November 7, 2007

Genuflect faster. Whenever my boss speaks with me this is what I hear. I had hoped they had hired me for my mind, and I realized it was for the combination of obedience, authority, and bursts of obsequious toadying that I displayed during the interview. I suppose that does constitute my mind. It was late in the day when they interviewed me. At 4:30 p.m. the place was silent. It was the waterfront office of a regional shipping company with vast swaths of real estate holdings, shipping terminals, oil wells, old -time resource wealth. It displayed its old-style resource wealth in a massive office building full of richly appointed resources -- marble floors, burnished oak desks, recessed lights, vast abstract expressionist paintings, and inexplicable bronze shapes that I suppose were supposed to represent sculpture. Work for me had become about becoming good at doing the work -- and in the interview I forgot the other aspects of work, that a job was less about doing work and more about working for. They didn't know what I did, but they knew what I was capable of: rapid genuflection. I found at Big 5 sporting supply some very thin soccer kneepads. In the morning before work, I sprinkled my knees with Johnson and Johnson's Baby Powder and carefully place the kneepads into place. I thought my knees would give out before my Old Navy trousers, but I can see that my trousers, surprising resilient, will last long enough that they will realize a suitable ROI. I will invest in some new trousers immediately after the thread wears down from my continual popping to the floor.

I envy your work arrangement although I imagine that the grass is, as they say, always a more suitable color from the point of view of someone looking from across the street at you standing on your own plot of grass. In turn I suspect you would envy my plot of patchy, weed choked grass. I marvel at the effort expended to keep lawns short in my neighborhood. They, however, have not perfected the art of removing weeds. My streets lack the bright green and white trucks named ChemGreen I see trolling in the well-to-do neighborhood with old shade trades, wrought iron fences, and patches of neatly edged grass that like massive flaps of green fur.

I would have to kill you to be you, but then you would be dead. I suppose if you were dead, I could get you stuffed or make a custom out of you. If I looked like you, I think that would go a long way toward being you.

I called around to find out who could do this sort of thing. They are all in jail. I typed the phrase, " a person suit" in Google to find if there was a company or artist that could make a suit from a person who I had killed -- that person being you because I would like to be you -- and I found this sentence, " Each person is provided with a bed, desk, chair, ladder, wardrobe, and chest of drawers as shown." However, there wasn't a picture.

I also discovered that, " A part of the family budget was set aside to buy birthday garlands and animals for sacrifice, just as we might plan to spend a certain sum for balloons, party hats, and an ice cream cake." I have never, though, made plans for birthday expenses.

I don't know when my birthday is. I had my birth certificate, but the date was merely 1/1/1970. I know I wasn't born at that day because it was the habit of the poor house to give all children born unobserved within the chambers a birth date beginning with the year discovered. I was most likely born in the later part of 1969 -- but I am guessing. My mother lived there, but the poor house respects the privacy of those who end up there and fastidiously destroyed records in order to preserve an appropriate secrecy.

If I was you, then maybe you wouldn't be dead. You would be me.

My boss became agitated by something while she was talking to me. It wasn't something I said because I hadn't said anything. I didn't think of her as my boss until I began to write this, and I didn't know what to call her. She wasn't merely a person I knew, because in her role she could tell me what to do and in my role I would try as well as I could do as she bid. I do not know myself unless I am told what to do. I was confused about what I was supposed to do, though, because her instructions were garbled by pleasantries and a piece of string that become stuck in her throat. I busied myself during the day making charts and tables and then filling them in with data. I wanted to contribute something to the enterprise, but then I realized no one knew what they were doing. In fact, they were irritated by the obligations of coming to work and coming into existence by being told what to do. Someone needed bodies sitting in the cubicles acting out the parts of people at work. I didn't believe it was possible to spend my days asleep. There was a vast fountain in the middle of the working place. Water ran in a three-inch deep trench from one side of the building to the other. The fountain made a gurgling sound all day long so that when conversations were held their voices would not carry. In the babbling white noise, I would drift into a slumber with my eyes open. I struggled against the slumber. My head nodded, and then I found myself snapping up and trying to look like I was awake. The other people watching me chuckled because for the first several months they too had suffered from the babbling of the fountain, and gradually they had discovered that a regime of coffee, standing, and stretching, and sleeping at home would keep them from falling asleep. I spent long hours at home sleeping then I had the routine down. I would work during the day on whatever it was that seemed sensible to work on -- it didn't really matter what it might be as no one would complain if I worked on something that had already been done or something no one had instructed me to work on because they didn't want to admit they had long ago failed to remember the purpose of that place. And so I would work on the work that I infused with seriousness although I knew, really, it didn't matter. I would not fall asleep, and I regarded each day I didn't pass out cold as success. I came home and lay down in my bed and fell into a deep, undisturbed slumber.

I woke because my boss had become agitated while speaking to me. Maybe it was something I had not done rather than something I had done? Work itself was about things done, lists checked, paper documents printed, and shredded in the industrial shredders. I didn't pick a boogie even though my nasal passage has been blocked all week. At one private moment listening to the burble of the fountain, I caught the edge of a buried chunk of something solid in my nasal passage and yanked it free, sending a cascade of warm, salty nose juice tumbling down my throat. The simultaneous feeling of something breaking fee and opening hidden sockets of congestion combined with the sense of drowning was overwhelming. I had not performed this trick in front of my boss but rather within the confines of my cubicle where I could only been seen whether someone was looking at me. This is far preferable to my normal state where I am visible to anyone who happens to be looking at anything.

I was out drinking with a man who used to live near me. We became friends when he lost his cat, and we spent an afternoon combing the neighborhood looking for the tabby. I became accustomed to seeing the tabby coming home from my job then. I worked in a building that has since been torn down, turned into a parking lot, and is now a new mix-used building where there is a jazz club and the people in the audience, sitting out on the sidewalk are younger than I was when I first worked in the building. I remember being that young, but at that age I didn't own a pair of leather shoes much less one of their stringy ties or sharp suits. The girls wore beautiful floral print dresses and thin silver necklaces. The music itself was a variant of cool jazz infused with some recent stylistic innovation, still nostalgic, but cool. I stopped to look at the crowd with envy. The man and I never found his cat. I missed the cat with a pattern like someone drawing a circle around a circle around a circle the kind of doodle that I might draw in math class. I used to keep my doodles. I was more interested in my doodles than the lecture and homework I was supposed to be doing -- but I have long since lost the file with my doodles. Sometimes in a meeting I will try to recreate them. Yesterday when I came home from work, I passed the man who had lost his cat, and he was yelling at the sky, " kittie kittie kittie." I just want to join him because there is chance that we will be greeted by the response of the cat bell as the kittie returns from the dark green wood.

I have this image of myself sitting on a balcony overlooking the ocean, maybe it isn't really an ocean. Maybe it is Puget Sound. Maybe it is a vast lake such as Lake Michigan. A water surrounded by land is a pretty color, blue shot through with grey and green. In clothing, blue and green will never be seen. In nature, however, blue and green are amiable neighbors.

The table is wood. The chairs are metal. The brick is red and was fired in kilns ages ago. It has been washed a thousand times. I order sangria, and it comes with a side of chips and I am going to order but instead of ordering I drink my sangria and order some more and then finally I order food and the day has vanished and I don't care because by this time I am drunk and do not exist, as nature intended.

October 21, 2007

When she was hungry she would come outside and have something to say to me. It went something like this, "Have you been waiting for me?"

"I haven't been waiting for you. I've been sitting here minding my own business," I said. "Why do you ask?

"I am interested in knowing if you have been waiting for me because I need three dollars for a hot dog and a coke."

"Do you buy the coke from the fountain machine?"

"Where the Big Gulps come out?" she asked me.

"Next to where the Big Gulps come out," I said.

"Naw," she said. "I get a bottle, because they are always screwing up the formula for the machine. They can't read, or won't read the direction at that place. It doesn't really matter which."

"What doesn't matter?"

"If they don't read or can't read the directions," she said. "It doesn't matter because it results in the same thing. I just get myself a bottle. There is quality control in a bottle. When I was staying at my friend Sarah's house, we were watching this show--"

"--I think I saw that one."

"You saw that one? Do you even know what I was going to say?"

"I do know what you were going to say. I saw this show where they compared bottled water to tap water. There was this other show, Penn and Teller, and in that show Penn and Teller like went around looking at where bottled water came from, and it came from some really disgusting places. It came from places like these gross springs with all kinds of gunk in addition to water coming out of it. It was really bad. And people would pay top dollar for water with gunk in it. They even had this water tasting, you know like a wine tasting. They had this tasting, and they were getting their water from the back, out of a garden house. The maitre d was crapping himself. He was delighted to fill the bottles with this water. They pointed out that this water came from the tap. And you know, tap water turned out not to be so bad. There are all of these regulations about water that comes out of a tap. It has to be inspected. It has to be approved by some federal agency. Bottled water can come from anywhere."

"Yeah, I saw that show, but I saw a different show, too," she said. "In the show I saw, they said the water that comes out of your tap is horrible. Between the place where the government tests it, and your house, all kind of bad things happen. Pipes are rusted. Some of them are made out of wood. Those wood pipes were laid a hundred years ago, and the water you put into you mouth goes through them! Imagine that."

I tried to imagine that, but I couldn't imagine that. It seemed incredible to think about pipes a hundred years old. I would be drinking wood that had been cut down a hundred years ago. It was hard to imagine that. The world was a confusing place, I had that to give her.

"Those three dollars?" she asked.

I have her three dollars for a hot dog and a coke.

August 19, 2007

This is a story I wrote that appeared in a book hand-bound by Jennifer Borges Foster accompanying the ACT/Roethke Readings this month. The book includes work by Jonathan Crimmins, Rebecca Hoogs, John Olson, Trisha Ready, and others.

My first father worked as a mechanic on airplanes, but he couldn't fix his own car, a 1939 Pontiac with secondhand wheels with wooden spokes. It had wheels like a Conestoga. He enforced his rules with a swift smack to my back. My second father worked in a bank and came home after six tired. He took off his jacket and lay on the couch where he snoozed until dinner. After dinner he had a glass of sweet wine that was as thick as molasses and the color of cola. That improved his mood for about half an hour so I could stand him. We played a game of chess. He always won, except for our last game. I started to study chess books and learned chess traps. We sat down to play, and within ten minutes I had him. "Checkmate," I said. "Checkmate?" He repeated back to me. He sat looking at the board for a long time. "Well," he finally said. "That settles that. "We didn't play chess anymore. He never told me his rules, but I knew them.

My third father designed control panels for submarines. He talked with a slow, country drawl and always wore a felt hat. When it rained, which it always did in those days, the hat turned funny colors and all splotchy like a giraffe's neck. He used to tickle me until the insides of my rib cage felt bruised. The muscles in my belly twitched. He hooked a finger, when I was paralyzed with laughter, under my bra, and peeled it back so that the cups squashed my boobs. He acted like he didn't know what he was doing. When I squirmed away from him, he would walk slowly after me calling out in his country drawl. During his regime, I lived though an uneasy lawlessness.

After Mom married my fifth father, I asked her," Why do you marry every other man you meet?" It was getting so every loony, psychopath, and social misfit got wind of her divorce and lined up. "I am in love," she said. This was her answer for everything. When she started to get ready to kick me out, she told me she loved me. Love for her was the beginning and the end of the story. I figured by my fifth Dad that for Mom it was easier to find a man than find a job. This father came with his own set of rules he wrote on an old piece of cardboard he secretly nailed to the back of the garage door where I wouldn't see it until I broke one.

