Flash Wednesday.6

During June I'll be posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every week. 

No One Is Perfectly Cast

The Order decided he would be the one. Short in stature, sadly, but loved by many, the glare of his teeth blinded them to the shit on his breath. Funny now, from where we stand: a midget sock-sliding across the floor in his briefs. But it’s hard for us to fathom the temporal nature of influence. In his own maniacal minute, he was god.

A wife, ordered the Order, and this is where they faltered. Model after long-legged model, each surpassed him in her glamour, clawing up fame with nails like shrimp tails until she had enough to make it on her own. And the irony: the least towering of the prototypes went solo from the start. Shortly after she hatched, the Order watched her stagger away into the night. She settled in a mossy northwestern town: mysterious villagers, weird diner, a possibly esoteric past.

Years later, a location scout stumbled on this town. Perfect, he told the casting director over a slice of pie. But when she showed him a headshot of the actor she’d picked for the part of the werewolf, the location scout balked: He reminds me of the one. A synthesizer riff hit them both at the nape of the neck, lovingly shoving their faces toward the stage. There she stood, the least successful of the one’s potential wives. She’d found work at this roadhouse as its chanteuse. And even now, from where we stand, her song is wax, is isinglass, is wary.

Flash Wednesday.5

It's the return of Flash Wednesday! During June I'll be posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every week. This one's based on real-life work experience selling tee-shirts.

The Drift

Try to think of something different, Hazel said.

We’d been surrounded by the same slogans for so long, calling out the same prices, answering the same questions, it was really the tallest sort of order.

At this point, as you can imagine, the tee-shirt stand seemed about the extent of the world, let alone the fair. The two of us weren’t a big enough staff to allow for breaks.

I tried to describe to Hazel the former planet of our lives: a cheap, uncrowded coffee shop; a landlord willing to wait till mid month; bi-weekly unemployment checks. As I remembered this planet, though, I began to doubt we’d ever walked its terrain. This, I decided mid sentence, was the planet we hoped to get to, the one that would spin up to meet our feet in the instant we finally got paid.

As I manned the table, fetching sizes, engaging in chatter, my feet became wet with carnival muck. The soles of my boots, I realized, had split.

On the sixth day, the air began to purple, the shadows curled in a fetal sort of way. The rides were being dismantled, tents were sinking in on themselves as if starved. All potential shoppers shifted their interest to the sky.

They should’ve thought of this before, Hazel said. They should’ve manufactured us some pinholes to sell.

I must have known somewhere deep that the moon was now in front of the sun.

Hazel sighed as, for the first time all week, she sat. It felt strange to not be working, the sun now so dark and bright. Like a bomb had gone off, like going blind. I echoed Hazel’s sigh and also sat. I could hear the prize-winning chickens, the only sound now in the otherwise silent weight of the eclipse. I could hear their voices gather in the chambers of their beaks.

I thought about buying a corndog, a bag of roasted nuts. I thought about the golden way such things give upon first bite, the satisfaction when they split. I thought about how much of my check would go toward a new pair of boots.

Boots be damned, I thought, the carnival muck by now such a normal part of having feet. Because: as our new planet spun into view, I began to have time to mold its continents into temperate shapes.

Flash Wednesday.4

For the month of March, I’m posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every Wednesday.

Dawn In the Afternoon

Victorian Steve, who was quite a cooling commodity out there in the endless desert, had stopped by sometime around morning snack and offered to build her a doll factory, and as he sat down to his tedious work, she put all her youthful energy into willing him into a trance in which he lost every last irritating itch of time. She was determined to have Victorian Steve to herself for a very long while. And it must have been hours now, she thought, as she tracked her guest’s progress from the corner of her eye: a sound yet delicate foundation, so sugary, it couldn’t help but give fruit to several storeys. This was an unheard of attention span for the normally scattered Victorian Steve.

