TOMORROW TAKE

The first day of December was a beautiful day
And William Wister died the last day of November.
The second day was a beautiful one and nothing happened of any interest that day.
The third day was also a pretty day though it could not be said that it was beautiful.
The fourth day we had a downward snow and Mr. Whitejacket rode to our lodge on a notable visit.
The fifth which is the Sabbath and there is a sharp ice on the ground and Harvey is cooking K.T. James’s big turkey for dinner.
The sixth day was a very cold one indeed and the snow is about an inch or another inch deep on the ground to day and Mr. Whitejacket left the lodge today for home.
The seventh day I was on guard and it was a very cold day.
The eighth day was also cold and me and Harvey washed our clothes at noontime and he made a fond remember of the turkey he cooked.
The ninth day was a storm and Mr. Whitejacket arrived back at our lodge today on a notable visit.
The tenth day was cloudy but not much rain and I wrote a letter to Mr. Whitejacket before remembering that he was at our lodge. 
The eleventh day was a very pretty day overhead but muddy underfoot in a way that near to took your boots off. I meant to take Mr. Whitejacket his letter but the mud. Nothing happened today worth naming.
The twelfth day which is the Sabbath was a beautiful day of sunshine and me and William Wister’s ghost ate a big chicken all afternoon and I made a promise to him and to me that I would tomorrow take the letter to Mr. Whitejacket.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME

Meryl Streep was on a narrow street, imitating Marsha Mason trapped in a Martian basin. “Next,” she said, “Diane Keaton kisses a dying cretin, then Goldie Hawn rushes past a moldy lawn.” Glenda Jackson took action, reset the agenda. She, Faye Dunaway, and a stray runaway went to Mississippi, where Sissy Spacek had lost her paycheck to the wiles of a man in a Honda. Jane Fonda saw it plain as day. Sarah Miles had lost her salary to the same man. Valerie Perrine stood in a bank line to explain. Diahann Carroll drove by in a sedan, screaming that they were all imperiled. “No one has been harder hit,” she said, “than Ann-Margret.” Talia Shire, endeavoring to inquire, was told that one man had the answer. He was an ex-felon, a fan, but he had cancer and was in Somalia. The situation worsened. In came Ellen Burstyn. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DAMN THE LIGHT

Too bad it’s light, because the memories that are now with him are about nights, the night in junior high that his friend Tim slept over for the first time and they pulled mattresses down onto the floor and pushed them perpendicular and spent over an hour (he knew by watching the clock, red digital numbers floating in the air) making puns that played on (played off?) the names of kids they knew in school, and Tim drifted first, voice blurring as he worked through variations on Bret Moore’s name then sharpening as he announced that he was going to sleep, and he told Tim good night, but he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even close his eyes, believing as he did that he had experienced a perfect evening inside a perfect circle of friendship that he hoped never to leave, which is why he was unwilling to mark the end of the day with sleep or even closed eyes, but eventually sleep came for him and he woke in the morning to find that both he and Tim were still happy, still joking about kids like Bret and Chris and Drew, but that something had shifted, and that what had seemed magic from one angle seemed ordinary from another, and it wasn’t that he could no longer see the perfect circle, but rathe that he could see that he was outside of it. The morning was flooded with light. Damn the light. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MIKKI'S OBSERVANT DAY

Long avenue, lined on right side with a succession of stout women pulling things from the backs of cars, this one a rug, this one a chair, this one a box with Christmas decorations (could Santa be more out of season than June?), and then there’s a woman who looks similar to the others but is moving more quickly, frantically brushing at her shirtfront, and she’s saying something, maybe the name of what’s on her that she wants off, maybe the name of her deity of choice, speaking quickly and maybe even loudly, but the music is on loud in the car that’s driving down that long avenue, Pharaoh Sanders, sheets of sound, and so Mikki can’t hear a thing. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

