John McKernan LATE SUMMER NEBRASKA 1601

"The Flat Land"
Other languages

Wrapped in smoke
Layer
Of` red orange yellow blue green flames

Skull-tall prairie grasses
Curve in a sea of wind
Melt in the tan-black edges
Of a serpentine fire line

Aroma of roast chipmunk
Perfume of rabbit fur
Rolled into dry creeks
Necklaces of bison
Stare at the sky’s blue knife

 

 

John McKernan

is now a retired comma herder. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press.  His most recent book is Resurrection of the Dust - selected poems.

John Kearns TIME COMES, TRAP FALLS

And where is the way
From one world to the other?
From shore to Stygian shore?
Where is the portal?
Up on the platform
Under the Bridge of Sighs
Within the Tombs
Shaped of ancient Egypt
Shade of Eastern ends
Staring stubborn doom
At multitudes unruly
Mulberry Bend
Its courtyard colored
Full of freckled faces
Hardened as Bowery
Brick and mortar. 

They lead him forward
Hands tied
To the portal they erected
For the time being
For the time passing
For the time escaping
(Heavier for him
Than anything borne)
To stand on the portal
To drop.

An exemplary end
Purposeful, punitive
A rite of man
Mandated marked
The time chosen
The time arriving.

He kisses the cross
Blest portal
Of the Christ condemned
Asphyxiated at the Skull
Giving weight
To Seven Last Words.

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Grand and generous
To lose a life
He never had.
Grave words weighted
Enough to etch in granite.

“When my country takes her place among the nations of the world,
then, and not ‘til then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.”

Magnanimous silent stone!
Pass the fight with fools
From Fenian dead
To Fenian living. 
Faugh a ballagh!
Fog of valor!

Time comes, trap falls.
Through the portal he passes
Kicking like a kid
Newborn, held high. 

John Kearns

has a Masters Degree in Irish Literature from the Catholic University of America and lives in Manhattan, where he has had several full-length and one-act plays produced.  His play "In the Wilderness" will have two staged readings as part of NYC’s  Planet Connections Theatre Festivity in June. Recent fiction publications include “A Tragic Story by Beatrice Mahon, O.P.” “Chances,” and “Dreams and Dull Realities” in DM. His novel, "The World," was published in 2003 and his novel-in-progress, "Worlds," was a finalist in the 2002 New Century Writers’ Awards. His poetry has recently appeared in the WestView newspaper in Greenwich Village, the ASBDQ experimental text journal, and the Write On Maui E-zine.

Levi Wagenmaker THREE POEMS

 

the Eumenides favour

given the choice of any
three women would
not
have me realise fantasies spun
from the silk of celebrity
(celebrities do not tickle my fancy)
but
home in on most likely relatively
obscure women scientists:

a mathematician

a physicist

a biologist

together they would satisfy my curiosity
as to the chances
of bits of body’s hereafter

not my soul
is headed for fire
(fantasies both)
but my body is destined
to be cremated
(after death I should hope)

most of it is water and that
won’t burn but evaporate
(up up and away)
and the rest will be fine
(ash that is)
to be dispersed where I know

what
(I wonder)
are the chances that one molecule
of my evaporated majority
of water
will join a cloud where it
with many others will
condense unto a particle of dust
(or soot or ash)
to drop as rain
fancy that
one molecule of ‘my’ water finding
one bit of ‘my’ ashes
the tiniest of monuments

I’m curious so

ladies
to work!

windwalkers

they pull on their leads
half a gale pushes the
other way
inimical to progress
retreat firmly backed
one by one they kneel
half up half down
facing half the gale
very sensibly given what
they stoop to
still on their leads they
not the half-gale
show the way home
leaving wind behind from where
it keeps pushing ahead
their tails are up in full
defiance of half a gale
a ga
a le
whatever
the last remaining goodies
in a jacket’s pocket
come out in the hallway
downwind

straight up and down

animals including humans are more akin
to sonnets or quatrains or even limericks
than to free verse that next of kin to eerie
chimeras sprouting from the convolutions
of neurons by themselves not much given
to wild imagination but collectively rather
prone to going off at an angle but having
said that angles should not be attributed
to curvature or the latter will be lost to the
sharpness of distinction between a goat
and a snake and a lion (breathing fire as
Homer asserts with metrical consistency
in a long epic poem to an author by such
a name attributed not quite consensually
but even so inspired by the oral tradition
of even earlier times the word iambic an
offspring of ia an earlier than Greek term
for yell a rib in the corset of formal verse
later embodied in rhythmically marching
lines of verbal soldiers to win or lend the
ears and minds of those fashioned from
genetically determined meetings of more
than minds (or less as trends of thought
may dictate) so that now to add injury to
insult this block of brick-shaped lines of
verse is being hurled at panicking panes

Levi Wagenmaker (1944 – )

is a retired journalist, living in the Netherlands for most of the year, and in France for some of it, with three bitches, two of whom are dogs.  Enamoured life-long of language (and languages), for reasons immaterial to the act he writes poetry in English only, even if he could most likely manage it in a few other tongues.  His poems have been published on line more than in print (DM can vouchsafe for this) and the rest Google will tell the curious what, where, and when. E-mail:  salman@xs4al.nl

Diana Pollin THE ERL KING

 

Here a creak, there a creak, down the dinky stairs to the basement where Mr. Cheese sat fermenting. Oh, old Mr. Cheese wasn’t really fermenting, but  Hans loved mockery even if the sting of guilt came  after the unkind thought and Hans could be most unkind.   Old Cheese had chosen  glowworms to remind him of the forest, and Hans was grateful to Cheese for that. Hans was grateful, but he was also mulishly demanding, and  if there was one thing Hans loved above all, it was light, any sort of light, except the  bare bulb crowning Cheese like a brain miraculously extracted from a skull and made to stand upright, stiff as a soldier on parade day, and just as stupid, Hans added to himself, and Heaven knows, the world was full of  soldiers moving, or in their lingo, maneuvering, about the bombed out area which puckered the ground like a scab  and they were poking out people who were forming,  not the glowworms’ lambent pyramid amorously  inching up and down and in and out of Cheese,  but  the mad scrambles of mice, a race, Hans was sure, that  scrambled ceaselessly. War, Hans thought sorrowfully, had annihilated the pleasure of walking,  never had life seemed so ill fitted to live therefore, strangely,  never had the mice become so desperate to live it  and seldom had the city seemed so  leaden with the occasional bloodshed after the rata tat tat of the guns’ to cut through its sapping grayness, but then there would come the brilliant ribbon streaking the sky,  all sound and blinding light violating its sullenness, and causing Hans to clap madly and  beg for more. The marvelous flash was, with chocolate, Hans’ only weakness.

But, here, in the basement, where moisture coupled with darkness, the  huge ticking Bulb beamed a stinging splash of light solely on Cheese  . Objects had become just stuff and yonder a shadow spoke, as a shadow could only speak, in teasing uncertainties. Was this an old chest of drawers or a commode or a gun closet ? Was that the gun closet where some long dead  master of the house stored the means to defend his property when the world had rules for – or against- such property, but now that sorry thing had as much meaning as an amputated arm trying to bring a cigarette to a pair of lips. Noises are the voices of guessing games and Hans was rarely in the mood for them which was why he hated the cellar, although he loved gazing at the glistening lights  the glowworms left on the gauze they were weaving about Cheese, embalming him,  he  who would never die. 

