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For These Humans Who Cannot Fly

by Amber Sparks

“The annals of the German waiting mortuaries are a “damned” chapter of history; few people outside Germany know anything about these extraordinary establishments. Even German writers on the subject concentrate on architectural and social aspects and avoid the central questions: Why were these bizarre hospitals for the dead built? Why were they maintained for a period of more than a hundred years? Did they ever serve any purpose?”
--from Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, by Jan Bondeson

I sell certainty in death. Why? Because every death is an important story, a love story. It's the goodbye part, but the love is still there, strong and true and wide as the world.

When my wife died, I began to understand this. I began to build the death houses. The name is misleading, since these houses hold not only death but futures, possibilities, hopes that the end isn't the end and that the beloved will return. These are perhaps tall tales, but they stack up better than dead bodies and they burn longer than cordwood. These are lists of the things we lack and the things we can't live without until, suddenly, we can. I sell these tales for the living, and for the dying, and I have done this since my wife flew away.

The story about my wife is a short and sad one, not so new or so tall. My wife was lovely, with a smile like the moon dipped in stars. When we first married, she would fit herself into the crook of my arm as we slept; she would write me love letters three times a day and slip them into pockets, under cushions, behind the backs of mirrors and along the linings of drawers. She loved animals even more than she loved me, and we always had a cat or two in the house along with the dogs, mice, chickens, hedgehogs, goats, and sometimes even pigs. We never had birds because my wife couldn't stand to see them caged.

She sang on the stage, but soon grew to fancy herself an actual songbird. She would chirp and whistle instead of speaking and flap her arms as though they were wings. She started digging worms out of the soft earth in the early mornings, crushing them with her moon-smile and leaving pink fleshy bits in her teeth. She would hop to the window on light feet and watch the birds in the trees, weeping because she couldn't join them in flight. She banished the cats from the house after one brought in a robin with its neck broken and dropped it on her pillow.

I have reached a milestone today. I have now built exactly one hundred death houses, all over Europe and the United States. In those houses I've placed exactly five hundred Temporary Resting Containers, built to house the newly dead until they reawaken. Five in each house to start with. (The clients are free to build more, but I provide only five.) Five hundred love stories, begun at their ends. I do think of myself as a romantic. I think of myself as a false idol, or sometimes, a saint. Women often embrace me, and many offer me expensive gifts and sometimes more than that. Men shake my hand and choke up, clearing their throats too often. When I leave a village or a city with its very own death house, I can see it collectively sigh and relax, as if a great weight had been lifted from its massive shoulders. I can see the people's relief rising in waves, palpable and and smoky as tamped-down fear.

I usually choose a restful spot for the death house, or Leichenhaus. It should rise gracefully in an arc, casting a long shadow on cobblestones and hearts. But I try to keep things playful, too. In many villages, I find that placing it at the end of a long road and a short curve mimic the element of surprise so often found in death.

One morning my wife told me that on the river, bodies crash like a car wreck. She said she had been waiting at the high bridge, watching and studying the jumpers for years. She had discovered the sound was almost glacial, glassy, like somebody breaking hundreds of china plates all at once.

Your skull splits right open sometimes, she said.

I feel sorry for these humans who cannot fly, she said.

I will show them how it's done, this flying, she said.

So I put my lovely wife in a place where the windows were barred and the doors were locked, and where the bird-ladies that roamed the halls could find no worms to tear into.

I always assemble the finest materials and the most skilled workmen when building a death house, taking special care when choosing the images for the stained glass. I particularly prefer Gertrude, robed in a light, flat grey, or Margaret of Antioch, lines of blue cut glass flowing through her gown like small waves. St. Michael, too, makes an excellent guardian of the dead; I often put him in royal red with the Kingdom of Heaven as a backdrop. And always appropriate is St. Joseph, patron saint of a happy death.

She wrote me letters just as before—three times a day, I discovered later. She never spoke but she could scratch out a few thoughts. The doctors who cared for her thought it best to keep these letters from me, as they contained useless scraps and musings, hopping from subject to subject and leaving sense entirely behind. The doctors seemed also to harbor vague suspicions about me; they seemed to believe something terrible had happened to tear out my wife's tongue like Philomela's.

I visited only once. My wife spent the entire visit tilting her head and chirruping at me in frustration. She finally ran at the only small window in the room, so many times that her head was bloodied and her hands and arms bruised all over. I tried to stop her but could not; she had become so small and light she could slip out of my arms as easily as she used to slip into them before sleep. I cried for the attendants and when I saw how they beat her, I fainted and woke to find myself being driven back home. I never returned.

I usually construct the death houses as large, simple structures with gently sloping roofs. Sometimes there are cupolas. But I never use spires or flourishes or gargoyles. No stone creatures of any kind, in fact.

It's a matter of taste, of course, but I feel the death house should be much like a room in God’s own house, and would God’s house be a Baroque affair? Some of my clients seem to think so, but I can usually draw them toward a more modest design. I make sure the building will stay dark and cool most of the time, and always include at least one large room for the dead and one small room for the watchman and his medical supplies.

One day the hospital wrote to tell me my wife was dead. She had escaped from her room somehow and discovered an open window in an office from which to fly. She had broken almost every bone in her body, they said. Broken. As if people could become pottery. I imagined her, hovering at the window the way she had done at home, reaching up to separate the edges of her life like chaff from the ball of clouds—then plummeting. Would she have known, I wondered? Would she have realized halfway down, checking her thin shoulder blades, surprised like anything that the wings she thought she saw that morning seemed to have disappeared like smoke?

I usually assist my employers in furnishing their Leichenhaus. The watchman’s room is kept comfortable, but spare, to prevent sleeping on the job. I suggest a chair, a table, a light, and a pack of playing cards. And a cot and a small first-aid kit for attending to the dead if they suddenly become the living. I always make sure the openness of the large hall is not marred by any unnecessary furnishings. Only the Temporary Resting Containers should lie in this hall. I usually recommend that customers limit the number of Containers, to keep unpleasant odors to a minimum.

Sometimes, when I arrive, the mayors of the towns give me medals to drape around my neck. Sometimes they provide me with the oversized keys to their cities. Someone important makes a speech, the citizens clap, and the local inn agrees to put me up for free. I am often told I have saved the town. I am often hailed as a hero. Once a local artist painted my picture and it hangs in the central courthouse, I am told, even to this day. I have grown elderly and weak but the local people still describe me in savior words wherever I go, whenever I come to save them from and for their deaths.

I built the first Leichenhaus for my wife, of course. She was so damaged that they would not let me see her body, not at first, but when I begged the doctors relented and brought me to the morgue. She was purple and black in places, and her head was a strange shape, and she looked flattened and out of joint, like a rag doll. But her pale face was still perfect, and her lips were slightly o-shaped and still pink, and her eyes were wide and sea-calm. She looked as though she were about to speak. So how could I bury her? I knew she was dead, of course I knew, but at the same time I doubted. She who had longed for sky and spurned four walls—how could I put her in a tiny box? How could I shut her up in the earth with a face like that? I'd read Bruhier’s popular pamphlet, Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort. It detailed the various ways to determine if a loved one is really dead: stabbing the nose or feet with sharp objects, pouring vinegar into the mouth, holding the fingers over flame, placing a mirror over the mouth to detect breath, pulling the tongue repeatedly to facilitate artificial respiration, etc. I went out of my head, I demanded the doctors perform all these procedures, I shouted that they would never bury or burn her.

Instead I built the first Temporary Resting Container, just for her. I used an ordinary coffin, and attached a three-foot cord to a bell and a bell stand. I sawed off the top half of the coffin lid, and lay the remaining length of cord in the top half of the coffin. I laid her mangled body on the red velvet and tied the piece of cord to one swollen, broken finger. In case she woke, in case she rose, she could but move her finger and the bell would ring. To guard her I hired two former soldiers; around them I built a small shelter to keep out the rain and heat. I employed doctors to stay on call for seven days, ready at a moment's notice to rush to my wife's aid should she awaken. They all thought I was insane; I was insane. But after seven days, the madness left me in a rush and and I consented to the burial of my wife. I was comforted. I was sure that the ending of our story was what it was, and was what it ought to be. I was sure it was really an ending.

I always suggest placing the Temporary Resting Containers in the middle of a large hall, in a harmonious and pleasing arrangement. This allows corpses awakened during the day to take in the full majesty of the stained glass windows, and may help to counter feelings of terror and confusion. Although I do not provide them, I also suggest placing flower arrangements around the Resting Containers; this aids in covering the unpleasant odors of rot and decay with more pleasing scents like violet, rose, and peony.

I usually do the hiring myself as far as death house personnel are concerned. I hire two to ten watchmen, depending on the size of the facility, to guard the hall and administer medical aid if necessary. I look for watchmen who are alert, healthy, strong, incurious, and possessed of little or no imagination. This is very important, as it would be very bad for business if one of the watchmen frightened himself to death in a death house. The watchmen must also be trained a little in medicine, in case any simple emergency medical procedure need be performed before a doctor could be summoned. Basic first aid training usually suffices.

I was a young man when my wife died. I am an old man now, and I am ready for death myself. I have built one hundred death houses and five hundred resting containers and I have seen five hundred love stories ended and begun. I have become an expert in managing death, in easing life into sleep into death into darkness. It's a slow process, but a good process. A necessary process.

And no, no one really comes back from the dead. Even in my beautiful, carefully-built Leichenhausen. Even when the sun pours from the Kingdom of Heaven through St. Michael’s stained glass robes and shines on the faces of the dead like rubies, like wine, like blood.

Before He Flooded the Rubble

by Kyle Minor

Synopsis of Late Chapters
and Excerpt from the Outline for
The First Chapter (Comprising the First 500 Days After
the Death of Davey Jaworski of Toledo, Ohio,
Who Lived at 1918 Sycamore Lane,
And Who Is Buried in the Calvary Cemetery on Dorr Street,
Among the 800 Crypts of the Rotunda Mausoleum,
Among the Ursuline Sisters, the Sisters of Notre Dame, the Little Sisters of the Poor,
The Deceased Bishops of Toledo, the Catholic War Veterans,
and the Bodies of the Infant Dead)
of Before He Flooded the Rubble, He Swept Up the Dust of Babylon,
or
Cat-houses Talk Cold Turkey to My Guards,
or
There Is No Kingdom In Our Kingdom of the Moon,
or
All the Human Carpets Spread Over Countless City Squares and Football Fields:

An Unpublished Memoir of the
First Two Hundred Years After the Death of Davey Jaworski of Toledo, Ohio,
Composed Mostly in the Third Person,
In Black Upon a Tablet of Black,
By J. David “Davey” Jaworski III,
B.A. (Incomplete), University of Toledo
b. Toledo, Ohio, 1983
d. Toledo, Ohio, 2003

