Ricky's Back Yard - Torsion

Ricky’s Back Yard To r s i o n

Edited by: Jo Szewczyk, Jenni Hill, and Lizzie Nicodemus

Czykmate Productions 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Czykmate Productions

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover credit: Lizzie Nicodemus ISBN-13: 978-1-329-78046-0

Ricky’s Back Yard www.rickysbackyard.com

Ricky’s Back Yard - Torsion Nyabur The Night Witch - Michael Owuor Looks Like Rain - Ryan Dunham The Death of the Dinosaurs - Kristin Harley Vultures - WJ Rosser Out of Mustard - Simon Sankoff Mytologi - Erik Harper Klass Seeds of the Empire - Mahmoud Sharif Swing - Diana Murtaugh Catapult - Alex Ayling Our fond good by and what’s next

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6 9 13 28 33 37 66 75 81 89

Dedication This issue is dedicated to all the Guns n Roses fans who stuck with us through all...wait...no...

That’s what I get for listening to Guns whilst putting this bad-boy into press. As a rule, I detest dedications. My editors, on the other hand...

Not being big on dedications myself, I will simply thank all the great authors who submitted to the magazine. Reading your pieces gave each of my (otherwise rather routine) days something extra whilst editing Torsion. ~Lizzie Nicodemus Who would have guessed that the meaning of ‘Torsion’ could be interpreted with such vivid disparity …. It’s great to know there’s a hearty population of unorthodox thinkers alive and kicking out there.

Of course none of us can help having our favourites – I particularly enjoyed reading ‘Death of Dinosaurs’ and ‘Looks Like Rain’ – two distinctly different styles of story, but both entirely engaging. Though to be honest, I think we have a pretty good issue here with a real diversity of compositions, so I’m entirely sure that even if you disagree with my top choices you’ll find something in here to enjoy. ~Jenni Hill

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T on Torsi

Michael Owuor I like to work. I especially like work that is challenging, as long as I have the capacity to do it. I write to share my feelings about certain experiences and challenges in life; having come from a family with lots of difficulties where one had to think quickly to survive, I find that sharing helps us.

I was born to a mentally incapacitated father; he had got the problem shortly after he had started some progress with his work. He was violent to his family, and beat up everyone at home using whatever object came his way. My big sister and late mother were the most affected. Mother lost four of her upper teeth and suffered several chest problems. I remember some of the violent incidents when Mother ran carrying me away as stones were hurled at her‌ let me but stop here for now. I will tell you more in detail the next submission, if I am fortunate enough to be published twice for this magazine that you read.

Reading helps us heal. I like to read anything of whatever kind as long as at the end of the day I have a lesson to pick out from it, I believe every piece of writing has an idea it puts across.

Best regards, Owuor Michael

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Nyabur The Night Witch by Michael Owuor

At about the age eight, something happened in my village that

is still fresh in my mind. There lived an old woman called Nyabur. She walked alone and her back curved like a question mark. It appeared she couldn’t take even the smallest of steps without her walking stick. She never dropped her walking stick. She had large squinted eyeballs, and a very tired back. One would wonder how she managed to terrorize the whole neighborhood at night. But she was a known master at the art of night dancing and witchcraft. Her night design was an outfit-dress of ash powder that she designed to cover her scaly body when on duty.

Tell no one, my friend, for I saw this myself one evening.

That evening we were done with supper, and had hardly closed our door when we heard a cat-like scratch on the door. That evening I borrowed the courage of my late great grandma. I looked through a tiny hole on the cracked wall; the moon was generous that night and I saw the woman. She was without her walking support. She was upright. Hanging on her dry chest were two sock-shaped features that rolled down to her loins. In her ash outfit, every feature on her was loud. In fact, the ash made her look like a guinea fowl. She made several revolutions round our house, struck the windows, and sowed grains of sand all over the old roof. My heart pumped and I felt a stream of adrenalin down to the toes as my bro cocked and ran out with the two tongued spear; the weapon of mass destruction, that was inherited from our great grandpa. I picked a mingling stick from mother’s millet pot and followed him into the madness. My bro came panting; the elusive and outwitting creature had disappeared into thin air.

One day, my cousin Otewa, who was about fifteen, came home; he was the most playful creature I knew and he my favorite cousin. We narrated to him about the night goddess and how she had terrorized the neighborhood; but Otewa did not seem much touched by the story; he instead told us more horrifying stories about his place and 7

vowed to catch Nyabur. He worked on his Catapult, the AK47 of the time, and tried several targets to ensure it was well zeroed. Night came and my cousin, accompanied by my bro, lay ambush under the millet granary with the new launcher at the ready. They had with them magazines of cycle-nut missiles for the deadly mission. I was very eager to see the outcome, I tell you no scrap of sleep dared to cross my eyebrows that night. I listened keenly for the slightest sound outside.

Fortunately, her time table was favoring; she came trotting, and, as usual, went about her business: she checked the windows, the doors, and then went about baptizing the roof with her grains of sand. She had hardly gone quarter way her business when I heard the missile and then a loud moan. Shortly after, the two freedom fighters were at the door beaming with smiles of triumph. The mission was complete, the missile had blown off a fraction of her face, but she had managed to slip away.

At dawn, everyone woke early to confirm the job well-done. And at the scene was something like Nyabur’s squinted eyeball that had sprung out from its orbit when Otewa released the trigger. Nyabur was surely wounded. I put the eye in my pocket. I’m not sure why I did it, but it felt right. We then followed the trail of blood up to her hut, whence she lay… resting at the door step, a pool of blood under her tiny hard body, never to wake again.

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Ryan Dunham Ryan is currently an ABD doctoral candidate in the Media Arts and Studies program at Ohio University. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing at Binghamton University.

He is such a big Deadhead he names most of his short stories after Grateful Dead song titles.

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Looks Like Rain by Ryan Dunham

Call it fortuity. Call it happenstance. Call it fate.

Delilah has never seen the rain.

The sun has always followed her.

“What are those?” she howls.

We’re at the park and I’m watching two octogenarians feed two pigeons cornbread. Lifelong lovers introducing the chirpers to their lifelong mating partners.

I can’t tell if Delilah is inquiring about the octogenarians or the pigeons or the cornbread until I turn around and follow her eyes to the sky. The sky is bird-less, octogenarian-less, cornbread-less. The only thing keeping clear blue from entering our eyes are proverbial rain clouds.

“Why aren’t they white?” She shouts the semblance of racism innocently and neither the pigeons nor the cornbread offended. The octogenarians can’t hear a word she says. “Why don’t they look like marshmallows? Like cotton? Like fluffy bunny rabbits?”

“Um.” How do you tell an adult about the rain? The things we assume people know. The things we take for granted as common. You don’t want to come across as pedantic. You don’t want to come across as an ass.

I coo to try to lure the pigeons over for misdirection. I complain about the government and the youth of today and the cost of a gallon of milk but the octogenarians still can’t hear me.

A raindrop hits my forehead and I tell Delilah it’s just sweat.

“But it’s so cold,” she says.

I’m running out of time.

“We should go,” I suggest. Tick. “It’s…getting late.”

“It’s only 12:30.” Tock.

The octogenarians are out of cornbread. The pigeons look upset.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“We just had lunch, Jack.”

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“Don’t you have to go to the bathroom?”

“I went before we left the restaurant, remember?”

“Don’t you need to check your Facebook, your e-mail, your Twitter, your other e-mail?”

“Nope.”

“Didn’t you leave the stove on?”

“Honey, we don’t have a stove.”

Why aren’t humans interested in anything else? There has to be something.

The pigeons are revolting. They are still hungry.

I feel a raindrop on my bare toe and tell Delilah it’s just the morning dew.

“This late?” She watches what was once a girl riding a tricycle but is now a giant blob merged with what was once a turtle chasing a family of cartoon coffee mugs but is now a grey mess. She seems unfazed, her imaginative mind at work. “It looks like,” she stops.

The octogenarians have submissively given the pigeons their socks and loafers. The pigeons are not satisfied. The hunger has not been assuaged.

“We have to go,” I tell her. I look at the pigeons. I look at the sky.

“What? Why?” “I’m pregnant.”

“Huh?” “Your father’s dead.”

“Honey, this really isn’t the time to bring up the past.”

“It’s Armageddon,” I tell her. “We have to run for shelter.”

She turns to me, her vision going from one storm to another.

“Honey, please. Can’t we just enjoy this afternoon?”

The pigeons are demanding the octogenarians’ pants. They’re demanding their underwear.

A raindrop falls on the spot just below my belt and I point to it, in a way that says, “See, Delilah, I need to use the bathroom.”

She knows I’m lying. She knows I have something to hide.

“Is it another girl?”

“No.” “Is it another guy?”

“What? No. No. Definitely no.”

“Oh, geez, Jack, are you some kind of freak?”

The pigeons are demanding the octogenarian’s flesh. They’re 11

demanding their souls.

A raindrop falls on the tip of Delilah’s nose and she screams.

And it’s here that I realize that my forehead burns. My big toe itches. My crotch tingles.

“What is this?” The rain has dyed Delilah’s hair a white-ish gray.

A gray-ish white. “What are those things in the sky?”

Dogs and cats can be heard howling in pain from every direction.

I turn and in the fog I see the shadow of two giant birds, one hunched over, one with a cane in its right talon.

“Delilah, let’s go to the car.”

As we walk towards the car the fog becomes thicker. The enveloping howls become more harrowing. The rain becomes more acidic.

“It’s called rain,” I tell her. “It’s usually not this bad, but it is coming down hard.”

She’s crying and the tears cool down her face. They sooth her.

Through the fog I find the car door and help Delilah into the passenger’s seat. I run around the hood as fast as the weather will let me and when I’m in the car I comfort Delilah.

“It’s okay.” I turn on the air conditioning because it’s hot. I turn on the radio because it’s silent.

I turn on the windshield wipers and two giant, crinkly-faced, liverspotted members of the avian family stare back at us.

“You’ll be fine,” I tell a trembling Delilah. “I swear.” And I start the car.

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Kristin Harley Kristin Harley is a learning technologist for a large library system.

She is also an independent librarian/archivist, indexer, and writer. She has acted in local, independent films and performed onstage and in festivals as a Raqs al-Sharqi performer (belly dancer).

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The Death of the Dinosaurs by Kristin Harley

“We’re taking the dinosaurs back!” proclaimed the bumper

stickers, and the window decals, and the buttons, and naturally the t-shirts—so many t-shirts, so many colors, so many styles (sport-t and casual-t, which due to a memo from management was about to be renamed, and feminine-t, which was simply abbreviated as…you guessed it), and so many sizes, but no insulting L or XL or XXL, and even no S or M (this had also merited a memo from management), but having been newly christened, as it were, in these ascending motifs: Innocent (baby sizes), Quester, Apostle, Samaritan, Penitent, and most comfortingly for those who were struggling to cut their food portions in half, Solomon.

Each of these items, the bumper stickers, decals, buttons, and shirts, also featured a laughing dinosaur flanked by Biblical characters in clothing drawn from a screen capture on the news that could pass for Middle Eastern dress, and all were also for sale (as were the action figures complete with sandal and Moses staff accessories) behind the recently-installed glass of the gift shop. Small dinosaur action figures were for sale there, too—they had names such as Leviathan and Enmity—as well as books that “proclaim that absolutely inerrancy and scientific accuracy of the Bible.” There were Jesus chemistry sets, complete with a “spontaneous generation vial,” into which one merely poured water in order to watch the miracle of God creating tiny sea horses out of nothing, and which looked to the cynical eye much like the “Sea Monkey” kit ads that had smiled from many a comic book of the 1970s. There was, however, no complementary vial to mimic the special cocktail shaker Christ used at the wedding at Cana. There were the ubiquitous copies of that homeschool textbook favorite, Of Pandas and People, with its updated supplemental text, Panda Thumbs and Personal Theories, plus videos that debunked evolution and the Big Bang, guides for parents on how to raise morally upright, evangelical teens (“Even staring into the eyes for too long of a member of the 14

opposite sex—what we call ‘making eye-babies’—can be a sin”), and refrigerator magnets with catchy phrases (such as “Pray, or prey?” “God is my co-signer,” and “If it’s SUNDAY, you must be GOD!”).

The gift shop was not yet open for business, and neither was the museum. The museum’s lobby, its halls, and its exhibits all reposed during the day in a gray twilight which was slanted through with milky shafts from the windows, but at night the place fairly simmered in a greenish security light. Vague, still semi-formed four-footed figures pantomimed for a future audience, as if rehearsing for the museum’s upcoming opening day, a silent and tragic spectacle: their formation

by God out of dust, every one of them a separate and special creation; the presentation of them to Adam and his naming of them; their amiable, peaceful, carefree, and vegetarian coexistence with the couple, the upright, standing male and female human figures who, at the conclusion of this tableau, raised their arms above their heads as if to clutch at the hands of the unseen God as He drove them out of this garden and into the nightmare of necessity, where their former fourclawed friends now stalked and preyed upon them in a fallen nature red in tooth and claw.

Apparently, the creators of this full-scale model of Eden were disobedient to the order of the first of the two Genesis stories, for most of the animals in this series of boxed vignettes had been only partly completed, each needing a final coat of paint or a touch-up with whiskers, but the couple, this man and this woman, Adam and Eve, were already finished—and this was only Tuesday.

The bland, low-slung cinderblock building had as yet no sign to announce itself. But on its website, the homepage banner jauntily announced, “Welcome to the Genesis Museum! The Genesis Museum is an outreach of Questions of Creation, a non-profit ministry located in Gallileville, eastern Kentucky, USA. We offer a walk through man’s history from his Creation, through his Sin and Fall, to his Redemption by the Death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. This 25,000 square foot facility will strike the first blow against the dogmatic, evolution-driven, atheistic natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the authority of the Scriptures. We proclaim to the world that the Bible is inerrant, the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice, the basis of all morality, and the origin of all true Science.”

The large entry was flanked by cuddly-looking dinosaurs, huge 15

and lumbering, definitely of the vegetarian kind, not unlike Barney.

Just beyond the entry, inside the lobby, a smaller, lither dinosaur stood upright on its hind legs, dangling its front limbs—and it wore a saddle. One expected there to be a coin machine attached to this cute, harmless-looking Barney twin, as there had been coin machines beside the galloping horses outside of the Jubilee Foods of old Gallileville before all the Wal-Marts rose up like giants among the sons of men.

However, it would seem that Christ had already descended to this particular temple to shake hands with the power-suited director of the Genesis Museum, Dr. Kenneth Loin, for there was a painting of them both—The Lord in his robe, and Ken Loin in a suit and tie—shaking hands, just as He was also doing in the painting on the main wall of the Gilead Bank just down the road a mile, where “Biblical-based investment counseling” was advertised, along with interest rate prayers and credit-healing sessions, in traveling red letters on the jumbletron at the edge of the parking lot.

There was Jesus in that painting just inside the glass doors— there was the Lamb of God Himself in his modest robe and beard, shaking hands with the man in the three-piece suit, the bank’s head moneychanger, William Tremplaux, who was also the best friend and financier of Kenneth Loin and the Genesis Museum. “Follow me,” said the quote on the scrolled brass plaque beneath the painting, “and I will make you golfers of men.” William Tremplaux, like Kenneth Loin, loved golf, and together they had formed the Genesis Golfers Outreach Platoon which sought to “Go ‘Fore!’ into the world to save souls.” * * * The Genesis Museum’s grand opening was not scheduled for another year, but a publicity release offering a special tour of the premises, by invitation only, did reach the desk of the metro section of the Gallileville Spectator. It landed on the desk along with the yearly press release from the DNR, which urged Kentuckians to obey the law this year and remember not to burn wood in their yards, or to burn off the brush on their property, or even to burn trash in barrels, for fear of starting a grass fire. “People think that burning off their property will get rid of the snakes. They actually believe this,” a DNR official was quoted as saying. “Rainfall levels were especially down this year. The conditions that we are seeing now are just the sort of tinderbox that we feared to encounter earlier in the summer. We urge all citizens to 16

remember that starting private fires are not only dangerous—they are illegal.” The metro section of the Spectator led with the headline, “State Officials Seek to Prevent Fall Forest Fires,” but the second headline in the smaller font was accompanied by a photo, provided with the press release, of the burdened dinosaur in the entryway of the Genesis Museum.

The metro section would later devote its entire front page to the publicity tour of the Genesis Museum, much of it cut-and-pasted from the press release sent out afterward by the museum itself to head off any nasty rumors that the tour had in fact not gone well.

One of the visitors on this pilgrimage, a reporter writing for a major men’s magazine—who took the tour along with other reporters, local homeschool advocates, Intelligent Design theorists, Young Earth scientists, HIV-to-AIDS deniers, global warming deniers, and assorted veterinarians who scouted, freelance, for the chupacabra on month-long sabbaticals—later noted dryly in his unauthorized article about the tour that the dinosaur in the lobby was, in truth, wearing an English saddle, a particular style of saddle which lacked a horn, indicating that the huge reptile was not really meant to be ridden, or even to be yoked, but was rather a show dinosaur of sorts, perhaps trotted out for stakes races at the local Mesopotamian equestrian ring.

This writer’s sarcastic review of the museum’s exhibits, the sole review that was not lifted from the Genesis Museum’s genial press release, prompted several Christian bloggers to take his article seriously, and they had a lot of fun exchanging their speculations of how the ancient Israelites might have utilized the various species of dinosaurs for different purposes, such as for shows. These young bloggers, pious and pierced and goth like so many teens, traded various theories on where and when man first domesticated the thunderlizards—when Adam first named them, what he had named them (“I think he would have called him Joyosaurus—I know I would have,”), whether he and Eve had ridden them out of the Garden after the Fall, or if Cain had made his quick getaway on one and if so, had the beast erased its own huge footprints with its 1950s-textbook-era kangaroo tail? This online discussion attracted so much local attention that a noted evolutionary biologist from the University of Kentucky, when asked in a television interview on the local news about the date of Adam’s domestication of the dinosaur on a local news show, answered 17

in disgust that the dinosaurs were first domesticated in present-day Gallileville, Kentucky—and had also become truly extinct on that same day, as had common sense.

