She walked her dog, the same places, the same time at night and also first thing in the morning.
Those who knew her spoke, but the youngsters all had their heads down reading whatever pish was on their phones.
Garibaldi was a boxer and he wasn’t the brightest, but he made her laugh.
“Hi Ella, how’s it going?”
Continue reading “A Sign of the Times by Hugh Cron”
When I was twelve I was cute. When I was thirteen I was ugly.
Acne whacked me. The cute me. The twelve me. It happened overnight. It happened so fast that inside I was still twelve. Still wide-eyed and twelve. Still wide-eyed and twelve and oh-so-underprepared.
My friends (friends!) called me Silly Putty. Me, with my shiny, bulbous, pink-colored face. Grinning like jackals, they called me Silly Putty.
How did this happen? Overnight! How did the canyon open? The open canyon. From twelve to thirteen. From cute at twelve to thirteen, bulbous.
Continue reading “The Year of 13 by Lisa Shimotakahara”
Though this is not a particularly Auld or unknown piece it is obvious that Thurman Hart feels passionate about this and it has had a profound effect and that surely qualifies for a place in this occasional feature.
Much of what Bradbury saw has come true–social media and disaffected youth. Yet let us hope that words will still be precious to some in the worlds to come.
***
The work that I’m afraid will be forgotten is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. This is, of course, a flight of insanity on my part. The book is a true classic and will always (it seems) find its way into various literature-based curricula. However, the true masterpiece of the work is overlooked, at least in my experience.
Fahrenheit is a dystopian work, set an undefined length into the future where fireman are employed to burn books, the implication being that they control dangerous ideas that books contain. The general population has been dumbed down, too interested in the parlor wall families – i.e., characters portrayed on wall-sized televisions – to even notice that they are being controlled. In fact, Mildred, the wife of the main character, Montag, attempts suicide when he tries to force her and her friends to feel and think by reading them poetry. Even people who understand what is happening are too afraid to fight back, as evidenced by Montag’s very literate supervisor, Beatty, who goads Montag into killing him because he can no longer live as a tool for this governmental control. There’s even an aspect of invasive technology via the mechanical dog that tracks Montag, and what is now called “fake news” where Montag listens to the report that he has been tracked down and killed.
This is the obvious masterpiece of Bradbury’s work: that he can look at his contemporary and near-historical events such as the red scares of the 1950s and the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s and 1940s and make them seem like they are about to happen all over again. Like the portrait by a master painter will have eyes that seem to follow the viewer as they move, Bradbury’s predictions of society seem as near-future today as they did when I first read them in the mid-1980s. In this, Bradbury is a champion of free thought and artistic expression, and it is a good and proper thing that he is studied for that reason.
But Fahrenheit is not merely this. Tucked away in the third section, entitled “Burning Bright” is a passage that deserves a canonical place next to Shakespear’s “What a piece of work is a man.” Montag has escaped from the city and made contact with a small group of rebels who exist outside of society in order to keep alive the memory of written works. The masterpiece is delivered by Granger, when he tells Montag:
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
When I first read those words, I was dumbfounded. It was if a veil had been lifted and someone had shown me a timeless truth of existence. I sat on the edge of my bed, amid the dryland cottonfields of West Texas, and tried to fit the entire sum of my fourteen years into those words. Then, as now, the full measure of those words eludes me. They are a moving goal that I can only aspire to hit. It is why I turn my hand towards excellence in all that I do. It is why I write. It is why I sing. It is why, every year, I plant a new garden so I can watch the sky and worry and wonder. I know one day I will be gone, but I know my soul will live on in the things I have touched and passed along to my family and my friends.
It is this passage, above all others, that moves Ray Bradbury from someone who writes stories into the realm of an author. Here, he doesn’t just string together words, sentences, and phrases. He builds an idea. He presents a philosophy. He gives us his ability to reach through the written page and touch us. Not just for a lifetime, but, I hope, for many lifetimes to come.
Thurman Hart
Image: Pixabay.com – an old metal goblet on a dark background with a quill pen and a book
In Just Spring
The American Pacific Northwest is similar in climate to the UK. Both are just about as north as the other and both are close to an ocean. My home in the Puget Sound region is typical of the kind of weather found in such latitudes. We get twenty, sometimes thirty spring days spread over the course of four months. Seldom more than two in a row.