After Thanksgiving in the early days of the 1960 Christmas shopping season, when the stores were just getting decorated, and the Salvation Army Santas had just set up buckets on the sidewalks, Mom kicked me out of the house. She said if I wouldn't follow the rules of the house, I could figure out how they worked on the street. She might have thought after a few days I would return home contrary and eager to do as I was told. Problem was, I was always eager to do as I was told. I just had trouble figuring it out.

I took my bag and went downtown and rented a locker at the Greyhound bus station. When sleep arrived, it didn't matter that my body wasn't lying in perfect repose in freshly laundered sheets with soft pillows. I slept most of my life in sheets on a mattress in a room with a door and the familiar shadows of stuffed animals, my chest of drawers, the faint odor of my mother's dinner lingering in the house. She boiled meat. On the huge wooden benches at the bus station, I approximated sitting, lolling until my head curled into the embrace of the wood worn by the scalps of countless passengers waiting for their cross-country buses. At home, sleep rolled out through the night and I would reluctantly wake in the sheets staring at the morning light streaked across the ceiling of my room.

In the bus station, I woke throughout the night to check the area around me to make sure some pervert, or drunken sailor, hadn't sidled up to me. My neck kinked as I came to at some early morning of the hour to find a sailor in his whites sitting a respectable distance on the bench next to me. He had his hat over his privates, and the hat danced up and down. I stood suddenly, pain flaring in my back, in my sleeping legs, and I grabbed my coat. I staggered into the middle of the bus station. No one else was awake at the hour. The sailor watched me move. He wasn't an ugly man, or even plain, but somewhat handsome. His face was flushed from whatever he had been doing to himself. He adjusted himself. He had bothered me, but at least I figured the sailor was honest about what he needed and how he would get it. He was actually looking at me, but, once I was awake, he swept himself up, leaned on the bench for support, and disappeared out the door into the cool, middle of the night. I was awake but aware of the fuzzy feeling in my neck and the back of my knees. I still needed sleep for school in a few hours. I returned to my spot and returned to my troubled slumber. I adjusted myself when the pain of sleeping in an unnatural position became too much.

I showered at the YMCA and then caught the bus to school. In the evening, I returned to Seattle. I sometimes stayed at school for as long as possible because I didn't have anything to do. I hung out in the art room and drew pictures. The art teacher and sometimes my English teacher drank coffee together and commented on my drawings. I listened carefully in order to follow their instructions. My English teacher said his wife was an artist. At four o'clock, I bought a cup of soup at the dinner and drink a cup of coffee and did my homework, and then finally I napped on the bus.

After two weeks, I let it drop I was sleeping in the bus depot, and one of my friends offered for me to stay at her house. When I moved in, it became clear she wanted company in everything she did. She wanted me to follow her around. If she was reading a book, she wanted me to turn the pages. One night I told her I would have some coffee with some friends. She got her coat. "I'm going by myself," I said.

"You mean without me?" she asked.

"I'll be back," I said.

"You mean I am not invited?"

"I just need some time alone," I said.

"You mean away from me?"

"We can have coffee together tomorrow night," I said. In the morning, she wouldn't talk to me. I didn't want to go back to her house after school. I did my routine of going to the art room and drawing and killing time. Finally, I went back to her house. It was a week until Christmas. It was raining. They had a Christmas tree. Her parents sat under quilts in the living room watching a program and drinking hot chocolate. "Hey Marge," they said. My friend kicked me out. She had packed my bag. "It was getting old anyway," she said.

I ended up at my English teacher's house in a deal where I would watch their kid, so he and his wife could live an approximation of their life before they had a kid. They were beatniks. Jim had a tiny little patch of beard on his chin. Eva wore stripped t-shirts and cardigans. They both read books and listened to jazz. Their house was small but lined with shelves. I had a room in the basement next to the laundry room. The other room had a cement floor and was used as a kind of workroom and studio where Eva painted.

At first, it was a good situation, because I would look after their kid. He always fell asleep when they went out. I would have the run of the house. They didn't own a TV, but they had a ton of books and magazines. I read and drank a glass of wine. They returned late in the evening and sat down to eat something before going to be bed. They became closer during those nights out at the jazz clubs in Seattle or the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle where they visited some of Jim's old college buddies and sometimes went to parties near the University of Washington campus.

It was from Jim and Eva that I learned about Roethke the greatest poet in the Pacific Northwest. Jim had taken a class from him. "Three months and he told me everything I need to know," Jim said more than once. He referred to his teacher by his last name, not Professor Roethke or Theodore Roethke, but just Roethke.

Still drunk, even after the drive back from Seattle, Jim slurred his way through all of Roethke's poem," The Lost Son. "I had to watch him read it. I stood to say goodnight. Jim stopped reading and asked," Where are you going?" I sat down. He kept on:

The shape of a rat?

It's bigger than that.

It's less than a leg.

And more than a nose.

Just under the water.

It usually goes.

"We were at a party with Roethke," Jim said. "He was as drunk as everyone else. He was drunker than everyone else, except for the guy who passed out in the lawn. "

I had applied to the University of Washington. My art teacher and Jim wrote me letters of recommendation. I suppose it would have been possible to enroll in Roethke's class. Maybe Roethke could tell me what to do, because although everyone else seemed intent on it, but their instructions weren't giving me a clue.

Jim talked sometimes about the artists Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson, and Morris Graves. Eva, in turn talked admiringly about an artist who had lived in Vancouver, Emily Carr. But for these artists, who had grown up in places like Edmonds, although they admired them they also had contempt. Jim figured they fooled people into considering them great artists. They were all right, but… Roethke however didn't come from anywhere around here. He had ascended from elsewhere, a cloud island drifting over Ireland crowded with a hodgepodge of poets, a veritable anthology of English verse: Dylan Thomas, Keats, T.S. Elliot, and so on. Toward Roethke there wasn't any jealously, just reverence.

Through January and February that year I thought I was the luckiest girl in school, because I had escaped from my parents' house and I had escaped from the street, and I was living with a writer and his artist wife -- this seemed like a perfect combination to me -- and I looked after their peaceful one year old.

But, gradually Eva became suspicious of me. I'm not sure how it started. She began to give me more chores. At first, she liked me to be downstairs watching after the baby while she painted. Jim was upstairs grading papers, and I was downstairs drawing and painting and verifying their kid didn't kill himself. Eventually, Eva said she needed to do her work in her peace. So I took the baby out in the stroller and visited the river. I tried very carefully to do exactly as she said.

I was accepted to the university that autumn with a scholarship and grant. That night we had a big dinner in my honor and numerous bottles of wine. Jim became very drunk and suggested that after the baby went to sleep," Lets all get naked!" Tipsy herself, Eva just giggled. I went to lay the baby down and was wondering what he meant," Let's all get naked?" When I returned upstairs, Jim and Eva had gone into the bedroom. The door was ajar, and I could hear them. I couldn't tell whether I should go in there as well, and so I sat on the couch. They finally came out. They played Mingus while I picked up the dishes and washed them, and then I sat on the floor and drank a glass of wine. Eva looked at me. "Congratulations, honey," she said.

"Thanks," I said. I was happy again, and I didn't think about the weird incident again until a couple of nights later I came home and Eva and the baby where gone and it was just Jim and me in the house.

"She finally left us alone," he said.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"She's at her mother's house. Her father isn't doing well and needs help. "

"Shouldn't you be with them?"

"I have papers to grade."

"Shouldn't you be grading them?"

"I graded them already," he said. "After three years of reading these papers, I've already read everything these kids are capable of writing."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Personal essays," he said. "Individual expression is fine, but seventeen-year old kids aren't individuals."

"Is that how you felt about me?"

"I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the students in class where I work."

When he said this, I thought he was giving me a pass. I thought maybe I was no longer just one of those students in the class where he worked.

He got out of a bottle of wine, and he put on Mingus. We ate cheese and slices of ham for dinner and oranges for desert. After we finished the bottle of wine, he opened another.

I kissed him because he wanted me to kiss him. I hadn't thought about boys one or the other the entire year -- being more concerned with where I was going to sleep. We were on the couch drinking wine and kissing and pretty soon I was folded up under him, and I had to pee. I wanted him to stop, but then I didn't want to be rude. I had never done this before, and then I started to cry when I realized what had happened and that I still had to pee. I jumped up and went to the bathroom and half expected blood or something, but there wasn't anything I wouldn't expect.

When I came back he was saying, even before I got there, "It's okay. It's okay." We sat on the couch listening to the record. It came to the end. The needle lifted and ratcheted into its slot. "You should make sure to brush your teeth," he said.

When I woke, Eva was back and so was the baby. I could hear the baby crying. I went upstairs, drank cold coffee still in the pot, and dressed for school. School had lost its importance. The kids there were obsessed with baseball games and now in the spring with the sequence of parties and dances leading up to graduation it all seemed quaint. I liked sitting with my old friends, and listening to them talk, but what they were talking about had nothing to do with me.

Eva suggested I move out. She found an apartment for me near the University District. She said I would have to find a job or something in order to pay the rent, but I had my own place.

"But what about the help with the baby?"

"We'll figure it out," Eva said. "I don't think it works having you in the house with Jim and me. You've been a wonderful guest.

She took me to the apartment, and I couldn't believe I would have my very own place. Already, Jim had moved a few pieces of furniture there, old things they didn't need. He wasn't there. I could tell from Eva's careful expression I shouldn't ask about him. Eva said to me, "Good luck," and shook my hand, and then left me alone. I had a door I could lock.

I slept there the first night. I woke in the middle of the night imagining that a sailor was sitting in the corner. I could hear sounds outside in the street. In the morning, I dressed and walked down the block and came to a boulevard filled with used bookstores. A cat languished in one window. People played music. Kids sat on one of the walls and smoked then beyond that there was the campus where I would go after the summer.

I walked across the campus and thought maybe I would see Roethke. Maybe he would be there somewhere teaching people to write poetry? The campus was filled with wild plants, huge rhododendrons, and gigantic trees that I couldn't even see the tops of unless I stopped and stared right up at the sky.

Nothing had happened in my life to make me what I was, and yet I was a person, even if people like Jim and Eva didn't know what to do with me, besides doing what any drunken sailor would do, which was to make me do things for them. They didn't want to hear what I had to say or what I had to think. They liked an audience. I wondered if I could draw or paint or write or do something that anyone would be interested in? I had this image of myself as one of those portrait artists down by the waterfront, painting people who stopped. Everyone was interested in his own portrait.

Walking through the campus with its view of Mount Rainier and the distant choppy water on Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains I wondered why the school had been built to look the way it did. It looked the way a college campus was supposed to look, and this made me suspicious. There were gothic building, lead-paned glass, a general Cambridge-Oxford-Harvard pastiche. It looked real enough, but the overall effect was chintzy and put on. I could pretend to be anywhere. The view was the one thing that wrecked the illusion that this was some real institution of higher learning.

It occurred to me I could see Roethke if he was here. I could find where he was and go to his class. I went to the library and found a map and asked where I could find the English Department. An old woman at the department said Roethke taught class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2:30 in Denny Room 213. I would skip school the next day to see him.

That night, I found a job waiting tables. I read books in my apartment and drew pictures at the Formica table. In the morning, I caught the bus to school, though. I didn't want to return. Jim paid no attention to me during the class. I left school at noon and took the bus back to Seattle and went to stand outside Room 213.

