Category — Fiction

Betty Sederquist photo, http://sederquist.com

The Tramp and Lydia

By Beth Couture

You go into the woods, and what are you thinking will happen? The man is there, everyone’s seen him, and what do you think is going to happen when you walk up to him, offer your hand and say “I’m Lydia”? You ‘re not a stupid girl, not naïve, though sometimes you act that way. Your parents have warned you, as parents do, but of course you never listen to them. They tell you about that other girl. You can’t remember her name. The one who was raped in the woods years ago. They had to put her away or something after she walked out of the woods with her legs torn up and bleeding, her hair a mess of twigs and dirt. They said she didn’t talk for weeks after, and they put her on medication. She didn’t come back to school after that. She walked into the woods after school, and when she walked out again, she was bleeding between her legs. Dark red blood like the period you haven’t gotten yet, but it wasn’t her period.

All the teachers tell you not to go in there. “Don’t go any farther than the tree,” they say. “Stay where we can see you.” They remind you of the girl, say it could happen to you, that you should be careful. It happened right here—the same place you’re in now. She isn’t real, though. You don’t even know what she looked like.

And you are eleven years old, your body changing, your mind struggling to catch up to it. You’ve started feeling wet between the legs, started noticing it happening more and more often, and your face gets warm, flushed. It’s like you have a fever but it only happens when you think about certain things, when you watch Michael Levin running in gym class, when you wake up from dreams with your hand pressed against your stomach, creeping down. So what do you think is going to happen when you go into the woods with the tramp, where he is sitting with his dog in his tent, waiting for the storm? Really, Lydia. This is what your parents were talking about. And the other girls don’t believe you’ll do it. They stand near the tree and giggle, their braces flashing, and they wish they were you. They wish they had the guts to walk through the brush, the dry grass scratching their bare legs, toward the tramp and his tent. “I’m Lydia,” you say, and you hold out your hand.

He doesn’t smell like you think he will. You’re expecting body smells—unwashed hair, sweat, mud, dog. He lives in a tent in the woods. But instead, when you get close to him, you smell cologne, something almost like flowers. Like the lavender sachets your mother keeps in all the dresser drawers. There’s something else too. Leather? And maybe citrus. Lemon. You’re not sure. It’s faint. You breathe in deeply. He looks at you, doesn’t offer his hand. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says. “Your teacher’ll have a fit.”

“Why are you here?” you ask him, putting your hand on your hip and tilting your head a bit. Your mother always says you’re trying to look “sassy” when you do this. “Don’t you have somewhere to go?” And he looks at you. He’s not rolling his eyes, but you feel like he is, like he’s mocking you. “Well?” you say, shifting so that you’re standing straight again, looking at him dead on.

But he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say a word. His dog, a big black thing, comes up and sniffs your hand, then butts his head against it. You don’t want your hand to smell like dog, but you scratch his ears and he shifts slightly, leans against your leg. “Sweet dog,” you say. Suddenly you’re imagining yourself touching the tramp’s head, your fingers under his cap, tangled in the dark brown hair that peeks out from it. You imagine it’s soft, slightly oily, like it would leave your fingers shiny. You know the tramp wouldn’t let you pet him like you’re petting his dog, but that’s what you want to do. You imagine what the inside of his cap smells like, the damp wool pressed against his hair. Your little brother is three, and his hair smells sweet and a little sweaty all the time, kind of like an animal. You imagine this is what the tramp’s hair smells like.

“He’s been with me for three years now,” the tramp says, and smiles a little, for the first time since you’ve been here.

“What’s his name?” you ask, and the dog grumbles a little, pushes his head against your hand. You scratch harder.

“You give something a name…” the tramp says and shrugs.

“And what?” you ask.

“And it hurts more when you lose it,” he says.

Your name is Lydia. Your parents named you for your aunt, a woman you never met. She was your mother’s sister, and she died of breast cancer when you were two years old. She lived in Spain, and your parents planned to take you to visit her when you were older, but they never got the chance. You wonder about her, imagining her as beautiful and slightly crazy, up all hours in bars and cafes listening to longhaired men playing the guitar. You imagine her as an artist, a painter, a cigarette in her hand and a bottle of wine on the table next to her as she worked on huge canvases, the paint under her fingernails and in her spiky blonde hair. Aunt Lydia wasn’t a painter. Your parents tell you she went to college for art history and that she had loved Goya, but that she never painted. She worked in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, writing artists’ biographies. It doesn’t matter what your parents tell you. You imagine your aunt laughing in a crowded bar, throwing her head back, a man next to her with his arm around her waist. He kisses her shoulder, cups the inside of her thigh in his large palm. You imagine them in bed in the morning, light falling across her bare stomach, his legs and arms and back.

When you asked your parents why they named you after her, this woman you don’t know and now can never know, your mother got tears in her eyes and looked at you like you were insensitive, like you knew you were hurting her and you didn’t care. “She was my sister, Lydia,” she said, “and she died at a very young age. Too young.” You don’t understand why this would make her someone to name your daughter after, it just doesn’t make sense to you, but you nodded like you understood. You stole all of the pictures of your aunt from the photo albums your parents keep in the oak cabinet in the living room and keep them hidden under your mattress. At night you bring them out, run your fingertips over her face and hair, imagine what it would be like to touch her, who the last person was who held her hand or smelled her breath. You never met your aunt, and so you know you don’t love her. You know you can’t love someone you never met, someone you spoke to on the phone only four or five times in your life. What you feel for your Aunt Lydia isn’t love, only sadness—like somehow your life would have changed forever if you had met her, and you don’t know why.

And this is what you feel when you’re standing there looking at the tramp, hoping he will touch you on the arm or at least shake your hand. You know if he touches you, you will be changed into something completely different. You don’t know why you feel this—it doesn’t even make sense when you try to think about it—but you feel it in your stomach, in your chest. You’re having a hard time breathing next to him. “I think you should name him,” you say, focusing your attention on the dog, like that’s where it’s been the entire time. “Everything needs a name.”

He smiles at this, and you hope he’ll reach out to you, even to pat you on the back like your father does when he isn’t sure what to say to you. If the tramp doesn’t touch you before you have to leave him, you aren’t sure what you’ll do. But he doesn’t touch you. He does smile, a real one this time, and you take this as a good sign. He is warming up to you.

“So what do you think I should name him?” he asks you, gesturing toward the dog. “He seems to like you, by the way.”

“Almost all animals do,” you say, and you feel proud when you say it. “I’m going to be a vet.”

“That’s a good profession,” the tramp says.

You look down at the dog. Its eyes are closed and it makes soft, wet smacking sounds with its mouth. “Name him George,” you say.

“Why George?” the tramp asks, and again you feel like he’s mocking you, like he expects you to say it’s after a cartoon character or something stupid like that.

“ ‘George’ means ‘farmer,’ “ you say. “He looks like a farm dog. I like to know where names come from.”

“And what does your name mean?” the tramp asks, and he’s not really smiling anymore. He’s looking at you intently, his head cocked just slightly to the side like he’s really listening to you. No one has ever looked at you like that.

“Noble,” you say, and you try to hold his eyes with yours. You move toward him, and he backs away. Just barely. If you weren’t watching him so closely you wouldn’t know it, but you can see him take just a small step, a half-step, really, backward. You’re making him nervous. They’d kill you if they knew you were here, if they knew you were in the woods talking to this man, but he’s the one who’s afraid. Of you. You, Lydia, in your brashness and sassiness scare this man so much he’s trying to get away from you. And you feel powerful. And something else. The lower part of your belly aches and your face is hot. Your legs are shaking, the muscles tense. You hope he can’t see them quivering. He’s still looking at you. The dog has moved away from you and is now next to the tramp, and there’s nothing to do with your hands so you fold your arms over your chest.

“Well, noble Lydia, you should probably get going. Don’t you think? They’ll probably send out the search party soon.” He smiles, nervously laughs a little.

You look at your watch, the pink Hello Kitty one your best friend Claire got you for your birthday this year. “Recess isn’t over for another fifteen minutes,” you say. “My teacher won’t look for me until then.”

“Why do you want to be here anyway?” the tramp asks you. He is starting to sound impatient, even annoyed. “Shouldn’t you be playing with your friends — jumping rope or chasing boys, or whatever you girls do? There’s nothing for you here.”

But there is, and you think he knows it too, but you can’t say it because you don’t know how to put words to it. You wouldn’t even be able to talk about it if someone asked you. It’s just there, like the ache in your belly, the way your armpits are beginning to sweat.  You feel a drop running down your side and rub your t-shirt against it. You’re both standing there looking at each other, and you know you’re supposed to say something back to him but you don’t know what to say. You move your tongue around inside your mouth, like you are searching for words behind your teeth.

“There was a girl,” you say, and then you stop. The tramp looks at you and nods slowly, waiting for you to continue. You clear your throat. “She went into these woods and something happened to her.”

“What?” The tramp looks nervous. He’s backed away from you even more, and his hands are in his pockets. The dog leans against him almost protectively.

And you aren’t sure what to say. You, Lydia, who walked into this, who brought it up, even, are nervous too now. When your teacher Mrs. Johns says the word “rape,” she says it in hushed tones, and you and your friends never say it. “You know,” you say, and now you’re having a hard time looking at him. “There was a man.”

“He hurt her?” the tramp asks, and you nod. “Did he kill her?”

“No,” you say.

“Oh,” the tramp says. “Okay.”

“It was a long time ago,” you say, and you look at his face again. He’s staring at you. His eyes are pale green, the color of new leaves, and there are wrinkles in the corners of them. He looks like he could be your dad’s age, maybe a little younger. His face is kind.

“Lydia, you need to leave,” he says gently. “You’ll get us both in trouble if you don’t.”

“I wouldn’t get you in trouble,” you say, but you know this isn’t true. You wouldn’t mean to, you’re not that kind of girl, but he would get in trouble no matter what you said, even if you tried to keep it from happening. You wonder if that other girl meant to get the man in trouble, and you think she probably didn’t.  The tramp hasn’t stopped looking at you, and you stare back at him, trying to feel powerful again.

“My aunt was named Lydia too,” you say. “She lived in Spain and had tons of boyfriends. Beautiful Spanish men who kissed her neck and told her she was sexy. She had so many men in love with her.”

“Good for her,” he says, coming toward you. “But you have to go now.”

“Have you ever been someone’s boyfriend?” you ask him.

“Yes,” he says, and stops about three feet from you. The dog lies down outside the tent.

“I don’t have a boyfriend yet,” you say. Your entire body is damp with sweat. You can feel it on your legs, between them. And the other wetness. You wipe your forehead with your palm.

“No?” the tramp asks, smiling a little. You shake your head. “I’m sure it’ll happen,” he says. “You’ve got time.”

“My dad says he won’t let me have a boyfriend until I’m sixteen,” you say, “but he can’t stop me, really.”

“Sixteen is a good age for boyfriends,” he says.

You’re standing there, Lydia, and all you can think of is his hand on your arm, your shoulder. You imagine him touching your neck, the way you imagine your aunt’s boyfriends touching hers, and you shiver a little. He isn’t even very good looking, but you can smell him and he smells clean.

“I want you to touch me,” you say, and even as you say it you can’t believe you are so brave. Your friends would never believe it either, not even Claire, and you know you won’t tell them. Your voice doesn’t even shake when you say it.

“No,” he says. Just like that. His eyes don’t leave yours, and he doesn’t say anything else.

“I don’t mean in a dirty way,” you say.

“I don’t care how you mean it,” he says. “It’s time to go, Lydia.”

“I’m not leaving,” you say. You sound like a grown woman, cold and controlled. Strong.

“You have to,” he says. “Why are you doing this?”

You don’t know why you’re doing it. You don’t know why your voice is so hard, why your legs have stopped shaking and your belly is warm now, why you feel like you could do anything and get away with it. But you aren’t going to stop.

“I’m not leaving until you touch me,” you say. “On my neck. And if you don’t do it, I’ll tell everyone you tried to rape me.” The word sounds horrible coming out of your mouth, like something heavy and dead.

“That’s disgusting,” he says.

“Maybe, but I’ll still do it,” you say.

“Lydia, I’m not touching you,” he says. “You can say whatever you want, but I’m not doing it.”

“Just on the neck? I just want you to put your hand on my neck.” It isn’t a big deal, you think. Just a few seconds is all you want.

“No,” he says. “Get out of here right now.” You don’t move, even though he’s coming toward you angrily, even though he really could hurt you if he wanted to. Your feet are firm on the ground. You’re standing less than a foot apart, and you have to crane your neck to look into his face. The dog has gotten up from its spot near the tent and is standing next to the tramp with the fur on its back raised. “I mean it,” the tramp says.

And suddenly you hear your friends calling you. It’s faint, but it’s getting louder. The tramp hears it too, and you see the panic on his face. You look at your watch, and see that it’s time to go back inside. Past time. They must be worried. You hope they haven’t told Mrs. Johns on you yet, and you think about what you’ll do to them if they have.

“Touch my neck,” you say. “Do it, and I’ll leave. I promise.”

“That’s all you want?” the tramp asks, and you can tell he doesn’t really believe you. He thinks there must be a catch.

“Yes,” you say. “That’s all I want.” You tilt your head to the right, offering your neck to him. “Just touch it.” Your body is shaking again and the air feels cold on your damp skin. The tramp looks at you, his face pale and angry. You can tell you are the most disgusting thing he has ever seen, but you smile at him. “Touch it,” you say again. He reaches out a single finger. “With your whole hand,” you say. He stops for a minute and exhales harshly. His breath smells like spearmint.

“As soon as I do this, you better leave,” the tramp says. “I mean it.”

“I will,” you say softly, trying to sound gentle, “I promise.”

His hand shakes as he reaches it toward you, and then he is touching your neck. So softly your skin can barely feel it, but you feel it with your whole body. His hand is warm. You press against it, make a soft humming sound with your mouth. You can feel your eyes starting to tear. Please, you say silently. Please. And then it’s over. He has pulled away and is walking back toward the tent. “Go,” he says. He doesn’t look at you.

You go. What else is there to do but go? You’ve gotten what you wanted. He has touched you, and while you don’t feel changed now, you know you will. You’re certain you will. You know later, in your room alone, you will feel the change that has taken place in you. Your body will feel different. You will feel it in your chest, in your lungs. Between your legs and on your tiny breasts, in your mouth and throat. When you’re lying in bed you will feel it, this difference in you. You won’t be able to tell anyone when you see them, but they will feel it too. You know this. You are different now, Lydia, and you will feel it. You must.

About the author:

Beth Couture’s work can be found in a number of journals and anthologies, including Gargoyle, Drunken Boat, The Yalobusha Review, The Southeast Review, and Thirty Under Thirty from Starcherone Books. She received her PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2010 and currently teaches composition at Bloomsburg University.

__________________________

 
Nadja Asghar illustration

VIGILIA’S TEMPEST

By Stephen Poleskie

Chapter One

(Excerpted from the novel)

The boy’s hands held a death grip on the hot, rusty iron ladder. The world below him seemed to be rolling off its normal course, spinning, things were beginning to blur. Frozen with fear, he found himself unable to go on. The blood pounding in his head had turned the green pine-covered hills around him to pink, and yellow, and red. Seen through the afternoon haze they should appear blue or gray. Aerial Perspective was what Leonardo da Vinci called this visual phenomenon in his notebooks. The boy had once thought that he wanted to be an artist, a painter; but there was no art in his town, so he had painfully worked his way through Leonardo’s text, hoping to teach himself all that he needed to know. It was in these notebooks that he had found his design for a flying machine.
A cold blast of wind rattled the water tower. Sweat coated the boy’s palms. On the ground it was a fine summer day, with only the occasional strong breeze. A sudden gust tore at the knapsack he had strapped to his back containing the fabric for the flying device, threatening to lift it free. The pack’s straps dug into the boy’s shoulders, the bundle of thin bamboo poles tied onto the bottom swaying to and fro. He hesitated. If he would be an aviator he must learn not to fear the wind.

Others have done it long before I was even born; so why not me?

Time seemed excessive, still, raw and sterile, of no use. Risking a furtive glance, the boy saw that he was higher than the hill where he lived, and where he had first tested his device from the roof of his father’s garage. Grinning into the cool sky, he began breathing normally again. He had six rungs remaining before he reached the top. There was another puff, but not as strong as before; could the wind be dying down? Glancing up he wondered what came after the ladder reached the rim. Were there handholds continuing onto the roof of the tank? He had never been up here before. Fighting his fear, the boy forced himself to climb another rung. His movement, or was it the gusting wind, caused this ancient iron structure to vibrate, its motion giving off a hum, demoniac yet singsong.

Over I’ll go and see what happens.

What curiosity had drawn the boy to the water tower? What kind of degenerate, unstable elevator had whisked him to the top floor of the building, opening opposite the dim stairway to the roof, leaving him receptive to this abnormal temptation, the highest point on the highest structure for miles around? You could never get lost in this small mill town; wherever you were, just look up and there was the water tower.

The colorless, and mildewed, door to the roof had opened on a beautiful and fantastic vista, unvisited for many months, perhaps even years. This neglected roof exposed a seam in the boy’s ambition, the sense of space, of being above it all, in touch with his hero, Leonard, in his tower, writing in reverse in his notebooks, penning ink drawings for parachutes and flying machines. The rough, mottled doorway to the stairwell was gone, melded into the wall; there could be nowhere to go except up.

Over I’ll go and see what happens.

Looking around the boy’s breathing slowed; the nearby hills had gone back to being medium blue, the ones farther beyond to a paler gray, just as Leonardo wrote they would. With apostolic zeal the boy’s purpose returned, if not his courage. Slowly, he climbed another rung, and another, and then, making a rapid spurt, the final three. Pulling himself up against the weight of his burden, the boy gazed at the pitched top of the water tower, uninhabited except for six startled gray pigeons that took flight at his emergence. With jealousy he watched them leave; what a glorious gift they enjoyed, he told himself.

If only flying were so simple for me.

Bathed in luminous midday sunlight, the slanted landscape below beckoned, but the boy still clung fast, immobile. He was unwilling to trade his grip on the last rung of the ladder to reach for the first of the handholds. Traffic went on in the streets below, a few people passing by. The small town looked unchanged, much like the old engravings that he remembered seeing in a yellowed book in the library. Were these pictures early aerial views? Perhaps the artist had gone up in a balloon, or had he climbed this very water tower?

The sky around the boy had become crowded with various species of birds, circling on an endless track, sounding his intrusion into their private space. Down below him people were walking around, grounded in their own realities. Few had an immediate need to contemplate death. If they chanced to look up their assumption would be that the figure on the tower belonged there; he was working, it was the time of the day for work; they were working, or on their way to work, or going to look for work. People did not necessarily think much about death until confronted with it, ignoring the irrational need to turn it into something of value. The boy knew that he was born to die, but first he wished to fly, and if this choice might hasten his death, then so it would be.

Over I’ll go and see what happens.

His flying machine was a simply made affair of nylon fabric and bamboo sticks, lashed together with cord. The boy had assembled his device many times, but the pitch of the roof, and the wind, were making it difficult today. An audience had gathered in the streets, and a few people were waiting at the base of the water tower, with lifted heads and clucking among themselves. No one was brave enough, or foolish enough to climb the rusting ladder to try to get him down, but someone had called the police and the fire department. The boy could hear the wailing of the sirens as these public servants raced each other through the labyrinth below.

His fragile glider assembled, the boy slowly drew himself upright. Holding his wings open wide, he imagined himself a living crucifix taking possession of the sky. People in the crowd were shouting now; he could hear their voices wafted up from below. A fireman was speaking something through a bullhorn, perhaps addressing him. All the sounds were unclear, only background to the many thoughts that were beating in his head, and the wind rushing in his ears.

A sudden, strong gust knocked the boy down; for an instant the would-be aviator disappeared from the view of the crowd below. No one could see him grasping fearfully at the handholds. And then, in a flash, he popped up again, his courage returned. Had he lost all reason? Walking mincingly along the very edge of the water tower, he waved to his watchers, but that was not enough.

If only flying were so simple for me.

The boy could hear them clearly now; even if his audience did not dare express its pleasure it would never forgive him for stopping here. Their shouts compelled him, demanding everything. He gave it to them.

Over I’ll go and see what happens.

Stepping from the edge of the tower, the boy felt the cold rush of wind on his face and the downward pull of gravity; a gentle jolt lifted his body as the homemade wings caught the air.

I am free; I am flying.

But below him all the sadness of the world still waited.

About the author:

Stephen (Steve) Poleskie is an artist, writer, and photographer. His artwork is in the collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tate Gallery in London. His writing, fiction and art criticism, has appeared in many journals both here and abroad, including American Writing, Essays & Fictions, Leonardo, Lightworks, Many Mountains Moving, Pangolin Papers, Satire, SN Review, and Sulphur River Literary Review in the USA; D’Ars, and Spazio Umano, in Italy, Himmelschrieber in Germany, and Imago in Australia. He has published five novels, The Balloonist, The Third Candidate, Grater Life, Vigilia’s Tempest and Acorn’s Card.  Poleskie has taught, or been a visiting professor at twenty-seven colleges and art schools throughout the world, including: MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Art in New York and the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor emeritus at Cornell University. He lives inIthaca, N.Y., with his wife, the novelist, Jeanne Mackin.

