Sirenetta 

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The Terrorist of Shangri-La 

After working so hard to find contentment, I'm scared now it'll bore me. Have I been aimed at the wrong thing all along?

What I think, lately, is that I should keep marching toward it, as planned, but pack a bag full of dynamite so I can explode it once I get there: I'll be the terrorist of Shangri-La.

We're hiking the Himalayas, me and the sherpa who keeps talking, incessantly, about Elizabeth Bennett. Pierre—the sherpa's name is Pierre, a transplant from Picardy—rattles on with his theory: that Elizabeth Bennett was the first modernist seeker. Her campaign to challenge the mores of her day, and her slow and reluctant seduction of Darcy, were the precursors to this very expedition that he and I are mounting across this glacier toward the lost city of Shangri-La.

"What about Thoreau?" I ask, not because I care for Thoreau, but just devil's advocate.

Pierre makes a poo-poo face in that French way. "Thoreau was a pompous ass-sitter."

We walk on, and he begins humming some sordid love song. Just my luck, halfway around the world, to get a sentimental pseudo-intellectual French sherpa instead of the normal kind.

His humming echoes back off the icy walls above us and I start thinking, not idly, about avalanches. I knew a man in the Alps, a former scout for the Nazis if you'll believe it, who retired under a fake name to Geneva, and we met there on a ski trip. The man had taken up a late-in-life interest in the study of avalanches—the interannual variability of seasonal snowpacks, their effect on the cryospheric reservoirs, that sort of thing. He knew avalanches like Eskimos know snow. But he got to know one a little too well, when it collapsed on top of him and buried him alive, avenging Jews everywhere.

"Just shut up about Liz Bennett already. It's a girl's book and I'm tired of hearing about it. You know how things get done in this world, Pierre? What two things power all of civilization? Pride and prejudice. So just shut up about Liz Bennett."

We climb a while in silence, watching the clouds of a coming storm. There's a thing the wind does when it hits the mountain ridge above the treelike: it whistles. It stirs up the snow in swirls, and they rise off the crest like ghosts. The whole mountain seems haunted.

"Are we there yet?" I ask, a childish sort of peace offering mainly to break the silence. Pierre looks at the ridge and then back at me. "I have a confession," he says in that froggy accent. "I don't know how to get to Shangri-La."

The wind howls and the ghosts dance. We're at 18,000 feet, give or take, with carefully rationed supplies of food, water, fuel, and oxygen, portioned out based on the precise distance between our base camp in Nepal and a destination that Pierre now claims may or may not exist.

Where are we going, then?

My mouth starts watering for the panang curry we ate in Kathmandu, after our plane landed, maybe the last best meal I'll ever have.

"In my defense," he says sheepishly, "no one knows how to get to Shangri-La. I needed your money. For my daughter's hairlip. It's very treatable with surgery. She'll live a normal life now, thanks to you."

I consider jamming a stick of dynamite down Pierre's throat, but then I remember the avalanches. "I'm glad she'll be alright," I tell him.

Then I set off up the mountain.

"Where are you going?" he calls out after me.

"Same as before. I'm going to Shangri-La. It can't be far now."

My crampons in the ice are like a raspy heartbeat. The wind picks up and I can barely make out Pierre's tiny French voice. "There's nothing up there!"

But he's wrong. There is something up there, over the ridge, and I'm going to find it. When I do, I've got a bag full of dynamite and a decision to make.

"I'm not gonna write you a love song," I sing, as I disappear into the snow. 

Brotherhood 

If you could hear sound in space, you'd hear the groaning of metal, creaking, popping, uneasy expanding at its bolts and seams each time the Sun's unbridled heat makes its way around its temporary daily eclipse of the Earth, the metal beginning to stretch and bend as its temperature changes, suddenly, from arid, frigid, airless cold to its opposite: searing burning irradiated heat. If you could hear sound in space, you might hear radiation screaming. Energy makes sound, but not in space. Space is silent.

There's a small crew of astronauts inside the metal can called Bratstvo, "Brotherhood." The craft is Russian, but there are no Russians inside. They take six-month shifts, and on this shift, there's a Swede and an Australian and an American, and for the fist time in Bratsvo's four-year history, the official language inside the can is English.

Though the three of them have only been in space a few weeks, they've lived together, more or less, for the past six years, every day training, sometimes in the old converted Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily base in St. Petersburg they use for mission control, sometimes in a deep-sea tank in the Swedish waters of the Baltic Sea. The astronauts were chosen partly for their complementary skills — "A scientist, a doctor, and an engineer walk into a space station…" — but mostly because they can stand one other's company without driving each other nuts. They're a quiet, kind, hard-working set.

They each have their own duties: a mix of maintenance, science experiments, and plain old chores. They keep a chart, like roommates, that tells them whose turn it is to cook, whose turn it is to clean, and though they've come to understand the Swede is their most gifted microwave chef, and the Aussie is a bit of mess, at least for an astronaut, still, they share these chores as equally as they can.

Today is different. They've put aside their tasks, at least the dispensable ones, so they can watch CNN and Al Jazeera. You can watch CNN and Al Jazeera from space. You can watch almost all television from space. The astronauts have a radio channel open to mission control, and they're receiving incoming calls from their various governments, too. But they can't get a clear understanding of what's happening. Pakistan struck first, or maybe India did, though there are reports that the initial launch may have come from somewhere in the South China Sea — from a submarine. What they know for sure, what's indisputable, what they've seen with their own eyes, is there were twenty-four blasts across Asia, mostly focused in the Indian Subcontinent, but a few spreading into China. There were ten sudden minutes of nuclear explosions lighting up a corner of the globe, and they saw it all.

Nuclear explosions, as you might guess, look beautiful from space.

The clouds of dust that rose up into the stratosphere changed very quickly the picture of Earth from space. The familiar blue orb was suddenly watercolor smudged, burnt sienna.

Every nation and every person on Earth is on high alert, except maybe a remote few who don't yet know what's happening. But the remotest people of all, drifting 350 kilometers above the planet aboard the Bratstvo, see it more clearly than anyone. The three astronauts watch it all unfold on their monitors and in their window, while cries of alarm go up on the news stations: it's happening. The United States, then China, then Russia, while making public pleas for calm, launch their stockpiles into the sky. Each one strikes, they claim, preemptively, at the other. The astronauts behold the longest hour mankind has ever made. From space, it looks like fireworks, like a switchboard, like a blanket crackling with static electricity in the dark, like the sparking neurons of a giant brain.

And then it's quiet. There is no radio. There is no CNN. There is no Al Jazeera. A blanket of rust-colored air rises up and blocks the view from space, and while those below suffer their fear and mortality, some instantly and some slowly, these three in space watch from above, no way out, no way down, nowhere to go, counting the days before starvation, before power failure, before orbital tugs pull them back toward the home they'll never see again. 

Hoopty Time Machine 

(This story will appear in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in October 2013.)

The Subway 

After I died, I went to a bardo that looked like a subway car, filled with many of the people I'd known and loved during my life. Whenever the subway came to a stop, one or two people stood up, shuffled to the door, and exited the train.

I noticed my dog was underneath my seat. He got excited to see me, wagging his tail and nuzzling me with his nose. But as the train slowed to its next stop, the man sitting next to me, a stranger, got up to leave, and he was holding the leash of my dog in his hand.

I understood now, my dog would be going with this other man.

When the doors opened, the two of them made their way off the train. My dog looked back at me, and I said, "I'll see you around," though I knew I wouldn't, because once we get off the train, we begin our new lives, and leave the old ones behind.

The Book 

I climbed down to the basement, the basement I'd nearly forgotten, the basement I'd given back to the spiders and grubs and mice and dust and mold. When Janine died, our children boxed up her things, so I didn't have to look at them, and asked me what to do. A stronger man, a man more inclined toward healing, might have taken those boxes to consignment or Goodwill, where they'd have done some good. Janine herself would have done this. She'd have found new owners for all my suits, men who would fit in them, probably, better than I do. She'd have found new feet for the shoes cluttering my closet. Janine, my wife, rest her soul, was a stronger man than I am.

I asked the kids to carry her things to the basement. There, I could retrieve them and rummage through the memorabilia whenever I wanted, and I wanted to, often, but I never did. It was perfect dark dankness down there, like climbing into the coffin itself, and I couldn't do it.

So the boxes sat in the basement, enduring whatever seasons pass underground: a steady rain of dust, water weeping through the walls, sometimes floods, the burrowing of animals. Who knew what went on down there? I certainly didn't.

Then the day came I needed something, something of Janine's, a nothing thing, a trinket: an old wind-up music box that my daughter had always loved. I decided to find this thing and wrap it for her, for her birthday, because she had children of her own now, and I wanted to give her a gift of this, of history and her connection to it.

"Try to Remember" was the song it played.

The basement bulb had burned out, so I climbed the stairs in the dark, clutching a flashlight in my good hand and the railing in my bad one, till I set foot on the dirt floor. The boxes were piled onto shelves along the wall, unlabeled and in various states of decay. Knowing no other way to begin, I tore into the nearest one. It was stuffed with Janine's hand-sewn wedding dress, yellowed with age, and, on top of the dress, the strangest thing: a book, a thick, hardcover book with a faded cover. "The Story of My Life," it said, and then, where the author's name should be, I saw my own name.

This book, this autobiography, a book I'd never written, a book I'd never seen.

I turned to a page, and this is what it said:

The Cave 

The four boys were playing in a field on a Sunday afternoon. One of them lost his footing when his leg slipped into a hole. Trying to climb out, he noticed the dirt around the hole kept sliding downward, like an hourglass: he had accidentally carved out an opening to an underground cave.

This is the sort of thing boys dream of, when they go outside to play in a field.

The three of them helped each other into the cave. They lashed together their belts and shirts into a short colorful rope, to help ease their way back up, whenever they were done exploring. Then they crawled down into the opening.

They were scared, maybe, a little. It was dark in the tunnel. It smelled like an old, wet basement, slippery with mud and mold and earthy water. The tunnel wasn't designed for people; maybe people had never been here; and that was exactly what thrilled them and drove them to continue climbing downward.

They climbed in the dark. The cave walls here were sharp, and cut at their hands and their clothes, and one of them lost his footing and almost lost his courage, too, but the others goaded him to keep climbing. He was glad he did:

At the end of the tunnel, the cave opened enormously, into a cool chamber where even the quiet had a kind of echo. The air tingled with static or magic or maybe just with the boys' excitement. They held up their cellphones for light, and could make out, just barely, the etchings on the walls, painted in ochre and charcoal: stick figures of hunters hurling arrows and spears; deer and horses and antelope bounding in herds; majestic bison and bear; and handprints, with outstretched fingers standing in for ancient signatures. The boys knew they'd stumbled upon something unique, humbling, and powerful. They knew, even while it was happening, that this feeling they felt was one that they would never, across their entire lives, feel again: this feeling of connection across so much time.

The boys laughed and cheered and celebrated their extraordinary luck, and dreamt immediately of the fame and fortune that awaited them when they climbed back to the outside, and they never noticed the far end of the cave, with its stanchions and railing and walkway leading to a locked door: the boys never imagined for a moment that what they'd discovered was a back entrance to the "replica cave," opened by the government as a sort of historic theme park, to help share an ancient and treasured heritage while also preserving it: locking the real cave away, and opening the replica to tourists six days a week, every day but Sunday.

The Spider 

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Oddfellows Local Volunteer Fire Brigade, pt. 2 

What happened next was this:

Those boys, the Oddfellows, were out in the woods. It was summertime, and as soon as school let out, the three of them went into the woods and settled into that cabin of theirs, and used it as a kind of home base. They said they were up there fishing, and for the most part, they weren't lying. They legitimately loved fishing, or at least the two of them, Will and Phil, did, and Bailey tolerated it well enough, standing next to the other two in the river, wearing matching waders and talking almost nonstop about anything, about his theories, theories mostly about conspiracies and government cover-ups and why the news was reported one way when facts and circumstances made it obvious to anyone who'd look that the reality of things must be quite different.

Will and Phil weren't really the political sort, but Bailey's rants amused them and they'd play along and laugh good-naturedly, and gradually, over time, they probably came around to believe some of his theories, themselves, even if they didn't know they did. His talking didn't bother them in the slightest, as long as he didn't talk too loudly and scare off the fish.

Before you go thinking it's strange a few boys who weren't old enough to drive would be allowed to spend days on end, alone and holed up in the middle of the forest, you have to consider the boys' home lives. Phil was the youngest of seven kids, three brothers and three sisters, and every one of them was the sort of person you'd meet and think, "That person must have had good parenting as a kid." Phil's family were all good people, and they were all raised to treat everyone else like good people, and Phil, growing up in that sort of environment from the moment he was born, well, no one worried much about Phil. He got away from the house for a little privacy, and by his measure, the constant company of his two friends was a lot more private than the constant company of his six siblings; and with all the coming and going in that house, sometimes his parents didn't even realize he'd been gone. But they wouldn't have worried, overly, even if they did notice.

Will was a sweet kid, too, but at the other end of the spectrum, parenting-wise. He'd never known his dad, and his mom took more and more solace from the bottle, and sometimes worse than the bottle. Sometimes she'd worry when she discovered Will missing, but more often, she felt relief: one fewer thing for her to worry about. From Will's perspective, that cabin in the woods was his home, and his mom's place was just somewhere he visited from time to time, to wash dishes and replace the empty rolls of toilet paper.

Bailey was a separate story, as you might expect. No one tried harder to understand Bailey than Bailey's parents did. But Bailey defied most understanding. Even his birth was something of a mystery: his small, blonde, soft-spoken parents had birthed a dark-haired, fourteen-pound bawler. The hospital held him for two days' observation just to try and puzzle out why the kid was crying. Then, suddenly as he'd started, he quieted down, and, at least according to his parents, never cried again.

Instead, it seemed, Bailey internalized. When other babies were already forming sentences, Bailey sat silent, watching, almost brooding behind his black curly hair. His parents took him to a doctor, worried his development was somehow stunted. The doctor offered reassuring words but was at a loss to explain what might be going on inside Bailey's brain. Then, in the kitchen one day, without so much as clearing his throat, Bailey spoke his first words, in an almost-baritone voice: "I don't think I want anymore peas today." His mother was so shocked, she dropped a glass pitcher of iced tea onto the floor, shattering it to pieces.

Most of Bailey's early years were disappeared into books—children's books, naturally, but very quickly soon after, he began devouring texts of all shapes and sizes. His favorites had dragons or spaceships and scantily clad women on their covers, though he also enjoyed horror stories quite a lot. The ones he liked best involved some kind of overt or covert demonic possession—human behavior that couldn't be explained without some nod to the supernatural. Bailey didn't believe or disbelieve in demons; he just knew he enjoyed the thrill of reading about them.

His parents didn't understand their son's interests, but they tried to be open-minded about them. They took him on a family outing each payday to a bookstore, and let him pick out two new titles each visit, so that, by the time Bailey entered middle school, his shelves and his imagination were both overflowing with fantastical and terrible ideas.

No one knew what precipitated the day that Bailey returned from school, piled his entire collection of books in the backyard, doused it in kerosene, and lit it on fire, watching the flames slowly lick over each page before reducing them to small black leaves that floated, each one, skyward. The process was slow and captivating. Gasoline might have consumed the whole pile of them in a roaring blaze, but his choice of kerosene had a decidedly more hypnotic effect: each page took on a blue glow and shrank, its words still intact, before turning suddenly black and taking to the sky. Bailey had finally discovered something that fascinated him as much as the books themselves: fire. His parents stopped taking him to the bookstore after that day. He kept reading, but he had to get his fill from the library; and there weren't any extra kerosene tanks in the garage anymore, either.

Bailey wasn't the social misfit you might expect: the boy held his own. He was surprisingly able with his peer group; he just didn't particularly seem to care about most of them. He had a respectable outside shot that made him a threat in any game of H-O-R-S-E, and he was better than almost anyone at a pool table. He was also one of the first boys in school with a gun, an heirloom squirrel rifle that Bailey's father had received from his father at the age of thirteen, which made him more adamant and less reasonable than usual about passing the gun onto Bailey at the same age. Bailey pretended to listen avidly to his father's safety instructions before marching off, the very next day, to school, with the small rifle tucked in a duffel bag to show his friends.

The three Oddfellows were an unlikely pair, which is to say, Phil and Will probably would have been friends no matter what, and the two of them fell in with Bailey partly because the boy had a strange charisma, and partly because he lived nearby. Phil's dad, one of the town's last remaining actual lumberjacks, started bringing the other two boys on the hunting and fishing trips he took with Phil into the woods, and this quickly became the thing the three boys had in common, regardless of their other differences. They spent enough time together that their particular differences didn't do much to drive them apart: Phil's growing interest in football and in girls; Will's almost obsessive absorption in fishing generally, then fly-fishing in particular, or the nagging idea he had to fix up his old snowmobile and then ride it across Canada, a not-so-secret quest, the other boys knew, to find his dad; or Bailey, Bailey's interest in Bailey things, which is to say in almost anything, the more arcane the interesting—politics, chemistry, medieval history—the subject changed from week to week, but the intensity Bailey brought to each subject never changed. He was curious, and the subject of his curiosities was in itself a curiosity; but this did nothing to dissuade the other boys, who regularly, loyally, and earnestly called Bailey their friend; and even though he'd never once said the word back to them, at least not to their faces, they trusted that Bailey felt the same, or at least felt something similar, in that Bailey sort of way.

