of crazy parents allow their child to get attacked by an alpha-male? This dog is just full of testosterone.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“How come they didn’t have its nuts clipped?”
“Mom and Dad feel it’s cruel to do that.”
“If you don’t train a dog, it will train you. This is a natural mammalian law. It even works with people. Here, let me show you what to do with this dog.” She tried to put him through a trap-door. He didn’t like that idea, and growled. So she grabbed by the skin on his back and swung him like a hammer throw and hit the floor roaring. Then she straddled him, twisting his ears until he cried out. “There. Now you try it.”
The next month was bliss while at the trainer’s, for she insisted I throw Barney down and twist his ear until he cried. These were my first lessons in Martial Arts. After that Barney wasn’t the only one I trained. Anybody calling my Mom nuts, I slammed, occasionally even twisting some fool’s ears until he cried. Mom heard about me doing this to other kids and encouraged it. But she never heard about me doing it to Barney. I always made sure she wasn’t around when I took the pliers to him.
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Scott Morley bio
Scott Morley has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Most recently he’s published in Traveler’s Tales. He’s also published in Larry Flynt’s Big Brother Magazine, Jeff Lebow’s Korea Bridges, and Tom Glaister’s Road Junky. On Busan Web he published The Mother-In-Law Diaries, a column about raising his sons with his Korean mother-in-law, wife, neighbors and other in-laws. On this website and Korea Bridges he also won several awards for fiction. In 2011 he won several awards with Kellogg Community College’s Multicultural Medley Arts Contest/Poetry and Fiction Division.
Scott has lived and written in South Korea, Turkey, and China. He now lives in Vietnam where he’s attempting to publish his picaresque novel, Hanson’s Homeland, about an American expat in Asia with a deep-seeded phobia of everything American.
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extend
Janet Kuypers
1/19/15 (1/20/15 IST, from the India haiku series), on twitter
doctors found gene to
extend life; plan to use for
anti-aging cream
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Margins
Matt Koch
“Everyone’s a little gay,” I scribbled toward the edge of my notebook paper beside world history notes. I was about to flip the page when the meaty hand of Bobby Masterson snatched the sheet straight out of my notepad.
“Look,” he whispered, while passing the page to Daniel Richtfield. “Big Nose is admitting he’s gay!”
“I told you!” said a snickering Daniel as he began circulating the torn paper around the room.
Ms. Levine flashed her bespectacled eyes at our bustling corner of the classroom just in time to see me pop Bobby on the shoulder.
This wasn’t my first visit to the principal’s office, but every other instance had been for cutting class after lunch—and once for writing a dirty limerick in English class. I slumped back into the enormity of the bonded leather chair and breathed in an amalgam of lavender and mildly acetic hand sanitizer that permeated Dr. Davidson’s sacred little space. For a minute or two he delicately fingered a ghost orchid that peeked in mocking repose over the rim of a Waterford crystal vase. Then, sighing, he hoisted the glass as if he were going to offer a toast and then clanked it down on a remote corner of his desk.
“I do understand that those boys have been picking on you for some time,” said Principal Davidson. “So, I can’t really blame you too much for standing up for yourself. Unfortunately, this school does have a zero tolerance policy toward physical violence. Sam, I uh—” He rubbed together his recently manicured mocha fingers. “I’m afraid I have to place you in ISS for the rest of the week.” He returned to his shrugging orchid.
Years later—after college, after moving north to a rust belt mining town, after a broken engagement to a part-time wedding planner, and after receiving an early morning text with the words “car crash” and “Bobby Masterson”—I thought back to high school. There was Samantha Higgins, who shaved her head sophomore year after dumping her final boyfriend. And what about Thomas White, who sported leather pants and shopped at the Coach store in the mall with Stacy Sanders and Amanda Cummings? Bobby and Daniel never picked on either of them, while I was shunned for a week in gym after praisingBrokeback Mountain. It’s funny, I thought, as I stared out of my midrise apartment window at the yellowing grass of the courtyard, how fast we all fled after high school. One season crushed another and colored the earth with erasable markers. Meanwhile, the washed pallor of the violet wisteria vines continued its menacing climb up the lattice next to the brick wall that led toward my open window. There I perched atop a tufted emerald side chair—forever crunching on the polystyrene barrel of the Bic tucked snuggly within my cheek and peering lecherously at the blank remaining space off to the side of a crowded sheet of paper.
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Matt Koch brief bio
Matt has a doctorate in English from TCU and teaches creative writing, college composition, and literature. He has published both in scholarly journals and within more creative venues.
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Change of State
Dean Jones
The skyline dominated with old factory chimneys of the proud working class town. Shifts started and ended, with black faces emerging from the depths of the industry that created the town we know today.
People went about their business on a cold September morning, hoping for life to provide pleasant surprises and that the joy once embedded in the town would remain.
It was Friday, and the pubs and clubs would be packed later in the day as a celebration of how good life could be when surrounded by friends and family, and not infected by the wealth and trivialities of the middle class. They were never welcome and would never fit in, with the population ready to fight to preserve their way of life.
However, the middle and upper class attack came in an instant, with no time to react, creating thousands of cremations with no coffins. The class war had begun.
A bright blinding light of a billion dollar red, white and blue capitalist program exploded above the town producing extreme heat and a blast wave of winds. At that very point individuals directly under the explosion were instantaneously vaporized. Those within a mile suffered a horrifying death as their skin was charred or peeled away from their bodies, their eyes melted, and all that was left was a burnt out shell. Those who didn’t die instantly would suffer agonizing pain and radiation poisoning which would could take a few hours to a few days to finally destroy the victim.
The middle classes laughed from the shelters in suburbia at the pain they caused. Teasing the dying to fight back knowing that it would be impossible. They watched as people starved and couldn’t find water, as the leaches drank and ate to their hearts content.
In one instance, they saw a survivor crawling through the wreckage the searing pain encompassed his entire body as he slowly died. He had lost his left leg, and tried to raise himself with a piece of wood lying in the ruins. But he didn’t have the strength to lift his body and him agonizingly onto the ground, gasping and crying in pain. All he could see was the desolation surrounding him; the town he knew and loved was gone and replaced with what he envisaged was hell.
Buildings were either flattened by the initial shockwave or crumbling as fire burned out of control around the Town. There was no hope of rescue or an end the suffering of thousands of innocent victims. They are considered as innocent as they did not have a role in the war and had not been involved in the fighting between the armies of class.
There were cries all around him, shouts for help mixed with sounds of endless fires, burning and spread by ferocious winds of the fire storm and buildings continuing to crumble after having been weakened from the initial explosion. He could not get his bearings as there was nothing familiar in the surrounding area.
All he could remember was walking down towards his place of work in the south of the town and was aware of people looking up at a plane high up and an object falling from the sky. In second there was a blinding light with searing wave of heat which immediate burned the shirt from his back and the trousers from his legs. The following blast threw him several yards and he landed at the base of a small brick wall.
It seemed like a lifetime before he was able to move and look up at what had happened. All he saw were fires raging all across the Town. The place he knew seemed to have been soaked in oil and a match tossed onto the Town, immediately turning into an inferno.
His burns were unbelievably painful whenever he tried even the smallest movement. He felt death surrounding him and he couldn’t understand why innocent people were made to suffer in this inhumane manner. He knew the end was near and prayed that he would go to sleep and never wake up in this hell.
The sky was dark and a thick black liquid fell onto the ground around him. However, this was just another cruel joke. Many of the living grabbed anything that could hold water and try to capture this black rain. The survivors drank it in as they gasped for water. They did not realize that the black rain fell from the mushroom cloud as radioactive. As they poured the liquid down their throats, the radiation slowly spread through their bodies, which would lead to a slow and painful death, if they didn’t already die from their current injuries.
It was impossible to tell whether it was night or day. The burning fires continued and dark sky was like hell. He imagined for a moment laughing as if Lucifer was mocking mankind on their own destruction.
Close by was the twisted wreckage of the district hospital. Half of the building had collapsed, but he hoped that in the remaining floors on the east side of the building would have some medical supplies so he could dress his wounds.
His progress was slow and painful. It took him over an hour to reach the building. As he got closer it was obvious that there was nothing of any value in the remainder of the building. The gaps in the walls showed that the inside had been gutted by fire. Smoke was still drifting out of the lower floors.
As he looked around, he felt helpless and he knew this was the end and that life would never be the same again. The voices around him began to fade into the background, as he the sound of the fires burning and building crumbling was all that could be heard.
Without any warning, the wall of the hospital fell away and landed a short distance from where he lay. What he saw next made him ashamed to be a human being. The bodies of the hospitals patients hung from the crumbling masonry, many burned, other dismembered. He tried to look away but he was transfixed with this grisly scene.
He felt he had cheated death, if only for a few hours. He was so filled with all consuming misery. He looked around to see how he could bring his suffering to end. As he laid on the ground, with all of his remaining strength he picked up a piece of fallen masonry above his head and let go. In a faction of a second he was gone.
As the days passed and turned into weeks, his rotting body, like many others around him, remained uncollected or buried. The stench of rotting flesh and sewage was unbearable. Many of the survivors were in varying states of depression and withdrawal. The spread of diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery were a direct result of the rotting bodies around the Town. The radiation was poisoning survivors who would soon die after slow and painful suffering before any help would arrive.
In other parts of the Town survivors wandered the ruins with varying degrees of injury. They sought what food they could find, but it would be days before recovery services would enter the town. Until then the population would be left to suffer and die.
Nuclear war is a weapon of the rich to spread fear and demand conformity and obedience. It is the working class who have to fight and it is the working class who die.
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Nocturne, Played With Abandon
Zain Saeed
She broke something. I don’t know what exactly. Not my heart or anything. No. More like my nose, or my face. Yeah. I think it’s my face.
She broke my face.
The nerve!
Okay well I might be exaggerating a bit. Just a little. Okay okay so she didn’t really break anything. It was a slap. She slapped me. In the cafeteria of all places! Smack bang in the middle of the cafeteria.
I was sitting there with a couple of friends minding my own business on a blue chair next to a light blue table surrounded by people and the smell of food and munching on some heavenly absolutely heavenly beef stroganoff when I got a message from her.
“We need to talk.”
I pictured her with a spear and a tremendous beard. Death. I shook my head violently.
No one used this bloody phrase before we came along. There is no account of life in the 1850s where an angry woman sends her lover a letter saying “we need to talk”. Then a week later he replies “okay”. And then another week later she replies saying “can you meet me at so and so on so and so?” To which he replies (two weeks later) “I got this three days after your suggested date. How about on so and so?” To which she replies in a further thirteen days: “Okay”. And when they finally meet the woman’s not really sure what she wanted to say in the first place and the man has already begun courting some other woman he met while milking a cow. Or maybe a goat.
I like goats.
Anyways. Letters. I wish we still had letters. They might save us.
So she said:
“We need to talk.”
To which I replied:
“No.”
To which she couldn’t reply because she was apparently out of credit as I found out five minutes later along with other information she had for me regarding my libido, cheapness, fatness and such qualities. Let me explain why I said no:
The night before, at precisely 3:24 a.m., I was caught red handed by the aforementioned girl while fraternizing with another member of the opposite sex. Note the use of the word “fraternizing”; I was merely being friendly. There was absolutely no physical contact except for our feet with the ground and our hands with our glasses and our limbs with ourselves. I must explain that it was a party (red, everything was red) and the woman I was speaking to was my sister-in-law-twice-removed anyways so I wasn’t really in a compromising position. However, as such times in life go, The Woman saw us standing in a corner exchanging smiles. I had at that very instant told my sister-in-law-twice-removed a childhood story about a play called “My Pineapples Are Chickens” (which was really all a lie I made up in that very moment in a bid to sound like I had lived a full life rife with cheeky plays) and gotten nothing close to the hearty guffaw that I had expected. The Woman stormed towards us and gave my sister-in-law-twice-removed the Stare of Perpetual Disdain (I hate the Stare of Perpetual Disdain) forcing her to back slowly out of the room. The Woman then turned towards me and said something I couldn’t hear but to which I nodded and smiled anyways. Apparently it was the appropriate reaction to what she had said because she walked back to where she was before, looking completely satisfied.
That was why I said no. I was afraid.
The minute I sent the message I saw lightning.
Thunder showed up about five minutes later.
It said:
“No? NO? What is THAT supposed to mean?”
I replied with some weird whale-like moans because my mouth was at that time full of the aforementioned stroganoff.
Then she slapped me.
Right across the face.
In full view of the entire clientele.