The other visitors on the tour, the parents and the members of the clergy who been invited as “seed members” for their having donated money (there were various levels of monetary contribution, from “mustard seed” on up to “all I have”) noted that the differences between various dinosaurs roughly paralleled the differences between the makes of cars. One “noted biblio-paleontologist,” a dentist by day, wrote an article after the tour stating that the variety of dinosaurs exploited by Biblical man broke down according to ethnic and social class: Pontius Pilate, for example, used the—but, guess!—Tyrannosaurus Rex on which to yacht himself, with a muzzle on its humongous snout of course, easily removed to terrorize the Israelites like a Doberman on a leash, whereas Abraham rode on the gentle Brontosaurus, “the first SUV,” as the author put it, “to accommodate his growing family.”

Apparently, when Abraham, that great patriarch, threw his mistress, a pregnant and weeping Hagar, out of his house, Hagar and Abraham’s unborn son (who would later father the whole race of Arab peoples and thus become the patriarch of petroleum, blessing us all with a liquefied dinosaur in every gas tank) searched for water in the wilderness with the help of another dinosaur, Diplodocus, a sort of lanky, living divining rod.

A former President was asked by a reporter quite off the cuff one day as to what kind of dinosaur he would prefer to ride on, if he could, if it were possible, and if he had the choice. Genial as always, the man replied, “I am aware of the good work done by the Genesis Museum.

Being a President that has to fly a lot, you know, in the air, above the ground, I would need one of them trapezoids, you know, or teriyakis, whatever they’re called—no, not—not a chicken, that was a bad slip! [laughter] but the kind of bird, of dinosaur, you know, that flies. I mean—yes.”

The fact that the former President had tried to say that he would use a Pterodactyl in place of Air Force One led the news all that day. A prominent cable news comedian gave it a full fifteen minutes.

Some left-wing bloggers snickered about the threat of avian flu from the former President’s new mode of airborne transportation. Some bloggers—perhaps right-wing, perhaps serious, or perhaps parodists— became seriously worried, or pretended to be, about the issue, asking 18

if avian flu could leap, or jump, or hop from bird to lizard —oddly enough, no one thought to use the verb “fly” in their effort to avoid the word e-v-o-l-v-e. What about all of those snakes and scorpions that could threaten our troops in Afghanistan? Could our troops catch reptilian flu from desert lizards? The online discussion went on fast and feckless for quite some time before a noted biologist sent in a caustic reminder to everyone that the poor Pterodactyl was extinct! Avian flu could very well be a danger to us all, and it could be spread around the world on cargo planes, rather than migrating birds, or indeed it could be spread by migrating birds, but it had not yet mutated into a form spread airborne from human to human, but being that there were no more Pterodactyls, there was absolutely no danger from Air Force None. * * * About a week after the official press release came out from the Genesis Museum, some actual tour footage, shot by a hidden body camera that had been smuggled in by one of the reporters from the mainstream press, was posted on YouTube. It revealed that the press visit to the Genesis Museum had been a near disaster for the organizers. The reporters had entered the museum with all good intentions of being polite, smiling at the emasculated dinos in the lobby and at the plaster “fossil reproductions” (“No actual dinosaurs were harmed in the making of Jurassic Snark,” one of them joked in a low voice)—but they were soon overtaken by incredulity, particularly when escorted into the exhibits area and shown the newly-completed vignette of Adam and Eve enjoying their innocence in the Garden of Eden.

“Why are they white?” asked one of the reporters, putting up his hand and interrupting the guided tour given by the museum’s director, Dr. Kenneth Loin. “Why did you make Adam and Eve white?”

“What?” asked the director blankly.

Fingers from the group of reporters pointed at Eve, who stood smiling, vapidly enjoying the stream that ran through the garden, its conspiratorial depth covering her up to her waist, her hair trailing its mermaid-ingénue tresses conveniently, and presumably, across her breasts, which, as one reporter discovered when he hung back from the group and lifted her rayon hair with a fake cattail pulled from the Astroturf bank, she proved not to have. “She looks like she’s in Behind the Green Door, not in Mesopotamia,” sneered another of the reporters.

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“Wrong hair,” retorted another reporter.

“But a snake.”

“More like The Devil in Miss Jones,” cracked another reporter.

“Well, we don’t know what Adam and Eve looked like,” Loin retorted, in a tone of voice that implied that he enjoyed a quiet evening writing sermons against baristas in bikinis.

“Wouldn’t it have been more accurate to portray them as African?”

“We represent them as ordinary people, so that our audience can identify with them. The point is not to show any bias. We are asking you to use your imagination.”

There was a flurry of writing at this—the reporters had been forbidden to bring their cameras, or their phones, or their “biases,” with them. “White people are ‘ordinary’ people?” someone else demanded.

“Portraying Adam and Eve as white is not showing any bias?”

“Did she have a double mastectomy, too?” asked the guy on the bank, the looky-loo. All of the reporters turned to him, and back to Eve, in renewed interest. The reporter hurriedly stuck the purloined cattail behind his leg.

Director Loin chose to ignore the last remark. “We are choosing not to represent Our Parents as being of any race.”

“But you did!” insisted the only female reporter, who had been told to wear a skirt that reached below the knees. She perched awkwardly on the Astroturf in her high heels.

“Look at Adam, while you’re at it,” sniggered another, as he swung his finger from Eve in her creek to Adam, bearded Adam, as he reposed tepidly on the stream bank on his back, one arm outstretched, the other behind his head, and with one knee strategically bent to cover his privates. “Take a look at him from this side. Adam has no penis!” Head craned to look, while the visiting parents hurriedly clamped their hands over their children’s ears. There a chorus of fascinated gasps from the reporters, and some snarls from the parents about modesty, and a few outright guffaws. Someone snapped a photo, and promptly had his camera taken away by a guard dressed in a Security Angel costume. The reporter was hurriedly escorted past the Tree of Knowledge and out the exit.

The reporter on the bank above Eve shoved the cattail into the Astroturf behind his leg in order to free his hand, but the cattail fell forward and propped itself against his left buttock. “God, Dr. Loin, even my daughter’s Barbie Dolls have tits!” he said in disbelief. “Maybe 20

they don’t have nipples, but still!”

The reporters, having tried valiantly to hold back their laughter while Dr. Loin was speaking, now collapsed into hilarity right in the answering silence that had descended upon the group like a godly finger from the clouds.

“Hey, Ken! Why doesn’t the Ken-doll have a wee-wee!” The reporters were practically falling on each other in mirth. The angry murmur from the assembled parents swelled into a shout of impatience, and Dr. Loin turned beet red. The kids, with their heads held like steering wheels between the hands of their parents, just stared, some with their thumbs in their mouths, other slack-jawed, like the “DNA proves you’re the father” guests on daytime talk shows that some of them were sure to grow into.

“He is Adam,” retorted Ken Loin. “He is not a doll, but a sacred symbol of the First Man. You are mocking our First Parents!”

“But didn’t Adam have a dick in the Garden, Dr. Loin?” asked the female reporter. “That is hardly ‘Paradise’ to me!”

“He used the snake,” guffawed someone else. There was more tittering among the reporters.

“No, look—he’s petting the little dinosaur next to him. Knowledge of Good and Evil?” The owner of this voice pointed out how Adam’s hand reached toward the tiny dinosaur beside him, and there even were more sniggers. “It’s Jungle Fever!” bellowed another reporter.

At this point, the director angrily motioned to the guards, all in their angel suits, complete with wings, complete with bobbing halos anchored to the headbands on their heads, and the guards terminated the press tour. All of the reporters were turned out of the Garden and deposited without ceremony in the parking lot, thus missing out on the fruit cocktail and coffee that was served in the neighboring commissary, which featured an Assyrian-inspired deli counter prepped with Red Seafood Salad, Manna Sandwiches, and Bethlehem Bread Pudding. It was perhaps a week later that a friendlier reporter managed another visit and noted that Adam and Eve had been painted, it seemed, a safe and inoffensive caramel. * * * After a full week of worldwide snickering at the former President’s remarks about the Genesis Museum, during which the former President’s library tried desperately to counter the publicity, the President’s latest Press Secretary appeared before the press corps like 21

a man punching a malfunctioning Coke machine one last time on his second-to-last dollar. This newest hired hand, haggard but unbowed, held his chin up before the assembled reporters, most of whom had already appeared in those framed squares on cable news television shows to speculate that this latest incarnation was close to resigning as well. The room was hushed as the publicist issued a statement saying that, since it was the President’s position that “the jury was still out on evolution,” the question as to what kind of dinosaur a sitting President should ride, and indeed the larger controversy of whether or not a public figure endorsed the kind of science pursued by the Genesis Museum, had been “posed in the context of an ongoing investigation,” and therefore, the former President’s library had, or should have had, but at any rate had now, “no official comment on the matter.” The President himself had not helped things by trying to explain again his position by invoking the “Why are there still monkeys?’ question. The President’s beleaguered Press Secretary hurriedly improvised that most of our ancestors had fled Europe to escape the “secularist leadership” of the divine right of kings for the freedom that everyone enjoys in this country to worship God in his or her own way. He was then asked by one of the reporters that, if most religious Americans came from secular Europe, why was there still a secular Europe? Laughter erupted in the press room, whereupon the publicist angrily terminated the press conference. * * * This video at YouTube of the visit to the Genesis Museum provoked a furious response on talk radio. The group of visiting reporters was referred to by Dr. Raymond Gaumier, the intelligent design theorist from the Institute of Discovery in Seattle, as “plants”— that is, as atheistic agents posing as mainstream reporters, brought in by some nefarious secular lobby, probably by the famous biologist and atheist Professor James Marden of Oxford University, to spy on Dr. Ken Loin and to ridicule his project. The reporters were referred to by many conservative radio personalities and by other sympathizers with the well-funded Institute of Discovery as evolutionist “snakes in the grass” without an intentional pun. The “snakes” metaphor was used so many times by so many creationists that Professor Marden himself finally weighed in—a rare event—and pointed out with sarcastic glee that everyone seemed to have forgotten that even the Bible portrayed the serpent as actually once dominating the treetops, 22

not unlike our own distant ancestors! Fundamentalists howled at such desecration of biblical inerrancy. Moderate Republicans squeaked that “this destructive controversy” was detracting from their “centrist” position that American schools should “teach the controversy.” Liberal theologians sidestepped any controversy altogether by refusing to defend the actions of the reporters, the statements of Professor Marden, or the biological fact of evolution itself, to the continued frustration of the scientific community.

But one intrepid blogger posted his own streaming video, in reply to the video of the Genesis Museum visit, in which he parodied the teen-age Luke Skywalker “light saber performance” video which had likewise enjoyed its own long trajectory on the Net. In this version, the anonymous blogger, masked and dressed in Skywalker boots and nothing else, whirled and flailed like a dervish in his own penciled Eden that was taped to the walls of his bedroom, which had been pimped with small plastic dinosaur models set up on the floor, table, chairs, and bookshelves—Tyrannosaurs and Brontosauruses and Triceratopses and Diplodocii, all of which he felled with the deft strokes and jabs of his own unsheathed, erect, and natural, er, lightsaber. The video enjoyed fifteen thousand hits in one hour before being taken down as porn.

This joke garnered the appreciation of a certain niche of online mammals located all around the American continent and the world, who laughed at the video of Luke’s leg show, and laughed at the video of Ken’s dolls, and created online “$1000 for the Most Intelligently Designed Post-Mastectomy Reconstructive Surgery for Eve” contests, and put up parody Facebook pages such as the one devoted to the group “Tremplaux’s Gofers and Out of Touch Buffoons” with the motto, “Go Whore into the World!” and to advertise Panda Thumbs in People’s Bums, a satirical electronic book written by several of Professor Marden’s colleagues about the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement. The mainstream media in the U.S. largely ignored this ribald hilarity as these online creatures laughed unapologetically at the increasingly strident claims of the creationists, and applauded, via their many comments, the statements of Professor James Marden.

They posted unapologetic blogs championing the teaching of evolution in public schools in the United States, traded snide comments online about Dr. Raymond Gaumier and Dr. Ken Loin, photoshopped the painting of Ken Loin shaking the hand of Jesus so that it looked like 23

Jesus kissed the Godfather’s ring, and kept on laughing, while around them the right-wing media giants stomped, growled, bared their teeth, and geared up for another season of the War on Christmas.

As it was, it was almost Halloween. This year, a small but vocal Wiccan group in Dayton, Ohio launched its own pre-emptive “Stop the War on Halloween” salvo by quoting, and parodying (though it was hard to tell one from the other), various fundamentalist denunciations of Samhain. Smaller battles were launched by other Neo-Pagans and Druids, such as the declared “War on Apollo,” “War on the Goddess,” and “Battle for the Mystic Barrier,” but not being very catchy they did not get snapped up by the major news media, and neither did the larger story about a supposed boycott of the national knock-nsnack by fundamentalist Christians. It was just too difficult to pick on Halloween, being that it still emptied the shelves at Wal-Mart every year, and was big with the local churches besides. However, one group of charismatic Catholics, who shouted in tongues and brandished brochures clutched in their fists, did manage to get on “Good Morning America” by disrupting a group of dumbfounded parents in Agape, Ohio, who had taken their children Trunk-or-Treating in the local megachurch parking lot. Trunk-or-Treating was a sort of substitute Halloween celebration, in which the trunks of cars were decorated as tiger mouths or treasure chests, into which the costumed children reached for treats.

“Stop this satanic worship! The wildfires are proof that God is not mocked!” the Catholic charismatics cried, on cue and on camera, referring of course to the drought-fed grassfires that had started a week ago in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. God, unlike His performance in Japan during World War II, was apparently firing a bunch of practice shots before aiming square at those snakes in the grasses of Kentucky, for then, inexplicably, He had paused—for a thick mist had enveloped the eastern state of Kentucky, temporarily, weirdly, and ironically, just in time for Halloween. Therefore, the Catholic charismatics formed their human chain between the children and the trunks in a Roger Corman-like mist that wilted the decorations and sogged the kid’s masks, and made the on-location local news reporter look like she was delivering her spot at an Angel concert.

Soon enough, a few days after Halloween, the wildfires in Kentucky were burning off the fog. The DNR blamed the first grassfire on a Tarshish County man, a freelance evangelical minister 24

and poet, who had stored a huge pile of tires next to his grain elevator on his farm, but a group of local citizens charged that the DNR had actually started the fire to overplay the danger from yard burning and to buttress the federal government’s protection of endangered snake species. If the DNR had let property owners burn off their lands sooner, they asserted, no one would be seeing the present conflagration.

However, the subsequent discovery of the remains of a meth lab in a shed right at the foot of Mount Goodyear tended to favor the DNR’s theory—though of course, no one had been there to witness the making of meth, and after all, there was no way to prove that the charred fossil remains of glass beakers and tins of battery acid could not have been deposited by a great flood that had swept through the area several years earlier when a creek burst its banks.

A week after the parking-lot performance by the Catholic charismatic protestors, one of its leaders agreed to speak on the local radio show in Agape about the perils of Halloween, but she soon became sidetracked in a tangential debate about whether or not America should be made English-Only. That was appropriate, since the only reason that the woman had been invited to speak at the radio station in the first place was due to the fact that the show’s producer had mistaken this group for another one, a cult of born-again and virulently anti-Catholic evangelicals from Waco, Texas, who performed exorcisms armed with “soul rosaries” and had elected their own “pope.”

It had certainly been easy for anyone to confuse these Catholics who spoke in tongues, and who passed out pamphlets quoting prominent Protestants on the issue of Samhain, with the rival group of evangelical Protestants who waved beads and claimed to have performed exorcisms. “Jesus spoke English,” justified the woman who led the Catholic charismatic group, in a tone of voice that made four out of two and two, and seventy-five out of seven times five.

“Ma’am,” said the radio talk show’s host, “Jesus didn’t speak English.”

“Were you there?” she demanded. She began to sing, “…When they crucified my Lord…”

“Look, he couldn’t have spoken English, ma’am. English didn’t even exist at the time in which he lived.”

She hesitated. “English—” she said, and stopped.

“Wasn’t even around in Biblical times,” finished the host. “It evol—” and he caught himself in time. He didn’t believe in evolution, 25

himself, but now he suddenly realized how often people in the media, including himself, used the word. The Evolution of Hurricane Katrina.

The Evolution of African-American Literature. The Evolution of a Painting. That’s weird, he thought. That’s really weird.

“That doesn’t matter,” the guest replied, recovering. “Jesus could do miracles. He could speak English if He wanted to.”

“Well, maybe he could have, ma’am, but no one else would have understood him even if he had. No one spoke English then. So there was no reason for Jesus to speak English, even if He could have.”

“What did they speak, then?” she demanded.

“Everyone in the area of Galilee, including Jesus, spoke Aramaic…”

“Jesus wasn’t a Muslim!”

“Not Arabic, ma’am—Aramaic. It’s a dialect of Hebrew.”

“You’re insane,” asserted the woman.

The host allowed humor to creep into his voice. “Didn’t you see The Passion of the Christ? The Mel Gibson film?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Well—that film was in Aramaic. The film was made in Aramaic.

Mel Gibson made the movie in Jesus’s own language, to be as historically accurate as he could. Understand?”

“Well, okay,” said the woman. “Okay, maybe He spoke in Aramaic, but what about those English words, too?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She gesticulated excitedly as she spoke, nearly knocking her hand into the microphone. “There were English words in the movie. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but God translated his words into English, so that everyone who heard Him could understand Him. Just like in the movie.”

The host audibly huffed into the mic. “What are you talking about, ma’am?”

“The words at the bottom of the screen! God was translating Jesus’s words—into English!”

