then the radio died

the Lunatics: a walk across a field

2009-01-09T20:10:00.000-08:00

Here's the thing. The first boy who fell for me was the first boy I destroyed. His name was David. The funny thing is, that was also my Grandfather's name. David was a friend from Tell City with an alcoholic sister named Jenni. Did I mention that luck did not run in abundance through our town. He would steal alcohol from her because it would fall into his lap every time he visited her. Jenni had a husband named Wayne and she kept the bottles hidden everywhere in the house, I mean everywhere. David would look in on his sister and the bottles would rain down on him every step he took: in the hat box, under the bathroom counter, miniatures in the spice rack. He would bring it to us- I mean me and the rat pack I used to run with- but would never touch it himself.

Poor David would walk to the ends of the earth for me. He looked at me with these aquatic frog's eyes. I've seen infants gaze at their mother with the same time of rabid, hopeless, need-driven love. He was a good kid, nice temperament and lovely tanned skin the color of a walnut. But when someone looks at you with so much love you either need to love them back or you need to step out and get a breath of fresh air. Since I was not in the position to be loving anybody I should have excused myself from the table, so to speak. But I didn't. So this is what happens next.

We were all sitting in Natty Clement's car in the field above the cemetery. We were fifteen and sixteen years old. There was a marvelous lightning storm playing out across the world. The world at least as we saw it, through the windshield, and that's only world that was for us. It was Natty and Johnny and David and me. At that point I had never seen such a storm. Later on during the Unseason when my mother would stand at the window and flutter her eyelids, then I would get used to the terrific beat and pulse of lightning, to nearby thunder banging in your teeth and resonating up your jaw, climbing up your face to your eyes.

But at this point I was just fifteen, just a girl caught in a storm. I had two parents at home reading the newspaper and worrying about seed-pearl rain on an unfinished chicken house. We were drinking a bottle of Davey's sister's finest: lemon-flavored vodka that smelled like something you'd use to disinfect the drain. It felt that way too but I drank long, outlandish pulls just to get the eyebrows raising. I could always be counted on. And the Natty from the front seat turned and told David he ought to take a walk across the field. The absurdities of this suggestions are too many to be catalogued. The storm was on us and we were the eye. He would have a no easier time dodging the stabs of lightning than he would trying to avoid the raindrops as they fell. Johnny twisted his body around and looked back and forth between David and Natty, his interest piqued.

'Just a walk across the field, David, that's all.' He spoke evenly, a little smile playing over his mouth.

We were all watching David. I stretched my arm and tapped his knee with my index finger. 'We'll come and pick you up on the other side. You just have to go one way.' He didn't say a word, just turned his face and pressed his forehead against the window, exhaled through closed teeth.

'David.' I said, 'go walk across that field. And tell me all about it. I'll take you out to Jillian's after this, just you and me, and you tell me all about it.' As I said this I could see, in my periphery, Johnny's jaw hitting the floor of the car. I ignored him. And that was it, David turned his high-beam eyes to me and made this expression with his mouth, half open, like he was fishing for words but coming up dry. Then he put his hand on the door handle, gave it a pull and stepped outside.

Why did we let him do such a thing? Because we were at an age where curiosity starts to bend into cruelty. Because kids throw rocks at animals.

He made it nearly halfway across the field. Any farther and we would have lost sight of him in the deluge. I think he was feeling a little better, not so scared, that he made it that far. Something made him stop dead and turn around. He raised a hand up to us, either a salute or a hello or a goodbye. Didn't wave it, just held it up next to his face. And then there was a white flash with a pink center that was David. It was accompanied by a grotesque clap of thunder that was like a hammer being slammed down on our eardrums. In the aftershock there was a faint buzzing that you felt more than you heard. And the rain kept falling and the storm went on.

In the car I Johnny was screaming and Natty was shouting 'OH JESUS OH JESUS OH JESUS OH JESUS'. I was quiet but I was pulling out pieces of my hair without noticing. My stomach ache felt like it was frothing up and would very quickly be spilling out of my mouth. The car suddenly reeked of sweat and lemon vodka. As for David, he lay on the ground smoking. I don't mean he was smoking a cigarette I mean there was literally a plume of smoke curling up from his head.

Somehow we managed to lurch the car over to his body. And I stood outside by the hood of the car, I seemed to be glued to the car and couldn't move from it- and Natty bent over David and shouted 'CAN YOU HEAR ME??? CAN YOU HEAR ME??'

Well he couldn't hear him. Was he dead? No, but he never heard another word as long as he lived. Deaf as a doornail. Funny thing was that even after all that he still wanted me to take him out to Jillian's. Kid wanted his reward. But I never did. I figured, there wasn't much for us to talk about now that he couldn't hear me.

There is a word for girls like me. Thankfully, by the time David was old enough to know it, he had lost his grip on language entirely.

the Lunatics; meet Eve

2009-01-09T19:11:00.000-08:00

My name is Eve. I grew up sitting in trees. My father called me 'The parrot'. When he saw me running on the ground barefoot and wobbly (the tree gave me sea-legs) he would exclaim, "Now, what is The Parrot doing out of her tree?" When I came down my mother would feed me medicine. I drank glasses of pepto-bismal when the other children drank milkshakes. She claims that I liked it especially though a straw. As a result I had a perpetual stomach ache and I think that I have some developmental problems. For example I can't remember the names of birds and certain colors make me throw fits.

Some things you should know about me. I spent my limb-bound childhood dreaming of being a polar explorer at McMurdock Station. I am from a fairly, fairly small town called Tell City, where bad news grew on trees. Nobody from that place had any luck. Just take me! My father shot himself, my mother aged at twice the normal rate and is scared of her own shadow, my poor aunt is the size of a house, and I, having already lived a substantial portion of my life (I don't expect to live too long), have never even set foot on the South Pole. Closest I think I've come is when one of the lunatics cracked the ice in the pond and smashed my head under so I could see the world from under beneath the freeze. It looked like light coming in through church windows. It was a long cold minute I spent under there and I longed for a layer of fat like seals have to keep them warm. I didn't run out of breath because he would yank my head out every now so that I could hear what he was saying to (shouting at) me:

Head out: "You bounce for me! You bounce for me now! You don't bounce with anybody else!"