I stood in the hallway and looked at the students arrive one by one. They came in and looked out the window. They learned on the desks. They smoked and chatted. 2:30 came and went. No one resembling a teacher came. At 2:45 a thickset man, not fat exactly, but fleshy and dripping with sweat, his tie flung over one shoulder rushed up to the door. He paused to breath in heavily, and then he blanched when he saw the students in the room. He looked at me standing in the hallway. "Do you need help?" he asked me. He kept trying to catch his breath.

"I'm going to be a student here in the autumn," I said.

"You do need help but that is beyond my powers," he said. "I think a handful of reputable universities are still accepting applications. You will need to make haste."

He seemed perfectly happy standing in the hallway. He was a man with freely wandering eyes. He looked at from head to chest. That seemed to calm him down.

"Are you the teacher?" I asked.

"I'm the professor," he said. He seemed glad that I had asked because he reached for the door. "I don't teach."

He threw open the door. "Class!" he hollered with a deep-throated burst, and launched into some speech as the door closed. I watched him through the glass in the door where it seemed safer, although the class appeared unmoved by his shout. He glanced back at me to confirm the effectiveness of his entrance. After he turned, I left the musty school building down the marble steps to where I could feel the wind racing over Lake Washington and through the too tall trees. What did he mean," I don't teach?" Wasn't that the job of a teacher to tell students what to do? Everyone wanted me to do what he said. I realized I didn't know what I wanted to do myself, but I would do something.

July 25, 2007

I have a review of Tao Lin's book of stories Bed in the current Stranger. I have been trying to write 250 or less word reviews (as per instruction) and this is the first one. I hope to have more soon. I will I hope perfect, one day, this size of review. This review isn't there, I admit. I admire Robert Christgau's brevity but music I think lends itself more directly to a kind of consumer evaluation. I can't bring myself to do this with books and I don't think it works as well anyway. Ideally a review, I think, provides a point for an entrance for an interested reader (and not everyone may be interested) to join in the conversation generated by the author. Tao Lin I think encourages a conversation about being a writer in the context of the internet. His books aren't purely incidental to this, but they do feel at this point ancillary to the main action. Tao Lin will be reading at The Elliott Bay Book Company at 7:30 on Tuesday (7/31) next week and 7:00 at the UW Bookstore on Wednesday (8/1).

March 21, 2007

My contribution to the Revolting Sofa blog has just been posted. The Revolting Sofa blog juxtaposes text inspired by photos of hideous sofas discovered on Craigslist. James, the instigator of this online log of grotesques, sent this note to me: "Let the piece resonate with the photo, rather than referring directly to what the viewer can already see in the photo." Here is my contribution, and here is the ongoing catalogue of yesterday's fashionable settee alongside current text.

short piece.

February 10, 2007

I told my daughter this story the other day at dinnertime. She had her dinner. She only eats yogurt, peanut butter, and cream cheese for the most part. She was eating yogurt and said she needed entertainment while she ate. So I told her a story.

There was a fat prince in a kingdom that had fallen into a famine.

What’s a famine?

A famine, I said, is when there isn’t enough food. Usually, it is because there is a drought, which means there isn’t enough water. The crops die. The grass that the cows eat died. And pretty soon everyone in is hungry. In the prince’s kingdom, they had a drought. Everything was dusty. The fields turned into flat, dry places full of cracked mud. Only the mud dried out in the sun and wasn’t muddy, but as hard as plastic.

The fat prince was hungry and left the palace looking for food. He took his sword and a can of water. In his castle, he didn’t realize just how hungry the people in his kingdom had become during the famine. They had eaten everything they could. They were so hungry they ate all of the old stuff in their cupboards: the old cans of tomatoes, the packets of macaroni and cheese, the dusty tins of chicken soup. And then, they ate their houseplants, the crows that lived in their neighborhood, their pets--

Their doggies?

Yes. They ate everything that could move except each other because as hungry as the villagers got they wouldn’t eat another person. The thought had crossed their minds, but they said to each other they would die of hunger together before they began to eat each other.

The hungry prince knocked on the first door he came to and asked if they had any food, and then they saw the prince standing there with his stomach and full face they howled with anger. He was the first person they eat if they were going to eat anyone.

The prince for his part was scared. The person who opened the door was so skinny they looked as though a skeleton covered with wrapping paper. My lord, the bone skin person said to the hungry prince.

The hungry prince wisely decided no to ask about food. What has happened? he asked the villager.

There is a famine. The land has failed. There is no rain. Their cows have died. We’ve everything we can find.

I will find some food; the hungry prince said. He had to find some food because his stomach ached and gurgled he was so hungry.

He walked for many days, growing hungrier. In a dusty stand of trees, one morning he woke to hear cries from a nearby village. Food! Food, she has food.

When he arrived at the village in the center of the square was a wagon with bars like a jail on wheels full of children. A wizened old woman with a black pointy hat was handing out boxes of food.

A couple passed the hungry prince. They carried one of these boxes and inside he saw the most wonderful thing: chicken, a packet of beef, bright red and yellow apples, a loaf of fragrant bread, a jug of milk, and a foil package of chocolate. Where did you get that.

They wouldn’t tell him and ran away from the prince.

He went to the investigate the old woman as he approached, a woman handed over her pretty young daughter. The old woman handed the woman a box, and then placed the pretty girl into the cage with the other children. The children were happily sucking on lollipops.

I want one.

They’re in the story.

Do you have a lollipop?

I don’t. I’m telling you a story.

Can we get a lollipop?

Do you want to know what happened?

Is that old woman a witch?

She was a witch. She was trading boxes of food for children. The villagers were hungry, and they didn’t know how anyone could survive for as long as they did without food and worried they figured it was better to give their children to the witch for a box of food then to wait until they finally died of starvation. They weren’t happy about trading their children for food, but as soon as word spread everyone started to bring out their children and trade them for food. Pretty soon the witch has most of the children in her wagon.

The hungry prince didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have any children to trade for food. H would use his sword, but with a witch, he could cast a spell on him. So he decided he would leave. As he left, he saw two twin girls in the playground on the swing. They were singing. One had golden hair and the other had copper hair. The prince grabbed the little girls. They struggled and screamed and squirmed, and he took them to the witch. When he got to the witch, the little girls’ mother cried out.

Those are my daughters! If you are going to trade them for food, then that is my food.

The prince realized when she said that how horrible it was. He was so hungry. He handed the girls over to the witch. The witch, her hands occupied with holding both of the squirmy girls, didn’t see the prince pull his sword from his side.

Oh no, this sounds violent.

It probably will be.

The prince should cover the wagon his cloak so the children don’t have to see the violence.

He won’t do that. It would give away his plan, and the witch would cast her spell.

Okay, they should close their eyes.

Okay they closed their eyes, except for one boy named Peter at the back of the wagon he kept looking even though he wasn’t supposed to look.

The Hungry Prince slashed off her head.

It flew into the middle of the dusty field. Her body though still held the girls and was about to put them into the cage. The prince cut off both of the arms, and they fell onto the dusty ground.

The witch’s head started to laugh. She said, “Hickity Hickity,” her magic words. But because her head wasn’t attached to her body, the spell fizzled. So she called her body over to. But she needed her arms to put on her head. So she called her arms. The severed arms pulled themselves across the dusty ground with their fingers. The prince cut off the fingers. The fingers continued to crawl on the round, so the prince stamped on them as though they were slugs. Each finger popped like a grape.

The prince let the children go and handed out the food and made sure keep a box of food for himself. In the empty box, he placed the witches head and carried it to the nearly dry river and threw the head into the middle of the water. The head floated out to sea never to be seen again. With the death of the witch, rain began to fall and soon the land was green and fertile again and everyone had enough to eat.

THE END

January 25, 2007

A note from the editors of the Steel City Review which will go live on January 26th:

The first issue of the Steel City Review is almost here. It will be "live" (www.steelcityreview.com) Friday afternoon, and we're sure you'll like the stories we gathered for our debut! Enjoy stories by Claudia Smith, Steve Fellner, Maggie Shearon, Donna Vitucci, Marc Lowe, Sharon Knauer, Ejner Fulsang, Matt Briggs, and Vanessa Gebbie.

Pittsburgh's City Paper has an article about the new lit mag.

October 19, 2006

I was inspired by Matt's story about eating earwig larvae and decided to turn the experience into a song. Enjoy! -- Myshkin

Yes. This is a song from a story I wrote about eating baby earwigs.

September 28, 2006

I've posted a reading of my story "Earwig" from my book, The Moss Gatherers, at MacJams. MacJams describes itself as "an online community of people who are interested in creating or presently create music using the Macintosh platform, as well as people who are interested in listening to such music." The site is very large and has hundreds of great songs and other audio artifacts.

July 10, 2006

I have two new stories posted online, at The Mississippi Review and Slouch Magazine.

Mississppi Review
James Whorton Jr. has edited a collection of "Partly True Stories." In his introduction, he writes, "The idea for this issue of Mississippi Review Online came out of the hubbub following the revelation that a certain memoir, made famous by Oprah, was partly made up. Credulous readers who'd swallowed that story whole were unhappy; literary types, connoisseurs of genre confusion, were delighted." And this issue includes work by Pia Z. Erhardt, Gary Percesepe, Claudia Smith, and myself.

Slouch Magazine
The fine poeple at Portland OR's Slouch describe their efforts as: "We try not to fill up our brains with too many opinions, so our ideas have plenty of room to grow. in a world of imitations, we get busy with the innovation. there are plenty of magazines out their for people having trouble with their mom or their ex-wife, for people who believe there's nothing west of the hudson, or for people who think that "tristan" and "amelia" are good names for characters, but not SLOUCH." Here is my contribution...

June 17, 2006

The youngest of three sons woke with a deep thirst for he was very ill and couldn’t keep any water down. His name was Giles. Gile’s skin had dried to a crusty surface like the crust of a cracker.

His father slept unaware of his son’s thirst. In the morning, the boy listened to his two older brothers wake and dress and stamp their boots to check their laces. After they left, Giles listened to his father cough and prepare coffee.

The water sang as it fell down the drain. The father had lost his ring down the drain. In his desperation to recover the ring, he’d removed the drain screen, and lost the screen as well. Fruit flies filled the apartment living off the pipe sludge, unhindered by the drain screen. When the tap turned on it fell, unimpeded down the pipe where it sang and hummed until it landed somewhere under the earth far under the apartment where the father’s ring lie.

Lacking apple vinegar, the father and his two oldest son’s made flytraps with rolled up bill circulars and the last of the honey. They fixed them down with Scotch tape and used all of the water tumblers in the house. The only cup left was the father’s coffee mug, a piece of promotional merchandize from a company where the father no longer worked. The father kept the cup next to the sink with the missing drain screen and the coffee percolator on a hot plate.

After the father woke and drank his coffee the father implored his son to stand up and put his sickness behind him. His sickness was caused, his father said, but his lazing around in bed all day.

I can’t talk all day, the father said. He left for his job collecting grocery store shopping carts that been lost from their parking lots, collecting them in ditches, vacant lots, and weedy dead end streets.

After the father left, Giles invariably rinsed out his father’s mug and filled the cup with tap water. He waited by the open window for a beautiful parrot that would visit him at noon. The parrot had crisp yellow and blue and gold feathers. It had a bright red knot on its beak where the nostril holes were. The parrot came to talk to the boy because it is a well-known fact that parrots can talk. The boy worried about the parrot because winter was coming, and the parrot would become sick in the cold. But it was summer now and the parrot came and he would talk to the boy. As the parrot talked he asked the boy about his troubled and the parrot shared his water with the boy and for the time they talked the boy’s thirst began to lessen. The parrot told knock knock jokes.

