The rain fell in thick, viscous drops upon the road, upon the earth, upon the things that crawled or walked upright in blasphemy, upon the insects, the trees, the birds seeking refuge among the mulberry leaves, upon the women in their heels cursing between their teeth, and upon the men huddled under cruel umbrellas. It fell upon the black cars with a sound like marbles, this rain, rolling without end, without respite through the thick blanket of air. The headlamps of the cars shone through the bars of water, illuminating the silver spilths, like metal wires, like crystal goblets, striking them with their pale yellow beams. And on the rain fell, without cease. It felt as if this were the way of the world, a world of falling water, a world of gray skies and darkness upon every face, such that, if the rain were to suddenly stop, the world would come to a shattering end. So the dim faces seemed to think as the water ceased its plunge, and the sun shone its yellow plate as if to burn the earth to cinders.
At the moment the rain stopped, a car slammed into another in front of it. As innocuous as it may have seemed to the average bystander, if they would have been able to see or think clearly through the thick falling shafts and their immediate disappearance, this was no accident. To the man driving the car in front, this was planned, albeit rather hastily, for while the rain was falling the car behind was inching forward in the other lane of the four-lane road with the intent of passing, though not moving fast enough to actually do so. Immediately in front of the first car, another was slowing down to take a turn, leaving the driver with a choice--to stop altogether, or switch into the other lane and risk crashing into the car therein. To him, the driver of the other car was being insensitive, selfish, even cruel not to see his plight, a man or woman only out for themselves, the worst kind of human being. And so, before the other car could surge ahead, the man switched lanes, accelerating the car with so much dexterity as to avoid colliding with the other, and immediately ground his car to a halt, forcing the vehicle behind him to slam into his rear bumper. The man behind (for it was indeed another man) was furious, throwing wild hands into the air, beating the steering wheel, cursing aloud at the immobile gray silhouette in the car in front. As he was about to get out to confront him, the driver in front opened his door with slow deliberation, rose up and walked over calmly to the man.
Ordinarily, such a scene would not have nonplussed this man, who was used to being in positions of power, who now felt wronged by the driver in front and had every intention of throwing down the gauntlet with as much force as he could muster. Humanity be damned, this nitwit will pay with every ounce of his existence! he thought, before his eyes beheld an object in the other man's hand, the man who was now coming toward him with a peace quite at odds with the heat of the situation. Upon seeing the object, his anger faded, his face drained itself to the color of chalk, and he became aware of a sere chill upon his spine, for in the other driver's hand was most unmistakenly a bat, well worn from excessive use, a bat which raised itself between tan, calloused hands and began beating the windows, the doors, the roof, the hood. The headlights were shattered, the windows had caved in, the doors were beaten with such ferocity that they nearly fell from their hinges. The wronged man huddled under the steering wheel at the pedal floor while the roof was beaten inward, forming upside-down mountain ranges whose peaks threatened from above. Then, as suddenly as the rain had stopped, the beating ceased. Space and time were held in abeyance. The man cowered toward the pedals, the smell of dirt and motor oil filling his head, almost too aware of the sickening, coarse texture of the wet floor mats. Then the unthinkable happened.
The wronged man saw his driver's side door open, and a foul hand attached to a long, gristly arm reached in and grabbed him by the hair. He flailed wildly as he was torn from his vehicle, screaming for help to bystanders who watched in desperation, or fear, or perhaps in the interest of entertainment, men and women and children who did not move, or continued walking, oblivious, or kept walking to avoid the scene altogether. The man was suddenly alone, without a friend, without a companion, without another who merely cared for the sake of his own species, alone with a man with a bat. His follicles stung mercilessly as he felt himself dragged through the street over the hot, wet, gritty pavement, drawn parallel to the thick yellow lines in the center. Then he felt the man release his grip, and he fell hard onto the road. Placing his hand on his head to comfort the ache, he was unprepared for the first blow to his left shoulder, which fractured it immediately. He fell sideways, screaming in pain as the bat came down upon him again and again, the bones splintering, his skin horribly bruised. He could hardly see the face of the man who was now brutally beating him, save for those eyes of pale blue, as of the sky, calm, pristine, unreadable. The last blow fell upon his head, and he collapsed immobile in the middle of the road...
When the clouds broke, and the sun gleamed whitely in the midday sky, the bat man returned to his car and drove off. The motorists continued on their way, the pedestrians took up their separate gaits, hesitantly at first, then with renewed determination. The children glanced back toward the beaten man in the street before their parents urged them not to, hurriedly shuffling them in front. One child looked up at her mother and asked, "Why did he hit that man?" The mother, walking in quick, clicking steps with her daughter, looked down at her, frowning. "Hush, dear, you'll be late for school."
Friday, June 19, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
The Glass Jar, part IV
Rowan had made up his mind, as he closed the door to his room silently behind him, not hearing the faint chirping of his black orb, to pay his father a visit in the basement. Against his father's repeated wish not to be disturbed at his work, especially when Rowan had previously destroyed one of his projects, he descended into the depths of the dank and reeking room step by tentative step to prove to himself, and to his father, that the latter's candy-making toils mattered nothing to him, were in fact an abomination. More than this, though, Rowan wanted to hurt his father. He wanted to cut into his chest with bitter words and glances, make powerless a seemingly hard and powerful man, show him through actions that he hated him, hated his work, hated his angular jaw, hate, hate, hate! As the bile wormed its way into Rowan's heart, he stepped audibly on the floor of the basement so his father could hear.
"I told you not to come down here," said his father hunched over his desk, still tinkering with various tubes, phials and burners. He made no effort to turn his face to his son, but continued to work, with at intervals the grayish spectral image of a horse emanating from one of his creations. Rowan bit at his lip. Frightened as he was of his father, yet he still held to the red anger burning within. It was his only source of power over the man. And yet, seeing the ghost of that noble beast rising out from the desk and above his father's head, Rowan remained in awe of those miraculous things his father could create, even in the gaping maw of the man's anger, resentment and sadness at the world, keeping these somehow at bay as thought after thought morphed into thing after thing of intensely loving beauty. And in his awe, Rowan's anger doubled, for that love his father gave to his work was supposed to be meant for him. The attention that he craved was being circumvented into...what...a piece of candy, however marvelous, however achingly beautiful? And he cursed himself for caring the merest fraction about his father's work, cursed his weakness, his age. No more would he care. This day marked for him the end of his love for his father, and he answered the stone man in kind.
"I didn't come here to watch you work! I was just looking for some colored pencils." The words were pointed, yet somewhat timid. Rowan's attempt at anger did not go altogether unnoticed. "You would be wise to curb your attitude, young man," said his father. "Get your pencils, then, and get back upstairs." Deep in his recesses, Rowan became furious, though whether his wrath was more for his father or himself, he could not tell, for in this battle of words his father was winning, and Rowan had little recourse. But his fury mounted, the fires of his anger were being stoked and the steam was rising in little gusts up through his chest and into his throat. "Don't you tell me to go upstairs!" Rowan hardly recognized the voice. His father was taken aback, not so much by his son's new found sense of authority or power, but this clear affront to his own authority, so that when he spoke, he lifted himself up from his chair, each word falling singularly with the slow unfolding his movements. "What...did...you...say!"
"You think that I care anymore about what you do down here!" Rowan was trembling as he spoke, his body charged with the excitement of unleashing his spleen, at hurling anger at the face of one whom he feared, his straight hair sticking to his hot forehead. "I hate what you do. It sickens me! I never want to look at your candy again, it's disgusting, vile!" He had hardly noticed that he was starting to cry. His father, however, did not soften at this observation, his eyes becoming more and more distended in exasperation. "I'll go upstairs because I want to, not because you tell me to!" As these last words were being shouted, Rowan ran up the steps, his father following close behind in black anger. Rowan ran to his bedroom and was about to shut the door behind him when his father's hand interjected its way between the door and frame, pushing the door with such force that the nob struck the wall, leaving a significant gouge from where the drywall had caved inward. Rowan almost fell back from the shock, as if the force of the door had sent the air vibrating in massive waves, which even now were being felt by the other objects in the room that seemed to Rowan to be wavering precariously on their shelves, their table-tops. As Rowan picked himself up, he met the full severity of his father's livid face, the black hairs on his chin and jaw jutting outward like blunt needles, the skin ruddy and pock-marked, the eyes small and savage.
When his father spoke, it was a mixture of red and black ink, sanguine and loveless. "How dare you say such things to me! How dare you insult me, my work, everything I have cared for..."
"What about me, father! Did you care for me once?" The import of his son's words did not register, so entrenched was the vitriol against the insult he received. "...everything I have lived for, worked for, bled for! Do you think you can push it aside? Do you think it is easy for me to raise you by myself after your mother left us, to continue working even in the face of great unhappiness? Do you think that you can hurl insult after insult at me after all that I have done for you to keep you fed, to keep you safe? You may not appreciate what I do, but you will respect my work. You will respect me!" As the words were spat in his face like venom, Rowan wanted more than ever to cut out his father's heart in a single stroke, and in the bitter retort that followed, he had no idea at the time how close he had come to accomplishing this. "My mother didn't leave us! You sent her away! You did this to us, you monster!" His father fell silent, not in a way that signals a recognition of truth, nor in a way that suggests a literal loss for words. No, the silence that followed was a premonition of the violence to come, a palpable death knoll at the approach of the scythe, a dim fog that drifts in upon the open sea, obscuring all to the eyes of the sailor save the cold sting of the encroaching winds from a great storm. It was in this throbbing white silence that Rowan's father happened to glance something that, at least temporarily, held the storm in abeyance. Behind Rowan, in a glass jar on a nightstand, was a Blue Bubble, humming restlessly in its container and casting rust colored sparkles in the air. As the recognition of what it was made the circuitous journey to his consciousness, the doors were flung wide to receive the deluge.
