Two Short Stories, Four Poems,
a Comedy Monologue, Seven Collages,
One Resident of Budapest, an Intern from Australia
and Ten Berliners
Bordercrossing Berlin is an English language literary journal that focuses on writers living outside of countries where English is the primary language. Sometimes this is reflected in the writing and sometimes writers will use periods of living abroad to look back at their homelands, or even to create fictions that take place neither in the country where they are living nor where they’re from. As well as providing a forum for ex-pat and “translocal” authors, Bordercrossing also covers the writers’ scenes in various ports with a regular correspondents section. We also feature interviews with authors living or doing residencies in Berlin.
Dennis has generously allowed us to give you a taste of the journal. So far there have been three issues, all well received. We thought it would be fun to do in this Weaklings-blog what we haven’t done in the journal: introduce you to the people who put it together. For those of you who are writers (regardless of where you live) you will also find a couple of calls for submissions down the page.
Rattke ‘Change Of’
Fiona Mizani
Fiona gets all the credit for both getting the journal started and for its focus. Previously she ran Café Rosa, a shoebox café that hosted regular prose and poetry readings, almost all in English. The events and the café itself ended up becoming one of the centers of the growing scene in Berlin. Being a city of both cheap rents and lots of culture, it has acted like a magnet for authors who come here to work on their big novel, or just take an extended break. Often these writers stay longer than they planned and set down a few roots. And more are always arriving on the next plane or train, to the degree that Fiona thought it was important to start recording this scene, but also to open discussion on the phenomenon in general of writing in “foreign” locals. In the age of world wild web we can easily forget that we live in our bodies in actual places, and that these places effect our use of language. Fiona has been Chief Editor for the first three issues. She is now taking time off to work on her own writing.
Tom Bass
A contributor. Born in London, Tom grew up in the US and has lived in Budapest since the early 1990s. His work has appeared in Pilvax in Budapest, Blatt in Prague, and has won first prize in a short story contest in his home state of Wyoming. Stories that have been in the first two issues of Bordercrossing will also be part of a collection of his short fiction, Monsters Cannot Die, available around December of this year from Slash press. This story of Tom’s was in our premiere issue.
Höhenwanderweg
Tom Bass
Victor struggles up the trail in the Alps. These are not the low hills of Pannonia or Avignon. He follows the Höhenwanderweg, signaled by red and white targets painted on the rocks.
His legs creak like two old doors as his knees buckle with each step. One might be shorter than the other. One leg might be twisted and gnarled. The other might be burned and hairless. There might be a rash between them, scars from surgery or dog bites along their length. It doesn’t matter because his lungs carry him forward, two balloons of membrane unmindful of the thin air.
Marmots sound three short whistles that echo from the scree.
Beware! Beware! Beware!
Where there were black eyes and wooly ears there is now a burrow.
Victor zigzags up the trail, incrementally adding vertical meters with each bend. Chevrons of boots and dots of walking sticks mark the trail. Pale alpine flowers line the trail, even edelweiss.
The cold wind is blowing against his chest. His kerchief is soaked with a stinky wetness.
His back is hot and sweaty against the rucksack. His heel is blistered and hurting, but up he goes, past dirty snow and sliding rock, one side of the trail dipping sharply.
Any rock kicked loose is a danger to those below. And any misstep is an invitation to a tumble over the cliffs and a certain end.
Victor hugs the side of the mountain, patient, biding his time.
“Elizabeth?” he cries, the wind wiping the words from his lips. “Bill?”
She does not come — perhaps wearing a straw hat and an aqua rucksack, with her hands on her waist and a worried expression on her face, not daring to look down.
“Keep your head up! Look at the trail in front of you!” he calls to the apparition.
No one is there except the bobbing heads of the flowers.
A new vista greets him when he crosses the saddle of the pass, but the clouds are gaining an ominous aspect, congealing around the horns of rock like blood. The wind here is cold, like the end of a switch.
He wipes his chapped, scarred face and descends.
He slides over the rocks, riding the dry rapids of the mountain’s face, moves diagonally towards a distant point where a group of hikers enjoy a thermos of tea.
They have moved on before he gets there, for surely they too appreciate the solitude.
