Stream of Consciousness Friday

One can't have too many reminders that this is Autism Awareness Month, Please check out the blogs at snoopmurph and also Mother of Shrek to find really great info on autism, as well as blogs authored by parents with the most loving of hearts. I know there are many more such parents--if I have forgotten you, please forgive me.

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As many of you know, Dave Kuzminski at P&E is being sued by a publisher and two agents because he had the audacity to do what he has done best for approximately a decade: tell people who's honest and who's not. He doesn't deserve this and is considered one of the straight shooters in the writing community. He is asking for help with his legal defense. You can click on a DONATE button at Preditors and Editors. Even A-list agents don't always act professionally, and Dave's source of info is invaluable.

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I started posting some flash fiction a month or two ago, and at the time I supplied a link to the work of David B. McCoy, who, like myself, is a fan of quirky short fiction. Since 1978 he ran Spare Change Press. David emailed me recently after a Google search turned up his link on my blog and told me about his other work. Anyone interested in some good short fiction can find more about David B. McCoy at David B. McCoy and Origami Condom Issues and finally The Book of Scars.

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Stream of Consciousness Friday

today we’re playing for a sunbeam grilled cheese maker … friday’s quiz: how many people know what etaoin shrdlu means? … true story: i once almost killed a groundskeeper the only time i played golf … some guy dove behind his truck just in time … an errant ball … speaking of errant balls … better not go there … hello would you like to go to the errant ball tonight … go red sox … i’m not an actor but I play one on tv … mark twain said opera isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds … like most libras i don’t believe in astrology … i once almost had the fillings slapped out of my teeth many many years ago when I decided to see if the produce section really was the place where singles met … “how can you tell if they’re ripe?” says i … i wonder if she knew how to make errant melon balls … let’s have some animation again … enough with the pixar stuff already … well, the nurse says I have to go to the day room for my meds … so long until next post … good night errant good night john boy

A Question of Balance

Archibald Wix was a retired banker, meek and mild, who lived his days in ease … if ease can be defined as listening to the incessant nagging of his obsessive-compulsive wife, Clara. Archibald usually turned his hearing aid down in the evening while reading the paper. It was a sacrosanct hour, when silence and the crisp pages of the Herald, spread wide, blocked out whining that had begun thirty-seven years earlier.

“Your shirts are hanging crookedly on the hangers again!” Clara shouted from the kitchen.

Archibald turned to the Science and Technology page and read that mini-black holes, no bigger than the wart on a stepmother’s jaw, drifted through space like vagabonds looking for handouts. Well, in theory, at least.

“Archibald, you left your cup in the sink again!” Clara said with vocal cords raw from years of finding fault with the cosmos.

An hour passed, and Archibald turned his hearing aid up to see if any natural disaster other than Clara required his attention. He lived near the San Andreas Fault, and sometimes the earth did a quick mambo, rattling the china cabinet. He heard a melodious voice singing in the kitchen, a voice with the clarity of crystal and the timbre of a medieval damsel singing ballads to her suitor. It was a situation that called for investigation.

“Hello, Archie,” said a comely woman in her early forties. “What would you like for dinner?”

To Archibald’s left, a small black dot was floating through the kitchen, boring into the wall as a small, tinny voice called from the dot’s infinite density: “What are you up to, Archibald? Who is that woman in our kitchen? Get me out of here!”

Archibald wasn’t a scientist, but he knew that black holes not only gobbled up matter but also coughed up molecules on occasion, like cosmological burps. A mini black hole had apparently wandered through his kitchen, making both a deposit and a withdrawal. So long Clara, hello Elizabeth, the name of Archibald’s good fortune.

“How did you get here?” the banker inquired.

“I’m not quite sure,” Elizabeth said. “I remember being somewhere very small, like a genie’s bottle or a magic lamp. But I know you’re Archie, and now I’m here in the kitchen. So what would you like for dinner?”

“You,” replied Archibald Wix, not feeling the need to provide any astronomical explanations to a woman just moments away from the delights of courtly love.

As a banker, Archibald had always kept his books balanced. The universe had given him far more than a gold watch in return.

The Original Sin of Biff Penfield

[This story has been revised based on previous comments.]

Biff Penfield had been warned by his fraternity brothers not to go out with Nebula, the vixen from Chi Delta Chi, a sorority rumored to be aligned with the Dark Arts. Hazing was one thing, but Nebula was considered to be bad mojo. Some of the boys she dated disappeared or flunked out of school.

Biff was game for anything, however. He’d heard that Nebula had erotic charms that were known only to certain Chinese concubines. How could he pass up the invitation to go swimming at her father’s deserted mansion on Long Island?

Nebula slowly descended the steps in the shallow end, violet eyes sparkling beneath long, jet-black hair. The tattoo of a snake writhed from her navel up to her left shoulder, circled her neck, and fell upon her right breast in serpentine fashion.

Biff, wearing nothing but the designer clothes given him by Mother Nature, treaded water in the deep end and watched Nebula swim toward him using—what else?—a sultry breast stroke that was slow and mesmerizing.