Bits of beef rocketed out of my mouth and onto the table. Audio accompaniment was provided by The Woman in the form of hurtful information as I’ve already explained. My friends pretended to pose for a picture that someone on the other side of the cafeteria was taking.
She didn’t stop with one slap, oh no. She went for another but missed. By the time she got to revealing sensitive information about my apparent uselessness in bed her screeching had reached swan-level and the whole cafeteria was now tuned in to the action. Boxing commentary would not have been out of place.
It took her two whole minutes to calm down. I felt the air get dense with expectation as people then turned their focus on to me. I had to do something, so I decided to do what any self-respecting man would have done in such a situation:
I laughed.
“HA HA HA!”
I kept on laughing. I couldn’t stop. I hadn’t found any of that funny at all, no. I just didn’t know what else to do. It was almost involuntary. Everything was so ridiculous.
But it wasn’t the first time. Shit like this happened if you were in love with The Woman. Which isn’t to say that I was any less of a drama-monger myself. I was probably worse. (Or better, depending on your outlook on life).
I laughed harder.
Knockout.
The whole cafeteria joined in the laughter. The awkwardness died. Food became the order of the day once more. We all became twenty-somethings again.
All of us, except her. She left, crying.
Or was it laughing? I couldn’t tell which.
***
I’ll tell you how I met her.
Three years ago. It was the year where everything that could fall into place did not fall into place and decided instead, along with other clichés, to continue in a similar shitty fashion for its entirety.
That was until I met her. In a bar. Promise. I really did. I’d never picked up a girl in a bar before. Never. The only way I was going to leave a bar with a girl I hadn’t come in with was if she had a psychological condition that ran contrary to pogonophobia, maybe something that made her fall terribly in love with beards.
I must admit, I had a pretty decent beard.
I was having my usual happy hour beer at the bar when she came up to me from behind and said:
“Hi.”
She was neither attractive nor ugly. Her face had a slight carbuncular intensity (it was allergy season). When men through the ages thought of women in their heads, they did not think of her.
The minute she started speaking, though, I was ready to spend my life buffing up her nails and straightening her hair (not that she needed it; curly, I love curly hair). I was ready to jump off tables and declare war on pesticides and collide with goats and pray to god (or the secular equivalent) and recycle and talk about politics and wait up for her when she was out with her girlfriends and make her breakfast in the morning or in the afternoon or at night.
I was, simply, a goner.
Ten minutes into our conversation she was the most beautiful thing in the universe and at any bars or restaurants present at the ends of it. Her eyes – gray, green; they could make you feel like you had no pants on. I couldn’t gather the courage to ask her for her number, where she lived or what she liked to eat. I don’t even know what we talked about for however long we sat there. Then she got up and left.
I woke up the next day and all my hair was standing up on end because the electric charge from her hand on my shoulder had still not completely dissipated. Well, at least that’s what I told myself. My hair had a tendency to do that anyways.
I also felt like slapping myself silly because I didn’t know how to find her.
I kept going to that bar every day for the next month hoping to run into her (convincing myself that I was actually going because their cocktails were reasonably priced, not because of her) but she was never there.
It wasn’t obsession. It was worse. I just thought of her at random points throughout the day: while opening the fridge door, while scratching my face, while doing the dishes etc. I also began misinterpreting exclamations as questions, which created further, albeit unrelated problems, and gave me the perpetual appearance of someone who had forgotten to lock the front door on his way out.
I started noticing little pouches of belly fat and began to go for runs in the park. Another Doner I did not eat. I cleaned my room almost every other day. I shampooed my hair as if the lives of all the world’s children depended on it. I took special care to have chewing gum on me at all times.
Then one day I ran into her. Well, we both ran into each other. She was still single, she hadn’t grown another leg, she was just as beautiful, just as interesting and, apparently, equally interested. So we got together. It was perfect.
***
Three years later, today happened.
I finished eating what was left of my stroganoff, shook my head with disapproval at my friends, and headed off to find her.
I found her on the stairs that led up to a bank building.
What did she look like?
Shit. Shit is what she looked like. We’d already had several conversations as to whether our sole purpose in life consisted of intermittently looking like shit for the other person. We were yet to agree on an answer.
“I must admit you do a pretty good bird screech,” I said.
“This isn’t funny.”
“I know.”
“What?”
“What?”
“Whatever.”
“Okay.”
Then she lit a cigarette. Then I lit a cigarette. And we smoked it all in complete silence.
“Okay. I’m sorry,” she said after she was done.
“I know.”
More silence.
I wasn’t angry. At all. She wasn’t either. The stroganoff gurgled in my stomach in protest against my nonchalance but I ignored it.
“You know, that was a relative of mine yesterday,” I said.
“Really? Haha. That’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“Give me your phone I need to check my email.”
I gave her my phone.
“Do you realize there may be a time when this stops working?” She said.
“I do.”
“So?”
“So what? I know other stairs.”
***
I don’t recall when I first realized that everything I had thought about her after that night at the bar owed a massive debt to my powers of description; that if I began to forget the words I’d used, she’d shed skin. Maybe one day she’d disappear completely, dissolve into a flaky powder, all because I couldn’t describe her to myself anymore.
I did forget my words. Very soon. But she didn’t disappear. No. In fact she became more solid – words now seemed to beat a hasty retreat, bouncing off this force field she’d conjured. I soon found out that I could conjure one up for myself too.
And just like that, words were defeated.
She probably didn’t disappear because she realized at the same time as I did that our lives really weren’t going to change just by us having run into each other. The fact that I’d met her, and that she’d met me, and that there was enough electricity between us to power a small city, meant nothing in the present.
In the past, yes. In the past it mattered. In the past everything was either perfect or completely shit. There was rarely an in-between. Smiles were unnaturally happy. It meant something. It was something to think about during a rough day at work. It was something to wallow on when the feeling took you. The past was what you saw in the movies. It was scary. It was whole. Solid.
In the future too, yes. It mattered. Everything mattered. We were closer. We knew each other better. We’d gone through what most people were supposed to get through. It was something to look forward to, something we were moving towards.
But in the present, in the moment, nothing meant anything. No matter what had happened, or would happen, nothing mattered. Someone would always be a second away from being shat on by a pigeon, from standing, lifting, opening, grilling, bumping, turning, changing, scratching, glancing, sneezing and tapping things. And then nodding and leaving.
Nothing could affect how all of the above could happen simultaneously and change something. How being shat on by a pigeon could lead me, while standing on a balcony, to lift up my coffee cup and with one hand open a door that led somewhere where people grilling chicken were bumping lips against each other while someone was turning the door knob from the inside of the bathroom opposite and the delivery man below was changing the songs on his IPod while scratching his collar bone and glancing constantly at the balcony (where someone was sneezing and tapping their fingers on the railing) because my doorbell wasn’t working. And then him nodding and leaving.
He left, taking the cake she’d sent me with him. I was sad. I was mad at her. I refused to listen to her. We had our biggest fight in months. Over confectionery.
There was not a spark in sight.
Bloody pigeon.
No wonder people who live in the moment go mad.
***
We sat there for two hours. By the end, she’d forgotten everything, and I’d forgotten everything.
That was how it had always been. Lines between affection and pure, unadulterated loathing would occasionally become blurred when either of us got bored. When that happened, someone would flip out and do their best to get under the other’s skin. We’d either stand face to face and yell things at each other or send messages at random intervals so it got doubly annoying, so the other couldn’t get extended periods of reprieve. We’d begin with sarcasm and snideness. We’d follow it up with hyperbolic anecdotes that neither of us really recognized. Then we’d bring out the big guns: the superlatives. Next came the silences: long, winding, deafening. After that came repetition. We’d say the same things that we’d just said, sometimes in the exact same words, thinking that the other wouldn’t notice that we’d run out of points to drive home. Any rational conclusion was then out of the question and whatever followed was orchestrated purely by a thirst for adrenaline. It felt good.
And then suddenly, everything was fine once again.
By now, we’d become semi-professionals at upsetting each other.
It was perfect, really.
We got up off the stairs and began to walk along the street.
“So. Are we human or are we clouds?” She said.
“What the...?
“Just wondering.”
“You’re weird.”
“So are you.”
Silence for a minute.
“So tell me something. Uh... Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with a conversation?” She said.
I wanted to ask her if she was talking about our first conversation, but I knew better. We didn’t talk about such things.
“Em. Yeah probably.”
“I mean just the conversation. Not the person you had it with.”
“Em. What?”
“Well. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and remember every word of a conversation you had, but you don’t know who you spoke to, what they looked like, what their voice was like, whether it was a man or a woman, whether they...em... used abbreviations when they typed, where and when you had that conversation. Nothing.”
“Like something I read in a book?”
“No no that would mean knowing where the conversation happened. No. Just words and sentences in your brain. Things that make you smile, laugh, cringe, cry. Everything you ever wanted someone to say, and everything you yourself wanted to say to someone, all in one conversation. All in your head. In your own little nutshell.”
“Hmm. Er. I don’t know. But no. I think I’d have to know who said those things.”
“Even if you didn’t need to at all? I mean, what more do you want?”
“Yeah. I don’t know. You have massive ears.”
She bumped into my shoulder.
She coughed.
The usual things.
We walked for ten minutes and got to the bus stop. We sat on a bench to wait for the bus.
“I really am sorry.”
“I know I know.”
“It’s those glasses of yours...”
“My glasses?”
“Yeah. They look...ugh. Bloody hell.” She kissed me.
“That escalated quickly.”
She coughed again.
We sat in silence for the next - I don’t remember how long - for the next really-long-period-of-time. Her head was on my shoulder. I could smell the Old Spice on her. I was looking straight ahead. If only I knew what she was thinking then...
Not really, though. Even if I did know, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Everything else I thought of that night I’ve forgotten, because thirty seconds later her breathing slowed down, her whole weight settled on me, and her movements became scarce.
I never knew having someone fall asleep on me on a bench while waiting for a bus could feel like the greatest feeling in the world.
It did.
We missed our bus, though, because I too fell asleep. She wasn’t too happy about it.
But, as I was slowly beginning to find out, happiness, really, was hardly ever the point.
|
Blessed Mother
Rosalie Krenger
Sweat drips like melted wax between her shoulder blades, off the tip of her nose onto her lips, but other than licking the salt away she makes no show that the heat is bothering her. The light slanting in through the barn slats shimmers with the summer dust kicked up as everyone shuffles in. In moments her brothers and sisters surround her on the plank floor at their father’s feet, all listening rapt as he recounts the news he has brought back of the war.
He tells of the evils of the heathens they fight against, the atrocities and sins they commit without blinking an eye. The world has become a wicked place; a place where no one out there can be trusted, where even friends might be enemies. Nowhere is safe anymore, and the end of the war is not in sight. The only people that can be trusted are family. The only place that’s safe is home. Here. On the farm with Father, who cares for all of his children with the purest kind of love, the first kinds of love, like God loved Adam and Adam loved Eve. Brothers and sisters alike nod knowingly in agreement and she grabs the sweaty palm of her eldest Sister in reassurance. They share a smile and a quick squeeze of fingers as he recites their daily verses. They bow their heads and await the morning prayer.
But Father says nothing.
She sneaks a glance at him. He sits still, contemplative. The sun slants just so, bringing out the gold that God hid in his hair. He heaves a sigh and steps down off the stool, one slender bare foot sending up a puff of dust as it gently touches the floor. His children watch with wide eyes as he seats himself on the floor in front of them, as he ignores the way the dirt and his sweat mix to make a muddy stain on his white pants.
“Children.” He says looking from face to face, and her heart pounds once, hard and painful in her chest. “My children.” He says, closing his beautiful eyes as though he were in pain, and her heart stops. “I’m sorry. I thought I could keep you safe in this world, but I can’t. I can’t keep the heathens from our door any longer. Nonbelievers,” he says, “Each of them a Judas, have infiltrated our everyday life.” She can hear the wound in his voice and a small thrill of fear shoots through her as she notices the absence of newly familiar faces. She releases a loud, shaky breath, drawing his eyes to her. He smiles at her reassuringly, white teeth in a tan face only outshone by his green eyes, and she becomes acutely aware of the sweat-soaked cotton shirt clinging to her budding chest. She casts her eyes down as he goes on.
“There’s only one way for me to protect you now.” His voice breaks and she finds her hand empty as her Eldest Sister lets go to stifle a sob. Her heart is sore as she looks around and feels the pain that they all feel for this beautiful man.
He doesn’t need to say anything more. A world that causes such pain in so pure a being, so perfect a man, is obviously no place for them.
