The House

The front room of the house, filled with the quiet scent of dried lavender flowers and the dignity the old velvet couches, in the style of the early days when the house’s striped gold and beige wallpaper and baroque portraits had been the mien, was a relief to Isobella; despite its cramped dimensions and the bleak lines of the withered winter trees outside the fringe of the drapes, it satisfied something in her. It was not that the room was neutral, although she did appreciate its muted fragrance as superior to the lunchroom’s blare and raucous camaraderie; it was that it was established; although she did not always appreciate the authority of her teachers and the adults who bounded her life like a barbed-wire fence, there was always that core in her that respected the silence of the room even beyond the short history she had in it as a child, one small hand clutching the leg of the coffee table. She recognized its age and the refinement it symbolized even if it had never entirely realized this embodiment.  

Autumn

I went outside, on the first day of autumn, to find a black triangulation,
a shingle on the ground, a piece of the sky fallen down.
Teenagers do not appreciate:
the sinking of a spoon in honey,
a poem by Stanley Moss,
the solitude of morning on a grey step.
In ten days 
I turn sixteen. 

Blonde in the Bleachers

Isobella is the blonde in the bleacher. The boys can't stay away; like moths to the pale flame of her hair they buzz around its flicker, and she rises above them, a queen they can't quite discern. In her, they learn that beauty shares some properties with heat, because no matter how close she is, no matter how hard they strain, they cannot quite make out her face. Although it is not in their natures, they do not complain when they can't break her facade, because Isobella stirs something in them and they can't bring themselves to mind.

Even so, behind her blonde hair and smooth blue eyes, Isobella is a mystery even to herself. Inside her mind, she is alternately perched on the edge of a perilous cliff and squeezed claustrophobically into an egg sac. Her greatest fear is the unarticulated sense that someday the cliff will fall out from under her feet and the egg sac will contract, leaving her weightless and empty. It doesn't show, but whenever she looks in a mirror she sees its broken edges and herself balanced on them. She is alarmed some days to find herself posessing such an aptitude for self-admiration; she knows that, one day, she'll look too far and nothing will be the same again.

It was on one of these days, when her gaze steadily avoided the plate-glass windows of the school, that she very nearly broke down. The boy to whom she was talking, an old admirer named Richard, detected nothing more than a slight contraction in her eyebrows before she made a very hasty excuse to him and rushed off to consult her analyst.

Mr. Brown

Mr. Brown, although he was of a slender composition and was always stubbornly underweight, was a person composed of circles and elipses; his wrists, poking out of the baggy cuffs of his mechanic's jumpsuit, creased in such a way that his hands almost seemed unattached to his forearms. His long, bony fingers twitched nervously now and again, and he never seemed to know what to do with them: if they were in his pockets they became bulges against his thighs, and if they were out they always seemed to be bumping into somthing, always in flight, as though someday the perforation between palm and wrist would snap clean away, leaving them wriggling uncomfortably against the floor. His face was strangely free of lines and slim and rounded at the edges. His nose was long and slender; his lips were tense and smooth and round, and he was always moistening them with the tip of his tongue, as though testing a barrier between the world and the words which, when they emerged, flew from his mouth like smoke dissapating into the greasy air of the airport where he worked, a setting which was hardly ever identified as incongruous--although it was--since nobody ever noticed quite what Mr. Brown said. They looked at Mr. Brown's eyes as through the bottom of a glass of milk; his glasses fogged his eyes so thoroughly that their original color, an insipid blue, could not be discerned even if any of his coworkers had been inspired to try. They saw the way his brown hair fell limply over his forehead and they disregarded what he said. Mr. Brown worked quietly and efficiently at the work to which he was assigned; he put his tools away when he was done with them and he took one hour to eat lunch when the clock switched numerals. Because of his nearsightedness, he tended to hunch slightly over whatever he worked on. This was the state in which he could be found most days, hands grease-stained.

Scraps

The theater is dim, even after the light that filters through the never-ending fog outside; the low ceiling over the main floor is lit by eight incandescent light bulbs. At least ten small fans whir quietly on the walls, which are papered with pictures of famous actors and the theater’s benefactors; the lights glint off the glass in their frames. The musty smells of the theater pervade the air: old curtains and seat cushions and the smell of wood polish.

Seventh Graders

Seventh grade is a year during which students mature in many ways until, by the end of the year, they become paragons of sophistication. Before this ultimate goal can be achieved, however, they spend their time in a chrysalis, like all things that enter ugly and unenlightened and emerge bright and glorious . Almost-teenagers writhe within their cocoons until they batter the fragile walls of childhood away, finally presenting to the world the marks of their maturity: a changing facial structure marked by a handful of zits like jimmies sprinkled by a greedy toddler. This transition heaps upon their brain tissue a certain gawkiness in their movement, and the sudden realization of the importance of society; the legions of saccharine songs extolling the evils of an exaltation they have yet to feel and bitter eulogies bemoaning the pains of a condition they cannot claim become the soundtrack of their own drama; the darkening tones of their bearing and dress and makeup convey with unfailing accuracy their awareness of the bitterness of middle-class life.

Once discovered, life’s unfairness and insurmountable woes are overwhelming and the exploration of these woes is inexhaustible; the seventh grader has just realized that his comfortable cocoon has burst, and as the sterilized fragments fall from the height his new wings achieve, he loses the absurd notion that he will ever be as comfortable again. The disappointment and the shock produced by this disillusionment gives rise to the realization that the rest of the world—teachers, family, peers, the opposite sex--doesn’t appreciate as much as they should everything he does and how hard he works. He realizes with a jolt of self-righteousness that he should now be as powerful and attractive and self-assured as the high school senior, who, after all, is a teenager just like him. Add all this together and it is a wonder that the seventh grader is as productive as he is.

The angst of the seventh grader pervades the brightest of days, armor against the intrusive rays of the sun as destructive as a finger stroking the wings of a butterfly. His defenses are already stretched to the breaking point by the torments of a family woefully lacking in the sort of empathy known to the general populace as “extra-sensory perception,” as well as the ever-present, ever-potent, ever-devastating criticism, voiced and unvoiced, of his peers. Before his entrance into adolescence, the seventh grader had not appreciated the constructive power of that criticism, which remained as unrealized as unexploded ordnance remains impotent, but now it becomes of uttermost importance: when it is negative, it is devastating; when it is positive, it is as miraculous and ephemeral as the feathers that fall from his new wings on the slightest provocation.

The urgings and commands of parents and other such individuals not suave enough to be idolized become ridiculous, outdated, and self-serving, and it is in the best interest of the seventh grader that he ignores them. They are completely ungrateful when the seventh grader extends the open hand of constructive criticism meant to expand the tastes of the other to fit the mold the seventh grader strives to. Insensible to their own failure to measure up, they ignore his help, casting a hard eye on the colors of his new wings. Yes, the life of the seventh grader is filled with woe, through which the seventh grader does his best to fly, avoiding the landmines set by the inadequacies of a sycophantic family and the harsh arena of teenage society and the failure of their bodies to become measure up to those around them.

Success

I tried to define success, in the days that have ensued since my confidence that I would be able to procure a definition for the admiring public. However, in the days that have ensued, it has become entirely clear to me that it is impossible for anybody, let alone me, to define success. You see, success as it really should be is an entirely personal affair, corresponding only to an individual’s personal and professional needs; it is related in no pure form to culture beyond the fact that some individuals achieve it and that individuals make up a culture. In fact, I will, although in no way promoting the act of self-promotion, point out the use of the word “some” in the previous sentence: I could have said, reasonably, within the bounds of my conception, that every individual achieves success, because there is always someone striving towards that way of life; because there is no actual originality in life, it would be possible to say “every individual achieves success” without lying. However, it would not be true to my sense of the word to say that every individual achieves success, because success is the most personal thing in the world. Success holds within it the promise of the end result, the hope for the achieving, and all the failures and knowledge acquired in the time when the individual strived for success. I cannot define success; I cannot reasonably apply the rule of my own life onto the life of another. I can measure for myself what I think success is, but another person looking at my definition is likely to say, “Poppycock, I’ll settle for nothing less than the presidency.” Success is a term that must be defined in the moment of success, not in the dusty archives of a library dictionary: The book is shut, and success ends.

Untitled

Once again, incredibly rough stuff--and very bad working practices, to post something like this! But I didn't want whoever does read this to think I've been unproductive.

Jienne took refuge in the warm scent of stagnant air, lying dormant for the days she had been away; undisturbed by the outside air that always destroyed this quiet equilibrium the piles of linen created. From her windows, she could see the murky blue of the skyline, which reminded her of the difference between the harsh blue of the country skies. Over the years, she had begun to appreciate the paler blue, which reached an almost golden quality on particularly smoggy days; in the days of her youth when she had listened to defiance and found meaningful poetry in everything, the blue sky over uninterrupted highways brought tears to her eyes. She had imagined, then, the creativity of routine that the daily drums might produce; like driving a car, she found that it was less interesting when done properly, and, several years after breaking out on her own, contracted a bad case of the Non-deviated, Sterile Atmosphere of Culture. It was cured, at length, by a feigned bought of physical illness—not difficult, in fact, since the lethargy of her disillusionment was heavy and noxious enough to induce symptoms of a far more dangerous disease to the visage of anyone—which allowed her to convalesce alone, at home, among the misfounded order of the passing regime of Culture. She closed her eyes and discovered that, inside the ten-minute breakfasting, two-minute, blank-minded meditations, and neatly regimented dietary plans, she liked herself. Specifically, she discovered that there is no such thing as mindless meditation.

