Excerpt

The last time I posted an excerpt, it was of a paragraph I cut, as it was a little too over the top.

This one I'm keeping.

When he got the call in the middle of the night he packed the barely-awake kids into the back seat and drove to his mother’s home, expecting to be greeted by ambulances and the flashing lights of fire trucks, but of course they had all left by the time he had completed the three hour drive. Pools of fog lay in the pre-dawn fields and shallow valleys between his house and hers; months later now and he still thinks of grief in this way, laying low to the ground, indistinct, inert. He remembers how during the drive he wanted to gently pull the car to the side of the road so as not to wake the kids, get out and lie down in it, cool grass against his back, damp air against the skin of his face. How he wanted to be blanketed by fog, asleep in its arms, the rest of the world disappeared into the wide hazy distance forever.

Wolves, Books, Moons

Things are better, by the way, since my last post. They tend to do that. They get better. No more images of wolves peering in from the edge of the darkness. I'd be less vague were it my own life, but it is not. Or at least not mine alone.

So, I'll be vague. But things are better. Trust me.

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Finished an excellent book last month, good enough that it deserves a passing mention. Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is a dystopian novel set in the very near future, in the waning days of the United States, a country that is broke, stuck in a military quagmire in Venezuela, and run by one party: the Bipartisan party. People are benumbed by commerce, by social media, glued to iPhone-like apparati that continually stream credit ratings, net worth, and f*ckabilty rankings to the masses.

The words alone and lonely seem to appear on almost every page.

No one reads books anymore. People find them smelly.

It's a very funny book, and very telling satire, but the truth worth of the book is that a turn of the page can find the book leaping to melancholy, to anger, to delicate lyricism.

Anyway, this isn't a book review, merely a recommendation, so I won't blather on. But you should read this.

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My favorite moon, Saturn's Enceladus, has a unknown power source near its South Pole, one that vents geysers of water ice into Saturn's rings from huge cracks in the ground called the "tiger stripes." They've known that for awhile. What's new is that Cassini (the space probe currently orbiting Saturn) has found the power source is 10 times more powerful than anyone expected. Here's the key quote from the JPL report:

“The mechanism capable of producing the much higher observed internal power remains a mystery and challenges the currently proposed models of long-term heat production.”

Trippy. It churns out 15.8 gigawatts of energy, the equivalent of 20 coal-fueled power stations. What's hiding under those tiger stripes? Stay tuned.

The Big Fat Dog And Other Dogs

My oldest daughter is calling this her first novel. The happy implication being there will be others.

There is a darkness at the edges of this that as a writer I like very much, but as a father I find disquieting. I'm trying to get used to the tension between these roles, as this surely won't be the last time I feel it. Life can be a dark ride. They've seen more than their share of that already.

I like that she gave the chapters individual titles. Not a new trick by any means, but it is one she learned from me.

And that last sentence of chapter 3 is simply good, strong prose.

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The Big Fat Dog And Other Dogs
By Shay

Chapter 1

The Dog Ran Away

So it all started with the dog. It was on a leash. The dog was fat. He was so fat that the leash broke and he ran away. The owners were sad. Their names were Lee Ann and Jade. The kid Jade cried all the way to school.
It was really sad. I had to go home. It was in the newspaper that his name is Marley. The next day the guy found the dog called the number the number changed. They had moved to California. So the he drove to California but they weren't there.
The person found the owner. They were happy.

Chapter 2

They were happy

The family was so happy. The people saw the tag. It was the dog. They were so happy. They played with the dog all day long and gave him a bath.
They got a new dog because their dog had died. They braided him. The second dog was named Mane. They were so happy. They could not stand it at all. They loved it so much they got more and more dogs. They sure love dogs. They had 5 dogs. They played with the dogs all the time. It was the dogs’ birthday. They had so much fun at the birthday.

Chapter 3

The vet

The dog was sick. We took him to the vet. He was ok. We love the dog so much. The dog had babies. We kept the puppy. We played with the puppies.
They are as small as a hand.

Chapter 4

The dogs had died except for the puppy. And the puppy was safe. The dog has food and water. He lived happily ever after.