A crucifix has been erected at the vantage point. The wood is carved with a command: “Enjoy God and Nature.”
Victor shrugs.
Who else is here on the mountain, tacked to a bit of wood and painted with nail polish?
He unwraps a lump of fruitcake from wax paper and studies the clouds. He automatically cuts an extra slice but no one accepts it.
The purple billowing curtains seem to draw around the mountains. The Maker is sealed in.
He spits out an overlooked walnut shell, tips back his flask and rejoins the trail.
Victor walks comfortably as he flanks the high alpine meadow lining the old glacial bowl. Some white rocks, sheep, rest high on the mountain face. A mammoth could be napping behind one of the large boulders that have tumbled into the pasture, a surreal wasteland of giant stones and tufts of grass. A brook runs with cold water over sparkling rocks. He dips in his hands and drinks, tastes the raw energy of the melted tears of snow that were the mountain’s sadness only moments ago.
He reaches a tiny hut with a stovepipe chimney. Some boots are stored under the eaves and a padlock holds the door.
Victor pulls on his rain gear and licks his sores as the clouds advance upward to greet him. He lights a shaggy cigarette and hunkers on an outcrop. The cigarette sizzles like a fingernail.
A shepherd approaches in the distance as the clouds roll up the valley. He emits the oily lanolin smell of sheep, offers no words of salutation. The man materializes through the aquatic blanket of approaching fog and rain. He looks worried.
Who has been slinging rocks at the sheep?
What predator has dismembered a lamb and eaten only the organs?
Why does he find a man, alone, squatting on a tuft of grass and puffing on a smoke, his head beaded with acrid perspiration, when he clearly spotted a man and woman on the pass earlier?
Is that sweat guilt?
“You should leave the Höhenwanderweg. The weather isn’t safe,” the shepherd says, pointing to the clouds at his fingertips, signaling the way down.
Victor nods, registers the oblique warning. The water beads off his plastic layer; tart sweat collects inside.
The shepherd glares, then moves on, his odor sweet, like milk curd and whey.
He unlocks the hut, then stands on the little porch, his arms crossed, guardedly questioning the figure crouched before him.
Did this stranger have an argument with his beloved? Was she afraid of heights, trembling and panting and refusing to go on? Did she challenge him to push her down the mountain when he confronted her? Did he? Or did he hold onto her pack’s shoulder straps and gently lower her to the earth for a last kiss before she perished?
Is that why everything is dead and silent?
Is that why there are no more footsteps?
Can things happen here in the Alps over which he has no control, much less a memory?
Certainly, no rules or laws exist on the mountain, and the many seasons that can come and go in a day are the only suggestion of time.
Victor hails the shepherd again.
He smiles his widest smile, his head between his knees. He’d like to confirm his position on his map, but the man just points at the switchbacks that cut into the valley and end at a gravel road, faint like the trail of a slug.
“Should I go on?” he implores.
The shepherd shrugs.
The man won’t listen, judging from his grip on the map.
Victor reconnoiters. The next refuge can’t be more than an hour away. A warm, well-provisioned lair is the incentive to stay on top.
It’s summer and surely the storm cannot be that deadly when the foothills ripen with apples, grapes and hay. So what if far below the maelstrom has collapsed the tents of the waltz festival, sent the tourists under the arcades of a medieval town and wet the musicians in lederhosen and lace.
Sheets of blue water begin to fall and the red targets marking the path become invisible.
He drifts from marker to marker over the vivid green grass. The trail is faint, stitched with the crisscrossing paths of cattle. No bells tinkle anywhere, but a surplus of mushrooms sprout from the dung. Victor scoops up the little pale brown fellows, confirms that they are indeed the funny ones that might convince him to shed his rucksack and dance in the rain like a pixie, drumming on his chest and calling out to the peaks to show him the way, if he would dare to eat the gatekeepers guarding the moat of perception.
No answer — just the mist swirling around him and the slight patter of drops as he rustles in his olive skins, vainly looking for the blinking red targets of the Höhenwanderweg, a cairn or clumps of lichen that might indicate the path.
The fog is accented with otherworldly chiming music.
The refrain is perfumed, almost recognizable.
“Let’s keep together!”
Is that Elizabeth beckoning?
