Today I Am A Farmer

Today I am a farmer.  Everything I grow is dying.  There’s a window in the upstairs where she watches.  I keep my smile on.  I wave into the sun, squinting.  She’s dying too; she doesn’t need more worry from me.

When I see the stalks are right, I pull them.  Each time thinking, this time will be different.  This time I’ll see an intact casing with a hue even and full.  I’ll be able to swing them into the bed with confidence, trusting they’ll make a hard thud against the others; a sound indicative of unripeness, a thick promise of rewards to come.  I’ll be able to work a fruitful morning before the heat of the sun becomes unbearable with the coming noon.  I’ll be able to haul my bounty into the cool of the shed, go in and make lunch, sit with her without fret.  Just a regular day with a regular crop. 

But it never is.

So many things happen when I pull the stalks.  I find myself bracing.  There is a clench in my chest and jaw.  I suck my breath.  I think a quick segment of prayer.  A section of words God should be familiar with.  I tighten the part of me that threatens to collapse into despair and fear.  All of this takes place in the moment before the pull. 

When the pull happens, there is a natural release that comes with the process.  Taking something out of something else using force has an inherent satisfaction.  They way it holds then relents.  How it lets go into you; a type of giving.  So, there is that feeling, but it is false.  It is a trick.  The pleasure is as fleeting as sneeze. 

With the pull comes the disgust.  Which variation will be hanging off the green in my fist?  None of them the same, yet all of them bulbous and dripping.  All of them with a fecal, rotting stench.  The fleshy, oozed gapings exposing further, internal horrors. How many wounds can I pull from the earth?

I want to hurl each one of them.  I want to build a pyre and feed them into it.  But I cannot.  I have no choice but to toss them into the truck bed, hear the wet slap and gurgled cries as they join the growing pile.  She is watching from the window. She must see nothing different.

The harvest squirms.  My mind screams.

Is screaming.

I pull swiftly through the morning, wanting to rid my field of this blight as quickly as I can.  The sun is hotter today.  I will dump this load next to the one from the previous day, which sits next to the one from the day before which sits next to the one from the day before that.  All of them outside the shed, away from the view from her window.  I pray the sun has finally burned their wet away, dried them dead.  I cannot bear to hear their mewling anymore, the moist squelch of their struggling. 

If I know they can die, I know I can be rid of them.  I can clear my field and start anew.  I can go to her with peace in my heart and tell her everything is just fine and she will smile at me in her new weak way that will make me almost believe it.

The Rumpus

Hi.

I wrote this thing for The Rumpus. 

March 2013 Personal/Confidential Email Exchange with Brian Allen Carr RE: Edie & the Low-Hung Hands.

Is this your email?  Did you leave Facebook?  I cracked Edie last night and was PISSED AT YOU THE ENTIRE TIME!!! Dude, you make lines that KILL ME!!!  I'll read one and i'm all, FUCK YOU BRIAN ALLEN CARR!!! AND WHAT' SUP WITH HOW I HAVE TO SAY ALL THREE OF YOUR NAMES EACH TIME!?!?!?!  i dont enjoy being MANIPULATED you dickweed!!!!

so jealous of your wordskillz!!!

man, you are the real deal.  love it.  the story is fuckin great. not sure where i left off last night...like, what page...but it was right after dude killed dude's buffalo and cooked it.  EVERYTHING IN THIS STORY IS RAD.  i cant wait to get back into it.

so, in closing, i'd like to say, with lots of love and admiration,

FUCK YOU BRIAN ALLEN CARR!!!

Sincerely,

me

Ah, baby, this made my morning. I love when people say fuck you to me. 

Yeah, Facebook makes me ashamed of myself in a way that twitter doesn't. I think it's because there are less boob pictures on Twitter.

I'm super stoked you like Edie. I'm like nervous about her, because it's all weird and not realistic and such. 

I imagine you might've had similar feelings about Billie. 

Which, what the fuck are you talking about, every line in that little book is magic and FUCK YOU TOO.

Nah, just kidding, I love you. You're the best. 

Also, yes, this is my e-mail. 

hahaha. i assure you, i meant 'fuck you' in the most positive, loving way.

seriously. i love how you write. was curious how you'd transfer your way of writing to this 'fantastical' type of book and...it's so great.  The book i'm working on now is sort of similar and so it's nice to see how you worked yours.  

It seems like you were having fun when you were writing it.  Were you?  

How long did it take you to write Edie?

What inspired the tale?

(maybe i will turn this into an interview and post it somewhere..hahaha)

But, seriously, i'm interested. Let me know when you get the chance.