So the patient was freed of the cancerous disease which inflicts Society. When her illness was up, she briefly considered staying out the year in the job she was working as a library aide, but the menace of the malaise was too persistent for her to do much more than hand in a letter of notice to her supervisor, a tall old lady whose face was ridged in soft, unchangeable lines carved by years inside the belly of the Beast. Her name was Mrs. Whiling. Jienne came in—and by this time, there was very little left of Jienne’s reason, which had been eaten away by her long-suppressed desire to live life visibly—and Mrs. Whiling looked at her for a moment, and took her letter. Jienne was relieved and surprised that there had not been more fuss and carrying-on, but Mrs. Whiling stopped her on her way out, because years before, she too had been a young woman and had harbored the generational desire that lives of in the lives of the descendents to make herself known, to live as liberatingly as order had promised to be in the early days of her youth. Mrs. Whiling had been, in the days of her youth, a Good Girl, and she had gone along with her reputation because she saw the desirability in being two-faced and in having a shell of irony against herself, and she had never been able to break away from her shell. She had tried, years ago, decades ago, in the water-damaged halls of the apartment where she had lived an ordered life in quiet sophisticated grey suits with a small lady-like watch and index cards of recipes, and one day she had looked at herself in the mirror and screamed—inwardly. That part of her sat down with a bump and now lived at the level of the knees of the current Mrs. Whiling; Mrs. Whiling, who had been, obliviously, though the childhoods of her son and her daughter (who grew up to fit perfectly into the shells they created for themselves after very little initial resistance on the behalf of the value of the treasure they were entailing) and the death of a husband and fifty years of work at the library, knew that living to Society and Culture were the easiest and the most practical and the best thing to do. So she stopped Jienne for a moment and felt just a moment’s pang in the reflection of herself that was passing before her; she wondered, in that instant, if she was dying, for her life was surely passing before her eyes. And then Jienne was freed from the pragmatic pull of the life that Mrs. Whiling had lived herself, since Jienne looked into Mrs. Whiling’s eyes and saw there the product of Society and Culture.
Jienne walked into the street and realized that the important thing is not how the story is told.
It was fairly easy for Jienne, in the Metropolis where she lived, to get a job. She looked around on the internet, did some poking, some phone calling, some looking up addresses in the yellow pages, and some walking, since her money was wearing thin and becoming your own person takes money, and then she was hired by an online journal, to whom she submitted Fiction and Satire whenever she wrote it. The relationship worked out well. For a great while, she was breathing out a sigh of happiness at her timely escape, but as long as she was sighing she was also on edge because the relief meant she was thinking about how great it was to get out of it all, and how horrible it would be to get back in it. The people in the Organization like Jienne’s writing, and she was paid enough for each story that she was all right, although she lived frugally. She got into a relationship with N____, who rode a motorbike and didn’t drink. N____ had been, many years ago, a crab fisherman in the Bering Strait, and for a while had lived on a houseboat, but when a new occupation had come around in the form of a motorbike, he had ridden his new form of transportation halfway across the country and stopped, penniless, in the Metropolis. It was there he had lived for the past two years, during which time he had gotten a job at a bakery. He had risen in position there, and, in between long cold rides on his motorbike, he worked with vats of bubbling, rising bread dough and massive trays of cakes sliding into the cavernous mouths of the red-hot ovens that lined the back wall of the back room and pervaded the air in the bakery with the scent of the things within. N____ came home with occasional burns, smelling like yeast and sugar. Fortunately for N____, his vast appetite for the things he baked—and bought, and bought home, and ate in the kitchen with Jienne—was matched by a fast metabolism and a lenient boss who sent him home now and again after a strenuous couple of days with a steaming paper bag on whose sides the insidious smell of the cakes it contained was marked permanently.


Some months after Jienne became newly liberated, she was walking home in the city dusk, past the playground by the school—she stopped a moment by the gate, gazing over the barren fields of abandoned dreams, and realized there were two young children playing there, twirling enthusiastically around the brightly-colored jungle-gym bars, pretending to be butterflies and princesses and space aliens—and past the library, past the big house on the corner which was home to a rambunctious, sprawling, utopian group who stayed up until the wee hours playing music until their respectable neighbors came banging on their doors in nightclothes. It was November; her coat collar was pulled up around her face, and the wind was numbing her nose. Her fingers were just warm enough to feel the bite of the handles of the plastic bags of groceries. Upon reaching home (which was an achievement realized after a prolonged fumble with clumsy fingers and the heavy felt coat pockets whose treasure, the house key, was yielded only reluctantly,) Jienne sat down at the kitchen counter for a moment to catch her breath.
The apartment was cozy after the wind of the outside, the close walls’ ambiance snug rather than claustrophobic for once. Jienne sat in silence undisturbed until her cell phone rang; from the tone, a rapid and complex series of electronic beeps aligned into the tune of “American Pie,” she could tell it was N____, and she hastily answered it.

“Hello?”

It was N____, of course, and they talked for just a moment. He said to forgive him, he’d be home in about an hour, and he loved her; she said okay and that she loved him too. The phone snapped shut and the line died. It was five o’clock. Jienne unpacked the vegetables—broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, scallions, and red peppers—and the chicken, chunks of ice sliding silently off the plastic wrapped against the soft pink meat on the counter. A can of oyster sauce followed. Jienne lamented briefly the deficit in their kitchen supplies that necessitated a finger-breaking trip to the grocery store for even the simplest recipe. At least there were frying pans, one of which Jienne placed carefully on a burner. Some time later, little browning pieces of chicken were muttering away in the pan, bathed in a puddle of oil. A pot full of Chinese noodles lurked behind the chicken like the stealthy killer in a murder mystery. It was nearly six when Jienne served the Chinese chicken up onto two of the five mismatched plates she owned, set them beside her two mismatched mugs—full of ginger ale—and lit two mismatched purple candles, one of which was a gift from a friend’s mother and one of which Jienne had found, half-burned and still tall, in the dumpster behind the church beside the grocery store. She sat down to wait for N____ with a New Yorker, and became entranced in a lengthy article extolling the virtues of the virtual world. inoculated from the world as she was, she would not have noticed that time was passing if her stomach had not begun protesting over the lengthy walk from the grocery store and the tantalizing smell of the Chinese chicken, which sat uneaten by the mugs of ginger ale; once, however, she became aware of the gradual darkening of the sky outside the window beside her which had turned the evening from dark grey to dark navy, and her first thought was of N____. She looked at the clock opposite the chair where she was sitting; it read A Quarter to Seven and No N_____.

Jienne’s insides were cold; she took out her cell phone again and called N____. His cell phone rang insistently for almost a minute until there was a click and his voice greeted her ears, warm and comforting as a draft of chicken noodle soup until she realized that it was the eager, upbeat strains of his answering machine: “Hi, you’ve reached N_____’s cell phone. I’m not available right now, so please leave a message.” She was barely able to force out her inquiry over the bubble of surprise that rose in her throat, a request for him to call her as soon as he could, and then she hung up. She waited half an hour; the chicken lying on its bed of noodles with its attendant vegetables grew dry and, when she tried to eat a bit, tasteless; she threw the chicken away. Its existence disgusted and scared her. She longed to simply go to sleep, and thought for a minute of going to bed, of piling on the covers and turning out the lights in the darkening night, but she realized that the tension would be too great; besides, she had to know what was happening, and becoming unconscious would not make her more aware, would not tell her where N____ was and why he had not returned home.

It was midnight when the shrill call of the doorbell reverberated around Jienne’s head. It took her sleep-befuddled mind a moment to realize what it was and how she should respond to it, but finally she stumbled out of the living room towards the door; her hand gripped the handle with terrifying clarity, and she opened the door to reveal two men in police uniforms. “Ms. Duchene?”

“Hello? What…” They stepped past the door she held open, and something must have been working in her brain subconsciously, because, through no effort of her own, she closed the door. She was numb now, and blinked a couple times, restoring herself to the cognitive world. She opened her mouth again to ask what was going on, but the shorter policeman was already explaining.

“We’ve found the remains of one N_____ Venegas on, and the only calls to his cell phone in the last month have been from you.”

“N____? What happened to him?”

The policemen shuffled their feet, as though whatever had happened was their personal fault.
“He’s in the morgue, ma’am; it appears that he was assaulted sometime around five thirty that evening, possibly by multiple people, in an alley off North Water Street. The cause of death has been identified as a handgun.”

The first emotion Jienne felt was anger. “And you just now got around to telling me? It’s been nearly seven hours! What have you been doing since then?” She felt a fresh wave of fury at their impotence. “And…and do you know who did it?”

The policemen looked down. “No, ma’am, I’m afraid we don’t.”


In Jienne’s mind, there was no question that she would move immediately, although her landlord, a nervous, plump, middle-aged man who seemed to have no idea as to how to handle the recently bereaved, was not so happy. Nevertheless, Jienne, in her newly numb state of mind, battled her way out with the backseat of her brother’s station wagon packed tight with the cardboard boxes in which she had packed all of her things, a job that took her barely two days, since in her haste to quit the city she worked from early in the morning until late at night, powered by grief and the desire to cut her losses; she ate up the rest of the food she had, and didn’t leave the house until her brother pulled into the driveway and stood in the doorway hesitantly watching her manic energy filling the rooms of the small apartment. They stopped by N____’s funeral, held in an old stone chapel on the edge of the city; neat planning had Jienne leaving the town the day her love was interred there forever. As they pulled out of the parking lot still filled with the rattle-bang cars of the friends N_____ had made during his time in the city, the strains of an ironically happy tune ran through Jienne’s mind, and she nearly broke down and cried. She thought about what wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t become her own person: she wouldn’t have met N____; maybe, even, the course of Fate would have been altered enough that, in not meeting N____, she would have preserved his life. Distracted for a moment, she considered that possibility and decided she couldn’t tell which would have been worse. In the end, she decided that the path of Fate is unalterable, so really it wasn’t her fault: she was just redeeming a preset path, which brought up the question: was she really her own person if all she did was fulfill fate?

