Douglas Copeland Went to Town

Douglas Copeland Went to Town

By Dougy Dirk (divorced and remarried)

you so smart and clever

me so slow and dumb

your exquisite derriere

my old flabby bum

Dougy, you might call me if you want to get your teeth rammed down your throat. My mother calls me Dougy and gets away with it, but that’s about it. You asked me what I do. I write. That’s my job. I make money writing. Yeah, I’ll have another beer if you’re buying. Sure is slow around here. I mean the service. Six tables at least for her. Hi, sweety. Yeah, you. They should call you sweaty. Anyway, bring us another couple each. And, stick the ham between your legs. Okay, okay. I was just testing the old buns. Sooorry. Oops! Sooorry, did it again. I’ll try to control myself. Yeah, as I was saying. My mother calls me whatever and I don’t mind. Oh, maybe six years. The last time I saw him he was wavin’ me goodbye, hurry homedrops on his cheeks. Ditz, that’s what he is. And not just because he left us in the lurch. No, he is really a ditz, whether I’m pissed at him or not. He drinks beer for lunch and has just cold potatoes that he snacks on. Jeeezz! Gaaad! How do you know him, anyway? I have no respect for that man. No one would. He takes young girls up to his room and sleeps with them and pays them to let him take their pictures. I think he makes money selling them to Videarn. Yeah, I saw the pictures. He doesn’t even bother to put them away when someone's over. Now, that’s vulgar. That’s what I mean by ditz. He couldn’t tie his own tie I almost sometimes think. Still off the farm in the forties, way back in the hills, no T.V. nor church nor nothing to rear him right, a Pontiac with big fins and rusted bumpers, an old calendar, if you know what I mean. Say, have you got the time? I have to get going. Ginny’s meeting me at the Sal’s. At four. Quarter to? Okay. Nah, she’s at the Bay now. They didn’t need so many clerks. Perfumes. Gaad, she stinks sometimes. I don’t know why they put so much on. Do they think they smell like sweat? Do they think other people will smell their periods? Huh? Jeeezz, already. I mean, I can’t ride elevators at Eatons anymore because all those girls wearing it in there. It smells like a perfume outhouse, if you get my drift. Nice shit. Anyway, she knows I don’t like it and showers before she comes to bed. Yeah, she puts it on after she leaves the house. I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe Channel, or one of those. Oh, shut up. Why do you want to know? You want to buy her some? Just stay away from her. I’ll drive your teeth right down to your ass if I ever see you near my place when I’m not there. My next one? Chapters. Tuesday, seven. Along with Moss and Webster. They spelled it Copland, the pricks!. Jeeeezz, already! Can’t they get one thing right? At least they sell good coffee. That I’ll give them. In there, even the books lament their own stasis and long for libraries where promises of love await them each time a girl pulls them to her lap. Hey, Love! Another two. For each of us, yeah. Pilsner, please. May I? No? Why? I thought you liked it. I won’t pinch hard. Just a little, like this. Sooorrry! Okay, okay. I won’t after this last time. Oww. A beer bottle? Right, I’ll watch my hands, already. Melissa? Nice. What are you doing when you get off? Suck one yourself, you little . . . . Jeeezz! Yeah, I’m off to L.A. in a few weeks. No. No. No. I don’t think she’s going to come. She’s got this new job at the Bay, like I said and she can’t just get off any time. Plus, the two retrievers. They’d go nuts in a kennel. No, she’s going to be staying home. Why do you ask? You little prick. I know what you’re thinking, you piece of shit. If I find out that you so much as called my place when I was gone I’ll drive your teeth so far back in your throat they’ll have to do a rectal exam before they start the dental surgery. Stay away, and I mean it. Don’t. No. No. Shut up. I don’t want to talk about it. Just fuck off already, you little prick. You dirty little weasling rat humper. You slimy measly piece of goat shit. You called her? When? Why, you . . . . She never told me. I don’t believe you. We don’t even know you. You’re lying, you sniveling hunk of donkey shit. Pink? With little red love hearts? Yeah, so? You been looking in her window, that’s what! You been looking in her window, you gaaddamned . . . . You snuck in the house and looked in her drawers! Oh, jeeeezz! She told you she was? What? You asked her? You right out and asked? Take that you fucking wife-stealer. And that. I hope you bleed to death. There, try to phone her on the cell yet now, you sneaky bastard! Gaaaadd! Jeeezz!

