Thousand: Four Hundred Eighty-Seven

of a tree, the very tip top, she said, where no one could reach it, though it is so beautiful, it must be delicious. Ha! It is not an apple at all but an aerodrome, cleverly designed to look like an apple from the ground. You look up into a tree and you see the apple and maybe a fly comes out of a hole in it, if you can see it up that high, and around the apple whirls the fly, making a distant little whine, as flies do, and you think nothing of it, spy for the enemy

Thousand: Four Hundred Eighty-Six

doing what it does, that is, existing simultaneously in multiple coordinates of space-time. I don’t know who made it. Unless it was me. I was quite a weaver in my day. Once upon a time there was a dog somebody tried to store in a. In a. That’s what brought up the girl with the shift. She claimed to have a transdimensional satchel, too. Now. Now, that just isn’t possible, you know. I don’t really believe she had the shift, either. It’s true I saw her pull from the satchel an apple she said she had plucked from the top

Thousand: Four Hundred Eighty-Five

buttocks of an ox. I miss my transdimensional shift. In toggling through scenes offered me by remote sensing apparatus of fine and improbable range and access, I came once upon a scene in a shabby apartment wherein a young woman claimed to be showing her friend, sprawled on the dilapidated sofa, her very own transdimensional shift. I could not believe my eyes or my technology or my ears. A transdimensional shift is so rare I have a strong suspicion there is, in fact, but one! Should you spot a second you have merely come upon the only one in existence

Thousand in thirds?

I’m thinking about trying out a print on demand service and using a section from Thousand to see if I’m any good at design.

I’m leaning toward Amazon.com’s CreateSpace, mostly because my friend Mel C. Thompson is pleased with the books he’s done through it. Mel says the process is pretty easy and doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t cost anything if you make very basic choices, it seems. There are always options you can pay for.

Thousand has a long way to go, being as we’re not even halfway. But I thought it would be nice to have the first quarter or the first third in a hard copy book. I like to fiddle with pages as I read. Reading Thousand off the blog takes practice; you have to get used to reading in a leapfrog fashion, from the bottom to the top. I also recently noticed it’s not easy to find the first Thousand post. It appeared on May 4, 2010, if you’re curious.

I don’t know if anybody has read all of Thousand. I doubt it. As a story it’s probably more frustrating than rewarding. I’ve enjoyed writers like John Yau and Clark Coolidge who write things that seem to be fiction sometimes, but the words refuse loyalty to any single narrative. The reading is fun for the sounds and the surprises and the wit rather than the what-happened-next of a plot.

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out a few cute anecdotes about the afterworld. There’s the time I met my great great grandmother on my great grandfather’s side, having never met her during my time on earth, of course, one ghost might say, slipping her arm through yours, pressing her ectoplasmic eyebrow against your shoulder and looking up at you through dark lashes, she was so surprised she had a Japanese granddaughter, though I’m really only a quarter Japanese, and that I’m a poet, too, because, she said, nobody in her family could ever read or write or did anything but flick a switch across the

Thousand: Four Hundred Eighty-Three

picket fence mottled with lichen and moss, one cat so still and unnatural-looking on its fence post perch that you think it bad art until it hops down and disappears into the tall grass. Whoever lives there must really be quirky and original and ready to take under her wing some other individual of special talents and fresh ideas who could use a mentor, a guide over the rough patches on the tarmac of life, a listener, a thought-provoker, a spiritual wise woman who has communed with good ghosts happy to snuggle up to you on the windowseat and trot

Thousand: Four Hundred Eighty-Two

myth about yourself as not of the herd, unique, a maverick, if you will. Wandering off after your own drummer, who is, no doubt, slapping bongos painted all over with colorful rain forest animals and fruit, while the rest of them in their drab uniforms march dolefully and mindlessly after the tat-a-tat-tat tat-a-tat-tat of the snare, you stop to smell the wild white roses, disturbing a bumblebee which rises up and hovers before you as though to say, “Ah, it is you, the seeker, not the lost.” You find yourself before a shack almost buried in roses and honeysuckle, the

Thousand: Four Hundred Eighty-One

won’t effect an immediate change on present circumstances, the past that led to where one is today has not been altered. This does not, on the other hand, mean that no past has been altered. Having a transdimensional shift in the first place means you have access to many alternate paths through space-time. The road less traveled is the one you take because it will make all the difference. Tell the truth, though. Deciding which road is the one fewer have trod is less about the relative abundance of weeds in the ruts than about your need to groom a

Thousand: Four Hundred Eighty

mistake. I trusted someone who I shouldn’t a trusted. You know how that goes, right? Wouldn’t you rather believe someone than go around all the time suspicious? People tell you the truth most the time, right? Right, right. Well, water under the troll. Comet vaporized in the solar corona. What’s done is a future don’t. Can’t undo the past. Although, if you have your transdimensional shift in hand you can reach through to the space-time coordinates that correspond to the moment you made the fateful decision and touch your fingers to the exposed wires and complete a different circuit. It

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-Nine

if you were in a box on a hostile satellite, traveling alone around a foreign sun? Wouldn’t you? Sure you would! I used to be able to get around. Yeah. I did. Used to be I had a transdimensional shift. It was very handy. Fact is. Yes. It’s what got me here in the first place. Or rather. I made a bad business decision. I traded knowledge of certain things. Which I won’t go into. They were very super secret things that nobody knows, so this is valuable information I’m talking about. And. And what happened is. I made a

