You Reading This, Be Ready

 by

William Stafford

Mark Belo

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Credits:  This poem can be found online at thedewdrop.org.

Seashore

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

From the shore, we look and say, "There!" and point out there, using our hands to commute unfathomable latitudes into the discrete anatomy of mast and skiff, ship and seabird, lighthouse and rockcliff. All the vocabulary of summer objects and all the wide sky for a backdrop. We make of it a little picture, a keepsake of the Cape, that we can pocket.


The always going sea
The fate of unanchored things
Found and then lost again

André Derain

Credits:  This poem was originally published in Contemporary Haibun Online in 2009.

Earth's Sunny Solar System

 by

Kathryn A. Kopple

   

Robert Rauschenberg

    Small hands gripped the corners. It was a girl in a baseball cap and loose-fitting shorts with a puzzle in her hands. Her head was down as she studied the puzzle art on the box. Planets flung out across space with earth surrounded by a thick, blue halo off to the left. It was the most difficult puzzle in the store. All puzzles pose specific challenges but what counts is the number of pieces; this solar extravaganza boasted a thousand of them.

    I coughed to let the girl know she wasn’t alone in the aisle. She glanced in my direction, her round face half hidden under the baseball cap, fingers still gripping the puzzle box like talons. Kids grip only the things they want. Their little fingers are endowed with strength beyond their height, weight, stamina. They are also precocious, going after games and puzzles that their parents don’t understand or like—and most of all fear will wind up in a mess on the living room floor. I’ve witnessed the tug-of-wars between adults and children, and the adults generally win, but not before something ends up on the floor. The Earth’s Sunny Solar System was dropped a lot. “Now look what you did!” “You made me!” “Don’t talk back to your mother!” “But you promised!” “You don’t even like puzzles!” The quarrels nasty and dry-eyed repeating like an unhappy song chorus—and the Earth’s Sunny Solar System, caught in the middle, going nowhere but back on the shelf. And yet, despite past disappointments, I held out hope that this would be the day I’d finally sell Earth’s Sunny Solar System.

“Nice puzzle,” I said.

“Dope,” she replied.

I suggested we look inside and put out my hands.

She wouldn’t let go of the box. “The earth only looks blue from space.”

“Makes you realize how much they paid attention to the details when they made this puzzle.”

“It’s mostly blue. If it were all blue, the whole planet would be covered in water.”

“Excellent point.” I didn’t care if the earth were flamingo pink because all I wanted was to move that puzzle off the shelf.

“It’s going to happen. I read about the ground disappearing.”

“That would be wild. I guess anything could happen.”

“Anything does,” she said.

    I decided to redirect the conversation. “If that puzzle doesn’t interest you, I could show you something else. We have lots of games. Do you like Parcheesi?”

“I’m good,” she said.

“Yeah, that puzzle you’re holding is the best. Should we ring it up?”

“Maybe later.” The girl put the puzzle on the shelf and walked out the store.

    Puzzles have a shelf life. After a year on the shelf, the boxes take on a ravaged appearance. Earth’s Sunny Solar System was going on three years. I peeked inside to discover a spider that turned out to be a hermit crab. Alone and unshelled, the pitiful thing scrambled over the jumbled cosmos.

    I wondered how many hermits escaped their crab-it-tats—if they were hiding (and dying) all over the store. I hurried to check and found the lot of them in distress, climbing the silicon walls desperate to get out. The mice didn’t look particularly happy either. They were thin and mangy, and no one wanted them. A garter snake hissed as I walked by. A menagerie of hostility caused by shortages in the supply chain. The chain, I imagined, wound the globe east and west, north and south; it held the world together. Now, that chain was coming apart link by link. We’d soon have to start feeding the mice to the snakes—and where that would leave the hermits I had no idea.

    When I mentioned my concerns to the manager, he took a hit off his vape. “What do you expect me to do about it?” Then, back turned to me, he lapsed into reverie. Unlike the hermits, he appeared pleasantly lost.

“Uh, maybe I could have a hit?”

“You’re too young to vape.”

“I’m eighteen.”

“In answer to your question, no. And get back to work.”

“But the hermits…”

“Fuck if I know,” he said.

“That’s all you got for me?”

“Pretty much.”

    Days later, the hermits and crab-it-tats vanished altogether. I gave the manager a look. “Was there a seagull attack?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The crab-it-tats are gone.”

“Yeah, the crabs. Why are you bothering me about gulls?”

“Gulls eat hermits in the wild.”

He hit his vape. “You got some weird obsessions, that’s for sure.”

“Because I care about the hermits?”

“For starters.” Lemon haze poured out his nostrils. “It’s for the best.”

    I nodded, not because I agreed. I just knew—and that certainty gutted me. “Did you have to?” I got a rag and started dusting. People wandered the store lost in aisles of emptiness. Sometimes, they bumped into one another, saying “Excuse me” in zombified voices. No one shouted. No fights broke out. The sluggishness and monotony made me wish someone would start something. Time went faster when the kids and adults got into it. Or, when someone got caught shoplifting. It was store policy to take the offender straight to security. Her name was Lal. She was tough, like she’d been born to put people in a line up. She paced the catwalk (her name for the long plank held high in the air by two ladders) and, if she saw anyone sneaking around, she’d blast the suspect with her bullhorn. “You! In the Run-DMC t-shirt and cut-offs. Front of the store!” Typically, people would run, a stupid thing to do but people weren’t smart when stealing—always thinking no one was watching when no one escaped Lal. Maybe that was the real crime. Thinking they could get away with it. Not under Lal’s watch. She was a one-woman panopticon.

“Hey!”

“What!”

“How about you come up?”

    I hesitated. It never occurred to me what life up there was like—that I, a mere salesclerk, would receive an invitation from Lal on the catwalk. Things like that just didn’t happen. The catwalk was where Lal worked and the rest of us underlings kept to the aisles, cash registers, and restrooms. Everyone and everything in its place. My place was below while Lal worked from on high.

“Come on up.”

“Okay.” I stuffed the cleaning rag in my back pocket. The ladder shuddered. I looked up at Lal. In what universe was this a good idea? I made a few calculations. Lal weighed approximately 150 lbs. I weighed in at 140 lbs. Our combined weight might push the scaffold’s weight-bearing capacities too far. A net was called for, at the very least a bunch of boxes—anything to break the fall.

“What’s the matter? Afraid of heights?”

“Nope.”

“Then get your ass up here.”

I girded myself for the climb. It was a lot farther to the top than it looked. When I managed to pull myself onto the plank, I was panting hard. Sweat stung my eyes.

“Cat got your tongue.” Lal gave me a freaky smile. She reached out her hand. “Stand.”

“Up?”

“You can’t appreciate the entire effect sitting. You have to stand. It gives you added height.”

“I figured.” Closing my eyes (which really was the stupidest thing to do while suspended mid-air), I managed to get my feet up under me and stood. “The view! It’s wild.”

“You can see all.”

“I never knew.”

“You think I work this job for the lousy minimum wage! No, sir. It’s the rush that gets me out of my warm bed in the morning. Up here, I feel alive, free. It’s the best.”

