Pieter Kűrbisesser

During harvest season in the town of Chervale, one can understand the superstitions that have arisen to explain its agricultural fertility.  Fragrant concord grapes weigh on trellises, engorged gourds swell in the grasses, and McIntosh apples are collected in bushels.  It is a strangely quiet hamlet and one can almost hear, or at least sense, the fecundity of its soil.  Its richness has been known at least since the Palatines were granted asylum to settle there by the tribal mothers of the Haudenosaunee, who took pity on the hardships they had faced in Germany and then in the region of the Hudson River.  They were permitted to farm and live in that verdant valley.  The soil was known to be rich when the Palatines arrived, but old stories attribute its potency to a disaster that came long after that.

Who can say this fertility did not come from the blood of innocents that was spilled on the soil, that entire community slaughtered by angry Seneca and Mohawk working with the British?  Who can say that this abundant life is not the result of the death that inspired George Washington to have Sullivan scorch the earth behind the Iroquois fleeing to Canada, never to return?  Death begets life and life begets death.  Perhaps that is blood edged on the yellow maple leaves of fall.  Perhaps the exceptional darkness of the beetroot and sumac in this valley is truly sanguine.  The autumnal colors in the surrounding hills have here a more crimson hue than elsewhere, and at the right time of sunset, for a brief moment, all is illuminated in a roseate light.  Rational explanations of these phenomena are absent.

Pieter Van Kahler settled in Chervale with his wife several years after the massacre.  He and Sophia started a farm and were fairly self-sufficient.  The young couple grew mostly corn, potatoes and rutabaga.  They had an old horse and a young goat for milking.  They were neither prosperous nor poor.  He and his wife worked hard, but lived well.  And he adored her.

They expected to have children, but after a few years on the farm they did not, and it wasn’t for lack of trying.  Sophia, though wanting a child, accepted the concept of a childless life gracefully.  Over those few years, she gradually decided it was God’s plan, becoming somewhat relieved of the responsibility since work on the farm was exhausting and her poor Pieter would have had to do even more if she was busy with child.  She was too pure a person to think that the burden of child in addition to farm work would be a strain on herself.

Pieter himself never belied his disappointment, because his disappointment was not so much that they didn’t have a child, but that he was worried about his wife’s happiness.  He believed that she must have felt inadequacy and shame since she was infertile, and he remained outwardly positive because he didn’t want her to suffer any more than she had.  He was incorrect in this thinking since they were childless due to his narrow urethra.  So, he stayed the strong and supportive husband and toiled side by side with her in the fields, and at times took the rifle and the horse for a few days and returned with venison and turkey.  They had meals of perch and potatoes, rabbit and rutabaga, and watched the sun set together, marveling quietly in those brief Chervale moments of roseate illumination that must have been God’s work.  Who else’s work could it be?

One autumn afternoon, Pieter was hunting a few miles from their farm when he spied a cotton tail a few yards ahead of him on the edge of a field.  He raised his rifle quietly and saw the rabbit down his sights as it raised its head, mouth munching, to look around.  When he shot, the animal somersaulted from the force of the bullet.  As he picked it up, fresh, warm blood dripped from the hole in the rabbit’s ribcage and onto Pieter’s boot.  He grabbed an exceptionally large leaf and broke it from its vine to wrap the rabbit before stuffing it in his game bag.  He realized this leaf had the same tactile, ciliate hairs of a squash plant and he investigated further.  He pushed, scraping through the immense tangle of vines and discovered a gigantic pumpkin, one larger than he had ever seen before.  It was sagged to the side like a rotting apple, but firm and fresh, a yellowish orange with a spattering of wart-like growths across its side.  It was the size of a small boulder and too large for him to carry.  He marveled at its size and shape.  Since it was impossible to transport, he found a sizable rock to break it apart.  After much trying, he returned home with a decent slab and many seeds that he was sure to plant in the spring.  That night his wife cooked the gourd’s flesh with butter and brandy, and the rabbit was delicious.

The following spring, Pieter planted his pumpkin seeds and watched them closely.  He marked the location of each cluster of buried seeds with colored sticks in a clearing behind their barn.  Eventually, only one sprout emerged and he was careful with his cultivation, fertilizing the already rich soil with the innards of fish and the offal of fowl.  To his credit, Pieter was an exceptional farmer, and he might have been referred to as a horticulturalist if there had been such a designation in those days.  When the orange flower buds began to yawn widely on their dark green stems, he was sure to hand pollinate each one.  When infant pumpkins began to swell on the vines, he chose the largest and healthiest one to save and pruned off the rest.  Useless branches of vine were cut away and soon his lone pumpkin began to grow exponentially through the season.  He did not let the growing of this pumpkin take him away from his regular work on the farm.  It was a pet project and he wanted to make it a gift to his wife, proving his capability as a farmer.  By late September it was more than twice the size of the pumpkin he found while hunting the year before.  When it was time to harvest, with the help of a neighbor and his mules, he hauled it to a strategic point in front of his house to present to his wife.  And she adored it.

The night he presented her the pumpkin, she was ecstatic.  When she saw it out from the brush and vines and so immense and prominent in the short grass in front of their home, her eyes went wide and she laughed with genuine surprise.  When she congratulated Pieter with a hug and a hard kiss to his cheek, she had a youthful blush he hadn’t seen in years.  Some of her hair was loose and hung like tendrils of silvery gold.  She even climbed up and sat on it laughing!  That night and during the following weeks there was so much intensity in passion Pieter was sure her problem was solved and she would have a child within the year.

The following winter was a long one.  They didn’t want for food as their stores were sufficient, but they endured a few blizzards and the snowpack was high.  Another storm at the end of March brought another two feet of snow and the rains of early April brought flooding to the region.  The creek at the back of their main field dammed with detritus and water inundated the property.  Their home was safe, but it took a long time for the water to recede and a longer time for the land to become farmable again, causing a late start to their season.  Stress began to show in Pieter’s normally cheerful eyes.  The length of the winter, the annoyance of the flood, the barrenness of his wife: all weighed on him heavily and he started thinking in that way that people do which is misguided and unhealthy.  He started to think he was being tested by some greater force and was failing. 

Many believe winter is the toughest season, but really it is spring.   Food stores are lower, yet the land is still barren and lifeless.  The trees are gray and empty and even though the air may be warming slightly, it is as cold as death.  That spring was even longer to Pieter than the previous winter and he spent a lot of time on his own wandering the countryside.  It was still too early to plant, so he’d wake just before dawn and walk and think.  Spring means another year of toil is coming.  Toil and work can be satisfying in its own right, but he began to ask himself: why?  Year after year, the same work, the same results and what?  Another year older, another year closer to death, another year of bloom and richness so it can just die and germinate again the next year, until one year he or his wife will simply be gone forever.  He lived the life of plants, the life of seasons and years and now that he was getting older, he was beginning to understand its futility.  He realized then that that was why he needed a child.  The child is the man regenerated.  The child is the reason.  He was being tested.  He knew suddenly that his purpose was to give his wife a child, to sow himself from her and he was not going to fail.  He was incorrect in this thinking because life does not have a purpose and he had a narrow urethra.

