one thin dime

Baby, I stole all the money from your wallet and now I’m off. I don’t know why there’s that saying, “one thin dime” because if you think about it, dimes are much thicker even than a hundred dollar bill. Even a stack of those kinds. You were calling me names in your sleep last night. Again, I heard you slur at me. My dreams were the falling kind. Now, the light’s up again—you’re not, I am. I’ve ransacked your wallet, thinned it of everything; various widths. There wasn’t much there, certainly no hundreds. Was almost afraid I wouldn’t have enough to make it. But now I’m on the bus to work. The day’ll go quick. Today I feel it. Tonight I’ll be back, closing my eyes next to you and sleeping so deeply it’ll be like death.

some lie to tell

We'd come up with some lie. My dad was supposed to tell it to the person who answered.

He picked up the phoned, dialed.

Stammered.

Hung up.

Said, "I couldn't do it. I'm terrible at lying. I couldn't."

I said, "What are you talking about? You're a great bullshitter. You did it for a living."

His whole career, he'd been a marketer.

An expression broke across his face like cracks in dried mud. "I only pressed six numbers," he said, "It was all dial tone."

a foible

The land’s suburban, a ¼ acre plot that used to grow a swapping of soybean & corn. The man’s German by decent and by temperament. He has a pet. It’s an imported, domesticated marsupial, small, and it scuttles through the piles of leaves the man forms with his rake. For hours and hours, he works straight with no rest. The two trees, maples both, hang over him like a tarp packed with God’s lice. He looks up, then goes back to his work. There is no wind today. It’s late October still and still as a glassy lake. The pet is not leashed. It’s trained well and knows its name, which the man cracks out like a horsewhip when the thing goes too far. It comes back to him. The many hours this work takes gives rise to calluses, muscles that will soon cry Epsom, Epsom! Color is falling out of the daytime, sheds of skin. The man switches on an electric leaf blower to get remnants the rake left behind. His pet startles. Goes right up one of the two maples. The man shouts the thing’s name, screams come here, a few words in German, any potential of expletive his tongue had waiting in it. The pet’s up the tree though, climbing the system of branches. There are a few still full of leaves colored the earthly expression of a very deep psychosis.

Because of some weird application of footing, it all comes down: the leaves, the pet, all the junk that hides up high in a maple. Things you could never even guess at.

The blower stays loud.

21 sounds my heart makes that it shouldn’t

1. A car going down the Pacific Coast Highway with its muffler dragging.
2. The theme song to The Munsters.
3. A shovel digging into frozen dirt, hitting a rock.
4. A major league baseball game broadcast over AM radio.
5. Harry Caray wheezing after a homer.
6. Two cast iron frying pans, filled with Palm oil, clanged together, still hot.
7. Stray electricity leaking out of the telephone wires overhead.
8. A gate with dry hinges left open, slamming in a bad wind.
9. Bubbles.
10. The city of Mumbai, capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra.
11. The Dead Sea Scrolls, flaking to the ground when picked up.
12. An office building first thing in the morning, before anyone shows up.
13. A tree falling in a very crowded National Forest.
14. Something akin to News Chopper 12.
15. Corduroy on a fat kid’s thighs as he or she runs from a pack of pink-cheeked bullies on a school playground in Anytown USA, USA.
16. The giggles of a child who cannot yet speak..
17. A curtain thrown open on its metal rod so you can glare at a neighbor mowing his lawn at 7 a.m. He will not notice this.
18. My grandmother cursing.
19. Up 4 or 5 carrots being julienned.
20. A briar pipe filled with Burley tobacco being doused with a lighter’s flame until the cherry buries itself in and stays going on its own.
21. Clumsy ghosts scaring you accidentally.
    

pictures as stories

This weekend, I started using the magic trio of my iPhone, Diptic, and Instagram to tell stories.

These are the stories so far. Watch out, they'll make you cry.

