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the way one should feel, the way one should always feel. O! That is how a name used to begin, the one that drew him. What does it mean to him now? O circle, start on you anywhere and go on from there, go on, go on. No stopping until the traveler decides to, until he puts his foot down and points it in a new direction. The hand he is holding is not his own. A youth, his soft cheeks unbearded, dark curls around big ears, his eyes bright as in a photograph, his long neck descending to shoulders

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gleaming, pulsing. It has muscle, this red. It has strength, this red. Heat. Are those flames? Skinny, velvet flames, like the ribbons on a present. It’s funny. A gift of love. From me to you. Nobody’s laughing at you. We are all laughing together. It’s funny. It’s a funny life, isn’t it? Sammy, Sammy. It’s a funny life, is it not? Way down in the pit, way down at the bottom, a white glimmer, he sees the spread of his teeth. His practiced, professional smile relaxing into joy. Yes, the transcendental butler is off duty. Or maybe this is just

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throbs. The red dot. Is it whispering? Is it growing? Fatter. Thicker. Deeper. Samuel hears laughter. He closes his eyes. The darkness is red. Red and spreading. He puts out his hand. There is no resistance. Maybe this isn’t the spirit world. He opens his eyes. That, however, is not easy. He opens his eyes. He tries again, expelling his breath in the effort. The laughter, distant, then close, soft, is it even there?, then parked in his ear like a motor revving in a garage. The darkness is red, but it is not a dark red now. It is

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walkie talkie and runs from the room. Mr Opie, the transcendental butler, rubs an eyebrow and watches the unmoving red dot. It may not be moving but it is not dead. The dot. The man, yes, the mayor is dead. Of what did he die? He drowned. But that only means his lungs filled up with water. Did he overdose on medications? On contraband? Did someone push the old man under, hold him down so the water could find its way where the air used to, could enter him and take up the space his life occupied? The red dot

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ringtone. “Odd,” says the appointment secretary. “He has voice control answering.” She whispers the next, “He will pick up no matter what he’s doing. Sometimes I hear him farting. Panting.” Resuming a normal volume, “So far as I can tell he doesn’t care who hears. He likes us to know where he is, so has the penthouse rigged to capture his movements. A red dot on this schematic is him. Yes, always. Guests are randomly assigned other colors. It is that sophisticated. I’m trying a louder alarm now. Mr Rumiere, Mr Rumiere. OK. Pardon me.” Ms L snatches up a

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fingers a hint of that ancient obstacle. This world or the other one, you can’t have both. You can’t have both. He is humming this as though it were the lyric to a pop song. You can’t have both you can’t you can’t you can’t have both, baby. If you were to get there before me, I’d find you there, I’d find you there. I’ll take you there. The billionaire mayor whose spirit house the transcendental butler is to put back in order has not yet been found drowned in his bathtub. The telephone in the bathroom coos its dove-like

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would curse as they scraped it away. No worries. It’s only a dream. Nothing bad can happen in a dream. Samuel is walking to his meeting. He remembers reaching through the resistance, stroking the cheek of the man he had been, the man who was afraid. That makes his lips curl. Afraid! Fear real things. Not spirits. His career is predicated on the unreal these days. It was that dream that dispelled the wall, what had seemed solid becoming a passage. Whenever he has to cross from the here and now to the other realm he feels again in his

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that had whipped his hair against his cheeks, that had rippled and puffed his shirt, that had tugged at his pants (wasn’t he glad he’d worn a snug belt!), that had rushed through the seams of his shoes and cooled the sweat in the toes of his socks. The wind had not quit, hadn’t stood aside in favor of some other power. That body was still on target to slam into the side of the building, was heading there directly. If something wasn’t done in less than a second, he’d be fly on the windshield, a smoosh the window washers

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been dying he feared. Rather, he said to himself, getting up from the black leather office chair, he was afraid to leave the world of sensation. He pressed his hand against the glass, its blue no more blue from this side than any sky when you are in it. The hand held to the window encountered not a surface but resistance, an unwillingness to go on. The body he had been flying was still in the phenomenal world, stretched out, suspended. No, that was wrong. It wasn’t suspended, it was flying. The wind it rode blew with the same strength

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bang into it, he struggled. He struggled against the inevitable. This was not how it would end. What was about to happen, no. The great blue face of glass stared his death at him. Only, it wasn’t death. That’s not what he thought was coming. Perhaps he would not have recognized death if he had been awake and launched on a collision course with 182 stories of financial district. It’s not that he knew what it was, but when he was sitting in a board room in the building, looking out at the distant fields, he realized it had not

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anymore. It’s like he never had it. It was a mirage. After he’d walked through it he looked back and nothing was there. How could it be real? It left a residue, a new last name. “Obie. Is that Irish?” “Obie. Are you related to the Obie of the Obie Awards?” Once he dreamt he was flying. He soared over the a checkerboard of green and greener fields. A city appeared on the horizon. As it came closer he lost altitude. The air grew bumpy. A skyscraper of blue glass loomed. As soon as he realized he was going to

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new policies that improve the interplay of spirit forces, that create the optimal environment for spirit entities, so far as can be determined considering the current state of things. He’s done pretty well for himself. Travels the world. Fucks beautiful women, occasionally hires a boy for himself. Just to carry his luggage. And for the nude massages. Plus he likes to be paternal. He doesn’t like children. But he likes to help people. Samuel Obie. Mr Obie. It’s not actually his name. O and B are his initials. Or they used to be. He doesn’t go by that other name

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there also are those who are guests. There are invaders, too, but a butler is not an exorcist. You can’t do everything. The spirits of the throat want to work with the spirits of the lungs, but misunderstandings can occur. A butler’s job is to make sure the household runs smoothly, that the spirits who need to work together know their jobs and the spirits who oughtn’t be in each other’s business are occupied with their own. He’s more a consultant than a servant; he reviews the comity and efficiency of your spirit community, makes recommendations, oversees the implementation of

