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Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
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12:23 pm - Update On Handwritten Novels
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| Friday, July 18th, 2008
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2:29 am - Poor Ol' Maureen
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"Bring them over here, now!"
He bellowed through the frost.
I carried a bundle of sticks to his swollen hands.
"Don't cry!" he shouted again.
I knew it was because he was worried that my face would freeze. Become as delicate as porcelain. That I would drop from my snowy shelf. Shatter.
And only the trees would remain.
Without a word I told him that I loved him. A great breath of Christmas colored sky opened. It began to snow.
"Oh fuck, oh fuck," he said, and tried desperately to make a fire but I think he was just hoping for a miracle.
We're atheists, and we're already fucked.
Allowing my body to sink into the snow, I knew it was over. Before he could swear again I fell fast asleep.
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| Thursday, July 10th, 2008
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11:53 pm - Whiskey Birds: Part IX
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"Hey Rumy," Hank yelled up the stairs, "do you know someone named Elissa?"
"Yeah," Rumy shouted back, opening her bedroom door. "Why?"
"She's on the phone for you."
Rumy produced a wildly enthusiastic paroxysm and ran down the stairs. Elissa was her father's editor and Rumy considered her an aunt. "A sister, maybe if I were older."
Hank handed Rumy the phone.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Rumy."
"Hi!!!"
"Wow, I didn't expect you to sound so cheerful."
"Sometimes I do the unexpected, I guess."
"Yes you do. How have you been?"
"Shitty."
Elissa almost asked her if she kissed her mother with that mouth before catching herself.
"Understandable. I want to see you, what are you doing today?"
"Nothing!"
"Terrific. I'll be over in an hour, if it's okay with your grumpy Uncle Hank."
"Of course it is."
After hanging up Rumy asked Hank why Elissa called him grumpy.
"No reason, really, she just kind of sounded like a bitch."
"I'm telling her you said that!"
"Oh great. Now it's going to be awkward to meet her. Elizabeth! Please bake me a cake."
Elizabeth popped out from the kitchen,
"What for?"
"I need to go into a diabetic coma for a couple hours while Rumy's friend comes over so I don't feel uncomfortable."
Rumy laughed, holding her small stomach with an even smaller hand. Hank couldn't get her to laugh that hard very often, but when he did it made him feel like a father. And that feeling sent shivers through every bone in his body.
It's just that he wished Rumy didn't look so much like her mother.
----
"Hi, Elissa," Hank said, shaking her hand and opening the front door.
"Hello, Mr. Powell."
She briskly walked by Hank and scooped up Rumy -- who under no circumstances would let anyone else pick her up -- and kissed her repeatedly on her splendidly freckled cheeks.
"Hi!" Rumy squealed.
"Hi!" Elissa squealed.
Hank passed the writhing conglomerate of estrogen and into the kitchen with Elizabeth.
"Cake!" he demanded and Rumy started to laugh again.
"What's so funny," Elissa asked.
"Hank thinks you're a bitch," Rumy said.
"CAKE NOW!" Hank echoed from the kitchen and Elizabeth and Rumy both started laughing harder. Elissa furrowed her brow and shook her head.
"Your family is beyond bizarre. We should go for a walk to get out of here.”
"Okay."
They left and Hank sighed.
"Thank God."
Elizabeth was still chuckling,
"You really are a terrible man."
"Oh Elizabeth, stop hitting on me. I'm too young for you."
----
Rows of green slopes unraveled into deep country roads. The post snowstorm melting had produced patches of mud, reflecting the upward world in murky puddles. Elissa whistled sarcastically.
"Your family also has a unique affection for hills."
"They're pretty," Rumy said, and gazed.
Elissa looked down at her.
"You have the same look your father did when you space out."
Rumy said nothing, but briefly closed her eyes.
"I saw him yesterday," Elissa said.
Rumy continued her silence, running her fingers across a wooden fence as she walked. Birds whistled sarcastically from the treetops.
"He's doing okay," Elissa continued, "he's breathing and he's eating and he's talking and he can even walk around."
Rumy stopped and picked a flower breezing in the high grass. It was a shade of orange she had never seen before.
"But he can't remember anything?" she asked.
"The doctors say he doesn't, but every once in a while something seems to briefly spark in his mind. Although he doesn't verbally recognize anything. He doesn't speak much at all, really."
Rumy put the orange flower in her pocket.
"I'd really rather not talk about him right now."
Elissa placed her hand on Rumy's shoulder and she could feel the whole earth turning underneath her tiny feet, pulling threads of grass like the scalp of a woman, weeping the trees free of their birds, blinking eyelash branches and closing the sky to sleep. There was a sound like thunder but no clouds to be seen. Nowhere.
