favorites

by rhoda penmarq

when i was born i made a list of my 25 favorite universes when i opened my eyes i made a list of my 25 favorite ceilings who each made a list of their 25 favorite spiders who each made a list of their 25 favorite flies who each made a list of their 25 favorite windows outside the window i made a list of my 25 favorite flowers who each made a list of their 25 favorite bees who each made a list of their 25 favorite skies who each made a list of their 25 favorite clouds who each made a list of their 25 favorite raindrops who each made a list of their 25 favorite umbrellas who each made a list of their 25 favorite doormen who each made a list of their 25 favorite hotels in their 25 favorite cities in their 25 favorite universes entering the lobby i asked the desk clerk for my 25 favorite newspapers which i took up to my 25 room suite on the 25th floor where i read my 25 favorite comic strips and checked the scores of my 25 favorite teams and the progress of my 25 favorite wars fought by the followers of my 25 favorite gods who each made a list of their 25 favorite followers but i wasn't on any of their lists so i cried 25 tears who's your favorite?

Q&A

by human being

illustrations by rhoda penmarq

a question came upon an answer... q: are you my answer? a: not quite sure... q: do you want to be my answer? a: not quite sure... q: are you anybody's answer? a: not quite sure... q: don't you know any other answers? a: not quite sure... q: you think i need your answer? a: not quite sure... q: well... i don't! a: why did you stop asking questions? q: errr... i'm not quite sure... and you... you are asking questions! a: will this cause any problems? q: not quite sure... a: you think it'll be ok if i ask more questions? q: not quite sure... a: will there be an answer to my questions? q: not quite sure... a: are you my answer?

"The Autobiography of September" part 1 by Jesse Mitchell

The Autobiography of September
Marx

by Jesse S. Mitchell
This first appeared on my blog commonobscura.blogspot.com

Pigeon

What is the difference between living and dead? A moment perhaps, a half-split-second falling down, sliding, slipping into a watery comfort of oblivion or a slow fizzling down to a passionless wasting…both, neither, everything. What is the difference? Is it temporal, physical, emotional or mystical? The beating pulse of blood in the tip of my finger gets stronger. My mind rolls along this morbid line of thinking. The smell of diesel fumes comes creeping through my window. The squat delivery truck rocks back and forth, chugging impatiently, belching out thick gas and grey clouds. Horns are beeping, men are walking, boxes being handled and moved, lights change in vain, no one moves…the sight and sound and smell of everything is frozen in constant motion. My blood rises as I watch the always-burning of outside. I can hear the cathedral’s bells clanging. Paying honor, rich brass sound waves reverberate…the shockwaves of force on force…exploding and ringing…blasting out the ruckus of supplication. Out of the big bad grey heaven above me fall tiny specks of grey ash and soot. Darting through the fluid sky comes a ragged bird, rough and thin on two scarred up legs--a grey pigeon, but I pretend it is a soot and grime-covered dove…peace from out of the sky…sent from above…sent by God. He heard the bells. The delivery truck chugs and leaps without warning and rushes off into the clutter and clatter of city streets and the bird disappears back into the sky in a flash of feathers and fuss. I am all alone in this red-brick and black-iron tomb. The fire escape rocks in the wind. The sound of metal against stone sets my teeth on edge. Madness. Crazy groping of inanimate things. Manmade wildness now far out of man’s hands…my grasp. I breathe so hard it hurts my lungs and pulls my muscles. Peace. Fire escape, to escape what fire? The fire of dormant passion? This world will explode all over when it finally goes and no feeble ladder down to a second level will save my flat feet. We are all doomed together. I have given it all I can. Let your body be the bottom firestick and your mantra the top and rub together and rinse and repeat and condition if necessary and the fire of God…passionate things…the mystical way will take you…the fire. Thank God, I have a fire escape. The pigeon has returned. The horns continue to beep and blare. The cars run and wait and race and stop and nothing changes for more than half a split second and everything freezes back into place. What is the difference between life and death? I cannot tell and neither can the ten or so people lined up at the fish market around the corner. The old man with shock of white hair sticking out from under his houndstooth Rex Harrison hat has no idea…not yet…but soon…I can see him already starting to fade. His hands shake as he holds and folds and holds out his ratty newspaper. Oh the awful humanity of humanity. The blood pulses inside me.
The truth of the matter is this: I have no idea…about where the line lies between this and that…life and death…pulsing urgency…peaceful calming. I cannot look back and see where it is that I started. I have no idea. I get caught up by things and carried away. A thin scrap too frail to fall, floating aloft in all this lovely breeze that covers over the face of the Earth. There are times when lying very still I begin to think that perhaps I am the last and greatest thing standing between the two giant halves of the universe…the last thing standing in the way of all kinds of beauty…I keep all the pretty things from blooming through. I get lost in the power of the thought. Lost in the snowflake similarities of each and every still so different terrible thought. In the cold grey-flannel pajama night I toss and turn, moaning in my mind…but the truth is that I still have no idea and all of that is simply sick fantasy. I am nothing but the same as everyone else, a spiraling piece of misplaced virus DNA coming closer and closer to a quick self-extinction…or just the last and newest member of an ever-widening family of troubled people. Our last hope. Down the hall I hear the click of hard heels on the soft stain-addled floors. I can hear the creak of doors and the momentary buzz of light bulbs switched on and off again. The constant searching of the weary human eye. I watch the pigeon walk back and forth. The pacing soothes it. The truth of the matter is this…I have no idea, none whatsoever, but living is not dying and living to die is definitely not living…but dying to live…dying to live…now there is a thing that can make my blood pulse. I can feel the heat of blood inside my body circulating…moving…pacing back and forth.