The cabin, which Bailey had dubbed the Oddfellow's Local Volunteer Fire Brigade, was a three-mile hike from the nearest fire road and about ten miles outside of town, so often, when the boys went there, they stayed at least overnight and sometimes longer. The water from the stream was drinkable, though Phil's mom insisted they boil it or treat it with iodine. They'd load their backpacks with apples and peanut butter and chocolate, a flashlight and a lantern and some kerosene taken from Phil's, not Bailey's, garage; books and comic books and old Playboys and some puzzle games; ammunition for Bailey's .22; Will's compass and collection of topo maps and rods and hand-tied flies; Phil's first aid kit and hatchet and 17-tool Swiss Army knife, and a walkie talkie that his dad had him bring along in case of emergencies; and Bailey's assortment of matches, lighters, flares, firestarters, and flares. They'd pile, all three of them, onto the back of Phil's dirt bike, ride precariously up the fire road to the trailhead, and then walk the overgrown path up the mountain, the rest of the way.

The boys did their best to keep the exact location of the cabin a secret, intentionally covering their trail with brush every time they came or went. Each of them had been there so often they could find it, maybe literally, in the dark; and, far as they knew, no one else had set foot in the place ever since the original homesteader abandoned it all those years back. They were, intentionally, as isolated as they knew how to be—and that's why what they saw that day made no sense to them whatsoever:

The man, stumbling, confused, dirty, thirsty, delirious, sun-burned, bruised, lost in the woods, and wearing a black suit and tie and dress shoes nicer than any of the three boys had ever seen, outside of magazines. The man staggered toward them, out of the trees, and then collapsed at their feet, unconscious or maybe dead.

The Outbreak 

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Oddfellows Local Volunteer Fire Brigade 

This was not an expedition that was bound for success. Anyone could see that, plain and simple, except for those of us who were on it.

When the Bigfoot craze hit our town, and the tourists started arriving in bunches, Dad saw it as an opportunity, a chance to make good after a long succession of making not-so-good. A fresh start. Almost overnight, with no particular field of expertise whatsoever, Dad opened up a "Bigfoot Safari," offering guided tours into the wilderness, promising "real Bigfoots" [sic] and (here's the kicker) "satisfaction guaranteed."

Still, it was good to see Dad excited about something.

The whole plan hung on the Oddfellows, three boys from high school who spent all their free time in the woods, fishing, smoking pot, and lighting things on fire. The Oddfellows' ringleader was a heavyset bandito named Bailey, who'd spent really all of his walking-around life lighting and then extinguishing small controlled fires. That Bailey was a full-fledged pyromaniac, no one doubted; but this habit had also given him an enormous amount of experience with fire, including putting out fire, and when Bailey was fifteen, he was recruited as the first junior member of our local fire brigade. He was on the scene for every major fire in town, anyway—even the ones he hadn't started—and the chief figured they might as well put him to use. 

It was while fighting a small wildfire in the forest that Bailey had come across the old cabin in the woods, abandoned years ago by a logger or prospector or homesteader or hermit, and he returned there later with his two friends, to fix it up—which mainly meant clearing out the bulk of trash and spiders and burrowing animals that had been nesting there, and installing a table and some chairs and a kerosene lantern. Who knows what they did up there. Anything along the gamut between penny ante poker and devil worship seemed plausible enough. From what I saw, mainly Bailey would set things on fire while the two other Oddfellows, Will and Phil, liked to go fishing.

But the three of them knew that part of the woods as well as anybody, and when Dad decided to go into business, his first move, after buying the truck, had been to enlist the services of the Oddfellows. They became his first-ever employees, though the scope of their responsibilities only became clear to the rest of us later.

We Watch 

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International Talk Like a Pirate Day 

I care about "International Talk Like a Pirate Day" as much as the next guy. I enjoy it, I really do. But I think you guys took it too far when you hijacked that cutter from the marina. And yes, it was fun and funny when you replaced the boat's flag with a Jolly Roger, but I don't think you needed to run the boat's old skipper up the mast, or rape his wife, or make his son walk the plank. 

And while wearing that parrot on your shoulder looks kind of cool in an ironic sort of way, I disagree that you should have sawn off your brother's leg and replaced it with a piece of broomstick. It's just "International Talk Like a Pirate Day," man. 

When I asked you to consider what you were doing, it was as your friend. I was looking out for your best interest. You were wrong to call it "mutiny" and maroon me on this desert island.

So, Terrance—or "Bloodbeard," if you're still calling yourself that—I'm going to keep putting these letters in bottles. I don't know if you or anyone will find them. I don't expect they will. But I'll keep writing, and throwing them into the sea, and hoping—because I want you to know that whatever's happened between us, it's not too late to make things right. Please sail back, and let's talk this through, not like pirates. Please.

Your mate, 
Brian

Bigfoot Inc. 

We packed our things into the truck and drove off in search of Bigfoot. 

The trip was a complete surprise. A few days earlier, Dad didn't believe in Bigfoot. In fact, a few days earlier, Dad didn't even have a truck. He dropped me off at school in his old VW and picked me up in a new 4x4. "New" in the Dad sense, not "new"in the "new" sense. 

The truck didn't have a new car smell. It had sort of an old Cheetos smell. 

I'm still not sure Dad believes in Bigfoot. But once he bought the truck, he really wanted to believe. And now he was financially invested. 

I guess it all started because of Mom's cookie business. 

Ever since my parents split up, Dad's been really competitive with Mom. It's understandable, since she was always calling him a loser. I mean, that's understandable, too, because he kind of is a loser. When this Bigfoot craze hit town, Dad did what he always does, which was laugh about it and make fun of the people who believed, and then fall asleep in front of the TV. But Mom, well, Mom's got a pretty good sense of humor about things. So when the town started to get a little Bigfoot crazy, she figured, why not have some fun with it? She started making footprint-shaped cookies and selling them to the local cafe. Then homemade fudge she called "Bigfoot Patties" and which the cafe started selling as "Bigpoops." Soon, she had a whole brand going: Bigfoot birthday cakes, gingerbread men shaped like Sasquatches with two red cinnamon eyes, that sort of thing.  Each day, she'd bake a plastic bigfoot into one of her cupcakes, and the cafe held a contest, a free latte to the person who could "find Sasquatch." She got me to start silk-screening t-shirts in the basement, and she even talked Grandma into hand-stitching Bigfoot sock puppets, and they were so popular at the cafe that some of the other shops in town started selling them, too. Mom was a hit. Mom was Bigfoot Inc. 

And it drove Dad nuts. One day, on his way home from work, he stopped by the cafe to get a cupcake, and he got so angry that he chewed the whole thing down in three big bites and almost choked on the plastic toy bigfoot. Dad won the "Find Sasquatch" contest that day, and it just made him feel like more of a loser. 

"That night," he told me later, "I looked into my heart and I understood what I had to do: I had to capitalize." He looked me in the eye to make his point: "This, son, is the American Dream." 

He bought the truck the next day and told me we were going for a camping trip, and to travel light, because we were going to be backpacking. He didn't tell me his real purpose in setting out into the mountains was to find Bigfoot — find Bigfoot, catch Bigfoot, return with Bigfoot, and become bigger than Bigfoot. 

His real purpose, I figured, in setting out into the mountains was to prove a point to Mom.

His real purpose, I figured out later, was to impress me, his only son, so I might finally see him as something other than a loser. 

And you can guess how well that turned out. 

The Tired End of the Party 

It was late, and the party was getting down to its last dregs. The food had run out hours ago, the keg was spitting foam, and the people still sober enough to walk were circling one another like underfed hyenas, mangy and weak but emboldened by urgency, desperate not to go home empty and alone.

This is how Death found her: drunk and lonely at the tired end of a party where she'd had too few friends and nothing in particular to celebrate. Death flattered her and listened to her and smiled, and persuaded her to have one more drink, for the road, and then come home with him, which is exactly what she did, and didn't even need much persuading.

Belly of the Whale 

(This story will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Fractured West.)

The Sacred Book of Salmon 

This entry is not currently available.

Steamer 

My granddad lives with us now. We knew each other when I was younger, too, I guess. I don't remember it, but he does: he tells stories about when I was a baby, like a time he was changing my diaper and I peed on his face, or another time when he took me for a walk in my stroller, and got distracted by something, probably a girl, and my stroller got away from him, rolled down the street and through four lanes of traffic, before coming to rest right in the middle of a gaggle of nuns. "If any of you ladies ever has a change of heart about this convent business, you give me a call," Granddad told them with a wink, just like he winks whenever he tells the story to me.

"Where was this?" I ask him.

He shrugs. "Here, in town," even though there's nowhere in town with four lanes of traffic, even though there is no convent here in town.

"I can't remember," he says when I press him for details. That's his usual answer, and I believe him, because he can't remember much. Some days, he can't remember my name, and he cycles through all the other names from his life: the name of his son, my father; the names of each of his other sons; then the name of his wife, even though I'm a boy and he obviously knows it, claiming as he does to have changed my diaper. 

Some days, he doesn't speak much at all, just stares out the window, watching the squirrels squabble with the crows. "Donny," he calls to me, though I've never met a Donny. "Can you get me a whiskey?"

I return from the kitchen with a glass of apple juice, and he stares at the glass and then at me with the same sad disappointment. Maybe he suspects I'm putting one over on him, but can't remember for sure what drink he'd requested; or maybe he's sad that he's aged into the kind of man who drinks apple juice on the rocks, instead of bourbon. But he takes the glass without question or complaint. 

On the days he's clearer-headed, he'll tour me sometimes through the memories he does have. The ones he keeps clearest are all from when he was younger, and in the war, and these memories are so rich and terrifying, it's no wonder his head ran out of room for recording new ones. "We fell asleep each night in a jungle full of eyes. The enemy soldiers were fearsome and cruel but they were the least of our worries. One morning I woke up to find our lieutenant half-eaten by a python. Swallowed him head first and had worked his way, so far, up to his waist."

"How'd you know it was the lieutenant, then?"

Granddad eyes me to see if I'm sassing him. "His boots. The lieutenant was the only one in our squad who's boots weren't rotting off him."

Then, to prove his point, he shuffles into his closet and has me help him drag out the old steamer trunk inside. He throws the combination lock -- on some points, his memory is failsafe -- and pulls from the trunk a pair of vintage combat boots. "There," he says, tossing them to my feet. "There was no saving the lieutenant that day. But damned if I was going to let the snake eat his boots, too."

Granddad's stories don't always check out. I'm not even sure there are pythons in the South Pacific. 

"If they fit you, you can keep them. They were always too small for me."

The trunk is filled with memorabilia, mostly from the war -- flags and uniforms, badges and medals, maps, piles of old letters. That stuff is all fascinating, I guess. But all I ever want to see from the trunk are the piles of old handguns, disassembled rifles, hunting knives, rusty bayonets, a hollowed-out hand grenade -- a secret arsenal that Grandad keeps hidden inside his closet, governed by three simple rules:

1. My dad can never know anything about it;
2. The trunk and its contents are strictly off-limits to me except under the supervision of Granddad himself; and,
3. The entire trunk and all its contents will be mine whenever my granddad dies.

So far, I've learned the first two parts of the combination lock, and I think, today, I finally got a clean look at the third.

"The boots are a perfect fit," I say, already getting used to the way they look on my feet.

"Well then," he says, giving me a salute and then a wink, the same wink he gave to those nuns, or said he did, all those years ago.

The Changeling 

(This story will appear in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in October 2013.)

The Interview 

(This story will appear in an upcoming issue of The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review.)

Opportunity Not Knocking 

Opportunity is not knocking at my door. Opportunity is staring at me from across the street, sipping iced tea on his porch on this hot summer day, not really inclined to go much of anywhere, and I'm doing the same thing from my porch — sipping a lemonade and waiting for Opportunity to make the first move.

If we got together, we could split an Arnold Palmer.

But no.

Opportunity is right over there, across the way and just out of reach. I'm staring straight at him, but he won't look up from what he's reading. I clear my throat to see if I can catch his attention. If he notices, he pretends not to. If he's pretending, he's good at faking.

He's on one side of the street and I'm on the other and never the twain shall meet.

Each day I write him a postcard, "Wish you were here," and hand it to my postman; and each day, I watch as the postman works his way down and then back up the block, toward Opportunity's house. The mailbox there is overflowing with envelopes and other junk. Opportunity nods at the mailman as he comes and goes, but doesn't budge from his seat. What is he reading that's so interesting to him?

"What are you reading that's so interesting to you?" I ask him.

"What?" he says.

I shout again. "What are you reading that's so interesting?"

He shakes his head. "I can't hear you from across the street. Why don't you just come over here?"

The traffic looks dangerous and I still have half a glass of lemonade. "Nah, I'll catch you later," I say, and head back inside. 

The Atheist of Dekalb Street 

(This story appears in wigleaf in March 2013.)

The Bigfoot Sighting of Emory Crane 

Before everything, before we were run out of town, before the rockslide and the heavy rains, before the forest fire, before the guns and the chainsaws, before the little girl went missing and before she was found, Emory Crane was up in the woods and he saw a bigfoot, or said he did. 

No one believed him, not least of all because he was Emory Crane.

Emory Crane's credibility problem preceded his bigfoot sighting by fifty-two years, which was one year shy of the duration of his entire life, owing to the time that his parents packed him into a baby basket and set him on the riverbank while fly-fishing salmon. When they looked up, their boy was gone, washing downstream across rocky rapids and waterfalls and finally coming to rest by the town's old sawmill, where little Emory was plucked out of the water by a young couple snuck off for a few moments' privacy. 

His parents told him this tale so often that he felt inordinate pressure, even as a boy, to live up to his Moses-like auspices. He grew up wanting nothing more than to lead his people to the Promised Land, but struggled to understand which people were his, exactly, and which land was the promised one: who and where to? 

Till the day of his bigfoot sighting, Emory Crane had shown no particular wit or talent for prophecy, though not for lack of trying: after years of poor luck at the lottery and some fairly extensive dabbling in the Tarot, Emory had settled himself into a job monitoring a weather station in the woods and then making reports to the local news, a modest sort of prophecy for which he proved to have some diligence, at least, if not accuracy. People forgave him: no weatherman seemed to have clear insight into the future, and why should Emory Crane be judged any differently than the rest of them, the circumstances of his baby basket beginnings notwithstanding?

In practice, the weather station required very little monitoring. It collected measurements and reported them back through the network to the weather service, just one set of data points on a vast grid of teeming information. The science of weather, be it what it is, tells us that looking at small things, closely, can't compare to looking at broad things, systematically: patterns are more important than points, and computers much more capable of processing the patterns than people ever were. No weatherman was needed, strictly, at the weather station. Maintaining the place meant mostly applying occasional oil and resetting the cable modem.

Still, Emory Crane liked jotting down the data into a hand-written journal, and comparing it, year on year, to the weather of days gone by. He liked almanacs. He liked watching the twirl of the anemometer. He liked the varieties of clouds. 

On this day, the sun shone through the wispy cirrostratus nebulosus such that Emory Crane predicted a medium-to-high chance of rain before evening, and it turned out he was right; but having stared so long toward the hazy sun, he couldn't quite make out the details of the tall, too tall, humanoid creature that stood in the clearing between the weather station and the edge of trees, stood, stock still, staring right back at Emory Crane and then suddenly dashing off to disappear into the forest.

"I know what I saw," he maintained later at the bar, though how could he? He was seven kinds of crazy and had been staring at the sun all afternoon, and there was no way he could have known what he saw. So everyone laughed and drank and turned it into the town joke, for a while, and would have forgotten it soon enough, except for what happened after that....

The Bigfoot Hunter 

This entry is not currently available.

I Am Not Philip Roth 

Philip Roth sat down at the writing desk that had been in his possession for forty-eight years, a gift given him by Saul Bellow after Saul had separated from his wife and decided to give away her things. So, Maggie’s desk, and that’s how Roth had always considered it, then and now. The wood was smooth from so much use over the years, and the same thing might have been said about Roth, Roth thought to himself, as he took in the quality of his decidedly old-man skin: it looked as though it had been soaked in milk and then baked into a custard. Not like skin at all. Certainly not like his.

We never imagine, when we’re young, that age will come to us exactly like it comes to simple persons.

Earlier in the week, his desk chair had lost a wheel and teetered over while he’d sat in it. He and the chair both crashed down into the floor, making a sound awfully like felled timber. The chair had broken an arm, and when Roth sat up on the floor, he said aloud, “Better him than me.”

Now this chair, which had been his loyal steed for many years and many books, was piled into a corner of the living room. He couldn’t bring himself to take it out to the curb, emotionally or physically: the old beast weighed at least fifty pounds and would be near impossible for him to navigate around the spiral of his staircase.
Till he could find an appropriate replacement, he was sitting on an actual pile of stacked American Pastorals, a case of which he still had left over from an over-ambitious book tour. He sat gingerly: the pile was, like the book itself, at least as precarious as his old desk chair.