“Knock knock.” “Who is there?”

“Who.”

“Who Who?”

“What, are you an owl?” the parrot asked.

When the parrot left the boy’s sickness returned and he vomited into the sink. He rinsed the vomit down the sink contributing the sludge on which the fruit flies gorged themselves. In this way the boy’s thirst, his father’s lecture, the amiable visit from the parrot, and the boy’s sickness continued for many days.

In the evening two oldest sons returned and drank water with their hands cupped. They worked long hours at a warehouse near the river and returned home in the evening too tired to do anything except eat their noodles and sleep. Their names were Niles and Miles and their father smiled as they slurped their noodles. “You work hard,” he said.

As the weather cooled, Giles worried about the parrot and one day the parrot said that winter was coming and he had to go away. Giles began to cry for he would be all alone.

Don’t worry, the parrot said. The parrot asked Giles to pull three feathers from his wing, red, yellow, and gold. If things became bad, he could ask the feather to make things better. The parrot flew away and Giles placed the under his pillow.

After his father left the next day, Giles felt sick and waited by the window for the parrot to come, but he did not come.

Despondent, Giles used the green feather. He waved the feather and felt better. He felt so good that he put on his clothes and walked outside. On the sidewalk in front his apartment building an old man asked Giles if he would mow his lawn. He would pay Giles.

Giles mowed the old man’s lawn and the man paid him five dollars. Giles took the money to the store and bought a new drain screen. When his father returned home most of the fruit flies had disappeared.

The next days Giles felt sick and waited by the window for the parrot but the only thing that came was rain.

Despondent, Giles used the yellow feather. He waved the feather and felt better and so he cleaned the water glasses with boiling water, rinsing the honey and dead fruit flies down the drain. As he washed the dishes, Giles thought he saw his father’s rink glinting in the depths of the pipes. But he didn’t know how he would retrieve it.

When his father and brother returned from work they wandered around the clean apartment puzzled. Niles and Miles drank water from clean glasses.

The next day Giles felt sick and waited by the window for the parrot but the only thing that came were orange and copper leaves blown in the wind.

Despondent, Giles used the gold feather. He waved the feather over the drain and the lost ring rang as it twirled up from the piped in the earth below the house and landed on the counter. Giles cleaned the ring and lay it on the table.

When he came home, his father smiled and hugged Giles and Niles and Miles. Here we are, his father said. Here we are all together.

March 9, 2006

DESK by John Olson

This desk belonged to the grandmother of the man it belongs to now. It is where she kept her diary. A deeply pragmatic and grounded woman, her diary (not pictured) is full of facts; simple, bare, unadorned glimpses of life on a farm. The desk is a serious deep brown in which the grain of the wood swirls and waves. There are two large compartments on the bottom. At the top, a flap of wood comes down to provide a writing surface. Inside is a tiny drawer and two open compartments, one small, one large. The large compartment once housed a radio. When the grandmother used it, the radio was the major source of news and broadcast. Jack Benny, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, and President Roosevelt’s fireside chats issued from its speaker. The grandson frequently wonders what his grandmother, deceased since 1969, would make of her Neo-Surrealist grandson using her desk to practice verbal acrobatics and nonsensical flights of fancy. The space that once housed a radio is now radio-less and stuffed with the grandson’s letters and folders and manuscripts. On the top of the desk the grandson keeps a quill made with the long swoop of a pheasant feather. Next to it is a paperweight, a gift from a gay friend after the grandson’s second divorce.

Note On Availability: No power on earth could separate the grandson from this desk. He doubts it would bring him much money anyway. Its value is personal, but not entirely sentimental. He likes the look of it. It brings to mind America in the early 1900s. A woman in a red bandana going to milk eight bellowing cows at four in a crisp Dakota morning.

From the Spring 2006 isssue of ARCADE, architecture and design in the pacific northwest, edited by Christopher Frizzelle. He presents "a catalog of interiors that are not for sale" with items by Jonathan Raban, Anna Maria Hong, Jonathan Safran Foer, Charles D'Ambrosio, and etc. And I have one as well.

February 7, 2006

The new print issue of Spork is being feverishly assembled by a production crew including Drew Burk (Lead Binder), Rachael Simon, Maraya Hoenig, and Brian Arnold (Machinist/Fabricator). However the issue, edited by "remote editor" Kevin Sampsell is online right this minute and contains stories and work by a lot of great people Mark Jude Poirer, Frayn Masters, Elizabeth Ellen, Paul Tobin, Tao Lin, and oh yeah, me.

September 11, 2005

A Fifth of July

I feign clearance with my neighbor. In the manner of a land without sidewalks, a manner I can only guess at, I whack the chain link fence and stuff my blank note into a wad between the links. “How do?” I call.
“We will get to it one of these days.” I cannot fault him for discreetness.

(read the story)

July 1, 2005

I went hiking last weekend with my father. My father has invited a young man who he met on the bus my father drives to live with him in his little house in Fall City. My father's house only has one bed. The young man didn't have any shoes.

He was living as a kind of serf in a trailer in Maple Valley and working for the man who runs the horse and carriages in downtown Seattle. In exchange for room (the trailer) and dinner, my dad's friend did menial chores around the farm. This seems to be a pretty common arrangement now in the rural areas of King County. Pepper Schwartz had a farm on the North Fork of the Snoqualmie and my brother had a girlfriend who took care of her horses and llamas in exchange for a place to live and a couple of hundred dollars a month. In any case, my dad picked up this hungry and essentially clotheless waif and moved him into his house. The young man is a burly Australian named Harley (he changed his own name from Harry to the name of a motorcycle. I suppose you could call him 'Hog' for short.)

While my dad was first hanging out with his buddy Harley, he lost his driver's license. My dad drives bus for King County, and so this was a problem, since it is widely believed a driver's license is required to drive bus. He was temporarily fired. How my father works these arrangements, I don’t know. He's since been rehired. You'd think losing your license, even if it was reinstated, but be reason enough to question a persons fitness as a driver of a vehicle as large as a bus and as full of people? But during his period of unemployment, my father got a license for Harley and then Harley became his driver.

During this time of my father being driven around by his buddy Harley, found a dead dog in the trees alongside the Issaquah/Fall City Road. The old roads between the East Side town used to pass through stands of trees. The roads themselves were built on a kind of wall, and so the ditches on either side went straight down into the ferns, salmon berries, and devils club. A woman was standing in the middle of the road at a turn trying to work her cell phone. A jeep Cherokee lay on its side down in the forest, off the road, and a man stood in front of it. Music came from the Cherokee at a way too loud volume. My father and Harley called down to the guy. And then my father climbed down to check on the man. The jeep lay on his legs. And then my father shouted at him, "Are you okay?" And then he saw that the man was dead and his body was held in place by the jeep. When the paramedics finally arrived they took the man away and the found a collie stuck in a tree a hundred yards from the tree. The collie was dead as well.

After my father and I went hiking, we went to see Phil Elverum of the Microphones/Mount Eerie at the Seattle Center. Phil played a bunch of really nice songs and curtseyed after each one. At one point, Phil sang a no smoking song that had a lyric "every time you smoke you are killing a little part of you," or something like this. Many of the smokers in the audience put out their cigarettes. I thought it a little odd that Phil has a kind of public service announcement in his song, but then he was also kind of conducting the audience the way the genial couple who worked Kindergarten at Fall City elementary used to handle a room full of addled five year olds. No sudden movements and very clear instructions.

My father however and his buddy Harley didn't enjoy them. After the show ended, Harley said "I prefer The Vines. Have you seen them. They had a huge stuffed Kangaroo at the show I saw and at the end they ripped the Kangaroo into little pieces."

November 12, 2004

BUD: My daughter arrived during an unseasonably warm winter week.

KEVIN: I’m late.

BUD: The tulips bloomed in our neighbor’s yard.

KEVIN: I leave early but I arrive late.

BUD: And I carried her up the driveway in a basket. The cherry tree blossoms glowed in the pale dusk light.

KEVIN: In between those two points – I don’t know what happens. I listen to the radio. I drive. I wait behind a half-mile line of cars at a stop sign. The row advances car length by length. That stop and start is how every one of my days begins.

BUD: I don’t mean to interrupt you—

KEVIN: I can’t talk now. I’m sorry. I’m late. Didn’t I tell you I was late?

BUD: I’ve been meaning to talk to you.

KEVIN: The garbage is out of hand, I know. We accumulate trash. Every morning I take out a bag of trash. I don’t enter the house with anything—

BUD: I don’t want to delay you—

KEVIN: —and I come out with a bag stuffed with trash. Spontaneous generation is what it is.

BUD: I would like to talk to you about your tree.

KEVIN: It’s a cedar tree. I take a lungful of it every morning as I wipe the dew from the windshields of the car. It reminds me of my childhood. I grew up in a little house under a Western Red Cedar just like this.

BUD: Can I talk to you about that tree?

KEVIN: That moment in the morning is the only moment of peace I know. Look, I’m late.

BUD: I won’t take more than a minute of your time.

KEVIN: I’m so late that I don’t know if another minute will make a difference. I might actually arrive at work sooner if I delay. Once, I left a half an hour later and I arrived an hour sooner.

BUD: That tree is ripping up the sidewalk on my side of the fence. You’ve seen what the city has done down the block?

KEVIN: I did. They parked their wood chipper in the middle of the road. It caused endless delays.

BUD: Can I cut down that cedar?

KEVIN: I’m sorry. I’m really running late.

BUD: You don’t have to answer now. I just wanted to mention it. I’ve been meaning to catch you.

KEVIN: And today I left late and so you were able to get a hold of me.

BUD: I will replace the tree. It was a little thing when they planted it. It went in during an unseasonably warm week the middle of winter. That week, your cherry tree thought spring had come. A million white blossoms. My daughter was born that week. And the people who lived in the house then planted a tree. They planted that tree.

KEVIN: I’m thankful to them. I depend on this tree. It is just getting to that size when it will really be a tree.

BUD: I really would like it down.

KEVIN: I don’t know.

BUD: I’ve been meaning to catch you. But you drive away so quickly. Please? Can we work this out now?

KEVIN: I need time for rumination. I like the tree. And I’m late.

BUD: My daughter died last year.

KEVIN: I’m sorry. My condolences, if that is meaningful to you coming from a complete stranger.

BUD: We’re neighbors.

KEVIN: I mean anything I say would pale in comparison to what you’ve been through. I don’t know anything about death. It’s not something I was encouraged to study in school. I’ve been to one funeral in my life. Death in my experience has been something happens to other people. So, I’m sorry.

BUD: Thank you.

KEVIN: You have to keep the tree then. If it was planted to honor your daughter, it should live.

BUD: You don’t understand.

KEVIN: I’m not trying to understand. I can’t understand what you’ve gone through.

BUD: I want the tree removed.

KEVIN: In a few years the tree will really be something. I don’t have to see any of the neighbors in that direction. In the morning while my car warms and I prepare for my drive through limbo itself, I can listen to the blue jays holler from its boughs just as they did in the cedar trees in the forest around the house where I grew up. That forest is gone now. They built a subdivision. Called it Cedar Grove.

BUD: I want the trunk knocked into rounds and split into cordwood. I want the stump chipped. I want the roots pulled. I don’t want there to be evidence of this tree. And I will not rest until this median is a pad of Kentucky blue grass.

KEVIN: This is my property.

BUD: That is why I’ve waited until I could ask you.

KEVIN: I’m sorry about your loss.

BUD: It was an unseasonably cold day. I had always told her, watch out for the black ice.

