A Literary Feast

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 veil you lifted, “There’s another veil. . .”?

 

We rename the puppy every fifteen years: Toto, Bruno, Arlo.

We travel – dollar by happy dollar, we laud the wonders of this world.

 

Then the picnic on the shores of New Zealand,

“What’s a Chinese gooseberry?”

We shave our first kiwifruit –

 

I’m a girl in a white dress wearing glasses, with an Emerald City melting on my tongue.

 

That very night Toto-Bruno-Arlo wakes us, barking at thunder.

At curtains. . .whirling.

You get up but – “Leave it open,” I say.

“What is it?” You wipe my tear away.

 

“Husband, somewhere. . .(kiss).

Somewhere outside that window

We will find a man with a green flying balloon.

 

“And I want to live, to stop disappearing,

To settle and be with you and Arlo –

Wheresoever it lands, or

Never lands.”

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 way that it felt like I was spinning even though I was standing still.  I lit a cigarette and stood in the middle of the street outside my house.  It can be a pretty busy street sometimes so I guess I was sort of lucky that no cars came by since I’m not sure I would have thought to do anything about it if they had.  That’s a weird idea anyway.  Being lucky, I mean.  I’ve never really been able to figure out what it’s supposed to be.  It’s not really a personified force in the world, like it’s not supposed to be god or jesus or something I don’t think.  Sometimes people talk about “lady luck” but I always figured that was more of a rhetorical device than an actual lady who walks around handing out luck or sprinkling people with luck dust or whatever.  It’s just really abstract, is what I’m saying.  Like if the word “luck” didn’t even exist and people just used the word “good” instead, like instead of saying “that was lucky that that guy didn’t see you” you just said it was “good” that that didn’t happen, I’m not sure anything would really be lost in the translation.  I started walking down the street towards the corner market where they sell junk food and magazines and lotto tickets and gasoline all night.  I made a little game out of walking on the two yellow lines in the very center of the road like they were some kind of tightrope.  I stuck my arms out at my sides like I was trying to keep my balance and made some really exaggerated stumbles but of course I didn’t really fall since I was just walking on regular flat road.  Some of the houses had their lights on but I didn’t see any people in them.  I wondered what the people in the houses were doing as I was walking by.  A lot of them are watching TV I bet, some of them are probably jerking off or having sex.  I bet at least one house or apartment that I walk past on my way to the store, I bet the people in there are doing something really strange, like eating raw meat or making their kids dress up weird or just lying butt naked in an inflatable pool full of thousand island dressing and laughing really hard.  There must be at least one thing that I do that someone who walked past my apartment thinking what I’m thinking would have thought was weird.  I’m not, like, really that interesting, so maybe they wouldn’t have.  You know what though there is one thing, sometimes I sit on my couch and look at the TV for a long time even though it’s not turned on.  It’s not like I’m deep in thought or anything, I just sit there looking off at nothing for like hours at a time, sometimes when I’m really tired but sometimes when I just can’t think of what else I might be doing.  I don’t think that’s that weird but I’ll bet someone would, some real type A who takes vacations to go rock climbing in our nation’s national parks or schedules their free time on their cell phone so they can reference later what they thought they should be doing.  I kept looking into the windows to see if anyone would look out at me but no one did.  I wonder what someone who saw me would think, walking down the center of the street with my arms out like a tightrope walker on a freezing cold night.  I’ll bet if some parents saw me they would worry that I might try to interact with their kids or damage their property.  I wonder if it is a tendency of parents that they are naturally more suspicious of people like me or if it is a sign of my immaturity that I worry about the inevitably, at least I assume inevitably, negative opinion that parents in general will have of me.  Weirder than walking past the lit up windows was walking past the dark ones. The people inside those houses must be asleep.  It felt somehow invasive to be walking past these people’s houses while they were asleep, like they might wake up and see a newspaper headline reading UNIDENTIFIED INDIVIDUAL WALKS STRANGELY PAST HOUSES: HOMEOWNERS NONE THE WISER and wonder if they should move to a different neighborhood.  I came to an intersection.  The market was on the corner diagonally opposite me.  I watched the traffic lights turn from green to red even though there were no cars at the intersection.  I don’t know why but I pressed the button and waited for the walk signal.  When the little white stick figure guy showed up on the crosswalk signal I hurried diagonally across the street, not quite running but not really walking either.  The market was a weird beacon of fluorescent white light beaming out from the hazy blue suburban twilight.  Adult contemporary alternative radio hits that were about as old as a decent bottle of inexpensive wine hummed softly, indistinctly really.  A case of premade sandwiches and burritos lined a wall adjacent to the syrup and ice drink making machine.  None of them appealed to me in any particular way so I chose one basically at random and walked towards the counter.  The cashier informed of the price of the sandwich I had chosen without looking directly at me, only generally in the direction of the front of the counter.  I thought about hurting him.  It would be misleading to say that I “considered” it because it’s not like I had any real reason to do so or had to come up with a reason not to or anything.  I just thought about how easy it would be and how little there was that was that prevented me from doing that.  I pictured myself grabbing the back of his head and slamming it into the counter.  I wondered if one slam would be enough to break his nose.  I wondered if five would be enough to kill him.  I wondered if I would be able to kill him by slamming his face into the counter at all, and if I would be able to do it quickly enough that it would be over before he really fully understood what was happening to him.  I wondered what would happen immediately after, if I started running right then and got on a bus and wound up in Mexico or something if I could actually escape the repercussions for having done that.  I wondered if I would feel guilty or not.  I handed him four one dollar bills and he gave me back thirty seven cents in change.  I thanked him by nodding curtly and turning around and walking out the door.  The thought occurred to me that part of thanking him involved not slamming his head into the counter but I guess in reflection that that was sort of ridiculous.  I walked outside and back across the street and started eating the sandwich as I walked home.  It was bland and cold and very slightly soggy and seemed like something that was intended to be microwaved although I sincerely doubted that spending time in a microwave would have done this particular sandwich any miracles.  As I was walking and eating a group of guys roughly my age were walking on the sidewalk on the same side of the street in the opposite direction, meaning that they were walking towards me.  At a distance they were talking pretty loudly and moving around a lot, but as we got closer to each other they quieted down a bit and all looked at me while trying not to seem like they were looking at me and I did the same to them.  At the very moment we passed each other I tensed up a little and I even made a fist in my pocket with my non-sandwich hand just in case it turned out they were looking for trouble.  Because I mean, you can never really tell what someone else is thinking.

