It wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t read about their care. The author had mentioned, offhand, that it was best to use an empty aquarium. That convinced Joss that the mother Surinam frog must be aware of the matter, and dislike it.
In the worst dreams, she doesn’t have the problem. He can’t see his back, but he knows what’s there: the rough honeycomb shapes, and, waiting, their spadelike little heads.
The walls are smooth. He can’t rub against them. The babies are restless. The mother just sits there, smugly repeating her own taxonomy: “Pipa pipa,” she croaks. “Pipa pipa.”
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
It’s hot in Scarsdale, but Lil P still sports his thick red beanie –he won’t be caught without his colors. These three boys in black, he thinks, must be sweating even more.
“Looks like some APA chump come downtown all alone!” says the lead.
“Y’all MLA punks best back up offs,” snaps Lil P. “Your pages is numbered.”
They go cold. “Nobody disses our style,” snaps one, stepping up, but the lead restrains him. He and P both hear it: somebody’s rig bumping, nearby…
Then the Turabian hoods roll around the corner, grinning, and all of them break sweat anew.
Monday, November 15, 2004
“I’ll put the lilies–” Helena begins.
“Put them over there,” orders Mister Fannon. His thin hands should move languorously; they don’t.
“Why’d we have to get the Bossy Funeral Home?” mutters Gracie.
“Helena wanted it.” Sven shrugs. “Said she needed direction.”
“I looked through that catalog,” Helena’s saying. “I was thinking about the Millennium?”
“Not for a cremation, honey!” says Fannon. “You just get a nice pine box–the Excelsior, say–and spend the extra money on a trip for yourself. That’s what Ben would’ve wanted, am I right?”
They don’t go in for nonsense at the Bossy Funeral Home.
Friday, November 12, 2004
“It’s not like I don’t want to learn,” says Courtney. “I mean, I can spell… But I am in college, so I expect I’m going to get corrected on grammar, or whatever, I expect some red ink–”
“Which they don’t use,” says Violet.
“Exactly! They use green ink because somebody,” Courtney says, “somebody with a sinecure, wrote a memo about how we associate red with bad and that–that completely misses the point. It just makes them look like a bunch of jackoffs.”
“I think you mean ‘jacksoff,'” says Violet.
“They got to you too!” Courtney shrieks. “You’ve been contaged!”
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Grinning, Gerhard helps Judy out of her sweater as she kicks off her slides. She helps him with her fly, and he strips off her tank top. For him, it’s like Christmas.
Once her underwear are off, he pulls her close; his fingers find the zipper behind a seam, above the cleft of her buttocks.
Her skin and the molded plastic underneath it are easy enough, but the iron-plated octahedron within them requires some work. Gerhard digs out his ratchet set. When the last bolt is out he has an irregularly-shaped stone–probably igneous.
He borrows a chisel from next door.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
“What have you got?” his lawyer is saying.
Stine figures that there should be violins playing now, short strokes, heightening the tension. Everything should be slowing down.
“That’s not acceptable,” she says.
They’re not. Instead of a dramatic climax, the closest analog to this he knows is giving blood.
“Man two,” she snaps. “Five years, serves three–”
There was a sharp pain, then the surprising lack of it; a lightness; a sense of sharp contrasts and distance, of things happening quickly.
His lawyer is looking at him, nodding, and Stine has the gradual and worrisome feeling that he’s being deflated.
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
“And then my wife and I,” says Duc, “we are facing?”
“Facing each other,” says Francisco in his best missionary voice. “As are your privacies.”
“This is how Jesus wants me to have my wife?” Duc is dubious.
“This is the righteous way, as endorsed by the Holy Church.”
“But Jesus–”
“Yes! This is how Jesus wants it!” Francisco’s learning to hate Indonesia.
Duc thinks maybe they have different Jesuses; his wouldn’t care about this stuff. To him, Jesus is four feet tall and hairy, wild-bearded, laughing with a joy so fierce and wild it startles the birds to flight.
“All our flights but one have been cancelled,” apologizes the pretty Asian girl behind the desk.
“Let me guess,” says Floyd woodenly. “You’ve got one seat left on it. Coach.”
“Why, yes, sir! Compliments of the airline. We’ll have to re-route your luggage through Alexandretta to meet you in Carthage–is that acceptable?”
Floyd knows neither of them will make it there. Cancellations on the layover, and he’ll be redirected to another in a series of increasingly unreal cities. Where next–Constantinople? Metropolis? Babylon? Ur?
“Sir?” she’s asking.
“Wherever,” he says. One hundred twelve and counting, and never a flight home.
“You can open your mouth and eat,” Maya says, quietly and firmly. “I fed you before you came back to yourself. You don’t need me to now.”
Rob reaches for the pad and pencil, but Maya holds them away. “No crutches,” she says.
He looks angry, but it subsides. He stands and walks to the door to flip off the lights. Maya doesn’t understand until he turns back, and there they are, faint as moonlight on his lips: stitches.
He reaches for the pad again, and this time she lets him have it. You can open them, he writes. I can’t.
Thursday, November 4, 2004
“Certainly, Feldman had the more Brandoesque demeanor,” Duvall says. “But it’s hard to make the case–”
“I disagree,” says C.P. “It’s not hard at all, and… Harrison, are you listening?”
But Harrison’s daydreaming–daydreaming about listening, in fact. He’s partitioned in his mind the sets of sounds his ears sense, those he actually hears and those he’ll remember. They’re fairly disparate, after all. What if you overlaid them? Would they be too close–not quite one wavelength off–so you’d end up with feedback? Or would the differences in timing and tone be enough to make harmony, rhythm, melody, music?
Wednesday, November 3, 2004