And  it was here that the Bulb’s  police light beamed cruelly down on such… majesty! A true plebian intruder ! Hans found  it almost unbearable. “Foolish brat!” Cheese hurled from behind as Hans jumped from stair to stair, pretending he was a monkey. Cheese had little patience with clowning, Hans’ damning character trait,  which he would never “grow out of,” nor would want to, for Hans had ways of finding pleasure that eluded Cheese who might be, Hans suspected, slightly jealous and too overburdened with the worms to bother much about humor.

The last plank of the last stair groaned as Hans’ toes curled slightly over the edge and rested there, in an impromptu game of jungle swinging, the board was loose, Hans had just discovered, and it tilted in and out of the lighted area  so Hans felt as if he were an ape hanging onto a shaky branch  merely by his two feet.  Cheese’s “Come here and stop that  nonsense ! ”  cut short his play  and  brought him beneath the  hotness ticking out of the Bulb, which would wear, had it possessed a face, a sanctimonious smirk. 

Of course the Bulb was no more a man than Cheese, Lord of the glowworms,  which would knit his shroud with their vomit if Cheese could die, but Cheese never died, he just grew more flesh like that altruistically stupid Greek god punished for stealing fire. Cheese had spoken to him about the god and the eagle feasting and the flesh returning, but he mentioned them to Hans only to warn him against Hope, which was a waste of time, although that would be self defeating to publicize as both Hans and Cheese had made Hope their stock in trade. Hans giggled. With all the city in ruins,  those still alive sought refuge in the flimsy façade of Hope, which was like the god’s flesh, eternally restored and eternally devoured, not a pleasant thought for Hans or for Cheese who, in his private moments wondered whether Hope might be a  double agent working both sides. Hans wondered about nothing.

An incessant drip announced the presence of a sink, invisible, like all the rest of the stuff in the  room, but gifted with sound, although Hans could not understand the purpose of a sink in a room waiting to be blown to bits. Still, the unseen sink was linked to the droplets circling the  base of the Bulb and Hans thought of a swarm of righteously mad bees buzzing about a robbed hive and this  was what angered Hans the most. Things would take on some but not all the characteristics of the forest, pervert its traditions and its intent, and somehow, fall stingingly  flat of all Hans’ expectations and miserably fail,  for what is anger if not movement and sound ? It was horrid ! And the bulb- ah that word again, belonging so legitimately to a tulip or a potato – seemed the  measure of the horridness of this burnt out urban forest, their tentative headquarters. Whenever Hans went down to the cellar, he tried not to notice the top of Cheese’s bald head gleaming like a stretch of desert in the midday sun,  mirroring the emptiness of an incidental sky.
 
Outside  was a cold smoking swamp where the shouts of the bullet brown folk , like the drip of the faucet in the basement, gave a slapdash identity to doom.  Sometimes, during the pallid daylights winced from the mean sky,  Hans  left the house  to gaze at the cloud chamber with all its  pinging and ponging noises, but not infrequently, the scratchy recording of a cabaret singer crooning a cradle song or a tenor slurring a love ditty reached his ears and he regretted nothing, he had a sentimental side which regarded little things with a certain compassion, and he hoped that Cheese would be a good sport and send a huge sky flash just to please him, but Cheese, who was a stickler for duty, told him repeatedly that “work is work and that is that.” There was no sense reasoning with Cheese on those days and Hans cursed the pale sullen light of the smoking swamp which relented to predictable dismalness when a terrifying hush crashed down on the city with the marauding darkness  and only a few  flickering street lamps with rouged birds nervously stepping in circles  about their stalks,  were to be seen before a monster wail announced  the bullet browns.

But Hans also loved the irregular twinkling light that covered Cheese and he adored the  worms which he took in his fingers. There were hundreds, maybe thousands,  crawling over Cheese and, he was sure,  down there, in the gentleman parts, (Hans giggled) he could not really tell because of all the thick clothing Cheese wore, but sometimes a hole in a trouser showed up with a warm lemony glow, so Hans felt pretty sure that Cheese had some down the  you know where. Well, Cheese was a mind reader and when Hans wondered about that, Cheese would not like it,  and cross his heart, Hans would get a scolding, and,  he was sure, a scowl from Cheese, although he had never seen Cheese’s face, as it wore a visor and a veil of worms from the brow down, but bald men always make stern schoolmasters and Hans was quite sure that Cheese’s  mean words went with meaner grimaces serving to quiet his annoyance, and embarrassment. This touch of vanity although misplaced was somehow endearing, just like the stern schoolmaster who would scowl and scold but forget to rap  the naughty boy’s fingers.  Cheese, Hans decided,  must harbor some sentiments, some emotions which gnawed at his heart as the worms picked at his flesh and Hans had come down to the cellar not only because Cheese had wanted him, but also to test Cheese with his latest exploit. The time had come to add the whiff of adventure into their “contract”, a brave thing to do for Cheese wasn’t the least inventive.

However, Cheese was never angry for long at Hans. Cheese needed Hans and the glowworms needed Cheese and Hans,  so after a while, Cheese would let Hans extend a plump and confident arm to the worms so that the more adventurous ones could ride up to his elbow, prickling the soft white skin  until it became obvious even to glowworms (Hans giggled) that he was not embalming territory but… Oops! Too late, Hans’ small cold fingers would pick one up, hold it up to the hated Bulb and squeeze its fuzzy flesh. “Ding dong. Ding dong.” Hans chanted as his fingers pinched its tiny tube body and, it seemed to Cheese,  that Hans would do this for hours on end, until the worm drained of its strength  gave up and died. Yet, Hans was more imaginative than cruel and wondered what actually must be happening inside the glow worm’s body as its light went on and off.  Was there a sky snake in the beastie ? Were there also families of scurrying mice?

Cheese groaned, Hans had tested his kindness and  his patience, there was always work to do and , besides, Cheese was possessive. He demanded that Hans replace the worm  in its “its proper hole” which was  ridiculous because the animal was either dead or dying, but Hans threw the glowworm onto the floor, just under the hottest part of the Bulb to see if the body shriveled up in a dramatic dying exercise. Hans,  who loved the spectacular, prayed for the “wee wee wiggling” of the animal… three long tumultuous seconds before the bludgeoning stillness of death. His prayers went unanswered. Hans never understood that exhaustion thwarted violent movements and the worm was a raspberry splotch long before Hans’ foot  sounded  the final note.  The Bulb  swayed and ticked. Was it cackling vengefully to its electric self ? Or, was it sounding forth a warning, or worse,  a death knell to  Hans who was essentially the arm of Cheese. It was true that this time, Hans had overstepped the limits, had been naughty, had taken initiatives that he never should have taken and, the mean acrimonious Bulb was taunting him with the certainty of the rap on the fingers, the schoolmaster would assume his harsh duties, well, let him assume them, Hans would survive, he was sure, he would go on as this harsh petty world went on with its sickly mornings and its dismal nights, only the flashes of the sky ribbons   spelled the presence of God,  of a god. Hans knew nothing about religion but suspected  it took place in the sky. 

