Curt Brown

They brought it up in trucks, in trope

Grumble... grumble... wondered the nephewless uncle, his niece has gone toward stores weeks ago—migrated westward and shallowed the clouds as they stumblebummed their freight across the bindlestiff plains. He wondered, expressed wonder in grumbles and pushed his cap back to let a line of sweat trace floorward. Orange juice, she had said. The light snaked in cracked blinds. She was gone. His sister was all metaphor. Why hadn't she birthed a boy? Bouncing in blue—bubblegum cigars. Instead she left him with railroads, carving their rails back, illusory-connecting in distant childhood.

Grumble. He wondered again, pulling a folded pack of cigarettes from the pocket of fade denim coverall. Rivets, he thought and he did his best to rivet his memory of her—of both hers—into firm coiled dirt. He planted the tiny metal where it could afford a view of the sea. Swallow the salt. Steal an errant beam. His nephew was a lighthouse. A pulsar. Still, wood clambered in bits. Jagged. His hands were full of splinters. Orange juice, stanzad citrus. Hollow, he thought. Grumble. The pins engaged, the rectangles were plagiarists. There—concrete. The sea heard as blood, beating in tide to his head. Groaning light, hum. In this hue, just. His hand gripped. Cold. Grumble, he wondered, is Florida this close?

Gertrude Stein on the Atomic Bomb (1946)

~
They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.
~
I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn't any more than in everybody's secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.
~
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
~
[first published in Yale Poetry Review, December 1947]
~

