Inklings

Playing with words

[christimalia]

The News is only ‘The News’ because That Stuff rarely happens.  That’s what makes it New.

 There is no Dearth of Kindness

In this far flung world of ours.

To watch the news, anyone’d think

That the only thing holding us back

From slashing our neighbor’s throats

While they slept,

Is not knowing what time they went to bed.

 Have you never had a stranger

Offer you their place in line at the grocery store?

Have you ever dropped by a friend’s house,

Unexpectedly,

To see how they’re recovering,

And watched them get out of their sickbed

To get you some iced tea?

A piece of pie?

 Haven’t infants,

Practically wet from the womb,

Ever given you a gummy grin,

Meant to melt your heart?

That’s not gas.

Have you ever tried to walk

Your dog in the park without having

Some kid, some old woman, someone,

Stoop to pet,

To shower the creature you love,

With more love?

Some days you might as well

Just sit on a bench, holding the leash,

Waiting for the comers to come,

And coo and fawn.

 There is no dearth of kindness

Even in this me-first world of ours.

Institutions (like racism) are intolerable.

Actions (child abuse, for example) are unacceptable.

Attitudes (misogyny) are unbearable.

And a lot of the food, frankly, is designed

To kill you.

 But the people . . .

The living breathing people

The babies, the eight year olds full of unshakable wisdom,

The dads, the brothers, the skateboarders,

The sullen barista who never gets your order right,

The teacher, the tattooed bookseller, the bank teller

Smiling behind a wall of glass, the kids detained in cells,

The girl with down syndrome who’s a model IN PARIS,

The surgeon rushed off her feet, the foreign ladies,

working in a factory stuffing nylons into plastic eggs,

the ninety-year-olds who

Still need more time, who have other plans, something to say

Who, nevertheless, want a tomorrow, and another after that . . .

Me in a chlorinated swimming pool

In a silent underwater world: untouchable,

Remote and weird,

We’re still GRAND.

Don’t say otherwise.

Still perambulating miracles, every one of us.

So full of unspent, untapped, unawakened potential!

 You mean to tell me a people who produced

Shakespeare, Rosa Parks, Byron and Botticelli,

Sydney Portier, Amelia Earhart, and both Obamas,

Fitzgerald, Bradbury, and Pratchett,

Angela Davis, Richard Ayode, and Neil Gaimon.

Led Zeppelin, the Stones, AND the Beatles,

My nanny, my niece, and me,

This family of people,

This remarkable array of stardust and sunlight,

Should be incapable of a little kindness,

Of letting someone else get the last word?

Take the biggest slice?

Hold the remote control?

Saying sorry even when you’re sure you’re right?

Of not asking to speak to the manager?

Of saying yes unless you absolutely must say no?

 Of asking, “How can I make your day better?”

When our own day has been one of the world’s worst,

In the entire history of people, or days, or things being bad.

You’re a liar if you say so.

You don’t know our people,

Like I know our people.

And they’re ALL our people.

 This abundant world is abundant in kindness.

Despite certain old folks being certain

That going to Wal-Mart after dark,

Is essentially building your own coffin,

With your own hands.

 A long time ago, now,

I was walking home from the grocery store,

In January, in the snow, a little after midnight,

And a girl, chatting on her cellphone, ran a red light.

She sent me flying.

Then I crashed to earth, rag-doll style,

Broken wherever a break could manage to be.

 And this kid, this youth, this child,

Called 911 to save the life she had

Forever altered.

So brave.  So decent.  So kind.

And the ambulance was delayed.

And the fire truck was slow in the snow.

So random people, about a dozen,

Whose names I will never know,

Whom I can never thank,

Got out of their cars,

And made a circle around me,

So I wouldn’t be struck again, you see?

So that If I died on that frozen road,

I wouldn’t die alone,

In the snow, my poor dead pup just inches from me,

Splattered in blood and orange juice.

 So, don’t you ever tell me

That there was a BOGO, Prices Slashed,

Sticker Clearance, Black Friday, Cyber Monday,

Everything Must Go Sale on Kindness,

And we’ve nearly run out.

 Not when the basic ingredient of

Being Human is still

Humanity.

[christimalia]

Pacifist’s Lament A gun looks like nothing But a gun. When my father died, We cleaned is condo. I found his gun, Loaded, of course, Because my dad always said An unloaded gun Might as well be a stapler You plan to fling At an intruder’s head. I held that gun, Daddy’s gun, Dead man’s gun, And thought, It looks like nothing But a gun. Most things look like something else. Nature in her infinite wonder Still repeats herself: The way a peach Looks like a baby’s bottom And a giraffe is mostly an oversized llama. And when we MAKE, We always borrow, we always steal, Even the best imagination Is referential. Think it is a coincidence That an umbrella looks like a mushroom, A stealth fighter jet Is a manta ray in the sky, And a basketball is just A functional pumpkin? No Everything is connected. Except a Gun, Which looks like nothing But itself. It pulls light into itself, Like a black hole, It is silent menace, Like a black panther, It sings a song of potential death, Like a like a vulture, Calling for a meal. And yet it is none of those things. It is built for a hand. The worse thing about it, Is how comfortably it rests in your palm, Like it’s been waiting for you. As if you and it are one, An extension of your will, Expressed in the propulsion Of Little Lead Balls. Don’t listen; it lies. A gun, is a gun, is a gun. A tool for putting holes Through living things. And anyone who says it looks like a “seven” “A broken stick” Or an “L” has never beheld, A thing so silent So waitful, So cunning, So appallingly appealing, That it has become A universe unto itself. By Christi Manley March 2021

[christimalia]

Duppy-Man

Anne Rice’s Lestat-Fanfic

by Christi Manley

It was Bowie’s death that did it; reminded me of my rock star days.  Long behind me now.  I was sincere in my love of the music, you must believe me, on that score.  But I confess to abandoning the interest cruelly, once it had served my grand purpose. That used to be my way with things . . . with people . . . like a over-indulged kid who breaks a new toy, drops it on the floor, and moves on.  I’m trying really hard to be better now.

I mean if you can’t commit to anything, what’s eternity for?

Satan’s Night Out, our little band was called.  We were part of all that gloriously absurd New Wave Romanticism, with a little Emo pop thrown in, and a dash of Zeppelin because . . . well why not.  

I was the frontman, of course, as if I’d allow myself to be anything else.  I didn’t play an instrument.  I could’ve, mind.  If you can play a harpsichord or, God forbid, a virginal, you can play a piano.  If you can play a piano you can play one of those horrible little synthesized organs, so ubiquitous during the New Romantic era. Remember Nick Rhodes pressing a single pre-programmed, computerized button with a single manicured, gleaming, polished finger, and releasing a wave of digitized music?  I do.  That is the problem with the Dark Gift.  Too much time.  Too many tomorrows spreading out before you, too many yesterdays gently juttering in your wake.

I remember Nick Rhodes.  Do you?  Duran Duran?  I think they’re still knocking around, here and there, remnants of their former selves. I remember another pretty boy named Nicolas, also a musician.  Weapon of choice: Stradivarius violin. But I don’t want to talk about either of them. As I was saying Bowie’s death moved me to journey out of my New Orleans rooms, down to the Old Music House on Queen Anne’s.  I know there are far better places to buy an instrument.  More selection.  Hell, more lighting so you can see what your getting, not that that’s a problem for me, but there’s an ethic, right?  And all of them tend to stay open late.  