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 some echo of the smoke that came out of that car that caught fire in the parking lot last winter.  The dishwasher came and got me and I put the knife down and we stood at the window, watching the glass pop and the darkness come out of the back of the truck and he said well, damn, and I agreed.  They thought it was electrical.  Antonio, the other dishwasher who wasn’t Kyle who was young and nineteen and loved speed metal and women with large rear ends, had parked his car next to the one that met its demise and said that he couldn’t get the smell out for love or money.  Which is a strange phrase, ‘love or money’, like someone is going to keep offering you that choice, or, offer it to you ever.  Anyway.  Anson left my hand and then I thought that some part of him might’ve stayed, and that night, I both did and did not want to wash my hands because of this.  I’ve been historically bad at making choices.  This one was no different.

 

There was the question of what to do with his boat and while it was still a question the boat sat under a loose tarp in the yard, facing seaward, the way a dog will wait by a door for someone.  I kept thinking that I should give it some word of encouragement when I passed it on my way to work, but then I’d get there, and I’d start cutting up vegetables and chickens and whatever else they passed my way and I’d forget.  Lorna asked if I was still thinking about graduate school, and I looked down at my cracked dry knuckles and their tendency towards blood and said I guess not.  You wonder if your hands will always recall certain things, or if they’ll forget.  Anson’s hands knew all of the knots, and now those things are some part of the atoms that make up the bay, but I haven’t woken up knowing any of the hitches in the line yet.  Lorna tells me that I’m young, and I don’t know how to explain to her the sense that I have, nightly, of running out of time.  Time for what, she’d say, and I would have to say I don’t know, time for everything.  For doing the right things.  For saying the right words.

 

I’m in love and I don’t know how much time there is for that, for instance.  It takes up some back otherwise unoccupied room in the house that I imagine is my brain, and that entire room is this one name, and I turn it over and over again in my palm, smoothing it like a stone.  I haven’t done anything about it, and I don’t know that I will, because I’m uncertain of its reception which Anson always said was a Human Problem.  You could see the capital letters.  His hands would be cleaning fish, and his mouth would form those words with a great solemnity and I would want to ask him what the solution was because his hands formed answers out of things that seemed like impossible messes.  And then he died.  And I’d run out of time for another thing.  And so now I just have this room with its one name instead, and the sense that, if my private feelings were reciprocated, surely there’d have been some sign by now, some motion.  The problem might be that my efforts have mostly been in the realm of trying to outrun the room and the name at night, and you can’t say to someone I spent this lone hour on the sidewalks trying to outrun love, like it’s a gift that you can give them and they’ll understand it.  In the film that I see while my feet run down the streets past the lit windows of other people’s dinners and arguments and silences and once, kisses, I don’t have to say anything at all.  It just happens.  There is a Before and then there is an After and also an Ongoing and we take ourselves up with the rhythm of the words and days and the feeling of that is that there’s suddenly enough time for everything.  Anson said that expectations were the source of all misery.  But they seem tied to hope, somehow, and I haven’t figured out how to have one without running it into the other.

