Fiction
On Narrative
I find short-short fiction, as well as prose poetry, a place of intense friction. Words living between intense pressure and heat, create intersections of fantastic narrative. I try to live in those intersections.
Another Kind of Heaven
My folks took me to town to see a doctor and he said I got the scarlet fever. I guess I was sicker than I realized. I was delirious. Later, I saw merry-go-round carnival horses, red, green-gold, yellow-blue, coming out of the ceiling in my room.
I’d say, Mom? I’d say, Mom, those horses are gonna hit you. You better move your head. She’d move her head and smile and wipe my forehead with a cold cloth and say, Say, boy, those horses are dangerous aren’t they? That’s the last thing I remember.
It doesn’t happen the way you think it does, where you float out of your body and look down at everyone crying as they stand around your body and mourn, and then a brilliant light shines a tunnel and you go through it, enveloped in an egg of soft white light on a golden chariot with wheels of fire and the sounds of legions of Cherubim and Seraphim blowing trumpets and all their Hallelujahs. It doesn’t happen that way at all. You blink and suddenly, you’re someplace else.
For me, it’s summer, a pick-up game with Ronnie, Daryl, and the rest of the boys from town, and me, out in right field, my favorite position, snapping my fist into my father’s worn glove. Sky, like the ocean I never saw, and earth, dew-soaked and fresh shorn green against the pale yellow dirt of our baseball diamond, so green and perfect like a watercolor paint-by-number, everything in its own space, and when the chants from the boys ring out clear across the field, I begin to think that my being sick must have been a dream and just when I manage to believe, I see rabbits and horses in the clouds, hopping and galloping across the sky–red, green-gold, yellow-blue.
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Cadence
“Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.”
- A. E. Housman (1859-1936)
A blizzard crept up and bit the recruits in the ass. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Lying prone in the snow, the slings of their rifles tight around their biceps with sling-palsy setting in, they sighted in and fired tracer rounds at able-body targets– the size and shape of a man’s torso.
The young men were led to believe these targets were the enemy incarnate, though no one had yet disclosed the exact nature as to whom the enemy was. This small fact seemed as inconsequential as the differences between hominy and grits at morning chow.
A sweet and noble thing it is to die for one’s country. Chants ricocheted inside their heads. Some of them tried not to listen, but their resistance did not last long. This is true for all young men and platoon 2021 was no exception. All boys of sound mind submit and those who do not are shamed into silence for the rest of their lives. The young men knew the fastest and easiest way off Parris Island was to submit and submit they did.
A miss-fire occurred at the 500-yard line. Some poor sodbuster from Missoula went and got his left eye blown out. The corpsman was called; he applied a compress, but was certain the boy would never see out of that eye again. This interruption was only a minor inconvenience and after the boy was hauled away, all clear was sounded and the young men finished firing.
Cease-fire was called. The scores were tallied, the young men dressed, were called to order, lined up in the blowing snow asshole-to-bellybutton, and began the long march back to the barracks, with the metallic taste of brass and gunpowder on their tongues, and the cold wind at their backs whistling a cadence they had never heard.
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Dear Cranial Nerve Number 7 and distinguished Unio
n Members
Dear Honorable Cranial Nerve Number 7 and other distinguished Union members:
I know I have never formally recognized your existence as Spokesperson for this body’s Union and for that I am extremely sorry. I apologize and humbly ask for your forgiveness.
Really, I’m not trying to make excuses but the human body is a living machine with trillions of moving parts and I must confess, I didn’t even know there was a bonded, certified Union much less a Spokesperson. So when I woke on July 17th, 2003 and found the left side of my face paralyzed, I hope you’ll forgive me for some of the expletives that I called you for walking out on your job and initiating a strike.
Really, I am sorry, but were all those stabbing headaches for weeks on end really necessary while you shouted at me from the picket line, maybe eczema or a mild cold sore would have been a more dignified way of getting my attention. And was it really necessary to shout “SCAB” to the other body parts that stayed at their post and kept working. I mean, for instance, if the Heart picketed with you, let’s just say that there wouldn’t be an increase in salary or a Christmas bonus this year.
That said, I fully understand there is no excuse for ignorance of the laws that govern this body and hereby accept all consequences of said ignorance in recognizing the specific needs and demands of your Union.
To answer some of your many pointed questions:
1) Yes I do believe in the co-existence of the body as a Union with the other members of your Union family—the Emotional and Spiritual. 2) I must default again to ignorance; no I did not know that you formed an umbrella Union that is commonly referred to as The Human Trinity, not to be confused with The Holy Trinity which is something else entirely. 3) No, I did not know that you are a certified 501 c3 non-profit as deemed and administered by The Holy Trinity and are therefore afforded all rights and privileges pertaining to all issues concerning the health and welfare of this body. 4) Yes, I also understand you have a long list of grievances that date back twenty-three years. 5) And, yes, I am familiar with most of the grievance items on your list, and I hope I’m not out of line here, but honestly, when I was ten and tied rope to the ends of an old poncho to make a parachute and jumped from the second story of our Colonial house in Pennsylvania, I really believed it would work, it always worked with my green plastic army men. I’m sorry, but it’s true. 6) And finally, no I do not feel it is necessary for me to retain a lawyer.
