Story excerpt: "The Best Day (Alia and Marck's Olive Juice)"

Some lives don’t actually have a best day, that particular kind of day that sets a heart’s compass to true, forever.  But I’ve been lucky, and know mine exactly: it was the day I was finally forced to marry my brother.

 It seemed like we’d been waiting absolutely forever.  And while the setting might’ve been far from anyone’s first choice, the decorations were perfect, the music we’d settled on seemed to please everybody, and the room seemed packed full – everyone was so genuine, so real – despite the modest number of attendees.  

–Okay, and there was an open bar, too, but who wouldn’t want to be a little naughty when you had the legal permit to basically shoot the moon anywhere in City Hall.  (Jail included!  Ahem..)

We have a wedding video, of course, but I never end up watching it unless I’m showing it to someone else.  I just remember it so much better from where I was, … all of the dimension – the scents, the quality of the lighting, all the laughing and dancing, the sympathetic judge actually setting off small fireworks indoors (his bailiff laughing alongside), it was amazing.  It wouldn’t – couldn’t! – have been as wonderful if it hadn’t been so weird.  I knew I was living the best time of my life, and that’s enough.

My name is Alia, and I’ll try tell it like it was.  —I miss you so much, baby.  Shit, I’m already crying.

Story excerpt: "For Love, And Also Peanuts."

Jelka glanced down from her place on the couch, sighed, and nudged her father aside with a toe.  

At first he seemed confused to be facing in a new direction, but his halting, tentative steps eventually built into a somewhat-lopsided scuttle to the other side of the room.  Something over by the radiator seemed worth revisiting.

Cheerfully clomping down the stairs, Talena flounced into the living room and stopped short, blinking as she took stock of things.  Her little sister – two years mattered a lot, she was sure – was frowning, arms crossed.  Their mother looked glassily earnest, doubtless trying to impart a wooly platitude and meeting with utterly predictable but somehow unexpected resistance.  And their father was licking at the floor, or maybe along the seam where it met the baseboard.  

Talena was So Not Interested; she spun around and marched to the door, snagging a jacket as she disappeared without a word, leaving Jelka to deal with the familiar dreary nonsense by herself.  

Jelka sighed and brushed some loose hair behind her ear.  She regretted it immediately because it had been hiding part of her face, had allowed her gaze to wander in obscurity.  She’d already missed her chance to find a reason to leave with Talena – she might’ve gotten lucky; hadn’t been quick enough.  

“Jelka, honey – are you even listening to me?”  Her mother was frowning.

Jelka stalled by picking a few salted groundnuts out of the end table’s ever-present dish, eating a couple as cover.  The dish was kept stocked in the hopes that someday a guest’s hand might ever again stray towards it, but since nobody drank beer or watched the Premier League in the room any longer – or came by the house at all, really – the nuts mostly languished.  However, since they were good Dad-bait (as she thought of them), they could also be… useful.

She tossed one to the floor.  

The promising sound it made against the wood drew her father’s snuffling attention almost immediately, his nails clicking lightly against the repetitive laminate as he waddled over to repel the incursion.  Floor-level groundnuts were a singular affront to his sensibilities.

Bunch of fixes and polish

Cheers – I've been accumulating changes to nearly all of the material published here, and have finally gotten around to posting them (no net access out in the boonies!).  They're basically living documents, and my friend Mike Gatny will be rewriting things and setting some to music.

I really wish I'd found a poetry/writing blog-ring or something, to get things out more.  Some of my best work has only been read a very few times.  A bummer, really – things got tough here and so many photos and stories and music never got online.  It's hard for me to ask for attention.

I have some short stories, from which I'll publish excerpts (after William Gibson's online example).

Be well, take care, and thank you.

"Think of England"

I had a nightmare that there was a forest

with no shade, just all built of light —

holy as it was, blinking didn’t help

so everyone would cry, every night.

There was a disease that made people take back

every kiss that they’d given to you;

the worst part was that, during it all,

you could feel them coming out again.

You lost a tooth for every white-lie told –

but you’d lose two if your words made someone cry.

Nobody grew laugh-lines anymore, unused 

tongues sunburned fast in open sky;

and the water hurt your lips – so you’d gulp it fast,

blink back tears, and try to think of England.

Everyone’s hands were so cold, so you warmed them 

on the fireflies that’d just burst into flame..

Duty flaked off like dry old dead skin

because everything just led to something worse –

the better choices felt like inaction and the 

safely-fruitless bounty of sullen silence.

–So you ended up a prosthetic of yourself,

trying to calmly emulate self-mastery;

blindly wide-eyed, nerves scraped raw, 

praying to keep the well-lit predators at bay.

"Funeral moth"

You became a funeral moth,
natural and unwholesome,
drawn by will against wisdom to wool
seeing its last day in the sun.

(You rebecame a tyrant child,
riveted to an endless now –
everything handled like a toy,
ever-more sugar in the cereal;

while he filled his sails being bored,
sucked through life by things that suck,
blowing backwards against intent –
distracted, unimpassioned, dust.)

—Just then the darkness unfolds
like it might in the nighttime,
but hmm.. the space feels so small,
and no stars are shining…

And there’s an endless feast
of exactly what you ordered,
and there’s nothing else,
at all, forevermore…

"Rain like a cloud"

She doesn’t rain like a cloud…

She isn’t fair like the sun.

More under-handed than even-,

she’s already unbegun.

She won’t make like a tree.

She doesn’t break like a heart.

She’s never not been indulged –

she makes paint run in hung art.

She won’t get out of the way.

She has her own set of plans.

Mountains jump up in the sky, 

she’s got a canyon on the run.

She doesn’t sweet like a peach.

She doesn’t brake for a curve.

Not easy on the world,

she fights its every turn.

She deserves less than what she has.

She doesn’t ever invest.

She doesn’t keep souvenirs, just a 

flare gun on her desk –

she says it’s a bad way to go,

a smirk there, wry, on her lips.

Her satisfaction is all,

don’t be tempted by her kiss.

She doesn’t bother with things.

She doesn’t twinkle at all.

She doesn’t care where you’ve been, and

just forget eye-to-eye or heart-to-heart.

"Freak flag upside-down"

Pepto’s not a foodie fave – sometimes wish 

I could just eat sun and sound.

But I bungee jump from my petard-hoists,

and I fly my freak flag upside-down.

I’m having broken windows installed on Monday –

will beat this torn rice paper, for sure.

But at least the dogs’ve got their own couch –

prerogatives of the freak flag unfurled.

After dark, the rivers all run with ramen –

  go fly your freak flag upside-down!

Cats and mice cutting a rug all tonight –

  go fly your freak flag upside-down!

–the tree is same from the leaf.

–the knife is different as the gun. 

All the pants are on fire, but nobody’s crying, 

so I fly my freak flag upside-down.

Eating eyelash salad has yet to help 

anywhere outside of Japan –

and oh the things in their vending machines,

but it keeps their freak flags flying.

Tepid times like these, wish I were more like Bowie: 

hey, go ahead, just be brave and strange.

It’s okay that we’re all adrift and at-sea,

just leave your freak flag out in the wind.

You got more colors than a clown – shine on

and fly your freak flag upside-down!