Binge Inker

Pescador Libre

2007-06-23T00:28:00.000-06:00

I don't know why I feel the need to share half-written work on here---I guess I crave justification, even if not a one of you reads this.

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One day on the broad white sands of the western Mexican coast there is a man. He is stoop-shouldered but sturdy, and perched buzzard-like on the overturned hull of a dugout canoe. His face is limed from the steady beating of the salt air and the thundering of the waves that have pulsed always in his thoughts and on the horizon of his dreams. Mostly he is still. But his leather hands move regularly and all of his eyes are on them as they repair the broken meshing of a cast net, which has been without fish for one day and already one day too long. He is the man from Teacapan.
Now a second man approaches from the mangrove forest up shore. He is the traveler. Carrying a tin box with one hand and a fishing pole in the other, he comes out of the shadow-leaf canopy and onto the sand. The box he carries swings like a dull hunk of lead at his side. His pole pierces the milk-glass sky like a stalk of goldenrod and sends the sunlight sprinting across its length with each jostling step. The man walks with a heaviness that defies his lean frame, as though his shoes are full of mud and his legs logged with saltwater. Though, even such a clumsy gait is absorbed by the dunes and the break, and his passage takes on the quality of a ghost or a whirlwind moving slowly across the sand. The man whistles as he comes, and in his bone-khaki clothing and red bandana he looks like something washed up from the Iberian coast. But as he draws nearer, the illusion of his cloth escapes into the air above his sunburnt features, ushered off by the decidedly American melody blowing across his thin lips.
Unabashedly, the traveler walks up to the canoe, shedding the hunk of lead and leaning against his fishing pole like a winded and colorful frontiersman. All of the man from Teacapan’s eyes roll over to the man in white and then slide back to the cast net like two obsidian marbles.
"Have you got any water, friend?" the traveler says, surveying the rim of sea foam.
The man from Teacapan stitches the net with his eyes.
"Good damn, it’s hot. The sun’s liable to bake this whole ocean to a crisp and all the fish with it," he says with his hand on his hip. "But that wouldn’t be so bad. Make catching them a whole of a lot easier. Know what I mean?"
The man from Teacapan works the net.
"How about that water, friend?" he says, waving laggardly at the man on the canoe. "Hello?" he says. "Hola. Water?"
The man on the canoe looks up, then reaches into the shadow beyond the gunwale and produces a swollen brown bladder. He unscrews the neck and passes it to the man in white, who accepts it eagerly and looses a fat trail of quavering droplets to the hot sand before settling the stale water to his lips. The spill is gone before he has a chance to notice. The man on the canoe watches the spots dry out.
"Thank you much," the traveler says, handing the water back. "Been a while since I had a drop. Good damn, it is warm," he says while stooping to open his tin box. He pulls out a bundle of bandana and unfolds the ragged cloth to a fillet of dry red meat. It flakes apart as he picks through it, and he holds the red fish out in the palm of his hand like a tiny dinner tray.
"Have a bite," he chews. "It’s snapper, and damn good too."
The man from Teacapan shakes his head, all of his eyes on the net, stitching.
"Yes" he says. "Come on and have some. It’s the last of it."
The man from Teacapan lets the net droop between his bowed legs. Accepting, then, the situation, he pulls off a petal of red fish and pockets it against his gum. The man in white seems to be smiling as he squints across the sun-bleached sand, first down shore, then at the man on the canoe, then out onto the water. In the shimmering distance, a pair of grassy discs buoy with the tide, their navigation unclear and arrested against the staid horizon. Closer, a pair of discs track southward. Beneath them, the deep brown length of a boat creeps like a wooden shadow. The traveler finishes the snapper and looks down shore, and the man from Teacapan studies the patching of his net with serious hands and expression. His lips purse in thought. The waves break four or three times.
"Where you from, friend? Down south?" the traveler stands and brushes his knees. "There hasn’t been a single sign nor spirit since I left Escinapas about six days ago. Thought I’d fished myself over and beyond the edge of civilization."
"Si," the man from Teacapan says. "From the south. Yes."
"Far?"
"Yes."
"Figure could I make it in the day?" he says, rattling his fishing pole. "I set against something heavy a few days back and snapped my line."
"By night, I think," the man on the canoe says. "But then you do not want to go. Dark."
"No," he says. "I guess not."
For a time nothing is said, and the damp echoing of a seabird dips out of the trees and dies fast against the pillows of quiet sand. Somewhere in the canopy, invisible wings whip up a torrent of leaves. The traveler sucks his cheeks. Then nothing.
"That’s a serious piece of meshing you’ve got there, friend. I don’t imagine you would have an extra length or two of line, would you?" searching his pockets. "Not for nothing, of course. I’d pay you for it," he says, and he produces a gold clip of bills. Fanning it out, he pulls two green notes and then pockets the rest. "This ought to be more than generous."
The man on the canoe stares dully at the man in white.
"No," he says, waving a slow hand. "No money."
He reaches around in the shadow and pulls out a loosely raveled weed of clear line.
"Here," he motions. "Here. No money."
"Are you sure?" the traveler says. "It’s nothing really."
"No. Is okay." He spools off a length and cuts it free. "Is okay. No money."
"Thank you much, friend."
"Si."
The traveler threads the line through the eyes of his rod and winds the reel. The pickup ticks and spins slowly like the neck of a wobbling steel top, and he watches the thread feed. Out on the water, a staggered school of dark bodies roll up in the spun-glass curl of a wave and then vanish below the mounting crest. Closer in, the wave leans and crashes white. Then again, the shifting, shapeless dark appears in the depths, twirling for a moment just below the surface, then diving like a child beneath the swell of the tide. The wave breaks and the traveler catches his line just before it slips through the last eye. With a quick knot, he affixes a pounded-tin minnow at the end of the rod. The lure dangles for a moment and twists in the breeze like the ball of a wind-chime, the sunlight throwing off of it in tiny racing arcs.
"There," the man in white says with a tired satisfaction. "Better."
Beneath the break, the dark swells up and sinks back. The traveler looks in time to see the green-black shapes go under.
"Good damn," he says, as the man from Teacapan spreads his net out on the ground. "Did you see those fish?"
The man on the ground squints up at the traveler and the sun, then out at the ocean. The dark rises and falls.
"Dead Man’s Fingers," the man from Teacapan says.
"What?"
"Seagrass," wiping a backhand across his brow. "Is called Dead Man’s Fingers."
He sits up.
"In the storm, the tall waves, these boats take on water," he says, tapping on the hull of his canoe, "not so good. Just solid, you know. Can pull down pretty fast beneath the wave. Drift too. Sometimes the boats, they no come back up," he buoys his hand. "Here is bad, you know. Out there."
"By those boats?"
"No, closer," he points. " Reefs come up beneath, you know. Is good for fish but bad for fishermen."
"Right," the traveler says, watching the dark of the waves.

(etc.)

22.27.00.06.20.07

2007-06-22T12:34:00.000-06:00

I've been feeling especially uninspired lately, so I wrote a poem---bullshit, I know.

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Tonight a man I do not know
told me to look at the sky
to watch the station and the shuttle
pass slowly and quietly by
the white summer moon.

I followed his finger and tried
to see what I thought were men
in the stars, but all I espied
were two water bugs gliding
across a black lagoon.

They skimmed along the surface,
taking time to pass, and I
wondered if the heavens had sunk
or if the earth began to fly,
its furnishings strewn

against the dark glass of space.
When soon those peopled stars, those high
dreams of our limited sight,
submerged themselves in the watery sky,
their gravity unhewn,

and then the bugs faded like sparklers die,
cooling and falling on the fourth of July.

The Seated Scribe

2007-04-25T11:50:00.000-06:00

The old man sits in an obdurate leather armchair. His skin is grey, his beard is grey, the hair atop his unblemished head is white. Very patiently and very deliberately he writes through the pages of a book, crossing and correcting until the nib of his pen becomes vulgar and dull, ephemerally satisfied. High and behind him, an inaccessible casement window casts its attenuated glare upon his desktop, and soon lamplight replaces dusk. Somewhere in the steep hours of the night, the old man trains his limpid eyes on a passage in the text: and there came, during that irascible misadventure, no cause for recoil. He produces a fresh nib from the drawer and impresses the same line, retracing it over and again in varied and impassioned script, until nothing of meaning or consequence can be lifted from the ink. Somewhere in the small hours of the morning, the old man slips briefly into a dark and troubled sleep, only to awaken with the lingering twilight; the pen, already in his hand.
The book in which he writes has no formal name. That is to say, the text is not conscribed by any one title or term. Some have called the book Longing, others have known it as L’ Appetito, still others, Forbearance. The old man believes in part to have once referred to the text fondly as Home, and later more keenly and bitterly as Aerugo; though, he cannot be certain of either, because many conceivable, cureless names preceded their delivery, and many more persisted, and still persist, after their realization. He can only be certain that the text has had a name, and that by some brevitous discovery it will have one again. There are X pages in the book. The number of pages keeps with the number of years in the old man’s mind, of which he has never taken count. Were he to tally them all, the summation of his efforts would be a number irreducible by division, both continuous and naught; for each page turns into the next, and when one page rescinds yet another page unfolds, and with it the records of him continue. Paradoxically, he is both conscious of and eluded by the unenduring devices at work in the book. He has charmed them into being. He has forgotten their spell. By his hand alone, the letters and lines have been lifted from the soil, carved and regarded with devout ambition, then buried once more beneath fathoms of similarly designed passages. Like fragments from a heatless fire, the lines of the text have been fortuitously recovered and recommitted by the old man, his attention never failing to impress upon them something foreign, something of the present. Thus at any moment, in any furrow of the text, even the smallest word may bear no semblance to its antecedent self. At one time, the old man believed there to be a linearity to the progression of the book, but as the text has been transcribed and rewritten, lapsed and remembered, performed, its meaning and direction have changed, its point of revolution, reversed. The aggregate of the pages is now a dim and porous cage of the old man’s construction, for which there is no sliding latch to open, nor an interstice wide enough to permit his reentry or even his rediscovery of what has been bound up inside.
Through diligence, the old man has come to witness a great many realities live and die within the pages of the book. With his pen, he has been the rector of silent victories and sentient awakenings. He has stood amid the ribbed vaults of a rayonnant cathedral, hung upside down over green waters from the branches of a kapok tree, floated in the eyes of a lover. He has swept dust from checkered floors and felt the breeze of winter breath suddenly in July. He has heard singing in the night, reached out and held only the darkness. He has fallen infinitely through the vestibules of time and space, dragging his heels in the air and whistling. He has smelled weeds and the deracinated roots of hyacinths, dined in the company of strangers. On his back, he has conquered the highest plateaus of the sky, sustained himself on rainwater, and known himself to be a god. He has forgotten days to dreaming. He has applied himself to the study of the natural sciences and realized the impetus of creation. He has fired a rifle into the air and pulled the defeated slug from a hole in the ground. He has known the tenor of the long arc of friendship and the brief, perfidious arc of passion. He has swallowed loss, gazed upon ruined, frescoed walls, and known the infinitesimal consequence of his misfortune, the value of his suffering. He has consumed corners of the world to which he has never been, climbed apogeal heights he has never seen, and held fast to a myriad of memories and self-truths that have never existed. The old man has known all of these things. He has known them to be the fantastic shadows of his irrecoverable past. They are the vestiges of his home, the rust of copper, and he has directed each one of them into being.
The realities of the book, like those of the old man, are axiomatic; their practice, based in a universal truth. Namely that the myth and the word are indivisible: neither can exist alone, and each creates the other. The old man’s history has given rise to the book, and in turn the book has initiated his history. It is by this truth that the old man has been able to permit the evolution of the text, and with it the dissemination of his past. Over time, the innumerable symbols of his memory have transubstantiated and evanesced below the stoke of his pen. They have suffered the muted crimes of the mind. Through his sustained reimaginings, he has come to lose, little by little, the features of an unalloyed past. People and places, moments, have spread out across the limitless enclaves of the book. They have lost touch with themselves, evolved in seclusion. Every attempt the old man has made to recapture some recess of the text has served only to reshape it, the mien of one event replacing the cast of another, wholly different yet no less true than the first. Unwittingly, he has altered the material and spiritual realities of his life beyond repair. He has suffered an infinite loss.
However, the old man has not been unaware of this fact. Through precipitated realizations, he has come to know something of his great failing. He has come to witness the realities of the corporeal world and the realities of the text as stark and incongruous. He has been unable to align the two. The old man has forgotten the walls of his room and the names of the birds in his window. He has lost sight of the moon, the ever-present smell of juniper, the cool sensation of his knees against the plain of his desk. He has become ignorant of the grey dust growing thick around the base of his lamp. He has forgotten the anatomy and function of his own tongue, the expulsion of breath from his deflated chest. He has become alien to the dull, rolling pains of hunger. He is unable to recall the impression of being awake. He cannot remember the word for pen, nor the word for change or time. He cannot name his want, the anger that he feels against what has been taken from him. He cannot define his privation of self. Though it is not that the old man fails to perceive these things. Quite the opposite. In his soul, he is able to sense the void of a life lost. He is able to roll the pen in his hand, recognize the desk at his elbows and the walls crowded in around him, experience the movement of his heart. He knows that he is aging, but he cannot articulate this concept. He cannot pronounce the world around him because all of these perceptions, and countless others, are not represented within the pages of the book. They have been locked away. Fleetingly, the old man has searched the text for some outline to his immediate experience, some codification of his reality. But all he has arrived at is a cyclical configuration of episodic impressions, wholly dissimilar and removed from those that he believes to be real. He has come to doubt the truth of the book. He has come to question the validity of its many corrugated and fantastic realities. He has come into the habit of removing page after page of his theoretical past, crossing and countermanding that which he does not remember, that which he does not believe. Gradually, he has come to lose both his true history and the speculative history expounded upon within the text. He has come to a pristine reduction. He has come to the first line of the book: I was born. He has come to doubt even that.

The Green Room

2007-03-12T15:30:00.000-06:00

She comes into the green room at one in the afternoon balancing a tray in her left hand stacked with two china saucers and two china teacups and one small blue china teapot and she sets the tray down in the middle of the room before drawing the shade.
"Why do that?" the blonde-haired child asks as he pokes around the soil of a large, low-hanging rhododendron pot with a branch he has broken from the same dwarf tree. "The sun is so very white and long."
"Because, Simon, this room is green," she says as she pours out the steaming tea. "These plants would brown and wilt if I left them out in the sunlight for too long a time."
"No, that’s not right."
"Actually," she sips carefully, "The sun can hurt these plants as much as it helps them."
"But then how did these plants live before you came along to draw down the shade for them?"
"Well."
"They had to be outside."
"Well, they’re from another part of the world. A part where the sun doesn’t shine so very white and long."
"Oh," the child says and he snaps the twig between his pale hands. "May I have some tea?"
"Yes, certainly. Sugar?"
"Five spoons."
She sifts out five spoons.
"That’s too much for a boy your age."
"No. It isn’t," Simon says as he drags the old mauve armchair around to face the shaded window. Its varnished wooden feet moan against the varnished wooden floor.
"You know, when I was young, we weren’t allowed more than two," handing him his saucer. "Usually we took one or none. That’s how our parents drank it. Strong black tea is more rich and better for the body."
"It’s not the body that concerns me."
"Well, it stimulates the mind as well."
Simon looks down through the slant blinds on the window and out into the yard across the street where the grass is clipped and brown and the trees are tall and brown and the house is grey and still.
"It’s not right of you to keep these plants in here," he says. "They’re shrinking at the roots and they’ll never grow up."
"But they’d die if I didn’t."
"So what," he says and pauses to consider.
"It’s better to live and die tall and brown than to hide and be small and green."
Mrs. Basu thinks about this for a time and sips her tea and Simon looks away through the window. The tilted shadows from the blinds and the sun spill in across the green walls and across the middle of the room where they settle upon her bare forearms and lap. The white light lingers long over her skin and it feels very sharp. Mrs. Basu tries to rub the heat away but stops and quietly decides then that Simon is absolutely right, but that she would never tell him this. Her plants are healthy, perfectly healthy.