You can find more information at his web site: www.StephenPoleskie.com

 Hymen

By Ann Bogle

The nicknames revealed the nature of our relationship but not our identities.  His name was Hymen and his last name Bender.  This was a conceit, because though he had had a vasectomy, he did not ravish me; he ravished me and wept for all those who ravished and did not weep.  He had two sons and a daughter, and he had a proper wife whom he didn’t bother to divorce and an ipso facto wife, the mother of his littlest boy.

My name was Anneliese Neumann.  One day we were listening to German language tapes.  For me German was a school subject.  For Hymen, who could pronounce German but not speak it, it was a poetic technique or element, shorthand for what ails the world.

“Anneliese, wo wohnen Sie?” the tape said.

“My name is Anneliese Neumann, and I live near Stuttgart,” I translated.

“Do you have a hat?”

“No, Mr. Siebler.  I lost my hat in the river.”

Hymen said that Anneliese Neumann was like me, because she gave more information than was necessary.

The Wedding

Anneliese digested Hymen’s lie to the ipso facto wife that there was no other lover.  Later, witnesses to the wedding at AMPs, to which Anneliese contributed earrings and cashews, must have told Patty otherwise.  A bartender from a different bar, a man who looked like Kenny Rogers, performed the ceremony.

Kenny Rogers came into AMPs with another man who looked like the cousin of all the men in upstate New York.  His eyes were dull as a dog’s and had a predictable closeness; his nose was sharp.  They sat next to Anneliese, the way men often did when she was with Hymen, as if she were alone, and began to talk to her.  Anneliese enjoyed these conversations more than Hymen did.

Hymen said, “It’s Kenny Rogers.”

“What are you doing with this ugly faggot?” was Kenny’s question.

“I love him,” Anneliese said.

“You love him, are you going to marry him?”

“I’m a schoolteacher,” she said and wrapped her legs around Hymen’s hips from her barstool.

“This is a secret marriage,” Hymen said.

“You have to have a ceremony, or you ain’t married, and if you ain’t married, then I can talk to her.”

“That would be up to Anneliese Neumann,” Hymen said.

“Let’s get married,” Anneliese said.

Kenny Rogers crossed himself and said, “Do you, sir … love, honor, fuck only her.  Anneliese, he’ll always be sick, take care of him, and never talk to me?”

“I do,” Anneliese said.

Hymen, who often lectured Anneliese on the semantics of intercourse, laughed snidely.

“He doesn’t use the word ‘fuck,’ ” Anneliese explained.

Anneliese inserted one of her crystal drops in Hymen’s left ear and kept her left earring in.  For a quarter, she bought a handful of cashews and plopped them on a red napkin.

“There,” she said to Hymen, Kenny, and the witnesses. “That’s the reception.”

In the Closet

Hymen had made a home for himself in the empty coat closet of the man with spectacular pectoral muscles.  The pec man taped up a poster in there, while Hymen was at school, and, as a joke, he stored a gallon jug of urine.  He drew skull and crossbones on a piece of masking tape and stretched the tape over the cover of the jar.  When Anneliese climbed in the closet with Hymen, she worried a little that the shelf wouldn’t hold, and that they’d be splashed with urine and broken glass, all for a little privacy.

“Let’s go in the living room,” she said.  “Your roommates are sleeping.  They won’t mind.”

“No,” Hymen said.  “This is where I live now.”

She couldn’t make love to Hymen in the closet.  They lay side by side, on their backs, tracing the lines of street light that seeped through the slats in the door.  During the night she woke to find him clinging to her, his face wet and contorted.  She stroked his forehead and imagined leaving him there.

He said he had lost his son.  She told him that it wasn’t true, that he could be a better father because he had moved out.

“I promised I wouldn’t leave him,” Hymen said.  “I will never do that to my child.”

“You did,” she said to herself.

Killing the Spider

When he was a teenager, Hymen, the eldest of a record-large brood in Friendsville, Pa., cried when his mother and sisters stomped the life out of an enormous spider who had ventured into the kitchen.  Seeing him cry, his mother, who cried herself when she thought she was alone, called the hospital.  After that, the family and all the cousins—the whole town of Friendsville—said he was crazy.

Anneliese remembered this one day, when she and Hymen were leaving the student pub to look for the car, and the sky over that nameless stretch of humps in the Appalachian chain around Vestal was cornflower blue.  Hymen stooped near the parking lot and popped a cornflower blue blossom in his mouth and ate it.

“And you’re the guy who cried when they killed the spider?” she said.

Hymen turned instantly sullen, and Anneliese, the driver, pet his knee from the time they got in the car until they got to the next bar on the parkway.

Telephone Calls

“I don’t think you understand how what you say affects people.  You think you can say whatever you want, and that it won’t hurt anyone.”  He said this three days after Anneliese had reminded him of the spider.  He had walked to the grocery store with Nicholas to make the call.

“Papa, is that our friend?” Nicholas said.

“No, Nicholas.  It’s Anneliese.  Anneliese is Papa’s friend.”

“Can we see Anneliese?”

“No, we’re going home to make soup.  I have to go,” Hymen said.  “I just wanted to tell you that this upset me.”

The next day Anneliese was working at home when the phone rang.  She picked it up and said hello twice.  The caller waited before hanging up, long enough for Anneliese to hear a child’s voice in the background.

“She knows,” Anneliese said the next time she talked to Hymen on the phone.

“She doesn’t know,” Hymen said.  “You’ve told everyone who knows, and you haven’t told her, have you?”

“You don’t live there anymore.  You should tell her.  If you don’t tell her, someone else will, and that would be worse.”

“No one has to know.  No one has to get hurt.  Someone is already hurt because you told him.  I won’t do that to her.”

“He asked,” Anneliese said, even though Hymen had forbidden her to talk about Harry.

Instead of Quebec

One of their promissory jests was a trip, at bar time, to Quebec City.  It never happened.  The best they ever came up with was a trip to Carl’s.  Anneliese was not allowed to talk about Carl, either, since he and his roommates sold cocaine from their living room.  At Carl’s the women and men stayed up late and didn’t answer the phone.  The men answered the door.

They always got to Carl’s late, and they never had to be anywhere in the morning.  Hymen sat with the others in the kitchen.  He had quit using cocaine, except on special occasions, which turned out to be whenever they went to Carl’s.  Carl played guitar, and Hymen played harmonica; sometimes they improvised.

Hymen sang, “I’ve got the safe sex blues.”

The men were laughing, but Anneliese knew it wasn’t true.  They avoided safe sex.

“He doesn’t have those blues,” she said, but no one looked up.

“I got me a vasectomy but the plague won out.  It didn’t make a vas deferens in the end.”

Carl’s concern was with sexual hi-fi.  He had a talent for keeping his women apart.  One would leave minutes before another arrived, and no one, not even Anneliese and Hymen, knew how he did it.

Anneliese grew bored in the kitchen.  She walked the rim of the living room on old acetate couches and sang Janis Joplin songs from the depths of her diaphragm, mentally correcting the grammar.  Then she let her leg drop over the side of the couch, so it was visible from the kitchen, and lay there willing Hymen to come to her.  Carl noticed her leg before Hymen did.  Hymen resented it when Anneliese treated him as if he were like all other men.

“Mike,” Carl said.  “Your woman’s looking for you.”

“I don’t have a woman,” Hymen said.  “You can’t have a woman.”

“Well, she’s looking for somebody,” Carl said.

In the Beginning

Anneliese and Hymen had taken a class together, but they hadn’t known at the time that she would become Anneliese, Queen Anne from the Land of a Thousand Farm Machines.  He remembered her lips because he had drawn them during her oral presentation on Dada in Zürich.  She had known—because her friend had told her—that he lived with someone.

When they met again, the moon had conjoined with Jupiter.

She was angling for an escape from Harry, who lived in Manhattan and drove most weekends to see her.  For some time she had been living on a transom between boredom and guilt.  Harry was forty and her moral superior, and she wasn’t attracted to him.  Hymen, people told her, was ugly and a drunk; whereas Harry had a sportscoat and a job.  She had never had the feeling with Harry, as she did with Hymen, that she had picked him.  It was for Hymen that she had spent high school parting the curtains.

Here was Woody Guthrie.

Hymen actually did jump freight trains, but it was only between Johnson City and Endicott.  He wanted to move to Dublin and to see the cities of the world, but he stayed where he was to save the children.

Barfly

They were so busy going to bars that they hadn’t seen Barfly, but they called Charles Bukowski on the phone.  His houseboy answered at a home on Long Island.  Anneliese told him that she had been a gatekeeper herself.  “Put him on,” she said to the houseboy.  “We are here reading his poetry, and there’s a part we don’t get.”

“Sorry, lady, but this is the wrong number,” the houseboy said.

“What is the right number then?” Anneliese said.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Don’t be afraid,” she said.  “Just let us talk to him.  We are poets.”

Hymen was laughing at her antics, but he said, “You sound short on the telephone.”

“Here is my houseboy,” Anneliese said and handed the phone to Hymen.

“You can’t trust kids with the phone anymore.  Sorry to wake you,” Hymen said and hung up.

It started because the man with spectacular pectoral muscles had gone to bed early after seeing the movie and saying to Anneliese, Hymen, and the others present, including Hymen’s proper wife, that Anneliese and Hymen were Barfly.

When the pec man had come in, Anneliese was jumping on the small trampoline that they used as a coffee table.

“Get off the tramp,” the pec man said.  “You’re so elitist.”

The pec man talked that way to everyone, repeating things he had heard repeated in other contexts.  He was in school, applying to school, and finishing a degree in deconstruction theory.

“I’ll have you know,” said Anneliese, a little breathless from jumping, “I have had thirteen clerical jobs.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” the pec man said.

Hymen’s wife, who was with them because her boyfriend had hit her, rolled her eyes. “Dumb but cute,” she said confidentially.

“The living room is not a gym,” Anneliese said solemnly in the tone of her mother.

The White Goddess

As good as Anneliese and Hymen together were Anneliese, Hymen, and Tom.  Tom had grown up in Binghamton and had played with the children of the town’s

poets.  He spoke in lyric riddles and knew how to whistle.

One of Hymen’s ongoing projects was to find Tom a lover.  He lined up one woman who wore too much make-up, and when that didn’t work, told Tom that there was no reason to be ashamed if it turned out he was gay.  What Tom liked was distance.  He kissed Anneliese lingeringly when she and Hymen dropped him off in his driveway.  No one had ever known him to have a steady girlfriend, but his name had been linked to a woman named Claudia.

Claudia wore jumpsuits in the primary colors and large wooden earrings shaped like safari animals.  Anneliese met her when Tom’s sister graduated from medical school.  Tom was the youngest and lived at home.  His parents gave their children everything and expected only what they got.

Anneliese and Hymen went to the party for the food.  Anneliese filled a plate and brought it to Hymen who was hiding in the study, reading a book about squirrel habitats.  He was the eldest of his parents’ twenty children.  He hated parents.  He hated being a parent, and he hated knowing that the world would continue its ceaseless propagation despite his vasectomy.

“Claudia isn’t Tom’s girlfriend,” Anneliese said.

“How do you know?” Hymen said, dropping the book.  She had smuggled a tiny bottle of tabasco under her plate, and he tapped it over an oyster.

“Her colors are too loud.  Her hair is treated.  She isn’t Tom’s type.”

“I think she’s very attractive,” Hymen said categorically.

Anneliese knew Hymen’s fantasy about the voluptuous hitchhiker in white lace lingerie and sheepskin vest, stranded at the side of the road by her insensitive biker boyfriend.  Hymen comes along to save the day but gets them arrested on a technicality, and they’re forced to spend the night together in a single jail cell.  The White Goddess, he called her.

“Well, she’s not exactly the White Goddess,” Anneliese said.

Hymen had told her two things about his attraction to her:  He had never been attracted to a woman like her before (for one thing, he liked short, fat women, and Anneliese was tall and thin), and that she was more attractive to other people than the women he had married.  He had a theory that she provoked sexuality in everyone.  He didn’t get jealous, he told her; he was just concerned for her welfare.

Hymen stood like Donatello’s David, petulant, with his stomach thrust slightly forward and his back swayed.  His hair fell in thin braids over his shoulders.  He had strong wrists and hands that he put on the table to win easy money arm wrestling in bars, easy because no one knew he had it in him.  He also made some money under the table as an artist’s model, but most of that business he had diverted to the pec man, Tim.  Ten years ago, he told her, men pestered him like flies.  This she could imagine because she had seen a photo of him that was so striking, she had asked him who it was.  “That’s me in my eyeliner days,” he told her.  It was his knees that got her.  They were square as stone wedges, and she couldn’t look at them without wanting to span them with the arc of her fingers

Harry

If it were true that Harry had wasted his time loving her, it was also true that he hadn’t saved time before he met her, so it was relative.  Everything was relative.  Everything was a choice.  Every choice was a thing that stood between her and the door to her apartment.  She’d go out, she’d come in, carefully avoiding the choice in her living room, a day, a week, a year, not choosing, carefully avoiding the decision and walking around the thing.  The thing had a smell to it, like a body, and she thought of her past friends, who lived far away, how they didn’t have this thing to deal with; they had other things but not this thing, which was her thing, and she didn’t want it, so she called them, and as time went on, the living room smelled bad.

Habits

It took as much coffee to wake up the system as it took beer to let it rest.  There was the additional bombardment of cigarettes.  Hymen smoked Camels or he broke the filters off hers.  At a certain time of night, nothing was strong enough.  Two cigarettes at once.  On Wednesdays they smoked cigars at Swat Sullivan’s Hotel.  Old men went there, including George, who was hired to heckle at the readings.  What George said from the sidelines mattered more than what the poets said in their wildest moments.  Perhaps it was because the poets weren’t getting paid.  George got five bucks.  He agreed to keep it secret, but Anneliese knew.

“What are you doing with that ugly devil?” was George’s question.

“I love him,” Anneliese said.

“Love,” George growled.  “You need a man to support you, buy you flowers.”

“He buys me flowers,” she said.  “And cigars.”  She was smoking a cigar at that moment, inhaling, holding it between her fingers like a fat cigarette.

“Jezebel,” he said.

She had to look that up at home.  George knew his stuff.  He was worth every penny.  He knew “The Face on the Barroom Floor” by heart.

About Face

From an angle a face, that face, the face, his face, the first and final face, the face to wake to, the face to push against her face, their eyes open, connected like the ramp to the plane.  Three days under the stars, a poster on the ceiling really, of the Creation of Man.

One of his ex-girlfriends had left them the keys.  They fed the dalmatian, got up to eat and pee.  There was plum betty in the fridge.  Anneliese was surprised.  His ex-girlfriend didn’t seem the type to make or eat plum betty.  It was a waterbed.  There were porn videos, and lingerie dangled from every doorknob.  His ex-girlfriend was a counselor at the abortion clinic.  She fielded tips from Florida when the clinic was about to be bombed and stationed troops of rednecks at the door.

Anneliese looked forward to going to her apartment because she could finish reading articles in Cosmopolitan.  Women in Cosmopolitan had more than one lover.  They knew what they wanted and how to be wanted.  They thought wanting was a good thing.

She told Hymen, “I don’t know why I spend so much time trying to figure these things out on my own, when it’s all written down here.”

He laughed in a gentle way that pulled her up to their dance floor.  It was important for them to see themselves as others saw them: artists or famous people.  Their genitals were so swollen they were one person.  It was Easter weekend.  Good Friday to the Resurrection.

The End

It was difficult to trace the infection when it happened, but she felt responsible.  She called all three men and told them one story.  She read them the brochure: “Chlamydia is not a flower.  It is a dangerous sexually transmitted disease.”  Two of them were negative.  Hymen didn’t test.  She figured that one of them would have gotten it from her had he at that point, that weekend, been with her, and the other would have gotten it had she had it then, that weekend, etc.  Eventually she realized that it was not from her; it was from Hymen.

He denied it.  They fought, not about spreading disease, but about lying.  He had not been jealous about the broker, he said, but mad that he would have to tell Patty something.  They would need to take the cure.  Anneliese hadn’t known that he had been with Patty.  Hymen told Patty that it came from wearing tight pants, and Patty believed him.  That was one thing.  Then the pec man told her that he had heard banging in Hymen’s closet.  Hymen told Anneliese that his ex-wife had been crying, and later, that she had used a vibrator.  These were sordid details, and Anneliese had to sift through them, again and again, so that she could say, at the end, that he still was lying, that there was medical proof of it and that he had been unkind to expect honesty from her without being honest himself.

Lonely Nights

Some nights Hymen climbed out of the closet to fulfill his fatherly obligations, and Anneliese prowled her apartment, a sphinx shut out of Egypt.

Her roommate’s wild days were behind her.  Angelica had found a mate, and she had spent the last year trying to convince him of this fact.  Geraldo was hard to convince.  He had not put his past behind him.  The phrase they used was “burning bridges.”  Angelica would say of Hymen, “He certainly doesn’t burn any bridges,” and Anneliese would say of Geraldo,  “His bridges are all unburned.”

One night Geraldo was out reinforcing the foundations; his ex-girlfriend was back after a year in Paris.  Angelica must have been spraying perfume.  She had been in the bathroom for more than an hour.

“Do you want to go out?” she said.  Steam swirled above their heads and into the bedrooms like a question.

They were in their second year in the same apartment and had never been out together; that’s how important men were.  They had heard the sorry halves of each other’s telephone conversations, had heard each other howl from the bedroom—crying or trying to come—but they had not gone out together, not even for coffee.

“Okay,” Anneliese said.  “But what will I wear?”

“Black, don’t you think?”

Anneliese assessed her black stuff.  Garter belt.  Heels.  Angelica wore size one.  Nothing of hers would fit Anneliese, and nothing in Anneliese’s closet remotely resembled what Angelica was wearing.  Angelica’s clothes were frothy.

She put on a slip, a skirt, a vest, and the heels.  She observed herself from every angle to be sure she knew which parts were detracting.  It was full battle dress.  Drag, she called it.  Hymen would feel he had missed something.  She was all dressed up with no one to kill.

Anneliese hadn’t gone to a disco since she was fifteen, when it had seemed very important.  They attracted a fair amount of attention.  Angelica seemed to know a lot of people in the bar; men approached from right and left to ask where she had been hiding herself.

“Well, you know,” Angelica said.  “Busy doing things.”

Angelica introduced Anneliese to the taller men, including a lawyer from a Yankees family.  Two generations of his family had been on the team.  His own career ended when his back caved in.

“What do you do when you’re not here?” he asked her.

“I teach,” Anneliese said.  It was a variation of her standby.  He wouldn’t want to picture the children.

“What I remember best about school is Henry James,” he said.  “I’m inspired by Henry James.”

“Oh?” she said undramatically, seeing him suddenly as Alice James, drained of his athleticism.

“The beautiful sweeps of time,” he sighed, nudging her with his soft shoulder.  “I have a favorite leather armchair where I read.  I light a fire.  You can’t resist it.”

“You just don’t go to the right places,” she said.  “I know people who read Henry James for a living.”  That was a brush off, she thought, but he still seemed interested.  He asked her what she was drinking.

For one half-second she was alone.  Then Angelica came back from the rest room, trailing a piece of toilet tissue.

“It’s sick in there,” she said, looking around.  “Wall-to-wall people.  Oh, my God,” she said in a whisper.  “Don’t turn around, see this guy, coming up behind you.  Say something in German.”

Anneliese turned around.  “Guten Tag, Herr Siebler.  Wie geht es Ihnen?”  It was the only name that came to her.

“Hallo, meine Freundin.  Wie geht es mit dir?”  His “dir” undid her.  She considered telling him she was visiting from Switzerland, but his German was faster than hers.  He was a commodities broker.  His parents lived in Mexico.  Nazis, she thought.

“Bulgarian,” he told her.

The lawyer reappeared with the drinks but stopped to talk to someone else when he saw the broker.

“You want him?” the broker said, nodding at the lawyer.

“Nein,” Anneliese said.  “He’s not my century.”

The broker raised his eyebrow provocatively.  Everything about him was provocative.  She had no idea what she was doing in this place, but she felt happy.  No one could touch her, and no one knew her name.

“What are you drinking?” he said.

“That reminds me of the old one,” she said.  “The man would say, ‘What are you thinking?’”

About the author:

Ann Bogle’s short stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Fiction International, Gulf Coast, Big Bridge, Black Ice, Mad Hatters’ Review, Wigleaf, Metazen, Blip, Whale Sound, Thrice Fiction, and several other journals. She received her MFA at the University of Houston,  her MA from Binghamton University and  her BA from University of Wisconsin. She is poetry, creative nonfiction and book reviews co-editor of Mad Hatters’ Review,  and fiction reader at Drunken Boat.

Mistaken Identity

Obasa min Dahlin’ used his head to stop a bullet. The people in the press room used their eyes. If they blinked with their eyes closed they sometimes saw a deeper red. Their wide-angled phones caught everything – they were so powerful.

They were so powerful they could tune rumour into fact. [One of those instances when the word ‘powerful’ and the word ‘sensitive’ are nearly synonymous.]

Dahlin’ was a free bird in a free world because he has wings. I have never had wings. I have never felt the air solidify around me because I never travel at such speeds.

What I have is roots. What he had is caves. What they have is fences. [You could call this a primer.]

I have seen fences that shed the clothes they were given so that they could keep their neutrality in plain sight. In a borderless world I like the reassurance of fences I can see through. I often wonder at what speeds a person would need to travel to make it through those gaps all fences have. If you travel really fast – at bullet-speed, say – is the fence still porous or is it solid?

[Discuss.]

