Lake Boat Stories

Stories told from boats in the middle of a lake in the middle of a lake in the middle of a plague.

  • Possible Beginnings (to the Novel I will Likely Never Write)

    The Poppy Rip-Off

    It was early summer. You were living by yourself for the first time ever, after your divorce from the woman who convinced you to move to this city. It was a lovely, small but clean, studio apartment, for which you paid $400 a month in rent. You were walking over to Broadway when you saw this beater Honda screech up to a blue bungalow. Then this white guy with dreadlocks, cargo shorts and no shirt, leapt from the car, ran up to the front garden of the house, ripped out two or three tall blossoms, and then escaped, roots dribbling dirt, back to the car.

    A woman ran out of the house as the car peeled away. She looked at you and shook her head, more exasperated than enraged. “They stole my poppies.”

    “Your poppies?”

    “They’ve done it before.”—Why the hell would anyone—“They think they can make heroin from them.”

    “They do?”

    “They can’t.”

    You both looked in the direction the car drove off.

    “Idiots,” she said.

    That was 1994. You had met Gary by now, at Annex Theatre in Belltown, but you weren’t close friends.

     

    Palimpsest

    You and me. We came here for the same reason. To get away from each other.

    It’s why anyone comes to Seattle, comes out West, comes to America, comes to consciousness.

    We love each other and we need a fucking break.

    From each other.

    We’re always looking for room. Room to grow. To spread out. Lebensraum some called it. “Living room.” And, man, the lengths we are willing to go, and the depths to which we are willing to plunge, to get it.

     

    ⚓

     

    This book is about Seattle.

    In case that thought hadn’t occurred yet.

    “Seattle is dying”.

    That’s what they say. It was on the TV, so who are we to disbelieve them?

    Monroe says, “There are always three sides to every story. Your side, my side, and the truth.”

    You’ll meet Monroe later.

    But the right now truth is—and some part of you knows this fundamentally, bone sure—that whatever downfall you’re watching take place in this city, in all cities, is the direct result of:

    • your greed,
    • your pride,
    • your neglect,
    • your preference for your children over all children,
    • your inability to genuinely connect with other people in any truly meaningful way.

    “Seattle is dying?”

    Of course, it’s dying, ya jug head! Everything is dying. You’re dying. Your children—remember? The ones you preferred above all others?—they’re dying, and so are their unborn children’s children.

    Meet the new loss.

    Same as the old loss.

    Grow up.

     

    ⚓

     

    This book is about Heaven and Hell.

    In case that thought hadn’t occurred yet.

    But it’s also about running out of time.

    The concept of Heaven and Hell being separate places is a luxury we can no longer afford. There’s no time. There’s no room. To fit everything and get it right Heaven and Hell have to exist together as a palimpsest: an overlay of texts, of stories, one on top of the other.

    Then you can fit them wherever you want.

    Even Seattle.

     

    ⚓

     

    “Where are you from?” It’s so common in this city to be from somewhere else that this is the first question we ask upon meeting someone new.

    “Dude, I’m from here!” is the proud Seattle native’s reply.

    But you’re not from here. You’re from a there in the past, a least more than one Seattle ago.

     

    ⚓

     

    There’s a house in Green Lake.

    It has only one bathroom.

    It may be the only house left in all of Green Lake that has only one bathroom.

    We live there.

     

    ⚓

     

    There’s a black guy selling street news on Fourth Avenue South right between the two train stations. A big bald white guy says something to him as his passes by. The black guy hollers after him: “I’m out here selling newspapers. How is that not working for a living?”

    Later he tells someone, “Nah, it’s better this way. With Trump in the White House people tell you what they’re really thinking, and not lying like snakes in the grass.”

     

    ⚓

     

    That house in Green Lake?

    We’ve lived there 15 years.

     

    Gary / Monroe

    Tell the story about how you started your new gig at Charles Street Yard on the day you found out Gary died. Only you didn’t work that day. You realized you couldn’t, but only after idiotically thinking you could.

    Explain how an “out-of-class” job works at the City. And… well… how they don’t, sometimes.

     

    ⚓

     

    It’s not like you didn’t give them warning. You started lighting them up with emails at least a month out. “Hello from SDHR and greetings from the 55th floor! Just a heads up that my out-of-class assignment is up on May 3 and I have decided to come back to my old job. So please let me know if this works for you guys. Otherwise I’ll see you on 38 on Wednesday.

    [Insert here a hint of how horrible Susan was (out-of-class boss, head of HR for the city), but only a hint. Save the juice for later. Build suspense.]

    At the end of the day on Tuesday, you even brought a box of your stuff down to your old cube, where Alysha was sitting, herself working out-of-class. You had your lamp, your ergonomic footrest, and a box of your favorite office supplies. You put it in a corner of the already cramped cubicle. You apologized to Alysha for crowding her, but also reminded her that you had nowhere else to put it, and as far as anyone had told you, this would be your space again tomorrow. You didn’t mean to be a dick to Alysha. And she didn’t seem take it that way. Rather she seemed as puzzled as you were by the lack of communication from management.

    Word must have gotten to your once-and-future boss that you had dumped your stuff at your once-and-future cube because you saw a phone call coming in from him on your cell when you were headed home on the bus, but you had no interest in having that sort of conversation when you weren’t on the clock. You assumed it couldn’t be good news, since he had waited so long, but you honestly didn’t have a clue what sort of bad news it could be. What was the worst they could do to you, a protected civil servant?

    At home you listened to the voicemail. First thing the next morning, Andrew wanted you to meet him and Genesee, the SDOT Director’s chief of staff, at the Seattle Municipal Tower Starbucks to discuss “a really great opportunity.“ This almost certainly meant you weren’t getting your old job back. Otherwise why not just meet in Andrew’s office right next to your old cube?

    You barely slept that night as your mind cycled through ways to fight for your old job. They owed you that much: it was just that simple. But then, nothing’s simple at the City, and for a counter-attack like the one you were conceiving, you needed air cover, possibly from HR, and you just burned all of your bridges up there on the 55th floor. You’d get no help from that Hell.

    Heather advised you to wait and hear the offer. Be patient. Plan your counterpunch.

     

    ⚓

     

    May 3.

    You get to SMT early. Kill some time in the downstairs lobby’s public gallery.

    {Art should be a theme through this book, especially since Gary both loved and loathed it with the same kind of ambivalent passion that you do. He especially hated the kind of “safe art” so celebrated at the City. And he would’ve loved the idea of Monroe’s “road art”, even if he would have hated the actual painting. [NEED physical description of painting.]}

    The offer tendered: “An exciting opportunity to help Maintenance Operation optimize data tracking on their summer campaign, ‘Potholepalooza’.” Eeesh! Andrew assures you that there’s “room for growth and advancement within a few months.” (It’s been over three years as you write this. Never even offered a raise, let alone a promotion, and with the end of this pandemic nowhere in sight, the situation unlikely to change soon.)

    Andrew walks you across the street to the Bank of America building, where Maintenance Operation has its downtown offices. But you aren’t going to be working downtown. He tells you that you’re going to Charles Street Yard, well south of downtown, beneath the I-5/I-90 interchange. It’s where people in coveralls and orange vests work.

    On the way across the street, your phone rings. You see it’s Gary’s girlfriend, Jamey. She’d promised to update you after Gary’s procedure today, but you can’t deal with that right now. You send the call to voice mail. You’ll have to get back to her. It’s weird she’s calling you so early. It gives you a slightly sinking feeling.

    Andrew takes you up to the 31st floor. He introduces you to a woman, a fellow admin, and then leaves you in the lobby to go to another meeting. In a few minutes someone else is going to walk you down to Charles Street Yard and introduce you around. Sitting in the waiting area, you get a chance to listen to Jamey’s voice mail. She’s so hysterical you can barely understand her, but the gist is clear: “Please call me as soon as you get this.”

