I wrote this for NPR's three minute fiction contest. Probably overdid it on the vocabulary, or threw too many ideas into one short piece, etc. Have to remind myself that these contests are subjective.
Enjoy.
Some people swore that the house was haunted. I had no choice but to trust these people; the house was the only property in the city that I could afford and my career was on the line. If they were wrong, then little stood between me and ravenous creditors, circling like sharks.
No, like vultures. Sharks don't circle. Or do they? This is why I need the ghosts – why my business card says “literary medium” rather than “writer.” I'm just no good on my own.
One source had claimed that the haunting was attributable to none other than P.B.Z. Yassouf, a notorious court poet from what is now the United Arab Emirates. I had my doubts, but the name was known among my preferred clientele – tenured academics with furtive occult tendencies – so if I could use it, I was golden. Then again, my source was an elderly ex-librarian with bad cases of lung cancer and apophenia who spent his convalescence at a bar called The Turtle, so my chances weren't great. But I was no stranger to tilting at wind farms.
I took great pains to make moving into the house as inauspicious as possible. Took possession on the 13th. Ladders everywhere. Walked backwards across every threshold in the building. Cheap mirrors, bought for breaking, dropped at midnight. I even adopted not one but three black cats (the shelter had a glut of them for some reason). Still it was days before I observed even minor manifestations; the “roving cold spot” my first night in the house turned out to be a clerical error at the electric company. I could feel the bank sniffing at my toes. Admittedly, it may have been the cats.
Finally, I had a good night's sleep ruined. Chanted couplets with no discernible source woke me from dreams of debtor's prison and kept me up for hours. Ecstatic, I tossed Tarot cards all over the floor and put Ouija boards on the furniture, then drank a pint of Headmaster's Old Particular and slept the sleep of justice. Greeted with elegant lines of Arabic text in the shower-fogged mirror when I woke, I allowed an undignified whoop to occur.
When I translated the writing, I broke into an even less dignified sweat.
“Dear Sir or Madam, please vacate the premises or legal action will follow.”
The boards confirmed it, all pointing to “no,” “goodbye” or out the door. All the Tarot cards were face-down except the Knight of Pentacles, who represents sinecures, trade barriers and litigiousness. Worst of all, the cats had shredded my bank statements for use as litter. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen.
I put my crystal ball back in the box and sat down. “Okay,” I called aloud. “Let's negotiate. Maybe I can make monthly payments.”
The manifestation looked like a junior account executive, which he turned out to be, posthumously employed at a holding company in Dubai. In-house oracles prognosticated a spike in the house's market value and they wanted it back. They'd also bought up my debts.
“How could you be so foolish as to buy this place?” he groused.
“You're supposed to be a poet!” I shouted.
Chagrined that he'd failed to frighten me off, the ghost considered me warily. “So tell me. What exactly do you want?”
I gave him a fish-eating grin. “Has your firm ever considered diversifying into publishing?”
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
29 November 2010
15 May 2010
Short fiction for a JC zine
I submitted this to Margin, the latest downtown-Johnson-City 'zine that's working hard to promote the best part of this town. I don't know if it's much good, but I wrote it in a couple hours.
Prompts/ specifications: 3-500 words on the subject of "identity."
Enjoy.
They Done Give It Back
“You hear how they got a computer now that can carry your whole life around in one em things kindly the size of a damn phone?”
I could hear his whole life, in broad strokes, in that one sentence: white guy in his late fifties; former coal or factory worker; smoker; Wise or Scott County native. A natural skepticism, brought on by hard living, that expressed itself as a disdain for difference and a tendency to vote for Republicans, would be his armor and his cage as he suffered the slings and arrows of modernity. And if he could overhear these thoughts of mine, as I sat with my back to him nursing a beer and a crossword, the best I could hope for would be his contemptuous dismissal.
“Them things stay on the Internet all the time, even when you aint lookin at nothin, tellin some damn body in Langely or Washington where you're at, everything you're buyin, writin it all down in a graph and a formula they just put you in and figure out your whole damn life like doin a sum.” He barely paused to finish off a beer before adding, “Put all your records, all your official papers, in one spot where they can just read it off when they want. In that damn health care bill they make you do it, so they can put all your medical records in there too.”
The bartender had his doubts: “So they can know it every time you take a piss?”
“So they can give you a piss test.” This one was lean with stringy long hair, an ex-con unless I missed my guess. “Forget the cup. Forget the damn lab. Just test you every time you go to the head, beamin it right back to headquarters.” If he wasn't reading Bukowski, he was living it.
