Mortimer and Me

My wife is preparing for the California State Park Ranger agility test, a very rigorous set of physical feats. Most of this she is doing entirely on her own, but I'm proud to be able to contribute in my own small way: as a practice substitute for the dead-weight pull.

I'll be your dummy, just say the word --
Your Charlie McCarthy, your Mortimer Snerd.
You can drag me and drop me, limp as a sack.
Just grab hold of my arms -- I'm flat on my back
For you.

It's the least I can do to help you to practice.
Might tire you out some, but me, it relaxes
To lie here like I was a sackful of sand.
Why, shoot, I'd do most anything if it means I can hold 
Your hand.

'Cause you want to be a Ranger
  and must prove your agility
In the Physical Agility Exam.
It's to show that when there's danger 
  you'll have the right reliability --
I just hope you know, reliably, 
  I'll always be your man.

True, you can go buy dumbbells
And go running at the high school track.
But when you need to haul a dummy,
I know that you'll come running back
To me.

Earth

I shall visit Scotland
And know that I am no visitor there.
I shall feel my hands in my native soil,
And rub it on my face,
And roll in it like a dog in fragrant garbage
Or a pig in shit.

I shall carry my native soil
Back to my nowadays home,
My unreal estate--
Not in great, oblong boxes,
Like some Transylvanian noble
Of peculiar appetites--

But in small crescents
At the ends of my fingers and toes,
Behind my ears (Don't you ever wash?),
In the corners of my eyes

Where it will mix with salt tears every day for joy
Of knowing that here I am
And there I am
A Scotsman,
And an indigenous person.

And the grit will so irritate
That the tears in each eye
Will make a pearl of it,
And through that eyeball-pearl
I shall see this world for what it is,
And I shall tell you.

Remember the drowned Phoenician Sailor.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Tramps

(with thanks to Gary Ferguson and to Marley Shebala)

"Tramps," the Paiute call us.
The Zuni say "visitors" —
A more gracious term, I suppose.
But the meaning is the same:
We are the rootless ones.

We are the ones who buy houses
And call them homes,
Who later sell and leave them behind.
Who feel the heartache and the tug,
But leave just the same.
As if we could take our land,
Our memories, our groundedness—
The graves of our grandfathers—
And toss it all on a potlatch pile,
Abandoning our very place in this world,
There with a heap of household goods.

We have powerful words in law:
Deeds and rights, liens and easements;
We exchange money and tell ourselves
That we have found our homes.
But we do not own that ground
Any more than it owns us.
The ones who own it are the ones who stay.

In time, like us, our deeds will be undone,
Our homes made insubstantial, liquidated,
And their proceeds disbursed
Among our displaced legatees.

Laughing, She Said

She came to me in the dark of night.
A friend and I sat
Making quiet music when it was late
And we should have been still.

She came to me in the dark of night,
She, dark as night,
And eager to share--

For there on her one hand
Was a letter-sized notepad,
And on that a leaflet,
And on that a card,
And on that, confined in a circle of card
Defined by the rim of an upturned glass held firmly there by her other hand
Was a scorpion.

"It was in the bathtub," she said.
"Bathtub?" I thought.
I didn't get a bathtub.
Neither did I get a scorpion, though.
And at least she was sharing that.

I shined a flashlight, admired
The scorpion's curl, like the curl
Of stars in the sky.
Not far away, like they, but still,
Under its glass,
Safe to view.

Beneath it, layers of paper, cardboard, ink.
To slow its progress,
Should it try to dig its way out.

With flashlight and scorpion
We walked downhill,
Away from the buildings,
Away from the sleeping dreamers,
And there she released her captive --
Flipping it past a split-rail fence.

Laughing, she said:
"Do you think that will keep it out?"

Ficlets 9: A Formal Introduction

(This is just a snippet from a family story that's gradually falling together. Quite a family . . .)

-- There she is. Oh, I'm really glad you came. I've wanted you to meet her. Gran? This is Gordon. Gord, this is my grand...