KEVIN: But why do you have to make your loss my loss?

BUD: She said that ice doesn’t have a color. And I said black isn’t a color. Black is the color of no color.

KEVIN: I need time think about it.

BUD: I’ve waited for you long enough. I need you to answer now.

KEVIN: It is almost a really very nice tree. It has just turned from a bush, don’t you see, into a real and proper tree. It will take years for another tree to get to this size.

BUD: I know how old the tree is.

KEVIN: Did they – the people who planted the tree – plant a seedling or a tree?

BUD: It was little tree.

KEVIN: So the tree is really a little older than your daughter already. There is no need to cut it down. Their ages do not correspondence exactly. The tree doesn’t have to mean what you think it means.

BUD: Do you intend to keep this tree that is ripping up my sidewalk and growing into the power lines?

KEVIN: It’s my tree. I like this tree. I suppose if you replaced this tree with a tree of exactly the same size I would get the same use of out it.

BUD: I am willing to buy a replacement but I won’t be able to buy a tree of this size.

KEVIN: I had to wait years and years of this tree to reach this size.

BUD: You didn’t live here. You just bought this house. You don’t know anything about how long it took this tree to grow.

KEVIN: A year ago. I bought the house a year ago. I have some idea about the age of trees. This is my tree.

BUD: We are neighbors. We share a fence I painted a coat of 20 year white enamel paint and that you haven’t even painted. We share this tree that the occupants of this house planted to remind us of our daughter. She died the week you moved here.

KEVIN: I not sure you and I agree about the definition of “neighborly.” But I have made up my mind anyway.

BUD: It will provide me much peace.

KEVIN: You can kill my tree if that will make you happy. You can chip my tree if that is what will provide you peace. It’s the neighborly thing to do. It’s no trouble.

BUD: Thank you.

KEVIN: It will save me time in the morning dallying in my front yard remembering the things that happened a long time ago under the sent of a cedar tree.

BUD: It will make you more efficient. You won’t be late.

KEVIN: I’m late.

November 10, 2004

"An Uncontrolled Swelling" at MonkeyBicycle.net...

November 3, 2004

Part 1 -- We came to the end of the gravel. It wasn't really gravel anymore. It had long since given out to small rocks, ruts filled with black muck. Clear water rushing over the muck. A cool fog lay on our faces brushing away the smell of sweat. I always smelled like sweat and wet sock after moving along like for as long as this. I had to go back to work and now I smelled.

You said right at the top. This is too far. There is nothing here. There were the fresh stumps of fur trees fresh enough they smelled of sweet sawdust.

Get down on your knees.

I am paying you. The customer does not get down on his knees.

I didn't attend business school, he said.

Part 2 -- A field of fresh chainsaw stumps ascended to the gravel. Two tire ruts, unused, held run off from the ridge. Clear water ran over the black muck. A fog or clouds or mist, cool and smelling like pine and sawdust rushed up the slope. Snow melt gushed in the drain. The sound of traffic -- Semi-s and machinery -- engines muted through the fog, engines a bass hum as the carried their loads upward, engines ---

Heaps of last season's ferns lay flattened from last season's snowfall.

This came from aclass exercise that goes like this:

1) Write a short scene set in a location very familiar to you. Write this scene so that that it is continuous action among 2 characters in dialogue.

In your portrait of the place, DO NOT tell us where it is, that is, don't say "The Bothell QFC in Washington State," and don't even use the more generic, "grocery store," instead, illustrate any aspect of the place important to the scene with concrete objects -- cold case full of farm fresh eggs, stacks of waxy Red Apples with a sale price of 50 cents a pound, etc -- and other sensual (sound, smell, touch, taste) of the place. When you are done with the scene, reread it and then in a sentence summarize the mood of the exchange between your two characters. Feel free to use an abstract word, like joyful, angry, frustrated, etc.

Length: 10 minutes

2) Rewrite the same short scene without any characters. It takes place in the same period of time. Again, do not name your location and do not name your mood. Attempt to capture the abstract word used in part 1.

Avoid personifying nature or introducing any people into the scene. Personifying nature could be as simple as using an adjective with a noun, as in the “lonely fire” or the “angry tree.” It will be tempting to insert someone so observe the scene. Instead, the writer must figure out a way of using active language and ascribe active verbs to essentially inanimate objects. Furthermore, how do these objects begin to suggest meaning?

Length: 10 minutes

October 19, 2004

In my child’s empty room
There was a Pooh Bear
And a new loom
And a box full of--

Four hungry hippos butting snoots
And 40 high ho cherries Os in baskets

And Douglas a unicorn signorina
And an elephant ballerina

And a tiny carriage
And a toy marriage

And a book and a mark and a mug full of tea
And a smart pill bug who was preparing a plea

Goodnight room
Goodnight snoots
Goodnight hungry hippos butting snoots

Goodnight light
And the new loom

Goodnight cherries
Goodnight fairies

Goodnight signorina
And goodnight ballerina

Goodnight ozone
And goodnight phone

Goodnight carriage
And Goodnight marriage

Goodnight book
And goodnight tea

Goodnight e-mail
Goodnight plea

And goodnight to the smart pill bug who was doing preparing a plea
Goodnight drain

Goodnight rain
Goodnight voices everywhere

May 2, 2004

I went to the Shelton Writers Conference on Saturday at Olympic Community College and wrote two American Sentences.

Fountains drool water goading the thirsty to kiss the public steel tip.

All activities recorded on video will aid the prosecution.

I went to the Shelton Writers Conference on Sunday.

It was held at the Shelton branch of Olympic Community College. The college branch consists of a single green building built in the same style as the Cascadia/Bothell Campus -- metal sheets painted green, tall cement pillars, a massive eave that provides the sense that the entire place is in a gigantic shed. I went to school in the rural Washington in the foothills of the Cascades and spent a lot of my recess time running around under the shelter of the play shed. The wind sometimes blew in rain or drizzle. And even though it had the feeling of being outdoors, it was dark like it was inside. The entire playground -- all of the classes, squeezed themselves into the shed and there was hardly room to play kickball or hopscotch.

I'm not sure I like the idea of Branch Campuses, although I do like the presence of these schools so far out beyond the regional center's of the northwest. However, a branch suggests or means that oversight is being applied from some central administrative campus. I imagine then that quality control inspectors visit the campus and collect data to enter into their databases to run metrics. The need for a community college so close to Evergreen State College seems kind of redundant. There are two baby University of Washington's which have the overt feeling of franchises. The Shelton school was built at the very edge of a stray clump of strip mall that had built in the clear cut land between Puget Sound the Olympic Mountains.

But the drive from Olympia which rests at the southern end of the sprawl that begins in Everett and runs down to the edge of Mount Rainier feels as if I'd passed beyond something (the urban/suburban area) into something else. It wasn't the rural or wilderness because the land use was essentially residential or discarded timberland. There were some farms, but the majority of the land that I could see from the Highway 101 was pure empty, desolate land left over from logging. The trees would regrow, but in thirty years, would the land have trees on it or would the urban/suburban have grown into it?

The road jumps up and down deforested hills. There are few houses or mobile homes, just a clump of old trees and then a glimpse of scarred foothills, and the vertical face of the Olympics. I found the view of the Olympics from the South rather than the West (Seattle's view) unsettling. I didn't recognize the mountains. I was unsure where I was even though the landscape was familiar. Looking at the Olympics from the South rather then from the West (Seattle's view).

In Shelton, I taught a class to people who lived in small communities north of Shelton on the Olympic Peninsula. One student said the name of her place, a name I didn't recognize, and whose gnarled, Salish syllables I can't recall. She said, I just found out that where I live is a town. She said this as if she could not believe that she actually lived in a place. It was a town and a town was somewhere. Before, I suppose, she imagined that she lived nowhere. I remembered this sense in living in a place in the Pacific Northwest that was not connected by 7-11s, Jack in the Boxes and street lights to other places. Here town lies in proximity to Olympia and Shelton but not part of those places. In the fourth grade I was asked to draw where I was from and I drew my house in careful detail capturing my bed, my room, my closet, the bathroom, kitchen and the kitchen cupboards, the shed and cellar outside, the rotting barn on the hills and then growing in less detail the further I drew from the house until there was constellation of places that I understood only in how to get there from the house or rather how my parents drove there from the house. Issaquah then was more important than Seattle. I had been to Portland, Organ once.

I took also took a class from a poet and performer named Paul Nelson. In his class I wrote two things called American Sentences, which is a Allen Ginsberg's form the haiku -- it runs a single line and is seventeen syllables long.

Fountains drool water goading the thirsty to kiss the public steel tip.

All activities recorded on video will aid the prosecution.

September 2, 2003

The spinning-top poet articulated the clean water for the clean racehorse even though the clean racehorse would only articulate the clean water for the sad racehorse.

Yet, the sad racehorse articulated appealing water for the spinning-top poet. The sad racehorse broke clean water for the spinning-top poet. The sad racehorse and the poet broke water. The sad racehorse and the clean racehorse broke water.

The spinning-top poet and the clean racehorse broke no water.

Spinning-Top Poet: Walk with me. Walk with me to the water that breaks -- a spinning top.

Clean Racehorse: I articulate clean water for the sad racehorse.
Spinning-Top Poet: A spinning-top, my clean water. A spinning-top in the desert! A spinning top in the water! A spinning-top in racehorses!
Clean Racehorse: I fly. You slither. I break the spinning-top poet into a sad poet.

Was the sad racehorse the poet’s racehorse? What poet? The spinning top poet. What racehorse? The sad racehorse. But the sad racehorse articulated the appealing poet’s water and the clean racehorse articulated the sad racehorse’s water in the desert. What racehorse? The clean racehorse. What poet? The spinning-top poet. To articulate the spinning-top poet the clean racehorse must slither under the sad racehorse. A racehorse slither? A racehorse breaks the desert. A racehorse breaks and breaks and breaks until it is desert.

This desert senses no water, no spinning-top, no spinning-top poet. A chapel where a poet and a racehorse sense themselves and water, water and the desert, and the articulation of the poet’s water and the racehorse’s water. The water breaks like a spinning top and flies like an appealing racehorse in the desert.

He senses the appealing racehorse, the clean racehorse. He walks the clear desert with the sad, sad, sad, racehorse and only senses the clean racehorse. Fly poet! What poet? The spinning-top poet. Fly to your appealing racehorse. Fly to your chapel and break the racehorse’s water as a spinning top clears the desert water. The poet, the racehorse articulated, articulated, articulated the sense of sad water. The water once articulated slithered clear. The clean racehorse and the spinning top poet slithered into the chapel and broke like the appealing and clean and sad desert.

May 31, 2003

During the breakfast rust at Jack's Diner one early Sunday morning, Alan had asked Lydia if she wouldn't mind letting him sit at her table. All of the tables were completely full. Alan would have sat outside but a steady drizzle had coated the sidewalks with small beads of water. While he and Lydia sat at the table they started talking. They laughed and had some more coffee.

They met for coffee later that week. A couple of months later, Alan broke up with his old girlfriend and moved into Lydia's apartment. When Alan moved into her apartment, Lydia told her old boyfriend to stop coming around. Alan went to college and Lydia worked as a temporary employee. They never had money. Even so, they liked having coffee together and talking about other people sitting in the cafe or diner or wherever they were drinking coffee.

While walking past Jack's Diner, Alan noticed a sign in the window saying, "Help needed, now!" He thought he would surprise Lydia with a new job. Inside, a cook in a white uniform, splotchy with yellow drops of grease looked Alan over and set him to work washing dishes. During his first break, Alan used the pay phone at the back of the restaurant. When he had Lydia on the phone, he had to speak louder than normal because of the racket coming from the kitchen. "Guess what," he said, "I'm working at the diner!"

