CW Final (Body = Weird/Incarnations 3rd)

"Girl" pov

Second

"The School" pov

First

"The Land of Pain" pov

Second

"Hills Like White Elelephant" pov

Third

"Incarnations of Burned Children" pov

Third

"Vampires in the Lemon Grave" pov

First

"A Story About the Body" pov

Third/Omniscient

"The Colonel" pov

First

"Battlefield" pov

First

"Girl" piece

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna¹ in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like very much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh; but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?

"The School" piece

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that … that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems … and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that … you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed. With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably … you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe … well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander … well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags. Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it. We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy. We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to the school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then… And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar – that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely, because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian. Page 2 And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid's name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn't have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the school, particularly, I've seen better and I've seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy. The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they're excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There's a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don't know what's true and what's not. It's been a strange year. I forgot to mention Billy Brandt's father who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home. One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don't know, I don't know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn't death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of – I said, yes, maybe. They said, we don't like it. I said, that's sound. They said, it's a bloody shame! I said, it is. They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen. I do like Helen but I said that I would not. We've heard so much about it, they said, but we've never seen it. I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out the window. They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened. I said that they shouldn't be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

"The Land of Pain" piece

You go for a walk and during the walk something happens - you trip, you fall, you dive off a cliff; you crash, you twist, you type, you age. When you get home you notice that your house looks slightly different than when you left—mushier, if that’s possible, with misaligned corners. You open the door and are surprised to find a foil banner hanging over the mantle. It says - Welcome to the Land of Pain. So you go to the doctor and the doctor has you follow the standard management protocol (ice/rest/exercise/pills/ignore). When that doesn’t work you go for the aggressive therapy intervention (surgery/pills/rest/ig- nore). Unfortunately that doesn’t work either, and one bright afternoon the doctor and her entire staff sit you down and explain that you’ve basically reached the end of the line. Your options are these - 1) nothing, or 2) the brainless clone. You’re trying to be jaunty about this, upbeat and optimistic, and so opt for the brainless clone. Oh, they just call her that—she’s not really brainless. She has a wee, reptilian brainstem that attends to her motor skills, her bodily functions, her ambulation and self-care and whatnot. She can be trained to do tricks and loves chocolate. When they pull her out of the vat she is well-formed and healthy and everybody is exceed- ingly pleased with her, though personally you’re freaked out to see this little you, this exact genetic replica of yourself (only much younger, of course, and with no brain save a reptilian brainstem). But you’re also excited, trembling with hope, because these brainless clones are state- of-the-art and the next big thing and like a miracle and for the good of mankind and a leap forward for science and all that. You take her home and put her on accelerator, a clear goo that comes in a green squeeze bottle and is, they’ve told you, sort of like plant food. With this stuff dripped into her food she grows at a brisk pace. You ignore her for a while, but as she starts to enter various awkward stages which you recognize from your own girlhood, you haul her out of the cage and cart her off to lessons. You make her study ballet. You force her 3 to do yoga. You have her practice in padded rooms, far from any of the known entrances, pitfalls, chutes or trapdoors that lead to the Land of Pain. You want her graceful. You want her flexible and strong. Because she’s your ticket out, sweetheart. She’s your luxury cruise to a tropical island. Sometimes you sit and watch her to see if you can catch her grow- ing. You drip extra gobs of accelerator into her food (though this is not recommended). Her routine goes - in the cage, eat, sleep, defecate, stare blankly. Out of the cage - plié, relevé, sun salute, headstand, stare blankly. The legality of the deal is that she needs to grow to adulthood before you can have the operation. This is the operation where they take out your big, thinking-and-feeling brain that possesses humanity and patch it into the smooth cavity inside her head, into that flesh-lined bucket (thwack!), so that from that moment on your consciousness exists inside a pain-free, healthy, twirling and leaping body, identical to your own (except younger, and not in pain). What do they do with your old body? They use it for experiments. As of yet, no one has successfully undergone the brain transfer operation. But, they assure you, it’s only a matter of time. Anyway, you enjoy just hanging out and watching your clone prac- tice. She’s got those buck teeth and short little legs you had at her age. You cut her hair so she has the dorky bangs you once had. If you toss her a chocolate kiss she’ll do a pirouette. For a whole candy bar, she’ll attempt a solo from Swan Lake. In the meantime, you undergo a series of medical tests in an attempt to better understand the painful region. The painful region is explored with needles in an effort to isolate the painful spot. If they can pinpoint the painful spot, say the doctors, then they will be able to discuss treatment strategies with you. And if they cannot reach it with the needles they have tried so far, they will just have to try some longer ones. You say - Any luck yet with the old brain switcheroo, doc? Doc says - We’re close, very close. The brainless clone continues to ripen. Though the process is ac- celerated, it nevertheless takes several years, years you spend languish- ing in the Land of Pain - eating grapes, watching movies, popping pills, worsening, enduring therapies, pretending you are not in the Land, etc. The brainless clone barrels into adolescence, a time you spent slumping through the halls of junior high with a book clasped before your breasts. 