And OpenOffice.org (the free version of Microsoft Office and exactly the same so why would anyone pay?) suggested that 'thought' be converted to 'thoughtless.'
Of course the idea that deep truths crystalize accidentally from infinitesimally layered digital systems
-> is ->
perfectly reasonable,
and would be silly to ignore.
But OpenOffice.org's (I stress again, a free word processor with a feature set entirely at parity with Microsoft Office) suggestion was based on repetition.
When our class goze to the library we sit at the table in the corner.
When im looking for them at lunch sometimes I cant find them because there looking for me.
We stayed up almost all night at Alexes house and we played time crisis with the real gun I got from my cousin and then we snuck out the window and lit the speshal maches alexes big brother got from army cadets.
They bern bright for ages because they have the red stuff almost halfway down the mach except its brown which is probably for camo.
Nics house is big because it used to be a church and his dad takes us to the rugby in a limmo.
Nic knows the driver but his mum never comes with us.
At the stadium we can drink unlimited cokes.
Nic has something hes going to tell us that he has been keeping a seecrit.
We ask him and beg him to at least tell us at school.
He is going to tell us behind the greenhouse that is next to the sandpit.
The sandpit is where the little kids play so its sort of a seecrit place to meet.
Nic says close our eyes.
He asks if we can see the wite lights.
Alex says yes and Nic says that he thought he would.
I say I can see them too but i dont get it - what wite lights?.
Nic says Heres how you charge them up.
He rubs his eyes and his elbows do big chicken wings.
I can see them - The white lights are brighter now because I charged them up.
I do what he did and and I can see some stuff now.
I didnt know what he meant before but now I can see them and I saw them before too but I just didnt know what he meant.
Alex can see them even more now too.
We can all see them.
This means we have special powers.
Cool what are they says Alex.
Yeah cool what power is it I say.
You have to practise and some people cant even do it says nic.
You can move things.
Nic closes his eyes and charges up the lites then he shoots his hand out.
Here we go he says.
We look across the grass area to the bball court.
It looks windy.
Im making that happen says nic.
Woah your moving the ball says alex.
And your making it windy I say.
Yeah I knew you would be able to see says nic.
I think your powers will probably be pretty strong.
The bell goes.
Practiss at home and as much as you can says nic.
2.
I dont tell Ed or luke about the power on the way home.
Its a seecrit and its better if they dont know.
I have to practiss so I say goodbye and dont hang around when we get to the parc.
At home I try to charge up my eyes and open the gate with my powers.
When i open my eyes I think it might have moved a tiny bit.
A gate is big and I still have to practiss a lot.
What are you doing says my sister.
Its a seecrit I say and smile.
She says its stupid and she already knows what it is.
No you dont I say you cant its a seecrit.
I run away but only because I have to practiss more.
I move almost everything in the house a tiny bit.
Things can move a really tiny amount.
If I can just get lots of things to move a little bit then my powers will be trained up.
Alex will be training too and nic already has strong powers.
3.
I have been hiding from nic and alex at lunch because I cant move things far yet.
Luckily i am fast so I can always get away when i need to.
We still sit together at the back when our class goes to the library.
Im glad when nic says he had to start small when he was practissing.
He says try this and takes a pencil and makes it so it points at the roof.
No charge he says and he closes his eyes and puts his nose close to the pencil and the pencil falls over.
I say yeah I did that one when I was practising at home.
Alex says show.
I put the pencil up and i close my eyes to focus my power.
I hope that i can get one of my tiny movements to happen or nic and alex will think that my powers are weak.
It takes ages but i hear it fall over and it falls all the way off the desk.
Woah I did not think i could make it move that much.
I smile tho.
Alex looks at nic and smiles and grabs the pencil so he can try.
It falls over before he can start and Nic laughs because he knocked it over as a joke.
Alex looks at nic and grabs the pencil again and sets it up.
I will charge my eyes up a bit he says in a funny voice.
Good idea we can help you says nic.
He closes his eyes and I say yeah we will help.
I probably dont need it but ok says alex.
My eyes are itchy from rubbing and I open them for a second.
I see nic push the pencil over and he looks at me as he does it.
Pyanfar's Tranquil Evening (Pride of Chanur Fan Fiction)
The airlock hissed closed behind her as the silken tufts at her tail’s extremity whipped out of harm’s way, a semi-autonomous entity toying with its own demise. That sound - so soft and yet so distinct - brought a special relief, assurance, finally, of solitude. Pyanfar felt her shoulders slump forward like those of sullen Mahi deck lingerer - Gods, she thought, if Hilfy were to see me now she might well throw every stern word I’ve ever said to her out with the next expulsion.
She thought of galactic garbage because one such deposit was, at this moment, making its way past a crescent shaped void. Little pieces of engineering waste glinted in the darkness as they dispersed. She’d cut out this crescent moon from an old vulcanised fibre sheet and stuck it against the inch of plexi-glass between her room, her space - and the space outside. This window decoration, among other personalised features of Pyanfar’s quarters betrayed a much gentler, and perhaps more idealistic self than the hardnose pragmatist her days and nights uniformed on deck required.
There was the diamond shaped container of a red neon goo that, when heated, would bounce, break and mould with the rest of itself in a soothing tide. This thing, a ‘lava lamp,’ the human had called it, was so quaint, so trivial in it’s essential proposition and yet, Pyanfar found it amazing and could lose herself for hours at a time, gazing happily in the knowledge that there was no hidden motivation. Just a gentle ebb and flow.
She liked to flick her pointed ears lazily back and forth, pausing as her pendant pearl earring teetered and fell onto the other side. She removed her gold arm band and laid it down on the small surface, beside the room’s central control unit.