"You're what?" Lydia asked. And then she realized that he had started working at the diner where they had met. She thought how they sometimes liked to go there when it was raining. They would sit at the booth where they had met, hold hands, and ask for demand coffee refills. Now, Lydia knew that they would never go there again. When she suggested that they go there, Alan would say, "No, I work there."

"I'll earn all the money we need," Alan said. He didn't shout and Lydia had trouble understanding him.

"Great. Great," she said. "We can talk about it when you get home." She didn't know what to say. She knew if she said anything, she would probably hurt his feelings. However, the more she thought about what he had done, the more she wondered if he loved her. If he had loved her, he would know that getting a job at the diner would wreck it for them.

She called her old boyfriend. He sided with her completely. "I would never do something like that," he said. "Why don't you come over and talk about it?"

When Alan finally came home, Lydia smiled. She poured him a cup of coffee. Alan, tired, stripped off his dirty clothes. They smelled like soap and mashed leaves. He wadded them up and dropped them into the machine in the apartment building's washroom.

Lydia watched Alan as he drank his coffee. "Are you all right?" she asked him.

"I'm tired is all," he said. He smiled for her and grabbed her hands with his. The tips of his fingers were warm from holding the hot coffee cup.

In the morning, Alan woke with only a half hour before he had to be at work. He pulled his clothes out of the dryer and folded them on the top of the washing machine. On the side of table he noticed, in among people's old, stray socks, a button like one missing from Lydia's cardigan. Just under the button, folded into a neat triangle was a pair of underwear, smaller than Lydia's. Alan flapped them out and admired at how narrow the waist was. Then he folded it back and lay the button on top of it. On the way back to his apartment, he thought he should grab Lydia's lost button. And then in a moment when he wasn't really thinking, when he saw he only had fifteen minutes to get to the diner, he put away his folded laundry and dropped the underwear and button into Lydia's chest-of-drawers.

Some days later, Lydia found the underwear and a button she didn't recognize in her chest-of-drawers. She held them up and knew that they did not belong to her. She knew that Alan must have found them in the laundry after some woman he was sleeping with had hurriedly thrown them off. She wondered if he had met her at the diner. She wondered if he had taken up with his old girlfriend. Waiting for Alan for to return she decided to confront him with the evidence.

While they sat down for their evening cup of coffee, Lydia kept the underwear and button rolled up into her hand. Finally, she stood up and threw them onto the table. The button bounced and rolled. "You think I don't know what's going on? I'm not foolish. I've also been sleeping around, too. I've been sleeping with Jared this entire time."

Alan picked up the button. "You lost this didn't you?"

April 13, 2003

The main problem was that the tiger would either eat the child in the first half hour of the show, or the tiger would act like a big house cat until it starved to death.

The desired effect of the show was that the cat would behave like a house cat with the inevitable, intended promise that it would eventually freak out and eat the boy. The boy through cunning and guile had to survive -- not that the boy would survive because he had bonded with the cat. This was the problem they had uncovered after going through several hundred test boys -- that is boys without any clear identifying information that they had bought from the homes on the streets of LA. Four hundred bucks bought a functional seven-year or eight year old. They preferred English speakers, but many of the boys spoke Spanish. One boy spoke a haunted babble they could not identify but thought might be Linear Pict X. Thirty of the boys died within minutes of getting launched in the test lot with the tiger.

They tested five tigers -- and this became a problem, too, because the tigers that learned to kill continued to kill (and got better at executing the boys) and so the producers learned that once a tiger did the kill, it would keep killing. And this became part of their thought process in putting the boys in the boat with the tiger. They would have to have a supply of tigers, as well.

Of course all of the boys had to die because no one could know how they had perfected the show. It had a lot of problems, this show. It was a delicate balance to get it to work.

Yann Martel had to be contacted and he threatened to sue if they went ahead with the show. The public domain idea, he said, was a boy and a wild cat. A boy and a tiger in a lifeboat, I have that copyrighted. If you do this, my lawyers will contact you. So they paid him a half million dollars for the rights and threatened to say they would call it ?Yann Martel?s Tiger in a Lifeboat,? playing both to his ego (like anyone even knew who this guy was) and his pretension, what kind of literary guy was he if he?d originated a reality cable show?

Reality was played out anyway. This was a latch ditch effort to get some interest behind the show. Early one morning in a warehouse in Burbank, they launched the boy and the tiger in the lifeboat, and waited.

March 6, 2003

Harris caught Edith in the hallway with mismatched socks on her feet. He smiled at her and she smiled at him and kept on walking unashamedly along the poorly lit hallway.

The carpet gently whispered with each step. Edith walked so close to the wall the sparse brown hair on her right forearms brushed the pained molding. The molding ran halfway up the wall and was neatly mortared at the six doors. The place had been a nice dormitory for professors at the university years ago, but working people like Harris and Edith now rented it. He took an evening class the first winter he lived in the building. Now he complained about parking. She still took her classes in figure drawing and landscape painting and methodically filled her sketchbooks and filed them in a large gray filing cabinet. Normally they wouldn't say anything to the other person because they never said anything to anyone else. She was suspicious that men were testing her out to see if she would be one of those fabled easy lays who would invited them into her apartment where they would go through the predictable ritual she used to read out-loud to her girlfriends from the tattered copy of a men's magazine she had found in a boyfriend's uniform drawer, full of sold jock straps, foot ball tights, and nylon belts. She broke up with him after he told her it was time for them to do it and she said if that is the it your are referring to I am not interested. She had liked to talking to boys and there was always that gentle tug she couldn't identify and when she read those ridiculous letters that followed puerile plot line of man meets complete stranger woman she invites him to a private spot, sucks him, and then strips and then there is much c - u - m - ing. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror looking at herself and frowned. Even calculating in the arrangement of her body and the lighting and the make-up and the airbrushing (because these were the photographs in the magazine) she wouldn't look anything like that. Her breasts were like fatty tumors and her nipples were large without any clear areola edge just slightly bigger bumps than the bumps that sort of spread out into the flesh of her chest. She had a bright red rings around her waist - like a line someone had drawn between her belly button and her breasts. And so she sat in her classes, her lips lividly tight as she concentrated on drawing. She liked her life drawing classes the best because she had such a difficult time controlling the line of her pencil. Her figures turned out brutish and trollish; when she managed to make whatever she was marking out look the least bit human, she was happy.

She wasn't expecting to talk to anyone on the hallway of her
apartment. She had seen Harris late at night when she was coming home from class.
He had a brown bag of take-out and smiled at her but turned away quickly.

The take-out had a soy sauce sweet flavor and he liked the dumpling floating in a neon orange hot sauce. The paper take out was soggy and the lid wilted back when he opened it up after coming into his dark apartment that smelled like old pizza boxes and unwashed dishes and the fabric softener his mother had used and that he still used on his clothes. He sat a fold chair at his kitchen table and read a business magazine and then turned on the TV. He thought for a second about Edith who he didn't know as Edith just he thought she must be a driven artist or something a student he assumed because she always had her supplies when he saw her in the hallway.

That Saturday, though when he caught her in the hallway
without matching socks he nodded his head and walked down the stairs with her.

It wasn't odd -- by the way -- that they took the stairs even though they lived on the eleventh floor. The elevator was a small cage from the 1920s and crept up and down the floors and because it was so slow, someone was always waiting for it each floor and so it was a small packed elevator that stopped at each floor. And so if you wanted to get downstairs comfortably you walked in that building. And he and she walked down the stairs together not saying anything to each other although they were both aware of each other and listened to the other won walking down the stairs.

She walked all of the way down even though she had on one pink sock and one white sock. Maybe he fell in love with her because she walked down eleven flights of stairs with him and it gave them a moment to not talk to each other but to listen to the other one walking down the stairs. She gasped when she opened the front door and noticed the couch that filled the space under the first flight of stairs in the lobby. 'What is this?' It was a gigantic couch and had big black buttons and a dusty fringe along the base of the couch. She didn't like the sofa in the lobby. We should get rid of the sofa. When they went outside they asked one of the passerby's if they needed a good sofa. They were moving and they found that they didn't have room for it at the new place. So they had to construct a whole story about getting the sofa. He said his mother have it them. No telling how much she paid for it. She always bought the top of the line because she said it lasted longer and made up the cost in the long haul. It still had some time on it. But if you don't have room for it, then what do you? You want a sofa? Of course they did if they were just giving it away. They'd come back with their truck. So he and the Edith went to a coffee shop on the corner and then came back when the people parked in the no parking zone in front the building. They walked into the lobby and the two men sat down the sofa. It is a little dusty. But hell it's free. Harris guided the sofa into the truck and then it was gone.

'You water your plants' Because it looks dead.'
'No I didn't water that plant. Your the one who bought the
planet.'
'I should have named it. I never let anything with a name
die.'
'It's not dead. It's just thirsty.'
'Right. It's not dead sweetie. It's just sleeping. A deep
sleep.'
'You don't believe me. All you have to do it water it and it
will come back to live.'
'Are you playing god with my plant?'
'How much do you think it cots to water your plant that
doesn't have a name?'
'Erskin.'
'Erskin?'
'I think I will name my dead plant Erksin.'
'Erksin isn't dead. He's just thirsty.'
'See. If I name something it never dies.'
'You resuscitated the plant by naming it Erksin.'

Watering the plant did not help. It was dead. Edith stood at
the window. She push the potted plant she named Erskin out the window and they watched it drop. It dropped and then bounced off the left a story down - the
soil inside the pot slide out and everything spiraled into the air and they
still watched it fall for several stories. Harris imagined that people looking
out of their respective windows and saw the soil fall and the pot falling and
thought a bird was flashing out of the window and they went back to their lives
and it kept falling the eleven stories then the pot split on the sidewalk each
fragment turning into pebble sized fragments and the soil slumped onto the
pavement and Erksin himself splattered onto the pavement the force of the
impact splitting his fibrous stalks and shucking his dead leaves. Harris looked
at Edith and she smiled. 'Erskin was drinking us out of house and home.'

February 27, 2003

British Airways mislaid my luggage somewhere en route to Heathrow. My wife and I didn't know it had been lost as we came down over the just waking country at 6:00 o'clock in the morning. Over the gently rolling hills, the orange glow of lights lay arranged in circular patterns along the suburban lanes and around the circles of round-abouts, although I didn't know that's what they were then.

The landscape in the early morning light was green and organized and as it should be. In contrast the descent to Sea-Tac Airport, over the suburbs south of Seattle, reveals the gash of strip malls, highways, neon motel signs, jumbled street lamps, and lit parking lots scattered in chaotic sprays. Coming down into England was like coming down into a nation-sized golf course.

I spoke in a soft voice to the woman at the desk in her blue uniform and hat. She tried to listen to me, but couldn't hear me because I didn't want to speak loudly enough that she could hear my accent. "Pardon me?" she asked. I didn't want to complain with my American voice. While in England, whenever I did speak, which I did as little as possible, I spoke very quietly. I silently filled out a form and slid it across the desk and said, "Thank you."

At the passport gate, the customs officer examined my card. "Word Processor?" he asked. This was my profession. "In the UK that's a machine."

"I do my best," I said.

Passing along the concourse to pick up our luggage, a man behind me said, "Your left shoe lace is untied, if you are at all interested."