Jienne moved farther across the country this time, making her way to the farthest North-West corner of the United States, nearly Canada. She was entirely unsure of what she would do from there; the soles of her feet itched constantly, pointing her further away from wherever she was whenever she stopped. In this state, therefore, Jienne came to Mrs. Robinson’s boardinghouse: a tall house on the edge of town that looked like it hadn’t had much outside business in the past few years, although from the plaque by the front door she could see that it had endured a hundred years on its bluff above the sea where the sky was nearly always an indeterminate grey and the sea provided most of the color and sound. The first time Jienne recognized the boardinghouse as home was the day when she came back to it—opening the door to the bedroom Mrs. Robinson had assigned to her, the smell of the room registered unconsciously as Home, and she felt as comforted as she had when, as a young girl, she had hidden herself away in the piles of linen in the upstairs closet of her childhood home—after a day in the town, sitting in the coffeehouse that she used as her base of operation because it had the free wireless that allowed her to send her work off to the website that still provided for her room and board in its paychecks, which arrived in her bank account on a monthly basis. Eventually, though, her reserves of money dwindling, Jienne was forced to take a job—at the coffeehouse, which seemed appropriate—to supplement her income.

Working at the coffeehouse was comforting insofar as it provided hours of physical labor that took her mind off everything except the best way to load dishes into the industrial-size dishwasher and the total on the bill of the next customer; on the other hand, she was surrounded daily by the smells N___ had brought home on a regular basis. Every now and then, they struck her with fresh potency, but she was relieved, two months into the job, to realize that the impact wasn’t as strong; she was able to go weeks without going out the back door, on break, to cry. Soon she became close to a young man who worked her shift (which was to say, nearly all the time; it was remarkable to her that she was able to keep up both of her jobs, although, working so many hours she rarely had time to reflect on the day’s events before she fell asleep in Mrs. Robinson’s boarding house, this fact rarely had time to sink in) and one evening in February, a week after Valentine’s day, he invited her to the ice cream parlor, which was just down the street from the coffeehouse. After work on that night, they got into similarly thick jackets designed for the cold of almost-Canada in winter and walked down the icy sidewalk, slowly and, at first, solemnly; but soon they were talking more and more about what had brought them to that moment in time. Over coconut ice cream they discussed fate and the intricacies of working at the coffeehouse; their exchanges over the affairs of their coworkers verged into the dubious realm of Gossip, but they were both grateful for the innocuous human contact: Ben, as he was called, was living in isolation with a couple of nocturnal roommates at the other end of town from where Jienne ate, quietly and demurely, dinner with Mrs. Robinson, night after night, which was a good deal, since Mrs. Robinson was a good cook, but not very interesting, since neither she or Mrs. Robinson was very apt at making small talk. The young woman at the counter—a high-school student fretting over lost study time for a Physics test the next day—was forced to turn them out onto the sidewalk (where she joined them for just a moment after a couple minutes before getting into her Volvo, the last one in the parking lot) at midnight. Jienne, in a moment of clarity, realized that she hadn’t thought about N____ all day and that it was too late for her to return to Mrs. Robinson’s house without disrupting the lady’s sleep. She inquired if coming to Ben’s apartment was a viable option; it was, and, although the night was spent in unbroken chastity, a romance was in the making, a romance that would tempt Jienne from the erstwhile side of Mrs. Robinson early in March under the duress of walking halfway across the admittedly small town to work and then to Ben’s house and, from there, back to Mrs. Robinson’s for a change of clothes and a shower.

Ben was five years younger than Jienne; in the subsequent fall, he would leave her and the coffeehouse and the only corner of the world he’d ever called home and go to Dartmouth. This was declared early on in the relationship—in fact, several weeks before he received a thick letter from New Hampshire inviting him to go there, he was telling Jienne that in exactly eight months and ten days he would leave her (forever, perhaps, but he didn’t say that.) Jienne, who was at that moment 24, decided to make the most of their time together. As the snow began melting in April, they trod around the issue; in fact, they largely ignored it. They were, their coworkers remarked, very well behaved at work; since many of their coworkers were female students at the local high school from which Ben had graduated the previous June, there was a certain amount of bite to their comments.

Rocks

There was something about the evening air, moist from the rain that had drenched the area earlier in the afternoon, that made Natasha feel like stopping the car. The CD faded to a stop, and Natasha was left in silence by the shore of a little lake—more of a pond, really. The beach was really very rocky; from the size of the tiny parking lot in which Natasha was now wedged it was pretty apparent that it was not a popular destination. Even after the clearing of the rain, there was nobody there. Natasha opened her door, startled at the noise it produced, and stepped out onto the sand. She crossed the grass and sat down on one of the rocks.

The sky was the color of the grey primer that had overtaken Natasha’s afternoons. It had started out innocently enough, another Project by her husband—once completed it would probably sell for hundreds of dollars. Vast, billowing wooden shapes had begun congregating around the house, and eventually they were swathed in buckets and buckets of the grey primer that Greg brought home almost every day. Natasha had not been happy when the structures began moving into the house, but when she had gone to visit her sister (alone, since Greg was too busy wielding his roller) and returned to find that the Shapes had invaded the bedroom in her absence, she returned to the car.

She had thought she’d known, five years ago when she had married Greg, what she was getting into: when they had first met he had been working constantly on a series of telescoping green giraffes, except for the evenings he spent with her. Since then, however, Greg’s sculptures had burst onto the popular art scene and he became obsessed, always out in the garage with the tools of his trade, which he arrayed on an immense workbench surrounded by samples and shavings of differently colored wood: his chisels and the small chainsaw he used for particularly monolithic projects, like this one was turning out to be. That Greg would have even considered putting his sculptures in the bedroom was the very last straw.

The rocks reminded her of the time they had gone hiking, some six years ago now. Although that day could not have been more different than this day, the rocks had the same even coolness as they did today, although they weren’t as wet. At the summit, they had eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The sky was a clear hard blue and the sun shone down. Remembering happier times brought tears to Natasha’s eyes for the first time in years. For the first time that day, she thought about getting back in the car and turning around. She wavered for a moment, weighing the virtues of the past against the disadvantages of the present. The disadvantages of the present won out; she got back into the car, angrier than she had been before.

I thought I'd post the rough drafts of some things I've been working on before I go away.

Peanut Butter

The last thing Orrin Openmeyer bought in his lifetime was a jar of peanut butter. It was an 18-ounce jar of organic extra-chunky salted, so maybe his death—crossing between the barely visible white paint lines on his way back from the store, an old green Ford had plowed through his neatly arrayed body—was justified. Still, his death, like many things he had done, launched a wave of public wonder at the Openmeyers, and an investigation into the affairs of the road agent, whose job it was to keep the crosswalks of sunny Burgandese in top condition. Maybe, his friends mused, if the crosswalk had been more clearly marked, the car would have seen it and stopped. However, the driver of the car was a notably unstable local tough guy who might have committed the accident on purpose. A trial was scheduled for July.

It was somewhat ironic to Orrin Openmeyer’s family and close friends that a jar of peanut butter, bought for sandwiches for the lunch his eleven-year son would eat the next day at his exclusive soccer camp, had been his last purchase; that Openmeyer, a high-profile stock trader and notoriously not a family man, should die in the act of purchasing something so petty, so familiar, as a jar of peanut butter was so uncharacteristic. Indeed, his parents noted, Orrin had never really been “at home” unless he was at work.

He was a restless child until he was allowed to go to school; he arranged the toys on his shelves neatly to one side when he was nearly eighteen months old, preferring instead to flip the pages of an upside-down volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His parents noted an especial abundance of wear on page 252 of the eighth volume, and, when his choice of career was made, wondered if it had been a premonition, a foreshadowing of what was to come. In any event, young Openmeyer was proficient in school. It was not so much that he was brilliant as that he was diligent, but, by the time graduation rolled around, he was first in his class. His valediction was short and to the point; it wished his classmates well on the paths they chose to follow. He attended university; once again, he graduated first in his class. It was generally known among his peers that Openmeyer was too focused to have time for lady friends, and in fact he never even joined a fraternity. The salutatorian, a jovial, stout, brilliant young woman whose major was marine studies, was a bit put off by Orrin, and was held as honorary valedictorian by the majority of their classmates, who were more often graced by her company.

Orrin Openmeyer surprised many when he got married, seven years after graduating and working his way up the hierarchy of stock traders. The ceremony was brief and formal, little more than a meeting of family in the town clerk’s office. He and his wife settled down in a rich part of town, and lived indulgently but not flagrantly. The community was shocked once again to find that Openmeyer spent just as many long overtime hours at his downtown office after he got married as before, but two years after—and one before his promotion—his marriage, his wife had a son, whom they named Oscar. There was little question in Orrin’s mind that he loved his son deeply, but the rest of the town wasn’t sure. Although they were the spitting image of each other, there was little sign of affection between the young son and the father. That Orrin’s final act would be in performing a service, however slight, for his son, was the subject of discussion in the town for about a year. And then, like the paint of the fateful crosswalk barely visible on the steaming hot pavement the hot June day, the public memory began to fade away, until Orrin Openmeyer became just another businessman in the town, successful, with a wife and a young son.

No Man's Woman

This is going to be a non-fiction entry.

I was thinking about why my Theme Song (No Man’s Woman, by Sinéad O’Connor) is my Theme Song. The song deals with the narrator’s desire not to be “no man’s woman,” and in the end she makes a reference to Jimi Hendrix and it ends up being an allusion to how music is helpful. You would think, from listening to the song, that I have had really bad experiences with romance. But this is really not true at all. I do have a boyfriend, but he’s one of the nicest people I know and one of the least domineering.

Now, writing this essay has made me think about what else I might like about the song’s message (I know what I like about the music itself.) Writing this essay, in such tight constraints, about something I don’t want to write about, doesn’t give the feeling I love in writing. When I write, I want my writing to express how I feel, and, in general, writing makes me feel like I have flair. Like this picture, but personified. My mental image is of someone—not that I particularly like dancing, but it’s a good image— dancing a flamenco. In writing, I wouldn’t say “I’m able to express myself,” because that’s not the point. Expression is secondary. The important thing is that I get that feeling of independence.

