Short Story Anthology

Marble Amble (2010)

"Your move, Baldie." Tuck smirked. It was two-to-one, and no way could Balder's rotundo clip a ricket at this angle. The other kids whooped like monkeys and scratched their armpits. It was the new thing.

But Balder was as calm as a chess player. He wiggled his thumb back-and-forth, slow one way and fast the other, testing his flick. Rotundo was a mean one for sniping; big and wide, and it rolled hard enough to knock 'em outta the ring and slow enough to stop, but it was no good for rickets. All big and heavy, no good for skimming the edge, you needed a littler marble for that, a blip or a darter.

But Balder had to make do. Tuck's catseye fascinated him. It was no ordinary catseye-- it was bright blue, and looked like it came right out of the skull of an angel. He had to win it. Besides, his best darter was at stake. He'd be nowhere without that darter. Balder was real good at the rickets.

And then he knew it, the right way to do it. He bit his tongue lightly, held his breath, cocked his head like an army sniper, and flicked the old rotundo as hard as he could. It hurtled towards the blip like a steamroller and blasted it out of the way. They both went flying out of the ring, tracing the chalk in little trails. Tuck started to laugh, but stopped when the blip bounced off his shoe, back into the ring, and struck the catseye like a bullet. Both marbles rolled out, and the catseye landed obediently at Balder's feet.

And the crowd went wild. The kids started howling. Tuck was furious, kicking marbles left and right and rubbing out the chalk with his fingers. The commotion drew a stern teacher, and the kids scattered. Balder pocketed the catseye and slipped away. He kept his hand in his pocket and rolled the catseye marble between his fingers. It was the smoothest thing he had ever felt.

The rest of the day he couldn't keep his hands off that marble. During class he rolled it gently around his desk, watching the way it caught and spun the light around and threw it back out in blue streaks. He wasn't listening to the teacher.

During art class he dipped his marble in the red paint and put it on a board, and tipped the board here and there and watched the marble trace red lines in curves and circles and twirls of different thickness and brightness. Then he did it with blue paint, and then with yellow paint, and he did it fast enough that the paint didn't dry until he was done, so where the lines crossed they made short streaks of green and orange and purple. It was like a spiderweb, only curvy like cotton and fluffy-colored like a cloud, and all rainbow. It was beautiful.

After he was done, he washed his marble carefully, and put the painted board back on a shelf.

As he walked home that afternoon he tossed the marble up in the air and caught it over and over again. Once, as his eyes followed the arc of the marble into the sky, it stopped right over the sun, and he saw the sun shine right through the catseye, and the pupil was looking right at him, and it was like a great shining eye staring down from the sky. Then it fell and he didn't catch it and it hit the ground and rolled into the street.

He ran after it. The street was curved towards the sides, and the marble rolled down towards a gutter. Balder flung himself at it and caught it in his fingertips inches from the edge of the gutter. A car driving by swerved around him and missed his feet by inches.

When he got up he held the catseye in front of his own eye and tried to see through it. Everything was shrouded and twisted in a rich blue halo, like a portal underwater. He wandered around with his marble monocle and stared at the trees and the flowers and the houses, fascinated. It was like he could see all the blue in things that were only secretly blue, and all the light hiding in things that seemed dull.

While walking he tripped over a water hose and scraped his forehead on a stick in the grass. It hurt, but this time he didn't drop his marble. Eventually he meandered home.

He went up to his room and stared at his marble for a long time. He tried to draw pictures of it, but they didn't look right. He didn't have the right blue in his crayon box. He wanted to show his mom, but he suddenly felt like that wasn't right, like this marble was a special secret he had to keep. He hid it in his pocket and went to the bathroom.

As he sat on the toilet he rolled his marble between his fingers some more, and then he put it in his mouth. It tasted like nothing, but it was so smooth on his tongue that it tasted like smoothness. There was something cold and blue about it too; as he rolled it around in his tongue it felt like water lapping against the sides of his mouth. He felt like a riverbed. It clattered against his teeth but he didn't hear the sound, he felt it click in his skull like lots of buttons being pressed on a keyboard. And then it rolled down the back of his tongue and stuck in his throat.

Balder's face went red and he started gagging and choking. He bolted up with his pants down, flung open the door, and stumbled down the hallway. The commotion drew his mother, who gasped when she saw him. His face was turning blue like the marble. She grabbed him and spun him around and started pounding his stomach, screaming.

