The Fabian Society

2011-11-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

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If you're looking for the left-wing British think-tank and policy center, turn to fabians.org.uk.
If you're looking for tiny little stories about reprehensible people, turn to alexanderhammil.blogspot.com

Jormugand, the Serpent

2011-11-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Fabian Society has moved to alexanderhammil.blogspot.com. Don't forget to update your links!

World girdling serpent, Jormugand is both the extent of the word and the limit of it, the envenomed paling between what is knowable and what is not.

We pass over his obscure birth, his unsightly mother, his horrendous siblings. Into the water sinks Jormugand, down past the kingdoms of the sea, past the dark cold where Llyr the Ever-Moving keeps endless patrol, down to bedrock and the massed weight of the world-river Ocean.

Moon pulls on Jormugand, now this side, now that. The belt of his body tightens on the waist of the world.

His body, his blood, his bones and his breath are rich with poison. His jaws are locked on the food of his tail; serpent without beginning, without end, the 1 and the 0 both. Thus: contradiction. Marriage of opposites. Though his life is poison, his death spells the end of all things.

This image: Brave, foolish Thor, laughing, casts the ox head over the side of his boat. Always hungry Jormugand seizes upon this rare morsel, this singular feast. Up he rises, too soon, swaying, the hooded head of the ocean rising, rising, rising, spraying poison and confusion into the sky he has seen but once.

The Minotaur

2011-11-10T06:00:00.000-05:00

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Think of Blake's illustration of the Commedia. Think of Borges' Book of Imaginary Beasts. In short, think of the minotaur as inversion: man above, bull below, human head on taurine body. The poor, near-sighted creature! Think of other questions: such a large babe ne'er grew in woman's womb. Question Poseidon's gift: a bull? or cow? If cow, whither the father? Minos, then? or love-struck numinous creator? Whose seed germed in that forbidden garden?

But, so. Let us consider clothing. Or, rather, the lack therof -- for if there is one thing constant about poor Asterion it is the lack of cover his several parents have provided for to cover up his shame. (Saving the labyrinth; a cold stone cloak throne upon an impudent figling.) How he swells in his maleness! See now the sad ghosts of past crimes rubbing down to nothing on a convenient cornice! These little deaths whicker in his ears.

What can he do when they have broken under his thwarted love? What other food is there? Outcast, untutored, unfed; without family, without language, without all the needed gentle ties of his human head, what is there for him? What, but turn cannibal? Poor omophage, he turns corner after corner, wears stone to earth with heavy hoofs, but never finds the door his key would fit.

The Labyrinth

2011-11-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

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Sex and death; death and sex.

The labyrinth is a map of itself. There are no side-paths through its tangled coils, no shortcuts, no evasions. To understand the labyrinth you must travel it, pierce through to its hidden center, enter into its subtle calyx. At the center he waits, Asterion, the minotaur, beast with human intellect, man with bestial desires.

You have been given a clew, a patient spindle to unwind your way. This long thread tells you no secrets, opens no doors for your confusion, but binds you to yourself, to your journey's beginning and its end. You carry this wooly rod into the umbral pit.

The labyrinth is a social construct. It has no meaning in isolation: Asterion's den becomes what it is only because the world itself is forbidden that chimerical embrace. You come to him in plenipotenary dignity, crowned, the spindle now a scepter, the unravelled yarn now a globe. You bend to meet him, muddled beast, and his mouth opens to receive you.

G = 6.67384 x 10^(-11)

2011-11-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Fabian Society has moved to alexanderhammil.blogspot.com. Don't forget to update your links!

It's the quiet moments.

Lying in bed, you look over and there they are, idly scratching their cheek or turning a page or typing something out, and suddenly it almost hurts to breathe.

Or they tell a joke the same way fifty times for years and there's always a little pause right before the punchline, and one day, without thinking about it, without even realizing it, they set it up and you reel off the ending. Boom. And they laugh that they've trained you, and you laugh, because it's true, and you don't mind. The joke becomes the automatic reaction; a deeper kind of humor.

The petty arguments, well-worn and familiar, ever-changing like the tides, like the precession of equinoxes. The same hollow pit in your stomach when you hear their key in the lock, every time, an acrophobic looking down from the open plane door, silk chute packed tight against the hollow of your back.

The glorious freefall of their presence.

Transmigration

2011-11-07T06:00:00.000-05:00

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On the rack of their words they broke Tara Cotter, bent her back over a grammatical structure and quartered her with syntax. Their voices swirled around her, rushing syllables dipping, cutting, separating, measuring.

She lengthened in her geometry, went clean, alien and efficient as Swiss clockwork. Her fingers they filed to killing points, her legs to swifter running, her patient arms to work. The cold clay of her mind they spun on the wheel of their speech. She was remade, shaped by their will, forged by her will, silk-sharpened, stone-polished.

They traced a path through their labyrinthine demands and let her rush herself along it. They laid traps for her, to teach her caution; praised her, to teach her wariness; loved her, to teach her to kill.

Sunlight was a revelation after her long confinement. She turned her face to the north and set out in the stark light of early morning, one side baptised in light, one still swaddled in shadow.

A Changing of the Guard

2011-11-04T12:21:00.000-04:00

As of today, The Fabian Society (small though this blog is) will be changing its name to Alexander Hammil and moving to http://alexanderhammil.blogspot.com/. Content will continue to be posted here for the next week, but after that anything new will show up on the new site.

Why? Well, mostly because The Fabian Society is still an operating group in England, and I don't want to bite their style. When I first started posting these little niblets back on (ye gods!) Livejournal in 2005, I took the name as a tribute to founding Fabian and crackerjack children's author E. Nesbit without bothering to Google around to see if the actual society was still running. Turns out it is! I've felt bad about keeping the name for years, but haven't gotten around to fixing the issue until now.

All of the old posts and comments have been transferred over, so if you're worried about losing that history for some bizarre reason, quit it.

...

This is kind of a bizarre post to write, since I've got such a tiny audience and The (actual) Fabian Society is pretty hugely influential in British politics, but there you go. Small price to pay to sleep more soundly at night.

If this fills you with tremendous ire or unrestrainable hilarity, uh, well, I guess feel free to drop me a line at quintusflaccus (at) gmail (dot) com, otherwise I hope to see you at Alexander Hammil!

Trapped in the Weave of His Nets

2011-11-04T06:00:00.000-04:00

Romance, huh? Let me tell you about romance. This was, oh god, years ago, almost, what? ten years ago now? Have I been stuck in this little flyspeck of a town for ten years? Ach, horrible. Well, anyway, like I was saying. So, I've just moved here, and I'm broke, and I mean broke. Selling plasma for rent, that kind of broke. Thank god for food stamps, or else... well. And I'm taking the bus home from the bar one night, high in that way you only get after drinking when you're down a pint... or two... and it was deserted, because it's ten on a wednesday and of course everyone's either snug in their beds or firm on a bar stool and I would be too, only, well, you know. I couldn't face the walk home.

So I get on the bus and it's just me and the driver and I'm slumped against the window jonesing mightly after a cigarette and we go out past the piffling lights of downtown and there's this long stretch of road before you get to where I was living, these scrubby little woods in-between with, like, no sidewalk and no shoulder and no goddamn streetlights, so black as pitch, yeah? which is another reason I'm on the bus and not woozily, bloodlessly weaving my way home afoot, and we slide into this just thick puddle of shadow and night, and while we're all ghostlit by the blue aisle lights I realize there's someone behind me.

I don't think I missed him when I got on. How could I? I swear to god he wasn't there. Not until it got dark, anyway. So. Yeah. Okay, so I turn around and there he is, and he's gorgeous. I can't... look, I can't say it right. I can tell you all about this but you won't understand. It sounds monstrous, and maybe it... he... was, but he wasn't. I'm telling you, he was gorgeous. Jaw-dropping, like. But he's got these just huge horns, like, three, four feet tall, just big fuck-off horns, or antlers or, or, or... whatever you call them. And his eyes. Even in the terrible little light of those awful blue runners, they... caught it, or... were glowing, or... I don't know. They were like sheep's eyes, with those weird rectangle pupils and they... they were beautiful. They were beautiful. I don't know what to tell you. I know how it sounds! But... yeah. And it was like he filled the whole end of the bus, like there wasn't room for him and the seats and everything all at the same time, and he'd just moved them all... somewhere else to make room. He was all doubled up just to fit, and even then there was barely room for him. His horns kept scraping against the roof. And then we came out of the woods and he was gone. Not like he disappeared or, or hadn't been there or... or anything like that. He was just gone, like he'd left. But you knew he'd been there. And, and, you know, the driver pulled the bus over and we just sat there on the side of the road for five, maybe ten minutes, and we were just dead silent. And then he kind of shrugged and started the bus back up and I went home and passed out and had... well, not forgotten it, exactly, but pushed it down, until it was just this sick sort of ache in my... stomach, I guess.

But I kept thinking about him, and I keep thinking about him, and I guess that's why I'm still here, for all that I hate this place. I keep thinking I'll see him again. That's all, just see him again, just for a minute, just see him...

Mr. Minchew on the Porno Planet

2011-11-03T06:00:00.000-04:00

All characters in this story are 18 years of age or older and have their documentation on file with the California Secretary of State.

He's been late to work for three days in a row thanks to the ineffable lack of majesty of his car, so he gets called into the boss's office.

The boss is an attractive older Asian woman with stern, horn-rimmed glasses, a no-nonsense black business suit and luxurious black hair twisted up into a bun. "You've been tardy repeatedly, Mr. Minchew. I'm afraid I'll have to discipline you." She closes the blinds and lets her hair cascade down her back.

"Ah, geez," he says, and bends over the desk, already hard.

Later, still smarting, he orders a pizza and contemplates a night in. When the darkly handsome boy arrives with the large sausage, of course he can't find his wallet. "Maybe we can work something out," he tells the kid, doing his best to smolder.

"Ah, geez," says the kid, "you're the fifth one tonight. I gotta start drinkin' those protein shakes."

Still later, he's watching an MMA match on tv. The two fighters, a scrappy Latina girl from the wrong side of the tracks and a professional Nordic pug from an uptown gym, brutally pummel each other for seventeen rounds until the scrappy pins the pug down and begins fisting her. The pug screams her orgasm to the crowd and their records flicker onscreen, 35-12-3 for the scrappy and 52-76-13 for the pug.

"Ah, geez," he says. He'll have to square things with his bookie tomorrow or the next day. She's a real hard-ass, an attractive black woman in her mid-thirties, maybe slightly alcoholic and impatient. He's light on cash at the moment, but they should be able to work something out in trade.

Martial Chan

2011-11-02T06:00:00.000-04:00

Chan McClintol keeps bursting into song in the morning, which she hates. It drives her roommates nuts, not least of all because they can't help but join in, and by the time the dust and choreography have settled they've all missed the bus. So of course they call a house meeting.

Chan,

(sings Jacob Benoit, a well-groomed baritone who's working two jobs and trying to save enough money to open his own Cajun restaurant in memory of his dead mother)

Though in other ways you're divine
This morning routine is not sublime

(Adelpha McKibbons takes a verse. She's an alto, alone in the city for the first time and desperately lonely for the large family of social outcasts that adopted her years ago. The neighbor across the alleyway keeps singing accidental mournful duets with her late at night, but they haven't started dating yet even though everyone knows they will, sooner or later.)