The Year Halloween Fell on a Thursday
~
Charity Anderson had polished off three quarters of a bottle of her favorite Merlot. The subject for this evening’s homily—her own sad joke—was “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” All she wanted for her shy little boy was for him to grab just the teensiest portion of the life out there for us all. She had been so clever, gone in the train store and found what she wanted, laughed all the way home—this would do the trick. She had schemed on such a small scale, for such small purposes. How could she know what trick it would do? How could she be expected to know?
~
If Tom hadn’t run off to Australia two years before (good riddance, she had thought) he might have told her to leave it well enough alone, let the boy be himself, whoever that self turned out to be. He would have been right, that’s what hurt the most. She shouldn’t have been so proud—too clever by half. She took another hit off the cigarette before she slowly, methodically set the glowing ember into the soft, white skin of her inner arm, among the bright and fading flowers there.
~
She remembered the year Halloween fell on a Thursday as vividly as if it had come yesterday, or earlier today, for God’s sake, as if it was happening right now all the time. There was Billy, her only child, telling her he had too much homework, but she wanted him to go trick-or-treating. I'm too old, he said.
~
Fifth grade—that's too old? Eleven years, too old? But she knew the problem all along: masks frightened him. That’s how she knew he wasn’t ready for this world. That’s what scared her. When masks are all we know, you can’t be scared of masks—be scared of the real face, that’s what she would have told him if she could.
~
She imagined him across from her at the kitchen table, a grown young man of twenty-two. When you were little, you mistook the mask for the reality. You didn't like knocking on strangers' doors, and you didn't want to admit you were afraid. I was the original aging hippy. We once watched a children’s show together because I wanted you to see Ringo Starr, the former Beatle, playing Mr. Conductor. So…knowing you wouldn’t want to go trick-or-treating, I bought a conductor's hat and jacket, a long, wooden whistle that sounded like a passing train.
~
You might have been a little fifth grader, but you were a smarty, good in math and science like I had never been—your father’s genes at work. But, smart or not, you were still a kid. The whistle interested you, so you tried the hat and jacket. It didn't feel too bad—hardly a costume. The sound of the whistle excited you. You went out as soon as it got dark enough, carrying a hemp bag your old hippy mother provided. Several neighbors remembered you at their door. You seemed to be enjoying yourself, blowing the whistle as you went from house to house collecting candy. A boy named Jimmy Samson remembered saying, “Cool whistle.” That comes back at night, when I don’t know that I’m awake.
~
That girl in your class, Julie Jenkins, said hello to you. You smiled back at her but were too shy to say anything. The ghosts and goblins must have seemed pretty harmless. You wondered why you had been afraid—a little cute one then, with the bluest eyes and lightest brown hair that almost floated as you walked. And when you put your glasses on I wanted to cry.
~
You might have been out an hour, heading for one of the last houses you intended to hit, when you ran into Ralph Bunch, who only co-operated because his friend Kip Green mentioned seeing you. Once the parents and police started asking everyone, Kip couldn’t keep quiet. Keeping a secret is holding a balloon underwater—it wants out.
~
It had gotten dark by this time, and chilly. You weren’t dressed warm enough, and later on it started to rain. I hate to think of you out in that weather, no one paying attention to whether you were warm, whether you were dry. You blew your whistle as you passed the trees bordering old man Hager’s house—that drew their attention. Kip had wrapped himself in ace bandages and painted his face brown with yellow lips. Ralph was a tall seventh grader who had gone as a vampire. You didn't recognize either of them.
~
All you saw was a chubby zombie and a tall vampire with a white face, red blood dripping from his black lips and fluorescent fangs. It must have terrified you to see them standing there, blocking your way—a zombie and a vampire. You must have lowered the whistle and looked at the vampire’s eyes, glittering green in blackened sockets. The cape spread out on one side as the vampire's arm drew back. The fist shot out, slamming you in the nose—this according to Kip who thought it looked cool when the fist in the white glove came out. For no reason but he wanted to, that’s why I blame him.
~
You went down flat on your back. That Ralph didn’t want to admit this either, but Kip told us he snatched the cap off your head and spun it in the trees. That’s where I found it, no one else thought of going in and looking for it. I kept thinking I saw you behind a bush, or lying under a tree. In my dreams I see you running here and there, in and out of trees, giggling or crying, which wasn’t your style at all, I know that. You would have been quiet.
~
They left you there, on the ground where he had knocked you, didn’t even go back to see if you were all right. Ran on, laughing, never thinking they might have seriously injured my sweet little boy. Left him for dead, thought no more of him than that. Was he still conscious? Was he lying in the dirt wiping his mouth or blacked out to the world? They did that, left him there, the last anyone saw of him that night, my Billy boy, or the years since.
~
How many nights have I walked out there to stand, smoking a cigarette, looking at the spot where he lay on his back, unattended how long? There was the empty house, the dark windows from which Jim Hager could have watched the moment when the white glove shot out from the black cape. Did he have a moment’s good intentions? Did he come out to see if my boy was all right and find him there unconscious, semi-conscious, wakeful but ashamed? How did he get Billy to come inside? Was it that Billy recognized him as the kindly old fellow? Had he been inside the house before? Or was it entirely different? Had Ralph Bunch and Kip Green done more than they said, done something worse and dragged him off into the trees? Or was it something else?
~
She would walk out back of the Hager house and stand where bones had been found by a neighborhood dog fond of digging, with a sense of smell that went back years. He had come home, this mangy black and white, one blue eye and one brown, with a rib bone in his mouth. What possessed Sarah Miller to take it from him, turn it over in her hands, and show it to her husband?
~
When she let him out again he ran back to the same spot, came up with another—a dog with a bone. Over here, here’s where I found that one. Come look, come and look now. Was her tail wagging high? Why now? Why this time? Had it simply been long enough in the ground?
~
Was there some key to everything in the length of time such things must go undiscovered. She walked around the Hager house, looking in the windows, sometimes found a way inside and gravitated to the basement, even though she found nothing to indicate anything that would make some awful sense to her. Sometimes going home she saw the faces at the windows, watching the mother in her bathrobe, smoking another cigarette, coming back from they knew where.
~
How long had it taken kids at school to get used to your empty desk? No one asked much more, except one teacher and a couple friends of mine, once in a while, but even they avoided me when you became a scary story: Billy Anderson, the boy who disappeared the year that Halloween fell on a Thursday.
~
It came as a shock when bones were found by Happy, Sarah Miller’s black and white dog, inside the woods behind the Hager house, less than a mile from where we live. No one wanted to remember you, but there you were, your little bones, as they had been when they were planted in the dirt.
~
Oh, I knew immediately. Police said they found a rotting wooden whistle nearby, the kind that sounded like a train. I kept covering my face with my hands, looking between my fingers, as if I couldn’t keep myself from seeing the last moments or hours of your precious life. Behind the Hager house—what did that mean? Hager had been dead for seven years, by his own hand, with a shotgun in it. But he had always said he hadn’t seen a thing, and who could doubt a poor old man, with all his liver spots and sagging skin, those enormous watery eyes swimming behind aquarium lenses?
~
Cleaning crews had spent a couple of weeks there but didn’t find a thing to make them suspicious he was anything more than a lonely old man. Now, I’m turning forty-three, and all the years you didn’t live have been collected with the bones in loose dirt behind the Hager house. Those who still remembered you had a little fear some retribution might be exacted from those who did nothing to save you. But the one that suffered, little man, besides you, was me, who ceased to think of anything except the fact that I insisted you go out that night.
~
The little cap, the rotted whistle on the table, she keeps hoping they tell her something more. All they can say is, I am dead, I died an ugly death, and it was your own fault. So when she sets the ember to her wrist, between the roses burned in there already, it doesn’t hurt. She keeps them fresh. She holds it there until she feels the spark of something left.
~
One rose for every year that he’s been gone.

Incomplete

~

This semester is almost over. I have turned in grades for two classes and have one to go. I mark days off on my calendar, like a prisoner chalking days on his cell wall. I will pick up some essays at school and read them tonight or tomorrow morning. I will experience momentary happiness giving students who have done a good job an A or B and momentary unhappiness giving students who did a less than stellar job a C or less. Even when the latter is accurate, it is never satisfying. It leaves the taste of incompleteness in my mouth--like biscuits not cooked through completely.

I recently heard from a couple of friends that they hoped one day to read all the books on their shelves which they have started and not finished or had intended to read but have not cracked. That sounded like something I ought to understand, but I realized I did not have this problem, as I have enough of a driving need to finish what I have started or know why. A book I have not finished does not go back on my shelf, but into the Goodwill box--because it seems to me not worth finishing. There's another feeling of incompleteness.

Once I pick a book to read, I generally read it through. And I generally pick a book knowing a little bit about it. I have usually read or heard something about it, or, more often, read a few pages or a chapter in the book store, enough so I know whether or not I want to read it. A lot of people loved The Lovely Bones, but after a few pages of stomach turning prose I knew I would never be able to finish what seemed essentially a book for young girls. I think the word that tipped me off was skeezy, though I may be botching that word. The young girl who was clearly about to be molested and killed said that something made her feel all skeezy. I put the book back on the shelf. There was enough in that word usage to let me know I had nothing to gain there: morbid sentimentalism and false youth.

There is not much better than finishing a book knowing that it has satisfied you in many of the ways a book can satisfy. I can name things that beat it on the fingers of one hand, though, to be honest, I use all the fingers. In the pitch of the last weeks of a semester, I am usually unable to read something not required of me, as I must reread the books I have assigned, and student papers and stories, perhaps a thesis or two, keeping up and finishing off as grandly as possible. So as soon as I had attended my last class of the semester, and even though I still had plenty of work to complete myself, I picked up a book my dear Lisa recently bought and began to look at it.

When she bought it, it seemed like a book I would pick out; it had been niggling at the back of my mind since she put it on the shelf unread. As soon as I got home from the last class, I pulled it out and gave a look. It looked short enough I thought I might finish it in time to get back to what the world required of me. Two hundred pages of pleasantly produced text, a handsome cover with a photo of lissom grass on a sand dune, obviously near the ocean--inviting and forbidding under the title Being Dead. The writer was a Brit named Jim Crace, who looked pleasantly like he had spent some time on such a dune. Also on the cover, a small gold seal which claimed this novel had won the National Book Critics Circle Award, which had no effect on me whatsoever until I finished the book and felt this was a pretty good choice for such an award.

One thing I noticed right away: each 'chapter' of the book was short, generally of the same length as all of the chapters. This matched the gentle and generous tone of the novel, and made it more pleasant to read, as it seemed to open before me. In the very first chapter we understand that a pair of married zoologists have been rather brutally murdered on a sand dune much like the one on the cover, that Celice is naked from the waist down, and her husband Joseph is totally naked and holding on to her ankle.

Throughout the novel, the couple remains dead, though they are visited by various insects and birds and small mammals, and, finally, by their human counterparts. You might say that the entire novel is a meditation on their being dead, though we go back to the momentous and very unspectacular day they met, and several days in between, but that doesn't really account for how engrossing the book became for me.

Why does it strike me as a small miracle that the two main characters, though dead, were in their fifties? And not entirely attractive. She is built a little like like a satyr, a lovely, small-breasted torso from the waist up, and the large butt and thighs of a normal woman. He is too short for most things, as he often points out, and certainly shorter than her. Their lives, though intense and dedicated to their science, are really common, moderate, usual. And the natural processes of death to which they become susceptible are also completely normal, though often shied away from in the course of our lives.

I want to note that I am sixty-three years old at this writing. I have had a heart attack, which I like to call minor, and have two stainless steel bits in my chest to keep arteries from occluding once more, so thoughts of death, while sometimes as inviting to me as to anyone else, are not entirely welcome. I do not like to take long walks through graveyards--which I take to be the reason I chose not to read The Lovely Bones. In addition to this, sentimentality often seems to me like a way to invite death to your doorstep; please don't ask me to elaborate. But this death I enjoyed reading about. It left me unfrightened, accepting, acknowledging.

Perhaps this is because Crace is something of a naturalist in his understanding of the processes of senescence and thanatology, which are the basis of the study to which the deceased couple gave themselves in life. How, you might ask, can such a gentle novel of death keep the reader's attention? I think the answer is balance. He balances this discussion of death with scenes from life, and just when it seems impossible that Crace could keep my attention alive through his meditations, we get a new character--the daughter of the deceased couple who becomes involved in discovering what has happened to her parents.

Even with her rebellious nature (she has left home, shaved her head, and gone to work as a waitress at a hot spot called MetroGnome) she manages to charge the prose without taking over. In the course of the novel, she discovers her place in this world, and a little about her parents, even if only that they were born to die; much more isn't required of children, is it? Children of decent parents, let's say. That should be enough to cause them to be loved by the child who took life from them and will yet take it further than she or they could have imagined.

But now, alas, I must leave this discussion unfinished, as my duties call me back. I must finish, submit grades, a hundred other little things--some of them large and heart-breaking in their smallness. But let me say this much: the life in Jim Crace's book is real, unadorned by dreams or falsity, yet touched by the grace of decency, of respect for life, such as it is, such as it will be, in this world. And finally, it is touching. Because, at last, the novel is as beautifully complete as their lives.

A Few Words about "Flip Cards"

~
I am going to say a few words about my personal essay "Flip Cards" for my friend Steve Smith, who asked me to. An English class he teaches at Manchester High School will be reading it in the Fall of 2009. When I think of what to say about it, I first think about the experience of getting it published, and only after that what it was like writing it, so that's the way I'll go here. I think these notes will be best after you have read the personal essay.

"Flip Cards" first appeared in The Georgia Review, was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize and then again in my book of stories, Private Acts. I never really thought much about whether it was a story or an essay, and when I first sent it to Stanley Lindberg, at The Georgia Review, I didn't identify it. Stanley told me he first thought it was a story, but then it lit up when he realized it was a personal essay. I had sent him a few things before, and he had published an essay of mine already, but this time he sent me a rejection saying he wanted to publish it but felt the ending needed to capture and reflect the whole essay. I had ended with an image of my friend Danny's father wandering around their house playing the accordion, which seemed to me to do everything I wanted, but then I am strongly oriented toward the visual image rather than excess talk or reflection.