-- Just a minute, Dear. And so she says to me, she says, "I looked again, just because it looked so odd. I couldn't see just what they were doing," she says. "There was a campfire they were gathered around, four or five of them. And it looked like a shopping cart, from the grocery, parked on top of the fire for a cooking grill. And I don't know for sure what they had on it," she says, "but from the size of it, it couldn't have been anything else but some poor little dog," she says. That's what she said. Cooking a dog in a shopping cart, right out by the dump. Can you imagine? A dog! Now, what were you saying, Dear? You want to introduce me to your young man?

Just a Talk with Dad

Here's an abbreviated form a piece I've been working on for a few months. It's part personal essay, part fiction, and to some extent "based on actual events," but the conversation itself, which makes up the body of the piece, is entirely made up. So I guess that makes it fiction. This is the version I submitted when applying to the Tomales Bay Workshops (I got in!).

Just a Talk with Dad

by W. J. Coats

My father never thought much of astrology. He was born in 1924 on July 22, on the cusp, he said, right between Cancer and Leo. I remember that every day he read three newspapers, front to back, though, horoscopes and all. The morning papers had him as a Leo, he would regularly point out, but to the afternoon paper he was a Cancer. It was cancer, though (not Leo), that got him in the end.

Dad lived longer than some of us expected, given his two main vices: heavy drinking and cigarette smoking. Toward the end had a lot to deal with: increasing pain, physical dependency, lack of control of his body and his life, and, well, just plain old suffering. In November he was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was after that that he finally quit smoking and quit drinking. Maybe, facing something as certain as death, he could see that whether to smoke and whether to drink really were choices after all, and that he really did have the strength of will to choose against them. Maybe he just wanted to see the world around him clearly while he still had the chance. Eight months later he was dead.

Up until that November, there were a lot of things Dad just wouldn’t talk about—ever. Alcoholism and smoking, for instance, and the health and social consequences of both. But I never heard him talk about their pleasures, either: whether he enjoyed puffing on a Camel, or how he liked that feeling of warmth behind the ears when he took his first swallow of a vodka martini. He was a Navy veteran of World War II, Atlantic Theater, but until his last 6 months he didn’t talk much about that, either. An attorney for 45 years, but I didn’t hear him talk about cases or courts—maybe the occasional grateful and faithful client, but that was it.

Those last 6 months saw something of a turnaround, though. Sober, he apologized for a lot of the things he’d said and done when drunk that hurt the people near to him, things that we had assumed, by family tradition, that he really didn’t remember at all. I think he wanted to be at peace with the people he loved.

Recently it occurred to me that, now that Dad has been gone a few years, it might be a good time to have a talk with him that would include some of those things that used to be taboo. He probably wouldn’t clam up on me now, I thought, and he sure wouldn’t go off drinking. Probably be a pretty good listener, too. I could just ask my questions, I thought, and then do my best to conjure up the answers he might have made—had he be been sober and willing to talk—being as true as I could to what I remember of him.

So, here I am, sitting at the dinner table late at night. The house is quiet. My wife and kids are all off to bed. It’s a good time to begin. We’ll start off easy, with topics that Dad actually talked about with me in life.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Me: When I walk in my front door some evenings, I think about you coming home from work, and how Mary and I would play “foot-ride” with you, or “I’ve got a lump in my chair” or “pop up the chimney.” When I think about it now, being a father myself, that must have been a huge amount of kid-energy to have unleashed on you when you walked in the door. How was that, coming home from work?

Dad: It was good to get home, very good to have you and Mary to play with, and before you, Barbie and Janie. Sometimes I was pretty tired—sometimes a hard day at work, but it was good to get home.

M: We always seemed to have the TV set on—even during meals. I guess the TV was a pretty novel thing; probably even the radio was fairly uncommon when you were growing up. Did you like to have the TV on so much, or would you rather have it switched off sometimes?

D: Well, I think your mother liked it more than I did. I always liked to read, and I would read in bed every night before I went to sleep. The TV news never seemed to be very thorough, but I liked the detective shows and some of the comedies. Most of them were pretty corny, but that’s the kind of thing I like. Your mother always liked Johnny Carson—I never much cared for him. Besides, he was on too late at night if I had work the next day.

