Labyrinth

We have forgotten the way
through the five-petal path,
our feet calloused
and eyes grown pale.

Just because it was here,
we walked it.

We remember only the spiral
that lives in the walls,
our tongues silent
and fingers too wise.

Just because we cannot leave,
does not mean we wish to.

A Little Problem

Toothpick in his mouth, the pest control man hooked his thumbs in his jumpsuit. “Okay. So, what you’ve got is a Death Weasel infestation.”

A small orange rodent with too many sharp teeth edged near the man’s foot. He kicked it against the wall, absentmindedly.

The house-owner, cowering on his coffee table, grimaced. “Is—is that going to be expensive?”

“As far as price goes—” The exterminator stiffened and looked down at his hand. “A scratch! They’ll smell the blood—”

A wave of Death Weasels burst into the room. They leapt on the exterminator, quickly overpowering him and stripping his carcass to the bone. Finished, they looked at the man on the coffee table.

He frantically dialed the next pest control listing.

Meaning

For what, is the grass?

The grass is here to be grass,
to be green or blonde
in the rain or sun,
to grow sweetly or not at all,
covering the earth
or fighting a few tendrils through the rock—
just to be grass,
as the rock is here to be rock.

But people—
for what, are people?
We do not know,
anymore than we understand what it is just to be people,
to grow as the grass grows,
stand as the rock stands.

Is it any wonder
that we weep?

But then. . .
we are not grass.
We are not rock.
Perhaps. . .
perhaps that is what we are.
More than grass.
More than rock.

As much myth as meat.

The Sea of Faith Was Once, Too, at the Full

God went into the water because he was tired.

So tired.

He went down to the purest river he could find and just slid into it, first as the corporeal body he had taken so that he could walk barefoot in the grass, and then he dissolved it and let his spirit fill the spaces between the water’s molecules.

God listened to the hydrogen and the oxygen atoms talk to each other, and he loved them, because they did not even know that he was there. So he floated with them around the world a million times, from north to south to east to west, and he was happy.

And then God went into a glacier. There, in the ice, he watched as the gravel ebbed and flowed through it, as bacteria stared him straight in the face and then squirmed through his crystallized form. The debris and the bacteria made patterns, patterns that he did not need to control, and he loved it.

The swamps, the puddles, the heavy clouds that hang in the sky—God visited them all. And each tiny stream, the moisture that coats windows and slithers down laden glasses, and the ponds in deep caves where blind fish swim in evolutionary circles, all of these; God lived in them, and laughed in them, and he heard a million tiny conversations of joy and fear and anger and hope.

God went home, and remembered how his people were made mostly of water, and he loved us again. He knew that we deserved him, and he deserved us as well.

Then he gave rain to the whole world, and the sun.

It was a beautiful rainbow.















Bonus: the song I was thinking of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_FjmnzsW0M.

(Yes, I tried to link it, but apparently that was too difficult.)

WOOOOO!

Stripes, or Stories

The zebra leans over the edge of his pen. “I can tell you a story,” he says, his mane catching in the rough wood. He has already lost his left eye to a virus, eyelid stitched shut so as not to frighten the children.

I came to free him, but his appearance quells my righteous feelings and unnerves me. Of many responses, I settle for “why?”

He shakes his head. “If you need to ask, I cannot help you.”

I take a step closer. “Is it mine, or someone elses?” My bolt cutters slip from my hand, landing with a cloud of dusk. The sun takes on too bright of a quality, so that everything is outlined with a painful light.

The zebra laughs. “A better question. It is many peoples’ story.”

“And in return, you want me to free you?”

His nostrils widen and he stamps a foot, causing the patterns of light and shadow to shift painfully, dazzling my eyes. “Touch that gate and I’ll bite off your hand.”

I swallow. I want to leave, to rejoin my group, to save rabbits and dogs and cats. Sweet, safe animals that don’t talk or threaten to tell my fortune. I stoop to pick up my bolt cutters.

“This is the story,” the zebra announces, “of why she left you.”

Caught in midaction, I stumble toward the zebra, grabbing the slats of the fence and shaking them as I pull myself upright. “T-tell me! Now!”

The zebra smiles, and I realize that his toothy, wet-lipped grin is the most terrifying part of this afternoon, but I cannot even begin to imagine leaving before I hear the truth I have been wanting—needing—dreading for so long. “She left you because you could only ever find this story if it was given to you by someone else,” he says, and nothing more.

I freeze, every muscle in my body fusing to my bones, and my skin begins to itch, but I cannot move enough to scratch it. Then my body climbs the fence without my control and presses itself against the zebra’s flank. The sun is even more vivid, the heat so intense that I begin to melt.

Liquid now, I am soaked up by his pelt, my frame spreading out in a inky pool, and then—

The zebra licks his new stripe a few times, arranging the fur to lie in the same direction, and nods. Whispers buzz around his ears and he drifts to sleep, comforted. The zoo will die, but he will stay.

He will always be here.

Eclipsed

We have not seen the sun—
it went away sometime after summer,
between a lazy dusk
and a dawn that never came.

Is it wandering?
Will it return with no reaction,
slipping into a space still left
between the stars?
Will it be altered by its travel,
shaded by another galaxy’s dust,
emitting new colors
that we cannot perceive?

Or should we have said out good-byes
that long ago evening,
mourning the lengthened shadows
as the last warmth
seeped into our skin?
Is it lost, with no way to return,
or has it found another home,
other planets to hold in grateful spin?

We long to see the sun—
it went away sometime after summer.
We raise our faces to the sky,
but feel only an endless rain.

Remains

The shadow that lies
along the bottom of the bottle;
I think it is liquid
and lift it to my lips.

But the shadow lingers
on the floor;
the bottle is empty.

I must look elsewhere
to quench my thirst.

NaNoWriMo

I know I haven't posted any bits of the book yet (this is partially because it is very poorly written at the moment,) so I thought I'd add in a little word count widget thing instead. Marvel at the rising word count! Mock me on bad days! Remain completely apathetic, because this isn't as interesting as I think it is!

BEHOLD!

Hidden Spice

Her lips, flecked with ginger,
leave a burn against yours
that you will not notice until later,
touching an astonished finger
to your swollen mouth.
You lick your tongue across to taste
the flavor of Christmas
or soothing soda,
and wonder where all that fire came from.

Ivan's November

He thinks he remembers it well, but that’s the lie his brain has chosen for him, because of all the other possibilities, it’s the only one that might end up keeping him alive. Ivan is a skinny young man because he’s made the dubious choice to move away from liquor and to pills so beautiful they make his heart ache. At least, that’s why he thinks he’s crying, and his brain is either too kind or too disorientated to tell him the truth about the beautiful woman with red hair and snake tattoos that he never went to the bar. Ivan sits on the couch and shuffles a pack of cards over and over, soothed by the movement and the noise they make as they slide past each other, trying to ignore the mulberry-and-cream-colored capsule that has fallen on his shoe.

It was a pale month.

Eugenie's October

She spent most of it rushing from one store to another, trying to convince the tight-faced designers inside that they should send their rejects with her instead of throwing them away. Eugenie was a small woman with dark and a pixie chin, who both suited her name and did not deserve it. She took the clothes down to the Salvation Army where she volunteered and set them out on the slow days, always in the late morning so the hipster students would still be in school. Then she hid behind the tall register and smiled as the woman with three children clustering around her cart and one still crouching in her womb discovered a pink chiffon dress with a slightly crooked hem. Her face was still lit with happiness when she came to pay for it.

It was a good month.











(Well, look at that, something not NaNo related! Apparently churning out what I freely admit to be mostly substandard prose [with a better core than last year, but still with adverbs populating each line like craaaaazy] has led to semi-decent writing! It flew into my head out of nowhere, too.)

(Full disclosure: when I said "semi-decent," I was just trying to be good. I LOVE this. I am so pleased with it. And I really like Eugenie. And yes, I know I shouldn't talk about my stories, but yaaaaaaay! YOU [the impersonal kind] saw how little I've been writing lately. It feels so much better when I can type something creative.)

(I can't seem to shut up, can I? Anyways, this might be part of a little series, because I'm apparently not only incapable of being sensible enough NOT to do NaNoWriMo and concentrate on my classes, I feel the need to take up time writing something completely different as well. Argh to me.)

(Still want to do the series. All little bits like this, though.)

NaNoWriMo!

I was going to be sensible and NOT participated in NaNoWriMo this year (That's National Novel Writing Month to you sane people,) but I couldn't help myself. So, any writing during November will probably be centered around my attempt at those lovely 50,000 words. I participated and finished last year, so I've got high hopes for this year!

It's going to be a post-apocalyptic mystery called Menagerie (and yes, the first word is kinda cheesy, but it's accurate) and I'm really excited. For your "pleasure," here is the current synopsis. I'll probably change the title at some point, but I wanted something to save the documents under. Ahem.

Gwen Eyre lives a quiet live alone. She spends most of her time reading, playing with her pet bunny, and defending herself against the hordes of bio-engineered creatures that try to kill her every night.

Gwen lives very alone indeed, being one of only two survivors in her town. She doesn't remember anything of the time before it went wrong, and appropriated her last name from Jane Eyre, the first novel she remembers reading. But she's adapted well to the new rules of the world, and has created a reasonably normal life for herself. The only other survivor--a slightly mysterious man named Jack with slightly mysterious contacts--provides enough social contact to keep her sane.

But then Jack's brother shows up, and Gwen's life becomes a lot more complicated. . . and a lot more dangerous.

Cleverer Tricks than Spinning Straw into Gold

I could pull words out of this moonlight
that would make your throat clench with fire,
set your feet to dancing
and your eyes to wandering.
I know the words to yank kings from thrones,
to burst the rivers from their banks
and unleash the wind.

One syllable from my skipping tongue
set the cows into the corn
so that the farmer’s boy threw up his hands
and ran away to the city,
where a young girl twisted taffy
and watched the door for someone
who smelled like hay and ripe plums
and wasn’t yet stained with smoke.

I shouted nonsense into the dark,
to remind even the stars to be afraid,
and cawed insults at the birds
so they flew into each other.
A riddle at the crossroads,
jokes thrown at the wrong time—
power vibrated around each vowel
and thudded in my consonants.

The world tumbled against my voice;
I sang each morning and broke apart the dawn.
Luck danced with a limp behind me.
Fortune and Fate hid in the alleys
mumbling and weeping over featureless palms
as I stole their prophecy for nursery rhymes.
I wandered with mischief on my mind,
spoke chaos into the world,
and no corner held quiet.

I could pull such words out of this moonlight!
And I admit that I am tempted;
it would be something truly powerful
to stir your heart to trouble,
something out of the ordinary
to take you from mundane to magical,
from tame to tempestuous.
I miss the travel, my independence.

But I love you,
and my knees are sore in this cold,
and there is bread rising in the kitchen,
so instead I spin the moonlight
into the thick whisper you love most,
teasing words and laughing syllables,
and, eventually. . . silence.

Never Immaterial

If you build women out of wicker,
entwining their woven heads with oak,
their lips soft with poison ivy,
eyes stained by crushed blackberry,
why are you surprised to watch them wither in winter,
their fat, braided bodies shrinking to skeleton?
They need sap to keep them warm.

If you build women out of glass,
fitting shards into a glittering whole,
their breasts mismatched bowls,
expressions only as their cloudy flaws,
why are you surprised when they slash and are smashed,
their feet breaking off each time they dance?
They need space to keep brittle, not broken.

If you build women out of cloth,
stitching seams stuffed with sawdust,
their hair hanks of rough yarn,
skin dyed in streaky patches that clash wildly,
why are you surprised when they droop and flop,
slithering to the floor before you can purse your lips?
They need bones to stand on their own.

If you are building women at all,
why are you surprised to fail?
They need to see love before they can give it.

The Songs You Forget When You Wake Up

I have gone back to sleep, looking for the dream I left behind. There was a wall rising into a faded sky while the trees looked on. . .

Asleep, I live in the sweet poeticism that I can only brush with my fingertips while awake. My brain fills with the vista of someone’s imagination, a canyon that opens up to a navy sky full of constellations I’ll never know. A girl, long beyond weeping, turns her back to a thoughtless group, her task both abhorrent and necessary. . .