Head back under: silver bubbles, white ice, silence

Head out: "YOU UNDERSTAND ME NOW GODDAMNED IT EVIE YOU REMEMBER WHAT YOU'RE-"

Head back under...

and so it went. But it mustn't get to you. That is how a lunatic speaks when he is In Love.

the Lunatics

2009-01-07T11:48:00.000-08:00

"Why does this winter feel colder than all the others?" My mother wondered, sinking down into the chair with her back pressed against the window. The window that leaked cold air into the house in a frigid square, that she wouldn't fix, that she was continually drawn to like an insect to a porch light, that she sometimes left open in the dead of winter. She had her arms crossed over her bony chest, holding each elbow with the opposite hand.

"Maybe it's because it's your husband shot himself in the mouth" said Aunt Bella, making a gun from her hand and pointing it towards her face. As if we needed clarification.

It's a quiet way to go. After the initial blow, obviously. But a shot is a shot, we heard them all the time. Usually it's the hunters in the woods or somebody's ill-fated dog bearing the brunt of somebody else's bad day, or my mother in the yard shooting at the roosters to make them run. This time it was dad in the kitchen, right out of a shower, his hair greased, wearing starched pants and his nicest shirt, the color of a lemon, buttoned down and tucked in. Thought he'd save us the trouble of preparing him but he hadn't anticipated the blood. How can you plan to shoot yourself and not be thinking about the blood, that's what I wondered. I had a cousin leap from a bridge and he didn't leave us with anything to clean up at all, now, that's being thoughtful.
I think if you're going to go early, slip out the back door and take your hat with you.

My mother was nodding faintly. Then she snapped her head up and looked at us, my aunt and I, and then towards the kitchen. "Isabelle?" She asks, her voice tugging at the last strains of her sister's name, so it comes out like a whine, an insipid question. "Could you make us some dinner this evening? I just don't think I have the energy."
"Oh to Jesus!" My aunt heaved herself up from the couch and shuffled towards the kitchen, a gigantic marionette on sagging strings. "You had your week Eleanor, you can't just keep this up." She spoke with her head inside the freezer. "What happened to the pasta the the Guillinis left you?"
"We already ate it."
"Oh, to Jesus!"

***

That was the year that summer never happened. The snow melted but the grass strained to grow. The apple trees went directly to fruit- hard ugly knots that turned brown and fell to the ground. Birds fell right out of the sky. They pirouetted down, and lay in a daze for half a day before shakily standing up, stabbing at the ground with their feet trying to get their land legs. Lightning waned in the sky for days and my mother refused to sleep, convinced that it was her dreaming causing the storms.

It was the Unseason. And that's when I met the first lunatic, went running into him with the sort of frenzy that takes over when you're running fast down a steep hill and you lose control, your arms windmill and your knees give out, and whatever heavenly body you slam into next is going to take in the full force of you, all at once.

But remember the roosters shrieking as my mother took aim, cold air pouring in through a closed window, the shot gun blast directed towards my father's tonsils, the back of his throat landing on the opposite wall, the ubiquetous lightning. Bear in mind that I wasn't just running full force into the first Lunatic, I was also running away from all of that and the dogs and the grass that refused to live.

half way there, I just wanted to look at this again

2008-12-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

i tried, for the purposes of my own delight, to create a list, upon which the traces of every hard lesson would appear like dust, or frost, illuminated on the surface and sparkling; an all serving list, made beautiful by brevity, each word clear and etched fine, as if on glass. But when i got to the end, I had to start way back at the begining, at when i returned to the begining all there was to say was: the merest morning light, certain strong smells, lover of animals, your name in my hand really hurt and then I never saw you again, a moratorium, brave, give me my shoes back, was that even possible, and never again.

this ain't no fiction

2008-11-29T20:38:00.002-08:00

For the last eight years there has been an evil man in the whitehouse. In 2000 we hung our heads as everything our country was built on was stolen from underneath our feet. Those were dark years. Then in 2004, the planets shivered and our teeth chattered and they did it again, an old man in a cowboy belt held up by the tips of his ears by a terrifying empire of power, violence, corruption lust. We held on tight and lowered our faces against the storm. We prepared for the worst. But we had no idea how bad it would be. For too long the planet tilted on the axis of this man and his handlers, a monkey banging away at a typewriter with the nuclear codes scattered at his feet. It took an enormous effort, a massive unearthing of strength and will and determination- they will not do it again- that this country has not seen for decades, that my generation has never before experienced. It took the hope and frustration and fear and desperation of 66 million and the prayers of the entire rest of the world. But we won. We defeated and we broke the fuckers. On November 4th, 2008, Barack Obama was voted by a landslide to be our 44th president. The course of the universe changed directions, the doomed planet rocked back on its heels and thought, well, maybe I DO have a chance in hell. The little man has been folded up and packed quietly away, medicated with industrial strength shit, and left to luncheon with charitable Texas ladies the rest of his little life. May he live many long years with a tormented soul. But it isn't over yet. For now they are still sitting pretty, his pack of maniacs, spitting on our country, like a pack of dogs they will not leave easy. May Cheney and the Wolf be tried for their atrocities and war crimes. May they too live long lives without decay- may their minds remain sharp, may their conscious kill them slowly. May they die in mental anguish and rot in hell.

Welcome to the world, Barack Obama!

I went looking for America and found Maldova

2008-11-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

Ever since the Maldovans found out I went four days without speaking, they treat me like someone who is very sick or very sad. The truth of the matter is I am an extremely healthy horse, inexorably more so than them because my lungs are still pink, and I do not feel sad although some times I think I should. When the days stretch like this between work and snow and sleep, all that one needs to be happy is food and the ability to be warm and dry. This I have, even though some times I am too lazy to get up and put a fire in the stove. I'd rather lay there and shiver. But you cannot be made sad by your own personal shortcomings, if you do you will become a Fucking Ridiculous Moron, which I do not myself claim to be.

