The Great Mid-Western Gin Mill Particular

2011-03-20T21:21:00.000-05:00

"Jane, you are not going to believe this." I'm practicing what I'm going to say. I've been pacing up and down in front of her apartment building for a full twenty minutes. "Listen, Jane I've been offered a..." No, that's not going to work. "Jane, I'm sorry, but I can't let this go on anymore."

Yes that's it, I've got to make a change. It is still cold out. Even though we've had three days of sunshine and all the snow has melted and birds are singing in the trees they keep planting by the sidewalks. The trees that are never going to get older or bigger, but are going to die choked by cigarette butts and empty plastic water bottles, and chewing gum scraped onto their trunks.

I'm suddenly glad I'm not a tree. But maybe it wouldn't be so bad. If I were a tree I wouldn't have to see her with him. I know what they're up to. I know how she looks at him, when I'm in the room. Dance lessons, you bet your fucking ass, dance lessons. I'll eat my hat. What kind of dance do you do on the mattress when I'm not around?

No. Poison. That's a poison pill, that thought will grow vines and choke your mind. Stop it.

Just another nip from the flask. Wasn't it supposed to be warm today? We've had three days of sunshine, and the last time I read the newspaper my horoscope said I'd feel the sunshine coming through.

The homeless man on the corner, didn't ask me for change. He just let me walk on by. Do I look that bad? I know this coat is ripped, I keep meaning to sew it shut, but I've only got a little bit of time left to tell Jane that I'm leaving.

"Jane!" I shout up at her window. There aren't any lights on but I know she's there, hips tipped up to heaven and him pointing south at hell.

"Do you hear me Jane?" Lights go on and off in the other windows. Another sip, another smoke. Is she coming down? Should I run? Hearts beating faster. Why? I practiced this. There's a cop on the corner down the street.

"Jane I'm leaving now." I shout. I shouldn't shout so much. It is ripping up my throat.
I've got to go and sew my coat.

Tommy Andrews Lost His Tooth On March Twenty-Third

2011-02-07T03:19:00.000-06:00

Last week Tommy Andrews came down the street holding his arm that was bleeding. He looked really pale and his shirt was all red. He was shouting at me to get inside and to have my mother call an ambulance. That's when the car drove by again and this time they slowed down and shot Tommy Andrews in the face. This morning I found one of his teeth.

All week long I've been staring in the mirror. At school I excuse myself from the classroom and go stand in front of the mirror in the boy's room. I look at my eyes for so long that they start tearing up. I think the teachers are just glad that I'm not talking to Jeremy Gunderson anymore.

I haven't been outside in a while. I'm not afraid that the methheads will get me. I know Tommy Andrews did something to them, and you can't mess with methheads, its like kicking a sack of badgers, you leave that to the police.

I just don't feel safe. I mean if a great guy like Tommy Andrews can get his head blown off in What Cheer Iowa, where are you safe? Tomorrow the sun could explode and we'd know about it eight minutes too late. I suppose there's nowhere safe and that I should just be ready to have my head blown off by methheads any minute, wherever I am.

I suppose I should take Tommy Andrews' tooth to somebody. I'm sure his family will want it. But how do you give them a part of their son? Here Mrs. Andrews, here's this tooth, I'm pretty sure that it's Tommy's. He took the football team to state, and here is his tooth. Do you think Mrs. Andrews will think about when she was pregnant with Tommy? Will she hold his tooth and think about the head that that tooth used to be in, and how that head was once in her belly? I bet that would be weird. I know my mom has some of my baby teeth in an old pill bottle somewhere, and whenever I ask her why, she says I won't understand until I have kids of my own.

Tomorrow is April 1st, and we're all going to the funeral. I hope Mrs. Andrews doesn't think I'm telling a joke when I hand her the tooth. I hope I don't laugh on accident because of how nervous I am.

Hot News

2011-01-17T14:55:00.000-06:00

Hey Friends!

Due to a hatred of everything in it I am putting a full stop on that novel I was so jazzed about a couple of months ago.

We'll see how I feel about it in the future, but right now it just reads as a bunch of pretentious drivel, really it drips with angst.

So until I can cool down and come back to the work I am going to return to my first love, stories set in the Midwest in small dying towns!

Get ready for some guilt and nostalgia mixed up together with some prime self-hatred and regrets, we're heading back to the Midwest where everything started.

2010-11-15T21:27:00.000-06:00

Here are the things that I don't like about my writing:
1. The misogyny, how come my female characters are always so shallow and useless?
2. Not enough imagery. You don't really get a sense of scene in a lot of my stories. I emote very well, but you rarely know what color things are.
3. Action, nothing ever seems to happen in the stories I write.
4. Depth, they're all so shallow. It's like I really have nothing to say. I suppose someday I will and it will be useful then to have practiced speaking, but I'm worried that the practice will ruin the later message.
5. Length, too short.
6. I can't keep a coherent plot together to save my life.

212 B

2010-11-14T22:46:00.000-06:00

"Of course" She answered, not even looking up from the table.

"I'm, sorry but that doesn't answer the question I asked. I asked what room Alexandria Van Plotts is staying in." Timothy wasn't sure why he had apologized. The pale complexion of the counter girl, plus the ironic pill box hat perched precariously on her head, added to the too-red lipstick, meant that he wouldn't get a straight answer or good service out of the girl, she was too concerned with the higher truths of her complexion and image in the small pocket mirror cut through with neat razor slashes she held in her left hand.

"Sir, remain calm" The dreadful girl droned "We're doing everything we can to process your request, and we'll have an answer for you shortly."

"Excuse me, but it is a simple question. Don't you have a register or a computer or anything back there? Don't you write these things down?"

"Yes, we have all those things, and yes we write them down, but sir." With the last sir the young woman looked up at the young man, and with a twisted little delight in her eyes she said "We're doing everything we can to process your request, and we'll have an answer for you shortly."

Nothing was being done in the lobby of the hotel. The elevators were not moving up or down, and the ceiling fans were not even twirling. The air was stifling and stale.

"Look, I've got to meet Ms. Van Plotts, we've an engagement for the evening. You see I'm a reporter, well sort of, anyway, like I said, we've an engagement for the evening, and you know how she is, I'm sure you've read about her in the news."

"Sir, it is the official policy of the Whitmore Hotel to know nothing about this subject. The privacy of our guests is our highest priority." The pale girl said, that same wicked smile returning to her lips.

A man in a garish Hawaiian shirt casually pushed his way through the brass and glass of the revolving door. There was a camera around his neck, it wasn't a digital camera. A camera bag was carelessly hung from his shoulder. There was nothing about this man that indicated any sort of competency. He seemed to be the sort of man who would spend his whole Sunday drinking cigars and betting on horses or dogs at the track, if you take my meaning.

The girl behind the counter reached over and pushed Timothy to one side.

"Stu, you know the drill, third floor second maintenance door on the right, and this time you better get my split before Tuesday."

After witnessing this Timothy had come to several conclusions about the moral status of the Whitmore Hotel and its employees.

"Look, I just need to see Ms. Van Plotts. She left a message on my machine asking me to come here, she didn't leave a room number, anyway, like I said, we've got plans."

"I thought you had an engagement." The girl behind the counter looked very pleased with herself.

"Yeah, whatever. Look I'll give you twenty bucks."

"For what?"

"Just give me her room number."

The girl behind the counter leaned forward, which had the effect of drawing Timothy's eyes towards her bosom, and with some impossibly perfect swagger in her voice she said "Sir, the Whitmore Hotel is doing everything we can to process your request, and we'll have an answer for you shortly."

It had been twenty minutes since Timothy had first walked up to the desk. He leaned back on his heels, left hand to chin, and looked forward into the evening, he could scrap the interview, and he could stop dealing with this ridiculous facsimile of a person in front of him. He could go out to the bars and taverns and find someone to occupy his time until sunrise. Dinner could be found at any number of convenient and agreeable places, and in the morning at the staff meeting he could say that the Alexandria Van Plotts had not been at the hotel, and that a vomit stain outside of her door in the hallway had led Timothy to the conclusion that she was "in" for the evening.

It was going to be so easy. Timothy knew that the events he had just forecasted would come true if he let them. With a little smile on his lips he leaned forward and said to the pale girl, with the too-red-lipstick, and the coquettishly perched pill box hat, and said "What Room, please, is Alexandria Van Plotts staying in?"

Titles: If you're interested.

2010-08-13T14:43:00.003-05:00

These aren't really that interesting but I thought you might like to have some context for the excerpts, because the chapter titles are all indicative of what the chapter is about, and they form a nice little view of the book as a whole.

Tentative Title for the whole thing: Our Selves Explode in Light

Chapter 1: At 11th and Florence and I'm Nobody's Sweetheart.
Chapter 2: Where There’s Tea For Two, And Songbirds Sing Like Barges.
Chapter 3: In The Hospital, Where I Met My Other Selves
Chapter 4: We Aren't The Ones To Answer Your Questions
Chapter 5: About Organs Breaking, And Barges Singing Like Songbirds
Chapter 6: Or Why I’m Safely Asleep In Your Mind
Chapter 7: Sometimes I Can Really See Myself With You
Chapter 8: But I Can't Tell Who I Am, And I Might Not Be Me.
Chapter 9: Even If You Wanted Me To Do Something, I Couldn't.
Chapter 10: Because Nothing Can Stop Me From Hurting Myself.
Chapter 11: And Dreaming All Of This Was Such A Silly Lie.
Chapter 12: In Real Life All We Can Do Is Watch
Epilogue: Our Selves Explode In Light

Excerpt 5: From Chapter 5

2010-08-13T14:42:00.001-05:00

The man behind the desk was very angry. Blake could not understand why. He had provided proof of lack of identity. His fingerprints were entered into a computer and even after several hours of searching the faithful machine had not been able to find a match. A man was dispatched to one of the central bureaucratic facilities with a photograph of Blake. There even larger, boxier, angrier, computers would be put to the task of finding out just who our young protagonist was at that very moment of his life. These advanced machines were programmed to spend eighty percent of their processing power searching for just who Blake had been, his schooling, his grades in school, any crushes on boys or girls in his class that he had ever had. What sort of macaroni he preferred to paste onto construction paper, or how he felt about the very thrilling sensation of making a clean cut through card stock with safety scissors. The computers began a thorough search through every disappointing prom date that had been registered in the last quarter century, because their programming (correctly) surmised that Thomas had:
A) gone to prom in the last quarter century and
B) had disappointed his semipopular date (who it turns out was Kathleen Watkins, a basketball cheerleader who hated Chemistry but loved Physics for obvious and unknown reasons respectively)

However the advanced alloys and super-cooled central processing units of the servers assigned to identifying this physically broken young man could not find the answer to this solution. As Thomas’s jaw had been broken in several places in the accident the current alignment of his teeth, indeed even his mandibles could not be identified from extant dental records. In fact this line of investigation was pointless because Thomas’s parents had never taken him to a licensed dentist. They had taken him to their good friend Montgomery Alberto Montenegro, or as he preferred Monty. Monty had lost his dental license as a young upright man in the late sixties. He was robbed of this important facet of his life by a lawsuit against a former jazz musician, who after years of playing hard bop and an even harder secret heroin addiction, was no longer susceptible to the effects of any of anesthetics in Monty’s arsenal, and therefore felt very abused after a triple root canal.
Monty had preformed all of Thomas’s dental work, taken every last x-ray, even cemented and wired the youth’s braces. He was by all accounts a hardworking and honest dentist. Indeed the very paragon of dentistry. However through the cruel twist of fate and a lost soul’s abuse of heroin Monty had only attended three annual Dentist conventions and was therefore largely out of touch with the latest in dental techniques and practices. So to the trained eye Thomas’s existing dental records looked much much older, as the hand that had guided and shaped the jaw had been out of touch with the newer techniques to quide and shape the proud square jaws of Americas youth. Thomas’s newly squared and solidified jaw now fell into step with those of his peers. Whereas before he had a thin intellectual jaw, he now had a firm bold lantern jaw.
After seventeen straight hours of the whole bureaucratic facility’s computers being dedicated to searching the vast and transient networks and databases that currently define our societies definitions of life and identity (well at least as far as death and taxes are concerned) Thomas Blake was declared a non-person. This was a unique situation, and the decision has been studied at many of the secret universities that secretly train the citizens who become bureaucrats. It is known as the Clarence Richmond Decision, after the person who invented the form that allowed what happened to legally take place. In case you are wondering the form is available government wide, indeed it can even be requested from the Fish and Game office. The reason is that each of these offices needs to recognize the validity of the form, and intra-office politics dictate that if two offices have the same form and they both recognize it as valid, then both should implement the form. In bureaucratic circles this is referred to as Building the Dam.

Excerpt 4: From Chapter 4

2010-08-13T13:58:00.001-05:00

Today had been long, too long. Her neck ached, and her eyes burned from staring at her monitor. Her work had begun to bother her. The emails she was receiving from her coworkers had begun to be rather strange, they were too personal, and not related at all to the business of business. When she opened the computer she found an email from Cheryl. It read:

“Hey Evy, just wanted to see how your doing on that project I gave you last week. Also, my husband called last week. We ended up going to the bar, anyway one thing led to another and we did it in the alleyway behind the bar. It was so hot. I seriously orgasmed six times. Can you believe it? I couldn’t, he was never that good when we were married. Shoot me an email back, let me know what you think. We should get coffee soon, it has been way too long since we’ve pretended to do that.”
While this disturbed Evelyn it did not surprise her, Cheryl had a bad habit of slipping personal details into her business emails. This email was just outside the range of what she had come to expect but it wasn’t really out of character. However that was just the beginning, and a short message from Frank in Accounting where he explained that he “had a rash on (his) left nut for the last three weeks” precipitated the deluge of personal details from the company’s personnel. Emails came pouring in. At ten o’clock Evelyn’s email account was full. Every employee in the company, including employees at the branch offices in Texas and Ohio had sent her short disgustingly detailed missives about their lives. Evelyn had tried to respond to these, but gave up. She called the IT desk and asked them what to do. Greg, the technician at the desk didn’t believe her, he said that no one could fill up a corporate email account, and when he asked Evelyn if she had gotten his email about having sexual fantasies about his third grade teacher, Mrs. Hoskins, Evelyn hung up. So she did the only thing she thought she could do, she began reading the emails again.
Then impossible things started happening. Evelyn had accepted the fact that everyone employed by her company could feasibly email her personal things, on a case-by-case basis it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, and maybe someone had sent around a message that said she was very good at handling these matters.
Evelyn worked through lunch, and then stayed late. She was like Hercules fighting the Lernaen Hydra. Each email she answered was replaced by two more. She tried deleting whole pages at a time but that just encouraged more and more emails. It was if every action she could take encouraged more and more people to send her the messy details of their lives. She read about suicidal thoughts, about falling in love again, about seeing their first child being born and about being in a car accident while teaching a daughter to drive. She read about rape and lust and passion and abstinence, about how a man had never masturbated, had never had sex, had looked at women naked on the internet and in real life and found nothing, how he had looked at naked men, animals, children, even plants and inanimate objects and still he had never had an erection, this man was immune to sex in all of its insane varieties. She read about how a grandmother hated her daughter for having such beautiful children, and how she loved her grandchildren more than anything, and how she hated herself for this, because before she had been pure and free, a statue on the pedestal of herself she had held herself naked on the beach and felt the sun’s golden rays bathe her in perfection, but now even though she had more sexual partners, some barely old enough drive, most still in college, some older than her, and one born on exactly the same day down to the hour as her, even now in the lush jungle of her sexuality she felt cold and angry because of the impossibly perfect love that the sight of her grandchildren inspired in her.