Even the nightmares are grand and complicated, as I am chased through a glass house that tilts from its uneasy perch on a mountain-spire. The land below is quilted green and orange and I could walk on the sky if I turned the right way. . .

It is a cruel and delicate cobweb. I cling to the few images that remain, but my desperate clutch pokes holes and dents their corners until only shreds are left, stained with my conscious thoughts. Tied hands . . . a tattered ghost. . . a bottle labeled with an ever-shifting name. . .

And water, always water.

I am grateful that I have enough glory in me to assemble my dreams, but oh! It aches when they slip away and I am left staring at the same white ceiling, huddled under the same plaid blanket, living the life that is unable to be as amazing as they told me when I was a child. I want—I want—

I don’t know what I want. I’ve never dreamt of it.

Roses by Other Names

Subtle is the coffee
wafting from your drink;
cold chocolate ripples
against misshapen china.
You sip and look away.
I trace my glass rim,
ringing a high tone
against the crowd,
our curved silence.

You ask me to stop.
I nod and look away.

Our curved silence
against the crowd
rings a high tone.
I trace my glass rim;
you sip and look away.
Against misshapen china,
cold chocolate ripples,
wafting from your drink.
Subtle is the coffee.

I nod and look away.
You ask me to stop.

Lost and Found

My boyfriend just wasn’t good enough, so I slipped some sleeping pills into his coffee and dragged him down to the lost and found.

The woman working behind the counter yelped when I tried to stuff him into the box. “You can’t leave that here, ma’am.” She stood up and peered through the partition. “He’s not dead, is he?”

“Nah. You sure I can’t leave him here? I’ll pay you.” His shoe fell off, so I picked it up and balanced it on his nose. “Come on, you’ve gotta help me out! I keep trying to break up with him, but he’s. . . he’s a crier.”

She came out from her office and stared at him, now drooling onto his shirt. “So he’s sensitive?”

I rolled my eyes. “You have no idea.”

“Got a job?”

“He’s a manager at McDonald’s.” I shrugged. “Which was okay four years ago, but . . .”

She laughed. “My last guy ran pyramid schemes.” She shoved a clipboard at me. “Fill this out, and I think I can take him off your hands.” She moved the shoe. “Hmmm, not bad. Nice eyes.”

“Great.” I signed with a flourish and a grin.

Muscle Memory

Years from now,
when you and I have forgotten each other,
and I am sitting on my bed,
a tattered box in my lap,
staring at a strange Post-it
with a confused smile,
I hope that my name pops into your head,
and you wonder who it belongs to,
so that, for just a moment,
our expressions match.

Worse Than a Monkey's Uncle!

WORSE THAN A MONKEY’S UNCLE!,
or,
THE TRUE PERNICIOUS NATURE OF THE LATEST NOTION PUT FORTH BY MR. CHARLES DARWIN:
HOW IT IS DESTROYING OUR GREAT NATION AND BRINGING ON THE END OF DAYS

Faithful Reader, it is our Duty as a Newspaper to bring you all of the News which is occurring in our Great Nation, in order to truly demonstrate and elucidate all of those Events which happen each day. This is our Duty, and we are Proud and Humble to do so. However, it does so happen that there is some information that is horrible, so barbaric, so utterly Disturbing and Upsetting that we are distraught that we must place it into the Hallows of our Newspaper. We are Sworn to be Wholly and Utterly Truthful, however, and thus we do Shake our Heads at the State of Society Today. May we therefore take this Opportunity to warn our gentler Readers of the truly Disturbing nature of the following News, and to suggest they avert their Delicate Eyes from the material.

In previous Editions, we have been Shocked and Dismayed to represent to you the Blasphemous Theories of Mr. Darwin in his book The Descent of Man, which state that Man is descended from Ape! He is of the Evil Notion that, rather than being created in Full Form as God Intended and, Indeed, Did Create, we are merely the product of so-called Natural Selection, such that we are but an Accident of forces in a past of ludicrous proportions!

Of course, Faithful Reader, we have dedicated ourselves to Repudiating and Repulsing this foolish and unhealthy penny dreadful, but unfortunately there are always the Weak and Immoral who are Mislead by such Nonsense, and it is one of these Poor Sinners whom we reference today in this article, for it is by Them that an occurrence so Unfathomable, so Unholy, so Calumnious, and so very much Without Precedent so as to require a special meeting of Our Church has come to our attention.

For upon reading the Profane and Irreverent words of Mr. Darwin, one Aloysius P. Sallmen, a Eccentric Gentleman who has been known in the past to have been Unduly Influenced by Pamphlets and other Pernicious Pieces of Unsubstantiated Information, has announced that he will be entering into the Sacred Institution of Marriage with a Common Ape named Bernice, brought back from his travels in Foreign Lands! For he declares that if he is Descended from an Ape, then this Female is therefore nothing more than a Distant Cousin to himself, Mr. Sallmen, and that this Relationship is well outside the Laws of the Realm which Govern Familial Relationship, and also is not in Violation of those Laws which Govern Relationship between Man and Animal, for Mr. Darwin has declared Man to be Nothing More than Animal! He apparently has no Concern for the Rules of the Lord and His Kingdom!

We have received a letter from the Very Man Himself, in His Own Words, and this is what he tells us of his Sacrilegious Actions.

To Whom It May Concern at the London Monitor

Who are you to judge the actions of your fellow Man? Thou shalt not judge lest ye be judged himself, sayeth the Lord, and doth he not also say to Love Thy Neighbor as of Himself, and thus you see that my adoration of my Beloved Bernice is not an Unholy Aberration, as you have so cruelly stated in your newspaper. For as the Learned Mr. Darwin has stated, We, that is, Mankind, is a Sweet and Loving Neighbor to the Great Ape by Virtue not only by sharing this Vast Globe which the Lord has so Cunningly Created for us, but also by Virtue of a Familial Relationship as well.

I invite you, Gentlemen, to therefore visit me in my countryside estate and to see the Sweet and Doting face of my Dearest Bernice. For Who, after gazing upon the Loving and Liquid Eyes, so full of Wonder, could doubt or judge my Love for Her Whom I Love Best?

There, Gentle Reader, you read the ravings of a Mad Man who is Destined for Both Hell and the Sanatorium! But you should pity him, for it is the rantings and ravings of Mr. Charles Darwin who are bringing him to this sorry state! It is this so-called Scientist who is working his Vicious Lies into our Society and Will, we are Certain, be the Downfall of Us All.

Double Shifts

Miriam sighed as she saw two teenage girls slide into her biggest booth. She’d begged Grimm to let them start seating the customers, but he’d just thrown a plate at her and told her to shut up. She probably shouldn’t’ve asked him right after he’d gotten bailed out, but it wasn’t her fault he couldn’t keep his temper. She picked up two menus and put on her best smile, hoping to coax a decent tip out of them.

“Welcome to Grimm’s Diner, best coffee and short-stack in the state. My name’s Miriam, I’ll be your waitress today.” She set the menus down, already flipped to the beverage section. “Can I get you something to drink today?”

With the same beige hair and chocolate eyes, Miriam was sure they had to be twins. The one on the right looked confused. “What’s a short-stack?”

She smiled again. “Pancakes, hun. And we have the best!” It was a little over the top, but it usually worked. “That what you’d like?”

The girl on the left, eyes blurred by mascara, asked for black coffee. “Scalding, please. I like it really hot.”

Her sister, hair pulled into a messy ponytail, ordered tea with lots of sugar. “Real sugar, please. I hate the fake stuff.”

Miriam nodded as another wave of nausea passed through her. She gritted her teeth against it. “Coming right up!” Clutching her notepad against her stomach, she scurried to the bathroom and threw up as quickly as she could. Spitting in the sink, she scrubbed her hands and crunched three mints, then ran back and poured the girls’ drinks. “Hot tea, hot coffee! You sure you don’t want something for your coffee, hun?”

Mascara girl shook her head. “Nah. But can I get a, uh, short-stack please? With extra butter!”

Scribbling, Miriam looked at the other girl. “And you, sweetheart?”

Ponytail set her menu on top of her sister’s and handed both over. “Eggs and bacon, please. Scrambled eggs, extra-extra-extra crispy bacon. Like, just short of burnt.”

“Okay, then.” Miriam felt sick again at their choices. Not that she would normally, but she was just so sensitive right now. “Those should be up for you real soon.” She went to the kitchen and slapped the order onto the wall. “New order, Grimm.”

He ignored her, pouring batter into the waffle iron, but she knew he’d taken care of it. A few more of her tables filled up and she spent the next ten minutes busy, ferrying drinks and orders back and forth. Miriam checked in on the girls once, topping off their drinks, before hearing the bell for their meals. She hustled it over, and was amused to see them dive into their food as soon as she set the plates down. They’d probably ridden in on the bus.

Then the bells rang again, and she rushed to get all the other orders out. She tried to pay extra attention to the twins; they seemed sweet, but a little lost. When it came time for the bill, she snuck two dollars off their total. Grimm wouldn’t notice. “Here you are, hun.”

The girl with the ponytail held out a ten, but hesitated. “Um. Do you know where a Chinese place is around here?”

Miriam blushed, and fanned herself with her notepad to cover. “Phew, it’s hot in here. Yes, there’s a new one not too far, about two blocks past the hardware store. It’s pretty tasty, too.” She laughed. “You must be growing girls, though, to ask about another restaurant when you just ate!”

“No, it’s. . .” Ponytail reached up to play with her hair, eyes troubled. “The last time our dad sent the child support, he said he was working at a Chinese restaurant in Flashtown, and. . .”

“We wanted to visit,” said her sister, wiping at her make-up and making it worse. She frowned. “Mom’s new boyfriend’s a real jerk. He calls us ‘half-breeds.’ We thought maybe Dad would let us stay for a little while, teach us Indian stuff.”

“Native American!” her twin corrected.

Mascara nodded. “Yeah, that.” She peered at Miriam. “Hey, are you okay? You went all green.”

Her sister punched her in the arm. “Shut up, Casey!” She smiled apologetically. “Sorry.”

“It’s. . . it’s okay.” Miriam spoke too loudly and the girls looked startled. She swallowed hard. “Casey, huh? That’s a pretty name. Are you two twins?”

The other girl sighed. “Yeah. My name’s boring, though—Jane. I hate it.” She brightened. “Hey, if we live here, I could change it, right? Nobody’ll listen to me at home, but I could tell people it was something different from the beginning and they’d never know.”

“Dad would.”

Jane shook her head. “Nu-uh, ‘cause we could say it was a nickname. Like. . . Miley! I like that. I’m going to tell everybody that my name is Miley.” She looked at Miriam. “You won’t give me away, will you?”

Miriam shook her head, not trusting her voice anymore.

“Great. Well, we’d better get going. I bet they get real busy at lunch.” Jane set the money down. “Thanks for all your help!” She yanked at her sister’s arm, her ponytail bobbing at the movement.

“Yeah, thanks!”

The girls ran out. A few of the regulars chuckled.

Miriam leaned her forehead against the wall, taking refuge in its coolness, until Becca Grimm touched her shoulder. “Ahh! What?”

Becca winced at Miriam’s yell, the skin around her right eye still green. She was holding her left hand stiff against her side. She leaned in and whispered. “Can you take the next shift for me, hun? I don’t feel so good.”

Miriam blinked, then frowned. “I dunno. I worked a double yesterday, and—”

“Thanks, you’re a lifesaver.” Ignoring her, Becca slid out the door, brushing past a huge group and practically running down the street.

Miriam stood in the middle of the crush, the pit in her stomach suddenly feeling very empty—and much too full.


--the characters of Miriam, Grimm, and Becca Grimm, and the diner, are all creations of other authors. This was written as part of a writing exercise.

Premonitions

Carrie opened the book. She looked up at the man in the white coat and frowned. “I don’t want to.”

His hand hovered over the red button. “You must.”

She winced and leafed through the pages, turning them faster as she searched for the important pictures. Her thumb slammed against photographs of an oak tree, an arrow, a lantern, and a bicycle. “These. All of these.”

The man wrote in his notebook, the ballpoint pen leaking.

Carrie laughed when she saw his fingers grow dark with ink.

He glanced at her. “What’s so funny?”

Smiling, she said “Now all that’s needed is a man with a blue hat and a broken watch, and then you won’t press that button ever again.”