So why the Old Music House?  The man who runs the place has a huge dog that sits out side, dog called Yancy.  About two years old.  Hardly more than a puppy.  Some kind of St. Bernard and chow mix.  A mountain of cinnamon-colored hair.  He’s not fierce.   He spends most of his time napping on the doorstep, but the old man that runs the place (I don’t call him by name, because back then I didn’t know his name. It’s Plum, Tryvalian Plum, because some parents have no mercy, like that.  But when this story commences, it was part of our mutual conceit, Plum and mine’s, that I was only dropping by to visit the dog, not him.  I was Yancy’s friend) uses Yancy as a litmus test.  All the patrons have to step over or in the very least around Yancy to get inside the shop.  Those unwilling to do so, don’t come in.  

People who bleat lamely from the sidewalk, “Um, sir, could you call your dog?” are righteously ignored.  And if Yancy starts his soft baritone rumble at anyone’s approach, they are not welcome in the store.  

I was walking by a month ago, wishing (tragically, romantically, hopelessly that New Orleans would see fit to indulge me with a white Christmas, which was only a few days away.  Of course, I realize if I wanted to I could’ve set myself up in any number of alpine chalet and enjoyed a picture postcard holiday, but that’s not really me, in fact I don’t know any of my kind who do the full-on tree, or gaudy sweaters and sing silly songs, but I do like the pretty lights, and presents are always nice, but if I’d gone searching for snow it would’ve lost it’s magic, yes? That’s the whole beauty of a white Christmas, it comes to you, not you to it, or what’s the dammed point, but I digress . . . where was I) . . . oh, right. . . so I was walking down St. Anne’s moodily wishing for what I could not have.  I was passing the Old Music House, where the ancient man was smoking on his front stoop, and his ginormous puppy half-slumbered at his feet. And, as I approached, the massive beast thumped its ten-pound tail.  That’s all it took for me to focus in on him, make him suddenly all the world to me.  

I bent, soiling my favorite pair of dark green wool trousers (it was  Christmas-time after all) by allowing them to touch New Orleans’ sidewalk, then the mighty canine, a hundred and thirty pounds at least, lolled his head against my thighs to be thoroughly petted.  I obliged and he licked my face.  I lost track of time.  I think may have stayed that way with him for more than fifteen minutes.  I’ve always loved dogs.  Since I was a boy, hunting in Auvergne.  But more importantly, and I’m sure this says masses about my character and its many defects, I’ve always loved how much dogs love me.

I only looked up from this impromptu ruining of a once fabulous pair of trousers when the old black man who owns the place, and seems to be there all his waking hours, said in brisk shorthand, “Name’s Yancy.  Seems he’s taken a shine to you.”

He paused then as if spent by the effort of conversation, puffed his cigarillo, looking off into the distance in the way quite old people do, I’ve noticed.  Old people are like cats: spirits trapped in flesh.  Yes, I know you’re saying: But, Lestat, so aren’t we all?  Yes, fine, good point, well-made.  But cats and old people moreso.  They hear the chimes, the call of the beyond, long before they set foot there.  I am intermittently fascinated with the elderly.  I will after all never take my turn among them. Being what I am, at the age I was turned, and all, it doesn’t just mean never dying.  As my little dead daughter once said, it also means never, ever growing up.

I’ve been by the shop twice since then, once in jeans because I knew I was going and once in black trousers that got covered in thick red Yancy-fur, because the mood took me by surprise.  Both times I never went into the shop, the place seeming a bit too gloomy and forbidding for my tastes.  The last time I dropped by, the old man brought me a cold beer, which I had to pretend to sip and surreptitiously shared with Yancy while the old proprietor went back inside to talk a father out of buying his kid a full-sized clarinet. The boy was about nine and the father felt purchasing a child-sized one would be a waste, something he’d soon outgrow, but the old man just stared him down until he did the right thing.  When the kid and the father left with the appropriate instrument for a boy of nine, the old man came and sat on the doorstep with Yancy and me, finishing his own beer in triumphal silence.  

When I stood to go, he said, “Twenty percent off for you, anything in the shop.”

I was about to protest because the only thing I needed less than an ancient trombone, or a second-hand guitar was a discount from this proud old man, but he anticipated me and said, “Yancy is a sensitive.  He likes you.  He knows about folks.  We gotta close now.  Time for our supper.”

Yancy got the part of him that fit on my lap off and heaved the rest up, stretched, and followed the old man back into the shop, both of them leaving me on the stoop all alone.  I was moved beyond words anyway.  Not by the offer of the discount but because I was, at least in that rare moment ‘folks’ and not only ‘folks,’ but by implication good folks.  I don’t think I’ve ever been folks, not before my transformation, and certainly not since.  I was always a misfit, though I wore it dashingly and didn’t really care. But something about being included in the apparently selective cadre of other ‘folks’ upon whom the giant beast had put his massive paw of approval touched me. Of course, I didn’t think I’d ever have occasion to actually take advantage of the old man’s kind offer, then Bowie died.

A word about David Bowie.  Well not Bowie, in particular, but rather the general, existential, extrapolated Bowie. Y’see, the problem with this half-life called vampirism is time.  Blessed with too much of it, we are fated to see genius born (or hatched as may’ve been the case with that odd, gender-bending, changling that was Bowie), blossom, flourish and die.  

People who are simply better than I will ever be (remember when I wanted the old pontiff to make me a living saint?) people with more talent than I will ever have, if I live until the stars wink out, they come they go. Sometimes they leave too early, Joplin, Lennon, Hendrix . . . even Bowie, for sixty-nine is no great age in these modern times.  Sometimes, even worse, they leave too late, wearing the shriveled husk of their former glory wrapped loosely around them, the way a June-time locust wears its shell.  But at least it was theirs.  No one can ever take that away from them.  And what can I do but watch their passing with all the fleeting, pointless excitement of a man glimpsing a falling star.  Mon Dieu, poor you.  You catch Lestat in reflective and melancholy mood. They don’t last long, but they last deep.

Like Yancy I am a bit of a sensitive too, and when I woke on the evening of David Bowie’s death, I knew of his passing before I turned on my tablet.  I felt it. I had woken humming Ziggy Stardust, and couldn’t stop.  

Ziggy played for time, jiving us that we was voodoo The kids was just crass. He was the nazz, With God given ass. He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar . . .

 In the days that followed, even if I wasn’t humming it aloud, I was humming it inside.  It wouldn’t have been so persistent if I weren’t alone, but I was going through one of my self-destructive phases where I push everyone I love away.  Eventually I will have to go to them on bended knee and apologize for being such an ass, but that is one of the few actual gifts proffered by the Dark Gift: with us, eventually can take quite a while.  If Louis, or Armand, or Merrick the gorgeous Mayfair Witch, were staying with me, they might have helped me exorcise the song but they weren’t. And on my own, I could only think of one way.

“I want a guitar,” I announced to the venerable proprietor, as I approached his shop that evening.  Yancy raised himself from his habitual station and came to lean against me. If you are accustomed to the ways of giant dogs, you know how to anticipate the lean.  You have to put your legs slightly apart, and lock your stance, otherwise they’ll knock you over, even me.  I didn’t have to stoop to pet Yancy, he reached that high on my body, but I did so I could bury my face in the flowing warmth of his neck, ruffling my face through all that fur.  I smelled his blood, but it didn’t entice me.  Not that I would’ve if it had . . . no never that.  I don’t do innocents any more, and nothing and no one is more innocent than a dog who trusts you.