Story #1: The Complete History of Love As Told by the Titles of 3 Thrift Store Books

Story #2: The War Effort

the leaves

On Pine Street, a mouse runs into a pile of leaves. A raccoon, hunched over like it's begging to be shot and formed into a hat, notices. It runs across and follows the mouse in for food or friendship. My Yorkie, Pinocchio, walking with me unleashed, sees the raccoon and chases it. What else can you expect from me?—I follow Pinocchio and the raccoon and the mouse into the leaves.

When I'm in there, there's no rustle or movement. We're each waiting, not wanting the other to get away and not wanting to be noticed.

A car, wood paneled and huge, driven by my neighbor Rick makes a gummy turn around the corner, onto Pine, into the pile of leaves.

It's difficult for me to tell you this, but the weight kills me immediately. I don't even feel the roll of the back tire.

Rick keeps going, used to the thing's sloppy shocks.

Pinocchio's rotten sense of smell kicks; he nips the raccoon's tail, its squeal startles the mouse, who runs out, causing the raccoon to run out, and Pinocchio to run out.

There's a long chase, through yards and alleys and streets and a few parking lots and fields. A fox becomes involved at some point. Someone drops out and someone is eaten.

Eventually Pinocchio realizes how far he is from me. He takes a while to pieces things back together, linking his way back to me like PVC pipes, until the final elbow onto Pine.

He sits there by the leaf pile. Then lays down. When the guys from the city come in the morning to mulch the leaves, he goes at their ankles. They have Animal Control on speed dial.

the ferret and the man

The guy had a ferret at his ankles. Morning rush hour was just starting and they were walking near the Bay Viewda Triangle.

They kept close to the buildings. Using his foot, the guy would guide the ferret back against the brick facades when it started to veer off toward the curb and the road. It kept trying to do this, so the guy was using his foot a lot.

It was like he was kicking at the wormy mammal, and his foot was filled with pure love.

It must have been too much, because soon he swooped down and picked the ferret up. He draped it down beside his head like a shoulder pad that'd protect him in battle.

What he did next was turn his face and kiss the ferret. This lasted for some time. Then they crossed the street. Together, looking both ways.

the girl, this lass

The girl, this lass, she was born with the pelts of two squirrels for eyebrows. Over the turbulent, pitted seas of her eyes, the things often seemed alive.

They were head to tail on most days, except during the nights she slept badly. On those nights, she'd find herself dropping freely from nimbostratus cotton candy. Or sometimes with the fangs of canis electrified by rabid joy plunging into unformed plots on her body.

When the light was back up, she'd take the mirror she kept beside her bed for such purposes and see that the squirrels were snout to snout and tails away, looking at the gap of flesh between her brows like it was the sweetest acorn ever grown.

I've been put on notification, but they're keeping it quiet.

Here's how it happened: There were lights in stirred up colors. I slowed to nothing and then just sat there. Up to that point, I'd never done anything wrong in my life I'd been caught for.

Tonight though the few excess miles my tires were carrying came up as salt welts in my eyes. They were irrepressible. I felt stupid. The woman who had the plastic-brimmed hat and heavy belt must have thought me a pud.

She took my card, read my name into a black thing she had perched on her shoulder.

She handed the card back, saying next time and thinking or think and if it was up to me. Her face, I noticed, was a crude dolor. Her voice was shockingly flat, like she'd already said everything surprising that'd ever come to her.

Maybe it was all tiredness, the time of day, the extreme nightness of the hour.

Her lights went off. Or the opposite of went off: turned off. It became dark. She curled her squad car and went back to where my speed triggered her radar gun in the first place.

The lines for phones had a buzz to them and the grass was alive with insects and wind.

I started the motor, feeling like I could kill but not knowing what.

the basement

New kinds of animals appear in the basement every day. Each night after the table is straightened back, I go write down what's there with a stubby pen in a notebook with a small spiral, putting a flashlight between my teeth to see.

The wall gave way a few months ago when there was rain so heavy it moved things. We covered up the collapse with a tarp, bright blue, and weighed on the corners with bricks left from some project that never got life.