"Sit with me," they say, words leaded with the mystique of their accent. "You sit here now. You been okay?" They regard me as if I am some troubling painting. For lack of a better thing to do I am more than happy to play the part. "Oh, you know," I sigh, "I've been alright." What I don't tell them is that I am currently choosing a new life in the same manner one chooses a piece of candy from a vending machine, and pretty soon I will pull the lever, take my selection and walk away. I don't know yet who I will become next, so for the meantime I sit back and wait for my next move like a chess piece, drumming my fingernails against the counter.

As soon as I finished my shift for the morning, Milla appears out of nowhere in her dark make up and gold studded pants. She directs me to sit down with her and then vanishes outside with Elana, where they stand in two clouds of smoke under the dripping awning. Outside the sky has let loose a tantrum of sleet and rain, decimating the snow and slaying the schedules of schools. Life seems pretty grim even though I know better.

Earlier on in the morning, Elana informed me in the empty dining car that I would never have sex again until I learned to wear two socks of the same color. I told her that sounded okay, because sex never led to anything particularly good in my life. "This I am not so sure of," she said, pointing her chin at an angle. But her tone was thoughtful, as if the subject was still up for debate. Later on she told me a long and complicated story that kept twisting, about a boy who loved her (and was stalking her it sounded like, but she didn't seem too concerned, and to be honest I could only understand about a third of her words.) We stood there talking for a long time, she holding an empty tray at shoulder level, me holding a rag in position against the counter, in case the manager should come in and see us. "I went home, to Maldova, and he was calling me and calling me. But then I got sick, and had to sleep all the time, and got so skinny, and still he was calling me." How did you get sick? I asked her. "Oh, you know, witches. They look at me a certain way and I get sick. Very sick, my cousin take care of me." I asked, well...why? Why would the witches curse you like that? I was stuttering, wondering if there was a less draconian manner in which to ask the question. There wasn't. "Because they jealous, I am so beautiful and I have money, because I work at Mcdonalds in West Leb when I am in America. So they curse me, and all I can do is sleep, and sleep and sleep, and can't call him back because I am sleeping so much! So he gets new girlfriend." How, I managed to ask, did you get over being cursed? We see the manager walking out from the kitchen, the door swinging behind her, so Elana starts to walk away. "Water from the church, what you call this?" She asks over her shoulder. Holy water? I try. "Yes, holy water, I drink holy water. This cures me."

Milla returns from her cigarette break to find me hovering over my telephone. "What is?" she asks. Well...I start, wondering how to go about explaining. See, our friend Charles had a dog named Moon who was lost and it turned out he was stuck in a hole for three days. And I haven't heard from Will is a long time so I wrote him and asked, why haven't I heard from you in a long time, are you stuck in a hole with Moon? And he writes me back now and says, 'yes I am in a deep hole but I can still write.' So I am wondering what he means and how I should respond. Milla leanS forward to study his message herself. Then she asks, "Is this deep hole a hole of love?" What? I start laughing. Milla starts laughing. Is this a love hole? I'm not sure, I don't think that's what he meant, I tell her. "Well, you never know, until you ask him." The way she says it, it has the clarity of ice. So reasonable, that everything complicated in the world could be boiled down to this one thing: you never know until you ask him. I almost tempted to write Will back and ask, did you mean you are in a deep hole of love? Is this perhaps what you mean? But I don't. I figure he is in a hole because he is very depressed, because he is forced to take a computer science class in order to graduate. I write back instead: is this a hole caused by computer science? do you need anything? and his response: send down the geek squad.

Milla says she likes to sit in a car when someone else is driving, because it relaxes her. So when I leave the diner to do my errands I take her along. Sometimes it is nice, when the road is a sheet of ice and the weather is shit, to have the radio playing and a Moldovan half asleep in the passenger seat. I go to the bank and then to put gas in the car. I can't think of anything else to do, except go to the post office in White River, which would require getting on the highway, and that is too dangerous in this deluge. Besides, I didn't want to go to the post office just yet because I received a pink notice that there is a package waiting for me. I like to think it is from all of my friends who lived in Seattle who had combined efforts to send me an early Christmas. Of course I know the package is not going to be for me, I get my aunt and uncle's mail by accident all the time and they are big mail-order people. I don't want to go pick it up just yet, so I can keep thinking that it might be something nice for me. I don't want that little dream to be smothered so soon. (You see why I sometimes think I should feel sad?)

So I turn the car around and start to negotiate my way on those slippery roads back to the diner. A few minutes into the return trip Milla lifts her head from the window and casually announces she is getting married. "Not the boy from Oklahoma," She says. "Not him. But Mike, he lives right ere." She points out the window at a nondescript white house sitting directly on the road. By now what I have learned about the Moldovans is a) they say whatever they want, and b) they mean everything they say. So I respond, great, when is the wedding, can I come, I love weddings. "Of course!" She says brightly. "It will be some time before or after New Years." I think, the same could be said of every day there ever was except one. "It will not be December 2nd." Good, we are narrowing it down. Why not December 2nd? "Is his Court Date. Got caught with Mar-a-hoo-wanna." I said, lucky you, you're getting married! And she shrugged. "Is complicated. He was going to marry Elana, so she could get green card, but I start to like him so I say to her, I think I start to like him. And she says, so you must marry him."

This is how the world falls into place for Milla. She needs a green card and so she will marry the 21 year old from down the road who smokes mar-a-hoo-wana and lives with his super lazy and angry (for no apparent reason, he is a Fucking Ridiculous Moron it seems,) brother. What a catch for Milla. The thing is, if she wants to marry him, she will. Snap her fingers and that little stoner will make the trek to the courthouse and give an exalted whisper: I do. My eyes leave the road as they turn to her in wonder. I can't even get a boy to crawl out of a phantom hole and make a return phone call, and by all standards I am prettier than she is. I think, I am missing something. I am missing something that she has. I used to have it but now I've lost it.