There was some muffled, incredulous laughter from the other guests in the studio who were waiting for the upcoming spot. * * * As the grassfires rose around them, the citizens shouted for the DNR to save their property from the very people who were “saving” all of Kentucky from the snakes, but the DNR had to defer to the 26

Department of Homeland Security, who sent a runner to FEMA, while, in an act of divine sarcasm, a fire rainbow hovered all day over the still-clear skies of Gallileville, which stood directly in the path of the flames, a hapless, oblivious rainbow like some four-year-old Christmas angel that had emerged proudly, but too early, from the wings of the stage to appear before the surprised Owner of the Inn at the Sunday school holiday pageant. By the time that a state of emergency had been declared, the Kentucky National Guard sent its regrets via their computer terminals in Afghanistan, while the citizenry finally piled onto the buses that FEMA supplied or commandeered their own cars off the highways and over the terrain in a collective mad-dash that would have gratified Lot. As it was, Dr. Kenneth Loin was the only one to look back, for his Genesis Museum was burning along with whatever Sodom and Gomorrah one could have found in the mauve-carpeted three-season porches, and the refrigerators stocked with Lean Cuisine, and the “We’ve got Wifi!” church marquees, and the businesses advertising “Bring Your Bible to Work Day.” And though he did not turn into a pillar of salt, Dr. Loin did emerge pale and ashen, as it were, staring out with bloodshot eyes from under a government-issued blanket at a bus station in Memphis, Tennessee, as the uprooted newscaster from the parking lot newscast on Halloween in Agape, Ohio stood before her grime-caked camera man, shooting and re-shooting the account of their miraculous escape in Loin’s private plane, which was dotted with Bible verses and had been painted to look like—but this had been over ten years ago, and so was a coincidence—a Pterodactyl.

And then the end was the beginning, and the beginning the end, for at last dawn broke amid the smoldering ruins of the museum, and of the man and the woman there remained no sign at all, and no paper-maché rock or tree had given shelter, for all of the dinosaurs were now nothing but bones, just bones, just skeletal chicken wire and metal scaffolding without flesh, lying shattered among the ruins of a lost world beneath a burning red sky.

END

27

WJ Rosser WJ Rosser lives in Texas with his wife and four of their seven children. There are few in this world quite as effective at the art of irritation and the three sons who live on their own spend most of their time praying their mother can find superhuman amounts of patience because they know if she kicks him out, he’ll find a way to guilt one of them into taking him in.

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Vultures by WJ Rosser Chapter One

A wake is a funny thing. Well, maybe not funny. That’s most

likely the wrong word. Even though, let’s face it; there is a whole bunch of funny ways that people die.

This guy’s heart stops on a carnival ride. It’s one of those spinning ones with two seats inside a cage, and you and your date can make it roll over or spin around. He gets in there with his teenage son, and halfway through the ride there’s no more heartbeat, and his son doesn’t even know it until he tries to get his dad to step out. But here’s the punch line: the ride was called “Heart Attack!” Gotta wonder if that helped in court.

There’s this operatic tenor—his big debut; and his stage manager says to him, “Knock ‘em dead,” and he must have been listening because right in the middle of Che Galida Manina he trips on a prop, knocks a backboard over, and it hits the soprano he’s singing to on the head and kills her.

And, of course, let’s not forget the myriad of ways a man can die with his penis in or on something.

Oh, wait!

I was in the hospital for as asthma attack this one time, and this guy had the bed right next to me in the emergency room. I’m not kidding; the guy has a dildo so far up inside him that the doctors are prepping an operating room. They’re talking about trying to make sure he doesn’t get a perforated colon. Now get this, the guy looks like a football player. He survived. But man, if he hadn’t, that would’ve been a classic.

When I was fourteen, my dad— He’s dead now. In fact, he died when I was fourteen. One morning I woke up, showered, ate breakfast with him, stole a pack of his cigarettes from the glove box of his truck, and rode in the passenger 29

seat to the high school where I got out, waved goodbye, and walked away. I was walking to Algebra II, Geography, Chemistry, Sophomore English, P.E., Health, and a life without father.

Wait. I’m digressing. I was fourteen, and my dad— Sorry. So, I’m fourteen and I work in my parents’ paint store. One Saturday we’re mixing a five gallon bucket of Navajo White with greens and blues to make “summer wave” and the bolts on the mixing machine come loose. If you can imagine six or seven hundred pounds of rotating steel and paint causing no end of damage to shelves and inventory until it had me backed into a corner. Imagine me, a skinny, fourteen year old kid just about to be crushed so some housewife could have her den painted the color of the ocean—Well, that would have been a classic, too, but it pulled its cord out of the plug about four feet from me and I survived.

That’s a good thing, I guess. But on the other hand, it would have been the first wake for one of my family members that I actually attended.

Sorry about that. I’m digressing. I have a problem with rabbit trails. I’ve got to chase them every fucking time. Truth is, this whole thing is a rabbit trail.

It’s a rabbit trail.

Okay, I’m repeating myself. I do that.

I’m on a detour right now. It happened when I said, “wake.” See, I wasn’t thinking about weeping relatives, bad speeches, and a waterfall of Irish whiskey; but once the word was in my head, I got to thinking, and— You do that, right? I mean, do you just get off track when you think sometimes?

Well, it takes a while to get back on the main road.

See, I was looking at a wake just a second ago, three of them, parked right there on the bench. It took a second for me to see them, and the one in the middle keeps glimmering back and forth between fat ass and tail, but once you figure it out, it’s impossible to be fooled. I’m standing there smoking my tenth or eleventh cigarette since I stepped out of the station to wait, and they just waddle up.

Okay, well, I still assumed they were human when they came up, so I didn’t see them waddle, but that’s what they did. They can’t very well fly down. That would ruin the illusion. Right now, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who sees through them. God! If they flew around, 30

everyone would. Can you imagine it? One day everyone is just walking around minding their own business, and— Look. I know the correct grammar is “minding his own business” or “minding one’s own business” or even “her own business” for some pansy-assed intellectuals who are busy trying to convince everyone they’re ashamed to have a cock.

Yes, I know it looks like I did it again with “they’re ashamed”, but it references “intellectuals” which is also plural. I know my grammar. It’s a subject with which I never had a problem. See. It’s easy to avoid ending with a preposition when you want to. (Ooh, when “one wants to.”) I got straight A’s in English—grammar, literature.

Hell, all of it. While I’m at it, I got straight A’s in everything— Algebra, Calculus, History, Science (Except physiology, I got a B+). I was Mr. Model Student.

Where the fuck was I? Oh yeah. Everyone is just walking around and suddenly, whammo! Reality hits like the grill of a delivery truck right on the nose.

There was this movie I saw once—don’t remember the name—and it starred a guy named Rowdy Roddy Piper, an old bad guy wrestler.

They call those guys “heels.” The good guy wrestlers like Hulk Hogan they call “faces.” I used to watch a lot of wrestling when I was a kid. It came on right after cartoons.

That, and roller derby. Some of those chicks were hot. And man, the way their asses moved while they skated!

Damn it! I’m sorry.

So, in this movie, Roddy gets glasses that show him a bunch of aliens have infiltrated humanity. He starts wasting them all and finally blows up the secret transmitter disguising them and all of the sudden everyone sees them for what they are. There’s an alien doing a whore (I mean “whore” as a job; I’m not down on women.), and suddenly she sees the truth. It was a pretty cool movie, and Roddy has this line in it about kicking ass and being out of bubblegum, and I read somewhere he made it up right on the spot, unscripted.

They don’t want to be discovered like that. That’s why they don’t fly when they’re disguised.

Oh yeah. You have no idea what I’m talking about. You didn’t have a big, defining event, a moment of crystal lucidity that showed you how to strip away the disguise they somehow manage. I’m talking 31

about vultures.

That’s why I said “wake.” See, a group of vultures is called a wake.

You know, like a pride of lions, a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a murder of crows, a bevy of quail.

“Bevy” is a good one. I once got into an argument about it. The other guy swore up and down that it was whales. I told him whales had groups referred to as “pods.” We actually had to look it up. I was right, of course; but it turns out that bevy could be any group of animals even though it’s “especially a group of quails.” Pod is more accurate.

I grew up in the desert, and quail seemed to be everywhere. My dad put birdseed on the ground by the creosote bushes and ocotillo hedges to lure them out where he and my mother could see them as they sat out on the porch when it was relatively cool.

Okay.

Doing it again.

I was trying to say that the whole detour started because a wake of vultures is sitting on the bench waiting for the bus that I’m also waiting for.

They’re everywhere—janitors, fast food workers, doctors, salesmen, firefighters, police officers, grief counselors, teachers, bank managers— and they look (unless you know how to tell, and I think I’m the only one who can—God, I hope not) just like you or me.

I haven’t figured out their plans yet, but I know one thing for certain: Vultures eat death. There must be some coming.

32

Simon Sankoff This page is left (nearly) intentionally (nearly) blank.

33

Out of Mustard by Simon Sankoff

A small, dark prison cell. A man in an orange jumpsuit sits on the

bed in the center, staring at the ground. A guard comes by, wheeling in a cart with a plastic tray. The tray has a hamburger and a can of ginger ale. After the guard comes the warden, as well as a chaplain. The prisoner picks up the can, cracks it open, and takes a long drink. He puts it down, picks up the hamburger, and inspects it.

The warden: Jesus, it’s just a hamburger. It’s fine.

The prisoner (still looking it over): It’s my last meal.

The warden: So enjoy it. What, did we put poison in there? When you’re gonna croak anyway? It’s fine.

The prisoner tentatively takes a small bite, swallows it, mulls it over, and takes another small one, even more cautiously this time.

The prisoner (putting the burger down): God damn it.

The warden: What?

The prisoner: It’s overcooked.

The warden: Bullshit.

The prisoner: I’m telling you man, that burger is overcooked.

The warden: You must think I’m a real asshole. You don’t think every death row prisoner pulls that stunt? Let me guess. We spend a whole ‘nother hour making a meal for you, then, surprise, that one has a problem too. Eventually the whole day’s shot, we have to kill you tomorrow. Oldest trick in the book. Forget it.

The prisoner: Will you taste the burger?

The warden: No. The prisoner: It’s so good, give it a shot.

The warden: Jesus. Okay. Fine. (He picks the hamburger up.) Here I am, picking up the burger. Now I’m tasting it (he takes a bite far from where the prisoner’s bites are.) Now I’m putting out down and…

34

Goddamn it is overcooked.

The guard: Really?

The warden (handing it to the guard): Here. (The guard takes it and bites into it. He takes a bite.)

The guard (handing it back to the warden): That might be the worst burger I’ve ever tasted.

The warden (turning toward the chaplain): You want to taste it?

The chaplain: I don’t want anything to do with an overcooked burger. (The warden puts it back on the prisoner’s plate.)

The warden: Do we know who cooked this?

The guard: Frank.

The warden: Oh Jesus, can we take him off last meal duty? He’s been warned already for this kind of crap. (To the prisoner.) Wow. Look, I’m sorry pal. That’s terrible.

The prisoner: Thank you.

The warden: Just… eugh.

The prisoner: So what happens now?

The warden: Well. That’s the thing.

The prisoner: Don’t I get another burger?

The warden: You know, your execution is very popular. They’ve been covering it in the news constantly. Lots of people turned up. I don’t want to keep them all waiting. Do you?

The prisoner: For my last meal?

The warden: Hey. Show some respect. That man you killed? His mother’s here. You haven’t caused her enough grief, now she has to sit and wait for you to get a second hamburger? ‘Cause Frank overcooked it? That’s not her fault.

The prisoner: It’s not mine either!

The warden: No, no it’s not, I get that. (Thinking for a minute.)

Well how about the ginger ale? Was that any good?

The prisoner (Holding up the can): Was kind of hoping for a bottle.

The warden: Yeah, yeah, no, our vending machines – the ones by the lobby? They don’t sell bottles. Thought you would’ve seem them by now – well, no, I guess you wouldn’t have. You spend most of your time in here right?

The prisoner (angrily): Yes. (Trying to sound calm.) Look. Can you just try. It doesn’t need to be great, just properly cooked.

The warden (considering it): Actually, you know you might be 35

right. (Turning to the guard.) If we make this a real priority order, make sure fucking Frank doesn’t come within fifty feet of it, we could whip this off in twenty minutes.

The prisoner: There we go.

The guard: No, we can’t.

The warden and prisoner (at once): Why not?

The guard: Kitchen just ran out of mustard.

The warden: Oh shit. Sorry man.

The prisoner: I don’t care if there’s no mustard.

The guard: Now you’re talking crazy.

The chaplain: Can’t have a hamburger without mustard.

The warden: So, I guess that’s that.

The prisoner: I don’t get a proper last meal.

The warden: Now don’t think for a second that we don’t feel bad about this. Personally? I feel like crap. I don’t blame you for being upset. But I’m sure you can understand that both sending a guy out for mustard and keeping the victim’s mother waiting, well, it’s just too much special treatment for one prisoner. Think of the precedent it would set. So. We’re just gonna give you a few minutes here. Maybe think about things. Maybe give the burger a second shot? And then we’re gonna take you in, and we’re gonna… okay, well, you know what’s gonna happen.

The prisoner: Yeah. I do. (The warden pats him on the knee, then starts to exit the cell, ushering the others along. The prisoner starts calling out to the chaplain.) Hey! Hey you, you have any, I don’t know, spiritual advice? Any help?

The chaplain: Frankly, in all my years, I’ve never seen anything like this. That a hamburger should be so overcooked… it makes a man question whether he really believes. Try and hang in there, Son. (He heads out with the others.)

The prisoner turns back to staring at the ground, shaking his head.

After a few moments, he reaches for the can and takes a sip.

The prisoner: It’s not even cold anymore.

36

Erik Harper Klass Erik Harper Klass studied engineering at University of California, Los Angeles, and music at Berklee College of Music, Boston. Now he mostly writes. He lives in Los Angeles with a lovely girl and a terribly ugly dog. “Mytologi� is his first published story.

37

Mytologi by Erik Harper Klass Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee.

—Genesis 12:1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, . . . shall, from and after the first Janu-ary, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands.

—An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Doman (Section 1), May 20, 1862 . . . and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts.

—Exodus 10:13

A. The native traveler of Australia, to keep warm, Synnøve, will

bury his body in the sand. Just the head showing. See Figure 1. Do this, old friend. Nights can be chilly out here on the prairie. Wife and boy helped with the shoveling (hard to do on your own, once you’ve settled into your little hole). They stepped back, looked on, Beret and Peder, her hand on the boy’s shoulder. She stood there with no look to her. He, the boy, silent as a snowfield. They opted to sleep under the wagon. But I, Synnøve, I, like Frithjof ’s Vikings, slept ‘neath the stars, the dark-blue sky my tent. [Editors’ note: Figure 1 has been lost.]

B. Do not trust a soul in choosing your trail, for there are many trails, and these trails, I have learnt, are not all the same. When you seek to acquire information concerning these trails—or routes, as they are often called—from strangers living or owning property near these 38

trails or routes, or from interested persons or agents of steamboats or railways or other transportation establishments, I cannot emphasize enough the need for prudence. Synnøve: seek corroborating evidence from disinterested sources. Trust no one. Or you may find your-self bending the grass in the middle of an endless plain, the oxen, the cow, the wife, even the boy, looking at you as if you have lost the marbles, as they say over here in America.

C. Pull with the oxen. They endure the miles better than do the mules, of which mules I have one, which I ride from time to time.

Have named him Njædl Øverland. But the wagon I pull with the oxen.

Three reasons for the oxen: (1) Oxen, I’ve been told, are less likely to stæmpid [Editors’ note: words attempted by the narrator in English will be followed, in square brackets, by our best translational guess, in this case: stampede], an American word that means the animals run in all directions in a zigzag style. An act that is precipitated by the Indians in these parts. An act, truth be told, I have not yet seen. (I plan to be keen, ob-servant and wary, to keep an eye on the horizon, Synnøve, for that is where the Indians will emerge, like dark, strangelyshaped suns.)

D. Be keen, observant and wary. In general, Synnøve, do this.

E. Name them well, the oxen. Have named mine Sören and Perkel. Bought them from an old Swede in Høston [Houston] County, Minnesota. Were named Tåm and Bukj, which are common American male names [Tom and Buck (?)]. But those are not the names of ships bound on a great voyage of adventure, I’m sure you would agree, old friend. So settled on Sören for the one with the white head and Perkel for the other (a brown head). Boy has taken on well with the oxen, speaks to them with his hands. Oxen respond with their tails, the wagging. The three are becoming close friends. Oh, my mind, Synnøve!

I had forgotten. The reasons . . . (2) If the oxen do become excited by the Indians and stæmpid and zigzag and suchlike, they are more easily overtaken by horsemen than are mules. (I have no horse, nor the services of horsemen. Merely reporting what I have heard, regarding advantages of oxen over mules.) And: (3) The oxen, if the situation should call for it, can be used for beef, where-as the meat of a mule is, I have heard, tough and undesirable.

Which leads to: F. Never ever ever eat your mule. All is lost if you eat your mule.

G. Do make a daily nooning. This, Synnøve, is the noun form 39

of the verb noon, which, as you surely know, means to break in the midday for rest and food. Great benefit will be de-rived by these daily, so-called, noonings, as the oxen suffer much in the summer heat.

Sixteen to eighteen English miles can be made thus, without injuring the beasts (seven English miles equals one Norwegian). We have traveled some 400 English miles in this manner (I trust you can do the math, old man). How many more? Hope not many.

H. Do not tell the woman and the boy that you are lost. Go with purpose. Be firm of mouth. Shield your eyes with your hand and look knowingly across the plains, a wise ship captain scanning a stormy sea. They, the woman and boy, are of lesser minds, will not sus-pect you have lost your way. But, well, yes, the animals know. No fooling the animals. (Also travel with a cow, may have mentioned in passing.