the waitress and the satanist, chapter 21: black forest, part 2

click here for complete episode

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 45: lie to me

Daphne MacNamara (later, Ridpath), Cape May NJ, 1963

Click here for our previous installment; go here to return to the first chapter of our serialization of Larry Winchester's masterpiece, only previously published in drastically-cut form in a long-out-of-print "2-for-one" paperback with Sheldon Schott's Bullet For a Big Blonde (Top Notch Books, 1970).

Return with us now to what Harold Bloom has called in a recent interview with Charlie Rose: “not just the great American novel, but one of the greatest of all novels, able to stand on equal footing with such masterpieces of world literature as Natascha: Lass of the Steppes, Dr. Xing’s Stepdaughter, and The Seven Lives of Señor Doyle”.

We are of course in the month of September, 1969, on a ranch on the border of the vast and wasted New Mexico desert, just several miles outside of a town called Disdain...

(This episode rated R for restricted plot development.)

They lay side by side on their backs across the bed, their legs dangling off the side. Daphne’s hand lay on Dick’s damp upper thigh. Dick lay with his hands folded on his stomach and he and Daphne both stared up at the grim old floral-papered ceiling.

A cooling dying-day breeze smelling of rock and salt blew in through open the window.

Daphne rolled over partway on Dick’s chest.

“I want to know who you were thinking about.”

“You, sweety.”

“Balls.”

And she pulled at a clump of his chest hair.

“Well, who were you thinking about?” asked Dick.

“The Maharishi.”

His head jerked down to look into her eyes.

“No,” he said. “Don’t say that.”

“I wasn’t fantasizing about him. I was just remembering. You were the one fantasizing.”

It was never any use arguing with Daphne. She read him like an open comic book.

“It was that Hope girl,” said Daphne, with complete certainty. “Wasn’t it?”

“Of course not,” said Dick, although of course it had been, but the funny thing was that with him also it had been not so much like fantasizing but remembering. But how could he remember something that had never happened?

“You’re such fantastic liar,” she said, and squeezing him hard down below, she stuck out her tongue and licked his left nipple slowly like some beautiful sated leopardess.


Dick lay quiet, feeling Daphne’s sweaty breast on his sweaty chest, her warm breath in the hairs on his chest, her smell of sex and Chanel No.5, the smell of her hair, her hand on him.