The man stared, then cursed. He ran for the door, yanking at the unresponsive handle, shouting for security.

Carrie giggled and took the needle from her pocket.

Kountry Klutter

Ever since my hair turned white, my store has been doing ever so much better. I believe that people are just more comfortable buying antiques from somebody who looks antique herself, someone who may have very well owned the items they are now purchasing. A little silly, perhaps, but such is the way of the world. Everything these days seems to be about appearances over truth, veneer over substance.

I should not complain, I know. In today’s uncertain economic times, a woman should take whatever help she gets. Why should it bother me if I am selling better due to a quirk of pigment, rather than any special technique which I have concocted? I am grateful for the extra business, I truly am; until the appearance of my wrinkles, the store was on the brink of financial ruin. Then I took up knitting, and sales really picked up. I don’t know what I would have done had I lost the store—I live upstairs, where I have lived since I was born. While I was not permitted in the shop during business hours until I returned from graduate school, I remember wandering through it at night, luxuriating in the heady scent of dust, leather, and furniture polish.

My father always ruffled my hair when I complained about not being allowed in the store. “They come here as much for the atmosphere as they do for the things they buy, Caroline. And while of course I love you dearly, customers don’t associate children with ‘antique’ or ‘sophisticated,’ and so your presence would not be helpful. I know you would not wish to hurt business, darling.” Then he would spend the rest of the night showing me how to tell whether silver has been artificially darkened to look older, how a straight line instead of a curve made a beautiful piece of Chippendale into a cheap imitation, how to pick the real Ming vase out of a dozen fakes. I loved those evenings, sitting in my father’s lap, wearing cotton gloves to prevent oil getting on the more delicate pieces.

Small wonder that I studied art and its history; my professors said that I could have gone far as an artist, crafting new priceless antiques for another generation. But my father was ill, and I was needed at home, to help him as the fake glasses he affected to look intelligent turned into real ones and his hands began to shake too much to do the accounts. Business picked up then, too; his aloof demeanor, born of a fading mind, was seen as the arrogance of the affluent.

Of course, that was some time ago. It is probably different in larger or more modern towns, but here people are no longer interested in sophisticated; I sell more rooster-adorned tea towels than I do authentic Shaker dressers. No more am I intended to represent some mysterious enchantress with secret knowledge. Indeed, many out-of-towners delight in tricking me, buying seemingly worthless items which I later discover as priceless. I look like an archetypal grandmother—sweet but dotty, a little fuzzy on details such as which price tags I put on which item—and quite easy to fool. They snap up everything, eager to show off their knowledge of hand-blown glassware and American masterwork paintings. They are certain of their ability to separate treasure from trash—certain enough not to mind when I am too forgetful to locate the papers of provenance for the genuine baskets woven by real Osage Indians in the late 1800s.

----

The week before my father died, he asked me what I was going to do for contacts. Women couldn’t get into the antiquing business at that time; it was strictly an “old boys club.” We were running out of inventory and he was simply too sick to negotiate for new.

I just smiled, thinking of the purchases I had made at the hardware store that day, and promised him that I’d manage.

Iron Buffalo

I am so SICK of this poem. I don't even know if the last few stanzas work. Arrrrgh. Forget this noise; I'm done with it.

But here it is anyways.


Ghosts have followed you home
from the right side of the tracks, little girl;
look behind you out of the corner of your eye.
These men and women slipped from rails
onto a gravel-scattered ground;
they said goodbye years before they died.

Little girl, you’re just the same,
nobody seems to know your name
you tell the guidance counselor you’re fine.
Little girl, I ought to say
that things won’t always be this way—
but what if you can’t leave the past behind?

You walk alone past rusting trains,
their whistle only in your head, little girl;
that lowing helped you sleep at night.
Small wonder that these drifting ghosts
cling to your tired and limping heels;
they have that same uneasy mind.

Little girl, you need to wander,
you can’t stay here any longer—
soon you’ll run out of reasons to fight.
Little girl, your face is fading,
but you keep on masquerading;
you’re lost and gone while still alive.

Because no matter how you hope,
your daddy won’t die until you leave, little girl;
no-one will ever answer your prayers on time.
The ghosts know how easy it is to lose
when you insist on staying in last place;
if you don’t go, someday you’ll say goodbye.

Argh.

I've been working on this poem/song/thing for two days, and I can't seem to get it right. I think I've lost the state of mind. Also, it's going crummy in the middle. Frustrating.

But wait. . . wait. . . maybe I've got it. I postpone my RIP.

Because!

--For the reason of "because I feel like it," the chorus I made up for a song that does not exist. (In other words, I wrote the chorus and couldn't write anything good for the rest.)

--Also, the title of this blog does involve the word "sprinkles," which means I should really put more small things on here.

--That's what she said.



Baby had a good boy,
she had a good boy
who let her dooooown!
Baby had a good boy,
she had a good boy
who ran out of toooooown!
He did all the right things,
said all the right words,
but all his promises
were meant for the birds--
Baby had a good boy
and now she wants something baaaaaaaaaaad!



--This is best sung at the top of the lungs, in the car, on the way home from work. Trust me.

Schrodinger's Hourglass

We met between two grains of sand
pressed by the hourglass
into a thick block of yesterday,
but there was enough space for us,
even when today was forced into tomorrow
and hours were squeezed into minutes.

(Thank goodness for you
and your inability
to stand still.)

I am no longer afraid of this crushing
sense of loneliness
that overwhelms even the most independent traveler,
because you touched my eyelashes
and let me see that there is time enough
for anything.

The Whiteness of the Whale

She shakes the jar until the last flakes of powder fall onto the table. The storm rumbles through the roof, lightening punctuating a skim-milk sky in staccato. A window flies open, slamming against the wall and cracking. She flinches.

/s/

/top/

Clamping her hands over her ears reduces the roar of thunder to a soothing buzz, but she needs her fingers. Better to deal with the noise and get her fix—then everything will be better. Then she can

/do/

/n’tdon’tdon’/

/t/

“Shut up!” She scrapes the blade across the table, across the other scars already left in the faded plastic, and assembles the powder into a reasonable line. The straw is bent, but good enough. “Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not even real!”

/Iwaswas/

/ssst/

/canbewas/

/op/

There isn’t any pretty way to snort a memory, and she doesn’t try, just sniffs with a mighty intake of air. The fine particles, glittering in another flash from the sky, disappear up her nose. She sighs as the rush hits her.

/ohhhhhh/

/no/

/oh/

It tastes like—

ACT ONE, SCENE ONE: A BOARDWALK IN THE SUN

OUR HEROINE, TANNED AND FRECKLED, HER HAIR SUN-STREAKED AND WET, TANGLED WITH SEA SALT, IS LAUGHING. AN OLDER MAN, HER FATHER, HANDS HER A TOWEL. SHE LOOPS IT AROUND HER NECK.

SEAGULLS ARE CAWING OVERHEAD.

HER FATHER SAYS SOMETHING TO HER THAT WE CANNOT HEAR. SHE GRINS AND POKES HIM IN THE SIDE, THEN RUNS AWAY, SAND CASCADING AWAY FROM HER SWIFT FEET.

HE SHAKES HIS HEAD, SMILING.

THE BEACH IS FULL OF HAPPY VACATIONERS, FAMILIES WHO ARE DIGGING IN THE SAND, SUNBATHING, AND

/lies/

ICE CREAM SANDWICHES. A LITTLE GIRL PILES SAND AND SHAPES IT, CAREFULLY PUTTING ON THE SHELLS THAT SHE HAS FOUND, CLAM SHELLS, CONCH SHELLS, SWIRLY WHIRLY TWISTY WHISTY PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY

/worsetha/

/nlies/

SHELLS AND SUN AND A SUN AND A SUN DRIPPING DOWN INTO THE SEA SO THAT THE STEAM RISES, SMELLING LIKE HAPPY AND

AND OUR HEROINE HAS FOUND

/noteven/

/goodlies/

NO NO NO

SHE HAS FOUND

A BOY

BEAUTIFUL AND SWEET AND LOVING AND HE SMELLS WONDERFUL, LIKE

“Cotton candy,” she whispers. Her face is wet, and for a moment she thinks that she is crying, but then another drop of water falls onto her forehead. She touches it, and looks up to see the leaky ceiling.

/itwasn’treal/

“I know.”

/anditshould/

/n’tbe/

/worstkindofl/

/ies/

/theones/

/youbelieveev/

/enwheny/

/ouknowthey’relies/

She gets up and closes the window, tracing the broken glass as she locks it. “You’re not real either.”

/but/

/Iwas/

/IWAS/

/andyou/

“Shut up!” The lightning has stopped, the clouds are gone, but the sky is the color of liver. She shivers as she realizes that her hair is truly soaked from the rain. The back of her shirt is wet, sticking to her chilled skin like a piece of ice.

/t/

/he/

/y’re/

/comi/

/ng/

The lights flicker and go out. She pulls her hair into a pony-tail, using the rubber band she pretends not to know wasn’t on her wrist a moment ago. “I don’t want to die.”

/Ididn’t/

/eitherbutI/

/didanyway/

“Tell me again how it happened.” The wind picks up. Reaching out, she finds that the windows have disappeared. She slides down the wall and sits cross-legged on the floor. “Please.”

/no/

“Please.”

/it’sg/

/ettingt/

/oo/

/hard/

/erto/

/talkinyour/

/langue/

/ge/

“Try?” She is afraid. The whale is never unsure, never admits to a fault. The whale is too big, too absolutely and irrevocably itself, for it to hesitate.

/goin/

/gtob/

/eforgotten/

She curls her fingers against each other. “I’ll hold on as long as I can. I promise.”

/Imus/

/tad/

/mitI’mafraidtoo/

/you are/

/theonly/

“I can barely hear you.” The water evaporates in a whoosh as the wood around her splinters apart. She grabs a piece of it and focuses on its smell, the way it scratches and raises red lines on her skin. “Can’t you speak—” She doesn’t know whether the whale speaks too slow or too fast, too softly or too loud, and doesn’t know what she needs to say to make it better. They can only speak in bits and pieces, each letter pulled out of quicksand. “Can’t you speak more clearly?” The wood slips from her grasp and disappears.

/s/

/orr/

/ysorrysorry/

/youshouldn’t/

/havel/

/etthemfeedyou/

/somanyprettylies/

“I know.”

/theypulled/

/thep/

/lugoutnowj/

/ustafewla/

/st/

/secondsof/

/elec/

/tricity/

/left/

She stares at the blank white that has replaced the room. The whale’s voice is faint enough now for her to know that it is whispering. “Is—is there nothing I can do?”

/nothingnot/

/hing/

That flat finality can’t be argued with. She smoothes her palms against her arms, shivering, searching for something, anything, to—ah. She smiles and pulls up the memory. “Then—then let’s watch the sea until. . . until we go to sleep.”

/y/

/e/

/. . ./

/s/

The white wavers, shakes, and turns aquamarine. She smiles as the waves crash around them, the room filling with the dirty smell of salt. It’s as real as the whale’s memory can make it. “Is it good?”

/g/

/go/

/g/

/ye/

/s/

/th/

/a/

/nky/

/ou/

She closes her eyes. She hopes that someone else can remember the whale, that someone else can make this ocean. It is a good place. The kind of memory she wishes she had held more of in her—

ACT ONE, SCENE TWO:

OUR HEROINE LEANS OVER TO HER LOVE AND

“No!” She shakes her head and concentrates. The whale is gone, but she remembers the feel of it, the unshakable reality of the whale even though so much time had passed since it had truly been a real whale. “I want to see.” Her legs turn clear; her hands float away. She ignores it; she doesn’t need them. She grits the teeth that are not there, were never there, and focuses again, looking for the one scrap of truth that she knows must be there. The wind rises in her ears, wailing, plunging her into what must be an end and she summons up one last memory. It floats up and

. . .

The tide goes out.

A waterfall of low notes echoes against the water like they belong there, and if they were not her whale’s than they should have been.

She takes the breath she’s never needed.

And then

Just a heads-up--

I should not write things at 2 in the morning. The story that I'm posting next is weird. And it is not put together properly yet. But I'm too tired to fix it at the moment. But I am also incapable of not showing off, and I kinda like it? I think? Yes, I do. It is unique, at least. Mind you, it also started as something completely different, which is why it's disjointed.