So one day Osaba stood tall and carried a plaent in his right hand. Oops. I meant planet. He spun the planet & he chinked his spurs – which were, he said privately, and only into ears that drank his words in at one end and spit them out the other, the spurs of discontent. As soon as he said this, two words fell out the other ear of his listener.

‘Disco’ and ‘tent’.

Osaba was always an ambitious man and you should not judge the scale of his ambition by the size of these two words. Remember: he can carry a planet in one hand and only people who cannot spell think that what he holds is a plant.

 Resurrection

Fortune cookies on the table. There, in a bowl, extras for the avid and the unexpected. You spent forty Lenten days writing out each one, making notes, discarding the less-than-true. Earlier today we printed them out thin as edges twisted them into strips.

Someone will bite off more than they can chew, you said.

I should have taken sides. Why did I choose this city? We went to the wrong doctor. Thanks for thinking of us but it’s too late now. He should have got off one stop earlier. So many years and nothing to show for it. There, but for the absence of grace. Squandered.

Have you thought how to carry the conversation forward? Stage-management should include exit strategies.

Nobody meets your eye.

I’ve picked up the discarded strips of fortune.

Who got which one, I wonder?

Here – the remainders are all yours now.

About the author:

Sridala Swami’s poetry has appeared in Wasafiri, Asian Cha, Desilit, Drunken Boat, Spiral Orb, The South Asian Review and Poetry Salzburg Review, as well as several anthologies including The HarperCollins Book of Modern English Poetry by Indians (ed. Sudeep Sen, India: Harper Collins, forthcoming). Swami’s first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (India: Sahitya Akademi, 2007, rp 2008) was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. She has written three books for very young children, which were published by Pratham in 2009. Swami was the 2011 Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence at The University of Stirling, Scotland.

 
No Bones About It

Or the Case of the Too-Right Shoes

There was a word for it he was sure, but he had no head for trivia, and the more he tried to remember some small amusing or interesting factoid, the quicker he forgot it.  [What is aphasia, Alex?] His roommate, on the other hand (the largest Korean he had ever known personally), routinely squashed all three contestants on Jeopardy — routinely. He would’ve been a huge hit at parties since trivia excellence — like tournament spelling — is one of the few intellectual pursuits we all unabashedly aspire to.  Nam could’ve made millions, but why spoil it?  And it would be spoiled, he was sure of that.

It was a fact.  That was that and no bones about it.  Bones are for graveyards.  Bones are for stock.  Bones are for poison, for junkyard dogs.  You could love bones.  But bones were no good for feeding the grinder.  That’s how you cracked teeth and choked into your soup.

Maybe the mail would cheer him up.  He’d always loved getting the mail.  But email had ruined it all — nothing now in the box but bills and junk, an occasional pizza menu and pamphlets about getting into heaven.  Email had no meat to it.  It didn’t have a delivery time.  It didn’t come from anywhere; it didn’t go anywhere  —not really.

Opening the apartment door, he heard a thud as if he’d caught someone mid-knock and then scared them off.  Nothing was there but a small grocery bag tied to the doorknob.  He was pretty sure he hadn’t been in the apartment long enough to make enemies.  Maybe it was meant for another apartment?  What was it?  A bag of bones? A bag of dog shit?  It didn’t smell like dog shit, at least not from where he was standing.  After all, this was no small town; this was a big city.  People were busy here, had lives, had things to do and worry about.  That’s why he moved there.  No small town boredom turned to stoning: the smaller the town, the larger the stones.  It was some kind of inverse proportion thing.  [What are flux lines?]

It was just a bag of shoes, nice shoes too, designer brands appropriate for work and play.  They weren’t new but obviously not well worn either.  No note.  No name.  Just a bag of shoes.  It was one of his Watson moments.  He wasn’t skilled at deducing things.  Nam was probably like Holmes; he could probably deduce the hell out of this thing.  To Jim it was just a bag of shoes . . . size nine and a half.  This was his size.  Somehow he knew this would be the case.  He was tempted to try them on but was afraid he was missing something.  And, of course, he was.  They were all the same foot.  There wasn’t a matching pair in the whole bag — all right feet.  The proper thing to do was to leave the bag where it was and call the police, but before he could turn back to his apartment, he realized that this person had to know him.  They were the right shoes.  Only those closest to him knew that his right foot was in fact larger than his left, a lot larger.  If something happened to him, his parents could always identify him — assuming he still had his feet, that is.  If this were a movie, he would be the nameless guy who gets killed in the opening sequence — his mark the only thing left for the important characters to identify him with.  His left foot was always swimming in its shoe, but it was either that or crushed toes, and who wanted that?

Jim knew instinctively that email would have the answer.  Email was always so smug with answers.  He hated email even more than usual this morning.  There should be a word for that.  And, sure enough, in his inbox, nestled in among the junk, the porno solicitations and penis-increasing tonics and creams was a two-week old email for him.  He didn’t recognize the address, and there was no actual message.  It was all in the subject heading.

From: mmagoddess@yahoo.com

To: JimTick54@hotmail.com

Sent: Mon, September 27, 2010 5:05:58 PM

Subject: Jim Tickle, Tickle, Tickle.  Are you married, yet?  If not, come find me.

If only Nam were here. He wasn’t sure he could do this, and he hated it when people made fun of his name.  Everyone always made the same lame joke.  It was infuriating.

Clue 1: A mysterious package: the shoes.  A possible acquaintance.

Clue 2: An unknown address: “mmagoddess.”  A female.  Mixed Martial Arts.

Clue 3: A cryptic message.  This person was confident that Jim wouldn’t be married and that he would just drop everything and rush to her.

It had to be her.  Everyone has a her or him.  It was like a natural law or something.  She was always onto some damn new thing: parkour, roller derby . . . why not MMA?  She used to say she was preparing for the zombie apocalypse or some such thing.  He could never tell when she was being serious.  He could imagine her in tight spandex rolling around in some sweaty gym with a bunch of equally sweaty guys, wrapping her legs around them, pressing her body against their bodies, mounting them, being mounted.  His hypothesis was holding and nauseating.

She was always trying to make things more dramatic.  Two years, no contact.  There was never any doubt about it. When she left, he knew it was for good, and he knew not to wait for an explanation, so he didn’t wait for one or go looking.  He didn’t bother her mother or stalk her girlfriends.  That was what was expected.  He knew this, but he had no head for following directions.  He couldn’t even put together his cheap furniture; Nam did it.

But this time, the answer was obvious before the adventure even got started.  Holmes was always so enthusiastic, but Jim could never quite see why since Holmes had already solved the mystery while still sitting in his chair on Baker Street.  At most there was a detail or two left to be ironed out.  Jim decided it was way better to be Watson.  Not knowing was more fun; the answer was almost always disappointing.

She must have raided some poor massage parlor or karate studio or weekend carnival.  Those inflatable bouncing castles were easy targets.  Any place where it was customary for people to remove their shoes would not be safe.   The sad thing was that this was probably the best gift anyone had ever given him.  It was stupid, but she really knew him.  She saw to it that he would not be without the right shoes.  [What is a pun?]  He could see all those size nine and a halfs hopscotching home, an afternoon ruined.  So, she was in town!

*

Suddenly, someone grabbed him from behind, an arm across his throat and a pair of legs clamped steel around his waist.  As he began to lose his balance, he lunged for the couch so as not to smash face-long into the hardwood floor — standard in all Chicago apartments.  He was starting to blackout, and it was exactly like everyone said.  He tried in vain to break the grip.  Whoever was doing this was very strong and obviously skilled; the choke was being applied to the arteries running along both sides of his neck, and it was restricting the blood flow to his brain.  The living room began to phase out.  His ears buzzed.  Watson would never have found himself in such a position, never would have fallen for such an obvious trap.  Perhaps he wasn’t even a Watson.  Just as he was about to black out:

“I told you to come find me.”

That was a fact.  Jim could only gurgle a response.  She felt amazing.  At least his conclusion was correct, which was, he had to admit, a relief — not that it took a genius to figure this one out.  All of the curves were still there on her little frame as he remembered, but now she was also carved in long muscle that was hanging off a skeleton of rebar instead of bone.  Though he could barely breathe, he still felt the fit of her, felt her loosen her grip.  Her lips moved against his neck, nape, whatever, and then there was blackness — and the woman was gone.  [What is a rear-naked choke?]  The game was afoot, and he had his walking shoes, but the amount of meat needed to feed the bird of prey would surely leave him a bag of bones, and that was that!

About the author:

Carlo matos is a poet, essayist and fiction writer.  He is the author of two books: A School for Fishermen (BrickHouse Books) and Ibsen’s Foreign Contagion (forthcoming Academica Press, 2012).  His poems and stories have appeared in kill author, The Houston Literary Review, The MadHatters Review, DIAGRAM, and 63 Channels, among others.  He lives in Chicago, IL where he teaches writing at the City Colleges of Chicago by day and trains in mixed martial arts by night.
 

Morning

By Racquel Goodison

One morning, as I was waking up from anxious dreams, I discovered that I was not in my room.  I was, in fact, not at all in my home or the world that I went to sleep in.

The air was still and my breathing and heart beat was a muffled rhythm inside my head.  My eyes seemed to both belong to me and not belong to me.  They saw as if from a body I had come to inhabit, but that I did not feel was mine.

Inside this shell, I struggled first to get out from under a pile of blankets, blankets that were eerily familiar and yet not, definitely not what I knew I had curled up under the night before.  These were pink and shiny, downy and satiny.  I knew my sheets were orange and quilted.  After these shiny foreign sheets, I struggled with my heavy legs.  They were legs, but they seemed like rubbery attachments, things belonging to a giant or a heavy lumbering mass.  I worked to get them on the ground and then to get a look at them and at my hands, at my body, any way I could.

But this is where it all goes wrong, even more wrong than waking up into a dream or, rather, an endless nightmare.  Whenever I looked down at any part of myself, I saw something that looked like parts of a body – hands, thighs, feet, toes – but all parts of a body I could not understand.  I was left with just the impression of something but nothing more real, more concrete.  And when I touched my arms or legs or face or shoulders or any part at all, the same thing happened.  I felt a body was there but I could not wrap my mind around it.  All I knew was what I perceived or felt.  Nothing more.  I could not test this knowledge with my senses, my eyes, my touch.  My perception was my only reality.

All the while I struggled to climb out of this fog, I heard the lungs in me working the air in and out.  I felt the heart in me thumping, thumping, thumping…  All as if inside a shell, a thing.

I pushed the body off the bed and away from its satiny sheets.  I moved its heavy legs, one in front of the other.  I looked out and around as I lumbered ahead.  To my side I saw walls without windows.  Ahead, I saw rooms that lead to other rooms that lead to other rooms – no end of rooms before me.  The floor was a seamless flow of thick dark wooden planks.  All pointed, all pointing toward the endless flow of rooms before me.

I knew that I could only walk ahead.  I knew too that I would only meet one room after another.  And still I lumbered forward, breathing inside, heart beating a steady thumping, eyes wondering where I was, where the I that I was was, when the dream would make way to the world I went to bed in, when reality would appear like the morning sun I felt was somewhere outside the rooms, breaking the day wide open.

About the author:

Racquel Simone (Goodison) was born and grew up in Kingston 20, Jamaica. She earned a doctorate in English at Binghamton University and is  an assistant professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her stories can be found in literary journals including the Black Arts Quarterly, Proud Flesh Journal, Kweli Journal and Drunken Boat .

_________________________________________

thePHOTOGRAPHYspot

©2011 chuckhauptphoto

Beyond the Screen

________________________________________

Chuck Haupt is photo editor of Ragazine. You can visit his blog at www.chuckhaupt.com/blog.

For thePHOTOGRAPHYspot submissions, please see guidelines at ragazine.cc/submissions/

Code Periwinkle

by Pedro Ponce

[Editor’s Note: The May 2010 disappearance of Ernesto D. Elbianco, an adjunct instructor of Life Competencies at Medina College, continues to baffle authorities and concerned colleagues. Among the possessions recovered from Elbianco’s apartment by investigators was The Art of Fiction, or The Death of the Author, a textbook in manuscript purportedly intended for use in college-level creative writing classes. The project, begun in earnest, eventually devolved into a diary of sorts, alternating entries of a more personal nature with bizarre fulminations alleging a conspiracy between the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and an interdisciplinary consortium of administrators and faculty comprising PHUCO—Professionals in the Humanities Collective. Elbianco is known to have been taking Euxorin for anxiety and depression; the paranoia and extreme moods reported by those encountering Elbianco in the days before his disappearance is consistent with symptoms of Euxorin withdrawal. The family of Ernesto Elbianco has granted permission to disseminate The Art of Fiction, hopeful that doing so will revive the stalled investigation. I’m grateful for their allowing access to the Elbianco papers, and for their cooperation in authenticating the following edited excerpt. — PP]

Where Do Ideas Come From?

The story is told of an emerging sculptor who, lacking inspiration, learns of a sale at her local hardware store. Hoping to salvage her unproductive day, she decides to stock up on necessities for her work space. But she has already frittered away the morning and most of the afternoon dabbing at her sketchpad, napping, or staring into the depths of her perplexity. By the time she arrives, the only sale items remaining are shelf brackets and a box of rusting casters.

The first lesson to emerge from this anecdote is certainly the danger of napping. It is doubtless the nap that refreshes the artist in question sufficiently to inspire her redoubled efforts. Had she extended her nap with alcohol or sleeping pills, the comfort of oblivion might have made her more amenable to the ineluctable void that consumes all human endeavors, artistic or otherwise.

The second lesson of course is illustrated in the artist’s pluck as she purchases the brackets and casters and returns to her studio. She sets to work with sheet metal cutters, pliers, steel wool, and lubricant spray. The constraint of her materials requires not only the exercise of her existing faculties, but the discovery of unprecedented new ones. She emerges from her trials with the most innovative work of her career. She sells every piece in her latest group, affording the financial independence to pursue her art indefinitely.

And so, as shown in the foregoing tale, people will really buy anything. And lubricant spray really has 1,001 uses.

Write What You Know

Tonight we gather to dedicate the Wyatt Reading Room, honoring emeritus professor Henry Wyatt. Wyatt retired in 1999, but his scholarly output has only accelerated in his later years with the advent of services like YouPublish and Author Author. For his latest doorstop, Wyatt has apparently gone with the $700 Classic Minimalism package: A pine green card stock cover with white tissue-thin pages. A line extends from Wyatt’s desk — pierced with an explanatory gold-plated placard — to the buffet table. I nod thoughtfully over the gilt letters of the volume’s spine until the nearest conversational circle closes in on itself. Then I set it aside and shovel more cold cuts and cheese onto my plate.

Speech! Speech! That can only be Nathaniel Dreyfus, already buzzed on Blue Heron Port and possession of the room’s youngest spouse, Dora, nee Bloom, tennis team captain during Dreyfus’ brief tenure as team liaison. It was Dreyfus who started Medina’s Faculty-Athletics Liaison program, which he proposed in an impassioned speech on the floor of the Faculty Assembly several years ago. The speech was later reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Dreyfus’ visionary plea for integrating physical well-being more proactively into the liberal arts coincided with Dora Bloom’s enrollment in Dreyfus’ English Literature to 1800 survey. Bloom, an accomplished student-athlete, would often arrive to her afternoon class already dressed for practice in order to expedite her arrival on court. Dreyfus would never tire of remarking how fate — or Fortuna, as it’s known to medievalists — intervened to make a match of him and DD, a term of endearment modified to Double D depending on his audience.

The Department Assessor seems to appear from nowhere with a steaming mug that reads STATISTICIANS DO IT BY THE NUMBERS. Nice to see you out and about, she says, especially during a Code Lavender.

A what? I ask.

She waves a hand dismissively. Guess you haven’t checked your mailbox today.

Her remark suggests that I have my own mailbox, but mine is actually shared with four other adjuncts, the Dixon Hall Ride Board, and notes to maintenance and janitorial staff. I had in fact seen a thick memo from Central Assessment printed with my name, but I had tossed it into the nearest recycling bin as soon as I saw the telltale owl and beaver letterhead (“PRUDENTIA VIA DILIGENTIA”).

Completely slipped my mind, I say.

The memo is self-explanatory, which the Assessor demonstrates by way of explanation. The digital drop boxes for all Life Competencies courses are linked to a central monitoring program. The data collected by this program includes how many assignments are given each semester, when they are due, and when grades and comments are returned to each student. Using reasonable efficiency templates, the program establishes zones of turnaround that correspond with degrees of Learning Reinforcement (LR). The quickest turnaround for grading, the next calendar day, has been shown to promote Maximum Learning Reinforcement for the skills practiced in a given assignment. After this threshold, the program assigns a color code to the dwindling efficacy of delayed assessment. The interval between the next calendar day and the next class meeting is designated Code Goldenrod (Exemplary LR); between the next class meeting and the Saturday ending that calendar week is designated Code Umber (Acceptable LR); and so on. The color code ensures that instructors reading the correspondingly backlit warning e-mails are subjected to minimal eye strain.

Currently, we are at Code Lavender (Minimal LR) for assignments administered the previous week. You’ve been steadily improving, says the Assessor wistfully. It would be a shame to spoil it all with a Periwinkle [Poor LR] or a Lime [Unacceptable LR]. She takes another sip from her mug and leaves with a concerned nod.

Many Muses, One Art

If I cut behind campus instead of taking Main Street, I can be home in a matter of minutes with a good two-and-a-half hours of grading before the next assessment alert. This is the plan until I hear my name called from one of the darkened porches on Galloway. I turn reluctantly in the direction of the voice, tracing its source to a glowing orange dot hovering over a white banister. I recognize my office mate Liam. He breathes blue smoke in my direction and waves me over.

I watch him lean forward, releasing the slim butt to the shadows. In the light from her long toke is Dora Bloom.

You look like you could use this, she says.

I accept without hesitation.

What’d you think of the ceremony? I ask.

Dora shakes her head as she tweezes the joint between her thumb and forefinger. That was on campus. Now I’m off campus. I don’t have to think anything. She stifles a yawn as she pulls the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her hands. She’s changed her clothes and wears her hair down, looking more like the undergraduate she was three years ago.

I was just about to tell Dora about my recent windfall, Liam says.

The turd money? Dora fixes me with an indignant glare that quickly turns to giggling.

Last spring, Liam was just another underpaid adjunct struggling to pay his bills. On top of teaching two sections of Numeracy for Living and one section of Digital Research/Digital Discovery, he was also offered the chance to host the reception following the Prentice Reading, which invites an esteemed poet to campus every year. A logistical oversight had led the Alumni House to be reserved for another group. The apartment Liam shared with his cat was the site of the Old Library, which used to be where Medina held its literary gatherings; with a fortunate run of renters, it had not fallen into disrepair to the same extent as other campus buildings converted to housing.

Liam was given a pittance for refreshments and a detachment of janitorial staff, who scrubbed, steamed, and unpacked long stored memorabilia for display. He exhausted his refreshment allowance and most of his grocery funds for the month with imported sesame crackers, exotic cheeses, crudités, and two bottles of the guest writer’s favorite scotch. After passing inspection by the Dean of Academic Affairs, the Director of the Physical Plant, and the head of Alumni Development, there was nothing to do but await the arrival of Pulitzer Prize winner and current Tri-State Poet Laureate, Arthur Beech.

Beech was at his most charming during his visit, which is to say that he only brought two students to tears during his guest workshop and limited his sexual overtures to juniors and seniors. He was sober enough during his reading to school his audience on their collective ignorance of great Literature, worthy of capitalization by virtue of its humanity and universal relevance, which could only be found among certain poets of his generation. Those still awake applauded their abuse and took their time perusing thoughtfully at the bookseller’s table, ultimately deciding that a free library copy was just as edifying.

Liam looked forward to having at least one bottle of scotch left over to help him through the rationing it would take to get him to his next paycheck. But somehow, in the course of the subsequent reception, Beech and a handful of sycophants left him with only two fingers, plus a dollop of Livarot. While his host contemplated the shambles of his larder, the guest of honor requested directions to the water closet. Liam pointed the way, wordlessly.

The party adjourned to the bar of Beech’s hotel. Liam turned down the invitation half-heartedly extended by Medina’s tenured resident poet and was looking forward to a few hours of sleep before rising at six to prepare for his morning class. He made his way down the hall and nearly collided with a bolt of gray fur shooting from the opposite direction. Rudy, he admonished feebly. Liam followed a trail of litter into the bathroom, where Rudy’s litter box shared cramped space with the sink, toilet, and stand-up shower. He had just begun to brush his teeth when he noticed something in the periphery of his vision.

The turd measured 11 inches long, with a diameter of one and 7/8 inches at its thickest point. Rudy, a six-year-old Russian blue, measures 14 inches (excluding tail) and weighs just under 10 pounds. An avid omnivore—the primary reason he had been sequestered during the reception—he was on a prophylactic diet to ensure no health problems now that he had reached middle age. But not even feline agility would allow an organism to defecate nearly the full length of its body. In short, someone else had to be full of shit. Liam remembered the visiting poet’s rumpled blazer as he stumbled to relieve himself towards the end of the night.

Rudy consented to a brief examination—revealing nothing out of the ordinary—as Liam trolled online for a site he had discovered several months ago. Completist.com is essentially no different from any other trade and auction website, but it specializes in artifacts of fairly recent and often dubious provenance: “FOR THE COLLECTOR WITH EVERYTHING BUT.” He considered posting to the Celebrity pages, but it was doubtful anyone looking for Trey Seacourt’s yogurt spoon or Mia Clark’s used panties would know or care about the unexpurgated work of a prominent American poet. He settled on a page devoted to “Literary Curiosities.”