 

Maybe it’s this problem that makes me stop on the way home and step over the sidewalk and into the yard to where the boat is.  Lorna is still calling out orders and filling mugs with black coffee and therefore doesn’t see that second when I decide to take it, which I am sure was written on my face the way that everything else has ever been.  I take the key to the truck.  I hitch the whole business together.  I don’t know why I’m doing it, only, it seems to have something to do with that back room.

It’s late in the afternoon and winter which means that the light is grey but also blushing faintly.  I do this when I’m talking to the Object of My Affection in an uncontrolled way that has nothing to do with the subject matter of our sentences, and is all the more galling for it.  But.  Here over the ocean it makes the air rounder, softer than its normal self, and I get fanciful and believe that Anson is somehow fine with my current boat business.  It slides back into the water over the concrete slabs.  No one’s out.  I lower the motor.  The sound of its start is loud but then swallowed up and then I’m cutting across the glassy mouth of the bay.  The liquid pulls away from the prow in a white line of lace.  I’m not sure, yet, what the point is.  I just figure at some point, my hand will remember.

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 the things that no one could’ve seen coming.  We were sixteen, we were on a bus.  Shelly and Jay were doing something on the back seat that made her giggle and I was ignoring it and my shirt had gotten wet at practice so I was wearing Jay’s and it smelled like laundry soap and male sweat.  His dad would die in an accident.  Hers, cancer.  They’d both have twins, with other people.  The light climbs the hill and the day goes down and I think about the two sets of children and other people’s symmetries.

 

The year that I left school I sat parked in the dark driveway of the house where my therapist had an office and the stars were out.  Nothing felt like it was actually happening so I’d play a game where my choices could be things that only people in books would do.  I will say that I am going to get the bus, I will walk down to the lake instead and lie in the tall grass and wait until enough time has passed and then walk home again.  It is cold and I hate it but it is a story so I have to do it.  And so on.  My therapist seems to know this is going on but I say the right things and she’s willing to let things slide and we spend two hours, twice a week, talking past one another.  The dead space expands in my chest and she calls it rape and I call it I told you so and we shake hands and say I will see you next week and I take the long way home, in the dark.

 

The clutter creeps up on you.  This is why we go walking at night, even in the cold, especially in the cold.  The dog makes a silvered noise down the sidewalk.  We watch out for the ice.  Our words start in facts and end in fictions, predictions we make, beautiful things we’ve saved.  You are my friend because it is what I will allow.  I am your friend because I am not beautiful.  The dog loves, fiercely, both of us, maybe for different reasons.  We come home on empty streets. We feel clean.

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 during the train ride up while contemplating a sauce verte or a jus or simply a double cream butter laced with salt to spread over the air pockets. I am lucky to live in a city that provides both good bread and a working subway system even—especially—when the rest of your life has fallen apart. And an excellent baguette can withstand lonely blank chews across multiple stops while offering nothing more and better than its delicious air and crumbly crunch.

 

Things have been so damn scurvy-lipped—health-wise, wealth-wise, in terms of matters of the heart: all once again plunged into the lowlands of the gutter. I tried to work it out by way of stars and moons, some idea of pinning this on Saturn, perhaps, but it came to nothing. So, instead, I have done some pretty stupid things in a half-baked effort to mend heart, mind and wallet. With time to kill before dinner, for example, I wandered into Dean and Deluca. No, that’s not true at all. I marched right in, stopped the first employee I could find and asked with military precision, “Where is your caviar?”

 

I have rarely been in a position in my life to ask this question and I am particularly ill-suited for it now. But he led on without comment and deposited me before a frankly modest bank of osetra, American Siberian and those large ding-dongs of red salmon roe. I thanked him and commenced gawking—$220, $400, $550—astronomical heights, all of them, but especially so at this precarious moment in my life. I touched the thick paneled glass, chilled from the inside, that itself was just the first of several protective layers between where I stood and those delightful, salt-egg wonders.

 

At a gutsier, more romantic time in my life I might have batted eye in some lousy bid for a sample, something like, “Would it be possible to just try this one?” But we all know where that leads—more and deeper longing that buffets up against the harsh truth of $220 at a minimum and only one may win. Yet when part of my still-beating heart has been, most recently, crushed beneath the boot sole of a Persian man who himself, one day not long ago, came home with a full bucket of the finest, most shockingly sublime pave of black osetra jewels flown in from Tehran, I had to pause before the counter and pay tribute to a time when I had spooned heaping amounts into my still-laughing mouth and felt love and recognize, despite my self-aggrandizing pity, that I had known and would know again some kind of love, in whatever form.