This essay, coming back to the point, is as restrictive as anything I’ve ever had to write before. It makes me long for English 9 again. There were several virtues of that class compared to this essay: One, if the prompt wasn’t perfect, it was too lenient, too…easy. That allowed me to expand; for instance, there was never a really well-set word-limit, like 800 words. So we can conclude that I’m being lazy. Two, there is a difference in arguing for your piece in a public school system with a teacher you actually know and arguing for it in a course your parents are paying for through the nose with a teacher you don’t actually know very much at all. English 9 granted me, even in my least favorite papers, significant leeway.

So how does this come back to No Man’s Woman by Sinéad O’Connor? Well, I decided, in the course of my realization that I don’t like this essay because it’s too restrictive, that this song is my Theme Song because it represents Freedom and Independence.

Now you know why I don’t usually write non-fiction.

Working Up to the Send Button: A Rant

While we are on the subject of ranting (those of you who are reading online will need some background: I have been writing a very acidic rant about my writing course this summer, but it’s too biased to be really suitable for anyone to read without taking away the entire substance of the thing.) I should like to express my feelings on emailing.

Communication is a very daunting task for me. In real life, this is understandable, since I have a very quiet voice and I am very shy. However, it takes watching me work up to hitting the send button on a casual email to realize how at home I actually am in conversation. I think this is because, when face to face with someone, you can use facial posture and expressions to show exactly how you feel. Furthermore, sometimes you don’t even have to talk at all—you can shrug, or nod your head yes or no. This sometimes causes amusement among the adults who watch me, but that’s all right. I can live with people realizing I’m shy. People realizing I am shy is a good thing, because it proves how brave I am.

Now, the reason this topic comes up is that I just emailed two people, both about as supportive as you can get without being really personally close. One is my music teacher, one is a past music teacher. Anyone else would dash off the two-line emails I just wrote and hit the Send button without thinking twice about it. I can’t do that. I couldn’t even do that if I just thought twice. I think I thought about twelve times about hitting the Send button, but I could be wrong. It was a scary thing for me; by the time the little emails had left the nest of Juno for the sky of cyberspace, my palms were so sweaty it was difficult to believe I was actually capable of handling a mouse at all.

It’s a weird thing. Writing as a form of communication for me has always been—still is—akin to the experiences of those people who are clumsy on land, but who, when they slip into the water, are as graceful as the fishes. Writing has always been effortless, or relatively so. But making something as casual as a two-line email permanent, communicating with such little effort that it's easy to misword your thoughts and end up with a result opposite of the intended, that's scary.

Is there a redeeming feature to my fear of communication? I suppose you could say that; perhaps, since words are so difficult for me to send out into the atmosphere, I think proportionally harder about them than do other people. But I don’t think this is true. You see, although I take longer to write and send my email, a lot of that time is taken up with worrying about how the email will be received and working myself up to hit the Send button. I think longer, but not necessarily harder, about my emailing. I think that my fear of emailing is just a fear of emailing, and that I will have to work over it in time.

Cartesians

The philosopher came into the bar, tired as usual after a long day’s work unraveling the secrets of the universe, and sank into one of the stools by the counter. I mixed his usual drink, a gin and tonic, and set it a safe distance before him. It took him a moment to notice it, but when he did it disappeared in the blink of an eye. He looked a bit woozy afterwards, which is probably why what happened next did.

I asked him if he’d like another, and he began to reply in the negative: “I don’t think—“ but barely had the words gotten out of his mouth when, BOOM! There he wasn’t. He’s disappeared as surely as he’d been there—a point on which, after a few minutes, I was beginning to get hazy.

What sentient customers there were in the bar stared, gape-jawed as myself, and someone must have called the police because the next thing I knew red and blue lights were flickering across the ceiling and a bunch of big local guys, in uniform, were marching into the bar.

Of course, I swore to them I hadn’t laid a finger on the fellow, and on the promise of a free pint in the future they ceased their questioning. I should have known it wouldn’t end there.


The next evening, sure enough, another guy walked into the bar. By this point I had developed a nervous twitch at every ring of the bell above the door, because who knew which customer would be the next to disappear? When he got closer, however, I could tell that he was a detective, albeit a subtle one. He sat down at the seat next to where the philosopher sat and ordered vodka, which I provided. He sat quietly for a moment, commenting on the weather, asking after my wife and making general small talk; I was trembling in my shoes. Finally, he set down his drink, and with no apparent change in demeanor said, “Listen, the local police have brought me in about that disappeared philosopher.”

I’ll be having a word with them, I thought to myself, and listened to him.

“I wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions.” There’s nothing really I could have done. I shook my head no.

“Good. Can you tell me what transpired in this very bar on the night of the philosopher’s disappearance, 10 June?”

I told him, of course, omitting nothing from the gin and tonic to the patched sweater the philosopher wore. The detective made a note in his little notebook, and wanted to know the philosopher’s full name and address.

“What had your relations with the victim been in the past?” I balked at the word “victim,” but asserted that we had never been on anything less than amiable terms.

“I wonder if I could taste some of this gin and tonic.” I poured him some, and he drank it nearly as fast as the philosopher had consumed his drink the night before, presumably to see if the effect was indeed invisibility. He remained corporeal.

“Did you do anything to the victim? Did your hand, perhaps, slip over his drink, as an accident?” I denied this accusation. He shut his notebook indecisively and stood up.

“Thanks for the drink,” was his farewell, accompanied by the chink of the money he put down to pay for the gin and tonic and the glass of vodka.

The next I saw of the detective was the following Friday evening, when he came in looking as haggard and overworked as the philosopher had. He ordered gin and sat there the entire night without saying anything, swaying slightly and muttering to himself.


A curious phenomenon began to make itself known the next morning. All over town, people were disappearing into the humid summer air, as though the philosopher had brought on a plague which started at the bar and radiated out. The old gentlemen who sat in the shade of the elder trees by the bank started disappearing. Lazy students vanished in class. The detective was frantic, and he could be seen every day rushing all over town, writing down every detail of the successive cases of the vanishing townspeople. He began coming to see me a lot, at first alleging that he was searching for clues at the scene of the crime, since a lot of people did disappear there; as fewer customers brought a similar decline in disappearances, however, he dropped all pretence of coming there for business—in fact, he rarely said anything anymore.
Soon he was found slumped on the bar in front of me more nights than not, in despair over the possibility that it would be this particular case that would stymie him and end his career. Night after night, reviewing the evidence he had collecting during the day, which only reinforced his belief that the case was insolvable, he grumbled that the case would kill him.

“No, Detective, you’ll die of the gin,” I said.

“It’s the same thing,” he sighed.

He was sure that if he lived to see the end of the case he’d never be able to drink gin again; in fact, towards the end he used to buy a glass for the pleasure of pouring on the floor.


And then, one morning about six weeks after the philosopher walked into the bar, inspiration struck. The detective sat bolt upright, knocking over his glass and spilling its contents all over his shoes. He reached for his notebooks and pen, and rummaged around in his detective’s bag for the file, filled to exploding, that contained his extensive notes on the case and all the evidence he had collected, at the bar and the philosopher’s residence. He dug through the file for a moment before he brought out a sheaf of paper stapled together at one corner, and flipped to a certain page, which he looked at for a moment. Replacing the evidence in its folder, he wrote something down in bold block letters in his notebook, tore the page out and handed it to me. Then he fell off his chair.

I hastened to pick the detective off the floor, and propped him against one of the tables while I called 911. The ambulance, arriving some minutes later, found him still completely passed out, and they assured me that after some rest he’d be himself again.

That taken care of, I turned my attention to the piece of paper that had been given to me. I was sure it contained the key to solving the case. Unfortunately, it also appeared to be in Latin, a language I had never studied. It took me barely any time to close up the bar and run down to the house of the high school Latin teacher, who I found reclining in his slippers and bathrobe with a box of frosted chocolate doughnuts.

He leaned closer to inspect the note I held out to him, and it only took him a moment to translate the sentence therein.

COGITO, ERGO SUM
I think, therefore I am

I don’t think that can have anything to do with it. The strain must have overwhelmed the detective’s mind; he’s gone senile. I opened my mouth to voice my opinion and—

Urban Myths

The origins of the urban myth which convinces small children that if they eat their bread crusts they will have curly hair are buried deep in an obscure, tightly knit neighborhood. Before the institution of this myth, it had been a tradition among the children of this neighborhood to throw their bread crusts outside for the waiting birds, who promptly ate them. However, soon the excesses of birds hanging around their houses overwhelmed the parents and one of them went on a bloody drunken rampage one night and killed every single bird in the neighborhood. With the birds gone, the children were told not to throw their bread crusts outside, but the habit persisted in a reasonable majority, and soon the alleyways were filled with a disgusting miasma of disintegrating bread crusts. To counteract the habit, the parents of the children held a secret meeting and agreed to tell their children that eating bread crusts would give them curly hair.

Unfortunately, they lacked done important factor: many of the children had no desire to have curly hair. The parents were disconcerted by this unforeseen roadblock, and they met again to brainstorm. After a few weeks of confusion, they were on the verge of abandoning the alleyways to their sticky fate when motivation came in the form of a rich woman who owned several houses in the neighborhood. While putting out her trash one day in April, she had sunk her brand-new Manolo into the quagmire, and she came raging into the parents’ meeting with the evidence of the ruination in her hand. The imagination of the group, formerly sluggish as an addict without his morning coffee, jumped into action; several of those present rented their homes from the woman. They explained that they had convinced their children that eating their bread crusts gave people curly hair, and that to motivate them they had decided to hold a contest in the subsequent months with rewards for the children with the curliest hair. All they lacked, they said, was a wealthy sponsor who would provide prizes.