Named her Gro Svendsen. Milk produc-tion has diminished as of late, but is a good beast. Long eyelashes.)

(Yes, even the cow knows we are lost.)

Crossing rivers with a mule, a cow, a woman, a boy who is afraid of the water (to think that his father and grandfather and so on were fisherman!), and a wagon pulled by oxen is no easy task. Some miscellaneous thoughts and advisories on the matter: I. Be watchful of the mule. Mules have been known to stop for fear in the middle of a riv-er, often choosing for their resting place the most inconvenient of spots. When one becomes aware of his rather conspicuous position, he becomes embarrassed, lies down there, just his snout sticking above the water. Will put forth not the least exertion.

Must use ropes and ox-en—even the help of a jittery and mute young boy—to drag the beast to shore, and then ‘twill be necessary to set him upon his feet and hold him there for many minutes, your arms wrapped around his heaving midsection, before he is restored to a consciousness of his own standing and walking powers. (Njædl Øverland is, perhaps, a perfect name for our mule, when taken in the literal.)

For the record, the actions just recounted are perhaps another reason to pull the wagon with the oxen. Call it reason 4.

After you have arrived at a river and determined the places of ingress and egress, you may desire to know the breadth of the bank. A simple method can be utilized. See attached Fig. 2. Extend line AB, the distance to be measured, upon the bank to D. Then, go along the bank and mark off equal distances DC and Cd. Draw BC to b, such 40

that CB = Cb. Then extend db until it intersects the prolongation of the line through CA at a. You will find, as if by some miracle, that the distance ab equals AB, the width of the river to be crossed! Do this, Synnøve. This is letter J. Will impress the lady and the boy. Will raise your standing with them. [Editors’ note: Fig. 2 has been lost. This method of measurement works well, however. We tried it at a small stream in Tarzana. To the inch!]

Have given, I fear, a false impression of Njædl Øverland. Formed a sort of bond, the two of us, a team, if you will. Has a white snout, dark eyes, beard of black bristles, most dynamic of ears you ever did see, each of which, it seems, has a mind of its own, the way each twists and totters (twotters?) on high. Softness of the region between the nostrils (I believe this is called in English the møsel, though they might use the z letter, so: møzel) very nearly begs to be kissed [Editors’ note: probably muzzle]. Love him. Love your mule. Letter K, I’ll call this.

L. But show caution when kissing your mule, which action I suggest you perform, Synnøve, when the woman and boy are preoccupied in other matters.

N. There is a word of South American origin called madrinæ [madrina (?)], which word is defined as an animal (usually an old mare), that wears a bell and acts to guide a troop of pack mules. If a mare is unavailable, then you may wear the bell. You may be the madrinæ, old friend. I walk with the bell, walk with it hanging to my side, hanging from a length of twine, in the manner of a baldric. My hand and arm, in the usual swinging manner of up-right-walking primates, brush against said bell in a uniform fashion. The mule follows the ringing. I do say, old man, and to confirm what I said a few lines prior, my mule has taken a liking to myself. Not bad to have a friend on the dusty trails, what with the woman tied down in the wagon and the boy not saying a word. A thin lad, the boy. Bone pains. Wakes up hot and cold. Perhaps has the ague. [Editors’ note: the narrator, intentionally or other-wise, skipped the letter M.] O. Look carefully at the mountains. Yes, things are as flat as a pannekaker, but you can see a haze to the west. A rising woodland?

Just the thought of it makes the landscape livelier. The mountains, as I understand, are even higher than Glittertind or Galdhøpiggen (which latter I believe is now considered our highest peak). [Editors’ note: Galdhøpiggen is indeed Norway’s highest peak, reaching 2,469 meters above sea level, approximately 5 meters higher than Glittertind.]

41

P. Breve fra Amerika [Letters from America]. Read it, Synnøve.

Carry it with you. O, old friend, I can smell the soil, my feet sink into the sand and track through the grass of this Ca-naan. ‘Tis all true.

All true. Our own Promised Land! The Restaurationen is upon us!

[Editors’ note: Restaurationen (Restoration), written here in Danish, probably refers to the famous sloop of that name that left Stavanger in 1825 with a small group of Norwegian religious dissent-ers, thus commencing Norwegian migration to America. Its inclusion herein, not to mention that of Breve fra Amerika, an influential booklet of letters recounting stories of those first Nor-wegian immigrants, is opportune, in that it allows the Editors to provide for our readers contextually-relevant historical erudiation.]

Q. Do not wander about for days on end in the heat and sun.

Do not walk in circles. Do not carry a faulty compass. When you are sure, Synnøve, that you have lost your way, stop and reflect upon the course you have been traveling. And in these vast solitudes, where noth-ing seems to indicate the direction, where the sun sets upon the wrong horizons and at the wrong times, where the wind blows from all directions and covers up all traces of track with silt and sand, where the stars are lost by the evening haze, or are unfamiliar and seem to slash across the sky like drunken fireflies, when you are sure you are lost: sit, old friend, sit. The brave traveler sees better seated. This, this sitting: a widely known but perhaps underuti-lized rule of travel and exploration. (Let’s call it letter R.) Carry a small foldable camp chair, find a quiet spot away from the woman and the boy, and sit. The horizon, at these times, will rise up in simmering streaks of green, yellow and red, and you will know, you will know, my friend, that your direction is true.

S. Carry on. * He lies there prostrate in the grey alkali dust and unbroken solitude, the darkness threat-ening (advancing, enclosing); he wears the earth, is very near, I fear, an element of it, just the head exposed, an anti-ostrich I think to myself, and I laugh aloud, but he does not know, he cannot hear them, only my son can hear them, the humming, almost a singing, the soft words of our mothers and fathers, of home, runes imploring (beseeching) for a return, some kind of return, away from these black spots (the way the sun comes out from behind the stratocumulus clouds and in that moment, sudden, [unexpected, 42

surreptitious], lights up the prairie such that it glitters in a brilliance that burns the eye, leaves black spots in the vision), but a return whither?

We splash through the green grass, a green sea, the fuzzy flowers’ small twisted bristles, lavender and goldenrod, inflorescent, waving, churning, like the green sea’s foam, and the wagon leaves a track like the wake of a boat, but closing in rather than widening out astern; the squeaks of the axles are a bird, a single sea bird (crying, not unlike the puffins near Ålesund, or the cormorants of Trøndelag), that will descend and take your mind, and your soul with it, and leave you with your insanity (and one or two black feathers, falling, pendulously, falling), so I step down and walk in the lithe grass, bent already in the direction of our peregrinations (my son steers the wagon); I follow Per’s trail, and that of the mule, whom the man loves like a little god—they are wobbly spots (black spots) of distortion, my husband and his mule, up there in the blazing distance; and then the directions lose meaning, and the voices, and I know there is somewhere else to go, away from the bell that he wears around his neck; so I turn and walk obliquely through the sharp, incessant grass, ankles stinging.

My son, my little boy, (Per has named him Peder Victorious, a devil’s name), my son coughs and lies awake in the night; I know he hears the voices, is afraid of them, and I have no rhubarb, only the seeds.

We stop now for the night—Per is laying there in his sandy crypt, I stand with Peder, my hand distinguishing each little shoulder bone, the sun already set, the crepuscular light illuminating for a moment my hus-band’s face and each hair of his golden beard and the wrinkles at the sides of his eyes, like the feet of the ibis, and the brindled, grey, alkali dust—we stop and the surrounding infinitude compresses with a liquid pressure that, I think, would not be so oppressive if it were not for the silence, so deep, like water, laying heavier than a church, like water, yes, but I think now not at all like the green sea for the sea has its rhythms and its own song and splashing heart and the prairie is dead and dark, and I would rather die amongst the waves and strange swimming creatures of the sea than here where there is, where there is . . . the voices.

Beneath the wagon, the woolen blankets hanging from the wheels and held fast by clothes pegs of split willow, there is a quasicomfort, but in the recess of my mind, I can feel that ex-pansive emptiness, still, (hovering, imminent), beyond the woolen blankets hanging, ever-more.

Now as we rise to travel he ties me down so that I will not escape (quite surely to my 43

own demise) and I let him do this, but I have books, not enough, but I carry them in a broken basket, a volume of Shakespeare, Dr. Gunn’s Family Physician (a gift from Iørn Lö-vkrona back in a place called Mækentåskj [probably: McIntosh, Minnesota]), and almanacs that Per ignores, Pilgrim’s Progress, hymn books in burgundy leather binding, and for the boy: Pontoppidan’s Explanation (the older edition), Jensen’s Reader, Bogt’s Bible History, spellers (Dilworth’s), and an American arithmetic book; Per reads an old copy of Emigranten; he sits there in his folding chair, with a candle in his hand, his pipe hanging aslant from the corner of his mouth, a puff of smoke drifting and expanding and becoming, it seems, the very clouds (cirrocumulus) overhead; he tears a page and the wind takes the broken sound, holds it up and looks through small holes that he has cut with a silver penknife, he looks through the page into the firmament, one eye closed (I can only assume), as I have seen the young freck-led boys do in the schoolyards of Dræggen, the children eagerly observing the crossing of the sun and moon in the pale and darkening spring sky as night overtakes them all, and he, my Per, takes notes with a pencil, makes calculations.

He takes a season to cross each stream; he has to measure each one, as if the width would make a difference, as if we’d turn around if we found one wide enough (does he not see that we are crossing one interminable river of dry sand and grass?); I’ve tried to teach him an easier way, with the tables for sines, cosines, tangents and cotangents (for every minute of the quadrant, to six places of figures) that ac-company The Elements of Plane and Spherical Trigonometry: With Their Applications To Mensura-tion, Surveying, and Navigation (it’s an English book that I bought for a few American cents back in Minnesota so that I might teach Peder, when the time comes for that) [Editors’ note: by Elias Looms LL.D. New York: 1857], but he, Per, would rather scratch long lines in the dirt with a crooked stick that he appropriated from a dead ash tree (the elm and ash and oak of Minnesota are not to be found out here on the dusty plains; cottonwood trees grow along the watercourses, but grow smaller and smaller as we move farther west, like failing memories), a stick that, when he is not inscribing crude geometry upon the earth, he carries over his shoulder like a musket, crying made-up marching orders to Peder, who toddles behind hold-ing similarly a jouncing length of pussy willow that chafes the side of my poor son’s neck.

(Do I ramble, Berglot? Do my thoughts lack order? But then the linearity of 44

time, I think, is but an illusion engendered by the order in which we experience each flash of experience, so I must write as I write.)

Per, he does not stand, he sits, as each day comes to a close, he sits there well fore of the wagon, one leg crossed upon the other in an effeminate manner, the umber-green grass waving, looking, looking, for signs.

Sines.

Signs.

Sins.

We are lost, Bergljot; we are lost: eclipsed. (Did you know, my dear friend, that eclipse comes from the Greek ékleipsis, which means “the abandonment,” and from ekleípō, which means “to forsake, to darken, to cease to exist”?)

We should be thankful to our Lord and Cre-ator that He lets His sun rise on us so many times, that we may experience both good and bad, want and tribulation, misery and death, Amen.

The oxen and mule, even the cow, they can feel it: there is no fooling the animals. You know the story, Bergljot: before God, before the universe itself, were the Frost Giants; because the earth and planets and their in-habitants, at this time in history, had not yet acquired the means of the creation and preser-vation of fossils or other forms of geotic recordkeeping, we know little about the Frost Giants; one story told by our great grandparents suggests that when Ymir, the first Frost Giant, died (he was killed by his three brothers, but that is another story), his bones became the world’s mountains, his teeth the boulders, his blood the sea and rivers, his skull the dome of indigo sky, and from between his toes crawled forth the race of dark creatures that we call trolls; they travel at night, for they will turn to stone if they interrupt the rays of the sun. [Editors’ note: for a lively and comparative reading of the Norse creation myths, see Franz Rolf Schrö-der, “Germanische Schöpfungsmythen I-II: Eine vergleichende religionsgeschichtliche Stud-ie,” GermanischRomanisch Monatsschrift 19 [1931]: 1-26, 81-99.)

And we wake; Per, earth-colored, like a vole, crawls forth like a vole from his hole and yawns and stretches and shakes himself like a vole (or maybe a dog), and we trundle on, Per leading the mule, the boy, the cow, a long procession arched—by my vantage here, rocking, tied within—by wagon bow and cover, and the sun arcs the sky and falls into my vision, and there, do you see it? the boy sees it, we pass one—I lean forward (the ropes draw taught) to watch it pass, a leaden stone perched by the side of the trail—one that had looked, had turned away 45

too late from the streaming Crepuscular Rays; I look and then lean back into the wagon, and above the rosette sunset the evening haze gathers now, merging slowly into an ultramarine dusk, out of which an imponderable presence creeps closer, closer, (closer). * T. You must think me a rude or absent-minded writer of pioneer guidebooks, old friend. The small foldable camp chair I mentioned earlier, yes, I failed to describe its construction. Apologies. Oak. Build it of oak. Please see Fig. 3. A is a stout canvas, which will become the back and seat when unfolded into its sitting position; b, b, b, and b are iron butt hinges; c and c are straps, preferably of leather; these will form the arms; d is a rod of iron, with a nut and screw at one end; e, f, f, g, g, g, and g are optional, were suggested to me by an old farmer whom we passed near a little town (forget the name) near the border of the Dakota Territory, but I did not include any of the letters e-g in my construction, and my camp chair seems none the worse. [Editors’ note: Fig. 3 has been lost.] Yesterday I unfolded my chair just after dusk, the stars and their arrangements and permutations already visible, sat, looked out across what Beret has cleverly referred to as the sea (a smart lady, my Beret), through strategic eye holes that I cut into a small piece of paper, the apparatus intended to imitate the navigational characteristics of an astrolabe, and from my strategic perch (this crow’s nest) I saw it: a red-dish spot at the end of the horizon, framed by two stick figures, hats thrown, dancing the hal-lingdansen. [Editors’ note: the narrator is presumably referring to the constellation Gemini.

When viewed with a certain relaxed disposition, the figures do appear to be dancing, and they are indeed hatless. The “reddish spot” is likely Mars.] Have found it, Synnøve! Home! I write from its very confines, now, in the evening, by candlelight. Home!

U. To summarize: Find it, find your home, Synnøve. The stars will align, and you will know the time has come, you have found your land, your journey is complete!

V. Use the utropstegn punctuation (what is called the eksklæmaskjæn pøint in America [obviously: exclamation point]). Use it liberally!!!!!

W. Mark your land. Drive the corner stakes (the Americans use stakes, not stones). The earth will cry out and tremble. 160 acres (pronounced “ækers”) in the shape of a quadrangle. Two English miles in circumference. I have ridden every tomme [Editors’ note: literally 46

thumb: about 26.1 mm] of my borders, Synnøve, and each is as beautiful as the last.

X. Make one side of your land a river. Perhaps should not call it a river, for the water does not move quickly, and there are no trees along its banks. Must be honest with you, old friend whose father (God rest his soul) was a friend of my own (ditto): no water in this river. Is a far cry from our Gubrandsdalslågen. No fish. No ducks. No waving reeds.

No pools or oxbow lakes where the water will freeze and the little ones will skate beneath the falling snow (as we dreamt to do with our children, old friend, on the Lesjaskogsvatnet—O how we dreamt in the old days!). But, so, well: Let us call it a creek, this river, perhaps a brook.

Y. Plant your seeds. She has brought turnips, carrots, onions, tomatoes, a few potatoes, and, in a small bag with an opening held fast by a length of gold thread: rhubarb. (The wom-an believes that rhubarb offers magical healing powers. Will not tell her this, but I believe she is sometimes overly superstitious.)

Z. Turn your land. Have heard that rainfall follows the plow.

Probably true. You see, Synnøve, by exposing the sod, the hungry dirt and soil attract the moisture. A logical conjec-ture. Consider a cloth, how it can be laid half within a water basin (and half without) and how said cloth will draw the water up from the basin until the entire said cloth is permeated. The water moves from wet to dry. Water works in funny ways, old friend. I have sketched for your perusal the geological workings of this rainfall-following-the-plow phenomenon (perhaps I shall publish this in a scientific journal when I have a chance). See Fig. 4. [Editors’ note: Fig. 4 was not among these papers, nor did we discover, during a brief search of scien-tific journals from this time period, any figures or drawings on the subject.] Straighten the plow, plate the share in the ground, and speak softly to the oxen to get them on their way. Ah, to cut into your land, to hear the sound of it, to see the dirt stream across the blade. The land has sat unmolested since the time of our Creation (10,000 years, I think, or thereabouts).

The shocked sod awakens for the first time, turns and reveals its dark underside, glistening in the sun. O joy, Synnøve! O joy!

The ox, patient, stolid, is an animal that, I have always thought, and I think more and more, has been neglected by the poets. Let’s write ox poems, Synnøve. Call this letter Æ.

Not too important. A side note. Just letting the pencil scratch.

47

Feel free to skip ahead. My land has a little hillock at the northwest corner. I ran up, thinking that it might afford a view of things. Arrived, breathless. Confirmed: nothing so beautiful as the look of the land from up there, the first shades of evening darkening the blue sky, God’s rays descending in straight lines from western clouds (not sure, might be a word for this [Editors’ note: Crepuscular Rays]). I stopped, noticed a small depression in the dirt. Noticed a large piece of stone that had not been shaped by the hands of nature or any god, lifted the stone with some effort, held it, turned it in my hand, (licked it some).

