Thursday's: I Wish I Wrote This

Halloween is coming up, so a horror story seemed logical. This is episode one of "N" based on a short story by Stephen King. Just follow the link into YouTube to see the rest of them. I said one, bad number. Six is a fix, so long as it does come in three. That's a another kind of bad number altogether... the only way to fix three 6's is to add them together, which makes 18.

18 is safe.

Unless you divide it by 2. You can, however, multiply it. The number 36 is a very good one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXwZYc3fyLk&feature=related

Thursday's: I Wish I Wrote This

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex. No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing. Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other. So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it. -Pablo Neruda

Thursday's: I Wish I Wrote This

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale For Children

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away and sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor's voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

"He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down."

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo's house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a spiritual conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff's club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o'clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive's future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. The he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a her taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowd's frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out in the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn't just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to the priest's tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents' house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in tow and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn't get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel's reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo's courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn't get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn't get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and have up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn't receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth he'd gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn't resist the temptation to listen to the angel's heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn't understand why other men didn't have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he'd be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn't get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

Thursday's: I Wish I Wrote This

Thursday's: I Wish I Wrote This

Yellow Severed

the first thing I ever gave a girl?

I gave flowers.

I gave flowers to a girl I didn’t know

no tender

red

strings attached

being young, she was younger

could just utter words

each time I saw her

she was

alone

I never left the brick fence,

inside

she stood,

outside

I would pass daisies through the

C r a c k s

on the walls

and let them bunch up in gold rows

I knew flowers made girls happy

plucked and passed

I had no need for daisies growing on the floor,

older Sister witnessed

sitting in a tree :

KI-SS-ING

First comes love,

Then comes marriage,

Then comes baby in the golden carriage.

Red

Strings came crashing down

labeled

I never saw her again

daisies never grew back.

Frankenstein Resurrected

I always knew I was smarter than my husband. It was very evident today when he brought back home that tasteless action movie; I could hear Ward laughing all the way from the living room to the kitchen. I pictured him indented in the sofa with his mouth open ogling at the screen; like a fish out of water who decided to give up and stopped thrashing to save its life. Not breathing, blank eyes, gazing at the world. I could also hear barking from Frankenstein, our mutt terrier, from our backyard and it seeped through our walls. I began to wash the dishes and I looked outside into our back yard.

I lived in a placid suburb that seemed more like a ghost town, eerily quiet. It was a beautiful street, with two story houses that all gazed at each other with ostentatious stucco faces designed by the same architect, they were all the same color, had the same number of bushes, and the same number of lawn ornaments that the neighborhood ruled could not exceed more than four per house. The house I lived in stood at the center of the block, attached to its neighbors, aware of the privileged and calm lives within them. Occasionally I would see some joggers in track suits with earphones on, brisk fully jogging down the street. I would watch them; I would watch them jog, until they left the horizon of my perfectly paved sidewalk. It was always quiet, except for Frankenstein. My neighbors would have complained about the putrid barks Frankenstein made; that is, if I ever saw them.

Frankenstein was the name my son gave her, I tried to convince my son to name her something else, something more dignified; but he was bent on naming it Frankenstein after watching the movie Frankenstein. Even with that ridiculous name, my son and Frankenstein were once inseparable; they would terrorize my backyard and my plants, and even our laundry from time to time; but now there are no more ditches in our soil, my plants are a pristine green, upright, and unbroken, and our laundry never needs more than one round in the washing machine. The time I spent yelling at them and repairing my garden was now spent alone, in silence, with a television or a book. Frankenstein lived in her cage, a creation of my husband Ward with the help of my son. It was a compact diamond wire mesh fence that encircled Frankenstein’s even smaller igloo house. The cage was poorly constructed, with wires holding the fences together in a comical fashion and a door that couldn’t be opened unless you untied the wires holding it to the fences.

My son grew older and got bored of playing with Frankenstein, he would come home from school and head straight to his room and watch television and play video-games. He never stepped a foot in the backyard again, and would spend weeks without seeing Frankenstein or remembering she was even alive. I dried a plate with a rag in a circular motion and stared at Frankenstein as sunlight broke through the windows. Frankenstein was laid on the ground, her front paws outstretched towards me and her head in between them. She stared right back at me from her cage with pleading eyes as I gazed at her from behind the window.

“Sage, what is there to eat?” Ward yelled from the living room, his eyes still fixed on the television screen. That was the first thing he always told me when he got home nowadays. “I made a chicken casserole!” I yelled from the kitchen and brought him a plate without him asking for it, and set it down on the forever food stained coffee table. Rings were made on the mahogany from scores of cold beers; the wood was faded from ancient grease that had fallen from his plate. Stains that aren’t noticeable unless you’re up close, but stains I knew were there none the less. Barking from Frankenstein continued to echo through the rooms of the house.

I sat down next to him; he continued to stare at the screen, occasionally he brought food to his mouth and chewed loudly like a cow. I looked at his rugged face and remembered how Ward and I used to fool around on the very same sofa that we were sitting on now, how we would talk hours on end about nothing and everything, how he would bring back movies that he knew I would like, and how long ago that all seemed.