Albertasaurases (“Autobiography” cont’d)

Albertasaurases (“Autobiography” cont’d)

       By So-called author Dung Reimer

              ­kleenex

             one deserves preserves on the reserves

                 observe the reverb of the preverb at the highverb
                 nevre everve the televerves if they comatyouvervs

A body was flung into the sea. Police were notified and they followed a suspect. Cameras and hidden devices searched for clues and patterns. Scott Peterson was tried and finally exonerated. His wife and unborn child, dead by drowning, were buried at a cemetery near Wichita. The sea does not preserve well, but it preserves well enough. Much, much later it washed up on shore a nylon rope with markings on it and of a length that proved Scott Peterson guilty. After twelve years a free man he now whisked into a police station, he crowed and pleaded before a judge, he ate little and slept poorly, and then he died of a lethal injection administered at the Port Pravda prison in Louisiana. Scott Peterson is no more. His memory falters on. Only his kind remains in our minds two thousand years hence. Like the dinosaurs. We say there were Duck-billed dinosaurs and Albertasaurases along the Red Deer River, but none of them are named Bob or Aaron who had this or that specific history of criminal or generous behavior. History will not be kind to the particulars of Scott’s life, nor will it care about this or that demise. It will, though, recall forever that in itself that kills mothers and children by drowning them.

       Talking about preserves and the preserved, my mother, married to the great, great grandson of Klaas Reimer, fool of that Chortiza colony so resplendent in the late nineteenth century, made the best Bing cherry preserves. I fermented wine from the juice of those preserves, as some fifteen-year olds are wont to do. That is neither here nor there. The preserves are what I wish to tell about. They were in mason jars lined along a pantry in the northwest corner of the basement. There were cherry preserves, pickles, tomatoes, tomato ketchup, mustard pickles, pickled pig’s feet, salted chicken feet, jellied smoked farmer sausage in jars that had about them a grayish, jiggling look, raspberry preserves, strawberries in sugar water, beets, tomato soup, and in a corner a five gallon crock of sauerkraut. This was how I grew up and this is what we ate and thought about eating when we grew hungry. I did not eat in a restaurant three times between the ages of three and fifteen.

       At fifteen my sister was staunchly evangelical, my brother younger than myself was a flying daredevil on a Honda 150, my brother older than me was a budding scholar in the USA, and my youngest sister was growing up so beautiful the entire world would know about her in the sequel to the Flying Nun that hit the screens in the late eighties.

       In the late eighties things changed once again for the inhabitants of Greek Island on the north shore of eastern Asia. Descendants of Genghis Khan, they throve there in those godforsaken barrens. They remained excellent equestrians and gave themselves and their lives wholly over to horses and horsemanship. Even the girls rode well. For a period they had attempted en masse to switch to sidesaddle instead of riding bareback but that fetish soon got itself forgotten and they took off their blouses once again for riding and observed tradition. In eighty-nine, however, a visiting missionary asked to see the register of names of the town’s people and those of the surrounding hamlets and he was brought a tome of a hundred pounds bound in leather. In it he found entries as far back as the great Khan himself. He could not believe his eyes. Could he be perceiving correctly, he wondered.

He asked if he could borrow the book and take it to Moscow to have it verified, but the locals looked at him with amazement. They drew their knives and began to stab him. He implored them to save him for he had meant no harm. They bound his wounds and let him go. He came back ten months later with a small army of historical experts who saw the book, filmed each of its pages, secretly took a sample of the velum to identify the age and type of the manuscript and left. Then, to their great surprise, the thing turned out not to be a hoax. The village of Hamperskhan has never been the same. Now they have a television station, a radio station, a fast food outlet, and a small library.

It was in a library, in fact, that I had my first epiphany. I may have been thirty-two and I was idealistic. I thought that women were magic and that touching them was restorative. I also thought that I would or could find out a great deal more about God than I knew at that point. I entered the library at the university and began perchance to read books in the older sections of the building where were stored as yet uncatalogued volumes. I found one marked Shelley and it was an old, old text. In it I found to my delight a story about a monster who died trying to reach the North Pole. It killed its master in the process and then vanished over the ice running and swimming as if immune to the cold. I realized then that idealism is a bane not a boon. The real is not but only the reel of our imaginations hoping to be made permanent and famous and, so, valuable. I eventually reversed my opinion. Later epiphanies concerned babies, music, teaching, mules, underwear, children, food, and luck respectively.

Never underestimate the ability of a preservative to keep wood solid. My deck and my dock are still pristine after twelve years because I painted them with a green preservative purchased of a lumber company in Kenora. My boat gets attached to the dock each year and it is a happy sight. My wife sits on the deck and reads each summer for a few weeks when we are at the cabin, and that too is happiness. I should preserve them once more soon, just to keep in mind the day when rot may wish to make its presence felt. A great white pine and a great red pine made the respective logs on which my dock decking is laid. They are massive trees at least sixty feet in length and of a great weight. A white pine is a thing of beauty, and I only wish we might have, as a human race, preserved one lake-worth of these beauties for posterity. But no, we had to take each one down, so that now not a two-foot thick pine stands in all of the northern Ontario region.

