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?”

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.”

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.

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.

GoQuick

2007-05-19T20:28:00.000-04:00

Here's something different: No guns, no angst, no quaisi-deep thoughts...not even proper grammar.
This poem is meant to be read aloud with a two year old on your lap, and as you read you are required to supply hand-motions.

Go Quick

Go, go; quick, quick
caterpiller on a stick
see her little legs go
zoop, zoop, zoop.

Run, run; more, more
doggie running on the floor
see his furry feet fly
clickity, clickity, click.

Hop, hop; rapid, rapid
faster than a bunny rabbit
see her little paws jump
plonk, plonk, plonk.

Hurry, hurry; soon, soon
faster than the passing moon
see it hide behind a cloud
whooooooosh.

2007-05-08T15:33:00.000-04:00

The following is from the November 1993 issue of Harper's magazine andis therefore probably illegal to copy. So here it is anyway.

[Interview]
ON NOT WRITING

From an interview with Fran Lebowitz in the Summer issue of The Paris Review. Lebowitz is the author of two collections of essays, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. Since the latter book was published in 1981 , Lebowitz has been at work on a novel, to be titled Exterior Signs of Wealth; she recently completed the first chapter. The interview was con
ducted by James Linville, the managing editor of The Paris Review, and by George Plimpton, the journal's editor.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever enjoy writing? FRAN LEBOWITZ: I used to love to write. As a
child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it's not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have' no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don't hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes
writing easier. .
INTERVIEWER: When did you realize this? LEBOWITZ: Recently. In the past six months
I've had an easier time writing. I broke this tenyear writer's block.
INTERVIEWER: What did you do during those years?
LEBOWITZ: I sulked. Sulking is a big effort. So is not writing. I only realized that when I did start writing. When I started getting real work done, I realized how much easier it is to write than not to write. Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write-I mean if you're supposed to be writing.
INTERVIEWER: Is that because the ideas come steaming along and you feel like you should put them down and you don't?
LEBOWITZ: Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the

HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 1993
time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. Actually, I suppose that's probably an outmoded phrase, because I don't think criminals feel like criminals anymore. I feel like criminals used to feel when they felt guilty about being criminals, when they regretted their crimes. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work. .
Still, I don't get nearly the amount of work done that I read other people do. This is what most interests me in interviews with writers.
I'm not interested in the thoughts or ideas of these people, I only want to know how many pages a day they wrote. If I could meet Shakespeare, I would ask, "What time do you get up? Do you write at night?" I don't know many writers. I don't have many friends who are writers. But as soon as I meet any, as soon as I can figure out that it's not too intimate a question to ask them, which is about six seconds after I meet them, I say, "How many words do you write a day?"
INTERVIEWER: Why do you want to know that? LEBOWITZ: SO I can compare myself to them.
INTERVIEWER: Hemingway used to write down
the number every day and post it on a piece of cardboard on top of his bureau.
LEBOWITZ: I count my words, too. I was once at Sotheby's looking at some furniture. Just looking. This guy whom I knew came over and asked if I'd like to look at a Twain manuscript that was going to be for sale. I constantly have to disabuse people of the notion that I can afford things like Twain manuscripts. I said I'd love to look at it but I can't afford it. He showed it to me. A short story. He was telling me about the manuscript and where they found it and everything.
He said, "I'm pretty knowledgeable about Twain, but there's one thing we don't understand. We've called in a Twain scholar."
I said, "What is that?"
He said, "See these little numbers? There are
these little numbers every so often. We just don't know what those are."
I said, "I do. I happen not.to be a Twain scholar, but I happen to be a scholar of little numbers written all over the place. He was counting the words."
The Sotheby's man said, "What are you talk
ing about? That's ridiculous!"
I said, "I bet you anything. Count."
He counted the words and saw that I was right.
He said, "Twain must've been paid by the word."
I said, "It may have nothing to do with being paid by the word." Twain might have told himself he had to write this many words a day, and he would wonder, Am I there yet? Like a little kid in the back of a car: Are we there yet?

Dangerous Lines

2007-04-25T19:15:00.000-04:00

Sometimes we see ahead of us the line we don't want to cross. And then we cross it.
Thanks for the assignment, Stu.

Dangerous Lines

I knew why I didn’t want to be there.

It was my second season; I was twelve years old. I sat on the trunk of the same fallen tree as I had the previous November, my gloved hand picking at bits of bark, my thighs taking the weight of the rifle that lay across them. My breath was full of frost. My back was to a small stand of pines and I faced a hundred yards of open meadow. And I knew why I didn’t want to be there. I knew what was coming.

Last season I had been lucky and hadn’t even seen a deer, let alone have one within gunshot range. My father and Uncle Jerome had their places in a stand, a dozen feet above the ground. I could see them if I turned. They could see me. If I got a shot, I’d have to take it. My gut was warm and wet with the fear that, given the chance, I would have to try to succeed. I knew how it would change me. I picked some more bark.

Then there was the slightest crackle of sound and I looked up. A deer with at least four points of antler stood some eighty yards away. I shuddered. Looking back over my shoulder I saw the faces of my father and my uncle. And they saw me.

My breath was ragged, but I slowly lifted the gun. It was a clear shot and I didn’t dare miss. A sissy would miss, they would say. They would laugh. I brought the stock to my cheek and sighted. A film of tear made my vision clearer than reality. I aimed, as I had been taught, to just above the shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.

The recoil knocked me off balance for a moment and when I recovered I could see the deer, flat on its side, not a twitch, not a hint of winter steam from its nostrils. A clear shot. A clear kill.

I could hear dad and Jerome behind me, clambering from their stand, clumping through the snow, shouting. Praise...there was lots of praise, and when they got to my tree there were hugs and back patting. Dad was grinning so hard I thought he might cry. I was afraid of crying too, knowing what was coming.

We three approached the deer. I had been taught how to dress a carcass. Jerome lent me his knife, I took off my gloves, and they talked me through the cutting and cleaning. We rolled the animal on to a broad plastic sheet and dad tied a length of nylon rope around the antlers.

“You done good,” said dad. “Good clean kill. You can drag him to the car and then come back and join us. You done good.” Smiling, they turned and disappeared into the woods.

I looked at my bloody hands and knew what was coming. I smiled, just as I knew I would, and sucked the sticky blood from my fingers.

8 MM

2007-04-20T16:11:00.000-04:00

Last night at Writer's Group we were discussing old home movies. I remembered the following, which I had written over a dozen years ago. I did a bit of updating.

8MM
An Essay and Remembrance

A video camcorder lies by telling too much truth. Set it in a corner, set it on a tripod, set the switch to "on." It tapes a two hour birthday party for two hours. There is no discrimination.

There was a time, before this technology, when there were only movie cameras, Kodaks and Keystones. They were rare and the film came dear; a five minute reel for more than the price of today's five hour tape. One had to be discerning with ones' shots. Film, unlike tape, was good for only one exposure, no backing up and re recording. This is not to say the resultant subject quality was in any way superior forty years ago. People were as foolish before a lens then as they ever are now, but the difference is less in the shooting than in the viewing. Five minutes of eight millimeter snaps along-a few shots of a lawn party-a minute of the dog prancing for a treat-and then it's two seasons later and cousin Bob is throwing snowballs at the camera.

The camcorder dwells on its subject as though, in later showings we would really care to see every single second of an event. We don't. After the first few moments of the auto show we have no need to be reminded of every single car in sight and every pace between them. Within the frail time constraints of film we pop from highlight to highlight-moving snapshots-more like real memory and in that way, less is more. Fewer, briefer shots draw our closer attention; pique our curiosity as to what is coming next. Film seems the more satisfying experience. Times are reminded to us, not replayed verbatim.

It's only now that this distinction comes clear to me. It's only now, this year, that after long neglect I went to buy some eight millimeter film and found that it is no longer even manufactured.

The room is only semi-dark and the projector, perched on the coffee table, is balky. It has been over twenty years since I've threaded stiff, white, leader film through it. My mind forgets but my fingers remember how, and the framing comes into line. There is a hot and musty smell as two decades of dust burns off the brilliant bulb. Unshaped greens and yellows merge on the wall. I adjust the focus and see among the trees my cousin, Bob, waving towards the camera-standing gawky-squinting against the sun. Another moment and Bob is walking my collie pup past the trees. And now he is snapping his fingers to make her stand and jump. It is nineteen fifty-five.

There is no art in these pictures. They cut from shot to shot in no order. It was a July afternoon and I, at ten years old, was blinking my cameras' eye at whatever I could get to cross my path. More shots of Bob, more of the dog and some of Billy Moses who lived across the street. I reverse the film and watch the last few moments again, not to see Billy, but off to his right is the side of my house. It looks less wide, less huge, than I remember; "big as a house" meant more forty years ago. The trailer of film slapped, I rewound, and threaded the next reel quickly.

This image is less jerky. It pans across lilacs and small white flowers and keeps panning, away from the garden of my Grandpas house, to a small and obviously staged procession. Cousins Bob and Mike walking slowly, Bob mugging for the camera, and between them is my Great Grandmother. In this picture she is ninety-two years old. I move closer to the screen to see her face-the scene wobbles and blurs-an eyeball close to the lens-minutes of shifting red-orange light-massive over exposure. As the last two feet of film ratchet through the gates I see a few seconds of my grandpa waving from the porch.

A reel showing my fifth grade class. A field trip. My classmates and teachers wave from various poses for the full five minutes.

Now...here...in this fourth reel...my mother walking the collie. She turns to the camera and waves. I pan down to the dog. I wait a moment for the pan to return to her face but it doesn't come; only the flowered print of her skirt. I want to see her face. I say it aloud to the image on the wall. Up...up...just a little...I want to see her face. Now the scene is shot from across the yard. She pauses and shades her eyes. She is small on the screen. Her hair is dark. Then it is Christmas morning. Dark indoor pictures of the tree. And the five seconds, no more, of my father squatting on the floor in his pajamas, holding up a box.

This reel will not seat onto the motor gear. It stutters along and I am afraid the film will tear or burn. After a fifth rethread it travels smoothly. Pictures of our beach vacation. A long pan of the wooden pier and then the sand. And then my family, framed well and close enough to see. Grandpa and Grandma, she in a beach chair, he standing beside, toned and tanned and gray. My uncle and aunt walking the waters edge. My mother and father relaxed and sitting on blankets. My father, lithe as he stands. He is dark blond and trimmer than I recall. A swimmer's body. He helps Mother rise and they move at ease with each other. I run this film again, and then the last part with Mom and Dad twice more. The warm and sandy images blur and sharpen, not from the camera lens but from the wet of my eyes.

The last reel. More of cousin Bob. More of the dog. And then a shot to prize. My Father wheels his new, yellow and green, nineteen fifty-five Buick Coupe into the driveway. He leaves the car wearing a snug, white tee shirt and khaki slacks. He walks toward the camera and me. He is smiling and unselfconscious and he doesn't wave. The film ends.

As I snap the cover on the projector a realization comes over me. My Father-my elder-my senior. My Father who died thirteen years ago at age eighty-one. I am now eighteen years older than he is in these films. And I drive a Buick Coupe.

Deeper...It might not be as it seems.

2007-04-16T12:01:00.000-04:00

It may not be death. It maybe a state of mind...or just a situation. But it's probably death. Not a very cheerful post, but I like it anyway.

Deeper

Water, loose around her feet, she wades,
Deep to her ankles, deep to her knees,
Deep enough to soak her heart.

