They lived in a place
where their bent and private lives
found them stooping beneath apple trees,
to collect into their aprons and pockets,
apples that had tumbled back to earth.

In summers,
they wore July’s jacket of heat,
and on their large and covered porch,
they drank iced tea,
and fanned themselves
with folded crossword puzzles.

In the evenings,
in wooden chairs,
they rocked themselves -
while the sound of faraway screen doors
snapped shut against their frames,
and they listened,
as sounds floated away like lonely ghosts.

And together, in tenacious tandem,
they moved from room to room
from baths to meals and then,
to bed and back again.

And they danced this dance for fifty years -

she in her light and leading step,
and he in his clumsy footing.

The man tapped two fingers on the bar in front of his empty glass.

“Another,” he said to the barkeep.

The barkeep kept his back to the man but looked up and spoke to the man’s reflection in the mirror.

“It’s nearly two Pops, you sure you want another?”

The man looked away from their reflections and tapped his fingers on the bar-top again.
The barkeep carried away the man’s saucer and empty brandy-glass. He returned and wiped the bar clean in front of the man and set out a new clean saucer. In the center of the plate he placed a full glass of brandy. The man put his cigarette down on the saucer and lifted the brandy to his lips. He pushed the saucer and the cigarette away and set the brandy on the bar.

“Come on Pops,” the barkeep said, “it’s Christmas eve, I wanna get home too.”

The man grunted and pinched the cigarette between his thumb and first finger. He tapped the cigarette with his middle finger and flicked the spent gray-white tobacco into the saucer. The more the man drank the more taciturn and disagreeable he became.

“Look Pops, I got a wife and kids at home.”

“You open ain’t you?” The man asked.

“Well yeah Pops but everybody’s gone home now but you.”

“That don’t concern me.”

“I know Pops, but it does me.”

“I got money and you got brandy, that’s all the concern I got.”

“Sure Pops, I get it, but there are lots of other bars open with brandy.”

“But I’m here and you’re here and you’ve got brandy.”

“I could walk you out and show you a fine bar with fine brandy.”

“Bring me another and I’ll think about it.”

“Why don’t you go home and go to bed Pops?”

“Ain’t got no home, ain’t got no bed.”

“Well you can’t stay here all night.”

“Wasn’t planning to. Bring another.”

“No Pops, I’m closing now. Get it? I’m closing up.”

The Barkeep brought a glass of water over and set it down in front of the man.

“Here, drink this,” the barkeep said, “it’ll keep the morning from being so difficult.”

The man pushed his lit cigarette deep into the glass of water so that water spilled out and slopped onto the bar-top. The water-darkened ashes separated from the cigarette and dropped downward and settled in the bottom of the glass. The cigarette rose and bobbed horizontally then, as though it were clinging to a friend, hugged the side of the glass.

The man stood and fished about in one pocket and then another before finding money to pay the barkeep. He held himself steady with a flat palm against the wet surface of the bar. With his free hand the man tossed a few dollars onto the bar. Neither the barkeep nor the man bothered to count the money; it just lay there as an obvious thing that had come between them.

The man turned to go. In his large, black and unsteady winter-boots, the man walked carefully towards the street.

“Merry Christmas,” the barkeep said to the back of the red coat with fluffy white trim, “Merry Christmas, Pops – it’s me.”

She thought about the man and how he clung to his immaturities like a silver trout caught on a taut line. She laughed and remembered how he often used fish guts to fertilize the flowers in the garden.

For too long she’d fought him as he pushed his rotting ways,

into her soul,

and tattooed his icky thoughts into her head.

 

She gently closed the door and leaned back with her flat palm pressed against her exit. Her open palm smeared a mud-red shadow of guilt across the door’s solid-white theme.

Like sense bedewed upon an imbecile,

his eyes grew large and wide at her first strike.

 

Although he was planted deeply, into her family’s tree, she realized how the shallow ground of his generations was now free to push out the weed that he’d become.

No longer would his sick ideas drip,

into puddled pools of idiotic lineage -

where his drunken calloused feet once stood him,

like a troglodyte,

in the sludge,

and stink,

of his own stale genealogy.

 

Satisfied to be rid of him, but now without emotion, she laid the knife on the kitchen counter and began washing the blood and earth from under her broken and tender fingernails.

At the height of the hill the trees were cleared away and you could see across the cemetery to the main entrance where a wide arch that rested on stone columns spanned the width of the street. There were no cars coming through the entrance and there were no cars in the cemetery’s parking-lot. The street and the parking-lot were covered with rust-colored leaves. The leaves were matted to the road and it appeared as though they had not been driven over. An arched sign above the street read “God’s Acre”.

The cemetery was surrounded by shrubs that you could smell through the trees before you could see them. A breeze rolled over the crest and carried the scent of the shrubs down to meet you on the way up. All cemeteries have the same smell and the smell is of Buxus. It is a fine and solid odor that reminds you of antique things. It is the sweet aroma of the living and it always makes you nostalgic for simple childhood things that you can never have again. The shrubs were called Boxwood shrubs and a gardener must have kept them trimmed with flat tops and straight edges. There were openings in the hedge so you could walk from one part of the cemetery to another. Sometimes the opening had a little swinging gate in it or a grapevine-covered trellis that you walked through. The grapevines had dried and twisted twigs hanging in them that were easy to pluck out and toss aside without much thought.

Most of the grave-markers in the cemetery were flat, marble slabs that lay only a few inches above the earth. One of the markers was tall and obelisk shaped and stood in forgotten stoicism over the flat markers. The flat markers were dull and weather-worn and seemed to lie peacefully at the foot of the dopey obelisk. The obelisk must have felt foolish standing for so many years above simple slabs that only yawned up through the centuries. The obelisk was chipped and beginning to crumble and showed signs that it would someday lie with the slabs, and then, for the markers, all things would be equal, above and below the earth.

There is never much to do in a cemetery except read the plaques and enjoy the silence. I leaned my bicycle against an ocher maple and then carefully I walked through the even rows of markers. I looked for the oldest plaques and looked to see who had lived the shortest life and who had lived the longest life. The oldest marker was dated 1759 and it was on the edge of the path near the tree. I imagine it was a different cemetery in 1759 and that the tree was not here then. I decided that maybe other trees were here in those days and that made me feel better because, I thought, how sad it is to be buried in a cemetery with no trees.

I collected my bicycle and walked in the direction opposite the leaf-covered parking-lot and away from the arch that hung over the main entrance of the cemetery and I headed back onto the path that came out of the woods.

Going back down the path was easy enough but the ride on the bicycle was bumpy and you had to lean back and work the bike’s brakes carefully so you did not bounce about too much and lose control of the bicycle. The railroad ties were nearly hidden by the fallen leaves and you had to guess at where the ties ended in order to bike around them without slipping from the path. The edge of the path dropped down about a foot and to slip down would not have been such a great accident but it was better to avoid it just the same.

You had to cross a wooden bridge to get to and from the cemetery. The bridge stretched across a smooth shield of creek where the water was most shallow. The creek was at the bottom of the path and its water was always shallow and clear but in the fall it was also frigid. If you put your hands into the water, to turn a stone or retrieve an old bottle-cap, the water would numb and harden your fingers nearly instantly.

The bridge had good solid planks that made the bike’s tires stutter and tremble when you rode over them. Riding across the vibrating bridge was the sort of thing you did not mind circling back to do again, even if others were watching, which they were not.

Coming fast down the path and rumbling quickly over the bridge made the bicycle’s tires and the bridge hum together like old friends. The cold and sharp air pressed your face until there was nothing left to do but to laugh and to feel fabulous about the world around you – and sometimes, while riding a bicycle, all you want is to laugh, and to feel fabulous about the world around you.

He believed the younger generation was better musically but he was too tired to think that they were actually capable of this. They had words earlier but had they done this to him, beaten him and taken his music? He thought perhaps they had but he knew, that possibly, it could all be in his head.

He had dreamt of playing well – but hadn’t they all. He knew he was beat and that he had already played as well as he ever would, and it was better than they would ever play, or was it – he couldn’t be sure. Maybe their music was better. Maybe that is why they had fought. He seemed to recall that their ideas were fresh and that their music was groovy and that he enjoyed it. He dreamt of playing well – or had he already thought that.

He thought he had taken a pretty severe beating and when he had gotten into the cab he asked the driver to take him home or to the hospital, he could not remember which – and he did not care now for one location over the other. His confusion brought great geographical challenges that he did not care to consider. He decided that when the cab stopped he would step out, and knowing then where he was, he would know what to do. He did not trust his judgment now, but knew he could trust himself in his earlier decision.

Nick kept his head back so he did not bleed into his lap and wondered if he would die here amid his arid dreams or if he would live and wake and play again. The trumpet was gone and all the sheet-music with it. His trumpet could be replaced, but the music could not.

He staggered from the cab when it stopped and he knew immediately that he would be fine. He would be fine because he was home and being home meant he was not beaten as badly as he had feared. He would go to bed now and in the morning he would buy a new trumpet and start writing the music again, because after all, it was all in his head.

This made them angry at the man but they understood what he meant by it, and he knew they would forgive him. He did not mean that they did not want to write, although that is what he’d said. He’d meant to say they did not want to put any great effort into their writing; that they wished to write well without paying the dues that come before the writing is good.

They did not want to practice writing by going with him to the park where the old Jewish men played chess and talked about the past. They did not want to do this and then go home and write about the conversations they’d heard.

The man told them they did not have to write what they heard or even be true to it, but that they should listen to the old men speaking Yiddish and English and listen to the sounds their voices made even if they did not understand the words.

The words were not always important, the man said, but the emotions and inflections were things that even he listened for. You need only to hear the emotions of what the old Jewish men have been through in order to fully understand how you feel about things; things you do not understand intellectually – and you do not need to know their words, the man told them, in order to write their story.

Something about the girl made her seem sick and I did not like to be with sick people. Sick people were never happy and unhappy people rarely did kind things for others. Even when unhappy people tried to be kind to others, it came out wrong and left you wondering if they were being unkind in clever ways, or if they were being as kind as they knew how to be, and that the kindness was misconstrued as evil social-ignorance; one does not wish a man who has recently lost his wife a good evening. She did however tell him that she was sorry for his loss and she asked him to understand that she was not responsible, in spite of the evidence – and that she would prove it. This was before I knew about the virus.

She said the slick, satin-finished floor was the first unpleasant cold thing she dealt with and that peeling the covers back and placing her bare sensitive feet onto the institutional-gray floor was never a pleasant way to start a day. She said the cold toilet seat was always the cruelest thing and it was the one thing she could never prepare herself for. The girl told me that being cold wasn’t so bad in itself, it was waiting for the sun to warm the room and to warm the cold things in the room that made her impatient. The girl seemed normal and pleasant enough as she spoke about the things any young girl her age might speak of, but there was something about the girl that was unsettling.