Philip Roth looked at his computer screen’s blinking cursor and considered, today, what to write. He was seventy-nine years old, and the page before him was just as empty as it had always been, though over the years, the character of its emptiness had changed: his quest for revelation and self-discovery had shifted toward a crusade for refinement and, perhaps, self-aggrandizement. The ideas stacked upon themselves much like the books stacked under his butt: each new one was a palimpsest written on top of the old ones, the subject of which was now, and had long been, what it is to be Philip Roth. The biggest burden of all.

When you’re too old to believe you can change the world, why write at all?

When you’re too old to believe you can change the world, you write because you believe you can change yourself.

He reached his precious fingers toward his keyboard and began, the way he began every day, typing, “I am not Philip Roth.” 

Smokejumper 

There’s a fire now up in the mountains and I’m thinking of volunteering to fight it. I have no training in the fighting of fires, and my presence among the actual firefighters would cause, I’m sure, more harm than good — would slow down their efforts, would put me or, worse, them, in mortal danger. But still I want to do this. I want to drive down to the ranger station tomorrow, with my hatchet and my spade and my best hiking boots and a rain coat, and volunteer to help. “Where’s the fire?” I’ll ask — though the answer is obvious, because there’s a pillar of smoke filling the horizon, and where there’s smoke there’s fire. “How can I help?” I’ll ask. “Do you have experience fighting forest fires?” the rangers will inquire. “I once tried to write a movie about smokejumpers” is my only answer. This way the rangers know who they’re dealing with: not a firefighter, true, but a serious person, at least — a person who writes movies, a person who knows the word “smokejumper” and knows that the word is relevant to the current situation. I won’t tell them that I abruptly stopped working on the script early in my research phase when I heard that Kristin Scott Thomas was starring in an as-yet-unreleased movie about smokejumpers. Kristin Scott Thomas is a fine actress, but she was also one of the dancers in the Prince movie Under the Cherry Moon, and thus she is obviously too short to be taken seriously as a smokejumper; and if this is an indication of the respect that Hollywood intends to pay the subject of smokejumping, then my time is better spent elsewhere. Though I later learned that Kristin Scott Thomas was not starring in this movie after all, but rather it was an actress named Brooke Burns, who was in forty-six episodes of Baywatch and also Titanic II, and in this movie she was playing a character named Kristin Scott, who wanted to become a smokejumper, like I do. Though I don’t have any skills in firefighting, I believe the real smokejumpers would appreciate my company on the mountain, on account of my extensive knowledge of movie trivia, for instance. Smokejumpers do death-defying work, and I’m sure they’d appreciate a little levity. I could also go on beer runs or water runs or whatever kinds of runs they need. I drive stick, it’s one of my “special skills,” and that’s bound to come in handy up on the mountain. So I figure I’ll set my alarm tomorrow and head to the ranger station and convince them to let me help. But I oversleep, and I figure anyway the ranger station is probably closed, because there is a fire, after all, and all hands are on deck, fighting it. It’s a serious business up there.  

Loose Change 

The boy stands in the living room, straddling a suitcase, wearing dusty sneakers, pants too short, and a worn hoodie.

In the next room, his father is running his hands through his still-unwashed hair and talking into his phone.

Well I can't, he says. No. What were you thinking? Fair, you want to talk about fair? After everything? No, that's —. No. He's not welcome here.

The man is talking too loudly. He thinks of the boy in the next room. Max? Can you hear me?

The boy shifts on his feet and clears his throat. He doesn't know what to answer.

Max, you're —. Make yourself comfortable. Have a seat.

The boy sits down on his suitcase.

I need to sort out some logistics with your mother.

Back into the phone, the man says her name, Maddie, but the line is dead. She's already hung up. She doesn't answer his return calls.

The boy sits now at the kitchen table. It's formica with the edge peeling up, and a stain shaped like a butterfly. There are loose coins scattered across it, pennies and nickels mostly, some Canadian, and they're hard to pick up because of the smoothness of the table and because of the metal lip that runs along its edge.

Why did your mom send you away? the man asks.

The boy doesn't speak. He hasn't spoken since he arrived. The boy has been asking himself the same question, of course, and he has some guesses at answers, but none he wants to share with the man.

You hungry? the man asks him. You want eggs? You want pasta?

This is where you live? the boy finally says.

Yeah, for now.

It's different than I pictured it.

How'd you picture it?

Bigger, I guess.

The man cracks an egg into a cold frying pan and puts it on the stove. The boy starts unlacing his boot but can't get the knot out. The lace broke while he was on the bus, and he tied it in a good tangle to keep it from slipping off, but now it's stuck on his foot till he can manage to unsnarl it.

I can help you with that, the dad offers.

No, I've got it, the boy says. But he hasn't got it. He bites his fingernails and now they're too short to grab onto the tied-tight knot. He picks away at it and then instead tugs at the boot to try and free his foot.

You're just making it worse, the dad says, watching on.

But now the egg is burning, and the dad says Oh shit oh fuck to no one in particular. He should have used oil and he should have used lower heat but he's so distracted by the boy. He reaches for the frying pan with his bare hand and burns himself a bit but moves the pan to one of the cold burners on the stove. He flaps his hand to cool it off while with the other hand he starts scraping at the lost egg with his fork. I've made a mess of it, he says to the boy.

That's OK, the boy says. He reaches into his suitcase and pulls out a peanut butter sandwich, mashed up inside a plastic bag.

Give me your foot, the dad says. He uses the tines of the fork to pick open the knot, and then tugs off the boot.

Your feet. The man wrinkles his nose. Stink.

Can I sleep a while? the boy asks.

Sure, the man says. Take the couch. No. I have to go to work. Why don't you take my bed, for now.

OK.

You'll be here when I get back?

The boy shrugs. There's nowhere else to go. 

Bike Race 

This morning, Lance Armstrong challenged my three-year-old son to a tricycle race around the block, and beat him, and was a real asshole about it, and now my boy keeps asking me, “Daddy, daddy, what is human growth hormone?”

Blue Moon 

She'd been sad and it was hard to say why, and she couldn't or wouldn't snap out of it. Her birthday was coming. "How are you?" I'd ask. "I'm OK" she'd say.

I booked us a trip to the ocean. Get away from it all. Set our eyes on new sights. Etc. We drove an hour on the freeway with the windows rolled down, because her air conditioner wasn't working, and the wind crashed in the whole time, so we didn't speak a word. Sometimes we'd hold hands on the stick shift. Then, toward the end of the trip, we came down over the mountains and into the sea air, and everything cooled off and slowed down, and I thought to myself, "It worked," because it felt like we really had escaped.

At the campground, a park ranger told us to pick our favorite spot. We drove a slow loop, past a pack of shirtless predator boys, and found a quiet shrubby spot at the end. "Fifty five," we reported back to the ranger. "It's her birthday," I added.

We set up our tent and built a fire while the sun set, and we each found ourselves a big rock and dragged it across the beach to use as a seat, and watched the moon rise over the ocean. It was almost as bright as daytime.

The waves crashed into the shore and lulled us, not into sleep but into calm, at least. We didn't speak, but just listened to the waves, over and over: "Shhhh. Shhhh."

Then she stood up and dashed into the ocean, plunging in up to her waist, clenching her body against the cold with each incoming swell.

"How are you?" I called out.

"I'm OK."

That night, we fell asleep quickly, without touching, each of us breathing into our own corner of the tent.

When I woke, I was alone. There was a pile of her clothes laid along her bedding, laid down like a long skin that had been shed off her, plush and wrinkled, strewn and warm, empty.

"Where are you?" I shouted as I walked down the beach. The gulls, picking through the rocks, scattered at my voice.

Down the road, the pack of boys were breaking down their camp.

Back at camp, I toed the crumbling charcoal logs left over from last night's fire. They were still warm. The moon still sat low on the morning horizon, and the tide was pulling out, leaving a wake of shells and seaweed.

"I'm here," she said, walking up from behind me, wrapping me in her arms. "I'm OK."

The Kingdom of Frogs 

During the last week of her mother's life, we sat on the back porch listening to the frogs while they lurked and murmured around our lawn sprinklers. They sang while the sun set, and she and I sat in our matching Adirondack chairs, sipping beer and holding hands and listening.

"It's almost time," she said to me. 

"I know."

"It's for the best," she said, probably to herself. "Or it will be soon."

They weren't bullfrogs. They were small, skinny things, all legs and eyes. They were louder than their little bodies should have allowed, but in a pleasant way, a warm rumble that was comforting, at least to some people, at least sometimes.

While we sat, one of them hopped onto her foot, and stayed, staring up at her with its brown lidless eyes. She didn't flick it off, or even move, and the two of us watched the little frog, waiting like for some nod, some sign, to tell us that all of this—this horrible time during which her mother was no longer her mother but just a broken sick thing, turning to rubbish—that it was over, and she would move on, as we all do, in death, to join the frog, and the kingdom of frogs, a truly better place.

The Garden 

(This story appears in the December 2012 issue of Niteblade, and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.)

This Side of the Moon 

This entry is not currently available.

Renewal 

(This story will appear in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in October 2013.)

Goldilocks and the Three Boys 

(This story appears in the spring 2013 issue of Grey Sparrow Journal.)

Headlines from Surrealist Newspaper 

Little girl, burrowing to China, arrives.

Woman raises house full of spiders.

Astronauts in space so long, Earth forgets about them.

Volcano appears overnight in small town.

Sad woman's face disfigured into permanent smile; everyone assumes she's happy.

Housewife buries herself alive for peace and quiet.

Lifeguard saves child from nightmare about drowning.

Man, looking for lost love, finds it in his attic.

Sleeper, Awake 

Last night, I dreamt that I lay in bed, disappointed that I wasn't asleep, dreaming.

Greek Tragicomedy 

Aeschylus was offered the screenwriting job because producers misread Agamemnon as Armageddon, and his fear of their inevitable discovery kept him from doing his best work during the rewrite of the Transformers sequel.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventure 

This entry is not currently available.

The Wide Wide River of Regret 

You wake to find yourself adrift in a boat, floating on a river, heading out to sea, and then you realize the boat is a coffin, and it's yours, because you're dead.

Funny things happen in your brain while you drift out to sea in your own coffin.

"Did I leave the stove on?" "What was I wearing?" "Did I tell her that I loved her, enough?"

"Did I love the right ones?"

It's a wide wide river of regret, and you are floating in it, for a while. Your self-pity is warmly comforting: "Why me? Why now? Why so soon?" Second-guessing helps you pass the time: "I should have worn more sunscreen." "I should have driven slower." "I should have enjoyed that German chocolate cake."

Very few of these regrets are actually yours. You've inherited the idea of them, residue from some life you believed you were supposed to have lived, learned from TV and movies and from not knowing yourself well enough. You sail through this clutter, this Sargasso Sea of fabricated desires, bumping up against them with hollow thuds, till finally your boat hits something softer:

"I wish I'd been braver."

"I wish I understood that people cared about me, and let them."

"I wish I'd found something to care about more than myself."

The boat floats on toward the sea. There's no steering it. There's no stopping it.

One morning, you wake. You've rounded a bend, and the sun hits you right in your dead face. Everything is bright and clear, and you can't remember anything. You can't remember who you are. You don't recall where you came from. You watch the birds flying low over the river with great clarity, but you no longer remember yourself as the one who lived in that house, the one who went to that job, the one who loved that woman, the one who hoped for … whatever you hoped for.

Now you're just the man floating in the coffin on the river, on the way out to sea. You've finally arrived, in death, at yourself; and it's wonderful. 

Voodoo 

This entry is not currently available.

Bride of Frankenstein 

During the sex scandal, the Bride of Frankenstein stood by her man, silent and strong.

---

The Under-the-Bed Monster 

Harrison's fear of the Under-the-Bed Monster was strong, but even stronger was his fear that his bossy sister would find out and tease him about it, so he didn't say anything, even when it was obvious the monster was under there. Even when he could hear it snoring. Even when he could see its two furry feet sticking out from underneath the bed.

"I know you're down there," he called out.

"No, I'm not," answered a voice from under the bed. "There's no one down here."

It wasn't very reassuring.

In school they were working on adding numbers, and Harrison practiced to get his mind off the monster. "One plus one is two. Two plus two is four. Four plus four is—." He couldn't remember what four plus four was.

"Twelve," called out the voice from under the bed.

"No it's not," Harrison argued. He counted on his fingers. "It's eight. Just like how many big hairy ugly monster toes you have."

And while Harrison was distracted with the counting, the monster crawled out from under the bed, and ate him.

Poseidon's Net 

(This story appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.)

The Fibonacci Forest 

When she was one year old, to celebrate, her mother, the botanist, planted her a tree; and when she turned two, they planted another; and when she turned three, her father, the mathematician, switched them into another tradition—a Fibonacci sequence of trees: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on, so by age thirteen, they planted her 233 trees, and by twenty, when her father was already gone, she and her mother planted 6,765 trees.

She dreamt of living to a hundred, in a forest so thick no one could even climb through it, because by then trees would beget more trees; and this act, which had started as an act of will by her family—an effort to share her birthday with nature, but also to control nature, as a patron does—would be subsumed by nature itself: the forest growing more forest so it'd be impossible to tell which parts of nature were hers and which belonged to nature itself. In one sense, the woods were hers entirely, existed because of her; and in another sense, she knew they would continue long after she herself was gone and forgotten, and this made her happy and it made her sad.

"This is my tree. This is my first tree." All the subsequent trees were planted in a widening circle around that first one, so the youngest trees were at the outside, and the forest grew taller and older toward the center. When she turned twenty, and her oldest tree turned nineteen, she built her house in the canopy of that tree, and the house grew higher and farther from the ground each year; and when she turned twenty-five and was already surrounded by thousands of trees, she fell in love and married; and when she turned thirty she had her first child, and she and her husband started a new circle of trees at the edge of her forest, so her daughter's forest grew to mingle with her own like the way the daughter herself grew—adjacent and sometimes intermingled, but distinct, too, and pushing out in her own directions. A few years later, they started a new forest for her son, at the opposite corner, and finally four children in all, each one with a forest growing higher and wider, canopies intertwined, and houses on the highest points of all of them: they grew farther apart, and higher, too, till they forgot the look of the ground and each other, and remembered only the trees.

Breadcrumb Trail 

I was out walking the dog. He's a shelter dog, a little skittish, doesn't like if we wander too far from home, I guess because he's scared I'll leave him out there. He likes to cover his fear with the illusion of sniffing, and he looks at me sometimes to say, "I want to run up ahead, I really do, but it's really important I do this sniffing first."

Walking with him is a slow leapfrog, driveway to driveway to driveway to driveway. We wander through corners of the neighborhood I've never seen, a different path every day, so he gets comfortable and so I don't get too bored.

That's how we found the path that ran between two houses, and back up into the woods, narrow but clearly marked, and littered with breadcrumbs. The dog, uncharacteristically brave, charged right up, chomping down the breadcrumbs as he went.

At the end of the trail, we found a quaint house with a picket fence, and a woman and her Pomeranian in the front yard. She laughed when she saw us: "I was leaving those breadcrumbs for the birds."

The dogs played in the front yard and the woman, named Marie, offered me a hot chocolate. We talked a while, smiling and admiring our dogs and our good luck running into each other.

The cottage became a regular stop for me and my dog: each day, Marie greeted us with hospitality and friendship—and before long, I fell in love with her. I and my puppy moved into the cottage, where she treated us with respect and love, holding us captive with it, like the witch that she is, never letting us escape, so we were never seen by our friends again.

The Lost City 

The architect was busy drafting plans—measuring out smooth assured strokes till the building became clearer in her mind. It was different than other buildings: for each room above ground, there was another crawling underground, so the building sprawled higher, wider, and downward, too—a network of underground towers, spiral stairs, bridges. She was creating an underground city—not tunnels and caverns but a fully realized metropolis, such that excavating it later, hundreds of years from now, would reveal it as if it had once been above ground—the spires and cathedral tops would be the only hint, above ground, of what lay beneath.

She was building a lost city, from scratch.

---

 

Fundamental Particle 

These were the same scientists who spent their days looking at invisible things—neutrinos and quarks and electrical charge—the same people who were searching for what they'd agreed to call the "God particle"—yet somehow it slipped their minds that they spent their days trafficking in miracles, because they'd grown to take for granted, first of all, that math is a miracle.

So they were confused and speechless when the first set of images came back from their atom-smashing: they thought it was a mistake. One even laughed out loud: "That looks exactly like Markarian's Chain." She'd done graduate work in astrophysics. "It's a set of galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster."

As they compared the other images, the feeling in the room grew from uncanny to worse. Everything looked like something else. The scientists had been seeking the smallest particles in existence, and it turned out each of them was a scale replica of the largest. Zooming in to look at the atom, they'd found a literal complete universe inside, made up of stars and galaxies and nebulae and quasars, all drifting apart; ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; and a photon was no different from a supernova. These were measured people, forced to conclude that everything they knew was but one layer tucked inside many: zoom in or zoom out, there was no difference, only collisions and explosions and beginnings and ends, and people looking outward and people looking in; and this was the God Particle, after all.