Within minutes of his upload, a potential buyer was corresponding with him via Completist Chat. IS THE SPECIMEN WHOLE? asked PapaLives1962. Liam pondered whether his exhaustion had gotten the better of him as he typed that it was. IS THE SPECIMEN PRESERVED? Liam wasn’t sure how to respond. He settled, finally, on KEPT WHERE I FOUND IT. KEEP SEALED IN COOL DRY PLACE, responded PapaLives. LOOK FOR AUTHENTICATION PACKET BY EXPRESS POST.

The following evening, Liam received an expedited package containing three cotton swabs, a zippered plastic sleeve, and an expedited return envelope addressed to a post office box in Nestling Grove, Montana. The sender provided careful instructions for collecting samples from three different spots along the specimen’s surface.

Thirty-six hours later, Liam received a message from the buyer, offering $10,000, plus shipping and insurance. Liam got him up to $15,000 after sending pictures. He deposited the check just in time for Commencement, which he skipped for a weekend bender in New Orleans.

Liam hoists a beer from the cooler under his chair.

Any of it left?

Liam nods at my question, drinking from an ornate brown bottle. I’ve got to count my pennies. Not all us part-timers have the same perks. He looks briefly at Dora before giving me a conspiratorial wink.

I should go, Dora says. I hear the slap of her flip-flops against the cold porch.

Already? Liam asks. We just got this party started.

Fuck you, Dora says. She takes the porch steps two at a time and heads east toward the neighborhood known as Faculty Manor.

I better head out, too, I say.

Nice, whispers Liam. I bet she’s really hot when she’s pissed.

I give him a look before calling Dora from the darkened steps.

She stops and is about to say something, but I interrupt. I can walk with you if you’d like.

It’s only two blocks. Anyway, aren’t you in the other direction?

Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I head towards Main. By the time I pass Liam’s house again, the porch is empty.

I’m at the corner of Main and Kyloe when I hear the chimes of the campus chapel. More hours toll the longer I wait at the intersection. Nine. Ten. Eleven. I check the clock on the side of Niagara Savings.

Code Periwinkle.

About the author:

Pedro Ponce is the author of Homeland: A Panorama in 50 States (Seven Kitchens Press), the story collection Alien Autopsy (Cow Heavy Books), and Superstitions of Apartment Life (Burnside Review Press). His recent fiction can be viewed at the Sonora Review blog (http://sonorareview.com/2011/05/25/short-short-fiction-by-pedro-ponce/) and PANK Magazine (http://www.pankmagazine.com/the-church-of-best-guesses/).

The Truth About Love

Kyon natters softly.  His mouthful of little songs wakes Cho because it’s the sound of her son.  She opens her eyes and gazes into his copper-coin face, her devotion the precise size and density of a four-year old boy.  Uncurling from around Kyon, Cho flounders out from between lightly starched sheets – up and getting ready.  Cho brushes the black wave of her hair and then slips into a cream colored camisole and nylons her skinny legs.  A simple blue dress with long sleeves unifies her style into one appeal. 

Finding matching socks for Kyon has eaten up years of Cho’s life.  Every morning her hands become frenzied shovels scattering socks and misplaced toys in the dresser drawers until she finds a pair of matching socks and shoes.  Then it’s, “Make the ears.  Crisscross.  Into the bunny hole.  Pull them tight.” until finally, Kyon is socked and shoed and ready for daycare.   

She collects her bags and then out through her brownstone door steps into the winter street.  The sleet stopped in the small of the night but the morning is still shockingly cold.  Cho’s scarf frames her quiet face, her wool coat an ocean in which both she and Kyon swim.  They wait on the corner to hail a cab, every freezing minute stretching into the space of two.

The City is in Cho’s ears and the morning is all bang, bang, boom. Her impractical shoes make the shuttling of Kyon from taxi to the Tiny Years Daycare Center a teetering task.  Kyon prattles all the while, his voice audible but not his words.  Cho hands Kyon to an old woman with large ears, black eyes, and a “Hello.  My name is…” sticker, but there’s no name written on the tag so it’s just “Hello.  My name is… nothing.”  Nevertheless, Cho trusts the nameless old woman to keep Kyon from a thousand accidents. 

Cho jumps back into the taxi, her hair splashed across the back of the seat.  She reaches for her scarf, bracelets sliding down her arm, and realizes it’s no longer there.  How many scarves has she lost conveying Kyon from taxi to daycare, how many gloves, how many umbrellas, how many earrings?  Really, I must be more careful, she thinks.  But this is the last thought of Kyon she permits herself for the remains of the workday, rather, she concentrates on transforming herself into the dragon-lady of corporate advertising: frigid, bitchy and ready, if necessary, to use a Samurai sword to get her way.  It’s not a role of Cho’s choosing, but it is a stereotype her boss expects her to fulfill.  It is, after all, why he hired her – he likes Lucy Liu.

Stilettos punctuate Cho’s every move on the thirty-ninth floor of The Rockefeller Center with a fashionable snick.  She fires the man with horse teeth.  Snick.  She lands a multimillion dollar account.  Snick.  She moves the deadline up three days.  Snick.  She abruptly answers her own phone because she fired her horse-tooth assistant.  Snick. 

“Cho Nahm speaking.” 

“Ms. Nahm?”

“Yes?”

“This is Mi-sook at the Tiny Years Daycare Center.  I’m sorry.  Kyon is crying.”

“I don’t understand.”  Snick.

“Kyon won’t stop crying.”

“You called me because my son is crying?” Snick!  Snick!

“I’m sorry, Ms. Nahm.  Kyon has been crying for three hours.  I’m sorry.  I can’t make him happy.  So sorry.”

“Are you asking me to come and pick him up?”

“Yes ma’am.  I’m so sorry.”

Click.  Snick.

Cho leaves the office in a flurry of snicks.  And for nine blocks in the back of a yellow taxi, she is two schools of thought – corporate executive versus devoted mother.  The corporate executive orders the cabbie to stop, the devoted mother asks the driver to keep the meter running while she gets her son.  Cho enters the daycare center and the sound is suddenly overwhelming, like Grand Central Station, but diminutive.  And there, there in the middle of it all is Kyon crying.  He looks like an exhausted swimmer, red and drenched.  Kyon’s relief gathers itself in his expression as soon as he sees Cho, who swoops down to hover like a hen nestling her egg.  Together they become the still in the center of the room.  Cho gathers the familiar shape of Kyon to herself, pressing kisses into the bend of his neck.  She slowly pivots on her pointed heel to face Mi-sook who bows, hair draping.  Then Mi-sook tilts her head upward and unexpectedly the bright look of discovery makes a sunrise of her face.

“His shoes are on the wrong feet.”

Cho looks at her blankly.  Mi-sook doesn’t have the confidence to repeat herself, so she gingerly approaches Kyon’s feet, every mannerism a bowing apology.  Quick, quick she unties one shoe, then the other.  She juggles them to opposite hands and then quick, quick she ties one shoe, then the other.  She looks up for approval.  When Cho utters, “Thank you,” it also means “I hate you.”  And, “Write your name on the nametag, stupid bitch.”  

Leaning against the cold cab window on the way home, Cho watches narrow alleys and the lights on in every apartment pass.  She hides from the driver’s rearview eyes behind a curtain of hair and listens to Kyon breathing as a child will do just before falling asleep, deeply.  The cab slows, stops, and then idles in front of Cho’s brownstone.  The porcelain sky shatters just then and sleet clatters on the sheets of sidewalk ice and car glass.  Cho collects her bags, her son, and dashes to the door, splattering slush up the back of her legs. 

Cho’s coat on a chair, shoes slipped off, heavy wet nylons piled on the first step to upstairs.  Kyon’s quilted coat drenched, little hat hung, and yawning.  And then Cho notices a vacancy on her wrist – her bracelets missing.  She rushes outside in her bare feet hoping to find the bracelets between the front door and where the taxi was parked.  She tips on her toes searching in the pelting sleet, but the bracelets are not to be found.  Cho returns to the house and sits silent, rubbing warmth back into her feet.  She contemplates the significance of the missing bracelets, inventing meaning when it doesn’t become evident.  Cho begins to feel that Kyon has ruined her life.  His neediness, his mismatched socks, his culpability in her disappearing accessories.  The sharp-edged toys on the kitchen floor, the sleeplessness, the forever sticky face and fingers – all of it making her forget who she is and what she ever wanted. 

Cho’s eyes become a mystery to Kyon.  Sensing an atmospheric change, he hoards himself – mouth closed in fear, chin trembling.  In a quiet yet quick explosion of movement, Cho collects Kyon’s wet shoes and moves to him kneeling.  Without words, she positions him on the floor, his soles directed at her.  And then, like so many times before, she purposefully jams Kyon’s shoes on the wrong feet.  She yanks the laces tight while Kyon mouths the words, “Make the ears.  Crisscross.  Into the bunny hole.  Pull them tight.” 

The truth about love is that it isn’t always good.  And the particular places from which Cho’s fury erupt, makes her immune to Kyon’s painful pleading.  All Kyon understands is that his feet hurt and somehow, it’s his fault.

About the author:

Eric Bennett lives in New Jersey with his wife and four children. He loves trees without leaves and the silence between songs on vinyl records. His work appears in numerous literary and art journals including Writer’s Bloc, Fiction at Work, Prick of the Spindle, Ghoti Magazine, and PANK.

End of the Day

By John Palen

"The refrigerator kicked on ..."

After cleaning up the kitchen for the third time that day, Dave sat at the table with a cup of coffee and his list. The table was covered with a fresh cloth, green and yellow. The house was quiet and, except for the kitchen, dark. On a sheet of scratch paper Dave started a new list, beginning with uncompleted items: Iron clothes, vacuum bedrooms. Then he added new tasks he’d thought of during the day. An overhead light fixture in the basement hung loose on one side and needed to be reattached. The furnace needed to be drained. Before he was laid off he had neglected the furnace. One fall he had to pay $600 for new valves and sensors. Couldn’t let that happen now.

He heard a door closing upstairs, a flush, slippered feet on the floor. It was Diane going to the bathroom, going back to bed. Today was Tuesday. He added Wednesday’s tasks to the new list. Then  he added tasks done daily. Wednesday was the day to clean bathrooms and mow. The main daily task was supposed to be looking for a job. “Looking for a job is a full-time job,” the human resources guy told him in a scripted 20-minute session the day he was laid off. For a while he believed it. Now he knew it to be untrue. He wrote “look for work” on the list every day, but there were few jobs, and he spent more time simply dealing with money — juggling credit cards, haggling with collection agencies, prioritizing bills. He and Diane were two months behind on the mortgage, heading toward three.

The refrigerator kicked on, triggering a 30-year-old memory. It was a memory that almost anything could trigger, especially at night. When he was 18, Dave had killed someone, a middle-aged woman. She ran a red light and he broadsided her on the driver’s side. The accident undermined him. His depression faded away after three years of therapy, but the fact that he wasn’t at fault didn’t eliminate his visceral guilt, or his memory of watching the woman die. Something dimmed in her eyes, slow but steady, like water draining in a sluggish sink until it’s gone. After that he knew two certainties: Terrible things can happen without warning; and there are points of no return, points from which no recovery is possible.

When he finished the new list, he put today’s list with its checkmarks and marginal notes into a drawer. It joined a stack next to the flatware tray. At first he’d thrown his lists away. Eventually he realized they weren’t reminders of things he needed to do. They were reminders of things he had done, disconnected pieces of the day, like floating debris he could cling to. About a year ago he began to keep them, dated and stapled, month by month.

Dave was tired, but he looked around the kitchen with something almost like happiness. It was neat and spotless. He liked to keep it that way, using a more-expensive, name-brand cleaner on counters, mopping the floor, scrubbing crevices with a toothbrush,  In six hours, he’d be up  for breakfast with Diane, a supermarket cashier on the morning shift. Tonight he wouldn’t risk waking her. He sat a few more minutes, then poured another cup of coffee. Suddenly tired of paying attention, of watchfulness, he carried the coffee to the family room, turned the TV on low and stretched his legs in front of the couch. After a while he slept. Brightly colored images played across his face.

About the author:

John Palen’s Open Communion: New and Selected Poems was published by Mayapple Press. Since then he has published chapbooks with March Street Press and Pudding House, and has recent work appearing or forthcoming in Clapboard House, Bare Root Review and Off the Coast. He lives in Illinois.

Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dez and Petru Groza, Wikimedia Commons Archive

Chained by Law

Excerpt from the novel Cronica Teodoreştilor/Chronicle of a Lost World

Translated by Loredana Andreea Matei
University of Bucharest

* * *

On a bright and sunny day, in the early autumn of 1950, when each Romanian, breathless, expected the Americans’ arrival, and Groza Dej’s days seemed more numbered than ever, Stelian’s Teodorescu, a former inspector of the Cooperation Institute who retired before the end of the war and moved to the countryside for good, received an unexpected letter from Bucharest letting him know that, since he owned 10 hectares of land that he worked with   sharecroppers, the so-called Ministry of Labour and Social Provisions, by means of a special committee formed only for this purpose, decided to cancel his right to retirement pension.

After he had folded up the document, whey-faced, Stelian Teodorescu  had watched his wife without uttering a single word, then stood up slowly from his chair and went out of the house. For the first time in a long time, he urgently felt the need to smoke a cigarette, but as he had quit smoking before it became habit, he made do by merely breathing deep the cool air of evening. Walking quietly, he headed for the fence. He nodded at his  neighbour who stood by the front gate, as if waiting to start a conversation with someone, then  headed backwards to the other side of the yard, where a barn was under construction, filled with memories, but almost redundant for the last years since mandatory agricultural taxes were imposed. Incidentally, he glanced at the barren place nearby where a long time ago there was Fănel Trifu’s old house, an orphan boy who overnight  had sold his small fortune and was lost trace of somewhere in Bucharest. In his turn, the new owner hurried himself to destroy the decrepit house, but did not hurry to build a new one for reasons known only to himself.

He stopped near the massive, gnarled trunk of an old mulberry tree, which was there forty years ago when he had gotten married and come as a young teacher in Vărăşti, Elvira’s native village. Stelian Teodorescu leaned one hand against the barrier fence and looked faraway to the barren place — empty and sad as a graveyard and over which, once evening came, the bats had begun to fly freely. The unexpected trouble which ended the summer and the quiet period of the last five to six years, time in which he had gotten used to his retired life,  saddened him as much as  got him worried. He had thought many times of the inconveniences he might have had with the “comrades” who ruled the country and brought in their political regime riding on Soviet tanks, but had not really imagined that his trouble would be caused by the very patches of land scattered in four villages —  in the Argeş and Sabar river meadow — that all in one place meant not even a quarter of real estate. For decades these places had been given to work “in part” and never had the people who worked them shown any complaint about anything; quite the contrary, year after year they were the ones who had asked to be allowed to work those lands, a sign that they were earning money. Moreover, he had been very indulgent when, on the more distant lots, the wheat and maize crops had arrived to Vărăşti in a smaller quantity than had been previously arranged through agreement or contracts.  And now, those who unexpectedly hit him, were pleading for these very lands from which those men who willingly offered their “manpower” had gained plenty of benefits, and who had no reason to complain that things did not go right. The truth was that until then, he himself, Stelian Teodorescu, had felt somewhat sheltered, as he had never taken the side of any of the governing parties in the ’20s or ’30s, nor was he the man of Carol the Second or Antonescu, never minding about anything but his own job for the state’s benefit.

Distressed and wracking his mind trying to think if who was to blame so that he could better understand what was about to happen to him, he was startled by a nearby noise. Moving from the fence, he turned around and cast his eyes over Aphsint, his dog, who had lain in the grass at his feet and stared at him with his moist eyes, as if it understood what tormented his soul and wanted to do something to help him, if it could. His large head with his long black ears and nose gave him a solemn and respectable look of a shepherd dog devoted to his master.

“Did you come to see if I use my hands to lean on this fence?” the man said to him, forgetting for a moment that he had to be careful of what he said even in his own house. Then he immediately began to cough hard and explore the surroundings, but no one seemed to be nearby, to hear his unwise words.  ”Go under the shed, Absinth!” he added in a hurry, intentionally raising his voice and saying its name low-voiced. From behind the quinces and the plums, which grew on the limed, tinkered grooves of the neighbour’s fence, he heard a short bark, followed by an oath. Then a relative silence covered the whole place, and Absinth  left with his head down to sprawled under the barn’s roof with his head on his feet.

About ten years ago, in spring, one of the people who worked their land had brought to them a young shepherd dog, with black hard palate and cut tail. Elvira, with her endless birthday grace, together with her son Virgil, had decided to call him Stalin, to their friends’ and neighbours’ amusement. In the village alleys, then, marched the well-armed Wermacht’s troops, while the war in the East was about to begin so that the name of the  Bolshevik dictator in the Kremlin seemed proper for  a dog in Romania. Even some of Virgil’s friends, who had whelps at their homes, finding this gesture appropriate and spiritual, had followed his example in their turn. Stalin’s name became in this way to have a double meaning: dog, literally and figuratively. However, several years later, when the frightening roar of the Soviet tanks was heard on the streets of Romanian capital, what seemed to be appropriate and spiritually suddenly became inappropriate and stupid, and many of the quadrupeds Stalins were taken and slaughtered in the bottom courts. Meanwhile, on the road that until recently resonated with sound of German boots, were walking the Ivans who loved vodka and Kalashnikov. When it did not stink, the release could happen to break your eardrums or to make your skull feel like it had been smashed. As far as he was concerned, Virgil had spared the life of the poor quadruped, calling him by his new name, Absinth. The new name had been adopted quickly and intelligently by the dog, as he hadn’t grown so old that he couldn’t adapt to the times in a rapid and hallucinatory movement. Only the neighbours and close acquaintances used to snigger when they heard the Teodorescu family calling the dog by his new name. And the truth was that its new name was a perfect disguise of the old one, now inappropriate and dangerous.

When he returned home, Stelian found his wife asleep besides the lit lamp with the medicine bottle on the night table, and a small Bible, which for the last couple of years she read from before bedtime. He looked at her old face, tired of worries. The woman had trouble breathing, and in her dream called on their small daughter Cristiana, who died in Bucharest after the bombing from 4^th April 1944.

ROMANIAN ORIGINAL

ÎNLĂNŢUIT DE LEGE

Într-o zi însorită de la începutul toamnei anului 1950, când toată România aştepta cu sufletul la gură venirea americanilor, iar zilele regimului Groza-Dej păreau mai numărate decât oricând, lui Stelian Teodorescu, fost inspector în Institutul Cooperaţiei, retras din activitate înainte de sfârşitul războiului şi stabilit definitiv la ţară, îi parveni pe neaşteptate o scrisoare de la Bucureşti, prin care i se aducea la cunoştinţă că, întrucât era posesorul a zece hectare de pământ, pe care le lucra cu „braţe salariate”, ministerul zis al muncii şi al prevederilor sociale, prin intermediul unei comisii special constituite, luase decizia de a-i anula dreptul la pensie.

După ce împăturise la loc documentul, palid la faţă, Stelian Teodorescu îşi privise soţia fără să spună nimic, apoi se ridicase încet de pe scaun şi ieşise afară din casă. Pentru prima dată după multă vreme simţea imperios nevoia de a pufăi dintr-o ţigară, dar cum se lăsase definitiv  de fumat înainte de a deveni un fumător inveterat, se mulţumi să tragă adânc în piept aerul răcoros al serii. Cu paşi lipsiţi de grabă se îndreptă spre gardul de la drum. Răspunse cu o înclinare din cap la salutul unui vecin, care stătea în faţa porţii aşteptând parcă să înceapă o conversaţie cu cineva, apoi o apucă înapoi spre partea din dos a curţii, unde se înălţa construcţia solidă a unui pătul, plin pe vremuri, dar devenit aproape de prisos în ultimii ani, de când fuseseră instituite cotele agricole obligatorii. În treacăt, privirile îi căzură pe locul viran de alături, unde până de curând se înălţase casa bătrânească a lui Fănel Trifu, un flăcău tomnatic fără părinţi, care peste noapte îşi vânduse bruma de avut şi îşi făcuse pierdute urmele pe undeva prin Bucureşti. La rându-i, noul proprietar se grăbise să dărâme ruina de casă, dar nu se arăta deloc grăbit să construiască alta, din motive numai de el ştiute.

