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CONTENTS

Help Wanted

"Eft” or “Epic"

Mary

At the Rue des Boulangers Bridge Café

FAQ

The Beard of God

Crown Prince

The Half-Sister

Dear Miss Wonderment

The Film Column

Mounds Keep Appearing

In Kansas

I Heard That

Lord Goji's Wedding

The Life of Saint Serena

My First Lover

Secret Histories of Household Objects

It Tastes Bitter

Jon Langford, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds

THE WELL-DRESSED WOLF:

Dear Aunt Gwenda

Nicholas

gray's boadicea: unlikely patron saints, no. 4

The Truck

Writers Who Writ Large & Small

* * * *

Gavin J. Grant: Still.

Kelly Link: Outtern. Tap.

Jedediah Berry: Intern. Distilled.

Gwyneth Merner: Intern. Effervescent.

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, No.15 January 2005. This zine usually goes out each June and November from Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw $5 per single issue or $20/4. This time apologies for the recent US election which froze the zine solid. Much chipping and melting has led to the appearance of this in your hands. May the president be similarly chipped away. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. For external use only. This issue suitable for vegetarians (thanks, Henry) but produced in a facility where nuts, etc. are processed. As ever, thanks. Printed by Quantum Graphix, 2130 Watterson Trail, Louisville, KY 40299 502-493-5933.

Help Wanted

Karen Russell

1. Mer-Girl

The Mer-girl's dreams are full of salt-diluted longing.

"Quit thrashing around,” her husband grumbles, poking her awake. “You woke me up again."

His tongue sea-slugs against hers, an old invertebrate habit. She misses the thrill of those first kisses, back when he filled her lungs with unfamiliar air.

"You taste like purple smoke,” she whispers, “and interrupted dreams."

"You taste like toothpaste,” he says, rolling over. “Goodnight."

Every night, the Mer-girl brushes the sea-foam taste from her tongue. She buffs her scales with loofah until they flake off in iridescent ribbons. She picks tiny starfish and sea lice out of her long hair. Their dessicated bodies line the edge of the enamel tub.

"Get a haircut,” her husband suggests, watching as she braids dead eels through her ponytail. “And get a real job."

* * * *

The Mer-Girl gets a job at Aqua Tots. She teaches babies how to swim. The idea is that the babies will remember the aqueous warmth of the womb, their fetal gill-slits.

"You'll see, Amanda-Stacie,” the Director smiles. “You've got to start them while they're young, before they forget how to float on their backs."

The Mer-Girl tries flipping the babies on their backs to test the Director's theory. She can see that the Director has exaggerated these babies’ capabilities.

At Aqua Tots, there are black babies and white babies and Hilola, a honey-eyed Hawaiian baby. There are fat, taffeta-bright babies, and jaundiced babies that the Mer-girl cradles like sickle moons. All of the babies possess the same aptitude for swimming, which is to say, none at all. The Mer-girl is appalled.

Recently, Aqua Tots has started offering a service called Drown-Proofing. This involves dunking the babies under the water, again and again, until they learn how to hold their breath. They are slow, sputtering learners.

When their mothers aren't looking, the Mer-Girl tugs at the webbing of their tiny feet.

"Kick,” she whispers furiously. “Kick."

* * * *

At night, the Mer-girl scans the Classified ads. She works on her resume. She doesn't have many marketable credentials, although she does have an advanced degree. It's a secret education, one her husband knows nothing about. He likes to brag that he reeled her in on the first cast. The Mer-girl lets him. She doesn't mention her diploma from the Undersea School of Seduction. Anyways, it's not like she was a stellar student. The Mer-girl got placed in the Remedial classes.

"Don't flop right into the boat!” her teachers chided. “Do you want people to think you're some kind of floozy?"

At school, they learned how to smile demurely while flinging their bodies against the splintery hulls of ships. The Mer-girl used to get scolded for her bad attitude. When the sailors finally lowered their nets, she'd yawn with disappointment.

"You're supposed to act surprised,” the teachers lectured, “and helpless.” They made her study goggle-eyed fish for inspiration.

In the Honors classes, the more accomplished Mer-girls practiced churning their arms in tandem.

"You must create a coy sea-foam,” the teachers explained, “to cover all of your scaly horror beneath the water."

All of the students had to memorize the score to the Siren Song. The Mer-girl used to get confused and substitute lyrics from old showtunes. At dusk, they practiced singing it to easy targets: widowed sea kayakers, science teachers on singles cruises. Compositionally, it's not a very impressive piece—although there is one tricky part with a tambourine. But it worked on her husband.

The Mer-Girl has felt contemptuous of him ever since.

Even so, she still dreams about the first time she lay splayed out on his boat. Her withered fins twitch at the memory of it. That invisible line, tugging her out of her element. Then the quick ascent through skeins of orange light, bubbles streaming off her skin. Wild-eyed wanting, the joyful writhing on the hook, and that amphibious moment when she first broke the surface of the water. For a moment she swung perfectly suspended, the sun on her face, her torso cleaved by cold water. Back when her whole body was an indecision.

Throw me back—shallow-gasping in his shadow on the deck—Don't throw me back.

* * * *

2. Bat Girl

The Bat Girl frowns and thinks for a moment, scratching at the membrane between her mammalian wings.

"I graduated Summa Cum Laude, and I have years of relevant work experience,” she says. “Also, I'm a bat.” She hopes it doesn't come across like she's bragging.

"Vampire bat?” the interviewer asks warily.

"No, I'm a pollinator."

The interviewer nods without looking up, scanning the Bat Girl's application.

The Bat Girl never went to college. Her references are complete fabrications. There's a honey-suckled stamen caught between her teeth.

"You're hired,” the interviewer smiles. “When can you start?"

The Bat Girl works as a marriage counselor at the Caverns of Spousal Reconciliation. They give her one of the large corner caves with stalactite-chandeliers, lit by the dim effulgence of guano. The Bat Girl is the resident Sonar Therapist. She measures the distance between couples by listening to their echoes. The couples bounce accusations off one another—You-never-you-don't-you-can't-you-won't. The stalactites gleam above them like bared fangs. She rocks from the rooftop, eyes shut, and lets the acoustics of anger reverberate through her.

The Bat Girl has no formal training as a Sonar Therapist, but she has figured out that the actual words don't matter. Her tawny body shivers with their subterranean echoes. They drill into her ears like red-black spikes, a syncopated sadness: You stranger, you charlatan. You don't love me anymore.

It's exhausting work. Sometimes she wishes she'd taken that job as a silent-movie usher. From nine-to-five, she tries to steer the couples towards each other. She uses her echolocation to alert them to certain obstacles: buried grudges, old flames. She shouts upside-down encouragement from the rafters.

"Love is work!” she yells. “Fight the currents of discontent! Keep paddling towards each other!"

Then she watches, helpless, as they capsize on dark waves of sound.

The Bat Girl declines her colleagues’ insincere invitations to go out for tacos. She doesn't have much in common with the other therapists. The girls in the office all like to get tanked on Coco-tinis, and walk around upright. They split guac and chips, and place bets on which of their male patients will turn out to be bigamists.

"Gee, no thanks,” the Bat Girl always says. “I brought my lunch.” She points at a sugary bag of peonies, her pink nose twitching.

During her lunch hour, she spreads her thin wings and goes blind-flying around the empty office. She does solo airsaults, rejoicing in the ultrasonic frequency of solitude. She bathes in the blue sound of her own voice.

Echo-la-la.

In the sweet relief of darkness, the Bat Girl sings.

Today, the Bat Girl still has one appointment before her break. Her eleven o'clock comes in, carrying what appears to be a giant tuna in a honey-blonde wig.

"This is my wife,” he sighs, slumping her onto the floor of the cave. “She's depressed. We just moved to the Midwest. I'm an inland sort of man myself, but she's having a hard time adjusting."

"I am not,” she sighs in a sleep-bubbled voice. “I am a very happy person."

Then she proceeds to burst into tears.

The Mer-girl's sadness goes rippling through the cave at disheartening decibels. The Bat Girl gives her a blank, sympathetic smile, devoid of all judgment. Then she uses one clawed toe to scratch off the “Longshot” box on the clipboard suspended from the roof. She hopes her patients don't notice that she's placed her tiny claws over her ears.

"Oh boo-goddamn-hoo,” her husband growls. “I guess I'm the big villain now for earning us a living? I guess you'd prefer to be hitching rides on manatees, instead of driving our fully automatic family sedan?” The Bat Girl can see that his bald head is sweating. “I guess it's too much to expect you to hold down a part-time, minimum-wage..."

"I guess I'm having a baby,” the Mer-Girl interrupts. “And I don't want her to grow up marooned in a, a ... shitty suburb of Cheyboygan!"

The man stares at his wife. The Bat Girl gulps down the momentary silence, filled with guilty relief. She wonders which one of them baby will take after. She rubs her sensitive eyes. When she opens them, she realizes that they are both staring at her, waiting for her assessment.

"This relationship can work,” the Bat Girl warbles without conviction. “Love is work."

The Mer-girl gazes up at her with one lidless fish eye. “Then I'd like to use my sick days, please."

* * * *

3. Centaur Girl

The Centaur Girl finds seasonal work at the carnival, giving rides to children. It's a lousy job. They pay her in candied apple cores and bags of stuffing from the glassy-eyed bears. The Centaur Girl gets stuck carrying the fat children, the ones too heavy to ride the Shetland ponies. Her boss, the Carnival Barker, is a diabolical woman named Maisy Dotes. She wears a straw hat and carries a whip. She looks like an old sow, a slobbery ear of corn dangling from her lips.

"Don't worry,” she reassures the Centaur Girl at the job interview. “The whip's just for show."

Then she cracks the whip across the Centaur Girl's knuckles, leaving a bright red welt.

The Centaur Girl has a hard time fitting in at work. The magician's assistants spend their breaks in the trailer, daubing at their pedicures with long rainbow scarves. They look down at her unshod hooves and give her a pained smile. The Shetland ponies won't talk to her. They roll their eyes at her stringy hair. They pass nickering judgment on her horsehide, which tapers into paper-thin skin that hides nothing. They go gamboling around after hours to flirt with the locals, smelling of sweet manure and clover.

Centaur Girl spends after hours alone in her trailer. She smells like kidsweat, and ineluctable girl.

During the pony rides, Chumley, Maisy Dotes’ idiot son-in-law leads the Shetlands around a worn dirt track. The Centaur Girl's cheeks burn with shame. She envies the other ponies, who trot after Chumley with a dumb animal loyalty. The Centaur Girl doesn't even like carrots, and she's conscious of the stick. Still, she follows him around. It's just a job, she whistles through gritted teeth.

Some days, around the forty-fifth revolution, she'll decide that she's in love with Chumley. Her heart swells with a gelded longing as she watches him scratch his human ass. Then, by the time she's made it around the track again, she's fallen back in hate with him. She's not sure why she flip-flops this way. She supposes it's a strategy for passing the time. It beats swatting flies, anyhow.

The Centaur Girl keeps getting passed over for promotion. Her earnest neighing makes the children snicker. It negates all of her equine pretensions. It's too heartfelt, too human. And she lacks the ponies’ quadruped equilibrium. Her body wobbles gracelessly from the waist up. Whenever her tubby riders dig their sneakers into her flanks, the Centaur Girl stumbles. Her hands are caked with blood, and the orange stubs of losing raffle tickets. Pretzel salt gets in her wounds. If she's in a generous mood, Maisy Dotes will wrap them in gauzy strips of cotton candy.

Today, she is staunching a spot of blood on her right flank with a strawberry ice cream cone. Little pink and red droplets dot the ground. When she looks up, she sees that there's been some kind of hold up in the pony ride. A Mer-girl is standing in line, arguing with Chumley. The Mer-girl is holding a plastic bag with a goldfish, the kind you win at the Dunk-a-Lunk. Both she and the goldfish look intensely unhappy.

"I took the day off work,” she says. “Please, let me on. I'll take my chances. I just want to go for a ride."

"Sorry, lady, no dice.” Chumley shakes a fat finger at her belly, which billows out over her tail. “Pregnant women and people with spinal injuries aren't allowed on the ponies.” He points at a cardboard cut-out of an impish boy next to the CAUTION sign. “'Sides, you must be this human to ride."

The Centaur Girl gives her a sympathetic shrug, but the Mer-Girl doesn't see it. She is already taking mincing steps towards the parking lot, standing on the tips of her fins. The Centaur Girl wonders where the Mer-Girl works. She wonders if she'll take a seaside maternity leave. The Centaur Girl feels a sharp stab of envy in her own empty gut. The Vet has confirmed that she's as sterile as a mule. She'd be curious to know what mystery is incubating inside the Mer-girl's womb.

After the fairgrounds close, the Centaur Girl always lingers. She pretends to sweep up the colorful balloon scraps with her tail. The other carnies trickle out one by one:

"Bye Centaur Girl!” says the Singer of Unsung Songs.

"Bye, Centaur Girl!” says the Human Candle.

"Bye Centaur Girl” until she is nearly bursting with impatience.

Then she goes clip-clopping down the empty boardwalk to the dark, motionless Merry-go-Round. She trots in slow circles beneath the unlit bulbs, her tail swishing merrily. The Centaur Girl nuzzles the painted lions and the ceramic swans. She bobs up and down for effect. Sometimes she stamps her feet, and sometimes she claps her hands. She whinnies unconvincingly in the half-light of dusk.

* * * *

4. Girl-girl

Child labor laws prevent her from finding an occupation. In the economy of the womb, her eyes are shut in a dreamless sleep. Her body is an indecision. She's still floating on her back, unemployed.

[Back to Table of Contents]

"Eft” or “Epic"

Sarah Micklem

An extant fragment of The Lay of Roebland, translated by Dr. Simone Menthaler, with annotations by the translator.

Dobe evek y

An nolish bren o toft

Ovan ekven oblish

Y ony spen e stoft

The warrior1 smiled at2 her3

She bade him step over the threshold

And under the lintel4

Her eyes cast downward5

* * * *

1. Dobe: a warrior who supplies his own equipage but has pledged fealty to a greater lord in a time of need. The word is in the active modality, indicating he is armed and armored. In context with the subsequent word I suggest he is wearing a half helmet which conceals his eyes, such as the one recently excavated near Darvon.

2. Evek: a smile where the muscles around the eyes are not tightened as they are in most kinds of smiles; the lips curve without baring the teeth. This smile has no humor in it, but rather menace and possibly mendacity. If one agrees, however, that the warrior is wearing a helmet and therefore the eyes are not visible, one might conclude, as I do, that the smile is one of suppressed and dangerous excitement. It is inexact to translate this phrase as “he smiled at her” because the preposition folded into evek should be rendered as something more aggressive. I failed to find an English equivalent that did not sound absurd.

3. Y: the pronoun for a beautiful woman of marriagable age who is nevertheless not yet married.

4. “Over the threshold and under the lintel” is clearly a metaphor for marriage or sex. The Roeblish feminist Any Bevek has argued at length that this fragment describes a rape. I feel there is little evidence in the context to support her conclusion. See note 5.

5. Ony spen e toft: I've translated this as “eyes cast downward,” but it would be a more accurate (though unfelicitous) translation to say that the young woman who is yet unmarried takes a step aside, bends her stiff neck, and looks at the floor somewhat near the feet of the warrior. She keeps her face still but nevertheless her downcast eyes show not only modesty but fear. Here Bevek diverges from others, interpreting this as the maiden's fear for her safety, whereas most students of the epic, including myself, read it as a stimulating, anticipatory fear.

* * * *

A note on translation from Roeblish

Though I have, in the course of my career as a philologist and translator, encountered many words and concepts difficult to translate economically and gracefully into English, never have I faced difficulties as great as those I found in rendering “Eft,” believed to be a fragment of a great, lost, thirty-line epic poem from Roebland's eventful third century AD. Only one other line is extant from the Lay of Roebland, and for a translation and explication of that line, which I could never hope to better, I refer you to Dr. Alfoot's book, Meren Gon e Nesoom. The Roeblish hold these five lines to be a cherished part of their national heritage, and I know that in offering this translation I have laid myself open to their intense scrutiny. I lived among the Roeblish for fifteen years before making this attempt. It may take as many more years before I can fully understand whether I have achieved something worthy or failed utterly.

The great Jesuit linguist, Father Francisco Gargani, who first attempted a Roeblish/Italian dictionary, died exhausted after working on it for forty-five years. I am deeply grateful to him for revealing to the outside world the incredibly rich and strange language of the Roeblish. Tucked away on their northern isle, having little contact with other peoples, the Roeblish developed the language of emotion, gesture and expression to a degree unknown elsewhere. It is said the Inuit have seventeen (or two hundred, or twenty-five, or merely twelve) words for snow1 in all its manifestations, due to its importance in their culture. The Roeblish have, on the other hand, sixty-seven words for various kinds of smiles, twenty-six words for laughter, and so on, beyond my ability to enumerate. This allows them to express nuance with a precision that the writer who works only with the words available to him in English, for example, or French, Mandarin, even Japanese, can only envy.

From infancy, human beings around the world learn a universal language of facial expressions. When shown a photograph of a woman making a face of disgust, Okinawans and Ohioans alike could identify the emotion correctly. A Roeblish speaker, however, could tell if the woman was really disgusted or merely pretending, and probably could deduce whether the disgust (if real) was occasioned by a bad smell, an unpleasant taste, or something imaginary.

Infants who hear certain phonemes learn to vocalize them through imitation; those who do not hear the phonemes grow up without the ability to recognize or reproduce them. Such is the plasticity of the human brain during the narrow span of time in which the fundamentals of language are mapped in the mind. The Roeblish language has, in its subtlety, given its native speakers the perceptual tools to “read” and render in words the language of the face and body more accurately than other peoples. It has been noted by many travelers that the Roeblish are oddly inexpressive. Their facial expressions and gestures are minimal; their laughter is muted and often silent. They frequently cover their mouths when they smile. This is the face they show to strangers. The Roeblish fail to understand that they have no need to conceal themselves from us. We lack the very words to interpret their smiles or frowns; we cannot distinguish at a glance—as they can—between a liar and a truth teller.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Mary

Bruce McAllister

When the American boy lived in the little fishing village on the Ligurian Sea, he went to school with the other boys from the village. His father was an officer in the military and worked in La Spezia a few minutes north, but his mother, an educated woman who studied other cultures, did not want him to go to the base school in the Navy port of Livorno, eat hamburgers all day and be around just American kids. She wanted him, she told everyone, to learn about these people, to learn compassion; and so the boy went to the school in the little fishing village where he came to know the castle overlooking the cove, the witch with tuberculosis who lived in it, the fishermen who returned each afternoon with their colorful catch, and the dark, damp alleys full of cats and little apartments where the boy's schoolmates had been born and would, the boy suspected, always live. He came to know, too, out in the sunshine, the villas on the hillside (one of them his family's), the olive groves where the boys played after school, shooting the green wall lizards with their little blowguns, where meaner witches tried to poison the cats, and where, when his friends went home for dinner, the boy could sit and look down at the bay. There, the boy knew, Mary Shelley's husband, the poet Percy, had drowned one day l40 years ago in a storm, and, a few years before that, Mary herself had dreamed the terrible dream that became her book, one the boy knew, about a monster who wanted only to be loved.

Because the boy, too, wished to write stories, he found himself thinking of Mary Shelley when the other boys had no reason to.

The man who taught them French, Roman history, literature, geography and most of their other subjects—everything except math, which was taught by a balding woman with a bad temper, and religion, which a big priest who rode a Vespa taught them—was a tall, thin hunchback with a lisp named Montechiaro. The hunchback would stand before them in the cold room with its single light bulb and ancient furnace and, spittle gathering at the corner of his mouth, ask the boys politely to sit on their hands when he tested them orally. All of them except the American boy knew the sign language every child in the village somehow learned; and if their teacher did not make them sit on their hands, they would, when he wasn't looking, help each other with the answers. Professor Montechiaro, whose first name was Firenzio, was kind. The American boy would remember thinking this even then and wondering, though no one else seemed to, why he was a hunchback, why he had a lisp or why he was so kind. He had been born in the village of Pozzuoli, the next village over, and many of the boys in his class had known him their whole lives. They would not need to wonder.

Montechiaro knew by heart many long poems, both ones for study and ones for pleasure. Montechiaro knew The Iliad and The Odyssey, or most of them anyway. “Cantami o diva del pelide Achille/L'ira funesta che infiniti addusse. Sing to me, o goddess!” He knew the epic poem about King Theodoric that began with “Sul castello di Verona/Batte il sole a mezzogiorno,” and ended with the old, sad king taking a bath at the top of his castle. Montechiaro knew French and English poetry, too, and he knew the Italian poems in English and French as well, as if he had translated them himself; and there were some poems, because he never mentioned their authors’ names, that the boys felt sure were his, though they would certainly keep it a secret. Poems about the mind's beauty, the wind, and birds in song—those subjects poets always wrote about. But abstract ones, too, ones that were difficult to understand. One about a tempest, and a silly one, the kind they themselves would write, about a cat. “Non piu! Non meno! Just a cat.” Even when it wasn't literature they were studying on a given day, the hunchback would stop and, if it felt right (he would ask the boy's permission and they would of course give it), recite a poem, and the American boy would watch the man closely, trying to feel what their teacher was feeling, and happy when he could.

Professor Montechiaro would take them to church before final exams and let them pray to God for good grades. He would say, “This is not cheating, ragazzi. God does not mind.” When a boy had a hard time answering a question during the daily oral exams, Montechiaro would help the boy with hints and clues. He had no favorites. And when he'd catch a boy in class trying to help a friend with sign language, he would say, “You are a good friend, but now is not the time."

After school or on weekends or during the summer, their teacher would sit fishing with a little pole on the wall of the promenade area by the wharf, where the main road passed closest to the little cove, and wait for the boys from his class, one or two a day, to find him. He never caught a fish. The American boy was sure of this. He was there simply so that the boys could find him. He wasn't married. He liked a woman, people said, in Porto Venere, the next cove over—a woman named Emilia—but he never saw her. He had no children and his parents had passed away, so he had lots of time to sit on the wall with his pole and wait for any boy who wanted to talk.

The American boy watched all of this and wanted to go to him, but could not. He was a visitor and this was not his village. The American boy would stand outside the bakery or the beach-goods store and, if the hunchback was there on the wall, there would be a different boy each time. Montechiaro would be holding his pole and the boy with him might be holding one too, or not. What did they talk about? What do you talk about with your teacher when the pig production of Calabria or the length of the Po River is no longer important and you're sitting with him looking out at a bay where a famous poet drowned a long time ago and his wife dreamed a dream that became a sad, terrible book?