Yancy smelled of mint soap and faded sunshine, and clean, well-fed, happy, dog.  Having my arms around him, even briefly was like embracing a bear.  The old man rose from the wire mesh chair he kept on the stoop and gestured for Yancy and me to follow him.  

I hesitated before crossing the threshold.  Most definitely not because of that old chestnut about us needing a verbal invitation from the owner of the place.  Absolute rot and nonsense, I go wherever I like.  But the fact that I hesitated is important for what follows.  It’s important that I say I had a funny feeling.  Yes, I know funny feeling is not exactly literary or evocative.  In fact it rather sounds like a three year old trying to describe tummy troubles to his mother, but there you go.  I’d be lying if I said it was anything more than that.

“What kind of guitar?” the old man asked.

I wanted to say electric, though I understood enough to know that would involve amplifiers and the like.  I meant to say something very rock-and-roll, glam, and cool.  Très, très Ziggy Stardust.  For preference dark purple.  Inlayed with a swirl of abalone.  But before I could say anything, Yancy who was sitting at the shop owner’s side, like a small ginger-furred mountain, thumped that massive tail of his as he’d done on the day we first met.  

And when I looked at him, he looked toward a vintage acoustic guitar hanging from pegs on the wall, in an unfrequented corner of the dusty store.  It was such a distinct and obvious recommendation that both the old man and I couldn’t help following his gaze.  I had the strange sense that guitar had been hanging there forever.  Literally forever.  Like at the dawn of time, when brontosaurus languidly sucked down wet cypress leaves in the swampland that would someday become the water-locked Basin City, somewhere hanging in the middle of the air, where millions of years later there would be a street called Saint Anne and a neglected little music shop on said street, was that guitar.  Without a word to me, the old man strode over and plucked it from its place, where it had obviously resided for so long that the paint on the wall was a slightly different color behind it.

He put it on the counter and lovingly wiped a felt cloth over the wood.  “Yancey-boy says this is the one,” he stated as if it were a fait accompli.

I blushed.  I could feel heat creeping in my cheeks, and even given the fact that I’d fed heartily before hurrying to the store, that still justifies commentary, because I am not one of nature’s blushers.  Blushing implies embarrassment and/or discomfiture, and I am famously at ease wherever I am and whatever I’m doing.  But I blushed because I couldn’t quite bring myself to say I didn’t want that damn guitar.  It was nothing like the one I wanted.  I had seen myself, in the privacy of my mind’s eye, striking Ziggy Stardust-like poses in the mirror as I learned to play the song repetitively marching through my head, and then learned to play it left-handed as the lyrics demanded.

This was not the kind of guitar a man struck dramatic rock star poses with.  Or a vampire, for that matter, y’know what I mean.  It didn’t have zing or flair.  It was acoustic for starters.  But that might have been overcome if it weren’t so . . . so real.  You’re saying, what do you mean real, Lestat, aren’t you, pedantic little soul that you are?  Did you expect the man to sell you an imaginary guitar?  

Well, first of all, don’t be a smart ass and yes, to answer your question I kind of did. I may have forgotten to mention before, but I couldn’t actually play guitar at that point.  I’ve always had an affinity for music, and I was certain I could pick it up passably in a few days, due to my preternatural senses, but I had expected a guitar that would inspire me to flights of fancy.  That was not this guitar.  The facing was black, pure silken black.  The body was marled rosewood.  And I could feel something radiating off of it. I touched it hesitantly, and Yancey barked. Both his owner and I looked at him in surprise.  Yancy wasn’t a vocal dog.  But he gave me a big doggy grin of encouragement and thumped his tail several more times.

Not to take the guitar at that point would be a betrayal of our friendship.  I did treat myself to a case that was lined in deep purple crushed velvet, but the black guitar looked ill at ease in it even as the old man nestled it inside. He noticed, too.

“You’re sure that’s the case you want?’ he asked with a frown.

A bit sniffily I assured him it was, and went out into the night trying to carry my guitar like it was the most natural thing in the world. For the next three days, intermittently staring at the case, or deliberately avoiding staring at the case, took the place of my Bowie obsession.  It even managed to cast that wonderful, brilliant, but now rather annoying song out of my head for hours on end.  When I put the unopened case inside my master closet, one morning just as dawn was about to render me inert for the day, I had to confess something to myself I’d been hoping to avoid saying even in the confines of my own mind: I  was afraid of it.  Of an instrument.  On which I had used my Yancy’s buddy twenty percent discount.

Well, it was intolerable for me that I, Lestat the Wollfkiller, should let a perfectly harmless, inert object get the better of me, so when I woke that evening.  I bathed and dressed hurriedly, which I never do, went out, found my meal.  Child-molester, who frequently had sex with his own seven-year-old nephew.  Delicious and no great loss.  Then I came back to the house in a flurry, arranged the sheet music I’d downloaded off the internet onto my bed (three separate Bowie songs, Life on Mars as an appetizer, Wild is the Wind (yes, I know not his originally but mine would be a fitting tribute to his memory) and Ziggy Stardust for the penultimate dessert) and opened the guitar case, determined to master the music before dawn.

The moment I had the cursed thing on my lap, the moment I had it cradled in my arms, and moved my fingers over its strings for the first time, I knew I wasn’t alone.  I turned and gasped. I couldn’t have stifled that gasp for a million dollars.  

She was sitting on the other side of my bed.  Staring at me, thoughtfully.  A young woman of about thirty in a chambray peasant blouse and a flowy floral skirt that went down to her ankles.  Bare feet.  Delicate ankle tattoo.  Skin the color of nutmeg, long black dreadlocks that hung to her waist, filled with multicolored ribbon, shells, pierced coins and other little trinkets. Not pretty but statuesque.  Noble, y’know?  Tall, sturdy and long-necked.  Semi-transparent but gaining opacity with every passing moment.  The kind of woman who would own a guitar like this, and love it.  She had no scent.  No blood flowed though her veins.  No heart beat in her chest.

Now if there is one thing I am truly genuinely frightened of it’s ghosts.  It may be a vampire thing.  I mean, I’d have to be a full blown psychopath not to have some remorse for some of the lives that have been cut short so that mine may go on.  And if one soul can return from the Great Whatever, then why not all the people I’ve sent to early graves?  Indeed, why not anybody?  So as I say, it might be a vampire thing, but I suspect it’s more a personal Lestat-thing. They just freak me out.  So there I was, numb fingers resting ow what I could only think of as her guitar, silently freaking out.

“That is a truly God-awful case,” she said, glancing at the purple velvet-lined interior with a slight wince of distaste.  There was French in her voice.  Not pure French.  A colonial patois but there was a slight island lilt to it, too.  As if she had been born on some coconut, mango, guava strewn shore, but raised here in the states.

“I like it,” I whispered, because I was scared, not cowed and I thought it best she know that right up front.

She glanced around my bedroom slowly, taking in my rather baroque design style, including the burgundy velvet canopy that surrounds my enormous bed, with its rococo headboard.  It even has cherubs.  I am fond of cherubs. “Yes, I can see how you might,” she said, allowing herself the briefest of smiles, as she touched the overblown silk tassels.

“They keep out the light,” I said a bit testily, in defense of my brocade canopy.  The fear was seeping away.  It was hard to argue décor while terrified.  Though I knew if she moved towards me, even the slightest little bit, I’d freeze again, and I knew she was likely to move.  Eventually.