As we talked, the sunlight’s long fingers stretched through the barred window and drew warm vertical shadows on the block wall of her cell. The gray shadows grew taller and by mid-afternoon the vertical shadows were perfectly painted into the grout-filled grooves between the sun-brightened blocks. The dark shadows of the bars aligned themselves with the spaces between the blocks in such a way that one might think the bars and grooves were married to one another by a great architect of fabulous and fancy sun-dials. The girl was fascinated by the shadows and seemed to be obsessed with keeping an accurate count of the time. She said she was able to tell the time of day by watching the shadows creep across the wall. When the shadows from the bars met the rough separations of the blocks, the girl understood it was almost time. She said she was ready. She was very mature for such a young and delicate girl. That was the day the unnatural thing occurred.

The girl once claimed that she’d had the Lycan virus longer than I have been alive. I dismissed this and simply wrote the note in my report. She later explained to me that she is a “Leapling” and that she was born under a full moon on leap day, February 29, 1736. She said she has a birthday every 1,461 days; the number of days between leap days, and that a full moon on leap day is an extremely rare occurrence. I had been visiting the girl for nearly a year when, looking back, I saw the virus-note scribbled in the margin of my journal. I had written the note in the margin when I thought the girl was being uncooperative. Now I believe otherwise. I believe she actually cooperated with me because she liked me; not because I believed her story, but because I believed she believed it, and for her, that was an important distinction from those who assumed she was lying, which I never did.

The girl said she was cursed with the Lycan virus. – I believe it was not a virus at all, but a metaphysical mutation that had more to do with celestial syzygy than paranormal illness, or maybe it was the other way around. I did not know how to think about it any further than that, and I did not care to think about it more. She told me the Lycan virus is a demonic burden placed on the first child born under a full moon on February 29, and that on the leapling’s birthday, the affliction shows itself in the wickedest way.

I think I will never see a thing more disturbing than when the girl bit her forearm – quite deeply. She did this to show me it was nearly time and said I should not be concerned because it was not a painful thing to do, only a painful and unnatural thing to see. She said the skin was now dead and that she was no longer cold and that she had not been cold for sometime – not since the new sensitive skin in the beginning. She called the dead skin slough. She pronounced it “sluff” and said it would all be shed my morning; her birthday. But I did not see her in the morning, or ever again.

It was not the biting of her arm that was so disturbing that day, it was that she did not bleed, and when she peeled back the thick layer of dead skin – black and coarse fur sprang from the injury. That is what was disturbing, and that is a thing I can not un-see.

I never got to write the girl’s story but if I had I believe I would have included fear and I would have made it clear that the girl was not unhealthy or sick, but a lycanthrope – a werewolf – but I could not prove it, and so I did not write it.

When the cornfields in his mind cast the blackbirds out and flung them across the hazy horizon, it looked at first, from a distance, like dark-colored shoes were tossed about in many directions at once. The blackbirds, it seemed, always moved in his direction then grew larger and larger until they were enormous enough in their numbers to sound fan-like as they beat past his ears and cawed just above his head. It was always best to stand hard and face the blackbirds, but to turn with them and watch them rise and circle back was also a thing worth doing.

Watching the blackbirds always cleared Eli’s head, but it was only when the birds sprayed upward from the fields and fanned out overhead that Eli felt petty and unimportant. But that is the way it was with watching blackbirds rise, and circle, and then fall again; it was the same every time. This time was no different, except that perhaps, because this time he had finally gone through with the threats, he thought, that things did somehow seem better. Eli thought about what he had done and he was okay with it. He was okay with it, and his head was clear, and feeling okay and having a clear head meant he did not need to think about it any longer. But still he thought about it, and he remembered it, and remembering it made him angry.

Eli didn’t like to be angry. Being angry confused him, and when he was confused he panicked and when he panicked he made threats and when he made threats they were mean to him and they held him tight with the unfriendly weight of their bodies. Sometimes they held him hard to the cold floor of the infirmary and with his cheek pressed firm to the parquet he watched their black shoes fly about in many directions at once. They gave him shots and then held him tighter and when they held him tight and close, Eli cried out and kicked and tears filled his angry eyes and he choked and spat more terrible threats until the shots came and after the shots came the birds returned and it was the way the blackbirds poured over him that made Eli feel small and insignificant – and to feel small and insignificant was always enough to sadden even Eli.

I remember mother crying hysterically and how, after some time, the doctor and my father offered her no more comfort. I remember how every gasp that caught in her throat stabbed me again and again. I sat alone, cowered in isolation, and stared steadily through that lone window of our bedroom. I did not want the carriage to carry my brother away, but I knew it could not stay. I remember wishing it were me in that carriage and not my brother. I understood, even then, as the carriage pulled away, that every good thing in my life went with it.

My father and the doctor talked outside my window. Their words were framed hard and firm like the windowsill that separated me from my father.

“I will give her something to help her sleep.” 

“Thank you.”

“The sheriff will be called. There will be an inquest.”

“It was an accident I tell you, the boys never fought.”

“But it is the way these things are done – nothing can be done about it.”

“Of course. I understand.”

“I will check on her in the morning.”

After my brother was carried away in the carriage – an hour passed, and then another hour passed and with each hollow hour that dragged on, my bedside-clock unwound itself. Its tight and tense inside pounded out slow and deliberate minutes. The clock was a Baby Ben clock and I remember how it slowly measured my misery with one enormous second after another – and then another, until at last it was as though there was nothing else in the world but the clock, and me.

I sat and listened to the tick-tocking of the Baby Ben and noticed for the first time that each second actually sounded out as three separate tiny taps.

As the clock banged out this triangle of tick-tocks, I realized the cold steel taps had turned to dull and lifeless thuds that seemed to represent the parts of my brother that were his birth, his life, and finally – his death.

She was neither Catholic nor religious, so later, after the fear, the wide collared nun’s habit she began favoring was as mysterious as the other changes in Abigail and could only have been a mockery to God.

I forget when she started the candle lighting. It was a subtle change in Abigail; one I hadn’t noticed before it became an obsession with her. She said it was to keep the evil things away. But that was in the beginning, when she was afraid.

Soon after I discovered her obsession with the candles, I found her one evening in her room, sitting on the edge of her bed, in the amber glow of a candle which she cradled in her palms. She was rocking herself and whispering repeatedly, “Dear Lord, lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil.” Abigail kept the lights out in her room but always a candle was lit. She said it was the only way, and she was afraid then.

When Abigail was no longer afraid and the warts had come in like organic pebbles, she began walking through the low growing ferns and into the forest beyond the house. At first she would stay away for hours, then days. Now she returns only to creep around the yard like an animal or feral beast. A footpath is worn lifeless where she pads about after dark.

Before the fall of Abigail, when things made sense and nights were pleasant, a lit candle meant one thing only – that a candle had been lit. Now it means a thing that is deeper and darker than any I have ever known is near. Why I should sit here in this darkness and invite the evil in I do not know, but still I do it. I sit here now, warts and all, with my hands balled and clasped in my lap, rocking, fighting temptation to extinguish my good candle.

I miss Abigail the way a crying child is missed after the child is sent away to school or the way the sun is missed on a dreary day and realize now, when the sun was bright and high in the sky, I paid it no attention.

I know horror, now that things are bleak, and Abigail is lost to darkness. Oh how I wish I did not know such terror, but I believe there is a wicked thing here in this darkness, and that I must go to it – to be with Abigail.

In the mornings I would go down to the café for coffee where the girl knew my face and knew I took the coffee black. Hadley and Bumby slept late in those days, but later, after Bumby woke, he and Hadley would come down to join me and we would breakfast in the café and watch the pink tourists glow and carry their things out to the beach. From our room in the hotel next to the café we could look down onto the tables beneath the trees in the courtyard outside the café. Our room was on the third floor and looked out over the gray ocean. The ocean was always gray in that part of the country, but the gray made the blue sky that much richer. In the late afternoons Hadley and I would sit on the balcony outside our room and watch the same, now reddened, middle-aged tourists with their fat-bellied children struggle inland with their family’s vacation supplies in tow. They loaded their surplus into steaming station wagons parked below us in the hotel’s parking spaces. In these late afternoons, Bumby would nap on the bed in the room. Hadley would read in the chair next to mine on the balcony. Sometimes she would read a magazine or open my mail that came into the hotel. I would often write and drink Armagnac poured over iced water. The girl from the café would bring the Armagnac up after I phoned down and asked for her by name. Maybe her name was Marita. I don’t remember her name now, but I knew it then, and I remember liking it. I drank the Armagnac for my health but it did not hurt the writing either. If, while opening the mail, Hadley found a check, she would playfully toss it onto my writing and smile with pride. She would tell me again how proud she was of me and how glad she was for us and for all the money coming in. The checks would always have been deposited already but Hadley liked to think of the checks as trophies that signified an accomplishment. My latest book was in its second printing and an advance had come for the next book. I had a good feeling about my next book. The publisher liked it as well, but it is always difficult to predict how well a book will sell. It is always best to think about such things as little as can be allowed. But it is not always easy to think infrequently of a nice dream. Hadley liked to think the money would last forever, but I knew it could not and I had to start writing again. The short stories came easiest, but in those days, writing the stories made me feel like a whore to the literature. Now I see that it is the short story that is my craft and the novel is best left to better writers such as James and Scott. It was always better to compliment another writer in your own writing, because to compliment another writer in person was considered an insult. We still went under the system, then, that praise to the face was open disgrace. Maybe that has changed with a new generation, but that is the way it was with our lost one.

I no longer have Hadley or Bumby, but I still have the writing and the drinks. Some days I have more drinks than I have writing, but Catherine is understanding. I tell her easy reading is damn hard writing. She laughs. Catherine laughs easily and often. Some days I think I love her, some days I know I do not. Catherine is wise to this and to this she is also understanding. She tells me she loves me and says it is not because I am a writer that she is with me. I believe her. But it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t. Maybe some day I will write about the garden of Eden Catherine and I live in; a garden where it is only the two of us, one loving the other, the other unloved. Although this is mostly untrue, it is how I will write it, because I must write what I know. I know I can never be lonely with Catherine. No matter how cold and rainy the weather is outside, each morning the spring in Catherine’s eyes beats back the cold rain so that it seems it will never arrive. It is unnatural to think the rains will never come, and frightening to think that Catherine’s love may someday fail and let the cold rains come close. When the rains finally come in, I understand it will be because I have failed her. I would stop the rain if I could, but I can not. Someday I am likely to let the cold winter rain destroy our garden. Until then, I still have Catherine, my writing and my drinks – Catherine has no one. Afterwards, I too will have no one and Catherine will have, for what it is worth, only my writings.