 

But that love, for now, cannot and will not come from behind the Dean and Deluca caviar counter. Because those counters, with their impeccable steel casing and flawless clean glass, are the stuff of dreams, built only to sustain wandering soldiers like me who can and do march in, demand to be shown the good stuff and then stand, mouth agape and so much in the thrall of memory that only the repeated clarion call of “Can I help you?” and then only on the third time will you snap out of it.

 

I wandered on and away, abused credit card safe but that dear stash, too, left sadly undisturbed. A woman selling oil and vinegar allowed me to dip several pieces and fill my near-sobbing gob. Even her oil, and certainly her vinegar, was past my financial ken. But she was kind and forgiving and looked the other way while I reached for yet a third piece and slinked off to peruse organic cotton hand towels.

 

If it wouldn’t be caviar and it couldn’t be oil or vinegar it could, at least, be an amount of bread. I found the basket of loaves, selected one that had, like me, a hard outer shell and a dense, soft middle, and double checked the price. Three dollars. Three dollars is fine. Three dollars for all this good bread, this long baked wonder, is a kind of wealth, a gesture of pity for the store itself and the sad sops who had gone ahead and priced something this good this low. I added a salted pretzel bun to the mix and approached the cashier with confidence and was able, even, to pay in full and not on credit.

 

At the marble counter, before heading back out into the cold, I could feel my wound bleeding again so I ripped off the top of the loaf and ate it standing, a kind of fortification against the next leg of a cold trip and with the knowledge that I too, like new bread, will rise again.

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

that varied in length and quality

One of the best of these was

What about the rest of us, should we be concerned?

This was met by a few moments of silence,

and then the answer No

I don’t think so, we’ve nowhere near so far to fall as she did,

and besides none of us here are wearing stockings

which I thought was really a pretty good answer

(though I couldn’t see who had given it)

A service was held a few days later,

which we attended since

we were already so tangled up in the matter

that we felt it would be strange not to

Besides the abbess and a few of the sisters,

and one niece who had been sort of awkwardly contacted

at her home in Hillsboro only a few days before

by forces unknown

and who looked considerably more confused than grief-stricken,

we were the only guests,

which is pretty sad since we had never met the woman

and had only known her as a smear

They dripped her Human Remains

into a hole in the abbey’s backyard

using one of those honey-spoon-wand things,

which we were told was “very traditional”

but I have my doubts, I have my doubts about that

Categories: Uncategorized

The King of Sola Mesa

Posted on September 30th, 2013

We left a little after sundown, skipping like a stone on glasswater down the old road that used to lead to other settlements, up north of the bay. Now it just spills out from Ciudad and empties at Tierra de la Agua, past the borderlands. Mostly it’s only used by water-truckers anymore, but we hustled down in a beatup old van we’d found on the outskirts and fixed up in secret that summer. In the dark the fires in the borderland shacks winked and flickered through aluminum doorways and the whole desert seemed to twinkle like dust in new light. We were poisoned with bloodrush; I dug my fingernails into the cracked plastic of the seat cushion as the van shivered its way past the flickering camps into the black beyond. Neither of us had ever been out this far before; we were surprised at how empty the borderlands seemed, none of the music and dancing and large sprawling families cooking meat over fires like they tell you about in school. The rhizome network of aluminum and plywood scrapbuildings that buffer Ciudad from the desert stood silent, each one watchfully openeyed firelooking like scarecrow guards in the close-beyond.

We drove straight through to sunup. We turned off the road just as the first light cracked the horizon, before we got close enough to Tierra de la Agua for anyone to notice us, and aimed the van towards Sola Mesa. Our tires kicked up great dustclouds, brown chokingwind that cut a path behind us like running your fingers along the surface of a bucket of water. The mountain loomed towards us in the distance; it cast the only shadow visible in any direction, the golem in the far-beyond. Despite the heat I could feel a coldness in my stomach, the eyethrobbing adrenaline of danger and farness, the long long desert ahead of us and behind us. Slowly, slowly Sola Mesa swelled, and as the sun pivoted around the mountain’s axis something like a figure was splashed with currents of daylight. As we drew nearer the figure remained, enormous, motionless, glinting in the sun. We felt like sailors arriving at Rhodes, this strange colossus for our welcome. When it was nearly upon us, we could see it in full: a mile-high man, made all of trash and broken things, surefooted and proud, a helmet made of old car doors and dumpster lids placed squarely on his brow, a garbageknight in trasharmor. His approximate face, the area at the front of his head that is, was squintingbright with sunbeams as we arrived at his feet. He gazed outward, unflinching, in the direction of Tierra de la Agua which was a nothing out past the horizon this close to Sola Mesa.