But Cheese was losing patience.  The dank basement was his universe, the Bulb, his sun and his star, the drips of the faucet, the numbing trek of nameless hours, the war, an abject and humiliating  proof of his lusterless immortality . Exhaustion had taken its toll, he might have to sacrifice  Hans whom he had fashioned from the glowworms, skimming from their slime and excrement the substance of his being, carrying the boy in his beard, and he wondered if he would regret the death of his creation, which would not be a simple disappearance, but a certain death for Hans had stepped out of line and the hand of the Father is pitiless, Cheese knew for sure. Was it not the same hand which had sent the eagle to the fire stealing god who had learned everything  but the simple cretinous rule of Creation : never step out of line?

 Many years ago, Cheese had sat in a sylvan cave, an aged demon, too feeble to ride the night horses, too weak to wrestle with prey, too blind to see the ghost-lights dancing over the ponds and as he  languished, he  conjured   the depthless voices of the winds which used to charm him with tales of the past and the future,  but  now  they boomed in the circular sounds of never ending destruction, and  carried nothing but   waves  of murderous screams and the insane pounding of feet. But they also nestled,  in his nearly sightless eyes, visions of  bullet brown people who imagined they possessed the forest and could stamp haughtily over its darkest and thickest underbrush that  they had burned to  bile brown muck and that they could keep burning the world and all its creatures until everything wore the same excremental tint they wore on their backs .  The bullet brown people laughed when a frightened ferret bounded from a  lair, but it was not the ferret, nor the fox, nor even the stately deer, the bullet brown people sought. It was not the timorous squirrel scampering up a curl of bark standing miraculously upright on the pockmarked smoking land, nor the boar, drained of its fury with death in its eyes.  It was not the owl robbed of its aching screech they hunted, nor the forlorn hawk nor the snake wiggling through the marsh. It was human blood  the bullet brown people sought, but not as the lustful vampires for their strange twilight life, no,  the bullet brown people were not of the dead but of the deadened, a race of crushing silence and obscene laughter. And, the deadened hunted fruitfully, mercilessly, like the vampires, but also heavily, with steel, iron and powder which  had flattened the forest to a wasteland and had decimated the dark verdant  caves and matted the underbrush so that all was singed and faded, and the green wore their bile brown.

Cheese sighed. He was  no longer a young demon and the winds which he had welcomed into the glade had switched allegiance, they belonged  solely to the Lord of Night and they told  him to leave the forest as the forest would leave him, as the forest would become as whimsical as the Lords of Day and Night, which resembled each other so closely, that one was no more terrifying than the other. The land crawled with jagged processions,  sometimes a sun slashed through  to blind  the leaden sky before it, too, retreated behind  the gray green birds and their pellet excrement which caused the land to erupt in bile brown waves  interrupting the processions. People fell, people muttered ditch side prayers,  people meandered as if their meandering could save their bodies or their souls, which amounted to the same thing, as “dust unto dust” had no meaning when all was dirt and lead and the bullet brown stalked with their  silence and their obscene laughter. 

And, above, the sky’s serene billows swirled lazily, like the coils of a snake readying a strike which came in the form of the night streaks dying, as all the rest had died, into smoke and darkness ,  but leaving behind the smell of powder and decomposing bodies, and, in the rot that had become the city, wayward screams rose uselessly, to plead with one god or another for whom life was an item on a ticket of rationing. Cheese shook his head. He hated what he had to do, which was why he would not cry, never.

Once, long ago, Cheese prayed to  the Lord of the Night who had stroked his fair locks when he was a  youth , and who had given him flair and cunning. Perhaps the Lord should look kindly on me, should favor my  petition, should remember my services.  The Lord of the Night had answered his prayers, Cheese had been lucky to have Hans sent to him first as an insane itching about his chin and then the glowworms (the beastie Cheese had chosen) had come to froth a womb of his grass piqued beard. This had been  a wise move, Cheese remembered that children loved those fuzzy creatures who were forming a plump pasty faced baby boy. But as the kid was growing in his beard,  Cheese, like the dying queen, had whispered a final capricious plea to the Lord of the Night,“ Give my  son  but one human weakness, let him delight me as impish and intelligent children delight their fathers. And give me the power to grant him this wish, for he shall be a good boy and work hard to please me.” And so Hans was thrust forth from the beard, a strapping pie faced lad, looking every inch a baker’s boy, which was the profession Cheese had chosen for him, and his weakness, chocolate,  fit neatly into that trade.

 

The rest was a mere matter of following rules, the young demon replaced the older one in the cellar. The routine had changed. Mothers with children came to him, seeing in his sweet open face and friendly chubbiness the image of the soul’s benevolence.  Hans understood them, although their chatter tired him out, being repetitious and full of cherry pie hope! “Yes, of course, I will take your little one in, he’ll be the baker’s assistant, don’t worry about the papers, I will provide… will provide. Your little one will help me at the furnace, he will be safe, he will be warm and away from the bullet brown people, yes, away from the bullet brown people.  Yes, until after the war, after the war…A loaf of bread bespeaks my compassion for your plight, my sympathy for your hunger. Take it and bless you.”  Then – thwak!- as soon as the door was shut, another was opened and a line of bullet brown people marched off with the little one. It was a thoroughly functioning routine until Hans ran into little Issac. And that was why Hans was called down into the basement. Well, what a bore! There must be some way of getting away with it. Cheese after all was not such a monster!

“Have you done what you had to do?” Cheese asked sharply.

“Yes!”

“Tell me about it.” Cheese tried to adopt a neutral tone.

“ Just the usual.” Hans rolled his toe over the raspberry corpse crushed on the floor. It was going to be harder than he thought.

Cheese’s anger mounted , “ Don’t take me for an idiot! Tell me what happened. I want to hear it.”

Obviously Cheese already knew the truth, and was testing Hans’ courage and honesty. The rap on the fingers might accompany a secret sense of pride in his  son’s fortitude.  Or, the rap might not come at all. Hans  breathed deeply, assuming the nobility of his sedition which seemed so inescapably right at the time he had committed the crime, but the shame of  his betrayal overcame him,  and he stood for a minute in complete silence while the Bulb ticked spitefully.

“Speak!” Cheese let out a low scream, but, then , unexpectedly, softened his tone, “Come now, it could not be so bad. Nothing is unpardonable. Confession is half the way to forgiveness.”

A wave of cool spring air seemed to lick Hans’ neck and the Bulb had stopped its infernal racket. “Well, remember we had the appointment…. I mean the shipment. The little kid..”

“You are stuttering and I hate that. Just spit it out!”

“Well the kid came in, and just as I expected, he was a real beauty, all dark eyes and curls. The mother seemed so tender, so trusting, so…”

“They all are. Just tell it.”

‘He… he was different, this little dark Issac.” Hans was  gulping noisily. He suddenly realized that punishment was due, the rap, if it came, would be hard. Was there any punishment more painful?  “ He was all bundled up in a blanket, and tired and… well, I thought of a little bird with a broken wing and…”

“ I care not a fig for what you thought,” Cheese pounced back, “it’s what happened! Just say it and don’t worry about the rest. However, if you invent…”

“He was all bundled up in a blanket and I thought of throwing him into the fire like the witch in Hansel and Gretel which I told you about and you said that it was an alternative if nothing else could be done…”

“Would you kindly stop  your idiotic breathlessness. I am not a police commissioner. I leave that to the morons who buzz about. Just CALMLY tell me what you did. I am sure I shall find it in my heart to forgive and… well, not forget, but somehow pass over the unfortunate incident. You are young, and the young make mistakes. Don’t we all?”