The following day and for a number of days afterwards the woman saw the man. Some days she would stare straight upon him until his dark eyes glanced up from his work. She would turn swiftly then, and duck away, and blend in with the passersby.

The woman lived with her child and her withdrawn husband in a loft near Café de la Paix. The woman was stricken with great mental lassitude but managed to carry herself through her days of indolence by caring for her child. She loved her child above all else and cared for the child without a helping hand from her husband. The woman was lonely and lived with a constant ache, for the love of her husband had faded.

The man sat outside the Café de la Paix where the woman saw him each morning. He read the papers there and worked on his writing and drank his café noir. The man was covering a three-week bicycle race for the Toronto Star. The race was called Le Tour De France. The race would end in Paris where the man was staying. The man wrote and prepared for its grand finale.

After the man made an unexpected shift in his seat one morning, the woman suddenly found the man’s eyes on hers. His eyes were intelligent and friendly and a sadness washed from the woman and she did not try to look away. She stood solid like stone and soon discovered the man’s smile was also welcoming. No words passed between the two, but they knew the moment was theirs.

For several days the man and woman greeted each other with only their eyes and each morning the woman thought, tomorrow I will write him a note.

The woman dressed hurriedly this morning then left the loft feeling true and proud. She found the street empty now and the bicycle riders gone. Things were once again as they had been before the race. A small crowd was outside the Café de la Paix, but the man was not there.

The woman stood alone in the street and wondered what terrible thing she had done. She clutched the note in both hands. The sadness the woman had known and disliked returned as her eyes filled with tears – and the tears began to spill.

Café de la Paix

The man was ready for the frozen weather ahead. He had pitched enough wood against the back of the house to last until Spring. The wood was piled high next to the door and was covered with a tarp to protect it from the rain that came before the snow. The man always felt sad about burning the wood. He did not feel guilty, only sad – sad because the wood was a thing he had gathered when the weather was nice, and burning the wood made him feel as if he were destroying part of the warm season. He enjoyed the weather then, when it was warm, and wanted to remember it, but not destroy it.

The man did not like the cold cheerless winters, it made his heart ache and his joints stiffen. Also, he was unable to enjoy his garden when the cold months came, and he found it increasingly difficult to visit his children when there was snow.

When the snow came, the hilly path to the children was too icy to climb without the high risk of slipping. Because of this grave concern, the man stayed safely indoors with his heavy books and looked out and thought about what it would be like to be warm again.

When the weather is warm, the man will visit his children, but not before it is mild and the snow has thawed from the path and washed down the incline and into his garden. In the Spring, the man will climb the hilly path to visit his children. He will take with him white and spotless lilies that grow along the back of the vegetable garden. The man will group together two bouquets of lilies and loosely tie the lilies with colored ribbon. The man will take the lilies and leave one bunch each to his children on the hilltop.

In the Spring, when it is warmer, the lilies he will take will be those that seemingly have always grown along the back of the vegetable garden. The lilies grow large and white along the back – the vegetables grow in the front and are more accessible. The lilies are not planted along the rear because they are less important, but because the vegetables are for the living, and the lilies are for his children.

He would marry a woman who would not lie flat beneath his feet to be walked upon like a color-faded rug. One who would sing and dance and open his eyes to languages and arts and religions.

Buddy wanted a woman who would drink with him beneath the red windmill of Moulin Rouge, or fish with him in the crisp air of Aurora, or swim naked with him in the clear water of the Mediterranean, and afterwards, dine with him in their newly tanned skins on the hilltops of Greece where they would read French aloud to one another.

He wanted a woman who would bend from his reaches and splash outward from his cupped palms. A woman who would spill through his fingers like cold water from a Colorado stream, but who, like the stream, would always be there when he returned to kneel before her.

Buddy talked of wanting an untamed woman with her own ideas.

He talked of needing these things in a woman the way an ocean’s edge needs a place to curl under itself to collapse – to relax and spread out smoothly before the land in victorious climax.

He said he needed these things the way the shore needs the sea to show submission to the shore’s solid banks and rocky walls – a sea defeated after a thousand miles of treacherous travel, defeated, like Ulysses in an alternate Odyssey.

He explained to Rebecca how he needed these things in a woman the way the sea and the shore need one another.

This is what Buddy wanted. It’s at least what he told Rebecca, who was playing the part of Penelope. But Buddy was twelve, and knew little about such things as women. When he is his brother’s age, he imagined, he will know all there is to know about love and women.

Carefree and overhung with childhood happiness, Buddy unexpectedly lost the shirt to the wind. Buddy’s eyes grew large and Rebecca laughed at his carelessness. He turned then and with Rebecca chasing after him, they ran together like scatty rabbits back to the wedding party.

When he wrote, the old man brought all the words he knew and he imagined the words poured out before him like an unworked wooden-puzzle. The man spread the words out smoothly and flipped the words this way and turned them that way. He studied their sounds and the way the words fit, one with the other. He listened to the words and arranged them so the tongue was ready always to move forward to bring the words in. The tongue should never be offended and forced to move in two directions at once thought the man. The writing should be delicate and always flow forward. Words were meant to melt like snow on warm tongues, not to be spat about like sour things, bitter and misused. Bitter, un-bridged words caused the tongue to trip and when the tongue tripped, words became tangled and piled onto themselves. The man knew this and he understood this and as he slowly palmed the words about, the man linked fine but difficult words with other fine words so the bridge between the words was unseen. The man knew the words well but he knew he could never own the words. It was only the writing he could own, and after a lifetime of words he could not own, the man was pleased to have owned the writing, but he was not ready to relent to it.

The boy reminded his grandfather that he had written before and that he should not worry because he will write again. The old man knew this to be true but still it concerned him because this time the writing did not come, even with the drinks. It was always the drinking that made the writing possible – because it was the drinking that lead the writing.

Before, when the old man was young, the drinking made the writing easier, but now that the writing was gone, the drinking was worse and it did not bring the writing back. Now the drinking only made the writing more difficult, and difficult writing was writing that was not only difficult, but also distant, and distant writing was writing that drew the drinks in closer.

But there is more to write thought the boy – and I will write it. No one will know. I will write it for him. I will read the writers my grandfather read. I will read D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. I will read the writers he liked and also the writers he disliked. I will read Marie Lowndes and her Jack the Ripper Lodger and Georges Simenon, whom he enjoyed, and I will also read the writers who gave him no happiness. I will read Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. I will criticize the dead writers and I will criticize the writing of the dead writers and like angry torrents of spring,* I will pour my criticisms over their dead words and flood their old words with my new words and wash away their thoughts and replace them with my own. I will read the writers my grandfather read so that I can become a better writer. I will drink. And I will write fast and I will read fast and my writing will be read quickly and never misunderstood. My writing will be clear and quick and it will be loved because I want it to be loved and because that is the way it is. And no one will ever know.

*Just a fun side note to this allusion – Written by Ernest Hemingway, in an attempt to break a contract by writing something more or less unpublishable, The Torrents of Spring was a satirical treatment of pretentious writers and was sharply critical of other writers, namely Sherwood Anderson.

His name was Sam and with a bent finger, he removed a book from a waist-high shelf, then glanced over at the gang of boys. One of the students imitated the movements Sam made and whenever Sam looked over, as quick as a fly, the boy would look away and laugh with his friends. The boy plucked an imaginary book from a make-believe shelf then jerked his head around. His friends laughed. Sam heard the boy say it was odd for an old colored man who probably couldn’t read to be working in a bookstore. Sam felt the punch but plunged the book under his arm and shuffled about as though he were paying no attention to the boys.

The boys were students from the high school and when the rain became sharp and direct they plowed inside to wait. They gathered by the door and watched shoppers dash from the bookstore with their newly bought books; the books were bagged and held above their foreheads to deflect the rain as they ran. They avoided puddles by darting in long strides and short leaps like children playing hopscotch on steamy hot pavement.

The boy’s name was Eddie. He had a clubbed-foot that caused him to limp when he walked and to lean slightly to one side as he stood. A girl named Connie hung onto Eddie. She rested her chin on his low hanging shoulder when he was still. When he wasn’t still and he moved about, she cupped her palms around his arm as though she were measuring his small round bicep. Connie did not laugh at Eddie’s jokes, she only looked past the other boys and watched the old man approach. The boys became quiet, and like heavy drops of drizzle on an open window ledge, their unkind comments fell away forgotten.

When Eddie turned back, he was surprised to find the old man standing in front of him.

“One seventy-eight.” Sam said, offering Eddie two books.

“What?” Eddied asked, smirking and twisting to look back over each shoulder at his friends.

“Plath.” Sam answered. “This thing you’re doing – imitating me, reminds me of a scene from The Bell Jar.”

Connie leaned into Eddie’s back and stretched her arm forward to take the books. Connie smiled an apologetic smile, then looked away, embarrassed. Connie opened the first book to page one seventy-eight, but before she could read from the page, Sam began reading, from memory.

“I sat on one end of a wooden bench in the grassy square between the four brick walls of the hospital. My mother, in her purple cartwheel dress, sat at the other end. She had her head propped in her hand, index finger on her cheek and thumb under her chin.
Mrs. Tomolillo was sitting with some dark-haired laughing Italian on the next bench down. Every time my mother moved, Mrs Tomolillo imitated her. Now Mrs. Tomolillo was sitting with her index finger on her cheek and her thumb under her chin, and her head tilted wistfully to one side.
‘Don’t move,’ I told my mother in a low voice. ‘That woman’s imitating you.’
My mother turned to glance round, but as quick as a wink, Mrs Tomolillo dropped her fat white hands in her lap and started talking vigorously to her friends.
‘Why no, she’s not,’ my mother said. ‘She’s not even paying any attention to us.’
But the minute my mother turned round to me again, Mrs. Tomolillo matched the tips of her fingers together the way my mother had just done and cast a black, mocking look at me.”

Connie closed the book and moved the other book to the top.

“Oates,” Sam smiled at Connie, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

With some effort, Sam thumbed open the book for Connie and patted the tip of his crook’d finger onto the page.

Connie brushed her hair back from her eyes and began to read.

“He almost fell. But, like a clever drunken man, he managed to catch his balance. He wobbled in his high boots and grabbed hold of one of the porch posts. One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn’t in it. It pointed out to the left, bent at the ankle. He had to bend and adjust his boots. Evidently his feet did not go all the way down; the boots must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller. His face was red from bending over, or maybe from embarrassment -  because she had seen his boots. . .”