“Yes,” she sighed. “Time for some luxuriant tech…”
“Relaxing mist,” She almost whispered after activating the voice command system. And soon, a light blanket of mist rippled in anti-gravity relation with the roof. It was time now for a drink - “something to take the edge off” she enacted for herself. How fun it was to play! Perhaps she could allow herself another ridiculous human artefact she’d whisked away from the mistaken cargo collection in the hold. What had Tully called it? Ah yes, a ‘martini’ glass.
Despite its gaudy appearance, this vessel was actually very convenient for her tightly curled claws. The delicate glass stem sat nicely between her knuckles. She liked to let it droop before squeezing and arcing it back to equilibrium. But that awful transparent mixture with the green pellet - that was where the role play ended.
Pyanfar poured herself a half strength rum and coke, swirling the glass as she went so as to flatten the cola to her liking. One led to seven, and quite soon, Pyanfar was feeling pure impulse. She ran her red gold mane up against the arm of her ottoman, pushed up and cleared the top of it, then slowly slid head first down the other side, coming to rest in a glorious pile beside the platinum claw shaped foot that glinted and mimicked her own. Pyanfar brought hers over it.
“More mist…” She whispered.
“More mist!” She called out this time. “I love me a space room full of mist…”
I read submissions for a literary magazine no one has ever heard of. Many of the works I read come from the United States and initially I wondered how the hell they had even heard of this pathetic online afterthought. I’ve considered since then that the magazine could be American and perhaps I am the internet’s strange victim, reaching desperately over the Atlantic to give my two cents on stories generally worth less than that. I intuit that by some quasi-scientific measure, some value of myself is lost, as though the connection I have with the magazine spins me out like a spider’s web, floating (in)determinately through buffeting winds. I’m still relatively strong, but a migrating bird could sever me without noticing.
There are stories that are just not ‘literary’ enough, which can be a difficult thing to explain. Recently the thought occurred to me that once a work has a basic level of gramma and thematic consistency, a decent measure of its literary merit is the number of times the phrase ‘as though’ is used to introduce a metaphor, as though a work’s time spent comparing itself to meta-worlds were a sort of sidling up and rubbing shoulders with the literary execs. The big-wigs can be tricked from time to time into thinking the work is actually one among them. They of course have already forgotten their own duplicitous strategies.
The best sentences tend to come from the short bios each writer is asked to submit along with their work. They almost always have that terrific sense of telling a small part of a larger story. One cannot help betraying themself when writing a short bio for an un-prestigious submission. The details people choose to include often baffle me after reading incredibly un-baffling fictions. Every story announces itself like a primary schooler’s electricity project. Each wire is so explicitly placed that a glance should explain the arc...
There was the story about the woman whose confident husband was always out on adventure tours, whose nerves made her crazy couped up at home. Her worries made her house, her sanctuary, into a prison. Her love for her husband’s sociability became resentment. And of course, we were all worried about their baby, crying out in the next room. There were some strong images and the tone was judicious. We felt for the woman and saw that the husband wasn’t really doing anything wrong.
Each Character has to have an esoteric complex born out of the mundane. If the characters are middle class ‘boring people’ (like this story), then the writer will do their best to find an underside to this boredom, a aberration capable of rupturing their monotonous but fastidious study. They want to remind us that the plainest settings only seem that way because they haven’t been subjected to their interrogatory methods. So the woman’s house is broken into and the invading man’s apparent lack of motive quickly becomes intriguing. The writer returns to description as though a medley swimmer were kick-turning onto their favoured stroke. This paragraph is incredibly literary. It’s as though those smarmy gods have all tumblrd down from mount Olympus, vainglorious and liquored to the tips of their cherry red ears, swooning amongst the mortals in loose fitting togas that are wont to slip.
Then I Read: I am a Pacific Northwest native and building an off-the-grid home with my husband in the high desert of Central Oregon, and I tingled.
“Yes. It's a small street that crosses with Correjidora.”
“Ahh yes, Correjidora.”
“Yes. But you have to go down to Insurgentes first because it's further up the hill and Correjidora is one wa-”
“Yes yes young man. Left here?”
“Ummm no, we need to. Ok, left here...”
“You said Calle Ejido correct?”
“Yes Ejido. I can show you, if we can just go up the hill of Corregidora.”
“Heyyyy Maria! Sickness of the pig no! Hahaha, everytime I pass you're eating. Do you know Calle Ejido?”
“Hey, I know where it-”
“Calle Ejido? I don't know it. Come here a moment.”
“Really, senor, if you can find Corregidora... Right, he's asking the taco stand... And he's ordering a taco? Would it be the biggest gringo statement of all time if I reminded him that my ice-cream is melting...?”
“Ahh young man I'm terribly sorry, I just can't drive past the chorizo they have here.”
“ha, yes, I like to eat here too but I really-”
“Oh the meter! Don't worry young man, there is no charge after 15 pesos. How much time has passed here?”
“I'm not sure...”
“Where are you from?”
“Australia.”
“Oh wow. There are lots of beautiful woman there correct?”
“Ha, yes, there are many here too.”
“Ahhh, so you like Mexican woman?”
“Ha, yes yes, they are very beautiful.”
“MARIA, look, the fair boy says Mexicanas are very beautiful!”
“Raul! Leave him in peace.”
“Ha, no no it's fine. But, is it possible to-”
“I am very sorry for making you wait young man. Look, I know where to go.”
“So where do you live in Mexico city?”
“Pepito.”
“Ahhh, close to Zocalo correct?”