The End

Gravity's Rainbow

No, I haven't read the book. Hux has, but she is more tenacious than I. I gave Pynchon's V a try last year, and never even made it to the 50 page mark. I find him impenetrable. Henry James level impenetrable.

I digress. I'd been debating building one of those Estes rockets for a few months, and we finally pulled the trigger last weekend. Bought the kit, built 2 rockets Friday night (I built, the girls painted), let the glue dry overnight. Pictures are below; dig that crazy spaceman. I love how art begets art: you start out painting a rocket and end up making clay spacemen. Notice the clay heart and arrow off to the side.





The next afternoon I, Hux, the girls, my Dad, and a couple tag-a-long kids from the neighborhood, drove out past the city limits for our first test flights. Ten minutes of setup for 90 seconds of excitement, and well worth it. I doubt I'll become an enthusiast, but it sure seems like a fun way to spend a summer afternoon. Next up: double stage rockets. Woo-hoo!

Plus, I got to sneak some science in, about Newton's third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Next time out I'll talk about parabolas, described so elegantly by Pynchon as "gravity's rainbow".

Just because I haven't read it doesn't mean I don't catch the reference.

Solstice

A new one. It's been awhile.

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Solstice

The hard gray wall of winter had set in, with the flush of Christmas and New Year’s long past, the sugar fueled rush of Valentine’s Day still weeks away. Toby’s morning was typically harried, with his wife late for work and in the shower, his eldest daughter glumly searching the dresser drawers and clothes baskets for something to wear to school, his youngest home sick, huddled under a blanket on the couch watching old She-Ra cartoons, sniffling and sneezing, coughing with the violent shudder of a car backfiring. The doctor had told them both repeatedly not to bother with over-the-counter cough medicines, they did no good, chicken soup was just as effective, but how could you help yourself, how could you not try something, try anything, with the bark of each cough blasting through the brainstem like a guilt-ridden jolt of electricity.

When his wife was out of the shower and keeping half an eye on the girls, he made his way out to the car to make a run to the drugstore for cough medicine. The cold hit him like a rock to the chest. The trees and power lines were covered in ice, the sky was cloudless, a perfect blue. The sun hung low in the sky, shining directly down the center of the street as if it were Stonehenge at solstice, and Toby had to walk with a halting, old man’s gait, careful of the slick patches of ice amid the piles of snow. The car door was frozen in place, but flew open with a loud crack when he threw all his weight into the act. The report reminded him of his daughter’s cough. He started up the car, got out and scraped the ice off the windows, the fin of thrown crystals dazzling as stars in the sunlight. The car was reasonably warm by the time he was done, the heated seats doing their job and seeming not at all the luxury he had pegged them as when he and his wife had bought the car two years ago. He turned on the radio and eased out of his parking spot.

The first stop sign at the end of the block showed him in certain terms how slick the streets were when he hit the brakes and the car floated dreamily past the stop sign and into the cross street, barely even slowing. Toby sat at the wheel rigid with adrenaline and fear, a spectator. Luckily, the street was deserted. He drove to the drugstore at a crawl, feeling like that same halting old man who had walked to the car minutes ago but unwilling to speed up to gain a few relatively unimportant minutes. There was a traffic light at the busy intersection just before the store; he had to began pumping the brake pedal twenty yards before the lights to get the car to stop in time. The sun, now directly behind him, cast the low shadow of his car into the junction before him.

A rumpled young man and woman shivered at the entrance, hands out, eyes down. The car in the lot directly behind them was a swaddle of clothes, fast food wrappers, wrappers, sleeping bags; it appeared to be a makeshift home. Toby spotted what may have been a child’s booster seat peering from the back seats, started to look closer and decided he didn’t want to know. He reached into his pocket, held out a dollar midway between the two of them, not even noticing which one of them had taken the money as he hurried past them toward sliding doors.

It was warm inside the store, soft jazz playing, employees regarding him with half-awake smiles. Toby stood before the rack of bottles and pills, lozenges and inhalers, and finally picked the bottle directly in front of him because it was cheap and large and filled with brightly colored liquid, and because if they didn’t do any good anyway why did it matter which one he picked? He paid for the medicine, pulled his coat tightly around him, and walked out into the cold. The couple at the door were gone, but a sweep of the eye found them trudging down the icy sidewalk to the liquor store. Toby felt a momentary disappointment, but it didn’t last. He hadn’t told them how to spend the money. They hadn’t offered. You did what you did, Toby thought. You put your actions into the world and hoped for the best but it was out of your hands the second you let go of it, out of your hands and into the world.