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sum up creation, creation’s purposes, and the context of creation within the greater realms. Spirit is not more important than flesh, but it is more durable. The transcendental butler is a practical man. He doesn’t like long explications of systems, how future meshes with parafuture, past with pastime, present with omnipresent or subpresent. He’s found some things that work and he sticks with them, whatever the ultimate culmination explanation is. He calls himself a “butler” because he sees you as a house, a big house, in which various entities come and go. There are those who are permanent residents, but

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at a conference on business ethics under the dome, peaceful as a pizza, with the end result known only to the calculator. The spirit remembers, vaguely, what it will be like to remember experiencing the emotions of flesh, although much of history won’t yet have been written, writing being invented by parrots in a negotiation with crows. Writing has been invented several times by writers who never heard of each other, never read anything, and are too busy masturbating to understand the language of signs. Nevertheless, in paradise, the wise advisor explained, everyone is a word, and their meanings all

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the spirit please check November 11th for an afternoon interview as he was to meet a potential client that day, he is sure, yet can find but no mention of it in his day book. It’s okay, the spirit advisor wanted to say, that client was an ephemeral manifestation of the coming change that will reorder the world, not an ending but a realignment that will benefit some and be worse for others. The client exists, yes, and last week you rescheduled her for December 10th per a request from her son who called to say she was needed

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it said, or would say to a future self, which, the spirit advisor did not tell the transcendental butler, would be the transcendental butler at some point, although describing the events that would bring that about, while laid out with the lucid perfection of paradise, remained somewhat mysterious to the spirit advisor. When it tried in a roundabout way to share with the transcendental butler the insights afforded by a conversation with one’s paradisal self the butler got grumpy, snappish, claimed he was fine, thank you, not bothered by any of this, but he had a schedule to maintain and

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Paradise Falls or twenty-three to Paradise Lake. Paradise Park, Paradise Valley, Paradise Hill, it adds up. Then there are the transdimensional charges, discounted for spirit callers, true, but not negligible. Transdimensional calling is surprisingly affordable, although technically impossible. The transcendental butler’s spiritual advisor had been talking to its own future self ensconced in paradise. Yes, the real paradise, where everything’s perfect and the lion lies down with the lamb in an only incidentally sexual manner, the heavens rain lemonade, and everyone lives forever as far as it possible to determine. The advisor in paradise offered a few perspectives worth considering

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and toast and sipping at a tiny foam-topped espresso. Though dawn had managed and the curtains drawn from the windows, lamps had to be lit. The butler squinted at his day book, then, with a disapproving grunt, opened his electronic personal assistant, so-called, to make sure the two agreed. For several years he had relied upon a spiritual back up, but it took sides in a conflict between clients getting a divorce and began feeding the butler bogus appointments. It’s only so humorous to discover $50 charges on the phone bill for ten minutes talking to Paradise or twenty to

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yellow and vaguely barbell-shaped. As the transcendental butler is called upon to bring all the client’s service spirits into a harmonic working relationship and the sleep spirit was introducing a note of discord (“In the morning I can only piss in the shower,” the client explained) the sleep spirit department was called to a meeting. Which was promptly commandeered by dream spirits complaining about their work being disregarded. “He tells people he doesn’t dream! After we’ve put in such a long night!” one howled, to much nodding and applause. The butler was still thinking about work while munching poached egg

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dropped his legs over the side of the bed and, after gingerly coaxing, added the rest of his body to his feet’s obligations. Over the boxers rumpled on the rug, he tottered, side-stepped the belt buckle, and got to the toilet before his sleep extension had wilted enough to allow him to hit the bowl. Pressing his forehead against the wall tile’s cool yellow, the transcendental butler waited for consciousness to drive away whatever sleep spirit conjured his genitals into a firm chaise longue for its comfort. There was more than one, he knew. He’d met someone else’s. It was

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future atmosphere of healthful oxygen, provides nor comedy nor drama nor bewildered fascination to the modern audience. So. Consciousness. Start there? I don’t know. There was light. And it was on an automatic timer because in the middle of winter the transcendental butler had to get up before dawn and he had that depression caused by lack of light in winter so had a rough time shaking the weight of sleep without the help of electric light. So it was good? He saw the light. And it was too bright. Groaning and hacking to get out the phlegm, the butler

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which we can identify. It’s all very well to say that virtually as soon as one puddle on a still-steaming earth slackened its rolling boil life found its chance and billions of years of successful being fruitful and multiplying began in that moment. Life! Who doesn’t love life! But how much family feeling do you get for a stromatolite? Maybe a gnome, a creature partial to toadstools and creeping slimes, would get misty over the “columnar calcium-containing mass of many layers.” But blue-green algae growing on a mound built up from the bodies of older algae, whatever it does for a

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an old anger, the shame that hurts every time it’s touched. I don’t know that the new has ever been created out of nothing. Except in the beginning? In the beginning there was. There was no there there. There was no here here, for that matter. There was no matter to matter. There was no one to know the difference. In the beginning a dream disturbed the contentment. All was without form and void where not prohibited. A twitch. Was that what initiated? Starting too far back, you know, it deprives the story of anything we could recognize, anything with

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growls in its sleep, which makes the cat turn and look. But the growl quickly fades, the dog raises its head, blinks, then returns the head to cushioning paws and sighs with satisfaction. This is how the world ends? Not with a bang-a-lang or boom-shakka-la, not with a sob or shudder, but with a contented sleep. OK. Done with that world. We could come back to it? We’ll see. First, we need to dream something up. Dreams are unreliable guides to the new. They tend to be knotted with aches of the past, echoes of terrors, the smarting scar of

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man and the boy are carrying you. What are they going to do, waft you down to the end of the world and toss you over the edge? You remember those paintings of ships toppling down the great waterfall the oceans come to at the edge of a flat earth. Lying on air, even paralyzed, isn’t a bad deal, really. Makes one sleepy. A cat curls up on your belly next to a curly-haired little dog. The cat, eyes squeezed shut, purring, kneads away with its forepaws and through your sweater the pricks of claws tickle your skin. The dog