My wife's grandparents had invited us to visit at their house in East Grinstead, a village about thirty miles to the southwest of London. We were going to catch the train into the city from their house and spend our days wandering through the British Museum and Camden Town. We didn't know what we were going to do, but my wife had grown up in the UK and hadn't been back for years. She was happy just buying candy from the newsagent.

The cab driver, who wore a neat haircut, glasses, and tie drove us to her grandparent's house from the airport. East Grinstead was partly an older village that to me looked like a well-designed outdoor mall meant to look like an English village. It's a matter of course for buildings to be several hundred years old in England. This was pointed out to me frequently while visiting the UK. Two hundred years ago, in 1802, Seattle wasn't even a lean-to on Alki. This comparison, generally, used to point out how new and unproven the United States is compared to England. Instead it just illustrated the energy of American cities. While a two hundred year old English structure (and two hundred years is hardly a mark of longevity in England) in East Grinstead dutifully sat on its corner and people lived in the building clocking out their lives by the breakfast, tea, lunch, tea, dinner, tea they consumed -- in America a plot during the same period was 1) appropriated by pioneers; 2) clear-cut; 3) turned into farm land; 4) re-appropriated by an expanding city in the form of some building; and 5) this structure was ripped down and replaced in its entirety every twenty years until the current time, when a Land Use Proposal billboard appeared on the corner.

My wife's grandparents came out to greet us and they hugged the cab driver because he was wearing glasses and a tie. "Sorry. This is my husband," my wife said, and then they examined me, a little shocked by my stubble, my cow licked hair, the indeterminate stains on my T-shirt gathered from the daylong international flight. They took us inside, and plied us with tea.

The Purdys had a tiny little house with a spare bedroom where we would stay. They had a tiny little yard that was full of tiny little tomato plants, peas, and a frog that occasionally hopped through. A spider web hung from the rafter on their front porch and Mr. Purdy spent a great deal of time inspecting the construction of the web. He'd been an engineer, although he wasn't inspecting the properties of the web so much as the drama of the spider's project. His childhood portrait, a large, black and white image in a gilt frame hung on the living room wall under the tea service. In the photograph, he had long, flowing hair and wore a dress. At dinner that night they doled out half of a boiled potato to each of us and a sliver of ham. These weren't potatoes like heavy, Idaho russet potatoes, but golf ball sized, new potatoes, seasoned with a shaving of butter and a little salt and that was it. Mrs. Purdy asked after I had eaten dinner in a single bite, "Do you want a whole potato?"

I wanted about fifteen whole potatoes is what I wanted.

We rode on the train into London during the day. Mr. Purdy, a very old man, drove us through East Grinstead at a breakneck pace -- 70 miles an hour down the narrow country lanes. He slowed reluctantly for hairpin turns and stopped abruptly at the train terminal. We climbed into the train and rode to London. As the train drew closer to the city, the houses grew into tighter spaces until they were long rows. We passed a few places with graffiti and then past the Battersea Power station -- which I knew from the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals -- and finally, to Victoria Station. We came out onto the London street, then, and I realized that the suburban quality of East Grinstead was a quality of the entire country. Although in the train station, we did pass a young man carrying a beer can and he drank from the can just like someone at the Greyhound bus station in Seattle might drink from a coke can, that was the sole sign of seediness, of any kind of recognizably decay in the city. London is not a busy city the way New York or even Seattle is busy. And unlike Seattle and New York, it is clear that people actually live in London. They have business and they are meeting friends for lunch. In downtown Seattle or midtown Manhattan the only business going on is business. This lived-in feel to London, this slow pace, made the whole thing seem secure. Although statistically I was more likely to find myself knocked over the head and mugged in the UK than in the United States, it was less likely that I'd also get killed. This feeling of safety pervaded the country to the point where I began to miss, in just the two weeks I was there, the edge of living in America, and in Seattle in particular. The fear that always chewed away at me, a fear I'd become accustomed too like a bad knee pain, was gone. I often felt that something inexplicable and horrible was about to happen to me or someone I knew -- that some deranged killer would drag me into a stand of Weyerhaeuser seedlings, hog tie me with nylon rope, and after inflicting various sexually motivated injuries, bury me. Such things happen in the UK, too, but to me this is about the same as saying that Seattle has old buildings, too. Certain things are part of a place. Old buildings belong to the UK. Violent, inexplicable death belongs to the US.

Which perhaps explains in an odd way why I was unable to find any evidence of a literary subculture in London. I wanted to find rare and odd zines from the United Kingdom. At bookstores I kept asking if they had any zines. "Pardon?" they said. I didn't want to go into a lengthy explanation in my American voice. They didn't know what I was talking about. At a few stores, I changed my tactic and asked if they had any underground magazines. They checked to see if any of their co-workers had heard what I asked, and if their co-workers had heard, they wouldn't say. "You might have luck at the newsagent," one said. "We don't stock that kind of thing here." I realized, then, they thought I was looking for smut. At least this was a point of commonality between the two countries; it was easier to find a skin magazine than a literary magazine. I could find no evidence whatsoever of a literary subculture in England. I realized while looking through the newly released books on Charing Cross Road, that the reason I couldn't find something like this in England was because the mainstream culture accommodated it -- the mainstream culture in England was the literary subculture and the mainstream literary culture at the same time. There wasn't this stark delineation between mass culture and subculture that is in the United States. The UK, in part, lacks mass culture on the order of the United States. So everything mingles into a kind of hodgepodge of serious and trivial literature.

I read the Best of the Young American Novelists published by Granta after reading the second edition of the British version. The authors included in the British edition wrote about just about anything. They were, too, generalists in their educations; and not all of them had undergraduate degrees. Only a few had advanced writing degrees, and those from only one school, the University of East Anglia. Their writing style tended toward the loose and informal and slap-dash. Their stories lacked formal precision and many of the clips didn't have any formal structure at all, just bravado. While it didn't make for the best of reading, each writer didn't seem too much like any other writer. In the American collection, however, all of the authors not only had advanced degrees in writing but also jobs as writing professors. Their writing demonstrated formal precision and the generally careful handling of every element of their "craft" from the studied lack of commas to the calibrated metaphors until they presented a monotonous, unified front.

June 12, 2002

STORY -- Bret balanced on the outermost oily wooden trestle ledge looking down the thirty feet of girders and columns into the rushing gully cut into the mountain side. The cataract coated the uppermost trestle timbers with spray. A fine film of algae grew on the creosote and mist. Moss grew on the pillars. Bret liked the sound of the water coming down the mountain side. He gyrated on the slippery wood and shouted back at Cindy, “You gotta cross if you’re going to cross.” He slipped for a second, after he turned back from calling her. His worn tennis shoes didn’t have any tread left on the soles. They were just a sheet of pitted rubber floating on the layer of brown algae. Bret felt himself slide. He had his weight on one shoe and the sole slipped toward the gully but before he even thought about tripping and flying out into the mist and the space and falling into the stony creek way below, he shifted back and landed in the middle of the tracks. His legs shook. Bret tried to stop their quivering, but the muscles contracted and expanded over and over again on their own.

“I’m not crossing,” Cindy said. “I saw that. Why don’t you come back here? We’ll eat our picnic up here, on this bluff.”

Bret didn’t understand why Cindy had asked him to go for a walk with her today. He still felt like he did when he was nervous on the first day of school. He never slept the night before school started and when he went, he knew it was the first day of school because there was dew in the lawn and the cobwebs had water dripping from them on the walk to school and when he came to school he didn’t say anything to anyone. He dried the palm of his hands off all day on his thighs in case he had to shake hands with anyone.

Cindy kept her hair short, peroxides frizzy, pulled back with a rubber band from the Sunday Edition of The Seattle Times. She worked a paper route to help her housemate, Edwin, with the money. Bret thought maybe they were married, but then maybe they weren’t. Edwin had forbidden Cindy to work a regular job because he said he had old fashioned values. She didn’t mind because she liked being at home during the afternoons. Cindy had always stood a little too close to Bret in the morning when they picked up their papers from the delivery shed near the freeway. First, Bret thought it was because she didn’t know any better, and then Bret thought it was because she liked him. “You’re too old to be a paperboy, ain’t you?” she asked him the first time they met. Most of the other paper delivery boys were twelve or fourteen. “What about you?” Bret asked. Cindy stood right next to him, and he could smell Ivory Soap and baby powder on her. She had short hair, and he could see that it had been dyed because the roots had just started to show. The hair on the back of her neck was a completely different color. She saw him look at the hair on the back of her neck, and the next day he didn’t see those hairs. He didn’t see them again. Bret didn’t understand really why she liked him. She had Edwin. So when she asked him, “What do you like about me?” And he was thinking that well, he’d like to have sex with her, Bret knew at least enough not to say that. He felt his face heat up and knew she understood.

Bret curled his fingers over his eyes. He looked out over the alder trees growing on the muddy slope. Their leaves had already turned yellow, and most of them lay on the ground. Through the trees he could see the wide South Fork Valley of the Snoqualmie. On the distant wall, Interstate 90 ran toward Snoqualmie Pass. A truck fog horn sounded on the freeway, and he became aware after hearing it that he could hear the rush of the cars, a faint steady white noise he’d taken for granted. “Let’s just get around the corner,” he said.

“I’m not wearing the right shoes,” Cindy said. She wore heavy leather hiking boots Edwin kept oiled for her. She hadn’t slipped once on the damp wooden sleepers of the tracks she and Bret were walking on. She wore faded blue jeans she’d owned since she she’d been in high school.

Bret stood on the other side of the trestle. “This is the longest one. Just around this hill we’ll be in the watershed, were nobody is allowed. So there will be nothing there, but us.”

“I don’t know,” Cindy said as she started to cross the trestle. She stood directly in the middle and kept her eyes on the next trestle. She stood directly between the two railroad tracks. The diesel engine that carried lumber down from the spurs along the South Fork of the Snoqualmie had scrapped the rails into two long, sparkling steel lines. Down the tracks, they faded into the shadows under the boughs. “You don’t think a train will come?”

“No,” he said. So then Cindy put out the toe of one boot, as if testing the strength of the trestle. She gingerly put her weight on her foot and then began to walk. She didn’t look down. A breeze eased with the cold air down the mountain. When she finally crossed, Bret grabbed her and kissed her forehead. A thin layer of salt coated her forehead. He was taller than her but very skinny.

“You smell like lemon-rinds,” she said.

“Do you like it?”

She lifted her chin and made a sniffling noise. “You can smell it on yourself?”

“Yes.”

“They say if you can smell it, then you have too much on.”

“Do you think?” Bret asked. “Too much?”

“Edwin would have held my hand if he’d been here.”

“Is Edwin here? He doesn’t seem to be here.”

Now that they were on the other side of the trestle, Cindy cupped her hand over her eyes and looked down into the gully. The water rushed and sent mist all of the way to the lip of the gully. “Edwin once fell out of a three story window. He just stood up after the fall and dusted himself off and came back inside where we were. He was hardly even drunk.”

“A person shouldn’t drink too much.”

“Do you think you’re that strong?”

“I’m not jumping down into the bottom of this gully. I’d crack my skull open.”

They walked along the tracks, then, not saying any thing. Cindy whistled softly to herself. She asked him what time it was, and Bret told her. They kept walking and after making their way around a gradual bend in the tracks and up a long, steep grade, Cindy said, “I think today is a special day. I can feel it.”

“What is special about today?”

“What time is it?”

“Why do you keep asking that?”

“I’m just watching the time.”

“It’s five minutes after the last time you asked me.”

“What time was that?”

“Five minutes after the time you asked me before that. Why don’t you wear a watch?”