“Yes! Young man, you know the city very well.”
“Gracias, but not much”
“Here, You like beer correct?”
“Umm, yes but-”
“Come. I want to buy you a beer because you waited.”
“Oh, I... And he's walking into the bar...”
“Victoria, young man?”
“Umm, I prefer Leon if-”
“Very good, very good! Hello, Senorita, 1 Victoria and 1 Leon for my Australian friend.”
“Ooo, how blonde he is!”
“Yes, and he says Mexican women are very beautiful, AH! What is your name young man.”
“Ben.”
“Ven?” (means 'come here' in Spanish)
“Haha, yes. Always in the streets the people say 'ven, ven, ven' and I am always turning to look who is calling me.”
“HAHAHAHA, Ahhh look, the beers, VEN, VEN, VEN!”
“Ahh Raul, how rude! Leon for you correct?”
“Yes, thankyou”
“No Senorita. The blonde boy is called Ven!”
“Really, Ven?”
“Well, it's Benjamin but I just use Ben.”
“Ahhh Benjamin, it's a strong name.”
“Look Ben, she likes you! Andale!”
“Ahhh leave him in peace!”
“No, no it's fine.”
“HA! He does like you!”
“Nooo”
“Enjoy gentleman.”
“Ahhh yes, beers... Cheers young man.”
“Cheers.”
“Now we drink to the bottom.”
“To the bottom?”
“Yes, we finish all the beer, bottom, bottom bottom!”
“Ha, ok.”
“Ahhh it was a joke young man! You Australians drink strong hahah. I will finish mine in the car. What did you say the name of your street was?”
Ella didn't like the way she looked in her swimmers. It wasn't that she was overwhelmingly fat or blotchy, it just seemed like her body delivered nothing in the uncovering. Her proportions pushed and pulled in the wrong places. She felt that even if she'd been born an inanimate object, her shape would still be an oddity. A one-piece does nothing to conceal this. If anything the once-piece swimsuit has ultimately trumped the bikini in focussing a woman's shape for inspection.
The sun rained down in all directions. There were knobbly ankle bits slapping the concrete and wet hairs glued down like faded paisley on the men. The women seemed always to be surfacing. Their heads thrown back and their mouths popping open: 'Pah', as molten glass made turrets out of their otherwise chlorine stained hair. Every time their hands would follow, sweeping eye-brow to cranium, part of the re-materialisation process.
There were thin strips of mirror stuck on the window of the life-guards room and they'd sometimes catch the sun like golden venetians. Ella sat by the bags with a towel over her shoulders.
'Bet you can't do this' Yelled a boy before he ran at the water and continued his stride once the concrete stopped, his whole body accepted with sloppy grace into the blue. Sky blue, like the cigarettes he smoked twice a day. Ella could see the corner of the packet sticking out of his backpack. He was right, she couldn't do that. His head re-materialised and he shook it vigorously back into existence and his black hair looked like a burnt forest.
'Oh shivvers. Sorry. Thought you were my sister.'
'That's ok.'
'Thanks for watching my bag though.' He grinned, dived and disappeared into the glare.
Ella moved across the bench and wondered what else was in his bag. She grabbed all her family's stuff and put it on the other side of her, leaving herself closest to his things.
'Hey Ella come on!'
'Yeah just a minute.'
'What are you waiting for!'
Ella peered over the lanes. The boy was on his way to the deep-end. His freestyle was terrible but he surged on anyway with the same sloppy grace. She draped her towel over the bench like a tail on the comet of her family clump. Once she made it down the ladder and into the water all perspective was lost. Looking around at all the splashing arms and private screams Ella was reminded of Titanic. Her family had a red ball.
'Ella. Long one!' The ball sailed high over her head and into the crowd. She bounced a few times, hoping to walk but the tiled floor fell away steeply. She dived under, planning to pop up next to the ball. Legs flapped underwater like battery operated fans. Ella breast-stroked through it, hoping she was still going in the right direction. She did a quick forehead rub where she popped up. No one was around and the ball was gone. She looked back and saw her dad rolling over the lane dividers as the rest of them cheered him on.
'Looking for this?'
'Oh! Yeah... Thanks'
'No worries.' he dropped the ball and it bobbed between them as they tread water. Ella could see half of his face over the top of the ball. His nose was a bit crooked and his black mess of hair was slightly curled. He nudged the ball forward with his finger.
'AAARRRgghhhh.' Ella's brother dropped from the sky and grabbed the ball.
'Fuck Will!'
'You've been ages. Dad told me to get it.'
The boy was gone. Ella swam to the deep end and climbed out near the diving boards. She passed the mirror strips and made quickly for her towel but he was there, lighting a cigarette. Ella couldn't see her family anywhere. His knees where spread wide. His body was thin but it bumped out in all the right places. He had little ridges running down his hips. Ella stepped behind a light post and sucked in through puckered lips before blowing out as she slowly shook her head.
'Do you want a cigarette?'
'No. I-'
'Don't smoke?'
Elle looked around. Her mum was under the sunscreen tarp across the pool.
'No. I mean I do but I can't now.'
'Oh. Well I'm Dane. Did you get your ball back?' He stuck his hand out and Ella took it.
“Puta Madre” yells Octavio, mad with love in the summer night. The words hurdle Mrs Higgins brushwood fence and steel through her green curtained window. Her eyes blaze and she stands, sending her dinner tray to the carpet. Shephards pie, fuck it, thinks Dean, who has recently died, meanwhile Mrs. Higgins has found the phone.
'Hello, Police'
'Yes.'