-----
Hank's dream:
The meadow set orange, with the sun. So that even the dandelions were on fire, haloed like Renaissance angels still damp with paint. The grass had grown to our waists, catching up with our descent into kindergarten, a frightening phase in which we still imagined adulthood as a stoic suitcase of responsibilities with no room for fun--- school being that first ominous step.
The cicadas were so loud that I almost felt like someone was watching me. Little eyes creaking and peeking inbetween the blades of grass and cattails.
My cousin dropped his mitt into the dirt, said he'd had enough fun for one day. Always a grumpy, pudgy little bastard when he skipped his daily nap. He awkwardly milled off toward the house, his mother in the window like a reflection. She waved at me and smiled. A streak of white light wrapped over her bare arm, sunshine sparkling in her wristwatch, the dirty window fading her into a ghostly blur of pastels. I waved back.
Standing there in the warmth of skipping cicadas was my cousin's neighbor, Angela.
"So um. My mom's coming soon to pick me up," I told her.
She nodded. Her eyes curved into almond crescents, black hair cupping her cheeks. I endured the uncomfortable silence as well as I could until I started fidgeting. Quickly I threw my hands in my pocket. I didn't want to go and I wanted her to want me to stay without having to withstand a shyness induced seizure.
"Do you want to see the garden?"
I perked up.
"Sure!"
Walking down the pathway she said, "it's snowing!"
Dandelions breezed across us, feathering our faces. It was the first romantic moment I had ever experienced. I don't know what she thought about it. She probably didn't.
She led me to an enormous wooden gate. I can't believe how small we were. Angela went to one side of the gate and began pushing.
"Aren't you going to help," she asked.
Stupid Hank.
So I helped her. The wooden beams we grunted against shadowed over us. We kept leaning. And with a stumble over a rock and a weightless falling of arms the gate suddenly swung open. It's creak blended in with the cicadas and sunlight came back to our faces.
From where we were I could see the hill round into a garden, full of droopy, colorful plants. They swung their sulking heads in the wind and I imagined what they were thinking.
"Stay," Angela said, looking at me sweetly, "you'll feel at home."
What a remarkably romantic thing for a child to say. No wonder I loved her.
My mother must have been looking for me. But it was a moment I knew was important, somehow, in some way. I knew it was going to be something I would think about again. When I was a grown up. When I was trapped in that suitcase with no room for fun. That's what I was thinking as the dusk sounds meshed into a net of strings.
Then it came, my mother's voice from the airy expanse behind us.
"I have to go," I told Angela.
And what killed me, what absolutely broke my heart was that she stayed there as I walked away, leaning against the fence, the last honey of sunlight burning out in the contours of her face, a somber expression starting to come over her. As though she already knew that we would never see each other again.
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| Sunday, June 29th, 2008
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10:09 pm - A Labyrinth of Yellow
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She told me please, you have to be kidding. And when she wept the salt stung the dirt into shores, drowning ants like starfish. I put my arm around her.
"I'm not kidding."
But her ribs twisted into elks. It was too late. Like moaning, like galloping, like a forest opening into a meadow--- the moaning poured forth in clouds. I waited until she calmed down.
Cobwebs of corn trapped our bodies. A labyrinth of yellow. The ground seemed to tense its chest and sigh. Grasshoppers scattered and everything else drowned. I swear to God everything else.
Her voice broke into a smooth river of honey bees.
"Do you think Mom can still see us?"
I felt a tingle sweep across my face and tug at my tear ducts, but I did not give in. I had to be strong for us.
"Of course she can. Remember what she said? About the sky; about heaven?"
But this was not the right thing to say. This was not comfort. We had nothing to believe in.
And as it fell upon us I never thought sunshine could be such a depressing color.
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| Thursday, June 26th, 2008
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1:01 am - Poor Ol' Kenny
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He saw so many umbrellas when he fell from the sky that he thought the ground had grown a multitude of eyes. They opened wide. Dancing, water proof, multicolored vinyl beetles with pupils. The rush of air pulled back his lips into an ironic smile that he caught in the windows of the building he had just jumped off of.
Every night for two years straight he dreamt about this moment, and now it was finally happening.
Figures it would be raining, he thought.
A bird flew just underneath his torso, squawking madly and losing a feather. He tried to laugh but the rush of air had completely vacuumed out his voice.
Holy shit, he thought.
He suddenly realized how fast he was going. And that he had forgotten to go to confession. His Roman Catholic Grandmother had perpetually warned him of purgatory, and worse-- hell. He never completely bought it but went through with the motions just in case.