Oprindu-se lângă trunchiul zgrunţuros şi masiv al unui dud bătrân – care era deja mare şi în urmă cu patruzeci de ani, când se însurase şi venise, ca tânăr învăţător, în Vărăşti, satul natal al Elvirei – , Stelian Teodorescu se sprijini cu o mână de gardul despărţitor şi rămase cu privirea pierdută spre locul viran de alături – pustiu şi trist ca un cimitir – peste care, o dată cu umbrele serii, începuseră să zboare în voie liliecii. Neprevăzutul necaz cu care se sfârşea vara şi perioada oarecum mai liniştită a ultimilor cinci-şase ani, timp în care avusese răgazul de a se deprinde cu noua viaţă de pensionar, îl întrista tot atât de mult pe cât îl îngrijora. De câte ori se gândise la neplăcerile pe care le-ar fi putut avea cu „tovarăşii” care veniseră la cârma ţării şi cu regimul lor politic adus pe tancurile sovietice nu-şi imaginase în mod serios că ele s-ar fi putut să-i fie pricinuite tocmai de acele petice de pământ risipite prin vreo patru sate – în lunca Argeşului şi a Sabarului – care toate la un loc nu însemnau nici măcar cât un sfert dintr-o adevărată moşie. De zeci de ani aceste locuri fuseseră date la lucru „în parte” şi niciodată oamenii care le munciseră nu se arătaseră nemulţumiţi de ceva, chiar dimpotrivă, an după an ei fuseseră cei care ceruseră să li se dea să lucreze pe mai departe acele pământuri, semn că socoteala le convenea. Mai mult, el închisese ochii cu îngăduinţă atunci când de pe loturile mai îndepărtate recoltele de grâu şi de porumb ajunseseră la Vărăşti mai mici decât ceea ce era stabilit prin învoială ori prin contracte. Şi iată că cei care îl loveau acum pe neaşteptate invocau în mod justiţiar tocmai aceste pământuri, de pe urma cărora nişte oameni care îşi ofereau benevol „braţele salariate”, avuseseră destule foloase de tras şi nici un motiv de a se plânge că lucrurile n-ar fi mers aşa cum trebuie. Adevărul era că până atunci el, Stelian Teodorescu, se simţise oarecum la adăpost, căci nu făcuse niciodată politică militantă în serviciul vreunui partid de guvernământ din anii ’20 ori ’30 şi nici nu fusese omul lui Carol al II-lea ori al lui Antonescu, văzându-şi în mod onest de slujba lui la stat şi atât.

Pe când se frământa astfel, scormonindu-şi mintea, ca să-şi descopere vreo vină, care să justifice ceea ce era pe cale să i se întâmple, tresări auzind un zgomot prin preajmă. Clintindu-se din locul de lângă gard, întoarse capul şi dădu cu ochii de câinele Pelin, care se întinsese la picioarele lui în iarbă şi îl fixa cu ochii săi umezi, de parcă ar fi înţeles ce griji îl apăsau pe suflet şi ar fi vrut să-i fie cu ceva de folos, de s-ar fi putut. Capul mare cu urechi ciulite şi bot negru prelung îi dădeau o înfăţişare solemnă şi respectabilă de câine ciobănesc devotat stăpânului.

-  Şi tu ai venit să vezi dacă nu mă folosesc de braţe salariate, ca să mă sprijin de gardul ăsta, mă, Stalin?  îi vorbi omul, uitând pentru câteva clipe că trebuia să fie  atent la ce spune, chiar şi la el acasă. Apoi imediat el începu să tuşească tare şi să cerceteze împrejurimile, dar nimeni nu părea să se afle prin apropiere, ca să-i audă vorbele nu tocmai prudente. Marş sub şopron, Pelin! se grăbi să adauge, ridicând intenţionat glasul şi rostind apăsat numele Pelin. Din dosul gutuilor şi al prunilor, care creşteau pe lângă ulucile spoite cu var ale vecinului din cealaltă parte a locului viran, răsună un hămăit scurt, urmat de o sudalmă a cuiva, apoi se aşternu o linişte relativă, iar Pelin se retrase ascultător sub acoperişul pătulului, unde rămase tolănit şi cu capul pe labe.

Cu vreo zece ani mai înainte, când unul din oamenii care le lucrau pământul le adusese, într-o primăvară, un pui de câine ciobănesc, cu cerul gurii negru şi cu coada retezată, Elvira, cu nesfârşitul ei har onomastic, împreună cu fiul său Virgil, se grăbiseră să-l boteze Stalin, spre amuzamentul cunoscuţilor şi al vecinilor. Pe uliţele comunei mărşăluiau pe atunci trupele bine înarmate ale Wermacht-ului, în vreme ce războiul din Răsărit stătea să înceapă, astfel că numele dictatorului bolşevic de la Kremlin părea tocmai bun să fie purtat de un câine din România. Ba chiar câţiva dintre prietenii lui Virgil, care aveau pe acasă căţelandri, găsind oportun şi spiritual gestul, se grăbiseră la rândul lor să îi urmeze exemplul. Numele Stalin ajunsese astfel, pentru o vreme, să aibă o semnificaţie dublă: câine, la propriu şi la figurat. Câţiva ani mai târziu însă, când tancurile sovietice aveau să-şi facă auzit huruitul de şenile puţin încurajator pe străzile capitalei României, ceea ce păruse oportun şi spiritual devenise deodată inoportun şi stupid şi mulţi dintre stalinii patrupezi ai satului fuseseră în grabă luaţi şi căsăpiţi prin fundul curţilor. În acest timp, pe şoseaua pe care răsunaseră până nu de mult cizmele nemţeşti se scurgeau ivanii cei iubitori de vodcă şi de Kalaşnikov. Când nu duhnea, eliberarea se putea întâmpla să-şi spargă timpanele sau să-ţi găurească scăfârlia. În ceea ce-l privea, Virgil cruţase viaţa bietului patruped, rebotezându-l în grabă cu inocentul nume de Pelin. Noul nume fusese adoptat rapid şi cu inteligenţă de către câine, care nu apucase să îmbătrânească atât de mult, încât  să nu se mai poartă adapta vremurilor în rapidă şi halucinantă schimbare. Doar vecinii şi cunoştinţele apropiate ori rudele mai zâmbeau cu subînţeles, atunci când îi auzeau pe cei din familia Teodorescu strigându-şi câinele pe noul său nume. Şi adevărul era că acel nou nume îl disimula perfect pe cel vechi, devenit inoportun şi primejdios.

Când reveni în casă, Stelian îşi găsi soţia adormită, cu lampa aprinsă alături pe masă şi cu flaconul de medicamente  pe noptieră, alături de o Biblie mică, din care îşi făcuse în ultimii ani obiceiul să citească înainte de culcare. Preţ de câteva clipe, el îi privi chipul obosit de bătrâneţe şi de griji. Femeia respira anevoios şi articula prin somn numele Cristianei, fata lor mai mică, moartă la Bucureşti, în urma  bombardamentului de la 4 aprilie 1944.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Dragomirescu (born in Bucharest, in 1952) is a Romanian writer, literary criticist and journalist. Member of Writers’ Union of Romania (Uniunea Scriitorilor din România, USR). Published books: The Last Minstrel and Other Stories / Cel din urmă rapsod şi alte povestiri (2002); novels: Nothing New Behind the Iron Curtain / Nimic nou după Cortina de Fier (2003), Chronicle of a Lost World /Cronica Teodoreştilor (2008) etc. Published articles and short stories in cultural and literary magazines from Romania and some other countries. Nomination to annual literary prizes of USR Iaşi in 2009 for the novel Chronicle of a Lost World. Editor-in-chief of “Contemporary Literary Horizon”, a multicultural magazine, published in Romanian, English and Spanish languages.

Read Dragomiresscu’s review of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Player, in Books/Reviews .

_____________________________

thePHOTOGRAPHYspot

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………………..

ALBERT DORSA, Photographer

Albert Dorsa

Albert Dorsa, a 30-year resident of St. Croix, has never strayed far from the arts.  A lifetime photographer and designer, he’s been involved in projects ranging from publishing a magazine to patenting an invention to recently hanging a camera from a very large kite to make aerial photographs with a radio-controlled device, which he built.  Currently, Al is using a technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography that blends multiple exposures of the same scene to recover detail lost in shadows or highlights. Usually three or more exposures ranging from underexposed to overexposed are combined using special software to create the effects you see in his imagery.

These photographs appeared in the 24th Annual Caribbean Fine Art Exhibit Feb 18-21 at the Good Hope School in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. All were processed with HDR software to extract detail from shadows and highlights that would be impossible to capture in a single exposure.

For more information, including how to purchase prints, see: aldorsa.com

For thePHOTOGRAPHYspot submissions, please see guidelines at ragazine.cc/submissions/

Cactus

I’m doing my best to be nice this evening because I forgot that Tuesday I was supposed to watch Becky so my wife could go shopping for a dress for her second sister’s wedding, so I worked late, as the official story goes (unofficial story: I was online for an hour and fifteen minutes looking at GPS systems), which meant my wife either had to take Becky with her, into dressing rooms and all that, or cancel her plans, which is what she ended up doing, and man, she spat some serious fire when I came in sighing from my rough 9 to 5, now 7:30, until I promised I’d make it up to her by finding a sitter for Becky (not good enough) and taking part of Thursday off so we could go dress shopping for beluga’s wedding.

Sorry. I’m trying. I’m trying. But Lana’s trying to make me suffer. And, at this point, I’m bent on making her suffer by not suffering. This is mall number three, store someone help me. She steps out of the dressing room in a — how to put it nicely— in a dress that —

You look like a freaking cactus, I say.

Yeah, and what do you want me to wear? A quilt? You haven’t done one thing to support me all day.

I took half a day off.

But it’s like you’re not even here.

I gave you my opinion on the dress. What do you want?

Saying your wife, your wife, looks like a cactus is not an opinion, Randall.

The dress looks like a cactus, I say. You expect me to dance with you in that? Bad enough I have to dance with your whale sister.

The dress is strapless, floor length, with vertical ridges down the front from which pieces of plastic jut out like spikes. And it’s cinched tight in the middle so the top part of the dress looks puffy and the bottom part, well, poofy.

You said I look like a cactus.

The dress. You look like —

Lana rustles forward, picking up the skirt and wagging her shoulders. I look like what?

Like a fool. Then I add, In that dress. Then I add, Friggin’ cactus dress.

As Lana’s advancing to puncture me, the door of the adjacent booth opens and out spins a woman wearing a— wearing a dress that’s too small for her, that stretches uncomfortably over post pregnancy belly fat and that remains open at the back, showing the line of her bra strap, although she is trying to hold the dress closed.

When Lana sees my eyes focus behind her, she whooshes around, expecting perhaps a leggy Scandinavian type, and not this chunky, lonely thing. The woman has no one to help her with the zipper. How does she look? No one to tell her.

About the author:

Ian Williams is the author of Not Anyone’s Anything (stories, Freehand, 2011) and You Know Who You Are (poems, Wolsak and Wynn, 2010).  He completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an English professor at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He divides his time between Ontario and Massachusetts.

The Songs of Maldoror translated by R J Dent

—-

An extract from The Songs of Maldoror

by Le Comte de Lautréamont

Translated by R J Dent and illustrated by Salvador Dalí

VII

The corsair with the golden hair has received Mervyn’s reply. Across that
singular page he follows the trace of the intellectual unease of its writer
abandoned to the weak powers of his own suggestion. He would have done
better to consult his parents, before responding to the offer of an unknown
friendship. No benefit will result from his being involved as the main actor in
this equivocal intrigue. But after all, that’s how he wanted it. At the specified
hour, Mervyn, from the door of his house, goes straight ahead, following the
Boulevard Sebastopol to the Saint-Michel fountain. He takes the Quai des
Grands-Augustins and crosses the Quai Conti; as he walks along the Quai
Malaquais, he sees, walking parallel to him and moving in the same direction
along the Quai du Louvre, an individual carrying a sack under his arm who
appears to be scrutinising him closely. The morning mists have lifted. The two
passers-by simultaneously arrive on the Pont du Carrousel from opposite
sides. Although they have never seen each other, they recognise each other!
Truly it was touching to see these two beings, separated by age, bring their
souls close through an immensity of feelings. At least that would have been
the view of those who paused in front of the spectacle, which many – even
the mathematically-minded – would have found moving. Mervyn, his face
covered in tears, was thinking to meet, at the entrance of a life, so to speak,
a precious support in future adversities. Be assured that Maldoror said
nothing. This is what he did: he unfolded the sack he was carrying, opened
its mouth wide, and seizing the youth by his head, pushed his whole body in
the rough sacking envelope. With his handkerchief, he tied up the end that
had served as way of introduction. As Mervyn was uttering loud and piercing
cries, he picked up the sack like a bag of linen and smashed it repeatedly
against the parapet of the bridge. Then the victim, aware that his bones were
breaking, became silent. A unique scene no novelist will ever find again! A
butcher was passing, sitting on the meat in his cart. An individual runs up to
him, urging him to stop, and says: “There’s a dog in this sack; it has rabies:
Put it down as quickly as you can.” The butcher is happy to oblige. As the
individual walks away, he sees a young girl in rags holding out her hand.
What heights of audacity and impiety can he reach? He gives her alms! Tell
me if you want me to escort you through the door of a distant
slaughterhouse, a few hours later. The butcher has returned and as he
throws his burden onto the ground, he has said to his friends: “Let’s hurry up
and kill this rabid dog.” There are four of them, and each picks up the
hammer he normally uses. And yet they are hesitant because the sack is
moving violently. “What’s this emotion that grips me?” one of them shouted,
slowly lowering his arm. “This dog is whimpering with pain like a child,” said
another, “you’d think it knows the fate that awaits it.” “They usually do,” said
the third, “even when they are not sick, as in this case; their master only has
to stay away from home for a few days and they start howling in a way that’s
horrible to hear.” “Stop!… stop!…” the fourth shouted, before all their arms
were raised in unison to resolutely strike the sack. “Stop, I tell you, there’s a
fact here that has escaped us. Who told you that this cloth sack contains a
dog? I want to make sure.” Then, despite the taunts of his companions, he
untied the bundle, and pulled out one after the other the limbs of Mervyn! He
was almost suffocated by the discomfort of this position. He fainted when he
saw the light again. After a few moments he gave undoubted signs of life. His
rescuer said: “In future, learn to use caution in all of your dealings. You
almost found out for yourself that it is pointless practising non-observance of
this law.” The butchers fled. Mervyn, heavy-hearted and full of grim
forebodings, returns home and locks himself in his room. Do I need to dwell
on this stanza? Ah, who would not deplore the events consummated above!
Let us wait until the end for an even harsher judgement. The dénouement is
going to be precipitated, and in these kinds of stories, where a passion of
whatever kind is given, and fears no obstacle as it makes its way, there is no
reason for diluting in a godet the shellac of four hundred banal pages. What
can be said in half a dozen stanzas must be said, and then, silence.

VIII

To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to
dissect nonsense and powerfully brutalize the reader’s intelligence with
renewed doses, so as to paralyse his faculties for the rest of his life, by the
infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with the use of a good
mesmerizing fluid, ingeniously make him somnambulistically unable to move,
forcing him to close his eyes against his nature by the fixity of your own
stare. I mean – and I to say this not to make myself better understand, but
only to develop my thoughts that simultaneously interest and irritate you by
their most penetrating harmony – that I do not think it is necessary, to
achieve the proposed goal, to invent a poetry entirely outside the usual laws
of nature, the pernicious breath of which seems to unsettle even absolute
truths, but to bring about a similar result (consistent, moreover, with the rules
of aesthetics, if one thinks about it) is not as easy as one imagines: that is
what I wanted to say. That is why I will make every effort to do so! If death
arrests the fantastic thinness of my two long arms on my shoulders, used in
the lugubrious crushing of my literary gypsum, I at least want the reader, in
mourning, to be able to say: “One must give him his due. He has cretinised
me considerably. What would he not have done if he’d lived longer? He was
the best professor of hypnotism that I ever knew!” These few touching words
will be carved on the marble of my tombstone, and my ancestors’ spirits will
be content! – I continue! Once there was a fish’s tail which moved about at
the bottom of a hole, next to a down-at-heel boot. It would not be natural to
wonder: “Where is the fish? I only see the tail moving.” Precisely – for one
would implicitly acknowledge not having seen the fish, because in truth it was
not really there. The rain had left a few drops of water in the bottom of this
funnel dug in the sand. As for the down-at-heel boot, some have since
thought it was left there after being voluntary abandoned. The great crab, by
divine power, was reborn from its resolved atoms. He pulled the fish’s tail
from the well and he promised to re-unite it with its lost body, if it announced
to the Creator his representative’s powerlessness to dominate the raging
waves of the Maldororean Sea. He lent it two albatross wings, and the fish’s
tail took off. But it flew up to the renegade’s residence, to tell him what was
happening and to betray the great crab. But the latter guessed the spy’s plan,
and before the third day had reached its end, it pierced the fish’s tail with a
poisoned arrow. The spy’s gullet uttered a feeble sigh and gave up its last
breath before hitting the ground. Then an ancient beam, on the highest point
of a castle, drew itself to its full height, then sprang back on itself and cried
loudly for vengeance. But the Almighty, changed into a rhinoceros, told him
that this death was deserved. The beam calmed down and went back to its
place at the heart of the manor and resumed its horizontal position, and
recalled the startled spiders so that they could continue, as in the past, to
spin their webs in its corners. The man with lips of sulphur learned of his
ally’s weakness, which is why he commanded the crowned madman to burn
the beam and reduce it to ashes. Aghone executed this harsh order. “Since,
according to you, the time is ripe,” he exclaimed, “I have gone and recovered
the ring that I had buried under the stone, and I’ve attached it to the end of
the rope. Here is the bundle.” And he presented a thick coiled rope, sixty
metres long. His master asked him what the fourteen daggers were doing. He
said they remained faithful and stood ready for any event, if necessary. The
criminal nodded his head in satisfaction. He showed surprise, and even
concern when Aghone said that he had seen a cock split a candelabra in two
with its beak, look closely at each part in turn, and exclaim as it frantically
beat its wings: “It is not as far as one thinks from the Rue de la Paix to the
Place de Panthéon. Soon you will see lamentable proof of this!” The great
crab, mounted on a fiery horse, rode at full speed towards the reef – witness
of the flinging of the stick by a tattooed arm; the reef which had provided
sanctuary on the first day of his descent to earth. A caravan of pilgrims was
on its way to visit this place, thenceforth consecrated by an august death. He
hoped to reach it, to urgently ask for help against the plot that was being
prepared, of which he had knowledge. You will see a few lines further on with
the help of my icy silence that he did not arrive in time to tell them what a
ragman, hidden behind the scaffolding adjoining a house under construction
had recounted to them: namely, on the day the Carrousel bridge was still
covered with the wet dew of the night, he saw with horror the horizon of his
thought confusedly expand in concentric circles at the morning spectacle of
an icosahedric sack rhythmically pounded against the limestone parapet!
Before he elicits their compassion with the memory of this episode, they will
do well to destroy the seed of hope within themselves... To shake yourself
free of your laziness, put the resources of good will to use, walk beside me
and do not lose sight of that madman, his head crowned with a chamber-pot,
and with a stick in his hand which he uses to drive along in front of him one
that you would have difficulty recognizing, unless I took care to warn you and
recall to your ear that the word is pronounced Mervyn. How he has changed!
With his hands tied behind his back he walks straight ahead as if he were
going to the scaffold, and yet he is guilty of no crime. They have arrived at
the circular enclosure of the Place Vendôme. On the entablature of the
massive column leaning against the square balustrade more than fifty meters
above the ground, a man has uncoiled and thrown a rope which falls to the
ground a few paces from Aghone. With practice, one can do a thing quickly,
but I can say that the latter did not take very long to tie Mervyn’s feet to the |
end of the rope. The rhinoceros had learned of what was going to happen.
Covered with sweat, it appeared breathing heavily at the corner of the Rue
Castiglione. It did not even have the satisfaction of joining the fight. The
individual, who was examining the area from the top of the column, loaded
his revolver, took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. The commodore, who
had been begging in the streets since the day when what he believed to be
his son’s madness had begun, and his mother, who was known as the
daughter of snow because of her extreme pallor, pushed forward and used
their chests to protect the rhinoceros. Useless care. The bullet punched
through its hide like a drill; one would have thought, with all the appearance
of logic, that death would inevitably occur. But we knew that this pachyderm
had been imbued with the substance of the Lord. He withdrew, grieving. If it
were not fully proven that he was often too good to one of his creatures, I
would pity the man on the column! The latter, with a flick of the wrist, pulled
back towards him the rope, which was now weighted as described. Put out of
the perpendicular, its oscillations swing Mervyn, head down. His hands
suddenly snatch up a long garland of immortelles that join the two
consecutive corners of the base, against which he beats his forehead. He
carries into the air with him that which was not a fixed point. After piling at
his feet a large part of the rope in the shape of superposed ellipses, so that
Mervyn remains suspended halfway up the bronze obelisk, the escaped
convict with his right hand moves the youth into an accelerated movement of
uniform rotation, in a plane parallel to the column’s axis, and with his left
hand gathers up the winding coils of rope which lie at his feet. The sling
whistles through space, the body of Mervyn follows it everywhere, always
kept away from the centre by centrifugal force, always keeping a mobile and
equidistant position in an aerial circumference independent of matter. The
civilized savage gradually lets out the rope to the far end, which he holds with
a firm metacarpal bone, which has a strong but inaccurate resemblance to a
steel bar. He starts to run around the balustrade, holding on to the rail with
one hand. This manoeuvre has the effect of changing the original plane of the
rope’s revolution, and increases its already considerable tensile force.
Thereafter it turns majestically on a horizontal plane, after having passed
successively and imperceptibly through several oblique planes. The right
angle formed by the column and the vegetal string has equal sides! The
renegade’s arm and the murderous instrument merge in linear unity, like the
atomistic elements of a ray of light penetrating a dark room. The theorems of
mechanics allow me to speak thus; alas! we know that one force added to
another force generates a resultant consisting of the sum of the two original
forces! Who is to say that the linear rope would not already have broken but
for the strength of the athlete, but for good quality of the hemp? The corsair
with the golden hair at the same time suddenly arrests his own momentum by
opening his hand and letting go of the rope. The recoil of this operation,
totally opposite to the previous ones, causes the balustrade’s joints to creak.
Mervyn, followed by the rope, is like a comet trailing behind it its blazing tail.
The iron ring of the running knot, gleaming in the sunlight, itself helps to
complete the illusion. In the course of his parabola, the condemned youth
cleaves the atmosphere right to the left bank, passes it by virtue of the
driving force which I suppose to be infinite, and his body hits the dome of the
Pantheon, while the rope partly coils around the upper wall of the immense
cupola. On its spherical and convex surface, which resembles an orange only
in shape, one can at any hour of the day see a dried skeleton hanging there.
When the wind moves it, they say that the students of the Latin Quarter,
fearing a similar fate, say a short prayer: these are insignificant rumours
which one is not obliged to believe, and are only fit for frightening little
children. It holds in its clenched hands a sort of large ribbon of old yellow
flowers. The distance must be taken into account, and nobody, despite the
evidence of good eyesight, can categorically state that they really are those
immortelles I have spoken of, and which were snatched from a grandiose
pedestal during a one-sided struggle that took place near the Nouvel Opera.
It is nevertheless true that the hangings draped in the shape of a crescent
moon do not receive any further expression of their definitive symmetry from
a quaternary number: go and see for yourself if you do not believe me.