'There's a boy outside yelling all sorts of profanities'
'Well, no.'
'No.'
'What!'
'I mean yes, I think he might be trying to break in...'
'Yes that's my address.'
'Thankyou.'
Dean and Mrs. Higgins used to stay up late and watch SBS erotica and he began to mutter this “Puta Madre” every time some vigorous moisture came on-screen. Mrs Higgins stole from the room and phoned her stoned niece.
'Hello Simone it's me'
'I've another question for your computer'
'Ask it what puta madre means'
'What's funny?'
'Oh shame I'll bring you some beef soup soon, how's the computer going?'
'How lovely! I've always loved African languages'
'Bye'
During their next viewing, the night before Octavio's yell, she'd whispered it to Dean who went down on her like Mozart's requiem. Until then this was something he had only done with a drunk thrashing tongue, like he'd kidnapped a problem snail, tore it from it's shell and fed it meth.
The morning after Mozart's requiem Mrs. Higgins tried to assist Consuela with the dusting, all the while booty shaking and humming “Puta Madre”. Consuela, haunted by guilt and knowing that god was watching her, told everything, apologised and dodged the jar of honey Mrs. Higgins hurled at her.
Some hours later we watch a Wes Anderson cross section of the house. Mrs Higgins is upstairs and crying in the acid trip of doily's that will no longer serve as a marital bed. Dean returns from work and walks straight for the CD player, inserting The Red Hot Chilli Peppers Californication. In the break between Scar Tissue and Otherside he leans forward with a plan to press the pause button. Whether or not bees actually retrieve ready-made honey for the hive is irrelevant. The matter at hand is this bee, sitting quietly on the rewind button where an un-cleaned droplet of honey sits and now this little droplet serves as our fish-eye lens from which we see Dean's dopey finger making for the two parallel lines and falling short as a yellow and black bison explodes into shot and plants its sting. Dean stumbles back and starts to yell beneath 'slitting my throat is all I ever'. His wind pipe has swollen to closure by the start of: Get on top. He loses consciousness in Porcelain and dies during Saviour.
Octavio, who I remind you is now in trouble with the police, has other problems. The first is balance, the second is colour-blindness and the third is love. He is madly surging, Thomas Pynchon grotesque, fucked insane chasing a girl named Zora. The note he clutches in his gin-sweaty pal is a love letter and he's been instructed to jam it into a red box with a P on the side of it.
'Don't fuck with the parking meters' yells officer Briggs, in a strange tone, torn between feeling and duty. Mrs Higgins thanks the policeman who tips his cap to Dean's corpse on his way out. Officer Briggs, whose coarse marriage led him to police in the first place, takes it upon himself to deliver Octavio's note but Zora isn't moved. Octavio, unshaken, is still prone to fall in love with girls he sees on the bus.
He was one of those secrets in a city full of secrets. Such was the mystical description the prison chaplain had given of the metropolis. He wore a dark blue suit, and an old hat a grifter might have worn. His face was loose and non-committal, it's broad set eyes seeking no contract with the thick brows under which they had settled. His mustache might have been considered flamboyant if it hadn't so clearly been there for decades and the nails on the end of his self-conscious hands were shredded beyond reasonable doubt.
This was the fifth city he'd visited in as many days and the first one outside his original plan. For the entire period of his incarceration he'd requested nothing more than extra blankets yet when the news of his early release arrived he'd demanded books, paper and pen and set about plotting a full year of expedition. He'd heard that a year was the time it took for the body to replace all the matter of which it was made and by this time he'd have nothing but memories from the cell.
He wondered about waiting and frustration. The train, 8 minutes late. A deceptively short queue, oozing forward as a lengthy line reels past. He'd spent years waiting and wondered, tired though he was, if we're not all itchy for the last departure. The bus stop was empty and the rain softened. He stood and pulled his hat down around his ears before walking in the direction he though those buildings might be if they were still there.
The boys at The rugby club came from different backgrounds. Some were athletic exports, seduced by the coaches and senior players for their endowments in speed and strength. Most came from private regimes where they were used to owing their weekends to the game. A small contingent hung around because they'd played from a young age and had developed their own mythologies for what the game meant. Few people outside these criteria could outlast a single season.
In the rituals before training the ball was kicked as high as their legs could launch it. They'd gather round the rascals and listen to stories where girls and parties found themselves acting in accordance with the formations of the game. They all spoke about going out to drink and swill together, knowing that this was impossible, disastrous even, as they looked and smiled with each other.
Training pushed the boys to the limit. They were taught to look well upon the sessions that broke them. When a boy threw up the coaches left the other boys to get him just enough water for ridicule that served as praise. The coaches were always fathers who scattered themselves throughout the club in varying positions of power. The mothers could wait in cars beyond the fence or gather together on game days to watch their little men collide on the wet grass. They knew they could not give advice, only tend wounds and be worried or impressed.
One teams coach was a particularly passionate, stubble faced man. His slack jaw, wrinkled eyes, bulbous gut and rock-like calves were trophies to his career as a smoker, a drinker, a stock-broker and a coach. He would yell such abuse at referees that he was regularly banned from fields. The boys learned methods of victory they knew they could not admit attempting. The players wouldn't speak about him outside the club. They'd just snigger or shrug and say they supposed so.
Some of the boys would jive about this coach's large and obvious penis that swelled in the tense moments of games. His strategy meant winning and above all the boys wanted to progress. There was no talk of playing for enjoyment in his lessons. The tone of their jokes always shaped toward affirmation. They would depict him bending the smaller boys over behind the clubhouse, the boys who dropped important passes or fell from tackles on the edge. Sometimes these scenarios would reach obscene levels of surreal illustration. Coach had been known to cut holes in the boys backs if the standard openings did not suffice for penetration. Multiple offenders would line up like meat chunks on the skewer of his penis, each screaming his personal brand of weakness. Coach might choke the boys from consciousness before re-arranging their insides, his penis being the crux of every story.