He felt really odd, emptied of everything but a thin ghostly oddness.

Not that he’d felt much of anything else but odd for some years now. But there were degrees.

He tried to remember the details of what he had been fantasizing that he’d been remembering, but all he could recall now was that it was indeed this Hope girl, and that some people or some creatures had been watching them.


And now this woman here, Daphne, she and her warm woman’s body were the only thing keeping him here now, the only thing keeping him from just floating up off this bed and through that ugly floral paper on that ceiling and up and out of this house and just out there, out there.

Out where?

Get a grip on yourself, boy. Just get a grip here.

He put his lips to the top of her head and he kept them there, in her damp soft short hair, the smell of the Palm Grove hotel shampoo and of sweat, the damp cork smell of that pith helmet of hers, this strange head.

After a few moments she lifted her face up and looked into his eyes.

Then they joined into each other through their eyes, and for a moment they were beyond time and beyond flesh and words.

Their eyes closed together and they fell asleep.

(Continued here.)

diary of a heretic, chapters 15 and 16

to begin at the beginning, click here

by kathleen maher

pictures by rhoda penmarq

15) The Hot-Blooded Prophet He’s washed his socks and underwear in the sink and is drying them in the oven. As I write this, he’s padding barefoot in an old robe of mine, his hair unbraided, rippling down his back. He has a set of Chinese iron balls going counter-clockwise in each large thin hand and is pacing the apartment’s three rooms, rotating the balls so they chime rhythmically high and low without clicking together. My focus shifts from his fluidly moving fingers and exposed wrists to his tawny feet and surprisingly sturdy ankles. The robe covers his calf muscles and yet I’m so aware of them I have to shut my eyes and swallow hard, which only makes my breath louder and faster. For there is no reflex for blotting out his intense but roving concentration, his flowing hair, and the contrast between the delicate, synchronized chimes in here and the wind outside, which can only hint at the contrast between the callous sunless Carlos I’ve always known and the magnetism of the hot-blooded prophet circling my floor.  16) Enlightenment Is Immanent All through the snow, the shop had a fairly steady string of customers. We fed people who were cold and discouraged after traveling miles on foot and a few who’d flagged a rare bus or train for which they must have waited hours. People dropped into chairs and peeled off layers of sodden clothes. Carlos and I rushed to bring them coffee, tea, hot cider, or cocoa, as they worked their way out of ice-encrusted boots, wrung out wool socks (leaving puddles), asked for pans of warm water and dish towels, anything to warm and then dry their bloodless, sometimes swollen, sometimes frostbitten, feet. We did not serve donuts. No sticky, gooey non-nutrition: The blizzard people got dark, nutty breads. Since Saturday, when Carlos’s dream recipes resulted in four incredible loaves, fragrant with different grains, we’ve served warm half-loaves with little pots of butter and jam. Yesterday we had a family glide up on cross-country skis—mother, father, ten-year-old boy, eight-year-old girl all in good humor, the storm for them a pleasant adventure. And of course we’ve had people hovering desperately along the edges. Last night we allowed two hapless guys, Mason and Roger, to spend the night on the restaurant floor. Our preconditions were: no smoking, no noise, and of course, no weapons or drugs. Carlos frisked them, turning his face from their smell. “No third person can sleep here,” Carlos insisted, finger in their faces. “Word gets out that you two have found a sweet spot and the spot disappears. Not to mention the other non-negotiable term—as soon as the temperature goes above freezing, you two return to the street.” They nodded and Carlos barked, drill sergeant style, “Got that, motherfuckers?” I handed them mops and brushes to wash the floors and scrub the bathrooms—after they’d washed their permanently discolored faces and brushed their grossly decayed teeth with spare toothbrushes I found in the paper-towel closet, back where I’d tried hiding the second-meeting fliers. The guy I think is Mason got a somewhat used, hard bristle toothbrush while the diminutive Roger got a brand new, child’s Big Bird number. Carlos warned them not to wash other