Eventually, the temperature became favorable, the cold rains slowed and they were able to resume the work and life they loved.  Pieter, though, had a plan.  He planted his pumpkin seeds again and would grow the largest pumpkin one had ever seen, and his wife, subsequently, would be even more fertile that fall than the previous year.  They had come so close and he had almost fixed her.  This harvest he would succeed.

He repeated his procedures from the previous year, marking the seed clusters and hand pollinating the pumpkin flowers.  He enriched the already potent soil with the chopped innards of fish and fowl even more than the previous year, and when the infant pumpkins finally began to grow he spared the largest and healthiest and pruned the others.  He carefully removed unhealthy leaves and daily saw to the maximum health of the overall plant.  But during this process there was more urgency than the year before.  His attention to the chosen pumpkin became intense, paranoiac.  Woodchucks and rabbits, which previously had been pests, were now malignant spirits which were shot, trapped and clubbed.  As time wore on, he worried about opossum, raccoon and deer at night.  He began to neglect his other duties and his wife as well.

By mid-August, Sophia was beginning to be concerned for her husband.  He always seemed distracted and distressed, so much that they barely spoke.  When they worked together in the field he would look back over his shoulder towards the patch near the barn, muttering and exhaling dramatically.  She was concerned, but not worried.  This behavior was no different than her father’s, who barely spoke to her mother, unless he was enraged about something, and that wasn’t even speaking.  Pieter was a much better husband to her than her father was to her mother.  Pieter was kind and cared for her and if he was going through a period of difficulty, she would let him work through it as he always did.

As the pumpkin grew, so did his mania.  He weeded the patch constantly.  He fertilized the soil with horse manure and goat droppings, but that wasn’t enough for him.  The rich soil of Chervale and the nutrients from the flood were not enough for him, and neither were the putrescent innards of small animals.  He wanted that pumpkin to grow.  When his wife was absent he would dig cat holes around the plant and defecate in them.  Daily he hauled buckets of water from the creek and poured them carefully around and over the plant.  He would dip a broom in a water bucket and shake it all over the leaves, evenly coating them with droplets.  He put a layer of sand underneath the pumpkin to prevent rot.  He washed the pumpkin daily with a cloth, shining it and checking for insects.  There were none.

On a cool night in September, Sophia lay next to him in bed; her hair tumbled about her and her mouth slightly open as she slept.  He could not sleep, his mind consumed.  He saw moonlight on the floor of their room, he heard his wife’s light breath, he sensed the warmth of their blankets, but he felt only the xylem and phloem of the plant behind his barn.  He quietly got out of bed and went to the pumpkin.  It was immense by now, almost as tall as him with a uniform girth and it had a bluish hue in the moonlight.  He wrapped his arms around it and they barely encircled halfway.  He felt the cool skin against his cheek and pressed his entire naked body against the pumpkin, cleansing and cool, and he believed it felt him as well, his passion, ardor and heat.  This was his desire and potency, a physical manifestation of his virility and capability, and would be planted within his wife to be born again and anew, a son that was in fact himself to last beyond the seasons and years, an eternal regeneration.  When he presented her with this pumpkin, she herself would swell with desire and bear him himself.  Many nights he repeated this routine, finding himself fertilizing the soil with a most crucial and seminal substance.

He was losing weight and was haggard and unkempt.  He was neglecting the rest of the farm because he spent nights with the pumpkin and slept days.  No matter what Sophia tried, he would not pay attention to her.  The corn harvest was destroyed because of deer and crows, the horse needed shoeing, and the other fields were unkempt and haggard as he was.  She worked and worked, but could not keep up with the weeds and the growth from that mythical Chervale soil.  She kept the goat milked and did her best, but Pieter was practically catatonic during the day and essentially unresponsive at night.  But then the first frost hit right before the end of October and the pumpkin was ready.  He came into the bedroom the morning after that first frost, shivering and dirty, but he looked his wife in the eyes for the first time in months when he woke her.  She lay back against her pillow, searching his face as he smelled of vegetation, soil and rot.  He was wild-eyed and grinning broadly, bearing crooked yellow teeth streaked with brown.  He told her that in one more night all would be ready.  He curled up in bed and slept until that night.

The pumpkin beckoned.  Soil richer than coagulated blood, feeding and growing, swelling lust and burgeoning potency, the sky black, the moon white and the pumpkin blue: he crawled to its base.  On his knees sinking into the dark earth, he ran his hands across supple blue skin so cool, so cleansing.  Soon he was face down, prostrate, his arms encircling the base, fecund earth caressing his skin, seeping into self, xylem and phloem.  He felt the sticky scratch of the vines, hairy like spiders’ legs, twisting around his toes, the balls of his feet, tickling around his calves and the backs of his knees, tightening joyously on his throat and down around his armpits, grinding with that rich mud and squeezing him so tightly, his useless palms could only hold the base of the pumpkin.

The sun rose to a crisp fall morning.  Some leaves remained on the scarlet oaks, but by then the maples and elms were bare.  The cornfield was rippled with erratically broken stalks.  Sophia woke alone and saw no sign of her husband.  He had frightened her the morning before, but he did tell her that it was ready, whatever it was.  She assumed he was referring to the pumpkin and was glad the growing season was finally done with, although they would be in a predicament if the coming winter and spring were like the last.  Their farm, and subsequently, their stores, were in shambles.

The pumpkin was colossal in the morning sunshine.  It was five feet high and its girth twice that.  She marveled at its orange hue.  Pieter had sawn off the massive vines and arranged them in a gigantic wreath around its base, twining them in a complicated and beautiful braid, with some leaves acting as speckled ornaments.  Outside the wreath a saw had been dropped, its teeth glutted with vegetable matter, but there was no sign of her husband.  It really was a beautiful sight and she was glad her husband had succeeded so well at something he worked on, but she was relieved this whole ordeal was over.  Maybe now he could rest, or at least direct his energies in a better way.  But where was he?  As the day wore on, she convinced herself he had gone hunting, that he was to return in the afternoon with some rabbit and they would again have a wonderful dinner and watch the sunset together.  It had been so long since they enjoyed their life in that most essential of ways.

As evening approached he still hadn’t returned and she began to worry.  He had seemed so crazed the last time she saw him and his demeanor had switched so drastically and quickly.  She began to think that he wasn’t hunting rabbit, that something more sinister was afoot.  She fantasized about her old Pieter, the younger one, returning hopeful and happy with that slab of pumpkin she had cooked with butter and brandy.  She would see him enter with his game bag full and a slab of this new and most beautiful of pumpkins…but he wouldn’t cut this one up, for sure.  Then she remembered the saw, its teeth clogged with cellulose that was orange and yellow.

She burst out the door and ran calling his name.  She ran around the barn as the sun was descending behind the far hills.  She got to the pumpkin, breathing heavily and still calling for her husband, looking about, hoping he would emerge from the brush.  She saw the top of the pumpkin had been sawn off and then replaced like a cap fitted perfectly in place.  The stem was too far for her when she reached up to grab it.  She thought she heard someone behind her and whipped wildly around, but no one was there.  The milking stool!  She ran to the barn and grabbed the stool. She placed it at the base of the pumpkin.  The tip of the sun was just blinking behind the distant hills, and then began that haunting roseate illumination exclusive to the hamlet of Chervale.  She reached the stem and pulled with all her might and the top of the pumpkin came free from its setting.  She almost fell backwards as she let it fall to the ground.  The air was charged with radiant pink as she leaned forward and looked down through the hole to see her husband, writhing and squirming like a naked fetus in an orange amniotic fluid, smeared and bearded, bearing discolored teeth, looking at her with wide and wild eyes, and laughing maniacally.