"Where...did you get...that?" came his father's voice in a barely audible whisper, pointing to the jar behind him. Rowan turned suddenly, and seeing the Blue Bubble in this self-same jar where a black and lifeless thing once held residence only moments ago, he gave forth a tiny gasp at the transformation. And yet, when he turned back to his father just as quickly, he wore a mask of utmost naturalness, as if what he had seen in the jar he had expected to see all along. All the while, though, he knew that something extraordinary had happened, was happening, though whether it was to play to his advantage or destroy him utterly he could not determine. There was nothing left but to let events run their course. And so, when he responded, it was with a calm quite at odds with the highly charged ether, though with a coarseness in his throat like a breath of sand. "You gave it to me, remember?"
"I never gave you that!" his father hissed, then, slightly more audibly, "That's a Blue Bubble! I don't make them anymore, they don't exist! So I ask you again, where did you get it?" The malice in his voice was trickling out like the tongue of an adder. Rowan was partly at a loss himself how the black thing in his jar had miraculously transformed into a Blue Bubble, and to him, as surely to his father as well, it was a reminder of his mother, who loved them as she had once loved her husband. Rowan, not having any further explanation, merely repeated what he had said. "You gave it to me. It was clear, then it turned black, and now it's blue. I don't know how..."
"Liar!" his father screamed. "Tell me the truth!"
"I've already told you!"
"Liar! No more games! Tell me now..."
"You gave it..."
"No!" His father was in a fit of rage, his arms raised, his fingers claw-like. "No, Rowan! Someone else gave it to you, not me! Who was it? Who was it! Tell me now or I'll..." He stopped mid-sentence, unsure himself what he might do if his son kept to his story, uncertain as to whether his son were telling the truth or not. And perhaps it was this uncertainty that was at the core of his rage, which now was quickly supplanting the love that had once been dripping into the sink of his heart, dispelling all else but this single red-hot coal of anger. And all the while, the little Blue Bubble was sending up ever larger clouds of iridescent dust from its glass house, filling the room with a rainbow light amidst the tense battle between father and son. Rowan's father, in his moment of indecision, sensed a stalemate that should never have been. That his son should humiliate him with this symbol of his lost love was more than he could bear, but coupled with the thought that he was losing his grip of authority brought him to the breaking point. As if possessed by a surge of dark electricity, Rowan's father crossed the room to the wall where his son's pictures hung proud yet fragile in the sanctuary of his boyhood. With vicious sweeps of his arms, he tore the pictures from the wall, leaving corners of paper, some white, some dappled here and there with deep greens and blues. Rowan eyed him in disbelief, hot tears welling up instantly. "No! No!" he cried, but no sound but a choked whisper came out. His father continued the desecration of Rowan's work, screaming aloud, "You steal my work, I'll take yours! Tell me who it is!" until he came to the center of picture of the great scarlet dragon, gloriously bedecked with black scales and breath like a blossom of fire. This he tore from the wall with such force that it ripped in two. As Rowan watched the death of his picture, his voice found sudden and horrifying release. "How could you! Wicked thing how could you!" And the Blue Bubble heaved a sonorous, lamenting cry of beauty, like a chorus of ocarinas.
His father turned to Rowan. The pictures were clenched in a wad in his hand. His mouth was frothed, his eyes like a doll's, empty and lifeless save for the glint of a mind distressed and savage. Rowan wept horribly, his hands and body shaking, hardly able to comprehend the wound his own father had dealt him. At the sight of his beloved dragon torn in two, his heart split a second time since his mother walked away from his pleading cries. No more could he find love for his father, nor could his heart have held anything other than pain and isolation, so cracked and marred it had become. His father looked at him. He could not see his son. He did not recognize the face in front of him, nor had he a sense of what he was doing as he crossed the room again to the nightstand, picked up the jar with the violently pulsing Blue Bubble careening about inside, ablaze with dust and music, and hurled it against the opposite wall. The jar shattered on impact. The Blue Bubble let forth a terrible scream of cacophony like bloody knives and fell to the floor, black, inert, dead. Once again, the silence filled the room. The two figures drowned in it. The little candy lay on the floor like a beetle. Rowan's father turned toward the door, pictures in hand, and walked out, leaving his son alone in his room.
Rowan looked at the wall of his room where fragments of paper remained tacked. He shook intermittently, his sobs becoming staggered as he perused the remnants of his only creative refuge. His eyes turned toward the floor and saw the black object laying there, flattened on one side from the impact, surrounded by several fragments of glass, some in triangular chunks, others in needle-like splinters. He reached out his hand and picked up the black thing in his slender fingers. He clutched it tightly and pulled it inward toward his stomach, his sobs growing into heaves of white sorrow as he lay slowly upon the floor, curled up like a fetus among the shards.
"I told you not to come down here," said his father hunched over his desk, still tinkering with various tubes, phials and burners. He made no effort to turn his face to his son, but continued to work, with at intervals the grayish spectral image of a horse emanating from one of his creations. Rowan bit at his lip. Frightened as he was of his father, yet he still held to the red anger burning within. It was his only source of power over the man. And yet, seeing the ghost of that noble beast rising out from the desk and above his father's head, Rowan remained in awe of those miraculous things his father could create, even in the gaping maw of the man's anger, resentment and sadness at the world, keeping these somehow at bay as thought after thought morphed into thing after thing of intensely loving beauty. And in his awe, Rowan's anger doubled, for that love his father gave to his work was supposed to be meant for him. The attention that he craved was being circumvented into...what...a piece of candy, however marvelous, however achingly beautiful? And he cursed himself for caring the merest fraction about his father's work, cursed his weakness, his age. No more would he care. This day marked for him the end of his love for his father, and he answered the stone man in kind.
"I didn't come here to watch you work! I was just looking for some colored pencils." The words were pointed, yet somewhat timid. Rowan's attempt at anger did not go altogether unnoticed. "You would be wise to curb your attitude, young man," said his father. "Get your pencils, then, and get back upstairs." Deep in his recesses, Rowan became furious, though whether his wrath was more for his father or himself, he could not tell, for in this battle of words his father was winning, and Rowan had little recourse. But his fury mounted, the fires of his anger were being stoked and the steam was rising in little gusts up through his chest and into his throat. "Don't you tell me to go upstairs!" Rowan hardly recognized the voice. His father was taken aback, not so much by his son's new found sense of authority or power, but this clear affront to his own authority, so that when he spoke, he lifted himself up from his chair, each word falling singularly with the slow unfolding his movements. "What...did...you...say!"
"You think that I care anymore about what you do down here!" Rowan was trembling as he spoke, his body charged with the excitement of unleashing his spleen, at hurling anger at the face of one whom he feared, his straight hair sticking to his hot forehead. "I hate what you do. It sickens me! I never want to look at your candy again, it's disgusting, vile!" He had hardly noticed that he was starting to cry. His father, however, did not soften at this observation, his eyes becoming more and more distended in exasperation. "I'll go upstairs because I want to, not because you tell me to!" As these last words were being shouted, Rowan ran up the steps, his father following close behind in black anger. Rowan ran to his bedroom and was about to shut the door behind him when his father's hand interjected its way between the door and frame, pushing the door with such force that the nob struck the wall, leaving a significant gouge from where the drywall had caved inward. Rowan almost fell back from the shock, as if the force of the door had sent the air vibrating in massive waves, which even now were being felt by the other objects in the room that seemed to Rowan to be wavering precariously on their shelves, their table-tops. As Rowan picked himself up, he met the full severity of his father's livid face, the black hairs on his chin and jaw jutting outward like blunt needles, the skin ruddy and pock-marked, the eyes small and savage.
When his father spoke, it was a mixture of red and black ink, sanguine and loveless. "How dare you say such things to me! How dare you insult me, my work, everything I have cared for..."
"What about me, father! Did you care for me once?" The import of his son's words did not register, so entrenched was the vitriol against the insult he received. "...everything I have lived for, worked for, bled for! Do you think you can push it aside? Do you think it is easy for me to raise you by myself after your mother left us, to continue working even in the face of great unhappiness? Do you think that you can hurl insult after insult at me after all that I have done for you to keep you fed, to keep you safe? You may not appreciate what I do, but you will respect my work. You will respect me!" As the words were spat in his face like venom, Rowan wanted more than ever to cut out his father's heart in a single stroke, and in the bitter retort that followed, he had no idea at the time how close he had come to accomplishing this. "My mother didn't leave us! You sent her away! You did this to us, you monster!" His father fell silent, not in a way that signals a recognition of truth, nor in a way that suggests a literal loss for words. No, the silence that followed was a premonition of the violence to come, a palpable death knoll at the approach of the scythe, a dim fog that drifts in upon the open sea, obscuring all to the eyes of the sailor save the cold sting of the encroaching winds from a great storm. It was in this throbbing white silence that Rowan's father happened to glance something that, at least temporarily, held the storm in abeyance. Behind Rowan, in a glass jar on a nightstand, was a Blue Bubble, humming restlessly in its container and casting rust colored sparkles in the air. As the recognition of what it was made the circuitous journey to his consciousness, the doors were flung wide to receive the deluge.