He couldn't remember if suicide was a mortal sin, but if it was, he wasted a lot of years reciting bullshit. And if God wasn't real, he wasted a lot of years reciting bullshit. And even if God was real, but he wasn't Catholic, then he wasted a lot of years reciting bullshit. The odds seemed against him either way.
Oops, he thought.
And then the standard pre-death memories started flashing before his eyes, too quickly to digest. Driveways and trains and tree houses and fences and then everything paused at seventeen years old. He was staring down, and he could still see the streets and umbrellas but he could also see threads on a quilt with ants crawling along the stitches.
"Baby let's get up there's gross bugs," his high school girlfriend had said.
"That's how picnics are supposed to be."
"I thought they were supposed to be romantic!"
The rest of his thirty-six years of life didn't have time to play.
And in that split second before hitting the concrete he changed his mind about wanting to die. But of course he did. Wouldn't you?
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| Monday, June 23rd, 2008
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7:58 pm - Whiskey Birds: Part VIII
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| Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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12:38 am - Whiskey Birds: Part VII
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| Monday, June 9th, 2008
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7:59 pm - Go For It, Emily
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| Thursday, May 29th, 2008
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8:37 pm - Whiskey Birds: Part VI
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| Sunday, May 11th, 2008
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2:50 pm - The Parade Like Sparrows
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If I could tell you stories though music, they would sound like this: www.myspace.com/whiskeybirds
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| Sunday, May 4th, 2008
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10:56 am - Whiskey Birds: Part V
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| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
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3:44 pm - Rooms Like Your Polaroids
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I can still see the hope that had declined with the hills. Holding your hand as you slept, but it did not wake. And so it was over. My great grieving lungs had emptied. All was blue, the room and you, and when I started to dream, when I let you go, the moon began to weep in through the window. With wine I tried to drink myself back to sleep. Into the living room, the shadows of plants swaying on the wall. Polaroids looking down on me. That was when I heard the crickets like a string quartet breaking their notes. I went outside to listen, and said goodbye. To them, the trees, the neighbors, the grass and the mud and the gravel. I stared at our house until Spring came and took you away like a daffodil plucked from its roots. And now, I have bad dreams.
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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8:51 pm - Whiskey Birds: Part IV
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| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
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9:48 pm - The Whiskey Birds: Part III
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9:44 pm - The New Noah
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Gerald turned his hat inside out because it wouldn't fit right on his awkwardly shaped head. The library lingered behind him like a giant insect and he just huddled himself into his newspaper, just ignored everything. A gargoyle growled and it started to rain. The angels across the street turned their backs. The architecture started to dance. Sunshine still rolled over the shadows so that the raindrops sparkled in disco ball falls. Gerald looked up and saw no clouds. It did not matter, but the city was drowning.
"Oh hell."
The umbrellas of abandoned bar patios and awnings passed like film slides as he walked underneath. People were starting to stare up and wonder where all the water was coming from.
"Mother earth is probably cleansing herself," is what a man sipping from a mix drink and trying to balance on a stool that wouldn't fit on his awkwardly shaped ass told his friend. "I read about it in a book once. She'll start with downtown first, naturally." And everyone laughed, but Gerald hurried to the hardware store to buy some lumber for an ark.
When he got home with a car fall of four by fours, his wife laughed. He started to sob into her cleavage. She raised his head.
"Honey, baby, it's okay. We all knew it was going to happen."
"But I'm not sad about losing the coast I'm sad about losing you."
Gerald's wife did not think California would actually collapsed into the ocean. But he did. As he sobbed she felt crazy for falling back in love with a crazy man. She was. And California still floats but Gerald is sinking.
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6:30 pm - I Want to Write a Song For You!
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| Friday, April 18th, 2008
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6:51 pm - Whiskey Birds: Part I and II
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From the steps he shouted his knees into pleas, please. Cradling her. She was under the skylights, halfway down the stairs. And the blood blended right in with the cherry wood. He called nine one one and circled the kitchen, explaining the situation. Songbirds sung on the ceiling.
"Hank. Hank Powell. She's Hallie. Same last name as mine. Yes, she's my wife. She must of fell. There's these birds..."
And they were flooding the house. Singing their beaks. The skylight had broken from hail the size of softballs.
"No, no, there was a storm. It's over now."
The feathers rained, swirled with the circling wings. He had to go outside. The sirens started to swell the November air like leaves.
And when the paramedics came there were plenty of blood stains and cherry. There were plenty of feathers and glass and melting snow. There were plenty of glows from the sun shooting through the absence of window. Hank's wife was bleeding from the nose and everywhere else that he could see and he didn't know how, he just got home.