PB1970

PB1970

Paul Benson was 28 in 1998 when he got his first email address.  He was up late at his sister’s house drinking with her husband after a Saturday barbeque.  Their mother and the other guests had left a few hours earlier, and his sister Marie had stayed up a bit longer talking with them, distractedly, and occasionally getting up to clean bottles and plates from various perches in the house.  Eventually her husband Jason noticed she had been gone from the living room for a dubious stretch and found her leaning, eyes closed, motionless against the refrigerator, a half-empty heineken bottle in her hand.  He helped her to bed, drank what was left in the bottle and cracked two more before he went back to Paul on the couch.  He’d been eager to show Paul his new computer all evening, but had to wait out Marie. 

He grabbed one of the folding chairs positioned around the living room and placed it next to the one at his computer desk and turned to Paul.  “All right.  Let’s check this out,” he said in a bold whisper, with a quick glance at the carpeted stairway.

Paul was no Luddite, but he really had no use for a computer.  (It would be almost ten years before he got one and that would be rendered useless by a smartphone soon after.)  He worked as a landscaper since high school and had just started his own business a year and a half prior.  He had his own truck and a trailer and more than enough business, so much he needed to hire sometimes as many as three dirt-humpers for certain jobs.  He worked long hard days, often went to the local sports bar for burgers and beer, and went to bed before getting up at six the next morning.  He barely watched television and, as he saw it, had no time to “dick around on a computer.”

He was drunkenly impressed, though, as Paul energetically acted as his Virgil and guided him through the circles of late 1990’s internet smut.  There were so many pictures and websites, message boards and listservs, chat lists, list chats, site lists: he had no idea what Jason was talking about and really didn’t care.  But he liked Jason a lot and they had beer and lots of pictures of naked women, so he took his tour, often laughing at his brother-in-law’s absurd enthusiasm.

“If I was single like you are, man, I would clean up on here.”

“What do you mean?  I gotta piss.”  Paul started to get up.

“Wait!  I’m telling you, man.  On here, there’s like thousands.  They post pictures and shit and you can fuck’em.”

Paul let out a laugh and rose. “I don’t even got a fucking computer.  I ain’t gettin’ one either.  I gotta piss.”

He weaved slightly back and forth over the toilet, noticing the dried toothpaste stains on the sink and faucet, his sister’s hair entwining her round brush, the sweetness of the plug-in air freshener.  He wadded some toilet paper from the roll and carefully wiped away the drips he left on the seat, threw it into the bowl and flushed.  He went into the kitchen and took a few more bottles from the refrigerator, but paused to peel back some aluminum foil from a baking dish on the counter.  Marie’s special, the six-cheese-mac-and-cheese, was room temperature and wonderful as he forked away a nice crispy corner and shoveled it into his mouth.  When he got back, Jason was hunched over the keyboard and staring at the screen.

“What do you want as your email username?” he said, still staring straight ahead. 

“What?  No.”

“I’m telling you, man.  It’s easy.  I can do it right…”

“No.  I don’t need an email,” Paul interrupted.  “I don’t have a computer and this is cool and all, but I really don’t give a shit.  I don’t want one and I’ll never use it.”

“Listen.  You never have to use it.  I’ll just set it up for you and if you ever want to, you can.  You will thank me.  Believe me, you will.” 

Paul hesitated.

“You will thank me.”

“Ah, what the hell.”

When Paul acquiesced and dropped into the metal folding chair, he half-listened to the email tutorial he was given.  When it came time to choose a name, Jason explained that most people used some form of their initials and birth year to be recognized and remembered by those who know them, but not their full names.  Usually, they used a kind of code name.  “Especially, if you use this on message boards and shit, you don’t want your real name out there,” he explained.  They ran through possibilities and had a good laugh.  He really liked Jason a lot.  It was a good night and although Paul knew he would never use it, he wrote down the email and password on the back of a business card in his wallet, the card where he kept important numbers such as his ATM password.

Two years later, Paul had grown in several respects.  His business had grown so well, he had to turn away work.  He landed several contracts with businesses, including 15 acres around a medium-sized mall, and hired two full timers who did most of the physical labor.  For larger jobs, he’d get some temporary dirt-humpers to help out his boys.  He spent most of his time supervising, meeting potential clients and giving estimates.  His bank account had grown.  In a little more than twelve months, he had quadrupled his income, took out a loan on a new truck, and was in the process of purchasing an A-frame house just a half mile from a lake.  Also, he had grown physically, from a lean but strong slope-shouldered boy in his twenties to a confident man beginning his thirties.  Less physically dirty and tired from his days, he started to care more about his appearance.  He kept his hair cut, bought nicer clothes.  He even started wearing a gold chain around his neck when he went to meet important clients or a bar on weekend nights.

The small city he lived near began to show small signs of growth as well, when the owners of his favorite sports bar took a chance and opened an Irish pub in a downtown that had seen nothing new for years.  It was a success, so crowded and busy that when another new place sprang up in a rehabilitated firehouse, he was quick to make that place his own.  He was not alone in his thinking since the parking lot and side streets would be crowded with shiny pickup trucks every Friday by 4:30. 

A lot of men, mostly contractors, would crowd around the bar with booming voices and broad, yet controlled gestures.  Most of their shoulders were back as they nodded knowingly during conversations.  Two different sports channels were on televisions at either end of the bar, while a third was on the back wall running 24 hour news.  The bar was stocked with several pretty bartenders in their twenties and a few in their thirties.  They were very good at smiling through stupidity and had incredible endurance being called by name from the patrons, Paul thought.  He was also amazed how the bartenders knew many of the patrons’ names.  Although he himself enjoyed looking at them and their pleasant attention, he didn’t like the way the other men, guys in their forties and fifties, would simultaneously condescend and flirt with the bartenders and waitresses.  These guys had wives and kids, for sure.  Regardless of these minor annoyances, Paul would be there early every Friday, securing himself a spot at the bar, socializing, watching a muted game on television, and enjoying the scene as the place filled up with a happy hour crowd loaded with pretty women.

One Friday, he saw in the mirror a woman standing behind him trying to get to the bar.  He turned and moved his chair over to make some space for her and apologized.  Just then, the bartender looked at him to see if he needed anything and he motioned to the woman behind him.  She nodded to him politely and ordered a gin and tonic.  He smelled a light oakmoss perfume, much lighter than the occasionally heavy bouts of cologne he was used to in that establishment, and had a sense she was beautiful.  He noticed first her slender fingers and lightly manicured nails with a nude polish, on her wrist a classy, loose band.  They turned to each other and smiled and he immediately felt his life was going to get even better than it had been over the past year.  When she got her drink they exchanged another polite smile and she left to a tall table, joining two other women. 