Heartened by Cheese’s speech, Hans stood outside the circle of light. The dark dampness felt like a cool cotton on his harried face.

“ I was just about to let in the bullet browns when the kid stopped my hand and he beamed a marvelous smile at me. Then he reached into a pocket and pulled out… he pulled out…”

“What in the name of God did he ever pull out? DO NOT TEST ME!”

“He pulled out a large bar of chocolate. And said that it was the least he could do being that I was saving his life and he started telling me how his parents used to import the stuff all the way from Belgium and Africa and Arabia and how his Mother stuffed his pockets with it as a sort of gift he was to give me and how grateful…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. In other words, he bought HIS LIFE with a chocolate bar! And you went for it! Some traitors do it for 30 pieces of silver…” Cheese’s voice rose a tone or two before falling.

“No, no,” Hans responded softly, looking at the ground, “and what has 30 pieces…”

“NEVER MIND YOU FOOL! Just…just say the rest.”

“Well, I was about to open up for the bullet browns, but, I admit, I was interested …”

“And greedily devouring the chocolate!”

“Well yes, but I promise it won’t happen again. I really and truly promise… well, then, he just curled up and went to sleep. And then, I swear to you,  I was  not bought or bribed, I said nothing about what I am or what we are. I just looked at him asleep and somehow the chocolate he had eaten with me, sort of made his face rounder, and you know, Cheese, the effect that chocolate has on me, it makes me happy, makes me see the world not in the desperate colors of sullenness and eternal nights, but as a possibility , or maybe (and Hans paused to choose his words ) a bridge to some better place, where the forests will rise again and we will be able to admire the stately majesty of the fir trees and the hills will  not be leveled and brown  but crowned with wild flowers and something called peace will reign. That was in Issac’s sleeping face and I could not call in the bullet browns when I saw it. I just could not.”

Cheese waited a long minute to formulate an observation. He then said glumly, “ In other words, you have become human.”

“No, I would not say that,” Hans replied. “ If I am telling you this, it is because I owe you allegiance, and I have failed you and seek forgiveness.” He bowed his head low.

“Well, you have not finished your tale.” Cheese said and then assumed a high pitched mocking tone. “So the chocolate bar was the good fairy’s magic wand, and all the world was sunny and gay after you had indulged your greediness , and then what happened? Even dreaming fools wake up!”

“That’s just it, I didn’t, or rather, little Issac didn’t. But don’t worry Cheese, I took measures. The kid was sound asleep. I scooped him up. He was  already wrapped in his blanket and I took him out…”

“And gave him to the bullet browns, I hope!” Cheese provocatively filled in.

“No, I gave him to the crow lady at the corner.  The lady who seeks customers under the flickering streetlamp light. The lady who is the only thing alive in this land of curfews and bullet browns.”

“Oh no! You didn’t! So he is still alive !” Cheese began sputtering,” Don’t you realize that you … you interfered… You interfered with things as they were set down, as they were supposed to be! Issac was not to live, not even for all the chocolate in the world!” Then, he gasped and Hans entreated his demon father.

“Really and truly I am sorry! I promise you, Cheese, it will never happen again!”

Silence gripped the room, a  maniacal silence,  a silence that could have been waved from an enchanter’s wand, stilling  the drips and the ticks, unearthing the first silence of Creation when dust and water made the strange creature, and then, after dust had left for dust and water had returned to water,  the creature was alone and lonely in its judgments and its calls to  dust were answered by the winds blowing wildness and its calls to water were answered by the rolling waves and the answers they gave him belonged to the fishes or the birds but did not belong to him. And the creature, who was and was no longer part of Creation, had to find  in the forest or in the city the only answer suited to his kind and the only answer was life itself, to treasure and  to behold,  for it was the only thing the strange creature really possessed and the strange creature should only make judgments on the value of his marvelous possession which defied all the other rules of the universe, as Hans had made his final judgment, and as Cheese would never make his.

The glowworms had darkened their incandescence,  Hans looked at his demon father and saw that he  was no more frightening than a filthy mendicant,  stinking with the cheap blame for every pocket he had picked , for every crust of bread he had snatched from the bakers’ stalls, for every shoddy  lie he invented to prolong his miserable existence, and it seemed to Hans that the lowest of the low shone with suns of a majesty which blinded Cheese and all his powers and that Cheese’s  evil was but the shabby answer a demented monkey had once whispered to the lonely creature left to grope  in a dark forest or a basement which  a tribe of circus worms  illuminated with eerie lanterns in their bellies. And he began to feel a creeping repulsion for them and his father whose only crown was the Bulb and  he felt that his repulsion was cause enough to lay down his life.

Hans turned to his demon father and repeated, this time, in a grim and determined voice, “It will never happen again.” And Cheese knew what had to be done and that they should part. But, in a certain way, he was proud of his son and he said, “ There is a sky snake tonight. Very spectacular. I don’t think you will want to miss it.” Hans nodded and left.

The Bulb returned to its ticking, the faucet to its drips , but Cheese heeded nothing except a touch of his own sorrow and a phrase that the forest winds howled to him long ago, and to which, at the time, he paid scant attention, it was something about whoever saves a life saves … Oh bother! Cheese was not of that category and he knew it, but he felt cheap, cheaper than the bullet browns who had at least the excuse of their folly, but he had none except for, well, tradition.

The sky snakes would be breath-taking that night. Two ribbons crossing each other. He knew what Hans only suspected, that it would be the last. The eagle had ripped away its last parcel of flesh, it would not be returning for more. Then Cheese, the demon father, muttered a prayer for his son’s soul.

Diana Pollin

was educated at New York University, Middlebury College  and at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She holds degrees in English and American literature and Semantics. She has enjoyed a long teaching career in the French university system and  has been a translator and interpreter. A new writer, she has published on various websites (incl. DM) and has completed a first novel. She resides in Marseille, France. We wish we did, too…

Subhakar Das TOURIST

 

I wander through a city
Polished and glossy like the brochure
which promised primeval tombs
buried in time, and lied about gateways
covered with slabs of concrete, roads  that led
to memorials of dead soldiers unheralded,
past park benches where the old repent
in solitary soliloquy while the young
live in the flash of neons
and people hide behind facades
of glass and aluminum where men in suits
sweat and women defy the height
of their stilettos and walk its hollow
sidewalks selling their souls in the
shadows of lights, where
bodies with broken hearts
whimper for a morsel of pity
and some money for a song
or monkey tricks.

Subhakar Das

is a dentist by training and, in between patients, managed to complete his first work of novel-length fiction Where the Rain Falls. He currently resides in Guwahati, India.

Alexandra Seidel A COMMON FRIEND

 

Dear reader, don’t be shy now and come with me. Allow me to take you by the hand so that we may observe the work of a dear friend. Whose friend, you may ask now, ever-observant as you are. Well, let’s just say everybody’s friend at one point in time or other. There is no one who will not know him at one point…intimately. If I say he, that is just for convenience’s sake, dear reader. Be not deceived by the deficiencies of the language I employ so that your brain may better conceive my meaning. He changes his gender as often as he changes his clothes, his tools, his appearance, his very being. It’s just the essence, dear reader, the essence that is always the same, unchangeable as the words that have escaped from one’s mouth and will never return there. You would do well to keep that in mind.