4 Willow Springs She looks better than you ever did, clear skinned and white toothed, and in her own way she’s clever too. She’s figured out how to open her cage with her feet. You wonder - Why not with her hands? Ah, well, they don’t call them brainless for nothing! You try to get her to stay in her cage but you’re not much of a disciplinarian. You’re supposed to squirt her with water when she’s bad, but she looks so bewildered when you do, so wounded and damp, that you give it up. You’re also supposed to be able to direct her movements by shining a flashlight in her face (this is also the way you wrangle Sea Monkeys, they inform you) but this only makes her fold into a weeping ball, presenting such a startling replica of your own miserable adolescence that you toss the flashlight in the trash and give her a cookie, vaguely wondering exactly who is training whom. The result of this is that the brainless clone gains the run of the house. She twirls around all the time. If she walks, she walks on her tiptoes. She takes up more space than you ever imagined possible. It’s as though a tiny, wind-up jewelry box dancer has been turned into a giant adolescent monster through the ingestion of radioactive produce. You dodge around her swanlike arms and contemplate how you were never that graceful or slender or pretty. Complex feelings ensue. You and the other members of the study have been advised not to give names to your brainless clones. Researchers come to the house every couple of months to check up on her progress, her care and feeding, your compliance and mental health. As soon as they leave, you take off her scrub suit and dress her in a silk tutu. You’ve named her Princess Fifi. At home, your answering machine says - Hello, you have reached THE LAND OF PAIN, over a background of thundering organ music. None of your callers finds this funny or even particularly comprehensible. It looks like you’ve failed at the long tradition of cracking jokes in the face of adversity and thus signaling that you’re a tough cookie and a brave little bumblebee and a trooper and all that. The truth is you’re getting sick of pretending like the Land of Pain is not a sad and lonely place. You’re sick of pretending that losing the full use of your body—a pain- free body similar to the brainless clone’s—has been anything less than entirely heartbreaking. Things could be worse, the doctors are fond of reminding you. Chin up! It’s just pain, it won’t kill you. You decide this is typical of the kind of thoughts people have when they do not live in the Land of Pain. Your thoughts run more along the lines of - Why not do a few Richter 5 good deeds to boost your karma, then throw in the towel? Maybe in the next life, you’d get a better body. Unfortunately, things look bad all around out there - war, genocide, children with machine guns, rape and plunder and tyranny and epidemics. You don’t want to be reincarnated into one of those bodies. Anyway, you don’t believe in reincarnation. The brainless clone keeps twirling between you and the TV when you’re trying to watch the horrible news programs that remind you how much worse things could be. You try to kick her out of the way and get mud all over your socks. Ever since she learned how to crawl through the doggy door, she’s been ripping her tutus and dragging them in the dirt. She’s been climbing trees and running through the sprinklers, getting sunburned and collecting scars that you’ll eventually have to explain, once you inhabit her body. What’s more, your assistive animal (which you obtained after watching a videotape of a sweet, serious collie picking up coins with her mouth) considers your leather armchair a chew-toy and has reduced half of it to pulp. Somehow you had the idea that the assistive animal was going to be a terrific help. You had a whole fantasy scenario built up in your mind in which this wonderful assistive animal would do all the things you found difficult—organizing your shoes, picking up coins off the floor, making the bed with its little teeth and paws, dragging the sheets up carefully over the mattress (good dog!), stuffing a pillow into a clean pillowcase with her snout. Then she’d curl up at your feet while you relaxed in a specially designed, inexpensive contraption that suspended you in a warm soothing fluid, relaxed and completely pain-free. When you try to scoot the chair away, the dog sinks her teeth into the other side, growling happily, proposing a superfun game of tug-of- war. You muse on the fact that something like twenty-three muscles govern the frolicsomeness of that wagging tail. And it’s obvious none of them hurt. You take your medication and sack out in front of the television (which you can only really watch when you manage to nudge the pirouetting brainless clone into a corner). Now is the hour when citizens on talk shows tell their tragic stories in the second person, saying you you you about all the bad, traumatic, unfortunate experiences in their lives (“You just feel so betrayed when you see that little panda pulling a gun”) as though they have a genetic defect that prevents them from using the pronoun “I.” This is sloppy and angers the grammar and usage thug in 6 Willow Springs you. You’ve concluded that citizens telling their tales of adversity find the second person compelling because “you” is impersonal and removed, yet somehow includes everyone in its scope (“It could be you staring down the barrel at that panda bear next, sweetheart!”) whereas “I” is an orphaned baby doe blinking in a dark forest. “You are always in pain,” for example, is a more manageable utter- ance than the direct, final - “I am always in pain.” At nightfall, you can’t find the assistive animal anywhere. Finally, you locate her curled up in the cage with the brainless clone, nose tucked under her tail. They adore each other. And you, you, my friend, are filled with jealousy. You go to the doctor and the doctor says - Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, with one being negligible and ten being the worst pain you can possibly imagine—you brace yourself here—like surgery on your internal organs without anesthesia! The doctor asks this every time you visit, and every time it horrifies you. You imagine an awful knoll in the Land of Pain where doctors remove livers and kidneys without the benefit of anesthesia while brainless clones dance to the soothing strains of waiting room music. In the foreground, assistive animals grab twitching organs in their mouths and run off to bury them. You are not being a brave little bumblebee. What’s more, a few minutes later you start crying there on the green- ish exam table because the doctor is telling you they have completed the brainless clone study and have concluded that, unfortunately, they cannot, at this time, transfer human brains from one body to another. And there is very little else they can do to help you. When you start to cry the doctor takes a deep breath, and, with a kind of angry glee (similar to when the assistive animal picks up a coin and runs around the house, while you attempt to chase), starts to recite, in detail, a list of all her patients who are worse off than you are. She describes neighbor- hoods in the Land of Pain more burned out and dangerous than you ever dreamed of, hellish vistas where the afflicted and wracked limp through the streets in hailstorms while gobbling more Oxycontin and forgetting who the president is. Phantom Limb Pain. Fibromyalgia. Double Carpal Tunnel (with a cherry on top), Stiff Person Syndrome. You sniffle contritely and feel a weird, toxic gratitude that goes - Thank God. Thank God I’m only as fucked up as I am and not as fucked up as those other people. The doctor says - We understand you have a choice when choosing Richter 7 Lands, and we’d like to thank you for choosing to spend the safest part of your journey here, in the Land of Pain. Geographically speaking, the Land of Pain is a subcontinent of the World of the Sick. The World of the Sick is a nifty, parallel universe that exists inside the World of the Well. The curious fact is that while most of the citizens of the World of the Well don’t even realize that the World of the Sick exists, all of the inhabitants of the World of the Sick know about the World of the Well. The Sick live among the Well like spies, pod-people, or daywalking vampires - different, afraid, and isolated; and like spies, pod-people, and