Excerpt 3: From Chapter 3:

2010-08-13T13:46:00.001-05:00

He was seven again, and his father had just come home from work. His cheeks were flushed and he pulled a second beer from the fridge as he loosened his tie and walked upstairs aggressively to the master bedroom. He felt like he was in trouble even though his homework was all done. Then there was yelling and the meatloaf got cold on the kitchen counter. Thomas and his sister hid in the basement, playing distractedly with toys until tearfully their parents called them up to eat. There was silence at the table. Nobody spoke as his father stood, walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. The sound of the bottle being opened was followed closely by the slam of the back door.
Thomas was vaguely aware of something cold and metallic being pressed against his cheek. There was a cool hand being laid on his forehead, and his hair was slicked back against his scalp. He was throwing up. Was he in the hospital again?
No. He was eight and still in his boyscout uniform. He didn’t have any merit badges, tonight he was supposed to get his first one. He had held back with all his might. He had felt the sickness coming on as he got on the bus after school, but he had held on. He ate very little dinner and bounced from side to side in his seat, claiming to be too excited, but he was bouncing to stop the nausea. He was turning down the shake n’ bake chicken because it wouldn’t have stayed down. It wasn’t until they pulled into the parking lot of the Lutheran Church on Delancey and he had stepped out of the van that it started. First the milk from dinner, then the warm ovenroll, everything came tumbling out of him. He fell to his hands and knees: fruit punch from lunch, a corn dog, green beans, a piece of gum, and finally a couple of bran flakes. The waves came and left him less. He felt empty and shallow, sweating there in the parking lot of St. Mark’s Evangelical. Hands came around him, lifted him to his feet, and a cloth wiped his mouth. “You made it out of the car at least.” A voice said. But all he could do was look at the vomit, it was failure, he had almost made it. He had almost gotten a badge, he was going to know how to tie knots, or maybe start fires, but that was all over now. With success so close at hand he had thrown up, all over it. Then blackness. And then a voice, humming worriedly, and a cool cloth being wiped across his forehead.
“where am I?” But the words didn’t come out that way.
“Shh. Rest now.”
His eyes opened for single second, expecting to find the lamp next to his boyhood bed, but instead there was fluorescent light, and a water stain above his head. A woman with blonde hair was seated next to him, and he saw the red fullness of her lips, and then blackness.
But in the background the vomiting had stopped.
And the blackness gave way to visions. He was in a crib, and above him was a white washed ceiling. And on the ceiling, above him was a tawny water stain. He reached up with hands too small to be his, and arms too long to belong to the hands, but the ceiling receded as he reached, drawing away from him. The sound of footsteps filled his ears, a horrid marching, as if columns and columns of soldiers were coming.
Thomas focused with all of his power on the water stain. He wanted, no, needed it to be everything but what was around him. He didn’t blink, and in the eternity of the approaching footsteps the ceiling slowly morphed. It wasn’t white washed anymore, it was a ceiling tile, but now his eyes were closed, he knew this, but he could still see, as if his eyelids were sunglasses, and the whole room seemed darker. He was in an aging hospital, and the stain wasn’t just a stain, but it was in the shape of a mating pair of monarch butterflies. This realization led to another more brilliant leap of genius, indeed the tawny water stain was not a butterfly, or even a pair of butterflies, but it was a whole migration of butterflies on their way south to Mexico to die and birth and birth and die. But soon even this was not enough, and the tawny water stain was not an image of migration but of the proud country Bolivia, or more correctly and grandly the Plurinational State of Bolivia, or even more grandly and correctly Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia.
As his mind focused on the stain, the sound of footsteps grew louder and louder ringing with military precision, echoing down the long corridors of the ancient hospital. He soon saw that the map of Bolivia was indeed a perfect cartographic record of the Crab Nebula. In his mind he hoped that might bear a passing resemblance to a scar he’d had since childhood. The scar on his left knee was a result of an experiment with a stolen lighter and various inflammable materials. The resulting explosion left him miraculously unharmed except for the burn on his left knee which now, but that wasn’t right, was it someone else’s knee? The memory seemed to have left him. He felt lighter, nauseous, maybe because of how light he felt. It was like being at the top of a roller coaster hill, only he wasn’t bound to the tracks, he could go down or side to side, or up, forever up held aloft by his own buoyancy. He felt sick with the choices.

Excerpt 2 from Chapter 2:

2010-08-05T14:50:00.001-05:00

Things quickly get crazy, and you won't understand any of this, i've posted this deliberately out of context:

“Yes, your big toe. Give it to me.”

“So if you eat my big toe, just my big toe, then you won’t kill me?”

“Would eating you kill you? How strange. I didn’t kill the teapot or the table when I ate them.”

“Well they weren’t alive.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because they didn’t grow, or change… well that’s not right… look they didn’t ever move about on their own did they?”

“I’m not sure, you knew them longer than I did.”

“What? I thought you were here before me.”

“No, you were talking to yourself when I… became.”

“Oh, so are you still going to eat me?”

“Not if I can just eat your big toe.”

“Ok… what one do you want.”

“I don’t know, you pick, I’ve never been able to decide anything.”

“Alright, so we’re agreed that if you get this toe you won’t eat me, right?”

“No I won’t eat you, don’t be ridiculous, how could I eat YOU?”

“Ok do it then.”

Thomas trembled as the shape knelt down and lifted his left foot, and lovingly unlaced his shoe, removed his sock and carefully inserted the big toe into its no-mouth. The feeling of losing his toe into nothingness wasn’t exactly unpleasant. Seeing as Thomas remembered his big toe always running into objects and rarely bringing him any joy, he wasn’t after all one of those people who find the sensation of their toe being sucked to be the height of eroticism, Thomas actually enjoyed the sensation of losing his left foot’s big too. Soon the no-teeth had bitten all the way through, and to his surprise there was no blood, there was no wound. His foot ended cleanly and neatly where a big toe would have been. He found that he could not remember what it felt like to have that big toe. He could remember the fact that he had it at one point, but only the concept of the toe remained, there were no longer any memories of how it felt to wiggle the toe in a sock.

“Well that wasn’t so bad at all.” Thomas said still shaking, but now shaking more from relief than fear.

“That was incredible, and look!” The nothing pointed with its no-hand towards what was once its no-toe, and a miracle had occurred, there on the left foot was a big toe, to be specific: the sinister hallux. It was exactly the same as the toe Thomas had just lost, but now it was attached to nothing.

The shape said “If I thought I was living before… this” the nothing gestured wildly around and down at the toe “this my friend is living!”

Excerpt From Chapter 1:

2010-08-04T19:45:00.001-05:00

Remember everyone this is a rough draft, so please be kind:

They sat in the darkened living room; the fireplace cast shadows on the walls, and left the room in a flickering red twilight. The cousins, and aunts and uncles had left; the grandparents were asleep in the guest room upstairs. The necessary dishes had been cleaned, and the dishwasher hummed contentedly. The remaining dishes, the serving plates, and larger bowls, were left on the counter piled next to the sink. His mother was weary from a barrage of in-laws and she had opened a bottle of red wine for herself and sat back comfortably in her leather recliner. He began slowly: “Well, Mom, yes, there is something wrong.”

A concerned look appeared on his mother’s face.

“No, I’m not failing school- if that’s what you’re thinking” it was what she was thinking “and no it isn’t girl troubles.” Girl troubles were Mrs. Jennings second conclusion, and after this last sentence his mother’s face twisted into a look of confusion, and then a look of worry, greater than her initial look of concern about Thomas’s grades, came over her face. She asked “You’re not… gay” softly whispering the word gay with an exaggeration of her mouth, and then after a pause “are you?” Thomas, feeling the mind of his mother begining to brush against the barriers of his own, was silent for a minute.

“No, mother, I’m not gay.” He paused, then he began again, “It’s just that, well, I feel like I’m losing myself.”

“What do you mean losing yourself?” She asked with incredulity. “People don’t just lose themselves. Its not like you can just forget yourself at the beach or on the subway, you’re not a wallet or a watch.” Thomas’s mother was beginning to get into a comfortable ranting position, but when she took a long sip from her wine glass Thomas interjected.

“Its like, I don’t know what I want to do, I mean, other people know what they want me to do, sometimes I feel like I’m being told to do something, even when nobody has told me to do it.” Thomas was slowly realizing that what he wanted to communicate would be impossible to say to his mother. “I just feel like all my goals and dreams, you know, what I want to do with my life, like they’re being slowly taken away from me, like someone else’s goals and dreams are replacing mine, and not just someone’s everyone else’s.”

As he continued he saw his mother’s eyes glaze over, he knew she was switching into an automatic response mode. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could begin Thomas continued “I…I just feel like I… like I’m not myself anymore, like I’m becoming everyone else.”

At this his mother cut him off, “Thomas, are you on… the weed? Is that what I have to deal with now? I have to take care of my… dope fiend son now? It’s bad enough that your father drinks like a fish” she said as she gestured vaguely with her hand she splashed droplets of wine across the room. “I’m going to go to the pharmacy tomorrow, and I’m going to get one of those home drug testing kits, and you’d better hope mister, that you’re piss comes out clean, or else I’m pulling you out of that fancy university and sending you to community college, you’ll have to live at home of course…” His mother’s words began to fade to white noise.

A New Initiative

2010-07-19T07:26:00.002-05:00

Ok, internets. I know this probably won't happen, and I know no-one ever reads this, but please nobody steal what I'm going to start putting up here.

That said. I'm going to start posting novel (or novella) excerpts! Isn't that great and interesting!

Remember these are rough.
We're going to start with perhaps my biggest, and oldest work in progress. Something that I've tentatively titled (drumroll) Axis Mundi. Yes such a deep and thought provoking title, I know! After all I thought of it.

Anyway it will unfold slowly but I'll post some bits from it here soon.

Horseshoe Crab

2010-03-05T04:13:00.003-06:00

The horseshoe crab is struggling. I'm sure that if I spoke horseshoe crab, I would hear screams and pleadings. After all I'm holding it up to the fire on the beach. Aren't I cruel? Hideously cruel. I mean I've thrown twelve bottles of empty beer into the ocean. With every throw I hoped a whale would choke. I scratched my name and address into the glass, painstakingly. I wanted to be on the news. I wanted to be that bastard who choked a whale to death with an empty beer bottle.

Now look at me, now I'm just a fuck-up holding a horseshoe crab up to a campfire on the beach. How cruel.

The ocean is rolling in. It forms a nice background for the sizzles and pops. The crackle as the shell gets smaller and the insides of the horseshoe crab get larger, the snap as the shell cracks; these are the noises that I focus on over the endless chorus of waves coming in and going out.

I drove away all my friends this way.

Not by roasting horseshoe crabs. Not at all. I'm sure they wouldn't care. They've all got kids and careers and lives, they wouldn't care about one little horseshoe crab.

No I drove everyone away by holding myself over the fire. I tried to make them all hear the sizzles and pops. I wanted them to hear the crackle as the shell of my life got smaller and my insides forced themselves out through the cracks.

I'm not sure when the final pop happened, but now here I am alone on the beach. I'm staring up at the moon, and I wish I could find a way to hold it over a fire. I want to hear what happens to the moon when it starts cracking. How cruel am I?

I've tried to keep a steady balance, make sure no one loved me too much. I held everyone at a distance, even when I wanted them all to gather around and throw up their lunches at the sounds of my insides coming out. I wanted to turn their stomachs with the things I told them. I wanted to be the most fucked up of fuck-ups. I wanted a crown. I wanted a fucked up throne. because in my own little beach-combing mind I'm the god damned king of fucking-up.

I pissed away anything that ever meant something to me. That or someone took it away from me.

It all makes sense though. Especially when I look at the way the crab"s legs curl up in on themselves when the flame hits them. I want them to curl so far inward that they pierce the shell even further. I want the crab to rip off its own carapace in its dying struggles. Those meaningless dying struggles.

But here I am alone on the beach. Holding a crab over a fire. Listening to the pop and sizzle of something that isn't even edible. I'm watching the waves roll in, distorting the moon on the water. I'm wondering why I ever though ti was a good idea to be a horseshoe crab.

Weather

2010-01-31T06:52:00.002-06:00

"What do you want from me?" The angry young man in the heartless brown suit asked.

"I want you to sit down and finish your coffee, and think about it, this an opportunity here." Replied the older woman in the uncompromising sunglasses, lit eerily against the overcast sky.

It had rained for three weeks, almost a full month of summer rain. In the streets people were talking about crop failure, and floods, and the market, and the economy, and the rest of the imaginary friends society keeps for some strange comfort. But at the inexplicable pair sitting outside at the cafe, even as the thunderheads rolled in, they were talking about the Weather, whether it would change.

"I don't know how it happened, look I really don't, if I knew I'd tell you, but I haven't talked to her." and after a pause of sudden respiration, and perhaps even emancipation, or inspiration, or revelation, the young man in the heartless brown suit continued. "I didn't talk to her before she" he asserted quickly "well, look I can't explain it, sometimes she's just gone, and here I am left holding what's left of this mess together."

"Ethan, listen to me, this is your last chance for the position, I've seen your camera tests, and from what I understand you're the best meteorologist the station has seen since Ed "Perfect December" Blakely died, god rest him. Now, I want to see you succeed, I really do, I think you've got great hair, great teeth, and your smile, well I think we can make people think it is supposed to be sunny when you tell them its raining, just by smiling."