    You go to a window with no desks nearby and call. She picks up. She’s still hysterical, but she manages to tell you Gary’s dead. Last night. It was a struggle until the end, but the doctors could never get his heart and fluid levels under control at the same time, or something. You tell her you are so, so sorry. You tell her you’re going to need to call her back from somewhere you can talk. You tell her you’re going to call her back in exactly ten minutes. You promise you will call her back in exactly ten minutes, no matter what.

    You stare out the window at the Seattle Municipal Tower across the street. You wonder how the hell you’re going to start your new job today. And then you realize there’s no way in hell you’re going to start your new job today. And so you tell the nice lady who comes to take you to Charles Street Yard that your best friend just died and you’re going to have to leave.

    And then you realize you have to tell Heather. And then you realize you can’t tell her on the phone. You just… it wouldn’t be possible. And so you take a bus to Northgate. On the bus you call Jamey back and she’s a little calmer now, but not much.

    From Northgate Transit Center you walk to Heather’s office building and you take the elevator one floor up to her offices, and you ring the bell at the reception desk, and she comes out, surprised to see you. And she says, “Oh no, did you get fired?”

    And you laugh, and you say. “No. I had to come tell you in person. Gary’s dead.”

    And you don’t know it in that moment, but it’s also hardly surprising in retrospect: your life will never be the same, and you will never not miss him, or ever be free of the sadness that he’s gone.

    And the next day you land at the Charles Street Maintenance Facility in a grief haze. Sure you could have taken another day off, but then you’d just be sitting at home in a grief haze.

    No one seems to know what to do with you. Your putative boss, a haggard looking white woman named Karen finds you a desk in an open area with lots of other desks around, some occupied, some not. There are two nice young women working as temporary admins. Mary, a petite blonde, late 20s; and Katalina, a large Polynesian girl who comes off as older, but later you learn she’s only 23. When no one’s around they huddle and gossip about Mary’s dating life. Apparently, it’s not going well. The guys she dates don’t want to date so much as hook up. Katalina’s married and has a baby.

    Mary shows you how to enter data into a system which tracks usage of vehicles and supplies. There isn’t enough work to keep you busy, however, so you poke around on Facebook and try not to cry in front of everyone.

    Karen, your manager, occasionally walks by, going in and out of the building, but if she looks at you at all, it’s only to glance past your eye. She has nothing to say to you, no real work for you to do. You’ve been assigned to her from the Tower, and she has less of an idea of what to do with you than you have, and you barely have a clue. But your clue tells you that by the time she figures it out, the Tower will have forgotten you.

    Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe this is a place to hide for a while. With your grief-blasted heart.

    All through the day, guys of all different ethnicities, wearing yellow shirts or yellow jackets with silver reflective stripes, come in and camp at open computers. You’re not sure what these guys do, but they talk a lot about what’s going in the city’s roadways. One of them, a black guy, flat-out asks you, “Who are you?”

    You tell him your name. You tell him you were transferred down from the Tower.

    “What are you supposed to be doing?” This dude is now looming behind your chair, no doubt looking at your screen

    You explain that you’re not really sure. You’re still waiting to find out what your main job is going to be down here. You were told by the folks uptown that you were supposed to help out with spreadsheets for Potholepalooza, but so far no one down here has said anything about it.

    “This guy sounds like a spy,” this dude declares to anyone who might listen, which seems to be no one. You can’t tell if he’s joking. If he is, he ain’t letting you in on it. He has a froggish face. “Why they send you down here?”

    You tell him again you don’t know. That you wish you did.

    “Unh-hunh.” The way he says it is like he wants you to know he’ll be watching you.

    And so you decide to watch him. He’s got a face like a rockfish. You learn his name is Monroe, and over the next few hours it becomes apparent that he is Charles Street’s self-appointed gadfly, asking questions of everyone, about how the work gets done, about what management does and does not do. He’s also the self-appointed attention-grabbing loudmouth, hollering when he walks into the building, “Good afternoon, everyone!” and expecting people to answer him back. “I said, ‘GOOD AFTERNOON!’” He annoys you and raises your hackles. This guy could be trouble for you. At some point, you might have to have words.

    You stretch the data entry, because you don’t really want to ask for more work. You do your best, in your fog of grief, to reassure yourself that your new shitty job situation is impermanent.

    So along with being launched into the unknown of what life will be like without Gary (it will suck hard for a long time, and then, after that, only whenever you think of him, which is every day), you are also launched into the unknown of what happens to someone who has no work in a job he can’t be fired from. Part of you is actually interested in finding out. It’s like reading a book with a pleasantly unpredictable plot.

     

    Game Pitch Meeting

    You’re writing a book. The action—

    Wait. That’s the game?

    Yes.

    I’m writing a book.

    Yes. Hear us out.

    Okay.

    The action begins with you in your early fifties, sort of lost, not broken, but—

    I’m middle aged?

    Yes.

    And I’m writing a book?

    Yes.

    What other exciting, edgy twists to you have? Don’t tell me. I’m a white guy.

    Well, yes.

    I’m a middle-aged white guy, writing a book.

    Yes.

    Imagine the ground you’ll be breaking.

    It could be groundbreaking.

    Oh, do tell.

    Well, as we said, you’re sort of lost. Sort of Dante-in-the-woods type stuff.

    Referencing a 13th century poem? That’ll get the kids psyched.

    We’re not sure it’s for kids.

    A game, not for kids?

    Well, we’re still figuring that out.

    Are you sure you’re ready for me?

      

    Blake was right

     Maybe April is the cruelest month, but that year, 2017, May turned out to be one brutal motherfucker.

    You had known about Gary being sick since November. Which is also when you took your job in the Hell of being the executive assistant to the Director of the Seattle Department of Human Resources for the entire city. Your stint was supposed to be six months working out-of-class.

    Out-of-class?

    It’s a city thing. Well, a government thing. Unlike private-sector corporate jobs, in government you can fill a position, for which you’re ostensibly not fully qualified, on a provisional basis. It gives both sides a change to determine if there’s a fit.

    You’d been applying for out-of-class openings for a few months now, never getting very far. But you didn’t apply for this one. They sought you out. Someone in the Mayor’s office passed your name along to SDHR. To this day you’re not really sure who your “friend” in the MO was, or whether you should thank or curse them.

    You knew going in the director was going to be a challenge. You’d heard rumors; you observed the studies in blankness certain people’s faces became when you mentioned you were considering working for her. But you also knew you’d been through this variety of Hell before: the “difficult executive.” It was just some bleak territory you were going to have to re-tread, in order to get away from your current Hell at Transit and Mobility. And besides, what choice did you really have? You turn down an offer, even for an interview, from SDHR, and SDHR stops scheduling you for interviews.

    When you met with her, the director asked you if you were up for a tough job, and so you trotted out your city interview chestnut, about how before the Seattle Municipal Tower first opened, you were a window cleaner on the construction cleanup, hanging from cables in a two man basket fully 65 floors off the asphalt. Once you’ve done a job like that, you explained, it’s hard to be intimidated by anything that goes on in inside of the building.

    And she gave you the job. And it was easily as brutal as you expected. The director constantly taunting and tormenting you, and everyone else who reported to her. She seemed at times to be hoping her employees would break down in front of her. But you’d be damned if you’d give her that.

    And less than six months later, when you got the chance to drop out of the Hell of SDHR back down into the Hell of Transit and Mobility where you started, you took it. But instead, you dropped even farther, to a Hell so deep, that once you found your feet, you realized it just might be Heaven after all.

    You’re at Charles Street now. And Gary’s dead.

    And you’re broken.

    You’re broken. But broken isn’t bad. It’s just broken. Hearts are eggs that have to be broken before they can beaten and eaten and grown into new hearts. The point is…

    …The point is…. I’m off the rails.

    But that’s not a bad thing.

    The rails are karma, and I’m off them now.

