August to September – @ubree

August

Lil,

The prairie’s rot, even in the morning. Everything is either brittle, hollow, or scratch-dry. I even tried to pour some spirits over a bone I came across. I thought some of it might get soaked up but, no, it ran right off. Lets you know how long a thing’s been dead. I think we’ve all mistaken the poison for fresh blood just to cool the night. Everything feels good and damp for a little while but then we get trapped under its canopy, and then the canopy sways and promises to pour. So we howl at it to give it one back and to stay awake under the gathering weight. A gentle quiet like a mother follows.

The moon gets gone fast. Morning stars, critters, beans, rinds, mud (or what we used to know as “coffee”): we toss it all on the popping flame and everyone turns orange.

There are four of us and only three ponies now. Dub went down hard in the crick and twisted something. Everybody agreed it was best to put him out but no one seemed to have any bullets left, the discovery of which made us see and hear all kinds of peculiar things. (Mind, only some of them real.)

By the fourth day soaking in the same sun my shirt doesn’t smell nearly as bad. I’ve been dreaming while I ride and I’ve almost forgotten everything about the depot.  Dub was trailing us by a train car’s length until late last night. I refused to double up so Jake took Avery on.

Something must have picked Dub off or else he just gave up. Up to Avery to figure things out when we ride in again. When we do, I’ll be sending you this letter. When we do, I’ll figure out about this itch. I tried all day long but I couldn’t picture your ears anymore. We’ll need bullets – that’s really the first thing. I hope that by writing it down it will help me to remember…

I think I cracked a rib laughing when I got your letter. But you mention a photograph and I shook the paper like a goose and nothing like a photograph fell out so I backtracked practically halfway back to the depot. I rode looking so tight in the jaw that nobody even asked what we went back for till we finally stopped.

Funny to look at progress as it vanishes under you. We could see where Dub started to fade and where he gave a good last push right before he dropped down to his knees.

They didn’t ask – they all figured I’d tracked back for Dub and I worked up tears because I hadn’t found you anywhere. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

- @ubree

“I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

-Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell

Dear Daddy (DRAFT – Flossie)

click photo for photo credit

In the morning, there is sun. That’s what Mommy said. Sun in the morning. Her hands play in the light with all its scattered its and bits, can’t catch them, they whip and whirl like little fish through her fingers. I open my mouth to the light, maybe I can eat them, but they don’t taste like anything. It just feels warm, like sitting in the bath. I see them in the morning when Mommy comes to let the sun in. They dance and twirl; they are so tiny tiny tiny. I am so small, but they are smaller still. They are so many, but only in the sun. They are sun babies, Mommy says. I can’t find them in the dark. The moon has no babies.

“Soon Schultz was serving watered-down beer and bad whisky. Soon the numbers players had no chance at all.” FIRST DRAFT- Flossie

source: Mobster Times Magazine (August, 75 cents)

Soon Schultz was serving watered-down beer and bad whisky. Soon the numbers players had no chance at all. It was around this time of night that the flow of alcohol would slow, the mood would heighten and Schultz would wait patiently for the room to crack, its inhabitants like a drowsy monster under the waning influence of a powerful anaesthetic. A little water in every mug, a couple of splashes from the special whisky bottle – the one that sat open in a dusty shaft of sunlight in the muggy back room; it didn’t take much to turn his customers, a bunch of questionable characters to begin with. And turning them was the the main objective. They were better ripe.

“Soon Schultz was serving watered-down beer and bad whiskey. Soon the numbers players had no chance at all.”

Source: Mobster Times Magazine (August, 75 cents)

Soon Schultz was serving watered-down beer and bad whiskey. Soon the numbers players had no chance at all.

The Tuesday band was lousy and the bass player had no respect for Enzo. Schultz would have done something back in the day. Now he sits there all slumped over and snores through the set. Once Dottie even came in with Schultz’s dinner, oven-hot, mitt still on, and shoved it right under his nose. He said something in his sleep that nobody understood and drooled some. Must have been that Schultz hadn’t been home in days because Dottie snatched the plate back and left it in the stairwell where the bums tend to sit and watch the shiny shoes go by. You might have thought the bums had struck gold except that Dottie was a terrible cook. If you could get close enough to her to smell her perfume, though, you might find other reasons to go home.

“Listen, Enzo, En…zo: I’m going to get right to the bottom of this thing.” A finger goes down hard on the table.

“Sure. Don’t be surprised if what you find’s no different from the stuff you scrape off the bottom of your shoe. It’s got to do with Faraway Farm, ManO’War, all the stuff I don’t wanna talk about. ‘Nother splash here, Matt.”

Tap-tap. The bartender advances like a table football player and empties the rest of the bottle into Enzo’s glass, then loads contempt into one eyebrow and slinks off like tomcat.

“Got his wife driving around in a real jalopy these days.” Clyde reaches for his Chesterfields and swipes a couple of times before he realizes they’re not on him.

“Pathetic.”

“Pathetic.”