daywalkers, the Sick who can manage to mingle with the Well reflexively disguise their identity. And you, with your white picket fence and your neatly trimmed lawn in the Land of Pain, you are no different. There’s no little chair on your license plate. You look normal, you are able to leave the house for hours at a time, you’ve tried to pass yourself off as hunky-dory. But now everyone knows, because in her maturity the brainless clone follows you everywhere. She won’t let you out of her sight. She bellows like a baby calf if you stray too far from her, she bellows so fiercely that you think perhaps she’ll go on forever. She’s inconsolable and stubborn and unpredictable and thanks to years of physical training she possesses astonishing stamina. Rather than fight it, you do what you’ve always done and cave in. You take her everywhere with you. She trots beside you, grunting. She won’t wear anything now but soiled tutus and you have to attach her to your wrist with a tether because, well, she doesn’t exactly have a brain. You find the whole spectacle humiliating - she’s an idea whose time has passed, a relic of a failed era. It’s like you’re this weird person carrying around an eight-track player and truckin’ to disco. Certain kids find this cool and follow at a distance, trying to affect her distracted, zombie stance. Far worse are the religious zealots, who bother you constantly. They know where you live. They mobilize when you go to the doctor or the supermarket. They surround your car and chant - Even without a cerebellum/That young lady’s going to heaven! The nuts are convinced she has a soul (though she has no brain) and even though you have to get a restraining order against them, you’re secretly inclined to agree. So you walk around with this big, grunting, simple ballerina follow- ing you and everyone knows there’s something so wrong with you that you once actually contemplated having your brain taken out and put into someone else’s body, which in fact isn’t the worst part. The worst 8 Willow Springs part is when everyone goes - Oh! She’s so cute! Were you ever that cute? There, tethered to you with a piece of coiled plastic, is your lost youth and vitality - a pretty ballerina, arm raised, back arched, foot aiming toward the sky. She’s a poet of the body, ignited with life, and despite the fact that she has no brain you’re in awe of all she has. A friend says to you - Oh, these people take them to live on a farm. They have a farm for the brainless clones out in the country where they get to run around in the fresh air, and there are orchards and meadows and pet bunnies and they’re well-cared for and all that. A group of bran-eating hippies runs it—they do it for karma credits or energy wavelengths or something weird but reputedly not-evil. A lot of the brainless clones are living there now. They have sing-alongs. You say - Sounds fishy. Your friend says - Yeah. Oh but wait—the thing is they grow those pears there, the ones we used to get at the corner market. Remember those pears? You remember. You used to stop at a little market and buy the most ravishing pears, sweet and crisp, and every time you did the proprietor would roar - You will be back for more of these pears! They were yellow- gold. You’d eat them in the park while the juice ran off your elbow. You went back again and again, just as the man predicted. It was the longest pear-season ever. You were convinced it would never end. But of course it did end, and you moved to another part of the city, and by chance wandered into the Land of Pain and forgot all about the pears, since you had other things on your mind. So you take her to the farm. She wants to get off her leash and run around all the time now anyway. You bundle up her ballet slippers and her tutus and her bags of Brainless Clone Chow and push her into the backseat of the car and set off for the country. She keeps sticking her entire head out the window as you drive, making that bellowing noise, so awful and familiar and constant. My God, you think, make her stop. When you arrive, she jumps out as soon as you open the car door. You give her a little kiss on her zombie brow and unclip the leash. She stands for a minute, sniffing the air, chest heaving, fingers trembling, then breaks into a dead run for the orchard. Her tutu is the cleanest you could find, a pink one, and the pears hang above her like yellow lanterns. Her arms unfurl as she reaches up and her fingertips graze the branches. Then she lifts a foot and begins to dance. She’s a damn good dancer; breathtaking really, like a scarf drifting through the air. You Richter 9 watch for a while, trying not to imagine all she could have been if she’d actually had a brain. There are a couple dozen other brainless clones romping in the orchard too. They all look alert and healthy - they are eating pears, wrestling, singing snatches of camp songs, picking their noses, doing somersaults. It’s sort of beautiful but also awful. What if their owners suddenly all showed up? What if they arrived with their crutches and wheelchairs and bad eyes and frozen joints and stood around (if they could stand) and watched (if they could watch) as their clones pranced and jumped and fell down and then got back up again? It would be too much to endure. The weird karma people appear and offer you a bowl of cereal. She’s cute, they say. She’ll like it here. Everything will be fine. You all stand for a while watching the clones horse around. Then they tell you that it’s time to say goodbye. Oh no, you say - No. You don’t want to say goodbye. They take away your bowl of cereal and look at you with gentle, patchouli-scented eyes. They tell you that it’s good to say goodbye and that you really should. But no, you argue. Wait. Hold it right there. Just who do they think they are, telling you to say goodbye? There are things in life you never imagined saying goodbye to. How can you say goodbye to your unbroken version? How can it be that people don’t get better? How can their pretty ballerinas dance away under the pears while their owners hobble home, on their feet, on their crutches, in their wheelchairs? It’s not fair! Only when they’re unable to do the simplest things do they realize that the simplest things were so full of joy - taking a walk, picking a pear, picking up a child who says carry me. So there it is. You don’t want to say goodbye. Chill out, say the weird karma people. No one is making you leave her here. It’s voluntary. If you keep her she’ll probably still follow you around, bellowing. But (and here they look very sinister) they believe that the universe will be far more peaceful in its vibrations if you can manage to say goodbye. They stand with their wispy ponytails and their heavy bags of granola, perhaps suitable for use as a weapon, so you decide to give it a try. You call out Goodbye little clone in a small voice, without much conviction. Bye-bye Fifi. You give your brainless princess a wave, but of course she’s not looking at you. She’s too busy dancing beneath the pears. * 10 Willow Springs You accept a bag of cereal from the karma people and start to drive back to town. Your assistive animal sleeps in the backseat, twitching and whining, chasing rabbits or perhaps a flock of brainless clones. Somehow, though you’re certain you didn’t make any wrong turns, you end up on a strange, unrecognizable stretch of freeway. You realize that you’re angry, very angry - wherever you are, you would like to know just how you ended up here! You’d demand to know, if only you could find someone to ask. Then a green, reflective sign rears up along the side of the road. It says - Next Exit - The Land of Pain. You exit. 11 This work originally appeared in Willow Springs, and is protected by copyright, controlled usually by the original author, and in all other cases by Willow Springs. U.S. and international copyright laws apply and you may not reproduce this content without written permission from the author.