I, Sean Mclain Brown, sole host to this body and The Human Trinity hereby waive all rights to a lawyer and furthermore do not intend to defend my actions or myself. I agree to the terms set forth in your initial messages sent via messenger by way of that annoying rash on the left side of my entire waist two weeks before you called a strike. Frankly, I thought you were either bluffing or I had eaten some bad sushi. Sorry for the misunderstanding and for the subsequent twenty-three years of abusing your trust.
Sincerely,
Sean Mclain Brown
P.S. I am especially empathetic to that traumatic and abusive six-year stint in the Marine Corps, what the hell was I thinking?
Cc: The Holy Trinity
Factory Town
Screeching whistles. Steel stacks bellow mercury and silver smoke. Keeler’s Brass factory looses its day crew, and my father stumbles out with his men, tall and thin as young birch and as pale with eyes so blue you swear it was the real John Brown out of a smoking hole in the ground, and later at the pub, men singing Gaelic drinking songs with their twenty or more verses and inevitable refrains and everyone laughing at the coarseness of it all, and me in the corner, the invisible boy watching men shake off a hard days work.
Carried home on his shoulder through snow drifts, the city blooms like a barrage of black-cat crackers on July fourth, and soon, that vanishes too, as we move out of the city, where the silence of window panes quarters the moon into starry clefts, a squared softness blinks in and out of clouds and dog patches, the world does its thing, father says, and we press on through the snow, father’s hand closing around mine, our house in the distance, smoke rising from the chimney, sleep coming on, handless and thin, gray strands rise from earth to air.
Locus Solus and the Random Adventures of Semi-Colon
(Click title to download the story)
Minor Influences
I came here with nothing but an empty portrait, and after a while, some cows appear as if in the middle of a Minnesota blizzard. I must say, I was quite surprised at their showing up, and then some sheep came in from the right side of the frame and winter vanished as they grazed across my screen. A landscape began to form. It is early spring, I gather, as the roads I can see from here are honed and rutted from the heaves and thaws of winter receding, and the days are longer, and green is beginning to tip out along the brown branches, boys are chasing rabbits in the woods and children pick mayflowers in fields while others play “Red Rover, Red Rover” in the neighbor’s yard. The narrative runs between unpainted fences in a silicon landscape with people and creatures laden with words constructed of 0’s and 1’s that I cannot touch. The screen flickers and blanks. It is impossible to control; glitches happen everywhere and are random, and my influence is small; I press CTRL, ALT, DELETE.
The Horologist Speaks On the Disturbances of Pendulums and Balances and on the Theory of Escapements
The club-footed man from Mysore, bent and double-backed, jeweler’s monocle in his eye, surrounded by English and French longcase and mantel clocks, stacks of books and papers everywhere, says time is more than glass and wood, brass gears and steel springs, gleam to the hour by the light of sun or star. As in the beginning when the word was with Allah, when time still mattered, and in that moment he breathed into us the habit of time from the shadow of a rod on the surface of stone to a balance spring like a snake coiling and uncoiling in a sunny garden, a steely heart without chambers. To measure a day with precision by the length of a pendulum vibrating, and by the velocity and friction at the point of suspension, in such a manner, balancing wheels and countermotion, he deduces the formula for escapement, yet the division of days into hours, minutes, and seconds cannot be changed, a clock might as well be a pinwheel in the wind, chiming like crickets in a field you passed through when you were young and when you approach are silent, and the sound of them washing behind you, like the ocean over a thousand pebbles pulled by the moon. The old horologist looks up from his work, measures the angle of light as it slopes through the blinds, and then continues working on my watch, bent over his bench, the loupe tunneled into his head, his arms, pendulums, his body fixed and rigid against the motion of a dozen different clocks striking a dozen different hours.
Out Beyond Cape Point
Father on the prow of Jenny Lynn, and me at the tiller, another day trawling for Mackerel and our haul isn’t enough to pay the bills. That night at the pub, in a drunken rage, father scares off some tourists who try and take his picture, and the next morning, papers strewn across his bedroom floor, returns have bottomed out, and he sits on his bed like a dismembered corpse.
We are a family of percentages; lost two brothers, one born again and one in a war and my own null ramble the last good-for-nothing boy, and three rotting skiffs in the yard, where we played when we were young.
Out beyond Cape Point, Thursday boats return from the sea with nothing, columns of sun glitter on waves, the sea is gray and cold, there is talk of selling the boat, and mother weeps like broken thread in a seam that unravels, horses in the barn need feeding, and there’s sowing to be done, but no one seems to care.