The marble popped out of his mouth and landed silently on the carpet.

He sucked up all the air in the world it felt like, chest heaving and heaving and still hungry for air. She started kissing him and crying and yelling at him and kissing him some more. He saw the marble on the ground and wasn't scared anymore, wasn't even in pain anymore. He was just so happy his mother was holding him and sobbing, and it felt so right somehow, like being rescued by an angel.

Later that evening, he flushed the blue catseye marble down the toilet, and it started to flood.


Staying in New Zealand (2010)

Kawberg is the wisest bird in New Zealand. Every one of her feathers is a good idea. As she perches motionless on a high branch, the wind howls around her like a clamorous patent office. She blinks once 'Yes', and flies away 'No'. She is the only kiwi that remembers how to fly. She invented flying. That was how they got to New Zealand. Then they all forgot, and they forgot her, too. There are no laurels for the wise in New Zealand. The same old trees hang over everybody's head. Macho kiwis climb painstakingly up these trees so they can dance perilously on the branches. This impresses the dame kiwis. It does not impress Kawberg. Little impresses Kawberg anymore. Nothing changes in New Zealand, except the kiwis get a little more pitiful every generation, and Kawberg gets a little sadder. She once amused herself by making little men of sticks and grass with her beak. They formed a civilization, had laws, built huts and temples and lodges, but they were hollow creatures with no means of reproduction. She had to keep making more to replace the ones that fell apart. With no life-giving force in their society, they were a death-obsessed people who constantly sought some cataclysmic reckoning. Kawberg did the humane thing and stopped caring. They enjoyed slowly dying out. Now there are little empty huts in one forest in New Zealand, and the flightless kiwis sometimes make their homes in these huts. In a way, the stick creatures have passed on their homes to the children they could never have. Kawberg once reflected on this and found it touching. But that too has passed from her breast. New Zealand never really changes, and Kawberg's attitude never really changes anymore either. Hundreds of years ago, Kawberg lived in Australia. Kawberg flew all over the outback, over many many places, and met many people, but still was restless. She wanted to escape to somewhere bigger, grander. She gathered her kiwi brethren and flew East. They found New Zealand. It is much smaller than Australia. And it is too far from anywhere else to fly away alone. You need a team to make a long journey over sea. If only the kiwis could fly again, Kawberg could take her chances and escape with them. But they will never fly again, Kawberg will never leave, and nothing will ever change in New Zealand.