    I glanced floorward. The linoleum looked hard, cold and cruel. There was always the chance I might survive a fall but, unlike Lal, I didn’t receive employee benefits. If I cracked my skull open, no HMO was going to cover surgery. I decided to sit.

    Lal remained on her feet. “I could weep to see the store. It’s so beautiful when filled with people. I see their happiness, like this one time a guy comes in. He’s very rich looking. Nice clothes. He has a woman with him. She’s also very rich looking. They have a child with blonde hair. A perfect angel. They buy bags of toys. The child gets a bunny. They don’t even try to steal anything.”

“That is amazing.”

Lal grew solemn. “I never had kids.”

“Me neither.”

“Don’t be a smart ass.”

“I wasn’t,” I said. “It’s just that we don’t get a lot of families these days. There was a little girl, though.”

“The one in the baseball cap.”

“I thought for sure she would buy that puzzle.”

“The one with the crazy cover and a thousand pieces.”

“It’s called Earth’s Sunny Solar System.”

“Whatever. She didn’t bite.”

“No, she didn’t.”

    Lal rested her hand on my shoulder. “If things keep up like this…” She paused, the logical conclusion to her thought difficult to articulate. Where would she go? Or me for that matter?

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “They’ll get the supply chain up and running. When they do, this place will be stocked to bursting, and you will be back in business catching the bad guys.”

“If only.”

I let her have a moment. The scene below was dreary. Shell-shocked customers going round in circles. Cashiers slumped over the registers. The manager walking the floor vaping. “I’m going down.”

“Stay a bit longer.”

“No, really, I’m on the clock. I should get down.”

“Your choice.”

    Easy for her to say. She loved it up there. She felt alive, free. I felt like I wanted to throw up. There’s no easy way off a plank. I had to roll over on my belly, kick out my foot till I found the ladder, then slide down until I could use my hands to hold on while I descended the rungs. I could feel Lal pacing above me. I closed my eyes and kept going. Above me, Lal cackled in amusement. I stepped away from the ladder. She waved down at me. I walked briskly to the bathroom, splashed my face with cold water, used the urinal, washed my hands, splashed my face, and used the urinal again.

    The following night, I stayed late. After the crab-it-tat fiasco, I wanted to make sure the animals lived through the night. I also figured that they had to notice what was happening, that they too felt the scarcity as keenly as the rest of us. My presence might offer some comfort.

    The door rang. I must have forgotten to lock up. “We’re closed!” At the end of Aisle C, near the front of the store, there was the girl in the baseball cap. “Oh, it’s you.”

“I want to do it.”

“Excuse me?”

“The puzzle. I want to do it.”

“And if I let you, will you buy it?”

“I don’t have money.”

“I can’t let you have the puzzle. I can let you look at the bunnies. But just for a minute. Then, you have to go. No one is supposed to be here after hours.”

“No one is here anyways.”

“Even more reason for you to go home.”

    She shrugged. Home didn’t seem to do much for her. I began to suspect there was more going on, like she was in foster care or homeless or… both. On the other hand, she looked fine. No visible signs of stress.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“It’s about to rain.”

    I went to check. I pushed against the door only to feel it push back hard.

“That’s the rain,” she said. “It’s coming.”

“It’s just the usual deluge for this time of year.”

She started down the aisle. “We should do the puzzle.”

    The rain started in, harder and faster; water rushed under the door, around it, over it. I grabbed the girl’s hand. “Up the scaffold.” She didn’t ask questions. She began climbing. I stayed below and spotted her. After she reached safety, I followed. The ladder rungs were slimy and slippery. The lights flickered. I kept climbing until I was able to ease myself onto the plank. “It’s here,” she said.

    I stared through my knees. The watery umbra sloshed up one wall and down another, sweeping along plushies, rubber balls, gift bags, costumes, deluxe Legos, light sabers—and dozens of other gizmos ripped from their packaging and bumping around in the shadows.

“It seems to have stopped,” I said with forced optimism.

“There’s more coming.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I saw it from my house.”

“Where’s your house?”

“It’s not there anymore,” she said. “It was washed away with the others.”

“That’s terrible.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I asked her name.

“The name I use?”

“Uh, okay.”

“Yessel.”

“That’s your username?”

“One of them,” she said.

    In an otherwise functioning world, I’d try to get more information from her—like, place of origin, age, and address. Right now, our address was the mess down below and our precarious refuge above. I felt cold, queasy. Yessel put her arms around me. We sat without speaking. Beneath us, the water lapped hypnotically as the store grew darker until only the red neon of the exit signs were visible—and soon they started going dark. “Are you okay?” I asked to remind myself I was alive and okay.

“It’s still coming in.”

“It’s stopped.”

“It’s coming closer.”

I pulled her arms tighter around my waist. “Yessel, it’s going to be okay. I promise.”

“We’re stuck.”

“Only till help comes.”

“We don’t have that long,” she said.

    I suddenly felt the water around my ankles, then my knees. I braced myself. There really was only one way out. We’d have to swim.

“What is it about that puzzle?” I asked her. I lowered myself slowly into the water.

“It’s how I always imagined it.”

“The solar system?” I treaded vigorously. The water was freezing.

“Except the solar system is a lot bigger than a thousand pieces.” She reached over to test the water. “It’s like ice.”

“Don’t think about it.”

    She slipped down off the scaffold. I grabbed her under the shoulders. “Put your arms around my neck and don’t let go.” I held her fast in the whipping current. The building groaned. The water shoved us up against the large windows. Above the sky had disappeared behind thick, greenish clouds. Yessel was still hanging on. I kicked out a foot and the store entrance collapsed. The water swept us out across the parking lot, down block after block, before we were spit onto a mound of land. We believed the worst of it was over, though the ground was a sponge and every step sucked us further into the ooze. Somewhere, a shuttle rocketed through space. Earth’s Sunny Solar System. Yessel and I struggled on, walking and sinking—and consoling ourselves with the idea that, if we could survive here, we could survive anywhere.

Credits:  This story first appeared in the December 2022 issue of Blue Mountain Review.

Personal Tragedies in Rodrigo Hasbún’s Los afectos

by

Kathryn A. Kopple 

In 2015, the Bolivian writer Rodrigo Hasbún published Los afectos (Affections), a slim volume loosely based on the Ertl family, a clan foisted on the reader with precious little introduction. “The day papa returned from Nanga Parbat (with some heart-rending images, of a beauty that wasn’t human), he told us while we ate dinner that mountain climbing had become too technical and what mattered was being lost, that he wouldn’t climb anymore.” His wife and daughters take in their papa’s words, careful not to interrupt, as he sermonizes about communing with nature. These speeches – the reader learns – go on uninterrupted for lengthy periods and, finally, culminate in a bruised vision of the world that, in a fine turn of phrase, can only be healed by seeking out those places “where God is untroubled by our ingratitude and sordidness”. A lofty sentiment and one that is in lockstep with the character’s historical counterpart: the Nazi cinematographer and alpinist Hans Ertl – the same man who, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, fully earned his reputation as Hitler’s photographer. Hasbún, however, is not deeply invested in this aspect of Ertl’s story; he is drawn to the private life of the family man. Untethered by all but the most tenuous historical references, Ertl and every character in the book become protagonists in a personal tragedy.