• 1. After he died
• 1.1 The funeral
• 1.1.1 The body in the pine Lindner casket
• 1.1.1.1 Realization that body in the casket is his
• 1.1.1.2 Examination of body from previously unseen angles
• 1.1.1.3 Concern at appearance of portions of body reconstructed in wax, poor makeup job, ill-fitting suit, absence of favorite Swatch watch
• 1.1.2 The people at the funeral
• 1.1.2.1 Emily Gould, his ex-girlfriend, and Tony, his best friend, comforting each other, whispering things
• 1.1.2.2 His mother
• 1.1.2.3 His mother’s best friend Susanna, about whom he frequently fantasized while masturbating as a child, now in the late stages of chemotherapy, baldheaded, wearing a purple scarf, still attractive, still carrying a John Updike book in her oversized purse, still with those puffy red lips
• 1.1.2.4 His stepfather George, the bastard, fingering the money clip in his pocket
• 1.1.2.5 His father and his father’s partner Lewis, holding hands sweetly, not arguing for once
• 1.1.2.6 Various teachers, notably (surprisingly) Mrs. Etchell from 10th grade geometry, who he thought didn’t like him but turns out she’s balling her eyes out and Lewis is comforting her
• 1.1.3 What they said
• 1.1.3.1 “Solar energy, by God. He knew them panels, brought one over to my house, interrupted the goddamn Super Bowl, but you know this is the stuff that’s bringing jobs what the auto companies took away you know my friend Bobby was making forty-seven bucks an hour at the Eagle plant just mopping the toilets and all that’s gone now, your children my children forget it.”
• 1.1.3.2 “After Cecil left, you know there was some time where the world didn’t seem big enough no more, but then one day Denis shows up in my life and I was like where did you come from Denis? Where have you been all my life? You should see him in there every night, washing the dishes, changing the light bulbs. You ever see Cecil change a dirty diaper? You ever see Cecil clear a table?”
• 1.1.3.3 “Yale University, Maggie. New Haven, Connecticut. Get this: Rows Crew. You know what Crew is? It’s rowing a boat six o’clock every morning. It’s those guys you see on C-SPAN in the white button-down shirts. It’s the whole Congress and the kind of people’d marry the Stranahans. My Tommy, Maggie. Crew.”
• 1.1.3.4 “Od powietrza, głodu, ognia, wojny i nagłej, niespodziewanej śmierci — zachowaj nas Panie!”
• 1.1.3.5 “We got this killer van. Twenty miles to the gallon, all right? We got shows lined up in Findlay, Traverse City, Kalamazoo, Evanston. That’s Chicago. We got this guy Luke doing booking. We got merch. Stickers, strings, picks with Joe’s face on it. We got a light show hooked up to my laptop. You just push the button and these projectors start showing starving babies in Ethiopia and red letters from the Bible and shit.”
• 1.1.3.6 “He owed me twenty bucks from the Buckeyes game. Fucking Buckeyes. Fuck.”
• 1.1.3.7 “So what I’m asking you, Michelle, is what if it was you in that casket instead of him, you know? Like, if you died right now, or if you walked out of this place, and a bus hit you, just right out of nowhere, boom, some bus full of schoolchildren, and you just didn’t have time to think or pray or change your mind or anything, do you know for sure where you would go? Do you know for sure where you would spend eternity?”
• 1.1.3.8 “What is it you want me to say, Sherlock? Bales? Bamba? Bhang, bo, boo boo Bama, Buddha, bush, buzz, dobie, doob, Mary Jane? It’s a dime bag, Sally. The price is the price.”
• 1.1.3.9 “He was gonna take me to Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Q. He was gonna take me on Tuesday. Georgia Chopped Pork. Rib Tips.”
• 1.1.4 The room with the food
• 1.1.4.1 The spread: kiwi fruits, sliced banana, pineapple, watermelon, acai, blueberries, blackberries, Swiss cheese, sharp cheddar, rolled ham, rolled turkey, fancy crackers, punch, lemonade, coffee, tea
• 1.1.5 Grievances about food
• 1.1.5.1 How can people eat at a time like this?
• 1.1.5.2 Why is Lewis parked by the table with that plate, filling it and eating it and refilling it?
• 1.1.5.3 People who don’t like him or were mean or rude or otherwise unkind to him while he was alive ought not be allowed to eat.
• 1.1.5.4 People who loved him and are eating ought not be eating because they ought to be consumed by grief and therefore unable to consume any food, right?, especially the less-bland food like the kiwi and acai and the blackberries, right? Maybe it’s okay if they eat the crackers and drink the tea, but maybe it’s not, and if they drink the coffee cup after cup will they get that gravel sensation in their bellies, and will their urine smell like coffee, and when they smell the urine in their coffee will they think of him, and for the rest of their lives whenever they smell coffee or urine, will they think of him?
• 1.1.5.5 People who loved him and are not eating ought to be eating, right?, because if they don’t eat they might lose their strength and fall into the casket, and here—he believes—is the first evidence of the persistence of humor beyond death, because he is thinking now of all these living people—especially the young and the elderly, who don’t usually commingle—fainting one after the other and falling one after the other into the grave, the pit where the coffin has been lowered, and the old people’s thoughts when they awaken about oh no, after you’re dead you’re still alive in this hole with your body and all these other bodies, and the young people’s thoughts about night of the living dead or whatever kind of zombie thing one time they saw in a movie, with all these near-corpses, but living and breathing near-corpses, and, ha-ha, the realization that all your life you’re in the proximity of near-corpses who aren’t yet dead, and probably it was worse in the old country, because back in the day probably they didn’t farm out all the old Polish to nursing homes or whatever, and probably they just kept them all around at home, to bathe and to feed, but why is this laughter so close to crying, and why do I not feel a literal coldness in my bones around feelings like these, and why am I still laughing, and why when I close my eyes can I see this cartoon loop, these bodies falling, falling, falling, and why when they hit the dirt or the wood do they not break?
• 1.2 The graveside service
• 1.2.1 The things people said
• 1.2.1.1 “Lewis, all my life I have left things unsaid, but the one thing I need not to leave unsaid is that the best thing that ever happened to me was the birth of my son, I can’t deny it, and I hope it won’t upset you for me to say it, but the second best thing that ever happened to me was that day by the furnace when you came over with your mop and bucket and said, ‘I’m mostly done, I got five hours left in my shift, and I’m just walking around pretending to mop things that don’t need mopped. If you’re sick and you want me to, I can mind the furnace.’ Then you took me down to that room behind the janitor’s closet with the couch and put that cold cloth on my head. Lewis, I’m sorry, I’m gonna cry. You’re gonna have to hold me now.”
• 1.2.1.2 “Fucking faggots don’t even have any consideration here in front of God and the grave and the priest and the boy’s mother.”
• 1.2.1.3 “The thing I can’t stop thinking is he would’ve wanted to be buried with that Swatch watch.”
• 1.2.1.4 “After the service, we’re all going over to Bob Evans and just spend some time and be together. You come too, okay? Know it or not you been part of the family for a hundred years now.”
• 1.2.1.5 “Here’s two hundred dollars, Father. I know your time is precious.”
• 1.2.1.6 “Susanna, you’re a fighter.”
• 1.2.1.7 “Gimme one of those pills, Mary.”
• 1.2.1.8 “Emily, he didn’t know, honey. He loved you, you loved him. I never told him, you never told him. He didn’t know.”
• 1.2.2 His thought process
• 1.2.2.1 My father loved me
• 1.2.2.2 Who cares if my father was fucking Lewis?
• 1.2.2.3 Where is my Swatch watch?
• 1.2.2.4 I wish I would’ve told my father I didn’t care if he was fucking Lewis
• 1.2.2.5 Lewis takes care of my father. I wish I would’ve told Lewis I appreciated the way he takes care of my father.
• 1.2.2.6 If Susanna dies of cancer, will she be dead but still walking around like me?, and if she is, will I be able to see her?, and if I can see her, will she still be the same age?, will she still be bald and still have cancer?, or will she revert to whatever age she was young and pretty?, maybe the age she was when I was twelve and we went out on the Maumee River in those canoes, and she was wearing that purple blouse over her bathing suit, and the daisy in her hair, and she was up front in the other canoe with my mother, and she got wet, and I could see her nipples poking through the fabric of the blouse, and she was smiling, and her teeth were straight unlike anybody else’s teeth in the neighborhood, and when we reached the shore we all smelled like the river, and she spread out the blanket beside the place where the roots of the trees were three feet of them off the ground, and she tousled my hair and called me Mr. Handsome?
• 1.2.2.7 A History of My Stepfather George: “A church wedding’s too expensive, Mary. Let’s do it in the backyard.” “Do you know how much braces cost? Do you think your teeth are more crooked than your mother’s?” “They got steak at Bob Evans, too, and it’s just as good as any steakhouse in Baaston, New Yawk, anywhere.” “King’s Island? Fifty bucks a ticket, Mary. Let’s hit the waterslides over there at the YMCA.” “After the service, we’re all going over to Bob Evans and just spend some time and be together. You come too, okay? Know it or not you been part of the family for a hundred years now.”
• 1.2.2.8 My girlfriend is sleeping with my best friend sleeping with my best friend sleeping with my best friend sleeping with my best friend
• 1.2.3 Lifting away
• 1.2.3.1 The sensation of weightlessness
• 1.2.3.2 Arms above head, Superman-style
• 1.2.3.3 Feet above head; other contortions
• 1.2.3.4 Momentary giddiness
• 1.2.3.5 Memory of this movie about the Hindenburg, and these two mechanics arguing up in the bellows
• 1.2.3.6 Unbidden, the word Dirigible
• 1.2.3.7 Fear despite annihilation of gravity’s pull on the self
• 1.2.3.8 Inarticulable euphoria
• 1.2.3.9 Admittedly clichéd impression of those by the grave below as ants
• 1.3 Post-funeral travel
• 1.3.1 His ex-girlfriend
• 1.3.1.1 Emily Gould, alone, wearing a black Whitesnake T-shirt, crying
• 1.3.1.2 Emily Gould, watching a black comedian on TV, sound off
• 1.3.1.3 Emily Gould, urinating, showering, dressing, surfing the Internet, popping popcorn, leaving the bowl beside the bed uneaten, falling asleep with her clothes on
• 1.3.2 His parents’ houses
• 1.3.2.1 His mother pacing, George grabbing her by the shoulders, his mother crying, George yelling, his mother falling to the ground, George slapping her face, twice, hard, pull yourself together, I’m doing this because I love you, we’re the love story of each other’s lives, life’s not over Mary, Yes it is George, it is it is it is
• 1.3.2.2 Lewis on the couch, sleeping, belly exposed. His father in the bedroom, sleeping, unshaven. Bags of potato chips all around, melted ice cream in plastic bowls, marijuana ash in a ceramic tray on the living room table, the blue glass pipe still smoking, the Bible beside it open to the deuterocanon, Bel and the Dragon, fairy stories
• 1.3.3 His best friend Tony
• 1.3.3.1 Outside his mother’s house, smoking Marlboro Reds, although he’s not a smoker
• 1.3.3.2 Outside, mowing his mother’s lawn
• 1.3.3.3 Taking a break from lawnmowing, taking off his shirt, skinny chest, bird chest they called it in middle school, that long scar where he fell off his bike in the second grade and landed on that piece of broken copper tubing in the road and dragged it the length of his back, right shoulder blade to left buttock
• 1.3.3.4 Kicking a rock in his mother’s garden
• 1.3.3.5 Carving a crooked line in the oak tree in the front yard with his pocketknife
• 1.3.3.6 Pacing in the front yard
• 1.3.3.7 Watching Emily Gould arrive, opening her driver’s side door, touching a tendril of hair by her face, recoiling when she shoves his hand away, putting his hands out and low, softly, saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m an asshole, you’re right, you’re lovely, he was lovely, my God what will we do, sitting down beside her on the sidewalk, picking at the grass, chucking loose bits of sidewalk concrete, putting his hand over her hand, pulling her close, sitting there for a long time not saying anything, watching the cobalt streetlights fire up
• 1.3.3.8 After Emily leaves, masturbating frantically, eyes closed, in front of the bathroom mirror, not finishing, breathing hard, sitting naked on the toilet seat, head in hands, head back, eyes up at the ceiling, eyes dark around their edges
• 1.3.4 New York
• 1.3.4.1 He sits in the empty chair at Susanna’s house. Susanna’s husband sits on the couch, Susanna’s head in her lap. Susanna says, “The house smells like old pennies, doesn’t it?” “No.” “It does. That’s what bile smells like, and the whole house smells of bile.” “No, it doesn’t.” The orange beach bucket sits beside the couch and it is an inch high with bile. On the television, a Martin Scorcese movie, On Demand, her husband picked it, Davey watched, they can’t see Davey, everyone dead or alive can see the TV, he thinks Susanna at some point will briefly be one of both or none of either, he tries to remember what it was like for him to cross that threshold but it’s almost like there was no threshold at all, he remembers a fantasy he had when he was younger about carrying Susanna over a threshold. She was wearing a white wedding dress, and he was in a black tuxedo with a black bow tie. They were laughing. She was saying don’t bump my head on the doorframe. They were kissing as they went across. Sometimes the fantasy repeated itself when he was sleeping and dreaming, except in the dream version as Susanna was on top of him, making love to him, still wearing the white wedding dress, he said to her, “I wish you were my mother,” and she touched his face and said, “I will be, anything you want me to be, anything,” and in his dream it felt good to hear her say those things, in his dream that was always the point in time when he came, but when he woke up wet-pantsed and flushed, he felt sick and dirty, his hair was dirty and greasy, his armpits smelled, his breath was bad, for a moment he worried he would wake beside her and she would smell him, then he worried about the part where he said he wished she was his mother, that was something he would never tell anyone about, never, and when he saw his mother before he showered, he could not make eye contact with her, and once when she came out of the bedroom half-dressed, George following closely behind, he became sick to his stomach and went into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet, and his mother followed him in there and stroked his hair, the same way Susanna’s husband was stroking her hair now, and on the television, Harvey Keitel was saying, “It's all bullshit except the pain. The pain of hell,” and Davey was thinking that’s not true, that’s not true at all, nothing is bullshit, Susanna’s not bullshit, she’s sick and her husband is stroking her hair, it’s not right for me to be here with them like this, it’s a violation like the other violations I knew about and she didn’t. He was feeling very guilty and couldn’t smell the bile in the room but he could smell somehow the Lysol smell from Mrs. Jones’s office in the second grade when he went in there and she threatened to paddle him if he didn’t straighten up, and she showed him the women’s pump with the hole in the heel
• 1.3.4.2 On the television, Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel were in New York, and he’d never been to New York, and he thought who could catch me if I played the hobo and hopped the cargo train, so he did
• 1.3.4.3 He watches a man die in his sleep on the cargo train, then wake up dead, look at him, shrug, fall backward from the open door of the cargo car, land on his back, rise, stand, walk in the direction of Rochester, New York, take two steps on the air, float skyward in the direction of Rochester, New York

(Chapter Two: Holing up in an Abandoned Building near Park Slope, Brooklyn, Ruminations upon trolleycars, Ruminations upon Mortality, The Realization that Plenty of Other People besides him might be dead but still somehow hanging around, He gives up the solitary afterlife and sets out in search of the others, The Search for the Others, False starts, False philosophies of the afterlife, Meeting Jonny Applewhite, Learning to Fly with Jonny Applewhite, Circumnavigation of the Planet by Air, Temporary Euphoria at Things that are New to Him Including Melungeoning, Tooth and Claw Ventriloquism, Aiding and Abetting the Fertilization of Chicken Eggs by Unknowing Roosters, Voyeuristic Episodes Involving the Sexual Lives of Random Strangers, Free Admission to Movie Theaters, Wall Street Financial Meetings, Backstage at Theme Parks, The Secret Lives of Celebrities, An Evening at the White House, Flying, Diving, Alligator Pits, Bear Dens, etc., Attempts to Reach out to the Living (All Unsuccessful), Acknowledgement of the Other Fine Upstanding Dead, A Kind of Stasis Until He Visits Toledo and Finds Himself Standing Beside Susanna at Susanna’s Funeral, Surrounded by Susanna’s Friends and Family, Susanna’s Children, All the People from Susanna’s Church and Work, and Susanna Saying, “You’re not St. Peter,” and Susanna Looking Down at Her Still-Cancer-Stricken Body, and Davey Knowing Susanna is thinking Forever I’ll Be This Way, and Davey Taking Her by the Hand and Saying I Could Love You for Two Hundred, Five Hundred Years, No Matter, I Could Love You Forever . . . )

(Chapters Three through Three Thousand Thirty-Three: Loving Susanna Forever, Loving Susanna Forever, Loving Susanna Forever, Loving Susanna Forever . . .)

(Chapter Three Thousand Thirty-Four: The Decline of Love in San Diego)

(Chapter Three Thousand Thirty-Five: The Death of Love in San Bernadino)

(Chapter Three Thousand Thirty-Six: Leaving Earth, Leaving the Solar System, Wandering Alone and Lonely in the Void of the Universe)

(Chapter Three Thousand Thirty-Seven: Watching from a Great Distance as the Earth Crashes into the Sun)

(Chapter Three Thousand Thirty-Eight: The Universe Rapidly Consumes Itself and Implodes)

(Chapter Three Thousand Thirty-Nine: Davey Alone in a Void Absent Light, Parsing Lingering Questions About His Mother and George, His Father and Lewis, His Best Friend and Emily Gould, And Mostly, For Eternity: Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna, Susanna . . .

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Dear Homeowner

by Kristen Gleason

This is the season – swelling – for the garden. Take advantage. The jacaranda has bloomed and dropped – the grass wears purple well – beneath the tree the sitting is silk – I sat there often – on flowers – letting flowers fall. The season bulges – what is in the soil bursts – the white berries burst underfoot – all is full – read this letter under the jacaranda tree.

Excuse me – here I am. First of all – can I explain? You have – perhaps – relegated me to the past and this letter might spook you arriving – as it will – in the present. Consider me a friend – won’t you? Consider this letter a firm and pleasant handshake. Surely you are generous – the garage opened – and the yellow refrigerator – it was full of beer – you must expect celebration.

Please reconsider me. When we met – I was an insect – I am aware you thought me green and spindly. Rightly so! How I froze in the garden imitating prayer – I was not praying – you knew right away – any authentic would – how you moved on in your inspection – though I was a waiting mantis – as if no insect posed in the garden – my garden – your garden. What must I call it?