Prelude to the Lunatics

2008-11-22T18:47:00.001-08:00

I'd like to start by apologizing to the two lunatics in my life. All I can say now that you've both left me is, how I wish you two could have met! If you think you loved me, if you think we got along, well then you two would have just blown each other out straight of the water. We could have had us a time, just the three of us. How I wish we could have lived together as three souls who are locked in devotion to one another beyond rhyme or reason and I'm sure in one of those infinite universes where everything is the same only slightly different, we are.

To the first lunatic who lives in the wilderness: I am sorry for leaving in the manner in which I left. A goodbye would have been polite, a brief explanation would have been helpful, and hiding your car keys was regretable. You've more than made peace with the situation by now but for my own score-settling purposes may I add:

1) goodbye and so long, sianara, adieu, see ya later alligator & ciao
2) I caught a wild hair. Like a lightning bolt that's picked up by a breeze and carried far away from the storm, I no longer fit in. And then there was that business of the other lunatic writing me love notes with his blood for ink upon sheets of paper made from his own skin that he sealed with his own tears. I was haunting his dreams!
3) your keys are buried in the flower pot in the kitchen, to the right of the sink, the petunias.

To the second lunatic who also lives in the wilderness: I am sorry that I raised the hair on your arms. Please excuse me for being in the habit of running my index finger across your lips: first the bottom, then the top, the little divot. I feel terrible that you find the scent of my hair to be intoxicating. I am remorseful of the slight curvation of my spine and that it has captivated you. If I could erase from your brain the memory of my eyelashes fluttering against your cheekbones, I would. When you wake up from dreams (release me!) to find two lovely hands around your throat, forgive me.

If you two are wondering what has become of me, I will tell you. But first, I firmly believe we should march through the events that brought us here one more time. All we all know, nothing is certain. I'm not even sure if this is really the end or not, which is why I demanded that we start here. When we get to this point in the story, we will have caught up with ourselves, and when we continue beyond this point we will have lapped ourselves. Let this be a point of reference. Another reason I wanted to begin here is to tell you where to locate your car keys, because you live all alone up there, 17 miles from town uphill both ways, where the snow never melts, and also I threw away the spare.

Let's be Honest

2007-12-09T21:41:00.001-08:00

it takes money, fast light, and devotion to keep something like this alive. And when you stop and think about it, that city where he lives- more of a town, really,- is a long way away.

Love is forever, love is true, and nothing gets in the way of love.

Except for bad weather, a broken alternator, little vacation time in all the wrong months, and no money.

These things can really mess with even the hardiest of love, when it is spread as thinly as ours is, across the country.

baby bones

2007-11-15T23:57:00.000-08:00

found this from a few year's back. what a gem.

Baby bones didn’t eat anything. She hadn’t eaten a meal in five days. She just kept thinking about bad things. Like yesterday’s jewels and the end of the world. She thought about what it would be like to lean over and lay on top of Virginia. But then Virginia smokes cigarettes and has sex in the bed next to her and she can only lay there, listening, biting the sheets in agony, not breathing so she won’t miss a single moment.
This is something that’s much more real, much more raw, and forgive me for being pretentious. They were taking a car trip together which was really nice, at first. Then after a few days they got very tired of one another. Virginia got tired of her anyway, but it was harder for Bones. Much harder, because each passing day was like a wheel and every mile was like her face getting closer and closer to that wheel. And very soon she was going to fall into the gears and destroy the system, not to mention her body. They called her baby bones because she didn’t eat anything. It was her way to strike out against the world, and the others cared, mildly. Virginia cared temporarily, and then she got angry. She plonked sarah in front of a cheeseburger and said, God Fucking Damned it. Jesus Christ. Just eat. Then she lit up a cigarette and it burned between her fingers and she watched Bones sit there and sulk. What could be done?
Virginia was sexually compulsive but she tried to steer away from the directions of her friends, particulary short tired skinny ones with no curves and no energy for sex. She imagined. In actuality, yes, she was skinny, too skinny to be too much fun, but when she got going she got going. For Virginia, she would get going. She would be off and so far ahead Virginia would have to hire a jet to catch up. Yes, that’s right, she’d have to fly.
But of course, they had their good moments. One night at a party they were dancing and Virginia was drunk enough and Bones wasn’t, but she didn’t have to be. They were dancing so close and hot that they got a crowd, a very appreciative crowd, and Virginia and Bones liked that. Eventually the crowd asked them to kiss, and between them they raised 88 dollars, that they would split between bones and virginia if only they would make out for a minute or so. So Bones laughed b but she was nervous and she didn’t know what to say. Virginia put one arm around her friend’s waist and said, put the money on that chair. I want to make sure I get it. Then she said, we’ll be right back, and she pulled Bones away and onto the back porch, where she pushed her roughly against the wall and kissed her. Deep, hard, miraculous. It tasted like alcohol but it had the effect of speed on Bones. Then she whispered saltily in her ear, ‘I didn’t want to be payed for our first kiss.” Then they went back inside and kissed in front of the crowd, who were very appreciative, and Bones and Virginia liked that. They kissed all night long and many people speculated that they would probbably go home and do it, and Bones was secretely hoping for that too. But they didn’t it turns out, a friend of theirs drove them home and Virginia went downstairs, fell face first onto her bed and didn’t wake up till past noon the next day. And Bones sat idly next to her for a while and stroked her hair but that felt useless after a while. So she lay down next to her and whispered for her to wake up, but she was too hard asleep. So Bones fell asleep right there next to her hoping to wake up together, but Bones woke up at nine and eventually gave up, got up and made breakfast. For both of them. That got cold, so she had to start her day and they never talked about it again.

from The Church of Supernatural Science and Money Pursuit

2007-11-09T00:14:00.001-08:00

this is an excerpt from the Project at hand.

To catch you up to speed, the girl has recently lost both her parents (heart attack, picnic accident) and is living in a house in the very small, antiquated town of her mother on the rugged coast of Maine. As an outsider to the town with plenty of money but little to no desire to do anything (at all), she spends her days in almost complete isolation until she gets sick during the winter with pnemonia.

Marlow is the young attorney who is dealing with her parents' wills and the finances of the estate she has recently aquired.

