August 3, 2012
No one is quite sure how it got there, or how it remains even after the annual mini-monsoons in late July. But every time a curious onlooker walking their dog near the vet’s office peeks over the lip of the drainage ditch, it’s visible. Mud-spattered and a little rusty, but still there.
A child’s bicycle, still with training wheels, set upright in the drainpipe under a bridge, like a refugee from a bloated Stephen King horror.
August 1, 2012
In the darkest depths of the Great Depression, Ridgeway and the surrounding hamlets would occasionally be visited by an itinerant from the backcountry who followed the rails and the old 313 from place to place. At first the man was largely left to his own devices, but it soon became know that many of the vacant and barren lots in which he spent time between sojourns would blossom forth with fruit and flower after his departure.
Eventually, a man who’d lost his job when the sawmill closed approached the itinerant, who had no known name but was occasionally referred to as Garden Joe. The millworker asked for a batch of barren soil near his house to be blessed with produce so that his family might supplement their meager diet. At first “Garden Joe” refused, but the millworker prevailed upon him.
The itinerant agreed to help on three conditions: that he be left totally alone, unmolested, and unobserved on the land for 24 hours, that he be paid with a single silver nickel with a hole punched through it, and that the nickel be hung from a string in a nearby tree before it was collected. The millworker, desperate, agreed.
The lot next door soon blossomed forth with a bounty of fruits and vegetables, and the silver coin was collected three days later.
Word soon spread, and throughout Ridgeway and nearby country towns “Garden Joe” was deluged with similar offers. He made the same three requests to all comers, substituting a penny or a dime if the people involved were particularly poor or well-off. Each time, as promised, the garden would grow.
Eventually, travelers began speaking of Garden Joe’s shack in the wilderness, surrounded by floral beauty. Next to the house, people said, was an old dead tree with branches weighed down with silver coins on strings. It was inevitable in those hard times that someone would eventually seek to see for themselves.
A ne’er-do-well from Ridgeway named Samson eventually decided that he wanted more than beauty and food from Garden Joe. He followed the man back to his home and stole a single silver nickel from the tree to show to would-be confederates who could then help him steal the entire thing. He enticed a half-dozen Ridgeway down-and-outers to do so.
The next day, Ridgeway awoke to find their gardens brown and dead; even those who had canned or iceboxed their harvest found it rotten and inedible. Samson was unable to locate the house again despite the notes and trail markers he’d left; his “friends” wound up taking their share out of his hide.
And Garden Joe? He was never seen in those parts again.
July 31, 2012
You have a fast food soda cup that has been fitted with a small waterproof video camera that peeks out the hole in the “o” (perhaps the “o” in “McDonald’s”), and you take it to a meeting with a shady and squirmy person you supposedly knew from high school that doesn’t seem to correspond with any actual high school classmate you can remember. After he begins talking you point out the camera, which is enough to shock him into compliance with your request (which you forget the moment you make it).
Later you’re among a much larger group of people and a much more competent person is threatening you with bodily harm, death, and dismemberment in a way that he thinks is secret. Once he’s said enough incriminating stuff you point out the recorder, only you tell him that it’s a live circuit to the FBI (which is a bluff; the recorder is actually recording to a USB drive hidden in the bottom of the cup). To your great relief it works, and the threatener abandons his weapon and flees.
July 9, 2012
This post is part of the July 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “independence and slavery”.
Like a river winding from its headwaters to the sea, you come from whatever little burg gave you your spark and shake off its dust on the threshold of the city. The big city. The biggest city. It’s always been there, open, inviting, but you’ve only just now taken the time to meet it for longer than a visit.
You’re in the city to stay.
It’s like declaring your independence from circumstance and geography. “I don’t care that I was born in a place where nothing substantive has ever happened,” you’re saying. “I don’t care that it’s impossible to earn a living here as a writer or an artist or a singer. I’m moving to a place where things happen and talent can be rewarded.”
And then you go. You take everything that you’ve been given, from your parents, your friends, your school, everything. You take it and you go.
Suddenly you don’t have to worry about finding something to do tonight. The night is lit up, always, forever with a thousand neon signs and peals of hushed laughter. You’ve declared your independence from boredom, from shyness, from envy: if you feel those here, it’s your own fault for not taking deepest advantage, for not inhaling the sweet acrid city vapors to their fullest.
But even in this independence, deep and full, new chains take hold where the old scars have scarce begun to heal.
Even the city runs on money, on gossip, on superficialities concealed behind bright and inviting smiles. You must still make the rent, only it’s harder now with a thousand hands in your pockets. What so and so did with such and such is exchanged as freely and tenderly as the most bitterly mundane comings and goings back in your small town. People smile more here because it’s expected of them more, at least if they want to get noticed and get ahead. But the dagger in the small of the back is just as sharp when it connects.