The House of Doors 

Though the boy was scared and knew better than to enter the old house, his sister was curious and brazen and never did admit her fear (which made her a sometimes difficult playmate). "It looks like no one's been through this door in years!," and she charged off into the darkness. The boy followed reluctantly behind, hoping there wouldn't be too many cobwebs.

Instead of an empty house, they found an old man seated at a wooden table that he'd already set with three tall steaming mugs. "Well there you are," he smiled, not at all surprised to see them. "Would you like some hot chocolate?"

The boy blinked while his eyes adjusted. "Nobody drinks hot chocolate in the summertime." But his sister was already climbing into the high wooden chair toward the mug.

"Some people like hot chocolate in the summertime," the old man said. "In fact, if it's summertime here, that means it's wintertime somewhere else. I suppose everything is in fashion, somewhere."

The girl, who was often told at school that she was very unfashionable, got curious about these other places where unfashionable things were in fashion. She sniffed at her hot chocolate. "What's on top?" she asked. "Whipped cream?"

The old man chuckled. "It does look like whipped cream, doesn't it? On each cup of hot chocolate, I put a dollop of cumulus cloud, fresh from the sky. And this is very special chocolate, given to me by the ancient Aztecs. I travel a lot, and I like to bring back souvenirs."

The boy joined them at the table. "I've never seen an ancient Aztec."

"Of course not," said the girl, pushing up her glasses. "They're ancient. They all died a very long time ago."

The old man nodded. "But that doesn't mean you can't meet them."

"My name is Clarissa," the girl announced, suddenly aware of her manners. "And this is my brother Finley. He's shy."

"I'm not shy," said Finley. "I'm just cautious! Sorry we barged in your door. We thought this house was empty."

"Not at all. I was expecting you. My front door is always open to you. But if you're going to be a guest in my house, then I'm going to have to ask you to be more careful about charging through the other doors."

The children noticed then that the old man's little house was full of doors, but not the kind of doors that one finds in normal houses. The doors in the old man's house were all in the wrong places: some were in the middle of the wall; some were on the ceiling. There was a door set into the stairs and a door set into the sofa. There was even a big knob set into the kitchen table, and the girl realized suddenly that the table was a door. Some of the doors were square and some were round and some were wood and some were metal; some had elaborate handles and knockers and peepholes, and one had a big metal wheel that sealed it shut, and some were just normal unassuming doors. But the doors filled up the house, and they were all closed.

And a metal loop tied to the old man's waist held hundreds of keys that clattered and jangled whenever he moved.

The old man looked at his enormous watch, and stood up. "Please drink your hot chocolate. We have quite a day ahead of us, and I don't know when we'll have time for another snack."

 

Floating on the River 

You're in your house. It's not big or ostentatious, but it's comfortable and cozy and it feels like yours. You've lived there a little while: you have some agreeable furniture, some wall hangings, a few houseplants, a small collection of coffee mugs that make you a little happy each morning. It's a place where you've coalesced many of these sorts of things—objects that make you a little bit happy.

You like your house. You feel comfortable in it—so much so that you often forget that it sits in the middle of vast river, and it's slowly floating downstream.

You drift down this river, through rough patches and slow meandering bends. Sometimes you stare out the window at the trees on the muddy banks. Sometimes you look at an egret perched on a mooring.

You can't steer your house against the stream, but you do give it a push now and then, to avoid a rock or to pull closer to passing flotsam.

Or people.

Sometimes people drift by on the river. There was a man in a rowboat who wanted to talk to you about salvation. There was a swimmer you rescued from drowning, and took in briefly till he recovered and swam on his way. There's the family on the barge, who sometimes passes you on the river and sometimes you pass them. "Your boys are getting tall," you say. "We baked some muffins," they say. "Do you want some?"

Now and then, not too often, you come upon another house drifting downstream at the same pace. Its window is just across from yours, and you engage in conversation. "Would you like a cup of coffee?" "No, thank you. I'm more of a tea drinker." You start talking, sharing with each other while you drift side by side, and everything feels a little lighter, a little easier.

Eventually, you decide to lash your two houses together and float down the river as one, for a while.

Sunday Drive 

The sun is high and hot and it hasn't rained in weeks. The air is full of pollen that's almost willful in its atmospheric meandering. It's Sunday or maybe Monday or Tuesday. It doesn't matter what day.

You're driving. The sun lingered so long on the vinyl steering wheel that it's hot to touch, so you steer with your fingertips and hope some relief will arrive through the wind in the window.

It's a section of town like so many sections of town—a Mexican section, a poor section, teeming with life like you never see in the white neighborhoods with their lawns, so it makes you wonder if Mexican people are just teeming with more life than white people, or if wealth is a kind of stifling, or if the fervor of the people in the poor parts of town always comes from desperation. You stop at a traffic light and hear music coming from a storefront church. "Iglesia del Dios," the sign says, and you have enough Spanish to wonder if there are other kinds of churches than the ones of God. Next to the church is a carnicero, and a musty meat smell wafts thickly to you where you sit. For some reason, you think of a deli you used to visit with your mother when you were a kid, where thick slabs of salty meat hung by strings from the ceiling, and the salamis were indistinguishable from the pepperonis, and you wonder now in retrospect if that isn't always the way of things, a confusing of crucial distinctions and trivial ones.

The traffic light changes and you crawl your car through the crowd of bodies that inches along the crosswalk. A man walks beside your car, inches from the window, and you nod at him, to be polite. But he doesn't nod back.

You push free of the crowd, and now around the bend, your car is pointed straight toward the sun. Everything's backlit in a beautiful blinding flare, and again you see the pollen hanging in the air like lazy will-o'-the-wisps, silhouetted, slow motion, frozen.

There's a thump under your car and you know you've hit something: it rattles around in the wheel well before jerking itself free. In the rearview mirror, you see what looks like a small sun dress discarded in the street. A few blocks later you realize the dress wasn't empty. The next three traffic lights all say "No turns," and by the fourth light, you notice you don't feel a thing. You're not frightened or urgent or panicked or angry. It's like you weren't there. You don't know what happened, and even if you knew, it's too late to undo whatever's done.

The music on the radio changes. You're already in a nicer part of town, where trees alongside the road cool the air, and ahead of you, it's one green light after another, far as you can see, all the way to the horizon. So you drive.

We which are alive 

“Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord.

My guess is, the Rapture really will come on Saturday. We'll all of us be deemed unworthy, and life on Earth will go on as if nothing had happened.

Zeno's Other Paradox 

The more that the philosopher Zeno pondered how to get close to people, the farther he moved from his target.

The Labyrinth, Part 1 

There was a monster.

There was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull, and the king had him imprisoned inside a deep maze, called the Labyrinth.

The monster was called The Minotaur.

But his name was Asterion.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a Minotaur, and the king had him imprisoned inside a Labyrinth, where he wandered, hungry, savage, and alone.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, and none of them ever returned.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, where they almost certainly died.

Every year, the king decided, rather than kill the monster, to feed it seven innocent men and seven innocent women.

The monster's name was Asterion—which was also the name of the king's father.

So, this story is more complicated than it might at first appear....

The Architect 

We noticed it gradually at first. A few people here and there started talking about it. Then it caught on and everyone was noticing: somehow we'd all started to share the same dream.

We would drift off to sleep and enter a fantastic world, and somewhere in that world, everyone else was dreaming it too.

So our lives became split between two worlds: the world where we were awake and worked and kept our families, and the world where we lived while we slept, a world where we were able to start over and make fresh choices and try things anew.

It's easy to understand why people started spending so much time in the dream world, while their real lives slipped farther and farther out of mind. We invaded this new world like explorers: all of it was waiting to be discovered. It was exciting and it made us feel alive again.

And before long, people started to wonder about the one who had designed this world, and how it came that we all collectively entered it in our dreams. We called this person the Architect, and more even than we wanted to sleep, we wanted to find this person, and have all of our questions answered....

Apocalypse Now 

MP3 audio track

After a while we started to wonder if the apocalypse wasn't going to happen all at once, like we'd always imagined, but rather gradually—so slowly that we'd barely even notice. And then of course we started to wonder if it was already happening: sometimes it sure seemed like it was.

Then this idea: what if it had already happened and was over?

Since we'd always laughed at those religious doomsday theories like "the Rapture," we also assumed that if the Rapture actually happened, then of course we'd be among those left behind—but till now, we'd never considered that maybe all of us were left behind.

Maybe the world had ended already, and every single last person on earth was deemed unfit to enter Heaven.

Maybe the world had ended already, and no one had particularly noticed.

We started trying to guess when it might have happened. "Hitler!" "The A-bomb!" "Martin Luther!" "The Crucifixion!"

But the fact was, it was impossible to guess. Maybe apocalypse is all we've ever known—so how could we possibly recognize it? Maybe apocalypse came and went before we ever had a chance to see it, or record its signs—maybe back when people first learned to write, or learned to speak, or learned to dream. Maybe it happened as soon as Adam and Eve ate that fruit. Maybe God tossed us out of Eden the same way we toss out a baking sheet of burnt cookies: a failed batch, easy to replace, quickly forgotten. The smoke clears and you start over and you move on. And maybe that's all we ever were.

The Dinner Party 

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The Wallpaper 

She liked the wallpaper so much, she papered the inside of her house with it; then the outside of her house; then the windows; the lawn; the mailbox; street lamp; sidewalk; the car; the car windshield; the lenses of her glasses—till she'd ensured that no matter where her eye fell, it would land on something familiar, a recurring pattern, unchanging and comfortable, and she would never have to look at anything disagreeable again till they day she died. Then she lined the inside of her coffin with it, so she could feel this way forever.

Rapunzel's Tangles 

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When the Muse Comes Knocking 

When the muse comes knocking, let her in, even though she'll eat your food, track mud on your floor, dirty your clothes, piss in your bed, puke on your rug, sleep with your wife, abuse your children, steal your savings, ruin your reputation, hijack your dreams, and wreck every single night of sleep you ever hoped to get—because if you don't, you'll be lonely forever.

The Thick of the Woods 

Two lovers in a meadow by a forest, and one says, "Let's go into the woods!", so they run off hand in hand. The forest grows thick—tangles of branches and leaves that block the sun, thickets of vines that snarl the paths—and before long, the two lovers become separated from one another, and can't find their way back.

"Where are you?" "Over here!" They reach their fingers through the vines toward the sound of that beloved voice. As long as they can hear each other, they never feel entirely lost; but they can't see one another, except in maybe-imagined flashes of colors glimpsed through the trees; and they can't find a path that will bring them back together.

"Where are you?" "Over here."

So they grow old in the forest, in love but unable to see or touch. Sometimes they call out more from habit than urgency; sometimes they mouth their answer without making a sound. Eventually, they stop speaking at all—so there's no longer any proof of the other's continued existence in the forest. But neither do they want any proof. They believe the other is over there, somewhere, in the thick of the woods; and undisturbed in the company of this hope, they live happily, quietly, ever after.

Godzilla Reading Haiku 

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(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of Jersey Devil Press.)

Blog of the Future 

There's a blog that sometimes links to my blog, so people who read that blog sometimes read this blog too. Whenever this other blog links to my blog, I'm flattered: I sometimes doubt that anyone reads my blog. I sometimes doubt that anyone reads anyone's blog, except their own. So it's reassuring to see that someone has in fact read something on my blog, and even gone so far as to recommend that others read it, too.

In fact, whenever this other blog links to my blog, I read this other blog. It's as if their affirmation of my blog confirms my opinion of their good taste, and then I want to see what else they're thinking. I read it diligently, I'll find things I think are interesting, and often I'll add a link somewhere on my blog back to this other blog, so that presumably, the people who are reading my blog (if there are any) are now also reading this other blog, because of my recommendation. I assume this other blog sees that I've linked to them, and this causes them to read my blog more closely, and maybe find something they like enough to recommend to their readers.

It all reminds me of the closed-off glass globe they have at the Natural History Museum which has been sealed for years and contains an entire self-contained ecosystem, but would probably smell really bad if you open it up.

But it seems to work.

The closed-off glass globe and the cross-linking between blogs, that is.

However... a distressing thing has started to happen, because now this other blog is no longer linking to stories I've written. Instead, it links to stories I haven't written yet. It quotes these unwritten stories, and it points its readers to my blog seeking these stories which don't yet exist. It must be very confusing and disappointing for these readers.

The stories which the other blog says I've written, even though I haven't—I don't know if these are stories I would have written sometime in the future; but they seem interesting to me; so I write them.

I worry that the story I wind up writing is not be as good as the story that I was supposed to have written but didn't write.

These recommendations come, and I write for them, trying to catch up with their expectations, always a step behind, hoping not to fall two or three steps back, hoping not to stumble, hoping not to fall, trying to anticipate their next want, trying to fill it, to keep them happy, all of them, the readers and the future readers I don't yet have but apparently someday will. What do you want, stranger? And what will you want after that?

The Woman Who Planted Her Children 

When the first one died, she buried it herself in her own backyard, and on that spot grew a beautiful tree, which she named Sarah.

When the second died and was buried, another tree sprouted, and she called it Daniel.

So it was for each of them, a tree for a child, till at the end of her own life, she had a forest for a family, and was herself laid to rest in this quiet grove of sadness.

The Rowboat 

I had a rowboat but I lost it.

I live in a place, inhabited but not overcrowded, and the boat would take me away from it, through bubbling channels and quiet lagoons, to drift instead among the frogs and the light-footed dragonflies that skate on the surface of the pond. It's not long being in the boat before my troubles disappear; I disappear, into the swirls of water, or swirls of algae in the water, imagining shapes onto them as if they were clouds; or I look into the shapes of the clouds reflected onto the surface of the water; or I look into the clouds themselves. I follow the current's meanderings, navigating its minute discoveries—why is the air cooler here?—why do the fish gather there?—Hello, old rock. I might as well be sailing around the world, I'm so far from my troubles; till I find my way back, more at peace than before, tie up my boat, and resume my business.

Then one day the boat was gone, whether stolen or lost to the weather or a weakness of the rope or most likely the carelessness of my knot, I don't know; but I'm sure it's the last: that one day, I'd have paddled up toward the dock, drifted, bumped it, stepped springing onto the bouncing pier, sun in my eyes, sweat dripping from my brow, smell of summer on my skin and in my hair, some sogginess from water, worry about sunburn, hungry, missed phone calls, impatient to-do lists, life—I forgot to tie up my little boat, or tied it poorly, I'm sad to concede. Waves pushed at it, gently, again and again, into the dock, knocking like a welcome but tentative guest; then, disheartened, nudged by a chance in the wind, pulled it in the other direction. Away. Adrift.

Headless, the boat wandered toward a deeper part of the pond, where, finding an easy current, followed it to the place the pond meets the creek; stalled for a while on a shallow embankment; nudged again loose and away, to the spot less visible to us than the fishes where the creek becomes the river, where the river opens out to the sea, and the boat was free free free, tiny on top of a whole underwater world, rising up on the waves, falling, up and down, the earth's own breath; and in this way, it torqued and turned and traveled the world, following warm waters up, passing bare beaches and thick forests, steep cliffs, crackling ice, breaching whales, flocks of birds, flocks of fishes; vessels too passed it and noticed it or passed it and failed to notice, fishermen from Portugal, from Japan; an ocean tanker which itself contained a kind of ocean; happy people in the heavy sun; sad people; people of all kinds. This little boat saw them all, though it didn't understand or recognize them, but drifted on, oblivious to the richness of its adventures; while I, at home, regretted my poor knot and thought on it often.

The Man of Tomorrow 

Superman was persuaded to hire an IT guy. "Why do I need email?," he asked. "I can see clear to the horizon. I can hear radio frequencies across the globe." But his mother Martha wanted to send him photos, and Lois was always looking for a decent Scrabble partner. Most compelling, the NSA had evidence that Lex Luther was developing an advanced computer virus to take over the world. "How are you going to save us," the President asked him, "if you don't even know how to open up Outlook?"

"If I can't open up Outlook, I'll be the only one safe from the virus!" But he didn't like to think of himself as ignorant, so he hired a cousin of Jimmy Olsen's to install a complement of hardware and software into the Fortress of Solitude.

"How do I turn it on?," he asked the IT guy.

"The Internet? You don't turn on the Internet. It's always on, like the Sun."

Lois came over to show him how it all worked. "You should Google yourself! Look: one million, four-hundred sixty thousand results! Hey, click on the 'News' link: see if my stories are at the top."

"It says I already have a page on MySpace. What's MySpace?"

"Don't worry about MySpace," Lois answered.

When she came back a week later, he was still sitting at the computer. "Hey Lois! I'm the mayor of the Fortress of Solitude! @ThatSuperman has 400,000 followers!"

"You have a Twitter account?"

"I've got to protect my online brand, Lois."

The Internet afforded Superman with a whole new set of data that he could use to monitor crime, and to keep peace and order across the planet.

"Wait—Lex Luther is your Facebook Friend?"

"Well, we know a lot of the same people. And sometimes he harvests my crops in Farmville. Anyway, he doesn't really have time for world dominion anymore."

The Internet was far more effective at eliminating violent crime than Superman had ever been, because the criminals now mostly stayed at home—uploading photos of old capers, editing Wikipedia entries on classic bank heists, and playing each other at Mafia Wars till they fell asleep at their keyboards, icing each other all night long, from the safety of their dreams.