Sparse Plots

Sparse Plots

       By Lord Douglas (Salgoud) Rawleigh

                        i prayed to the father

                        and to the holy ghost

            `           i prayed to the spirit

                        but I prayed to god the most

Years ago when God was void, air and land and sea mixed in a swirling mog. Chaos ruled and no structure anywhere had a place in His grand dominion. God thought to Himself, I must change this. I am tired of it. I will do something to relieve the monotony of swirl and fold. And He did.

       He brooded on the deep. Now “brooded,” as you know, has that Saxon root of “broo,” spelled “brew” in our day. He drank a couple of beers that He rustled up from within Himself and thought with intense intensity about the problem. This would have to be a great thing, somehow, to replace the insane display that Chaos had cornered for itself. Cornered, or created, God was never quite sure. In fact, till this moment of boredom, He had never really contemplated much at all. He could and did do. That is true. But when You are a Flow and a Downward Rush, a Resistance and a Flight, You do with a kind of immediacy that requires no thought. Oh, thought could have been involved, but with the same characteristics that all other movement and action in Chaos demonstrated. Till now, then, Chaos contented itself had with such spontaneity. So, when the Divine brooded, he took to His Circulian mouth a formed bottle and drank from it the liquid it contained. He brooded for the first time in a long while. He had never brooded before. Correct. All Knowledge had never before felt like brooding and so hadn’t been that, though now that He wanted to He did. And doing so He came up with a response to Chaos that surprised Him not the least.

       It dawned on Him that brooding was work. Stopping and thinking, halting and reflecting, breaking from action and brooding, were a hell of a lot of work. Now, having thus labored long and hard, He realized that He did not really care for work. No, that is not quite correct. He discovered in Himself a resistance to labor, an inertia. Inert to movement of an unaccustomed sort, He decided, was the nature of Chaos. That would be the first thing that newness would have to contain within itself; there would be no allowances for the rule of inertia. Whatever came next would have to deflect boredom by refusing to sit still within its own flows, which were its will. Whatever came next would have to will and then live without that active flow that was will in the doing that came till the doing was done, which was not a doing. Yes.

       That was a tricky thought, but having sipped long enough till the brew had made that thought clear to Him, He knew that the most difficult part of the relief of boredom had been accomplished and He said to Himself that it was good. Having determined that work was a beast, that work was a doing of the non doing, the activity that was not activity, God said, “Now, what next?” He decided on something entirely foreign to Himself at that moment, too. I am, He thought. I am! And it is good! Lordy, how long do we have to wait? Which Road am I going to take? I’ve been in the lowlands too long. All these expressions of bluegrass delight infused Him, filled Him with the joy of knowing something exceptional. I am a thinking Thing. Thought is. Thinking, I Am.

       And then he rested. But, not for long. There was work to be done. “I am still bored,” He said. “If I stop here with the work of thinking (which is not a doing and a flowing that I will but a willless continuation of inward reflection, than I have done nothing. ‘I Am’ needs ‘I See That You Are!’ ‘I Am’ needs ‘I Seed You.’” And so, by circuitous means unfamiliar to Him, God arrived at an impasse. What to do to relieve the need to have a witness for His great discoveries about Himself?

       Well, now, this is where we come in. We were conceived at that moment. It was a long moment, and I am not going to bore you with the hourly reportage of it. The conclusion of this self-searching bore us. God thought us then. He reached into Chaos for the first available substance, like toast in the Thames, and formed it into earth. He divided the earth from the sky. He pronounced that good. And the next good too, which was the making of sea, fishes, and other things. He had already filled the sky with objects and great floating things. Now, next, still a bit anxious inside His own skin, God thought till He thought us and made us out of the earth of a favored sky object. Adam was made. There, I have duplicated Myself. That was a lot of work, but there I Am mirroring Myself.

       He said as much to Adam, who replied respectfully that he was bored. “Couldn’t I have something around here that I could see and put my faith in, as well as other things?”

       God then made Eve in the way we have come to know it. To relieve Adam’s boredom He made her. To even the score. She would see to it that Adam kept the garden neat and tidy. He would have little time for willing from that moment on. She would keep his life unboring. And she did. Things happened fast there, and before long they were out of the garden hunting and destroying snakes that attempted at the same time to outwit them and bite their ankles. Babies were born, and that kept them from willing. Children gave them hellish worries when they grew, and that kept them willless.

Animals needed to be husbanded (well, that may not be the best word choice, since Adam, on one or more occasion when Eve was in her way, or otherwise indisposed, did things unthinkable, mistaken as he was in his knowledge of words, but we will overlook that labor of his for the moment). Food had to be gathered. Eventually, governments had to be formed and kept track of and so on. Work, work, work, work. That was their legacy. That was the way of the world now. No time for flows. No time for willing. Only time for swilling and work.

Ah, well, where has the time gone?   

No Laughter and No Tears

No Laughter and No Tears

      

       By Ride-em Reimer

Lydian music merries the ear and tickles the fancies so that, if the hearer fails to respond with a full and bursting laughter before the finish of the refrain at some point in its fifteen minute duration, then plainly he needs some lessons in the freeing of the spirits. Dulcet for tears, Lydia for laughter, goes the old Roman truism.