Connie continued to read aloud from the book. Sam went back to sweeping the floors and restocking the shelves. His lips followed along as the girl read from the book. Sam was not proud of what he had done to the boy, but he felt honest – and he felt satisfied with feeling honest, and feeling honest, Sam thought, must be a fine replacement for feeling proud.

Eddie’s eyes were cast down and he looked at his feet and shifted his weight. Connie’s voice faded into a distant purr, her words slowly overtaken by the mature drone of rain outside the bookstore.

His tweed jackets with their leather elbow patches, leather patches that were sewn on long before he swore off eating and wearing animals, smelled of dignity and rich pipe tobacco. His breath caught thick within his throat when he smoked. His wine and books came from old stock. His books were shelved on the wall of a well lit mezzanine that circled his coffee colored library. Books filled the walled shelves above and below the mezzanine. They were piled onto end tables, discarded beside reading chairs and stacked onto antique rugs from locations long forgotten.

He was reminded that his edification felt less than perfect when, in the evenings after intimate dinner parties, repairing to his library left him feeling, without justification, under-educated. Nonetheless, before retiring to bed, he spent his evenings in the library where he read with writers long deceased.

“And then the young lady asked whether I had written for any other magazines.” Mr. Fitzgerald continued.
“Oh yes, I assured her, I’ve had stories and plays in Smart Set. – Would you believe the young lady actually shuddered before I could continue and asked, ‘The Smart Set, how could you?’”
Here Scott continued mockingly, in a young woman’s voice.
”’Why, they publish stuff about girls in blue bathtubs, and silly things like that.’ – I then had the magnificent joy of telling her she was referring to my play Porcelain and Pink, which appeared there several months ago.”

Mr. Casaubon chuckled with delight and rose to offer his friend another drink.
Mr. Fitzgerald was already standing, his back was turned, not deliberately, to Ernest and Eliot who were sitting across the library privately pontificating Paris.

“There is never an ending to Paris,” Ernest was telling Eliot, “and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.”

“Yes,” replied Eliot, “and we always return to it no matter how it changes us or how we change it. Paris is always worth it, and you receive from it equally whatever you take to it.”

“Ah, but that is the way Paris is when you are very poor and very happy.” Offered Ernest, “Besides, if you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, because Paris is a moveable feast.”

“A skoal then, to a moveable feast!” Said Eliot as he raised his glass to his friend Ernest.

“Let us go there, you and I,
while the evening is spread out against the sky,
we shall not ask, ‘Where is it?’
But let us go and make our visit.”

“And shall the best of your writing last as long as there is literature.” Answered Ernest as their glasses clinked.

It was nightly that in this way dialogue and theater continued in Casaubon’s thoughts.

The clink from the coin woke Casaubon and stole him from his visitors. The coin clinked, then rattled to rest inside the solid tin cup that rested on the sidewalk. Casaubon emptied the coin into his palm, gathered his belongings from the church doorway and carried himself onward through certain half deserted streets.

“Because that’s the way it is.” Chloe’s mother answered.

“Well it ain’t fair, he drove us all the way down here.
He even knows the words to all the songs, but still he has to stand out there. It ain’t fair.”

“Isn’t. And I’m sure he doesn’t mind dear – Pay attention.”

“Is it because his bible got burnt up in the fire?”

“Certainly not! Now turn around.”

Chloe was looking over her shoulder at Mr. Prosser standing outside the door. He held his driving hat in both hands. Beads of perspiration glistened on his brow and tinted his shirt collar. Occasionally Mr. Prosser would wipe his forehead and throat with an overused front-pocket handkerchief and tug at the uncomfortable tightness of his tie. Mr. Prosser stood there in his dark colored suit and mouthed along as the others sang aloud. He gently bowed his head when the others lowered theirs and looked heavenward when he felt it necessary.

“Paul  preaches  there  is  neither  Jew  nor  Gentile,   neither  slave  nor  free,   nor  is  there  male  and  female.” Boomed the preacher.

“Ahmen.” Said Mr. Prosser from outside the church doors. “Ahmen.”
Mr. Prosser’s voice was solid and guttural.

On the drive home Chloe asked Mr. Prosser what he thought of the sermon but Chloe’s mother told her to hush up.
Her mother said she shouldn’t talk to Mr. Prosser while he was driving.
Chloe did as she was told and looked through the car’s side glass. She read the crippled marquee in front of 16th Street Baptist Church as they drove past – “sundays sermon – the love that forgives”. Chloe could see the front of the brick building was blasted away. The steps that led up to the heavy double doors were also missing. A group of men was standing near the road. Some of them had their shirt sleeves rolled up and their fedoras pushed back. Mr. Prosser threw up his hand and waved. The colored men waved back.

A static laced voice played through the car’s radio speakers.
“The blood of four little children is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created, in Birmingham and Alabama, the atmosphere that has induced continued violence  – and now murder…”

Chloe’s mother asked that Mr. Prosser switch off the radio. Mr. Prosser did as he was asked.

After he drives the pink skinned girl and her mother back to their big white house, Mr. Prosser will go down into his cellar room below the house to listen to the latest news about the church bombing. He keeps a tiny transistor radio next to his gray, iron cot. His room is clean but empty. A square card table and metal folding chair sit in the center of the room. A print of The Potato Eaters hangs on the white-washed wall above his cot. The picture is a melancholy reminder of his own difficult childhood. The reminder is more of a necessity than a desire.

Mr. Prosser rolled the car to a stop in the driveway and switched off the ignition. Chloe’s mother stepped out and gently pushed the car door to. Chloe leaned over the back of the front seat and dropped her bible down beside Mr. Prosser.

“You can have it Mr. Prosser.”

Looking back and down at her blonde curls, Mr. Prosser lifted the bible. He felt it’s warm, textured cover and fine, thin pages between his fingers. He unfolded the book to where the delicate tasseled bookmark separated the pages. Galatians, 3:28.

“For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Mr Prosser read aloud. His voice barely more than a throaty whisper, but heavy enough to be rough and scratchy.

“That’s what the preacher talked about in church today.” Chloe said.
“About how all people are equal. But I was thinking since you had to stand outside, maybe they didn’t think you was equal Mr. Prosser. But I do Mr. Prosser. I think you’re as equal as the rest of them. That’s why you can have my bible Mr. Prosser, so they can see you are equal and then you can come inside the church too until your own church gets fixed up again, OK Mr. Prosser?”

Mr. Prosser closed the pages over the nylon marker. He smoothed his dry palm over the gold letters pressed into the cover of the book. He slowly turned the bible this way and that. He studied over it a minute before speaking.

“I can’t take your bible Miss Chloe.” Said Mr. Prosser in his deep, rich voice. “Besides child, I reckon it’s six feet of earth that make all men equal, not this here book.”

Chloe didn’t hear Mr. Prosser. She was already skipping towards her big white house where her mother was standing, waiting in the doorway.

The Ballad of Birmingham by Dudley Randall

Looking through an early morning fog towards an unseen Serengeti horizon, the man in the yellow hat sat for a long time on the edge of an oasis and listened to the sounds of the sanctuary at his back. The oasis had been silent moments earlier, but nature’s intuition was beginning to lead a pre-dawn symphony into harmonious jungle melodies. On one side of the man sat George, a chimpanzee. On the other side lay a pistol loaded with cartridge-fired tranquilizers. The man was cleaning a hunting rifle. The chimpanzee was pulling tufts of grass and putting the moist rooted ends into his mouth. The man in the yellow hat loaded a cartridge into the chamber of the rifle. He slid the bolt closed, reholstered the pistol, then stood to see if Augusto’s cabin might now be seen through the fog. It was. More than a silhouette of the cabin was now visible as the fog had lifted and the glare from the plains was beginning to shine through the thicket.

Augusto could be seen sleeping in the hammock in the yard. A corked bottle of whiskey lay in the dry earth beneath him. His shirt was unbuttoned, exposing his fat, sweat-shined belly. His crossed arms hid the pistol he used for shooting parrots.

Leboo, a single Maasai warrior watched Augusto from the bushy verdure. The local Maasai had come to the man in the yellow hat to express their excitement in seeing a lion near their village. The latest report was that the lion was seen near Augusto’s cabin. Misunderstanding the excitement for fear, the man assured the excited villagers he would take an early morning look around.

Spotting one another at nearly the same time, Leboo and the man in the yellow hat agreed with silent hand gestures to meet in the thinner foliage beyond the Mimosa tree.

“Let’s go George.” Said the man in the yellow hat.
The chimpanzee sprang to his feet and swiftly ran ahead of the man, across the dusty open, to the Mimosa tree. There was no time for the man to stop the chimpanzee. In seconds, George was beneath Augusto’s hammock holding the whiskey bottle. It didn’t matter, thought the man, George can take care of himself. Separately, the Maasai warrior and the man in the yellow hat continued to circle Augusto’s cabin.

With Augusto’s whiskey bottle in his grip, the chimpanzee noisily lifted himself into the lower branches of the Mimosa tree. Augusto woke with a start.

The man in the yellow hat was the first to see the lion. Its huge flat paws slowly, one by one, settled into the dust. Its solid shoulders were lowered. Its heavy head was up, level, inches above the earth. The lion crept steadily towards Augusto. From his vantage, the man in the yellow hat could see George, Augusto and the long crouching broad side of the lion.

Unaware of the lion that was nearly ready to gallop and leap onto him, Augusto cleared his head and trained his pistol on George.

“Finally.” Said Augusto.

The man in the yellow hat raised and steadied his rifle. His decision was made. The trigger was pulled. With an explosion, Whunk – the bullet found its home in the meaty gut of its target.

Heat simmer distorted zebras and fig trees in the distance. Grazing Wildebeest hardened like marble. Gazelles paused. Life on the Serengeti stopped for an instant, then carried on.

The girl’s brother hammered late into the night until the box was complete. The following day the girl’s brother brought a shovel from the barn and dug a hole outside his mother’s window. The girl asked her brother not to dig there, so close to mother, but her brother said it would be better this way. He couldn’t be told anything. The girl thought to pull the window closed so mother couldn’t hear, but decided against it in favor of the breeze.

It had been several hot days since the girl’s brother had mailed the letter to their father. “He probably won’t come.” The girl said. But if he does, her brother thought, he’ll need a place to stay. Her brother stopped digging long enough to lean on the shovel, wipe the sweat from his eyes and relight his pipe.

The girl thought her father would sometimes toss aside a spent match after lighting his pipe. She wasn’t sure. The girl was no longer sure that her father had ever smoked a pipe. But he prayed. The girl was sure of that. Nightly, the same prayer pounded against his palate so that it became smooth repetition. A repetition that caused his prayers to become empty vessels of lost emotions. She at least remembered it to be that way. The girl’s prayers, like her father’s, now floated from her lips and drifted away like sulphur from a discarded match, expiring. Father had been away for many years.