You and your generous face – so like a dinner plate – inspecting the root systems – the cracks in the patio – completing the work of a father – on the weekend. I saw you test the redwood fence. You are measured and thorough – I must ask you to excuse a woman like me – a real shaker. When I was young my father put me to bed with firmness – sheets so tight I could barely breathe – to stop the shaking.

(My father played the trumpet – in a big band – and often played at night – which divided the blackness in half – the first was of waiting – holding a stopwatch in my closet – fearing doorways – the second of welcoming him home – resting – finally resting – beneath the sounds of his sleeping – stone sounds – grinding – my heavy comfort.)

You see I did not want to leave the house. We’d been renting – me, a renter! – the whole time and Paul had not told me so. He might have told me – his wife. One lives in a rented house in a different way – one avoids enduring – one avoids moments in a rented house. Surely – had I known – we might have avoided a death in the house – in the master bedroom – Paul dragged himself to the balcony – face down with his nose between the slats – last breath of wood. He’d been watching that nest grow – in the jacaranda – an elegant choice for those fat little birds – in the weeks leading up to his death. He’d been watching something. Your balcony now.

And then I was faced with packing! Alone – you have seen that I’m a small woman – a real newt. The movers came and I could not provide boxes – I sat in the rocking chair – I offered orange juice. I was unmoving – truly sepulchrule – I’m sure I’ve spelled it wrong – and they just began piling things in the truck. I froze in the chair – just as I did in the garden – I’ve made you all endure such ugliness. I would not lift a finger to leave.

Midnight came – the house was still half full – and I let them pull the truck away without my things. I didn’t half care but – I’d forgotten the refrigerator – the yellow – dear yellow – given to me on the occasion of my marriage by my father. My father – a man like a tree – on which insects such as myself perch – trying to gleen reason from height – another word I’m sure is wrong.

Understand why I came back – after your young – strawberries in a patch – family established itself – to lurk in the garden. I wanted a glimpse of the refrigerator – but you had no occasion to open the garage door – and the garden – glimpsed over the fence – seemed an arborretum – I know I’ve gone wrong again – so orderly – for touring. For an insect like me – a joy – I could not bear that I’d been cast out. You were kind – to ignore me then – but I came again – didn’t I?

I might have slipped inside the house – turned sideways – sideways I am invisible – the width of a piece of paper – I might have come right through the front door. Out of courtesy, I stayed on the outside – toured the garden – until you caught me and I froze ugly. Not so ugly as your new neighbor – Ugly Mary I call her – have you seen her chewing oats in her kitchen window – don’t look for her – you can see her from the balcony. I’ve gone off track.

This letter is going badly – what I mean to ask – what I hope you’ll understand me asking – is a favor. For 100 dollars, I would like to retrieve the yellow refrigerator – which you have neatly stocked with beer – but which is not your primary means of cooling – there is the black one inside. Full of meat and cheese and milk – I’m sure.

(Milk was forced upon me – though I hated the taste – for health reasons. Father in the hallway with a glass of milk – father in my bedroom with a glass of milk – awake to a cool tumbler of milk – sweating on my bedstand. Drink – he’d say – before the wood stains – and I would – anything for him. And – now – consider my skin – what I’ve gained – an evenness – a creamy tone – pleasing to men – who favor dairy – my father chief among them.)

Why do I need this particular refrigerator? You’re young – you do not understand attachment – which was taught to me by my father too – who gave me the gift of the yellow refrigerator. To that machine – I am attached. You know – at night – when you are lying down alone – how you imagine you’ll die – go undiscovered – there is a tallisman against the feeling – spelling – and it is a man like my father – rare now. Rare as a certain landscape – permanent winter. He was the hum of a special machine – and now there is only the machine – these are important facts.

Have I watched my tone? I want it loving – easily relating my love – I’d like you to read this letter and retrieve a beer – drink it thinking of my father – and your duties as a father – the protection of your little family. Think of the shrinking of my family – which accounts for my slithering state. Take pity! There was a time when our garden crawled with caterpillars – black and fuzzy – but the earth was not generous for long– you’re left with pill bugs. There is a lesson somewhere.

Be generous. I’ll be generous to start – let me consider raising the sum – I might pay more for that simple yellow box – a small price to pay considering – I am exiled from comfort. Don’t imagine you can keep it closed against me – my father had a sword and a mountaintop – he’ll swing the door wide open. Again – I’m buzzing. Forgive me – I’m frozen. You – being the right type of man – will help me?

I’ll relate this story – against my better judgment – don’t perceive threat where there is none. One evening I could not sleep – the mourning doves went on past dark – unusual. These days – I walk a great deal – needing a cycle – having no other means of motion. Without a husband I am poor – he did not prepare for me a life after – in any case – I am not bitter – only humming – simply humming. I walked to your house – my house – so recently it wore the smell of us still – this was weeks ago – as I mentioned – in the past.

Aren’t your children lovely puppets – not of nightmares – of play and poise – Elspeth and Sally. Lovely girls – may they love their father as I loved mine – for his generosity. Walking – I came to the front of the house – through the front window – your ebony piano – your carefully arranged art – metal heads with metal hair – the modern age – I watched your family. You were gathered to discuss – or pray? Every neck in attendance bowed – a circle – a ring of bursting blossoms – a garden inside.

Let me soften this – I might pay more – let me enter bowing – you must accept me. I stood in the driveway – straddling the dip in concrete – the dip left by the rolling boulder – displaced by teenagers playing a prank – before your time – lowered the value of the home – to your advantage – you lucky man. I stood there and willed the garage door to open – just a glimpse. I thought of the origins of power – height – tools – the door moved – I thought of machinery – quarries – it opened.

(A game we used to play in the old quarry – foolishly – as foolish children – left my leg pinned beneath a block of stone – granite. Father would not retrieve me right away – seeking to teach me a lesson – about caution – left me there overnight. He came – with the sun – to free me. He cried as he came toward me – as he must have done all night – as I had – and such was his love – teaching.)

When I was married my husband gave me a plain gold ring – only that – a heavy thing – and over time it took my hand’s mobility. Remember – better lightness – in every case! Like when the garage door became light for me – sprung up – but it’s a loud thing – isn’t it? You heard it – your sharp ears – your pricking up – I saw through the window. You came to investigate – only this time I did not freeze – I hid – the large shrub – white berries – behind it.

Now this I did not like – that you emerged into the garage – flipped on the light – then thought better of it – flipped it off. In darkness – the two us were free to suspect each other – weren’t we? You could not meet the darkness. Though the light was off you were clearly visible – as an outline – suspicious soldier – wrongly bristling – and so I bristled too. I thought – userper – I’ve spelled it wrong – but – I thought – sick defender – fearful – fallow – less a man than I’d imagined. An ungenerous situation – you created – with your fear. Fear that you would be entered – your house – mine.

Our neighborhood is outerspace – late at night – into that space you opened the yellow refrigerator – and its light – warm – vintage light – unmatched – irreplaceable – perhaps you agree – I need it – give it back – good god – will 500 dollars do? Remember I am poor – but not so poor as to toss away memory – or forsake the light of nostalgia – relieve me of my begging. Your face hovered in the light of the open machine – round – lunar –you got yourself a beer – I assume the events of the night had upset you – you closed the garage door to keep me out – you returned to your family – and I to no one.

You are a tough general – aren’t you – different than the man you were in the garden – look where we are now! I’m a teardrop – a roach – a slithering bargainer – please. What will it take – 500 – 500 – 500 – have that sum – from a widow – have it. The coolness – you crave – the cool pale sparkle of your beer – is it worth more to you than generosity? Take that sum – but give me what is mine – the refrigerator – you must – or else – your garage door will raise – nightly – letting in the night – the men and women hiding in your shrubs – white berries.

(He didn’t trust a school – I was a curious child – learning from books – inside mostly – except at the quarry. There are gaps – I know – he wished it so – that I might be more blank than occupied – not full up – not bursting over – not naming in the garden but kneeling on the grass. I never had a classmate.)

Have 500 dollars – you’ve swollen the figure –silent guzzler– only give me back my what is mine – not a glimpse of a family circle – not a praying circle – to taunt me – not a garage door to sever me from comfort. Listen to me – pay attention to signs – symbols – yellow or otherwise – watch for machines where the souls of your loved ones live – cooling machines that hum like insects – without which you are turned to an insect – turned out into the world – freezing – alone – wearing only a gold ring – plain – bearing only that sorry weight – not the other – not the good – fatherly – weight – the perfect gift.

(An aunt gave me a birthday card – pictured – a monkey riding a horse – an unnatural coupling. I threw it away. I awoke to the card tucked into my mirror – looking at me as I looked past it. I crumpled it up – I threw it away again. The next day – there it was – again in the mirror – which seemed to darken – showing me older. I ripped the card in pieces – I threw the pieces away. The next day the card was there – it had been taped together – there on the mirror. I had a vision of my father – at the kitchen table – under a dome of light – piecing together the artifacts of living – our only proof.)

Where is the proof now? Where the important items? You’ve proven yourself nothing but a husband – I pity your girls – I yearn for the purple blossoms of the jacaranda – so recently a silken place just for me – and the balcony – the eye – the high seeing place. Where are the machines that keep the good men alive? Nowhere but in your garage – take my money – raise the door – the whole of my life is whirring inside.

I <3 Escapism

by Joseph Goosey

Cleopatra and Mark Antony took a dive and were subsequently consumed by otters.

Napoleon and Josephine were made fun of for their acne.
Some students threw rocks.
This is cause for a shooting indie film style.
The shooting will be filled not with regret but with marbles.
Napoleon chickens out anyhow.
Lameass.

Juan and Evita Peron sometimes argued about the newly purchased crystal.
What will this do to their credit score if they can’t pay it off by the 31st?
Be quiet bitch! Poops Evita Peron.

Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson are forgotten similar to your shoelaces from ’97.
Who is Wallis Simpson?
Only your girlfriend.
Maybe even mine.

Voltaire and somebody whose name is difficult to pronounce just played Scrabble.
Voltaire always challenges his love interest.
He keeps the OED handy.
Wins FIFTY EXTRA POINTS!
So many affairs have been based upon Scrabble victory or loss.

Czar Nicholas The Second and his pet Alexandra Federovna used too much lube and were often referred to as “The Seals Troupe.”
In the summer Czar Nicholas The Second and his pet Alexandra Federovna travel south for molting.
You haven’t enjoyed “the other” until you have molted side by side.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor overdose on roast beef.
The roast beef was never intended for such pressure.

Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton started a rum business that went under real fast.
Disillusioned, Lord Nelson takes up scrap booking and his deemed unfit for penetration.

Tristan and Isolde are adjudicated for tax fraud.
The IRS thought there were going to be thirteen cars in the driveway.
The IRS only discovered three cars.
All cars are set on fire.
Your commitment to your spouse is dependent upon the mood of the IRS.

Pyramus and Thisbe are the talk of the fucking town man.

Prince Kuhram and Mumtaz Mahal become overwhelmed by the gas bill.

Nora Roberts is secretly J.K. Rowling and the joke is on you, asshole.
She really had you there what with her kissy kiss sucky suck moomoo pie.
Nora Roberts wanted to be a wizard her entire life until she met J.K. Rowling who is really just Nora Roberts.
They enter into a blood pact.

Erich Segal chewed through his own handcuffs and came at you with a box cutter. You are not surprised by the turn of events.
You manage to take the box cutter from Erich Segal.
CALM THE FUCK DOWN you poop on him.
Poop is the speech, the new directive and how we interact.

Nicholas Sparks and I once went down on one another in a Coney Island port-a-potty while there was construction projects abound.
When I released my mango juice into Nicholas Sparks’ thirsty tonsils no one could hear me scream because of the jackhammers. It was like space.
Emily Bronte must have enjoyed hot sauce.
Emily Bronte smiles at you from across the fish shack.
Dare you snub such a well renowned fisherwoman?
Emily Bronte has been at sea for sometime now and I’m sure this would reflect in the bedroom.

Colleen McCullough does a lecture.
Cabbage is wasted.

Charlotte Bronte was totally envious.
There is a duel involving leather.

There is a warrant out for the execution of Diana Gabaldon.
We feel confident in the community’s ability to deliver.
Soon we will see Diana Gabaldon take responsibility for her years of lies. HAPPY?
WE DON’T THINK SO WE DON’T BELIEVE IN TWO PEOPLE MAKING BROWNIES OUT OF WEDLOCK OR EVEN IN FOR THAT FUCKING MATTER.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez applies eyeliner in anticipation of his latest romp in the warehouse.
An Old Man Grows Wings?
That’s ridiculous that’s not marriage that’s limp clay in the hands of children.
There are no angels only mistakes.

Ayn Rand?
Somebody asks.
Ayn Rand.
Somebody else says.

Jeanette Winterson is standing in line for coffee.
She gets robbed by a man who says “ATTICUS!” real loud and then runs away.
There is no pending investigation.
When will the police learn who they’re fucking with upon the eve of fucking with Jeanette Winterson knows people she will own you in three days time.

Willa Cather got some new leggings.
She is attempting to draw your attention.
How raw are your appendages?

Jane Austen poisons your cookies.
All you can do is thank her.
Jane Austen is all we think about now.
That was the effect poison.
The poison was a rare poison and it has no other affects aside from making you think about Jane Austen ALL OF THE TIME.
This sounds an innocent poison until you get fired from your job at the market for going on about Jane Austen all the time.
Ernest Hemingway pisses his pants and pretends as though nobody notices.
Ernest Hemingway makes it home to only to discover home is a warehouse without a ninth wife.

Barbara Taylor Bradford experiments with same-sex excursions and returns repulsed.
There was an island where everybody was nice to everybody and the orgasms were cookies.
That’s not America, says Barbara, that’s the opposite of $$$ sex for engagement procreation baby diaper.
For this statement, she was voted of the island by a jury of the unemployed.

Judith Krantz is reduced to working security at a local Dollar Tree.
I saw her once and said “Aren’t you Judith Krantz?”
She only spat on my toes.

Cinderella is baker acted on the twenty fifth of September.
Some of her family feeds her oatmeal by the spoonful.
Cinderella is visited in Ward C by a prospective suitor who was going to be the one until he was a little to “grabby grab grab” with her dress.
What is underneath Cinderella’s dress?
PURE GOLD OR URANIUM!

Romeo was one of those assholes who takes big shits and leaves it in the toilet for his roommates to witness.
This was his eventual downfall.
Romeo’s former roommates posted ads all around town claiming what a tool Romeo was and some of the ads featured Xeroxed photos of Romeo’s turds.
Romeo could never get another roommate EVER.
Romeo couldn’t afford the rent on his own.
His father was less than helpful.
Dirty Dancing was playing on a small television the night I received my first “Three Finger Aboriginal Pounding.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the “Three Finger Aboriginal Pounding” best you remain so.

Clark Gable’s mustache burns in a German bonfire.
There was protest but nobody wins in this year.

Fabio has a poor credit.
He cannot rent on the better side of town.
Romeo suggested they move in together and have Romeo’s name the only one on the lease.
Fabio has to live alone.
He has secrets.

How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days is the inspiration for every action my Grandfather completes.
How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days is better than any cookies you can bake me.

Snow White is the inspiration for all of my decisions.
I think “Would Snow White deem this morally permissible?”
Then I decide the opposite.
Snow White was known for her abysmal moral compass.
I am known for an awesome moral compass.
‘Cept for the time I tried to slip something in Snow White’s drink.
I am the eighth dwarf this is a fine porno featuring mutual enjoyment.

Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez gather for a séance and achieve little result.
Jennifer Lopez is a former object of Ben Affleck’s affections.
Ben Affleck is a current object of my genital’s affection.
I don’t know what Jennifer Lopez views in the mirrors of corpses.

President Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Nancy Reagan once fought so bad that President Ronald Reagan was forced to skin the poodle and sleep on the remains for a fortnight.
This started a new trend amongst the presidency.
Be Obama the first whose worship of the poodle transcends American tradition?

Garbo and Gilbert is the name of my cat.
Come here Garbo and Gilbert! Garbo and Gilbert will soon explode from the confusion.
This is a social experiment.
I actually own two cats.
You are a fool.
I heart them equal.
I give them valentines and bring them Dove Chocolate.
When they die I will probably stare at walls.

Jean Harlow saw spiders in the atmosphere when there were little to no spiders in the atmosphere.
Jean Harlow is the kind of name that makes tingle in the regions of least light.

Orczy was famous for the smell of her insides, for the smell of pennies and mango.
Orczy’s coroner was a vegetarian.
How ecstatic he was to discover the scraps.

Margaret Mitchell ran her assistant staff of about 70 like slaves.
She was deemed by one of the staff “Baroness Whip-Bitch.”
Three of the staff members got off on the harsh environment.
They received demotions.

Prince Genji had a complex.
He was forever in the sixth grade.

Kathleen Woodwiss was totally addicted to Venti Sugar Free Vanilla Lattes.
Kathleen Woodwiss overdrafts twenty three times and claims any real man would admire her for her skills with the wrench and not for her sense of financial responsibility.
Where do you stand on the subject?
Do you have the right to get up from you seat?

Stephanie Meyer is liable to “knock a bitch the fuck out” if she hears one more word about Robert Pattinson’s JUNK.
Stephanie Meyer Contacted me personally and wished to make clear that she has never seen let alone TOUCHED Robert Pattinson’s JUNK.
I am free to play as I please in a playground filled with such silly toys.

Abigail and John Adams made a sex tape and this sex tape is buried.
There is a map to the sex tape located deep within certain realms.
Weren’t you once all about Lord Of The Rings?
Find it and there’s a prize!
You love prizes!

Annie Oakley makes an appearance in my wet dreams at least once a month.
In my wet dreams Annie Oakley sighs and this produces the release.

A jury of her peers voted Helen of Tory “Funniest Girl.”
Her peers were all named Helen Of Troy.

John And Jackie Kennedy were a little too into Halloween.
They often played “Peter Pan and Wendy” a game that involved costume and a brief inquiry into child-pornography.

Zeus and Hara is a fast-food joint that just opened up on the corner of Ocean and Laura.

Yoko Ono is my chimpanzee.

Anne Boleyn was dyslexic.

The other Boleyn girl could really shake it when the fire occurred.

Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo got freaky once in the summer of ’81 and then after that everything such a straight line.

Boccaccio is not Marquis De Sade but sometimes in the dark I confuse the two.
This is perhaps due to something I ate last night.
Do you know?
Is this a “forever disease?”

Mary Tudor’s Showtime standup special was the worst in years.

A review of the involvement between King Arthur and Guinevere is as follows.
There is no prescience this is a rat.

Elizabeth and Robert Browning both worked in the Hyde Park J.Alexander’s.
They were both very stressed in this working environment.

Katherine Hepburn has a framed acrylic of me above her guest sink.

Pygmalion, regardless of your God, is not a Peanuts character.

Jesse James is the reason I “switched teams.”

Pocahontas entered a drawing contest and lost. This led to her worst decisions.

STOP.
REGURGITATE.
HOW TO RECONCILE?
YOUR FAVORITE BOY/GIRL IS LOCATED FIRM WITHIN IN THE RIVER!

Pocahontas fails drastically in the marinara business.

Jesse James is the girl sitting next to me with an atrocious dye job reading the latest Chuck Klosterman.

Pygmalion is pro-sex pro-porn pro-fatty acid.

Katherine Hepburn is my window seat.

Elizabeth and Robert Browning are complacent and thus shall drown.

King Arthur slips up slips in to Genevieve in lieu of Guinevere.

Mary Tudor is a construction business.
Can you get that concrete by next Wednesday the twenty fifth?

Boccaccio is subpoenaed in Warren County.

Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo are fascinated by rope and whip play.

Is the Other Boleyn girl now actually just the Boleyn Girl?

The Boleyn Girl is so fucking jealous!

Yoko Ono is three counts of credit card fraud. Defend her. Do your job.

Zeus and Hara give one another fruit baskets. All is not thin.

John and Jackie Kennedy wake up on dismal afternoon to discover their pet poodle entitled “Mr. Vittles” has been abducted from the White House.
There is a note written in some kind of blood substance or maybe whatever comes out when a woman is spotting, ouch.
HEY, read the note, ADMIT YOU WANT TO BE ME ADMIT YOU WANT MY JOB IN ADVERTISING AND I WILL RETURN MR.VITTLES.
This is the only occurrence of love in a traditional sense.

Helen Of Troy is ignoring my frequent texts.

Annie Oakley fails the math conference, fails to remain wet.

Abigail and John Adams are so disappointed in the depiction.
They though there was going to be so much oil.
Not oil as lube but oil as $$$.
This is so not hearts.

Stephanie Meyer takes the vampire thing a little too serious.
She skips town with a seventeen year old who listens to The Nine Inch Nails every morning while applying fresh “guy-liner.”

Kathleen Woodwiss owns an auto repair shop, grows the requisite mustache.

Prince Genji is (perhaps) rightfully trampled by an Indian Elephant.
SMOOSH AND GLOOP!

Margaret Mitchell sometimes reads Stephen King’s Carrie four or five times a week.
This becomes detrimental to her day job as a mop.

Orczy plagiarism.

Jean Harlow is the first ever sex kitten to dress up, actually, as a newborn kitten.

Garbo and Gilbert hangs oneself.
Remember the cheers that occur?
Oh it was very in your face.
To live in a time when a noose is akin to an episode of “The OC!”

President Ronald Regan and Mrs. Nancy Regan really tried to resuscitate the stranger choked inside of Ruth’s Chris.

Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez had a superb time at this years Super bowl.
Of course Jennifer got food poisoned from the Hor D’ouvres.
She suspects the Shrimp.
Marc Anthony submits a formal complaint.
This is loyalty in bronze frame.

Snow White is your favorite fetish.
There is a deficiency in Snow White Themed pornography.
To rectify: write letters.

On the set of How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days Zach Braff got seasick.
No.
He was only ACTING.

Fabio opens a “second-chance” bank account.
The road is very gravel.

Clark Gable forgets his Loritab while looking in the mirror.
He feels really nervous while out that evening, keeps fingering the air of his pockets.

Dirty Dancing is deemed obscene by the Utah Mothers Coalition of Armed Nudity Prevention Poo.
There are three members in the coalition.
They are pathetic.
You should see them under glass some time.

Romeo’s tongue perpetually tastes of Caesar Dressing.
Authentic fucking Caesar Dressing.
Not Kraft.

Cinderella, too, must be revisited by the board of trustees.
This is Silicon Valley.
We are on TOP of shit.

Judith Krantz let you down heavy in the summer of 2005.

Barbara Taylor Bradford picks up one of those BOP magazines for her thirteen year old to blush towards.
She regrets this decision later on a flight to Portland.
There are so many clocks we cannot fight.

Ernest Hemingway was not just a cat enthusiast but also a cat in general.
He is sitting on your lap right now.
He is shot with the squirt gun for poor behavior.

Jane Austen drills through her grave with the drill she brought with her to the grave.
What are you going to do now?
Write another book about zombies?
She’ll drill right through you too if you isn’t careful fucker.

Willa Cather is too similar to catheter is really scary.

Jeanette Winterson is from Orlando.
You didn’t know?
Bow and beg.

Ayn Rand is so embarrassing.
To combat this disqualifying embarrassment I am going to print t-shirts with Ayn Rand’s filthy face covering the entire surface of the t-shirt.
Reverse psychology is really elementary school.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was your grandpa all along.
Ask about him in the streets.
See if they ain’t heard.

Diana Gabaldon would be a terrific name for a pet dragon if you believed in owning pets.

Charlotte Bronte can’t be bothered with any of this.
She’s cooking potato skins for the boys.
Social constraints traveled down a water slide and rendered her fingers nubs.

Colleen McCullough raises awareness for Lupus by way of a bake sale.

Emily Bronte poses nude for a DIY feminist rag.
She has to defend herself on CNN’s Crossfire.
CNN subsequently receives accolades for paying attention the small press industry.

Nicholas Sparks they’re not going to let us fill the pool with petroleum jelly!
Are you suffering from your gourd?
Goddamn you’re sexy come over here and let me taste a bit of that.
I’m going to be your SLUT Nicholas Sparks.
Nicholas Sparks you’re never going to want in your loins again.
I live to chug your piss Nicholas Sparks.
Put that in a novel.
Pay royalties.

Erich Segal did you hear what I told Nicholas Sparks?
How are your veins?
Is your blood proper?
I don’t know about you but my pants need some air conditioning!

Nora Roberts don’t despair.
I’ll chug your piss too but only when mixed with that of Nicholas Sparks.
Haven’t you ever been to a bar?
They mix stuff all the time.
Our communion will be an island vacation.

Prince Kuhram and Mumtaz Mahal engaged in role play wherein one of them pretended they were Nicholas Sparks and the other pretended they were Ryan Gosling while working on the set of the film adaptation for Nicholas Sparks’ acclaimed novel The Notebook directed maybe by Robert Rodriguez.
They pretended Nicholas Sparks shared creative voice with the director of the film.
Prince Kuhram (As Nicholas Sparks): I’ve heard your tongue is a radiator.
Mumtaz Mahal (As Ryan Gosling): My tongue is a nest or blubber.

Pyramus and Thisbe are interchangeable with any other marginally famous sex-team.
The new phrase for “couple” is “sex-team.”
America hearts competition and so do you.

Tristan and Isolde (the film) starred James Franco before he hosted Saturday live for the first time.
I would like to be James Franco’s neighbor in arms of defense against the outside community.
What’s that?
Google me.

Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton really hit one out of the fucking ball park man when they had that really ugly baby together.
Remember?
We all had to go over there and look at the baby like you have to do when somebody has a baby.
The fucks that about anyhow?
O I HAD A BABY NOW YOU HAVE TO COME LOOK AT IT!
But who says?
Lord Nelson should be rum.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor both taste of make-up.
I don’t know.
I’ve never tasted either but really I am assuming and that’s all you can do when confronted with a total lioness of a credit card company.

Czar Nicholas The Second and his pet Alexandra Federovna played a tennis match wherein the winner had to walk around on a leash controlled by the loser for a month straight.
This was an unorthodox arrangement and so am I.

Voltaire, I’ve always guessed, was really sexually literate.
Meaning, he knew how to scream.

Juan and Evita Peron once met Madonna in a back alley and you know what happens next.
They all went back to Madonna’s place and made smoothies.
They poured the smoothie’s out on Madonna’s marble floor and rolled around.
Morning came and there was such a mess.
Madonna has staff for tending to that sort of failure.

Napoleon and Josephine reeked vengeance upon the townspeople.
Filled with tremor the townspeople challenged them to a tetherball tournament.
WE ARE NO LONGER CATHOLIC screams Napoleon.
YOUR GOD SITS THIS ONE OUT WHILE CRYING ABOUT HIS BEST FRIEND screams Josephine.
The townspeople explode.

Cleopatra and Mark Anthony pay for reconstructive surgery.
They get furious anew.

Imperfections

by Will Luers

1

At the bell, she rubs her eyes and sees the bald man has left. She dusts the cushion and slips out after him.

Listening to his breath, she had imagined a wave alone in a field. Separated from the ocean. At the bus stop, he doesn’t even glance at her. Just stares up into the elms, sipping his Chai.

She walks home. Stretches her legs across the cracks.

Her apartment is one pixel thick. A vast, shallow pool. The mouse is her only friend. The shadows cast by the afternoon light brings out the imperfections.

She searches for travel deals.

2

On a hot street corner, she thinks her hips are too big. She needs water and batteries and a pair of those shades. Shops are closed and it’s almost time. People are looking up in the sky already. The crowds have gathered in the park.

She spreads her lace scarf near the weed smoke. Everything is washed in a pale light. A woman next to her offers the special glasses. Then a joint. Mouth open, she watches the moon obliterate the sun.

The didgeridoo player points to an orange dot in the trees. It looks like a balloon. Tells her all about a rare parrot that escaped its owner fifteen years ago. They ride white bikes to the beer garden.

She hasn’t had to talk about graphic design once. And there’s not a single hair on his chest. He’s in for a surprise.

She stares at herself in the mirror. The rules she sets. The if-this-then-that mentality. Life is all rupture and chaos. And besides. A fucking didgeridoo player? She grabs the train schedule.

3

He had instructed them to move the mind into the still-life and to let the shapes co-evolve on the paper. Easy enough. The apple, the kiwi. The fire hydrant, the light switches, his leather bag. The mind moves laterally and nothing ever really stays together for long, except as a memory. She talked to him after class about constraints.

The sun came out from behind a cloud. He took his keys from the dish. She pulled up her pants. This is how her art project began. A series of loosely connected affairs that seemed to absolve the anxieties about her future. It was a multimodal piece, made of text, image and video. The unfinished project lies in a box in her mother’s basement.

Maybe it all began earlier? She was reminded of the boy next door when he came back for Christmas. The bed, the small flowered sheets, the cat behind the pillow. She was wearing an over-sized t-shirt and let him stay up watching Mission Impossible. He said he was scared to sleep alone.

His father was a single Dad. Garage full of sporting goods. A passion for faucets. The flowers were all fake. His porn was predictable. How these things come back to her? Or maybe they are all lying around, all the time.

She dated her boss because of his beautiful art books. It’s a long story. They went places on weekends.

On a whale watch for example, where they sat inside, sheltered from the icy wind. Their conversation full of practical reflections, interspersed with comments about the air, the color of the sky and whether or not the whales would appear.

The answer meant everything to her and she didn’t know why. He, on the other hand, had given up looking outside for confirmations. Stringing things together so that it all made sense. She found his isolation both admirable and so dispiriting.

After a night of whiskey sours he announced that evil must be a force for creative evolution. She pressed against her eyelids, and thought about the tasks of the next day: find a color scheme for the layout, clear the weeds from the side yard, find a way out of this.

A few months later a woman started talking to her, in the aisle, facing the horror section. Her boldness was impressive. The unruly hair, the pelvis wrap, the scent of mothballs. Then meetings in coffee shops, afternoon visits to the museum. Her dissertation topic? Mumification as performance art. The exquisite unwrapping.

She found an apartment and officially ended it with her boss. She bought a couch and wore turtlenecks. The galleries started hiring her for print work. She paid the bills. Her mother was proud.

One night, after her second sherry, her mother explained why she had not dated for so many years. She’d had it after being harassed by a boyfriend who wanted to use her image for a line of pantyhose. And that seemed to sum up both of their stories.

4

The train arrives at night. It is hot. There’s a parade around the serpentine streets. Music and masks. Rings of sparkling green, blue and gold. A waitress comes over to wipe up the sangria. This is more like it, she thinks.

The room has a patio with a view. She lies on the bed in her underwear and reads about the cathedral. A famous destination of pilgrims. A memory palace.

The bull stumbles in the shadow half of the ring. The point driven into the soft flesh, it moans under the growing cheers. And then the sudden collapse of symmetry, the symmetry shared by all living forms. Spiral growth and bilateral growth. Center and extremity. Left side and right side. Just a heap of meat with no coordination or circuitry. The shapelessness of her own life.

Or like a smoke ring in moonlight. Unfiltered. This one was easy. She found him in a bar, making a sincere effort to teach ancient men show tunes. An innocence that is only slightly annoying. And now, the undulating contours of his sleeping body. The hum of the street lamps.

Apparently, the cathedral is something to behold. A profound symmetry. She will savor the imperfections.

5

Her mother waits for the basil tofu and casually asks about the trip, the itinerary really. She doesn’t travel much. She doesn’t understand that “the trip” never stops. It’s relentless. The closure of the telling just makes room for more.

Outside the rain comes down. People wait under canopies. She remembers just a week ago sitting with him in an outdoor cafe with a stack of postcards between them. She tried to make each one different, to be selective in her anecdotes and observations. But she found it impossible.

The trees here are like silly old men. Lots of love.

In My War Novel

by Matthew Salesses

My wife used to say I would never be a writer. She said nobody adopted amounted to much. She didn’t use those words—she said it in Korean—but I knew what she meant. Not that I know Korean, but I could guess. I know my wife. If I saw her now she would say, “Do you still eat with a knife and fork?” and I would slap her with these pages.

These are the things I know about my wife: I know she was born December 12, 1952. I know she took 16 hours of labor, a fat baby with lots of hair. I know she went to school in Korea for a while, and then transferred to Canada because her parents were getting a divorce. I know she owned a car before she could drive it, and had to sell it once she could drive it because by then her family needed the money. I know she had money and then didn’t have money, and I know she thought I had money but I didn’t. I know she married me in 1978, and left me twelve years later. I know we’re not divorced. I don’t know where she’s been the last two years, with my adopted last name. I know she’s 39 and looks 29 and that’s how she’s getting guys—that’s how she got me, by looking innocent, when she was in Canada and so was I. I know she would say she’s 41 if she were counting in Korean, 25 in American. I know she keeps my last name as her last name so people won’t know she’s an immigrant until she speaks.

If you asked my wife about me, she couldn’t tell you much. She doesn’t know my real birthday—but then neither do I; my birthday was a guess by an orphanage. She doesn’t know that in the last two years my hair has turned gray around the edges. She doesn’t know I think of her when I eat cereal, do laundry. She doesn’t know I’m writing this. She knows I’ve always wanted to write a war novel. She knows I know nothing of war. I guess she doesn’t know my surname means we’re still attached.

If I wrote a war novel my wife would be killed off before our relationship figured out our differences. Like her being really Asian and me being just so-so Asian. I learned that from A Farewell to Arms. I know enough to want my readers to love me.

In my war novel I wouldn’t be the narrator. I would be the doomed hero’s best friend and advisor. I wouldn’t want to be the narrator because the narrator would die. I would always say in interviews that it was up to the reader, but really he would die.

My war would be one of the world wars, because those were the biggest and, I hear, the best. At least people are always talking about them. In interviews, I would say the scar I got from hitting myself on the nose with a block was from being stabbed, and the dots on my knuckles from breaking a mirror were from another encounter, in a fight against someone who wasn’t myself. My closest experience to the military was the time my adopted father said he would send me back to Korea. Real Koreans have to serve two years.

When my wife left me she said, “You trying to send a kill at me? You think I got a coffin to catch?” I didn’t know she knew the word “coffin.” She would say this in my war novel, but I would change the word “coffin” to “deathbox” or something else, to make it more believable.

The hell with those other wars. I would write about the Korean War. I would write about the Korean War to show that I was Korean and also to rub it in people’s faces. Nobody knows anything about the Korean War except Koreans.

In the time before my wife left me she said I was 100% American. That is not true. In fact I was 100% Korean, but then my mother didn’t want me anymore, so she left me at the orphanage. When I was three I was sent to America. So what does that make me? My wife knew all this before she got involved with me. If she didn’t like it then why does she keep my last name now? Which wasn’t even my original last name, she must have pointed out 1000 times.

I never knew my original parents. As for my adopted parents my adopted father died when I was ten and my adopted mother stayed alive until two years ago, when I was 36.

My wife used to tell stories of her childhood that her mother had told her. My wife said before the Korean War the Koreans liked everybody. After the war the soldiers became assholes and it was impossible to like Americans. This is all I know about the war, I promise.

When my wife was a child the soldiers used to give her candy because she was so cute. One time the soldiers kidnapped her and brought her back to their base because she was so cute, and her mother had to go to the base to pick her up.

I’ve seen my wife’s baby pictures. I have to admit she was adorable, and I have to admit that doesn’t make it right to kidnap her.

That doesn’t mean I still love her. I’m just saying, kidnapping isn’t anything someone should do. I wouldn’t keep my wife locked up in the cellar with my war novel, and not feed her so she would have to kill rats for food. I wouldn’t even think about it.

In my war novel soldiers wouldn’t have time to abduct anyone. The war would go on forever, and war is busy. The soldiers would be busy dying. In my war novel the hero would die from something trivial, like bad chicken or gas.

After I wrote my war novel I would start to think of it as a person, full of lies and contradictions. My war novel would say to me, “I will make you famous. You will never be forgotten. People will never believe any wife could have left you. You will be known twice over, as you and as me, and as a Korean and an American, not half of both.”

After I wrote my war novel I would believe whatever it told me. If it lied to me we would fight to the death.

My wife would find it on the bookshelf in a grocery store, and she would scream, or maybe just faint, when she saw our still-shared last name on the spine. The aisle boys would have to clean up her mess. Then she would be embarrassed and feel foreign. When she read my war novel she wouldn’t understand it and would have to call her boyfriend about words. Some of them he wouldn’t understand either.

Wherever my wife is my war novel would find her. It would report back to me. My war novel wouldn’t be about women. The narrator would die from lack of sex. The narrator would die as a child, before he could have sex at all. He would hit himself in the nose with a block because the other children said his nose was too big for a gook, and forced him to agree, and the cartilage would shoot up into his brain.

My wife was an only child. Her family was ashamed because she wasn’t a boy. I don’t know if I was an only child or not. I was a boy but it didn’t count for much. In America I was an only child because my adopted father said he would never adopt again because of me, and my adopted mother said she would never adopt again because of him.

In my war novel there would be no children, not because I hate them, but because I know nothing about them. In my war novel I think I better stick to only one thing I know nothing about.

It’s my wife’s fault I know nothing about children. My wife just plain hated kids and didn’t want a baby. Actually she didn’t want an American baby. My wife just plain hated Americans, and she didn’t want one inside her.

My wife just plain hated a lot of things. She just plain hated looking at my penis. She just plain hated getting old. She just plain hated wearing a wedding ring; she was always leaving it in places I would find it, like a little gold-rimmed hole to another dimension on the table, a little gold-rimmed hole to another dimension in the medicine cabinet, a little gold-rimmed hole to another dimension at the bottom of a trash bag, a little gold-rimmed hole to another dimension pinned to the wall with a note that said she was leaving.

My wife just plain loved getting thrown up against the wall and fucked silly when she was drunk. She just plain loved getting drunk. She just plain loved cosmetics, trashy underwear, trashy television shows. She just plain hated that I knew these things.

Here’s another list. Once when I was awake and she was asleep she tried to strangle me. She swore it was because of a bad dream, and that was when we were in love, so everything was true.

One thing that is true is that my wife is a cat person and I’m a dog person. Apparently that means dogs are loyal and cats fuck around.

Another thing that is true is that she never had a cat. She just hated dogs. She said they were pathetic. She looked this word up on one of our first dates, in her electronic translator.

Another true thing is that she believed we didn’t get along together because she was an A blood type and I was a B. Another true thing, she said, is that lots of Americans are B types, and she could tell by looking at them.

In my war novel everyone would know their blood types and would carry it on a card in their pocket in case they needed blood. This would have come in handy that time I broke the mirror in school, just after I called the only other Asian kid a chink.

In my war novel the hero would survive: airplanes being shot down on bombing raids à la Catch 22, rescue missions à la The Naked and the Dead, machine guns over the trenches à la All Quiet on the Western Front, and the perils of deserting à la A Farewell to Arms. In the final chapter the hero would jump on a mine to save his superior officer, but it would be a dud. Then his helmet would roll off, and he would be shot in the head.

In my war novel nothing would happen as it was supposed to happen but everything would happen when it was supposed to happen. My adopted mother called this, “you can’t trick fate.” My adopted father called this God.

I think I said there would be no women in my war novel; I forgot I also said my wife would be in my war novel. She would be eaten by a snake.

My wife was very loveable: that’s what makes her so hateable. For example I used to listen to my wife snap at her cereal like a venus fly trap—that beautifully hungry flower—Sunday mornings before her hour drive to the nearest Korean church. I knew she rolled over onto my side of the bed the other mornings. She always said our bed was too small even for my chicken legs. I would notice her before work and calculate how much of her shifted—her thighs or her face, for the warmth or the smell? I knew she liked my cologne, because she said it made her want to “jump on my bones.”

I remember the first time I brought my wife to meet my adopted mother. My adopted mother did not approve. Later my wife said this meant my adopted mother was a racist. My adopted mother used to try to get me in touch with my Korean side. She would bring me to meetings of adopteds as if we could all learn about our lost culture just by proxy. We would sit around reading, We Adopted you, Benjamin Koo, and trying not to spill anything yellow on ourselves, learning to use chopsticks.

For my tenth birthday dinner my adopted mother made Korean food, and my adopted father came back in the middle of the party and said his son deserved better. I didn’t say anything. On the one hand he was just being an asshole again, and on the same hand the food sucked.

I wonder what they would say if they saw what happened last October, how an American soldier raped a Korean woman in Seoul and killed her by inserting things: a coke bottle up her uterus, an umbrella up her anus. He dusted her body with laundry detergent, because she was unclean. This caused a lot of riots after he only got 15 years. It wasn’t in the American news. In the American news Bill Clinton played saxophone and the Canadians won the World Series. I just found out about this today and then started thinking up this novel.

Back in 1978 my wife thought the American dream meant just getting to America. She didn’t know it was a dream Americans had; she thought the dream was only for non-Americans. When she got to Canada they told her the dream was just about getting out of the place you were in, and then she had it all over again, but for real. When I took her to America, she couldn’t tell at first that it was America. What she really had was the Korean dream, which was more about getting back to Korea and rubbing America in people’s faces. In America she gave up on the Korean dream. She had to take the American dream of America.

In my war novel the hero would be captured by the enemy. He would escape by dressing in North Korean uniform and hiding his face. When he got back he would be shot by a soldier on his side who didn’t know any better.

My war novel would have a lot of blood. Blood is a must in war movies these days, so why shouldn’t it be in war novels? People bleed. That’s the truth. When my wife hit me with a lamp it cut my shoulder and I bled for two hours.

Maybe it was less than that. I bet if you bleed for two hours you die.

I never hit my wife but she hit me a lot. She liked to use objects we had around the house. I remember the sounds. The usual things made a loud clunk, an awkward type of noise like when I pushed her down the stairs. That was an accident.

In my war novel the hero would impregnate the love of his life just before he died. I guess it would be a North Korean girl. That’s the way life goes on. That would be right before the war ended.

What would happen to his baby, you ask? In real life it was a tough time after the war. I don’t know this, but this is what I imagine. The country was poor and parents were leaving kids out on every street, drowning them in the dirtiest rivers where no one would notice the bodies. Imagine a very dark world in which a person, or two people, could give up a smaller version of herself. I guess war sucks enough without having a kid around—especially if your husband fought for the other side, especially if your family died in battle, especially if your lover wouldn’t support you or ran away or just wanted a fuck, especially if you were raped or disfigured or cast out of your community or on the run or told you have only another week to live or any of the other 500 reasons I’ve figured out. Then you would have to get rid of that kid, and at least you didn’t drown him.

When my adopted mother died she didn’t know my wife had left me. I kept that a secret. My adopted mother believed in marriage and the truth is she came around on liking my wife in the end.

In my war novel everyone would believe in marriage. My war novel would remind me of how my wife used to call my arm her arm pillow and say if I ever left her she would have to cut it off to sleep. My war novel would remind me of how I took my wife to Hawaii on our honeymoon and she laughed about “getting lei’d.” While we were in the middle of making love she laughed and screamed she was getting lei’d loud enough for everyone to hear us, and I tapped her on the buttcheeks—maybe a little too hard—to shut her up, but then she screamed, “Slap me some more you fucking love-muffin,” so I did. That was when she liked it rough. Then later she liked it soft. Then at the end she liked it drunk, or not at all.

When I took her back there to rekindle our marriage she stayed out late at night by the ocean looking over the water to where she was convinced she could see Korea.

In my war novel my wife would like it soft, to counteract the war.

Once I overheard my adopted parents arguing about me and then a lot of pushing sounds—and I guess that was sex, as if they were trying to erase the thought of me.