I begin to see us all fading and thin, ghosts in our own home, and by November, I feel outside of myself, when I was young, father said, be a spoke in the wheel, be tough, be hard like icebergs. Out in the barn, father with bright fires in the forge hammering horseshoes, and me out walking through our empty fields, tendrils of smoke hang over train tracks in the distance, and the moon shines on nothing in particular.
Passage
When we take out the cast iron pot of your mother’s, handed down to her from her family in the Appalachians, it reminds me there are places where you can’t drown under water or earth, up-lifted plates of earth, where you can look down on the tops of trees and view the world as a small god who lets the clouds open their storms blowing the odor of drying smelt on the south wind and the taste of snow floating in through our window late in the season.
When the ice gets thin some drunk from town goes ice-fishing at night and disappears and washes up in spring tides. Whatever lies frozen in the ice, a mitten or a corpse is suspended like the families in town, generation after generation either fishermen or miners. It gets so that you believe the whole world makes their living on the ocean or under the ground, and eventually, I suppose one of them is likely to be true. Things wash up on our shores; a tire, a buoy, fishing nets, someone’s husband or brother. Everyone takes it in stride, it makes front-page news, and the town arrives for the funeral and wake.
The old salts at the docks say there’s a map on your hand where the curved lines of latitude and longitude meet and if you plot the distance from each point you can measure the exact date of your death. I tell them they’re full of it, but only because I’m afraid it might be true. There are darker shapes on the horizon that are worse than storms. Things go missing everyday and out at sea not even a compass can save you.
The Annual International Etymologist Conference
The invisible word was written between dust-to-dust as day was separated from night, when words held light for the first and last time and so became corroded, as now, under the tarnished patine on the roofs of so many houses, where words gather and the people who discuss them, some soft as a baby’s bones, others scaled with armor no bullet could pierce, and more as brittle and blue as a Robin’s egg, and the hum of voices in parenthesis continues, and the words on the wall on which the hand wrote, illegible after all the fingers touching, hoping to transfer some divine spark, that their own words could possess such power, as when they were young, and discovered patterns of sounds held shape and weight, and that those shapes held an alphabet of practical figures, and those people, charting the dense sea of vocabularies, unaware that those same words they confided secrets with would betray them, and all of them in search of the unspoken, what lies in the white spaces between—the orphan word, unclaimed—how could they know that this single, collective word is all that holds their world afloat?
The Urgency of Strangers
“It was nothing and everything personal, everyone has a job to do,” Gaither says, “it was the same then as it is now.” Gaither looked at high ground as we drove through the Tehachapi mountains covered in snow; his eyes darted around as he spoke. “After I returned from Korea, I admit, I was a violent man, vicious, unyielding, unforgiving, unrepentant, but in combat I was decorated, hell, everyone in my battalion was, at least those that were left, but what good are those demons now?”
I agreed. My platoon led the assault on Hill 520, I said, and when I first reported to G Company, I asked ‘What’s the deal, lieutenant? How’s it look?’ ‘Nothing to it,’ he said. ‘Seems they got a bulge in the line. We’ll straighten it out. Piece of cake.’ Thirty days and thousands of casualties later, we lost and won that lousy piece of real estate several times. Piece of cake my ass.
We arrived at the veteran’s retirement home on Pearblossom highway, Gaither and I shook hands and he grabbed his gunnysack out of the car, slung it over his shoulder and walked away.
We had talked as only strangers can, two veterans with a sense of urgency, sometimes both at once, as if no time remained and our lives depended on it. I stood there in the blowing snow and watched him till he vanished inside the building. I looked at my watch. It was 6 p.m., February 15, 1997. I couldn’t feel the wind or cold.
Where the Levee Broke
By breakfast it had still not entered our neighborhood. We stood on the gallery of our house and watched and waited. Then, down the gutter of Percy Street we saw it slither, like a dirty brown snake swallowing everything in its path.
Father looked over the drowning town and a light went out in his eyes as though a swarm of locusts obscured the sun. I was frightened to see my father like this. We had no money, no boats, no tents, no food, yet he waded through the mounting flood, with me on his shoulders, to the poker-rooms of the Knights of Columbus where Negroes were not allowed, hung out a sign labeled “Relief Headquarters."
In the end, the engorged snake had done its work; washtubs, workbenches, houses, chickens, our Springer spaniel Bigbee, my father and many others, all floated away as memory does. It was in this way I learned that the flood brought a swift and redemptive judgment to all of us; my father standing tall and straight as a Jack pine, a man that never leaned against a doorframe or a wall, a man that never put his hands in his pockets, aristocrats gone to seed, poor whites on the make, and Negroes, all of us aliens that blend or curdle, firstborn and the last. The soil is where we rise and where we return. Who can argue with the justice of the Lord, and the mighty arm of the river sweeping us up as though we were wayward children with nothing in our pockets, lost and in search of a home?