He hoped that hadn’t been a child’s booster seat in the back of their car.

He got back in his own car, now cold but still so much warmer than the outside air, cranked up the engine, and rolled slowly out of the parking lot. When he turned onto the main thoroughfare he was greeted with a bright blast of sun from the vanishing point well beyond the end of the street, straight into the windshield and bouncing off the glass, the ice, the snow, the polished metal of the hood. Stonehenge at solstice. He was blinded by sunlight.

The traffic light hanging above the intersection was still visible as a vague dark shape, and he thought it was green but couldn’t be sure. He looked to the sides but was met with a featureless glare; no way to tell if anyone was coming, from the left or right. Or, if they were coming, whether they saw him. Or, if they saw him, were able to stop in time. No way to know. All he knew was that the intersection lay between him and his home, where his life was, where he was needed. He looked up, tried one more time to get a read on the state of the traffic light and failed, looked to the left and the right and saw nothing but the couple from the drugstore, standing patiently in the cold for the doors to open. The liquor store didn’t open for another two hours. It was going to be a very cold two hours. Out of your hands and into the world, he thought, easing up on the brake pedal and ever so gently pressing on the gas, bracing for calamity as he entered the junction as blind and vulnerable as a newborn, he on one side of the street and the whole wide world on the other, waiting.

Jetsam

I'm writing again, though still daunted by the idea of rewriting the novel.

Here is a paragraph that ended up on the cutting room floor, or the recycle bin, or wherever pieces of writing go that never see the light of day. It's a little hyperbolic, though it does have a nice rhythm working for it.

Jetsam, incidentally, is cargo that has been purposely discarded. Flotsam is unintended wreckage of a ship or its cargo.

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People kept telling him to go see a counselor, go see a therapist, a priest, an old friend; get drunk, get laid, go to church, go for as walk, take up a hobby, lose a bad habit, and he wanted to give one or even all of these things a try, he really did, but never pulled the trigger. It was just too tiring to contemplate. Life was a river, they’d say. Life was a garden that needed careful tending. And the nature imagery resonated, albeit in unintended fashion, as life felt to him like half-starved grizzly bear that had wandered into camp late at night looking for food and found the beer instead, drank all of it and then found the whiskey, smashed the bottle to open it and got the glass shards in his throat and was now stumbling through the campfire, drunk and angry and hungry and mean, fur singed and stinking, mouth agape with drunken hunger, eyes burning demon red as the Damned Thing staggered in the dark toward the flimsy, listing tent where he and his family lay sleeping.

Rising

As most of you who read this blog probably know, our two girls are adopted, and came to our home at the ages of 18 months and 3 years. We've always been pretty open with them about the process, though what we tell them about their parents is necessarily abridged. There has been one exception to this: they have a sister. Somewhere.

We didn't tell them right away. I'm not sure why we held that one huge piece of information back. Partly to spare anxiety on their part, partly because we know so little about her. No name, no age, no city.

Regardless, we decided to tell all this past summer. We told them they had a sister, and that we knew nothing about her, not even her name. We took out the deep pile of documentation and paperwork and let them see it, take it to their rooms, read it. My office functioned as kind of a lending library for this bit; they had to turn in what they had to get any more (there were detailed and sometimes painful histories of their bio-parents buried inside, but you had to really dig to find it). They were obsessed with the papers for awhile. After a couple of weeks they quit checking out the documents, seemingly forgetting about them.

Hux and I combed the stack for any info about their sister in there, and found not a single word. We called Social Services, got no answer, called back and got no answer, called again and finally got a callback months later with some basic info: name, who she lived with, where they lived seven or so years ago when all this went down.

We told the girls their sister's name. Told them the town she lived in back then. The pattern stayed the same: they were tripping over their words asking us questions, then the questions slowed, then stopped.

Thst's not to say they don't think about her. I suspect they think about daily. But there are no more questions to ask, nothing to say. Their sister's presence has moved beyond words.