IF IT'S ALL ADDED UP

She is secure for the moment, in close contact with what is strange, keening kee-mo ki-mo into the space between her weathered brown leather chair and the muted television, but then the present lurches forward only a fraction of a second and she is jarred from her intimism by a two-tone chime and the appearance of an adult child on the videophone, Kevin is his name, has always been, but she calls him Kecalf, inside joke in a sense, that’s Aretha’s kid, she says Aretha like she knows her, and maybe in a way she does, in the same way you know an airplane when you’re parked at the edge of the airport, watching takeoffs from the hood of your car, she sees (hears) another takeoff in her mind now, the first sung words of “Save Me,” and that patches the gouge that’s been left where the chime scraped into the Chubby Parker, but then there’s a channel carved next to it, a channel that runs to her heart, where she’s pained to see her son’s face, at the mercy of his own vulnerability, he’s had a bad year, wife left, children won’t talk to him except when they want a check in the mail, does anyone say that anymore now that money rarely travels in the mail, and as she’s simultaneously drawing and erasing the picture of her son sadly depressing a button on his keyboard to educate one of his three ingrate children, who are also lovely children, of course, only right now stretched on the rack of family pain, at that very moment, with his drawn almost erased finger poised over the drawn almost erased button, she remembers that he is tending to her, that she’s the diagnosed one, that the tumors have invaded her body, except that she feels fine, feels that the lymphoma she has heard tell of from the doctor—this is the only phrase she’ll use, “heard tell,” protective irony clad in the clothes of an overdetermined folksiness—is an approaching train more than it is a station in which she stands, and she leans toward the screen so her son will see her, see her in health even as she is also in sickness, but that blocks what’s behind her on the table, the leavings of her lunch, the vase her bought her last birthday, but also the papers, what she had been arranging before putting on the music, before the banjo, before the “King-Kong-Kitchie-Kitchie-Ki-Me-O,” and her thought then returns as a thought now, which is that what is wanted most devoutly by an aging woman or if she’d prefer a woman of her age (and she would) is the the discovery of a cache of papers at death, papers that contain, in a crabbed but legible hand, brilliant things, surprising, meaningful, profound, so many of them stacked one upon the other then no one will be able say that the life that produced these papers and then surfaced them by going/not-being, that invested them with a preciousness borne from the fact that they are now a sealed set, that no one no matter how petty, no one no matter how vicious, no one no matter how hemmed in by agenda, will say that that life was wasted.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

POSITIVE I CAN'T BE SURE

Watching a channel. Watching no channel. Listening to the pipes hiss. Listening to no pipes. Chewing a piece of gum. Chewing no piece. Waiting on her call, when she will explain to me why she ended things, and how they might one day start up again, taking care to mention that it would be in my interest to wear the brown boots in case we were ever to meet. Waiting on no call. Counting the seconds at the same rate as the clock, tick tick, tick tick. Counting no seconds. Imagining ourselves younger, not yet attached, available to one another, smoke rising off cigarettes toward a ceiling that we know is nothing more than a temporary blockage of sky and stars. Imagining no one younger. Keeping a list of all the things I am doing but more importantly all the things I am not doing. Keeping no list. Taking a chance that in writing all this down I will miss her face at the window, and her expression, half-playful, half-pleading, as she asks me to open it so she can crawl through and tell me about her newest invention, a card-shuffler that instead randomly disarranges thoughts and feelings. Taking no chances. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HIT WITH A RAY

Hit with a ray of sunshine that scorches the edge of his book, he jots down quickly, “Pages layered, pages turned, folded, rolled, never ripped, and what is protected—what is kept—is all the words, none discarded, piled up, tumbled together, pushed to face one another at the closest of ranges and even to touch in places they had not expected, rubbing, frictional, producing a heat not quite enough to melt, a warmth that walks to the to the border of comfort and discomfort, a bake that blooms into redolence,” lyrics for a song he’ll always be singing even as he knows that no one can ever really sing it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PLAYDATE

I was visiting a friend in jail. He was behind bars and then there were bars behind him, not the brick wall you’d expect to see if it was a movie. “To let in the light,” said the warden, not sarcastically at all, and to be honest, there was a cheeriness to the place. My friend had put a vase with a small red flower on the small blue table next to his bed. The sheets were almost goldenrod. “We encourage decoration,” said the warden, also not sarcastically. My friend pulled out a red chair for me and I sat and the two of us talked, for a moment forgetting everything that had put him in there and focusing instead on everything that had happened before, and especially that one summer when we were both twenty-nine and he confessed his love for my sister and I reveled in the warmth of that circuit, knowing I’d have him close, knowing that would mean shared music, shared books, different loyalties in sports teams that would give us the same shared joy as we opposed one another every few days in a trivial but heartfelt manner. We stopped there. Air slid out of the room. We were back to the issue of his location. Too much remained to be said. The room had gone black and white and mostly gray.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BURN BABY BURN