He stayed in his spot for the next half hour, pretending to watch a Yankees/Boston game, but taking every chance to look at her.  She was chatting with her friends, and here and there, a random man would wander over to them.  At one point, an old acquaintance from Paul’s high school sat down next to him.  The guy was now an electrician and kept trying to buy him a shot of Jagermeister while complaining about health insurance.  While they sat and talked, Paul kept watching the woman with her friends in the mirror.  When the electrician was paying his bill, he added on a shot for Paul, gave him a hug and left, trudging towards the rear door.  The bartender brought the glass to Paul and she said, “What can I get you, honey?”  He was confused for a second, then realized she was speaking to the woman who had returned to his left. 

“Another gin and tonic, please.”

Her eyes were a lively, smart blue, and he thought, immediately, she had that kind kind of face, a face so friendly it’s familiar before you’ve met it.  She turned to him and they both smiled again, although this smile was longer and more sustained than polite.  When she got her drink and paid this time, she didn’t leave and he had the same feeling as before.  Without wasting any time he turned to her and said, “How’s it going tonight?” and they started talking.  After the initial, awkward pleasantries, they asked about each other’s work and then eventually their names.  Strangely, her name was Marie, just like his sister.  Then, they spoke on where they were from, along with some talk about television shows.

She was lovely.  She was smart and very quickly began teasing him here and there with an unearned familiarity that showed her confidence, but was so endearing he felt intoxicated by it.  He had been drinking beer for a while and that shot certainly affected him, but he felt elated at the ease of their progressing conversation.  She seemed a few years older than him and she worked in real estate.  She did mostly commercial work, but still dabbled in residential.  Her hair was expensive, he knew that, but had no other way of articulating it to himself, the same as her smart skirt and cream-colored blouse.  And she was interested in him?  Everything felt so right.

He’d had girlfriends, in the past, for about six months a piece, but they all wanted marriage and he had no interest in that.  He felt too young for a family and worked so much.  He knew then, though, this woman Marie was one for whom he had been waiting.  He needed to get her number and see her again.  He’d be careful and not push her to get together that night, she was there with her friends, even though they’d been ignored for a half hour.  He was doing so well, it was so natural, he did not want to screw it up.

Soon, one of the two friends came over to Marie and asked if she minded leaving, since the other two had to move on.  The friend smiled at Paul and they exchanged polite greetings.  Marie said she’d be over in a minute and the friend left.  Marie turned back to Paul and looked him full in the face.

“You know, I don’t know if you’d be interested, but I need someone reliable to prep and maintain a lot of the properties I am selling.  A lot of the time owners let the commercials go into neglect and that’s why they’re selling, so we always need a good landscaper to do some cleanup and spruce them up for sale.  What do you think?  Interested?”

He smelled light oakmoss, felt it was emanating from the dark waves in her blond hair.  Now he could get her number…

“Sure, can I have your number?”

She stopped with a sly look in her eyes; that teasing familiarity had evolved into flirtation.  “You think I’m going to just give out my number to some random landscaper in a bar?”

He had never been clever and his cleverness had been dulled by the alcohol, but even more by her beauty and cleverness.  “Uh, well isn’t this more like business?

She considered.  “Okay.  If this is business, let’s do business.”  She put her hand gently on his forearm.  “I’ll send you some pictures of a property I have now, and you send me back a list of what you would do to it with an estimate.  How’s that?”  She looked him in the eyes again with that lovely smile and removed her hand.

“Sure.”

She reached deftly into her handbag, which he hadn’t even noticed was on her arm, and produced a small notebook and pen.  “What’s your email address?”  He thought, paused, and she said, “You don’t have one?”

“No, I do,” he quickly responded.  Buying himself a second, he said, “I just don’t use it that often.”  He had never used it and didn’t plan on it.  While he was pulling his wallet from his back pocket, she laughed. 

“You don’t know it?”

“I told you, I rarely use it, but I will now,” he said nervously, remembering it was a stupid name, stupid enough, but the whole internet thing was stupid, and she’d probably laugh when she saw it. And as he issued his important numbers card, he realized she wouldn’t laugh.

“Wait, can I give you a business card?”

“Does it have your email address?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well give me the card and I’ll write it on there.”

He handed her a fresh card.

“What’s the address?”

“This is a really stupid email name. And, as I said, I never use it.  My friend set up the account.”  He gave a nervous chuckle and handed her the important numbers card.

“Pussy blaster 1970 at yahoo dot com?  Really?”  He looked at her and chuckled again.  “That’s funny,” she said, but was no longer smiling.

She left with her friends and even though he checked that email for three months, every time he was at Marie and Jason’s, he never heard from her or saw her again.  

Draft 2/19

“H”

            H is an intergalactic entity, an alien on earth if we were to impose on him our human-centered labels.  In actuality, he does not have a name or a gender.  We ascribe these concepts to more easily understand his story.  We are unable to describe him physically because he is not composed of anything our human senses can detect. The closest we can get to describing him is that he is a form of conscious and sentient energy that sees though all time.  It is the human conceit that keeps us from understanding that extra-terrestrials are among us.  Not only do we insist that aliens should be elongated, advanced and brainy hominids, we also believe that they can exist only if we can detect them with our meager senses.  In fact, aliens similar to H have been around us through all human existence, passing through our bodies and our lives on a regular basis: we just don’t know they are there.

            H is a special entity, though.  He is a student of life and he loves it in all its forms and because of his obsession with the beauty of life he is especially consumed with the planet Earth.  It is fact, not human conceit, that Earth is by far the most spectacular planet when it comes to organic life—the only type of life of which our limited brains can perceive.  The few places in the universe that support organic life do so only in short spurts and it rarely advances past unicellular organisms.  Earth, though, is a rich and complicated anomaly that H has watched with fascination for eons.

            Because he can see (again in terms with which we can relate) through all time, his experience with life on Earth is like a bourgeoning symphony.  Proliferations of colors like blossoming wildflowers flare and fade, organic life surging and swirling in churning mists in eternal beauty.

            He enjoys cycling life and doesn’t shrink from the brutality of existence and survival.  With neither the voyeurism of a sadist nor the self-indulgence of a masochist, he watches the dynamic of predator and prey with platonic clarity and comprehends the necessity of these relationships without the affliction of sentiment.  Unburdened with the human instinct to protect the large-eyed and soft he is unaffected by the snake striking the fox pup, the hummingbird stuck in the eager spider’s web.  Death and pain are ubiquitous as is birth and pleasure and H revels in the beauty of all, but he does have a sense of fairness and although he is a passive observer and student of life here on earth he finds himself at issue with, you guessed it, human beings.  H has no issue with the power of a lion over the calf of a gazelle, nor is he bothered by piranha devouring en masse an injured caiman 100 times the size of an individual fish.  If humans were to catch baby rabbits, snap their necks and devour them whole he would be fine with that too.

