Great with Rhododendrons

Great with Rhododendrons

       By Douglas Parenti the Unremarkable

              “A poem is worth a thousand words.”

Lister Sinclair   
          

                        Einstein’s social philosophy: “Give them

                                    An inch and they’ll take a mile.”

People waste fifty years of their lives boozing. Or, they waste sixty-five and die. Or, they waste their best years boozing and then quit at about forty and feel glad they did, often becoming evangelists against drink. I never minded people drinking, and getting into terrible trouble doing so, until my own kids had the disease and then my involvement became intense. Now it is time to leave those fears behind and let the girl grow up, alcoholic or non, drunk or not, without career and purpose or with.

       My name is Martimer Spanish. I live at sixty-three Wessexfieldeaurop Drive. The trees here are splendid. Basswoods line the perimeter of my seven acres. Rabbits live in the hedges of the Hyena Shrubs and produce babies that I catch and cook. My freezer has venison tenderloin in it from my own back yard. Raccoon meat is savory and becomes nice and tender breaded with dandelion flour and marinated in gooseberry preserves. Across the yard, a quarter mile from my sunroom window, lies the creek where I bathe in summer in a shallows I had excavated by Hermann the Human Backhoe. He can dig a grave in an hour and a half. He charges three hundred and fifty dollars for the work. He’s rich. He told me that to buy a mechanical digger and keep it maintained would cost him more than he can make doing it by hand. Barbary shoots in the swamp willows near the west end by the creek taste of menthol candies, slightly, but not as strong as juniper berries taste ginny. A substitute for cod liver oil is the oils extracted from the bark of the Swedish Pine that I planted a row of down the eastern side of the yard back in the early sixties. They tower over everything now and I hear them clearly at night soughing in the wind, though they are a hundred yards distant. I have planted a few acres of grass fit for human consumption. It tastes slightly of baker’s yeast but it works marvels on the digestion. Prunes I dry myself from the plums that grow wild along the shore of Banjo Creek.

       And that reminds me. All musical culture is a waste of time and dangerous to the health of individuals. When I drank a great deal in my twenties, I listened to bluegrass music and it drove me to wish for more drink, not less. Give up music when you give up drink and your life will be happier for it. Rhododendrons are good for you, despite the official cautions that they poison the stomach. I have myself consumed many a plant of the Russian variety and survived. Taken with coffee and sweetened with a little raspberry syrup, those leaves taste a great deal like pancakes dipped in peach nutmeg. To drink with rhododendrons, I recommend, besides coffee, Vasavean Cocktail. It is a concoction of juices from wild plants that have all been named on the container, and is available at most health food outlets. I do not recognize most of the ingredient names. The only one I knew was the Pristinia Wart Shrub. I had no idea that it contained any liquid inside the shoots at all, dry and withered as the stems always appear. Nevertheless, the drink is fine with rhododendrons. It comes across with slow increase to the surprise of the palette and especially registers its most sticky claret flavors near the back of the mouth, sour and sweet both, like fine red cherries.         

Gimli

Gimli

Character: a son of a whore

Setting: Gimli, Lake Winnipeg, Mb

Plot: No denouement; no expected resolution; no foreshadowing; just an encounter with a whore and a reminder that he is—his memory tells him—a descendent of a whore himself. He sort of likes whores. He dislikes women (somewhat, for someone who dislikes very little) who are not whores.

Theme: People are neither good nor bad, but are what they are and they won’t be people much longer in the humanist tradition.

Point of view: A son of a god tells this? Let’s see.

She charged two dollars for minor favors, and six for the larger ones, prices a small town shoemaker might accept. She managed quite well. Got by. That was the main thing, as far as she was concerned. When citizens of Gimli got up in arms about her being there at all, much less permanently ensconced in rooms in the beautiful Harbourfront Hotel, she paid little attention. She smiled—a little sadly—to herself, in fact, when she read the Gimli Gazette’s headlines to the effect that certain women who made their wages soliciting should be got to leave town by hook or by crook.

       Things got worse, though, and then she did think of leaving. Possibly for Riverton further down the lakeshore. Riverton posed a problem, though. Not enough of a customer base. Even if she included the fishermen from Gimli who docked their skiffs there and worked from that shore, she still doubted if she could put bread and butter on the table. When the going got rough, she phoned her “agent” in Sandy Hook for advice. He was seldom there for her when she needed him. He was unreliable. He took his share and spent it and gave her virtually nothing in return. An ear, at times such as this, but that was all.