“I’m just asking the time. I don’t need a lecture.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s ten-thirty.”

“You said it was ten o’clock last time I asked.”

“If you knew what time it was, why did you ask me? If you’re not up for this, that’s all right with me, I guess.”

“You want to go back?” She down on the long track, that went for a mile down the grade they had just walked up and then around turned into the trees.

“Are you worried about Edwin?”

“I’m worried about Edwin. He’s insane. I’m as worried as much as I can be. He’s not here right this minute, and you are here.”

“Why don’t you just kill him and get it over with it?”

“That’s not funny,” Cindy said. “Wouldn’t fix anything anyway.”

“Then let’s move, just you and me. We could go to someplace where Edwin would never look for us.”

“He has a computer. He could find us. Did I tell you how he found his father’s brother on the Internet? He just started searching one day and he found a list of six email addresses and one of them was a Cochran from Ohio.”

“We won’t have an email address. We won’t have a listed phone number. We can change our names. We can live on the Oregon Coast and drive an old beater car and walk on the beach when we’re not at our crappy tourist-trap jobs.” Bret said this as he walked down the tracks. He saw a rabbit dart over the ditch and into the bracken fern. “Did you see that?”

“Is Edwin following us?”

“A rabbit. There’s a million of them along the tracks. Now that we are in the watershed, we’ll see all kinds of wildlife.”

“I didn’t see a rabbit.”

Up ahead there was a rabbit eating grass growing along the side of the track. It nibbled on the grass and then looked up at the two of them coming down the track. It’s nose took in their scent -- a damp black cherry -- wrinkling and pulsing as it chewed the grass. It half turned ready to jump into the blackberry bushes.

“Stop,” Bret said. “It’s about to jump into the bushes.”

“You’d kill that rabbit if I asked you,” Cindy said.

“I’m not going to kill a rabbit. Unless you are planning on eating it. Nothing should just get killed.”

“What’s the difference? If I want to eat it or I just want you to kill it, it’s the same thing. From your end, it’s still killing the rabbit.”

“With one, you want to get yourself some food. And with the other you just want to me to kill something. And anyway the rabbit heard us talking about killing it, and took off.”

They walked further down the tracks not saying anything, now. The sun had risen high enough that it fell down between the fir on either side of the tracks. Heat began to hang in the air. As the creosote railroad ties warmed they filled the dusty air with a heavy oily odor. Occasionally, some insect that Bret had always known the sound of but didn’t know the name of whistled in the forest. They passed a sign nailed to a tree. Cedar River Water Shed. No Trespassing. Violators Will be Prosecuted. Another rabbit chewed on some grass in the shade of overhanging bushes. They were just about up to it. It hadn’t seen them out in the bright sunlight. “Kill it for me, please?” Cindy asked.

“Oh Jesus,” he said. “You better eat it.”

Bret leaned forward and then sprung in front of the rabbit. The startled rabbit jumped toward the cover of the bushes, but Bret had already jumped there. He caught the rabbit by the ears and flung it against the tracks. The rabbit bounced against a railroad tie and then slid up against the track. Bret jumped after it. He picked the stunned rabbit up and whacked it quickly against the smooth metal surface of the rail. Blood jumped out of its ears and eyes. “Oh Jesus,” Bret said. “Now I’m covered in blood.”

Cindy looked at Bret leaned over the rabbit carcass. “You did it,” she said.

“Here’s your rabbit.” He held the rabbit by the feet. It dripped blood like a wash rag dribbling water.

“I don’t want that rabbit. It’s been in the dirt and it’s all bloody and it’s raw. Besides, I don’t know where that meat has been. Suppose that rabbit has worms or something?”

“Well, I killed it. I smashed its skull in because you said you wanted it. You said you’d eat it. This is your rabbit.”

“I don’t want it.”

“What am I supposed to do with it? I can’t just carry it around with us.”

“You should’ve thought of that before you killed it.”

“You asked me to kill it. I didn’t want to kill it.”

“Would you do anything for me?”

“It just about looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Throw it in the bushes. Some animal that’s hungry will get it.”

“If I do that, then I’ll have killed it for the hell of it.”

“No you didn’t. I asked you to. You killed it to prove that you love me.”

In the watershed they swam in a river pool. It was chilly and clear and lay under gigantic Douglas fir trees. The sun filtered down through the boughs and cut through the flowing water to the gravelly bottom, sparkling with chipped granite and quartz and mica. While in the water, they could hear the sound of bushes breaking and then a stampede of elk, the size of horses, passed through the stream. Their skin was brown velvet. Moss hung from their antlers like banners. Cindy stood up in the water to watch them charge around them, through the shallow parts of the river. Water riled off her breasts. Bret couldn’t believe his pornographic good luck. He stood out of the water listening to the crash of the animals fade as they trampled through the salmon berry bushes.

They walked slowly back over the trestle out of the watershed. The sun had set a little while before, but it was still hot and dusty on the tracks. The cool air came down the gully and felt good to Bret. They crossed the trestle and then finally came to the first paved road and walked along that holding hands until they came back into town. Bret let go of Cindy’s hand when the first car came toward them. It had its lights on. The man inside of it, Bret, figured, probably knew Edwin. The car kept driving. Finally, they walked down the street of small, old houses. They had been building gigantic mansion sized houses on lots about the same size out on the hillsides of North Bend. Bret delivered pizza to them one summer. He drove his the old Chevy Celebrity. The car made a rattling noise as he drove in the shadow of these huge houses, and there weren’t any trees or bushes, just rookeries that looked like they had come wrapped in plastic. Spindly Japanese maple trees grew in beauty bark islands. Down in the old town, people grew corn in their front yards. String beans hung from a web of strings running up the side of a garage, and people sat out in their yard now that it had cooled off. They sat in lawn chairs and drank lemonade from plastic cups and beer from bottles.

The door to Cindy’s house was open and Edwin’s truck, a battered four-by-four Toyota pick-up with roll bars and gigantic tires sat on the lawn. Edwin stood in the middle of the lawn spraying soap suds off the hood with his thumb over the garden hose.

Bret stopped before Edwin had turned and looked at him. “I should go,” Bret said.

“I’m going to go with you,” Cindy said.

“Now?”

“Come on,” she said.

Edwin saw them, then, standing at the edge of the yard. “Hey Cindy. Where you been?”

“Out hiking and thinking,” she said.

“How are you doing Bret?”

“Fine, Edwin. Amazing weather isn’t it?”

“Shit,” he said. “Amazing isn’t the half of it. First we have El Niño and then we get La Niña. What were you doing, son, with my wife all day.”

“I don’t think she’s married to anyone.”

“The hell she ain’t. She’s living in my house. Way I see it, that makes her a married woman.” He turned off the hose. Water dripped from the truck. The door to the house was still open. Bret could hear music then, coming out of the house, guitars and howling, and then it stopped and Bret saw Cindy through the front window at the stereo cabinet, putting CDs into a brown paper Thriftway bag.

Edwin walked across the lawn and stood, then directly in front of Bret. Bret stood on the slight slope of grass coming off the road and down into the yard. Even so, he was a lot taller than Edwin. But Edwin had a hard round stomach with his T-shirt stretched taught across it. His shirt had long sleeves but they only came half way down his forearms. Motor oil stained the shirt in crusty, black patches. He wore a pair of khaki shorts and didn’t have any shoes on. His face was covered in short, wiry hair and his beard ran halfway up his cheeks. His hair ran all of the way down his neck. He rubbed one of his callused hands over his eyebrows, across his face and down his neck. It made a noise like a heavy object sliding across a rug. “I have half a mind to break your legs.”

Bret shook his head. “I can understand that. I really do.” Bret stood over Edwin. Although Bret was smaller than Edwin, he looked over the top of his thinning scalp. “If someone wants to leave someone else, there isn’t anything anyone can do about it. We are all free to do what we want. Land of liberty.”

“She doesn’t want to leave. You’re talking her into it; and your bloody lips will talk her out of it.”

“She doesn’t listen to me. She’s the one who tells me what to do.”

“Why don’t you just smack me in my face. Because I am sick of you kicking me in the balls. She’s staying here.”

“I’m going with Bret,” Cindy said. She stood on the porch. She had several bags slung across her back and a garment bag in her arms. A couple of brown bags sat on the porch steps. “I just came by to get my things. Bret came by to give me a hand.”

“I didn’t know she was going to do this,” I said.

“Fuck you,” Edwin said. “I’ll fucking give you a hand, bitch,” he said. He took several short, mincing steps toward the house and then ran at full title. Bret jumped after him. Bret’s long legs carried him across the lawn, and he tackled Edwin in the damp and soapy yard in front of the truck. They dropped into a tangle of arms on the soggy lawn, wet grass slicking their shirts to their bodies. And then Edwin has his arms around Bret’s shoulders, and he folded Bret’s head into his chest. Bret slide out and hit Edwin in the face with the heal of his hand. Edwin grunted and blood came out of his nose. Bret captured Edwin in a headlock. Edwin grabbed Bret’s crotch and twisted. They both struggled and howled.

“Nobody asked for you two to fight over me,” Cindy said. She put her things in the passenger side of the truck.

Edwin and Bret broke away from each and took a couple of steps back from each other. Their hands were on their knees and they breathed in and out. Edwin felt his nose and then Bret climbed into the truck. Cindy told him to get out of the car. He stood, confused, and she picked up the floor mat and lay it down on the seat. “You’re dirty,” she said. “I don’t want you ruining the upholstery.”

“Sorry,” Bret said.

Edwin whacked the side of the truck with the palm of his hand. “Cindy,” he said. “Where are you going?”

She drove away. They didn’t say anything while she drove through town, past all of the houses that Bret liked, and then down the highway to the little apartment he lived in at the top of a brick apartment building at the edge of a corn field. Bret followed Cindy up the stairs. She hurried up them, and then she took off her clothes, and he took off his clothes. They showered. They stood in the steamy bathroom, and he was aware she was there with him then. He felt like crawling into bed and sleeping, but she was there with him now. She sat down on the toilet, and he went out into his bedroom and kitchen and sitting room, and he sat down on the chair looking out at the Snoqualmie River over the wrecking yard full of broken cars. There was something about the orderly bins of smashed car parts that Bret found comforting, that even after an accident a kind of order was reestablished in the junk yard. When she came out of the bathroom, naked, she smiled at him and looked around. “There’s only one chair.”

“Sorry,” he said. He stood up and sat down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

“Good God, you have a horrible view,” she said and closed the curtains and the room was dark now. He could see between the curtains a bright sliver of the outside daylight, but there inside, the room was dark.

STORY - Along a river slough, long since cut from the Snoqualmie River, something started and failed. A farm had once tried to grow along the river but the Snoqualmie had jumped the banks and had left a shallow lake. The fields turned swampy and filled with cattails. The fruit trees grew twisted and their branches filled with blackberry vines. The empty pastures filled with alders and finally cedar trees.

The old farm house still stood. Silvered fence posts with caps of moss were all that remained of the pastures. They ran in broken lines through the cedar tree forest, up to the edge of the old river bed. The roof of the house had been replaced and a stone foundation laid. Below the house the still waters of the slough reflected the forest and the clouds.

The sun was out, and already the cool air that hung around the river in the morning had blown down the valley. Now a stifling heat clung to the trunks of the red cedar trees. Ellen walked along the rutted road toward Joseph’s house above the slough.

Ellen planned to tell Joseph straight out, regardless of how he felt, that she was leaving next month for school in Amherst. She had already registered and filled out the forms. Her parents had already f