Or a cascade tumbling through a chute?
The compass twitches nervously at the rocks: the mountains are magnetic. The binoculars are of little use. His boots are swamped with rain.
Victor rummages for his emergency whistle. The shrill toot is swallowed by the rain.
He consults his dripping map, shreds of red and green ink peeling off its surface. He bumbles from rock to rock, blindly, as the clouds fulfill their prophecy.
Maybe he should squat down on his chakra and meditate? Or keep picking forward?
The clouds gather and change colors, shifting from purple to indigo, pink to yellow.
They snap at his legs and pinch his arms. They engulf him in a membrane of water, binding with him, pulling his boots, legs and then his very body from the ground. Like a monster, the clouds lift Victor from the Höhenwanderweg into the dense sky over the divide between Austria, Italy and Switzerland.
The temperature drops. Joy billows in his soul. His breath shortens. Responsibility and guilt fall away.
He swings from the chords of a translucent sail, loftily carving the cold thermals with the dexterity of a bird.
He’s not going to make the same mistake as Icarus and reach for the sun. Instead, he looks for the way down, not without enjoying his communion, flying without wings.
Why shackle himself to the via ferrata that lead across the Alps when he’s warming up to this unexpected, exhilarating experience like to a good bottle of malt?
He drifts in the white, gray nothingness, momentarily defined by an outcrop or a morass, cradled by the fog billowing around the feet of his cloudy throne.
The eerie voice mews, “Let’s keep together.”
The cumulus strafes Victor with rain.
He fears judgment.
Abracadabra isn’t going to release him.
The clouds are solemn and quiet, free of the transmissions of the Voice of Austria and Vatican Radio. Yet somewhere he hears the dull throbbing of jet engines and the screech of terns and senses the strange morning glow of pack ice.
Victor yellows.
Has he been bounced to Greenland or worse, Canada?
The altitude and dearth of oxygen make Victor combative as he resorts to swatting at the condensation. His heart and lungs strain with starving blood.
Or is that Lake Geneva below?
Is that the fruitcake that he has hacked up?
Victor kneels on the miracle.
Earth?
The blurry red marker indicates that he’s on trail seventeen. His ears leak wax and blood, his eyes tear and he swallows.
Victor pats, strokes then beats the ground, supremely happy.
He dislodges his soaked rucksack from his shoulders and opens the fabric hump. The contents are fine, wrapped in miscellaneous plastic bags: Lidl, Kaiser, Migros. Victor finds no wings, but grubs for the flask of schnapps.
Hitchhiking on clouds has made him thirsty.
Victor rolls on his back. He has landed indeed. Even the clouds are clearing to a degree and he recognizes the shepherd’s hut graced with a column of smoke. His worries turn into smiles and he laughs, the panic replaced with hysterical relief that he has not landed in the Watkins or the Rockies but rather in a pool of mud and grass in the Alps.
His skin is dirty, doused with the pollution that litters the sky. He’s wrapped in hair and shreds of Der Zeitung and La Correra like a clogged drain. His pockets are filled with a ballast of old European coins: lira, schillings and francs.
Apparently he isn’t good enough to go much higher; anchored by guilt, pulled back by some force, maybe of his own making.
He studies his face on the bottom of his metal cup: it’s covered with red kisses. Angels, Victor concludes. Bad ones or good ones, he doesn’t really care. It’s nice to be blessed.
The light is fading and night pushes down the valley.
He coils down, following the seventeens. The visibility improves and the path is easy — well-worn switchbacks leading past the foundations of a few collapsed mountain huts. Above, the opaque peaks whisper with water.
“Let’s keep together!”
Night is falling, the chill works into his spine, and the rain returns.
Piney smoke seems to indicate a dwelling, and soon Victor comes to a smelly barn and a low-slung house.
Nothing else twinkles anywhere in the valley on this inclement night.
He knocks, enters the fiery kitchen that smells of wood and milk.
A red-faced farmer, his wife and two daughters morosely pick at a lump of Speck.
“Good evening, fine sir,” Victor says. “Can you assist a traveler on this lonely night with a room?”
The farmer grunts a yes.
Victor sheds his gear and unpacks his waterproofed supplies. To be polite, he asks for a cup of yoghurt, then offers his schnapps.