       The reason she thought about going at all arose for her as a result of an incident with local authorities. The police seasonally pestered her because of certain husbands enjoying themselves too freely. Now, again, this year, there was a kafuffle. This last incident happened at breakfast where she sat alone on a cold February morning. A great Hollywood actor, unbeknownst to her, had arrived in town and was staying at the very hotel in which she had rooms. He was, apparently, expected at breakfast and just as her eggs arrived and her coffee had been refilled, with the cream put in, two policemen stopped at her table and said they needed her to come with them for a short while. She smiled but felt no joy. She understood the general intent, if not the specific reason for their sudden attention.

       “No,” she said. “I’m finishing my breakfast first.” She looked at each of them and then started on her eggs. One took her by the arm and the other put his hand on her shoulder. She leapt up and shouted, “Police!” Of course, that made them smile. She smiled, too. The waitresses looked through the double swing doors from the kitchen. A few eaters at the other tables pretended not to have seen or heard. Once more the officers took hold of her. She was about to give in when a greying man of fifty stepped into the room and, taking one look around him, called to them.

       “What did she do?” he said, pointing. “Was she bothering anyone?” He asked this so simply and with such interest that the men in blue stopped and walked up to him.

       “She’s bothering the clientele here, even if she’s not soliciting at the moment,” they said. The stranger glanced from her to them and said, “Please, just let her stay. There is no need for this, is there? She surely has a right to eat here just as I do, and as those three over there do?” He waited, watching the men who seemed moved by his words. They glanced at each other.

       “But we have an order to arrest her. She has broken the law again and we have to confine her. What choice do we have?” The tall officer with the thin face and pink nose blew into a hanky. The other put his hand over his own nose to keep out airborne germs. The waitresses had been joined by the cook, brown and red spatters on his apron and his hat on crooked, as well as the dressy manager of the hotel. The manager made moves as if he should enter the discussion. He desisted, maybe because he himself on occasion spent some time in Raymonas’s room.

       “You have never broken the law, I take it?” the stranger said. “If you have, your logic is weak, you know. Just give her a warning and let her go. It won’t hurt anyone. And, anyway, I’ll write a letter of commendation for both of you and it might well result in your promotions instead of anything else.”

       Wagging their heads, after a few moments, and smiling as if friends with the stranger, the two nodded and walked out, though not without a look of disapproval at the woman.

       “Join me, Raymona,” the stranger said. “Let’s have a real breakfast, shall we? Bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, and even, if they serve that in winter, walleye fillets!” He winked at her and took her elbow. This time the woman made no move to remonstrate. She did not yell “Police!” Nor did she look sadly at the floor as if she knew the moves. Over at the door, and even from the portal to the kitchen, she heard a name mentioned.

       “Harrison Ford! That’s him! I want his autograph. I wonder if he’ll give it to me?” and so on. She had been rescued by Ford himself! She thrilled at the turn of events. How would she be able to believe this herself later, or ever convince anyone what had happened, she thought. And Ford was thinking, my mother was a virtuous woman, but she told me about my ancestry and it is not pure. Five generations back my maternal ancestor was a whore in  some village in North Carolina and she had more trysts than you could shake a toboggan at. And Jesus. Jesus’s great, great, great, great grandmother was a whore, history tells us.     

       

Garbage Cans Along the Beach

Garbage Cans Along the Beach

       By D (Twilled Curtains) R

Pukatowagon is hotter in May

Than boys on a nude beach at close of the day

Count your blessings name them one by one,” Enid Muswagon sang to herself as she bent over the stove and fished out the quarter that had fallen behind it. She added it to the jar of bus change and replaced it in the cupboard above the butter door. She had come from Mission Station this morning on Main Street. Drunks and poor people lined up quite a way down the block, starting at eleven o’clock. The soup was good. She had eaten two bowls and a couple of buns. Last night’s wine sat uneasy in her stomach.

       “A penny for your thoughts!” Count Gordon called through the window. He lived in the apartment adjacent to hers and separated by a couple of feet. He could reach in if he wished and borrow the dish detergent on her windowsill. She thought about how she needed to keep the lights off when she paraded around at night without clothes on sometimes if she had to go into the kitchen for some reason. Sleepy, she forgot now and then, and assumed that the Count had seen her naked on more than one occasion.

       “What’s that smell?” Enid called to him and he stuck his head into her window. He did not seem to know what she was referring to and she explained it to him.

       “It smells like your dog came in here last night and shat all over my floor. It also smells, on top of that, as if your sewer pipes had exploded and plastered junk and sour stuff over half my apartment. Not only that, but it stinks like rotten meat left in the sun for a week and then dipped in old castor oil.” She returned to the window where the Count lounged and listened. He pulled out a pipe and put tobacco in it and lit it.

       “That would explain my stomach!” he said. “The tobacco will help.” He puffed voluminously and sent the billows in the direction of her window. He was not fully dressed, in a sleeveless t-shirt and jeans, and cited the early hour as an excuse.