Biff felt intense waves of ecstasy as his mysterious host physically joined him and spun her body a full one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. His legs circled Nebula's torso, and his hands clutched her thighs as she hung upside down in the blue water, her body straight as an arrow aimed at the underworld. And then he was unconscious, Nebula disappearing into a black maelstrom beneath the diving board.

“Well, what happened?” asked Biff’s frat buddies as they stood around his hospital bed. “What did she do?”

“I’m not sure,” Biff replied, “but if I don’t get the tattoo of this snake lasered off my chest and shoulders, my parents are gonna kill me.”

Biff lived an ordinary life in the years ahead, but on certain moonless nights when the tide was high, he found himself scratching his chest and shoulders. Temptation not rebuffed has a way of leaving an indelible mark, even if unseen …

… not unlike the taste of a forbidden apple lingering on the palate of mankind, which must forever swim in a pool of regret while searching for a lifeguard on a tall wooden platform.

Painting: Lilith, by John Collier, 1892, public domain

The Five-Dollar Apocalypse

Meriwether Stout entered the fortuneteller’s small studio on a lark, for he didn’t believe in crystal balls, astrology, or tarot. He was a bookkeeper, a clerk who juggled numbers the way a circus clown juggles balls. He’d never dropped a nine or a six—not any number—for he was a model of circumspection and rationality. But when Madame Zoya touched his arm, he felt a jolt of electricity jump through his veins and then burrow into the very marrow of his forty-year-old bachelor bones. For a brief moment, he felt his skull had been rendered into a photographic negative.

“The years will be unkind,” Madame Zoya told him. “That’ll be five bucks, mister.”

On the street again, Meriwether was flustered and checked his pocket watch to find an anchor in the temporal, green-ledger universe. The timepiece had mysteriously gained three hours. The five-billion-year-old sun was lower in the sky, and the shadows of pedestrians were unnaturally long and ominous. Nearly everyone looked long in the tooth.

He walked on and glanced at his pocket watch again. The minute hand was spinning wildly, like a third base coach waving a runner home. Building facades cracked, and ivy tore great fissures in the sidewalk like tendrils of sentient, malevolent rope. Cars grew rusty, sagging on reddish-brown axles that had not spun into gear for eons.

Meriwether was nonplussed, which is to say his brain was experiencing a minus for the first time in his Newtonian world of rational, balanced numbers. He looked up to see the glacier, a mile high, scraping its way down Broadway.

He didn't snap out of a trance or awaken from a nightmare. The years had indeed been unkind.

Picture: public domain.

Lily Fourshanks, Searching for God

Now just where was that rascal? Lily had searched under the bed, behind the refrigerator, on top of the armoire, and inside the closet behind the winter coats. No God. Not even an angel or an Old Testament patriarch. She found only gum wrappers, a picture of Elvis, and several empty pill bottles. She knew the lithium prescription was important, but she was so busy this morning, what with looking for God and all.

And then it hit her. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

Lily ran to the storage closet under the stairs where the board games were stored. God knew everything and would be a natural at Trivial Pursuit. She pulled the box from the stack of Parker Brothers pleasure and proceeded to carefully lift the cardboard top from the game, expecting a billowy cloud of white wisdom to rise up like a genie.

“Rats,” she said when no deity appeared. “He certainly is elusive.”

Lily believed that an almighty being should be more accessible. If she needed her washing machine fixed, all she had to do was pick up the phone and call Sears, which had radio-dispatched trucks. If one wanted to communicate with God, therefore, one used a communications device. She had been so stupid!

“Hello?” she said into the black cordless receiver. “Are you there, God? This is Lily Fourshanks of 317 Henway Drive, Minetonka, Idaho.”

Lily heard the dial tone, not the voice of I Am Who Am.

“That just takes the cake,” Lily said, slamming down the phone. “Whatever God is, he’s no Sears repairman.”

Lily was on the verge of existential despair and lay down on the rug in her dining room. God was lying right next to her.

Lily picked up the shiny copper penny, on which was inscribed, “In God We Trust.”

“He looks a lot like Abe Lincoln,” she mumbled, “but at least he has a beard.”

Lily dropped God into the pocket of her apron before happily washing dishes and mopping the floors.

Lily ardently believed she had found the Almighty. For the rest of the day, nothing indicated otherwise. The neurotransmitters in her brain had ceased a feverish mambo in favor of a peaceful waltz.

It is said that not a single sparrow falls to the ground without the Father’s leave. The same apparently goes for pennies.

Picture: public domain

The Dirt Road

Wendell Hodge was an affable man who worked for the Hancock County Department of Roads for twenty-seven years. He raked gravel into level ribbons of highway before the paving crew came along with its steam-driven dreadnoughts to lay asphalt over his careful Zen-like strokes.

He retired at age sixty-six in the piney woods of Mississippi, taking long walks every morning so his feet could stay in touch with the idea of roads—of traveling, of seeing the world, of arriving. He had always regarded himself as a bit of a travel agent.