All the adults, of course, were at the government building, at work, for all she knew, on some updated, even more ruthless, breed of bomb. Something, maybe, that so plumbed the depths of murderousness, it was almost pleasant. Like a tall, cool glass of waterthorn tea, only contaminated, of course. She wished she had some sort of refreshment to offer Victorian Steve. She sat in the small patch of shade at the foot of the lanai, and as she watched him, intently bent over the parts he’d spread across the outdoor carpet, her mouth shriveled to a sour little void. Where did such a feeling come from, she wondered. It wasn’t quite angry, but certainly wasn’t joyful either, considering the typically calming and coveted presence of Victorian Steve. She was too young, of course, to be aware of the low-frequency unease she currently felt. Separation anxiety was a term she was on the brink of discovering and identifying with.

The book she was in the midst of reading then was something required for every child in that arid region. It discussed the point during childhood at which one first individuates. In a vaguely melancholy tone, it bemoaned the loss of the communities of imaginary friends that occurs around this time. Such creatures begin to solidify into socially accepted archetypes: princesses (pink), pixies (slender), vampires (cloaked). The book referred her to a crisis line in case she found it difficult to navigate this change.

She looked, once again, at Victorian Steve, who seemed so much paler and pointier of tooth than he had in the past. Judging by his shifty eyes and the faint sweat he’d broken, which surrounded him now like a mist, his attention was starting to shift. Having just read what she did, this came as a relief. But although the return of such typical behavior was a comfort, beneath that comfort ran a terror. As Victorian Steve got up to leave, the doll factory’s crank and masher only half complete, she lost her normally staid composure. In a wavering voice, she asked if he was ever coming back.

Flash Wednesday.3

For the month of March, I’m posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every Wednesday.

The Uninvited

In any case, she thought, she wouldn’t want to be a guest at that baby shower. Marley’s sisters both had serious screws loose, and there were times, even, when she looked at Marley—the dour way she walked when she got sloppy drunk, for instance—and saw signs of that same wayward screw. She liked to think that she was the stable sister Marley had never had. That’s why girls joined sororities, wasn’t it? In search of a foolproof family?

Strange the way some refuse to hold their liquor.

She hated to blame it on their father, seeing how many positive ways the family leaned on his vision. But sometimes there’s just no getting past dear old dad. Even at his most silent, his worldview wrapped around the three girls and cinched. Like a parasite, not a houseplant: he offered not a lick of oxygen in return.

Her own relationship with him, so far, had been a bit more balanced.

She pictured the series of games the girls would play, and shuddered at the likely disparity between their practicability and their ambition. No combing the web for the older sister—she thought she was too creative to take anonymous cues. And the younger one always went at tasks from the obliquest of angles. Come bearing offerings, the invite had read when she hacked into Marley’s device, in honor of the fire-sprite and her glow-worm/descendent.

Something about this mess—through luck, though, not through insight—something about its verdant heat suggested Marley's temper.

She wondered if their father would manage, despite his gender, to make an appearance. He was, after all, the only truly ingenious one in the bunch. For what felt like a very long second, she re-thought her relief at not being invited. Then threw back the rest of her drink.

Then reached out to him one final time. A ruthless mirror as she typed at him: she gripped him in her own worldview, and felt doubly relieved, thus renewed.

In the morning, she checked her device and there was the payoff: a hello—most likely breathy—from Marley’s father. Her hangover shriveled and disappeared with the dew. She rejoiced in the vein now pronounced on her brow, as well as her wits, which in addition to an inborn brawn, made her immune to a variety of traps. She was the type of animal the furthest shade from green, the type that ate rather than be eaten. She was amber swelling to ivory with a tiny indigo seed at her mealy core.

Her reply began with a flirtatious decline, followed by the excuse that she’d been invited to a shower. She’d never set out to be a villain, she thought. As long as she’s not missing out on any meat. 

Despite his many positive traits, Marley’s father lacked fundamental nutrients.

Two months later, when the fire-sprite gave birth to her glow-worm/descendent, an apology, gauzily insincere, found its way in among the buoyant Mylar. 

