Jon Zech Short Fiction

Alice: A writing prompt

2008-12-03T20:44:00.000-05:00

Okay, I forgot about this weeks writing prompt, although I did manage to send out the piece, "God's Wife."

The prompt that everybody else chose was this: Alice didn't remember who had given her the key. Well, it's hardly polished, but here's something.

Alice

Alice
400 words

Alice couldn’t remember who had given her the key. She hoped it was the Klingon. Even under all of his scowling makeup she thought she had seen a twinkle in his eye. But then, it could have been the Vulcan. He had sort of twinkled at her too.

The afterglow party had left her rather confused. A couple dozen from TrekCon2290 had moved from the hotel bar to the hospitality suite. Between sniffing more than too much from the tank of Arcturian atmosphere gas, and smoking a bit of Silurian ceremonial herb, Alice couldn’t remember much.

Holding the key-card to her barely covered green breast she tried to concentrate. She had been among a small crowd in the corner, tightly packed together, whispering gossip and catty comments about the lack of fidelity some of the participants had displayed this year. It takes more than a pair of ears to make a Romulan. And then she felt a warm press on her arm and when she brought up her hand to look a moment later, there was the key, and no one near enough to have obviously put it there.

She thought for a minute that any potential friend for the night should have at least introduced himself before the invitation. But then she realized that as Vina, the Orion slave girl, if she was to be faithful to her role, she was only to respond by obeying. It wasn’t an invitation.

The vine-like armbands of her outfit felt tight. She tugged a bit at the very low cut sheath dress that she had created in her basement. She was not Alice and she was not the clerk at an insurance company who hasn’t had a real date in nine months. She was Vina. She was an animal. She was desired.

Making her way to the fourth floor, she steadied herself on the elevator door frame. She rechecked the key number and moved up the hall and did a quick inventory in her tiny, leaf-shaped purse for breath mints and condoms. Some things are universal.

The key purred and clicked at the door, she took a breath and stepped in. The lights were low. Then from the bed she heard a voice, “Krall nacck tranmat niir.” She thanked God that she had practiced her Klingon vocabulary, smiled a wicked smile and began dancing.

The Vermillion Express

2008-11-11T16:07:00.000-05:00

This is my first post in nine months and I have my new writer's group to thank. Interesting people and serious about their writing. And there was an assignment: a story of about 500 words containing three elements:
1) A man dressed in black 2) a train 3) a goldfish bowl

This is what I came up with.

The Vermillion Express

Yost Haddeson slumped in his seat, in and out of a doze, exhausted from his escape, exhausted from loss of blood. The train was hot, but right leg was alternately cold and numb, the inside of his thigh a sticky wet. But he had done his job. He had killed the man and gotten away with what he hoped was only a flesh wound. He almost wished that there were more pain as that might be assurance of less than permanent damage.

He had rightly guessed that there would be road blocks so he stole a bicycle and peddled back streets as fast as one and a half legs would go. The airports would be monitored and the bus stations too. He planned to bike past the periphery of the road blocks and steal a car.

But then, as his leg strength ebbed, he saw the train station. He’d never imagined that there, deep within the industrial heart of the city, would be a train station. He stopped, leaned the bike against a trash can went in. The place was nearly empty. He followed a lone yellow glow to a caged counter staffed by a single clerk.

“Passenger trains,” he said. “Are there passenger trains that stop here?”

The clerk didn’t look up but glanced at a schedule card. “There are,” he said.

“Any time soon?”

Another glance, “You’re leaving soon?”

“Yes, I’m leaving very soon.”

“Of course you are. And your destination?”

Yost hadn’t considered that. “Chicago,” he said. “Anywhere, really. I mean anywhere west. I’m meeting my grandfather. He’s been sick.” A stupid, unnecessary lie he thought. His grandfather had died in the seventies.

“West bound train?” asked the clerk. “The Vermillion Express leaves in ten minutes.”

He felt a low thrumming hum building in his chest and then in his ears. He turned and saw through the station’s back window, the towering side of the Vermillion’s locomotive. He limped to the platform. Six cars long, the train was a solid flat black with a slim streak of vermillion red running its length.

Yost boarded, found a seat and dozed.

When he awoke he was not alone. In the seat facing his was an old man, rumpled in all ways; his hair, his Einstein moustache, his black clothes, even the flesh of his sleeping face. The car felt warm and he slept again.

His eyes opened a minute or an hour later. His seatmate was awake and in his lap, a sloshing fish bowl, with fetid green water and small orange koy floating on its side.

“Your leg...it’s wet,” said Yost.

“As is yours.” Yost touched the spreading stain on his thigh. The thick hot air was becoming unbearable.

“And that fish. It’s dead.”

“Of course it is.”

Yost blinked and looked and there, heavy and hot in his lap, a bowl, spherical and full and stinking. His fish floated and twitched and then it didn’t move any more. The hot thick water slapped with the rocking of the train, flowed down the glass and soaked Yost Haddeson. It soaked him to the bone. One last time he opened his eyes. He saw the old man. He said, “Grandfather?”

John Holland's Story

2008-03-08T15:33:00.000-05:00

The other night at write's group I read these thousand words. General concensus was that it was less a short story and more a novel outline. I guess I could get a 20,000 word novella out of it, but I don't love it enough to settle in and go for 80,000.

Jon Holland's Story

John Holland was not a gun fighter, but he had a gun, an old Navy Colt and it was lying on the ground beside him. He’d had it stuck in his belt but it jammed into his crotch as he sat and he didn’t want to shoot his balls off before he’d had a chance to kill Bertrand Biel.

He’d chosen a spot on the trail out of Taos. Not the one to Albuquerque or the one north to Colorado, but the less used south east route to Fort Union. That’s where Biel would head, as it was the closest thing he had to a home. John had sniffed him out in Taos, but Taos was not a good place to kill a man. It was pretty calm there now and killing was less common than before. Word was that Biel was running short of cash and would likely ride out within a day or so. Better to do a killing on the trail.

And so John Holland sat, his back against a sudden cliff face that rose sharp from the flat plain. It was cool enough not to need the shade, but later in the day, if he was still there, it would be welcome. Ten yards away his horse stood, tethered to scrub, its eyes closed, its ears flicking flies.

If he had killed Bertrand Biel in Taos there would have been a trial and a lot more likely than not, John Holland would have been found not guilty. More than not guilty, he would have been found innocent. Innocent, as in pure. A man who killed the man who raped his sister was committing a pure act. But the trial would have taken time and there was always the slightest chance that the jury would have gone against him. And then things would have come out; things that John Holland wouldn’t have liked to have had made public.

Ella Holland was a simple girl. More than simple, she was downright slow. She could fetch water and gather fire wood, but you wouldn’t have sent her for eggs or to do any actual chopping. She smiled more often than she cried, both for no apparent reason. Most of the time her expression was plain. She had big eyes and was a little pretty. She didn’t speak much and sometimes would bite your hand or snap a chicken neck, likewise for no apparent reason. She might have been about to do that when Bertrand Biel found her in the coop. He liked her big eyes and especially her big breasts, which he said he had just wanted to handle and then he said they were just so damn nice that he had to keep going.

Ella must have had some sense that what he was doing was wrong because she fought back, grabbing his left ear with her right hand and crushing as hard as she could. She would have torn it off if he hadn’t slapped her. After that she didn’t grab any more and he didn’t slap.

There was some talk of sending Ella off to be with an aunt just in case she turned up pregnant. There was also some mention of her living with the nuns in the convent over in Abiquiu. Neither of these things happened. Three days after Bertrand Biel left town, heading north with his broken ear, they found Ella out behind the horse barn with one of the hands from two ranches over. The next night she went missing and turned up just before the next dawn, wandering on the trail, trying to find her way home from the place where that young fellow, and several other young fellows worked. On Sunday her mother found her in the parlor, trying to make friends with the dog. After that they locked her in her room.

Now, if that had been all there was to it, John Holland probably wouldn’t have been sitting in the cliff face shade. The rape was bad enough but might not have caused him to plan murder. There were still things that could have been done and the family would have saved face. There were always the nuns.
The bigger problem wasn’t that Ella was shamed, it was just the opposite. The thing that had been done to her turned into the biggest and best thing in her life. She simply loved sex. Sex with anybody or anything. She’d break out of her room and stop the next man she saw on the trail and lift up her skirt.
Then there was the slicker who told her that if she loved it so much, why he was just the man she needed to meet. He knew a place in Albuquerque where she could meet all the men she wanted and have a place to stay and even maybe have a few dollars of her own. She didn’t even go home to pack. She rode on the back of his horse and he set her up in that special house.

Everybody thought she’d gone off with some young cowboy and was more or less a wife now. Or maybe she’d been killed by a jealous wife, but they’d never heard of a murder like that anywhere about. Probably the cowboy idea was right.

Then things happened fast. John Holland happened to be in Albuquerque and happened to get stupid drunk and happened into the wrong fancy house and it was all real dark and John happened to wake up next to his sister. Then he screamed and she screamed and the old drunk guard busted into the dark room and took a shot at John but hit Ella who died on the spot. Then the madam ran in with her gun out and John managed to yell, “Hey, this damn guy’s crazy!” Not needing more trouble than there already was, the madam whacked the guard’s head with the barrel of her gun and made him get out. There was then some discussion between the two as to whether John should give her a bunch of money to shut her up or if she should give John a bunch of money for the same reason. In the end John walked away and she let him.