Ever since I've moved here
Wracked with guilt
Consumed by fear
You've always been my friend
My confidante, my support
But these antics have to end

Chan glowers at all of them. She doesn't do any damn singing-- out of pure stubbornness, since she has a perfectly lovely soprano -- but can't help herself from dancing her frustration. Then they're all up and around the room in an orgy of twirls, leaps and syncopation, on the furniture, in and out of closets, up the walls and ceilings. In the end nothing gets resolved, though she takes to wearing a ball gag in the mornings, which at least keeps the singing down.

Descent

2011-11-01T06:00:00.000-04:00

Dark things there are at the bottom of the lake, and many.

Down we sink in our bathysphere, our little impermeable bubble of air, down past light and movement into darkness, into murk, into slow times.

Here are crabs the size of kettles, many-legged and clever, with gentle reach of weeds growing thick upon their backs. Here their mouths move silently, always speaking, always singing.

Here are things with several teeth, mud-sided, impatient, grasping. Ancient they are, old as the lake, old as caldera, and they gnaw, they gnaw, with senescent fury they gnaw upon the unbreakable walls of our sphere. We huddle within and watch those rows of teeth, those blind and horrible jaws clash and strain against us. We pass within; we are swallowed; we persevere.

Down we go, always deeper down, past straining muscles, past exotic flora of small intestine, past lakebed, past bedrock, past earth's stony cradle, down to where deep things live and move in fire. Down we are carried in the belly of this fishy beast, down in Leviathan, in the blind hunger of the immortal, down to where life begins...

Lilian

2011-10-31T12:18:00.000-04:00

Well, he had his room, and I had mine. That's important, I think, that you each have your own space. Someplace that you can call your own and not worry about someone else coming in and ... and tidying up, or worrying about what they think about, or, or, or anything like that. I wouldn't want him coming in my room, not that there's anything in there he couldn't or shouldn't see, mind you, just that it's my space and it's nice that I can go there and get away from everything, including him. After 40 years -- well, almost 40 years, 40 years not this year but the year after next. Almost 40 years. After 40 years, you know, I mean, we still love each other, of course we still love each other, but there's not the same need to be always together. There's not much in my room. I guess there's a bookshelf with my books on it, not the books you see in the living room but my, ah, indulgences. Oh, you know, nothing smutty or anything, but not, uh, not the books I'm proud of having. You know the kind, all time-traveling Vikings and impossibly helpless women, lots of murders and storms and that sort of thing. Plus all my craft stuff, my paper monsters and automata, my binding supplies... all that kind of a thing. It's messy, and I hardly ever do anything with all of it, but, you know... it's mine. It's my space.

All of which is kind of a roundabout way of saying that, no, I've never been in his room. Or, at least, not until y'all came in and wanted to take a look at it. It was his room, and he's as deserving of privacy as I am. I guess I've been a little curious, but, you know, only a little. I figured, heck, probably it's a lot like mine, except maybe with a few more of those girly magazines, and that's just fine. I don't mind that. No, I had no idea! I wish I had, or maybe not -- you'd think there'd be a smell, though, wouldn't you? Or something? All those poor girls... I guess it just goes to show, you never know someone. Oh, my poor Harold...

Command Wheel

2011-10-26T06:00:00.000-04:00

You speak or write or merely think these things and it is so: there is a box. A box supposes a room, that is, is supposes a place for a box to be and so there is a room around you, of infinite height and width and depth, of space infinite but nevertheless a room with a floor for the box to sit upon. In the beginning was the floor and your spirit moving restlessly upon its surface.

You think about rooms and that means walls for you so suddenly there are walls infinitely close and infinitely distant, indeed at no set distance, but walls, yes, of no particular color or shape but there they are, connected to the floor, and (by the very nature of walls) implying an outside, an other place beyond the walls. You think (or speak or write) a door and there is a door.

You make further assumptions and everything scales down to human sized. The door is just over six feet tall, the room is maybe twelve feet by ten and the box is, well, let us not worry about the box. Smaller than the room, obviously.

You go through the door and think the world and the world grows up around you, waiting only for you to LOOK AT it (or think it or say it or write it) for it to be, more than a collection of objects but then nothing more than that, anyway. A collection of nouns you verb yourself upon, and break without changing.

Kyriarchy

2011-10-25T16:09:00.001-04:00

After an hour or so wandering between the clanging lights of the slot machines and the empty green coolness of the felt, Alex gets bored and tracks Nuncio down.

“I’m bored,” she says. “Are we done here?”

Nuncio is long, languid and lean, the planes of its extrahuman face beautiful and cold in the fluorescent lighting. “Leave?” it says, and laughs maliciously. “Why would you ever want to leave? There’s everything you could ever possibly want in here.”

“I dunno. I guess I don’t really like gambling?”

“Well, I’m still having a good time. You’ll just have to wait.” So back Alex goes into the maze, until she runs out of chips and the pangs of hunger get to gnawing at her.

"I'm hungry," she tells Nuncio.

"So buy some food, dearest, why are you bothing me about it?" Nuncio is vicious over its cards and its cigarettes.

"But I'm out of money!"

"Oh, goodness me," drawls the beast, "has the little darling lost all her funds, and the great fangs of hunger a-ripping at her belly? Gracious! Whatever shall she do? Well, you'd best figure it out, my sweetness, and quickly, that, or it's out into the darkness and the gnashing of teeth that you'll go. Now be off with you, for it's on a winning streak that I am, and can't be bothered with the dark luck of your losing."

And Alex was much disturbed.

The Princes

2011-10-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

The little boys are very tiny. The little boys are dark and hidden. The little boys have faces like the insides of flowers. The little boys speak with gentle voices.

The little boys are slowly dying.

The little boys are lost in the desert. The little boys are searching. The little boys are on the trail. The little boys are falling in love. The little boys are getting hurt.

The little boys can't sleep at night.

The little boys are very clean. The little boys are well-behaved. The little boys do well in school. The little boys are understanding. The little boys are tolerant.

The little boys know all your secrets.

An Anonymous Japanese Man's Response to Angela Carver

2011-10-20T09:06:00.000-04:00

He is wandering between Tokyo bars. A woman is crying in the street. “Why are you crying?” he asks.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, oh.”

They go to a hotel. There is a greasy mirror on the ceiling and cheap lace around the bed. They undress. They fuck. Afterwards they lie together in the darkness. There’s a full moon outside. She watches the mirror. He doesn’t sleep. After a while, she rolls away from him, sits on the edge of the bed, lights a cigarette. He watches her. He’s mostly sober, mostly tired. It is raining. He falls asleep. When he wakes up she is still smoking, still sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him.

She leaves in the morning. He wakes up to the sound of her dressing. He falls back asleep as the door closes. He doesn’t know her name. He is hungover.

The Chevaliers

2011-10-19T08:58:00.000-04:00

The little girls have armed themselves with kitchen knives. The little girls are taking back the streets. The little girls are patrolling the alleyways until just before dawn. The little girls are slipping into their mother’s beds, bodies small and cold from the evening mists.

The little girls are leading double lives.

The little girls are being called on in school. The little girls are giving the teachers the right answers for a change. The little girls are throwing things. The little girls are getting into fist fights.

The little girls are tall enough to hamstring a man.

The little girls are working on the farms. The little girls are strong and quick. The little girls are studying all the ways. The little girls are riding horses and never getting down. The little girls are jumping fences.

The little girls are running back to home.

The little girls are fighting crime. The little girls are fighting doublethink. The little girls are never lying anymore.

Meinkraft

2011-10-18T09:31:00.001-04:00

Five minutes in and the wolf is very mad at her. Fire is everywhere destroying the grasslands, and a little girl in a unicorn suit is latched on to her arm, shrieking, "The Soggy! The Soggy!" over and over again.

Plus the interface is like driving a knife into her brain. She knew it wouldn't feel real, but she hadn't realized how much. Every step she takes and doesn't feel, every wild swing she takes at the Soggy girl and doesn't feel sends shivers of dissociation and disgust trembling through her.

Alex is supposed to go up hill, she knows this, but eff that. Eff it. "Eff you," she tells the Soggy girl, who just shrieks louder. She's going downriver.

A tooltip appears glowing superimposed over the Soggy's face. "The unicorn," it says, apparently quite seriously, "appears when 75% of the land is underwater or on fire. Some users dislike her, and will intentionally let the clock run out rather than risk an action that will summon her."

"The Soggy!" shrieks the unicorn, eyes wide, mouth red and wet from sucking at Alex's sleeve. "The Soggy! The Soggy!"

Alex tries to drown her in the river, but all that does is make the wolf that much madder.

Chernobog

2011-10-17T12:45:00.000-04:00

After much struggle and little oxygen they pierce the cloud layer ringing the mountain and come through the high glorious roof of the world, a sky as blue as midnight and thronged with stars.

Mighty Chernobog stirs in the depths of the stone and regards them.

“Little crawling things,” xie says, “have you come to visit me? My brothers, my sisters. My quick-limbed children. My loves. Have you come to visit mighty Chernobog?’

“Holy shit,” says Alex.

“Long have I waited. Long, and long, for you to come, for the bridegroom, for the white-clad bride. Have you come at last? Are we now to have our long-waited consummation? Come to me, come to me.”

Much panic and alarm. They plummet back down, down through the clouds, down the rocky cliffs, tear through the alpine forests, the soft mountain meadows, burn back toward civilization, toward the protection of people, of words, of neon. Mighty Chernobog thunders in their heads: “Wait for me, my best beloveds. I am coming. Wait for me, wait for me…”

Amherst

2011-10-15T15:45:00.000-04:00

The first thing you do is burn your boats. Now, whatever happens, you’re committed. It’s a symbolic thing.

You don’t stick around to watch them burn, but you feel the heat pressing against your back for miles, one last goodbye from the old, beloved homeland. You do your best not to think about it.

You think about training, how they made you grow out your hair – your hair! that had once been so beautifully short! – and took away your clothes, your books, even at the end your language. You know it’s still there, somewhere, but try as you might you can’t remember a word. Vague proverbs flit at the edge of your mouth. Your heart longs for taller trees. The new words do not shape the phrase right.

You are come as a plague to this new world, a dutch rat let loose in the Old Town, dysentery, cholera and smallpox. This is a war you are fighting. Though you are sick at heart, you will kill and kill and kill until there is no one left to kill, until the entire night side of the world is wiped clean and safe. You have been driven to it, this you know, though not how, not why. So much is gone, gone, fading and gone.

Lights up from behind. A car, strangely shaped and long, glides in behind you. A man leans out, smiles with the wolf in his eyes, says, “Hey, honey, you need a lift?”

You let him help you into the car. What choice do you have? What destiny awaits the bullet?

From the Brother: Hoopla

2011-08-22T14:17:00.000-04:00

From left to right: Skiff, Hoopla, Palinurus

Introspection

2011-08-22T12:38:00.000-04:00

Alexander Hammil broke one of the cardinal rules and looked into the mirror. He hadn't looked at his face in... years, possibly. He couldn't remember the last time.

He knew what his face looked like and this wasn't it.

The angles were off, the spacing was off, everything was off, just slightly. He recognized himself as a parody of himself. He was older than he should have been; heavier, too. These jowls weren't his. He ran his fingers along his jawline, and the image followed, just a split second behind, stranger's hands tracing a stranger's chin. His hair was too long, and shaped the wrong way. He couldn't make it go in his eyes the way it was in the mirror. The mirror was wearing glasses. He didn't wear glasses.

A shadow moved across his eyes.

