Seeding the Ocean

Gravity is fully capable of taking the bottle out of my hand and breaking it on the ground below.  Can’t say why I feel the need to help it along.

Aiding an inevitability.

It’s what I do.

We’re tailgating, except there’s no truck.  There’s no parking lot and no game.  We’re on a cliff with a portable hibachi, drinking some weird-ass microbrew (that none of us particularly like) because it comes in blue bottles.  The three of us with three cases.

Drinking beer after beer and letting them rip.

Eating barbecued meat off of sticks.

Listening to sauce and sizzles.

Watching blue bottles explode when they hit the rocks below.

Letting the crashing waves take the shards.

Nothing’s been easy and I can’t blame anyone for their reactions, for treating me different, or anything like that.  Simple things just aren’t simple anymore.  The world is so much larger for me now that I can’t navigate it as quickly.

No one made me put myself in the position to be so injured.  They generally warned me against it.  I’m trying to come up with a way I can blame everybody because blaming nobody has left me breaking blue bottles with the only two people who can still look at me for extended periods.

Frankie almost slices her thumb off cutting oranges into wedges to stick into her beer.  When knives are concerned, she’s always been this way.  I know she won’t complain when she takes a chunk out of her hand.  It’s happened so many times before, but she’ll still ball that orange in her fist so it won’t slip away.

James, on the other hand, is far from fatalistic.  He will advise against her grip every time.

“Jesus Christ!  Cut AWAY from yourself.”

“This is a better grip.”

“Who taught you knife safety?”

“Never got that merit badge.”

The definition of insanity is repeating an action or series of actions and expecting different results.  The definition of tradition is repeating an action or series of actions for comfort.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re insane, other times I wonder if we’re traditional.

The day started differently.

 

At first, when I close my eyes, I can’t tell if I’m in an elevator or a funeral home.  The room seems to be moving, which would suggest an elevator, but I smell flowers, so it must be a funeral home.

I make a mental note to include a playlist in my last will and testament, something distasteful and utterly inappropriate.

Right now, I’m thinking “Legs” by ZZ Top, or perhaps “Baby Got Back” by the incomparable Sir Mix-A-Lot.  Something that says “I may be dead, but I still like to objectify the lower half of a woman”.

I’m sitting in my wheelchair, lined up to speak to Marissa’s parents.  I feel completely numb.

As children, we had been close for a bit.  She was pretty tight with Frankie (Francesca, at one’s own risk) who lived next to me and remains one of my two best friends.  After puberty, I really only ran into Marissa at parties and in bars.  It wasn’t a conscious decision, we merely went in different social directions.

I’m the one left holding the regret bag.

I’m wearing my dress blues, although I don’t know how kosher that is.  I’m not technically in the Marines anymore.  No one around here is a big fan of the war, so I forgo putting my new leg on and pin up my pant.  The lamer I look, the less-likely anyone will give me shit.

Behind me, also waiting to get his condolence-passport stamped, is the middle school football coach who was always trying to poach me from the hockey team and awkwardly explained nocturnal emissions to my half of the health class.  That was right before lunch, during which Frankie and Marissa pelted me and James with tampons from their “grow breasts and torture guys” starter kits.

“Hey there, Murphy.”  The man still refers to me by my last name, like we’re about to pick teams for dodgeball.

I resist the urge to say “Didn’t Marissa fucking hate you?”

Instead, I nod and reply “Coach.”

“How’s that leg?”

“Elsewhere, Coach, my leg is elsewhere.”

I consider going off on the guy, but when I look in front of me, all I can see are Marissa’s little brother’s, looking like they’ll puke any second now.

So I swallow it.

I wheel up, grasping for something appropriate to say.  I barely recognize them, which makes sense.  It’s bound to happen when you don’t see a ten year-old for seven years.

“Remember me?”

“Not really,” the older of the two said, “But we’ve heard about you.”

“I used to ride bikes with your sister.”

“How’s a guy with one leg ride a bike?” said the much younger.

“Slowly,” is my response.

“He used to have two.  He’s the guy that got blown up by insurgents.”

“That’s right.”

“Can I see what’s left?”

“Danny, that’s rude.”

“It’s my stump and I don’t mind.”

I unpin my pant leg and roll it up, exposing the odd lump of tissue and bone jutting out just above where my knee used to be.  It’s got a chicken wing look to it and is passing through various stages of callusing.

“Cool.”

It’s not the first time a kid has said that, but it never sits right.

“Not really.”

My chair is suddenly lurched forward and pulled back.  James’ head appears over my shoulder.

“Stop exposing yourself to minors.”

“This is James.  Your sister used to fart and blame it on him.”

The line moved, which was a good thing.  The novelty of my nubbin was wearing off and my mention of their sister reminded them of the box eight feet away.

I said something inoffensive and James wheeled me on.

We approached Marissa’s mother and I froze.  Unfortunately, I continued to advance because James was pushing the chair.

“We’re so sorry for your loss, Mrs. F.  We’re both going to miss her a lot.”

“Thank you both so much.”  She looked down at me in my chair, pant unpinned and looking as if my leg had simply deflated.  “And you’ve had such a hard year already.”

Her eyes were full of loss when she looked at me.  She was looking at a metaphor: the rug swept from beneath her feet; not having a leg to stand on.  She saw a physical manifestation of her pain.

“Man, I wish she was here because she would laugh inappropriately.”

I hadn’t thought before I spoke.  Marissa’s mother’s face dropped.

She suddenly burst out laughing.

“I’ve been thinking that all day!”

She smiled all the warmth of happy memories and leaned down to hug me in my chair.  I got a face full of late-middle-aged boobs.  It’s strange, mainly because they’re still breasts, and that’s great, but they’re attached to a mom at a time when even the hot moms had seen better days.

The room’s filled with people I only see at funerals.  They’re people from high school, from the hometown.  They’re people I don’t really remember until they’re directly in front of me.

Even though I’m back home and still hang out with Frankie and James, I’m somehow immune to the small town thing.  I have dated outside the town, for starters.  If I got married, it wouldn’t be to someone I’ve known since pre-school.  I also find it creepy when I see guys my age dating girls I baby-sat for.  There’s nothing wrong with it, technically, but I find it disturbing, mainly because I can’t say for sure that the guys didn’t baby-sit there, too.

Everyone draws their own lines.  I draw one there.

Leaving helped.

The staging areas for Afghanistan were in Australia.  We stopped in France on the way to Iraq.  I’ve been to Italy, England and Korea.  I started in the Philippines.  A few of us slid down to Egypt on leave.  There were shenanigans in Mexico and Panama.  My unit was on a carrier that docked in Argentina for some reason I had absolutely no complaints about.  I’ve been rejected by women on every continent except Antarctica.

If I had a “To Do” list, that’d be on it.

Looking at Marissa in her casket, I wonder if she had a “To Do” list.

Knowing her, pancake make-up and satin wouldn’t have been on it.

It bothers me that I can’t see her tattoos.  I remember that she had several and they were all either covered by her dress or painted over.  She thought something was important enough to needle into her skin, but someone decided it wasn’t important enough to represent her at her own wake.

My mind wanders a bit, looking at her.  I wonder why we hadn’t remained close.  I wonder if she consciously chose not to sleep with me or it just never came up.  It’s inappropriate as all hell, but what can I do about it?  I’m looking at my friend in a casket and all of a sudden the thought is there.  I’m afraid it’ll always be there.

I wonder if anything the paint and clothing hid could explain her death to me.  She was at a concert, drinking heavily and dancing.  Her heart stopped.

End of story.

One moment outtro.

I wish I had heard her laugh more recently.  She had a startling laugh, loud, a bit like the bark of a beagle.  Usually, if she thought something was funny, I had no choice but to go along with it.

My mind slips through a litany of “Like this one time”s, but they couldn’t be done justice in retrospect.  Because Marissa’s in a coffin, I’ll never be able to share some things that make me laugh just thinking about them.  I’ll just laugh alone, like a crazy person.  I’ll try to explain that you had to be there.

And I’m the only one left who was there.

Maybe that happens a lot.  Maybe that’s what crazy old people are about.  Maybe that crazy old guy who keeps spraying me with spit while he laughs isn’t crazy at all.  Maybe I had to be there.

I’m not sure what to do with all the things I wish I’d said to her: from the important “I would be a different person if I hadn’t known you” to the mundane “Frankie bought your ballet teacher’s motorcycle” that she would have gotten a kick out of.

Nobody tells people what thy mean to each other until someone dies, and then it only happens for a week or so, usually while drinking.

Marissa’s parents could easily have been my parents.  Elvie could be standing awkwardly next to them, talking to a lifespan’s worth of my acquaintances.  I could be in the box like Marissa is now; like Sanchez was in February, like Pat in July, like Julia in September; like Mark, Jesse, Del and Molly scattered around the year before.

Everyone decided to die after 25.

I was in a vehicle that hit an IED, but I survived.

Part of me is wondering if I missed the memo.

Another part of me is wondering if I’m being excluded on purpose.