Throughout this tragedy, the intimacy of perspectives creates the feel of memoir, albeit one that is subject to fragmentation. Although Hasbún is best known as an acclaimed author, his scholarly work focuses on the interconnectedness between diary, biography and literature. He takes issue with the idea that diaries must be read at face value, as testimonials, when their very existence opposes worldly interests and demands. The diarist writes for a reader of one, presumably herself without, as Hasbún contends, “deference to the literary institution or publishing world." Diaries may enter the public domain but their purpose is other. They are reclusive, hermetic. It is as if there is no activity more solitary – or personal – than that of the diarist. Nor is it coincidental that Los afectos is a book imbued with solitude. Hans Ertl’s treks up mountains and through Amazon forest are journeys into the heart of solitude. He is the man who “leaves." His wife, Aurelia, languishes in the imposed solitude caused by her husband’s absence. Each of his three daughters is a solitary creature unable to sustain familial ties and relationships. Solitude of this sort is profoundly Heideggerian, that is, inescapable.

 Israel Beltrán

In fact, the entire novel reads like a Heideggerian fable. The characters are cast into a strange, new world to live out their finitude with precious few inner resources. Severed from their German homeland because of Hans’s Nazi past, their identities are stripped away; they must begin from scratch in Bolivia. In the high-altitude, low-oxygen city of La Paz, time is as precious as air. Hans wastes no time between expeditions. He returns from filming in Nanga Parbat already determined to set off again in search of Paititi, the lost Inca city of gold. His two eldest daughters, Monika and Heidi, are intensely aware that the clock is ticking and they are growing older by the second. The youngest daughter, Trixi, spends a melancholy Christmas alone with her mother, Aurelia, who tells the nearly thirteen-year-old that life is longer than people imagine, and that at times it feels “interminable." Trixi sees her mother as terribly lonely. She fails to understand how she has too much time on her hands. In her abject pronouncements, Aurelia echoes Heidegger’s assertion that it is through boredom our awareness of time is heightened. Boredom leads to gloominess but forces us to reflect upon the groundlessness of our existence. Aurelia smokes, drinks, and reminisces but, most importantly, she philosophizes. Sadly, it’s all downhill for her from there.

In contrast with Aurelia’s lassitude, the eldest daughter, Monika, suffers fits of anxiety. Heidi, who fears and resents her sister, describes these episodes as grotesque. “It was ugly to see her writhing about, I won’t deny it. It was shocking, horrible even, to the point that, the last time, we had to tie her up.” The episode passes and Heidi suspects that Monika’s outbursts serve an ulterior purpose: they are a means of holding her distracted parents’ attention. Her resentment of her sister intensifies when she learns that their father is taking Monika with him on his next expedition. Heidi demands to go. Her father agrees in a way that unnerves the girl. “As if he had predicted all of it, including the questions I was asking, a strange smile appeared on his face. My chest froze and I looked at my sister and she at me and at that moment neither of us knew what to say.” A limit has been reached. Words fail. There is no turning back for Heidi. Now, like her father, she is the one who leaves. She also falls in love with Rudi, one of Hans’s assistants. Most significantly, she becomes lost, psychically speaking, unable to remember the day or the reason for the journey. This stripping away of perspective, time, and purpose brings her closer to what Heidegger calls authenticity.

Authenticity, for Heidegger, refuses imitation, it can’t be contained in archetypes. Rather, it prefigures individuation as an ideal mode of being. Hans may be the paterfamilias of the Ertl clan but he is, above all things, a man who is true to himself. He becomes disillusioned with mountaineering because alpinists have become mere technicians. Averageness disgusts him. In contrast, he aspires to all things sublime. The rain forest is no less sublime than the glacier. Sublimity involves terror. It is awe-inspiring. Add to that a mythical Inca city of gold – buried in all that forest – and the quest promises certain glory. At one point, he heaps praise on Hiram Bingham, the man credited with discovering Machu Picchu, thus inserting himself in the tradition of great explorers. But then he has already proven his worth by filming the 1936 Olympics and being at Rommel’s side during the war. Hans also possesses a certain erotic magnetism. When Trixi asks her mother if she fell in love with him at first sight, she replies, “The second I saw him…. But I wasn’t the only one. I think everyone on the committee was a little in love with him.” And then, not least, his eye never fails him. Whatever he films turns to magic. Authenticity – the discovery of the ideal self – goes hand in hand with exceptionalism.

For Hans’s daughters, living with such a man is overwhelming. Their feelings for him cause rifts and divisions – an utter lack of peace reigns over the family. It’s apparent that Hans loves Monika the most, ostensibly because she tests him. Of all the ironies to be found in the novel, the fact that Monika will go on to become a left-wing revolutionary is the most poetic. (But then, Heidegger too was a revolutionary. He found academic philosophy guilty of all manner of sins, not the least of them complacency. There is an air of nihilistic joy that runs throughout his writing, a sense that once the old norms have been destroyed, philosophy will arise like a phoenix from the ashes. And no doubt, Heidegger thought of himself as that phoenix. It’s also true that he was a committed Nazi and antisemite.) In Los afectos, it is Monika who forces the issue of Hans’s Nazism. She accuses him of being a “lackey of the powerful, a disgusting fascist”. Her words open a great wound in him. After her assassination by the Bolivian military, the elderly Hans has a grave dug for her, literally forcing him once and for all to stare into the abyss.

When Los afectos first came out, it was marketed as a historical novel. From the disclaimer on the first page of the book to his assertions in numerous interviews, Hasbún is adamant that the book is historical only in the broadest sense of the term: as story. The story involves multiple points of view, lack of chronological cohesion, and a directness of expression that breaks down aesthetic distance. Instead of history, we are presented with instances that turn inward, personal, and reflective. Out of this assemblage of disparate voices, the question that arises is why history at all? Especially since Hasbún claims to use as little biographical detail as possible. The author seems to be pulled in by the unwritten aspects of the story – in what the historical record either suppressed or omitted. Nazism recedes into the background, almost imperceptible, as if opening a window to let in some fresh air.

In the essay “Fascinating Fascism”, Susan Sontag remarks that it may “seem ungrateful or rancorous to refuse to cut loose” the work of Nazi propagandists from their past. She takes issue with the rehabilitation of Leni Riefenstahl despite the cinematographer’s ongoing commitment to fascism. The same could be said of Hans Ertl. He never became disillusioned with Nazi Germany: it was post-war, democratic Germany that failed him. Moreover, during his self-imposed exile in Bolivia, he sought out the friendship of the notorious Klaus Barbie. Barbie is thought to have been involved in Monika’s assassination by Bolivian security forces in 1973. Given his friendship with Barbie – and, as mentioned in the novel, Ertl’s relationships with high-ranking members of the Bolivia military – he may have had more to do with his daughter’s death than the novel suggests. Whatever role he played (active or passive), Ertl never repudiated Nazism or his fascist associations. He would go on to write two memoirs, both of which are imbued with sentimental accounts of mountaineering and exploration. Both memoirs pay homage to the Germany of his youth.