What follows is an OUTLINE of what happens. If you don't think the writing is very good that's because it's NOT, but it's the general idea and you really just have to start somewhere, don't you.

By the time Marlow visited, I had pneumonia. The winter outside was violent, but it was nothing compared to what was inside my house, inside my body. My fever bounced up and down like the flight path of a hawk over water and my ribs buckled under the gale force strength of wracking coughing fits. It was all I could do to lie in my bed, first burning, then ice, and drink from a glass of water on the nightstand, which, once empty, remained so until I could summon what felt like inhuman reserves of energy to walk to the bathroom sink to refill it.

It was this condition that Marlow found me in. At first he said nothing, but propped me up with an afghan and brought me a glass of near boiling water. Then he left, and returned a half hour later looking grim, and carrying with him a bottle of cough syrup, twelve cans of soup, a box of Tylenol, and six boxes of lemon tea. After heating up one of the cans, he sat next on the edge of the bed and fed me the broth, spoonful by spoonful. Any other time I would never have allowed such an activity to go on but now, barely aware of what was going on, I let him hover over me, as one would over a wounded animal.

“I’m going to tell you a story now,” he said, after some time. “Don’t interrupt me. Don’t speak. Just listen to me.” At that point I lay back down, exhausted to the point that even being fed was too much for me. I could feel the fever smoldering in my forehead, and I hard to grasp his words as they floated in and out of my head.

“When I was growing up, I went to school with a man named Edward Nolen. Since we were little kids. We never got along all that well, but you could say I knew him pretty good. As much as anyone could, anyway. Ed was a real Northerner, one of four sons from family that has been here forever. He was built like a tree, solid. It was like the man was made out of wood. He didn’t smile much, didn’t hardly say anything. He was blonde like his father, dark blonde, the kind that looks gray. He dropped out of school even before he was sixteen, but nobody bothered trying to change his mind because we’d all expected him to do it long before then. He started working with his father and some of his brothers as a boat detailer down at the docks. Apparently he had a real talent for it.
He was making a pretty decent living, and at a real young age, too. But then around the time he was twenty one or twenty two, he left town. He straight up disappeared. Nobody knew where to find him and we were pretty surprised, because nobody in his family had ever left the town like that. People talked, but nobody got the real story from his dad or his family, I geuss they figured it was a private affair, which it was.
Ed was gone a little more than a year, and I had stopped thinking about him completely. And then one day, in the middle of winter, he’s back. And the shocking thing is, he’s got a girl with him. Someone no one has ever met before. The two of them moved into a little house over on Jericho, and sort of hole up there for a week or so. And still no one’s talked to them. I remember I was at the post office and Mr. Nolen was in front of me, and the postlady behind the counter asked him about Ed’s return. She asked all brightly because it was good news, him coming home, and because she is always cheerful it seems. And I remember Mr. Nolen just nodded. I think he smiled, but he just nodded and took his mail and didn’t say anything, and then I stepped up and the post lady looked at me and raised her eyebrows, but I pretended that I hadn’t heard anything. Because I didn’t really care one way or another, why he was home. Like I told you, I had stopped thinking about Ed altogether.
But then, only a few days after that, Ed goes and gets married. They got married in the Congregationalist church and most of the town came out to see it. The whole church was packed with Ed’s people, his family and all of us, I don’t think his bride had one familiar face in the whole church. I mean besides Ed.
Caroline. That was her name. I still don’t know anything about her, but I remember what she looked like. Everybody does, I’m sure. She didn’t look a thing like the girls around here. She was somewhere far away and it showed. The woman looked just like a swan, I swear to heaven. I can’t describe it. She was beautiful though, in that wedding gown and her pale skin. She was very tall. She was nearly as tall as Ed.
Ed, he looked really happy at his wedding. Didn’t smile much, but you could tell anyway. Something had changed about him. He was gentle with her, the way he moved around her. He didn’t take his eye off her once. He was probably thinking, Jesus, how in hell did I manage to get this girl. That’s what we were all thinking.

seven and half minutes

2007-08-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

there is a hospital across the street for young girls. it's a mental institution but parents pay a lot of money to have their little darlings housed there, more often than not to save them from the state penitentiary, or worse. Most of the girls are very sick, a few are just plain criminals. Psychotica, sociopaths, sadists, anoretics beyond hope. From my bedroom I can see the barred windows and the faint blue light that eminates from within. this is the first place where I've lived by myself, and the women and girls who live across the street, the blue light and the distant shouts I sometimes here at night, keep me grounded. They are not unlike roomates, except for that they keep to themselves.
I've noticed that at nine thirty exactly, the lights in the rooms begin to shut off for the night, starting at the very left of the building and moving steady as clockwork down the building, a silent cascade of blue institutional light becoming black. there are some times when a curtain might be pulled back, as if someone inside is trying to look out onto the street, but just as many other times the rooms are still.

It takes, from the first light out, to the last, seven and a half minutes. Exactly, to the very second. There is never a moment's deviation.

This came to my attention during certain evenings, when I would be standing over my bed with a number dresses laid out in front of me, deciding which to put out. I used to go out in the evenings, with a number of friends, play aimless games of shuffleboard at the quiet bar a few blocks away. I drank too much and too quickly, but so early in the night that I would be sober by midnight, and restless.

Each morning I would dress for work with the lights off, so early in the morning it was still solidly dark out, darker than it was when I went to bed a few hours before. I felt sick and dizzy, finding less and less things every morning to entice me out of bed, feet on the cold floor, sweater over my head.

It was only a few months ago that I felt differently about things. As if everything that had ever happened in the world had happened for the sole reason for preparing the universe for my arrival, and everything that would happen in the future was just for the sake of sustaining me. Everything was perfect, just as if should be. Life came easily to me then, things jumped into my open hand as soon as I pointed a finger, I knew the answer to the riddle before the joke had even been asked.

A few months into my new life in the new apartment, across from the hospital full of girls, I began making excuses to stay in at night. We all know the excuses that we make when we no longer want to go out at night, and I made every last one of them. And then I stopped making excuses, and gradually people stopped asking.