"You really think so?" The young man in the heartless brown suit sipped his coffee and leaned back into the chair, and it seemed to him that a crack appeared in the clouds above him, just a tiny crack, and that maybe there would be sunshine today. "I mean, I could've gone anywhere you know. I had a job offer in Boston, you know that? I've never been to the ocean. I was gonna be the guy that set off the John Hancock Tower lights: steady blue, clear view; flashing blue, clouds are due; steady red, rain ahead; flashing red, snow instead."

Behind her uncompromising sunglasses the older woman, not old perhaps, but certainly mature, smiled. The smile did not reach her lips, and it was only for a moment, like a cloud passing over the sun.
"That sounds great Ethan, but nobody would have ever known who you are. What I'm offering you is local fame, and the money's not bad either."

"Yeah... but, I mean I can't, I mean I don't know where she is." Ethan's lips quivered as the word she passed through them, and the woman in uncompromising the sun glasses across from him saw her reflection in Ethan's eyes.

Ethan grew pale in his heartless brown suit. The skin of his upper lip began to perspire, and his leg trembled. Perhaps it was at the thought of giving her up for the job, for his future, but it was easily as likely that his leg began to shake and his lip began to sweat at the thought of being on camera, of being known, of getting the weather wrong.

He breathed in and almost sighed, but instead he spoke a sentence very quickly: "Amanda, the last time I saw her, she was leaving my apartment after I told her that I wasn't going to sleep with her. We had a big fight about..." and then a pause came. A look of fear came over Ethan's face as if he was suddenly afraid of revealing so much to the woman behind the uncompromising sun glasses. He finished his sentences speaking the words as if they were poison, only the poison came from them coming out, as if they were stoppers that had been loosed and the poison had been inside him all along. "We fought about the weather, she refused to let me help her." Then suddenly the poison didn't matter, words were coming out, and the original burn of illness had turned into a slick patina of rage and jealousy. "I was angry that she had been throwing away my analyses." Ethan's eyes began to light up, the sort of light that hits the bottom left corners of a persons eyes when they are lying, but believe that they are only bending the truth, or they believe that the truth is too complicated and cannot be extracted from the layers of past that surround it. "I think she was throwing them away before the broadcast, not even reading them."

"Ethan, that's what I wanted to hear. The job's yours. I'm firing Amanda." Sun broke through the clouds, and the woman behind the uncompromising sun glasses smiled, this time it reached her lips, she said "Can you believe she said it was supposed to rain today? With sun like this I could go to the beach." She grabbed her umbrella as she stood up and walked away, leaving Ethan smiling, but trembling.

He thought that perhaps if he had tried to tell the truth a little bit harder, than maybe it would've rained, but then he smiled and looked up at the sun coming through the clouds as if it were the blinking light of the studios cameras, and the clouds seemed to melt away.

Rejection Letters, a new series. Pt. 2

2010-01-18T14:56:00.002-06:00

Dear Stephen,

Your Graduate School Application was lost in the mail, but that didn’t matter. There’s no room in your stupid choice of a major. Why did you ever think it was good idea? Also, even if there were room in the program you selected what makes you think your pitiful ideas are any good? This institution questions your right to exist based on the poor grades, and even worse letters of recommendation.

However, if you would like to apply again in a couple of years when you’ve all but given up on your dream of becoming a successful person, we’ll gladly accept your application for processing. Fair warning though, everyone younger than you is smarter and better trained at what you want to do; also they are better looking and have WAY MORE sex.

In all honesty the thing that made us reject you was the fact that you cry yourself to sleep at night. We don’t associate with babies.

Signed,

The Graduate School You Always Wanted To Go To

Rejection Letters, a new series.

2010-01-18T14:32:00.001-06:00

Dear Abigail,

We cannot process your student loan request. You were wrong to think that you could get ahead in the world, stop trying. Our decision was based mostly on how attractive you are, which is clearly not enough. We suggest you get a large paper sack to cover your whole body.

Furthermore, after consulting with your parents we have determined that you are a disappointment to everyone you ever met, especially your Grandmother, who never loved you. We are informing you of this as a courtesy, in the hopes that you will continue to store the few dollars earned from your pitiful, dead end, minimum wage job in our trustworthy hands.

Formally,
Customer Service Representative #859-23-4788

To The One Who Knows Who This Is From: A Love Letter

2010-01-11T21:48:00.003-06:00

At the very end of my life, perhaps I will regret all of the moments that I spent in pursuit of you. It was only those scant few decades, those April months spent staring at the moon: inhaling the scent of newly blooming flowers. Perhaps, upon my deathbed, I will recant all the days of my life; hoping that the seconds stolen with you will not weigh against the lonely years.

However, now that we are both in the prime of our lives, I cannot even hope to smell another scent than that of your hair. I cannot even dare to dream of another caress than that of your fingertips running up and down the inconsolable length of my arm. In the darkness I shiver at the memory of your touch, and my lips swell with hope in dreams as they gently devour yours in passionate sunlight.

Now, in the growing shadow of my youth I realize that I am wasted by those seconds of love. I am ruined by the impossible heights of passion, and the inconceivable depths of sorrow that our affair brought me. If only in a different time. If this or that hadn't happened, then perhaps now, you would wear something of mine, and I, your heart; would walk boldly in the streets. Alas, alas, alas, this or that was not meant to be.

Do not weep at this missive, for it is just that, a thing that may be dismissed. However, even though this letter is granted a brief nature, it reflects a sentiment that I hope is deeply missed. Instead of sorrow, know that I do not expect that my life find harbor in any distant port of love. Know that I only intend to travel upon the river of memory that flows from our fleeting love.

Yours,

Forever.

From The Desk of The Editor

2009-12-23T00:56:00.002-06:00

Dear Reader,

Exciting news! The staff, by now you should get that joke, of this soiled publication has decided that it is in the worst interests of everyone they know to put out this publication in a physical format. What we're talking about here is a book. You'll be able to find it on Amazon.com in the coming months, and some discrete private distribution may happen as well.

Regards,

MJK

Dogwood

2009-10-22T06:48:00.003-05:00

The best Swamp Magnolias in Powesheik County grow along the banks of the Deep River, just north of the town that shares its name. There is a grove, if you can call it that, which is split in half by the river. Their branches reach out to each other, straining to touch. In late spring their flowers fall into the river.

At that time of year a man by the name of Warren Guthrie used to sit on the muddy bank and watches as the petals drift lazily down the small shallow river. It wouldn't be right to describe Warren as a smart or happy man. He spent his life avoiding such things. His youth was wasted smoking marijuana in abandoned barns, and drinking stolen liquor in the darkness of Deep River's only movie theater. It didn't matter what movie or what barn, just as long as the whiskey was strong or the smoke was thick.

When he dropped out of High School he joined the military, and spent three years of the Korean War on a military base in Virginia, smoking dope and drinking beer. He was discharged, dishonorably, and he returned home.

He spent the better part of his life working as the worst mechanic in town. The cars he fixed usually came back months or even weeks later in worse condition. If word had gotten out at how poor of a mechanic he was the good people of Deep River would never have patronized Earl's Garage and Auto-Body Repair. Earl was a shrewd business man though and kept Warren on, he would rotate Warren from customer to customer, never letting him work on the same car twice. Earl explained this to his wife Sylvia saying "That boy doubles my business, it is getting to the point where people around here think their cars just fall apart." It was true.

Warren rarely talked when he smoked or drank, he just sat there with the same blank look on his face, as if he was watching the magnolia flowers drift slowly down Deep River.

When Warren died, of cancer at the age of 78, the county had to come and collect his body. He hadn't married, and there was no next of kin. These were unusual circumstances in Powesheik County, most people there had enough cousins to make dating a treacherous endeavor. It isn't unusual to find couples on their first dates reciting their family trees, looking for the branch that overlaps.

In his will Warren asked to be cremated and to have his ashes spread among the grove of magnolia trees. The county sent Glen Carrol out to search for the grove. It took three weeks of looking up and down both sides of Deep River before Glen realized that Swamp Magnolias don't grow in Poweshiek County, the winter kills them before they have a chance to take root.

So Warren's remains were spread under the branches of a stand of Dogwood trees. Now during the summer months Glen Carrol thinks of Warren Guthrie when he sees the white flowers of Dogwood trees.

We should all be so lucky.

The Consequences of Split Pea Soup

2009-10-21T05:25:00.007-05:00

In the early afternoon a man in a grey hat sat at a table drinking a glass of iced tea. The beverage was an un-seasonal choice, it was mid-november, and snow was falling gently on the man's grey hat. The staff of the small cafe had abandoned the man to his glass of iced tea an hour ago. He was innocently waiting at his outdoor table for a simple bowl of split pea soup. The cashier told him it would be brought to his table. His request of a table to be placed outside was unusual, but somehow the manager had been convinced that it was the only rational place for this man to sit.

The only thing that was remarkable about the man's attire were the sporadic burn marks that mottled his grey suit and hat. His tie was straight and black, and his shoes were somehow darker than black. The shoes were obviously polished with care, yet their darkness swallowed any light that came into contact them, as if he was standing in two puddles of darkness.

Passers-by chortled and snorted to each other. They laughed at the mans burned, out-dated, clothing. One brave soul asked the man "Where did you get your hat?" and then quickly answering his own question "A fire sale?" It was not a good joke, and the man in grey gave a cold stare that removed any sense of mirth from the passerby. The young man scurried off into the falling snow, giving periodic glances over his shoulder.

When he finished his iced tea, the man in scorched clothes, stood up walked slowly into the cafe, took out a book of matches, and busied himself with the task of setting the building on fire. As the fire took hold, and began to climb the wall the man grabbed the nearest waitress and repeated his request for a bowl of split pea soup. Unable to comply the waitress screamed for her life.

No one died in the fire, but on the other hand the man in the grey suit could not be accounted for. Police sketch artists made attempt after attempt to capture the likeness of the man. Each sketch was a failure, when the witnesses was given the chance to examine the portraits, they invariably said that the sketch looked nothing like the man in the grey suit.

Never make arsonists wait for their soup.

What I Think About When I Hear Glenn Miller

2009-10-19T01:20:00.004-05:00

The last time I saw my Mother she was already underground. She hated everyone and hated herself for hating everyone. Towards the end she would write me these letters about how I didn't brush my teeth right, or how I never put the bottle of ketchup back in the fridge. The letters were about the childhood she gave me. I like to think they were her anger at how short that time was. It was only fourteen years before I got a job and started helping to pay the bills.

I hated her too, or I hated what she had become. It is hard to love someone who is filled with bile and rage. None of the nurses in the hospice wanted to treat her, or even get near her bed. She would scream out at them, yell at them for stealing things she never owned, or even wanted. The hospital called me when she bit a nurse who was changing her i.v. bags. My mother was yelling at her because the nurse allegedly stole her water pick. My mother didn't even floss. She had never owned a water pick, let alone an electric toothbrush.

The doctors barely touched her. Towards the end they only graphed her downward spiral. The charts were filled with vitals and statistics, all shrinking and decreasing, as if the woman I knew, the mother I loved had already left and the remains were evaporating. The only evidence was the charts. They wrote everything down on the clipboard that hung from the foot of her bed, and they wrote it in duplicate on the clipboard that hung on her door. Other than that they told me how slowly she was dying every time I asked.

When the hospice called me for the last time, to tell me mother wasn't going to make it through the night, I tried not to go.

Let me explain.

She wasn't always like that. I remember when I was little and she would put her favorite records on, and we would dance together in the living room. We'd flip the coffee table over onto the couch, and then she'd go and choose a Glenn Miller record, and put it on the turntable. She taught me how to swing dance, how to foxtrot and keep a steady jazz square going. She would turn me and spin me, and then we'd slow dance. She'd hold me close like only a mother could.

Sometimes she would cry and tell me she loved me, and that nothing else mattered. At the time it confused me, why was she crying, we were dancing and having fun. As a child I never made the connection between tears and laughter. At the time, I didn't understand that you could recognize how quickly the most beautiful moments in your life flash by, and how even when you are in those moments you can mourn their passing.

Her illness took all of that warmth away. She lost that part of herself that made her care about moments and people in her life. She'd been in the hospital for the better part of the year by the time we moved her to the hospice. She called me names, and told me how disappointed she was in me. She told me I was a mistake, told me that the day I was born was the worst day of her life. How I wasn't worth the nine months of effort, and the eight hours of painful labor.

When the hospice called, I was listening to music alone in my own empty living room. It wasn't Glenn Miller, I don't even remember what it was. I only remember the silence between the notes, and the how wrong it felt for the singer to mourn their unrequited love. The voice on the phone sounded worried and practiced, and finally relieved when I told her I was coming. I wondered how many times a day that person had to make that call, and how many times no one came to watch their next of kin die. I thought about how horrible it would be to die alone knowing that there was someone out there who once loved you, but couldn't bring themselves to hold you at the end.

I made every stop I could. I was hoping that the nurses telling my mother I was coming would be enough, and she could die in peace, knowing that I still loved what was left of her. I was hoping I would come and find her lying on her bed, looking like she was asleep and at peace, and that maybe I could hold her limp figure and cry, and wish away all the years we spent apart.

When I entered her room she was crying weakly in the dark. Every breath was a sob that took all her strength. It took all of her strength to cry. I sat next to her bed and reached out to take her hand, and stroke her hair, but she pulled her hand from mine. She cowered on the other side of the bed. I sat with my hands outstretched for the better part of an hour before she started to struggle to breath. She stopped sobbing and started gurgling and coughing. Five minutes later she was dead. She didn't get any last words. There were no whispered promises of love, not even any last promises of bile. My mother simply died, her face still wet with tears.

Adam's Merciful Divorce

2009-09-28T15:51:00.002-05:00

Adam arranged for the marriage to last only a short while. Now, let us not judge him. Indeed when he took his vows he meant every last one of them. There was part of him though that itched and chafed as he declared his love for Julia. He couldn't stand to look in her eyes when he said his vows. Everyone took this to mean that he was trying not to cry, and they thought he was a good lad for doing so, but Adam, and maybe the minister, and improbably Julia's kid sister Tiffany knew. They knew that he couldn't hold her gaze, because he was afraid she would see into him. He was afraid that she would see into that part of him that wanted to run wild in the streets and burn down civilization and howl at the moon as he tore meat from a bone. He was afraid of all of these things in himself and so he couldn't let her see.

It really was better the way things happened. Imagine if she loved a man who raped and pillaged along the coastline? Of course he had to sleep with his secretary.

He couldn't even explain it to her. Not even when the took him away for bombing the marinas, and laughing as he burned down the Arby's. He couldn't explain it to her, if he did then maybe she would forgive him, and then maybe his illness would spread to her.