Let us follow behind him now like echoes. He is always busy, you see; these days, he tells me, work is steady. Very diverse, too. There are wars, mostly–though by no means exclusively–in what some like to call the Third World. The small ones starve everywhere or are murdered by their parents as if it were a sport. AIDS is steadily claiming, but he says, it is not as interesting as the plague in some ways, more so in others. He wouldn’t complain about the plague, dear reader, don’t misunderstand. But he finds joy in diversity, and the plague offered little of that.

He tells me, the greatest misconception is the scythe. In all his time, he never once used a scythe, he assures me. Why would he want to scare anyone like that, he asks me, and I don’t know why he would. Do you, dear reader? He tells me, he prefers it when they are not scared. It is pleasant, he says, because he can have an actual conversation with them then. That is when he finds his job most rewarding.

I cannot resist the urge to ask my friend about near-death experiences. He laughs. (Is it not a strange sound, dear reader, to hear him laugh, like the sound of one hand clapping?) He says there is no such thing, period. He is either there, and when he is, there is no mistake, no second chance, no going back. Or he is not there. When he is not there, he is not near, he continues to explain, as he has better things to do than standing idly by. So a near-death experience is just another misconception. He continues to elaborate that he has no business looming over people either. Our friend sure takes pride in his work, don’t you think so too, dear reader?

I’ll let go of your hand now, you look as if you have seen enough. Right over there, there is a path made of white white stones, tiny ones, almost like so many molars. We’ll part ways there, dear reader, you just go on, it’s not that far. And when you see our common friend again, dear reader, waiting somewhere by the path, don’t be shy and tell him something about yourself. He so loves a little chat, a tale, a hue of gossip trickling from ephemeral lips…think of it as a reward, a tip, two coins worth of kindness for him who’d never leave a job undone.

 

 

Alexandra Seidel

is certain that being an author is the best excuse for daydreaming and staying up very late. Some of her daydreams, usually caught on paper in the small hours of the morning, have appeared or are forthcoming in Niteblade, The Horror Zine, Enchanted Conversation, Danse Macabre, decomP, Apparatus Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Word Riot, Star*Line and others. To find out more, look at her blog: http://tigerinthematchstickbox.blogspot.com. Alexandra lives and writes in Braunschweig, Germany, where she also practices and teaches martial arts.

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Get Your Götterdämmerung On!

Enter und WIN!
 

 To win your fantastiche two-disc set Twilight of the Gods: The Essential Wagner Collection simply help reconstruct the Professor’s creation from "Coffee Time," above. As indicated, you may attempt a complete revision of the Venn diagram for extra credit.
 
• Send your contest entry typed or pasted as plain text in the Submission Form above.
 
 • Include COFFEE TIME in the subject line or it’s doubtful your entry will receive the attention it deserves.
 
• One entry per contestant, please. US residents only, svp.
 
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• Judges’ decisions are swift, arbitrary, and final, but freakishly impartial. Make us laugh, liebchen, and we’ll give you the world.
 
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DM XXXVIII

 Stonewall

 r e d u x

premiering Fri 6 Aug

Lotte Van Ness THE WALL STREET JOB

 

You don’t know
I presume
that in the morning hours
Komarovsky lays chocolates on my desk
for me to choose

And how it is that the man in the far corner
who yearns to be loved
who bites in the late afternoons
so as not to forget ourselves
and let his secrets dance off our tongues
dreams of tomato trees

How the boss
roars
for him not to get bored
for us not to get bored
for we must not get bored
for we must play

And this morning
on a note
I found a poem too!
‘Lotte,
like clockwise,
can we please?’

And how we all
wicked as we are
do not even remember the names
of those who leave

And how this evening before
I crawled out of the door
with their pockets full
of war gas
with their pockets like balloons
they asked me
‘So tell us my dear, how much fun was it here?’

 

 

Lotte Van Ness

was born In Berlin, Germany and now lives in New York. She is 28 years old and works in finance while not writing. Glückwünsche auf ihrer ersten bekanntmachung, Lotte!

Justin Burnside DELILAH

I dreamt such a strange dream. Let me tell you of my dream. The dirt descended snow- flakes, a snow that fell where I lay on my back, with no knowledge of how I arrived there. I remember feeling very warm, and comfortable, except that I could not for the life of me move my arms from where they lay crossed on my chest.

There was no horizon in this dream. But I could see. I could see things there with me in the gloom. They seemed to be buried in the air, to my right and to my left. There, from my warm spot, I turned my stiff neck to get a better view of my surroundings. There to my left, a music box. The kind that one might give a young child, suspended at a strange angle, its paint mostly pulled away, but one could still see the hint of a leg of a ballerina, or perhaps of a princess, exposed in the peeling paint.

And to my left, a child’s doll, horizontal, arms folded like my own arms were folded. Its head was turned in my direction, a smile on its lively lips, a familiar smile I remembered from somewhere far away.

Such a strange dream! In this dream a voice came to me from a direction I could not pinpoint, but it was strong this voice, and familiar; I strained my ears to make an identification. It seemed to be coming from above where I lay dreaming. A small voice humming a tune I knew because I, too, played piano once.

At once there was a knocking that drowned out the soft tune, followed by something that had been driven from nowhere downward into my atmosphere. I recovered from my fright to come face to face with what appeared to be the business end of a sharpened stick of bamboo. This stick was followed by two other sticks, and I suddenly became worried because things made so little sense to me.

And another sound came to my ears. The light sound of a triangle being rung, perhaps, I can not be sure. Followed by the sound of whatever it was above me leaving, no doubt toward the sound, or, away from the sound. I have no way of knowing.

By this time I was beyond confused, and really to the point of panicking. I had had it with this world of gently falling dirt and baby dolls. I wanted my arms to work and I wanted to wake up. But I had no idea how to make this happen. I searched my brain for all information pertaining to dreaming, and to waking oneself from a dream, but I could access nothing that would be of much help to me. And so I gave up, which is just like me from all I have heard from others. Sleep came and went, and I passed what seemed to be a very long time somewhere in between.

I can’t remember if I was awake, or if I was dreaming, but suddenly I could move. My arms again my own reached up into the descending dirt and pulled. In this way I ascended, or descended, I had no way of knowing, at the time, which way was which. I moved past the music box, threaded my body around those yellowed bamboo sticks, and finally broke out of the ground. A soft breeze blew across my bare scalp. I got my head out of the dirt and stayed like that a moment hoping to get a better grasp of where exactly I was. It looked like I had crawled my way out of hell only to end up in my own backyard. Seeing my own backyard after such an ordeal filled me with a passion I have since never known. I was somewhat at a disadvantage because my legs were still stiff and not yet under my own control. They stuck out like roots below me. This was a perplexing situation that required much effort on my part to free myself, but I could see my very own house just a little ways off and the promise of comfort and the ambitions of the body propelled me forward in my task. I pulled myself hand over hand, measuring distances in handfuls of grass, moving myself from my grave in the ground, across the driveway and up onto the porch where I sat facing the west.

The sun was about an hour from setting. It looked to be a fall sunset. It was then that I realized I was dressed in a suit and tie, which was strange, because if it was indeed fall then I should be wearing jeans and a work shirt. It was in fall that we brought in the hay and everyday in that season was set aside for that very task.