Maybe islands, maybe clouds,
Out beyond her line of vision.
Something on the other shore,
Something more than nothing,
Closer every step.

Her skirt swirls, paisley in the tidal flow,
Panties, dry on the shore behind.
The current streams between her legs.
She knew somehow the massive sea
Would enter her.
One way or the other.

In amongst the weeds and slime and sea and decomposing fish,
She confesses as the water rises to her breast,
I’ve never felt so clean.

Ocean water on her tongue,
Drops of sour salt in her mouth,
She thinks of him,
And keeps walking.
Deeper.

Lorna in Kinshasa

2007-03-02T21:41:00.000-05:00

This last time in the hospital...a week or so...I actually wrote several pages for a new project. All in red ball-point pen on the reverse of old menu sheets. I really need a lap-top!
By the way...for any friends who are not on Blogspot, if you want to comment anyway, you can always drop me an e-mail at JonZ314@aol.com. Would love to hear from you.

The red ball-point pen story is a long way from finished, but here's an offering from several months ago.

Lorna in Kinshasa

M’Kubu B’Lama moves the gearshift lever into Park and he does so very methodically, feeling the clicks as it goes. He is very careful. He has never driven a car with an automatic shift before this one. He moves his foot to depress the parking brake, but before he can, the Pastor, Mr. Biggers, has already opened the rear door and is hauling his bulk onto the shoulder of the road. M’Kubu is mildly distressed at this, believing that to be properly parked, the brake must be depressed. He is a responsible man.

“Carter,” says Mrs. Pastor Biggers, “you be careful. Don’t you get swindled. And remember, Kleenex, not that other stuff you got before.”

Mr. Pastor Biggers nods and is sweating already. “Lorna, this is not K-Mart. I’ll get what I can.” He turns and walks from the car, across a packed dirt easement and through a small crowd of men to a small mud brick building. They nod. One stands as he passes. He says, “Bless you,” and sounds tired and breathless.

Lorna shouts from the car, “Kleenex!” Without looking back he nods.

“Mikey,” says Mrs. Pastor Biggers, “why, in a country this size, can one simply not find a simple Kleenex?”

M’Kubu considers as much of economics as he knows and says, “The people here, for them it is Zaire brand. It is the kind we have.” He is quite sure his words and his sentence are correct. He has been told that his English is good. Not as good as his French, but acceptable. That, and the fact that he had, in the past, driven an automobile, and the fact that he was a Christian, had been qualifications enough for this job.

But M’Kubu B’Lama seeks to improve himself and now, in the evenings, he studies more English. He reads a book the Pastors have given him. He has found the word “gingerly” and is unclear about it. He knows ginger. It is a spice he has never tasted. But gingerly? Somehow when the very young girl in the story picks up a small animal, she does so gingerly. This could mean in a spicy way? Maybe she picks it up roughly, but no, there is a picture and she hugs this animal; so, not roughly. He worries about being too bold but clears his throat and says, “Mrs. Pastor? I study my English. From the book...”

“That’s very nice Mikey. Is the air conditioner on at all?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is on at all. See? The lever is all to the blue side.”

He takes another breath. “In the book there is a word.” Lorna is staring out the window.

Whirls of dust move unimpeded across the road. “And the word, it is ‘gingerly.’ May I ask, what is this word?”

“Hmm...?” says Lorna, thinking to herself that a box of Tide would go a long way in making these people much happier. “Gingerly? It means, ah, right away. No, wait, gingerly? It means slowly. Yes. Now you know.” She continues to stare out the window. M’Kubu remembers her lesson. He will use this word out loud some time. He compares it to similar words in French and Swahili. He smiles at his new word.

Pastor Mr. Biggers returns to the car with a flat red box. His suit jacket flaps open as he gets into the Fiat’s back seat and through the rearview mirror M’Kubu sees a great wetness under the Pastor’s arm. There is a stain the size of a melon. He should, thinks M’Kubu, perhaps not wear this coat in Zaire at midday in August.

Mrs. Pastor Biggers is angry. The flat red box is not Kleenex. “It’s all they had,” says the Pastor.

“I should have gone myself,” says Mrs. Pastor. But she would not have gone. She is larger than her husband.

“Whether you went or I went, this is all they have.”

“I’m sure,” she says, ripping open the box and blotting her face. The tissue comes apart. She makes a disgusted sound. M’Kubu thinks that maybe only a very large towel would help.
Then she says, “Did they cheat you?”

“No,” he says.

“They did. I know it. It’s genetic. A nation of cheats.”

“Lorna,” he says, glancing towards M’Kubu in the front seat.

She sniffs something about K’Kubu’s lack of understanding. “Did they short change you? You’re foreign. White. It doesn’t matter to them that you’re a man of God. They did, right?”

“No, Lorna, I’m sure not.”

“Show me the change.” He hesitates. “Show me.” She is nearly shouting.

From his jacket pocket he takes a one thousand Zee note, a five thousand Zee note and three hard candies.

“I knew it,” she says. “Go back. Go right back in there and get your proper change. They owe you, what? What does that figure to? Three hundred Zee?”
The Pastor is exhausted from the ride in the car and the walk into the shop and the sound of his wife. M’Kubu listens but looks straight out through the windshield. He sees a boy digging in the dirt with a stick, eyeing the car with side long glances. He knows what to say for the Pastor’s defense but he says nothing.
“Lorna, there is no hundred Zee note. A hundred Zee is like a tenth of a penny. They can’t make change like that. They give a few candies. It comes out.”

M’Kubu is pleased. The Pastor knows many things and he’s happy to know that he understands this aspect of monetary exchange.

It is too hot to argue. Mr. Pastor Biggers says, “Drive, Michael.”

“Yes, Mister Pastor. To where?”

“The sweatshop. I want to take some more pictures to show the congregation our success.”

“You don’t owe him an explanation,” says Lorna. Then she doesn’t say any more and the car pulls smoothly away.

The sweatshop is thirty minutes away, also on the edge of Kinshasa but further to the north. Kinshasa is a large city and M’Kubu is justly proud.

Just before arriving at the sweatshop M’Kubu veers suddenly and pulls off the road, the Fiat stopping at an uneven angle, its right front tire in a shallow hole of some size. Mrs. Pastor Biggers grunts. Mr. Pastor Biggers says, “What...?”

Then suddenly, in plumes of dust and flying gravel, two motorcycles pass, then a pickup truck with soldiers in the bed, then a dark blue Chevrolet sedan and finally a black Mercedes limousine. From every vehicle flies the flag of Zaire. From the limousine fly four flags.
M’Kubu averts his eyes. It is President for Life, The Most, Most Honorable, Robert Mugabe. He goes down the road as fast as the motor cycles can lead him. All people on the road, on foot or in cars, stop. They look down. Those still wearing scraps of military uniform salute from attention.

“Twice this week,” says Lorna. “We are so lucky. Twice we are honored by la grande fromage. Well, he’s gone, Mikey. Drive.”

“One moment, please, Mrs. Pastor.”

“Drive!” she says.

“Mrs. Pastor Biggers, please. Many times there are two...ah...parades...lines of cars. One does not have him and then one does. It is to fool the enemy. One moment.”

Lorna draws a breath but says nothing. She knows the soldiers in the motorcade have killed suspicious looking bystanders. “La grande fromage,” she says. There is no second line of cars. The people begin to move. M’Kubu gently pulls out of the hole and drives on.

The sweatshop is a cinderblock building perhaps one hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long. It is whitewashed but dirty. The sign above the overhead doors reads, “Ashley Kemp Fashions,” and then there are some smaller words that they are too far away to see.
“Closed up tight,” says Mrs. Pastor Biggers. “And good riddance. We’ve done well, Carter. One less place like this in the world.”

“You should be proud, Mikey, to be allowed to drive the car of the man who did this.”

“Oh, it is my honor. Truly.”

“Now,” Lorna continues, “the children, at least in this neighborhood can go back to just being children, as God intended. It is a great thing, don’t you agree, Mikey?”

“Yes, Mrs. Pastor. Now they will go back how it was.” And on this M’Kubu says no more and watches as Mr. Pastor Carter Biggers leaves the car and walks to the building with his camera.
Back to how it was, thinks M’Kubu. The sweat shop is one thing they will not be doing.
“It was a bad thing that there was this sweatshop,” says M’Kubu. “God wanted it gone.”
Mister Pastor Carter Biggers stops near the factory. He bends a bit at the waist and puts his hands on his knees. Then he straightens and walks some more, pausing to snap photos. Several children hover around him, but not too close. They are several feet away. They move like flies.
“You have taught me many things,” M’Kubu goes on. “But there is so much I do not know.” Lorna Biggers has taken to looking out the opposite window, not following her husband’s progress. “Why is it,” says M’Kubu, “that God wanted it so?”

“What?” she says.

“The factory. The sweatshop. I know...I believe it was a bad thing and that God wanted it gone. But why did He want this?”

“To save the children.” She is agitated. “You are not a stupid man, Mikey. To save the children. You live here. Surely you know what went on in there...twelve hours work days, poor lighting, no ventilation. Some of these children were only eight years old. They barely earned a dollar a day. Now they are free to be home and be normal children.”

And M’Kubu thinks about children being normal without the factory. Before the factory there had been maybe three things a child could do. The easiest and in some ways most fun was begging. The second was picking through the steaming mountain of garbage a few kilometers away for odd bits of saleable trash and almost edible food. And the third, of course, was selling one’s body, an occupation for which the girls had a real advantage. And oh, thinks M’Kubu, of course the fourth option was death. And now with the factory gone, those options remained. M’Kubu is sure that the God of Jesus has a plan. He is very sure. But still he thinks he will check.

Pastor Biggers returns to the car. The children follow at a distance. He wishes he had had more candies to give them.

M’Kubu will approach his question carefully. He says, as they begin driving back to the Pastors’ compound, “I am most pleased to be a Christian now.”

“God will bless you,” says the Pastor. “How old were you when you found Jesus, Michael?”

“Mmm...I think it was three years past now.”

“Oh. Wonderful. Three years with the Lord.”

“Yes,” says M’Kubu, “three years. I learned of the God of Jesus from the Pastor Mister Cadwell from America.”

“And God has blessed you for your faith.”

“Oh yes. The God of Jesus is a fine God. I like Him very much. This Christian God, He is more...ah...hmm...easier to get along with than the other ones.”

“I don’t understand,” says Carter Biggers.

“The other Gods, they are harsh. This Christian God, He knows when he makes mistakes. He is very, very smart that way.”

“Carter,” says Lorna Biggers, “why are you talking to this man? Clearly still half heathen.”

“What do you mean?” Pastor Biggers asks M’Kubu.

“In the old book, God is mean. He kills many people. But later, after Jesus, then He doesn’t kill any more. He has learned.”

There are creases in Pastor Biggers forehead. He is curious as to how this simple man’s mind comprehends theology.

“Oh yes,” says M’Kubu. “I have studied this. In the old days before Jesus, God killed many. The first born of Pharaoh’s kingdom. All dead. All of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. All dead, too.”

“Michael, they were sinners. They turned their backs on Him. The city of Sodom was evil and had to be destroyed.”

“All died?”

“Every one.”

“I think maybe there were some babies there. You think so?”

Pastor says nothing.

“And women with child? You think? But it’s okay. God learned. After he had a baby, He learned, and then he didn’t go killing people any more.”