So. The reason I bring up any of this is because a metaphor presented itself to describe the experience. I just finished China Mieville's clever genre-bender of a book, Kraken, which, amid all the very weird goings-on, talks of a monstrous being, deep under water, in silent motion, unseen, its true shape unknown. The thing is worshiped by some as a God. And it is rising slowly toward the surface, this huge mass. Rising. And when it breaks the surface, when its true shape is known, the world will change irrevocably.

Now that I reread that last paragraph it sounds oddly apocalyptic, and while I did not mean for that note to sneak in there, I won't edit it out. There will be a day when their yearning will break the surface, and they will want to seek out their sister, meet her. There is no way to know how that will go. There are a million ways in which it can go badly. And a handful of ways where it can go well. All I know is that we'll help them find her, if they ask for our help. And we'll be there afterward, whether in celebration or in sorrow. Or, likely, both.

Horse Latitudes

I was in a parade last week. For Thanksgiving I cooked a turkey, dressing, gravy, which le Huque pronounced to be "a poem." Fixed a toilet. Weather-stripped a door.

Beyond that, not much else.

My Mom died in September, something many of you reading this already know. If not, well, she did, and now you know. Consequently, the wind has left my sails.

With Thanksgiving behind me, I can feel the mighty suck of the Christmas vortex, so in the coming couple weeks I'll be busy with all that hoopla. Lights. Tree. Presents. I enjoy that stuff, I really do. So that will, very soon, pull me out of these horse latitudes (allegedly that part of the ocean where the wind goes dead, and the sailors must throw horses overboard to lighten the load; almost certainly an apocryphal etymology, from what I've read this morning, as they would have eaten the horses rather than drowned them).

I'll spend what little down time I can find with a blanket and a comfortable chair and China Mieville.

Have a happy holiday.

The Future of American Fiction

I helped with the spelling - note curious is spelled "cireis" in the illustration - but all words and pictures are K's.



The Cat
written by Kaylene Wood
illustrated by Kaylene Wood



I once had a kitten named Blake. I named my kitten Blake because he was a blake cat. And was very curious.



After that he accidentally ate dog food and got sick because he ate dog food.



He was very tired and so he dropped on the carpet.

The Jiffy Pop Effect

Got a new story up at Fiction@Work. Baby Teeth. An early version of it appeared on this blog. It's a little cleaner now. I'm fond of it.

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The novel rewrite is going well. About a quarter of the way through. Two chapters cut, one major character cut, and another seriously downsized.

What's making me feel good is how the surviving chapters are plumping up (I think of this as the Jiffy Pop effect; do they even make Jiffy Pop anymore?), even as I cut large chunks of the novel away. Stories, regardless of length, kinda harden after awhile. They turn brittle. You pick apart a sentence and realize your changes affect three other sentences later on. It's been too long, there's too much distance. Happily, the novel is still alive, still reacting to changes, still capable of surprising me. New character details, new plot points, more dialogue. At one point two characters just started talking to each other at the end of a chapter. I let them. I'm glad I did. I learned from them.

A concession I am making to the marketplace is to give the couple in the novel a more traditional love story. I'd strenuously avoided that during the first two drafts, as I felt it was important thematically for the two lovers not to communicate well, to show their interactions as stumbling and incomplete. I realize that's not a very satisfying experience for the reader.

Now I'm beginning to see how to approach the theme of disconnection from the other side, by showing those rare and meaningful moments when they do connect as a contrast.

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The Copenhagen Suborbitals attempted manned space flight last weekend was a scrub, but they vow to continue, and launch next year. They designed their own rocket, their own submarine, their own floating launch platform. They'll figure it out.

Pg Up

I mentioned in my last post that it took me 2 hours to get through 6 pages of a rewrite of the Novel. Didn't write Tuesday, as full tilt first-full-day-of-school craziness took over the household. Hilarity ensued.

Last night, I didn't feel like writing. Dead tired. And yet. I made myself do it, and got through the second half of the first chapter, and the entire second chapter. In addition to the feeling of accomplishment, I'm beginning to see a path where dumbing down the novel might make it a better novel. More focused. Leaner.