He drove east to the refineries. (2011)
He could already taste ash on his tongue.
He didn't get the job because he failed the drug test and his mom screamed bloody fucking fury and his dad boiled with shame and he was
         broke and stranded in a city with a fever like a body that didn't want him anymore and he was caught between a woman on the west
         coast who ignored him or maybe she didn't notice or maybe she didn't care-- and anyway what did he expect but more humiliation and
         silent tension like tongueless torture or else that frosty nostalgia and lucidly gaping sadness between skin and distant skin?--
         between that hot bothered lost hellcat and the girl on the north side who baffled him like empty sudoku with her titillating anythings
         that always meant nothing and with her imaginary friend-- it seemed obvious yet their relationship left everything to the imagination--
         and with years of awkward memory and a heavy dose of wishful thinking like the drug that softly carries an old pet to sleep and it was
         clear the fork in the road had two dead ends and nobody wanted him at their doorstep and even when he tried to say it to his best
         friend it all quivered inside of him like the water in a tight kettle and steam stung his eyes and scalded him all over the inside but all
         that came out was every other kind of gibberish and now with the job opening evaporated and all his bridges burned and sunk and his
         pockets turned inside out flopping like ears on a delirious dying dog and every surface of everything and everyone searing his fingers
         and bedazzling his eyes and his guts growing hot with the angry sickness of inner loathing and the sky of the city growing madder
         and madder and kicking him and spitting on him whenever he stepped outside and the house shrinking inch by inch every day until his
         chest was tight against the wall and the loneliness and confusion making an egg in his brain that pressed at the backs of his eyes
         and shoved aside all rational thought until all he could focus on was the muzzle flash of an imaginary gunshot-- that's when he peeled
         out of his life in that oven and burned a quarter tank of gas going the long way around the city to the refineries on the east side where
         they incinerated everything useless and ugly and what remained was clean and black and ready for consumption.
He saw the gold eyes of the hungry temple rise over the curve of the highway against the smoky night and he remembered pilgrimages with
         his friends listening to Dylan and Cash and Cobain on the stereo and swallowing lipless prayers to an imaginary justice and the
         reverent homage to the cyberpunk spires and Kerouac delivering a sermon on jazz as they crept along the frontage road staring into
         the sepulcher shacks and barbed wire lots and breaking into the desecrated sanctuary with the damp cold angel spread across the
         wall and the blank black horror where the silver screen used to be and the sinister chair with the feeble light and the watering hole and
         fleeing home pumping enough adrenaline to kill a horse and dreaming of the yellowed poster of Audrey Hepburn and her sideways
         feline glance as she slinked right out of the ad and into his bed and waking furious and miserable in cold sweat-- and his eyes watered
         as he returned to the holy city that had hid behind his hometown all his life.
He parked at a 24 hour joint near the back, and crossed under the freeway, just like old times.
He snuck through a maw in the fence and tore his jeans and swore.
He found a maintenance ladder up the side of one of the towers.
He hated ladders.
         Inside the facility the heat was exhilarating.
                   The air wavered and wobbled like it was about to pass out.
                             Even the metal sweated and heaved.
He stumbled down the narrow low hallways in a delirious daze.
He came out into a vast chamber with a bridge over black oil.
He could feel all the hate and torment that fueled the mounting heat churning and smoldering at its source in the spiteful oil.
He suddenly saw the heart of all the misery and fire that had engulfed him for as long as he could remember.
He saw it all in the oil.
He leaned over the railing.
He peered deep in the hot gooey pool of lightlessness til it was a cold still void.
He leaned further.
He thought he could almost sink his fingertips in the inky oblivion.
He fell into the oil that choked his screams and stifled his thrashing and finally he was still and calm as
He sank into that hot wet pit.

Maggie and the Stone (2011)

He laid a massive, withered hand upon her thigh and she shuddered.

"--His strange beliefs about--"

The record player bled like raw meat.

A halogen lamp stirred in the smoke. The smoke smelled cheap. The lamp dimly accused the thick air. Her cigar was a stub in the crook of her small knuckles.

'Sorry', she remembered, so she said "sorry." But the word, like the dusky light, hung stillborn and stale. The word, like the light, revealed nothing to milky eyes.

His lips flickered under his beard and the smoke billowed where he spoke upon it.

She heard bed bugs playing cards under the mattress.

The smoke billowed but he hardly made a sound, only pattered like a child splashing limply in the low tide.

Her ear prickled under his beard and her skin quivered where he spoke upon it.

"--the moon; its influence--"

The recorded thudding of drums was the only heartbeat in the room, throbbing beneath the arhythmic patter patter of his concealed lips.

His hand moved up her thigh. She flinched and reached for his wrist.

He laid his other massive hand across her face with the thunder of a gun. She froze, rigid, then collapsed against him like a ragdoll.

"--upon men of affairs--"

Her eyes watered very slightly but he remained oblivious. She buried them in his shoulder and carefully restrained her latent sobs.

He rubbed her hair between his stony fingers. He deftly plucked the cigar from her flaccid hand and stamped it out right there, on the desolate carpet.

"--The danger of its cold light--"

He laid her down across the bed and loomed over her, unbuckling his belt. His cold, blank eyes shone dangerously.

She remembered 'sorry' so she whispered, "sorry". She couldn't remember anything else and she wondered where she'd picked him up.

He slipped his watch off his wrist and groped around in the dim gold. Knocking over her perfumes and a picture of her father, he laid the watch and the belt on the dresser.

She thought she could hear the bedbugs casting bets under her, despite the pounding drums and the explosive tension as he slowly unfastened every button. There were five buttons but they felt like fifty.

"--on your face while you were sleeping--"

He threw the shirt carelessly and she was unconscionably grateful when it landed over her face. She breathed slowly and deeply, and imagined its musky odor was a cool fog crowning a mountain.

Neither the butcher nor the sow wants to watch sausage being packed.