Lorna’s face is red. She seems prepared to melt. Or explode. But M’Kubu cannot see her face and thinks they are proud of him for giving so much thought to God. He goes on, “And the God of Jesus, He is the best God because He only cares that He is number one. Now, Ala, oh, he says there is only one God and it is him. But the God of Jesus, he says the other gods are okay as long as nobody puts those other gods before Him. It is a commandment. It says, All other Gods come after me.”

M’Kubu is about to show what he has learned about prayer when Lorna Biggers screams. She screams in sound and in words. Her scream fills the car. M’Kubu has never heard many of these words. Mrs. Pastor Biggers is pounding on the back of M’Kubu’s seat. Then she reaches forward and grabs his ear. If M’Kubu were not a very responsible man, the car would have crashed. But he does stop as quickly as he can because his ear hurts very much. He is surprised to hear himself screaming too.

Pastor Biggers convinces his wife to release M’Kubu’s ear. He tells M’Kubu to leave the car. Pastor Biggers leaves the back seat, rounds the car, gets behind the wheel and drives away, leaving M’Kubu by the side of the road.

Rubbing his ear, he starts walking east. It is a long way to walk and the day is hot. And the Fiat is nearly out of gas. He prays to Ala that he be merciful.

Hope

2007-01-31T16:15:00.000-05:00

I'm back at my computer again...Hopefully for good. I don't like hospitals much. Clearly, I haven't yet been able to keep up with my postings, let alone visit your sites...But I will.

I have found an interesting thing has happened to my writing while I've been under the weather. My handwriting has become kind of dyslexic. Words are coming out backwards, out of order and just generally weird. New letter forms are appearing...Seriously. Odd little bunny eared scrawls are Ws. Sometimes. Clever, new and seemingly meaningless punctuation shows up, poof. I started outlining a new novella length piece yesterday, and had to go back and language check the danr thing before closing the notebook, for fear that the text would read like Urdu the next day. My typing isn't much better but then, it never was. At least there's spellcheck.

So, here's a story for Spring. Stu, you remember this one...two weeks...pitchers and catchers, right?

Hope.

Most visitors’ dugouts in the Blue Water League have a place where Meachum can feel comfortable. He likes to sit in a corner where he can slouch against two walls. He likes wooden benches. He likes it dark. Here, at Huron Park, the bench is aluminum and he squints against the halogen brightness. Lots of managers are pacers or standers or leaners. Meachum sits, his voice sharp enough to cut the crowd noise and find his batter’s ear.

“Come on, ‘berto, pick him up!” Roberto Greenstreet, his tank of a catcher, sways at the plate, the bat light in his hands. Nobody out and Davis is on first. One and two on Greenstreet. The Huron Bay pitcher jams one high and inside, Greenstreet twists away and the ball nicks his bat, squibbing like a bottle rocket sixty feet toward first. The first baseman misjudges and charges the pop fly, grabs the ball on its first bounce and with surprising grace, he whirls and tags the runner. He’s so pleased with himself, he forgets to throw to second, missing a likely double play. Double A ball is like that.

Meachum sighs. It’s only the second week of May and already his Jets are two and seven. He guesses this Thursday crowd to be about twenty-five hundred. This is the Huron Bay Clippers’ second season in the League and they are drawing well. The Jets have been in Wyandotte since the middle eighties and they can’t pull two thousand on a Saturday. A couple of winning seasons could fix that. A title run could fill Jet’s Park. I can give it another few years, thinks Meachum. Or I could leave in September. There’s the IRA and the pension. I could leave. Meachum is fifty-five. There’s some talent on this team, though. A little, at least. There’s Kimbe’ Reese.
“Reese,” calls Meachum. A tall, black, willow-switch of an eighteen-year-old looks up as he walks to the on-deck circle.

“If Scuddy gets on, you just have to make contact. Put it in play.” Reese doesn’t nod, but he understands. “You hear me? Just put the ball in play.”

Kimbe’ Reese takes a few steps toward the dugout, turns to spit at the pitcher, turns back and says, “I can break it.”

“One run, Kimbe’. One run. Put the ball in play, poke it into right. One run.”

Reese raps the rubber weight from the end of his bat, takes a sweet, hard, singing cut at the air and says, “Three runs. Quick. Break that fucker’s heart.”

Scuddy walks. One out. Reese steps to the batter’s box, scuffing sand, tugging his batting glove on with his teeth. He stands in, takes three practice swings and then glaces back at the umpire. Time has been called. The Clipper’s catcher trots out to the mound. Two infielders join him.

For Meachum it’s always been baseball. He played mostly Double A ball but for all of the sixty-seven season he played Triple A. And for two weeks, when God loved him particularly well, he’d been called up to the Phillies. Never mind that more than half of the Phillies’ pitching staff was down with the flu. He’d been to The Bigs. Pitched middle relief in three games. Almost had a win. He told Miriam that when he died he wanted her to tear his page out of the Baseball Encyclopedia and bury it with him. He had also wanted his major league stats on his tombstone but she told him he’d have to settle for, “Beloved Husband.”

Hurley, the third base coach, is giving signs. He finishes with two slaps to his rump and two fingers to his temple. It means, “Don’t be a butt head.”

The pitcher sets. Reese holds the bat high and as the pitcher comes over the top, he coils back, moving the bat less than two inches, and Meachum can almost hear the click, like the cocking of a gun. Curve ball; ball one.

The next pitch is a blur and the swing of the bat is a blur and they meet with a hard thack that fills the air. The ball streams up and out toward right center field. Meachum leans forward on the aluminum and watches, judging the arc, guessing the power. It might go. It might fly for days. The arc peaks, the ball slows a single-star constellation against the night sky. It starts to fall. The center fielder got a late break, but he’s not digging hard to meet the ball…he’s running just fast enough to watch it if it goes out or catch it if it’s short. Meachum knows. Reese put three hundred twenty feet of power into that swing. He needed three twenty-five. The center fielder brakes and stretches out a lazy arm. As clearly as with field glasses Meachum watches as the ball meets the fingers of the glove. He sees the leather flop backwards, as though there were nothing in it; no fingers in the glove, no bones in the hand. The ball bumps the mans’ left thigh and drops off to the left. Reese trots in to third surpressing a grin, trying to be cool, not knowing how close he was to being out. Meachum settles back. Two innings later they loose the game. Two hours later they are at their rooms.

Motel restaurant fish and chips rumble his stomach. He’s changed to khakis and a polo shirt. He can’t remember if he’s locked the bus.

Meachum thinks, I should have called Miriam…it’s too late now, she’d be asleep. She spent the day waiting for the results of the biopsy. And taking the grand kids to soccer practice…not even baseball. He wonders how his sons see him. They wear their suits and ties and go to their offices every day, while he wears short pants and knee socks and goes to the ball park four nights a week to watch old boys and young men play. At fifty-five. He could leave in September. Even owning twenty per-cent of the Jets doesn’t seem like a serious occupation. But I was there, Meachum thinks. Thirty thousand people watched me wear that red cap and kick my leg high and blow a fastball by Willie Stargell.

The bus was tired when Greyhound sold it. It is exhausted now. Meachum opens the door, flips on the lights and sits in the driver’s seat. Five hundred and sixty thousand miles. Yeah, thinks Meachum, but they’re highway miles, and he laughs out loud. He checks for leftover, smoldering cigarette butts and steps down, double checking the door lock.

The baggage door on the side looks slightly ajar. He opens it to slam it tight and a loose ball falls from the lips of an equipment bag and rolls out, bouncing on the blacktop, stopping in the grass by a phone pole. Meachum flips the ball lightly and walks the edge of the parking lot. It’s nearly midnight. He stops at thirty paces. When he was a boy he’d pace thirty steps from the strike-zone box he’d painted on the barn wall and pitch until dark.

He turns now, facing the phone pole. He brings the ball to his waist and turns to check the runner at second. Looking in to the plate, Walker, his old catcher in Triple A, gives him the sign. He gives a quick look to second and back to the plate. Miriam, in the crouch holds one finger down and gives it a waggle. She calls out, “Bring it home, Mac.” He starts his wind-up, loose and young, his arm new and easy as it whips down, the ball like a thing with no weight flies on a line, smacking the pole two feet up from the grass. Meachum retrieves it from the weeds, checks the bus doors and goes in to make a late call to Miriam. He’ll ask about the biopsy. They’ll talk about September.

Lessons Learned?

2007-01-20T18:04:00.000-05:00

Hey, that will teach me...maybe. Post a death poem and get a collapsed lung. Sorry...couldn't even crawl to the computer to post after that one! Back from a week at Ford Hospital, ready to start radation Monday. Need to start shoveling some good karma out there. Here's something a little cheerier than last time. Yeah more poetry.

HOW TO BREW THE REALLY PERFECT CUP OF COFFEE

Pick a rich October morning and be the only waking soul about.

Wake to no alarm but the wind swishing drying maple leaves across a dying lawn.

Walk softly, slipper footed, to the kitchen and fill the glass kettle with water to just below "Made in USA."

Fire the burner; a full and rolling boil will take time.

The morning paper is jammed between the front door and the screen.

Carry it to the kitchen table scanning the front page for names you know.

Check the water.

Find the filters.

There is, in amongst the silverware, a plastic spoon,
the last remaining member of an ancient picnic set.

It gives the perfect measure.

Scoop the same number of scoops you always scoop and study each for fullness.

Always add half a scoop knowing you miscounted.

The water boils.

Pour the water full and steady over sweetly musky grounds
watch for overflow.

Settle on a kitchen stool, see the transformation;
the near black mud reduced to a slim stream of oaken brown.

The brew collects.
Just before the dripping stops, disconnect the funnel top and pour a cup.

Sit looking out a window,
seeing patterns in the blowing leaves and the sky,
seeking omens for this day.

Refill your cup and fill a different cup; carry them both upstairs
and kiss your wife awake.

An Unamusing Poem

2007-01-11T17:53:00.000-05:00

I am not afraid of the dark

I am not afraid of the dark.
But of the darkening skies, the passing of the second solstice, the coming of increasing night…these things are troubling.
These things bode of short sharp breaths, taken quickly, held too long, harbored deep against the growing cold.
They speak of early bed and early death.
They speak in a high-wind whine, deep within some second brain; some smooth reptilian cortex stem that only feels.
Sleet and storm are not the things of winter. Ice is only crystal.
Dark begins at noon and lingers long past sleep, in the sky as in the soul.
And there is that pagan fear, that with the flicker of the candle, with the loss of the flame, the night is forever.

more hospital stuff

2007-01-09T18:21:00.000-05:00

Okay. Now it's starting to feel like the beginning of some kind of story. It could easily become the first part chopped away in edit, but it's the spark that lights the story.
Please read the previous post before this one...this is the continuation, and purely fictional...kind of backwards huh?

Hospital Setting

End of previous...
(He raises his clip board, "So...I'll put 'no' for that."
She sighs and lays her head back.)

I look at my wife lying on the gurney. She’s sleeping. This is going to be along night. I walk out to the waiting room and take a seat next to a guy wearing a blue Amoco cap and a blue Amoco jersey. He smells like he just got back from smoking a cigarette outside the front door.

“So what do you think?” he says, nodding at the television on the wall. I look at him. “This guy, Bush? Is he just some kind of ignorant jackass or a fucking genius, or what?”

I have to decide pretty quick if I want to get into a deep political discussion with Mr. Amoco or if I just want to be left alone. “Probably some of each,” I say.