This rejection found me at the end of my rope. It exasperated me more than I could say, enough to write out, by hand, a rather frustrated response that stated that I thought the reflection and any conclusions that could be made were already obvious from what was there. I told him what these reflections and conclusions might be under the force of my anger that even my best work, which this seemed to be, was being tested like someone sticking their toe in the ocean. I laid it out for him. What did I have to do, walk on water? I let him have it. And this is a testament to how frustrating it can be to send out your work, because he was the smartest, kindest, most gentle editor with whom I have ever had the privilege to communicate.

A few days later I got a phone call that I never expected. Stanley asked me if I had a copy of the note I sent him, and I said I did not, a little embarrassed that I had sent it at all. He said, "Let me read it to you," and then I felt like pure crap. But he read it to me, and then he said, "Bob, this is what you need at the end of your essay. Now, I'm going to send this back to you and you see if you think you could work it in. Don't do it if you don't want to, but I think this is exactly what you need." As he said it a light came on in my mind. I could see exactly what he was saying, and that what I had sent him was in fact the true end of the essay. I could not wait to get the note back, but by the time it had arrived I had already been working on the end. I rewrote it and sent it back to him, knowing this was the right way to end the essay. You can see how it ends now, and this is the result of Stanley feeding me back the note I sent him.

Once he had the finished essay in his hands, he called me on the telephone, at a time he had already set up, and we read the essay to each other over the phone. He said he wanted to hear it. He asked me questions about the essay and we talked about it for over an hour--he had a meter on his phone. We didn't change the essay, just read it aloud, perhaps the best experience I have had with an editor. I did make one change from the conversation. For some reason, I had decided to make one of my paragraphs one long sentence. I had seen writers try to make long sentences before, and I always thought they weren't really sentences, that the reader knew most of the time that this one had been patched together for effect. I wanted to write a really long sentence that worked perfectly and that no one would notice. Don't ask me why. Probably pride.

Anyway, Stanley was reading at this point, and when he reached the end of the sentence he paused. "I just noticed," he said, "that sentence is one, two, three....thirteen lines long." I told him what I had tried and he said, "You did it. Now, can we put some periods and commas in there?" I laughed. "Sure," I said, "now that I know I did it." The paragraph was just a little better, and there were no splashy effects after that one was removed.

And then, some time after the essay appeared, Stanley called again. "The Pushcart wants to use it. This is firm. They want to publish it." He was very happy about it, almost as happy as I was, it seemed to me. But all this took place after the essay had been written.

When I wrote it, I experienced delight, not so common for me. I can't remember how the idea entered my mind, but the first thing I did was to describe a game we played when I was a kid, involving baseball cards, and how much I loved these cards, and how they smelled, and how good I was at playing flip cards. Sometimes you discover a talent you didn't know you have and you have no reason for possessing, and it's a high experience, so you go with it. Asked once why she wrote, Flannery O'Connor said she wrote because she was good at it. I played flip cards because I was good at it, and because it became the mode of the day, the thing we did, the expression of our desire.

I spent a very long time one bright morning writing that first section and then I went home. I wrote it at my office at the university, and I didn't think there was anything more, until I returned the next morning and started thinking about my childhood friend Danny Gary, and his parents, and where they lived. I thought, there is more to this, and so I wrote the next section. Every morning I returned I had something more to say, more to remember about this time in my life. What a wonderful period this was, living on the edge of the ocean! Delight filled me as I wrote, and then I spent some time putting it all together. I just laughed when I finished it, a little embarrassed about the way I had been spending my time, feeling foolish about writing so much about my own childhood.

When asked to give a reading on my own campus, I decided to try it out. This seemed like a safe forum, but I was deeply embarrassed to be sharing such private moments, and to talk about who I was at that young age. But I read it aloud and the response was overwhelming. My colleagues might be polite a great deal of the time, but this went beyond politeness, and it surprised the hell out of me. I went back to my office, put it in an envelope, and sent it to Stanley Lindberg with my heart beating. So when I got that first rejection I was dashed.