Salvador Dali, Signed Portrait, Valerie Brown photo, 1976

The French, which follows:

VII

Le corsaire aux cheveux d’or, a recu la reponse de Mervyn. Il suit dans

 cette page singuliere la trace des troubles intellectuels de celui qui

l’ecrivit, abandonne aux faibles forces de sa propres suggestion.

Celui-ci aurait beaucoup mieux fait de consulter ses parents, avant de

repondre a l’amitie de l’inconnu. Aucun benefice ne resultera pour lui

de se meler, comme principal acteur, a cette equivoque intrigue. Mais,

enfin, il l’a voulu. A l’heure indiquee, Mervyn, de la porte de sa

maison, est alle droit devant lui, en suivant le boulevard Sebastopol,

jusqu’a la fontaine Saint-Michel. Il prend le quai des Grands-Augustins

et traverse le quai Conti; au moment ou il passe sur le quai Malaquais,

il voit marcher sur le quai du Louvre, parallelement a sa propre

direction, un individu, porteur d’un sac sous le bras, et qui parait

l’examiner avec attention. Les vapeurs du matin se sont dissipees.

Les deux passants debouchent en meme temps de chaque cote du pont du

Carrousel. Quoiqu’ils ne se fussent jamais vus, ils se reconnurent!

Vrai, c’etait touchant de voir ces deux etres, separes par l’age,

rapprocher leurs ames par la grandeur des sentiments. Du moins, c’eut

ete l’opinion de ceux qui se seraient arretes devant ce spectacle, que

plus d’un, meme avec un esprit mathematique, aurait trouve emouvant.

Mervyn, le visage en pleurs, reflechissait qu’il rencontrait, pour ainsi

dire a l’entree de la vie, un soutien precieux dans les futures

adversites. Soyez persuade que l’autre ne disait rien. Voici ce qu’il

fit: il deplia le sac qu’il portait, degagea l’ouverture, et, saisissant

l’adolescent par la tete, il fit passer le corps entier dans l’enveloppe

de toile. Il noua, avec son mouchoir, l’extremite qui servait

d’introduction. Comme Mervyn poussait des cris aigus, il enleva le sac,

ainsi qu’un paquet de linges, et en frappa, a plusieurs reprises, le

parapet du pont. Alors, le patient, s’etant apercu du craquement de ses

os, se tut. Scene unique, qu’aucun romancier ne retrouvera! Un boucher

passait, assis sur la viande de sa charrette. Un individu court a lui,

l’engage a s’arreter, et lui dit: “Voici un chien, enferme dans ce sac;

il a la gale: abattez-le au plus vite.” L’interpelle se montre

complaisant. L’interrupteur, en s’eloignant, apercoit une jeune fille en

haillons qui lui tend la main. Jusqu’ou va donc le comble de l’audace et

de l’impiete? Il lui donne l’aumone! Dites-moi si vous voulez que je

vous introduise, quelques heures plus tard, a la porte d’un abattoir

recule. Le boucher est revenu, et a dit a ses camarades, en jetant a

terre un fardeau: “Depechons-nous de tuer ce chien galeux.” Ils sont

quatre, et chacun saisit le marteau accoutume. Et, cependant, ils

hesitaient, parce que le sac remuait avec force.” Quelle emotion

s’empare de moi?” cria l’un d’eux en abaissant lentement son bras.

“Ce chien pousse, comme un enfant, des gemissements de douleur, dit

un autre; on dirait qu’il comprend le sort qui l’attend.” “C’est leur

habitude, repondit un troisieme; meme quand il ne sont pas malades,

comme c’est le cas ici, il suffit que leur maitre reste quelques jours

absent du logis, pour qu’ils se mettent a faire entendre des hurlements

qui, veritablement, sont penibles a supporter.” “Arretez!… arretez!…

cria le quatrieme, avant que tous les bras se fussent leves en cadence

pour frapper resolument, cette fois, sur le sac. Arretez, vous dis-je;

il y a ici un fait qui nous echappe. Qui vous dit que cette toile

renferme un chien? Je veux m’en assurer.” Alors, malgre les railleries

de ses compagnons, il denoua le paquet et en retira l’un apres l’autre

les membres de Mervyn! Il etait presque etouffe par la gene de cette

position. Il s’evanouit en revoyant la lumiere. Quelques moments apres,

il donna des signes indubitables d’existence. Le sauveur dit: “Apprenez,

une autre fois, a mettre de la prudence jusque dans votre metier. Vous

avez failli remarquer, par vous-memes, qu’il ne sert de rien de

pratiquer l’inobservance de cette loi.” Les bouchers s’enfuirent.

Mervyn, le coeur serre et plein de pressentiments funestes, rentre chez

soi et s’enferme dans sa chambre. Ai-je besoin d’insister sur cette

strophe? Eh! qui n’en deplorera les evenements consommes! Attendons la

fin pour porter un jugement encore plus severe. Le denoument va se

precipiter; et, dans ces sortes de recits, ou une passion, de quelque

genre qu’elle soit, etant donnee, celle-ci ne craint aucun obstacle pour

se frayer un passage, il n’y a pas lieu de delayer dans un godet la

gomme laque de quatre cents pages banales. Ce qui peut etre dit dans une

demi-douzaine de strophes, il faut le dire, et puis se taire.

VIII

Pour construire mecaniquement la cervelle d’un conte somnifere, il ne

suffit pas de dissequer des betises et abrutir puissamment a doses

renouvelees l’intelligence du lecteur, de maniere a rendre ses facultes

paralytiques pour le reste de sa vie, par la loi infaillible de la

fatigue; il faut, en outre, avec du bon fluide magnetique, le mettre

ingenieusement dans l’impossibilite somnambulique de se mouvoir, en le

forcant a obscurcir ses yeux contre son naturel par la fixite des

votres. Je veux dire, afin de ne pas me faire mieux comprendre, mais

seulement pour developper ma pensee qui interesse et agace en meme temps

par une harmonie des plus penetrantes, que je ne crois pas qu’il soit

necessaire, pour arriver au but que l’on se propose, d’inventer une

poesie tout a fait en dehors de la marche ordinaire de la nature, et

dont le souffle pernicieux semble bouleverser meme les verites absolues;

mais, amener un pareil resultat (conforme, du reste, aux regles de

l’esthetique, si l’on y reflechit bien), cela n’est pas aussi facile

qu’on le pense: voila ce que je voulais dire. C’est pourquoi je ferai

tous mes efforts pour y parvenir! Si la mort arrete la maigreur

fantastique des deux bras longs de mes epaules, employes a l’ecrasement

lugubre de mon gypse litteraire, je veux au moins que le lecteur en

deuil puisse se dire: “Il faut lui rendre justice. Il m’a beaucoup

cretinise. Que n’aurait-t-il pas fait, s’il eut pu vivre davantage!

c’est le meilleur professeur d’hypnotisme que je connaisse!” On gravera

ces quelques mots touchants sur le marbre de ma tombe, et mes manes

seront satisfaits!–Je continue! Il y avait une queue de poisson qui

remuait au fond d’un trou, a cote d’une botte eculee. Il n’etait pas

naturel de se demander: “Ou est le poisson? Je ne vois que la queue qui

remue.” Car, puisque, precisement, on avouait implicitement ne pas

apercevoir le poisson, c’est qu’en realite il n’y etait pas. La pluie

avait laisse quelques gouttes d’eau au fond de cet entonnoir, creuse

dans le sable. Quant a la botte eculee, quelques-uns ont pense depuis

qu’elle provenait de quelque abandon volontaire. Le crabe tourteau, par

la puissance divine, devait renaitre de ses atomes resolus. Il tira du

puits la queue de poisson et lui promit de la rattacher a son corps

perdu, si elle annoncait au Createur l’impuissance de son mandataire a

dominer les vagues en fureur de mer maldororienne. Il lui preta deux

ailes d’albatros, et la queue de poisson prit son essor. Mais elle

s’envola vers la demeure du renegat, pour lui raconter ce qui se passait

et trahir le crabe tourteau. Celui-ci devina le projet de l’espion, et,

avant que le troisieme jour fut parvenu a sa fin, il perca la queue du

poisson d’une fleche envenimee. Le gosier de l’espion poussa une faible

exclamation, qui rendit le dernier soupir avant de toucher la terre.

Alors, une poutre seculaire, placee sur le comble d’un chateau, se

releva de toute sa hauteur, en bondissant sur elle-meme, et demanda

vengeance a grands cris. Mais le Tout-Puissant, change en rhinoceros,

lui apprit que cette mort etait meritee. La poutre s’apaisa, alla se

placer au fond du manoir, reprit sa position horizontale, et rappela les

araignees effarouchees, afin qu’elles continuassent, comme par le passe,

a tisser leur toile a ses coins. L’homme aux levres de soufre apprit la

faiblesse de son alliee; c’est pourquoi, il commanda au fou couronne de

bruler la poutre et de la reduire en cendres. Aghone executa cet ordre

severe. “Puisque, d’apres vous, le moment est venu, s’ecria-t-il, j’ai

ete reprendre l’anneau que j’avais enterre sous la pierre, et je l’ai

attache a un des bouts du cable. Voici le paquet.” Et il presenta une

corde epaisse, enroulee sur elle-meme, de soixante metres de longueur.

Son maitre lui demanda ce que faisaient les quatorze poignards. Il

repondit qu’ils restaient fideles et se tenaient prets a tout evenement,

si c’etait necessaire. Le forcat inclina sa tete en signe de

satisfaction. Il montra de la surprise, et meme de l’inquietude, quand

Aghone ajouta qu’il avait vu un coq fendre avec son bec un candelabre en

deux, plonger tour a tour le regard dans chacune des parties, et

s’ecrier, en battant ses ailes d’un mouvement frenetique: “Il n’y a pas

si loin qu’on le pense depuis la rue de la Paix jusqu’a la place du

Pantheon. Bientot, on en verra la preuve lamentable!” Le crabe tourteau,

monte sur un cheval fougueux, courait a toute bride vers la direction de

l’ecueil, le temoin du lancement du baton par un bras tatoue, l’asile du

premier jour de sa descente sur la terre. Une caravane de pelerins etait

en marche pour visiter cet endroit, desormais consacre par une mort

auguste. Il esperait l’atteindre, pour lui demander des secours

pressants contre la trame qui se preparait, et dont il avait eu

connaissance. Vous verrez quelques lignes plus loin, a l’aide de mon

silence glacial, qu’il n’arriva pas a temps, pour leur raconter ce que

lui avait rapporte un chiffonnier, cache derriere l’echafaudage voisin

d’une maison en construction, le jour ou le pont du Carrousel, encore

empreint de l’humide rosee de la nuit, apercut avec horreur l’horizon de

sa pensee s’elargir confusement en cercles concentriques, a l’apparition

matinale du rythmyque petrissage d’un sac icosaedre, contre son parapet

calcaire! Avant qu’il stimule leur compassion, par le souvenir de cet

episode, ils feront bien de detruire en eux la semence de l’espoir …

Pour rompre votre paresse, mettez en usage les ressources d’une bonne

volonte, marchez a cote de moi et ne perdez pas de vue ce fou, la tete

surmontee d’un vase de nuit, qui pousse, devant lui, la main armee d’un

baton, celui que vous auriez de la peine a reconnaitre, si je ne prenais

soin de vous avertir, et de rappeler a votre oreille le mot qui se

prononce Mervyn. Comme il est change! Les mains liees derriere le dos,

il marche devant lui, comme s’il allait a l’echafaud, et, cependant, il

n’est coupable d’aucun forfait. Ils sont arrives dans l’enceinte

circulaire de la place Vendome. Sur l’entablement de la colonne massive,

appuye contre la balustrade carree, a plus de cinquante metres de

hauteur du sol, un homme a lance et deroule un cable, qui tombe jusqu’a

terre, a quelques pas d’Aghone. Avec de l’habitude, on fait vite une

chose; mais, je puis dire que celui-ci n’employa pas beaucoup de temps

pour attacher les pieds de Mervyn a l’extremite de la corde. Le

rhinoceros avait appris ce qui allait arriver. Couvert de sueur, il

apparut haletant, au coin de la rue Castiglione. Il n’eut meme pas la

satisfaction d’entreprendre le combat. L’individu, qui examinait les

alentours du haut de la colonne, arma son revolver, visa avec soin et

pressa la detente. Le commodore qui mendiait par les rues depuis le jour

ou avait commence ce qu’il croyait etre la folie de son fils et la mere,

qu’on avait appelee _la fille de neige_, a cause de son extreme paleur,

porterent en avant leur poitrine pour proteger le rhinoceros. Inutile

soin. La balle troua sa peau, comme une vrille; l’on aurait pu croire,

avec une apparence de logique, que la mort devait infailliblement

apparaitre. Mais nous savions que, dans ce pachyderme, s’etait

introduite la substance du Seigneur. Il se retira avec chagrin. S’il

n’etait pas bien prouve qu’il ne fut trop bon pour une de ses creatures,

je plaindrais l’homme de la colonne! Celui-ci, d’un coup sec de poignet,

ramene a soi la corde ainsi lestee. Placee hors de la normale, ses

oscillations balancent Mervyn, dont la tete regarde le bas. Il saisit

vivement, avec ses mains, une longue guirlande d’immortelles, qui reunit

deux angles consecutifs de la base, contre laquelle il cogne son front.

Il emporte avec lui, dans les airs, ce qui n’etait pas un point fixe.

Apres avoir amoncele a ses pieds, sous forme d’ellipses superposees, une

grande partie du cable, de maniere que Mervyn reste suspendu a moitie

hauteur de l’obelisque de bronze, le forcat evade fait prendre, de la

main droite, a l’adolescent, un mouvement accelere de rotation uniforme,

dans un plan parallele de l’axe de la colonne, et ramasse, de la main

gauche, les enroulements serpentins du cordage, qui gisent a ses pieds.

La fronde siffle dans l’espace; le corps de Mervyn la suit partout,

toujours eloigne du centre par la force centrifuge, toujours gardant sa

position mobile et equidistante, dans une circonference aerienne,

independante de la matiere. Le sauvage civilise lache peu a peu, jusqu’a

l’autre bout, qu’il retient avec un metacarpe ferme, ce qui ressemble a

tort a une barre d’acier. Il se met a courir autour de la balustrade, en

se tenant a la rampe par une main. Cette manoeuvre a pour effet de

changer le plan primitif de la revolution du cable, et d’augmenter sa

force de tension, deja si considerable. Dorenavant, il tourne

majestueusement dans un plan horizontal, apres avoir successivement

passe, par une marche insensible, a travers plusieurs plans obliques.

L’angle droit forme par la colonne et le fil vegetal a ses cotes egaux!

Le bras du renegat et l’instrument meurtrier sont confondus dans l’unite

lineaire, comme les elements atomistiques d’un rayon de lumiere

penetrant dans la chambre noire. Les theoremes de la mecanique me

permettent de parler ainsi; helas! on sait qu’une force, ajoutee a une

autre force, engendre une resultante composee des deux forces

primitives! Qui oserait pretendre que le cordage lineaire se serait deja

rompu, sans la vigueur de l’athlete, sans la bonne qualite du chanvre?

Le corsaire au cheveux d’or, brusquement et en meme temps, arrete sa

vitesse acquise, ouvre la main et lache le cable. Le contre-coup de

cette operation, si contraire aux precedentes, fait craquer la

balustrade dans ses joints. Mervyn, suivi de la corde, ressemble a une

comete trainant apres elle sa queue flamboyante. L’anneau de fer du

noeud coulant, miroitant aux rayons du soleil, engage a completer

soi-meme l’illusion. Dans le parcours de sa parabole, le damne a mort

fend l’atmosphere jusqu’a la rive gauche, la depasse en vertu de la

force d’impulsion que je suppose infinie, et son corps va frapper le

dome du Pantheon, tandis que la corde etreint, en partie, de ses replis,

la paroi superieure de l’immense coupole. C’est sur sa superficie

spherique et convexe, qui ne ressemble a une orange que pour la forme,

qu’on voit a toute heure du jour, un squelette desseche, reste suspendu.

Quand le vent le balance, l’on raconte que les etudiants du quartier

Latin, dans la crainte d’un pareil sort, font une courte priere: ce sont

des bruits insignifiants auxquels on n’est point tenu de croire, et

propres seulement a faire peur aux petits enfants. Il tient entre ses

mains crispees, comme un grand ruban de vieilles fleurs jaunes. Il

faut tenir compte de la distance, et nul ne peut affirmer, malgre

l’attestation de sa bonne vue, que ce soient la, reellement, ces

immortelles dont je vous ai parle, et qu’une lutte inegale, engagee pres

du nouvel Opera, vit detacher d’un piedestal grandiose. Il n’en est pas

moins vrai que les draperies en forme de croissant de lune n’y recoivent

plus l’expression de leur symetrie definitive dans le nombre quaternaire:

allez-y voir vous-meme, si vous ne voulez pas me croire.

About the Translator:

R J Dent is a poet, novelist, translator, blogger, essayist, short story writer, researcher and Creative Writing tutor. His latest book is an English translation of Le Comte de Lautréamont’s surrealist classic, The Songs of Maldoror, published in 2011 by the University of Chicago Press/Solar Books. Prior to this he published a novel, Myth (2006), a poetry collection, Moonstone Silhouettes (2009), and an English translation of Charles Baudelaire’s decadent classic,The Flowers of Evil (2009).  He is currently writing a book about Emily Dickinson and studying for a PhD at Sussex University.

Details of R J Dent’s work can be found at www.rjdent.com

An excerpt from The Songs of Maldoror
by Le Comte de Lautréamont
Translated by R. J. Dent (© R J Dent 2010)
with Illustrations by Salvador Dalí
and a new Foreword by Paul Éluard
ISBN: 9780982046487
Publisher: Solar Books
Format: Paperback, 264 pages, 22 half-tones, 5 1/2 x 8 ½
Price: $16.95

R J Dent’s translation of Le Comte de Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror is now available from:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=bio&isbn=9780982046487

from:

http://www.solarbooks.org/solar-titles/maldoror.html

and from:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Songs-Maldoror-Solar-Books-Nocturnal/dp/0982046480/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289143240&sr=1-1

San Diego Zoo Photo

What Had to Happen Happens

1.

More an expression of absolute terror. You know: giant eyes, open-mouth frown, hands in front of the face, running from the room. So, of course, I got scared too. I mean, I had no idea what was going on yet. So I figured it was something like she’d seen a burglar out the window. Or a jumper. Or a plane crashing. But no—just a normal summer morning: Sunshine on the fire escape. Sound of frying bacon. Someone on the phone. Singing. Normal except for my own wife running through the apartment, slamming doors. Then I heard her on the telephone. Hysterical. Mostly I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then I distinctly heard the word “ape.” Then a little bit later, I heard it again, even louder. “Ape!”

Mostly I was still terrified. But in a way, I wasn’t. I was just lying there on the bed like nothing was happening at all. Like I was just slowly waking up—which was, in fact, what I was doing. I mean Oonagh was off slamming doors, having some sort of total nervous breakdown, and I was just lying there, looking around the room, fiddling with myself. That didn’t actually make sense. But I wasn’t awake enough yet to realize that yet.

Then two things happened: First, I began to really want to get out of bed and see why Oonagh was so upset, and when I couldn’t do that, I began to panic. Like I’d just discovered I was paraplegic. Except, I wasn’t. I was moving my arms and legs. My hands. But for some reason, even though I wanted to, I wasn’t getting up. The second thing was that I looked over at the mirror on the closet door, and what I saw was that there was a gorilla in my bed. Not me. Just a gorilla. A fat, five-hundred pound mountain gorilla, lying on the bed, fiddling with himself. I wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

2.

Guns everywhere, the hallway elbow to elbow with cops. Some of them acting like it was all a big joke. Like: Fucking Jesus! Do you believe this shit! But I could tell they were actually terrified. From the way they couldn’t keep their eyes off me. Their twitchy little movements. One time I sighed and they all went silent. Every eyeball on me, like I was a ticking bomb. There was this one cop. I could tell from the sneery corner of his mouth, his pebbly eyes, the way he kept readjusting his grip on his pistol. He was just waiting for the excuse to shoot me. There was nothing in the world he wanted more than to tell his buddies about the time he shot a five-hundred-pound bull gorilla in some lady’s bedroom. You know: his friends’d be like, Wow, man! Incredible! And he’d be, Yeah, yeah. Pow! I just blew him away.