    I ruin everything I touch. I’m like Midas, except for shit. (And even that inverted trope feels like it’s been done before.)

    I got nothing, G-d. Nothing to share with the world. And that’s what I have everything banked on. Sharing with the world.

     

    ⚓

     

    This guy sounds sad.

    Oh, he’s sad, all right.

    I suppose he has his reasons.

     

    ⚓

     

    What am I doing?

    First inspiration for the book: April 2019 after a haircut with Cee in Belltown. Fully high, having eaten both halves of a gummy, but no booze, because I was on some sort of mini-Lent.

    Lost in Belltown. Tall towers of Amazon throwing off my natural navigation. Was I on Third or Fourth Avenue? (I was on Third.) And which one did the bus come down? (It comes down Third.)

    I realized that all of my life has to do with other people. And so of course, using Sartre’s syllogism, that means all of my life is Hell, because “Hell is other people.” And then I realized that this book needed to be me mapping Seattle as Hell. And then later I realized, but also Heaven.

    Because here’s the thing about Heaven and Hell. William Blake was right. They’re married. And as much as they love to bicker and differ, they hate being apart from each other for much more than a single moment.

    Heaven is power and power is Hell, and Hell is helplessness, and helplessness brings you closer to G-d.

     

    ⚓

     

    November 2019

    Second great insight into the book.

    It’s a game.

     

    Somebody Fell Through the Hatch

    You’re writing a book.

    Oh, a book, is it?

    Yes. We start you somewhere normal, a moment not unusual in your life. Thornton Wilder warned that one should always pick a normal day, nothing special.

    Thornton who now?

    Wilder. He was a 20th century playwright and novelist—

    I know who the fuck Thornton Wilder was. Our Town? The Crucible? The question is: will your players? And if so, will they care?

    So… it’s a bleak, gray, rainy, windy day in December. You bus into work in darkness, and you bus home in the same darkness. You swim through it. Viscously. A darkness different from the mere absence of light, possessing a malevolent substance of its own.

    All right already. No need to push the sale. I’ve lived through a Pacific Northwest winter. It’s grim. I get it.

    So, you’ve been working at Charles Street Yard now for over two years. It’s the city’s largest service facility. The road crews dispatch from here. The fire trucks and police cruisers come here to get fixed. The First Hill street car rolls from here, as well as many of the city’s utility trucks: electricity and water, lights and sewer. It’s where they keep the salt and sand for when it snows, and the gas pumps for at least half of the city’s vehicles. You work as an administrative staff assistant in Building A, a squat, brown, two-story, mid-century architectural turd that houses the Maintenance Operations Division of the Seattle Department of Transportation.

    I’m a secretary.

    No one’s called them that for like fifty years, but… yes.

    I work for the city, but I couldn’t be a cop or a fireman?

    You arrive a little before 8 am, which is considered a late start in a department that dispatches street crews. You enter time until your coffee break.

    I enter time?

    From the crews. They write their time on daily crew reports and you take that and enter it into the payroll system.

    Spellbinding

    Walking to Starbucks on your break at around 9 am, you begin to cheer up. The Clash is playing. “Rudy Can’t Fail” and he really can’t, can he? And the wind is picking up and it’s reminding you that the world is wild, and wide. And you start to feel like if it’s going to kill you—and it is going to kill you—perhaps you can negotiate better terms.

    At the Starbucks counter you flirt politely and very, very subtly with the adorably smiling Asian girl with streaks of teal in her hair. Her name tag says “Nga”.

    And when you get back to your desk, all the sudden you’re writing again, after not writing for weeks: notes about said crinkly-eyed, teal-haired girl, all four-foot-ten of her, with her smile, which craves kissing. You’re easily old enough to be her grandfather.

    Later that day, coming back from lunch you see an SFD ladder truck with its lights flashing parked across the streetcar tracks in the yard just outside your building. You check the ladder number online to see if it’s your friend Craig’s rig. Craig’s an SFD lieutenant at the U-District station, but this ladder “#1” rolls out of downtown headquarters.

    You’re at your desk for maybe half an hour when you hear someone say, “Yeah. It was one of the guys working on the roof today. He fell right thought the hatch at the top of the ladder in the main stairwell.”

    “He was non-responsive when they took him away.”

    “Harborview?”

    “Yeah. I would think so.”

    “He might not make it.”

    “Have you been up there?”

    “Where?

    “The stair well.”

    “I don’t want to go up there.”

    “Blood everywhere, they say.”

    “Damn,” you say, finally piping up. “Must mean he hit his head. That’s bad. Very bad.”

    Gene, the out-of-class crew chief : “I feel bad for him.”

    You: “I feel bad for his family.”

     

    ⚓

     

    That’s it.

    That’s what?

    That’s the moment.

    What moment?

    The Thornton Wilder moment. The ordinary, thin slice of your life, remarkable but not profound. Somebody fell through the hatch. Blood everywhere. Must’ve hit their head. SFD shows up. Takes him away. Critical condition. Heart goes out. To him. His family.

    And what’s the game-play?

    Simple: do you keep writing? That’s the decision nexus that advances the game-play.

    Do I keep writing?

    Yes.

    How should I know?

    Decide.

    Well…

    You have to decide. To not decide is to decide.

    …

    Decide.

    Uh… yes. I keep writing.

    Okay. Good…. Maybe.

    What do I win?

    You have to wait and find out.

    But I do win something, yes?

    You have to wait to find out.

    That’s excruciating.

    That’s the game-play.

    And absurd.

    That’s the game-play.

    I’m intrigued.

    We’re glad to hear it. So you keep writing?

    Yes. Let’s say yes.

    Okay. So here’s what you write in your journal that day.

    Karen just briefed us (Monroe, “light-duty” Reuben, and me): A roofer fell through the hatch in the stairwell. There’s still a lot of blood on the floor. They took him to the hospital unresponsive. The stairwell’s going to be inaccessible until L&I comes by for an investigation and then a bio team comes to clean it.

    Me: Man, never a dull moment down at Charles Street.

    Monroe: I been telling ‘em: they need to start filming a reality show up in here.

     

    ⚓

     

    Your second day at Charles Street, this guy Monroe came in after lunch, and started in again, grumbling: “This place, man. I don’t know sometimes. It’s always something. I’m just trying to get the job done, but you never know what you gonna get at Charles Street, y’all.”

    The old, white crew chief Steve said in his soft voice, “Do you ever stop complaining, Monroe?”

    “Naw, man. Don’t you know? When you stop complaining, that’s when you dead.”

    Steve nodded, and grinned almost imperceptibly behind his tinted glasses. Monroe went back to grumbling. You went back to typing, on Face Book, something about missing Gary. [Get this Face Book post.] Then Monroe started speaking more loudly, and more pointedly, “I tell you want I want to know… I wanna know why this guy from uptown is sitting down here all day with nothing to do.”

    Something snapped.

     

    ⚓

     

    I spin around in my desk chair to face him, tugging out my badge out on its retractable lanyard attached to my belt loop. It’s in a plastic sleeve along with my city-provided-ORCA card. I say, “Look, man: this is my city ID, okay? Means I work here just like you. I don’t know why I’m here. My out-of-class position up at the Tower was up; they were supposed to send me back to my old job, but they didn’t. They sent me here. I was supposed to come Wednesday at the beginning of the new pay period, but my best friend died, so I came yesterday. And I don’t have any clue what I’m supposed be doing, but check the badge, man. I’m a city worker just like you, okay?

    Monroe slowly nods his head, as if weighing some matter of grave import, then, suddenly grins, spreading his hands out wide in welcome. “Well, all right. That’s all I wanted to know. Welcome to Charles Street.” He holds his hand out towards me, and I shake it firmly. “Sorry about your friend.”

     

    ⚓

     

    You did it!

    What did I do?

    You went into it. You played the game.

    Huh… yeah… I guess I did. I felt that. I went in.

    Congratulations.

    Uh… thanks?