"Where...did you get...that?" came his father's voice in a barely audible whisper, pointing to the jar behind him. Rowan turned suddenly, and seeing the Blue Bubble in this self-same jar where a black and lifeless thing once held residence only moments ago, he gave forth a tiny gasp at the transformation. And yet, when he turned back to his father just as quickly, he wore a mask of utmost naturalness, as if what he had seen in the jar he had expected to see all along. All the while, though, he knew that something extraordinary had happened, was happening, though whether it was to play to his advantage or destroy him utterly he could not determine. There was nothing left but to let events run their course. And so, when he responded, it was with a calm quite at odds with the highly charged ether, though with a coarseness in his throat like a breath of sand. "You gave it to me, remember?"
"I never gave you that!" his father hissed, then, slightly more audibly, "That's a Blue Bubble! I don't make them anymore, they don't exist! So I ask you again, where did you get it?" The malice in his voice was trickling out like the tongue of an adder. Rowan was partly at a loss himself how the black thing in his jar had miraculously transformed into a Blue Bubble, and to him, as surely to his father as well, it was a reminder of his mother, who loved them as she had once loved her husband. Rowan, not having any further explanation, merely repeated what he had said. "You gave it to me. It was clear, then it turned black, and now it's blue. I don't know how..."
"Liar!" his father screamed. "Tell me the truth!"
"I've already told you!"
"Liar! No more games! Tell me now..."
"You gave it..."
"No!" His father was in a fit of rage, his arms raised, his fingers claw-like. "No, Rowan! Someone else gave it to you, not me! Who was it? Who was it! Tell me now or I'll..." He stopped mid-sentence, unsure himself what he might do if his son kept to his story, uncertain as to whether his son were telling the truth or not. And perhaps it was this uncertainty that was at the core of his rage, which now was quickly supplanting the love that had once been dripping into the sink of his heart, dispelling all else but this single red-hot coal of anger. And all the while, the little Blue Bubble was sending up ever larger clouds of iridescent dust from its glass house, filling the room with a rainbow light amidst the tense battle between father and son. Rowan's father, in his moment of indecision, sensed a stalemate that should never have been. That his son should humiliate him with this symbol of his lost love was more than he could bear, but coupled with the thought that he was losing his grip of authority brought him to the breaking point. As if possessed by a surge of dark electricity, Rowan's father crossed the room to the wall where his son's pictures hung proud yet fragile in the sanctuary of his boyhood. With vicious sweeps of his arms, he tore the pictures from the wall, leaving corners of paper, some white, some dappled here and there with deep greens and blues. Rowan eyed him in disbelief, hot tears welling up instantly. "No! No!" he cried, but no sound but a choked whisper came out. His father continued the desecration of Rowan's work, screaming aloud, "You steal my work, I'll take yours! Tell me who it is!" until he came to the center of picture of the great scarlet dragon, gloriously bedecked with black scales and breath like a blossom of fire. This he tore from the wall with such force that it ripped in two. As Rowan watched the death of his picture, his voice found sudden and horrifying release. "How could you! Wicked thing how could you!" And the Blue Bubble heaved a sonorous, lamenting cry of beauty, like a chorus of ocarinas.
His father turned to Rowan. The pictures were clenched in a wad in his hand. His mouth was frothed, his eyes like a doll's, empty and lifeless save for the glint of a mind distressed and savage. Rowan wept horribly, his hands and body shaking, hardly able to comprehend the wound his own father had dealt him. At the sight of his beloved dragon torn in two, his heart split a second time since his mother walked away from his pleading cries. No more could he find love for his father, nor could his heart have held anything other than pain and isolation, so cracked and marred it had become. His father looked at him. He could not see his son. He did not recognize the face in front of him, nor had he a sense of what he was doing as he crossed the room again to the nightstand, picked up the jar with the violently pulsing Blue Bubble careening about inside, ablaze with dust and music, and hurled it against the opposite wall. The jar shattered on impact. The Blue Bubble let forth a terrible scream of cacophony like bloody knives and fell to the floor, black, inert, dead. Once again, the silence filled the room. The two figures drowned in it. The little candy lay on the floor like a beetle. Rowan's father turned toward the door, pictures in hand, and walked out, leaving his son alone in his room.
Rowan looked at the wall of his room where fragments of paper remained tacked. He shook intermittently, his sobs becoming staggered as he perused the remnants of his only creative refuge. His eyes turned toward the floor and saw the black object laying there, flattened on one side from the impact, surrounded by several fragments of glass, some in triangular chunks, others in needle-like splinters. He reached out his hand and picked up the black thing in his slender fingers. He clutched it tightly and pulled it inward toward his stomach, his sobs growing into heaves of white sorrow as he lay slowly upon the floor, curled up like a fetus among the shards.
Monday, February 9, 2009
The Glass Jar, part III
Some weeks had passed. The sky loomed like a tattered gray sheet over the first winter thaw, and the snow that once covered the earth with a white blanket had given way to tawny grasses patched with green, streets swollen with black puddles, and parks and fields dappled with lakes both vast and minute. Sidewalks girded with chain-link fences bared their cracked teeth where smaller puddles gathered, reflecting the matte gray of the sky like metal sheets. Along one of these sidewalks, disturbing at intervals the scattered lakes, two brown shoes were making headway, their course a mixture of the determined and the uncertain. Of a sudden, they turned to the right, these two shoes, as if from an incalculable whim, treading a new path with renewed vigor. It seemed that their destination was of little importance compared with the journey itself, whose form was being hunted like an elusive prey, making ever more intricate twists and knots in the tangled skein.
Rowan had taken to finding ever more circuitous routes home from school, not wishing to spend any more time at home than was necessary. What previously had taken a mere ten minutes now spanned nearly thirty, sometimes more, though arriving home late inspired little spleen from his father, who spent most of the day working in his basement. Once home, though, Rowan would immediately sprint to his room, lock the door, and seat himself at his desk, where he would draw out a thick piece of paper from one of the drawers, select from an assortment of crayons and colored pencils an iridescent aggregate of hues, and start to work on another fantastical drawing. His room was now covered in his pictures, one of a great gelatinous green beast with long scarlet horns, another featuring something like a blue cow, pierced with giant orange whiskers, defiant in the sun among emerald-green grasses. Each picture sported ever stranger beasts of imagination, some in colorful backgrounds, others stark against the paper's white edge, but each with the marks of a mind run amok. Today, he set to work on a red dragon, whose wings were outlined in violet, indigo, sea green and tangerine, and scales marked out in fine black lines carved into the waxy hue of the body. About the dragon, the sky was light blue (though Rowan took care to leave uncolored patches of white to mimic the clouds), and against the peacefulness of the sky there lay, like a thin carpet of marigolds, the violent, bright orange and yellow lines of the beast's breath. Rowan scrutinized his work with meticulous care. It certainly bore a great deal more detail than his previous drawings, and there was a liveliness to it that the others lacked. Proud of this new piece of art, he took down the picture of the green beast, which up till now held pride of place among the others, and replaced it with the creature of crimson against an azure sky, carefully pushing the pins into the farthest corners of the paper to avoid obstructing the image. The green beast, meanwhile, lay among the pile of discarded others that managed to escape the trash bin.
It was in this way that Rowan avoided his father for most of the day, save at breakfast and dinner, both of which he dreaded. Conversations were largely non-existent, save for a few absently dropped questions with no particular answers expected, and always the cavernous jaws of silence opening wide at intervals. Rowan braced himself for the inevitable meal, walking down the corridor slowly, both to avoid making any noise on the floorboards and to allow a few more moments of peace without the cold stare of his father on his skin. His father was already at the kitchen table when he arrived, a plate of pork chops, spinach and rice waiting at his place as he sat down. It was several seconds before Rowan picked up his fork and knife and set into his dinner. The silence yawned.
"How was school?" came his father's question without looking up.
"Fine," Rowan replied mirthlessly. His father seemed not to hear.
"Did you finish your homework?" The question was flat, issued between bits of food.
"We didn't have any today." Rowan's father for once looked up from his plate at his son, a pair of ruthless eyes staring at a pale face. Then the painful sting of silence pricked the ether.
"Lucky you," said the angular man, returning his gaze to his plate. There was a great precipice stretching over the chasm between the two, and Rowan stood on the edge of it.
"I made a new drawing today." His lips let slip the words before his mind had opportunity to reign them in. His father, for a second time, lifted his head and turned his eyes toward his son. Hardened as the face was, the eyes seemed slightly less caustic in their gaze. He put down his knife and fork as he finished his recent bite. "Let me see it." Rowan remained for a few seconds in a state of shock. His father had never before shown much interest in his recent predilection for drawing, nor did Rowan expect any reply to his initial statement, and now the man wanted to see an example of what he had been working on all this time. Rowan felt horribly self-conscious all of a sudden and began to regret ever saying a word. As slowly as he had arrived at the table, he rose from his chair and walked down the corridor to his room, where he plucked the tacks from the wall one at a time with slow deliberation and took down the picture. Holding it in hand, he waited in his room for a full minute before returning to the kitchen. His father snatched it from Rowan's hands as if it were a newspaper article and began to peruse it absently while chewing a bit of pork. In the brittle seconds that followed, Rowan felt faint, rubbing his hands rapidly behind his back.
