A Literary Feast

The Farmer General > Recent > 2014 > January

Archive for

Dorothy’s Ever After

Posted on January 18th, 2014

What could I tell them? That behind the whirling curtain, “There’s a curtain. . . .” All Em could say, after not letting me go (or go on) – “What on Earth happened to your shoes, child?”   Before I met you: I loved dust; I gave up training Toto to speak; Em squeezed my hand with every passing thunderbolt.   Do you see how we dress infinity in a bowtie?   Suspicions grew when Toto stopped aging. Eternal youth. Em and Henry feared I had made some depraved pact. We were all of us ever so grateful for your attentions: You were a welcome cyclone.   You adore me. I am your door to happiness. How do I tell you that behind the…

Categories: Uncategorized

I Was Hungry

Posted on January 18th, 2014

I was hungry.  Not that kind of hungry that people in office buildings get when they want expensive salads and talk about their blood sugar, the kind where you’re sick to your stomach and you have a headache and even just thinking really clearly about food makes you dizzy and instead of eating all you can think about is being hungry.  I got up from where I was sitting and walked around my kitchen.  There were things in the cabinets but none of them seemed to be anything that was of any use to me.  So I put on my coat and my boots and my hat and I stepped outside.  It was nighttime.  That stars were all moving around me in such a…

Categories: Uncategorized

Before and After

Posted on January 18th, 2014

On the day that Anson died we went down to the water in the flat grey light and I found a rock with a split white band across it like a web of heat and put it in my pocket.  Lorna has a jar of these that sits on a shelf in the kitchen, filled with water, so that she can see them as they had been when she found them, and I wondered if she’d prefer to fill Anson’s coffin with water too, for this same reason.  But, we didn’t.  His body was burnt up and then it was parceled out and it left our hands and went into the wind one shake at a time.  The shape of it rising was like…

Categories: Uncategorized

Clean

Posted on January 18th, 2014

I went out to the Pacific with an alcoholic Montanan who ran the camera for a weather program and had a Jeep that smelled like soup.  I bought a key and put it on a chain around my neck and bad coffee and the rain found every unsealed part of whatever I was wearing and put its hands in there, and jesus, it was cold.  He wanted pictures of us there on the sand and I didn’t want to lie but I said sure.  The first week in a new city, a year later, my car was broken into and the photos were stolen and it seemed like it was supposed to happen that way.   Going home is mostly a process of cataloging…

Categories: Uncategorized

A Bandage Made of Caviar

Posted on January 18th, 2014

A friend made me dinner last night. This was great; I have been in need of a good look in the eye and a fine piece of meat, both of which my friend provided together with some red. She cooked the meal a long time, in her British way, and with her new job on the horizon and the fact I am still bleeding from a recent medical procedure we were both feeling introspective and in need of iron. At times like this I am extremely grateful for friends with working full-gas stoves and those old cast iron pans that take to butter and meat, both, in the classic style and without fuss.   I came carrying a half-gnawed loaf I had worked on…

Categories: Uncategorized

The Trappestine

Posted on January 18th, 2014

We came across some stuff at the edge of the campus that included a catalogue of teeth, most of a leg wearing most of a stocking, and something like a kind of smear or stain The technical term for this is Human Remains We sent for an ambulance at once, which arrived swiftly and the very personable yet professional paramedics did their best to console us and calm us down, though they had no small amount of trouble securing the smear-stain-tooth-leg-stocking person to the gurney for safe transport We found out later that the name of the smear was Angelica Bedelamante and she had been a Trappistine who had gone missing several days before At the press conference, a number of questions were asked…

Categories: Uncategorized