During this time I would make it a game to have dinner made, the kitchen cleaned, my work prepared for the next day, my clothes laid out, as much as I possible could do, before nine thirty. Then, at nine thirty, I would lie on my bed and watch as the lights began to snap out down the side of the building. Seven and a half minutes later, the building was dark.

one night my friend Shane came and visited and watched me do this ritual. Instead of asking the obvious questions to me, he asked, 'i wonder what you have to do to be put in a room at the left of the building? you're the first one to be in the dark each night.'

It's only seven and a half minutes, I told him, from the start of the building to the end. Seven and half minutes exactly. 'But that is only for one night,' he told me, studying the little dark windows. 'that is fifty two and a half minutes each week. that's probbably more than some of the girls get on their own during the entire day.

And after that, I had a new game. I lay in my bed at night and closed my eyes in thought. if I was a good girl at the institution, and I had taken my meds without hiding them beneath my tongue, and watched television without screaming at the set, and not sent the other girls lapsing into their episodes, and controlled my rage, would I be given a room at the right of the building? If I had used the dull scissors handed out each wednesday afternoon by the orderlies to cut out paper chains instead of using them against the soft skin of my inner arm, and if I had talked to my therapist instead of spitting, and chosen dressing on my salad instead of eating the transluscent shredded lettuce dry, and made my bed in the evening and folded my clothes in the evening, would I be given my seven and a half minutes of freedom, a privelage that no body else received, not even the girl in the room directly next to me?

Could I fall asleep in seven and a half minutes? Hold my breath and keep it held? How many pages of a book could I read, how many times could I write my name in cursive? If I touched myself, could i come, in seven and a half minutes? How many times? could I seduce someone, an old friend, my old boyfriend, his best friend, his brother, his father? If a stranger entered my bedroom at nine thirty, could he be naked and gasping for breath and begging me for one more, by nine thirty seven, halfway to nine thirty eight?

Because I've been good, and I've bitten my teeth down hard against my rage and I moved out of the apartment I shared with ben and into this new house without a sideways word to him about what he did.
Never letting him know that for nearly two years the tricks he put me through were enough to have him committed into the bleak house that stood across from mine? That the glittering secrets he thought he kept from me were never really secrets at all? But I, being too polite to bring it up, thought I'd let it go-

while we were living together, eating together, talking, fucking, kissing, crying, reading, walking, saying the names of objects outloud, filling up bottles with warm water, spitting into sinks, stacking plates, reading directions, turning thing off, begging. Him to me that I let him go, me to him that he give me a shred of something inside, and he told me there was nothing. that he was sick.

but he was lying. he had it, and he sent it away. for a long, long time.

and this is when i bring back the idea of lying next to someone, and having them being so deep inside of themselves that they do not see you. the inches between you becoming miles of empty roads, of city bridges hung with rotted metal and packed with strangers in cars who never want to know you.

and this is when I introduce the idea of lying on my back, happily accepting the blame for everything, and being so pleased with myself for keeping up the fight that I felt like the world was working like the making of a giant clock, and I alone was the one to hear its chiming.

and this is when I escape from the story, and it's no longer fiction, and i emerge from the story like someone raising their body out of the river where they have been drowning in. because I'm running out of time. If i could say it outloud, what I've been afraid to say now for so long. If I could say it I would. That I belonged in a madhouse during that time. that he convinced me I was crazy, such a subtle architect of well constructed lies and manipulations.

i know he lied about many things and that to the girl he left me for, months and months before we broke up, he was as open as a heart transplant patient to a surgeon, and while I put on my white gloves and scratched around in the dirt for a cure for a disease he somehow made me believe I was infected with, he kept me like a glass cage in an aquarium they kept together. Every time I see him I am reminded of that time, and I'm sick of being reminded. that the little wounded animal of our friendship is lying dead on the side of the road I want him to please, please get the hell out of my life.

And that I wrote this in seven and a half minutes.

Poem for the Makatu

2007-07-27T22:20:00.001-07:00

body language speaking
and body language screaming
trying to recall what we knew while we
were dreaming, remembering our hands
they were open in the sand
fingers counting five,
four, three, two,
one below, two above
one is watching two in love
two together, one apart
crashing rhythms, beating hearts
waves explode and tide pulls in
under water, under skin,
striving beating breathing yearning
waves that battle, earth
that's turning
counting on your fingers as they beat upon my chest
matching out our rhythm to the ocean swell and crest
counting five, four, three, two
one forgotten
two entangled, ocean's surf is silent strangle
bodies splayed like kelp
to dry, sweat and salt and tears they've cried
the falling tide is not denied
nights is lifting, stop pretending
never fully comprehending the galaxy the soul
collide, falling helpless side by side
hands together, fingers ten, counting over
and again ten, nine, eight and you wake
just to see the sun is rising and the seven seas
surviving and the six, five
foreign to us all is this desire and the dousing of the fire
and the three, two,
one is waking
then demanding, have they lost their understanding?
buried ocean black abyss
closing hearts and breaking fists
this body, it's a vessel and i'm taking out to sea
and the rythym that's dividing seperating
you and me is growing wider, and water
and what are we to do but cast our eyes away like anchors
watch eachother walk the plank
and see the tide is retreating, understand that it
was fleeting from the start.
But there again on the horizon, your silouhette is rising
waving me away into the wind:
five fingers waving five, four, three, two
one aboard
one beyond
one moving forward
on sailing on.

this is for you

2007-07-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

this is dedicated to Gordon, who died with us one summer day at the swimming hole.

We didn't die, obviously. Not yet.

And Gordon shouldn't have, he wasn't a risk taker, he just had horrible luck.

They took his body and buried it in town. We took his boots off of his body and buried them below the rocks next to the swimming hole. We cut down the murderous rope swing and buried that, too.

We would have buried the river, too, if we could have, just to get rid of it. That thing, with it's venomous innocence, snake-like, had taken eight.