When it does come, everything gets all warm and cheery. People appear ready to spontaneously break out in song, smiles are unforced, and birds often garnish people with necklaces made from wildflowers, just like Snow White.
Continue reading “Week 428: Spring Cleaning; the Week That Is; Ten Names For the Inhabitants in the Box Behind the Stairs”
‘What’s he doing out there?’ Jill says, as the tall figure of their father passes by the window.
‘Who cares?’
‘No, seriously Brendan, can you come have a look? He’s being weird again.’
‘He’s always being weird. Just ignore him.’ Brendan’s playing Fortnite. His eyes don’t leave the screen.
Jill gets up and goes to the window, sticking her face near to the frame so she can get a better angle. ‘See, see, he keeps walking around the house, looking under it from time to time.’
Continue reading “The Chicken by James Hannan”
Our houses had always been haunted. We were always running from one old New England house to another. Finally, my parents found a ranch house in a small subdivision. It was painted a soft buttercup yellow. Everything was mostly new, less than five years old. “Only one owner,” the realtor reassured my parents. I immediately loved it. No scary attic. All of us on one floor. Even the basement was finished with wood paneling.
Continue reading “Suburban by Teresa Berkowitz”
And so she stands under the lamp post with her camera strapped around her neck and a candy cigarette tucked between her lips. That’s just for kids, isn’t it? But this woman certainly isn’t a kid. She has the look of a doting aunt. It’s in the eyes: the eerie combination of leering adoration and simmering jealousy.
Continue reading “Miss by Keith LaFountaine”
There is a truth about loneliness that is known fervently to all those suffering from it, and yet is forgotten the very moment we find ourselves free from its oppressive yoke. That is to say that being alone is not unlike having a blocked nose.
Continue reading “On Alternate Realities and Blocked Noses By Daniel Ashmore”
Welcome to this week’s Sunday Feature. Today we proudly present a breathless little “kiss” of a work by Jacob Greb. Although it is brief and lies somewhere between a prose poem and a story, we found this too wonderful to pass by. We hope you agree.
***
I Kissed Her Goodbye
I stare at the headlights with distress. The restless night made me a zombie. “Brains?” I beg a bystander. He kindly smiles.
“You fool,” memories of Julia’s last words like waves return to the shore. If only I knew how to swim. I keep on chasing the wrong fields. The meadow has turned brown. The autumn has come and Julia’s feet got cold. She likes to wear orange and green striped wool socks. My mesh of a head however can’t catch any fish. I am lonesome for her touch but Julia repeats that she loves me more. We sweep each other into our arms and lay wrapped in the blanket.
“Your heart beats radicle,” Julia says between her hums. She does so to sway me to sleep, but my fingers tingle readily to paint a thousand moons. The notes stain another night as the pianist plays the wrong lullaby. My mother’s curse carries on. White stripes and surgical tables. That’s where my mind wonders at the late hour. The wanderer I become. Julia falls asleep and I lay listening to her light snores. Nothing can cure my disease. I lift my feet and leave the bed, stumbling on the crate reused as storage for books and doctor’s notes. Hope has left the day. The streets at two finally breathe with relief. A bicycle leans against a steel pole for thieves to gaze at and take.
“Don’t leave your valuable unattended.” The reminder notice I keep in my pocket. I stole it from the psych ward.
I enter the middle lane and take my chances. The strange air is left behind by the last exhaust pipe and I inhale the pollution and cough. Fly by with a honk, but I continue to walk to the top of the block and close the loop. Takin’ on the sideways, finding a nickel, before I stop and stare at the headlights approaching, thinking of poor Julia. The curve of her smile as she whispered, “I love you. Good night. Be in peace. You fool.”
I kissed her goodbye.
Trains, Edith Piaf and Schizophrenia
A heavenly tune plays in my ears. Then follows the voice of Edith Piaf.
« Non Rien de Rien. Non je ne Regrette Rien. »
One can almost hear the very birth of the french R on her vocal cords.
She rolls it in her throat and spits it out. It comes sharp as daggers and I wonder how it doesn’t tear her tongue to ribbons in its way.
” Ni le bien qu’on ma fait. Ni le mal. Tout ça m’est égal.”
I sit with her words crowding my head, and mark the spilling of seconds on my notebook while the train sways my body rhythmically.
That’s what I do; I write down the things that people don’t usually see.
The little details of life that don’t matter and that nobody will later care to remember.
Somebody has to remember them right?
Somebody has to glorify them.