* * * *

One day when the boy was writing a story in class—one about a child-vampire that no other children wanted to play with—when he should have been paying attention to their teacher, who was talking about Garibaldi's March to Volturno, the hunchback stopped the class and said, “What are you writing, Hudson?” Face suddenly hot, the boy held his breath, and, deciding to be honest, said: “I am writing un racconto, una fantasia, Professore.” The hunchback looked at him and a miracle happened. He smiled. He did not scream or shout the way the boy's mother would, nor did he have contempt in his eyes, the way she sometimes did. Instead, Montechiaro continued to smile until he finally spoke. “I wish you the best of luck with your stories, Hudson. As you know, the great novelist Mary Shelley lived here for a while. If you publish your stories some day, please send them to us.” There was no sarcasm. The man was sincere. But how did he know the boy was writing stories—and more than this one? Gian Felice, his best friend, was the only one who knew. Had he sat on the wall one day after school and told him?

"Yes, I will,” the boy said, but he did not write in class the rest of the week. When he started writing again the following week, it was a story about a man who loved beauty so much that he became weak and died. He didn't write very long in class that week, just long enough that the story could be moved forward, that the people in it could become more real, but he knew their teacher was watching him as he did.

In the winter of that year, he wrote a story about a man who killed demons but then fell in love with one; and when the hunchback didn't seem to notice that he was writing in class, the boy dropped his pen twice and rustled his notebook pages until the man looked over at him, smiled and nodded at him. The boy understood: Even if their teacher wasn't looking at him, he knew the boy was writing; and this made it easier for the boy to write.

In the spring, when the school had its religious essay competition, the boy wrote about Jesus and how being gentle, kind and reasonable was difficult in a world where people thought it was a weakness to be that way. The boy's tutor—which his parents paid for and had paid for since their first summer in the village—helped him translate it and the essay tied for first place. It was only fair, the American boy's mother pointed out to everyone, that one of the boys from the village win too—not just an American visitor. One of the judges for the competition was Montechiaro, who wrote a note on the essay for the other judges (and not just its author) to see: “This is a persuasive argument for love and reason, and the author writes with heart."

* * * *

Over the summer the American boy played with his friends in the olive groves, shooting at the wall lizards and teasing the witches in their hillside huts, but he also studied with them because he had a final exam to retake for a class he hadn't passed in the spring. He had only one exam to study for while most of the other boys had two or three, but he was glad he had flunked. It was good to be with his friends, first at Pagano's apartment to study, then Gian Felice's, then Tincani's, and then at his own little villa at the end of Via San Giuseppe, just above the Hotel Byron, where Mary Shelley's villa had once been. During that summer one of the olive-grove witches poisoned his family's cat—the white one—and the American boy had to watch it die, making little pig sounds, in the shower stall of his bathroom. In vengeance, he and his friends broke the windows of the witches’ huts, but it would have little effect, they knew. Streghe! The witches would still appear on the cobblestone path to the tiny village of Pozzuoli, its red hammer-and-sickle designs bright on the miniature doorways, and would scream and shout at anyone passing, and more cats would die.

When the boy's father was away in Spezia and his mother was spending the day with the Contessa Marmorotto in her villa up on the hill, which was most days, the boy would write. He was writing another story about the man who killed demons, but in this one the man killed angels instead—not because he wanted to, but because God told him to, and, though it made no sense, it was God's will and so he had to do it. Though he wasn't in class for the teacher to see it, the boy felt sure the man knew he was writing. Wouldn't Montechiaro assume it? Wouldn't he assume the boy was writing a story during the summer?

In the fall, the boy wrote in class again and was happier. His new story was about an angel that had sinned, though it did not know how; and because it had sinned it no longer had wings, only stubs of bone on its shoulders, and could no longer fly. He showed this story to his friends, translating the first page without his tutor's help, and the boys liked it, they said. They teased him in the right way, letting him know they were his friends; and he was sure at least one of them told Montechiaro about it, for a few days later the hunchback nodded at him in class, as if to let him know.

The next summer, the boy and his family went home. When, twenty years later, the boy was grown and married and had children of his own, he returned to the village to look for Montechiaro, to tell him that he had, just as the man had asked, continued to write and that indeed the stories had been published—maybe not the ones he'd written back then, but other stories—and that he had one of them with him, one published in English, French and Italian, to give him. But the hunchback was gone. When the boy, now grown, found his best friend—who was living with his own wife and children in one of the castle towns not far from Pisa—Gian Felice said, “I am sorry, Johnny, but Montechiaro jumped from the castle wall in despair ten years ago because Emilia, that woman in Porto Venere, married another.” As Gian Felice said this, Tincani, his other best friend, who was there for dinner too, shook his head and later, as they were leaving, whispered, “The witches poisoned him. He was a good person, so they poisoned him. That's what my uncle always said. He threw himself from the castle, yes, but because he was dying."

From others in the village the boy heard that the hunchback had drown years ago, boating in the bay in June, when it is always dangerous to boat or swim; and also that he had actually been killed only a year ago by students from Parma who, coming to the olive groves during the summer to shoot drugs into their arms, had found him walking on Via San Giuseppe one evening and attacked him for his money. Even the Contessa Marmorotto, who couldn't think well now, had a story: “He became a cat. It's a secret, but you may tell your mother—only her.” And then, as the American boy was about to leave, a man at the hotel said: “Montechiaro died of tuberculosis just a few years after your family left. I do not know why there are so many rumors. People like good stories. Hunchbacks do not live long. That has always been the case."

The boy did not know what to do. He had, he saw suddenly, been waiting all this time to bring the man a story. He had in fact, he saw now, been writing all these years for him, the man who had not gotten mad at him that day in class and who had, for reasons the boy would never understand, wanted him to write. As if writing made life worth living. As if it led to the truth, to the power of Love and Reason. What use was it, the writing, the publishing of it, now that the man who had helped him feel what needed to be felt was gone? The boy could do nothing but go home. And there, one day, as if in a miracle, as if it were a story being told or dreamed by another, he thought of Mary Shelley, her drowned husband and the son she'd had to raise alone, a castle and poisoned cats and a hunchback who, cursed with the living soul of a long-dead poet, loved a woman he could never have, and the boy felt this, and was able to write again.

[Back to Table of Contents]

At the Rue des Boulangers Bridge Café

John Trey

Because Margot thought of herself as a poet, the romance of having her last meal on an August afternoon in a Paris cafe appealed to her. That she could embarrass her harshest critic made it all the sweeter. Her motley horde of companions had yet to recognize it, but the largest threat to the plan could very well come from two tables away.

"What if they don't bring the wine?” asked Hannah, her legs swinging back and forth under the chair. The color of her pinafore perfectly matched both her blue-sequined shoes and her eyes. Loose hairs had escaped her pigtails.

"Bah.” Margot waved dismissively. “They brought everything else. They won't stop now.” Yes, the waiter and the maitre d’ were whispering furiously, but Margot was more interested in the shirtless young men working in the street. Slick muscles bounced as the spike driver bratted against the pavement. She struggled to come up with an evocative description that would capture the scene.

"You're never too old to appreciate a good cut of beef,” she guffawed, but then wrinkled her nose. “Nah, too trite."

"Pardon, Madame,” said someone behind her.

Margot looked in the wrong direction. The preening smoky egret blocked her view of the thief. He was a pretty thing, but too intense. She could only think of him as a thief. Likely a mundane as well. Margot didn't remember seeing him before.

She turned to the waiter standing over her. A student, probably, and definitely a mundane.

"Madame understands that the 1990 Latour is very costly? More than a thousand euros?"

"See, I told you,” said Hannah with a pout.

"Yes, I understand, young man. Merci,” Margot said to the waiter in her most matronly tone. He nodded and went away.

The broomstick man danced after the waiter in greatly exaggerated steps, then scurried back to Margot. Composed of loose collection of a dozen or so shiny, dark blue metal poles with white rubber rings at their tops, the broomstick man clattered as he danced.

"They won't bring it,” said Hannah.

"Yes, they will. Why don't you go talk to Uncle Walt until it's time to go to the bridge? And take the broomstick man with you."

"I don't like Uncle Walt. He smells funny."

Margot and Hannah glanced at Uncle Walt, who grinned at them from the next table, his big teeth whiter than his beard.

Margot returned her attention to the workers as they made their way noisily up the Rue des Boulangers, driving some kind of traffic control spikes into the pavement. The air was thick with faux cinnamon pumped in for the benefit of tourists. Except that tourists rarely came this way anymore. And there wasn't much traffic but the new solar/natural-gas hybrid buses recently brought in from Japan.

The smoky egret squawked.

"Uh oh,” said Hannah. “The man who was staring at us is standing up."

"The thief?” asked Margot. “He is a mundane, isn't he?"

"Oui. Here he comes."

Margot glanced from the corner of her eye. The smoky egret flapped its great wings and squawked again, but the stranger paid him no mind. Hannah hid under the table.

The young man stopped at her table, but Margot didn't look up. She spotted the broomstick man a block away, near the bridge, with the friar, the ghoul, and the fox, who always hovered in the distance, never coming near Margot. It must be bad for the broomstick man to flee that far.

"Afternoon, madame. May I join you?"

The egret hopped from foot to foot, its wings trembling and its beak open and jutting skyward. Margot could feel Uncle Walt's agitation, though she didn't turn to look. Hannah clung to her leg under the table. The mundanes didn't react, but then again mundanes never noticed anything.

The stranger sat without waiting for Margot to reply. He placed a PDA on the table, a slim model she didn't recognize.

Suddenly the waiter was there too. “An extra glass, Madame?"

"No."

The waiter uncorked the bottle, poured half a glass, and slipped away.

Margot still hadn't looked at the stranger directly. He wore a charcoal pinstriped suit, like a businessman from the last century. His skin and eyes were dark. He almost seemed to shimmer, to vibrate as if he were under great pressure, holding something explosive inside.

"I am very pleased to meet you. I recognized you at once, of course.” His voice was very smooth, soft enough that one had to focus attention to hear clearly.

"You are mistaken."

"That cannot be. You are Margot Truth Lejune, the poet, yes?"

She turned to eye him.

* * * *

"I thought so. Once a professor at the University of Iowa, but living in Paris for the past seventeen years.” His oily smile only confirmed Margot's feeling that he was here to steal something.

"Did you know you wrote your first poem exactly thirty-eight years ago today?"

"What do you want?” She sipped the wine. Exquisite, blood-red, dissolving on the tongue like a cool fertile mist. Too bad she couldn't enjoy it alone.

"I'm interested in your work. You had a remarkable talent, so the critics said, but you only published three real poems. By real I mean masterpieces. Not all the hack work you couldn't manage to place in any respectable journal.” He seemed to conjure a cigarette out of thin air.

Margot noticed the broomstick man tiptoeing back, and that made her even more nervous than having him far away. That meant she was going to feel the need to defend herself, perhaps she'd even want something from this thief.

He sucked on the cigarette, and the end began to glow. Margot wondered if he was trying to impress her, as if she'd never heard of self-lighting cigarettes before. An online catalog she sometimes ordered from offered them.

"Ah, but those three works. Treasures. One was in a short-lived academic anthology. I've got copies of them all at home.” Smoke darted from his nostrils and curled away. It was a clove cigarette. Margot had once had a fondness for clove cigarettes, back in her bohemian days.

Uncle Walt giggled. When the egret squawked, Margot sat up straight and cleared her throat.

"You know a lot about this poet,” said Margot. “You are perhaps the only one who does.” She sipped.

"It's a shame. If only you had written more, I'm certain everyone would have heard of the great Margot Truth Lejune."

"Don't listen to him,” called Hannah from under the table.

"I repeat my question. What do you want? An interview?” She gestured toward the PDA. “Are you a reporter of some sort?"

"Not a reporter. And I'm not recording anything.” He put his hand on the PDA. Then he leaned across the table and whispered, “I've been sent to take away your talent.” He blew a cloud of clove smoke over her head. “As punishment for failing to use it properly."

Margot raised an eyebrow and nodded thoughtfully.

"Oh no,” cried Hannah, clutching Margot's leg so hard it was certain to bruise.

The broomstick man raced toward the table and leaped at the thief. Margot flinched, but the broomstick man stopped, hovering just above the thief, arms upraised and rattling.

No, no, no, Margot thought. She'd been baited by a lot of little shits in her day—this one wasn't going to provoke her. She took another long, slow sip of the wine. The broomstick man backed away a few steps, his racket diminishing a bit.

"I don't believe an innate talent can be stolen."

"No?” The thief snapped his upraised fingers and the waiter hurried right over. “Garcon, I've been watching your work. You are very skilled—Henri is it?"

The waiter nodded and thanked the thief.

"I wonder just how skilled you are. Can you tell me the last twelve food orders you've received?"

"I believe so. Fondants de poisson au beurre de citron and magrets de canard aux poires; two feuilletes de saumon aux asperges, one with potage ambassadeur, one sans; two petits farcis nicois and escalopes de saumon gigondas; four oeufs en gelee aux crevettes and civet de lapin a la francais; three rouelles de veau bourgeoise, two of them with oeufs a la tripe. Also two petits pots de creme, three gratin de fruits au marsquin, three tulipes aux trois fruits rouges, and four mousse au chocolat aux noisettes et au whisky."

The thief applauded.

"Very impressive. Tell me, Henri, how long have you been a waiter?"

"Almost four years, monsieur."

"How many glasses have you broken in all that time?"

"None, monsieur.” He smiled smugly.

The thief winked at Margot.

"Would you repeat that list of orders, please? Once more for my doubting friend here.” He grinned as the waiter began.

"A feuilletes de saumon aux asperges and potage ambassadeur—no, two feuilletes de saumon—I seem to have forgotten.” he frowned.

"Well, I'm sure it will come to you. Merci.” The thief dismissed him with a backhand wave.

The waiter slowly turned away, straight into the path of an oncoming colleague. A whole tray of drinks crashed down, narrowly missing Uncle Walt. The mundane at Uncle Walt's table leaped up, snatching his web reader out of the growing puddle.

"Means nothing,” said Margot. “An innate talent cannot be taken away. Perhaps a learned one, but not one that derives from the soul."

"Not convinced, you say? I understand.” He absently tapped his PDA.

One of the new natural gas powered buses puttered by, giving the workmen a wide berth. The buses were so much more quiet than their predecessors. And so much more ugly. No wonder the French hated them.

"I know about the misplaced account card,” said the thief. “I know that you are charging this meal to a publisher who has rejected your work many times over the years, most recently just this week. Not much of a revenge plan, if I may say."

Margot heard Hannah whimper.

"I even know about the corner by the bridge where the new buses tend to roll over the sidewalk. A very dangerous place to stand. Someone could be killed there, no?"

The broomstick man trembled. The street workers had moved along toward the bridge.

"I can see,” said the thief, “that you are wondering how I know so much.” He flicked the stub of his cigarette toward the street. It passed through the broomstick man, who clutched his ill-defined chest. “We both appreciate a good story. In a good fairy tale the villain traditionally offers the heroine a chance to escape her fate."

"A la Rumpelstiltskin? The heroine always does escape her fate, you know."

"Perhaps. Tell me why I know so much about you, and I'll leave you be, talents intact."

The egret shook its head and squawked.

"Please don't,” said Hannah.

"So generous of you,” Margot told the thief. She sipped her wine. “I don't believe for a moment that your challenge is serious. However, you amuse me, so I'll play along. Are you restricting me to three guesses? I believe that's the usual routine."

"Please, make as many guesses as you'd like."

"Merci.” She filled her glass, and Hannah peeked over the edge of the table. “The first, most obvious explanation is that you are insane."

The thief shrugged. “Doesn't explain how I know the details, discounting the fictional tendency for the lunatic to possess mystical powers."

"True. Perhaps you are an obsessed scholar from the future, come back in a time machine to save my life so that I might finish my last masterpiece."

"No, I'm not from the future. And as I said, I'm here to collect your talent, not encourage you to use it."

"Ah yes.” She glanced at her distant companions. The friar, the ghoul and the fox each in turn and looked guiltily innocent. “Perhaps you are a demon, come to tempt me, a la Faust."

"No."

"Are you my long-lost son?"

"You had a son?"

"No. Then perhaps you are my younger self, come to talk sense into me."

"I don't wish to talk sense into you.” He looked down at himself. “Besides, I'm a man."

"I may be nearly an old woman, but not so old that I don't know gender has become ephemeral."

"Good point."

"Already I tire of this game. You are a mischievous elf? Or a hallucination. You must be a hallucination."

"Hey!” said Hannah with a scowl. The broomstick man shuddered in mock terror. Even her three distant companions covered their faces.

The thief smiled. “I see now why most of your works are so weak. I think we can consider your talent forfeited. Your resistance surprises me. What difference does it make if I have your talent when you will be dead in a few minutes?"

"It matters a great deal to me."

The broomstick man lingered near the thief again, shuddering and clattering.

"If you know me then you know that my failure to live up to my potential is essentially a failure of ambition,” said Margot with a scowl.

"What are you saying?” cried Hannah.

"I lack ambition because that's the way I was raised back home in Cedar Rapids—to be meek and polite. My parents died disappointed that I didn't marry and live the dinky suburban existence. They never once encouraged me to do better."

As Margot's voice rose in volume, the broomstick man danced ever more wildly. His stick arms flailed, and he kicked high his stick legs.

Hannah ran away.

Margot was tempted to chase after her. When the fox followed in the direction Hannah had gone, Margot wasn't sure whether that was a good thing. No doubt she'd later find Hannah atop the Arc de Triomphe. That's where Hannah went whenever she was upset.

"Blaming your failures on your upbringing? Not a terribly original defense,” said the thief. He brushed his nails on his lapel, then began tapping them on the PDA.

"There's also the matter of opportunity. I've barely kept myself out the gutter since I came here. I had some notion that it would still be possible to do a Lost Generation thing. But mostly I've been fighting just to keep from becoming homeless, not always successfully. My life has been very hard."

"Poverty and upbringing?” The thief shook his head. “You haven't given me much reason to change my mind. I sympathize, but there's still a little matter of personal responsibility."

Margot hung her head. The broomstick man drooped until he was little more than a pile of sticks on the pavement. Uncle Walt and the egret were as still as death, and the others were nowhere to be seen. Margot fretted about Hannah.

"Fine,” said Margot in a whisper. “I concede. After all, I will shortly be dead, as you so kindly pointed out. Tell me one thing before you steal away my talent. What are you that you know so much about me? Not a mundane."

"Think of me as a metaphor."

"A metaphor? A metaphor for what, exactly?"

"I think, if you look inward, you will find that you already know.” He tapped the PDA, then put it in his pocket.

"Maybe I do.” She gulped the rest of the wine. “What will become of my talent?” Tears clouded her eyes.

"I will take it with me. After that, I don't know. Perhaps if I linger, I may jot down a ditty or two of my own."

The waiter, looking as if half a kitchen had been dumped on him, approached and handed the thief an account card.

"Isn't that mine?” Margot asked. The waiter turned with a glassy stare and then went away.

"Or rather the stolen card,” said the thief. He snapped his fingers. The waiter glanced back at him, eyes wide as if he'd just awoken. “No. It is in fact my card."

"You're robbing me of my petty vengeance too?"

"Yes. I have a soft spot. Because of those three masterpieces, your oeuvre, I will prevent your name going into the history books for this one petty act—though it would have been only as a very minor footnote, mind you. And I will do you one other favor.” He leaned toward her and whispered. “I'm only going to take your imagination."

"I don't understand."

"You'll still have your skills. Just no imagination."

"What good is that?"

"You don't have to throw yourself under a bus now, as I've taken care of the bill. So maybe somehow you can write something good, by accident as it were, if you just keep trying."

Margot frowned. Then an idea began to form in her head.

"Now, if you're ready,” said the thief, one finger upraised.

Margot shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, the world was mundane. The effect was like taking off sunglasses on a day that's a little too bright. She couldn't quite see things the way she used too.

"Wait, wait,” said Margot. “I had an idea.” She struggled to hold onto it.

"Sorry,” the thief smirked and stood. “What's done is done."

He frowned at the table behind her, Uncle Walt's table. She glanced back. The table was empty.

Then the thief swung round as if startled by something Margot couldn't see. The egret? The thief took a couple of steps back toward the street, then whirled around again, looking upward. He screamed and ducked, trying to hide behind Margot. She giggled, the wine having gone to her head. She recalled the first time she'd seen the broomstick man. She'd nearly wet her pants.

"They're not a bad bunch, really,” said Margot to the cringing thief. “You probably won't have to put up with them long. Not long enough to meet the really nasty ones, anyway."

"Nasty ones?"

"I did have one thought—but no. As you said, what's done is done.” She looked away.

"Perhaps I spoke too soon.” He placed a hand lightly on her arm. “Please, share your idea."

"If you insist. We both like a good story. In many a folk tale the hero has a year and a day to uncover the solution to the mystery. What say you let me keep my imagination—and my companions—for a year and a day? If at the end of that time I haven't become famous for my talent, you may take all my talents, anything I've produced in that time, and under the wheels of the bus I go. Sound reasonable?"

"Yes, no. Yes."

Suddenly, there was the broomstick man dancing a jig. Uncle Walt blew her a kiss, and the smoky egret preened itself. Margot even saw Hannah and the fox in the distance. Hannah waved and began running toward her.

The thief ran his hands through his hair, and smoothed the wrinkles from his suit. “Don't make me regret this,” he said.

As Hannah threw herself into Margot's arms, Margot thought she caught a glimpse of the retreating thief frantically punching buttons on his PDA. Then the thief was gone in a crowd of mundanes.

Margot winked at the smiling fox, then she and her friends crossed over the Rue des Boulangers bridge, but they did not wait for the bus.

* * * *

A year and a day later the thief sat on a stool by the wrought iron fence that separated the cafe from the garden. The day was blustery, and the city had finally stopped pumping in the faux cinnamon. He was a little sad about that, because now the street smelled of the river.

"I didn't expect that she'd fail to appear,” he said to no one in particular.

"Sir?” said the waiter as he went by with a tray full of drinks, scooting around seated patrons.

"Henri!” said the thief. “Good to see you again."

The waiter looked at him quizzically as he went away.

The stink of fish didn't seem to be hurting business any. In fact, the cafe was amazingly crowded. At the table nearest the thief sat an old man with a bushy beard, and what must have been his granddaughter in pigtails. They looked oddly familiar. The young professionals at the next table seemed eager, fiddling with palmtops and drink glasses but not speaking much. Many others looked like students. The air of expectation was thick.

The thief checked the time on his PDA, then sighed.

"Sir,” said the waiter on his return.

"Cafe au lait—no, make that Latour, 1990."

The waiter's eyes grew wide. “It's you. You're the thief."

Somewhere a large bird squawked.

"I beg your pardon,” said the thief.

People all around had begun whispering, staring, a few even pointing.

"I mean, you're the one who was here with Madame Lejune."

"Yes.” The thief scowled. “Is she here?"

The waiter looked puzzled.

"Pardon me,” said a young woman, one of the professionals from the adjacent table. “Are you here to meet the poet Lejune?"

"Yes, that's correct. Is she here or isn't she?"

"You don't know?” She turned to her companions. “He doesn't know."

The news spread through the crowd. The thief saw several people capturing it all on video. He straightened, running a hand through his hair.

"I've been out of touch this past year. What's happened?"

"You are the thief, the one in the song."

"The poem,” said the waiter.

"I don't understand,” said the thief.

"Tell him,” called someone in the crowd. They were all staring at him now.

"She's ... famous?” ventured the thief.

A round of laughter spread like a wave across a pool.

The young woman pointed to his PDA. “Try any search engine."

The thief entered her full name, and found more than a million and a half hits.

"How is this possible? In only a year..."

"Well, last fall she wrote hundreds of poems in a creative outburst."

"Not all of them were good—” said the waiter.

"Yes they were,” said someone else, starting a cascade of discussions about the quality of her work.

"But anyway,” said the young woman, her voice raised above the mutters of the crowd. “No one knew about that, she being such a recluse and all. But one of them, an unfinished piece, ended up on the old Internet—"

"Where a folk singer found it and made a song out of it,” said the waiter, excitedly.

"Yes,” said the young woman, scowling at the interruption, “but it was another performer who made the song famous. Meanwhile, people were adding their own stanzas to the original poem. There are a couple of versions online that have thousands of stanzas. It became a kind of party game—"

"Celebrity verses are being collected in a book,” said the waiter.

"Incredible,” said the thief, reaching for a cigarette. “The princess has bested Rumpelstiltskin."

"And you're the thief. The one in the song."

"The poem,” added the waiter. “Several poems, in fact."

"All these people are here to meet the thief, the man who started it all. The song said you'd be here today—"

"No, it was in one of her other poems—"

The general discussion resumed, arguments even broke out.

"People, people.” The thief stood on the stool to rise above the growing crowd. “I am honored. Tell me, where is this most famous poetess. I would thank her for the immortality."

The crowd hushed, except for the squawk of a large bird.

"She died earlier this summer,” said a round, hairless man.

"Did she?” said the thief.

"Never knowing what she had created,” said the young woman.

"So she doesn't know she prevailed.” The thief smiled to himself, then spotted the little girl in pigtails weeping in the crowd.

"How did it happen?” he asked.

"Struck by a passing bus,” said the waiter, “while she waited at the corner."

"She was pushed,” called someone.

"No one knows that for certain,” said another.

"Oh, the irony!” The thief laughed despite the scowls and puzzled looks.

"Who are you?” shouted someone.

"Yeah!” Others picked up the call. “What's your name? Who is the thief?"

"I am no one important. I assure you,” he said, unnerved by the surging of the crowd. “Just a metaphor."

"Seriously, who are you? Her mentor? Her lover. A rival?"

The stool wobbled as the people pressed closer. The thief fell over the fence, losing his PDA and his cigarettes. As he stood, patrons of the cafe began to stream over the fence and out the cafe. The thief ran for the Rue des Boulangers bridge.

"Wait, come back!"

Among the clamor behind him, the thief swore he could hear the sound of broomsticks clattering together.

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Collaborations by Well-Known Twentieth-Century Authors Which Were Rejected By Their Publishers and Are Now Collected By Benjamin Rosenbaum & Paul Melko

Gertrude Stein & Dr. Seuss:

Green Eggs and Ham and Ham and Eggs and Eggs and Ham So Green So Green

William S. Burroughs & Truman Capote:

Naked Lunch at Tiffany's

Louisa May Alcott & Edgar Rice Burrough:

Little Women of Mars

Walt Disney & Arthur Miller:

Steamboat Willie Lohman

John Steinbeck & Gene Roddenberry:

The Grapes of Wrath of Khan

Anais Nin & Carolyn Keene:

Nancy Drew and the Secret Touches

John Updike & John Norman:

Rabbit of Gor

Ayn Rand & Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Atlas Shrugged: Great Deltoids in Six Minutes a Day

Ogden Nash & Mao Tse Tung:

Candy is Dandy, but Religion is the Opiate of the People

A.A. Milne & Anne Rice's trilogy:

Treehouse of a Vampire, The Vampire Eeyore, & Piglet of the Damned

[Back to Table of Contents]

FAQ

Mary A. Turzillo

Is death contagious?

Death is transmitted by a spirochete endemic to fresh peaches, phytoplankton, and dreams of empty houses.

Does death wear a disguise?

Death has a splendid set of polished pewter teeth, worn only at the decease of royal infants.

Is it true that a new dessert incorporates sugar, creme fraiche, and crystallized death? What is the calorie count per hundred grams?

You would find that fatiguing.

Is it polite to hum along if the bereaved bursts into flames? Should one intervene before the etheric stage?

Yes, and never.

I have seen skeins of gray linen draped on bare trees. Are these sacs of freshly laid death eggs?

One should not offend the modesty of mothers.

Might one dance with death at an afternoon tea and still call oneself holy?

If decorously clad.

What is death's favorite beverage? Should bottles of absinthe be concealed when death visits?

Absinthe is entirely correct, garnished with fresh thujone.

Can death estivate in the shells of the fighting conch?

In temperate zones.

Does death preen before mirrors staged in infinite regression?

Wouldn't you?

If death is seen walking on an interstate carrying a leaking gas can, should one offer assistance?

How could you resist?

Is it true that if you draw four deuces in a row, or if you fail to promote an eligible pawn, death will slash your hamstrings?

This is a superstition promoted by Borges cultists and the Penitentes.

Does death experience orgasm?

Only if you like.

Am I going to die?

No.

Is anybody I know going to die?

Only persons you know very remotely. Your touch confers immunity.

Does the thicket conceal death better at dawn or dusk?

Both.

Does death have a favorite number?

Yes.

Does death have a home town? A native language? A weakness for leibfraumilch?

Yes.

Will I know to close my eyes?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Beard of God

Michael Northrop

Fog has laid siege to this little island, smothering it in a gauze of hushed vapor. It is a fog so thick that it seems to blot out not only sight but also sound and even meaning. It is a slate too blank to be written on.

There is a tree, stunted by salt-air, that leans into our rented clapboard cottage. One of its sharp brown branches juts off and brushes the window with its dark green leaves, just about there, where I am pointing. Even at the point of contact, you can not see the leaves now. Even when the wind shoulders numbly through the fog, you can not hear the familiar scraping of wood on glass. The pane frames a white silence. I stare out at it in the way that you might watch a tiger at the zoo, or perhaps, in the way that the tiger might gaze wearily out.

All across Deep Pine Island, people peer out at the fog, this odd phenomenon that has eaten away their vacation, delayed their return home, and, if the rumors are true, has begun to do much more than that. No one ventures out alone or for long. The crowded share-houses stay crowded. The young play Scrabble or cards and listen to the radio or the voices of loved ones on the other end of the phone. The rich pace the floors of their summer houses and check in with their offices in New York or Boston. Those who have satellite TVs watch them. Outside, the walkways are empty and the beaches full of nothing save mist.

It is early afternoon on a Monday and every light in the place is burning.

"No, his name was Richard,” Tina is saying. “He said he was a lifeguard. He was ripped, remember?"

"Was this the guy from Virginia?” Ritu asks.

"That was the other guy,” says Tina, “but he said he was a lifeguard, too."

"I don't think he was, though,” offers Anne. “Not the second one. He swam like a moose."

They are three young women, sitting around a light-blue table and talking to keep each other company. Professionally, they run the gamut from public relations to public health to what Anne liked to call “wholesale fishmongery.” Oliver is studying for a real estate licensing test at the rolltop desk in the corner, and I am folded onto the couch, using a beach towel as a blanket.

The cottage consists of this one main room, a small kitchen, and three tiny bedrooms, each containing two cot-sized beds, a lamp, and a few kitschy decorations. The place is supposed to sleep seven, including one on the couch, but depending on the weekend, there are as many as ten people here. I generally avoided the busiest weekends, though, and there are just the five of us here this go ‘round.

We call the cottage “the Wigwam,” because some drunken jackass down at The Albatross had asked Ritu “what are you?” and when she'd said she was Indian, he'd asked if she lived in a wigwam. Extending the metaphor, we call ourselves the “Five Little Indians,” gallows humor based on a nursery rhyme that begins with ten little Indians and ends with none.

We are rationing our food and, to a lesser extent, our alcohol. None of us have been sleeping well and I doze off, despite the chatter and the urgent drone of the radio. I do not remember in dreams, not in any literal way. That's not really how it works. I escape in dreams, though I don't always like the places to which I escape. This time, I am in the house where I grew up. There is a large, unexplained hole in the roof, and fallen leaves have blown in and drifted here and there in the corners. My mom is telling my brother and I to get into the car. We are going somewhere and have generic cream soda in cans.

I am disoriented when I wake up. I look out at the mist, and that is when I remember. I slam my clenched hand down on the arm of the couch, hard enough so it hurts. I do it either out of anger or to distract myself, like a soldier in a movie, biting down on his hand while they saw off his leg. The others continue talking quietly. We are becoming resigned to each other's outbursts. There is still no sign of the ferry, they are saying, no word from anyone onboard. Oliver mentions the Bermuda Triangle episode of In Search Of ... It was a good one.

The fog first descended on Deep Pine two days ago, on Saturday. Something like forty people—no one knows the exact number—made their way to the ferry that morning, stumbling along walkways and feeling their way from gateway to clothesline to fence. They boarded the strong-bowed, radar-equipped vessel and sailed off into nothingness.

There were no distress signals and no panicked cellphone calls, but the ferry never arrived in Wellfleet. If it had sunk, the emergency beacons should have activated as soon as they came in contact with water, but there was nothing. It was a mystery and there were, obviously, no witnesses. The announcement went out over the radio: No more ferries would leave until the “unusual, persistent fog” cleared, and no boats, helicopters, or vehicles of any sort would arrive.

Panic crept onto the island. You couldn't hear it, but you knew it was there. People swarmed to Deep Pine's few markets like blind crabs and carried off all they could. Phone lines lit up over distances that could probably have been spanned by cups attached to either end of a length of twine. What had been neighborly friendships or beachfront hookups became lifelines: Did you hear, Sara didn't come back from The Landing? Has anyone seen Andy? Is he over there with you guys? People were simply vanishing into the mist, gone without a ripple, like bones dropped into a bottomless well.

Those left behind clung to the belief that the missing had simply lost their way. The ferry was idling just off shore. Sara had, understandably, taken a few wrong turns. I knew it wasn't true. I knew that they wouldn't be coming back. I alone had given up hope in the pale face of what I knew to be bloodless carnage. I'd seen it before.

It was the summer of 1985, and I was one of nine Cub Scouts on a camping trip on a small mountain in the foothills of the Berkshires. We were cooking sausages for breakfast on folding Sterno stoves. Mr. Windham, our scoutmaster, was prowling around, supervising the lighting of the gelatinous fuel. The bluish, chemical flame was a thrill for young boys, but he wanted us to know about the dangers of fire in the woods and that a Sterno can was not a thing to be lit lightly.

The sausages themselves were less of a thrill. The low-grade meat was little more than half-cooked when Windham came back around to make us smother the flames under the pop-on metal lids. We cut the damp, lukewarm links with our pocketknives and chewed indignantly.

"Tastes like a turd,” Bart Weaver said to me under his breath.

"Turds are warmer,” I said, as if I was a connoisseur.

"Ten minutes and we break down the tents!” bellowed Windham from a fallen tree trunk on which he was perched in his odd, old man's angularity. “Finish your food!"

"Finish your turd,” Bart said, louder this time, but Windham either didn't hear or didn't acknowledge it. Conspiratorial laughter licked the cool, gray morning air. When it subsided, the woods were placid. A lone bird trilled somewhere down the mountain then stopped.

"It's not even...” I began. I was going to say something about the unfairness of being woken up so early just to walk all day, but I halted when I heard how my voice carried, almost echoed. The mountain should have been layered with the comforting sounds of insects and birds, of wind in the trees and acorns bouncing onto the forest floor. Instead, it had become utterly quiet.

We were smalltown kids, born to the woods, and the silence broke over us like a wave. The fog followed after. We saw it tumbling down the mountain like a cloud that had lost its way. Mr. Windham had moved to our town from New York to help raise his family. Having done that, he now shepherded Cub Scouts in what we imagined to be the same fussy, judgmental way. He was just now picking up on the fact that something was wrong. He looked up, down, and to either side, everywhere but at the fog bank, which was directly behind him.

"It's sneaking up on Mr. Wind-bag,” whispered Connor Dietz, not exactly as a joke, but his whisper carried.

When Windham turned around, his nose was almost touching the advancing wall of mist. He stumbled backward through the semi-circle we'd formed in the sloping clearing. We rose from our haunches and he looked around at us in astonishment.

"It's as white as the beard of God,” he said a moment before the fog overtook him. He said it as if it were an expression we'd know, but I'd never heard it before and it made no immediate sense to me. I understand now that it implies the extreme age of God, in the same way in which you might say that something was as fiery as the top of God's birthday cake. If you were to send God a humorous birthday card, it would say that. It was, in any case, the last clear human voice I remember hearing that day.

The fog washed over us in one smooth gulp. Everything was white and wet and cold. I tried to call Connor or Bart or even Mr. Windham, but nothing came out, nothing really. It was as if I was calling out from the bottom of a tub filled with foul bathwater. I had the sensation of falling upward, though my legs told me that I was, in fact, running headlong down the mountain.

I knew I was going too fast. I could see nothing and I was not surprised when I fell. Wood and stone and the edges of things cut at me. The ground pressed into me as I rolled. I heard only internal sounds, my heartbeat and my brain bouncing inside my skull. I got up and fell again. My cheek rolled against a softness I knew to be moss. The crown of my head came around and thumped against a hardness I knew to be rock. I scrambled upright and repeated the process. I was chilled through and constantly short of breath. I sensed but could not see that I was bleeding.

Things seemed to level out after lord knows how long, twenty minutes or a half an hour. And then I could hear something: a low, primal sound, a massive broken rhythm. With nothing else to guide me, I headed for it as best I could, tripping, crawling, walking, running, and tripping. The ground was either getting softer or the mist was getting harder, I could not tell which. I got up again, what I thought was up, took three steps and toppled into the river's powerful current.

Two hikers found me a day later, three miles downstream, my lungs half full of water and my head full of nonsense. My version of the events was written off as the product of shock and trauma, but it is the only version that exists. No one else from that camping trip was ever found. Whole towns out beating the underbrush and all they found were our tents and goddamned Sterno stoves.

My cuts and bruises healed and my scars stayed small as I grew into adulthood. I stopped telling or even acknowledging the story. Even the concept of a sole survivor offends some. I told myself that it had been a freak meteorological condition. I developed a powerful interest in such things and watched Storm Center on The Weather Channel without telling anyone why. I liked to think that the others had stumbled down the other side of the mountain. That they'd grown up in towns other than Salisbury, with names other than Connor and Bart, Gerry and Geoff.

I know what you're thinking, but I am not so different from other people. I am driven by discontent. I move forward so that I can forget what I've left behind. I am hardly alone in that. I am a professional. The fat in my body can be measured in percentage points. I know how to box and can recommend a good Riesling. It is just that my past contains a malignancy, one which refuses to be shunted aside. I am not alone in that, either, but mine is more extreme. It can not play nicely with others.

I am lying sideways now, looking at Ritu. She is conducting an inventory of our food with Oliver, who is gay and losing his tan.

"Two loaves of bread,” she is saying, “and they're Wonder, so they'll keep forever."

She is speaking brightly, trying to make things bearable. She is wearing a green Dartmouth sweatshirt and faded gray shorts and has folded herself up on the heavy-framed chair, hugging her brown legs to her chest and pointing her toes toward the floor. She looks like a leaf and takes up no more space than a kite.

I half imagine and half remember the backs of Ritu's ankles notched against my shoulders, how her breasts ripple and her chestnut eyes round as I thrust into her. Sex with her had been impactful and hard, as many forbidden acts are. We had not had a condom that first time and I'd had to pull out and splash myself on her stomach. The semen had seemed impossibly white against her skin then. It did not seem so now.

She is here with me, in this furiously lit room, but this can not persist much longer. All of the stranded, the trapped, and the missing, they'd simply gotten in the way of something that was never about them. They'd found themselves knee deep in someone else's unfinished business, knowing only that they were knee deep. You'd think I'd feel guilty, and on some level, I do. I swear I do, but there's something else kicking around down there. I feel important. How could I not? That's probably why this note is so overtly philosophical. I guess these sorts of notes often are, but it's something I rarely indulge in. “Impactful and hard, as many forbidden acts are...” Please.

But how could I not feel that this was somehow all about me? In summer share terms, I'm the one who tracked the sand in. And I'm just a quarter share, the lowest form of rental life, that's the real kicker. This was just my third time out here. Why here, why now, why—but it makes no sense to quibble with the timing. I can see now that this has been rolling up behind me my whole life, that I have merely been looking in the wrong direction.

Ritu, Oliver, Tina, and Anne are frozen in place as I touch the cold metal of the doorknob. Oliver stands, bless him. “Paul, don't,” he says, but I am moving quickly now. My head is swimming from standing up suddenly after lying down for so long. I close the door behind me and take three steps forward. This time, there is no river. Breathing in is like swallowing paint. I survey the milky oblivion. I feel it press its thousand fingers into me and welcome me back. I shut my mouth and wait for what there is in silence.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Crown Prince

Ellen Rhudy

She says to me, she says, I know what you want but I can't give it to you. I won't.

Yes, I say. You won't. (But you can.)

* * * *

Her nipples are like worry beads. I press them between my fingers and roll them around, and they feel just like little glass beads, like little glass beads that are warm and cold all at once.

Maybe I worry.

* * * *

She lives on the ground floor of a stone tower. Past her I can see the stairs, looping up, gripping the walls for balance. I went up those stairs once, before she knew. I saw her and that was all it took, that one glance—a second, not even—and she took me back downstairs and pulled me inside her and made me forget.

I visit her tower every day. I do not always go inside; sometimes it's better to just stand outside and look up up up at the top story, where the stairs gasp free of the wall and spill into a loft. That's where she is, sleeping, always sleeping. If she came to the window I think I would remember better. If she came to the window I think I could climb the stairs again.

* * * *

She works at the Kitty-a-Go-Go next to her crumbling stone tower. (Something I only noticed today: White gouges on the stone.) She works with little pink stars stuck over her nipples. I sit and watch her and think—there is something, I cannot remember—and afterwards return to the first floor of her tower where she unsticks the stars and sits bare breasted counting her money.

Yes, I think. There is something, something I came for. But that is as far as I get.

* * * *

The sleeping girl has blond hair. Blond hair and blue eyes. I tell you this because it's all I know, other than her walk with legs unmoving beneath wool dresses, how when I first saw her, before she came here, I thought she had no legs (I was young, then) and moved on puffs of air, and maybe she does or maybe she does not, maybe the sleep has been too long and she has forgotten.

* * * *

I am as adamant a proponent of beauty sleep as anyone, but a hundred years seems excessive even to me. But perhaps not. Perhaps it is just enough.

* * * *

She keeps her money in a row of jelly jars glued with used pink stars scabbing off the dusty glass. She announces her plans to use her Thong money to build an addition, to open a bed and breakfast.

She cannot cook, she cannot clean. But pink stars cling to her nipples, do not come loose in the middle of an act like some of the other girls', which is a more useful talent than any I can claim.

You will be my cook, she says. And then, I am leaving to draw blueprints.

* * * *

The next morning there is a kitchen, there are bedrooms and bathrooms, whole suites, whole apartments. I make scrambled eggs in the kitchen and then she leads me up the stairs, past new doorways leading to rooms that hang from the tower like stone boils. She leads me past door after door to the loft, and then she winks and says, You know what to do, and leaves.

* * * *

I send letters home, sometimes.

I am evasive. I do not provide a return address. I write: “Things are well here, I hope you are having good weather."

My mother is too old to beget another son. If he isn't already, my father will soon be doing it with the maid. And then the bells will ring ten times and the people will rejoice and the footmen will store all the birthday presents in the spare rooms. My mother's maid will write thank-yous to the other kings and the foreign dignitaries and higher lords, will pretend to be my mother. And again, they will not know the difference.

* * * *

You do not awaken a sleeping princess by kissing her on the lips, as per rumor, but by whispering into her ear the names of precious metals and jewels.

Little else can sustain the female royalty.

* * * *

The bed and breakfast begins to fill up. She adds more rooms, places them randomly, overlapping and unbalanced. She adds an elevator that shoots straight up the center of the stairs. She makes another line of jelly jars, without the stickers. Every night she goes to the Kitty-a-Go-Go and every night I follow.

* * * *

I cook and she cleans. At night when I am trying to fall asleep she tells me that she is a princess and will return home once she remembers where that is, exactly. She thinks by the sea.

I tell her I'm a prince. And if I have had a bad day I tell her that her hands are too worn, too calloused and cracked and bruised and red from scrubbing the flagstones, for her to ever return home.

One day she agrees and we marry, the pink kitten buzzing on and off over her head.

* * * *

Some nights I walk to the Kitty-a-Go-Go in disguise and tip her handsomely with money I've stolen from the Thong jelly jars.

* * * *

One night the sleeping woman is gone and I am alone in my loft. I sneak downstairs and lick the worry bead nipples.

And then one day she is back. She says, I think I found it but I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't remember what my father looks like.

Nor do I, I say, though this isn't true. We lay side by side not touching, and before she falls asleep she says she is going home as soon as she remembers whether it is North or Northwest, that she is engaged to a crown prince and she is sorry but when it comes down to it she will choose a crown prince over a lost one who makes scrambled eggs every morning and washes dishes the rest of the day. I tell her I understand, and keep secret that there is a princess waiting for me at home and that I will choose her over the one next to me. I wish her luck in making it home and say that I won't be too upset if she leaves again, only I don't say that she's too old and has worked, two things that destroy a princess faster than anything.

When her breathing slows I take the stairs to the Kitty-a-Go-Go, which is full of businessmen tonight. I recognize some from the bed and breakfast but we pretend not to see each other.

I leave early and sit on the first floor of the stone tower, between rows of jelly jars. I peel star stickers from the glass and roll them into hard little beads, and pretend they are her.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Half-Sister

Sarah Monette

I was cleaning the lamps when the stranger knocked.

I knew it was a stranger, right off, because whoever it was didn't know about the postern door that's the only thing in the front wall that opens. They'd knocked at the ceremonial gate that hasn't been used since Father reached his majority and won't be again until Gunther comes of age in another twenty years—if Father hasn't quarreled irrevocably with Gertrude before then and disinherited the whole pack of them.

I stayed where I was, up to my elbows in lamp-oil and dirt, while Nanna creaked her way slowly across the hall. Nanna's terrible arthritis does not change the fact that she is the ranking woman in the household. Gertrude hates that, but she loses the argument every time she starts it. Lane outranked Nanna, but it didn't matter, with Lane lying there like a dead thing in her bedroom, without even the strength to turn her face to the wall.

Nanna wrestled the door open, and stuck her head out to shout at whoever it was. I could hear a mutter of explanations and apologies, but all of the greeting formulas got carried away by the wind, so I was completely unprepared for the man who stepped into the hall at Nanna's gesture of invitation.

He screamed Southerner from head to foot, from his braided hair and long mustaches to the expensive but completely inadequate boots on his feet. They were soaked right through. I suppose he was handsome, if you go in for that sort of thing, though there was too much cheekbone for my taste—too much crag. Craggy-faced men always think far better of themselves than they need to.

He said to Nanna, slowly and distinctly, as if she were some kind of idiot, “May I see Madalane, please?"

I knew who he was. My hands—big, lumpy-knuckled hands, short-nailed and filthy—clenched so hard that the rag twisted between them tore. Nanna and the stranger both turned to stare at me; from the way his head jerked around, he hadn't even realized I was there.

I stood up, conscious of my shabby dress, the strands of hair escaping from my hairpins. “You should not be here."

"You must be Karlin,” he said, as if I'd said something normal and polite. “Madalane told me a great deal about you."

If he thought that would make me like him, he could have spared his breath. “And you're Gerard. Lane hasn't said a word about you."

His face darkened in hurt and anger. But I continued before he could find words: “Leave. Please. Leave Lane alone."

"Lane can make her own choices, Karlin,” Nanna said, her pale eyes sharp for once. “You will not make them for her.” She turned and hobbled slowly out of the hall.

I stepped out from behind the table where I had been seated and approached Gerard. Prince Gerard of Hylfeneth, he was, and by Southern reckoning, Lane was his wife, although I wasn't sure whether their marriage was binding under Northern laws. It was one of the many things Lane wouldn't tell me.

"Please,” I said, though the word was dry and bitter in my mouth. “Just go."

"I can't,” he said, spreading his hands as if he expected me to understand.

"Haven't you hurt her enough?"

"Hurt her?"

"If she dies,” I said, “it will be because you have killed her."

For a minute, I thought he was going to hit me, and so did he. But he changed his mind, and ran his hand over his face instead. “Karlin,” he said at last, and if I could have liked him, I might have pitied the weariness in his voice, “I don't know why you hate me, but I don't think you have any idea of why Madalane left Hylfeneth."

"Don't I?"

"You don't know what we went through."

"You haven't sat with her every night for a month of nightmares. You weren't here when she came riding up the pass like something that had been dead for a week and was just too brute obstinate to admit it. You haven't argued with her over every single bite of food she eats—and had to give the half of her meals to the pigs anyway. I have. So don't tell me what I don't know."

He looked as if each word was a separate nail being pounded into his flesh, and maybe he would have left then, maybe he would have gone and left Lane alone, except that a voice said, thin and shaky, “Gerard?"

We both turned. It was her.

I don't know how she did it. She hadn't been able to leave her room for weeks, even to escape from Father, but there she was, leaning in the doorway—white as a ghost but fully dressed.

"Lane,” I said. “Lane, you oughtn't—"

"Gerard?” she said again, and then they were clinging together in the doorway, talking and laughing and crying all together in a horrible tangle, and I knew that she was going back. Going back to Hylfeneth, going back to him, going back to the life I'd thought and hoped and even prayed she'd renounced. I'd thought she'd begun to see me again, the way she'd seen me before some fool traveling peddler had infected her with dreams of Hylfeneth and she'd stopped seeing anything but the blood-red minarets and lace-spun bridges of the stories. I'd thought, when she came back, that the reality had cured her of the mindless dreams, that if we could just wait out the last throes of the fever, Lane would be back, my Lane who'd never laughed at me for being raw-boned and ugly and dark, who'd never called me goblin, who had shared with me things that this handsome hero would never understand. He didn't know the Lane I did. I'd thought Lane had realized that, too, but the radiance on her face told me I was wrong.

They were deciding to leave as I watched them. I could see it on their faces. They would go riding off into the clouds together, and Lane wouldn't have to face Father or explain herself to Gertrude or confront any of the remnants of a life she didn't want. She didn't even see me when she said goodbye, only her faithful half-sister—every heroine has one.

I don't know if there was something I could have said, some way I could have reached her. I lie awake nights, wondering. But there was nothing I could have told her that she didn't already know, and if what she knew was not enough to keep her here, then what use would any words of mine be?

She strode out ahead of Gerard, eager for the next adventure I suppose, and I caught his cloak and said, “When she dies, don't bring her body here."

I don't think he understood me, not really, but he understood something, because he nodded and said, a little awkwardly, as if he wasn't used to it, “Karlin, I'm sorry."

I shook my head. “She's made her choice."

He left then, following her as he would follow her anywhere, and I stayed behind, as I had stayed behind the first time she left. Stayed behind to keep the lamps clean and lit, to keep the household running, to keep carrying the responsibilities Lane had let fall.

I'm no heroine. I don't have a story. And Lane's story is not mine to tell, except for this: she made her choice.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Dear Miss Wonderment

Geoffrey H. Goodwin

Dear Miss Wonderment:

I hope you're finding yourself okay. I dreamed I received a telegram that said you were coming to visit. Hours later, perhaps still in slumber, perhaps in reality, you showed up—frail, bedraggled and shivering—on my front stoop.

You're not here now, so I'm writing you this letter.

In what therefore must've been a dream, I couldn't help but notice the new tattoo on your left forearm. In Day-Glo pink it said, “What time is it right now? Become a new you by 12:22!"

But you, my darling from a different time and space, were unchanged. Your teeth had become pointier and certain patches of your skin were well worn and parts had become thinner, but you were still you.

You were the same lump of damaged goods that you've been for quite some time.

In my dream I sent you a ticket to ride the ferry from Penobscot Bay to Lake Michigan.

There are three possible ferry captains:

1) Moss is a one-hundred-year-old woman who pilots her craft extremely carefully. When you give your ticket to Moss, it will be a very slow and gentle ride.

2) Hotstick seems gruff and resembles a military general, but he has a gift for exchanging pleasantries as long as you begin the conversation by speaking first.

3) Murray Bamf is a Franciscan monk who steers erratically and goes too fast, but he is often willing to drop passengers off wherever they desire—not just at the pre-assigned stops.

But I have digressed; everything is prearranged for you. The two men will not be your ferry captains. Moss will be picking you up this morning at 11:12, as long as my dream is correct.

You might find this bland, perhaps too predictable and organized, like the compositions of Schubert—but these matters are of the gravest importance.

Your ticket is underneath your periwinkle blue pillow. Feel free to ignore the tooth with the cavity that has been under your pillow for two weeks. Teeth with cavities become uglier once they are removed from mouths.

Be forewarned: Moss has rapid bones and tight fingers, so you will be coming, for your own good, whether you like it or not.

She will remove your pajamas and hold you beneath the waves for several minutes. This is to indoctrinate you into the purity of what we, for lack of a better phrase, call “hootwater."

Hootwater will allow you to endure the intermittent frost of your journey.

I remember when we went to the Statuemaker's. It was a summer day—or at least a fairly warm day when the sun had discarded most of its clouds. I made a plaster cast of your forearms and painted them green. I still recall the gentleness of the imprints that your bulging veins made. If I remember correctly, that was the same day that you made a life-size replica of the head of the lead singer of the band Shark Week. I still remember the jagged blades of his hair. It's so remarkable how few lead singers go bald, sometimes I'm willing to hazard a guess that they use hair plugs or strange sprays that come in aerosol bottles. Each age creates its own alchemy, I guess.

Miss Madison Wonderment, there will always be a siren singing you to shipwreck, but I miss you and I love you and I hope you are okay.

If terrorists attempt to overtake the ferry, I hope you'll know what to do. Violence is never an answer. And, as we all know, it's seldom even a question.

Eventually, once these pen strokes stop representing the formalities of what I'm supposed to say and start to show more of my heart and less of my mind, I'll tell you why I'm writing this letter.

Please wake before Moss arrives to snatch you. I'm aware that you are still slumbering and will therefore ... (even if I find a very helpful black lark from the Urals or one of the last living Bran Arthur crows and they are willing to let me rubberband this missive to their leg, or even if I find a timeshifting polecat who will teleport and land on your bosom) ... most likely oversleep tomorrow morning, thereby being most astonished when you are awoken by a mythical or near-extinct creature who has an overly long and long overdue note that says to find a ticket beneath your periwinkle pillow because an ancient yet rapid ferrywoman is coming to, if you will forgive the pun and this tortuously long sentence ... ferry you off.

Even if Moss tries to slice your clothes from your body with a rusty scythe, please take a moment to remove the dust and cobwebs from your bedroom. I doubt you will ever return or even see your belongings again, but I encourage you to do a light job of cleaning, else the muck in the crevices will infect the noodles of your mind and haunt you forevermore. Please remember that the tilt of a gothic sentiment is rarely becoming, even when you pass the pasture full of bleating sheep. Giving up, giving out or giving in will all seem tempting.

Instead, I urge you to keep your wits about you and to practice arias so your vocal cords will be limber for when you need them.

I will enclose the Field Guide to the Care and Handling of Mythical Creatures and I am unsure if you will find it useful. You may be so well acquainted with most of the bestiary that you could generate a similar compendium yourself. I doubt you would include such an offensive section as the chapter on ‘Unicorn Porn,’ so I have removed those pages and will be keeping them for myself. Plus, those additional sixteen pages might make the overall package too heavy for the aforementioned black lark, crow or polecat.

It won't all make sense, but I need for you to suspend disbelief and just go for it.

Many of the actions will seem counterintuitive. The actions are, no matter how far afield they seem, designed to intensify your skills at chess. You remember well what a fierce tactician I once was...

Alas, my game began its exponential decline on the day of my great chess coach's demise.

I still see Miss Frothy Nougat's face from her wheelchair vantage point: her beady eyes staring, her mouth chortling. As she fianchettoed my king and queen with a protected bishop—forcing a queen for bishop trade that was not in my best interests—and my vision became hazy with the color of beets, she finally developed alchemical powers of transmogrification and turned herself into a fifty-eight-piece set of flatware! Eight seven-piece stainless steel settings and two serving spoons! All there before me, complete with the wooden chest to store them!

A coup de grace. A coup d'etat. All relentlessly polished.

Miss Madison Bloomflower Wonderment, my dear friend from the bedazzled and misbegotten days of our youth—when everything was different and we didn't have to sell our organs and burial plots in the name of refinancing our plans for world peace. It makes my mouth thirst for cranberry soda just to think of it...

I, metaphorically, can taste your apprehension. I've used an extremely shiny scrying mirror and looked in on you from time to time. I know that you've—until this moment—lived a mundane life, and I'm unsure of how to put you at ease. I haven't written a letter like this to anyone in some time. Eventually, the iciness of your journey may force you to come to the conclusion that you're no longer breathing...

Don't worry. As long as the boat is moving and you can smell the aftertaste of the hootwater and the unpleasant, microwaved kelp odors of the deep, you're alive.

My digressions are not digressions. I offer these instructions, these examples, to help you see how it will feel to shed your skin and live in the new world. And I need you to do this for me.

You've always spoken rapturously, eyes glowing like irradiated yo-yos, of how you are willing to scour, scourge and scorch the earth in the name of Goodliness.

Your transformation will be more than taking responsibility for your actions. It will be about taking responsibility for the concerns of our planet. Desperation looms at our borders. Mother Nature has been forced to hide in the deepest of creek bottoms. She whispers Nan'an-accented Chinese in the Chang-hua Hsi-hu Dialect in Taiwan and even Literary Urdu while traversing the streets of Nice, but the world has weakened. Her guises possess less of her resplendence than ever before and are becoming more and more unsettling every day.

Beware of the sheep. If you're not careful, their song will sing you to shallows and miseries. Earplugs and Dramamine won't render you immune. Burning a reproduction of Lucien Freud's painting of Jerry Hall from when she was naked and pregnant, and then stuffing the ashes into your inner ear won't do any good at all. You, before you wake from your dream and enter into mine, must rehearse a song.

Since there was the ill-fated possibility that you would board Moss's ferry unprepared, thereby binding you to drown at the bottom of Lake Erie as you pass the sheep, I planned ahead and, four years ago, gave you a special collection of songs.

Yes, the entrails—actually, their vegetable-based equivalent consisting mostly of burdocks and nettles—and auguries, even four years ago, revealed that you, despite my doubts and self-indulgent consternation, would be the only one who could unhook her ankles from the trammels of time and destiny.

I made preparations and precautions, hoping against hope that you could rise up and make a stand in the names of Decency and Goodliness.

I knew my realms could begin to crumble—that my labors of love and pain and loss could lean toward the abyss, but, even in making backup plans and preparing for such plumb and perverse eventualities, I didn't know I'd become this world-weary. I feel hypocritical, like a windup toy that's broken when it first comes from the packaging. But ... I was wise enough to teach you the mystical chant.

And we must press on. So, betwixt “The Last Train To Clarkesville” and Chris De Burgh's most sprightly pop-rock hit, I burned—uncompressed yet digitized, stereophonic yet innocent—a copy of the song you must sing to get past the sheep. This will be the dark teatime, the nadir of your private underworld, the foment of rebellion that gets stoked by your self-will.

At least I buried the song you will need to sing on a CD-R that you have listened to so many times that you'll know it by heart, even under stress and duress.

Yes, a cruel fairness on my part, but I am too fond of you to leave you fully unenchanted. But it will be quite difficult for you to sing, for, as you've now realized, Edgar Winters’ “Frankenstein” is an instrumental and driven by a textured triumvirate of synth, sinister guitar and a drum solo.

If I'd truly known the direness, the totality of these circumstances, I would've hired the soprano Anna Selina “Nancy” Storace as your vocal coach. Or her reanimated corpse, since she died two hundred years ago.

Had I truly known, I would've held your hand as you screeched and yowled for every high and low note.

Here is the time where you may have to rush to the prow of the boat and fight Moss, if need be. I know I have told you that she has rapid bones and you cannot resist, but I am unsure of her loyalties and—if she is a minion of a darker force than I—I wanted to give you a heads up, so that she wouldn't get the drop on you and bash an oar into your skull right when things were getting really important.

Sweetheart, your work is cut out for you. In fact, it's microprocessed like cheese that was grated and then put in something that was both a chopper and a hopper until all that was left was some sort of stringy and gooey cheese-butter. And I do apologize.

Due to the vagaries of metaphysical adventuring, your ordeal will only take one hour, the most intense sixty minutes of your life.

Forgive me if I treat you like a snapshot frozen in time. I know we've drifted over the last half decade. If I trusted someone else, maybe I would've dreamed about their coming to rescue me from myself and ... well, we really mustn't question the power of dreams. We've just got to go with this. Fate: how the gnarled yarns are woven, measured, and snipped, these aren't the part of living that we get to question. We can wonder why we eat strawberry jam even after we're full or why we wear certain clothing even after it fits too tightly and stops looking snazzy, but comfort foods and comfort clothes seem like tripe when compared to infinite fights between demons and angels, fire raining from the sky and all that.

Destiny is destiny, and it's getting the best of me.

There's nothing left inside me. I only seem alive. If you don't gather the prettiest flowers (I recommend gladiolas intertwined with verbena) and place garlands around your neck and sully forth on this treacherous mission, people we once held dear as fairly decent friends will become mere foggy memories, or worse, I, and everyone else we used to love, will perish ... we'll drop from the earth like puppets with their heads bitten off by the giant from “Jack & The Beanstalk."

Honestly. That's why this is so urgent and so dire.

I wear the same clothes I once did, but the description of my face has changed radically. My skin is baggy and I walk like a woman who has forgotten her feet.

The flowers of the garland that I pretend to wear in my mind are long wilted and tumbling to the ground, one chartreuse blossom at a time. My powers have diminished to the point of being non-returnable items that I couldn't even hock at a flea market in Oceania. My clothes smell of rancor and strife. The world has won. The battle for my wits and sanity is lost.

I wish today were a different day and that we were reminiscing of happier times, munching crullers at a cafe in Prague or betting on ponies in Saratoga Springs.

Do you remember when we went to Glenn Miller's birthplace for a camp field trip? The gold records in the shadowy basement of the library? And there was that other exhibit, the one with “Protective Devices from throughout the Ages?” Condoms, firefighter suits, slingshots, religious relics and pajamas with feet in both children and adult sizes. Those were my favorites. What were yours?

I wish we could go back to that museum. I shouldn't let this part slip, but these terrible things are brewing inside me like a bitter tea...

Let me clear my pen like someone clearing their throat.

There, on a separate piece of paper you may never see, I've made a strange doodle that looks like a skull with batwings mounted on its temples.

If I'm letting the horrors flow, please forgive me. If you die on your quest to save me, please forgive me. If I am deceased when you arrive, that's an acceptable ending...

No, I'm serious and I mean it. Too many people, in our cankered and plague-blighted age, want nothing but happiness, nothing but Jane Austen.

You, my pretend love, will have to be wise enough to accept tragedy if it's time for tragedy.

Maybe the truths I need are, for lack of a better construct, truths from beyond the grave.

Your trip will go something like this:

Moss will capture you, threaten to skin you alive and then, instead, remove your clothing and submerge you under water for a few minutes.

Then you might have no choice but to choke some of the elixir known as hootwater down your throat.

You will pass a field of flowers more succulent and charming than anything you've ever seen. Please pay them no mind whatsoever. Promise me you won't even look hard.

You will go underwater and underland and smell things that are slightly worse than any smells you've ever imagined. I remember when someone snuck a vial containing the musk of a striped skunk blended with the rancid remains of four-hundred-year-old ghee clarified butter into the handicapped-accessible bathroom in the back of our classroom at Sleepaway Witch Camp. The vial, left on the radiator, smelled atrocious, but what I'm talking about is far worse.

You will encounter the singing sheep. This is paramount. You need to open your mouth wide and let the “Frankenstein” music cackle from your throat, even if it starts snowing pink snowflakes that make your eyes go kooky.

If you don't die, and out-sing the sheep, the bleaters will then morph into giant Koala bears and pteranodons. Things will be both mad and deep. The Koala bears will test your abilities at high-speed ballroom dancing and the Cretaceous period pterodactyloid winged reptiles will play you in simultaneous games of chess.

Be careful. Pteranodons don't have teeth, so they'll be moving the pieces with their claws.

I erred before—though it is important, chess is not the proper metaphor for your journey. A more correct parallel would be to compare your quest to spelunking. I am the flashlight on your head, but you are the only one who can remember to wear the hat and lean so the beam points in the right direction. That makes you the heroine for this one. I've said it previously and in a prism of ways, but I really and truly need your help on this sucker.

There are three final dumplings of wisdom that I must offer, even if you feel your brain is full and a goodly amount of interstitial seepage is clogging your ears:

1) Eventually, you will have urges to strike your forehead against hard, flat objects. Please refrain.

2) All vegetarians have sacred cows. It's how the totemic animal connection occurs. Even if they occasionally wear leather that they received as a gift. Meat eaters do not have “sacred carrots” or anything of the sort. If someone eats meat and claims to possess sacred cows, they are nothing but a deceiver and you shouldn't meet with them, except at public places like the reference section of the New York Public Library or the aforementioned pastry shop in Prague. Even then, you may merely dip into the pages of a library book you've already read or have one cruller or two, but not three.

3) If you are given an unsharpened pencil, by anyone, you must sharpen it with your teeth. Immediately, even if your mouth is already full.

Finally, in what, potentially, should've been comment number four: interstitial brain seepage will not protect you from the songs of the sheep. Sing as if your ability to draw breath depends upon it, for it does. Like many countries and sovereigns who have grown fat with greed, I have made enemies faster than I can kill them.

Please do not blame me for being the messenger. Please do not let your eyes jaundice on this matter, Miss Wonderment. It pains me to admit this, but you are my only hope.

Finally, I'm sorry about the thirty bucks that you think I still owe you. Several weeks after I last saw you—approximately 1,222 days ago—I loaned thirty dollars to a whitetail deer who was jumping through the woods. Therefore, the deer now owes you thirty bucks and I've been in the clear since then, even if you weren't aware of it.

Thank you for your attention to these dire and utterly important matters.

Disregard them at your—and everyone else from Katmandu to the tip of Timbuktu's—peril.

Cruella Boney “Maroni” Stiltskin

also known as

Little Medea Medusa Mendicant

(who had blonde pigtails and sat next to you at the first level of Sleepaway Witch Camp)

* * * *

P.S. At some point, you may be asked if you would like to enter the “Land of Beauty.” Don't. No matter what. Even if they tell you that Jimmy cracked corn and you shouldn't care. I mean it. Do not enter the Land of Beauty. It isn't worth the creosote-drenched bandages...

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The Film Column

William Smith

The Tenant

1976, dir: Roman Polanski

Few films can match The Tenant's portrayal of the nervous isolation under every city-dweller's skin. Trelkovsky, played by Polanski, has a lead on an apartment from which the previous occupant defenestrated herself. He pounces, claiming to have heard of the opening through “a friend ... no, a relation,” and resourcefully bargains his way in. He never displays either doubt or guilt at having stolen a nearly-dead woman's home, and when the super reassures him that “she won't get better” he seems relieved by the lack of complication.

Trelkovsky isn't cruel, but apartments are “very hard to come by these days” and, after all, every vacancy is predicated on someone else's triumph or tragedy—they've either moved up in the world or out of it. Once the apartment is secure, the tenant has the luxury for pity and visits his predecessor in the hospital. She is wrapped in bandages from head to toe and what can be seen of her face registers nothing but horror and pain. A grief-stricken (and attractive) friend stands by the bed. Trelkovsky—who is “a relation ... no, a friend” of the afflicted—offers her comfort and a drink.

At first Trelkovsky lives the montage of city-life with Buster Keaton-like calm. One moment he is listening to a howl of the damned, bellowing from a bandaged-wrapped hole, the next he's groping a pretty girl at a Bruce Lee picture—Bruce archetypically crunching down on his enemy as the bandaged girl must have crunched when she hit the ground. One experience is spliced onto another without emotional transition. It's as if Trelkovsky is dropped into a different film every five minutes and has lost the ability to be surprised. He just concentrates on figuring out his role in each scene.

Back at the apartment the tenant gets to know the building's well-worn details; the clanking pipes, the creaky floors, the shared bathroom visible to all through the airshaft. He also discovers telling articles left behind by the suicide; a single dress in the closet, a tooth packed into a hole in the wall, and a postcard of a sarcophagus. The dead girl was interested in Egyptology (it was fitting that she was mummified) and the film uses these visual hieroglyphics to evoke the layered past, and the enduring presence of the dead.

Despite the building's stark loneliness, the tenant has nothing resembling privacy or space. Apartment dwellers try not to acknowledge how much can be picked up about their neighbors’ lives, but Trelkovsky's neighbors complain they “can hear every word [he's] saying!” They're constantly at his door and his smallest movement brings wrathful knocking on the walls, floor, and ceiling. The tenant learns to walk on eggs but the quieter and more insubstantial he becomes, the louder his sad outbursts echo through the building. Through his interaction with the other residents—and the building itself—the tenant begins to understand that he has a specific and inevitable role to fill.

Renting an apartment is a convenient and simple business transaction—a way-station on the road to permanence—but temporary spaces have a history and they claim a part of us. A building, a city, is like a coral reef that grows on the remains of its inhabitants. Capturing this accretion, The Tenant is a universal and blackly comedic allegory about the way we live on top of each other, yet valiantly and agressively defend our space.

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Mounds Keep Appearing

on the lawn, except when covered with snow: a city from the Mound Builder era.

One wag frowns pronouncing it gophers, one shakes his head pronoucing it moles offering methods of killing with wagging heads.

Rather than killing, I bought two sonic rockets, that once buried were to chase the catacomb residents to large fields in all directions.

"To chase away burrowing rodents, you have to think like one,” the directions said. But, plagued by dreams of families forsaking homes, the rockets were dug up, the batteries saved.

So, it is back to stepping around mounds, wondering what subterranean life is listening under foot, and trying to see designs in newly dug mounds.

No longer plagued by dreams of the underground homeless, I read words on Vibrasonic Molechaser boxes:

"Don't let your molehills become mountains."

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In Kansas

The Greeks had many gods to blame for misfortune:

We can only conclude God is absent, doesn't care, or is doing it for our own good.

I sought Dorothy's reassurance that it was a dream without the wish to be in Kansas;

perhaps I hadn't chanted

"There's no place like home” often enough—then too, I hadn't her red shoes.

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I Heard That

when a person falls between a passing train and platform they become a twisted corkscrew ribs down

And when removed their guts fall out—before they just feel numb

In my passing, I've learned falling is not a requirement for numbness

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Lord Goji's Wedding

Richard Parks

The training of young monks at Hanaman-ji in Kyoto was rigorous, and the old monk in charge of their training sometimes used blows to reinforce the lessons, and sometimes he used stories. The young monks were generally in agreement that storytelling was the harsher method of the two: the sting of a blow would fade in an hour or so, but a story could have them puzzling for days on end with no real understanding in sight. So it was with some trepidation that fine spring evening when the young monks noticed the gruff old man looking especially thoughtful.

This was always a bad sign.

Two of the more optimistic monks were already seated zazen and made a decent show of being in deep meditation when the old monk entered the training hall. Perhaps they thought to escape their fate, but the older boys knew better. They simply waited.

And waited.

The old monk simply stood in the doorway, looking at them for a long time. “You're young,” he said. Normally when he said such a thing, it was clearly meant to imply that “you don't know anything, so be quiet and listen.” Not this time. The old monk said it as if reminding himself of something he'd almost forgotten.

"Cushion,” he said after a while, and the two closest acolytes scrambled to bring it to him. He kneeled down there on the floor and made himself comfortable. One of the two “meditating” monks let out a gentle snore and the other sighed, opened his eyes, and punched his companion awake. The old monk finally started speaking.

"Long ago in a place not very far from here, there was a young scholar of good family. His name was Goji. He took his religious training at the local temple and was so moved by the piety of the monks and the purity of what he was taught there that he was actively considering a life in the temple. All that changed when he fell in love."

Several of the youngsters visibly relaxed. Clearly this was going to be one of those “sins and distractions of the world” fables. So long as they could sort out the story type and extract the lesson the old monk expected, they knew there would be no problem. The old monk just smiled a wistful smile.

"Now, in that same temple there was a most worthy monk. Most worthy indeed. He knew quite a few things, and was always telling what he knew, for he believed that sharing knowledge was the act of an enlightened being."

The old monk fell silent again, and one of the younger monks was moved to ask. “Then he was an enlightened being, Master?"

"It was said of him,” the old monk replied. “He never said it of himself. Weigh that in the scales, for what it may be worth."

The young monks just looked at each other, and after a moment the old monk continued his story. “He was invited to the wedding, of course, as one of Lord Goji's favorite teachers. It was summer, and the monk was taking the breeze on the engawa when the bride's wedding party arrived. It was his karma that he would be the first to greet them, or perhaps it was everyone's karma present, for it happened just that way."

"What happened then, Master?"

"He greeted them, of course. It would have been rude to do otherwise. Since the girl was of noble family she was escorted by five samurai and several maids, plus servants bearing her sedan chair, and all in summer clothes and colors. The bride herself was wearing a shiromuku of such pure whiteness that she seemed made of snow. She was veiled, as is the custom."

He paused again, and again one of the younger monks asked a question. “Master, I have sometimes wondered ... in China a bride wears red, or so I am told, for the color is considered lucky. Why does a bride in our country wear white, the color of death?"

The old monk shrugged. “Perhaps because both marriage and death are transformations. Also, among old samurai families it was an indication that the bride came to them in the same spirit that blank washu comes to the calligrapher. As the paper takes the ink, so would she accept the family colors and mon of her groom. In the old days I believe the wedding costume was actually taken and dyed appropriately after the wedding was done. However, dye would not be enough to let this bride become part of Goji's family. No, that was not possible."

"Why, master?"

"She was a fox. For that matter, so were her attendants."

The young monks gasped in such perfect unison that perhaps the old monk wondered, for a moment, why they could not chant the Lotus or Diamond Sutras with the same precision. Or perhaps he thought nothing of the sort.

"She was of ancient and noble family, as I said. But she was not human."

"How did the teacher know?” asked another.

The old monk shrugged. “He couldn't fail to notice. Years of practiced meditation and discipline had given him the ability to pierce many of the illusions of this world. Not all, perhaps, but many. When he saw the wedding party, he knew what they were, even as he greeted them. Foxes, every one."

"The young lord had been cruelly deceived,” said the oldest boy.

"Perhaps,” said the old man.

"I don't understand,” said the oldest boy. “You said she was a fox."

"I did and she was. As for your not understanding, well, listen to what happened then. You still won't understand, but you'll know more. So, as I said, she was a fox. The teacher requested a moment alone with the lady to bestow his blessing. As he was a respected guest, her retainers withdrew to a discreet distance, though the bride of course remained veiled in her chair. He approached her with every outward sign of respect and he whispered the following words to her: I know what you are, Lady. Leave now and never return, or your beloved will know, too."

"How do you know exactly what was said, Master?” asked the youngest monk. The oldest boy punched him then, but the old monk just smiled.

"It's a story, young one. How can I not know what I have decided the words should be?"

The youngest monk blushed furiously even as he rubbed his sore arm. Still, he must have assumed that his embarrassment couldn't get any worse, since he asked another question. “You are saying, then, that this story isn't true?"

"No, I am not saying that."

Now the oldest boy frowned. “You're saying it is true?"

"I'm not saying that either. Now be silent and let me finish."

The young monks subsided though they looked, if anything, more confused than before. If the old monk noticed he didn't show it. “The lady made a small sound, rather faint. A bit of breath, perhaps, no more. Behind them there was the whisper of sliding screens. A servant had informed Lord Goji of his bride's arrival and the young man was on his way. The monk spoke to the bride again, saying: I see what you are and I will not allow you to deceive my pupil, for whatever your designs might be they cannot be to his advantage. You are a fox, and no human girl at all. Begone while you can."

There might have been no more questions then, but once more the old monk fell silent. One might think he had forgotten that he was telling a story at all, or perhaps the words had slipped away from him. He seemed puzzled, almost, looking off into nothing as if whatever was missing now might, perhaps, be there instead.

"Master, wasn't the teacher afraid of being cursed? I've heard that foxes sometimes do that."

The old monk grunted. “Why should he fear, he who saw with such excellent clarity? How could he fail to see, or speak what he knew? What heed of curses when there might, at the end of the day, be a profaned wedding instead?"

"What happened then?"

"The lady lifted her veil and the monk could see her beauty, despite the fact that he knew it was illusion, and she said: ‘I know what I am, good monk. Yet I love Lord Goji and mean no harm to him. If you can truly see what I am, then you can tell if I speak the truth.’ The monk, of course, said that this did not matter."

"Master ... did it matter? What would you have done?” asked the youngest.

"What would I have done?” The question seemed to confuse the old monk for a moment. Then he shook his head. “It is useless to speak of what might have been done. What matters is what was done. The monk's spiritual power was great. So great that, when Lord Goji came out to greet his new bride, he saw what his teacher saw—a fox. She smiled at Lord Goji, and she said: I would have made you happy. Then she reverted to her true form, she and all her attendants, and they fled from Lord Goji's house. They were never seen again."

"What happened to Lord Goji?” asked the oldest boy.

"He searched for her, for a time."

"Why? To punish the fox for deceiving him?"

"To find her,” the old monk said. “As to his purpose, who can say? I'm not sure even he knew. Yet, before he began his search, he said this much to his teacher: Master, I was happy."

"That sounds rather ungrateful,” said the youngest.

The old monk shrugged. “I suppose. However, I don't think he ever found her. In time Lord Goji returned, shaved his head, and joined the temple. He became a fine monk, one of many more fine, pious monks just like him."

The old man rose slowly and carefully off of his cushion and started toward the door. The young monks watched him, frowning as one. Finally the oldest could stand it no longer. “Master, is that the end of the story?"

"It is,” the old monk said, not even pausing.

"But master,” the oldest persisted. “What does it mean?"

"Meaning is an illusion, too,” said the old monk. “but if you insist, I'll tell you—It means that I was a fool."

The arguments started before he was even through the door. Some monks insisted that their own teacher was the wise teacher. Others insisted just as loudly that he must be Lord Goji himself. Others said it was just a made-up story, similar to the tale of Madame White Snake told in China and the old monk was simply trying to confuse them again. “There are many such stories,” they insisted. “This one is only a little different.” “Yes, but...” someone else would say, and everyone was off again. The discussions went on for days.

The old monk listened, as he always did, but would answer no more questions. He never spoke of the matter again.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Life of Saint Serena

Stepan Chapman

After lunch, girls, as you know, we'll all be walking through the town as part of the procession of Saint Serena the Selfless.

I'm sure that most of you already know the story of Saint Serena. But I'm going to tell it now for the youngest girls. Listen closely, because Saint Serena is the matron saint of our convent. And what's more, she lived her whole life right here in this very town.

When she was young, Serena lived in a white stucco house on the Rio Central, with her husband, a car mechanic, and her two growing sons. They kept a dog, two goats, and four chickens. Up until her twenty-seventh birthday, Serena seemed perfectly normal. She cooked meals, washed clothes, mopped floors, and threw dishes at her family roughly once a month, like any normal wife and mother.

But one windy morning in November, Serena awoke in her bed with the certainty that she'd lost her mind. She looked all over her house for it and then searched her yard. Her worst fear was confirmed. Thieves in the night must have robbed her house, for she'd definitely lost her mind. No one made breakfast for her family that morning.

Having lost her mind, Serena decided that she no longer needed her possessions. She walked around her neighborhood barefoot, wearing only her nightgown, carrying armfuls of her household possessions and giving them away to her various neighbors. She gave away her silverware and crockery, her pots and pans, her bedding and dry goods, her poultry and her goats, her shoes, her clothes, and her family's clothes as well. Then she put her husband and her dog into a mule cart and took them to the local humane society.

"Please feed these two specimens for a week,” Serena instructed the woman at the reception desk, “and try to find a good home for them. If no home can be found, you may put them to sleep. And if you can find my two worthless sons, you can have them too."

"That won't be necessary,” Serena's husband told the receptionist. “My wife has lost her mind.” And so saying he set out for the nearest tavern, to drown his sorrows.

Serena returned to her house just long enough to write a note bequeathing it to the mice. Still in her nightgown, still barefoot, she wrapped her old gray shawl around her and wandered mindlessly down the road that led out of town and into the badlands.

She saw a fat little boy beside the road. He was sitting on a rock and weeping mournfully.

"Why so sad?” Serena asked him.

"My heart is broken,” the boy replied, “and can never be mended."

Hearing this, Serena resolved to help the boy. “You can have mine,” she told him. She reached inside her nightgown, yanked out her heart, and thrust it, dripping blood and still beating, into the boy's hands. The boy sat speechless with his mouth hanging open. Leaving him in that condition, Serena proceeded—mindlessly and heartlessly—down the road.

At the crest of a hill, an old woman was rubbing her feet and grumbling loudly.

"What troubles you, Mother?” asked Serena.

"My feet are killing me,” the woman answered.

Serena found it intolerable that a blameless old woman should be murdered by her own feet. “You must have your feet thrown in jail,” she told the woman.

"And what will I use for feet then?"

"You may use mine,” said Serena. And so saying she sat down in the road, unscrewed her feet, and laid them in the woman's lap. Then she hobbled on down the road—mindless and heartless and without a foot to stand on.

In the middle of nowhere, she came upon two men, one tall and one short. They were down in a ditch beside the road, digging with shovels. The tall man groaned.

"Are you all right?” inquired Serena.

The tall man leaned on his shovel and wiped the sweat from his neck. “Well...” he said, “we could certainly use a hand here."

"Actually,” said the short man, “we could use another couple of hands."

Serena knew just what to do. She unscrewed her left hand and tossed it to the tall man. Then she used her teeth to unscrew her right hand and dropped it into the hands of the short man. The men didn't know what to say. So Serena limped on up the road—no mind, no heart, no feet, no hands.

At the edge of the hill country, a girl was sitting at the top of a telephone pole and screaming into the wind.

"Hey,” Serena called up to her. “What are you doing up there?"

"I'm hiding,” the girl shouted back.

"Why are you hiding?"

"Because I'm in trouble. I got myself into trouble, and now I'm ruined. And all because I fell in love and lost my head."

Serena pondered. If the girl had lost her head, then why was she wearing one? Was this head perhaps a borrowed head on loan from a friend? Whatever the case, Serena had the perfect solution. Employing the stumps of her wrists, she unscrewed her head and pitched it up to the ruined girl. The girl caught it and immediately wished that she hadn't. Serena staggered on up the road—without a thought in her head or a head to think it with.

Climbing the road into the hill country, Serena passed an isolated clump of birch trees. Lurking among the trees was a thin man in a white suit. There wasn't much left of Serena, but she still had her body. The thin man decided that he wanted it. He jumped from the trees, tore off her nightgown, and took it. Then he burned the nightgown.

There seemed to be nothing left of Serena but her old gray shawl, which lay discarded on the dusty road. The shawl picked itself up, brushed itself off, and continued up the road, having nothing better to do. It thought it was all alone in the world.

But in fact it was carrying Serena's soul. Serena's soul had fled her body and gathered itself together into a speck as small as dust. Then it had hidden itself in a strand of the shawl's wool.

The shawl mumbled and dragged its fringe in the mud. The wind blew through its holes. It slumped to the earth beside a pile of horseshit and sighed deeply.

"Why so glum?” asked the pile of horse shit, which was glad to have some company.

"My mistress has deserted me,” answered the shawl.

"Why did your mistress do that?"

"She gave herself away until nothing was left of her."

"How did she manage to do that?"

"By doing favors for people. A boy whose heart was broken. A woman whose feet were killing her. Two men who could use a hand. A girl who'd lost her head. A man that wanted her body."

"Broken heart?” said the pile of horse shit. “Homicidal feet? Pardon my asking, but was your mistress a fool?"

Hearing this insult, Serena's soul stirred within the gray wool of the shawl. She leapt from the shawl, landed on the road, and expanded to the size of a woman. And there she stood, as naked as a jaybird.

"I was a fool,” Serena's soul told the horse shit. “But I wonder, Good Sir, if you would consent to do a great service for a fool. Please come with me, if you would. I have a use for you."

Serena's soul wrapped up the horse shit in her shawl, slung it over her shoulder, and hiked back toward town. She soon came to the grove of birches where the thin man in the white suit lurked. She threw big wet lumps of horse shit at him and hit him smack in the face. “Wheee,” shouted the flying turds.

Then Serena sang her famous shit throwing song, the same song we'll be singing in the processional. Let's sing it once more, girls, just for practice.

* * * *

I swallowed your horseshit.

It came out my ears.

Now you can eat mine.

I am fed up to here.

Take back your horseshit,

You scum-sucking crook,

And give back my body.

Give back what you took.

* * * *

Very nice. Where was I? Oh yes.

Serena's soul walked across the badlands with her shawl and her sack of shit. Before too long she came to the girl on the telephone pole. She pelted the girl with phenomenal accuracy and sang the song again. Naturally the girl returned Serena's head. The soul found the ditch diggers. More throwing of shit, more singing of the song. The soul reclaimed her hands. Then she tracked down the fat boy and the old woman with bad feet.

Serena marched into town, triumphantly reunited. She took back her house from the mice. She visited her neighbors and took back her household things. Shit flew in all directions. By nightfall Serena's family was more or less back to normal.

On the following day, Serena began to bake sweet cakes in the shape of herself, just like these here. (Don't nibble, Carmela. Those are for the poor.) Serena baked piles and piles of her delicious Serena cakes and sold them in the market square at a steady clip. Each time she sold a cake to a customer, she would sing her famous cake song.

* * * *

Cannibals you always were,

And cannibals you be.

So eat this in my image.

For you'll have no more slices of me.

* * * *

Which is of course the song that we'll be singing after the processional, when we distribute the cakes.

Girls? Your attention please. Is everyone ready now? Does everyone have her box of cakes? Does everyone have her sack of horse shit? Excellent.

Let's join the processional.

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My First Lover

It was me that found the secret hideout, half—seen behind a nest of ferns, ripening mushrooms.

A secret weaver's shed. You loomed in the corner, a great clacking shadow. Safety-pin seamstress, short-handed, I mended the telltale tears you earned scrambling in. We picked dandelions, rushes, bitter greens, to eat and to dye with. Your mordant wit fixed colors safe. The heat in there was close.

But, then, what was it you dropped running?

We snuck out to retrieve it. Voices wavered out of the air, a violet became a raised arm's shadow.

Skeins looping everywhere: oozy greens, sweated yellows, badly carded (by me), tongue-rough.

You were sweet and I was sucking a lump of sugar.

Heat lightning, real, I swear, snaked out and fingered you and where did you go? What did you leave on me?

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Secret Histories of Household Objects

The adjustable wrench longs to grip the pitted surface of the pipes under the sink.

The can opener is in love with the corkscrew.

The microwave hates you. I'm too good for her, it is thinking when you burn the popcorn again.

The shadow world of suburbia, they lie in cabinets, under tables, in piles in the garage.

They love, they hate, they are angry, hopeful, sad.

Some are dusty, some shiny with use. They live their little lives. They try to ignore you.

So when you fall down the stairs, spare a thought for that one loose nail striving toward the sunlight.

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It Tastes Bitter

They arrested the woman who threw her pear core on the ground in the winter garden. Sign says

No Littering, Lady. A brown cardinalon the sign picturesquely.

Thirty minutes in a car is a long time for someone with ants in their pants.

Night's falling. Traffic signs slide by like eels but nothing changes.

Up a one-way stair, smelling of leather and spilled wine. All the way to the top. It goes all the way.

You are what you eat. I'm a bowl of soup, I'm bread, I'm water, I ate the whole pear, including the seeds.

Body held like a slingshot.

She thought they'd make her eat it, but they are more baroque in their invention.

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Jon Langford, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds

(bloodshotrecords.com)

Chicago-based, Welsh-born singer, songwriter, artist (he also produced and did the art for this CD) Jon Langford's second solo album is what might be called, whisper it, a concept album. However there are no fairies tripping the light fantastic in this glorious collection of country punk tunes. It's a reflective (if that word might be used in describing music as lively as this) and excoriating look at the music industry, reminiscent of the ‘80s film Breaking Glass. Langford's ragged and instantly recognizable voice recounts the tale of a country singer who lives to regret signing with a major label. The jaunty rhythms jar against the dark topics: in “Nashville Radio” (released as a single and also on the Making Singles, Drinking Doubles compilation) Langford begs for prescriptions, gets thrown out of the Grand Old Opry, and eventually does a Hank Williams. Later, in the incredibly catchy “Over the Cliff,” Langford, “sick of all the yawning, the bitching and the bawling,” decides the best way forward is out. In just under half an hour Langford—who's also in The Mekons, the Waco Brothers, and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts (present on a couple of tracks)—builds us up and knocks us down. There aren't any encores for the villains of the piece, us, the ever-hungry audience. Instead we're left begging for more.

* * * *

Jon Rauhouse, Jon Rauhouse's Steel Guitar Rodeo: Featuring Tommy Connell

(bloodshotrecords.com)

Steel guitarist Jon Rauhouse is fast on his way to becoming a somewhat unexpected but bona fide star. He's toured and played with Kelly Hogan, Neko Case, Sally Timms, Calexico, Giant Sand, and the Waco Brothers, and now many of them play turn about and guest on his second solo album. Rauhouse makes a good case for instrumental albums, but there are also vocals enough (8 of 18 tracks) to satisfy those looking for more than just a surfing soundtrack. Rauhouse plays pedal steel, Hawaiian, and regular guitar as well as banjo, and even sings on a couple of tracks. His voice is okay, but his guitar playing is wonderful: dextrous, playful, loose, and transporting. It's the 1950s, it's the 1970s, it's 2004—but way more relaxed than usual. His main collaborator is Tommy Connell, but rounding out this everyone-who's-anyone-in-alt.country fest are Jennie Benford from Jim and Jennie and the Pine Tops, Giant Sands's Howie Gelb, Kevin O'Donnell, Andy Hopkins, Carolyn Mark, and others.

* * * *

Friends of Dean Martinez, Random Harvest

(narnackrecords.com)

The Friends of Dean Martinez have been around a long time for a side project. But then the whole Giant Sand thing is all about sharing and doing different things, and besides can any band really be defined as a side project if this is their ninth album in ten years? I didn't think so. Random Harvest sounds heavily influenced by film soundtracks. The title track, although not the longest (that would be “Dusk,” at 11:44), has some epic Spaghetti Western aspirations. Based around the steel guitar but incorporating everything from subtle classical guitar to some serious power chords that wouldn't go amiss on an Iron Maiden album, this album is not for the impatient listener. It is, however, very rewarding if you give it the attention it deserves. Recommended for driving or biking.

* * * *

Johnny Cash is dead. R.I.P. We procured the 5-CD boxed set from the library. If he's dead, is it okay to copy it? Do we care about copyright that much? Damn, what a fantastic collection. Mojo, the music mag for old music, did a CD of Cash covers and some of them are good, but still, none of them are Cash. So. R.I.P. Johnny, we'll see you later, wherever you are.

* * * *

The Fawns, Smiling (thefawns.com) is an addictive poppy album likely appreciable by fans of the Rosebuds, Blondie, the Cardigans, and Catatonia.

* * * *

Sunday paper in the UK come with compilation CDs, a couple of which (a Franz Ferdinand EP and a What's Happening in Sottish Pop) we were lucky enough to be given. Come on NYTimes et al, get on the ball! One fave: Aberfeldy's “Heliopolis by Night."

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THE WELL-DRESSED WOLF:

a rhetorical journey through his wardrobe in fairy-tale

Written by Lawrence Schimel

Illustrated by Sara Rojo

* * * *

* * * *

What a magnificent creature is the wolf! Look at the way his velvet-smooth pelt shifts over lean muscles, like the sliding of shadows across the ground as a cloud passes in front of the moon. Shadow-like the wolf stalks across the night, but the wolf is anything but substanceless. The wolf represents power. And danger. Just look at the wolves of fairy tales, always lurking on the edges of the story, ready to snatch unwary children.

* * * *

* * * *

The storybook wolf is always assumed to be male. Maybe it's the wolf's predatory nature that gives this assumption, where we associate hunting and power with masculine. Or perhaps it's the fact that most marchen seem to be morally instructive to girls: wait for your prince to save you, don't talk to strangers, be respectful of your elders, and so on, and a male presence (in the form of the wolf) is more useful for extrapolating to real life encounters.... It may simply be that Western culture seems to have divided animal-representations of sexuality as follows: fox=female and wolf=male.

If one were to visit the storybook wolf in his den, it would be no surprise to find his closet full of James Dean black leather jackets, clean white T-shirts, and sharply pressed denim jeans.

* * * *

* * * *

But that's not what wolves actually wear in fairy tales. Instead of living up to his bad boy image, the storybook wolf, when he wears anything at all, winds up cross-dressing. And not even in something sexy! Instead of red leather mini-skirts (the female equivalent of badboy biker jackets?) the storybook wolf winds up wearing granny's flannel nightgown and bonnet, fuzzy slippers instead of high heels. What does this all mean?

* * * *

* * * *

On the one hand, the wolf's dressing up is a disguise. He's trying to hide his dangerous nature with the most innocent-seeming façade he can think of, to lure the innocent ewe or the young girl with her red cape into his clutches. There is nonetheless something sexual that can be seen in this predatory nature, for appetites can as easily be applied to sexuality as to physical hunger, and does not this fateful scene, in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, take place in a bedroom? Does this cross-dressing merely underscore the wolf's dangerousness: he is so deviant, he will even indulge in this? Or perhaps we should look to the Brothers Grimm themselves, who spent their days gossiping with housewives, to account for this prurient interest in transvestism. What would Freud have to say?

* * * *

* * * *

Not unsurprisingly, it is always the lone wolf who winds up cross-dressing—or who winds up in stories, for that matter. The wolf is a pack animal, one of many shadows in the ever-shifting fabric of the night.

Is the wolf's cross-dressing an attempt to establish his individuality? Or is it rather, bereft of a pack, the lone wolf's desire to fit in, to be part of the crowd, anonymous. Why else, in one of the few tales where the wolves wear clothes, does he put on the fleece of the animal that most-commonly represents a lack of individuality, the generic, fitting in?

* * * *

* * * *

And where does the sheepskin come from? In Little Red Riding Hood, we know he is putting on the grandmother's clothes, after having eaten her. But his sheiling coat? Does the wolf steal it from the farmer? Does he go shopping for it? The whole point of the story is that he can't get near the sheep in the first place, which is why he invents this subterfuge. If he's already got a sheep at hand to take the skin from, the whole enterprise becomes redundant and his meal is already at hand. And if he does kill a sheep to get its pelt, how does he get the blood-stains out, to avoid alarming the flock he intends to join. Sheep are not killed when they are shorn for their wool, but given that the wolf steals wool from the farmer, what does he stick it on to make his sheepskin? The stories are vague on all these important questions, and obviously their editor should have returned the manuscript for rewriting.)

* * * *

* * * *

In both stories, the climax comes at the moment of undressing, of true natures being revealed. But isn't that always the case with men? Once the civilized clothes are removed, what's left is the hairy, primal beast. But what is nudity to the wolf? Unclothed, the wolf is still dressed in his own fur.

Does it reflect a moral judgment, for having dared to cross the gender divide, that the wolf meets with death in both tales? (Of course, the wolf in fairy tales almost always gets a short shrift, is it any wonder they're becoming endangered?)

* * * *

* * * *

And what if our central premise is wrong and the storybook wolf is actually female? Of course, even trying to posit this question leads more credence to the male wolf, since a female would've chosen more flattering outfits.

(Could it be more obvious that these tales were written/recorded by straight white men?) But rereading these stories with a female wolf, how does the subtext change? Would they have different endings? Would a female wolf clash with a young girl heroine, the way the Queen is jealous of Snow White's beauty? If we change Little Red Riding Hood to a boy, would a female wolf become a nurturing figure, like the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus? That's all we have time for this afternoon. Next session, we'll investigate the tailor as hero in fairy tales.

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Dear Aunt Gwenda

The Post-Election Depressed, Non-Timely, You'd Better Be Thankful Anyway, Doom & Gloom Edition

As you'll see demonstrated here, Dear Aunt Gwenda makes no promise of providing answers in a time frame that is of help to you, the question-asker. But why does everything always have to be about you anyway? That's what I thought, big britches.

I plan to enter this compendium of advice into one big sacred text, which I will leave somewhere both hidden and handy following the impending economic collapse of the United States. It will be found years from now and people will use it to learn to read again. And to hope.

So get over yourself. We're making history here. First question:

* * * *

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

The state in which I live (NY) is thought to be a sure victory for Kerry. That's great, but I feel left out—how can I do my part to encourage regime change in DC?

Thanks—

Blue State Blues

* * * *

A: Well, obviously, Blue State Blues, whatever you did, it wasn't enough. But really, this had to happen, in order to bring about the impending doom mentioned above. What you should do now is sharpen your weapons, secure your barricades and buy lots of bottled water.

* * * *

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda:

How about that veggie burger with bacon?

* * * *

A: Vegetarianism has many strange permutations. The use of cloned pigs for guilt-free bacon is a perfectly acceptable one. I prefer facon and have it every damn morning when I get up and contemplate how after the apocalypse comes I'll be too busy shooting at interlopers to go to the abandoned grocery store and steal facon. Or perhaps that the fake pigs will be freed by some misguided hippie type and there won't even be facon anymore.

* * * *

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda:

My future in-laws would like to present us with a silver cutlery set. Foregoing the easy lycanthropic excuse, how can I persuade them this is not what my future husband and myself would most appreciate?

Lycanthropically Yours

[Name withheld by request]

* * * *

A: I just got married and I would have loved a silver set. Not to keep, mind you, but there's got to be a place to return it for hard, cold moolah or a black market on which to fence it. You pretend the movers stole it, or your covetous friend from high school who should never have been invited over in the first place. Alternately, embrace the silver set and realize that you'll be able to use it to barter for more practical goods during the post-apocalyptic Road Warrior/28 Days Later/Anna Nicole Smith Show-esque days ahead. You may want to keep certain items as weapons.

* * * *

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

I held an intimate soiree (cocktails, dinner, a seance) and someone, a friend from long ago happy school days, H., brought someone whom I'd rather not have seen at all—never mind too much of them too little covered—in the comforts of mine own compact and bijou home. I'd love to keep my friend H., but would like to ensure my not seeing his partner again. Advice? Plots?

* * * *

A: Well, this just goes to show that you should never have happy school days to begin with, and certainly never, ever keep in touch with people from them. H. and his baggagey partner are just going to slow you down when you are fleeing the lycanthropes and carpetbaggers after The Great and Final Collapse. You seem to actually perceive that you are in danger of passing the end days with someone you hate. However, since this is the situation in which you find yourself, make the most of it. Once social mores becomes meaningless, you can kill and eat this person. The sweet, sweet taste of human flesh will be far more satisfying than either cloned pig bacon or fake pig facon.

* * * *

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

The mice are chewing at the corners of my flour sacks. What should I do?

* * * *

A: I commend you on the foresight of having stocked up on flour. Obviously, you are not someone who needs my advice. But remember: mice skins can be sewn into lovely jackets when fabric becomes hard to get ahold of. Go on with your bunker-dwelling bad self.

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The Future of Soul to Soul and other Sound Systems We Loved and Then Which Disappeared Or Became Somewhat Uninteresting (is Outside the Scope of These Notes)

Missing on the ad for the wunnerful-wunnerful reading experience Trunk Stories is the bit about the super limited edition available to the smart, the $7-rich, the quick off the mark. What's limited about it? Is it, like the future Small Beer (ooh, another ad for the “sponsor” of this paper thingy, ooh) limited editions on lovely paper with illos and all kinds of “special” things? Is it signed by the author and illustrator? No. But, if you're really smart you'll ask the editor/creator Mr. William Smith to sign it for you. Each of the numbered and limited-to-one-hundred-copies of the zine has a hand-made pop-up in the center which will provide you with hours of amusement and no small amount of hours of how-did-he-do-that-type wonder. We are serious. We might sell some of these on our website or perhaps we will hoard them.

The Small Beer limited editions of Kelly Link's second collection and Maureen McHugh's debut collection will be fun and no doubt will also take up more time than even we expect. They are due in May and June. Golly.

In the new year we'll be heading up to a printer in Vermont to talk about paper and cloth—no leatherbound editions here, yay! (unless we use something like that facon mentioned by the ever so sharp and wise Aunt Gwenda). We'll get to use the types of materials we always want to but can't afford to use for the trade editions. (Hand-pressed Italian paper? Cloth made from Spanish cotton harvested by well-paid farmers only working on warm but breezy days? Ink milked from wild squids whose pay is donated to the Nature Conservancy?) We'll also be seeing if we can get some of the illustrations letterpress printed. This is probably silly and beyond what can be done even for one hundred dollar books—we'll know soon.

Six books next year, Whoopee! Editing The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. Looking for editing, designing, teaching, and/or writing work. [See our non-existent ad in the trade mags.]

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Nicholas

Mark Rich

Joy of the world. It begins here, beside the stately pines (rushing down with that cold, early December air comes the scent of old things, the needles, the oak leaves with the look of the skin of a hundred-year-old still alive by the grace of dark tea and rye bread) where only I walk.

This, Nicholas thinks to himself. The world will come to its ruin behind the steering column of the four-wheeled car, adrift in a flat landscape with painted lines leading far from these oak leaves on this sidewalk. “I can turn the wheel atop the steering column,” says the man knocking at the iron gates. “I can turn it quite well.” And he is let in. The policeman in his 1950s-revival black and white sedan sails by and then waits at the corner, stopping and ticketing no one for missing the oak leaves on the sidewalk. Not even the policeman knows these oak leaves. Ride by on your chariots, multitudinous asphaltophiliacs. Carried on tires. Rubber being an insulator. Electricity of life cannot pass that barrier.

Nicholas carries two cloth bags, both marked with the faded logo of the food co-op, although where he walks from now is the grocery store north of the nunnery, past these pines, past these oak leaves, past this street where numbed folks ride by, halfway to living death, upon spring-cushioned and double-axled couches.

No, he thinks, it begins not here on this sidewalk, the joy, but back in the store, standing in line while the overburdened clerk helped the woman before him, the stately lady who shed no pine needles and who said, “Plastic,” when asked if she wanted plastic or paper. The clerk, working her eighth hour standing in one place, started putting the groceries in a paper bag. “I said I wanted plastic,” said the woman, who then stood there, stock still, while the clerk then put the groceries in a plastic bag.

The lady stood there, shedding not a needle and not an oak leaf, no cool air coming down from her treetops, and why did I think she was a stately graying woman, Nicholas thinks.

Nicholas bagged his own two cloth bags: the box of Point beer, in one; and the meat and cheese, bread, green tea, can of tomato paste, and box of mushrooms, in the other. What a strange shopping trip to the grocery store, thinks Nicholas. I bought four kinds of meats, and I do not even always buy meat. Sliced corned beef, since a life needs some corned beef in it, even a life that has been sometimes of the vegetables-only variety. A slab of bacon from a local smoke shop. Sealed, so it will keep. Some smoked sausages, from the same shop, also sealed, so they will also keep. A package of lamb cut up for stew. Even though he just made a stew with lamb two days before, he rarely sees the lamb stew meat. So he bought it. Four kinds of meat: what a rarity. On top of that he bought three kinds of bread. Sourdough rolls form California: ridiculous. Greek bread, not from Greece. Two packages of frozen bagels from out East. This is Wisconsin. Some local bakery should have established its name across the country by now for its fine Polish rye bread. Does anyone in town make a fine Polish rye bread? The last he remembers came from Chicago.

* * * *

* * * *

The man next to him at the deli counter, volunteering: “She's next,” meaning Nicholas standing there with his long, curling hair, in his dark leather jacket, still zipped tight from having walked in from the cold. The man corrected his pronoun, hearing Nick's voice ordering corned beef, half-pound, thank you. Still these mistakes, more than thirty years after the long-hair season of the children's revolution. Making the sex call by length of hair. Another man driving by, blind to the oak leaves on the sidewalks. Or that balding Mr. Pippin at the art opening, walking up to Nicholas and Nell and protesting, “I can't decide which of you has the more beautiful hair,” and then returning, only minutes later, to Nick, with eyes wide, saying, “I've decided. It's you.” Ah, Mr. Pippin, who is in an uneven groove with respect to the world. Easily offended, that man is, Nicholas thinks. Prickly Mr. Pippin. May our hair smooth over our rough spots.

It may have been that moment, in the cashier's line, when light bathed the world. Nicholas stood there, feeling as conspicuous as ever in the dark leather jacket, a jacket that by itself intimidated weak souls who saw things within its dark folds Nicholas never carries. Between the flayed cow at the slaughterhouse and the man carrying his thirty-five dollars of groceries and beer down the street, past the pines: there lies the shadow. Is this not true, old skin and bones Eliot? In that moment, in the cashier's line, he felt the wideness and tallness of life in the world. He amazed himself, watching the clerk leave her station to tend to that pillar of useless plastic-please ladyness, the woman who could not help herself. It amazes him he lacked an ounce of impatience, in that moment. He stood and admired the bustling world. He helped out the bustling world by bagging his own groceries when his time came: you help where you can. Nicholas believes this. You help where you can. The world may not help you. Help, and help yourself. All these motions of the universe are for you, dear lady in the stiff jacket and imprisoned mind. Please carry them out, these motions, with you to your car, in that plastic bag. Then leave the plastic bag at home, and leave it behind next time, because the store might give you a nickel for the effort of bringing it back. Almost as bad as helping bag your own food.

It is already yours, after all. You have paid, and have accepted the receipt, and here you still have the clerk act as though the food is still owned by her employer.

Nicholas grows enraged at this in an amused way, without being truly mad at anything or anyone. Everyone has been a stiff, upright lady, awaiting service, at some time. That lady may even have worked the store aisles herself, in a decade gone by. An unlikely thought, but possible. Strange things happen to people, ironing them flat before they can be properly laid out flat. They forget who they are. Or discover something else to be, that involves forgetting who they were.

Nicholas stood there waiting for the clerk to return from her bagging duty. That may have been the moment. He minded this not at all, was perfectly happy, and ignored the others in line behind him: they had bottles of Impatience out, ready to spray on their necks for a bit of end-of-shopping cologne. They could watch him through the mists of the scented spray as he stood there smiling. All he wanted to do at the moment was stand there smiling. He figured he might as well do what he wanted to do.

Or before that, as he walked down Portage Street past the building that once held a soda-pop company, when he met Jake, the mailman: a tall spindle of a man Nicholas knows as a fellow walker on the mostly empty sidewalks and, too, as one of the likewise few souls who would sit around an open-mike evening, enjoying local players and singers. “Nicholas! A Merry Christmas to you if I don't see you before,” came the voice from across Portage Street. When Nicholas looked up to see Jake, he emerged from his walking reverie and crossed the street.

* * * *

* * * *

"I haven't been out as much,” Jake said, standing at the place where the sidewalk met the walk up to a front door. “I've been on the wagon. Haven't been drinking for six months. I was starting to have a little bit too much fun. Six months, in January. That doesn't mean I can't get off the wagon now and then, like for Lizzie's birthday. Had to go out for Lizzie's birthday."

Merriment, at drink and at music. Strange, the concourse of minds, and then the falling apart of relations that seem fixed, because they are so simple. Leaves on sidewalks, iced snow on sidewalks: blow away, melt away. Endings. A face not to be seen in smoky bars, for some time. A man reclaiming something for himself, putting a simple thing together again that had failed and fallen apart.

These thoughts still with him, now, in the night, in the pew at the Episcopal church, through whose doors he passed only once before, to shop for old things at a rummage sale. Here now for Haydn, not for church; and only here in the church, so late in the day, does it strike him. It is St. Nicholas’ Day. The church is putting on the mass by Haydn Nicholas has never heard, nor heard of. A Mass in Honor of St. Nicholas: kyrie, gloria, credo, sanctus, benedictus, agnus dei, the common Latin of the mass-singer, pronounced without rolled liquid consonants. Agreeable voices in the choir, dissonant string players valiantly hoping for consonance against their own inadequacies. The music rolls to its starts and finishes, with the never uncertain grandness of Haydn throughout, in its weight, in its fleeting shapes. A church that holds St. Nicholas as its central saint, founded on the saint's day. It is the day.

We came for the music, says Nicholas to the vaulted ceiling. Here, in the open chamber ribbed like the whale. Thank the uncaring stars I am not a saint nor saintly, he says, for if I dwelled in joy how would I know it, for what it is. How could it arrive, being there, always. Glorious, the fact music ends. Haydn, messenger from a time when neither mass nor symphony sought grandeur through massive occupancy of clock-time. Twenty minutes of evocation and memory. Notes, voices, flat violins.

My day, without really being my day: strange not to think of it before, he thinks. The fact before your face, the fact not seen by eyes.

Off with Nell for a beer, then.

Cold air over snow-crusted sidewalks.

Beer, companionship: of the world.

Night.

Simple.

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gray's boadicea: unlikely patron saints, no. 4

Amy Sisson

so 1 day gray told me i could come along on 1 of his midnight runs, he wanted 2 show me something. i didn't know what he wanted but i was glad & i knew the other girls would b jealous if they found out. anyway me & gray had already been IMing 4 a few weeks but in school he didn't act like he knew who i was & maybe he didn't. sometimes people aren't who u think they r. anyway he asked if i could sneak out at night & i said sure my mom never wakes up after she's gone 2 bed.

gray had a motorbike, not a real big 1 like a harley but somewhere between a dirt bike & a real motorcycle. he even had a green helmet 4 me that matched his. i rode w/my arms around his waist & thought about him & what my mom would say if she knew. she'd freak over his eyebrow ring or his long hair, which was pretty dumb considering the greaseballs she dated.

we rode down 2 the beach near katyville. it was pretty warm being may & all but it was almost 1 in the morning so we were the only 1s there. i didn't say much b/c i got the feeling gray didn't want 2 talk. i was a little nervous at 1st, i mean i hardly knew him so he could have turned out 2 b a nutcase or something, but then he took my hand & i just kind of knew i could trust him.

"remember in bio when we talked about endangered species?” he asked. “i'm kind of in2 all that. especially turtles, u know? u kind of looked like u were in2 it 2."

"yeah,” i said. “that was kind of cool. i mean, not cool that they're endangered or anything but u know."

"look, there,” he said real quiet, pointing.

i looked but at 1st i couldn't c anything b/c there was hardly any moonlight even. then i saw a wide track like some1 had dragged a box thru the sand. i looked at gray but he didn't say anything so i just followed the track. i can't c great in the dark, so i almost fell over it b4 i saw it. her, i mean.

"she's nesting,” gray said real quiet. “her name's boadicea. i found her 3 years ago. i came out here 1 night after a fight w/my old man & i found her track & followed it & there she was. i didn't know what she was doing at 1st, but then these 2 college students came riding up in a jeep & told me she was nesting. the students dug up the eggs when she was done & took them back 2 their lab 2 make sure they hatch. if they leave them, dogs dig them up & people walk on them or seagulls eat them. & even the few that hatch, they have 2 make a run 4 the water & most of them get picked off by seagulls. anyway, they said i could name her since i found her 1st so i named her boadicea. c that big gash in her shell? they told me she must have got hit by a boat propeller. i figured she was like an old battle-scarred warrior queen, & that's who boadicea was."

that was more than i'd ever heard him say all at once. while he talked he stroked the turtle's shell. the poor thing looked exhausted. she'd scrape the sand w/her flippers 4 a few seconds & then just lie there again w/out moving. but she didn't seem scared of us.

"anyhow, the students, they try 2 find the turtles when they lay but sometimes they miss a couple. that's no good—they miss 1 turtle & that's like 100 babies that won't hatch, or a few that hatch but only live a few hours. it's not their fault, the college students i mean. they can't b everywhere at once so i try 2 help them a little."

we backed away & sat down, close enough 2 watch boadicea but far enough 2 give her some privacy.

"where'd u get the name gray?” i asked.

"my real name's gary,” he said. “but i didn't think it fit. i think there's a lot more gray in the world than black & white, u know?"

then i told him how my mom & i haven't been getting along 2 well, & a couple of weeks ago she finally came right out & said she'd b glad when i graduated so i could get a job & move out. no way she'd help me pay 4 college so i wasn't sure what 2 do. i didn't say much more b/c i don't like talking about her, & anyway boadicea started 2 move more & gray said she was finished.

the poor thing looked so tired. she turned towards the water & started 2 push herself along w/her flippers. she'd go a few feet, then stop & rest 4 a minute. i got scared when she reached a dip in the sand w/a little water in it. it confused her & she got herself turned back away from the ocean.

"gray,” i whispered, “she's going the wrong way."

gray walked over 2 her. “boadicea,” he said, right out loud. “ur going the wrong way.” & then boadicea turned around again, just like she understood him, & moved in the right direction. when she finally felt the edge of a wave under her it was like i could feel her anticipation. she rested a few seconds more, then pushed herself another foot or 2. it was incredible, like this huge joy & relief & then we were gone, well she was at least.

gray was quiet 4 a minute. then he said, “come on, we need 2 dig up the eggs.” i'm not sure i would've found the right spot again, but gray went right 2 the nest she'd covered w/sand, & gently smoothed it away til he came 2 the 1st egg, well, the last 1 she laid, really.

he picked it up, & i knew the egg was in safe hands.

"do u want 2 hold it?” he asked, & put it in my palm.

it was round & leathery, the size of a ping pong ball. it was a little squishy, but gray said the outside would harden later. it was hard 2 believe our queen boadicea had come from an egg that little.

there were 103 eggs in all, not including 1 that was broken. while i was made sure we had them all, gray went back 2 the parking lot & pulled a bucket from behind the public bathrooms, & we set the eggs inside. i was worried about leaving the bucket there, but gray said it was ok, the college students would b coming, & then i saw headlights down the beach. gray waved at them 2 make sure they saw us, & then we left. we didn't talk at all on the way home, not that its easy 2 talk on a motorbike anyway.

when i woke up the next morning, the whole thing seemed like a dream, but i knew it wasn't. the name boadicea kept running thru my head. i thought about her, lonely boadicea swimming by herself & coming back 2 her birthplace every year. would she recognize 1 of her children if she met it? would i c her again next year? if i did, i knew i'd recognize her from that propeller gash.

i thought about gray 2 but i didn't c him again. he never came back 2 school, & when i asked around, no1 knew anything. i missed him.

i talked 2 ms henry, my guidance counselor, not long after. she found me some info on financial aid & said if i started at the community college & then switched 2 stony brook i could get a marine sciences degree & it wouldn't cost as much that way. she said she'd help me w/applications & stuff—said she had a daughter a few years younger than me so she could translate my IM in2 college speak, lol. so i've got some work 2 do if i'm going 2 b 1 of those students in the jeep someday.

but i have an advantage now, i think. i can't explain it, but i'm pretty sure i have gray's touch now.

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The Truck

Neal Chandler

Gary Parker rifled through the top drawer of his night stand. He'd be late to teach his class. He was as good as late. Damn. He threw the drawer shut, crossed the room and began to rifle through his wife's lingerie drawer, down among the jewelry boxes and empty Nivea tins. Camilla had left again without leaving him money. He found a quarter and two dimes underneath a rolled pair of panty hose. It wasn't enough. Damn. Damn. Damn. The drawer bottom was dotted with pennies, but counting out pennies in the faculty dining room was humiliating. He slammed her drawer shut, threw his book bag over his shoulder and ran down the hall to his daughter's room. Emily was fourteen. She was intensely fourteen, and she'd have a fit if she came home to find her baby-sitting money missing again. It would be the second fit in as many weeks. With the file on his nail clipper, he opened the bright yellow cash box on her dresser. He took out three dollars, thought about it, and put one back again. Then he thought again and stuffed the third bill into his pocket. Camilla was the one at fault. Let Camilla deal with Emily. He had to get to class.

Today he would cover “the climax and seeded self-dissolution of Structuralism” (this was a line from Parker's own forthcoming monograph), but today was also the last lecture before spring break. Ten minutes late and he could count on fifty percent attrition. Any later and the classroom would be empty.

He replaced the cash box, zipped up his jacket, and headed back down the hall toward the living room. Hitching up his book bag, he was picking up speed and also noticing that the lace on his Topsider was untied and trailing, and thinking as he broke into a jog that he didn't have time to tie it, and was, in fact, just entering the living room when he smacked head on into the truck.

He met the carpet with a muting, sense-swallowing thud. Slowly, grumpily he heaved himself up to a sitting position, flinching and gritting his teeth and probing the knob on his forehead. “Shit,” he mumbled, beginning to collect himself, and then after a few moments of opening and closing his uncertain eyes, spoke again in a tone of epiphany, “Shit!"

There, looming in the filtered sunlight was the startling, orthodontic grin of a chrome grill towering brightly above his head. He closed his eyes, lay back down while waves and colors churned through his optic nerve. He calmed himself. When he felt in control, he carefully re-opened one eye.

"Holy shit!"

The truck was immense, a steel-and-jet enameled Leviathan overwhelming his tiny living room. Something had happened. He'd been knocked unconscious and awakened insane. He'd been rushed and late for class. But to snap off completely, he couldn't accept this. He was going to ignore it, to get himself up off the carpet and go to school. He looked at his watch and groaned. He'd missed his class altogether.

Unsteadily, he got onto his knees, pushed upward, straightened and stepped back into the hall. He took hold of the door jamb and looked hard at the machine across a narrow strip of carpet. The truck was a Kenworth. It said so vertically on a round red medallion.

Gary Parker knew something about trucks. When he was in junior high school, his best friend's father had owned a White cabover with a 430 engine and nine-speed transmission. The friend had taught Gary to spot Whites and Peterbilts, Kenworths and Internationals the way that other kids spotted Chargers and Mustangs and Camaros. That had been long ago, of course, and the bald truth about Parker two decades later was that he couldn't even drive a stick shift. But he had once aspired to, and now, standing in the doorway, the sub-sweet smell of lubricant and diesel fuel filling his nostrils, he saw clearly that the blow to his head had dislodged a fragment from his past, had sent it somehow crashing into the space occupied normally by the living room. Nothing comes from nothing, he thought. Matter over mind. A remarkable and illustrative occurrence.

Parker let go of the jamb. He stepped back into the living room where the high fenders and soaring sleeper rose cathedral-like over bookcases, his wife's hanging plants, and the coffee table. He was seriously injured. He had to get to work.

It was almost dark when he arrived home again, and he was in an evil mood. Condescending smiles and the “I was here. Where were you?” notes tacked to his door hadn't improved his day. People had been reliably sympathetic. The secretaries marveled at the swelling on his forehead. The growing purple bruise—soon to be edged in green—certified his innocence, in fact, his martyrdom. Yet he felt like an idiot.

When the students, returning from vacation, got hold of this story, they would gleefully class him with the sort of professor who can't tie his shoes or pay a bill, who loses his glasses on his forehead, leaves his fly open, walks absently into the women's john. There would be jokes in the cafeteria, the registration line. “Oh yeh, Parker. Very deep. He walks into walls."

He wheeled his bicycle into the garage and chained it to the rototiller. The car was there. Camilla was home, probably sitting with her legs up in the living room where a few hours earlier, injured on the floor, he had imagined seeing a truck. It was cold and getting dark, but he tinkered in the garage, adjusted his bicycle seat, cleaned a reflector, ordered the lawn tools along the wall, took his time about going in the house.

"Why can't you get home at a reasonable hour? I made dinner. I don't know why I bother.” Camilla was grousing at him quite ordinarily from the living room. He felt a surge of relief. It had all been a wild hallucination.

"I don't see any dinner."

"It's in the oven. All you have to do is cook a vegetable. The broccoli in the refrigerator is a week old. I only buy it because you say you like it. Make a salad if you want. And get Emmi to set the table.” There was beef-something thawed and bubbling in a casserole in the oven. He knew he'd find Camilla spread across the sofa doing reports. He edged towards the door. “Where is Emmi?"

There sat his wife amid files and clipboards and binders, her feet propped high on the coffee table just inches from the stamped, metal steps and enormous polished fuel tank of the truck.

"What?"

"I said ... I...” He looked at the Kenworth and then back at his wife.

"Gary?"

He had to look away. “I asked where Emily was."

"Where else would she be?” Camilla went back to her work. “In the basement watching television. I just don't see why you can't get away from that place. They pay you little enough."

He called down the stairs to his daughter to come set the table. After taking the broccoli from the refrigerator, he called down again.

Her answer was preemptive. “You took my money, didn't you?"

By the time she'd reached the bottom stair, he was in retreat. “Talk to your mother."

"I already did.” In the kitchen she knelt and began throwing things around in the cupboard, looking for place mats.

He broke the silence. “Your mom paid you back, didn't she?"

"I hate it when you break into my bank. It's ... it's like burglary."

"Yes, it is,” he conceded. “And that's a serious crime in bourgeois societies which value property over people. But among the desperate poor, burglary is sometimes a talent, a survival skill."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that for people with money, burglary means violation of rights and of principle, but for people left without money, burglary means lunch."

"That's bullshit, Daddy."

"Of course it is. I had a burrito and a Pepsi. What did you have?"

"For lunch?” she asked.

"We were talking about lunch."

"We were talking about burglary. You know I hate school lunch. It's disgusting. I ate the brownie, but I picked out the nuts."

"Well now, for some needy people..."

"Don't tell me. For starving people wasting food is worse than burglary."

"Exactly. The real crime is starving."

"You're not starving."

"Let's say I'm innocent of starving."

"And that's supposed to make you a good person?"

"Hey, it's not always easy."

She wouldn't smile or look at him, but he knew they had gotten through this skirmish.

It wasn't until they'd all sat down at the kitchen table that his daughter noticed his injury. “Daddy, what happened to your head?"

Camilla looked up. “Gary, my god!"

"I'm okay. I hit my head on a door jamb this morning. It looks worse than it is."

"Are you sure? It looks terrible."

When it was settled that he was all right and evident that he didn't want to talk about it, they retreated to eating. Parker ate broccoli and salad and picked reluctantly at the red meat. Camilla savored the beef and shuffled the green stuff around her plate until it was spread thinly enough to suggest having been eaten. Emily expanded on both leads, stirring virtually everything on her plate into hungerless entropy.

"For Pete sake, Em,” Parker raised a reproachful eyebrow, “try something. You can't eat cereal three meals a day."

"Why not?” Her face was lit with challenge.

"You need a balanced diet.” He leaned forward on his elbows toward his daughter and saw the high fender and enormous tire appearing directly through the door behind her head. “There are four major food groups,” he said.

Emily rolled her eyes. Her mother was silent.

After dinner, he cleared the table and did the dishes, listening to a basketball game. It was April and his team had already been mathematically eliminated. By the time he'd finished, Camilla and Emily were downstairs watching television. Parker dried his hands and went carefully into the living room. The truck awaited him, preened and softened by the lamplight, attendant on his coming. Its deep obsidian finish had the sultry perfection of luxury cars in slick magazines. He moved his fingers across the fender as if along a perfect ebony shoulder.

He reached up and traced the chrome and red enamel logo. Then he continued around the cab, the sleeper, and on along the trailer. The passage was narrow. He had to squeeze past the stereo and climb up and over the recliner. He'd progressed almost to the end of the mammoth rig when he realized he was still in the living room. It made no sense. Of course it made no sense. And it made no difference which sense he employed. No truck this size could possibly fit into his tiny living room, his house for that matter, nor could it have entered without reducing the three bedroom ranch to rubble. Yet here it was, sprawling far and wide across the carpet.

Later that night in bed, Parker put it behind him. He had hit his head, had been hallucinating. It could have been worse, but he would now think about other things, pleasant things, would float off to sleep. Yet every attempt he made at distraction, every line of conjecture, even sure-fire sexual fantasies floated off rudderless and disconnected toward the specter in the living room. He was still awake and brooding when Camilla came to bed.

"Aren't you going to read?” She was genuinely surprised.

"I have a headache."

"Poor thing.” His wife crawled in next to him and reached over to kiss him carefully on the side of his forehead opposite the bump. “Are you going to be okay? Do you need to be consoled?” She ran a finger over his chest.

"I'll be all right,” he said. “I'm just very tired,” and he rolled over onto his side.

Camilla nested her chin on his arm for a while and traced a finger along his neck.

"Don't.” He twitched away.

"Good night, Gary,” she said quietly. “I'm sorry."

In the morning Parker was certain he hadn't slept at all. But he feigned sleep until his wife and daughter, fighting over the curling iron and over who was making whom late, finally managed their noisy exit. Then he rose and staggered to the bathroom. Fully blossomed, the bruise over his eye looked like an evil mushroom. No wonder he'd been out of his mind. It was now spring break. He wanted to lounge and work on an article he had outlined months before. His lectures were on file, the most recent set of papers graded and returned; he had a full week of freedom to work. But he couldn't concentrate, couldn't point his mind. Oh, the truck would be gone. He was certain. Like any bad dream, this one would have run its course. But why had it been there in the first place? These things had significance. Nothing comes from nothing, especially not an enormous truck. He was mending, but he was shaken.

He showered and dressed just to feel that he was doing something. And then a burst of resolve launched him from the bedroom out into the hall. The moment he'd cleared the door, however, his shoulders slumped. The eighteen-wheeled behemoth still rose sphinx-like from the carpet. Parker slunk miserably past it through the re-cluttered kitchen and out into the morning.

The sun on his forehead, at least, seemed welcoming and free of implication, and he gave himself over to it. Wheeling his bicycle from the garage, he turned, out of habit, toward the college. He didn't have to go to school, so he dawdled, shifting up only twice through the rachet-rachet-kerchunk of his ten-speed. The snow had shrunk to matted eyebrows under the hedge rows, and the poplars and sugar maples in the distance were haloed in that wan, phosphorescent green that pilot-lights the spring. The wind, despite the sun, was laced with cold. He was glad when he reached the campus.

The blinking computers had recently been connected to library systems state wide. There were 623 sub-entries under “truck.” From “truck campers” and “truck drivers—anthropometry” he skimmed on through “drivers—health and hygiene, vocational guidance, truck racing and terminals.” There were categories for dump trucks, fork lifts, refuse collection vehicles. The relentlessly analytical parade of screens made him tired. He tried a search of the Psychological Information Index but turned up not a single reference under “truck.” Nothing he stopped to check on, no aspect, no category seemed remotely promising, nor was much of anything “locally available."

Abandoning the project, he wandered to the periodicals area and gathered up current journals. He needed to think about something else, to regroup. In a sunlit corner he stacked the journals at his elbow. He began to read, but found himself needing to reread the first paragraph. He was out of practice. He went back to the table of contents to find something easier. But wherever he began, he couldn't seem to find a gear low enough. He read for an hour, an hour and a half, but it was no use. Disgusted, he gave up and went sullenly out to unchain his bicycle and peddle away.

He rode across campus and out the main gate, headed south toward the Interstate. The sun was high and hot now. There were fits of dandelion along the berm, and just across a freshly ploughed field, scores of crows dropped into the stark branches of a black walnut tree to glower and prate.

When he reached the overpass, Parker dropped from the saddle and stood straddled over his bicycle at the guard rail while traffic disappeared beneath him. The freeway was a pulsing artery through row-tilled calm, a connecting torrent of sedans and compacts, muscle cars and mini-vans, pick-ups and flatbeds and U-Hauls and, of course and especially, the semis he had come out here to see. The big rigs emerged like bar-graphs from the horizon, rising slowly in the flat, linear distance, pressing toward him vaguely at first, then with sudden deliberateness, approaching faster and faster—forty, sixty, eighty thousand pounds of steel and chrome and glass through the acid sunlight—first climbing, then running, then plunging toward his fragile perch. He stopped brooding. Splayed over his bicycle in a faint diesel haze, hushed and box-eyed, he fixed on each big braying rig as it bawled closely beneath his feet to leave him gently quaking with the overpass.

Two hours later, on the way home, sun deep in the afternoon sky and his mind pumping and clicking along again with the gears and pedals, it occurred to Parker that his afternoon had been research after all, but mind yielded up to body. The rush had been purely physical, but it had been a platonic sort of physicality, disembodied somehow, and somehow absolute. Like orgasm, he thought, without sex.

For a day or two this notion intrigued him. Wasn't there a case to be made for somatic understanding, the role of the body in knowledge? Weren't there things that could be lived, but not spoken? That seemed pivotal. He found his unread copy of a book on somatics, put his feet up like Camilla, and read. When he'd finished thirty pages, he rubbed his eyes and read one more. Then he put his feet down and threw the book against the wall. “So what?” he demanded, his voice rising as if helium driven, and he pointed instructionally across the table, “There's an eighteen-wheel truck in my living room, goddamn it. A goddamn eighteen-wheel truck!"

By the weekend Parker was so distracted he was itching for confrontation. He had begun to suspect that something devious was going on, something in his family, something shifty and disloyal, perhaps even cruel. He had been watching the traffic patterns between the bedrooms and the kitchen, and though his wife and daughter maintained a canny silence, their behavior, which is to say their navigational habits and certain shrewd avoidance maneuvers, betrayed an awareness of and, as he was becoming increasingly convinced, probable complicity in the outrage taking place in his living room.

Nightly, surrounded by her statements and printouts, Camilla stretched her long legs and bare feet across the coffee table to within inches, centimeters, barest millimeters of the knuckled steps, the gleaming aluminum fuel tank. She came so repeatedly, breath-stoppingly close that after a while it was impossible for Gary, spying from the kitchen, to accept her invariable failure finally to make contact as a matter of chance. She was teasing him, baiting him, intentionally making him crazy. His daughter, at fourteen not yet so cunning as her mother, was flagrant. More than once he had watched Emily bounce out of her bedroom and head straight toward the chrome-toothed grill of the Kenworth only to stop short at the very last possible moment, stoop down to pick up some scrap of paper from the floor—when in all of her fourteen years had she ever voluntarily stooped down to pick up anything?—and then veer off at right angles toward the waste basket. Just how gullible did they think he was?

He felt insulted. Ridiculed. And when on Saturday, Emily repeated this same transparent stunt, dropping to her knees in front of the Kenworth for what surely must have been the fourth or fifth time, Gary Parker, tracking her from the hallway, exploded.

"Just what do you think you are doing down there?"

Emily, spread on all fours, gathering school books and papers, froze. Slowly she twisted around in place to look up at her father, eyes a careful study in perplexity. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

"I'm.... “Her eyes widened, but she couldn't hold his gaze. She glanced quickly over at Camilla, who was looking up with an equally quizzical expression. “I'm picking up, Daddy.” She said this ostensibly to him, but her statement seemed not so much an answer to his question as a postulate submitted for approval to her mother.

"Gary,” Camilla interceded, “are you all right?"

"Oh, I'm fine, Camilla. I'm just fine. And for your information, I'm also on to all of this. How dumb do you two think I am?” The silence was enormous. Exactly what he'd expected. But he'd made his point. They knew now that he knew. And so he walked out on the two conspirators, left them staring dumbly after him through the kitchen door.

That was on Saturday. By Monday, however, he despaired of actually forcing the intrigue into the open. The shrewd interrogations he invented out riding his bicycle seemed frankly demented when it came time actually to put them into words. He kept silent, a counter-conspiracy of one.

The college term resumed and he had to work. But after Camilla and Emily left each morning, he slipped down the hall to the Kenworth. While work piled unattended on his desk, he climbed the steps to the cab and settled into the seat. He shifted experimentally through the gears, then reached for the ignition switch as though this were reflex. He turned the ignition key many times, watched the gauges spring to life, waited for something to happen, but nothing ever did. He tried again and again, but he was also nervous, afraid he might do something wrong and irreparable. And why did he even care? This was hallucination. Yet always, as now, he would come back, heave himself into the custom leather, take hold of the wheel, and guide the Kenworth mentally off through the furniture, beginning to envision, however darkly, just where he and this truck were headed.

On Wednesday he had no class. The sky was clear, the air humid, hot. When Parker reached Taylor's Truck World, he was sweating. His T-shirt was stained in a dark wet bib down the middle. He dismounted and pushed his bike up the long gravel entrance ramp. There was a ramshackle disreputability to this sprawling aggregation of store fronts, service sheds, squat fuel pumps and soaring pavilions.

Parker started down the nearest rank of trucks. There were Freightliners, a Marmon, a massive Peterbilt not unlike the truck he was looking for, but too pumped up, too horizontal. He passed a White/GMC, another Peterbilt and was halfway down the row when he stopped short. Forty yards away across the packed dust and gravel rose the gothic features of a truck he'd never seen before. The bright red logo was unmistakably Kenworth, but the truck itself was a verdant brown, glazed darker, almost green by the sun, the color of nightmare. The gaunt, nostriled hood and tinted windshield arched high above the lot like some terrible mantis. Even the mirrors rose on either side like strange, horned mandibles, and above each of these a single quivering antenna.

Parker approached it slowly. When he was directly in front of the monster, he leaned his bike against what should have been the bumper.

"Somethin’ I can help you with?” The voice, which did not sound remotely helpful, came from behind him. “You lookin’ for someone?"

"No!” Parker jumped. “No, not really. I was just looking at the truck.” He turned around to see a wiry man with flame hair and matching face, standing with arms folded across his chest. “I mean,” he struggled to sound casual, “It's an impressive rig, isn't it? It's different."

"That your bike?"

"Yes, yes it is."

"You got it leaning up against my truck."

"I do. Sorry about that.” Parker stepped quickly back toward the Kenworth, grabbed the bike and pulled it away.

"This is your truck?"

"That's what I said."

"Right. You did.” Parker was stammering like a freshman. He tried to pull himself together, “Look, would you mind if I asked you some questions? Actually, the thing is, I'm out here doing research."

The trucker eyed him with disdain. “Mister, I don't know who you are or what you want, but I'm going to explain something.” He waited and then began as if this were an old irritation. “First,” he raised an instructional finger above his wrist, “I like girls. Women. You understand?"

"Sure,” said Gary, who didn't. And then he did. “I mean, yeh ... I mean, ah ... of course..."

"And second,” the trucker raised a second finger, “a lot of people got a lot a money invested in these rigs. You could real easy get yourself hurt. You understand?"

"Oh, I understand completely. I do, but maybe I could explain.” Parker was intimidated, but undeterred. “The thing is ... I was wondering if maybe you'd, you know, let me buy you a beer or something."

He could tell as they slid into the turquoise vinyl bench seats in Taylor's Truck World Country Grill that his new tutor could not believe he had let himself be talked into this.

"Let's get this straight,” he sounded angry. “You're paying?"

"Right. Absolutely."

When the waitress came, the trucker, who had not disclosed his name and, apparently, did not intend to, ordered a Molson's and pointed at Parker's forehead. “His tab,” he said.

The waitress nodded and turned to Parker, her green order pad bobbing suggestively.

"Uh...” He hadn't thought about this. “I'll have a Diet Coke, please."

"Don't have Coke,” her reply was weary reflex, “We have Pepsi."

"Fine. Diet Pepsi then.” When he looked up, the trucker was staring at him.

"I don't drink,” he felt obliged to explain. “It's not a moral thing. It's just nutritional, I guess.” He shrugged. The trucker said nothing.

"There's really no one around here I can talk to. I...” Parker laughed a small self-conscious laugh, “I tried the library."