I thought I might walk the fields, in order to get my head cleared up, but found that it was impossible to physically leave the porch. I cannot explain what I mean. My legs were working, and my arms working, but each time I tried to leave the porch I found that I couldn’t for the life of me remember why it was that I was leaving. My mind could hold no thought so I sat there on the porch, which seemed the smartest thing to do.  Not being able to focus my thoughts I let my eyes wander. I looked out on my front yard where the driveway snaked past the old house and back toward the road. There was a small island cut off from the rest of the yard.

An empty birdbath surrounded by some browned out bamboo, and the remains of what used to be, pure conjecture here, roses.

The crabgrass and some scotch thistle supplied the only green round the front yard because the time of the year was approaching late fall.

A dilapidated pig corral fenced in with old tin roofing material placed to the right of the driveway sprouted a particular green that had been fed by past years of pig shit, shaded by a stand of pecan and chinaberry. A section of grass had been cut; I could just make out a fresh plot of dirt, some of it freshly overturned, and I had a strange affiliation to that spot of dirt that I couldn’t explain. I could not remember why, but it felt as if I had been there recently. Three pikes of slender bamboo stuck up at one end of the plot, and on top of them were small skulls, the end of the bamboo sticking out of their crowns.

The screen door slammed behind me. I felt eyes on my back.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Nothing.” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Where’d you get those catfish heads?” I asked her.

“Somewhere’s.” she said.

I was afraid to turn around. I thought I might scare her. Or, I thought she might scare me. Something felt wrong. I kept my attention on the pig corral even as I felt her move to my right side.

“Are you my real daddy?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure of anything.” I said.

I hoped she wouldn’t touch me, or in any other way make contact with me. It was such a strange dream after all.  I knew those brown eyes. I chanced a look. She caught my eyes with hers, I was powerless to resist.

“Will you stay?” she asked me.

I looked at her face. I could see where the baby ended and the girl began, and even, in those brown pupils, where the woman started to stretch out—to push against her ribcage.

“Are you my real daddy?” She reached out to touch me, I recoiled.

“No.” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Will you be?” she asked.

“Do you want me to be?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter.” she said. “I’m thismany, so I’m mostly grown anyway.”

“Lilah…” I began and stopped. Nothing came out, like a cow with its throat cut, I stumbled wildly for the words and finally succumbed. I smiled to soothe her, a foolish move on my part because I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t afraid of me of what I might say.

Dusk was upon us and I felt my time growing short. I had many things to say to her. I wanted to tell her that I used to come in and check on her before going to bed with her mother. That it was me who found her with the blanket gathered tight around her little head, only her nose and mouth poking out.

It was me, this is so strange to think, who listened as she explained that she wore her blanket like a talisman against those specters that visited her nightly. Those forms that fingered the keyhole, whispered from the darkened corners, and sat heavy on her chest. I wanted to tell her it was me that waited until her breathing slowed. It was me who left the door cracked just enough to allow the hall night light in.

I believed her. I had seen them myself. I was seeing them now for the first time in daylight. Two particularly perverse forms followed the child’s every move. They never left her; their empty faces concentrated, one on either side, on her face; their hands always on her chest. Some stared from the window curtains. Others crawled between us as we sat there pretending we did not see them. All of them seemed more interested in the girl than in me. I wanted to tell her that one day she’d substitute flesh for that night light, just like I did, and hold on tight till even that crumbled into dust; every night burying her love like everyone else.

As the sun went down beyond the branches I struggled to remain focused on that little girl. This was such a strange dream after all. I tried to pull myself up so that I was standing but my hands could not grasp the porch railing. I could hear someone inside the house, footsteps, and the heavy clunk of cooking pans. Delilah stayed where she was, squatting on the porch, a look of concern furrowing her brow. She brushed the hair from her face and rested her head on her hands. The world came in and out of focus and I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. My thoughts turned increasingly toward the old pig corral, that certain plot of dirt. I thought I heard the faint wisps of a child’s music box on the breeze.

She was too young to understand. And she was dying. I could see it growing there inside her small body, death growing, death pushing against her small lungs. She coughed and the world spun. I remember yelling at them to leave her alone, to stop touching her, but they seemed to no longer have any interest in me.

“Are you staying?” she asked.

“Yes.” I said. “As long as I am able.”

 

J.P.Burnside

lives in Sin City where he writes, teaches, and dreams of California waves. His work has appeared in Alice Blue Review, Slightly West, and an upcoming issue of Interim.

Meg Tuite SEDUCTION

 

She thought she would disturb his plan to seduce her by jumping off the roof. They sat side by side on the edge, feet dangling, moonless night. A floodlight from above bleached the two figures colorless against a flat, black sky. A bottle of red wine was passed slowly between them.

Like a composer who knew more intimately than the musicians themselves every lingering note of the clarinet, every vibration of the cello, each movement of his had been strained over, subtracted and defined seamlessly, until what finally quivered and transpired before the public was no more than a calculated execution of all that went before it. What remained was what must remain. The rest had been carefully discarded. His overture demanded a subtle maneuvering of lighter conversation into deeper themes of soul exposure, coupling vulnerability with unmistakable strength. There would be the necessary troubled outbursts and whispered confidences, a delicate sprinkling of bleak childhood memories that he interspersed with heavy silences and bowed heads. If he mouthed the words weakness, fear, and hatred, then the score included potency, imprudence, and love. There was no place in his world for impulsive words that formed like spittle. He believed explicitly that life was transitory and with each moment there was an obligation to reap.

He looked into her eyes and lowered his head into a deferential bow. Her eyes were black tonight, but they proudly displayed their pain with no intention of concealing it, and he knew that she had heard many pieces and knew her music well. His only handicap tonight was the garish bulb that plunged demented light down on them. His words were best conveyed by candlelight flickering shadows strategically across his face. He took a long, slow swallow from the bottle and passed it to her.

She could tell by the stoop of his neck that he planned to kiss her soon. She wondered what sort of angle his face would take watching her body pitch forward into a night so beautifully grim that it would not be incapable of encasing her like a tomb. He would scream probably her name if he could remember it, and an arm would strain into the blackness and grasp at little more than air for some time. He moved closed until their legs touched and embarked on what seemed to be an endless barrage of childhood memories. She took several small sips in rapid succession before giving the bottle back.
He leaned forward with his hands clutching the edge of the roof, raised his eyebrows, sucked in his lips and stared out into the dense night with the brooding look of one who is disturbed by the world’s suffering, yet understands it. He inhaled slowly and then let out deep, exhaustive exhales every few minutes and shook his head.

“Don’t you see.” he lifted his hands in front of him and clenched them.

“The world tries to define us. Close us up in its parasitic little fist.” He staggered up to his feet and swayed. He threw his arms out and quoted Whitman:

“I match my spirit against yours, you orbs, growths, mountains, brutes,
 Copious as you are, I absorb you all in myself, and become the master myself.”

And then out surged billows of his own verse.

“I have worn the soiled cloak of the perverters,
clawed and pecked for my coveted share of this our daily bread,
and when I am alone and find myself homesick
for the stench of this united cesspool,
I bolt my door from the clattering human chains
that battle to commit me.”

He looked down briefly to see if she displayed any sign of awareness that the two poets’ sense of the individual’s triumph seemed to merge together, as though in an embrace, and found himself moved to a depth even greater by the captive trance of this singular audience. He wavered emphatically back toward Whitman again.

        “The many in One- what is it finally except myself?
These states – what are they except myself?”