"Hills Like White Elephants" piece

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid. “What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table. “It’s pretty hot,” the man said. “Let’s drink beer.” “Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain. “Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway. “Yes. Two big ones.” The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry. “They look like white elephants,” she said. “I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer. “No, you wouldn’t have.” “I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.” The girl looked at the bead curtain. “They’ve painted something on it,” she said. “What does it say?” “Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.” “Could we try it?” The man called “Listen” through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar. “Four reales.” “We want two Anis del Toro.” “With water?” “Do you want it with water?” “I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?” “It’s all right.” “You want them with water?” asked the woman. “Yes, with water.” “It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down. “That’s the way with everything.” “Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” “Oh, cut it out.” “You started it,” the girl said. “I was being amused. I was having a fine time.” “Well, let’s try and have a fine time.” “All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” “That was bright.” “I wanted to try this new drink - That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” “I guess so.” The girl looked across at the hills. “They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” “Should we have another drink?” “All right.” The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table. “The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said. “It’s lovely,” the girl said. “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.” The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.” The girl did not say anything. “I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.” “Then what will we do afterward?” “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.” “What makes you think so?” “That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.” The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads. “And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.” “I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.” “So have I,” said the girl. “And afterward they were all so happy.” “Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.” “And you really want to?” “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” “I love you now. You know I love you.” “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?” “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.” “If I do it you won’t ever worry?” “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.” “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.” “What do you mean?” “I don’t care about me.” “Well, I care about you.” “Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.” “I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.” The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees. “And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.” “What did you say?” “I said we could have everything.” “We can have everything.” “No, we can’t.” “We can have the whole world.” “No, we can’t.” “We can go everywhere.” “No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.” “It’s ours.” “No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.” “But they haven’t taken it away.” “We’ll wait and see.” “Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.” “I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.” “I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do—” “Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. “I know. Could we have another beer?” “All right. But you’ve got to realize—” “I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?” They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. “You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.” “Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.” “Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.” “Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.” “It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.” “Would you do something for me now?” “I’d do anything for you.” “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights. “But I don’t want you to,” he said, “I don’t care anything about it.” “I’ll scream,” the girl said. The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said. “What did she say?” asked the girl. “That the train is coming in five minutes.” The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her. “I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man said. She smiled at him. “All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.” He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the bar‐room, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. “Do you feel better?” he asked. “I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

