WINTER HAS PLACED A CHILL ON HEARTS

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

During the past few days the polar weather has done much mischief to romance. A rendezvous between Karen Kane and Alexander Norton at Landsdowne Park that carried great promise—his planned proffer of a trip away for the two of them, proposed at the spot where they first met, would likely have been their most exciting moment yet as a couple—was postponed from Friday night to Saturday. Unless an immediate change occurs, the rescheduled meeting is in jeopardy as well. This comes on the eve of several key moments in other relationships. Business in connection with the Jackson engagement and the Dufresne divorce are at a standstill, as neither party in either instance is predisposed to act favorably with conditions so frigid and bleak. Were it not for the remarriage of Jennifer and Harold Lewis, which no one believed would happen and most everyone still speaks of in hushed tones, as if afraid to break the spell, folks interested in matters of the heart would be puzzled to find any subject for conversation. As it is, the homes that are going up on Flying Fox Lane, the prices at which they will change hands, and the kinds of people likely to move there, young couples mostly, is the topic that comes closest, and as a result several people who previously showed no affinity for real estate have demonstrated, or at least feigned, an interest.

CONNOR LEAVES HIS POST

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Lively scenes were witnessed on Hickory Street last night, when some two dozen frightful apparitions besieged the bedroom of Timothy Pine. Pine, nine, had a sense that they would be arriving, and arranged for his older brother, Connor, to be in readiness, dragging a spare mattress in so that Connor could sleep on the floor until  he was no longer needed. Connor spent two nights standing guard without complaint, but late on Monday, he was called away by a friend, Alden, who wanted to walk into town and sneak into the theater to rewatch the last fifteen minutes of a movie, the final scenes of which had confused the boys, Connor believing that the hero had been a double agent all along, Alden insisting that he had merely pretended to be a double agent to survive an interrogation. The phantoms took advantage of Connor’s temporary absence to make a surprise attack. They seeped from below the closet door and from under the bed, a few even emerging from the clothing draped over the desk chair, and did considerable damage to Timothy’s peace of mind. He talked to himself rapidly at first, seeking comfort if not calm, and turned to more aggressive measures, pelting with balled-up socks the spots in the room where he believed the specters to be. When he could abide the situation no longer, he called out for his parents, who came down the hall at a pace too leisurely for his taste and turned on the lights, banishing all  wraiths and spirits. They escorted him to a place of safety and hot chocolate. Connor, arriving home a half-hour later, apologized before noting that now he understood the movie in full. 

THE PROCESS BECAME LESS SECRET

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Efforts are being made to revive the natural cartoon dye industry, especially as a suitable employment for retired cartoon characters and their families. In the early days, of course, all characters were black and white, sometimes in combinations that gave shades of gray. But there came a time when such a look had run dry, as it were, and artificial colors, let alone digital, were still a long way off, and so the characters began to seek out ways of attaining hues. Assorted lichens easily obtainable in the vicinity around the  studio—white, dark rock, and limestone—were used to make reds, yellows, and browns. Blueberry and elderberries yielded blues and purples. Green came from bareroot, and dark green from rubber rabbitbrush. Loganberries and brier produced deep orange, and pink came from a mix of maple-tree bark, calvatia cythiaformis, and Nadia blossoms. These plants were treated in a manner initially known only to the earliest characters, mainly anthropomorphized dogs and cats, along with the occasional anthropomorphized  pig or horse, but as time went on the processes became less secret, and certain other cartoons—clowns, stick-men, sailors, babies, goggle-eyed boxers, talking furniture, and the like—came to understand how to create colors. It became common. Today, those early characters look at belated adopters as if they would like to wash them out with acid, and the sight of a brightly-hued clown or baby is akin to heresy.

A PICNIC ON THE GRAND SCALE

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Three young immortals, who raced to the rescue of two small rowing boats caught in a squall off Microphone Island, were drowned Thursday afternoon but remained alive. The three were resting just below the sand, leaching ideas and energies from the earth itself, when they sensed the distress of the rowers and swam to the help of the craft, only to be overpowered by Poseidon Epactaeus. Two were flung back to land. The third was stunned as if struck. He drifted more than six miles out to sea, where he floated until life flowed back into him, at which point he rose and rejoined his compatriots on the shore. The families of the dead rowers were located, made to understand their loss, and comforted, at which point a celebration was then arranged in honor of the immortals. Some described it as a gorgeous garden party, others as a picnic on the grand scale.  