Anniversary

2007-03-12T15:26:00.000-06:00

It is eleven o’clock and Bride’s dress is torn and she knows that if she does not mend the shoulder tonight she will be unable to do so in the morning. She will be unable to wear the garment ever again and the sight of it on her sewing chair, frayed and decumbent, will only depress her. It will remind her, when she would like nothing better than to entirely forget the consummation of this tear and go about pretending that the sleeve had not been pulled from the shoulder. Better now to patch and stitch at night before the whole dress unravels; a heap of loose thread will never do. Things seem so utterly irreparable in the light of day.
Groom snores and the chop of his snore sounds as though he is choking on his soft palate. It is a girding and returnless sound and it fills each part of the bedroom without prejudice. If the noise were to give out, Bride will know that either Groom is buoying infirmly between sleep and cognition, or that his breathing has stopped completely. She does not consider former or latter and hopes instead for the droning to continue on through the night and most of the day and that when he finally surfaces he will be resplendent and new.
Bride wonders if Groom dreams.
As she works the dress down over her mid-section, Bride watches herself in the mirror hanging on the door of her chiffonier. The light is thin but there enough, coming naked from a streetlight through the blinds. When she peels the fabric back along the widest part of her hip, she stops. She sees. Floating in the airless silver circle of the mirror, a plainness; the walls and the windows bending in and a face as muted as her breath. The eyes are dark spangles, unrecognizable, and she cannot move them into something familiar. She blinks and they do not change, arresting her with the feeling of untried discovery. They are deeper than her other two dimensions and where they bottom out she does not know. The back of the room. The back of her mind. The bed. The. Bride rakes wispy fingers through her tired hair, folding it behind her ears and smoothing it above her shoulders. Bits of it pull loose, and in the dim glow of the streetlight the wiry strands are the same tincture as her black, colorless eyes. Bride draws the hairs out and wonders where the years have gone and mutters under her breath, Mercy.
She steps free and the dress rumples quickly and quietly to the floor. Bride flicks on a small brassy light and clambers through the top drawer of her chiffonier until she finds the proper thread and needle. Groom rolls onto his back and snores with more force. From her sewing chair, Bride looks over her lap and over the room and into his mouth as it gapes and maws before she puts a basting stitch to the fabric. It is cooling fast, the warmth from her body no longer working to preserve it, and before long the dress will be a vague, heatless nap to her hands. Bride works nimbly now, but the lavender and white oleander pattern of the cloth makes the process slow going and soon she loses focus. As she bobs the needle through the ragged shoulder, Bride does not think about the long and circular motion that she weaves. She does not yet realize that the seam will not hold. All she can see is her husband’s breath moving in and out, in and out, and when she closes her eyes she hears his stale, fetid voice whisper, I do, I really do, and then him coming down heavy upon her.

November Smoke

2007-02-14T23:26:00.000-07:00

First draft of a story I wrote for a workshop

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November Smoke

In the back yard a fire burned. A quick burn of dead, matted leaves to make mothers nervous, small children delight, and white-bristled gentlemen softly reflect. On what, one could assume either the glint of a memory or the nature of an ember. Both would suffice and sustain for the moment. Under and around this sudden fire the frozen ground softened and the crystalline blades of grass, hastily encapsulated by a mid-November frost, slipped free from their watery prison. Those around the blaze tossed foliage by the handful and a dry heat burst headlong from the pile of leaves, only to be forced into retreat by the cold. It was a trifling, evasive warmth. At each sprinkling of umbrage the flames leapt skyward, lapping at the heel of a thick whorl of smoke and carrying off the dizzy shards of leaf that flitted like brilliant moths before extinguishing in the cool evening air. The children jumped and the mothers distressed.
Mr. Lomen could see none of this. From his perch on the high truss, he could make out only a thin column of smoke, substantial here, drawn out there, rising slowly at an angle with the wind. To those unfamiliar it would have seemed nothing more than a silver ply of yarn, fraying against the fabric of a darkening sky; a curious strand of cloud, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. Mr. Lomen, however, would not be so mislead. He knew what this was. Even from a distance he could smell the dry leaves, taste the bitter ash. It was the winter pyre, one of many that would be burning across the region to clear the fields and mark Autumn’s passing. First frost had finally settled upon the valley.
Reasons. Someone had asked for reasons.
Mr. Lomen gripped up on a girder and scanned the hilly horizon, making a conscious effort to ignore the shifting of tired legs and intermittent conversation at his back. Surely the rabble would have thinned by now; it was, after all, the dinner hour. In his time on the truss, Mr. Lomen had felt the luminance of spectacle rise as the people gathered and then fade when they remained. In the space of an hour they had made their presence felt, and now their persistence, their quiet, lingered like hot annoyance on the back of his neck. What business was it of theirs, a considering man? Had these people no families or warm homes in which to retire? Certainly they did, he thought. Yet they came in spite of their pleasant trappings, drawn on by the lure of spectacle like a parade, each man and woman preoccupied with the same enduring thought: someone is on the bridge. What they so anxiously waited for Mr. Lomen could not be certain of, but he guessed it to be one of two outcomes: down or off. One of two diametrical opposites that for the last few hours had been pulling on each other, grating across the fulcrum of a rust laden iron truss. Down or off. And while he hoped that the people willed the former, in his heart Mr. Lomen knew human nature to be far less forgiving; off drew the crowds, off made the papers.
Presently he glanced over his shoulder. A stranger clothed in the thick blue and grey wools of the local constabulary stood between Mr. Lomen and the crowd. In caution, the stranger raised his eyebrows and his hands, which had become raw from prolonged exposure to the air. This was the man who moments ago, after an extended consultation with his book of procedures, asked Mr. Lomen for a reason, reasons. A well-intentioned, though poorly exacted pursuit of dialogue. Yet, bumbling as they were, the question and the red-cheeked stranger stirred in Mr. Lomen the embers of thought that had gone dormant during his long vigil on the truss: reasons, justifications, troubles.
By the accounts weighted and deemed worthy, Mr. Lomen had no reason at all to find himself in his present company and situation. There were no chinks or breaches to be found in his well-being; nothing to speak of really. He did not ail from weak joints or an arhythmic heart. Both his vision and hearing were sound. He had never been troubled by money, in acquisition or retention. In love, he had never suffered so great a besieging as could not be mortared and masoned to its original strength. He did not smoke. Only rarely did he take drink. No troubles of any concern to the banker, the butcher, or the doctor. No, what troubled Mr. Lomen stood behind the whitewashed battlements and dry-cleaned linens. It swirled in the window wells of respectable living, falling quiet from time to time but never spending itself before precipitating a fine layer of grit on the once clear pane of glass. What troubled Mr. Lomen was the bridge itself. The thought of the bridge and the small child that he had seen step from it.
Precisely how these things came to calcify themselves in his mind was no mystery. He had seen the child a few days prior and time had not yet degraded her image. Though, he did not see her there, not on that exact iron bridge. Rather, he saw her on a grassy commons, from a park bench, from the shade where he so often sat to consider.
Reasons.
It was late afternoon and all around Mr. Lomen the world was turning to glass. Shadows from the forest began to grow long and fan out across the landscape, reclaiming, if only for a short while, their dominance over the fields in which they once stood. The taut shafts of light that clung to the tips of the ash trees were close to collapse, and they would very soon snap and fall back to the sun; already there were great clefts in the corners of the sky. Gradually, the air began to crack. Mr. Lomen allowed this to happen. The last fine rays of daylight, he believed, were nature’s best tool for whetting the mind. Clarifying, he thought. Crystal, he thought. But that was all, nothing more; these were his only thoughts. Neither the black branches that swayed above him; nor the cold, climbing through his coat; nor the echoed yelping of the dog who sniffed anxiously about the base of a sycamore; nor the tang of duff and dead leaves; nor the sound of his own tired pulse, pushing languidly across his eardrums: only crystal, only clear. How empty Mr. Lomen would have felt, had he been aware of this. But for a time he was not. And so Mr. Lomen sat vacantly, meditating on nothing at all, and drifted out above the commons, where everything was crystal and clear.
However, one cannot escape the wanderings of the mind indefinitely; a knee will jerk, a voice will call out, a thought will crest the quiet surface. Mr. Lomen knew this of course, yet the return of his senses came none-the-less as disturbing and inelegant, and he found that he had been staring off into space rather dully. As he clenched his teeth and shifted his seat in an effort of self-appraisal, Mr. Lomen felt unusually apparent. This awareness was redoubled when he noticed that the space in which he had been staring was occupied by three small children, and that these children, though now contentedly playing beneath a rutted swingset, had probably seen him stare.
The idea of his leering made Mr. Lomen shift once more. If he had bothered them, he thought, they showed little sign of it.
In fact, the children showed little sign of anything. Physically, they were quite ambiguous. Cherubic and freckle-cheeked, with bright shocks of coarse-cut red hair. Only after much consideration did Mr. Lomen place them as girls, though their navy overalls were faded around the knee and their tartan-fringed jackets mudded along the sleeve. From where this deterioration came, he could only guess, for their play, if it could be called such, would have been of complete imagination. Since he had been watching them, the girls had scarcely moved. They sat in a lazy semicircle, their lower halves splayed haphazardly as if each one of them had been dropped to the ground like a rag doll, which only after a period of settling came to assume its current posture. In an occasional and hushed manner, the girls would exchange looks and low voices. What was said, Mr. Lomen imagined to keep with boys and cakes and rings, but even these things could not hold the girls’ attention very long, and quite abruptly they would descend into silence. Only the rise and fall of the breeze, which carried airward the fine tendrils of their hair, gave the continued impression of subsistence to the three children. It seemed to Mr. Lomen as though they belonged to noone.
But this could not be, such peaceable and unassuming youth. It would not be fair. They were so unconfined; their stillness, so natural. Serene, he thought. Surreal, he thought. It made Mr. Lomen feel heavy, knowing that at any moment the children might suddenly become active and shake away their calm, and that when this happened he would remain pacified, and his own stillness would sit untouched. That for some reason beyond his control they could be moved, but he could not.
These were cold realizations. So cold, indeed, that when Mr. Lomen pulled them back into himself, they made distant the inner workings of his chest. His blood slowed, his lungs became short, and as he worked these thoughts down, wore them to slim shavings of ice, he saw that the children were now completely aware of him. One of the girls was smiling softly in his direction. How incredibly affectionate and disarming this gesture was, for the warmth of it settled upon Mr. Lomen with the conciseness of a spark, which fades quickly after it is felt. The other two girls craned their necks to follow the path of the smile. These two faces, unlike the first, were white and inexpressive. Empty. Though, there was nothing of calculation to their blankness, nothing of indignity. Rather, they looked on Mr. Lomen frankly, as though their minds had no preformed response for dealing with strange old men in parks. It was with this same frankness then that all three girls rose to their feet, gathered up their knapsacks, brushed the twisted sheaths of grass from their overalls, and seated themselves on the swingset.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Legs in, legs out. Back and forth. And Mr. Lomen could breath once more.
From this swingset, there ran a long, downtrodden chain of slate stepping stones that had been designed to join with the gravel path of the park in the most roundabout of ways. The stones made a great swooping arc that, bending by gradual degrees, came toward and then ran alongside the gravel walk, finally merging with it after spending some fifty or sixty slabs of slate. Many seasons and many thousands of tiny, spirited feet had taken their toll on the stones. Some flaked, others sprouted shoots of grass, still others had vanished completely, having been either ground to dust or physically displaced. The overall impression was that of a crescent moon balanced artificially on its tail, a connect-the-dots that had yellowed and faded with age.
As the sun smothered under thick iron clouds, the children made their way to the nose of this worn-out, stone moon. The two girls with hollow faces approached mouth to ear, and the smaller, more larking girl fluttered at a close distance behind them. This one, Mr. Lomen decided, was the younger sister. No doubt that the distance she maintained had been placed upon her, ingrained by years of hair twisting, nose flicking, and name calling to the point of tears, and then the tears, and then her sisters playing nice. Though it seemed she still maintained a resiliency toward the arrangement. This too would fade, Mr. Lomen thought. Long is the road, Mr. Lomen thought. And sure enough, when the two girls reached the first stone slab, they removed their knapsacks and tossed them at the feet of the smaller girl. Almost compulsorily, she began to pick them up, looping one on each arm and struggling to keep their many straps from dragging on the ground, as her sisters hopped away. The new game brought a sudden color and liveliness to their faces. From one broken stepping stone to the next, they exacted their leaps, making clumsy calculations so as not to land on the grass. To land on the grass would have been to fail. Mr. Lomen learned this when one of the two girls over shot her mark, hollered, and then, defeated, began again from the first slab.
Their gaiety faded only when the smaller girl followed them out onto the slate. At this, they did not revert to their look of blank indifference, but instead turned sour, downcast eyes upon her. Mr. Lomen knew what such looks meant, how such undue bitterness felt; the younger sister could only watch. She had been relegated to the role of a dumb beast, lapidated into obedience. Her reward was inactivity.
Yet, the verbal crating of her sisters proved only so strong as the propinquity which it maintained, and when the two older girls had bounded halfway across the moon the smaller girl stepped out. Not onto the stone, however, but instead upon one of her sisters’ knapsack. She then placed and stood upon the next, taking great care to avoid the grass. For a moment, the girl paused at the end of her short progress and surveyed the ground she had just covered. From there she turned, lifted up the first knapsack, tossed it a small distance it in front of the second, and took her third step. It was in this way that she fashioned her own two-piece span across the grass. Measure by measure, she moved away from the swingset, away from her sisters, away from the slate moon. She was some twenty steps out before the others realized what was happening. Even then, they would only shout to her, call to her with sugar forced into their words and give her reasons as to why she should come back. Though this was only a secondary concern; they would not abandon their game.
The small girl seemed to know this, and it soon became clear to Mr. Lomen that the she would not ever turn around. That she would continue across the commons and through the treeline and through the night, carried off upon her own unfolding trail. That she would not bend to her sisters’ requisitions. That in doing so she would, for a transeunt moment, unburden herself. If only she could stay above the grass. If only. The other girls realized this as well. But by the time they let go of their game and took off running through the park, their sister had already gone, eclipsed in the distance by a forest of ash. With an urgency as much out of fear as out of concern, they pitched into the woods after her, and Mr. Lomen was left alone with nothing to regard but an empty field at dusk. And a moon that would not set.
Reasons. Someone had asked for reasons.
Behind Mr. Lomen the faces in the crowd had grown hard. They were strange, disinterested faces, for which he held no significance. Weary eyes, sagging mouths, and running noses, that sniffed impatiently, that thought they smelled something in the air: fire, or failure, or frozen blood. It would not be long before they would encircle Mr. Lomen and, following the lead of the policeman, begin baying at him out of frustration; the gall had already worked its way into their hungry throats. Here was a man in need of communion. Though, their noses had led them mostly astray, for in Mr. Lomen they would find nothing of frost or frailty, only flame. Nothing they might do could bend him. These people would not know this, however, for in their numbers they felt immune and in control. How terribly unaware each and every one of them was. How complacent, Mr. Lomen thought. But, they were on the bridge too, he said to himself. Stop. Go. Stay off the grass. They were all on the bridge, and he was slowly rising above. The policeman was the first to see this and called out to him. Then the crowd broke into an uneasy gossip as Mr. Lomen stepped from the truss and rushed past. A number of the women were round and stunned that a man might do such a thing, covering their mouths and whispering, how terrible, a lost soul. The men were graved with a sense of rage and mockery; they believed their name would be tarnished with his. Some cursed him, others reached out to him, but Mr. Lomen shook all of this off. He would not hear it. He was already some twenty steps out and floating past the moon, rising up out of an empty field and curling like November smoke.
And everything was crystal and clear.