"What is it?" came his father's question like a wound.
"A dragon." His father looked at it again. It was very plainly a red dragon, and to anyone else looking at it there would not be a shred of doubt as to that simple fact. But he had worked so much in abstraction, in materials more in line with surreality than with actual reality, and with parts of his brain more attuned to globules and plasmas than with tangible imagination, that when confronted with the obvious he immediately doubted the whole of what his eyes were seeing and instead saw only the abstract shapes, the splashes of color, the black contours, the lines of yellow and orange. Rather than coalescing into a single image, these components remained for themselves, separate and discrete. Because of this, it took him some time before he finally saw the dragon. "Ah," he said at last. "Not bad." He gave the picture back to his son and continued eating. Rowan gave forth an inaudible (purposely so) sigh before returning the picture to the wall of his room. That his father had said "not bad" filled him with both elation and dejection, the one in the sense that he had not outright rejected the picture, the other in that he seemed incapable of seeing any particular beauty in his son's work. Rowan slept fitfully that night, and all the while, terrible thoughts echoed in his head. "I don't care about your work either!" he thought. "I don't want to eat your candy, or look at it, or touch it, or even think about it! It's ghastly! It's horrible! Like you! I will never care about what you do! From now on, I'll treat you the same as you treat me--with contempt! That's it, contempt!" As his thoughts drifted, sleep at last entered his eyes like a warm blanket among the nightlights, the pictures on the walls, and the empty jar by his bedside...
The following day was as gray as the last, though the once vast lakes consuming the fields had been all but completely absorbed by the grasses, leaving thick patches of soft loam in their place. Rowan once again found himself careering along wet sidewalks on his way home from school, bisecting sponge-like lawns and making short work of the alley ways. His gait still held that determined spontaneity, though on this day there was more of vehemence behind each step. As he approached a narrow alley that led to the back yard of his house, something caught his eye, though it could not have been any bigger than a chestnut. Tucked in amidst a patch of grass on the side of the alley lay a small, almost perfectly round black object, like a marble. Rowan plucked it from its hiding place between his thumb and forefinger. It felt like dense rubber. Its black was pure but lackluster, like a starless midnight. He examined it more carefully, turning it around between his fingertips, till at last the blood drained from his face, for he saw very clearly on the surface of the thing a pair of grooves carved into it. He realized that he held a death in his hand, not a physical one exactly, but a spiritual one. This was his candy, a black death. He had discarded it several weeks prior, heard its faint hum as it disappeared in the twilight. Now here it was, the result of his rebellion, a lifeless corpse. He cradled it gently in his hand as he walked through the front door, through the corridor and into his bedroom. He opened the jar on the nightstand and placed it carefully inside before closing the lid tightly. The room was quiet. The pictures on the wall screamed in brazen colors. As Rowan closed the door behind him, the little black thing chirped sweetly like a cricket far among high places.
Rowan had taken to finding ever more circuitous routes home from school, not wishing to spend any more time at home than was necessary. What previously had taken a mere ten minutes now spanned nearly thirty, sometimes more, though arriving home late inspired little spleen from his father, who spent most of the day working in his basement. Once home, though, Rowan would immediately sprint to his room, lock the door, and seat himself at his desk, where he would draw out a thick piece of paper from one of the drawers, select from an assortment of crayons and colored pencils an iridescent aggregate of hues, and start to work on another fantastical drawing. His room was now covered in his pictures, one of a great gelatinous green beast with long scarlet horns, another featuring something like a blue cow, pierced with giant orange whiskers, defiant in the sun among emerald-green grasses. Each picture sported ever stranger beasts of imagination, some in colorful backgrounds, others stark against the paper's white edge, but each with the marks of a mind run amok. Today, he set to work on a red dragon, whose wings were outlined in violet, indigo, sea green and tangerine, and scales marked out in fine black lines carved into the waxy hue of the body. About the dragon, the sky was light blue (though Rowan took care to leave uncolored patches of white to mimic the clouds), and against the peacefulness of the sky there lay, like a thin carpet of marigolds, the violent, bright orange and yellow lines of the beast's breath. Rowan scrutinized his work with meticulous care. It certainly bore a great deal more detail than his previous drawings, and there was a liveliness to it that the others lacked. Proud of this new piece of art, he took down the picture of the green beast, which up till now held pride of place among the others, and replaced it with the creature of crimson against an azure sky, carefully pushing the pins into the farthest corners of the paper to avoid obstructing the image. The green beast, meanwhile, lay among the pile of discarded others that managed to escape the trash bin.
It was in this way that Rowan avoided his father for most of the day, save at breakfast and dinner, both of which he dreaded. Conversations were largely non-existent, save for a few absently dropped questions with no particular answers expected, and always the cavernous jaws of silence opening wide at intervals. Rowan braced himself for the inevitable meal, walking down the corridor slowly, both to avoid making any noise on the floorboards and to allow a few more moments of peace without the cold stare of his father on his skin. His father was already at the kitchen table when he arrived, a plate of pork chops, spinach and rice waiting at his place as he sat down. It was several seconds before Rowan picked up his fork and knife and set into his dinner. The silence yawned.
"How was school?" came his father's question without looking up.
"Fine," Rowan replied mirthlessly. His father seemed not to hear.
"Did you finish your homework?" The question was flat, issued between bits of food.
"We didn't have any today." Rowan's father for once looked up from his plate at his son, a pair of ruthless eyes staring at a pale face. Then the painful sting of silence pricked the ether.
"Lucky you," said the angular man, returning his gaze to his plate. There was a great precipice stretching over the chasm between the two, and Rowan stood on the edge of it.
"I made a new drawing today." His lips let slip the words before his mind had opportunity to reign them in. His father, for a second time, lifted his head and turned his eyes toward his son. Hardened as the face was, the eyes seemed slightly less caustic in their gaze. He put down his knife and fork as he finished his recent bite. "Let me see it." Rowan remained for a few seconds in a state of shock. His father had never before shown much interest in his recent predilection for drawing, nor did Rowan expect any reply to his initial statement, and now the man wanted to see an example of what he had been working on all this time. Rowan felt horribly self-conscious all of a sudden and began to regret ever saying a word. As slowly as he had arrived at the table, he rose from his chair and walked down the corridor to his room, where he plucked the tacks from the wall one at a time with slow deliberation and took down the picture. Holding it in hand, he waited in his room for a full minute before returning to the kitchen. His father snatched it from Rowan's hands as if it were a newspaper article and began to peruse it absently while chewing a bit of pork. In the brittle seconds that followed, Rowan felt faint, rubbing his hands rapidly behind his back.
"What is it?" came his father's question like a wound.
"A dragon." His father looked at it again. It was very plainly a red dragon, and to anyone else looking at it there would not be a shred of doubt as to that simple fact. But he had worked so much in abstraction, in materials more in line with surreality than with actual reality, and with parts of his brain more attuned to globules and plasmas than with tangible imagination, that when confronted with the obvious he immediately doubted the whole of what his eyes were seeing and instead saw only the abstract shapes, the splashes of color, the black contours, the lines of yellow and orange. Rather than coalescing into a single image, these components remained for themselves, separate and discrete. Because of this, it took him some time before he finally saw the dragon. "Ah," he said at last. "Not bad." He gave the picture back to his son and continued eating. Rowan gave forth an inaudible (purposely so) sigh before returning the picture to the wall of his room. That his father had said "not bad" filled him with both elation and dejection, the one in the sense that he had not outright rejected the picture, the other in that he seemed incapable of seeing any particular beauty in his son's work. Rowan slept fitfully that night, and all the while, terrible thoughts echoed in his head. "I don't care about your work either!" he thought. "I don't want to eat your candy, or look at it, or touch it, or even think about it! It's ghastly! It's horrible! Like you! I will never care about what you do! From now on, I'll treat you the same as you treat me--with contempt! That's it, contempt!" As his thoughts drifted, sleep at last entered his eyes like a warm blanket among the nightlights, the pictures on the walls, and the empty jar by his bedside...