Coach sometimes caught snippets of this and smiled to himself. He'd tell the bigger forwards 'not to get their dicks wet' the night before big games and glance at the others, laughing that they didn't have to worry.
It was a tradition for the under 16's to travel out to the country for a tour match. The boys spent the 3 hour bus trip asserting themselves to the group, explaining their social lives. Away from the city the Coach became even more vigorous. Sometimes he would throw the boys to the ground when their learning frustrated him. He said training was a part of the game and they should always be ready to get hit. One boy took issue with this, yelling 'it's under 16's' from his pile in the dirt. There was a pause and the coach breathed heavily, shaping words that might have surprised them all, but a lone shout: 'pussy' was heard from the watching group and the others began to chant it too. From inside the drills the name Maybelline emerged for this boy whose long hair and soft features made him their ideal female.
Coach took this boy somewhere in his four wheel drive that night. The other boys watched the car pull out in the low hanging mist, it's red brake lights squinted back at them. Some began the obvious joking routine but found they couldn't lose themselves to hysterics and all went restlessly to bed. Most were awake in the dormitory when Maybelline returned later that evening and they started by bashing her with pillows. Soon they used their fists and ripped clothes off, using the strips to bind wrists to the bed posts. They yelled 'how was it, did he tear you a new one, did you like it'. Maybelline wouldn't speak. One of the boys halted the procession and said he'd show them how it was. Each of the boys showed the rest how it was. Passing over her one by one. Some just slapped her cheeks with their penises, others turned her over and gripped her hair as they thrust, scrunching up their faces for effect until they were exhausted and fell asleep on the floor where they lay.
Ken Charles waits alone in line at the Sundance sandwich parlour. He is considering sun-dried tomatoes among the other solar styled items for sale and otherwise. Pictures of bulging sunflowers in scratched wooden frames stare out from the walls. Sunsets over the African Savannah, the Andes mountains and isolated pine forests emboss the frosted table tops. Voluptuous women in sunglasses and little else wait translucently on glass fridge doors.
[I'm just here to fill up]
he thinks with his fathers stoic pride. Regardless, Ken, at age 47, having never tasted a sun-dried tomato, is considering them now.
'They do look incredible in those little jars', he whispers, causing a pregnant woman in red polka dots to turn and scowl at his aged filth. Ken's clouded look as he swishes all things sun-dried about his palette does little to convince her otherwise. By the time the mist has cleared and Ken has ceased unapologetically simulating sense the woman is turning back around and any sort of interjection, a romantically hopeless effort to stop the madness (like tank-man in Tiananmen square) is gone, moving faster than his thoughts can brave themselves to action.
Ken looks at his half reflection in the glass. He sees neither Jekyll nor Hyde, just Ken, the one that artists were supposed to have started painting centuries before.
[But when did 47 get old!]
Ken suddenly exclaims, waving arms inside his cranium. A bell rings somewhere in the shop, or maybe a phone. Ken stops his reverie, flattens back to speculation and wonders what might be transpiring in front:
['They do look incredible in those little jars']
{Pray you cook regrettable with those pitiful arms?}
{You look edible in those little thighs?}
{I could have petted you, in-house, little arse?}
[Christ!]
The line shuffles forward and Ken realises he has to get sun-dried tomatoes. The young people mention them like passwords. They clutch their lurid sandwiches like life achievement awards, taunting irregulars, making aquariums of their lifestyles.
Ken is getting close to the cashier. He checks his pants for a wallet lump and glances up at the pricing board to be sure it hasn't changed. He hopes the woman in front will hear or see his order. He suspects it might somehow exonerate him.
All the little red dots on her dress stare blankly at him.
[They could whisper anything they wanted...]
Ken goes on to wonder about the baby inside her, how it will be a boy, called Trey or Xander, and how they will terrorise Newton County with attitudes he'll never understand. They prowl the streets on levitating skateboards, gnashing their teeth through foods he never knew the sun could even dry.
Glancing down at his grey woollen shirt Ken feels sure the woman thinks he's a psychopath.
[Can't we just cut them into slices and serve them up?]
Ken thinks, indicatively-about the tomatoes. After another glance at his egg colored arms he figures (sniggers) they probably expect him to be sun-dried too.
[This place is a solarium cult]
'Cancerous sandwich vessels', he whispers bitterly as the woman turns for the second time, parting her maroon lips to destroy him. 'E-' She is halted by a scream at the register.
'All the money. Hurry the fuck up!'
Another man, about 47, in a grey woollen shirt is holding up the Sundance sandwich parlour.
'Oh that'd be right' says Ken, volubly sardonic. The man turns and focuses back on the register, waving the gun as though he's worried it will evaporate. The pregnant woman looks from Ken to the thief, hair and shoes, squinting. Even her polka dots contract, whispering 'secretly' like pensioners behind Venetian blinds. Ken begins to expand and shine like neon, silencing the dots. The woman has forgotten the thief, his evils are a given, absolved, and he is not shining with what can only be guilt.
[The woman knows... Knows what! We're not fucking accomplices!]
Ken, brave with anxiousness, experiences himself diving at the thief who takes a single step back, clearing the floor for Ken's implosion. He scrambles about, slipping on the retro kitchen tiles, still trying to grasp the situation.