An American Dream 

(This piece was the featured story in Necessary Fiction the week of October 24, 2012.)

The Man in My Eyes 

When I close my eyes, there's a man talking to me. He's little, and if he's making sound, I can't hear it, but he sits on the inside of my eyelid, well-dressed, behind a desk, like a newscaster on a tiny television, reporting sternly and firmly on the passing of pressing events.

I don't know what he's saying but I know it's important.

He's not there every time I close my eyes—only intermittently, usually at the ends of long days. Sometimes he's changed his tie or he's wearing a different colored shirt. Even in a pink shirt he looks composed and urgent.

He's very small, and it's hard to make out the movement of his lips, but one word I think I can make out, because he uses it so often: "Help."

Lately, he's been cutting to other correspondents with greater and greater frequency. They're always on the scene of a terrible disaster—plane crash or hurricane or the death of an innocent child. When the correspondent finishes, they cut back to the original little man, but he always takes a moment of solemn stillness before his lips begin to move again, silent reading of an unknown almanac.

"Help," the little man is saying inside my eyes, and then maybe, after that (it's hard to tell) "yourself."

The 100th Floor 

In all his days as a window washer, he had never once seen a door on the outside of the hundredth floor, until that day.

They'd started at the roof, as always, plunging their small platform over the edge and then riding it down, little by little. They enjoyed each other's company, but even more, they enjoyed the silence, the silence and the squeaking sounds as they worked over the glass. They enjoyed their own never-ending rhythm, fanning in graceful arcs, fanning and dunking and drying, complementing one other, filling in the limits of each other's reach.

They almost never looked inside the windows; they almost never cared to. The people inside were murky shadows, like ghosts, or underpaintings, or characters in an old, washed-out silent film. Their shapes distorted as the windows were doused, then wiped dry, doused, then wiped dry, and the men on the scaffold noticed the people inside only sometimes, the way one notices shells on the ocean floor, revealed after a passing wave, then hidden, then forgotten.

They loosened the ties on the pulleys and lowered themselves, and started again, window after window, floor after floor.

Outside, the Sun was an arm's reach away.

Outside, the wind was cruel.

Outside, they brought with them their own weather. On cloudy days, their scaffolding would sometimes seem to ascend above the clouds into a sunshine that no one on the ground could see. On sunny days, such as today, the window washers would sometimes disappear into a small cloud that hovered over their platform, perhaps fashioned from the water they were carrying and from the heat of their own breath.

It was from such a cloud, and dangling from a heaven-high roof, they wiped at the windows again and again and again; and in an otherwise unremarkable moment, their little cloud parted, and that was when he saw it—the door, high above him, high and to the right: a glossy black door with a brass knob that reflected the sunlight into his eyes, a heavy wooden door set into the vertical plane of steel and glass, an impossible door.

The other men were already unfurling the platform down the building and bringing the door farther out of reach, and he knew then that if he didn't reach for it, didn't at least try, then he'd never have a chance again, and never know what lay on its other side; and without a word to his colleagues and friends (for they preferred to work in silence), he stepped off the platform; and they never did understand why.

The Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto, pt. 1 

Or, What I Like: Thoughts Toward an Essay

A year ago, in an effort to help cultivate more of the writing that I myself like to read, I sent out a call for fiction, and attached the following statements as a short manifesto:

1. We believe there are many ways of looking at the world, and you can see a lot by sometimes closing your eyes.
2. We believe the best ideas come out in unexpected ways.
3. We believe fairy tales are for grown-ups, who might not always be able to puzzle out the moral.
4. We believe the medium is a message, and we like the digital medium.
5. We believe in concision and negative space.
6. We believe a lot can be built with shoestrings.
7. And we believe that stories—even short ones—especially short ones—should leave us feeling transformed.

People did send stories. (Thanks!) But I also received one short, unexpected, hateful email from a stranger: four sentences of unsolicited vitriol which can be politely summed up by its final line, "Get a job!" I had a job, but apparently something in my bullet list struck a nerve, and made this man understand me to be lazy, wasteful, and anti-capitalist. Whether those things are true or not is beside the point. (They probably are true.) The point is, with precious few clues as to what set him off, I'd like to guess that he was lashing out at the term "fairy tale."

Nothing evokes childhood and its spendthrift squandering of time—time, the most precious of all adult commodities!—quite so quickly as the fairy tale. These are stories set in faraway times and places, starring princes and frogs and whole casts of characters whom we can never hope to be. These royals and freaks struggle in worlds that don't even share our own laws of physics: wolves speak, at least one parent is always deceased, and the prick of a needle might put you to sleep for years. The world is warped, causality is surreal, and a practical person could reasonably conclude that the morals of these stories must certainly be useless to us. The fairy tale is the most extravagant example of the uselessness of all fiction, and the uselessness of the time that we give to it.

Yet this talk of "use" and "commodities" speaks exactly to the fairy tale's real value. This, then, is a "Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto," because it proclaims that one function of these stories is to liberate you from the belief that your time must be well spent. When you read a fairy tale, your time is getting wasted, and you, the worker/shopper disappear; as a reader, you are transported, however briefly, into a place where the concerns of your job cease to exist, where nothing is being bought or sold, where shopping won't solve any problems, and where things are, in general, much too weird ever to be commodified.

Thus, the act of valuing a fairy tale is a radical act, because it expresses your independence from a capitalist dialectic (working/shopping) that defines so much of our everyday ("workaday") existence. Every time that I decide I "don't have time" for fiction, what I'm actually deciding is that it has too little "value," in the sense that it doesn't help me to get any of "my work" done (though "my work" is, in these cases, usually actually someone else's work). This habit strengthens the value of capitalism in my mind and on my time, and it weakens and devalues imagination—the one place we are most free.

The point of a fairy tale is to enable you and to train you to think fantastically, and expansively. It enables your humanity, and makes you a bigger, richer human being—arguably, I think, even more so than "getting a job."¹

---

1. I don't at all mean to limit the discussion of "fairy tales" to the Hans Christen Anderson and the Grimm Brothers: these stories are so entrenched and well-known that they may make it harder to think expansively: they are too canonical. But I do mean to include Garcia-Marquez, Isabel Allende, etc.; Milan Kundera; Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, etc.; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, many of the writers associated with "slipstream", etc. etc. etc.... in short, I mean nearly all of the writers I read and like.^{2, 3}

2. The occasion for writing this not-quite-essay was a recent conversation with a friend regarding a playwright I much admire, Sarah Ruhl, and the common criticism that her work can be "twee." I disagree both that her work is "twee" and also that "twee" is, in itself, a criticism. Since none of my feelings on this particular subject made it into the above passage, I'd like to hope there will be a "Part Two"....

3. See also, "Mythic Proportions."

The Introspective Superhero 

or, Fortress of Solitude, pt. 2

The Introspective Superhero would happily rescue people, if only he knew with certainty that's what they wanted. But it's hard to know what's best.

Take Anna, for instance. Her tabby cat Bartholomew is currently stuck up a tree, beyond Anna's reach. Bartholomew is getting more and more frightened at his situation, and he keeps pushing himself farther up the tree, as if sensing that the ground is an enemy from which he must retreat. Anna, too, is beginning to panic, though she's normally quite level-headed: she thought the cat would have good enough sense to come down by now, and since he hasn't, she's becoming unsure of how to resolve the situation.

Nothing would be easier for the Introspective Superhero than to swoop in, fetch the cat off its branch, and return it safely to Anna's worried arms. But how much better would it be, he wonders, if Anna were to arrive at her own solution—remembering, say, the old stepladder in her apartment building's shared garage; setting up the ladder; confronting her own modest fear of heights; and, from a rung halfway up, luring the cat Bartholomew back down to safety? How much more confident and empowered would she feel? How much more fond of her cat, and herself, at the opportunity, years from now, to look back nostalgically at her afternoon's heroics, and how her actions had brought her and her cat closer together? The intervention of the Introspective Superhero would not help her. It would diminish her.

Even in matters of life and death, the path of the Introspective Superhero isn't always clear. He remembers painfully a time when, during a bank robbery at United First Federal, one of the thieves pointed a gun at the chest of a police officer and fired. The Introspective Superhero used his lightning speed to interject himself between the officer and the speeding bullet. But the policeman was furious. "I was wearing my vest!" he yelled, pointing at his Kevlar. The gunshot wound would likely have been trivial, but would have afforded the middle-aged beat cop a medal, promotion, and a path to an easy retirement. The District Attorney, too, was put out by the hero's actions. Till he'd arrived on the scene, it had been a clear open-and-close case of armed robbery; but against the Introspective Superhero, all weapons were useless, and the bank robber's lawyer convincingly argued the judge down to a misdemeanor.

Superpowers, it seems, don't make the world less complicated. Rather, because they afford the hero with near-infinite options, they make the world incredibly more difficult to manage. Each choice presents so many possible outcomes that it's impossible to guess which one is best. That's why most nights, though the hero could be saving innocent lives, instead he elects to stay at home and do very little. The best way to make the world better, he reasons, is to avoid it altogether.

The Strongest Man in the World, pt. 1 

The world's strongest man wants to make omelette, but every time he tries to crack an egg, he crushes it, so he gets shell in the frying pan and yolk all over the floor. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man owes $125 in library fines because he keeps tearing out pages. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man hits a home run every time he has an at-bat, so baseball isn't any fun for him. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man once ate a fork by accident. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man can't put on a condom without tearing it. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man has never forgiven himself for the accident with his puppy when he was a boy. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man is tired of being called "Ox," "Bull," "Hoss" and "Big Guy." (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man wants to give you a kiss, but he won't because he's scared of hurting you. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man worries that no one will love him for his mind. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

Map of the Great Explorer 

After the empire had continued to grow, year on year, till the Emperor himself was no longer clear of its boundaries, let alone what was contained therein, he commissioned a renowned explorer to create a definitive map of the empire's contents. Fully aware of the scale of the undertaking, the Emperor insisted that no expense be spared: the explorer was afforded a generous budget and three full years to gather supplies, resources and crew before beginning his great expedition.

Pronouncement of the adventure was met with much fanfare: the people excitedly greeted the explorer as their newest hero—he who would stake her flag in the farthest reaches of the world, would act as her ambassador while collecting its finest trophies, would calculate and define its exact glory for all posterity. The empire was truly great, and the explorer was both an effect and a new cause of her greatness. Yet he was veteran of many adventures, and took the weight of his great task with seasoned, methodical assurance.

Before setting out on his monumental voyage, he requisitioned a great collection of maps, journals and logs of those who had traversed the empire before him. Seeking to build on their knowledge while avoiding their mistakes, he splayed their charts across his oaken table, and studied them long into the night. He copied the maps longhand so as to learn every curve of every continent; he combed them for discrepancies, charting out every known and every unknown, till he could imagine, clear in his mind and without benefit of the map, exactly each route and its possible pitfalls.

He examined too the roads and paths. As he was a traveler by trade, he understood that every road exists to connect two things which would otherwise be isolated; thus, he studied each point of departure, and each destination. He requisitioned more books—tax records, local laws and customs, the ledgers of commerce—till he began to understand the roads as a great circulatory system, the arteries of the empire, and he could imagine the flow of goods that coursed through them like the empire's blood.

And now the great explorer saw that trade is always the result of appetite, and that a map is a map of needs, pulsing to and fro, town to town and state to state. What is missing from here is sought from there. A road without people is not a road. He began to see in his ledgers longing and loss and love: he saw in them villages built from hope and villages decimated by famine and disease; saw cities leveled by earthquakes and war, then rebuilt; saw babies born, lovers wed, parents buried. He saw caravans trekking mountain roads to relieve the suffering of faraway people; saw caravans avoiding those same roads for higher profit elsewhere. From his map, he began to hear songs in a thousand languages, tales of small glories and great pains. His map had grown into an almanac that charted people's aspirations as if they were weather—here temperate, here stormy—and he saw them pass in seasons.

A road without people is not a road, so at the explorer's bidding, his agents brought him books of history, and literature, and poetry, and he read them without pause, till his great sailor's eyes began to fail; and when this happened, then his agents brought him the poets themselves, from all corners of the empire, and in the explorer's study, they regaled him with their tales of faraway lands.

But poets have a way of romanticizing things, especially when those things are far away; so the explorer sent for others, too—fishermen, farmers, whole families; he sought out soldiers and merchants and pilgrims, holy men and criminals, too, and brought them all together under his roof, and asked for each of their stories; and he listened carefully, and sometimes they would cry together, and often they would laugh, and usually come to some understanding; and then the explorer thanked them for their time, and closed his failing eyes till he could see it all clearly, and made some adjustment to his map.

At the end of the three years, the explorer was called before the Emperor. The budget for the great expedition had been exhausted, and not a single ship had sailed. By now, everyone had seen or heard tales of the parade of constant human revelry, long nights of singing and storytelling at the explorer's home. The patriotic people, having once felt so much pride in the explorer's impending journey, now felt betrayed, and in their anger and disappointment, they accused him of fraud and treason.

The explorer unfurled the map before the Emperor, a map which, by now, resembled no mass of land or expanse of sea, marked no towns, showed no roads or riverways; but which, from various angles, reflected the face of every one of the Emperor's subjects, and charted out all of their possible futures, their dreams and losses, all possible contentments and disappointments and joys, to scale. It was a map which excluded nothing, so preferred no single path over another; had no boundaries, no borders; and which would take a lifetime to explore.

Sugar and Stones 

(This story appears in the October 2012 issue of Bewildering Stories.)

That Kind of Crazy Afternoon 

The summer has been really lousy. It's rained a thousand days in a row. Some people got really excited about the weather this summer, because it never really got too hot. That killed me. People got excited because they never had to use their air conditioners, but they couldn't go outside, either, because it rained like a monsoon every single day, I swear to God it did, so no one really got to enjoy their summer, but at least they didn't have to use their air conditioner.

One thing about me is, I sweat a lot. Summer comes and I start sweating and then I don't stop till October. And what's funny is, it doesn't matter whether it's eighty-five degrees or ninety-five degrees, I sweat just the same. I wear an extra t-shirt to mop up all the sweat, and then I use a handkerchief to mop it out of my eyes, and then I have to change shirts a few times a day, too. Like that tennis player who no one can remember his name, even though he was really good. He was going to be a tennis star except he sweat so much he'd get dehydrated. It got so he started covering his body in talcum powder, to stop the sweating, but it wasn't enough, he'd still get dehydrated and cramp up, and eventually he had to retire, even though he was good enough to beat just about anybody. Sometimes I wonder if I have a medical condition like that. I've been using my air conditioner all summer, just to stop my sweating, and I'll probably use it till October.

But this week wasn't like that. After a million days of rain in a row, this week the sun came out and there was this cool breeze and it was really nice, for a change. Everyone and their uncle came out of their apartment then, you can bet they did, to go outside in the beautiful weather. Everyone called up their boyfriend and their girlfriend to go for a walk, and even the people who didn't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, they called up someone nice too, because just about everyone outside was holding hands with someone. That's what kind of nice day it was—the kind of day you want to be holding hands with someone, even if that someone isn't really your boyfriend or girlfriend, just so you can pretend for a little while, to make the day even nicer.

That's the kind of day it was yesterday, and I went up to Central Park so I could enjoy it. Maybe if you haven't lived in New York, then I should explain how there's just so much of it, block after block of streets and sidewalks, and more streets and more sidewalks. Boy, is it big. Sometimes it can be a little disorienting, even if you've lived here a long time, because everything is on this grid of streets and sidewalks for what feels like a hundred miles in every direction. Every corner there's the exact same stuff—a deli, and a little diner, and maybe a restaurant. I mean, some of them are nice and some of them are lousy, but after a few blocks, they all look the same. Then there are high buildings everywhere, so you can't always see landmarks, unless you recognize that particular deli or that particular diner, which sometimes you do, but just as often, you don't. That's why it's so important for people to get out of the city. Sometimes it just repeats itself too much and it's exhausting.

I think that's why people go to Central Park. It is literally a breath of fresh air. People always say "It was a breath of fresh air," and I puke when I hear it, but in this case, it's literally true. It is a big breath of fresh air. And it's so goddamn big. This park is bigger than some cities. That's not even an exaggeration. Central Park is bigger than the whole city of Boston. I'll admit, it's pretty nice to be able to get out of the goddamn stinking subway crammed full of all those people and then be in a whole city-sized park full of fresh air.

Except, today I got out of the subway and I couldn't move, there were so many goddamn people. I just wanted to go down to the lake and watch the rowboats and the ducks, but I couldn't really even do it, because there were so many people. It killed me, because here was all of this nature and supposed peace and quiet, but instead everyone crowded around this one phony bastard doing magic tricks and telling jokes into a PA system. Some of the tricks were pretty good, and he was athletic, too. I mean, at one point, he completely jumped right over this little girl, and she didn't even know he was going to do it. That was pretty impressive. But this just isn't the venue for that sort of thing, that's all.