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My Page Up button quit working yesterday. This morning I pried the little plastic key off, blew off a bit of something that had been trapped underneath the key (I'm guessing a Cheetos crumb; I'm a pig). I've been struggling ever since with getting the little plastic key reattached to the keyboard. It is consuming my workday. Your tax dollars at work.

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Snail news. Since I last reported on the miraculous reappearance of the snail, it has disappeared and reappeared and disappeared again. And just yesterday, it reappeared yet again! It's back in a jar of moist peat moss and rocks and an errant baseball card. It is no longer named Prince and Princess, however. It is now named Pedro Martinez. After the baseball card.

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More Cassini: this picture is of an unnamed moon causing ripples inside Saturn's A ring. A movie is here. Notice there are ripples on either side, traveling in opposite directions. Cool, huh?

Crawling Bats, Flying Turtles

Back to school yesterday. During the weekend we bough school supplies and new shoes, instituted wildly unpopular earlier bedtimes. About 10 p.m. on Sunday the girls ran into the hallway screaming. Bat! Bat! We saw a bat in our rooms!

Hux and I were at first dismissive (it's just a bad dream, go back to bed), but there were so adamant about it, and we did have a bat sighting several weeks back (crawling along the carpet of the dining room no less, a seriously trippy sight to see). So. Hux and the girls dragged their blankets and pillows downstairs into the living room, and slept huddled around the couch til morning.

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Started the third rewrite of the New Novel on Monday as well. Getting rid of a major character, big changes to another one. Smoothing out the abrupt shifts in tense and point of view I was so proud of when writing it. Yes, I'm dumbing it down a tad. Yes, I'm hungry to get it published.

The results of my first day of rewrites? Two hours to get through the first 6 pages. Yikes.

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New school year, new draft of the novel, and who better to guide us through these new beginnings, these challenging straits than Gamera, friend to all children, protector of boy scouts. In the original Japanese, with English subtitles. Come on, Space Monsters, bring it on! Let's cut and poke!

The Unlikely Tenacity of Weeds

Backyard existentialism.

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The Unlikely Tenacity of Weeds

I rarely mow my lawn. No need to. The relentless sun, the lack of rain. The weeds have an easier time of it than the grass, dandelions, bull thistle, henbit, they grow faster, are more hearty. No bother, the weeds are easy to control, and colorful. I do not use poisons or herbicides. I pluck them by the roots, or ask my daughters to pick them, a penny a stem. I feel no need to eradicate them. I like bio-diversity. We maintain a cautious truce.

I fight a losing battle with the junk trees, the alley trees, the ones that go by the giddily euphemistic term “paradise tree.” They are voracious, predatory, tenacious. Nothing can be done to eradicate them, and only with great effort can they be fought to a stalemate. So. I fight. Weekly. If I do not they will take over the front yard. I stoop to pull them out by their shallow roots, foot by foot, limb by limb, I stoop until my back cries in pain, stoop knowing they will be back in one more week, only to be battled again.

I rented a roto-tiller and plowed under a large section of yard this spring, in order to plant a garden at the side of the house, and pulled out a large swath of the tree’s root system, the roots shallow, misshapen, bulbous as fetuses. I piled them in a unlikely tangle on the sidewalk; they look like something found in a carnival sideshow bell jar. I wondered at the time, and continue to wonder often, why weeds have not taken over the world, with their efficiency, their unstoppable energy. It is a wonder there is room for other life to thrive. But other life does thrive, I only have to look around me to see it to see the improbable flowers mixed in the weeds, the wild roses, the tulips, the day lilies. Most I do not know the names of. This house is over a hundred years old, with perhaps a dozen owners, each with their own garden, their own floral tastes, the seeds now mixing through one century and into the next, intermingling, hopelessly tangled, a history told in a confusion of perennials.

