FOLIO

Issue No. 16, Models of the Universe

2009-08-11T19:51:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 16, Models of the Universe - Physics for Perverts

2009-08-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

by Holly Jensen

Abs0lute Zero

He calls Fun Girls USA when he can’t sleep, which is every night.

“Hey, baby,” she says. “My name’s Ella. What’s yours?”

“My name’s Van,” he says. “And that’s even the truth.”

“I’m so glad you called, baby. I was just lying in bed all by myself.”

“What do you look like?”

“Well, let’s see, I’m twenty, I love making new friends, and—”

“I’m clairvoyant,” he says. “Is that the word?”

“You think you can read my mind, baby?”

“I know I can.”

“What am I thinking right now, baby?”

“You think I’m some rabid weirdo.”

“That it, baby?”

“You want to get me all worked up and then leave me alone. I wish you were here in my room. I bet you smell nice. Do you wear perfume? Do you like it when your roots show? Do you have blue nail polish? Your voice sounds like you have soft skin.”

“I do, baby.”

“I bet that’s one of the ways you get them. They touch your skin and—oh—their little bird hearts flutter. It’s like a fairy tale, but with blue nail polish.” He sniffs and clears his throat, coughs wet. His voice is tight and he’s talking too fast. “What if you actually made me feel all right?”

“I wanna make you feel good, baby.”

“I wanted to be an astronaut,” he says. “For about a semester. I was reading that Wolfe book. But that’s how I am. If I’d been reading ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ I’d’ve wanted to be a mongoose. What do I know?”

“I don’t know, baby.”

“I didn’t stick with anything more than a semester. I appreciate the specialization of the mind. Some people spend their entire careers studying turtle ears. And bee dances. And how the prairie grasses have sex, right? It could go on forever. It does go on forever. You know how it is.”

“Forever and ever, baby.”

“Atta girl,” he says.

“You like forever, baby?”

“There are certain things I like, yeah. Only a few. There’s only so many likeable things in the world, you know? But let me tell you what happens when things get cold.”

“You can tell me whatever you want, baby.”

“That’s right. You’re right.” He sounds surprised. “So, the unit of measurement here is degrees in Kelvin.”

“Kelvin, baby.”

“As in, room temperature is three hundred degrees Kelvin. This room, for instance. Or your room, even. And the sun? That’s five thousand degrees Kelvin. And absolute zero is zero. You follow?”

“Zero is zero, baby.”

“That’s right. As my ex would say, damnwell right. You ever heard that? I hadn’t. I thought, optimistically, that it was an affectation. But I was terribly wrong. That’s something that happens. Historically,” he says, “I am mostly wrong. Though I bet you are, too.”

“Think so, baby?”

“What if I wanted to kiss you on the mouth? Would you even like that? Hold on. I have another call.”

She hears him set down the phone, hears a clink and a long soft sound, like sighing.

He picks up the phone. “You still there?” he says. “That’s a horrible question to have to ask.”

“Yeah, baby,” she says. “That was quick.”

“Quick call, sure. Yeah. It was my neighbor, my neighbor friend. He’s says we’re going out on the town tonight, he’s gonna get me some girls. He has powers.” He laughs. “Listen to me. Cause let’s cut through the bull, right? What I really want from you is ears. You think you could handle that?”

“I could do that, baby.”

“Ah. That is so, so good-hearted of you. You know what that is? That is Christ-like. And what was I saying before?”

“You were naming the temperatures, baby.”

“As you approach absolute zero, strange things happen. You don’t even know.”

“Tell me, baby.”

“You think there’s three states of matter, that’s what they tried to teach you. And by ‘they’ I mean the school marms. Solid, gas, and liquid. But there’s a new state of matter. Named condensate. We invented it, although it wasn’t on the front pages how you’d think. ‘By the way, new state of matter created. Just thought you’d like to know.’ ”

“Something like that, baby.”

“When we get toward zero, the atoms, heretofore represented as the usual dots—the dots from science with marms—begin to cool and slow and stretch. The dots become waves. They get so stretched out they overlap. They get confused. They forget whether they are themselves or their neighbor. It’s got to be frustrating. You follow?”

“I think so, baby. They’re discombobulated.”

“That’s exactly it. You’re right. Here’s chapter two.”

“Chapter two of what, baby?”

“Technology marches on, and this scientist decides that she should shoot some light into this condensate. Can you believe it? Just like a woman,” he says. “This particular condensate was, I think, described as cigar-shaped, if that helps. This scientist wants to see what happens. Like, for fun or some other lunatic concept. None of which makes the papers. Needless to say.”

“Needless to say, baby.”

“Or at least it didn’t make The Intelligencer. Where are you right now? Never mind, I don’t want to know. Now listen to me, because the light did not stop, as it does when you shine a light at a wall. Instead, the light, shot at this brand new state of matter, slowed—and I quote—to the speed of a bicycle.”

“For real, baby?”

“Light like a bike,” he says. “I wouldn’t lie to you. Would you lie to me?”

“Never, baby.”

“You know that people used to think cold was a thing? Imagine walking around in the winter feeling burdened by all the cold. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand, baby. Strange things, burdens.”

“Where are you?” he says. “Never mind. Never mind.” He coughs. “The books I read I get secondhand, like a decent human being. You know, like I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those—well, they’re not really book stores, are they? They sell cupcakes and calendars. Easy targets.”

“Gift certificates.”

“That’s right,” he says. “I buy books from places that smell like mold. You can feel the spores in your lungs. Listen to me. It feels good, it feels damnwell good. And the floors creak. You know what I mean? The books I like, somebody’s already read them. They’ve already been between somebody else’s palms. Someone’s marked them up before, someone’s beaten them up a bit. The books I like, people bracket parts and write in the margin, ‘Joke?’—question mark, question mark, question mark—underline. That kind of book.” In a soft voice, he says, “If I wanted to push you down, would that be okay?”

“That’d be okay, baby.”

“Now I feel stupid,” he says. “And you’ve got whatsit, you’ve got culpability. Listen. You know what that means?”

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“Culpability,” he says. “That’s one of them BBC words.”

“I like talking to you, baby. You know what I’d wanna do if you were here right now?”

“You talk to me like that but no one’s really here. No one, and not you, either.”

“I just wanna make you feel good, baby.”

“Well, god,” he says. “I fell for it, didn’t I?”

Multiverse

“Because our universe isn’t the only universe,” he says.

“Sure, baby,” she says.

“One hundred years ago this would be mad raving. Now it’s fact cosmology,” he says. “This idea of parallel worlds was silly and spooky, but it kept coming back, stranger and stranger. Like that one cousin at Thanksgiving. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, baby,” she says. “Weird cousins.”

“When they talk about these particles existing in more than one place at a time, they use the verb flit. To flit. In and out of our world. In and out of existence.”

“Flit, baby.”

“There are infinite versions. In one, I’m in the space station, fixing space toilets. In another, we got hitched and you’re loading the dishwasher. I’m upstairs, fixing our earth toilet.”

“Sounds like fun, baby.”

“It’s the way the world is. It’s the way it might be. They think we live in a neighborhood where gravity is weak. This is true. Hold up your hand.”

“I can do that, baby.”

“Well, aren’t you sweet? They think that somebody else has the rest of our gravity. Hoarding it. The other verses in this multiverse.”

“Right, baby. Verses.”

“And if there’s life, it might be right by us, clinging to its own little membrane. Listen, you know what a stranger is. Life in the other worlds could be passing by us, this second, and we don’t know.”

“Yeah, baby?”

“We’re ghosts to one another.”

“Yeah, baby?”

“A life of theirs would be unimaginably different from ours. Even from yours. New chemistry and new laws. Maybe all we have in common is this gravity. It might be all that binds us to our branes,” he says. “Cause explain to a two-dimensional person what three dimensions are like. Go ahead. Try.”

“So what do they matter, baby?”

“Hell, explain me to you. No. Fair question. Does this have anything to do with you? We might be too stuck to our branes. We might be too, I don’t know, devoted. Is that what I mean?”

“We keep an eye out, huh, baby?”

“We hunt the hell out of it. But this other life, whatever life, it’s tricky life. Looking for it is playing badminton in the fog. We get four dimensions. Left-right, up-down, forward-backward, time. But the string theorists count ten.”

“What are they, baby?”

“It’s hard to imagine, the next step. I don’t know even what your life is made of,” he says.

“Like seeing a new color,” she says. “Right, baby?”

“Do you like to be called names? How many miles away are you? Have you ever met up with someone you talked to on here in real life?”

“What do you think, baby?”

“Um,” he says. “So, these other vicious cosmologists were arguing over whether there are ten or eleven dimensions. To them, it meant everything. The string theorists and these supergravity folks. One version of the universes versus another version of the verses.”

“It’s a real bar fight, huh, baby?”

“Now they think this eleventh dimension is really real and is a trillionth of a millimeter from every point in our world. It’s nestled against our cheek, they say. They say we’re wrapped in it.”

“Cozy, baby.”

“You’re only thinking about cozy. Maybe you should hold on to the kitchen counter.”

“I can do that, baby.”

“Then they said there’s another universe on another brane at the opposite end of the eleventh dimension.”

“In the back forty, baby?”

“This is where Lisa Randall comes in. She’s important, so she was born in America. She climbs rocks. She thinks about why gravity is so weak. She wears rock-climbing shorts. I either saw her or I dreamed her, and, either way,” he says, “shorts.”

“Sounds sexy, baby.”

“Gravity is leaking from this eleventh dimension. She can calculate this. By the time gravity gets to us, it’s faded. We get the drippings,” he says. “Everyone’s excited. Hawking—that bitch—said there wouldn’t be mysteries after they were done with the world.”

“He said that, baby?”

“The universes move through the eleventh dimension—this aura hung up on us—and move through it like waves, one after the other, as orderly as an ocean. Then the scientists began to wonder what would happen if two waves crashed together. And they decided that was how a universe gets born.” He sighs, says, “Once she chugged the entire bottle. We got back into it and she was sloshing around like a water balloon. This woman was an R. Crumb woman. What was I saying?”

“The big bang, baby?”

“Is when parallel worlds hit in the eleventh dimension, right. And this is true: the lumps of the universe—the stars, dirt, spoons, and you—are from the wrinkles and the ripples of the branes.”

“Wrinkles, baby?”

“We coexist. We flit together. Isn’t that everything? Kaku—he’s got a head of hair on him—said the universe is a bubble in an ocean. I’m almost positive I saw Kaku ice skating. On a show? Either way, it was remarkable,” he says. “That’s why I remarked.”

“Got it, baby.”

“You ever ice skate?”

“Not yet, baby,” she says. “But I like to try new things.”

“With frilly swimsuits and glittered tights and razor boots,” he says. “Now parallel universes are popping up in everyone’s equations. Cause who doesn’t love a winner? Listen, Duff says it best. Physics is all fads. Fickle as a little girl. No offense.”

“None, baby.”

“And nobody wants to be stuck with our four measly dimensions.”

“So, baby,” she says. “What’s the fifth dimension?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the sixth?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the seventh?”

“I can’t remember,” he says.

“That’s all right, baby. We can talk about anything you want.”

“What this means is that if we understood everything in the universe, we would understand only our universe.”

“Yeah, baby,” she says. “It’s a problem.”

Issue No. 16, Models of the Universe - Sketches of a Naturalist

2009-08-11T19:32:00.001-07:00

Issue No. 16, Models of the Universe - Prism

2009-08-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

by Keith Radke

That way lays the uniform,
Relentless, righteous white,
deaf and dumb.

This way lays fracture and colors,
each demanding a name,
a mouth to utter it.

In the middle, I am cut but
healthy only to the extent that
the idea is humane.

Issue No. 16, Models of the Universe - Intelligent Life

2009-08-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

by Nik Garvoille

Issue No. 16, Models of the Universe - Credits

2009-08-11T19:03:00.001-07:00

images ALEXA GARVOILLE
fiction HOLLY JENSEN
comic NIK GARVOILLE
poetry KEITH RADKE

This issue of FOLIO made possible by SUSAN GILBERT.
Thank you for reading.

Issue No. 15, Flight

2009-04-17T13:49:00.001-07:00

Issue No. 15, Flight - Letters to Iqbal

2009-04-17T13:42:00.001-07:00

Dearest Iqbal,

Every time I get back the automated response from you, I reread it, searching through those uniform sentences for a tone, a double meaning, a hint I may have missed in the past or that has evolved over the time you have spent out of country.

Think of the changes that have become manifest since you were last here. My middle name is still the same, and the color of the sun is pretty consistent, and 4 is still NBC, but changes that have been occurring over our lifetimes have become distinctly manifest, and that is usually the moment that matters.

In this sense we miss the boat. We mistake a hundred million grains of sand for a dune. It reminds me of Borges’s “Argumentum Ornithologicum”:

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer—not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc—is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.

Now of course there is a slight glibness to Borges (detectable in the title and the unnecessary “ergo”). Speaking from experience I can tell you that librarians (even blind ones) have a sense of humor. But isn’t he quite right?

It reminds me of The Gospel According to Luke, Chapter 12. Luke quotes Christ as saying, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” (Conveniently mirrored in Matthew 10:29: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.”)

Of course, suggesting that 2.5 sparrows can be had for a penny is absurd. Is Luke suggesting that Christ thought you could buy half a sparrow? I thought sparrows were chosen in this anecdote because they are small and essentially indivisible.

And then Matthew further complicates things. Are two sparrows sold for a penny? I don’t know, you tell me! If they are, then the price of 2 sparrows is one penny, which is not the same price that Luke quotes. Now if they can’t keep the price of sparrows straight, maybe they’re wrong about other stuff. Maybe Matthew meant, “Some of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your father,” or Luke, “God lost count of the hairs on your head.”

The two quotes, however absurd, do go hand in hand with the Borges piece, no? Birds are an ideal vehicle for ontological discussion. First: they often travel in flocks, which happily blur the line between independent creatures (each of which is numbered) and a collective identity being guided by a divine or all-powerful force. Second: they fly! Nothing reminds us more of the rules we must follow than seeing them broken. In fact, I’d say we can’t recognize something as a rule unless we see it broken. No?

Hope all is well!

Robert de Saint-Loup

*

Thank you for your e-mail. I am currently in Tanzania/Zanzibar doing research for the year and will have limited internet access. It will take some time for me to respond.

My new cell is: +XXX (X)XXX XXX-XXX

Have a wonderful and blessed day.

Asante (thank you),

Iqbal

From http://losttimenotfound.blogspot.com

Issue No. 15, Flight - Fragments

2009-04-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

When Chester complained to his father about the climbing rope in gym class, Chester’s father knew just what to do. He was a pilot and could not abide a fear of heights in his children. He found a rope, nearly a mile in length, and fastened it to the end of his next flight to Cleveland. The other end was given to Chester, who was instructed to stand in the street outside their home. “Wrap it around your arm once or twice,” said Chester’s father, “maybe around your waist. But not too tightly.” So Chester stood while his classmates were climbing ropes in school. He waited the whole morning for his father to reach the airport and board the passengers. The myriad ways of connecting the rope to his person passed the time, but soon he heard the rippling of atmosphere above him and, looking up, saw Flight 1407 approaching his neighborhood. The rope brushed through the trees, scaring the birds, and on the street before Chester it picked up like fire following a line of gasoline. With a tremendous strain on his forearms and palms, Chester traveled to Cleveland. The most experienced of passengers felt a slight drag but thought nothing of it. Chester skidded across a frozen lake and, when he stood up, complained only of rope burn.

*

Morose and ill at ease, the superhero sat at home watching television. There was a blindfolded soldier on TV cleaning his gun. One channel up a blindfolded mechanic was replacing a timing belt. On the channel above that a blindfolded chef was preparing a risotto. The superhero felt insecure. Super as he was, he did his job fully sighted. Gradually though he grew inspired. “I can do this,” he said. He tugged his cape out of his collar and pulled it over his face, covering his head. It looked like an onion was bobbing between his shoulders. “I can do this!” He took a running start at his window and crushed the framed Dali print to its right.

*

The soon-to-be martyr eyed with loathing the conservatively dressed businessman at the other side of the gate. The businessman’s style of dress was exactly the one the martyr was forced to copy, and of course it was the businessman’s values he was forced to destroy. His betters thought the sockless loafers, suit jacket, and open collar would dispel the connotations of the dark pigment in his face. But it was no good. The martyr felt a fool. He saw a young man at the window. The man wore a polo shirt under a trench coat, brown corduroy pants, and suede dress shoes. The clothes suggested to the martyr an intellectual rigor, a seriousness and sense of purpose. “I should want to look like him,” he said, and pulled his loafers back under the seat.

*

Years after Flight 497 flew into the Sears Tower from Dallas, a reporter at the Tribune wrote a piece about everyone between the two cities who might have seen the plane on its way north.

“The high-flying bird and the current of its white wake,” he wrote, “entered into the daydreams of lounging Midwesterners before becoming a part of their nightmares minutes later. Men looking up from a lawn mower that wouldn’t rev up and children not reading in hammocks saw in that plane the place they wanted to be—a flight attendant handing off a cold Coke, the chance to look down at the clouds when everyone else is asleep then joining them with a pillow you find above your seat.”

The reporter told his subjects that the plane they had been gazing at was the same plane on TV. Several of the interviewees later stated they had a hard time looking at the sky again, which in the Midwest is a difficult thing to be afraid of.

*

The head librarian of the Carnegie Library enlisted all the children’s reading groups to stop reading and comb the stacks. He wanted every book thumbed so that the boarding passes left in as bookmarks could be irrevocably removed. Those passes irked him, and the closer they were to the front the more they irked him: obnoxious proof that the patrons were up to finishing their journey but not their book.

*

No aspiring oil painter can begin his working life as an oil painter, which is why, at the age of twenty-five, Louis became a flight attendant. He enjoyed the travel, the chance to meet a wide variety of people, and the time it gave him between drink services to catch up on a canvas.

I happened to be in seat 1A on a flight between New York and Raleigh when Louis asked politely if he could paint my portrait. Since I was already locked in place, I agreed. Frankly the attention flattered me. I asked him which pose he liked best: reading, sleeping, looking out the window. He suggested something more classical, my chin on my hand, my eyes unfocused towards something in the distance. Once I was posed, Louis set about sketching.

It made the flight seem shorter, or longer. I was more, or perhaps less, aware of everything around me. The sitting put me in a mood removed from time and space, not unlike the mood you get from flying itself.

Once we landed and the Fasten Seat Belt sign was switched off, Louis turned the canvas around for me to see.

At the outset he had told me he was going for something photo-realistic, but the pockets of turbulence had made it an abstract. Either way I was flattered. I asked him if I could take a picture of it with my cell phone, but he told me it wasn’t quite finished, that the colors weren’t right. He took a picture of me with his cell phone. “For guidance,” he said, then he asked for my contact information and thanked me again.

Meanwhile, everyone had already grabbed their bags from overhead and was ready to deplane. Louis stuffed his easel into the service cubby and began his goodbyes. The pilots opened their door to give their own goodbyes and, with one look at the paint splotches all over the front of the cabin, promptly upbraided poor Louis.

At the end of that month, I received via UPS my painted portrait. He really did get the colors right. He also sent me, along with the invoice, a snapshot of the interior of his plane. Each window was covered with a finished work. On the back he wrote a note: “The pilots calmed down. You can see their portraits in the front two seats.”

Issue No. 15, Flight - Credits

2009-04-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

cover BEN TUTTLE
drawings JILL OSTROWSKI
letter ANDREW FERRIS
fragments JONATHAN TUTTLE
design ALEXA GARVOILLE

this issue of FOLIO made possible by CHARLES PATTERSON

this is the penultimate issue of FOLIO

Issue No. 14, Piety

2009-02-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 14, Piety - The Children's Mass

2009-02-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

It was because of Penny’s, a twenty-four hour diner across the street from the rectory, that Father Ben was still asleep. He was folded comfortably in the corner of his twin bed, dressed in the same clerical get-up he fell asleep in hours prior and smelling of pie and cheddar cheese. The fresh typescript of his sermon lay on the floor, just polished at the bottom of a bottomless cup of coffee. It was the best homily of his budding career, and it would have come to rapturous applause if only he were awake enough to deliver it.

The phone rang, and, thinking it was his alarm clock, Father Ben shoved it off the nightstand. The ringing ceased, but the urgent cries of a Mexican woman began.

“Padre? Padre?”

Father Ben intoned a piece of his dream.

“Padre! Help me!”

Finally he picked the strange alarm clock up and spoke to it. “Yes…hello.”

“Padre Benjamin, help! I cannot come to mass this morning!”

“There is no mass this morning.” He sunk with the phone back into his pillows.

“Yes, ten-thirty mass.”

“No, no, today is…. What day is today?”

“Sunday.”

“What? What time is it now?”

“Ten twenty-five.”

Before Father Ben threw the phone across the room and dashed down the stairs, across the garden, and into the pulpit, the voice on the other end implored just two more minutes of his tardiness.

“Padre, you must help me.”

The procession was lined in the hall to the classrooms, every child in his or her place, when the greeter gave the cue to the usher, and the usher to the reader, and all the way down the rota until a quiet knock was given on the side doors, the bells rang, and the procession entered. Customarily, the rector’s was the first face seen, his hand on the shoulder of a preening child. But the child, in this case, entered alone.

The congregation sat back and observed the entering choristers, each head taller than the last. There were more children in the procession than there were adults in the pews. A boy in the middle paraded his faith, hoping to be seen as religious with furrowed brows and slipping glasses. A girl in the back threw her long, thick hair behind her to show off her perfectly shaped singing mouth. Distinct cliques of twos and threes passed gossip up the line. The procession flooded the aisles, and just before the youngest members left for religious education—only to return in time for the Eucharist and coffee hour—Father Ben excused his way into the sanctuary.

His hair was still under the impression a pillow was near and splayed out on one side. The ends of his oxford cloth came out of his fly. Toothpaste filled the corners of his lips. He squeezed up beside the procession leader, but she, and all the children behind her, promptly left. The congregation was riveted by his Sponge Bob slippers.

Rather than take his seat beside the altar and listen to the lessons, Father Ben stood still and gave a nervous scan over the heads. The musical director smoothed things over with a speedy launch into an old favorite, pulling everyone out of their confusion and into their hymnals. The diversion was good enough for Pat and her son Peter, who had both come in late, to settle in unnoticed–unnoticed, that is, until it became clear Father Ben was running towards them.

Peter was an intensely small boy. Though no older or younger than the children in the middle of the procession, he entered eye-level with the tops of the pews. His blond bobble looked as though a broken bowl had been used to form his hair. His bangs began normally enough on the left then jutted down in an extreme angle to the right, covering his eye. He did not object to the barber, being only dimly aware that he could. He let the scissors do what they wanted.

The greeter did not allow latecomers to enter the sanctuary until the procession was over, so Pat, proud owner of a bushy new perm, killed time brushing up on her theology, “Anglo-Catholic Real Presence,” with complimentary brochures. She stuffed them into her fanny pack as quickly as she could when Father Ben kneeled in front of her. Over the robust singing of the baritone beside him, Peter could hear none of Father Ben’s obviously grave remarks, and once the hymn came to the end of its sixteenth refrain, the rector gave a squeeze to Pat’s arm and stepped away.

The crowd took their seats, and Father Ben the pulpit. Realizing he had left on his bed what was possibly the best homily he had written since that first competitive week at Divinity, Father Ben took a swig of air and winged it for what was to be the shortest homily delivered in the history of St. Marge.

Throughout the service, Pat leaned down to Peter and attempted to explain the conversation she had with Father Ben. But there were countless interruptions, and the clatter of kneelers hitting the floor finally drowned her out completely. As Father Ben broke the bread and distributed it to the visiting clergy, Pat bit her nails. A line of sweat marched down her forehead. Any outside observer, including Peter, would have thought she had only fifteen seconds to diffuse a bomb beneath the crucifix.

“Everything will be revealed” was the cue for the first pew to file out for their bread. When they were through, the next pew followed, and so on. Soon, after everyone in front of them was reeling in the ecstasy of their one drop of wine that week, it was Pat and Peter’s turn. “Come on, go, go!” Pat said, pushing Peter down the aisle. He was confused, but not alarmed. After a lifetime of single file lines, this was merely a new flow to go with.

At the fence between congregants and clergy, they kneeled together. Father Ben mumbled the usual, though he too was sweating. He gave Pat a bit of crust as if he were offering a secret, and Pat swallowed as if she already understood. But instead of rising and rejoining the line, Pat remained, her hands clasped, staring at Peter. His bit of bread, this one from the middle of the loaf, pale and airy, with wide caves running through it, was placed in his hand. Peter put the bread in his mouth and looked up to the deacon carrying the wine. As she came forward with her own mumbles, Pat took Peter by the neck, put one hand in front of his mouth, and with the other slapped the back of his head. The bread popped out, undisturbed, onto her palm.

“Where are we going?” asked Peter.

Pat was driving with an abandon he had never seen, cutting corners, running red lights. He wondered if it was possible to be kidnapped by one’s own mother.

After “Peace be with you” Pat skipped down the steps outside the church. She led Peter to the car by the scruff of his neck and bolted out the parking lot, the bread deposited safely in her pocket. Peter eyed it as his mother careened across town.

“Where we always go,” she said.

The Taco Bell parking lot was empty and Peter wondered if it was even open. They had never been there that early.

The tables were still gleaming from last night’s wipe down. It was as cold as ever, though the dance music wasn’t on yet. The woman in the headscarf, who was usually confined to the kitchen, stood on a table trying to slide a peeling advertisement back onto the window. With a strong reach her cardigan slipped above her waist and she struggled, balancing on one foot, to cover her lower back with one hand and preserve the Ninety-Nine Cent Taco sign with the other.

Pat wound her way through the railings in front of the cash register, which would have, on a normal day, made her feel a bit ridiculous. Peter did not enter the maze, but hung back at the door, and watched.

His mother’s mysterious rush was interrupted by the absence of a cashier. Pat tapped the bulge in her pocket and looked at the menu as she waited, even considered changing her usual. She noticed the television monitor above the drive-through window. Hoping she wasn’t the only one who could see it, she waved at the security camera, then put her palms together as if in prayer. Still, no one came out and Pat contented herself to try a few quarters on the Missing Children coin game beside the register.

Peter noticed the monitor too and saw himself standing in front of the number 3’6’’ on the notched strip by the door. Peering further into the grainy image, he could just make out, on the other side of the trashcan, the shape of a child. It was sitting at a booth, and upon close inspection of the back of its head, Peter determined it was a girl. Just as he was about to creep around the trashcan to get a better look at the person capable of matching Taco Bell’s eerie silence, a small Mexican woman came running out from the walk-in refrigerator.

“I so sorry!” she said. “We have accident with toys!” A bag of Jonas Brothers was caught around her ankle. “You are Pat? Pat?”

“Yes,” said Pat. “From St. Marge. Are you Alba?”

“Sí, sí. Do you have it?”

Pat reached into her pocket and pulled out the bread.

Alba put her hand on her heart and let out an enormous sigh. “Sancta Maria!”

“I’m glad we could do this for you.”

“I never work Sundays,” she said, still tragically worked up. “I hate it. This Sunday they made me.”

Pat shook her head disapprovingly.

“I told Juliet her grandmother could take her to church. She say no, she want to stay with me. I told her I had to work. She say she wouldn’t go without me. We have big fight.”

Pat tried to remember a time she fought with Peter, but couldn’t. “Where is she?”

It looked to Peter like Alba was pointing at him. He backed up into the measuring tape.

Pat turned around and, without warning, took the bread out of her pocket and threw it to him. It was a gutsy move on Pat’s part, knowing full well that Peter had only ever heard the words “Good try!” after attempting a catch. The bread flew over the railings with all the force of his mother’s and Alba’s combined prayers that he would catch it. He did.

“Right there,” said Pat, pointing. “Give it to her!”

Peter pulled himself onto his tiptoes to get a good look over the trashcan. Failing, he stepped around it and approached the rather sizable child. Bright plastic pins decorated her long, dark braids, over which a set of headphones pumped the New Kids on the Block—a fifty-cent Good Will cassette—into her ears. The table was covered with markers spilling out of a marked-up Ziploc bag. She was exhausting the possibilities of an old coloring book.

“Give it to her!” said Pat, frustrated Peter did not already understand.

But Cher finally came on over the speakers and Peter could not comprehend his orders. He lifted the bread. “This?” he said.

“Go on!”

Alba clasped her hands and mouthed “please.”