'Fucking Sundance' he shouts as he reaches up to heave his body back in line while the gunman is handed $485 dollars which he snatches and walks outside with. Kens blind hand soars above the counter, teetering like a kite, then crashing, like a kite, onto the hot sandwich press which grips his skin with fat and oil, pulling down the lid and sandwich toasting his left hand.
The young policemen who arrive late to question the patrons of the Sundance sandwich parlour record each and every witnesses onomatopoeic rendition of Ken's hand sizzling in the press. Back at the Newton police station these hissing sound-bites are sampled into an instructional video on interviewing witnesses to stress the corroborative value re-enacted statements.
Ken will never see this video. Being the only witness who doesn't make the hissing noise he's questioned more extensively than the others.
[She must have aired her theory]
thinks Ken, reflecting on women, sandwich parlours, polka dots and criminals, all conspiring somehow without knowing it, all of them controlled by some kind of mass machination of urge and interest, dooming, for no fair reason, people of Ken's ilk or people born in Ken's same micro second. They work for a mindless being, as of yet not even indifferent, pre-conscious but bullied into bullying him, each and every day, to frame him and muddy up his explanations.
[What if I'd called the bluff, seen through the barrel to the vacant space inside, walked over and asked him to leave. He would have threatened to shoot me and I would have grinned and said:
'Be my guest', and he would have shuddered, maybe gotten violent... Shit. I'd need my own gun to put a stamp on it. Hold it up, loaded, and let him know that he had to do like I said]
'Next time I'll be ready!' Says Ken, now outside in the heat with an old lady waiting for the traffic signal, to which she answers:
'hmm?', peering up at him through thick submarine windows.
'I'm buying a gun', he says to the cosmos.
'Good for you dear' she croaks back as she reaches out for his arm, assuming he'll ferry her over the road. She misses. As the green man beeps into life Ken is gone, striding resolutely into the late afternoon.
The door to The All American Gun Store is heavy and windowed. Venetian blinds clatter against the glass as Ken works his way inside. The shop has presence, and guns sitting like shoes on every wall.
'Hello sir, what can I do for you.'
Ken almost forgot his plight as he looked into the honest eyes of the storeman. Short, stout and about 47, his gaze promised respect and trust in the man that Ken surely was. After all, Ken thought, this man is selling powerful machines, he's got to be a good judge of character.
'I'd like to buy a handgun.'
'Well sir, this cabinet here is a good place to start, all American steel...'
Ken gazes down into the gun cabinets, each piece compact, so beautifully engineered, reaching out to grasp his hand. Matted Blacks, nickel, chrome. Ken is thinking back to his cupboard, visualising his jeans and belts. He imagines this to be a purely functional wander, nothing to do with style. He wants to leap around the store and watch himself in the mirrors. He wants to commando roll over his blanket and shoot hats off people.
'Nasty burn you got on your hand there.'
'Yeah.' Says Ken, literally coked up. 'Held up at the Sundance sandwich parlor. Had nothing to do with me.'
'Yep. It pays to be prepared for these people without our good intentions.'
The next 5 days cross without distinction. Ken manages to sleep but the transition has no effect. Conscious, unconscious, waiting. He opens his eyes each morning to meet the same episode as the day before. The nights pass like add-breaks, failing to turn the soil over and chapter off his existence. On the final night Ken stings himself at home, spreading thinly over the early morning, not wanting to burst through the door at 9 and beg for his gun. The five days feel like nine months. He throws up at 4, showers, shaves, dresses, walks 1 mile to the store, arriving at 9, like he promised he wouldn't, in a cold sweat.
Ken watches his new Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver all afternoon. He strolls home in the heat with the cold metal pressing into his skin, hoping against hope nobody jumps him.
[I've got the gun but I'm not ready yet],
His house is empty. He lays the gun by the box of bullets on the kitchen table, speaking.
'Darlene I've just collected something.'
'See this here, this could end you mister, now back away.'
'Excuse me, no sorry, yes. The man with the gun, what were you saying?'
'You picked the wrong fucking sandwich parlor.'
Once loaded Ken places the gun alongside his tasks. He sits it next to the kettle and watches it distort in the rounded metal. He wonders if it would penetrate or ricochet, and what does a ricochet really sound like? He sits it by his reading chair, casually on the edge of the lamps fuzzy light radius. He has trouble finding a good place to put it as he brushes his teeth. The sink is too small and rounded, precarious and the toilet cistern, out of the question.
Ken pulls open the right hand side of the mirror cupboard where the shelves are cluttered with what's left of her things, vitamin jars, eye shadow, cotton balls.
'Useless!' He shouts, looking quickly down to see if the gun has heard. The shelf is cleared to the waste basket and Ken rests the gun there as he brushes his teeth. He flosses for the first time in months, inspecting his eyes up close and gargling like a cyanide victim.
He sits up in bed, emptying the bullets from their cylinders and rolling them over in his palms, forcing the dull click of the hammer down when the gun's not loaded, poising his finger and squeezing the trigger as far as he can before the spring jumps. He aims at the wall, saying: 'Just joking' after he pulls the trigger.
