Stray Reprints

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

WEDNESDAY IN THE FOREST

The leaf was on the grass, not moving. “There’s wind,” said the rock, “so what gives.” The wind tried harder. The leaf didn’t budge. “Is it refusing,” said the brook, “or is this not a matter of will at all, but rather a matter of physics?” The bramble didn’t understand: “Are you saying the topography is such that the leaf sits in a hollow that can’t be reached by the wind?” The grass was incensed. “Get off me,” said the grass. The tree weighed in: “It moved when it was on me—maybe it just loves you so much.” The mockery in the tree’s tone was conspicuous. The empty soda can with a crimp in its side felt the chill of evening coming. The acorn dreamed of something like heaven. The leaf remained immobile. The yellowed pulp paperback cover with a picture of a shirtless Abraham Lincoln thought about calling a doctor.

WHAT A TERRIBLE THING TO BE TWENTY-NINE

Q: What advice would you give to a young paragraph? A: Start small, set the scene, table, chair, both bare, don’t be afraid of a little music, rhythm, assonance, let what’s normal in the situation fascinate you, behind the table a narrow ledge, a tall glass tumbler near the edge, filled with what looks from a distance like water, though you’re not at a distance, you’re close, close enough to have had a sip a minute ago before you put it back on the ledge, to feel the heat of it in your chest, to feel it suggesting a new idea, let what's vibrant in the situation inspire you, and through the glass, through the liquid that decreasingly fills it, you can see the wall behind it, once flat white, now brilliantly colored, ecstatic hues of orange and pink and yellow, shoutingly floral, and the picture they make, distorted by the liquid in the glass, is a portrait of her, done in Sharpie and Highlighter by your hand the day she moved in, consecrated that night with two, four, six, glasses filled and refilled with non-water, the portrait regarded ever since as a an icon, proof of love, proof of persistence of love, though what it proves now is that your hand was unsteady, foolhardy, false, as she’s not in the house, will never again be in the house, was clear about that when she hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder and went out to the car where her other suitcases were heating up the trunk, and the glass is lifted once more, another pull at the liquid, and it's returned not to the ledge but to the table, no longer bare, filled with emptiness. Q: What other advice would you give to a young paragraph? A: Don’t be afraid or aware of how old you feel.

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

THE LESS SAID

How many people go from one big city to another? Annie counted along the line at the gate: at least a hundred, maybe a hundred and ten, some plugged into headphones, others with books in their hands as they stood, many snacking or sipping. Annie had a headache and then some. She had been out too late drinking too much, and she had ended the evening unwisely with a couple from the bar. Whatever she had done in those early-morning hours had been mean, even the things that produced pleasure for her and for others, and the meanness hadn't yet left her. The less said, the better, she thought. The man in front of her hadn't gotten the memo. He was saying more, about everything: about the weather and about sports teams and about different ways of lacing up shoes. He settled, finally, on a topical matter. “The biggest difference between a car and a plane,” he said, “is that if we were driving we could stop along the way. Strongsville, Youngstown, Snow Shoe, Drums.” The woman standing next to the man lowered her coffee from her lips. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Did you have a stroke?” The man shook his head. “Those were the places on the way,” he said. “I remember them from when I was a kid, when we would all get in the car and go. That’s the biggest difference with a plane. If you stop along the way, it’s first of all unscheduled and second of all never a good thing.” The woman raised her coffee, lowered it, raised it again. She had the appearance of an animatronic. “When you’re right you’re right,” she said. They were looking at each other. Something leaked from their eyes that Annie figured was love. She hoped to the heavens that she wouldn’t be sitting near them on the plane. It was the kind of thing that could make a girl pray for an unscheduled stop.

A TRUE STORY

The notebook he found said “Azealia Banks” on the front, hand-lettered, but it wasn’t by her, which is what he first thought, but rather about her, which was in a way more surprising. It had page after page of doodle-clouds drawn around “212” or “Fantasea,” with short paragraphs scribbled in the space where the doodles weren’t. These paragraphs tended to be simple stories whose last lines incorporated, with obvious inelegance, the title of songs: the tale of a woman who took a new job and left at lunchtime on her first day to shop for shoes (it ended with “She was ‘broke with expensive tastes’”) or of a man who displayed only relief at his own divorce hearing (“He was ‘used to being alone’”). Every once in a while came a spread of pages that contained neither doodles nor stories. Those were blank but for tiny words written vertically along the gutter. Upon closer inspection, he saw that they were lyrics as well, but with words changed in a manner that scuttled rhymes or rhythms (“Chinchillas, feathers, and leathers / AB, AB, the two initials”; “Zooted and sipped, I’m suited and ready for whatever the night ahead might bring”). The notebook fascinated him, and he kept it as long as he could, knowing that it would soon vanish, which it then, one day, three weeks later, as he sat at breakfast at a diner, folding a corner of a piece of toast, waiting for a refill on his coffee, did.