The door opened and a handsome family of four walked in, gussied and hungry and tipsy from the wine. The post-church families had made it out of coffee hour. The mother and father stood behind Pat at the register while the son and daughter ran to the back booth, indifferent to the woman in the headscarf standing on their table, who squealed like an elephant at the sight of mice and moved a booth over.

Pat was reluctant to give up her space beside Alba. The mother and father were standing there for legitimate reasons but it was hard to imagine those were more important than hers. They would have to wait.

Peter came up to the edge of the table, bread in hand. Juliet did not appear to notice him, or if she did, she did not consider him a valid replacement for her coloring. She kept on scribbling.

Another family entered, of a different sect altogether. They had no khakis but long denim shorts and camouflage t-shirts. The children were taller than the parents and talked about ordering twice as much food.

A boy Peter’s age came in wearing a T-ball uniform, which Peter knew meant there were more to follow. Fourteen kids in stretch-pants and caps, their coaches and parents, lined behind the camouflaged teenagers at the counter, every child in his or her place.

Where Peter was confused at first he was now a bit frightened. The people behind him further separated his understanding from his mother’s wishes. He knew that he was put in front of this girl. He knew he had some bread in his hands. The only possible outcome of these two pieces of information, and the action that would bring this whole strange business to a close, was to hold out his hand. He held out his hand.

A station wagon pulled up outside the window. At first it tried to merge into the drive-thru lane, but a few honks forced it to park. Juliet did not notice the honks or the outstretched hand, which remained outstretched while Peter’s attention was diverted.

A boy hopped out of the back seat of the station wagon. He had a thick coating of freckles over his face and red, Chef Boyardee stains around his mouth. The boy was fast, and his mother cruelly slow in removing herself from the driver’s seat. He danced and jittered beside the car as if she were the burden of a full bladder set to burst. And when the locking beep finally beeped, it was his shotgun cue to bolt at the Taco Bell doors. He ran past the girls sauntering to the door in their sleepover pants and flew inside.

Peter watched him swing around the railings, playing chicken with the customers’ legs. Shoving his way to the front, he tried to push the quarter game over the counter. He shouted numbers back at the kitchen. He attempted to swipe the sour cream gun, and when someone told him to stop, he ran over to the soda fountain, licked his finger, and stuck it up the Pepsi.

Peter was transfixed, and when the ADD boy caught him staring, Peter rushed his eyes back to his hand, which was empty. Juliet was still coloring but chewing now, and when she was finished she took a swig of her soda. She did not say “Thank you,” smile, or even turn off her music. She swallowed and returned to her coloring.

Peter turned back to his mother, who was still behind the impatient crowd. She lifted a very proud thumbs-up above the other heads. Alba said a short prayer under her breath and started to work the line.

Soon Pat and Peter could slide into their own booth. Pat pulled the church brochures from her bag––the Mexican Pizza tasted best with reading material–and Peter read the jokes on the back of the sauce packets. Although he was never allowed to use them on his food (Pat forbade it, saying even Mild was Fire and Fire would make his tongue hurt) he thought they might be good on their own as play things, a little skateboard for your fingers when your tacos were gone. Peter picked up eight, seven Milds and a Fire, precisely the amount he saw the ADD boy stuff into his pockets.

“Good Gosh!” said Pat. A piece of Mexican Pizza slid out of her mouth. She pointed to the picture on her brochure of the hands holding up the wafer. “We forgot about you!”

She sat back and shifted her eyes nervously around the table. “Should we—we have to call Father Ben!” She dove into her purse for her cell phone. Peter heard the dialing on the other end and eventually Father Ben’s startled greeting.

“Father Ben!” said Pat. “You have to come and consecrate something!”

Peter smiled and closed his fingers around the Fire packet in his palm.

Issue No. 14, Piety - SOC (for cabin fever)

2009-02-15T11:19:00.000-08:00

it’s an ailing life methinks…
The pine straw stinks of stars and alien links
to an after-life I’ll never see…
To the shining soul I’ll never be…
What has become of me, what has begun in me
that now stings at the core of abandoned hives?

The links in me brain are forging a head
with which I’m no longer familiar…
There is a bird in my vernacular I can recognize
only as vermillion…ooh as scarlet as wine-dark seas…
The trees flow ‘gainst the sky much as fire flows
through oxygen, much as flames blow through the stanchions
of mis-appropriated and bank-vacated farms…

These recent days pass by unalarmed…
Scarlet letters burn in my mailbox…
I have no votive candles to proffer
the inquisitors of my air of privacy.

Issue No. 14, Piety - Credits

2009-02-15T11:13:00.001-08:00

cover KATIE CLAIBORNE
fiction JONATHAN TUTTLE
photography ALEXA GARVOILLE
poetry J. WILLE G.
drawing BEN TUTTLE

this issue of FOLIO made possible by BOB DRIES

FOLIO Has Been Institutionalized

2008-10-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

This past week, a lone cataloger deep in Wilson Library has been hard at work preserving issues 1-13 of FOLIO for the North Carolina Collection.

Issue No. 13, Secrecy

2008-09-13T09:43:00.001-07:00

Issue No. 13, Secrecy - Who

2008-09-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

FOLIO is produced by a group of young literati in the eighth floor janitor's closet of the university library.

Issue No. 13, Secrecy - The Arsonists

2008-09-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

Strange pieces of information began to trickle in. We discovered the arsonists formed at a Whole Foods Café as a Meet-Up group. We found this after one of the guys googled “the arsonists.” But just before we could jot down their names the page disappeared. If you google them now all you’ll find are local news videos, coverage of the eleven apartment fires this year. They torch whole units within the complexes. Twenty-two freestanding chimneys stick out from the apartment section of town now, looming over the charred toilets and air conditioners like Greek ruins. Displaced students are washing their hair in library bathrooms, young investment bankers are crashing on friends’ sofas, and divorced fathers are spending the weekends with their children at a Four Seasons pool—then heading back to their Day’s Inn for the week.

As a small promotion, the Force assigned me to live undercover at the one apartment complex not yet touched by the arsonists. When I told my wife, she ran into the bedroom and slammed the door; her usual strategy: protesting her neglect by becoming unreachable. “Fine!” she screamed. “Go!” I told her I’d miss her and packed up my plainclothes.

The woman at the apartment office, Judy, also had a hard time understanding. “A lease?” she said. “For three weeks?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I don’t have any pets.”

After whispered calls to my boss and hers, I signed a lease and she bit her nails. “Do you really think there’s a chance?” she said. “I mean of us too?”

The prospect put a damper on our tour of the premises. “The pool is fairly large. Second rated in the county. That could put out a fire, couldn’t it? If we got a line of people and some buckets?”

The complex was complicated, a labyrinth of earth-toned pods set back in the trees. It was Fall and the dogwoods weren’t close to blooming, so I assumed the white dust on most of the cars was ash, the remains of nearby apartments. The observation pleased me. I had to keep my eyes open for work like this, and I had to see things differently. I had to keep a record. The job as I saw it, a large one, was to protect everyone in the apartment complex without drawing the attention of anyone but my superiors. It was daunting.

“And this is Mr. Clyde,” said Judy, pointing to a man in a wheelchair sitting on a second-story porch. “He’ll be your upstairs neighbor.”

“I see. Where is the elevator?”

“No elevator.”

“And he lives upstairs?”

“Yes, the one-bedroom below him is yours. It would have been Mr. Clyde’s of course, but since this is an emergency…”

“No, no, I can take the upstairs apartment, that’s not a problem.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”

“But how does Mr. Clyde even get out?”

“He doesn’t. Well, he has his porch.”

I waved, with guilt, to Mr. Clyde. He did not wave back.

For some reason I thought the apartment would come with furniture, or at least the Force would have pitched in for an air mattress. As it was, all I had was a folder of take-out menus from Judy and an icemaker in the freezer that sounded like two barges slowly colliding. My one-bedroom had a half-bath, a cute kitchenette, and a parking lot view. There was an obvious carpet cleaning done recently; the floors could not have been more perfectly off-white, nor the walls or ceiling for that matter. I’m sure I was to be fined if I left the apartment any more or any less off-white than I had found it. I wondered what they’d charge me if the place were burnt down.

Unsure of the rules on how often I could leave my post, I snuck out for furniture as fast as I could. I found a small couch in town and, since it looked lonely without, a TV too. I drew up a supply list once I got back. I thought about walkie-talkies; binoculars, maybe passing them off as a bird enthusiasm. I wondered if the apartment had a fire extinguisher. And did the fire alarms work? I made a note to check them once I got a chair, or at least the strength to move the couch. I also needed a place to hide my gun, because if I wanted to look out, I had to allow for people, arsonists, looking in. The only potential place was under my new cushions. I pushed the gun under and fluffed, which gave me an excuse to sit down, turn on the TV, lie down.

A twilight descended that was utterly unlike the ones we had in my neighborhood. There were things to see and so I strained to see them, but the effort made everything seem impossible. If it were night and black, I think I could have seen better. I could have the moon or a light bulb. But this was just mud. A fluorescent streetlight outside the living room window buzzed on. The dull noise was terrible.

I didn’t know the apartment came with cable, but there it was. I clicked up past the static and the game shows and the sitcoms and soon enough I was in the mid-twenties. I settled on a favorite, the Discovery Channel, and they happened to be discussing my favorite Discovery Channel subject, the universe. I like to think about infinity from my couch, like where it starts and what’s at the end of it. Seeing those Hubble Telescope pictures in my new apartment made me feel at home. And it wasn’t just me. Soon I noticed that, with a two-second delay, the same show was playing upstairs. Mr. Clyde and I were learning about strangelets.

But I could tell the cushions were taking me under. I had bought a comfortable couch. However, I vowed to stay vigilant. There were no striking matches, but I noted the sensory street lights coming on, the sliding glass doors being shut. I heard a dried leaf scrape against the pavement like a cracked and upturned dinner plate.

The next morning I set out for some research under the cover of a leisurely stroll through beautiful autumn weather. Although I had the look of an aged man enjoying his daily allotment of fresh air—a shaggy crew cut kept in nostalgia for the Marines, a sweatshirt over a shameful stomach—in truth, I was secretly scanning the islands of landscaping for signs of potential arson. Perhaps the arsonists had scouts, and perhaps these scouts left clues.

There were sirens rising up from the north. Hopefully not a fire, I thought, half out of genuine concern and half out of envy I couldn’t be there catching the bastards myself. I was on the other side of the complex when my wife buzzed in my pocket. I realized just before I answered that in my fatigue the night before I had forgotten to call and check in, tell her how my first day on the job went. I had never been away from my family like that, and admittedly, the etiquette escaped me.

But from the tone of her voice after I apologized, I gathered my wife did not mind the missed phone call. Without pleasantry, she told me that my daughter, Maddy, was deep in a science project and making too big a mess in the house. Since I had the space, she said, there was no reason Maddy couldn’t come over and make a mess of my place. “Saturday can be your day,” she said.

I was happy to see my daughter but worried about the amount of work left to do. My undercover jaunt had turned up nothing and there were only so many excuses I could give for picking through mulch in flowerbeds. But it was a nice walk. Surprisingly, the apartment complex was even quieter than our subdevelopment. There were no lawns to be mowed. No ice cream truck jingles. No teenagers roaring through on the Jeeps they got for Christmas. They would have been forced to a crawl like everyone else, portaging over the yellow, half-acre speed bumps that the Brits call, hideously, “sleeping policemen.”

I was shaking my head at the name, trying to get the image out, when, coming up on my apartment, I saw my daughter standing at the door. She had a camcorder and tripod in one arm, a three-part folding poster board in the other. At the exit back to the road, I saw my wife’s car pulling away.

“Hey, Roland!” Maddy called. “Nice crib!”

Since she was two and I decided to tell her the truth, my daughter has always called me by my first name. “Thanks for getting all the furniture out of here, Roland,” she said once inside. “We’re gonna need all the space we can get.” Maddy pushed my couch into the closet and unfolded her tripod.

“Do you want anything?” I said. “If you hold your nose the tap water’s all right.”

She was busy drawing little squares into her notebook—the one with the dolphins flying through space on the cover—then filling the squares with arrows and stick figures. It made me think I should have been doing the same, noting the measurements of apartment units, locations of the best escape routes, etc. My daughter has always had a way of making me feel less professional.

As she scouted locations, an idea began to take shape in my mind, perhaps inspired by Maddy, of an extensive fire-drill plan for everyone in the complex. I would have to pass out fliers to set up a time. Maybe the promise of a barbecue afterwards would get the job done.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” said Maddy.

I had never heard anyone use a knocker before and I guess it went unnoticed. Looking through the peephole, I found four or five mops of unkempt hair around the bottom. I opened the door.
“Maddy’s father?” said the child in front.

I recognized him, and a few behind him, from Maddy’s school plays.

Maddy pushed me out of the doorway and ushered them in. “Joseph, did you bring the chair?” she said to the short one.

He held up a collapsible wheelchair.

“Alex, did you bring your iPod?” she asked another.

His headphones fell out of his pocket.

“Benjamin, what about the sticks?”

Benjamin pulled a movie clapboard and a pack of chalk from his jacket. It seemed I wasn’t alone in wanting to work as hard as Maddy.

The knocker knocked again, and in the peephole I found another swarm of classmates.

“Get in here! You’re late!” said Maddy.

The place was quickly packed. I was in permanent danger of being toppled by Maddy’s gophers and yes-men. My only choice was to pull up a chair in the back and watch, maybe jot a few notes for my fire drill.

Maddy yelled and a kid slammed a clapboard in front of Joseph’s face. His legs were dangling over the wheelchair’s footrests and his head sat slumped into his collarbone. His hands hung over his lap, holding the iPod.

“Dr. Hawking,” said a boy sitting next to him. “Tell us: what’s at the end of the universe?”

Joseph made a few clicks on his iPod and a few tics with his lip while another boy standing over by Maddy spoke into a toy megaphone. “Space and imaginary time together,” he said, his voice now deep and electronic, “are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. That would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have any boundaries or edges. I have been round the world, and I didn’t fall off.”

Another question was asked and again Joseph pulled up his lip and clicked his iPod, keeping his eyes fixed ahead of him with hints of curiosity and delight. The less he moved, the more his eyes seemed interested, ambitious, wild. Maddy cast well.

“Take five!” she yelled.

Joseph jumped up and ran around the building, just to stretch.

I was impressed. It all sounded like something I could have heard on TV. “You’ll get an A plus,” I said to a student. “I’m sure of it.”

“We’ll see,” said the child. “The other group is shooting in the planetarium.”

The afternoon turned out to be as productive as the morning. Stephen Hawking himself was floating through my apartment, speaking simply and powerfully about the collapse of hydrogen giants. “That was stunning!” I said to Maddy after a take. “You have a real talent.” And she did. But I realized that the time I spent sitting in amazement of her hard work was just that: time spent sitting. The little notebook I had vowed to fill slipped from my lap, and just when I noticed, Maddy yelled, “That’s a wrap!”

A knock came at the door and the pizzas I ordered were welcomed inside. Someone hooked up the camera to my little TV and soon we were all putting back our third slice and reviewing the day’s work. The students were entranced, laughing and boasting, glued to the screen while I stole another slice.

But Maddy was doubtful of her success. “Something’s missing, something’s missing,” she would mumble, and her minions passed it on. Soon I noticed some students laying down their pizza and picking up equipment.

“What’s wrong? Do you guys want ice cream?” I said to a few.

“We’ve been dismissed,” they said.

Cell phones were brought out and parents dialed. Students were leaving in twos and threes, faster than I could say goodbye. A long line of headlights stretched outside, and I waved blindly, proving myself a responsible chaperone.

A few of the headlights suddenly switched off. I braced myself for confrontation—“Do you know how late it is?” “My Ethan should not be working this hard on a science project!”—but saw instead only college kids, slamming their doors and walking up to the apartment across the way.

The lights inside that apartment got brighter, music came on, and I could feel the bass. I began to wonder if the arsonists weren’t already embedded in an apartment just as I was. Did they have the resources for something like that? I wanted desperately to know if that beer had Whole Foods labels on it; perhaps that was the alcohol they used to spread the flames.

I rushed back to my notebook to mark every flip-flop and lower-back tattoo I saw. It felt good to finally have an idea. “Sorry, sir, my daughter was making a fascinating video” would be some excuse for the Chief.

“Whatcha doing?” Maddy said. The camera and tripod were again slung over her shoulder and the three-part poster board, now covered in banners and photos, was in her arm.

“Drawing a thong,” I said.

“Thanks for letting us use your place.” She walked over to the door. One more pair of headlights had come to rest behind her. They switched on to high beams and Maddy leaned in for a hug. “I don’t want her to think you’re keeping me.”

The lights were still bright in the apartment opposite. Their sliding porch door opened and voices—singing, laughing, shouting curses—filled the parking lot. I told myself I had no proof that they were arsonists, which helped assuage the cowardice, and retreated quickly behind my door.

Pizza crusts and plastic plates awaited my return on the living room floor, but I didn’t mind. It was a nice reminder of a nice day, what I had and the alleged maniacs across the street did not. I speed-dialed a friend. “You wouldn’t mind sending a couple of rookies out on a noise complaint, would you?” Brushing a few breadsticks into the crack between the cushions, I sat down and kept my fingers between the blinds until the uniforms came. I had a good laugh. The revelers would have to shut up and the recruits would have to suffer their abuse. But when I saw one of the college kids open the door and invite the cops in, I grew gloomy and turned up the volume on the Discovery Channel.

Again, the subject was the universe. Meteors were falling over a desert. It was a moving sight, especially coupled with the soothing rain sound effect. The light changed shape and soon the stars were water being poured into a fishbowl. A fish appeared rounding the bowl over and over and I felt a little bad for it. A deep voice came on telling me that although the fish could never leave the bowl, I shouldn’t pity it, because the line it swam was endless.

“How’s that supposed to make me feel any better?” I thought, and I might have said it out loud. “It would get so bored! And it could leave if it wanted to. Don’t some fish jump?”

“If it jumped it would die,” said the narrator.

“Well,” I reasoned, “that’s a form of leaving, isn’t it?”

The voice grew impatient. “Nevermind! You are stealing this from Mr. Clyde!”

The meteors came back. I heard the rain again, and an odd sound effect of dried leaves scuttering across pavement. A car ran over a speed bump, and, before I fell asleep, I said a short prayer for the policemen who had to sleep outside.

After I woke up I called Maddy’s cell phone but couldn’t get her. I tried her mother. “I’ve got a great idea for Maddy’s project,” I said. “Is she coming over today?”

“Just text her your idea.”

“You don’t understand, she has to be—”

My wife hung up. How’d she get so busy all of a sudden? I was the one with the job. There I was in my plainclothes underwear on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in a student’s apartment complex working my ass off. I reached for my notebook to prove it, but the spare scribbles I saw there reflected poorly on my discipline. I put on my pants. I would not waste the day.

With the notebook at my side I locked the apartment and set off into the field for inspiration. I managed to squeeze out a few half-hearted thoughts about removing the spare keys from under everyone’s mats, and a really laughable one about covering the grounds in dog crap. My idea: one squishy step and the arsonists would flee. But each thought was an embarrassment, an insult, and they quickly subsided to thoughts of Maddy’s project. Passing a dumpster, I had a strong urge to jump in and find some styrofoam I could sculpt into planets and moons, but I resisted.

The air was floral, pleasant. The revelers were passed out inside and the streets were mine. I felt flushed, warm, and as I walked further, hot. Up above the leasing office, a plume of smoke was drifting. I thought, Already? I had only begun to take notes, my phone was inside; I wasn’t prepared! But how was I to put that in the report? I jogged towards the plume, hoping the arsonists were not far behind, or at least the fire not too far gone.

At the office I saw nothing. The doors were locked, the lights out, and the smoke continued. The mini-gym was empty too, though the TV was blaring. I pounded on the doors of the the mini-laundromat, heard the pennies and buttons tossed around in the driers. I ran around the back, not having the presence of mind enough to look for footprints or lighters. The back of the laundromat was as pretty as the front, painted and landscaped. The grass grew flush with the first line of mortar in the bricks, where a pipe extended letting out hot air from the dryers, which met the cold air outside and—of course—turned thick white.

I sat down on the grass, up against the bricks, and tried to focus on that amazing floral air. At least there was no one to see me running around, I thought. In that sense a catastrophe was truly averted.

“Hey. Why don’t you keep a key under your mat?”

Maddy was standing over me. The light on the front of her camera was red.

I offered Maddy the leftover pizza back at the apartment. “It was a real treat to watch you work yesterday. How do you feel it went?”

“So, so,” she said, spooning the cream out of a Twinkie. “We haven’t hit it yet.”

“Hit it?”

“Hmm. Haven’t hit the core yet, the juicy bits.”

“I don’t know a lot about juicy bits, but I’m glad you brought your camera. I’ve been thinking about your film, and I wanted to introduce you to my neighbor, Mr. Clyde. I think he could add a really authentic touch. Not that Joseph isn’t any good, but why not make this a documentary?”

Maddy seemed intrigued. She consumed three more deboned Twinkies before her camera was done charging and I escorted her upstairs.

“Is it on?” I said outside Mr. Clyde’s door. “Are you ready?”

Maddy snapped her fingers in front of the camera. “Testing. One, two.” She gave me a thumbs up, looking even more professional than she did yesterday.

I looked into the little screen she switched around to face me and brushed the sleep out of my eyes. Then I knocked on the door. And I knocked again.

“Not home?” said Maddy.

“He can’t leave!” I craned my neck to peek through the windows but his blinds were closed. I turned to Maddy and sighed.

“Just push it open,” said a voice behind the door.

Maddy nodded me on.

Wheeling back slowly into the hallway was Mr. Clyde, a toy periscope in his tiny hands. “It’s how I look through the peephole,” he said.

Mr. Clyde was probably a small man even standing up. His banana peel body fell to one side of his chair. His slacks looked pressed; his shoes were tied. A piece of string wrapped around his globular head connected the ends of his glasses.

“Excuse me, Mr. Clyde,” said Maddy, the viewfinder still cupping her eye. “I’m leading a science project about Stephen Hawking.” Leave it to Maddy to ditch the small talk. “My father suggested I interview you about your similarities with Dr. Hawking.”

Mr. Clyde smiled. “I don’t know if I’ll be much help,” he said. “But come in, come in.”

Mr. Clyde gestured toward his living room arrangement and we sat down on his sofa, a shade more faded and an inch less poofy than mine. I wondered who, if anyone, had ever sat on it before. I never heard any footsteps when I was downstairs, so I don’t think he had any visitors. The sofa served a more general purpose. He could not use his legs, and yet he had them. The same was true for his sofa.

“I apologize for the spare set-up,” said Maddy. “I usually have a crew with me, lights, microphones. I’m afraid I’m as unprepared for this as you are”—she glared at me—“Could I ask you to say something for me?”

“Say something?” said Mr. Clyde.

“A little more.”

“What would you like me to say?”

“Got it.” She looked up from the rising and falling lines on her little screen. “How long have you been using a wheelchair, Mr. Clyde?”

“Since I was a teenager.”

“What were you like as a teenager?”

“Normal.”

“Were you passionate about science then too?”

“I was never any good at science.”

“Does your limited physical space give you free reign over a vast, uncharted mental space?”

“I like things quiet.”

It occurred to me I should have been more specific in describing what I knew about Mr. Clyde. But this was an awkward time to clear things up. I urged Maddy on.

“Mr. Clyde,” she continued, “do you find people discount your intellect on account of your condition? How do you cope with that?”

“People are generally very nice.”

“When did you notice you were losing your mobility?”

“After the car crash.”

“Is your family supportive of your research?”

“I have a stamp collection. Do you mean are they supportive of my stamp collection?”

Maddy turned to me, put her palm over the mic, and sighed.

I felt she was asking for my help. The camera was rolling and, subject or no subject, she needed a film. If I couldn’t find any arsonists, I could at least make a good eighth-grade science project. “All right,” I said. “Now we won’t take up too much more of your time, but I think we’re ready to delve into some juicy bits. Sound ok?”

“Ok,” said Mr. Clyde.

“In your opinion, does the universe have a boundary?”

“A boundary?”

“An edge.”

“Does it?”

“Let’s say you think it does. Now, can the universe still be infinite?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

Maddy was turning red, and not her embarrassed shade, the angry one. I needed to prove to her that I retained at least some small part of yesterday’s work. “Well, Mr. Clyde, I know a certain Stephen Hawking who would be very disappointed in you.”

“I don’t follow classical music.”

“Stephen Hawking! He’s all over TV!”

“I don’t watch much TV.”

“Well, I wouldn’t either, but there’s nothing else to do here! And it’s free!”

“Yours is free? I pay every month.”

“Well, thank you Mr. Clyde. I think we got everything we need.” I was getting a little angry too. Mr. Clyde’s paraplegia did not affect his brain, so it wasn’t a total tragedy. The tragedy was that his brain wasn’t that great to begin with. Unlike Hawking, Mr. Clyde’s dead-fish expression had less to do with his condition than with his dead-fish thoughts.

“I hope your video comes out well,” he said, wheeling behind us to the door.

“We do too,” I said. “We’ll try and get you a copy when it comes out.”

“No we won’t,” Maddy whispered.

I followed her out, but stopped, remembering my own work. “You wouldn’t happen to hear anything strange outside your apartment at night, would you Mr. Clyde? Anything suspicious? Footsteps? Sort of like leaves blowing?”

“I hear leaves blowing,” he said.

“Hmm, I hear that too.”

Maddy wouldn’t talk to me once we got downstairs. She called her mother for a ride and waited on the sofa. I would have gladly offered to take her back home myself if I didn’t think she’d bite my head off. I wanted to apologize to Maddy in the car for ruining her project when I couldn’t save my own. And if she didn’t want to go back home, if she wanted to go to the mall, or the movies, I would have done that too.

But my wife pulled up outside and honked. Maddy walked out without a goodbye and I was alone again. I should have closed all the blinds and turned on all the lights. I should have microwaved some hot chocolate and stoked the fake fire. The twilight was still very depressing. But I did nothing. On went the television, one more window for that cheerless blue-grey light. Grainy images from the surfaces of other worlds were floating across the Discovery Channel.

Pretty soon Maddy would be home, my wife preparing dinner. My work kept me away, quite far away really. I could see the arsonists through the craters on TV. They sat at a table in the middle of a Whole Foods café just outside the universe. Though they were surrounded by people, trays of food flying over their heads, children running between their legs, they never seemed to mind. They were involved in a lively discussion, almost athletic, full of old embarrassing stories shouted across the table, whispered secrets, and snatches of song. They were white, black, Asian, Indian; but all young professionals, people who knew that the world was before them and they were invited inside.

If I stared a little harder, and concentrated, I could see a young man in black-framed glasses, something of a ringleader, conferring with a young woman beside him. He was listing numbers, addresses.

The young woman said, “Ski masks this time?”

He shook his head. “Too hot. Why bother?”

I saw an Asian girl bragging to a friend. “I’ve been pretending to read meters for three weeks and no one notices! With a few more readings, I can find a way to take out three units in a row next time!”

A shorter girl, the Tiny Tim of the group by the sympathetic smiles she garnered, sat on a bag of charcoal, permanently perfuming her adorable red pea coat. “Do you know the body is two-thirds water and it can light on fire?” she said. “The world is two-thirds water too.”

I blinked and realized I hadn’t blinked in ages. I couldn’t afford to. All this strange information was coming so fast. I wanted names, phone numbers.

But the fluorescent streetlight switched on outside and drowned the arsonists out. I listened for a moment past the buzzing, hoping they were still there. But I heard nothing. The leaves took up again outside my door, a slight wind pushing them across the porch. If I were an arsonist hiding from a policeman who was disguised as a renter, a loner, a divorcee, I would disguise myself as a leaf and tiptoe as if I were scraping along his porch.

Soothing thoughts of infinity crept in to claim me: sun spots, my daughter’s discipline, the length of my evenings, the fact that the Discovery Channel goes on discovering even while I sleep.

The fire started at twelve that night. When my eyelids fluttered open for a brief moment, I thought: someone’s doing laundry. It wasn’t until the fire came in through the fake fireplace and lit across the carpet that I fully woke up.

I cannot remember the order of my thoughts. I remember the TV was burning but still on. I remember appreciating the little there was to save. And I remember noticing the lack of any emergency procedure. There was no line of neighbors outside passing buckets of water up to the fire. No one stormed in and threw me over their shoulders. The notebook that detailed all of those plans was a flying fleck of ash in the kitchen.

I slid into my shoes, placed by the door for such an occasion, and ran out through the flames with my hands over my face, tired, disappointed, hot. I should have left my wallet inside; that way I would have something to complain about too. But, as it stood, I lost nothing.

From the parking lot, the building looked like a fancy wrapped gift. One long sheet of flame wrapped up from the bottom porch to the tallest chimney, coming together in a smart bow. The flames, like a candle’s flame, were not violent. There was barely any sound. The bugs had flown off the streetlight. I suppose they had something bigger in sight. I noticed also there was no late-night kegger behind me. It was a good night to be drunk somewhere else.

I took out my phone and decided to call the wife before I called the Chief. I told my answering machine I’d be coming home that night, that the job was over, and she wouldn’t have to worry anymore.

The arsonists were surely on the other side of town by then. All they had to do to admire their work was turn on the news. The TV vans were probably already on their way, the fire trucks following shortly behind.

Uninterested in seeing the roof cave in or the windows shatter, I got into my car. The flames left my rearview mirror minutes out of the complex, the smell of smoke minutes later. Soon I was back to the homes that aren’t connected to other homes. I knocked on my front door and followed the retreating nightgown into the bedroom. Without undressing, I curled behind my wife. I did not miss my couch.

When I went in to surprise Maddy the next morning, I found her already hard at work—of course. Several monitors were set up on her desk and bed. “Did the school let you have all that?” I asked, tapping on her headphones.

“Hey,” she said. “Did you get off work today?” She seemed to have an eye on every screen, and didn’t turn around for an answer.

I ignored her question too. “How’s it coming together, champ?”

“Just working with this guy.” She brought up the blank face of Mr. Clyde. “He’s a little tricky. A lot of the stuff he says doesn’t make any sense put together. I’d ask if we can go back for some follow-ups, but I’m not sure how much more—Are you ok?”

My face went ashen. “We have to go,” I said. “Get your things.”

“Roland, I appreciate it, but more of the same isn’t gonna give me—wait up!”

I wasn’t sure if I expected Mr. Clyde to be alive, that in an act of belated heroism I could drive over and save him, or if I was going out of morbid respect, that I had to hold some peremptory funeral. I think I went in order to deliver an apology.

We drove in silence to the complex, and found my building a blackened skeleton like all the others before it. The caution tape was up but the cops were gone; there was no one to yell at me. I told Maddy to step carefully, the embers could still be very hot and the rubble could give way.

We walked into my apartment, much as I left it only without walls, and, tragically, without ceiling. Beside the heap of my sofa sat Mr. Clyde’s wheelchair. It faced the television, Mr. Clyde a small pile on its seat. Maddy, realizing that she had made absolutely sure to return her own prop wheelchair and had not left it behind, began to cry.

“I’m sorry, Maddy,” I said. “I failed.”

On the way back home she insisted we stop at the mall. I was happy to oblige. Her friends could cheer her up better than I could. But when we pulled up to the door, she asked me to get out with her. She took my hand and made a beeline to the pet store. “I’ve been saving up,” she said. “I want to buy a fish.”

We picked out a gold one with deep red fins. Removing the wad of allowance from her back pocket, she got a bowl, some flakes, and the fish. She held it up to the window on our way home, explaining to it everything it saw. Careful the fish didn’t fly out of its bowl, I drove very slowly over the sleeping policemen.

Issue No. 13, Secrecy - Vignettes

2008-09-13T09:16:00.001-07:00

Issue No. 13, Secrecy - Credits

2008-09-13T09:13:00.001-07:00

art ALEXA GARVOILLE

fiction JONATHAN TUTTLE

this issue of FOLIO made possible by MUSSY CLEARFIELD

Issue No. 12, Escape

2008-06-02T21:03:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 12, Escape - A Thief's Best Friend is His Tote Bag

2008-06-02T20:49:00.001-07:00

The Farmer’s Market reaches its peak time at ten o’clock – for me. The best goods are dwindling but the crowd is rising, and the buzz around their heads is thick enough to disappear beneath. It’s not exactly a Middle Eastern bazaar—there are no newsprinted fish flying overhead, no shouts from rotund fruit men to escaping boys with bulging coat pockets—but these farmers have a pomp all their own. They sit back in their homemade chairs, hands in their homemade pockets, stroking their homemade moral superiority, without even considering the amoral superiority beneath them. They are no match for me.

I walked the entire length of the market before I began, weaving down the aisles from the front of the tent to the back. I made sure the vendors were where they were the week before. I checked up on their inventory, noted the items furthest from reach, the big, the small, the wrapped, the unwrapped, and came to rest at meat. The meat tables occupy the end of the line for most shoppers. Men who think that blood will trim the femininity off their aprons stand arms crossed and snug behind coolers of plastic-wrapped flesh. The coolers present a challenge unlike that of a stray head of broccoli, but it’s better to get the hardest part over with first.

A mustached man still nursing the toothpick from a sample of cheese approached the butcher. His wife was held up somewhere, probably baskets, and he was determined to get the most out of his morning. “Do you know I’ve always wondered,” said the man, “at what age a veal is no longer a veal.”

The butcher cocked his head. “A veal?”

“You know, is the year a calf’s a cow the year a veal’s not a veal? Or is a calf never a veal until it’s dead? Or does it matter? Ha! A veal’s a veal’s a meal!”

While the butcher busied himself with his affronted stare, I swept four links of his best blood sausage into my empty tote bag and walked away.

My bag says “PBS” on its side. I stole it during a fundraiser. There are many just like it all across the market, though the sausages inside them are probably wrapped in receipts. It’s important to blend in. You blend in so you can blend out. I wear cargo shorts and a beige rain hat. I wear an over-large t-shirt because I am very small.

People dress their Saturday worst for the Market. Their least-favorite shoes wade in the mud between stalls. Any other day and they’d be whining, but today they gladly stride, sucking in the mess of global thoughts and local acts, even taking their dogs along with them to churn and contribute to the slush. I pet one.

There were a few leaves of chard left on the center vegetable table and the crowd politely danced around them, waiting to strike while pretending they were interested in kale. The vendor was chewing a honeycomb lent from the seller behind him. He moved slowly with his chores, opening rolls of pennies in his battered tin cash box, licking his finger to open a paper bag; all giving the impression he was a humble man who enjoyed life’s sweet simplicities, that we were guests on his front porch. But after he got his finger into the bag, he would smile and flick it downward so fast the air popped in like a gunshot, waking everyone up from their courtesy and moving them closer to the chard.

I buzzed in and out of the circle, trying to find the best position, stretching my hand out over the leaves only when the vendor smacked a bag open. With each smack I got a little closer, the crowd got a little more confused, and on a smack so hard it blew the bottom of the bag out, I touched the chard.

“Mon-ey chan-gers!”

The cry from the middle of the tent was loud and drawn-out, the anger in it mounting syllable by syllable. Just as everyone turned to see who had screamed, I wrapped my hand around the chard like it was a Golden Ticket and went giggling, really giggling, out of the circle.

I looked for my benefactor but saw that only Jesus had arrived, that is, the homeless man who calls himself “Jesus.” It was a bit late for him, and he looked more frazzled than usual. He cut right into the middle of the market and paced barefoot up and down the aisles. His typical blue bathrobe was dragging in the mud. His Speedo was lost in the hair of his thighs and stomach. The beard, as one would suspect, was grown to effect––less so the fingernails.

I am always happy to see him. As someone who is paid very little attention at the Farmer’s Market, and always hopes to be paid a little less, it helped that Jesus was around. I would have tried to be crucified next to the real one too.

“Out! Out! Money changers!” It plainly came from Jesus. Usually, his mumbles were low and undirected. This was strangely coherent.

A few disapproving glances were sent in his direction. He was finally making a commotion too loud not to glance at. Was this a performance piece? the shoppers were sure to think. Do farmers perform “pieces”? Was this a shouting schizophrenic they had heard on the street before? If so, which one?

“My house shall be called a house of prayer and you scum are making this a robber’s den!”

Jesus took his raving down the aisle, so that’s where I took my tote. I stayed behind and three shoppers to his right. Appropriately enough, a pair of Philistines was selling hummus at his next stop. Jesus dragged the tip of his finger through their sample cup, as if he were writing in the sand, and smeared a line of the Roasted Red Pepper over his mustache. Jesus was an intimidating figure even without the menacing gestures: six foot something with a football player’s build. Understandably, perhaps expecting a slingshot to come out of his bathrobe, the Palestinians pulled back in fear, and just enough for them not to notice my collection of their pastries.

Beside them, the community’s favorite married couple was operating a children’s puppet stand. Their show concerned climate change, I think. There was a sun and an ailing dragon. Jesus was transfixed. Landing on the lap of a less-than-transfixed girl in the front row, he kept his eyes on the bare wrists below the sock puppets.

Before long, it was apparent Jesus’ attention was out of disgust, not admiration. “Where is your farm?” he said to the wrists. “What land do you till?”

The puppet couple was unused to audience participation. The show went on until the screams of children brought their heads above the curtain.

Jesus had taken his swimsuit off. He pulled the dragon sock from the husband’s hand and slid it over the offending organ. “What seeds do you plant?” he shouted at the puppeteers. “What fruit do you pluck?”

While parents and children were covering their eyes, I took the tote of an outraged mother and pushed it into my own.

I was thrilled. My tote was fuller than it had been in weeks. Jesus and I were truly working as a team. I’m at the mercy of the nearest diversion in my job, and with Jesus, there could not have been a greater mercy. I wanted to pull his sleeve along with me so we could skip together to the next farmer. But I couldn’t risk anyone thinking this marvelous accident was somehow planned. I ran to baskets and only prayed he ran along with me.

The baskets were typically impossible to fit into my tote, but with Jesus still screaming, I felt the impossible was ready to be tried. I looked for the small ones, the widely woven ones that could be easily collapsed. The seller, a shy tee-totaller with a beer belly, was watching all the commotion at the puppet stand, and when I saw her eyes widen and her lips separate, I knew backup was on the way.

“Silly ass!” Jesus shouted at the basket weaver. “Liar! Hypocrite! Money changer! From what tree did you pick these twigs? Are you a farmer or a demon in a silly ass’s clothing?”

He took her credit card slider, pressed it against her head—“Out demon! Leave this ass behind!”—and ran the slide over her white curls. “Out!”

He was angrier than I thought. I was concerned, but had no time to ask the woman if she was all right. My tote was heavy and begging for more. I stopped searching for the easiest basket, just grabbed the nearest handful of reeds.

More and more people from the corners of the market were coming inwards to spectate. Looks of concern dotted the crowd. As everyone had left their cell phone at home to more fully experience the authenticity of the market, no one could call the police. The bored son of a butter churner, his Tonkas having run the gamut of possibility, came back in from his trucks and wriggled his way to the front. His face was glowing. He was entertained. Saturday had finally lived up to its name.

Ducking under arms and purchases, I found the soy table next door and, just as I wished, Jesus found it too. He picked the teenager who was manning the table up by the collar and shook him furiously. I hid behind a barrel of soybeans.

“Do you know who I am?” Jesus spat in his face. “Do you know who I am?”

“Who are you?” said the teenager.

I was reaching my hand up into the barrel when Jesus suddenly pulled it away from me. He raised it over the teenager’s head, beans pouring over their shoulders, and let it drop. The barrel had a false bottom two inches down. The poor boy’s head cracked straight through and he teetered around, seeing stars where there were supposed to be soybeans.

This must have been some kind of last straw. A group of thirty-something male musicians, all shaggy beards and plaid shirts, closed in on Jesus with chivalrous frowns. Some tackled his legs, others his arms, flying up in squid-like fury.

“Sell everything you own!” Jesus shrieked, the musicians having forgetten to cover his mouth. Perhaps it was his awful smell, but once they had throttled his chest, they backed off a little and Jesus wriggled free.

“Sell everything you own, not everything you make!” He toppled the next five stands, pulling out tablecloths like a bad magician and flipping over tables. I had to run ahead of him so he wouldn’t wreck the items I had my eyes on (I once had to take a head of lettuce from the ground and was very disappointed). I ran backwards, holding my tote out under the tables as Jesus filled them up.

Unfortunately the plaids conquered their senses and mustered the strength to bring the schizo down. I could do nothing to help him, just stepped back and watched. It was a horrible sight, like the tent of a three-ring circus falling in on an elephant. They dragged him back to meat, his ankles bobbing through the mud, his beard stuffed into his mouth.

“—everything you own” was the last I heard him say, and I was almost certain the first word was “steal.”

The vendors quickly relit their pipes and blew the sweet smoke over the crowd, anxious to get their audience back. They opened a few more jars of dijon or chutney or dijon-chutney, the tops shooting like champagne corks into the silence.

My shoulder was aching from the weight of the tote, and I thought, sans companion, maybe I should just go home. My spoils were plenty. My shoulder needed icing. However, the pretzel sticks left out for the taking sent a strong reminder of the task at hand. Duty first, I breathed deep, pulled my hat back over my eyes, and wrapped my arms around the pyramid of mustard jars. With or without the perfect diversion, I had to finish what was already the best day at the Farmer’s Market I ever had.

I wondered, scooping roasted walnuts from their buckets, whether Jesus ever noticed my darting around beneath him and if he realized how much he was helping. I would have loved to thank him. Alas, we could have never met, since I can never be noticed.

“Hello there,” said the florist. “You’re carrying quite the load.”

Flowers were my last stop, the farthest point possible from meat. The florist set up her stand outside the tent, where there was grass instead of mud, and where she could greet the families walking in. They were all carrying heavy loads, so I ignored the florist and kept on for her daffodils.

“Did you see Jane Eyre last night?” she said. “Excuse me, Jane Eyre?”

The petals in the front were a little peaked, so I rifled through to the back. I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Was it all you hoped it would be?”

“What?” This may have been my first spoken word at the Farmer’s Market. It hurt my throat.

“Jane Eyre. Masterpiece Theatre.” She pointed to my tote.

“Yes, PBS, it’s—”

“All you really need, isn’t it?”

So she wouldn’t be able to inspect anything past its insignia, I shifted the tote around to my back.

“Do you have something specific in mind?”

“Specific?”

“A flower.”

“Yes, a flower. I have a flower in mind.”

“Is it for someone special?”

“No...”

“I think this one sets your hair off nicely.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes.”

I reached into my back pocket, again a first, and pulled out the change I had taken from the Leave A Penny, Take A Penny.

“Please, please, it’s on the house,” she said.

Obviously, she wasn’t like my other Farmer’s Market companion. But although she smiled and Jesus frowned, both expressions carried vast generosity. I nearly melted under hers.

I took the flower. “For me?”

“Put it in your tote, Tote-man.”

I put it in my hair.

Issue No. 12, Escape - A Break from It All

2008-06-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 12, Escape - Evil the Hand that Frees the Hermit

2008-06-02T20:20:00.000-07:00

Evil is the free hand that raps the hermit’s door,
while hidden, the other within the coat secretes a store
of court orders, judgments, liens, levies galore…

So exquisite the bouquet of legal array
is presented the hermit that he faints away,
the scent of reed and rice and lisle sending him to floor…

Un-nerved, the process server stoops to feel for pulse—
ineptly finding one, she tents his face with her papers,
as if the finest of linen shrouds, and slinks away!

Stealing to the Bonneville parked just outside,
she slams it into Reverse, mindful to rehearse
the mantras of her training:

“It’s not personal! It’s just business!”
“It’s not personal! It’s just business!”
“It’s not personal! It’s just business!”

Issue No. 12, Escape - Credits

2008-06-02T20:15:00.000-07:00

This issue of FOLIO made possible by Melinda Van Slyke.

Cover: Ben Tuttle
Lino & Photo: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Drawings: Jill Ostrowski
Poetry: J Willie Garvoille

Issue No. 11, Actors

2008-04-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 11, Actors - The Gray Lady

2008-04-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

Rena had a bad habit of wearing her Bluetooth to bed. It put a crick in her neck and, this morning, it nearly made her deaf. “Tasha’s on the front! Tasha’s on the front!” it screamed. Rena shot up, ripped the Bluetooth off her ear, and threw it across the room. It continued to shout at her from the radiator. “I was picking up eggs and the cashier dropped a quarter and the paper was behind her and Tasha’s on the front, girl! Tasha’s on the front page of the New York Times!”

Rena ran down the hall, the screaming phone held in the air. “She everywhere!” it said, sounding something like her sister. “I seen everyone holding up that big, color picture of Tasha!”

Rena kicked the door open to Tasha’s bedroom and jumped on the bed. “Get the hell up, girl!”
Tasha raised an eyelid.

“You the most famous person in the world!”

While Tasha was pouring her cereal, dressed in yesterday’s jeans––but in last week’s shirt so no one would notice yesterday’s jeans––Rena skipped down every hall in their building, scanning the doorsteps for that bright blue bag. Most were without, having already been picked up or replaced with a Plain Dealer. Rena, who herself had never touched the New York Times, suddenly loathed the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Bathrobe billowing behind her, Rena left their building with an armful of blue bags and stormed up the sidewalk for more. She collected papers from every apartment building on their block and when she saw an old man through the window sitting down to his grapefruit and Times, she rang his doorbell and, with what little breath she had left, politely demanded A1.

The flakes left in Tasha’s bowl were a mud beneath the milk when she turned her attention from the back of the cereal box to the uncracked paperback copy of Johnny Tremain. She flipped to the ending, “Chapter 12: A Man Can Stand Up,” and Rena dropped fifty-one bags of Times on the table. She slid out the papers and arranged them right-side-up in front of Tasha, so that before Tasha could slam her book shut and blame her mother for her bad grade in English, there were fifty-one hers staring right back at her.
“Tasha Cloud, 13, a student at Thurgood Marshall Middle School, cools off under this east Cleveland fire hydrant on the warmest April day ever recorded.”

Tasha’s eyes, wanting to get the worst part over with first, went straight to the thighs. She had changed into a bikini the day the picture was taken, conceding to the truly hot temperatures but only on the condition that she walk where the other kids did not. Without a public pool to be publicly humiliated in—the last one became a graffiti gallery from lack of funds—she sought less conventional refreshment. A drop of air conditioning dew was perfect; the higher the story it fell from, the more refreshing it felt. The storm doors from a pizzeria basement opened and a boy came out with a bucket of ice. He dumped it onto the sidewalk, scattering the cubes into a field of cold coals for Tasha to meditatively walk over. And when she saw the open fire hydrant, generously gushing out and over the street, she was too thrilled to notice the photographer, perilously close to deadline and having waited behind it for hours. She ran headlong and thighs out into the fountain.

“I’m calling everyone we know,” said Rena. “Now you just sit right there. No front-pager of mine has to go school.”

Tasha was not listening. To her immense astonishment, her thighs did not appear to her as that grotesque. Allowing for a momentary relapse of her well-trained critical eye, she looked again, fully expecting to see the bulbous brown siding, like the rear of a pick-up truck with double tires. But she saw no pick-up truck. Who was this photographer? she thought. Who was it that could find the right angle and the right light to make me look halfway normal? God sent this man, and she couldn’t even remember what he looked like.

Rena was hanging Johnny Tremain above the trashcan and typing into her phone when Tasha came to.

“What are you doing?” she said, jumping from her chair.

“There’ll be no more of this sissy English teacher of yours!” said Rena. “You don’t have to spend your morning reading trash like this no more! Not when everybody else is reading about you!”

Each gripped a cover and pulled.

“You’re gonna give me a bad grade!” Tasha said.

“It’s that damn teacher’s fault your grades our so bad, giving those crap assignments! You’ve accomplished more than that man ever will!”

The phone buzzed with another text message and Rena let go of the book, sending Tasha flying back to her muddy cereal.

“Your great aunt Stacy says you made her day,” Rena said. “Grandpa’s selling subscriptions to everyone at work. Hold on, how do you spell ‘modeling’?”

“Modeling?”

“Like modeling agency.”

Tasha took her purse and squeezed into her shoes.

“You better not be going to that English class! I might have to go with you!” said Rena. “Get back here and tell Uncle Jim you love him!”

“I want to go to school!” said Tasha, walking out the door. She wanted to go to English class, not least of all because she wanted to know how to spell “modeling” too.

The bustle along the corridor of lockers was the same: thick and smelly and parting for no man, regardless of publicity. A front-page picture on the New York Times seemed no more eventful than a bomb threat. Tasha wanted to reach out and grab the nearest student, hold them tightly by the arm and describe the picture in graphic detail. But the wall between her and her classmates was insurmountable. She wouldn’t normally have so much as smiled at them, how could she brag to them? And none of the strangers took her by the arm. She wondered if it was because she was a stranger to them. Couldn’t be, she thought. I’m on the front-page of the New York Times; I’m not a stranger to anyone anymore.

But when she found someone she could brag to, she couldn’t shake the image of the disgusting girls in class who actually felt comfortable in their two-pieces. If she were as arrogant as they were, she’d ruin her newly-seen good looks. With a large gulp, she kept her fame to herself. She went the first three periods of the day without giving or hearing a single mention of the Times. The largest secret ever held was breathing its own breaths inside her chest, a secret held only between her and the rest of the world.

She thought about the salmon fishermen in Alaska as her science teacher put a map of the Arctic on the overhead. The fishermen were probably browsing through a Times in the hull of their boat right then, bottling their envy of her warm weather and fresh water in abundant laughter.

When was teatime in London? Tasha wondered in Pre-Algebra. She saw two men in bowler hats picking through a pile of newspapers in a back-alley café and quoting numbers back and forth. Then they picked up Tasha. One man pleaded to the other to change into a bikini. He demurred at first, but after another glance at Cleveland, gleefully gave in. They ran down cobblestones in pink bikinis, kicking up rainwater from the gutter.

In social studies, Tasha thought of a saried woman in India who was laying down a newspaper––stolen from the back of a passing elephant––as a mat to change her baby’s diaper on. The baby was wailing and the coos and tickles proffered by his mother did nothing to quiet him. But the second he was laid on the front-page of the Times, he wiped his tears away. The woman picked him up and saw immediately Tasha’s graceful figure and fun-loving face. She and her baby laughed and exchanged an understanding hug.

English brought Tasha back to America. “‘Reflection Journal of the Day,’” wrote Mr. Feyton across the dry-erase board. “‘What makes Johnny Tremain so brave?’”

“One page, please,” he said, turning back to the class. “You have fifteen minutes.”

Tasha held her face in her hand and twiddled her pencil against her notebook, collecting dots of graphite in the corner of her blank page.

Mr. Feyton fiddled with the dial of a radio till he honed in on some fuzzy classical music. “Ah,” he said. “Thinking music. Let it seep.” When the blurred voice of a newsreader interrupted his thinking music, he sighed and began walking through the aisles.

The Unconscious Improvement On One’s Writing By Classical Music was one of many extracurricular lectures routinely given by Mr. Feyton. He also liked to lecture on the word ‘discriminate.’ “It’s not really such a bad word,” he would say. “If you were to call me discriminating, you’d be paying me a compliment. To discriminate is to eye skeptically, to thresh through. I would never thresh through you, but I am more than happy to do so through your papers.”

Comments such as these, exaggerated and retold to parents by students angry with the amount of homework, constantly put Mr. Feyton in hot water with the administration. The latest furor was over his remark, “There are so few truly good synonyms for one’s bottom.”

“That racist mooned my child!” was the inevitable message on the vice-principal’s voicemail.

Mr. Feyton’s synonym of choice was “seating-appendage” and his was a bulbous one, like two globes shoved down his pleated chinos. The khaki stretched taut and its sheen reflected the light like the apples of Mickey Mouse’s cheeks.

By the time Mr. Feyton’s seating-appendage arrived at Tasha’s desk, the field of dots on her page was dense and black. She could sense him stop behind her and she quickly put her head down to cover her wordless page. Mr. Feyton bent to her ear and whispered, “Congratulations.”

His wristwatch beeped and he switched off the radio. “Who would like to share their journal entry with us?” he said, and without looking at Tasha, “Yes, I think Tasha would. Tasha?”

Tasha looked up from her dots. The students were sitting back, their eyes rolled up into their heads, and Mr. Feyton stared at them with a sly smile.

“Um,” said Tasha, puffing up her cheeks. “I didn’t really—”

“Stand up, Tasha, stand up!” said Mr. Feyton. “Take the stage!”

Tasha stood, leaning against her desk and kneading the bottom of her windbreaker.

“You know, I bet you wrote about the bravery of those colonial printing presses, didn’t you Ms. Cloud, age 13, a student at Thurgood Marshall Middle School?”

“I couldn’t really think of—”

“Yes, I can see that being right up your alley: ink-stained men working tirelessly with nothing but tiny, metal letters to overthrow an entire empire.” It was clear by “empire” he meant P.T.A. “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, those are your heroes, aren’t they, Ms. Cloud?”

“…Yes.”

“The real shame of it all though was the distinct lack of photographs in those incendiaries, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t a photograph have been just the thing to win the public relations war for Independence? A candid shot of looney, old George III, perhaps? A pair of mean-faced Redcoats stomping on a flower? Or maybe just the delightful image of a carefree thirteen-year-old cooling herself on a hot Spring day?”

Tasha’s kneading fingers went still.

“I’m not sure how many of you are aware of this,” continued Mr. Feyton, “not many of my colleagues in the teacher’s lounge were aware of it this morning, but Ms. Cloud here has found herself an extraordinarily important person today.”

The class was not stirred.

“Yes, Ms. Cloud today, in all her beauty, was featured on the front-page of what is undoubtedly the best newspaper on the face of the Earth, with the exception of Johnny’s Boston Observer, of course.”

Mr. Feyton walked behind his desk and opened a drawer. An inch of bright blue plastic stuck out, and with it, Tasha’s secret. A portion of her breakfast returned to her throat.

Mr. Feyton took the bag from the drawer and, like a Kleenex, another took its place. He threw a bag to every student in the class, who kept them on their desks, unwrapped, like frogs they were about dissect.

“Go on, read the first page,” said Mr. Feyton. “It won’t bite.”

The faces Tasha could bear to peek at looked nothing like the faces of the fishermen or the businessmen or the Indian woman and child. They were just blank stares. She felt stabbed in the chest and fame, not blood, was gushing out. She wanted to sit down.

“You get right back up, young lady!” Rena was pointing to her from the window in the door.

“Get that, would you?” said Mr. Feyton to a slug in the front row.

The pupil’s pupils dilated to a fine point when his eyes rolled back to meet Rena, huffing and puffing blasts of condensation onto the glass.

“Go on!”

The student rose and opened the door. “Yes, Ma––”

Rena swung the door back, sweeping the student along with it. “We gonna have a little chat, Feyton!”

Tasha set her eight-pound Trapper Keeper up on her desk and hid behind it.

“Excuse me, class,” said Mr. Feyton, and he turned to Rena. “I’m afraid I was just in the middle of introducing our new celebrity, would you be available to speak another time?”

She was in full headset, Rena, and her most formal blacks. Her arms were laced with shopping bags, which she let flop against the dumbfounded faces of students as she made her way to Mr. Feyton. “That celebrity wouldn’t happen to be Tasha Cloud, would it?” she asked.

“You’ve heard of her!”

“She’s my daughter, Canned-Fruit, and she’s exactly why I’m here! Hey Tasha!” Rena held her bags up to Tasha. “I spent all morning getting everything you need! More swimsuits, lipstick; I got you an umbrella so we could shoot a beach scene on the lake!”

“Perhaps you’d like to take a seat and join our discussion of your daughter’s talent.”

“Perhaps you’d like to take a seat while I school you on how not to say ‘seating-appendage’ in front of children!”

“Children, how about a study hall in the cafeteria? Polish your journal entries and I’ll be in––”

“Kids ain’t going anywhere.” She waved her bags over the class. “It’s on their behalf I’ve come to talk to you, Mr. There’s Ain’t Nothing Wrong With Discriminating Now Hold Still While I Show You My Appendage!”

“Mrs. Cloud, if you’re speaking of my bottom, I will have to ask you to keep your voice down.”

“My daughter comes to me every day telling me what revolting things you’ve put in her brain!”

Tasha tried curling up on the metal shelf under her seat.

“I heard from every mother on the block that you tell these cherubs that a white ass is better than a black!”

“I never! Students, have I ever said such a thing?”

The class was silent, like they were watching T.V.

“Dennis, when did I say anything about my white arse?” He pronounced the “r”.

Dennis held back a laugh. “I don’t think you ever did, sir.”

“See?”

“He’s just scared,” said Rena. “What kind of grades are you getting, Dennis?”

“D’s,” he said.

“Now there you go. My Tasha can barely keep a C with your thirty-page essays on top of your ass-bigotry!”