One would assume that people change, but I’m looking around the viewing room and everything seems so very much the same.  Some people, athletes mostly, have put on weight.  Others, freaks and nerds for the most part, look much better than anyone would have estimated.  Making exceptions for the “So-what-are-you-up-to-these-days”‘s, the old groups hold together.  It’s like this at every funeral.  Someone inevitably says that nothing will be the same without the departed, neglecting the fact that that in a lot of ways, it already is.

The world wouldn’t be different without me in it, at least not particularly different.  I’d die and have this same funeral, hopefully with different music and likely with less flowers, or acceptably masculine flowers (I don’t know quite what that means, other than nothing pink or light purple).

Right now, dying would significantly increase the amount of social interaction I’m having.  I’m getting a lot of looks that say “You weren’t close to her,” “Why are you here?” and mostly looks that say “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”.  The ones that are getting to me are the ones that say “So that’s what’s left.”

James leaves me with some stale funeral coffee to go mourn-mingle.  Frankie should be here by now.  I don’t come up with anything, because I’m pretty sure no one will approach me.

That is, of course, until Bethany Clark arrives.

A.K.A. BFFany, Bethany Clark had proclaimed “Best Friends Forever” with 90% of the people she’s met.  The percentage will surely rise when she learns how to say it in Spanish.  I never particularly liked her, partly because I thought she was fake, but mainly because she assumed everyone felt as desperate to belong as she did.

The moment she entered the room, she was irresistibly drawn, not to me, but to my wheelchair.  She wanted to include me.

I could feel it.

I can’t hate her, her motives are kind, but something must be done before she imposes her Kum-by-ya on me.  It’s somehow very offensive, this happy sunshine dot-your-lower-case-”i”s-with-a-heart personality type.  She’s just so nice and good all the time that I don’t wonder if her parents beat her, I wonder how much.

BFFany was going to be my best friend if I didn’t move quickly.

I wheel forward, towards her.

“Excuse me.”

“Where are you going?”

“The head.”

“The what?”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Takes awhile, with the chair and all.”

“Do you need help?”

I stop.  It’s mean, but I can’t help myself.

“You know that means holding my penis, right?”

Part of me thinks it’s less confrontational because I say “penis” instead of “cock” or “dick”.  I could have said something like “wang”.  Damn, I should have said “tallywacker”.  That would have been good.  Unfortunately, that’s not how I immediately refer to my dick.

Maybe I could train myself.

I wheel on without looking back at Bethany’s flustered expression too much.  I’m trying not to laugh.  Maybe it’s time to get some air.  Sounds good, with some tar and nicotine in it.

Frankie is outside, leaning against an ugly safety rail meant to support the slow-moving elderly who frequent places like this.  Around her feet are the butts of half a pack of cigarettes, all her brand.

Even chain-smoking, she had to have been there an hour or so.

“What the fuck are you doing out here?”

“I’m trying to smoke my feelings.”

“How’s that working out?”

She lets out a little cough and a big puff of smoke with something that may have been a half-assed chuckle.

“Drinking’em’s easier.”

“Anyone ever told you that your friend’s wake was going to be easy?”

Frankie raises her dark eyebrow at me.  Usually, when she’s gets upset, she gets funnier or she keeps trying things in the hopes that they will come out funny and make her feel better.  She’s terrible with emotions, hers or anyone else’s.  It seems to be what having a psychiatrist for a mother does to people.

As a military man, I can relate to being an emotional idiot.  That is, if military men had emotions, which we don’t.

I swear on my toilet paper ration.

“You’re going to be alright.”

“Yeah.”

“Not soon enough, but it’ll happen.”

“Yeah.”

I hate this.  I hate to see Frankie barely reacting to stimuli.  She’s in her head and whatever going on in there is overwhelming her.  I want to help, but you never really do.

“Feel anything yet?”

“Not specifically.”

I know what she means, I think I know.  It’s something akin to shock, but more aware.  There’s this knowledge of how people react to death and loss.  It’s not how she feels, those people on TV who scream and sob and jump on the casket.  There’s a somewhat a somewhat cold calculation of exactly how different her life will be without the person who’s dead.  She know’s she’s going to let go, probably sooner than she expects.  She’s going to let herself feel normal, because if it hasn’t hit hard yet, maybe it won’t hit as hard as she thinks.

That’s when it hits.

Or at least that’s what happened to me.

Frankie silently stamps out another butt.  She fidgets and I know she’s wondering how long she has to wait before she lights up another one now that I’m here.

James’ lanky frame appears in the doorway.

“They started without you.”

When Frankie looked at James, I saw the signs.  She looked like a drowning victim, bloated in unfamiliar ways.  The area around her eyes that normally recedes was swollen from crying and trying to rub it away.

“You know, she was a real bitch sometimes.”

It’s not that James and I didn’t know.  We’d both experienced Marissa’s bitchy side, but Frankie has a way of taking things personally that persists for years, in spite of how rational she comes across.

The summer evening sun turned from orange to red and sank until its light refracted a reasonable spectrum over us, almost purple on one side then yellowish and orange clouds on neon pink over the Boston skyline.  We were nearly out of cigarettes when Frankie spoke.

“I’ll just be a second.”

She went in.  James finished his smoke then followed.

I would have gone in, but I can’t do that anymore.  If I was supposed to be there, Frankie’d have wheeled me in.  This was private, and James was working security.

James returned first.

“When she’s done, we’ll grab some beer and hit the cliff,” he said.  ”She looks like she’s praying.  She’s actually hiding tears and humming a Monkees’ song.”

“Daydream Believer?”

“Indeed.”

 

While I was gone, Frankie and James didn’t fuck.  The didn’t become a couple in my absence and I’m glad.  My mother always thought I’d date Frankie if it weren’t for James.  His mother thought I was the one who made us a tricycle.  My prolonged absence and subsequent return suggested that none of this would happen.

Leaving for boot, I thought everything would change.

Frankie got us the usual unlimited rides at the carnival, plus anything and everything we could eat.  We hurled all day and got trashed that night.  We stumbled into the rare phenomenon of a biker karaoke bar.

We sent James up first, involuntarily.

Mid-Harry-Belafonte, he announced to the bar that I was shipping out.  The bikers took care of us and I never corrected the misinformation.

I’d ship out soon enough anyway.

I was trying to sing “Only the Good Die Young”, but every time the DJ plugged in the numbers “Son of a Preacher Man” came out.

My hometown swan song was an ode to the only boy who could ever teach me.

We were having splash-fights in the northern Atlantic well before the sun came up.  There were sixes of tall-boys and a few random bikers along for the ride, trying to fuck my best friend.

I awoke with pink sunlight and purple glow across the water.  Frankie and James looked orange and purple, trying to figure out who’s puke was who’s.

Frankie’s was easy: corn-dogs; marshmallows’ chili-cheese fries.  All of it was tinted blue, pink and a sick shade of lilac and still resembled the former incarnations of carnival food.

James’ puke looked like poorly handled diner scrambles.  Little pieces of undigested bell-pepper gave the pools of vomit a look Frankie called “festive”.

I barfed the Jackson Pollock aftermath of a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving.  The closer I came to leaving, the more my mother shoved Americana down my esophagus.  A month of her “A-Game” kept coming, instead of the instant food I had real emotional attachments to.

How could Spaghetti’Os be comfort food?

Why would six-hour stew recipes handed down from on high not have the soothing effects of Jello and Chicken & Stars?

My lack of appreciation for the finer things has upset every woman in my life to date.  Mom, Elvie, my teachers, Mrs. Logue at the candy store, Gramma (especially), Katy (who only dated me for a minute), even Frankie (once, and JUST once) has suffered at my preference for chopped liver over pate.  What can I tell them?  I like things that are familiar, even if they’re not particularly good.

I showed up for boot camp with sand in my shorts, salt crystalizing on my scalp, fourteen pairs of tightly balled white gym socks, fourteen brand new pairs of briefs (still in bags) and a lot more hair than what came out the other end.

After boot, I had a hot second to wave goodbye.

In that hot second, my mother was someone I’d never see again.  Elvie was a woman and I could see why my friends staged the “Your sister got hot” intervention.  My father was as proud and pissed off as I’d ever seen the proud, pissed-off man, conflicted into inaction by the fact that his service made him a man and maybe he wasn’t so psyched about the man he’d become (that could be wishful thinking on my part).

Frankie and James were cheerleaders until the last second, actually a few seconds after the last second.  They couldn’t wait for postcards.  They showed me the coolest Marine tattoos, because I should get one.  Haze somebody for them.

The bus pulled away and people were either dispersing or staring blankly at the road that had taken their sons and a few daughters.  Everyone’s emotions were too high to realize that we were about to come back around the corner because the highway was in the other direction.

I said “I love you!” I said “Goodbye!”

They said “We’ll miss you!” and “Tell us everything when you get back!” and “We’re proud of you, son!”

I’m letting go.  I’m committing to memory the last images of the people who love and support me.  The images settle in my mind just as the notoriously confusing Massachusetts signage rolls me by my father assaulting a trash can; my mother nipping a flask; my baby sister not just smoking but bumming from the shithead in the Impala Katy dumped me for and my two best friends (who would always be there if the aforementioned loved ones did or said anything I didn’t want to handle) curled in each other’s arms.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t know all these fucked up things about the people I love and maybe I love them more because they went to the trouble of hiding it.