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animal standing in the forest, the yellow orange of a gimbe, calamansi orange, gentle pitaya reds, the deeper gumichama reds, purples of jambul, so bright, so distracting, that the animal standing in the forest cannot be seen but for its immensity, its breathing, its confident strength. Lightly, like the tickle of a moth, you notice at the base of your skull a touching. The old man. Your feet stick straight out, and you remember the assistant in the magic act who is rendered stiff as a board and stretched out flat on a bed of absolutely nothing. How funny. The

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and suddenly the boy is in your face. Gently, he takes your left arm and folds it across your breast. He takes your right arm, folds it across the left. He moistens his thumb with a kiss and to a spot directly between your brows presses it. With the thumb resting in that place, you begin to tip back. The view is tilting, filling up with sky. You look to the boy’s eyes and you see safety there. But eyes are replaced by clouds, clouds taking on the fruit colors of a yummy sunset, the day’s blue transmogrifying also, an

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uniform. She was an angel, surely. She gave you a drink ticket. She didn’t have to do that. She could have stabbed you in the heart with a pitchfork. The kid drops his rag back on the counter and gives you a curious look. It’s as though he were looking at something left behind that it really seems unlikely anyone would abandon. Like a television sitting on the curb playing the world series. Or an obelisk woven from disposable chopsticks. He gives a nod to the old man who stands abruptly, rocking the table and upsetting the glass of ice,

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has snapshots of his handsome children in his wallet that he’ll offer up, a story with each, or who knows, he’s the devil. Or an angel. Could be. It is the end of the world, after all. Who knows who hangs out at the end of the world! But I suspect you are shy, that talking to strangers has always made you uncomfortable. And there’s something about the man’s silence and concentration that adds a wall you don’t feel you should break through to disturb him. You look over a shoulder. Where did that girl go? The one in the

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ain’t nobody gonna be it for you. When else you gonna be genuine, huh? The end of the world oughta sober up anybody, make ‘em think about what they been doing. What they been wastin’ time at? Did they make some love along the way? You’re alone at the end of the world. Unless you count the magpie. And the kid cleaning tables. And the old guy. You glance at him. He’s staring at his glass of ice. If you are the gregarious type you might go up to him, ask him what brought him to this, or maybe he

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what works for you. Be true to your own special, unique self. Don’t let anybody force you into some generic cookie-cutter version of a person. Don’t let anybody open your mouth, cram down your throat the soliloquy from Biloxi Blues, and permit yourself unthinkingly to throw it out as though your own heart (or a region nearby) contained naught but those words, those very only very you words which all these years had been waiting for the right moment to arrive, to set up shop, to hang out a shingle, to jump out in spangles and bows. Be yourself cuz

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you? Everybody wants to be in pictures. You’re more real that way. It’s not that you aren’t real, right now, standing at the end of the world, or rather, near the end of the world. The end of the world promises to be just down the boardwalk. Yet in a room dark but for the light of your face, who could deny you enhanced reality? OK, say you refuse that whole Lord returning business. Say you keep it simple, “Oops. My bad.” Or. “Pardon me.” Or. “Hey. What the fuck! You tryin’ to trip me or something?” Fine. Go with

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love interest has to dab at lightly with a cotton ball before turning to the apologetic hero and whatever else you are contracted to say falls away before the editor’s snips. But these lines entitle you to a union card, which means you get an agent and residuals, you get a royalty check every time the movie shows on late night TV, and surely you get a cut when the DVD comes out or the streaming video, don’t you think? I don’t know. Digital rights might still be up in the air. You’d say that stuff for a movie, wouldn’t

Thousand explained some more

So far I have three tags for this blog, two of them are related to the ongoing “Thousand” project: thousand and thousand process

Thousand Process is the tag for posts like the very one you’re reading.

I just reread the process posts for myself. Not much has changed, even though I wrote the last more than two months ago. Writing 100 words a day is sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. It’s been at its most difficult when my husband Kent has been in the hospital or just home. That’s when I was so tired I could barely concentrate.

I began “Thousand” after Kent was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer. “Thousand” was to give me a practice demanding attention that had nothing to do with household tasks or medical procedures. I needed a distraction, a distraction that was also art, a distraction that would be an ambition – a 100,00 word prose work. Call it a novel? An improvisation?

My stepmother Jan was diagnosed with cancer this spring also. We went from accepting her sympathy over Kent’s diagnosis to expressing concern over hers. Jan’s disease was frighteningly far advanced, we learned. An obituary for Jan was published in the Anchorage Daily News this week. Two others I know faced cancer diagnoses this year. 2010 has been a year.

“Thousand” has been a helpful chore. I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s going somewhere with me. Having the sense that one is moving forward is a good sense. Even if the progress is on something as weird as a plotless hunk of prose and the progress consists of slapping a bit more prose on it.

When my brother David was here for a visit and I sat down to write my “Thousand” piece for the day he was surprised to see me stop writing and erase every word I’d written past one hundred. The work that appears on the blog is not written ahead of time. I write it. I post it immediately after writing it. This is not to say the posts go up completely first draft. I write, read the work over, revise (occasionally extensively), reread until it works for me, then post. But I do not write ahead.

David said he knew other people who were doing long projects but they produce a lot during short periods then parcel the work out over time on their blogs. I can’t work that way. Not to say Never. But the point of “Thousand” is the process. A product is created, yes, and that’s not incidental, but the work is not the result but the living it.