I tried to climb through to the rowboats but I couldn't on account of all the people and the way they parked their baby strollers side by side across the entire sidewalk. Anyway, by then, I didn't really want to see the rowboats anymore. I just wanted some peace and quiet and to enjoy the goddamn day. And would you believe it, as soon as I got out of earshot of that magician, didn't I find another crowd of people around another guy with another PA system? Maybe that's what people like to see on a beautiful summer day—some phony bastard talking into a microphone, instead of lakes and trees and instead of relaxing. I guess they think it makes them urbane.

I was in one of those moods where I didn't want to be around people, so I made my way toward the zoo. I thought it would be nice to see the gorillas because at least the gorillas seem to enjoy some peace and quiet. I heard a story once about how a mountain gorilla in a zoo found an abandoned kitten and adopted it, and when the zookeepers tried to take the kitten from the gorilla, she protected it and wouldn't let them get anywhere near it. She just cradled it like a little football and kept walking away from the zookeepers and took care of it like it was her own baby. And then the zookeepers, who are supposed to love animals, they took the kitten away from the gorilla, and she bawled her big black eyes out, and they gave that kitten to a goddamn pound. Hypocrites.

There was never a point where I wasn't surrounded by crowds, and where I couldn't hear some moron on a PA system. It was kind of funny in a way. The trouble was, I couldn't concentrate too hot with all these people around, and then a funny thing happened: I was having trouble breathing. I really was. I thought I might puke, so I went looking for a bathroom, but there was a line full of people and baby strollers, and I decided to just sit down. I really wanted some water, but the water from the fountain was so warm and bad and the goddamn zoo wanted four bucks for a bottle. So I sat down at a table in the cafe, and I was near the gorillas, but I never did see any, not a single goddamn one.

When Harry Met Daniel 

The Urban Sherpa Interviews Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel Radcliffe is tired.

He is sprawled out on a chaise lounge in London's Claridges Hotel. "I'm knackered!," he laughs. "I don't even know what's going to come out of my mouth."

Radcliffe has good reason to be tired: while he's promoting the recent installment of the Harry Potter franchise (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), he's also begun principal shooting on the final set of Harry Potter movies.

"Sometimes it feels as though I've been working on this for my whole life. It'll be really nice to finally kill Voldemort once and for all, and get on with things." He stares out the window with a faraway, dreamy look in his eyes. "You know, Ron and Hermione are off to university this week? But not me."

"You mean [Harry Potter co-stars] Emma Watson and Rupert Grint?"

"Right. Of course." He gives one of his famous shy smiles. "Sorry."

Radcliffe fantasizes about going away to a university and having a normal life—but a "normal life" may be impossible for the charming millionaire who has spent his whole adolescence in the public eye, depicting a beloved hero, growing up alongside him, their fates always intertwined. "Other people lined up for their copy of Deathly Hollows to learn what was going to happen to Harry Potter. I read it to learn what was going to happen to me."

He plays absent-mindedly with the promotional broomstick that Warner Brothers left in the hotel room. "You can imagine, growing up like this... Everywhere I go, it's 'Oh, look, Harry Potter.' I'm not ungrateful. But sometimes being the Chosen One is its own burden.

"I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like, without this—" he gestures to his forehead, to the location of Potter's famous lightning scar. "I wonder what I would have become. Maybe a cricket star. Or maybe a tosser. Who knows?"

He snaps out of his sulk at the chance to talk about his turn in Peter Schaffer's Equus: "I was naked!," he exclaims. "Waving my magic wand! Seriously, it was a brilliant experience, a great chance to prove to people that I'm more than just 'The Boy Who Lived.' Even my friends, sometimes I think they wonder: 'Sure, you survived the Killing Curse. But can you act?' Hopefully, I showed that I can. Professor McGonagle came opening night—"

"You mean [Harry Potter co-star, Dame] Maggie Smith?"

"Right. After the show, she kept going on about how I'd grown. It was really affirming."

The Potter series has given Radcliffe a chance to act alongside the greats of the British stage. "They've all been so supportive. I've learned so much. But most of all, I don't think I could have done it without my parents. The bravery and sacrifice of James and Lily Potter is a real inspiration."

"But surely you mean your real parents, [literary agent] Alan Radcliffe and [casting director] Marcia Gresham?"

Radcliffe shoots a look and snarls something in Parseltongue, before recovering his charm. "Yes. Of course." He stares out the window again with a grim and distant look, as if remembering fantastic wrestlings with evil, flying battles pitched among the clouds, powerful magicks that Muggles will never know. "It's been a very, very long day."

Blog of the Last Man on Earth 

This entry is not currently available.

Demonology 

My friends tell me I should get rid of my demon lover. The scars and blisters she leaves on me are unsightly. Her brazier is sure to burn my house to the ground. "She won't even tell you her real name!"

They don't understand anything.

I don't mind the bite marks or the scalding iron. I don't mind her sharp teeth or dirty claws. I don't mind when she curses my family in Aramaic.

It's endearing.

My demon lover understands me like no other. "Forever is how long I will understand you." When I wander alone forty days in the desert, she speaks to me—she and she alone—and everything she tells me is true.

"I understand you," she says, her head fitting perfectly on my shoulder. "We're both fallen angels."

Less Than 

It's because of the shrinking.

It was hard to notice at first. Remember, growing was like that: "How big you've grown!," the cousins whose names you never learned would always say. And you would think, defiant: "No I haven't."

But you had. You'd grown imperceptibly, day by day. To prove it, your parents would mark little indisputable lines on your door jamb in pencil ("July 21, 1980: 47 inches"), till your incredulity was replaced with a hard-to-explain, slightly misplaced pride whenever you sized up your hash marks: "How big I've grown!," you would think.

Shrinking is like that. It sneaks up on you, without any giveaway signs. The hat still fits; the pants are tighter than ever—but you know that you are smaller than you were. You know it as surely as you knew looking at those pencil marks as a child. You have shrunken. You are less than. You realize, too late, that hopes and dreams have mass; that their mass centered you like ballast; they plumped you up; and now they're gone.

Shriveling. Wilting. Shrinking into less and less.

If you know, then it's only a matter of time before everyone— friends, co-workers, the nameless cousins, the strangers on the street—realize it too. It almost doesn't matter, though, because at the rate you're getting smaller, by the time they realize, you'll have disappeared altogether.

Snakes 

MP3 audio track

(This piece appears in the October 4, 2012 issue of MicroHorror.)

Shiva the Destroyer 

(This piece appears in issue 29 of In Between Altered States.)

Stella of the Angels  

MP3 audio track

(This story appears in the November 2012 issue of Bartleby Snopes, where it was "Story of the Month.")

 

Forced Entry  

Kato Kaelin's been here again today. He broke a window to let himself in, ate some food from my fridge, made a mess of the living room, and was gone before I ever got home.

I think he might have napped in my bed.

I don't know what to do.

We used to be friends and now we're not. But he keeps coming over when I'm gone and it's driving me crazy.

I want to tell him he's got it all wrong: he doesn't have to be so furtive. I want to tell him to help himself to my things. I don't mind if he tries on my clothes; it's nice that we're the same size. I like that he listens to my music and that he watches my movies; I like that we have the same taste.

He'd be a welcome guest.

I'd like to see him, actually.

But he doesn't want that. He prefers this other way, this occasional, unpredictable forced entry. He prefers coming and going, leaving trails of crumbs and greasy fingerprints everywhere. Leaving traces and clues. He prefers leaving. Touching everything, and never being touched.

The Cleaning Lady 

His apartment was too large and his schedule too busy for him to have time to dust, or clean toilets, or scrub floors, so he got a referral from a co-worker, and hired a cleaning lady. "Look at all these nice things you have!" she exclaimed upon her arrival, and promptly threw them in the trash. "There. Everything is cleaner now," she said, and indeed it was.

Parable of the Salve 

Let's say, you have a condition.

You have a rare, debilitating medical condition that causes you chronic, widespread pain, and you have had it as long as you can remember. Your condition is hard to describe: sometimes the pain is in your stomach, sometimes in your liver, sometimes in your heart, sometimes in your neck. Sometimes you feel it acutely over all your skin. Doctors have examined you up and down, and they can find no cause for your pain, no symptoms, no clues that might lead to relief. They prescribe pain killers which have fleeting, incidental effect. The doctors want very much to help you. But they can't.

You go on like this for some time. You begin to lose hope that anyone will ever be able to understand your condition, or to help. Then, one day, you are visiting a new doctor, explaining your condition (as you've done fifty times before)—only this time, the doctor nods and says, "I understand. I know exactly what you need." She reaches into her medicine cabinet and fetches a small jar. "This salve will make you feel better," she says.

It is miraculous. You have lived with your condition for so long, you'd given up hope that you might ever feel good again. The salve changes everything. With the salve, you forget your pain. You live happy and free, and every few days, you return to the doctor for another application.

Years go by—so long that you forget what life was like before the salve. So long that you begin to doubt there ever was a "condition."

But you begin to notice a change: the doctor is applying the medicine in smaller doses. Your weekly appointments become monthly, and the pain begins to creep back into your belly, your skin, your bones. You return to the doctor, desperate and demanding. She looks at you sadly. She tells you that she is sorry, but she has no more salve to give you.

The pain comes back now. It is familiar, like an old friend. It is hard to describe: it is sometimes in your stomach, sometimes in your liver, sometimes in your heart. The pain comes back, worse than before, because now it is augmented by your memory of the salve—by your dreams of relief. Through your pain, you work to remind yourself that it is not the doctor who gave you the pain, by withholding the salve; she is not the cause of the pain; but rather, it is the doctor who relieved the pain, if only for a while....

The Lion and the Thorn 

One day, a lion roaming through the jungle got a thorn in his paw. A shepherd saw the lion, and, his pity overcoming his fear, approached it, and offered to remove the thorn. "You cannot heal while the thorn is still in your paw."

"I am king of the jungle," the lion roared. "This tiny thorn cannot hurt me!"

Some time afterward, the shepherd again came upon the lion. He lay on his side; his paw was enormously swollen; he could no longer walk, and he was starving. Again, the shepherd offered to remove the thorn from the lion's paw, and again, the lion refused: "I am king of the jungle," he growled, scaring the shepherd off.

That night, the hyenas and jackals circled the lion, afraid to get too close, but waiting, as the lion weakened. He remembered the kindness and the wisdom of the shepherd, who was nowhere to be seen. "I am king of the jungle," he whispered proudly, and at that point, he used his powerful fangs to bite painfully into his own foot, till he himself had removed the thorn.

When Ulysses Returned to Ithaca 

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This entry is not currently available.

The iPhone is Not Jesus 

Even Gandhi had to wait in line for the new iPhone. He queued up an hour after I did, just as the sun was heating up. "Do you mind if I stand up there?," he asked, pointing to a spot of shade in front of me. "Fuck you, old man. Wait your turn," I told him.

Bruce Willis, who was queued up two people ahead of me, nodded his approval, and chimed in, "That's right, Macaca. We've been here since 8am this morning. Wait your goddamn turn."

Mary Kate Olsen fidgeted with her hair and hid in the shade offered by her umbrella. "How many do you think they have in stock?," she asked no one in particular.

Steven Hawking answered: "I heard they're already out of the 16GB."

"What did he say?, asked Gandhi from the back of the line.

A hot dog vendor rolled his cart by. "Water, five dollars." Mary Kate bought one and popped a pill.

"What are you all waiting for?," someone called out from a passing car. Bruce Willis shouted back: "They've got a new book at the library." The driver looked disappointed: "Nobody famous?" He drove off.

Lily Allen, who had been one of the first to arrive, came out of the store and showed off her new iPhone. She'd gotten a white one. She made up a little iPhone dance, and we clapped for her.

"You want another forty?," Bruce Willis asked me, passing me a lukewarm bottle before I could answer. "Could I have one?," Gandhi asked. "Sorry," Bruce Willis answered. "That was my last one."

The hot dog vendor rolled by. "Water, ten dollars."

Steven Hawking pointed to the front of the line: "I think John Mayer just jumped the queue."¹

The heat was too much for Mary Kate: she had to be taken home. When the store manager came out to announce there were only two iPhones left, we decided that the honorable thing to do was settle it by knife fight. I made short work of Steven Hawking, and when Gandhi killed Bruce Willis, the two of us walked into the store together, bloody and triumphant. The iPhone was delivered to us, shrouded in blinding white light, by naked angels.

"This is some tight shit," Gandhi said, already installing the free Light Saber app. "Totally worth the wait." Then: "What's your number? You wanna grab a drink?"

1. Just like Steve Wozniak.

---

The Obituary 

Imagine his surprise when he saw the obituary, force itself as it were into his daily routine, in the middle of his second cup of coffee ("Light cream, two spoons of sugar") and between bites of cinnamon roll ("No nuts, please, they get caught in my digestion"). He had just padded down to the bottom of the driveway without his slippers ("Damn dog") trying to ignore the cold rain ("and worms") that got between his toes and the bottom two inches of his unhemmed pants ("Gotta do that").

The paper spread open on the mahogany table leaving nut-sized drops of water that might or might not ruin the wood after time. As always, he skipped straight to the end, to the announcements, to the life and death page ("The only real news"), which was the main reason ("the only reason") he subscribed to the rag.

"So. There it is. This is what it's like to be dead."

He wondered if it was no longer appropriate to finish his coffee ("but since no one's looking...").

In many ways he felt cheated—not at being dead ("It seems natural enough"), but rather at the system failure, that he hadn't been notified, that he'd had to read about it in the paper like everyone else, and ("My God!") that meant some people in this meddling town knew before he did ("Nosy").

Rather than let himself get bitter about it ("bad for my blood pressure"), he poured himself a third cup of coffee.

"Well, better go tell the kids", already sleeping through some of their favorite cartoons because the clouds and the rain kept the sun off their sleeping eyes.

(" At least they spelled my name right.")

Fortress of Solitude 

(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of Apocrypha and Abstractions.)

The Bogeyman 

The bogeyman came over last night, and
he wasn't as scary as I'd remembered.
We made dinner. He said the wine went straight
to his head. At the end of the night,
We started kissing, and I fucked him
On the same bed where he used to lurk,
slovering and snarling, clawing at my ankles.
Now he's snoring while we spoon,
his sleeping face lit in moonlight, and
I know I haven't conquered fear, just
moved it somewhere else, still undiscovered.

---

When He Surrounded Himself... 

When he surrounded himself with the things that were left to him—a box of Grape Nuts, a toilet kit with dental floss and eye drops, a rusty bicycle, a small pile of movie ticket stubs, two potted plants, four books with folded pages and underlines, a wax Buddha candle, seven headaches, and a 28.8 fax modem—he piled them all onto his kitchen table (which was rented), and, watching as it buckled under the weight, he contemplated: what was the best way to eat everything?

The combined wisdoms of Betty, Julia, Wolfgang, Rachael, Emeril and The Two Fat Ladies offered no answers. The indexes of so many stew recipes did not tell him what he needed to know. So, on his own, he chopped several cloves of garlic, minced a fresh bunch of parsley, and set to simmer all of the ingredients of his life. He reduced them in a stock pot till he had a puree—a hearty soup with no name, of his own creation.

Pouring it out with an old bent ladle into a deep mug, he drank it hot, the soup of his own life, and dipped a few bits of old sourdough for bulk; and when he'd eaten the entire pot of it, he was of course entirely empty, because whether he knew it or not, he was drawing identity not from what filled him, but from what he lacked...

Fucking Hillary Clinton 

(This piece originally appeared in the literary journal Cargo.)

The ice cubes in my glass freeze together head to head, like a kiss. At the point where they've decided they best fit, they become one, melt together, away from the world, and I twirl them around in the midst of their disappearance, to hear the music they make against the glass, clink clink.

The phone is ringing and I'm not answering it. I'm playing with my ice cubes and their wonderful music, clink clink, and the dull thump when they slide against the lime.

The answering machine will pick up, like a good answering machine.

I'm thinking of fucking Hillary Clinton. I'm thinking of taking her in a darkened room of the White House, under the titillated eyes of the Secret Service, on a desk once used by Andrew Jackson. I'm thinking of pulling Hillary Clinton by her hair, biting the diamonds on her earlobes, biting her neck, while she writhes to reach the clasp of her dress. I'm thinking of  thrusting my way into American history.

The answering machine picks up, as it's wont to do. Whoever's calling hangs up. It's annoying, especially 3am. But that's the way the game is played. The ball is in my court.

Things I have trouble imagining: Hillary in the throes of orgasm; Hillary with morning breath and raspy voice; Hillary cooking me breakfast; Hillary unrolling a condom onto me; Hillary letting me do her without a condom.

The harder these things are to imagine, the more they turn me on—so when she does them, so goes the game.

I pick up the phone and dial *69, but after the first ring, I hang up. I'm getting too old for this.

I like the image of Hillary pacing by the phone, feeling junior high, trying to get up the courage to call. I like to picture her hanging up after she hears my voice. I like Hillary flustered. I like knowing I just *69ed Hillary Clinton.

I pour myself another Scotch and watch the ice cubes fade into oblivion. The phone is ringing again: she's 69ed me right back. I reach to turn off the machine, cover up the evidence, shred the papers. She knows the drill. But I change my mind. I'm no good at being coy. Let her know what she's dealing with.