The farmer wraps his mouth, marked by an open herpes sore, around the flask. He soon brings slices of black radish soaked in salt and wine and Victor merrily adds this to his sandwich. The farmer cuddles his daughters in a dark, possessive way and they too have open teenage sores on their lips.
A cow relentlessly lows for her calf stowed in the barn.
The farmer points to the bench where Victor sits.
That’s the bed.
The flask travels from mouth to mouth once more.
Victor settles for the sound of the fire rather than explain that he has been flying without wings. He studies a patched chink in the wall, seemingly filled by a wild eye learning speech.
Only after the farmer locks the kitchen door does he feel compelled to look at the stars.
But the sole option is sleep, and that isn’t so easy. The tiles on the floor are cold. The pine bench is rough, but its top opens to reveal a cache of blankets. His thermals aren’t substantial enough to keep him warm. Neither is the dim fire.
On a jumble of blankets spread on the floor, Victor’s mind moves with clouds; he cannot simply delete his sky helmet. He twitches and jumps as if defenestrated. He screeches, hits his noggin on the low beams of the kitchen and swears. Next to the chunk of cooling iron stove he gives his rucksack and pillow a kiss and shuts his eggs once again.
The passage opens before him, graffitied with graphics that read:
“Let’s keep together.”
He’s ready for whoever wants him: bride, monster or Maker?
He travels through his eye’s surface into his brain. The psychedelic patterns of his nerves are striated like clouds.
Victor’s first step peels from the floor.
Tonight in his mind the weather is clear and the sky is scratched with cirrus. But this isn’t a matter of a good weather report. No, this is something else, though Victor has trouble identifying exactly what.
Has he swallowed an asp and been suspended by his feet over a stew of boiled stork as a remedy? Has a scorpion crawled in his ear as he dozed under a Tuscan cypress and hot oil been poured over his head by a peasant as old as paper? Has a tapeworm crawled out the aperture of his mouth due to a week-long fast? Has he visited a psychotropic shop in Vienna or Zurich and purchased funky plants? Or is this more likely a part of the dreamscape that seven billion people experience on a nightly basis, when their eggs flutter like birds?
Victor levitates above the cold coals of the stove. He’s probing for an exit, for there is much walking to accomplish tonight. He bumps against the windows. He tests out the sooty stovepipe, almost slips through the greasy keyhole of the kitchen door, but then squeezes through the chink in the wall out into the cool night.
The grass is frosted with hoar. The clouds circulate around the fur-embroidered backs of the peaks, gathered together like wild boar.
A security floodlight in the barnyard ticks on, and he quickly moves past the sticky breath of cattle. He must be back before the farmer’s family wakes to milk the cows, brushes the blood from their sore-laden lips and finds
Victor not there.
He hovers outside the farmhouse far too long.
Victor catches the silhouette of the farmer. Like a troll, the farmer slips under one bed, then another, a stone falling from the mountains, unable to stop, since God has blessed him with a surfeit of women and a place without taboo, where even the dead can be given life.
Victor could be the eponymous hero, there to spare the girls from incest. Or he could be the villain, waiting for his turn. Either way, he’s ambivalent, anchored by his own guilt and goodness when the farmer spills into the farmyard.
The farmer is enraged, standing in his nightshirt, his penis poking at its fabric, clutching his shotgun, rubbing his herpes sore, shouting obscenities. The farmer points at the floating, flying man before his finger touches the trigger.
Victor’s entrails spray through his back and he collapses in an acrid heap of manure where surely he will be buried. But even mortally wounded, Victor rises, as if he always had been dead, as if there was some confusion about his living or dying, about his very supernaturalism as both scientist and creature.
“Let’s keep together,” whispers the voice, physical, warm and close, lifting him from the stink, carrying him into the sky as if they have always been together, nothing less.
He’s neither flapping nor peddling, neither riding a broomstick nor sitting on a carpet. He’s no Exupéry or Earhart, but Victor walks the sky trails with extraterrestrial effortlessness.
His gait is steady, his knapsack loaded with supplies, especially yoghurt and ham for his sky picnic. He follows the Höhenwanderweg, moving along the peaks, in contact neither with the trail nor the mountain.
