A doctor and patient in an exam room. The patient has a crude bandage on his arm.
Doctor
Well, let’s get this bandage off and take a look.
Patient
It really hurts.
The doctor unwraps the bandage. The patient winces. The doctor peers at the wound.
Doctor
Ooooh, ouchie.
Patient
What?
The doctor has turned to his computer and types while he speaks his observations.
Tamar and I climbed trees together. She would climb high and hang by a single hand like a cluster of grapes. I was content to watch her climb. You don’t have to deny your sister’s beauty. You can enjoy it in a nice, distant way, like it’s a sunset. You don’t want to sleep with a sunset.
Amnon always grasped, an extra fig, an extra rib, greasy-thumb and face. No one talks about how fat he was. Recently, while I was in the stables checking in on Sara, my mule, I saw a mother goat screaming. She couldn’t pass the second kid. They slit her and a squirming mass rolled out, wobbled on the floor. I almost stepped on it, just in memory of Amnon.
When I heard of the way he’d done it, with the believable lure of illness — perpetually sick — I broke a limb off an almond tree, and nearly went that night to kill him. The grasping was something he wouldn’t quit. I almost went then and shoved the stick down his throat, but I thought, “My father will deal with him. David won’t ignore the grabbing.” Two years later and Amnon was still kicking, and it fell to me. I set it all up, my men struck him once, brothers scattered, avenged Tamar, done. I didn’t regret it. I know the law. I have it bound on my wrists. It’s been stamped into my head.
“Don’t go in the water. No one knows what’s in the water,” the boy’s mother said. They were at the beach.
“I know what’s in the water,” the boy said.
“You can’t see what’s under the water,” the boy’s mother said. “It’s too dark and deep for anyone to see what’s there.”
The boy looked hard at the water, its green and blue and black swirling.
“There,” the boy said. “I saw.”
“No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have seen.” His mother dug her feet into the sand down to the cool wet beneath.
“I did,” the boy said. He walked close to the edge of the water and stared. He looked like a small tree bending out over the water.
“What do you see?” the mother said.
“Monsters,” the boy said. Continue reading “Under the Water”
After he unlocked the shop door, and stood look looking at the figures in the display area, Levi slapped one of the wooden figures in the face. The figure bore a fish’s head, and the wide-eyed stare almost seemed to be a consequence of having been struck. He walked to the back of the shop, then stopped and turned around. He trudged back to the figure.
He patted it on the head, making amends, struggling with himself not to tell it, out loud, “I’m sorry.” Throughout this, the creature’s expression remained fixed, staring. But even in the static expression there lived a spark, unmistakeable in Paul’s work. He almost waited for the figure to take a breath. He glanced around at the bird-headed, dog-headed, beetle-headed figures. A menagerie of heads on humanoid bodies. He felt their eyes on him. Continue reading “Workshop”
“The thing about getting older is that we’re all, as we get older, at least everyone around me, we’re all spending a lot less time stealing from convenience stores. I never stole much, but I had a few friends that did.
“The one time I stole from a convenience store I couldn’t believe how easy it was. It wasn’t a pre-meditated hit. I was walking down an aisle with two friends. One was Dave and one was Jon. They’d both been in separate life-threatening car accidents, but Jon was the one who’d had mild brain damage. It hadn’t lowered his IQ at all, but it had made him somewhat spacey and passive. And I think that when we were walking down one of the convenience store aisles, and I saw a package of oatmeal cream pies, and thought, “I’d like those” it was Jon’s passivity that beckoned to me, and encouraged me to actually take the cream pies and shove them into his coat and down the sleeve of his coat. Continue reading “Stealing: A Monologue”
The room is dark. There’s a power point slide up. A figure steps in front of the projection, distorting the image.
Josh
I’m a poet. But I’m not your average poet. It may shock you to know that my poems don’t rhyme. Because have you ever heard a heartbeat? The beating of a human heart? Does it rhyme?
Well I guess I just proved my point.
Some have asked questions like, “Do hearts use any of the standard poetic devices?”
And then I’m like “Yes. They use repetition and meter.”
And then some people are like, “That’s getting a bit free with the idea of meter. It’s just the same beat over and over again.”
And then I’m like, “Unless the human heart has an arrhythmia.”
And they’re like, “So your model for poetry is an abnormal human heart, with an unpredictable heartbeat?”
To which I say, “Like the human heart, my poetry is constant, life-giving, and, due to a congenital defect, syncopated and surprising.”
A number of years ago a mother and her daughter were in their home. The mother was busy with something. She was washing dishes, perhaps.