Through the Darkness, Kansas City Jazz

2006-12-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

This is a creative, personalized research project. I like it--hence it is here. I think I might expand it with a deeper analysis and pepper the thing with photos, format it like a small coffeetable book--a small kickass coffeetable book. I've omitted works cited for this entry.
-----Learn Something.

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Through the Darkness, Kansas City Jazz

"Kansas City [. . .] has elements in common with histories of other notable artistic communities. [. . .] Some twentieth-century examples of these communities and their best recognized arts are: New Orleans in the teens, also for jazz; Paris in the twenties for literature; New York in the 1940s and 1950s for visual arts; and London and San Francisco in the 1960s for rock music." (Pearson, Goin’ to Kansas City xviii)

In the summer of 2006, I was in Kansas City for a concert at the Starlight Theater. I had never been to Kansas City before, though having driven through Kansas several times I had developed relatively low expectations for the city; expectations springing from the cowish monotony of the state itself. I was surprised then, despite my erroneous prejudgment, to discover that KC had high-rises, civic centers, and all the amenities that a city should have. But more surprising than this was a discovery I made while burning a few extra hours before curtain at the Starlight. While wandering through the streets, I and a few good friends of mine stumbled across the American Jazz Museum on 18th Street. Yes, culture, it seemed, had found its way into Kansas City along with the high-rises.
But a jazz museum in KC, a city quite literally in the middle of the country, as far removed from the cultural coasts as possible? As far as I was concerned, this building had no business being anywhere other than New York or New Orleans. I had to make sense of this. And so, led by curiosity and spare time, I passed through its doors, where inside I fell upon a series of exhibits that illuminated Kansas City as a former mecca of the jazz scene. There were names that I knew and recognized: Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker. These jazz masters were musicians who I associated with NYC, the place where they gained their broadest fame. I was stunned then to learn that these men, along with scores of others, came to musical fruition in the streets of Kansas City during the 1930s. My self-purported acumen for jazz was shattered.
However, I was slightly redeemed by my friends’ similar ignorance. We had never heard of the Kansas City jazz scene. But were we the only ones who had missed the train?
The question had been rolling over in the back of my mind for several months, forgone but not forgotten, before I thought to seek out an answer. We couldn’t be the only ones ignorant of this piece of musical history. And so I conducted a survey, rather informal, of a cross-section of my peers. In the survey I asked my subjects to name three American cities associated with jazz. My hope was that their first two answers would allow for the big players of New Orleans and New York City, and that the third city might reveal something more removed from the beaten path, something like Kansas City perhaps. Of the thirty people I questioned – I realize that the number is scant, but I could assume the results would be roughly the same with a larger pool – no one deviated from New York City and New Orleans. For the third city named the results are as follows: Chicago, 19 times; San Francisco, 4 times; Los Angeles, 3 times; Memphis, 2 times; unable to named a third city, 1 time; Kansas City, 1 time. (Iredale)
The results of my informal survey solidified my belief that I and my friends were not the only ones to overlook Kansas City as having an association with jazz. The thirty people I questioned also revealed a general knowledge of the jazz world, as nearly two-thirds of them settled upon Chicago, a reputable jazz city, as their third choice. I have to wonder what the results may have been should I have asked for four American cities associated with jazz. Might all of the people who said Chicago for their third choice have then chosen Kansas City as their fourth? But, speculation aside, the fact that of those thirty people, who on the whole seemed to possess a general knowledge of the jazz world, only one of them said Kansas City, lends itself to my point and question. Namely: why did Kansas City Jazz slide under the radar? Where did it come from and where did it go? What happened in Kansas City?

Love that Swing

Kansas City’s unique style of jazz developed from a great number of musical influences, due largely to its geographic location. Famed jazz commentator Ken Burns explains the centrality of Kansas City as having appeal to every traveling musician "between Chicago and Denver, Galveston and Minneapolis"(Burns). Musicians were arriving from every territory of the middle of the US, bringing blues from Texas and Arkansas, Dixieland from New Orleans, and integrating it into the traditional style of ragtime, which was native to Missouri.
These three distinct styles, blues, Dixieland jazz, and ragtime, came together at the crossroads of Kansas City to create a wholly unique style of music that began to emerge in the late 1920s. Ragtime, a fast paced, straightforward piano driven music lent its background of intricate melodies and "hot" syncopations to the mix. The blues offered a strong 4/4 rhythm and a twelve or sixteen bar backbone for soloists to work over. And the New Orleans influence, coming up by way of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, peppered the blend with a movement towards improvisation. The end result was the fast swinging, rhythmically driven, improvisational commodity of KC jazz (Pearson, "Political" 185).
Though, the style of improvisation prevalent in KC jazz of the late 1920s and early 1930s is not what we would think of as improvisation in the modern jazz sense. These musicians were not as freewheeling and avant-garde as a Miles Davis of the early 1950s. KC improvisation was much more structured, as the blues element would suggest. "What we hear in Kansas City jazz," Dr. Martin Williams of Oxford suggests, "is a disciplined dance music whose strengths lie in its energy, its ensemble verve – in that fine paradox between power and relaxation"(21). I believe this ensemble verve refers to the structure and size of the KC jazz band, most of which were between eight and fourteen musicians in number. To accommodate for the sheer bulk of instruments, Kansas City musicians developed the style of "riffing." Essentially, this was the creation of a brief, repetitive passage by one musician, which would then be picked up by others, and used as a harmonic backbone over which soloists could rip. Renowned KC jazz scholar Nathan W. Pearson explains:
"Setting riffs (creating the riff structure), building new compositions through riff-based improvisation, and using the base of swinging riffs for extended solos were all part of a musical ethos and were a splendidly effective way to blend dance music with improvisational jazz" (Goin to Kansas City 114).
"Riffing," with its endless supply of combinations, gave Kansas City jazz a real communal feel. Musicians would create continuing variations of a certain riff, while trading solos, and jam into the small hours of the morning. Jazz pianist Sammy Price recollects the atmosphere: "I remember once [. . .] I came by a session at about ten o’clock and then went home to clean up [. . .] I came back a little after one o’clock and they were still playing the same song" (qtd. Williams 23). This exuberance for creation, coupled with "hot" tempos and rhythms and the big band atmosphere developed Kansas City jazz into the premiere dance music of the late 1920s and early 1930s: swing jazz.
But, simply resting at a geographic crossroads was not the only factor in the development of KC jazz. The middle of the country could be the middle of nowhere if there weren’t some attraction for citizens, and more importantly musicians, to settle there. Above all else, the thing which drew musicians to Kansas City was the uncommon level of prosperity and vice that flourished there during the late stages of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression. These good times were made possible by political kingpin "Boss Tom" Pendergast (Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The powerful and corrupt political machine of Pendergast had held dominance in Kansas City as early as the mid-teens. By the early-twenties, Tom had decanted the practice of crooked elections, and a public generosity to please even the smallest man, to a science. With prohibition keeping the American mouth dry and desirous, Pendergast found it best to aligned himself with the bootleggers of the day, in return for kickbacks of course. The streets of Kansas City were flooded with booze, and with the bureaucracy letting things slide the city gradually became a magnet for all manner of vice. Underworld operated nightclubs and gambling dens sprang up, their numbers reaching in the range of the hundreds, and by the end of the 1920s, around the time of the Market crash, Kansas City had become a wide open town: the Paris of the Plains (Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12).
As the Depression began to take hold around 1930, and the country floundered in economic turmoil, Kansas City with its booming, though illegal, flow of commerce shone like a beacon in middle America. Musicians who had been traveling throughout the heartland of the county during the 1920s now found work hard to come by in the wake of the Depression. Nathan W. Pearson explains: "With massive unemployment and lower standards of living for most Americans, few were comfortable paying [. . .] for an evening of dancing. [. . .] Musicians quickly realized that Kansas City was somehow immune from much of this" (Goin’ to Kansas City 77). KC offered a safe haven for these musicians because it operated in its own economic bubble. People had alcohol to drink, money to spend, and, hang it all, they wanted to dance.
Never before, and possibly never again, had a town been so primed for a musical explosion. With an abundance of nightclubs and performance venues available to them, and with organized crime looking out for them–because what’s good for the musicians is good for the clubs is good for the men in charge–the Kansas City jazz musicians had no trouble finding work and play. Pianist Mary Lou Williams, who arrived on the scene at the end of 1929, reflects on this period of affluence: "Politicians and hoodlums ran most of the nightspots, and the town was wide open for drinking, gambling, and pretty much every form of vice. Naturally, work was plentiful for musicians"(qtd. Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12). It was this wanton environment that harbored the musical chops of pianist Bennie Moten, trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page, tenor saxophonist Lester Young, and Kansas City’s most famous jazz musician, before the emergence of Charlie Parker in the late 1930s, pianist and band leader William "Count" Basie (Williams 21). All of these musicians bounced and "riffed" off of one another from the end of the 1920s to the middle of the 1930s, cultivating the KC sound and embracing a musical environment whose pinnacle and rapid decline would soon come to pass.

The Inside’s Out

With all the talent and musical energy booming in Kansas City during the first half of the 1930s, it would be a great oversight to assume that the rest of the country was ignorant of this scene. You can disguise great music with the Midwest, but eventually its echos will drift to the coasts. After all, what’s buried underground cannot stay hidden forever. KC was a cache of virtuoso musicians just waiting to spill into the national scene. Eventually, and not surprisingly, one act transcended. In 1936, the Count Basie Orchestra was discovered by Columbia Records executive John Hammond. By early 1937, the fourteen piece ensemble that carried the heart and spirit of the KC jazz scene began performing and recording in New York City (Williams 27). Basie’s steady, rolling rhythms and "hot" tempos and technical prowess were unparalleled. "Combined with several brilliant solists [. . .] all of whom were relatively unknown, Basie hit listeners and fellow musicians like a thunderbolt"(Pearson, Goin’ To Kansas City 134).
One might assume that such national exposure and reception could be nothing but a gain for KC jazz. However, Basie’s ascension to the top, more importantly his recording in New York, set the table for a period of massive migration. Hammond had found his newest musical tap in Kansas City, and was set on bringing that tap to the most lucrative market in the country. Mary Lou Williams explains Hammond’s reaction to KC jazz:
"He was knocked out by what was happening musically, because he’d never heard such a thing. And he began to get jobs for the musicians. [. . .] It was very beneficial what he did, but it left no one there that anybody could copy or to continue what was happening, because everybody that was playing left" (qtd. Pearson, Goin’ To Kansas City 184).
The prospect of "hitting it big" in NYC, as compared to simply skirting along through the dens of iniquity in Kansas City, was too palpable for most to pass up. As a result, the best of the KC swing scene hopped a bus and headed east. Their sound then gained recognition and prominence through the clubs and radio stations of New York, and little by little the KC jazz sound took on an association with its new home. Undoubtedly, this was a great benefit to the individual musicians, but it proved a bane to the city and scene that cultivated them.
A second layer lurks beneath the dissemination of Kansas City jazz, which may have been more influential than John Hammond in the musician migration. Count Basie and company were not simply going to where the money was, they were going where the work was.
Around 1937, the freewheeling, racketeering, open spirit of Kansas City began to gain negative recognition throughout the rest of the country. In response to the seedy image that developed under Tom Pendergast’s control, newly elected Missouri Gov. Lloyd Stark made it his top priority to bring this period of lawlessness to a close. In 1938 "Stark declared war on vice in Kansas City" (Haddix "Tom’s Town" 13). Through enacting a series of investigations and reforms Stark began a cleansing of the city and an ousting of Pendergast. One of the more devastating new pieces of legislature required that all bars and performance venues close their doors by 1pm. This greatly limited the business of nightclubs, and resultantly limited the amount of work available for professional musicians (Haddix, "18th & Vine"). By the end of 1938, most of the mob run clubs, gambling dens, and performance venues were shut down. Finally, in 1939 Tom Pendergast was convicted and jailed for income-tax evasion, a symptom of organized crime previously made famous by Chicago’s Al Capone (Pearson Goin to Kansas City 86).

Ain’t Nothing But a House of Cards

When Kansas City jazz began collapsing in on itself, when all the pillars that held the musical roof up either moved out or were imprisoned, a new talent emerged. A talent so genius and incomparable that, if he had chosen to do so, I believe this talent could have resuscitated the spirit of KC jazz, and drawn the music back. I’m speaking of course about saxophonist Charlie Parker.
But this talent did not, and would not, resurrect the Kansas City style, simply because his virtuosity was too great for the style to contain. You cannot bury a Charlie Parker in the works of a twelve piece ensemble. His level of skill and progressive innovation calls for a much smaller, more intimate collection of musicians, so that his music can take center stage. The rise of Charlie Parker, and the general rise of the individual talent, as opposed to the big band dynamic that flourished in KC, led jazz into its modern age. The ensemble "riffing" and steady rolling rhythms of swing jazz dissolved into the more free flowing, intellectual and uncompromising form which it is found in today. Effectually, when Charlie Parker came along, jazz stopped dancing. And when jazz stopped dancing the people stopped showing up. The broadly popular style characteristic of Kansas City in the mid 1930s was no longer the direction in which jazz was headed. The form that Parker initiated then waned in national acceptance and became relegated to a pure underground of jazz afficionados. Kansas City’s prodigal son, as it turns out, put the final board across the door of the KC jazz scene. That, along with the fall of "Boss Tom" Pendergast, the cleaning out of Kansas City’s underworld influences, and the contractual attention of Columbia Records executive John Hammond, led to the very rapid collapse of KC jazz.
However, fingers should not be pointed, and blame should not be placed. Neither Parker, nor Hammond, nor Basie, nor Pendergast should be faulted for the disappearance of Kansas City jazz, because each of these men, in their own way, wrote the history of what we call Kansas City jazz. They were all benefactors and victims of a beautiful and unrepeatable place in time. These men met on the windswept streets of Kansas City and played their cards out on the table, for all who wanted to see. It just happened that their cards piled up into the shape of a nightclub, which, for a short but glorious while, towered over the world of music. Whether they were unaware or unshaken by the infirmity of this house of cards is something only those who built it can know. Maybe they believed it would endure forever. Ultimately though, despite their sincerest wishes, the unbending prairie winds toppled Kansas City’s house of cards and carried away the individual pieces. By the end of the 1930s, the Paris of the Plains was merely a shadow of its musical past; just a ghost town of empty, echoing nightclubs.

The Addition (u)

2006-12-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

Another story in progress, abandoned until the semester ends. Purgatory. Etc.

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They started building the addition in February, while the ground was still firm and frozen. A rudimentary draft, pastelled with beige and salmon and crude unscaled evergreens, hangs on the empty wall where the new wing will one day fuse with the sluggish aseptic halls of the Nine Lakes Retirement Community. The draft is there to give residents who happen to find themselves at the farthest end of the eastern corner of the building a glimpse of the new facilities that are materializing just out of sight. It also disguises the window, which previously framed a stretch of biscuit colored cornfields, but since the foundation was laid has been boarded over to abet the construction of a new hallway. Hallways, they decided, are more valuable than corn.