He wraps a long silk scarf around his neck. He slides a brown tam onto his head and tightens the sky helmet. His fingers intersect with gloves. He fastens an oxygen mask around his chapped face. The crampons are easy to buckle to his boots. He fastens carabineers to the clouds. His multicolored ropes dangle downward and he pulls upward, grunting at the sky, moving through the cloudscape — a granite boulder field, a glacier glowing with starlight, spires of soft unctuous rock, a pass marked with bison bones, a gorge running with cold blue water, a dry hard desert spiked with blue cactus and terraced with indica, black volcanic slopes drenched in ferns and populated by a people who cannot count to a number any greater than many.
He struggles with the sky. Like Icarus, he wants to go higher after all.
The sky is not the pale blue of dawn, not the pale opal of rain, not the pale jade of a funnel cloud, not the pale pink of hail, not the pale ruby of a hurricane. The sky is the pale black of night.
The red and white targets of the Höhenwanderweg lead him everywhere at once, ungraspable and unknowable, as if his body was breaking into its component parts, dispersing and diffusing his atoms into the atmosphere.
Victor admits flying without wings might be chemical, when the equilibrium of life comes to rest, but he certainly doesn’t feel death. Maybe it’s simpler: too many codeine paracetamols, wheat beers and shag cigarettes, too many vices that add up to a sensation of flight.
Spooning in mouthful after mouthful of cloud yogurt, wet, warm and fizzy, Victor can only speculate that the mountains will take his life like they take the rain that falls from the sky.
He could collapse into a glacier, a bullet having passed through his gut, and no one would know the culprit.
The farmer?
The shepherd?
Elizabeth?
The monster?
Victor might be unearthed five thousand years later, not overly decayed, and scientists would open his belly, find the fruitcake and not notice that he was someone’s victim.
They would never know he had flown without wings or that he too had interred at least one victim in the rose rocks of the Alps.
The scientists would find a pocketknife from Solingen in his bag. They would find that he had insulated his boots with grass. They might subject Victor’s body to x-rays and only then begin to suspect, but without ever comprehending the feeling of Victor’s great flight over the Höhenwanderweg.
Rattke 2006
Alistair Noon and Catherine Hales
(Alistair photographed by Clare Jephcott)
Together Alistair and Catherine edit poetry.
Alistair was born in 1970 and grew up in Aylesbury, UK. He has lived in Bristol, Voronezh, Shanghai and Wuhan, and since 1993 in Berlin. He coordinates the annual Poetry Hearings festival in Berlin, and is poetry co- editor both for Bordercrossing Berlin and no man's land, an online magazine devoted to German writing in English translation. Links to his poems, translations, reviews and essays online can be found at myspace.com/alistairnoon
The first three issues of Bordercrossing were designed and laid out by Andrea Schmidt. While we’ll miss her, we are also excited about our new designer, Gwenaël, whose collage work is featured throughout this post.
Rattke ‘Hallensee’
Richard Toovey
Richard is an excellent poet and our Correspondents Editor. His section has covered parts of the English language literary scenes in Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva, Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and Munich. He stays in regular contact with these cities, and is looking to explore other corners such as Istanbul, Madrid, Warsaw, and Mexico City, to name just a few.
Rattke 2006
Lance Anderson
Rattke 2006
Lance Anderson
In charge of local distribution: Lance is 29 years old, was born in Zimbabwe, grew up in the UK, studied English at UCL in London and has lived in Berlin for eight years. Westalgia, his first novel, is also inappropriately the name of his blog: westalgia.blogspot.com. He has had short stories and poems published in BlazeVOX (Buffalo, NY) as well as Bordercrossing. He is currently working on his second novel, a queer mystery set in a Turkish area of Berlin.
Rattke ‘Night Hawks’
Jacinta Nandi
Jacinta is a single-mum-slash-superperson who lives in Berlin with a three year old terrorist named Rico. Her hobbies include flirting with the homeless (someone's got to) and reading Agatha Christie novels. She is a teacher, comedian and writer. She has co-written and performed in four plays at English Theatre Berlin, and is a founding member of the Berlin comedy group My English Class. She has a regular column in the journal and you can see her in action in this video:
Jacinta explains one-night-stand etiquette to a German boy
www.myspace.com/myenglishclass
Interns
We would be nothing without them. Here’s a shot of Niko helping to put together this very blog entry.