“THE SUBURBS ARE SO LOVELY AND SO QUIET”

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Amplification is still the dominant element in this lonely afternoon. A passionate desire for both company and significance pressures even the smallest sound  into service, and so a cat purring atop a hardback copy of “Blood in Bad Bederkesa” is heard as the roar of a nearby ocean, though land is all around for miles. The young boy on the street outside the window probably had no object except to test the accuracy of his arm by throwing acorns at a mailbox, and would have been more surprised by anybody that he was experienced as an enemy army. A report on the radio that morning is recalled as vastly satirical, though the tone was subdued and dead earnest. Equally exaggerated is the sole inhabitant of the house himself. When he lived in the city, he was measured enough in word and act. He was a  slow-pulse worker at the office, and then walked home through a welter of noise and color that did not dislodge him from his calm. But he moved away from the city, to this land of lawns and houses, a change that has done more than anything to inflame his mind against itself. He now wakes in terror of the silence that surrounds him, and grasps greedily at the first noise he hears, determined not just to have it reverberate within his mind all day long, but to make it matter, and he repeats the process with the second, third, fourth, all too aware that the sounds will taper off, that the terrifying silence will once again descend and the day will settle down into it. Now there is nothing to hear, and he is afraid. He counts the seconds, the minutes, his heart beginning to race. Is that the faint squeak of a pipe from somewhere within the torso of the house? He treasures it beyond all compare.

WARPE LAND

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Her home lies…miles further south, nearer the Carpatt...as they first drive in he surveys the scene and makes a proclamation…“warpe land,” that is…he actually says it, “that is”…she frowns…he has no awareness of its sound in the air around him…this “girdle of intolerable pretention,” as he once said of Shelley…“warpe land,” that is land reclaimed from the sea…she knows this…she has known it her whole life…still she nods as if he has taught her something…“nod as if in love and in love you will be”…he was her teacher…she his student…he taught her Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley too and then took her to bed…nearly a decade has passed…she is thirty…now she is his and he hers…it is, he says, a “skein of pronouns tangled by the years”…she sees his eyes somersault slightly when he turns a phrase and she permits him this pleasure as she permitted him the insight as they drove…this is not the first time she has brought him home…it is the first time without her parents alive...they stop at the house, now vacant...continue to the cemetery, not vacant...flowers are left behind, tears along with them...they go out walking past the hamlet of Biltonhaven…once it was a port for vessels that went to sea…time has made deposits and now it is separated from the ocean…“sand bank,” he says, in the same tone he used for “warpe land”…but she laughs now and shakes her head…no nodding...“no”…it is a wide band of rich alluvial soil bounded by the bank……it has rich mineral deposits…she says “bank,” again, “deposits” again…now she is onto something…he hurries ahead to escape what is clear to both of them is a victory on her part…rising into view is the dock tower on the other side of the river as well as trees…but the waters themselves are invisible…large ships pass across the horizon land as if pulled on stage-tops…but the waters themselves are invisible…“it is below the sea level,” he says…then he stops…she catches up to him…she stares at him…he has not moved since the word “level”…is he sick or worse?…he is searching for a word or phrase…this strange old man…he is licking his lips as if to bring it out…he looks at her to loosen his thoughts…she looks back at him…still staring…her eyes are wide enough to both frighten and inspire him…is it simple adoration or has she glimpsed something else?…impending eternity…he will not live forever…he will keep company with her…he thinks of her standing up from the bed…all of her strong youth apparent…the image stirs him and trips a wire in his mind…“sunk island,” he says…she presses against him and repeats what he has said…her strong youth apparent…it is not at all a depressing or dolorous land.

WILY OLD UNCLE PETROS

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Her beliefs remained docked in the same place, no matter how “wormy with decay” or “barnacled with inanity,” both fragrant phrases of her old Uncle Petros, a lawyer who in early middle age began to fancy himself a theatrical impresario and spent the last half of his life operating a repertory company in the town where he lived, which was also the town where she had been born and raised, the town where she had first tasted ice cream, the town where she had first tasted disappointment, the town where she had first let a boy taste her, the town where she had married, mated, mothered, the town she had eventually left, waving, from the rear of a departing railway car, after which she was off to the city, for a time as a wife and mother and then, rudely, shockingly, as a newly single woman, at once proud of her freedom and terrified of what might happen if she used it, and from that vantage her hometown was mostly a memory, real only when she called Petros, a weekly event of an hour’s duration that was devoted mostly to a digressive account of local events, which actors were giving him a headache, which ones were giving him hope, how he came more and more to see that the theater and the courtroom were one in the same, how he missed her, and here he always performed a pause and asked her if she missed him, by which he meant home, the shift in meaning not just hinted but made explicit, “by which I mean home,” he said, then performing a second pause, and each time the phrase made her misty, put her on the tip of tears, and she forced herself to say something harsh or sarcastic to fend them off, something about how he would soon die and she wouldn’t even visit for his funeral, and he laughed and told her that she didn’t mean it, that she was the same girl she had been at thirty or twenty or ten, that her beliefs remained docked in the same place, no matter how wormy with decay or barnacled with inanities, and then she was laughing too, and still crying, harder now, and while the call eventually ended, she had only a week until it all happened again, the same thing or something close to it, his gazette, his question, her sharp answer, his parry. The old man really had her pegged.