Stood above this depression for many minutes, ruminated, kicked some dirt, looked around nervously. Replaced stone as found. Then turned to look again over the land. Opened my arms, as if to embrace it, the slender slope, the flow-ing grass, down to what I call the river. All mine. The Kingdom is mine! Ø. Do not let the ghost of a dead Indian drive you from your land. Å. But do not touch the grave. Will have to explain, when the neighbors arrive, why I have left this hill unplowed. Will have to think of something. * This is not our land; we are trespassers; we seek to hide here, but the very flatness and ex-tent of these pallid plains leave no protection: it is a false endeavor (we, like primordial men, should be living in caves), and besides, Bergljot: another has come before us, has marked it, just as falsely as will Per with his Deed to the Kingdom, straight from the land office in Sioux Falls (yes, this is the spelling), which could be hell for all I know, and just as falsely as those who came before that dead Indian buried up there on the little hill (Per thinks I do not know), and those who will come after we have returned to stardust and comingled with our ances-tors and descendants (we speak in chemical bonds; we rot literally like skjit [shit]).

Breathe, Bergljot, breathe: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

We should be thankful to our Lord and Creator that He lets His sun rise on us, every molecule of our being, that we may experience want and tribulation, misery and death, Amen.

To escape, which reminds me of a news story I read in Norwegian of a German man named Jacob Brod-beck who not long ago built an air ship, powered by a coiled spring, and flew above the trees in a place called Texas, but the man had not discovered a way to rewind the spring while aflight, and his maiden journey—observed by, we might imagine, a small crowd of men and women, with their topography of 48

black hats pulled down to just above their eyes to shield the throbbing sun, their mouths opened like shocked and bewildered (and hungry) birds—culminated in the ship’s crashing into a chicken coop; Jacob Brodbeck, though not seriously injured, some days later burned his air ship in a tepid, reluctant fire and, like mankind itself, left the notion of flying to fairy tales and the gods and those with ill, infantile minds.

(But oh, Bergljot, to escape, to fly, to fly!)

Allow me to pause here and begin a new subject: you are probably aware, are you not, Bergljot, of the story of the changeling in Skramgården who would not speak, would only cry and cough dryly and whose bones would ache, so the countrywoman fired up the red-brick oven and held the crying trollboy in her hands, cradled in her sallow apron (for the child’s quilt had been lost long ago), and as she opened the iron door, the hinges screaming like wagon axles, and began to push the quivering creature past the threshold toward the fluttering red coals, the trollwoman came down from the woods, holding to the edges and shadows of things, and within her arms, in a quilt of mauve and amethyst threads, a child quivered (or perhaps I should use a different word: perhaps: qua-vered) and talked incoherently, and the trollwoman, fetid, large of nose, hirsute, said, I have never treated yours the way you have treated mine, and she returned the human child (along with the mauve and amethyst quilt), and took her own child and disappeared in a streak, like evaporated rain (and there is my lost quilt, thought the shocked and bewildered mother). [Editors’ note: for more on changelings, we recommend Bengt af Klintberg’s excellent, ex-haustive, and challenging Svenska folksägner (1972). For a less thorough but (an) easier read, consider J.S. Møller’s Moder og barn (1940).]

(Forgive me if I write too much, my friend, for the hours pass by interminably in this inexorable prison, and I must write, write, write . ) It is a singular thing, this feeling of unease, a feeling beyond words, a strange feeling that, I have found, can be very temporarily subdued only when, in a moment of perfect si-lence, I contemplate it, or attempt to, in its entirety, as if I were an ancient philosopher con-cerned with the Universe or First Forms or the Alchemy of Experience, and I think: if there are just a few finite ingredients within our blood and bones (each beyond words), and if the complexity of what we might choose to call an emotion is but a carefully-calculated agglom-eration of these core elements flowing through our nervous system, then I would have to say, Bergljot, that fear is one of the major constituents of what I feel 49

now and all the days hereto-fore.

All of this is to say, what I have been trying to say: the trolls have taken Gro Svend-sen, they have taken the cow. * AA. In trailing the cow, note the impressions left in the grasses, the direction of trodding. Note the change in color. The trace will be seen for some time.

AB. When you have reached the sudden and inexplicable end of the cow’s trail, beyond the edge of your land, not more than a few hundred rods [Editors’ note: rod: unit of measure, about 5.029 meters] from the quadrangular depression that will soon become your house, when you have taken steps from this point in all directions—you and your mule, ears all aquiver—and have found nothing but the tall, waving grasses, when there is no sign of her, call into the wind, call for Gro Svendsen. I stopped, Old friend, stopped, looked to the empty sky, cried out. Cow has disappeared, as if pulled skyward by the talons of a giant black bird. I looked for scattered feathers. Nothing.

Will carry on. Will build a well. Will drink the milk of the earth.

AC. Build a well, Synnøve. Until built, do as follows: bathe only upon special occasions. (Might also drink bit more liquor than normally recommended.) By the bye, old friend, have discovered a very effectual preventative to thirst (besides the liquor): find and chew a small green twig or leaf. Has become a habit. When not smoking the pipe, you’ll find me with some piece of God’s green earth spinning and jouncing from my dry lips. Boy has taken on the hab-it as well. Woman has none of it, but ‘tis a good custom, when your mouth gets afoamy.

Call this AD. In the meantime, Synnøve, build that well. I used a weighted drill bit that I bought for a few cents back in Blumingtun [probably Bloomington, Minnesota], hung by a rope from a springy pole, just as the pestle of the old hominy block is hung. (Follow along in, what is it, Fig. 5?) You raise the pole (A), step into a stirrup (B), and jig away (see a, b, and c for before, during, and after sketches). You can haul up the drill with a windlass (C), and then pull out the loose soil with something called a fiskjør [probably: fisher], aka a sand pump (D), that is unless you choose to use a mauler (E), which requires a wincher (F) and borer (G), not to mention a post-hole auger (H) and a shafter (I), as well as something I’ve heard called a pyp- [pipe-, we think] andpoint mechanism ( J). [Editors’ note: Figure 5, of course, has been lost.]

AE. If, after many days of digging your well in the endless heat 50

(while, at the same time, plowing and planting your fields and trying to build a house out of sod), you have not yet found water, and if you are so thirsty that you don’t have the time or patience to boil the wa-ter you and the boy deliriously find a ways down the dry riverbed (or creekbed, call it) in a little pool that had been frequented by the animals of the area, and also quite clearly their ex-cretions, you may purify the water by placing a piece of alum at the end of a split stick or reed, and using said stick or reed to stir the water for some minutes.

Not sure why or how, but this works well. [Editors’ note: the efficacy of the above method for water purification has not been verified and is not recommended.]

AF. Read to the boy. Still does not talk, but I tell Beret: read to him. (She spends her days reading to herself, all those books of hers, and writing on her handmade sheets of foolscap. Writing, writing, writing, that woman.)

AG. To make her love you again. To bring back the sparkle in those grey eyes. To turn her hug. Try the following: (1) kill a starling, (2) take the heart, (3) wrap the heart into a small piece of cloth, (4) place between the big and second toes of right foot, (5) step on her foot. And (6) she will love you again. [Editors’ note: a hug, aka sjel, refers to the mental life of an individual, and its physical manifestations; it is different from the Christian soul, which im-plies a spiritual element identified with the godhead and is, therefore, dichotomous to the physical embodiment of the individual. See Åke Campbell, “Det onda ögat och besläktade föreställningar I svensk folktradition,” FmFt 20 (1933), 121-46.]

AH. Build your house. Hole is dug, as I may have mentioned priorly. About 10 fot x 14 fot, and 4.5 fot deep [Editors’ note: fot: unit of measure, about 313.74 mm]. The morrow, must look for a ridge pole and dig some steps so we can get down into the place without climbing. Wife and boy sleep under the wagon, but I slept soundly, beneath the wind, in what will be-come our home. When I woke this morning, Njædl Øverland had found his way down, had settled himself in the warm dirt, head resting upon my shoulder, breath like the moist morn-ing sea breezes in Gubrandsdal when the fishermen come in, a pleasant smell.

AI. Come, Synnøve. Bring Bergljot. Will raise our families together, you and I. Weather’s lovely. Birds sing in the morning.

Not sure what kinds, never was good at what I believe is called 51

orthopterology. To sleep, old man. I’ve a house to build tomorrow.

To sleep. [Editors’ note: orthopterology is the scientific study of grasshoppers (of which more below) and other insects of the order Orthoptera; the narrator assumedly meant to write ornithology, i.e. the study of birds.] * The meadow lark and robin and blackbird sing in the morning; all the migratory birds, the swan, the goose, the crane (a sort of ostrich), the black thrush, the duck, and others fly overhead, heading mostly north, somewhat northeast; I see almost all the birds we have back home, Bergljot, except the cuckoo and the sparrow; even the raven and the crow and mag-pie, but I can hear they do not speak Norwegian; rumor has it the canary is found wild here, but I have not seen any; we also have the grouse, but it does not change color; nor does the hare, which is smaller here, as are the wolf and fox; Per has tried and failed to catch some-thing called a muskræt [muskrat], an animal resembling both the beaver and the gopher; its furs, so says he, with his bright red cheeks (Per’s, that is), pay ten to twenty cents apiece, but one must catch it first, I think to say to him but do not, and to whom would we sell? for we are like the rare gases, like inert atoms, colorless (like snakes), lost and alone.

How, I wonder, does man decide where the line resides that separates those acts that are accidental, subconscious, originating in the deepest, impenetrable reaches of our minds—think the inces-sant beating of the heart, the blinking of the eyelid (is it that there is some rhythm to it, some splendid cycle?)—from those made from the realm of the brain where thoughts (inchoate, germinal) are forged, but then, who holds the tongs and hammer, who lights the fire of thought?—well, none but God, of course: perhaps it is not internal at all: perhaps our thoughts originate from some field of energy or divine light within which our own system of inherent potentials is stored in some sort of organic code; I think, forthwith, to write: we cannot conceive of that which is not; but then when the actions are thus created, set in some motion, well then, how can we blame?

How can we loathe? We hold not the hard, streaking hammer, it is out of our hands (literally), so we think to forgive, we try, but what is thought?

(Oh Bergljot, forgive me my multiloquence, for my thoughts are yellow birds [of questionable species and origin] and my mind is a cage and my pen is an open door.)

Per has become clumsy: just a day hence he stepped toward me, his mottled face moist 52

and flushed from the heat of labor, and the man proceeded to step on my feet; his sense of distances, I fear, has be-come diminished out here in the infinitude; a clumsy man. He has built us what he likes to call a house, the land itself stripped and torn from the body earth and laid like bricks, thin rafters from the gnarled branches of a dead hawthorn tree, covered with hay and sod (a roof that, if the stories are true, will leak muddy water in the fall), walls of sod that already sprout greenery, weeds that he plucks like daffodils and places proudly into his very own mouth, windows composed of strips of leather that I can pull away to let in the magmatic air; we lie beneath the ground (little by little we return ourselves to the earth, but in our case the rate has been accelerated precipitously). I sit here in the dark room on a wobbly folding chair of his own construction, a small, brown trunk my table, and I write to you, Bergljot, for you are my soft speech, my turned ear. . . .

There! shhhh: a silence so sudden it is not silence but deafness; And then I can see the faces in the advancing clouds (cumulo-nimbus); oh, my dear friend, I can cover the windows, the flapping leather, but still the deep-throated yowling echoes across the myriad of intricate grass, the fiery golden eyes that glow in the dark, even in my sleep, in the compressed heat of this sepulchral fortress; yes, it is hot, so, so hot: 30 degrees Réaumer in the shade, at least. [Editors’ note: Réaumer: temperature scale in which the freezing and boiling points of water are set to 0 and 80 degrees, respective-ly; named after René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur; 30 degrees Réaumer is equivalent to 37.5 degrees Celsius (or 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit)].

The ox is gone. Sören, sweet, sweet Sören, has soundlessly set sail.

[Editors’ note: the preceding alliteration is an accident of trans-lation.] * AJ. Will have to find some men to harvest soon. Do this, Synnøve, for the work is too much for you and a single ox. Yes, ‘tis true. You read rightly, I’m afraid. O Sören! Ol’ Sören! Where has my white-faced companion gone? The boy (crying and sniffling), and Njædl Øverland (also, it seems, downhearted) and I again followed the trail, and again it stopped not far from the edge of my land. No sign of him. Boy is not well. Stands beside Perkel now, presses his body against our one remaining ox, whimpers. I have to pick him up and carry him to supper. He cries as a dog cries (with his breath, a whistling sound). I set him down in our little house, where he does not eat a bite of Beret’s tørrfisk [Editors’ note: dried fish, not as bad as it sounds].

53

But, well, so: the house, Synnøve, I have finished the house! We sleep in warm slumber, like the méskrat [muskrat].

AK. Work in your shirtsleeves. Yes, old man, ‘tis hot, but a pleasant hot.

AL. Pray. The minister is not to be found in these parts, but Beret says we must observe the Sabbath. I blacken my boots with soot and grease, carry a walking stick that was left over from the rafters, a coonskin hat (a gift from Iørn Lövkrona, back in Fillmore County), but now the heat is too much for it, must switch to my usual straw one (wife scowls). We dress the boy in his best suit of clothes. Woman wears her calico, her black silk bonnet over a white linen cap, the tabs tied under her glistening chin. A beautiful lady, my Beret. Priestly and sul-len, yes, at times, sure, but beautiful still.

AN. [Editors’ note: the letter M, missing once again, here as part of the biliteral AM, is the 13th letter of the Norwegian alphabet.

Vide nota supra for letter N.] Watch out for the rattle-snakes.

Haven’t actually seen any, but well: does not a snake best explain the disappearance of the cow and the ox? Would take some creature, some creature indeed, to make these large, walking mammals just disappear.

A snake, a snake can suck the insides out, and then pull the empty outers right down in the hole. Have heard this is a regular occurrence out here. If you have a better explanation, son of my father’s best friend, I’d like to hear it.

(Yes OK fine OK yes: the Indian. I know it is the Indian. Moves like a spirit. Hovers near the horizon.)

In any case: the rattlers. Have heard of several antidotes, of which one is to apply to the wound a short section of the offending reptile, held tightly with a length of string or cloth. Poison returns whence it came. Seems a most commonsensical solution. (In the same way, I have heard that the hair of a dog is an excellent applicant to a dog bite, but that is neither here nor there.)

AO. Bring the rain. Have you heard the story of the witch’s daughter of Vanse? ‘Tis just a story, of course, but, so: At Vanse the chaplain of the little church, a young man with happy eyes and the beginnings of facial whiskers, affianced the daughter of the friendly witch of the town. The two young folks allowed themselves a usual evening stroll. This one evening—under a still sky, not a cloud, the moon and stars readily apparent—the girl asked her fiancé: Would you like to see me bring rain from the clear sky? The chaplain, incredulous 54

(but also curious, and perhaps even a bit expectant, in the way that all men of religion must be), re-plied that he would indeed like to see the girl make the clear sky rain. So the girl crouched down, there in the dimly lit street, under a tree of one kind or another, pulled her skirt over her head, and all at once the sky opened and down fell the warm rain. Both got soaked. (Have never really understood this story, truth be told. If you can make heads or tails of it, as they say in America, old friend, please let me know.) In any case, have had no luck bringing the rain. And the sky is so clear, Synnøve. Is a strange thing, the sky out here.

AP. Steer clear of the fires, the grass fires. From a distance they are beautiful. Soft and blue, like gems (are there such things as blue gems? have forgotten completely). But if you should find yourself in its track, must start your own fire. Allow me to clarify this as its own label: AQ. Travel with matches. Must fight fire with fire on the prairie.

[Editors’ note: the alike-ness of the methods of counteracting or fighting rattlesnake bites, dog bites and prairie fires is, perhaps, noteworthy.]

Have to run. Must start to think of the harvest. Oh, when to begin? A hair in the butter. * I hear frogs and toads down by the dry creek when I try to sleep; I hear gophers and snakes laughing in the night; at dusk the first pale fen fires began to shake and shimmer in the distance and then spread out like dropped bottles of ink on fabric, like blood, Bergljot, and slowly the light ripens into a scree of green and yellow and blue, especially blue, like topaz, or perhaps sapphire, or sodalite, or when the light is right: amazonite, and all of it tinged in rust, and I want to sit and think here in the clear shaking world, sit calmly and spaciously, beyond time, to settle in deeply amidst the swaying undersea flora, like green and brown and yellow roots of plants that seem upside down, rising and held fast up above but dancing im-perceptibly down here where I sit and think in the clear shaking, the surface far away, its hard separate instances.

Last night a colorless snake came through the wall; it is called a rætølsnæk [rattlesnake] here; it is the same as a kapperslange; Per yelled that we must not lose the snake, we must keep it, dissect it, something about an antidote to its bite, but the snakes here only snicker at us, there is nothing to bite, nothing to suck from these empty parched bodies of ours, these empty husks; 55

Per, disappointedly it seemed, used a shovel and escorted the serpent from the room.

They are coming back for my boy, that much is clear enough, for what use would they have for an old cow and an ox? (perhaps it is their eyesight, these mistakes of abduction, for they are notoriously purblind); yes, my son, he hears them too, softly mixing their words into streams of wind and then suddenly shutting off the sound like a spigot (I am not talking of snakes, Bergljot), so I do what is only natural: I spread ceramic bowls of water across the floor in a circle around Peder, who sits quietly beneath the gleam-ing window, within clear sight of the exploding clouds (nimbostratus), and I hold the rifel [rifle], and Peder sits there, fear in his eyes (he knows), and the ellipses of light glow like shin-ing portals, and they quiver and pulse with the energy (or form or pressure) of a great else-where (for there is surely time passing there, on the other side) and I will wait until I see their reflections, I will watch for the images looming, I will wait, the cold, hard gun in my hand, I will wait, (I will wait). [Editors’ note: for more on conjuring the images of trolls (or other ad-versaries) using mirrors or surfaces of water, see Carl-Herman Tillhagen’s dry but informa-tive, “Finnen und Lappen als Zauberkundige in der scandinavischen Volksüberlieferung,” Kontakete und Grenzen [1969], 135-36.]

Perkel is gone.

Perkel is gone.