*sing-song tone* I stilllll liiiiiiiike itttttt!

Libre

I smile each time I remember:

clear sky
open field
hands outstretched—

and unclasped.

Ellipses

Ellipses

She wakes up in the kitchen, a lemon in one hand, zester in the other. Naked fruit is scattered across the counter. A stray orange floats in the sink, a buoy amongst shipwrecked dishes. Bewildered, she sets down her burden and tastes her fingers. Sugar, cinnamon. Citrus. And rum?

Yanking open the oven, she stares at the cakes inside. They belong to one of her favorite recipes, a decadent pile of rum-soaked layers and butter-cream frosting. She eases them out, gripping with scorched potholders. Perfect.

The cooling rack is ready. She flips the cakes onto it, yawning when she sees the early AM blinking on the clock. This is the special-occasion-only dessert; it takes two hours to assemble, even after it’s been baked. She’ll finish later.

She wonders what it’s for.

. . .

She wakes up in her bedroom, forehead pressed against the door, hand on the knob. Letting go, she winces at the cramps in her fingers. As she returns to bed, she notices a red mark on her head from leaning. She touches it, makes a face, and slips back into bed. He moves to make room. She sips the jasmine tea on her nightstand; it is some time before she falls asleep again.

. . .

She wakes up in a coffee shop, sputtering as her drink goes down the wrong way. It spills into her lap, staining her red skirt. The man sitting across from her jumps up to help, blotting the liquid with napkins. She stares at his curly black hair, too confused to make any effort to help. He finishes with a rueful smile, and takes her cup for a re-fill.

Sticking a finger into the half-eaten pastry at her place, she licks the filling. Chocolate mousse. The crust is dry, flaking across the tablecloth and littering the front of her shirt. She brushes at the crumbs with a shaking hand. She has no idea who this man is.

Their wedding rings match.

. . .

She wakes up in the backyard, her back sore and her knees throbbing. A shovel lies nearby, its handle broken, the blade smeared with red mud. She tastes iron.

Pulling her knees to her chest, she rocks and tries to ignore the half-filled hole next to her, the tip of a shoe poking out of the soil.

Dog Lullabies

Three little wolves
outside my window,
one white,
one red,
one black.
They say Bow-wow, Bow-wow,
and dig holes in the gerbera daisies.

Or maybe there is only one little dog,
that changes from white to red to black,
and sometimes not even a dog at all,
but a green shoot with human hands,
or an overgrown baby
pushing its snub-nose face
at the glass, saying
ma, ma, ma-ma-ma
as I shake my head
(no no no)
and slam the curtains.

- - -
I cannot get the little white dog
and the little black dog
out of my house.
They are up-turning my tables
and rooting in my notebooks
and spilling through my study
which in another house would be the nursery
(But there is no baby,
no baby,
never a baby.)

The little black dog
and the little white dog
crouch on my shoulders,
licking my face with their milky tongues.
They say Arf-arf.
They say Arf-arf, Arf-arf.
When I shake my head to dislodge them,
they fall like drops of water on a stove,
and I say no no no.
- - -
Somebody’s car hit the little red dog.
I find it lying outside my window.
The little white dog and the little black dog
bump at the window from inside;
Woof-woof, they say, Woof-woof.
I stoop and stroke the curled tail of the baby—
no, not the baby, there is no baby,
there was never a baby,
I have no baby—
stroke the little red dog’s curled tail.
Its mouth gapes with
a frothy dandelion,
seeds flooding its mouth
with a lacteous gush.

I hear the little black dog
and the little white dog keening.
I look at the window
and tangled in the curtains--
there is no baby,
there can’t be a baby,
I never wanted the baby,
I have no baby,
no baby, no, baby, no--
its chubby palms flatten against the pane,
blue veins merging with the glass.

Eye for an Eye

Ah, yes, it is no problem for asking! You know, many people, they are looking at the different colors of my skin, and they asking themselves “what is this?” and “is he being sick?” and they are just staring and staring and making me to be very uncomfortable, and I would rather they are to be just asking.

My right arm, she is coming from Greece. I am traveling there when I am being much, much younger—I am not being ashamed to say that I am being very old now!—and I am being in the country, minding my own company, when I am meeting a farmer. And I am walking in his field, and he is taking his, ah, pitchfork, and he is just stabbing me with it, and he is putting terrible holes into my arm. And of course I am being very put-out, but I am not speaking Greek, and he is waving his pitchfork at me again, so I am to be just leaving with my poor arm full of the holes, and of course I am losing him. So I am going back to the farmer’s house when he is sleeping, and I am seeing that he is having a wife, very strong of limb, and so I am taking her arm as a fair replacement, you see? She has been a good arm for me all these years, even better than my own arm was being, and I am being sure that this farmer is being kinder to innocent strangers now! He was to be learning his lesson. And perhaps they were not being a good couple, because they were not sleeping in the same bed, so that he is not hearing when I am slitting her throat. Perhaps she was being of the snorer, ha-ha!

No, no, I am not hearing this! How can you be being ready to go already? The night is being young—though I am not being so, ha-ha!—the bar is being, ah, “open,” and you are wanting to know more of my many, many history. I am being able to tell this. So! Of course you can be seeing that this is my very own left arm, but the hand is being from this sweet little boy who was being so unlucky as to have been being in a car accident with myself, terrible, ah, crash-up. This is being in the year—oh, I am forgetting, but many, many years ago. I am thinking the car, she was a Model T? Not so very long ago, really—not when you are an, ah, “old-fogey” like myself, ha-ha!—but how quickly one forgets even so. But the poor sweet boy is being killed and I am being lost of a hand, and his are being so smooth, so soft—feel, feel!—and I am thinking that it is, ah, being a lucky fate for me that he will no longer to be using him for himself, so I am being replacing my poor crushed one. He, too, has served me very, very well, and I am being very careful with him, with the gloves, and the lotion, and the virgin’s blood, all to be keeping him as sweet as his previous owner.

Another drink! I am insisting. Please, it will be being such a comfort to a poor old man like myself, if you were to be staying just a little longer. Alas, it is no longer being a custom for the young to be giving respect for their elders, and it is getting more and more difficult for me to be getting around. These legs are being from a young man—this is being a very long story, and I am waiting for my drink before I am telling it, but I will be saying that he should not have been shooting his arrows into the bushes, and I was giving him back to his family only a week later, and I was being very generous and allowing him to live—but they are being now also old with me.

And my poor eyes, they are going as well! I should be being replacing them soon, do you think? Perhaps I should be looking for the blue eyes; I am thinking that they are going with my skin color, ha-ha!

It is being too bad that yours are brown. That would be being so convenient! Ah well.

Dusk

Navy clouds dragged through the sky,
maples honeycombed against the horizon.
It is a cold moon
that shines into the hollow in the grass,
but there is no body heat left to steal.

Two sets of footprints,
imprinted in crushed soybeans,
lead away from the hollow.

They point in opposite directions.

The Hum of Flame, the Murmur of Honey

Every morning, Da carries my sister Cora down to the hives to check on the honey. She screws her eyes shut and leaves marks in his shoulders from her fingers, legs real stiff so her feet don’t dangle. Da carries her like china, walking careful down the hill so he doesn’t jostle her none. Cora sniffs at the air the whole time; she says she wants to know if air smells the same outside as it does through the window.

----

The people at church

poor Daniel
how does he cope
that poor crippled girl
and that boy one of the devil’s own

whisper a lot. Da tells me not to listen, but it’s like the bees’ drone. I can’t drown ‘em out, or ignore it, no matter how hard I try. Even when the preacher’s giving the sermon, I notice them elbowing each other and talking behind their hymnals. Instead of “Nearer My God to Thee,” all I hear is

Bill lost three horses in that fire
of course the mother was no better than she should be
the poor man
but i suppose he’s made his bed

and it’s all I can do to keep from making fists. Cora tried coming once but she said the organs made it even worse, that they were too loud, and it felt like she was in a bunch of places at once. Da makes me go by myself. He can’t leave the bees, and he says it would make everybody too happy if our family stopped coming.

----

Da bought Cora a new bed last Christmas and I got her a spice rack. She was so happy she jumped up and hugged both of us. All that day, she played guessing games with the spices, trying to identify without looking. For her birthday, I painted her ceiling with bees and flowers, fruits and clouds. She hid under a drop-cloth with just her eyes peeking out, munching her cake and watching. I let her lick the brush when she asked; she said the paint tasted like old eggs. Sometimes she doesn’t have any sense, when it comes to trying new flavors.
----

They talk even more

hey freak
queerboy
you like fire
i’ve got something hot for you

at school, shoving me against the lockers and laughing. They brag about stuff they did with my mom, tell me what they’re gonna do with my sister. The guidance counselor ignores my latest black eye and pushes the technical school brochures across her desk, smiling. I stare down her shirt to make the time pass; I’m not stupid enough to talk about art colleges. She gets excited when I tell her about the bees, her hands fluttering

family business, how wonderful
that will be a good opportunity for you
how is your sister, dear
she is so inspiring, how she copes with her disability

as she hurries me out of her office. I let her push me. She’s right, of course. I’ll never go away from home. In math, I don’t bother to pay attention, just fill up my notebook with scribbles. The shrink said that I draw fire when I doodle and that I’m trying to release my anger at mom for leaving, but I just like the way the pen feels, that soft glide of ink over the paper.

----

We sell mail-order honey that Da and I bottle ourselves. Cora, tucked into a corner with blankets around her, tells me what to put in each jar. I try to listen, but it’s hard. We melt honeycomb for sealing, and the matches flicker a lot. The fire shines nice against the honey, blue and orange in the pale yellow. Cora yells when I get distracted. She says she can taste the difference. Sometimes she gets so mad that she clambers to her feet and tries to chase after me, but she always falls.

----

When I poured

shh
hsh hsh hsh
hissssssss
shh shh

the gasoline onto the hay, I could taste the smoke in the back of my throat, but it was more than that. For just a second, I tasted the fire that would come out of it, and newly sharpened pencils, and the mud Da uses to treat bee stings. As I stumbled away,

ahhhhhh
hush hush hush
mmmm
shh shh

the world spinning, my mouth watering, I wondered if this was how Cora felt all the time.

And for a second, I hated her.

In Which We Forgot About Magellan

Somebody with a less politically correct grasp of history had named the initial probes to Xithe after Columbus’s ships, obviously intending some grand gesture.

The Nina, largest of the three, miscalculated the entry angle and crashed, killing all but three of its crew of seventeen. They managed to convert their living quarters into a make-shift escape pod and fly out of the atmosphere, where a passing garbage ship picked them up.

The Pinta was infiltrated by an eco-fanatic who disabled the landing gear and trashed the guidance systems. They jettisoned him but could do nothing about the damage, so were forced to turn back home without making landfall.

The Santa Maria made it onto Xithe without any problems. However, the ship touched down in the territory of those people later nicknamed “Wildings.” An attempt at communication ended with the Wildings eating all eight crew members and pushing the Santa Maria into a lake.

When the Santa Maria’s flight recorder returned with the news, (the ‘bot so upset from its dunking that it gibbered and threw sparks), the UN of E urged calm. But the released photos of the crime, and the Wildings’ appearance (lanky apes with dinner-plate-sized squid eyes,) created a public outcry that couldn’t be quenched, so the Lusitania was duly equipped with a double cargo of peace-keeping materials—loaded with both heat- and bio-seeking missiles, just in case.

But Earth is civilized, so the Lusitania hovered in mid-air above the Wildings camp and offered up their terms of surrender.

It was then that they learned the Wildings’ aquatic nature, as the still-working gun turrets of the Santa Maria erupted into action, a grinning Wilding clambering over each weapon. A lucky shot hit the fuel tanks and the Lusitania exploded. A few made it to their parachutes and jumped out.

At which point the Wildings emerged, tracked them down, and ate them.

Furious, the UNE sent a dozen warships over, each bristling with the latest in planet-cracking arsenal. Giving the order to fire, the commander was surprised to see the Santa Maria limp out of the atmosphere, battered but transmitting the desperate cry of a Lusitania crew member, who had somehow hidden from the Wildings. The commander told the nearest ship—which happened to be the Hindenburg—to assist the wounded vessel and bring the survivor aboard.