Frankie’s more sensitive than she than she wants to admit and James didn’t have to fake anything because this time he hurt and he really did care.

I couldn’t even pretend that this one dumb decision I made wasn’t going to change anything.

It had already changed everything.

I can’t say what happened while I was gone.

The difference between Frankie and James before I left and when I came back is like the difference between vanilla and french vanilla.  A connoisseur would know the contrasting notes in a second, but I can’t tell unless I have both at the same time.  I had one most of my life and the other after a period of absence so I don’t know if it’s different or if I am.

Well, I know I am.

I’m sure they are, too.

This is what I’m thinking about as Frankie lets another bottle rip.  Something about the light on the waves has done this to me.  The cobalt bottle escapes Frankie’s raised fist, spinning and singing to its doom.  The angles of the moon, the stars and the far off lights of the city give the bottle some pomp and circumstance as it hurdles towards its doom.

The lights hit every wave uniquely, but they feel permanent because they will continue with or without your existence.  The way the waves persist will lull you away from the things that you concern yourself with, hypnotize you and let you dwell on the things that matter on the inside.

The bottle explodes below in a tide pool that we’ve always known as “Grampa’s Pool” or “Gramma’s Pool” depending on which grandparent took you there to play with the periwinkles and small anemones laying on red billiard table algae just deep enough to in if you face-planted for three minutes.

From twenty feet up we can see cobalt shards against the red velvet.

“Oh shit!”

Frankie lunges for the cliff.

James and I grasp for limbs, the only way to stop a Frankie in motion.

I grab her left arm across her chest and James makes a play for her ankle.  We take her down fast, but not clean.  The side of her right cheek catches part of the rock face.  The impact has a sobering effect.

“Stumpy, I can’t!”

“Don’t.”

“Stumpy, please!  I’m not going to fall.  Lemme go.  I can’t leave broken glass in Grampa’s Pool.  Babies play there!  You guys can watch me.”

She argues, but neither James nor I are moved.

“Is it better if I do it with you guys here or come back later and climb down shit-faced?”

How do you argue with someone who uses their own lack of rationality as a perfectly logical point of rebuttal?

I don’t know how to stop loving the moat infuriating person I know.

I think it would help if I wanted to.

James makes Frankie take the path.  The path takes maybe ten minutes, rather than the two minutes it takes to climb.  I couldn’t watch her go over the cliff.  I argue my own frailty, because that’s how you get to her.  She’ll ease my fears long before she takes into account the danger she puts herself into.

I watch them pull the shards out one by one.  Frankie’s on her hands and knees in the tide pool, soaking salt water into the conservative black dress she only wears at funerals.  James collects the broken pieces in his untucked shirt.  Frankie rolls around in the pool to make sure it’s safe.  Her giggle bounces off the rocks and hits my ears from every direction.

Like the giggle is holding me.

More than halfway through my case of beer and I’m already getting sappy and sentimental.  I’m thinking about how much I love them.  I don’t want to think about not having them in my life.  It’s true, but I can tell I’m coming down with a serious case of the “I love you, man”s.

I swipe two beers out of Frankie’s case as she starts her ascent.

It takes about three and a half minutes for Frankie to make her way up.  I suck down hops and nicotine while I watch them climb back to me.  They remind me of goats, the way they never look where they put their feet.  They know the rock will not give out and they don’t dignify the thought that they might make any kind of error.

I’ve got to give it to her, she’s pretty good at not dying.  Still, it feels better to know James is trailing her.  I trust him to take the impact.

Two heads pop up over the ledge, both grinning.

James spends energy opening his mouth.

“The babies are safe.”

Frankie uses her last breath to hoist herself over the jagged edge.

Frankie and I haul James over the last bit by his arms.

Tomorrow, we’ll wake up sore.  We’ll remember that Marissa’s dead.  James will have rock-rash on his ribs that match the open wounds on Frankie’s face.  We’ll all bitch about the combination of scabs, bruises and hangovers.  The rock-rash on the stump where my leg used to be would have been there whether we endangered then saved babies or not.

What did it matter if I got scraped up going to church or if I got rock-rash smashing cobalt bottles by the beach where my mother walks our dog in the hopes that she would spend more time picking up pretty blue sea glass and a little less time not knowing what to say to her crippled son?

I need to be with the best friends I’ve ever had.

I need to catch my breath.

I need to drink with Frankie and James and I need to seed the ocean with deep blue pieces of danger that will be smashed against the rocks until they are safe, round and foggy.

The same way everything beautiful and painful becomes.

The Night Menagerie

I am sure you’ve heard of me.  You will most likely never have occasion to address me, for that is an honor bestowed only on the bluest blood, the maddest and most brilliant scientists and engineers, the most gifted manipulators in stone, paint, and metal, and those who are so in harmony with their bodies and their voices, they can make us weep with an attitude, or with a single note. And last, (though as usual not least, ) those most renowned and revered in the field of zoology.  By these favored souls I am addressed (depending on their ranking amidst the best of the best) as Shining Light, Most Adored, or Scintillant One. I am Vallala, Emperess in Waiting of Rania. Also known (by the humblest to the highest) as ‘The Treasure’.

I do not know if these words will ever be read; but some disquiet is propelling my pen to the page. Something has been sniffing and snuffling, deep in the dark recesses of my heart.  I thought, when I first felt this pricking awareness, this blind thing cocking an ear, that is was the strange richness of the feast we had laid for the Princess of Erm, a land known for its fiery delicacies and steel cold palates. But no.  For the discomfort continued well into the next day.  And then it continued into the evening.  And then it grew into more than a strange indigestion.  It had awareness.  I cast my mind back to see if I could discern a beginning other than the feast for the Princess of Erm.

I went back in my mind to the morning of that day.

I woke up drifting like a lilly on a pool of silk blankets and satin pillows,

 

*** insert piece written chez Matthieu

Lyriette’s look of relief at my seeming meekness was replaced by chagrin, and then, after a short inner struggle, with one of philosophical resignation.  It was scarcely the proper spot for grooming a lady, but at least said lady was allowing her maid to perform her function.

I put the stool down by a little table set with a bowl of fruit and a little jeweled dish of grains and seeds.  The seed was of the type that a princess could sprinkle on the balcony to attract the palace bird population when her soul craved their cheerful chirping, and beady bright regard.  Or perhaps a bolder princess would have held out the seed on the soft palm of her hand and let the equally bold feathered creatures alight on her slender fingers and there peck delicately at the offering.  I wasn’t sure which one I would have been.  But the question was moot.  There was no sound of chirping, no scratch of claw nor rustle or beat of wing to be heard anywhere near my balcony.

No one had ever mentioned this lack within my hearing.  And the seeds were replaced after a rain when they became speckled with mold, and the bowl was refilled after a high wind had skimmed off its own tithe.

But, I could not remember a time when I did not have my own unvoiced understanding of why there were no birds near my little balcony.  I sat down on the stool so that I faced the north west corner of the courtyard over which my balcony and its  exotically plumed occupant were suspended like a little gilded birdcage.

The innermost courtyard of the Imperial Palace of Rania is one of its jewels.  It holds the sixth Emperess’ Garden — she who was said to have coaxed the fabled Black Orchid into not only growing, but flowering in her private plot. No one had ever succeeded cultivating it before, nor has since.  The Emperess’s Garden is bordered on its south side by the imperial conservatory.

This was an intricate structure of steel and copper and glass with a great central dome and two flanking wings each surmounted by its own cupola.  My chambers were directly across from it and It’s countless glass panes reflected a strange checker-box pattern onto my balcony.  I wondered how much time I had lost, gazing fascinated by the play of patchwork light on the rich fabrics of my dresses or across the face of my guest on the rare occasions that I entertained someone there.  I remember more than once, hearing a silence stretch past its natural point, only to realize that I had been so mesmerized by the bright shifting grid on my guest’s face that I had completely lost track of the conversation.

But that is not why I had chagrined Lyriella and placed my stool angled just so.  Lately a fresh fascination had begun to steel my time and concentration.  The thought of what my princessly duties had in store for me today, brought an immediate urge to look upon the place for just a moment in quiet contemplation, before I should be forced to walk through it in strange company, while exercising the utmost tact and diplomacy.

I am speaking of the Night Menagerie, of course.  It crouched in its corner of the courtyard, a shadowy and still behind a lot of trembling, sun-dappled foliage.  There is nothing to see, really from my vantage point.  But I felt that where my real eye strained to make out any detail behind the green baffle of trees and heather, my mind’s eye continued clear-sighted, and my ears echoed with the faint click of claws on alabaster tile, the whisper of something soft dragging softly on polished volcanic glass, the snuffle and snort immediately followed by the peculiar sound of igniting gas.  Behind all of these sounds I heard the tinkle of metal links.