She looked at me again, even longer this time, knowing me for what I was.  And made a soft noise of acknowledgement before asking, “Why’d you take so long to open the case, Vampire?  Did you know I was there inside?  Was that supposed to be some kinda, punishment?  For me makin you buy somethin’ you didna want?”

The way she said ‘vampire’ enabled me to guess her origin as Guadeloupe, with relocation to Louisiana as a young girl.  There was a possibility of Martinique in her accent, I suppose, but I didn’t think so.  

I belatedly realized she was waiting a reply.  “No I was just busy the past few days,” I lied, “Too busy to give such a fine instrument the attention it deserves, that’s all.  And I’d thank you not to call me Vampire, like that, Mademoiselle.  It’s my condition, not my name.  How would you like it if I simply called you ‘Ghost’?  I am Lestat de Lioncourt, and this is my home, my bedroom you are haunting, my actual bed, in fact.”

I paused, staring into chocolate brown eyes that never blinked, and gathered if I was waiting for an apology for her rude intrusion, that I ought to settle in and find a good book to read, because I’d be waiting some while.  “I don’t usually entertain strangers in my bedroom,” I said sounding prudish and petulant even to my own ears, “I don’t suppose you can tell me your name?”

“Of course I can.  Honoria Bouligat.”

“Oh,” I said, rather deflated, only now realizing I’d anticipated a bit more mystery than that and had been rather looking forward to it. “I thought names had power among your kind.”

“Names always have power,” she replied reasonably.

“Quite,” I said for something to say.  There was something in her insistent, casual frankness that took my breath away.  People always say that like it’s a good thing, it took my breath away, but when you think about it, I mean the briefest analysis of the words, it’s not that awesome.  Her words came back to me.  “What do you mean you made me buy the guitar?”

“Don’t be obtuse,” she said glancing down at the broken watch on her wrist, and then at the clock on my bedside table, then putting her own watch to her ear and shaking it rather hopelessly, for a tick that would not come.  “You love Yancey the Dog,” she explained as if to a child, “Yancey can always see me, whether I want him to or not.  Some creatures are just attuned that way.  So, I stood by my guitar entertaining him and telling him he was a good, good, boy and a lovely, smart boy, so he would force your attention in that direction.  I knew you wouldn’t be able to refuse him, though you would’ve most certainly refused me. You fear duppies.”

I’m no walking-talking Google, but I knew duppy was one of the many island names for ghosts.  But a certain kind of ghost.  Not your angry ghost randomly hurling ectoplasm everywhere, hungering to re-inhabit living flesh.  Not your confused gossamer spirit type, and has to moan dismally all the time in lieu actually asking for what it wants.  Not a poltergeist getting its kicks floating your favorite radio across the room, before hurling it to the floor in an explosion of plastic and sprockets.  Not the lingering family protector like Old Julien Mayfair had been when he was plaguing me about staying away from one of his beloved descendants, the magnificent Rowen Mayfair.  

If I remembered correctly, duppies were spirits who, for one reason another, had chosen not to move on.  They’d peeped into the vast beyond and shrugged.  They were content here.  They weren’t seeking.  They didn’t commune with the Deity.  They lived half in the spirit world, half in our realm. And the one sitting across from me was the first one I’d ever met.  Yet in the lager sense, she was entirely right; I did fear duppies.

Though she shouldn’t have said it.  Not just thrown it out there like a gauntlet.  However, whatever passed for manners in my world, obviously held no sway over this creature.  This Honoria.

She wasn’t exactly rude.  Matter-of-fact is a more apt description, but it doesn’t quite do her justice either.  She reminded me of my mother, actually.  The same kind of brusque thoughtfulness. Zero time or tolerance for bullshit. Huge amounts of energy and passion for the things she cares about, my mother I mean, and as it turns out Honoria, too.  But an extraordinarily comprehensive list of things in the world that qualified as bullshit. Me, I’ve always had rather expansive tastes.  Open to new experiences.  

“You were a musician? You made your living with this guitar?”

She regarded me and allowed herself a little nod.  “Do you always ask questions you already know the answer to?”

“No Miss Honoria,” I remarked, observing she wore no wedding band and somehow feeling rather formal with her, “I was working my way ‘round to asking . . .”

“Oh,” she said. “Nothing terribly exciting.  It wasn’t a murder or anything.  I had a residency at Julliard for a semester.  They’d asked me to stay on, and I was considering it.  I loved the school, the school was glorious, but New York wasn’t my cup of . . . anything.  I missed the South.  Hated the snow and the snobbery, up there.  Which isn’t a patch on the first-rate snobbery we have down here.  I hadn’t made up my mind, yet.  Well, I say I hadn’t but it obviously wasn’t where my soul was since I ended up back here.  You know, subsequently.”

“Right,” I said, indicating that I understood.

“I was staying in this commune kinda flat.  You know the kinda place I mean.  One of those big industrial lofts, with a pronounced lack of interior walls.  Where everybody shares everything, beds, toothbrushes, underwear.  I came home one afternoon and one of my flatmates was sitting around eating Froot-Loops wearing my actual panties.  I let him keep them.

“On the weekends I played weddings and the like for money. I was getting out of a cab, and reached back in to get the guitar.  Someone sideswiped my cab.  Crushed me flat and tore the door clean off.  The guitar, as you see, was just fine.  Still sitting on the back seat of the taxi.  My flatmates divided all my stuff between them, except the guitar.  I woulda haunted their asses but good if they’d kept it.  They sent it back here to my family, but my mama couldna bear the sight of it, so she sold it to Mr. Plum for his shop, and there it stayed. Me with it.  Year after interminable year.  Until you. I’ve been waiting for you.  Not you specifically, but someone like you.”

“A vampire?”

She shrugged.  “A vampire. A witch.  A mage. A seer.  Just someone who I could manifest to.  Yancy’s a sweet pup, and Mr. Plum is right, he’s sensitive, but my conversations with him tend to be a bit one-sided.”

My head was reeling.  She was waiting.  What in the hell did she mean she’d been waiting?  That’s the problem with ghosts, even a rather forthright duppy such as this one, harder to pin-down than a puddle of Mercury.  “Wait, you had loft-space in New York city?  And it was a commune?  How long ago was this?”

“February of ‘seventy-five.”

“Oh, Honoria, my dear, this is New Orleans. In the Year of our Lord two thousand and sixteen.  You mean to say no one who is remotely psychically sensitive has walked into that music shop in four decades?  I wouldn’t believe that if it were a stationary store in downtown Peoria, but if musicians aren’t attuned to the Otherworld, and if New Orleans isn’t the place to find someone better to follow home than me, someone who as you say is scared of duppies, then I don’t know where is.”

She smiled, and it was the first time I’d seen her really smile. It made the little blond hairs on the back of neck stand up.  Did I say she wasn’t pretty?  More the fool me.  Well, she still wasn’t pretty but she was sexy as all hell.  Her smile was quixotic.  She has dimples.  And a way of nibbling back the smile with her top teeth, as if she’s scared she’s given too much of herself away with that frank, mischievous grin.  And those eyes . . . those thoughtful, intelligent eyes could have melted butter in a glance.  My fear was suddenly renewed afresh, but it went rioting through me in a whirlpool of other feelings, the only one of which I could put a name to was suspicion.  

“No you weren’t the first I coulda gone home with,” she admitted, “You were the first one I wanted to go home with.”