The festival was held for the first time that June with great success, and the tradition continued until the grandchildren of the children were grown with grandchildren of their own. By this point, the origins of the festival were forgotten, and it was abandoned indecorously one year when its sole remaining advocate died a fitting death in her apartment, which was filled with cages of parrots, parakeets, and other domestic birds of all kinds. Upon her death they were released into the city in a great puff of yellow, green and red like the poisonous exudation of a mushroom’s spores.

Rivalry

I wrote this to the prompt below for a writing contest in the GCW on Gaia which involved using this story generator. The theme: light-hearted drama. The main characters: depressed fortune-teller and brutal businessman. The start of the story: party. The end of the story: repentance.

The party was in full swing, which could only mean one thing: a decline. Sure enough, the rooms, filled to the bursting point, began to empty until the din was nearly tolerable.

Sharon, sitting in the corner of the dining room with her drink uselessly in her hand, was glad the party was ending, although everyone she could see was having a great time; they would be sad to go and satisfied they had come.

Sharon never felt that way after a party—or during it, for that matter. Her idea of a good time was sitting at home, rapt at some Eastern fortune-telling treatise. Lately, though, that didn’t happen much at all. Sharon, although she was a fortune teller and being interested in obscure Eastern traditions was her job, was sent to more and more parties by her boss, a hard-bitten, short little man who had little interest in fortune-telling but a lot in the money it raised. He was applying his “real-life” solutions to Tall Dark Corporations, which meant “mingling” and “interacting with the customers.” Sharon was at the party as a marketing ploy.

Sharon had been working for the Tall Dark Corporation for fifteen years before the new guy, Mr. Zapatista, came into control, and although she knew she should quit she couldn’t bring herself to. For one thing, she had traded her cat, Black Noon, to Tall Dark years ago and leaving it would mean leaving her cat. In any event, if things continued this badly she wasn’t sure she’d have a job to quit.

She was about to get up—her left leg was cramped from sitting in the corner for so long—when she spotted a man leaning against the wall just a few feet away from her. He was tall and dark and she didn’t know him; he was obviously her destiny. He turned to look at her eagerly under her gaze, and she could tell he was as uncomfortable as she was. Perfect!

***

—Cliché , she thought, but their conversation was going well. She had never had so much fun at a party in her life. The tall dark man, whose name was Derek, was not only shy but witty and intelligent—and attractive. Sharon had a difficult time focusing all her attention on the conversation, and, thanks to her long training as a sybil, she was picking up signs that he was too. When the party wound to a close, Sharon and Derek left together.

***

“What the hell were you thinking?!”

Sharon quivered at her desk beneath the rage of Mr. Zapatista. She hadn’t known that Derek was the manager of their rival firm, ShortStuff Corporation. Despite Mr. Zapatista’s protests to the contrary, ShortStuff was close to eclipsing them in the field of fortune-telling. Derek had faxed Tall Dark that morning with a dangerous proposal: Send us Sharon.

Mr. Zapatista couldn’t make himself do that. Sharon was a major earner, for chrissakes, and he couldn’t let her leave Tall Dark for a lover. Sharon was shaken at the revelation of her own worth. She left that morning’s meeting disillusioned and more confused than ever.

Of course she saw Derek, but the offer of a contract was never mentioned. Sharon was torn between Tall Dark and Derek, although Tall Dark was definitely trying to decrease her conundrum: since the offer a week ago, Mr. Zapatista had been cloyingly sweet, and even the maintenance people made sure her booth was well-swept every day, the crystal balls polished and the atmospherics appropriately smoky. Even so, after a week of teetering on the edge of a decision, she left Tall Dark to work for ShortStuff.

ShortStuff was a clean, efficient operation, and Derek was much kinder than Mr. Zapatista. Sharon reveled in her newfound happiness and peace of mind. Here at ShortStuff there were no requirements for the staff, a cheery team of fortune-tellers who ran, as far as Sharon could tell, a nice eclectic mix of stalls around the city. She visited Derek at his home several times a week; if there were whispers about this situation they were quiet ones. A month passed pleasantly. Sharon became known as an expert on Eastern fortune-telling, and when her paycheck came it was so high she nearly fell over backwards.

Meanwhile, Tall Dark was doing badly. Mr. Zapatista’s marketing values didn’t work well in the field of fortune-telling; it was no surprise when he came crawling to Sharon one afternoon, asking her to return to Tall Dark. She refused. ShortStuff was too much fun for her to return to endless, pointless parties at the houses of anonymous people. Mr. Zapatista’s final words to her, however, were shaking; he suggested he listen more closely to Derek when the latter didn’t know she was around.

Sharon was plunged back into dismay, but she couldn’t help following her curiosity; maybe Mr. Zapatista knew something she didn’t. So, one day, she snuck into the ventilation system.

Crawling along the endless pipes in the ceiling of ShortStuff, Sharon wasn’t sure if she was going crazy or not to trust the word of a man who had always treated her disgustingly. Nevertheless, she inched steadily towards the buzz of voices she knew marked the staff lounge. She could hear Derek’s dulcet tones faintly and crawled faster to hear what he was saying.

“—yeah, and last night too.” She stopped abruptly to listen. “She comes over all the time now.” There was muffled laughter. “What a…!” a burst of laughter edited a sentence for her, and her breath caught in rage; she caught a few lewd phrases, and then a loud mention of her name—by Derek. “I can make her do anything.” She blinked. “Anything I want.” Another burst of laughter echoed through the ventilation pipes as Sharon crawled, apoplectic and stunned, backwards, falling out into the ladies’ room and barely catching herself.

Sharon berated herself mercilessly, and when she had finished a thorough personal mental tirade for being so oblivious—it was difficult for her to find that she had been used, and so obviously—the flush of shame set in. How badly she had misjudged the Tall Dark Corporation! At least Mr. Zapatista had never misused her like this. He was truly the better person.

Derek caught her as she was storming out of ShortStuff. “Sharon! Sharon—wait, don’t…Sharon!” She stopped and looked at him for a moment. He looked remorseful. “Sharon…what are you leaving for?”

“You ought to know,” she snapped, and turned away, deliberately oblivious to his cries of dismay. Sharon left ShortStuff for Tall Dark Corporation.

Epilogue:

A few days later, beyond Sharon’s hearing, her coworkers wondered what had made her leave such a pleasant position.

“She’s crazy,” sighed Nicole.

“There’s nothing coulda enticed me away from a place like that!” Clara declared.

“I wonder what it was?” Michelle wondered.

“It was Zapatista,” came the sudden reply, in a voice old and withered as the ends of the earth; a voice so ancient the gossiping women would not have been surprised to learn its owner knew the cause of everything that had ever taken place anywhere. “He can be persuasive if he likes, and he had a secret that she couldn’t avoid.”

An Accident

On a quiet gray evening in May a family was gathered around a dinner table, laid with a red-checked cloth and the remains of a well-enjoyed dinner; the members desultorily conversed on sundry matters; the mother and her son played a finger game and the object of this miniscule drama was set close at hand: a milk glass, half full and dangerously near the edge of the table. Through some unseen device (it was rumored to be an especially vigorous jab at an opponent in the finger game) the glass was prompted to vacate its given position—it fell backwards into the arms of its owner like a fainting lady; the owner, taken by surprise, fumbled for a brief moment before abandoning the glass to its fate.

The glass, inexorable, toppled to meet the floor as though gravity were, after a harsh spat of conjugal pain, its mistress, and struck the slate with a crash muffled by the splashing of its contents but no less dramatic for the deluging thereof; it shattered spectacularly. The blast radius was nearly five feet, and the poets of the house waxed lyrical about lilies unfolding and summer snowflakes made of silicon and connubial infelicity, as the mother scrubbed the floor.

The Sad Tale of the Intron and the Exon

Prologue.
Monday morning.
Biology Class.

…exons: pre-mRNA which are expressed and eventually turned into polypeptides

introns: not exons; they don’t leave the nucleus. They are removed forcibly from a conference with their brother in their favorite pizza shop through a filthy back alley that smells of garlic by two masked thugs in dark leather jackets and possession of very powerful guns. And so forth and so on.

Gene expression: an active gene that results in the formation of a polypeptide genome…

The Sad Tale of the Intron and the Exon:

Indignant of its undignified capture and the exon’s apparent indifference in their cruel nucleonic separation, the intron, with much difficulty and injury, breaks free of his captors—anonymous in this tale, as their existence signifies little more than the beginning of a blood feud—only to wreak bloody revenge on his estranged brother, exon; who, unfortunately, he finds set up in a hospital on the edge of a polymerase farm he had set up on a ribosome. His stay was prompted by some slight injury only, which nonetheless kept him from the aid of the intron. For a while he was able to mollify the intron with this tidbit; in actual fact, however, the exon was sufficiently egotistical to be able to dismiss the cruel abduction of his brother with little difficulty as an afterthought; he had not thought of the intron for one second after their tearful division in the nucleus.

In time, with the aid of an accomplice nurse who was able to establish that exon had never once, during his stay in the hospital, inquired after his poor brother, intron discovered the truth and his long-delayed wrath was great in its actualization. Upon killing his shameless brother, intron was seized by an incredible feeling of guilt; therefore, despite his total unsuitability for the role, he took over the management of his departed brother’s illicit polypeptide farm. In due time this venture failed, and, his guilt increasing to still greater pitches at his inability to sustain his brother’s legacy, intron killed himself in a spectacular suicide which remained famous among the organelles for days; the accomplice nurse, sympathetic to his plight, was the one who administered to him the fatal dose of caffeine.