    That was a key moment you just played. The beginning of your love affair with Charles Street, but only the very beginning. You didn’t even know it yet. One can imagine loving Heaven, but Hell you have to live through.

    Still, your love of Charles Street grew, and your love for Monroe, with his face like a river stone, lightly pocked but still somehow smooth, like a salamander, maybe. Screw it. You’re never gonna get Monroe’s face right. So decide.

    Decide what?

    It’s always the same.

    Do I keep writing?

    Precisely.

    Sure. Why not?

     

    ⚓

     

    Pocket Notebook:

     

    11/2

    I was a playwright.

    It’s such an absurd thing 2B that 2 not B it anymore multiplies the absurdity X itself.

    Now I write other things. Like I’m writing this book now.

    But for money I work for the city as an admin.

    Which actually works b/c all the best stories r here.

     

    11/4

    This book is k–ping me alive. That’s the only reason I’m writing it…

    Why do cop cars have tinted windows? I’m looking at one right now that does, parked in the driveway @8th + Dearborn. One of the new snazzy Dodge Chargers.

    But what does that say about my life that I need this art? Did I make an addict of myself in my younger years?

    Is this book the story of a failed playwright?

    This is a story of being lost.

    I’m a gray, blubbery ghost of the young man I was.

    If it’s true that people don’t so much Δ as wear out, wear down, then what I’m wearing into?

    You quit Θ.

    You write books instead.

    You get a job @ the city.

    You write a book about the city.

    You collaborated with an amazing designer.

    Your designer dies

    __________________________?

    __________________________?

    Beginning: We are all struggling here. Doesn’t mean that all of that struggle is good, or healthy, or wise.

    Some of it’s just the thrashing that brings the predators.

     

    11/5

    Big stinky bear guy in his corner seat, his reek seeping out to the rest of us. Sharp, full tang. Dare not dig deeper on description for fear of making myself sick.

    Bus packed and haven’t even reached last stop yet.

    Notes of puke & feces. Mostly just sour body reek.

    Breathing through my shirt. It smells slightly of chocolate.

    Mr. Fungible.

    Elroy Fungible.

    Mr. Prithee speaks only poetry to be unheard by the clouds.

    The happiness axis.

    The stress axis.

    Mourning axis (goes up and down)

    Bewilderment axis (drunkenness) pushes the mourning axis—spikes it.

    Thinking about how Colbert told Conan how his job is breaking him physically.

    No one escapes.

    1:33

    Good God, why do I feel like crying?

    We’re miracle machines. Truly. But all machines break down.

    Perpetual motion my ass.

     

    Doesn’t seem like much.

    They’re notes. They’re not intended to seem… well, they’re not intended to seem like anything. They’re just seed corn you’ve left out for yourself, on the hopes that maybe something will sprout from it.

    Does it?

    Does what?

    Does anything sprout from it?

    You have to keep playing to find out.

    Why was this guy Gary such a big deal?

    It’s a great question.

    Okay?

    You’re gonna wanna keep writing.

    Why?

    It’s probably the only way you’ll ever know.

     

    ⚓

     

    Heaven nor Hell: you don’t get to choose. If you’re lucky you might get to choose a real place, like Seattle, and go there, with some woman you will likely never see again, because she lives in Texas or some shit. But as compensation, because you do art, you get to meet truly amazing people, like Gary, the likes of whom you will certainly never see again, because he’s in Heaven, or Hell, or some shit. But really, he’s just dead.

    Gone.

    And instead you get Monroe.

    And Monroe’s pretty amazing even if he ain’t Gary.

    “Good morning, everyone… I said, ‘GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE!’”

  • David Penn

    David Penn is a poet living in the Pacific Northwest.

    David wrote…

     

    Introduction: Each Minute is a Work in Progress

     

    The “Linguistics Professor”

  • The “Linguistics Professor”

    There was nothing wrong with the hull of the boat that a ball-peen hammer to bang out the dents and a fresh coat of primer wouldn’t fix. Clearly it had featured an outboard motor of some sort at one time. Mangled remnants of the mounting bracket still dangled from the stern, but the vessel’s current skipper now piloted it with a single long oar, like a gondolier.

    He wore a much-faded gray-blue suit, possibly a uniform, the pants of which were torn off at the knees and the jacket of which was essentially sleeveless, but a long, official looking, golden chain still looped from his belt to his back pocket. His mustache was large, but not entirely unkempt. His skin was raw red from the sun. This man had clearly known better days within a wider civilization. Even so, when he joined the conversation his tone was cheerful, even avuncular:

    “Little known fact. The world ‘tailgate’ in its current usage is misspelled and mis-derived. Of course, back when such doings were permitted, the word was redefined to mean a social event held on and around the open rear gate of a vehicle, often at large sporting events, most especially football, but what very few people besides dedicated experts such as myself understand is that the first word of the compound is more accurately spelled ‘t-a-l-e’, as in a type of story. The ‘talegate’ was an ancient, quasi-mystical tradition, in which our forbears’ forbears believed that if enough of the right sorts of souls gathered in a circle, a particular portal would open, allowing stories to pour forth from the realm of the gods and the giants.

    “I believe it is still possible to open such a gate, right here, right now, on this very lake, at this very hour, palpably witching as it is. And if you all will oblige me, I’d like very much to deliver the first offering.”

    He smiled and his passengers – two couples and a single man – stared back at him. There is something sacred about the moment between the offering of the tale and its delivery, a caesura so immense that any true tale-taller almost finds himself regretting the violation of that silence. Therein lies the courage of tale-telling. Not so much, not even, the particulars of the tale to be told: the who did what to whom. And why. And how. Especially how. No. The bravery is in believing there is something better, something more beautiful than the anticipation you are replacing.

    “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ …”

    He froze. He peeked warily at the quintet before him: a little old man and little old lady swaddled in colorful windproof and waterproof pastels, a younger couple – also man and woman – though in darker, more weather-agnostic charcoal jeans and black fleece anoraks – and a single man who looked more like the skipper than he cared to admit.

    And that’s where the buzzing was coming from. He looked down at the man: a short, spindly looking individual, a face that was all nose, cheeks, and chin, blue black peacoat, and a battered Navy blue Greek sailor’s cap tugged down to cover all but the final line of furrows in the man’s brow.

    “Your pardon, sir,” the skipper began. “I didn’t quite catch–“

    “I said, ‘ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’. As in ‘God-ZZZ’,” the man replied.

    “God-zzz?” the skipper asked. His mind raced, then, like a face full of briny sea breeze it hit him. “Gods. Gods! You mean ‘Gods’? Yes, the plural! Of course!” The joy that accompanied both his understanding of the strange man’s mumbling – and the likelihood that he would be able to get on with his tale-telling – could not have been more profound. “Indeed gods and giants!” the skipper said, almost shouting in affirmation. “Gods and giants!”

    The man seemed not to share his enthusiasm. “Mmmm, hmmm,” he muttered, eyeing the boat’s pilot with that strange affect of raising his head while casting his eyes lower. “Well, I wonder … if you don’t mind me asking: just how many god-zzz you got in that tale of yours you fixin’ to tell?”

    He looked at the man, who was measuring him with a half-lidded intensity that almost made him drop his grip on the oar. There are some folks who like to get a rise out of tale-tellers, like hecklers at a comedy club, and the skipper had his fair share in all his years of dragging bored couples and lonely men in long looping circles around the lake just about every weekend between Mother’s Day and the Autumn Equinox. That much comes with the territory.

    And it just so happened that the tale he’d planned on telling today was a relatively simple affair involving more than a few giants, but really, only one god, as such. He scanned the plot of his story quickly to be sure: giants, yes. Loads of them. But only one god.

    The man was still measuring him. The skipper thought he saw a slight tug at the corner of the man’s mouth, a twitch, a put-on! The skipper raised his eyebrows, ready to pounce with good-spirited laughter as his strange interrogator made his bluff known. “I was just pulling your leg, cap’n,” he imagined the man would shout with bright eyes and a broad toothy smile, slapping his knee while everyone, even the Charcoal Twins, laughed uproariously. HOW MANY GODS YOU GOT MISTER? HA! HA! HA!

    But the man wasn’t laughing. The skipper smiled nervously back at the man whose mouth, while moving slightly, had yet to break into a smile, or a grin, or anything. He watched the man’s lips move in a flat, masticating oval hard once, twice, three times before launching a stream of mud-colored saliva into the salty air and over the side of the boat, vanishing into the thick blue that surrounded them as if it had never existed in the first place.

    The captain drew himself up, finally recognizing the power of the adversary before him. He’d known men like this before, people with one sense of life and to hell with everybody else’s. People with a sense of surety so damn sure that they have no issue with telling a man who’d lived his whole live one way that it was time to live in another. Or worse, that the life he’d been living up to that moment was a lie, some fiction, and that he, some stranger from a strange place, was here to tell the true tale.

    Sure, the tale he’d spent the past week memorizing had only one deity, to speak of, so to speak. But he’d be damned if he wasn’t tempted—if he didn’t more than halfway believe that maybe a point should be made. If not about tolerance, per se. Then at least about the liberty of a man – even a hired man – to tell the tale of his choice on his own boat.

    In fact, it was all it took for him not to call upon another tale. Ah, dear sir, how many gods – god-ZZZ – in my tale, you ask? Do you mean the tale of the Quarrelling Gods – the seven gods! All brothers. Prettier than princesses and all meaner than a kick in the shorts? That enough gods, for you? Hadn’t planned on sharing that one but, given your concern about the number of god-ZZZ, as you say…

    Or maybe the tale of the Weeping Gods? Only four gods in that tear-jerker, a quartet of celestial sad sacks lamenting all of Creation and their own increasingly tragic efforts at constructive intervention? Ha! What? Would You Think? About That?

    The man was still regarding him, patiently as a poll-taker. The skipper offered a quick smile, realized immediately that his attempt at bait had backfired, and while the man continued to look impassively back at him, the would-be tale-teller felt himself shrink behind his outsized grin, a grimace of fake joy he couldn’t make fade fast enough.

    Behind the man the skipper saw the undulating blue-grey green lake surface, flecked and frosted with wisps of spray and foam. Against the dark shifts of water, he could make out a black branch, a pair of branches, no, the arms, the arms of a man in the water. Splashing. Not drowning, but splashing. And screaming. Screaming at him. He heard laughter. The little old man and little old lady in the pastel-colored wind and waterproof gear converging on him, laughing and clapping their hands, pointing in the direction of the man in the water. Now the young couple was on their feet as well! They too were laughing at the man in the water. They’d hardly said a thing to anyone at all since they climbed on board. But now look them! Laughing at the man in the water.

    Now they were patting him on the back, as well, and congratulating him. The skipper felt his cheeks broadening against his will as modesty overcame him. There was a voice in his ear, raspy, but clear as black ink on white paper: “You showed him what’s what!”

    He heard a splash. Felt his eyes click into focus with a scratch that told him instantly that he’d been staring at nothing for too long. Some forty yards starboard, a woman was bobbing in the water, alternately clearing her eyes and paddling her arms in an absentminded-looking, but apparently very effective for floating fashion. She was laughing uproariously at a group of people in a nearby vessel who seemed alternately amused and terrified that she was not on board.

    “Karen! For fuck’s sake! Will you get back in the boat?” he heard, then saw, a woman in a floppy hat and pair of sunglasses, shouting from the swaying sea craft. Two other women stood next to her on the deck. One waving. One shouting. Both in the same combination of hip-to-neck nylon and terry cloth swimwear as the woman who was both waving and shouting at “Karen.” All three were almost stereotypically local, he thought, watching them huddled on the deck: a little wide at the hip and narrow at the shoulder, middle-aged, skin white as pickling salt.

    He looked back at the passengers in his own boat. The little old man and the little old woman – even the young man and woman in the technology costumes – were looking at him. He began to realize with a swiftly gathering remorse that they weren’t applauding any more – if they ever were. And they weren’t patting him on the back, either. Like his strange interrogator, who was very much not in the water, where the skipper – for a not-so-fleeting moment – had imagined tossing him. They were looking squarely at him and waiting for him to speak.

    He looked back to the nearby boat. Karen was onboard now, a trio of women who looked too alike to be related surrounding her. The skipper watched as Karen endured their ribbing for a moment, then suddenly hit a full, double bicep pose in response. The women exploded in laughter. One of their party snuck up behind Karen with a cartoony, exaggerated tip-toe, grabbed her around the torso from behind, and hoisted her off her feet, carrying her toward the side of the boat. An explosion of shriek-laughter arched across the lake as Karen slipped from her shipmate’s grasp and began chasing the other women around the deck with the threat of her own soaking wet embrace in return.

    The skipper regarded his passengers. He wasn’t in the trouble-making business. He was in the tale-telling business and, at least until the end of the weekend, the boat-piloting business as well. If there’s only one god in the story, then there’s no reason to just add in an extra god or switch to another tale just to prove a point. He looked into the face of his strange interrogator, the man’s eyes black and tiny beneath eyebrows that looked as if they once had a life of their own. “Rest assured, my friend!” the skipper shouted, “only one god in this tale. Only one! Indeed!”

    The man nodded and looked away, punishing the shimmering grey blue water with his half-lidded stare. The old people were no longer paying attention. The skipper wasn’t sure, now that he thought about it, if the charcoal-colored kids ever really were.

    “One god, indeed, my friend,” the boat’s pilot muttered to himself, steering the boat toward the deeper water near the lake’s center. “But many manifestations. Many, many manifestations.”

     

  • Jennifer Moniz

    Jennifer Moniz is an immigration paralegal, artisan gelato maker, and fringe theater director. She used to work one cubicle away from Paul Mullin and enjoyed throwing things at him. She now lives in Chicago.

    Jennifer wrote…

     

    Introduction: Provisions

     

    The Coven

     

  • The Coven

    On the third anniversary of Caro being taken by the sea, the rising sun woke Oona and she fought for a greater share of the blankets to cover her head. No one fought back. Her sister was not in bed. Oona found her in the living room, staring out the window at the vanishing darkness.

    Caro said that she did not remember being taken by the sea. She shrugged off any mention of it, but she was marked by it. On that first year, when the same day came around, Caro would not leave the house. The next year, her spirits were high leading up to it, but on the day itself again she would not leave the house. She would not say why. Oona asked her if she was afraid of something and Caro said, "What do I have to be afraid of?"

    But today, more than looking gloomy, Oona thought Caro actually looked ill. Oona asked if she was feeling all right and Caro said she was fine. Oona moved to feel her forehead and Caro slapped her hand away. The slap stung and in that sting Oona saw her sister in the dawn light for what she was. The fey look almost human. Very nearly human but there is a dark ugliness under the skin. That is what Oona saw and that is when she knew that this was not her sister. There was a changeling sitting where her sister should be. Caro moved and the spell was broken. She looked like Caro again, but Oona now knew.

    That day, Oona dragged her friends into the woods to search for herbs. She was not clear which ones were used to identify a fey, but she felt certain that they had to be unusual herbs so that is what she instructed everyone to look for. Something odd.

    Oona's friend Matilde complained. "This is stupid. The fey can only swap babies for changelings before Christening. You and Caro were christened years ago. They can't have done it."

    Oona heaved with frustration for it was exhausting to have friends who believed every story that they were told. "They only say that so children won't be frightened all the time. The fey can take us at any time. It just gets harder as we get older."

    Oona had been gathering clues to this truth for years. She just hadn't known it. She had observed how her sister slept differently now, fighting the blankets, snoring and mumbling. She used to listen to Caro recount her dreams every morning and now Caro claimed to never remember them. There were more things but the sleep things were so obvious. Oona should have spotted it sooner.