A storm was coming. It was cooler now. Pages of mother’s bible flailed on the table in front of the open window. Thunder cracked in the distance. The girl closed and latched the window then lay down beside her hollow-cheeked mother. The storm grew closer. Trees beyond the barn began to thrash about. Rain started. The girl and her irremediable mother slept through the storm.

Had father arrived in the night. Hadn’t she heard voices, a scuffle. Was it a dream of a night long forgotten. Were things broken. Why did no one wake her?

In the morning the girl’s brother was outside the window again. The storm had passed and another warm day was promised. The girl raised the window. A whisper of wind circled the room as if to survey the things mother would leave behind, then turned the thin pages of mother’s bible again, invisible fingers searching for an appropriate proverb. The girl fanned her gaunt mother and remembered the last time her father left the house. She cried when he left. The girl was too young to understand why her father was leaving, but she remembered knowing he was going for the last time. She had chased after him. The girl remembered tripping and falling and scraping her knees and palms. The girl lay in the dust on her belly and cried. It was from that pitiful position that she watched her father walk away. She called for him. He didn’t turn around. The girl’s father didn’t come back to kiss her bleeding palms, he only donned his preacher hat, climbed into his rat-colored car and drove away.

Now that mother is dying, the girl thought, maybe father will be back. The girl sat on the edge of the bed next to her grey, etiolated mother and watched her brother work. The window frame captured him just the way he is, hardworking, stubborn, unforgiving. The girl’s brother whistled as he shoveled earth down onto the box in the hole near the window. The girl didn’t ask her brother why he was filling the hole. She knew him to be unreasonable about most things anyway.

With the hole filled, the hammering had started again. A board passed in front of the window for the girl’s approval.

Dressed and ready to breakfast, Ophelia bounced down the stairs to endure the critical observation of her dignified parents. She passed an over-sized grandfather clock in the hallway, stopped, then studied herself in a mirror to double-check that she was innocent of carrying a caged hen or of having grown another head while she’d slept. Satisfied that she was without fowl and that she had indeed not mutated in the night, Ophelia joined her mother and father at the breakfast table.

Ophelia was determined that her spirit remain undampened, but having a conversation with her parents always made her feel as if she’d fallen from a parked car or slept in a creek or that she’d tied her shoe laces to the bed while dressing herself.

Whether she was rocked with grief or dizzy with delight, their disparaging comments more often than not derailed the course of dialogue and sidetracked the logical flow of mealtime conversations into communicationless tailspins.

Unaware of her mood and unconcerned with her feelings, her parents would sometimes cock their dry and dusty heads to one side and then the other, and look at her as though she were some effluvial meal and they were rusty feathered scavengers, vultures, male and female, studying her decaying thoughts, thoughts that to them, judging by their tilted craniums, must be senseless non-sequiturs.

They studied her over their lifted flatware and glanced, one to the other, in knowing secrecy and hidden shame, suspecting themselves of having raised an imbecile, a fool who would have been as well received coming to breakfast on horseback and wearing waist high fisherman boots as she would have been if she had come to the table in sneakers with laces.

But she was no fool, she was Ophelia, and she never ate her meals from the saddle.

With her lips as red as the poisoned blood of Hamlet and her skin as pale as his ghost, Ophelia giggled at the thought of how her parents might react to the notion that their heads might be dry and dusty. She winked at her dead grandfather, and hoped that from someplace pleasant, he was winking back.

As if keeping pattern with the pendulum of the hall clock, while Ophelia giggled and winked, her parents’ chins traveled to and fro in perfect synchronicity as they observed their daughter over their empty breakfast plates.

The most foul language Wilson could assemble, even at the worst of times, consisted of naming a few animals that could be found on ordinary dairy farms back east.
“Rats” Wilson hissed between clenched teeth.
The ess in rats trailed off into the forlorn and desolate countryside like the hiss of a rattlesnake.

Wilson had never seen a rattlesnake, except in books, and once behind glass at the Museum of Science back home in Springfield Missouri.
Rattlesnakes, Wilson thought, surely must be plentiful here in Oklahoma.
Besides, where else if not here in this arid landscape would a rattlesnake wait.
Wait! What do you mean wait?
Nothing. I didn’t mean a thing by it. I was just thinking snakes hide is all.
Wilson pushed back at encroaching panic and turned the key on the dash. The engine under the hood only clicked as if someone were rapidly withdrawing a tongue from behind the front teeth.
The engine creaked and moaned as though it were under pressure.
Engine parts ticked and popped at overlapping intervals like a broken metronome.
I’ll get out and have a look. 
That’s it. Wilson thought. I’ll get out and open the hood.
But the snakes -
The hissing sibilations from the engine continued as Wilson opened his door to step out.
Oh yes, the snakes. Wilson shuttered. They’re probably under the car.
They’re probably slithering and gathering in the shade of the car.
Their dusty bellies sliding over one another.
Dozens of them.
I can hear them. 
Wilson slammed his door with such force that he nearly fell over into the passenger seat.
Try the key again, Wilson panicked.
Yes, Yes the key.
Wilson’s hand shook with growing hysteria as he turned the key clockwise and then counter clockwise and then back clockwise again.
He got the same shame-on-you reply from the engine he had gotten before.
The clicking was now slower and more deliberate.
Wilson pounded his open palms against the Essex’s steering wheel.
Again Wilson! Again!
Nearly blind with panic Wilson hugged the steering wheel and tried the ignition once more.
The engine exploded to life  – Wilson roared with delight!

Working the car’s controls like a giddy girl turning straw into gold on a spinning wheel, Wilson maneuvered the car back onto the highway.
Driving into a magnificent Oklahoma sunset, Wilson laughed out loud to convince himself he was never, even for a moment, afraid that a family of rattlesnakes might be gathering under the Essex.

“See, right there – you did it. You said insipid, and jejunely”

“They’re perfectly pertinent words.”

“Yes but my readers don’t want words like jejunely.
Look, all I’m saying is people don’t get your writing. I mean look at that ‘Narrative of A. Gordon of Edacious‘ for Christ’s sake. How do you expect my readers to recognize the allusions to Oscar Wilde, ‘The Great Gatsby‘, Edgar Allan Poe and especially that ‘Anselm’s Ontological Argument‘ thing?”

“The piece is parody.”

“The piece is crap. It’s a travesty. A dozen educated Englishmen couldn’t untangle that mess. I mean ‘Born in a Handbag‘, Seriously?”

“It’s a joke. It refers to ‘The Importance of . . .”

“I know what it refers to – and ‘The Treachery of Images‘ – June 16, 1931 – really? Personal Odysseys?”

“I thought it was clever.”

“Clever, sure, but this – ‘La Tour Eiffel and seventy one more are buried beneath many coats of paint‘.”

“What?” Asked Jeremy.

“It’s too complicated.” Said the man behind the desk. “And this – ‘Let us sell Benjy’s pasture so that Quentin may go to Harvard.“

“Directly from ‘The Sound and the Fury‘.”

“But who would know that, Jeremy?”

“That’s not my problem.”

“As a writer it is your problem.”

“I can’t compromise my writing for the reader.”

“Fitzgerald did.”

“Oh now I’m Fitzgerald?”

“Hardly, I was only saying . . .”

“Besides, Fitzgerald didn’t compromise for the reader; he compromised for the publisher.”

“And that’s all I’m asking you to do.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then you shall remain unpublished.”

“Then I shall remain unpublished.”

Dejected, Jeremy Glass collected his writings into a small portmanteau, thanked the man behind the desk and stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of Hapworth 16. The man behind the desk followed Jeremy as far as the door, flipped the closed sign and pulled the cord that drew the blinds shut, separating himself forever from Jeremy. It was a rude gesture Jeremy thought as he headed north past the cafés and coffee shops that were beginning to overfill with an early Friday evening crowd. Later, the mass will amalgamate into an army of drinkers who will spill from bars and bistros and merge with guests from opposite eateries and pubs. Inebriated students from the law school will stumble upon one another as they teeter through thresholds in proprietary ways.
This is the way Hapworth street is in town. But beyond the university and this conurbation of shops, boutiques and outlets, where the chatter and prattle of urban festivities fade into suburban delight, Hapworth street leaves the locusts of city life behind and carries its travelers beneath a canopy of trees and into country tranquility.

Moving through the shadow of the awning of trees, and into this new sunlit surrounding, Jeremy switched his portmanteau to his left hand and let his right hand glide over the soft, fuzzy tips of the switchgrass that crowded the sidewalk.
A marsh lay behind the grass, but like tandem magicians, cattails and switchgrass worked as accomplices to conceal the marsh from Hapworth street. A crane cried in the distance as unseen swamp-frogs burped themselves and splashed their elongated bodies into the shallow water nearby. A Marsh Wren rose and alighted itself on one cattail and then another before burying itself again in the safety of the thicket. The cattails stood tall as a light breeze bent the switchgrass. With a bow, the switchgrass seemed to be acknowledging Jeremy’s approach. A short waterfall acted as liaison between the marsh and Lake Seymour, a misnomer for sure as Lake Seymour is no more than a flooded marshy area choked back by a dam that is Hapworth Street bridge.

Standing on Hapworth Street bridge, Jeremy leaned over and watched the water as it fell from the lake into the marsh. The water seemed to sit still under the arc of the bridge but sprang to life as it splashed and exploded into smaller and smaller droplets, falling onto one rock after another – down, collecting itself again to form the water of the marsh below. Jeremy walked to the lake side of the bridge and, like Narcissus in the painting by Caravaggio, admired his reflection in the smooth surface of Lake Seymour. Jeremy wondered if one can be sure of one’s thoughts only while staring at one’s reflection under a bridge. Deciding this to be the case, Jeremy unbuckled the portmanteau, separated the two halves, and poured the contents into the lake. He set the bag down and walked back to the marsh side of the bridge and waited for his writings to appear from under the bridge. One at a time, page after page floated out, then dropped over the edge of the waterfall.

Jeremy picked up his empty portmanteau, turned back towards town, and said out loud to no one, “Then I shall remain unpublished.”

Together, under wind streaked clouds and a crisp blue sky, the father and child begin a journey into the innocence of a Saturday morning. An innocence disturbed by a curious child who is pure and virtuous, but intrigued by a world full of wonderful secrets that only a child can spot. The child’s small eyes gather in and collect with amazement all that is offered before them.

A sleeping, bushy cat, petted too harshly, darts away then stops, looks back at a child pointing aimlessly, then resigns to find a new place to bask in the early sun.