“Why?” I my voice suddenly an involuntary whisper.

She studied me then asked a second time, “Do you always ask questions you already know the answer to?”

Then she was inches away from me.  She didn’t do my trick; moving too fast for the eye to see. She did magic. The sheet music was suddenly on my bedside table, under the little black crystal Elephant-God Ganish, I used as a paperweight.  The guitar was back in the case in the corner, safely out of the way of anything that might happen.  And she was close enough that I could have counted her individual eyelashes.  

“You were attracted to me?” I asked hoarsely.  “That’s why?”

She did one of those brisk micro-nods that I was beginning to realize were a habit of hers.  “And I liked you.”

“Why?” I asked, sounding modest, which I am not. Physical attraction I could understand. Lust, I could see how she might get there.  But anything more?  From the handful of times I’d come by the shop, hanging out on the front stoop? Why?

“Mostly because of how you were with the dog,” she stated, moving fractionally closer, which was as close as she could move without actually touching me.  “The dog was a test.  Dogs are always a test.”

“Of?”

“Of how you’ll treat somebody who’ll love you no matter what the fuck you do.”

She might not have a heartbeat, but mine was beating wildly, I could feel the pulse on the side of my neck.  I was warm with the borrowed blood of the pervert.  It was flowing through me, rushing through my veins, which suddenly seemed like a very good thing.  I may have fought the insane impulse to follow this where ever it might lead if she hadn’t said the thing about the dog.  She won me over with the insight about Yancy.  

           She brushed a thumb across my bottom lip. Just that little gesture.  Her touch was patient.  Gently exploratory.  As if I were skittish.  As if I might run.  As if . . . “Are you still scared of me, Duppy-Man?’ she asked, soft and low.

I kissed her.  Really kissed her.  Exploring those lush lips slowly and memorizing the sating feel of them between my teeth and fangs.  “Yes,” I said.  Because it was suddenly true more than ever.  And that was a delicious, giddy, wonderful thing.  

I pulled her on top of me.  So she straddled my lap.  She was warm, and soft, and pliant.  But she had no human fragrance.  I realized I missed it on some profound, visceral level.  I was, in fact, uncertain I could go on without it.  I didn’t mind that she didn’t need to blink, that she didn’t sweat, that there was no familiar thudding in her chest. But I was, when all was said and done, a predator, and being unable to smell her, made her too foreign, too much of a ghost.  

How I explained the problem to the gloriously naked woman in my arms (yes that was part of her magic, the hair was suddenly pinned up loosely, and the clothes, which I now recognized as Uptown Hippie-drag for a fancy bohemian wedding, circa nineteen-seventy five, were folded on a nearby chair) I can’t really say.  I pray I didn’t actually ask to smell her, but in the heat of the moment, who knows the exact words.

At any rate there was suddenly thick incense in the air, the wafting smoke of some pretty heady marijuana, and my own scented candles flared to life. Honoria, she smelled of patchouli and cardamom oils, and healthy young human female.  And excitement.  It was an illusion, but it was a convincing illusion.  One that I could quite happily live with for the next half hour or so. Still, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to . . . that is to say . . . I mean, usually the blood drinking is as close to orgasmic as my kind comes.  But ghosts are by definition magical creatures, she took my body over and made certain it gave her what she wanted.  She possessed me.

It’s been nearly a month since she arrived.  I don’t go out anymore except to feed.  And to get us supplies from the newspaper stand. Glossy magazines, trashy paperback novels, several different newspapers.  My old friends, my old loves, think I am walled away sulking over some imagined slight, and it suits my fancy to let them believe so. Because, y’see, once they meet her, she won’t be mine any more.  Not just mine, anyway.  It’s been a long time since anyone has consented to be just mine.

I haven’t invited her to come with me when I feed.  As intoxicating as I find it, the hunt, the thrall, the dominion over evil (however brief it might be until their dark flame is extinguished), I’ve had the sense that Honoria might find it somewhat less than romantic.  She was a vegetarian in life.  It was the seventies, go figure.  Her specialty was curried dish called korma eaten with bits of flat bread brushed with olive oil.  Obviously, I have never tasted this so-called korma, but she has described it to me in some detail.  It sounds dreadful.  My point is that I haven’t insisted she join me on my nightly excursions out of respect for her finer feelings.  Honoria is not me.  She is her own wondrous and separate thing.  So there’s that to my detractors, see, I need not always be the Brat-prince. I can learn, can evolve.  How do you like them apples from your well-developed, sensitive, proto-feminist, twenty-first century vampire?

We have, however, gone by the music shop to visit the dog Yancy. It was our first outing together. Kind of a date, actually.  People saw me talking to nothing.  Laughing with no one. I didn’t give a flying fig.

When I close the guitar case Honoria is gone.  When I touch the strings, she is back.  It’s not a power I intend to abuse.  Everyday, just before my fingers brush the instrument’s strings, I have this moment of pure terror that she will have moved on.  That she might’ve abruptly given up her duppy-hood and gone seeking a fresh start.  Elsewhere. Then she’s there, and I’m so relieved, I nearly cry.  OK twice I actually did cry.  Just a little.  I’ve been left before.

I know everyone sings the praises of new love.  So why should I be any different?  Surely, I am still a part of the throng that is every one. Honoria, she’s smart, funny, in a wry kind of way.  Remarkably grounded, for a ghost.  She wears spectacles when she reads.  I don’t know if it’s just an old habit, or if her eyes are no better as a duppy than they had been when she was alive.   But she’s dead sexy in glasses, my Honoria.  

She doesn’t want me to contact her family.  She doesn’t have unfinished business.  No mysteries to solve, or sins to confess, or long lost diaries to retrieve.  For now all she wants is to read the paper, listen to music, and make love with me.  Not a bad deal.  We had been together a week before she consented to play the guitar for me.   She was so good.  Too good. I was intimidated.  I know, me, intimidated.  

I still longed to play Ziggy Stardust, even acoustically, though I wouldn’t dare do the rock-star poses, for fear Honoria might kill herself again with laughter.  She apparently guessed that I was hesitant on her account because in recent days she’s taken out the sheet music and offered to teach me.  I demurred.  I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of her, curse my pride.

Tonight, though, she must have had enough of my excuses because she came and placed the guitar in my lap, as lovingly as a wife handing an infant to its father.  “Trust me?” Honoria asked, positioning herself behind me, bare knees pressing against the outsides of my thighs, and turning my head forward with both hands every time I tried to look back.

“Yes,” I said simply.

“Then let me in, Duppy-Man.”

I felt some mental barrier fall that I hadn’t even known was there, and my ghost-lover, that’s right I said it, I ain’t ashamed, my ghost-lover seeped into my flesh.  I felt her stretching her invisible limbs inside my own. Her hands stretching out inside my hands as they were gloves.  She kissed me lightly from the inside.  Inside my fucking skull.  Creepy girl, I shivered and said, “Stop that,”

“Sorry,” she laughed unapologetically, and I immediately wanted her to do it again.  That’s me, shamelessly fickle.

She moved my hands like a woman’s hands.  Turning them this way and that, to get a feel for them.  It was fascinating.  Disconcerting and, yeah, a bit creepy, but fascinating.  She moved my fingers like a classically trained guitarist moves her fingers.  The left hand brought the sheet music a little closer to our shared eyes.  And she strummed a downbeat.  Or rather I did.  Or we did, you know what I mean.  

And once again, with the supple elegance of a ghost, Ziggy played guitar.

[christimalia]

Gatsby Analysis 1

Discuss two symbols that describe the loneliness of the upper class in "The Great Gatsby" with quotes from the text.

by Christi Manley

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One of the more obvious symbols in The Great Gatsby is Jay Gatsby’s delightfully lavish, never-ending parties, themselves.  He throws these fabulous parties all summer long, tempting all of New York (upper and lower class, mobsters and film-stars, and just about anyone else who could manage to get a ride) to pile into their cars and head out to his flamboyant bashes on West Egg.  Gatsby is the host, but he almost never attends his own parties.  While people dance across his estate, and swim in his pool, or on his private beach, he hides upstairs in the house, often on the phone conducting his shady business.  His guests speculate and gossip about him, with casual cruelty as they eat his food and drink his champagne:

“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once."

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.

"I don't think it's so much THAT," argued Lucille skeptically; "it's more that he was a German spy during the war."

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany," he assured us positively. (Fitzgerald, Chapter Three)

It is obvious to Nick, and through him to the reader, that despite the fact that Gatsby always keeps his estate filled with "interesting people," as Jay puts it, their company is not intimate or comforting.  He is surrounded by leeches . . .  pretty, shiny, vampires . . . rather than friends, at least that’s his plight until Nick arrives and those leeches do nothing to fight his loneliness.

 Another symbol of the loneliness that comes with wealth in The Great Gatsby is the direct antithesis of Jay's wonderful parties: his sad, dismal, little funeral.  In the end, after all he had sacrificed for Daisy, she doesn’t even come to see him buried. Her cousin, Nick, says she doesn’t do so much as send flowers or a card.  Also absent are the hordes of partiers who had spent years as Gatsby's parasites. Jay Gatsby's funeral is attended by Nick, who will spend the rest of his life missing his tragic friend, and Mr. Gatz, the poor, broken, old man who still thinks of himself as Gatsby's father, despite the fact that his son had run away from him and the dustbowl farming life he had to offer years ago. Aside from them, as Fitzgerald so elegantly puts it, "Nobody came."

[christimalia]

Hamlet Analysis 1

In the play Hamlet, to what standards does Claudius hold Hamlet?

Citing at least two pieces of evidence as support.

  To answer this question the reader need look no further than the first interaction Shakespeare presents between the famous uncle and his even more famous nephew.  In Act one scene two, Claudius declaims the following:

'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, 290 To give these mourning duties to your father;  But you must know, your father lost a father;  That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound  In filial obligation for some term  To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever 295 In obstinate condolement is a course  Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief;

In a strange way what Claudius is recommending to his nephew is a kind of generic grief, without being so gauche as to descend into particulars.  He’s saying here that all sons have a duty to mourn their dead fathers. No matter how they felt about one another in life.  The son grieves and graves publicly almost as a kind of duty tax for the passing of the man who gave him life.  Claudius approves heartily of this kind of mourning, but he doesn’t want to go anywhere near the specific, particular, and complex relationship his oh-so sensitive nephew had with his brother, the war-hero, who he has so recently murdered.  He knows that if Hamlet can make his grief an abstract thing, the sooner the young man might recover.  And the sooner Hamlet recovers from all this moody, sullen, black-wearing grief, the better for Claudius.  Even if he had not committed fratricide, Claudius would still be desperately trying to get on with the celebrations of his recent marriage, and his ascent to the throne, and find his footing, now that he’s finally been relieved of his big brother’s, Hamlet senior’s, shadow.  The very last thing Claudius feels he needs is some moody boy glooming around the court as a kind of perpetual reminder of how he got the girl (Gertrude) and the throne and all the perks that come with them.  He accuses his nephew of being unmanly in his grief, kind of girlish, and by sexist implication, kind of weak.

 Later in this same speech Claudius says:

It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,  A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,  An understanding simple and unschool'd; 300 For what we know must be, and is as common  As any the most vulgar thing to sense,  Why should we in our peevish opposition  Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,  A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, 305 To reason most absurd, whose common theme  Is death of fathers.

He is saying here that Hamlet is essentially being a silly child, a simpleton and sort of  suspiciously atheistic.  Claudius implies that if God has a plan for everyone and everything, then to object so strongly to his father’s passing is a backhanded way of spitting in the eye of God, and on His plan.  This is incredible hypocrisy coming from Claudius since, for him to actually believe that, would imply that it was God’s plan for him to sneak up on his sleeping brother, out in the garden, and poor a corrosive poison into his ear.  The subtext of both these passages is that Hamlet is making a big deal out of nothing since the death of fathers is nothing but a “common theme” to us all.  Essentially insisting, both in word and in tone, that since millions of sons have buried their father before Hamlet, and millions will bury theirs afterwards, that Hamlet’s just being a big old baby by acting as if he’s allowed to grieve his own father’s death in his own particular way.  Because Claudius is a liar, who feigns most of his emotions and nearly all of his motivations, because he lives behind a mask and dares not speak his truth to anyone, he cannot imagine that his nephew’s deep pain could be sincere.  He can’t imagine being so naked, raw, or vulnerable.  He has no empathy.

[christimalia]

Wuthering Heights Analysis

By Christi Manley

Why does Catherine marry Linton in Wuthering Heights and where does Heathcliff go during his time away?

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Catherine decides to marry Edgar Linton to escape Wuthering Heights. This is ironic, since it is the ultimate fate of her unquiet soul to roam those misty, muddy moors which brought Heathcliff and her so much joy as children, seeking to gain entry back into her childhood home.   Just as Heathcliff found their proximity to the Linton children a kind of vague torture growing up, the reader discovers that Catherine did as well, however they were both tortured by the presence of these neighbor-children for different reasons. Heathcliff always despised them, and resented the influence they had on his Cathy.  However, her response to Linton’s proposal reveals a long-held desire  to be surrounded by nice, clean, expensive things and by mild, pleasant and civilized people, though she freely admits to Nelly that she is neither mild, pleasant nor civilized.  

 As much as Cathy is running away from her elder brother’s feeble, drunken attempts at tyranny over her, from Heathcliff and her passion for him, she also wants a break from the overwhelming burden of being herself, and feels Linton might be just the thing to provide this much needed diversion.  She tells Nelly of dream of being scorned by angels and kicked out of heaven, and how grateful she was not to be allowed in heaven, then admits, “ I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

 When Heathcliff hears this, he does run away from home for a time.  He wants to prove Catherine wrong.  Although he does come back to Wuthering Heights, wealthy and with a newly acquired-aristocratic bearing, he cannot be civilized because he is, at heart, a wild and unbroken thing.  Nelly guesses he may have spent some time in the army, but Heathcliff neither confirms or denies how he’s made a lifetime of money in so few years, though the reader has to suspect something very underhanded, if not criminal, that required the thinnest veneer of propriety.

[christimalia]

I’m not sure whether it was because of my recent re-watching of Julie & Julia or the collection of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks that I raked in for Christmas, but when I returned to my apartment after winter break, I had one purpose: I was going to bring my Ina Garten obsession to life and cook like the […]

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I f*cking loved this article.  It struck just the right note, y’know.  I WILL BE TRYING SOMETHING VERY SIMILAR SOON SO IT GOT ME EXCITED.