Flash Wednesday.2

For the month of March, I’m posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every Wednesday. This story is from the point of view of an autocratic farmer.

At the Contra Dance

I’m really not in the mood, the Cheshire Cow tells me, as our arms link up and we spin. I’ll be free of you soon, I reply, which for the most part is true, except for the indelicate teeth, which in a ruminant like this, can only hover so long before they clatter one by one to the floor. As we part, I can’t fully bask in my joy. The unfortunate thing about progressions is that bitches like this come back around.

What a refreshing sight, however, is the Strawberry Lass. The Strawberry Lass, so adorably, reminds me she’s on her own—this despite the fact that we’re arm in arm. The Strawberry Lass breathes in, and the seeds sewn into her corset grow tenuous as they strain, and I love to imagine what might bloom as soon as—and if—those buttons finally launch, and how the noise that they make as they hit the floor, just like rain, would be soothing and perhaps prevent my teeth from wearing each other down.

That’s just how hateful the presence is of this Cheshire goddamn Cow.

Do not judge. My goal in life, from the outset, was to make a nice little profit off my tidy farm. And cows are fine, whatever, and personified strawberries—it’s only a problem, really, when they try to transcend their tertiary roles.

Tertiary? the Cheshire Cow once retorted. Not even going to offer us seconds, huh?

What’s secondary, I told her, is the whole goddamn farm. You animals and you vegetables, too—although the strawberries then, for me, were newer and stranger as animi, thus, somewhat harder to buttonhole—you animals amount to but a fraction of a greater good.

Only farmers count as whole numbers, I tell her now, now that I’ve grown to the point where even my second nature has the rhetoric down. I tell her this in the midst of what feels like an endlessly tense do-si-do.

Across the barn, I spot the Strawberry Lass, who appears to have danced her way into a swoon, and as she melts into the arms of that motherfucker Handy Apples, she pinkens, then whitens, becomes ice-like, and devoid of every last pigmentary drop.

I’m ashamed to say this disloyalty comes as no small surprise.

Stop, I tell the room—and because I’m the farmer, everyone halts mid-turn. Stop trying to individuate, I say, when you know you’re all ending up in the same goddamn trough of swill.

The band begins again, hesitantly, and I tongue what remains of my teeth.

Flash Wednesday

For the month of March, I’m posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every Wednesday.

Laramie and Rudyard

Sometime around the end of the game, Laramie lost interest. Though the rules were complex, the art of spectating is an easy one to bluff, and Laramie could be convincing when called upon, to the point where even he himself had thought he was sincerely rapt. The spells we cast on ourselves, however, break harder and faster than most. Laramie, as if drunk, collapsed at last in laughter, and at the very height of overtime suspense, he stood up and briefly danced. Anger rippled through the stadium. Shouts came at him: Faggot, sit down! He couldn’t help it, he felt so all of a sudden much more feminine than Cleopatra.

Cleopatra was a queen who led a painful life. She suffered a series of heartbreaks—perhaps at the hand of Antony? The truth was Laramie knew nothing of the queen beyond the way her eyes were dramatized with kohl, similar to those of the athletes who now prowled the field. Laramie watched their asses, synthetically swathed and reflective, protruding in ways which in regular life, required the arching of backs. Faggot, sit down!

Rudyard, of course, had now been gone a very long time for someone who’d promised to return with beer. At which point, let’s pause to recall the awkwardness of Laramie in Rudyard’s room: that mattress in the midst of it, reputedly filled with water, that bed which must, at all costs, be skirted. That bed which must not be named.

The crowd—inexplicably—went wild. And Laramie rode this wave of joy like a cataract, cresting each ecstatic terrace on her way. This faggot is sitting down, she thought. This faggot is being carried, at last, to the vast expanse of Rudyard’s queen-sized bed. 