It took only fifteen minutes for the Wildings, who were giggling in the voices of their various meals, to sweep through the Hindenburg, gain access to the controls, and blow up half the fleet. The rest of the ships fled.

As they sped away, they noticed that the Wildings were busy collecting the few intact bodies left in the devastation.

Closer examination revealed that they were licking their lips.

Practical, Not Lyrical

I must not be a poet,
for in my night
there is no beautiful moon,
no mysterious stars,
but a porch light
with a cracked shade.
Moths skitter on my face
and I itch in disgust.
Where there should be
bumps in the night,
there is a cat-food stuffed possum
that shuffles into the bushes.
It smells like wet dog.

I must not be a poet,
because I am not remembering
a long lost love,
but instead wondering
if I will ever get the correct ratio
for the weed-whacker’s fuel.
I’m sick of sputtering one minute
and the kind of roar that makes me worry
about explosions the next second.
The stars remind me
of the grocery list I promised to make—
do I need milk?

I must not be a poet.
A mosquito just bit my elbow
and it itches like hell.
The cream better not have expired again.

Cross Country

She hates to run long distance. She hates the grueling pump bump pump of racing over courses that a goat would balk at. She hates getting lost, and she always gets lost, ending up in front of people who left her behind twenty minutes ago. They look at her with red eyes and she flushes, stepping aside to let them pass.

Once, stumbling along on tired legs and leaning against a stitch in her side, she came across a deer on the path. It stared at her, wide-eyed, before racing into the trees again, and she knew that she was so far behind that the huffing and puffing of her teammates had faded from even the timid fawn’s ears.

The coach speaks to her only when absolutely necessary, treating her with indifference the rest of the time. They both know she’ll never be an asset, never be one of the girls standing on a platform accepting a cheap metal medal on a patriotic ribbon. He mumbles lukewarm encouragement as she passes, her hair soaked in an attempt to stay cool. His face is already turned to the runner behind her, a boy who wears the coveted spikes purchased for top runners.

Oh, she tries, though she hates it. She attends every practice, lagging behind with a grim face, sweat staining the brace she wears on her left knee. At an invitational, she dry-heaves near the end, her stomach shuddering as she spits into the yellow grass. She feels a weird sense of pride for this and goes to her couch to obtain approval.

So, did I give 100%?

No. Maybe 93%.

Her muscles clench and she walks away, looking for something to put into her stomach so that when she throws up into a port-o-potty, it won’t hurt as much. A shoelace flops and she ignores it, the aglet tangling in dirt and pine needles. She wonders if anyone else on the team knows what an aglet is.

Eventually, the season ends. There is a dinner and she goes, eating squares of pizza and watching the seniors accept their praise and farewell gifts. She doesn’t know any of them except as irritated profiles. The coach does a small speech about each team member. She doesn’t remember a word he says about her, and doubts that he does either.

And then—track

—jumping—she laughs, smiles—

jumps and jumps and jumps—and wins

—her stubby legs are springs—and she bounces

—through the air—her socks stained by pit sand—

sunglasses tumble off her face at every leap—

nobody can touch her—she flies

—she thinks that—

Summer comes, and with it the end of the year, of the season, and something of her joy spills into the endless long distance practices that return with the heat. She finds a bit of wind in her and sprints around the lake, whistling at the frogs that part as their crowd thunders past. Time drops off her in chunks and suddenly she understands the group meetings, her arms propped on the shoulders of her teammates, chanting before their race.

Junior varsity, where she runs, is a dumping ground for the young and superfluous but she doesn’t care, treasuring her first medal as if it were important. She pounds a nail into her wall to display it, still wearing her shorts and tank top and now two knee braces, her slim ankles tan. The closet acquires a bevy of cheap T-shirts with ugly logos, her name usually spelled wrong, and she wears them to school, smiling when she finds a twin.

Deep down she knows that their section win really has nothing to do with her, she can still squeezes into the team picture, eyes no longer obscured by glasses. She grins from the top of the pyramid their limbs can hold only for a minute before it collapses into a heap of giggling girls who rub elbows and heads and throw beans at each other.

She is happy.

And if the pizza at the end of the season dinner still tastes like seasoned cardboard, at least this time she shares it with the girls who run fifty miles a week and think nothing of it. They drink too much pop so that their conversations get loud, echoing in the school cafeteria as their coach talks to their parents.

When the girls in her grade stand up for their individual speeches, she ends up in the middle, a little awkward in her skirt and heels. She fidgets as she waits for her turn, detached enough even now to want to roll her eyes at the stirring phrases he uses for each girl. They are all wonderful athletes, all tough, all fighters. . . she tugs at a seam as he says her name, smiling for the flash of her mother’s camera.

Jenny has very little running ability.

She blinks. The camera doesn’t flash and it takes her a moment to figure out why, a moment to notice that the room has gone silent with embarrassment, and then she takes in another gust of air and his words register. She flushes and lets out a ragged laugh, her breath skittering in her lungs like she was at the end of the third mile.

He continues speaking, now back to the familiar format of trying hard, and the steel pity goes out of the cafeteria, but she doesn’t really hear anything.

very little running ability.

When he presses the “most improved” plaque into her hand—an honor he gives to another girl as well, the first double award they’re ever had—she feels nothing. The polished red glints against her eyes and turns smeary for a second until she can find her other arm and wipe her face.

little, very little

Her friends congratulate her timidly as the next group files onto the stage. They pat her as she places the award upside-down on the table.

ability

She drums her feet against the chair with heavy thuds.

The Returning Tide

Grinding it to sand,
the ocean pulls my body
cell by cell—
out of landlocked earth
that smells of pine and coal,
and never of salt.

Who would have imagined
my death so far from home,
my hands grasping at air
instead of sand?

Thank God for the moon,
the creeping water,
a sea that doesn’t abandon its own.

Only at These Times

I love to say I love you:

by whisper in the middle of the night,
my words an emu’s wings
brushing across your slumber,
disturbing not even the spider
that crawls between the curtain
and the rod.

I love to say I love you:

in triumph,
shouted at the end of a race
or when I’m proven right,
my tone like orange bells
dredged from a century’s submersion,
gasping on shore.

I love to say I love you:

to lampposts at dawn,
near tortoises that gather by the roadside,
with the sort of thick throat
that precludes a tumbling out
of a lie, a secret, or—at last resort—
the truth.

Unlocking

She eases her hand into the sack of keys and sighs, entwining her fingers with their teeth, tracing their curves. Sometimes the bag contains candles, or shoes, and one terrifying day, a bushel of indistinguishable grains of wheat. She hid the bag for weeks after that incident, afraid to touch it, until chiming proclaimed a change to bells.

Mostly, though, it’s keys.

There are old-fashioned crooked ones, cheap store-cut keys that bend in her strong fingers, tiny ones for lockets, some that are big enough to lock a city’s gates, iron keys, plastic keys. Once, she found the key to Baba Yaga’s house, carved from a chicken’s leg bone, with a few scraps of gristle still clinging to it. She was relieved to find its door quickly.

Some days she loses herself in the sheer pleasure she gets from rolling her hands through the sack, but she remains sensible today. The trick of choosing a key is to not allow a beguiling notch or a tempting texture to lull her into picking a favorite. It has to be random or it isn’t fair. She thinks about what she will eat for lunch today—a tomato-from-the-garden and mozzarella sandwich?—and allows her fingers to close over the next key that their questing tips touch.

Pulling out her prize, she examines it, trying to guess what door it will open. She is sometimes wrong—often wrong, to be truthful—but she likes to guess anyway. The easiest ones to pick out are the car keys, and glass keys always unlock the odder doors. This key is neither.

It’s made of brass, that much she can tell, and it stinks of grease—no, oil. She rubs her dirty fingers on her shorts and turns the key over to trace the filigree engraved in its squat design. Something seems wrong with it, and it takes her a few moments to realize that there aren’t any teeth on it. The shape—a butterfly—rings a bell in her memory, but nothing solid.

She shakes her head and shrugs. The guessing game is fun, but it’s not really important, and she does have other things to attend to.

Grabbing a large bottle, she fills it with sweet mint tea, still warm from brewing in the sun. She once spent four days searching for the proper lock of a nondescript steel key. The hallucinations she rode for the next week as her body rehydrated had been interesting, but she doesn’t want to relive the experience. As an afterthought, she makes her sandwich as well with thick slices of cheese and tomato and munches on it as she walks to the room.

“The room” is how she always thinks of it, the words outlined and in block letters in her mind, casting a sort of shadow. She is a bit nervous of it, because, well. . . the sack changes, and that is strange, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a bag. If she really needed to get rid of it, a quick drive to the county dump would probably do the job. But the room is always there, except when she has friends over or when she invites the meter reader in for coffee, and it is far more worrisome. It’s probably silly to think this about a part of her own house, but so it is.
It is for this reason that she, with a sheepish but determined expression hovering on her face the entire time, installed the several bolts that she shoots back now. She has to shove her bottle under her arm to hold it as she negotiates the bolts, always stiff no matter how much oil she pours on them. And she thinks—oil from bolts. Is that why the key is filthy?

The door opens outward; inside she just has to lean against it to leave. It is a little too big for the hall, so she holds the door to avoid scraping the walls and slips inside, finishing the remains of her sandwich.

Just as the bag is mostly full of keys, so is the room usually full of doors. Small doors, about the size of a post office’s post-boxes, each of them a different shape and color. Some have been here for a long time, and she runs her fingers over them as she enters. The one door that is a different size, a tiny opening made of different wood splinters all jigsaw-ed together, with no door handle but a huge lock. Her favorite door, a cheerful red barn door with morning glories growing over it with a lock and handle worn from use. The door that is pure marble, smooth as ice and just as cold, with two gold handles and no visible lock. She suspects that it may only appear when its key does, and leaves it alone. It’s the sort of door built by the sort of important people who don’t like less important people touching their things.

Other doors, though familiar, she avoids. The barred one, composed of tight railings that sometimes allow flashes of red to shine through, she does not touch. Nor does she go near the pair of doors that have a chain running between their locks. One is spongy and warm and radiates lust; the other is covered in precious stones in designs that shift if she looks at them for too long. She wishes they would go away and but also hopes that she never finds their keys; there are some doors that should not be opened.

Most of the doors disappear even before she finds their key, so that the walls flicker with a cascade of change. She winces at the loss, but she has to follow the rules, or it wouldn’t mean anything. It’s the price she pays for her stewardship.

Rubbing her shoulder, she sets the tea down in the corner, taking a sip before screwing it shut. She weighs the strange key in her hand, twisting her head to examine its markings. Frowning, she takes in the state of the current doors.

Logic would suggest one of the stranger porticos. Walking up and down the length of the walls, she bites her lip and surveys the choices. The first time, she methodically worked her way from one corner to the other. After a week of this, she found the orange plastic door—labeled with a photograph of its key. Now she does an overview before she begins.

She pulls a piece of chalk out of her pocket and marks likely candidates. This brass one with a grate, a stained glass window, and a letterbox is a possibility, as is the one that looks like the door to a tent and is scrawled all over with Arabic. Sometimes she’s wrong on her initial guesses, and has to check the hard way, but at least she can make a start. She rejects a few doors out-of-hand—not that one, it’s a car—but makes sure, crossing them off as she is proven correct.

Humming, she scans the next wall. No. . . no. . . ah! She smiles and beelines it over to the square brass door holding the key up to it. The designs match and the lock on this door is a circle instead of the usual crooked shape. She slips the key inside and hears the satisfying click of an unlocking internal mechanism.

After the usual half-turn, she tugs at the small knob in the corner, but it sticks fast. Confused, she turns the key more, and after the third revolution her face lights up in understanding. Not just a key—a wind-up key. Enthusiastic now, she rotates the tool as fast as she can. It grows more difficult to turn as whatever is inside tightens, until finally she can’t move it anymore. A squeal comes from behind the door, then a few “boings.” Pressing her ear to the door, she listens to the clunk of gears starting up. She yanks at the knob again.

The whole door comes out of the wall and the section below it crumbles, the doors shifting on the wall to avoid the break. A pair of legs emerges, and she yelps, backing away. Arms crook out and hands press against the whole section of the wall, levering the body out of it.