Here’s the thing: Half I was so freaked out, I couldn’t even think about what was going on. Half I was thinking, Hey, guys, it’s just me in here. Nothing to worry about. Put away your guns. But also I was thinking: Where’s Oonagh? What’s happened to Oonagh? Why isn’t Oonagh here?

I was trying to talk, of course. The whole time. But I couldn’t get a word out. It’s like when you wake up and your arm is so asleep you can’t even move it to shut off the alarm. Only it was my whole face that was like that.  I was straining and straining to get my tongue, my lips, my lungs and my voice box to do the simple things they always did. Nothing happened. Nothing. It was like I was dead.

Except I could do things. I was sitting up. I could move. I was holding my short-legged grey feet in my big hairy hands, picking at one of my toenails. And I could feel the jagged nail through my finger and I could feel the warmth of my finger through my toe.

I was even making noises.

Like, you know: when I made that sigh?

That was as big a shock to me as it was to the cops. At first I was thinking: What was that! Where did that come from? Then I realized I had felt it coming up. I had felt my whole chest heave with it. Then I felt that sigh feeling. That sort of like relief mixed with sadness.

Then a little later it’s this noise in my throat. This sort of halfway between a grunt and a groan. Only so deep the walls vibrated. And that was like weird. I mean, How did I do that?

But then, for a second there, I thought it was all over for me. You know: kazhick-gazhick, the cops all straight-armed, pointing their guns—just like on TV. Thank God I didn’t move. Didn’t do anything but fiddle with my toes.

The strange thing is the grunt sounded a little like I was saying Oonagh. After that I kept saying her name over and over. Only, inside my head, cause nothing was coming out of my lips. Oonagh! Oonagh, baby, where are you? I’m sorry, Oonagh! I’m so sorry! Oonagh! Please! I need you! I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry!

I just felt so, so bad—like everything that was happening was all my fault. But what was I so sorry for? You know? What had I done? In a way that was a completely ridiculous feeling.

3.

I could tell by that sweet, nose-cleaning smell of animal shit. But mixed up with alcohol. Maybe some Mr. Clean. I opened my eyes and there was nothing but white tile in front of me. Then I remembered what happened: The police shoving aside. Then two guys in short pants. The one with the cow prod. The other with that gun. That kind of gun that shoots tranquilizer darts.

Bang! Right into my gut.

But then, in like one second, everything just faded away and I woke up, like in the land of white tile. And there was that stink.

For a long time I couldn’t do anything. Just lay there with my face on the floor, watching this one groove between the tiles go way off into infinity. I was all seasick. And exhausted. And just basically freaked out.

Then there was this really pretty girl crouching next to me. Big eyes, this pageboy haircut; nice and petite. She had shorts on too. And this little white coat. And a stethoscope.

Hey big guy, she said. And she ran the stethoscope up my chest. I could feel the coolness of the metal and the warmness of her little hand. Hey big guy, how’d you get so far from home?

And I just wanted to cry when she said that. I just wanted to cry and cry.

4.

So every day that girl came. Hey big guy, she said. She always said that. And every time she had a banana for me. And I was amazed, you know? Cause my gorilla had no trouble with that banana. He’d peel it just like a human would, and eat it in like two bites. And I got to tell you, I never ate anything as good as those bananas. I don’t know where she got them, but they were so delicious.

And while I was eating that banana, she’d be moving her hand around on my chest, and taking my blood pressure, and shining this light in my eyes.

Okay, she was always saying. Okay. Good. Good. Great. You know: Like she’s a doctor and she doesn’t want me to think anything’s wrong with me.

I don’t mean me. I mean this five-hundred-pound gorilla.

I thought that was kind of sweet.

By that time I was beginning to catch on to what had actually happened to me. And I was hoping that she’d—like adopt me. You know? Do language experiments. Teach me how to talk with pictures and plastic blocks. And I was thinking how excited she’d be when she saw what a fast learner I was.

Annalisa.

She’s got this gold plastic nametag pinned to the pocket of her white coat: Annalisa.

5.

I mean it’s not just that the gorilla house was all boring and everything. Monotonous. Bang your head on the wall cause there’s nothing else to do. The main thing is, there were some mean motherfuckers in there. Seriously! Like prison.

First thing that happened when they cow-prodded me through that sliding door was this gigantic silver backed bull bared his yellow fangs at me. Gave me one of those tiny-eyed snarly stares. And I was scared shitless, man. Absolutely shitless. All I wanted to do was go off into a faraway corner, put my hands over my head and pretend I was back in the veterinary unit with Annalisa.

But my gorilla did the absolute stupidest thing he could do. He just waltzed out to the middle of the—I don’t know what you call it—play area. And he just sat down there—like three and a half feet from that big, mean-as-hell bull.

And I was like, Oh Jesus! What the fuck’s the matter with you! Let’s get out of here!

And my gorilla just sat there. Like I didn’t count for anything. Like I wasn’t even there.

So, nothing happened for a while.

Except the big bull. He had this little guy sitting next to him who was like his henchman. And the little guy was constantly looking over and giving me the yellow fangs, the little-eye stare. And my gorilla, he just sat there with his elbows on his knees. His finger in his mouth. My mouth.

And then, of course, what had to happen happened. That big bull was just like a tidal wave rising up out of a calm sea. He’s all fangs and roars. Little feet slapping across the ground and gigantic arms up in the air.

Wham!

It’s like he knocks my gorilla flat onto his back.

And that fucking hurts, let me tell you! I’m seeing stars. Can’t hardly breathe. And I’m like, Let’s get the fuck out of here!

But my gorilla is so stupid, he just does the same thing back to the big bull. Arms in the air. Little slapping feet.

Wham!

Down we go onto the ground again. Only this time the henchman jumps us and sinks his teeth into our shoulder.

And that hurts just exactly as much as a dog bite. Have you ever had a dog bite? It feels exactly the same.

6.

So finally I figured it out. My gorilla was naturally the alpha male type. You know? Only I was holding him back. It’s like, even though he wouldn’t listen to me, maybe I was still having this little effect. Giving him second thoughts. Confusing him. Just a little. But enough so he couldn’t be himself.

Me, I’m nothing like the alpha male type. But after three days of getting bashed around. All bruises and cuts and no food and I’m fucking starving, I finally think, I gotta stop resisting. I gotta help this guy. You know: superior intelligence and everything.

It took a while for him to listen to me.

Actually, the first thing was I had to start listening to him. So the next time he’s like raising his hands over his head and doing that charging thing, I’m like, Yeah! Let’s get that motherfucker! And after a while it started to work.

It was my idea to go after the little guys first. It didn’t take much, really. Most of them, you just show them a fang, jerk your forearm a little bit, and they’re like, Excuse me, sir! Anything you say, sir! So once my gorilla has gotten a spot right near the gate where the keeper comes in with the food bucket, we start doing things different. Instead of just taking everything for ourself, we start handing out food to the little guys. And of course, a couple days of that, and they’re like loving my gorilla. He can do no wrong.

So the next time. Even though that big bull—he’s got like a hundred pounds on my gorilla. Next time he does that arms in the air thing. The fangs. My gorilla just does it right back to him, and there’s like ten littler gorillas doing it right along with him. So then, you know, the big bull freezes. His little eyes start twitching. Looking around and everything. Sort of doing the math.

My gorilla does the fang thing again. And that big bull just puts down his arms and goes over into the corner by himself. Put his hand over his head.

So it’s like a revolution! Democracy comes to gorilla land!

The thing is, gorillas are so easy to fool. You take a banana, cover it with a whole bunch of straw and they think it’s just gone. Disappeared. They’re like little kids.

7.

You could only see them when they were close enough to the glass that the gorilla room light could shine on their faces. But even then it was hard to see them, cause mainly what you’d see was our reflections. So that’s why I wasn’t sure at first. I’m thinking, Is that really her? Or is it only just I think I’m seeing her again?

Cause there was like this period when I was always thinking I was seeing Oonagh. Every skinny woman with stringy brown hair, I’m thinking, It’s Oonagh! Look! She’s here! At last! Oonagh! Oonagh! But it was never her. Mostly it was just some random teenage girl. Except one time I take a second look and I see Oonagh has like this little mustache and this pointy beard, and really she’s just this hippie guy. And that was like—you know: depressing.

So the first time I see her, I’m like, Nah, man—not possible!

But, of course, I couldn’t help looking. And she’s like moving in and out of the other people, mostly in the shadow. So it was hard for me to see her at first. But I can see that she’s looking for something. Like she’s looking at all the gorillas, trying to spot the right one. Finally she gets right to the middle, and she doesn’t just come near the glass, she puts both of her hands flat up against it, and her forehead too.

And this time there’s no question. She’s lost weight and everything. She’s got these big bags under her eyes. But it’s Oonagh. Definitely Oonagh. And, even though I know it’s her, I can’t let myself believe that it really is. So I’m like. You know. Paralyzed.

So there she is, right in front of me. Twenty feet away. But she’s still looking all around, not looking at me in particular. Which was natural, I guess. I mean: what’s it been? Like a month since she found this gorilla where her husband should be. And maybe she didn’t even look at me then. Just, you know: Holy shit! And ran out of the room. So, of course she doesn’t recognize me.

So I’m thinking, I gotta do something so she knows it’s me.

But even though my gorilla and me were working like a team by then, it was only when we were doing gorilla stuff. When it came to stuff that was just human. I don’t know. Either he didn’t want to do it, or he couldn’t. I can’t tell you now many times I tried to get him to write stuff. You know: HELP, or just HI. And even though he could peel a banana with his eyes closed, or swing from one of those fake trees in there like the world’s greatest Olympic gymnast, I just couldn’t get him to move his hand in the shape of letters. It’s like he had a block against it or something. And talk? Forget about it. Getting those lips to make words was like trying to pick up a dime with two sledgehammers.

But then I’m thinking: Oonagh! He almost said that once, already, so maybe it’s worth a try.

At first all he’s doing is this Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! But after a while I manage to get him to go Ooh! Uh! Ooh! Uh! Only he’s like real quiet and everything. Like he’s embarrassed. Or maybe he doesn’t know what the fuck’s the matter with him. And I can see, not only does Oonagh not hear what he’s saying, she doesn’t even know he’s making any noise. That glass was like three inches thick. So—you know: A noise has got to be pretty loud to get through that.

I keep on trying, but it’s no better.

Then I see that she’s pulled her head away from the glass. And she’s looking all lost and depressed and—you know: crestfallen. And I can tell she’s about to walk away.

So I’m like, Damn you, motherfucker! Shout! Make some fucking noise, asshole! Fucking raise your voice!

And then, I don’t know what happens.

Afterward what I figured was that my gorilla could feel how upset I was inside him, and it made him feel like he was crazy. You know? Like, What’s happening to me! And then that made him go really crazy. Apeshit! I mean. Absolutely fucking seriously!

He’s jumping up and down, running back and forth. And screaming. Like this horrible noise is getting ripped out of his throat. And all the other gorillas are running away from him, and the people outside the windows, too. Then he’s so messed up he loses his balance and falls into this, like pit, that’s between where we sit and the windows. And he’s rolling all around down there. And he’s jumping up and down. Banging the walls. Shouting. And the people are all like, Let me out of here! Gorilla on the loose! Even though, in fact, there’s no way he could even reach the windows from down in that pit.

So finally, you know: It’s like my gorilla comes back to his senses. And we clamber up out of there. And now there are no more people behind the glass. It’s just zookeepers. In their old fashioned Boy Scout hats and their short pants.

8.

Annalisa’s sitting up against one white-tile wall. I’m sitting up against the other. She’s turning this Bic pen over and over in her hands. She’s talking, but she’s looking at her pen more than she’s looking at me.

So you see what I’m saying, big guy? You got to play it cool from now on. All right? No more King Kong. You got me? Cool. Nicey-nicey. There’s people here who want you destroyed. They think you’re a danger. To humans and to the other gorillas. You understand what I’m talking about? Somehow I think you do. I think you understand every word. You better. I hope you do. Cause I talked them out of it this time. But you’re not going to get a second chance.

She looks me in the eye when she says that. She’s sitting with her legs straight out, the backs of her bare knees flat on the tile floor. She’s wearing her zookeeper shorts, fluffy gray socks, work boots. Her feet are small. Even in her work boots they are so tiny. Dinker feet. Maybe half the size of one of my hairy gorilla hands.

9.

For a long time after that I had these dreams. In almost every one, it was—you know: that morning again. And instead of screaming, Oonagh rolls over and gives me this sleepy kiss: affectionate, but also like its only a habit, like she doesn’t even notice it. Then she’s up and staggering out to the kitchen. I hear her clattering around out there. The coffee maker’s burbling. Then I can smell it. After a while I get up, too. She’s sitting at the kitchen table. Her cup next to her. Black. Two sugars. She’s reading the paper. I get my own coffee and sit down next to her. She gives me the sports section.

Or sometimes it’s later and we’re walking in the park. We come to the lake and we walk along the shore for a while. Looking at the ducks. Then we sit down and there are these fluffy white duck feathers scattered in the grass. The wind’s blowing them. But just a little.

Or we’re in a supermarket, on either side of a mountain of grapefruit. She holds one out to me. What do you think? she says.

Or we’re in some giant store buying a new couch. We’re sitting side by side on this rust-colored one that we both like the best. She smoothes her hand over the pillow between us. Then she give it this little pat.

The dreams were always like that. Just the most boring kind of everyday shit. Except I was always happy in them. And I was always sad when I woke up. Really sad, sometimes.

Finally they stopped. Like some part of me just gave up. You know? Deep down inside. Like what was the point?

About the author:

Stephen O’Connor is the author of the short story collections, “Here Comes Another Lesson” and “Rescue”. His nonfiction books include:  ”Will My Name Be Shouted Out?”, a memoir, and “Orphan Trains, The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed”, narrative history. His works have appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Poetry Magazine, and Green Mountains Review,  Agni, Electric Literature, The New York Times, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and elsewhere.

He teaches in the writing MFA programs of Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence. For eight years he directed and taught in Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s flagship creative writing program at a public school in New York City.

Napoleon on the ‘N’ Page

Sprawled on a Salvation Army Thrift Store couch dusty enough to hide advancing troops, Vina turned to the ‘A’ page of her address book, Anne Adams, a late-in-life dyke with a cleavage like heavy gears rolling, four children and conservative relatives frowning down both aisles of forsaken vows.  Her ex-husband avoided his children who reminded him he’d been left for a woman — although every so often he complained about his children being raised by a lesbian.

Vina looked at her legal pad with an uncertain eye.  Her plan was to profit from her friends’ problems, her thought being she had the advantage of distance.  So.

So.  There was Anne, once-unclaimed daughter of Bilitis’ overflowing womb.  Anne’s current lover was pouty and possessive.  Anne said she strayed.

“Honey, I want to watch The L-Word, I don’t want to live it.”

“I hear ya.”  Vina sighed.

The medium-tip Bic left splotches as she wrote:

Anne:  job, relationship (former), relationship (present), in-laws, kids, money.  Bad people picker.
The husband:  Anti-woman?  Too proud.  Luck of the draw.

Vina smiled.  Was she writing student evaluations?  Her attention wandered from the pad to a dust bunny under the coffee table, and it hit her, not the dust bunny, tenacious and fragile enough to have its own set of problems — a memory of fellow teacher Joan Czery who was always borrowing money.

She skipped over the ‘Bs’ to the ‘C’ page of her address book.  Vina and Joan’d had dinner after school at Taix on Sunset.  Vina taught History, which was nothing but problems, and Joan taught Science, which boasted it could solve the problems. They’d eaten early— poulet in a wine sauce and a basket of sourdough rolls served with sweet butter squares so cold, they alone could have defeated Napoleon’s army on its famous retreat from a numbing Russian winter.  As usual, Joan borrowed fifteen bucks.  Vina fought her irritation and, as usual, paid the bill.

In the tiny parking lot they ran into Ramona Martinez.

Vina thumbed over to the ‘M-s.’  Ramona and her boyfriend had fought; Vina was creeped out when the boyfriend snarled, ‘Now, Madam,’ and Joan’s hand almost clamped his shoulder when the couple locked eyes and stormed into Taix.

That night the President delivered his state of the union address.  Joan phoned Vina and the two watched with the sound turned off.  “That was funky,” Joan said, “with Ramona.”  She dropped the phone when her cat jumped on her head but rescued the receiver.  “You know what I mean?”

“Like fighting was an appetizer?”

Ramona quit her job a week later; the principal had to hustle to find a replacement Social Studies teacher, social studies being a discipline striving to understand the problem.

Joan:  $ stuff
Ramona:  unhealthy relationships, quitter, mystery element

Vina flipped to ‘H’ for Hubert, Latice Hubert who lived near the May Co. at Wilshire and Fairfax, where Vina shopped sales — her most recent Christmas coup being matching chartreuse-fluff bedroom slippers for her three nieces.

Vina squinted at Latice’s barely decipherable phone number, penciled in.  She’d met Latice at an art gallery in Venice, with bad Ralph, who’d been a major problem..

She and Ralph went to Latice and Tanya’s — the lover — moldy apartment after a few rounds of Irish coffees at Mulveney’s.  Conversation slogged along reasonably until Tanya received a phone call from her bar where the bartender had tussled with a drug dealer; things had gone from bad to fucked up.

Tanya’d ordered in a stiff, arched tone, “You’re coming with me, sugar,” and “Don’t you ditch me now.”

‘We have guests!” Latice yelled.

Ralph apologized because apologies were the best way to smooth take-off for a flight out of there which he and Vina, did, fly off, speedily, stopping off at Fatburger’s for two greasy bags of food which they slammed down at their apartment while they watched the old Cagney movie where he crams a grapefruit in Jean Harlow’s face.

Enough with Latice and Tanya.  Of Ralph, more later, except, all right, Vina’d recently lay down the prosthetic arm of the law and ordered him to leave.  And he did just that:  Left.  Ralph was gone, she’d asked for it.  There it was.  “Free to be me,” she said to a quivering dust bunny.  “Whoever the fuck that is.”

On the K-page was Nancy Katona, a friend since high school.  Nancy had created one problem to obscure another.  She was divorced, with the perennially complicating factor of kids; kids were perennials.  Nancy confided, “I got so tired of being the one who did wrong,” with her husband and later affairs, “the one accused,” so she drank and bloomed in girth.  “I got sex out of the picture.”

Nancy:  Food.  Booze.  No sex.  Bad skin.

Vina didn’t think for a second it was Nancy’s size that mattered — she was pretty and a great cook. But in drinking and eating so much she’d developed food allergies and ezcema and was now physically uncomfortable.

Vina was nowhere near a solution to this being alone thing.  If her former neighbor Al Zemo hadn’t moved, she’d unpack her feelings with him.  She leafed over to the ‘T’ page because she once thought his name was spelled Tzemo and subsequently cross-referenced him by writing ‘Al, See T’ in the Z’s.

“Really, I think I’m a lesbian,” he had told her.  “With all the constraints and ridiculous concepts everyone has of gay men, my God.”

A month ago he’d moved to northern Cal and rented a cottage in the back of a house owned by a woman named Meg.  There were redwoods all around, the only companions Al thought he’d ever need, but he had to go to the house to shower.  Meg’s boyfriend eyed him with suspicion and her handsome devil of a brother had a key.  Get this, Al wrote.

The brother is a Freudian slip-in-motion.  ‘I’m your landlady’s sister,’ he said to me.  I waved it aside, you know good-old-me, while the guy backtracked in fear and blindness.  Meanwhile, his woman, a strong girl, smiled bullets.  Eeek.

Vina turned to the second page of mauve stationery, a real letter.  Al was retro.

He’d written that Meg the landlady’s stereo was lifted.  She was pissed the thief’s dog fouled her carpet, and she knew it wasn’t Pepsi’s shit because she locked Pepsi in the service porch when she was gone.  She’d come home and smelled something, shook out the rug and there it was, wet and smeared.  Her brother had two dogs.

I didn’t leave the bungalow womb of Echo Park for this, my friend.

Crazies were drawn to nice Al in some perverse cosmic balancing act.  It had happened in L.A., too.  Vina sighed.  Oh, Al.  She again consulted the aging address book with its cover of peeling black leather and saw she’d missed Polly — on the P page because Polly was Polly, and that was that.  She lived in a Reseda mother-in-law in back of a three bedroom, had issues but wouldn’t admit them.

Polly:  Denial

A month ago she stopped by on a Saturday afternoon to sip ground Colombian with half and half out of ceramic mugs from Pier 1, and after a rant about California’s karma regarding earth, wind, air, water — quakes, Santa Anas, smog, and the drought —commiserated with Vina about Ralph. “And don’t you let him back, sister!  That no-good Ralph!”

Who was on the ‘B,’ for Boy with a ‘d’—‘Boyd,’ page.  Why had Vina asked him to leave?  His lies had become ridiculous; her susceptibility undiminished.

An in-town roadie to a rock band working clubs in Glendale and the Valley, bad Ralph told Vina the band had a gig in Puerto Rico.  Who would invent Puerto Rico?  It didn’t even occur to Vina, but when bad Ralph’s mother was hospitalized and his brother phoned, Vina discovered the group hadn’t left L.A.  Ralph had gone to Mexico for R & R.

Before Puerto Rico there’d been Colorado.  Ralph didn’t invent Colorado, but simply chanced on it when skiing in the Sierras, on the cheap, where he made friends and gone with them to Aspen so when Vina phoned to find him at a lodge in the Sierras on a Saturday night after her car caught on fire, no one in the expansive California mountain range knew where  Ralph was.  He’d slipped out to a new state as easily as a teenager slips out on a weekday night.