H’s issues with humans begin with whales and end with elephants.  He witnesses humans developing into creatures like no other with the capacity to kill creatures they shouldn’t be able to even approach.  Why should a creature with dull sight, terrible hearing, no real sense of smell, antennae, a creature that is slow, weak, with no sharp teeth, claws or even fins or wings for that matter hunt and slaughter a forty foot 130,000 pound creature that lives in the middle of the ocean, making the multitudinous seas incarnadine?  Humans can’t even swim for more than a few minutes at a time, yet they are able to destroy these magnificent behemoths.  They slice and powder the horns of dangerous ungulates with impunity.  Nowhere else in the natural world does this hold true.  Ants may gang up en masse on a larger creature, but they are built for it.  They have incredible strength and severe mandibles.  Bacteria multiply and destroy their host but that is their purpose.  But take as many men as you can find and have them, naked, with no weapons or tools, attempt to take down African elephant?  Good luck.  These clever buggers somehow found a way to do such things and for no other reason than for their entertainment.  Destruction of the environment and loss of animal life was acceptable for H.  He knew of the beauty that would rise from the ashes of mankind.  It was really just that humans shouldn’t have been able to do what they did to animals better than them.  That was what bothered H to the point where he broke his code of observation and took action.

He pinpointed a time in Earth to influence the course of events.  In what is currently Africa, Australopithecus were beginning to get cocky.  They were using tools, coming down from the trees, walking upright to see over the grasslands.  They were forming tightly-knit groups and advancing their forms of communication almost to the point of abstraction.  They were beginning to be a threat to the larger animals around them even though physically they were a joke. 

H intervened in the least intrusive way possible.  He found a moment when a matriarchal pachyderm had been startled by a lone, baby Australopithecus.  In this moment the large beast reacted aggressively, as they often did, and stepped on the young creature squishing it to death.  At that very moment H “passed through” her.  As I said before, H is a form of incomprehensible energy that cannot be detected by organic creatures’ senses.  But if he or one of any similar entities in the universe hesitates while passing through a creature, it can stimulate the electrical impulses in a brain and trigger physical reactions.  If you have ever randomly forgotten what you were about to say or do, you were probably “passed through” briefly. It happens all the time.  Other reactions include sneezing, hiccoughs, yawns, and epileptic fits.  And all it took was one pass through this matriarchal beast to change the course of human evolution.

H passed through and aligned himself in a way that produced an intense orgasmic reaction in the animal’s brain at the moment she stepped on that stupid little monkey.  The result was an epiphany.  From then on the giant pachyderm would step on small hominids every opportunity she had, reveling in the feeling it gave her to crush that warm, hairy mass between her toes.  She loved to hear the twig-like bones crunch and the snap and pop of spines and skulls squishing into the terrain.  Frankly, she hadn’t felt that good since early adolescence.  She did it with such glee and enthusiasm that the other deinotheriidae took notice.  Being the sentient and socially imitative creatures they were, others in her herd tried it and felt the surge of excitement and energy that comes with stomping on a little creature, just like kindergarteners with June bugs.  Soon, across the grasslands and in forests one could see elephants in ecstasy twisting a foreleg into the earth and letting out a joyous bellow.  Of course they couldn’t catch all the little monkeys they saw and they didn’t want to.  They still had their own pachydermic lives and concerns: feeding, drinking, protecting their calves from lions and such, as well as maintaining their complicated social lives.  But if one of those little monkeys strayed too far from a tree or was bold or stupid enough to ambulate challengingly across the plain, then that was another story.

The monkeys, for their part, soon realized the dangers in the deinotheriidae and stuck to the trees.  They were more on guard and less bold.  They couldn’t cover as much territory which meant less interaction with other groups, which meant a shallower gene pool, as they say.  They never developed any tools worth more than ones used to dislodge termites.  They never developed tools to injure themselves.  They never developed agriculture or had societies or churches or whaling ships.  They lived in trees, mated and sometimes successfully raised young and died at a decent age.  They spent their spare time eating lice and masturbating and throwing feces at each other.  And they were content.   

Old man Ody

Old man Ody

            Old man Ody adjusted himself in his chair, grimacing from the pain of moving but more from the pain of angry thinking that had dominated his life.  Ten years before, he turned his chair away from the window towards the television.  The twenty-four hour news channel played without sound, but Old man Ody watched the attractive brunette newscaster and the scrolling news feed below her.  Mass shootings in churches.  Celebrity overdoses.  People blown up in sand.  He had been angry and miserable enough in his younger days but now he was alone with cancer with his eyes ingesting more malignancy each day, anger scrolling in unintelligible script through his brain.

            He had been looking for his cat all morning and had given up for the moment figuring it had gotten outside.  It was strictly an indoor cat and he was worried it escaped while he was putting out the garbage.  That mangy thing had been darting out the door into the breezeway the past few weeks and he had grab it and put it back inside a few times already.  He sat and breathed and watched television until a mortgage commercial came on.

            It was almost lunch time and at any moment the mailman would knock once and then let himself inside the house.  They would lunch together for twenty minutes with a bottle of Canadian Club.  Old man Ody only drank at lunch and only drank with the mailman.  They had two glasses each and spoke to each other but not with each other.  Jim the mailman would expatiate on fishing although he hadn’t been out fishing himself in years.  Old man Ody would usually complain about minorities even though his community was profoundly homogenous and he rarely left his home or spoke to anyone but the mailman.  Their conversations usually went like the one the day before:

--Mark’s got himself a fine walleye last week…twelve pounder.  Worm on the bottom, he said.  Worm on the bottom, I said.  Worm on the bottom, twelve pounds?  I never seen a twelve pounder on a worm.  Large shiners’ how ya do it.  Worm on the bottom…

--I’m telling you they need a checkpoint on Altamont Avenue.  The blacks are coming in from there.  In droves.  Nah, a checkpoint with machine guns and all.  That’ll do it.

--Getting a twelve pounder with worms on the bottom?  More like to get a pike than that.  Nah, Marcus’s full of it.  Shiners or suckers.  Twelve pounder.  You know why pikes’ so big in Europe and Germany?  Cause they don’t have finny fish, only soft fish and the pikes gobble’em up an get fat.

--Some black kid showed up at my door with a badge trying to sell me some power or natural gas or something.  Badge looked fake to me.  And I says unless you got a warrant get the fuck off my porch.  And he says ‘Warrant?’  And I said yes, to be arrested or to search my house.  Otherwise, get the fuck off my porch.

            These dueling diatribes would last twenty minutes and Jim the mailman would drain the last bit of flavor from his ice and say, “See ya tomorrow, Ody,” and continue on his route.  Old man Ody would watch the news and nod off for a few hours.

            He opened his back door and yelled, “Fucknose!  Fucknose cat!” and scanned the catless back yard.  He went back and slumped in his chair and looked back at the television.  California was on fire again.  He paused and got up and looked out the window, searching again for the cat.

            “Fucknose,” he mumbled. 

He turned his chair from the television toward the window to the position it was in ten years before when he had a bird feeder.  That did not go well.  His daughter moved out when she was fifteen and when she was twenty and pregnant she came back to visit and thought she might make a connection with her father.  She was mistaken.  She found his irritability and stubbornness impossible and gave up after three visits.  His loneliness vexed her, though, so she bought him a bird feeder and wild bird feed and set it up in the crabapple tree out in his side yard.  “Why can’t you be happy that I’m happy?” is the last thing she said to him.  He enjoyed the feeder but didn’t like the way his cat would jump on the windowsill so he drilled sheet rock crews through the bottom of the sill as needle-sharp stalagmites.  The cat only jumped on the sill once after that. 

            He really liked the cardinals.  He had been retired for three years after thirty working as a custodian at the local high school.  Although he didn’t miss work, he was bored and the feeder was active with life.  Unfortunately squirrels found and dominated the feeder and that he could not abide.  He relieved the feeder of the squirrels with his air rifle.  After a week there was an accumulation of fourteen dead squirrels tossed over his shed into the neighbor’s corn field.  When the squirrels were gone he found the blue jays to be bullies.  They were harder to shoot so he removed the sheet rock screws from the sill to steady his elbows. When he was rid of the blue jays, starlings and house sparrows arrived in droves and he focused much of his day on them.  He stopped using pellets and moved on to BB’s to save time and money.  By the time the feeder was clear of these pests, Fucknose arrived at the back door mewing plaintively with the male cardinal dead in his jaws.

He removed the feeder, dumped it in the garbage, made Fucknose an indoor cat and turned his chair from the window toward the television.

Fifteen was a portentous number for Old man Ody.  Fucknose had been around for fifteen years until that day, both his son and daughter moved out of his house when they turned fifteen, and he moved out of his father’s house when he turned fifteen.  Ody left his father’s house rather than his parents’ house because his mother was killed in Italy during World War II when he was seven years old.  His parents met in the emergency room when she was a nursing intern and his father arrived with a foot he badly mangled after setting a bear trap.  His foot became as useless to him as he was to the armed services.  His mother left father and son for the war effort and was blown to pieces by an Italian shell while dismantling a field hospital.

Old man Ody’s old man worked in a carpet mill and arrived home from work at 7 pm, and that’s when Ody was allowed to enter the house.  He’d spend afternoons with a friend or two and then wait at the picnic table in his backyard until his father arrived.  Rarely, a friend’s mother would realize his situation and invite him in at dinner time, but Ody would always decline, knowing his father’s wrath at potential embarrassment.  When he was finally allowed in the house, he had to wash up, comb his hair and put on formal clothing for dinner as his dad sat at the table, grimy and smelling of benzene and toluene as he forked chunks of butter fried liver and onions into his mouth.  His father controlled a lot.  He controlled the food with a locked cabinet, he controlled the use of hot water with a timer, he controlled the climate of Ody’s bedroom with sealed windows, and even controlled the distribution of toilet paper by allotting three squares for each trip to the bathroom.  Old man Ody’s old man was so intolerable Ody started working at the age of nine and moved out by fifteen. 

He carried on his father’s parenting tradition after his own wife died giving birth to his daughter.  While the doctor was performing a cesaerian an artery was nicked and that was it:  Ody became Old man Ody.  He began with his son who was ten.  The boy needed structure with no mother and he needed to grow up fast and help with his family.  The boy moved out five years later, the girl ten years after that.

Still no Fucknose.  He boiled some egg noodles, drained them and dumped in a can of Hormel chili.  He hunched over his bowl at the kitchen table and munched in silence.  When he sat upright too quickly the pain pierced in his back again and he gasped.

He’d been to the doctor a few weeks prior because the pain was something worth discussing and his urine clouded the toilet water with red.  In the outpatient clinic which fit snugly between a Chinese restaurant and a Payless shoe store, he sat snugly between a coughing woman in a large coat and a heavy man with a soiled white captain’s hat, the television on the wall garish with a morning show.  Captain hat was sharing loudly his history of back pain to the receptionist as she was assisting someone else on the phone, although he said he was really there because of the diabetic sores on his forearms and calves.  The woman coughed violently into a paper towel, rattling the phlegm on her lung walls.  The perky hostess seated at a coffee table rolled her eyes in an exaggerated gesture as her cohost and the studio audience burst out in amplified laughter.  When he was called to the examination room, he stood eagerly.  He hated being examined in any way, but he would have been just as eager to leave that scene if he were going to a proctologist.  The doctor’s fingers were soft and cold like his stethoscope, but his manner was soft and warm.  After some questions during the examination, the doctor seemed not concerned but serious.  He wanted an X-ray and they brought Old man Ody to a back room for imaging.  He returned to the waiting room, but the two other patients were gone and he sat in the corner next to a dusty ficus and under studio laughter.  Back in the examination room a half-hour later, the doctor showed him a mass on his kidney and had the receptionist make an appointment for tests and a meeting with a specialist at the hospital.  When he stepped out into the strip mall parking lot the air was cold and the sun was glaringly noon-bright.  He never went back to that doctor and never met with the specialist.  He disconnected his phone a week later after getting too many follow up calls from the clinic.  He rarely made any calls on his phone anyway and only used it to tell telemarketers to “Fuck off.”

Still no Fucknose.  He sat in his chair.  The television did not change, in fact, it never will he thought.  California will always be on fire and people will always die in sand the same way those in Louisiana will fret over pederasts and floods.  There will always be sinkholes in Florida that swallow chlorine pools and Volkswagens.  Alligators will eat Jack Russell Terriers and mountain towns in Vermont will become islands in need of food drops.

Old man Ody took out the Canadian Club and the ice tray and quickly drank the bottle dry.  He fell asleep in his chair as the television glared silently in front of him and he dreamed he was a boy again but living in his present house.  He heard whining, a dog’s whine, and pushed open the back door and stepped from the breezeway into a bleak back yard.  The whining became louder and more acute as he tried to locate it.  The sound did not hurt his ears but rather the whole of his being.  He was in a panic when he realized it was coming from behind the shed and it was a puppy.  Although he couldn’t see it, he knew it was a yellow lab with brown eyes, a big nose and little puppy teeth.  He went behind his shed and found not a neighbor’s cornfield but an immense cement wall.  In the space between the wall and the back of his shed was a pile of blue dock barrels stacked high.  The whining from underneath the barrels turned to yelping as he desperately tried to lift them and the sharp edges of the rounded ends of the barrels cut into his soft young hands.  The cries grew louder and felt like they were coming from himself as he pulled uselessly and realized they were all bolted together in a complicated pattern, the bottom barrels lag bolted hopelessly in the concrete below.  He woke vomiting onto the front of his shirt.  He trudged into the bathroom, bumping against the door jamb and colored the toilet water and spattered the toilet seat and linoleum floor with crimson urine.  He was in a blur and would not remember anything past dinner.  “Fucknose cat,” he mumbled and stumbled out the back door into the open yard. 

The grass was a light blue from the moon and a 3 am stillness and quiet prevailed, not just an absence of noise but a vacuum of sound with the stillness of eternity.  The barren branches of the black crabapple tree posed cracks in the starless sky, the bright moon cancelling all other light.  He plodded to his shed and leaned his forehead against the splintery cedar shakes, staying in that position half asleep for several minutes, his bare feet insensitive to the frozen grass.  He wheeled around with his eyes wide looking back at his house, light glaring from the open back door.  He thought maybe the cat went in the house, but instead of checking he stumbled towards the back of his shed.  The line of staghorn sumac that delineated the space behind his shed was as empty as the cornfield.  He pushed through the branches and fell onto the frozen earth.  The field was barren, endless dirt furrows like a lesson in perspective, frozen clods with chopped cornstalk poking out like rebar.  Raising himself he stumbled towards the middle of the openness, the moon lighting a disconsolate blue his breath and useless hands that palsied in front of his useless eyes as he began his useless screams in that vacuum of silence and the farther he stumbled from his house into the middle distance, the farther he was from the distant invisible tree line as his screams became immense jabberings lost in the skin of atmosphere and the coldness and immensity of all.

Draft December 2016

The Skaters

The Skaters

            They stepped out from the warmth of their home and into the bitter cold of the street, he holding the canvas bag containing their ice skates and she locking their heavy oaken door.  The sun was already behind the trees and the other houses but its strength was in the undersides of the empty branches as the couple started down the slate plates of the walkway.  It wasn’t late enough yet, but soon the gas lights would illuminate the avenue when the sun was gone completely.  Clear wood smoke heat wavered above chimneys and dark coal smoke issued from others.  As they walked towards the river arm in arm, a motor car rattled down the cobblestones.

“Ghastly,” he said.  “Knowlton idles that beast continually in front of our home and poisons us with that exhaust.  I’m going to have a talk with him the next time he does it.”

“I don’t notice it, dear.  Our windows are sealed for winter.  Besides,” she kidded shaking his arm lightly, “you just don’t like it because it’s not electric.”

“They will be I can guarantee you that.  And these will be before you know it,” he said motioning to the streetlights.  “We’re already in major negotiations in the city…”

“I know, dear.  We saw them in Manhattan and you already told me and we’re not talking about work tonight.  You promised.”

“Are you sure you want to skate?  It’s terribly cold tonight and windy.”

“I just needed to get out of the house and move around a little.  Not for long.  It’ll be dark soon anyway.”

She stopped for a moment to adjust her fox boa snugly under her chin and gave her husband a smile.  He was so serious all the time, a naval man just like her father:  Serious, strong, successful and kind.  He already had a formation of ice in the top of his moustache below his nostrils but she said nothing about it because he would become distracted.  She took his dense woolen arm and they continued down to the river. 

At the base of the iron suspension span that crossed the river was a small shed provided by the river club.  In its shelter from the wind and glaring sun, they laced up their skates quickly with exposed and aching fingers, crisp puffs of exhalation quickly dissipating.  Fastidiously slipping on their gloves with excited yet forced laughter they patted their hands together to remove the chill saying, “Ooh,” ”Oh,” and “Wow!”

They navigated the boards of the small ramp down to the ice carefully and awkwardly and then slid out on to the ice quickly gaining their balance once moving.  It was a dry but cold winter and the ice was ideal for skating, smooth, clear, and eighteen inches thick at least. The sun was now in the trees that bordered the river but still glaringly strong and she loved sun like this before it disappeared in one last “Huzzah” as it were. The wind gusts were strong enough to wobble them, both competent and competitive with their skates, but they glided along gaining speed and holding hands and laughing when one cut to the left or right to surprise the other in a game they had played for years without tire.

There were other groups of skaters, black forms in the waning rays of the sun, single skaters and couples languidly arm in arm.  Two groups of boys at the base of the span were sliding a heavy rock as far as they could between them, yelling and gesticulating at a strong throw as they parted and then chased it down the ice, groaning and gesticulating when the return slide fell short of the other group.  Short but potent gusts of wind challenged all on the ice including the raucous and immense flock of crows downriver calling and flying between trees and ice, black dots peppering the blue and white.

They stopped skating and turned back upwind when they reached the railroad span about a quarter mile downriver by the ice cutter’s office with its distinct trail of wood smoke from the stove inside.  She remembered this spot the previous June afternoon when she expressed how she liked the yellow river lilies on the river’s edge, they were so tall and dense and wild and she would love to get some bulbs to plant in their yard.  She thought if she soaked them enough and put them in the sunny corner of their yard they might take.  Her husband took a trowel and a metal pail and scrambled down through the brambles trying not to grunt as she said, “It’s okay, dear.  I don’t need them…be careful.”  With the pail filled with an appropriate amount of river mud for the bulbs, he clambered back up the slope protecting the protruding stalks and flowers as best he could when he upset a nest of hornets.  He yelled at her to back away but they only had interest in him.  How swollen his face and hands became!  And he never grieved her for it, not once, no matter how she apologized and she really hoped the lilies would take to their yard, wild river lilies so stalwart and vibrant.

“How’re you feeling, dear?” he asked.

“I feel comfortable now we’re moving.  I did need time out of the house tonight.  No matter how I feel it has to be better than when we were here last June.  The lilies?”

“Look up there,” he said pointing up the ice past the metal span.  A small herd of deer were trotting deftly and briskly across the ice from the river’s edge to the island followed by the slouching gait of a coyote.  The sun had now set completely behind the trees and the sky was a brilliant purple and red, the kind of color nature produces only in the sky and in the organs of animals.  She watched the deer disappear into the bronchial trees of the island and then the coyote as well.  There was still considerable light left and some more time to skate as they reached the span and the skating shed when she thought about using a skating sail.  There were two for use in the shed and when she asked her husband he agreed a run or two may be nice.

As they approached the shed the groups of boys were breaking up, some heading to the north shore and some to the south exiting past the shed.  As they entered the ice with a sail one of the boys about eleven years old stopped and regarded them.  He had no skates but boots, black woolen trousers and a dark blue pea coat.  His hair was sweaty and frozen in chunks at the ends, his cheeks were bright red and he had an ample amount of mucus streaming from both his nostrils.  He stared at them with eyes of an almost caustic blue. 

“Hello, young man. Did you have enough of the cold today?”

“Yes, sir” replied the boy as he continued staring at the two.  “Are you taking that out, sir?”

“Why, yes we are.  Just for a breeze or two before dark.”

“Well sir, just be aware they’s thin ice on the far side down there,” he said pointing to the north end of the railroad span.  “Thems ice cutters been taking blocks out but you can’t see because of the thin ice over it.”

“Well thank you, young man.  We are very much aware and that’s why we’ve stayed on this side of the river.  But you can see they have it properly marked.”  He chuckled, “And here I wanted to warn you about the dangers of playing so close to the span because the ice here can be quite unsettled.  Thank you again.  And what is your name?”

“Alex J. Thompson, Jr., sir,”

“You be careful getting home, Alex Thompson.”

“What a fine young man,” he said to his wife when the boy walked up the boards of the ramp.

The river was fairly empty at this point since the boys were gone.  There was a pair skating on the north bank and one person for whom they wanted to wait in case the sail took them too quickly and they should disturb him or collide with him.  After a minute or two, the skater turned left towards the north bank and they had a wide open stretch of river to use the sail.  They positioned themselves and each took hold with one hand an end the sail and with the other the middle support bar.  “Are you ready?” she looked to her husband with a bright excited smile.  Before he responded they were in position and a strong gust took hold of them and they began to hurtle down the ice. 

She felt the power in her own legs and arms as she arched herself to gain speed, her husband doing the same as they glided over the ice faster and faster.  They worked perfectly as a pair controlling their direction as one, reading and adjusting to the other to keep straight much as they had always done in life.  They hadn’t the problems of others of which she heard so often in the gossip of her social groups.  Two weeks prior he did arrive home in the middle of the night senseless with alcohol but that was the only time in the seven years since they moved here that it ever happened.  He had to entertain some colleagues from New Jersey and told her he would be late, but he arrived home at 4 am and knocked over a table lamp in the foyer.  She had to help him into the bedroom and he was mumbling insensibly.  She remembered being glad they hadn’t any children yet.  He smelled fruitfully pungent with whiskey but she did not smell any women on him.  She knew all too well that many of his other colleagues at General Electric frequented the brothels by the lower canal and really believed he wouldn’t have accompanied them there.