“Mrs. Cloud, my grading is done with the highest professionalism and respect for the student. I would remind you that our Tasha has been on the Honorable Mention Role three times running.”

“Listen here, Community-Theatre. Our Tasha’s on the front-page of the New York Times. Now if that doesn’t deserve an A, I don’t know what does.”

“Publicity like this for Thurgood Marshall deserves a budget increase from the school board. With Tasha’s performance, I’m confident we can finally hire that extra math teacher, update the media center, maybe even start a class on photographic modeling.”

“How do I know you’re not just using Tasha for your own salary?”

“Money has never been important to me. It’s the school I love.”

“Fat chance, Bleeding-Heart. Tasha, get your stuff! You gonna rot away in this class!”

Tasha could not descend any further. Giggles and stares were beginning to develop around the classroom. Her only escape was with her mother. Tasha collected her things and walked to the front of the class, her chin burrowing into her sternum.

Rena was out in the hall, still railing, when Mr. Feyton took Tasha’s arm at the door, and said, “Best of luck to you, Ms. Cloud, in all your endeavors.”

Once at home, Tasha found copies of the front-page covering the whole floor. Like snakes in a dream, her picture appeared wherever she stepped. She locked herself into her bedroom while Rena paced outside it, saying to the phone, “A girl’s never too young for a publicist, Ma.”

Tasha dove into bed, lights out, covers up, and not until well past midnight did she stop tossing and turning. People she had never met suddenly knew who she was, and that was fine. But once there were familiar faces judging her own, the fame that filled her chest with bakery air was sucked away. She was empty. With her jaws taking the place of two pressed palms, she prayed for that awful and awfully good picture to be wiped off the planet. Cinematic newspapers spun out of black, hurling themselves at her retinas again and again. She forced a picture onto them of Yeltsin or Castro, but they slipped away, leaving always her own cute face. “Here, take this Cleveland girl,” said a gruff editor in a plastic visor. “Splash some color on our pages!” Overbit assistants ran clutching her picture and yelling, “Copy! Copy!” It echoed around her head. “Copy!”

At four that morning, her mind exhausted, her arms and legs quivering from the countless tosses, Tasha fell asleep and a bag was dropped outside the apartment. The paperboy, a poet in his forties, returned to the english muffin on his passenger seat. The BBC World Service came on with the engine and the story of a salmon boat escaping a storm in the Bering Sea accompanied the paperboy out of east Cleveland. On the highway he heard of a boosting Footsie and well into Shaker Heights, the sun still not up, he listened to a sun-soaked Indian woman tickle her laughing child. The world was spinning that night in Tasha’s favor. Its slow and immense motion towards the next day was a miraculous answer to her prayers.

Someone else was on the front-page of the paper. Tasha and Rena slept in without anyone to call and wake them. Eventually, Rena opened the Times hoping their might be a follow-up story, but there was only Yeltsin or Castro or whoever it was so unattractively not running through water, and she stuffed it back in the bag and stole the neighbor’s Plain Dealer.
At school again, there were no sudden lectures about her talents. The days were as gray and entirely without event as the days before her fame. Tasha felt in the clear. The quickest loss of the largest renown had the calming effect of a thorough puke.

The photograph was not forgotten about completely in the coming year. Rena used it for Christmas cards and the P.T.A. put it on a mock Wheaties box to impress the Board, who, in the end, permitted Thurgood Marshall Middle School to buy a brand new set of regulation-size basketballs.

Mr. Feyton no longer called on her when he knew she had nothing to say. Indeed, the averageness of the months and years that followed seemed to hit him the hardest. His proudest moment, his replacement for the hope of ever winning any kind of inner-city teaching award disintegrated like the newsprint that carried it, the very element of decay. His sweater-vests faded, his paperbacks curled with damp, until one day, many years later, a letter to the editor of the New York Times, written on the subject of urban education by one Peter A. Feyton, was printed above the fold. He nearly died of a heart attack then moved north to teach Literature at St. Mary’s.

Issue No. 11, Actors - The Sad and Unemployable

2008-04-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 11, Actors - I Own This Town: An Interview with Mary Holland

2008-04-26T21:40:00.000-07:00

Mary Holland is the greatest actress you haven’t heard of. Part Bette Davis, part Andy Kaufman, Holland is a recently graduated drama student from Galax, Virginia, home of The Old Fiddler’s Convention for 73 years. Documentary filmmaker Andrew Ferris discovers the life of an intimidating actress in a struggling city.

FERRIS: Does watching movies in Hollywood feel different than watching movies in Galax?
HOLLAND: Galax! I’m so glad you asked me about Galax... Well, the feeling is the same, if that makes sense. I go to the movies by myself, and I do it because of a specific feeling I get by going alone. I had that feeling at the Twin County Cinema in my beloved Galax and I have it here in Hollywood at the Arclight Cinema on Sunset Boulevard (my favorite movie theatre in LA). I’m sort of obsessed with going alone. I’ll rearrange plans and work it out so that I can go by myself.
In Galax, I was almost always the only one by myself in the theatre. Nobody went by themselves. It was a place in which social interaction took place; that was its purpose. In Hollywood, there are many addicts like myself, and I see people going alone all the time. People take movie-going seriously. They are there to watch the film and pass judgment and hopefully go home enriched in some way. I’m kind of watering at the mouth right now... I want to go to the movies.

FERRIS: Does acting feel as personally important to you in Hollywood as it did in school?
HOLLAND: It’s a different kind of importance. In school, I worked extremely hard and thought about the craft and the skills involved every day. I entertained concepts and tried new things and learned more about myself and the behavior of people than I ever thought I could. I tried to soak in everything and apply it to work for classes and for rehearsals. The struggle of a novice attempting to learn a complicated and elusive art. It was delightful. Painful, and delightful.
In Hollywood, I have to trust that I have the craft. That it’s in me. Because nobody wants to see you working on your “art”. They want you to do your job, and get out. I can’t spend hours musing over universal truths. I have to focus on making a living by showing what I can do. Acting will always be personal with me. It is me, it’s in my blood, you know? But I can’t be the tormented artist I had the luxury of being in school. I think that luxury will be mine again once I land a role, but for now I have to focus on landing the role, which is the hardest part.

FERRIS: Do you schmooze, network?
HOLLAND: God no. I don’t know how. You have to network out here, because it’s all about who you know and whatever, but I feel like a prostitute when I start talking to someone with the purpose of helping my “career.” It’s disgusting to me, and I can feel it when other people are trying to schmooze me. It’s the worst feeling I’ve felt out here to date.
I did this performance for a workshop a few weeks ago, a pantomime to one of Mozart’s symphonies. It went over very well, and everybody in the workshop liked it I think, and then the teacher said I should try to get it filmed and send it somewhere. The next day I heard from a guy in the class and we had lunch. After talking and having fun, he told me he wanted to get involved in one of my pantomime thingys. He wanted to get on Leno!
I had to take a shower after that lunch.

FERRIS: How do you prepare for an audition?
HOLLAND: When I first got here, I had no idea what to expect at a film/tv audition, so I overworked the script and went over every detail with a fine-toothed comb. I wanted it to be perfect. And it fell apart on me in the room with the casting director. I’ve since learned that once you get the feel of the character and the circumstance, you just have to play. That kind of freedom in acting is what I had in school, that sense of play, and it’s intoxicating to me as an actor and as a spectator. So I try to play in an audition. I don’t spend hours poring over the script now.

FERRIS: Before you walk into the audition room, is there something you always do for good luck?
HOLLAND: Um... I go to the bathroom. And I look around at things. And I try to take in everything. I try not to let my nerves get the best of me and get to my head. I tend to get overly excited and happy and shaky, and look like a crazy person. I just want to stay aware of the world around me, so I look around at everything and it calms me down.

FERRIS: During the audition, can you feel yourself switching from trying to make a good impression as Mary to trying to do a good reading as the character?
HOLLAND: When I audition, I think the most important part of it is the first couple of seconds right when I walk in the door. That’s when I feel the pressure in my brain: be me, be me, be me, be me, be me. Once, I was thinking that so hard, I tripped and fell into the room and then afterwards I got home and vomited. That last part is not true.
I’m used to these auditions now, so I’m not so nervous about presenting myself. I’ve become a bit jaded. I’m so tired of rejection, sometimes I just want to walk in and show them a boob or something. I’ve stopped caring so much what they think about me as a person. I just try to relax and be me and then show what I can do, and then get out.

FERRIS: What was your last audition like? Were you happy with the results?
HOLLAND: I was incredibly happy with the results. During the strike, it was completely dead. Nothing was auditioning except for a few films, none of which I auditioned for. I had been out of practice with auditions for almost 4 months when I got a call from my agent about an audition. It’s a high school girl, and they want a character actress (which is me). So I prepare and I’m pumped and I go in and I impress the casting director. She works with me for about 15 minutes and gives me wonderful compliments and then my agent calls me later and tells me that she sent the tapes in to the director. I got so freaking excited. And then a week or so later I heard that they had found someone else for the role. They said I looked too old. It must be the wisdom in my eyes.

FERRIS: Have you ever seen another actor in a role that you auditioned for? How did it leave you?
HOLLAND: It was flattering. One role that I got a callback for is now being played by Selma Blair (the role is Molly Shannon’s daughter on a TV pilot). So I don’t know. Right now I know that I have to be in a place where if I get the role, great, and if I don’t get it, great. Once the audition’s over, it’s over. And I have to get over it right away or my life will be miserable, you know?

FERRIS: Do you have a job outside of acting?
HOLLAND: I work as a hostess at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Most of the time it makes me want to shoot myself in the face. I stand and stare for hours on end.
We’re in an area surrounded by doctors’ offices, and once a girl came in and started asking me questions about the food we serve. Something seemed off about her, and I couldn’t quite place it until I noticed the incision in the crease of her left nostril. Her nose never moved when she talked. The incision still had fresh blood that appeared to have only recently been stemmed. She saw me looking, laughed, and said, “Sorry, I just came from getting my nose done. Do you guys have soup?” We do, but I didn’t answer her. She texted her way out of the restaurant and it took me a while
to recover.
Also, I just got hired as a model. For an art class. A nudie model. I’ve done it once and it was quite scary. But thankfully the class was small, and the people in it were mostly old, so it was like getting naked in front of my grandparents. I didn’t do that much after I was 6 or so, but still...fun!

FERRIS: What does a typical day look like for you?
HOLLAND: I wake up to my kitten licking my mouth. I wish I was kidding about this, but I’m not, she’s the only lover I have. If I have an audition, I usually find out the day before, so I get up and I go over the script. I have a tendency to get a little freaked out and nervous about these auditions, so until it’s time for me to get in the shower, I do something to take my mind off it. Like make out with my cat. Not really.
Because the traffic in LA is the worst in the world, even if the audition is a mere six miles away, I time it so that I leave an hour before the audition time. I get to the studio and enjoy a few wonderful minutes wandering around the soundstages and imagining myself working there. Then I get to the audition and I try not to get intimidated by the bombshells that are in the waiting room with me, and then I do the audition.
I go home, obsess about how it went, and get ready for work. I leave an hour early for work too. I go in and change into my uniform and prepare myself mentally for a few hours of mind-numbing boredom. I check my phone obsessively throughout the night to see if my agent called me to tell me I booked the part, and then around ten or eleven, I go home.
I listen to NPR and think about things. I go down the hall to see Michael and his boyfriend and we watch Jeopardy and they make me laugh. I go to bed and try not to wonder about the scary things about being out here – is this really going to happen? Am I freaking kidding myself? I’m terrified. Please someone give me a job.

FERRIS: Is there still a certain magic in the dream factory?
HOLLAND: Yes.

Issue No. 11, Actors - Slap An Actor

2008-04-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

4 Guilty in Blithe Spirit

by SHERIDAN WHITESIDE
Chief Theatrical Critic

Any of the following actors – Elizabeth Sommers, Jeremy Ostler, Maxwell Cann, Helena Whisk – may be slapped.

Each played lead to middling roles in last night’s otherwise acceptable Blithe Spirit. The actors singled out for this column represent, as usual, the wooden, the over-enthusiastic, the perpetually adolescently awkward, and the irritating to look at.

Ms. Sommers, thin hair, clam face, keeps an apartment on Third and Sycamore and can be seen walking her dog every weekday morning at eleven-fifteen. Readers should not be afraid of the dog, however. It can be easily stepped over as you move to deliver her well-deserved slap.

Messrs. Ostler, bow-legged, and Cann, indented sternum, share a condo in the Glennford development, number 18. The pair leave for the theatre together at five o’clock, so one hand stuck between their faces should create a perfect double whammy.

This critic has it thrice confirmed that Dame Whisk, fatty elbows, pimpled calves, does not lock her door before retiring and often sleeps in late. Perhaps not a task for the casual admirer of this column, but devoted followers should pull no stops in waltzing into her bedroom on 6 Regal Court, peeling back the sheets, and proffering a good, sound thwap across the cheeks. Whisk was particularly offensive on and off the stage, as her oft-diagonal spine could never truly be removed from concentration. Readers note: Whisk’s ruby apples present this season’s Golden Fleece! The lucky slapper will receive an autographed copy of this column. God’s speed!

Tickets for Blithe Spirit, should one need insult before their injury, are ten dollars and standing water only through the end of this month. Please remember, actors are to be slapped only, no nails, no fists, no wind up exceeding six inches.

In reply to last week’s column, “Slap Happiness,” the following was received: “Dear Mr. Whiteside, Thank you for the spot light in your piece last week. I was slapped yesterday and greatly enjoyed it. In the future, I will hold my arms more gracefully while onstage. Yours, Fifth Sentinel To The Left.”

Go forth! -WHITESIDE

Issue No. 11, Actors - Credits

2008-04-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

Portraits: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Interview: Andrew Ferris
Photos: Kihra Sorensen

this issue of FOLIO made possible in part by The Third Earl of Southampton

Issue No. 10, Chess...Live Here Instead

2008-02-18T17:29:00.001-08:00

Issue No. 10, Chess - Diorama

2008-02-18T17:22:00.000-08:00

Our house was little more than a shoebox for a third grade diorama, the rooms little more than scraps of cardboard glued up to represent rooms: a kitchen upon entry, its adjoining nook a living room, a set of stairs no wider than the narrowest closet climbing steeply to a bathroom, where any sudden movement would have shaken the whole box.

Reading in my room beneath the bathroom, I could hear the entire process of a shower. The swish of slippers would take me from my book and a new story would develop over of the one in my hands.

“This is a little late for Grandma,” I thought one night. The faucet ran and as cold turned to hot a towel was pulled from a rusty rack and the toilet flushed to speed things up. A heavy rush against my ceiling fanned out into a rain. A few rings shuffled down the pole.

Always miraculously, the ancient, stand-alone bathtub withheld the first step, and again I was amazed it did not crash through the ceiling and land beside my bed. There was a water stain on the ceiling, widening every day. I expected the second foot to peak through at any minute, but the porcelain took that one too, and I listened to my grandmother, Vivien, inch herself into the hot water.

I could hear the squeaks from her feet but I mainly gauged travel from the changes in the sound of falling water, massaging one part of my ceiling then slowly moving to another. Once the water kept a steady pattern, I figured my grandmother was struggling with a shampoo cap. Really, I did more reading of the upstairs sounds than of my book. Somehow that story, with all its lack of event, was more compelling than my novel. And then there was the fall, and the box shook.

Like ice cracking and sliding down the roof, the unique sound demanded full attention, and any thought I had of my grandmother slipping had to enter the brain as slowly as the sound faded. I dropped my book and swung open the bedroom door. I turned to dash up the stairs, calling “Grandma!” as I went, but I saw in the glow of our living room lamp, my grandmother, knitting.

“Grandma?” I said.

“Yes?”

“Did you hear that crash?”

She put down her needles and looked to the ceiling. “I thought I felt something.”
The shower continued above us, though water wasn’t hitting the tub. I could hear it come out of the faucet and then absorbed in some dull silence. I left Grandma to her scarves and vibrations and ran up to our only bathroom.

The slippers I heard swish were by the sink. The towel that rolled the rack was balled up on the toilet seat. I could see the cause of my ceiling’s water stain. A trickle of water dripped over the edge of the tub, where my little brother lay bleeding from the head. His legs were taking the water and his arms were dangling over the side, like he had just enough time to try and break his fall. His lids were open, and despite the hot water, his skin looked as white as his eyes. His hair was wet and still covered in soap. His gold necklace was resting on his sternum.

Grandma postponed cleanup till the morning after my brother’s fall, telling the mortician on the telephone he should rest up and get to bed, that there would be plenty of time for all he did later. Poking around for ourselves, Grandma and I were able to gather that the cause of death was almost certainly soap. Though I never taught him to do so, apparently my brother washed his feet in the shower, maybe that was his first time.

Orphaned early, my brother and I were put into the care of our paternal grandmother, though the court did have some concern about the location of my grandmother’s house. By far the smallest my brother and I had ever seen, let alone lived in, the house Vivien still occupied was meant for turn-of-the-century steel workers and their families. When we moved in, the neighborhood was a mostly abandoned, decaying pile of bricks heaped against the river.

If we did have neighbors, we never met them. A family could have been living next door, but I doubt it, and we never questioned for a second if there was or wasn’t. The court must have wondered if my brother and I would ever go out to play. We didn’t, but not because it was unsafe. Vivien made for us the happiest, warmest community to which I have ever belonged. Our home was infinite in its comfort and love and I wonder how much we would have gone out to play even if Grandma did live in the palatial north suburbs.

It was all a matter of the right lampshade. Our diorama rooms were effaced with beautiful light, a blood orange glow on Grandma’s chamomile bedspread, a twilit incandescent on turmeric-stained wallpaper. Scarves with tiny plastic beads were draped casually over lamps and dangled at our heads as we finished homework, or board games, or the last of the tapioca.

I thought about sleeping that night on the living room sofa so I wouldn’t have to lie directly under my little brother in his bathtub coffin, but Grandma, not heeding her own advice, stayed on in the living room knitting. Being born two years ahead, I was born outliving my brother and, that night, I continued to outlive him. I fell asleep staring up at the usual water stain, now darker and thicker in the middle.

Grandma spared no candor at my brother’s funeral.

“How did this happen?”

“He slipped in the shower.”

She stood her ground in the receiving line, giving the end of her translucent hand to whomever asked, never quite looking in their eyes. She wore the shawl she finished knitting the night my brother died and a dress I supposed to be older than she was.
The funeral was held in a community center north of our dilapidated neighborhood. It was strictly non-denominational. A man from the center was hired to say a few words, a few candles were lit, and soon we were back in the procession headed home.

Our meager house had a hard time fitting three people and a lifetime of fabrics and nearly disintegrated under the weight and conversation of all those strangers at the reception. They were younger people, younger than my grandmother at least. I took them to be children or grandchildren of people she used to know, neighbors perhaps. The respect they gave her was the respect given to someone who had only ever been seen in a portrait.

Grandma cleared off the buffet and set out strawberries and cheeses, and yet it was the guests who took pains to provide for her, asking her if they could spread a cracker for her, dip a strawberry into sugar for her. Eventually the attention they gave her even trickled down to me. The only thing I could wear that day––because it was the only suit in the house––was my grandfather’s uniform from the war. The bright gold buttons must have caught our visitor’s eyes and after they had plied my grandmother with snacks and well wishes they directed all tea and sympathy to me. “Sorry, son. Ten really is too young.” Then they’d go up and use the very bathroom in which my brother died.

After an evening of picking up strawberry tops from the buffet and wiping down rings of champagne, Grandma, who was knitting again under the living room lamp, called me over. She patted the cushion beside hers and plopped her yarns down on her aproned lap. She smiled at me, her eyes half magnified by her glasses. “I got you a little something.”

She reached beneath the sofa, digging around amongst sandwich crusts and successful mousetraps, and finally came out with a shoebox. A shoebox, however, that was unlike any I had seen in our house before.

She flipped open the top, pulled back the tissue, and picked up the first pair of brand new athletic shoes I had ever seen up close. Grandma cooed and ran her finger along the rubber soles. “Good traction,” she said. “For the shower!”

They worked. Perhaps not what they were intended for, soaking up my antique shower instead of basketball sweat, but six of one, half a dozen of the other.

“Good morning!” I’d call into the kitchen, where Grandma would be up and dressed and squeezing oranges.

“Morning dear!” and she’d keep on humming.

My pump-up, rubber, extravaganza shoes squeaked louder than the stairs themselves as I climbed up to the bathroom, laminated book in hand. Grandma, knowing how much I loved to read, bought me a bench that fit across the tub and a laminate envelope for my books.

I’d toss my robe over the sink and – pump, pump – step into the shower. Awkward at first, yes, but I was thankful for the safety and soon got used to the extra weight. It felt a bit like what I imagine drowning in a pair of cement boots would feel like, except here, my life was being extended.

I wondered what it sounded like from below, what I would have thought, reading downstairs, of the scrapes and bruises coming down on the tub. Grandma was downstairs, and I showered with a thought in mind of performance, lending a few odd stories she could piece out from the sounds above.

Later, whilst reading, I discovered Grandma did not have her own pair of shower shoes. I could hear none of the plops I was sure they made, only the familiar patter of bare skin on bare tiles. She’d switch the radio on to the old time Big Band station, and once she was in the tub, I could only interpret her quick and heavy footfalls as dance steps.

Afterwards she’d pounce down the stairs like a slinky, a tower of towel wrapped around her brilliant, white hair. Judging from an old picture of her I found in the attic, her hair had indeed lost all life and color, but came to possess the enviable luxury of invisibility, never dirtying a carpet or clinging to a sheet, never stopping up a shower drain.

My brother’s death had me noticing my grandmother more clearly, but one night I pulled out of my bedroom and read beside her on the couch, and it was there I came the closest to never knowing her at all. The light was worse to read by in the living room, though more relaxing. I’d start just sleepily running my eyes over the tops of words till my head would fly off the page completely and rest on the afghan. I pushed my cold toes under her legs and brought my eyelids down another notch. She could knit for hours, do dishes or flip channels for hours and the slightest hint of fatigue would never show, as if in solemnly accomplishing the smallest of tasks she was already sleeping.

The cloth over the lampshade cast a bell of light just wide enough to cup my grandmother’s body. The shadows bowed around her hips, never getting to the ten fingers and ten toes that after eighty-some years were still in tact. Her mother, I’m sure, counted those fingers and toes after she was born and delighted in the addition, but how much more delighted would she be that they were all still there? The shadows followed the bell of light around my grandmother, till the bulb above her head quelled them completely. The lamp lit up her hair, both brilliant and invisible, into a source that was greater than itself.

Issue No. 10, Chess - Allé des Cygnes

2008-02-18T17:20:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 10, Chess - The Creation

2008-02-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

after He, the great crafter,
had made many His worlds
and spattered palettes of color
across the un-canvassed voids,

He stepped back, to better his view...
and suddenly knew thereafter
how to make laughter.

Issue No. 10, Chess - Chess Night at Your Local Barnes and Noble

2008-02-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

"You know, there is such a thing as humorous chess."

-Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka

Issue No. 10, Chess - Romantic and Square is Hip and Aware, More Fiction than Non Dept.

2008-02-18T17:04:00.000-08:00

Bobby Fischer, the Corduroy Killer, died last month. He was exceedingly stylish. After the heights of his chess genius have cancelled out the depths of his anti-semitism, what remains in history will be only the well-groomed mysterioso. The Britannica entry for ‘Fischer, Bobby’ will feature multiple pages cataloguing the uniform corduroy jacket, the skinny tie, and the wave of sandy bangs.

Fischer is not the most photogenic of men––that mantle is still held by Truman Capote––but like Capote, Fischer’s visual allure comes in part from the very unalluring context in which he is placed. The Chess Club that meets every Wednesday night at your local Barnes and Noble will not keep your eyes up off your magazines. The prodigy eight-year-olds that stun the old men might give you a chuckle as you settle in, but none of them will keep you as entertained as your hot chocolate. For a bookstore café, they dress eccentrically: black flood pants and white socks, ropes for belts and bulging guts. But eccentricity is an expectation they conform to well, which makes them, in the end, anything but eccentric.

Bobby Fischer was eccentric, the early Bobby Fischer. A wildly bearded bigot does little to stand out, since a man with a computer’s mind is expected to hold a few unhuman beliefs. But the Fischer of yesteryear, the young man who made even a set of black and white squares look debonair, was as eccentric as a vintage photograph of J.D. Salinger (for a photograph of the recluse now only speaks to the pains at which it was taken, whereas an image of the young Salinger speaks to a time when he didn’t mind being photographed, a concept that, compared to his current view, seems unbelievably eccentric). And eccentric is attractive.

Legend has it that Fischer’s standout looks were noticed the second he walked into his Brooklyn Barnes and Noble café. Soon every man, woman, and child came out of their books and circled round his first game. They stared at the young man’s clear skin, not his board, and after a victory they applauded his fashion sense, not his win. What did they know about chess strategy? Everyone, deep down, can recognize good taste, even if they have none themselves. Perhaps at the time they imagined they were admiring his chess and not his chest, congratulating themselves for showing interest in something they were never interested in before. But on the drive home, the husband remembered the striking lad at the checkers board, and the wife reminisced over the strapping young man and his Candy Land talent.

The same neglect applies to history. The context in which Fischer was placed, the one that by juxtaposition made him look so good, will fade away, leaving only the good looks. Should a celebrity obituary expound on why a man was famous or why a man will be famous? We should speed history up and jump a few chapters ahead.

Encyclopedia Britannica supplemental volume The Freshly Shorn and the Cleaned-Up Nice, page 185, ‘Fischer, Bobby’: “He entered every room in slow motion. Haunting choral music was piped in from unseen vents as Mr. Fischer carelessly cut through a crowd. Carey Grant quaked in his shoes and James Bond ran to the bathroom. Utterly effortless, his collar starched itself and his cufflinks clinked themselves against the bar like the ice in his scotch. He will be forever carved into celluloid as those four unknown men are carved into the South Dakota mountains.”

Issue No. 10, Chess - Credits

2008-02-18T16:56:00.000-08:00

Photo and Drawing: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Poetry: J Willie Garvoille
Backpage Photo: Kihra Sorensen

This issue of FOLIO made possible in part by KNOCK MAGAZINE, http://knockmag.wordpress.com

Your Editors, Scott and Zelda

2008-02-06T18:17:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 9, Strangers

2007-11-11T19:52:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 9, Strangers - Specimens

2007-11-11T19:49:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 9, Strangers - The True Story of Rumplestilskin or The False History of Spain

2007-11-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

by C. Reilly

History, like a prolonged game of Telephone between people with various types of speech defects, has a tendency to screw things up. Truth be told (though it very seldom is, and in this case, probably shouldn’t be) the Aztec, Incan and Mayan empires started out as one big bluff.

Right about the turn of the 16th century, the word “Aztec” was pronounced something like “Ashhtkkkk” and stood for the particularly venomous noise given off by household cooks in Madrid upon discovering that the bread had molded again, despite their most fervent attempts to scrape off the largest blue-green lumps the day before. “Inca” (Nnnka!) and “Maya” (Moiiiahhhh!), were similar varieties of onomonatpoeic explicative. And they never would have made it into the high realm of the Proper Noun, without the little-noted birth of what should have been Rompeño de San Stephano-Carrero IV, one cold December, right around, oh, 1502.

Rompeño was born both prematurely, and, as his mother worked in the kitchen, onto a bed of lettuce––which resulted in his almost being mistaken for a bit of liver paté by one of the aforementioned cooks. And, perhaps because of this extraordinary beginning or because of the royal blood that ran in his veins, or because medieval Spanish kitchens contained such an odd mixture of miasmas, it was soon apparent that he possessed the equally extraordinary ability to make all self-aggrandizing lies come true. When his mother announced, “Madonna! I’ve just had a baby!” and someone else rudely yelled, “Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Spain!” poof, she was. (Incidentally, the long genealogical tree of Isabella is another product of exaggerations made true by this strange brand of magic.)

Other inexplicable wonders followed: while trying to explain who the boy’s father was, Rompeño’s mother developed a birthmark that looked exactly like the crest of the Stephano-Carrero household, and 2 acres of land, which hadn’t initially belonged to her, but were, in any case, roughly as fertile as a Castilian nun, started spitting out tobacco by the pipe-full. The poor woman could think of nothing to do but consult a local doctor. So, with Rompeño in tow, she explained what had happened, and the doctor prescribed some particularly strong medicinal herbs for delusion. But Rompeño’s mother insisted on the truth of her story (even going so far as to jab one long finger smelling strongly of cabbage into the physician’s robes), and demanded that the doctor brag about something completely impossible and see if it didn’t just happen. The doctor scratched his bed-bug-bitten chin, chuckled, and declared in a sardonic voice, “My daughter can spin straw into gold.” He didn’t think any more of it, and went home early that day with a slight headache and the sincere hope that cabbage soup wasn’t on the dinner menu.