"Incarnations of Burned Children" piece

The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child’s screams and the Mommy’s voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile before the stove and the burner’s blue jet and the floor’s pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the Mommy down on one knee with the dishrag dabbing pointlessly at him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she was almost frozen. Her one knee and the bare little soft feet were still in the steaming pool, and the Daddy’s first act was to take the child under the arms and lift him away from it and take him to the sink, where he threw out plates and struck the tap to let cold wellwater run over the boy’s feet while with his cupped hand he gathered and poured or flung more cold water over his head and shoulders and chest, wanting first to see the steam stop coming off him, the Mommy over his shoulder invoking God until he sent her for towels and gauze if they had it, the Daddy moving quickly and well and his man’s mind empty of everything but purpose, not yet aware of how smoothly he moved or that he’d ceased to hear the high screams because to hear them would freeze him and make impossible what had to be done to help his child, whose screams were regular as breath and went on so long they’d become already a thing in the kitchen, something else to move quickly around. The tenant side’s door outside hung half off its top hinge and moved slightly in the wind, and a bird in the oak across the driveway appeared to observe the door with a cocked head as the cries still came from inside. The worst scalds seemed to be the right arm and shoulder, the chest and stomach’s red was fading to pink under the cold water and his feet’s soft soles weren’t blistered that the Daddy could see, but the toddler still made little fists and screamed except now merely on reflex from fear the Daddy would know he thought possible later, small face distended and thready veins standing out at the temples and the Daddy kept saying he was here he was here, adrenaline ebbing and an anger at the Mommy for allowing this thing to happen just starting to gather in wisps at his mind’s extreme rear still hours from expression. When the Mommy returned he wasn’t sure whether to wrap the child in a towel or not but he wet the towel down and did, swaddled him tight and lifted his baby out of the sink and set him on the kitchen table’s edge to soothe him while the Mommy tried to check the feet’s soles with one hand waving around in the area of her mouth and uttering objectless words while the Daddy bent in and was face to face with the child on the table’s checkered edge repeating the fact that he was here and trying to calm the toddler’s cries but still the child breathlessly screamed, a high pure shining sound that could stop his heart and his bitty lips and gums now tinged with the light blue of a low flame the Daddy thought, screaming as if almost still under the tilted pot in pain. A minute, two like this that seemed much longer, with the Mommy at the Daddy’s side talking sing‐song at the child’s face and the lark on the limb with its head to the side and the hinge going white in a line from the weight of the canted door until the first wisp of steam came lazy from under the wrapped towel’s hem and the parents’ eyes met and widened—the diaper, which when they opened the towel and leaned their little boy back on the checkered cloth and unfastened the softened tabs and tried to remove it resisted slightly with new high cries and was hot, their baby’s diaper burned their hand and they saw where the real water’d fallen and pooled and been burning their baby all this time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn’t, hadn’t thought and when they got it off and saw the state of what was there the Mommy said their God’s first name and grabbed the table to keep her feet while the father turned away and threw a haymaker at the air of the kitchen and cursed both himself and the world for not the last time while his child might now have been sleeping if not for the rate of his breathing and the tiny stricken motions of his hands in the air above where he lay, hands the size of a grown man’s thumb that had clutched the Daddy’s thumb in the crib while he’d watched the Daddy’s mouth move in song, his head cocked and seeming to see for more way past him into something his eyes made the Daddy lonesome for in a strange vague way. If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again as if the lady was almost there with him looking down at what they’ve done, though hours later what the Daddy won’t most forgive is how badly he wanted a cigarette right then as they diapered the child as best they could in gauze and two crossed handtowels and the Daddy lifted him like a newborn with his skull in one palm and ran him out to the hot truck and burned custom rubber all the way to town and the clinic’s ER with the tenant’s door hanging open like that all day until the hinge gave but by then it was too late, when it wouldn’t stop and they couldn’t make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

"Vampires in the Lemon Grave" piece

Fila and I are alone. I press my dry lips together and shove dominoes around the table; they buckle like the cars of a tiny train. “More lemonade, nonno?” She smiles. She leans from her waist and boldly touches my right fang, a thin string of hanging drool. “Looks like you’re thirsty.” “Please,” I gesture at the bench. “Have a seat.” Fila is seventeen now and has known about me for some time. She’s toying with the idea of telling her boss, weighing the sentence within her like a bullet in a gun - There is a vampire in our grove. “You don’t believe me, Signore Alberti?” she’ll say, before taking him by the wrist and leading him to this bench, and I’ll choose that moment to rise up and bite him in his hog- thick neck. “Right through his stupid tie!” she says with a grin. But this is just idle fantasy, she assures me. Fila is content to let me alone. “You remind me of my nonno,” she says approvingly, “you look very Italian.” In fact, she wants to help me hide here. It gives her a warm feeling to do so, like helping her own fiercenonno do up the small buttons of his trousers, now too intricate a maneuver for his palsied hands. She worries about me, too. And she should - lately I’ve gotten sloppy, incontinent about my secrets. I’ve stopped polishing my shoes; I let the tip of one fang hang over my pink lip. “You must be more careful,” she reprimands. “There are tourists everywhere.” I study her neck as she says this, her head rolling with the natural expressiveness of a girl. She checks to see if I am watching her collarbone, and I let her see that I am. I feel like a threat again. Last night I went on a rampage. On my seventh lemon I found with a sort of drowsy despair that I couldn’t stop. I crawled around on all fours looking for the last bianchettis in the dewy grass - soft with rot, mildewed, sun-shriveled, blackened. Lemon skin bulging with tiny cellophane-green worms. Dirt smells, rain smells, all swirled through with the tart sting of decay. In the morning, Magreb steps around the wreckage and doesn’t say a word. “I came up with a new name,” I say, hoping to distract her. “Brandolino. What do you think?” I have spent the last several years trying to choose an Italian name, and every day that I remain Clyde feels like a defeat. Our names are relics of the places we’ve been. “Clyde” is a souvenir from the California Gold Rush. I was callow and blood-crazed back then, and I saw my echo in the freckly youths panning along the Sacramento River. I used the name as a kind of bait. “Clyde” sounded innocuous, like someone a boy might get a malt beer with or follow into the woods. Magreb chose her name in the Atlas Mountains for its etymology, the root word ghuroob, which means “to set” or “to be hidden.” “That’s what we’re looking for,” she tells me. “The setting place. Some final answer.” She won’t change her name until we find it. She takes a lemon from her mouth, slides it down the length of her fangs, and places its shriveled core on the picnic table. When she finally speaks, her voice is so low the words are almost unintelligible. “The lemons aren’t working, Clyde.” But the lemons have never worked. At best, they give us eight hours of peace. We aren’t talking about the lemons. “How long?” “Longer than I’ve let on. I’m sorry.” “Well, maybe it’s this crop. Those Alberti boys haven’t been fertilizing properly, maybe the primofiore will turn out better.” Magreb fixes me with one fish-bright eye. “Clyde, I think it’s time for us to go.” Wind blows the leaves apart. Lemons wink like a firmament of yellow stars, slowly ripening, and I can see the other, truer night behind them. “Go where?” Our marriage, as I conceive it, is a commitment to starve together. “We’ve been resting here for decades. I think it’s time . . . what is that thing?” I have been preparing a present for Magreb, for our anniversary, a “cave” of scavenged materials—newspaper and bottle glass and wooden beams from the lemon tree supports— so that she can sleep down here with me. I’ve smashed dozens of bottles of fruity beer to make stalactites. Looking at it now, though, I see the cave is very small. It looks like an umbrella mauled by a dog. “That thing?” I say. “That’s nothing. I think it’s part of the hot dog machine.” “Jesus. Did it catch on fire?” “Yes. The girl threw it out yesterday.” “Clyde.” Magreb shakes her head. “We never meant to stay here forever, did we? That was never the plan.” “I didn’t know we had a plan,” I snap. “What if we’ve outlived our food supply? What if there’s nothing left for us to find?” “You don’t really believe that.” “Why can’t you just be grateful? Why can’t you be happy and admit defeat? Look at what we’ve found here!” I grab a lemon and wave it in her face. “Good night, Clyde.” I watch my wife fly up into the watery dawn, and again I feel the awful tension. In the flats of my feet, in my knobbed spine. Love has infected me with a muscular superstition that one body can do the work of another. I consider taking the funicular, the ultimate degradation—worse than the dominoes, worse than an eternity of sucking cut lemons. All day I watch the cars ascend, and I’m reminded of those American fools who accompany their wives to the beach but refuse to wear bathing suits. I’ve seen them by the harbor, sulking in their trousers, panting through menthol cigarettes and pacing the dock while the women sea-bathe. They pretend they don’t mind when sweat darkens the armpits of their suits. When their wives swim out and leave them. When their wives are just a splash in the distance. Tickets for the funicular are twenty lire. I sit at the bench and count as the cars go by. That evening, I take Magreb on a date. I haven’t left the lemon grove in upward of two years, and blood roars in my ears as I stand and clutch at her like an old man. We’re going to the Thursday night show at an antique theater in a castle in the center of town. I want her to see that I’m happy to travel with her, so long as our destination is within walking distance. A teenage usher in a vintage red jacket with puffed sleeves escorts us to our seats, his biceps manacled in clouds, threads loosening from the badge on his chest. I am jealous of the name there - GUGLIELMO. The movie’s title is already scrolling across the black screen - SOMETHING CLANDESTINE IS HAPPENING IN THE CORN! Magreb snorts. “That’s a pretty lousy name for a horror movie. It sounds like a student film.” “Here’s your ticket,” I say. “I didn’t make the title up.” It’s a vampire movie set in the Dust Bowl. Magreb expects a comedy, but the Dracula actor fills me with the sadness of an old photo album. An Okie has unwittingly fallen in love with the monster, whom she’s mistaken for a rich European creditor eager to pay off the mortgage on her family’s farm. “That Okie,” says Magreb, “is an idiot.” I turn my head miserably and there’s Fila, sitting two rows in front of us with a greasy young man. Benny Alberti. Her white neck is bent to the left, Benny’s lips affixed to it as she impassively sips a soda. “Poor thing,” Magreb whispers, indicating the pigtailed actress. “She thinks he’s going to save her.” Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. “Help!” she screams to a sky full of crows. “He’s not actually from Europe!” There is no music, only the girl’s breath and the fwap-fwap-fwap of the off-screen fan blades. Dracula’s mouth hangs wide as a sewer grate. His cape is curiously still. The movie picture is frozen. The fwapping is emanating from the projection booth; it rises to a grinding r-r-r,followed by lyrical Italian cussing and silence and finally a tidal sigh. Magreb shifts in her seat. “Let’s wait,” I say, seized with empathy for these two still figures on the screen, mutely pleading for repair. “They’ll fix it.” People begin to file out of the theater, first in twos and threes and then in droves. “I’m tired, Clyde.” “Don’t you want to know what happens?” My voice is more frantic than I intend. “I already know what happens.” “Don’t you leave now, Magreb. I’m telling you, they’re going to fix it. If you leave now, that’s it for us, I’ll never . . .” Her voice is beautiful, like gravel underfoot - “I’m going to the caves.” I’m alone in the theater. When I turn to exit, the picture is still frozen, the Okie’s blue dress floating over windless corn, Dracula’s mouth a hole in his white greasepaint. Outside I see Fila standing in a clot of her friends, lit by the marquee. These kids wear too much makeup and clothes that move like colored oils. They all look rained on. I scowl at them and they scowl back, and then Fila crosses to me. “Hey, you,” she says, grinning, breathless, so very close to my face. “Are you stalking somebody?” My throat tightens. “Guys!” Her eyes gleam. “Guys, come over and meet the vampire.” But the kids are gone. “Well! Some friends,” she says, then winks. “Leaving me alone, defenseless . . .” “You want the old vampire to bite you, eh?” I hiss. “You want a story for your friends?” Fila laughs. Her horror is a round, genuine thing, bouncing in both her black eyes. She smells like hard water and glycerin. The hum of her young life all around me makes it difficult to think. A bat filters my thoughts, opens its trembling lampshade wings. Magreb. She’ll want to hear about this. How ridiculous, at my age, to find myself down this alley with a young girl - Fila powdering her neck, doing her hair up with little temptress pins, yanking me behind this Dumpster. “Can you imagine”—Magreb will laugh—“a teenager goading you to attack her! You’re still a menace, Clyde.” I stare vacantly at a pale mole above the girl’s collarbone. Magreb, I think again, and I smile, and the smile feels like a muzzle stretched taut against my teeth. It seems my hand has tightened on the girl’s wrist, and I realize with surprise, as if from a great distance, that she is twisting away. “Hey, nonno, come on now, what are you— ” The girl’s head lolls against my shoulder like a sleepy child’s, then swings forward in a rag- doll circle. The starlight is white mercury compared to her blotted-out eyes. There’s a dark stain on my periwinkle shirt, and one suspender has snapped. I sit Fila’s body against the alley wall, watch it dim and stiffen. Spidery graffiti weaves over the brick behind her, and I scan for some answer contained there - GIOVANNA & FABIANO. VAFFANCULO! VAI IN CULO. A scabby-furred creature, our only witness, arches its orange back against the Dumpster. If not for the lock I would ease the girl inside. I would climb in with her and let the red stench fill my nostrils, let the flies crawl into the red corners of my eyes. I am a monster again. I ransack Fila’s pockets and find the key to the funicular office, careful not to look at her face. Then I’m walking, running for the lemon grove. I jimmy my way into the control room and turn the silver key, relieved to hear the engine roar to life. Locked, locked, every funicular car is locked, but then I find one with thick tape in Xs over a busted door. I dash after it and pull myself onto the cushion, quickly, because the cars are already moving. Even now, after what I’ve done, I am still unable to fly, still imprisoned in my wretched nonno’s body, reduced to using the mortals’ machinery to carry me up to find my wife. The box jounces and trembles. The chain pulls me into the heavens link by link. My lips are soon chapped; I stare through a crack in the glass window. The box swings wildly in the wind. The sky is a deep blue vacuum. I can still smell the girl in the folds of my clothes. The cave system at the top of the cliffs is vaster than I expected; and with their grandfather faces tucked away, the bats are anonymous as stones. I walk beneath a chandelier of furry bodies, heartbeats wrapped in wings the color of rose petals or corn silk. Breath ripples through each of them, a tiny life in its translucent envelope. “Magreb?” Is she up here? Has she left me? (I will never find another vampire.) I double back to the moonlit entrance that leads to the open air of the cliffs, the funicular cars. When I find Magreb, I’ll beg her to tell me what she dreams up here. I’ll tell her my waking dreams in the lemon grove - The mortal men and women floating serenely by in balloons freighted with the ballast of their deaths. Millions of balloons ride over a wide ocean, lives darkening the sky. Death is a dense powder cinched inside tiny sandbags, and in the dream I am given to understand that instead of a sandbag I have Magreb. I make the bats’ descent in a cable car with no wings to spread, knocked around by the wind with a force that feels personal. I struggle to hold the door shut and look for the green speck of our grove. The box is plunging now, far too quickly. It swings wide, and the igneous surface of the mountain fills the left window. The tufa shines like water, like a black, heat- bubbled river. For a dizzying instant I expect the rock to seep through the glass. Each swing takes me higher than the last, a grinding pendulum that approaches a full revolution around the cable. I’m on my hands and knees on the car floor, seasick in the high air, pressing my face against the floor grate. I can see stars or boats burning there, and also a ribbon of white, a widening fissure. Air gushes through the cracks in the glass box. With a lurch of surprise, I realize that I could die. What does Magreb see, if she is watching? Is she waking from a nightmare to see the line snap, the glass box plummet? From her inverted vantage, dangling from the roof of the cave, does the car seem to be sucked upward, rushing not toward the sea but into another sort of sky? To a black mouth open and foaming with stars? I like to picture my wife like this - Magreb shuts her thin eyelids tighter. She digs her claws into the rock. Little clouds of dust plume around her toes as she swings upside down. She feels something growing inside her, a dreadful suspicion. It is solid, this new thing, it is the opposite of hunger. She’s emerging from a dream of distant thunder, rumbling and loose. Something has happened tonight that she thought impossible. In the morning, she will want to tell me about it.