Amoco looks back at the TV and then at me and he laughs. “Yeah. Maybe. I mean, that tax thing, it sounded good, but now they ain’t got no money. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” I say and start plowing through a pile of dead magazines. Does anybody outside of waiting rooms really read Field and Stream anymore? I get lucky and find a coverless copy of a year old Smithsonian and begin my study of this tribe in the Chilean Andes that harvests silk from spiders that they keep in these odd little woven grass cages.

“So, what do you think?” It’s the Amoco man. His name is Rob. It says so on his jersey and by way of confirmation, he tells me so, too. I say, “Nice to meet you Rob.” I don’t offer my own name. We aren’t that close yet. He nods toward the TV. Somebody has changed the channel. Regis is looking pensive and a pretty girl looking nervous and thoughtful and panicked is trying to remember if she ever knew who Wagner’s father-in-law was. “I don’t know much classical stuff,” says Rob. “Maybe Schumann?”

Schumann is one of the four possible answers the girl is pondering over. One of the other answers is Lizst. “Lizst,” I say. The girl says, “Liszt.” Regis makes a happy shout and the girl is up to a quarter million dollars. I feel very superior. Rob says, “Huh. Lizst. Yeah, well, gee, let me think…he wrote les Preludes in eighteen thirty two…I guess that makes sense. And Wagner got married in…”

I look at Rob and say, “So, what do you think? Want to go get a smoke while the commercial is on?”
Rob gets up. I get up. On the way out I say, “So, what do you think? About Bush? Crazy? Smart?”

Rob looks at me, “Maybe some of both?” We each burn up three cigarettes before the chill breeze gets us and we move back inside.
Heading back to our chairs we see the million dollar qusetion appear on the TV screen. It reads, “The predominent mineral underlying Niagra Falls is what?”

“Mr. Collier? Collier?” The ER desk clerk looks for recognition.

“Yeah?” says Rob as he turns to walk up to the desk. Over his shoulder he calls to me, “Dolomite. Niagra Dolomite.” Sure enough, five seconds later Regis tells the sad faced girl that indeed, Niagra Dolomite is the stuff the falls is built of. I sit down. I find my Smithsonian and notice that the man across from me is reading Field and Stream.

dialog snippet

2007-01-07T20:18:00.000-05:00

I've spent most of the last few weeks in the hospital. Lots of stories there but I don't want to tell most of them. I will share this...a snippet of dialog as best as I can remember it. Little pieces of life like this are where stories are born, and small slices of the human condition are far more enlightening than all of the great philosophies.

The doctor was a cardiologist-Pakistani or Indian-very dark red-brown skin. He seemed to have a "matte" finish-no depth to his skin tone-a kind of spray painted look. He was questioning an elderly white lady, as translucently white as he was matte dark.

"So," he said, "your heart-it hurts when you walk?" His voice rose and fell in a predicable, sing-song accent. Pakistani or Indian.

She shook her head. "No. When it hurts I can't walk.." she shook her head and frayed Grey hair spilled from her elastic plastic cap.

"So," he went on, "you would say it does not hurt when you walk?"

"No, I only walk when it don't hurt. But that isn't quite it." A woman, possibly her daughter, patted her hand. She said nothing.

The doctor chuckled but was clearly becoming exasperated at her being so contrary.

"I don't walk if it hurts. If I walk and it starts to hurt, I sit down. If I'm sitting down and it starts to hurt, I don't walk."

He raised his clip board, "So...I'll put 'no' for that."

She sighed and laiy her head back.

Parking Lot

2006-12-20T18:33:00.000-05:00

This story was originally around two thousand words, so this has been more an exercise in editing. I never did get it down to a thousand, but here is is anyway.

Parking Lot
So we’re sitting in this parking lot drinking beer, and the game is that we see somebody coming out of the mall and we have to guess which vehicle they’re going to get in.
We see this guy walking and Marty says, “The red Mustang.” The guy’s bad looking, maybe forty, decent clothes, not like thrift store, too short for his gut, bleach-faded crap clothes. Regular clothes. Last years Sears. He heads for the line of four cars. “The black Volvo,” I say. “Not the red Mustang type.”

But he keeps on walking, past the cars and through the parking lot to the little Plexiglas and steel cubicle with the SMART bus logo printed on it. He leans against the corner of the building and lights a cigarette.

“I’ll be damned,” says Marty. “We both ought to lose points on that one. He’s waiting for the five-sixty. Who would have thought?”

Not me. And sure as hell not the five-sixty. The five-sixty bus runs a long route between New Baltimore and downtown Detroit and the SMART stop we were looking at was on the Detroit bound side.

“Damn,” I say, “if we were that wrong about the car, I wonder what else this guy’s up to? What do you think? He lost his license or something and he works at the mall and he’s just going home now?”

“How much gas we got?” I ask and Marty checks the gauge and says, “More than a quarter tank. Why?”

And I say, “Beer?”

“These ones and another six pack in the cooler. Why?”

“I’ll bet you that this guy is going somewhere that’s not home and it’s not work. You win if he winds up at a house or a business. I win if it’s anything else.”

“You want to follow him?”

“You want to bet?”

“Yeah, I guess. What are we betting?”

“The next six pack?” I offer.

“Sure, what the hell,” says Marty.

Marty starts the car just as the five-sixty heaves into sight and we idle over to the parking lot exit, timing it just so we are ready to pull out as soon as the bus picks the guy up. We follow close enough so as not to lose the bus, but far enough back to miss most of the fumes that blow black from a pipe near the bus roof. It still stinks.

We’re getting farther south, and now we’re past Mount Clements and past Roseville and we pass Eight Mile Road and go another mile or so. Then the guy gets out of the bus and starts walking. We pull over to the curb and watch and I make real sure that the doors are locked.

The guy keeps walking. He’s the only white guy in sight except for us. But he’s not looking around or acting fidgety or anything. As he gets farther ahead we pull out and drive a bit and then park again. He crosses the street where there’s this big Shell station and he walks past the one car that’s getting gas and he goes into the station.

“You don’t figure he works here, do you?” asks Marty.

“Not real likely.

“Let’s just see what happens here.”

Sure enough the guy talks to the man at the gas station counter for a few minutes and then he steps outside and uses the pay phone.

“I bet it’s a girlfriend,” says Marty. I don’t answer him right away, but I’m thinking. Then I say, “I bet not.”

A ratty black ten year old Lincoln Town Car with sparkling thousand dollar wheel covers pulls up at one of the pumps at the Shell station and the guy steps over to it and talks to the driver for a minute and then the guy pumps his gas for him and some money changes hands and the guy takes the money in to the man at the counter. This transaction takes a while and pretty soon the Lincoln driver gets out and goes into the station.

"What?" says Marty.

“Drugs, you dumb ass. This isn’t like when we buy grass from Melvin. This is hard stuff. Coke. Crack maybe. Heroin. Nasty.”

Just then the guy comes out of the station and the Lincoln driver comes out behind him and there’s a lot of shouting, but we can’t quite hear what’s being said because we’re still across the street. Then there’s some pushing and shoving and the guy pushes the Lincoln guy back against his car and then turns and trots behind the station where it’s real dark.

The Lincoln guy cusses and brushes some imaginary dirt from his clothes and yells after the guy but the guy is out of sight. The Lincoln guy gets behind the wheel and starts the car and guns the engine. The fan belt makes a whiny scream and then settles down. He guns the engine again.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, and Marty says,”Yeah,” and he puts the car in Drive. We start to pull out from the curb but the Lincoln guy squeals his tires and almost cuts us off as he rockets around the Shell station parking lot and turns right into the back alley.

“This is something bad,” I say and Marty doesn’t say anything but he’s turning down the alley right after the Lincoln. “What the hell,” I holler. Marty doesn’t talk. He has jabbed at the gas and we’re bouncing over ruts in the alley and we can’t see a damn thing because he hasn’t turned our lights back on yet. Then ahead of us the alley widens and there’s our guy bent over by a fence and he’s got his sleeve rolled up and he all of a sudden has looked up to see the Lincoln charging down on him. He’s froze.

The Lincoln, throwing gravel turns left and our guy is centered in his lights. Marty guns it and comes up on the Lincoln real fast and whang, we slam him square in the side. He skids sideways and slams his other side up against a dumpster. The driver is pinned in…dumpster on one side and us up against his doors on the other.

Marty yells, “Get in,” and the guy runs over and gets in the back seat and slams the door and Marty finds Reverse and gets us out of that alley faster than he got us in.

Five minutes later and we’re going north on Gratiot Avenue and nobody’s said a word. I take a quick look over my shoulder and see the guy starting to roll up his sleeve and I see the blood on the inside of his elbow and I kind of shudder a little.

“Kind of messed you up a little, huh.”

He nods and says, “Yeah. But I dropped all my stuff before I could finish. Shit.”

We drive another mile.

Then the guy says, “Hey, I really hate to put you guys in this situation.”

“No, man,” says Marty. “No problem. I mean we happened to be there and we couldn’t just let that guy…”

“No,” says the guy, “I don’t mean that situation. I mean this one.” Marty can’t see the knife at the back of his neck so he just says, “Huh?” and I say, “Knife, Marty. Real easy, you better pull over right in this parking lot.” Marty can’t even see the knife in his rearview mirror, but now he can see the guy’s arm extended to just above his head rest and so he pulls over.

“Just give me all your money,” says the guy, and we give him all our money. He opens the rear door and gets out and walks behind an abandoned doughnut shop where he disappears in the shadows.
We sit for a minute and then pull back onto Gratiot, heading north.

I say, “We probably just should have stayed out of that alley.”

Marty says, “I didn’t even really think about it. I figured he needed help. It wasn’t my fault. Just my nature.” And I thought for a few minutes about that and then decided not to be too upset about the thirty dollars the guy stole from me. It wasn’t his fault either. Just his nature.

A Very Tangee Christmas

2006-12-15T23:26:00.000-05:00

I hadn't planned on posting any more Buck and Tangee stories, but it is Christmas and Susan asked, so...

This is from the beginning of the third section of the B & T novel.

If the Fourth of July is my holiday, the rest of the year belongs to Tangee. Her home-decorating year starts with Valentine’s Day. I have to drag out the pink and white six-foot tall plywood heart with the pink and white lights hung on it and she changes the clothes on the concrete goose so that he looks like a little cupid. For Memorial Day we do lots of flags and red, white and blue lights and they stay up for the Fourth of July and Labor Day. The pink flamingoes on the lawn get little Uncle Sam hats.

By the first of October Tangee’s decorating juices get going again and she starts planning our Halloween display. Along with the red-lit graves and plastic tombstones we’ve got about a thousand feet of orange Christmas style lights and my stereo speakers buried in the lawn playing spooky sounds. If there isn’t any wind we hang a bucket of water from the tree and drop dry ice in as the night goes along. I point my old eight-millimeter movie projector at the dry ice fog and show a movie of ghosty shapes. The flamingos get teeny, tiny vampire teeth and black capes. If we do too much it scares away the little kids and we wind up with a bunch of left over candy corn and milk duds. Sometimes I get bad dreams about the flamingoes.

But Halloween is just a warm-up. Christmas is the main event.

It was early December and Tangee was studying our plaster lawn population, “No,” she said, “it’s the fairies, then the elves, then the gnomes.”

I said, “But last year it was the other way—gnomes first.”

“No, I remember, it goes by size, tallest to smallest.”

“Oh, okay, I’m sorry. I thought it was fattest to skinniest.” I reset their little plaster feet in the dead grass.