Scarf

A visit to Aunt Lorrie necessitated the very best attire. My sister, looking as though she had been confined to a straightjacket, wore her blue and pink dress, laboriously pressed into folds down the front the night before. Only I knew how very much she hated wearing it, because I had hated just as much, five years before, the navy blue suit which had been forced upon me on the eve of every trip to Aunt Lorrie’s. She was now twelve, and I was seventeen, just beyond being coerced into wearing my childish best; the outfit I chose to visit my most feared aunt was what passed for fancy dress in those days: an ironic ruffled shirt, starched and bleached pure and sparklingly white and a pair of black pinstriped pants most unsuited to my only jacket, which was brown and scruffy to a degree that just missed the necessity of elbow patches, due to my youthful poverty, and although I did not altogether deplore this state of affairs my mother did, most wholeheartedly, bemoan the sad state of the wardrobe of her only son. She seemed to take my complete and utter disregard of conventional fashion sense as a sign of fiscal irresponsibility; as I was someday to manage her affairs, she nearly had a heart attack when I appeared in this garb, and could not restrain a whimper when she saw the device with which I would be endeavoring to protect my bare neck from the January winds.

Disregarding her pleas to remove the hateful object from her sight, I wound this monstrosity of a scarf, an insanely colorful thing knitted, in a moment of inspiration, by a friend of mine in the storms of November as a birthday gift for me. Needless to say I treasured it. By the time I had finished tying the elaborate knot, which in its ornate splendor seemed to keep my head itself on, she was speechless; I ignored her look of incredulous animosity. If it were not for the undeniable fact that I had evaded visiting my aunt for the past year, and the lamentable absence of my father—my mother, having grown up in an age of female repression, had never learned to drive—I am sure she would have left me at home. I led the way to the car, keys in hand and humming a little tune.

My mother remained silent until we had nearly pulled into my aunt’s two-story house, twenty minutes away from our considerably smaller version. When she spoke, I could tell she had trouble restraining her annoyance. “Harold.”

Pulling into my aunt’s driveway with a spin of the steering wheel, I turned exuberantly to face her and found myself cut off by the mute concrete wall she had formed her face into, baleful eyes glaring up at me; there was an expression there, part regret, part wariness, part sadness, that I’d never seen there before—nor have I seen it since. “Mother dearest?”

“There’s something you must understand about your aunt’s family and mine. You know. They never approved of me.” I thought I was beginning to understand something, slowly, like sand falling off a fossil. The thing you must realize about my aunt is that she isn’t actually my mother’s sister—nor is she my father’s sister. She is the last of my father’s family, true, but technically she’s his aunt, not ours; a whole other generation.

“Because your father’s family is very high-class. And my mother was a working woman, and my father was a painter.” I nodded. This part of the family history was well known to me; my grandfather’s artistic talent had been continued in my little sister, who at her young age was certain she would, one day, be wildly famous as a painter, like he was (I’ve no doubt that, one day, she will be.) I had never conceived of my grandmother’s employment as disgraceful. The thing is, you understand it in theory, the way women were repressed, but when it comes down to application you fail. For the first time, I realized that my aunt disapproved all the more heavily of my mother because of her family; then I realized my mother disapproved of her own mother. By this point I didn’t need the rest of my mother’s explanation. “I’m afraid she’ll think I’m raising your father’s children badly.”

I was amazed that she could care about such an archaic worldview, until I realized she held it herself. It was her incredible family loyalty which had kept up her intense, exasperated communication with her mother until my grandmother’s death a few years previously. I looked at her with new respect; without another word from her I unwound the scarf, folded it and tucked it tenderly under my seat. I straightened the shoulders of my jacket, tied the loose shoelace on my right shoe, and dusted off a streak of dried mud on my pants leg.

Now that I was securely on her side, my mother returned to her tart disapproval. “I don’t understand why you treasure that awful thing so.” She slammed the door to the car; my sister scrambled as slowly as she could to follow her.

Lollipop

The grocer had a Bell jar of lollipops by the cash register. They had been there for as long as anyone could remember, collecting dust; when the sun fell on them they shone with sticky promise in cloudy pink, lemon yellow, bottle green and murky blue so that the gazes of the children in line were drawn toward the imminent crackle of cellophane wrappers. This pact was nearly always fulfilled. The only time Esme could remember not receiving a lollipop, carried by the huge, kindly hand of Mr. Ripoll, from the jar was the day of the Colonel’s funeral; it had been a dark day, she remembered, although she had been no older than six at the time, and even the tears on the faces of the townspeople at the wake seemed tired and dry.

The jar watched her now as she stood an aisle away in the shelves of cheap plastic toys. Their lurid colors held the gazes of the passing children for the moment before they reached the jar of lollipops, a moment that was never sustained. They had learned already that the lollipop was a constant and that the toys never came down off the shelves.

Esme could feel a trickle of sweat down her back and convinced herself it was the heat of the day, although from the light that came through the glass storefront she could tell there were storm clouds gathering—it would not be hot much longer. She looked casually to her right, away from the register, down the rows of shiny kitchen appliances, blenders and mixers stacked on top of each other, so orderly you could tell they were touched by nothing except for dust and the ancient rag the hand of Mr. Ripoll wielded every week. Her hand moved casually towards the shelf, as though the thought of doing it were enough to propel such an action; when she touched the tiny pink thing, she couldn’t feel it. Subtly she pressed down hard enough that the ridges on the top of the thing dug into the tips of her fingers. Her hand enveloped its object, and it disappeared magically into her fist.

Her hand, curled around the toy as naturally as if it had been the hand of her mother, dropped to her side; Esme walked down the aisle as if to admire something that caught her attention there, her hand straining against itself in its haste to hide its contents. Her face burned, she thought, so brightly nobody could fail to notice her guilt. When finally she turned the corner and allowed herself to stow the thing in the pocket of her shorts it was as if her guilt disappeared as surely as the sight of her infidelity. Out of sight, out of mind.

Esme glided down the corridors of the long store on a cloud, sailing past tins of biscuits and round cardboard containers of Quaker Oats until she reached the counter. Slowly, slowly, she came to a stop in front of Mr. Ripoll.

“Not buying anything today, Esme?”

“Not buying anything, Mr. Ripoll.”

“Well, have a lollipop anyway. You have a good day.”

Esme took a pink one, as she did every time: “You too, Mr. Ripoll,” and stuffed the wrapping into her pocket, on top of the little pink toy. Sticking the lollipop in her mouth—a sudden saccharine assault on her taste buds—she walked out of the grocery store into the rain.

James Does the Homework

Fairy’s Drink—an accursed little town that had the sense of decency to hide itself and its foolish, outlandish name in the hills of Northern Idaho—was my new hometown, so far away from New Jersey, where I’d actually grown up. The name actually seemed kind of appropriate; the number of individuals in the town who were sober was infinitesimal, and, probably in direct relation to this fact, so was school attendance; my first-ever class at Fairy’s Drink High School was study hall, and aside from myself the only other occupants of the room were three ratty kids who laughed quietly in the corner. I had trouble believing this could be a school and restrained myself from checking that the people at the front office were actual employees, that they wouldn’t suddenly burst out laughing at the joke they’d pulled on me, only with great difficulty.

By the end of the day it seemed no less criminal, although it was no longer surprising, that only seven students beside myself were in English class. However, there was a proper teacher in this class by the name of Ms Smith. Our only assignment was to read the first chapter of To Kill A Mockingbird, which she handed out to us, I thought, wearily.

I had no other homework. Ms Smith, it would appear, was new to the district as I was and had not yet given up hope in her students. The rest of the teachers were quite as apathetic as the teenagers they taught, and the distinct possibility that the condition was catching paralyzed me from the moment I noticed the phenomenon. The bus ground to a tired stop, kicking up amber clouds of April dust in front of my new house. The first thing I did, once inside, was fall disconsolately onto my bare futon in my bare room. Apparently, although my parting with New Jersey had been tearful, I had not dreaded the move as much as it deserved.

The second thing I did was take out my shiny, unread book, bound in lavender; the new house had not been hooked up to the internet and the last thing I wanted to do was remind myself of where I wasn’t by unpacking; I liked the two boxes that crouched in the center of the room because they seemed to promise me that the move was temporary, that the next day I’d be back where I belonged, Fairy’s Drink an abortive bend in the road.

The assignment, as I have noted, was to read simply the first chapter; I can’t explain why I kept reading besides the fact that I didn’t notice when it ended. I read, as steadily as I ever have, as the sky darkened and the moon came out. I was, in fact, captivated, and I continued to read until the lack of pages under my right hand arrested me. The blank green numbers on my clock astounded me; it was almost midnight. I’d never have believed I could spend nearly nine hours reading if I hadn’t seen it for myself. I rolled over and fell asleep where I lay.

The next day was another lesson in futility, until English. Ms Smith, looking as though she’d been taking the same lesson I had, asked for a show of hands by those who’d read the previous night’s assignment.

The class showed no upward movement; a boy and a girl in the back row giggled as they tried to fit into one of the dinky chairs; the rest of the class was nearly comatose, slumped at desks, chewing gum or other things, counting the spots on the ceiling tiles; and Ms Smith sighed. The despair in her face and body was too much for me to take; my hand rose into the air. I had no idea why it hadn’t been there in the first place.

To look at Ms Smith’s face you’d thought the sun had just come out, like some kid in the movies had just opened the door of an abandoned shed, revealing contents blanketed in dust and begging to be discovered.

“Well, class,” she breathed to a room empty, practically, of everyone but ourselves, “James has done the homework.”

Turn-About

Adeline Cross was in a spot but her mind didn’t seem to have realized yet; in the course of an evening she’d abandoned Stephen, her husband, over some disagreement about politics, packed up a motley assortment of twenty-three books (crammed by order of preference into whatever space the nearest grocery bag her hand landed on, in the corner of the kitchen by the bookshelf, availed; its previous occupant had been carried home some three hours previously, a fillet of salmon destined for Stephen’s dinner), and promptly run out of gas at the point of no return, twenty miles from home. She steered the shabby green Volvo into the nearest gas station on the power of inertia and managed to maneuver it, sweat beading the back of her neck, close enough to the pump; she prayed that arbitrarily the car had been positioned on the right side, because she had certainly had no power over the thing; more certainly, she was sure she’d never be able to reposition it if it turned out to be out of reach.