Red berry clusters are stripped from Nandina bushes, pockets are filled with pebbles, potted plants are overturned and any number of organic things are tossed into a creek.

Splashes produce wide grins on the child’s soft face. Little hands are clapped together and dirty palms are wiped onto OshKosh denims as giggles fade away and new splashes are washed away like memories.

Sometimes a memory is all that is left of a day. No crayon drawing taped over a bed. No photograph or old snap shot to someday fall from an overfilled photo album. No tiny shoes or even a tiny child to fill them, because sometimes, only a memory remains.

On the last day of July that year, Ethan carried his poverty in both hands as he stepped down the plank of the ferry boat onto Ellis Island in New York Harbor.
In one hand Ethan carried a gunny sack filled with all his possessions, in the other hand he held a two pound Celtic cross; with both hands he held up his oversized pants.

Ethan eagerly waited by the Kissing Post outside the Registry Room for his uncle to claim him and welcome him to America.
The Kissing Post was a wooden post outside the Registry where immigrants met relatives already in the states. It had become tradition for immigrants to kiss the wooden post.
Leaning against the wall of the Registry was a fallen sign that read, “Drink Moxie Soda“. The man on the sign seemed pleased with himself and the soda, but unaware of the tremendous heat beating down on a thousand disoriented new arrivals.
Ethan slid his back down against the wall and, in the arid earth, joined the smiling man on the sign in silently watching the excited crowd of new Americans.
Ethan turned the sign over and with a piece of coal excitedly wrote in large block letters so that his uncle might better find him; ETHAN ALLEN.
A tramp steamer passed in the distance as Ethan became hopeful that another day would not come and go without him.
For five hours Ethan sat with his back to the wall and listened to partial conversations as relatives, friends and loved ones were reacquainted.
Such topics as health, weather and family grew from small meetings before wafting away into inaudible murmurs as congregations drifted away and new topics and assemblies were born.
For Ethan, images faded, lost color and grew dull then dipped below the horizon of memory, as sleep took him and left him alone in the sultry and heavy heat.

“So you’ve grown lad, let’s make nothing of it.” A slightly indignant Irish voice huffed.
“Let’s go son, I haven’t got all day.” The voice continued.
The man kicked Ethan’s worn, dusty boots.
“Today lad.”
Ethan wiped his face with the dirty palms of his hands and stood to recognize his uncle who, with a stumbling gait, was already stomping away.
Tottering somewhat, Ethan collected his gunny sack and cross, and staggered after his uncle.

Ethan’s uncle was thirty five years old and worked at Fulton’s fish market in lower Manhattan.
Every evening his uncle would take home a fish in a piece of oiled paper he brought from his tenement each morning.
At lunch every day he would remove the oiled paper from his lunch tin, wrap a stolen fish in the paper, then hide the fish and the oiled paper inside his shirt.
In the evening he would drink a bottle of John Barleycorn and fry the fish on the wood stove in his small, dark, airless room at the corner of Bayard and Mullberry streets.

Except for a single sink on the wall, a wood stove by the window, a small table for eating and a home-made bed, the single room tenement was otherwise empty.
A light bulb hung from the high cracked ceiling over the table. There were a few dirty dishes in the sink and a greased skillet sat on top of the wood stove. A pipe from the stove was bent at an awkward angle to force smoke from the wood stove out into Manhattan. A strop for honing a straight razor hung from the sink. A badger brush and a straight razor stood in a white porcelain cup on the edge of the sink. The words “William’s Shaving Soap”, were written in gold letters on the side of the cup.
An image of a reclining woman was carved into the entire length of the handle of the razor. Ethan thought it was probably ivory and the woman reminded him of the reclining Venus in a painting by Botticelli he had studied in school in Ireland.

Ethan never emptied his gunny sack but in the evenings would remove from it a book and read underneath the low hanging bulb at the rickety table in the center of the room. For a bookmark Ethan used the only photograph he had ever owned. A photo of his mother sitting sideways, reading, in a slat back chair. Her left arm rested on the top slat of the chair and she held a cup that appeared to be a goblet or chalice of some kind. On the reverse of the photo, written in pencil, were only the words, “Catherine Allen 1886″.

With each passing day Ethan’s uncle drank more. Every evening found him more belligerent and irritable than the previous. They hardly spoke a word between them and Ethan avoided eye contact, but could often sense his poor, cantankerous, ill-tempered uncle glaring at him. The squalid little room was frightfully hot and the unfriendly conditions made it miserable and nearly unbearable for Ethan. The air was still and sour and the tenement was drab and dilapidated.

Ethan was young and rarely needed a shave, but in contrast to his unkempt and uncouth uncle, he felt he needed to clean and shave himself. While his uncle slept off an especially hard night of drinking, Ethan cleaned the dirty sink on the wall then filled it with water for shaving. He laid his Celtic cross across the bottom of the sink in order to soak away the grime while he shaved. The rust from the pipes and the loosened dirt from the cross made the water less than pellucid. He stropped the razor in the way he’d seen his uncle do and mixed the shaving soap in the porcelain cup with the badger brush. He thought of refilling the sink but thought it made no difference as it was only for rinsing. Before Ethan could make the first pass with the razor he was shoved hard from behind. The razor fell to the edge of the sink as Ethan fell forward. Both his hands plunged into the sink to stop his fall. His Head was pulled back by his hair. His uncle’s rough stubbly neck rubbed against Ethan’s adolescent cheek. His uncle’s body pressed hard against his, pinning him to the sink. Ethan felt his uncle’s hot, rancid breath beating against his ear. Hissing between his rotted yellowing teeth his uncle pushed Ethan away and reached for the straight razor. As he spun away from his uncle, Ethan lifted the cross from the dirty water and with all the fear in him, backhanded his uncle behind the ear. His uncle sank to the floor in a heap, and still holding the open straight razor, fell back against the floor in a thud.

His uncle was still breathing as Ethan gathered what paltry belongings he had into his gunny sack. He stepped over his uncle and pulled the door open, sliding his uncle’s legs out of the way as he went out. Ethan pulled the door closed behind him and stood for a minute more. He took the photograph of his mother out and, with his heart full of sadness, wondered what he should do now.

I heard the delivery truck at dusk.
Peeking through the closed blinds of my bedroom I watched the delivery driver drop the package on the front porch of the vacant house across the street from my own.
The driver rang the doorbell and returned to the truck and roared off into a scheduled hurry without looking back.
This began the curious incident of the package in the night.

Beneath heavy illuminated clouds, street lamps towered above and between the package and me.
With a light snow beginning to fall and brighten an already lighted street, it looked as if a long dark-less and thief-less night was spreading out before me, leaving me to periodically peer through the blinds at the mysterious package.
I wanted the abandoned package, but darkness was what I needed.

An opportunity to swipe the package was turning its back on me, but lingered close enough to annoy me.
Although I felt annoyed by the slipping chance, a stronger sensation was that of being watched by unobserved acquaintances; the quidnuncs, the inquisitive gossipy people.
Surely they too lingered behind closed blinds.
I was a stranger in new company.

The vacant house sat quite close to the street and had a short driveway that pulled up to the right of a large and long covered front porch that was built in such a way that it probably never sees a breeze.
The front entrance to the house faces forward at the far left of the porch with the remaining girth of the house holding a single window – probably a bedroom.
Two sets of steps dropped down from the porch.
One set was in front of the main entrance and another set emptied to the right into the driveway at the right most part of the porch.
The front steps were connected to the driveway by a superficial walkway that swooped in a short curve.
An empty mailbox stood like an obedient sentinel guarding a “For Sale” sign where the sidewalk, the driveway and the walkway met at the street.
The yard was clean and because the house was for sale, it was well enough kept, but I knew any package left on the porch would go uncollected.
Unless of course – I collected it.

Having warmed up to my courage, sometime around midnight I started my approach across my snow covered front lawn towards the vacant house and the package that would soon be mine.
I sneaked about with my head down in a crouched position of fear.
Finding this a ridiculous posture that neither protected me from the cold nor hid me in the lighted street, I stood somewhat taller but continued into the tiny front lawn of the empty house. I could see the package cowered there in the corner of the porch as if recoiled in its own terror.
My footsteps sounded out as explosions in the snow as I cautiously crossed the small yard adjacent to my own.
Failing to will myself invisible in the gray night I sweated nervously underneath the hoodie that covered my head.
Attentively I stopped and listened to the temperature.
I watched.
I observed.
I eased in closer.
My confidence increased as the distance between the sweet prize and me lessened.
I was home free.
The package was mine.

The door opened!

I turned and shot across what was now a gigantic lawn.
I passed the empty mailbox in a flash.
I was through the street and back into my own yard in seconds.

Oh the horror that then befell me.
How could I have been so careless?
The only dotted tracks in the midnight snow made a direct line from my own front door to the front door of the house that I now understood with complete clarity not to be vacant.

I peeked through the blinds one last time before falling asleep with an open book on my chest.

Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I and the less fortunate can do better? Not me. If anyone imagines my sole aim is art for art’s sake, they are cruelly deceived. I find I am richer this year than last; so I enclose a cheque for 500 pounds for you to distribute among young writers and artists and musicians who may need the money. You will know, better than I do, who they are. But I must make one condition, that you do not reveal that the money has come from me, or tell anyone about it.

James mentioned again how important it is that Arnold not drink the water from the carafe, as it is no vin ordinaire.
“The city’s water is fine”, Arnold scoffed, “Besides, who is not to trust God and Belgrand. A toast – to Eugene, whose name shall forever remain engraved upon the belly of La dame de fer.”
“Yes Arnold, engraved forever, but La Tour Eiffel and seventy one more are buried beneath many coats of paint.”

“True Joyce, but forever engraved none the less – Do you accept the offer?”

Three months before Arnold Bennett died of typhoid fever, and four months before the Exposition Coloniale Internationale opened in the Bois de Vincennes, James accepted Arnold’s request to allocate funds to the less fortunate – but yet undiscovered talents of Paris.

June 16, 1931, twenty seven years after James and Nora Barnacle enjoyed their first of many personal odysseys crisscrossing the streets of Dublin, James and his wife visited the International Colonial Exposition in the outskirts of Paris. Having found no artist yet worthy of the late Arnold Bennett’s gift, but always on the qui vive for a beneficiary, James and his wife were entertained at booth after booth of human exhibitions, native arts and crafts from Senegalese villages, Belgian artists and grand reproductions of native architecture from far away lands.