Otherwise, how pointless will all of that be? We might as well not have lived them at all.
Winter’s icy fingers scratch the glass at my side.
The soft pitter patter of rain drowns and suffocates under Edith’s raspy voice.
The little drops of rain break on the window before the wind blows them away and turns them to streaming rivers, to rushing tears.
Oh how I ache for the little drops!
Nobody seems to like them.
The sky spat them bitterly and soon they will shatter on the ground and people will step on their dead bodies carelessly. What life must that be !
One tainted only with pain and torture.
« Non Rien de Rien. Non je ne Regrette Rien. »
I have a vision of Edith. Leaning down over my shoulder and singing right into my ear in whispers.
I can almost smell the sourness of coffee and tobacco lingering in her breath as she opens wide her mouth and moves her thin, vibrant-red lips in an exaggerated, cartoony way.
I can almost see her hair, cropped short and uncared for. Her brows; two fine, curving lines, fixed above electric-blue eyes with a black marker.
The shining beady eyes and the two brows drawn, a little too far upon them, cast an aura of shock on her face. As if she’s just received some terrible news and was put in a trance!
I wonder if she really doesn’t regret anything as she says.
I would definitely regret the brows.
I feel sad that I am all she has for audience.
I glance over the window and mark the things I see passing by;
-naked trees slapped by the wind. Their branches rising up towards the sky, like slender bony hands, pleading for the torture to end.
-Few lone scattered concrete buildings. Unlike the trees, those seem immune to the rage of winter. They stand proud and tall against the pouring of rain and the howling of wind.
Few seats before me, two girls engage in a deep conversation.
One of them, clad in a bright red bonnet and a matching scarf, moves her hands energetically as she talks.
The other wears a similar pink bonnet with a giant bobbing puff crowning it.
The puff wobbles when she nods her head at random intervals. Then, apparently too exhausted to bear the weight of it, she throws back her head against the glass and listens carefully.
The conversation quickens and climbs in crescendo and now the girl in red seems a little irritated and her hands cramp and move faster.
The other girl’s face contorts into a frown in response.
And Edith Piaf hisses like a snake in my ears. Her sharp Rs, like blades, start to sting.
I don’t remember having her album saved on my play list. I never liked her.
The red bonnet, reaches every time to run a nervous hand over her hair and even it.
The hair is rather nice and has good volume to it; The straight, honey-brown locks slither from under the bonnet and hang right over her shoulders. There weren’t as much as one hair out of its place, but she still reaches every time to smooth it.
Another woman sits close, with a giant orange suitcase secured between her legs and scrolls on her phone obliviously.
At every station, the train staggers until it comes to a stop and its doors part open.
A frozen breeze creeps in and reaches inside like the cold fingers of death and tickles the back of my neck. A shudder awakens in me and travels through my body like a convulsion.
I imagine the rest of the passengers shuddering all the same as they stretch their necks to glare bitterly at the sliding doors.
The red bonnet’s gesturing hands grow rather stiff then fall limp on her lap. The two girls stop their conversation all at once, and turn mechanically at the same time to glare on their turn.
All the passengers look suddenly like moving dolls, hanging from fine invisible threads.
How queer!
It feels like I am stuck in the middle of a painting.
Or maybe staring at one from a distance, looking at the succession of the different emotions that played on the people’s faces.
Oh how queer!
How they all looked like bad actors, with exaggerated facial expressions!
One man has his leg resting on top of the other and his head thrown back on the chair.
A dribble of saliva spills down the corner of his lips while he dives in deep slumber.
Even him- Even him!- turns now to glare at the doors with wakeful angry eyes!
The painting, I see, is rather a subtle one. With lots of grays and dark colors.
But, then, I think I see a smudge on the canvas!
Totally at odds with the rest of the composition.
Oh Dear Lord!
It is me!
I see myself sitting there on the ugly blue seat, under my dull red coat, hunched over a piece of paper and scribbling on it energetically.
How come! How come for one to see oneself from a distance!
I look like a drop of red ink spilled there by accident. Like a drop of blood from the painter’s finger left there to dry.
I look like something wrong and unplanned and regretted.
“Avec tes souvenir, t’as allumé le feu…Tes chagrins tes plaisirs ”
Were those the words of the song?
I don’t remember.
The doors close and life crawls back inside the train.
The girls go back to their conversation, the suitcase woman to her scrolling and the sleeping man to his dreams.