Outside, under the fluorescent noon, she prepared herself to think about the conflict. Strangely enough, though, her mind could not settle on that particular subject but floated away perversely to the most random things; it caught upon the bureau that stood in the front room of her parents’ house.

It was never “her mother’s house”, and propriety prevented it being Adeline’s father’s house, but the truth was that the latter had inhabited it so solidly, whereas his wife was prone to miss meals if not prompted—head in the clouds, space traveler.

The bureau, though, was old and scarred—the sort of thing you’d never think of. Over the years it had shifted into the house until it became as much a feature as the shingles, and although Adeline supposed they must have acquired it somewhere—it was never in the earliest pictures of the house, for instance—she couldn’t for the life of her remember where. It had done years of faithful service, though, the wood blunting at the edges so as to almost be closer to sphere-hood than rectangularity, and innumerable, unnamable scratches had sunk into its surface as completely as the layers of varnish that once had coated it; it was the color of melted chocolate, although as Adeline remembered it the wood itself was rarely seen, being hidden, for the most part, under a plethora of old tests, homework and report cards, as well as the fruit bowl.

It bothered her, the unknown origins of this bureau, as though it were an unnamed, un-thanked member of the family, a cousin maybe, who stood, socially awkward, by the side of the room. Adeline had, as of yet, no destination, and she thought of returning to her parents’ house—though it was two states away, the drive of many hours; a ludicrous proposition for a respectable woman who had taken only the most rudimentary preparations for a journey of any sort; she squinted furtively through the windows of her own car at the solitary bag of books. If she had any reason in her she’d turn back now, turn back and reconcile with Stephen; she’d be home by ten, barely a disturbance in the pond of local life—barely a fish surfacing to glance at a bounding shore.

The gasoline glugged steadily, with an unrushed sense of urgency, into the tank of the car. Adeline looked at the surrounding parking lot, rough cement stained by years of clear flammables in looks and smell. There was only one other car parked in the pool of superficial light the station cast, a car similar in looks to hers, battered, cast-aside. A young woman leaned against the open drivers’ window talking to another young woman inside, possibly a sister; reveling, it seemed, in the summer night air, through their wanton style of shorts and t-shirts. They had a sense of discovery about them; she almost envied the ties that bound them so closely to their parents, their justification for turning tail after facing the world, as they surely were, now, for the first time. Adeline had no such luxury after three years of marriage; Adeline gazed at them, probably for too long, because after a moment the standing one straightened to return her look. Adeline looked away, ashamed to be caught spying so obviously.

The pump stopped abruptly, jerking in her hand, a final gulp. She turned to the screen and paid for the gas. Then she pulled out of the gas station and turned home to Stephen.

Stuffed Animals- The First Big Important Man I See

The luscious parks of Herbredshire were paid for by the townspeople, who were extravagant in their beautification and stingy in their taxes, and peopled by their children and legions of well-paid nannies. Beneath one of the largest and shadiest trees were clustered a few people; two nannies and a child, perhaps aged six and hand in paw with a stuffed yellow bunny. The age of its occupant was hinted at by the loose folds of the skin, as it were, of the bunny, made of thin cotton with a faded floral print. The child, though about as old as its toy, was bearing its age much better than its companion; it was a young boy, eyes large from watching the activities of his superiors and contemporaries, mainly his nanny, who was at this moment engaged in a chat with another of her occupation, one eye on her charge.

“…and how’s the new little boy?”

“Oh, he’s a strange little kid—you see him just over there.”

“What’s strange about him?”

“Well, where are your kids?”

“Playing, of course; I see.”

The boy’s nanny motioned him closer, saying, out of the corner of her mouth, “And that doll of his he carries around…! Hardly normal…” Her friend laughed softly, watching the boy, who was slowly approaching the two women.

“Hey, honey, what’s your name?”

The boy was silent. (“Y’see?”)

The nanny tried again.

“What a nice doll!”

And again.

“What’s his name, then?”

“Hasn’t got one.”

The nanny was taken aback. “What’s that, luv?”

The little boy’s face remained immobile. “Hasn’t got one, it’s not mine, it’s hers.” A small hand raised to point at its owner’s nanny. “She wants me to look cute.” He took a deep breath: “And she wants for me to give it to the first big important man I see,” he continued, “’cause it’s got poison in its other paw and when the big man takes it he’ll die right there!

“She said she wanted to get into the newspapers because of some other man who didn’t know how to find her; and he’d be sure to if her little brat poisoned a big important man in the middle of the park. This wasn’t her first choice, she really wanted to rent a space in the Personals but she didn’t have the money so she dipped the paw of the bunny in the arsenic when we went to visit Doctor Leonard and gave it to me just this morning. If it doesn’t work she doesn’t know what she’ll do, but she’ll probably be reduced to shooting someone with an umbrella on a rainy day, and we’re in the middle of a drought.”

After this speech the little boy retreated, watching the people circulating in the park peacefully.

The second nanny looked, aghast, at the boy’s nanny, and inquired, in undertones, of the reality of this story. Bewildered, the boy’s nanny denied all charges and called the boy back with a trembling voice; soon he was once again in front of the two women.

“Sorry, sweetie? Who gave you that bunny there?”

“I told you. She did. And she wants me to give it to the first big important man I see, because she wants to get in the newspapers because she wants some man to notice her .”

“Really?”

The boy turned to leave again. “No. His name is Epaminondas.”

Rain: The Colonel

The air was as quiet as any air has ever been precluding a storm of phenomenal proportions; the Colonel sat at the weathered iron gate the edged the boulevard, in an old metal folding chair propped on two legs at such a sharp angle it was a wonder to onlookers that he didn’t topple over; but the Colonel was an experienced hand, although he appeared at all times to be half asleep. Here comes the lovely young Sarasina to talk to him about his overdue grocery payments; he hardly looks up, though it would be the privilege of any young man in the town to simply look in the direction of the proprietor of the grocery store.

“Colonel, I want to talk to you.”

“Ah so?”

“Yes, it’s about this month’s payment, and last month’s too.”

“Ah so?”

“Colonel, you have never paid.”

“Ah so? Blame my nephew,” the nephew in question, being the only surviving member of the Colonel’s family, was in theory in charge of all the old man’s monetary affairs; the rest of the family had been killed by various blood feuds, plagues, and wars in the years since the Colonel had retired from the military at the age of 76.

“Colonel, I cannot continue to offer you credit.”

“Ah so?”

“Colonel, you owe me thirty-seven dollars and nineteen cents.”

This figure the Colonel dismissed with a desultory wave of his hand. “There’s money inside the house. Run along and get it.”

Sarasin protested that she would never dream of removing the offending money, but the Colonel insisted, never once removing his hat, nor moving any part of his anatomy more than an inch in any direction; never once a greeting—no hello ma’am, no how’s business, apart from my debts, no lovely weather we’re having; but that was the way of the Colonel. The townspeople would have whispered to each other, as they did habitually, as they passed. But there was no-one in the streets. They had all gone home to escape the impending rain.

Portrait of the Author as a Young Girl

I thought now was the best time, my invisible and most probably non-existant reader base, to introduce myself, after three months of random literary and critical posts. My name is Eleanor. I am a 15 year old from New Hampshire--and yes, since my half-birthday was April 2nd, I can legally drive.

At the moment, as my age may suggest, I am a freshman at my local high school--believe me, I'm not that thrilled about it, but I was waitlisted at St. Mark's and Commonwealth, so I suppose I have to put that behind me (wait...wouldn't even mentioning that be alluding to it?) and I really am not sure what I want to do when I graduate. That is, when I graduate from college; I want to go to Oberlin college, where my dad went. Philosophy holds great attraction, as does psychology or writing; possibly music; I can see myself in law or science or something but that's not likely to happen, since whatever I end up doing will need a great degree of dedication.

I really do like music, which is necessary because my father is a choir director (my mother is a math teacher, which doesn't interest me quite as much. I'm no good with arithmetic but I like algebra.); you can check out the Slacker Radio box at the bottom of the page. My favorite band lately is probably Coldplay and my favorite individual artist is Sinead O'Connor.

Virginia Woolf is my favorite author. The last book I read of hers was just last week: Mrs. Dalloway, which I didn't like quite as much on the whole as To the Lighthouse. Seriously, though, reading Virginia Woolf in study hall when I'm really tired is trippy. I'm also a great fan of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. The last book I read was Morningside Heights by Cheryl Mendelson. I liked it a lot, for a modern novel (I'd give it a 4/5); it reminded me a bit of Jane Austen in how planned out and intricate it was.

So that's me at the moment! Thanks for reading and please comment...

Blue of April

I have no sympathy for people who have the blues; for people who play the blues; for Picasso’s blue period. Blue is the happiest color I know, blue is the sky today. Blue is the definitive proof that I can still see.

I am reduced to worrying about camera flashes, because stabs of lights are supposed to be one of the signs that my retina is detaching, drifting inorexably and irresistably away from whatever anchors it to my optic nerve, like a meteor into the gravity of a passing star ship.

When the clouds drift across the sky in April, instead of obscuring the blue they appear to be celebrating as I am; tiny black clouds dancing vertically, the fluffy cumulus layering themselves to different wind speeds. The snow in the yard is reduced to a few shamed patches, like marshmallows melting into the brown of the fall's dead grass; steam rises from the asphalt shingles on the roof as snow melts in the direct force of the sun; from the roof, the bare trees are a thin ring around the edge of my peripheral vision, but the blue, the blue is my world.

Moon over the Freeway

When I go to the edge of the parking garage, just out of the car and stiff from sitting still so long, and look out over the city, it seems like the world might not, even though from where I stand it looks infinite. The consciousness of so many people in that space weighs on me. If this world is only a figment of my imagination, or a figment of somebody else’s imagination that I’m facilitating by my existence, I am responsible for the existence of all those people! Think of it: I’m Einstein. I’m John Adams. I’m whoever I can think of, just by thinking of such.