The following day was as gray as the last, though the once vast lakes consuming the fields had been all but completely absorbed by the grasses, leaving thick patches of soft loam in their place. Rowan once again found himself careering along wet sidewalks on his way home from school, bisecting sponge-like lawns and making short work of the alley ways. His gait still held that determined spontaneity, though on this day there was more of vehemence behind each step. As he approached a narrow alley that led to the back yard of his house, something caught his eye, though it could not have been any bigger than a chestnut. Tucked in amidst a patch of grass on the side of the alley lay a small, almost perfectly round black object, like a marble. Rowan plucked it from its hiding place between his thumb and forefinger. It felt like dense rubber. Its black was pure but lackluster, like a starless midnight. He examined it more carefully, turning it around between his fingertips, till at last the blood drained from his face, for he saw very clearly on the surface of the thing a pair of grooves carved into it. He realized that he held a death in his hand, not a physical one exactly, but a spiritual one. This was his candy, a black death. He had discarded it several weeks prior, heard its faint hum as it disappeared in the twilight. Now here it was, the result of his rebellion, a lifeless corpse. He cradled it gently in his hand as he walked through the front door, through the corridor and into his bedroom. He opened the jar on the nightstand and placed it carefully inside before closing the lid tightly. The room was quiet. The pictures on the wall screamed in brazen colors. As Rowan closed the door behind him, the little black thing chirped sweetly like a cricket far among high places.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The Glass Jar, part II
It was one month before his eighth birthday when Rowan received the jar from his father on that mirthless day, though it was but a year before that when his parents divorced, and his mother, having lost custody of her only son to her husband, disappeared without warning, without a word, without the merest trace. His father, after she left, became more withdrawn, no longer seeming interested in his son's activities, nor in the matters of the world. His face took on its now familiar angularity, hardening with each passing day, and a sinewy violence underscored the precision of his every move. Not wishing to expend energy on even the slightest fancy of motion, he remained still much of the day, manipulating now this limb, not that digit, only when absolutely necessary, though from time to time a lid would twitch in the lamplight, and the taut skin of his forehead would crawl with the coarse movement of blood.
But what could be the reason for his father's vicious petulance toward his son? What could a boy, just shy of eight years, have done to deserve such wrath? Certainly, it was nothing to do with Rowan specifically, but that he was a reminder of the woman who left them alone. To his father, those eyes of his son were really her eyes staring out of the shallow sockets, her lips which spoke barely a word to a now distant and stony man. No one could possibly have felt the pain that his father was now enduring from her absence, save of course for Rowan himself, who never understood the reason for his parents' divorce, though he blamed himself daily for it.
In truth, his mother once loved his father very much, though falling in love with his gifts moreso than the man himself. It was Blue Bubbles that she loved the most out of all his marvelous creations, and it came to pass that, during the first year of their marriage, he discontinued their manufacture, instead making them only for her, for he could not bear the thought of another woman enjoying his creations as much as his wife did. To him, it was adultery of the most virulent sort. Such was the deepest affection he showed for his wife, and such was the affection that, after the birth of their son, she realized she could not return. After Rowan's birth, her love shifted to the chestnut-headed boy she cradled by day and night, and as the years passed, his father perceived the cleft between them burgeoning. At last, in a fit of rage at what he realized was a loveless union, his passions unrequited, his art for nought, he sought a divorce with Rowan's mother claiming, among other things, infidelity. The courts granted him custody based purely on his economic capacities--his mother had nothing. The same day of the verdict, as they left the courtroom, Rowan at his father's side, his mother walking ghost-like in the opposite direction, the boy turned to her and called out, but she could not hear him. He was no longer hers. Now, by the grace of the courts, under the protection of that one man, he was not her son; he was other, an alien, an orphan, for she was dead to him, and so, she felt, she must remain. Without heeding his tearful cries, she continued to walk, outwardly immune to pain, to pleasure, though her heart split for the boy's every whelp.
In the succeeding days, father and son became strangers, only grudgingly accepting their biological bond. As his father's face became more angular, Rowan's became more sullen, so that it became a rare occurence indeed when the merest smile carved itself out of alabaster. Rowan missed his mother terribly, and despite his desperate hopes he knew she would never return home. His father, meanwhile, poured all of his energies into his work. The vessel of his love shattered, he had no other place to put it but in the candies for which once she swooned, and in the wake of this circumstance Rowan, for want of any parental love, found a vicarious surrogate in watching his father work in secret beneath the stairs, in the cold embrace of shadows.
They sat in the kitchen the morning following the incident, the coarse chiselled stone, the cracked pebble. They spoke not a word. Neither looked up from their plates, the clinking of metal on ceramic making a brittle backdrop among the prickled motes of sunlight, and as the food disappeared piece by piece from their respective dishes, the gulf between them yawned. At last, it was his father who supplanted the sickly metallic din with a gristly noise from his throat.
"You know why I gave you the jar...don't you," he said with a barely audible hint of malice. Rowan did not respond.
"Months of work, hard-edged, painful work, ruined." The voice was horribly quiet. "Nothing I can do can bring it back, do you understand."
Rowan whinced, and in a voice like a mouse the words escaped him. "But it was beautif..."
"It's dead!" came his father's voice like a bloody hammer. "Dead! And now it's yours to do as you please! Reflect on its rotting carcass! Nothing will bring it back! Nothing!" He got up from the table and placed his dish rudely in the sink. Rowan did not move, save for pushing his chin closer into his chest, fighting back tears that caused his little body to gently shudder.
"You have to go to school. We'll say no more about this, you understand." There was a pause, as of a void spreading itself with infinite care.
"I have to go into the city," his father continued, and as he grabbed a satchel and headed for the front door, he spun around and looked at the boy. For the briefest of moments, his eyes softened, for in that form curling itself up like a beetle he saw for an instant his son, and in him he saw a love that once filled him with a great heaving sorrow, a love that was even now running into the sink of his heart. Then, suddenly remembering his anger, dispelling all else, the softness evaporated, and he wheeled himself around and walked out the door. As he did so, without turning, he shot back, "Go to school!" and was gone.
But what could be the reason for his father's vicious petulance toward his son? What could a boy, just shy of eight years, have done to deserve such wrath? Certainly, it was nothing to do with Rowan specifically, but that he was a reminder of the woman who left them alone. To his father, those eyes of his son were really her eyes staring out of the shallow sockets, her lips which spoke barely a word to a now distant and stony man. No one could possibly have felt the pain that his father was now enduring from her absence, save of course for Rowan himself, who never understood the reason for his parents' divorce, though he blamed himself daily for it.
In truth, his mother once loved his father very much, though falling in love with his gifts moreso than the man himself. It was Blue Bubbles that she loved the most out of all his marvelous creations, and it came to pass that, during the first year of their marriage, he discontinued their manufacture, instead making them only for her, for he could not bear the thought of another woman enjoying his creations as much as his wife did. To him, it was adultery of the most virulent sort. Such was the deepest affection he showed for his wife, and such was the affection that, after the birth of their son, she realized she could not return. After Rowan's birth, her love shifted to the chestnut-headed boy she cradled by day and night, and as the years passed, his father perceived the cleft between them burgeoning. At last, in a fit of rage at what he realized was a loveless union, his passions unrequited, his art for nought, he sought a divorce with Rowan's mother claiming, among other things, infidelity. The courts granted him custody based purely on his economic capacities--his mother had nothing. The same day of the verdict, as they left the courtroom, Rowan at his father's side, his mother walking ghost-like in the opposite direction, the boy turned to her and called out, but she could not hear him. He was no longer hers. Now, by the grace of the courts, under the protection of that one man, he was not her son; he was other, an alien, an orphan, for she was dead to him, and so, she felt, she must remain. Without heeding his tearful cries, she continued to walk, outwardly immune to pain, to pleasure, though her heart split for the boy's every whelp.
In the succeeding days, father and son became strangers, only grudgingly accepting their biological bond. As his father's face became more angular, Rowan's became more sullen, so that it became a rare occurence indeed when the merest smile carved itself out of alabaster. Rowan missed his mother terribly, and despite his desperate hopes he knew she would never return home. His father, meanwhile, poured all of his energies into his work. The vessel of his love shattered, he had no other place to put it but in the candies for which once she swooned, and in the wake of this circumstance Rowan, for want of any parental love, found a vicarious surrogate in watching his father work in secret beneath the stairs, in the cold embrace of shadows.
They sat in the kitchen the morning following the incident, the coarse chiselled stone, the cracked pebble. They spoke not a word. Neither looked up from their plates, the clinking of metal on ceramic making a brittle backdrop among the prickled motes of sunlight, and as the food disappeared piece by piece from their respective dishes, the gulf between them yawned. At last, it was his father who supplanted the sickly metallic din with a gristly noise from his throat.
"You know why I gave you the jar...don't you," he said with a barely audible hint of malice. Rowan did not respond.
"Months of work, hard-edged, painful work, ruined." The voice was horribly quiet. "Nothing I can do can bring it back, do you understand."
Rowan whinced, and in a voice like a mouse the words escaped him. "But it was beautif..."
"It's dead!" came his father's voice like a bloody hammer. "Dead! And now it's yours to do as you please! Reflect on its rotting carcass! Nothing will bring it back! Nothing!" He got up from the table and placed his dish rudely in the sink. Rowan did not move, save for pushing his chin closer into his chest, fighting back tears that caused his little body to gently shudder.
"You have to go to school. We'll say no more about this, you understand." There was a pause, as of a void spreading itself with infinite care.