He couldn't move, couldn't look away. He strained to refocus his eyes, but everything behind the face was blurred and indistinct. He saw -- or almost saw -- piles of books, paper tigers, crocodile heads. Bird skeletons and ancient rifles. He tried to turn his head, tried to swing the heavy load of his eyes left, and saw

Becalmed

2011-08-16T13:59:00.000-04:00

Two weeks north-northeast of the Agdistis islands and becalmed.

Time weighed heavily on Skiff, and sea travel. Hot the sun on his fur, uneasy his stomach. His legs ached from pacing the deck, from seaswell, from confinement. Nights he dreamed of running on the wide pampas of his youth, of clean crisp cold air and not this muggy stillness. Days he watched the horizon for windsign, weatherchange, or sported unhappily in the water.

Palinurus set the men to fishing, barnacle shaving, sail mending, and was content enough. Wind would come, and supplies and spirits were high. He studied his charts, his stars, his orreries and anemometers. Shu waters: he sharpened his blade and kept his powder dry.

Hoopla was patient with the patience of millenia. Whose eyes had spent a century contemplating the slow growth of forests would not be outlasted by a windless season. In the high nest Hoopla sat and smoked and looked ever east toward the lost city of heart's desire.

Passion's True Embrace

2011-08-15T00:00:00.012-04:00

Zoe's hair was long, long and her breasts were large, large. "Ooh, my prince," she cooed, her voice quavering, her cheeks flushed with the heat of passion, "I adore you."

Murgatroyd the Pirate was eighty-four inches of tightly toned masculinity. "Zoe," he growled, his voice rough with a passion he wouldn't -- couldn't! -- let himself express. "It can never be."

Zoe cried, big, fat tears running down her glowing cheeks like rivulets of fire. Murgatroyd's blood beat passionately against his skin. His hands, big ugly things made by a sculptor who didn't think small and liked veins, trembled at his side. He forced them to be still. "Don't cry, little one," he husked. "If there were any other way -- if my love wouldn't shatter you like a delicate porcelain teacup..."

She looked up at him through lashes drenched with tears. Her eyes were big, wide and blue, and filled with her passion for his love. "I don't care! Better to be shattered than to live without you!"

"Zoe!" he cried, and lifted her up, up, up in his big, muscly arms, unable to control his passion any longer. "Let's do it! Let's totally bone!"

"Hurray!" cried Zoe, passionately.

Cloverfield

2011-08-12T00:00:00.004-04:00

Cloverfield wakes in a strange place. Oh, this again, she thinks, and takes stock. The sky, pale blue, cloudless, empty. The air, breathable, dry, cold. Ground, rocky, sterile, also cold. In the distance, what could be the sound of waves. An ocean? No guesses, but her heart leaps lonely in her chest. She dreams an instant of white foam, salt flecked, pelagic depths. She dreams herself tiny, quick as pressure change.

She shakes herself out, numbers the parts of her body. More legs than normal this time. She thinks she might be huge. Hard to tell without anything to compare herself to. She dreams D2, D3, Tedwar, creatures with teeth like knives. Not home, but... She longs herself back in familiar places.

No rings she can see. She settles herself as best she can and starts stumping along, one eye cocked for... anything, really. The ocean, danger, a way home. Cloverfield has been centuries in her wandering, and she has grown tired, so tired, of never knowing where she is, or what she's about to become. In her mouth the watery taste of coconut, in her brain the cold spark of revenge.

Im Pelz

2011-08-11T19:42:00.000-04:00

This whole beating thing is starting to get Wanda down. It's just so much work, and god forbid it doesn't go just right, or he'll mope around for days. Oh, the whip was the wrong kind of leather. Oh, she bruised him too much/not enough/in the wrong places. Oh, her heart's not really in it, he can tell, he's very sensitive to these things. For someone who claims to be totally devoted to her, he's awfully demanding.

"Shut up," she growls, and he purrs like a kitten. It drives her up the wall. "Stop enjoying this!" He practically quivers. "You disgusting sack of crap! You quivering blancmange!" He's in ecstasy. You can't even get mad at him!

She tries the silent treatment -- ignoring him, dig? -- and boy, does that not work. He just follows her around, always asking if she's okay, does she need a pillow, a cup of coffee, cunnilingus? She tells him to shut up, and, so, yeah, he does, but he's got this look the whole time like he's being especially saintly. I'm doing this for you, his eyes say, because I'm so in luuuuuuurve with you. She could puke.

Eventually she sleeps with someone else, you know, just to rub his damn nose in it (and why shouldn't she? he's always telling her to do whatever she wants) and he snaps and beats her. Like, seriously. He almost breaks her arm!

So she calls the cops on him. She doesn't have to take his bullshit.

Godsleight

2011-08-10T00:00:00.003-04:00

"They need props, you understand?
They are given ready-made ideas, then they believe in them as they do in God."

~J-P Sartre, Dirty Hands

There was never a time when she was beautiful. Receding chin, potato nose, stubby arms and legs. The surgery was done when she was too young to remember, but sometimes she has dreams of flying. Her wings open for one last flight and she is effortfully up, just barely off the ground, but flying.

"Lady," they call to her, "hey, lady, hey, a moment of your time, if you please, just a moment. Lady, lady."

In the corner of a building she pauses, the sun bright behind her gentling her face with shadow. He is spread out over a bright carpet. His filthy hands, his beard dull with tobacco, his cracked voice. She pauses.

"Thank you, lady. Thank you. A moment, a moment only." He unfolds his display with cunning, every movement economical. "See here? See? A moment. Here is the volcano, here is the town." He points, she follows with her eyes, careful not to nod, not to agree to anything even by implication. The men are fleeing, are defying the sky; the women are bent, withdrawn into themselves, their faces turned toward the earth. "If you please, lady." He opens his hand: the volcano is still. He closes his hand: the ground shakes, and the town is buried.

She weighs him with her eyes, weighs the town. His hand, open; his hand, closed. She knows she is being played -- the dice are always loaded, the queen is always hidden in the palm of the hand. Still. She nods her head, and he capers; nods her head and Pompeii is destroyed. She was never beautiful, though the statues they carve for her will lie it so.

Excruciating Torture

2011-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

He's a young man, the kind with sad, distant eyes. He is wearing three layers too many for the spring weather, but he diligently struggles along the beach, pausing to take pictures of waves, of terns, of bits of chainlink fence. Self-consciously arty stuff, more to get a feel for the camera than for anything else.

A pair of red boots enter his frame. Up, up (slow pan to insinuating saxophone) past long legs, highwaisted jeans, a red top masquerading as a pair of bandanas. "Pardon me," he says, "you're in my shot."

"Are you a photographer?"

"Uh, yeah. I guess so."

"Are you famous?"

"No, no. I'm from Saint Louis. Nobody gets famous in Saint Louis."

There's a long pause. She's still in his shot. He fingers the ascot covering his yellow turtleneck fretfully.

"So, uh, what's your name?" She laughs as she says it.

"Well, I'm--"

"No, wait. Let me guess. You're... Finbarr?" She laughs again. "No, of course not. That couldn't be it. Oh, I know! You're Eric!"

He blinks. There's a loose thread on the front of his blue velvet waistcoat. He plucks at it, tries to avoid eye contact, fails. "Sure. So, uh, I guess I get to guess your name, too? How about, uh--" (For an instant his imagination fails. He can't think of a single female name. Has he ever known a woman? Has he even ever met a woman before? He starts to panic.) "--Linda?"

She giggles. "Linda's a pretty name!"

"Well, Linda, you're a very pretty girl." Something is dying inside of him. He wants out of this conversation. He doesn't know how to get out of it.

Linda takes her top off. "Why don't you take my picture?" she purrs. "I could be in Playboy, don't you think?"

He hems and haws, starts to struggle out of his purple corduroy jacket. He can barely breathe. "I ... suppose. I could. I mean--"

It's almost a relief when her friends break his legs, tie him to a post and light him on fire.

Among the Unfamiliar

2011-08-08T00:00:00.001-04:00

A great and wild emptiness fills you like a wind. It roars forth when you open your mouth and swallows the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky. It crackles from your fingers and devours the land, the trees, the beasts of the field. It bellows in your ears, plucks at your eyes, drags at the hem of your more than majestic coat. It knows your secrets, which are three, and mighty.

You are the smell of the ocean, the humus, the quiet darkness at the back of the cave. You are inward. You are the mystery of numbers, the shape of the future. You are the racing heart of time.

You awake to find yourself balanced on the edge of a cliff.

Clouds veil the ground, but far away you can hear the slush of the sea. You are in a garden on a cliff's edge. There is a lion.

You are flying through the air, borne on the lion's breath, flying without wings. You have made promises: of discovery, of protection, of revenge. You are clever, you are canny. You are at home in the dark. You keep a gun close and a bottle closer. You are never deceived. You are always in balance. You sleep with everyone you want.

You touch down on a plain without landmarks. Sparrows cover the sky in great numbers. Their bodies for an instant come together in towering letters:

WELCOME TO DARK. WHAT DO YOU DO?

Urbs Dolorosa

2011-08-05T00:00:00.003-04:00

The district is thick with black marketers. They have no language in common, but nevertheless they manage to imply that whatever Cedar wants they can procure. They purse their lips, they sneer suggestively, they stagger theatrically. Which means, cigarettes, alcohol, sex. This much they share with the city, which too speaks in only the broadest terms. She is not herself, here, but always the outsider, the masked stranger, the lone wanderer. The unknown potential.

In the cafés they sneer at each other, the waiters with their dirty cuffs, Cedar with her over-worldly parochialism. They battle with rudeness. The service is lousy; she tips poorly. They write satirical verses on the bill; she caricatures them, all nostril hair and beetled brows. None of them expect civility, nor want it. They trade on their wit.

She visits graveyards for the silence. Here too they do not aim for subtlety. Busts are everywhere, huge, imposing and idealized. Weeping angels, mournful verse. Morality tales, postmortem lectures. She smokes like (what else?) a chimney, blows tobacco in their stern, marmoreal faces. At night women all in black throng the hillsides, wailing, wailing, their faces veiled, their voices ragged with loss. They are martyrs, they are everywhere, winning, winning.

Before Maenads This Love

2011-08-04T00:00:00.001-04:00

Success!

And it takes. He feels it stir within him. For a moment, he is dizzily aware of a second pulse, beating against his thigh. Strange life, grown stranger in this unfamiliar space. He grows full, warmed by this warmth pulled quiet and small from the ashes.

There passes a time, a lengthy time.

It grows within him, fed on his body, drunk on his body. Fishes against his skin. Warm grip of sea weed, fertile swelling. He languors slowly, spins like the moon in orbit about this new body, this body within his body. His mind turns inward, dwells in hidden places, unseen vistas.

And yet more time.

It becomes real to him, this thing. This more than human life. This more than other other. He drinks deep of the thought of it. Born not of his mind, not of his body. Seized with intent. Made to live by his hands. He names it, dreams of a future, dreams it heroic or vile or mad. Life and work goes on. They move together toward an obscure end, breathing life, heady with blood, with wine, with an anticipated, postponed separation.

And yet more time passes.

Even These Rocks Cry Out

2011-08-03T13:33:00.000-04:00

I erred; I admit it. My pride was great. I grew sleek on maternity; my boasting resounded in the halls of my mouth. And so, perhaps, I deserved instruction. Brought down, humbled. Reminded of my simply human place. Silenced, perhaps -- struck dumb, or mad, or blind; all this I could have borne, simply, as I am simple, as I hope to be simple. The sin was mine, and the punishment, too.