I hadn't been home long – just a few months – but I figured it was safe enough to turn around and chime in that the kind of technology they were talking about was still years off, and that even if it were to be perfected, there were laws protecting us against that kind of nonsense. And although they disagreed with me, it was on respectful terms. Which is to say they treated me like they would treat any other man drinking at three in the afternoon in a two-street town.
“They already done it,” said the tough guy, with wounded vindication. “Ol Zeb there got one em new phones six months ago and it wasnt a damn week went by somebody stole his identity.”
I spared the poor bastard a glance; he looked like hell. “Is that true?” I received a slow nod for my efforts. “What happened?”
A glacial pause followed. Then: “They done give it back.” While my mind occupied itself with the logistics of this statement, its factual parameters, old Zeb added, “Didnt have nothin worth stealin.”
Prompts/ specifications: 3-500 words on the subject of "identity."
Enjoy.
They Done Give It Back
“You hear how they got a computer now that can carry your whole life around in one em things kindly the size of a damn phone?”
I could hear his whole life, in broad strokes, in that one sentence: white guy in his late fifties; former coal or factory worker; smoker; Wise or Scott County native. A natural skepticism, brought on by hard living, that expressed itself as a disdain for difference and a tendency to vote for Republicans, would be his armor and his cage as he suffered the slings and arrows of modernity. And if he could overhear these thoughts of mine, as I sat with my back to him nursing a beer and a crossword, the best I could hope for would be his contemptuous dismissal.
“Them things stay on the Internet all the time, even when you aint lookin at nothin, tellin some damn body in Langely or Washington where you're at, everything you're buyin, writin it all down in a graph and a formula they just put you in and figure out your whole damn life like doin a sum.” He barely paused to finish off a beer before adding, “Put all your records, all your official papers, in one spot where they can just read it off when they want. In that damn health care bill they make you do it, so they can put all your medical records in there too.”
The bartender had his doubts: “So they can know it every time you take a piss?”
“So they can give you a piss test.” This one was lean with stringy long hair, an ex-con unless I missed my guess. “Forget the cup. Forget the damn lab. Just test you every time you go to the head, beamin it right back to headquarters.” If he wasn't reading Bukowski, he was living it.
I hadn't been home long – just a few months – but I figured it was safe enough to turn around and chime in that the kind of technology they were talking about was still years off, and that even if it were to be perfected, there were laws protecting us against that kind of nonsense. And although they disagreed with me, it was on respectful terms. Which is to say they treated me like they would treat any other man drinking at three in the afternoon in a two-street town.
“They already done it,” said the tough guy, with wounded vindication. “Ol Zeb there got one em new phones six months ago and it wasnt a damn week went by somebody stole his identity.”
I spared the poor bastard a glance; he looked like hell. “Is that true?” I received a slow nod for my efforts. “What happened?”
A glacial pause followed. Then: “They done give it back.” While my mind occupied itself with the logistics of this statement, its factual parameters, old Zeb added, “Didnt have nothin worth stealin.”
28 April 2010
100
Some of these went out on postcards; others as electronic shout-outs to friends on LiveJournal. Then there are a few of which I didn't keep a copy; I like the idea that they're out there as unique artifacts that I cannot reproduce. Here are the rest, for your entertainment.
p.s. I got this idea from Gaiman's "Nicholas Was...", although I didn't count the titles of mine toward the word limit.
Spectacles...
(for Jeff Spicer)
“… are not to be ignored,” she said. We stood on a wall that bent until it enclosed everything worth seeing.
“The gaudy, the fantastic, the in poor taste: only an idiot would walk by, blithely secure in his austerities. Ours is a world of shit! One must feast before one can defecate.”
An audience had gathered below us to hear our debate, and they made me hesitate. To try..? To hold up what light..? Or to damn everything with impenetrable obfuscations?
I glanced at what lay outside the wall. “Nothing is ever quite true,” I told them.
Nero, Octavian, Caligula, et cetera
(for Sean Landers)
I have witnessed the blades of butchers, and stand unmoved by their heavy deeds.
I have walked the paths first pressed into shape by the iron heels of empire. My shoes added some little pressure of their own.
I have confronted monuments, towers, obelisks; the steeds and the clubs and the honorifics of a war stretching back in an unbroken line to before when they write the books about.
Nothing gets through. These blank centuries do not trouble me. I can learn about this later, from my screen. In a way I can appreciate. When the technology has been perfected.
The Book of the Dead...