[christimalia]

Bitten by the Hand that Feeds You

   Now that we have the entire scope offered by all three seasons of Hannibal, and despite the hope offered by our  Reichenbach Falls send off, they may be (heaven forefend) all the Hannibal we ever get, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jack Crawford.  Or more specifically who he was to Hannibal.  It would be terribly easy to see Jack as a cat’s paw, a dupe, a frustrated reactionary, and I grant you that over the seasons he was often all those things at some time or another.  He was always the one standing in the shadows with the monster and never looking in the right place until it was far too late . . . poor Jack . . . and yet, that’s not all he is.  If the brilliant but ever-floundering Will is Hannibal’s deepest obsession, his unwitting love, the distorted carnival mirror which allows him to see the truest version of himself, the one whom he is sending out his siren’s serenade to, then Jack is his buddy.  A rarity in Hannibal’s life, almost as precious as Will.  Jack was his friend.

 Certainly this is who Jack thinks he is in season one. No doubt if we could crack Hannibal open with more force than the oh-so-subtle Belinda was ever willing to do, the brilliant doctor would say that keeping Jack close was simply a matter of good strategy.  It was “educational” to see what his foe was doing.  It was amusing to see Jack scrabble like an upended dying roach, desperate and hopeless in his frantic efforts to right himself and resume a normal existence.  It did the mighty Lecter ego a world of good to personally bear witness to Jack’s many humiliations and false starts.  A normal person would no doubt be taking umbrage with my thesis and asking what kind of friendship is that? To which I would answer the Hannibal kind.

 So it is not only Jack’s inability to see Hannibal for who he is that makes them friends.   It is also Jack’s intelligence, his drive, and his methodical fortitude that give Hannibal an obviously much-needed break from Will’s frailty. In other words, it isn’t only in Will that Hannibal sees a broken reflection of himself.  If Hannibal suggests constantly to Will that he is what Will might become, then Jack suggests to Hannibal who he might have been if he had employed his brilliance elsewhere.

 Where am I getting this peculiar definition of friendship?  In the world of Hannibal intimacy  and some version of the word friendship are used in nearly every episode, at least until the third season when Belinda finally defines what is going on between ‘her husband’ and Will as a passionate love story with a consummation of killing at hits heart rather than a consummation of actual lovemaking.  However it’s not the repeated use of the word friendship that actually sent me down this path with Jack and Hannibal.  It is rather Will who opened my eyes to how to properly view Hannibal in this context.

 In season one, Jack asks if the Ripper is a psychopath.  Will replies that no he is a pitiful thing, emotionally deformed since birth, in a way that other people sensed intuitively.  And were repulsed by.  He suggests that even the nurses in the birthing ward wanted Hannibal to die, without entirely knowing why.  He speaks to Hannibal learning to pass as a defense mechanism, against this repulsion, then finally concludes with, “He’s something we don’t have a word for yet.”  In this way Hannibal is not poised at the hunter and slaughter of his fellow man, rather he is poised as something other that has to learn affection for this foreign species he resembles on a case by case basis.  He has no natural fellow-felling, precisely because he has no fellows.

 If we accept Will’s analysis, then the marvel is not that Hannibal has so few friends, so few intimates, the marvel is that he has any.  Hannibal trusts (uses) Jack to save him when he is being tortured to death.  He doesn’t just bring Bella back from the brink of assisted suicide to be cruel. And it is not solely because he admires her beauty and dignity, though he obviously does.  It is not simply to put Jack in his debt, and to emotionally blindside him; though that’s obviously a perk.  He does it because he wants to; and on the surface that kind of whim is not unusual in the Lecter psychology.  There are plenty of things Hannibal does just to see how they’ll play out, always with the caveat that if things stray too far away from his own personal interests, he knows how to course-correct with a breathtaking degree of swift brutality.  

 But in addition to saving Bella because it suited him, he also does it for Jack.  There are more dinners alone with Jack than any other characters in the Hannibalistic sphere.  Why? Because in a weird way Hannibal can relax with Jack.  Reminiscent of Hannibal’s advice to his surrogate daughter Abigail after she’d murdered someone, Hannibal doesn’t lie about everything to Jack.  The investigator would undoubtedly sense that.  Instead he lies to Jack about one thing, being the serial killer that Jack is searching for.  Aside from that single, though admittedly major detail, he allows himself to be utterly real with Jack.  They’ve much in common. Their mutual charm, refinement, their resilience and the fact that they are both bon-vivants under that beautifully reserved veneer.  

 Among all the higher beasts, a shared meal is a sign of amity and trust.  And Hannibal is undeniably a higher beast of some sort . . . an alpha-predator.  To rephrase my case for Jack and Hannibal’s mutual (though begrudging) respect, admiration, and fondness in Biblical terms, Jack has eaten more of his bread and salt than any other character in the series.  And also more of his meat. Never forget the meat.

[christimalia]

Much of my new novel is on Wattpad.  Please check it out.

Prince of Mists and Clouds - Chapter Fifteen (on Wattpad) http://w.tt/1Zip4Qm In the queendom of Great Iris, only extraordinary children grow up to become Treasures. Treasures are educated by the church to become "Vessels of Pleasure." Treasures are spoiled, and pampered and honored. Treasures have very special gifts, supposedly endowed upon them by saints. Treasures are the property of the Queen. Treasures are traded among the aristocracy so that a lucky few might know a variety of Tresured flesh. Bixidore Braithwaite is a young Treasure caught in a nexus of political intrigue and changing times. Instead of the vapid and luxurious future he'd been taught to expect, he is being forced to grow beyond his destiny. He is quickly becoming too smart, too informed, too opinionated to be anyone's Treasure. He is on his way to becoming The Prince of Mists and Clouds.

[christimalia]

Mana and the Late-Night Custard Bun

Tonight I was sharing a custard bun with my niece who is two, nearly three.  It was quite late and we were sitting at my mother’s table idly talking of this and that, and she inquired where I had gotten myself such a good custard bun?  Since she’d not yet had a bite, I assumed the good was a hint to share and so I let her poke a finger deep into the custard, which she sucked with an appreciative “Ummmm,” before extending her hand for her fair share.  I broke off a bit of  pâte à choux slathered in egg custard, for her enjoyment, and she nibbled cautiously so as to get a bit of custard in each and every bite.

“It’s very good,” she said, approvingly.

“I know,” I said confident in my own refined tastes.  I know what to order at a bakery, a custard bun being one of the few pastries that does not reach the height of it’s sumptuousness on the day of its making, but actually tastes better the second day once the custard has had a chance to make a humid biosphere out of the bun, and breathe creamy, golden, goodness into its surroundings.

“It’s the lemon,” added my niece with absolute confidence.

I turned the bun to look at me, as if I’d never seen a custard bun before.  I tasted no lemon.  I was nearly, almost, for-sure positive that the custard hadn’t a hint of citrus.  But then again, she has those  fresh minted, new to the world taste buds, whereas mine have been doddering along for four decades, and I actually have heard of people putting a drop or two of lemon juice into their custard at the last moment, just as it’s turning from milk and eggs into that magical golden goo.  It’s counterintuitive, I know, and early in the process it might curdle the milk and make the custard into so much glue but at the last moment, well, that’s when the magic happens.  

Not that I’m conceding the presence of any lemon in my custard bun.  However subtle.   Not tonight. I don’t think.  I think Mana only said that because it was yellow, and lemons are yellow, and well you can see how she might get there.

“You taste lemon?” I inquired politely.  Respectfully, you know, but she must have detected a hint of skepticism.