Me:     Too vulnerable.  Bad people picker.
Ralph: bad bad bad bad bad.

To avoid Polly, Vina slipped inside for Al’s latest letter.  She could diss bad Ralph, but Polly shouldn’t.  Guess what, she read, her voice so loud Polly winced..

The landlady’s thieving and devilishly handsome brother had moved in with Al.

I always forget to see that the process itself helps things unfold.  You find out more about the situation as you go along, things keep changing and soon it’s a different set of problems.  Someone said we don’t resolve problems, we outgrow them.

“Isn’t Al wise?”

Polly didn’t think so.  “I don’t have any problems.”

“You know I sleep with women now.”

“So?”

“Well it’s not a trivial admission.”

“But it’s not a problem.”  She muttered something Vina didn’t catch.  Vina was convinced Polly pushed away sensitivity.  Her force field had blazes of her name:  arrows, poison darts of autobiography whose trajectories said ME and I and POLLY.  She used to rant about her husband Fred in the same way she presented herself.  She was ME ME, I I, and Fred was HIM this and HIM that.

HIM HIM HIM.  And when Vina finally met HIM he was just a guy, Fred, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt, coming to her apartment to hook up her stereo.  Just a guy.  Not HIM, not any more than she was SHE or I or ME.  Fred’d left POLLY.

“You wanna go to a movie?”

Vina suggested another day.  Polly left to catch the matinee rate.

“Ah, shit.”  Vina threw her address book to the floor.  A dust bunny skittered.  She ripped pages from her yellow tablet, broke her pencil in two.  She knew, even if she didn’t know in so many words, that she couldn’t know in any words.

Two months later, Polly stopped by with a pound of organic Kenyan coffee beans.  Vina shared a new letter from Al.  The old girlfriend snapped her fingers like a genie and Meg’s brother was gone, Al wrote.

Now I’m stuck in another stupid apartment and really alone but, hell, we’re all alone and that’s the human or inhuman or un-human condition.

“I’m not alone.”  Polly bristled.

“Yes you are, Polly, and So am I.”

Polly clenched her fists.

“Though I like my new girlfriend.”

The women stared at one another.  Somewhere pages ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ ‘H,’ ‘T’ and ‘Z see T’  and ubiquitous bad Ralph sighed, from somewhere on the island of Elba.

About the author:

Sarah Sarai’s poetry collection, The Future Is Happy, is published by BlazeVOX [books]. Her fiction has appeared in Storyglossia, Fairy Tale Review, Stone’s Throw, Tampa Review, South Dakota Review and others. She divides her time between NYC and http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com.

Neville Leaves A Little Of Himself Behind

Neville leaves a little of himself behind: a paint can behind the stereo.  Polyethelene in the basement.  Wooden strips bound with twine in the loft.  If the woman had any idea why, she wouldn’t be snapping carrots at the sink with such force that the deer outside mistake them for guncracks.  They leap over the fence in five directions, even though they’ll be back, chewing the rhododendrons to sticks.  They always come back — or at least that’s what they want you to think.  Which is why the paint can gathers grime behind the stereo, and the fence he started stays just two boards short of finished, though he’s already working for the woman by the cemetery, who in her stupid excitement can’t yet see that this relationship’s going to last a lot longer than the wall going up by her pond.

About the author:

Paul Lisicky is the author of “Lawnboy”, “Famous Builder” and two upcoming books: “The Burning House”, a novel (2011), and “Unbuilt Projects”, short prose pieces (2012). He has been published widely in journals, chapbooks and magazines.  He teaches at NYU and in the Fairfield University MFA Program. Lisicky live in New York City and Springs, New York.

You can read more of his work at: http://paullisicky.blogspot.com/

Roses

Wali watched skeptically as Rasool crouched on the floor unfolding the carpet. “I’m not buying right now,” he said. “The store is way too full.” He lifted his arms and gestured around him. The floors were entirely covered with stacks of rugs, the walls were draped with ancient Chinese and Afghan pieces, and every aisle was lined with either a Turkish runner or a faded Kilim. Just outside the door, greeting the numerous cars and pedestrians on College Avenue, was a stack of camel bags resting on a sawhorse.

“Come on, Wali, just have a look. This is the most beautiful Gabbeh in the world, I swear,” Rasool said, winking at Wali.

When Rasool had the carpet spread out evenly on the floor, Wali walked around its perimeter with his arms folded across his chest.

“The colors are too bright—synthetic. And it can’t be more than fifty years old,” Wali said.

“C’mon man, it’s beautiful! What’s wrong with you? You could sell it in a day and you know it,” Rasool snapped back.

Rasool was right, it was beautiful. Probably the most beautiful Gabbeh Wali had ever seen. Unlike the others, it was not dominated by eccentric geometric shapes and figures, making it look as if it were woven by a child. Instead the entire field was filled with brilliantly colored roses — magenta, orange, fuchsia, and gold, each lined up side by side, separated by an almost imperceptible square frame.

It was also true that Wali could sell it in a day. In fact, he had at least three clients who would buy it unseen, over the phone, at whatever price he asked. Tribal carpets were hot, and Gabbehs the most collectable. Turning over a corner to inspect the knots, Wali realized the entire rug was as soft as a blanket.

“How much?” Wali asked.

“I won’t take less than ten thousand. You know it’s worth twice that — easy.”

“But you still owe me five from the Mercedes,” Wali said.

“Okay, five,” Rasool said firmly. “You’ve got to give it to me today, though. My landlord’s going to throw me out of my apartment.”

“Your wife’s on the phone, Wali,” Alexander the shop assistant called from the back of the store. “She wants you to pick up a bag of rice and some yogurt from Safeway on your way home.”

Wali did not respond. Instead he bent over and began folding up the rug. Rasool grabbed at the opposite end.

“How’s Zara?” Rasool asked.

“Fine.”

“And your daughter, does she like college?”

“Sure, she’s all right. Can you take a check?”

“As long as it’s good.”

After Rasool left, Wali put the carpet in the back office and went home for the day, leaving Alexander to close up.

***

When Wali opened the shop the following morning the entire back office smelled of flowers. Not the sharp smell of a cheap perfume, but the intoxicating wine-like fragrance of a large blossoming red rose. Wali was reminded of his mother’s garden back home.

“You see,” she would say, bending down to smell a rose, “they are sweet, just like God.”

“Good morning,” Alexander said, arriving late for work, as usual.

“Good morning,” Wali answered, not looking up. “Hey, Alexander, did you have a girl in here last night?”

Alexander was at that age and Wali knew he occasionally brought friends into the shop late at night to party. As long as they cleaned up after themselves and didn’t start a fire, he didn’t mind.

“Of course not!” Alexander said, pretending to be offended. “Why?”
“The place smells of flowers.”

“I don’t smell anything,” Alexander said, sniffing at the air.

“I guess it’s nothing. Forget it. I’m sorry.”

Wali thought of calling Dr. Weinsfeld about the new Gabbeh. Then he remembered how pretty it was. Maybe I’ll hold off and keep it in the shop for a few days, he thought to himself. What do I need money for? Zara will just spend it on a new washing machine. No, I’ll savor it for a little while. Besides, it will be nice for the customers to see.

Wali sat at his desk waiting for Sharon, the young girl from the hair salon next door, to come out for her morning cigarette. Unlike the other carpet dealers in town, Wali did not go out at night drinking or keep a mistress. Instead, he limited the pleasures in his life to three: his wife’s cooking, spoiling his daughter, and visiting with Sharon in the morning when she had her cigarette. The problem was that lately, for some unknown reason, his wife had begun withdrawing the one last remaining bit of joy she still managed to give him. Her rice was almost always sticky now, her vegetables pale and lifeless, and she hardly ever used spices anymore. Lately his evening meal had become little more than the necessary acquisition of sustenance, ingested at a silent table. To make matters worse, his beautiful, most-beloved daughter had just started college and was hardly ever home. Sharon was all he had left. The minute he saw the edge of her flowered skirt in the front window, Wali grabbed his pack of cigarettes and leapt from his chair.

“Good morning,” he said, smiling.

“Good morning,” she said, smiling back. “How’s things?”

“Okay,” Wali said, looking down at the pavement.

“You look tired, Wali. You work too hard. What you need is a good massage.” Sharon stretched out her long, ringed fingers, and kneaded at the air like dough. Wali stared in enchantment. “You should come over to my place sometime after work, I’ll give you one. I’ve taken classes, you know.” Wali was blushing like a teenage boy.

“What’ll it be today?” he said, trying to change the subject. “A dragon, a lion, the Tree of Life, what about diamonds?” Each morning, Wali would ask Sharon this question, and then dash into his shop to look for a corresponding theme in a carpet for the front window. “Actually,” Wali said, remembering the rose rug, “I have a surprise for you.” He then stuck his head in the door and asked Alexander to hang the new rug in the front window.

Now, Wali owned some pretty impressive carpets, and he was not stingy with what he allowed to be exposed to the harsh afternoon sun. Why, just yesterday he hung up a Nain that once belonged to the Shah of Iran, simply because Sharon asked for birds gathered around a fountain. But nothing, not even that silk Nain, had ever made her eyes sparkle quite the way they did when she saw Alexander unfolding the rose Gabbeh.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, putting out her cigarette so she could go inside for a closer look.

“Wali, It’s beautiful!” She repeated, brushing one of its soft corners against her cheek.

“Where is it from?”

“Iran. It was made by a nomadic tribe.”

“Nomads, cool! How much is it?”

Sharon had never asked Wali the price of one of his carpets before. This was a good thing, in his view, since he knew she would not understand. The Nain up the day before was worth eighty-five thousand, maybe more. How could he possibly tell this to a young girl giving massages after work to earn extra cash?

“Oh Sharon, I don’t know. I haven’t priced it yet.”

Sharon spent the whole day popping out of the salon to have a cigarette and admire the rug. Every so often Wali could overhear her proudly explaining to one of her coworkers that it was woven by nomads.

***

At about four o’ clock that afternoon a middle-aged man driving a vintage Jaguar pulled up in front of the store. He stood for some time looking at the rose carpet before coming inside and asking Alexander to take it down. Wali sat in the back office watching. The minute Alexander brought out the step stool, Sharon appeared with another cigarette. Wali waited a few minutes before getting up to greet his customer.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Wali said, finally making his appearance. “Wonderful piece, isn’t it?” The man didn’t respond. Instead he walked slowly around the carpet.

“The dyes are mostly synthetic,” the man said, stopping to flip over a corner of the rug with his shoe, “and it’s not terribly old either.”

Wali glanced outside at Sharon, who was pacing back and forth like an angry animal.
“No, you’re right. It’s not very old, maybe fifty years.”

Sharon motioned for Wali to come outside. He pretended not to see, but then she leaned her head in the doorway and softly called his name.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Wali said. “Would you like some tea? Alexander, please bring this gentleman some tea.”

Sharon stood nervously in front of Wali. “Is he going to buy it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

She then leaned close to him, so close he could smell her. It was the same intoxicating fragrance that filled his office earlier that morning. “Wali,” she said, “whatever that man offers, I’ll give you twice as much.” Again she stretched out her ringed fingers for him and rubbed a mound of imaginary flesh. “Twice as much,” she repeated in a whisper.

Wali was drunk with her smell and the sight of her young hands when he walked back into his store. Twice as much, he thought to himself. Twice as much.
When he returned, the man was sitting on the edge of a large stack of carpets, holding his cup of tea and scowling down at the rug.

“I’m very sorry to keep you waiting,” Wali said, as he quickly began folding up the rose carpet.

“Please, don’t take it away. I’m thinking of buying it. How much?”

“I’m sorry, it’s already been sold. I’ll have Alexander show you some more tribal weavings.”

“I don’t understand,” the man replied, clearly irritated.

“I’m very sorry, sir, but this carpet is sold. I have to leave now. Alexander will help you. There are many more beautiful rugs in the store. You will find another you love.”

Wali held the rose Gabbeh in his arms like a baby as he left the store. The girl is so sweet, he said to himself. Like God.

About the author:

Mira Martin-Parker is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Literary Bohemian, Mythium, Tattoo Highway, Yellow Medicine Review, and Zyzzyva.

____________________________

Hello Shoes

 
I’m in a stiff white dress. I’m attached, as only children can be, to my grandmother’s side. While the photo could have been taken anywhere, I know that it was taken at a party in Iran. It’s a Polaroid. If you look close you can see I’m not wearing appropriate shoes. The photo also fails to capture the brown aura around my grandmother. No one can see that but me.

My shoes were red leather sandals with yellow stitching that formed the pattern of a smiling apple on each foot. I stared at those apples a lot. Around them there was always sand and on my feet, always apples. On the TV there was “The Angry Man”. We were in Tehran just before the hostages were taken.

30 years later I am five years married. No surprise. I was bound to marry. I was a keeper of boyfriends. My first was a blonde in kindergarten who wanted to kiss me. I would only hold his hand. I turned him down when he offered to show me his noodle. Together we wore smocks for art class, held big fat yellow pencils and drank milk that tasted like band-aids.

I could go back there, back to childhood, have a kid and live through them. I could name it Sandy. It would be easy to get pregnant, to be off the pill with its daily dose of chemicals, hormones and control. Control, I can hear Janet singing that.  I could sing it. Dance Nasty.

Even thought I haven’t had Control since I was Wonder Woman and wore my red and white boots that made me run faster. They matched everything. Linda Carter was God: that skin, those eyes. I’d give anything for more than brown eyes, brown hair. I’m full of it up to here; up even into my aura. That’d be progress, if I no longer saw everyone’s bright bursting spirit colors.

Progress isn’t this new treatment plan. It is not a trip to a three-walled room where the fourth is a mirror that even a child knows is the glass through which they watch You. But like participants on reality TV, you forget the Observers are there. You let it all hang out and even tell Them about what the shoes have to say. Then you have to list.

Catalog: that was Christmas. We’d open the JC Penny Gift Book to circle, tab and tear out pages for what we wanted. We’d get one of the many we marked along with piles of Christmas clothes which looked like what everyone else called Back to School clothes.

When I was twelve, I circled a pair of shoes, a pair of fuck-me pumps. They weren’t red. They were black and pointed with a low heel; they would have to be worn with panty hose. The good looking girls at school wore panty hose beneath their jumpers when it was cool out but not cool enough for jeans.

I wore those shoes with everything.

Wouldn’t it be easy for everyone if I could say that those pumps proved their name? What if I could say I had been fucked at twelve or thirteen? But no one fucked me. Not physically. No, I waited a long time to be literally screwed. I was very linear, chronological. Like college, then graduation, and onto marriage. Like time ticking away. Like my biological clock tock . . . tock. Where is my baby? Caught in the ellipses? It’ll get its little head stuck between those dots, or the slats of a crib. I won’t be there to save it because I’ll be here, getting high on prescriptions and sessions and tasteless excuses for yogurt and pudding. But what can taste good, anyway, when your mouth has the consistency of cotton?

If I had a little one it could wear all kinds of little baby shoes. Like the ones I used to sell. I loved to help kids try on tiny Nikes and ballerina slippers. My feet were small enough to fit into little boy boots and sneakers. You could save some cash that way but little kids shoes have no support.

Can’t I just stay here with the staff? I could just sit with a book and a note pad, in a room by myself because I’m tired of walking, of getting up to wash dishes, of bothering. But, I’m not suicidal no matter what my husband says. Downing a handful of aspirin isn’t suicide, it’s stupid. I’m not enough of one way or the other. I just wanted the bottle to be empty, done. I never regret walking to the recycle bin. The bin at home a red crate just waiting for my washed out bottles and cans. I can still smile like apples.

About the author:

Jessie Carty’s writing has appeared in The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Houston Literary Review. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks At the A & P Meridiem (Pudding House 2009) and The Wait of Atom (Folded Word 2009), as well as a full length poetry collection, Paper House (Folded Word 2010). Jessie is a freelance writer and writing coach. She is also the photographer and editor for Referential Magazine. She can be found around the web, especially at http://jessiecarty.com where she blogs about everything from housework to the act of blogging itself.

Camouflage Discipline

Someone must manage the debris in vacant lots beside bus depots and railroad tracks, he thought, because there always appeared to be the same number of bottle shards, shreds of paper, rusted cans and absolutely miscellaneous things.
Across the street was a bench and he went over and sat down — and was rather too quickly joined by a man about his own age with a wet egg transparency of skin that was suggestive of a blind snake. Somehow that always seemed to happen to him. He was like a magnet. The clothes and the smell were all too familiar.
“They look just like people don’t they?”
“Who?” Casper asked.
The man with the even more unfortunate complexion than his own pointed to some people in the street.
“Down to the tiniest detail. It’s amazing. The subtlety. That’s what interests me most…the subtlety of them. The way they blend in so completely. You think you see them. Then they’re gone. And you can’t remember what they looked like. Like birds. You can’t say if you’ve seen them before. Maybe you see them all the time — the same ones. Maybe they’re watching you. You’d never know. Of course, they’re watching us. All the time.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Casper said.
“Who does?” the man shrugged. “My bud Maxwell — you know Maxwell? Hanged himself in the Gatwick Hotel. Hell of a thing. He thought they were all one species…but nothing like us…more like intelligent energy that was somehow all one…like a colony of insects. I don’t know. I miss Max. He was trying to help Tweetie Boy, this kid who collected parakeet toys…stole them…from pet shops. Tweetie Boy was all chromed out from inhaling spray paint. Doctors shaved his head. Haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“I’m…I’m sorry to hear that,” Casper said, wondering if the man was on drugs. He spoke very clearly for someone who was high on something.
“How do I know who’s one and who’s not?” the man asked after a moment’s pause. “I go with my gut. It would take sophisticated technology to be dead sure. To see through the camouflage. That’s what it is. And it isn’t just people,” he continued. “I had another friend, Lala. She said that wacko things go on all the time at zoos and you never hear about them. Like one morning, in St. Louis or San Diego…somewhere like that…one of the keepers went to check on the male tiger. His name was Sultan or something. Rajah. Well, you know what? He was there all right…in his enclosure…this big male tiger. Only it wasn’t Rajah. It was another tiger. That same day…on the other side of the world…at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, I think it was…their male tiger went missing. In its place was Rajah. Like they’d been switched, you know? Like pieces in a game or something. Thousands of miles. Tigers transferred! Freaked the zoo keepers right out. They put a lid on it of course. Didn’t want anyone to know. Maxwell was still alive then. He thought maybe it was a test. Like an experiment…before they started on the real stuff…you, know replacing Presidents and heads of companies and shit.”
Casper had had many strange ideas cross his own mind — he was glad he didn’t have this particular concern to cope with. “You be careful,” he advised, seeing an opportunity to slip gracefully away.
It was something he’d learned. Validation. One of the handiest skills there is. All you had to do was find out what someone’s favorite show was — that’s what he called it — their favorite show. Once he’d cottoned on to that, everything became much clearer. He got over the choking fit that sometimes overcame him at cash registers or on the brink of conversations. He stopped getting into fights. People nodded. Smiles came at the right times. He realized everyone had a favorite show — not just the residents, but the staff and doctors too. Once you could talk about their show with them, or listen sincerely, it was okay. You didn’t have to agree with them — most times people are as suspicious of too hearty an agreement as they are upset or angered by outright disagreement. What people want is validation.
“They don’t give themselves away easily,” the man replied, seeking to hold his attention a moment longer “You know what they call that in that military? Camouflage discipline.
Ah, thought Casper. The military.  Everything’s connected.
“But I’ve gotten sharper. They each have their own individual tale. That’s the thing that gives them away in the end. That’s what makes the watching worthwhile. That’s what gets me by — I’ve turned the tables on them. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.”
Actually…Casper mused as he sidled back toward the bus station…he would believe what the man had seen. He believed many things.
He’d seen shooting stars over Death Valley and the lights of Sing Sing from across the Hudson River.
He’d known a man in jail called The Pelican, who could swallow and regurgitate light bulbs whole without breaking them.
He’d had a truly delusional period in his late teens and early twenties…periods of bizarre visions…black-robed judges with the ears and snouts of limestone cave bats — highway patrol officers with the heads of grasshoppers — skeleton girls shimmying around glittering poles before corpses rotting at a mirrored bar.
Then things had gotten clear again. For quite a long time it seemed.
He’d picked up many skills over the course of his haphazard journey, but the one thing he considered himself really good at was listening to strangers — believing they were really there. That’s what people were most afraid of — not actually being. Phantoms. Nothingness. And so people opened up to him. They came to him as if called. They came like the wounded and the destitute had flocked to Jesus. Children…and children of trial.
That was an important part of his own favorite show. Listening to the troubled, the emphatic, the hopeful and the haunted…needy believers and those who seemed to have abandoned all faith. Like the strips in his Medicine Bag, their messages always seemed to connect with something that was happening to him, as if they were messages from his Bag brought to life.
He knew that if you listen closely enough to strangers, you always end up hearing your own story, however strange it may seem.

Kris Saknussem is the author of the novels Zanesville and Private Midnight, which recently became a bestseller in France. Enigmatic Pilot is due out from Random House in 2011. This story is excerpted from his latest novel, Reverend America.

E-mail Kris

www.saknussemm.com

http://www.facebook.com/saknussemm

________________________________________

Nora Meyer is an Argentine artist living in Miami.
More of her work can be seen at http://web.mac.com/rulipon.