(for James Kobialka)
… is never the same twice. This is only a great irony if you are a fool. It can be written in up to six languages, illustrated, subdivided into a near-infinite diversity of chapters with caesuras, voltas, interjections, commentaries and inscrutable aporia. It can be rearranged, redacted. You may even try to find yourself inside it, editing a unique version singularly suited.
But it must always be written. It must never stop. Somewhere, someone must always inscribe it. Add to it, copy it down, enclose it in quotations. Only do not cease.
When it ceases to be written, we die.
Silent places...
(for S. Randolph Mills)
... were his workshops. They were tiny, sometimes: the gap between two bricks in an old wall, a hollow under an adventurous vine, the forgotten corners of rooms too large. His toil (and its fruits): quotidian.
But each day held moments, after the paying customers had left, when all the ancient streets were open to him. He reinvented history, labored at wonders, kept gods older than stone alive with extemporaneous litanies. The city on the mountain had known many owners; he was nothing so crude.
It was just the nightmares of imprisonment and torture that made him glance sometimes road-ward.
(untitled)
(for Nicole McConvery)
There was a bridge. It doesn't matter where. It crossed a river as wide and sluggish as the plutocrats who'd paid for its construction. It wasn't a bridge for crossing. It was where they'd decided to keep all of their most precious things. If it was over the water, they'd reasoned, it couldn't be under it; if it was between the two halves of the city, it couldn't be in either. Their various workers and functionaries eventually noticed this and began saying, “Safe as bridges.” They built bridges of their own and lived on them. Meanwhile, the city crumbled.
War memorials...
(for Jubal Slone)
… never stay blank. Their surfaces are palimpsests of rust and graffiti. The colors blend. The messages fade together. When you approach, you hear:
“Francesco I love you bravely fallen fuck the left behind never on the fields of Gloria I love you freedom freely isn't given give me a world people united states fuck you I love you give me a war I hate I love I fade the ages angels God has taken God I love you God give me a world without war our brave young boys I love eternal rest above below give me everything.”
When the meteorologists went on strike...
(for Brian Baker)
... everyone in the world burst out laughing in what could accurately be described as uncanny unison. Unkind jokes in endless profusion expressed one sentiment: "We didn't know what it would do when you WERE working, so enjoy your little break!"
It was only when the first wave of mass suicide hit the news that we stopped our chortles. Alert journalists read their final predictions; several succumbed to schizophrenia afterward. And while we tried to warm ourselves with remorse, seek shelter under it, shade our eyes against the glare of the pitiless, baleful sky with it, eternal winter covered the world.
(untitled)
(for Maria)
"I care nothing for oracles!" she bellows, unsolicited. "Fate is the excuse of the weak, whose appetites are as feeble as their palsied limbs!" I always was a sucker for girls who talked like that.
While she isn't watching, I draw the four draughts. Cast yarrow stalks. Toss bones. To say nothing of my recurring prophetic dreams (which technically aren't my responsibility). Rather than write them down, where someday she might find them, I reveal the results only in casual remarks, cloaked in metaphor. She isn't listening, anyway.
"I will devour this world!" she screams. And insists I stop smiling.
We have tilled this earth...
(for G. Myers Gilmer)
“...since God was a nameless infant,” they told me. I remain skeptical to this day but, at the time, said nothing. “Empires have come and gone. Religions fallen. Still the work of our hands feeds the armies of distant potentates. We care not. Our walls stand impregnable.”
I said thanks for letting me stay, and left it at that. I was only in town for a night, on my way to meet a girl in the shining city in the foothills. I ate their food and walked away, unchanged. I tell myself this nightly, or I can't sleep.
p.s. I got this idea from Gaiman's "Nicholas Was...", although I didn't count the titles of mine toward the word limit.
Spectacles...
(for Jeff Spicer)
“… are not to be ignored,” she said. We stood on a wall that bent until it enclosed everything worth seeing.
“The gaudy, the fantastic, the in poor taste: only an idiot would walk by, blithely secure in his austerities. Ours is a world of shit! One must feast before one can defecate.”
An audience had gathered below us to hear our debate, and they made me hesitate. To try..? To hold up what light..? Or to damn everything with impenetrable obfuscations?
I glanced at what lay outside the wall. “Nothing is ever quite true,” I told them.
Nero, Octavian, Caligula, et cetera
(for Sean Landers)
I have witnessed the blades of butchers, and stand unmoved by their heavy deeds.
I have walked the paths first pressed into shape by the iron heels of empire. My shoes added some little pressure of their own.