M: And the night you brought home the big salmon—everyone was looking at the TV when you came in . . .

D: That wasn’t exactly the way I had imagined it would happen. I was on a cloud that night! Just getting the bite, just landing that fish! It was beautiful, so big and strong and smooth and alive. Four or five other men were fishing near there, under the bridge, and nobody caught anything like that. They grinned at me. They really envied me.

I landed that fish, clubbed it to kill it, and brought it back up to the car. It was really very heavy – 25 pounds at least – but I got it up just fine and laid it on newspapers in the back of the car. On the way home I kept looking in the rear-view mirror, smiling, just to admire it—even though I really couldn’t see it in the mirror. I was just happy knowing it was there.

Of course, when I think about it now, it was pretty late when I got home.

M: And when you were late getting home, we couldn’t be sure where you were or what you were doing—maybe drinking—so after a certain point we didn’t exactly look forward to your arrival.

D: Yes, I guess there was that. But for that whole drive home, I imagined . . . . I guess I imagined that I had a perfect family life, that I was the perfect Dad, and that everybody was going to be clapping for me and admiring me and loving me when I got home. And after a moment, everyone did. Or at least your mother did. She was really impressed with that salmon. And I think she saw it in my eyes; she saw what I needed; she saw I was confused, excited, worried, disappointed.

M: She led us in admiring you that night, got our attention, turned us away from the TV set.

D: Yes, she did. And of course she and I had to clean the fish, and cut it, and wrap it, and put it in the freezer. And she cooked it, too, bit by bit.

M: I love salmon now, but I remember getting really tired of it then. It seemed like it went on forever.

D: You got tired of it? You got tired of my fish? That beautiful salmon?

M: Look, I was a little kid. I didn’t know about fishing, or about fish. It was just the big pink meat thing that wasn’t a hamburger. I would rather have had hamburgers or Mom’s fried chicken just about any night. Or lasagna or goulash. But not lima beans or asparagus.

D: Oh, so there was something worse.

M: Asparagus was pretty weird.

D: I always thought your mother was a very good cook.

M: Oh, so did I. Her oven-fried chicken was about as good as it gets.

D: That’s the truth.

M: It must have been hard, toward the end, when you couldn’t eat much of anything.

D: It was awful. Drinking those little cans of chocolate muck. But there was so much that was more awful than that. I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself. I could hardly see, so I could barely read anything, and for that I had to hold the book an inch away from my glasses. Then it got to where I was so weak I couldn’t even hold the book anymore.

M: Sometimes it seemed like you were really ready to give up.

D: Sometimes I really was. Sometimes I really was. It just started to feel so pointless after awhile, when I really didn’t believe I was going to get any better. I felt just awful.

M: One time, Mom called me on the phone, crying, saying you weren’t able to breathe and you refused to use the nebulizer to take your medicine. I drove over and kind of “talked you down.”

D: I didn’t want you to do that. I just wanted it to be over.

M: I told you about how I had had to use one like that at the doctor’s office, and how much better I felt afterwards. I told you that you wouldn’t feel so bad if you could breathe, that I had felt hopeless, too, when I couldn’t breathe. I told you Mom was crying, and that we were all trying our best to help, and that you needed to do your part, too.

D: And I did. But I didn’t want to. I just wanted it to be over.

M: A few weeks later, it was.

D: That’s right.

M: You had a doctor’s appointment that day, the day you died, so I was planning to come over anyway to drive you and Mom to the doctor’s office. But Mom called early and said you had taken a bad turn and that I should meet you two at the hospital, at the emergency room. So that’s what I did. They showed me right into the emergency room where you were lying on a gurney, and Mom was standing there beside you. I imagined you’d be off in a room by yourself, but it turned out to be one of those very big rooms with hospital curtains to divide it up.

D: I don’t really remember that, or not very well at least.

M: You didn’t seem to be awake at all, or aware of what was going on. Mostly you were breathing, slowly but with great effort. Just breathing seemed to be about as much as you could do, and that with a breathing mask.