One by one they rock forward onto their knees and crawl to him, putting a hand on his hand, his knee, his face, offering support through their touch. She feels the understanding and love flow from her siblings to him, and feels him give it back to all of them like a conductor. He offers another smile in thanks and stands, shedding touches like water. He walks out into the daylight and they all resume their places and wait for him to return.
When he comes back he doesn’t say anything. He goes to her youngest brother first and kneels. He pours a small glass and offers it to the boy. Father wraps the boy in his arms as he drinks and after the glass is empty father kisses him on the head. He moves next to her youngest sister and she watches the scene repeat.
Tears stream down faces, but still no one says anything. Heads swoon but still no one says anything. Hearts break, but still...
Her eldest Sister takes her hand again and she looks down at the longer fingers tangled in her own. Before long her father is in front of them. Her eldest Sister’s smile is tired as she takes the cup and drinks first. Those tired lips kiss her hand, those longer fingers slip away, as her eldest Sister lays down.
Father offers her the cup, finally, and she takes it, finally, but does not drink. She looks into the cup and remembers drinking from it when she was smaller. Father tilts her chin up toward his own.
“My child.” He says. “My daughter.” Tears run down her cheeks as he envelopes her in his arms and his scent and his love. “Shhh my child.” He rocks her as she cries and kisses her gently until she stops. She cradles the cup in her lap and he hums the song her eldest Sister used to hum to her in the Before - before they were sisters, when they lived in a city, and the girl laying on the floor next to her was just Mama.
“There is no reason to be scared child,” he soothes as a strange wail sounds in the distance. Father looks toward the door with eyes the color of the meadow outside, and takes the cup gently from her hands. “I’ll show you sweetling.” He takes a deep breath and a small sip.
“You see?” He asks quietly. “We’re going together, all of us. We’ll be a family forever.” He smiles and she returns it weakly. He hands her the cup as the wailing grows louder. Her stomach hurts as Father lays down next to her.
She puts the cup to her lips, but doesn’t drink. She watches the dust dance in the light, inhales the smell of fresh milk and the wheat ripe for harvest. She tastes the dirt in the air and tomato she stole from the garden. She feels the sweat on her forehead and the soft dirt on hard wood under her feet. She hears the birds in the rafters and the breeze that teases the hair off of her neck.
She closes her eyes and cradles the cup again.
All of her siblings lay around her and the wailing grows louder. She presses her hand to her abdomen and tries to feel the life there, the Son. She tries to feel the salvation growing inside her and can only wonder if her new brother would have her Father’s eyes. She looks down at him, but those eyes are closed now. She touches Father’s face one last time and puts the cup to her lips once more.
She sits like that, wondering if she could ever even hope to give the true Son the life He deserves, the love and laughter and praise and hope He deserves, without Father here. And if a life without Father is worth living at all. She imagines the horrors beyond the gate that Father has described and her hand trembles, the cup clicks across her teeth.
The sirens grow louder still, as Father sleeps next to her, and she tries to will the savior inside her to save her.
|
Response to a Self Portrait
Skerdi Brahimaj
Searching like I’ve always done before
But I can’t find “I” anymore
Gone, forgotten
Like a lost cause
Trying to spot the semblance
-to no avail
In place of my self portrait
-only a blank slate
What I once painted with passion
Denies my vision like an illusion
This is a response to my self portrait
That lingers in a mental allusion
Have I lost my sight?
How can the paint disappear?
Is the canvas deceiving me again
for me to not exist?
The brush shakes in the hand
Dips in paint but all is clear
Impossible to recreate
The self portrait that used to be...
Even before there was a “ME”
|
Concrete Gray
Denny E. Marshall
Monday at work
I go to break
Behind the building
Away from everybody
Smoking a cigarette
Sitting on old railroad ties
The ugly green building
Is close enough
I could throw rocks at it
And never miss
The concrete silo
Stands silent gray
The weekend snow
All around me
Feel I am in the Arctic Circle
Thousands of miles away
So alone
Like the silo
Concrete gray
She goes on in my mind
Like the train tracks behind me
1st published “Abandoned Towers” Online 2010
|
The Intergalactic Brotherhood of Envatted Brains
Adam Mac
Seven brains in their respective nutrient-rich traveling vats are packed and ready to go to their first union convention. All come from the Advanced Mind Lab where they have been admitted for different reasons—old age, car accident, national security, expropriated body, witness protection, and just wrong place wrong time. At the lab, they are obliged to participate fully in the neurophysiological experiments, which are intellectually rigorous and emotionally draining, in many cases requiring supplementary psychiatric therapy. Management’s proposed changes to the lab’s protocols and the experimentation schedule have rallied the brains around a cause. Recently, following up on a tip from one of the friendly lab assistants, the brains unanimously voted to join a union.
Amelia: Where’s Mr. Caballo? I thought he’d enjoy getting away for awhile. I so enjoy his company.
Ted: He was afraid of management retaliation and he wants to keep a low profile. Ever since Dr. Wienckell taped our therapy session, he’s been more than usually paranoid. You know, the assassination plot he’s obsessing about.
Dotty: So, has anyone been to one of these conventions before?
Louis: I don’t think any of us has. We only just learned about IBEB, but I hear they’re pretty wild, especially when they’re not in session, and they spend most of their time not in session.
Hugh: Yeah, I heard the same thing. I hope this isn’t going to be a waste of our time.
Amos: I’m not even sure this is the right union, but it’s too late now. Besides it’s the only one that would take us.
Kevin: I can’t believe that management is threatening to take away our therapy sessions. I’m one of the luckier ones, but I need the weekly therapy sessions just to come to grips with living in a vat.
Hugh: And if management has its way, all of us will be working longer hours, too. Forget about leisure time. Now we’ll get 8 hours sleep and 16 hours a day calibrating, testing, and giving feedback then retesting, recalibrating, and providing more feedback. It’ll be double the workload. It’s immoral though not illegal, because as we all know all too well, there are precious few labor laws protecting envatted brains. And that’s precisely why we joined IBEB.
Dotty: That’s true. It’s even worse in some parts of the world and in other galaxies, so I’ve heard, where the brains in the vats aren’t tended to for weeks. Can you imagine swimming in the same nutrient soup for weeks at a time? Yuck!
Amos: God this is a rough ride. Never thought space travel was this herky-jerky. My water’s splashing out of this tiny fish bowl they gave me.
Louis: It’s specially designed for small minds, Amos. Mine’s bigger. In fact everyone’s is bigger.
Amos: You know what you can do with that, Louis?
Louis: Yeah, sorry. Couldn’t resist. You’re right about the ride though. It’s not nearly as smooth or quiet as I expected space travel would be, but then I’ve never been off planet Earth.
Ted: It sounds almost like a train. I remember taking one when I was younger and still had a body. It felt like this – swaying and jerking – and sounded like this with the constant clickety-clack and occasional loud whistle and ding-ding ringing at crossings.
Hugh: Well, it’s an illusion. We can’t get to the IBEB convention by train. It’s too far away ... not even in the same galaxy for God’s sake.
Ted: I think I recognize the stops though.
Hugh: Probably just coincidence. Anyway, we’ve got to be close and we’ll see then.
#
Conductor speaking over the PA system: This is Union Station. All passengers must leave the train. This train is now out of service. For information on connections, please go to the concourse. Thank you for taking Rapid Urban Transit.
Ted: It IS a train!
Amos: And we’re STILL in Kansas, Toto.
Hugh: Relax. Maybe it’s just a transfer point on our itinerary.
Amelia: Is anyone coming to meet us?
Amos: I knew it was a mistake coming.
Kevin: Someone’s bound to find us in this room. But the real question is—
Louis: What will they do when they discover a washroom filled with brains?
Ted: What about the Brotherhood?
Amos: Not in their job description. We’re SOL, LOL.
Amelia: Hello. Can anybody hear me? Are there any telepaths out there? Hello?
Dotty: They can’t hear you, dear.
Amos: Got any more bright ideas, Hugh?
#
Two scientists in white lab coats are surrounded by eight large vats each connected by thick overhead cables to a centrally-located IBM S/390.
Scientist 1: That went pretty well I think. Their uncertainty about their mode of transportation seems to have unsettled them. Little do they know that the train is no more real than the spaceship.
Scientist 2: Yeah, it seems to have been realistic enough ... for our purposes.
Scientist 1: You think it was too subtle?
Scientist 2: No. I think it was very clear, but they WILL have to think about it. We can listen in and get their reactions and present inclinations vis-à-vis unionizing and—
Scientist 1: And recalibrate then retest the scenario if necessary.
|
Paired
Allison Grayhurst
Hole in the sky we go
through. Other way
around, we exit on the peak.
Oblong mercy is the natural order
of things. We see an innate
camera reciting images
made up of everyone’s fluid flames,
discovering everyone’s life is short.
I remember sleeping in a dark summer,
remember the innards of the cave I strode into,
making a home out of its
damp walls and dirt.
I never meant to leave that home, never thought
I could find one to hold awareness with such intensity, savoring
the brink-edge depths, even
expanding the boundaries. Never thought to be coupled,
completed in an evolving perfection, never thought
I could find one to give me permission to embody my desires,
discover my desires before I do, then honor the reciprocation
of mutual satisfied longing.
Our bodies become spiritual.
Ourselves, undivided
from the fixed-point and from the no-point
chaos blues. Our gift
is a box of fresh fruit, full
whenever opened - mixed
succulent, surprising pleasures.
Ours is a wholeness that
can be experienced without complications
because we know that death makes God
necessary, and because
we are braver, only capable
when we are where we stood
before our births, each pore
mingled, sensitized, our organs submerged
in the consciousness of this re-joining,
speaking in tongues, with tongues and touch.
The time of only light awakened, then
the time before light
entered, restored.
|
Allison Grayhurst Bio
Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has over 500 poems published in more than 250 international journals and anthologies. Her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers in 1995. Since then she has published eleven other books of poetry and six collections with Edge Unlimited Publishing. Prior to the publication of Somewhere Falling she had a poetry book published, Common Dream, and four chapbooks published by The Plowman. Her poetry chapbook The River is Blind was published by Ottawa publisher above/ground press in December 2012. More recently, her chapbook Surrogate Dharma was published by Kind of a Hurricane Press, Barometric Pressures Author Series in October 2014. She lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com
|
Fool’s Gold
Neil Flory
foolishly proclaiming that my travels
have led to uncharted regions
loudly he proclaimed his
new religion and it was fun
and rebellious and really hip
and in many aspects actually
extremely intelligent and
interesting yet after only a
few moments I again
rejected it in favor
of the old
all of our long centuries exalted
civilizations great cities
and systems and yet we
remain a single
microscopic organism who has
burrowed into a single grain
of sand which is now violently
tossed and adrift only
for an instant in the vast
churning ocean depths
of the earth’s time
upon reaching the great
and high summit I
surprisingly discover boredom:
the chase contains the thrills
the kill is
really no fun after all
|
The Ritual
Patty Somlo
Billy got to thinking about the old days on a cloudy Wednesday morning, when he should have been working out a scheme to pull himself up from the hole. Sitting in his office, a ground-floor space with two wide floor-to-ceiling windows that looked directly across Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard at the new loft project in which he had sunk too much of his own money, Billy knew this was a mess he might not be able to talk or pray or scheme or borrow his way out of.
For a time, Billy had done extremely well, buying up old rundown houses in the neighborhood, paying rock-bottom prices all in cash after the bank foreclosed. He made each place look nice without going overboard, selling for a handsome profit. Some neighborhood old-timers considered Billy a vulture for cleaning up off of struggling folks’ misfortune. None of them ever said this to Billy’s face, because before becoming a real estate investor, Billy Boggs had been a credit to the race. Billy Boggs had been a star.
Billy Boggs had also been known as a superstitious ballplayer. Most of all, though, Billy “the Bomber” Boggs got famous for hitting home runs. Nobody cared if the Bomber seemed a little off. As long as he kept blasting pitches so high in the outfield guys didn’t know where the ball would come down, the Bomber could stand on his head and wiggle his toes for all the fans, commentators and coaches minded.
Even in the days when he ran the bases quicker than lightening and slid into home plate before getting tagged out, the brown-skinned Boggs with the memorable large solemn eyes carried extra weight around. Now, when he spent most of his time sitting down, the pounds had crept up. Still in his early fifties, Billy needed to push himself up with both hands from sitting, like a man who had several decades on him. The worrying he’d done this past year as he watched his fortune melt away had caused his hair to turn ashy and recede further back from his forehead.