However Hasbún adjusts the lens – the ever-shifting angles – it’s scarcely possible to insulate Los afectos – or any work of art – from its source material. The connection between old-world fascism and new-world exile is not severed but revised. Nazism may find itself reduced to mere figments, but even these have the power to mesmerize. The Argentine writer Manuel Puig, in his masterpiece El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman), explores the Nazi aesthetic, and how it catches us in a web of repulsion and attraction. The goddesses of Nazi cinema are no less beautiful because they are instruments of a brutal regime. They fascinate regardless. They provide an ideal of physical beauty and an antidote to the ugliness of existence. Fascism is predicated on a host of aesthetic values, among them the dictum that, without beauty, life is simply not worth living. Los afectos offers us a taste of such a life in the Ertl family saga. They are doomed and therefore beautiful. To paraphrase Heidegger, beauty is only as true as it is tragic.

Notes

All translations from the novel are mine unless otherwise cited. Regarding Hasbún’s critical investigations, please see Enea Zaramella, “Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún” in The White Review, https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-rodrigo-hasbun/, accessed 22 August 2021. A thorough discussion of the fascist aesthetic of Hans Ertl’s memoirs can be found in Caroline Schaumann’s “Memories of Cold in the Heat of the Tropics: Hans Ertl’s ‘Meine Wilden Dreißiger Jahre’” in Colloquia Germanica, vol. 43, no. 1/2, 2010, pp. 97–112, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23981639, accessed 22 August 2021. Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” may be found at UC Santa Barbara, https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm , accessed 22 August 2021. Los afectos has been translated into English under the title Affections by Sophie Hughes.

Credits:  This review first appeared in Ars Notoria.

About the Author:  Kathryn A. Kopple holds a doctorate in Latin American literature (NYU). Her focus is the surrealist poetry of the Rio de la Plata. She has also published original poetry and prose in multiple venues, including The Threepenny Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms. She has published two novels – Little Velásquez and The Leaving Year – set in Spain. Kathryn also hosts the literary blog The Leaving Year.

The House of Folly

 by

Peter Cowlam

Elena Motrich

Not new to these cloisters was one impatient student, who had come to consider Occidental principles – should he or shouldn’t he cheat? Nicola, the most recent of Schmutzburg’s guests, gazed from her dizzy summit, flanked by those primordial monarchs. Incredibly – for her own had been whirled away in the bitter night winds – another set of prints, another procession of black hollows, meandered from the vapours, like coals in pristine snow. The contest she had entered had a name – it was Frame Solutions. Her opponent had decided on his next move while her back was turned. She ignored him, musing on that solitary speck of a man (meaning Michael, a fortuitous presence, surely). If he turned, and looked up the mountain, at the sun and sky, and the clouds, it was only a matter of time before Schmutzburg, or its one last bastion, also entered his view. She didn’t wait, but with a toss of her hair swung away from the ledge and faced her opponent, but did not return to their game. Even if Michael, she thought, understood the inscription over the outer door, and entered, he wouldn’t last here long. For how could he remain? A cold stone floor and naked walls, a rudimentary bed, a low table, icy winds that howled in at the uncovered windows – no one was given more.

So she reasoned, while a mess of guilty thoughts in her opponent threatened to stay his hand, an impulse he suppressed once it had formed as a possibility. Words he spoke were a veil on his clumsy machinations—

‘You had begun a list of books.’

Nicola studied the board and the new, illegal position of some of its pieces, and thought about how to answer. A few summarising sentences were impossible. What would a mere student of Schmutzburg understand of her own student life, with its autumn afternoons? Could it mean as much to him, those sudden gusts, the flutter and flurry and shower of leaves?

She heard the bell – they both heard the bell – and was certain of what to say, was equally positive that the broad, extended lawns in the grounds of her orthodox life, cut and rolled into alternating bands of green – that these as phenomena were another dissimulation. Yet you cannot consign everything to the world’s history, from a surviving reality measured as private experience. The details were important.

One day she looked outward from a bench in the convent garden, and conjectured at the surrounding symbolism. Urns or sanctified vessels that hadn’t stood the test of time, smeared as they were in lichens, moss and mould. Neither were the holy statuettes of unassailable stuff, when limbs were fractured and noses broken off. No. She, Nicola, had nothing to say, nothing at all of the books she’d read, and anyway a chilly wind was rising. (By now Michael was puzzling over that relief.) Squatting down at the board, she accused her opponent of cheating. Honourably, he conceded a fourth consecutive game.

❦

Here in the House, a benign old mystic in a creaking chair had trained his mind to ignore the woody friction when he leaned forward to dip his pen, or back to gaze into the shadows and contemplate. He had never stopped wondering at the seasonal rites of peoples beyond the perimeters of Schmutzburg. These musings reinforced themselves whenever he beheld the careworn faces of Westerners who sometimes sojourned here, his life at a remove from theirs, invested with other meanings. They arrived with their signs and symbols and burdens of prejudice, for the wise elders of the House to examine, in the fullest flower of every human folly.

He’d dipped his pen for the last time that morning. He put it aside and glanced through his open arch. In the conical blueness, a solitary cloud had been busily disintegrating, and in that other perspective, in the oblong whiteness when he stood, a new set of prints curled up the mountainside.

The bell tolled and he left his desk. He took down a heavy book from a shelf and blew away the dust. When he opened it and turned to the page he wanted, too many hands had been here before, and he was obliged to smooth away the creases, to flatten out its script, before placing in a marker. A spiral of steps led him into the lower chambers, and here he met Nicola in one of the passages. Dusty shafts of sunshine filtered in at intervals through slits in the wall. He apologised, but handed her the book – not too late, he hoped. Well, this had been a long time coming, but anyway, Frame Solutions wasn’t a game one learned overnight. The old man chuckled.

‘I hear you’re beating all our best students,’ he said, adding, ‘I shall have to see if I can’t upset that winning streak,’ though it was years since he’d played.

Down, down again, and at the very foot of those stairs a young English head turned with a start. The old man had begun to interpret for his benefit a plaster relief over the mantel, whose three divisions – one upper, two beneath – represented what? One in the pair depicted an unhappy village husband left holding a new-born baby, with an empty jug of ale. His suspicious wife knew his evil ways, and where you saw her creeping round from behind, she clutched at a wooden shoe and wound back her arm in preparation for a blow to the head. A cowardly neighbour, keeping his own head down but determined to miss nothing, reported what he saw. What we see is a luckless husband condemned by the village fathers. On the right of the pair, local worthies come together and are unanimous – the drunkard they hold aloft rides the skimmington.

Michael looked at the old man, and at the relief, and at the old man again. ‘And that, the upper?’ he asked.

‘Ah, that is the just god in his heaven, who sees that his law is carried out.’

❦

Here on another winter morning, the sun in its ice-cool heaven rose above Schmutzburg, a forgotten country, and forgotten its House of Folly. A hole appeared, or the tiniest chink, where a glimmer of light briefly penetrated a diffuse wash of moisture over Europe. A wrinkled old rustic in his mountain shack looked up for a moment and fancied he’d seen something, but heard only cars and a tourist coach.

Michael was in the gallery, where the students had gathered, all of them determined to ignore him. Neither did Nicola speak, coming in moments after and finding herself a seat. Michael nodded. She opened a book. She’d got it for its commentaries, its author an expert on the game of games. Grading was able to mark her progress page to page. Then without warning she tossed her hair back across her shoulder, in a pause from the book, taking in what changes took place in the courtroom below.