       Roberta larked about for a few minutes before turning to the mirror to fuss with her hair that she had shorn down to the nub. She was going to the beach for the first time this year of our Lord, 1968. Why do men have balls, she thought. And she chuckled to herself. She whistled while she worked. Bikini. Don’t forget that, Robin. Itsy bitsy. Lotion. Where was the only place Janet didn’t let the strange man rub the suntan oil? In her eyes! Ha, ha, ha! Robin applied a bit of rouge, and eye shadow the color of Damsons. She painted ripe Bing cherries on her lips. She dabbed perfume under her arms, by her neck, and at her elastics. What did the lingerie clerk in Macy’s say when the customer asked how many pairs of panties they had in the store? Shower thongs. Romance. Ramona in Beijing. Sundress. In case it gets really hot. Who knew? What did the hatcheck girl say when she sat down on the cat? Okay. Have I got gas in the Civic? Yes. Do I have my wallet? No. It’s in the living room. Get that first.

       “Where do you work?” she asked Gordon.

       “At the Winkler Co-op. I manage dry goods, TV’s, radios, dishwashers, ranges, like that.”

       “Don’t let it get in my eyes,” she said, turning face down on her stomach. The sun shone. Birds whistled. The lake breathed.

       “I won’t,” he said. He moved his hands down along her upper thigh, barely touching it, taking his time massaging the lotion in. Besides the beach noises it was quiet.

       “I was married before,” he said, when he got to her knees. “I didn’t like it very much because I didn’t know what to do for my wife’s worries. She had a sad past with guys and I tried to listen and advise her but I wasn’t any good at it. She told me so and I agreed with her.” Robin lay on the sand. Maybe she was asleep, he thought. He found out when his hand rubbed up to within a few centimeters of her bikini bottoms between her legs. She turned over on her back and looked at him. He could tell that she was not looking yes.

       “Did you break up or divorce or are you still married?” she asked. A seagull called and the wind blew sand onto the blanket. A beach crab crawled up to her foot and he pushed sand over it with his heel.

       “I left. She wouldn’t divorce. She wanted us to stay together because of the kids. But I wanted to go. I couldn’t take her tears anymore. Cry at night. Cry Saturday morning when I finally had a day off to sleep in. Cry in church. Cry all the time. Jeez. I had no idea what she wanted. I think she just wanted to cry, maybe. Anyway, I didn‘t want to hear anymore so I left one day.”

       He closed the bottle of lotion and fell on his back beside her. The sun lay on them both. They could hardly breathe. After awhile they ran into the waves and then came and lay back down again. He went for ice cream. She took off her top while he was gone. When he was coming back she put the towel over her breasts and watched him. He didn’t say much but rested there glancing into the sun, up at her licking ice cream. She waited perhaps a minute then whipped her towel away to show him.

The rest cannot be written because it has been described so often. He touched her in a certain way, eventually. She liked it without reservation, immediately. He worked his way down toward her groin with caresses, too quickly for both of them but not so they could do or did anything about it. They panted and breathed with that unevenness. They said almost no words except silly ones. Yes, she explored him, too, enjoying as she always had the touching of a penis and its sudden wetness after a few minutes play. They moved their blanket behind some shrubs from where they could see someone approaching, and then they had what we call sex, which was quickly over. They washed in the waves. They repeated the above every half hour till they were both tired of it, suddenly. She cried then, from some inner emotion, or from being tired, she didn’t know. He laughed aloud to himself because he had enjoyed this so much, not having allowed himself to since his separation two years ago.

When they got to the parking lot there was nothing to laugh about and crying did no good. Her car had been stolen. His was there, still, of course, but it wouldn’t start because of the heat. For some reason it never did start well at the height of summer, being an old Ford. Its carburetors were tricky and got air locks. They laid down in the back of the station wagon on the few blankets and rugs they could assemble and slept there till early morning when, sure enough, in the coolness of seven o’clock the beast roared to life. They went for breakfast first before reporting the theft. After that they went to a matinee and in the evening decided to do something neither of them had tried before. They bought tickets to a comedy club and thoroughly enjoyed three of the five performers. She laughed happily, with a horsey and endearing whinny, and he tended to laugh too long so that after awhile, unable to stop, he would have tears in his eyes.

      

Harold, the Poopflinger’s Great Book

Harold, the Poopflinger’s Great Book

By Reimer (nee Portapotty) Doug

Harold, the Poopflinger (king of his country) was an educated man, never doubt that for a minute. His prodigious output of fictional writings attests to his learning. No necessity suggests the need to subject his remaining documents to the scrutiny of computerized studies in order to ascertain with certainty the intense philosophicality of the man. It may well have been his name itself—an exception, a uniqueness, in the nation that bore him—that drove him to push himself so relentlessly at subtle leanings and the wisdom of books. The national treasury lay at his disposal and he decided at an early age to spend as much of it as he desired on the patriation of bound texts from various and sometimes far-flung corners of the world. 