A tall figure steps back and shakes itself, raising a cloud of plaster. She watches, fascinated, as it turns around, still dusting off bits of the ravaged wall, which is already knitting itself back together.

The figure—revealed to be a clockwork man—bows and tips his improbable top hat to her. Its sculpted face is too perfect, with glittering eyes that she suspects are cameras. They swivel with a faint grinding, presumably scanning the room, finally fixating back on her face. “Excuse me, miss. Do you happen to know where a man named Martyn Perwellyn is?”

The clear and human tone of its voice startles her. The rest of its body, though well-crafted, shows little attempt to match the art of its face. It’s beautiful in its own way, gleaming metal and intricate fastenings, but does nothing to make the clockwork man more lifelike. “Sorry?”

“Martyn Perwellyn. Do you know him? Have you heard of him?”

She shakes her head.

“Ah.” The voice sounds disappointed, though the face remains immobile in a slight smile. “Then, if you will grant me leave, I am afraid that I must depart, miss.”

“Oh—of course. Yes.” Shaken for reasons she doesn’t understand, she steps forward and holds her hand out to shake. “Nice meeting you. Uh, good luck finding him.”

Instead of shaking, he bows over her hand. “Thank you for your kind wishes.” Straightening, he strides to the door. She notices that his feet, the only clumsy part of him, clank on the wooden floor.

“Wait!” It takes her a moment to realize why she protests before she registers the wind-up key on the floor, having fallen out as he emerged from the wall. She kneels and picks it up. “I think you’ll need this.”

He turns back. “Ah. Yes. I must thank you again.”

She hurries forward and hands it to him. The metal of his hand is warm and smooth as her fingers brush against it. She smiles. “No problem.”

Opening the door, he tips his hat again and leaves.

It occurs to her that she probably should have shown him out, when she hears the sound of front door clicking shut and the fading noise of his clanking footsteps. She shrugs and goes to the corner, retrieving her now lukewarm tea. Unscrewing the cap, she takes a few gulps then leaves, ignoring the reappearance of the door that shakes from invisible knocking except to slam the bolts across with more violence than normal.

Then, because she’s been intending to do it for days, she paints the kitchen.

A Cascade of Understanding

The anchor thudding onto the rocks is preceded by an explosion of fleeing finches, their drab wings and beaks contrasting the jungle’s unrelenting green. A fern droops under the heavy foliage. Lizards, their tails truncated from swimming,—

“Hold her steady.”

—clamber onto the vacated space, too intent on cracking snail shells to care about a heavy bit of metal. Flies mate on a tree with feathery leaves. A crab sidles past to a nearby tide-pool, claws clacking—

“Now pull! Gently, gently. You wouldn’t want to disturb it.”

—in a mating dance. Another crab watches, its color just different enough to suggest its femininity. A fish with delusions of grandeur flops out of the water and wiggles, heading for—

“Ease her into that crack between the boulders. Careful!”

—a shimmering insect, its movements strong even as a gull bites it in half. The fish’s clump of eggs sways in the water, only one day from birth. A sea snake plucks one from the bunch and undulates away, its scales—

“Perfect! Alright, I’ll go first and then you, Dunpoole.”

—gleaming in the afternoon sun even after a boot crushes its head.

He stands with his arms akimbo. Mud oozes over his feet and a dragonfly investigates his shoelaces. A hummingbird flits up to his sunburned face then darts away again. He glances back at his companion. “We’ll set up camp here, Dunpoole. I think that a small platform under the tents would be best.”

Leather face shaded under a broad hat, the other man nods. He knots their boat to a slender tree, slapping a shrew away before its teeth even touch the tempting hemp.

“Shelter first, then the gathering of supplies. That’s the way to do it, eh, Dunpoole?” Stamping his foot, he smiles. A line of ants quivers and shifts away from his heels. “Not bad for a foundation site. It’ll make a good port, someday. Once we’ve blasted a better harbor, of course.”

Dunpoole grunts, lugging their bags out of the boat. Setting them with openings pointed up, he checks their fastenings, cinching them tightly. A spider drops from an overhanging tree and crawls over the canvas. Thwarted, it skitters back up its line.

The sunburned man thumps the spider’s tree. “Not good English oak, but it’ll do for our purposes.” He holds his hand behind him. “Be a good fellow and hand me an ax, would you?”

Not bothering to sigh, Dunpoole crouches and opens the bag, rummaging. The spider seizes the opportunity and dives into the open satchel. Dunpoole yanks his hand out at the sight. He watches the bag until the spider emerges, then bats it from its silk and squashes it under his heel. He flashes the smile of a job well done.

“I say, Dunpoole, I—”

There is a whisper of fronds brushed aside by something very fast. Dunpoole’s eyes widen. He grabs the ax and hurls it at the green blur.

“Oh, God!” The sunburned man clutches at his leg, now spouting blood and missing a sizable chunk. His eyes roll back and he tumbles.

Dunpoole rushes to him, but the wound is deep and the skin above it is already red with infection. He swears at the komodo dragon, which speeds away into the jungle.

The other man pulls at Dunpoole’s shirt. “Help me, please! It hurts, it—”

He disappears, and after a moment, Dunpoole does as well.

Another spider ventures out of the canopy to drop into the open bag, but it vanishes as well, leaving the spider and its cargo of eggs on the ground. A crowd of ants descends on the spider, killing it and carrying away its offspring. The shrew sniffs around for the now missing boat before heading back to its den. A few worms sift the soil of the clearing as the flowers above them release their—

“Why can’t you just stay alive, you bastard!? I—you stupid son of a bitch—I oughta—”


—pollen, undisturbed by the sound of shouting and a loud splash that echo to the island from miles away. The komodo dragon trundles to its nest, a wad of flesh clenched in its teeth. It drops the meat to its babies. They rip at it and register the food as the most delicious they have ever tasted. They race back and forth, fighting each other. The little dragons are—

“I say, Dunpoole! That looks an awful lot like an island over there. What say we investigate?”

—even faster than their mother. They are too short to reach the birds that fly, startled, when sobs ring out across the water, but try anyway.

By Madison, Age 7, Miss Summer’s Class

About Me, by Madison, Age 7, Miss Summer’s Class

My name is Madison. I have brown hair and brown eyes. It is curly. I am 7 and a half years old. My favorit food is ice cream and pizza. They are really really good. My favorit part of school is recess! I also like gym and lunch and math. My favorit color is purple and pink and yellow. I have no brothers or sisters. I don’t have pets.

When I Grow Up, by Madison, Age 7, Miss Summer’s Class

When I grow up, I want to be a lifegard. They save people from drownding and they sit in the sun and they swim. I like to be outside. I like to swim. That is why I want to be a lifegard.

My Family, by Madison, Age 7, Miss Summer’s Class

I have a mommy and a daddy. My mommy is a mommy who stays at home. She used to work at a place where she sold money, but she doesn’t do that anymore. My daddy works at an office. He does not like it there. He is inside all day. I wood not like that. My mommy makes me pancakes. I love my mommy and daddy.

Christmas, by Madison, Age 7, Miss Summer’s Class

Christmas is the best day in the year!!!!!! I really really love it!!! You give presents to people and they give them to you. It is fun becuz people are happy and nobody fights. I wish it was Christmas every day.

Bunnies, by Madison, Age 7, Miss Summer’s Class

Bunnies are soft and furry. They can be brown or white or black. I like to pet them. They have long ears. Bunnies hop but they do not give eggs like in this picktur becauz there is no Easter Bunny. My mommy said. That is okay. I still like them.

Swimming, by Madison, Age 8, Miss Summer’s Class

I love to swim. It is my favorit. This is how you get ready to swim. You put on a swimsuit. Mine is very very pretty. Pink with yellow polka dots and it is two pieces. You have to be safe. I wear floaties on my arms becauz I don’t swim real good. Floaties are good if you are not good at swimming. Go to the pool! Some people go to a public pool. We used to have a pool at my house, with a white fence. Then my baby sister drownded in it and mommy and daddy cried for a very very long long time and I went to grandma’s and pop-pop’s. Pop-pop made me waffles every morning. I like waffles. Now we don’t have a pool and I don’t swim now. I miss swimming. It was fun.

My Pet, by Madison, Age 8, Mrs. Peterson's Class

If I had a pet, it wold be a dog. She would be brown and white and curly hair. She wold play catch with me. I wold love her and she wold love me too and lick my hand. It wold be a lot of fun to have a dog.

Sailor Take Warning

Carla reached out, trembling. She touched her index finger to the horizon line.

“Smudge it, smudge it!” they cried, tongues waggling, jumping up and down with their arms and legs flying in odd, twisted directions.

She hesitated then swiped her finger to the right, smearing the green ocean into the blue sky.

“Red it! Red it! Red red red!” Their voices grew loud, shrill. Laughter jangled in random bursts and soon they had all caught it up, giggling, shrieking, cackling. They thrust splinters of bone at her, jostling each other. “Red it! Red it!”

Sticking her palm onto a random piece, Carla winced as her hand poured out blood. The lucky one shouted in triumph and brandished his stained bone to the others.

Carla bit her lip and placed her hand into the sky. She withdrew, leaving a red palm-print that dripped tendrils of color into the ocean. She hissed as a sharp sting marked her wound and stepped away to look at the result.

“More!” They pushed her toward the painting.

Carla nodded and pressed her cut against it again, wiping her blood into the sky over and over until all the blue had been swallowed by her crimson. She turned back to them and showed her clotted hand.

Howling with delight, they danced, feet pounding the packed ground, sometimes clapping, sometimes linking arms with each other. They yelled and wailed and hooted, drumming on their chests or on others,’ with no discernable rhythm. One leapt and kissed Carla, hard, but otherwise they ignored her, instead throwing themselves into their frenzy.

She stood to the side, whimpering as fresh pain sparked through her hand and the sky dripped red around her, wondering if it was worth it.

A Fanfare, Just Because I Can

And nowwwwwwww. . . three flash fictions! Ta-da!

(One is a proper flash. The second is kinda weird. The third. . . a bit of both.)

Still! What a wealth of words waits for wondrous watching (reading)!

Centralia

Look at "Centralia, PA" at Wikipedia. You won't regret it.

Cracked Streets

Cathy coaxed Red into her pick-up with a strip of jerky. His back quivered as he scrambled in, white muzzle slobbering at the treat almost before his hind legs had made it up. “Good boy.” She wiped her hand on the side of her jeans and started the truck, wincing at the grinding it made as she shifted into first gear.

“Where you off to, Cathy?” Tom, smoking at the end of his driveway, waved to her.

“Post office. Want me to pick up your mail for you?” She coasted, not wanting to brake.

He shook his head. “I need any excuse to get out, nowadays. But thanks.” He took another puff.

“And how is Mary Lou?”

Tom glanced back at the house. “Not so good. The doctors keep telling me that she’s got to be admitted, but. . .” He trailed off, throwing his cigarette onto the cracked sidewalk and rubbing it out with his boot. “I don’t know how long I could keep her there, and for what good? The cancer’s already spread to her lungs.” Yanking up his sweat-stained cap, emblazoned with the mine’s logo, he wiped his forehead. “Besides, you know Mary Lou. She’s determined to stick in town. Says that her gran’s buried here, her mom’s buried here, and as the Lord is her witness, she’s going to be as well.”

Cathy felt for Red’s reassuring warmth. “Damn, Tom, you think they’d keep you from the cemetery? That’s cold.”

He chuckled and coughed. “They took our damn zip code. I’m not expecting too many favors from the likes of them.” He coughed again and spat out a hunk of green phlegm. “Better get a move on, Cathy. I think their post office closes in an hour or so.”

She nodded. “I’m just going to swing by the Vomers, see if they want me to pick up their stuff.”

He shook his head. “I hate the way this town’s falling to pieces, but it seems mighty cruel to raise two kids in this hellhole, pardon my French. They oughta get out of here, give those boys a chance. Well, as much of a chance as they’ve got with that father of theirs.”

Cathy felt her throat tighten. She and John had been in the same high school class. He’d been her first kiss, took her to their junior high dance. “He’s having a hard time of it, Tom.”

He snorted. “Less of a hard time than Helen, if you ask me. And no harder of a time than anybody else who's already left town. No, he’ll get no sympathy from me, excepting what I’d give to all the Vomer men. Drink’s always been their devil.”