The affable old mystic sat at a bench with two others, while the man accused took his oath from a cleric standing by. That official withdrew, leaving in view a Westerner in early middle age. His dark hair had thinned to greying wisps at the temples, and had receded to the crown, and that made it all the more unclear to Nicola that a poet was about to be tried, his eyes bulging behind the lenses of his spectacles. Two deep furrows demarcating flabby jowls accentuated the flare of his nostrils. His thin lips formed an intelligent, whimsical smile. He stood waiting – a poet of the English municipality – in a shabby blue suit, a white shirt stiff at the collar, and a two-tone broadly knotted tie.

The case against was roughly this, while the three old men were loose with their metaphors. Our poet took his afflatus not from any potent commingling afloat in the atmosphere, but from something much less elemental, bound up with the naked mastery of form. This was not to deny the necessity of rules – that was understood. The objection was one of emphasis, for what was the character or ingenuity of prosodic architectonics other than plain, arithmetic workings out, and the trivialisation of lived experience?

The defence was less vague. Historical problems couldn’t be ignored, and the poet confessed to a growing sense of intimidation in the presence of his technological colleagues. For example, he, the poet, was capable of this: he could conceive a regular figure, a tetrahedron, in his mind’s eye, and could tilt it, rotate it, examine its lines and surfaces. But the crudest schoolboy, with his home computer, could do as much and more. Or on a grander scale, think of this inscrutable planet Earth, and make of that a vision – a blue ocean sphere suspended brightly in an enveloping darkness. Can any lyric prefigure again so stunning a photograph? Even Armageddon, that most vital conceptualisation in his repertoire, has been subsumed into mere technics and delivered up as a political possibility.

The accused was a man of conscience, whose observations had something of a Janus nature, being both involuntary and the source of ceaseless irritation. If all our medieval visions were now the acquired, bastardised property of governments and technocrats, then the only freedom left was in wallowing – an art that was bourgeois, puerile – or in the frustrations of social protest. And anyway, they seemed to want to consider his case in a theological light, with accusations answerable only in the realms of the unknowable. The four looked up. The sentence seemed a mere formality – condemnation to the world again – but Nicola had allowed that open book to slide from her knees and fall with a thud to the floor. This first session was adjourned.

❦

Late evening. Michael sat in the gathering dusk on the edge of his bed – hands and forearms dangling, elbows on parted knees. He approximated cardinal points of the compass. North was cold and damp – the wall opposite. East was a window on a country in darkness. West, an open door on creaky hinges, allowing in the last warm rays of a world in decay. There as he guessed was the poet’s dying emblem, a dull red segment as the sun underwent its final descent.

In the early morning the position was much the same, though now he heard voices and not the whirr of his thoughts. Above, the trial had repeated itself in all its developments, however much he disciplined his mind. He looked out of his eastern window and saw a distant country, its clouds of dust, its plumes and billows of brown smoke rising through an early frost, a dew. Nearer – below him on the courtyard – the poet had just snapped shut his tarnished cigarette case and returned it to a hip pocket in his jacket, which was crumpled where he’d slept uncomfortably. He lit up – a tarry, unfiltered cigarette – and drawing deeply looked east himself, though from his elevation couldn’t see over the bright icy slopes into the valleys. Six, seven students just out of earshot had formed a circle and discussed concluding details, until at last an elected spokesman, whose warm breath Michael saw exhaled excitably into the cold air, detached himself and strode up to the smoking poet.

Later, a much older man was looking on, from the highest window in Schmutzburg’s southernmost tower. What he hadn’t seen – Nicola and Michael together again – was immaterial. His opinions concerning the two had already formed. Michael, immobile at the foot of the stairs, was pointing up uncertainly to the apex of the relief.

‘The just god in his heaven,’ he said.

Nicola, shrugging, said only, ‘Just god, no. It’s a landowner, that peasant’s feudal overlord.’ Meaning is always material – in this case a loss of revenue and the moral collapse of the workforce. We so like our parables of ownership and neglect.

Six or seven students set up a small table, while Nicola stepped outdoors with a playing board and a canvas sack for the pieces. The unbidden young Englishman followed, bewildered, while his older compatriot must accept he was guilty as accused. The poet as he loses his voice reveals his remoteness in what he says for those who have lost their faith.

❦

Dreary grey scholars, who for generations had sneezed and drawn their secret signs in accumulating dust, consulted their archives, and were able to make one assertion: in its breadth of possibilities and relationships, that historic discipline Frame Solutions, first appearing in the fourth millennium BCE, had helped its adherents achieve superhuman powers of assimilation. If that was its extent, what of the rules? Well, exquisitely simple. The players began with twenty-four identical pieces, the opposing sets being differentiated by colour, and to each individual certain powers and scope of movement were ascribed, though not declared until its first move or capture. Thus an almost limitless range. Half a dozen students now formed a semicircle together with the silent Englishmen, while a seventh, large-framed and pale, could feel the colour rising in his cheeks. He would have to retract his confident offer to commentate on every move, or explain the rules, when almost certain to result was a first, embarrassing defeat.

Nicola considered her options but wouldn’t make the decisive move. This was as much as Michael understood. The bell tolled again and the poet tossed down his cigarette butt onto the cold stone, crushing its smoky ember under a polished toe, a city shoe. A biting gust rolled in round the frozen peaks of that far eastern country, still twitching in its slumbers, under a long, feudal shadow. When the old man from the southern tower came out to the courtyard – robed, in open sandals, supporting his tottering frame on a staff – the sun in the east behind him settled on his grey hair bright as a halo. Nobody stirred.

So far this wasn’t the game he’d come to see. He shuffled forward to the two seated at the board and crossed his arms, waiting. It was a hopeless position. He smiled. The student foundered. Like so many before him, he conceded – he retired, scratching his head. Then the old man put the tip of his staff to his lips (he cautioned the gasps, the hubbub, the euphoria), and next it was Michael, with a wrinkled hand pressed to the small of his back, as that pushed him to the newly vacated place. ‘Play,’ he was told, and unaware that the passing of only a few more days would see the commencement of his own trial, he squatted down nervously and took his place against that all-conquering female. A slight flicker of amusement crossed her features, but she restrained a smile and set out the pieces again. Michael, reluctant in his challenge, made a first tentative move. She snorted when he named his opening piece – a choice revealing a naivety unsuspected even in him. In the shadow of that tyrant god her failing religion had sought to vanquish, her compulsion to teach a lesson, and punitively, re-emerged.

The old man chuckled, but didn’t remain, and when the poet took his place, assured that his own system could never be so vulnerable, no one foresaw his defeat, until late afternoon, when in the lengthening shadows, and a rising wind, only one spectator remained. But even he – pallid, large-limbed – shied away before the final outcome, consoled by the sure knowledge that both must turn to that distant, inscrutable country, to those shadows over the mountains, for any hope of salvation.

‘The House of Folly’ belongs to Peter Cowlam’s short-story collection Penumbra. Penumbra itself appears in Peter Cowlam’s recently published compendium edition Early Novels and Short Fiction, available at Amazon and other online retailers, as both hardback and ebook. 