“No, Clyde. You. You’re in rot shape. And you’re going to be in worse shape if you keep running your mouth. Like some kinda broken dumb hose. Like a leak.”

“I better take one of those…”

“I’ll bet.”

Clyde slides off of his chair, his feet far from the ground. In an effort not to feel like a kid at the adult table, he’s got a lean practiced, but that never helps with this part. Got to keep it together to make the book later. Right now, Enzo’s face is bleeding into mahogany. The drums are glittering and together with the bass, look almost like a Christmas tree. Christmas. That’s a nice clean thought; clean sheet in the breeze. Hang on, hang on…

As Clyde gets past the band and pulls at the back curtain, the drummer clashes the cymbals together in his direction. Laughs go up into thick gray air like bad-weather fireworks. Anger finally wakes Schultz up. It’s about time someone put a stop to the lousy music. Not worth the risk. And that’s all it ever is, thinks Clyde, passing a guy who’s full-on weeping in the back room. All it ever is is running the numbers. He hiccups, drawing a few more sneers from the Backroom Boys as he approaches the men’s. If Schultz knew how to run a business he’d get the girls back. He’d pull his investment at the China Diner. He’d keep his paws out of Faraway Farm.

Clyde decides that this will be his last Tuesday at the pig when he steps into the men’s. Time to focus on the books and putting down a letter to his brother. He wouldn’t mention anything about the poor guy’s shoulder. The poor guy…wouldn’t mention anything about the Red’s season. He’d stick to girls. Time to focus on getting Fran’s married name. Time to make a phone a call. But first, time to figure out what happened to his Chesterfields…

- @ubree

Allegory of the Four Elements

Minute twelve. We’ll start with the apogee girl:

How much longer, because this bird has sharp little feet, she thinks. Also: I can feel his longer looks. Cartoon corn typewriter. Back to me, and back to me, and back to me. Arm heavy…why? Don’t let the cup slip. Nearly nothing in it. Reflection of a cloud in a shallow acid sip. Be still. A real natural at sitting still, thanks to Mom and the bootstrap promise in every inflection. (Speaking of “sips”.)

Red rover, red rover. She tries to make measurements by the fly buzzing between them.  (Her and the girl in the ochre-colored dress with the “where is my chariot” face, bangs to match.) Maybe four or five minutes after they started is when she first heard buzzing. Going for maybe two or three minutes now. Thought it went away but then it came back. Maybe a minute gone? Does no one else have the urge? Everything she should have said last night is gathering in her left hand. It could form a thick anaconda coil – a knockout lump of tense flesh and abetting bone – before he even finishes mixing the colors for her hair. Shake the whole scene down! Take this table and use the whole of it to swat a single fly! Staring just past his un-ironed pant leg, through a thicket (the king loser of thickets, she thinks, because it’s all sun-charred and no good at concealing anything), she spends a second entertaining the idea that she might have been wrong about last night. This elk belly. Hot enough head already, thank you. But no, she quickly backs away from regret.

Papillons, Op 2:7, “Semplice” is looping in her head. She holds the cup up and a single thought reinforces it: down with danger! Plenty old and facing my own. She’ll stay out in the forest tonight if she wants and make up a story if she wants; join the band and back at dawn. She has to see their eyes to know what they’ve seen; she has to hear their weary instruments droning in unison with her own ears. According to her cousin, their gold bracelets jangling gave them away. According to her cousin (who only told her two lies ever as far as she knew), the elder’s scar was made by a bear’s claw.  Stories never satisfy.  But night seems far enough away. “Semplice” is fifty-six seconds long. That was…how many now?

Feeling thin and fickle, it must be afternoon by now, thinks the girl on his far right. (You’d feel the hour in a frock like that.) Ahh, to be the painter, not the painted in this life. But between her baths and long naps, she never managed much of anything at all.

- @ubree

Allegory of the Four Elements – Flossie

Allegory of the Four Elements, by Mark Ryden, 2006

She is always the first to arrive. This does not bother her; it is a simple fact. The cups are arranged neither haphazardly nor precisely, but rather sit, empty in their saucers, awaiting the preferred placement of those to whom they will serve. Four perfect, white cups cradled in four white saucers; they gleam, dazzling in the sunlight.  Positioning her own cup directly in front of her, she runs her hands over the smooth corrugations in the bole, feeling the warmth of the wood under the sun. The tree has many hundreds of years within it; she reads the lines like Braille, closing her eyes. A ring – A family of robins stains the branches like droplets of blood; they lay eggs, grow old; their babies stretch wings, leave; they curl in empty nests and die. A different ring – the river floods, the ground rumbles under hard hooves, soft paws; branches break and are lost in the rising water; the musky, mottled scent of animals passes as they flee to the mountains. She doesn’t move too far outward. There was a time when she would have, but that ache is old and painful, and unnecessary now. She opens her eyes and sighs contentedly; the cups are set; she is happy to have never chipped or cracked a single piece in transit. As if she could.

we’re the cursive collective…

…dotting our i’s, crossing our t’s and looping our l’s.