Night presses into early morning and Ken loads six .38 Special bullets into their cylinders and sets the gun down next to his bed, noticing his bandaged hand for the first time in days. Suddenly exhausted Ken crashes into nervous dreams. He's waiting by a horse, unsure if the saddle is strapped. The sun rolls over the horizon then skips back. People are watching him. He's sorry, it's always the first thing he says. 'Why am I apologising, It's always the first thing I-.' The people have lost interest. They avoid looking at him now as one might avoid the sun as they look up at a sculpture. The day keeps getting brighter. 'Good for you dear', says the old lady from the lights, her giant hand reaches out for him, bearing down on his face. Ken panics and yells back 'I'm sorry but-', the old woman won't let him explain! The sun is boiling everything, Kens left hand bubbles. He grabs for the cold spot under his belt to ice the burning. The gun's there and all the people look back at him now. They're all nodding like the man in the gun store. One of them says 'yep, he's gon' have to do it' to another who answers 'I know, it's the only way.' Ken points the gun up at the lady, squeasing the trigger, breathing louder than he can think. He fires a single shot in the darkness, his eyes closed. She's lying there, spilling red and watching him intently from her black shadowed eyes.
'Where's the old woman!'
There's a ringing. Ken doesn't know if he's fired the gun or not. It's pitch black now, still the ringing. His neck is soaking. A pause then another ring. Ken exhails and turns over in his bed, hoping to penetrate the darkness before he answers the phone. Two more rings and he reaches out his bandaged hand, fumbling for the receiver. Oddly the phone continues to ring as he draws it from the cradle.
She was washing a colander as the television continued. The rain outside her kitchen window served only as a calming percussion to the cosy protective heat inside. She was wrapped in light flannelette and calmly engulfed in socio-scientific advances. Come ten O'clock and her masters thesis would start to moan and her eyes would droop, wanting none of it, wanting nothing but dark chocolate and another episode; There was enough to fill a life.
That's how he would have described it: Socio-scientific advances. He called it the blissful distraction coma. It was rice-cookers, music and season tickets. It wasn't something he rallied against or pitied others for missing. It was something he pitied himself for concluding upon. It's an awful state to see life as a construct. How sad, it all sounded so desperately subversive.
He had an idea for a comic book. He thought it was perfect, it gave him a surge inside that promised the power of cult belief if he just found the right people. It was a man (or a woman, just a person), who's the protagonist but rarely if ever featured in scene or first person. His life in domestic detail would ruin the tone of his intent. He carried a sniper rifle and performed random assassinations around New York, always in the darkness and never in front of other people.
She had listened to him pitch the comic in semi-jest. He'd brought it up as an offhand quirk, a toilet invention. He wanted the people in the city to question and wonder, their consciousness tracked through a heartless detective, whether death in a crisp moment was so terrible.
He focussed in on the bang as the gun fired. He wanted his citizens, his little creations he seemed to be pleading with someone to accept as human to have knee-jerk reactions to the bang. A moment of bliss or a split-second of great hope, a collapse of ecstacy where you fall through a silk hanging that was a stone wall just seconds before. The people craved a sudden death outside of cause and effect.
When he got home he'd made his mind up. The comic would never get made and his skin would never feel dry again. She walked in on the bloody tiles that night with bleary eyes and an empty cup. She stared at the dark pools of red making their way to the drain. He had left and She'd never find out if the gunman could have been her hero.
People from the nearby towns sometimes request Georges property for their weddings, something he's fine with so long as he's permitted to give a short speech. George made his fortune glass-blowing. In 2007 Bombay Sapphire paid him a neat quarter million to design their 20th anniversary bottle. It was more or less the same bottle with 2 sharp lines indented vertically on each azul face and a diamond cut perfume lid for the top.
George has a wife, a son, no arms and a labrador. His wife Linda, is a painter and master of a surprisingly fruitful opium addiction. She has invented a strange George integrated bike for reasons only love and her sex-drive can explain. George straps in like an egg in a carton. A hockey helmet chin strap braces his head against the front wheel forks. His torso slopes down at 30 degrees to his hips where Linda's feet rest in Georges pouch like obliques. Having no arms does a lot for Georges core strength but more for his capacity to graciously self-objectify. The back wheel holds firm to Georges ankles, which like most people, are at the bottom of his legs. His body's rigidity against the forces involved in this construction are further evidence of his powerful core. The dog, Mitchell, bounds alongside as they ride about the grounds and wonders how the fuck it came to this.
Young Billy, Georges son, remains inside, the shadows under his eyes bloom out across his body and counter his pale frosty exterior with a healthy shade of blueberry. His melancholy, if properly marketed is sure to tickle some globally P-plated clitoris or fully licensed balls. Billy's acute brooding stems from the relationship between a Ukrainian migrant and Georges Fazioli piano, a combination he has sponsored in his house since the early 2000's.
Evgeny has never been on a plane but his music is quantum leaps ahead of the space race. He is from Odessa and a product of violent dislocation, hardship and homelessness that in itself has never shone upon him but out, through him, in the way he speaks at the souls of complete strangers with a nervous nod or one of Chopin's nocturnes.
His morning practice pays tribute to a romantic infinity, he calmly chronicles aspects of experience for which image and motif are a crass and hollow reflection. As crescendos roll and die the beauty Billy is left with glares halogen rays on nothing he's particularly worried about, rather his unbridled experience bares him to raw affects and confusion. He is failing to distinguish between mood and essence, power and wondering, love and abandon.
Billy's elasticity is not something he fails to measure, yet through social suicide he denies himself the perpendicular view to link Evgeny's music with his own suffering. Billy wants to see a psychologist and did, yet failed to pass the parental background stage for which the textbooks have little to say about mums who literally ride dads. This alone would be a small hurdle, a simple therapist switch and omission of this ostensibly alien interaction would suffice to talk the thing out anew.