"Hallie, honey? Wake up."
He pushed her shoulders, raised her head. Her breath was coming through barely parted lips. He could smell red pennies from her veins. The circles on the floor. Dropped in drips. A hand squeezed his shoulder.
"Sir, we need you to move out of the way."
The paramedics pulled him back and knelt down to his wife. He went outside and sat on the porch. A rainbow arched over the street and landed in the melting snow. She would be taking a photo if she weren't dying is what he was thinking. With the snow in hues of purple blues, clouded breaths frosting windows.
The paramedics carried out Hallie and Hank declined to go with them. He stayed in the house and tried to shoo out all the birds, but they kept pouring in, attracted to the warmth and the flight of their friends.
By sundown he called the hospital and they told him Hallie was okay and that he should come visit; she wanted to see him. He said he might, but had a lot of work to do.
Birds of all shades were sleeping in the house like stuffed animals and porcelain miniatures. Hank gave up on chasing them out. And he couldn't understand why he would rather be there than with his wife. Into the kitchen Hank went and brought out a bottle of whiskey he had hidden in a cabinet. He laid down in the midst of feathers. Maybe this isn't so bad, he thought. And instead of snoring, the birds whistled. A lullaby of sound.
-----
When Hank woke up the birds had left. Sunshine returned to him in parachutes and dropped down leaves like skydivers. He narrowed his eyelids and began methodically cracking various joints and bones in his sore body. Removing a blanket of feathers from his torso, Hank slowly stood up and tip toed over a wild assortment of little creatures and into the kitchen. A hangover tugged at his forehead and threatened to empty his brains out through his nose.
He leaned over the toaster to make sure nothing was in there that might catch fire when he turned it on and found a few ladybugs huddled together like rose buds. Upside down he turned the toaster, shook them out, and entered two slices of bread.
After breakfast Hank called the hospital and talked to his wife.
"Why didn't you come see me last night?"
"There was too much to clean up, and I was worried burglars would get in."
"Oh."
"I'm sorry."
"Did you still have your breakfast?"
"Uh huh."
"Good."
"But there were some ladybugs in my cereal."
"Did you eat them?"
"One, I think."
"That's gross."
"I thought it was a strawberry marshmallow. Until it crunched--"
"Eww!"
Hank laughed and felt his voice travel the coil of telephone cord like a subway being wound into a spiral.
"Well, will you visit me today?" Hallie asked.
"Of course, when should I come?"
"After lunch."
"Okay."
Hank said goodbye to his wife and opened the front door, announcing to all the bugs and critters that their welcome had been worn out. They stared back at him and then continued whatever nonsense they had been attending to. With his hands on his hips Hank sighed, thinking about the clothes that had been sitting stale in the dryer for two days. He hurried downstairs to the basement.
Hank opened the dryer door and smelled the statue of liberty. He turned the pockets of Hallie's jeans inside out and found green stains, moss covered pennies. He smiled and thought of all the times she had thrown pennies into a wishing fountain and said "poor Abraham, so many of him down there under the water." She and Hank would sit at a park bench and watch little kids steal quarters as the sun set and shadows rose. Sometimes before throwing the coins, Hallie would hold onto them and say "these are so much older than we are, Hank," as if it meant something. And she would listen to the sound of them ringing the water in swans of ripples, her eyes squinting to see where they would fall. Every wish she made she wrote down in a little notebook that she kept in her purse. If her penny missed the water and spun on the ground she would cross out the wish and assume that it would not come true.
Hank climbed the stairs with a basket of laundry. Upon reaching the kitchen he watched a squirrel perform circus tricks from the ceiling fan across to the cupboard, knocking down an expensive bowl that shattered into constellations. The front door was still open but none of the creatures had decided to leave. Hank decided it was probably about time he call an exterminator.
"Hey, name's Hank and I've got a pretty huge fucking problem. If you guys aren't too busy maybe you could send a battalion of pest control specialists out here."
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| Friday, April 4th, 2008
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11:25 pm - Freakshow On The Ninety
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Trisha runs a quarter through her hair before depositing it, wondering where the coin had been before she touched it, whose hair had been there, and where their hair had been. Quickly she cleanses her hands with the squirt from a bottle of bacteria slaughtering soap, which she always keeps within arm's distance. Although with this sort of limited work space, everything is within arm's distance.
The roads are slow and the tollbooths are ghost towns. Usually things were a bit more entertaining at this hour. All the freaks would enter the circus in semis and four by fours. Sticky money and black teeth. Long yellow fingernails and breaths like rotting fish and chips.