When she got him comfortably into bed, she fell asleep beside him and then awoke with him on top of her.  He didn’t speak and she wasn’t afraid but she felt his strength but not his touch.  When he collapsed and began to snore next to her she lay for some time with the blankets off her to cool her skin.  When she woke in the morning he was already cleaned, shaved and dressed in his collar and coat.  He was sitting at a table in the kitchen drinking tea and reading some documents.  When she was in the doorway in her bed gown with her hair tumbled down her back and she stood watching him, he said without looking up, “I apologize terribly that I let the alcohol ruin my judgment and it will never happen again.  I promise.”

“Alright, you let go!” he shouted and she released her end of the sail and they continued to glide quickly, but slowed themselves into a U-turn by the ice cutter’s shack.

“That was exhilarating!” she proclaimed breathing heavily, her teeth bright white and her cheeks reddened.  “One more before we go.”

“Alright, dear.  But just one because it’ll be too dark soon.”

By the time they skated back up to the shed to begin their last run, the river was essentially empty.  The pair of skaters had merged with the single skater to become a trio heading home on the north bank far upriver.  There was still good visibility but soon gaslights would be burning amid the low tree branches above the quiet cobbled streets.  “Okay, one more,” he huffed as they turned the sail into the steady breeze.  They started off slowly and steadily and were trying to arch themselves to gain speed but the wind was not cooperating so when they hit a decent but uneventful speed they began their game of changing direction suddenly to offset the other.  They were about halfway down the river when an exhilaratingly powerful gust took them by surprise and hurtled them at a speed which soon became uncontrollable.  Before they could even communicate with each other they were speeding into the thin ice on the north bank where the ice cutters had been working.

One cold night a few weeks prior the couple was seated in their respective chairs watching the fire in their hearth and listening to the phonograph when her husband admitted to her that he did not believe in God.  She was honestly surprised because they were active at St. George’s, regular attendees and volunteers.  He never showed any indication that he felt this way and she asked him why hadn’t he said anything and also why did he attend so much if he didn’t believe?

“Simply, I don’t want to bother other people with my own thoughts.  I also like the church itself quite a bit.  So it’s really not an issue but that’s how I feel.  I simply see it as impossible, just stories made up by men, and to devote your life, your soul to it?  I don’t mind it, I just don’t believe it.”

“But why haven’t you told me?” she asked turning herself towards him.

“I don’t want to bother you with my thoughts either.  I see how you enjoy it, the comfort it brings you, the good it does for people.  All I’m saying is that I don’t think any of it is true.  Just stories made up by men.”

“Of course they’re stories made up by men but that doesn’t mean they’re not true.  They’re beautiful.  That’s what makes them real.  Or true for that matter,” she insisted.  “I mean it’s like what Keats said about truth and beauty being one in the same.”

“Oh, you and your poetry,” he chuckled.

“But it’s true.  When we are there in that gorgeous stone church you don’t get a feeling?  It’s where everyone is equal and when we sing, I believe it, in it.”

“But really that feeling is just communion and it doesn’t have to do with God’s existence.  Once again, I don’t want to upset anyone and I enjoy it there.  I just don’t believe in the stories made up by men.”

“Those stories are beautiful though and that’s what makes them true.  There may not have been a real Adam and Eve or a Moses but the stories are true.  Last week in our poetry club…”

“Poetry club,” he said

“Yes, poetry club,” she laughed.  “We discussed The Lady of Shallott and it is such a beautiful poem and it is so true.  There was no ‘lady’ and it doesn’t matter if there was.  For all I know there may not have even been a Tennyson because it doesn’t matter.  He wrote in a way the story has a life of its own, it’s remote.  Just like the bible, remote and beautiful and true.”  She gave him a sidelong glance and smiled, “And I didn’t study at Elmira for nothing…”

“Well, I certainly know you are true,” he said leaning back.

When they crashed through the ice she experienced a searing mix of panic and pain.  She was surprised at how low she was in the water, struggling to get her head above the surface amid frantic splashing.  Amid the turmoil she heard her husband exhale low and powerful grunts that rose in pitch.  She felt him push her up against the edge of ice and try to lift her up but it was impossible.  All sensation was burning and she felt her muscles recoil into cramps but she managed to get one arm up on the ice.  She felt him kicking and attempting to heave her up onto the ice but it was futile as all he was doing was crushing her breast and ribcage against the edge of ice.  “Get up!” he screamed as he jostled her desperately, but she was too waterlogged and cramped and no matter how she struggled she kept slipping down.  He kept pushing and trying to power her up on the ice, his breathing painful to hear and his eyes wild in panic and desperation in a way she knew was possible deep in her self, but wished she never had seen it in this life.  She realized he felt the same pain and panic but now he had exhausted himself and must be cramping up as much as she.  She could barely breathe.  She started to scream for help.  She screamed loudly and repeatedly through the pain and panic, through the burning.  And when she started screaming she saw her husband look at her as he slid beneath the water and felt his touch for the last time.

“I’m telling you they was planning to put in a street right here behind us down to the water.  They was planning on it and now they will soon’s there’s thaw,” the ice man was explaining to his son.  They were sitting in the shack with the burning wood stove.

“You hear that?” the son sat up alert.

The father sat up quickly and quietly and listened and they both distinctly heard a woman’s scream.  The son began to scrape the frost from the window to peer out at the river while the father slipped his feet into boots and broke open the door to the shack and stumbled into the frigid evening.  “Get the pikes,” the father yelled.  The two ran out onto the ice towards the figure clinging to its edge and realized they needed a boat to rescue this woman and ran back to the shore, got one and dragged it across the ice.  (The rescue would not be successful.)

Her screams for help became screams of “no” as his body disappeared below hers.  The wool of her sleeve and her fox boa had become frozen on top of the ice. She could barely move at all so she started to sink with him but was tethered by her neck and arm to the surface.  Then she felt pressure below her skates that raised her slightly to keep her from drowning.  “No, no,” she sobbed.  “Don’t.  No.” 

He had braced himself on the bottom and held her by her skates just enough to keep her head above water.  She felt his strength but not his touch.  The wind howled in her ears, her body flexed and cramped without her control and she thought how strange it is that life can simply end.  Like this. She heard shouting but couldn’t respond.  She felt his strength but all she wanted was to feel his touch again, to die with his touch and not his strength.  The railway span loomed above her as she was eye level with the water like some duck.  She looked below and saw the crescent of his forehead and his hair waving like sea grass in the dark water.  She heard yelling and saw figures moving but she couldn’t move herself, her arm frozen to the surface of the ice, she could barely think.  The wind blew strong again as the night grew darker and she began  murmuring, “They come for me with pikes and poles, my love, pikes and poles, they come for me, I feel your strength but not your touch, my love, pikes and poles for me, my love, poles and pikes.”

Draft  September 2016