The sunset over the city is beautiful—it always is—as one catches glimpses of the sun burning through the buildings, but as always it reminds one of the Simon & Garfunkel song and the apricot sphere becomes irascibly linked with a mushroom cloud, the doom, the very sunset of humanity. The first stars come out, and I have to disagree with the poets, the novelists, the naturalist essayists. The twilight is so much more beautiful in the city, where you have to appreciate the contrast between the sky and its brash surroundings, and that maybe this is where the sun will never come up again.

Excursions

It was nearly a year ago—it will be a year in April—when Kelly took her children and me to the New Hampshire seashore . It was my first time there; my family visits Cape Cod during the summers, and hence the only ocean I know is, though just down the coast, so many miles different; the beaches there are much larger, much more a part of the local identity than in Plymouth, where the thin, hot strip of sand and shallow water is crowded against the hot asphalt of the cramped parking lot and hot asphalt street lined with beach houses in various states of repair. It is, of course, always dangerous to some degree to travel with someone with post-natal depression, more so in retrospect when she tells you she can’t remember any of it, none of those three months when she talked, with slightly manic desperation, so much to you in the hot, full van; and it was an unprecedented decision. One day Kelly decided she wanted to go to the beach and I happened to be available; I complied to her request that I help her handle her four small children. Isaac, her month-old son, swaddled in a sling, held close to her torso, and Grace with her tiny hand in mine, Kelly and I went to the seashore.

Of course, Kelly’s mood was not far missed by mine, plunged for some reason into a nostalgic depression of fourteen. We stood in the sea spray beneath the beating sun all afternoon; Grace encountered the ocean and promptly got my shirt soaking wet, Emma raced the waves and Alex tasted the ocean. We trooped around southern New Hampshire, stopping at gas stations to buy gallons of water for refilling the water bottles and to use their tiny bathrooms. The drive there felt interminable even to me, especially after the first, tantalizing smell of the salty sea air wafted through, accompanied by the cries of the gulls, the open windows; and then, crusty with salt, pockets filled with seashells and shoes with sand, we drove back the same way to the cool April evening which seemed so sweet and full of the promise of imminent summer.

Inamorata

I was sitting in my bedroom reading Jane Austen when I had a sudden picture of a girl lying fast asleep on a bed, bathed in the warm silver moonlight that came through, like some unearthly liquid, the window opened to the calm summer night: my old girlfriend.

I don’t know why I thought of her, but it was probably, according to the Freudian logic my current girlfriend is immersing us all in, a song on the radio they played when we were together those years ago that prompted a suppressed memory. If I proposed the idea to her she would probably seize on it with a passion and begin a prompt psychoanalysis, not getting jealous that I’ve ever thought about other girls—some would, but not her; that’s why I love her.

But just thinking about what that song could be, man, takes me back. The thought of her gives me a lump in my throat I just can’t explain, even though it’s been a few years and several girlfriends since I’ve seen her—I mean, I’m over her. Maybe it was Sinead O’Conner—that girl was a big fan of her, and played her records late into the night when we were together, still a happy couple, dancing until midnight.

Anyway, for one reason or another, I thought of her. She was an inamorata of prodigious skill—or maybe it just seemed like that to me, blinded by my own side of the matter. She was never skinny, and not quite fat, but if that was always my favorite thing about her it was her least favorite things about herself. I never understood it, the way she tried to diet, halfheartedly, and I still don’t. I remember also that she never made it through the week without having to, for one perfectly legitimate reason or other, bake a pan of brownies, or a chocolate cake, or the ginger cookies everyone loved—laughing, all the time, at herself, and then eating a plate of whatever it was when it came, steaming, out of the oven, and urging me to follow her example. She was a writer, too, though she never took herself seriously. It was impossible for me not to, because she’s the one who taught me that you have to include the good with the bad in a story to make it great. Since she left I’ve never done that quite as well. The idyllic has always been my preference, and my failing: I create utopias with no foundations, and untested they fall far short of their embryonic fantasy beginnings. Of course, she went through my rough drafts lining them with the teachers’ red pens she used to correct them, to ground them and give them perspective, structure.

It was on such a classic night for us this memory takes place, the sweet scent of a chocolate cake in the oven flavoring the air as I, her helpful assistant, made frosting—such a vital skill for the boyfriend of a cook, it was the only thing she had been able to teach me to make. It was partnered by the subtle sound, quiet as snow falling, of my girlfriend correcting my latest short story, the longest yet. I had worked for weeks on the seven pages, building them up and paring them down day after day. I watched her shear away sentences, and even from across the kitchen I could almost see the way she brought out what I had meant to say as though it was a tangible web of steel beams and bolts growing up around my worn phrases, slowly and as inexorably as water washes sand away. She sat back, and I could see she was tired. “Dearest, why don’t you go to bed?” She sighed, leaning forward to rest her forehead on her palm.

“I think I might. It was a long day.” Slowly she got up to give me a goodnight hug and kiss, and left the kitchen for the bedroom we shared, almost filled by the double bed we kept there. In a whirl of chivalry, I remembered, I frosted the cake, using abundant globs of frosting to glue the two halves of the cake clumsily together and giving it a proud, wobbly chocolate crown. When the kitchen was finally still, the dishes and bowls she and I had used washed and the cake set under an upturned tin, I went into the bedroom to find her fast asleep, stretched out full length in the moonlight and peaceful as a monument to a buried princess—so serenely and inimitably beautiful I nearly cried then as I nearly cried when I remembered it those years later.

Fear

My Biology teacher asked me recently if I was nervous about the upcoming arrival of our decision letters. Looking her straight in the eye I said, "No, not at all." I was, as she suggested, calm cool and collected. I am calm, cool and collected.

But wait--this is not right. I find myself feeling alternately that I have been drinking water in which pennies have been soaked or that I must have been electricuted recently. My mouth floods with the acrid, bitter taste of fear, paralyzing me where I sit or stand; my palms grow sweaty and start to go tingly or numb; my toes cramp; I get facial tics. I hope every day this does not happen during Band. After some brief introspection, which is how I arrive at all my mental-health analysises, I decided--calmly, coolly, collectedly: I am scared s*******.

Despite the fact that everyone I've talked to, except for perhaps my paranoid study hall teacher who has no reason to like me, has said they think I'll get into the three high schools I applied to this year, it appears that fear is not a logical impulse. Damn.

Now what is my fear exactly? As Sinead O'Connor so wisely said, back in oh-something when she got back into the music biz: "I started to wither away and think, No one will ever know I'm here, dogs will eat my corpse, that whole thing." Fear of being stifled in this god-forsaken place of beauty, idiots, and my friends. But the beauty and the friends will hopefully not be enough to keep me here. Sorry, DJ...

March 9, 2008- 3:43 (8 hours and 17 minutes)

An Appeal to Your Mercy

It was an afternoon in early March, smack-bang in the middle of the school year, or nearly so, and Scaggs, our earnest scholar of, at the moment, geometry, had taken up his well-read text in the school library, a noble institution outfitted with a number of inviting circular wooden tables and an astounding array of lofty bookcases filled with a selection of the finest volumes available, and now peopled with Scaggs, a party of his friends settled at the table next to his—scattered with assorted papers and assignment books—and one or two pairs of Scaggs's fellow scholars, discussing quietly at various places in the room the finer points of, shall we say, middle eastern philosophy. It was a fine day, the skies above painted the most brilliant blue and ornamented with only the whitest, fluffiest clouds, as though the heavens were holding a talent show, and the remainder of the school had poured outside to enjoy the first really good weather of the season. Scaggs began to solve the very first proof of his homework, dealing with the law of cosines, and had written down only a few lines when he was rudely jerked from the land of adjacent/hypotenuse by a loud burst of laughter from the next table, accompanied by various of the cruder expressions of the English language which our friend Scaggs, being properly reverent of the great facility of language in humankind, the very great leap into civilization it represents and the importance of using it properly, was caused some pain by these interactions. He cringed from what was, in his young soul, the highest offense any human could deliver to the faculty of speech: blatantly improper grammar, insinuating turns of phrase he disliked profoundly, crass innuendos, and a general Dionysian, Epicurean attention to nothing at all; the descent of the airy nothings until they were no longer airy or even spritely but lolled obviously, impervious to disgust at its lack of substance...

Nevertheless, Scaggs, being a brave lad despite his delicate sensibilities, forged ahead in the realm of triangularity, doing his best to ignore the vagrant flagrancy of his classmates. It caused him endless distaste, but he endured it: the immediate crudity that made its ugly presence known, an ancient crusted sea monster, after every comment which a perverted mindset would interpret as in bad taste: “Oh,” they cried, gulping with thin laughter, “that is what she said!”

But Scaggs did not break down until he had made his way, stumbling over the audible tangle of his friends nearby, through the third, fourth and fifth problems and was adventuring onto the sixth, a knotty, puzzling problem involving the square root of the hypotenuse’s third cousin twice removed and the opposite and/or adjacent sides. The cousin was discovered to be away to tea with an elderly aunt, and the weight of the relations of the put-upon triangle in his proof was such that Scaggs, on the behalf of his woebegone shape, desiring only to calm its sufferings and bring home the offending relations, snapped under the dual strain. The chattering of his friends suddenly overwhelmed him; the pettiness of their affairs concerned him more than they concerned the parties actively involved.

"Don't you know," Scaggs cried in desperation, "that you are offending the very matter of my being by existing in such a fashion as you do, as though life were no more than a series of fashions to be tried with the flighty fancy of the vapid butterfly who flits from flower to flower, and the way anything serious is discarded by you with not even a glance at its character rends at my greater moral sense until I can barely stand the pain?"


"Why, Scaggs, old fellow," they exclaimed reproachfully, "you'll never have any friends, if you take that attitude towards life."