Gustav Moser will tell you that he was the first resident to discover that the window had gone missing. It happened one morning, his discovery, between the small hours of four and five. Gustav had risen before the dawn to ferret through the pantries of the communal kitchen, a practice he habituated for several reasons. The tradition afforded him the greatest selection of fruits and breads, yet undisturbed by the palsied, overly discerning hands of the other residents. If he did not make this trip, choosing instead to shepherd himself with the masses, Gustav’s taste for these victuals would fail. In their morning inspection the residents would paw the food. They would crumble the breads and grope and mangle the fruits with their brutish fingers and selfish minds. The grapes often suffered the worst of it, their fine skins punctured and strewn from the headless vine. By any other regard, Gustav held his neighbors in equal esteem to himself, but their coarse behavior around fresh produce was something he could not tolerate. Grapes were, after all, Gustav’s favorite.
More importantly he enjoyed the utter emptiness of the building in the predawn. The quiet and the secrecy of his daily pantry raids made Gustav feel as a child. They reminded him of the deviousness of youth. In the fifth hour the halls were broader and the white walls seemed to soften and dissolve into a comfortable distance. Gustav floated through them. Only the occasional false step, from which he steadied himself with an outstretched hand, reminded him that they were still there; that they were still cold and arresting. When Gustav made the trek from his room to the kitchen, his slippers would shuffle across the thick latticed carpet, voicing a quiet shhhhf with each step. It was a pleasing sound. One that, during the day, could not be heard over the prying small talk and questions of the nursing staff. He made every attempt to avoid the nursing staff.

On the morning that the window disappeared, Gustav had gone about his ritual of harvesting the ripest fruit, as he would have on any other day. It was on his return from the kitchen, down to the far end of the eastern hallway that he made the discovery. Cast-iron posture inclined Gustav’s head towards the ground, but when he turned to open his door the emptiness of the concealed window became cornered in his presbyopic eyes. The soft light of winter was gone.
He approached the new wall with guarded procession, a stout woody sprig of black grapes overhanging the cup of his left hand. When he came near enough to recognize the rectangle of patchwork was a painting, Gustav stopped.
The building in the painting looked familiar. There was a lifeless permanence to it; the impassive brick walls and the off-white louvers, all thrown open to unlidded windows; the blue firs and the chlorined water features, untouched by the air; the brackish sky. Gustav adjusted himself to the left and then to the right. Each new angle revealed the same image. Gone were the fair things once framed here; the cornfields and the heavens, where stars had once shone. What advanced upon him now was a portrait of staunch architecture. He had seen this before.
Behind him a door opened, and a phlegmatic clearing of the throat came down upon the quiet of the hallway. Gustav paid this no mind.
"Morning, Gus."
The airbrushed grass. The hooded entrance.
"Moonlight getting to you too. I tell you, it creeps up in my joints. Legs are stiffer’n hell."
This painting was not art. It was too controlled. The structure, too rigidly designed to arise from the souls of men. Behind this crude sketch lingered a greater utility.
"Course I can’t say that’s what got me up. Might well have laid’n there all day if I didn’t need to use the commode."
"Mmm."
"But that’s how it is, you know. If you need to do something, then you need to do it. Lord knows I’m not one to abstain."
It was a draft, Gustav decided. A fanciful blueprint for those who wouldn’t understand the dimensions and complications of this building any other way.
"Thought I heard someone walk by my door, so I figured I’d come’n see who was out."
But a draft to what?
"You okay, Gus?"
He did not turn around, but balled and unballed his right hand rather absentmindedly.
"Well, say, I didn’t even notice. That a new painting?"
"Hmm?"
The canvas glared back at him, if it was in fact a canvas. The opacity of its many windows, like cataracted eyes, hiding behind their thin depth an unmeasurable wealth of detail.

Etc.

Lessons in Human Behavior at Nikko Tosho-gu Lounge

2006-11-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

Took that unfinished work from below to where it needed to be. Enjoy.

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Lessons in Human Behavior at Nikko Tosho-gu Lounge

"Would you have a look at what that woman is wearing?" Mirian leaned toward her sister, motioning carefully with a gloved hand. "I tell you it’s just ridiculous. A girl that pretty all dolled up like some –"
"Like some floozy," Josephine chimed in. "Like some little floozy, parading herself around for whoever wants a look."
"It’s just terrible."
"Terrible."
"You know, the poor thing’s liable to pop herself right out the top of that dress."
"Oh, that’s the least of it."
"And such fine skin too."
"Oh, fine skin yourself. I don’t see nothing but cheap snuff," Josephine fussed. "That girl’s looking to wind up in a backseat. Have herself knocked up by some smooth talking Joe Sixpack with a fast mouth and even faster –"
"Josephine!" Mirian brought her sister’s quick tongue to a pause. "Please."
Indiana watched his mother as she eyed his aunt into an unwilling repose. Visibly slighted, Josephine began picking about at the ice in her glass with a tiny plastic sword. She swizzled the drink into a tinkling circus of crystal and purple spirits, and her eyes widened with a sense of propriety as she seemed to focus on some point in the center of the tiny whirlpool.
"I only meant it’s not decent," she said as she cleared her throat. "You know that."
Mirian picked up her knife and sawed through a medallion of pork loin.
"Yes, well," she conceded, "I don’t think Indiana should hear things like that." Then pressing a mild smile across the table to him, "And I don’t think Indiana wants to hear things like that."
Indiana picked up his glass with both hands and lowered his lips to meet the straw. As he drank down the bottom of his third cola, the boy pendulumed his feet underneath the table and studied his mother.
Her eyes were warm but very tired. Faint pouches drooped themselves above her smooth dark cheeks. The skin at the corners of her mouth was creased, bringing to the surface a tiny branching system of wrinkles resultant from years of affected smiling. The green felt-hat under which she had drawn up her wiry hair was less vibrant than he had recalled; the poinsettia on it’s face seemed deflated. It appeared as if the cloth flower was wilting; as if the inanimate bud was somehow succumbing to time. Indiana wondered how long she’d owned the hat, for he could not picture her in public without it. The aged garment was her favorite hat; it was her only hat, and she wore it proudly.
"Oh, come off it Mirian," Josephine blunted. "The boy’s nearly ten years old. He’s bound to start a liking to girls soon and he should know what a decent girl is like." Turning to Indiana, "You should know what a decent girl is like."
The boy looked into his glass and watched as the last of the brown tonic disappear through his straw. He then set the empty glass alongside the others on the table.
"Shoot, Aunt Jo, I know what’s decent and what’s not."
"That’s right, he does," Mirian attested. "Because I’ve been raising him to be respectful."
"Alright, fine. Mirian, I won’t tell you how to educate your son," she said, prodding again at the ice. "Indiana, what makes a girl decent?’
"Josephine."
Indiana looked at the two sisters. Going out with them was usually fine; it meant restaurants, real food, exotic drinks. Their bickering was never before of his concern. The two women tended to absorb themselves in their own short-minded surveys, the topics of which were either above or below him. But now he was involved; his mother looked at him earnestly, his aunt, expectantly. He was being addressed and he did not know how to respond.
"Well. I don’t know," he admitted. "But I bet you I could pick one out. A decent girl, I mean."
"You’re gonna pick her on looks, huh?" Josephine whited her eyes. "Well go on."
"This is silly. Indiana, honey, you don’t have to pick out a girl," Mirian said. "And besides, judging a girl by the way she looks isn’t right."
"Mm-hm," Josephine shook her head and looked down at Indiana.
But the child did not hear this. He was already turned around in his seat, squinting through the leather and floral aromas of cigar smoke and perfume that filled the lounge, scanning the crowd for a decent girl. A decent girl.
All around him the floor was choked with two person breakaway tables, their impermanence hardly disguised by the covering of white tablecloths that freckled the otherwise darkly fashioned decor of the lounge. Seated at each of these many tables were the same two people: a man in formal blacks and a woman in spotless formal whites. The conduct at each table was the same: the woman quietly inclined her head towards the table while the man carried on garrulously, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. His deep voice pushed across wine-colored lips that did not move, but rather were frozen in a wide, gummed grin. None of the men moved their mouths as they spoke. None of the women raised their eyes in response. Boisterous, mouthless one-sided conversations and the clinking of highballs swelled throughout the room.
Indiana turned about in his seat and noticed that the sea of white tables and loud men continued out past several colonnades in every direction, carried off upon a sprawling diamond patterned carpet. There were no walls for his eyes to grasp, as the ceiling and the floor seemed to form a singularity in the distance. He could not discern any entrance or exit to the room, and suddenly Indiana forgot how he had arrived at his table.
"See, you’ve confused him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing."
Before the boy could respond he turned around once more. The women in white bowed lower, slumping towards the table. The men in black arched taller, their faces now completely stiffened as they carried on. The sound of toasts and the tinkling of flatware rose to shattering proportions. All of this began to cover over Indiana, as the undulation of the crowd grew more unmanageable to his senses. For a moment his vision spun, and he felt as though he might pass out. "Bathroom," he mumbled, as he pushed back his chair.
"What?"
"Indiana."
"Bathroom!"
He was up, his eyes shuffling with his feet across the heavily trodden carpet.
"By the entrance."
"By the entrance."
Indiana looked around. A horizon of blurred and blank faces met his. Women in all white with no eyes. Men in all black with no mouths. They had their glasses raised, not to one another but to Indiana, as if with this grey gesture they wished to recognize his place among them. Drinks were raised in every direction, and abruptly the lounge fell silent as an ancient ruin, with hundreds of statued arms vacantly saluting eternity.
In a moment of panic, Indiana reeled and turned back towards his table.
"It’s you."
His mother and aunt were gone, and a man he had never seen before was leaning against the back of his seat. This man was different from the others; he had a mouth. It was sturdy and perse lipped, and moved when he spoke. He had eyes; dark focused eyes that hung in the centers of a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Their whites flashed as he glanced quickly around the room.
"It’s you."
The man’s concentration came back to the boy. His hair was coarse and dryly notched to one side. He wore a soft, chocolate brown dinner suit and a mauve bow tie, and racked his hands uneasily as the two stared back into each other. The more Indiana studied him, the more familiar he became.
"I know you."
The two took seats opposite one another and inched their chairs towards the table.
"I know you."
Indiana gripped the fabric of his trousers.
For a time they sat quietly, surrounded by the sightless, voiceless angels of the lounge.
"Listen," the man said, as Indiana reached up to adjust his glasses. "There is no entrance."
But the child could not hear this.

-

Unfinished Work #33

2006-11-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

Page one of yet another temporarily abandoned piece . . .
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"Would you have a look at what that woman is wearing?" Mirian leaned toward her sister, motioning carefully with a gloved hand. "I tell you it’s just ridiculous; a girl that pretty all dolled up like some –"
"– Like some floozy," Josephine chimed in. "Like some little floozy, parading herself around for whoever wants a look."
"It’s just terrible."
"Terrible."
"You know, the poor thing’s liable to pop herself right out the top of that dress."
"Oh, that’s the least of it."
"And such fine skin too."
"Oh, fine skin yourself. I don’t see nothing but cheap snuff," Josephine fussed. "That girl’s looking to wind up in the back seat of some Mr. Bigshot’s wagon or knocked up over on –"
"– Josephine!" Mirian brought her sister’s quick tongue to a pause. "Please."
Indiana watched his mother as she eyed his aunt into an unwilling repose. Visibly slighted, Josephine began picking about at the ice in her glass with a tiny plastic sword. She swizzled the drink into a tinkling circus of crystal and purple spirits, and her eyes widened with a sense of propriety as she seemed to focus on some point in the center of the tiny whirlpool.
"I only meant it’s not decent," she said as she cleared her throat. "You know that."
Mirian picked up her knife and sawed through a medallion of pork loin.
"Yes, well," Mirian conceded, "I don’t think Indiana should hear things like that." Then pressing a mild smile across the table to him, "and I don’t think Indiana wants to hear things like that."
Indiana picked up his glass with both hands and lowered his lips to meet the straw. As he drank down the bottom of his third Roy Rogers, the boy pendulumed his feet underneath the table and studied his mother.
Her eyes were warm but very tired. Faint pouches drooped themselves above her smooth dark cheeks. The skin at the corners of her mouth was creased, bringing to the surface a tiny branching system of wrinkles resultant from years of affected smiling. The green felt-hat under which she had drawn up her wiry hair was less vibrant than he had recalled; the poinsettia on it’s face seemed deflated. It was as if the cloth flower was wilting; as if the inanimate bud was somehow succumbing to time. Indiana wondered how long she’d had the hat, for he could not picture her in public without it. The aged garment was her favorite hat; it was her only hat, and she wore it proudly.
"Oh, come off it Mirian," Josephine blunted. "The boy’s nearly ten years old. He’s bound to start a liking to girls soon and he should know what a decent girl is like." Turning to Indiana, "You should know what a decent girl is like."
The boy looked into his glass and watched as the last of the brown tonic disappear through his straw. He then set the empty glass alongside the others on the table.
"Shoot, Aunt Jo, I know what’s decent and what’s not."
"That’s right, he does," Mirian attested. "Because I’ve been raising him to be respectful."
"Alright, fine. Mirian, I won’t tell you how to educate your son," she said, prodding again at the ice. "Indiana, what makes a girl decent?’
"Josephine!"

Etc.

55 Fiction

2006-10-17T23:26:00.000-06:00

A story in exactly 55 words - Flash fiction - Etc.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Big Apple

Adam does not feel the woman’s eyes upon him. As he sprints towards the mercurial railcar, whose great engine begins to wind, all he can feel are the planks of the platform beneath him, rumbling like distant thunder.
The woman presses her face against the cold plexiglass, exhales, and Adam fades into the tainted distance.

"Rebop: The Savoy Remixes" - It's All in the Family

2006-10-10T19:07:00.000-06:00

Dabbling in the realm of the music critic . . .