I finish plucking trees from the front yard, I turn the wheelbarrow of treelets around and head for the compost heap. So much wasted energy, but the trees make for good compost fodder, so perhaps it is not wasted at all. Perhaps nothing is wasted. My hands smell of the sap, an unpleasant cloying scent that will not easily leave the skin. It is hot. I am irritable. My back hurts. I stop at the garden by the side of the house to turn on the faucet, pull the hose toward the dry cracked garden earth, it catches on an errant stump, I flip the hose and watch the wave travel the length of it, leap lightly over the stump to freedom. In some way this small victory me feel better, as does the feel of cool water on my hands, my feet my shins. I move to the clutter of the back yard. Naked muddy abandoned dolls. Sports equipment, water toys. Scooters. And yes, this is a family of four, but we have seven bikes, seven, four current bikes, two outgrown but still used by neighbor kids or when one of the main bikes gets a flat, one still too large but bought to be grown into, like shoes, like clothes, like college funds. I disentangle the wheels and handlebars and kickstands, put them away behind the shed one by one. The dolls I leave in a disturbing heap by the back door for my daughters to pick through. So much broken, so much left behind. I lug all the sports equipment, the water toys into the shed, bats and balls and rings and racquets, pools and tubes and wiggly water worms. Bats are bent, balls discolored and lopsided, the tubes and pools leaking air the moment they are filled with air.

I pick my way out to the compost heap. At our previous house I built a compost bin that was over-full mere weeks after building it, and so built the one in this house extra large so as to accommodate us and still find it is nearly full. So much waste, so much discarded, so much left behind, and yet so much remains, we are overfull. Shoes, clothes, college funds. I dump the trees into the heap, then shovel the bottom of the heap toward the top, cycling the trees in with the leaves, the weeds, the eggshells, the coffee grounds, all of this will go into the garden next Spring; some will cycle back into the heap as leaves and vines and the chopped ends of withered vegetables. Perhaps nothing is wasted. I look back across the back yard, the lawn, the side garden, bursting with life. Eggshells, baseball bats, discarded dolls, tangled bikes. Overfull. So much discarded yet so much remains, too much, this stubborn gift of life, this refusal to hew to boundaries, this ridiculous prodigal giving, the unlikely tenacity of weeds.

Hearing Voices

This item has been languishing in my bookmarks since January: Many children 'hear voices'; most aren't bothered.

The gist is that 15-ish percent of kids hear imaginary voices, and that the majority of the time, the voices don't interfere with their thinking or cause them much distress*. The voices aren't linked to schizophrenia, violent behavior, or any real ill effects. It's part of their lives. Part of how they think.

What struck me at the time is how much of my own thinking could be framed as "hearing voices." Don't worry, the neighbor's dog isn't telling me to kill, aliens aren't informing me of imminent planetary destruction. But I often think in a babble of voices: friends, family, voices from books and movies. Often it's a dialogue between me and the other voice. When I'm writing I hear character's voices talking. Sometimes I talk to a younger version of myself (usually asking him "what the f@ck were you thinking?"). And while I can't speak for the inside of anyone's brain but my own, I'd wager most other people are the same way. Linear, orderly, point A to point B thinking occurs in bad novels and Psych 101 classrooms. Which is why I don't like most interior monologues in fiction. Easy. False.

The unpredictable, wandering minds of real people, engaged in real life, is more subtle, more fractured, and much messier.

I like messy. I trust messy.

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* an interesting footnote: "Although urban children were less likely to hear voices, they were more troubled by them."

Independence

My fiction writing has been dark of late. Not sure why.

Well, that's not entirely true. Anyway.

Much of this one is simply straight reportage.

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Independence

Hot and humid 4th of July in Houston, gunmetal stratus clouds scudding low overhead. By late afternoon my brother-in-law’s kitchen table had a large mound of fireworks on it, as people stopped by to drop them off. The beer and liquor were left on the floor next to the table.

The party started around dusk. We drank and smoked and played pool in the rec room above the garage, and at surprisingly regular and increasingly joyless intervals the party would spill out onto the end of the driveway, where we set off fireworks, using cigarettes to light them. I had quit smoking months earlier and found the cigarette moving up to my lips unbidden, every time I held one. As the night wore on, and people got progressively drunker, the fireworks went farther afield, and when a bottle rocket hit the picture window of the house across the street the old people who lived there threatened to call the cops, but never did. Or if they did, the cops had better things to do. There was a fight on the lawn around ten, though it didn’t last long. Around one a.m. an M80 blew up in some guy’s hand, and in the stunned silence after the blast they got a dishrag around his hand and pushed him into the backseat of the car and drove weaving down the road toward the hospital.