“That’s better. See? Now it’s just like a little parade and they’re all on they’re way to see the baby Jesus.”

“Looks like they’re on their way to see Santa Claus, too,” I said. “Should he really be so close to the manger?”

“Oh, you’re just like those people on the contest committee. Maybe we shouldn’t have had Santa sitting on the roof of the manger last year, but we still should have won.”

The Huron Bay Beacon runs a contest every year for the best decorated home, and every year somebody else wins.

Tangee said, “I still think the Ozinskis paid off somebody at the newspaper. All they had were plain white and blue lights and some kind of tinsel stuff blowing in the wind. I bet that was a mess to clean up. We had twice as many lights as they did and all colors too, not just white and blue. And we had a manger and the gnomes and we had a Santa.”

“And Santa on the roof of the stable,” I reminded her.

“It was only silly because stables don’t have chimneys. We should have thought of that. This year he’s just standing there.”

“Yup,” I said, “the fourth wise man.”

“Too close?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Tangee looked up at the roof of the house and said, “I just wonder where we could put him, then?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, no. I told you, nothing on the roof. Period.”

“But, Buck, it’s mild and nice and there’s no snow yet and you could just tie the big inflatable Santa to the chimney with a bungee cord and maybe string a few hundred lights around the eaves. We wouldn’t have to use the reindeer.”

“Nope. It’s nice now, but in January you’re going to want him down and it’s not going to be so nice then, and there’s going to be ice and I’m not going to do it.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to take him down.”

I shook my head. “You’re the one who gets depressed when you see people with their Christmas stuff up halfway into spring. You’re the one who drives two blocks out of her way so you won’t have to see the wreath Gwen and Phyllis leave up until June. You’re the one who called the police to see if there was a law about leaving wreaths up out of season.”

“Well, then,” she said, “long about the second week of January, if it was icy, maybe you could just go out in the yard with your twenty-two and deflate him.” Tangee must have caught a mental picture of a shot, deflated, plastic Santa hanging from a bunge cord from the chimney until April. She shook her head, dismissing the idea.

“Well, what are we going to do then?” she said. “We have to have something special with the Santa Claus. We’ve got the gnomes and all and we got the manger and we got lights around all the windows and in all the shrubs and on the mailbox. We got the spinning aluminum tree by the garage. It’s all very classy but I think we need something splashy to win the contest. I just don’t know.”

Tangee looked sad and defeated as she walked out to the street to view what we’d done so far. Just before the ditch we’ve got what’s left of a hedge running parallel to the road. It had grown to about two feet high before that problem with the sewer killed it. She walked past the dead hedge and past the ditch and across the street to get a judge’s eye view of the yard. She came back grinning.

“Is the ground froze?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Have we still got those iron clothes poles in the garage?”

“Yup. Up in the rafters. Why?”

“Bucky, this will be perfect. When the judges drive by and stop in front of our house, they’ll see all of our decorations, just like we’ve got them, but they’ll see them through a kind of picture frame.” She brought me into the house to explain.

The idea was that we’d trim the dead hedge bushes to look like mountains and spray them with phony snow and cover them with forty strings of white blinking lights. Then we’d string a wire between the two metal clothes poles, which I would have pounded in the ground. The last thing would be that we’d hang the inflatable Santa in his sled along with his eight inflatable reindeer from the wire. The judges would look through the scene of Santa flying over the mountains to view the gnomes and the manger and the aluminum tree.

The next day was a Sunday. I made Tangee promise that if I got all of that work done by Saturday night, she’d let me watch football and nap the next day. I’ll do some awful things to get a guaranteed football/nap day. I was done by midnight.

Judging was the second Saturday of December and Tangee was beside herself waiting for the big day. She kept busy by planting a forest of candy canes in front of Fat Boy’s doghouse and making other important finishing touches. The pink flamingoes got halos and angel wings. We turned on the hedge lights one time to make sure they worked…Tangee was worried about showing the total effect too early in case somebody wanted to steal her idea.

The Friday night before the judging she couldn’t sleep and went outside at midnight with flashlight and a jar of blue craft paint to retouch the baby Jesus’ eyes. At four in the morning she plugged in all the lights for a minute to make sure they’d work. From six AM until noon she watched the Weather Channel, worrying about a frontal system in Wisconsin which might or might not make it to our house before the committee drove by at seven-thirty. She made a walk around the yard at one in the afternoon and came back in a panic.

“It’s Dasher and Dancer,” she wailed. “They’re deflating. You have to do something.”

I dragged the ladder out to the display and found she was right; the lead pair of deer were shriveling and Dancer’s head was half folded over. Dasher’s air filler cap was located just about where I expect you’d find a reindeer’s navel. I prayed nobody I knew would drive by while I was reinflating. It didn’t matter. The more I inflated the more Dasher deflated. There was a leak. In fact, just at the base of Dancer’s neck a whole seam was coming apart.

“Bucky, what are we going to do? Look. Comet and Cupid are leaking, too.”

“Maybe we could fill them with something,” I suggested.

“Like newspapers?” she asked.

“Maybe. Or, we still have a whole bunch of that Styrofoam popcorn- shaped packing stuff don’t we? I could make a hole and fill them with that and seal it with duct tape.”

“Anything, Bucky. Hurry.”

It worked. Dasher and Dancer filled out just fine, and to make sure the other deer and Santa Claus didn’t have the same problem, I filled them with Styrofoam, too. They were a little lumpy but I didn’t figure you could tell that from the road.

By six o’clock it was dark. At seven we turned on the hedge lights. A half-hour later we saw three cars full of judges, driving slowly up the street, pausing at each display.

Santa floated gently over the hedge mountains with the phony snow and the four thousand blinking white lights and the thick billows of drifting clouds. Exactly as planned. Except for the clouds. We hadn’t planned on thick puffy white clouds of smoke drifting over the hedge. We also hadn’t planned on a fire in the hedge, which was where the puffy smoke was coming from. One of the forty strands of lights must have shorted out.

The puffy white clouds turned black as the phony snow caught fire. Two by two the reindeer smoldered into brown lumps hanging over the flames. Then the judges stopped. They watched for what seemed to be a very long time. I stood in the doorway next to Tangee. She was crying. The judges left just before the fire department got there. I helped clean up and Tangee went to bed early.

It was real quiet at our house the next morning. The paper came at noon. We were front-page news. I read the story to Tangee.

“Congratulations to Buck and Tangee Crimmins on winning the annual Christmas décor contest! Although there were many beautiful displays this year, the committee decided that the Crimmins’ originality should be rewarded. Their spectacular interpretation of ‘The Christmas Song’ is well worth our first prize.”

I held up the accompanying picture, showing the brown plastic lumps hanging just above the licking flames of the hedge.

“The Christmas Song?” Tangee asked.

“Sure. Remember? ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire?’”

She put the prize, a golden wreath, on the mantle. Next year I think we’ll stick to gnomes and the spinning aluminum tree.

Oscar and Pablo

2006-12-12T23:30:00.000-05:00

I used the term Magical Realism a few posts ago in describing The Big Green Bird, but it didn't really apply to that story. It does apply to this one. (And E.V. Yunq / Ed Vega, if you're out there, this is for you with thanks.)

Oscar and Pablo: A Scene

Oscar Echiveria was already dead when Pablo arrived.

The snow was high, over Pablo’s shins, and it was a heavy snow making it hard to walk through. Pablo saw his grandfather seated on the passenger side of the pick up and he saw the pick up in the ditch, a plowed mound of snow drifting high over the right front fender.

The call had come to his house an hour ago. Is your Papa there? Your brother? It’s about your grandfather. He’s off the road, up past the tracks on Bonham road. In a ditch.
The caller, a neighbor, if a person living a mile away is a neighbor, didn’t mention that he thought Oscar was probably drunk. He didn’t need to.

Pablo put on his boots and his sister’s wool scarf and started walking. At ten years old it hadn’t occurred to him to call someone else, a wrecker or the police. One didn’t call the police about family things. He walked, planning nothing more complicated than rubbing snow in Grandfather’s face and then driving home with him. Pablo could drive the pick up. Or they would walk.

From a hundred yards away he waved but grandfather didn’t wave back and Pablo worried that it might take more than a face full of snow. From twenty yards away he saw how far the truck was inclined and knew there would be no driving. He clambered into the driver’s door and saw that grandfather’s head was bleeding. Or rather, it had been bleeding. It wasn’t bleeding now. The blood was still and made a flat patch across his forehead. He pressed an ear to grandfather’s chest and heard nothing. He scooted back over behind the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, over the hood and into the featureless bank of snow.

“It is very bright,” said Grandfather Oscar.

“Yes,” said Pablo. “Like a white sheet.”

“Bright like the white sand back home. Do you remember? The white sand with the sunlight right in your face. It was bright like this.”

“You’re dead now, Grandfather?”

“Yes. It seems I am quite dead now.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Dying? No, the dying didn’t hurt. I think the big bump that broke my head hurt, but it was a quick hurt. The dying part was not so hard. You don’t know about whiskey, but it was like a first big shot of whiskey. A pleasant hot feeling and then a slow warm feeling and then the brain, it seems to take a big breath. And then I was dead. No, it didn’t hurt.”

“Good.” Pablo stretched his arm and handled the gearshift lever. He had driven this truck before. But he wouldn’t drive it today. It was too far in the ditch. And also, his Papa might think he had been driving and gone off the road and killed Grandfather.

“Did you see Jesus yet?” asked Pablo.

“No. Not Jesus. Not God either. Not yet.”

Pablo didn’t want to ask if Grandfather had seen the devil, so he didn’t ask that. He did ask, “How is it that we are talking and you are dead?”

Oscar Echiveria shrugged. “I don’t know. I remember that my great aunt Maria came to visit after she died.”

“She was a ghost? You’re a ghost?”

“No. I don’t think so. I think it’s maybe like a watch after the batteries die. Sometimes just for no reason they tick again for a little while. I think I have a few ticks left in me.”

They sat without speaking for a while. The January sun lowered. No cars came.

“You are cold,” said Oscar. “You should go. No one is coming this way.”

“I would stay with you,” said Pablo.

“I know you would. You’re a good boy. But you should go. Tell your papa or your brother about the phone call. It might be best not to tell them that you were here. They might be angry with me for bringing you out in the cold. Just tell them about the call you got. They will come and take care of me.”

Pablo pushed the driver’s door open and stepped back into the snow. “You’ll visit me later?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Oscar. “Maybe. If I have some ticks left.”

Dear Tangee

2006-12-05T18:34:00.000-05:00

The assignment, many years ago, was to write a "Dear John" letter. We had ten minutes. Unable to write as directed, I took another tack and wrote the following. Then I found that I wanted to know and write more about these characters. Dozens of short stories and a great number of snippets followed, and within a few years there was an eighty thousand word novel. In the book, Buck is not near as much a Sad Sack as he is here. Funny how things get started.

Dear Tangee,
Your absence since this past November has made me sad. It has also made me wonder; have you left me for good or are you just gone for a long time? Maybe you are doing something you forgot to mention to me, or maybe you told me and I forgot. Probably I forgot. You left some Spring clothes here and I took that as a sign to expect you, maybe by April. April was four months ago so I guess I shouldn't make that much of a sign out of one dress and a pair of shorts. If you had left for good you would have written a note, wouldn't you? You would have left a note right here on our note pad thing by the phone which, by the way you haven't even called me on yet.
I just went down to the Seven-Eleven for some Pepsi and I'll be back in about half an hour. If you're not here, it's okay...next time I go out I'll leave you another note then. Just like this one now. Just like the one I wrote yesterday. There's cold 7-Up in the fridge for you. See you later.
Buck

Art

2006-12-04T18:57:00.000-05:00

Writing creative fiction, commentary and poetry is not a craft. It is an art. Technical writing and editing are crafts as is proofreading to a lesser extent.