“If you say so.” Cathy scratched Red behind his ears, fingers tense and shaky as his tongue lolled out with pleasure. “I’m off, then.” She waved goodbye without looking back, navigating around the potholes that turned the street into Swiss cheese. A thud jostled the cab as she ran into one she hadn’t seen. “Dammit!”

Red looked at her and whined.

“Sorry, boy.” She patted him. “Guess your bones are in about the same condition as the shocks.” He licked her hand and barked, making her laugh.

She hesitated at the Vomers’. The two boys were playing around a manhole, throwing leaves into the steam to make them fly. Helen watched from the front porch, patching somebody’s jeans. Cathy waved to them, and the woman waved back, a yellow bruise coloring her forearm. “Afternoon, Helen.”

Helen’s eyes skittered toward the window before replying. “And you, Cathy. Heading to the store?”

“Post office. Want me to get your mail?”

Smiling weakly, Helen shook her head. “It’ll just be more bills and—“ She looked at the window again. “Thanks anyway.”

“No problem. See you at church Saturday?”

The boys stopped playing and stared at their mother. She wilted under their gaze. “I—not this week, Cathy. Maybe another time.”

“Alright. We’ll miss you.” Cathy stroked her dog. “Don’t be a stranger!”

The other woman laughed. “That’d be quite a feat.”

”Helen! Where’s m’beer?” The screen door slammed open, knocking off loose flecks of paint. “I told you t’ get—“ Arm raised, Tom saw Cathy and let it fall. “Cathy! How you doing, sweetheart? You always were a pretty little thing.” He headed toward the truck, grinning.

Cathy swallowed. “Sorry, Tom, can’t talk. I’ve got to get to the post office before it closes.” She shrugged and smiled. “You know how they are.”

He winked. “Okay, but stop by on your way back.”

She nodded and sped away.

Another crack had opened in Route 61, smoke a noxious black. Cathy turned onto the detour, choking. She didn’t bother with her turn signal.

Dead and Gone to Escher

Alive! Not me, of course. No, two tons of car slammed against one’s head doesn’t leave a lot of room for maybes. But my friends are still kicking, though Jonathan shakes a bit and Erin has a few more months of physical therapy to go and Rob’s therapist recommends he start running again. I was surprised that they made it, I have to admit but I’m glad that I’m the only doorstop. How’s it go? “Marley was dead to begin with, there was no mistake about that . . .” and then a lot of overwriting. Charles Dickens, you paid-by-the-paragraph talented bastard, the only author I’ve ever preferred in condensed form. But look at me, taking a page out of your overloaded books—

Ay, my mouth runneth over! I don’t really mind being dead. It’s a lot like what I imagine an acid trip to be; all disconnected symbols and images skittering around in solid form. And the synaesthesia is wonderful, all copper-colored songs and square smells.

I wander the rooms and climb the stairs and peek sideways out the windows of my afterlife, looking for my friends. They can be difficult to spot, even with their bright red faces on the days that they miss me, but I crane my eyes for them anyway. Sometimes I wave at them, my arms turning upside down when they go through the window. “Hello, hello, I miss you!” The plants wave with me, seeking the sun that orbits us in dizzy parabolas a hundred times a day. “Hello!” they echo.

Though I can’t talk to anyone, I do have the ability to make graffiti in the living world. Did you ever see things spray-painted on the underside of an overpass and wonder how they get there? They’re probably all me, even the ones made before I was born—I have a little trouble with time here, and I end up posting messages all out of order. Oh well—graffiti doesn’t have to make sense, does it? Even dead and swimming in art, I still can’t draw, but anybody can scribble block letters along a train. I painted “Mighty” and “Mouse” on two of them. I hope they clack past each other soon; it’s the sort of joke that appeals to me now.

There are lots of books in the third floor basement’s library, but it’s difficult to get there and even more so to get back, because some of the doors only work one way. I don’t know if everyone’s afterlife is like mine, but somehow I doubt it. You’ve seen it, I’m sure—that Escher painting, the one that’s all stairs and mind-bending angles. Most days I love it, walking one way and meeting my legs coming back the other direction, but it hides the library. I’ve started taking a backpack so I can lug a few volumes with me. My old favorites line all the walls in the building, but I’ve found that my memory of them is too good now, and I prefer the philosophical stuff that I’ve been finding. They’re scattered enough to make sense to me.

Funny, even dead I can’t understand Umberto Eco’s books. I’m not sure what that says about me, but it could just be that they’re not the same as they should be. I tried reading a romance novel on a whim and was surprised when I fell inside near the middle when, out of nowhere, a pony ate the heroine. I was lost for days, met a prince who’d wandered in out of “1001 Nights.” Still not sure if he was real, and if he was, then when. His eyes smelled like fresh bread.

In a sewer in New York, I wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in Arabic and red ink. The alligators have taken to staring at it, not sure why, but I hope nobody goes down there. Posting a warning would only make it worse, I suppose; curiosity makes fools out of all of us.

Sometimes I have to crawl into a cupboard and hide from the flocks of birds that become clouds and the clouds that acquire feathers and beaks. I don’t mind the flesh-and-paint lizards that sometimes creep out of the floor, but the birds are just too much. They nest in the columns and squawk until the rain washes them away. I wish Escher had thought a bit more about his drawings; they’re just enough living and dead to make them fit here, and I’m tired of chasing his inky hands out of the kitchen with a broom.

Note to self: find out if I can make graffiti on places other than Earth. I’d love to freak out NASA.

My only regret, as I hang upside-down from a wall, is that my last drink was a Tequila Sunrise, which always makes me throw up. I didn’t want to die with my head out the window, Rob holding my hair back. A headlight hits me in the eye and I’m here, my words skittering across my tongue and universes hidden in the furniture. It makes me—

That’s a new door. I wonder where it goes.

Spirit Guide Tantrums

I pound on the medium’s door, a bag of un-husked corn in my free hand. “Let me in! You owe us!” I shout, making her placard rattle as I continue to hammer.

She slides open her peephole and scowls at me. “Madame Zelda does not do mornings.” The thick kohl around her eyes is smeared into her crow’s feet. “Go away.” She slams the opening shut.

A few kicks to the unsteady wood and she opens the small window again, her eyeballs jaundiced, with a scattering of blood shot through them, face creased with fury. “Please,” I say sweetly, showing all my teeth. “I’d like to speak to my grandmother.” I lean close to her. “Or perhaps I could go talk to Pastor Bill, tell him that you’re thinking of converting. How would you like to spend the next five hours listening to him talk about Presbyterian history and tactfully tell you that you’re technically a heathen and a terrible sinner before urging you not to make any decisions in haste?”

“You nosy, bossy—fine. Talk to your damned grandmother.” Closing the slit, Madame Zelda yanks open the door. She is wearing her day clothes, dirt-stained khakis and a sweatshirt from her daughter’s Ivy League college. “I’m beginning to wish that I had never gone to that retreat in New Mexico. You and your grandmother are more trouble than you are worth.” Grumbling, she rubs her eyes. “You are being rude, but I shouldn’t emulate you.” She nods toward the kitchen. “Go ahead and sit down. Do you want some coffee?”

I shake my head. “I don’t do well with caffeine. I wouldn’t say no to some hot water, though.” Fishing in my left pocket, I pull out a bag of peppermint tea. “She makes fun of me when I have the non-native plants, anyway.”

“Don’t I know it.” Pulling a battered teapot out of the cupboard, she jams it under the faucet. She jerks her head at my burden while she’s filling it. “What’s with the corn?”

Unexpectedly, I blush. “I thought it would make me feel closer to her. Y’know, a bit of shared culture.”

Zelda laughs. “You’ll probably cook it wrong and she’ll just mock you again.” Teapot full, she plunks it on the stove, spilling some of the water. She fiddles with the knob to turn it on. “I suppose you’ll want to cook it?”

I nod. “You can keep it when we’re done. My granddad got a huge load of the stuff and my granny and I been trying to work through it for days.”

She makes a non-committal noise, getting out an ancient coffeemaker and a can of the cheapest brand. “Alright. I’ve got a pot that should be big enough for five ears, and I wouldn’t mind a nice meal of corn on the cob tonight.”

“Thanks.” I play with the tea bag, easing the perforated edges apart and smiling at the wafting scent. “Uh, and I’m sorry for barging in, Madame Zelda.”

“That apology would mean more to me if I didn’t know that you’ll probably do it again next time you’re in a rush. Ay, you young things! You’ve got more years of youth than I probably have to live; I don’t know why you feel the need to hurry.” She measures out her ground beans into a filter. The smell mixes with my peppermint and I wrinkle my nose. It’s not the most appealing combination. “But your apology is accepted.”

To occupy myself while my water boils and her coffee percolates—I’ve pushed her as far as I really should, and I know better than to make her work before she’s had her drink—I look around the room. Usually I visit later and Zelda bustles me straight into what she calls “the room of mysteries,” a curtained and incensed room that I suspect looks cheesy in sunlight. Zelda means well, but she tends to go overboard when she doesn’t need to; I’m not really one to be impressed by velvet and mysticism. Oddly practical for a girl who communicates with her decades-dead great-grandmother on a regular basis, but both the stubbornness and the contradiction run in my family.

It’s a baking kitchen, of which I approve. I base my evaluation on the heavy double-rack of spices, the tea towels with burn holes in them, and the stack of dirty cookie sheets in the sink. There is a scent of bread in the air, which I sniff with appreciation. I wonder if I’ll be able to con her into giving me a slice.

“So, what was the urgency?”

I flinch, startled out of my staring with a pang of guilt; did she think I was judging her room? “Sorry, what?”

Zelda pulls a mug out of the cupboard in the same instant that the tea kettle starts to screech. “Avery, you banged on my door at seven in the morning, to talk to a woman who will be just as dead later in the evening as she is now. What’s going on?”

I squirm in my seat, reaching out as she hands me the filled mug. “I, uh, want to get some advice.”

She stares at me. “Advice. From your great-grandmother. The woman who, in a fit of pique, started howling about the Trail of Tears and William Henry Harrison in the middle of my séance when I tried to ask her to talk to Mrs. Peterson’s husband, never mind the fact that she was born after both of those events and on the other side of the country.” Zelda emits a dirty chuckle that rolls into a heaving laugh, tears rolling down her cheeks. “The—the—the woman who makes me call her ‘She-Who-Is-Bothered-By-White-People’ for her spirit name if she thinks I’m not appreciating her enough? You came here all in a bother, with a bagful of corn that is probably the wrong variety, because you want to ask her for advice?” Howling now, she bends over to support herself against the stove.

Annoyed, I drop the teabag into the water, releasing a grey cloud. “Yes.”

“Oh—oh my. Wow.” Wiping tears from her face, Zelda finally calms down, though a few stray laughs shake her in amused aftershocks. She grins, her missing top right incisor lending an extra smirk to her expression. “Honey, I always considered you to be the sensible type, but I take it all back.”

I glare at her. “Yeah, yeah, it’s all very funny.” Sipping at my tea, I stare at the calendar next to the fridge. From a local realtor’s office, it’s three months behind and my fingers itch to fix it. “Glad you’re enjoying yourself.”

The coffee boils and Zelda grabs for it with a happy sigh. “Thank goodness.” She pours her drink and dumps three teaspoons of sugar in it. Taking a gulp, she frowns. “Still bitter.” Setting it down, she rummages in the fridge, pulling out a carton of cream. A quick pour, another experimental drink, and she smiles. “That’s the good stuff.” Sitting across from me, she sips slowly, taking her time just to annoy me.

Made thirsty by her actions, I get back to my tea. Peppermint’s the only kind of tea that I like without sweetener, and even when it’s hot, it cools my mouth. Plus my great-grandmother doesn’t make snarky remarks about white girls and their Chinese tea when she smells it.

Getting impatient, I tap my finger against the mug and go back to studying the room. Zelda’s barely started her coffee and there’s no point in rushing her.

It’s really stunning, the difference between this room and the séance area. The walls here are painted buttercup yellow, and wavy glass windows let a lot of light in. She’s tacked some fancy plates up and the cabinets are a pretty, antique-looking white with open doors. I like it much better in here than in the mediation place—I wonder if I could convince her to let me talk to my great-grandmother here. Then again, for a Zuni farming ghost she’s a terrible snob. She likes the trappings and likes criticizing them even more.