WOW, WHAT A DAY!

He was at the end of his rope. He went down the hall and starting banging on the door where the bird was. When it began the week before, he thought the chirping pleasant, and by extension the bird. He smiled at its sunny energy and came to whistle the song when he was making breakfast or stepping into of the shower. But then the volume increased. The first day the bird got louder he thought that maybe a door or window had been left open, and that the sound was flooding the hall or the air shaft. The second day it got louder again, and again on the third. Now he did not need to whistle the bird’s song in the shower because he could hear it over the sound of the water, and he could not bear to whistle it at breakfast because it was taking his appetite. On the fourth day he heard not only the melody, now at a nearly intolerable volume, but a new tone in the performance of the song that he could only describe as mocking. That was the last straw. He went down the hall and banged on the door until he heard a series of locks clicking permissively. He did not know what he would see when the door opened but he could not have known that it would be his own face, twenty years older, as surprised to see him as he was to see it. Nor could he have known that he would begin shouting to overcome the chirping, only to realize with a start that it was coming from the mouth of the older face.

Sunday, September 19, 2021

IN A BIND

They took his appendix out. That was the first thing they did. He felt…not angry, exactly, but ill-used. What right did they have to do that? The man in the coat explained that he was concerned primarily with preserving what was necessary and excising what was not. “I won’t apologize,” he said to his wife, who was in the room despite the sign on the door that said “Essential Personnel Only.” She was wearing a sheer blue dress that looked as if he had picked it out optimistically. She carried it off and then some. She rolled her eyes as if his bravado or foolishness or cruelty was all too familiar to her. Next the man in the coat, considering the patient, went for the spine. His eyes threatened violence but his fingers only applied pressure. This wasn’t so bad. “I might not be done here,” he said to his wife. She rolled her eyes again. The man in the coat moved on to the back, to the joints, after which he reached into his coat and produced a small, sharp scalpel. “For the headpiece,” he said. His wife moved quickly now, coming across the room in a flash, slapping the man’s hand so that the blade clattered to the floor. “You will not touch it,” she said. He pointed at the Essential Personnel sign. Now she slapped the man’s face. He was whimpering something about her dress as she put the book back on the shelf.

Saturday, September 18, 2021

THE MAN FROM ZERO LAB

Vertical integration was the chief principle on which the company was founded, and was, for the most part, its North Star for the first decade. But then the leadership and innovation development program the company funded at universities across the world began to bear fruit, and there were suddenly more ideas for new projects than the firm knew what to do with, a number that not only exceeded its projections but also its capacity and capability. Disaffection rippled through the ranks. Come Monday morning, at the general staff meeting, a man stood up and lifted his only remaining arm—the other had been lost in a motorcycle accident, (drag race on westbound span of bridge, thrown three hundred feet, bike skidded three hundred more). “I know what to do,” he said. His brother, he explained, had recently left a firm that dealt with precisely these types of issues to start a boutique firm of his own. “He can solve any problem,” he said. “We could bring him aboard,” he said. On the strength of this recommendation—for the man was a valued employee who had once saved the life of the CEO’s daughter at a company party when she went from standing in the shallow end of the pool to flailing in the deep end—the brother was hired. He created an in-house department that was dubbed Zero Lab; all new projects were modeled out for solutions from the first, after which they matched technological demands to product design. Prototypes were suddenly plentiful. Executives stopped by at all times to inspect them, poke and prod, ask questions that could before only have been imagined but could now be articulated and resolved. At the next company party, the CEO’s daughter, now seventeen, approached the motorcycle man. He raised his arm the way he had in the meeting. The story had gotten around. “You have now saved two-thirds of my family from drowning,” she said. The man nodded with exaggerated sagacity. “Let your mom know,” he said. The girl crimsoned. “She’s not with us,” she said. “She has left. Greener pastures, she said. I think she went off for a guy in Alberta.” The man stopped nodding. He took his arm down. “I do not know what to do,” he said. His brother, coming across the lawn with a drink in one hand and a plate of food in the other, would later report that both the man and the girl were canting toward tears. He tripped, sending the food flying. He knew how to distort his face in slow motion, and he did, at the same time speaking just as slowly. “Nooooo,” he said. They both turned toward him. One was laughing and one was about to. He could solve any problem.