I had heard and felt all this many times in the previous 6 months.  It is almost as if the place had found it’s tongue and was suddenly essaying words and then full phrases in hopes that I would understand them.  But on this morning, the strangest thing happened.  When I thought I heard the clink clink of chains sliding acrosse the floor, my mouth was suddenly flooded with the taste of iron. It was like the involuntary salivation that comes at the though of a good meal. Except this was triggered by a sound, and actually produced a flavor.  I had instinctively connected the two — that sound, and that flavor.  But after it retreated, and I had time to discredit my gut, I heard the soft ‘clinck clinck’ again and a fresh burst of iron filled my mouth, just as it had when I was 4 years old and I’d tumbled down the stairs and bit the inside of my lip so hard.

I swallowed and my gut heaved as the warm saltiness slid down my throat.  Suddenly I wished I was sitting primly in front of the vanity in my room, gazing, bored at the too familiar image of my face framed in gilded scrollwork.  But I could not get up now.  Instead, I cleared my throat as quietly as possible and said as casually as possible, “Ah, Lyriella, would you be so kind as to tell them to bring my breakfast tea immediately.  And please bring it to me here on the balcony.”  I hoped Lyriella would take it as a sign that I was concerned about the time I needed for preparation for today’s diplomatic agenda. I felt her go still behind me, imagined the brush poised above the strand she was currently holding.  And then with a “yes, my lady” she was gone.

I let out a breath, I did not know I had been holding and slumped on my stool, wishing it was one of the cushioned armchairs in my sitting room.  I held my gaze averted from the northwest corner of the courtyard as if that would help to prevent any stray sounds eminating from that direction from reaching me.  Perhaps it did, because I did not hear anything more, and Lyriella soon returned with my tea.  She set it down next to the plate of fruit on the little table beside me, a delicate, but capacious china cup of lapis and gold on its matching saucer.  The cup clinked in its saucer a little when she put it down, and all my hairs stood up on end, but no answering burst of warm salt filled my mouth.  Suddenly my tongue felt dry as a bone and I took the cup and took a hasty swallow, and thoroughly scalded my mouth.  I had always been very insistent that my tea be hot when it reached me.  If I must bare the duties of an imperial princess, at leat let my tea be hot.

At noon exactly, after two hours of bathing and perfuming and dressing and adornment, I went to meet my father in a small room (well, smaller anyway) off the great dining hall.  We would proceed into the hall together, after all the guests has been seated.  When I was 16 and first began to fulfill my duties as the palace’s seneschal I marveled that an imperial family would countenance a tradition so little likely to contribute to either enjoyment of one’s meal or its digestion.  To be walking to one’s lunch or breakfast or dinner under the double phalanx of stares from many strange pairs of eyes, some curious, some sly, some vacant, and some angry made my stomach roil immediately and I had never been squeamish.  I soon found that just as in childhood, the daily life of an imperial adult seemed full of traditions that seemed expressly meant to take all the comfort out of daily rituals that for the common people were expressly made for comfort.  Today, I added to this all the discomfort of a scalded mouth.

I walked down a sconce-lit corridor hoping that today’s menu was not of the spiced variety and then remembered with a sinking stomach that whatever was in store for lunch, tonight’s banquet was for the Princess of Ehrm.  I sent up a prayer for a lunch of yogurt and cucumber sandwiches and lychee sorbet as I came abreast of the door to the ante room.  Normally, I would have had Lyrielly with me, holding my train up from the dust inevitable even with an army of servants, in the miles of corridor of the palace.  But today I had sent her to discover an absolutely crucial detail on some Ehrmish tradition that I must know before I entered the chamber.  You see, the dining hall ante-room had a peculiar trait — it’s whole northern face was a big stained-glass window.  As it was mostly green and crimson and purple this cast a peculiar stain over the whole room and every thing and person in it — which is why it was only used as a meeting place for the imperial family before it was led into the dining room. There were however, a few squares of clear glass in the general design.  One was exactly at my eye level.

I pushed open the door, alert to any warmth stirring within.  But it was empty.  I moved swiftly to the far end of the room where the square of clear glass beckoned.  I pressed my forehead up against the window and looked out.  Before me lay the widening vista of Rania’s capital city, then the countryside, then the sea and the world beyond.  My heart  beat fast and I drank it in with the thirst of a camel; for I must store the site until the next time I would have the chance to see it.  I cocked an ear for approaching footsteps but heard only dust-moted silence.  Then I had time for one more indulgence.  It was a game I played.  I would start by looking straight down out of the window.  The imperial palace stood poised on a great hill crowned by a rocky shelf.  The shelf had vertical sides that plunged some one or two hundred feet, depending on what side you were.  This was the shallower side.  Separated by only a few feet from the bottom of this shelf, was built a crenelated wall, three feet thick and slit with windows.  The wall itself was only 20 or so feet tall, made only as a cover from behind which defenders of the castle could launch all manner of horrible deterrents on its attackers.

I would rest my gaze first just inside this wall, and feel the closeness, the confinement, the lack of vista.  Then I would inch my gaze up to the top of the wall, and rest on the edge, where I could see the very beginnings of the city buildings abutting the walls.  On this side of the city, facing away from the mouth of the Rastha River the first tier of buildings were mostly administrative buildings, from where the huge infrastructure that supported the empire was guided, like the great wheel on a great ship.  I lingered only a moment on these, in order to build up anticipation, my ear cocked still for approaching footsteps.

After this tier the buildings became much more interesting — to me at least.  These were the city palace’s of Rania’s aristocracy.  Unlike the imperial palace, which had originally been built as a fortress, and later been carved down in some places like a sculpture from a block of marble, or developed ornamental additions like mushrooms on a tree trunk — such as my little balcony, the palaces below the castle, feeling all the security of the fortress just above them had been built with open abandon.  Each roof was a little oasis of gardens, fountains and delicate little gazebos made of marble carved to an almost translucent thinness.  Sometimes, two roofs were joined by little arched bridges of wood and stone and copper.

I reveled on these roofs for the few moments that I could.  I walked along the low carved walls and sat on the edges of the fountans, trailing my fingers in the water.  I sat for a moment on the marble benches and breathed deep the fragrances of the herbs and flowers carefully chosen for both visual beauty and aroma.

But there were headier thrills yet to come.  The roofs of the wealthy merchants held the serious and cautious reserve of the class — they had fewer gardens, and sloped down, taking the observer’s eye willy-nilly down their steep inclines to the lower tiers of the city.  The houses became less uniformly grand as they went further from the palace.  They were of all shapes and sizes like a colony of close-growing mushrooms.  Between them you could see mews and alleys and catch the brilliant flash of a horse’s tack.

I could have spent hours, dipping in and out of all the nooks and crannies like a sparrow, but of course, I only ever had moments for my game.  So my eye roved further to where the original walls of the town stood perhaps three stories high and to the Berenia Gate.  Now, at mid-day the great doors of wrought iron were open.  These days, with Rania at peace with all the world, only one guard stood at each side of the gate, sometimes stopping those who passed by to ask a question, sometimes letting them pass with a nod.  I slipped by like a ghost, unseen, unnoticed, unchecked.

From there, the imperial city marched on until the houses grew less close together and roads and fields appeared to separate them into little village clumps.  To the *** the land stopped and I saw a kind of shimmer that I knew was the sea.  To the *** the land dipped and then moved steadily up to the Garghen Mountains where it met the lapis blue sky.

I caught site of Felo and Falise, bathed in daylight like two girls caught in their chemises.  I felt a shiver creep over the nape of my neck and brushed at the single strand of hair that Lyriella had allowed to fall artfully down my back.  I’d seen it, gazing at my back in the double reflection of my vanity and my hand mirrors.  To me, it immidieately took the form an upside down question mark which had irritated me so much I’d made a little noise in the back of my throat.  This shocked Lyriella.  It shocked me.  I had been trained from a child never to make those little noises.  It sounded so ….human.  It was exciting, as if there was another me in there somewhere that might say things I had not prodded and weighed before they came passed from between my lips.