Being-At-Work-Becoming-Yourself (2010)


One- Genesis

It is a rotten apple on the bench. Children shy away from that bench. The trees droop around it and the birds make a great circle in the sky about the apple on the bench where you are sitting. You consider taking a bite from the apple when even as the sky turns a faint green as if hearkening a tornado your cell phone yodels in your breast pocket. Your mother does not want you to eat this apple. But your mother also wants you to send her money and kill yourself and solve all the problems and hate your father and vote for whomever and she really is a mess, so the phone goes back where it belongs and you contemplate the apple once more. As you take hold of the apple, a great worm writhes out and slithers down your arm and up your sleeve. It is long and long and long as if emerging from a great vortex within the apple and it peeks out of your collar and pries open your mouth with its pincers and slides right in. As the worm of the apple is pulled and squeezed by your esophagus the ground opens up beneath the bench and takes you and the apple and your worm as the birds screech over your head and the flapping of their wings makes a tornado that pulls all the dirt and grass up around the hole in the ground like a wound healing up until what remains is a great mound of soil like an earthy scab closing over your head as you plummet down the esophagus of the park with your worm and your apple. In free fall your hair and clothes float and ripple like an amorphous caul but then the tail finally emerges from the apple and the last bit of the great worm is engulfed in your unwilling maw and disappears inside of you where nobody can see what's going on. And now you've got this rotten apple with a great old hole in it and you're about to take a bite when your head abruptly erupts in a burst of mighty pulp and a massive eyeless trunk of a head emerges from your empty neck and howls. The howls echo in the great chasm above you but you cannot hear yourself because you are falling faster than the speed of sound. You scream and roar noiselessly as the apple crumbles in your hand and pink blossoms emerge from your fingers. You feel pressure building in your guts and your skin becomes hard and rough and dark brown and thin twiggy branches sprout from all over you as the pressure builds and aches in your stomach and you've been screaming so hard your throat falls out of your face and flies up to meet your screams. A horrible cracking and tearing accompanies the sudden splintering of your rib cage and the rending of your belly. The flowers on your fingers wilt and fall off as the leaves on your branches turn rich warm colors and you wish you still had a throat to scream with as your body bursts open and dozens of apples tumble out. What beautiful apples! Rich red apples and glistening green apples and shining golden apples pour out of your mangled torso and hang about you suspended in your reference frame as you all go plummeting down to the bottom. Your feet gnarl and stretch and your toes trifurcate into thirty thirsty roots while the bloody cavity of your body turns inside out and the inside is lined with bark and as it twists about and becomes a new skin, great boughs reach out into the space with their branches and their leaves and your horrible wormy head implodes to the size of a silly little caterpillar on a leaf and as the last trace of your old body is sublimated in glorious vegetation you land in green grass under a blue sky with a gentle 'plop'. Your roots infiltrate the soil and suck up all the juices of the earth and your great leaves flourish and laugh in the sun. A child sits in your gnarled lap reading a book about a bear and his honey, eating one of your apples. And then the screams and howls finally hit the ground, crashing down in a deafening torrent all awfully backwards like a rewound murder. The boy yelps, drops his book, and dashes all the way back home. It is a warm September Ten and you are an apple tree with a book about Winnie the Pooh, surrounded by your yummy apples.