    Ainsley called Oona over and pointed at a tall spike of purple flowers. "I've seen the witches picking these. They must be used in spells."

    Oona wasn't sure. They looked like something you'd find in any garden. But it was true that the witches in town grew harmless things in their gardens and only came into the woods to look for wild and magical things. Everyone knew that. She peered into the purple bell shaped bulbs and they were full of spots on the inside. So they were deceptive. She thought they would probably do. She had a bag with her and her mother's gardening gloves. She put on the gloves and pulled off a few bulbs.

    Ainsley suddenly became nervous. "What are you going to do exactly?"

    Oona had a plan. She thought her sister was most clearly not her sister when she was asleep, which was part of why no one else ever saw it. Oona would put the herbs into her bed and in the morning the fey would be revealed.

    When Oona got home that afternoon, Caro was curled up in a blanket by the fire. She was pretending to read. Oona's mother asked her where she had been and she simply said, "Playing in the woods."

    Her mother came over and tugged on her ear. "My daughter, the woodland creature."

    Oona waited until her mother was busy in the kitchen before she snuck into her and Caro's bedroom. First she rearranged the bed so that their pillows were on opposite ends. She didn't know what magic the herb would work on her if she was too close to it. Then she took Caro's pillow, which was stitched with green and yellow stars, and she tucked the flowers into the cotton of the pillow. Her mother called her for dinner and she arrived bouncing on her feet.

    Tonight would reveal all. In the morning, the herbs would show her parents what the dawn had shown her. That this wasn't Caro. Then it would just be a matter of them all figuring a way to get her real sister back.

    Dinner was a hearty beef stew, which was Caro's favorite and she only ate half her bowl. She said she was tired and wanted to sleep.

    After dinner, the girls went to their room and Caro noticed that Oona had changed the bed.

    "Why do you want to sleep like that? Our feet will be in each other's faces. I don't want to smell your feet all night."

    Oona said, "Last night you were snoring like mad. It was hard to sleep. I thought maybe I wouldn't hear you on the other side."

    Caro simply said, "Oh." Then she climbed into bed and buried her face in her pillow.

    When their mother came to kiss them goodnight, she too noticed the new arrangement. "Whose idea was this?"

    Caro kicked at Oona as she said, "Oona says I'm snoring."

    Oona kicked back. "Well you are!"

    Their mother told them to stop it and kissed first Caro and then Oona on the forehead. She whispered to Oona, "Tomorrow you are switching back. Don't be mean."

    Oona had a hard time falling asleep, excited as she was to see how the transformation would take place, but eventually she did fall asleep and she slept soundly until the screaming woke her.

     

    ⚓

     

    When Agnes heard the screaming, she ran straight for her daughters' room. She thought Caro must be having a nightmare. The poor thing had been so shaken by her near death at sea, no matter how bright and shiny she had seemed when they discovered her on the seaweed. She often crawled into her parents bed late in the night with bad dreams. They would soothe her and then she would sneak back into her own bed. She didn't want Oona to know. Agnes thought the anniversary must have brought on worse dreams than usual.

    But when Agnes opened the door, she screamed herself. Caro's face was all over welts. A terrible rash covered the whole right side. Caro was weeping and screaming and Oona was just backed into a corner, frightened out of her mind. Agnes rushed to Caro and asked her what had happened. Caro howled that she just woke up and her face felt on fire. The girl's father stood in the doorway dumbfounded and Agnes told him to go fetch the doctor at once. He nodded and ran off, threw his coat over his pajamas, didn't even change out of his slippers.

    Agnes told Caro to stay calm and took her to the bathroom. She filled a bowl with cold water and made a compress for Caro's face. When she applied it, Caro calmed a little and told her that felt good. Agnes saw Oona standing in the doorway, fretfully hopping from foot to foot. Then she saw Oona's left hand. It had the same rash on it, though not as bad as the ones on Caro's face. She told Caro to keep holding the washcloth to her face and promised her to be right back. She walked out, grabbed Oona by the wrist and dragged her down the hall. Oona protested but Agnes said nothing until they were well out of earshot of the bathroom. Then she knelt down and held Oona's hand up. Oona registered the rash for the first time and all the blood drained from her face.

    "Oona, what have you done?"

    "I've proven that's not Caro, that's what I've done."

    Agnes was stunned. "What the hell does that mean?"

    Oona spoke in a hushed voice. "It was when she was taken by the sea. That's when they switched them. Sent a changeling here in her place. So I got an herb to show her true face."

    "What herb? Did someone give it to you?"

    "No, I found it in the woods. It's one the witches use."

    "Witches? What witches?"

    "The old women in town. They're all witches. We all know."

    Agnes squeezed Oona's wrist so tightly that Oona winced. "And what did you do with this herb after you found it?"

    Oona stuck her chin out and said proudly, "Put it in her pillow."

    Agnes raced into the bedroom and opened the pillow. It wasn't an herb at all. It was flowers and she did not have to touch them to know what they were. Foxglove. She dropped the pillow and grabbed Oona by the shoulders. "Did you feed her any of the berries?"

    Oona shook her head.

    Agnes gripped Oona tightly. "Damn you, tell me the truth, did you feed her any of the berries? Because if you did, that will kill her. It will kill her! Did you feed her any berries?"

    Oona shouted in her face. "No!"

    Agnes pushed Oona away from her and the child stumbled and landed with a thud on her backside. Agnes stared down at her without an ounce of affection. "She is my daughter. I don't recognize you."

    Agnes went back to the bathroom and sat with Caro. When the doctor arrived, he told them it looked worse than it was. Caro must have very sensitive skin to have such a reaction but she would be fine. Agnes did not even tell him about Oona's hand.

    As she and her husband laid in bed that night with Caro tucked between them, Agnes wondered aloud what sort of punishment would serve.

    "Honey, it sounds like you scared the hell out of her already. And I'm not saying she didn't deserve it. But I think I take my belt to her and we call it a day."

    Agnes shook her head. No, that wouldn't suffice. That would not suffice at all. "You didn't hear her. You didn't see her face when she told me. She was so proud of what she'd done. And she could have killed her, could have killed both of them if she had grabbed something else. Punishing her isn't enough. We have to convince her that she was wrong. Or she might try again."

    "And how do we do that?"

    Like her daughter, Agnes had a plan.

    The next day, Caro and Oona stayed at home with their father while Agnes went out. She went to visit old Mrs. Tallach, a widow and the head of the local gardening club. When Mrs. Tallach opened the door, she smiled and said, "Oy, its the plum thief."

    Mr. Tallach had been a great gardener himself and Agnes had been a regular pillager of his plums. As a child, she would crawl along the top of his stone wall and leave with two plums tucked into each cheek like a squirrel. He would catch her and yell insults at her, though he never told her parents and she never relented. At his funeral, she had gone up to his coffin and dropped a plum pit inside.

    Mrs. Tallach offered her tea and said she had heard about the doctor's late night visit. "Foxglove. My Harris used to rage about people growing it because it looked so fine. I wish they would do a better job of teaching them about the local flora and fauna in school."

    Agnes wasn't surprised that the old woman already knew. Probably the whole town did. The doctor was the worst gossip around. "Well, that's the thing. Even if she had known to stay clear of it in this case, I'm not sure it would have done any good."

    Agnes told her the whole story and Mrs. Tallach gasped and sighed appropriately.

    "How does a child get such notions?"

    "I wish I could tell you. We don't go on about things like that."

    Mrs. Tallach did not mention that as a child Agnes had always been going on and on about the faeries. That she had frequently dressed as a fey herself and stolen the dolls from other children. Mrs. Tallach knew perfectly well where the girls got such notions from, but she just shook her head with what she hoped read as pity.