History of the Book.3

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2

For various reasons, that “summer trip to the West Coast” has now lasted seven years. I’m surprised those books I made years ago have survived like they have, considering how much I did not know what I was doing. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I was salvaging from more solidly assembled structures. But still.

Which leads me back to that space between the second and third dimensions, and the challenge of addressing it in a venue as seemingly flat as, say, a blog. Because this is where I’ve been channeling that energy—once reserved for dissembling and mashing up longer-form, structural narratives—into compressed one- and two-shot collages.* There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. My attention span has waned, what with the Internet and all that. I try to fight it in some arenas, but since the blog is a medium suited to quick little glimpses, I figure this is one battle not to pick. Also, I finished writing a novel last year, and since then, most things I do—whether writing (flash fiction) or art (collage as blog posts)—want to be microcosmic.

2. Binding kind of stresses me out. I love the results: a sturdiness that allows for shifts as you turn the page. But there’s a commitment there that’s scary. Besides, I’ve never really gotten the math down.

So there is a kind of liberation in the blogged collages, in that they are both low commitment and ephemeral. I can knock one out in an evening if I want, and I don’t have to worry about it lasting. Once I’ve placed it in the scanner, and made sure any wayward details are straightened, I can shove it in a milk crate and forget about it. If for some reason in the future, I try and dig it back out to hang on a wall, and it crumbles in my hands, I’m okay with that: I’ve prepared myself. Anything that survives is—if not a miracle—a bonus.

Because all that matters here is the scan, those few crucial seconds after the lid closes when the light cranks by. And here’s where it’s hard not to think of the scanner as a book. Its design seems modeled after the codex, doesn’t it? And it “reads” the things you put inside it, a fleeting act that ends up feeling kind of like a fossil record. A mummification in the ether. An anti-binding, maybe? Or at least a binding that takes place in some unnamed dimension.

There is a whole genre of scanner art, I’ve discovered, called scanography (scannography) or scanner photography—where images use the technology of the scanner in their composition. Just as zine aesthetics (and Xerox art) came about through the advent of the photocopier, the accessibility of the scanner has created an aesthetic of its own.

One thing I’ve thought about is how zine aesthetics changed a lot when photocopiers digitized and Kinko’s became harder to scam. As zine makers have focused more on using pre-Xerox printing techniques, such as silkscreen and letterpress, there seems to be less of an emphasis on the textural nature of collage. This makes me wonder about the future of the scanner: what might be marketed to take its place? That’s why it’s good, I guess, that I’m trying to become less reliant on—and take take less comfort in—technologies that are ultimately temporary.

The book, though, is not one of those technologies—despite the hand wringing that’s happening with the spread of ebooks. The physical book is becoming increasingly fetishized as it threatens to disappear, and with it, I think, the sense of touch. Although all our coveted devices are sold to us by boasting features such as touchpads and touchscreens, once we step away for a second, we see how flat these things really are. And what about CGI? These “3D” creations would deflate with a fart if you tried to grasp them. A simple line drawing is more dimensional than CGI's special effect placebos. So, yeah, there's my side-rant, and I guess my point is this: there is a longing, I think, beneath all this prognosed dematerialization, for something you can hold in your hands. And that longing is here to stay.

So the neglect I’ve been giving bookmaking lately is temporary. I'll return to it, I promise myself, after I tire of the fun I'm having completing things that can remain incomplete. In the meantime, I like the challenge of trying to bring tactility—or at least the illusion of it—to the often textureless realm of the Internet. I also like the freedom of being able to incorporate three-dimensional elements that I couldn’t in a book whose pages must ultimately lie flat (the scanner's fine with not closing all the way). Who knows? Maybe one day, when blogs are obsolete, I can come full circle and take on the challenge of translating this blog's content into a physical book. How's that for completion?

*I’ve only made a couple altered books since I’ve been on the West Coast: Tarpaulin Kingdom and The Witch, a Lemondrop Wedged Firmly In Her Cheek, Begins Her Evening Prayers.