He stood there silently swaying for some time, lost in a familiar vision of himself and Whitman sharing a bottle of wine, arms clasped in genial admiration, while they took turns reciting poetry. Some nights they spewed out a mutual disdain for the limited souls that surrounded them, but tonight it was strictly poetry.

He lowered himself carefully back to a sitting position, grabbed the bottle, took a swig and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He produced two cigarettes from a pack in his shirt pocket, stuck them both in his lips and lit them. He handed her one and put his arm around her. He blew out perfect smoke rings one after another, dropped his hand to the small of her back and let his finger drift delicately around in little caressing circles. He loved her for her perceptive silence. He took one more drag off his cigarette and with a low, steady hum eased into another humorous childhood story while distant cars and voices and dogs maintained a natural, unobtrusive background.

She smoked and listened to a dog barking in the distance while his voice dropped to a dull, bearable hammering and his clumsy hand raked at her back. Her first sight of death had been a dog that lay freshly run down and battered on a side street. She had sat down on the curb across from its wailing, howling moans and watched it foam, kick and spasm with an unwavering intensity as singular as any Olympic swimmer churning and flailing toward the finish. She had been horrified, but fascinated, by the amount and intensity of motion before death. Did the dog quake and shudder its way out of life toward death, or thrash to hang on to its final ledge of life. She didn’t know.
 
She waited a long time before death drained itself in front of her again. It was a grandfather this time, saddled with a cancer that had been spreading for years. He had been stamped “terminal” from the onset of his illness and maintained this precarious state for over two years, until the doctor and family expanded on it, whispering “terminal stage” instead, and with the evolution of this stage they had wheeled him out of the hospital and into their house, setting him up in a bedroom upstairs–this arrangement would not be wasted by her. She pulled up a chair next to his bed and sat.
 
For five days and six nights she watched the eyes recede further and further into the creaseless, dappled skull that got bigger while the decayed body beneath the covers diminished. His cough remained dry and hopeless, struggling out every hour or so from a head unable to lift its increasing weight from the pillow. He choked on anything that the family fed him, but most of the time just lay there with rice paper lids that either fluttered or did not.

Until the moans began. Here now developed a new terminal stage no one had anticipated. The family brought in every obscure aunt, uncle, cousin, or neighbor who filed in and stood or sat fidgeting beside the bed, each silently reckoning with his own death scene, staring anxiously at the moaning, skeletal man who barely looked through them when his eyes decided to open at all. The moan started out as a low, guttural sound rattling from inside his throat like someone drowning or gargling, and then sometimes it rose and wavered like a sick, southern woman or became a man crying horribly and heaving from the gut, or like a child barely audible after the child had screamed himself hoarse and could barely whimper, and each of the haunted visitors quietly turned away at some point and left.

But while the day moans might have seemed somewhat recognizable, the moaning after dark when she was alone with him was depraved and cunning. The grandfather became a hackling, haughty lunatic at night. The head that hadn’t lifted off the pillow in days suddenly bolted up, and those hollow, frantic eyes of his turned back in on this world again, railing over her in a feverish pitch, while his demented fingers that had shuddered uselessly under covers all day began to grope through darkness until they gripped her wrist, reminding her that he was the one who was dying here and whatever she or the rest of them had thought of his sedentary life was to be dismissed entirely. His fingers and eyes would lock on her, the delirious moans would claw inside her like the old dog dying in the street, and she realized that now, for the second time, she was going to be able to watch death move.

He flicked his cigarette out into the night, ruminating amiably at his own expense, humbly drawing to the close of another handful of somewhat humiliating scenes. “Lost once again in the recitation of yet another poem.” He shook his head. “God, it was bad.” It had actually been one of his most accomplished poems of the sentimental genre to date.

“I think I was on the third stanza.” He put his index finger to his lip, absently tapping it and smiled, “yes, well,” he cleared his throat.

        “Oh, quivering tree
drooped in banal deformity,
mere backdrop to the life
that radiates you,
another muffled voice now,
how has it come to this?
Your berries drop no longer
as remainders of some heaven,
but only scattered, soiled turds
of any life that deigns to surround you.”

“But, you must excuse me–the plague of first love. I drove us right past our exit sign and we ended up lost for hours that night.” He’d actually driven the girl straight into a ditch, but he spared his audience that part. He brushed her hair off her forehead and slipped it behind one ear.
 
“A sputtering romantic.” He studied her face in horror. She was distracted. He had lost her. He trailed back over his orchestrated pursuit somewhat deflated. The gloom of childhood had been interwoven with a spattering of poetry, but maybe he’d gone too far. He’d had an unfortunate incident recently with a bitter grad student who had sucked down most of an expensive bottle of merlot one night, stared at him and asked, “Why didn’t you just stay home and masturbate? You would have had a better time of it, and wouldn’t have wasted any of this crap on me,” and then she had got up and left him. It had horrified and stifled him for weeks, leaving him devoid of poetry and the desire to pick up girls. It had become a vague and ugly period spent shuttling home every day after work to mutter to himself on the couch while the darkening walls illuminated revolving, evil sitcoms and scattered empty pints of ice cream.
 
It took the potent detonation of Walt Whitman to set up the ironing board again. Walt shot him, ironed and starched, back onto the boulevards with quick, convulsive steps traveling blocks past his destination, hands clasped behind him, restructuring meter or tempo, only to find himself halting to pull his pen and notepad out of his suit coat and fill up his pockets with folded slips of pleasant new compositions. A blue silken vest and three new sport coats were purchased in celebration of his reclaimed confidence in an ever-expanding universe.

He wondered what had gone wrong this time. He’d complimented her eyes, her hair, her smile, held her sweaty hand, and rubbed her back. Very little mention had been made of his credits. Granted he had been hazarding his way into the publications and various readings he had under his belt and the fact that he’d been the same age as Faulkner when he’d procured his first set of stanzas in print. No. He decided it was time to change his course. He put his hand on her dry knee, thought for a moment, looked at her and smiled. “Well then, enough about me.”  He patted her leg. “Let’s here a little something about you.”

She looked at him as she did the rest of humanity. She knew that he would not disappoint her. Something was expected of her now, as she had expected it, and so she smiled at him in acknowledgement of her role. He was no more than the public, waiting with pathetic regularity for her to amplify his performance by some formless human display, and so a smile subdued him, and he gratefully smashed her against his chest. A six-story building, roof to concrete, was ample distance to spare her from any more blundered attempts at capturing those animated moments when life and death merged.

An overdose of somebody’s pills on a Christmas no less dismal than the rest had been sloppy and ineffectual. She’d drifted up in a hospital bed with no keys, no shoes, no memory and twelve cents. And after two days of concerned intervention and a doctor’s prescription for a new vial of pills given to her mother, she’d walked out with detached annoyance and “The Little Drummer Boy,” replaying the dreary holiday over and over again in her head. Slitting her wrists had been slightly more melodramatic, proudly playing itself out like a bad made-for-TV movie.

Her mother had discovered her with the obligatory screams, panic, and sobbing, “how could this have…what’ll they…oh, no, not my baby,” and then the sirens, the ambulance, the pooling neighbors, the hospital, crisis counseling to follow-up counseling she’d passively sat through while they pumped her for childhood trauma, as if twenty-five years in the world didn’t account for enough.