Every day for five years, his meandering took him down a dirt path to a log cabin, smoke curling up from the chimney and hanging in the air like a corkscrew miasma. Wendell finally knocked on the door one day, and a few times he had the gumption to peek inside, where he saw coffee on the stove, water running in the sink. Once he even heard a soft, lilting tune coming from a music box on the kitchen table, but no one was ever home. He started taking a different route on his constitutionals. The cabin scared him.

Wendell decided to revisit the dirt path five years later, but it was gone. Fifty-year-old pines and hundred-year-old oaks rose from the ground where the path had been. A robin engaged in soliloquy sat on the telephone wire above Wendell’s head.

“The world is full of windows,” the robin declared, interrupting his deep thoughts. “They open and close.”

“Do you mean the cabin wasn’t real?” Wendell asked the philosophical bird.

“The only thing that’s real is the road you’re standing on,” the robin replied. “Reality is always shifting, rearranging, evolving, but the journey never stops.”

Wendell realized that the robin was nothing less than feathered wisdom. Men were born to walk down roads, nothing more. He of all people should have known.

He walked on, but the lilting tune from the music box remained in his mind for the rest of his life.

Pic: public domain

Mandelbaum the Astrologer

[Another bit of quirky flash fiction—284 words.]

At forty-two, Izzy Mandelbaum spent his days pouring over zodiacal charts, correlating his findings with eclipses and conjunctions and planetary alignments. He sometimes gazed into tea leaves for extra inspiration. He even wore a tall, conical hat emblazoned with moons and stars—with Pisces, Capricorn, Libra—plus his lucky two-dollar bill and various political campaign buttons. He could afford to endlessly gaze into the heavens after inheriting a family fortune built on the manufacture of feather dusters. It was on a warm April evening when Izzy gazed at his detailed star maps and leaned back in his chair, eyes wide with disbelief. He was horrified to learn that Jupiter’s position relative to Orion meant that he had died five years earlier.

“If I am dead, I shall go forth from my apartment and walk the streets until I gradually dissolve into the ether of the cosmos,” he mumbled. “The universe will surely correct its mistake.”

On his second day of aimless wandering, Izzy entered the Museum of Natural History and stared at the beautiful young woman reflecting on the Cretaceous period. She was a vision of soft skin and dark, shiny hair more lustrous than the Pleiades. Izzy approached her and made small talk. He was powerless as he stood in the gravitational field of this newly discovered star.

That night, Izzy and his star woman danced and laughed and drank wine. He kissed her hair and lips as she nibbled Izzy’s ear and stroked his cheek. Somewhere in the solar system, Jupiter edged away from Orion by a few degrees, not daring to spoil the resurrection of Izzy Mandelbaum. Sometimes, celestial mechanics has a heart.

Picture: Public Doman

Flash Fiction: Da Vinci and Father Abraham

The following is very quirky flash fiction modeled on stories by David B. McCoy, who, like myself, is a fan of the late Richard Brautigan. You can sample McCoy's work at Buffalo Time.

Da Vinci in My Kitchen

Da Vinci is aggravating. I have seafood gumbo on the stove, and all he can do is waft his wrinkled hand over the large pot and make notes, writing backwards in order to record the smells being analyzed by his Florentine nose.

“I need information about everything,” he says, scratching his beard. “Everything.”

“Did you ever finish your helicopter?” I ask him.

“A what?”

I point to my son’s Coast Guard Search and Rescue model on the shelf.

Da Vinci’s eyes open wide. “A helicopter! Yes!”

He runs out the kitchen, the weathered screen door banging shut several times like weak applause. A few minutes later, I see him on the steps, peering through the screen.

“How much garlic do you use?” he inquires.

“Doesn’t really help when making helicopters,” I reply.

“Smart ass,” he says. And then he’s gone.


Not Bad Work When You Can Get It

Our story thus far: the universe has collapsed from gravity and dark matter floating in the interstellar void, only to explode again in another Big Bang.

Fast forward fourteen billion years. Lester Hoop sits in his yard, burning leaves as sunset brushes crimson, orange, and purple across the horizon. His neighbor, Miss Ruby from down the road, saunters up and sits next to Lester on a log. They share cheap whiskey from Miss Ruby’s brown paper bag.

“I’m tired of it all,” Lester moans. “Bang and crunch, bang and crunch, and it always ends up with us sitting right here burning leaves. The universe is nothing but a yo-yo.”

“Not much to do about it,” Miss Ruby says.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Lester proclaims.

He gets the chainsaw from his barn and starts cutting down trees on his five acres of crimson heaven, mowing ‘em down like a rabid logger.

The next time around, Miss Ruby sits by Lester, who is once again ready to cut down all the trees in his yo-yo universe.

“Wait a minute,” says Miss Ruby. “If we have to keep goin’ on like this, why don’t we go inside and make love instead?”

Lester rubs the stubble on his chin and puts down the chainsaw. “Damn good idea,” he says. “Should have thought of it billions of years ago.”

In the halls of eternity, Lester and Ruby sire a nation of children, like Father Abraham. Not bad work when you can get it.

Pic: public domain