But, as we already know, nothing remained the same for the doctor after he came home – he was fabulously wealthy, from all the straw his daughter had just up and decided to try and spin with. Like a good medieval man, he carted her off to Madrid’s city center, explained her gift, and tried to pawn her off on the somewhat financially-challenged royals. A demonstration was duly given, and immediately afterward, a secret wedding.

However, as obsequiously mentioned by one of the high advisors, how was this sudden massive influx of gold to be accounted for? There would be no reason to maintain taxes if it could be suddenly proved that the kingdom was generating a veritable surplus of revenue. And if there weren’t any taxes... well, they might well slip into republican government, or something equally heinous and 300 years too modern. A committee was formed to assess the problem, and after three weeks of very serious thinking, someone suggested that they simply claim to have found some new land, excessively far away (yes!...across the ocean, even!), hand-select a few well-known explorers and throw them temporarily in prison, and announce the unexpected discovery of a group of massively wealthy primitive people who just happened (though appropriately so) to regard the Spaniards as the long-awaited reincarnations of their deities. The royals loved it, the explorers were tossed behind bars (with the provision that they would be let out after telling some ludicrous story about the world being round), and the doctor’s daughter started spinning.

The wanderings of Rompeño’s mother and her magical son eventually brought them back to the doctor’s now-sprawling castle. She immediately realized what had happened, considered it proof that her original assumptions had been correct, and decided to pay the good doctor a personal visit for a little well-deserved “I told you so.” Upon learning where the daughter was, and feeling slightly guilty that she had more or less doomed the girl to a career as a state worker, she proceeded to the city center to see the royals. Though initially rebuffed, the highest High Advisor eventually got wind of a crazy wench with a brag-sanctifying baby hanging around the gates, put two and two together and called an emergency committee meeting. The “wench” was brought into an inner chamber.

While she waited to help that little dear condemned to spinning, an under secretary who found her to have recovered from her pregnancy remarkably well, blabbed the story of the newly discovered empire. He had heard it, he claimed directly from the High Advisor himself, and he’d be damned if the whole thing wasn’t completely true. Rompeño gave a little squeal, and 3,000 miles away from the Stephano-Carrero household’s unrecognized child, the tectonic plates rearranged themselves, a fully formed and populated continent burst out of the ocean, and the imagined-into-flesh natives shook water from their headdresses, and wiped off their spears.

The imprisoned explorers immediately found themselves onboard ships they never remembered setting out in, but in which they now happily stood in gold up to their knees. The letters they had-not-actually-but-now-had written materialized on the broad committee table with a slight popping and sucking noise, and the committee members, forgetting proper language in their total astonishment, uttered “Nnnka! Moiiiahhhh!! Ashhtkkkk!!!” like common cooks. Their cries passed from the inner inner chamber, to Rompeño in the outer inner chamber, and settled lightly upon his ears. Young as he was, and not fully in control of his powers, he allowed these familiar explicatives, which had so often passed into the womb, to adhere to the tribes of the “new” empire.

Yet, forced to acknowledge that the fictional ships and imagined empires were no longer lies, and that the (only slightly) more kosher riches were on their way, the committee was faced with a serious problem. The whole bit could be undone at the squeal of a baby. Accordingly, the High Advisor slipped from the inner inner chamber, and, pretending to address the matter of the confined doctor’s daughter, bashed mother, child, and secretary soundly on the head with copies of the codified laws, and buried them in a common grave outside the city.

In order to avoid further unpleasant questioning, it was decided that the whole tale would be foisted off on the Germans, Rompeño de San Stephano-Carrero IV’s name changed, and copies of the story circulated by secret Spanish agents among the German press. Incidentally, the phrase ‘to spin a tale’ comes from a printer in Heidelberg who ran low on ink, and couldn’t be bothered with explanations about straw.

The supremely Catholic advisors of the royals could not, however, resist including a moral twist in their fabricately fabricated story. Accordingly, the little tale they circulated (entitled Rumplestilskin, after the Germanized Rompeño) ended with a trick about discovering a true name and being forced to give up one’s first child. While they intended this as a subtle warning to over-curious etymologists, the death of Rompeño had left a lingering curse on the court, and their plan backfired. Having bumped off Rompeño with some old laws, they naturally could no longer rely on their own bragging to sustain the empire (that is, Spain’s first child), which ultimately fractured, beneath the burden of Spanish law, into the much-feared independent republics. Whether the untimely bludgeoning of the empire by a scroll of antiquated, old-world codifications bears any resemblance to the mode of Rompeño’s death, can, of course, only be left to wild speculation.

Issue No. 9, Strangers - Fragments

2007-11-11T19:46:00.000-08:00

In the café, a woman approached a young man writing. “That is so rude,” she said. “You might as well be talking on the phone.”

Unfortunately, I took my daughter to the pier. I stood at the end admiring the view and she did the same, tucked into a ball at my feet. It might have been an itch on her back, or a strong wind, but she rolled to windward and off the pier, dropping that thirty-foot drop, down to where the Mexicans trawled their fish heads. I saw the little splash and the last little bubble. I thought about jumping in after her but quicker thoughts came after – all the way down? in my clothes? is it cold? I couldn’t call anyone because my cell phone was at home and I didn’t want to raise a ruckus with the fishermen. In a panic, I just walked back to the shore, thinking that, maybe, if I just breathed deep and walked steady, the problem would solve itself, like the problem in a clogged toilet that loosens over time.

The boy at the desk beside me pulled a handful of dry pasta from his pocket. He put one spiraled noodle into his mouth and pulled his cheeks into his tongue. A few minutes later he spat it out. It was bigger, rounder. He put it between his teeth and bit it in two. “I get angry,” he said.

I left my life and set out on the road, looking not for the circus, but for a roving band of Jesuit teachers.

The substitue teacher had a photographic memory, onerous when storing the images of small butts pushed up against the windows of passing cars, but handy for remembering license plate numbers.
Round little Sean was picked up for exhibitionism and the poor substitute teacher missed early morning classes, tossing and turning all night from elementary school butt.

Two library books belonging up north were taken and lost on a vacation down south. The signs that tied them to their city, the stamps on each side, the return date, the barcode, were meaningless on the floor of Winn Dixie.

Security laughs at me, but from my post at Crabtree and Evelyn I can see a young man walk back and forth across the garden footbridge in the center of the mall. Every day he comes and with the same distracted, faraway look in his eyes. He paces, stops, and stares down over the railing.

The secret shopper was surprised, surprised and touched, to see a sales clerk so polite. The shopper was hired from an independent firm to weed out the ineffectual workers, those who have the time to lean and use it. But this clerk, oh this dimple of a clerk, he could do no wrong. No machine installed to replace him could be faster, stronger. And the clerk, after all, could smile, a smile that hooked the customer, closed the deal, and warmed the cooler patches of soul left in the poor, retailed sucker. “Let me buy you a drink,” the secret shopper said to the clerk. “I cannot drink on duty,” of course he said. The shopper laughed. “After your shift, son, please, I would never.”

Once, interred at the City Recycling Center, I was to remove from the plastic bottles all the wrappers unwrapped and stuffed inside. Removing them without breaking the bottle in a frustrated fit was a delicate job involving tweezers. The only way I could do it and still retain my sanity was to think that instead of taking the wrappers out I was putting a miniature sailboat in.

The tourist saw a Buddhist monk and shook her head. “That’s no way to live a life,” she told her husband.

Issue No. 9, Strangers - Credits

2007-11-11T19:43:00.000-08:00

Fiction: C. Reilly
Fragments: Jonathan Tuttle
Photography: Alexa Garvoille
Drawing: Ben Tuttle

Issue No. 8, Libraries

2007-08-12T13:38:00.001-07:00

Issue No. 8, Libraries - FOLIO in Print

2007-08-12T13:35:00.001-07:00

Issue No. 8, Libraries - Maldestiny and the Library

2007-08-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

Miraculously the young man woke an hour before work. He sat on the porch and looked at the street. The porch, he thought, is a stage where the actor can watch the audience. Knowing him, I’m probably right in thinking he ran upstairs after having that thought and scribbled it down into an old school notebook. He used to be an actor; that is, he used to act; that is, once upon a time he and his little friends dressed up in strange clothes to amuse adults. Now, he worked in a library.

He had the feeling sometimes of being behind a curtain when he left his house for work. The old, reliable butterflies spread out in his chest and called excitedly to his mind that this was it again. The mind, however, knew all too well where it was dragging the chest. This miraculous morning he arrived early enough to enter through the back as his employers wanted, not “with the public,” who were grouped outside the sliding front doors imagining the porn sites they were about to explore.

Who had the idea to let people into the library? thought the young man. The library itself is a fantastic idea, every town should have one, but the doors to the library…. It’s not as if people should be barred all together. Someone let the books in and the books were written by people and bound by people and given the very best qualities of those people. The books are sifts leaving all snot, shit, and tears outside…on the curb…where they belong.

Unfortunately the sliding doors did slide apart and all flesh and fluid rushed at the young man, none of it interested in books. They needed internet passes and directions to DVDs and had to use the telephone and had to take a piss. Luckily the young man was getting older, had just received a degree of higher education even, and found it easier with each passing day--not to smile--but to at least curt and tart his lips into a pinch when faced with the shitty sacks. His eyes, on the other hand, were not maturing fast enough. He could tell his eyes were betraying his thoughts. “Have a great day,” he would say, and the patrons’ mouths fell in horror at the disrespect.

Funny, to his co-workers, he was all rings and posy. They often told him how pleasant he was, how responsible, what lovely eyes he had, but probably only because he asked them lots of questions, and that they truly adored. “Did you grow up here?” “How are your kids?” “Are you feeling OK?” The attention shone bright in their eyes, like footlights blacking out the audience. They couldn’t ask him questions, they couldn’t see him.

His boss’s name was Happy. She was a middle-aged woman with long, disparate hair, floral stretch pants, and a penchant for trash. Shy and mature most of time, she occasionally let out a lighter, or darker, side. “Did you see the news? I’m letting everyone know. Anna Nicole Smith died today,” she said, mournfully; as well as, “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Jesse Bradford. He was a shelver here when he was a teenager. He’s in that movie Swimfan. I love that movie.”

The mayor recently awarded Jesse Bradford a READ poster: the actor’s headshot beneath the word “READ” and with the quote, “I read scripts for a living.” His chest hair hangs out of his bathrobe. The young man stood beneath the poster, burning off violent energy by assuring a drooling woman in a wheelchair she owed the library fifty-five dollars. When he got sick of it, he nodded to the security guard, a dim, aggressive man who quickly came over and wheeled the woman out the doors. Her chair came to rest in the middle of the street.

“Could you please announce that this car has its lights on?” Happy was standing behind the young man. How long was she standing behind me? She gave him a scrap of paper with a few neatly written letters and numbers and gestured to the nearly antique PA system in the back. “I’ve never done any announcements,” he said. “It’s easy, just flip the switch,” said Happy. But the young man knew it wasn’t easy. The announcements were always being mangled with nervous stutters and dropped phrases. He watched the higher-ups argue over who would have to do it, each competing to be the shyest librarian.

The young man found the switches necessary, stooped over the microphone, and gave the announcement. He thought for sure he was being punished for his less-than-chipper tone with the invalid and, returning to the circ desk, told himself sarcastically how lucky he was to have a job where he could try so many different things. Frank of Reference swung by the desk. “A tip,” he said. “When I do the closing announcements, I always shush into the mic first, so I can hear myself out there, make sure it’s working,” and then in a whisper, “Shhh. Like that.”

The young man did not wake an hour before work the next morning. Lightning doesn’t strike the same place in the river twice. He jumped into the car, forsaking contacts for glasses. This will let them see another side of me, he thought, my Clark Kent. I’ll look so different, they’ll have to ask me who I am, where I came from, what I did in high school. “Sorry I’m late, Happy. The traffic––” “Could you make the opening announcement?” interrupted Happy.

“Opening announcement? I thought we just make closing announcements.” “New policy,” said Happy. “But we already opened. I accidentally walked in with the public.” “And please announce our summer schedule of programs.” “The whole schedule?” “Read all the dates, times, and locations. Out loud, please.” Happy pointed again to the microphone, then slid past to the secret, back staircase that lead to the book bindery. Sure enough, the young man found, stuck to the PA, an old card-catalogue card bearing the tiny words he was to announce. “Shhh. The library is now open,” he said, a perfect two inches from the stand, clearly and without spit. “If you would like to check out items but need a library card, please go to the circulation desk. If you would like to use the internet but do not have a password, please…” etc.

Surely, surely he was being punished. Reading every storytime, book discussion, and ESL session? The glasses must have failed to disguise the invective in his pupils since his co-workers had not asked him a thing about his past, just banished him to the back where he could be heard but not seen, heard but not see, where his Medusa eyes could not browbeat any patrons into stone. I want to work on Sundays, he misanthought, when the library is closed. I’ll wake up early for that. Put on a suit and tie. Force my way in and stand at the desk, ready for work, as still and upright as the books.

One woman, besieged on all sides by her legions of small children, waited, hands and feet tapping at the desk, for the young man to return. “Can I help you?” he said. “Where is everyone?” The young man looked around. Indeed, all clerks, assistants, and directors were absent. He glanced back to the usual computer multitudes and even they looked a little thin. “Is there something I could do for you?” he faltered. The woman spat. “I don’t owe you a dime!”

Next morning, Happy handed a copy of Poe’s collected to the young man. “You’ll find a story dog-eared,” she said. “We’re trying to get people in the mood.” “In the mood for what?” asked the young man. “Reading, checking out books.” “You’d like me to announce it?” “Of course.” She went to the stairs, leaving the young man alone with the Poe and the microphone.

“Misery is manifold,” he began. It felt a little silly, flicking the switch for a half hour of recitation, but, after all, this is what he trained for. Somewhere in the middle he even got a bit into it, lending occasional scary voices and gracefully magesticulating with his free arm. In the corner of his eye, he saw a huddled family rush out of the library while he was reading. A line of patrons shrank one by one behind the desk. The posse of computer crazies was slithering out of the library and they did not linger by the flagpole. It gave strength to the young man’s voice and he read to the end. The remainder of the day was relatively quiet, as if it were raining.

A Divine Comedy sat on the young man’s keyboard when he next came in for work. A post-it note on the first page read, “Begin here. There’s water by the microphone. Happy.” He looked to the front doors. The unsanitary napkins and soiled fingernails were already seeping through. He took the book and went to the back. Flipping through the pages before flipping the switch, he thought: It’s gonna be a long day. But it wasn’t. Purgatory was finished up after lunch and by paradise it was time to go home.

The young man put the book back on Happy’s desk, realizing he hadn’t seen her but for the second in the morning when she rushed down the stairs. Closing announcements should be made pretty soon, he thought. “Everyone must exit the library immediately,” that sort of thing. But upon reaching the front desk and looking around at the stacks, he saw there was no reason for that announcement. No one was browsing, no one was masturbating. There wasn’t anyone there.

The books looked glad, I remember him thinking, like they were enjoying each other’s company. He wound his way through them as if he were winding his way through an art museum, pace slow, hands respectfully clasped behind him. He spotted a handsome John Donne volume but did not dare pick it up. After all, the books were not meant to be used, just to sit touching side by side in exactly the right order, forever. So this is what Sunday looks like, he said. It should be all days.

* * *

I hung my vestments as usual after a well-attended midsummer service and plugged in a hot pot for tea. I always run up to my office after a service. I do not mean to be anti-social, certainly I have become anything but in these later years. My smile, I’ve heard, is an actual smile and my eyes block any mischievous thoughts, though for the most part they no longer see people as undesirable sacks of desire anyway. I eventually go down to the undercroft for coffee-hour, but the minutes after the service are my minutes and I take them in my dressing room of sorts, taking off my make-up of sorts.

I jotted a few notes for myself in an old school notebook––“Visit Mrs. Palmer,” “Speech to the board”––and sat back. A knock came at the door.

“Come in,” I called, half-expecting a tipped-over coffee pot that needed attention.

The door crept open and Happy stood in the frame, hair more disparate, pants more tasteless.

“Good morning, Happy,” I said, “Come in.”

“Reverend, I slept late,” she said flatly, remaining at the door. “A boy put fireworks in the drop box and it took all night to clean it up. I apologize.”

“That’s all right, come in, come in.”

Happy sat in the chair in front of my desk. Her jittering knee rattled the pills in her purse. “I missed your sermon,” she said.

“Well, you can expect hell for that.”

She did not laugh. She had no patience for the kind of humor that goes over so well with everyone else. “Could you read me your sermon?” she asked.

“Read it? I can give you a copy if you like.”

“Read it out loud.”

I checked my watch. “Well...” Having handed my hard copy to the editor of the newsletter just a few minutes prior, I had to find the file on my computer. “Tell me again, you just…want me to…read it?”

She nodded. I cleared my throat. Her knee slowly came to rest. “What patience He had for his followers is a miracle worth awe, but what patience those young men had for Him should also give pause. Though suffering graciously was mostly His job, they at least could suffer a fool and there were so many times He must have looked”–– etc.

I glanced up at Happy once or twice in the beginning, then with increasing frequency towards the end. She had me feeling immensely flattered, and not because she asked me to read––she had done that many times a long time ago––but because she sat there while I read and allowed me to glance up at her.

“Thank you,” she said, after I had finished, and got up.

“Wait,” I said, rising with her. The flattery made me ask. “Can I ask you—”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you where you went all those times you asked me to announce things?”

“I went downstairs.”

“Yes, I saw that, but why did—”

“The better to hear you.”

“To hear me?”

“There’s a speaker downstairs. I put a sofa in front of it.”

“Oh…”

“I had to put lots of sofas in front of it actually. We all went downstairs to listen to you. You have a very natural speaking voice. It lulled us to sleep, no offense. We spent all day sleeping down there. Resting on each others’ tummies.”

I laughed.

“You make a better minister than a circulation clerk,” she said. “Your eyes were never quite as insulting as ours.”

Happy left; she had taped all of that week’s local news shows and had plans to curl up with a bowl of popcorn and a police chase. I decided to stay in the office, the coffee-hourglass being on its last few grains anyway. There were parts of the sermon that came off as quite foul when I read them to Happy––I wanted to make a few adjustments and get a new copy to the newsletter. I refilled the hot pot and called the family. I rolled up my sleeves for another day of rest.

Issue No. 8, Libraries - From the Comic Book "Wake"

2007-08-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 8, Libraries - Vanity and the Photograph

2007-08-12T13:23:00.000-07:00

A child comes of age in the public library when the top of his head is flush with the top of the librarian’s desk; that is to say, flush with the tips of her miserable nipples. The sign on the desk doesn’t put it that way, but words are things closely watched in the library while shapes are generally ignored.

One child not yet of age approached the desk of his public library and removed from his inner coat pocket a folded leaf of eight-by-ten Ilford. He placed it on the desk. “Yes?” the librarian said, keeping her hands crossed next to the paper and her eyes stooped towards the child. But he only looked up at her, without expression. She pried the paper apart, whereupon she saw a young girl, a nude, her back to the camera and bent over an older man. He, also nude, knelt below the young girl, each of his fingers encased in a stick of unsalted butter. The librarian opened her mouth and shut up her throat, pushing one small, pitiable breath. She looked back to the child. He was wiggling into his mittens and halfway out the door.

Later that day, the librarian recognized the child as a boy she had eavesdropped on not a week earlier, a boy she then scolded for using the Lord’s name in vain.

Issue No. 8, Libraries - Pleasure Reading

2007-08-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

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Cover Star: Eunice Marx
Photography: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Drawings, from "Wake": Ben Tuttle
Funded by: Melanie Samson

Issue No. 7, Wilderness

2007-07-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 7, Wilderness - Closing the Distance (Hermit's Curse)

2007-07-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

Wherever I live it’ll be some afflicted mix
of character, some soup of unkown stock...
As of now I hear my unknown neighbors
with CD or DVD at some 90 decibel,
the bass cranked to some amphetamine level...

It’s rarely ever quiet here in the so-called sticks.
This citified forest houses, maybe, 5 or 6 each block
(count the mail-boxes as you drive round
and while you’re at it, snoopy boomer,
take down the numbers on the Realtors’ signs).

Once-muffled traffic has grown louder yearly,
every new owner leveling a tree-towered lot,
selling the boles for pulpwood and burning
the stumps uprooted by the same machination
that fuels this yearning for Victorian lawns.

A level un-grassed plot, smooth as a cemetery,
fresh-raked earth, and within its periphery
a house plunked down, dumb as a tombstone
planted too soon in un-fertile ground––
such slack imagination cannot stifle my yawns...

I’ll be moving on soon, so have at it!
Snoopy boomer! Tear down the trees,
mow down the house, and gravel the drive!
Just as if no-one ever lived here while I was live...
By the way, make the driveway circular––

it’ll be easier for the EMT’s (or the coroner)
to snatch you up after another hard day
of digging up the creeping-charley, oxalis,
stinging nettle, curly-dock, wildwood violets
I left especially to retard your way!

Issue No. 7, Wilderness - The Old Man from Winter

2007-07-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

Disappointment awaited David’s return from the final day of fifth grade; not a bowl of salsa con queso, not a knock on the door from a good friend, not even a long nap. Mrs. David, determined not to enter summer without spring cleaning, shoved a box of trash bags into his peach-fuzzed arms and barked, “Clean your room or there’ll be no supper!”

David was unfamiliar with the word “supper” but nevertheless took the bags and went upstairs. He pushed against his bedroom door, wedging his way through a mound of paper. A four-foot stratum of work from grades zero to five covered his entire bedroom floor––hay he was now expected to spin into a decent sixth-grader’s bedroom. His backpack, once calmly hanging from his left shoulder, slid off in shock.

David had heard many of his classmates over the last few months, and indeed over the last few months of every school year, describe detailed plans of burning their schoolwork once graduated from the grade. But David was never invited to any such bonfire, never saw smoke rising from the neighborhood or smelt any textbook ash. Though he wishfully searched his pockets for a box of matches, he figured everyone’s work ended up like this, piled in the closet till it was piled in the bedroom.

He picked up a packet of envelopes postmarked Phoenix and return addressed in a boyish hand, “Jonathan.” These David quickly remembered were one half of a pen-pal project launched by his lonely third-grade teacher. David was assigned Jonathan and Jonathan David, alike in age but as far apart in experience as they were miles. David slid out a piece of wide-ruled Arizona loose-leaf and reread:

“I don’t get it. Why didn’t you go to school? Snow here is just paper squares in the mall. What is it there? Why would it stop school? Does snow make everyone sick? If you’re sick, feel better. But you said you spent the day sledding and throwing balls of the square paper at each other. Do you have paper cuts? It makes me sad thinking I had to be at school and you were allowed to have fun.”

David returned the page and dropped the envelopes back on the pile of parchment, or, as Jonathan would have it, the blizzard. He sighed a sigh so deep a corner of wrinkled vellum on the other side of the room raised its head a bit in the breeze. He picked up another page and vowed to chuck it out but he stared at it instead. He found himself in vertigo; teetering at the top of a long, long division problem and watching the answer sway below him.

When he pulled his eyes back up he noticed ten points for “work shown” marked in red at the top of the page. Work shown was time wasted, he lamented. There, beside the meaningless characters of the date “11/17,” he discovered that that “work shown,” so fundamental for the advancement to the next day, had in fact nothing at all to do with the advancement of years. “It’s not because of this I’m eleven years old,” he thought to the paper.

Just as Mrs. David opened her mouth to object, David said, “I’m breaking,” and went outside. What he thought he needed was a really exotic drink, or even just a cup of ice with a curly straw and an umbrella, but he settled for the porch swing.

House painters were packing up for the day and reminded David that grownups don’t have summer breaks, and sadder than never having snow days is never having summer breaks. He rested with the sad thought while rocking the porch swing––as best he could without floor touching toes—and itching what used to be a standard buzz cut, now just a shaggy mess. He was feeling around for lice when he noticed the neighbor’s hedges across the street rustling without wind. He narrowed his eyes. A boot poked out from under the bush and the more David squinted the more he could make out a figure extending up from the boot. It was a lumpy figure, and dark, and while David was trying to find some waist between the top lump and the bottom lump, a face came out from the hedge, its eyes directed at David’s.

The face, hauntingly expressive of some unnamed anxiety, further saddened rather than shocked David and he returned the face’s stare. From face the lump became chest and legs as the figure moved out to the driveway. The boots David could see now were snow boots and the pants were snow pants, the top a thick, grey jacket. The man wore mittens, earmuffs, and a big, black woolen hat. He stepped onto the road and walked slowly across, seemingly propelled by the vibrations running from coat to boot. He was old, weathered, and wrinkled. His lips were blue and cracked where they weren’t chapped. He appeared even stranger in the middle of the street, like an astronaut who, rather than playfully leaping, suffered from extreme gravity.

The man came right up to the foot of David’s porch.

“Are you looking for something?” David asked.

The man only shook.

“Back in that bush, what were you looking for?”

The old man sunk his hands further into his armpits and pulled down his hat. “Kindling.”

“What’s that?”

“Little ones,” said the old man.

“Little what?”

“Kindle. I want to kindle.”

“Where are you from?”

“I…” The man stopped.

“Aren’t you from somewhere?”

David got a little scared and thought back on his What To Do With Strangers lessons from kindergarten, probably listed on a worksheet somewhere upstairs.

“I think I hear my mom calling me.” David stood up and put his hand against the screen door. He would have gone through had the man not shaken out a stream of words from his mouth, of which David could only piece together: “I chop wood, most of the day. I use it at night. Keeps the bills down. My daughter’ll call me. She needs money. I have to get to the bank but I can’t get out. They plowed me in. But I can keep chopping if I have to. I have to keep chopping. I can go through piles of wood, my whole backyard covered in piles of wood.”

The old man jerked his head to the side and set his eyes off down the street to an even older man with a long, white beard. David looked, too.

“The crossing guard?” he asked.

The man down the street did indeed wear an orange reflective vest under his beard and helped usher a stream of children beneath him.

“What about him?”

“Piles of wood, piles and piles of wood.” The man’s gaze softened and his head sunk back to his chest.

“You know,” said David, touched by the man’s gaze, “I actually have some piles of my own that need chopping.”

“Can’t stop moving. Too cold. Stop moving and I’ll be my pipes.”

David let out his hand. “We don’t want that,” he said.

The old man took a step towards the porch but shot his eyes up quick to the crossing guard again.

“Come on in.”

Mrs. David was falling asleep on a pile of warm laundry when her son and an old man in winter clothing woke her up.

“What is that?” she said, half asleep, at the figure in the woolen cap.

“He’ll be helping me with my bedroom,” David said. “For a third of my allowance I think we can get it in tip top shape.”

“That’s really weird, David,” said Mrs. David, falling back into her towels.

David went to the kitchen. “Hi-C? Capri-Sun? Sierra Mist?”

“Hot chocolate,” the man garbled.

“OK, hot chocolate…”

The old man looked around a little at the decoration while David drank and went on about the injustice of his mother sleeping. The man saw paintings of watermelons, little wooden lighthouses, refrigerator magnets in the shape of crabs. He held his hot chocolate up to his face as if to barricade himself from these strange surrounding objects. It seemed the only relief to his confused eyes was the constant, agitated shaking of his body.

David threw his cup into the sink. “Ready to work?”

A few stacks had to be toppled for David to open the door of his room again, but he managed. He scaled to the top of his bed and stood up, looking out over the room.

“All this,” he said, “is elementary school. Get rid of it.”

The old man was not sufficiently impressed in David’s opinion; maybe he wasn’t lying about all those piles of wood. The man bent over and began stuffing his first bag. He wasn’t quick about it, but he did indeed keep moving. He mumbled as he worked, and again David picked up words like “daughter” and “bills.” The nervous energy with which the man spoke seemed to go directly into his cleaning, as if the room would move towards cleanliness with all the slow force of his life moving towards despair. As a corner of carpet became reacquainted with the sun, David noticed that the old man never once stopped to look at any of the papers he was disposing. David couldn’t have picked up two sheets without reading everything on them, being reminded of the dim, dank, winter days he scribed them and then being transported to that same dim, dank mood. But then, the old man had no reason to explore such days and moods––he was already in them. He knew, or sensed, that the papers were filled with meaningless toil and, being no stranger to the concept himself, he meaninglessly toiled through them. He seemed at home.