No it was much better the way he ended things, on top of his secretary on the dining room table, rattling the china hutch.

After The Storm Breaks Pt. 1

2009-09-14T01:37:00.005-05:00

In the east thunderheads were gathering, giant black and grey anvils, stacking up on one another. In the west the sun was setting slowly. Bantam cocks fought in the yard as my father and I filled the barn with bale upon bale of hay. With each toss and turn, the stacks grew higher and higher. Finally after hours of stooping and reaching and grabbing and tossing- we were done. Just as we closed the barn doors a crash of lightning announced the arrival of the storm.

My father and I ran, almost skipping, through the rain, thrilling in the wild downpour of the sudden storm. That was the last moment I want to remember. We stopped short of the porch when we saw the figure of my mother crying by the back step. Around her were all the dishes, every last dish in the house, lying broken and shattered in a semi-circle around her. At her feet lay the two Bantam cocks that fought in the yard. She had wrung their necks, and the blood that dripped from their beaks was on her hands.

Not knowing what to do I rushed inside. The kitchen was empty. There was nothing in the cupboards, in the pantry or on the counter tops. When I got to the dining room I found out where everything was. The kitchen knives were stabbed into the table and the seats of chairs. Everything had been thrown or stabbed, or stabbed and thrown. I had never seen anything like it. I almost laughed at the clever way my mother's madness arranged the knives, smallest to largest, except one knife was missing, there in the middle, taken away, like a man with a broken grin.

Things had never been this bad before. Even when my mother had her "that-sort-of-day" days, even when her medication ran out because she had been taking them and throwing them down the sink. I ran upstairs to the office to the phone to call someone, but when I got there I didn't know who to call. I thought about calling my siblings, maybe my older brother Ted who still lived in the area, only a twenty minute drive away, or maybe my sister Susan, she was down in Moulton though, a whole hour to the south. I sat there paralyzed by the phone, I knew that I needed to call someone, because my father was down there dealing with my mother, who would probably try to hurt him or me, or both, like she did last summer when she pushed my cousin James to the floor and bit him on the shoulder. But she'd been taking her medication and we thought, we thought things were getting better.

I ran my hand over the phone, I still didn't know who to call when I heard my father yell from down stairs. He yelled in pain. This was the man I saw lose a finger without flinching, he didn't bat an eye when the tractor engine sheared off his right ring finger. He simply grabbed a kitchen towel, wrapped it around his hand, and walked to the car. My father calmly drove to the hospital with his hand above his head. So when I heard him cry out in pain, I knew my mother had stabbed him. I knew she had done this because last winter we took her to the hospital and as the orderlies took her away she whispered in my ear "I'm going to get you for this you little shit, I can't believe you'd betray your own mother for Christ's sake." and then no longer in a whisper she yelled "I'm going to get you all, oh yes, you'll all pay, they won't get me." When the double doors slammed shut we could hear her yelling down the hall.

I was finally happy and free for about three months. Father and I worked the farm, and we even allowed ourselves to laugh sometimes. We didn't have to force pills down my mother's throat, we didn't have to wake up at three in the morning and drive along country roads to go find her.

And I didn't have to run to the phone to go call someone.

Flax Seed Oil, Eggs, Avocados, Radishes

2009-08-11T03:42:00.005-05:00

The last note she left me, the very last crumb of us, read like this: Flax Seed Oil, Eggs, Avocados, Radishes, and at the end "harold I'm leaving. Everything"

I didn't understand it at first.

In fact I still don't.

Who ends a twelve year relationship at the bottom of a grocery list?

Sunil the Thief

2009-07-15T06:24:00.005-05:00

Somewhere in the deep jungles of southern Sri Lanka is Sunil. He is known as the Bachelor, also as Sunil the Thief, and Sunil the Handsome, and of course Sunil Who Returns. He is getting older now. His long white hair clings stubbornly to his scalp. It is not the thick perfection it once was, and yet, his mustache still shows the virility of his youth, as it ever will. What maiden can resist the temptations of Blue-Skinned Sunil's Mustache?

They say that on long cool nights you can see him running, slightly out of breath. With the wind at his back he reaches speeds, well not nearly the speeds he used to reach, but still speeds of valor. They say that you can see him leap cliffs, and climb up the tallest trees. Some sages whisper that in his youth Sunil could run along across the tops of branches, almost as a bird in flight.

Sages also tell of the tragedies left in Sunil's wake, of the ruined women, the absent mothers and the hordes of his many scorned fiancees that can be seen chasing him through the dark and moistened trees. The jungles thick vines hampering their every step, as they strain to catch their hearts prize. Each of these poor wretches was left at the altar, as a profane sacrifice to the gods, or to the men whose hearts they broke in turn.

Whatever the reason, the chase goes on, and it will continue until Sunil climbs up into a white-flowering tree. He will release the women from the bonds of love by laying down his life to the serpent he will find there, but it will not last. From the serpents egg will spring a new Sunil, who will run across the land and unknowingly draw women from their lovers arms even as he flees their caresses.

This is what will happen, it is written in neat white scripts running up and down Sunil's deep blue arms. On his back are the curses of Lakshmi, who loved Sunil from the moment she looked down from her chariot, which is drawn by nine white and black swans.

A Special: Iceberg Lettuce

2009-07-15T06:07:00.004-05:00

The staff of the Particular made his way over to the 6 Sentences (http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/) blog the other day, and the staff decided, on a whim, to submit six sentences to their site. On the very likely chance that they wouldn't approve, the editor-in-chief (god rest his blackened soul) decided to publish those six sentences here. The title of the piece is "Iceberg Lettuce." Without much further commotion, here it is:

Iceberg Lettuce

"On first dates, Africa doesn't count", she told me this when I brought up the subject of places we'd each like to see. I thought about answering the question with a very smooth, but ultimately futile: "Your apartment." She answered first though and she said the south pole. She carried on and on about how cute penguins were, or rather, are. I couldn't listen anymore, not with my childhood flashing before my eyes, I got up and left. Penguins killed my father.

Summer's Fat Dripping Down Our Chins

2009-07-15T05:36:00.002-05:00

Here we are in the thick of July. Deep in the heart of this hazy, thrice-hexed season. We're sitting on the porch, breathing heavily in the descending sunlight. Our movements are slow and thin, as if our limbs were too large and too porcine to penetrate the calm and ease of this moment. This is the moment when I learned about how I really felt about you, myself, and every item in my life.

It isn't so much indifference as another greater sort of benevolent apathy. Here on the porch, safe within its halcyonic columns, I can clearly see the sun dipping below the horizon. Above us, high above the purpling clouds, come out the fireflies, and we are lost. For our gaze drifts between them and the curling smoke that comes in waltzes from our lips. One, two, three, one, two, three, and again again the waltz- breathe breathe smoke, breathe breathe smoke. Rising from the ashes of our cigarettes are moths that flutter in the growing moonlight. They fly west towards the sky's lowering flame, like humans towards delusions.

We, all of us, all that matter for the moment, are here, gathered on the porch. We watch the towns around us, and we watch the flickering light from the cities on the hill. What more can one ask than this, this twilight paradise? Truly on our porched thrones we are kings and queens, emperors and empresses, coronated with soft fluttering breezes that chill our sweat dripping bodies. We sit in the blessedly growing darkness as the fat of summer drips down our chins.

Jonah and a Whale

2009-06-21T14:14:00.004-05:00

"Like the guy who got swallowed by a whale, right?" It happens every time I introduce myself to people. Even here, with this guy holding a gun to my head, all he or I can think about is the story of some guy who got swallowed by a whale. Me, I'm looking at the whale tattooed on the arm that's pointing a gun at me. My parents tell me that they named me after a distant relative of ours who fought in the civil war. Why they named me after someone who's life never overlapped with theirs, I don't know, but it happened, and I wish it hadn't. Damn whale follows me everywhere.

I can't go anywhere without the whale. In the grocery store, "Hey Jonah, have I got a whale of deal for you!" The whale is everywhere. For christmas my perpetually dying great-aunt Esthelle, always makes me a sweater with a whale on it. Each year she makes me put it on, then we take a picture of us together. I have to wear the damn itchy sweaters all day. In our family photo albums you can see me growing up, foot by foot, with the whale right on top of me.

I used to wish it would happen though. I wished a whale from the Lord would come, come and swallow me and take me away from here. This little town, it needs to be swallowed by something, or at least something other than the decay that is swallowing it now. Although I suppose decay is a sort of whale. Yeah I used to wish something big would happen, that is before this happened.

After he asked if I'd ever been swallowed by a fish, stupid question, the man with the gun came over the counter. I had to stop him, not because he was robbing our store, and not because he had already shot someone, but because of the whale.

On his arm I could see his tattoos. There, right there, on his left arm was a big white whale grinning at me. When he pointed the gun at me, all I could do was look at that whale on his arm. I don't remember much more than him pointing the gun at me, and me looking at the whale. I've been told I screamed something and ran at him, and I still want to ask everyone who was there what I said, but I know they couldn't tell me. I know all they heard was the sound of gunfire, and then the sound of a body crumpling to the floor, my body.

A Postcard To The Atlantic

2009-06-19T16:12:00.002-05:00

Dear "Howard",

Firstly, I'm not even sure who you are. Let alone how you might know me. Also my cat died when I was in high school. Were you a neighbor of my parents, or a friend of theirs? If you did really kill my cat, why did it take you so long to tell me?

Anyway, it was nice to hear from you. I agree with you on the whole zeppelin front, such a shame. I've always wanted to fly in one. I know one of my great-grandparents took a ride in one. Of course that was before I was born, but I like to imagine that some part of me, some part of their genetics, has flown in a zeppelin.

Can you even send a postcard to a ship? I guess they have mail-planes, or telegraphs. Maybe they'll scan this and you'll get a printed copy. I hope you get to see the picture of Mt. Rushmore on the back of this. I drew a mustache on George Washington, and I gave Abraham Lincoln lipstick.

Regards,

Mary Anne

A Glass Night

2009-06-16T13:20:00.006-05:00

A man sat in a worn out rowboat, on a small pond without a name. It was midsummer, and the wind was dying in the pine trees that surrounded the pond. He had inherited the pond and fishing rod from his father, along with all the old farmer's debt.

Somewhere in the distance he could hear the rumble of a large truck, hauling away his father's tractor. The tractor would hold off the bank for a month, maybe two, but that didn't matter to the man in the boat, not right now anyway. Even the pale line on his finger, where until very recently he wore a wedding ring, didn't matter. What mattered at this moment was the subtle movement of his hands, pulling gently on his rod's line. Twenty feet in front of him a fly he'd tied himself danced magically along the water's surface. It bobbed and hopped across the still surface of the water.

Nights like this are rare. To himself, below his conscious the man in the boat knows these nights as glass nights. They are nights when the wind dies, and the air is cool. The surface of the water is like a mirror reflecting the failing twilight. Insects rise from the water, and light from the setting sun reflects off of their wings. A subtle show of lights, small crystals flashing across the surface of the still water.

The man in the boat let his hands go still. He laid his rod down in the boat. These things the fish, the rod and the boat were the excuse he used to come here on this night. Nothing mattered but the stillness of the water. The trees let their whispers fall silent. It seemed as if the birds in the trees sensed the sanctity of the moment, and they stopped their common chatter.

To the man in the boat the momentary silence stretched joyously on for hours. He sat there in the boat in a state of earthly nirvana. He did not exist, all that existed was the still and quiet of the water. There were no troubles, no money or love, only the constant quiet of the still water.

In the distance a car's horn sounded, and the world started turning again. The wind picked up, the trees brushed their limbs against one another. Birds started a chorus, and the sun moved slowly towards the earth.

The man rowed to shore, back to money and love and movement. He rowed back to all of the things that make nights like this possible, these glass nights.

The Glorious Descent of Lockjaw Jones

2009-06-11T04:04:00.005-05:00

Lockjaw Jones, nobody remembers him anymore, except me. What good has he done me? Here I am pushing a broom around this stinking joint because of him. Everyone else forgot about him and moved on with their lives, they got better jobs, faster cars and bigger houses. Me, I'm stuck here, stuck in this old arena, nobody even comes here for the fights anymore. But it doesn't really matter, I've only got a couple of years left in me.

The owner of the arena organizes a local boxing circuit here. I get to watch the fights for free, well I have to watch the fights. I clean up the teeth, I mop the blood sweat and piss up from the ring. Yeah that's one thing they don't tell you, sometimes you piss yourself when you get knocked out, sometimes you shit yourself too. The kids who come in here these days, so full of hope. You can see it in their eyes, they aren't here to fight, they're here to put bread on the table. These kids will never make it past this old broken down ring. They're gonna spend their weekends here fighting for scraps until they can't lift a glove anymore and they have trouble remembering whether milk goes in the fridge or the dishwasher.

Don't get me wrong. You still get into it. You attach yourself to one color of shorts and yell at the guy standing in them to beat the crap out of the other. You yell at him, because you can't do it yourself. It doesn't matter that the kid in the other corner can't pay his medical bills from the last fight, you still yell for your guy to kill him, because you want to be in there taking his punches and hitting back harder, showing the world that you can still do it.

That's the way Lockjaw was, right up until the end when he fought "Tricky" Ricky Robinson. God, I still remember that fight. I can't go day without thinking about it. I still remember the camera flashes made the fighters look like statues, the way the light froze them in a pose and your eyes wouldn't let anything go until they took everything in. I remember the way the referee danced around the fighters like a marionette.

Lockjaw tried to go down in the eighth, like he was told to. "Tricky" Ricky wasn't in on it, but Lockjaw thought he was. So when that last blow came, the one after he had started falling, well Lockjaw set his jaw tight. He got back up and spent the next eight minutes giving "Tricky" Ricky a lifetime of lost car keys and half-finished sentences.

The men in suits who had tried to fix the match watched in horror as Lockjaw Jones let the referee lift his glove over his head. They sent a man with a bat to the locker room. What happened there is something I can't tell you, I wasn't there, but I heard Lockjaw describe how much he screamed before he passed out. Lockjaw's legs were broken, the doctors couldn't set the fractures right.

A boxer's nothing without his legs. Any damn fool can throw a punch, but a boxer's gotta move out of the way of those punches. He's gotta be able to shift his weight, lean in for the strike and lean back for the counterstrike. He's gotta absorb the blow, or twist away from the punch. Everything comes up through the legs, gains power in the hips and stomach, and finally out through the arms. A good punch comes from the earth. If you can ground a punch right you've got the whole damned world behind your fist, and there ain't nobody who can take a hit from the planet.