"I have to go into the city," his father continued, and as he grabbed a satchel and headed for the front door, he spun around and looked at the boy. For the briefest of moments, his eyes softened, for in that form curling itself up like a beetle he saw for an instant his son, and in him he saw a love that once filled him with a great heaving sorrow, a love that was even now running into the sink of his heart. Then, suddenly remembering his anger, dispelling all else, the softness evaporated, and he wheeled himself around and walked out the door. As he did so, without turning, he shot back, "Go to school!" and was gone.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Glass Jar, part I
The jar stood upright in its vitreous glow upon the nightstand of Rowan's bedroom. At a glance it was nothing special, a tall, round piece of glass, slightly opaque, though still catching the ochre and scarlet of the night-lights gleaming peacefully in the mid-winter evening. He got it from his father, a candy maker, though not of the ordinary sort with which we are typically acquainted. The candy his father made was incandescent, throbbing, casting shimmering sparkles in the air. The jar in question once held pearls of sapphire candy that would expand and contract at random in their container, giving off their own peculiar half-light. At intervals, tiny specks of yellow-orange dust, like orbs of light, would explode from one or another of these pearls, at times even permeating the glass and making their way into the outside world for a matter of a few seconds before collapsing into minute quanta and disappearing altogether. They were called Blue Bubbles, though the label, once alive with movement and color and light, was now torn away leaving only the white scarring of adhesive and paper, with but a trace of the original label clinging to the surface with indelible tenacity.
Rowan had at one time been captivated by his father's work, watching him in the basement as he concocted some new magical creation or mixed phials of foreign and other-worldly substances which coalesced into a new brilliance. In spite of his interest, though, his father would hardly let him near his experiments, sometimes shouting at Rowan to get back upstairs.
"This is extremely delicate material, Rowan. Even looking at it could destroy months of work. Do not go near it, even if I'm here, do you understand me?" His father's words were stern, bordering on a precarious anger. Rowan simply nodded and ran upstairs to his room, flopping limply on the bed, tears trickling from his eyes and clinging to his lashes in crystalline droplets. It was at these moments that he would be torn between two poles. At one end of his brain was a deep desire to know how his father made the miraculous things he did, at the other end a growing impulse to rebel against him, for Rowan did not understand the contradiction between the beauty of his father's creations and the wicked ugliness of the persona he showed to all who ventured too near his work. It was during this time of uncertainty, where his mind stood balanced on the head of a pin, that Rowan acquired the jar.
During an afternoon, Rowan stole into the basement to watch his father work in secret, hoping to hide amongst the boxes underneath the stairwell, swallowed by the shadows, though with a clear side view of his father's desk, lit by a single lamp upon roughly sanded wood. As he prepared to duck underneath the stairwell, he noticed his father was not at his desk, nor was there any sign of his being anywhere in the basement. It was deserted. The lamplight shone a bright yellow corona around the desk whereupon, in seeming disarray, a myriad of objects, test tubes, phials and bottles filled with matter of every hue and texture, lay like toys in a sandbox. Rowan approached the desk timidly, on tiptoe, his every fiber taut, the hairs on his head and neck standing on end as if pulled outward from his skin by invisible hands. An excitement poured through him as his eyes fell on the miscellany before him, never having been this close to them before. Almost instinctively he closed his eyes, afraid to open them lest he see the miraculous liquids spilt from their shattered containers. Slowly his eyes let in a sliver of light. Everything was as it had been, their positions unchanged, their colors vibrating languidly behind thin glass. It was then that Rowan noticed, separate from the other items on the desk, a small sphere the size of a gumball. It was transparent as far as he could see, though now and then it would pulsate gently and emit a pleasant sound, deep and soft, accompanied by a faint spectrum of color. As he bent down to take a closer look at it, the vibrations became stronger, the sound becoming at once brighter and deeper, with multiple tones ringing in a strange but familiar harmony. It seemed that the closer he came to it, the more brilliant its tones, to the point that he could not help picking it up between his thumb and forefinger. The little orb immediately lost its transparency and became alive with swirling rainbows, and sounds of brass, bells and light echoed in his ears with seraphic sweetness. That this was a candy, Rowan had no doubt, but one of such sensory brilliance that it seemed pointless for him to experience its pleasures only halfway and not fulfill its supreme purpose of being eaten.
On the brittle equipoise between admiration and anger, Rowan tipped the balance in the latter direction, and he bit into the throbbing symphony in his hand. As his teeth cut their parallel grooves into the orb, a kaleidoscopic cacophony of broken glass and grating metal lacerated the air, and paper thin shards of sound were pulled from the horribly vibrating urchin like needles from a pin cushion and pricked his rippling flesh, so that he would not have been surprised to see trickles of blood dripping from a thousand tiny holes. He dropped the candy on the ground where it became suddenly inert, and the ghastly din died as quickly leaving a chill silence filling the room like an icy breath. A taste like strawberries and molasses lingered on his tongue, though his ears burned. He knew he could not hide this and so turned away immediately from his crime to escape up the stairs and into his room, only to be met suddenly by the furious red eyes of his father boring deep gouges into his chest. There was no word from his father's lips, though the rough, angular features of his face were more painful to endure. His father grabbed Rowan by the shirt collar and dragged him up the stairs, his feet half stepping, half tripping along the planks, the two incongruous forms racing down the hall with surprising speed until Rowan felt himself hurled into his bedroom with the door slamming behind. "Never again!" screamed his father as the lock clicked pitilessly. "Never again!" Rowan said not a word, but lay on the floor where his father had thrown him, having not moved the slightest bit the moment he touched the ground. He lay in this state of mock paralysis for almost three hours before an arm twitched from the ache of immobility. His eyes were swollen and red, his skin cold, his lips cracked. He sat himself up slowly. His joints were sore. He climbed into bed without taking down the sheets, where he lay quietly sobbing through the purple twilight.
He was awakened by a click and the sound of his door opening, followed by a singular clack on a shelf near the door. Then the door closed and the lock clicked as before. Rowan got up from his bed and walked slowly to the shelf. His eyes beheld the transparent candy with its familiar bite marks bruising the surface, contained like a lab specimen in a glass jar with the label rudely torn away. He bit his lip so hard it bled, and he took the jar, opened it, and taking out the contents, hurled the misshapen orb out the window as it whistled faintly in the night air.
Rowan had at one time been captivated by his father's work, watching him in the basement as he concocted some new magical creation or mixed phials of foreign and other-worldly substances which coalesced into a new brilliance. In spite of his interest, though, his father would hardly let him near his experiments, sometimes shouting at Rowan to get back upstairs.
"This is extremely delicate material, Rowan. Even looking at it could destroy months of work. Do not go near it, even if I'm here, do you understand me?" His father's words were stern, bordering on a precarious anger. Rowan simply nodded and ran upstairs to his room, flopping limply on the bed, tears trickling from his eyes and clinging to his lashes in crystalline droplets. It was at these moments that he would be torn between two poles. At one end of his brain was a deep desire to know how his father made the miraculous things he did, at the other end a growing impulse to rebel against him, for Rowan did not understand the contradiction between the beauty of his father's creations and the wicked ugliness of the persona he showed to all who ventured too near his work. It was during this time of uncertainty, where his mind stood balanced on the head of a pin, that Rowan acquired the jar.
During an afternoon, Rowan stole into the basement to watch his father work in secret, hoping to hide amongst the boxes underneath the stairwell, swallowed by the shadows, though with a clear side view of his father's desk, lit by a single lamp upon roughly sanded wood. As he prepared to duck underneath the stairwell, he noticed his father was not at his desk, nor was there any sign of his being anywhere in the basement. It was deserted. The lamplight shone a bright yellow corona around the desk whereupon, in seeming disarray, a myriad of objects, test tubes, phials and bottles filled with matter of every hue and texture, lay like toys in a sandbox. Rowan approached the desk timidly, on tiptoe, his every fiber taut, the hairs on his head and neck standing on end as if pulled outward from his skin by invisible hands. An excitement poured through him as his eyes fell on the miscellany before him, never having been this close to them before. Almost instinctively he closed his eyes, afraid to open them lest he see the miraculous liquids spilt from their shattered containers. Slowly his eyes let in a sliver of light. Everything was as it had been, their positions unchanged, their colors vibrating languidly behind thin glass. It was then that Rowan noticed, separate from the other items on the desk, a small sphere the size of a gumball. It was transparent as far as he could see, though now and then it would pulsate gently and emit a pleasant sound, deep and soft, accompanied by a faint spectrum of color. As he bent down to take a closer look at it, the vibrations became stronger, the sound becoming at once brighter and deeper, with multiple tones ringing in a strange but familiar harmony. It seemed that the closer he came to it, the more brilliant its tones, to the point that he could not help picking it up between his thumb and forefinger. The little orb immediately lost its transparency and became alive with swirling rainbows, and sounds of brass, bells and light echoed in his ears with seraphic sweetness. That this was a candy, Rowan had no doubt, but one of such sensory brilliance that it seemed pointless for him to experience its pleasures only halfway and not fulfill its supreme purpose of being eaten.
On the brittle equipoise between admiration and anger, Rowan tipped the balance in the latter direction, and he bit into the throbbing symphony in his hand. As his teeth cut their parallel grooves into the orb, a kaleidoscopic cacophony of broken glass and grating metal lacerated the air, and paper thin shards of sound were pulled from the horribly vibrating urchin like needles from a pin cushion and pricked his rippling flesh, so that he would not have been surprised to see trickles of blood dripping from a thousand tiny holes. He dropped the candy on the ground where it became suddenly inert, and the ghastly din died as quickly leaving a chill silence filling the room like an icy breath. A taste like strawberries and molasses lingered on his tongue, though his ears burned. He knew he could not hide this and so turned away immediately from his crime to escape up the stairs and into his room, only to be met suddenly by the furious red eyes of his father boring deep gouges into his chest. There was no word from his father's lips, though the rough, angular features of his face were more painful to endure. His father grabbed Rowan by the shirt collar and dragged him up the stairs, his feet half stepping, half tripping along the planks, the two incongruous forms racing down the hall with surprising speed until Rowan felt himself hurled into his bedroom with the door slamming behind. "Never again!" screamed his father as the lock clicked pitilessly. "Never again!" Rowan said not a word, but lay on the floor where his father had thrown him, having not moved the slightest bit the moment he touched the ground. He lay in this state of mock paralysis for almost three hours before an arm twitched from the ache of immobility. His eyes were swollen and red, his skin cold, his lips cracked. He sat himself up slowly. His joints were sore. He climbed into bed without taking down the sheets, where he lay quietly sobbing through the purple twilight.