Saddened by this, David slid off his bed and made an exit. “God’s speed,” he said.

Downstairs, Mrs. David was nowhere nearer to folding the laundry but was instead having a very pleasant dream about falling asleep on the laundry.

“You gotta get yourself your own weirdo, Mom,” David said to her on his way out. He returned to the porch swing but this time without the dread of cleaning up the past five years’ refuse. It had taken care of itself. He finally felt that classic summer freedom. The earth had reached the part of the solar system where the air smells better and there aren’t any problems; problems were piled on the opposite side where poor Mercury was probably trudging through right then. His feet didn’t make it when he tried to kick them up onto the railing but he didn’t mind, they swung back under him, swinging him into a wonderful slumber.

“Mr. Walter!” Mrs. David screamed, waking David outside. “Thank you so much!”

David rubbed his eyes and brought his feet back down to the porch. Inside he found the old man still dressed for a blizzard and shaking to boot. His mother was clapping and smiling. The laundry on the couch was no longer on the couch but folded into neat piles and placed in the basket.

“That’s so kind of you, Mr. Walter! David, you know Mr. Walter, don’t you?”

“Well…” David said.

“From down the street! How’s Mrs. Walter? I haven’t seen you two in ages! You sure are bundled up. Do you want something to drink?”

“I already gave him some hot chocolate,” said David.

The old man started shaking his way to the door.

“Well, OK, Mr. Walter, thanks so much for stopping by and, and––helping out. And be careful in that sun out there. But you and Mrs. Walter must be used to that, what with you two being from–– you two are from the southwest aren’t you? Where are you from originally?”

David gave his mother a look of hopelessness for the question, but the old man, half out the screen door, gave voice to his first few unmumbled words.

“Four months ago,” he said, and left.

“Odd man,” said Mrs. David. “Helpful.” She lay back down on the sofa and ran her hand over the perfectly level laundry.

David gave his bedroom door another hard push but the door flew open and David landed on his bed––his made bed. He sat up and after blinking a few times saw only wall-to-wall, naked carpet. He dropped down to look under the bed and make sure the old man wasn’t cheating, but David found more carpet. Strange too was the smell in the air, like some apothecary’s stew of tree sap, hot chocolate, and worry. David followed the smell to the trashcan by his desk. Inside were the ashes of his homework, the corner characters “11/17” glowing red and then consumed by black.

He ran to the window. There, down the sidewalk, David saw the old man limping on, probably to another bush, and some twenty paces behind the old man was the crossing guard, running to catch up. The guard did not look quite like an old man, more like a young man with a long, fake beard. He looked as Shakespeare must have looked playing Father Time in A Winter’s Tale – a play that now lay smoldering in David’s trashcan.

Issue No. 7, Wilderness - Ratzingers Wake, More Fiction than Non Dept.

2007-07-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

The sound of typing thrills me. I expect it was the sound rather than the Fitzgerald that had Hunter S. Thompson typing The Great Gatsby word for word. Ready to type whatever was at hand, I happened upon The New Oxford Annotated Bible supporting a leg of my desk. I remembered as I watched the book slide back to the floor: a teacher from my wilderness days at a Christian private school once told my classmates and I to underline the word “mountain” every time it appeared in that Bible. He had us do the same in Shane.

A young woman ran up to her priest after the mass. She pulled out a copy of Newsweek from her tote bag. “Did you know the Pope wrote a book?” she asked. “He’s written tons a books,” said the priest. “Am I supposed to read it?” The priest shrugged. “If you want to.”

I began at the beginning of the middle, Matthew, and moved forward from there. Weeks later I had one dry ribbon and four versions of the same story. James Joyce collected the four gospel authors themselves into one primordial writer, Mamalujo. And good thing too Joyce did so without a computer, where pesky red squiggles would have underlined every word.

The young woman found the last copy of Jesus of Nazareth in Barnes and Noble. She turned to the back and read: “About the Author. The author is the Pope.” Convinced, she bought the book. She ordered a sweet tea from the café and began to fulfill her Catholic duty.

Mamalujo, repetitive, conflicted, forced his hero to reenact all of human history in the hopes of fulfilling it. Central to Jesus’ play-acting is a troublesome retreat to the wilderness. Troublesome, since this reversion to the private sector takes place just after Jesus’ diluvian plunge with the Baptist, the beginning of his public activity. The Pope himself interrupts this narrative to ask, why did Jesus, hours after throwing his name into the hat of history, withdraw to begin his work in total obscurity? What a strange beginning! he says.

Three pages in and the young woman was having a Finnegans Wake experience with the Pope’s new book. As she felt obligated to read anything her spiritual father had written, so she felt the need to begin with preface and introduction. But these preambles did nothing to inspire a turning page. They were a tangled thicket of academic allusions and the poor young woman could only crawl blindly along the esoterra firma. “What an awful beginning!” she thought.

As we learn from Borges’s Pierre Menard, translator of Don Quixote, literal re-writing does not change questions into answers. In fact, it does not even recognize questions. Soon, your eye sends the shape of a letter to your fingers and your brain is no longer required; questions are no longer asked. As I hammered away mindlessly, troublesome sections seemed to solve themselves and nascent images of wilderness simply floated up in my mind: the desert was really a nursery of pine trees––small, uniform, good for hide and seek with prophets and devils. Jesus the man, full of anger and obscure motivation, becomes Jesus the God, gentle, unquestionable, when retyped.

Tote bag saddled behind her, the young woman again approached her priest. “It’s a bust,” she said, “It’s too hard to understand.” The priest smiled and turned away but the young woman grabbed his shoulder. “Here, I found this helps.” She took from her tote bag a large manuscript, the words “Jesus of Nazareth by the Pope” typed on the front. “My version’s a little clearer,” she said.

Issue No. 7, Wilderness - Deserts and Underwoods

2007-07-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

Contributors: Alexa Garvoille, Jim Garvoille, Jill Ostrowski, Jonathan Tuttle
Funding: Nancy Ball

Pepsi, A Short Film

2007-06-25T19:20:00.001-07:00

Issue No. 6, Pop

2007-03-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 6, Pop - Boy Becomes Discman

2007-03-11T15:21:00.000-07:00

American Idol was on Wednesday night. I snuck down to Barnes and Noble behind the nation’s back.

I was so happy Italy won the World Cup, I ran straight out and bought a copy of Vogue Italia.

I danced so hard my mirror fogged.

Boy becomes Discman.

Issue No. 6, Pop - Gentlemen, Where Are Your Socks?

2007-03-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

“Gentlemen, before we begin, I do have a few words to say about decorum. I was shopping with my daughter for a bathing suit at Target this weekend. I saw a number of you there and more of your person than I’d like. I saw your feet, dried calluses, rising veins – your feet, gentlemen! I understand, as exchequer and exemplar, I may be responsible for this alarming fad. I do remember letting my ankles show once or twice but I will never do it again and, gentlemen, if you value your positions I suggest you fo thr smewq–“

Penelope tired fast of typing. She replaced her Dictaphone headphones with radio ear buds. Johnny Late Riser, her favorite DJ, took the morning shift at KWOW and played her everything she needed to get the blood flowing back to her tips. She flipped through a glossy fashion magazine while she listened, timing the turns of the pages to the symbol crashes in the songs. Soon her licked finger just slid off the corner of the page in a puddle of saliva instead of picking it up, and she returned to another five-minute stint of yesterday’s minutes.

“’Bout time for your lunch, pet,” said the boss, pulling his belt up over his gut as he walked out of the office. “I bet lover boy’s waiting for you right now.”

“Oh yes,” Penelope swooned, “He always waits.”

“Well don’t keep him too long, he’s not getting any better looking waiting in my lobby.”

A cutting comment, but Penelope had been going out with Fon for going on a year and any reservations she might have had at first about his height, skin, and limp were long gone.

“If it’s all the same, I think I’ll listen to the radio a little more. It’s so romantic just knowing he’s down there.”

“Suit yourself,” said the boss, walking back into his office. “The Anniversary Parade meeting’s this afternoon. Look sharp.” The door slam hit a particularly jealous note.

Eventually, Penelope rode the elevator down the bottom fifteen floors of the Renaissance Plaza and there was Fon, a flower made of carrot peels held out in his hand. They walked as they did every lunch hour (the hour between ten and eleven when no one else was out), arm in arm down three blocks to the West Wind Café, a two-table Vietnamese restaurant owned and operated by Fon’s father.

“It getting cloudy today, Pen,” said Fon.

“Certainly doesn’t bode well for the parade,” said Penelope.

“Is bad luck for my question.”

Penelope and Fon took the seat by the window. Penelope powdered her cheeks and Fon relished his time away from bussing tables.

“Stupid boy!” said his father, dropping two menus onto the table. “You take my last carrot flower!”

“Good morning, Mr. Hingtzu,” said Penelope. “I’ll just have the usual.”

Fon grinned and handed back the menus. “The usual.”

Mumbling Vietnamese curses, Mr. Hingtzu threw a towel over his shoulder and went back into the kitchen.

“It been almost a year,” Fon said, taking Penelope’s hand. “I have question for you.”

Penelope cocked her head and looked up at the sky. “Those floats get soggy in the rain,” she said.

“I’m ready to ask my question now.”

Penelope brought her head back. “Question?”

Six captains of industry burst through the door for an early lunch. Together they threw their ties over their shoulders and pounded their silverware against the table.

Mr. Hingtzu ran out of the kitchen, all smiles and menus. “Good morning, my sirs!” He pointed to Fon and snapped his fingers. “Water, now!”

“But…” Fon squeezed Penelope’s hand.

“It’s all right,” said Penelope. “There’s plenty more to type.”

Fon rose and set about pouring water for each of the hogs that took him away from his beloved.

Penelope sat and admired him working for a moment then rose as well, put her compact in her purse and walked back to the office.

“General Tso’s for me,” said a hog. “You listening? I said General Tso’s!”

Fon trembled, a pitcher of water in his hand and a tear welling in his eye. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

The next day and Penelope was hard at work transcribing yesterday’s tapes. “Last year’s parade was a mess! I was humiliated and I damn well hope you sockless bastards were humiliated, too! All in the way of saying, gentlemen, that tomorrow morning we will be having a dress rehearsal! No, gentlemen, I don’t want to hear it, the majorettes will be here and thas anirh tjug–“

Penelope took off her headphones and twirled a pencil between her fingers to get the blood back. She switched on the radio.

“Oh, Johnny. Always the right song at the right time.” She closed her eyes and let her heels slip off.

A good fifteen minutes she spent bobbing and swaying in her chair and she would have danced longer if it weren’t for the fifty majorettes that came walking by her desk and into the boss’s office.

“If he wants to make me jealous, he’ll have to try harder than that,” she said. “I’m sure Fon is coming for me right now.” She got out the Dictaphone and rolled a fresh sheet into the typewriter.

“And that’s another thing, gentlemen. Half our audience was asleep last year. We got to shock, provoke! Think, what’s better than a bunch of batons being thrown up in the air? At tomorrow’s dress rehearsal, we will implement my plans…my plans…is someone going to fix this projector? We will implement my plans at ten o’clock a.m. to fling from this very window dozens of twirling batons like so much ticker tape at the–“

Penelope jumped to her feet and looked to the clock on the wall. Ten o’clock. She let out a childish whimper.

Overcast skies meant nothing to Fon as he waited outside, the perfectly worded question in his best American accent running through his mind and a flower made of ginger peels perfuming his hand. He was the only one on the sidewalk, the only one in the world really, and he felt like bursting into song. He even tried. He spread out his legs and reached out his arms, threw his pimpled, doughy head back and opened his mouth. “Happy Anniversary!” cried the plumed majorettes, and fifty spinning batons fell from the fifteenth floor of the Renaissance Plaza, filling the overcast sky and looking to Fon like the most beautiful constellation, for he could even see, behind the stars, the smiling gods who created them. Then he was pummeled, pummeled dearly.

Issue No. 6, Pop - Norwalk to Manchester

2007-03-11T14:56:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 6, Pop - Pretty in Pink Indeed

2007-03-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

Andie Walsh worked at a record store called Trax. Her boss, Iona, stapled LP’s to the ceiling as decoration. A child tried to snitch a cassette and Iona shot a staple at him. “This ain’t the public library,” she said.

Mid-eighties Chicago was overcoats and indie rock. School wasn’t school, but being bullied by a rich kid. And work wasn’t work, but sitting behind a counter and turning the pages of a magazine. Andie did that a lot, but I could never figure out which magazine it was.

I know Andie liked fashion, but what music, what movies? She would like the films of the British New Wave, those late-fifties black and white townscapes of kind-hearted young people stuck on the wrong side of the tracks; like Andie, stuck, and the train never comes for London.

Critics argue that for all their contemporaneity, the New Wave filmmakers turned a deaf ear to pop music, relying instead on jazz scores that compromised their progressive intentions with a conservative’s lust for the past.

Funny thing, too, that the New Wave films have no pop music, because where would modern indie music be without the New Wave? Belle and Sebastian’s “The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner” from Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Smiths’ “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, the Arctic Monkeys’ “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

In the mid-eighties, a sixteen year-old boy named Mark Taylor sorted out connections between pop music and the New Wave cinema for a fanzine he wrote called Smiths Indeed. Staying up late in his Bristol bedroom, he kept his parents awake as he tried to lay out headlines using Letraset on his typewriter.

It’s possible Andie was reading Smiths Indeed when she should have been shelving new seven-inchers. There were posters for the The Smiths all over Trax and Duckie, the poor boy who loved her, listened to the group when it rained.

H.B. Gilmour wrote a novelization of Pretty In Pink in 1988. I’ve worked with the reference librarians at my local public library but we can’t find it anywhere. Still, my nostalgia will not abate and I’ve stolen a typewriter and a record player so I can spend my bedroom nights writing my own novelization. “If you’ve no world of your own,” John Osborne wrote in Look Back in Anger, “it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”

Issue No. 6, Pop - This Sporting Life

2007-03-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 6, Pop - The Public Library

2007-03-11T14:44:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 5, History

2007-03-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 5, History - Red Tailed Hawks, 1925

2007-03-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

wo remarkable events happened the winter I was fourteen: my Daddy lost his job and Floyd Collins got himself stuck down a cave.

My daddy worked at the tobacconists down by the coal camp and he knew Carl Carlisle since his school days, but all the same, Carl said it was getting tight around the store and he’d have to let him go and he hoped he didn’t mind. At least that’s what Daddy said. Mama was angrier than he was and broke two wooden spoons on the kitchen table and cursed to surprise even me. Daddy just kind of wandered, not walked, out the kitchen door and went down the road without his winter hat. He wasn’t home for dinner and Mama said he could just stay at the Blue Hog as long as he wanted for all she cared but that night she went and got him anyway.

The next day, at school, I heard about Floyd. Mama told the class, “That Collins boy’s missing and they think he’s caught in a cave. This is why your folks don’t want you running around the caves by yourself.”

Some of the boys seemed excited, whispering to each other across the aisle, and some of the girls began to squirm, and Lila, who cried at least once a week in school, began to sniffle. Her voice shook and her nose ran as she asked Mama, “Is he going to die down there?”

“Shush, now. He’ll be just fine. They’ve got men who know every cave in Kentucky out there and the police and Collins family. They’ll probably get him out before the end of the day.” Mama did not look at Lila as she spoke. Mama never looked at you when you cried.

Lydon Hopstreet was one of the best looking boys in eighth grade and Mama liked him all right and I guess so did I.

She told Daddy, “The youngest Hopstreet is sweet on Clemmy.”

He looked at me. “And?”

“He wants to take her out with his family after church,” she said.

Daddy ran his bread heel through the last of the gravy on his plate. “I suppose that’d be fine.”

“I’ll give you something in case they don’t bother for lunch,” Mama told me. She took the bread basket off the table and snapped her hand towel at the crumbs on the table, sending them to the floor.

“He’s a nice boy,” I said to Daddy, guessing.

He nodded and kept his head down.

Daddy was home now during the day and out at night. I used to know how to talk to him after school, after dinner, before bed. But I stopped telling him about school because he didn’t like to hear about Mama’s work. When I saw him, he looked uncomfortable to be around his own house. It made me feel like maybe I should be uncomfortable, too.

He paced the creaky floorboards like the little bear the Doggards kept in a cage by the side of the road. For a nickel, you could walk right up to him and watch him throw his shoulders against the side of the cage to make the cage and you rattle. The bear seemed stronger, and smaller, than I’d expected.

Pastor Olsen rubbed his hands together and took a drink of water. Several babies began to cry.

The church was a one-story farmhouse with the walls between the living room and dining room knocked down to make room for twenty pews. The air inside didn’t move. I shifted in my seat and sighed. I tried to straighten the hem of my dress, which crumpled no matter how many times Mama ironed it. My Sunday dress was fading badly and I began to become a little ashamed of it, especially because Lydon would take me out after. I hoped to find a newer-looking dress at the camp second hand shop, but nothing fit. I was getting fat in the stomach. Pastor Olsen had us pray for Floyd, and for everyone who was lost.

At fourteen, I had already mastered the art of half-paying attention to Pastor Olsen. It got so I only listened when he talked about himself.

“About eleven at night on August eighth, the late Julius Hanson, a neighbor, came to inform us that my sister had been in an accident. One of my parents asked if she was hurt. Mr. Hanson answered, ‘She’s dead.’ Some of the first words my Mother said, in Norwegian, were, ‘Oh, where is her soul?’ It took this tragedy in our home to bring my Mother back to the Holy Father. It became also the means to stir my heart again into the realization of my lostness and my need of deliverance.”

I had buried three tomcats but I’d never had a relative die. Probably just because we didn’t have many, Mama and Daddy being just about the only ones left as far as I knew.

After church, I met Lydon’s family and we all went to see Floyd. I was so happy to be out of the house for a whole day. Lydon’s Uncle Brewster was in town from Louisville and had brought his Model T. Lydon kept elbowing me as he walked towards it, saying, “Not bad, huh?” but it looked like the toys the younger kids at school played with, only gone huge and silly. It was unnaturally shiny. Nothing was shiny in January except, sometimes, the crick when it froze through. Lydon grinned as his uncle pulled down a divider seat for us in the back of the car.

I’d made a honey and butter sandwich that morning and kept it in my coat pocket. I thought I could throw it down to Floyd, who was probably not getting many honey sandwiches. I also brought a comb and powder case I made Mama buy for me, which seemed to try her.

“You’re going to waste my money on that nonsense. At your age,” she said, scowling, as she handed over the money.

Lydon sat next to me and sometimes his knee would bump mine, making my stomach hurt. His mom and aunt sat across from us and didn’t stop talking for a breath till Brewster leaned back and shouted, “We’re here. Will you take a look at this traffic? Looks like half Kentucky showed up.”

“My word,” Lydon’s mother said as she peered out the window. “These buggies need to get out of our way. Honk the horn, Brewster.”

More people were standing outside that hole in the ground than I’d ever seen at the county fair. I couldn’t get close enough to see the hole, much less throw down my sandwich. And the folks ahead of me and Lydon weren’t even talking to Floyd. Far as I could tell, they were talking to each other, and mostly about sports and taxes. There was Bub Former and those two McGuires who used to run the coal camp general store, where folks bought their calico, needles, hangover remedies, salve and any number of elixirs to soothe sooty lungs, all of them talking a mile a minute as if they were still important, as if anyone had to listen to them anymore. Some of the men I recognized by their voices, size, shoulder slopes, by their hands, but their faces looked naked and bleached without a layer of coal dust. Only a few people seemed to remember Floyd was there.

“Why didn’t he tell anyone where he was headed?” a man said.

“Wouldn’t’ve done him any good.”

“Hope he’s got a coat.”

“How long you suppose you could go without food?”

“About six hours.”

Lydon lead me around the outside of the crowd. He asked me if I enjoyed church that day and I asked him how his geography project was going. He said he hadn’t started yet. I said he should consider Egypt. “It’s just deserts and one big river,” I said. We passed a cluster of men around a fiddler and I hoped Floyd couldn’t hear the music.

It was cold and unpleasantly bright that day. Too bright to see, too cold to smell. A blue jay screamed at the trespassers from an ash tree nearby.

Lydon bought me a sock doll with button eyes and a yarn mouth that had Floyd Collins, ’25 stitched onto its chest. So I’d remember. I wondered which inventive town person had come up with that idea. Someone was selling hot tea and someone else had sandwiches. All the people laughing and chattering made me feel restless and wrong. Two men ushered two other men into a buggy parked under a Pignut and in a moment, the visitors left with smothered smiles and two tin cups. Lydon elbowed me again. “Think we should get something to drink?” he asked. I didn’t know how he meant it, so I laughed. He looked handsome when he didn’t have that grin on his face. It made him look like a little boy, apple-cheeked and laughing at some stupid joke. I felt silly standing next to him.
“That’s a Red Tailed Hawk,” Lydon told me, pointing to a vulture who was circling higher and higher until he disappeared.

When we met back up with his family, Lydon’s mother’s cheeks were bright red. “You’ll never guess where that lady was from. Cleveland. Doesn’t that beat all?”

“I think I met a gentleman from Memphis. Probably a businessman,” the aunt said with some tone of authority. "Said nothing can stop money in Tennessee, said sooner or later everyone here's going to move there, land of milk and honey and all that, called us the land of coal and lichen and I told him I don't even know what lichen is. Clementine," the aunt said and looked at me for the first time, "ask your mother what lichen is."

“Your mother,” Lydon’s mother told me, “should take you all here. To learn about caves and not wandering down every hole you see. And to wear a hat,” she said, then looked at the aunt. “I mean, really. No hat. No gloves.”

The aunt nodded her head solemnly, like people did at church. “And can you imagine how his mother must feel?”

“Maybe I should send her something.”

“You’re too thoughtful.” The aunt plucked a pill from her felt skirt and flicked it Lydon-ward. "There's money in lichen, you think?"

“It’ll give me a chance to try that new sweet potato pie recipe.”

“Those army men look so strong,” the aunt said, sighing. The blue jay kept screaming.

“I might join the military,” Lydon told me, “when I’m older.”

“If I ever get stuck down a well or a cave,” his mother announced, “I hope they send those boys after me.”

“I think it’s a shame the police couldn’t do it on their own. Our boys have more important affairs to attend to than the Collins boy. And did you see the redhead soldier? My word.”

The next day, I couldn’t pay attention in school. I got worn out, always being around Mama, at home and at school, and never being around Daddy. I’d drift off during the day, thinking about that man stuck under the ground.

I wondered what songs he was humming to himself and I wondered what songs I would sing if I was in his place. Not Nearer My God to Thee, you can't sing that in the bottom of a cave. Maybe There's a Wideness, Abide With Me, or One Who is All Unfit. Or maybe just one of Clete Hindman's songs about ladies and the Blue Hog and wasn't Gray Hill better when he was young. I thought about how well he was sleeping, if he was sleeping. I also wondered if Daddy would want to see Floyd. Daddy wasn’t having any fun as it was and maybe the trip would be good for him. Show him that someone had it bad, too. And maybe he’d meet a man from a big town who’d give him a job and we could all move away but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to the cave. The radio said that morning that the men digging him out had caused a cave-in and blocked the entrance.

Mama yelled at me twice during the day and almost made me stay after school, except that I have to do that every day to wait for her anyway.

On the way home, she walked too quickly for me and I had to skip a step every once and a while to keep up.

She was holding her lips tight together and looked at me and said, “I know what’s been on your mind, lately,” like it was a threat. “It’s Lydon, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” was all I could say. I asked if she’d heard anything about Floyd during the day.

“No, thank God.”

“Why is it taking so long?”

“Because people are incompetent.”

“People?” I asked and looked at my shoes. “You think the army’ll be able to get him out?”

“They’d better. You can’t go without water for more than a week.”

“How long has it been?”

“More than a week. You know,” she said, “I heard an interview with the commander in charge of the scheme. He said they’re on track and that the last cave-in was part of their plan.” Mama rolled her eyes. She had embarrassingly little faith in the police or the army. That summer, the police wouldn’t charge our neighbor, Tom Salks, for shooting our beagle, Elmira. And the firemen, she says, let our barn burn down because we didn’t go to the dance they have every year. I’m not sure what she had against the army, but she sure didn’t seem to think much of them either.

“I prayed for Floyd last night,” I told her.

“Me, too.”

“You think he’ll be okay?” She didn’t answer. “Cause why pray if you don’t?” I said, a little nervous.

She stepped over a slush pile and said, “Try not to ruin your dress, will you?”

We kept the radio on all night at home, and Mama even put it on at recess. It became useful at home, because no one had to speak at dinner. We’d sit there, staring at the box like we could understand the voices better by looking at it. Mostly it was Floyd, but also there were crop estimates for the next year and harvest, general coal outrage, and, sometimes, a storywriter would come on and read us something. One was a true story about a man who saved his family and the neighbors from a bear by beating him to death with an axe handle. Sometimes, Lydon would come over for dinner. Then we’d talk some. I could tell that Lydon didn’t much like talking to his teacher at the dinner table and that Daddy seemed to frighten him. Seeing Lydon next to Daddy made Lydon look like a chubby, sleepy baby and Daddy like a lumberjack.

“You should’ve seen him before, though,” I told Lydon one night after dinner.

“Before what?”

I didn’t want to tell him. “Before winter. Before Floyd. You’ll like him better in the spring,” I said.

Lydon stretched. “I can’t wait for spring.”

“Me neither.”

“I’m gonna try out for the baseball team. Think I’ll make it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Yes.”

“Dinner was good. I love pork chops.”

“Yes,” I said.

A door shut and a wave of cold air rushed through the living room. “Was that your Dad?”

“Yes.” I began to feel as if I didn’t have to answer for Lydon to continue.

Daddy left after dinner, always, and it got so I didn’t like having Lydon over. He told me he thought it was strange Daddy didn’t stay and maybe I did, too.

Girls like Alice Ians or Greta Tomshaw’d giggle and ask me if Lydon’d kissed me and wanted to know everything about where we went and what we said to each other. I didn’t know what to tell them. “He’s all right, I guess,” was all I came up with.

One day, Lydon walked me home from school and we hung back a block or so from Mama. He asked me about the poem we had to memorize, and if I’d chosen one yet. I said no, that I didn’t feel like reading poetry in front of the whole class and he said, “I know what you mean.”

Then he asked if I heard anything about Floyd and I said no. He said Greta Tomshaw had passed him a note and wanted to know what we were up to. He said I looked pretty that day. Then he said his brother and Evelyn Williams were going to get married so they could see each other naked and kiss and touch each other. He talked about it long enough that I got the hint.

“I just don’t think I could,” I said. I was quiet for a long time and I scrunched my mouth from one side to the other and kicked some rocks out of my path. It took about a minute of that before he kicked a water pump and cut through the Neckers’ yard.

I had to run to catch up with Mama.

Mama was cleaning the table when the radioman began talking, loud and rushed. “On the eighteenth day of the Floyd Collins crisis, we have an update,” he began.

The army men had found a new route after the one caved in, and they had reached Floyd, three days dead. Mama set down the bowl of potatoes on the table and looked at Daddy, who was halfway out the door. He stood there, letting the winter air fill the room.

“Fools,” Mama said in her spiteful voice and crossed herself. “Bickering, arrogant fools.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was a little glad he got to die in private. If he’d been rescued, what would he say to the crowd? To the man selling sandwiches?

Daddy pulled out a chair and Mama shut the door. He slumped like someone let the air of his chest.

“I can’t believe it,” Daddy said. He held his head in his hands. Mama stood behind him and put her worn hands on his shoulders. I looked away because I didn’t want to see him cry.

“I just can’t believe it,” he said. I could. And I was only surprised that I wasn’t surprised.

Issue No. 5, History - The Diary of a Country Priest

2007-03-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

Childhood grown old.

*

Things change. Sensitive parents have suggested I lead my Sunday school class in prayer to Gosh.

*

A letter from a Methodist preacher in Rome: “YOU feel out of place? I’m as invisible as God. They have no sense of time here. They think it’s evil, that it comes from Times Square.”

*

The walls around the pool of wax inside my Glade scented candle look like the catacombs of the primitive church.

*

There is a finite amount of gold in the world. The same amount that existed two millennia ago exists today. Imagine my surprise when, picking the wax out of my ears, two flecks of gold leaf fell out onto my desk. I set to work immediately on the halo of an icon.