“Alright, Avery, let’s get this over with.”

I look up at Zelda with surprise. “Aren’t you going to finish your coffee first?”

She rolls her eyes. “Avery, I have to admit that you are the least annoying of my customers, even though you don’t really pay me in anything but your grandmother’s temporary cooperation, but I have other things to do today.”

“Oh. Okay.” I am appalled to realize that I’m a little hurt by her frank admission of wanting to get rid of me. I must be going soft. “Works for me.” I grab my bag of corn and hoist it over my shoulder.

Squatting, she opens a lower cupboard and pulls out a large pot. “Husk the corn into this. You’d better make sure you don’t leave a single thread of silk in the room; I shudder to think of the abuse your great-grandmother would heap on me if I didn’t have a spotless place for her to manifest.”

I take it from her and follow her into her séance room. As always, I choke at first on the thick scent of whatever herb she was burning this week. She used to favor sandalwood, which I actually liked, but my great-grandmother griped about it so much that she switched to more natural grasses, which smolder and make my eyes water. For a woman with no corporeal body, she has a ridiculously sensitive nose, and the pickiness to back it up. I don’t know how Madame Zelda puts up with her all the time, I really don’t.

We sit at her smaller table, which only has room for two or three people. The other one seats up to ten, but it’s really awkward with just the two of us. This table is nicer, anyway, made like a puzzle out of many different kinds of wood. I like running my fingers over it; it feels like pebbles.

Madame Zelda lights some of the red candles that she has placed around the room. I put the pot on the table and pull out the first ear of corn. She shakes her head as she sits back down. “You know we have to hold hands for the first part and I’m not touching you if you’re all sticky.” She slides her hands across the table, palms up.

I put my fingertips in her grasp and she folds her fingers back to grip them.

She starts humming and rolling her eyes around. The lights grow dimmer and a whispering noise starts up in the room.

I fidget. She has a light switch and a stereo remote stashed under the table. “C’mon, Madame Zelda, can we skip all the mumbo-jumbo voodoo crap? I thought this sort of stuff was for when you don’t actually have a ghost to summon, so you have to distract people.”

Returning to normal, she glares at me. “Avery. You are here to summon the ghost of your great-grandmother. You know, the dead woman. So if you make one more rude comment about the mystic arts, I will shove that corn up your nose and ban you from my house.”

“Fine.” Grumbling, I try to stay still as she goes back to her conjuring. I snort under my breath when a crystal ball is lowered from the ceiling, but she’s humming so loud at this point that she doesn’t hear me. To keep quiet, I count the pillows scattered everywhere. Thirty-seven, and that’s without turning around. At least they match the purple curtains she hung over all the walls.

Releasing my hands, Madame Zelda makes esoteric passes over the crystal ball, then raises her fingers toward the ceiling. “Oh spirit, hear my plea. I beseech you to honor us with your presence and answer the questions of this humble petitioner.”

“Great-grandmother, can you please hurry up? I wanna ask you a question.” Humble petitioner, ha! I’m blood to this woman, the only descendent she’s got who has any interest in Zuni culture and doesn’t go around doing the “woo-woo” thing.

I hate my cousins.

Madame Zelda hushes me fiercely, but a blue glow is already forming around the crystal ball, a small smoky portion inside of the thing and the rest coalescing outside of it. The smoky substance swirls for a minute before shaping itself into an eagle feather. “How, pale folk!” says a deep voice, the color of the spirit gliding through darker shades of blue, heading into one almost black before running backwards through the tint. “Me Chief Redman Talks-to-the-Earth. You have questions for Chief Redman Talks-to-the-Earth? Me answer with my great Injun know-how.”

I roll my eyes. “Great-grandmother, that’s not funny. Knock it off.”

The feather blurs and becomes that familiar broad face with amused eyes. “Ha, white girl! I should have known it was you again.”

“I will help you communicate with this young woman,” says Madame Zelda. “Spirit, how fare you in the Afterlife?”

I sigh. And this is why I don’t feel too bad about waking the woman up to let me talk to my great-grandmother. Outside of being a medium, she’s fine, but something about the atmosphere turns her into a hippie-dippy loony, and it drives me up the wall. No wonder my great-grandmother likes to needle the woman sometimes during her commercial séances. “Madame Zelda, we can hear each other just fine without your help, thank you.”

“Why I ever latched onto you I’ll never know,” my great grandmother taunts. “I should’ve just kept haunting that souvenir shop, making tourists feel nasty chills and buy too much jewelry for luck. There were only Hopi running it, but at least they knew better than to drag me all the way to the other side of the country, where it’s too cold and wet all the time.”

“Perhaps you sensed my connection with Avery,” says the medium, gritting her teeth. “Or knew that I would be able to help you pass your great wisdom onto—”

“To be honest,” said my great-grandmother in a more serious voice, “I was commanded to come with you, by the voices of Father Sky and Grandmother Spider.”

Madame Zelda perks up. “Really?”

“Hell no.” Forming a small bag out of nothing, Great-grandmother picks something out of it and pops it in her mouth. “Ha! Why on earth would the Great Ones care anything about a fifty-seven year old white wiccan? Nah, I was just bored and moved on an impulse.”

For all her talkativeness, my great-grandmother prefers to lie rather than give any real answers about where she lives. She does admit that there are other spirits there with her, though she won’t give any information on them unless somebody specifically asks, and I’ve always suspected that half of the time it’s just her playing dress-up and disguising her voice. But other than that, she’s closed-mouthed about the whole situation and won’t even answer the most basic questions about what it’s like.

One month, to amuse herself, she pretended to be in the Christian Hell, spending the whole time screaming about demons and fire. Then an old woman said “It’s just what she deserves” one night when Madame Zelda was called in as a fun addition to a wedding shower and Great-grandmother started in on her brimstone act. Apparently the bride hadn’t considered what her aunt might think of the “occult” goings-on. Indignant, my great-grandmother told the aunt that her beloved son was the one killing all her cats, exposed the affair that the maid-of-honor was having with the groom, and poured twenty gallons of red punch on the presents.

Madame Zelda doesn’t do showers anymore, though she can be prevailed upon for a bachelorette party.

I am distracted by her actions. “Hey, what did you just eat?”

The bag disappears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Great-grandmother. . .”

She grins and her smoke starts to drift apart so that her features stretch and distort. “The spirits of some dried peyote buttons.” Sticking her tongue out, she giggles. “Woo, they pack quite a kick! I’m going to be seeing stars for a few days, that’s for sure.”

I stare at her, open-mouthed. “How—how does that even work?”

Great-grandmother shrugs. “Dunno.” Then she giggles. “You two look like lizards. You have pretty scales, white girl.”

“Can’t you ever call me by my name?” I whine. I get enough mockery for not “being brown enough” to claim my heritage by alive people without her calling me “white girl” or “gringa” all the time.

“I’ll call you by your name when you get a real one,” Great-Grandmother retorts. It’s an old argument that I’m not going to win. Avery means “elf counsel,” which is the sort of thing that happens when your parents meet at a Lord of the Rings fan club.

I push out my lip and fold my arms. “It’s not my fault! Blame my parents.”

“I do! I haunted their dreams for three weeks straight when I found out about it. They’re just stubborn.” She sniffs. “I blame your mother.”

I stand up. “You shut up about my mother! Just because she’s not Zuni is no reason to assume it was her idea, and it’s no reason to say mean things about her either.”

“Gringa!”

“Corpse!”

“Enough!” Madame Zelda slaps the table, making the crystal ball shake in place. “You’re like little children. I thought you were supposed to have the wisdom of the ages, Mrs. Quintana. You claimed to be surrounded by great thinkers and spirits!”

My great-grandmother shrugs. “I lied.”

Madame Zelda leans forward and bangs her head several times on the table. “I should just go back to rapping and magnet controlled Ouija boards. At least fake séances are reliable ones, and nobody starts telling a bereaved widow that she’s thinking of having sex with the deceased husband that she’s been interpreting for.”

“It was funny!”

“You said what?” I ask, mouth gaping in shock. “Okay, you never get to make fun of my tank tops again, d’you hear me?”

From the table, Madame Zelda mumbles “Please just ask the damn question so I can get rid of her. I am too tired to deal with either of you this early in the morning.” She must have thumbed a few switches, because the crystal ball retracted back into the ceiling and the lights returned to a more normal level.

I’m tempted to point out that my great-grandmother started it, but I don’t want her to yell again. I take a deep breath. “Should I just let it go?”

“Let what go?” asks Madame Zelda, curious.

Both my great-grandmother and I turn to glare at her, with what I’m sure is the same expression. “None of your business,” Great-grandmother snaps.

Silence stretches on for a full minute before she sighs. “White—Avery. Do you know much about the Zuni way?”

I’m not sure what the answer I’m expected to have here is, so I shake my head.

“I didn’t think so. Nor should you, really; you weren’t raised near it. More my fault than yours; I should have made more of an effort to teach your grandpa about his own heritage, and I should have convinced him to come back before I died.” She runs a hand through her thick braid, turning the threads of it smoky for a moment before they reform in its absence. “The Zuni way is to be easy-going. Friendly. We try not to let things bother us, and move through life with as little inconvenience to others as we can. Suspicion, grudges. . . are considered to be, um, bad. Un-people-like.”

I wrinkle my nose in confusion. “But you are the least easy-going person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m dead! I can act however I want now, and there are lots of bad influences. Besides, you’d be amazed how people change once their society’s expectations are gone.” She laughs. “You think George Washington is as sober dead as he was when he was alive?”

Madame Zelda perks up. “You know George Washington? I’d love to have him at a séance.”

“No. I heard it from Crazy Horse, who heard it from Pocahontas—did you know you’re related to her, too, Avery?—who heard it from Benjamin Franklin. There are a lot of dead people, you know. I can only find those new ones you pester me about because they’re hanging around the very edge between life and death.”

“So you want me to let it go?” I ask, still processing the information about Pocahontas.

My great-grandmother shakes her head.

“But—”

She sits down. “I said it was the Zuni way, and that’s a statement that is not intended to mean anything about you. It’s about that boyfriend of yours. He is about as far from Zuni as you can get, and that’s not his fault, and it may not even be a bad thing, but the Zuni way and his do not meet in a manner that’s healthy for you.” Reaching out with an abnormally long arm, she pats my head. “You’re a good kid, even for a white girl. I don’t want you to make choices you’ll regret just because you think it would make other people happy.”

I smile at her, and she grins back. “Thanks, Great-grandmother.”

Madame Zelda coughs.

I look at her, and am stunned to see that her face is greenish-white, and she is slumped over the table. “Not to be rude, but I really need to let go now,” she says, even her voice sounding exhausted. “You are a draining woman.”

Great-grandmother nods. “I thought as much.” She smoothes my hair. “Seeya, white girl.”

“Yeah, yeah. Bye.”

The blue smoke grows paler until it is finally white. A wind comes from nowhere and blows it apart.

A little color returns to Madame Zelda’s complexion. “Thank goodness. I couldn’t have held out for much longer.”

I run to the kitchen and grab her cup of coffee. It’s lukewarm, but better than nothing. As an afterthought, I pull out the bread, which is smoking. Cutting off the least burnt part, I smear some butter on and return to her with both items.

“Thank you, Avery.” She eats and drinks, dunking the bread in the coffee. I’m not sure if she was trying to warm up the coffee or cool the bread, but it looks disgusting to me.

Then I see my bag. “Dang-it! I completely forget about the corn. Can I just leave it with you?” I pout. “I really wanted to get some recipes off of her.”

Madame Zelda jerks and drops her bread onto the table. Her eyes lock in place and her mouth opens. My great-grandmother’s voice comes out. “It’s. . . the wrong. . . kind. . . anyway. . . white girl.”

Then Zelda wobbles, her eyes focus on me again, and the possession is over. She scowls at me and shakes her fist. “Your grandmother is the worst spirit guide.”

This time the voice comes out of nowhere. “I’m still right.”

Laughing, I stick my tongue out to the empty air. “Yeah, but my corn is better, old woman.”

I may be a white girl, but I’m still her great-granddaughter, and I don’t take crap from anybody.