This art, as in the arts of sculpture, painting, music and all the other classic forms, requires the envisioning of a goal and aiming to achieve it beautifully. It requires a deep knowledge of language and the reading of language and the speaking of language. It requires the wresting of difficult forms and ideas into clear and meaningful stories.

A craft is learned by rote. Knotting a rug to a numbered pattern is a craft of sorts. The glass workers a Greenfield Village may be artists on their own time, but they are crafters at the Village, blowing out identical flowers, one after another. The writer of innumerable limericks may be clever, but he’s no artist. The writer of the compiled listings in Writer’s Market may have a finished, perfect novel on his desk at home, but at work he’s a mechanic. And that’s not to say that mechanics, literary and otherwise don’t have value. They are wonderfully needful in our world. But they are not artists.

We, as writers of fiction and poetry, are artists, some better, some not so good, but writers and artists none the less.

Don't Blame Bill

2006-12-02T19:04:00.000-05:00

What the Hell does one do with these micro-stories? I guess one posts them on his blog.
(By the way, Stewart HATES the PS at the end. You can hate it too.)

Don’t Blame Bill
617 Words

As you can tell from the first page I wrote, I fully expect to die and so that was my will; who gets what and all. This page is more of an explanation of my current circumstances and I hope you will understand.
Everything was all right, here in the shack, and we were pretty well prepared to sit it out until Spring. Even the blizzard, heavy as it was, didn't mean much as we had plenty of provisions and I'd dug the latrine deep. It is obvious, though, that I hadn't reckoned on that roof beam breaking; but break it did and in came the roof and most of two walls. The beam hit me square on the shoulder and knocked me down and as you can no doubt tell from the position of the beam and my broken bones, it ended up hard across my two legs, just above the knee. As to the matter of pain, I can tell you that at first it hardly hurt at all, even for some while after I regained consciousness. Later, in what I think was the second day it hurt a lot but that didn't seem to last too long. This may have a something to do with the way the snow fell in on me, covering my lower legs where the beam was. I believe the cold is mostly responsible for my present numbness.

_______________________________________________________________________

One consequence of the damned roof breaking was that it knocked over the map table, so now I have the backs of our geologic survey maps to write on. Sadly, the pantry was not so effected and I can only stare at the can of pork and beans on the shelf. I have never thought much about such things so I am purely ignorant as to which of my situations will do me in first, the cold, the starvation or something concerning my leg; I can't see it and maybe I've got some loss of blood or something.

________________________________________________________________________

I think it has been several days since the roof fell. I keep sleeping or maybe passing out.

_______________________________________________________________________

I haven't mentioned Bill, but it's important that you know some things. First, smart as he is, he can't figure out that I would like very much for him to fetch me that can of beans. He's a good dog and he spends a lot of the time curled up against me and that keeps us both warm, but somehow I imagine he's doing it mostly for my benefit. Bill is looking pretty skinny now and I don't guess he's eaten since the roof fell. I haven't even seen him leave the shack, even though he could.

_______________________________________________________________________

I get real bad dreams and am dizzy.

_______________________________________________________________________

I think I just slept for a long time but I'm still real tired and may take another nap.

________________________________________________________________________

Bill is with me all the time now.

________________________________________________________________________

When you find me dead, I kind of expect you'll find Bill alive. He's been a good boy and I told him, after I'm gone that if he was starving, he could have such meat as I might provide. Should he choose to do that, I don't want you to hold it against him, as it was my wish. Don't blame Bill.

________________________________________________________________________

A POST SCRIPT

Dear Mrs. O'Hara,
You have my deepest sympathy. In addition to the enclosed will and letter, I am enclosing your son's other personal effects. Most importantly, let me add that when we were able to get back to the cabin in May, we found two skeletons.

The Big Green Bird

2006-11-27T23:09:00.000-05:00

This is the first story with my character, Buck Crimmins. As with the previous post, Avast, there wasn't a place for it in the novel so I thought I'd share it here.
Not a lot of places publish humorous short stories. Maybe I should have marketed it as quasi-zen, existential, magical realism.

THE BIG GREEN BIRD

I sipped and waited while the beer bubbles broke on the roof of my mouth, then I swallowed. The five o'clock evening new break was a tinny din on the cheap radio. I sat tilted back on the cheap lawn chair and watched the cheap weeds wilt. I heard the five oh five drive time traffic 'copter report begin, "Things are very, very nasty out here this afternoon, and it looks like a lot of you are going to be getting a late start on your weekends. The north bound I-75 at Crooks Road: an accident has traffic backed up to Adams. At Pembroke, the John C. Lodge Freeway is stalled in both directions with concrete falling from the overpass. South bound Southfield at Warren, a steel hauler has dropped its load, and east bound I-94 at Twelve Mile Road, a large bird on the embankment has caused a gawkers slowdown backing traffic up to Harper."

I didn't decide to go; I just went. The old Chevy ground and choked and started. Blue smoke obscured three directions and then trailed behind me as I turned down Russo Highway and left onto the I-94 service drive. I caught three red lights and ran them all. In a car like mine you don't stop unless you have to and red lights don't count as "have to." Near where I reckoned the bird was I slowed to under twenty-five. It was a good thing I guessed right because the car bucked twice, clanked one last time and stopped. I left it where it died and hopped the chain link fence to the embankment.

As far as I could see to my left traffic was oozing by at no more than five miles an hour until they got past the spot where the bird was and then they sped up. I scuttled down the grassy grade until I was level with the bird and turned towards him. He was fifty feet away. I stood real still for a few minutes until I was pretty sure I wouldn't spook him. I closed until I was within twenty-five feet and stopped. I scrunched down on my haunches and squinted against the sunset. He was green and very large-maybe over three feet from claw to crest with long skinny legs-a kind of stork, I thought. He looked at me while I smoked a cigarette and when I flicked it away he turned and pecked the grass at his feet. He didn't snare any bugs but he didn't seem to mind. He looked at me again. A guy riding shotgun in an old Ford pickup chucked a spark plug at him and missed. I waited for the bird to fly but he didn't. He took one step and pecked again. Then he didn't peck any more and just stood still. My knees ached so I plumped down on my butt and crossed my legs. I lit another smoke and we watched commuters for a long time. My last beer was ready to be recycled so I told the bird to wait a minute. I strolled over, darkened the concrete on the nearest overpass and came back to the bird. I sat down and lit one more. I found four corn nuts in my pants pocket, ate three and tossed one to the bird which he ignored.

I looked left which was upstream for the east-bound lanes. Upstream. I understood why people talked of traffic flow and the stream of cars. The road was like a river and the moving cars were like water, sluicing and slowing around curves, then faster in the straight places. And stalled cars were like rocks and rapids, the surge balking and swirling then swooshing on. There were overpasses for the freeway and bridges for a river. I was just starting to reason out the place of semi-trucks and busses in this scheme when the bird brought me up short.

He said, "Bullshit." He made me know that this was, indeed, a road. It might remind me of a river or a herd of wildebeests or love in the afternoon, but it was a road. I was chastened and decided not to mention my last thought on where motorcycles fit in.

Traffic was thinning out but now people were lined along the chain link on either side of the freeway watching the bird; watching both of us, I guessed. TV news trucks never showed up and that was a good thing because I didn't want to attract any loonies who might scare him away. I was a loony who had been attracted here but I wasn't scaring him. I did ask him, though, if he was a sign or a portent or something. He didn't answer very directly so I looked for signs of him being a sign. I didn't know quite what I was looking for since I had never looked for omens previously and wasn't sure what to expect. But there were no patterns in the grass and the face of Jesus didn't reveal itself among his feathers.

Around seven-thirty he left. He ruffed his feathers and stretched his wings one time and with a leg hop and a wing stroke he flew. He flapped mightily and made a great rising circle over the freeway. He headed out generally west and in a straight line. I watched him until he disappeared over the horizon of the Shell gas station roof.

I stayed on for a while, uninteresting to chain link fence gawkers and freeway drivers. I pissed one more time and smoked my last two cigarettes. I didn't decide to leave, I just left. The Chevy had forgotten it was dead and fired to a clanking start. It got me home.

Back home I couldn't find any point to it all. Really, it's not even hardly a story somebody would buy you a beer to hear about. But not every tale has a story, and not every story has a moral, and many, many things in this life have no point beyond the obvious. Like, don't look for Jesus in a big green bird.

Seduction

2006-11-13T18:37:00.000-05:00

Stewart's assignment: Seduction in less than a thousand words. How about in less than three hundred?

Second Date

We walk up a short rise, aspens at the crest, a few boulders. A wildlife preserve she says. A favorite place. Even in November.

She steps ahead of me, her full long peasant skirt luffing in the wind. She knows the trail and reaches back to haul me up. From there and along the ridge crest we hold hands.
Last Thursday night we saw a film, foreign and with subtitles. She said she liked it. Hard to tell. We kissed at her door. She said next time we’d go to a place of hers. There would be a next time? We kissed again, briefly, smiling.

We walk for forty minutes seeing only one other person.

“This is one of your favorite things?” I ask.

“It is,” she says.

Through a ravine. Autumn colors are long gone but there is a certain beauty here. On a flat black rock we sit and talk and muse and are, for a time, quiet. It’s a good quiet with no straining need to fill the silence.

“A bit further,” she says.

We enter and exit an acre of woods and find a stand of aspens, growing but bent into half-hoops from root to ground; a little wooded cavern. We bend to enter and sit beneath sparse cover as the wind shifts. Thirty minutes later a light snow starts. The flakes feel fresh and good on my naked back.

Warning: NC 17 Ahead

2006-11-11T22:56:00.000-05:00

The assignment from Stu's blog, has to do with seduction. I'm going to post a nice little story in a few days that I think will qualify. But I have something a little more NC 17 on the subject. I'm not going to post it here, but if you would like to see it, drop me a line at JonZ1314@aol.com.
I'll send the story to you. (And for my local friends, the story is Stranded in the Snow. You may have already seen it, but I'll send it again if you like.)

A Love Poem

2006-11-09T19:12:00.000-05:00

It had to happen sooner or later...a poem. I'll keep it brief for those of you who can't tolerate the stuff. Comment if you will.

A Love Poem

It is an incandescent love,
Brighter than a burning angel,
Brighter than the eye of God.
And with that light comes heat;
More than enough to melt the stars,
and fire the frozen moon.

Avast: A Snippet

2006-11-06T22:17:00.000-05:00

Okay, here's the deal. My second novel, Buck and Tangee; Things that Happened, is complete but I can't post much of it here without messing with future publication rights. But I want to share something of the flavor of the book, so here's the solution: The following post is from a section of the original book that didn't quite fit. It's a snippet from the editing room floor.

Now, here's the other thing. Most of my posts are only a few hundred words. This one is about 2200. I hope you think it's worth it. Let me know, okay?

(And my appologies for lack of paragraph indentation...I just can't figure out how to do that!)

Avast

For the first half of summer last year, Rusty had a boat. He won it in a poker game in early May and lost it in a poker game in mid-July. But that wasn’t so bad, because the weather kind of cooled off by then.

“Avast!” yelled Rusty.

“Avast?” I said.

“Yeah, avast. Come on, Buck, avast will you?”

The boat was pitching a bit in the chop. The wind had picked up and a cool mist was blowing across Anchor Bay. My tee shirt was feeling like a chilly, damp second skin and I wasn’t in any mood to play pirate.

“What is it you want?” I asked.

“Avast. It’s boater’s talk. It means get your head out of your ass and pay attention. Pull up the anchor. We’re heading in. I don’t like the looks of those clouds.”

After three weeks of boat ownership Rusty had not only become a full-fledged yachtsman, but he’d also gotten infinitely wise in the ways of weather. I pulled up the anchor. The clouds did look nasty.

Rusty’s yacht was a twenty-four foot pontoon boat that he’d won in a poker game in early May. He stripped the camper cap off the back of his totaled out pickup and welded that to the deck. His measurements had been a bit off so the boat’s pitch was actually more of a dip to the left followed by a swoop to the right. He called it a list to starboard.

I waved when I had the anchor on board, and from his perch on top of the camper, Rusty turned the ignition key. Nothing happened. The antique Evenrude outboard motor stayed quiet. He turned the key again and when that didn’t work, he jiggled a few wires. The steering wheel and ignition had also come from the pickup, which accounted for the fact that the boat was also equipped with a transmission lever and turn signals. Rusty cussed. Then he yelled, “The motor...yank the rope.”

I yelled back, “Don’t you mean, ‘Batten the hawser’, or something like that?”
“Yank the damn rope,” he yelled. I yanked the rope.

There was a brief chuff from the engine and a small cloud of kerosene smelling smoke tore away in the growing wind. I pulled again. Chuff. Then chuff, chuff. Then finally chuff, chuff, braaak, and the prop started spinning.

In peaceful, calm weather, one horsepower per foot of boat length is probably adequate. It had at least been enough to get us a mile into the bay. But with the wind coming from shore and the boat having the aerodynamics of a bull dog’s face, we weren’t making much headway going in. It’s hard to measure speeds that slow on the water, but it took over a minute for to almost pass a chunk of seaweed.

“Buck, grab an oar…I’ll steer.” Miles across the bay the low dark clouds flashed.

“Just tie off the wheel with a bungee and you grab an oar too,” I yelled. Within two minutes we were both paddling in a semi-coordinated effort and had left the seaweed several feet behind.
It seemed odd that the flashing clouds across the bay behind us were getting closer because the wind was still in our face from the shore. I wondered if that was some sort of clue about tornados. Or hurricanes. The flags were snapping.

Rusty had screwed a flagpole to the deck. It was topped with the stars and stripes and below that were two pennants, one red with a white martini glass stitched on it and the other was black with the reclining figure of a large breasted woman in yellow. Rusty said they were party flags and would show he was a good time guy and that women were welcome. I thought all they showed was that the boat operator was a red-neck. The martini glass flag was getting frayed. The seaweed passed us going the other way. We were being blown slowly backwards. Then the Evenrude died.

We paddled like crazy, the wind shifted to our backs and the brick-like shape of the camper-cap acted like a sail. I guessed we were making close to one mile per hour. The storm was coming in at about thirty miles an hour. I had vision of us on the six o’clock news, hanging by a rope from a Coast Guard rescue chopper. If we were lucky. And I didn’t feel lucky. Rusty quit paddling and swayed over to the flag pole.

“What are you doing?” I yelled.

“The flag,” he said. “I’m going to hang the flag upside down. It’s a universal distress signal. Anybody who sees that will come and help.”

I yelled back, “Anybody who is close enough to see an upside down flag will also be close enough to see two guys rowing a barge with no motor in the middle of a typhoon. Come back and row.”
Despite my good advice Rusty took the time to lower and unclip the flag, reclip it and hoist it up again. Then he came back and paddled some more. Ten minutes later the boat was rolling so bad that my oar only reached the water between the crests of the waves. Then we had company.

From our left, about a hundred yards out, a personal watercraft with one person aboard was jetting across the waves. It had to be going at least forty miles an hour and seemed to be completely air-borne after topping the biggest waves. We waved but it kept on going. I figured it was too small to take on passengers and the driver was heading to shore to get us help. Then, suddenly it carved a wide U-turn arc in the water and turned back to us. Within seconds it was idling just off our left side. I could see Rusty grin; the driver was a woman. Rusty always grins at women. She was wearing a black wet-suit trimmed in yellow. Scuba gear was lashed to the back of her boat. She yelled, “Throw me a line.”

Rusty ducked into the camper-cap and came out with a length of white nylon rope. He tossed the coil to her while holding on to the end. Then he looked around for a likely place to tie it off. He settled on the flagpole. She whipped her end around a cleat at the back of her boat and then settled back behind the steering bars.

Spray from her jet washed back over our deck and we started to pull ahead. Twenty minutes later we were at the dock. Our right pontoon had burst at a seam and grounded in the sand while the left pontoon bobbed furiously. We scrambled off and into the waist deep water. The jet-ski woman cast off her end of the line and zoomed away and out of sight. We waded to the dock and Rusty tied a neat bow to fix the pontoon boat to a piling. We made it to the beach and fell on the wet sand. My pickup truck sat alone in the parking lot. We staggered to it and collapsed into the seat. I fired up the engine and we sat, staring through the windshield as the heater warmed up. My cigarettes were soaked but I found a couple of fairly long butts in the ashtray.

Rusty said, “I guess we’ll have to wait until after the storm to haul the boat out.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be an issue,” I said and nodded towards the end of the dock. Rusty’s bow had held and the line hadn’t broken and was still tied to the flagpole. It was just that the flagpole wasn’t attached to the boat, which was drifting further out with every wave. By the time we had smoked the shortest of the cigarette butts the boat was gone. In a moment of calm Rusty ran out on the dock and pulled in the flagpole which we stowed in the back of my truck.

I dropped Rusty off at his house, bought a dry pack of cigarettes and went home.

I took a hot shower, put on dry clothes and sat on the couch wrapped in an afghan, sipping whisky, straight.

Tangee made me a grilled cheese sandwich and snuggled up next to me. She said, “You guys have all the fun. We need a boat.”

The funny thing was that after a month or so I started thinking we needed a boat, too. The only problem I had with boats was that they go in water and I’d had enough water for a long time. I made a list of the good things and bad things about owning a boat.

A boat. Why not? Well, the first why not has to do with all the scrubbing my neighbor, Vince, does on the hull of his twenty-four foot inboard cruiser. He starts scrubbing in early April, right after the last of the ice melts, and he keeps on scrubbing until Memorial Day when he puts the boat in the water. Scrubbing is not recreation. Neither is spending money, although Tangee would disagree with that one. Boats don’t run on gasoline or diesel fuel or wind power. Money is what makes boats run, and they don’t get many miles per dollar. The third thing wrong with boats is that they go in water. Water is nice for swimming if you have a pool or if you’re at the beach. Water is not nice for swimming if your boat springs a leak and falls over and you have to swim to save your life.

But still, for some reason, boats are cool. You can be a mile out in the bay and therefore be a mile away from anybody you don’t want to be around. Nobody just stops by to visit you in your boat a mile out in the bay. And you can fish. That’s a good thing. Boats aren’t completely evil. So I decided to build a boat and just skip the part about the water.

I went to the junk yard and found an eighteen year old Chevy pickup truck in ruined condition. The motor ran but the manual transmission only worked in first gear and reverse, but I figured that was plenty for what I had in mind. The sheet metal was rusted through and banged up so bad that even duct tape wouldn’t hold it together, but that was okay too. I towed it home and parked it in my driveway. Then I tore off all of the sheet metal. I laid planks down on the bare truck bed and around the seat, dashboard and steering wheel which were still pretty much in tact. That’s what a boat is; a deck and some chairs. I stained the wooden deck and bought some folding aluminum yard chairs and a wicker chaise lounge at a garage sale. A proper boat also needs a cooler because in addition to money, the other thing boats run on is beer. But a cooler is only about two cubic feet and if you put some sandwiches in there with the beer, they get soggy when the ice melts. I bought a used Norge refrigerator and wrestled it aboard. The whole operation took less than one weekend and by Sunday evening I was sitting in my driveway on the deck of my new boat in my wicker chaise lounge, sipping a beer and eating an unsoggy sandwich. The only part I was missing was the being a mile away from everybody, so when Rusty pulled up in the driveway, I couldn’t hardly ignore him.

He yelled, “Hi.”

I yelled, “Ahoy.”

After he had scrambled aboard and helped himself to a beer and pulled up a folding chair he said, “This is the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.”

“No,” I said, “the stupidest goddamn thing you’ve ever seen was your pontoon boat sinking like a stone in that hurricane we got caught in last month. This boat won’t sink.”

“This is not a boat. This is...I don’t know...a porch. You’ve got a porch sitting in your driveway.”

“Hah!” I said. I moved from my wicker chaise lounge to the seat behind the steering wheel. I tuned the key and the motor fired up. It coughed and choked and smoked and sputtered. Just like a boat. Then I put it in first and idled forward ten feet or so.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rusty asked.

“Just moving in a bit toward the dock,” I said.

“That’s your garage.”

“For my car it’s a garage. For my boat, it’s the dock.”

Here the story merged back into the main part of the novel, so as I said...this is less a short story than a true excerpt. I hope you’ll find time to comment.

The Green Room

2006-11-03T18:27:00.000-05:00

If you've been over to that superior blog, WWW.House-of-Sternberg.blogspot.com
(and if you haven't been, you must go), you'll know that he's very keen on giving writing assignments. He established that the work this time would be less than a thousand words, take the form of a two character one act play, and reflect a conversation that follows a tragedy.

What follows is my effort.

The Green Room

The curtain opens to a spare room, walls of Paris Green, curtains of ivory satin. There are two chairs facing each other. They are straight backed and severe. Between the chairs is a matching coffee table, bare but for a Bible and a box of Kleenex.

Two men are seated there, both in suits, both in their late forties or early fifties. They are Pastor Pollard and Pastor Kartch. Kartch is slumped forward with his elbows on his knees. He has obviously been crying. It is a cry of despair.

Pollard: Another Kleenex?

Kartch: I should have done it myself, shouldn’t I?

P: No. It was right the way it was. And at the end you led us in the Twenty-third Psalm.

K: Not enough. It wasn’t enough. She is my wife. I should have led the whole service. Shouldn’t I?

P: Honestly, Karl, I don’t think so. I mean you weren’t in much shape to go through with it.

K: Not a very good example for my congregation, was I?

P: Because you cried at your wife’s funeral? You forget, I cried when Jill died. Even though she was only three days old, I cried. Bill Kinney from Faith Temple had to do the service for us.

K: I was here last night. After everybody left. After the visitation. I called and they let me in. Must have been after midnight. I prayed.

P: Of course you did.

K: No. I prayed for her to come back. I prayed to Jesus to raise her from the dead. To sit up in that damn casket and turn her head to me and smile. I could here her little laugh and her asking, “What happened?” I offered every sacrifice I could think of. He could have done it you know. Why wouldn’t He? Why didn’t Becky deserve it as much as Lazarus?

P: I’ve been asked that by parishioners many times, and so have you. What did you tell them?

K: I told them it was an example of His love. I told them it was like giving someone you love a great gift…you don’t need to give the gift every day; you give it and it’s remembered.