    Agnes drained her tea and set the cup down dramatically. "No matter where this idea came from, I need to convince Oona that her sister is not a fey or I will worry every time I have to turn my back on them. And I think only something magical will convince her of that. That's why I've come to you."

    Mrs. Tallach was confused. "To me?"

    Agnes leaned in and whispered, "Mrs. Tallach, would it shock you to hear that the children in town think that you're a witch?"

     

    ⚓

     

    Oona sat outside and stuck her hand in the mud. Neither of her parents had lifted a finger to help her with the itching and it was clear that no one wanted her in the house so she sat in the yard and buried her fist in the cool earth.

    This fey was a clever one. It had revealed just enough to Oona so that Oona would do something foolish and now it had convinced her parents that Oona could never be trusted again. Oona might as well just bury her head in the mud while she was at it.

    Her father came outside and stood over her. "Your sister is sleeping. Don't go making noise out here."

    Oona didn't say anything. Her father knelt down beside her.

    "I've never taken my belt to you but last night I wanted to for the first time. That's how much you upset me by doing that. Your mother talked me out of it."

    Oona remembered that he had taken his belt to her before but she didn't say anything.

    "I understand you might think your sister has been acting strange since she had her accident. I think she is too. She's lost in her head half the time. But that's just what happens to people sometimes when they nearly die. I know you want her to be back to herself again, but the only thing that can do that is time. You hear me?"

    Oona thought about how much time had already passed but she didn't say anything.

    Her father stood up, brushing off his pants. "If I ever hear you talking this fey foolishness again, you'll wish for me to grab my belt."

    Oona watched him walk away. Her poor father. He couldn't see what was right in front of him.

     

    ⚓

     

    The next day, Agnes announced over breakfast that she was taking Oona into town with her and Caro was to stay behind. Oona did not protest. Caro had no desire to go into town until her face had healed so she said that was fine with her.

    Agnes did not say a word to Oona until they came to Mrs. Tallach's house. She stopped at the gate and turned to Oona. "When we go inside, you are not to say a word unless you are spoken to. Do you understand me?"

    Oona nodded. She looked wary but curious. Agnes held open the gate for her and Oona walked up the path to the door. Before they could knock, the door opened. Mrs. Tallach stood there in a black dress. "Come in. We've been expecting you."

    Oona entered and followed Mrs. Tallach's direction inside the house. Agnes stayed on the doorstep and whispered, "We?"

    Mrs. Tallach winked and ushered her inside. All the curtains had been drawn. The only light was coming from the sitting room and Mrs. Tallach beckoned them that way. The room was lit by candles and three women stood in a semi-circle facing them. Agnes recognized Mrs. Bannatyne and Mrs. Quiller from church. Ms. MacCombie stood in the center. She was a famous spinster and probably the best candidate in the room for an actual witch, but Agnes only knew her to say hello. She had to admit that the image of them all together was striking. Indeed, Oona seemed struck. She stood wide-eyed and silent on the edge of the room.

    Mrs. Tallach passed between Oona and Agnes and joined the circle. The four women clasped hands and said a few words in Gaelic. Agnes' Gaelic was never very good, but she was pretty sure that at one point they said A 'nighean mar a mathair. "Such a mother, such a daughter."

    After a minute of this, Mrs. Tallach turned to Agnes. "Why have you come?"

    Agnes took a deep breath. "I am worried that my child has been taken by the fey and replaced with a changeling."

    Agnes saw Oona's head snap up to look at her though Agnes did not meet her eye. Oona seemed to shake with excitement.

    Mrs. Tallach only nodded. "I told you that to make such an inquiry of the spirits you must bring something precious belonging to the child."

    Agnes nodded and reached into her bag. She pulled out a blue ribbon. It was Oona's ribbon.

     

    ⚓

     

    Oona was so confused. That ribbon was her favorite. Her mother must have made a mistake.

    "No, that's mine!"

    Her mother hissed at her. "Be quiet."

    Mrs. Tallach took the ribbon and looked at Oona. "And you are sure you wish the child to be here as we ask his question?"

    Her mother insisted that she did. Mrs. Tallach turned back to her circle. She wound the ribbon around her hand. She said a few words in Gaelic and then unwound the ribbon, passing it to the next woman who repeated the gesture and said a few more words.

    Oona did not know any Gaelic but it was the language of the faeries, that she knew, and so she imagined that the witches must be asking them whether Oona was one of them. But what if they lied? The faeries were obviously keen to disrupt Oona's life. They had already replaced her sister and turned her parents against her. What was a little lie after that?

    Once they had all completed the gesture, Mrs. Tallach handed the ribbon back and said, "This child has not been changed."

    Her mother protested. "But are you sure? Are you sure because she–"

    Mrs. Tallach clapped her hands together sharply and the other three women did the same.

    "The spirits have spoken."

    Oona felt triumphant. Whatever mischief the faeries may have wanted to perpetrate, they had failed. Mrs. Tallach looked at her sweetly and then turned to her mother.

    "Now the other one."

    Agnes tightened her grip on her bag. "No. I said there is no doubt there."

    "But there is doubt." Mrs. Tallach looked at Oona again. "This one has doubt. And so we will ask the question."

    Oona's mother hesitated and Oona wondered then if maybe her mother did have doubts about Caro. Maybe the changeling would be revealed after all. Her mother reached into her bag and pulled out a green ribbon. That was Caro's ribbon.

    Mrs. Tallach took it and repeated the same ceremony. Passing the ribbon from one to the other, chanting as they went. Oona held her breath. It was coming.

    They finished and Mrs. Tallach held out the ribbon. "It is true that this child was saved by the spirits, but they did not take her. She is still with you."

    Oona felt her mother's eyes on her but she did not meet them. Oona only stared down at her feet. She felt so many things at once that she thought she would choke on them.

    Her mother told her to go wait outside. Oona did so. She felt so stupid and so angry that she began picking up rocks and hurling them at the garden wall. She expected her mother to come out and yell at her for it. But no one came. She was wrong and she was alone in it.

     

    ⚓

     

    Once the door shut behind little Oona, the four old women began laughing hysterically. Agnes shushed them.

    "Quiet, if she hears you, the whole thing is ruined!" She took a deep breath, clutching her belly. "That was quite a show! I started to worry that you would be expecting payment."

    Mrs. Tallach turned on a lamp. "Agnes, meet my gardening club. When I told them what you asked me to do, they insisted on joining."

    Ms. MacCombie was absolutely shimmering with giggles. "I never thought I'd get to be a real witch! I've been called one often enough. I think I have a real knack for it."

    Mrs. Quiller grabbed a bottle of sherry from the sideboard and said, "I think we all do. Let's have a toast then. To the coven!"

    The women all laughed but Agnes demured. "No, no, my performance is still going. But thank you, ladies, so much. That was above and beyond."

    Mrs. Balantyne raised her glass. "It was our pleasure."

    Mrs. Tallach told the ladies to hush for one more moment as she walked Agnes to the door. When they opened the door, Oona was just standing there but she looked as if she had just been caught in the act of something dreadful. Both women looked around and saw no evidence of anything.

    Agnes thanked Mrs. Tallach and then she took Oona's hand and pulled her down the lane. They walked a few minutes before Agnes stopped and looked down at Oona.

    "I thought maybe it was you who had been changed. I couldn't believe that you would do that to your sister. But those women know more about this than I ever will. So if they say it's you, I have to believe it."

    Oona stared at her blankly. Agnes narrowed her eyebrows.

    "Do you understand what happened back there?"

    Oona nodded gravely. "The witches said that I am me and that Caro is Caro."

    Agnes nodded. "Yes. Now listen. I am never going to tell your sister what you did to her. She doesn't know and it would hurt her to know it. I am trusting that I don't need to tell her because you won't ever do anything like that again."

    Oona exhaled. "I won't. I promise."

    Agnes saw little Oona's face so shaken and she knew she had gotten through to her. She hated that she had had to resort to such theatrics. But she needed her daughter to know in her bones that she had been wrong.