In the shadow cast by the Warrior of Debris we came upon plainbrick hut, still burned throbbingred from the sun even in the Warrior’s shade. Its only nonsurface event, a small portal that was probably a doorway, glanced lazily at us as we slowed the van to a crawl in front of it. It reminded us of the story we were taught in littleschool, about the turtle who built his house far away from everyone else, and anytime he saw someone he tore it down and built it up again even farther away, until one day he needed help but no one could hear him so he got eaten up by a fox. It was sort of eerie, to see it sitting there all by itself.

“Hey!” I yelled out, thinking maybe someone was home, or maybe wondering if the hut itself was going to answer me, “Anybody in there? We’ve come all the way from Ciudad and we think we’re about as lost as we could be.”
At this, a little silver and red ball wearing a white cape rolled out from the little doorway at the front of the cabin. After a minute of bodyshock, we focused in on the thing and realized that it was a man’s head, burned red as his house with skin pulled tight against his skull, with a long long white beard and a crown in his head made out of what looked like bits of old hood ornaments. He had a look on his face like he was annoyed to be interrupted from whatever he was doing, but thought it would be rude to make that clear, so after a second he pulled his frown into a bigtoothed grin. “Hello, travelers!” he called out to us, with his neck turned awkwardly to see up at us in the van windows from his lowdown doorway. “Welcome to the court of King Winslow of Winslow. You are welcome guests to my court, provided you observe the natural laws of civility and tact one should expect to show to a king. Now, how have you come to find yourselves so lost, and to where might your being unlost be directed?”

It must have been a full minute before either of us got ourselves together enough to answer him. “Umm… well, Mister Winslow, we’re-”

“KING Winslow, of Winslow!” he exclaimed, now visibly annoyed. “You would not walk into the court of King Arthur and call him ‘Mister Arthur’, now would you?”

“Oh! Umm, yes, of course, I apologize, your majesty. I’ve never met a… king before, and, well, I haven’t had muchpractice at being courtly, I suppose.”

“Well, see that it doesn’t happen again.” He began to emerge from his hut, pulling first his long, attenuated arms out past his head, then using them to drag the rest of his frame through the hole like a babyperson pulling itself along a carpet before it can crawl properly. As he stood and dusted himself off we could see how sicklythin he was, his waist appearing through his robes to be slightly narrower than his head, though as he stood we noticed that he had remarkable posture for a man his age. He wore a long black cloak, which must have been absolutely sweltering, even in the shade. “Now, how came you two young serfs to my court, all the way from that filthy hole you call a city?”

“We had heard rumors that there was a great kingdom out here at the foot of Sola Mesa…” As I said this, looking at this brickred figure, arms akimbo, whose whole figure was bent towards our van in its best attempt to seem menacing but who might just as easily been blown over by the wind as a paper doll, with his ridiculous chromeplastic crown and knotted white beard, it became clear that we had been the victims of a severe misunderstanding, or else a rather egregious prank. It seemed completely absurd to us that anyone would have taken this man seriously even as a man, let alone the king of a “great kingdom”. All the time spent on fixing the van, pulling parts out of junkyard cars at night and siphoning gas from borderland shuttles, the long long journey out here across the desert sands, all of it came crashing down on top of us as a total waste, just to see this old lunatic who’d been fried by the sun. The realization of all that being for nothing welled up inside and brought us to a bloodboil. “But instead all we’ve found out here in the heat of this goddamn desert is some old crackpot who’s about one chrome hood ornament away from a heatstroke! Who do you think you are, calling us ‘serfs’? What gives you the right to call yourself a king? What could you possibly be the king of, a bunch of sand? Your crummy little hut?”

‘King’ Winslow’s eyes widened up like saucerplates, seeming to balance precariously on edge atop the deep purple bags that held them, and for a moment I thought he was about to rush at the van and try to fight us. Instead, after a few heartbeats of wildeyed staring, he broke into a fit of uproarious laughter, such that his knees buckled and he bent over double, clutching his stomach with both his arms. We were, in all honesty, surprised that such a frail-looking man had the strength to laugh so heartily. As his laughter subsided and he returned to his full heights, he wiped a tear from his eye as he said, “You know, when you first arrived, I was worried that you might be some threat to me. It is not many who have the fortitude for the long, hot journey out here, especially not those coming from the horrible city. But now I can see you are just two fools who have no idea what kind of power you stand before. I am sorry to have disappointed you! Perhaps someday you will understand what you now do not. Farewell, serfs!”

With this, he turned and began walking towards his hut. But my anger and frustration had, by this point, overwhelmed my goodsense that we had best start back towards Ciudad if we wanted to arrive before nightfall, and I called after him, “Wait! You wait just a goddamn minute!”

He turned and looked at us over his shoulder. The good humor had vanished from his face, and as he turned and began walking towards us, his posture swelled in what seemed to be an attempt to intimidate us. “Listen, serfs! My patience with your tone and your impropriety has just about worn thin. I’ve no obligation to offer you an explanation of anything, nor do I think foolish servants such as yourselves would be able to comprehend the magnitude of my reign. But, if it will buy me a reprieve from your insolent presence, then I will offer you this much; I am King Winslow, of Winslow. I am lord and master of all that I am, the king of my own being, the emperor of myself. I call you and all your kind, the filth that populates that disgusting city, ‘serfs’ and ‘servants’ because that is just what you are: you are slaves to yourselves, your passions and lusts, your hungers and thirsts, the possessions you’ve built up around you in the prison you call a home. How dare you wretched creatures come out here to my castle and make demands of me? I am among the highest order of living beings, the highest nobility of the human race. I have shed all my hungers and lusts, mastered my passions. I have learned to savor hunger and become stronger for it. But that is a greatness that is clearly lost on the likes of you. So begone! Interrupt no more my revelry in myself and my power. Leave me to my kingdom.”

As he said this, he advanced towards the van, slowly but deliberately, until he was only about ten yards from the driver’s side door. When he finished, he stopped and planted his feet, doing his best to loom over us but coming just short of seeming really threatening. Perhaps, in another context, we would have been moved to pity for him; it seemed clear to us that these were the ravings of a madman, and that further arguing with him would do no good for anyone. But the heat and the looming cloud of wasted effort spurred me to harshwords, and after a moment I yelled at him, “Lunatic! Goddamn lunatic! You’ve no right at all to call yourself the king of anything! You think you’ve ‘mastered your passions and lusts’? Look around you, you old fool! You live in a wasteland! There’s nothing here for you to lust after; you’ve run away from all your temptations like a rat from the sound of a rifle. You haven’t mastered anything; you’re just a coward and a crackpot.”

For a moment, there was silence in the desert. Then, with a burst of energy and motion that took us quite by surprise, Winslow broke into a full sprint towards the van. He rammed his shoulder into my door like a football player, and then immediately collapsed on the ground. He let out a wild animal howl, and as he stood back up it was clear that he had dislocated his shoulder. He reached through my open window with his good arm and began flailing wildly, crying “For Winslow! For Winslow!” at the top of his lungs and attempting to hit us. We finally overcame our shock enough to realize we had to leave immediately, and as we hit the gas on the van and began speeding along the sands back past the Knight of Debris, we could see King Winslow shaking his good fist at us in the rearview mirror, his other arm hanging sickly off to the side.

As we entered the outskirts of the borderlands, the sun was just beginning to set. Outside the cluttertrash shacks, the borderlanders were dancing; it was nothing like we had imagined, no wild frivolity or drunken chaos. They all stood in neatly ordered lines, moving in perfect unison, looks of complete disinterest on their faces. They pivoted to watch us as we passed, none breaking time with the others but fixing their gaze on the van and watching us until we had passed from their line of sight. We held our breath and prayed for darkness.

Categories: Uncategorized

The Melon Thief

Posted on September 30th, 2013

One morning, the melons were gone.

The evening before, they sat right where intended – attached most certainly to the lovingly-tended but misplaced vine that refused to grow past spindly. We had done these melons wrong in planting them where the neighbor’s garage and dusty red Jeep stole the sunshine for most of the day, and despite our best efforts and our loving applications of worm tea and compost, we could only watch with anticipation as a few melons bulged slowly, grudgingly, into being.

And one morning, they were not there. Sheared cleanly off the vine, leaving no clue or hint as to where they might have gone. Our melons were somewhat stunted and most definitely unripe, but they were ours, and we lost them. It must have been an animal, we hypothesized; an animal came into our yard
in the night and ate our fledgling melons. Perhaps it was that opossum that teeters along the top of the chain link fence in the dusk, or the raccoon whose eyes we’ve caught slinking in the yard next door.