Perkel gone. * AR. Hide the gun, Synnøve. Am not sure where, but find someplace, someplace dry. Woman is in no condition to handle it. Found her yesterday sitting straight up on our little bed. Had positioned my boy beneath the window. All of our bowls filled with precious water encircling him on the floor. She held my rifål [rifle] (not sure if I have the spelling right; this is a musket in appearance, but the bullets come out in a spinning fashion, for accuracy’s sake; wave of the future, old friend), she held it, loaded, cocked. She had yellow eyes, Synnøve, like the eyes of an old horse.

AS. Give her time. Will come around. Just a matter of getting used to things.

AT. Do not wait until it is too late to procure the firewood. Must be honest, Syn: waited too long. Not sure what to do. Been planning all along to take Perkel and the wagon to the woods east of the Sioux 56

River to stock up for the winter, but Perkel has followed his old friend into the great oblivion of this place. Might ride out with Njædl Øverland and see what can be brought back on the little fellow’s back.

AU. If you do not manage to get to the woods before your oxen disappear, you can use hay for firewood. Twist the hay into faggots.

They burn fast, flaring up like birch bark, but they burn warm. Better than nothing. Heard that sunflowers also burn well. Is a sad thing, however, to burn a flower, don’t you think, old friend?

AV. Or use buffalo møkk, what they call døng out here [probably: dung]. Yes, this may sound strange, but this is a common source of fuel upon the plains. The mountaineers call them kjips [probably: chips].

The French call them bois de vache [Editors’ note: this translates, from French, quite ingeniously, to wood of cow]. Mule, boy and I walked ever-widening con-centric circles, shuffling and spiraling through the dirt, looking for the døng. Have filled sev-eral barrels with the stuff.

Woman gives me disapproving looks, but she’ll thank me when the winter comes. (Aye, old friend, ‘tis true: there is the residual of a bad odor with the døng, piled there in the corner of our home.)

AW. Ring the church bells. Heard a story once about a herding girl from Dovre who dis-appeared in the summer pasture on Vetle Mountain. She’d been taken into the mountains, as the saying goes (in this case, literally, old man!). The members of the town ran to the little church and rang the bells, and after some time, the girl returned.

Was said she acted quite strange for a while—funny look in her eyes, and so on—but eventually she recovered her senses. So find some bells. [Editors’ note: in Norwegian folklore, the expression “taken into the mountains” often refers to a sudden psychological change in an individual, often a change associated with a traumatic experience. See Bengt Holbek and Iørn Piø, Fabeldyr og sagnfolk (1967), 111-120.]

AX. Take comfort in the little things. Beret, in her sleep, a few days past, the room cold and dark, slid her body, pressed herself against my own. I held very still, so as not to wake her. But she woke eventually and made the necessary corrections to her physical misalignment. (Was a lovely few minutes, though, my friend. A lovely few.)

Harvest done. Got some potatoes. Winter close. Nights longer.

Can see my breath. Cold winds from the north. Njædl Øverland lays his ears flat, turns his head to the south. Oh, Njædl, my one remaining friend!

AZ. The gun. Have found no place to hide it.

57

* Per stands inside our dwelling, flakes of snow from beyond the doorway drifting in like cold, dying insects, flittering around his silhouette and falling to the floor, where they perch for a moment, wings upraised and quivering in the manner of (to be more specific) moths (to be even more specific: Cabera pusaria), and then the flakes vanish, leaving little dark spots in the dirt; his face is painted black; big green, radiating eyes; he frightens me so, Bergljot, stand-ing there, ringing his bell, and Njædl Øverland hears the bell and runs into our dwelling (the door is still open) and stands there at Per’s knees, trembling, pressed up against the man, happy to be out of the frozen wind. The weather: I have read that the cold in America is about equal to that of western Norway; I have heard stories, Bergljot, of people dying in the middle of the winters here, being laid out in a snowbank, like animals, because the ground is frozen and impenetrable, black shapes that we might imagine preserve their facial expres-sions for the months to come, and what will these expressions be, what will be our counte-nances on the threshold of the Lord, that blinding pellucidity amidst the cold, caliginous fu-neral of night; it occurs to me that, if indeed what the scientists say is true, we sense but a sliver of our world; what might we see and feel if we had eyes like microscopes or telescopes, if we could dance amongst the atoms and cells and planets, if we could feel the particles (or are they waves?) of space and time, could see the colors beyond the rainbow, could experi-ence an eternity in a second, a second in an eternity, could feel, could touch dark matter, dark energy? Perhaps Heaven is not a passage, perhaps it is not an elsewhere, but rather an expanding, a swelling of our own sense organs, an (apparent) amplification of signal, a glori-ous understanding of the language of God. In any case, my dear Bergljot, I fear there will be many burials in the spring. [Editors’ note: the mention of dark matter and dark energy at the time of this manuscript (c. 1873-74) is, to say the least, surprising. The Editors have no explanation. Nor are we sure about the wave versus particle debate. French physicist Lous de Broglie, in 1924, suggested that all matter displays a seemingly aberrant wave-particle dual-ism, so perhaps both sides (of the debate) are right. In any case, this is beyond the scope of this text.] * AÆ. Have the woman make long johns from old sweaters of yarn.

Have her stitch up the collars. Simple as could be. Legs a bit short, 58

truth be told. Tad tight. She dyed the material with fermented urine and some indigo that she brought along (the indigo). Nice color.

AØ. Jollify. Wife won’t wear the long johns. So we dance. I sing.

We waltz and chitter like bugs. Woman resists. Have to lift her up and swing her ‘round. (O, how we used to dance in the Old Country, her blond hair swinging like how the cøwbois [cowboys] out here swing their horsehair riætas [riatas].) She’s lost some of that youthful enthusiasm, but, well, the dancing warms us up. Even the boy, he claps and bounces around in a rather disor-ganized, aimless manner, then coughs and coughs and coughs (somewhat ruining the mood).

Had a dream. The Indian returned. Rather not write about it.

AÅ. Watch out for the snow-blindness. Happens all of a sudden. Snow falls from a bright white sky. Big clumps, wet-like.

Then suddenly the clouds clear and the crystal blue sky emerges, the sparkly white plains beneath. Can’t see didöl [we assume: diddle].

So wear the glasses, old man. I have ones of green glass, but I believe blue works fine. Enclose the glass in a wire network. Have made a sketch. See Figure 7. [Editors’ note: need we say, the figure is lost, as is, presumably, Figure 6, which the narrator may have intentionally or otherwise skipped.] They are handsome affairs. Scares the boy, though.

Also recommend charcoal around the eyes and nose, to blacken the reflecting parts of the face. BA call it, this blacken-ing. (This, unfortunately, really scares the boy.)

BB. Write Ox poems. Let’s see. Here’s a try: I miss the oxen, Old Soren and Perkel.

And now all I got, Is a mule I’ve named Njædl.

So I look to the west, To the slow-brightening verge, And pray that my oxen, Like suns shall emerge. * In my hair, dear Bergljot, I wear woody nightshade (Solanum dulcamarae) and orchis (Or-chidaceae maculata) and a small glaze of tree sap that I have taken from the dripping ceiling beams; I look to the west, from which flickering shapes appear beneath a welkin of ma-genta, rumors of mountains, and I think: perhaps it would be better there; Peder clinks and clatters his teeth, he is not to go out, 59

too easy for him to disappear within the endless whiteness (the white endlessness); a formula: Kulumaris Kulumari Kulumar Kuluma Kulum Kulu Kul Ku K I write the words on strips of paper and feed them to my son, one each day [Editors’ note: Klintberg suggests that kulumaris derives from the Latin calmaris, meaning “be still.” See Sven B. Ek, Tre svartkonstböker (1964), 16-20, 35—be forewarned: we found the reading dull at best]; I also feed him milk: I stick Per’s knife into the loamy wall of our dwelling and hang a small, rusted pot (not unlike the hanging copper laver in Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece, or, yes, van Eyck’s painting of the same subject [Editors’ note: Ghent Altarpiece, closed view, back panel, upper register, second panel from right]— either one, Bergljot, will do), and from the slanted wound comes forth milk, which I feed to him and squirt into his eyes to guard against the blindness; he looks like his father, but so so small.

Per leaves to look for wood, tele-marking across the plains, his shadow vibrating next to him like the shadows of the gulls of Finnøy gliding over a troubled sea (in the winter here upon the prairie, we, like the birds, make roads where we may); he disappears into the gloaming.

Perhaps it would be better out there, up in the mountains, quiet, still, (silent). * BC. Stay warm, Synnøve. And eat. Consume. I had no choice, old friend. We were so hungry. Oh, I cry. I cry. Njædl Øverla [Editors’ note: the rest of the above entry is missing.] * Whilst a visiting priest from Drøbak with a geometric, (angular) face and a loose (that is, ill-fitting) cassock of 33 buttons spoke at the church in Lillehammer about the souls of plants and animals I noticed that there was something mixed up about his expressions, Bergljot, in the sense that his eyes and his words went off in different 60

directions, diverging and scattering and, eventually, commingling (but separately) with the colored rays of the stained glass win-dows (if I recall, the vision tended toward the blue light; the words: the yellow and red), and his mellifluous vocal sounds fell upon our language circuitry in ways that made his words impossible to fail to understand, words that averred that the souls of animals and plants are material, not spiritual, that they cannot transcend the limitations of matter, that the animal’s soul, because it is constructed of parts—a top and bottom, a left and right, etcetera—must thus necessarily decompose and become “other” at the time of death, whereas the human soul is not material, is, rather, unitary, lacking top, bottom, left, right, etcetera, cannot be bro-ken down, can only exist or not exist, and thus, by the laws of thermodynamics (which was not the way the priest put it), must endure indefinitely, and we were convinced by his swimming words, as one is convinced of a rectangular prism or the differential equation de-scribing the vertical motion of a weight attached to a spring of constant k, etcetera, but his watery eyes—yes, his blue eyes shone significantly there in the old church (even then, the church was old)—suggested otherwise, and at the culmination of his sermon he rang a tin-tinnabulum of six bells (not unlike the one carved into the capital at the Cathédrale St-Lazare in Autun), as was the custom at this church, and, amongst the sneers and curled lips of the animal souls in attendance, disappeared, or perhaps escaped, into the dim cool space of the sacristy, and I think of this, Bergljot, dear friend (yes I know, I write too much, I have crossed an invisible line), I think of this now that we are alone here, now that we are truly alone, now that it is just us and the trolls. * BD. Leave porridge for the nisse. Is essential, old friend, to leave the porridge. [Editors’ note: the nisse is much smaller than the average troll, tending to range in size from less than 30 cm to the size of a human toddler. Often portrayed as a tiny old man. Norwegians believed that the nisse was some kind of reincarnation of the first human farmer to cultivate a piece of land. He would watch over the farm, apparently for eternity. See Bengt Holbek and Iørn Piø, Fabeldyr og sagnfolk (1967), 135-36.] * but the animals will accompany us and watch over us, like dreams * 61

Survived. Sorry haven’t written. Survived, barely. Yes, yes we ate him. Even the ears. And the boy, you ask? Skeletal. Woman feeds him dirt. Is hot, the boy. But the weather is turning. Snow amelting. Things looking up. But . . . Oh . . . Oh, Njæ [Editors’ note: the rest of the above entry is missing. Trust us: we looked everywhere.] * Later, much later: the clouds: * BE. Be. [Editors’ note: this is a coincidence. The narrator had written være, Norwegian for the verb: to be, we assume in the sense of persevere or roll with it. Needless to say, we were pleased with this fortuitous turn of ortho-/listographical events.]

BF. Plant your fields, my friend. Go through the motions. Pull your own plow. Farm like the ancients.

The Indian. * they start out like strange silvery spots, circling slowly to the north, and I am reminded of that old adage, Bergljot, that evil dwells and springs from the north; they drift across the sun like a fast-moving storm; land darkens; the clouds hover for a moment, then swoop down like a flood, slicing the land; millions of them; they beat like hail against the walls.

Breathe, Bergljot, breathe: 1, 2, 3, * BG. Later. Much later, Synnøve. Watch the sky. Burn everything.

Must burn everything. The fields, the tools. If we had any animals left, we’d burn them too. Must kill the creatures and their eggs.

The Indian. I can feel him, can feel him coming. * 4, 5, 6.

We should be thankful to our Lord and Creator that He lets His sun rise on us so many times, that we may experience both good and bad, want and tribulation, misery and death, grasshoppers.

Amen. * BH. Survive. * Sweet sleep swept upon me; the lucidity of the dream revealed unknown colors and words I could not understand and it occurs to me, as I write, that any effort to prove that our waking universe is, for 62

lack of a better word, real, (and, conversely, that that of our dreams is false, illusions of the sleeping mind) must necessarily utilize language (deductions, syllogisms) engendered by that so-called waking world (we must resist, I have always been told, the impulse to define a word with the word itself ): the endless plains, now goldenrod, hints of green-yellow in the swales, the sky a slow gradation of white on the far horizon, darkening to azure in the east, the susurrus of the sticky gesticulant grasses: yes there is a concreteness to it, its images are easier to cultivate, to preserve, but who is to say that when we dream we do not experience the same sense of rigid awareness? this undulating world of torment may be but fleeting pictures, (afterthoughts, eidola), to our dream selves, and within the dream the boy came to me, so clearly, he spoke (!); he poked his wet finger into my eyelid and I awoke (in my dream, I awoke), surrounded by rainbows of unknown colors, the child’s eyes like coronas of pure luminescence; he is hungry, of course, my son is hungry; the boy took hold of my skirt; I rose and walked (strangely, without stepping) to the stove—I will prepare him some tykmelksuppe [Editors’ note: thick milk soup, not bad if done right], I will sprinkle it with pepper, and at the sharp, strike of ignition, the flame shaking and expanding, an explosive discharge, like a rifel [sic] blast, propelling me backward, I pierced that liminal of these two worlds, a delicate, permeable, (diaphanous) gauze of con-sciousness, and awoke (I awoke again; which waking is real? perhaps all, perhaps none); I look around the still room; where is everyone today? so quiet; the sun, the window, the light; everyone was here a moment ago but now the room feels like a vacuum, as if some-thing had scooped out part of my innards, and my body, viscous, (gelid), had not yet taken up the new space (what I feel, Bergljot, is emptiness); someone once said that fear is more terrible than loss, for fear is a passage, a wandering, but loss is at least an arriving; The sun is blinding; the distant motion of a man and a shovel, way up on the little hillock, etched against the pallor of afternoon sky; the intimation of clouds forming to the south like the slow, eventual accumulation of lost thoughts; I ascend the hill, step closer, perhaps a steinkast away [Editors’ note: steinkast translates literally to “stone’s throw,” perhaps 47.05 m; by defi-nition, we suppose, not an exact measurement]; I feel so strange today, Bergljot, so very strange; there is a man, his beard red and waving slightly in what is otherwise a scene still as a diorama (he has turned now and looks down 63

at me as I walk up to him and he leans heavi-ly against his shovel, or what I realize now is actually a spade, and he is motionless); Per, it is Per, and he is oblivious to the animals—the oxen, the cow, the mule, they have returned, they stand there, watching, quietly shuffling and vibrating in the dirt like massive bits of snagged linting in the wind; you look pale, I say when I finally reach him; come, I say, you should not be out here digging holes if you are not well; Per sets down the spade and wipes his hands on his pants; he is wearing his best clothes; they flutter and snap; he must be feeling ill; he clears his throat but he does not speak; you must quit right now, I say to him; I’ll rush in and boil you some milk; it comes from the walls; he follows me; he does not speak, has become a strange man; the prairie, I fear, has gotten to him; he just looks at me with sad eyes; he enters and eyes the rifel [sic], now cold, lying on the floor next to the wall, whence the snakes come; he looks at me again, eyes red and evacuated of meaning; I will boil you some milk, I will add some pepper; he does not speak, just stands there in the doorway, the clouds (cirrostratus) beyond him thickening to the south, a thread of sunlit silver at their lower boundaries. Where is the trollwoman? I ask him as the fire ignites, but he does not move, does not answer. Where is Peder? I ask and still he is silent, and the clouds draw closer, closer, (closer).

Where is my son? * BI. Sit. Wait. By the time I notice, he has emerged from the horizon like a dark-green sun. Can already see his shadow. Rides a pale-green horse, green møzel. Sees me sitting on my chair at the top of the little hill. Everything green. (I wear my green glasses, Synnøve.

Have become accustomed to the look and feel of them.) He stops, raises a hand, heat waving around him. Rides closer. Stops again a short distance away, gets down, hobbles his animal, steps slowly to where I sit. An old Indian. Clearly an Indian. Dark hair. Long. Braids to each side, tied with string or twine and holding down-pointing feathers of some kind or another (Beret would surely know the type).

Wrinkled face. His eyes glitter when he turns his head a certain way.

Comes up to me. I manage to rise from my chair, knees creaking. We stand there. He makes a sign with his hand, one, I assume, of peace (see Figure) [Editors’ note: lost]. He motions toward the graves. One is faded—the rock, the marker, still there, as I left it. The other grave, shorter than the first, swells of fresh dirt (I have not yet laid the stone).

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Yes, I say to him. I nod my head so he can see I understand. He walks to the grave, the north one, the grass filling in the depression. Stands over it. I clear my throat. I’ve been waiting, I say to him in English, but he does not seem to hear or understand. His back to me. I have been waiting for you, I say. He has no hat to remove. Just stands there, we both just stand there, looking down into the furious dirt.

Translated by R. A. L.

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Mahmoud Sharif Mahmoud Sharif was born in Somalia, he now lives in Montreal and works full-time in the Telecommunications Industry. He is the author of several short stories. Writing is his passion, and his way to relay the unseen, untold, and unheard. From 2008 to 2010, Mahmoud was the head writer for an IT magazine at his workplace. Since 2013, he has joined different Montreal writing workshops, growing and learning in a spirit of community.

He has been published in the Sleepy House Press, and Ricky’s Back Yard Yard.

He writes about social rights, solitude, and the paranormal; giving a voice to the voiceless. He is inspired by authors Jorge Luis Borges, Haruki Murakami, and Knut Hamsun.