Later in the day when the effects of the hangover and all the shooting had let up, John had to consider the fact that he’d just been carnal with his own sister. This was very bad, and when something bad happens, there has to be punishment. And so John Holland sat, waiting for the old drunk guard, Bertrand Biel, to come along. Way up the trail there was a bit of dust rising. Soon, thought John Holland, soon I’ll be clean of it.

ATTENTION ALL POLITICAL COMMENTATORS

2008-02-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

Let me say this very plainly: The word is "pundit." The word is not, "pundint."

Okay, I can't help myself...I'm intollerent of people who mispronounce words (even though I probably do it too.) When someone mentions the raised column upon which a statue rests and they call it a "pedistool," I go nuts.

But the word of this political season is pundit, and fully eight times out of ten I hear it pronounced with an "n." And this by professional media folks. It's crazy.

So cut it out!

It's no doubt a hopeless cause. These are probably the same folk who call their aunt's child their "cousint."

Heels

2008-02-17T16:08:00.000-05:00

Geez I write some wierd crap sometimes.

Heels

He is unsteady but moves with a focused determination. He thinks he should have opted for a lower heel. Three inches is quite a reach for his first time in stilettos. He is reasonably certain the rest of his outfit is satisfactory. The decision to wear slacks instead of a skirt had been a hard one, but there was so much else to concentrate on that the ease and familiarity of pants legs just made too much sense.

Through the parking structure of the Tropicana, down the half flight of steps to the casino floor and past the first row of slots. The casino air feels smooth on his newly shaved face. No more beard. No more moustache. After twenty years. He would find some explanation for his wife when he got back to Indianapolis. Past now a small bar on the gaming floor and a look in the mirror. Without breaking stride, all he can see are his full, gel-padded breasts. Forty-two D. He is not a small man and would not, therefore be a small woman. In the next mirror, again, all he sees are breasts. He stops at this bar and orders a whiskey and ginger ale. He considers his hands on the glass and guesses that he has known women with bigger hands than his. He sips his drink and studies the mirror.

The wig is good. Not too long nor too short. A casual style. Feminine without being frilly. His silky blouse is tasteful; jewel garnet in color and high in the neck. The breadth of his shoulders is unavoidable. He smiles at the barman. The barman smiles at him. Charles knows that the barman knows and he doesn’t care. But suddenly he thinks the barman may ask his name. He has no name; no new name. What would he say? Who would he be? How did he miss this detail? It couldn’t be a name that sounded made up. He couldn’t be Fantasia or Desiree. But he wouldn’t be Sylvia, either, nor Francine. Jill. His mother had told Charles that she thought he was going to be a twin and that she would have called his sister Jill. But he decides not to volunteer this name. He’ll keep it for emergencies.

His drink finished, he walks on, thinking that it might not have been the smartest thing to drink while learning to walk on high heels. A few people glance at him. He categorizes their looks. Some know. Maybe most know. A few much older men look him up and down. One winks and stares at his chest. Two women pass and he hears one comment on the color of his blouse. Luscious. That is the word she uses.

He walks up the Strip for maybe a block but it is very hot and he worries about sweat spoiling his make up. He worked hard on his make up. He turns and walks back to the Tropicana and back to the bar. He needs the cool air and he needs to think. He needs to take the next step but it’s not clear what that next step is. He orders a straight ginger ale and sips.

He takes a breath and says to the barman, “I’m looking for a bar. Someplace where…” He hesitates.

“Someplace where you’ll be comfortable?” says the barman.

“Yes. Exactly that. Nothing too…” He hesitates again. He almost says, nothing too queer. Charles is not queer. Charles is very straight. It’s just that today he is a straight man with tits and a garnet jewel colored blouse.

“You want Sandy’s,” says the barman. “It’s not too…much.”

“Right. Not too much. Exactly that.” He pays generously for his ginger ale and leaves with a brief, small stumble. He has forgotten about the heels.

In front of the Trop he has no problem hailing a taxi. He says, “Sandy’s,” the cabby nods and Charles settles back to watch the Strip go by.

Down Las Vegas Boulevard, a left at a wide street the name of which Charles misses, then down to Industrial, a right turn, another left and there, between a strip club and a party store is Sandy’s. Stepping form the cab, Charles feels the heat reflected off the beige cinder block walls. He enters the club, pays a twenty dollar cover charge and waits while his eyes adjust. The dark seems complete at first, with only a few shallow pools of light to his right and sharper neon beer signs by the bar to his left. Within a minute more detail resolves and he sees his way to a bar stool. He stands beside it, not wanting to have to hike himself up.

He orders a whiskey and ginger ale, “Easy on the whiskey,” he says.

Charles looks around the bar and sees that he is in company. Gay men holding hands with gay men. Lesbian women holding hands with lesbian women. A stern woman in leather. A much less stern man in a silk shirt. One other cross-dressed man who looks to Charles to have taken much less care in his appearance. A man in a business suit asks Charles to dance. Charles says, “I’ll try. I’m not much of a dancer.” It is a slow song and he spends most of his time paying attention to his feet and little of his time noticing his feelings. The dance over, Charles thanks the man. The man kisses Charles on the cheek. He is surprised. It is not unpleasant, but it is not pleasant, either, and certainly not erotic.

Charles looks back to the bar and sees that it is full; his place is taken. The bar is filling up. The tables he can see are occupied. He walks to the back of the bar, looking for a place to be; a place to observe; a place to assemble himself.

At one table sits one girl, unaccompanied. Charles’ calves ache. He touches a chair at this table and says to the girl, “Would you mind?” She half smiles and half nods, and he sits.

After a short while he asks, “Are you waiting for someone? I could leave.”

“No,” she says, “I’m just sitting.”

“Have you been here before?” asks Charles.

“No. You?”

“No. I’m from Indianapolis,” he says as though that will explain things.

“Fresno,” says the girl

Charles says, “I’ve never…been here or anything like that. I’m married. I’ve never…”

“Dressed? This is you first time out?”

“Yes,” says Charles.

“You look wonderful.”

Charles wants to say, “Really?” He wants to angle for compliments. He wants to hear how he looks.

She looks him over. “Yes, really,” she says.

“This seems to be a decent place,” she says. “But still, be careful. I don’t know anything about the guys you might meet here.”

“I’m not looking for a guy.”

“Oh,” she says. “Then what?”

“I don’t know. I think I just wanted to do this. To be this, even just this once. But I’m not looking for a guy. I’m married. And,” he says, “I’m straight.”

“Can I ask,” Charles says, “What you’re looking for here?”

“I don’t know either. I thought maybe I’d like to meet another girl. I’ve never been with another girl. I have a boyfriend. I’m not a lesbian.”

They both scan the room. “Why?” asks Charles. She looks at him. “Why did you want to be with a girl?”

The bar is dark enough that honesty is easy. “I like the way they look,” she says. “Women…look nice. I guess somehow I imagined I’d like to be with a girl but then in my mind, if it ever came to…intimacy…I don’t find that idea appealing. I don’t know.”

They, at that moment, look at each other.

“You know what we want?” askes Charles. “We want each other.”

She furrows her brow.

“Yes,” he said. “You want a woman with a penis who likes women.”

She laughed, “Yes, and you want to be a woman with a penis who meets a woman who wants her.”

For an hour they chat. And then there is an awkward silence. She says, “You know the chances of us meeting like this are microscopic.”

“In Vegas?” says Charles. “Chance is everything. But, you know,” he went on, “when we leave here, we will not be leaving together.”

“I know that,” she says. “You’re married.”

“And you have a boyfriend.”

They stand together. “Good bye,” she says.

“Good bye,” says Charles. As she walks away he whispers to the back of her neck, “We’ll always have Vegas.”

The Night Before the Comet

2008-02-03T14:40:00.000-05:00

The assignment, several years ago, was to write a story using all of the five sences. This is what I came up with.

The Night Before the Comet

The experts on CNN were about evenly divided. Half said the comet would smash into the Northeastern United States tomorrow at 11:42 PM and end civilization as we know it within three days. The other half said it would skip off the stratosphere like a rock on a pond and the worst result would be really crummy radio reception for a day or two.

I thought I’d see for myself what the world was up to on what was maybe going to be it’s last day. I had heard there were lines at the gas stations and most freeways were pretty congested, so I topped off the tank of my Harley from the lawn mower gas can and took off on back roads heading generally East. For a minute I considered riding up to Wannatuck and spending the night with my ex-wife, but she was always a frantic kind of woman even when things were calm so I passed on that idea. I figured I’d just ride around until I’d burned about half a tank of gas and then head home to watch the world end from my lawn chair in the front yard.

It was June twentieth. The National Weekly Globe had made a big deal about the fact that the comet was arriving at the Summer Solstice. Something about the wrath of God or some ancient Druid prophecy or something and they seemed to be betting on total annihilation. Probably. I noticed they still offered five-year subscriptions.

Cramer Road was empty of traffic. A hundred years ago it was a main route between Lincoln and Huron Bay. Now it’s just a busted, hard packed, dirt covered two-lane country trail. A steady crosswind bent the weeds and kicked a hot, fine clean dust under my visor. Every once in a while I’d get a whiff of fresh cut hay or grass with a cow manure chaser. The bike eased through the bumps and potholes, fifteen pounds of recent fat recoiling over my belt.

Panic was hard to find. I think if you don’t have a bunch of people gathered together, panic just doesn’t know how to show itself. It’s like laughter. A guy can be funny as hell on TV but if your watching alone you might not even chuckle. If somebody’s with you, you’ll laugh. At a comedy club you’ll slap the table and choke on your drink because he’s so damn funny. It’s the crowd. Like we need permission to laugh. Or to panic. I passed a woman hanging sheet of tan canvass over a tree limb beside her house. Was she desperate? Was she torn with inner turmoil? Was she at peace with God? Was she maybe just not paying attention?

I should have packed some food in my saddlebags. I never considered that it might be tough to get a Quarter Pounder on the eve of Armageddon. I took the Bingham Road up toward Huron Bluffs. There is a little road just before the Bluffs that dead-ended at a great overview of Port Commerce and the freeway that might be worth seeing on a day like this. I must have gotten turned around a bit, because I wound up on Norton Mills Road with nothing on either side of me but soybean fields. I pulled over at a wide spot in the road to check a map. I killed the engine.
The only thing near as sweet as the rumble of a Harley motor is the silence when you turn it off. I checked my pack and found I hadn’t brought a map. It was well past noon but the sun was still high and white. I looked east but it was way too early to spot the fuzzy pulsing sky-streak of Yamota-Bernstein. It would rise just after dark and then I guessed it would fall shortly thereafter. Or not. Up the road I heard the high pitched ying, ying, ying of a circular saw. I clipped my helmet to the back of the seat and rode slowly toward the sound, the hot wind feeling good on my scalp.
I rolled into the driveway of the next farmhouse I came to and followed it around to a back shed and the sound of the saw. I shut down the bike and he put down the saw. The sweet, sappy smell of his fresh cut wood mixed with the odor of my hot engine oil. The man with the saw was older than me. He could have been anything from a real tired fifty-five to a well-preserved seventy. His face was the color of an old catcher’s mitt, but it wasn’t nearly that smooth…maybe more the texture of hard leather work gloves left out on the John Deere all winter. He nodded. I nodded.
“I’m kinda lost,” I said, running my hand through my hair. “Huron Bluffs?”
He pointed back the way I’d come, “Back that way five miles, then jog left, then right…another three miles and there’s a service station. That’s at MacMartin’s Speedy-Co. Left there takes you to the Bluffs. Got it? Left, right, left.”
I looked at the lumber he was working on, “Cherry?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“Furniture?”
“It’s gonna be a crib. I got a grand baby gonna get born next week.” He ran his hand over a three-foot length of one by six.
I decided to stretch for a minute and lowered the kickstand. I swung my right leg over the handlebars and leaned against the seat. “You’re not worried about the comet much are you?” I said.
“I don’t think on it. What you don’t think on you don’t worry about. It don’t matter any way. If it comes I’ll be dead whether I do this or not. And if it don’t come and I don’t work on it, then I’ll be a whole day behind getting it built. Either way. Don’t look like you worry too much either, just out for a ride?”
“Yeah. Like you. If it’s going to end, I want one last look. If not, it’s a nice day for a ride. How are you going to finish it?”

He rubbed the wood again. “Haven’t decided. Probably clear polyethylene. I could use cherry colored stain, but that would be kind of stupid. If I was going to do that I could’ve just made it out of pine and used cherry stain. The baby wouldn’t know. Or I might paint it. My daughter in law wants it painted blue.”

“Be a shame to cover that grain with paint, don’t you think?” I walked over and picked up one of the perfectly turned dowels. “You turn these yourself?” I asked.

“I got a lathe and nothing much better to do. Could have bought ‘em pre-made and a whole lot cheaper.”

“But not in cherry?”

“Right.” He rested his hand on the top of a blue plastic cooler, “You want a baloney sandwich?”

I patted my saddlebag, “You want a beer?” I might have forgotten food and a map, but I did have my priorities.

His porch was screened in and overlooked the backyard. We let the screen door slam and settled into a pair of creaking wicker chairs.

“What do you think it’s going to look like?” he asked.

I took a sip of beer and let the bubbles break on the roof of my mouth. “Haven’t you been watching it?”

“I saw it two nights ago. It was pretty big then. Missed it last night. Actually I fell asleep in front of the television.”

I judged which way was west and pointed up, “The tail looked to be about so long,” and I spread my thumb and forefinger as far as I could. “And like there’s two jets coming out of it now so there’s really two tails. One of the TV guys had some explanation for it. Trapped gas or something.”

Last night, just before I went to bed I took a walk in my backyard. Fatboy was barking and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything more than a squirrel. I called him and as we turned to go back to the house I saw the comet hanging there about halfway up the sky. It was the first time I’d ever paid it any real, personal attention. I stopped walking and stood for a second. Then I just sat down on the ground. Fatboy sat next to me and I rubbed his head while I stared up. It seemed that it should have been making some kind of sound. In all the Star Wars movies the space ships and missiles and asteroids all made a bunch of noise. Yamota-Bernstien just hung there.

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

“If you want.”

We sanded and fitted and glued the crib until it was too dark to work. “I got one beer left. You want to split it?” While he went in the house to get a glass, I waited on the porch. He came out with some glasses and a big square quart bottle of bourbon.

We talked about his wife dying and the price of soybeans and his Ford truck. Then we talked about my wife leaving, drywall versus plaster and my Harley. Then that same steady wind that had been in my face all day puffed a couple of hard gusts and rattled the aspens. Through the quaking leaves we saw a white-silver glint of light. Ten minutes later the comet was above the tree line. It was square overhead in half an hour, covered an arc wider than my two hands spread out and had started pulsing pink around the edges.

“It’ll either be down or gone in about ten minutes, I’d guess.”

“I’ve got it figured out,” the farmer said.

“Better late than never,” I said. “What?”

“The crib. I’m going to seal it with a clear finish. The hell with stain. But on the headboard I’m going to paint it with a picture of the comet.”

As the head of Yamato-Bernstein passed over the far horizon I thought I finally heard it make a sound. But it might have just been the aspens.

One Touch Removed

2008-01-20T10:44:00.000-05:00

One Touch Removed

In college I met a girl who had been to a Beatles concert a few years previously. She told me that she had been midway back in the audience, couldn’t hear a thing and could barely see the lads as they performed. But when the show was over, instead of moving with the crowd as it left, she stood behind a pillar in the auditorium and waited until the place emptied out. She made her way to the front and touched the boards of the stage. She told me that she cried to think that she was touching the very place where George Harrison’s boots had scuffed. She didn’t wash her hand for a week and her friends who hadn’t been to the show would often take her wrist and hold her palm to their cheeks. The power of touch, as remote as it may be.

I think about that as I think about the very long life of my great grand mother. She was one hundred when she died...born in 1863. I remember sitting on the porch with her when I was very young and she was very old. I asked her if, when she was a child, she knew anybody as old as she was now. She thought for a minute and then recalled to me a very old man named Messerschmidt who lived up the road from her house in Germany. She guessed that she might have been five or six years old then and that he was in his nineties. She couldn’t recall much but she knew he had a pet crow and that the crow could speak a few actual words.

I don’t know if I’ll explain the next part of this correctly; the Beatles and the stage and the old man and his crow and the touch. You see, my great grandmother, when she sat with me, would pat my hand while she talked. I imagine the old man would have patted hers. She was born in 1863. Lincoln was still in office. The old man must have been born around 1778. Washington was yet to be elected president. I have touched a hand that touched a hand that lived before the Constitution was written. One touch removed.

I’m somewhat saddened that with a health history that is problematic at best, I won’t reach the ages of my great grand mother and Herr Messerschmidt. If by some freak chance I do make it to 2045, I hope someone will bring me a baby so that I might pat its hand and sent it deep into the twenty-second century only two touches removed from the generation of the very birth of our nation.

My Mother and the Crow

2008-01-15T14:55:00.000-05:00

Mom 1955

My mother was ninety-three when she died last month and frankly I was a bit surprised that she left so young. Her grandmother was well over one hundred when she died, so I just kind of assumed that mom, being in nearly perfect physical health at her last birthday, would probably carry on until at least 2015. But that didn’t happen. That dark crow, Alzheimer’s, hovering over her these last few years, made a last great swoop this past Autumn. He roosted somewhere in her mind and didn’t leave. There were, however, moments when he dropped his guard. These were not warm, blessed minutes of normalcy but tragic windows through which mom saw where she had been and where she was and where she was surely heading. Those were the terrified, “My God, what’s happening to my brain?” moments. It must have been in one of those brief, bright episodes that she devised a plan to beat the bastard; she’d starve him to death. In little more that three weeks she went from her usual eighty-six pound weight to about sixty-eight pounds. I am convinced that she had decided to kill the crow, even if it meant he’d take her with him. And she did. And he did.

Walking the Wolf

2007-11-12T17:03:00.000-05:00

Is this a new genre? The fictional essay.

Walking the Wolf

There is no such thing as a tame wolf or even a partly tame wolf. There can only be a wolf who, for the moment, has decided not to attack.

Walking for three or four miles with a wolf on a leash is never casual. There are no moments of illusion that you are one with your “pet.” You are only there as an adjunct to his hour. The leash only keeps you within each other’s boundaries in a vaguely consensual orbit.

There is always, in the pull and tug, the awareness of the relative pound for pound difference in your strengths. He is ninety-five pounds, and if you consider this in strictly human terms, you lull yourself into a false feeling of equality, or worse, superiority. A ninety-five pound man, when pushed, will fall. The wolf will not even allow himself to be pushed. His bones are light and his body fat is nonexistent. He is all muscle. And heart. And will. Pull hard and he may come, but you must always know that he will come on his own terms, and he may decide one time that those terms may be backed with anger. So you go together as a small pack, every minute weighing which of you is the leader.

You jog past a house with a fenced yard and in the yard is a large German Sheppard. The dog barks. The wolf stops. Wolves don’t bark, except when they are pups. We have bred dogs to remain pups through their lives and so they bark. The wolf sniffs. You feel a quiver through the leash, but the wolf calculates and in that moment decides the dog is not worth fighting and not worthy of inclusion with the pack. You move on.

Rounding the third mile the road heads home. A dog, sensing the nearness of his kennel will pull, or maybe drag back, tired from the walk. A wolf does neither. Home is where the wolf is. And wolves never tire.

Happy October/Mask

2007-10-27T20:05:00.000-04:00

I planned on writing ten stories in ten days. I couldn't even come up with ten titles. Then I thought I'd ask all of you who have been kind enough to stop by to make suggestions as to what I could write a story about...kind of a Short Fiction Deli...call an order and I'll try to fill it. But I chickened out.
But it's October, and I just had to post something.

Mask

Mask

The school was small; a dozen rooms for five grades plus the kindergarten, offices and a lunchroom. The first pair of rooms dated from the thirties, the rest from nineteen fifties suburban growth. There was one main hall, and on this warm October evening it was filled with milling knots of parents, cornered teachers and streaking children. It was Fun Night, a combination teacher’s conference, art show and carnival.

New to these surroundings were Jenna Ahern and her husband Wilson. They were new to the subdivision, fresh from the Eastern Shore of New Jersey. They stood with cups of Kool-Aid punch by a corkboard filled with thumbtacked poems and tempera paintings. They were deep in conversation with another new couple, Margaret and Clarence Tubbs.

Jenna said, “It’s so small, really. The school I remember from when I was a kid this age was ten times this size.”

“I think,” said Margaret nodding to her husband, “that this school is half the reason we moved out here. I mean, admittedly, there’s a certain loss in leaving the city, but things are changing so fast down there. Some for the better, I guess, but we were all the time worried about C. J.” Clarence Senior nodded. A small pack of eight-year-olds zipped through the hallway.

Apart from the conversations and the ring-toss game and the cookie tray stood MaryAnne McColl. She looked cold, all bunched together against a nonexistent wind, her forehead lined. Her husband, Ralph, stood by her, looking as cold as she did. He was the only man in the crowd wearing a suit. His wrists dangled. Their son, Peter, looked to them for comfort, found none and assumed a chilled stance of his own. He was in third grade and this was the first time in his life he’d ever set foot inside a school. MaryAnne needed to work, to get a job, so home school was over. All three seemed to shiver at the prospect.

A siren sounded from the parking lot. The newcomers looked confused, but throughout the crowd was a generalized cheer. The township fire truck had arrived. There would be rides through the neighborhood and kids would pretend to be firemen and parents would pretend to be kids. The population of the hallway was halved.

MaryAnne McColl and Ralph McColl and Peter began to move toward the lunchroom. They had hoped to have at least a few minutes to speak with Peter’s teacher before he started class on Monday. Other teachers sat at desks under signs that told who they were and what grade they represented. The third grade desk was unoccupied. A young mother stopped with a tray of Kool-Aid and placed a Styrofoam cup in the hand of each McColl. Peter looked at his mother and saw a sign in her eyes; a sign so subtle as to be almost nonexistent. He lowered his drink a few inches and held it in both hands. The family took small wary steps to the edge of the room and a small table on which to leave their cups. They stood with their backs to the wall
MaryAnne McColl studied the opposite wall, covered with sheets of paper clipped to look like autumn leaves. To her right the wall held twenty-eight drawings, each with a house of one shape or another drafted in crayon. Rounding the corner were a dozen papier-mache’ globes, blue and green and brown, swinging slowly on strings. An entirely different display hung on the wall behind where the family stood and MaryAnne caught a shape from the corner of her eye. She turned to look.

She staggered, lunged a few feet away from the wall and let go a shriek that displaced all conversation, the fire truck siren and all normal thought. When she lurched, Ralph first froze, then he turned, grabbed Peter and crouched hugging him beside the screaming MaryAnne. Then she was suddenly silent and the room was silent around her. She pointed to the wall and the row of modeled clay masks and whispered, “Satan.”

Among the blue and purple dinosaur masks and the yellow painted smiley faces and the brown approximations of puppies and kittens was one mask, somewhat larger than the others. The left half was black, the right was red. The small curved horns erupting from the forehead were sharp.

MaryAnne McColl, still pointing said, “Satan.” She was no longer whispering. She stood, her shoulders square to the offending image, her chin out. She no longer seemed quite so short or small.

“I knew it,” she said, her voice descending to a full-throated alto. “See?” she said, looking at Ralph, “See? They all say bring him to this school. That there’s no harm here. He’ll be safe. But look who’s waiting for him.

“You people,” she had turned to the rapidly assembling crowd, “there are those amongst you who are innocent and you bring your children here, but look at what they learn! And there are those in here who are of the Evil One.” She pointed again to the mask and whispered, “Satan.”

“Now, wait a minute.” A slim woman stepped from the crowd. “I think that’s just a mask. It don’t have to be Satan or anything. I think there was a movie with a monster in it like that. There’re just kids.”

“I don’t know,” said a young father, “the bible has lots of things to say about the devil and how he can come into the world in different ways and things.”

Within three minutes the lunchroom was divided into two factions, they had each occupied their own side of the room. There was much shouting and finger pointing. Faces were getting red. The noise level grew. At once a consensus arose. “We should find out who made this mask.”
At just the moment MaryAnne McColl reached for the icon to see whose name was printed on the back, she heard a voice from the doorway. “Mine.”

The mom was pretty in a young Martha Stewart way, with jeans and a jean jacket. The dad was short with frizzy reddish hair and a frizzy reddish beard. Their son, standing between them had the proportions of a seal. His head was big and his eyes were small and his hands flapped at his sides as he chugged across the room. He pointed to the mask, “Mine.” Then his eyes fixed on MaryAnne’s “Jesus Loves Me” brooch and they stayed there until his parents joined him.

“Satan,” said MaryAnne, a little less sure of herself.

“Down’s Syndrome,” said the mom.

MaryAnne looked to her husband. “It means he’s retarded,” he said.

“It means he was born a certain way,” said the dad. “Samuel is very high functioning. This,” he pointed to the mask, “is simply art.”

MaryAnne caught Samuel’s eye, “Why did you do this? Why did you create this image of Satan, the devil?”

Samuel looked at the mask and then back at MaryAnne, “Mine.” His parents smiled.

“Red and black…the colors of the Evil One. Why did you paint this thing red and black?”

Samuel looked around the room at the other children. He squinted his squinty eyes as he pointed to each, “Marty had the blue. Phillip had the yellow. Somebody had the green. I got two colors...all that was left.”

“The horns? Why horns?” asked one of the parents.

Samuel covered his eyes and peeked out through his fingers.

“These? Here. These things. These are horns.”

“Oh,” said Samuel. “No. Them are carrots.”

MaryAnne and Ralph and Peter left the school five minutes later. Ten minutes after that lines had reformed at the fire truck. Fun night continued.

Samuel and his mom and his dad walked the two blocks to their house. They split a bag of Doritos three ways, helped Samuel brush his teeth and put him to bed. Then they padded to their bedroom and got undressed. They turned to the wall.

As the dad pulled a wall curtain aside he said to her, “We’re really going to have to be more careful.” The curtain parted revealing in red and black the painted face of their Lord and Master. He was not pleased.

STOKING UP FOR WINTER

2007-08-28T19:33:00.000-04:00

I hesitated in posting this. So often after a fresh post, visitors don't hop down to see the previous one, and I am really hoping that it won't get burried. But still, we are in the time of hot days and chill nights and I thought you'd like this.

STOKING UP FOR WINTER

We swallow sunshine while we can,
stoking up our solar souls,
laying by against the time,
when Summer goes,
and we, like moles,
burrow deep for warmer climes.

Wicker Loveseat

2007-08-24T13:35:00.000-04:00

The assignment was simple: The protagonist finds a wicker loveseat in the middle of the road.
This is what I made of it.

Wicker Loveseat

Right out there on the road to Chopshaw, Alabama, straddling the center rut, was a wicker love seat. From a half mile away Wisson Berryboy thought it was a cow. It could have been a cow although pigs and chickens were more common on the Chopshaw Road. Either way Wisson didn’t give it much mind, and he kept on walking. The sun, even through the thin scrim of clouds, was a force against his face and he mostly looked down at the flat-packed, sand-dust shoulder. Such dust as he raised with his thick brown brogans settled quickly; no breeze.

From a quarter mile away Wisson determined that if it was a cow that he was seeing, it was a dead one, or at least a downer fixing to die. At a hundred yards he saw that it was furniture. When he drew parallel to it he stopped.

Some wicker is painted white and sits on a veranda and creaks when you first settle into it. Other wicker, older wicker, wicker that’s been retired from the veranda, might spend its last years out of doors, under a tree, fading into a soft, bleached, straw color. But this wicker, the wicker that Wisson Berryboy was studying, had been stained and finished to a dark red-brown that shined as though varnished or shellacked. Wisson had never seen wicker in a proper living room in a white man’s house, but he imagined that if ever that might happen, this was the piece that would fit.

With that thought Wisson began to consider what he should do. If he were to continue walking toward town and if something were to happen to this piece of wicker and if he had been seen near it, there might be blame. And at seventy-eight years, the last thing Wisson wanted was blame for something happening to a white man’s property. It didn’t look heavy and he decided to just move it to the side of the road and then walk on, but having taken only a single step he caught sight of a plume of dust rising from the road to the east. He stood by as the plume approached in the form of a brand new, black, DeSoto sedan. The car slowed and a man wearing a cream colored suit with a matching hat called from the window, “Why don’t you move that damn thing? Is it yours?”

“No, Sir,” said Wisson. “It’s not mine at all. I’m just minding it.”

“For who?”

“For Mister Dick.” Randolph Dick was a white man who Wisson considered might just have a set of wicker like this. And if he had such a set and this one piece had fallen to the road, and if he had seen Wisson walking, why it would be just natural that he would ask him to mind it until he could send someone to retrieve it. And surely if it were not Mister Dick himself, then it was another white man from not too far away who would have made the very same request.

“Randolph Dick?” asked the man. He consulted briefly with a woman sitting next to him. Then he said to Wisson, “I could take that loveseat to Randolph Dick myself. You could put it in my trunk and I could carry it to him.”

“Well, Sir, Mister Dick didn’t say nothing about moving this here furniture.” And that was the truth. Wisson Berryboy felt safer with the truth than with the merely plausible.

“So you’re just going to stand here and wait?”

“I’m just supposed to mind it for a while.”

“Fine,” said the man, clearly disgusted. The DeSoto kicked dust and left.

And now Wisson had a problem; having been seen with the love seat he could hardly leave it, but also having refused to have it moved he had made a certain commitment. He resolved to mind the furniture for a while as he had said. He pulled the loveseat to the shoulder and sat down on the ground next to it. It never occurred to him to sit on the loveseat itself. The wicker cast a dappled shadow and that was enough.

He must have dozed because he didn’t hear the clattering pre-war Ford until it was nearly upon him. In the Ford were three young men of varying shades of black, but all with the very same eyes. They were the sons of Pamela Bacon and they lived not too far from Chopshaw, down the Old Dam Road and a bit east. Wisson didn’t know they had a car now.

“Hey,” called the one who was driving.

“Hay is for horses,” said Wisson.

The driver’s door opened and the first lad slid out, all slow and loose in his limbs. The two others followed through the same door. “Well then, how do you do, Mister Berryboy? That better?”

Wisson nodded, “Better. When did you get a car? Is that your car?”

The second boy said, “Momma’s friend. He’s got two cars.”

The driver, Maurice, said, “Mr. Berryboy, how come is it that you’re sitting by the side of this road with a sofa?” The third son of Pamela Bacon snickered. His name was Charles.

“I’m to mind this here wicker loveseat for a little while for Mister Randolph Dick.”

“Is he paying you?” asked Charles.

“Yes,” said Wisson. “Mister Dick is paying me two dollars to mind it here until dark.”

“What happens after dark? Is he sending a car? How did it get here?”

“You don’t need to concern about any of that,” said Wisson. “That’s all Mister Dick’s business. And mine.”

“We’ll mind it with you,” said Maurice. “Keep you company.”

Wisson thought for a minute that he wouldn’t care for any company, but then decided that it might be more comfortable sitting in the old Ford than on the ground so he didn’t object.

Wisson awoke an hour later in the front seat of the Ford and saw that two of the Bacon boys, Charles and Maurice, were sitting on the loveseat and their brother Pinchon was talking with a fourth person. This fourth person was known as Alan but nobody knew his last name. He lived in a shack out behind the deserted peach cannery and kept pretty much to himself unless he’d been drinking, which he appeared to be doing at this moment. Wisson got out of the car.

“No,” he shouted. “That loveseat isn’t for sitting on. We’re just to mind it.”

The boys stood up. Alan took a swig from a bottle in a paper bag and stared at Wisson.

The air was cooler now and the shadow from the loveseat longer. Wisson told Maurice Bacon that he was disappointed to see him sitting on the wicker and he was sure Mr. Dick would have been upset to have seen it, too. He heard a rustle and turned around to see the paper bag passing from Pinchon to Alan.

“Now what is this? What is this? Pinchon, what are you doing with that bag? Nothing you need in there.” Pinchon grinned.

Alan passed the bag to Wisson. He hesitated, but it had been a long day so he took the bag and took a full swallow. The cheap whiskey burned, but it cleared his eyes and settled him down a bit.

An hour later the sun was down and only a thin band of indigo hovered in the west. The bottle was half empty and Wisson was sitting on the loveseat. He figured he was protecting it.

“Mister Dick isn’t here yet,” said Alan.

“No,” said Wisson. “And it’s near full dark, pretty near.” He was preparing to ask the Bacon boys to give him a ride home. He lived with his daughter, only about five miles down.

But then there was a scuffle in the weeds and two people stepped out and onto the road. The boy led the girl by the hand. She whispered something to him and he hitched up his pants. He was Antonio Brown, tall, light skinned, broad shoulders and not yet sixteen. She was MayAnne Spencer and MayAnne Spencer was known to be good for only one thing and it appeared that Antonio Brown had just learned about that one thing in some detail. MayAnne had a homely face but her body had been full grown since she was eleven.

In the twenty minutes it took for the sky to become full dark, Alan’s bottle was empty. MayAnne said, “That nasty old car got a radio?”

“Yeah,” said Charles, “but there’s something wrong with the speaker. It don’t play good.”

“Let me see,” said Antonio, and he slithered on his back under the dashboard. “Just a loose wire,” he called, and in seconds he had the latest song from Big Momma Thornton blaring through the tinny speaker. “And that’s not all.”

He snaked his way from under the dashboard and onto his feet. He held one hand behind his back. “Look what I found.” It was a nearly full bottle of Lord Standish Sloe Gin.

The moon came up and the level of the Lord Standish Sloe Gin went down. Twice Maurice had to start the Ford to recharge the battery. There was a slight breeze and a slight chill and about ten o’clock Pinchon and Charles dragged some brush and dry tall grass to the side of the road and lit it with a kitchen match. Alan figured the fire was far too small and went off to find some real wood. He hauled back a twelve foot elm branch which he proceeded to stomp into relatively small and burnable pieces.

MayAnne and Pinchon danced in the half-light a dozen feet from the fire. Maurice and Alan jitter-bugged and Wisson found himself wagging his foot to the beat. The gin left a sour candy taste in his mouth and only another swallow would clean it out for a few minutes. Between songs on the radio MayAnne and Pinchon left the light of the fire.

“He’s too young for all that,” said Wisson.

“Thirteen,” said Charles. “Not too young. I was fifteen before I met a willing girl.”

“How old are you now?”

“Sixteen. Mister Berryboy? How old were you your first time?”

“People ask the damnedest things nowadays. Whoever would have thought? A sixteen year old boy asking a grown man…an old grown man…about things like that. Truth is I don’t rightly know. I didn’t mark it on a calendar or anything.”
Charles asked, “You don’t remember your first time?”

“Oh, I remember just fine. Just fine.” He collected his thoughts for a minute. “School teacher’s daughter,” he said finally. “Older than me. Skinny shy girl. But she knew what she was about. I think I might have been your age. It was while my momma was still alive and she passed when I was seventeen. Maybe the summer before that.” Wisson Berryboy smiled. “Oh yes, I remember just fine. I remember a lot more than I’ll tell.”

Pinchon and MayAnne returned. Maurice had found more wood. Wisson was feeling tired.

There was a high sharp cry and Wisson saw that Alan had MayAnne by the arm and was leading her to the shadows, but she was having none of it. She tried to pull away but he held firm and she snapped back to him like an elastic band and cracked his face with her free closed fist. He stumbled backwards, still hanging tight to her arm and the pair lost their balance and fell, MayAnne on top of Alan and Alan slamming flat on his back into the fire.

Alan was screaming before he touched the embers and MayAnne, now free, was slapping him with both hands as the soot and ash and a massive shower of sparks sprayed around them. The hem of her dress caught fire and she just kept slapping. Charles and Maurice and Pinchon grasped and grappled at the pair to pull them from the fire and each other.

At last Maurice and Charles held Alan, one at each arm, as he bellowed that they were grabbing where he was burned. They didn’t let go. Pinchon had MayAnne on her back and had swatted her burning skirt until all it did was smoke. Her eyes never left Alan.

Wisson saw it all and he turned to catch his breath just in time to see that stray sparks and bits of burning elm had found the wicker love seat. Small flames ran up the left arm and started across the back. Wisson snatched up the blanket and threw it over the flames. He pulled back the blanket and sent a rolling cloud of white smoke upwards. Charles and Maurice and Pinchon stood by him. MayAnne sat by the fire still muttering curses at Alan. Alan was gone.

“Well now,” said Wisson. “Well now. This is a kind of a problem.”

Charles said, “Yeah. Mister Dick. What’s he going to say?”

“Hmm,” said Wisson Berryboy. “Hmm. If this here wicker was found to be damaged, I expect there would be trouble.”

“But?” asked Charles.

Wisson smiled and reached for the scorched arm. “Here. You grab the other arm.”

They dragged the love seat over to the remains of the fire and tipped it onto its back. It caught in seconds. It burned bright and fast and satisfying. Even MayAnne was grinning in the orange light.

A short while later they spread the ashes of the fire and of the loveseat and of the evening and scuffed it all into the dust leaving only a slightly darker patch of road for the morning to find.

The sons of Pamela Bacon offered Wisson Berryboy a ride home and as he settled into the back seat he thought to himself, “And the hell with you Mister Randolph Dick.”

Sasha Kinski Tells a Joke

2007-08-09T15:54:00.000-04:00

Sasha Kinski Tells a Joke

Sasha Kinski wants to tell a joke. He knows his English is very good, even though accented. Here is the joke: The teller says to a new acquaintance, “You know, I have CRS.” The listener wonders for a moment what kind of disease this is but before they can speak, the joke teller says, “CRS...can’t remember shit.” Sasha has heard this joke told twice and each time there is laughter.

And now Sasha is at a party. Two dozen or thirty people are standing in small clumps or sitting on the loft’s few furnishings. He has been conversing brilliantly, mentioning with casual humor some of the more amusing consumer products he grew up with in Poland in the seventies: the Trabant, that filthy, square and dangerous auto from East Germany, the splinter filled bathroom tissue, the counterfeit Coca-Cola. He knows the time is near for his joke.

Sasha is tall with dark, droop-eyed good looks. He wears an ill fitting sweater that seems perfect for him; very ethnic, but he doesn’t know this. The small accumulation of party goers near him likes his voice and slightly bear-like movement. One of the women, the one in the teal slacks, is considering what his big hands might mean and if she should make an effort to find out tonight. Some of the men are considering whether his mannerisms might be endearing to potential clients and whether, if they hired him, he might boost sales.

A woman has mentioned that her sister has been ill for the last week. Sasha clears his throat and says, “Well, you know, I have T.B.” Those near him pause. He clears his throat again and they take half a step back. Sasha begins to say, “Can’t remember shit,” and realizes that it doesn’t fit. He has erred, but he’s not certain of the meaning of T.B. Then he says, “Ah, T.B.—Tiny Bladder. I must go to the bathroom.” Two people point the way and step even further back as he suppresses a small cough.

Half way to the bathroom he looks back. The people are whispering and muttering to each other. The woman in the teal slacks is thinking, “What a pity. They are very big hands.”

Sending the Dream Away

2007-08-07T14:32:00.000-04:00

Sending the Dream Away

The postage for the manuscript was over seven dollars: a cover letter, a synopsis and the allowed thirty pages of text. And the SASE. This buys transport for dreams away from my post office to New York and home again. Not hopes and dreams; just dreams. The hope stays with me.

A half hour after posting I check my mail box and laugh a single Ha, amused that some space in my heart is already looking for reply. And so it is every day after, from the impossible first week through the implausible second week and into the vaguely possible third week, waiting to see my own handwriting on the full manila package. There is the daily hot-chill, loose-tight gut as I walk to the mail box. Nothing. Of course.

And just as well. The twenty-four hours between postal drops is profitable for feeding hope. Without the almost certain rejection, I can read, in my mind, the perfect letter on its way to me. Phrases like, “You were cruel to send only the first thirty pages. Please, please send the rest by overnight mail.” Or just, “Yes!” hand written on expensive, engraved corporate letterhead.

The hope. The unrealized potential. The tension of the foreplay of the waiting for the dream to return. Between the sending and the reply, all potential is possible. The contract. The galleys. The cover. The book signing (a mahogany desk? A smooth, worn pine deal table? A card table?) Everything that could be, could be. The reviews. Oprah. Why not?

In the time before reply, the dream, in-transit, grows and the dream feeds the hope that stayed behind. Without the boiler-plate “Dear Contributor” the ever possible “Yes” remains.

And then the manila envelope comes back and with it the manuscript and the synopsis and clipped to the upper right corner, the five by eight inch, mint green “Dear Contributor...” And then, the next day, with fresh envelopes and fresh postage, the dream is again sent flying. And the hope stays home. And Oprah is real again.

Life as a Story

2007-08-02T19:53:00.000-04:00

I learned a lot of things as I wrote the novel, Buck and Tangee: Things That Happened. One of the things was that not every word nor every scene works. Some things may be good, but they just don't make the cut...they don't fit. That's whats happening with the following five hundred words. The book took a different turn, and Mayanne became Tangee and this brief interchange never happened. I hate to waste things so here it is.

Life as a Story

Daylight Savings Time is good. Sitting on MayAnne’s front porch at eight o’clock at night, there was still a low clear sun to squint against. The slightest breeze pushed bugs and dust and dandelion fluffs past in lazy eddies.

The used-to-be-yellow lawn chair creaked as I turned to her and said, “Want to go to a show or something? Get a pizza?”

It didn’t much matter what we did, if anything at all. The plan was that later on we’d get all naked and sweaty, but for now most anything would be okay.

Her daughter, Angel, looked over from her book. “Couldn’t we, like, do something real? What’s the point? Movies and pizza. There’s no point in that.”

“Movies are fun and pizza is food. How much more real do you need?”

“It’s like we’re wasting everything,” she said. “Time and life and everything.”

Angel is sixteen; baggy jeans and a too tight tee shirt. She was bright and she knew it and she was stuck here and she knew that, too.

“Everything has to contribute to the plot,” she said, leaning against the porch railing. “That’s how stories go. That’s how novels go. It makes sense. It’s the one thing that Mr. Eiler said last year in English that did make sense. When you write a book or something, everything has to contribute to the plot. She wagged her straight brown hair off of her face and waited for rebuttal.

“This here is life,” said MayAnne. “This ain’t no story. And I don’t want to sit in the movies. It’s a nice night and there’s some of our funny shows on TV. Pizza’s good-just remember to get your mushrooms and stuff on your half. I don’t want to have to go picking mushrooms off my side.”

MayAnne has beautiful little feet. They were in tennis shoes at the moment, but later she’d scuff them off in front of the TV and I’d rub her toes.

“This might be life,” Angel was saying, “but it wouldn’t make much of a story. It wouldn’t get a D in class. Nobody’d ever buy this book.”

“Well that’s just fine with me, Missy, because this life ain’t for selling.” MayAnne was getting a little defensive. “It’s just for living. That’s what people do. They live. It’s the books that ain’t real. Besides, what are you doing that’s so important? You ain’t got no plot either. Unless you’re doing something with Bradley that you shouldn’t be doing. That kind of plot will get you in trouble. Next thing you know, you’re going to be pregnant and I’ll be stuck with the baby and you’ll wind up on welfare or something.”

“Ma, we haven’t even done anything and you got me on welfare already.”

Of course Angel and Bradley were doing something and their plot had advanced a whole lot further than she was saying. But I figured saying something wouldn’t be all that helpful, even if it would make our story a little more interesting for a while.

Summer Song...for kids

2007-07-31T19:52:00.000-04:00

Okay, it's too cutsie. So what?

STINGY BUGS

Be watchful, dear, the bumble bug,
the black and yellow rumble bug;
he whispers warmly with his wings,
and sings.

Be careful of the honey bug,
the browny yellow busy bug;
he hurries on from flower to flower,
each hour.

Be fearful of the waspy bug,
the black and shiny nasty bug;
he whines a warning days and nights,
and bites.

Study now these stingy bugs,
these multicolored pointy bugs;
but see how beautiful they are,
from ’far.

Hard Writing

2007-07-24T16:39:00.000-04:00

Hard Writing

When I’m on a roll and I’m working on a story, I can usually write well over a thousand words a day. It just flows. I can see the scenes and the characters and how they interact and the words I need to express everything I see. It’s like watching a movie and writing down what I’m looking at.

That was how it went with my novel, Buck and Tangee: Things That Happened. When I got into the groove the words just seemed to appear on the screen. But that book is done and now comes the hardest writing, the submission cover letter and synopsis.

It should be so easy: “Dear Ms. Agent...” But it’s not. There are particular forms to follow and rites to observe. It’s a book of humor but the letter can’t be funny or clever. It has to be business like. So I write a business-like cover letter and I read it over and I realize that if I were an agent I’d be thinking, “Humor? This guy isn’t very funny.” Then I do a letter with a few neat turns of phrase and I just know that the agent would think, “Who the hell does this guy think he is? He doesn’t even know me and he’s trying to be cute.”