"You got a job?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well?"

The trucker's impatience made Parker less than anxious to reveal who he was. “I'm a ... well a teacher."

"You're a what?"

"I ... I teach at the college here."

There was a long silence.

"You like teaching?"

"Sure. Sort of."

"So why are you prowling around trucks?"

"It's a kind of a mid-life crisis, I guess. I think I may need to change careers?"

The man looked at him strangely, then away out the window. “No, you don't,” he said.

"What?"

"You don't need to drive a truck."

"What makes you so sure?” Parker regrouped.

"For a professor, you could use some education. Look, a rig like that ain't for running down to the grocery. You drive it off the lot, you're eyeball to eyeball with guaranteed fifteen to eighteen hundred a month just for the tractor. That's if you got maybe $12,000 down. Then there's two-hundred fifty in insurance and maybe five hundred, maybe more for maintenance. God damn tire costs three hundred dollars. Tolls on a bad run'll eat you alive and then you got fuel. Have to turn twenty-two, twenty-three hundred a week minimum just to keep the son of a bitch on the road. Now that ain't impossible if you're smart and lucky and know what the hell you're doing and if you don't mind working fourteen-fifteen hours a day, seven days most weeks with maybe three nights home a month, maybe, n’ just lucky you made enough to keep yourself on the road because you sure as hell can't get off the road, not and pay the mortgage, not and make expenses. You got a family, cowboy?"

Parker, transfixed by the trucker's litany, was ill-prepared for questions. “Huh?"

"Well, do you or don't you?"

"Do I?"

"Do you have a family?"

"I have a wife and a daughter."

"If you're trying to get away from ‘em, if gettin’ out is what you're after, then sure, okay, you could drive a rig. But you want advice? Good advice? Forget it."

"The thing is,” he said, knowing he sounded like a screwball, “I already have one."

His mentor seemed stunned, “You got a rig?"

"Pretty much like yours. It's a Kenworth anyway. Actually, I never saw a truck like yours before. It's almost, I don't know ... menacing. What is it?"

At this change in topic, the driver looked suddenly away, out the window. “It's new,” he said. “A fleet truck. It's aerodynamic.” There was high, nasal disdain in his voice. “Get's maybe one, maybe two miles a gallon mor'n a real truck, but it's ugly as hell. That's the price. I didn't buy it. I just drive it.” He shook his head. “Looks like a goddamn anteater coming down the road."

"It looks different, that's for sure."

The driver was clearly irritated. He changed the subject. “You was telling me, you already bought yourself a Kenworth truck."

"Oh no, that's just it. I didn't buy it, I inherited it, sort of, but I don't know about it. I don't know anything about running it."

"And where is this rig?"

"At my place."

"A hood?"

Parker squinted incomprehension.

"Does it have a hood?"

"A huge hood."

"And chrome?"

"Everywhere."

"And saddle tanks?"

"You mean fuel tanks? They're under the sleeper."

The trucker gave him a strange look. “Is there a nameplate behind the fender?"

Parker thought about this. He closed his eyes and paced mentally around the truck. “A logo? Yes, by the steps."

"Shit, cowboy, you got yourself a 900. We're talking a classic here. A goddamn Kenworth 900.” He shook his head again in slow incredulous arcs.

Parker sensed his stock rising. “Yes,” he said, “it's quite a machine."

"There's drivers out there would kill family for a rig like that. And you want me to sit here'n tell you in one beer how to drive it?"

"Right, I mean, just some general information. Basic stuff."

"Look Mr., they got schools for that."

"Right. I know. I've seen ads on television. But it's not that I want to get out on the highway. Not yet. I just want to move it. I've got a small place, and it's sitting right there in the middle of everything. I mean, it's practically in the living room."

"You could sell it. Rig like that's worth some money. You want to sell it, I know people. I could give you a phone number."

"I'm not interested in selling."

"It'd be a fair price. You could buy yourself a pick-up maybe, big-ass Dodge Ram with a stretch cab and gun rack. That's half a rig all by itself. Help get this truck thing off your mind. You could blow the rest on Diet Pepsi."

Parker stared at the remnant of crushed ice in his glass. “I don't think I can do that.” he said. “I appreciate what you're telling me. But it's not really possible."

Deep skepticism returned to the trucker's eyes.

Parker shrugged, “It's complicated. I mean, I understand what you're saying, and you're right, of course, it makes sense, but I'm afraid I just can't."

The trucker finished his beer and stared back across the table as composed as a case worker. “What's the name of that college you say you teach at?"

"My college?"

"That's right. Your college. I got friends with kids graduating high school. They're gonna want to know exactly where you're at, Mister. And I'm gonna tell ‘em."

"Yeh,” Parker nodded, “you probably ought to do that, but first,” he waved at the waitress and pointed at the trucker, signaling for another beer, “tell me this one thing, would you? When you turn the ignition key, the dashboard lights up, but it doesn't start the engine. What exactly do you have to do to get the engine started?"

* * * *

The following morning, before she left for work, Camilla came and stood in the bedroom door.

"Gary."

He opened one eye.

"On the way home could you stop at Lesher's and buy something for tonight?"

"Buy what?” he grumbled, half asleep, half irritated.

"Scones or those oatmeal things you like. The Felderbergs are coming over. Remember?"

Parker sat up. “No! What are you talking about?"

"It's Thursday. Darin and Elaine are back from the Keys. She says they took some great pictures."

Parker's irritation became distress. He was trying to imagine himself in the living room with Camilla and the Felderbergs, passing photos and tea biscuits around the Kenworth. What was she thinking?

"I know,” Camilla was saying, “Darin's photos again. But we'll play Scrabble, and Elaine will have all the college gossip. You'll find out what's going on down there. You never know anything."

Parker stammered and looked at the floor, “I can't. I...” He threw up his hands. “I have to work."

"Gary,” Camilla cocked her head, “are you sure you're all right? All last week you were ... I don't know.... You hardly talk to me. Do I need to worry? Is something wrong?"

"Well, yes there's something wrong. I'm buried in work. I am way, way behind, and I just can't deal with the Felderbergs right now. Is that some sort of crime?"

"No.” Camilla looked resignedly away. “Of course not. I'll call Elaine. We'll call it off."

"I'm sorry!” His apology was pitched too high for contrition. He didn't look at Camilla.

"It's all right, Gary,” she said and turned to go. “I'm sorry, too.” But then she stopped and turned back again: “Oh, and Gary."

"What?” He didn't look up.

"Do you ever shave anymore?"

Late that night, after the Felderbergs had not come and not gone, Gary stood barefoot in the living room in his T-shirt and shorts. The trucker was right. There was something classic about this rig, something solid and broad-shouldered and—here in the narrow impound of the living room—sad, a life force yielded up to cafe curtains and books, but meant, surely, to break free.

He was romanticizing wildly, he knew, but consoled himself, there were less rational people in the world. He'd met a man with over 26,000 baseball cards, each individually sealed in custom plastic. The guy spent every waking hour at this, and his eyes were as glazed as his dirty pants. You could smell him from a distance like a spoiled melon. But that was not Parker. He held down a job. He bathed. He would remember to shave. Still, he knew this wasn't moderate craziness either.

It could have been a movie: some guy careening from his dean to his wife to the sheriff, crying “truck,” but nobody's listening. By the end his own family sends for the county van and the county keepers to take him away. He escapes, of course, in the nick of time at the wheel of the Kenworth. The wail of an air horn is all that remains.

Parker climbed up into the cab. He looked out over the living room and turned the ignition key. To his left a red light lit up. The glow plugs, he had learned, were now heating the cylinders, and the light would blink off again when they were ready. When it did, he pushed the button directly beneath it. The immediate drone of the diesel filled the cab. He had expected more drama, thunder rolls, Niagara, but the cab vibrated docilely to the pulsing baritone of the diesel.

The transmission was in neutral, the parking brake was on. Parker eased on the accelerator and listened to the engine clamber slowly up out of its sonorous idle and into the tenor range. Then, for some reason, he pushed it on. The tack soared easily to 1200 revs, then 1800. By 2000 it had climbed on through counter-tenor to a pitched whine so shrill and emphysemic that Parker had to squint and grit his teeth. This was better, he thought. It seemed to burn off the congestion in his head. It seemed, in fact, a kind of detonation. The tachometer topped out at 2100. He wanted to push, wanted the release, whatever it meant, but he did not want to be stupid.

He eased off, and for a long while merely listened to the idle but then began to experiment again with the accelerator, racing the engine in short bursts. The cab pitched back and forward slightly with the changing torque of the engine. Parker rode the swell and watched the living room below him, watched the furniture, the hanging plants, the Woolworth's curtains for some sign of movement, of cause and effect, of synergy or sympathetic vibration, any sign at all that the enormous diesel tractor in which he sat was connected as well to the house in which he lived. But nothing moved. Nothing. Not even a breeze through the open window stirred the curtains. On the narrow sill where the curtains parted stood a bud vase, a high, slender horn of fluted milk glass. Parker fixed his eye on the vase and goosed the engine. Then he did it again and again. This created a kind of gentle bucking motion as the cab lurched and rebounded, back and fourth by turns with the shrill clattering and groaning of the diesel. At first nothing moved. The room stood stock still. The curtains fell leaden from their rods while Camilla's plants hung as rigid as stalactites from the ceiling. But the vase? Hadn't the bud vase begun to move, to quiver? He blinked and leaned forward to make sure, pushing the engine to the limit, then again, watching the slender lip of milk glass first tremble, then wobble, sort of, then start, in fact, to totter.

Parker gave it up. Camilla loved that vase. He shut off the engine, but in the following stillness found he was no longer certain of the movement. Maybe he had merely projected the truck's intense vibration onto the vase. The observer biases the observation. He knew the drill. “You wanna break vases, you wanna be sure,” he lectured himself in the drawl of the trucker, “you're gonna have to release the parking brake, cowboy. You're gonna have to put the goddamn thing in gear.” There was something out there waiting for him—he understood this—some unimaginable call, but he was still back here piddling with the controls, watching the tacometer, the curtains and milk glass, terrified to take hold of the wheel and just let out the clutch. He was gutless, he knew, and was stalked by a premonition that soon ineptitude and hesitance would cost him his chance. He would rise up one morning to find the thwarted Kenworth gone, his cluttered living room free again of chrome and steel, the smell of diesel, the metallic taste of obsession. He would be safe. But also trapped behind the plywood-gypsum shell that held the Kenworth so barely, so ludicrously caged. The thought made him frantic. He reached for the ignition again. He fastened his seatbelt.

At this moment he heard his name called, heard Emily start up the basement steps. And he was breathless and not a little disoriented when they met near the kitchen.

"When are you coming downstairs, Dad? You promised you'd come watch TV."

"I'm reading,” he held up the book he'd grabbed from the coffee table.

Emily took it from him. “Hey, this is my book. You hate this stuff. If you're going to read my junk, you can come down and watch my show. It's a horror movie. I'm scared."

"If the movie's scaring you, then turn the television off. You ought to be in bed anyway."

"No, I want to be scared. But with you."

"It's late, Em."

"It's Friday. There's no school."

"No, but you have your music lesson."

"Aghhh!” Emily groaned. “I hate my lesson."

"What do you mean? You begged us. We're spending a fortune."

"I like the flute. I hate Mrs. Hurley. And I hate waiting around all afternoon for Mom to pick me up.” Her cramped expression tightened and then softened into compromise. “You could come and get me."

"Your mother needs the car. She picks you up as soon as she can."

"But you could get me on your bike. You could ride me on the handlebars."

"That's dangerous, Em.” Parker took her book back.

"We could come home along the canal. There's no traffic.” Emily put her arms up around her father's neck and kissed him sweetly on the cheek. “Please, Daddy,” she implored in the soft coloratura voice that always dissolved him, “I'll buy us a coke."

"Ohhh,” he crooned, disengaging and turning Emily by her shoulders toward the bedrooms, “so, you think you can bribe me."

"Sure,” she said airily, yielding to his pressure, “and...” Suddenly Emily froze. “Oh Daddy,” she began again in a slow, foreboding whisper, “I didn't do it. I'm sure I didn't.” Warily she pointed across the room toward the window where Camilla's bud vase lay shattered on the sill.

It was very late when Parker slid carefully into bed. Camilla had to be up before seven. But before he'd even settled under the covers, he sensed alertness across the mattress.

"Where have you been?"

"Working,” he lied reflexively.

"You work at the wrong things, Gary."

"What do you mean?"

Camilla waited, as if deliberating, but then moved closer across the stretched linen, sliding a hand up underneath his T-shirt, then drawing it slowly downward in a long established declaration.

"You could be right,” he conceded.

"Of course I'm right. Your priorities are a disaster."

"Don't you have to get up in the morning?"

"I have to get up every morning."

Camilla put her free hand over his mouth to silence a response he hadn't begun to formulate, then she pulled herself above him to kiss him, first reflectively, then hard. Parker relaxed, or tried to, but Camilla was not interested in relaxation. Her energy startled him as, straddled above him in the moonlight, she roughly removed his T-Shirt, then took his resisting hands and kissed them before moving slowly down his arms to kiss him again on the mouth, deeper and more insistently. He tried to struggle up off the pillow, but was no match for his wife, breathing when he could and through his nose until she moved on to his throat, his shoulder and then slowly, methodically down his body, drawing out alertness he'd forgotten or hadn't even known he had. When he answered her with a reflex or a moan, she bore in like a lawyer, making him respond to the same query again and again. His wife of seventeen years was taking him back to school.

"Camilla,” he whispered and reached for her face through the hair twined damply along his stomach, but before he could find her, Parker came abruptly up off the bed at both extremities, eyes cramped open with pain, toes separately and sharply pointed into the air.

"Camilla!” he bellowed, “what are ... what...?” When he got his voice back, he let out his congealed breath all at once and tried not to whimper. “Ow!” he said. “Ow!"

The silence was crystalline. Camilla rose up and looked at him. “I just wanted your attention, darling.” She smiled and moved over his graceless sprawl to settle in his arms. “Are you paying attention now?” She accepted his silence as assent and rolled them both onto their sides. “Good,” she said, “then be attentive."

When some time later, sweating and wincing, Parker came, the pleasure was wrapped brightly in pain. He opened one eye at a time. “That was amazing.” There was neither abandon nor amazement in the eyes that looked back at him.

"What is it Gary? Where are you? Are you fucking one of your students? Some junior faculty member? Are Em and I in your way? You must think I don't notice anything, but I do. I notice everything. And I'm tired of waiting for you. I want to know what's going on."

Parker looked away through the window. Camilla was painfully right. He'd been a fraud, an impostor for weeks. He needed ... everyone desperately needed for Gary to come clean. The fledgling hillside thicket, the woods, the long, greening valley glowed softly outside. Suddenly, it all seemed so amazingly simple.

"There's a truck in the living room,” he said in a cautious but optimistic voice.

She stared at him for a long time. “There's a truck in the living room? What do you mean, Gary, a truck?"

"Hell, Mill, I don't know. It's just a truck.” He knew the “just” was a lie, and he looked down again nervously at his wife, but she'd averted her face, was looking off sideways into the darkness.

"You're not going to tell me, are you Gary?"

Even in shadowed profile, he saw cold anger in her face.

"At least...” she closed her eyes and a kind of weary pleading crept into her voice, “at least tell me it's not a boy."

"What? No, Camilla. It's a truck. An eighteen-wheel truck.” He was mortally serious, but the words sounded loony and concocted even to him. Suddenly he needed very much to rush to the door and make certain the Kenworth was still there. But he couldn't do that, of course. And while he hovered on his arms, trying to concentrate, trying to think of some way to rephrase, the moon clouded over, became pale and plastic; the room crosshatched with shadows. Nothing, absolutely nothing seemed simple. He was still inside his wife, still wet with her, but she lay mute and dark and solitary beneath him, receding like an asteroid into space.

Gradually he lowered himself, settling carefully down over her and whispering urgently into Camilla's ear. “There isn't anything else, believe me. You can trust me on this.” His face was wet and cold against her plaster skin. He was in trouble, he knew. He was crying. But there was no way back, no way ahead, and no way in the world to explain.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Writers Who Writ Large & Small

Gwenda Bond advises the public from Lexington, KY. She can be found online at bondgirl.blogspot.com. Despite the title of said web journally thing (Shaken & Stirred), she'd generally prefer a glass of white wine, thank you. And a book. She liked that NBA finalist Godless, have you read that yet?

* * * *

Neal Chandler is a former soldier, missionary, emergency room orderly, furniture store owner, German professor, editor, and chauffeur. He teaches in the English Department at Cleveland State University, coordinates creative writing, and helped create NEOMFA, a new graduate writing program spanning four universities. He has published essays, short stories, and a story collection, Benediction. He and his wife live in Shaker Heights, OH. Their eight children live everywhere else.

* * * *

Stepan Chapman, sub-chairman of research for the Institute for Further Study and manager of the Aphasia Gorge Wild Insect Preserve of Waxwall, Arizona, has published historical studies in such scholarly journals as The Baffler, Happy, and McSweeney's Quarterly, and in such anthology series as Orbit, Leviathan, and Polyphony. His major works are The Troika and Dossier.

* * * *

Suzanne Fischer lives in Minneapolis, where she bicycles all winter long. She is currently writing a dissertation on wax museums.

* * * *

Nan Fry teaches in the Academic Studies Program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and is the author of a book of poetry, Relearning the Dark. Her poems have also appeared in Plainsong, Calyx, and the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and Poetry in Motion (Coast to Coast).

* * * *

Sometimes the stories Geoffrey H. Goodwin touches get a little messed up.

* * * *

Steve Lieber is the cover artist. His groovy comics includelots of big-company things, Family Circle with Sean Stewart, and Me and Edith Head with Sara Ryan. He's very nice and will illustrate for you if you ask nicely and so on. (stevelieber.com)

* * * *

Bruce McAllister has had fiction in Omni, Asimov's, F&SF, literary quarterlies and “year's best” anthologies since the ‘70s. He was away from writing for most of the ‘90s, and is happy to be back. He has three wonderful children (Liz, Ben and Annie), is married to the choreographer Amelie Hunter, and, after an eternity in academe, now works as a writing coach and book and screenplay consultant.

* * * *

Sarah Micklem worked as a graphic designer for twenty years but was pestered by the idea that she ought to write something. She wrote on and off for more years than she cares to admit before completing a novel, Firethorn. She is now working on the sequel. “Eft” or “Epic” is her first published short fiction. (www.firethorn.info)

* * * *

After twenty-five years, Sarah Monette is no longer a student. What, she wonders, will she do with herself now?

* * * *

Michael Northrop grew up in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, which is very nice, before inexplicably moving to New York City, which is fraught with peril. He works as an editor at Time Inc., and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Snake Nation Review and McSweeney's (web).

* * * *

Richard Parks’ first pro sale was published in Amazing Stories in 1981. In 1994, after a 13-year hiatus, his second story appeared in Science Fiction Age. Since then his work has appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Black Gate. His first collection, The Ogre's Wife: Fairy-Tales for Grownups, was a World Fantasy Award finalist.

* * * *

Ellen M. Rhudy just bought a guitar. She knows how to play three chords and spends most of her time playing these chords or fondling her guitar. Her fiction has appeared in Hanging Loose and Smokelong Quarterly. She edits a lit zine, Frothing at the Mouth, and is currently writing a zine about working in a Christian bookstore. She lives in a very very small room with some books and dirty clothes.

* * * *

Mark Rich writes, “Mark Rich writes all the time but still has that basic insecurity that he is not really a real writer. He is the author of some books (Foreigners & Other Familiar Faces, Lifting, Funny Gace, Baby Boomer Toys, Toys A-Z), but that's something different. Right now he's writing about himself ... a further cause of discontent. Is this what he should be doing? Is all writing this unsettling and unbalancing?” He draws pictures, too, and has little to say about that. (sff.net/people/mark.rich)

* * * *

Karen Russell is a girl who lives in New York and likes to write about alligator wrestlers and sleep-disordered kids and the moon. She hopes you like her story. It's the first one she's published.

* * * *

Lawrence Schimel & Sara Rojo have published over a dozen children's books in Spanish and/or English such as No Hay Nada Como el Original, Andres and the Copyists, & Misterio En El Jardan. They also create graphic novels for older readers, such as the full-color Mixed Blessings (Germany, Fall ‘05) and the b&w romantic vampire comedy A Coffin for Two (U.S., Spring ‘06). They live mostly in Madrid, except when Sara is in Cadiz or Lawrence is in New York. (livejournal.com/users/desayunoencama) (sararojo.com)

* * * *

Amy Sisson is a librarian of the non-shushing variety who was recently transplanted to Houston, TX, where she lives with husband Paul Abell and a collection of ex-parking-lot cats. She is a member of the Clarion West (2000). She invites you to visit amysisson.com for more about the unlikely patron saints.

* * * *

Before turning to fiction and poetry, Carol Smallwood's books such as Michigan Authors were published by Scarecrow, Libraries Unlimited, and others. Her work has been in The Detroit News and dozens more; forthcoming in Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry 2005, Mobius, Parnassus Literary Journal, Poetry Motel, Zillah. In 2004 she appeared in Who's Who in America and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

* * * *

John Trey attempts to exploit whatever meager talents he possesses from an old house in a suburb in the midwest, where he keeps all brooms locked safely in a closet. His fiction has appeared in LCRW, Spellbound, MarsDust, and Fortean Bureau. When not writing, reading, or critiquing, he often can be found playing with his daughter, listening to jazz, or pondering the mysteries of invisibility.

* * * *

Mary A. Turzillo's novel, An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, was serialized in Analog from July-November 2004. She won a Nebula for her novelette, “Mars Is No Place for Children.” If you sense an obsession with Mars, it might be because her husband, Geoff Landis, is a Mars scientist. She is also obsessed with death, but she likes Mars much better.

* * * *

William Smith publishes Trunk Stories from Brooklyn, NY, where one day there will be a Grand Sichuan International. Until then, he will occasionally make the trip over the river. Besides publishing, managing a bookshop, and writing about films, he is a paper artist. (trunkstories.com)

Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

Table of Contents

Help Wanted

"Eft” or “Epic"

Mary

At the Rue des Boulangers Bridge Café

FAQ

The Beard of God

Crown Prince

The Half-Sister

Dear Miss Wonderment

The Film Column

Mounds Keep Appearing

In Kansas

I Heard That

Lord Goji's Wedding

The Life of Saint Serena

My First Lover

Secret Histories of Household Objects

It Tastes Bitter

Jon Langford, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds

THE WELL-DRESSED WOLF:

Dear Aunt Gwenda

Nicholas

gray's boadicea: unlikely patron saints, no. 4

The Truck

Writers Who Writ Large & Small

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