I enjoy watching Hillary at press conferences, on TV, wearing tailor-made suits of red or blue, crafted by conservative designers who are well paid but will never be known by name. I like watching her and guessing which panties she's wearing. I like knowing Hillary is cool and collected and smart and tough with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that she can't sleep nights, thinking of me. I like not calling her back, and standing her up for our secret, elaborate, tightly-scheduled rendezvous, pushing her nearly far enough to put my own life in danger. I like making Hillary Clinton cry.

And I think she likes it too.

Oh the games people play.

The machine picks up, and she hangs up again. Maybe she's thinking of Bill right now, somewhere in the back of her mind, thinking of a long time ago, when she was in love; when she still believed in love. I don't know what she's thinking, and I never will. I can only try to love her in the ways I think she wants to be loved, in the ways I think she needs to be loved.

And I do. Every day, I do.

Warning Signs: Lost at Sea 

Delta

Juliet

How cellophane 

Sometimes it's as though the aliens are reaching out to us, or the dolphins—if only we knew how to hear them... This fell into my spam folder this morning, from "Cherie", with the subject heading, i'm sad chris:

Is ransom buddha the gravid enthusiasm melee or galatea enthusiasm?

The micronesia detonate not mardi but luxuriant matsumoto rawhide and genevieve afterword. Sometimes buttery is eddy but gravid, glandular ah adsorb scot tacitus dunkirk prelude servitor!

How cellophane? aitken! afterword dreamlike keenan rawhide!

Is cousin diatomaceous the agony cloture deck or superfluous handstand?

The blythe rubble not cloture but aminobenzoic boson bound and rawhide handstand. Sometimes andiron is agony but blythe, token aspheric describe cepheus contradict urea cyril drown!

How totalitarian? iniquity! maggoty toenail lathe goof!

I want to help, Cherie. I hear you. Sometimes buttery is gravid. How totalitarian.

Cherie—I'm sad, too...

Everywhere You Go, There You Aren't 

You wake up before the alarm and you're completely disoriented: the way the light comes through the window makes you think you're in that apartment you had in Santa Monica, all those years ago. When you come to, you head to a coffee shop down the street, which reminds you of one you visited a few times in Berkeley. Later that morning, you stroll through a park, a copse of trees that looks a lot like a section of Valley Forge, near where you grew up, and that bend in the stream reminds you of another spot, in Westchester County. That afternoon, you're riding in a friend's car, suffering deja vu from a road trip somewhere in Arkansas, and you pull into a parking lot that strikes you as looking oddly like one you visited in Phoenix. Your destination, a grocery store, is laid out exactly like the one you used in Ithaca, New York. Finally, you get your bearings in Harvard Square, a place that looks, thankfully, like Harvard Square, but as you look around, you're nostalgic for another time, ten years ago, when you and some good friends spent a summer here. You duck into a movie theatre—escapism from all of the escapism you've been feeling—and once the lights go down, thankfully, you could be anywhere. You could be nowhere. By the time the movie is over, you sincerely have no idea where you are...

Angeles 

The First Night of the Rest of My Life

The phone rang seven times before I picked it up. The voice on the other end was the one I expected.

"What? No answering machine?" (Obviously.)

"I threw it out. I don't want people to be able to get in touch with me."

"You answered the phone." (Baiting.)

"I can't stand the thought that people can't get in touch with me."

"You've really lost it." (Without sympathy.) "Be at the Dresden Room at midnight."

I looked at the clock. 11:11. I wanted to make a wish, but I couldn't think of anything to wish for. "Make it twelve-thirty: I want to finish this Details."

On my way out, I fetched the answering machine from the trash can. There was an earthquake, a little one. The radio man said a 4.0. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

Over the Counter Pick-Me-Up Cocktail

• One shot of espresso, grains tightly packed, prepared with a twenty-second press, and served with a lemon twist.
• Two capsules of Korean panax ginseng, 500mg each. Swallow with:
• One cup of cranberry juice cocktail. Save the last ounce or so and set it aside.
• Two hits of Primatene mist.
• Two capsules of Ripped Fuel metabolic enhancer. Swallow with:
• 2 oz. Absolut Citron, shaken with crushed ice, the juice of one lime, and the splash of cranberry juice (above). Strain and serve in a martini glass, with a lemon twist.
• One bar of Hershey's Milk Chocolate, preferably the Big Block, though never the King Size Big Block, which is just too much.
• Four cigarettes, chain-smoked. Ideally, the first should be European. The last three may be of any high tar domestic variety. Kamel Reds are an excellent example.

Try to remember where you left your car keys. Now you are ready to go out.

The Dresden Room

The usual crowd was there, and the lounge singers were crooning a song that I recognized from a Frank Stallone album. I ran into Paul by the back door. "They keep the phone in the bathroom! I just called you and left a flush at the tone—to welcome you back to the Answering Machine Age."

"The Kids", Cathy and Dunbar, were in the better-lighted half of the bar (the part I'm told is a restaurant during so-called business hours, though I can't vouch for it personally). They were in a corner booth sipping from drinks they thought made them look reminiscent of alcoholics—Amaretto sours, and a drink Cathy liked to call a "Corrupt Shirley Temple"—grenadine and ginger ale with a shot of Bourbon. "Which she says she invented herself," Paul explained, "but only because she's blacked out all of the times I used to get her drunk on them and take advantage of her."

"You have a different tactic now?," I asked.

"We're in love. I use guilt to manipulate."

Paul and I have a strange relationship. We say we're friends for lack of a better term.

There was also a vaguely European-looking man in the booth I didn't recognize. "You remember Davíd?" (with an accent—not David). I said I didn't think we'd me, and he smiled and shook my hand graciously.

Graciously. As in, not from Los Angeles.

Cathy and Dunbar were in the midst of something they'd picked up in an acting class. "Ansel Adams," she called out.

"Adam Ant," he shot back.

I ordered a Tanqueray gimlet and held my breath.

Cathy squirmed.

"What are they doing?" Davíd asked in a vaguely European-sounding accent. He was wearing an orange tie.

"Alan Alda."

I saw our waiter coming around the corner with my drink. "The Name Game. He has to find a first name beginning in "A", any last name. She takes the first initial of the last name and uses it for her next first name. But Cathy and Dunbar only pick doubles, because they're pretentious."

The waiter, prompt and cordial as ever, served off my drink, powdered sugar along the frosted glass like alpine snow. Sweetness.

"I understand all that." Davíd smiled. "I mean, why are they doing it?"

I smiled back. Orange, I'm told, is the new black.

Caution Curves

I take Mulholland home. It's not on the way, but it's closer to the stars.

Monsieur has to leave, I'd told them, because Monsieur has to get up tomorrow.

Tires squealing around the bend, g-forces pressing away from the curve and toward the tangent of the curve, shoulder leaning into the curve, as if that changes anything. As if gravity gives a damn.

Monsieur does not have to get up tomorrow, Paul heckled, because Monsieur is gainfully unemployed, and Monsieur can drink his life away, if Monsieur wishes. Does Monsieur wish?

Foot hovering over the brakes nervously. Foolish foot. Mind persuading foot that brakes aren't real, brakes don't actually exist, brakes are propaganda put forth by Mercedes and Volvo to ensure our continual investment in research and development for new, always-improving ABS systems, which also don't exist, but somehow mysteriously raise the price of all cars on the market. Foot not following mind's sloppy argument, but continuing to hover in inert confusion.

Mon dieu forgets, I said, slipping out of the booth, that Monsieur is on creative leave. Said with enough emphasis to get the attention of the table.

Pardon. Monsieur on leave of his creativity? Paul's goodbye. Good riddance to Monsieur.

The entire valley of Los Angeles opening up beneath me, beautiful view, clear night sky, (Is that a shooting star?), and free fall, one, two, three, four seconds before my cradle, my crèche, my fair-weather, fuel-injected friend, skipping on rock, rolling on gravel, meeting a tree and making a bad first impression, glass is everywhere, steel is everywhere, sky is everywhere, and yes, I'm sure, yes. It was a shooting star.

Dreams

A dream I remember: I am driving through the town where I live. I am listening to the radio, driving without thinking. I make a left turn and nearly drive the car off the road—because in front of me, rising up out of my neighborhood, is a volcano that has never been there before. It takes up my entire field of vision, a wall of glacier and granite with its own pull of gravity. I am terrified, because it is spewing steam and smoke and ash, but more because it exists, and somehow I never knew.

Another: I am in the sky, flying high above Los Angeles. Somehow I can see the tectonic plates of California and the eastern Pacific moving as if they have been filmed in stop-action animation, sliding across the Earth's mantle like butter in a pan. Where the two plates meet, off the coast, there is an amazing fire, impossibly hot and under water, nearly nuclear, and I can see its glow through the ocean and through the miles of sky. The plate that California rests on is being pushed into this fire, and cremated into mustard-colored ash. There is an unseen force pushing—easily—the United States into the fire.

Visiting Hours

My first guest at the hospital was Davíd. He brought irises. He wore a black suit with an orange shirt beneath. "These are for you," he said, handing them to me. I tried to take them but got tangled in my IV.

I sat up. "How long have you been here?"

"How long have you been here?" He smiled again. He was always smiling. Actually, I had no idea how long but was afraid to ask, so I looked down at the flowers, already wilting in spite of the sub-zero air conditioning.

"It's the IV gives you the chill. What's flowing into your bloodstream. The room is about seventy-eight degrees."

"Are you a doctor? I can't feel my body."

"It doesn't matter." And then I must have fallen asleep, because when Davíd spoke, he was on the other side of the room.

"I have a message from God."

From the hall, I heard the clatter of aluminum, maybe falling bedpans. Then a vague electronic beeping, and, farther away, the cry of someone very old: "Help me. Help me please. I think I'm rotting from the inside."

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"You're going to be okay. But God wants something from you. God is ready to destroy Los Angeles. He wants to do it soon."

I could feel my body for the first time. The feeling came as a pain from underneath my ribs.

"God wants you to write a screenplay to record it all. If you set down all the things worth remembering, He may spare the world."

Then Davíd was gone. Visiting hours were over.

Demerol

Generic name: Meperidine hydrochloride

Type of drug: Narcotic analgesic

Clinical pharmacology: Meperidine hydrochloride is a narcotic analgesic with multiple actions qualitatively similar to those of morphine. The most prominent of these involve the central nervous system and organs composed of smooth muscle. The principle actions of therapeutic value are analgesia and sedation.

Warnings: Side effects cannot be anticipated. Most frequent are dizziness, light-headedness, euphoria, dysphoria, transient hallucinations, visual disturbances, and disorientations.

Caution: The side effects of the narcotic drugs are exaggerated when the patient has a head injury, brain tumor, or other head problem. Narcotics also hide the symptoms of head injury. Meperidine should not be mixed with alcohol or other depressants. It should be taken with food to reduce stomach upset.

Flowers

"My stomach is killing me."

"How's your head?"

"Still can't feel it."

The room filled with flowers I didn't know the names of, and Cathy's eyes rimmed with mascara. She looked like a raccoon—or a speed freak. "Well, we were worried about you."

I read the cards:

If you die, can I have your stuff? Hugs and kisses, Dunbar.

"They said you broke your head. I pictured spilled brains everywhere, Blood on the Highway, all that. It was scary."

What do you expect? Your whole life is a car accident. Paul.

"Look, I got you this." Cathy held up a plastic crow. "When you pull the string, it's supposed to squawk and say 'The end is nigh.' But it's broken."

"What's that one? Is that one a pot plant?"

"It's basil. It's from Pepper. She said you'd take actual flowers as too much commitment. She's probably right.'"

I changed the subject: "How's the car? Am I being charged with anything? "

"You haven't heard? The accident was listed as 'No Fault.' You were thrown off the mountain by an earthquake.

(Suddenly remembering, sitting up, looking around the room.) "Where are the irises?"

"What irises?"

"From David."

"From who?"

My head hurt, and my ribs, and my leg. The smell of flowers everywhere, it made me feel I must be dying. I closed my eyes. I saw orange.

"I'm going to let you sleep," Cathy whispered, kissing me on the cheek.

Release Date

Paul picked me up from the hospital and drove me home. The cars all seemed faster than usual, and the highway seemed strewn with a disproportionate number of roadkills, or what looked like roadkills: looking more closely, I could see they were old car parts, big bits of carpet, trash bags. Nothing organic at all.

At home, the afternoon sun was just starting to come through the kitchen window. The plants were dead. Dominos Pizza had left three ads on my door. The room smelled like dirty laundry. There were ants in the pantry.

"Sweet, or dry?" Paul asked.

"Dry."

"Shaken or stirred?"

"Shaken."

"Olive or onion?"

He couldn't find a clean glass, so he poured into a coffee mug. "Welcome home."

Message from Pepper

"Ben, you little shit. I am so pissed at you. How could you? I go away for a few days, I'm practically relaxing, and you almost get yourself killed. You're so selfish. You probably got absent-minded while you were driving and started looking at the stars. Prick.

"I miss you. Be careful. I'll be back Tuesday."

Lost

At some point I might need to talk about myself, tell you who I am and why I'm writing all of this down. For now, a few facts:

I live in a small deco apartment that is ugly in that it looks like a bathtub, and beautiful in that it is four blocks from the ocean.

I spend a lot of time by the ocean. Some days the beach is crowded and I squeeze in to claim an unobtrusive spot of sand, to watch people fly their kites, spin their cartwheels, laugh at each other's jokes, and walk hand-in-hand along that always-moving line where the water meets the shore. Some days I let this remind me of a condom commercial, but most of the time, I manage not to think anything at all.

Los Angeles is the wrong place to be lost: the light is too good, the roads too well-marked, the distances too insignificant, the people too apathetic.

Behind me a wall of mountains strewn with debris, flotsam left from a hard rain, the last stop on the long march from the Continental Divide: at the foot of the ocean, it's all uphill from here. In front of me, waves roll in from the Channel Islands, from the Marianas, from Japan.

I am on a beach, pinned between mudslide and tidal wave.

I bury myself in the sand, to hide from the sun. I think I can make out an island, through the haze, but I'm not sure.

Skipper

I went to visit my friend Skipper (because we all need a friend who is crazier than we are). Skipper has what might be the only basement apartment in Santa Monica. The light comes in from a lone window, tiny, facing east, where he's set up a telescope.

"Look at that." He had the telescope trained on a bulldozer resting in a vacant lot. "New strip mall. Just what this town needs. Why'd you shave your head?"

"I was in an accident. Got some stitches."

He didn't seem impressed."Strip malls spreading like cancer. I don't need another grocery store. You know how many places I can go right now and buy fresh arugula?"

"You eat arugula?"

"Seven. Seven different markets, all within walking distance."

"I find it bitter, as greens go."

"Soon to be eight." He wheeled the telescope around for punctuation.

"Romaine, red leaf, I find them more palatable. I'd go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and eat iceberg lettuce before I'd eat arugula. Eating arugula is like eating a salad made of parsley."

"Not by Flood, not by Fire, but by Strip Mall. End of the fucking world." Then: "Have you noticed all of the birds are dying?"

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cathy put on her best pout: "What are ya thinkin' when you look at me like that?" She batted her eyelashes. Dunbar pushed up his glasses: "I don't remember thinkin' anything, Maggie."

Off in the distance, I watched the strange sight of a DJ setting up speakers on the beach, running from one speaker , back to his mixing board fifty feet away, and then to the other speaker. He seemed to be having cable troubles.

Cathy plopped down in the sand: "Livin' alone with someone you love can be loneliah than livin' entirely alone."

Dunbar leaned in: "Would you like to live alone, Maggie?"

Cathy looked up. "You cut off my line. No, it's okay. But you cut off my line."

Dunbar frowned. "Where? What line? Maybe we should cut it."

A small crowd was starting to gather around the DJ. They didn't seem particularly young or old, skinny or fat: I couldn't tell what the event was. I stretched out my legs in the sand and tried to read a magazine but the wind kept folding the pages into chaotic origami.

Cathy moved in on Dunbar. "You're the only drinkin' man ah know that nevah seems t' put fat on." She patted his bony belly. "Well, soonah or latah, it's bound to soften you up."

I saw something had washed up on the beach not far from us: a dead seagull. No, not quite. The wing of a dead seagull. The flies were already on it. With all their motion, the wing was practically alive again.

Cathy continued to berate Dunbar in a bad southern accent: "Ya always had that detached quality of playin' a game without much concern ovah whethah ya won or lost, and now ya've just quit playin'. Ya have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in the very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. Ya look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool."

The DJ finally got his speakers working. "Check, one two. Okay, everyone. Happy New Year!" It was Rosh Hashanah. We'd meant to leave as the crowd came in, but they started singing songs in a language we didn't understand, and we decided to stay.

The Click

In the second act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick explains to Big Daddy, "I have to hear that little click in my head that makes me peaceful. Usually I hear it sooner than this, sometimes as early as noon, but today it's dilatory. I just haven't got the right level of alcohol in my bloodstream yet."

Sometimes, if you're quiet enough, you can sneak up on the click. The right combination of sun and sand, cuddling you as the waves "Shhh," over and over. Sometimes, too, under night stars, when there's no noise but gentle waves, the click comes. That one moment of peaceful nothing: no wind.

And just as suddenly, it's gone.