He was awakened by a click and the sound of his door opening, followed by a singular clack on a shelf near the door. Then the door closed and the lock clicked as before. Rowan got up from his bed and walked slowly to the shelf. His eyes beheld the transparent candy with its familiar bite marks bruising the surface, contained like a lab specimen in a glass jar with the label rudely torn away. He bit his lip so hard it bled, and he took the jar, opened it, and taking out the contents, hurled the misshapen orb out the window as it whistled faintly in the night air.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Mere coincidence?
Perusing Shakespeare's Sonnet 104, I noticed a couple of interesting things. The first two lines run:
To me faire friend you neuer can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyde...
"Eye I eyde," in addition to being, perhaps, a kind syntactical stutter, reminded me almost immediately of roman numerals, III. That this "spelled out" number should be re-iterated several times throughout the poem gives sense to this interpretation. And perhaps it is mere coincidence, but the final couplet contains only three 'i's as well:
For feare of which, heare this thou age vnbred,
Ere you were borne was beauties summer dead.
This, and the fact that the word "beauty" (or beauteous) appears in all three quatrains and the couplet--the fate of beauty in its threefold course: birth, life, death.
To me faire friend you neuer can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyde...
"Eye I eyde," in addition to being, perhaps, a kind syntactical stutter, reminded me almost immediately of roman numerals, III. That this "spelled out" number should be re-iterated several times throughout the poem gives sense to this interpretation. And perhaps it is mere coincidence, but the final couplet contains only three 'i's as well:
For feare of which, heare this thou age vnbred,
Ere you were borne was beauties summer dead.
This, and the fact that the word "beauty" (or beauteous) appears in all three quatrains and the couplet--the fate of beauty in its threefold course: birth, life, death.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Limericks I
A bestial fellow named Frig
had a cock so excessively big,
that one single thrust
thirty hymens could bust,
and of course, each belongs to a pig.
There once was a fellow named Todd,
who delighted in rubbing his rod
when playing the organ,
so come sontag morgen
his penis would point straight to God.
There once was a lady named Winnie,
whose body was so very skinny,
that although quite the glutton,
her wee belly button
had transformed from outie to innie.
But Winnie, she grew very pouty,
when her newborn arrived short and stouty,
for after the birth,
an excess of girth
changed her innie back into an outie.
There once was a lady named Becker,
who was rumored to have a large pecker.
She found it injurious
when the boys, all quite curious,
would lift up her skirt--just to check her.
Said a lovely young lady from Haiman,
who had fallen in love with a gay man,
"Oh, if I were a flower,
how I wish he'd devour
my pistil instead of the stamen!"
A man with his wife on vacation
was caught in a prevarication,
for he told her his junk
was full up with spunk,
when he'd spent it all last masturbation.
had a cock so excessively big,
that one single thrust
thirty hymens could bust,
and of course, each belongs to a pig.
There once was a fellow named Todd,
who delighted in rubbing his rod
when playing the organ,
so come sontag morgen
his penis would point straight to God.
There once was a lady named Winnie,
whose body was so very skinny,
that although quite the glutton,
her wee belly button
had transformed from outie to innie.
But Winnie, she grew very pouty,
when her newborn arrived short and stouty,
for after the birth,
an excess of girth
changed her innie back into an outie.
There once was a lady named Becker,
who was rumored to have a large pecker.
She found it injurious
when the boys, all quite curious,
would lift up her skirt--just to check her.
Said a lovely young lady from Haiman,
who had fallen in love with a gay man,
"Oh, if I were a flower,
how I wish he'd devour
my pistil instead of the stamen!"
A man with his wife on vacation
was caught in a prevarication,
for he told her his junk
was full up with spunk,
when he'd spent it all last masturbation.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
The Conversation
A Thursday afternoon. A father and his six-year-old son are driving home after school.
FATHER: So, son, how was school today?
SON: Great, Daddy! We drew pictures and read stories about dinosaurs.
FATHER: Sounds like fun.
SON: Yeah. Heh, Daddy, guess what...I made a poopy!
FATHER (somewhat alarmed): What poopy?
SON: I made a poopy!!
FATHER (more emphatically): What poopy?!
SON: In art class!
FATHER: In art class? My God, what did the teacher say?
SON: He liked it.
FATHER: What do you mean, he liked it?
SON: He showed it to the rest of the class.
FATHER: Christ, that's sick! What did everyone do? Did they make fun of you?
SON: No. We put it on the wall.
FATHER (disgusted): Oh, God...that's horrible! What the hell was that guy thinking! Vanderhorn is gonna hear it from me tonight! That's...oh, God...
SON: What's wrong, Daddy?
FATHER: What's wrong?! You make a poopy in class, the teacher shows it to everyone and displays it on the wall for all to see?! How the hell did he fasten it to the wall?
SON: Daddy, are you swearing?
FATHER: No...well, yes...a little. I've got a right this time!
SON: 'Cause when you say the Lord's name in vain, it makes baby Jesus cry.
FATHER: What are they teaching you in Sunday school? Lord's name in va...fine. No more swearing. So, how did he fasten the poopy to the wall?
SON: With tape.
FATHER: What?! And it worked?!
SON: Uh-ha.
FATHER: That is...I've never heard of that. Still...how the he...never mind. What happened after art class? Did you have to go wash up? Did you have to go to the clinic to get changed?
SON: We just washed our hands.
FATHER: What about your underwear?
SON: What about it?
FATHER: Aww, Christ, don't tell me you're still wearing it!
SON: Daddy...
FATHER: I know, no swearing, sorry...you've still got them on?
SON: Uh-ha.
FATHER (deeply sighing): Oh, man...oh, man...alright, we'll get you cleaned up when we get home. Man, your mother is NOT gonna be happy.
SON (suddenly worried): Why not? Did I do something wrong, Daddy?
The boy starts to cry.
FATHER: Now don't start there. It's alright. I'll talk to her, it'll be fine. No one's gonna get in trouble, OK?
SON (recovering a bit): OK.
FATHER: Good. I still can't believe Vanderhorn did that...typical artists! Probably a conceptual guy, too. Another Piss Christ in the works...
SON: DADDY!!!
FATHER: SORRY, sorry. No more...man, a poopy. A poopy?
SON: Uh-ha.
FATHER (shaking his head): I can't believe it's just gonna stay there on the wall like that. Someone's bound to smell it.
SON: It doesn't smell.
FATHER (chuckling): Yeah, right. For the past five and a half years it hasn't smelled. I still can't get my head around this right now. It's probably best your mom doesn't know. We'll just keep it to ourselves.
SON: But I wanted to show it to her! I want to put it on our refrigerator!
FATHER: Are you out of your mind? There's no way I'm putting your poopy on our refrigerator. Child services would have us arrested and you taken away. There's no way that's happening.
The boy begins to cry again.
FATHER: Oh, come one, son. You've gotta understand, now. We can't go around putting feces on the fridge, it's disgusting.
SON (crying): It's NOT feces, it's a poopy!
FATHER: A poopy?
SON: Yeah, you know...woof, woof!!
FATHER (in disbelief): You mean a "puppy!"
SON (as if with a sudden epiphany): Oh, yeah...
The father begins to cry.
FATHER: So, son, how was school today?
SON: Great, Daddy! We drew pictures and read stories about dinosaurs.
FATHER: Sounds like fun.
SON: Yeah. Heh, Daddy, guess what...I made a poopy!
FATHER (somewhat alarmed): What poopy?
SON: I made a poopy!!
FATHER (more emphatically): What poopy?!
SON: In art class!
FATHER: In art class? My God, what did the teacher say?
SON: He liked it.
FATHER: What do you mean, he liked it?
SON: He showed it to the rest of the class.
FATHER: Christ, that's sick! What did everyone do? Did they make fun of you?
SON: No. We put it on the wall.
FATHER (disgusted): Oh, God...that's horrible! What the hell was that guy thinking! Vanderhorn is gonna hear it from me tonight! That's...oh, God...
SON: What's wrong, Daddy?
FATHER: What's wrong?! You make a poopy in class, the teacher shows it to everyone and displays it on the wall for all to see?! How the hell did he fasten it to the wall?
SON: Daddy, are you swearing?
FATHER: No...well, yes...a little. I've got a right this time!
SON: 'Cause when you say the Lord's name in vain, it makes baby Jesus cry.
FATHER: What are they teaching you in Sunday school? Lord's name in va...fine. No more swearing. So, how did he fasten the poopy to the wall?
SON: With tape.
FATHER: What?! And it worked?!
SON: Uh-ha.
FATHER: That is...I've never heard of that. Still...how the he...never mind. What happened after art class? Did you have to go wash up? Did you have to go to the clinic to get changed?