"A Story About the Body" piece

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.

"The Colonel" piece

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes - say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of the wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

"Battlefield" piece

Back when I used to be Indian I am standing outside the pool hall with my sister. She strawberry blonde. Stale sweat and beer through the open door. A warrior leans on his stick, fingers blue with chalk. Another bends to shoot. His braids brush the green felt, swinging to the beat of the jukebox. We move away. Hank Williams falls again in the backseat of a Cadillac. I look back. A wind off the distant hills lifts my shirt, brings the scent of wounded horses.

"Girl"

Jamaica Kincaid

"The School"

Donald Barthelme

"The Land of Pain"

Stacey Ritcher

"Hills Like White Elephants"

Ernest Heminway

"Incarnations of Burned Children"

David Foster Wallace

"Vampires in the Lemon Grave"

Karen Russel

"A Story About the Body"

Robert Hass

"The Colonel"

Carolyn Forche

"Battlefield"

Mark Turcotte

1st Person

uses "I" and "we," referring to the speaker and their group

2nd Person

uses "you" to address the listener or reader directly

3rd Person

uses "he," "she," "it," and "they" to refer to a person or thing other than the speaker or listener

(Third Person) Limited/ flexible omniscient

Point of view allows us to see a character’s interior world and the exterior setting around her as she experiences it. Once established, we can’t pop into a different character’s perspective or into a full voice; we stay within this character’s frame of perception.