Here's what I've seen:

• Frogs, two kinds
• Spiders, so many that that the webs are like a sheets
• Mice
• A kitten, its eyes sealed shut with sick
• Crickets or cicada (I never learned how to tell)
  
• Rats and their nests made of tax records and insulation
• Opossums, one living & four dead

There are pockets of wetness forming on the ground. The support beams are seeming almost maritime. Tortoises will soon find their way in, then winged things with echoes in their throats.

A rolling fog will roll in.

One day I'll leave the notebook, pencil, and flashlight upstairs, take off my shoes. I'll take down a rod with me and cast it out. I'll bring something in.

mosquito rain

A pond formed at our yard's tail when the rain got zealous for what seemed to be weeks. It was like an internal organ had liquefied; the smell, the color, and the way everything softened and became unsure.

The kids took a kayak to it, oaring the distance between the fence walls. They took BB guns to it too, raising small splashes as they pierced the surface and the frogs no bigger than their own thumbs. The frogs stopped where they were and released a small dye of red into the pond.

One day the kids even set up tarps and slid in, rashes mounting their skin that night, making it hard to sleep.

As adults, we hadn't risked the ceaseless discomfort of the storm. We ran from the car to the house like it was the heat of battle. We stayed inside. Checked the sump pump and checked the forecast. Made a game out of compiling a list of things we'd do when it all let up. Arcane places to dust, an aerated and fertilized front and back lawn and the machines we'd need to rent for that, feasts with lines charred to their surface, a cold can pressed to our heads after it was all done.

Meanwhile the mosquitoes were laying unseen eggs on every welt of water around us. There was ferocious begetting, with generations generating generations as if it were shift work.

There was no way we could guess at how deep the bond of blood could really be.

In a temporary letup of the rain on day 24, I ran out in my sandals and placed a pile of coal briquettes on the shore, which was now making an attempt at the composite deck we'd built the year before under a singe.

The mosquitoes? I imagined them falling to the yard like a TV station switched off for a night.

And that's it.

I still have no picture in my mind for what happens to their corpses once they've dropped.

a bag of pulp

The ribs in me were like the needles of pines that day, taking in the air that happens once February starts dying.

I was riding my motorcycle along the inner arm of a bend in The Big River, a few dashes from the towering trestle bridge that attaches our town to another state. There are shacks on water down in that bend, and I was going to see someone I didn't know not well but well enough to go to see. His name, back then, was Robbie.

Now it's Rob.

We all tend to shed some things as we get older.

Robbie was the same age as me, 24, but you'd never tell that from the sick color of his skin, the way he walked leaned really far back with his stomach leading.

He looked off balance. Or out of. Unsteady, I mean. You almost wanted to grab him by the elbow like you would someone who was triple or more your age and frail.

His dog (of indistinct breeding - fat as a retired defensive lineman, with tight-knit fur and a bald tail) ran shrunk blind circles around the shack, stopping to take occasional pulls from the river water, thrashing and spitting up chunks of ice.

Hearing the noise of his dog taking me in sight, Robbie came out the door but left it open. He raised his right hand to set the sky right.

Above the platform of his hand, I Robbie had on the crown he often wore. It was made from chain link fence that had offset his childhood home from many acres of state land. He'd filed the sharp ends down so they didn't jab into his temples, forehead, scalp.

In his left hand was holding onto what they'd handed to him and asked to give to me.

It was in a paper bag that looked soft, like it was wanting to turn back into pulp. He urgently motioned me on-board with that bag and I thought everything'd scatter.

I take what happens next with the lightness of, say, a tank.

Out of the narrow edge of my left eye, I saw this huge bird with exotic, important colors curl its beak around the latch of the cramped metal cage it was in. It made a sound like the snapping together of wet fingers. The cage made a rattle sound, a metallic shiver.

Then again. That's it. Twice, and the door was open, the bird out, unsteady at first, but its wings remembering their role quickly, and the thing balanced in the air, flew over to where the dog was standing, totally weirded out—we were all frozen by the onslaught of what was going down—and did a several foot free-fall right into the huge dog's mid-back, dug in its claws.

Its wings had to work hard to make it happen, but eventually the bird found its stride and was far off down the river, holding the stiff, stunned dog.

"Robbie!" I said.

Robbie said my name, dropped my bag, then went back inside, closing the door behind him.