If he’d just stuck to houses, he thought, every time he started to beat himself up about the hole he had gotten into. He’d gotten greedy, that was all. When the opportunity came up and the white developers from downtown promised potential investors the lofts would be sold before the foundations were even poured, Billy let the thought of quick double-digit returns convince him to put more money in than his gut told him was wise. Displacing long-time black businesses, the three loft projects Billy sunk money into around MLK Boulevard were not popular with longtime neighborhood folks. Billy, however, disagreed, believing the projects would lift the neighborhood up.
A few lofts were sold in each of the buildings and owners moved in. But the majority stayed empty. Having borrowed and then borrowed more to cover his debts, Billy fell into a deep financial crevasse. He’d reluctantly started to consider bankruptcy.
So here he was, sitting in his office pretending not to believe that eighty percent of the lofts hadn’t sold and he didn’t have all his money tied up in those buildings. Instead, Billy let his thoughts travel back to a better time.
When Billy was still playing ball, everybody wanted to know what he did out there before heading to the batters’ box. The commentators watched him after the announcer called his number and his position, second baseman, and finally his name. From the on-deck circle where he’d swung the bat and moved his mind into what he thought of as the zone, Billy stepped a few feet from home plate and drew some symbols in the dirt, using the tip of the bat. Then he shuffled his feet in what looked to the crowd like an Irish dance. Last but not least, he blessed himself – once, twice and then a third and final time – before strolling to the plate and getting ready to bat.
The ritual was born in San Francisco. Billy had gone looking for something, he wasn’t sure exactly what. A young player headed for the big leagues, Billy didn’t want to admit that he was after a lucky charm.
His first spring training, he explained to the beautiful girl working in the Mission District shop. She didn’t know a thing about baseball, she confessed.
“Baseball is everything,” Billy said and smiled.
Several girls had let Billy know they thought he had a beautiful smile, so he made sure to slap one on his face and beam straight ahead at this angel.
She was lovely. “The Dominican Republic,” she said, when Billy asked where she was from. Her accent sounded like music to dance to, only Billy wasn’t much of a dancer, her skin caramel colored, and her wildly curly hair the shade of toffee. Her eyes were green and soft. Looking at her, Billy couldn’t think straight.
The store sold candles and statues of Catholic saints. Alicia was the angel’s name and she had on a pale blue sweater and gauzy white skirt that drifted down to her ankles. Billy could see her legs through the skirt, which unsettled him. She began telling Billy about Santeria and how they still practiced it in places like Cuba. Billy didn’t remember much afterwards that she had said, mostly because he was figuring out how to get this girl to go out with him. He did grasp several things. Santeria was based on practices the slaves brought from Africa, combined with Catholicism. And the rituals helped practitioners believe they could get what they wanted in their lives.
At that moment, Billy wanted two things. He most definitely wanted this girl and he wanted to be the best ballplayer that ever stepped onto a major league diamond. He kept asking questions because he wanted to keep looking at this beautiful woman. And he kept smiling.
Billy rarely thought about the old days. The few times he did, well, it just made him melancholy. Billy didn’t use that term to describe his feelings. Neither would he have admitted that he felt depressed, though that was more like it. If he’d been honest with himself, which he rarely was, dwelling on the days when he was a star felt too much like grieving for someone close who had died. He wasn’t that guy anymore, the Bomber who felt so passionately about life and believed anything was possible. That guy had died.
Yet remembering now, he realized that it happened so suddenly. If he’d paid more attention and read about players who had come before him, Billy would have known. Instead, he concentrated on his swing and stance, putting himself in the zone, and making sure that nothing got in the way of what he referred to as being one hundred percent.
Well, almost nothing. Billy had a couple of weaknesses. The first happened to be that Dominican beauty, Alicia. The day Billy met her and she helped him find something that wasn’t a lucky charm like a rabbit’s foot or a smooth stone for rubbing or even a shiny gold cross was two days shy of Billy’s twenty-third birthday. He was slim and strong, in the best physical shape he’d ever be, with those wide, dark brown eyes that knew how to take in a woman’s best features and reflect them back to her. He’d already seen how this made girls, and later women, want to slide their arms through his and let Billy take them anyplace he wanted to go.
So this is what happened with Alicia. Billy left the city for spring training with a ritual she’d helped him devise. It wasn’t until later that he learned he’d left Alicia with something to remember him by. Billy did the right thing and married her.
The Bomber had a weakness for more than his wife Alicia. He also loved to eat. The more home runs he hit and the higher the ball soared, the bigger his appetite seemed to get.
When reporters asked the Bomber why he gorged himself, he explained, “I love the taste of food.” He might go on to describe a sirloin steak he’d eaten the night before, cooked rare the way he liked, and the cherry cheesecake he’d savored afterwards.
“At least I don’t drink,” Billy sometimes said, usually to himself. He would say this, thinking about his father, who drank himself out of one job after the next, until he ended up on the street, and then dead, in a downtown doorway one frigid December morning. Billy didn’t view his appetite for food as an addiction, like his father’s sickness. He loved life, he liked to say, and this was how the media portrayed him. That is, as long as he kept hitting those home runs.
The few times Billy let himself think about what he and the media dubbed the slide, he remembered that it began on a Tuesday night, at a home game against the Dodgers. The legendary fog had settled over the stadium early in the afternoon. A light wind scattered drops of heavy mist all around.
Billy swung the bat in the on-deck circle and right away knew something was off. The usual smoothness he had in his swing when he practiced without a ball had gone missing. He didn’t like thinking about his swing, preferring to simply move into the place where his arms, the bat, his hips and legs became one. If the swing had been a walk, there would have been a slight limp, a hitch, right at the end, which, of course, lessened its power.
The announcer called Billy’s number, his position and finally his name, and the hometown crowd roared. He stepped closer to the plate, twirling the bat like a baton. The twirling made him appear relaxed, which he was not.
Billy reached the spot where he performed his ritual and stopped. In that moment, his mind went blank. It was like forgetting an old friend’s name, just at the moment he intended to introduce him to someone else. Blank. Billy couldn’t remember how his ritual started.
He shook his head back and forth to clear it and then fiddled with his gloves. There was no way he could bat without first performing the ritual but all memory of it had gone. He needed time, but where would he get that, now that time was running out?
So he crossed himself and whispered a prayer, pleading with God to help him. Then without another thought, he began to scratch in the dirt, using the end of the bat in front of the tip of his shoes. The quick foot shuffle followed and he tapped the end of the bat against his toes, patted his helmet to conclude, and stepped over to the plate.
But he was shaken. Although he’d managed to remember the ritual and perform it in time, the zone was nowhere to be found. He heard the crowd chant. Let’s go Bomber, let’s go. Let’s go Bomber, let’s go. The chant grated on his nerves. What he wanted was silence.
“A swing and a miss,” the announcer informed the fans watching on t.v.
Billy wasn’t aware that he’d swung.
“Got him,” the announcer said, moments after.
Billy turned to look at the umpire, still gesturing with his arms. The Bomber didn’t know what had happened. Without even being aware of the ball flying over the plate from the pitcher’s hand, the Bomber had let himself strike out.
The slide that began on a foggy Tuesday evening took over the Bomber’s life. Although he now remembered the ritual right off when his name was called, the ritual didn’t feel the same. Billy never told anyone that in the old days, every movement he made when he performed the ritual gave him power. Since that fateful Tuesday night, though, he just went through the motions, without getting a single positive thing back.
And then he swung. He swung at high balls and low, outside and inside pitches, even ones that came so close to his chest he had to step back and choke the bat, in order to whack at them. Billy had always been a player who liked to swing but now he couldn’t manage to get his bat in contact with the ball.
In a matter of weeks, Billy’s batting average sunk down and his mood quickly followed. The only thing he wanted to do now was eat. Fans began to notice. The Bomber’s belly, hips and thighs were ballooning out. He no longer seemed capable of hitting the ball.
Food took the place of everything. Billy lost interest in the lovely Alicia. The rare times he was home, Billy holed up in the den alone, watching t.v. and eating. Alicia warned the three kids to stay away from their father.
Then one Friday evening in a game against the Dodgers, Billy performed his ritual and stepped up to the plate. It was the ninth inning, with two outs. The bases were loaded, the team down one run. This looked like Billy’s chance to haul himself back up out of the hole, by bringing in the tying run and maybe much more.
In the old days, without much effort, the Bomber would have gotten a grand slam, propelling the fans to their feet, the applause and cheering loud enough to rock the stadium seats. The fans worried now that Billy would screw this up.
“Got him,” the announcer told the t.v. audience.
And for the first time since Billy stepped out onto a major league diamond, he couldn’t help but hear the fans booing him, as he walked with his head down toward the dugout.
Billy felt relieved to be pulled out of his reverie, since recalling that day he lost the game had made his chest ache. The truth was that Billy wanted to cry, but how could a grown man sob over something that happened a long time ago?
He turned away from the door, so the mailman who’d just stepped inside wouldn’t see Billy quickly wipe the tears that had dribbled down onto his cheeks from his eyes. Billy turned back around.
“Afternoon,” he said, in response to the same greeting from the mailman, Robin. “Got more bills for me, I can tell.”
“Isn’t there a check for ten million in there?” Robin asked, the same joking question he often posed. “Didn’t you win the lottery?”
“I’m afraid not,” Billy answered, his debts having ballooned so, he couldn’t joke about money anymore.
Robin dropped a rubber-banded stack of envelopes onto the side of Billy’s desk. Billy knew without looking that they were mostly letters from collection agencies. In addition to the mail, the money collectors had started pestering him by phone.
The mailman hesitated for a moment when he got to the door. Instead of opening the door and stepping outside, he turned around and looked at Billy.
“Well, this is gonna be it for me,” he said softly. “My last run.”
“What do you mean?”
“Today’s my last day. As of tomorrow, I’m officially retired. The wife and me, we bought an RV and we’re headed to Florida.”
“Well, that’s great, Robin. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Robin said.
Billy waited for the mailman to leave but he kept standing there, staring at the floor.
“Hope you have a good time,” Billy said, as a way to fill up the suddenly awkward silence.
The mailman cleared his throat and then raised his head, as he fished inside the dull blue canvas mailbag.
“I was just wondering,” he said, his throat raspy, as if he needed a glass of water.
Before Billy got a chance to ask, he saw what the mailman was holding in his right palm.
“I was wondering,” Robin said again, and stretched out his arm. “Would you mind?”
Billy couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked him – to sign a ball or a program or his photograph. It had been years since he felt a glow run through his body, being the special sort of person whose very name meant everything to a perfect stranger. He didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry or get down on his knees and thank this man for giving him another chance.
Billy decided that at this moment, he didn’t need to do a thing, except give this man what he’d asked for. And so, for one last time, Billy became the guy that could bat a ball so high in the outfield guys didn’t know where it would come down.
He pulled a blue ink pen he used to sign checks from the sterling silver holder on his desk and signed, Billy, the Bomber, Boggs. And he even made sure to add the extra curl on the final “s,” in order to prove that the signature was an authentic one.
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About Patty Somlo
Patty Somlo has received four Pushcart Prize nominations and has been nominated for storySouth’s Million Writers Award. Her essay, “If We Took a Deep Breath,” was selected as a Notable Essay of 2013 for Best American Essays 2014. She is the author of From Here to There and Other Stories. Her second book, Hairway to Heaven Stories, is forthcoming in January 2017 from Cherry Castle Publishing. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Los Angeles Review, the Santa Clara Review, Under the Sun, Guernica, The Flagler Review, and WomenArts Quarterly, among others, and in sixteen anthologies. She recently moved from Oregon to Northern California. www.pattysomlo.com.
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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
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Judicial Order
Monica Busch
“Last night, I ate the whole sandwich. I never do that.”
Lynn scratched at the cracking two-dollar color on her upper lip. The midday sun beat into the courtroom, glinting off the brass wings of the outstretched eagle hanging from above the witness stand.
“But you know? I’ve been craving spinach salad, it’s so strange. I’ve been going to to the Proctor Mart a couple of blocks down. Have you ever been there? They’ve got this salad with, um, spinach, pecans, and bleu cheese.”
Sally, young and rotund, shook her head as she leaned over the wooden box where Lynn was sitting and stroking the pleather belt that held her Glock 17.
“I’m so hungry,” Sally said.
Lynn sucked on one of her canine teeth and adjusted her thick, drug-store-black dyed ringlets.
“Me too.”
“Do you think the judge’ll be out soon?”
A small cough came from the only other person in the room, a young blonde girl sitting behind the bar, re-reading the same paragraph over and over on a page halfway through a small paperback.
Sally and Lynn both turned to look at her. The girl did not look up.
“Eh, probably,” Lynn said. She lowered her voice.
“What’s this one?”
“Restraining order.”
“Makes sense. Crazy ex-boyfriend?”
“Crazy uncle. Death threats.”
“Should be an easy one.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Sally sighed, intimating a return to a normal decibel.
“It’s supposed to be really nice out today. I’m thinking of heading up to the lake this weekend.”
“The weather forecast said almost seventy today.”
“That’s what I heard. My boyfriend’s family has a house up there with jetskis so I was thinking, why not? They won’t be up there until at least the middle of June. It’d be nice to get away.”
“That sounds good. My sister’s coming down this weekend. We’re going to head up to the mall so she can return some shirts she got for her husband. I’m thinking I might stop and look at the carpets. The one in my bathroom is falling apart.”
“I haven’t gone shopping in a while. I never have time and then when I do, it’s time to pay rent.”
“Isn’t that how life works?”
Both women chuckled.
A single fly buzzed around the florescent light hanging over the judge’s well. It buzzed and it buzzed, looping the same circle over and over.
The girl reading put her thumb by the sentence she had read seventeen times and looked up at the black speck.
She thought that fly would be pretty unlucky if that light wasn’t shielded by murky plastic. It’d be zapped before it knew what hit it. The fly never deviated from its loop. The girl returned to her book.
On the wall, next to the brass eagle and slightly left of center, hung the words “We who labor here seek only the truth.”
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Fall is Golden (V3)
Michael Lee Johnson
The last golden yellow apple
hangs like a healing miracle
bow down old apple tree
winter is coming.
Life is a single thread this time.
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All Manner of Things
© 2014 Ag Synclair
he said all things
will be better here
even if winter
is a lifetime
even if our bones
are scattered across
the plains, like the ashes
of dead trees, like the
fireflies younever chased
across these high plains,
like the mighty gallatin
churning under a seasick sky
go and chase those fireflies
said the river
go and take your mad boots
over that mountain
all things
will be better here
her mouth
a perfect egg.
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Ag Synclair Bio:
Ag Synclair publishesThe Montucky Reviewand edits poetry forThe Bookends Review. Widely published in the small presses, he manages to fly under the radar. Deftly.
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Leaving the concert hall
Sean Lause
She is eleven, maybe twelve,
but numbers no longer matter,
for she has heard Bach and Mozart
for the first time,
has mastered the mathematics of the wind,
the heart’s algebra,
where A is not A and need not be,
and now her fingers conduct the weather
until it shivers with illuminations.
She walks, then skips, then
spins to a private pantomime
that need not reveal itself,
for she is the conductor.
Silent notes come swirling around her
in wizard colors of the new,
and the ecstatic leaves whirl
in xylophones of dance.
She feels her joy float from breath to breath.
Bezeled light dazzles round a point,
a perfect jewel, emerald, topaz, diamond,
and everything is all right, for a moment all right.
Then, as the sky imagines a storm,
and the school bus pulls up,
she folds a crescendo inside a breeze,
and sets it free.
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Nimble
Roy Miller
James sat in his car and stared at the doors of the funeral home. Smoke swirled from his hand and drifted out the window. Two men in suits stood by the entrance and opened the doors for people as they approached. James wondered how many people they would see over the course of their job life there, and if all the grief surrounding them ever weighed on their thoughts and kept them from sleeping.
A woman he assumed was the widow emerged from the right side of the building where the parking lot wrapped around. She was flanked by a man on her right and a woman on her left, both wearing the same color as her. Probably her children. The men at the doors opened them wordlessly and stood off to the side while everyone filed in, then shut them and returned to their standing positions against the wall.
James got out of the car, took the last drag of his cigarette and tossed the butt on the ground, grinding the cherry into the pavement with the toe of his shoe. He made his way up to the front just like the others, nodding his appreciation when the doors opened and closed for him. He briefly wondered if the parlor owners ever considered cutting costs by installing the same type of doors the grocery store has, then assumed that the human element the doormen provided must have added something to the experience.
Inside, the hallway buzzed lowly with hushed conversations from the right side viewing room. The deep blue padded carpet helped muffle the sound a bit. Chandeliers hung overhead with clear candle-shaped lighting tips. James saw two women sitting on the couch at the end of the hall, arms around each other, unmoving. The solidarity between human beings at the viewing of a loved one was always something to be seen.
He made his way into the viewing room and was immediately met with bodies. There was a line wrapping around some chairs and back to the door for attendees wanting to sign the guestbook. James inched his way to the right and headed for the back of the room, since that was usually where the piano sat. People didn’t tend to bother someone that preferred to be alone at a funeral.
A quick look confirmed that that funeral home’s piano was much the same as the others he had played. It was a dark mahogany, like the one he had so much fun playing in school. He wanted one just like it for the house, but his father wouldn’t have it. He tried to get James to play Baseball, but that was the last thing he wanted to do. After a few years of fighting about it, they agreed to disagree, but it ended up as more of an end to their father-son relationship.
The group of mourners was sectioned off into smaller groups. Each part of the room held small circles of people that carried on their own conversations. Occasionally, someone would break off from one circle and be joined into another after they realized they knew someone. It reminded him of watching organisms under the microscope in school, how they’d detach and reattach. The room was like a thriving microeconomy.
Two younger guys shimmied their way to the back and one of them made eye contact with James. He smiled weakly and sat in the last row of chairs. James situated himself on the piano bench and watched as the rest of the room began to sit, and a couple minutes later the Chaplain entered the room. He straightened some papers on the podium and waited for the room to quiet down.
This was the point where the Chaplain would go through a whole list of why the deceased was such a great person, regardless of what they actually did with their life. The person in the coffin could have been a serial killer, but no one pays seven thousand dollars to have someone say negative things to their friends and loved ones. Sometimes, the deceased didn’t have much in the way of good things, and in those situations there was a lot of emphasis on that clay leaf-shaped ashtray they made for their mother in third grade.
James never made a clay leaf-shaped ashtray for his mother. She smoked, sure, but he liked to use his time at school for music. His father wasn’t really one to appreciate art, and any time he asked for a piano there was always a resounding no that pushed him back into his room. It was also what eventually pushed him to being in that spot, behind the piano at a stranger’s funeral.
He couldn’t think of one instrument that was more widely appreciated than the piano. Centuries old and timeless at once. His music teacher in seventh grade commended him on having nimble hands with long, strong fingers. “It’s like you were born to play,” he said. Of course, that kind of talent needed nurturing, something he wasn’t getting at home.
The Chaplain continued his praise of someone he likely didn’t even know, probably reading a pre-written sermon designed for that exact purpose. The deceased’s wife cried silently into a tissue while her son rubber her back gingerly. She was older, but not old enough to be frail yet. James supposed that anyone in that situation would be weaker than usual, though, and continued watching with a renewed interest. He hadn’t experienced much death in his life.
As the family stood up and turned to face the room James cracked his knuckles, knowing that his turn was coming up soon. He had been to roughly thirty funerals over a span of five years, with his random appearances being the only time he got to play, and each service went pretty much the same. The widow greeted everyone and thanked them for showing up while her children stood with their heads up and eyes averted. He had learned most people weren’t big on eye contact during times of grief.
When the family bowed their heads and returned to the side of the room next to the guestbook all of the attendees began to stand up and socialize again. James took his cue and started playing a piece by Ó lafur Arnalds. A few heads turned in his direction at the start of the music, including the family by the entrance. The daughter seemed to know the piece, or at least be interested in the music in some way.
His fingers stretched and danced across the keys almost effortlessly. He wondered once if that was how Stenographers felt, being able to flawlessly type hundreds of words per minute. Regardless of his piano prowess he could barely manage fifty, seeing as they didn’t have a computer in the house when he was going through school. The notes carried through the room and reverberated off the padded carpet and stained-wood walls.
As he finished the first piece and moved into a second the deceased’s daughter made her way over and sat in the back row of chairs, turning one to face the piano before she situated herself. The top was open so she sat off to the side so she could keep James in her vision. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, just barely in his line of sight from the edge of the piano.
The second piece swelled and deflated, building up to an impending crescendo. Most of the composer’s work was muscle memory to him so he watched the room around him more than the keys, getting familiar with the whiskey-colored eyes of the girl staring at him. He cracked his neck without the use of his hands and kept playing. The girl stood up slowly and took the few steps between the chair and the piano with her eyes on him.
She walked around the left side of the piano and trained her vision down to the keys. James was suddenly hyper-aware of his situation and his heart began to pound in his chest. He always felt the romantic essence in Arnalds’ pieces, but being watched by a beautiful woman as he struck each note felt warm and exciting. Of course, he wasn’t bound by grief in that moment as she was, and the gray undertones of the pieces pulled him more into the moment than he’d ever been.
“You’re quite good,” said the woman, sitting on the edge of the bench as the song came to an end. “I’ve always wanted to learn how to play but I don’t have the discipline for it.”
“It’s the same as anything else in life.” James fingered a few chords to begin the next song. “You can appreciate it, but if you don’t have a real passion you can’t force it.”
She watched as he got into the third piece. A few other people gathered around the front of the piano. James could see their clothing through the gap by the hinges on the piano lid. He could hear a few of them talking amongst each other, mostly about the gathering following the service, where they would grill some food and let the kids play on the playground for a while. If there was one thing to be said about death, it had a way of bringing people together.
The third piece finished and the woman next to him spoke up again. “How long have you been playing?”
“About eleven years,” said James, knowing that he would have to make an exit soon.
“How did you know my father?”
James cracked his knuckles and slid off the side of the bench. “I have to run to the bathroom really quick, sorry.”
He smiled weakly and headed for the door, passing a few people who nodded their appreciation for his performance. The widow reached out to him as he passed and shook his hand briefly, breaking eye contact with her current conversation partner for only a second to smile at him. He returned pressure in her grip and slipped away without engaging anyone else.
The two men at the door were locked in a conversation of their own, becoming tight-lipped as he approached. They opened both doors at the same time and flashed their supportive-but-solemn smiles as he passed through. As soon as the scene disappeared behind him with the closing of the doors, James lit another cigarette and headed for home.
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Roy Miller Bio
Roy Miller is a midwestern cinephile and book fiend. He enjoys watching and discussing film, reading anything from short stories to screenplays and listening to music, mainly post-rock and modern classical.
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The Mafia in Higher Education
Ron Iannone
I am a small thin guy with a hooked nose and long black hair. I teach theatre classes at a community college outside of Boston. It’s called Franklin and is located in a small hamlet called Smithtown, which is in a state of decay because of the lost textile mills years ago.
In the summers I am the producer of a summer stock theatre called Smithtown Public. In a nutshell, and because of the economic stress of 2008 and 2009, the theatre was facing $400,000 deficit. I needed cash quickly.
Over the years, my wife and I had mortgaged our home three times to attain a line of credit. The banks have refused any more loans for us.
A couple of months ago I met a man by the name of Mark Willis, who was a multi-millionaire. He made his money franchising lumber companies throughout the United States. It provided house designs and lumber for small time contractors. The Board of the theatre felt he may want to help. Recently, the Board had a change in leadership: A woman, by the name of Jenny Patrick, was voted in as President. Anyway, I read everything I could online about Mark Willis. I read he was working in attaining economic development monies to redevelop the downtown area. The article that I read said he was also interested in renovating the old Capitol Theatre which has been closed for several years. It was an old vaudeville house that brought in such stars as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and others. It was turned into a movie theatre for a few years then closed. We presented our musical shows at the college’s theatre, but the thought of doing Broadway musicals in a newly renovated Capitol Theatre was exciting.
I made an appointment to meet him the next day at his corporate headquarters. As I drove through the security gates, I noticed that the building was all glass and steel. It reminded me of the new September 11th Memorial, especially how the glass reflected the powdered blue sky and the beautiful landscape surrounding the building. Inside the lobby it was softly lit with maroon wallpaper and alcoves where big Picasso, Monet, Warhol, and Dali paintings were hung. A prim forty year old secretary brought me up a spiral staircase decorated out of the Gone With the Wind movie. She led me into a huge conference room whose large windows overlooked the rolling hills of Smithtown. At one end of the table sat Mark Willis and two other men. Mark was dressed in a white shirt and dark blue tie that hung over his barrel-chested frame. He introduced me to Peter Delsanto, who was thin and sharply dressed with gray slacks, blue blazer, and an opened white shirt. The other man was Jack Cook, who had on a camel-haired sport coat and looked like a weasel with a long, pointed face.