Omniscient

This point of view speaks from an all-knowing perspective that understands the past, present, and future and is free to tell readers anything, even what the characters themselves may not know.

Objective

This point of view knows no more than a person observing the scene would witness, just what's present to the senses, not the interiors of the characters.

Image/Imagery

use sensory experience; to construct experiences for the reader—experiences we taste, touch, see, hear, and smell with our imagination, we are informed AND emotionally moved

Point of View

this refers to the distance between the reader and the narrator or speaker

Meta fiction

describes a story about storytelling; it’s written in a self-conscious manner, draws attention to the work’s artificial or “made” nature, and asks the reader to think about the relationship between reality and fiction

Motif

any recurring element that has figurative significance; pattern

Flash fiction

a work of fiction imagined for a two-page space, typically under 750 words, very short

Foreshadowing

an advance signal or warning of what’s to come

Flashback

signaling to your reader that the narrative is shifting back in time

Flash forward

jumping ahead in time and avoiding a chronological plot

Character

is essentially a desire or yearning, represented as a specific person

Round character

complex, multi-dimensional fictional person who has a realistic and fully developed personality, with various traits, emotions, and motivations that often contradict one another

Flat character

one-dimensional, predictable character with few traits and little to no personal complexity

Protagonist

the main character, with whom we are meant to mainly identify

Antagonist

the "villain"

Creative non-fiction

literature rooted firmly in our real world - it is true; use of the full range of tools, imagery, and figurative language, scene, character, sound, voice, and perspective; bring the world vividly alive (with sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch & beyond)

Fiction

in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people; something that is invented or untrue

Metaphor

states a comparison without acknowledging the comparison is consciously made (garden of green lace)

Simile

makes a comparison between two things using the words like, like or as… (each like a corpse)

Scene

language that reaches the imagination tangibly; the place where an incident in real life or fiction occurs(ed)

Summary

a brief statement or account of the main points of something

Setting

intrinsic to the understanding and expression of character, comes to the reader filtered through or for the development of character; the place or type of surroundings where something is positioned or where an event takes place

Text

literal words, actions, or images in a story

Subtext

underlying, unstated meaning that is conveyed through those elements and the story's context

Freytag's Pyramid

five-part dramatic structure for storytelling that includes exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution

Voice

the distinctive style, personality, and attitude of a written work, created through a combination of vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, and point of view

Denotation

literal meaning

Connotation

implied meaning

Irony

contradiction between the way things appear and the way they really are

Prose poetry

hybrid form, it combines the highly lyrical sounds and brevity associated with poetry with the prose (paragraph shape and lack of line breaks) and emphasis on character associated with fiction

Climax

story's highest or most intense point

Conflict

a source of tension or trouble that will cause the main character to change

Resolution

causes the character to change

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people; talking

Dialect

a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group

Dialogue tags

a phrase that identifies the speaker of a piece of dialogue

Diction

word choice

In media res

the technique of beginning your story in the middle of the action rather than with exposition

Narrator

the one who tells the story

Unreliable narrator

this individual experiences the conflict and change your project explores, but clues signal to the reader that this narrator is so biased or unstable that his or her point of view can’t be trusted

Persona

a mask donned in first‐person POV, this poetry is written from the perspectives of (mythological) figures/something else, the purpose is never simply to retell or dramatize the story the reader already knows (like in Skinhead)

Authorial intrusion

occurs when the POV of the author “breaks the wall” of the narrating point of view already established, interrupts the readers’ relationship with the narrating POV and makes us suddenly aware we’re in an artificial story

Story

an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment

Plot

the sequence of events in a narrative that is linked by a cause-and-effect relationship

Concrete language

creates an experience that is inviting/trusting (figurative language)

Abstract language

informs but doesn't move us ("power")

Funicular

powerful descriptive element, drawing on its physical meaning to evoke imagery, mood, and thematic tension; does not have a specialized or abstract literary definition different from its standard usage

White elephant

a possession or project that is expensive and burdensome but ultimately useless or unprofitable

external; internal

In stories, desire can relate to any theme and the resulting change can be ____ (expressed as an action) or ____ (expressed as thought or reflection)

Desire

for the speaker to better understand and make new meaning in the present from past experience

Direct characterization

when the text offers a generalization or judgment about a character

Exposition

briefly establishing the “normal” life of the character

Rising action

meaningful complications

Denouement

“falling away” after the story’s climax; the journey may continue longer

Colloquial voice

is writing crafted to sound more like authentic speech than like formal, written English

Pidgin

simplified version of a language developed as a means of communication between two or more groups that don’t have a language in common

Tone

the quality of sound produced by a voice or instrument

Sarcasm

form of verbal irony calculated to judge or hurt someone through (false praise - “Love your hat!”)

Jump cut

shift to a different scene

Tableau

an arrangement, an image of a moment in a scene where all motion has been stopped and frozen

Narrative

an account of connected events, animated through time

Representative scene

makes use of all the tools of scene but offers a sense of the typical rather than of one particular scene

Information dump

term for large chunks of exposition not carefully interwoven into a narrative

Idiot lecture

dialogue that exists for purely expository reasons (the sitcom character’s roommate repeating the events of the last episode to the main character)

Incluing

the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information

Epiphany

a sudden realization that can follow a period of reflection about a problem

Stream of Consciousness

long passages or entire projects written to replicate everything the mind notices

Perspective

is the distance between the narrator or speaker and the action

Central POV

comes from the main character