*

There isn't a child younger than me!

Issue No. 5, History - Come and Go

2007-03-11T13:15:00.000-07:00

Teresa McGarry, a toothy, handsome 74 year-old, tells me of her mother, Mary, walking 11 miles to town and coming back with a "hi-fi" on her back. Hi-fi? I wonder, before realizing she means a phonograph. Mary delivered her daughter Margaret the next day. Margaret muses that this must explain her affinity for music. Margaret, Teresa, and Agnes were the last of 11 children born of Mary and Anthony McGarry in a small village in Ireland. These three girls grew up together and moved to the United States in the late nineteen-fifties.

When asked how they saw their future they all respond, "I didn't think about it.” Apparently, there wasn't much time for daydreaming. "When we came home we had a lot of work to do," including chores, helping in their mother’s store, and tending the potatoes. “Oh the potatoes, I hated that!" exclaims Margaret. They toyed with being nurses (as their older sisters were), but the one option they never considered was staying put and living out the lives of their parents. Though not for any want of happiness. Despite their work and chores, "We had a lot of fun, too" insists Agnes. After fifty years, the memory of dances and socials still excites the girls and makes them laugh. "It was during the war and nylons were especially hard to find...There was nothing we wouldn't do for a pair of nylons to wear to the dance." (“We didn’t have the thongs of today,” Agnes adds later). Margaret, when asked to describe her first husband, whom she married before she was 25, can only muster that he was "a good dancer."

None of their marriages seem to have modeled themselves after their parents’. Teresa, who confesses to not having wanted to get married, tells me of her husband’s vices: “the jealousy is worse than the drinking. I hit the jackpot and I got both.” That marriage, which ended in a bitter divorce, seems to have soured Teresa on men in general––except priests, with whom she spent the majority of her life while working in rectories. She did have a boyfriend in her sixties, a rather wealthy man who seems to have been quite nice to her, but Agnes tells me on the sly that he was definitively “sexless,” if not “gay,” and this was the reason Teresa felt so comfortable with him.

Margaret’s marriage, too, was plagued by jealousy. “If someone even said hello to me, whooo.” Her husband––the dancer–– was a hard-working man with a penchant for smoking, which killed him, and wanderlust, which kept him from being happy. “He wanted to be in control,” Margaret told me. But once he became sick he had to trust her or accept his fears. Not long after his early death in 1982, Margaret used the money from his insurance to set up a beauty salon.

One anecdote the girls seem to relish sticks out in my mind. When they were children, the British sent a rough and untrained military force, called the Black and Tans, to tame the Irish. These men were of dubious moral standing and felt free in the countryside to take what they wanted, as one did when he entered the McGarry home. Mary stopped him and declared that he was not to go into the girls’ bedroom. Brushing her aside, he found himself unable to move. His foot had been pinned to the floor by a pitchfork. Mary was summarily arrested and charged with ‘Obstructing a gentleman.’ The judge imposed a fine, which she refused to pay, denying any wrongdoing. Her husband Anthony “must have gone through hell,” because he did pay his wife‘s fine, slowly and secretly.

Issue No. 5, History - There isn't a child younger than me!

2007-03-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 4, The Day Job

2007-01-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 4, The Day Job - The Shoppe

2007-01-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

A polite young man from the San Fernando Valley phoned the shoppe one rainy morning and held it up. Rain kills business, so they say, and so it did, all morning. Which is not to say it was a particularly bad morning. I do enjoy the quiet time, savoring the potpourri and thumbing through my Reader’s Digest. A woman eventually did come in, a tad severe in her demeanor, but I didn’t judge. She walked directly to the glass case beneath the register, to our most precious of Moments, the newlyweds and graduates we keep under lock and key.

“I’ll take this one,” she said.

“The little boy with the chocolate smeared on his face! How lovely!” I climbed down from my chair and opened the case. “Would you like this wrapped today? Why don’t you try some of our biscuits there and I’ll get this all wrapped up.”

“Thank you, I will.”

“This must be for someone very special, I can—”

“Jeanette! Jeanette!” Lisa, our newest part-timer, came running out of the back office with the phone. “There’s someone on line one who wants our money!”

“Lisa, I’m with a customer at the moment, it’ll just be a sec.”

“He says it’s a stickup and we need to send him all our money!”

“These biscuits are good,” said the severe-looking woman.

“Aren’t they? That’s real apricot—take another. Lisa, could you wrap this figurine for me?”

Lisa came over, sweating more than I’d like, and I took the phone. “Rosebud Gifts, this is Jeanette, could you hold for one moment? Lisa, the bows are in the drawer. That’s it, the blue one. Yes?”

“Send me all your money.” The words were direct enough but the voice was soft, shy, inviting of a conversation even if the young man on the other side didn’t seem to want one.

“My, oh my! Who may I ask is calling?”

“Nevermind who’s calling. Send me all your money.”

“Yes, sir, of course. I’ve never been held up before so—hold on a sec. Thanks for coming in! Enjoy your miniaturette! Sorry. I’ve never been held up before so you’ll have to walk me through this. Although I did imagine if it were to happen, it would happen in person.”

“I’d get caught if I did it in person.”

“Yes, I suppose you would.”

“And now you can’t call the police ‘cause the line’s tied up.”

“Very clever.”

“Go get an envelope.”

“Ok. A business-sized envelope?”

“The biggest you’ve got.”

“Lisa, go into the back office and get one of the manilas.”

“Wait—is there someone else with you?”

“Yes, I always work with Lisa on Thursdays.”

“Well, tell her to get down—and with her hands behind her back.”

“Lisa, the young man wants you to lie down. If you could just grab one of those manilas and then lie down—and with your hands behind your back.”

“Now empty your till.”

“Let’s see, I’m not sure how to enter this in. Shall we just say it’s a No Sale and I’m getting you quarters?”

“Just take out the money!”

“Right, I’ve got the envelope.”

“Good. Put all the money in it.”

“All of it? Gosh.” I had Lisa hold the manila above her head while I shook the drawer into it. “Alrightey, it’s all in there.”

“Seal it up. And address it.”

“Will do. Just have to find a pen. I’m addressing this to—who am I addressing this to?”

“To—damnit! Evan Kowalski.”

“Evan! I almost named my son Evan.”

“24 Orange Grove Place. Woodland Hills, CA. 91302.”

“Wood…land…Hills. CA. CA? That’s in California!”

“Yes.”

“That’s the other side of the country!”

“I can’t hold up a shop in my own town!”

“No, but California. Wow. Where in California are you?”

“The San Fernando Valley.”

“Well I’ll be. You know I have a son-in-law comes from that area. I’ve never been myself. Is the sun everything they say it is?”

“Did you address the envelope?!”

“What do you do down there in the San Fernando Valley?”

“…I’m a student.”

“Oh, how wonderful. What is your area of study?”

“Botany.”

“Fascinating! And do you know what you want to do after you graduate?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s fine. You know, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was—”

“My health insurance runs out.”

“—your age and everything worked out just fine so don’t you worry.”

“My health insurance runs out.”

“What’s that?”

“When I graduate, next month, there’s no more health insurance.”

“Oh, companies normally take care of that sort of thing. I remember when I—”

“Do you know of any openings for a botanist?”

“Well…”

“I get sick all the time. They’re about to kick me out on the street and I’m gonna get sick!”

“There must free clinics in the San Fernando Valley.”

“I’ve been coddled and mollycoddled and now it’s skid row, the cold nights, the whores, the hypodermics, and all without health insurance!”

“No, that doesn’t sound good.”

“Not to mention the shelter and food I used to get. Where is it now? I need money!”

“Have you thought about teaching?”

“Don’t try making up excuses and giving me advice.”

“Sorry.”

“All this future living, it’s blind tightrope walking! They gave me a line, it moves forward and forward, over and ever forward and suddenly, at the drop of a hat, they’re taking the net! I’m falling and the only thing provided is the cement floor that turns my body into a half-inch layer of blood and crushed bone! And no health insurance!”

“I’m sorry.” I was touched

“Put it in overnight,” and the young man hung up.

The electronic chimes went off and another woman, not as severe as the one before but similar capris, came into the shoppe. “I’m looking for a figurine,” she said, “it’s a little boy, his face is covered in chocolate?”

Dazed, I said, “What? Chocolate? Oh no, I’m afraid we just sold that one.”

“Shoot. That’s too bad. Why is that woman on the floor?”

“Hmm? Oh, Lisa, get up. Run this envelope through the postage machine. Is there any thing else I can help you with today?
“I’ll take a quick spin around.”

“Jeanette! The envelope’s too big, it won’t fit!”

“Just put stamps on it!”

“How many?”

“All of them!”

“Are these soaps handcrafted?” asked the woman.

“We’re out of stamps!” screamed Lisa.

“Soaps? Uh, yes, I think so. How can we be out of stamps?”

“You two sure are busy today.”

“We were robbed. Um, can you go to the post office?”

“Robbed! Did anyone get hurt?”

“No, he did it over the phone.”

“There’s no time for the post office! He’ll call back!”

“I don’t understand. Over the phone?”

Lisa was jumping up and down. “What do we do? What do we do?”

“Yes,” I said. “From California.”

“California! Well, don’t send it!”

“What?”

“He’ll come to our windows at night!”

“And he was so polite! We have to send it!”

“He’ll look at us through our windows at night!”

“Suit yourself. I do like these soaps.”

The electronic chimes went off again. A woman dragged her sons inside. They started running around, touching things. I looked to Lisa. She still had the package in her hand.
“Excuse me,” a woman approached me, “I saw a card in here a couple weeks ago. There might have a dog on it. Do you still have that one? Douglas! Did you-? If my boys break anything, what is your policy on that?”

“Well…”

Lisa slid the envelope under the counter and bit her lip. I bit my lip. We walked onto the floor and helped our customers—so much for the rain.

We take the phone off the hook now. The envelope is still under the counter. Our till is filled with new money. But something is missing. The shoppe moves on, over and ever on, but something like the floor is missing.

Issue No. 4, The Day Job - Questionnaire

2007-01-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

-What did you do in your previous occupation?
-Sully.

-What do you and your wife do for fun?
-Switch bunks.

-What is the best advice you have ever received?
-Good things come to those who nap.

-What advice would you have for your employees?
-Each deed procrastinates the next. There is nothing more ridiculous than effort.

Issue No. 4, The Day Job - Ask-A-Librarian

2007-01-07T19:03:00.000-08:00

Two stout bottles of physic when Frank of Reference opened his mirror. Both of equal shape and size, both topped with stained, upturned cups, but the stains of each of different colors; one a sunny orange, the other a nightshade green. Frank, confusing the image of the two bottles with the prior of his face, reached out and unscrewed his eye—his green eye.

“Marco!”

Dorothy rose to the counter after hiking up her grandmother’s stockings. Nearly grandmother-age herself, the stockings had a tendency to curdle. “Hello, Thomas. How are you this morning?”

“Hey! Where’s Frank?”

Dorothy swiveled to the hand lotion, worked the squirt into her palms, and searched for a title on her computer, all the while able to engage Thomas without speaking directly to the knobby buzz cut only just clearing the counter. “I don’t think Frank has come in yet, Thomas.”

“We were supposed to play our game!”

“The library doesn’t allow Marco Polo in the stacks.”

“Frank lets me!”

“I know you ask him every morning.”

“We were going to play today!” Thomas sat up on the chair beside the counter. He looked around at the homeless, jobless, and foreign slowly filling the library. “Tell me when Frank is here,” he said and stumbled off towards his daily books and computers.

Frank’s bedside phone and not the noonday sun finally woke him.

“Good morning, Frank. This is Dorothy at the—”

“Dorothy—what time is it?”

“It’s twelve-thirty. I was just looking at—”

“Dorothy…” Frank attempted to prop himself up on the headrest but fell back into his pillow. “I think I’m gonna have to call in sick today. Do you mind handling the desk by yourself? I’m feeling really…tired.”

“No, it’s ok, Frank. I was just looking at the schedule and it says you’re slotted for Ask-A-Librarian duty anyway. So as long as you have your computer on, have a nice afternoon.”

“Ok. Wait. What’s Ask-A-Librarian?”

“You were at the last meeting. It’s a feature on the website where people can ask a reference librarian questions from their home or work computer.”

“Ok.”

“All right then, I’ll see you tomorrow, Frank.”

“Ok,” but Frank was mostly back in sleep by then. The receiver slid down his chest and off the bed, tipping the bottle of original flavor Nyquil from his nightstand. It landed on the carpet and began its slow drip-drip, the final drop joining the puddle hours later.

Frank woke of his own volition to see his alarm clock inching towards four. He felt unusually rested but the guilt caused by that first sight of clock sank in and threatened to unrest. The days were short that time of year and four meant end, not tea.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, hoping the brisk movement would counter the guilt. He smiled, resolved not to waste daylight on a shower and mustache-trimming, not even a proper dress, and rounded quarter-to down to half-past, effectively changing four to three.

He greeted the kitchen yawning “Carpe diem,” slippers squeaking and the untied ties of his bathrobe trailing behind.

“Oh no,” he said, noticing a houseplant he was particularly fond of, the only house plant in the house, stuck in the shade. He thought the kitchen would have been a perfect spot for the plant to receive sun. But this being his first afternoon at home in the thirty-some years he lived there, he had never been around to notice the repercussions of a northward- facing kitchen.

He took the plant out of its dark corner and carried it, whispering an apology, to the study, where a fulsome pool of sun was collecting on the floor. He primped a few leaves and patted the soil, but a beep—quite unlike the usual ones—suddenly let out from above. He followed the beep to a new window displayed on his computer, on top of the regular library website.

The window resembled a chat room, something Frank was familiar with from late nights chewing fat with likeminded science fiction fans. At the top of the page, from a gigglypuff98, “Marco!”

Frank smiled, typed, “Afternoon Thomas. Hope you’re staying out of trouble.”

He was surprised by his child friend’s inordinately nimble fingers when—before he could even give a second glance to his favorite houseplant—a reply was posted. “Currently drowning in bad research for an expansive novel I’ve been planning for years, historical fiction, and need desperately any and all material relating to eponymous explorer Marco Polo. Only I am homebound, stricken with a terrible case of fatigue. But if you could reply, with call numbers and, of more importance, directions to those numbers on your shelves, I will gladly retrieve the books as soon as I am halfway awake.”

Frank read the post over twice. “Thomas?” he eventually replied.

“Doctor (née Tank Engine),” was the immediate response.

The plant was then sadly absent from Frank’s at first groggy and now groggy and puzzled mind. He compared the prolix post with the juvenile name and considered the impossibility of little trend-diagnosed Thomas ever composing a consistent sentence.

Frank typed: “You’ll find all non-fiction material concerning Voyage and Travel in the early to mid 900’s. We also shelve biographies in that general area.”

“Which general area is that?” popped up.

Frank replied, “All non-fiction is stored on the first floor, the 900’s—” but another post came up before Frank had finished typing.

“This is the Jefferson branch, correct? I’m afraid I live too far away from the main library (though my kid makes me drive out there enough).”

The kid would explain the screen name, Frank thought. “That is correct. The old building off Main Ave.”

“Is that before or after the Cold Stone Creamery?”

“Before, if you’re coming from the south.”

“I’ll be driving from the north.”

“In that case, the library will be on your right, just after the Cold Stone Creamery.”

“And where in the library are the 900’s?”

“All non-fiction is stored on the first floor, the 900’s are in the southwest corner of the building. They occupy the last shelving unit before the artificial ferns.”

“Would the materials be on my right or my left as I enter the aisle between the shelves?”

“Coming from the side of the ferns or from the windows?”

“That’s the windows that look out onto the river?”

“The windows that look out onto the parking lot.”

“The ferns.”

“The left. And you’ll have to crouch. The Marco Polo material will run the length of the bottom shelf of the first column.”

“I have a bad knee. Will there be anyone at the library who could pull the books for me?”

“Yes. Anyone at the reference desk would be happy to help.”

“Where would I find the reference desk in relation to the southwest shelves?”

“Directly behind you.” Frank cracked his knuckles and looked down to his plant. The sun had left in favor of a sliver of wallpaper on the opposite side of the room. Frank turned on the light beside the computer, and returned to the keyboard. “We also have several picture books on the life and travels of Marco Polo in the children’s section, if that would interest you.”

“Where’s the children’s section?” predictably.

“Second story. Look for the B’s, B for biography—after, that is, the J for Juvenile. Alphabetical by subject.”

“No. I don’t think I’ll be making it up there. Bad knee.”

“We have elevators. Second right after the ferns.”

“Thank you very much. This is quite a service.”

“Good luck on your novel.”

“If I can ever get out of bed…”

“How long have you been tired for?”

“Feels like always.”

“I’ve been drowsy all day today. I’m actually typing this from home. Slept sinfully in, I’m afraid.”

“No harm done. What’s the culprit?”

“Woke with a sore throat but took Nyquil instead of Dayquil.”

“Dayquil’s the orange stuff.”

“Yes. But I enjoy being at home.”

“It’s a different world, home in the business hours.”

“The sun’s gone done.”

“Too bad.”

“This would be close to my bed time, after a long day of work.”

“You worked.”

“I did. Does that mean the day is over?”

“Yes.”

“Over.”

“Over and done with and out.”

Dorothy’s stockings bunched around her toes as she ran alongside a group of security guards, policemen, and firemen over thousands of toppled books. Patrons were huddled in a frightened circle beside the newspapers. The computers were consumed in flames and had set the sprinklers off. Thomas was high on the shelves, laughing, pushing them over and onto the guards as he leapt from one to another. He teetered over the edge of the last shelf, fake ferns far below him. He looked to the right, at the windows and the parking lot. He looked back to Dorothy, gaining on him. He ran head first into the window, making it halfway out before a cop jerked him back by the foot. The glass cut into his chest and blood ran down the policemen’s arm. Still, Thomas laughed, and kicking his feet and punching the glass, screamed, “Polo!”

Issue No. 4, The Day Job - Anais Nin From Nine to Five

2007-01-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 3, Murder!

2006-12-20T15:36:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Young Life: A Nathan McMurphy Mystery, Part I

2006-12-20T15:31:00.000-08:00

I was reached for the morning I had spent all week dreaming of, the Saturday morning I was to float downstairs mid-afternoon and greet my parents’ cries of “This is how you take advantage of your youth? You’ve wasted the day! Your breakfast, lunch, and dinner’s cold! We were going to take you to the movies but you can sure as hell forget about that!” with a calm, face-to-the-fridge, “Sorry, I dreamt in.”

I was reached for and thrown into the shower before the migrant leaf blowers had even wiped the sleep from their eyes. I reminded myself whilst dressing in yesterday’s corduroys to bring my pillow along so I could continue in the car, but I was called for and forgot. I sat back--my head on the folded-down armrest--watched the dew fly off the window, and called to mind mass homicide(1) .

Weekends arrive and tireless parents are never content to stop moving--they daytrip. Every state park, historical mansion, colonial village, art museum and arts and crafts museum has been trod upon by my parents and me on at least one Saturday afternoon. They were on a college campus kick, visiting every one, doing the same things at each: the library, the galleries, the dorms, the quads, the disparaging comparisons to their own alma maters. The went to remind themselves of the youth they had lost, not my awkward, lumpy, sixth-grade youth, but university youth--lithe, pale, and in all senses upwards.

The general feeling walking amongst such budding gods and goddesses was of overwhelming self-disgust. I, a pustule of a boy, trailed my parents under the age-old oaks and stone halls with all the anger and hatred that seethes from ugliness like the acne from my sweating, rubbing inner thighs. The feeling was not foreign, but was inflamed amidst people on their sexual peak. Had my parents brought me just to inflame me? Had my parents had me just to inflame me? I had to pee.

“Guys! Mom! Can we stop?” I made the plaintive plea trying to catch up through miles of topless volleyball and mud wrestling, careful my volume did not attract attention. Eventually, I did catch up enough to accidentally step on my mother’s bare heel. She turned back fast, her eyes tearing from the pain. She pointed to a three-story Georgian home across the street.

“Piss in there!” she said.

“I think I can hold it.”

“Piss in there!”

I kept the imposing edifice in view as I walked under a banner with strange letters, Greek to me. At the stoop I turned back and saw my parents continuing down the sidewalk. I thought, rather than run after them, I had better pee first.

The door was open. I saw no one in the foyer. I walked down the hall and peered into the keyholes of all the shut doors. Whatever the rooms were--I saw only crushed papers and soiled undershirts-- they were not restrooms. The hall took me to a staircase and, it being my only choice, I took it. I peered my way down another row of closed doors until I finally came upon a toilet. I shut the door behind me, tried to lock it, failed, and went.

It was an old toilet, involving an arcane system of pulleys and chains. I must have pulled the wrong pulley, or perhaps I wasn’t supposed to pull anything, but the box on the ceiling came crashing to my feet, cracking to pieces and soaking my Airwalks. I did my best to collect the porcelain into a neat pile. I turned on the fan to dry the floor and left the bathroom redder than I arrived.

An older boy passed as I stepped into the hall. He was like the rest of them, an inspiration to mannequins everywhere, but he shot me a very worried look. He walked fast, was down the stairs by the time I noticed the toilet water seeping out from under the door.

I heard voices and sirens; they got louder as I got closer to the bottom of the stairs. I wasn’t sure the floor I walked down to was even the floor I first walked into, it held so many people. Most were university youth, others policemen. A band of caution tape blocked off the stairs from the crowd. They must not have figured someone as young as I would have been in the house since I was able to walk quite comfortably under the tape.

Slipping in eye level with the older groins around me, I noticed all were facing the same direction and--slipping in that direction--I found a small clearing in the center of the hall, in the center of which was the body of a young man, alike in all physical respects to the standing bodies around it, but dead. Two policemen stood closest to the body, one at each outstretched arm.

“Do you think it’s another one?” said one to the other.

“There’s one sure way to find out,” said the other to the one.

He knelt beside the body’s chest, to a tear in its sweater. He pulled the tear apart, revealing a wound, and pulled the wound apart. A translucent liquid, bubbled, poured out of the gash and onto the floor, pouring until all that was left of the chest was a standing ribcage. The policeman closed the wound, ordered a bandage, and the leak ceased. He looked up to his partner.

“Yup,” he said. “It’s Pellegrino.”

I remembered my parents. I slipped my way back to the front door, feeling like a snorkler caught in so many jelly fish he didn’t know which way was surface. I found, after finally making it to the front, my problems of navigation were caused by the sudden fact that no light was coming from the open doorway. The bright Saturday daytripping weather had turned. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was so overcast one couldn’t help but imagine it was.

Having set off in the direction my parents walked off in, I was admiring a marble globe outside the planetarium when a very fat woman intercepted my path and grabbed me by the neck. Her apparel was as one would expect from a fat woman: sweat, and too small. The only remarkable characteristic, aside from the violent greeting, was a silver, shoulder-length wig, too silver to pass for real and yet even too silver to make for a sensible costume. I paid enough mind to what she was saying--though the dried Chef Boyardee in the nooks of her lips was distracting--to at least hear, in a nasal British, “Very like a murderer to calmly leave the scene.”

Despite my loudly-stated intentions of finding my parents, the woman in the wig turned me around and carried me back to the old Georgian house.

to be continued…

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Footnote #1, Nathan's Fantasies

2006-12-20T15:29:00.000-08:00

A child is asked, “Would you ever like to kill someone?” The child rolls his feet to their sides and pulls on his fingers. “Sure.”

The secretary’s long, auburn-dyed hair was pulled and taped to the front of her desk, the secretary lying face up on her blotter. A pair of scissors were taken out of her pencil jar, raised with both hands and driven into her forehead, then again between her eyes. Her cheeks, her nose, her mouth were stabbed. A family member later called to identify the body said the face was nothing more than “a bowl of marina sauce,” although her blouse and woolen skirt ended spotless.

I watched the tiny, white waves cover the toddler’s face. His mother punched me in the gut and dove into the hot tub after him. I was expelled from my hotel.

The living tend to blend in, except when they’re ripped open. Blood lets everyone know that living is something different.

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Rigor Mortis

2006-12-20T15:26:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Young Life: A Nathan McMurphy Mystery, Part II

2006-12-20T15:15:00.000-08:00

The crowd in the hallway was as I left it. Wig Woman pushed me through, carrying me right back to the policemen over the body.

“Here’s your suspect, boys,” she said. “Caught him fleeing the scene.”

“Mindy, why don’t you just go home?” said one of the policemen.

“Here, tell ‘em where you were five minutes ago.” She bumped her hips into my head.

“Well…”

“Come on! Speak up!”

“I was in the bathroom…upstairs. I had some trouble with the toilet.”

“With the toilet?” asked the policeman.

“It’s true, sir! Look at his shoes!” A lesser, younger officer piped up from the side. “There was water everywhere.”

“Hmmm.” The policemen started think. “Water, huh? Well, we’ll have to take you in.”

Mindy grinned at me.

“Can I go tell my parents?” I asked.

The policeman thought again. “Ok, but come back.”

I retrieved my arm from Mindy’s love handles and turned to leave--but stopped. “Couldn’t that be a calling card?”

I pointed to a corner of paper sticking out of the body’s pants. The policeman bent down and pulled from the victim’s key pocket a small black and white photo. He handed it to his partner.

“Look’s like that cat’s got homocidal tendencies.” He turned to me. “How did you know to look there?”

“No one puts anything in their key pocket. Any bulge is suspicious.”

He handed me the photo. It was a portrait of a young, Hispanic man, the victim’s age, a ripped, denim jacket over his bare chest, a knife in his hand, his mouth sneering at the camera.

“Good work,” said the policeman. “Good work, indeed. How would you like to help us out a little?”

Mindy protested. “Sarge! He’s no detective!”

“Mindy, go home!”

“He’s too attractive, Sarge!--”

“I’m too what?” I said.

“We could sure use another hand.”

“He’s bait at best!”

The detective ignored her. “Where would you like to start?”

I decided to tackle the victim’s classes first. It would take a week to visit all of them so the police gave me a room in the old Georgian house--which I later learned was a Christian fraternity--to sleep and work in, provided I help fix the toilet. The other residents were not very useful. They had spent so much time trying to look like one another and succeeded, that they were all too afraid they’d be next to even be seen with me. They never left the house, only left their rooms to silently pass into another, throwing me sly, knowing looks as they went.

I snuck into the back of a full lecture hall and heard, “Structural narratology(2) …” The professor meandered from there and dismissed his class, half of which immediately swarmed him with bodies and questions. I waited a half hour for my turn.

“Did you know--” I began to ask.

He gave me his office hours and showed a young woman his writer’s callous.

“It’s been like that all week,” I later reported to the policeman. “None of his teachers recognize the boy in the photo. I don’t think that last one ever looked at a male, much less a Hispanic.”

“We’re stuck,” the policeman said.

“We have to start back at the beginning,” I said. “What do we know? The victims are young men. Broad shouldered. Flawless complexion. Blood replaced with seltzer. All killed in the residential area of campus. Ok. What connections does the young man in the photo have to this area?”

I was given an interrogation room in the basement of police headquarters and a long list of possible connections, so long my stay at the fraternity was extended indefinitely. It seemed like everyone who had ever set foot on campus came into the dim, steel room and checked their hair in the two-way mirror--even my parents.

“First of all, I’d like to know why you left without me,” I said.

They gave an apathetic pause before my mother launched into something about my being too gloomy. I let them off the hook but called up to make sure they got a parking ticket on their way out.

I was running out of ideas. I didn’t feel fresh. I had a moment between interrogations to roll up my sleeves and wipe my cuffs across my forehead. Mindy came in and, though I didn’t think I had another one in me, I sighed.

“All right, boss,” she said. “How are we doing?”

“Mindy, you are not a detective. Why don’t you just waddle back outside and help yourself to some donuts.”

She inched her way up onto the doctor’s room white paper sheet that for some reason covered the table.

“I still think I was right. Your good looks could impede this investigation,” she said.

“Thanks, Mindy.” I picked up the interview list and turned to the mirror, thinking if I squinted I could see the policemen sleeping in the other room. I ran my thumb down the page and, to my surprise, printed below my parents’ names: “Mindy.”

“I think it’s in the way you hold yourself,” she said. “No, it’s your eyes. Something in your eyes is very handsome.”

“Mindy, I’m going to ask you a few questions.”

“Come here, I want to see what’s so doggone handsome in your eyes.”

I stepped closer to the table. “Where were you coming from when you met me outside the planetarium?”

“It’s the pupils. Isn’t it? They’re darker than most people’s, aren’t they?”