But no. Stronger poison had the gods for me, not drip-fed gently in my veins, no. Not for me the sanctification of penance. No. No blind wandering, sweetly steered by my daughter's hands. No decade of hard labor, fed on nettles, no slavery, no human bondage to an idle man. No. Oh, my long-limbed boys! Oh, my brainy girls! How bright you were on the hills that day, how bright your blood that streamed o'er the rocks! How sweet your voices as you lay dying! How cold the gods that struck you down to physic me!

There was no justice done. This monument I have become -- these endless basalt tears -- find no repentance in me. In this perpetual flow I rage. Bitter the gods, and petty; may every mother damn them so.

The Chorus Speaks of Itself

2011-07-18T20:18:00.003-04:00

Exit Thomas Sterns. Stet the Sharks and the Girls.

The Sharks.
in unison
O, he is troubled, he is troubled indeed. His loyalties prey upon his mind. Who shall unmaze this riddle?

Crystal.
What's he gonna do, give himself an ulcer choosing between Betty and Veronica?

Bernardo.
Where shall be found the place of peace?

Ronette.
An emergency room, honey.

Indio.
O, surely not! He is the most pacific of men.

Chiffon.
He's sexier than the Wolfman on the radio. You're gonna pick him to death.

The Sharks fall out of formation and scatter over the stage in exuberant frustration. Much random singing and dancing; the songs and dances interact in strange ways. They heckle the Girls, each according to his fancy. Crystal to stage left, Ronette to front center, Chiffon to stage right.

The Girls.
singing (sarcastically) I Wanna Love Him So Bad by The Jelly Beans
I can't help it -- I wanna love him so bad.

Crystal.
I know his name.

Ronette & Chiffon.
(His name is Jim.)

Ronette.
I can't be blamed.

Crystal & Chiffon.
(for loving him.)

Chiffon.
I could make him happy.

Crystal & Ronette.
(oh, yeah?)

Always New Beginnings

2011-07-16T20:49:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

In the darkness of the station concourse we swap plans for revolution -- this coup, that terror, this bomb hurled beneath the wheels of the Archduke's carriage. We will miss on that first throw, we purr, but the Archduke's foolish bravery is matched only by his foolish compassion; he will hurry to comfort his wounded vassals, and that is when we will strike in earnest. What matter if they take us then? Sic semper tyrannis!

It's not all such high-mindedness. We have fallen in love with the trappings of empire. The medals, the uniforms, the endless parades. We plan dictatorships like weddings. Flower, organs and ceremony.

We grow dizzy on train smoke.

Our brains fizz with rare storms. Colors and sounds swell and twist, find rare significance. We clasp hands, swear eternal loyalty, death before dishonor. We weep with the strength of our emotion. Rare camaraderie: at station's end we puff out into the streets, vibrant and in love. We are perfect conspirators. Come the morning we have forgotten faces, names and plans, all save the purity of our devotion.

The Gentle Art of Learning

2011-07-13T03:40:00.001-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. You can see more of his work here.

Cilia

2011-07-13T02:03:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

She is many things to many men.
Whatever they want her to be.
Quiet for this one, argumentative for that one.
Chaste, demure, aggressive, wanton, demanding.

She has many skills, whatever she needs.
She understands books, movies, ideas well enough to have them explained to her.
She can cook perfectly well, but she's always happy to go out instead.
She doesn't mind dancing.
She can sing, slightly, prettily.

She's never alone.
She's always in a group, laughing, drinking, shouting.
They crowd the tables in the late night diners, close out the bars, throng the streets.
She's always drinking, never drunk.
She's a good sport.

She keeps her teeth sharp.
She's on a diet.
She doesn't like the sunlight.
She doesn't mind the night.
All her pets die young.
Her plants don't survive much longer.

Radios play horrible static when she's nearby.
Crows take screaming to the skies when she closes car doors.
Her old apartments have all burned down under suspicious circumstances.
No one knows what happened to her parents.
She keeps jars of rosemary, foxglove, coriander under her bed.

She's been married seven times.
She never keeps her name.
She's bad with money.
There's always more.

She likes high places, streetlamps, roof gardens, obelisks.
She perches there on moonless nights and looks down.
Her hair shadows her face.
The streetlights sway beneath her taloned feet.
She is many things to many men.

That Patient Hunger

2011-07-12T17:03:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

The City of Red Water

2011-07-12T00:08:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

The trains run beneath the minarets of bone in Cheka, along the southern edge of the Great Salt Desert, past the silent dwellings of the necromancers to the mountains that shelter lost Anquim. Beyond the mountains they tie together magician's city Albion, shrouded Oast and soft Pinene where poets vie with leather-lunged verses in the marketplaces, but here they trace stranger paths and seldom traveled. The secret police watch the railroad closely and throng its carriages, their talk of sign and countersign drowning out all other speech. Few travel through the remains of the southern empire; only the servants of the necromancers who indeed know many secrets but few that sit comfortably in living ears.

It is claimed by the police that there has been no death by violence in the City of Red Water since the last emperor succumbed to plague. This is true, though every morning new bodies strew the plaza beneath the Palace Tower. Death by misadventure, death by suicide.

Or, perhaps--

On a high-shouldered island in the Red Water the police have their headquarters, and each evening older bodies wash ashore. Death by misadventure, death by drowning.

The young women of Cheka lay themselves upon the tracks to prove their courage. When the trains thunder over them, they shout their defiance and their names into the rattling steel. Inside the cars the police hear nothing over their own endless recognition. The servants of the necromancers do, indeed, but their thoughts are of farther things, colder passions.

Caught in the Bright Lights

2011-07-10T00:25:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Interregnum

2011-07-09T15:26:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

The city has been burning for days. We have gathered at the lakeside to celebrate it, to remember its glories, to drink to the destruction of our memories. We have left pride, honor and names to curl in the fire; here we are nameless, our faces hollowed and consanguine with anonymity. We build smaller fires and dance over them. We hurl burning brands far out over the water, racing to meet their uneasy reflections in the dark sky. We plunge in after them.

At daybreak we are scattered, some drowned among the slime at lake bottom, some lost and tangled in the woods (faces pressed to faces, bodies twitched to bodies), some still and cool and turned to the ashen billows of the sky. We have become more than ourselves: we are elemental, we are undine, we are tree-bole. Sharp urgency of leaf must. We tatter with the black reach of smokehand. We are civilization, the watching, unsleeping eye, the sound of tires against dirt roads.

We are stranded here at the place where the forest marches down to lake bed. We swim between drowned trunks and the city waits beneath for some stronger gravity to pull us back.

A Faithful & True Relation

2011-05-16T20:01:00.000-04:00

Dee and Kellet have come to blows at last, over, naturally, the royalties for the book. "Autolycus!" hisses Dee, his voice echoing off the tiles of the natatorium.

"Gestas!" bellows Kellet, and shoves Dee's head under the water.

They both try to call on Enoch to judge between them, but xie doesn't want to get involved. The angel's perched up in a corner of the balneator's office, watching the fight unfold. "Tragic, really," xie mutters to Mister Boots. Mister Boots keeps his own council, and pretends to concentrate on grooming his tail, but his eyes take in everything. Mister Boots is canny, and doesn't get paid enough to get involved in this kind of rumpus. Casaubon's going to be very interested, though -- very interested, indeed.

The End

2011-04-23T03:01:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Passing is Easy

2011-04-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

People mostly see what they expect to see. Not always, not every time -- everybody wants to be the smart one, the one who notices things, the one who isn't taken in, so everybody is always hoping to spot a con -- but for the most part, yeah, it's not too difficult. It's a way of walking, a way of holding yourself: angles of shoulders, hips, hands. Whether you look them in the eye or not. How deep your voice is; more than that, how you use it. What you wear. Marion's always amazed at how important clothes are.

Marion puts on the padded undershirt, stained with rust; the heavy steel shirt, so almost-familiar; the wide leather belt. The gloves. The hair's not a problem. You can cut your hair any way you want, and it doesn't make much of a difference, especially if you keep the helmet on, which Marion does, most of the time. She keeps her hair long because it's extra padding, and because it hides her antennae better.

On the field they only know her by her colors. "Bradamante!" they roar, and it doesn't mean much. She strips down again in the forest after the tournament, down to her skin, and all her fair sisters come out and cloak her in a more brilliant armor. She feeds them sugar, starch, fat and news.

Marion

2011-04-21T02:37:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Valerie

2011-04-20T10:57:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Oh, the salons of Paris, darling, I could tell you some stories. What a time that was! How beautiful and free we were! How young and beautiful and adored I was! Oh, I had admirers, you might say, swains, even. How the men loved me! And how strong and handsome they all were! But of course I had no time for them; who ever had time for men? Well of course we slept together, that's what you do, darling, but nothing serious, no, no, nothing serious, just sex. We were living the high life of the mind! The sex was just friendly, easy sex, not that there weren't always such complications! Oh, we had so many theories. We lived on theories then, always rules and right ways to do things and then when you ran up against someone with different theories, well, that's when things got complicated. But it was all good fun, though sometimes awfully distracting.

No, we were glorious thinkers, up every night until the very edge of dawn, talking, arguing, explaining everything. There wasn't an author we hadn't read or met, a famous artist we didn't own and buy drinks for in the Montmartre! But then we were so serious, too, always worried about where we were going, what we were doing. We were positively going to change the world, darling, absolutely we were.

Philosophy

2011-04-20T10:39:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Precarious

2011-04-18T23:30:00.001-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this poem came from this image.

These are days for the edges, my love

We will snap our fingers for luck
Cross our hearts like good Catholics
Mouth the words to our favorite songs
Tie knots to cast spells
Guard diary entries in scribblings
Close our eyes and our mouths

We must be trained to forget

Banned are the nightmares
And the nights without sleep
Now we slip on our gloves
Wipe the prints off the trigger
Enter these open spaces
Armed only with laughter

Let's do this, my darling
Risk our grace on the rocks below

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

2011-04-18T20:57:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

In the high places overlooking the valley of Embers. The god of the mountain, who looks like Veronica Lake with a Fu Manchu, wants Cedar to go down into the city and testify. They're dickering over terms.

Cedar ticks off her fingers: "Eternal youth, eternal health, eternal life unless I want to kill myself." Ask for more than you want, then walk it back.

The god is scandalized. "I can't do that!"

She tsks. "A wallet that never runs out of food, a key that opens any lock, and a horse to carry me anywhere in the world in seven steps."

"Be serious, would you? I'm a mountain, sweetheart. You want to know about rocks, erosion, avalanches?"

Cedar spits in her palm and slaps hands with the god. "Done and done."

It takes a couple of days. When she comes down from the high places, she's walking funny. Knowledge has its own mass, and she hasn't gotten used to hauling that extra weight around. Plus, she's stuffed with a bunch of prophecies, most of which boil down to "stop strip mining me, you dicks, or I'll dump a bunch of snow on your precious little houses."

Woman on Cliff

2011-04-18T20:56:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Starlight Park Diving Club, 1921

2011-04-18T20:51:00.006-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this poem came from this image.

After what seemed like an eternity, school finally let out. I practically ran to the amusement park every day that summer. I couldn’t wait to avoid the nagging drone of my mother’s voice, after her meeting with the principal that spring.

“Samantha excels academically, but she spends far too much of her class time rough housing and making coarse jokes with the boys. A certain amount of tomboy behavior is tolerated among the girls of the lower grades, of course, but Samantha is almost 14 years old now and must learn to socialize with girls her age. If she does not learn to deport herself as befits a young lady of feminine grace and poise, her troubles are only at their beginning, I’m afraid.”