There's less depressing jobs, sure. In cities that don't have tollbooths.
Like a lamb yawning her lawn stained limbs, Trisha yawns. Her eyes close in tulips. Lips part like honeybees. And the dreams from headlights with their motors sing.
A thunderous crash awakes her. One of an eighteen wheeler's eighteen wheels has come rolling free and into her booth. It's smoldering like a burnt reptile. Trisha screams because she has just dreamt of a ferociously hungry dragon.
The truck driver comes bounding over like a guilty labrador and whistles his apologies through a scissor pair moustache.
"Oh ma'am, gee oh God, I'm sorry. Crap son of a bitch and I mean, wow, just dozed off for a bit and man, Christ Almighty forgive me, but the rest is history, I mean, crap!'
Trisha starts to laugh. The wind picks up and carries the scent of rotting fish and chips from the lake. Clouds unwrap their coats and let down a snow that stales into ash stained heaps before reaching her sheepish nose.
"You know what," sweet little Trisha says, "it's fucking shit heads like you, man, that give me the creeps and wish abortions had been legal when people your age were born."
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9:36 pm - As I Awoke the Meadows: Part I
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I've been turning birds into confetti since morning. Now it's afternoon. The birds keep coming to the vineyard and I keep blowing them away with a sawed of shotgun like the protagonist in some blood-soaked action flick. And I'll tell you, it sure is something to witness a starling explode, with those beautiful feathers of theirs, like the northern lights for a second, flashing above the trees and falling like leaves. The violet eyes of the grapes are a silent audience, only applausing when the wind picks up.
This used to be the job of some kids in the neighborhood. A significantly quieter job. They just had some BB rifles and air guns. I can't believe my father left me this goddamned place without even asking if I wanted it.
West Virginia is pretty nice, though. A far cry from home. Feels rustic. Everyone wears flannel. You'd get a kick out of it.
----
Writing this while driving is turning out a little messy. Hal is taking me to the house my father left me and a couple acres of property. I guess I should be excited, after the barns I've been sleeping in on the drive down here, but I miss you. Not so much your mother. But I'll be back. Now that I'm finally divorced I'll be able to save you.
Anyway Hal is the whitest Mexican that I've ever met, and I enjoy his company the way I enjoy Letterman. Annoying, but some good jokes here and there. Little gap in his teeth and awkward as hell hair. You know. He smokes weed at twenty minute intervals but I can't tell that he's high, he acts normal. Like smoking is this intellectual, caucasion pumping brain chemical. And he was in charge of managing my father's two properties. I don't know what he did at the house, landscaping or gardening I guess. And of course now he is refusing to work until he gets paid. He's just been taking some sort of goddamned fiesta of abstaining from physical labor, letting the places go to hell and offering to fix their degradation for twice the wage he had attained previously.
"You'll need someone who knows what they're doing, or these places will die. Wait until you see the house."
"Well I'm thinking of just selling it all."
"Oh but you can't do that! Mr. Weir would have wanted you to keep it."
"That's just unfair, Hal, and you're a bastard for using my dead father against me."
"Yes sir."
"I mean I have a kid back home in Maine, after all."
"Ahh, and a sexy white wife with blonde hair!"
"Well she is my wife. And she is white."
"But a bitch and a brunette?"
"Yeah."
"That's okay, love becomes routine after enough time passes. Just like everything else."
"I didn't know there was such a thing as a Mexican nihilist."
"Except blowjobs, I mean."
"What?"
"They never become routine, not for me. I think a good blowjob is just about the only thing I can really get excited about anymore."
Twenty minutes later, and I swear to God I don't know how, he convinced me to hire him.
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| Saturday, March 29th, 2008
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9:49 pm - Being a Father Would Feel Like This
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Christ just held his hands together. A couple vines brushed down the nearest tree like braids of hair. A tingling ran through his scalp and he thought of roses. Sweat bloomed down to his knuckles as he gripped the earth like a dear friend. Like a child he had helped raise and felt tremendously sorry for. His knees sobbed into the ground and his back hunched over and his neck craned to the bristles of grass. He told God he was sorry for his weakness but hadn't known that flesh would feel like this. He hadn't known that being a son would feel like this. He asked his father if there was anything that could be done. The arches of his feet curled, stones bruised his bare ankles. He patiently waited for a response. All he received was the sound of snoring coming from the trees and a heaven that began crying like Magdalene. But he was not refreshed. He was drowning. Blood rose to the pores of his skin and came out with the sweat. Torches chimed like choirs in the distance. And with the earthworms crawling up to his beard, Jesus wept.
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