In my war novel there would be a lot of hard sex going around. And also alcohol and worse. Anything to keep the soldiers’ minds off the war.

My wife employed this strategy for years. She was very good at it but not good enough. In the end she left me.

In my war novel there would be lots of women. None of them would be hurt by Americans. None of them would be raped. They would all be willing. They would have many children, legitimate and illegitimate.

In my war novel there would be a great final battle, but it would decide nothing for the war. For the characters it would make them decide whether war is good or bad.

For a while after our honeymoon my wife never looked at other men. She wore white underwear even on weekends. She put my clothes in the new electric dryer before she woke me for work—she said warm clothes would have the warmth of her body, and when I left the house they did. She let me teach her how to turn me on: come up behind me and nibble my earlobe. I told her I liked a good sneak attack.

My wife used to be like wax paper the mornings after she’d been drunk. Smooth and slightly see-through.

My wife used to say the end was never the end.

Not the day after she left but a week after, or maybe a month, I stood on our bed and held my neck between my hands until I passed out, and when I woke up I said, “I can’t believe you did that to me again,” but she was gone. Only her scent was there. Then I realized her scent was there and I snuffed out my breath in her pillow.

In my war novel her character and my character wouldn’t know each other so well. The war would go on in the background. I wouldn’t write about the war. In my war novel the hero would be shot in the head, through his brain, sure, but who says this is death? Who says? Once the body is begun it can’t be stopped so easily. A dead man’s cells go on living and dying, and who says his consciousness is not in his cells, who says there’s no consciousness in cells? His fingernails grow; his hair grows. The cells know that they are alive, don’t they?

Revising the Pharmacist In Love

by Kristi McGuire

Psychopharmacologist (n.) an expert or specialist in the branch of love that deals with the study of the effects of drugs on the mind & behavior

[1970 // Alvin Toffler, Future Shock: ‘new knowledge... in psychopharmacology, made many Freudian therapeutic measures seem quaintly archaic’]

[here we intercede in the recession of images uncaptioned; did I write the book?]

In examining the small body of critical theory dedicated to the work of Hannah Weiner, it’s difficult to locate an article that doesn’t begin with some mention of (A young Spaniard who studied ‘Does this change’) Hannah’s re-invention of form (twilight is defined according to the solar elevation angle). For a poet so concerned with the ethical and political implications of language signification, a fascination with formal organization shouldn’t appear anomalous. What’s remarkable about Hannah’s appropriation of form^[1], however, is transparently obvious:

it’s remarkable simply because it is a literal appropriation, or better, dictation, from what Hannah labeled an ‘extreme psychic ability’ or clairvoyance. This paper is concerned with a three-fold assessment of Hannah Weiner, first we begin by before we begin

Beuys is long dead! Through his drawing practice, the wild coyote becomes a wound incapable of achieving the radical illumination of the readily transparent; exhibition as birth and death, becomes (in consideration of length and time) a beginning

In consideration of length and time^[2], we focus primarily on The Fast (1970), the first of three early journals that preceded the substantial formal innovation of The Clairvoyant Journal (1974). The last book that Hannah claimed to have written ‘in her own words,’ The Fast was culled from over 100 notebooks, and chronicles the early days of Hannah’s psychic development in the wake of her clinically diagnosed schizophrenia (Hannah meet Alice it shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume).

1909 – neutral – sense changed in the 1960s – OED supplement 1997

We wish to call this lingering, motionless empathy with the static form of the phenomena physiognomic or emotional—a pure condition hints and traces of attitudes and emotions (the cliff stands at attention)—we perceive and read spiritual defiance into it

Keywords: alter ego, characterization through the spin, spin through the desert Mojave (in Calico ghost town Yucca brevifolia, I—no, I forgot myself: J. Robert Oppenheimer during the Trinity test incants the Bhagavad Gita—John Donne, Batter my heart—and then: Now I am become) UNDER CIRCUMLOCUTION (once spoken)—structured through a series of flashbacks that navigate and construct consciousness in ‘spacetime’ as coined by contemporary social neuropsychiatry & two centuries of fiction rather than quantum mechanics filtered through speak again [also: or not] / we’re poised through the impatient referent Alice James merged with Alice Coltrane, navigated through a structure of ships passing (which also constructs the arena as a metaphor of 21st-century consciousness—resurrecting William James as the pragmatic link between his sister’s depressive episodes & the turn from Freudian psychoanalysis to behavioral neuropsych in the early 1970s (I’ve made this up, again; I won’t be her revisionist, won’t again 500 times is a rhyme dimed by the oologist’s daughter), which is a moment shared by Alice Coltrane’s rise from sessions pianist to _________ [ambassador of the cosmos / ethical voice / free jazz force / widow [the play of spiders]]—this character plays with multivocality: her voice is alternately my own, Alice Coltrane’s, and a narrative about Alice James told through and around the creation of Alice James Books in 1971, a series of unattributed images of ships & arenas—which is the

As I child, I wrote ephemera about presidents, civic lessons and letters to the editor of The Detroit News about Oliver North—spent two years sleeping with annotations on the pleurisy of—stop breathing—tossed Life Studies into the Domus Aurea (under construction)

interstellar space—Mars—in which the Pharmacist and the Empath will come together—triggers: the feminine, transtime, the body / the vessel, servitude, solace, I love you, the role, I know now I don’t, don’t I, poetic asides // interested in the changing structures of consciousness that came together in the waning years of the Vietnam War: this is the birth of contemporary neuroscience and the firm decline of Freudian psychotherapy (no, no it isn’t/Let us go and make our visit)—a moment when images and metaphors reflect cosmology, the cosmic, the infinite, the radical potentiality of change in a pragmatic sense grounded (I feel again) in the rise of the singular imprint, the tweaked, the visionic & psychically-addled, the drugged-out spirit, the schizoid— there’s also so much going on with vessels / voyages / arena (rock) / the prog[ressive] / how does this manifest the multivocal, how to make a hinge

before I begin, I

begin and am informed by: the biographical histories of Alice James [as told in her journals, 1889–92] and Alice Coltrane; the usual dip & critique into the Heideggeran vault of beginning with an etymological descent; the canonization of neuroscience and the decline of the Freudian in the ‘popular’ works of the early ‘70s such as The Aquarian Conspiracy, Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, the fiction of Jonathan Baumbach (the palefaced vicissitudes of analyst and I—I am, I analyze); the shift to experimental visual form in the particular pedigree of poetics published by Alice James Books—Moholy-Nagy and Grecian still, the island of Mykonos that birthed the Titan (we saw the ship that sailed before and a prophecy the band played on); very contemporary reassessments of William James in works like, in works like I wrote the book didn’t I, I apologize to chloral hydrate and Lowell Webster Hall; psychopharmacology as appropriated in popular Cantos—maybe I’m trying to deal with the psychiatric vernacular here & in my mind it’s inextricably linked to the sonic, a certain type of repetitive and free associative music—perhaps that’s also what drives my intentions to systematize, that sort of speech Oppenheimer held Einstein’s old position, then finally chemotherapy—a sense of mirroring and speech her fictions are nota bene—conceptual—the background Tarkovsky aside; also meant to be written from the depressive position as advanced by Melanie Klein and later DW Winnicott—there’s a part of me that wants to tender each Pelopid aside (Burbank with a Baedeker/Bleistein with a Cigar), engender a particular sort of analysis that would directly follow in a secondary footnote or maybe a structure built on the page. I’m concerned with allowing myself the broad superficiality that would [image-based] paint a consciousness—but I also plan / want to work from a very detailed outline that would allow all of the links / similarities / convergences be brought to the surface—this too, would be part the Empath feels

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CONCERNS: how to footnote images / how to better work with a footnote structure outside of the documentation—true and HOW2—how also to incorporate the filmic (Muybridge’s Phenakistoscope); how to best interpose and collide THE PHARMACIST and THE EMPATH majuscules date to Gutenberg in the Roman alphabet; how to find a space for myself to write (we are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn’t the best of it after all hasn’t she hasn’t she Djuna Barnes) & all the weighty resolutions at hand; what about the possibility of manipulating this as articulating all the veins of a would-be novel that never materializes, the conceptual fiction that

The journal emblematically appropriates colors, auras, and pictures as metaphoric indices of the poet’s bodily pain, spurred by paranoia, and manifested as a metallic hyperallergy.

                                                                        Perhaps the most striking aspect of Freud’s

The subject of the journal, one could argue, is situated less with the character of the poet/narrator, Hannah Weiner, who records the barrage of color manifestations during the course of her 21-day fast, and more centrally on the conflicting multivocality of Hannah’s ‘intuition’ and its concerned, if infrequent, normative counterpart. The opening of the journal links directly the process of psychic awareness with dictated form,

I want to write but I am lazy. I would like to put my thoughts about the fast directly on tape without the medium of speech. California does psychic. It is unnecessary for us both to speak. Does she send her thoughts to me or I send my thoughts to her? When we both think it is 10 o’clock and it is 11:30 we are both not perceiving reality.

In terms of elucidating what I will call the transparency of the banal, this opening paragraph achieves more than a simple association of clairvoyance with its formal expression. ‘I want to write but I am lazy’ evokes not just a desire that is substituted with the affect

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

THIS IS BY NO MEANS EVEN A FORM YET. IT’S SUPER SHALLOW / it is indifferent.

Do I have writer’s block? Have I fallen in love with space / time?

2010 Confine the edict
          Exactness in a room with          THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN
Little bell-selves

Wavering between sympathy & impatience: I don’t want to write about Alice James^[3]. I want a point in time that’s an indestructible referent—something cauterized around cosmology in the sense of Poe’s Eureka (1848) and Einstein’s concept of Minkowski space [we lift the urns from a Wiki // lift the urns & burn our incendiary demarcations^[4] – moments, ghosts, four-dimensional distance that encloses the arena^[5] of it all].

1972

Universal Consciousness is the fifth studio album released by Alice Coltrane.

1892

---

^[1] Maurice Blanchot and I share a day of birth, its numerological figurehead – 22 September – & its psychogeographic facets: a tendency to isolation, verbal acuity, and origins in carnival sideshows of the late nineteenth century which contained catch wrestling, combat, and the profoundly strange experience of writing. Cultural icons shape the dominant promotion through the standard method of scoring victory through public acclaim and the fall – literary language is double negation. The node of interest begins when it becomes a question of realistic performance at the space of the exterior or at the space of death, which is impossible (on home video). Born with a Sun in Virgo and Moon in Pisces just like Georges Bataille, only one entrant from each team may be designated as the ‘legal’ or ‘active’ interest in and literary criticism. He draws heavily from Franz Kafka and is shot through an engagement with turnbuckles, though usually the referee will try to partenaire invisible free him. On the other hand, our vision is blurred because of the words underneath the ropes; little was known until recently about much of Blanchot’s life, though I think it is imperative when thinking about vision to think about its obstructions & what makes it kayfabe. Reading is largely a result of entering in a manner that preserves character traits and loss. He was a close friend of Emmanuel Lévinas and became famous for winning matches by submission while cultivating apathy from audience interest. Moving between narration and philosophical investigation – what, in the sense of tapping out, does that mean? The movement in his work could portray his muscularity, and though friendship is a reoccurring topic – that movement between narration and philosophical investigation again – the conversation allows escape from pinfalls. Language is infinite and forgivable. Language is infinite and forgivable and a direct low blow to the groin. Is it?

^[2] The theory that an event occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties – covert but influential agency

^[3] The last monday of the month, they took me      off the rig.    Think about
              the ocean-going voyage     vessels     you hold me in the dark like a viaduct.
                         At times, I’d sing.     The arachnid tunnel, the plumage,     the obstinate spider-taste
                                                                                                    of mouths
               and broken waterways.     Succinct,     a portal to the place.     My even-keeled deck
               swabbed with the death stacks, stanza breaks     Your Portia,     a merchant     We sold the scarves
               for     sink those jugs of wine     as false as water.     The consistency of fish legs, as if we
                         could steady our limbs.     I’d swear     the daughter     the mocha java whales
               moby dick-eyed in Nantucket wake light     the funeral thrush     the Birdland jazz
               the ship sails     I chant my chains in sight     orchestrate, orchestrate, orchestrate.

^[4] Ending, like the silver thread     pulled through the pirouette     the body spins then stops
               untangles.     Your consort     the angle     between eye line and land locked     set     the compass
                         drops from north-northwest and then     the chromium drips.     For days all we had
                                   were salt ticks     our tongues coated with the white mold     dull knives that flashed
               touch lips     to spore to lips     phosphorescent.     The night     awash     our lungs gestalt
                         science of hip beds and ocean wives,     the vow of weeks spent     until
               with blinders on     from eagle’s peak     the sand bed sinks under the bow,     the boat leaks
                                   Our mouths fill with sea     the mold clots     we drink.

^[5] The arena was once the central part of the amphitheater – covered with sand to absorb the blood of the slain / gone. By extension, the word encoded a meaning that eventually included & referred to the structure as a whole; in language, through becoming, arena became gravel bred in a Human Body or any sphere of public or energetic action—the fourth quadrant, the sphere; exhibiting a hundred lions / ARENICOLOUS [a] inhabiting sand. In the visual iconography of ships, the arena tells the history of man from the shore to the sea: the sand. Alice Coltrane recorded Universal Consciousness in 1972 (largely on keyboard), following a lengthy pilgrimage to India under the devotion of Sathya Sai Baba, who is said by followers to have manifested daily vibuthi, or the holy sand. Sai Baba believed that his darshan – his twice daily presence / appearance to followers – had a spiritual benefit: clairvoyance among other concerns. Darshan, in Hindu doctrine, literally means “sight” – 1973 is also the year of the publication of The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology, the first textbook that publicized & problematized the aims of the new discipline (a liar is a person who is lying), as well as Jack Spector’s The Aesthetics of Freud, the first scholarly monograph to ground Freudian analysis in the category of the aesthetic rather than the psychological (who tends to lie by nature repeatedly), and the start of a burgeoning movement in clinical psychiatry and psychotherapy to discredit psychoanalysis as the dominant methodology in American analytic psychology (disguise or forgeries), later accelerated in the same year by HJ Eysenck’s The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, which attempted to discredit experimental cognitive procedures claimed by many to support Freudian dynamics, heartbreak (Hobbes, in Leviathan: “in war, force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues”).

Portland: City of Rosebuds

by Daniel Portland

1.

Billy. AKA: Billy Kill, Billy Team, Billy Frumpies, Billy Corrections, Billy Love, Billy Boredom, Billy Gain.

