Dick and Jane and Bob and Sally lived in a pretty little town with grass and trees. One day Bob was gone, leaving his body behind. Dick said to Sally, “Where is Bob?” Sally said to Dick, “Bob is gone.” They looked at Bob’s body, poking it with a stick. It did not move. He was not there.
Prologue: A case of the heebie-jeebies.
In a determined effort to spread inefficiency and uselessness throughout all possible universes, the Amalgamated Union of Pennames and Imaginary Friends(of which I am a reluctant member) has expanded like a toxic spill, and now includes the clientele of the recently defunct Guild of Fictional Characters. The mess has been “rebranded” the UPIFFC.
Continue reading “Meanwhile, Back at the UPIFFC… by Leila Allison”
I
Every house has this book tucked away somewhere, father tells me. Some keep it locked in the attic, while others hide it in the depths of bookcases or submerged under dusty bowls in forgotten boxes. My father, however, makes a point of reading it to us. Just as he has read it to my brothers and sisters, so he will read it to me. It’s an old leather bound book and inside is written my whole life.
Jackie Cushing was fighting it all the way, wearing knickers, him, twelve going on thirty it felt some days, dreams about Ginnie Grayson practically every night now, the morning dew being the vague remnants his father spoke about with a smile on his face, new hairs in his crotch, his mother wanting her boy to look neat, his father looking at the horizon almost saying aloud this too will pass. It was his one-shoulder shrug that carried verb and noun in its arsenal. Jackie had early discovered that his father did not need a lot of words.
“Do you want to play guns?” he asked me.
This was a complicated question, and while I stood not knowing what to say, the summer heat beat down through the cloudless Virginia sky. Twenty years has gone by now, and each summer heat wave brings back this vivid memory. It will forever be with me, as clear as it was that day when I was eight.
Estaban deTullis may not have been the most beloved man on the small island of Azure De Ponce De Leon, 57 miles south of Caracas, but that was only because of the sometimes venomous feelings harbored toward him by his often-times put upon wife and busy-body mother-in-law.
Joy’s eyes were stinging from the stench of urine. She was hoping it was from her mother’s three tiny dogs, but suspected the mutts weren’t the only ones who’d been incontinent.
Pahuac rested his head on the sacrificial stone. He would have to go through this if he wanted to find his way back home. Why couldn’t he remember?
Setsuko was twenty years older than me but she looked my age or younger. When I was first at university my brother came by and started talking to me when Setsuko was giving me a violin lesson in my practice room. He thought I was performing in front of a friend.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote,” if you are strong there are no precedents.”
Manfred Gogol lived “off the grid” and was a person of many small mysteries, like Gatsby. Gogol’s wealth wasn’t money, though he somehow had acquired plenty of it from a mysterious trust fund that was established very early in his life. It was, in fact, his enviable ability to be completely mobile, free, unattached and without any marked responsibility whatsoever that was most singular.