You can follow him on twitter @marcusmontreal

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Seeds of the Empire by Mahmoud Sharif

An approach to the mystery of life was narrated to scribes. The

story laid the stages of the journey. A journey set with pitfalls, and traps with respect to the secret values and laws of the universe. The precise outcome of this story hardly matters for what withstands time seals its truth.

In the seventeenth century, in the kingdom of Spain, at the height of the Habsburg era, a metal smith drudged very late at night. He hammered under the heat of the furnace, forging blades, knives and horseshoes. He worked in the summer nights and the wintry mornings, pouring molten copper, sweating and panting, bending and cutting, pounding and clanking, with the dazzling sparks.

His name was Rodriguez, and he lived in the city of Bilbao.

Every night, before he went to bed, he counted what he had saved: golden escudos, copper bullions, and silvers piasters, dusting them before hoarding them inside his coffer.

When work was scarce, he meandered the alleys, stooping, with his hands in his pockets and eyes downcast. Rodriguez was stubby, of medium height, with strong arms. His hair was charcoal black, and his skin swarthy, with a moustache, and a beard trimmed all the way up to his temples. He walked gazing at the young working seamstresses, or peering at mothers breastfeeding their children. His eyes fixed on all newlywed couples with a somewhat withdrawn look; one that was always pensive.

Passers overlooked his scowl, and his long face as he watched children holding their parents by the hand.

Rodriguez slept alone in bed, cut off from the world. If one day his bed swallowed him down, and sucked him into the depth of the abyss to swirl into the gallows of the underworld, no one would ever notice.

No one but his mother, for she was the only one concerned when he lost appetite and brooded constantly. As days faded away, as months and years drifted, the burden of living lingered on.

Ultimately, Rodriguez decided to change his fate.

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The metal smith courted country women but was spurned. He wished upon a shooting star but saw no progress in his life. He tossed coins in a fountain without results, learnt the Lord’s prayers, and even asked gypsies for advice; they drew him into the occult world, then he inquired about charms, spells and amulets, until he found someone.

The meeting was set at night, in the cemetery, where ghouls roam through the transient space, where the moon is buried in the sky and the stars mourn it, like orphans before the hearse, singing a dirge to their dead parents.

Rodriguez followed the man, as they walked amongst the graves, tombs, and shrines. He glanced behind him. His eyes rolled left and right. A shiver ran through his back. The hair on his nape bristled.

They sneaked into a mausoleum, under the shroud of darkness, while the gate creaked as it was shunted. They sat on the ground facing each other. The stranger lit a candle. The room brightened, but the air inside was saturated, too thick to breathe, it felt pungently hot and squeezed on their lungs.

The stranger was an old man. He was dressed in a monk’s frock, with ashen hair, and a beard that reached down to his slim belly.

“I am the magus,” the stranger began. “I have travelled the world, and know things which others do not know. What can I do for you?”

Rodriguez answered, stopping at intervals, or slowing, to catch his breathe. He spoke as he glared at the candle. His hands wriggled, his head stirred forward, then backward, then back and forth. He whispered his story, now and then lifting his right hand, pointing an index to his right, or stroking his beard.

The old man’s eyes opened and his forehead wrinkled. He nodded with a flat face that conveyed no expression. His shadow flickered behind him. Rodriguez finally said, “I am like an ant, or a stone, left alone, without a destiny. I need your help.”

The old man looked down, his eyes twinkled.

Both men were breathing, inhaling with strain, glancing at each other with their mouths shut. A dark gloom permeated the room, a moribund silence made the wait tedious, and then the gate creaked with the breeze. On the ground, the candle dwindled.

“I have something for you.”

The old man slipped his right hand into his pocket then withdrew a leather drawstring pouch.

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“Inside this pouch, you will find seeds,” he said.

Rodriguez stared at the pouch. He failed to notice the pointed eyebrows of the old man, and the smile.

“These seeds are magic,” the old man said. “If you plant them, they will grow. And they will sire fruit. Once the fruits are ripe, they will yield men and women. Yes, indeed, these seeds harvest human beings.

“Follow the wisdom of the magus. Honor these seeds and they will honor you,” the old man added.

He handed the pouch to Rodriguez, who offered him a pouch filled with gold coins. Rodriguez eyed the pouch of seeds in his right hand.

The old man stood up and recited final rules and directives of how and where to plant them. As the candle died, he vanished into the edge of the night. ****************** While armies were waging wars in Europe, colonies were up for grabs in the Americas. Rodriguez set out to travel to South America.

Hombre prevenido vale por dos. A man prepared is worth two men.

Rodriguez mastered new skills: how to farm and how to graze animals. He mastered the geography of New Spain, and the language of native tribes. He collected all the money that people owed him, put all his savings into his coffer and, finally, kissed farewell to his mother.

She was the only one who cried for him.

Rodriguez boarded a merchant galleon that sailed for South America. After two months at sea, it docked at Santo Domingo.

Rodriguez disembarked, and a few days later, caught a patache boat which took him to the port of Cartagina. There, he found boatmen with a barge whom agreed to take him into the rivers inland. They navigated the rio Magdalena in a southerly direction until a sudden rain showered on them. They had to anchor in the town of Mompós.

They went ashore to wait for the rain to end. Rodriguez waited alone, distanced from tobacco merchants, slave drivers and gold traders. He quietly sauntered the cobbled streets with his eyes downcast.

When the rain stopped, they boarded the barge, and sailed the river in a southerly direction until the river split into two. They carried on, through the rio Cauca in a westerly direction, for four days, until they docked at Santa Lucia. Rodriguez disembarked on his own with 69

all his belongings: an ox, his coffer, tools to plow the land, and most precious of them all, the magus’ seeds.

Rodriguez forced his way through the jungle, with guidance from locals. He marched a distance behind the guide, clenching his musketeer sword. His head swiveled left and right, he halted to all unfamiliar sounds. They treaded the rocky tracks, the muddy earth, and the treacherous people.

Finally, he found the Promised Land.

It was a forested hill with a river at the bottom. It took in the greatest intensity from the sun’s rays, with sunshine falling in an angle perpendicular to the hillside. It had a rich soil, a cool climate, and a meagre rainfall.

He established his home there.

He cut the trees down, cleared the land, uprooted the stumps, plowed and tilled the soil. Then, he purchased goats and sheep to chew the remaining leaves, brushes and weed. He dug crude water canals to irrigate the soil.

It was a harrowing life of labor, with neck and back pain. He drudged day and night, without a break, in happiness and sorrow. He ground himself to his work, with soiled hands, sullied clothes, and sore feet.

When the land was finally cleared, he planted wheat, corn, and potato. He built for himself a cabin on top of the hill, and when the crops were ripe, he pruned them and sold the surplus, then bought clothes, another ox, and more cultivating tools.

The seeds were clutched in his right hand.

There were seventeen seeds in all. Eight were brown, eight were green, and the last one, the largest amongst them, was pink.

‘The brown seeds will sire sturdy men; the green seeds will bear lovely women.’ The magus had told him.

Rodriguez seldom lay his eyes off the pink seed. He was wooed by its carnation hue, and its crescent shaped form.

The pink seed will blossom into a woman. His woman. A woman who will love him, ease his loneliness, and bear his children. And they will prosper together in this new land, have a family, live off the land, live happily, and let not hunger nor poverty befall them.

Time moved on, he was patient, a new harvest bloomed.

One year elapsed since he had settled in the Promised Land, and now the soil was ready. Rodriguez opened the pouch. His forehead 70

crimpled. His eyes blinked, a smile wrinkled on the corner of his cheeks. He took a deep breath.

Only a small batch for now. Only a few seeds to prepare the place for the next ones. Rodriguez withdrew four brown seeds, and four green seeds, then sowed them gingerly.

‘The harvest will bloom after four years.’ The magus had said.

Gigantic leafy stalks will grow. Plants thrice his height.

Thereafter, he harvested barley, potato, and corn. He milked the goats and sheep, and forged new blades and knives.

One morning, he sat up on top of the hill, looking over his magical plants below. He glared at the stalks swaying with the wind, at the leaves, and the emerald colored flowers.

But then, the foreground blurred, he felt the ground twisting to one side. The sky tumbled before him, and the river spun in a whirlwind. Shapes and forms appeared and disappeared. He closed his eyes.

His past delved inside his head.

He remembered noblemen in Bilbao, and the authority that they held. He remembered friars and the reverence that they channeled.

Rodriquez remembered the hidalgos, the caballeros, and the titulos, their august upbringing, and their wellborn lineage. He recalled their names, and their titles, remembered the military commanders, and their ranks. He remembered all the lettered men and the respect bestowed at them.

He recalled everything.

And as the memories faded away, his eyes opened, and his sight lingered on the eight plants and their incipient buds.

“Men and women will spring forth, all their children and grandchildren will be faithful to me.” Rodriguez told himself.

“We will build a new society, conquer new lands, lay the pillars of a new civilization, establish new laws, and rewrite history.” He was sitting on the ground resting his elbows on his knees.

“We will build a new Empire. An Empire as great as Rome, Egypt, or Persia. A dominion that will last a millennium. I will fight the Habsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Ottomans. I will be crowned emperor Rodriguez the 1st.”

So he said, and time wended its way. Rodriguez built new cabins, and beds. He bought new farming tools, horses, and fabric to clothe his subjects. But his money was dwindling. He thought about the men and 71

how to shape them as soldiers to fight, and how to build his golden throne and crown.

One year after he planted the seeds, the stalks had grown twice his height.

“I will build my palace here,” he said. “And here I will establish the capital of the empire. My mother will come, and live with us. Women will seek her blessings. The Pope will canonize her, and she will become the patron saint of the people, venerated by all.”

On the second year, Rodriguez pruned the branches, patted at the raw female fruits, and peered at their sensuous forms. A series of images sprang forth of how they would look like. He chose a name for the first four women: Carla, Maria, Catherina, and Sophia.

On the third year, disaster struck.

Floods inundated the farm. It was a deluge coming from hell.

The horses died. The ox died. The cabins were wrecked to pieces, and the farming tools were lost. His dear plants drowned. He saw them drifting into the swamp. He saw them pale as if ghosts had taken their place. He saw them crooked and curved, somewhat yellow, somewhat white, their roots swaying with the wind.

The world before him crumbled.

He implored the Virgin of Begoña and pleaded to Archangels Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. He made a promise to fast. He stood under the moon, and felt it cry with him, he saw the hummingbird moan, and the crickets grieve with him at night. But yet, eight seeds were left. And the pink seed was still there, with him, in his right hand.

Rodriguez wiped away the tears.

“After this defeat, I will soon be victorious.” He whispered.

He lay his eyes on the pink seed. She will be the queen. No, Empress. She will be Empress, yes. The empress with the sweetest name. Her name shall be Isabella, she will be an inspiration to mankind, the paragon of virtue, praised by poets and revered by children. The earth shall bloom before her feet, and the sky will glow up above her.

Isabella will be the last one sowed, once the land is ready for her, once the farmers, foot soldiers, and maidservants will be there. Once all the subjects will be present, to bow before her.

El amor todo lo iguala. Love smoothens life out.

Rodriguez grasped his shovel hoe, then toiled the earth, working as hard as before. He bought new farming tools, bought goats, sheep, 72

two oxen, and a horse. He toiled and toiled, until his arms and legs became numb, until his back hurt, until he teetered. But a constant worry glided in the air. There were no more coins remaining in his coffer.

The land was now ready, he planted the eight remaining seeds. The last batch before Isabella.

The labor and the time lost wasn’t in vain, for the outcome at the end would be the world cowed at his feet. All his subjects would be at his call to kneel before him.

In the meantime, Rodriguez built a garden for Isabella, in which he planted roses, tulips, and carnations. He also built a swing for her, so that she may delight in the afternoon breeze, serenading him.

He planted cornflower and an apple tree. He smiled at the sight of swallows singing to him.

“I will honor your birth with a festival every single year,” he said.

It was an auspicious season in the meadow. He rested well, leaning on his back, with hands behind his head, as he contemplated the clouds and beheld at the sun, as it glittered back at him.

“Isabella, I will have your portrait minted on every single coin.”

So Rodriguez waited, sitting idly as time went by, watching the magical plants bloom. Isabella, the pink seed, was still inside his pouch.

“Isabella, will you have blond or brown hair? Will you be tall with blue eyes? Or perhaps short?” He asked himself.

He persevered for one, two, and three years. The wheat, and other harvests were plentiful. His livestock grew, giving birth to lambs and kids. The river brought forth delicious salmon which he feasted on.

The fish, the plants, the grass, and the trees were colorful and bright, as bright as the rainbow after the rain. Bees sipped nectar from his tulips, and butterflies basked on the apple tree.

In the fourth year, all his hopes crumbled into pieces.

Fungi killed the crops, and the magical plants.

Rodriguez slumped on the ground, as if crushed by the weight of his own sins or, as if pulled down by a vengeful leash. His throat dried out. His face turned grey and his eyes closed.

There was no more sense to this. No more seeds left. Only Isabella remained. Rodriguez faced the earth. He knew that she was not yet born, but that she was out there somewhere condoling with him. There was no sun, and no life, only mysteries that he couldn’t explain and Isabella held the keys to their spiritual home.

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The river ran its course next to him, unabated.

Rodriguez drew Isabella out of his pouch, and looked at her.

Isabella will come, she will lessen his grief, and cast away the evil spell. She will pull him up, and together, they will build the realm over the heaven and earth. She will bear his offspring. The hour will surely come.

The pink seed dropped from his hand. Rodriguez dozed off.

In that dreary state, he remembered what the magus had said: ‘The pink seed will reap in one single night.’ But he could not survive one more day unless Isabella will be there to bring him life. ****************** Three days later, horsemen from the Muisca indigenous tribe came to pay him a visit. They found the body of Rodriguez on the ground, facing up. A frozen smile etched on his face. There were also footprints on the ground. There were dried leafy stalks, and they noticed the fallen apple tree, the dead plants, and the goats and sheep lying dead. The chief picked up a bit of hair. It was unlike the coarse hair of the felled Rodriguez. This hair was wavy and hazel; it was long, and soft on the touch.

One among the horsemen pointed at the body’s neck. They noticed ligature marks on it, and fingernail wounds. The eyes were dewy red.

Then they noticed the stomped ground.

Another one pointed at the other side of the river. Tall invasive plants had bloomed on that side. All the men could smell a fragrance.

A warm breeze laden with the perfume of fresh fields, and carnation.

A little later, it turned into a putrid smell of brimstone. They sniffed it and felt a sudden drop in temperature, and tingles on their skin.

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Diana Murtaugh Diana Murtaugh resides in Binghamton New York with her husband and three children. She currently teaches high school English and one day aspires to be a super hero or a zombie apocalypse survivor.

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Swing by Diana Murtaugh

My father kept a baseball bat in every room of the house. For

protection, he used to say. Protection from what, I would say. From anyone, he would say.

“It was like five, six years ago. It’s over now. He’s moved on; I’ve moved on.”

“Have you really?”

The bats were wooden. Louisville Sluggers. My only memory of him ever actually using a bat was when my older sister brought home her first boyfriend. The boyfriend stood at the landing, my father at the railing. He slung the bat over his shoulder and said, You will have her home by eleven. Yes sir. He positioned the bat against the iron railing and walked away.

He shrugs his shoulders, staring down at his half eaten sandwich of pepperoni, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. He fingers the white Styrofoam tray across his desk, runs his other hand through his overgrown thick brown hair. Leonardo DiCaprio + Claire Danes kiss behind him.

“Do you think about it often?”

“Everyday.”

“Then you aren’t really over it.”

When I got my license, my parents gave me a beat up ’92 Nissan Maxima. It had 250,000 miles, an antenna taped to the back window, tan fabric seats stained blue, a back door that had to be tied closed, and a non-existent muffler. On my first day driving The Beast to school I had a surprise waiting for me in the back seat. There, next to an umbrella and an ice scraper, was the Louisville Slugger from my bedroom closet. Why is there a bat in the back of my car? I said. For protection, he said. From what? I said. From anyone, he said. The next day, there was pepper spray clipped to my visor.

“I can handle this. No one else needs to know.”

“It’s time to stop hiding. We can’t keep this a secret.”

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“Ms. Murtaugh…”

“I think deep down you know I’m right. This is too much for one person to handle.”

“I can take care of myself.” He casts his eyes to the floor, flicking the tray. I have become very familiar with the top of his head.

“She needs to know.”

My father has a saying, There isn’t a problem that can’t be solved with a baseball bat to the kneecaps. The bats were a symbol of his paranoia. Even though he long since moved out of the ghetto, he never got over the abuse, the gangs, the theft, the poverty. I remember, sometime in the junior high, crying at the dinner table over Hope Garnacia. Hope had abused me throughout all of elementary and well into junior high. I really don’t remember what she said, probably something about being too fat, too smart, too something, but it had upset me. My father’s response, Stop crying. I rubbed my eyes hiccupping, She is just so mean. Yeah, and? He said. And what? I said pulling the sleeves of my shirt over my cheeks. Bust her kneecaps.

She’ll back off then.

“Here’s the deal. You have a week. Your deadline is one week from today.”

He turns his head away, piercing through the character portraits from All Quiet on the Western Front. “I feel like Bäumer.”

I wait. The color brown in his hair was not the original. Upon closer analysis, it is clear that it has changed to brown – it is not true, dark with shades of chestnut or mahogany like my own, but auburn in nature. It must have once been redder to match the freckles that spot his arms. I continue to wait. Maybe his eyes aren’t blue, but just light?

Maybe they are green or hazel? He used to make eye contact with me.

Why can’t I remember if they are blue or green? Blue. They must be blue. Or hazel? Hazel. I think they hazel.

“Dehumanized. Dead. Like the men who survived the war but didn’t come back whole.”