parts of their bodies, or even a corner to their clothing. The stench would be too much. Any infraction of the rules, he said, and goodbye Mason, goodbye Roger. “If it comes to that, “I’ll throw you out. It’s my shop.” A detail I worry that Carlos forgets: My shop, not his. And I do any throwing necessary. “Tough Guy,” Carlos whispered, his sinewy arm wrapped around me, his lips warming my neck, near my ear, forcing me to focus on the door handle. “If it weren’t for me you’d be saddled with those two forever. And don’t think they don’t know it.” Well, fine, so I probably wouldn’t know how to get rid of them. It’s as if they’re only half here. Mason and Roger stare into space and move with a painstaking, “don’t-mind-me” exactness. They’re barely visible. Partly a deliberate survival technique, but partly too, I think, the eradicating effect of poverty. Their clothes, their posture, their personalities all are ghostly. You glance at them and glance away. Carlos sleeps four hours a night, and following his lead, I’ve found that a half-night of ecstatic REM is infinitely more refreshing than seven straight hours of dumb oblivion. All these years I’ve been sticking to a single course, a monotonous round: working the shop, closing it late, shoveling in food, skimming a tabloid, falling into bed. But with Carlos’s visit, I’ve discovered that by doing the same things I’ve always done, only with more awareness and less sleep, I’m suddenly liberated. The cycle of boredom and disappointment that was my life has become a heart-pounding adventure. On four hours of sleep, pinpoints of light swim in the air. I am elated to the point of levitating. A phrase fills my mind; my pulse beats with it: enlightenment is immanent. Carlos goes to bed at midnight. Ordinarily, I go to bed at midnight, having kept the shop open until ten. But I don’t wake until seven and don’t get downstairs until 7:30; by which time Carlos will be deep into the day’s baking, having started before five. When I asked him today—astounded that I’d never wondered or cared—where he lived, his answer was vague. When I pressed for an address, working hard to suppress my panicky curiosity concerning roommates or other intimates, Carlos said, “I can’t say for certain where my rightful abode is at any one moment. No one can.” Stephanie, whose shift starts at six, rarely arrives before eight. She’s usually just hanging up her coat or tying up her hair as I finish at the computer and Carlos moves on to tarts and cakes. When I ask how she justifies this, she says, “No one tips before 8:30. At six and seven, they’re fascists.” “How do you know?” “Trust me, it shows.” Stephanie does what she wants, as she wants, and I have no interest in interfering. Unlike Carlos, she harbors few secrets. She’s forty-two years old and lives above a beauty salon on Davis Street, where she gives manicures and pedicures, part-time. A long time ago, she was married to a drivers’ ed teacher who racked up huge debts on her credit cards. Irritable and competent, with a big round face surrounding pale, bunched up little features, she devotes a good deal of her life to caring for her older sister who has multiple sclerosis. Stephanie’s smart and bad tempered, and who can blame her? With the storm, with Carlos sleeping here, I’ve been keeping his schedule. I rise instinctively during his meditation and we go downstairs together. He whips up three kinds of dough, then wakes the poor human bundles curled on the front-room floor. I make coffee while Carlos supervises Roger and Mason in the bathrooms. By five we’ve handed them bagsful of leftovers and sent (more like shoved) them into the cold. An hour later the aroma of Carlos’s baking has overcome any lingering smell of their fitful night on the hard cold floor. The miasma of deprivation, confusion, and illness vanishes with the first batch of donuts, the first hot tray of Danish. The shop reverberates with the grinding of coffee beans, the scalding of cappuccino and hot cocoa. With the storm, Carlos and I have had only die-hard optimists in the mornings, dressed for business. In the afternoon we’ve had college kids, the occasional family, and a few giddy young couples, newly, seriously in love. They all seem jubilant, as if the blizzard has granted the world a reprieve from ordinary worries. People who normally push others away are temporarily sympathetic. Because we’re all in this together. And there is no other news.

chapters 17, 18 and 19

the girls, chapter 9: harding grows weary

for complete episode, click here