The box Sharon had taken delivery of on Tuesday night and which Helen opened Wednesday morning showed itself to contain two long sticks wrapped in banana-yellow paper that gave off the sound of loose sand when shaken. A fuse, wrapped with a blue tape, protruded from the top of each stick, and when contacted by lit matches (paper, Sharon’s, from a book decorated with a line drawing of a martini glass and a tiny woman swimming inside it) those fuses sent up wisps of smoke that were succeeded by a white column of the stuff, followed by a ring of fire the same color as the tape but brighter, then an orange sheet as the fire spread to the paper around the stick. The sticks themselves, which Helen held at the bottom, pinching each between the meat of the thumb and the sidewall of the lower joint of the index finger, seemed protected from the fire during the burning of the fuse and the paper, but when both of them were consumed in full, the stick was revealed as a glowing line that crackled as flames bristled all along its length. Finally the tip, turned to ash, opened like a black flower and pollinated the air around it, bits and pieces of what was released in air drifting down to settle on Helen’s hand. “That was something,” she said, and Sharon agreed that yes, it was, though she didn’t turn in Helen’s direction. That would have given her a satisfaction that Sharon didn’t think she deserved.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book was set in a digitized version of Arcimboldo, a typeface long attributed to the Italian engraver and silversmith Paolo Arcimboldo, who lived in Parma in the first half of the eighteenth century. However, it has been suggested that these types are actually the work of Arcimboldo’s next-door neighbor, Giancarlo Condulmaro, who studied in Amsterdam under the renowned type founder Hendrick de Bruyn. According to available records, Condulmaro designed at least two hundred other known typefaces, while Arcimboldo’s entire typographical oeuvre is limited to Arcimboldo and a second face, Ciottolo, which consists of pebbles arranged in a shallow bed of sand and viewed from the top of a tall tree, from which distance they look like type, a method that is relatively unwieldy in practical printing. Also contributing to the theory that Arcimboldo may have appropriated one of Condulmaro’s typefaces is an unfinished letter written by Condulmaro and found among his possessions after his mysterious disappearance in 1723. The first half of the letter, which was intended for Condulmaro’s son Eduardo, who was studying to be a painter in Rome, busies itself with Parman gossip, noting that “a cow walked into town and died” and that “Donatella Pitellini, the younger of the two Pitellini sisters, has begun to invite men into her home in the evening and not release them until the early hours of the morn.” After a brief bit of advice for his son (“When you paint, dear Eduardo, paint only things larger than a hat, and please remember that this category does not include hats”), the elder Condulmaro turned to the thornier matter of his neighbor. “Arcimboldo has been bothering me again,” Condulmaro wrote. “I saw him in the market yesterday, and he would not leave me alone. He told me that he plans to kill me, make my death look like a mysterious disappearance, and steal my new typeface, which he and I agree is so elegant that it rivals the finest Dutch faces of Bruyn, Voskens, and Janson. I do not know what these vague threats of Arcimboldo’s can possibly mean. Oh! I must go now. One of the Lollobrigida boys is here, and he has just told me that another cow has walked into town and died.” The type is a rare example of an Italian type that has proven, over the years, to be as influential and sturdy as the Dutch types of the time. No less a judge than William Caslon declared Arcimboldo “mucho excelente.” 

©2001 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

LOOK OUT

It was not until Lucille turned off the interstate onto surface roads and began to make calls that the rumor about her began to harden to a consistency that supported weight and to take a shape that resembled reliable intelligence. The first call, to her brother, was filled with demurrals, but he noticed the way she breathed, as if holding deep within her being something whose escape she could not permit. He suspected, he said when phoning her sister ten minutes later, that this thing was truth. Her sister had just hung up with her. “There was no relaxation of her manner,” she said, “despite her insistence that she felt ‘floaty’ — something about a tincture.” Her sister had to hang up because her boyfriend was on the other line—Lucille’s boyfriend, not her own. “She made a point of maintaining the friendliest tone,” he said, “but I know what that means. That’s her version of an eye for an eye. It scared me so much that I am standing outside now waiting for her to pull up. I think I know what she’s going to say. I hope I’m wrong.” Lucille’s sister let out a noise. “I hope you are too,” she said. Lucille’s sister called her brother back and found him still convinced that the thing held deep was truth. “All I can say is that I wouldn’t want to be that guy,” he said. The line hummed with all variety of perturbation. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BORNE ETERNALLY

Everyone ran off down the street, screaming, trying to make sense of what they had just seen, but there was no making sense of it, as it was at once the most magnetic and the most repulsive thing that any of them had ever encountered, and they were both honored and ashamed to have witnessed it. So what was it? What had they seen? How can it be told? It cannot. It was—it is—like those horror moves made in countries with longer memories than our own, countries where ghosts roam freely through dim halls, where they bang on kitchen pans and knock down bicycles into the dust. In those movies, true horrors, when glimpsed, cannot be described for others, cannot be communicated or replicated. They work like a curse, tunneling into the consciousness of those who have seen them and refusing to be clearly shared. The burden is borne eternally by the witness. And so they must be approximated, which is a form of misrepresentation. This particular one, the one that everyone ran from screaming, was, let's say, a woman, maybe thirty, with long black hair and eyes to match, staring straight ahead, thinking of her freer youth. She fretted a corner of her sweater. A dark light danced in the hedges behind her. No one would survive the sight, not for long.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

Why were Faye and Delores up so early Tuesday morning? Really girls! 