It rained in the night. The next morning I woke up late, hungover and exhausted, to the loud cold buzz of the air conditioner and a vicious argument between my sister and her husband downstairs. I looked out the second floor window to the front lawn, littered with beer cans and cigarette butts, the spent firework casings below blackened, crushed, sodden, like dead birds.

Crazy Eyeballs

I have another flash up at Everyday Weirdness: Feral. I like this one. Kinda Twilight Zone-y. In a good way.

Started a long short story this weekend, so no more flash fiction for awhile. May be the start of something longer.

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We went to the city fireworks this weekend. The music was some pleasantly bland new-age-y thing, and while I prefer old school marches, the fireworks themselves more than made up for it. Several kinds I'd never seen before. Very delicate, less over-the-top bombastic than what I'm used to. Which might explain the musical choice.

When we got back home we lit our own fireworks with a few of the neighborhood kids. Sparklers and small fireworks we bought at a tent earlier in the day (my favorite is something called Crazy Eyeballs). Hux and I lit them, with five kids dancing and screaming in the noise and light and smoke. A small perfect moment. You could almost feel the folds of your brain storing the memory.

Six years ago, on July 2nd, the girls came to our house. Being so close to the 4th, there were loud fireworks in the dark that night, and the next several nights. I cannot fully imagine how frightening that must have been, a strange new house, with strange new parents, and loud noises outside the windows as they slept. They cried. Of course they cried. Wouldn't you?

Things are better now, but shadows of those fears remain. After the front yard fireworks our youngest had an angry meltdown, no doubt from all the excitement of the long day. She had to be calmed down and consoled before we put her to bed. It's alright. We held her, sang her a few songs. 500 Miles. Blowing in the Wind. I carried her up the stairs. We tucked her into bed. Good night.

Horizontal

So.  Had a great time for the first 4 innings of the Father's Day baseball game Sunday.  I was at the concession stand getting hot dogs and beer, turned around to get some ketchup packets and snap!, a sharp pain in my back, like a knife.  It was hard to even breathe, let alone walk.  Took me several minutes to get my composure, then I made my slow and painful journey back to the seats.  Incredibly, I took the beer and dogs back with me.  No spills.

We stayed for the rest of the game.  I was relatively pain-free as long as I remained standing, supporting myself against the railing.  There are worse places to throw out your back than in the middle of a baseball game on a gorgeous summer afternoon.  And the Sky Sox beat the Las Vegas 51's, 13-4.  It was a fun day.  Got to play catch on the field with the girls before the game. They got free baseball gloves. And they're actually pretty good gloves!

Getting out of the stadium and into the car was pretty dicey (another reason we stayed: avoiding the crowd).  Out of the car and onto the downstairs couch (where I've been ever since) was similarly difficult.  And the first night was painful and spasm-riddled and not something I ever want to experience again.

Better now.  I can't get up or down from the couch without help, and pain.  Lying motionless I'm fine.  And I can lie on a couch motionless with the best of them.

So.  I'm reading undemanding fiction and watching whatever movie I can snag on the DVR.  Last night was Dreamcatcher.  Absolutely awful.  I rather enjoyed it, but that's just the muscle relaxants talking.  Tonight is Ride With the Devil, which is about a period of the Civil War I'm pretty familiar with.  Ang Lee directed it, which bodes well.  Jewel is in it,  which does not.

---

p.s.: Got another story published.  Baby Teeth, in fiction@work (an early draft is here).  Had to tussle with the editors about the last sentence.  I like tussling with editors.  It means they give a damn about the story.

Baby Teeth

I wrote this as a 10,000-ish word novella some years back. It had its moments; overall it was a little misshapen, a little unwieldy. I condensed it to a paragraph last week, and like the result better. If I had simply done it this way in the first place I coulda saved myself a summer of writing.