Tress Theory, a Lesson

by

Kathryn A. Kopple 

The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope Illustration Aubrey Beardsley

Charles gazed at the night sky and smiled. It appeared filmy, as if a giant sheet of wax paper hovered between him and the heavens. The hotel balcony, where he stood, gave him a sweeping view of the Gran Vía, the large boulevard that ran through the center of Madrid. Pulsing red, twinkling blue and violet, blinking yellow, speeding white high beams—the street swam with electric intensity below while above all was murky. Nothing shone or twinkled up there. Even the moon was less visible, something he noticed back in New York over a year ago. He didn’t make much of it, not at first, assuming that the moon’s disappearance was an effect of light pollution. Astronomers had long issued warnings: too much artificial outdoor lighting was responsible for transforming pristine darkness into an unsightly wash of cloudy denim. Charles experienced a sense of loss but in an abstract way. No one born after the Edisonian Revolution felt starved for more stars. So what if a few stars were no longer visible to the human eye? More like eight million but really who was counting? And then, one evening, standing on the roof of his Upper West Side apartment building, Charles realized that the moon was also disappearing from view. He couldn’t have been more pleased.

He glanced once more at the sky before going inside, where Belinda was rummaging though her suitcase. She pulled out one item, then another, while Charles spoke in a feverish rush about what he had—or, more precisely, hadn’t—seen.

“Very happy for you,” Belinda said. “Now where are my pajamas? I need to get out of these clothes.”

“You can’t imagine how great this makes me feel.”

“Truthfully, I can’t.”

“Why is it so hard for you to be happy for me?”

Belinda looked at him in exasperation. “It’s not easy to live with a man on a mission.”

“All the more reason to get on with it. Get rid of the mess up there and start over.”

“You mean down here.” Belinda said, working her way out of her dress.

The mission Belinda referred to was Charles’ determination to rid the moon of names. As a member of the Historical Society for the Simplification of Lunar Nomenclature, he couldn’t bear the chaos of names that now cluttered the moon. He couldn’t look at the moon without seeing a mishmash of names. It drove him crazy. Names like Babbage, Bouvard, Bowditch (and those were only the Bs) created utter confusion, and the moon was littered with them. Considering that there were thousands of these offenses, Charles felt the solution was to simply start over. A blank slate. No more Babbage! Geologically precise terms only. How difficult could it be? A question he often shouted across a conference table at some Bouvard during meetings where he was invariably met with icy rejection.

“She’s not the only moon out there. What about me? Are you going to have me deleted as well?” Belinda asked. She had finished the unpacking and now sat cross-legged on the bed, her back bolstered by oversized pillows. In her silky cream-colored pajamas, she practically glowed.

“Have I told you lately how beautiful you are?”

“Answer the question.”

“Well, that is the point, isn’t it? Are we talking you, Belinda, looking sexy as usual, or Uranus XIV?”

“You mean to say, Belinda. Her name is Belinda.”

“You mean, it. Uranus XIV is a planet, not a person.” Charles began inspecting the collection of bottled waters displayed on the sideboard. “Do you want something?”

Belinda beckoned for the Perrier. Charles handed her the bottle. “I wish I could make you understand.”

“Oh, I understand.”

“Then you agree that the whole thing is an illusion. One that we’ve collectively created over thousands of years. Wipe the slate clean and we can start over without all these archaic beliefs, superstitions and fanciful names. Misconceptions of all kinds would be wiped away, for the better.”

Belinda frowned. “I hope that you aren’t suggesting that I’m archaic.”

“It never occurred to me.”

“Good,” she said, as she undid her hair, allowing it to cascade over her shoulders, down her back, and swirl past her waist.

Spellbound, Charles stared. Belinda’s hair never ceased to amaze him. He adored her hair–abundant, full of movement; it had a life of its own. Often, when he woke in the mornings, he would find long dark strands circling his fingers and wrists, the way a vine wraps around the branch of a tree.

“How does it do that?” he asked.

“What are you on about now?”

“Your hair.”

“What! Is it disappearing?” She laughed and then asked, “Are happy now?”

“I was talking about your hair, not the moon.”

“Right,” she said and began taking tiny, delicate sips of Perrier. She stared at him with singular intensity, energy rising within her—annoyance, possibly rage.

She had the grayest eyes. Magnetic.

Charles sighed. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“Of course, not! You never mean anything.”

“Let’s just change the subject.”

“How I wish we could but all you ever talk about is your grand plan.”

Charles responded in a prickly voice that he would happily stop talking about the moon if she found it upsetting. He sat down on the bed beside her. Her hair! It must be a trick of the light that made it seem to vibrate like that. “I really don’t want to upset you.”

“I think you do.”

“My god! What is it going to take?”

“Oh, no, not this.”

“What!”

“You want to make me the problem. As if I’m responsible for the fact that you can’t get your way.”

“I don’t mean to,” Charles said. “I am frustrated. Angry. Half the time I can’t get anyone to talk to me about the moon. It’s all about Mars now.”

“You do sound sad.”

“I am.”

“Defeated is probably a better word.” Belinda was finished with the Perrier. She set the empty bottle on the night table. “At least you’re being honest.”

“I love my work, Bel. I need my work.”

“Where does that leave me?”

A feeling of weariness came over Charles. He wanted to lie down next to her on the bed, but Belinda’s hair was in his way. Maybe she should cut it. Bel’s hair! That abundance he had always found remarkable suddenly struck him as encroaching mass of knots and tangles.

Doing what he could to stay clear of Bel’s hair, Charles stretched out on his back and stared at the ceiling. He stared a lot at the ceiling. He found it comforting. “It’s for the best,” he said, after a long silence.

“Listen to yourself!” Belinda got to her feet. She stalked the room, drawing the heavy damask curtains and shutting the door to the balcony with a sharp bang. She turned to face Charles. “You need to stop this.” She swept past Charles and resumed her place in the center of the bed. “Turn on the television. I want to watch a movie.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower.” What good ever came from trying to explain things to her? When it came to science, he was the expert. It was a lonely way to live, but there it was: no one to talk to about the one thing in life that defined him. His work. The moon.

“Aren’t you going to take your shower?” Belinda asked. She was staring at the television screen. She held the remote out in front of her, as if it were a weapon and aggressively clicked through the channels. The face of a famous American model popped up on the screen, her voice dubbed in Spanish.

Belinda asked Charles tersely if he was going to stand there all night. Clearly, his hovering irritated her. He retreated to the bathroom. Shirt, belt, socks, Italian loafers ended up in a little pyramid on the floor under the sink. When he’d finished soaping and rinsing, he slid open the glass shower door and a burst of hot air escaped, steaming up the room and clouding the mirror. He toweled himself off and slipped into one of the plush hotel bathrobes.

Through the wall, he heard music and assumed Belinda had found some romantic comedy to watch. He wiped the steam off the mirror and inspected his chin. He needed a shave. The music in the next room grew louder, as if a child had gotten hold of the remote and was gleefully blasting the volume as high as possible.

Charles yanked at the door and stepped into the suite. Belinda had fallen asleep, curled up in the center of the bed, her hair spread all around her, as serene and vulnerable as a nesting bird. With an impatient click, he hit the off button on the remote and watched the screen fade to black. The room was unbearably hot. Under the heavy terrycloth, he dripped.