“Your wig--”

“You know, I don’t tell many people. I suffer from chemo. The hairs fall off with the cancer therapy. Or they will soon."

I had gone too far. My foot slipped into the straps of Mindy’s purse. I knocked it over. A bottle of club soda rolled across the floor and as I watched it roll I could see, in the corner of my eye, her watching me. She lunged off the table, arms stretched to my shoulders and pinned me to the mirror.

There not being much strength in fat, I was able to throw her down. She hit her head against the table, though not hard enough to shift a hair of her wig or deter her from pulling out a penknife. She crawled at me fast but I darted out and locked the door. I ran into the room behind the mirror ready to wail at whoever didn’t think I was worth saving but there was no one in there. I ran upstairs.

“The sergeants want you over on Lee Street,” said the receptionist.

Lee Street was no stranger to police presence, it running through the shady neighborhoods behind campus.

“Keep the interrogation room locked,” I said on my way out.

A crowd like the crowd I first saw in the fraternity stood outside a convenience store. Showing my sheriff’s badge, I slipped my way to the front.

“This was dragged up from the sewer this morning, sir.”

I saw the body of a young Hispanic man, a ripped, denim jacket over his bare, ripped chest. Rats crawled over his legs, but his face--lips still sweetly sneering, eyes open to our faces--seemed somewhat serene, as if he had just been complemented.

“Nothing in the key pocket, sir.”

A rat wiped its mouth and belched.

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Footnote #2, The Professor's Lecture

2006-12-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

[Structural narratology], contrary to popular opinion, can in fact have a direct link to the fabula. The reader of mystery fiction can actually solve the case before the detective by critical application of the theory. Intuitive following of shape and pattern, keen observation of the universal laws of beauty, will reveal the murderer. Never deductive logic. Do not spend your precious literary time sniffing around for motivation. It does not exist. Not on the page. Not off the page. Solve the chalked-out shape committed by the writer. Return to your great-grandfather Poe and his friend Dupin: think like a murderer; that is, think like a writer. Auden tells us: “Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer.” Please finish the Levi-Strauss for next week. I hate to, but I will quiz you.

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Lights Out

2006-12-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 2, Words

2006-11-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 2, Words - The Concert Mistress

2006-11-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

The concert mistress followed me, I assume, out into the lobby during intermission. I was standing in line for a Pepsi and Reese’s when I could feel someone, her, tapping my shoulder. A great deal smaller than myself, she still had to wave for my attention after I turned around. She looked adorable, smiling up at me in her long, black dress covered with—invisible from the stage—tiny, diamond sparkles. “I like you,” she said in a Chinese-accented staccato.

It was the dress and the posture that filled it which made me realize the personage before me. Due to the position of my seat, I could never have recognized the face; all of the violinists looked the same to me, for that matter. But set off against the herded, hunch-backed furs, it was obvious who she was. I managed to mutter a polite, “Hmm?” to which she said again, “I like you.”

The patrons in line behind us began to clear their throats as the gap between me and the person in front of me grew unacceptably large. I apologized and turned back to the concession stand but I felt again the same, small fingers. The concert mistress swung me around by the arm, stood up on her tip-toes and said, loudly this time, “I like you.” Before I could say, “Excuse me?” the clear-throated patrons behind me walked up and filled the gap themselves.

I was not, however, without a place to stand. The mistress pulled me across the lobby and stood me at the water fountain. She held each of my shoulders firmly in front of hers, squeezing them as if she were planting me into the carpet, and said again, this time slowly, mouthing the words grotesquely in case I were deaf, “I…LIKE…YOU.” I shook my head, honestly bewildered. I attempted to complement her performance but she interrupted by saying, tapping her sternum on each word, “I…LIKE.” She then poked my chest, hard, and said, “YOU.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.” She squinted and frowned and I could see her in her eyes wondering, perhaps, if that were defeat. She must have decided it was for two seconds later she let go of me and walked off, shoulders slumped and her head down, into the crowd. I do not know why, but it made me very sad to watch her walk away. I no longer had any appetite for a Pepsi, not to mention a Reese’s.

I excused myself through the line leading to the women’s restroom and walked to the men’s. While washing my hands, I glanced up to the mirror and recognized something new in my reflection. Certainly the lank of my torso and the droop of my spine were as I last saw them, and the feathery, red hair and the crisp, smart bow-tie de rigueur, but there was a look behind my eyes and mouth that looked back at me anew. The idea struck me: It’s only her poor English preventing her from expressing something quite true!

The lobby lights were off when I came out of the restroom, allowing me to see perfectly across the lobby and through its crowds the diamond sparkled dress of the concert mistress, just then sliding behind a curtain. When the lights came on again and the ushers rang their bells, I called out to the dress. “No, no!” I said. “I understand! You’re contracting the ‘AM’!”
Immediately, she turned around, that smile I saw when she first tapped my shoulder fully returned to her face. I sprinted across the lobby floor to her, never minding how many mingling enthusiasts I pushed from my path. I grabbed her squarely by the shoulders and said, “I AM like you!” She nodded giddily and repeated, “I am like you! I see you from stage! I am like you!”

The house lights came down on the settling crowd, stealthily unwrapping their contraband Reese’s. The orchestra, too, were making themselves comfortable, ending their final private rehearsals and self-tunings. Eager to move things along, the audience applauded right upon seeing the door in the back flat open. I stepped out and the applause weakened considerably. Giving a good pat on the back to the principal percussionist—the one with the largest mallet—I wound my around the violinists and took my place at the center-front of the stage. I looked out to my old seat in the second mezzanine, at my friend the concert mistress, her smile covered in melted chocolate. I blew big kisses with both hands to her. I announced to her for all to hear, “Let ‘like’ be assumed, I AM YOU.”

My imaginary coat tails swung behind me as I turned to tune my peers. The principal wind held out in silence. The winds did not match pitch, neither did the strings. The second tubaist yelled out, “Who the hell are you?” I think it was the second tubaist. My stand partner was not overjoyed to see me, either. After I knocked our music to the ground with my unwieldy bow, she refused to accept my apology.

I heard the back flat open again behind me. I had attended enough concerts to know that when the back flat opens for the head honcho everyone pats their thighs and bangs the stage with a foot, so I banged away. But I soon found, still in silence, that the flat had opened not for the maestro but for two security guards, each eventually with one of my arms in their hands. They dragged me across the stage, my feet limp and lagging behind, as I tried to explain to the best of my ability the events of that night’s intermission.

A true friend, the concert mistress left the concert hall with me, although a bit more gracefully, unaided by large men with guns. In the parking lot, she told me to ditch her violin. We took my car and without even discussing it drove straight to the mall. We skipped hands-held to the photo booth, pulled the curtain, and exchanged each other’s clothes. There is a loving strip of us, my orange chest hair spilling out of her low-necked blouse, her hands lost in the elbows of my jacket. We are smiling and making faces.

Issue No. 2, Words - Paper Words

2006-11-03T19:11:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 2, Words - There Are Poems Beyond Reproach

2006-11-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

there are some poems beyond reproach
whose time-sick authors often gutter
and then blacken with ill-timed flame!

there are some moments pass us blind
that only in brightest afterthought
we are shown exactly how re-frame!

there are deadly nightmares we approach
whose roaring monsters often mutter
some once distinct and much-loved name!

there are wakeful instants we are kind,
whose twisted aftertastes have brought
us wonder the sour nature of this game!

there are small candles we light and coach
in arts of fire---through cupped hands we utter
curses at fistful winds we cannot tame!

there are small prayers sent out, aligned
to the spectra of starlight, with nought
to guarantee any answer to our aim!

Issue No. 2, Words - Fragments

2006-11-03T19:05:00.000-08:00

A kid on the bus told me I can’t trust everything I read or see on TV. I imagined a page in a library book: a paragraph, a photograph, and a caption – a phib! I was repulsed. “A whole library filled with lies!” I imagined a news anchor with her fingers crossed behind her back. “Now what I am I supposed to do?” I decided the kid was full of it. I’d trust everything I read or saw on TV. But I wouldn’t trust him. I wouldn’t trust what people said about books and TV.

-Everything’s a mess, the kids were up in arms, running around like Banshees-
-What’s a Banshee?
-It’s an expression.
-A Banshee is an expression?
-Like a Banshee. Crazy.
-I see.

“Do you like balloons?” the doctor asked the little girl. “Yes.” “Good, because right now your lymph nodes are like balloons.”

David slew Goliath with a psalm.

I was on the elevator with a stranger. The stranger tapped the elevator floor with his foot and said to me mischievously, “The ground.”

A girl passes time in a Barnes and Noble reading about her astrological sign. “Leo—You are ugly.” “Well,” she said, “that read me like a book.”

There is a dearth of words spoken directly to you and many, many words spoken just past you. You gradually learn how to listen to the words spoken past you and you correctly mistake the words spoken to you as your own.

Issue No. 2, Words - Colourful L@ng#@ge

2006-11-03T19:01:00.000-08:00

My favourite writer was the boy in ninth grade who, halfway into fall semester, shaved his head down to the brain and safety pinned a swastika to every piece of his Salvation Army leather clothing. It was only a little sad to see the curls and shyness go; the new persona was so vibrant, entertaining, I didn’t miss them much. Once in the new uniform, Jacob—that was his name—took it upon himself to offend every one of his classmates on every imaginable verbal level. He saw no point in starting small. Our teacher, Mrs. Stuart, had been gone for a few days and she explained upon returning that her mother was ill and may need more attention in the future. Jacob politely rose his hand and said, “Your mother is a f#*%$*g c&*t and I hope she dies before you can say goodbye.” Mrs. Stuart’s face lost all colour and she muttered in a tone none of us had ever heard her use before, “Get out. Get out right now. Go to Mr. Vilsac’s office.” Alisha sat by the door and on his way out Jacob looked at her and said, “Turn the other cheek, n#g.” And off he went, goose-stepping down to the vice-principal’s office, as he did every day from that day on. Detention did not exactly curb Jacob’s words, nor did the PTA’s expulsion of his own mother. Throughout the year: athletes became recluses when he analyzed their friendsips; Muslims, Hispanics, and fat kids became convinced of their own worthlessness; the most popular girls in the school broke down in hysterics after he rape, rape, raped them with the most disgusting slurs, slurs like fireworks, slurs like “I want to smear s*%t in my mouth and eat you out.”

Jacob’s favourite reader was myself. I was the only one who got it and I believe he knew it. Jacob’s genius was in never allowing his voice or his body to be violent, only his words. All his utterances had the effect of gestures, and what is a gesture but lovely? Every sentence moved someone, often to tears, like a hand moving a glass of water. Such colourful language: he spoke in cursive! His were the words that sunk a million ships! I could never talk like Jacob—sadly, the role of my head is to hold my tongue--but I at least appreciated Jacob and his talent. Everyone else called him “The Monster.” He knew that I knew how wonderfully ridiculous it was for our classmates to become upset over a few sounds created millennia ago. Every teacher teaches the rhyme of sticks and stones but no child learns it. The words that are never taken personally are the words in that rhyme. Jacob couldn’t hurt anything, but his readers pretended his words were sticks and then went about hitting themselves over the head with them, investing meaning in things that had no meaning.

I made a brief effort of explaining these interpretations to my favourite writer when we happened to be in the bathroom together. “I believe you have the Great American Insult somewhere inside you, just waiting to get out,” I said. He kissed me on the lips and whispered in my ear, “Puckered anus where there should be a young man.”

Issue No. 2, Words - A Defense of Reading

2006-11-03T18:58:00.000-08:00

In the age of Poetry Defended, narrative dominates the public sphere. Anyone with a computer can be an internationally acclaimed poet, millions of escapists worldwide stop their days for televised fiction, books take nations by storm, and artists are pop icons. Society has come full circle since the Philosopher banished the Poets from his Republic. The Poet has now become the Philosopher King, leading the world towards the blinding light of ideal forms as distributed by cable networks across the universe, while the position of the Reader, our hero, Philosopher-like in her questioning of forms, is degraded to the former inferiority of the Poet. Because the Reader does more than just watch and because she directs her critical activity at something other than the physical forms of this world, she is taken for a threat to artistic pleasure, by the Poet, and to social productivity, by the Political Activist.

To the Poet, the Reader’s extension of the Poet’s creative world is a rebellious and presumptuous deconstruction, an appropriation of meaning as dangerous to his world as nuclear testing is to ours. The Reader disrupts the peace of simple viewing by insisting on a mistrust of forms. She extends the chain of signifiers beyond the literal reading of text as reality role-playing.

To the Activist, the Reader’s sincere concerns for fiction are trivial as compared to “real life” problems (like nuclear testing), and he hopes any critical discussion will further his causes. While political and social dissent is very real and sometimes fruitful, the interpretive dissent of the Reader is regarded as fruitless by the Activist.

Reading does not engage a representation of reality – neither the Poet’s fictional reality nor the Activist’s global reality – but rather culminates in the presentation of an experience, in which an equal exchange takes place between the Reader and another element, whether it be Text, Author, or community of Readers.

Intentional concerns (’what does the author mean?’) and confusion of text with reality (over-identification with a character, for instance) inhibits a Reader from being critical, from exercising a careful evaluation, a comprehensive understanding of a text that can be made available to her in the experience of reading. Reading is a personal relation with and a reinterpretation of a text and deserves to be practiced by everyone, not solely a limited number of published Literary Critics.

Reading, like Poetry, is a creative art. Just as the artist perceives and reinterprets the world around him, to the delight of others, the Reader perceives and reinterprets a textual world. So why is the Reader necessarily a failed poet, as the Poet was a failed philosopher, conjuring forms twice removed? The Reader is rather a creator in her own right, the missing link between Poet and Philosopher, experiencing and reinterpreting objects in reality, words themselves.

Issue No. 2, Words - From Monster To Word

2006-11-03T18:56:00.000-08:00

Issue No. 1, Travel

2006-10-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

Issue No. 1, Travel - The Dole by Jonathan Tuttle

2006-10-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

The heroes of boy Bevy were the kings of late night comedy. Surely it is they, thought Bevy in Civics, and not the political leaders they ridicule, who do in fact run this country. It is gracious statesman David Letterman who, unlike the object of his wit, at least speaks to us regularly, who lends to his subjects his stentorian voice at the crown of every day. Indeed, of more import to Bevy was not the man who was to fill the next empty White House, but rather the man who was to fill the next empty desk on the next empty oval platform. Bevy drew a line connecting his immediate goal, that of attaining summer employment, with his grander goal and wrote to Mr. Letterman directly. “Dear Mr. Letterman,” he began, “You are a gracious statesman and your stentorian voice crowns my doldrum days. I need a summer job. You need the summer off. I was wondering if you were hiring for the position of host? I can fly up at your earliest convenience. Thank you for considering,” signed, “Bevy.”

A reply was not forthcoming and Bevy fell on a back up plan. He was to produce a daily pamphlet, distributed among the discerning crowds about town, wherein would be typed a list of highlights from the previous night’s shows. Bevy took notes while watching his heroes, jotting down in his reporter’s notebook every set up and punch line he found worthy of print. He typed the jokes first thing in the morning, printed fifty copies, and folded them up. Typed along the top of his pamphlet was a large banner that read, “Funnier Than The Dreams You Were Having – 25 Cents.” He threw the stack into his messenger bag and biked to every social establishment open. Reaching up, Bevy would drop a pile at the end of a bar and tip his hat to the oblivious barman. Bevy did notice the pamphlets were read, or at the very least moved, for he saw them lining the make shift mattress of a panhandler. But the quarters, like Mr. Letterman’s RE, were never received.

Bevy was broke and if he was so much longer he was sure his parents would kick him out; first from the house and then from the tent he would pitch on the front yard. They didn’t want him to turn into his readers, asleep on his papers. Bevy was greatly upset at the prospect as well and looking through newspaper one morning for the classifieds his dread was pushed head long into spleen. A front-page article announced that the city council spent last evening debating the necessity of half the public library research staff. Bevy was good friends with a member of that staff, though the two had never met. He admired from across non-fiction the poise and serenity of the humble sub-sub-librarian, dressed with the aesthetics of a devout ascetic, going about his monastic routine with a perpetual dolphin’s smile. Bevy adored this sub-sub to such an extent he found himself unable to enquire of the librarian a job. And look at him now, the poor librarian, being put to sleep the night prior unawares of which time he should set his alarm clock to: the usual working seven or the now jobless never. The image deeply saddened Bevy.

“Think of it!” he thought to himself, “what it means to be unemployed in this salesmen-sucker society, the brunt of each day spent being sold to by the barrage of surrounding images – the TV commercials and the billboards and these here lingerie photographs in the paper – and what’s left of the day spent spending. It is our ability to spend, that is, the money we have most likely made selling something to someone, that lets us forget, nay, enjoy the pictorial banter of salesmen. Unless, that ability is lacking. Unless, you have no money. Then you are outcast by your own vision, seeing in the iris of every billboard model the imposing reflection of the corporate photographer. Every grinning clerk and rep grins to clench their position between their teeth, knowing full well that if they let slip their piece of American pie they’ll be swept up into that outcast vision with you and me, sub-sub and Bevy in miserable company. Where in this lame brained country is the romance of the unemployed, the romance so espoused by the English working class, as in those black and white movies my mom shows me? Where are those pubs whose business hours are filled with the cheery, ruddy-cheeked likes of those avoiding business? Where are those towns whose factory noon-whistle serves not as a dinner bell but as an industrialized cock-a-doodle-do? Oh, if we but had that drop of vanilla socialism, not large enough to curb our humour but large enough to calm our Coked-up, sales-addled brains into a lush melancholy. Find me a dole line and I’ll extend it by one! Find me a country, though I have one in mind, who appreciates my citizenship enough to see to it I continue to citizen! I’m not asking for a lavish lifestyle. I’m asking for a check. Now! Send me a check!”

The heated passion of these thoughts did not cool in Bevy until eleven thirty postmeridian, when the foreshipmen of late night comedy took the helm. Joke by joke a smile widened across Bevy’s cheeks. He even wrote a few of the jokes down, in spite of the homeless. And then, a joke came along that widened Bevy’s smile to the cracking point. Mr. Letterman was discussing the recent tour the Prince of Wales and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, were making across the country. Apparently, the couple had been drawing exceptionally meager crowds, and apathetic ones at that. Mr. Letterman fancied, “In fact, this very night, the two were forced to cocktail alone, playing cribbage at a Best Western in” – crack – Bevy’s hometown.

The laughter after that punch line was great and the applause greater as Bevy was on his bicycle hightailing it to the Best Western. “Typically disrespectful Americans!” Bevy continued as he rode the international thoughts of the afternoon. “To disregard two well-speaking demigods, why it’s abominable! If there’s no one else they’ll at least be me to welcome them to our community, and with fireside chat instead of musket shells!”

Bevy didn’t bother with the bike rack. He crashed into the revolving doors and followed them in. He ran to the lobby. Jumped his eyes from loveseat to settee. No sign of them. He ran to the pool. There was no one in the pool or the hot tub. He ran to the front desk and wailed on that waiting bell like thunder’s crashing cymbals. Out from the office in the back stumbled the bellboy rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He was Bevy’s age, had Bevy’s sconeish build, even bore Bevy’s near terminal acne. The only real difference between the two was a pair of pressed slacks on one and some cut off cargos on the other.

“The Prince of Wales! The Duchess of Cornwall!” Bevy stopped to catch his breath. “Where are they?”

“They’re still in the restaurant,” said the bellboy. “They were just about to go up.”

Bevy took off in the direction of the bellboy’s pointed finger but stopped short and turned back.

“Could I ask you another question?” he said. “How did you get this job?”

“My dad owns the place,” the bellboy responded.

Bevy said, “Oh,” and he took off running again. But he stopped and turned again to the bellboy.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be hiring would – “

“No.”

Now Bevy was really sprinting, to the restaurant, through the restaurant, kicking every empty chair and table out of his way until he came to the one inhabited corner of the room. Sitting across from one another, each hanging faces long enough to stir their hot toddies with, the Prince and his beloved Duchess looked deeply and silently into the cribbage board between them. Royalty as real as his television heroes, reality as royal as his dreams, they sat finally before him. To speak or to collapse.

“Welcome to America,” he spoke.

After a silence deemed awkward only by Bevy, the Prince eventually turned, mumbled a delicate “Thank you”, and returned to the chewing of his tongue. They were obviously quite depressed.

Bevy spoke again. “Are you enjoying your stay in the States?”

This time it was the Duchess who tilted her head towards Bevy after a semi-awkward silence. “Yes, dear,” she said.

Bevy stepped closer to their table. “Are you two down in the dumps?” he whispered.

“Yes, dear,” repeated the Duchess.

“No one wants to play with us,” mumbled the Prince again, signaling that everything he and his wife would say was to be dipped in a rancid irony.

“Oh come on,” said Bevy. “You know what you two need?”

The Prince made a move on the cribbage board and the Duchess wiped the toddy off her nascent mustache.

“I’ll tell you what you two need,” said Bevy, stepping again closer to the royal table. “You two need a court jester.”

“Charlie had the last one hung,” said the Duchess.

“One Viagra joke is one too many,” said the Prince.

“He was indeed well hung,” said the Duchess.

Bevy tried to laugh. “Dry as their streets are wet, that’s the British wit, or so my mom tells me.”

“Yes, dear.”

Bevy, remembering that employers only respect the bold, took three cribbage pieces off the board and began to juggle. The Prince and Duchess continued playing without notice. Bevy got nervous and dropped a piece in the Prince’s toddy. He took a sip.

“Aw come on guys,” said frustrated Bevy. “You could use the Viagra for your upper lip.”

The Duchess giggled. Bevy pointed to her waning smile and said, “Look! Look! There it is!” The Prince raised an eyebrow. “Sorry your highness,” said Bevy, “but I just can’t stand to see the two of you moping around like this. I have an idea!”

Bevy went to the table beside the royal couple. He removed all of its chairs but one and pushed the table close to the Duchess. He sat at the table, alongside the couple but facing out towards the barren restaurant.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the empty table and chairs spread out before him, “we have an amazing show here for you tonight. On tonight’s big show, fresh from their tour of our once betrothed nation – the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall!” Bevy stood up clapping. “Welcome to the show lovebirds, it’s great to have you here. The both of you look amazing, just amazing. What do you think of America?”

“Daft,” said the Prince.

“Hmm?”

“I’m daft about it.”

Bevy laughed out loud and clapped. “Now, tell us who you’re wearing Mrs. Cornwall.”

“A fox I met in Highgrove gave me this hair shirt. The scarf’s Burberry’s.”

Bevy laughed and clapped. “We have to go to commercial here so sit tight and we’ll be back in a moment with this merry young couple from merry old.” Bevy looked out in front of him. “Are we out? Yes? Ok.” He turned to the Prince and Duchess. “Wonderful job, guys. I think they’re really loving you.”

“Smashing,” the couple said together.

“So what do you think? Are you feeling better? Do I get the job? Can I be your court jester?”

The Prince and Duchess sipped the last of their hot toddies, quietly rose from their seats, and turned from Bevy to walk away.

“Hey! Hey!” said Bevy at his host’s desk. “Where are you going? Don’t you need me? Can’t I come with you?”

Still, the royals walked to the elevator.

Bevy shouted after them, “Now what am I supposed to do?”

The Duchess paused and looked to Bevy as her husband held the elevator door. “Thank you for your hospitality,” she said. “We know our two great nations can sustain each other well into the future with the knowledge of our long lasting friendship.”

And the elevator doors closed on the image of a curt, cupped Princess hand waving.

“Ah hell no,” said Bevy and he ran to the front desk. He swung round the counter and into the office where the bellboy was snoring face down on the desk, Mr. Letterman’s musical guest finishing up on a telly beside the bellboy’s head. One hesitant second passed before Bevy undressed himself, undressed the bellboy, and redressed himself in the bellboys pressed slacks. Bevy flipped through the registry and found the room number of the hotel’s special guests – 401, Economy Suite. On his way to the elevator Bevy poured a drink at the bar and placed it on a tray.

“Room service!” he called after knocking on 401.

The Duchess called back, “It’s unlocked!”

Bevy entered the suite. The bathroom door was closed but he could see the light was on inside. He heard water patting against the tub.

“Did my husband order something?” the duchess shouted from behind the bathroom door. “Just leave it on the nightstand! That’ll do!”

Bevy could see the heaving outline of the aging prince in bed and heard the chatter of the Prince’s grinding teeth. Putting the drink down on the nightstand, Bevy looked over the room and found in the corner, next to the air conditioner, exactly what he had expected to find. He opened the lid of an enormous white trunk, bearing the characters C&C on its sides, and got in it.

As Bevy was slowly lowering the lid, the Duchess shouted again from the tub, “Thank you for your hospitality. We know our two great nations can sus – “

The lid shut. The lock fell.

Bevy’s hometown was not the final stop of the royal tour. From inside the white trunk Bevy had the opportunity to not see a dozen or so other American towns and landscapes before being slid into the cargo hold of the newlywed’s private jet and flown off for the home across the pond. It was hard for Bevy to hold his growing boy’s hunger and he considered escaping on more than one occasion. But holding his thirst made it easy for him to hold his bladder and somewhere over the Sargasso Sea Bevy fully realized the enormity of his journey and he floated into a novice traveler’s ecstasy. Curled fetal-wise over one of the Duchess's favorite ball gowns, Bevy mulled over the first win-win situation he had ever encountered, for life in London is either life as a jester or life on the dole.

Issue No. 1, Travel - Le Tiers-Monde by Andrew Ferris

2006-10-19T20:35:00.000-07:00

We travel to India. On a patch of monsoon-cracked concrete along Napier Road, just off one of the major intersections of the old city of Pune, sits a small, grey-haired woman with a round face. She doesn’t have a stand or sign or even a lock-box for the money she collects; laying her goods out on the shady pavement, she tucks the coins she gets right into a fold in her sash. She sells assorted things: candy wrapped in shiny foil, baked snacks, rolls of tangled thread. Items go for 5 or 10 rupees, equivalent to 10 or 20 cents. Her location is hardly ideal: a thoroughfare mostly populated by children walking on their own to school, or rickshaws ferrying their passengers to other parts of town. On a good day, she’ll make 2 or 3 dollars. This woman produces little money and spends little money. Is this the Third World?

In retrospect, one of the blessings of the Cold War was that both of the major powers felt compelled to economically support lesser states in order to maintain power and influence. The American Marshall Plan and the Soviet Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) dolled out millions of dollars in aid and infrastructure support to poor and war ravaged countries. However, all this philanthrophy was politically motivated and therefore limited: nearly all the money ended up in the battlegrounds of the Cold War.

Walking a little further down Napier Road, we come to an intersection: telephone booths, internet cafes, and barber shops, line the sidewalks while cows, dogs, and the homeless lie on the sidewalk. Rickshaws and mopeds make way for Land Rovers and Rolls Royces. There is no doubt: money is abound.

Pune, an academic town called the “Oxford of the East,” once small is now burgeoning with a population of nearly 5 million. The growth is due to foreign investment: IT companies and Coca-cola plants employ the youth. But one shouldn’t confuse investment with aid, or cash with infrastructure. The “Developing World” is hard to find, because development takes generations and the pay off is never quick. It happens from the streets up. India, like many Third World localities, is splitting down the middle. Two parallel economies are being formed: one fed from the outside and one sucking on the bottom. The woman selling little for little will spend what little she has on food and shelter. She doesn’t starve, but nor does she save. She exists entirely in a local economy. However, floating inches from her is a global economy that she passes every day but can’t be a part of: an economy that sells cars manufactured in Germany and MP3 players designed in Silicon Valley, all at prices directly commensurate to West because, essentially, it’s the same market as 5th Ave.

There are fewer and fewer geographic places that conform to our vision of the Third World, and what few remain are slowly joining the global economy, but it would certainly be a fallacy to suggest that we are in one united world. The Third World exists in the eyes of the old woman, who can see, but not see into, the First World around her. It’s in the outlook of people who have limited means and limited room for growth.

The gaps growing in Third World countries between local and global economies are deeply problematic and have long term consequences. We should not forget that as the global economy unifies, and as the bottom rises to meet the top, the top must lower itself to the bottom. This will involve not just investment but traumatic sacrifice. Cheap labor may be the beginning of the opening of Third World economies, but competition will follow. Competition not only of individuals or ideas, but of entire systems of value.

Issue No. 1, Travel - Travelling Words by Alexa Garvoille

2006-10-19T20:34:00.000-07:00

This issue of FOLIO made possible in part by LOUISE DOTTER.