Principal Rautch set her mouth into a firm minus sign and pointed her thick fingers toward my chest for emphasis. “Why, you can see for yourself, Mrs. Desborough, that she is fast approaching womanhood, regardless of how inappropriately she may choose to behave.”

A hot flush of rage crawls up my face just remembering. At the time, I carefully kept my head hung to hide my scowl and my blushing cheeks.

My mother nodded vigorously, “Yes Ma’am, don’t I know it? I assure you, I done my best to bring her up right and ladylike, but she’s always taken after her father. She’s an only child and her pa treated her like the son he never had. When he wasn’t spoiling her like a royal princess, that is. I tell ya, since he passed, it’s only gotten worse. She’s headstrong and it’s all I can do to keep her in dresses and skirts, she’s so full of vinegar and spit.”

“Yes, my sympathies for your loss. I know the loss of a parent is taxing on any family, but we must stay vigilant during this critical age, mustn’t we Mrs. Desborough?”

“Yes certainly, Principal. She’ll be a proper lady before I’m through, I assure you.”

After that, my mother was constantly reminding me to handle myself like a lady. The only relief I had was at the park. My mother only allowed me to go there because I pretended to hang around with other girls. Every day when I returned, I dutifully rattled off fake tidbits of gossip and hair tips to keep her happy.

But when I was actually there, I was free. I ran with the boys more brazenly than ever, as the first and only female member of the Starlight Park Diving Club.

Douglas Quinn tried to tough me out at first. “Why don’t you shove off with the other girls?”

He motioned toward them, dolled up and draped over the sand and along the dock, chewing gum and cringing every time a splash came within a breath of their elegant hair.

I just laughed, “Hang out with those silly harbor seals over there?” I flapped my hands and waddled around, barking until they all cracked up. The women did resemble a crowd of seals, laying out luxuriously and yelling snotty comments back and forth.

Regardless, any objections the boys may have had despite my goofing, vanished when they saw me dive. I was fearless going off even the highest diving board and I was constantly curling my body into stunning new shapes and twists when I dived. No boy could rival the speed of my flips or my crisp form as I slipped into the water.

When I straightened my body out and found the perfect zero point to enter the water, I wasn’t a girl or a boy. I closed my eyes and thought, “I am the torpedo bursting through enemy metal. I am the acrobat catching the trapeze every time. I am deadly as lightning, precise as a knife.”

The River Heraclitus

2011-04-17T22:35:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Sunday afternoon and her half-day off. She puts the dinner in the oven and slips out through the service door, plunges into the crowd and fleet-foots her way down to the river. In the sunlight her hair streams behind her a banner. The crowds that press against her are mighty varied, mighty varied: families in their church best, young sharpers out idling, flaneurs making spectacles of themselves, kids who've slipped the net, servants.

Down at the water, and it's Evangeline, honey! Hey baby! Come on in with us! How you doin kid? In and out of the changing booth, whistles whistles for her bare arms and then poomp into the water, eyes tight clamped and mouth snapped shut against the foulness but what a joy to move so. They roughhouse, they horse around, they gas each other, and in the distance sharp needy carnival music and shrieks for the roller coaster.

She climbs out and dives and dives and climbs out and shakes her hair back, lolls in the sun, so close to freedom. Anything could happen. She could run away and do, well, and do anything. What could be is a river she hangs above, arms clasped over her head, ready to dive.

The Swimmers

2011-04-17T22:34:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Ode to Gwili Andre

2011-04-17T12:26:00.001-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this poem came from this image.

“Her death in 1959 was a bizarre suicide after years of alcoholism and failed attempts to revive her stalled career. Alone in her Venice, California apartment she gathered together reams of publicity stills and promotional material from her early career and set it alight, allowing herself also to be consumed by the flames. She died later of her injuries."

After the movie ends
And the screen fades to black
I am the after exposure
On the backs of your eyes.

I am the unseen,
I was never there,
But the lack
Of my presence lingers.

You will miss me
Without knowing my name.

Jewel Heist

2011-04-17T00:10:00.002-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

We are such masters of disguise, The Great Detective and His Archnemesis, that we can never be sure which is which and who is who. Sometimes we slink through opium dens, the very soul of corruption and dissolution, and sometimes we ghost our way through the salons and fêtes of the idle rich, our long-fingered hands delicate and soft.

Tonight we are hunting each other at the opera. The Great Detective is elegant in a long velvet gown, wig piled high on his head, the fabulous scarlet emerald of Agafnd flashing at his aristocratic throat. Poor Inspector Cramer, who of course has no idea who the beautiful lady is that he's chaperoning, dances attendance, bulldog eyes locked on the many faucets of the scarlet emerald while The Great Detective flirts outrageously with him.

There's a commotion during the intermission. The jewel of Agafnd has been stolen! The Inspector is beside himself -- he never took his eyes off the rock, not for a second! The Great Detective laughs, low and thrillingly, and kisses his mortified cheek. "No one could have done more, my dear Cramer, but this was not a crime we were meant to prevent."

And with that, The Great Detective is gone, leaving the Inspector thinking -- and blushing! -- furiously.

Artifice

2011-04-16T15:54:00.003-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

For Every One You See: Comments

2011-04-16T15:49:00.000-04:00

Stephen did an interesting job on the gas mask picture, but all of that subtlety and nuance disappeared when we posted it on Blogger, due to the forced shrinking of the image.

Well, that's dumb. Here's a bigger version that you can actually see.

Pilgrimage

2011-04-16T15:36:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

They are a child army from where you sit in the jam, cockroaches scuttling dolorously from one side of the road to the other, heads gone heavy and long with their dust masks, backs bent against the wind, the light, notice.

You see the smoke before the dull crack of the shot works its way back to you, see the eddy in the parade before you spot the shooter. It all happens so languidly, so naturally: another round chambers into the rifle, another essene floats heavily down to the ground. They gather around the body for an instant and move on. They keep their faces down.

Hours pass. The shooter kills maybe ten more, but the river never stops, never slackens; never resists. Whoever it is grows tired of the game, or perhaps runs out of bullets, and still they stretch from horizon to horizon. Toward evening the last few trickle across the road, and the jam begins to move. By the time you make it to the front, there is nothing left of the bodies but a few slivers of glass, a few red smears from which you avert your eyes, and a trail leading off into the dunes, already being erased by the wind.

Feedback

2011-04-16T01:16:00.003-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this poem came from this image.

“I still don’t get why everyone’s wearing gas masks.”

“Because it’s a post apocalyptic wasteland, ok?”

“But how could anything at all still be alive if the air is so toxic? Wouldn’t all the animals and plants die? And then what would they eat? How are all the trees around them still alive?”

“Plants and animals aren’t affected somehow. Only humans.”

“Uh huh.”

“Whatever! There are plants and animals that can breathe the toxic air, ok?!”

“You mean, like cockroaches? Everyone’s living on nuked cockroaches?”

“Sure. Protein. Also, um, people look cool in gas masks.”

“Yeah. I mean, I like the picture and all. It just seems . . . over the top. A whole town of people wearing gas masks all the time?”

“Well it’s better than not being alive, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your sense of imagination anyway?”

“Ok, ok. It just raises questions, that’s all.”

She squinted at the photo, considering.

“I like the hats.”

“The hats?”

“Yeah. Like, it would be one thing to have this whole huge group of people, including children, wearing crazy gas masks and whatever. Even add in the uniforms. It’s creepy, but you know, it’s just creepy. But I think what really makes it, is the hats they’re wearing over the gas masks. It makes you think of them, standing in their bedrooms, pulling their gas masks on, and then being like, ‘Wouldn’t want to forget the hat! That really completes the look!’”

“You're dumb.”

"No, you are."

For Every One You See

2011-04-15T01:24:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Valax

2011-04-15T01:12:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Here's what Valax knows: everything true. Trees, cells, stars, atoms, cancer. The parents keep giving him stories: The Wind in the Willows, Five Children and It, The Wishgiver, Hatchet, but he sells them or gives them away or trades them for real books. He discovers math and devours it, starts with the Elements and sprints straight through to Galois. He falls in love with Galois, wallpapers his room with pictures of the dreamy Frenchman. So young! So brilliant! So dead!

The dad is baffled. "What's all this about, V? Wouldn't you... wouldn't you like, I don't know, a Pokemon poster or something? Harry... Harry Potter? That's what kids like, right? Er. Power Rangers?"

Valax snorts, doesn't even take his eyes off his book. He's reading about spiders now. Orb spiders, wolf spiders, funnel spiders... The dad hems and haws a little bit more and then drifts away awkwardly.

The mother takes him for a ride and tries to wait him out. She puts on some music and looks at him like, maybe we could be listening to this together? He hears it, and thinks of Pythagoras, thinks of Bach, thinks of the octave and the pentatonic scale, burrows back into his book. The mother smiles and shrugs and they drive on.

Jack Likes Spiders

2011-04-14T21:05:00.001-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this poem came from this image.

Jack likes spiders.
Spiders are the coolest.
They will weave a web
And turn your bug guts to jelly.

Jack named his pet spider
Chelicerea Pedipalps
Even though his brother said
That name was too long.

Jack’s mom hates spiders,
She says, “No spiders.”
But he keeps Chelicerea a secret
In a shoebox under the bed.

While Jack is at school
Chelicerea is spinning webs
To catch the doodle bugs
He will bring her after recess.

When Jack is feeling brave
He lets Chelicerea climb
Over the tops of his hands
And she feels like a whisper.

Jack wonders what he tastes like
When she brushes over his fingers
With her tiny, sensitive hairs.

Books About Spiders

2011-04-14T10:40:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Isabella Blow

2011-04-13T22:50:00.002-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this poem came from this image.

She started to suspect she might be the reincarnation of Rasputin by the time she figured out what was going on. Admittedly, maybe she wasn’t entirely serious about killing herself at first. The attempts started small. She chased a bottle of wine with an alarming quantity of sleeping pills, but woke up the next morning with the worst hangover of her life and still very decidedly alive.

The next time was on an outdoorsy, cabin-in-the-mountains getaway. Around 5:00 in the morning, she awoke before her family and friends and hiked over to the lake. She put stones in her pockets as a nod to Virginia Woolf and walked into the center. Even at its deepest point, the lake was only deep enough for her to be at eye level and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop herself from tilting her head up and gasp with panic before she could drown. She returned for breakfast, soggy and heartbroken.

Her third attempt happened more impulsively in the middle of her daily commute. A very sad, bluesy song came on the radio and instead of braking at the next stoplight, she hit the gas and headed straight for the back of an idling semi. Right before impact, she realized the back of the truck was painted with a huge, smiling Mr. Peanut. She thought how intensely stupid it was that this would be the last image she’d see. When she came to in the hospital, she had a terrible case of whiplash and bruises all over her face. She wept for days during the recovery and the nurses learned not to bring her any of the desserts sprinkled with nuts.

After that, she decided that if she truly wanted to die, she would need to get serious. She took a long walk and made her way to the Hammersmith Flyover. It wasn’t as high as Golden Gate Bridge, wasn’t some dramatic monument to industry, just a regular overpass over concrete. All she wanted was to kill herself. She figured it would do. She took three deep breaths to compose herself and jumped. There was a horrible snapping noise when she landed and she never even lost consciousness. Her ankles took all the weight of the fall and her brain and vital organs were untouched. While she waited for the ambulance to arrive, she wondered if she’d ever walk again. She wondered if she’d hurt herself badly enough this time that she wouldn’t be able to finish the job.