       That is how he accumulated most of the extant texts of the Alexandrian library (they happily had been largely preserved, despite the persistent historical accounts of the great burning) and read a good portion of them in his spare time. His venerable tutor, Putkins, without whose careful direction he could not have read the amount or kind he did, encouraged him, while he was still only twelve, to punctuate his daily habits with consuming literature (while sitting in the outhouse, fiddling with himself in secret and not so secret, whining for his string of nurses to pleasure him one more time before lunch, flying his paper airplanes, sneaking smokes from his father’s cigar supply), to carry books with him everywhere and to read as many as he could. He soon averaged thirty-five books a day, one for each activity in which he engaged. He based the duration of any personal endeavor on the time required to start and finish a book. So, while, for instance, undressing Mamitha Sqirl (pronounced with a long “i” as in “stye” and “smile”), the cook’s helper, and diddling her as she lay on the kitchen cutting block whisking cream, he read Plotinus’s The Vindication of Woman and of Man. This occupied about fifteen minutes. He had been taught speed-reading by the sagacious Putkins.

So, as it was, the Alexandrian library resided on his estate until its palace, too, unfortunately burned to the ground and then not a book remained. (Harold should have known better than to entertain himself with too many lighted candles all gathered in close quarters around Hermione Crescenta’s--the chimney sweep’s--voluminous crinolines--secretly borrowed by the said gay blade from his mother’s dressing room and, after a bath of her, encouraged onto the girlish figure of this his newest conquest.) By that time Poopflinger had ingested six thousand and fifty-seven volumes and grown sick of reading. Since he knew virtually all written knowledge then available to be known in the world, he gave up the habit and decided to spend more quality time in dalliance. Fifteen-minute rendezvouses became twenty-five. Hasty and playful nippings turned into extended forays into the secrets of the removal of clothing.

Harold enjoyed himself thoroughly until he died suddenly while libationing with a close friend, a renowned clergyman by name of Roger the Snivel (nicknamed Smackbottom by his parishioners). The reverend had not even time to pronounce official prayers for Poopflinger’s salvation before His Eminence expired and that was the end of him. I was going to say, when I was so rudely interrupted by the story of this gallant’s high learning, that he wrote many a fine book himself, books which many read then and would be reading now but, alas, mostly burnt in the conflagration. Only a few have survived. I do have in my possession a copy of one that I intend to translate into Spanish. It resembles the account of Don Quixote by the famed Cervantes, only written in a more solemn style, and with less levity. A strong, reverent delivery it assumes, with here and there the elicitation of a chuckle.   

Crack, Smack, Back, Plaque, Whack, Rack, Hack and Nack

Crack, Smack, Back, Plaque, Whack,
    Rack, Hack and Nack
            by Douglasr Eimer