Lockjaw had a limp for the rest of his life. Maybe it was out of pity, or vengeance, but the men who broke his legs got him a job working for them. You can still see Lockjaw somedays hanging around the ring, watching the young kids fight, leaning on his broom.

A Postcard From The Atlantic

2009-06-11T03:53:00.002-05:00

Dear Mary Anne,

The boat left the dock a couple minutes late. Crossing the ocean this way gave me a lot of time to think. Even small delays, like the porter dropping my luggage from the cart add up. Across the ocean these small delays build up like a cresting wave, until it takes us four extra days to make port.

I don't know why we don't have zeppelins. Airplanes are terrible. You don't have enough time to be comfortable, and the airlines make sure of that. If we still had zeppelins I think air travel would be cheaper. People would spend another couple days on board the zeppelin, while airplanes would only get used by businessmen and for freight purposes.

But things happen, we don't have zeppelins anymore, also I'm afraid I killed your cat.

Best Regards,

Howard.

A Request To The Readers from The Editor-in-Chief

2009-05-25T14:52:00.002-05:00

Dear Readers,

The Staff of the Particular has decided to send a story up the river to another, more illustrious publication. However, we're flummoxed as to which story to send. This is where you come in, we'd like to hear from you. What is your favorite story we've put out so far? Why?

Please reply with a comment on this post. Our staff is standing by and we're anxious to read your thoughts and opinions.

The winning story will be submitted to, and probably rejected by, literary magazines all across the country.

-Cheers,

The Staff of the Gin Mill.

That Thanksgiving The Oldest Man in the World Had Us All Over For Dinner.

2009-05-20T03:06:00.003-05:00

When those brown envelopes came in the mail it was a surprise to everyone. A lot of people thought it was a clever advertisement, but when they all called their relatives to prepare for thanksgiving, well the only thing anyone could talk about was the strange letter handwritten on a piece of legal paper.

Everyone got a letter. Expecting mothers got two or more depending on how many they were expecting. In a couple of cases the mother didn't know how many children were growing in her, but in nine months the number of letters proved accurate.

The letters were all politely addressed to whatever name we each preferred. The return address read simply Great-Grandpa. A lot of people, I'm told, opened their letters wondering why their great-grandfather had written them a letter, seeing as they hadn't spoken since their eighth birthday.

The letters all had the same text too. Each one invited the addressed to join the mysterious sender for a holiday dinner. Eventually our Great-Grandpa called a press conference. He explained that he wasn't really our Great-Grandpa, there were a lot more greats. A lot of people didn't believe him when he said he was the founder of the human race, and a lot of people pointed at the bible and their old pictures of Adam from the fifties. "But he's not white!" they'd say. Great-Grandad would just chuckle and say "who knows what color I am, if you spent as much time in the sun as I have you'd be tan too." Eventually some team of scientists proved Great-Grandad right, everyone on the whole planet was related to him.

Our Great-Granpappy just got lonely, he'd been in a nursing home for thirty or so odd years and no one had visited him. So he had decided to invite us all to dinner. Every last one of us.

Of course, not everyone made it, and there wasn't enough room for everybody. Instead of cramming into some building we decided to set up tables along the highways. Everyone brought more food than they could eat, and we all ate more than we thought we could. As I asked a homeless man to pass the plate of dinner rolls I realized that I passed him everyday on my way to work. Then the thought struck me at how ridiculous it was that I never gave him a dollar. We all ate together, everyone, and then when we were all too full to eat anymore we went and shook hands with our great grandfather. He was an old black man with a big white beard.

A lot of people asked him why it took him so long to get everyone back together. He would answer shyly "You know how it is... trying to get everyone together... big families just have troubles like that sometimes. 'Course I would have wrote to you all sooner if you all hadn't been so damn angry at each other."

After dinner everyone went home and for a couple of months the whole country was happy. People hugged each other when they got off the subway. Airports were jam packed with people welcoming and hugging strangers. It was great: people didn't rob or kill each other, nobody got too drunk or took too many drugs. Everyone just wanted to be invited to next years Thanksgiving.

But then Christmas came and when everyone didn't get together we were all pretty disappointed. Then Valentines Day rolled past, and everyone started to forget the reason why they didn't cut in line anymore or cheat on their taxes. Soon everything was back to the way it was, and nobody talked about who they saw at Thanksgiving. Like the old man said "some families just have their problems, especially big families... but still its family."

I waited all year long for that envelope, me and the homeless guy who passed the rolls, we waited in the worn down benches at the post office. To pass the time we told each other old family stories. We waited another year, but those brown envelopes never came.

Part of Me Will Float Forever At The Bottom of the Ocean

2009-05-19T02:21:00.004-05:00

When that man from Denmark approached me, well it didn't make any sense. Why would I lock myself in a steel tube at the bottom of the ocean? The bigger question really was why I would lock myself in down there with five thousand other people. I imagined it after a couple of days, our bodies coming free from the restraints, bumping into each other in suspended animation.

But then, I thought about it. I thought about how really I'm locked in a steel tube anyway, only the sun shines on me and I don't feel weightless. I imagined how great it would feel to have even a part of me, just a single part of me floating down there with everyone. We'd all be free from worry, and we would drift endlessly through the currents.

When the time came I paid that man from Denmark, and he put me, well part of me, just some hair and blood, in that steel canister. Then the man from Denmark took a boat to the middle of the ocean and threw me and everyone else in the cylinder overboard. My friends and family tell me it is a sham, they ask me how I could pay a hundred dollars to have some of my hair put at the bottom of the ocean.

I don't care what they say. They will never understand how I can still feel that little part of me: down there at the bottom of the ocean I am drifting endlessly through the currents, free from myself and everyone else.

Everything We Lost in the Fire

2009-05-11T05:31:00.003-05:00

Twenty three napkins and fifteen napkin rings, twelve place settings, and everything else in the buffet. The insurance company still wants to know how much we lost, and I can't tell them everything. There are some things still smoldering in there. Underneath the ruin of our lives, burning in the wreckage of the cellar, there are still some embers glowing.

I know you want me come to the store with you, so we can buy all those things that made up our home. You should know we lost more than things. When the fire came through the walls, you didn't even turn to watch me get trapped beneath the ceiling. From inside I heard you screaming, somehow over the roaring flames I heard you yelling for me.

I saw the panic in the fireman's eyes when he cleared the rubble off my body. I watched his face as he picked me up, as gently as he could. Both he and I were afraid that I might turn to dust and ash if he held on too hard. All the while the world went blank and there was only me breathing in the smoke and your voice screaming in my ear. For some reason I always thought you would turn back and look for me as we ran out of a burning house. Instead you ran on ahead without me.

We lost everything in that fire.

The Birds in the Darkness

2009-05-07T04:14:00.002-05:00

In her sleep Aderyn could hear the birds chirping outside her window. Her dreams were filled with the echoes of birds chirping and singing back and forth to one another. Of course, this made her hours of rest much less restful than they should have been. How can a body perform the necessary functions of sleep with a constant chorus of songbirds outside the window? Aderyn's days were long hours spent aching for the rest of sleep, knowing that it would find her and leave her unsatisfied, like so many lovers.

In the daylight hours Aderyn had the habit of singing. She sang songs with out words, sometimes without melodies, and more often than not songs without repetition. She would sing fluidly from one song to the next, never knowing when or where the music came from.

When her therapist, who happened to be an avid amateur ornithologist, heard her singing one day he instantly recognized the song of the common Bewick's Wren. He then asked her a series of thinly veiled questions about the fauna and insect activity surrounding her house. After responding to the question "What mood do the azaleas, that is if you have azaleas, put you in, in the morning?" she answered "sleepy." At this moment, Aderyn realized that her therapist was an idiot. Despite her immediate disappointment in his skills, the fact remained that he had identified the, until then, unknown source of her problem.

She hoped with the birds gone that lethargy and crankiness would leave her, and she could continue on as she had before, blissful and rested. An exterminator was called. It is surprising the sort of things people will do for money. The morally flexible exterminator proceeded to send a cloud of poison into the nests and branches of the trees outside Aderyn's window.

Her nights were silent. Her days too fell silent. She found that instead of brighter days and darker nights her future consisted of grayer, duller, days, and an endless series of forgotten dreams. She sang no songs and ached to be tired again.

You were right, it is good to just sit down.

2009-05-06T19:12:00.005-05:00

Staring up at the clouds we could smell the grass growing around us. We could smell that sharp silica, and the long ages the grass had grown on that hillside. Somewhere across the field a pine tree was growing. In the air between us and the tree, riding on the gentle currents of wind, was a saffron sea of pollen. When the wind picked up it looked liked the tree was evaporating into the blue sky above.

We didn't talk about anything for a long time. Words came out, there were topics and sentences, but we might as well have been quiet. Eventually we were. We fell silent, staring up at the clouds. I knew you were trying to figure out roles for the clouds to fill. You're always finding, or trying to find, patterns in things. Remember that time you went through Jean Dutourd's The Horrors of Love? You circled every first letter of a page and told me it meant something. In the end you couldn't find an anagram for anything meaningful, but that didn't stop you believing.

In the silence of the clouds we didn't need to care about our lives. We didn't need to care about the war, or your father's drinking. I didn't feel those uncomfortable desires to move closer to you, to run my hands through your hair, and try to kiss you on the cheek, and then maybe the lips. All the problems of the world melted away into the blue sky above. The gun felt lighter in my hand than it ever had. There was no meaning beyond the moment. There was nothing to attach to the memory except the memory itself.

When I look back on it now, sitting in my prison cell, I wonder where you've gone. To pass the long endless nights I remember that day in the field. I stare up into the blue sky of my memory and everything falls away, up past the clouds.

Fires of Synchronicity

2009-05-04T00:10:00.003-05:00

Ten years ago I swallowed a handful of popcorn. After a half hour I vomited, what came up was not popcorn but thirty-two pernicious violet butterflies. I haven't understood that moment until now. At the same time I vomited the butterflies a mine shaft collapsed in Virginia. No one was in the mine, but two types of rare flower went extinct.

When she walked in the room, somewhere in africa a baboon began mating. My memory is more beautiful than the moment itself, even as I look at it now, I still prefer to remember the way her hair fluttered around her shoulders in the afternoon light. I know that seems disconnected, but looking back now, events seem to have a certain glow about them when they go together. When you watch the earth spin from my view you can see these fires light up the darkness of chaos. A statue topples and an infant nurses, and the universe glows brighter.

Every time I sneeze, I notice that a bus stops in Chicago. I've never been to Chicago, and I don't know if I could go in the spring. Traffic would become tragically backed up. I've also noticed that right before I sneeze a man in Hong Kong usually breathes in.

Last year, before this all happened, I would have told you that the world has rules and laws. Everything in nature works one way, because that's the way it works. I'm not so sure any more, being able to see all of time, I'm not so sure that gravity isn't just an illusion caused by the profusion of the color red in crayons.

Very recently I've started questioning a lot of things. As you can tell I have no more faith in the red giant gravity. It is a pretty thought to think that it can escape us at any time. On some rainy days, I like to think that when we push down hard enough we hurt the earth's feelings and it runs away from us for a second. But because we are her favorite children, she cannot stay mad at us and rushes back to hug us.

Everything is different now. It has become hard to think straight through things. Someday I hope time will go back to the start of things, or before I could see everything. If I could jump into the burning brilliance of every moment, I would, but now I'm stuck floating through time and space watching the fires burn brighter and brighter.

The Death of St. Bartholemew the Merciful

2009-05-03T23:38:00.004-05:00

He was found in a small church near Boleradice, in the country we now call the Czech Republic . His body was laid out on the altar, as if in his dying moments the young priest had offered his body to God. Maybe it was out of fear that they were wrong, or simple superstition, but the enemy never touched his corpse. They left him to die the painful death he had chosen for himself. On his lips was a smile, and his eyes stared coldly at the remains of the ceiling.

As the townspeople fled for their lives, the young priest had fired thirty-two bullets at the advancing soldiers. With each shot he recited a short prayer. In the end the young priest killed thirty-two of the enemy's men before a bullet found its way to the Eucharist in his stomach. Each man the priest shot died with a smile on his lips, perhaps with the knowledge that they would not have to kill anymore.

The first miracle of St. Bartholemew occurred when the bullet penetrated his stomach. The desperate men that advanced upon his dying body found that what poured from his wound was not blood, but wine. They found him laying on the altar, with his arms spread wide. His white robes were stained red with wine.

The second miracle occurred in a small cafe on the south side of Berlin, when a survivor of the conflict found St. Bartholemew's head floating in his soup bowl. Of course the size of the soup bowl was much too small for the head to float, but there it was floating all the same. The head spoke to the former sergeant, but no one around could hear the words that made the guilty man begin to weep.

The third miracle the saint performed was when he delivered a small german child to her grandfather. The girl had been missing for three days, there was no explanation for her disappearance. One minute she had been clutching her grandfather's hand, and the next thing he knew her clothes lay empty on the train station's platform. The little girl was returned to her grandfather in perfect health. She appeared in his attic wearing blood stained and bullet ridden clothes. There was the faint smell of wine around her.

The old man explained to his granddaughter that he loved her very much, he then returned her to her mother. After a meeting with his lawyer, he packed a small suitcase and made arrangements to travel to Boleradice. He was found stretched out on the altar of a ruined church, smiling. Around the body there was the smell of wine.

The World is Filled With Glittering Beetles

2009-04-29T06:19:00.004-05:00

To a mind blinded by the bleak promises of science: we inhabit a realm of cold chance and bounded, explainable, probability. Each miracle of existence has behind it laws and rules correcting its presence in the world. Even the tiniest particles must adhere to strict traditions regarding their movements. To such a mind the following events will no doubt make a certain sort of sense, but such comprehension is false. There is a deeper layer of meaning that I myself have yet to find.

Recently I received a letter. It was from an old friend who I hadn't seen or heard from in a long while. The friend was writing from a hotel in Avignon. On the envelope there was a drawing of a Golden Scarab. The drawing was clearly illustrated by a talented and loving hand. One could easily note the care with which each line was drafted.

The next morning, on my walk to work, I passed by seven posters advertising a particular brand of pipe tobacco. I don't smoke a pipe anymore, I haven't since the war. The central design of the posters was exactly similar to that of the Golden Scarab on the envelope. In great haste I contacted the friend who had written the letter. He denied any knowledge of the brand of pipe tobacco, or indeed performing any design work for any corporation.