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to atone for such transgressions as these I have committed against you.” What? You doubt you’d say that? Even if it was in the script and you were on the stage in a community theater? Everybody likes community theater. Maybe you’ve been cast in a major motion picture as an actor in a community theater through the outer wall of which the hero bursts his white Range Rover and you get only three words of this spiel out of your mouth before the styrofoam bricks rain down, supposedly leaving you with a cut on the head the paramedic and

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over a wing at you, flashes a white underlid over its black eye, says, “Raak! Raak! Raak!” and wanders off among the condiments. You take a step backward and bump into the youth who slipped out of the drinks stand to wipe down the tables. “Oh! I’m sorry,” you say. “You will have to forgive me. It was what I wanted least to do in this world. The day will come when the Lord returns in glory, flames of gold cushioning his naked soles, sparrows carrying a pot of tea, his eyeglasses of purest rose, and I will be forced

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skull was cleaned of its evil evil brain by tidy good samaritan magpies. The end! And its eyes, too. Plucked right out of their little bowls, like ordurves. The end!” The magpie bursts into a series of screeches, which, only after it stops and eyes you from its perch on the cash register, do you recognize as magpie laughter. The magpie turns its back on you with one hop, preens its breast, lifting a wing to probe under it, and dropping a turd on the boardwalk, which lands on older black turds centered in splashes of white. The magpie looks

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and a tongue covered with spines. That’s an end for you! So you gonna get something to drink or what? Ain’t ya thirsty? I’d be thirsty come all that way over the moors, wind blowing in my monkey face, hot sun poking in my eyes like a stick. We got sodas and juices and waters in variety. We got teas and tinctures, tisanes and elixirs. No? I can tell you a story. That’ll parch ya. Once upon a time. Once upon a time there was a cat! And the cat got run down by a car and then its split-open

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the blue ticket, and you smile nervously. “Cat! Always there’s a cat that’s at the bottom of things! You go on. You go on to the end of the world. It’s just down the way. Yes, yes. You go on to the end of the world and you’ll find a cat, I’ll bet you a dollar and a quarter. You go on to the end of the world and you’ll find a big fat ugly vicious cat sinking its nasty claws into the world’s tender, innocent flesh, and drawing the world to its cavernous mouth filled with needles and knives

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a leprechaun’s jacket. “How ever did you get that clean in the first place?” asks a magpie, which you notice for the first time. The youth dips the green rag in a bowl of suds, wrings it out, then hangs it from a blunt red hook. “Did you want something? Hell! Oh! Hello, you, did you want something? Something to drink? We also have biscotti and bags of potato chips and cheese twirls and rubbery candies. Pheh! What does anybody see in that gunk? Cat got yer tongue?” You realize the magpie is talking to you. Your hands close around

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taking your hand, helping you up, “You have arrived! Would you like a complimentary beverage?” You glance down at the blue drink ticket she’s slipped you. Her smile does not waver as you contemplate her existence, which seems persistent and likely. You are thirsty, so you go on down the boardwalk to the drink stand before which are three unoccupied tables with umbrellas. At a fourth an older man holds an unlit cigarette, and a clear plastic cup with nothing in it but ice sweats on the table. The youth at the drink stand is wiping down the counter with

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place. Tears begin to hurt in your eyes. One escapes, rushing down your nose and flinging itself toward the earth. It strikes the toe of your left shoe with an audible tump. You cross your arms over your chest and walk bent over. Your stomach twists. Are you hungry or are you ill? A ringing in your ears, you feel dizzy. “Hello, my name is Liz! Welcome to the End of the World!” A young woman with a polite smile, bright eyes, and a uniform jacket, knee-length skirt, black leather shoes with buckles, beckons from a boardwalk. “Yes,” she says,

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little hungry, aren’t you? Yes. Tired, too. How funny that your feet have gotten heavy; pushing them forward is like kicking a medicine ball. Earlier it was as though no foot even existed! The world flitted by while you turned your head to admire it. There’s an ache in your side. This breathing business is getting to be trouble. It was better when you forgot it, right? You pass a hand over your face and find it’s bunched up, so you massage your cheeks, your forehead. That smile seems to have stretched things beyond their ability to settle back into

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the rock and lose the view, you are surrounded by the blond stone for a moment, and in the shadow it feels cool, almost chill. There’s rubble in the path and you stumble, put your hand against the big rock to keep from falling. This isn’t the way you came. Must have been all that spinning around. Well, what’s the difference? When you were at your highest, you weren’t very high. If you follow the rock around to the right, there! The path is relatively smooth and it’s downhill all the way. You’re walking again, which feels good. You’re a

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You spin, slowly, once more. You close your eyes to do it. You breathe consciously to keep yourself steady. You keep your head up, your arms out for balance, your feet feeling the way on the uneven surface of the rock. When you open your eyes you can see it in your peripheral vision. It’s still there. And it’s not roaring toward you. It’s not some great machine, belching smoke and spinning belts, lubricated and powered up. It’s just there. Waiting, maybe. Indifferent, maybe. It expects you, you think. It won’t take long to get there. You step down from

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were approaching it but it that came for us. There, the speed! There, the power! Every way forward had been filled by the body of this terrific mechanism. There was nothing for us to do. Run? Crawl? Stand! The future this prophet’s rage-honed finger pointed out was too great, too complete, too damnably thrilling to avoid. There was nowhere to go. We could not even fall back. What was behind us was past, we couldn’t go there. The future in full reverse, its engines screaming at the insult, pressed every iota of its power into the mission. Crush the present.

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to end? Hard to say. But now that you see it, what else could it be? And it’s so close. So close. Really! From this little rock you can see the end of the world! Oh yes. It makes perfect sense. How close you are to the end! Move your feet. That’s all it will take to get you there. You remember to breathe. So much to remember this close to the end. Prophets have declared the imminence of the world’s end, declared it and described it, raised a righteous finger and pointed as though it were not we who

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and old oaks standing in loose groups, and the wind making the grasses and wildflowers shake and bow. The path you took to get here is a scar but a faded scar. If you’re not looking for it you don’t see it. You turn around and around, not at all afraid of getting dizzy. The world could go on like this forever. But then you see it. The end. The end of the world. What set your feet in this direction. Would you have said it was the end of the world if you hadn’t been looking for the world

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let it get as big and freaky as it wants. The wind is playing with your ears; are those the songs you last heard in bed, a tear in your eye? You feel like dancing! When was the last time? You touch your lip with a finger and feel the quiver there of a word you said once that gave such joy the vibrations have been rocking back through you ever since. You step off the path onto rock. It’s a big rock so you have to crouch and use your hands to get to the top. Meadows and marshes