We did what we could. Waited for blood to fade off rocks, throw up (Caroline and Suzanne, who heard the skullcrush, and Chris, who had been in the car with the radio on, but who always threw up when the people around him do), open up a can of beer, and, in my case, fly back to the city and wonder what the hell I had been so afraid of, these past few months.

will you marry me

2007-07-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

It was difficult to tell what turned him, on this night, and sent him drifting off into his dark and unreachable corners, miles deep within himself, seeped in poison. It was never easy to pinpoint the occurance that was the catalyst- something as slight as a tilt of the head or a shift in voice tone could set into motion a series of events within his mind that would result in him spinning off into the thick and dark brambles of his psyche. The things I said and did could not cause it directly, but they could cause it indirectly by pushing him slightly into one direction where he would be apt to bump into this, which would remind him of that, which would lead to the recollection of a girl he once thought he loved, whome he had most certainly shut out and sent away before realizing what he actually wanted was to be with her, at which point it was too late, and this would remind him of the wealth of failures that flourished alongside his life like an invasisve plant, and then he would be left to wallow in the deepest recesses of his memory and ignore me, lying inches away from him on the matress we shared, offering myself up to him in every realm to which i was capable: mentally, physically, spiritually, literally, figuratively, and sometimes-this embaresses me- proverbially. But his eyes, when his body was turned my way, saw clear through me, and his lip turned up into an expression that read- I see you, but only because the laws of matter demand it.

Under normal circumstancing, this inward plunge and the richess of unhappiness that bloomed out from inside of it like clouds of ink, was disconcerting. But tonight- it being our wedding night, the first night of our honeymoon, the commencement of the rest of our life together- it was just poor manners. It was almost entirely predictable, however, given who he was, and the momentus occurance that had just severed our lives in two: the time before we were married, tripping along happy and confused, two seperate souls amusing themselves in a word buzzing with potential, and then the time after marriage: the same two souls suddenly welded, fused together at the trunk, and left to wander the hills and plains for all eternity, or until one of the welded souls cautiously mentions the idea of a 'trial seperation' because the word 'divorice' sounds too ugly, too real.

I shouldn't be saying this. I sound as if I do not love him, as if this was not the happiest day of my life.

I do. It is. I suspect he loves me very much in return, and that this, the sacred night of our marriage, is one of the happiest nights of his life, as well. The fact that in spite of this he is still able to slip wordlessly into the calm grey ocean of his unchecked depression- that just gives me a hint as to what I am in for.

halfway there

2007-06-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

i tried, for the purposes of my own delight, to create a list, upon which the traces of every hard lesson would appear like dust, or frost, illuminated on the surface and sparkling; an all serving list, made beautiful by brevity, each word clear and etched fine, as if on glass. But when i got to the end, I had to start way back at the begining, at when i returned to the begining all there was to say was:

the merest morning light, certain strong smells, lover of animals, your name in my hand really hurt and then I never saw you again, a moratorium, brave, give me my shoes back, was that even possible, and never again.

another story

2007-06-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

maybe it had to be this way. maybe we had to burn up, just to keep alive.

I kept hoping these past two years we might explode into a thousand hot stars. Colorful, shooting off all over the place.

But now, i say- (i'm looking out the slender window onto playing fields, a shopping mall, an intersection with a long red light I would run every night on the way to his house) but now, he's the only one shooting off, into another girl.

Oh please- my professor has his hands raised over his head, a linguistic referee. don't get into sex, you are so not ready to write about sex.

Well. Sez i.

But out of curiosity- is anyone shooting stars into you these days?

Well.- just now i should have a cigarette burning between my fingers to put between my lips, to quiet myself. That's another story. That's a seperate story entirely.

this didn't work, either

2007-06-21T00:31:00.001-07:00

But I try to be concise, because my words are useless, and my love was useless, and all I ever wanted to was make him laugh:

There were a thousand things he would have died for. his family, his friends, his team, the girlfriend before me that he still needed, an big infuriating blonde kid who may have been a cartoon character, a girl far away he barely knew.

David is listening.

But not me. i leaned forward. Not me, do you get that?

Keep going.

that is the one thing he could have said that would have allowed me to leave. He went away but he never came back. I would die for everything in my life, except you.

But he never said this outloud? My professor asks.

He never had to.

So what happened?

Here is what happened. He was here, with me. And then he went away. But he never came home. Someone else came back and took his place, but he's different. He's a different person, he's angry and sarcastic and when I look at him, he flinches. The person I loved- he's gone now. Lightyears away. Is that clear enough?

David says, clear enough. and you're right. it's mediocre.

David says, try this. Tell it from his perspective.

We used to watch things, underground, in glass cages. We once walked under sharks.

David says, if he could reach you, what would he tell you?

I know immediately.
I'm sorry. I miss you. I love you. Forgive me.

David jumps up- YES! the only things so far you've said worth writing. Beautiful but- and he sits down again, and laughs at me- you're delusional.

still struggling

2007-06-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

Just tell me what happened. David sits very still in his chair. He watches me very carefully. Just tell me, in plain language. Until you do, this thing will haunt everything you write and I will get very tired of reading about it.

Oh yes- I look incredulous- it's already there. The dead woman being hoisted up into the clouds by her late husband. The man who drinks his milk from a bottle, the mother who moves like an insect, the infant under the earth- all different anchors off the same ship. Just- he moves close- this isn't class. No radio, no ocean, no otter- the otter always confused me, why did you ever write about an otter? Just tell me in very plain language, what happened?

Yes, what did happen. Where did things go wrong, or were they running wrong, as he perpetually insisted, from the beginning?

My poor professor, who has no time for this. Who began every class with, "good afternoon class. Melina- how are you doing?" Who gave me in response to showing up at his office, pleading with him for something to make sense of, only this: a news article about a man dying in a parachuting accident, because he had been so excited to film the jumpers, he had forgotten his own parachute, and in the film you hear him screaming in delight and then reach up for his shoot- tug- then, uh-oh (audible)- then, the film ends.

So I try to be very clear with him. I close my eyes.