She was absolutely, entirely incompetent at suicide and she couldn’t figure out why. All these methods she had tried, but some force always seemed to protect her. She had forgotten her trademark: her outrageous, fantastical hats. She remembered when she tried on her first hat as a child. She stood before the mirror in her mother’s pink satin cloche hat and solemnly pulled its black netting down over her eyes. Her image was magically transformed, more dramatic and adult. From then on, she wore hats all the time and they made her feel safer. They magically removed her from everyone around her and now they were continuing to keep her.

For her last attempt, she remembered to remove her hat before swallowing a glass of weedkiller. And this time, bareheaded on the bathroom floor, she was finally allowed to die.

All Communists Are Liars

2011-04-13T21:42:00.002-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

The woman whom they've named Isabella (ironically -- a queen's name; meaning, traitor, patrona, historically God's oath; their little joke) watches herself in the mirror, watches them flicker and fade out on the walls of the room. They won't reveal themselves to her directly anymore, but she can still see them. When they are listening, watching she sees them, their long black shadows cast on the wall. "Who knows what evil lurks," she murmurs, a phrase new to her vocabulary, learned from the radio, spaced between the numbers and the melodies. "The shadows know." The shadows reach for her with bony hands, but they can't touch her, no, not really, only listen and watch and judge.

It pleased them to call her pretty, to reassure her that she was lovely, and wasn't that a gift? They told her she was powerful, a weapon needing to be used, that the others would be weak against her, weak as they were not (no, though of course they could recognize what would inspire weakness in the others, they knew the others so well, of course), that she had a mission. She burns with their words, brought to life by the words they'd put in her mouth, written on her forehead. Isabella, among others. A joke -- "god's," and there were no more gods, "oath," and there were no more oaths. Only the inevitable, infinite revolution of the wheel, promising violence, freedom and change.

Cameo

2011-04-13T01:06:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

The Ornithopter

2011-04-12T12:30:00.002-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this poem came from this image.

Motion with lift,
Speed against weight,
Simple principles
Measured and divided
Until they compose flight.

Bike with wings
Rises against gravity.
Dangerous thoughts
Suspend and glide
Before they dive.

The Gravity of Androgeus

2011-04-12T04:16:00.002-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

When my brother's name was hidden from me, mazed in doublespeak, twined in euphemism, the older one, the tragic birth, such a pity, even then I knew the stories, drank them deep with my milk. Daedalus, inventor, murderer, exile, kinslayer. How he grew so impudent, so sodden with drink and love for my mother that my father could bear it no longer and threw him and his sullen boy in the tower where they could dream away the years in gentle perversion and harmless blasphemy. How they broke free at last, how one died, how one flew on without a backward glance. O, great daring! Even my father's magisterial fury was tempered with admiration.

He was my inmost heart, second only to the king and queen my parents; o, to have cracked wide my vasty wings and soared out over the unsettled sea! To have compassed this fairy earth! It is one thing to want a thing, and another thing indeed to know it might be done. If done once, why not again? Did we not have his notes, did we not have wealth enough? Did we not already hold every land the sun touches? Not gods, perhaps, nor their maddened, wild children, but more than human. I was born to a higher place.

Ornithopter

2011-04-12T03:33:00.003-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

The Swamp

2011-04-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

He came from the Louisiana marshlands and a family with more children than they could feed. When the kids weren’t in school, they hunted the swamps for creatures to add to Ma Rosalie’s stews and gumbos. Only one picture was taken of him as a child for a blurry family portrait. He was the runt of the family, and looked skinny and sickly looking, face covered in muddy streaks. He had probably been stalking toads or hunting nutria through the bullrushes before being called back to the house.

As a young man, he burned to leave the swamp’s soupy air, the endless swarms of insects, the Spanish moss hanging over everything like a deathly pallor. He studied hard, read all the books he could find, and won a scholarship to study law far away in a great Northern city. He never returned to his family home and spoke to his relatives only rarely. They were slow in responding to letters. Neither his parents nor any of his siblings shared his readerly bent. And they were even slower in getting telephone service. Not that it would have mattered. He did not know what to tell them about his life now anyhow.

The city was everything the swamp wasn’t. In every corner of the city, the will of man declares victory over the landscape. Streets and buildings are planned and designed and built, entirely undisturbed by the hungerings of the natural world. For swamp people, nature was the the absolute, savage sovereign. Any attempts by humans to stake their claim on it, or even to separate themselves from the wilds around them, always failed. There was no defeating the creeping moss and ferns and vicious things.

His family could not understand his new life and he made sure that no one in the city knew anything about where he came from. He preferred his solitude. And by the time he retired, he was one of the wealthiest, most prominent attorneys in the state. As his health declined though, recurring nightmares set in that he couldn’t shake.

They started as an ordinary day in his law office. He would be working at his desk in his favorite dark grey wool suit, smoking his pipe. But he would pause in the middle of thinking through some argument he was writing and casually look down at himself. Instead of legs, he’d see a crawfish’s segmented lower half. Spindly crawfish legs would twitch and flail at him. He’d realize that his right arm was now a newt’s, staining the legal documents he was working on with a dark slime.

He couldn’t see his left arm, still shadowed under his desk. He’d try to somehow, however he could, stop himself from looking, but he wouldn’t be able to resist. He’d lift it out of the shadows and where his hand should have been, he’d find a baby alligator’s smiling, snapping mouth.

These nightmares only ceased when he made a final change to his will. When he died, they returned his body to his family. They buried him deep in the swamp behind the house.

The Illusion of Objectivity

2011-04-11T00:29:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Analysis. Migration habits of swallows, shell patterns on malnourished turtles, the annual death rate of the Coho salmon, the number of text messages sent and received per capita in major American cities, the annual number of obscenity charges per county in Massachusetts between 1890 and 1960, dispersal patterns of oil spills in North Africa. Signal to noise ratios, population shifts, rainfall in Nova Scotia. Strange music.

Dissection. The hidden, internal geography of mice, toads, snakes, lizards, sparrows, cats, dogs, apes, cadavers. Ontology, phylogeny. Organs, glands, systems. The body as cybernetic organism, the body as population. Communication between subsystems, optimization, development. Sweet heavy smell of formaldehyde.

Observation. Stress. Weight to load ratio, arches, spans, thrust, stability. The symbolism of bridges, cathedrals, towers, ossuaries, cenotaphs. Iron, marble, granite, coral, cables, struts, spars. Balance, tension, opposition. Symmetry by necessity. Misdirection. Gunpowder and sabotage.

The simplest ways are best. Messages tattooed under hair and spread on washing lines, sewn into skirt linings, bounced around the ionosphere, carried in memory. Skill, knowledge, insight mean little. What there is, is data, aggregation, compilation, chaos. Simple rules generate infinite complexity, and random chance and god are isomorphic.

Alligator Man

2011-04-11T00:28:00.001-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Kitsunetsuki

2011-04-10T19:01:00.006-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

"Strange is the madness of those into whom demon foxes enter." –Lafcadio Hearn

Her mother had warned her many times not to go into the forest after dark and every day she returned to the house when the sun began to set. Lately she had hardly gone out at all though, even during the the day. Since her monthly bleeding started, her mother increased her load of chores to prepare her for wifehood.

Since she first learned to run, she always preferred to be outside. Indoors, she felt self-conscious. Her body looked awkward in the dresses her mother chose for her; her hard, lean angles smothered in ruffles and lace. She was too clumsy for women’s arts, causing disasters wherever she went. And she was too distracted for fine work that called for close attention and delicacy.

Without time to restore herself in the wilds behind the house, each night she was full of nervous energy and racing thoughts. In her moments of insomnia, she reached under the bed for the hidden boxes of small frogs and newts she kept as pets. She felt calmer running her fingers over their cool, wet skin and feeding them the small insects she caught as she went about her daily work.

She thought of how her mother had found a little toad once. Its nocturnal croaking gave it away before she could set it free. Her mother opened its box, reached in coolly, and threw it to the cat.

“Whoever heard of a wife who kept crawling, horrible things as pets? How will you ever be fit to marry? Daughter, your sweet face and brown curls won’t matter if you keep the devil’s hobbies.”

Her skin itched all over at just the thought of it. How weird her mother’s eyes looked. She resolved that tonight, no matter what punishment she got, she would sneak out of the house.

The wooden floor felt strangely warm under her bare feet. She closed her eyes and sent prayers into the old boards. If she concentrated hard enough, she imagined she could detect a faint buzzing in her toes, guiding her around the creaking planks. Somehow she made no sound crossing the endless passage and made it outside at last.

She felt better right away. Even though it was late fall and she wore only a thin shift, there was no chill in the air to discourage her. The night transformed the forest. The trees seemed stronger and taller silhouetted against the stars and she sensed the presence of new creatures, awake and watching her, but she was not afraid. It felt like a game she was playing with an old friend wearing an elaborate disguise.

A high-pitched cry rose in the distance, an inhuman mimic of a girl’s scream, and she decided to walk toward it and see where it would lead. As she went deeper into the woods, she saw a shimmering white glow that changed shapes as the wind blew through the leaves. Although she hadn’t been outside long, when she looked behind her she realized she couldn’t see the outline of the house anymore.

Still, she walked on and came to a pond she’d never seen before. The glow had only been the moon’s reflection seen from afar. At the water’s edge, a white fox awaited her. She knelt down before it and buried her fingers in its soft fur. The hairs changed to tiny needles under her fingernails.

When her mother tried to rouse her the next morning, she found only the shell of the girl’s body, covered in fine, pale hair.

What Remains

2011-04-10T13:43:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

She's eavesdropping. She's pretending to examine the stuffed fox, but really she's eavesdropping. She can only hear half of the conversation, and she doesn't understand most of it, but she loves listening, anyway. Nobody's smarter than her mother.

"...incredibly racist, and it's bad fiscal policy on top of that. The economy is driven from the bottom, not from the top, and..."

The fox is a little threadbare in places. She picks at the loose threads, trying to make a hole big enough to get her finger inside. There's nothing in there but stuffing, obviously. Probably.

"...most effective creator of new economic opportunity and new jobs. Uh huh, right. That's what I'm talking about! Tax breaks? Even if they were interested in staying in the country..."

Its glass eyes glitter at her. They're misted over now, white and blind. She rubs them with the corner of her shirt.

"...the larger you are, the less you pay. But even if they were staying here and paying back into the system, you're just not getting the day to day spending..."

She reaches in to touch its leathery tongue. The eyes blink and focus on her, and the jaw slowly closes on her hand. She yelps.

"...just aren't enough millionaires to make a noticeable... oh, hang on a second. What's going on, Viv? Oh, honey, what did you do? Listen, I've got to go, we've got a minor situation over here. No, nothing too serious, Vivian's just hurt herself somehow. I'll call you back. Yeah, thanks. Bye!"

Her mother comes and lifts her up, kisses her soundly. "What happened, kiddo? Come on, we'll get you loose. Hush, now, hush. You're very brave. That's a good girl."

Atavism

2011-04-10T02:31:00.001-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Exit

2011-04-10T02:23:00.001-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

She told us she was going to the grocery store,
Looked back one last time before she left,
And now I dream about her chestnut eyes
And her autumn colored dress.

She said she would pick up the meat
And I imagine the steaks
Wrapped in butcher’s string and white paper
To match her white gloves and white hat.

I think of the nape of her neck
As she leans over the cutting board,
The precise square chunks of beef,
Red jewels of flesh on glass.

But she never came back.