The subway, the bus, the tree-lined parkways…in many ways they are new chains, shackling you as surely as distance and time and indifference do in cities that are small enough to walk across. The expectations are still there, hemming you in, only they’re different this time. You must still move a certain way, act a certain way, be a certain way if you want what others have to give. Disappointment is perhaps all the keener because there are so very many opportunities.
The city is independence and slavery made one, just as is the village.
Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
knotanes
meowzbark
Ralph Pines
randi.lee
writingismypassion
pyrosama
bmadsen
dclary (blog)
Poppy
areteus
Sweetwheat
ThorHuman
Tex_Maam
June 5, 2012
You are convalescing in a small bungalow or summer cottage behind a much larger house and attached to it by an open decked walkway. You’re feeling very under the weather, perhaps from a bad cold or recently healed wound.
You have a visitor: a very attractive someone named Riley that you knew in school years ago. They seem unusually interested in staying and talking (a major change from when you knew them before) and goes on and on about personal topics like political beliefs, the cochlear implants they need to hear, and other facts that you already know (both in waking life and in the dream). You listen politely.
Eventually Riley sits on the bed and becomes rather aggressively forward, beginning with personal conversation before moving to heavy petting. You reciprocate after some hesitation; things don’t go any further. The whole time, though, you are preoccupied with what Jordan (who is away on business) would think if they knew; you try telling yourself that it’s just a harmless dalliance with no sex and no consequences, but the guilt is still there.
You’re interrupted by the sheriff, who is the last person you expected to see, but he has even worse news: he’s just let Jordan into the house after they arrived home early and found it locked. The look of shock and betrayal on Jordan’s face is shattering. Riley runs off, redfaced, and you pursue Jordan to the front door, protesting that the situation isn’t what it seemed. They scream that they’re sorry they ever thought you were different than the others, that you were worthwhile, and leaves with a slam.
You sit down heavily and realize, with horror, that neither Jordan nor Riley will ever want to have anything to do with you again. At that moment, the skies open up with a torrent of rain and thunder.
June 2, 2012
You are brought into a large and gothic library with a high ceiling and a long bench along one wall. An older man begins going down the row, speaking with and examining each of the large number of people seated along with me in turn. You have a sense that you’re not supposed to be there, one that is exacerbated by your realization that the people on either side of you have six fingers on at least one of their visible hands. Fearing that is some kind of required sign, you hide your hands in your robe before the older examiner can get to you.
When he approaches, he smiles warmly and hands you a golden box. You know instantly that he has seen through you, and knows that you are not supposed to be there, but that hardly seems to matter as you and the other “rejects” begin to float skyward: the old man seems to have abolished gravity for all of you. The others begin to converse while you and the “rejects” cavort in the air above them, unable to hear what they are saying no matter how close you get.
For a while you are content to float about joyously, kicking off of the ornate fixtures near the ceiling in a glorious ballet of weightlessness, but soon you become curious about the meeting below and what it entails. You decide to take some small books from a shelf immediately above where the older man is now seated. You have a vague notion of reading them to discover their secrets, or perhaps trading them (and others) for answers.
You remove the books and attempt to show them to the others that were rejected from the gathering and float nearby. You’re interrupted from a cry down below; the old man mournfully, vengefully declares that the meeting and all its business must cease because of the injury inflicted on the library. You look back at the sconce from which the books were taken, and see that there is ink on the shelf, red ink, like blood from a fresh wound. It’s as if the library is a living organism and you have cut off a finger.
A sudden, overwhelming feeling of guilt strikes you, washing away the former desire to know the secrets of the meeting. You convince the other floaters to help you in cleaning the library and restoring the books to their rightful place, but the old man’s sullen expression indicates that it’s not enough.
June 1, 2012
Max was on a town street that is lined with expansive bookstores with a student group. He enters one of the larger stores, which is very airy and open, only to find that the place is packed with customers and employees who are equally rude. He climbs up to a second level into a reading area that has bright windows overlooking the street below on two sides, and sees a rather famous actor there giving a lecture. The actor is in an altercation (not quite an argument) with a younger woman who appears to have written a book about him. This is clearly the reverse of what he expected.
The woman begins to read the book, and Max can see the images vividly as she describes them. She speaks of the actor’s difficult childhood as a Yiddish speaker in New York City, which is true enough from what Max has heard about the actor’s life, but the woman has inserted herself into the narrative at odd spots. She is the actor’s nurse, a street vendor, a character and meta-narrator. It’s a fascinating blend of biography and literature, but a little creepy.
The actor snatches the book from the woman and gives it to the nearest bystander, Max. Max notes that some of the pages are printed on what look like foreign banknotes in all their Monopoly money glory, shiny and with security strips. The actor nods as if satisfied by his confirmation of this.