     which word does not fit

In June a transport jumped the median and smashed into Helen Groceteria. Half the box and the back eight wheels stuck out of the building. The driver explained to the owner that he’d been reading. When the owner’s wife was released from hospital in February, she kept the new arrangement at the store where a younger, more energetic female had been doing her former work behind the counter and along the aisles. The owner’s wife began planning new employment for herself. In July, she had an interview with a company that allowed its employees to travel. In August the truck driver was found guilty of gross negligence causing bodily harm and sentenced to one year in prison. That same month the new girl at the store fell off the short ladder and sprained her foot and had to stay home for two weeks. The owner found the load at work very difficult, but his wife would not step back into the place. She unplugged the phone and listened to the messages now and then and returned only those calls she wished to. The owner got his sister from whom he felt distanced to let her thirteen-year old daughter work there for adult wages for the two weeks. She returned to babysitting instead after three days and the owner had to resort to helping himself. The babysitter told her mother that the owner sold dirty magazines under the counter to underage boys. It was true. He sold Playboy magazines and a mild form of Japanese pornography with the text in Japanese. When his sister asked him about them, the owner phoned the magazine distributor next day and cancelled the standing order. The distributor sent him a bill for two thousand dollars plus for lost sales and breech of contract and the owner paid them. The legal hassle, since they had contacted a lawyer about the matter in advance of his payment, caused the company no end of grief and much later bankruptcy. The lawyer spoke to a judge of his acquaintance about the pornographic magazine firm. The judge, in a routine set of judicial orders some weeks later, gave this magazine company as an example of scurrilous values at a political rally. The leadership candidates debated national family mores and the question of sexual corruption of youth by media and business. One of them promised if elected to look into the issues and begin to do something about them, and, in short, ordered an investigation into this company’s holdings. He found, quite by accident and incidentally, that they had defrauded their shareholders. They were ordered by the courts to pay back six million dollars plus fines of another two point four. They declared no contest, closed their doors, and set up business in Texas. The truck driver lost his license to haul freight in May and decided to stay on welfare till he found a new job. The owner's wife sewed doll clothing for a toy store in downtown Toronto and took her ideas from television runway shows. Her doll clothes were risqué and not meant for children. A year later she had made a small name for herself and began to travel to actual fashion shows. She attended one in Paris and another in New York that winter. The mother of the babysitter began to work for the owner since her husband was ill and could no longer regularly appear at the computerized sign company. He’d been employed there for thirteen years. Before that he had also hauled freight by transport. Now he mainly stayed home and lay in bed or watched television in the living room from the couch. His wife looked newly joyful, now that she had work. Till this recent employment she had been a housewife and had grown tired of the business of providing for adolescents. The store owner liked his sister’s work habits and began to feel a renewed interest in his store. He thought of ways of making it pay him better returns, and eventually turned to her for ideas. She had a large store of them and they were of a sort and kind that produced results. Customers flocked in now on days when there used to be half a dozen a morning. In December they began the building of an addition to house the shoe and clothing lines they had taken to selling, and by April it was completed and up and running. The previous February, the husband had died and it took the sister two months of lethargy to return to the energy needed to begin to sell the new products in May.  The owner’s niece began to work for the T. Eaton company on Bellville Avenue and the next year, when she was in grade eleven, she had her first pictures in the store catalogue modelling clothing. That summer she began to pose for photos in a Canadian fashion magazine. She wrote her mother from Sidney next March that she would soon come home for a visit, but she would not be able to finish her high school for another two years. Her priority now, she wrote, was to establish her career while she had the looks and the figure. The store owner broke his leg falling from a ladder and by the following September he had still not fully recovered. He sat in an easy chair in the store while his sister organized, rang up sales, climbed ladders, set up displays and in every way showed him how competent she was at this world of commerce. The truck driver began to think about working again. In October he bought a little quarter ton and by the end of the month was delivering and hauling small items around the city. His first delivery was a gas generator to a small company building homes on the outskirts beyond the power grid. His second and third jobs were more rural and had to do with carting manure to gardens well past the perimeter. By the early months of winter he was busy almost every day without a driver’s license. 

A Meal of Grand Proportions

A Meal of Grand Proportions

      

       By Wisdom Personified

       “Hey, Buddy!” said the first king. “We’ve got to wage war.” He picked up his guitar and strummed three notes that sounded sinister and clear. He had studied in a royal music academy and was deemed to be very good at brief compositions of the sort that ring in your ears for a second and then are forever forgotten except as memories of something detestable you hope never to enter the porches of your ears again.

       “Nah,” said the third king, “we don’t.” War is all fine and good for you old guys but I am still young enough to be asked to lead the troops into battle and act as all around heroic role model and I will have none of that. I prefer eating fish and sauces and drinking both Rennish and French wines as well as English beer and were I to be emasculated by the throes of conflict and come home without either arms or legs or what lies between these poles, if at all, then what is to become of my concupiscence and its consequences? Nay, nay, war is nat for ones lak mae. Ee wold reethar shat and pae.”

So saying, he sat him down on a fallen log at the entrance to his abode all richly decorated with vine leaves representative of the making of vintage and, leaning against a wall, fell soundly asleep. A dove landed on his head and sang pretty numbers there, in deference to this regent who once had housed without great charge the great Francis of Assissi, belovéd of all nature. He snored. He breathed foul flatulent and feathery mists. The other two stared at him a moment and walked away. They would have nothing to do with such a budgie, such a miscreant.

       The second king was a wise one who prided himself on his insights into history and world affairs. He said, “Now that we are private, and away from that gullet, let us reason together about what is the best way to chastise the Kurds on our borders who have, as you know, already destroyed a good ten percent of our holdings, villages included. Plus, they have taken livestock from the royal barns, treasures from our nobles, measureless tonnes of wheat and barley from the granaries of the richest farmers, and most of the larger women from the houses of both the poor and wealthy. What is to be done, you ask? War, now immediately and no concern since in this condition of siege we already live in a hell of someone else’s making? Diplomacy, with its bowing and scraping, with its singing of mellow praises to the very leaders who have already insulted us beyond endurance?”

He waited for king one to respond, but since that fellow had no resources to understand such things he continued in an attitude of listening, waiting for his friend to enlighten him. A fallow sang, a bittern bounded across the trail before them, and all nature lived for the answer. Flowers of a blue such as we see just before the black of night, scented the air with lemon and orange. A stone rustled down the bank.

“Well, I opt for subterfuge,” he continued. “Let us forge a pact here and now to harbor them without rancor. We will make their stay in our land as pleasant as if the Islands of Paradise had themselves been transported to our Hyperborea, with good viands, fine liqueurs, and various delights of a carnal sort that our daughters more fully understand than we. And, when they are fast asleep, so to speak, we will trip them up so their souls go to hell whereto their heads unfortunate point.”