Ages ago I attended a university; I had plans to become a writer, I never finished. With short hair, and a free spirit I cruised through my writing classes with ease, all my professors commented that I had a natural talent with words. I met Ward through a close friend at the university and quickly fell in love. He was the sweetest man I ever met, always saying the corniest things imaginable; it worked on me. My mother always told me to follow my heart, and with that advice, we foolishly moved in together a year later in order to wake up naked in each others arms. We could only afford to keep one of us studying and I quickly buried my dreams underground for him. I always felt I had more potential than he did, but my career path didn’t guarantee us the financial stability his did. We had a child, my hair grew long, I became a housewife, and I never looked back.

Ward continued to gawk at the television screen, sometimes I felt more alone being with him than I did by myself. The barking started up again. I picked up a vanity magazine and opened up to the picture I fantasized about earlier: a slender young woman with a short French haircut. I asked, “Ward, what do you think of her hair?” His stare shifted towards the lifted magazine for half a second while food crumbled down his shirt and said, “What’s wrong with the hair you have now? I took a deep breath and replied, “I was thinking of cutting my hair, having it like I used to, like I did back when you first met me.”

“Your hair looks fine as it is,” Ward said with a mouthful. The barking seemed to be coming from right outside the door; my attention was back outside towards Frankenstein’s cage, she was gone.

I told Ward, flabbergasted, he rushed to the door. The second he opened it, Frankenstein rushed in with muddy paws and jumped on the sofa and began panting deafeningly next to me while Ward cursed at the top of his lungs at her. She crawled onto my lap and put her head down like my son used to when he was a child, I raised my hand slowly to her head and patted.

It took a bit of convincing, but Frankenstein was allowed to stay inside. I gave her a good wash and argued with Ward that keeping her locked in that cage was a crime. The weeks that followed were a blessing for me and a travesty for Ward and my son. She would keep me company while they were away, but would do a number on their possessions. My son came home one day and found his videogame console cables tattered to ribbons along with his television power cord. Ward got the worst of it. Frankenstein made it a habit of urinating on everything ward owned, along with destroying any piece of Ward’s clothing that got in her reach.

I started writing like I used to, with Frankenstein on my lap and my notebook resting on her back. My creativity and energy came back to me all at once, as fast as turning on a light switch. I mostly wrote children stories about Frankenstein. She would go on marvelous adventures meeting mesmerizing characters while learning life lessons, some humorous, others heart-breaking, in a magical realism style.

My time with Frankenstein didn’t last very long. Ward and my son were finally fed up with the situation. One day, Ward brought home several materials from the hardware store, resolute on building a new impenetrable cage. I didn’t argue about it, I knew there was no defense I could muster on why Frankenstein should stay in the house, and why their cherished belongings should keep being ruined on a daily basis at the cost of her freedom. I watched on from the living room as Ward and my son began to build a new cage with Frankenstein on my lap; as I moved my hand from her head to her back, to and fro, my eyes didn’t divert from the construction. Finally, the time came when the cage was nearly finished.

Ward asked me to bring Frankenstein out. I brought her outside along with her favorite tennis ball. I tossed the ball around by the open front gate facing the beige cloned houses. I had an emotionless expression, my eyes looking at nothing, hardly blinking at all. Ward making the finishing touches looked at me and said, “I am sorry, we just can’t afford to have her free.” He squatted down and began making calling hand gestures at Frankenstein while whistling and saying her name in a pseudo loving manner. Frankenstein crawled to him slowly in a submissive manner, her tail wagged, with trepidation in her eyes. She leaned sideways when Ward came near her and he scooped her up with ease. He walked towards the cage while I stood still by the gate. My son opened the cage door for Ward; Frankenstein seeing this realized what was going to happen.

She lashed out with snarls and teeth at Ward in a fit of rage. With blood running down his arm he tossed her up in the air. Frankenstein landed on the ground and began running around the yard with Ward and my son in pursuit. They made dives at her and tried to cut her off, but each time she broke free. They succeeded in working her into a corner, but failed when she ran in between them. Ward yelled as he and my son chased after her. The whole scene brought life back into my eyes. Frankenstein was dashing towards the gate. “Stop her, don’t let her get out!” Ward and my son yelled out. I stood still and just watched her; I watched her wild eyes and her pink tongue hang out in ecstasy as she ran out the gate. Ward in frustration asked “Why did you just stand there?” She made it halfway down the block when she turned around and looked at me; I looked on from inside the gate. We made eye contact for what seemed to be an eternity, but when Ward and my son came near her time came back into the world and she turned back around towards the streets and ran.

I watched them all run into the distance as I made my way into the house. I walked into the bathroom imagining if Frankenstein would have all those adventures I wrote about. I turned the knob on my sink to hot and thought about what was most likely going to happen to her, she would be caught by either Ward and my son, or a dog catcher some time later. I wet my hair and as I towel dried it I pictured her dead of starvation and laid out in a street with tread marks on her stomach. I shook all these thoughts off my head and just pictured her wild eyes and her pink tongue. It brought a smile to my face as I began to cut my hair.