The girl in the ocean rocking herself to sleep. Reaching out in that sleep for the person who should have been there by now turning on the damp sheets- each night she reaches farther. Her hands clenching into fists around air- waking up in sudden panic. Each morning waking up as if her body has sprung a leak. There is a difference between catastrophe and free will, but which one is harder to take- that is impossible to know.

And the radio, there is always a radio steady as a clock, comforting. And then the radio dies.

What is worse than inevitable tragedy is tragedy that is late to it's own party. Or, that never shows up at all.

That's what the silence says, after the radio died. Before that, there was the ticking. The morning that said, keep punching. But he never came back home. He said I'm leaving you, and I'm not going to bother to throw punches. And the feeling of the air where his fist should have been, against my collar bone, my cheek bone- it burned like something terrible, that lives in the sea, that in some better time we might have gone to look at, in it's glass cage.

My first try didn't go so well

2007-06-20T23:15:00.000-07:00

David told me: Until you write about it, you're harboring a fugitive.

Imagine swimming out into sea and waiting. Being a ghost, a solitary light. You sleep each night in the shape of a cresent, curled around the place where he used to be, where he would be soon. There is a date marked on the calendar in red ink.

You are sweet as a pea, soft as a shelled lobster.

The day comes and goes. And then the radio dies.

You are swimming alone at sea and then your radio dies.

You had your ocean, your jacket, your radio, the audience on shore applauding you.

Then you turn around, and no ocean, no jacket, no radio, no audience. For godsakes, you are not even a swimmer.

And that's what it's like, I tell David. That is everything there is to say about it. Is that enough? Am I done? Can I go home now? Is it going to get better?

'fraid not.

from Michael

2007-06-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

There was a night, back when he was still young, when Michael’s luck turned around. There was a great Midwestern storm, with rain as hard as diamonds and lightning that split a tree down the center as Michael awoke sitting erect in his child bed. In the instant that the tree was struck his room was hot and washed in sudden sepia. Having been pulled from a soft dream, he sat alert, his heart a heavy anchor thrown overboard and plunging into deep water. He breathed as quietly as possible until he began putting names to the sounds around him, until he knew for sure that the sounds were not coming from his mother’s room.
His father, the third point in the irregular triangle, had long ago disappeared, passed over to that place where fathers of children of these sorts of mothers go to. Since then his mother went on telling the same story, insistent, that the father of her sweet boy had been an angel who had flew through her bedroom window. “Look what he left me.” She would say, trailing a hand over the face and neck of her handsome boy. “Look what he brought me from heaven.”

competition

2007-06-12T15:03:00.000-07:00

there are two ranked in front of me. I met them at the SF conference. They both go to small liberal artish schools. They are lovely people, if not brilliant writers today then destined to be someday soon, energetic, caring, gracious, and I would love to seem them both dead.

then the radio died

2007-06-08T01:52:00.000-07:00

then the radio died, and uou expect me to remain. it's not a bad thing if I leave, don't you understand that? You want to stay with me to make sure i do not leave, but I am going to leave. I can't stay here, I can't stay here, I can't stay here, I can't stay here,I can't stay here, I can't stay here,I can't stay here, I can't stay here.

6/5/07

2007-06-07T14:55:00.000-07:00

Add this to the reason for the razor
Answering back gun wound by gun wound
The last to turn around and never the last to leave
I promise to leave you, love.

Daddy glows at the kitchen table
Prolonged exposure with his daughters

I promised to leave you until I left somebody else
head back, quiet, just like that—

Didn’t daddy leave you more than just a gun?
I promised to leave you, love.

from The Lunatics

2007-06-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

That was the problem with knowing everything. I knew the answer to the riddle before the question was even formed. I knew the fate of a doomed love affair before the growling children were even thought of or conceived. I knew from the second Andy was across the room with his lunatic eyes that when the mother in law twice over, seven years from now, opened the autobiography in a crowded library looking for a trace of her sons, her jaw would drop at the thought of both her boys swimming after the same child who wanted and needed nothing but their sexual attention. Straight up, like whiskey. The poor mother who was against me from the beginning.

from "Wild"

2007-05-31T17:36:00.000-07:00

I drank something, I don't know what it was, Julian gave it to me- I felt great. I flew home drunk. Twelve minutes into bed and I it was back again, the ticking, the waiting, the absence of trajedy just waiting for something gloomy to swoop through and fill it. I took half of a sleeping pill- then another, then a third half and then a fourth. I took two sleeping pills. Still drunk from Julian's poison a veiled concern arose in the framgent of my mind and I realized that I had technically just attempted suicide- I was at that moment attempting to kill myself. Without intent, but intent mattered very little in the court of law when someone's dead. Maybe a sentence degree. If I were to go in and explain the situation they would put me on suicide watch for 48 hours and then all the counseling...I knew because it had happened before. I had fallen neatly, arms out, onto twin horse shoe rings that were embedded in the ground and surprisngly sharp, and split both wrists down the vein. I had been surprised by the amount of blood. I was twelve. I had no idea what suicide was or else I probbably would have tried it by then.

from 'Michael'

2007-05-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

He did not have a trace of memory of his father, angel or human, and no memories whatsoever of being a baby or even a child. It seemed that every year he grew forward, another year from his past slipped away. His uncertain infancy and the dead end of his paternal track left him with the uneasy concern that perhaps he was the miraculous product of his mother alone. This made him, as he saw it, half of a person- the heart in his chest was half of a muscle twitching in its cavity, his brain half of a lobe resting in a half dome, the rest of his mysterious organs shivering uselessly against tissue, as if his body were a net filled with stunned silver fish. He came undone easily, he wept, he needed things other boys did not need.

From 'Wind Turners'

2007-05-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

Then the radio died and I hit the roof, because we had litterally nothing. Peter Kagin's neice sat in the cabin all day waiting for her uncle to return and take her away. It was heartbreaking to see her watch the fish in it's bowl of gunsmoke turn little circles all day long and say nothing. Soon after the radio died the little girl took to growling- constantly, to all of us, whether or not we were speaking to her. The only time she was quiet was when she was at long last asleep. She was tired of waiting. We were all tired of Waiting.