 

(New Elephant) Reaching Outpost

Prompt: Please Just Listen

By Paul

everytime i find myself here i cant find exactly what it is to listen
through the waving mirage of light and heat the sound.. the summers are always the worst.
five years ive been here. and in five years i still havent been able to grow a single inch worth of usefull thumbnail to roll a decent cigarette
the ferm aint strong enough to light a flame. and every day i im at this outpost of humanity i wish to hear a last call.
ever since the laws changed to recognize the workers rights there isnt the familiar end to a night. or a sober hour.
the ice shucked up from the south in cooler pipes. makes a whiskey on the rocks more like a whiskey with pennies.
i’m all for workers rights to a proper wage an what not. but the line blurred when it came to what tax we pay when its what we need to eat.

this time i swear ill do something different. this time i might have something worth to say. besides the daily reports of pressure and flow. illd add something extra.
something personal. sigh.. can you type a sigh? cant you? i suppose you can answer your own rhetorical questions if you have enough ti
me.

journal entry 3 2 7 what the fuck at 1100 hundred hours of shit
i know this isnt nothing. ive been here enough to know that the others on the slope here dont care.
no point singing a song if everyone thats gonna read it already knows the words.
thats why im writing it for you babe.

my dog died. the pamphelt said to keep him in the tent. the pamhplet said he could smell a bear before it came to close. but the bugs.
they can find a way into a mans ear far enough to drive most mad if he pays enough attention. just pretend theyre parakeets. finches maybe, doves even.
just dont let the dog outside the tent.
i didint mean to.
he dug a way out. and now im alone. the disease got him. and now im here with my thoughts. hes left me. i suppose you feel the same way.
but im stil here.
this land doesnt forgive. fuck. i forgot. journal entry 438, 2055. shit. ill never get the hang of these reports.
they want us to report the day, the lack of day, the stay of night, the pressure, then lack of pressure, gauges dieals blah blah blah.
at this point im tired of it.
five years, five years without you.
and im sure i still wont get used to it.
im halfway through my contract and i keep thinking that carrot will be enough for us to get to a nice place.
a place with good people. a place with good water. a place where the land doesnt open up and swallow us whole. like jared.. and betsy..

journal 427 2055. i should keep better track of these. the psychologist going in said i needed to write everything down. everything. but its hard when you cant sleep.
when you’re trained to listen. and all you end up wanting to do is go to the spot. the post has the best pure ferm there is around. i heard it comes from matanuska.
i heard they still have good soil.

the wind never hits here. it never.. changes the way they work. the way the swarm moves. not to say its some being, i know its not some us verses them battle to the death.
its thousands, and they are legion. each breeds a new batch of somethin worse you never wish to see. the sound. theyre wings. the constant buzzing.
i used to think the lights were bad enough with the usual commie bullshit coming blasting so far on the radio waves you can hear it in everything that vibrates and is metal.
except theyre wings. this time of year they block out the sun. not a lot. but just enough. its like the smog over l.a. when there was an l.a.

the biologists say we’re at an apex. eventually theyll die out. exaust theyre resources. theyre food. but they havent yet. its still that constant hum, that buzzing. that leeks thourgh
the walls, the lights, the radio. its like theyre on the same goddamned frequency now. its impossible to reach radio beyond 30 cliques without it taking over the signal.
tucker couldnt handle it. thats why pump station 3 needs a new tech. he listened too much. he couldnt drown it out with all the ferm th company supplied.
and he paid the price, didnt make it easy either. bullet woulda made it clean, but he had to overload the whole damn system. said the frequency could kill em.
he was wrong.

Winter Blind

Prompt:  Please just listen…

by Cristina Loughrey

 

The temperature has dropped.  Snow powders the ground with frightening quickness, erasing color from the city.  Usually the snow does not seem to fall in any special hurry; awhirl amidst distractions, it changes its mind midway through the plummet and swoops back up again.  Right now, it falls fast and heavy as carpet bombs.  It burns against the skin.  It falls like wrath.  I would call out for god, pray for it to stop, but forgiveness will not come faster than change.

“Fuck this,” I say out loud.  No one notices.  “What the fuck brought people to live in these places past a summer?”  It gets personal. “Winter’s son of a bitch—cold as one, too.”

When weather is all you have, it begins to take on personalities.  It seems alive as anyone, the way it constantly changes.  Some would argue it does not have the same intentionality as a person.  But from where I sit, neither do most people have intention.

The snow blows the cup thin paper cup over.  “God damn you.”  Pulling hands out from armpits, I prop it up again.  Index and middle fingers immediately begin to purple where the knit gloves are worn off.  I shoe away the snow with my free hand, swatting it from shoulders and blowing it from my upper lip.

The letters on the cardboard sign are becoming shadows under the white.  A pair of polished red boots kick it over accidentally.  The red boots fade quickly with a clip-click across the sidewalk.

More and more, passersby cloak themselves in phones and conversations with people who are not there—half of them looking crazier than the tin man who waits for signals in the park.  Whole of his skinny torso is bandaged in hijacked food trays and fake aluminum.  Puts his hand above his head and beeps, turning his wrist as though his hand is a satellite dish.  Not sure if he is trying to be taken home, but I am sure he is not here.  Crazy as the birds that don’t migrate in New York winter—all fucked up by the scraps they can survive on.  Sure thing is Charlie—that’s the tin man—does not want to be here.  He gets fewer scraps.

“Hey, Charlie,” I had told him during the autumn, “Why don’t you take this cup and sit awhile with it?  I’ll go get a cup of coffee and get another one.”  I speak Spanish to the workers at the café and they’re nice to me—look the other way when I take extra sugar, give me a new cup no-charge when mine starts to crack up.

“No.” Charlie speaks so softly that he seems already on another planet. “I might miss them.  What if they can’t find me?  No address for the transmissions.  Keep signaling.  No stopping.”

Sometimes I sit in the park and listen to him and the other crazies.  They seem to like it ‘til their eyes go a wobbly and they realize you are bringing them back to someplace awful.  Then they boomerang back into outer space until they can visit again.  Bit by bit, you piece them together and see the earth planets they came from and the ones they fled to—Superman and his schizophrenic Bizarro world.  If Bizarro is Superman’s shadowy mirror image, let us remember that a shadow proves something is three-dimensional and real.  It takes up space.  It is matter.  It matters.  A big 3D delusionary cipher of cosmos and consequences.

Once upon a time, Charlie lived in a room with a bed stand and a nice orderly named Nancy who brought him little paper cups full of things that would protect him from the space men.  Once upon a time, good people realized that Charlie would never pay taxes and Nancy was better changing gold-plated bed pans.  Progress would transform Charlie into a superhero of self-salvation.  God knows what nuclear planet Charlie had been born and exiled from.  And if god knows, he was not listening then and is not telling anyone now.

No.  These crazies walking by me on their way to somewhere wear haircuts and nice shoes.  They are plugged in same as a cow to a mechanical teat, plastic siphons in their ears so deep as to be implanted.  They dream this is a positive future.  I can feel the machinery of any campaign like a dog salivates at a bell.  The CIA envies the corporate hold on the well-behaved soldiers of other peoples’ fortunes.  They wish they had cleverly exploited consumerism as a vector.  Corporate bio-terrororism using the person as the surgeon and victim, product as vehicle, artificial identity tagged with the company’s genetic markers as pathogen.  Not me.  I have all the freedom they do not want to see.  The freedom they are increasingly too distracted to see.

“Listen!  I have a face.”  They walk by without a moment of silence.  Maybe they would be crazy too, if they knew what it is to stink, if they sat invisible and voiceless.

Winters are hard.  Cities are hard, full of concrete bedding and exoskeletons scurrying in clicks and couples across the sidewalks.  Cab horns and hot dog carts bang and waft.

Some stubby vendor sits in his tin cube, scraping the grill.  No one comes.  Every step is white flame as I lumber through the cold.

“Closing up,” he says.  I pour a dollar in nickels and quarters onto the metal shelf.

“Closing up,” he repeats without looking up.  I know he sees me.  The grill is hot.

“What?” My voice feels like a blade.

“You hear me.  Closed.  Too cold.  No customers.  I go.”  His accent is thick.
“Too cold is right.  Too hungry, too.  I am a customer!”

“You understand me.  I speak English good enough.  Night school.  You go to hell.”

“Can’t you just throw a dog on while you break things down?”

“No.  Go home now.  You go somewhere else.  Closed.  You go find soup somewhere.”

I can feel the weight swinging at gun-side, hear the rattle of my pack.  My feet are rotting wet in my boots.  I am a super hero—defending justice and Charlie, or fighting Charlie, not sure anymore but that I am fighting.  I lift the cart over my head and throw it through two lanes of traffic.  Hot dogs go everywhere.  They scatter like shrapnel.  They rain down on the commuters, knocking cell phones from their hands.  Pages from night school course books float down in feathery waves, covered in blood and mud.  The vendor begs for forgiveness, offering hot dogs and his first born child.

That is what I can feel.  In reality, the tips of my fingers are too cold to feel anything.

I have not moved an inch.  “I closed,” the vendor repeats, this time pushing my change off the ledge and slamming the window shut.

The cold tips of my fingers ball inside fists and pound against the metal.  The cart stays unflinching.  The vendor yells.  He comes out of his truck and shoves me hard.  I fall into the drift.  The fucking police stop and stare.  I leave the change and scream, “Fuck you!  I fucking went to a real school, you fucks!  I fought for your fucking cart to exist!  They fucking worshipped me once.”  My lungs fill and hurt with cold.  The cops start to open their doors.  And I run.

No cardboard sign, but I fall into a new spot.  This one has a little awning—just a couple inches.  Still have some insulation in my bag, which I set out like a nest.

“Spare change?”  I can hardly hear myself say it.  The newspaper crinkling between me and the sidewalk is louder.  Not sure if anyone is listening: god, politicians, the woman in the forest green scarf who smiled vaguely in my direction.  A derelict smell of unwashed crevasses and warm parts of the body drags my attention to a hole in my pants.

“Spare change?”  There is my voice again.

An older man with a gleam of stubble, a genteel leather briefcase, and a height only gotten by pride walks briskly by.  His eyes are unswerving.  He reminds me of my father.  There is my mother with her set curls and the little cross that would hang delicately over my eyes when she kissed me goodnight.