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insubstantial fly; a few follow you and get in your hair. You step faster, waving your hands in front of your face. But that’s kind of it. The weather’s nice. The sun feels good; a bit of a nip in the air. You took off that sweater on the last rise, tied the sleeves across your chest. After the marsh and the stinky blossom you thought it would get worse, but the wind is blowing fresh and clean, and it makes you giddy, frankly. The smile on your face, it doesn’t quite fit it’s so grand but what the heck

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stop paying attention to the way. There are flowers here that are remarkably ugly, probably live nowhere else. What bee would bother tiptoeing through that hairy blue-green splatter of petals? Would a butterfly want to unroll her long tongue into those tiny black dead-looking knuckles? The one you lean over to sniff has the air of a fart too fat and lazy even to let the wind carry it. Maybe the bugs that pollinate the plants at the end of the world don’t have anywhere else to go, take what they can get. You pass a wispy column of some

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research and development. You hear about the end of the world. It’s nearby, people say. You ask for directions. The man is selling a map. It’s expensive. You talk him down to three dollars. He wanted six! But once you’re stumbling down the path, the map doesn’t seem to correspond to anything. The fork that takes off over the hill, is it even drawn on this thing? There’s the marsh and the path seems to skirt it. But where’s the bridge? Ahead. Is that it? No, it’s a sunken rowboat. You finally fold the map (a feat in itself) and

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the skunk is a white animal with flair for the bold black gesture and those who argued that the skunk is a black animal who knows how to accentuate its blackness with a bolt or two of white were given skittish skunks to take home so they could investigate their theories further. Although through his fourth term President Lincoln presided over a nation at peace, unified and prosperous, which demonstrated to the entire world a system of liberty and social justice to envy and emulate, Lincoln is also and more darkly known for beginning the U.S.’s fascination with chemical weapons

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Congress to replace the eagle as the official animal emblem of the United States. Senators Revels of Mississippi and Passions of New South Florida introduced the legislation so the first black man and first white woman elected to that august body would reinforce the symbolism provided by a national animal that united both black and white. With the post-war exposure of the South’s system of death camps in which life depended upon the relative whiteness of one’s musical scale, few disagreed that the relative proportions of the black and the white on the skunk was appropriate. Those who argued that

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was in love with life, then in despair over it, hating it, wishing it would leave him, then LOVE!!! again, but what Abe now found was profound, he realized. He was in love with a skunk. For this skunk, he leaned over and began stroking its triangular head, he would move mountains, divert rivers, make the world safe for skunkkind, and weave a thousand daisy chains. The skunk considered making a threatening noise, but it had already shot its cloud, might as well give itself up to fate. So it was, after thrashing the American South properly, Abraham Lincoln asked

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black eyes at Abe as he approached. Abe was a real nature boy. Soon’s he set one long-toed foot in the woods, some fern tickling his ankle, as he wanted to strip off every stitch and feel the breezes feeling him up, the low shrubs nipping at his knees, the tassled grasses brushing their beards against his foreskin. The skunk lay there, pressed flat by a collapsed angel and its own exhaustion, and stared up at all that future-presidential nakedness. The skunk didn’t know it but Abe was in love. Not just with life, for like many a depressive Abe

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out from under all that angel. Young Abe covered his mouth but couldn’t hold in his barking laugh. The skunk, frightened anew by this sudden sound, redoubled its efforts, but the flailing only brought more tatters of leaf and mold and dust into its face. Shortly the skunk’s head was completely covered up. Exhausted panting made the forest floor fluff flutter until the breath caught and the fresh mound exploded with a sneeze, exposing a skunk face, usually so sleek with its black and white stripes, sadly speckled and dimmed. So tired was it that the skunk only rolled its

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an angel’s wing is probably this: it will transform a skunk’s weapon into a gift of love. Let’s back up a moment. Remember Abraham Lincoln? One day while walking in the forest the young Abe came upon an angel who had fallen from a tree onto a skunk. The angel was insensible, but Abe could see the skunk was conscious and desperate. The golden heap had dropped upon the woodland creature’s brilliant tail, and its forepaws scrabbled now at the loose scurf, panicked squeals alternating with frantic grunts, as it failed to gain the purchase it needed to pull itself

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at the tips rise to the ceiling, the big white wings rippling away below, taking up much of the room. Then with a light toss of the head the dog brings the wings down and they scoop up the air that had been waiting to be moved. The congressmember and the youth hit the floor. The black bailiff in gold chain crouches behind the scimitar’s broad blade. The injured bailiff licks his own blood from the porcelain shard, gets hair on his tongue. The first wave of skunk odor hits all of them at once. What you don’t know about

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That would be what a conductor does. Not a train conductor, because when you punch a ticket you’re using a small grasping motion with an even-less-dramatic-than-blunt-nosed-scissors hole punch in your hand. Not a copper wire, for, although a copper wire is a good conductor, it can be charged with thousands of electrons and pretty much remain inert. The conductor before the symphony orchestra. That guy. A slim white baton in one hand, reaching with both arms into the music to raise it, to lower it, to rush it forth, to pull it back. Like that. The wings. The long feathers

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known and loved throughout the world, in pool rooms, and among the cognoscenti. The dog dips its head, fitting its muzzle into a loop at its chest. One tug unfurls the angel wings, which are far larger than one might have supposed seeing them tucked against the dog’s back. Once the wings are raised, seemingly ready to lift the dog into a sky full of noon and floss, the dog need merely nod, a gesture gentle and assured, and the wings beat. Beat. Perhaps that is the wrong word, as it suggests a mindless pounding away at the air. Conduct.