With unsteady steps, Charles went over to the door to the balcony and pulled. It refused to give way.

“Where are you going?” asked Belinda.

Had she been awake all this time? His sweaty hand slid off the doorknob. For a second, he thought he might pass out.

“I need some air.”

“Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I’ll feel better if I can get a little fresh air.”

“If you cared more,” she said in a far-away sounding voice, “you’d listen to me.”

“I suppose,” he muttered. He couldn’t figure out whether it was the strange hotel room or the weeks of travel, but he desperately wanted to get away from her.

“You act as if you care but all you really do is humor me. I am just your poor, confused Bel.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” he said, his voice brusque. He’d reached his limit.

“And you accuse me of being predictable.”

Charles flinched, injured by her insulting tone and yet unable to respond because he was too ashamed to admit all the ways in which he failed her. She deserved better but, for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine how to please her. What did she want? He had no idea.

“Try to get some sleep, Bel. Things will look brighter in the morning.”

“You know best, dear.”

He wiped sweat from his eyes. “Don’t take it like that.”

“You don’t want me to get too close to you, do you? I think it’s because you’re scared that if I really got inside your head you might begin to see things differently.”

Charles wished she would stop talking. It was so damn hot in that room. He would suffocate if he didn’t get some fresh air.

“I’m going to step outside now. I will feel more like talking after I get some air.”

“Just one more thing.”

“What is it?” He was already making plans to break up with her when they got back to the States. Who could live like this?

“I’ve never once heard you say that you love me.”

“I tell you I love you all the time.” Hopefully, that was enough to appease her.

“You don’t mean it,” she insisted. “You tell me you love me because you think that’s what I want to hear.”

“It’s not true, Bel. I care for you a great deal.” His heart was pounding. “Now try to rest. Sleep will do you good.”

Charles wiped his hands on his bathrobe, pulled open the door, and stepped out onto the balcony. Still burning up, he waited impatiently to feel the wind on his face. He went to take off the cumbersome terrycloth. Who cared if he were to expose himself to all of Madrid? No one was out there to see him. He thought of Bel and her questions as he tried to undress. Whatever had come over her? She seemed determined to push him to the very edge. He tried to undo the belt to the bathrobe, but his fingers were tied in knots—bound by some substance that felt remarkably like Belinda’s hair. And there it was: music of a kind he didn’t immediately recognize. Celestial notes. As if the stars, blind to them though he was, had formed a choir. He remembered that, as a boy, he would carry a pocketknife on him at all times in case of emergencies. But that was a long time ago, and he had nothing to cut through the heavy cilia—no scissors or jackknife. Panicked, he groped about for the door. He tried calling for help, but it was everywhere: in his mouth, falling into his eyes, ringing in his ears. A tremendous gust pushed him against the balcony railing and started to drag him over. A ten-story fall to the ground below. Or was it the sky above? He’d lost all sense of direction. The music grew louder, one crescendo after the other when above him a moonbeam appeared, and through the silken light, he saw Belinda one last time, rapturously combing her hair, like a violinist pulling a bow across the strings of a Stradivarius.

Credits:  This story originally appeared in 2021 in The Fictional Cafe. 

Excerpt from John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James

The Prologue: The End

No living thing flew over the village of Gibbeah, neither fowl, nor dove, nor crow. Yet few looked above, terrified should an omen come in a shriek or flutter. Nothing flew but dust. It slipped through window blades, door cracks, and the lifting clay of rooftops. Dust coated house and ground, shed and tree, machine and vehicle with a blanket of gray. Dust hid blood, but not remembrance.

Apostle York took three days to decide. He had locked himself in the office as his man waited by the door. Clarence touched his face often without thought, running his fingers over scratches hardened by clotted blood. The Apostle’s man was still in church clothes: his one black suit and gray shirt with tan buttons that matched his skin, save for his lips, which would have been pink had they not been beaten purple three days ago. Clarence shifted from one leg to the other and squeezed his knuckles to prevent trembling, but it was no use.

“Clarence,” the Apostle called from behind the door. “Pile them up. Pile them all up. Right where the roads meet. Pile them up and burn them.”

Men, women, and children, all dead, were left in the road. Those who scurried home with their lives imprisoned themselves behind doors. There were five bodies on Brillo Road; the sixth lay with a broken neck in a ditch where the bridge used to be. Clarence limped, cursing the hop and drag of his feet. At the crossroads he stopped.

“All man who can hear me!” he shouted. “Time now to do the Lord’s work. The Apostle callin you.”

Faces gathered at windows but doors remained shut. Some would look at Clarence, but most studied the sky. Clarence looked above once and squeezed his knuckles again. A dove had flown straight into his face, splitting his bottom lip and almost scratching out his left eye. He felt as if more would come at that very moment, but the Apostle had given him strength.

“I talkin to every man who can stand. Heed the word or you goin get lick with friggery worse than any bird.”

Birds. They came back in a rush; in screams and screeches and wounds cut fresh by claws. “You know what my Apostle can do.”

Clarence knew the houses where men hid. He hopped and dragged to each one and hammered into the door.

“Sunset,” he said.

Three days before, when noon was most white, the village had killed Hector Bligh. Reckoning came swift, before they were even done. God’s white fury swept down on them with beaks and claws and the beat of a thousand wings.

But there were things the villagers feared more than birds. One by one they came out and the men threw the bodies on the bonfire.

“This was judgment,” said Apostle York. He had emerged from the office after the fire was lit. The Apostle’s face had no scratch. “Judgment!” he shouted over the brilliance of the pyre and the crackle and pop of burning flesh. “Judgment,” he said again in morning devotion, noon devotion, evening devotion, night mass, penitence prayer, children’s prayer, women’s prayer, blood atonement, prayer for the saints, and the School of Boy Prophets. From that day, the incident was never to be spoken of lest God again unleash his wrath on Gibbeah.

The building had begun a week before the killing. With chopped down trees the villagers made a fence all around Gibbeah’s boundary. Then they surrounded it in barbed wire. Every city of righteousness had a wall, said the Apostle. This was God’s way of keeping holiness in and iniquity out. Sooner than expected, the fence was finished. It wouldn’t be long before nature hid wood and wire in the deceit of leaves, vines, and flowers. Soon Gibbeah would disappear from the map of men. Soon all would be spared from recollection but Lucinda.

She had also spent three days in a room, but her door was locked from the outside. Lucinda panicked whenever she trapped fingers in her gorgon hair. Her eyes popped from jet skin. She had believed the Apostle, for love and God had punished her for sin. Before she went mad there were two faces in the mirror, neither of them hers. After Hector Bligh’s death there were three. Bligh’s eyes snaked her. They tormented her in dreams. She screamed at him in the tiny room below the church’s steeple. The room stank of bird flesh. In a fit of rage brought on by the fever that madness carried, she struck the mirror and shattered it. But in each broken piece was another face. Three faces became ten, then a hundred and a thousand and still more. A million eyes that saw everything and judged like God. She could do nothing but scream. By day her room was dark, but at night she moved back and forth in the light, a gaunt silhouette one instant, a ragged chiaroscuro the next.