“Goodnight and god bless you,” I say loudly, clear as a Salvation Army Santa, as coins clang in the bottom of my glass.  “God bless!!”  Everyone looks angelically blurry through snow-laced lashes and I missed who the donor was.  I have stopped trying to make eye contact.  I think it started as shame and has evolved into a courtesy; they pay not to know how alike we are.  Now my parents are gone and the cold is burrowing in.  All the shelters have collapsed in the recession.  I dig a cigarette butt from a corner of the door frame and then flick it away.  Not enough to bum a light for.

The sad truth is you never lose yourself.  You lose what you thought you were.  You lose the ability to imagine there are limits to people.  You become people.  Only the word people is not shiny anymore.  Someone is coming at you and you act, simple and quick as any animal.  Only, animals do not cry afterward.  Animals keep going; they walk around responding only to what they want or fear.

“Please help?  Spare change?”

The people walk by, plugged into busy.  Their devices flash like instincts.  The wind begins to yawn and roar.  The savage cold attacks.  People in big coats make their way into nearby doors.  People scatter with the garbage.

Wiggling into the hole, I rub the exposed spot and draw my legs closer to my chest.  Feet as cold as frozen gasoline, nearly as dangerous, the time passes.

“Spare change?”

The newspaper is getting wet where my body melts the piling drift.  The wind dries spit in my beard.  All the church doors are shut in the late hours; most good people are inside.  “Once upon a time, I had a wife.”  It is too cold.

Struggling up, I wander through the growing whiteness toward the subway.  It gets more expensive every year, but it is warmer.  Shortcutting through the park, the whole place is spidery white webs of fences and trees.  I trip while cornering a bench.  The hole in my pants scrapes against the sidewalk and there is the sting of lost skin.  The cup scatters tithes into the snow.  Grasping and squinting, I manage to clasp a couple coins in one hand.  I run the other hand along the ground, up the branch I tripped on, up Charlie’s trunk.  Squatting palms down around him, I look at his face.

“Charlie!  You crazy fuck.”  Of course he was in the park.  He never thought about going to the subway unless you found him.  Someone usually drug him along.  His eyes are shut, ready for transmission away from the cold ground.  Hopefully he is landing somewhere.  I leave him the coins, putting the ones in hand my on his chest.  “Safe travels, Charlie.”

The subway seems closer now.  I move quickly.  I move by sense.  Like birds migrate.  I can feel the hot gusts, pushing hell’s breath from the belly of the City.

 

Flight of the Handles

Prompt:  ”Please…just listen.”

Rebecca was, quite literally, stomping through the quad.  All of the preternatural grace she normally rode her cartoonishly large platform boots with was gone, and what was left was very much a young girl, in costume, in a really, really big hurry.  She checked her cell phone every 30 seconds or so to punctuate the urgency of her appearance.  Normally the walk from the dorms to the student studios took 17min…tonight she made it there in 9.

 

She blasted through the front of the studio and pulled up short.  Several other students flinched up from their work and stared wide eyed at the red cheeked, blue eyed, purple headed girl huffing before them.  “Hey.”  Her voice strained beneath suppressed hyperventilative urges.  The several other students said ‘hey’, grunted, blinked, and said nothing, respectively.  Her mouth bared its teeth in a display of human friendliness.  The other kids did not and returned slavishly to the tasks before them.  Only the girl who had said, “Hey.” returned the gesture.  She also dropped her knitting needles and made her way forward to finish her sentiment off with a hug.  Rebecca reciprocated by visibly deflating in her arms.

 

“Have you heard back from Professor Magill yet?” Kiroly was using the MurmaSqueeze, guaranteed to be impervious to all casual listeners and most eavesdroppers.

 

“No. Nothing.”

 

“Well don’t worry.”  She pushed back to hold Rebecca at arms length, her face illuminating with ear to ear positivity.  “They’re a-maayy-zing!”

 

She always says that, Rebecca thought.  (Bare mouth teeth now)  “Thanks.”  (Close face walk forward)

 

Rebecca clomped over to a draped form in the far corner.  Kiroly floated along behind her.  They paused before the drape.  Rebecca took a deep breath and slowly, using both hands, lifted the muslin carefully out and up in a methodical peeling movement until every snaggable inch of cloth and flesh was free and the drape could be whipped away, revealing her baby, her passion, her design school senior opus hidden beneath.

 

Each girl took a moment all their own.  Rebecca’s was an eye narrowing, jaw clenching moment of defiant triumph in the face of all opposition.  Many had doubted but she had persevered.  Nobody had suspected but she had believed.  Everyone had wondered but she had known…this day would come.

 

Kiroly was just fucking awash in gratitude.  She should have been stressed out given the fact that her project wasn’t done yet and the Senior Fashion Show was in just three days, but that didn’t seem to matter right now.  Her performance all semester was solid and while her final project was appearing to be a little more ambitious than she initially suspected, the end product had enough going for it that she just needed to knuckle down and do it.  It was all very probable that her work would make the cut and would walk in the Show…something that had not even seemed possible for Rebecca just days prior.

 

If Kiroly was the tortoise than Rebecca was the hare and Rebecca, true to form, time after time, over the past 4 years, had always just missed her deadlines or just missed targets…never the twain had met.  And here they had been, going in to the last week of their final project in the pentultimate year of their design school education, and Rebecca had had…nothing…nada…zero to show for it…just attitude, defiance and distinct whiff of fear.

 

Yet now here they stood, mere days later, both marveling in their own way at the turn of events that stood undeniably before them.  Rebecca had waited for inspiration and inspiration had come, finally, upon wings of black plastic chainmail and feathers of blade.  Just three days ago, in a virtual trance of desperation, she had found herself before a box of hundreds of unwanted black plastic handled children’s scissors from an overshippment to a local elementary school, just staring.  And now, three days later, the box of hundreds was rearranged in to meticulous overlapping rows, their plastic finger loops held not by little hands but rings of steel, their edges cutting not construction paper but the stale, florescent air of the Senior Studio.  Through careful study of a gull wing pattern found and printed off the internet she had reconstructed each of the primary, secondary and tertiary rows of feathers in scissors, linked their handles together with metal bands, and attached the whole assembly to the understructure of her ex boyfriend’s “Incubus the Bat” wing costume from Halloween two years ago.  Rebecca pulled the bicycle cable that hung from the harness and watched and listened as hundreds and hundreds of tiny blades washed across each other in a silvery song each time the wings opened and closed.  Just beautiful.

 

Her phone was vibrating.  Rebecca dropped the cable and fumbled through her pocket. Message from Prof. Magill.  ”No…fucking…way.”  She dropped the phone, bit her lip and scrunched her eyes.   White light…curtains of red and green disappointment…sparkles of rage.

 

Kiroly put her hand on her shoulder.  “Are you OK?”  This time she used the super secret hush grab, impervious to eavesdroppers and barely intelligible to the recipient.

 

“It’s not fair.”  Rebecca sobbed.  “I don’t care if it only took three days to make.  I don’t care if I reused Jared’s stupid fucking Incubus wings.  That band sucks so badddddd.”  She was sobbing now.  “It’s j-just a bunch of puritanical bullshit leftover from the fucking reformation.  All this fucking emphasis on hard work, perspiration and persi-fucking-verance.  It’s fucking fascist!  FASCIST!”  She soapboxing now.   She wasn’t standing on anything but she was definitely out there, in the middle of the studio, screaming.

 

Kiroly couldn’t watch.  She dropped her eyes to the floor where they came to rest on the phone lying there, screen up, messages app highlighted.  She bent down slowly, focusing to read the entire way.

 

“Message from Prof. Magill:  You’re not running with that.”  Kiroly blinked and thought for a moment.  At that second another texted beeped onto the phone.

 

“Message from Prof. Magill:  U’ll put our eyes out.  ;) Come talk 2moro about walking in the show.  Congrats.”

 

“Ummm…Rebecca?”  From the miasma of disappointment at the epicenter of the room there was no answer…just sobbing.  Kiroly looked at her poor wretched, tattered friend.  “Rebecca.”  She entreated.

 

“WHAAAAT?”  Rebecca heaved from the bottom of her soul.

 

“Please…”  Kiroly was beaming once again.  “…just listen.”

 

Quick Write No.2: Boxed Fruit

Boxed Fruit – A One Elephant Quick Write (10min)

by Cristina Loughrey

Inside the room, there were the normal stale amenities.  People complain about smoking rooms and perfume in the workplace, but no one complains about the smell emerging from unopenable windows in high rise hotels.  No one thinks about what Freon and transience reeks of.  And the people that recognize it, well they do not readily talk about it.  There is something dirty and desperately cliché in it, like falling for a hooker.

This was that ordinary room.  There was a glow of city lights outside.  It could be any city.  It was every city.  The phone by the bed reminded him that the phone in his pocket was quiet—it was a conspiracy of quiet launched by cellular culture to make him, personally, feel unloved.  Though, in this case, it was quite accurate.