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a teetering stack of colored blocks. A brown dog trussed up in a set of fluffy angel wings staggers in behind the congressmember. The dog, clearly, is as drunk as a skunk, which fact need hardly be contested as a skunk carrying a bottle of whiskey takes two steps into the room, raises a foot to take another step, loses its balance and quicksteps backward, which exit is punctuated by the thump of the bottle striking the skunk’s head as the head hits the floor and the meandering into the room of the essence for which skunk is so well

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goes, “Whatever for? Whatever for?” A second bailiff enters. She is wearing a toga as a turban and, like the first bailiff, is largely naked. Her main accoutrement is a fine gold chain which, every few inches, has been glued to her skin so that the chain hangs in scallops around her body, creating from a distance a perception of scales. When she sees her colleague bleeding she draws a sharp breath and yanks from the coat rack a scimitar gleaming with fury and one prominent nick. “Give ‘im what for! Give ‘im what for!” the purple crow croaks from

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(one especially sharp piece wet with his blood), glares at the congressmember and his young friend. “And what would you say you are?” The congressmember directs this haughty query at the bailiff who is naked except for a row of peacock plumes which make a colorful and swaying crest down the center of his back. The congressmember adjusts his Groucho goggles, the black caterpillar of a moustache rippling in his huffs. A purple crow, having been released from the prison of the vase by its shatter, toddles groggily across the lime green and apple green malachite tiles, croaking as it

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toga and singing alive alive O! A bailiff enters wearing a hat. The hat falls from his head. He stoops to pick it up. While the bailiff stoops a shot rings out, the bullet shattering a vase on a mantle just behind where the bailiff’s head had been. Ow! cries the bailiff as a substantial chunk of vase bounces off his skull. A congressmember enters through the door open at the opposite side of the room. He is bearing a pistol. “Just like that your honor,” the youth says at his side. The bailiff, shards of porcelain in his hand

Thousand: One Hundred Forty-One

a fire hydrant, while the nearest house, having long burned to see the hydrant spew, listens to the internal combustion engine with a wistful wall. Somebody needs to count higher. A version of the bill was settled in committee then reverberated throughout the halls of Congress with rubber-ball-like boings. Sincerity leaps. We who have stood the test of time sit down as midnight approaches. We raise a toast to legs, strong, steady legs. A nuance was left on the road. Falls compel us to succumb to the treble compare. What you watch consists of what you sacrifice toward wearing a

Thousand: One Hundred Forty

a long time! Emily considers the prospect of being a kid for a long time. It’s like a prison sentence, isn’t it? “Schools look just like prisons.” When Emily said that Ti Ti passed her a plate of cake and ice cream and said, “I am going to be Jesus when I grow up.” Emily said something through a mouth full of cake and ice cream. Ti Ti turned on the make-up mirror and began experimenting with mascara. Strudel poked her wet black nose out from under the bed and licked Emily’s bare ankle. A newspaper truck idles next to

Thousand: One Hundred Thirty-Nine

for kids. And people think that’s reasonable! There’s always some category of person that’s disallowed equality, that it seems perfectly natural to discriminate against, any other way of organizing society so unthinkable bringing it up is a total joke. Everybody knows children can’t be allowed to make decisions for themselves, or decisions of any sort! Women! Blacks! Indians! They were denied their rights as autonomous persons because, everybody knew, they were as good as children! How ridiculous is that! I mean, isn’t that the most ridiculous part? There’s nobody who wasn’t a kid once. And for a long time! For

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roads run out, you can get on a boat or a plane or a helicopter or even an elephant or a camel and go on farther. There’s always somewhere else. But grown-ups won’t let kids just go wherever they want. No, it’s like when you get a certain height you’re given permission to poke into the business of everybody shorter than you. You could pretend you’re a midget, Ti Ti would say, Ti Ti who never let there not be a solution, no matter how ridiculous. I bet an old dwarf would rat you out, thought Emily. Freedom is not

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you watch what they do and try to figure it out and no matter what some of it just stays dumb. Or boring. But you have to be so old in order to drive and Emily wants to drive because when you can drive you go where you want to go, not where somebody else thinks you ought to go. There are highways to everywhere, and if the road runs out, and it’s hard to imagine the roads ever running out because there’s always just another one you can turn onto which will take you someplace else, but if the

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jab you in the mouth. Ti Ti says it makes your mouth red, like you’re bleeding. We could pretend we’re vampires, Emily says, letting some of the red red liquid drip out of the corner of her mouth. But right now, Emily is finishing off her surreptitious champagne, and wondering where they hid all that fun. It tastes nasty. She narrows her eyes at her mother and Polly. But she refills their glasses, while they both laugh laugh laugh about something stupid. Shoes or something. You’re going to end up a grown-up someday, and for a really long time, so

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bottle was big. The bottle was slippery, and, even as it gave up glass after glass, it was heavy. Mother didn’t notice when Emily splashed some into her own waxy cup. She imagined how wonderful it would taste, the delights of every birthday party condensed into a water, all the cries of pleasure and giggles of joy injected as a gas into that water. It smelled kind of funny. Funny. Ha ha. With the liquid fun’s first touch to her tongue Emily’s mouth puckered. She was drinking punch, sweet red punch, she reminded herself. Nobody chokes on punch. Punch doesn’t

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at Emily as she said this. I hope you choke, Emily thought at the time. This she does not remember. In fact, she remembers herself a most gracious host. Perhaps the champagne glass in front of “Aunt Lolly” repeatedly emptying, its scum of foam replaced by an amber swirl and the tiny bubbles rushing to get out of the liquid before it slipped past Lolly’s gleaming lips, distracted Emily from her less friendly thoughts. For she was the one who tipped the heavy green bottle to make sure Aunt Lolly (and her own mother) did not want for celebration. The

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from a party that was supposed to be a surprise but the guest of honor flew to Europe on short notice and the party didn’t happen. So it was a disappointment party, that’s what Emily called it. A few of Mother’s friends came to commiserate. And ate half the cake. Mother made like they were doing her a big favor because there was no way she was going to let the girls eat that much cake. “Terrible! So much fat and sugar!” Mother’s best friend said, shoveling a second big piece into her maw. She had the audacity to wink