D: A breathing mask? I remember there was something.

M: Yeah, you had a breathing mask, plus rubber tubes running into your nose, an I.V. into your hand, one of those light sensor things on the end of one finger, and all sorts of monitor wires taped onto your chest and arms. I was on your right, holding your hand, and Mom was on your left, holding your other hand. You were kind of cold, but so was the whole, huge room, which happened to be pretty empty at that time of the afternoon. Mom told me about what had happened, how you were having a lot of trouble breathing at home—she was afraid you would stop breathing—and she had called 911 and they sent the ambulance. We both stroked your hair and told you we were there, with you, that we loved you, that you could relax and rest.

D: I could hear you, but it sounded very far away—like when you’re half asleep and you hear something, but you really don’t want to open your eyes and wake up—you just want to rest, to sleep.

M: After awhile the ER doctor came in to check on you, and a woman was there too, the hospital chaplain, I think, and the nurse on duty, too. She’d been there all along, in and out. The doctor checked the monitors to see what they said, and he asked us about how you’d been doing. Mom and I gave him a sort of a general history: when you were diagnosed with cancer, how long you’d been smoking, what your symptoms had been before diagnosis.

D: Coughing, trouble breathing, fatigue . . .

M: Uh-huh. Then we talked about how you’d been more recently, your colon surgery and stoma, and about the cancerous tissue the surgeons found when they went in to take out part of your colon. I told him how you’d been having trouble lowering yourself into a chair; that your legs and arms would kind of give out halfway down to the chair. It’s just something I’d seen, and it seemed to be getting more severe. I don’t know what else we told him. But after awhile he told us a few things about the kind of cancer you seemed to have and the way it tended to progress. He said that since your liver and lungs were heavily involved with the cancer, it was probably in your brain, too – just because that’s the way that kind of cancer tends to spread. He said that seemed to fit with the trouble sitting down, and could be making some other symptoms, like breathing problems, that much worse. He said we could prolong things, but the most anyone could probably do at this point was to try to make you more comfortable.

Mom and I accepted that, and we kept holding your hands, and looking at your face as you fought to breathe. There was a mask over your nose and mouth, and I asked the doctor if you’d be able to breathe without it. He gave me a roundabout answer, which boiled down to something like “He’d have a much harder time breathing without it.”

I thought, “If I had a choice when I was dying, I’d want to breathe my last breaths straight from the air into my nose and lungs, and not through a tube. If my family were with me, I’d want to have at least a chance to remember their smell, to know they were there.” I talked about it with Mom and we agreed to take off the mask.

Then I looked at the clear tube running into one of your nostrils and the piece of red rubber hose that was run into the other. I said, “Those tubes don’t look comfortable at all.” I asked Mom if it would be okay to take out the hoses, and she said yes.

The doctor nodded, and he asked the nurse to take out the tubes.

Then we turned off the monitors, so there weren’t any more beeps, and the nurse started unclipping the wires. Your face was clear to us now, without all that hardware, and we could hold your hands, just your hands, without any wires in the way. It began to feel more like we were a group of people together, more so than when we had all of those machines between us.

It just felt like you didn’t have much time left, and you should be as comfortable and feel as loved as you could for that short time.

Mom and I kept talking with you, stroking your hair, holding your hands.

You were fighting hard for each breath, all of your body’s energy going into just lifting your chest to inflate your lungs. The doctor offered to give you some morphine, to help you relax. I wondered whether you’d want that, since you’d been worried that maybe you’d hallucinated from morphine after your surgery, but in the end we said that would be alright, and he ran some morphine from a syringe into your I.V.

You began to relax, breathing a little less often. It seemed like each breath was a struggle, like the lift of an eyelid for a person so tired he just couldn’t stay awake any longer.

Your breaths came further and further apart, and after a time the doctor said “He’s passing now.” I thought about how he knew, how many people he had seen pass, what signs he saw that told him you were coming near the end. You tried another breath, your whole body shook, almost rattled, as if trying one last effort but really wanting to relax at last, and then you did. You relaxed. And we could feel your passing. And I could see how much work it can be just to stay alive, just to breathe, just to move, just to open your eyes, when you get to be so tired. I thought how much of a relief it must be for you, just to be able to let go. Because you were done; there was nothing left to do.

Mom and I still stood there on either side of you, each of us with one hand holding one of your hands, one hand on your head, stroking your hair. I remembered hearing about near-death experiences, people talking about how they drifted up above their body and looked down on the room, so I looked up to say good-bye. I looked up to where I thought you might be, looking back down, and said good-bye, and told you I love you. I said the prayer that I say when someone or something dies: “May you see things as they really are, and may you not be afraid of what you see.”

We stayed with you. After awhile the chaplain came and talked with us again. She told us we’d been brave, and that we’d been merciful and caring to let you go when it was your time.

She told us it would be a good idea to remove any jewelry you had on, just because, well, things could go missing otherwise. Mom tried to get your wedding ring off, but it was stuck pretty fast. I don’t think you took it off much. I lent a hand and managed to ease it off, and then I gave it to Mom. We unclipped a cross you had around your neck. That was all the jewelry you were wearing, I think.

That’s about all I remember. I don’t know whether I drove Mom home—I think she drove herself, with me following behind. It must have been sometime in the afternoon, on one of those long summer days. Just a week and a half before your birthday.

D: Well, thank you.

M: What?

D: Thank you. You did the right thing. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that. I don’t know whether your mother would have been able to do that without you. I’m grateful that you were there to help. And I’m proud that you could help in that way. I’m sure you’ve wondered whether you did the right thing, or could have done better, but I think you did just fine. It was a strange feeling to let go, and it’s true that you die alone, but it helped me to have you and your mother with me.

M: Well, thank you. That’s very kind. I’ve had all kinds of feelings about that day. I guess that writing this down is a way that I’m dealing with those feelings, working them through. I worked with Jane on your obituary, but that certainly didn’t go into the details of your last hours and minutes. Thank you for helping me to work through it all. And thanks for everything else, too. I think we’ll be talking again, soon—there’s certainly more to say. For now, though, I’d better get myself to bed so I can get up for work again tomorrow. Life goes on. Goodnight, Dad.

D: Goodnight, Jim.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

It’s great to be able to say goodnight to Dad and know it really means “goodnight.” When I was a kid, sometimes it would mean exactly that, but other times it might mean, “See you in a few hours, when you come back from the bar and sit on the end of my bed to ramble on and on incoherently for the rest of the night.” But the thing is, you could never really tell which it was going to be. "Goodnight." You say the word, and you hope it means what you want it to mean. Sometimes precise language just isn’t enough, though, especially when it’s language that attempts to foretell the future. “Goodnight” can be a wildly optimistic prediction, depending on circumstances.

Ficlets 8: Drex Underground

Left to his own devices, Drex would have been out of the locked basement and up to street level again within minutes, before his captors even had time to unpack their needles. But these were not his own devices. They were somebody else’s, perhaps more than one somebody’s, and devilishly enigmatic besides.

A strange array of elegantly designed yet unfathomably complex miniature machines lay spread across the small room’s one, otherwise-bare shelf. One of them might have been a shell splitter for stubborn pistachios. Or perhaps a toenail remover. Another that at first appeared to be a burnished and fissured brass avocado pit responded to a slight tap by expanding into a graceful, almost spherical cage for a finch.

Devices, yes: this they certainly were. But devices, it seemed, devised to do little more than puzzle the curious mind of a captive. The inventors clearly knew that if you ask the questions, you control the discourse. And the question posed by these was clearly: What are you supposed to use me for?

Ficlets 7: Sunset Clause

“Had you been more clever,” hissed the evil Doctor Krell, “you might have had an inkling of the importance of those first 125 characters.” He laughed to himself, a wheezy, sinister laugh. “But you weren’t clever, were you, you great man of letters? No. Idiot! You wasted your first precious words on some rambling description of a sunset. As if everyone hadn’t already read about more sunsets than any human can hope to see in a lifetime. What a fool!”