Sure. Um. . . . . . 

I had a blast writing it. I was reading a bunch of stuff like Jules Verne and Jim Thompson, more plot driven things, and originally Marlet was just gonna be a weird guy with long arms in a small Texas town. Marlet is actually taken from a cameo character in Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass By. He doesn't have long arms int that book, but he's called Marlet, and no one likes him, and he just kinda shows up for three pages. I think, originally I just thought I'd write him out. But then, I was jogging, and I was like, I'm giving this fucker a sword. I didn't know why. The sword made me either place it in the past or the future. The future was easier and creepier. So. . . . . 

(I guess I could've also gone like alternate universe, but fuck that seems exhausting, no?)

The first draft took like eight months, I think. 

It was originally quite a bit longer. Like, maybe 10,000 more words. 

But I scraped out a lot of the information dump stuff. 

Like, there's one scene in the original draft where Marlet goes to the Alamo. That's gone now. 

I was living in Victoria, Texas when I wrote it. There are so many churches there. Ron Paul was the rep. from that district. 

That's where all that comes from. The violence from religion (as churches there seem to cannibalize each other, because there are just too many of them), and the notion of bombing out the roads and becoming wholeheartedly independent (because libertarians are, insofar as I can tell, against societal constraints, like, y'know, ties to other places). 

that's so great!  I get wanting to 'write out' a character that you wonder about.  That's where i got the novel i'm working on now.  

"Give this fucker a sword"...lol.

Having written this, do you prefer this type of story and will write more like it or will you go back to your 'normal' set in the 'real world' type of stories?  

What are you working on now?

Good question. I think I've always been interested by that which could feasibly occur but that looks incapable. I mean, it could be that Marlet just has marfan syndrome. I suppose the blank-skinned men are harder to explain. 

I love Spaghetti Westerns and how bizarre reality can seem. I love the Bible, and how oddly our beliefs came to be manifest. 

I've never really thought of myself as a realist writer. My characters have always been wildly odd, or at least I've thought so, but, yeah, the sword and the long arms is perhaps a step further. 

But I'm always attracted to that in fiction. I love Harrogate and Queequeg and Norwood and Candide. 

I've recently been working on a novel. In this, again, there is a living brother/dead brother relationship going on--I feel this will be a theme that plagues me--but in this, the two had a good relationship. The dead brother was an actor. And again I'm playing with the impractical. 

I'm allowing myself to be influenced by Guy de Mauppassant's "The Horla," and I'm drastically stretching into reality what grief does to the mind. 

But that's as much as I'll say about that, because I think talking about it might scare it away, and yesterday I was blank in the mirror again. What? 

  

funny how we find ourselves writing through the same themes over and over in different ways, both direct and vague.  And, yeah, i can see that even in your 'traditional' work, you do have some 'out there' characters.  Another thing i love about your writing!!!

and DON'T SCARE IT AWAY!!!  i get that.  I'm at the end of a huge section of 'backstory' and once these next few paragraphs are done i'm going to be like, WHAT THE FUCK NOW?!?!?!

keep looking in the mirror.  you'll be back soon.

xoxo

Today I Am A Basketball Coach

Today I am a basketball coach.  I hear the parent’s voices.  All of the hands grasping and shaking me.  Wanting me to come back. Begging me.   I cannot.  It’s nice here, under this table.  With my eyes closed, it’s almost dark.  I wish I could ask someone to turn off the gym lights.  Paint black the skylights.  I want to yell, “Leave me alone! Please! Just leave me alone!” but I know I am crazy enough right now.  I don’t need to take it further.  But, if I am shaken one more time…

I have collapsed.  I cannot continue.  My knees will not unbend.  They could, but I will not ask them to.  I will leave my legs alone.  Such fragile things.  China.  Eggshells.  Window panes.

What they do not know is what they cannot see.  It’s what I can see.  What I can’t stop seeing.  Hearing.  It’s all of their sons screaming in unison.  It’s white shards making themselves known.  Shooting proud through their earth of flesh, overeager to see the sky first hand; a fantastic thing told to them before bedtime, perhaps.  Painted excessively magical, overly beautiful.  Something fabled they needed to make true.  For themselves, their sanity. 

I see the boys writhing.  Their skins so different, yet, in pain, the same.  In blood and bone, the same.   Anything that falls below the break lies separate, or askew, or dangling.  Nothing below the break makes sense.  They are just dead things that used to be.  They are my childhood home after my mother got the phone call that made her unable to stop scream-crying for hours and then days.  They are my brother lying in his casket, the crushed half of him hidden under the closed half-lid.  They are my brother’s empty bed my parents refused to remove from my room.  They are things you need to carry on from.  Things you must, “Make the best of.”  Things useless now they are apart from what they belonged to.