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anything, Emily remembers thinking. She remembers thinking this so fiercely she doesn’t remember what her mother said. She vaguely remembers Eula crying. Maybe she was crying about something else. Eula is the cryingest! Working the apple around in her mouth without spilling it, or choking on it, takes Emily’s concentration for a moment. She holds her hand up in case she has to push something back in. Two drops of juice and saliva slip from the corner of her mouth. She dabs at the escape with a red napkin. The napkin has party balloons on it and is left over

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asked. Emily pushes the rest of the apple slice into her mouth. It’s a little too big, and makes her cheeks bulge. When Emily was at Ti Ti’s house that morning the TV news interrupted Tom & Jerry with special alert news bulletins about the flash flood that ripped through the campground and the twenty or more people who were missing. One body had been found dead in a tree. So Emily wondered what Mother was going to say. Maybe if we had a television, you wouldn’t have to tell us everything like you’re the only one who can know

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gives him ideas sometimes. Sometimes, though, it steals and feeds on them. A body’s gotta eat. Emily raises a slice of apple to her lips and sucks on it. She closes her eyes. Once she saw a tiny copper fish in the shallows of river. The fish nibbled on her ankle, which made her giggle. The next day, her mother said, a flash flood took out the campground where they’d pitched a tent. Emily nibbles the apple. Tiny flecks of white flesh on her tongue. She presses them against the roof of her mouth. “Did anybody get wet?” her sister

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fisher gnome, scoots, but there’s no place to scoot to. It quivers in its last shallow. Into the puddle the fisher gnome slides his hand, water pouring into a bowl in the middle of his hand. The little copper fish is heartened to see all that darkness suddenly available and rushes to hide his shiny body in it. The fisher gnome leans over his palm and breathes on the water, ripples dancing its surface. Then he snorts it all up. Just like that! This is how a fish came to be in the back of the fisher gnome’s mind. It

Thousand: One Hundred Twenty-Eight

In the back of the fisher gnome’s mind there’s a fish. Once the gnome came upon a puddle in which a tiny copper fish was circling. The puddle had been abandoned when a sudden flood almost as suddenly went back to bed, its dreams calling it. There were puddles left after the flood and the one in which the tiny copper fish was warming did not happen to be one of the bigger. The sun shaved the skin off the puddles with a blade so sharp the water didn’t notice. The tiny fish startled at the shadow cast by the

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unnoticed, “I know. I know. Leper’s gone. Leper’s gone. Gone, leper, gone. I know, I know. One less. Count ‘em all up. And you get one less. I know I know. Why I know? Why why? I’ve got a reason. A reason reason. I know, you know. Do you know? Who but me knows the reason reason? Who who?” This went on rather longer than it ought to have, frankly, the counting leprechaun investigating an uncountable series of minor discomforts, the fisher gnome burbling on and on about some special knowledge, the Lazarusing leprechaun hung up by a power cord.

Thousand: One Hundred Twenty-Six

his chin, picked his nose and nibbled the finger, pinched his lip on which a ragged nail caught and blood welled at the wound, scratched his ear with a knife, squatted and rubbed his lower back against a broken chair, spat a tooth, and yanked thirteen hairs from his left brow in a precise exercise of hunt down and root out, no one of the thirteen to be suffered, only surprising they had survived to now. The fisher gnome watched this set of behaviors with flared nostrils and a quivering lip, muttering softly, though not so softly as to go

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gnome. He saw in them something distant and misshapen. He squinted. Yes, there was something in them that was coming soon. On its head a city fixed in place with silver screws housed a nation of refugees from a plague that had burned through mountains and avenues. The counting leprechaun yawned again, which gave the fisher gnome a good view of what of the leprechaun’s last meal lingered in the festering pockets of his gums. There was a new sound from the reviving body. It could have been, was it?, a whimper. The counting leprechaun tilted his head and rubbed

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bank (leprechaun), and a gnawed shrub crossed with a toothless beaver stuffed in a thrift shop pillow case (gnome, natch), the leprechaun’s fingers can bend backwards at every joint. “I know what you’re counting for. There’s one missing, in there? There’s a leprechaun be gone, eh? There’s a leper abroad. Eh? I’m right, eh?” The fisher gnome’s self-satisfied chuckle was overdubbed by a whooping gasp and a violent blat of a fart. The dead leprechaun was not, it seemed, dead in the manner one expects of the dead. The counting leprechaun looked at last into the eyes of the fisher

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floor, let’s shake some leaf, let’s let’s.” The body is silent but some drool falls from the mouth and the joints begin to quiver. The counting leprechaun yawns. Ah, wah wah, he says. He rubs his eyes which the yawn made water. “I know, I know,” says the fisher gnome standing right beside him. They are both small creatures, this gnome comes up to the counting leprechaun’s shoulder, the gnome’s nose is bigger both in length and width, neither would make you think of a child, more a cat mixed with a crow and rolled out on a clay river

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for feet for dancing. Head good. Especially you have pointy head like me, heh heh. Spin like a top. Like a top!” From the leprechaun into which life may or may not have been returning, a new sound, a groan, or a creak. Which becomes a snore-like snort. “I like the songs of trees. They need the wind so maybe it’s the wind that’s playing the trees like they big instruments. The creak like that. The long groan as the big limb swing, the wind taking they arm, the wind saying, let’s dance, you me, let’s take it to the

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that sidled into a whistle which rose and rose in pitch until stopping abruptly. “Fish good drummers too. Good singers, you know. If you know fish, not just eat but get to know, you know. Not all fish same, you know that. Silly to think else. All birds same? All four-footy beasts? Ha! And Ha! Crawdads not much into music. Except dancing. Crawdad like to dance, you know. Somebody else gotta set the tune? Maybe. They got rhythm in the head maybe, or the tail maybe. All those feet. Many feet. Better for dancing to have more feet, eh? Good

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and the eyes bulged, staring, lightless. “Yep, yep,” said a voice behind the counting leprechaun. “Doing good so far.” A deep, reverberant moan from the hanging body. “I bet he could carry a tune,” the voice continued. “I have some sticks. You could knock on the empty noggin. Bone makes good drum. Notes, not just percussion. It’s the crystalline nature of the structure. There are probably bones lying around here, too. You lepers got not much covering you bones either. You could bang on him with that bony arm of your.” Another sound from the body, this one a hiss