His socks were a little floppy at the end.  There was a warm pocket of air he rubbed his big toe into.  The television flickered in the background.  It was just noise.  He liked to hear the voices of dramas.  They smacked of an intention he knew he should have.  His suit bag loomed in the periphery, a shell of a businessman.  There was a happy hour he had missed and room service he could not be bothered with.  Well-traveled, he had already stopped by a liquor store and the mini bar’s novelty was ineffectively pouting in the corner.  She felt neglected, but charged too much for attention.  Everything in a hotel room had a personality to him.  He thought about how those little bars of over-perfumed soap felt being unwrapped and left to be thrown away—how it seemed young and stupid.  The expensive shampoos you would keep, hiding them in your bag as though you were getting away with something.  He liked the pristine polish of the glasses with the covers.  They seemed proud, clean, able to last through days.  Sometimes, he had conversations with them.

Then the doorbell rang.  He wasn’t expecting anyone.  It was a box of fruit and chocolates.  He took it and tipped the bellboy.

In the room, it sparkled on the stoic wooden dresser.  He looked inside, touched all the fruit.  He refused to read the card until everything was touched.  Then, plopping a truffle in his mouth, he opened the card.  Exactly as he expected, it was not for him.  It was not for him, but this was his room.  What did it matter if his name was or wasn’t Ralph or Sarah?  So what if it was not his honeymoon?  They would easily overlook this part of their new bliss, but he had this wonderful box of fruit.  It changed the room.  Made it personal.  Filled the air with candy and trees.  And he kept it, even the wrapping, packing it away as he left in the morning.

 

Lost & Found

Long Write No. 2: “don’t leave me here”

By Cristina Loughrey

Gigantic, inseams stretched towards the halogen sky and pudgy hands darted left and right skimming the jam-matted fur.  No one picked him up.  He sat there on the floor, waiting without blinking.  The big black eyes looked forward, scared to be so alone.  Big feet tromped by, pulling reluctant children to wait in lines for checkouts and fancy gift wrap.  All the candy swirled and chocolate bars dazzled like a tinsel wonderland.

“Once, when my fur was soft as the silk edge of blankets and fluffy like playground clouds, I was wrapped in a pretty bow.”  It seemed a long time ago now since those little arms had nearly strangulated him with love.  At that time, he had all his whiskers and his ears were perfect triangles.  Now they were a little gnarled with adventures.

He sat there on the cold and mottled linoleum, measuring the time in each pair of legs that moved towards him.  As they came nearer, the anticipation grew and popped like a tawdry balloon.  The legs would get bigger and another, newer one would get picked up as though he had been found after a terribly long absence.  The tinkle bells and brass horns of Christmas poured from the ceiling.  He wished to be home.  Lost or abandoned, what is the difference?  The familiar giggle and whispered secrets were gone.  His heart was plastic and hollow.  She had left him there, too distracted by all the new animals.  He had watched her wander away, chasing her mother saying, “Mommy, I want this one!  Mommy, come over here!”

“Don’t leave me here,” he had said to the little girl.  But the girl did not hear him.  He lost sight of her in the crowd.  Other children passed with theirs.  Soon, there were no more feet.  Finally, a cloddish pair came and picked him up, tossing him in a little cage.  The night passed without music or hope.  He curled into a warm bit of fluff that smelled like peanut butter and perfume.  And he stared out into the bare grey evening, watching the quiet.

When the lights came up again, the people in their red smocks came.  There were mops and chatter.  He sat in the cage, unnoticed.  Soon the voices became louder.  It was a carousel of exclamations and whines.  Purses jingled.  Shoved into thick layers of coats, children roasted.  In a little while, from below the ledge of a counter, he heard her—his Voice.  Her little fingers curled white over the ledge as she lifted herself up.  Eyes like buttons stared worriedly.

“She has been pestering me all night,” he heard the little girl’s grown up say,  “It’s a little stuffed dog, raggedy, sort of white with a black spot.”

The little blue buttons sparkled like ornaments and holiday twinkle lights.  He could feel her tears soak into the seam where her cheek had worn him down to the fabric.  The tinkle bells and brass horns of Christmas poured from the ceiling.  He felt new again.

Get Worse

Prompt #2: The Animal You Fear Most

By Christianne

 

“It’s not like it couldn’t get worse.”
I’m not responding to this. I’m agitating the Mr. Bubble that makes it look like I’m sitting in a dispersing cloud and smells like a fresh wad of gum. I’m marinating from the waist down and I’m thinking Mr. Bubble was a bad plan. Gum and nuts don’t mix. I’m not paying attention to James blabber until my thought breaks and I hear:
“. . . because they have acidic vomit. It’ll eat right through your skin.”
“What’s barfing on me?”
“A turkey vulture.”
“oh, that makes sense.”
“Yeah, they begin digestion in their mouths, like komodo dragons.”
“So being attacked by a komodo dragon would be just as bad?”
“Maybe worse,” James squints at the screen and hunkers down his shoulders. “They have stronger jaws. Could snap your limbs in half.”
“So nowI’m having my limbs snapped and getting vomited on by a komodo dragon.”
“Yeah. That’d be worse, right?”
“It would be.”
James’ little green man dies on screen. My little red man appears and James hands me the controller, careful not to drop it into my tub. The peppy music starts and I maneuver him around his brightly but limitedly colored world.
His shirt is the same color as his moustache.
“Then you could get stung by a baby scorpion. They have the strongest poison.”
“I thought they didn’t sting as deeply.”
“They don’t. I’m making it worse, not killing you.”
“You’re a huge comfort to me in my time of need, James.”
James laughs. “What in our shared history made you think I would be comforting?”
If I had a chalkboard, I’d put a nice, big tick-mark under his name for that one.
“Then you could get pecked by a penguin.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“Wanna bet?”
James points the index finger of his left hand at my face. The screen is blocked out by by a flesh-colored lump of cauliflower sprouting around his nail bed.
“Whadafuckizat?”
“I got pecked by a penguin at the aquarium.”
“Did you stick your hand in?”
“No. One escaped.”
“You were attacked by a rogue penguin?”
“To make a long story short.”
“Is there anything else to it?”
“Not really.”
“Thereby not a long story.”
Point, Stump.
“Get that out of my face, you deformed freak.”
“Look who’s talking.”
I look down at the trash bag taped around what used to be my leg.
Advantage James.
“So am I in the desert for this? I mean, where am I? I’m being vomited on by a turkey vulture while a komodo dragon snaps my limbs in its jaws then vomits acid on me and a baby scorpion is stinging me as I am pecked by a rogue penguin.”
“Biosphere. They’ve got everything.”
“Yeah, they’ve also got guardrails.”
“OK, you’re in a hypothetical predator pit a billionaire built to make animals battle for dominance.”
“The penguin’s doing surprisingly well.”
“He’s unassuming. Didn’t you see ‘I, Claudius’?”
“No, I was busy thinking about getting laid.”
No points awarded for this round. The score remains James 2, Stump 1.
“So a hippo comes through and snatches you from the smaller, yet formidable predators. It drags you into the water where a bullshark fights with it for your flailing body. Bullsharks have a separate organ to breathe salt and fresh water. You were going to stop me, I know, but I had it covered.”
“This day just keeps getting better and better.”
“The bullshark, topping out at seven knots -”
“You don’t even know what a knot is!”
“But you can’t tell because you’re trapped in the jaws of a speeding bullshark. On the other hand, you can tell when the water gets salty and you’re then stung by a manowar.”
My little red man enters a bonus round, collecting enough coins to buy himself a new life.
“It took me from the savannah to the Gulf of Mexico?”
“It’s really determined. By the way, a knot is equal to one nautical mile per hour.”
My little red man slides into a pit. The green guy pops up and I pass the controller to James.
“I haven’t bled out?”
“You’re the fifth toughest guy I know.”
“Thanks.”
“This is where it gets really bad. The manowar and the bullshark get tired of you and you drift to South America where a candiru swims up your urethra and chews its way out.”
“But I’m not dead?”
“No.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m just letting you know what’s out there.”
“Get out of my bathroom.”
James doesn’t, he takes his little green man to the hidden spot where he can jump forward several levels.
“Did you drink any tainted water over there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“You could have a guinea worm. It’s a long, thin, noodly worm that starts in your intestine and eventually pokes out near your ankle. You have to wrap it around a stick and pull it out an inch t a time over the course o six or seven weeks.”
“Fantastic.”
James looks at me, stewing in Mr. Bubble, then back at the game.
“Just telling you it could get worse. It usually does.”

Old Circles

C. Loughrey

Prompt No. 2:      Animal you most fear…

It had been his home since he could remember.  It had cycles of paint, creaks of age, spots that made him smile where repairs had lovingly tended to the home.  In the old rooms were photographs, old beds, things to remember.  His life had moved through different areas with changing frequency.  Sometimes visiting a room or book he had not picked up for a while, he would nearly giggle with the effervescent feeling of being past and present at the same time.  It had made him love the smell of books, especially when his knees ached.  The table in the kitchen, he left it like his mother had taught him.  It was as all tables should be, as all tables were in the picture book of his mind:  the salt and pepper shakers in the middle to the sink-side of the napkins; the flower vase on the other side; and the chairs all properly still and in place in like children waiting impatiently to be excused.