So saying, king two plucked an apricot from a branch above his head and bit into it. It squirted aphrodisiac and then the two made their way back to the site of king three who still slept with a calm and happy look about him as if he had just indulged in a meal of grand proportions and quality.

A Bee was in her Bonnet White

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A Bee was in her Bonnet White

      

       By Ding Dang Doggy Doug

        A bee was in her bonnet on a bright warm sunny day

         It flew in while she put it on to walk in early May

         She noticed it after a while when bending down to smell

         A flower of the season bright a pretty pale blue bell

         And “ouch” she said for it stung her then and tried to fly away

         She smacked the top of her white hat and had the wit to say

         “If every tiny creature bit each other creature so

         The world would quickly pass away for we’d all want to go”

Carla walked through the woods and met there on a ridge of slender birch trees a shaggy wolf, which stepped out of the gorse and began to speak to her.

       “What is your name, little one?” it inquired with gentle voice and a smile wide as could be. It appeared so friendly and good-hearted that Carla herself gradually inclined in the same direction. She had been very frightened at the first, but now she settled down and her courage got the better of her agitation. She pulled herself up as straight as ever she might and spoke in answer.

       “Hello, sir, whoever you are. I do not recall having heard a wolf speak in a language other than howling before, but since you seem to know mine, I will assume that you are not who you appear to be?” Her salutation tilted up at the end to form a question that she hardly expected to be taken for such. The rest of her interlocutions were not queries, however, unless she intended an answer, and she continued thus.

       “I am afraid of wolves, normally, and I felt great trepidation when you stepped out from behind the tree. Your kind words and refined manner, however, have so far ministered to my agitation that I feel I may ask you a question without either appearing rude or encouraging anything unmild in your behavior. She paused, watching his mouth for signs of irrationality. None was forthcoming. The wolf, wise and experienced in the ways of relationships, waited for its companion to continue as she inclined. A whiskey jack flew into the pine and stayed there, where it rattled out a message to a mate somewhere further inland. The wolf took snuff and sneezed, apologizing immediately.

       “Accepted,” she said, and asked him this. “Sir, you have not told me your name?” She paused, waited, and then found that her impatience began to itch in her shoulders. Her feet commenced to move forward along the road. Her dress, a red one, below the knees, and with a crinoline lacy and white visible beneath the hem, made a rustling sound with each step, not unlike the leaves of aspen in a breeze. The wolf followed beside her near the edge of the path.

       “My name,” he said, awkwardly pausing, “is Wagner. I am Germanic by birth, and of Teutonic royal blood. Yet, I find myself here, in this granite country, transported away from my natural environment.” He stopped, but found his friend interested and inclined to hear more.

       “Who are you, miss, and how did you come to be here in the woods in the vicinity of Kenora on the Lake of the Woods?” He took snuff once more, apologized, enjoyed the drug immensely for a moment and then turned towards her again. A mottled frog hopped diagonally over the path before them and disappeared into the shrubbery.

       “My name, sir, is Carla. I am fifteen, and am first in my class. My grades are always “A”s and my teachers think that I am a very good student.” She waited for some encouragement and got it in the smile Wagner gave. He waved a paw as if asking her to continue and let his furry arm touch her side for a moment. The limb was warm and soft and he wished he could stroke it in the sunshine. He did not, of course, act on his inclination since we unbidden do not do as we desire in matters such as these. Small lime leaves, recently buds, waved on the more tardy birches. On others, full leaves smiled and looked about as if happy to be observing the world once more.

The way grew rocky and often their feet faltered over this projection or that. They appeared headed toward a nearby lake. Heat beat down with vigor. For a time they walked together, wolf and girl, and said little. She felt radiant with sun, inside as much as outside on shoulders and hair. Wagner needed to cool off and thought about ducking into the shadows of the woods, even just for a few moments, into its easing breeze, but he desisted. Soon the lake came into view.

“We maybe should go swimming?” Wagner said, indicating the water glimmering ahead, blue as herons' eyes. Far distant waves lapped on a rocky promontory. The rise of hills at successive points of land along the lake edge and the grand sweep of spruce and pine on each of these made the longing to get into the lake urgent of a sudden, and Carla thought and in time, after silence, nodded.

       They were soon in, side by side, calling out how cold it was on skin and neck, but then just as quickly that left and other sensations of more relaxing kinds succeeded and they began to swim out from land. They found themselves in a bay a few hundred yards long and a hundred wide. Paddling left, they stayed close to the bank, plying their way by inlets and indentations of shore until they had by inchworm circled the entire bay. They stayed close together, pressing forward, speaking little, their fingers or feet touching now and then. Soon, too soon, tired, they climbed out and sat side by side in the sun on the rock.