SON: We just washed our hands.
FATHER: What about your underwear?
SON: What about it?
FATHER: Aww, Christ, don't tell me you're still wearing it!
SON: Daddy...
FATHER: I know, no swearing, sorry...you've still got them on?
SON: Uh-ha.
FATHER (deeply sighing): Oh, man...oh, man...alright, we'll get you cleaned up when we get home. Man, your mother is NOT gonna be happy.
SON (suddenly worried): Why not? Did I do something wrong, Daddy?
The boy starts to cry.
FATHER: Now don't start there. It's alright. I'll talk to her, it'll be fine. No one's gonna get in trouble, OK?
SON (recovering a bit): OK.
FATHER: Good. I still can't believe Vanderhorn did that...typical artists! Probably a conceptual guy, too. Another Piss Christ in the works...
SON: DADDY!!!
FATHER: SORRY, sorry. No more...man, a poopy. A poopy?
SON: Uh-ha.
FATHER (shaking his head): I can't believe it's just gonna stay there on the wall like that. Someone's bound to smell it.
SON: It doesn't smell.
FATHER (chuckling): Yeah, right. For the past five and a half years it hasn't smelled. I still can't get my head around this right now. It's probably best your mom doesn't know. We'll just keep it to ourselves.
SON: But I wanted to show it to her! I want to put it on our refrigerator!
FATHER: Are you out of your mind? There's no way I'm putting your poopy on our refrigerator. Child services would have us arrested and you taken away. There's no way that's happening.
The boy begins to cry again.
FATHER: Oh, come one, son. You've gotta understand, now. We can't go around putting feces on the fridge, it's disgusting.
SON (crying): It's NOT feces, it's a poopy!
FATHER: A poopy?
SON: Yeah, you know...woof, woof!!
FATHER (in disbelief): You mean a "puppy!"
SON (as if with a sudden epiphany): Oh, yeah...
The father begins to cry.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Assorted fruits
Mrs. Peach betrothed a leach she met down by the river.
Said Mr. Leach of Mrs. Peach, "There's nothing I can give her."
Mr. Pear divorced a hare despite the latter's merits.
The hare preferred a mocking bird, the pear a bunch of carrots.
Mrs. Lemon had a stem atop her yellow rind.
Her husband, Mr. Lime, dismissed her for a porcupine.
Said Mrs. Lemon to the lime, "How can you leave poor me?"
Said Mr. Lime, "It's simple ma'am, your head looks like a tree."
A turtle dove once fell in love with a lovely cantaloupe.
They ran away to wed one day, but found they can't elope.
Against the law it was. In awe they walked back into town,
and tried their luck with Mr. Duck, a preacher of renown.
Said Mr. Duck, "I see your tiff. Perhaps I have the answer.
The dove can wed my wife instead--I've fallen for a dancer.
And as for you, my melon true, I may have just the thing.
A honeydew, whom I once knew, just bought a wedding ring.
So I suggest you don your best and tie the knot with him.
Stick to your kind and you may find your marriage far less grim."
A strawberry and blueberry did one day take a stroll,
till one said to the other, "We'd be happier in a bowl."
Mr. Plum would use his thumb to hitchhike on the road.
A trucker picked him up one day, and ate him a la mode.
A ripe banana from Havana wed a nectarine.
Their wedding was a farce because they held it sub-marine.
The guests were wet, the food was wet, the priest was full of fish.
"At least the caviar," they said, "is still a tasty dish."
A lonely cherry, sitting very pretty in her dress,
once met a pear so comely fare, who one day did confess:
"It seems, my dear, that mirth and cheer are lacking on your part.
I'd like to help," and here he whelped, "but cherries make me fart."
The cherry then began to weep and ran away in tears.
And never did the cherry ever marry all these years.
Said Mr. Leach of Mrs. Peach, "There's nothing I can give her."
Mr. Pear divorced a hare despite the latter's merits.
The hare preferred a mocking bird, the pear a bunch of carrots.
Mrs. Lemon had a stem atop her yellow rind.
Her husband, Mr. Lime, dismissed her for a porcupine.
Said Mrs. Lemon to the lime, "How can you leave poor me?"
Said Mr. Lime, "It's simple ma'am, your head looks like a tree."
A turtle dove once fell in love with a lovely cantaloupe.
They ran away to wed one day, but found they can't elope.
Against the law it was. In awe they walked back into town,
and tried their luck with Mr. Duck, a preacher of renown.
Said Mr. Duck, "I see your tiff. Perhaps I have the answer.
The dove can wed my wife instead--I've fallen for a dancer.
And as for you, my melon true, I may have just the thing.
A honeydew, whom I once knew, just bought a wedding ring.
So I suggest you don your best and tie the knot with him.
Stick to your kind and you may find your marriage far less grim."
A strawberry and blueberry did one day take a stroll,
till one said to the other, "We'd be happier in a bowl."
Mr. Plum would use his thumb to hitchhike on the road.
A trucker picked him up one day, and ate him a la mode.
A ripe banana from Havana wed a nectarine.
Their wedding was a farce because they held it sub-marine.
The guests were wet, the food was wet, the priest was full of fish.
"At least the caviar," they said, "is still a tasty dish."
A lonely cherry, sitting very pretty in her dress,
once met a pear so comely fare, who one day did confess:
"It seems, my dear, that mirth and cheer are lacking on your part.
I'd like to help," and here he whelped, "but cherries make me fart."
The cherry then began to weep and ran away in tears.
And never did the cherry ever marry all these years.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Child rearing scenario
Emily, a married woman in her mid-30s, has a single child, Stanley. She wants to return to work around two months postpartum since she needs the money and greatly enjoys her job. Of course, the thought of assuming work-related stresses, even part-time, coupled with those of being a new parent, frighten her. She truly wants to continue impressing the higher-ups the way she did before the baby, though she worries what the commitment to Stanley will do to her job performance. Of course, she wants to spend as much time with her husband, John, and her son in order to establish a true family bond. Her work place, however, has no daycare, nor does her husband's. John, who works full-time but has agreed to cut back his hours over the next year, suggests Emily hire a nanny who can help out with basic chores and take care of little Stanley in case neither Emily nor John is available. Emily agrees...
The one thing that scares Emily the most is that the time she takes away from her son will undermine the attachment parenting she and her husband had originally intended to implement. Despite this, she and John hire a nanny to work days...
Over the next year, Emily has a fantastic time at work and feels more invigorated and fulfilled than she thought possible. She feels relieved that she did not heed the advice of self-help books suggesting that she start an at home business to supplement her income and establish her firmly as a stay-at-home mom while her husband worked 'in the field' as it were. A price is paid, however, since Stanley feels slightly more bonded to the nanny than to his mother, sometimes crying when Emily tried to hold him...
Several years later, Emily and John find Stanley rather disobedient. The lack of attachment parenting they were able to give him has diminished his trust for them, yielding a series of fights between parent and child. Nevertheless, the years had taught them to establish boundaries for their child, maintain firm rules and stand their ground, yielding only when necessary. They establish family meetings, spend quality time together during the evenings, and use their free time to make excursions to nearby places. The fights pass...
Stanley is 15. Emily and John are both working full-time. Stanley sees his parents' desire to maintain their careers while raising a child the best they could empowering. He excels at school, using his parents as an example of the fruits of hard work. A new kind of respect develops between them, and they revel in the idea that, although one's original plans may not work out, other solutions can be found, compromises made, and an equilibrium can be maintained. Emily and John's attachment parenting practices never came to full fruition the way they thought, though the ideals of those practices had seemed to have been made manifest in their lives...
The best practitioners of a system of parenting may not yield what they initially thought, and those who have been thwarted from their original ideas may come upon territory the never before encountered.
The one thing that scares Emily the most is that the time she takes away from her son will undermine the attachment parenting she and her husband had originally intended to implement. Despite this, she and John hire a nanny to work days...
Over the next year, Emily has a fantastic time at work and feels more invigorated and fulfilled than she thought possible. She feels relieved that she did not heed the advice of self-help books suggesting that she start an at home business to supplement her income and establish her firmly as a stay-at-home mom while her husband worked 'in the field' as it were. A price is paid, however, since Stanley feels slightly more bonded to the nanny than to his mother, sometimes crying when Emily tried to hold him...
Several years later, Emily and John find Stanley rather disobedient. The lack of attachment parenting they were able to give him has diminished his trust for them, yielding a series of fights between parent and child. Nevertheless, the years had taught them to establish boundaries for their child, maintain firm rules and stand their ground, yielding only when necessary. They establish family meetings, spend quality time together during the evenings, and use their free time to make excursions to nearby places. The fights pass...
Stanley is 15. Emily and John are both working full-time. Stanley sees his parents' desire to maintain their careers while raising a child the best they could empowering. He excels at school, using his parents as an example of the fruits of hard work. A new kind of respect develops between them, and they revel in the idea that, although one's original plans may not work out, other solutions can be found, compromises made, and an equilibrium can be maintained. Emily and John's attachment parenting practices never came to full fruition the way they thought, though the ideals of those practices had seemed to have been made manifest in their lives...
The best practitioners of a system of parenting may not yield what they initially thought, and those who have been thwarted from their original ideas may come upon territory the never before encountered.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