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-Eight

guessing. Weigh a fact gathered here against a fact gathered there and wonder if either is true. Here in my mirrorcade, the windows looking into windows, the voices speaking words and phrases other voices have already worn soft and vague. Here in my safe house, far from the madding cloud, perfect storms pretty pinwheels over distant seas, the hail hale and elsewhere. Are my eyes closed or open? Do I have eyes or is all visual information being loaded directly into my neocortex via third party vendors? Such questions! Wouldn’t you torment yourself all day with this sort of thing

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-Seven

darned by a violet thread to a glacial physiognomy. You never know what is going to happen, except when it has been written on three by five cards, or it’s a movie. Those are easy. The Tomato is taxiing for a loop-de-loop. What a daredevil! A lot of those earlier aviators made derring do look like a daily spin around the block on a bicycle, the front wheel of which stood tall as a man. What was that about? The wheel’s radius had to be as long as a man’s leg? I’m just guessing here. I spend my entire life

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-Six

After noxious elements of the green perfection erupt in baritone wattles, the present collapses into three precise yet flexible performances of the rare amusement boutique, sometimes known alternately and sometimes incognito. We who love catalepsy recline! A fair wind begins again its riotous scribble across Martian faces, while the novena disliked by generations of hare-lipped children has been pared and pared and pared until the sounds no longer move one to the next but wander betwixt barricaded silences. Look, thou, upon the bearded menace of the gentle intelligence officer, his barred and vaporous bad thoughts, his thinning nonchalance, the smile

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-Five

caveat that uh. Forget the dog with wings, there’s a monkey crossing a wire between the two tallest buildings in the world, one in Dubai, the other in Bahrain. It’s always raining in Bahrain! Once upon a time there was a chimney sweep who dripped slowly into the repaired cheese, so much better to amplify the barium accent in tense objects, a new revelation potentially compressed. We who love ancestry abound! The vagrant tic calls a newer mate with a vibrating mandible and a noodle scented with patchouli albumen. Down among the yards wander the robots, sentient as cemetery roses.

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itself against a fence when it wants to raise a back leg for a scratch. Besides, those wings. Nothing glorious about them. I mean, the hummingbird-sized wings on Mercury’s heels are metaphors for fleet-footedness. What are these pigeon-sized wings on a dog’s back supposed to symbolize? Not that there’s anything unusual about novel creatures made from the parts of ones more familiar, the griffin’s lion body and eagle head, for instance, the chimera with its goat body, serpent’s tail, and lion head. Sphinxes have lion bodies, human heads, and wings. Lions go with everything, don’t they! I would add the

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-Three

Once upon a time there was a dog. But is it even a dog? Check out the little wings that are shaking out from the dog’s shoulder blades. I didn’t see them at first, the same gray motley as the rest of the shaggy mess. Plus they were neatly folded against the body. There’s no bird hiding on the dog’s back, unless there’s a hollow it can plunge its whole body and head into. Dogasus? Or dog angel? The worlds are infested with angels! An angel wouldn’t shamble, stiff-hipped like that, though, would it? I see it has to prop

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-Two

syrup and changes her mind. Is this scene contemporaneous with the gazebo make-out session? Let’s check back in on that for a sec. Yes, tongue sliding against tongue, a hand slid into a waistband. Nice weather. Desert conditions. Hot. Just gonna get hotter. I wonder if I can tune in Sir. Hm. Is that? Is. No. No. It’s another dog entirely. Doesn’t look healthy, patchy hair, a torn lip healed so the yellow canines show in a perpetual tired snarl, the lower eyelid on the left sags and the eye looks watery. Nerve damage on that side of the face?

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy-One

any ice cream?” she’s asking her sister. Eula shrugs and spoons up a curl of vanilla, a stripe of chocolate syrup stretching thin and breaking as she raises it to her mouth. “You never leave me any ice cream!” says Emily. “You never do. If you’ve had a bowl then there isn’t any left for me. There! See! You put it in. You. OK, there’s a little. Not very much. Where’s the chocolate syrup?” “On the door,” says Eula as she scrapes the bottom of the blue bowl. Emily opens the refrigerator and looks at the sticky-mouthed bottle of chocolate

Thousand: Four Hundred Seventy

long slender nose, the shimmering gray eyes fringed by blond lashes, these firm lips. I suppose I could cut away to the comet again. Turning slowing back toward the sun, etc. It’s not that I’m squeamish or uninterested in the growing connection between these two boys. But I’ve already spent so darn much time on this scene and here in my box of rain on the dark side of the moon, twisting knobs and tapping dials, I have limited resources to devote to any one thing. Hang on, Emily is coming in on the next channel. “Did you leave me

Thousand: Four Hundred Sixty-Nine

one look at and know what to do. Leprechaun, shmeprechaun. Giant worm with human heads for feet? Pah! This sudden confidence does not come with concrete plans, but Bernie is kissing a cowboy and that seems like something to be proud of. If you were to ask Bernie if he thinks cowboys are special, if snogging one is a grander accomplishment than getting an accountant to bat his eyes or fondling a giggling traffic cop, Bernie would at least have to think about the question. It’s not like cowboys are his ideal. But this one sure is pretty, what with