This was the process of writing, a pure joy, an exploration of memories. In an earlier story, "Beth," I had discovered that once you began to remember a period of time, the memories came back with greater fluidity. You remember what happened before and after, and then before and after again. It spreads, it opens up, before it finally closes again, and the story is finished. This happened with "Flip Cards." And the memories were so bright, and so filled with delight for me, that even the darkest moments were mitigated. The essay made me happy like a piece of music, and it had taken two weeks to complete!

I immediately started another autobiographical piece, one that I had been thinking of for some time, about the year I was seventeen and a paper boy in Maryland. Six months later, worn out, pleased, and still engaged, I sent out a completely different kind of personal essay that had come in three parts. The first, "The Friends of a Stranger," appeared in The Missouri Review, again the first place I sent it, and the third part appeared in the alumni magazine under the title, "Lucky Bob." All three appeared as the last entry in my book of stories, under the title "A Million Billion Trillion Stars," a title taken from an e.e. cummings poem about the good Samaritan. This one was darker, but, I thought, in the long run richer, but readers have always like "Flip Cards" best.

I wondered why this one made such a hit, and for a while I thought it might be the baseball stuff, with the baseball card material, and then I thought it might be the delight with which it was written, the glow of light from another time. Finally, I just let it be and stopped rereading and revisiting it. I moved on, but it was back there, the spot of light, that landscape and seascape with the sun rising or setting over it. It was there just a surely as that time in my life had been there, as magical in the experience as it had been in the writing.
~

"The fairy tale...takes these existential anxieties and dilemmas very seriously and addresses itself to them: the need to be loved and the fear that one is thought worthless; the love of life, and the fear of death."
--Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment

My first experience of fairy tales was my mother reading at night before we went to sleep. She read other stories, recited poems, but nothing in a fairy tale stopped surprising. I'd like to know your take on any fairy tales that sticks with you: essay, story, poem. Send to rpope@uakron.edu, whatever form it takes.

~

Contents:
Steve Smith, "black dreams and blue thieves"

Dave Materna, "Boondockle"
Robert Pope, "The Tailor's Boy"Mary Biddinger, "Show Pony"
Shurice Gross, "The Princess of Building 4"
Tony Bradford, "Slumbering Siren"
Alex Cox, "The Edge and the Other Side"
Dave Materna, "Pre-Mortem"
Gillian Trownson, "True Love Waits"
Tara Kaloz, "Mr. Horner's Heads"
Brittany Stone, "In Support of the Little Guy"
Two by Kristina von Held, "Transformation," "The Pull of the Water"
Nick Elder, "Sandy"

!

Steve Smith

black dreams and blue thieves

~

a pregnant wife should dream of

willows and cotton and children

pattering across blanched linoleum

~

mine dreamt that construction was

going on across the street at 4 am;

the elementary school—crews had been

there for summer weeks.

but nowthe school was vacant and black

~

so her mind's rattle of saber saws and

clanging scaffolding had to be

the work of a sinister imagination.

REMs spinning like a cockeyed phonograph

they buzzed and screamed in her

wee hour ears and

she thought someone sawing and

grinding and sawing through chains.

~

she awoke.

~

sat up, belly full, upright and

cautious—stole a glance

through the window gauze

like deer at leafy branches

watching evening shadows

fall across fallen corn

~

there, in the back yard, were

the workers that had been laboring—

at least in the black electric dream of hers.

now they'd come back to life

as thieves in midnight blue

wheeling her gas grill noisily through

wet grass—a broken security

chain dragging behind like a brat

by the hand.

~

for the man next to her side

half nude, open-mouthed and

exhaling dryly like fine sand,

for him

summertime poverty

whispers a strange psalm

that the killing verse

should follow a blue thief to

the grave. final.

~

here’s the shotgun loaded

in my hands and i pull back

sleep's webbing and

whoosh through

the front door in underwear

boiling blood

~

Harrington & Richardson is a

tunnel that does not change course or

bird shot in the chamber

and low-brass in the hand.

~

when you draw a bead

on another man you decide

right then—if you take a chunk of

the criminal mind, you just might

blast something else from the midnight sky.

!