Then in my office, as I was interviewing a patient who had just confessed to having dreams about a Golden Scarab, I heard a noise tapping on my window. When I opened the window a beetle flew in. I grabbed it from the air, and noting the color I pocketed it. I calmed my patient, and returned to our therapy session. For the next few hours, as my patient complained about their parents and upbringing, I would pretend to check my pocket watch. Secretly I was examining the beetle.

After the appointment I ventured over to the city university and presented the beetle to an entomologist. Professor Stapleton, although normally reserving himself for the study and collection of butterflies, confirmed my suspicions. The beetle was a member of the scarabaeidae family. Indeed the color of the beetle's shell was a bright gold that seemed to glow regardless of the lighting.

Several days later I was called into my study by my maid. She had just finished dusting the mantle above the fireplace when she noticed a glowing line forming on the paving stones before the fireplace. By the time I entered the room I found, burned into solid stone, a perfect representation of a golden scarab. In fact the light given off by the glowing stones distinctly matched the color of the beetle I had brought to the Professor.

The following evening, as I walked home from work I noticed that every third woman seemed to be wearing a golden scarab broach. Aside from the broach, I could not sense any other similarity of dress in any of the women I encountered. I interviewed several women as to the origin of their broaches. No two gave the same answer. It seems that craftsmen from multiple points in history, and geography, decided to craft identical broaches resembling golden scarabs.

How strange is it that our lives are full of unavoidable details. One man may find that doors seem to close in front of him. Another may open fortune cookies only to find the same fortune, reprinted time and time again. For myself, I have decided that the beetles are as unavoidable as the sun above us and the air around us. I can no more remove the golden scarabs from my presence than I could pull the moon down from the autumn sky. Instead I have decided to catalogue each incident. Perhaps some sort of satisfaction may be gained from this endeavor, perhaps not. Regardless, my world is filled with glittering beetles.

When Baron La Croix Comes Calling, Open a Bottle of Wine

2009-04-27T01:34:00.003-05:00

What you won't get for a while now, what neither you nor I will understand until it is our time to understand, is why Baron La Croix laughs when he comes to visit. Perhaps you've met the Baron in passing, seen him walk into your neighbors house, or even watched him sitting across from you on the bus. I'm certain I've shook his hand in the cemetary after a funeral, and I think he's punched my ticket on the train.

Last Saturday I was having coffee with a friend. We had just finished talking about all of the insincere details of our lives when I heard the Baron start laughing. He's got a very distinctive laugh that never sounds the same any time you hear it, but you always know its his. When I turned to see the source of the laughter I saw someone choking on their bread. My friend ran over and administered the Heimlich Manuever. When it was clear that everything was ok the cafe's patrons clapped and shook my friends hand, but behind all the noise, echoing off the buildings, I could hear the Baron laughing.

I've been told that, until he explains it to you, you'll think the Baron has a cruel sense of humor, but once you get the joke, well you might as well follow him out the door into the night because nothing else is funny anymore. That's why I like to be prepared. I know the Baron likes wine, an old Mamba told me once. So, I've started buying wine every week. I'm not sure what type the Baron prefers, but I know he's well versed in every style.

I know he's coming to visit me, but I don't know when. So I'm going to settle into things, keep buying wine. When the Baron comes dressed in his black tuxedo I'll ask him to sit down and tell me a joke... after we drink some wine.

A Conversation Between Friends

2009-04-27T00:15:00.001-05:00

"As surely as my name is Al Jolsen, you are a crocodile." Said the zebra to the waiting predator.

The crocodile gazed up at the zebra and wondered if it was worth it. He knew that right now the zebra didn't know for certain that he was a crocodile, also there was no way that zebra could be Al Jolsen.

"Your half right" said the crocodile as he jumped up and bit the zebra in the neck.

Blood mixed gently with the murky, muddy, waters of the Serengeti watering hole.

Later a human drove by and shot the crocodile.

The Tallymaker

2009-04-26T23:49:00.005-05:00

Several decades ago a woman was born in Brooklyn. At the instant of her birth she had a sort of consciousness that is conventionally given only to philosophers and the French. She realized that her life was fleeing before her, and even as her heart beat she was dying from the effects of time.

In an effort to stop this, or perhaps to celebrate it, she began counting. It is not known how she came to possess knowledge of numbers at such an early age. Those who knew her, and knew of her obsession, would claim that it was simply an innate skill, or perhaps she invented her own numbering system that simply fell into accord with the generally accepted system of numbering the rest of us use.

As she aged she grew into a normal and beloved person. She married, birthed children, and even took care of a dog for many years. Aside from her obsession with counting each infinitesimally small moment of her life it could be said that she lived a rather mundane existence. As a result of her counting she could perfectly remember every moment of her life, even her dreams. If you asked her she could tell you the angle of the sun as her parents wished her a happy first birthday.

When she died the powers that be decided she had no use for an afterlife because she had already attached herself perfectly to each moment of her life. Her soul was allowed to rest until Time was instructed to flow backwards once again.

Her reverse life was, and is, fraught with despair as she was forced to perfectly divorce herself from her existence. In this way she spends eternity in perfect despair and perfect joy, the paragon of living.

I'll Eat the Core of the Earth

2009-04-26T05:35:00.004-05:00

I made a promise to my mother. I would always be a good boy. She laughed and told me that sometimes you can't avoid it. I've always tried but sometimes I get away from myself.

When I drive the hearse I feel the bodies in the back pulling me into strange parking lots. Their fervent demands cause me to deviate from the route as we stop in all the places their foolish dead minds try to remember. I don't know why people don't cremate their loved ones. It really seems to be the most economical choice. When I die I'm going to leave instructions to my few remaining friends to have me cremated.

I don't want to leave anything behind. I don't want anyone to look at my body and wonder what might have happened if I had lived longer. I just want to accept what will happen, and I want everyone to accept what -by the time I die- has happened.

If you want to spread my ashes fine. I'll make do with the wind. I'd prefer it if you buried me though, because my carbon has always wanted to be as hard and unyielding as a diamond. I'm pretty sure my molecules can handle the heat and pressure of the earth, we've dealt fairly well with life so far. Surely one million degrees of heat and unknowable amounts of pressure can't be much harder. When I get down to the center I'm going to eat the core of the earth, then it will be a part of me, and I'll look up to the surface and watch life spin around me.

Twenty Thousand

2009-04-26T05:23:00.004-05:00

Twenty thousand trumpets sounded, and in the background you could hear the syncopated marching steps of the infantry. As they passed us by we told each other that some day we would be wearing their bright uniforms, with the pressed creases and impressive badges. My father gave me his old war helmet and I laughed as it fell over my eyes.

Twenty thousand years from now they'll find our bones, fossilized in the ground, right next to the petroleum. A man in green pants will fill his automobile with the remains of our families and friends. You and I will dance the slow waltz of the earth. Our coffins will decay, but we'll still find each other beneath the soil.

Twenty thousand seconds have passed since I held you last, and the time drips slowly by. You might wonder at my famous impatience. I will never be satisfied. I am a man on the edge of reason, even at my most reasonable moments. You can calmly talk to me and stroke my hair all you want, but I will remain hot-headed and romantic, just like the stag that charges into the headlights of trucks on the highway. I will leave myself ruined and wasted on the side of the road.

Twenty thousand is an odd number to choose for your destiny, but an old gypsy whispered it to me in a tent at the state fair. In the darkness of that August afternoon I believed everything she had to say. The next week I watched in wonder as her predictions came true, one by one, and now I have no doubts about the future.

Twenty thousand, twenty thousand, twenty thousand, twenty thousand. I look into the Aleph, and watch my obsession with the Zahir, but everything blends together. I feel the universe pull me into a wider reality twenty thousand times, and everything spirals outward towards the center.

Molly Mclarey and the Cylinder

2009-04-21T12:48:00.003-05:00

It was no surprise to Molly's mother when she admitted that she had started taking antidepressants. The doctor who wrote the prescription wrote it out in a huff. The pharmacist who filled her handed her the paper bag with instructions and warnings stapled to it looked down her blouse. It seemed to Molly that he sighed as if it wasn't worth the effort.

The conversation with her mother went something like this:

"Mom I've started taking antidepressants because I hate myself."

In an ironically sweet voice her mother replied "Well that's no surprise, you hate everyone, and your kind of a bitch. I've got to go now sweety, it's Wednesday and your father's already taken his e.d. pill."

Then the line clicked off and Molly stared at the red tail lights in front of her all the way home.

In the morning Molly brushed her teeth staring straight ahead at the small bottle in her medicine cabinet. She thought about how brilliant the inventor of the medicine cabinet was, because you didn't have to look at yourself when you swallowed the things that were supposed to make you whole.

When she swallowed the pill she expected some sort of burst of sunshine. She wanted the clouds to part and a white beam of light to descend while a choir sang the "Ode to Joy". Of course that didn't happen. Instead she felt nothing. Her disappointment and bitterness started to fade, but nothing came into focus to replace them. She was not ecstatic, and she wasn't cured. She still hated herself, but that didn't really seem to matter as much.

After a month of mornings staring at the orange bottle she refused to refill the prescription. Molly told her doctor they didn't work. He agreed and then cancelled her future appointments. Molly left the office and walked out into the rain, content with her discontent.

Diesel Engine Blues

2009-04-20T20:33:00.005-05:00

Gregory the engineer piloted the Number 29 back and forth across the state. After working his way up to the position of engineer he said "Is this really all I do?" The railroad instructor nodded and turned to mark something on a clipboard. Gregory silently cursed to himself and pressed the button to engage the electronic horn, wishing that it sounded like a steam-whistle. Then he leaned his head out of the window and imagined great clouds of smoke puffing joyfully out of the nonexistent smokestack. Outside nobody waved to the anonymous train as it passed their identical homes and cars, they merely grumbled at the inconvenience. Despite their complaints Gregory delivered their mail, their coal, their steel, and the thousands of other items that make up our lives; all the while looking out of the window watching invisible clouds rise across the plains.

A Love Letter to Jenny

2009-04-20T16:49:00.004-05:00

Dear Jenny,

You're all I think about. I know it has only been a couple of days, but when I got your last letter, well I just had to write you back. I'm so glad that you finally relented! I can't wait for you to move in with me. I'm sure it was annoying, me constantly asking you, and at first I thought it was because I've turned into a wolf, but the rest of the pack assured me that it was something else. I know I can be difficult sometimes, but I really want you to know that I'm committed to this relationship. Yeah, I know it is a big step, and that scares you, but I can accept that. I mean after all, you're still human. I'm not gonna leave you like your asshole of an ex, Mark, what a douche.

I will admit though, you had me worried for a while there. Like last week when I started yelling at the policeman who gave you a ticket. Those idiotic leash laws have ruined more than one of our dates and I was fed up. I really didn't mean to tear his trousers. The bill came in the mail yesterday. I never knew how expensive police uniforms were. I thought you were going to yell at me for days, but when you looked into my eyes and laughed, well that was worth all the fines and ugly stares from strangers.

My favorite part of being a wolf is how I can smell you from far away. I know it is weird, and if I were still a human I'm sure it would be creepy as hell, but I can't help it. You smell like a freshly killed rabbit, in the best possible way. Hell I think you smell better than a sickly fawn. When I see you again I'm going to roll all over you. The other guys in the pack are going to complain, and I'm sure more than a few kills will get away from me. Whatever, it's worth it, just to have you with me all the time, even if it is only your scent.

I know we're always going to have our troubles, and I don't think your parents will ever understand. My tail still goes between my legs when I think about the first time I met them. Oh god, the thought of your dad with that shotgun. I don't know if you saw the rage in his eyes on the dim light of the porch. The only thing that kept me together was your hand on my paw.

It feels really good to know that you've finally gotten over your commitment issues. If we could get married I'd propose to you right now, but I don't think they accept a paw print as a legal signature on marriage licenses. I can't wait to see you again, in a couple of days the moon will start to wane and I'll be able to get away from the pack for bit. Until then I'll think of you constantly. Oh, the pack killed three deer yesterday, so I'll bring you some venison steaks.

All my love,

Francis

P.s. Does your dad like venison?

The Miracles of Harrison H. Hardigan's Beard.

2009-04-19T19:17:00.007-05:00

The beard itself began as unremarkable stubble on the pale face of a pre-pubescent Harrison Hardigan. Perhaps it was in an effort to impress the young girls at school, or perhaps it was a misguided effort to save money on razor blades, but one day on the school's lawn Harrison H. Hardigan swore in front of the flag, with his hand over the Holy Bible, that he would never ever shave his beard. He swore that no razor would cut through the hairs on his face. Among his remaining family members it is whispered that Harrison vowed the uniquely binding oath to spite his father, who was a barber by trade.

By the time Harrison had reached high school he had become an impressive athlete. He was particularly well known for his talented take-downs on the wrestling mat. Among the more religious members of the community many joked that he was Samson come to take revenge on the philistines of Franklin Pierce High. The fans who watched young Harrison in his blue singlet would often chant "Smite 'em, Smite 'em, Smite 'em hip and thigh!" and Harrison H. Hardigan would oblige, with a shrug of his shoulders and a twist of his torso he would toss his opponents to the floor and pin them there until the unfortunate youth would scream or bleed too much for the referees to allow the match to continue. In the showers after wrestling meets Harrison could be found telling stories from the lives of those he had pinned .

When Harrison arrived at college his beard had grown past his waist. It seemed that there was some mysterious connection between the beard and the strength of his limbs. Doors came off their hinges in his grasp. Desks flew across classrooms when he tried to gently move them out of his path. Tables broke in half when he sat down to eat. When he was allowed to join the wrestling team his enormous strength led the coaches to believe that the innocent young man was taking steroids. They could find no other explanation.

When he reached his sophomore year young Harrison had lost all contact with those around him. He was ostracized. No one would listen as he told the life stories of those around him. Fellow students were afraid to socialize with him. Even the kindest professors turned him away from their classrooms. Society had begun its long judgment of Harrison.

Several times during these years he attempted to shave the beard off, and when that didn't work he would attempt to turn the scissors and razors on his wrists. However his oath to the flag and the Bible held so firmly that the scissors and razors dulled against his skin.

Then came the unfortunate day when Harrison attempted to catch a young red haired woman who had fallen out of a dormitory window. Her bones shattered as he caught her in his arms. He shouted for help and was immediately arrested for assault. The woman’s parents asked the judge to lock the young man away for life. They assured the court that their daughter, still unconscious in the hospital, wanted Harrison to be put in prison. During the proceedings Harrison sat meekly in front of the judge, and would not utter a single word in his own defense.