On my Yamaha, headed home with the bag bungeed to the seat behind me, a scarf tied around all my head but the eyes, I realized this: There are certain things in life you can understand perfectly, certain things you can't at all.

It doesn't matter.

What it comes down to, when someone asks, What was the craziest thing you ever witness first hand? or What’s the saddest thing you’ve seen? or Do you believe in chance? or What makes you laugh? or How do you define pure true real love?—when you’re asked these things, or anything really, you just need to have some words you can use.

the globe

I found this old globe, alright? All washed out-looking and occupied with places that have been conquered by more powerful places or new economic ties or merging ethnic interests or swallowed back like an aspirin by furious oceans. I took this thing, then took a pointed and new black marker and clustered a million tight circles into a single fat dot.

It was right off the featureless coast of a massive island whose topography was mainly crested and irregular scallops of ugly plastic.

The dot I imagined was an island of my own. Not close to the land, but close enough. A strong swim or more, amidst the copper grid and the squiggles that show the depthless flow of green salt water.

I was sick of all the bullies on earth. And the bully of earth. So I felt right bullying back, distorting the natural order of the miniaturized representation of it. That marker couldn't be erased—by person or the draining power of sun or anything.

I made sure of it.



(incredible textile image by fellow Wisconsinite Leah Evans)

Something whole to swallow

I ate bread off the floor. It tasted like dirt. Not because of the floor. The floor was not dirty. But because times were tight as the head of a snare drum and we'd dug up the blackness of our yard, mixed it with the soured dregs of a stout bottle and hoped that it would lift up in the hot sun.

The result was the cold rightness of a corpse.

But by evening we were back at the shovel, sleeves rolled to let our arms deep into the trashcans along the alley. The clanks and cuts of bottles.

A dash. A pinch. Something whole to swallow. And full knowledge that science works only so well or not at all.

night owl

Somebody, please. Get up and get the gun. Go shoot the night owl. All his hooting, the carrying on.

I've put some boots next to the radiator to warm them up a bit. The rifle's sight's been righted.

The bastard, cold screaming into the echo of night. Testing out tones, adjusting his bifocals. Oooh, and oooooooooh. Loudly darting to get mice and other little rodents whose bellies almost swing to the ground. Upsetting the tall, uncovered grass and drifts of cancer cell snow.

His face round as a lie. Going ooooooooooh, oh oh, oooooh.

Nature's a blessing first, then a curse. My patience is on fire.

So here—the rifle.

And here's some food for it, a surplus of The Armory: 7.62 x54r. And now something to go over your eyes so you can see greenly and full in this dark.

I want to see a rain of feathers. A ticker tape parade. A sea of red at the bottom of the tree.

I'll sleep easy. Heavy as a monument.

Here. Quick. Take it. Do it. I would, but can't myself.

an old friend

I'd enrolled blindly.

All I knew was that the name of the teacher was the same as the man I'd spent so many hours with back before this jungle of complication had sprung up all over my life. It was in a different country. We'd walk around and he'd have me take photos of him while he made phallic gestures with the great monuments of the city we were in.

He'd have my follow him as he followed dark-skinned women with the skinny asses of boys.

He drank whiskey. Introduced me to it like holy water.

Anyway, the class with his name attached to it was a low level one. It was was supposed to teach us to put words together better. I didn't have much passion for the subject. Mostly, I was curious how and who he'd become after a whole decade had rotted behind us both.

First day, I sat in the middle of the small strand of desks that made up the cramped room. Eager, nervous as hell.

He was thinner. Back then, his the hair on his head was neat and a little fuzzy, like a young bird. His face was bald of hair altogether.

Now he'd gone gray and stringy. A lasso of sparse white beard from ear to ear. The weight of a nursery full of babies had dropped from his frame.

But I was sure it was the same guy.

He called role. Looked at me after my name. I stared straight back, said things to flood stories out of him, construct some sort of context.

"I don't know you," he said. His eyes were the color of concrete and maybe harder. "I've forgotten so much."