Why is Lisa called “Lightning”?? 

Who is Dixon Mason’s new admirer? Could it be Judith Rollo Zipton? 

Is Chris Hugo getting gray of head or is Knightsy just seeing things? 

What is the question Alice is afraid to ask Greer????? 

Who are the great surreptitious overhearers of Center Towne High?? How about this Victoria and Hermione? 

“Dollimore! Get Back!” 

Margaret really had the girls worried Saturday night. You’re a good actress, Peg! 

We hear Glenne Kessel has joined the “Rooster Prowl.” Is this true Bertie? 

It seems like Mr. Shaw is hell-bent on destruction every time he teaches his trig class, to the point where he has raised the volume on more than one student, and that a senior who will not be identified is retaliating daily by filling Old Shaw’s car gas tank with goldfish-tank water. Really kids! 

Why are Mackie and Merce studying up on their Latin and sporting shorter and shorter hemlines? Audentes fortuna iuvat.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FOREARMS ON KNEES

A hint of the darker side of the conjurer’s life was evident during a tour of the home of the Great Oliver, the veteran magician, who resides in Spraight Manor with his second wife, an heiress to a glass-making fortune. Upstairs, beyond the second sunroom and the music room, where the grand piano and harp both lived, there is a studio outfitted with mirrors, tables, and performance lighting. In that room, on the tour, a silk hat was found on a small table filled with chicken salad, rose petals, pennies, and car keys, and beside the table was the Great Oliver, sitting on the floor, forearms on knees, crying like he might never stop. All he could say was that he didn’t understand why the trick wouldn’t work, that it had always worked before, that he didn’t understand why it wouldn’t work, that it had always worked before. The tour hurried on to the gymnasium.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

STACEY RUSSELL MEETS A GUY IN A BAR

“I am overlapping worlds. I receive a daily poetry newsletter and also count among my acquaintances people in the highest levels of government. My friend, who I won’t name—I’ll say only that he’s the current boyfriend of a woman I used to date, and that my character is such that I had no objection to establishing a friendship with him, and no difficulty maintaining it—works at the music industry, where he writes songs and produces records for some of the rawest black metal bands on the planet, including Punctura, Gorgorum, Bloodscape, Killscythe, Elevatorture, Norwegian Moe, and Pagan Throne Bazaar. And his mother, one of my favorites, is an inventor who has done important work on blue-light blockers and is wickedly funny to boot. They are all in different worlds, yet they are all in my world, meaning that I am a nexus, a bridgework, a connector. Some people make the world smaller. I make it larger by being too large for it. Can I buy you a drink?” Stacey Russell stands and leaves.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

UNDERSTUDIES

The role of the delivery room doctor will be played by Albert Jenkins.

The role of the cabbie who drives the new family home from the hospital will be played by Roland Ferris.

The role of your father will be played by an older, sterner man.

The role of your mother will be played by a younger, more idealistic woman.

The role of your hometown will be played by an adjoining town, wealthier but without the same sense of community.

The role of your first job will be played by a fruitless summer at the swim club.

The role of your wife will be played by your ex-girlfriend.

The role of planned pregnancy will be played by unplanned pregnancy.

The role of your loving son will be played by an ingrate.

The role of your loyal business partner will be played by a deceitful colleague.

The role of your best friend will be played by a neighbor who tends his lawn obsessively and rarely speaks to you.

The role of God will be played by a gnawing sense of despair that cannot be alleviated by alcohol.

The role of the twenty-year anniversary will be played by divorce.

The role of prosperity will be played by bankruptcy.

The role of retirement will be played by a brief period of manic travel that culminates in a weekend spent in a Tallinn hotel with a paid companion who follows your night of debauchery with a long story, told at breakfast, told convincingly, about the difficulties that have dogged her throughout life (cruel father, distant mother, a survivor's instinct that kept her moving forward but did not keep her from wandering into danger), a story that has you feeling protective toward her until the moment when, a week later, you discover that she has charged more than a thousand dollars on your credit card and no longer answers the number she has promised you can call any time "just to talk—because I like you."

The role of flu will be played by diabetes.

The role of old age will be played by single-car accident, ruled suspicious.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas