Stray Reprints: February 2022

Monday, February 28, 2022

THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY LECTURE

“Here is the image, right up here,” Eric said. He pointed at a screen. The screen went black. Eric did not acknowledge the outage. He kept pointing at the screen. “Right here,” he said. “You see? Here.” The audience murmured uneasily. A woman in the front row raised a hand, coughed, lowered her hand. Eric, sensing that he was losing the crowd, spoke louder and faster. “Here is the image,” he said. “Right up here.” The woman in the front row was gathering her things to leave. The lights in the room went off. The crowd was not murmuring any more, if any crowd was left. The room was filled only with silence and Eric’s voice, rising to a scream. “The image,” he shrieked. “The image. Here, see.”

Saturday, February 26, 2022

BLAME IT ON THE RAIN

Through the window, the land behind the house looked underdone, soggy still and in need of more time in the sun. She put on a hat, took it off, opened the door, closed it, baked a cake, ate it, baked another, cut it into slices to deliver to neighbors, and finally ventured out into the morning, where she angrily thrust a stick into the earth, screaming at the soft spots. All around her were men who lacked the courage to do the same.

RIVER UNBLINDNESS

The man had not two eyebrows but a single one that extended like a vinculum over both eyes and as such served as an instruction that the pair was to be operated on as a single term by whatever it saw which in this case was the woman standing on the far bank of the narrow river half-turned away from him and looking into the distance where an orange fog was lifting off the green earth in a spectral manner. The back of her t-shirt said something he could not fully see in a language he could not read at all.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

FIRST DAY

The stranger, who gave his name as Samu-El (stepping heavily on the second syllable) sported an outfit that reached across the entire rainbow, beginning with the jacket, in which crimson reds and verdant greens dominated, though in neighborliness with generous regions of yellow (aureolin) and blue (ultramarine), and beneath it a white shirt covered all over by flowers of a royal purple, and the picture filled out by brown trousers textured like tree-bark, black and pink socks, and shoes of a blinding aerospace orange. “Nice to meet you all,” Samu-El said. “I am looking forward to working at this bank.”

MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING

Mireille bounded up onto the stage. “Hello, everyone, and thanks for coming,” she said. Her accent, honed over the months at home, in her office, in front of smaller crowds, had one foot in the South and one foot across the ocean. She was going for folksiness and authority at the same time, and the prospect of momentary dislocation did not faze her. “Let’s get started,” she said. Behind her a slide made a blue square on the screen. The next slide added yellow corners. “We’re all part of it,” she said, “this big United States potato chase.” The slide now showed a circular track. Potatoes with legs raced around it. “To stand at the edge of this moment is to visit the sea at the blackest moment of night, to sense the tides coming in and going out, to know that the water is breathing as it has breathed for an eternity, and yet to see nothing.” The next slide was black, though still projected as light, and then the projector snapped off. Mireille bounded up onto the platform at the rear of the stage. A hook on a cable began to descend from above. It would lift her and take her away. She would dance in the air. The last things the crowd would see before the lights snapped off were her hips, moving magically. She called our her final line: “Goodbye, everyone, and thanks for coming.”

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

UTOPIA

A person pretends to be another person, who pretends to be a third person, who pretends in turn to be a fourth person who is similar but not the same as the first person, similar in race, that is, and in gender, but are those in fact lines of similarity, says the second person, and the third person answers in the negative, and the second person lifts a finger to retake the floor and wonders aloud well what if they are lines of similarity, and the third person begins to mock the notion, asking in lampoon what about wearing the same color shirt or fantasizing about the same lord god or for that matter what about being born in a state with the same first letter is that a common trait is it is it huh, and the heat between the second and third persons increases, red faces pressed to redder ones until they fuse in embrace, at which point the first person and the fourth person, left to their own devices, shrug and also embrace, and thusly from four strangers, each imposter or victim of same, emerge now two couples, with sparks of love arcing off of fingertips. Clothes fall to the floor.

Saturday, February 19, 2022

STAGE MANAGEMENT

Her father had always told her: They’re going to watch you sing but they’re going to watch you. What he meant was that what she wore would to hit them before, during and after what they heard. “So,” he said, “put on that striped shirt. Put on that sailor’s hat. Put on the glasses rimmed in light. Put on the pants that have asymmetrical cut-outs, different shapes on each leg, one close enough to the inside of the thigh to run a little risk, the other in the shape of an arrow. Tie a ribbon in your hair and tie a balloon to that ribbon.” Her father was a lawyer. How did he know all of this?

GETTING A HANDLE ON THE TALENT

The question of what her paintings were like was difficult for the same reason that the question of what she was like was difficult. She seemed like she was sitting down when she was standing up and vice versa. She seemed loud when silent and the opposite also. She looked like a performer but thought like a zookeeper. “But I’m not the best person to ask,” the lecturer said, after saying all the rest. “You should probably ask someone who isn’t in love.”

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

ONE DAY IN OCTOBER

“No emotion,” she said. Was she criticizing what he had said or coaching herself? “No determination,” she said. Was she criticizing what he had done or relating the state of the case currently before the judge? “No way,” she said. Was she criticizing how he had made overtures toward her or lamenting the roadblock that prevented them from reaching the hospital? “No onions,” she said. Was she criticizing his lack of courage or ordering lunch? He had no retort for any of it. What could he say? “Emotion”? “Determination”? “Way”? “Onions”? He would come off as a mindless contrarian. He was mindful of that, at least. The fingers of the sun reached out for the leaves of the nearest trees, tousled them until they were golden and then some, shaming him into an even deeper silence.

PEOPLE PERPLEX

“People perplex….” She was writing a song. “People perplex me, the choices they make.” She took a sip of coffee. She lit a cigarette and let it burn in the ashtray. The doctor had ordered her not to smoke—“the cancer, for starters,” he said, though that was also the last reason—but she still missed the smell. “Unaccountably,” said her ex-husband, who had grown close again during her illness, had delivered food and jigsaw puzzles, had stayed to eat and solve, had stayed the night sometimes. “Do you think you and Dad will get back together?” said her daughter, who was going through a divorce of her own and could not keep an edge of envy from her voice. She took another sip of coffee and went on to the next line. “The body they find after dredging the lake.” She put her arms around herself and squeezed. She was the body. She was the lake.