This reasoning suited us, for a time. Then the thoughts crept in – neither of the animals we proposed would have been large enough to pick up and steal off with one of our precious melons, much less all three. If they had eaten them all on-site, impressive in its own right, would there not have been seeds or woody pieces of rind left as a clue, or evidence of chewing off around what had been a still very solid connection between fruit and vine? And there was the clearest piece of contradictory evidence – the vine had been sheared off quite cleanly, as if cut with a sharp knife or perhaps a small but powerful laser (the latter suggestion clearly a distraction to the most obvious next step of logic, which neither of us wanted to take).

A human had stolen our melons.

A human being had come into our backyard in the night and cut our rather large, highly unripe melons off the vine.

This is an unsettling prospect, as I’m sure you can agree, and it took quite a while that day for either of us admit that this is what had happened. Instead of considering the ramifications of a person coming uninvited into our backyard, merely feet from our sleeping bodies, we decided instead to attack this phantom melon thief with barbs concerning his or her intelligence. Their skills in covert operations were obviously fairly sound, but what sort of person might use those skills to steal the unripe fruit of our obviously malnourished agricultural efforts? Did they not know the first thing about picking ripe melons? Could even they not see that our sad little plant was obviously unworthy of such efforts? And then, the million dollar question: Of all of the things in our backyard that stood available for the taking – two bikes, unlocked; an easily transportable and decently nice fire pit; expensive certified-sustainable foldable outdoor furniture; and most likely some assortment of belongings that didn’t make it inside after returning home from work (to note, we lived in a place where theft was not *usually* an issue) – why the melons? And if they were strictly edibles-focused, did they not notice the garden on the side of the house, practically smothered to death by a harvest of heavy, ripe tomatoes?

And then – how did the thief even know the melons were there, when they weren’t visible from the front of the house?

That was the question that did us in, and that night we rather unceremoniously dug the remainder of the vine out of its rather poorly chosen plot of dirt, along with its sickly lettuce and pepper neighbors, and shut down our rather ill-fated backyard garden for good. Melon thief 1, Closes 0.

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The Cream of Unknowing

Posted on September 30th, 2013

I’ll never see it again. I’m not sure it was there in the first place. It may have been a dream, or a summer night’s hallucination. On a lonely stretch of unmarked road somewhere outside of Montague, MA, walled in by dark trees and the whisking of bats overhead, I found, or thought I found, the world’s perfect soft serve.

 

If you’ve spent much time with your head inside a broken-down soft serve ice cream machine, you’ll understand that it is not a commodity often associated with perfection. Soft serve begins its life as an unwieldy sack of upsettingly viscous milk product weighing perhaps forty or fifty pounds. It sloshes like the innards of a giant squid as you drag it from the back of the walk-in fridge, praying to the patron saint of plastics that it won’t snag on a sharp corner and spill its guts out onto the concrete floor that it is probably your job to mop later. You open the top of the machine, a wide trap door that resembles the lid of an municipal garbage bin. Finally, in one clumsy motion, you hoist the sack high over your shoulder, rip out the plastic stopper, and try to keep your balance as the thick white slop pours into the dark innards whose workings you don’t fully understand.

 

Fittingly, this dubious treat was the chance afterbirth of a mechanical catastrophe. Ages ago, the lone ice cream truck of the great Mr. Carvel (of supermarket freezer section fame) broke down on a scalding day in summer. Desperate to save his wares, he began dishing out half-melted glop to those who would have it. And, inexplicably, the people loved it, lapping it up like thirsty dogs.

 

Therein lies the unlikely charm of soft serve. It is really the only ice cream you can properly lick. It requires no go-between. In a dish, the spoon is mere convention, a nod to propriety; in a cone, it yields to the tongue in effortless swaths. The teeth play no role. The gums never freeze in panic. The spoon invites seductive inversion. It’s blissful, really, as long as you don’t know too much about where it comes from.

 

It’s easy to learn too much if you get too close. Those machines don’t keep themselves running. Levers snap off. Thermostats break. Mysterious moving parts must be slathered periodically in a lard-like substance from a giant can labeled “edible lubricant.” And the upper chambers need to be cleaned from time to time: drained, unplugged, and wiped down with a damp rag the color of old snow. The only way to reach the deepest corners is to surrender an arm, a shoulder, and possibly part of a head to the demon within and hope that the sugar coma keeps it docile.