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The leprechaun listened to the sound of the fisher gnome’s skin, his meat and skin. Plap plap. Plap. But he watched the work the breath he’d given was taking on. It was not easy work. The chest heaved, the belly poked out, pulled in. A sickly yellow-green, the color of a healing bruise, began to underlie the ashy blue. The nostrils twitched, the tongue jerked. The eyelids had once settled neatly over the eyes, but the eyes had sunk into the head, and the lids had remained in position, stiff, bloodless, and ajar. But now the lids fluttered, snapped open,

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After giving it a head start, the counting leprechaun warmed another lungful, leaned forward, put his fist under the other’s chin to lessen the slack mouth’s gape, and covered it with his own. The second breath he forced in with a sudden whoosh. Then (as long as we’re counting) he sent a third, a fourth, and, after a pause, a fifth, though this last was slow slow, and finished up what lingered deep in the counting leprechaun’s doughy belly. As he stepped back, someone nearby applauded languidly. That dull slap of hand against hand could only be the fisher gnome.

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his head just under the nose, so the upper lip curled back and the pointy nose jutted out, then from a picture hook strung him up. The counting leprechaun looked at the teeth the curled lip hid no more. They were quite nice. Capped with gold. Even and clean. Dazzled, the counting leprechaun leaned close and tapped a tooth with his cracked fingernail. He smiled a Mona Lisa smile and into the mouth of the blue, unbreathing leprechaun he let a warm wayward breath find its way. This breath knew what to do; he felt it orient, begin to probe.

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familiar faces drinking turpentine and less familiar faces drinking turpentine with cream. Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five. Number thirty-six was an ashy blue and displayed no familiarity with breath. The counting leprechaun rolled this one over and kicked the empty tequila bottle thus revealed. With a slow yawn, which exposed black and yellow teeth chummy as headstones in a pioneer cemetery, the counting leprechaun pissed into the tequila dregs. He grabbed the blue leprechaun by his matted scalp and poured the piss-tequila mixture down his cold throat, then he shook him and pounded him against the wall, tied a power cord around

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snoring in a pool of green vomit, his beard wrapped three times around his neck, cold vodka dripping from a cracked vase onto his chest. Number two hung by a toe twisted into the beads of a chandelier. Numbers three and four were squeezing hallucinogenic pus from the sores of number five who had been tied to a fireplace grating. The blue slick fingers were then lapped at by whichever tongue happened to be closest. Though tempted, the counting leprechaun only paused for a connoisseur’s sniff before moving on to the flooded bedrooms. The hours passed as he checked old

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to a wall or toadstool and slump, sigh, drool a little, sniffle, rub his eyes, one of which had invariably wandered away from its brow and had to be nudged back, then pinch his cheeks until the red in them gleamed like apples slapped with a strop. Taking courage from a swallow of fermented aphid juice and a chaser of deoxygenated brown recluse venom, the leprechaun would rub his nipples absently, squint at least one of his unsteady eyes, and return to the scene of the count. A square-tipped finger picked out the first of his fellow leprechauns, this one

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kind of whimsy an office manager would enjoy, or a VP in charge of marketing, not a five-year-old. The daughter sniffed the turtle’s diaper (smelled clean) then returned to the kitchen. Meanwhile among the leprechauns one of the least inebriated began counting noses. He had done this a few times and each time had come up with a number. Just when he grew confident that he had the right number, the next count, a count merely to confirm, a count to make sure there was no mistake, would turn out slightly different. The leprechaun would slap his forehead, stagger over

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could not restrain herself from the most elaborate and various whims. They ranged from elephants made of cotton candy to water in anatomically correct globes that do-si-do’d with smoke armadillos. Even if none of this lasted more than a few minutes it still sounded dangerous. Disruptive anyway. How did multiplication tables get memorized? Besides, didn’t this seem more whimsy than whim? And everyone knows that whimsy doesn’t come on until middle age. A child’s whim is more along the lines of smearing eyebrows with lipstick or pouring lemonade on the dog. A ballerina made completely of paper clips was the

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mobile into a spin, tossing off a comet that hasn’t yet been reattached. Later, she learned, her baby was merely going through a rock dove mood. They do that. Moods, phases, whims. The mood is of relatively short duration, usually passing within an afternoon. If the turtle was a phase it could last weeks. Infants typically don’t experience whims. Whims are too sophisticated. Whims tend to come on sometime around 30 months. The daughter’s cousin, a school teacher, once had a student whose whims had to be separately housed, with attendants. It wasn’t that they lasted long, but the child

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check on the baby who usually woke from its nap at about this time. In the crib instead of a baby a dusty brown turtle was burrowing under the fuzzy blanket. The daughter pushed the blanket aside and lifted the turtle to her shoulder. She patted its shell gently. A month ago the daughter had gone to the nursery and found a rock dove nestled under the blanket, its head neatly tucked under one wing. She had screamed, which caused the dove to burst into flight. It rushed about the room, brushing knick-knacks off the bookcase and sending the star

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ablution team at the World Ablution Championships, an event that comes around every six and a half years. Cheering for spiritual cleanliness seemed to have a greater social import after the bloody unrest. Or so she thought aloud, while washing the baby’s bottles, her left hand smarting from a speckling of freshly boiled water. When she shook the bottles out and leaned them in the dish drainer, she turned to her father, and found he’d left the room. The daughter sighed, pushed behind an ear a few strands of auburn hair that had been tickling her nose, and went to

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also was a pleasant spring with lots of flowers on the hedges, the Truth Commission hearings were winding down (the ratings for which had hit a nadir), and the new Red vice president (the former rebel commander) and the Blue president (the previous administration’s minister of argument) had been seen at state dinners civilly passing a basket of sourdough. The farmer’s summons likely involved jury duty, ceremonial guard duty at one of the nation’s monuments, museums, or sacred cenotes, or drinking. None of these, the daughter reasoned, was high risk at present, what with the recent victory of the national