Almost worse is the synopsis. It’s just supposed to be a very straight forward, present tense description of the contents of the chapters. It comes off the same as trying to write a clinical analysis of a joke. “That’s supposed to be funny?”

It’s all like a blind date on paper. I can only hope that the agents in question will somehow get past this forced prose and start reading the first thirty pages of the manuscript that I’m allowed to send.

So let me ask...how do you handle this business of writing?

The King

2007-07-12T16:06:00.000-04:00

Just a little fun. Maybe you have to be of a "certain age" to get it, but what the hell.

THE KING

The Elvitian Monks and the Holy Order of Prestlians are at war again. Mostly the fighting is centered around Memphis but there’s hardly a trailer park in Michigan where you’d feel safe. Tensions are running high since The Comeback is expected any time now. The question is where? The Elvitians look toward the Holy City of Vegas and the Prestlians are holding out for Memphis. There is even a small group of Unaffiliated Faithful camped out near Tupelo. Spray paint has been the weapon of choice, but considering that an acceptable color for an Elvitian cassock-jumpsuit is camouflage, you can’t be too careful.

When it comes to religion, I’m pretty much interdenominational, although I must say, I’ve never had much faith in polka. Probably it was my well-known Ecumenicalism that made me the prime candidate to be named emissary for this mission. The Secretary General—as secular and tone deaf as he may be—thought at first I was a Sinatrist, but when he found that I practice most other Musics, he figured I’d do as good a job as any.

The mission was pretty basic: deliver to each group an invitation from the Secretary General to a joint Concert, the point of which was to find common ground and stop (or at lest slow down) the internecine assault rate. After all, it is hard to hear the Holy Songs over a lot of gunfire.

I approached Memphis in a properly neutral costume. I worn a flowered shirt and lei patterned after the third scene in Blue Hawaii. Both sides accept tasteful adaptations of Elvis’ movie garb as respectful. Prestlians favored worshipping the Early Elvis and dressed more in silk and Banlon shirts and sport coats; the Elvitians went more for jump suits and sequins.

This was one of the finest Prestlian Temples I’d ever seen, and it looked a lot less like a pole barn than most of the others. Of course it was a pole barn, but was still and all a fair approximation of Graceland. A deacon escorted me in.

“Elvis has seen you safely here. I’m glad. I am Elvis John Martin.”

Elvis John wore snug black slacks and a lime green silk shirt open at the throat. I guessed, based on his coloring, he had naturally sandy or even blond hair before he’d died it coal black. His sideburns were patchy at best.

He nodded at my outfit and said, “Blue Hawaii. I preached on that message two weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry I missed it,” I said, and quoted a few lines from the film. He smiled.

“Elvis John, you know why I’m here,” I said. “This combined Concert could be very important. Of course, none of us can know when The Comeback may happen, but every Concert offers the chance, and one as great as this could offer the best chance yet.”

Elvis John fairly glowed, “Wouldn’t it be grand? Just imagine, if He could Comeback at our concert.”

This was becoming an easier sell than I had anticipated.

He asked, “What sort of service is planned?”

I knew this was the turning point. The Prestlians didn’t hold with Incarnations and in fact, still called them “Elvis Impersonators.” While every representation of The King was to be respected, they preferred to worship the Original Canon through recordings, films and the occasional lip-synch.

I said, “The Elvitians have agreed to a single Incarnation, but they insist he perform for at least half of the service.”

Elvis John frowned, but he was clearly in the game. “Not half of the service. Half of the Canon performance, maybe. And we’d have to agree on the songs he would perform. I think we could allow them some input on our choice of recordings. If they can accept those terms, I’m sure we can. But the message? Who will give the message?”

“I am authorized,” I said, “to tell you that if you are willing to accept the Incarnation for half of the service…”

“Half of the Canon,” corrected Elvis John.

“Yes. The Canon. That if you can accept that, they would be ready to share the spoken word. They have even offered you the opening Benediction. They would do the close.”

“It would seem we are cast as merely the opening act. I don’t like that.”

“I think they were quite sincere,” I said. “They felt that since your beliefs focus on The Kings beginnings—his roots—that you would prefer to begin the service.”

He hummed a few bars of Devil in Disguise. Then he looked at me and said, “I don’t believe they think in such generous terms. But, although they may have their own motives, they may have a point.”

I breathed a little easier. Actually that last little bit of BS had been my own creation, but hey, that’s what diplomacy is all about.

Later, after we had worked out some further details and signed documents he walked me out.

“I’m sure,” he said, shaking my hand, “we couldn’t have reached this agreement without the help of the Spirit of Elvis working through you. You’d be a fine addition to our congregation. Would you consider it?”

“Thank you, Elvis John. I’m flattered. But you know I’m an Interdenominationalist.”

“But at least tell me…thee must be one pre-set on your stereo that you favor—one CD you play when you need divine inspiration. Tell me.”

We’d arrived at my car. It may have been a breech of some diplomatic rule, but I couldn’t help it. I whispered in his ear. He smiled and said, “I should have known…of course…the True Prophet. The One and Only. Mr. Excitement.”

As I pulled away I hit that favorite pre-set, cranked the volume up to ten and treated the assembled Prestlians to the wailing strains of my one true god of Music, Jackie Wilson.

Ah, Tony

2007-06-13T16:08:00.000-04:00

I never watched the Sopranos. Not a single episode. So I suppose I don't have much of a right to comment on the final thirty seconds of the program that has been shown all over the place. The hell I don't...this is a blog...it 's the last place on earth a person needs to be qualified to comment.
My lack of involvement does mean that I don't have enough information to speculate as to how ther show should have ended, but it seems to me that viewers are missing something. That last scene where Tony looks up? He's not about to get whacked or to finish off one of the other characters. We don't see his hands, only his eyes, and then to black. He has a gun under the table. He shoots US! Whang! Except there was no whang...you never hear the one that gets you. He kills the viewer, and with that instant death, all is suddenly black. See? There was something at the end. We were just too dead to see it.

Sparks

2007-06-09T09:04:00.001-04:00

SPARKS

Sparks-
they're all just
sparks.

Fleeting, flying, incandescent bits,
struck from hard blue steel.

Ideas only,
written quickly
arcing briefly,
going nowhere,
cooling fast.
Cold before they land.

Beautiful in their profusion-amounting, still, to nothing.

Summer Reading

2007-06-07T17:22:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading

Ten years ago, after a heart attack, I had a lot of reading time. I read several volumes each of Anne Tyler, Updyke and Vonnegut, along with several others.

This year, in the last few weeks, I seem to have fallen into another pattern of twentieth century American authors: C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Mickey Spillane, so far. It’s great fun to read Lewis’, “Screwtape Letters” back to back with Twain’s “Letters from the Earth.” Spillane...my God, how could you not love a book, “The Killing Man”, whose first paragraph contains,
“I could smell the rain. It was the kind that hung above the orderly piles of concrete until it was soaked with dust and debris and when it came down it wasn’t rain at all, but the sweat of the city.”

And Gatsby...I have to read it every twenty years, just to be reminded that style need never get in the way of story. The Hemingway was, “The Sun also Rises,” a story so resonant with today’s “news.” Was there ever a more perfect Lady Brett Ashley than Brittany Spears? Maybe Paris Hilton.

So, what are you reading? Current books? Some kind of theme? A genre? The Cuthulu mythos? It would be interesting to know.

I See Things in Darkness

2007-06-05T21:26:00.000-04:00

Stewart's assignment this time was to write a tale of up to 1500 words containing the line, "I see things in darkness that no one should see by light of day." How i wish I'd had another thousand words. Both in tone and content, that line could only evoke the following...