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I first caught wind of "Rebop: The Savoy Remixes" from a good friend of mine, whose musical taste I generally hold in the highest regard. He pitched the album as 1940's jazz meets 21st century hip-hop, and swore to me that he’d never heard anything like it before. I took a selected listen from his copy of the album, with the music in one ear and him talking up his favorite tracks in the other, and believed in his interpretation of what I was hearing. Wow, I thought, jazz and hip-hop, what a novel concept. But then a few days later I gave Rebop a second, more thorough listen, and I discovered something. I discovered that while some tracks put forth a successful blend of the two genres, which did result in a new sound, a larger number of the tracks seemed painfully juxtaposed - with either hip-hop completely dominating the jazz, or the jazz and the hip-hop clashing in a battle of stylistic opposites. And then I had to sit back and wonder: What happens when hip-hop and jazz take a spin around the four-poster?
For the answer, first a short family history. The term rebop comes, appropriately, from bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos and an improvisation based on harmonic structures - harmonic structures that refrain to anchor a song. Bebop was first recorded in Newark in the 1940s, before the arts vacated New Jersey, at a little place called Savoy Records. Now, hip-hop was spawned in the Bronx in the 1970s, and relies heavily on improvisational lyrics and the sampling of previously recorded songs, that repeat or refrain behind these lyrics. Sampling is done, of course, by a DJ, who takes previously recorded material, cuts it, and splices it into a remix of the original. It would seem then that hip-hop and bebop are geographically close neighbors, and being thirty years apart the two genres might very well be second cousins.
What "Rebop" tries to do is bring these distant relatives together for a family dinner - and there are definitely some heavyweights on both sides of the table. Representing for the bebop legends are Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Curtis Fuller, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cannonball Adderley. The original recordings of these jazz greats are offered up by the powers that be at Savoy and handed off to some 21st century DJs. These spinsters include the likes of King Brit, DJ Logic, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Basement Boys, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest. Individually they cut, fade, blend and break-beat the original compositions to varying degrees of success. But why stitch these two genres together? Could these estranged relatives ever make sweet, sweet music?
Diehard fans of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis could rest easy upon hearing Quantic’s remix of "Moose the Mooche," which takes a rather minimalist approach to the composition. There are touches of the DJ in a rebuilt drum track, emphasizing the high-hat. He also takes the liberty of phrasing one of Parker’s sax sections as a refrain. But between these refrains, Quantic leaves Miles and Charlie to solo, more often than not, over the original rolling snare track. But, where Quantic makes minimalism shine, other DJs fail in their light strokes. The most notable flop would be Large Professor’s take on "Minority," by Cal Tjader. This track is nothing more than Tjader’s smooth vibraphone being assaulted by an overly bright drum track and the periodic, quick scratching of a turntable.
Then there are songs on "Rebop" that sound more like DJ compositions built from the ground up, as the bebop artist is barely noticeable. Like the minimalist approach, this overly liberal artistic approach to the original recording can have both triumphs as well as faults. One such track that succeeds in overshadowing its origins is DJ Smash’s work on Dizzy Gillespie’s "Caravan." Smash employs drum programming, new backup keys, a sitar and a guitar. Using these instruments he builds a wall of sound evocative of the Persian sands, and concocts a very danceable track. The only problem being that he uses samples of Dizzy’s horn as more of an accent than a centerpiece. If you’re looking for some straight Dizzy Gillespie, this ain’t the track - but it’s a good one none the less.
As for those DJs who took their creative liberties in the wrong direction, there are a few lowlights. Over, Under, Sideways, Down Treatment’s interpretation of "Yardbird Suite," by Herbie Mann, takes a beautiful airy piece of bebop fluting and reduces it to a videogame soundtrack with sporadic laser sounds and an overly dynamic 1980s synthesizer. Also, Boots Riley’s remix of Gillespie’s "Shaw ’Nuff" has an overly electronic techno beat to it and absolutely no sign of Dizzy at all- his horn has been replaced with the synthetic distortion of a guitar that would be lucky to find its way onto a Jefferson Starship album.
But between these highs and lows, these minimalist and liberal approaches, lies a unique middle ground - a place where the cool untamable entity that is jazz comes into a perfect union with the rigid, ass-shaking fundamentals of hip-hop. This middle ground is what "Rebop" is all about. Two tracks fall squarely in this place: Basement Boy’s adaptation of Curtis Fuller’s "Minor Vamp," and King Brit’s mix of "Lover Man," by Dizzy Gillespie ft. Sarah Vaughn.
The already cooking bass and drums of "Minor Vamp" leaves the Basement Boys little for improving in rhythm, so they add a simple drum track on the upbeat to accent. A sample of Fuller’s trombone serves as the refrain for "Vamp". In between these refrains Fuller trades solos with Lafayette Gilchrist, a modern jazz pianist recording himself into the song by the aid of the Basement Boys. Phrasing of Fuller is then thrown in overtop of the solos, creating the effect of a backup horn section. As the song winds down, leaving only the original bass, drum, and overdubbed drum track, the voices of the Basement Boys come in, urging the music on in a style reminiscent of a bebop houseman.
King Brit’s go at "Lover Man" is just plain sexy. Brit adds an ensemble cast of musicians including guitar, backbeat, upright bass, keyboard, and background vocals. Aside from the new backbeat, which gives Gillespie’s original a more consistent, driving pulse, all of the new elements blend in seamlessly - so much so that they sound like part of the original. The guitar is smooth and cascading, complementing Sarah Vaughn’s smokey, classic voice. She comes through under the soft filtered sound of a sixty years old recording, singing, "Got a moon above me, but no one to love me," with a timeless elegance, only further supported by Dizzy’s muted brass solos and fills.
"Rebop: The Savoy Remixes" takes a bold step in uniting the close relatives hip-hop and bebop. By crossbreeding these genres the album strives to unite two different classes of music afficionados, educating while entertaining them along the way. It further breaks down the already relaxing labels on musical genre. The ultimate success or failure of "Rebop" will not be known for quite some time, as the album must first work its way into the hands of all the hip-hoppers, beboppers, and musically bicurious folks of the world, like myself. But so far as I’m concerned, these musical cousins can keep rubbing up on each other; who knows, something really cool might just pop out. So while you ponder the moral dilemma that is incest, pick up a copy of "Rebop: The Savoy Remixes," share it with a friend - or a relative - and get loose. AI

(Columba Livia)

2006-09-30T21:10:00.000-06:00

Consider a bird refusing to fly.

------ awoke from the shiftless trappings of a red and dreamless sleep on the back stoop of an apartment building with no recollection of his ever having been there before. He was greeted by the tinkling sounds of rainfall, collecting in sinkholes of asphalt and playing in staccato rhythms off the tin lid of garbage container nearby. As he lay with his shoulders slumped against the coarse ruddy brick, his lower half unprotected by the eave of the building, ------ found with some dismay that his shoes were sopping and his blue jeans were already dyed black. Drawing his legs in towards his chest, ------ sat up and began rubbing their tight goose-skinned flesh through the rust in his arms and the thickness in his cold fingers.

Above him hung the cast iron skeleton of a fire escape: slatted platforms and ladders glossed with weather that, despite their intangible number of crisscrossing patterns and pathways, progressed an aerial trail of water to the very place where ------’s head now rested. Shuffling his seat, ------ brushed off the water and squinted upwards. The buildings around him rose nearly a dozen stories, affording from his vantage point in the alley only a thin swath of slate-colored sky. Its thick drooping clouds echoed in his mind with the low hung canopy of some great four-poster bed in which he believed himself to have once slept, but that he could no longer place. In regarding the dull light coming through this grey weave, ------ marked the time of day somewhere between dawn and dusk, as when in the presence of a rain hours dissolve and wash away like clumps of sand.

While looking high upon the wall of the building across from where he sat, whose brick had been sporadically stained dark with phantom drapes where a gutter failed to hold back its carriage, ------ became aware of yet another sound mingling with the cascading rhythms of the rain. It was a sound that he knew by the same effortless recognition with which he could identify his own voice; he heard the papered fluttering of a bird’s wing. Leaning his head out towards the sheeting barrier of the open alley, so close as to feel a steady mist, ------ peered around the faded luster of a percussive garbage container to where the trough of his backstreet became conjunct with a lazy avenue. There he saw, no more than twenty feet away, though safely recessed from the scrutinies of the main road, a grounded pigeon with wing raised, and a child with eyes trained upon the pigeon.

The bird, with one wing outstretched, shook dew from its appendage and, trembling its small mass, agitated its many purple-oil feathers until they billowed to a double girth. The pigeon then folded the wing into its downy exterior and was still. The child, a boy of the age cresting upon adolescence, knelt a mere arm’s length from where the bird stood, and was equally as still while he studied the pigeon with curious, unflinching eyes. He was dressed mainly by the waxy blue cape of a rain slicker that crumpled its baggy length into dark folds around his small body. From under this, ------ could see that the boy was wearing white pleated trousers and a pair of scuffed brown penny-loafers, minus the pennies. Considering this, and the appearance of a faded part yet maintaining itself in the child’s soaking blonde hair, ------ wondered if it was not in fact Sunday.

Moved by a sort of awe and puzzled amusement at the boy, the bird, and their close communion, as well as his feeling of broken privacy, ------ thought it better to make his presence known than to conversely have his presence discovered.

"What’ve you got there, boy?" His voice came out with a morning gruffness, though it seemed to him to fly swiftly through the muting rain. The child did not move.

"Hello over there," he tried again. The boy raised his thin, tightly drawn face long enough to acknowledge ------’s location on the stoop, and then just as quickly lowered his attention once more to the pigeon.

"I said, what do you have over there?"

"Just some bird," the boy replied after pause, addressing not ------ but instead talking down his chest towards the ground. As he spoke his hollow-set eyes maintained a cool, almost scientific watch over the pigeon, whose smooth prismatically colored head turned occasionally. "I came along and saw him sitting here."

"Well I can see that," ------ nodded watchfully. "But what do you want to stand in the rain staring at a pigeon for?"

"I don’t know," consideration marking the child’s voice. The pigeon raised now both of its wings and seized their delicate length in the liquid air. "I saw him and wanted to chase him off, but he wouldn’t go. He walked a little ways and just stopped. And every now and then he does that."

When the boy finished, he reached a hand out to touch the dragging tailfeathers of the bird, which wicked moisture from a tiny reservoir formed by a chink in the asphalt. When his fingertips acquired their aim, the pigeon’s tremorous wings batted at the impetus and the bird began to stagger away. The boy withdrew his hand. While the bird moved, its head danced left and right and its red eyes wildly searched the degrees of the alley, vainly seeking out their tormentor or their path of escape. The pigeon skittered in short leftward inching sidesteps, pivoting around its back end, until by attempting to move away the bird had returned through a full revolution to the position where it had begun. The boy looked on intently and frustrated as the pigeon turned around once more.

"See," the boy decried, looking accusatively at ------ "It doesn’t go anywhere."

"Oh," was all that ------ could think to say.

Presently, upon completing the greater part of a third revolution, the pigeon’s failed deliverance came to a pause. Therein the bird proceeded once more through the motions of shaking out and fluffing up its fallen plumage. After this was finished the bird then stooped and curled its sleek domed head into the downy cove under its left wing. ------ watched this, and he watched the child watching this. The bird watched neither of them.

As ------ considered whether to chasten the boy for his mistreatment of the pigeon or to simply lend this behavior to the passive involvement of a child’s curiosity, a man appeared at the opening of the alley. Cloaked in the distance by rain and the black awning of an albatrossian umbrella, the man’s long profile opened up as he paused and turned in ------’s direction, his dark form framed against the bright colorless wash of the open avenue. Through the masked shade of the umbrella, ------ was able to catch a dingy reflection of the man’s face as it seemed to unfold with a blend of resentment and relief. He stood calmly at the opening and waited briefly for the boy to notice his presence. When the child did not, he cleared his throat. Noticing then ------’s occupancy of the stoop, the man passed upon him a look of stern indifference, at which ------ recessed against the brick of the building hugging his arms to his chest.

"Come along Simon," he stiffly commanded. His oilskin duster was undisturbed by the weather and hung fixedly over high-gloss oxfords.

"In a minute," the boy whined, keeping his small eyes on the pigeon.

"Now," the man asserted in a rather flattening tone.

At this the boy let out a faint groan. As he rose to his feet, the child shook loose his matted blonde hair and a pointed spray of water was released and then dissolved amidst the falling rain. The pigeon did not move. Before joining the man on the sidewalk the boy made a short search of the alley, eventually settling his hands upon the damp grey heft of a cinderblock. His forceless body strained under his dull blue coat as he manipulated the block and shuffled towards the place in the alley where the pigeon stood. Attributing to the weight all the height that he could muster, the child candidly held the cinderblock above the silent pigeon, and for a brief moment he stood poised as one presenting a collection plate. Then at once he relinquished the mass to gravity. The shadow of the cinderblock briefly encompassed the small bird before rejoining its architect, as the distance between the block and the asphalt zeroed, and the pigeon was cobbled into the ground with a dull thud.

The child then turned towards ------.

"That bird wasn’t going to fly," he casually stated with eyes of absolution.

Then the dark man and the child were gone.

Unfinished Work #26

2006-09-19T12:04:00.000-06:00

-Hey, hey guys. Come look.
Brother turned his wan attention to the calling of his classmate, and in doing so, unmindfullly bounced the basketball which he had been dribbling off the side of his shoe. It rolled along in the opposite direction of the gathering children, gritting the blacktop in measured bounds, until coming to rest several yards away with a splash of sandy playground gravel. Across a short weed choked field, the boy who had been calling squatted down above an open drainage grate. With his finely featured face crumpled under much discernment, the boy squinted into the shadowed depths and began carefully to draw his sleeves up about the elbow. Brother watched, in the passive autumn air, as still more children shepherded themselves towards the grate; their sluggish unmastered footfalls drumming softly upon the mudded field, and flatly slapping the newly wetted concrete. Very soon, a good number had gathered near the crouching boy, and as they huddled about, a small rise of commotion crescendoed briefly from them like a gust of wind, until gradually all of their questions had been answered and the gaggle fell silent.
Curious as to their interest with the drain, Brother took a few waif steps in their direction, shuffling his feet as he considered an approach. But, as the children stood, tightly knitted in a patchwork semicircle, their backs walled towards him, he suddenly found the idea of placing himself amongst them to be quite uninviting; and so he stopped. For a moment he stood solitary on the flat expanse of the basketball court, watching his long emaciated shadow grow weaker and then become more defined in the slanting sunlight of the late afternoon. The wavering light gave his shadow the appearance of movement, but, as he himself did not move, Brother knew it to be a trick upon his eyes. Again he heard the rustling of conversation from the direction of the gathered children, but ignoring it he continued on with this taffied abstraction of himself. Before long, its once tight boundaries blurred, and his fading shadow spread out across the white lines of the court and was gone.
Aware of himself again, Brother heard the rush of straggling dinner hour traffic at his back, and felt a sudden folding in his stomach. He was hungry. Shifting his attention once more, Brother turned around in the direction that his ball had rolled to find the eyes of two young girls upon him, who hovered somewhat disinterestedly over the spot where it had landed. Upon facing them, the taller of the two let her eyesight fall beyond him, while the other girl met Brother with a look of cool unflinching self-possession. For a time, he dared not to blink, and she too kept on with casual poise. Her long stare drew upon something wild within Brother; it made him uncomfortable.
- Give me my ball. he called suddenly and without consideration; surprising himself.
- This? the small girl narrowed her sable eyes as she delicately placed an uncommonly white loafer atop the basketball. With her knee raised, she trundled the sooted ball back and forth in the gravel and continued to study Brother.
- Yes, that. he halfway asserted. It’s mine.
- Well I don’t want your crummy old ball. and upon this she turned a glance towards the taller girl, who was still looking away into the distance. Maybe she might.
At this the larger of the two gave, with a glint of recognition from her faded green eyes, what could be considered either a sign of consent or perplexity; perhaps both. Brother watched while the girl, who was rather an ogress in stature, reached a long hand up to brush a shock of boyishly short blonde hair away from her brow. Considering, it seemed, the question, she pawed the shock of hair with twisting fingers and looked down intently upon her counterpart. Soon the smaller girl nodded, and the tall girl looked away once more.
Unsure what to make of this exchange, Brother waited for the small girl to speak. When she did not reply, choosing instead to quietly smooth out the pleats of her immaculate white dress, his impatience mounted.
- Look. Will you just roll my ball over here?
- No. she flatly said at once, pitching her head side to side in a whirl of black hair.
- Well, why not? Brother soured his tone and felt a hot welling inside. Annoyance put motion to
his feet, and as he began to approach the girl, his small chest set heavily before him, Brother saw a thin smile turn across her round face.
- No. she paused. Because sister Taylor here might want it. You see, she’s just not sure yet.
- I don’t care. Brother huffed, observing the tall girl’s stillness. From where he now stood, he knew her measure to be slighting of his own. It’s mine and I’ll have it now.
The small girl suppressed briefly her grin, and began chewing on her underlip, as she weighed Brother once more with dark eyes.
- I like you. she spun, ceasing her grating motion of the basketball and lifting her foot slightly from its drab face. Her loafer floated above the ball with spurious frailty as she spoke. Sister does too.