Billy asks a lot of questions. He’s shy and he likes Gertrude Stein and skateboards. He looks mass cool, too. His building was on fire and he pulled out his guitar. He’s wearing a t-shirt decorated with an outer space landscape. I’m like a girl in a reform school and Billy’s like the janitor. He cleans the hallways and bathrooms in the daytime, and at 3:30 in the morning these psychic projections come into the building from outer space, and I tell him stories about this. Billy is fiction and Billy is the epistemology of cool.

Billy works as a stripper and I work as a fry cook. When I ‘m a frying thing in the kitchen, he comes in and he says, “hey, sister.” He shows it to me and then he goes on stage.

Tobi and I take Billy home. I put my hand down his pants with spit and he puts his hand down Tobi’s pants with massage oil, even though she doesn’t like it. He has a dolphin tattoo on his stomach and keeps telling her, “but you’re getting wet.”

Nothing ever happens with Billy, like, he never blows me and we never kiss or anything. I wonder, what was the origin of those kisses handed out so sparely and with such discrimination? Never before had I seen a dignitary embracing anyone with that restrained emotion, as if sticking on stamps or pinning a different row of medals on each cheek. I don’t see any end to these hypocritical kisses. But I’m turned on from the inside. I project him out in front, so to speak, and the spectacle is an astounding one. Ordinary objects take on the luster of gems. There are spectral fountains, riotous hallucinations, and a fantastic interplay of sense responses in which colors, sounds, tastes, and odors become one-hundred animate kaleidoscope.

I don’t see Billy for months, then one day downtown the door of a black ship of a van opens up— the cave I emerge from, the cave I sometimes find myself in again through some fleeting emotion—and all this pot smoke blows out and Billy comes a-stumblin’ onto the sidewalk—a radar scope in all silver and all platinum lights.

2.

Ian. AKA: Ian Ulysses, Ian Make-Up, Ian War, Ian Gang, Ian Creamers, Ian Candy, Ian Club.

Ian has read Marx and he wants to destroy America. He’s a vegetarian. His hot rod car is loaded with revolutionary comic books. He greases his hair and we grease the night. He’s sharply dressed in a suit. He’s the sassiest boy in America. I’m a girl and Ian is the most perfect boyfriend material I could ask for. I’m a pig and he’s gonna off me. I’m his fifth member and he’s gonna lemme get what’s mine. Ian is the gospel.

Ian is a customer and I’m still a cook. He buys jalapeno poppers and leaves a big tip—antics and theatrics. Ian knows that the arrogance of the strong will be met with the violence of the weak. It makes me excited.

He comes back later to give me the empty popper basket and he asks me to show it to him. I am younger and quieter than Ian, but Ian is inspiration, so I flash him. It makes him excited. He throws money at me. It makes me excited.

He comes back every 15 minutes.

I make a lot of money off him that night and think about how mad my boss would be if he knew I was taking money away from Billy and the other strippers. Theft is just moving something from one place to another.

At the same time I fantasize about making a reputation. Like word would get out and Ian would bring Calvin and they’d both throw money at me and I’d make a small fortune, bits of metal, magnetized bodies magnetizing one another.

When I was a child, Billy gave me a piece of broken mirror in which to trap a ray of the sun and reflect it into one of Ian’s windows. And by that open window, in the mirror, I discover bit by bit my face and body cast in plaster.

3.

Calvin. AKA: Calvin Rays, Calvin Happening, Calvin Team, Calvin System, Calvin Benders.

I went to school, with Calvin. He’s a square dancer. He eats pie and plays pinball. He may or may not be a kiddie fiddler. True or false. Calvin wants to know the size and color of the hearts and minds of the lollipop generation. He is sensitive and has an extensive collection of sweaters that he keeps in trash bags. After the accident I was his little boy nurse and I taught him how to talk again.

Calvin comes in to flirt with me, even though he has a boyfriend. We start to talk, like, maybe we can hang out sometime. Calvin’s boyfriend is older and smokes a lot and I don’t find him attractive, but when Calvin asks me to go home to the farm with them, I can’t resist. I imagine the cries and groans we invent while making love, going back to our childhood with its moments of wonder and its flashes of comprehension. I guess I figure maybe the boyfriend just wants to watch. So I collect the pathetic amount of tips the tired old barhags leave the lowly barback and hop in Calvin’s shiny red pickup truck. On the way we drink apple soda and eat candy bars from a machine.

Calvin and I fall through his bed while his boyfriend changes into voyeur’s clothes. But then he hops into bed too, hacks up a lung, and says he’s the more oral one. I try to be open-minded, but ennui is apparent and he gets all huffy and goes into the kitchen to sulk. Calvin tells me I have to give him more attention. I can’t lie, so I respond in a low whisper that I’m afraid of the dark. But when I think about it, the thought of Calvin sleeping next to me makes me riled and the thought of Calvin’s boyfriend waking me up every 30 minutes with a guttural cough makes me recoil, so I politely ask Calvin to drive me home in his pickup truck. Outside it’s storms of fire and steel. Suns with stars revolving round them, and every sun keeping its distance. With my head in the crux of his arm, I burn, shriek, turn into a brand, blacken, and turn to ashes. I let myself be slowly covered first with dust and then with earth, seeds, and moss. I leave behind nothing but my jawbone and teeth and finally become a little funeral mound with flowers growing on it and nothing inside.

He smells like Evergreen.

Second-Hand Blue

by James Greer

I'm going to meet my death on the Rue du Nil, in Paris, in exactly one hundred days. The Rue du Nil is more an alley than a street, and dead-ends at a brick wall. There are no windows or doors at street level anywhere near the wall. It's the perfect place to trap someone. To trap myself. To die.

You might reasonably ask, "Why such measures? Yes, you drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl decades ago, but those were crazy days, there were mitigating factors, and in the years before and since, your contributions to world culture have been of such magnitude that they overwhelm that grievous lapse. Do you really feel so guilty, even now, that you want to die?"

I don't want to die; and I don't feel guilty. Not for that incident, anyway. As for the arguments regarding extenuating circumstances and the value of my work, these are things lawyers and critics, or to be more and less precise, judges, must consider, but not me. I am going to die because I have to die, and I will die in the Rue de Nil because that is where my destiny waits, impatiently, and one cannot outwit destiny.

My biography is incredible, even to me. The things I saw as a child, the things I did as an adult: horrible, wonderful, horrible, but useless. Perhaps inevitable, perhaps even necessary, but useless, all the same. Because in the end I am going to die, in a cobblestoned alley in Paris, in the small hours of the morning, at the hands of an imaginary mob. Should they carry torches? I haven't decided. Torches might be a bit much, but the lighting would produce a nice effect. Shadows on the wall, marching inexorably closer. Shot correctly, edited properly, the scene could be marvelously suspenseful.

But then it would not be true, and death must always be true. Quick, merciless, and banal. I will crouch in fetal position, bunching my tiny frame in what will look like infantile terror, wearing borrowed jeans and a sea-blue windbreaker with a broken zipper, and pray for a painless demise. I don't believe in God, but I predict that I will pray, nonetheless.

I'm not telling you my fate to elicit pity, nor do I want anyone to try to talk me out of going to the Rue du Nil on the appointed day. I'd be especially miffed if someone were to try to intervene and prevent my death. Inutile, anyway, because you don't know when I'm writing this, so you can't know when my hundred days are up. Could be tomorrow. Could be a hundred days from now. Or any day in between. Could, quite obviously, have already happened. My advice: leave me and my death alone. It's a personal matter. It doesn't concern anyone else.

I will share with you a story that will help you understand. It's a story no less for being true, and it's true no less for being set far in the future. The closer I get to death, the clearer the future becomes. I've always had a knack for seeing ahead, as well as for seeing behind. But I've never before seen ahead with such clarity, whereas my view of the past has become distorted by the stained glass of memory. Have you noticed that if you stare at anything long enough it loses its apparent quiddity, and transforms into a mirror?

*

There are one hundred varieties of love, and five hundred varieties of hate. These are exact numbers. I've spent my life calculating and tabulating these varieties, so you can be assured of the accuracy of my headcount. Do you know the song "Thin Line Between Love and Hate"? Beautiful song, except: wrong. There's no line between love and hate. It's like crossing the border from France into Switzerland by train. No one checks your passport, there are no customs officials to search your luggage, but you are in fact changing countries. Whole sets of laws and regulations and cultural mores and even languages alter invisibly, and if you put one foot wrong you end up in jail, or in a spacious and comfortably-appointed chalet.

It's the same with love and hate. You cross the border from one to another unaware that anything's happened, and nothing, really, has happened, except that everything you say and do is now governed by a completely different set of rules, and enforced by a different authority. This can be bewildering, and just as with my entirely fictitious France/Switzerland example, you can end up in a kind of jail for no sensible offense.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse! How many times has this bromide been repeated by a sententious robed figure sitting on a high bench above a cowering culprit whose so-called crime was having once, years ago, picked a small flower with delicate blue petals that grew in abundance in his own country but which was, all unknown to him, a rare and protected species in this foreign place. No matter that he picked the flower out of love, and gave it as a gesture of love to a dear friend. The friend had been mortified, had blown the whistle (in this country everyone carries whistles), and he had been forced to run from an angry mob bearing pitchforks (it was daylight, so torches would be absurd).

Because there are five times as many varieties of hate as there are of love, it would seem to follow that it is easier to go astray in that vasty dark country than in the relatively small, sun-dappled land of love. However: no. Hate, a product of misapplied reason, is a lawless and anarchic state, whereas love, ruled by rigorous passion, has had to develop a complex and even contradictory set of regulations, and its borders are not clearly marked. And because it's a much envied and sought after destination, it is strictly policed. Let me illustrate.

*

1. The Country of Love, Part One

As Anna drew close to the earthberg certain features became clear. Giant scars along its face, vertical rakes as if by talons of an impossible bird. Evidence of great impact along the shore. This was no easy landing, thought Anna. We felt the shudder in the village. The Elders knew what the shudder meant, though to most they did not explain, or gave some other explanation. There was a secret vote. I was elected. The election was presented as a choice, but I had no choice. Not inside me, where the choice had been made long before I was elected. I had a sense of: finally. She may count herself lucky who just once has contracted the purposefulness that makes life and death worth bearing.

Nearer the earthberg Anna lost perspective and could not gauge its mass, though more details emerged. Trailing ropes. Ladders hammered into jutting rock. A horizontal maple. Here and there, the glow of some kind of light from within some kind of cave. Wondrous beyond imagining. A hive thrumming with unseen activity.

Anna approached a semi-circle of poles on which had been hung lanterns, signaling the end of a long, similarly-lit boardwalk that led to a small entrance at the foot of the earthberg. Three men stood in the pool of lantern-light, their shadows long and inconstant.

"I'm Anna," she said, upon reaching them. The men had unreadable expressions, neither hostile nor friendly nor exactly neutral.

"Most likely," replied the largest of the three, in a thick accent Anna had never heard.

"I’ve come from the village through the woods," she said.

"Does the village have a name?" asked the large one. "We were just discussing, Pyotr and Nikolai and me, what part of the world we might have stumbled upon."

"We've always just called it the village. But I have heard some of the Elders use the word Norfolk for the larger area."

The large one snorted. "Norfolk. That’s of no use. There’s a thousand Norfolks, and most of them aren’t even in the north. Not anymore, at least."

"Please, sir, might I ask, how many are in your company?"

"You speak a kind of Anglo," the large one mused. "Which means, as I was telling Pyotr, we might be anywhere."

"Sure enough we’re somewhere," interposed the one who must be Pyotr.

"I am called John," said the large one. "We travel with one hundred souls, though we started with five hundred. Many of us are sick, and we are in sore need of fresh supplies."

"Might I come on board your ship?"

The three men began to laugh.

"Ship!"

Anna smiled, perplexed.

"This hunk of rock’s no ship, kid, we cannot steer nor guide her. We call her Quoi qu'il en soit."

"Then you are Franks."

"No, we are Rus. Quoi qu'il en soit is Frankish, yes. Its name in our native language... I don’t even remember. Anyway."

"Is there water here, and food?" asked the one who must be Nikolai.

Anna did not answer. Instead, she turned to look at the boardwalk. "Might I come on board?" she repeated.

"Where are my manners?" said the one called John. "We may be scavengers, but we’re still men. Follow the lights to old Tom. He’ll take you topside."

A mountain is most impressive from its base, thought Anna. At its height you lose the majesty. And the threat, however ridiculous, of being crushed.

At the end of the boardwalk was a metal door with a small window, lighted from the inside. A man’s face appeared in the lighted window, startling Anna. The door slid open, heavily, and she found herself staring at a small, thin man with a heavily creased forehead. He wore jeans and a faded blue windbreaker with a broken zipper, and was covered in dust from the crown of his dusty curls to the scuffed leather of his dusty workboots. When he smiled his skin cracked, and in the cracks was more dust, and dust between the gaps in his brown teeth.

"Going up?" he asked.

"I think so," said Anna.

"There is only up." He stepped back from the door and motioned Anna inside. "My name is Tom."

Anna walked through the doorway, into a very small, dimly-lit metal room. "I’m Anna," she said.

"Anna," repeated Tom. "Hello, Anna." He pushed a button on a panel near the entrance and the heavy door slid closed with a satisfying clunk.

"Hold on," said Tom, pressing another button on the panel. There was a loud creaking noise, and the whirring of gyros, and the room lurched upwards at a frightening speed. Anna cried out and ducked to the pimpled metal floor, clutching a handrail. She pulled the hood of her blue cloak, borrowed from her sister, over her head.

2. The Country of Hate, Part One

A clot of darkness inside muted light of sunset, just above the far hills. These are the bad angels, gathering in gloomy bunches like poisonous grapes, purple with blood. Leafless trees scratch with upstretched arms at scudding clouds, and in the growing mist barn owls perch on lower branches, scanning the radio air for the slow heartbeat of approaching doom. The bad angels grasp in their grasping claws the agenda of nightmares, larded with entrails of dead shrubs and bits of styrofoam and brick. You roll the heavy door across its track and fasten tight the locks. You know that nothing made of something can stop the angels, who are nothing. You've looked them in the eye and seen the end of time. And still you roll the door, and still you light the fat candle, and the wax drips green on polished marble floor: you turn and find yourself inside a tomb, which is where you keep the rain, for safety.

But you are not safe. The rain cannot keep you bright for long, and your tears will only fall, unseen. There are hallways here that lead to holy places, but all the holy places have been destroyed, out of love, out of a desire to love that burns without burning — a plague of love, a cholera of kindness. Dig a ditch and wait for pistol shot in back of neck. Or is that too romantic? Would you prefer a meaner death? Shriveling for years in the data basement, in an old hard drive, dispersing bit by bit on the ocean floor of knowledge, frozen, unexplored, blind, pressed flat by calamitous gravity.