She left us for science.
She did not need our love.
Only a clean, still lab
And faith in method.

Many Will Enter, Few Will Win

2011-04-10T02:18:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

This is what Sylvia keeps in her bag:

First of all, always a book. Not always the same book, obviously. Whatever she's reading. Right now she's about halfway through the new Highsmith book. It's about lesbians.

Secondly, gum. She's trying to quit smoking. Smoking isn't ladylike, plus she thinks it makes her teeth yellow. So she chews gum like a maniac. Always gum. She's minty-fresh with desperation.

Third, a copy of the DRF. She's a religious reader of 'Bloodlines.' Leon Rasmussen's great.

Fourth, her K-22 Masterpiece. It's a beautiful gun, and you never know when a beautiful gun will come in handy. The well-dressed lady is never without a gun, as her mother always said.

Other miscellanea, including keys, pens, lighters, scrap paper, spare change, lipstick, and so on as she needs them. Including, most importantly today, a pair of kid gloves and a clean handkerchief, and hadn't they come in handy. She's listened to Dragnet, she knows what they could do with a set of fingerprints. Before she leaves, she does one last quick pass with the handkerchief, making sure to get the doorknob, decanter and glass. They'll know someone was in here, but as long as they can't peg her for it, that doesn't matter. It's a long, long ride to Chino, and she's not going to punch her own ticket, if she can help it.

Revenge!

2011-04-08T20:36:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Barnstormer Betty

2011-04-08T12:58:00.009-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

"Around U.S. Navy bases, bars still dependent on military customers introduced 'foxy boxing.' These entrepreneurs believed that having women wrestle and box each other on stage would make the American sailors more eager to have sex. Women, in turn, learned that they would be paid for their performance only if at the end of a bout they could show bruises or had drawn blood."
- paraphrased from Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War

"Women's boxing is hounded by a widely held assumption that the female body plus violent aggression equals pornography." -Carlo Rotella, Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesman and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

"A flying mare is when you get a girl by the hair of the head and pull her over your shoulder, then slam her to the mat as hard you can. And I love doing that." - The Fabulous Moolah

It started as a joke that wasn't funny. Betty's new boyfriend, the boxer, was teaching her some moves.

"You know, there's a lot a real jokers in this world. With the lousy security in this joint, forget about it! I don't know how many times there's been some no good, two bit grizzler nipping at my tits like I'm some kind of free range bovine in a milk bar! One a these days, a swift knee to the groin might not cut it."

She was showing off to the other girls, quick and light jabs at a blank opponent.

"They call this one the Candy Cane!" She made a vicious twisting gesture with her fist and threw her whole body into a punch to the costumes rack, sending the whole mess over.

"What's that racket?" Nick busted in right away.

"Just showing off my on-the-ropes technique, Coach."

"The charming influence of that palooka you're making it with, I gather."

"You betta watch out callin' him that." And she faked a cross to the chin.

He dodged and then froze, making the screwed up face that was the gloomy omen of all of Nick's worst schemes.

"What's tha matta? Oh, here we go . . . " Betty dropped her wrists, but it was too late.

The club was slow this summer. There was no money for a real revamp like their competition though, with classy decor and rainbow neon signs, or Nick was too cheap for that anyway. The Happy Clam had the same peeling paint and sticky floors it always had. Even the peppy burlesque figures on the front windows looked weary. During the day, most people were off the boardwalk and on the beach anyway. Without customers and without foot traffic, the club was sunk and the only solution was some gimmick to try to pack them in.

"We'll call it foxy boxing! We'll stage it on the beach and it'll bring all kinds of low lifes in here!"

The ladies groaned but by the next week, they all had hand-me-down boxing gloves that were so oversized they almost flew off their hands when they punched. Not that anyone punched much, besides Betty. Compared to her, the other girls looked like sad cupcakes melting in the sun. They were city girls through and through. They'd made eyes at a thousand men, but hadn't made a fist more than twice. Betty, on the other hand, was a farm girl from a family of 6 brothers and with a shitkicking Pop, who worked her like hell until she finally ran away.

At first, she pulled her punches to keep from hurting anybody or "bruising the merchandise," as Nick phrased it. But her fists wanted to connect. She itched for real knockouts. And it wasn't long until she found one, like it or not, with a right uppercut to Nancy's lantern jaw. Betty quit before she could be fired. She'd found her calling.

Pyrrhic Victory

2011-04-08T02:20:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

"So," sneers Phyllis, "looks like it's just the two of us now."

Cherry Boom-Boom titters and cinches the laces tight on her gloves. They circle each other, feet sliding and uncertain on the sand.

"Do you know how long I've waited for this, darlin? Do you know how many nights I've fallen asleep seeing your face--" (she spits) "--bloody and trashed, and knowing that I'd be the one to trash it for you?"

Cherry Boom-Boom titters and sends a tremendous roundhouse punch careening into Phyllis's face. Something pops in her neck and down she goes. This would be where the referee would begin the count (lazily; she's not getting up again), if there were a referee, but there isn't, so Cherry Boom-Boom just starts peeling off her gloves, whistling through her teeth.

Phyllis lurches to her feet. Her head hangs limply on her broken neck; she has to prop it up against her fist to talk. "I swore I would kill you when I was eight, darlin, and I keep my promises."

Cherry Boom-Boom swallows her gum and steps in close, not laughing. Her fists piston in and out, breaking ribs, rupturing organs. When she finally stops, she's soaked in blood and Phyllis is a red ruin, her face like the inside of a can of dog food. Phyllis titters through broken teeth, and Cherry Boom-Boom would run away if she could, only the sand sucks at her legs and won't let her go.

Schism

2011-04-07T10:47:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

White-Bear-King

2011-04-07T04:03:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

"Have you had a finer seat?" asked White-Bear-King Valemon.

"I have not," said Megara, and took a bone from out his thigh.

"Have you seen as far?" asked White-Bear-King Valemon.

"I have not," said Alecto, and took his voice from out his throat.

"Have you ever ridden as fast?" rasped White-Bear-King Valemon.

"I have not," said Tisiphone, and took his heart from out his chest.

A wreath of gold and cunningly wrought had White-Bear-King Valemon, and this he wore about his neck. Tisiphone rode upon his shoulders and toyed with its leaves, delighting in the play of soft light upon her hands. Boneless, voiceless, heartless, White-Bear-King Valemon ran on, bearing the youngest of three to his castle.

By night he came to her clothed in the flesh of a man, and had no name. Her teeth were sharp in the hollow of his neck, her venom lashed him to a fury of love. After a year and a day she woke and White-Bear-King Valemon was cold beside her, and all the castle was empty. She drove her nails beneath his shining coat and peeled his skin like an orange; the walk home was long, and winter was cruel.

Antiquing

2011-04-07T00:10:00.008-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Every Sunday afternoon he would walk down the long row of antique stores. During these outings, he would always have this feeling, this terrible nagging at the front of his brain, that he urgently needed to find something. It was one very particular, very specific something. Or maybe a collection of things? The constant calling of it after him worked on his nerves; made his teeth scrape and his eyebrows knit together in a constant expression of worry.

For all that though, he never seemed like a desperate man. He would spend hours in a single shop, but he wasn’t obsessive or fastidious like many of the regulars. Anyone watching would only notice the care he took in examining things. He’d pick up an object, turn it in his hands delicately and close his eyes for a moment, as though he was gauging its weight, and then he’d place it back on the shelf. He felt sure that as long as he was calm enough and careful enough, he’d know whatever it was when he saw it.

For how often he was there, you’d expect him to be friendly with the shop staff. Usually the stores had a single owner who was also the sole clerk. He certainly got to know their taste in music and he’d listen in to their conversations. He preferred to keep to himself though. Plus, he worried that if he grew too close to one store owner or another, he’d lose focus on his quest.

His favorite place was probably the vintage toy store or maybe the rare bookshop. He never grew tired of pouring over the little, brightly colored miniatures that populated the toy store’s shelves. He also loved to flip through the books, reading over their stilted language, their illustrations’ old-fashioned flourishes.

After all this time though, he was surprised one day by a new store. A dilapidated furniture factory which had sat vacant in the midst of the other antique places had finally been converted. He walked in, anxious to see what new wares it had to offer.

Mostly its narrow, winding aisles were crowded with heavy, expensive furniture, which he found dull. He walked through row after row of oak bureaus and cherry wardrobes, bedposts and bookshelves. In addition to furniture, they stocked old musical and electrical equipment. Jukeboxes, 50’s televisions, and gaping Victrolas with bells that could swallow his whole upper body.

He also noticed that they seemed to specialize in taxidermy. Plenty of the other antique stores sold novelty moose heads and antler racks, the kitschy pseudo-legacy of this western city, but this was different. The entire bodies of exotic animals had been taxidermied here. Not only that, they had been strangely placed through the store. He wasn’t sure if it was intentional, a macabre joke of some kind, but several were hidden in the shadowed space under a desk or tucked between two larger pieces.

As he walked through the aisles, he wouldn’t see them at first, but he felt watched. Then suddenly, he’d catch a flash of some monstrous thing out of the corner of his eye and after a moment’s jolt, he’d see that it was one of the poor, stuffed animals. Even after he figured out what was happening, he felt unsettled and distracted.

He turned another corner and some creature, a cat maybe, leapt at him. He let out an involuntary welp and stumbled backwards. Instead of crashing into the furniture though, horrible furry arms enclosed him. He covered his face with his hands and hunched over his knees.

There was a long moment of wordless terror until he realized he was sitting in a chair. The legs and arms of a bear had been patched together and used to cover the limbs of an armchair.

The force of his laughter made his body shake, his chest wheeze. He ached with joy and forgot what he had been looking for.

Valemon

2011-04-06T15:00:00.011-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

For the Gentlemen

2011-04-06T00:21:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Everything proceeds by signals and signs – hats, handkerchiefs, bandages; angles, degrees, subtlety. The Gentlemen do not know each other ahead of time, never see each other again. Their religion is silence and misdirection.

They pass each other on the stairs and fall into step, as if accidentally. The crowd pushes them together against the railing; one lights a cigarette, one idly watches the sun reflecting off the cliffs. Recognition is never confident, always perilous; their city breeds mistrust.

(At night: knives, poisons, ropes, falls. The balconies are famously feared, famously braved. The Gentlemen run riot, mad with revelry. They die by the hundreds and are ignored.)

In bathrooms they are most daring. They tape messages to toilet tanks, under counters. They write in wax on mirrors. The white hush of running water whispers with their rusty, unused voices.

They are loyal, each to his single cause, and because they are loyal they are dangerous. Their keep their loyalties private. They form uneasy partnerships, alliances which dissolve as quickly as they form. They trace strange currents, erratic orbits, and trust in a plan that no one knows.

Stay Careful

2011-04-06T00:02:00.002-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

I am digging out from under
The mountain of my own head.
No sound gets out,
No shouts or taps against collapsed walls
To confirm that I am living.

I am a plain white farmhouse
The jewel on the edge of the prairie.
See the empty driveway
And the windows full of blue light.

I keep my mouth
Closed around my tongue
And my fingers
Over my thumb.
I make a fist.

Fair Warning

2011-04-05T12:00:00.003-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Alexander

2011-04-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

This is a guest post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Her rise was swift and decisive,
But the victories did not satisfy.

Every battle was fought again,
Pressed in wax.

Her troops surged through twenty countries
Enemy lines turning like receding ocean tides.

She was still roaring them forward,
With cracking lungs.

Her soldiers pushed deeper.
They would endure.