The Belgium exposition showcased booths of Belgian congresses, histories of French speaking Walloons and Dutch speaking Flemings, Magnificent Murals of the guild houses of Brussels, and booths of artists and craftsmen of one kind or another, one after another.
Standing opposite a painting hanging inside a small gallery inside the Belgium Exposition, Nora read aloud, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe“.
“Whatever could it mean dear, it clearly is a pipe?”
“Maybe the artist has challenged us in some way”, answered James. “Perhaps we are to rethink what we surely recognize as a pipe, or perhaps it is a provocation.”
“Maybe so James, But I still say it is a pipe –”
“Then stuff the pipe”, a voice interrupted over her shoulder, “How people reproach me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying, would I not? My paintings evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does it mean?’ When sometimes, it does not mean anything.”
Nora turned to answer a commonly dressed handsome man in his early thirties. His face was polite and his grin was genuine.
“I suppose, once it’s put that way, from, I presume, the artist himself, that there is no disagreeing.”
“Ma’am – by the name Francois Magritte, I merely attempt to challenge viewers of their preconceived ideas of reality. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, and that is the treachery of images.”
“Then it has been well accomplished, dear sir.”, James volunteered as he offered his hand to his new friend, “James Joyce, and my wife Nora.”
“Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte, but please call me Rene.”
“And what shall we call your painting not of a pipe?” smiled Nora.
“Ahh, the painting has no name, it is merely an unpurchased advertisement for a tobacconist in London. I am a struggling publicist, and the painting must be called –”
“The Treachery of Images!”, Nora offered with amusement.
“Then it shall be.”, Laughed Rene.
Removing a card from between the painting and the wooden frame, Rene penciled in “The Treachery of Images” below the words Studio Dongo, already printed on the card.

“My brother Paul and I have a small studio in Brussels where I begrudgingly paint commissioned works of advertisement. My life obliges me to do something, so I paint. Four years ago I took part in the Exposition Surréaliste at the Galerie Goemans here in Paris, but with no finances to allow my stay, I returned to Brussels and opened the studio. Now I get by with what little earnings I make as a Belgian publicist.”

Thanks to a generous gift bestowed upon the artist by an anonymous admirer, three years later Magritte was honored with a solo show at the Palais des Beaux in Brussels where he stunned the art world with the first of his series, The Human Condition, in which a painting representing exactly what lies behind the painting, is seen on the canvas.

James Joyce smiled as he read the favorable review in the paper and read aloud Rene’s comment on his work to Nora.

“In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting.
Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. . .”

Nora took her husband’s hand across the breakfast table and glanced at the words “A portrait of the artist as a young man” which appeared in the paper below a photograph of Magritte.

James and Nora beamed at one another and knew without a word between them, that their friend Rene also knew.

My days are deadly dull and my nights are barely brighter.
I play chess, sleep alone and eat my meals standing over the kitchen sink.
I don’t bother anyone and I don’t look for trouble.
Five days a week I go to work, two days a week I don’t.
My neighbors don’t annoy me and I return the favor.
They are an odd lot anyway.
They pay yard-boys to mow their lawns, rarely go outside
and probably bathe their pets in Pinesol.
Their trash bins appear on the curb Friday mornings and are
collected again by evening – but I never see them do it.
For all I know it’s an automated neighborhood where
I go to bed thinking my life is a bore -
and wake up knowing it…
They think I’m crazy – and the only thing more difficult than convincing
someone you aren’t crazy, is convincing them you are.

Quentin dialed his dad’s number as he spun around to close the door to his dorm room with the book-bag he was carrying. He tossed his bus pass, the open envelope and the check onto the bed beside the rest of the mail and let the bag drop to the floor in a complete disinterest in its existence.

That’s the way it is on my street,
everyday is yesterday, and I have fallen
victim to life’s gray mechanical predictability.
That’s what I do – predict.
Always I get it right; but rarely think to mention it before hand.
Over and over again I get it right. Over and over again I fail to mention it
before hand – but no more.
Convincing them I ain’t crazy means showing them I am.

“But dad”, he paused, “That’s a lot of money. What did Benjy say? What?
What do you mean he didn’t get a check
But that’s unfair
That land was his inheritance. . .
Yeah I know, but I mean -
It’s unfair to him
I know, but you shouldn’t have sold his pasture
Who?
Anonymously?”

I bit my lip and studied an English opening spread out over a tessellated
table top and considered an ultra-symmetrical Rubinstein variation. Why
not. Son of a bitch Quentin always opens C4 because he won’t play a
Sicilian. So predictable. Have it your way. C5. Then play your knight to C3.
I’m not crazy.

Quentin snapped his phone shut and stood there biting his lip. Now what?
He remembered.
“Let us sell Benjy’s pasture so that Quentin can go to Harvard”, he recalled.
“He’ll never know the difference”
“Who cares if he does”
“Benjy will never go to college anyway”
“But that’s Benjy’s inheritance”
“Hell, Quentin can pay it back when he graduates”
“Benjy didn’t even want to go to college”
“Yeah all he wants to do is sit in that dark house and play chess”
“And correspondence at that”
“You know he still mows his own lawn”
“Close-fisted”
“Benjy should pay for Harvard anyway”
“Maybe – but that’s not our business”
“Well it’s not right of him”
“Penny Pincher”
“Useless prognosticator if you ask me”
“Don’t judge others before judging yourself”
“Yes sir”

“Nine numbers, that’s all you gotta do Benjy. Only cost you a buck”.
and I say,   “Nine numbers huh?”
And he   “Yep, letters and numbers, mix it up, your choice.”
And I   “Just a buck?”
And he   yep.
And I   OK I’ll play.
And he   how many?
And I   just one.
And he   you sure?
And I   yep.
And he   what’ll it be?
And I   E4 C5 NF3 D6. The dragon.
And he   what?
And I   Sicilian – nothing – nevermind.
And he   forty for the gas and one for the ticket.
And I   break a hundred?
And he   yep.

Quentin cracked open a soda and studied the chess board on the computer screen.
Benjy had moved in the game and there wasn’t much to think about. His knight
to C3 was pretty standard for this opening. Maybe someday he’ll let Benjy play
that Sicilian Dragon against him. But for now, he’s won enough with it. He
flipped open his phone and began dialing.

Quentin moved knight C3. I played NC6. It’s what was expected.
And that’s what I had become, predictable.
A predicting anomaly whose own predictability had become
the contraceptive of his own creativity.
But I still had twenty million reasons not to care.
Besides, they were all taken care of.
Leeches. All of them.
Harvard got their check.
I bought my own eight hundred acres.
So what if they didn’t know who bought the land.
They knew they sold it, and I knew it too, but they didn’t know I knew.

I cracked open a beer and watched through the window as a neighbor
wheeled a trash bin through his yard.
Barely noticing the sound of a mower in the distance, I sat at the chess
table and wondered who I’d give the eight hundred acres and twenty million
dollars to.

The phone is going to ring. It will be Quentin.
It did, and it was.

“Hail Mary,
Full of Grace,
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit
of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary,
Mother of God,
pray for us sinners now,
and at the hour of death.
Amen.”

The old man ended his yesterday with the usual habits of removing his pants, rolling them up and stuffing a newspaper inside them to make a pillow for his head.
Again, he said his Hail Mary as he promised he would if he caught the fish.
Feeling the black coffee he’d ordered sometime after midnight wrestle sleep away from what was left of the night, he surrounded himself with the quilt on his bed.  Beaten, he pulled it up to his chin and curled up under the darkness in his room.
Since returning from his trip, with only the backbone of the huge marlin, last night was the first time the old man had retired without a gallon of beer in him; beer he had bought each night, after the boy had gone home, with what little credit he had left at the Terrace.
As he rested and waited for sleep, he remembered what it was like to be a fisherman with nothing.
As he waited, he thought of how he will live as a fisherman with nothing more to fish for.
“you’re tired, old man,” he said.
“You’re tired inside.”
At last he slept and dreamt once again of the lions he’d seen as a boy on the shores of Africa.
The sunlight didn’t wake him in the morning, where, in retaliation, the old man would have attacked last night’s caffeine overdose and lack of rest with a whisky from the jar he kept hidden on the dirt floor under his bed.

As a small crowd gathered outside the old man’s shack, the boy cried again as he picked up empty beer cans along the shore.

I set my broken glasses down beside the sink and wondered how I’d gotten here from the driveway.
It was late as I made the only eye contact I’d made all day and stared myself down in the bathroom mirror.
My reflection gazed back at me with a complete disinterest in my existence.
Some time had passed before I realized I was going to lose the staring contest with my own reflection.
Blinking my way out of a game I couldn’t win, I swallowed the pills.

Again, the condescending silence surrounds me.
Moving in rhythm with the stillness that has already caused my breath to gather in light gasps, in order that I can listen more closely, the silence moves like a fog across the hardwood floor and floats into my bed.
It curls up with me, becoming part of me.

Like so many nights before, I lie here with the suffocating silence, and wait nearly breathless for that one moment when her key meeting the lock instantly sucks the silence from the house.

I wait for her to step through the back door in her usual drunken stupor.

She never does.

Because she never returned, I have the bed to my self.
Content, I roll over and grin, and sleep with my new friend silence.

He was easy to like and difficult to ignore as his charming personality and good looks painted him as his own Dorian Gray. Guests found him to be pretentious, congenially pretentious, but pretentious none the less. His pretentiousness was offered with good humor and his manners were natural and honest. When he spoke, his teeth tripped his tongue and caused words like complacent to escape as “complathent”.

“To be ignorant of a thing is unfortunate, to be complacent in that ignorance is quite another thing entirely,” I heard him telling a small gathering back at Bobbi’s house after his book signing.

Bobbi was the Gertrude Stein of our generation and had published several best sellers, including A.G.’s first book, “I’m Hunter S. Thompson, but Better Looking “.
Bobbi’s house was on the lake on the southern most point of Edacious Island. Those on the mainland could see the opulence of Edacious, and after dark could see the lighted windows and small green luminaries that surrounded the lawn of Bobbi’s “Edacious Island Estate”. Those visiting Edacious often commented on how unattractive the mainland appeared from the island. It was an unattractiveness that included a single stretch of highway that ran the entire length of the mainland. The highway was crowded with billboards that towered above automobile repair shops and unkempt two story apartment buildings. An unattractiveness that might be romantic inspiration to an astute observer.

“To be complacent in that ignorance is to be deliberately obtuse,” A.G. continued as I excused my way through his regular loyal listeners; an audience that has grown into an amalgamation of leeches with no understanding of his writing. Because he was gifted in the art of spontaneous conversation, A.G.’s loquaciousness was never intrusive but in fact appreciated. In the style of French poet and great story teller Léon-Paul Fargue, A.G. entertained guests in Bobbi’s den with story after story of adventures and untruths that he presented in his rehearsed fashion as factual accounts of his day to day life.

“I was drunk and there was a snake in the kitchen, and because I didn’t want the snake in the kitchen, I needed it out of the house. It was important to me that I didn’t harm the snake. Now whether or not this sounds difficult isn’t important – it’s not for the inebriated. After starting my task with ebriose thoughts, I somehow managed to trap the snake in a jar that I carried out into the garden. I realized that greater victories had been accomplished by more indolent individuals, but my releasing the snake into the garden was a triumphant and sobering moment.
I stood there in the glory of my imagined altruism and watched the snake cower inside the glass jar. I believe killing for sport is a barbaric pastime practiced by individuals incapable of being entertained otherwise so I left the snake and the jar to separate in their own good time and turned my thoughts towards my own escape from my approaching visitor — My neighbor, Mr. Anselm; a man who doesn’t subscribe to my mantra that the best neighbors are seldom home and never visit.
I’m aware that I’ve been over sensitized to the absurdities of others but it is still my opinion that Mr. Anselm walks with too much resoluteness for a man who carries an ashplant stick, not to mention he was wearing bedroom slippers. Because he was wearing slippers, I hoped the need for expediency had influenced his appearance and predicted a short visit. I could see through my garden gate that Mr. Anselm had his cane tucked into his armpit as he hurried past my sleeping dog, Butler. Mr. Anselm and Butler seem to share a mutual disinterest in one another. More often than not, because he is off again in short time, I have learned it is easier to let his uninterrupted tangential topics run their course. Because his mannerisms are so animated and his words come so quickly they almost overlap, the entertainment he provides is the only gratuity for his visits. Mr. Anselm, with all his British-like politeness, but in an unusual accusatory way, asked through his teeth whether I’d seen his poodle, Wiggles — I lied and said I had not . . .”

As A.G.’s words faded into the party prattle I shuffled my way through his listeners toward the exit and thought how odd it is that Mr. Anselm and A.G. sound like one and the same.

“. . . It could have turned out differently, I suppose, but it didn’t . . .” A.G. was boasting as I picked up a copy of an excerpt from his most recent work, “I used to think I was Agnostic, Now I Just Don’t Know”.

God cannot be conceived not to exist. – God is that, a being which nothing greater can be conceived. – That which can be conceived not to exist is not God. And it exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Accordingly, if that, a being which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being is God.
So truly, therefore, God, does thou exist, that thou cannot be conceived not to exist; and rightly. For, if a mind could conceive of a being better than thee, the being would rise above the Creator; and this is most absurd. And, indeed, whatever else there is, except thee alone, can be conceived not to exist. To thee alone, therefore, it belongs to exist more truly than all other beings, and for this reason in a higher degree than all others. For, whatever else exists does not exist so truly, and so in a less degree it belongs to it to exist. Why, then, has the fool said in his heart, there is no God (Psalm 14;1), since it is so evident, to a rational mind, that God does exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is dull and a fool?*

As I stepped into the dusk and down the marble steps, I realize that A.G’s playful pompousness is reserved for his writing. Looking up at an orange and violet broken puzzle of clouds that leaned down and held the horizon of Edacious as it’s border, I secretively joined the society of readers who have no interest in his provincial certitude, but enjoy his company immensely.

*Anselm’s Ontological Argument

In a style reminiscent of Hemingway,
I drew the last bitter smoke from a Macanudo and spat the bite onto the old brick floor.
Like the old man in “The Killers”, I’ll wait.
I’ll wait with intentions of writing,
though there is nothing left to say.
Someday,
others will come and enjoy the dusty fan.
And I’ll still be here,
with nothing more to write,
but lots to remember.

From where I sit I can see over the hedge that surrounds the patio just beyond the porch.
I stare across the lawn into the lighted street.
Cars pass,
then quickly leave me again to stare into the silence.
I sit here now,
not nearly sober,
with my head in my hands,
and remember.

Some of us read . . .
Some watched television . . .
Others exchanged polite salutations,
Then shrank into their seats.

Together, we sat with our red clip-ons,
JUROR.
Worn to single us out like the amber stars of David,
worn by Jews of a different generation.
JUDE.

Not nearly so serious a fate awaited,
as jurors were chosen,

and separated,

like Wiesel –

from his mother.

Left and right.
This way.
Single file.
No one spoke.

Now daybreak coffee brewed gives
rise to recollections
of summer days uncalendared
and sitting soundlessly –
in that worn out station wagon,
white with organs rusted red with
his side in the shade
of a sun divided seat
returning home with him,
choking in the sun –
were but me and the bream.

Did you know I have a peach tree in my backyard?
I do.
I’ve been watching a peach ripen.
Today I was going to pick my peach.

Weeks ago I carved out the surrounding shrubbery so the sun and I could get closer to the tree.
In the mornings, on my way out, I would stop by my peach tree, and think . . .
Maybe this evening.

Not long ago my peach was a small green orb I could see above my head.
Yesterday, a heavy orange and yellow fruit held a branch down near my waist,
and offered me itself.

Today the peach is gone,
and the branch, again above my head.
Why would someone take my peach?
I guess it was never mine.
I only thought it offered itself to me.

I remember used book stores
hidden behind creaking doors
with bells that jingled as we stepped inside.

I remember those days in Asheville
when we had lunch outside,
and ordered too much cheap wine.

We laughed at our idleness,
but all along,
before we lost our way,
we knew where we were going,
and that was the beauty of it.

(This is how it was at my last job of course. Not where I work now. No. You don’t know these people. These people I work with now are not the same people. That was a different job. . . Different people. . . You don’t know them. . . They quit. . . Yeah that’s it, they quit, they don’t work there anymore. . . )

To eat
and sleep
does not earn keep.
If only I ate meat.

I often devote entire conversations to my brilliance, if only others would join in.

Of all the things I’m really good at – getting lost is the most useless.

It often irritates me to learn that other people don’t know the things my parents taught me.

An autodidact is only as smart as his teacher.

I’m not dsylexic, are you?

Do I think it’s poor use of language to ask a rhetorical question? Yes I do.

If I ever get a tattoo, it’ll say Leviticus 19:28.

A hangover is the result of poor planning.

We can’t help how other people behave, we can only mistreat them the only way we know how.

The problem with following the recipe for fruit cake is, that once you’re done, you have fruit cake.

I avoid cliches like the plague.

I’m prognosticative in hindsight.

I have a right to the opinion that suits my mood.

It concerns me when someone doesn’t talk enough, and bothers me when they do.

The problem with imbeciles is that they don’t even know how stupid they are, do we?

I think I’d like me if I ever got to know me, but I ain’t going near me.

I’m no different than anyone else, and I’m not happy about it.

I talk to myself because I sometimes think I’m someone I know.

My unhappiness is bringing me down.

Except for the people, I kinda dig the crowds.

When releasing self defeating habits, one should know when to quit.

The balance of our marriage was upset when she never came home again.

I realize we’re not talking about me, but we should at least be thinking of me.

Although I spend my days avoiding insipidness, it seems to be attracted to me.

I don’t force my timidity on anyone.

I used to say, “Ignore the Inebriated”, now I walk amongst them.

I’ve been over-sensitized to the absurdities of others.

I used to think I was agnostic, now I just don’t know.

I wonder if Christians think Jews are half atheist.

Provincial certitude is the plague of religion.

Do you think God is one that believes Anselm is one which
cannot be conceived not to exist?

It’s hard to be this misanthropic, (while putting on airs of philanthropy).

What I need is a lawyer and a truck.

The problem with homeless people is they don’t have anywhere to live.

Everybody’s different; but that’s no excuse for not agreeing with me.

I hope when I get smart, I’m not mean to stupid people, like I am now.

The critically shallow get their energy from their ignorance of culture.

Life is so resilient, anywhere you aren’t looking, it will come in.

Silence is such an aesthetically pleasing sound.

I’ve know better people to be less impressed with.

I married beneath my spirit.

I shopped myself into a state of frugality.

The only thing I hate more than shopping is not having things.

People wrap fish with the things I write.

To combat global climate change, it’s urgent that we do as little as possible, with no
wasted movement.

I should have more confidence in quoting myself, I mean it’s not like I make up this stuff.

I know you aren’t stupid, but I don’t have time to prove it.

I need to discover what it is I’m not wasting my time doing.

Being Idle is hard work – but I don’t mind it when there is nothing else to do.

Sometimes success is out of reach without encouragement.

Home is where your things are.

As for human nature, I value it, but history shows to expect little from it.

My age is a ridiculous age to be at my age.

Alcohol and atheism, what a life.

My teenage daughter is so taciturn, I don’t know whether to be thankful or suspicious.

I can tolerate cute a lot longer than I can tolerate dumb, and you ain’t that cute.

I either need more money or fewer needs.

I often find myself in the awkward but not unfamiliar situation of not knowing what I’m talking about.

I’m running out of ways to ignore you.

The best part about being me is that I get to be with me all day.

Faith is merely a byproduct of hope.

Napping is like sleep exercise.

Although I generally dress for aesthetic satisfaction, I realize the age for comfort is creeping up on me.

Until I can write something else that pays my bills, I’ll continue writing checks.

I’m emotionally celibate and socially dysfunctional.

The best neighbors are seldom home and never visit.

Planned spontaneity is like unpremeditated strategy.

The only thing worse than being me, I think, is not being me.

I’m so lazy I can’t even complete a . . .

Sometimes I think doing nothing with you is better than doing anything alone.

The unfortunate thing about work is that it often interferes with leisure.

It’s all fun and games until someone’s phone gets wet.

Ever notice when you have fleas, even pepper is suspect?

Only the poor find the rich interesting.

My brain is working perfectly inadequately.

Creative improvisation is the genesis of art.

I think someday I’ll make a list of the top ten things
that should never be on a list.

Sometimes a writer must sacrifice plausibility for effect, and a reader must sometimes suspend disbelief.

When gravity fails
to set the sun
on a thousand spring rainbows
when flowers bloom and children laugh
and lift their little arms
to fly their kites and walk atop
the walls that separate
they’ll scatter life that fell as death
unnoticed there last fall.

She must have come in sometime after dark and was drawn to my sweaty flesh.

The raised screenless-window had allowed both the humid air and the blood seeking beast to creep cowardly into my room.

Ready to leap again, the disease carrying creature crouched and rested her scalloped covered abdomen between her three sets of jointed legs that jutted from her blood filled belly.

I could imagine the blood pulsing through the veins in her otherwise transparent wings as she threw her hairy body against mine.

The straw-like proboscis extending from between her eyes punctured my flesh just above my right temple.

Surely a beast this evil has no soul.

Instinctively, I retaliated, and with one swift blow, spread her across my own forehead.