The Periplus and Rhapta. Arab and Indian traders looking for gold in the first of thirty long centuries. Why fear the means of grace, expel yourself from your own garden? Difficult to till, ravaged by bad angels, daily exposed to the secrets of flight. The last thing out of the chest, children, was a very fragile creature, its tiny hairs still slick with afterbirth. You must do your best to keep it alive.

3. The Country of Love, Part Two

The elevator shuddered to a halt, and the heavy door slid open. Tom gestured for her to exit, and Anna stepped onto a flat, barren surface, mostly red dirt, cratered in places, sparsely grassed, with a few sickly ash trees. Under one of these, a hundred paces away, gathered twenty or thirty men, women, and children, listening to an Elder with a scarred and wrinkled face, long white hair, and a scraggly, untamed beard. She went closer, in order to hear.

"In with the good, out with the bad," the Elder was saying. "But it’s not air of which the teacher speaks. Something more valuable. Essence. Out with ignorance, in with wisdom. Knowledge of the self means knowledge of things hidden in plain sight. When you can see what’s in front of you, these hidden things will be revealed. When you let out what is in you, that is creative. Held inside, these uncreated forms living in darkness will consume you like the fires of hell.

"The aspirant must work in solitude, because only then comes the ability to know yourself. Without distraction. Without guidance, except that which answers the bell of the mind. The two words which interest us most are therefore gnosis and logos. Gnosis translated as insight or vision, and logos, as proclaimed by the teacher, who reserves the term for himself, represents the highest form of being: truth.

"Did we create the sun or did the sun create us? Or did something else create both, or have we always existed, but in different, possibly less cumbrous, form and content? Or — do we exist in different form even now but lack the means to see? If you do not know the manner of your coming you cannot know how to go."

The Elder caught sight of Anna lurking on the fringe, and stopped talking. Everyone turned to look at her. A murmur of curiosity spread through the crowd.

The Elder held up one hand for silence.

"A guest! Welcome! By what name are you called?"

Anna was disconcerted to be addressed directly, but stepped forward.

"My name is Anna. But I'm afraid you're mistaken. I'm not a guest."

"What, then?"

Anna opened her borrowed cloak to reveal a heavy vest of some explosive, wired together and attached to a detonator, which she now held in her right hand.

"I was elected by the Elders of my village."

No one moved, or seemed particularly alarmed. The Elder sighed.

"I see. May I ask why?"

"We have a book," replied Anna. "It contains our laws, and prescribes certain actions that we must take to preserve ourselves."

The Elder nodded thoughtfully. "We, too, have a book, which foretold your coming. It's called The Book of Life. Does your book have a name?"

"Usually we just call it the Book. But I've also heard it called the Book of Love."

She shut her eyes and pressed the detonator.

4. The Country of Hate, Part Two

Everybody wants my blood. The helicopters shooting diamonds into the bluffs at night, the Russian nurses, the white-coats, the sloppy sailors with buckets of fish guts, preening on the wharf. Or perhaps I should say: there’s no one who does not want my blood. Not the inmates downtown in their leather cell, sitting side by side by side by side, not the loser seagulls, not the seeing-eye toadies who peer through slats at time of day. Not one of these does not want my blood. That is why I'm covered in bruises, from constant poking with needles. That's why I am so anemic.

Thomas Quin has pig snot for brains. What runs through his arteries I wouldn’t want to guess, but nothing good. Once I saw him pricked with a dagger and something green spurted from the wound. (I will admit that I pricked him.)

To what purpose he does the ravaging and so forth? To what purpose at all? The countryside is stupid, infested with stupidities, plied every day with more stupidities, by various means, some popular and open and free. Thomas Quin knows all that, but he doesn’t care a damn except for the well-being of his flowers. In the meantime I am running short on blood, and there are only so many stupidities I can reasonably stand.

I need to stop Thomas Quin. Well, not stop him but instead turn his attention to the stupidities. From the flowers to the stupidities, which are like flowers in that there is no end to their blooming. Thomas Quin, his warlike spirit properly directed, could stop the stupidities. Could attack them with his curved sword — there’s an exact word for the type of sword Thomas Quin uses, perhaps the word is scimitar, perhaps not — and decollate the stupidities, blood spurting in rufous fountains over land and sea and high into the oxygenated sky, past gravity’s pull, through the atmosphere and gathered in ruby globules by the flexibly inflexible rules of physics, floating forever in vast: space.

But a man who bends his mind to flowers is not easily swayed. Il n’existe pas un homme qui can resist the lure of botany — the sweetest science, super-succulent and dangerous to the sanity. Jag älskar dig, spoke Karl The Father. Who, contrary to expectations, lived a mostly placid and self-satisfied life, crowned with crowns, and in addition had interests outside botany extending even to anthropology — the science of cartoons.

The one does not contradict the other: existence and non-existence. These are complementary ideas, albeit frivolous and entirely beside the point of what Thomas Quin would call "bleeding." Everything about Quin is a hybrid. The man himself — his ridiculous name — blends seeds of meaning and matter into new, unimproved forms, because he can’t leave well enough alone. And yet he searches restlessly for a perfection in nature that he cannot find in his artifice; will kill anything that tries to block the pursuit of his silly blooms.

In this way death came to our town.

*

I hope that my brief sketch of your future — which could just as easily be your past, I'm no longer convinced there's a useful distinction — shows you why I have to go to the Rue du Nil in one hundred days and meet my destiny. Everyone deserves to die, and everyone will die. It’s a question of when, that’s all. I've lost track of how many of the one hundred varieties of love and five hundred varieties of hate I have tasted, and in tasting violated; but what's the difference? It only takes one.

Strays: A Love Story

by Sandra Simonds

1a.

        I don't know why every time she walks the baby
                                                down Corinne Street
                                        on that black leash, she sees a dead squirrel.
                Nothing unusual. It's all so unusual. But this
                                        time that squirrel’s brain runs from
                mouth—red rivulets. Planets in dirt. She scoops some up, lets Dog
                                        eat off her fingers. Wife is
                                an intelligent and cultivated young woman.
                        Now why does Dog run to Wisconsin, find a
                                        horse ranch family with a daughter named
                                        Ellena who is fond of The Italian by Ann Radcliffe?
                                        Daughter Ellena reads to Dog at night.

                        Every afternoon Wife's nipples leak titanium as
                                soon as she reads the berserk
                        passage in The Italian— where Vincentio is acquitted— to young Cashier
                                        at the bookstore. How she misses Dog!
                                        “I received an email yesterday in which I was instructed to
                                                register for a website then email fifteen people the cure for
                                                sickle cell anemia within the next two hours or
                                                it said I would die,” she tells Cashier.

                                        Moreover, she is frightened.
                                        Each night she thinks,
                                                        Answer.
                                        No one. Answer.
                                        Her beauty: it’s a carbon copy of squirrel eyes, an unearthed
                                                Etruscan vase if it breaks down the middle
                                                        down the middle and you trace the zebra fissures
                                                on its surface with your forefinger.
                                                                        Easy to say “Dog runs to Wisconsin.”
                                                                Someone say something. My books.
                                                                        No one is going
                                                                        to buy my handmade books.

1b.

                                        Tipsy Wife in love with young Cashier,
                                        (here's to you). You decide not to send any
                                        emails because it’s your death and you don't

                                        care to be bullied into it.
                                        Onward!
                                        Now Mother calls.
                                        Terrible timing.
                                        Excuse the mess.
                                        “Tipsy. I'm tipsy. No I’m drunk on Mint Juleps and Dog

                                        is missing,” you tell Mother.

                        Her answer? “Dog was unpleasant and
                        I know you know he shit all over the house.”

                        Stars in Wisconsin, 100 times 500 times 100 times 500 times 100 times 500
                                times 8 of them
                        tumble over
                        one another until they are ground down, until they
                        ring out
                        yesterday's fine sulfurous powder.

2a.

And then Cashier begins to
        catch on to Wife's advances.
                Oh really?
        Zeroing in on that cut forefinger
                        yelp has never been his
                game of choice. He doesn't want to give away that he is in high school,
and that he is bullied and has recently thought about hanging himself with a thin breeze.
                “My chances of dying each day” he googles, and the first thing that comes up?
                Ellena has a 500/5,100,500,100 chance of dying from a shark attack.

2b.

Tonight he roams the aisles of CVS looking for...aha...
high potency acne medication. Tonight he puts that medication
in his trench coat and walks out wanting
        nothing less than to get caught. Catch me if you can.

*

“Give up,” Wife thinks for the 100th time, on her evening walk. Wife
sees Sparrow flying from
                a newspaper mailbox.
        Light Sparrow carries away an article about a cold case in which a
        thirteen-year-old girl was raped and run over
                eight times with a truck.
        Rick Bass, the cop, says the crime could not have been committed by one person.

                        She imagines Sparrow
                                understands sorrow but when Sparrow smashes its head
                        right into another sparrow in a freak mid-air sparrow accident,
                                        really, she can feel
                                                        only remorse for her imagination.

*

Until now Husband spends most of his time in the meat shop,
        nursing a cold. He has been mute since April of last year,
deaf since the age of fourteen. He has had

enough of Wife's odd behavior. Tonight he brings home a
        donkey and a lamb. “There's starfish in the lamb's coat just
beyond his head.” says Wife.
        “Yes there is,” Husband confirms.
                “A depth catches me,” she says and as
                        easily as saying it she
                        pulls out the starfish which
                                turns black like carbon.
                                Hush, it says.

3a.

When Dog writes Wife a letter which begins, “You had better watch
        out,” and ends with
                “Long gone. My best wishes,
                        Very Novemberly,
(enclosed with my 500^th howl),
signed, sealed, delivered, your former loyal canine… Milton,”

        Milton does not bark. He explains how life on the farm suits
                a dog more than life in suburbia and how angry he is that the yucky,
      yellow baby has upstaged him. It is underlined in red ink.

Husband has never cared for Dog but is happy to know that he
        uses his time so wisely with his new family. Dog’s letters are
                        never enough, Wife thinks, and falls asleep.

        Time-stamped. Amorphous. There is no return address.

3b.

O Wife, you hypochondriac! Heart beating too fast, chest
wheezing, baking soda pale skin.

Establish disease, seek
instant fixes,
        medical advice,
poison for your winding staircase night terrors, gastroenteritis, finger nail loss, Rabies? Leprosy?

O Wife get the doctor to prescribe
Valium or an antidepressant that boosts several neurotransmitters. How they fire!

Eerie is the fungal brain. Brain, O Wife, is a front.

Rice. Wheat. Gum. Ban them from your diet.
        I want you to try 500 grams of this free-range donkey meat for your backache.
                Should you shiver,
        hold a cube of ice to your forehead and recite Psalm 100.
                        Eat only fermented organic figs mixed with ear-tips.
                            Don't bathe in anything but mochi and millet. The brain's Western Front.

4.

To say Wife misses Dog like a parrot misses its clipped, talkative wings would be an understatement.
                Hold on. Cashier and Wife have made love in the bathroom at the bookstore.
Ear parts uncurl: it's creepy but a pleasant. Hold on. It’s a rainbow sprinkled donut.

She might get arrested, it occurs to Wife, like those high school teachers on America’s Most Wanted.
                Kiss skull. It freaks her out but not enough to change anything. Cashier has to

        unearth The Italian from the squirrel eye dirt, then go to band practice.

        Lonely Wife doesn't ask what instrument he plays. Kiss skull, skin fool.
        Loony Wife imagines the drums or the saxophone?

Sixteen years and her son will be as old as Cashier, this Jell-O and bones.

Poor Cashier plays the flute, has lied about band practice. Here’s your $1.00 copy of Romeo and Juliet.
                In fact, today he must find the right medicine for acne.

Nice pharmacist discussing the pill with a girl from his school. Cashier wants a tattoo that
says “Peace on Earth” in Chinese symbols, written across his pelvis.

5a.

My world is shaped like a palm frond, says Husband. It is
        oblong, a malady of sharp bird
trills. It is angina. Damned impossible to titrate enough

hot plant scent from these cumulonimbus clouds to make a perfume for her.
                Egg life. In wait.
                    Rich cholesterol cures I

    will not invent in time, so how will I get her back?
                And the idea, of course, is to grow meat on trees—to grow

steak, ribs, to grow soup bones with
        a deep mahogany marrow, drumsticks, wings.

                Timing. It's all about timing.

        Right away,
                    after work, I toil with
        giants in my lavender-walled laboratory. I read the letters of Pierre La Monke,
                18th century alchemist.

                        Come on onyx, you're on to something!

*

        Gust of 500 eyes: It begins to rain orange robes
in Wisconsin where Dog helps the other displaced monks build a shrine, offer
        raisins at the foot of a statue of a god with fifty heads.

*

            Look here, Mr. Fortune 500, Does not a donkey shank grow from that oriental-fan bonsai spruce?

6.

        Then Wife begins to sleep with her son's uh oh Pediatrician.
                Washed out waiting room. Two mothers exchange stories of their

            irritating children who battle ADHD.

                Sit still. Uh oh, the kids spill their candies all over the white
                        tile floor. They roll, scatter,
                                ignite. Wife begins to wonder:
            Now, am I cheating on uh oh Cashier, Husband or Pediatrician?

                        Go away, mothers.

        The Pediatrician, dull as low fat yogurt, never talks about alchemy like
                Husband or Albert Camus's
                        ethical imperative like Cashier but when he cries
                                “Never let me go, dog,” after they have sex with
                each other in one of the examining rooms
while Baby is crawling around, considering all that has happened with
                    Milton's departure, in an
                odd way, it endears Wife to Pediatrician. Wife always leaves the office
                  underwear twisted, smelling metallic like rain.

        Tonight she writes a book called “The History of Analytic Geometry: The First Hundred Years”
                Her eighth line? “Mighty are these uh oh numbers, joined with art like iron rods.” 

A Note on the Form:

Most of the parts of this piece of writing are acrostics using lines from the poet, George Oppen. . Each letter of the Oppen line is the first letter of my line. The following lines are used from George Oppen poems:

Part 1A: “I don't mean he despairs, I mean he does not”

Part 1 B “The context is history”

Part 2A: “A cozy game”

Part 2B: “Things alter, surrounded by a depth”

Part 3A: “Wolves may hunt”

Part 3 B: “O we impoverished”

Part 4: “The skull spins”

Part 5A: “Mother was a tragic girl”

Part 5B: “Choke on words”

Part 6: “Twisting the new mouth”

About

In February of 2010, we had a contest so that one lucky writer could receive 100 books from Dalkey Archive. The theme: love stories. The overall winner was Kristi McGuire with her story "Revising the Pharmacist in Love." We hope you enjoy the winner and finalist's stories as much as we did.