D-L Alvarez
D-L is the Prose Editor of this journal and his new press, Slash, is now publishing Bordercrossing. Slash will also release a series of anthologies which focus on various cities from outsider (foreigner, freak, the other) perspectives. These literary “travel guides” will include works of art and fiction, and it’s only natural to base the first in Berlin. The next deadline for Bordercrossing Berlin is April 15th.
Submissions to the journal can be on any subject as long as you are living in a non-English speaking corner of the world: fiction (up to 5,000 words) or poetry.
The anthology, Ausland: Berlin Stories, is open to anyone writing fiction about Berlin, and is accepting work through July 24th. Please mark submissions for the anthology “Attn: Ausland.”
Hard copy submissions only please.
Fiona Mizani
Bordercrossing Berlin
Postfach 02 12 91
10124 Berlin
Deutschland
For inquiries and further details on any of these projects write: info@bordercrossing-berlin.com
Rattke 2006
10124 Berlin
Deutschland
For inquiries and further details on any of these projects write: info@bordercrossing-berlin.com
Rattke 2006
Emily Lundin
Emily has a contribution in issue two. More recently she interviewed to be our new Chief Editor. Guess what Emily? You got the job! She is doing research on a Creative Writing Fulbright Fellowship while finishing a novel set in Mississippi, where she grew up. She teaches creative writing at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiberg and lives in Berlin. This is the story she sent us last year…
A Small Dead Animal
------------------------an anatomy
----The door wasn’t even locked. It stuck to itself. It had a stick-to-itselfness that could have been mistaken as final, the last word.
----Lacy and Pascale were both nearing the end of adolescence, and so something could have also closed in them as a caution, a reprimand from an internal, burgeoning adult. But when he leaned down on the golden L-shaped handle and pushed forward hard, it cracked and sucked such satisfying sounds. These noises were an invitation or at least a seductive admission of weakness.
----The only visible entrance to the house rested underneath the covered driveway. Behind them, wisteria wound itself around itself and the rusted metal poles that held the overhang up by its logical corners. It webbed a light trap and weighed the structure, promising eventual collapse. Amethyst blossoms dappled the carport. The weed’s odor was profligate and everywhere. Mississippi jungled itself all over the one acre plot next to the university. It snuck up underneath the oil-spotted drive and split crabgrass through cement. It lay down with pale green gentility on the cracked sills. Generous windows unabashedly exposed the house’s innards; the wan lemon curtains frayed at the bottom and sides as if waves from the Gulf of Mexico had banged them for decades. Those panels of cloth were thin as a negligee; through them, light passed with impunity. It was a cheerful place, in spite of its wear. Abandoned cobwebs laced the door’s exterior, and as he pushed, Pascale caught them across his face.
----As usual, they had stopped to regard the house on the walk from campus to his dorm to have sex. He remarked on the luminescence of the empty khaki house, glowing in the dark, even though it was three in the afternoon. Darkness hovered in the surrounding pines. It’s simply resplendent with light, she responded, in a crappy faked British accent. She squinted and hunched her thin bare shoulders up.
----Stopped in the middle of the lazy street, he smiled and pushed her shoulders down, holding the nubs of the ball-and-sockets in his large hands. He understood that her comment was also meant as a language lesson. Never mind that he knew resplendent in French and Spanish (resplendent: resplendissant, resplandeciente). English was Pascale’s second of three tongues; he was an exchange student from Avignon, in love with William Faulkner by way of Garcia Marquez. He had actually chosen Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for his exchange, although no one except the locals believed him. He repeated the word into her ear, “resplendent,” and let his hands run down the sway of her back: Lacy, we should go inside this time. It is surement abandonée.
----The door creaked and groaned. She leaned her weight along his back to help; his ass pressed into her belly. She bounced lightly against it and they both laughed at the suggestive ball muscling her sundress and in general embarrassment.
----He turned and snapped his teeth at her nose.