    Agnes touched Oona's face and Oona flinched.

    "I am glad that you are you."

    Oona did not look convinced. Agnes imagined it would take her a little time to recover from the embarrassment of it all. She would tell her husband when she got home that they should drop the matter and not speak of it again.

     

    ⚓

     

    Oona walked with her mother back to the house.

    So many things had been confirmed today. Witches were real. So were spirits and faeries. Changelings were real. It should feel good to know that all that was true, but it felt rotten.

    What good was it? What good was any of it if it never actually touched her life? If faeries existed and they existed to cause mischief and strife, why hadn't they caused her any? All her strife had been caused by her own mind. They could have done it but they didn't bother with her.

    They had saved Caro. She was worth bothering over. They had reached out and touched her life.

    Oona knew now that her sister may not have been changed, but she was different. The spirits had changed Caro somehow, stirred something in her. And Oona had seen that, seen the distance that had sprung up between herself and her sister. The distance between someone who has had magic in her life and someone who only imagined that she did.

    Oona and her mother approached the house. Caro was sitting on a bench in the garden with her father. Her face was looking better. She smiled when she saw them. She was almost Caro. She was still not quite Caro.

    Oona did not smile back.

  • Introduction: Provisions

    It was difficult to guess her age. She had a young face and a laugh like ringing bells, but when she raised her glass, her hands were older. She had the hands of someone who had washed dishes all her life, but the soft and weary bearing of someone who had never worked very hard. Maybe she gardened a lot when she was on land. Yes, it would be easy to mistake her for a young woman, but the way she drank her whiskey spoke to decades of practice. She drained the glass and tilted it this way and that to watch the ice cube dance around the bottom.

    "My husband is inside reading. It's all he does these days. Reads, reads, reads. Nothing good, just fiction. All heroic cops with divorces and drinking problems. I don't know why he keeps reading them because he always hates the endings. Either he saw it coming a mile away or it made no sense. Half his books end up in the lake. Go to that cove over there and you'll see a shelf's worth of paperbacks washed up on the shore."

    She stared into her empty glass as if she could will more whiskey into it. After a moment, she set the glass down on the table next to her and when she looked up, you could see the age in her eyes.

    "He says that nothing satisfies as much as a proper ending. Which isn't much of a compliment to me, but I do think he's wrong. I think endings are really very uncomplicated. In Shakespeare, there were only two endings – either everybody got married or everybody died. Marriage and death. Those are the only real endings."

    A man emerged from the cabin behind her with a whiskey bottle and refilled her glass without a word to anyone. She did not give any indication that she was aware of him aside from the fact that she stopped speaking. He disappeared inside again. She picked up her glass and smiled, her face suddenly bright and youthful again. "Now, beginnings. Beginnings are much more interesting."

     

    Story coming in October…

  • Introduction: The “Linguistics Professor”

    There was nothing wrong with the hull of the boat that a ball-peen hammer to bang out the dents and a fresh coat of primer wouldn’t fix. Clearly it had featured an outboard motor of some sort at one time. Mangled remnants of the mounting bracket still dangled from the stern, but the vessel’s current skipper now piloted it with a single long oar, like a gondolier.

    He wore a much-faded, gray-blue suit, possibly a uniform, the pants of which were torn off at the knees and the jacket of which was essentially sleeveless, but a long, official looking, golden chain still looped from his belt to his back pocket. His mustache was large, but not utterly unkempt. His skin was raw red from the sun. This man had clearly known better days within a wider civilization. Even so, when he joined the conversation his tone was cheerful, even avuncular:

    “Little known fact. The world “tailgate” in its current usage is misspelled and mis-derived.  The word was redefined to mean a social event held on and around the open rear gate of a vehicle, often at large sporting events, most especially football, back when such doings were permitted; but what very few people besides dedicated experts such as myself understand is that the first word of the compound is more accurately spelled “t-a-l-e”, as in a type of story. The “talegate” was an ancient, quasi-mystical tradition, in which our forbears’ forbears believed that if enough of the right sorts of souls gathered in a circle, a particular portal would open, allowing stories to pour forth from the realm of the Gods and the Giants.

    “I believe it is still possible to open such a gate, right here, right now, on this very lake, at this very hour, palpably witching as it is. And if you all will oblige me, I’d like very much to deliver the first offering.”

     

    Read the story in October…

     

     

  • Introduction: Each Minute is a Work in Progress

    They say the two happiest days in a boat owner's life are the day of purchase and the day of sale. That might be true. As grim as he’d been on the drive out to Mukilteo, braced for a misanthropy-inducing negotiation with “Tom” from Facebook Marketplace, whose listing for the 1959 Canby PT blared in all-caps “BEST OFFER! LET’S MAKE A DEAL!” he’d been happy as a fool for every minute of the four-hour drive back, grinning and hopping around in the front seat of his Ford F-150 as the boat—salmon pink and cement grey—rode in the trailer behind him. And while he wouldn’t presume to predict the future, when if ever, he’d sell the thing and, as such, couldn’t even begin to guess whether he would feel as happy then as he did when he first took the Canby PT home five years ago (six?), he’d always believed that “Tom” was pleased with his side of the transaction: the way he thumbed through the short stack of hundred-dollar bills he’d received in exchange for the boat with series of approving grunts, swatting his open palm with the wad of cash, once, twice, again, before they hitched the Canby PT and its trailer to their new owner’s truck and exchanged a few half-sentences of good luck and farewell… That didn’t really prove the saying was true, he’d admit, since he allowed his and “Tom’s" separate yet simultaneous joy as buyer and seller to count for both of the saying’s occasions of satisfaction when he knew it was supposed to be a “saying for one”. But that’s the thing about sayings: they don’t always mean for you to do something or think something specific. Sometimes they are just words to keep you humble in the face of happiness.

     

    Story coming in October…

  • Introduction: The Coven

    Few in town agreed on when the feud began. The fishmongers believed it began the morning of the Birthing Feast honoring their first born daughters, when Oona purchased the mongers' entire supply of Beluga caviar knowing full well her sister Caro would be relegated to the scraps for her daughter’s special day; serving white fish to her guests? Oh, the shame. The fortune teller, backed by her crystal globe, swore it began the day five-year-old Caro fell from her mother’s lap into the sea. Found two hours later, smiling with a pearl clutched in her tiny fist and floating atop a clump of seaweed, her return was deemed a miracle. Townsfolk whispered that perhaps Caro’s father was a Selkie for why else would the sea return the babe but Oona would sulkily point out that Caro couldn’t possibly have a Selkie father for that would mean Oona had one too–they were twins, weren’t they? This is where the midwife stepped in. The feud began with their birth, she stated. Tearing out of the womb, arms wrapped around necks, so entwined the midwife could not determine who was born first. No matter how loudly the townsfolk gossiped and speculated, the answer remained a mystery—and maybe the two women preferred it that way. Caro said little but smiled much, and Oona offered such conflicting explanations that the townsfolk sometimes wondered if the sisterly feud was a…performance?

    Go to the story…

  • Scot’s Fun Challenge

    Words Words Words
    Blah di Blah Blah Blah
    Noun Verb Adjective Noun YAWN
    You know what's worth a thousand words?
     
    Scot self portrait
     
    That's right, A Fuckin' Picture!
    Are you somebody who can take a blank wall and a Sharpie and create something that'll put Bottle Chile's Bertha Venus to shame?
    Does your copy of Great Gatsby have little pictures of drunk flapper girls in the margins?
    Do you avoid thoughts of self-harm during Zoom meetings by doodling epic hellscapes?
    If you draw, paint, sketch, sculpt–we want you!
    Help us bring these god-damn stories to life!
    Send us an illustration of your favorite (or least favorite) character, plot point, tableaux from one of these tales!
    There might be a prize!
     
    Send your pix to paul "at" paulmullin dot org.

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