She wrapped the flag over her shoulders
And the branched bones of a bat’s wings took hold.

The Natural

2011-04-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

The Natural has been working this job for a long, long time.
Every night for centuries, a little bit of razzle dazzle.
The murmur of the crowd, the impatience, the boredom.
The moment -- just one, but that's enough -- of silence.

The Natural straightens its hat and licks an eyebrow smooth.
The Natural lets its eyes loose to check the line of its high-collared coat.
The Natural gives one last shine to its buttons.
The Natural squares its shoulders and spreads the curtains wide.

The Natural owns this space, owns the cheapness of it, the tackiness.
Stale perfume, dirty shirts, the crinkle of cellophane.
Reek of sex under bleachers, boozy piss, chewing gum and graffiti.
The Natural keeps it all written down.
The Natural remembers.

The Natural spreads the joy of music.
The Natural can't stop dancing.
The Natural lifts its feet and rises through the air.
The Natural moves in and out of the crowd like a shark.

The Natural is tired of war.
Always fighting somewhere, always hating, always killing.
The Natural remembers a better time.
Children don't know what's hard and what's easy, but the Natural knows.

The Natural can feel the crowd going restless.
Peaks and valleys, it wears them on its skin.
The Natural slides its sleeves back.
The moment -- just one, but that's enough -- of silence.

One More Battle

2011-04-04T00:00:00.001-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Hello Cruel World

2011-04-03T00:02:00.002-04:00

This is a guest image post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

This house must be baby proofed.

We must wind the sharp corners in cloth.
We must lock the medicine cabinets.
We must mount gates across the open spaces.

Small objects will be kept in a safe deposit box.
Low hanging curtains will be cut.
Scissors will be sealed with string.

Move the chemicals.
Kill the houseplants.
Seal the outlets.

Simple Surgery

2011-04-03T00:01:00.010-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

It's been forever since the Aged has had any real work, so these days she mostly scrapes by. Children have always liked her for some reason, so she does a lot of nannying. She amuses herself on slow days by carefully drawing out their lives; she doesn't bite the threads anymore, but her teeth remember the soft thrum of a death, and for a while it's nice just to remember.

She lives in her head, lives in her memories. Days when she was a force greater than gravity, less than fate. Passionless days, and busy: the Girl's wheel humming blissfully, the Woman's clever hands spanning beginning to end, her sharp teeth always meeting, click, decisively. Interesting work, always interesting. So many lives. She can remember how each one felt between her jaws.

She's stopped in front of a department store, looking idly at row after row of bright steel shears, when the Girl finds her. "Hey," she says.

"Hey," says the Aged. "Long time."

"I've been looking all over for you. Listen, we're putting the band back together." The Aged shivers; her child starts to cry, uneasily. "Are you in?"

"Oh, yes," says the Aged, and smiles, long yellow teeth sharp again with purpose. "You can always count on me."

Auspicious

2011-04-03T00:00:00.003-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see his version. You can see more of his work here.

Red Car

2011-04-02T00:02:00.007-04:00

This is a guest image post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

Too hot to stay indoors. Leo barely thought about it, even though it was early in the morning and her mother was still sleeping. She couldn’t wait to ask for the car. She had to get out. If she was driving, at least she was bursting the dead, wet air apart.

The air conditioner was broken and so she rolled both windows down, slapped the locks on both doors, and almost enjoyed the sting of the steering wheel under her fingers. She tried to hold her skin away from the leather seat, but it kept sticking against her legs anyway as her shorts rode up, and her whole body felt heavy under the iron sun. Looking across the prairies surrounding the house, she thought she would give anything just to be buried underground instead of running like a dog over the boiling surface of the earth.

She would try to reach some wooded place, a hundred miles away, a shady grove and babbling water. At first, she let the whine of cicadas drown out her thoughts, but as they grew louder she felt a panic rising in her chest. The radio worked at least and she rolled the dial over until she found some low country blues to turn up loud. She could measure out the time left until dusk in distance. How many miles per hour to reach the relief of a black sky?

After two hours, the red arrow on the dash pointed empty and she pulled off the road for gas.

“Hot as hell on earth today,” the old, worn face of the gas attendant muttered as he rang up her orange Nehi.

“You speak the truth, sir. You wouldn’t know of any place to swim around here?”

“There’s an old dirt access road, next to an abandoned shed down the way. That winds back into the hills a ways to the creek. It’s flood season though and the current’s too fast for swimming.”

“That’ll have to do. Thank you.”

She swallowed down the bright flavored soda and threw the car back in gear.

Soon she was tearing down the empty dirt road and for miles she couldn’t see anything but bleached out brush in all directions. Hills loomed in the distance, however, and as soon as the road finally curved beyond them she saw a stand of elms. She eased off the shoulder and parked. She took off her shoes, to let her toes drag through the damp, cold grass, and headed for the trees. She heard the sound of water and soon stood beside its red brown rushing.

The attendant was right. It was too big and fast for even wading. One of the tree’s thick branches spanned the water though and she thought she might be able to lay out on it, perched in the cool air above. She had loved climbing trees. As a teenager she was too often mad at the way her body no longer felt like it belonged to her, too consciousness of her awkward limbs to reward them with a good climb.

Her muscle memory was still with her, feeling around the bark’s grooves and making the flowing shifts of balance from one branch to the next. She edged out onto the last branch and then carefully, laid her body down along the full length, her arms and legs wrapped around to keep her steady. She pressed her forehead against the wood, stared down at the blurred rapids below, and dreamed that she had found the one holy branch where she could wait the whole fucking summer out.

Flight

2011-04-02T00:01:00.001-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

You come to in the driver's seat, hands steady on the wheel and the road throbbing away into darkness. You don't think you've been asleep, but there's a long empty stretch back of your eyes and you can't push through it to the other side. What time is it? Where's your city?

There's nothing out there. The headlights throw you back a circle of trees, a ribbon of highway, jewelflash of animal eyes darting from shoulder to shoulder. No stars, no moon, just a dim red glow like a banked fire. Off on the horizon flashes of lightning. The car growls beneath you like a beast all teeth and wild hunger.

Morning catches you miles from anywhere. It's been hours, and you haven't seen a sign of anything you recognize, not so much as a telephone pole or stop sign. The gas gauge hasn't dropped an inch in all that time, not so much as a flick of the needle, and you're starting to figure things out. You're not sure who whammied you, or why they wanted you out of the way, but you're getting home if it kills you. You leave your shoes nailed to the red dirt of nowhere, and trace the anchor of their wandering back up the river of asphalt.

The Great Escape

2011-04-02T00:00:00.005-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see the original version. You can see more of his work here.

Frog Eyes

2011-04-01T00:02:00.000-04:00

This is a guest image post by Marissa. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

I first caught a glimpse of her when she moved in next door. But I saw only the swaying of her lithe figure, her face obscured by a large Chinese lamp she was carrying. She turned the corner into her place, trailing its black cord and the smell of gardenias behind her.

My building was an old pre-war walk-up, converted from a glamorous, but discreet hotel where fading stars would go to drink and wait out their decline. It had not changed much since that time. In the hallways, the floors were covered in thick carpeting, the walls in a pattern of gold florets, and the ceiling lights glowed dim behind smoked glass bells. The place was coated in a shabby hush, sinking us into the desire to be left alone, Greta Garbo style. We pretended ourselves more successful, more temporary guests from an earlier time.

When I saw her next, she was opening her mailbox in the lobby, and I caught a flash of elaborate, white blonde braids above a tailored dress. I noticed her silk stockings, her high heels, and the milky skin of her neck. I could picture the even symmetry of her face, the shape of her clear, sad eyes, to match her hair.

Late at night, I thought I could hear the muffled sound of her door buzzer or maybe it was the ring of her telephone, through the wall. Then there would be jazz music and the low hum of voices. I imagined her breathless, in the arms of one of those unsaveable boyfriends, some handsome, broken musician type.

Months passed and one night when I went out on my balcony, I found her out as well, chain smoking and staring at the street lamps below. I still couldn’t see her face at first, but then she turned. She looked just as I had pictured her; the porcelain skin, the perfect nose, the almond eyes. But I noticed something was off, her right eye was slightly less open, glazed over, and as she tilted toward me, I saw the glint of green glass. She reached across the gap and in a cigarette scarred voice, said “Hello. Nice to meet ya. My name's Suzanne, but friends call me Frog Eyes.”

The Ten O'Clock Hour

2011-04-01T00:01:00.000-04:00

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

She takes one last drag on her cigarette and waits for the light over the camera to go on. Her hands are shaking, but she wills them steady. What's there left to be afraid of?

we are done, ladies and gentlemen.

The studio is silent and black beyond the circle of the lights. It's taken her eight hours just to get everything in place and ready, eight hours of backbreaking labor, and for what? To send a message out to the emptiness that's all that's left of the world?

you know what's happened. i'm not here to tell you the news. no one's here to tell you the news. there's no news left to tell.

It feels wrong, sitting here like this. She's still waiting for the door to crash open and Morgan to order her out of the studio, off of the lot, out of the business, even though she's seen him, or what's left of him, crumpled over the top of his desk. The gun had burned a hole in the carpet, that beautiful luxury of carpet, and she cried when she saw it.

if you're watching this, if there's anyone else out there to see this, i just wanted to say goodbye. i just wanted to say that. goodbye. thank you, and goodbye.

Suggestive

2011-04-01T00:00:00.071-04:00

This is a guest image post by Stephen Cole. Roll over the image with your mouse to see his version. You can see more of his work here.

The City of Stones

2011-03-17T16:11:00.000-04:00

"So, like, tell me," slurs Cedar, who is drunk again. "Tell me. Tell me..."

"Yes?" says her new friend, who always seems to be laughing at something. "Tell you...?"

"Tell me about the stones. You're famous for them! There's got to be a story there."

Her new friend smiles. Cedar squints, trying to fix her friend's face in her mind. She can't quite hold it together. Everything dissolves into bits and pieces: a nose, a mouth, two eyes, cheeks, planes and hollows. None of it means anything, none of it adds up to a face.

"Oh, who knows?" Nothing looks like anything. "All the walls, maybe?" Cedar looks at her hands and all she can see are fingers, thumbs, knuckles, skin and bones. Not a hand. "There used to be a lot of rock walls before it all got replaced with concrete." She starts hyperventilating. "Hey, are you okay? You'd better drink some water."

Her friend is gone. She's adrift in a sea of unconnected images and signs. She casts about desperately for something to hang on to, some solid place of rest; for an instant, just before she blacks out, she suddenly gets it.

Lago

2011-03-16T03:48:00.000-04:00

It's a grey afternoon when Cedar gets off the bus in Lago, and it's a grey afternoon, hours later, when she stumbles exhausted into the grimy hostel room she's renting. It's been raining the whole time, a thin, mean-spirited drizzle that soaks everything. Her room sweats, a greasy ooze that cuts channels through the black mold that fuzzes the walls. She's had better rooms.

The sun never sets. The street lights never turn off. Abandoned cars are everywhere; she takes one and hacks her way around the city. Business is nonexistent. She drives for hours and never sees more than a couple people hurrying through the rain. Block after block is empty. Lights flicker in every window, but uneasily, automatically. They might be programmed.

The only life she sees is at the bus station. There's a constant trickle of people in and out of Lago. They never stay long -- the lively ones simply shuffle across to another bus and are gone. The others -- the dead-eyed ones -- drift out into the twilight streets and disappear. She rolls after them, engine purling, but they're gone, so many forgotten memories.