Harrison spent ten years in prison. Upon his release Harrison struck out to find gainful employment. He worked a series of low paying jobs and was fired from each one. Once, while working at a construction site he had rushed to the aid of a fellow worker trapped beneath a pile of rubble. Harrison threw the stones and boulders aside with ease. The man’s life was saved but the stones landed on the houses and buildings in the surrounding area. The construction company was forced into bankruptcy to pay off the damages. The man Harrison saved would later complain about the loss of his job.

So Harrison began the lonely life of a vagrant. He walked around the country and begged on street corners. In every town he found the need for his strength. In Atlanta he pulled children out of burning houses. In Seattle he pulled a sinking ship safely to the shore. In Omaha he saved workers from a stampede at the stockyards. He stopped runaway trains, and cleared wreckage. He once held a collapsing building up for three days as the residents calmly moved their possessions out on to the street. Instead of gratitude Harrison was met with anger and hate. More often than not he was blamed for the catastrophes he had saved people from, and the townspeople would run him out of town in a great mob. At the back of every mob was a red haired woman.

One day, while Harrison was silently begging for change on a street corner, a man in a suit approached Harrison. He was an advertising agent and was putting together a promotion for a razor company. The idea of the campaign was to film homeless men shaving their beards. The commercials showed before and after shots of the men, who were given suits to wear in the second photo. The man in the suit contracted Harrison for the promotion, despite Harrison’s silent warnings and promises that the beard would not submit to any mortal blade.

When the time for filming came the production crew found that all of Harrison’s predictions came true. They tried every razor the company produced. None of the razors could cut through mystical beard. The advertiser called the company, who quickly sent a man in a lab coat to examine Harrison’s facial hair. When the scientist could find no way to cut the beard he contacted his supervisor. After a brief conversation the man in the white coat asked Harrison to come back with him to the company’s headquarters.

For the next several decades the razor company employed Harrison as a consultant. His job consisted of sitting in a chair while men in white laboratory coats attempted to cut his beard. Several options were tried, pneumatic scissors, diamond blades, focused plasma beams, and microscopically sharpened edges. Nothing worked on the supernatural hairs. Despite the all of their failures the company advanced man's understanding of shaving technology by leaps and bounds. NASA sent inquiries into the project and soon the company had a government grant to cut Harrison's beard.

Over the years Harrison began to lose hope. He stopped talking to the technicians. He reached such a state of depression that he would not leave the laboratory and spent the long hours of the night sitting quietly in the chair where they attempted to cut his beard. Harrison grew so despondent that he blinded himself, not in the usual manner of fire or gouging. Harrison simply stopped using his eyes. He closed them and refused to open them. For years he lived in a darkened world of whispers and questions. Until one day a red haired woman appeared next to his chair in the laboratory. She calmly sat down next to him and began stroking his beard. Feeling a gentle pull on his chin Harrison opened his eyes.

When his vision cleared he was gripped with a sudden terror of words he began to speak without end. Narrating the events of his life he told her of the flag and the bible and the girl on the ground. He told her about the man trapped beneath the rubble and the long years on the road. He became lost in an endless stream of words until he was no longer narrating his life, but the events of every person’s life he had ever met. He told her childhood stories of the lab technicians. The histories of all of the towns and people he had saved poured from his mouth. In great detail he described the lives of people he had never met.

One evening, after talking for five years Harrison paused in the middle of a sentence. He closed his eyes, and fell out of his chair. Harrison didn’t notice when the red haired woman kneeled next to him. He didn’t protest when she pulled an old straight-edged razor from her pocket, and he didn’t raise a hand when she calmly began to cut away at his beard. Written on the strands of hair that the woman cut were the stories and histories Harrison had spoken.

In the morning a janitor found Harrison’s, clean shaven, smiling corpse. Nobody could identify the body without the beard. An article appeared in the newspapers declaring that an old man had broken into the building and died of unknown, but assuredly natural causes on the laboratory floor. The body was cremated and put into a cardboard box in the county health department’s storage area. Months later, no one noticed when the box mysteriously disappeared. In towns all across the country nobody noticed as a red haired woman was seen scattering ashes.

A Grand Promenade

2009-04-16T04:41:00.003-05:00

The Golden Seas

2009-04-14T14:02:00.000-05:00

Those who knew him before the sailing accident would often remark at what a waste it was. A man of only twenty-five years, and handsome at that, struck down in his prime. Well yes, Jeffery was at one time a rather handsome and robust youth. That was all before the sailing accident. Back then he was smart as a whip, he could calculate the ships position accurately in his head. He was never wrong. There were several times when the captain of the ship, who faithfully held onto his charts and tide tables like one holds onto the bible with a dying breath, doubted the miracle of Jeffery Mare.

Young Jeffery was the finest sailor the sea ever knew. Some say he was found on a beach, in a basket wrapped in a ships sail. Their fellows would whisper of a dark past full of murdered lovers, betrayal, deceit and threats of capital punishment. The rarest version of Jeffery's history, and perhaps the one closest to the truth, was as boring as every man's story. In this tale he simply set out to see what lay beyond the horizon. The poorest of sailors, those who clung to their religions the fiercest, called him Jeffery Moses. They said he could, if he so wished, divide the seas with but a wave of his hand. He was modest, truthful, faithful, loyal, respectful, in short he was all of those things most people try to be, but actually aren't. Jeffery never faltered at the helm of his doubting captain's ship. When the storms blew and the gales came he would stay rooted to the ship's wheel.

At sunset, no matter the season, no matter the sea, Jeffery would be found on the bow of the ship, looking into the west at the golden waters below the sun. If one approached Jeffery at such a time they would find an unresponsive statue of a man. When the sun would finally succumb to the waves Jeffery would let out a sigh of longing and regret, and then turn and address the mundane queries of those around him. Once Jeffery was out of earshot the sailors would huddle together and ask each other what they thought Jeffery was looking for.

His evening contemplations soon became a regular service of sorts, sailors would gather around Jeffery and sing hymns, and wait expectantly for Jeffery to give them some sort of sermon. Jeffery never did, but that did not stop the sailors gathering. There was even a time when the sailors would discuss what message they could divine from Jeffery's silence. Some claimed that each day brought with it a different sort of silence. Others said that the length of his silence was linked to the length of passages in the bible, and each day they would read aloud passages, trying to find the one that fit with Jeffery's silence. These men soon gave up though. Only the hymns became a lasting feature, and in the end those did little to hold back the fires.

When the accident happened, well many sailors say some sunlight left the glittering seas. They say the sea wept, and still weeps. Several ballads and tear stained sonnets were written for "Bonny Jeff". Of course none of the poems ever got the story right. Most of them said that Jeffery Mare died in the calamity at sea. There are long passages written about the moment when the boilers exploded, and ninety-three men would've been lost if it weren't for "Bonny Jeff's" quick wits and strong hand. Several stories have been sent in to sailing publications falsely describing the innovative methods Jeffery used to rescue those men. Even more common is the type of long sad ballad that ends with Jeffery's supposed last words, "Tell the captain the ship is still on course".

What very few people know, and even less admit to themselves, is that after a long night of drinking his secretly smuggled rum Jeffery overloaded boiler number three. The captain of the destroyed ship still swears there was no cause. But there must have been some, surely no man would change so swiftly from a gentle and popular soul to the possessed beast that destroyed the graceful Swanknight. In his unknowable rage Jeffery grabbed everything he could find, every crate, anything that would burn, he threw into the boiler. He locked the crew in their bunkrooms and burned everything he could lift. The cargo hold was soon emptied by Jeffery's quick and sturdy hands. The captains books of charts and tables of tides were burned along with the drawers from his desk and the goose down comforter from his bed. The ship's clock was thrown into the furnace along with several Gideon's Bibles. The things he couldn't lift he broke apart and threw piece by piece into the fiery mouth of the glowing-red metal furnace.

When the great iron belly of the boiler finally gave way to the pressure, Jeffery was standing next to it. By some miracle, or curse, of the sea he survived. His face was immediately scarred and his left arm was torn off at the shoulder. He lost his legs below the knees to the infections that came with his untreated wounds. He spent several days at sea floating in the wreckage from the ship, and when another boat pulled him from the water he asked to be thrown back overboard.

If you can find him now, and you ask him his story, he will smile and gladly tell you. He will relate all of the events in the finest detail, he will describe the smells of the objects in the furnace, the sound of the cargo crackling in the boiler, and the yells of the his fellow sailors from the bunks. Jeffery Mare will tell you all of these things, he will even show you his scars. With a practiced hand he will point to his face where the metal and steam tore away his handsome features, and then he will lift his shirt and point to where a pipe pierced him clean through. All in all you will hear a tale of the greatest injuries a man has ever endured. The only thing Jeffery Mare will reserve for himself is his reasons for destroying the ship. If you ask him his motive: he will fall silent, then laugh and quickly turn his head to the west. What he sees with his steam-blinded eyes is beyond any sailor's guess.

Sooner or Later We're All Higher or Lower

2009-04-11T19:30:00.001-05:00

Of course you know the story of the great flying ace, Hans-Joachim Marseilles' death? The man who shot down seventeen allied aircraft over North Africa, you do know how he died, yes? He died falling out of his aircraft, he wasn't even flying over enemy lines. Apparently his last words over the radio were "I've got to get out now, I can't stand it any longer", then he turned his plane over, opened the canopy and jumped.

What you won't read in any text book or radio transcript is why this decorated Nazi pilot decided to leave his perfectly fine aircraft. His aircraft was marvelously decorated, the whole nose of the plane was covered in the small icons pilots once used to denote kills. There were bands of french flags, artistically arranged in a spiraling pattern branching out from the nose. In between the these were streaks of Union Jacks and Old Glories. What would drive a man to abandon his seat in the sky? Oh sure his squadron says that his aeroplane was on fire, and that he was referring to the smoke. Well, really, they're just lying nazi bastards.

The truth is that the pilot known as Hans-Joachim had just had eaten some bad shellfish earlier that day, striped muscles I believe. Anyway, the poor blighter suffered a case of Diarrheal Shellfish Poisoning, the symptoms include as you might expect, a large amount of diarrhea, over which you have less control than normal diarrhea. When the search party found the "Star of Africa's" body, the smell was too much for most of the men. What you might not realize is that these men regularly picked up putrid, desert-cooked, corpses. When a man who picks up rotten bodies for a living can't stand the smell, well, then you know it's bad.

Now, here comes the real shocker. Hans-Joachim Marseille did not die in the air over the desert that day. The thing you won't believe, the thing nobody believes, is that he switched places with a now anonymous corpse just before take off. Of course he took all the precautions and taught the dead man everything he knew about flying an aircraft, which let's be honest is quite a bit. The corpse certainly did not object to the switch. In fact, once in the cockpit, the dead man seemed as if he was trying to smile through the rigor mortis that held his face in a painful grimace. Can you blame him? Who wouldn't want to trade the dark certainty of the grave for the bright blazing uncertainty of the sky?

The night before the mission Hans, as usual was seen in the bohemian cafe that sprang up in Sidi Abdel Rahman. After downing quantities of liquor worth several hundreds of Deutschmarks, the flying ace stood upon his table and gave a speech about compassion for our fellow humans. His peers all toasted and cheered. They congratulated themselves on the excellent capacity they, as the aryan race, had for tolerance and compassion. On the way back to their lodgings that evening a group of combat pilots raped a young woman, all the while they thought about how truly compassionate they were for their fellow man.

So it came to pass that Hans-Joachim placed a corpse of a young german soldier in his cockpit. It had taken very little effort to find a suitable sample in the shallow graves of the northern Sahara, and the young dead soldier took very little convincing to walk back to the German base with Herr Marseille. After treating the man to an unusual breakfast at the only place in Sidi Abdel Rahman that served shellfish, Hans-Joachim took the corpse to the airfield. There he spent a few short hours guiding the dead hands of the anonymous corpse through the pre-flight checklist. After quickly explaining some theories about combat and marksmanship, the young flying ace closed the cockpit, wrapped his scarf around his head, and quietly made his way out of the German base. The dead man took off beautifully and joined Herr Marseille's squadron with supernatural ease. Their formation held tightly until the shellfish poisoning, or the fire, whichever version you prefer, forced the corpse to exit the aircraft and return dramatically to a shallow grave on the desert floor.

Meanwhile, Herr Marseille had arranged for passage to Morocco, and then perhaps to Paris. To be authentic the decorated officer had decided to make the journey by camel and in full beduin garb, turban and all. He imagined that he could pass the long hours in the dessert observing the sublime vastness of the landscape, and somehow come to a fuller understanding of his existence. After four days his guides turned their guns on the pilot. They took his bags, his forged documents, and his food. The bandits left him with only a half a canteen of water and the clothes on his back. The young man eager for a bohemian existence allowed all of this to happen with a pleasant smile on his face. It would only be seven hours before that smile faded into an unending stream of curses and oaths, only interrupted by desperate pants for breath.

If things had gone the way they were going Hans-Joachim would have made it to a small dessert oasis, and then perhaps on to Morocco, and then given some small luck on to Paris. However, fate has a way of landing squarely on our shoulders, and no matter which way we turn, what vast nameless dessert we choose to wander in, it will find us.

Hans-Joachim's last moments were spent trudging up the face of a great dune. He noticed that a shadow had begun to grow over his position. Then as he stood looking upward for the source a familiar sound reached his ears. If he could have seen the fuselage before it crushed him, perhaps that same smile and eagerness for a sublime understanding of the mad world around us would have returned to Herr Marseille. For the fuselage of the ruined flying machine was decorated with a spiral of French flags, in between the spiral arms were patterns of British and American flags, all delicately painted and artfully arranged.

C'Est Pas Grave

2009-04-10T03:05:00.004-05:00

When it happened, I can assure you madam, I didn't know what to do. The moment I sneezed the first snail I clapped my hands three times. I couldn't ever tell you why, it is one of those things you do by reflex. When the doctor strikes your knee with that little rubber mallet you kick. The same rule applies to sneezing snails, when you do it, your hands vigorously force themselves together three times. After I sneezed and clapped you might have wondered why I immediately started singing the chorus to an old calypso, "c'est pas grave, c'est pas grave, c'est la guerre!", in french. I would like to give you an answer, I haven't been able to develop one properly though. I think the singing and the snails and the clapping are all connected somehow though.

The other waiters at the restaurant won't even look me in the eye anymore. The maitre 'd has threatened to fire me because of the incident with your soup. In fact that's why I'm writing you this letter. I figured maybe if I could explain to you why the snail was in my nose, and then your soup bowl, well maybe you could ask the maitre 'd to not fire me.