P: I like that. A wonderful analogy. Doesn’t it work for you now? Can’t you accept that it isn’t something we can expect every day, or ever at all any more?
K: No. Frankly I can’t. Now I see it as more like somebody standing by while you choke and withholding CPR. I see it as cruel and mean to have once shown us that He could do it and now standing by and refusing. I want Him to do what He can do. He’s done it before. I want it now. I want for my wife what He gave to Lazarus.

P: What did He give to Lazarus, Karl?

K: He gave him life!

P: And then? What happened then? He gave him life and he lived again, and then he died. He died, Karl. He may have lived again for a while, but then he died a second death. And where was Jesus then? Lazarus died, Karl. That’s the lesson. He died and nothing Jesus or God or the Holy Spirit could do would change that. The pain of death, twice. The grief of his wife and daughters, twice. The mourning and the tears and the suffering…twice. And that’s the lesson of Lazarus; not that he lived twice, but that even with divine intervention…Lazarus died.

The two men sit in their straight backed chairs. Pastor Pollard is thumbing through the Bible. Pastor Kartch is crying again. But it’s a cry of resignation.

Daschound Migration

2006-11-01T23:18:00.000-05:00

Shooting and murder and sickness and vampires and death...enough, already!

At least half of the fiction I write is humor. Kind of like this...

Daschound Migration

(Voice-over from a Science Channel program that hasn’t aired yet.)

It’s fall and the dashounds are migrating. They gather in pairs and threes, often under shrubs, waiting for the sun at dusk to guide them. They’re heading south, roughly following I-69 until it crosses route sixty-six. Then they head west. The faint scent of guacamole, which is heavier than air, hugs the ground. And the daschounds hug the ground, displaying once again the marvels of adaptive evolution. West and south they go as they do every year, to winter near the groves of their beloved avocado.

The short hairs leave first. They must conserve heat and their tolerance for lack of avocado is much lower than the long hairs’. And too, the short hairs prefer to travel in company and their herds can number in the hundreds. Long hairs are more clannish and stick to smaller family groups.

As far back as the earliest days of the opening of the old west, pioneers reported their wagon trains being held up for hours, even days, as the doxies spread in a wide, furry river from horizon to horizon. It was said that after their passing nothing would grow on the land for seven years. Except for maybe avocado.

Some Days

2006-10-31T18:39:00.000-05:00

Some days are better than others...and others...

Some Days

Some days he can talk. This is not one of those days. He holds a chop stick, broken in half and taped together for thickness, and he holds it like a wand; a baton. Slowly, but sometimes in a quick jerk, he moves the wand over a board printed with letters and a few words. He spells what he means to say.

“I……t…..i…..r….e…..d”

“You’re tired?”

The wand moves slightly left. “Yes?” I ask. The wand relaxes.

I recall a line from, “Racetrack Lore,” a short story of his I’d read years ago in Esquire or Harpers, long before it became a best selling novel, long before the movie. He had written, “Gratten sat, his spirit deflating; the pressure in his soul leaking out, almost audibly. To echo the sound of his soul, Gratten sighed.” Now he manages, “I tired.”

I chat a plain chat with him. Things that require no response. I pack my interview notes and my unused tape recorder. He watches; his eye muscles are still working. I stop chatting. I am wondering what scene he’s writing in his head. What kind of drilling insight would he jam into a dozen words to describe my leaving? I think, “What would he say?” And then the thought follows, “…if he were alive.”

'tis the season...

2006-10-29T12:17:00.000-05:00

Legend

His hands were cold; colder than the night breeze; colder, even than his eyes. But that was the normal condition for one of his race: cold.

His only heat was in his temperament and eagerness to be about his task. He wished that, like the legends, he could simply transform himself and with a flap of velvet leather wings be out, upon the night sky, unseen by those he sought. But those were legends. Reality had him trudging through the mist-thick streets, his eyes alert for movement, his senses taught.

He looked for one as alone as he: one in no company, and with no direction. One who had the inner warmth he lacked-the heat he craved. He saw a woman. She was huddled on the alley stoop of a café, wrapped in rubber slicker, hoarding to herself her own fading warmth. He approached making small intentional noises- a shoe scuff; a nose sniff. She would hear him coming and not be startled away. She looked up as he neared. They saw each other in the half reflected moonlight and each drew a sigh. Neither saw the warmth they needed.

"It's a cold night," he said.

She nodded, not wishing to spend her strength in speech.

"It seems times have been hard for you, too," he offered.

"They have." Her voice was small and far away.

"They are for all of us."

She nodded again.

"Move if you can. They won't come to you. Those times are gone. Sad times now...we've got them out numbered, and our success will be our undoing. Move if you can. You'll find one."

He started to walk off.

She called after him, "If only we could fly."

2006-10-28T18:06:00.000-04:00

DEE-troit Sports

2006-10-14T21:53:00.000-04:00

I was born the year the Detroit Tigers beat the Cubbies in the World Series. Nineteen forty-five. And I grew up in the era when the Motor City was rightfully known as “The City of Champions.” The Red Wings and the Lions were perennial champs (the Pistons didn’t move to Detroit from Fort Wayne until about ’57.)

Then came a long stretch during which the Red Wings were known as the Dead Things, the Pistons were called the Pissed On, the Tigers were reduced to pussy cats and the Lions rarely raised above the level of “opponent”. Sad times.
Sixty-eight brought a World Series and so did eighty-four. The Wings got better. The Pistons were winners. And now we Detroiters have what will doubtless be our greatest sports year ever.

Our basketball and hockey teams gained the best records in their leagues. The WNBA team won their championship. The Tigers are going to the World Series. Even the Lions will have their chance at perfection. If they keep going at their current pace they will finish the season with a perfectly imperfect 0-16 record. Perfectly imperfect in the City of Champions. When you’re the Detroit Lions you take your records any way you can get them.

Me

2006-10-12T22:00:00.000-04:00

God

2006-10-06T23:02:00.000-04:00

What is this? A super-short story? Flash fiction? A fable? You tell me...

God

When God was very young, his father told him stories. In time, although time hadn’t been invented yet, God had heard and learned every story his father told, which was every story there was to tell. In many ways of understanding the stories were basically mathematical; equations, algorithms, progressions and fractals. All were perfect and all were predictable.
When God was grown and on his own he remembered the stories and wanted to see them expressed and so He used everything he had learned, and this was Creation. Creation contained the essence of every story and each of them moved together perfectly.
God aged and loved the stories he saw before him, but in time, as now time had been created, he wanted more. He wanted new stories, but there could be none because all of perfection already existed. And so he made life and he made men and he made men to be different than anything that had ever been; he made them imperfect.
In their imperfection the living things were unpredictable, they were random and they were unique. Those things that were human tried to make sense of the senseless and find meaning where there was none and in doing so they gave back to God the one thing he needed: new stories.

Hollyhocks

2006-09-23T17:42:00.000-04:00

Hollyhocks

By one-thirty it had already been a long afternoon. Missus Eunice toed the faded porch floorboards, pushing the glider to a few more gentle rocks. At least there was a breeze and mosquitoes were not much of a problem, it having been a poor year for most bugs. She slid the shotgun further down her lap and reached in her apron pocket for a Halls Honey Lemon cough drop. She didn’t have a cough, but she liked the way it made her breath swoosh through her nose.
“Missus Eunice, I’d sure like to come up to your porch and sit a bit with you. We need to talk.”
“We’re talking now, William Bark, and I don’t much feel like talking further, let alone with you here on my porch.” William Bark leaned against her left gatepost and tugged at his broad, police issue belt. His dark blue police issue jacket lie draped over the other gatepost. Four people stood several feet behind him, across the sidewalk, in the shade of the one remaining elm trees on Elm Street.
The glider made a low, rusty moan with every backswing. Missus Eunice considered how empty the birdbath was and how she’d have to refill it later in the evening, after the sun was down a bit.
The big, fawn colored hound dog lay on its belly in the middle of the small yard. It might have been dozing or it might have been considering the several flies buzzing and orbiting and landing on his back. But it wasn’t doing any of those things because it was dead, a sizable hole blasted through its side.
Missus Eunice had rather expected the dog to go home to die and was distressed that it hadn’t. She had seen Mrs. Fletcher solve cases on television and was quite sure the dead dog would constitute evidence, or at least a significant clue, as to how it died and who had killed it. The shotgun was now heavy on her knees and she pulled it back a few inches, but still leaving her apron pocket accessible.
“Missus Eunice, now you know we have a kind of a situation here. I’m a patient man and all, but some time pretty soon you’ve got to let me come on up on your porch so we can talk about this.”
“If you were any kind of a patient gentleman you’d just leave and come back when you were properly invited. I know your daddy, you know. Had him in fourth grade. That boy couldn’t spell to save his own life. Can you spell, William Bark? Your daddy was Robert Bark and he couldn’t spell. I believe he became a plumber and took up with Evelyn Reed.”
“Yes ma’am. That’s my mother. She asks after you often. Please, can’t I just come up and talk?”
“What do you know about hollyhocks, William Bark? Do you know that hollyhocks generally grow to a height of four or five feet? Tall as a person. And do you know about my hollyhocks? Nine feet. That’s how tall my hollyhocks grow, unless there’s a windstorm. Or a hound dog.” Remnants of dug up, fallen hollyhock lay at right angles to the corner of the house. “I’ve got a fence for a reason, William Bark, and it surely isn’t to keep my hollyhocks from running away. It’s to keep such as that animal out of my yard. And people, too, unless they are properly invited.”
“Missus Eunice, I’m just real concerned about that shotgun. If it was to slip and fall or something, it might just go off and then somebody might get hurt or something.”
“I am quite offended, William Bark, that you’d think that I’d be such a silly woman who’d just let a shotgun slip and fall. And if all these people weren’t around, then there’d be nobody to get hurt.”
Now there were six people under the elm tree. “But it could be an accident, Missus Eunice. Things happen that are just accidents. Why don’t you just put the shotgun up, just in case?” One of the people under the elm tree, a Mister Kyle LaFournier, owner of the hound, took a few steps forward and spoke to Officer Bark. Bark nodded and motioned him back.
“I have thought about this,” said Missus Eunice, “and I believe this shotgun has become heavy, and I will lean it here on my porch railing. But you are still not invited to come and visit and I wish you and your friends would go away.” Maybe, she thought, this son of Robert Bark and his wife, Evelyn, is not too bright. Maybe he thinks this dog came to be dead by an accident. She lifted the gun and leaned it against her porch railing. Then she settled back, reached in her apron pocket and found she had no more Halls Honey Lemon cough drops, only a few stray Good and Plenty licorice candies which she withdrew and began to chew.
“Missus Eunice?” called a loud raspy voice from under the elm tree. “My name is Kyle LaFournier and that there was my dog you killed.” Officer William Bark turned his head quickly and said something sharp to Kyle LaFournier.
He knows, thought Missus Eunice. “I don’t know any LaFourniers, and you are not invited to my house and I believe I will choose not to speak with you. You are not even wearing a proper shirt.”
“Missus Eunice, that was my dog, and I’m going to take him out of your yard and I’m going to take him to the vet and if he’s dead, then I’m going to take him home.”
He brushed past Officer William Bark and past the gateposts and into the yard where he crouched over his big brown dead dog.
Missus Eunice reached into her apron pocket and withdrew a small thirty-two caliber pistol which she aimed and fired, causing Kyle LaFournier to crumple, first to his knees and then to the ground, his right arm falling straight across the full brown belly of his dog.
The recoil caused the glider to rock, leaving a rusty, metallic moan hanging in the air.