Later I lost the book he'd assigned, went searching in wet grass. Gave up.

a whole lifetime for

Sometimes, when the nautical theme we'd set up for a party would actually turn to water, we'd wish for a beach to comb with metal tines.

This is the power we have, hitching the cuffs of our jeans to the protrusion of our knees. Then everything would quicken and we'd sink down.

"There are devils down here," he'd say.

"No, only light."

"Or darkness."

"More sand."

I'd take the comb, slick back my hair. Brush the sand from my lips with my forefinger.

We'd get bored, imagine a schooner. Two schooners. The boat and the glass for beer. We'd sit on the schooner and sip from schooners. Watch the sun go down, then come up. Like flipping between focuses at
the eye doctor. The sea rocking us sick.

He'd take a heavy-lined fishing rod, cast it out, reel in something from deep down. A sucker of some sort. Fine, fine, we'd say, sharpen our knives.

We'd cut into that sucker and it’d open wide. A new place, where glares of sun attach themselves to the midriffs of deciduous trees, stab out at us. Wonderful, threatening.

It’s now and the pier we're sitting on is handmade. Rickety. We can see the opposite shoreline clearly. Could swim there, no questions asked.

The water is echoing light. There are no wrinkles in it.

It is quiet. I mean to say absolutely still.

Pine, you can smell it in the air, rich as something you’d save a whole lifetime for.

the myth of the woman who scared easily

There are cold bats hanging from the ceiling of the room where your hat gets hung. There are worms in the earth. There is something that will crawl across your skin and just freak you out.

Hear the sound, canid or feline, in the empty woods of wherever, that sounds like it could kill you before it even needs the spears in its mouth?

You could write a novel about caves stuffed with days that are darker than death. You could eat an ice cream cone and stroke out. Not even have time to come up with one word to describe how it feels.

Doesn't matter much.

The only thing sure is that airplanes will continue to fall from the sky like cigarettes dropped out of highway cars. Oil fire as the only mirage. Floods and all that. Plain godawful gestalt.

At night, when it crashes and scatters, you'll hear the floorboards scream some ugly ass ancient song, some bone-splitting tone; you'll be caught with your pants down or without pants at all. The careful days will unravel and flap.

Remember the myth of the woman who scared easily. Her moral. And her hair, the color of dark ale, fine enough to cut through rock.

(Old Pine by Cecilia Lieder)

The happy art of sorrow

His death will be like a plane ride. He won't die in a terrible aeronautic accident. That's not what I'm saying. But he'll die with the sensation of a stuffy-aired space, curving over a cube of words, claustrophobic.

In the years that remain, Katie will say in that way she does, a million times over it'll seem, that although he was born in a house so high up in the one hill in town that the only way for it to truly settle was to tumble piece-by-piece until it became nothing more than a skeleton of rotted 2X4s covered by rough shingles, he's now a man of wealth, of means, of a wallet crammed with a current of proud, stern presidents; this isn't common, not something most people could ever realistically expect, but it's yours and still you act like an infant in soiled diapers, face beaten beet red and tears spilling out of your wormhole eyes.

He's come to resent her. But not enough to leave.

So there will be more tongue lashings.

They will be battered rams. Deers in headlights.

The fisticuffs of life together will be gloves off.

Katie will come home that last time. Her grocery bags will be filled with things sprung from the local earth.

She'll put them away, right where they belong, whistling a song that's never really been written and where not a single note repeats.

She'll call his name a few times, each time more forcefully than the last. She'll hear her own voice echoing back from the kitchen tiles.

That'll spur a search, a scouring.

When she turns the doorknob to the room, she'll find him under layers of blankets, in a clap of sunlight. She'll find that he's swallowed things that combine badly.

Her tears, when they come, will be the wrong kind. Warm not hot. Streams not bursts.

She'll write his obituary in blue pen, send it into the newspaper. Both newspapers. It'll be his whole history. The wind of it will be long and exhaustive. She'll leave nothing out.

Nothing, of course, except his last private sensation. The one where his stomach goes sick with the perfect, empty feeling of lift off.

town of planks

New, super-short piece of fiction up on Showed & Told today. It's called Town of Planks.