Two- Works and Days

Tree-you traces a line in the sandbox and all the critters cross it and where they stand is the other side now. Squirrel up on the parapet of the sand castle grimaces and chucks acorns in your general direction. Hoo hoo! Love is carved in the skin of your barky body but the loves are all dead now, Bobby is elsewhere and Emily is elsewhere and James and Rebecca split up when Rebecca came out and Sheila's in a halfway home somewhere while her old sweetheart Brenton's got a nook carved out on Wall Street. Hoo hoo! The sun is falling and the owl in the eaves is excited because she loves to go dancing with the mice on a Saturday night in her sexiest talon slippers. Squirrel didn't always hate you, but hell, Squirrel won't always hate you anyway, squirrels have short memories, wait til he's begging for acorns again. Winnie the Pooh used to harass the bees in your boughs, but he's too old for that now and he's somewhere savaging salmon and hikers while the honey turns to dull crystals and the bees all drop off. Pesticide works wonders, but you can't eat that kind of honey. A beautiful magnolia with the most voluptuous flowers would flirt and wink all spring, but all those precious red seeds pert as nipples didn't look so hot wilting on the ground in the hot wet yellow grass by the sprinkler. Couldn't help but draw a line in the sand, shot your mouth off, now everybody's on the other side and you wish you had a shoe to scuff it up. Who ever told a tree to feel? Do what you do best, grinding pulp and juices and grains on the inside churning hard to stay stiff and sturdy and brandish those formidable leaves. Saturday night you get to curl out those gorgeous pink blossoms and sway in a warm breeze and hold up all the strapping lads and skirty dames on your strong branches while they make out in the moon and carve immortal love with penknives. Now that's a party. And then the apples are nice too. Juice runs down the children's chins and anybody can point up at you beaming and say that's his fruit, that's her fruit, and you'd chuckle if you still had a throat but you left that behind up there somewhere. The smell of those apple pies... she sure brings out the best in you. You and some brown sugar in a flaky crust. Now, that's not a thing to feel so bad about. A good aroma to remember. You wish they'd bring you a pie with some candles some September, but you couldn't eat it anyway. All you eat is the sunshine. And it's sweet and all, though it's a light meal and it never quite hits the spot. You can wash it down when it rains, but what's just enough is not what it could be. That sun is falling tonight, as usual, leaving you still a little hungry, as usual, and a little lonely too. A tree is lonely because it cannot snuggle, it can only be snuggled, so you're lucky if you've got a nest in your branches or a badger burrow under your trunk or better yet, some philosophical wanderer or troubled youngster sleeps in your gnarled lap, a great warm body toasting your toes. But that doesn't always happen. It's not called luck if it always happens. Some trees are sickly, some starve, some get chopped down, some get struck by lightning, and most of the rest are lonely. One of the best and worst things is growing near another tree. Always just barely in contact, touching leaves, rubbing branches, sharing flower petals, dancing sensuously in the wind, but never meeting trunk to trunk. It is so exciting, so teasing, so titillating, so frustrating to be born beside another tree. It is an almost pleasant hunger that tingles in every branch, every leaf, every fruit, every root, just underneath your bark, such a certainty that you are a tree, grand and hungry and paralyzed, so maddening that sometimes you wish a hurricane would tear you up by your roots and hurl you into your beloved so you can die in her arms, his arms, those stout branches, those gently yielding leaves, life slowly ebbing in the soft shadow of another. You pity those tortured trees that dream of dying, but you envy them a little too, because they're not alone, at least in their suffering. No tree lives forever, not even those gargantuan ancient redwood cousins out West with all their rings, and it's a different thing altogether to die alone. Dull throbbing in an apple; worm pokes its head out and waves. You shudder with the wind.

Three- There and Back Again

October... no... not so cold, not so gold... this feels like... September... can taste the sun dying... lunch... more meager every day... summer winding down... but still waving goodbye... definitely September... born... on a day like today... today? The tenth dusk since August? Maybe... Harder to stand stiff... such a great load... drooping deep and dull... sagging on the earth... slumbering in the sun... breaking a little every dawn... breaking in the majesty of the sun... blurry... choked... sweet... God... pie... dying... flowers... lonely... What? Bad dream! Sad dream! Rip van Winkle dreamed a life inside his life... Dream... cavity... plunging... marrow... one hundred twenty-six rings... falling inside... twenty-five... twenty-four, twenty three... a tree is rings... one-o-two, one-o-one... these years were rings... one hundred, ninety-nine... falling inward... eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty-... three, thirty-two, thirty-one... falling down and falling into yourself... dreams taste softer... ten thousand million miles... from one wall... to one wall... to one lonely tree... lonely dying tree... to sky... to bottom... to sun... ten thousand million miles in the past... screaming and falling with a worm for a head... ten thousand worms... hiding in your trunk... nobody can see... apples all roll out... into space... flowers into fingers into flowers into... sheaves of wood slip off... fall together into a bench... an airborne bench... born in the air... sweet apples... feeding ghost... the ghost of a scent of apple pie... the scent is a ghost of an apple pie... for you... hungry arms reaching in a thousand directions... oh... hungry branches... nothing in ten thousand million miles in a thousand directions but ten thousand worms hiding in your trunk and a dying you in a tree in a dream of a trunk of a falling you... golden you... golden child... up above... on a bench... with an apple... an apple you... a bench you... a child you... birds born in your branches... perfect ring... great circle in the sky... sky that shook your boughs... your mother is calling... no you rotten apple you... can't reach you now... alone on yourself with yourself in a world of yourself... golden self... alive inside your life... holding a rich and everliving heart... ripe crisp sweet soul... tasting apple for the first time...