In my dreams the paramedics leave them there; the broken alphabet of limbs strewn across a Pollock of blood.  The parents, having hysterically followed the lights and sirens to care for their sons, leave me alone to clean the mess.  I grab a push broom.  I pile them.  A soft kindling of expensive sneakers, red-soaked sweat socks, and skin fuzzed with hair still too young to have understood they would soon have belonged to a man.   

I cannot get out from where I am.  I cannot bear to see them jump even one more time.  I will stay curled.  I will keep their sons whole. 

Today I Am A Babysitter

Today I am a babysitter.  So overweight.  So plump.  A landscape of skin.  You leave everything I need in the freezer, in the refrigerator, in the cupboards, on the shelves.  “Don’t hide the wrappers,” you tell me.  “I want to know everything that’s making you more.”

“She dresses horrible.  Such a pretty girl too, it’s a shame.  Kids today…”  Your wife doesn’t like how I wear too-tight things.  How my low-rise jeans and too-small t-shirts let my gut escape, all forced between the fabrics and exploded.  You love the fishbelly-white skin, how it’s a beacon for you. 

“I’m hardly a kid,” I complain.

“Nevermind her,” you say.  “Wear what you wear.”  And I do.

I come over as arranged; one hour before you need to leave for the theater.  Your wife likes little Mandy to be slowly acclimated to my presence; like placing a frog in a pot of water and turning on the burner.  Little Mandy needs to adapt to me in a way that is seamless.  Your wife wants the both of you to be able to leave without little Mandy making a scene.  She wants to be able to slip away with you without little Mandy even realizing.

It’s what you, in turn, do to your wife.  The half a sleeping pill you slip into her tea when I arrive at the house.  The way you get her comfortable in the theater seats, making sure to take away any popcorn she might be holding before she nods off.  The quiet way you leave her side, rushing out of the theater to the car, then to me, then back again.  The way you return, slipping silently beside her just as the credits begin to roll, then playfully chastising her about falling asleep, again. 

Seamless.

You are a clever, clever boy, always choosing movies with the longest running times.  With the theater a mere 6 minutes away from the house and the absence of mid-morning traffic, we usually have a good 90-112 minutes together.  I get naked as soon as I get your text.  It’s always the same, “Is little Mandy ok?”  

Clever, clever boy.

I spread myself on the couch, the way you like me.  The maniacal look on your face as you drop your keys on the kitchen table, the way you make your way to my flesh, hands Frankenstein-forward, eyes fat-riveted as if nothing else exists, not even me, is my favorite moment every time. 

You dive into me, face first.  Your mouth and nose pushing air out against me until noise ripples out in absurd flatulence-like bursts.  Your tongue soon follows, heavy with slobber, sliming over every fold you are busy squeezing into entirely new appendages.  It only takes a few minutes for the wet to mix with the air, changing the farty outbursts into wet, undulating rumbles. 

I let you knead and rub as much as you want, as hard as you want.  Even on the days when your arthritis is absent and it hurts; the new found strength in your hands a punishment taken out on my rolls.  You’ll be proud of the bruises later.  “Makes me feel like a young man seeing that,” your fingers tracing paths over the purple-blue. 

Little Mandy will jump up on us sometimes.  Her fur getting soaked in your drool.  We’ll laugh and you’ll lift her, scolding, “No, no, little Mandy!” while placing her back down on the floor.

You go back to your wife, then both of you come back to me.  Snacks are eaten between the three of us while we discuss the movie and what little Mandy was up to during it. You both decide to see another senior early-bird showing two days from now and you tell me you’ll text me what time I’m needed.  I take the money you give me and go back home.  I have just enough time to rotate the laundry before having to pick up my daughter from school.  We stop at Mc Donald’s on the way home.

Today I Am A Hypnotist

Today I am a hypnotist.  I do not want to force you, but as I’ve said, the sensible thing is “sustaining.”  Making and keeping everything in the place it is supposed to be.  You are here now.  In this place.  With me.  You staying here will result in forward movement.  If you leave now, you will only move backward.  I am asking you, with the plainest of words, to please stay.  Sustain.  It’s for your own good.

“I will stay.”

Good.  Now, please do as you’ve done before.  Give me the minutes to take you there.  I will start with the motion and then the sound.  When the sinking begins, discard all fear.  The place is waiting for you.  It wants you.  Do you feel it? 