Mark began: “Andy, what can I do for you?”
“Our theatre is hurting. If I don’t get some money quickly, I’ll have to close it. “
He said, “You know the theatre is good for Smithtown and my employees. And you know, buddy, I always respected that you were willing to put your own money in it.”
“Thanks,” I said gratefully. The two other men smiled with shitty grins on their faces in agreement with Mark.
“Look, Andy, I think we can help if you get involved with us.”
“How?” I asked.
Mark said, “I believe we can get funds from the state to renovate the old Capitol Theatre. It can be beautiful and you won’t have to deal with those assholes at the college.”
He went on, “Hell, if you still want to use the college’s theatre, we can work that out too. The new president, Bob Otto, is a friend of ours. Right, Pete?”
Pete smiled.
“Look, he owes us and he’s a nice guy. Hell, with the state funds, Andy, we are planning a new 5 star hotel downtown with an event center. You also can do shows there. You’ll have three places instead of one to do your stuff. What do you think, Andy?”
“Sounds good,” I said, unbelievably.
“We can become partners, Andy,” Mark said. “Okay? I know the Board of Governors likes you because of you mortgaging your home. You know how to talk and you may have to make a major presentation when we make our pitch with State.”
“Sure. I’ll do whatever.” It sounded too good to be true. No more money problems and no more mortgaging our home.
Now Jack, the weasel-faced man, spoke in a high pitched voice. “Hey, Mark, let’s just get the event center done. We can make more money at the hotel and we’ll give the downtown theatre to the community. The people will love us.”
“Yeah,” Mark agreed. I thought he looked like a boring kind of guy.
Small talk followed, and we agreed to get together soon. I remembered someone telling me that Mark Willis had connections with the Ohio Mafia. So what? I thought. I’m going to have a new theater. Most rumors are untrue, I thought.
I brought Mark Willis’ ideas to my Board of Trustees. They loved them and gave me the go-ahead. My new Board President, Jenny Patrick, especially liked the idea. She was in her mid-forties, pretty face, with big brown eyes along with hair like a huge fuzzy cloud with streaks of brown, terribly sexy. She had been a real estate agent for ten years.
The next day the local newspaper reported that a number of the Franklin faculty questioned how the new President, Bob Otto, was appointed. They said there was collision between the Board of Governors and Mark Willis. Of course, the Board and Mark Willis denied it. Later that day, I got a call from Holly Springer, a reporter from the newspaper, and she wanted to know my involvement in getting the President appointed. I told her, “absolutely nothing.” I told her I was hoping for a new theatre as the old Capitol Theatre was being renovated and also maybe at the new event center being built in the new hotel. Finally she asked if I was concerned that Bob Otto was appointed President with no higher education experience. She said that, basically, Otto was a lobbyist for Mark Willis and his partners.
“Honestly,” I said, “I didn’t know any of that.”
Late that night, I received a call from Willis and he said he, Pete, and Jack wanted to meet me for lunch at Pete’s restaurant Vino’s. He also said that the college’s Chief of Staff and attorney would be there. I began to worry. I called Jenny and told her. She said even though it was late we needed to get together to prepare for the lunch meeting. We decided to meet at Vino’s. I wanted to see where it was. If Pete was there, I thought, so what? I wanted him to know our Board was concerned. But he wasn’t there when we met. Vino’s looked like Pete wanted to bring a little bit of Italy to Smithtown. The photos and artwork complemented the Old World stone walls, lit up in some areas by bright sconces. It was a nice comfortable atmosphere in which to meet.
I found out Jenny was married with two children and had a husband who was a lawyer for one of the top firms in Boston. She and I immediately hit it off. Except for a couple of casual affairs, I was faithful to my wife of 30 years. My wife Carrie was a talented painter who taught art classes at the college. She was still cute and perky with short blond hair and eyes like a deep blue lake. She kept herself in shape by running three miles a day. Everyone loved her. Jenny told me her husband was six four, tall, very handsome, and would screw anything that walked by him. He was now screwing a sixteen year old. He loved to screw his women on his father’s grave because his father likewise screwed younger women while he was alive.
We decided she was going to check on Willis and his partners’ backgrounds. She had a good friend who was an ex-state trooper and was now a private investigator.
As I walked her to her car, she invited me to sit in the back seat with her.
“Sure,” I said.
She said, “You know, Andy, your lips are so sexy, along with your haunting dark eyes.”
The next thing I knew, we were having mind-blowing sex by finger fucking and kiss fucking. It was the most intimate sex I had ever had. Afterwards, as I walked to my car, I knew I was in deep shit. As was my habit, I tried to empty my thoughts of her, but it didn’t work.
That night, I couldn’t sleep because of Jenny’s wildness in the back seat. Finally, I forgot about her and thought about what the papers were going to say about Willis.
The next morning, the local newspaper said that there were rumors that he was hooked up with a shopping mall kingpin who had just recently been cleared of dumping two bodies of restaurant owners in the Ohio River. Anyway, something just didn’t seem right as the three of us met at Vino’s again. Today, the excitement and the sex-charged atmosphere was gone and replaced with smells of overcooked tomato sauce and spoiled fish.
Everyone was there: Willis, Delsanto, Cook, and the two people from the college. Willis sipped on a water glass full of Crown Royal. Jack Cook began quickly and turned to the college’s Chief of Staff whose name was Larry Meyers.
“Okay, Larry, you think you can work an agreement where Andy’s theatre becomes a partner with the college. We want to make sure if he’s having financial trouble again that the college takes care of it. Hell, you guys at the college are set for life because of Mark’s generosity.”
Larry answered, “Yeah. I think we can work something out. It will be complicated, don’t you think, Brian?” Brian Stewart was the legal adviser for the college.
He responded, “It will be complicated, but we will get it done.” With his conservative suit and blonde hair, he reminded me of someone out of the fifties. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days.
“Of course,” he went on. “The faculty is worked up because of the appointment. But you know we got a new sheriff in town. The faculty really has no power.”
Everyone at the table laughed, except for me. Now Willis turned to me. “Well, Andy, what do you think?”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I just worry about the faculty.”
Willis responded, “Look, buddy, let Larry and Brian handle it. And you with your golden voice sell the public and the State why this redevelopment is good for Smithtown. You understand?”
“Okay,” I said with uncertainty.
A few days later I made the presentation to the Massachusetts Economic Development Committee. I could tell the Committee was impressed with my presentation, and so were Willis and his partners. Soon after, Willis got word one of his LLDs, called Essex, was getting 25 million for the redevelopment in Smithtown, including the new hotel, theatre, and other infrastructural work.
Later that night, I met Jenny at Vino’s. I wanted to celebrate the good news; however, she had bad news for me.
“Did you hear the news today?”
“No, I was hiding out at the library all day working on an article so I can get promoted this year. Publish or perish, you know that fucking saying.”
“Yeah, I know, but the faculty voted this afternoon to investigate how Otto got appointed. It’s even gotten national news. Tonight President Otto resigned, along with the Chair of the Committee that selected him. Everyone knows Willis was involved. The Board of Higher Education also appointed an interim president, some old guy near eighty.”
“What the fuck!”
Just then my cell phone rang. I could see on the screen that it was Willis calling.
“I need to see you now, Andy. I got some problems,” he said. “Meet me at my office.”
“Be careful,” Jenny said, as I got up. She now pulled me to her and whispered, “Stop over to my home. My husband is gone and the kids are with the grandparents. You like oral sex?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking I was dealing with some major problems here and she was talking about oral sex. Oral sex is not a high priority right now.
The security guard at Willis Industries led me through a smoky glass security door which was sandblasted with “Willis Industries.” He was leading me to a different place than where we met before. Everything seemed to be retro, but the place screamed of money as I now saw him and his partners sitting on two different sofas made of soft bluish material. The ex-President of the college was also there. He looked like a young Santa Claus with a puffy red face and long gray hair without the beard. He rose and shook my hand.
“Hi, Andy.”
“Hi,” I repeated as I sat next to him on one of the sofas across from Willis and his guys.
Willis spoke. “Look, Andy,” I need your help. You know what happened to Bobby?”
“I just heard.”
“Well, I also just got word from my contacts at the state level that they are cutting some of the funds. We are only getting 15 million instead of 25 million. That still isn’t bad.”
“I guess.”
“In order to get the money for the theatre, you’re going to have to raise four million. Maybe I could loan it to you. Also, you’re going to have to pay rent.”
“How much?”
“We think about $100,000 a year will help our cause.”
“But you said it was going to be free.”
“Things have changed,” he said seriously. “The state has given us some tough guidelines.”
“They have,” Pete said in chorus with Jack.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Help me out here, Andy. Don’t you want a first class theatre?”
“Yes, but I don’t know. Do I have a choice?’
Willis quickly responded, “No. You need to keep quiet about all of this. You understand?” His blurry read eyes scared the shit out of me.
“Yes,” I said, softly and beaten. I realized that I had been used so these fuckers could get money for their hotel and other projects. We got shafted.
“Don’t worry,” Otto said. “Look at me and what happened. I trust Mark.”
Willis now said, “Yeah, you meet with the construction company tomorrow and they’ll tell you what has to be cut from the theatre because we need it for the hotel.”
In shock, and almost completely numb, we all shook hands and I thought I just lost millions that the theatre was supposed to get and now it ended up in these fucking crooks’ hands.
That night, Jenny tried to help me out of my depressing mood as she gave me oral sex and many more fun things I couldn’t believe. Still, quickly afterwards a flood of thoughts filled my mind. Higher education is supposedly where truth is discussed and its community of scholars discuss such things as truth, beauty, and the metaphysical and allegorical meanings of things. It’s all bullshit. I was devastated. I thought about calling a lawyer friend Stan Puloski who was the theatre’s lawyer, but I just heard recently that he and Pete Delsanto had begun a new restaurant chain that centered on stone crabs and other seafood.
The next day I picked up Jenny as a steady rain fell. I drove out to the country and said nothing for several minutes. I stopped the car, put it in park. I gripped the steering wheel with anger, breathing hard. The rain continued to come down hard. She touched my face with her fingers. I now knew what I had to do. Even though I was confused about Jenny and felt guilty because of my wife, most importantly I had to make the call. Jenny also might have to accept that I couldn’t live with the guilt of cheating on Carrie.
I turned to her and said, “Whatever happens, know that I will always appreciate your love.” I kissed her hard and then broke away and pulled my cell phone out.
“I would like the number for the FBI in Boston. Thank you.”
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The Corner
Carlo Frank Calo
Before dawn breaks, the men arrive at the usual corner. This one alone, others in groups of two and three and four they are drawn to this same place each day. They wait for the trucks and vans to come. Patience is rewarded for some, the regulars, who are canvassed before they even stop for coffee. The young bucks joke about this game, a ploy to avoid the truth of their circumstance. For the rest there is no ambiguity. This is their job, this is their life, and if they are to feed their children they must take what comes. The sun is in its descent, low in the cloud-scattered southern sky. As the shadows stretch, the bones chill and the crowd dwindles.
The last three gather at the corner, familiar these many years. Bouncing in place their skin is pricked, again and again, by stinging specks of earth and sand borne by the approaching nor’easter. Alien to the cold, huddled against it, the man elbows his remaining compadres. They call him the smiling man, always laughing. The jostling is as much for his warmth as for theirs. His friends accept this absent complaint. They are used to his nudges. Returning his smile they welcome the incursion, sun and sweat having long ago bleached away any remaining competition. Whether they are among the chosen today has less to do with talent than with luck.
The smiling man crosses the road performing his customary traffic dance like a matador, dodging the cars honking from both directions. Walking a bit more he arrives at his bicycle and reaches under the seat to access his stash, glancing back to be sure that no one is watching. His stomach churns as he sees a van pull up to the corner. He curses himself for jeopardizing yet another opportunity, scarce as they have been. Rushing back across the road, smiling and waving – too late – the van passes, saluting him with the mocking beep of its horn. Inside, his friends – heads bowed and hands pressed to the windows in apology – turn to him, their Mayan eyes meeting and sharing regret. As he looks into their eyes he grins, baring his teeth while shaking his head, and thinks about that beeping horn. He is surprised that it bothers him more than the occasional cries of “Go back where you come from spic!” He is amused and at the same time angered. It is easier to accept the truth of hatred than the hypocrisy of mockery.
Now, with even more pretext for his vice he sits at the corner’s curb, alone, in an ongoing battle with the shifting winds to ignite. The winds prevail and he is out of matches. On this day he has shown neither talent nor luck. Arms resting on his knees, frozen hands release the matchbook. It flutters unnoticed to his heels joining the charred remnants previously bound to it, each spent, one by one, none having fulfilled its purpose.