I have confronted monuments, towers, obelisks; the steeds and the clubs and the honorifics of a war stretching back in an unbroken line to before when they write the books about.
Nothing gets through. These blank centuries do not trouble me. I can learn about this later, from my screen. In a way I can appreciate. When the technology has been perfected.
The Book of the Dead...
(for James Kobialka)
… is never the same twice. This is only a great irony if you are a fool. It can be written in up to six languages, illustrated, subdivided into a near-infinite diversity of chapters with caesuras, voltas, interjections, commentaries and inscrutable aporia. It can be rearranged, redacted. You may even try to find yourself inside it, editing a unique version singularly suited.
But it must always be written. It must never stop. Somewhere, someone must always inscribe it. Add to it, copy it down, enclose it in quotations. Only do not cease.
When it ceases to be written, we die.
Silent places...
(for S. Randolph Mills)
... were his workshops. They were tiny, sometimes: the gap between two bricks in an old wall, a hollow under an adventurous vine, the forgotten corners of rooms too large. His toil (and its fruits): quotidian.
But each day held moments, after the paying customers had left, when all the ancient streets were open to him. He reinvented history, labored at wonders, kept gods older than stone alive with extemporaneous litanies. The city on the mountain had known many owners; he was nothing so crude.
It was just the nightmares of imprisonment and torture that made him glance sometimes road-ward.
(untitled)
(for Nicole McConvery)
There was a bridge. It doesn't matter where. It crossed a river as wide and sluggish as the plutocrats who'd paid for its construction. It wasn't a bridge for crossing. It was where they'd decided to keep all of their most precious things. If it was over the water, they'd reasoned, it couldn't be under it; if it was between the two halves of the city, it couldn't be in either. Their various workers and functionaries eventually noticed this and began saying, “Safe as bridges.” They built bridges of their own and lived on them. Meanwhile, the city crumbled.
War memorials...
(for Jubal Slone)
… never stay blank. Their surfaces are palimpsests of rust and graffiti. The colors blend. The messages fade together. When you approach, you hear:
“Francesco I love you bravely fallen fuck the left behind never on the fields of Gloria I love you freedom freely isn't given give me a world people united states fuck you I love you give me a war I hate I love I fade the ages angels God has taken God I love you God give me a world without war our brave young boys I love eternal rest above below give me everything.”
When the meteorologists went on strike...
(for Brian Baker)
... everyone in the world burst out laughing in what could accurately be described as uncanny unison. Unkind jokes in endless profusion expressed one sentiment: "We didn't know what it would do when you WERE working, so enjoy your little break!"
It was only when the first wave of mass suicide hit the news that we stopped our chortles. Alert journalists read their final predictions; several succumbed to schizophrenia afterward. And while we tried to warm ourselves with remorse, seek shelter under it, shade our eyes against the glare of the pitiless, baleful sky with it, eternal winter covered the world.
(untitled)
(for Maria)
"I care nothing for oracles!" she bellows, unsolicited. "Fate is the excuse of the weak, whose appetites are as feeble as their palsied limbs!" I always was a sucker for girls who talked like that.
While she isn't watching, I draw the four draughts. Cast yarrow stalks. Toss bones. To say nothing of my recurring prophetic dreams (which technically aren't my responsibility). Rather than write them down, where someday she might find them, I reveal the results only in casual remarks, cloaked in metaphor. She isn't listening, anyway.
"I will devour this world!" she screams. And insists I stop smiling.
We have tilled this earth...
(for G. Myers Gilmer)
“...since God was a nameless infant,” they told me. I remain skeptical to this day but, at the time, said nothing. “Empires have come and gone. Religions fallen. Still the work of our hands feeds the armies of distant potentates. We care not. Our walls stand impregnable.”
I said thanks for letting me stay, and left it at that. I was only in town for a night, on my way to meet a girl in the shining city in the foothills. I ate their food and walked away, unchanged. I tell myself this nightly, or I can't sleep.
17 April 2010
fiction
I've decided this is as good a place as any to serve as a central location for some not-so-great-yet-still-interesting short works. For every time I've started a story and left it undone, every fiction contest I've not quite entered, every ill-conceived notion that almost saw a reader's eye, there must be an answer. It shall be here.
To begin: last summer before I left for that trip to Europe, I heard about a writing contest on NPR. I had a couple days at most before the deadline. I began a story; I lost interest, presumably, or simply failed to get it done in time. In any case I wrote what is now a lost chunk of micro-fiction and haven't done anything with it since. If memory serves, there was a 500 word limit and the following prompt: the first sentence must be, "The nurse left at five o'clock." The title below is the best I can come up with at the moment.