“Well, I thought …”

” ‘You thought,’ did you? ‘You thought.’ Ha!” Krell smirked. ”’Thought’ is the whole problem, isn’t it? It isn’t thought that draws them in at all, is it? It’s action! Danger! Fear!”

Milliken’s face was blank, uncomprehending.

“You still don’t comprehend, do you?” asked the observant, though evil, Doctor. “Let me give it to you again. Your first line is vital! It determines whether anyone will even bother to read another word. I should destroy you now, but no: you have one last chance. Now, go write it over and turn it in again on Monday!”

Ficlets 6: Return to Manderley

Last night I dreamt of Manderley again. To be honest, I mostly dreamt of Dannie, or, I should say, Mrs. Danvers. And really, we weren’t at Manderley at all. We practically never are. She and I were on a little shingle just past the boathouse, at low tide. I had gathered scraps of wood from a recent wreck and built them into a fire where we sat warming ourselves, wrapped in woolen blankets and roasting sausages. (No, of course we weren’t wrapped in roasting sausages! The idea!)

Gazing across the lively fire, I saw its flames reflected in Dannie’s eyes as she laughed aloud at some snide comment I had made. It was a look I would never forget.

Most of my dreams lately have been somehow related to old movies, and more and more of them are in black and white. I wonder if I am becoming somehow like a dog? It’s said that they see in black and white; perhaps they dream that way, too. I wonder, do I also make little yipping noises when I sleep, or twitch as if I were running? Alas, I may never know. I sleep alone.

Ficlets 5: A Game of Darts

“You’ll have to be quicker than that,” Fednor taunted. Then “Ow!” as a dart struck his left forearm, and “Ow!” again as two more punched the thick of his thigh. Everyone knew the sterile tips did no real harm; the danger came if you got hit in an artery. That was the object of the game: Hit your opponent’s artery before he could hit yours. One arterial hit and you were out.

Fednor and his team knew very well what that meant. When you were out, you were literally “out”: out of the game, out of consciousness, sometimes even out of your body, floating above until the medics could patch you up, pump you full of fluids, and wake you from your dark fantasy. It also meant (which was worse) that you were out of the game for at least a week.

Only flesh wounds so far, deep but clean, and spilling little blood. Then in a distracted instant came that familiar, deep ache. Before he could put words to his pain, all was black. He was gone. Again. When he woke, though, he saw a sunny meadow, not the familiar hospital ward.

Ficlets 4: Someone to Watch Over Me

He lay down dutifully in bed, and was tucked in, wished “pleasant dreams,” and left with the door closed, in the darkness of the most terrifying space his young mind had ever known: his own bedroom. A quick scan of the room confirmed his fears. Here were all of the familiar inanimate horrors, each masquerading with a face and eyes as a living, malevolent creature.

The life-sized punch-nose clown balloon with its insipid smile and its relentless readiness to be beaten down and then pop back up immediately to mock the boy’s puny fists. The saucer-eyed Japanese fish kite, easily a foot longer than the boy was tall, hanging from the ceiling by its huge, gaping mouth. And any number of dressers, toys, and other objects on which the boy’s eyes (in a bizarre twist on the whimsical illustrations of H. A. Rey) could identify still more insidious faces, each one observing his every move.

What could be the point of this surveillance, he wondered silently to himself. What could they want? And who had put them up to it?

Ficlets 3: Heir of Mystery (II)

“So what’s the ‘Z’ stand for? Is it for real?”

“Yeah, it’s for real.” I gave her what I hoped was a probing look, though I’m not sure I’m good at that sort of thing. It’s a question I’ve been asked before. A lot. I don’t usually give a straight answer, or even answer at all. But there was something about her. Actual curiosity, maybe? She wasn’t asking just to be coy, or to tease. I don’t know. Well, what the hell. “It’s Zimbalist.”

” ‘Zimbalist’?” I could hear the extra quotes in her voice. Mistake. Oh well; no turning back now.