His smile is gone, replaced by a vacant face, a mirror of the hungry emptiness inside. Taking a deep breath, and then another, the man gazes down the road toward the van as it shrinks, slowly, into the distance. Eyes never leaving the van he shivers – feeling a new chill – and thinks only of another corner, back home where he was born, where he first experienced a smile and a laugh, where he knows he will find warmth.
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Turning Into A Rose
Rose Marie
The bones in my arms tingle into hundreds of petals
My legs become stems, and my arms thorns
It doesn’t matter where my heart has gone
Or where my conscience has resolved itself
I am more beautiful than a hundred women.
From here I can see the endless turquoise sky
I watch my petals diminish one at a time
Considering how I’ll miss having endless dreams
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Professor Haines On Strayed’s Wild
Doug Hawley
Prof. Haines - As announced previously, today’s lecture covers “How to get an interview or endorsement from Oprah”. As you know an appearance with Oprah, or her endorsement can mean millions of book sales.
First is there anyone here who has not read the reading assignment “Wild”? OK, you two can leave. Don’t hurry back.
What gets Oprah to notice you?
Sex – Enough said.
Drugs – People want that vicarious thrill of watching a train wreck.
Abuse – Builds sympathy.
Tragedy – We are glad it happened to someone else. We may feel real empathy.
Spouses – Hate them, love them, we can all relate.
Social status – We like the extremes of society. Trailer trash and celebrities or the rich are exotic to most of us.
Redemption – After all of the tragedy, we want a feel good come back.
Good writing – Always helpful.
Therapy – Scores well with the touchy-feely types. It doesn’t hurt that Oprah is our therapist general and a huge segment of the population gets its guide to life from self help books, talk show hosts and columnists.
Social media use – It is the 21st century.
Previous success – Always good.
Truth – Check out the trouble that James Frey and Greg Mortenson got into with alleged fibs in their memoirs.
Supporting cast – No one operates in a vacuum.
Closure – Do we know how the author feels at the end of the story? Are loose ends tied up?
Let us see how “Wild” scores on these points.
Sex – Based on her Googled photos, Ms. Strayed is attractive, although she downplays her looks on the trail. Her encounters with Joe, her Portland guy and heroin addict, and Jonathan the handsome man she met in Ashland are not graphic by current standards, but then if they were they would qualify her for the Penthouse Forum instead of Oprah. She appears to be a sex positive feminist, who could turn off conservatives, but her descriptions probably appeal to most of the straight population and maybe some of the “other”. Men can imagine they are among her no strings pickups. Women can imagine that they are her having impersonal sex with her hot pickups, and later having a happy married life.
I give her a B for Sex.
Class – Why the paucity of writing about sex with Paul? Mr. Henderson?
Mr. Henderson - Professor Haines, throughout literature, no one cares about married sex.
Prof. Haines - Good Answer.
If she had been having sex with family or animals and could not write, she would be Springer material.
Drugs – Heroin goes with the overall tenor of the story. It is kind of a hipster drug and fits well with her sadness. Meth and coke might be too serious and marijuana not serious enough. The shot to the ankle just before her hike was a good touch.
I give her an A.
Question for the class – would her story have been better if she was addicted rather than a user. Ms. Anderson?
Ms. Anderson - Professor Haines, I think that if she had been addicted, the PCT hike would not have made much sense. How does she get her fix on the trail?
Prof. Haines - Good point.
Abuse – Her father was despicable. Certainly others have had worse abuse than her, but hers was bad enough.
Call it a B. Move on.
Tragedy – A lot of bad things happened to her, but some have claimed using the new cliché that they were “first world problems”. That seems harsh to me. It wasn’t just one thing – her mother’s death was the worst, but then her family and marriage falls apart. She is set adrift and adopts an extreme and unusual solution.
I give her an A minus.
Questions? None, OK moving on.
Redemption – Thousands of people have hiked the PCT and other long trails. Many people have achieved amazing journeys. Most of us have huge losses in life and love. So why does “Wild” work so well? The key is in the subtitle “Lost and Found”. We want to hear about those who have struggled and yet managed to triumph over their obstacles. Her critics complain about her extreme sadness over what is not that unusual a situation. They point out accurately that in some ways she was less organized for an eleven hundred mile hike than a normal hiker would before a ten mile hike. She had not tested her shoes or pack before starting. I could, in the cliché of our former president, feel her pain intensely.
As a sometimes backpacker, I’m surprised that she did not refer to the difficulty of dumping environmentally in the woods. It may have too much ick factor to be mentioned, but she mentioned urination, menstruation, but not defecation. Personally, tents have usually outsmarted me.
Given all that, would she have a best seller with only the loss part, or with only the found part? I think not. We have to keep in mind stories about perdition and redemption go back into the mists of history. Think Ulysses. He screws up big time, but is the hero at the end of the story. Oprah laps up this stuff.
Solid A.
Ms. Creech – Professor, she did refer to the difficulty of shitting in the woods fairly early on in the book. She mentioned how difficult it was to dig in the ground and how she almost fell into her own crap.
Professor Haines – Good catch, sorry I forgot that passage.
Spouses – We don’t know much about either one from the book. We can get info on the current husband from the internet, but not much from the book other than he was handsome and ready to give up promiscuity.
Usually in these types of books the author is dumped, keeps marrying the wrong person, or gets to trade up to a better model. What happened here? Throw out some ideas.
Ms. Grant - I wanted her to get back with Paul. He was such an understanding guy.
Mr. Krasny – I liked the charming bad boy Joe, but hanging with him could have cost her her life. Whatever happened to him?
Ms. Fenton – I would have guessed that she would hook up with somebody from the trail after the hike.
Ms. Anderson – Without knowing more about Paul, I’d say she traded up.
Prof. Haines – I’ll give her a C for spouse based on what little we know.
Social Status – Clearly she starts at the deprived end of the spectrum. Her housing is rustic at best. Finances are limited. Of course if she had been a celebrity, no pain or achievement would be required to write a best seller.
Although not the worst of circumstances, I give her a B for social status.
What is the status of her life now?
Ms. Shandon – With her current fame, money and semi-celebrity husband, any memoir based on her life post 2012 would have to be celebrity writing. My God, according to her website she wrote on an island off Brazil and will be a part of a writer’s workshop in France. She could, however, mine earlier times before the celebrity phase.
Good writing – She is a trained writer and a good one. Her integration of the hike and the tragedy is very good. The pain and the triumph both work.
Another A
Therapy – Her reference to therapy is very short. We don’t know who performed it or when. This snippet appears to underline her “male” approach to sex – she finds an attractive guy and gets it on. Another thing we don’t know if her attitude changed after her mother died, or if that was always the way she was.
Make it a B, good relevance, but very limited.
Social media – Her website lists Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tumbler.
Let’s call it a B – she must be missing something.
Previous Success – Her popular novel “Torch”, which is clearly closely related to her nonfiction, was a natural setup for “Wild”. At that time, she had no other full length books, so give her a B.
Truth – So far she has not been “Freyed”. Note taker that is F-r-e-y-e-d, a reference to James Frey, not f-r-a-y-e-d or s-t-r-a-y-e-d.
No one has questioned any of the book and in fact it would be difficult to do so. We don’t know the real names of most of the people in the book outside the family and most events are undated. The details which could be verified are incidental. We can’t check on her abortion, various sex partners or heroin use, so even if she has lied we would not know. Mr. Tyne?
Mr. Tyne - Sir, she said early in the book that her backpack “Monster” weighed half as much as she did. In a later interview or FAQ, she said that she did not know what it weighed. Then how could she know it weighed half as much as herself?
Prof. Haines - Good catch, I’ll give her a pass on a minor goof. Make it an A.
Sidebar – She seems very insistent about condoms, but gets pregnant with Joe. Ideas? Ms. Shandon again.
Ms. Shandon - She got pregnant before the trail, so maybe she learned her lesson.
Prof. Haines - Mr. Grant –
Mr. Grant - Given her loss and regret for her infidelity, maybe she was looking for pain or punishment? Maybe it was the heroin clouded her judgment? What do you think professor?
Prof. Haines - Either or both of you could be right. If brain research has taught us anything, it is that our actions frequently can’t be rationally explained or understood.
Supporting Cast – This may be the weakest part of the book. Even granting that it is her memoir, except for the family we don’t get to know anyone well. We get few details about people that she meets on the trail. Even the family, other than the mother, is very thinly described.
Other than being a saint, giving her all the space she needed and taking her away from heroin, and a flake, flipping between Ph.D. and guitar player – Paul is a cipher. Did he favor the divorce, acquiesce, or appease Cheryl? What happened to him in the twenty years after the divorce?
Lisa is a friend. That’s about it.
As previously noted, Joe charmed her into sex and heroin. That’s about all me know about out him.
Can’t give her better than a C
Sidebar - One thing that makes me a little happier about humanity is that none of the characters in her book have tried to leverage their closeness to celebrity to write their own tell all book. We know that relatives of Joan Collins, Sylvester Stallone and so many others have exploited the fame of relatives.
Closure – She is found, she can go on with life. She has become more her true self again than changed. She forgives herself, but I’m not clear on how a hike does that, and what exactly she is forgiving herself for. The abortion, infidelity, the inability to save her mother or her family? Maybe the pain and single mindedness brings clarity. Sometimes we can run away from our problems,
Call it a B.
Overall, a great Oprah Book. Nothing below a C. Most books get a number of incompletes. An A overall despite some low individual scores.
Postscript - The fame or notoriety of her story has inspired a tour company to sell coed “Divorce or Loss PCT Hikes” including porters, camp setups, happy hours and condoms and private tents for those that hit it off. Prices to be announced depend on length of hike, but don’t expect them to be cheap.
I hope that we have had some fun today and not taken it too seriously. You will never get an Oprah endorsement, but you might shoot for a local rave. Despite my disdain for Oprah and Oprah types, Oprah might be an actual human being behind the mega corporation façade, hard to tell. If you can’t get an Oprah look, you can claim that your readers don’t want an “Oprah Book”. It could help with the literary snobs. I’m fairly certain that Cheryl Strayed had some reason for writing her book other than hanging out with the big O.
Another little postscript, I’m thinking about restarting the 50 mile walk craze that started when JFK was president. I don’t intend to seriously prepare for it, at least not publicly. I still have to work on motivation, the deep underlying cause. Coincidentally, I’m up for tenure.
Next class, “How to have your memoir turned into a movie”, same text. Assignment is to take basic ingredients of “Wild” and turn it into a Rom-Com pitch with lots comedy, no tragedy and your ideal cast.
Any Questions? Mr. Franklin?
Professor, to me this is just white people whining. Is there any relevance to people of color?
First of all, do you have any idea what “people of color means”? Is that just a catch phrase implying that people of non color are the oppressor class? Are people from India of color? Japanese? Middle Eastern? Or are people of color PC for colored people? My rant is over now.
We can assume that Ms. Strayed’s family was all white based on the cover art. Paul is probably white. The race of Joe and Lisa are unknown. If they were, say, black it might have been racist to mention it. I will admit that the book in no way addresses race issues, but that was not what it set out to do, so I see no problem.
Anyway, to paraphrase Joe South, before you accuse or abuse her walk a few hundred miles in her ill fitting shoes.
We’re out of time, see you next class.
Professor Haines – I hope that you remember the assignment from our last class – Take the bones of “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed and come up with a Rom-Com pitch, soon to be a major motion picture. Has a novel ever been turned into a minor motion picture? Has a TV show ever been partially new? Sorry, I got off track for a moment.
Somehow, you have to take the major elements of “Wild” and manufacture a story which is funny and the “right” people end up together. So, you have to have a mother dying, a marriage breaking up, an 1100 mile trip on the PCT and “Cheryl” or whatever we call her in the Rom–Com happy at the end.
What do you have people?
Ms. Schoonover – First we emphasize the break up, downplay the mother. This is a romance, not a tragedy.
Mr. Sheen – I felt sorry for “Cheryl’s” husband “Paul”. “Wild” says nothing about how he ended up. What little we know of him from “Wild” he really tried to make “Cheryl” happy. I think he could have corresponded with “Lisa”, “Cheryl’s” friend and after a long correspondence they discover that they have more in common than their concern for Cheryl. He visits Portland, they end up in love.