----The door smacked its rubber lips. It was a tree wanting to crack in a storm. Though the air was heavy with water, no breeze moved around them; no storm approached. He wondered if the sweat on his ass reached through her dress to her bellybutton. She wondered if the sweat from her crotch touched his thighs when she pressed forward. She leaned her whole self against the lean I of his body. Finally the entrance bowed and submitted to their youthfully insistent bodies. It opened up, confessing the secret of its hot, stale breath.
----Light bled from the doorway, and in they tumbled. The pantry’s cabinet doors hung open from some hurried hunt. In them, cans of string beans, cans of lima beans, cans of halved peaches, halved pears, cans of maraschino cherries, jars of pickles, jars of baby food, jars of applesauce and marinara, cans of milk, cans of beets, cans of cranberry sauce, boxes of oats, boxes of cream of wheat, of powdered milk, of tapioca and pudding were dusty and yellowed from smoke. No, yellowed from age. The brands no longer existed. The food had been waiting for an emergency to be eaten. The pantry tunneled into the kitchen, also a corridor.
----In the kitchen, he said, See? No one lives here anymore. –--But why is the door unlocked? Why are there dishes in the sink? Why is the house full of furniture? Who is going to eat all that food? Who left in a hurry and how long ago?
----She was not scared because the house was too bright for horror. It seemed to suck all the light from beyond the pines in the yard. The walls were yellow and white, the furniture shades of regurgitated greens. But what is that smell?
----He led her by the fingertips further in.
----In the living room, the shag carpeting had been pulled up in haphazard strips. Lacy leaned over and tugged on a piece; it stayed in the air like a petrified wave.
----Pascale encouraged her hem further up the stalks of her thighs.
----It smells like something dead here, she protested.
----He told her that he learned in chemistry about putrescine. A colorless crystalline compound, ptomaine, forms during the decay of flesh, C4H12N2. If something is dead, it will look like a jewel and part of it still will be living and growing. He rubbed her hips as he explained.
----I know what ptomaine is—food poisoning.
----In the bay window swam billions of dust particles waiting to fall. The dust cheered them onand in further. They peeked around corners without leaving the large room. They could see from where they were that the bedroom was dark, nearly windowless. A bare mattress leaned on its side against the wall, filling half the room. A dresser spilled its drawers open, clothing fell like seaweed over its lips. They didn’t have to say that they wanted to remain in the room with the furniture in its proper places and in the palatial light. They stood still and let the charged air land where it would. This light was dry and eternal as gems, but spiced at its molecular edges with a small, dead animal. Neither lover spotted the dead animal; therefore, they were safe.
----The boy and girl embraced.
----Do you think we will go to New York together sometime?
----–--My aunt lives in L.I.C., Long Island City, she offered.
----They lowered themselves onto an electric blue rug with long shag.
----Where is that?
–---It’s up North, with smokestacks and sidewalks. Everything is gray and makes repeating machine noises.
----We will name our love L.I.C., he whispered, pulling her dress up over her head.
----–--What will it stand for?
----Mais bien sur, rien que Long Island City.
----–--Whatever you want, she offered. And so he pulled off his pants.
----In each other’s pupils they looked for lies. Dilation, they had learned in physics class, was the expansion of a hollow organ that was, in the eye, connected to emotion. The pupil dilated when telling the truth and contracted in deception. And despite the room’s resplendent light, their pupils were wide and black as suburban streets. They were hungry, gaping.
----Once inside her the boy said he felt tremors. He was very sensitive to everything, but especially to movements in the earth’s crust. He often felt tremors.
----They reversed themselves so she could lay hands on him and track the vibrations. It was true; he trembled. His stomach was like a woman’s, with a belly button that stretched slim when he was prone. His pale skin flushed. She could see his heart trying to beat out of his chest. She didn’t argue with him about being below sea level and too far from a fault-line to ever feel tremors. His body, quaking and generous with pleasure, was proof enough for her.
----–--Don’t stop, she whispered. You’ll get cold.
----We have had sex nine other times, and this is number ten.