(etc)

The Color of Rain

2006-08-02T17:13:00.000-06:00

-What am I? the girl asks aloud of herself, or of no one especially, as she picks amidst the gathering debris of cellophane and cigarette packages, which, no longer being of any use or measure, rest in semi-permanence on her bedside table. Her window frames a chalky sky and slanting beaded snakes of rain that seem almost as obscuring as the quiet silver light of the midmorning, distinguishing and at the same time softening every inch of the unlit hotel room.
-What’s that? unmindfully from behind the unlatched powderroom door.
She does not answer. Nor does she remove herself from the littered tabletop until, through casual yet determined appraisal, her slender white fingers produce an equally slender white cigarette between her lips. Lighting this, she gathers up the tawny cotton sheets about her waist, and, sliding back against the headboard, relaxes into the pillows until her otherwise flat stomach becomes shapely with folds of bare skin. As she exhales into the graded light, her hushed turquoise eyes trace the ionic molding around the window and around the top of the wall, until they fall upon the powderroom door, which cuts a thin fluorescence across the floor, drawing the carpet into sharp actuality. The girl inhales.
Presently the door is pulled open and his body appears, depthless and silhouetted before a backdrop of too-white porcelain and sterling fixtures, as he fixes a knot in his tie.
-Did you say something?
Bringing her cigaretted hand forwards to shield away the hard light, she squints like a child looking into the sun and searches for the eyes in his dark, featureless face. The frail smell of aftershave and the thick of dime cologne move with him as he trails across the floor.
-No. It was nothing. I was just talking. Would you turn out that light? motioning with her free hand.
Ignoring her, he works his collar down while checking a wrist watch, with the swiftness and precision of a man accustomed to late entries and early exits. He pauses for a moment before the running window, hands on his hips and scrutiny on his face, regarding the morning.
-Goddamn ugly day it’s turned out.
She can see his eyes now, severely brown and deeply set into the creases of his city weathered features, pulled into the mask of a constant deliberative scowl. His body, too, seemed as though submitting itself gradually to some unbending burden; age, perhaps.
-The light. she sighs impatiently.
-What’s the matter now?
-That light. indicating with a flash of her eyes the starkness of the powderroom. Turn it off.
As he retrieves a grey four-and-four check jacket from the mahogany chair back, the only such piece of furniture in the room, sitting solitary and open towards the quiet window, he pauses for a moment, arms crossed about the shoulders of the coat. Unfolding them, he twists the jacket over his sloping shoulders, in a capelike flurry of fabric which sends his cologne wafting about, and he shuttles his arms through. The scent settles upon the bed and the girl like a pollen.
-The light? Right. And I’m sure you’d rather sit here all day in this dark fucking room and wait for the sun to go down. he snaps very dryly, adding with a presumptuous half smile half sneer, bearing only his left teeth. I have to run, the meeting’s almost over.
With the aired noncommittence of which one might regard a pet, or disregard a young child, he makes his way towards the main door, smoothing his hair back as he goes, and calls back to her over his shoulder.
-Stay good while I’m gone.
She waits until he reaches the door to reply.
-Wednesday morning is no good for me. she offers with mellow aloofness, splaying her legs out under the smooth cool sheets and taking a deep drag. Smoke curls across her upper lip and twists through her jagged hazel bangs.
The man turns back and, knitting his brow, looks down upon the girl with a puzzling look.
-And why is that?
-It’s personal really. releasing a colorless swell. I don’t see that it’s any of your concern. She narrows her eyes through the smoke and watches as he reappears. For a moment nothing is said, and the sudden silence is slowly filled with the light drumming of rain against the window, and the small mechanical whir of the powderroom fan.
Presently the man loosens his bushy black eyebrows, arching them to meet the contented and unconcerned wrinkles building across his forehead.
-If you think so. he needles, opening the door. I wish you wouldn’t smoke. It sours you, and your mouth.
The door bangs shut behind him, its resonance dying quickly amidst the quiet of the room. The girl inhales again to feel the rise and fall of her chest, and for a time she searches unsuccessfully to measure the cadence of her heart. She sits this way until the cigarette in her hand trails down to the filter, and the long column of ash falls snowlike, under its own weight, across her lap, leaving a mark on the tawny cottons sheets not unlike the color of the chalky morning sky. Very soon she brushes the ash away, into a smudge, places the cigarette butt upon her bedside table, and rises naked towards the mahogany chair. There she finds, upon the satiny cushion, a fold of bills, bathed in silver light and aftershave. She does not count them. Without mind, she moves silently towards the powderroom door, relinquishes the electric light, and returns to her chair before the window. She does not sit down. Instead, the girl stands with her hands pressed against the cold glass, hoping to feel the rhythm of the cloudbursts, and searches the streets below, until her breath turns to fog, and her eyes are the color of rain.

E.h.M.

2006-07-27T22:20:00.000-06:00

-Far back as I remember, and as I have been faulted in most general qualities except for memory, it can be held as truth that I have always been moving. Moving away from, and, at the same time, towards the numbered events that have staked out my life. Some such events that I have sided up upon, and other such events that have sided up on me. As to whether any exercise of control, in regard to these happenings, has either laid inside or outside of my person, is not something for me to know. My progress from, and to, is only my own.
-So far as I have been told, I was born and brought up, the whole of my youthful years, on a farm in southern West Virginia, which had belonged to my mother’s father. I never knew him, as he had passed before my coming. And I only knew of him from a masoned and moss-worn granite marker that sat towards the back of one of the fields, upon which was scrawled the name Edward H. Morrow. It was also by the circumstance of my old man inheriting the plot that I came to know of my dead grandfather.
-Anyway, I was raised up solely under my old man’s oversight. See, something of an unagreeable nature came between him and my mother, when I was still new to the world, to which they drew a line in the dirt. On this division, I sat, with a mind yet unhardened and a body still wobbling. It just so happened that I fell in my father’s direction, as he held his ground, and my mother went the other way.
-Being a steadfast woman, she was both unwilling and unable to rid herself of the farm and me, and so she kept a home at the opposite end of the spread from the main house, in which I was boarded by my old man. As far as I can mind, she and the old man never saw nor spoke to one another after their division, but when they broke I suppose they decided it would be best to stay in a close approximation on my account. The end of which suited me just fine, as my mother was near enough that I could reach her, if and when things with the old man turned sour.
-And so the first of my movement was held in traveling from one parent to the next. The length of such a journey stood about three quarters of a mile, as a crosscut through one of my father’s fields, and endured my passage on a basis of four or five times a week. As a child then, I was inclined, as most children are, to measure my life in small strokes, such as these. Counting steps, and cowtails, and cobbles along the way, the amount of which did not amount to anything. But beyond the consequence of such smaller events, for which time holds little remembrance, the greater years of my life were marked by the birth and death of summer, between which I existed.

c

2006-06-03T14:14:00.000-06:00

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- The park sits at a distance no less than several blocks from the center of Schollsville, and no greater than several blocks more from the edge of the town proper, a border distinguished by the disappearance of marked roadways, the opening of a quiet stretch of grassland, and the onset of rolling West Virginia forests of longstanding oak and pine. In warmer months these forests shake off their stillness, with the ragged needles and delicate husks of leaf from the year past, breaking off like spun glass in an untrained hand, as the brush of a spring wind carries in from the north and adds yet another layer to the thick blanket of the forest floor. The slow swaying motion of the trees brings with it a scent of earth and acrid musk that, much like the rustling sound of the leaves, carries from the oak and pine, with the wind, across the grasslands, over the irregular rooftops, and into the heart of Schollsville.
- The town itself is segmented by a system of winding stream braids, which, if compared to something manmade, would resemble the arbitrary scribbling of a young child upon wet sand. A good number of these braids meander along the edges of roadways, and clip across the fronts and backs of lawns, in such a way that the architecture of the town seems to have been set out over the top of these deeply scored ribbons of water. Because of this, Schollsville is thatched with a system of large steel bridges and smaller wooden footpaths, the latter of which stand flecked with scales of paint, and are largely revealing of their smoothed oaken frames. Together, the waterways and criss-crossing bridges give the town a unique beauty, a rustic tribute in design to the causeways of Venice, of which the people in Schollsville have seldom heard, and of which none have seen.
- If you were to follow any one of these stream braids, tracing from its original tributary in the forest to its termination, you would invariably arrive at Philip’s Pond, located at the east end of the town’s only official park, Philip’s Park, both named for the founder of Schollsville. The pond (though to locals it seems more a small lake, as the nearest equivalent body of water rests some miles to the south) year round holds a regular population of visitors, children digging along the steeped muddy banks for craw babies, trout fisherman and paddle boat enthusiasts of assorted age and demeanor, to name a few, but today it holds only the audience of one person. This is because the clouds are a mottled gray and hang unusually low, so low as to seem near enough to touch, like the canopy of some great bed, and the steady winds from the north have briefly fallen to a calm, suggesting rain. A triangulation of geese, flocking in pointed company with the receding chill of late winter, passes over the frosted sun, that hangs as a naked bulb in the quiet sky. One of these migrant birds lets out a purposeful honk, but its call is quickly muted under the weight of the clouds, and only the faintest echo arrives, untraceable, to the ear of Mr. Alvin Fenton, as he purses his lips and turns a wandering stare towards the sky, in search of the geese that have already passed.
- After several long moments, suspended again in the stagnant air, Mr. Fenton submits to the strain of his upward glance, and presently his eyes, heavily lidded and pale blue as the dawn, return themselves to a more comfortable aim, down and into the cool depths of the pond. With careful fingers, antiqued by creased skin and knotted joints, though hardly diminished of their strength, he searches out the root of his discomfort and rubs the ridges along the back of his neck, letting out a sigh, until once again he is still. At rest, his posture recalls that of a drooping willow or a cast-iron street lamp, poised in a constant bend, and while sitting in the middle of a bench, masoned from granite, in an empty Philip’s Park, one wonders if he has not indeed become part of the park itself. For even the eldest members of Schollsville cannot consider the pond without first thinking the name, Alvin Fenton. This is because he arrives every Sunday, with the sun, to take a seat at his bench. And there he waits, speaking to no one except for the occasional bird, until the day rolls into evening and the moon begins to drop its purple veil across the sky, at which point the man rises from his statued pose and walks away with the night. If you sit next to him, or try to speak with him, he will regard you with a peculiar, sideways glance of crestfallen sincerity, as though he were expecting someone else, and turn his attention back to the water and the birds. So far as most people are concerned, and they would not be wrong in their assumptions, Mr. Fenton is a lonely, embittered old man, with neither a care for those around him nor a friend in the whole of Schollsville. Though, this was not always the case.

m

2006-05-31T17:56:00.000-06:00

On rain drenched days I march through overgrown fields and kick the faces off of weeds, like tulips and roses and forget-me-nots, in my Army fatigues, recommitting them to the ground until my horizon is reduced to a tatter of bleeding bulbs and dampered leaves, that lay broken in every direction

Spring? (i.p.)

2006-04-27T01:15:00.000-06:00

Like dead seeds scattered,
you spread your dreams upon
the cold Winter’s ground.
They fell
hard like
concrete
and sewed stones of maybe,
and were resurrected before the fourth April rain,
that blossomed in the Dogwood petals of
pale pink and purple that
line the gutters of my street.
The natural pallet of
the colors of Spring that
lay pasted,
sopping up runoff
on the runways of
cement
and
down
pipes.
In chorus with
the
cigarette wrappers
and
shards of broken glass
that
lay discarded and forgone
but
not
forgotten
as they swim past the petals
in
a muted image
that is
so beautiful
it makes me

stop.

T.V. (i.p.)

2006-04-24T23:48:00.000-06:00

Gentle and inviting is the television invasion and the hot reckless laugh,
where the lonely know God not.

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I’ve seen bodies prostrate in half-realized existences,
with reflected images treading obtrusively across static-kissed faces of blues and greys and whites. And shadows cast like dancing silhouettes in firelight,
struggling to be rid of their weight, the part of them that breathes.
To break free across the surfaces of couches and the smoothness of walls.
To leave.
But they continue to change direction as the static rises and falls,
forever being pulled back and tied to the thing which has borne them.
The body that lies.
The face that opens its eyes and peers into the static,
searching for something familiar, something it can recognize.
And all the while pours itself out through its peering and its pores until the floors run thick with thoughts of commercialized satire and ready-made lifestyles, where people and styles exist without life.
Roles without conscience and unconscionable goals,
that ford the rift between fantasy and the wandering amorphous souls of the children who lie in the living rooms watching.
And with hollow-eyed stares and weak emptied minds,
like canvasses blank and sponges readied and dried,
they sit and they baste in the shit we provide.
We nurture with waste and their minds waste away,
incubating caramelized cartoon drivel and carnal sin from 9 to 5 dribbling across their eyes and down their spine.
Until it is all that they know.
And worse, all that they want.

Extraordinary Rendition

2006-04-15T13:38:00.000-06:00

Moving beyond "He Remains Aground," into the illicit string of underground Black Sites, which lay outside of the mainland United States and legal jurisdiction.

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Silence. It wrapped itself around him. It was the first thing he heard. He laid there for a while, vacantly, suspended without thought. Only as his mind began to struggle to the surface, and the veil began to lift, did he realize that he had a body. The silence was met with a rush of blood in his ears, which kept time with a part of him he did not yet know existed. His head began to swim. Next he became aware of the short, labored, half-breaths which his body forced down his nose and across his clammed upper lip. Each exhalation was accompanied by a dull pain, first along his left breast and then increasing with intensity as it passed across the whole of his rib cage. The cadence of his breath and the tenderness in his chest struggled to be rid of each other. The harder either of them worked, the closer the two of them ultimately became. He coughed until his lungs burned and the pressure inside of him reverberated as they tried to regain the air they had lost. The veil continued to raise. He knew that he had legs now. He could not move them, but he could tell that they were there. It was the quiet numbness of his flesh and the sharp aching in his bones that assured him. His right hip and his right shoulder came together and told him that he was laying on his side. The importunate sincerity with which they begged let him know that he was laying on concrete. Languidly, he forced himself to roll over. By now, the initial silence had passed over him, and the quiet of unconsciousness was replaced by the roar of his own body. He fought against the swollen weight of his flickering eyelids, and the world flashed, out of focus, before his eyes. Having not the will to move his head, his sight fell upon his own body as it materialized into resolution. His legs were still there, tucked up towards his chest. They were sheathed in a tatter of brown fabric, which would have at one time passed as clothing. It was the only garment he wore: his only remaining effect. Next, his arms came into focus. They were bare and bruised and married at the wrists, bound by what appeared to be wire, palm to palm in mock prayer. The strictures were held painfully tight, and his wrists bled in protest.
An idea seeped into his thoughts: Have I been moved again?
Vision then fell past his tired body while his mind tried to cling to the environment surrounding him. Beyond the horizon of his arms he tried to construct what he could from the dim void in which he found himself. His eyes met first with the damp grey concrete on which his body lay. The ground was stained with watermarks, puddles, circumnavigated by crusted saline rings of yellowwhite filth, and other congregates which he could not decipher. The window wells, of which there were two that he could make out, had either been blackened, boarded up, or bricked shut. The only light in the room came from a deep crack somewhere in the ceiling, which threw its blade against the wall opposite from where he lay. It cast itself upon a network of pipes, which ran up and away with the shadows, into which he could follow. Three faucets intermingled with the maze of piping, showing what they could of their empty luster through a thick of lime and rust. The faucet on the left dripped steadily, softly, to the concrete below. There the water was collected, and slipped down an open grate, to whatever lay underneath.
His eyes began to convulse from exhaustion. They had moved him. The world, it seemed, was room, and he was its only citizen. Cold and pained, he recoiled into himself, submitting to his eyelids as his mind shut off that which was outside of his control. Sleep then fell upon him as a warm leaden blanket. It was sleep without dreaming, sleep without feeling, but more importantly, it was sleep without himself.
-

Chic

2006-04-13T10:54:00.000-06:00

This just bubbled up while my alarm was going off this morning. I have no idea what it may or may not become.