May 19, 2012
Let us now consider the nature of truth. Relativists claim that truth is highly subjective; each man may have his own truth which is completely separate (and even in opposition to) the truths of others. Essentially, they argue that anything a human being sees, feels, or believes, has an element of this personalized, relativistic “truth” to it.
However, we must concede that there are thing that human beings cannot see, hear, experience, or grasp. A human may never see infrared or ultraviolet light, for example, or touch an atom. And there are things that we cannot grasp, if only because of the sheer limitations of biology. Just as a cockroach will never be able to grasp the concept of a pneumatic drill, there are—must be—things beyond the pale of human experience. We may even be aware of them—just as a cockroach would notice and avoid the noisy, spinning pneumatic drill—but their governing mechanics are beyond our grasp.
Thus, there must be things that cannot be assigned a relativistic truth, because they cannot be experienced or grasped by a human being. We can therefore divide all things into two groups: those which may attain a measure of relativistic “truth” through human experience, and those that cannot. The former group is as true as relativism allows anything to be, and the latter is as false. To wit: if a thing cannot be experienced, and cannot be grasped, it is outside the pale of human experience and may as well not exist.
We can therefore say, even allowing for the most liberal relativism, that some things are true and others are false. That we cannot name the falsehoods is irrelevant–were they things man could name, they would be things within his pale, and therefore “true.” Working inward from this, let us now consider the category of “true” things established above. Suppose something can be experienced and understood to be true by a human being, yet it never is. Suppose, out there in the cosmos somewhere, that there is a sensation waiting to be had by the human race. There is a creature in the deepest ocean that will never be seen by human eyes or touched by human hands. We can conceptualize its existence in the abstract, perhaps, but it is not “true,” since it has never been subjected to the lens of human interpretation.
April 22, 2012
The few that had gone and returned left tales, naturally, and those tales spread far and wide on the lips of tellers who never had and never would see the place with their own eyes. They said that what you found down there reflected who you were as a person much more than any external, metaphysical reality.
Ellis wasn’t sure what a vast wasteland of frozen mountains and snow said about him. Maybe he didn’t want to know.
In the world above–say, in Antarctica–trekking through such a wasteland would have required more supplies than Ellis could possibly have carried, and far more survival training than he possessed. But that wasn’t the way down below. He got hungry but never had to eat; got thirsty but never had to drink; got cold but never had to build a fire. One might have thought that the removal of those things would have made the journey an easy one.
Instead, Ellis found his pain and suffering focused to a thin, white-hot edge. If there was no death at the end, no unconsciousness, then the pain simply brooded and grew far beyond what was possible–or even conceivable–above. Forget the stories of torments unnumbered, or even other people. The suffering of an unforgiving environment with no company but memories was infinitely worse.
There was no night and day, only a constant gray haze. As Ellis struggled through waist-deep snow and up naked rockfaces savaged by high winds, he occasionally tried to take shelter in a crevasse or eat a little snow to dull the pain. It didn’t work; the snow quenched no thirst, the deepest caves and crevasses were canvassed by the same howling polar winds, and the memories were omnipresent above them all.
Those same dilettantes, seated by cozy fires above, said that the pain down there wore away at a soul until it obliterated every trace of memory and left them to wander infinitely in their own personal “down below.” Ellis wouldn’t let that happen. He’d had no inkling of what was ahead when he had performed the ritual of key and coin to venture down below, even after all the interviews and research and preparations.
But even as the pain threatened to devour him, even as the snow and solitude made him question whether he had ever really seen another living being, Ellis pressed on.
Annemarie and Cassandra were out there, somewhere.
And he had to bring them back.
March 22, 2012
Some people say the quiet ringing sound people hear in a very quiet area is a mild auditory hallucination, thanks to the human ear’s limited ability to perceive sounds below certain frequencies. Others say it’s a case of nascent tinnitus, or the sound of blood rushing through your veins–just like hearing the ocean in a conch shell.
They’re wrong.
Certain people, if they’re fast enough and keep at it–to say nothing of being a little lucky–can begin to make out what’s behind the sound. Voices, soft and quick and secret, speaking in every language you’d care to name and many that defy classification. They’ll take no notice of those rare few who listen, and with practice one can begin to catch and interpret words, phrases, conversations.
The understandable snatches dwell on people, places and possibilities. What has happened, what might happen, what should happen. The tones are, for the most part, oddly benevolent if completely detached from anything resembling the human condition. They discuss rescues, redemptions, about-faces, sacrifices, gifts. On those rare occasions when the comprehensible part of the whisper-speech turns to the negative, it is always in the context of how things might be salvaged.
As for those behind this low and benign humming? None can say. It espouses no creed, plays no favorites, advances no positions.
Those who have heard it first describe many sleepless nights, followed by a feeling of profound and sweeping relief.
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 