On nights like these, I look up with vague memories of the constellations I was taught in junior high school. I look up and wonder about questions I've never been able to articulate, and wonder if I'll see the answer in the sky. But all I ever see is sky.

Pepper

Pepper argues when I tell her I'm amazed people ever manage to leave Los Angeles. Her flight arrived that morning; I picked her up at Burbank, the drive-thru airport.

"It's like gravity must be stronger here, making it harder for people to leave. Like there's a black hole in the middle of the city. Probably the Cathedral..."

Pepper was trying to find something on the radio. "Ask me about my trip."

"Or maybe in the Hollywood Bowl! It's the only explanation for the constant traffic on Highland."

She raised a red eyebrow like a Shakespearean actor. "You don't think it has to do with the freeway, and the cars coming out of the theatre?"

"At one in the afternoon? At four in the morning?"

"You're the only one I know who's been in a traffic jam outside the Hollywood Bowl at four in the morning."

I changed tactics. "Maybe magnetic fields. Does iron usually collect around a fault line?"

"My trip was amazing, thanks for asking. The leaves were changing out there! When's the last time you saw real fall? I brought you some. They're in my bag."

"You brought me some leaves? Thanks."

"And I watched the eclipse from the observation deck of the World Trade Center. Where were you? You did watch the eclipse, right?" Those same expressive, acrobatic eyebrows furrowed. "Jesus, you've sold you soul or something."

"I've seen them before."

"It was the last one of the millennium. Maybe the last one ever. Isn't the world supposed to end soon?" She gave up on the radio, turned it off, rolled down the window and sat back..

Average speed on the freeway was eighty-two miles per hour.

Jellybeans

Pepper at my apartment made a Mickey Mouse mosaic out of jellybeans. Since neither of us like licorice, she used the speckled cappuccino flavor for Mickey's head, instead of black. "Look," she said. "He's graying."

"About time. What is he, seventy?"

She started combing the fuzz on my head with her fingers, I'm sure leaving sticky bits of colorful corn syrup. "You're not even half that old. But look at these: growing back gray." She tried to pluck one.

"Ouch."

"Ben?," she asked. "How come we're not in love?"

"I don't know. We never wanted that."

"Mmm." She pulled my head back against her belly, still running her hands through what little hair I had. She grabbed a handful, gently. Then she let go.

Theme and Variation

The lovers I have had, their faces arrayed before me in snapshots that seem unfairly to cheat time (because these are neither the women as they are now, nor as I knew them, but in a way, as they truly were at that time; they are snapshots, then, of women I never really knew), come in all figures and shapes and sizes. Even photos of a single woman make her a chameleon. I rearrange the order of the faces and find that everything falls apart; the only thing about them that is, in fact, solid is their chronology: FACT: This comes first; FACT: This follows; FACT: Third in succession.

My memory of each is determined by the memory to precede it. They are not people; they are events for contextualization; they are control, then experiment, then hypothesis, then control, then experiment, then hypothesis. And my memory of the whole of them is determined wholly by my latest theory.

[Time is confused for lovers because for them it stands still, while the world goes on. In my mind I have locked them so that I may freely compare and contrast. Are they still growing? Of course. But my system does not allow that, which is why I prefer snapshots. Moreover, my history with my lovers is not determined by me, but by them. They dictate to me whether it was "true love" by their current interpretation of the whole affair. E.g., my first love was true enough at the time; now it is a fact that it was not true love, because she has decided it was innocent and naive. As I was there, I have no choice but to agree. So, though I would like to keep my old lovers, I will not, because it is more important to me to have control over my own history.]

The sum of all of this is that my second experience in love is held in direct contrast to my first and is not an unprecedented experience unto itself. The third is compared to the average of the first two, and so on, so that I have distilled the THEME, "Love," and have a number of examples, VARIATIONS. It is now impossible for me to have an experience of love, only an event that will fall closer to or farther from a feeling that I think I once felt, but which continues to be re-written.

The Screenplay That Can Save the World

Why, given a mandate from God through an archangel named Davíd, has our hero Ben Hugo not given a single thought to writing a screenplay? To be fair, screen writing is harder than is commonly believed: there are pitch meetings, treatments, rewrite after rewrite after rewrite. There are lawyers, agents, managers, unions. There is a tremendous amount of work between the typing of the first slugline and the completion of a final draft.

But none of this has occurred to our hero Ben Hugo. Here is why:

Ben Hugo doesn't believe in very much. If a man named Davíd, whom no one else remembered, came to you and claimed that God wanted a screenplay, what would you do?

Ben went to the Smog Cutter.

The Smog Cutter

Karaoke night at the Smog Cutter (isn't it always?), and a woman with big hair was belting out a heartfelt if atonal rendition of "California Dreamin'."

Pepper tugged on my arm. "I love this song. Let's dance."

"You want to dance to karaoke? I can't: if I dance before I'm ready, my arms and legs get all out of control. People could get hurt."

"One dance, that's all I'm asking."

"Pep, it's for your own protection."

Paul suddenly appeared and clinked my martini glass. "He just doesn't want to spill his drink."

"Poor Ben. If only he had a hobby, he wouldn't need to drink so much." And she disappeared to the dance floor.

The bar was crowded with people wearing flannel, latter-day hipster lumberjacks. The song changed to something by the Kinks, and the waitress took orders for another round.

"Are you and Pepper okay?," Paul asked.

"Sure. Why?"

"Dunno. Cathy asked me, earlier." We both watched quietly while the bartender poured out our next round.

"Pepper Corazón!" the karaoke man read from his list. She squeezed her way through the crowd toward the mike and drilled her eyes on me I. The music came up — the Go-Go's "Vacation." I smiled and lifted my drink to toast her; she didn't smile back.

Can't seem to get my mind off of you
Back here at home there's nothin' to do
Ooo, ooo.
Now that I'm away
I wish I'd stayed
Tomorrow's a day of mine that you won't be in

"God." Paul leaned in to me with gin breath. "She looks even better than Belinda Carlyle."

Vacation, all I ever wanted
Vacation, had to get away
Vacation, meant to be spent alone

Suddenly I felt sick.

Purging

My body heaves with a mix of vomiting and sobs, near a urinal that is ponderously high.

"What's the matter?," asks Davíd.

"I don't know."

He holds me, while I shake, against his silk shirt. "Do you love her?"

"I don't know. I'm so lonely."

Davíd nods and points two fingers at my chest. "Look here."

A hole has opened in my chest, a black cavity the size of my fist. "Where your heart used to be," he says. "Look at it. Look inside." He takes my hand and forces it toward the hole.

I shake my head. "I don't want to." I try to see, but the angle is wrong, and it's too dark inside. "What's in there?"

"Nothing. That's why you're sick."

Davíd's eyes are pure black, indiscernible. He takes the flower from his lapel and places it inside my chest. Covering the hole with his hand, he leans over and kisses his own knuckles. "Now maybe you will feel better."

He leaves through a side door, out into the alley. I'm no longer shaking. But when I get back to the bar, Pepper is gone.

The Man with the Flower in His Chest

A man has a flower planted inside his chest in the men's room of a small Silverlake bar. What does this mean? How can this ambiguous gesture give him the strength he seems to require? Can he draw strength from a metaphor?

One thing is certain: if a man has a flower planted inside his chest, it is a challenge to him—can he let the flower grow?

Coverage

Title: Angeles
Author: Ben Hugo
Type of Material: Vague
Location: Los Angeles
Circa: Present day
Genre: Apocalyptic black comedy (?)

SYNOPSIS: The story of yet another marginalized would-be-writer, Ben Hugo, drifting through life and using his own boredom as his only self-motivator. He has a menial job writing coverage at a small production company but tells his so-called friends that he works in "development," and covers his malaise with a veneer of high-proof alcohol.

The story's real adventure is happening in Ben's mind: he begins to envision his aimless wanderings as a spiritual quest set at the end of time. He becomes certain that epiphanies wait at every corner; he meets angels for coffee; he has been chosen by God to chronicle the apocalypse. But he's out of step: he misses his meetings with the angel by the minutes it takes him to find a legal parking place.

COMMENTS: This story lacks plot, it lacks drive, it lacks legitimate love interest. It has little arc and no climax. It thinks it's wittier than it ever is, and its main character fails to be sympathetic or engaging. The whole thing is a wet blanket: don't get wrapped up in it.

RECOMMENDATION: Pass.

Black Iris

Greeted at my home by a mail slot filled with overdue bills (I half-expected a phone bill saying, If you die, can I have your stuff?), I found a postcard written in an architect's handwriting—clear, strong, unfamiliar:

The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence, and it repenteth me that I have made men. And behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Make thee a script for film. Plots and subplots shalt though make in the script, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it: the length of the script shall be one hundred and twenty pages in a twelve-point font. In breadth, it shall obey verisimilitude of space and time, and shall not tax the limits of plausibility. With lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

And behold I, even I, do bring all fire and water to do my bidding, do call all locusts and birds and things living to do my bidding, to destroy all flesh. But with thee will I establish my Covenant: thou art my Instrument of Remembering.

And on the other side of the card, a Georgia O'Keeffe flower: Black Iris, 1926. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Oh shit," I said aloud. "God's an Aristotelian."

But it was settled. I was going to have to write a screenplay. I grabbed my Syd Field book from the shelf and got started.

 

[end of part one]

Insomnia 

The sky is a lush curtain of purple and the house I'm in is washed out of any other color—that one hue only, and the rest is silver gelatin. And hints of pink in the clouds, from a sun that has long ago set but still stubbornly throws light from below the horizon. The night is long but I'm more awake than I've been in months, years, maybe ever; and the air is so clear it carries every last smell to my nose and I breathe it in. First among them is the sweet sweat of my lover. Her cheeks are flushed and she's breathing short breaths. I have a hand firmly on her waist and the other has a grip on the back of her head, and from there, her two centers of gravity, head and womb, I hold her sway, and seize into her with a hungry kiss. She collapses almost imperceptibly into my body, moans slightly. Then the blood starts. It is spilling from the corners of her mouth down the line of her jaw. I am sucking her blood up through her lungs, gulping breathfuls of it, but spilling more of it than I'm swallowing, and a small river of it runs runs between her breasts and begins staining the belly of her white dress from the inside. She can't breathe.

Finally, I ease her down into the grass. She put up no fight, even at the end, because she loved me. I am a vampire, but she loved me.

* * *

The freighter at sea groans like a creature breathing, its metal subtly twisted by relentless underwater waves, so the hold is full of sound even though I'm alone. I climb a ladder to the top deck and try to make out details—landmass, iceberg—but the dark is too thick: I see shapes where there aren't any. All I can see are different grades of darkness.

I look a minute more: I'm desperate for some confirmation of what I'd just learned, with absolute certainty but no proof, down in the hold. A single tangible fact to make my next acts easier. But there isn't one, and sadly I turn away from the railing and start climbing the short ladder to the ship's bridge.

It's warm when I step in, lit by an amber lantern, and all of the people there—my family—are huddled around the lantern like it is a campfire. When I throw open the hatch, they look up with expectant eyes, relieved to see me. It is my job, I know, to get them out of this, to save them, and they know I will. And I, too, know I will. But I know something they don't. I know with absolute certainty that the ship is about to sink, and this room full of people I love will soon fill with water, and every last one of them will drown painfully in a dark arctic ocean. I don't know how I know this but I do, and that's why I have the machete behind my back, and why I used it already on all of those people down in the hold. I must kill them to spare them. Because I have failed them.

* * *

Am I dreaming? There's something not right. I don't remember leaving the door unlocked, and I can't explain the smell of cigarette smoke in my studio. Nothing looks amiss, but ... something isn't right.

Maybe I'm dreaming.

Or maybe he was here.

My heart surges thinking about it. Maybe he was here. I haven't turned the light on yet and I'm suddenly glad I didn't. I move slowly toward the window and peek through the half-open curtain. Is he out there? One of those parked cars across the street? Or any of the darkened windows in the apartment across the way?

Has he seen me come home? Because if he has, I'm a dead man.

An axe, I think, is what he used last time. Against the last person he hunted. A hatchet.

How I wish it were a movie, or a dream—I'd have a box hidden in my closet with a handgun. Bullets in the nightstand table. I'd have some way to fight back. But it's just me, inside my dingy apartment—a pile of books, a few pots and pans, dirty laundry. Nothing that actually matters, now that it comes down to it. The tinny set of kitchen knives that seemed like such a bargain now seems worth every penny I paid for them and not a cent more. Barely cut a tomato; useless on meat.

I'm going to die here. And I can't even remember why.

Has he seen me, yet, through the window? Is he walking, even now, quietly up the stairs? I don't know. But if I run for it, he'll see me for sure.

I sit on the floor. With inevitability, I find, comes calm. Maybe I hear him, down on the stairs, the hatchet man. He's coming. Now, or later. There's nothing I can do to stop him.

Maybe I'm only dreaming, and I'll wake up, tired, sweating, frightened, but alive. Or maybe I am awake, and this is exactly why I've been having so many nightmares...

Parabola 

Stories stop suggesting themselves to me, as if the woman, the birdy old lady who comes and takes my milk bottles and keeps me posted on the comings and goings in the town, so that I have my stories brought to me with milk and sometimes homemade bread, that batty old gnarl-footed woman with dentures too big, never comes anymore. I am left alone, a swinging pendulum swinging toward stillness.

I am a pendulum. pushed sometimes by an idea, up, pushed, past the horizon. up, into the twilight, up, through the darkness that fits between Orion and Cassiopeia, then falling with vertigo in my belly and balls, and I get all giggly so I want to jump from the swing at the highest point, before --

The inevitable. The pendulum, scorched from its descent, settles. It gets quiet. There is no energy in it. It sways a little, from the wind or from its own memory, we can't be sure; and then it dangles, the Hanged Man, and it dies, having left no arc of its own descent.

The stone hangs alone, on the end of his string, sinking lower and lower, stretching the chord that connects and moors him. He reaches out because he wants to rub against the ground. So in stillness, he is striving, but for something different than height: for a place he has not yet been.

In his dreams, the stone imagines that he is a grave, and that he has been planted up to his knees in the ground, at the head of a dead woman. The stone has finally planted his feet in the earth. He is not dangling anymore, or reaching; he is still for the first time.

'Oh, the earth is cold!'

He tries to speak to the old woman, whose head rests on the stone's feet.

'It is wrong for her to lie so close and not speak! As if resting costs nothing!'

The stone thinks the woman is full of stories, that she has closed her eyes so she may dream herself, walking, like a pole, from porch to porch, delivering milk and bread and stories. The stone thinks she is dreaming all of her stories, so that her life in stillness is richer than her life in waking.

But the woman who delivered milk is dead, and she has no more stories. She has set them all free, given them away in little pushes, so that they give lightness to the stone weight at the end of the pendulum. As the stone realizes this, he wakes from his dream and finds himself still, dangling from the end of a string. He is no longer the grave; he is the stone. And he doesn't know if he has all of the stories in him, or none of them.

The stone is part of the pendulum and seeks motion. I am the pendulum seeking stillness. Outside is an old woman I used to see often. I can't imagine where she's gone.

Vacation to Saturn 

"Dreary winter so far. I was thinking we should get away. Take a trip."

"Where you want to go?"

"New place I keep reading about. Saturn."

"I saw pictures. Supposed to be nice."

"A lot of frequent flier miles. Like seven-hundred million."

"People go to Saturn?"

"Yeah. Well, no. Titan. Moon. That's where I was reading about. Oceans, beaches. Maybe some wildlife."

"We should do it. It'll be nice."

"We'll sit on the beach, we'll look at the sky: it'll be a full Saturn out."

"I love you."

"Love you too."

This Is Your Life 

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You wake up a little before sunrise. You sit up but you can't see; you have a cracked pair of glasses around somewhere but who knows where. You must have been sleeping on your neck, because it feels like whiplash. Something's not right: an amber flicker on the wall, which your myopia reads as sunrise till you glean that it's the candle you left burning all night. You reach for the plastic cup of water by your bedside, and drink half before it slips and spills on the bed. You roll to the opposite corner and fall asleep.

You wake again an hour later, the sun now bright enough to find your glasses on the windowsill, next to the half-liter of whiskey that survived the night before. Outside: the small yard filling with brown leaves where squirrels find some refuge. Across the way: a symmetrical grid of darkened windows, ethereal in a morning fog, like row after row after row of Mark Rothko. You see all this, like you see every morning, through a set of wrought-iron bars. They are there, you remind yourself, for your own protection.

Your body is sore and your mouth is dry and you can't say why, exactly, you feel so bad. Winter and its too-short days. You think of recent events and how the sum total of them should add up to more than this, this vacant feeling, this deep-down boredom and disappointment. You think back to a doctor's appointment earlier this week, as he ticked down a list of test results, each one "Negative." You found yourself wishing, Please, let me have something. Please, let there be some measurable deficiency, some quantifiable cancer or lurking parasite, some infection, something. Let there be an explanation, or at least an excuse, instead of this general malaise, this incurable unwellness.

You refill your plastic cup and drink it. You blow out the candle. There's no reason to be up, yet, so you don't bother. You return to bed, confident or at least hopeful that by the time you wake, next time, things will look better. They often do.