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The girl has no conception of money or time. She keeps a tattered, spoiled scepter woven into the frill of the headboard on her four poster bed, suspended above her as she sleeps, while princess dreams and multimillion dollar inclinations swirl, not unlike ideas, and seep into her brain, which operates purely on basal functions and a distorted perception of self. When she wakes and when she sleeps the girl dreams of American aristocracy and the floating heads and perfectly flawed pedomorphic faces and lifestyles of the gossip rags. New York. Los Angeles. Dream big, she thinks. Dream so fucking big that everyone will remember my name. I’ll run up enormous bills and cumbersome, unthinkable debts on the walks at Rodeo Drive. My marquee on Fifth Avenue. The Shubert on West 44th. Yeah. The girl dreams on and the girl dreams big. Bright pink sports cars and black SUVs. If you ask her, her favorite color is pink or black, chancing on when you ask. I love pink. Black is hot. And so on. The scepter is pink and her sheets are black.

Culture of Fear

2006-04-08T18:13:00.000-06:00

400

"We’ve all been there. It starts out with a tap of the horn, a dirty look; strangers in their cars, ready to snap, driven to violence by the wrong move . . ." The warning rang out of his thoughts, ran down his arm and around his right hand: paralyzing. " . . .The most disturbing aspect of the growing trend towards roadway violence: We can’t choose whom we drive with on the highways . . ." He exhaled with purpose but couldn’t force his fingers to respond. It happens without warning to ordinary people. Oh god. Nothing but the series of tinny mechanical clicks, nearly audible, as his key passed out of the ignition. He had his arm back. The cold sweat dissipated as he opened the door and looked helplessly down at the idle sedan, and then to the dingy metal garage door behind. Then himself to the kitchen door.

"It’s better like this. I’m liable to be shot along the way." He set his keys down on the linoleum counter top and wiped the grime off his kitchen windowpane and glanced out. From what he could see the sky was blue, as it ever was; the street pulsing with empty faced pedestrians he had never seen before, as it ever had. Sense slapped him in the mouth for a brief second. "I should walk to the store. Who would bother with an old man? Yes . . . Who would bother with an old man? No. Who would bother to notice if I should fall and break my ankle in a ditch crossing the street? They wouldn’t. The city is in such disrepair." He had learned that a local commission was lobbying for road repair in his neighborhood in pouring over the mornings paper. "I’d die. Christ. There’s no decency anymore." It was enough to make him tear up the paper and vomit in despair, had he anything left in him to expurgate. Instead he folded the day up neatly and placed it on the pile: second row, fourth stack from the pantry.

Into the sitting room. He turned the nob with his right hand and melted into the armchair. It came over him in slow, calculating waves. "In tonight’s program, Teenage Time Bombs. Don’t miss Dateline or YOU could be the next victim!" Timidly, on the edge of his brain, he pulled the walls in around him and drove headlong into the static.

I saw it in the news.

For

2006-04-08T16:04:00.000-06:00

In dusk I stir and open parched eyes to lavish turns and guardians of the falling sky. Thursday nights I meditate on Tennessee whiskey and bad rap music. Juveniles cruise by reckless and swollen. Smoking in their own escape. Polluting the air with Febreez. They have been me, I say. I do not wear sunglasses during the night because I find it pretentious. I wear sunglasses when I sleep. To distance myself further. I am aware. I am running from real time to the graces of elaborate time. When knowledge stops. I see the moon slide and drip and I see my clock move and I see chaos. There is no reason to this. All of this. I push it all away. If you encourage me. In the pause. We’re gonna get raked and go touch each other. Behind her eyes she grabbed me. And everything is brought to rights by the left. Happen. This way

Schizophrenesis 8705

2006-04-02T01:37:00.000-07:00

This comes as a brief homage to Joycean superparatactic methodology. There is no definitive statement, only a precession of cryptic statements of disappearance.

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. . . slolely and flowing. The bengender, she plies and pouress and poles the walksiding, sliding unto one two tree and fifty metars. Lays capit cis, blooding and bludging. No audimony in replis or division or lectorums gone come or came but went, whooring off imbibed and driving diving strivations of. Con. The pubs down for dawn, pups done fer Dante, and morticules full o fur confused bludgening bender renders Dante in the dawn. Yells and ports, screechingly offofoff the road and contemporaniations blind up slugish consciens or bind around morseless taughtthoughts, retracting out inought oneself or in nondescript egress. Automotion peels and reels and steels and the fends til the brutest layaman peaks palecrat and the old familialar claphumclaphumclaphumhsss. End or the empty necraway with sun gone, stands ejected in the disperring window margin. Wayaway. Moving drags trace spot tops and bottoms smot a fur and bludging and dentationing increment over the fender. Long along and a long when he ports and passes porter and the commodius gastrocracy pungesex and places head under wing over mind over dripbowl ruminations. Dripslip and Dropsendrip. Decomporreness a pang twinges hyperolial, rolls up, runs in, rowdening out, and sends senses or sinkings and a tongue glossing til angled angeled murk comes. Crosses the I’s and the me’s and the thee’s with the they’s and the trees, where he passes into dreams. Macronics shakes many mindings in the Melahanepolis, shrunking or small or falling and dissolving. Fallssolving. And drifts discharging rifts arc and growing and build on black to give way or draw back. Al di fuori and dawn cracks on unpremedicipitations in hyaloid line a highway. Him down down down, bumstumbling rightleftright . Stop. Foot. rightrightleft or leftleftleft. Felt feebling go opening and sedening and torsioned with negscopitable thinkenings to going. For dry fur lips licks whettedly, steps on pulls out slugishly and going and pulling out or peeling and feeling no sun sound swounds. Knowing lessonliss not a missages til bends round and round and alooking down. And aloofing. High saltsatising goes wheel sends fleel goes flailing with a yelp. Thumpbump. Thumpbump. Magneyes shake to wake beholdence at theem or they, nod alevving not awalking node athunking, just sailednees and a rolling sees the woman up and a head. Catacollisioning is she nonsachant mirrorsing with unleashed and brimless floding comeing out and . . .