       Quiet an hour, lying, sitting, knees up, knees down, they began in time to speak freely. They discoursed of water, of wolves, of girls, of nature and of the holy union of all creatures. From that summer on, Carla and Wagner looked forward to swimming around the bay together each chance they got. Carla took at least one annual swim in his company for all the years she was a girl, for all the years she was a young woman, eventually married, and for all the years she was an old woman, even after her husband died. She never forgot Wagner and Wagner never forgot her.

  

        

       

Cousteau's Cousin

Cousteau’s Cousin

       By Uglas Yemer

              a most private place

Carmana, Donita Carmana, after whom the opera was written, was Jacques Cousteau’s second cousin. His mother was a Ferrari, and her mother a Salvatore. Dona Salvatore’s daughter, a Frederico, gave birth to the eventual Dona Reclusiva, and this woman produced Cousteau’s cousin. All this happened in the little village of Sole Musica in the furthest northern undulation of the Alsatian Alps.

Carmana was all ears. For music. She would even listen quietly, raptly, through her Uncle Renaldi’s uninspired performance of Brahm’s tedious “Bull Run Revels.” She would have attended with the same sincerity if he had played it through again. She was, in May of 1964, seventeen, five feet five inches in stocking feet, of slight weight, with hair as much the hue of night as has ever been since God created Eve, and a figure as light and lithesome as Juliet’s herself when the Franciscan murmurs about her gossamer footfall on the everlasting flint. And she was on the verge, this mundane Brahms morning, of meeting her creator. Or, rather, the creator of a composition that would suddenly bring her to Cousteau’s attention and eventuate in that conjugal union, the offspring of which now is being sought so assiduously, as you may have noticed in the papers, on a worldwide warrant by the FBI for his role, unexplained to the public as yet, in the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma city.

Bizarre, that union of black mane and purest white skin that poets have ever had the urge to adore. I have many times myself noticed it and marked it as miraculous, but my interests lie elsewhere. And she is my second cousin, too, on Cousteau’s side. Be that as it may, she sat there, pitch and chalk together, rapt in Brahms. Newspapers proclaimed death everywhere and she was oblivious. She cared not a whit. And if all the world had been collapsing, its great towers sagging under the weight of sudden colossal tremors, its bell towers pealing accidental warning, the very raindrops descending in tiny shrieks of sorrow and inquietude, she would have leaned there, white cheek on her white hand, black hair about her shoulders, attending to what makes this life a thing of worth. On this May day, then, joyful, not knowing her own feelings, not accustomed to seconding “joy” or “sorrow” or "disgruntled” or "dismayed” or “happy" or “unconcerned” to name herself, she was just Carmana, unnamable, the most beautiful and serene femaleness on the land on that day in that hour that nature had ever labored to bring about. And here came Mozart to tea with her uncle.

       Mozart had never before visited the estate on which Carmana spent her first sixteen years, growing up as if outside of door and book. Her uncle knew the composer from various pursuits they held in common, practiced usually during evening hours and then inevitably under the enchantment of brandy and wine. This day, however, both men had uncharacteristically agreed to meet at Uncle Delacroix Renaldi’s home instead, each suffering from the the most unforgiving of hangovers. The previous evening they had renounced liquor of all kinds and agreed from that day forward to drink only tea and coffee, besides water and fruit juices. Mozart knocked, entered, gave up his gloves, hat and coat, looked over at the divan on which Donita Carmana sate, and motioned alertly to Uncle Renaldi not to stop but to continue rhapsodizing. Carmana sat as oblivious to the presence of an observor as she was to, we know, death being  dealt in the world at large. She listened, all ears, without opening her eyes.

       Entranced, Mozart, too, attended to Renaldi’s numbers with greater intention than he had ever before bothered. When Uncle came to the place in the epithalamium where the crescendo and the dolce forme announce the closure of the breamage for the bride, Mozart motioned for please one more repetition, and Uncle complied. For another two hours he gazed on Cousteau’s cousin and felt himself expanding outward till his very being touched hers. The great composer came to know in that short time that without her always in his presence life would be a mistake.

       When he finished Carman, on which he sweated ceaselessly for the next eight months, Mozart invited Carmana to a private performance of its most elegant movements. She came. She listened, sitting absolutely still so in upshot he could not guess her mood. Eventually, he decided, his heart beating with hope for her approbation, that she leaned in favor of this music. She stood, when he was done, bowed to him, still silently, still without lifting her head, still without him having once seen her face, and then raised her eyes to his. He saw there what he needed. Tears. Two drops of water in them. She studied him for some minutes, and then inquired if this music had a name.

       “Carman,” he said. She smiled, and with a little bow, left. And that was the last time Mozart ever saw this astonishing woman.

       She and I have crossed paths many times since. We scuba-dive together. In fact, we studied that art on the island of Calmotroy off the Guatemalan coast last June. She dives well. She likes to sing under water with the bubbles foaming up around her face and hair. She smiles then the most rapturous smile. And, though I cannot hear her words, I know that she is setting a tea the fishes will never forget.