I See Things in the Darkness

The house was a cabin, build of old rail road ties and smelling of creosote, but it was enough for what I considered to be a weekend writing studio. The lot was three wooded acres, behind which was a four hundred acre area owned in common by those twelve of us who held property along that stretch of the Maniwong River. I was a new comer; this was my first autumn.
I had four sets of wind chimes ranging from tiny brass cylinders that tinkled like a celeste at the slightest breeze, through a set of somewhat heavier brass strips and a chime made with a metal ball that struck tuned steel rods. The biggest was a heavy iron triangle and it took a hell of a wind to get that one going, but I loved its song and the four of them together made great music on a windy night.
It was the Friday evening of a long holiday weekend and I was clearing brush away from the south side of the building. It was a chore that needed to be done and was a useful excuse for not writing.
“That’s a smart thing to do.” I heard the voice, but I hadn’t heard the foot steps of the speaker approaching. I turned.
“Yeah,” I said. “Less chance for fire damage if I get this brush out of here.” I held out my hand. “I’m Clement,” I said. “Clement Dixon.”
We shook hands and there were more than a few extra seconds before he said, “Malcolm.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I’m pretty new here and I need to get a few things squared away. This place has been vacant for quite a while.”
“I know,” he said.
“Maybe later,” I went on, “I’ll do some hiking in the back four hundred.”
“You’ll want to be careful about that. I don’t think that’s something you ought to do much of.”
“Why not? I mean we own it. Why not check it out?”
Again there were several seconds of hesitation. “Bears,” he said.
“Well, I guess there might be a few around,” I said, “but I think if I’m careful...”
“We don’t much like people tramping around back there.”
“We?” I asked.
“My people.” And again an overly long pause, “Think of it as a burial ground.”
“Your people? You’re an Indian? Native American?” That seemed the least likely of all possible national origins for this fellow. He was short with washed out eyes, so pale blue I could hardly tell where the iris stopped. And his hair, what there was of it was a whitish blond. He was mostly bald but with an enormously thick moustache and beard. It tangled in oily dreadlocks down his face and below his chin.
“I suppose you might better say Native American. Not Indian.”
“No offense meant,” I said.
“No problem,” he said, “but it is an important distinction.”
“So there is what, like a cemetery back there? Nobody told me. Well, trust me, I’ll be careful not to desecrate anything.”
“Yes,” he said. “Be careful.”
With that he left me to my brush and a lot of questions. Of course now I had to do some exploring.
By noon I had done as much yard work as I was going to do. I went into the cabin, ate a sandwich and sipped a beer. This Indian burial ground thing was stuck in my head. I finished my beer and put on some heavy leather walking boots.
The four hundred acres began just past the power lines and where I entered it was just ankle high ferns and weeds and a few sprouts of pine trees. Past that low meadow, the forest began. There were a few deer trails and other open areas, but always off to every side, the blue dark cover of the pine. There were also a few huge maple trees and it was at one of them that I stopped for a rest. I sat on the needley ground with my back against the trunk. I pulled a can of beer from my light pack and took a few deep swallows. It was nice to rest. Some of the needles poked at my butt and I reached back to brush them smooth. I noticed the splayed roots of the giant tree and idly poked at the nearest one. There was a bit of a hole between it and the ground and I continued scraping until my finger scratched against a buried rock. I dug. The rock came out. But it wasn’t a rock. It was a small stone figure, no more than five inches long. It looked for all the world like an elephant, but a very weird elephant; there were carved indications of a dozen trunks instead of one and other incisions on the creature’s body seemingly meant to represent hair. I fingered it for a while and then slipped it in my pocket. I took it home and set it on my dresser.
I napped that afternoon, or rather started to nap. There was a knock at my door. It was Malcolm.
“You shouldn’t have gone,” he said. “Was it to spite me? Hadn’t I just warned you?”
“Hey, I went for a walk,” I said, and added, “on my own property.”
“You’re name is on the deed,” he said. “Ours is on the land. Your only saving grace was that you went in the afternoon. I’ve seen things in darkness that no one should see by light of day. You’ve done a wrong thing, Mr. Dixon. See that you don’t do any more.” He turned to leave and said over his shoulder, “Return the doo-dad.”
My face flushed. I hadn’t done anything wrong. It was my land. It was a hateful accusation. The doo-dad? Maybe I had taken something associated with a native burial. So what? I thought. I sat until early evening facing the blank bright blue-white of an unfilled computer screen. I was pretending to write, and failing even at the pretense.
The sun had set and the sky was barely violet when I heard the crash. I looked to the north where the thudding sound had come from and saw, above the line of the trees, a shimmer of light, no brighter than an aurora, with colors shifting through an impossible range of blues and pinks.
My first thought was a plane crash. I pulled on my boots and headed out, hoping my strong flashlight would steer me into the growth. I’d trust my compass to guide me out. I got deeper into the woods than I had that afternoon, but I heard nothing more. The aurora-glow had lessened too, with only a few dim clouds of sparks sailing slowly over the trees. Then, suddenly, to my left the glow brightened and I saw from the corner of my eye, a shape. It seemed to be running, but also looked to be about five feet above the ground. Impossible. It moved in a jagged line, right and left, up and down, before it disappeared.
Then I heard the chimes. In a mad chorus I could hear them, although I was hundreds of yards from the house. And then another sound. Not a chime; a gong, deep and hollow and ringing through the forest. And there was no wind.
I turned and ran, falling over stumps and tripping over the reaching ferns. I stopped to check my compass and each time I was heading in a slightly wrong direction. I looked up and saw the aurora lights, bright and dancing. I checked my compass and headed straight toward it. I knew the lights were over my cabin.
I made the clearing of my house and saw, from every window, that fantastic spectrum, flashing bright as a strobe. Then the light lowered and there, loping away was the same bear-like shape I had seen earlier. It turned to me and I saw it was no bear but the very figure of the stone carving I had found. It shook its head and from its face the dozen trunks or tentacles shook.
I hunkered low until the light had entirely gone. Then I crept back to my home. The entire south west corner was gone. I inspected. There were tooth marks. It had been chewed away. I entered through the gaping wreck, nearly slipping on some kind of mucous or drool on the floor. Some of the furniture had been knocked aside, but the damage ended at my dresser. The statue was gone.

A Mirrored Lantern

2007-05-31T21:56:00.000-04:00

A Mirrored Lantern

It was twenty minutes into the power failure before Arthur finally decided to light a flame. It took that long for him to decide that it was a semi-permanent situation, find the faux pewter lantern and fill the base with oil. He set the lamp on an end table and stared into the light. His girlfriend, Allison, stared too.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

Arthur didn’t answer.

The glow was generally kind to him, giving a warm color to his skin that light bulbs and sunshine failed to do. But it was unkind as well, making the slight wrinkles around his eyes look deeper and old. Allison was twenty years younger and didn’t need the help, but her tan now took on an even more golden glow.

“I wish I had more than one lantern,” Arthur said. “We had a pair of them, but I don’t know where the other one is.” The “we” was Arthur and his ex-wife. Allison noted the “we” but didn’t care much and said nothing.

“I wonder,” said Arthur, “if I put a mirror behind it, if that would double the amount of light? It would have to, wouldn’t it? I mean, it would be like two flames.”

“I don’t know,” said Allison. She was wondering if the power was out at her apartment and how long the ice cream would stay frozen. She snuggled closer to Arthur and rested her hand on his thigh.

“Or if I had two mirrors, would it be like having three lights.”

“Oh, A. J.,” she said, “I don’t know. It couldn’t be, really. Then why would people ever have more than one lamp or candle or anything in a room? Don’t you suppose that even before people had electric lights, some one would have thought of that?” She brought her hand up higher on his leg.

“I think we have an old mirror in the garage,” he said. Arthur was forty-five, loved sex, and especially loved it now with Allison. But now was not the time. Later in the evening would be the time; after the power came back on, he could turn out the lights and they could go upstairs.

He stood up, took his weak little flashlight in his hand and opened the door in the family room that accessed the garage. He was back five minutes later. “Well, I thought we had one.”

“I think,” said Allison, “that all a mirror would do would be to catch the light that’s going the other way and bounce it back this way.”

“Still, wouldn’t that double the brightness?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it just returns the light that’s wasted on the wall. But still, there’s only so much light in one flame.”

Arthur sat back down. Allison sat straight, her hands folded in her lap, wondering if her cat was afraid of the dark. Probably not.

Rolling Sevens

2007-05-25T17:54:00.000-04:00

Yeah, another poem. Stewart, you can click out now if you wish. And yeah, it's wierdly indented, and frankly I don't care much for cleverly formatted poems, but you see, if I can't read it to you in person, I have to use such breaks to approximate verbal cues like the un-notable micro comma, and the half breath. Hell, read it any way you want.

ROLLING SEVENS

How long can you keep rolling sevens?
How long,
until you meet
that snake's beady eyes?
Your search for a small piece of Heaven's
not consistantly wise.

It seems that your victories are hollow;
Your winnings recover
things you don't need.
It's becoming a life that you follow,
not one that you lead.

You’ve always been a gambler;
your wagers on credit,
your betting's an art;
Risking
none of your principals,
but all of your heart.

Time now to leave the Casino,
taking your winnings,
still using your wits;
Gathering
your final jackpot
and calling it quits.

A piece of my heart, it goes with you;
And all of the rest of me
stays here to play.
I'm due to start rolling some sevens,
Now that you're making a clean getaway.

The Dog Next Door

2007-05-21T11:12:00.000-04:00

Five months ago I determined that this would not become a cancer blog. There was nothing interesting to say about the diagnosis, the treatments or my feelings about it. Now, in my second round of chemo, I feel better and can step back a bit. The neuropathy has withdrawn to be a minor tingling in my right foot. My hands are okay; I can write with a ballpoint and my typing is much less dislexic. For what it's worth, this is what I thought about today:

The Dog Next Door

The dog next door has learned a new word. Prone on the ground he goes, “Wortle, wortle, wortle.” I think it means, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.” Other dog words mean, “There you are, there you are, there you are.”

As I sit on my back deck reading, the neighbor dog is my dog, separated only by a fence. I sit on my back deck, the upper level, the south-east corner, out of the sun. The chemicals in my body would make me burn. I mow the lawn in a long sleeved shirt.

I am generally quite confined now. The chemicals in my body would make someone else’s cold my pneumonia. I wear a white mask when I go out; a molded B cup of some kind of pressed paper. A face bra, strung around my ears with elastic. The first days I wore it I felt foolish and self conscious and pitiable. I think that people think that I have some illness that I might give them rather than the other way around. They stare at my nose bra. Lately I care less. Let them look. Wortle, wortle wortle.