“Yes.”

Good. 

Now relax. 

Now breathe. 

Have you arrived?

“Yes.”

How long have you been there?

“1,949 years.”

How long can you stay?

“Only minutes.”

Then tell me.  As much as you can, as fast as you can.  When you feel the pull begin, let it take you and I will catch you upon entry.

Go.

“They were webbed. All of them.  Again, crawling and vicious. And when I climbed through and got behind them, I found the room.  It smelled as it had smelled before and I winced.  I did not want to go in! (crying)  I called out to you, ‘Do not make me go in!’ but you did not answer and I thought, “sustain.”  (crying)  And I went.  The air inside was stagnant-warm and palpable.  I wanted to wipe it from my skin but it was nothing.   The light was ample but I could only bring myself to see the walls, the floor, the curtains, the ceiling but not the bed.  (crying)  I took small steps forward avoiding him until I could no longer.  His breathing found me first.  A straw-like husk sound and it froze me.  I forced my eyes to find him and there he was.  A feminine thing now.  No trace of masculinity; his countenance paste and wisp, his hair blinding white and frothed.  He was asleep and so I stared.  His mouth pulled open and back.  His teeth long, gums gray and receded.  His face, skeletal.  I wanted to run but then your voice came, ordering, ‘Sustain!’ and so I did! (crying) I walked forward to touch him, even though it was furthest from anything I wanted to do but I felt it what was needed.   I searched his hand with my eyes, making sure there were no webs and then I reached for it.  My hand seemed so massive above his which was this shrunken thing and suddenly I felt no fear, only sadness.  But then he grabbed me and I leapt! His strength was nothing that I’ve ever felt before! It was as if his hand was a steel trap!   I couldn’t move! He had me! I couldn’t move! (shrieking)  (crying)  He pulled me toward him.  Slow, but strong, and I could do nothing!  (stammering) (moaning) Oh,yes! The pull! Oh, blessed pull! (sobbing)”

Let it take you.  I will be here when you return.  You did well.

Very well.

SQUALORLY

I have a small thing in the third issue of Squalorly.

Don't miss this interview with Robb Todd and don't miss his writings either.

Today I Am A Missing Ten Year Old

Today I am a missing ten year old.  There are 33 of us.  When I got here there were 17.  The crying was bad then, now it’s horrible.  I know it will settle down in a few days.  The ones that have been here the longest no longer cry.  They are little roly-poly balls that stink, all gray and rocking.  The newest ones wail loudest, still fresh on Cheerios, Capri Sun and Cartoon Network.  They haven’t stared out of these bars for hours, haven’t been dulled by all of the nothing.  Give them time.

The cage is big and very tall.  There are bunk beds.  My bunk is one second from the bottom.  If I lean over and look up, I can barely see the topmost bunks.  There are lots of skinny ladders whose tops disappear into a wall of flapping sheets, swinging legs and stretching arms.  It looks like the outsides of skyscrapers people are trying to escape from.  Things keep falling; both dry and wet.  It’s a different type of weather in here and there’s no way to get away from it.

A while ago they gave us a Doberman Pinscher puppy named Rita.  It was dressed in doll clothes.  It got passed around.  It was fought over like a new toy.  There was the crying and there was the screaming over who gets Rita next, and then there was the sound when four kids got Rita at the same time. 

That day had the worst weather.

Some kids get taken out, but they are few.  At first I thought they were taking only the good kids, or the ones that stopped making noise or moving.  But they take any kind of kid; the boy that kept jumping off the ladders, the girl with the screaming nightmares, the girl who kept stealing all the pillows, the boy who kept banging his head into the bars, the boy who played with all the poo.  All of them taken and gone.  Their beds are now filled by new kids. 

New kids keep coming and coming.  Nothing is clean anymore.  It’s never quiet.  I can’t get warm.  I am always hungry.  Even when I’m sleeping.   I can’t stop rocking now.  My hands around my knees. Back and forth, back and forth. And even though it scares me I can’t stop. It’s the only thing that feels good.

Everyone wants their mother.  Not me.  I want my dad.  I want us to play airplanes.  I want his tickles and storytimes.  I want his big hands to pull me out of this cage.  Pull me out like I am a hamster.  I want him to carry me on his shoulders to his truck.  I want him to ask me if I’m all belted in, boy.  When I am bad, he has a way where he shakes me.  It’s like he’s using all of his muscles to knock the bad in me loose.  Like he’s a bunch of scared ten year olds and I am a puppy dressed in doll clothes.  I don’t even care about that anymore.  I just want to be found.