The train controller walks down the aisle.
He stares at me as he passes by.
He studies me for a long time.
He knows, that I am writing about the passengers and about him.
He knows, that I didn’t turn to glare at the doors as I’m supposed to.
Oh he knows! He knows! He knows!
He stands near my seat now. Right behind me. Pretending to check the train ticket of an old lady.
But I know.
I know he is reading this.
I know.
I see you asshole!
He walks away and doesn’t say anything.
He will come again sometime later and do the same.
Till then, I won’t worry too much about him.
I keep watch on the slumbering man and count the number of times his chest rises and falls.
I have to make sure whether he is really sleeping or whether he is just pretending to.
He has his arms wrapped about him and his lips slightly parted open. His warm breath is seeping out like smoke.
And then, his eyelashes flatter ever so lightly, like a butterfly flapping its wings.
One might not see it if one doesn’t really look hard.
And oh well, what a devil he must be!
Now, the man sitting beside him produces a phone out his pocket and holds it up before his face.
He pretends to scroll on the screen. But I don’t buy that. I know well the people his type.
Those people, they form a whole specie on their own.
They think themselves too sharp and take the people around them for simpletons.
He might ruse the other passengers, but not me.
I know he is filming me. Maybe, thinking that his camera will catch a glimpse of my notebook and my words.
Just like the slumbering man thinks he might close his eyes and listen to the very beating of my heart.
What devils!
The corner of his lip curls slightly and I know he is laughing at me.
I bring down the hood of my coat over my face and shut him out and go back to my writing.
I only leave a little split, enough to see my paper and the wet blue tip of my pen sliding against it.
And in the periphery of my vision; their shoes;
The dirty black sneakers of the man filming me. His laces rest in a loose, lazy knot.
Maybe he will stumble over them later. I hope he does. I hope he falls on his face and breaks his teeth.
I see the dusty black wheels of the woman’s suitcase.
Oh how many roads must she have crossed for the wheels to get this dirty!
I see the sporty sneakers of the slumbering man. A pair of knock-off Nikes. As fake as the man wearing them.
He has his jeans rolled up a little too high for the cold weather, leaving a large patch of hairy naked ankle skin.
And of course, I see my own boots.
A thick stout pair with laces slithering like little snakes.
They are so heavy and thick, they seem to anchor me to the ground, like roots connecting me to the train.
I feel like my body is flowing down and spilling into the hard metal under my feet.
I fear that if I move one foot the whole train will shake.
Edith Piaf no longer sings in my ears. She started whispering some words in french.
As if confiding an extremely important secret to me. But, of course, I spoke as good of a french as an earthworm did a human language.
I look down again at my feet and feel my body and the metal skeleton of the train as one.
There are no limits where my body ends and the train begins.
I am the train.
I am the passengers inside.
I am the two conversing girls , the woman and the orange suitcase, the fake slumbering man and the snob man filming me.
I am the controller, the train driver. I am the ugly vibrant blue seats, the luggage , the windows the broken rain drops bleeding on the glass.
The red bonnet brings out a book, sinks in her seat and starts reading from it.
I imagine her reading the words I have written and feel the beads of sweat welling up on my forehead.
I think she lifts her eyes from the book and glares at me for a second then goes back to reading.
Oh God she is reading my entry!
Oh God what devilish thoughts must be playing in her mind now!
I grit on my teeth and twist on my seat in pain.
I glance at the painting that is the train and the red smudge hunched on the blue seat, seems like it’s starting to soften.
Edith’s voice is like needles in my ears. And the fact that I don’t understand the words makes her all the more irritated. And so her Rs grow sharper still. I twitch harder in pain and reach finally for my ears to pluck out my ear pods. I had enough of that bitch. I can’t stand her voice inside my head anymore.
But as I reach with my finger, I only touch skin and cartilage.
I reach deeper in my ear in case the pods should’ve been sucked inside.
But, still, there is nothing.
I keep digging and digging inside . But her voice only grows louder and angrier.
I dig too deep and feel something thin and liquid against my skin then my finger comes out red.
And Edith releases a sharp scream. This one feels like a stab.
I grow dizzy and watch the world sway before my eyes and taste vomit in the base of my throat.
The red smudge on the painting is bleeding away now. Just like a miserable rain drop.
Soon it will disappear too, and the picture will be untroubled again.
Rania Hellal
Image – Pixabay.com
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