Baby Teeth

Her name is Betty Bowens, though all the neighborhood kids call her Betty Bones, and she lives in the old house at the end of the street with her three dead children. They are dead; she is not, merely old, very old. Her children died of different causes, at different times: hit-and-run, cancer, suicide. Two were adults when they died, the cancer and the suicide. Her boy Tristan, poor lovely Tristan, he was the hit-and-run, he died at five. But here in her house, in Betty Bones' house, they are all children again, all toddlers again, their trikes endlessly squeaking down the sidewalk, their food endlessly spilling down their bibs. They need comfort when thunderstorms loom, cold washcloths on their foreheads when they are hot with fever. They gather in the living room every Christmas morning. They blow out candles on birthdays. They are losing their baby teeth, over and over again, forever smiling at her with loopy gap-toothed grins. She finds the teeth in odd places. Tilting in the drain of the bathroom sink. Rolling in the backs of kitchen drawers. Curling in the gray tendrils of her hair as she combs it out at night. She keeps them all in a fragile teacup perched on her windowsill, the cup now filled to overflowing, tiny enamel pearls dropping to the porcelain saucer below like tears, bone white and shining.

No (pause)

I’m not sure what this is. Not a poem, exactly. Not even fiction really. It’s based on conversations we’d hear the girls have on the baby monitor late at night as they lay in their beds, years ago, when they first came to us (an earlier version of this appeared here a couple years ago).

Been thinking about adoption quite a bit lately. About the notion of the Other Mommy. Of sisters having whispered conversations in their beds. I believe a New Novel may be taking shape around this.

No (pause)

Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
What’re you thinkin?
About Other Mommy.
What about Other Mommy?
Where she is.
Where is she?
In the Other House. She lives there.
Can we go there?
Yes.
Will you take me there?
No.
Why?
We live here now.
(pause)
Can we go there tomorrow?
Yes.
Where Other Mommy is?
Yes.
(pause)
Where is Other Mommy?
Across the ocean. She lives there.
Where the war is?
Yes.
Can you see her?
No.
Is she in a hole?
Yes.
Can we go there?
Yes.
Will you take me there?
No.
Why?
We live here now.
(pause)
Are there holes there? Where the war is?
Yes.
Is that where the dead people go?
Yes.
In the holes.
Yes, in the holes.
(pause)
Will you take me tomorrow?
Take you where?
Where Other Mommy is.
Yes.
When?
Tomorrow.
To Other Mommy?
Yes.
(pause)
Where is Other Mommy?
In a hole.
She’s in a hole?
Yes. She lives there.
She lives in the hole?
Yes.
In the Other House?
Yes.
A hole in the Other House?
Yes.
Can she talk to us?
Yes.
What will she tell us?
It’s time to go to sleep.
(pause)
Okay.
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
Is that other man with Mommy?
No. He’s gone.
Is he in a hole?
Yes.
In the Other House?
Yes.
In a hole in the Other House?
Yes. He lives there.
With Other Mommy?
No. He’s in another hole.
A different hole.
Yes.
Different from Mommy’s.
Yes.
Can he talk to her?
No.
Can he talk to us?
Yes.
What will he tell us?
It’s time to go to sleep.
(pause)
Okay.
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
Is it time to go to sleep?
Yes.
I’m going to sleep now.
(pause)
Okay?
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.

Kitty Treats

The first sentence is non-fiction.  Everything else spun out in my mind as I was putting away the ladder.

Kitty Treats

Toby’s daughter was sobbing, sobbing, sobbing because her beloved cat was trapped on the roof of the three story apartment building next door and he tried calling it, then shaking a can of kitty treats to lure it down but no cigar, so he grabbed a ladder from the shed, lugged it up the three flights of rickety wooden stairs built on the back of the building and climbed up, holding onto the lip of the roof with one hand while shaking the kitty treat can with the other until the cat strolled unhurriedly over.  He had the animal comfortably in hand just as the woman living in the upstairs apartment flung open her back door to find out what the ruckus was all about, and the bottom fell out of the world.  He was tossed three stories down onto a gravel driveway, spent eight weeks in the hospital, and over time developed a taste for Oxycontin and the handy workers comp check that came in the mail every month.  His wife left him about a year later, took the kids, let him have their house, the three stories of the apartment next door looming over him like an Old Testament God.  His daughter is in college now, though he doesn’t talk to her much anymore.  But she calls him on his birthday every year, and always remembers to thank him for saving her cat.