Human ash became dust. What dust would not cover, wind swept away. Gibbeah built a wall that sealed the village from memory. But within her walls Lucinda would not forget. His ghost lived with her now, his voice mimicked her cries, and his eyes saw her secret skin. The Apostle had called Hector Bligh a disgrace, abomination, and Antichrist. She called him the Rum Preacher.

Chapter 1: The Rum Preacher

Make we tell you bout the Rum Preacher. Even if you never live anywhere near them parts, you must did hear bout the Rum Preacher. After six years, false story and true story rub together so much that both start shine. People think that everything shoot to Hell after the Devil take hold of Lillamae Perkins, but if you did know Pastor Hector Bligh of the Holy Sepulchral Full Gospel Church of St. Thomas Apostolic, you would know him was on the road to Hell long before that.

Before Pastor Bligh come to Gibbeah nobody ever see a man of God drink. Some people say Second Book of John, verse one to eleven, say that Jesus turn water into wine, so him must did drink wine too. Three man who sit down outside the bar all day say that him is man after all and man have right to get drunk just as him have right to scratch him balls when him want to scratch him balls or beat him woman when she don’t act right.

Bligh drink like drinking goin out of style. All Saturday night when him should be readying himself for church, him down the bar drinking liquor and talking out people business. And when the time come to do the preaching, him don’t know what to say. We never see preaching like this yet. When Bligh drunk all you hear is mumble. When Bligh dry him sound like that mad captain in that Moby Dick picture that show at the Majestic. The preacher before him did have fire. Hector Bligh have nothing but ice. Maybe is fi we fault cause country people take things as them be, as if white man goin beat we if we change them.

Lillamae.

Lillamae Perkins. Is was two years since the morning her father wake up but just for a minute to see him bed all red and blood gushing like spring from where him penis used to hang. Nobody never see what happen, but everybody see Lillamae, outside her gate looking like them obeah her, with one hand holding the knife and the other hand holding the bloody cocky. She eat green pawpaw to kill out the baby. Two years later, Sunday come and Pastor Bligh was him usual drunk self. Him fling himself into the Pastor seat by the pulpit like him would crash on the floor if him did miss. Lillamae goin up to the altar to have them drive out her sin and iniquity, even though Preacher never call nobody yet.

Everybody hear she.

“Lawd Jesus Christ! Lawd Jesus Christ! Consuming Fire! Consuming Fire! LAAAAAAAAAWD!!!”

Lillamae Perkins fling herself pon the ground. Her leg turn into scissors, she swing them open, then close, then open, and everybody could see her fishy which never cover up with no panty. Then she see Lucinda, who scream out to Holy Jesus Christ.

“Wha Jesus goin do fi you, river-whore? Satan watching you from you start mix tea,” Lillamae say. People screaming and running, and tripping and crushing and more screaming, cause when she open her mouth is a man voice come out. Then she see the Pastor and all Hell break loose. Five deacon rush the altar. Churchgoer and sinner both call them “The Five.”

“One idiot, two drunkard, one sick-fowl, and one who beat woman. Now who is who? Who is who?” is what she say. The Five circle her, wrestle her, but nobody could pin down Lillamae. She slip from one like grease and claw through another one face. She kick a deacon in him seed bag and five man become four. Lillamae beat up all of them. She crick the second man neck, break all of the third man finger, punch asthma back into the fourth man chest, and blind the last deacon in him left eye.

Nobody know where the knife come from. Some people say she jump, some people say she fly. When demon take you, you can do anything. All people see is when she leap after the Pastor with the knife and him hold out him hand like him was goin catch her and she stab right through him left hand middle and him stuck on the wall like Holy Jesus crucified.

“Fool. You should a do this two years ago when we was one. Now we is one and seven,” was all she say. Pastor Bligh bawling and screaming, but nobody goin cross a girl with eight demon in her. Then she scream and run out of the church.

Two day pass and nobody can find Lillamae. Then Wednesday, a little boy find her body sailing down Two Virgins River. Pastor Bligh did drunk when him bury her. After that plenty people stop come to church.

* * *

Coming home from the bar, Pastor Bligh made his way up the road, teetering like a drunken colossus. But the fire dug holes in his gut and sent flame down his thighs screaming, Let me out! He moved over to the side of the road and released himself, bursting a black circle on the pavement with a torrent of yellow piss. The sun teased him from behind and suddenly there was lightness to the morning. He had learned long ago never to trust happiness. But something came over him, bringing both pleasure and a slight fear. A silliness that made him fall in love with pink-striped skies and opalescent dew bubbles and chickens crowing themselves awake. Bligh was still very much drunk. His pants were around his ankles and when he moved he tripped, fell backwards on the base of his skull, and knocked himself out.

A church sister saw him first. She had come out to water her hibiscus and thought a mad man or a drunkard had fallen dead in the road. She inched toward him, afraid that he was merely asleep and would awake at that very second to rape her with calloused hands and dirty fingernails. But when she saw Pastor Bligh’s face, the woman frowned, disgusted and unsurprised. “Disgrace” she said. And yet she was relieved by Pastor Bligh’s behavior, as were many in the village. So tormented was he by his own sin that he could never convict them of theirs. But as she summed him up from head to foot, her view came to a halt midway. There looking at her was his dark penis and balls, sprawled as carelessly as he was, bracketed by his thighs and the open ends of his shirt. She forgot his arms; the right spread open and the left under his back. She forgot his face, gaunt and gray, his mouth open and pooling with drool. She forgot his shoes, dirty, brown, and mostly covered by pants that strangled his ankles. There was only the thing, lifeless between two legs yet as monstrous as a serpent in Genesis. Her dark face went white, even pink, as she rushed back to her house. For several minutes he was unconscious. Minutes that horrified old women and scandalized children who passed by on the way to school. Lucinda, who never witnessed the incident, would nonetheless report of it in the first person in that tone she reserved for special heresies.

After the pee-pee incident, the concerned citizens of the village, namely Lucinda, had had enough.

“Him goin mistake him chair for a toilet next Sunday, just watch,” said one observer, but as he was not a member of the church no one heard, anticipated, or dreaded it. In short, that person was not Lucinda, who had begun a letter-writing campaign to have Pastor Bligh removed. Lucinda remembered very little schooling other than the Bible, so her words often packed more Hellfire and damnation than she intended. She wrote to every church she knew, even the archdiocese, despite Pastor Bligh being no Catholic. Bligh answered to nobody but God, and Jesus wasn’t saying anything that Lucinda wanted to hear.

Nobody answered Lucinda’s letters. She would never curse God, but reminded Him that this was why she also prayed to someone else. Then the Majestic Cinema started showing Sunday matinees at 10:00 and chopped the halved congregation to a quarter. The Pastor now drank day and night. He was spiraling downward and would have taken the village with him were it not for the other, who lead them instead to a light blacker than the thickest darkness.

He came like a thief on a night colored silver. He came on two wheels, the muffler puffing a mist that made children cough in their sleep. As his motorcycle coursed up Brillo Road it left a serpentine trail of dust. There were no witnesses to his coming, save for an owl, the moon, and the Devil.

Credits:  This excerpt can be found online at Akashic Books.