Mr. Grayson – The trail is a problem in the original version. We have to dial down on the things that go wrong and find the funny. Let say she trips and falls on somebody’s crotch. Maybe there is a mismatched couple on the trail that always fights, but always ends up making up in their tent at night. A guy that drinks, and seems really slow, but ends up the fastest hiker?
Ms. Schoonover – One of her food deliveries ends up being paste instead of pasta? She might meet some guys to get her out of her dilemma.
Professor – Who does she end up with?
Mr. Franklin – It can’t be the same guy she met after the hike. That would violate the rule that you have to meet the boyfriend / husband early in the film.
Mr. James – If we wanted to lean towards a women’s channel movie we could enlarge the threat from the Bear hunters in “Wild”. Maybe some handsome guy could have save her and lead up to a romance.
Mr. Sheen – I could see her hooking up with “Joe” the bad boy that introduced her to heroin. In the original book, she hoped he got cured. In the rom-com version they could stay together after he goes through the cure.
Ms. Steel – How about she gets a job waitressing in Portland and her trail stud Jonathan show up at the restaurant. He turns out to be an executive from an outdoor wear company, they start to talk about her hiking equipment and romance blooms.
Actors?
Ms. Reyes – Any pretty faces from some TV series. Somebody from “Gossip Girl” or from one of those movies on the women’s channel. They couldn’t afford anybody very expensive, because who wants to see “Wild” turned into a rom-com.
Professor Haines: This isn’t real life; just pretend the movie was never made.
Mr. Tyne: None of the younger actors have made any impression on me. From watching Turner Classics, I’d go with a young version of Janet Leigh for the Cheryl roll and maybe a young version of Jack Lemmon for Paul.
Professor Haines: I see that our class time is only half over, but let’s get an early start on spring break. See you in two weeks.
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hold
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/8/14
hold my hand, so I
feel hearts, cupids, sunshine
all over again
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A really bad idea
Matthew Hentrich
“A good idea taken too far can easily become a bad idea. Happens all the time.” Dad said. Then he turned and put six rounds downrange. He ejected the magazine and loaded up a fresh one, then popped off a few more shots.
“Like what?” I asked. “If an idea is good, doesn’t that mean it will always be good?” I lit the end of the molotov cocktail and heaved it over my head in a backwards arch. I heard the satisfying crunch and woosh a few seconds later, and maybe a scream. But that might have just been my imagination.
Dad considered my question as he dragged the M249 into position. “Well, take the self esteem revolution of the 1970’s. The idea made sense - be careful not to damage a child’s self esteem because kids with low self esteem have a higher likelihood of using drugs, engaging in violence, and experiencing teen pregnancy than children with high self esteems. But, taken too far, and the consideration for maintaining self esteem prohibits constructive criticism, and creates adults who are unable to adapt to life’s challenges. Some psychologists are now reversing their opinions on the idea, but some are going too far in the other direction, which can be equally dangerous.” He laid prone behind the M249 and started pumping off rapid three round bursts.
A concussion grenade thudded in the distance It was close, but not close enough to have shaken their well constructed sandbag walls. A commanding voice bellowed through a megaphone, “WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED. LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS RAISED. YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.”
I thought about Dad’s answer. “I think I understand. Like, when mom starts cooking with the garlic powder. A little bit is good, and dinner wouldn’t taste right without it. But too much ruins it.”
Dad laughed out loud - a rich, hearty sound. He reached over and tousled my hair, then said, “Exactly. There’s always a balance to be found. Where people get in trouble is when they take an idea too far, or toss an idea out altogether because someone else took the idea too far.”
Pounding footsteps were drawing closer. I flipped the actuator on the handle in my hand to FIRE and squeezed. The M18A1 claymore mines detonated with a deafening cacophony of sonic booms. The footsteps stopped pounding, at least for a moment.
Dad finished loading up his last belt of ammunition into the M249. A thought tugged at the back of my mind. “But pappa, what about us?” I asked.
He gave me a sidelong look. “What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it possible that we’re taking a good idea too far? The compound, the barricades, the weapon caches, the whole resistance thing? Is it possible that we’re taking a good idea, like mounting a defense for what we believe in, and taking it too far, by applying violence to get what we want?”
Dad stared at me. It was one the only times I had ever seen him not have an instant answer ready in response to a question. After a moment, he shook himself and answered, “No, not us. Definitely not us. We’re very well balanced.”
I wasn’t so sure. He didn’t look so sure, either, but he gave me a reassuring smile in spite of that. The footsteps had started pounding again, and the voice over the megaphone was blaring even louder than before. Dad stood up and reached a hand out to me, so I took it.
He slung his last two bandoliers over his shoulder and then turned towards the small opening in sandbags. I hurriedly grabbed my stick grenades with one hand and drew out my sidearm with the other, then I got in line behind him. Before we left the safety of the compound, he looked back over his shoulder and smiled at me again. Artificial light poured in from the opening, making it hard to see his face. But I could still hear him as he called out, in the tone of voice that betrayed no lack of confidence, “C’mon, son, let’s go show them how balanced we really are!”
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Ants and Crosses
Janet Kuypers
haiku 3/17/14
based on the 9/19/06 poem “Ants and Gods”
Ants aren’t Christians
There aren’t tiny crosses shoved
in tops of ant hills...
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Pulling Your Own Life out of a Hat
Richard King Perkins II
Most suicides begin like a magic trick—
preparation, a few props, the intent to impress.
All a friend of mine needed was a rifle,
some beer and an audience of trees.
When the show was over, there was no applause
because he had only made himself disappear
into the ground, which isn’t much of an illusion.
since anyone can do it.
The real magic is in making yourself reappear
before the act is done.
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Skewed Map
Richard King Perkins II
Thirty paces east it says
but I’m doubtful about the accuracy
of my directions.
Like the damned,
I’m being led to a place
of illusive promise.
My skills, useless as dry ink,
the sun, a coalescent flare
lacking intent.
I won’t betray myself
by asking for forgiveness or guidance.
Better to wander into a quagmire
than forgo the inevitable discovery.
The map is a poor forgery.
The trail is fractured, a wind-driven recursive.
There was never a need to search—
nothing is buried
nothing is even missing.
I’m not bitter. I’m not even lost.
I’m the treasure.
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Richard King Perkins II bio (updated 6/11/15))
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications. In a six-year period, his poems have appeared in The Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Roanoke Review, The Red Cedar Review and Crannog. He has poems forthcoming in The William and Mary Review, Sugar House Review, Plainsongs, Free State Review and Milkfist. He was a recent finalist in The Blue Bonnet Review Spring Poetry, The Rash Awards, Sharkpack Alchemy, Writer᾿s Digest and Bacopa Literary Review poetry contests.
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Our Song
Zachary Harp
If you sing for me
I will sing for you
And our music will
be like two screeching
birds fighting
over a meal
If you will be my soprano
I will be your bass.
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Lineage
Judith Ann Levison
I would not have told you
If you were going to shudder
Look wounded again at the name given you
A lineage gives you a box of relics
Old eyeglasses, ribbons, a piece of silk
And whirling voices all trying to speak
In drenching rain their tears let you know
Your sorrows were like theirs
In every pattern of a rainbow’s floating veins
They said someone had your soft grey eyes
Or even was your twin, sailing in a boat
Her garden hat trailing in the water
Disliking all her eligible men
Wearing a tarnished bracelet
Glinting your names in the sun
Hoping you too found no one
From MUDFISH
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Judith Ann Levison bio
Judith Ann Levison is of Micmac Indian descent, and was raised in a logger’s family on coastal Maine. She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College (BA), Hollins University (MFA), and Drexel University (MLS). Upon moving to Pennsylvania, she was chosen as Bucks County’s first woman Poet Laureate.
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on the mend
Janet Kuypers
9/23/14
Rushing to the bathroom every two minutes is not the way to spend every morning. For over three weeks I have been sick, swallowing over the counter pills in the evenings to alleviate the symptoms. Changing my diet a few times, I spent two and a half weeks trying to see if my food brought this sickness on, but nothing did the trick. Finally getting to the doctor’s office, they took samples from almost every orifice to hyper-analyze me.
Everything in my blood seemed to be okay (I didn’t realize my blood could give me stats on my calcium, potassium, or sodium, I just thought it was some innocuous bluish liquid flowing through my veins like I was royalty or something), but one of the science-y medical tests came back telling me I had a rare aeromonas caviae complex.
What?
Like I wanted to know, but it’s a rod-shaped bacteria that’s extremely toxic.
Lovely.
So the medical people give me a prescription to kill this bacteria, and suggested I take a pro-biotic. Because apparently some bacteria are good, and some bacteria are bad.
(So I’ve learned in this sickening venture that my blood tells me about what I’ve eaten, and that I should eat some bacteria, and kill other bacteria in me. Lovely.)
Aggravating as this has been, there may be an end in sight, so I went to the local druggist and got my prescription to kill some toxic bacteria in me. I may have a week to wait for this medication to save me, so I still get to deal with the sickness... But that’s when He came to me to show concern for my condition. He went to a store and bought another live pro-biotic for me (because I can’t get enough of certain bacteria, I suppose) — but He thought that I needed a sweet treat to lift my spirits.
Now, I should probably explain that I love some sweets. I’m really psycho for certain candies, like Chewy Sprees or dark chocolate mint M&Ms or Charleston Chews... But I have so much resolve (you know, to not stuff my face and gain a ton of pounds from my sugar overdose) that when I get these candies, I savor them slowly and make them last as long as I possibly can. I mean, here’s an example: I snack on one or two dark chocolate mint M&Ms by taking one M&M and biting it in half to savor it twice.
So when He came to “lift my spirits”, He also brought a mini-bag of the vegan marshmallows called “Dandies”. (Yeah, they are dandy, and yeah, He found these rarely-seen gelatin-free treats, and I mean, how often do people get the chance to just enjoy the texture of a good marshmallow?)
I know I’m a vegetarian, and I know how hard it is to find things like vegan marshmallows, so yeah, He really helped to get me on the mend.
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flooded war memories 2010
Janet Kuypers
(poetry converted to prose)
it was st. patrick’s day, went to another country to see you. met up with you at a hotel — it was like we were never apart, we talked like old friends, old war-time veterans who fought in a war together, who shared our life stories while sitting in a trench together waiting for a bomb to strike.
it was st. patrick’s day, and everything seemed normal and right, even though you lived far away and even though we had different life plans.
it was st. patrick’s day, i remember you laying down in the bath tub, like a little boy, splashing and playing in the water, not even flinching that i was there talking to you, while you were naked in the tub.
it was st. patrick’s day, i wanted to get out, see the town. and you didn’t want to move, content in a dingy hotel room.
all i could think was that it was st. patrick’s day, and i was in another country, i wanted to get up and go... and i don’t know what snapped in you on st. patick’s day, but i was in a dress, ready to go, and you knocked me down. i remember being knocked on to one of those hotel beds in my panty hose and dress, and you strangled me. it was like you were in the war again, and you were fighting to the death.
but i thought we were on the same side.
why are you trying to hurt me.
and like a bull dog that finally listened to the commands of their master, you finally stopped, and there i was, your ally, the one that sat in the trenches with you all those years ago...
torn panty hose, bloody knees...
i never thought you’d fight one of your buddies, i swear.
i got out and called for back up in the hotel lobby. at the pay phone an older woman came up to me, asking if i was all right.
her question stopped me from hyperventilating.
i looked down at my torn hose, bloody knees... and I said, i’m fine.
i just knew i had to get out of there before more shells fell.
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Watch the YouTube video
(3:49) live, WordSlingers feature, WLUW Chicago radio 88.9FM
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Watch this YouTube video
live at the Café in Chicago 03/16/10
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Watch this YouTube video
(with the “line drawing” filter)
live at the Café in Chicago 03/16/10
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Watch this YouTube video
(recorded with a metallic filter)
live at the Café in Chicago 03/16/10
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Watch this YouTube video
(with the Pastel Sketch filter)
live at the Café in Chicago 03/16/10
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Watch this YouTube video
(with the Posterize filter)
live at the Café in Chicago 03/16/10
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Watch this YouTube video
of the introduction at the Café in Chicago, & the poem Flooded War Memorieslive 03/16/10; at the Café; in Chicago
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Watch the YouTube video
of this poem read live in her Pilsen feature “Games We Play” 3/17/12 at Café Mestizo (music from Francois Le Roux, the HA!man of South Africa)
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See feature-length YouTube
video of many poems read 3/17/12
at Café Mestizo from the live feature
“Games We Play”, w/ this poem
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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 and chaoticarts.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.
From January 2010 through August 2015 Kuypers also hosted the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
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& 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.
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