I continue to wait. Human contact seems like the solution. I would want a hug, but I can’t hug him. I remember when I started working another teacher told me never touch a student, even if it is a congratulatory shoulder grab. It might be misconstrued. It might be taken as sexual assault. And the student is always right. I dig my fingers into my knee, pulling at the caps. And wait.

“That’s why I like AQWF. They are like me. Dead inside.”

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Students will open up to you in ways you never thought they would. A simple essay could turn into an account of how Daddy beats Mommy after church. Be aware of the signs, my education professor had told us. Yet she never gave us advice on how to deal with that student. No psychology class to beef up on. No list of things to say. My father, however, always had the answer to tough situations. Just bust his knees in.

“Mike, one week. And, in one week, I’m going to call her. No matter what you say, I am going to call her. The conversation can go two ways. It can either go, ‘Hi, did Mike tell you something this week about…’ ” “No. Not going to happen. No. I won’t do it.”

“I will tell her, Mike. Do you want her to hear it from you or from me?”

“I’ll leave first. I’ll leave before I hurt her.”

It wasn’t enough just to have the bats in the house. We had to know how to use them. And anyone who has ever swung a bat knows that it’s not something that you can just pick up. If you don’t know how to swing, there will be no damage; therefore, the thing you were looking for a get-away-while-you-still-can would be useless. Just some dumb chick patting an abuser with a stick. My first memories of father-daughter time are outside in the backyard with me swinging a bat that was too heavy and too long. Come on, Diana! You have to put your body into it! But it’s too heavy, I can’t lift it! You don’t have to lift it high to hit the damn knees!

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No. What?”

“It just means I don’t wanna hurt her. Don’t make me tell her.

You’re the first person I’ve ever told. Let’s leave it at that.”

“But I can’t.”

“You already said it’s not reportable. So then why does my mom have to know?”

“It’s the right thing.”

I played baseball - not softball - throughout all of high school.

Sometime around the 6th grade, I volunteered to be the catcher and I stuck with that position until I graduated. I was lucky. I did not meet much opposition from parents or fellow ballplayers because I have played with most of the boys since kindergarten. I was a common 78

fixture on boys’ teams. I was only ridiculed by the boys on other teams, but probably because they were jealous. College scouts often approached me with the same pathetic line, too bad you’re female. As if being a woman was a bad thing.

“Listen, I gotta go. Thanks for listening.” He grabs his knapsack.

Dark blue. Embroidered with the Patriot, John Jay, the namesake of the school.

“Wait!”

He turns, flips his thumbs under the rope style straps.

“Um…we aren’t finished…um…I mean…we need to talk more about this.”

“There isn’t much to say. I told you everything.”

“What do you mean, there isn’t much to say?” Come on!

Something….something…something….that list of phrases would be good right now. Sorry your brother is a dick. Sorry your mother is oblivious. Sorry your dad didn’t teach you how to swing a bat.

“What about your younger brother?”

“My younger brother?” Still no eye contact. Still staring at the speckled initialized floor.

“Yeah. Has your older brother ever, you know…”

“No.” He said without thinking kicking at an imaginary clump of dirt. Green? Maybe green?

“How do you know?”

“I would know.”

“Like your mother knows about what he did to you? They don’t stop you know. They don’t just say after they do it once that it’s over.

They keep doing it. Your brother will hurt again. Maybe you should think about protecting your little brother and get your older brother kicked out for good.”

Mike flips his bag around and pulls out his Yankees cap and throws in on backwards and shrugs. He turns his back to me and proceeds out the classroom door.

Shit. I pushed too much. Now he’s shut down. I grab my purse from my desk and run after him. Not exactly sure why or what I am going to say. I lock the door. “Hey, wait. Walk me to my car.”

Mike stops halfway down the hall. “I don’t mean to be rude, Ms. Murtaugh, but my mom is waiting to pick me up. You’re not going to say anything to her, are you? She loves my brother. Probably more than she loves me.” He lowers his pleading blue eyes to meet mine. They are 79

blue.

“That’s not true.” Or is it? “And, no, I won’t say anything - yet.”

“I have a Lacrosse game tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Against whom?”

“Greene. Should be easy.”

“Cool.” What is Lacrosse again? Sticks with nets? Or is that Rugby? “What position do you play?”

“Midfielder.”

“Cool.”

We walk in silence from the exit of the building across the lawn to the facility parking lot where my green Corolla is one of the few cars that remain.

“My mom is over there. Thanks for listening, Ms. Murtaugh. Bye.” He points to a newer model red SUV about three spaces away from mine.

“Ok. See you tomorrow.” I open the back door and throw my purse on my son’s car seat. I turn to see Mike off. He’s frozen equidistant between our cars. A man stands outside the driver’s seat.

“Mom’s busy.”

“Oh.” Mike says.

“I’m Ms. Murtaugh.” I wave from my car. “You must be…”

“You weren’t a teacher when I went here,” the man says across the spots.

“Murtaugh, this is my older brother,” Mike doesn’t turn around.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He hustles to the back seat.

“Nice to meet you!” the brother yells as he opens his door.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

I turn and scowl at the floor mats. Peaking out from under the umbrella, next to the ice scraper, is the handle to the Louisville Slugger.

And I promise I will be just as nice to you as you were to him when I shove my cock up your asshole. There isn’t a problem that can’t be solved with a baseball bat.

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Alex Ayling Alex Ayling writes, among other things. He is also currently directing a foul mouthed crude web series called “Mish Mash and Jacket� and trying not to stumble about in despair. He currently resides in London, which is a world away from Canada, although if he gets his act together he might get around to getting his Canadian citizenship actually sorted out.

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Catapult by Alex Ayling

I

haven’t seen Dennis for months. And now, as I stand in his back garden, the ragged tarp flung onto the dewy grass, staring at the giant fucking catapult he’s made, I understand why.

I mean this thing is massive. It’s practically a tower. I haven’t said a word yet. Dennis has just been talking and talking and talking about how he has made this damn thing, showing me finely drawn blueprints he’d drawn while building this thing. I mean, I spent this whole summer trying to get laid and playing video games, and only one of those things was successful. How did he even get the materials for this? The DIY store? DID HE SAY THE FUCKING DIY STORE?!

I DIDN’T REALISE THEY SOLD CATAPULT MATERIALS ALONGSIDE BUCKETS AND GODAMN DRAIN CLEANER. “So as you can see, it was a real bitch getting the length of the counterweight beam in comparison to the length of the sling beam-” “Dennis you’ve built a giant fucking catapult.”

“Trebuchet, a trebuchet Tom. I have built a trebuchet. A medieval siege eng-” “Dennis you’ve built a fucking medieval catapult.”

“Trebuchet, but yes, let’s stick with catapult since you can’t seem to move past that wo-” “Dennis you’ve built...”

“A fucking medieval catapult?”

“DENNIS WHY HAVE YOU BUILT A FUCKING MEDIEVAL CATAPULT? WHAT ON EARTH HAS POSSESSED YOU TO BUILD-” “A fucking medieval catapult?-” “GODAMN IT YES A HOLY MOTHER OF GOD FRIGGIN’ MEDIEVAL CATAPULT! DENNIS THIS THING IS BIGGER THAN YOUR HOUSE! IT’S BIGGER THAN ANYTHING AROUND HERE FOR MILES! WE’RE IN THE 82

MIDDLE OF THE SUBURBS, WHY HAVE YOU BUILT A TREBUCHET-” “Hey you got its name right!”

“SHUT UP DENNIS. NOT THE POINT. DENNIS IS THAT A TREE TRUNK THAT’S THE ARM?” “Yes, it’s from the park. I went there at night and cut down a tree.

It was deep in the forest, so I cut the thing in pieces and carried them back, and put them back together here, strengthening the fault lines as much as I could.”

A brief silence followed.

“Do you know something Tom, tree trunks are actually quite difficult to move-“ “WHY DID YOU VANDALISE THE PARK, DENNIS?” “I didn’t technically vandalise the park, the park is for public use, and I publicly used it.”

I stare sarcastically at Dennis.

“Okay, so yes maybe it was not technically correct-” “DENNIS YOU HAVE LITERALLY KILLED A TREE. FOR A CATAPULT.” “Okay so perhaps I should explain. Also, Trebuchet. I’ve always loved the medieval world, alright. I fell in love with it at an early age, the knights, the castles, I’m not talking princesses and dragons here, I’m talking the real gritty excellent world of kings and wars not fought with guns and missiles, but the furious clash of steel and horses and arrows pouring from the sky! Think what it must have been like, Tom!” “Dennis, if I like the Egyptians that doesn’t mean I try and construct a godamn replica pyramid in my back garden! Why can’t you just watch Game of Thrones and be contented with yourself for fuck sake!”

“But that’s not enough Tom! Don’t you see, it’s not enough to just watch others play act my dreams, my love. I want to be it, to breathe medieval air, to live that life, to hear the smashing of iron on an anvil, to feel the cobbles beneath my feet, to-” “You know there’s re-enactment groups solely dedicated to this, right Dennis?”

“Bah! They just do it as a side thing, something they do for a couple days before returning to their regular lives. I need the authenticity of it Tom, need to build my own world. Look at my house, what do you see?”

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I turn towards the house. In front of me, at the other end of the garden is the back end of a semi terraced cream coloured house. Glass patio doors show a well furnished kitchen, black granite worktops which look like they’ve jumped out of a catalogue. Honestly, it looks a picture of white suburbia.

“I see your house.”

“I see a castle.”

“You need to get your fucking eyes checked.”

“Bite me. I obviously don’t mean I literally see a castle, but I see my castle. My foundations for building a world that I love to inhabit, not just because I’m forced to, like this world, this grinding soul sucking 9-5 at a 7-11 or whatever else they have lined up for me. I don’t want that, I want to be free of that soul crushing machine. I’m going to build my medieval amusement park slash re-enactment centre slash dream world right here. Right smack bang in the middle in the middle of this white washed faceless area.”

Dennis is breathing hard. Maybe it was the speech or the emotion it took, but he’s wheezing. I see him take an asthma pump out of his fleece pocket, and pump it down his throat. There’s a tear running down his right cheek. I don’t know whether to hit him, hug him, or walk out. Probably should do all three. I mean, Jesus, he’s gone off the rails. I was worried when he didn’t return my calls and messages, but I just assumed he was busy. Nothing like this, I mean, how can you ever assume something like this? What do I do?

“So you got it all figured out then have you, eh Den?” “You doubt me don’t you?”

“Well I’m just thinking, you know once you move past the whole building a giant castle and twisting the entire government to somehow meet your bizarre whims, you can convince your mum and dad and Serena and your pets to live in your magic dream castle.”

“Look I know it seems ridiculous.”

“Does it? I mean we’re stood next to a catapult-” “Trebuchet-” “Motherfu-...We’re stood next to a trebuchet that’s got a rock attached to it that’s so big I’m pretty sure it could crush a house.

Compared to that, fantasy dream land isn’t that far away.”

“Ha bloody ha, Tom. Always the smart arse huh. That’s why I never liked you at first you know. You and your friends at school always used to rip on me, always used to attack the kid who had his head in a 84

book instead of playing tricks on the teacher-” “Oh come on Dennis, I can’t believe you would bring that up.

You’re not a fucking child anymore, and besides I don’t see those guys anymore-” “Yeah well the stuff that happens in childhood affects you for the rest of your life.”

“You pick that up off some internet feel good post?” I catch Dennis’ arm moving towards me, fist clenched. Eyes streaming now.

He kicks me in my balls. Low fucking blow Dennis. I let go of his arm and crumple to the floor, the dull screaming pain coursing through my body. I can feel him on top of me, and his fists colliding into my body.

Dennis is swearing, and for all his effort, his punches glide off me.

I throw my body round, and Dennis flies off me, as if he were made of air. He lands on the grass, and scrabbles frantically to get up, mud flinging itself and clawing its way under his fingernails, only for him to go down again as I tackle him. I mount him, and grab him by his fleece lapels.

“Why did you bring me here Dennis? What do you want?”

“I want you to see!”

“Want me to see what? That you’re batshit insane? That you’re too scared of responsibility so you’ve retreated into this dream world?

Wake up Dennis! Your dreams are going to be crucified, nailed to a fucking post as you try and actually keep yourself fed, the same as every other dickhead on this planet. Your mama ain’t going to be here to breastfeed you for the rest of your fucking life!”

Dennis says nothing.

Dennis’s wrists feel cold against my grip. I take a closer look at him now, while he stares at me, deathly silent. His face is gaunt, his cheeks shaded with hollowness. He looks sick more than anything. His shiny green eyes bulge in their sockets, tears running into the wet grass.

I stand up and offer him my hand. He takes it and stands. He won’t look in my eyes.

“Dennis-” “I want you to see, t-to...to see that I am trying to be. That after every time you or your friends or my mother or anyone has ever tried to stamp me down, every time I was hurt, when I was in the toilet and your friends poured their piss on me from down high, when they beat me after school weekly, when my father told me to buckle up before he belted me, when my mother did nothing but cry and ask God why 85

I couldn’t be a better son, when I caught my sister telling things to her friends that I had told her in confidence, and how they became general knowledge for everyone to laugh at me. I’m still here. I want you to see that you’re my friend and that I’ve suffered. And I’m not just surviving, I’m still wanting to live, to make things. Just because I want to retreat from the world doesn’t make me a child, it makes me someone who’s been hurt.”

Dennis is running his hands over the trebuchet, like a man running his hands over a new car. I can see his fingers; still bear the scars of when my group and I stamped them, crushing the bones underneath. I don’t know what to do. I would take all those cruelties back if I could. How can I ever repent for something like that though?

What can I say to him? I can’t bring myself to look into his eyes. Thank god he’s not looking at me.

“Listen Dennis-” “Do you remember that time in the snow?”

“What?”

“That time in the snow. When you invited me out to play. I must have been only 9 or 10. You and your friends invited me out to play, since it never snowed. And we did. We got all the neighbours out and we had a massive snowball fight and I loved it.”

“Of course yeah, the snow fight I remember-” “Do you remember what happened after they went in?”

“Who?” “The neighbours.”

I rack my brains, trying to remember. What is he talking about?

“After the neighbours, the adults left, we all hung around for a bit. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t go home after that. Maybe I wanted you all to like me. But your friend thought it would be funny if you buried me in the snow. I don’t know what you thought about it, but he coerced you into it. You all grabbed me by my limbs, and started shovelling snow onto me. Only you didn’t just bury my body, your friend started shoving the snow into my face, into my mouth. I started to try and scream, but no words came out. All I could see was the snow pressing down onto me. I started to suffocate. I was thrashing like a wild dog, but you all didn’t let me go. My vision started to blacken, and I genuinely thought I was going to die-” “Dennis-” “Let me finish damnit. I remember punching your friend in the 86

face, and I seem to have hit him hard enough for him to let me go. I gasped for air. I lay there on the ground, broken and you all got up and realised perhaps that maybe you had gone too far. And then, you tried to laugh it off, as if it had all been a joke. I nearly died, and it became a laugh.”

“God Dennis, I’m sorry I’m so fucking sorry” I can feel the hot tears streaming down my cheeks. Oh god what have I done to him?

“Dennis listen I don’t know what to say I’m sorry and I know we can never undo it but you can’t let something like that rule your life forever, we were cunts utter cunts utter putrid filth for how we treated you I’m sorry Dennis jesuschrist-” “Relax Tom. Like you said, it can’t be undone.”

“But Dennis seriously if you need me to do anything I’ll do it I swear-” “Tom, you’re my friend now, and while those other bastards are home right now, who probably don’t even remember what happened, you’re here with me, and you’ve been here with me over the past couple of years. We’ve had some good times together right?”

The sky is dimming now. Oranges are bleeding into the dark blue, infecting it.

“Godamn yeah we have” I wipe my running nose on my jacket sleeve, its dark green now covered with splodges of mucus. “I’m not going to lie, sitting around playing games all night until 4AM has been some of the best times of my life. I hated school too Dennis, and while I didn’t suffer the same way you did, having you there helped me get through it.”

“And you the same Tom.” His fingers are curled round a chain at the front, and he strokes the wood, almost lovingly.

“You know, it’s funny. In castles they have prisons. Well dungeons.

So if anything, at least I’ll have my part of a castle.”

“Dennis wait...why am I here?”

“Because I wanted to save you.”

Dennis pulls his hand away from the chain, and the entire beast lurches into life. Howling groans from the wood ring into the air as the hulking machine growls and grumbles, actively angry for its sudden summon into battle. I can see the box at the front coming down, a massive counterweight which slings the arm into motion, a furious black ball hurtling into the orange skyline.

“Dennis why did you fire the stone-” 87

“It’s not a stone. It’s a grenade.” “...where is it heading?”

“I think you know the answer to that Tom.” “It’s heading towards the guys who held you down in the snow, isn’t it.”

“Yeah.”

The explosion vomited fire into the air. The skyline barely noticed the orange intrusion, but the black smoke that surrounded it was a violent intruder on the purple tinted clouds.

“Den...”

“Yeah.”

“Den...”

“Yeah.”

I’m falling. I can feel my legs collapsing from underneath me.

I look round and there’s Dennis, standing next to his war machine, leaning his weight against it with his hand and staring into the distance. I can’t tear my eyes from him. I just lay there and watch him, as he stands next to his creation, his labour of love and hate.

The screaming grows louder in the distance, the echoes of a terrified audience. We stay like this for what seems like an eternity. Bathed in dimming sunlight and shadows.

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Our fond good by and what’s next Another issue done. Another issue over. We want to thank everyone who contributed from the superstars listed in these pages to the people who weren’t quite ready and even the people who were, well, let’s say--there were people.

As for people, I need to thank a few (two) for their unending help with the issues. Jenni Hill and Lizzie Nicodemus put in a lot of time (and some drawerings) to make this issue come to press. They are, without a doubt, the finest editing crew I ever had working under me.

Until next time, dear reader....

Ricky’s Back Yard will be back in...

Saint

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