“Zimbalist. My middle name’s ‘Zimbalist.’ Efrem Zimbalist Street.” She gave me a blank look. She didn’t get it. “See, my mom watched a lot of old TV detective shows.” Still nothing. “I take it yours did not.”

“What?” She seemed a little embarrassed. “No. No; my parents were really into the folk scene. You know, clubs? Jug bands in the park? We didn’t even have a TV.” Then a glimmer: “Bet you can’t guess what my middle name is.”

I thought a moment. “Rainbow?”

She looked crushed.

Ficlets 2: Heir of Mystery (I)

Hard to get down to business on a day like that. What is it about a foggy morning? It’s almost like a new-fallen snow, but better still: Just walking through the snow leaves a mark, spoils the curve, but the fog heals itself, swirls right in behind you as if you’d never been. That and a sense of short-sighted clarity, surrounded by a huge potential for mystery and wonder. Five feet ahead could be a black sedan waiting at the curb, or a grim-faced cop, or a lurking, silent stranger, or (and yes, I admit this one’s usually the most likely) my own front gate, dripping with dew.

Just the sort of morning that would be perfect for disappearance, walking off into familiar ways and never being seen again. And, as I learned from a distraught Mrs. Otis in my office three days later, that’s exactly what her husband Clarence appeared to have done.

“Mr. Street,” she begged me, “you have to help me find him. He just went out to pick up the paper. He didn’t even have his shoes on. I can’t sleep. I’m just sick with worry.”

Ficlets 1: Terminal Behavior

(NOTE: I've started posting short (1024 characters max.) bits of fiction at ficlets.com. As I post them there, I'll post them here also. This is the first.)

>> What is that? Do you smell that? Is someone eating in line?
>> No; it’s that woman with the green suitcase. She’s got a jar of mango body butter, it looks like. Probably just figured out she can’t take it on the plane. She’ll have to give it up at the gate.
>> So, what, is she using the whole pot up right now? That’s gonna be a very fragrant aircraft.
>> I don’t see how . . . Oh. Well, would you look at that! That’s a good idea.
>> What?
>> She’s sharing it with people in line. She knows she can’t keep it, so she just used a little and now she’s passing it around.
>> How nice, I suppose. That explains the fruit salad. This whole terminal is turning into an enormous human smoothie.
>> Ugh. Well, that’s an unpleasant image. Oh, look! Can I try some? Over here! Please!
>> Hey, wait a . . .
>> Thank you! Ooh, this feels good. Smell?
>> Thanks, but I’ve had a pretty good whiff already.
>> Mmm. Hey, I wonder if I’ve got anything to share . . . Oh, look at that. Um, does anybody need some contact lens solution?

Something masculine

Here's another in the "random titles" series:

Something masculine

Some places, something masculine is easier to come by –
A table or a notebook, in the lands of le and il and el –
But speaking English, as I do, sex always seems specific
And so functional, not part of everything around me.
It's only part of you and me, and animals and vegetables,
Of fruit trees and of flowers and electrical connectors.

Not metaphorically, no, but truly, everything has sexuality,
From rocks to bottletops, the Queen to Miss America.
The strings on my guitar, the notes I play, the music that you hear,
The ears you hear it with, the movement of your feet if it's a catchy tune,
If you know le and il, or der and die and el and la, la, la.
But if you're speaking English, it's an aspect you may never know you missed.

Masculine or feminine: it's ins and outs. It's plugs and sockets,
Birds and bees. The energy that drives the world. That made us all
And made the universe. And in a universe where everyone
And everything is trying, always trying to fit in, what if you don't?
Or know you wouldn't want to if you could? Is there no deeper
Commonality, a fundamental quality that joins us all?

Sometimes I wish for just an il or el, I wish I knew the sex,
Without a thought, of every lamppost, cup, or napkin that I see,
For every bat and ball.
To know the yin and yang, to see the tension, see it clearly, without thinking,
To see everything as one grand picture; then perhaps I'd know where I fit in
When I really feel I don't fit in at all.

La la le, la la, el il la
El il, el il, le la la la