Billy's real problem is self awareness, the will to explain. He longs for a cause to face compulsory psychological assessment. Without this essential gravity the world of therapy has an innate contrition, a whispering conspiracy always slightly audible from the couch, always asking why he's saying things, what he's trying to establish, how clear his issues are to himself and how pathetic the therapist must think him to sit and pay to be interrogated, for someone to really care and take a specific interest in him. He fails entirely to arrest his sense of self judgement and thus he sits on television, broadcasting to English and Hindu speakers alike, the true content of his first world problems.
So Billy, confronting 1 grain in the muesli bar that is his chronic slump, brings his houseguest and raincloud Evgeny into a plan to label him mentally unstable. The obvious option would have been to copy the perfect blueprint of his parents mutual mobility solution, but sometimes good methods just can't be copied.
Instead he purchases a vast array of action figures and arranges them in a diorama. Billy and Evgeny neatly display the barbie's, GI Joes and green army men for extras amongst the soft straw floor of a Prada shoe-box. The less pliable toys have their shoulders melted for appropriate gesticulations of horror and praise. Evgeny, bemused, but always willingly curious (in this way a perfect child for molestation) sits behind the camera, clicking away every time Billy says 'shoot'.
The resulting stop motion video features an ant farm progression of a society in turmoil, bottlenecking where the flows were once absolute and suddenly deserting sections of previously populated shoebox. The figures change costumes numerous times and seem to forget who they are, casting love and anger at the outfits they used to wear, breaking eachother, becoming dirty and less convincing, becoming alien and disfigured from their fire surgeries. The figurines pay constant attention to a rigid cylinder conducting the musical accompaniment that is Evgeny's rendition of the moonlight sonata. With every few frames the coloured material wrapping the cylinder changes, at times reflecting the mood. With the first of the Sonata's final two chords, at what seems in a Hamlet sense, the end of the little diorama world, the cylinder is revealed as Billy's erect penis and he ejaculates all over the plastic corpses, the frame rate increases for this section giving it the visceral reality Billy feels he'll need to really capture his pseudo insanity.
He hands this piece in for his Society and culture major work but they don't think he's insane, just a boy.
'What took you into the tunnels anyway? Risky shit to go alone'
'I came upon something before. A cloth. A terrible sadness pointing down and you boys are the next link in that chain.'
'Well we're just collectors.'
'Of what?'
'Whatever they want, we go and get it.'
'And do they want anything now?'
'You could.'
'Oh. No. I'm not the kind to out-source.'
'Why are you here then?'
The air curdled. A charge from elsewhere, a jagged feel. Edges scuttled as courage wagered pride against reason, passion against bravado. I rose, intent to diffuse but so caught, so taught was our twine that any action was challenge.If you know someone well enough then simply making them aware is to control them and we were all aware of something. I had to shoot one to get out. I'd hoped for a clean shoulder but couldn't tell where what was in Adrian's flying jacket. A woman on the street screamed as I burst out the door with a hot gun in hand. I stuffed it in my pants but she only got louder.
She just stood there screaming and flailing like a fire. I couldn't leave her with the thought that gun-wielding men are loosing rounds across the city without care for their neighbours. She was caught on the edge of a prejudice she didn't deserve. I said:
'Listen mam, I know this looks rough but-
Quade appeared with blood on his hands. Mike popped out behind him yelling:
'GET EM!'
She had to trust me. I threw a few shots, grabbed the girl and flew out across the street.
Every creature has sounds to which it keys. One of mine, dice falling, maybe 200 hundred yards further in.
I was reticent to leave the cloth, but it wasn't mine to collect. Time, of which there was still none, and decision had proven that. The dice were downhill. Minutes later I was too and by this point the dank drip of the tunnel was so real I almost believed in spooky places. The men I found weren't playing dice, rather one among them had a pair that he rolled over his consciousness. He was the first man I'd seen who's manner provoked close inspection, whose being was something more than the snap drawn whole in which I'd come to be buried.
I approached their round wooden table, stopping just outside a rim of choking light. I pointed my shoes with purpose and made no attempt to cushion the pocks of my hard rubber souls. None of them skipped, ostensibly with nothing to hide. Entering their light space was like unzipping a tent. Purpose inside, nothing neon. My man spun entirely to face me.
'Who's bruised you up there?'
'Just some children earlier.'
'So You let them go?'
The haiku proving we both knew where we were, some of our stiffness evaporated. '...I've got to ask who you are?'
He looked intently at my orange socks while the other men whispered something about my getup. People assume that haunts of the eccentric come with a blasé attitude to appearance, not so.
'We'll trade names when pull up a chair, we're more casual than this.'
'Rudolph.' I said, not moving.
'Mike, Adrian and I'm Quade' He said, nodding left and right as each of them nodded in turn. Mike said I looked like a character from the Maltese Falcon, a comment I left rhetorical.
The dice fell as I sat down, acceptance, not yet a reason to conspire? It turned out they were incidental vagrants. The kind of men who couldn't stand waiting and to whom anger rarely made sense. We were close but not kindred, with differing styles but many of the same reservations. They shaped at first in the line of capturing my young assailants but killing bees, I told them, was cop-sport. It's funny how ones logic of retribution is something to trumpet about, yet equally the silent note, one of our biggest secrets. In truth I was indifferent to the fate of the scamps, but toyed along with the line before it fell nicely onto obscurity's conveyer-belt. After some slim chat about cigarettes and the wok-men I came back to the nights melody.
'I'm looking for something very particular.' A silence. I wondered if I'd fallen off something. We all looked up at the metal brimmed light hanging above us. Quade pocketed his dice and spoke with his head down.
'We got to go'
'I guess he's coming' Said Mike. I paused before taking a measured step and Adrian cheered
'THERE IT IS'
Benjamin J. G. Barnes @benjaminjgbarnes - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