“They can do that y’know,” she assured me, in the voice of a culinary expert, indeed an everything expert. “Put lemons in custard.”

Then, I saw her think that I might think they put whole lemons into custard, (no doubt a bitch to get smooth) and she rushed to disabuse me of the notion: “The squeeze them,” she said her little hands balling into tight fists so that her whole little body went rigid with the violence that must be applied to lemons to extract their juice.  She even closed her eyes in her pantomime of great squeezing, “And then the juice pours out, into the custard, at the bakery.  And they mix it in.”

She gave me a little nod, to convince me she wouldn’t sully our relationship with lies.  I may not’ve ever heard of this novel thing called lemon juice but I could trust her.  Now there are many grand experiences offered to all of us in this hardscrabble and splendid existence of ours, but few of them outrank my littlest niece’s unshakable belief that the things that are new to her are new to me.  And I’ll tell you this for free, I wouldn’t correct her belief that she is dropping pearls of wisdom on me for all the second-day custard buns in the whole world.  Lemonated or non.  Old things made new through new eyes . . . what a blessing.

[christimalia]

My Rainbow Right Now # 6

Red: When I was about twenty-two, I worked at Godiva at Southpark Mall.  I closed the store at night.  I dipped strawberries and orange peels in warm chocolate.  I got to meet Kevin Costner when he was shopping in my store. I shined counters and glass.  I was a Godiva girl.  Now my favorite candy then and now, was the open oyster but a close second is the raspberry cordial.  I love the thinness of the candy shell, how it breaks with a crack and how the tart raspberry gel oozes into my mouth.  It is two perfect bites.

Orange:  Martin Whittfooth’s Noctourne

Though this is a modern work, I have long been a fan of the Old Dutch master’s style.  I love the notion that black is an expressive color, that there are shades of black.  I love how this painting relies on the glowing tiger coming out of the darkness as opposed to using bright light.  Also, the way the tiger walks across the peonies as the slip down into the swamp, the night moths coming on his breath.  There is a story there but not one Whittfooth is any hurry to tell his viewers.  He’s more than content to let us figure it out on our own.

Yellow: This is a strawberry limoncello pound cake.  I know as summer ends people tend to put away the strawberries and I guess that make’s sense, but I find a good lemon cake brings extends summer indefinitely.  I see no reason that everything in the latter half of the year has to taste like pumpkin spice.

Green:

I am fascinated with the matcha bowl, around building breakfast around as many superfoods as possible.  Yogurt, quinoa, matcha green tea, baby kale or baby spinach, raw nuts, berries, chia seeds. I love the notion that its super healthy and no cooking.

Blue:

This sounds like a sad confession but it doesn’t feel that way I swear.  By the time I was four and in swimming lessons I had discovered the best thing about the pool was the moment your ears were underwater, everyone on land lost immediate access to you.  Water is the earbuds that God gave us.  Where else could a four year old go, stare into the face of a parent obviously anxious to go home after a long day, and give that kind of tweeny shrug that so effortlessly communicates, I can’t hear you, and there’s nothing I can do to remedy the situation in the immediate future.  Mind yourself while I swim in circles some more.  I also discovered shortly thereafter that the ocean was even better for blocking out the concerned cries of parents, or their arguing, especially their arguing come to think of it.  The pool was silence.  The ocean provided its own soundtrack.  I remember moments just like this hovering cross-legged between the sand and the air, encapsulated in brine like a plump little pickle.  Feeling the sand as this far off disparate thing, filtered through water.  They were some of the best moments of my life.

Indigo:

The communion with the indigo whale.  This is hands down my favorite nature photograph.  I always have it somewhere around me, as my screensaver, taped to my wall, now in my blog.  I am always fascinated by that moment when understanding transcends species, and it becomes something like I have a mind, I sense that you have one, too.  How interesting.

Violet:

Mr. Plant in purple. The ways in which I could praise this man are myriad, the well is bottomless.  His fashion sense.  His sort of effortless ability to stay culturally relevant.  That fabulous hair.  That God-sent voice. Those classic Led Zeppelin moments when he pauses to listen to his partner Page at work, and you can see in his eyes that he has declared the music good.  Worthy to be the work of his life.  But for today I will speak of Robert’s charm.  He has this shy charm that comes through on every interview I’ve ever seen with him.  He never puts himself forward; but I’d imagine geniuses don’t really have to.

[extrasexyoliveoil]

Mark Sheppard Gif of The Day

  I stole this from http://marksheppardappreciation.tumblr.com/

[naturally-fantastical]

I love it when you get all tough, it touches me right where my bathing suit goes

Crowley, Supernatural, Season 8 (via naturally-fantastical)

[christimalia]

Crowley: "You shut up. You'd sell your brother for a dollar if you really wanted a soda."

[christimalia]

My Rainbow Right Now #5

Red:I am addicted to ahi poke, that sumptuous rare tuna mixed with sesame oil.  It is dinner, and it is lunch obviously, but I see no reason it can’t be breakfast too.  And the great thing is that as it reaches the end, it can be stretched with cold vegetables.  Cucumbers.  Radishes. Cilantro

Orange:I am thoroughly enamored with Ray Caesar’s work on the whole, but this painting touches me with it’s incredible richness.  Look at the rippling fabric.  I guess that particularly to a person who remembers the horrible avocado, mustard, rust palette so common in the seventies, to see this deep orange reclaimed and used beautifully is an amazing redemption. 

Yellow: Ginger Soother by the Ginger People.  If I could afford to, I would drink this all day long, everyday.  It is a tonic.  A spiritual and soul healer.  it is a retreat in a glass.  It refreshes the entire system, is balanced and refined.  If I could make it myself, and save four books I would, but alas they have the recipe just right.

Green: This is my favorite, favorite perfume.  It is deceptively complex but with a light hand.  It works for day or night.  It can go absolutely anywhere, without making me feel I’m trying too hard.  It even smells green while also being sweet and nutty.

Blue:OK.  I’m not going to delve, if it isn’t obvious, then nothing I can say would make it so. Tom in Blue, with lovely girly cheekbones.

Indigo: I love this scene.  It’s also interesting that the indigo is not so much the predominating color in Wes Anderson’s palate but an effect of all the jewel-tones married together.  It’s almost a suggestion that the saturation of color in India is so profound that it tricks the eye into simplicity.  Effect indigo, mood indigo.

Violet:Kim Novak and those beautiful violet eyes.  I this poster is from Bell, Book and Candle, which is this lighthearted approach to  mid-century feminism.  It’s also this interesting treatise on authenticity, but I also really love her in The Man with the Golden Arm.  Oh, and my characters Periwick are totally a riff on Kim’s cat Piewackett.

[christimalia]

Life Quote #1

“Every Nightmare is over at some point and someone will be left to tell the story, even if it’s only giant demons under the earth.”

I know the author who said this may have meant it to be haunting and macabre, and it is but  . . . personally I find it hopeful and inspiring, not to mention beautiful.  Think what it means.  There will always be someone to serve as scribe.  A story-teller.  The living embodiment of memory.  Monstrous, yes perhaps, but nevertheless, eternal.  And interested in narrative.  I find that strangely comforting, frankly.  Like doom is just now wearing a frowny face.  If that’s true then paradise must be also just like now, only with a face lift. So that gives me hope, and makes me smile.  And feel like I can just get on with things and let the future take care of its own darn self.  See now you can rest easy. :)

[writerswritecompany]

[ofhouseusher]

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[christimalia]

made me laugh