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In Progress

2006-03-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

The Summer Harvest: Ch.1

My old man used to tell me, "Son," he’d say, "Boy, there’s two things yuh gotta get yuh tuh make good in this world. Money and God." The one justified the means of the other. Now, which justified which was somethin he never did tell. I spose he spent a good bit of time thinkin on the matter himself. Lord knows the old man had heaps of money. But I often wonder if he ever did find no heaps of God. We weren’t a part of no church, so I knew he wasn’t gettin it there. But the old man did like to rattle on bout the Lord like He and him was old friends.
"Jesus and me," he used to say, "We’s knowd each other since primary school. We used tuh play ball tuhgether. Yeah, I used tuh knock him somethin terrible on the field." And then he’d break off in a laugh what shook the whole house, slap the table, and go on talkin up the good Lord’s name.
I believed him too. Wasn’t til a wiry, weatherbeaten, pale colored fella showed up at the door sayin he was lookin for my pop and that he went by the name of Jesus that I knew the old man was full of shit or somethin worse. He didn’t know no God, just some sorry old bastard from town. Though I never did call him out for it. Seemed to me like the old man had enough on his plate to satisfy two men, or give em nothin but a mountain of sorrows from worryin and weightin em down. Then I had to wonder if he mighta found God or got God or had God with him at least at some point in his life. Cuz why else would he tell me I needed God to make good? Give the old man a quarter and some time and he’s liable to find twenty pounds of sugar what some other fool could only find ten for. Give a man enough time and he’s liable to find just bout anythin. That’s another thing he used to tell me. So I gathered then that he musta had God square up in his left pocket cuz, between whopin on my head and drawin on his Jack and disappearin bout once a week, weren’t much else for the old man but time.
Like I said, my pop was a good man. And like I said he used to disappear bout once a week. He’d set off in his empty pickup and go rattlin down the road twards town, kickin up a terrible brown dust what choked up the horizon when you looked through it, like he was in some awful hurry. So he’d tear off to town, what was somethin like fifteen miles, or so I remember it. He’d always leave round four or five in the evenin, when the shadows are bout half their parents worth, and he’d stay gone the night and the day and then come rollin back the followin evenin. Often times he was skunk drunk when he found his way back, and every time he came towin a full bed of things what he hadn’t set out with the night before. He’d come back bearin dressers and chairs and clothes and jewelry and other things of that sort. The dressers and chairs we’d put in the house if they was good for lookin at and sittin on. If they wasn’t, then they got brought in the house anyways, only my old man would take an axe to em first, so we could burn em up in the fireplace. The clothes we wore and the jewelry we turned round and sold. Or, he’d turn round and sell em when he disappeared again the followin week.
Couple times I’d asked him where he goes when he goes and where from did he get all the things he always had up in his pickup when he got back, but that’d make him awful sore. He’d turn beet red and light after me with a switch or a belt or a bible, whatever’s closer to him at the time. If he caught my arm before I made it out the door he’d come down hard and fast, whopin and cursin and hollerin so it seemed like the whole world might hear. If I could manage to slip his grip I’d fly on down the road, but Lord he had some powerful hands. I remember I broke free one night and tore off for what musta been a mile or two. I ran that dirt road til my feet burned and my lungs stopped workin right, til it hurt more to go on than it did to turn round and go back. Paved road wasn’t for another mile or so more, and wasn’t another house for a few miles after that, so I had nowhere to end up. At that point I started to walkin back.
That particular evenin the sky was cold slate grey and sharp, and I recall it looked like somethin from a picture book, near enough to touch but not what it appeared. Kinda like the negative of somethin else gone, the ghost of somethin once livin. Really there weren’t nothin up there that night but the wornout colorless moon. As I walked it cast a flat light over my head and led my feet round the bumps and breaches in the road, though the path was more or less straight and by then I knew the way blind. It usually took what musta been a half hour or so before the house come back into view. Front door always hung open, light still burnin in the main room. By then my old man’d be past out, slumped all crookedlike over the table or in one of our new chairs. I’d pull the door shut, damp the fire, and fall on into my bed. More than likely the old man wouldn’t remember a thing once the sun broke the sky. Like I said, my pop was a good man.
When I’s eight or ten or somewhere in between, my old man come home from one of his trips with a twenny-two. Had a oak stock, a steel lock what locked like it was brand new, and a barrel, black as an empty well at midnight and polished shinnin like a motor head. Beautiful. Thing stood bout three quarters my worth, right under the chin, so I knew that I had to have it. It went that I’d beg and the old man’d get sore and I’d have to run off to come back and beg again. Weren’t more than a day or two before he got fed up with my jawin so’s to the point that it was causin him more grief to keep the popper from me than it would to just hand it over. Spose the idea of givin his child of eight or ten a piece beautiful as that one was somethin the old man had to play round in his head with. Maybe I just beggered him at the right time on the right day, caught him in a pleasant state. I can’t speculate too much on the old man’s thoughts. Was only when he opened up his mouth to curse or praise or teach that I had any bit of a clue to what the man was thinkin.
Either way I come beggin one afternoon what musta been the middle of the week, early summer. My pop was sittin down over the porch step with a jug in his right and a cig in his left, watchin out at the flies playin hopscotch on the cattlebacks. I’s gettin ready to give him the whole thing and go bout preachin to why I should have that twenny-two, why it weren’t right to keep it from me, and why I needed it, but he cut me before I could even open my mouth and think bout sayin I.
"Boy," he drawled heavy. My old man was kinda slow at the mouth. "Why yuh got tuh come round me everday flappin bout that damned twenny-two? I tell yuh I’s bout had it witcher whinin. Yuh done want me tuh knock yer skull for yuh, do yuh?" It weren’t til the last that he took his eyes off the field and set em hard on me.
"No," I told him. He always had a way of keepin me small when I talked, like I felt I could only ever break out a word or two at a clip.
"No?" He says, straightened and powerful like he’s fetchin to smack me one. He drew his jaw taut and sharp edged, so as to pronounce his grit, and turned his brow down. "No what?"
"No, sir."
"Goddamn right no sir." Then he eased off and set out to starin into the cows again like he felt he accomplished somethin or had made some kinda point and was through with me. "Yuh member that next time yuh dressin me, boy." For a man what was rough natured and generally unsocietallike, he sure did lean on me for my manners. Maybe cuz he lacked em in so many ways.
"Sorry, sir," I says to him timid, kinda like a chicken round a couple of hogs. Not sure if they’s gonna eat her but damn sure that they’s bigger than her. "I only want it what cuz you got one like it yourself and I wanna learn to straight shoot like so I can go out to huntin with you cuz I—"
"Damn it boy." His cig was gone down, so he took his last from it and crushed it out on the porch. He had a look like his nerves was stretched too thin, but softened himself cuz he musta felt like my sell bout goin huntin with him was genuine. Spose it was partly true.
"Well now, I guess I ain’t never thought bout learnin yuh tuh hunt," he thought out loud. "Least not yet."
I could see his wheels were goin, like his mind was buildin up to move his mouth into what I wanted to hear. Weren’t many times til that day that the old man showed any bit of reasonin or acknowledgin to what I had to say. Spose there weren’t many times after neither. Mattered only now that he was listenin and understandin me like I’s a regular old friend of his like Jesus, so I leaned on it some more. I leaned just hard enough to persuade what was a generally unpursuaded man, but not to the point where he’d wanna whop me or send me runnin on down the road.
"I’s just thinkin it’d be good is all, sir."
"Well," he idled for a beat or two. "Well, I spose talkin on it now it done seem such like a bad idea. Boy’s gotta become a man sometime, and sooner than later’d do yuh good." He tipped the jug with his right and prolly thought that whiskey all the way down. Then he broke into a grin what made me know I’d stuck my head in mud and come up clean.
"Now yuh ain’t gonna go round poppin off intuh my livestock with that thing?" His breath turned heavy and mean like he was tryin like hell to be serious and to hide the gentler part of him what had come through in the grin. "A course, that’s if I decide if I should let yuh have it."
"No, pop – sir," I assured him with the very best of my sincerities on my face. "I promise I won’t never do nothin like that." And I’s crossin my fingers in my head just like any person would do when they are sayin whatever they have to for to get what it is they want. I spose in some cases a little untruth is the best thing for everybody. I usually didn’t care too much to be true to my old man, seein how he didn’t care too much bout bein up front with me neither. We got along like that.
"Now yuh promise on yer mother, boy. Else yuh won’t be gettin it. Not today nor tomorruh." He was serious as an chestnut oak what’s been chopped through and is on the fall. And I’s serious bout fellin my old man, so I leaned to the last.
"I promise, sir, on my mother."
He seemed to find relief in my honesties. So after my words he picked himself up off the stoop, balanced his way into the house, and come back bearin my winnins in his left hand. And sure as sky is up and the Devil is down my old man let me have that twenny-two. Didn’t show no signs of regret after or nothin, he just sat himself back down and went to starin off into the field again. I gave him a look like pure grain awe was pourin out the corners of my smile, but he didn’t return it. To me it seemed to be what shoulda been a bigger moment in the scale of big moments between a man and his son, but my old man didn’t seem to think much of it. He was prolly just happy to have me off his back bout the piece, so he could be alone again. Hell, I really didn’t care. Besides, in the house he had a whole army of guns to himself, so what’s givin one to his son anyways?
I’s so happy to have the piece that I couldn’t think to thank him and so I didn’t. Musta stood there like a fool in the sun for a number of minutes, gawkin from the twenny-two to my old man and back to the twenny-two, before it hit me what I wanted to do. I’s gonna show this to my mother and my mother’s gonna see what a grownup I’s becomin. The idea was so good that it made my insides waffle and my breath go up high in my chest. Soon enough my mind was dancin over the notion and it was chompin at my bit and tellin me to go. I didn’t give the old man a look after that, to ask him or tell him, cuz he wouldn’t have let me go. His business was his and mine was mine, but trouble drummed up every time they crossed ways. It was best not to tell him more than he needed. Then I hoisted the popper up into the groove on my left shoulder, balancin it with both hands cuz it was up over me like a high chimney to a house, and set off into the smooth summer air.
My old man had what you might consider a considerable spread. I don’t know for sure, cuz I never did get it from his mouth, but I gathered we had bout six hundred acres or more, most of which was once pasturage and bush farm. If you gave it a right goin over I bet the land might even be worth somethin, but I only knew it as it stood neglected. The pastures still held their worth cuz they didn’t need no tendin to, except for the attention of seventy or so head of cattle what kept to their own grassy world. My pop would occasionally milk one of em, and they always seemed watchfully indifferent of him like he’s some exotic foreign thing. Most of the time they’d let him put his hands on em and go on cuttin the cud like my old man wasn’t even there, or like they was just bein complacent to get it over with. I spose he prolly shoulda milked more of em more often, seein how they’d get bloated, but my father didn’t seem to care much for farmwork. He had his weekly ventures to keep his muscle up.
The plot we had was so ample that it was alright for my mother to live at the other end of it from my old man’s house. She and my pop never really saw each other no more, but when they broke I spose they decided it’d be best to stay in a close approximation on my account. She never came to my pop’s house and my pop rarely if never went across to her side of the spread. Only thing connectin the two of em anymore was bout a threequarter mile crosscut through one of the fields and me walkin it four five times a week.
The path to my mother’s was one I had on the back of my hand, much like the dirt road what my father made me so often run. It was at one time a tractor rut what gave my old man passage to the far edges of the corn crop through which it was set down. But since he quit to farmin, and I never did know him to farm, the crosscut had gone from hard earth, what looked like the underside of a tire tread, to a loose overgrowth of dandelion and tallgrass. The crop hadn’t gotten on much better neither. Over a lifetime of disregard and uncultivatin, the corn had fallen outta favor with the soil and come to be patchy and sparse. It weren’t a natural occurrence in our part of Flats and without proper seedin didn’t stand much of a chance gainst the native underbrush. The corn had less or more been replaced by wild blackberry brambles what, much like the tallgrass and dandelion, showed no prudence and crawled slowly outta the fields and into the tractor rut. It didn’t bother me so much, except if ever I caught my leg on a thistle and I’d have to walk the rest of the way with an unagreeable pain shootin up inside me. The blackberries with their white blooms gave the air a tartness what always made me want to pluck one off. But from their color that day I gathered it was only June and they wouldn’t lose their sour for another month, so I left em be.
My mother lived to the northeast on the upbank of Turnmill Run, which was the rivulet what cut off the far edge of our property. Unlike the pasturage round my old man’s place, my mother’s spot was shootin up all kinds of tree life cuz of its nearness to water. Things like droop in dogwood and knotted ashen beech defied the otherwise leveled nature of the crop fields with their timberline. Soon as the shade of those sky piercin trees cooled my skin I knew it wasn’t much more walkin til I’d reach my mother’s.
When I arrived that afternoon it was like my arms were thin molasses from bearin the weight of the twenny-two all that way, and my mother was already waitin for me. She had come accustom to my trips, what were generally after the second meal of the day, and knew to expect me round that time. Normally we’d sit just up over the bank of Turnmill, lettin the water run away and talkin like a mother and a son do. If it was sunny we’d talk in the shady dotted light under the roof of the trees. If it was rainy we’d talk through the chorus of rainbeaten leaves and get dropped on. If it was snowy there’d be a blanket to wrap round the two of us and we’d collect white weather on our heads while we talked. She never did take me into her house, didn’t even offer. Spose I would’ve been outta place in there, but it never did bother me none cuz I liked our spot outside near the bank just fine.
I think she knew how excited I was when I come marchin over into her direction, balancin the popper manlike as I could with a look like I had just gotten away with somethin. I musta looked kinda like the cat who swallowed the canary, cuz it felt like my eyes couldn’t hide the pride.
"Look at what I got," I says to her, as I took a seat on her right facin the water. I let the piece down gentle across my folded lap to give my arms a rest, cuz they were fed up with me.
"Well, isn’t that lovely, dear," she’d say with a perfect lilt. And then she’d let me talk.
"Oh yeah, you bet. I knew you’d think it was perty, that’s why I brung it. Take a look at this stock here. Pop told me it was oak. The lamination is so slick. Look. And it even has some pheasants carved into it." Then I had to catch my breath from prattlin on and hold the piece up so as to present the stock to my mother’s inspection. The picture was of three birds what looked kinda like chickenmallard crossbreeds what I took to be pheasants. Two of them pheasant were in flight and another one was not far behind it, liftin off the ground outta a tallgrass field. The trio of em were woodworked into the handle of the twenny-two and flyin back the butt end of the stock.
"Ruffed grouse, dear," she corrected me. "See the plume on his head there?" And then she’d point some extra feathers out on the head of the grounded bird and I’d know for certain it was a grouse. I felt pretty thickheaded after that, but I knew my mother was right. Seemed she always knew everythin.
"You must be fairly tired from carrying a thing that large all this way, dear," she’d say to me all motherlylike, as if her eyes would be comfortin me.
"No, I ain’t tired ma." I lied to her but I think she knew. "It weren’t nothin for me. I could do it again, walk there and back again, holdin this here popper up over my head as I went. Heck, I could carry it one arm there and the other arm back, if you want me to." And then I put both my arms right out in front of me and squeezed em hard as I could so my mother could see. Weren’t much life left in em before the squeeze and I could feel em drainin all the way out, but I held em there all constricted until my mother’d speak and relieve me.
"We don’t use heck, dear. Correct?"
"I’m sorry ma, that’s right."
"Good. And no, dear, I wouldn’t want you to do a silly thing like that." And I’s awful glad too, cuz I knew I wasn’t gonna make it halfway back down the rut before my arms wholly fell off.
Then I put the butt of the twenny-two stiff gainst my right shoulder and did my best to show my mother I could aim it. The muzzle came up and I pointed it out over the creek and set my eyes to lookin down the barrel. Though I couldn’t hold it steady for any period of time and soon as I lifted her up she’d start saggin back down under her own weight like some trampled flower.
"That’s fine, ma. I wouldn’t wanna do all that walkin when I could just as easy sit right here. Specially if I’d just end up right back where I started out from anyways."
She didn’t say nothin in response to that, and I’s still catchin the air up in my lungs and tryin to get a regular beatin back in my chest, so I didn’t say nothin after that neither. It didn’t matter none though. Often times we’d just sit and be together, listenin to the talkin waters of Turnmill dribble along on their undyin travels.
As I continued attemptin to point the popper into the trees on the other side, the barrel began wiltin faster and faster, always endin up pointed straight into the run. So presently I gave up and set the twenny-two down on the grass to my left and let my arms soak up a much needed rest. The sun came down quiet and warm through the breaks in the beech cover and felt good on the tops of my cheeks. My mother and I sat there appreciatin the afternoon until the daylight disappeared behind us and it was time for me to head on home. At that point I hefted the twenny-two, which had become unheavy durin my sit, up over my left shoulder, said my goodbye to my mother, and took off down the rut where my father’d be waitin in the house, prolly raked and ready to buck his head.
Generally I made it back round supper time, what was a fascination of itself on account of my old man. I gather he learned himself to cook outta the necessities of his circumstance, bein without a woman in the home, but it weren’t ever all that good. Meals’d come together as a last second thing, where either the sun would be beddin down or I’d be pokin round and lookin hungry and he’d realize it was time to stove. Irregardless of his sentiments and his draw count on the day he always found his way to makin dinner. Often times I’d wait at the table watchin him crack and chop and fry, all the while mutterin and swayin under the pressure of his daily consumption, and wonder why it was that he bothered. Spose he saw it as an obligation and a chore. But, the truth of it is that cookin is nurturin, and nurturin is a love of some kind or another. Course I only came to that conclusion some years later.
Anyhow, that night he had everythin set when I come through the door cuz the sun had been gone a while by then. The house wore its usual dinnertime stench of overly charred meat, of an uncertain make, and burnt salt so prevailin that it made me phlegm up in the top of my throat. My old man was glosseyed and put down at the table in the main room with a plate for me and a plate for himself, which I always had to find curious cuz he didn’t never have much of an appetite outside of his bottle. But it was kinda ceremonious, our sittin down together, like an attempt of his at things bein normallike round the table. I didn’t know it no different though, since I couldn’t never remember my mother eatin with us, and so the whole thing got lost on me.
"Yuh been out through the field agin tuhday, boy?" He weren’t ready to buck just yet and his voice came gruff and tired. "Gone out tuh see yer mama agin?" He didn’t approve of my spendin so much of my days in the company of my mother, to which I spose I understood but still knowinly disobeyed.
"No, sir."
At that he turned from tired to spiteful and set his eyes right into me.
"Ain’t no good lyin tuh me bout it, boy. I seen yuh take off."
I’s standin bout ten paces inside the door, the twenny-two restin stock to the floor in my right hand. I gripped up on the muzzle and considered runnin out cuz I knew he prolly had seen me, but I decided to smooth it and pull one over on him.
"No sir," I stammered, "Well, yes sir. Yes. That’s true. I did set out to the fields. But I’s just layin out there in the tallgrass, drawin a beat on some birds and coons. I didn’t never go to mothers."
"Birds and coons, huh?" He saw through me.
"Yes, sir. Cept I don’t have no ammo for this here—"
"Yuh tryin tuh spin me, boy?" His tone took insulted and he turned his craw up, "I know where it is yuh go."

The Jack musta been itchin him up somethin monstrous that night, cuz he did know I regularly spent my days on Turnmill but generally wouldn’t rail on it less I started things down that path. My mentionin my mother was what regularly set him off, but I hadn’t said a thing and he went right to it. He had his good times and his evil times.
"Never, sir," I says, at which he looked even more incensed. Realizin his misconception with my response I’s quick to pad up his nerve. "I mean, I mean, I know you know where it is I take to, but what I meant was I wouldn’t never try to spin you—"
"Listen here now damnit," he weren’t havin it.
"—Sir."
He’s pointin a regimented left hand in my direction and leanin his choleric weight into his elbow. His eyes were distant and wet, but they hung to mine with a sincerity I hadn’t often seen in the old man.
"That’s onehunerd percent goddamned right. I do know where yuh take tuh. And short a boundin yuh up tuh a post in the ground I know I couldn stop yuh neither." He took a labored breath from deep inside his body and it rattled til he began to cough. They were wicked whoopin coughs, kinda like an old crudded engine what’s strugglin to kick on. Hackin fits often caught him when he got worked up.
"And I live with it," he broke between coughs, "I live with it damnit. I have tuh! Nine years," he stopped short to suppress his fit with a long draw, all the while keepin his eyes locked on me. There was somethin wild behind em, like the fear in a dyin animal. "Nine years it’s been and I been puttin up with it! With you!" Jack sprayed from his mouth in angry bursts as he spoke, and he slammed the jug down hard into the table, upturnin his plate and sendin a fork to the floor. It was a wonder the jugbottom didn’t break out.
"With this." And he turned his head down to register the mess he had just made of his dinner.
I could feel my head shakin and my mouth go numb, as a cold sweat filmed up on my right hand, which white knuckled the barrel of the twenny-two. I’s unable to get up a word, so I stood there and took it. The popper was the only thing keepin me on my feet.
When his eyes come back up the old man had a look of stone sobriety what made the color drop outta my face. He had let this much out and figured to finish his point.
"But if I ever catch yuh near yer mama with that goddamned gun!" he snarled and pointed with a menacin finger,"or find that yuh been tuh see her with it! I’m gonna string yer ass up!" Then his eyes gone intensely depraved, but his voice went the other way and quieted, losin all intonation, which bore right through me, "And then beat on yuh til yuh can’t walk."
My old man rose from his seat, took up the bottle, and didn’t leave his eyes from me. He drew long again and set the Jack down. Then he come heavy and hulkin in my direction til he got so close he’s chokin me with the poison on his breath. I woulda run off but my feet were pegs in the floor and I could feel my mind startin to slip. He breathed sour into my face, and as my body began to drop he grabbed me up with both hands viced on my shoulders.
"Where was yuh tuhday, boy?" His voice whispered like a steam pipe what’s bout to blow. "Answer me when I speak tuh yuh. Where yuh been with that twenny-two?" He waited just long enough to let slip and fight back another cough before his wits snapped and the pipe blew.
"Answer me goddamnit!" and he began shakin me with a strength which defied his consumed state.
"Talk!" The gun slipped from my hand and collapsed to the ground like a hammer drivin a nail. It lay there while the room got agitated and my vision bounced. My old man began screamin with a tortured determination.
"Talk yuh little bastard! Done yuh know!? Respect goddamn yuh! Respect!" He began thrashin me bout side to side and his fingers burrowed deeper into my shoulder bones.
"Tell me where the hell yuh been with that gun yuh lout bum bastard! Tell me!"
"I’ll kill yuh for this I swear tuh heaven! Done yuh know it’s yer!?" his voice cracked apart and he all of a sudden thrust me back gainst the wall. I brought up my arms best I could to shield myself from the whoppin and closed my eyes.
"It’s yer, yer mama," came instead of rabid fist. "It’s."
"Done yuh know it’s, today," his voice ebbed and went away into an aired realization, "it’s yer. It’s yer birthday." I opened my eyes guardedlike and stared up at him. I had no thoughts to put to words.
"It’s," his lips began to tremor and his eyes sunk in shock at himself. He musta seen somethin in my face what shamed him and put the humanity back in him, cuz as he turned away from me I could see him fallin apart.
He stood there for a while sunk and defeated and lookin down at himself. Then his breathin idled for a moment as if he were steadyin himself to speak, but he didn’t turn round. Instead he walked vapid and ghostlike to the table for the Jack and then to his bedroom, draggin his body behind him, without a word. The light from the main room worked its way into the shadows as his body disappeared. From the darkness I could hear the wet slide of broken suction followed by the splash of liquid in a bottle. Then the same two sounds a second time. Then nothing. After a painful exhalation came long and drawn out from the bedroom, the door swung slowly shut and he silently placed the lock home. The slightest click came from the door as he took his hand off the knob on the other side, which let me know that it was final.
The whoppin and the wailin on me were things I could take, on account that they were worldly and empty at the same time. I could always escape, if not on foot then in my head. Still there’s a kinda closeness in it, some kinda touch like a hug. A clement hand, like an evil hand, is still just as warm. And when he raised a hand, I knew it were only Jack takin my father for an ugly ride. That it weren’t his heart, just an etherized head what no longer belonged to him. But when the old man took it to words I felt obscene and undesired. No dull fists or hugs, just a jagged and piercin hate what turned me upended and alone. So much distance can be made in so few words. So much pain, real pain what don’t go away like a bruise or a swell. So much truth. That night his heart had shone itself for what it was, and I knew then that he would never come outta his bedroom again, least not the way I’d seen him. The respect was gone, and so I lifted the twenny-two off the dusty floor and brought it over to the table with me. Then I turned my old man’s chair round and leaned the popper up gainst it, and I ate my dinner in quiet isolation, feelin very cold.

Thought, No. 1

2006-03-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

When we emerse ourselves in literature,

we are at the same time dissociating ourselves from reality.

We die and are reborn each time we open a book.