She waited for him to release her, finished off the last of the wine. She stared down beyond their dangling feet into blurred shapes that amounted to almost nothing, but needed no sharp edges to provide her with details. This roof had long since ceased to be a roof. It was a platform, the point of entry measured exclusively by the height of its possibilities. A house, a bungalow, a three-story building were no more or less than a vial of sleeping pills or a razor, carrying out only what was to be expected. Blatant mediocrity worshipped by the indignity and uselessness of the feeble attempt. High- rises sat on the other end of the spectrum, mere carnivals to a mindless public already priding itself on the slaughter of the individual, displaying their hunger for protoplasmic gatherings in the stretch of a single building, stripping away all shreds of a dignified end by spraying the body out like a garden hose. But a six-story building promised something. It had the firm foundation of six solid stories without excessive waste of distance.

The roof was, of course, now his platform as well, even if she had brought him there. Nine to five, Monday through Friday, he genuflected with the rest of the world for the same meager salary increases, same useless titles as the next, but nights and weekends were what sustained him with something that never let a suit coat see the bottom of the hamper or feel the dust cracks of the tile and hummed a meticulous sheen to his shoes each night. He had rounded the stairwells and climbed up the ladder to this roof and made it his own, even if it was not what he would have chosen. He always made it a point to walk out of restaurants that had bad lighting, and theatres where seats were not available in the back. This floodlight from above was a grotesque assault that created a stage-like mawkishness that did not in any way suit the women he chose. The world at large might have considered them homely or unappealing, but he believed that it was nothing but an empty triumph to pick the largest, reddest strawberries peak season, and discover the jam delicious. His women were the cobblestones, the cupboards, and the back alleys. Their coarse, ordinary features wore a history of deceit, disappointments and solitude as uniformly as they wore the future that would replicate the past, only slower. They were invisible and unadorned, uninhibited by momentary spectacles of beauty or romance that saturated the rest in an interminable fog. And the less seducible the woman, the more extraordinary his performance, because what can a man think of himself when he has molded and transformed the most raw of ingredients into sculpture? And when he genuinely believes that what he sees is art, then the piece itself takes on a more expansive and captivating stance in response to him, and so, art it is. What these women walked into his life with was a scant shadow of what they departed with. But, of course, he wasn’t always successful, just as there are people who walk out of the greatest opera and theatre bored and dissatisfied, unable or unwilling to allow themselves to be swept into something. He had to remind himself that these women were picked from the infested orchard of humanity as well, and there was always the risk that what was inside had already rotted and decayed.

He had first discovered her disrupting the rhythmic balance of a rush-hour crowd. Her slow, lurching steps forced everyone behind her to bypass her with a look of disgust. She was lanky, clumsy, perfect, and so he had found himself unable to stop following her, and when they’d shuttled through the turnstile of the public library his anticipation grew, because an educated woman was not prone to empty pleasantries and could accurately measure the depth of his erudition. She picked out two books. He picked out Rilke and followed her to a table. She ignored his recitation of one of the Duino Elegies, his invitation for coffee, a few of his own poems, an invitation to dinner, but suddenly got up leaving her books behind when he’d offered to buy her a beer. A bar down the street was noisy and ineffectual, and she seemed reluctant to leave it, sucking down four beers in about forty minutes, which started to panic him. He was afraid she might pass out before they got to this roof she’d promised to take him to, although she quickly pacified his anxieties when she stood up and lurched out with no more of a sway to her steps than before.

She spent many hours in the library. It was the only place she had found where a group of people in the same building was able to do as they pleased. There was no time limit, no procedures, nothing to buy or sell, no dress code and no explanations necessary for sitting there or staying there all day if one chose to do so. She had listened to him recite Rilke, beg her to go for coffee, tremble through some intolerable poems and then invite her to dinner, and when she’d thought about telling him to go to hell, she’d nodded her head instead. This tall, nondescript man in a suit too small for him had transported her back up to the roof. She had looked at him and the scene had created itself as if it had already happened–the two of them up there on the edge– and she had stood up, and he had followed her quickly out of the library, although she had a brief moment of pity for this ridiculous man with the shrewd, drooping eyes when she had worked over a plan that would prove itself to be the final spiraling death of his own.

She let his fingers snarl through her hair and stomached the hollow words that dribbled out of him like so many empty cans dumped into a recycling bin. Attraction, intimacy, love, every one of them used up and deprived well before they were ever voiced, and yet when she looked over at him, she discovered that he was actually trembling like some fanatic, drumming everything he had into each and every word like one of those rare actors who are able to play the same character in the same role, belting out the same soliloquy night after night, year after year, as though he truly believed that this was his life and his words that were passionately delivered and shared for the first and only time with each separate audience on each single night.

He turned his head and moved slowly toward her, whispering, while everything inside her accelerated. Blood drained through her at a diarrheic rate while her body trembled and sweat, and she was sure that if she looked down at herself she would discover everything visibly spasming beneath her skin-heart, liver, intestines, lungs. She saw the roof again as she had first seen it and would always see it-the tarred, abrasive edge imprinting her palms as she pushed away from it, falling forward, forward, with that nausea of weightlessness that is experienced only on the edge of sleep when she might find herself falling from a cliff, falling in relation to the height of the cliff, maybe slowly, seeing everything in sharpened detail, or watered down in a rushing blur with arms and legs flailing recklessly, apparent traitors to any final decision she had made and acted on, as though there was something inside her that was divided and maybe stronger than she was, something that evolved in spite of her, unconsciously, without her knowledge, battling and foraging to save this pathetic life that she had rejected without her consent, or for that matter, any concern for who she was or what she believed. Then the asphalt was straining up at her and those last twenty feet spiraled and plummeted with unnatural speed and the ground flew up at her not once, but over and over again until all of the senses had time to formulate their own fear into a physical response, and then the final contact with the ground that was beyond pain, because everything inside the body had been bombarding through the system already, and so any pain of impact would not be powerful enough to wrestle through the overload of sensations the body contended with at this point, and it would be a long, long time before the aftershock of the body’s trauma stopped its cataclysmic pumping and flooding of blood and adrenaline and everything else inside her and even if she had woken up to find it was all just a nightmare and she had not really fallen from a cliff or a roof, but was strangely secured in her bed, it would prove itself to be no less apocalyptic or physically severe.

He moved toward her whispering as she watched his lips part and come together, felt him brush her hair away from her face and pull her toward him, listening to him as one listens to buzzing flies on a carcass, whispering, “it is you…you are the one…knew when I saw you…meant to be…ours was an inevitable connection,” while beneath, or inside, or maybe in place of those disinterred phrases she began to hear something else as well, whispering that death moved not in one way, but in many ways, and that this singular occupation that possessed her had actually eluded her, that she knew nothing of it at all, and she began to listen to him closely now as she watched his lips move, and the words circled inside of her, one after another in a way that she had never allowed them to before, and she suddenly felt herself falling forward, slipping into another one of the blurred shapes in the distance, and watched his hand reach out above her as clearly as she saw his contracted face take its exaggerated form, every feature strained as far as it was able, into a mask of disbelief and horror, and then he was screaming her name, and it reverberated until it became as empty as the scenery, gravitating further and further away, rotating through space, a succession of circles, how everything moves, a continuous band, a single moving cycle, around and around.

They kissed.

 

 

Meg Tuite‘s

writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Calliope, San Francisco Bay Press, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fast Forward Press, Boston Literary Magazine, SLAB Magazine and many others. She is the current fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review.