Memory (working title)
The nurse left at five o'clock. She entered the subway station at Charles Street nineteen minutes later and waited another ten minutes for an inbound train. She boarded it, sat by herself and began to murmur quietly, not rocking back and forth, not sitting bolt upright, not staring or sweating or showing any other immediately visible sign of distress. At 6:03 a.m. her train crashed into another Red Line train waiting to enter the track at Park Street and at 6:04 a.m. she emerged from the wreckage clutching her left arm to her side, pushed her way through the crowd and walked up the stairs without a word. This much we know. What we do not know - what I cannot stop dreaming of her until I know - is why. My name is Marcus Andrews and I am from the future.
Five people were killed instantly by the initial impact; another seventeen were wounded. Witnesses called the EMS immediately and the first medical personnel arrived on the scene in under four minutes. During that time, three injured passengers succumbed to their wounds and died. Above them, a fully qualified RN named Annie Gilbrading held her left arm against her side and walked away.
I would like to tell you that this event is of crucial significance - that I traveled back in time to save the life of a man who would have cured a disease, or to save a nurse's soul - but I am shirking my responsibilities by being here, studying these events. They matter solely to me and I do not know why they compel me. I have a husband, a daughter. My career is meaningful. Still I dream of her soft, blank face and find her beautiful. Still, she lets them die.
Strict rules govern time travel: a cap on number of years from the point of projection, a limit on the duration of each trip. No physical manifestation is allowed. If you discover certain facts pertaining to your own life or origin, they may be confiscated on your return. The authorities may enter and search your mind without a warrant if your trip is deemed a threat to national security, and you can be called to account for actions taken outside your native timestream.
I push them. Settle myself on her like a cloak, mimic her experience of the cold, the drip from the wound. and as glances or stares or earnest inquiries come in I press my lips tight and breathe. She says nothing. Walks toward something on a horizon no one else could see and I am behind her, beside her. If they discover these thoughts I will be punished, no doubt, but I have no answer for them.
To begin: last summer before I left for that trip to Europe, I heard about a writing contest on NPR. I had a couple days at most before the deadline. I began a story; I lost interest, presumably, or simply failed to get it done in time. In any case I wrote what is now a lost chunk of micro-fiction and haven't done anything with it since. If memory serves, there was a 500 word limit and the following prompt: the first sentence must be, "The nurse left at five o'clock." The title below is the best I can come up with at the moment.
Memory (working title)
The nurse left at five o'clock. She entered the subway station at Charles Street nineteen minutes later and waited another ten minutes for an inbound train. She boarded it, sat by herself and began to murmur quietly, not rocking back and forth, not sitting bolt upright, not staring or sweating or showing any other immediately visible sign of distress. At 6:03 a.m. her train crashed into another Red Line train waiting to enter the track at Park Street and at 6:04 a.m. she emerged from the wreckage clutching her left arm to her side, pushed her way through the crowd and walked up the stairs without a word. This much we know. What we do not know - what I cannot stop dreaming of her until I know - is why. My name is Marcus Andrews and I am from the future.
Five people were killed instantly by the initial impact; another seventeen were wounded. Witnesses called the EMS immediately and the first medical personnel arrived on the scene in under four minutes. During that time, three injured passengers succumbed to their wounds and died. Above them, a fully qualified RN named Annie Gilbrading held her left arm against her side and walked away.
I would like to tell you that this event is of crucial significance - that I traveled back in time to save the life of a man who would have cured a disease, or to save a nurse's soul - but I am shirking my responsibilities by being here, studying these events. They matter solely to me and I do not know why they compel me. I have a husband, a daughter. My career is meaningful. Still I dream of her soft, blank face and find her beautiful. Still, she lets them die.
Strict rules govern time travel: a cap on number of years from the point of projection, a limit on the duration of each trip. No physical manifestation is allowed. If you discover certain facts pertaining to your own life or origin, they may be confiscated on your return. The authorities may enter and search your mind without a warrant if your trip is deemed a threat to national security, and you can be called to account for actions taken outside your native timestream.
I push them. Settle myself on her like a cloak, mimic her experience of the cold, the drip from the wound. and as glances or stares or earnest inquiries come in I press my lips tight and breathe. She says nothing. Walks toward something on a horizon no one else could see and I am behind her, beside her. If they discover these thoughts I will be punished, no doubt, but I have no answer for them.
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