“Mom!” came the voice of the daughter.
They had a standing rule that the daughter could not simply yell at the mother from across the house. The mother ignored the voice.
“Mom,” the voice said.
“Don’t yell at me. If you need something, come to me and ask me,” the mother said and went to wipe the table down.
“Mom,” the voice said again.
The mother put down the wash rag and went to the back of the house, following the voice. The mother didn’t stomp, but she let her feet fall heavier than was necessary. She went back to the room. The daughter wasn’t there.
“Where are you?” the mother said.
“Right here. I need help with this leotard,” the daughter said.
She wasn’t there. The mother opened the closet. No one there. Continue reading “Other Voices, Other . . .”
I’d finally figured out how to control the birds. Not real birds. The birds that I made. Just because you made something doesn’t mean that you have control over it. I figured that if I made the birds, they’d worship and obey me. But they left droppings on my bike instead.
Here’s why I made the birds: I wanted to. That’s really all of the reason there was. Jordan claimed that he didn’t believe me. I wanted to make beautiful birds and put them out into the world and watch them live.
Here’s how you make a bird. Get good white clay. You need the kind from a stream that’s fed by one of the old springs. One of the springs people used to drink from and cure disease, or turn back death a few years. I know a spot.
Once you have the white clay, you have to work up some spit. It has to be mostly yours, but you can get someone to help you. This is where I got Jordan involved. He’s amazing at spit. It flows out of him. It makes him annoying to talk to, but extremely useful when you’re trying to create living, flying, breathing and singing birds. Continue reading “Birds and Spiders”
A couple weeks ago I was sitting in the teriyaki chicken place, Red Bento, with Caleb, and I could tell he had something to say, so I delayed by immediately wondering out loud about this whole Red Bento issue. “Why must the Bento be red?” was my question. Caleb is my younger brother. I’ve made him cry in public more recently than it would appropriate for me to say. Two months ago.
When I concluded with, “and it’s the whole mind-body duality that we’re really at war with,” Caleb nodded and then waited for me to say more, but I’d harvested every field of inane banter on my topic.
“Here’s something I was thinking about,” Caleb said. Right then our server came for our orders.
When he left, Caleb began again.
“I was thinking,” he said, and was interrupted by another server bringing miso soup.
“Do you know the end of Exodus 4?” He pointed his forehead at me, an angle of intense inquiry.
I wanted to best him with instant recall of the passage, but failing that I said, “In the Bible?”
“Exodus, second book of the Bible, chapter 4. End of the chapter, I don’t remember the verses.”
I looked at Caleb.
“Do you know it?” he said.
“Yes.” I didn’t.
Caleb stuck out his lower lip and nodded.
“As you know, it’s where Moses is heading out of Midian, back to free the Hebrews from Pharaoh, and the Lord shows up and wants to kill him.”
“Right. Coming back from Midian,” I said, making a limp gesture.
“Every time I read that passage, it sticks out to me. I’ve never understood why God wants to kill Moses.”
“But now you think you do,” I said. Our food arrived and deplaned.
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his chopsticks together in a vigorous attempt either to remove splinters or start a fire.
“It’s because he’s a dick,” Caleb said.
My brother wrenched his tiny pick-up from street to street, from hospital to home, while his wife labored on a white-sheeted bed, in a cocoon of medical personnel. The spaces between contractions were tightening, but on his mind’s wall he’d written that the first thing his daughter heard would be Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon,” a song born for a second time into a wider world as the soundtrack to a car commercial. I knew it from the commercial. CD and player both sat like bored orphans somewhere in his apartment, illegitimate members of the birth kit. I had offered to go for them.
“You won’t get back in time,” he said. “You look for things the way an aging trombonist reads sheet music.”
I found this convoluted, but a recognizable description of myself. I offered to download the song on my phone instead.
“That would work fine,” he said, “if the song were by Ke$ha, with a dynamic range designed for low fidelity MP3s to make you shake your ass and do vaporized alcohol shots while you swim in a sea of potential STDs. This is a song designed to make you shake your heart.”
As the car flung us around, I talked (an attempt at distraction) about how “Pink Moon” was an interesting choice, remarked on the intersection between art and commerce, between obscure poetic expression and commercials, and how it was an appropriate initiation into our shared American identity, and was going to go on and ask questions like “What is a ‘Pink Moon’? and “Why should we concern ourselves with whether or not it’s “on its way”? but he turned from his driving, mid-turn, to show me eyes like two half-empty espresso cups, and say, “I wish you believed in beauty.” Continue reading “Squirrel Baby”
A Fruit Salad of Harm 