----In the small movements of air they pushed around each other, they smelled something other than the house’s jeweled death. It was alive. Pascale and Lacy were young and only half-clean in the heat, half smelling like babies—corporeal and fresh. Babies are small: fingernails of paint flakes, ears like mouse fetuses, joints of half-cooked dough, reptile eyes and breathy jaws. They have small intestines, but no large ones. Their intestines are gardener snakes, thought Lacy, short and harmless. They are only long enough to sour milk and playfully toss brown and yellow pigment into their waste. She smelled this. He smelled it too, but in French. When she kissed and bit him on his neck, he arched his back. She leaned forward further, burrowing her face in his shoulder blade. They both submitted their bodies to death’s unnatural contortions. Petites morts.
----In front of the house a white van slowed and stopped in the driveway, just out of reach of the wisteria. It bore the green emblem of Forrest General Hospital on the large side door. A black attendant in a white coat hopped out and opened it; a metal grate lowered to bear a wheelchair and its inhabitant. A thick, forward-bending C of a man sat inside the van, immobile but apparently not yet dead.
----Out? The bay window on its façade gave the impression of opening, but it was a false sense of expanding space, a trompe l’oeuil. The house had only one exit: the way they came in. Cackling and dripping, the scavengers scrambled into their sweaty clothes. They ran back down the luminescent tunnel, past the yellow and the white, past dirty dishes and canned goods and cobwebs, popping louder than life into the out of doors.
----Caught. They were neither attendant nor infirmed, not abandoned or quaking. They ran, clamped to each other. They were caught.
----Back inside, curtains swayed from the roused air and crackled as the rot loosened its crystallized grip. The trespassers had been mistaken about the components of putrescine. They had forgotten four whole molecules of hydrocarbon. NH2(CH2)4NH2 continued to reproduce, all the same.
Rattke
----
5 comments:
Alright. Emily Lundin is a writer. Period.
Blogs are great but it's still better to have the physical journal to flip through. While publishers are paying ridiculous amounts to super models to 'write' novels or teenage reality show losers to do a life story, the real stuff is in the small presses (and online).
As with music/film (and soon TV) it's great to see power being taken away from the conglomerates.
Okay Dennis, there's been so much to go through here and to comment on and so little or too much popping into my gourd that I've been a poor poster of late.
Disneyland was a fun of course however it has changed so much. The food in the park is at an all time low. The shops all have the same things in them and most poorly made to boot. Most of the stuff is Tinkerbell,Goofy, Mickey,Nemo,and such. The classic characters have mostly been replaced by new "attitude" characters. I mean Graffitti Mickey? Come on now. Innocence is not to be seen. I think would be puking if he could see the place now. The Carnation dining is now an empty plaza. The Starkist boat diner by the whale is gone. The new Toy Story ride is pretty cool.They give you a laser gun and you get to shoot targets from your vehicle while it's spinning. The carousel of progress is now a playstation area where you get to play computer games.There's a new Winnie the Pooh ride that's okay. I didn't get over to Tom Sawyers Island. From across the way it looks the same. However I noticed that the burning cabin is no longer there. Politically incorrect I guess.It's still a fun place to go, but like I said it's lost alot of the innocence and gotten even more commercial and less Disney.
The California Adventure Park was a surprise to me. There were quite a few fun attractions. The whole Hollywood area was really cool. There's a petting zoo and very cool High Sierra themed area where you can climb around on netting and such. All in all it seemed to be a better maintained park. One thing that I thought was a little odd was that it's okay to walk around with alcohol.They sell it !!!
Downtown Disney was where all the decent food was. Again pretty damn commercial.
So my overall opinion of the whole Disney complex is that it is still a great place to have fun at. As long as you don't try to compare it to what it once was.
Oh yeah, There's no Disneyland sign on Harbor anymore. I really miss that.
One more thing. The fireworks show was exremely well done and must be watched from the end of Main Street in front of the castle.I'll post a few photos on my blog.
steven > thanks … I’m saying that on Emily’s behalf. She’s going to be excited to see all the positive feedback she got here. I remember when I told her I was including her story she was nervous, wondering what fans of Dennis, who writes such brilliant minimalist prose, would think of her work. “I mean, that story is so maximalist,” she said. When it comes to skill and talent however, I agree with you, she’s great (period).
joe m > good to hear such sentiments, thank you. As someone about to dedicate a lot of time, money, and energy into producing something tangible, your comment is medication.
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