It was always there, behind the door.  It waited for its master’s resolve to weaken.  It had perseverance.  It knew that the irritation of claws at the door would overrule the decision to put the animal out.  He hated its desperation—the desperation of whimpers and yelps that never seem to wear out, of a door that never could disintegrate.  That door would outlive the sun.  It would have been easier if the wood rotted, raked into shreds of lumber, incinerated from the heat of the animal’s demand.  Before it was put out, he had not known how dangerous it was.  It seemed so friendly and fiercely loving in its loyalty.  There is a thin line between demand and desire.  He had a choice.  It did not.  He could hear it.  There was something wrong in actually turning the handle.  “If only…”

Somewhere in the house was a little journal with worn edges from the years before.  They both looked soft then.  He had misplaced the book.  Vague penciled words floated in his eyes, but he could not make out exactly why the animal was put out.  He could not remember.  It had been a pet once.  “I should have put it down,” he barked at the door, “You hear that?  I should have put you down.  For the life of me, I cannot remember why I didn’t.  It would give me peace now.  But no, it must have been loyalty made me stupid.”

It had been there so long, lurking in the protection of the midnight ink.  At moments, the house had been full—the rhythms and gasps of love, the tinkling of dinner plates, laughter, tears, children playing, painful moans of adolescence, college boxes being dropped by the front door. When the house was full, he could not hear it there.  Then there was the funeral song that left him alone with the door and its animal.  It is all he has left to speak to; he told it its regrets through the heavy door.

They had both grown old.  Sometimes its shadow would slide through the backlit crack.  It made him cold when it ran over his toes.  It knew that sometimes, out of loneliness, he would press his ear to the door.  There were times before when there was no loneliness, just the animal and him adventuring.  They knew each other.  That was something.  Anything is better than the emptiness of the house, the animal’s endless noise wrapping around banisters and bouncing like billions of excited rubber balls in a vacuum.

Thinking about It, the animal, caused his bones to hollow.  Winter blew through its brittle tubes, like unused subway tunnels.  It was the animal.  He feels the cold trapped in the pockets of its matted coat.  There was an unctuous mustiness in the fur.

“Things smell badly for reasons,” he thought, slightly gagging. “They smell bad because they are dangerous.  Shit smells so that we don’t eat it.  Decay smells lovely to the things that can survive on it: zombies and carrion eaters.”

The thought distracted him for a moment, almost made him proud of the retch reflex he had thinking of the Its smell. The keenness showed him the strength of instinct.  “And it all gets back to instinct,” he laughs and gags a little more.  The animal compulsive.  “What a pathetic creature he is, chasing his tail.”  The scratch at the door becomes louder.  He can smell it out there.

The smell of his wife’s hair in the morning comes to him—slightly dirty with sleep, sweat, and oil.  He had loved her smell; it was different than that lonely animal.  It was hers, before the day took her away from him.  It was his now that she was gone.  The animal almost overpowered it, but it just led back to her.  It would try and rub its scent against the pillows she left.  That is what animals do.  The stink would replace her.

He did not want to get old, but he no longer recognized his hands.  These were crumpled like an overused paper bag.

“Why do old people smell?”

He turns his attention to the door handle.  It seems bright, shining in the lamplight.  It gleams like a dinted moon, the brass polished where hands have worn it in.  All he wanted was quiet.  It had been a long time.  When the sun was out, the weather more amenable, the scratch at the door was not there.  He did not know where it was, but that it was still somewhere on the other side.  Maybe it had fallen asleep in a warm patch of sun, the way he would on the porch swing.  Maybe it was running over hills, rolling in the grass.  His imagination on those sunny days made them similar.  These were the only times he was not afraid of it.  There were marks on his body from where he had opened the door before.

It was not time yet.  Nonetheless, the sun had set.  He shuffled to the heavy oak hutch.  The china gleamed behind the glass doors in spite of a thin film of dust.  Opaque doors on the lower half were soundless as he opened them.  The half-full bottles swished lighter, but pleasant.  The windows were night-blackened.  He settled into the well-worn chair with its cushions that no longer plumped like obstinate grapes.  These were battered into more comfortable shapes. Its lumps had a phrenological conformity to his body.  He settled in, deeply, allowing the heaviness to push his bones back into the chair.  The brandy sloshed, perfuming the stale air.  He stared at the door.  The sound muted. Twilight changed the light.  Everything fell into the hum of the refrigerator and power lines; cold drinks and light bulbs bubbled to life magically in his home.  The door sunk behind his closed eyes.

This happened for years.  Each time he fell a little deeper into the chair.  And now perhaps it was time for the two to be brought together.  The old home was too empty.  Now, this was all he had left.  That animal who had snapped at love, chewed through the fixtures of stability, and driven itself out of life—it was all he had left.  Eventually, he would fall asleep and it would eat him.  It was miserable company now.  But it would stay there and scratch to remind him that it was all that remained at the end.  There he was, at the end, confronting the ugliness he had raised, locked out, and which had remained loyal to him.  There it was, monstrous and begging at the door.

Mad Dogs & Englishmen

Prompt No. 1: One Elephant

~ Matthieu B.

Crumpled, huge and endless, its gray expanse filling all before me, it heaved its final breath and simply died.  For forty days and thirty-nine wretched evenings we pursued the beast.  My favored coolly, a slight chap of no more than five feet, met his end rather horribly on the seventh night.  My only son on the tenth.  We marched endlessly it seemed through these worst of the Bengali months.  Not yet consumed by rains, but still horribly burdened by summer’s pestilent little denizens, the very air we labored through our lungs conspired against us, reminding us ever as we ventured deeper that the god of this place was not ours to claim.

I believed we would find him.  I knew he would be mine.  Mother India knew I was a fool.  In the end his end was his…and his alone.

Just mad dogs and Englishman…and one elephant in the midday son.

Socializing with Flatulent Elephants

Prompt No. 1: One Elephant

~ Cristina Loughrey

The room was swarming with people.  Palms sweating, everyone seemed armed with oyster teeth and perfect hair.  They look and flirt like carnivores.  They all have elephants, I remind myself.  Paisley, flatulent, un-ignorable elephants birthed from some maternally unattractive maw of paranoia. Everyone has an elephant that sits there farting loudly in effluvious drafts from aseptic hell—an elephant that follows them room to room.  For some, it is a vanity and others an insecurity or a dirty secret that they hear trumpeting underneath their words.  At least, I tell myself we all have an elephant following us.  Mine looks like my mother.  It sounds like her.  I am pretty sure everyone hears my mother pounding through villages, haunting the graveyards I buried adolescence in.

The people grin and chat.  I wonder about their elephants.  I try and smell them, their brimstone farts.

But I smell nothing.

So I drink a little more wine and stare at the ground—avoiding my elephant, looking for elephant shit, staring at the shiny men’s shoes that I try and see carnival interpretations of my face in.  I stare at the women’s pointed shoes that stiletto sexiness.  They could kill me. There is a hell with women in pointy heels stabbing each other, walking holes into throats.  But, Christ, that is someone’s squish-fantasy.  Maybe squishing an elephant.

And soon, all I am is in a cavorting heard of mad, happy, pink elephants dancing with my mother.

One Elephant to Start a Stampede

Prompt No. 1: One Elephant

~ Anne Smith

One Elephant.  That’s all it takes to start a stampede.  And therefore that’s all it takes to get drunk.  I think this as I idly trace the strangely elephantine shape of a crack on the ceiling of my attic.  I haven’t ever been drunk (on champagne) I think dreamily.  But surely, it would only take one small event.  One tiny catastrophic occurrence. One dislodged pebble, to bring the whole side of the mountain down.  This thought keeps me alive.  Keeps me at my small allotted tasks.  I rise as if someone had spoken.  It’s time to put on my dim gray dress,  To tie up my long golden rope, into an undistinguished chignon.  It’s time to step down the attic stairs, into the house that was mine, and now is not.  Time to step and step and step, down to the cellar, down to the scullery.  Time to take the silver tray for step-mamma, the shiny teak for Drusilla, the warm varnished walnut for Jane.  I will take each step so carefully that the pebble tilted on its edge, shivering rests as solidly as a mountain.

Crumpled Lifespans

Prompt No. 1: One Elephant

~ Christianne Manzano

Something about the skin made me think of my grandfather.  Grey and weathered, larger than life, completely unassailable in any way conceivable to me.

It might have been the same elephant, or perhaps sometime in the last fifteen years, the zoo had switched out its elephants.  I have no idea what an elephant’s lifespan is.

My grandfather was ninety-six when he died, driving home drunk from a card game.  I have no idea what his lifespan would have been otherwise.

The elephant seemed impassive, as if its size allowed it a measure off confidence completely unavailable to me.  It was also cared for constantly, had none of the concerns the rest of us did.

Or at least none of the concerns I had.

The elephant’s crumpled-paper skin sagged around its joints, like the weight of an empire.  As I made eye-contact with it, it merely blinked.  To it, I was small, inconsequential and just another of the many that passed through, a little more weight to the empire.

Just like I was to the old man who wrapped himself around the tree.

I hate that fucking elephant.