 

For one reason or another, the cultural clout of soft serve seems to have reached an all-time low in recent years. Maybe one customer too many has passed through the gauntlet of a summer job at the levers of The Machine. Or maybe we can blame the irresistible faddishness of frozen yogurt. After all, the last decade has seen the unassuming T.C.B.Y. give way to the likes of WonderPink-CreamBerry-SwirlO, YoLick-FreezeBerry-PinkLine, and YögoPinko-BerryZen-MixZing. Soft serve can never hope to achieve the cosmopolitan allure of frozen yogurt, even if the only detail that separates one from the other is the inclusion of a fistful of bacteria. Frozen yogurt says: I know actual yoga poses. I ask whether the strawberries are organic. I know the Himalayas are especially spiritual this time of year. Soft serve says: I don’t mind that this cone has no flavor. Yes, I want the rainbow sprinkles. No, I don’t care—I don’t care—I don’t care that this is half-frozen ooze from the unclean spout of a temperamental machine. I like it that way. I like peanut butter “sauce” and marshmallow “topping.” I even like that horrifying dip that trusts crusty when it cools and intends to resemble chocolate. Yogurt is food. This—this is ice cream.

 

I lost my faith once. I spent too many hours with my head down the crusty hopper. But on that long ago summer night, on that empty road outside of Montague, MA, I found something worth believing in. I don’t know what lured me in. Maybe I was tired of watching the twilight go by the windshield and I wanted a rest. Maybe I had nowhere to be, and there looked as good as anywhere. Or maybe the peculiarly sticky glow of the yellow floodlights sent some secret signal to some primal part of me: Confections Here, Not to be Missed.

 

The ice cream man spoke in a strange accent. I was the only customer. There was vanilla, there was chocolate, there was swirl. No mochi chunks or sliced mango. I ordered a medium dish of vanilla slathered in peanut butter sauce, and when I saw the way it curled into a perfect peak, felt the way it yielded to the spoon with just a touch of resistance, and tasted it—as though a zealous cow had offered itself in sacrifice to some dark Antarctic sugar god—I forgot all about the crusty hoppers, the bin lids, the edible lubricant, and every exotic yogurt flavor ever concocted by the self-enlightened millennial bourgeoisie. Here was something real, even if it did come from a sack. Here was a thing worth forgetting for.

 

Then I promptly forgot how to find the place.

Categories: Uncategorized

Hungry

Posted on September 30th, 2013

The air felt different. I had noticed a single tree with leaves that were starting to turn, crisp, brown, die. I wished that the afternoon would never end. The sun was still warm but the breeze from the river had a certain chill to it. At first I thought this story was about a boy. I realize now that that is fictional. I made it up. This is something different.

I’m not actually hungry. Food tastes different. I can’t handle the thought of it anymore. I was so lonely. I could never really count on people. They judge. They disappoint. They sleep all day, or don’t call you back, or think you’re something else. The food never judges. It is comfort, reliable, company. I stand, alone in the kitchen, stirring something, and I feel less alone. The movement is hypnotic. The food stays with me, listens. I don’t actually want it. I don’t feel physical hunger. I don’t know the last time I have. Time passes and steam rises, pasta softens, I am alone, stirring. Eventually, I sit down with a bowl of anonymous starch and cheese. I sit alone and blindly scoop noodles into my face. The food is warm, salty, sticky. It lands, heavy, with no particular feeling, only that I need more. I stare and chew and try to feel something. Still, empty. I still feel alone, invisible. Maybe that’s just me.

I want to say that its funny, but really I mean sad. Sadness manifests in my body, softness, inert, ignorant, stone. It’s been almost a decade and still I feel like a shadow. I can’t remember those words we said to each other in the snow anymore. Back then I felt like I owed you something. You weren’t ashamed to be seen with me, hold my hand, put up with the fables of my childhood. I want you to see me, notice, but you don’t. I don’t think I’m especially easy to miss? I take up enough space. Hair like rust. Skin like drifting snow, heavy, cold, untouched. Dig your fingers in and I yield, warm, sinking, so much to dig through before you find what’s buried.

This shell that carries me is just that- a shell. The edges are worn, barnacles have grown over the spots that are damaged, all it takes is someone who wants the meat. Pry apart the edges, wriggle your way in, rip me in half, gorge yourself on the flesh. Squeeze of lemon?

So what exactly am I feeding? Not my physical self. Some forgotten child? No, she died years ago, looking at her father in the dark changing room by the lake. My teenage self? Offering sex like cupcakes. Take one, maybe that will make me worth noticing, acknowledging, loving. Married girl, fatter than ever but more beautiful and sad and happy than she’s ever been? What is this thing that is my life? Who the fuck am I? I’m not any of these stories I tell myself. Fiction. Lies. They tell me that the Self lives in a secret cave in the heart. It is the size of the tip of the thumb. This Self does not require food, or company, or congratulations, or texting, attention, iPhones, bourbon, a new pink bra. Endless love and silence. How do I find it? How do I cultivate self-love? Can you send me the recipe?

 

 

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