It all started a couple of weeks ago, when the new shipment of meat came in. As you know madam our restaurant is renowned for its premium steak selections, as well as our fine French cuisine. The meat that came in that shipment was of a particularly magnificent variety, it is a shame that you did not order a filet or sirloin. In the months I've spent working at the restaurant I've become friends with our butcher, a most superstitious man named Giorgio Fellini. Giorgio, despite what you'd expect is not italian. He was however adopted by italians. In fact Giorgio is haitian by birth. I'm almost certain that Giorgio absorbed some french while he was in the womb. Giorgio is a consummate butcher, classically trained. He is particularly well known for his abilities with pate, foie gras, and sausages. While he is busily working in his butchery he hums old french calypsos under his breath. In the corner of the butchery is a small statue of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary with a candle at its feet.

The calypsos are important because that is how I met the old woman. I met the old woman just after smoking a cigarette by the dumpsters with Giorgio. Even though I had a cold, I had spent my lunch break with Giorgio. In that brief time he had endeavored to teach me his favorite calypso. I don't remember the name of the calypso, but it had a chorus in french. "c'est pas grave, c'est pas grave, c'est la guerre!" Giorgio had impressed upon me the proper pronunciation and pacing of these words, and I had to admit the phrases soon became caught in my mind as I attempted to emulate the grand exotic manner with which he pronounced the delicate lyrics. As I was singing, behind the dumpsters, an old woman came up to me. With a look of terror on her face she walked up to me, grabbed my cigarette, threw it to the ground and stamped it out. Holding her finger to her lips she grabbed my wrist. Somehow, with unnerving ease, she turned my hand over and opened up my palm. Then she reached into the pocket of her raggedy blue winter coat and pulled out a small blue snail shell. In french she said, "Au moment même vous venez comprendre la vie, vous cesserez d'exister comme avant." What that means I'm not sure, I don't speak french. The old lady then clapped her hands three times and walked around the other side of the dumpster, when I looked around the corner there was no sign of her.

I threw the snail into the dumpster, and went back to work. Later when I reached into my pocket for my pen I found the snail shell, and immediately the lyrics to Giorgio's calypso came into my mind. For several days I would empty my pockets of the snail shell, only to find it and the mysterious lyrics had returned to me.

The situation reached its climax when I sneezed the snail into your soup bowl.

It has been several days since the incident, and in the meantime I have sneezed thousands of snails. I suppose it is only natural that I cannot turn my thoughts away from the old lady and the snails. All of my friends and family have become worried about me, not so much about the sneezing or the singing, but mostly for the lack of concern I seem to have. No matter how hard I try I can't seem to attach any meaning to any of this. So, the thought occurs to me that none of this matters. The dumpster doesn't matter. The maitre 'd firing me doesn't really matter. I mean, it would be nice to eat for a while longer while I figure out how to stop sneezing snails. The more I think about it though, the less I care, in fact I've even come to enjoy the snails, and the singing, and the clapping. "c'est pas grave, c'est pas grave, c'est la guerre!"

What The Coyote Said

2009-04-09T20:46:00.000-05:00

$250. The Coyote wanted six hundred. Six months of scrimping and saving, and this was all he had to show for it. He’d eaten ramen every day, he bought day old bread, dented cans, and he walked to work. He’d asked for a raise, or some sort of change. However, the restaurant was strapped for cash, or at least that’s what his manager told him. Six months of hard work and Miguel was only $250 in the black.

He’d already paid rent, he’d already bought enough bland and outdated food to last him another two months. It was the Coyote that was his problem. He had said that there were unforeseen expenses relating to the transportation of his Maria. Last Tuesday, on his way home from the gas station where he bought his cigarettes, Miguel had called the Coyote from the usual pay phone. As Miguel tucked his change and an ill-fated state lottery ticket (it had come free with the purchase of two packs of cigarettes) into his wallet, he listened to the sound of traffic and the ringing on the other end of the line. In Miguel’s weary state the sounds merged into one soothing melody.

When an unpleasant voice suddenly spoke into his ear, Miguel was startled out of his momentary stupor. The Coyote began the conversation with his usual sinister politeness. Miguel listened as the faceless man told him of the many dangers the desert held for unwary travelers. He listed off the usual threats: vultures, cacti, snakes, scorpions, and -of course- Coyotes. Miguel knew what he meant.

After the conversation Miguel asked his manager for the raise again. He’d done dishes, he’d sliced so much celery it made him physically sick to smell it anymore. He had mopped, he had swept, and he had taken all of the garbage out. The young immigrant had performed every single mind-numbing task the manager could think of, and still there would be no raise.

The neighborhood kids who worked in the kitchens in the afternoons and on weekends, tried to make small talk. Miguel replied in kind, made jokes, his English was decipherable, just not pleasant. Despite their mutual attempts it was beyond the abilities of either to connect with the other; they could not know his existence.

Every morning at four Miguel unlocked the restaurants back door. For the last six months he had been tasked with baking the restaurants bread. This morning was no different from the last six months. The monotony of the morning seemed to stretch into the future, giving Miguel visions of himself as a withered old man opening the restaurants doors hours before the sun rose, and locking them hours after it had set. Immediately upon entering he turned on the ovens. They took an hour to heat up, a hurried tortuous hour. While the ovens transformed the backroom from a cramped ugly workstation to a hellish one, Miguel had to unload the day’s shipment of fresh produce.

The days labor was long and monotonous. Celery was sliced. Soup stock was boiled. Bread was baked. Long lines of glistening produce passed under Miguel’s knife. With each slice of the knife another hungry, bloated, mouth was fed. At ten o’clock that evening the manager finally let Miguel clock out. After a short conversation about the impossibility of a raise Miguel began the trek home.

Halfway to his apartment Miguel stopped at the pay phone he used to contact the Coyote. He was going to ask for more time. But the words stopped in his throat when the Coyote greeted him on the other end of the line. The Coyote talked for several minutes, and then with a chuckle he bid Miguel farewell.

When the line clicked off, Miguel went numb. He went to the liquor store and overdrew his bank account several times. Then back to his apartment. His mind glazed over, and hours later, he realized that he had turned on the television and opened a now flat beer. Between Wheel of Fortune and the nightly news the lottery numbers were announced. Remembering the little scrap of paper in his wallet, Miguel checked the numbers, and began to sob.

It never happened. It couldn’t have happened. Even if it had happened it was too late. Miguel wandered the streets for a few days, with the ticket clutched in his hand. It didn’t matter how much money this insulting scrap of paper was worth. He had bought it because of the promotion; really he had wanted the pack of cigarettes that came with its purchase. He almost threw it away, but instead, he tucked it into his thin, worn down wallet, then the only piece of paper the faded leather held.

She was dead, and he was rich in America; the wrong half of the dream came true, and it was now a nightmare. He wandered the streets for days, clutching that filthy insignificant scrap of paper. Somewhere in a dessert far away a coyote howled at the moon as it ran across the sands.

I Don't Care If It Rains Or Freezes

2009-04-09T14:55:00.003-05:00

Brian was sitting in his car. The keys were in the ignition, but he hadn't turned his wrist to start the car. The problem was with his Plastic Jesus. Normally the cheerful figurine of the savior sat directly above the steering wheel. This morning it seemed Jesus had decided to venture over to the dashboard in front of the passenger seat.

Nothing else in the car was disturbed. The usual garbage in the wheel wells was in it's place. The fast food wrappers and cups all held their positions, like staunch soldiers in trench warfare. Only Jesus had taken it upon himself to move, to go over the trench into No-Man's Land.

The morning sun was warming the automobile. Soon Brian's armpits became damp with sweat. He was still staring over at that Plastic Jesus, who stood on his abalone shell. Finally, with a shrug, Brian turned his wrist and started the car.

His work was only ten miles away, but the drive took an hour. The cause was, of course, the esoteric manner in which the city had laid out the highways and surrounding streets. They had built an overpass directly above Brian's house. It really was a marvel of engineering. The tall elegant pillars that supported the road almost always glistened in the morning and evening sun. When the city builds an overpass directly over your house they never make it easy to get on the highway. They should install convenient on and off-ramps nearby, but they never do. The excuse the city council gave was simple, direct, and utilitarian. They didn't want to move anymore houses than was necessary.

As compensation for the overpass above his roof the city gave Brian ten thousand dollars. That was enough to take a couple of years off mortgage payments, but not enough to move. His house was now the least desirable dwelling in the county. All of his neighbors left. The neighborhood became a dark silent place.

The solitude was why Brian had purchased the Plastic Jesus, to keep him company on the long drive to work. When you pressed the button at Jesus' feet a recording spouted out various parables from the New Testament. After six months of constant pressing Jesus' voice had become demonic. Brian no longer pressed the button.

The drive to work took twice as long as usual, and instead of parking, Brian drove around the block. He only made sharp right turns, hoping that the force of the turn would move Jesus back over to his side of the dashboard. After an hour of turning right Jesus was still anchored to the passenger side. Brian stared across the sea of fast food wrappers and plastic bags. Finally he gave up.

When the police arrived at city hall they cordoned off the block. When news crews started arriving the police erected barricades. It took several hours for the hostage negotiations to come to an end, even though everything moved along at an eerily ordered pace. The council members were the most unusual hostages. Instead of crying and begging for their lives they laid out the reasons for their decisions. Everything came down to sound, logical, reasoning. There was no malice, only the cold apathy of Utilitarian zoning policies. There were no casualties, but Brian was still charged with several felonies. The sentencing was quick. The public defender had several other, more desperate, cases.

In an unfortunate turn of events, the Judge was very understanding of Brian's circumstances. Instead of time in prison Brian was sentenced with several thousands of hours of community service. He was allowed to return home, where everyday a van would pick him up, and make the long commute to the highway.

As he walked up and down the highway, carrying his pointed stick, Brian found thousands of Plastic Jesus figurines. The ditches along the highway were full of them. They were in their wrappers, fresh and new. A smile lit Brian's face as he gathered the figurines into the pockets of his orange jumpsuit. Suddenly the bridge, the dashboard, the wrappers, even the loneliness all made sense. Next to the ditches filled with Plastic Jesus figurines the city council's decisions and stoicism made perfect harmonious sense. In the light of his unknown discovery life became bearable, and the universe unfolded before him. He filled his allotted trash bags and returned to the van for more.

Years later the city decided to demolish the overpass. The city had shifted to the south, and a different more direct route was needed. The most striking aspect of the bridge was that its pillars still sparkled in the morning and evening sun. Truly it was a miracle that the decades of car exhaust hadn't dulled the shimmer of the white concrete. When the zoning inspectors came to vacate the old dilapidated house below the bridge they found the door unlocked. They found the house in perfect order, save the incredible layers of dust that covered every inch of the residence. In the center of the house they found the mummified remains of a man. The body was lying on the floor, arms outstretched. Surrounding the naked corpse were thousands of grimy Plastic Jesus figurines.

The Ballast of Professor Barnum's Balloon.

2009-04-09T04:00:00.000-05:00

In Professor Barnum's balloon it is hard to hear anything other than the sound of the wind, seagulls, and of course that damned slide-guitar he carries everywhere with him. Last week I almost threw it over the side of the basket. But when the old coot pointed out that the guitar provided some of our precious ballast, well I had to acquiesce. The irritating thing is he never stopped playing the guitar. He kept finishing his arguments with a chorded strum of the slide guitar's strings. Even right now he's still playing that damn thing.

We haven't gone hungry yet. Thanks in large part to the seagulls. The butterfly net I brought has seen to that. We hang seagull guts over the side of the basket. Even though the smell is atrocious, the seagulls can't get enough of it. When we get down from here I am never, ever going to eat seagull again, unless of course I've got some of that spicy chinese mustard. My only concern is the similarity between Barnum's incessant slide guitar antics and those of an experienced Guqin player. Of course you and I know the difference between the elegant Chinese instrument and Barnum's backwater bastard of a banjo.

Yesterday it rained, which was actually the best possible thing that could have happened. Well, rain or a sighting of land, a place to set the balloon down would have been nice. The Professor and I reckon we've got enough water to last us another four days, and if we keep steering into thunderheads I don't think we'll have a problem making it to the mainland. The Professor must be tired, I didn't see him lift his head once yesterday. Yet, the whole day he played that damn slide guitar.

I'm only writing this note in case we do crash on the mainland. I'm tired of eating seagull, and I can't stand the sound of the slide guitar. If I threw everything over the side of the basket then I wouldn't have to listen to anyone blather on about the relation of balloons and twelfth century scottish folk dances, the relationship is negligible, tenuous at best. I think the Professor might suspect my plan though. If he wasn't dead I'm sure he would say something. Who knew someone could be allergic to seagull down? I might've angered him when I made fun of his hives, but it has been over a month, and he hasn't said a word. All he's done is driven me mad with that infernal slide guitar.

Tin and Timely Logging Accidents

2009-04-09T03:22:00.001-05:00

When I had asked you, "Is that it then?" Well your silence broke me. I couldn't tell you what part. It might've been the liver, but the pain didn't stop at my torso. My nerves might have shattered, of course I mean what's left of them might've shattered. Somewhere a steam gauge whistled as it released a pressure valve. When you slammed the door I crashed to the floor for a minute.

Anyway I went out back and chopped off my left hand. It hurt that much. I threw the hand at the house. It hit the window with a bloody thwop. The doctors built me a new hand a week later to match the other one. Now I've got two new hands, and neither of them remember how your hair felt running through their fingers.

When you left for your mother's again, well I lost control of my ax. Either way the doctors said I was better off with this new leg. I can barely tell the difference anymore. I think I run faster now. The trees seem to fall quicker too. What matters most to me is the fact that this leg will never remember the way you would run your foot up and down its calf as we lay in bed whispering our love to each other.

It wasn't until those suspicious lumberjacks approached me and handed me those blue papers that I figured out was going on. Of course they startled me, just as I was making the final cuts in a large Douglas Fir. Well the ax hit me right in the sternum, and well, you know how strong I am. For a while I was glad to be dying, but then the doctors gave me my new organs. I got new kidneys, a new spleen, of course a whole new digestive tract. Best of all they made it so I didn't need a heart.

So I guess you understand now why I didn't cry in court. Why I didn't cry when you took the kids away from me. I hope you even understand why I didn't cry when you went into great detail about your love for your new husband. That was really unnecessary, I sometimes think that the judge should have stopped you. I just wrote this so you would understand that I didn't cry because I couldn't. Otherwise I'd rust up.