“Would you care for a cuppa?” he asked and disappeared and returned in a minute with a steaming mug that he reached over her windowsill. He whistled tunelessly and then sang a happy melody from a musical she did not recognize. The words were foreign, probably Italian. She asked him what the story was. He told her it concerned the death of a young boy who had loved a girl very much who did not want him to love her.

“That is very sad,” she said. “Does she die, too?” She leaned out the window and took no notice of the traffic that slid by to her left on Alamont. An older man stood between the buildings fiddling with his fly. Enid sipped the coffee and listened.

“Who told you that?” he said. After a minute he continued. “The girl dies many years later in an accident. She falls from a window where she has been sitting alone looking out of over a lake. One knows that she has been thinking of very little for she sings at that moment about the seagulls swooping over the bay. It ends with the ambulance arriving and taking her away, while out on the lake boats ply their trade and the wind continues its gentle soughing. Smoke from the peat fire burns the eyes of passersby.”

Enid thanked him and returned to her preparations. She was getting ready to return to the Mission Station. She loaded her minivan with her amp and guitar and mikes and stands and drove across town. She got help unloading and setting up from a few of the regulars there who faithfully came to hear her. She sang half a dozen numbers for the down and outers after their supper of fish and potatoes and then packed up and drove home again. She sat in the window in the warm June night air and listened to the few seagulls still squawking around the garbage cans along the beach. Smoke from a campfire on the point drifted past her apartment. It tasted nice on her tongue.

Christmas Tree Island

Christmas Tree Island

       By Douglastrodome Reimer

Duties skedaddle

Back in the saddle

Riding the fictional range

A plane drifted east over the lake and left a wake behind so white in the blue you’d think the dome of heaven had fallen in. Jonathan stood still for a moment looking up at it and then resumed his trek across the frozen surface toward Christmas Tree Island. His trail would take him past Highpoint, Limmel Island, Trout Narrows, Gooseneck Island and Scotch Rapids, and then through a long winding passage into the Big Northwest Bay. At the end of this bay, still some eight miles distance, lay Christmas Tree Island and the cabin of the mysterious man who had called him on his battery telephone late the previous evening.

       “Iss dis, ah, ah, iss diss Mr. Ofalbecken?” a throaty voice had asked when he’d answered. The ringing had startled him. The phone never rang. He kept it working for emergencies. He kept it working for the entertainment of the thing. If he felt like it he could dial someone. This made life fuller. It brought society or culture or urbanity into his otherwise wilderness world.

       He paused. “Yes. Who is this?” He did not know what to say to anyone over the phone anymore. He never had. He had never known what to say to anyone over the phone. He had got his wife to answer. Actually, he had left the answering up to her because she liked to answer it and already ran from wherever she was to get it. If she was ironing in the basement, she would begin to run up the stairs. If she was in the back yard gardening, or lounging, she would begin to run at the first sound of the ringing. That suited him fine.

       He was following the long north shore of High Point with its great visual barrier of red pine, crowning the mile long granite arch with a forest of towering conifers as fine as diamond tiepins and as matched in height as hair in a brush cut. A moose track came suddenly out of the trees and crossed the lake before him. It headed toward a southern  promontory where he had seldom been himself. Maybe that would be a good place to go hunting, he thought to himself. He was always on the look out for a new place to try for game. Winter supplies went quickly. A man living off the land had to make sure of three things well in advance of winter--lots of black tea, lots of sugar, and meat in the tree cairn.

       He thought the line had gone dead. “Hello?” he had said, and then the man had answered. The man seemed no more accustomed to the telephone than he was. A dog barked and the line crackled. Where was his voice coming from, he had wondered.

       “Can you come over right avay?” the voice said. What the heck! he thought. What does he mean, come over? Is he near here? Maybe he has the wrong number.

       “Where?” he had said. At first there had been no response. The man must have thought he would know where. From the long silence that followed, he concluded that this was a wrong number. He waited, looking about him for a piece of firewood to add to the stove. He put in a slab of birch and the door screeched and ground.

       “Christmas Tree Island,” the voice said and then the line went dead. The man had hung up or it had quit working. He had held the receiver in his hand for quite some time before he realized that he was doing so. He approached Limmel Island. From this distance, about half a mile away, it stood low to the horizon and had little shelter on it if he would ever need to take cover there. But he had done so once before. Once, when he’d come back from a hunt near Longjohn Rapids, a storm had driven him onto it and there, in the moment of danger, he had discovered a den, a bear’s den, beneath a ledge. He’d crawled in and lain down next to the hibernating animal, happy to be kept so fortunately alive. He kept on. Eventually, he found himself in the Big Northwest Bay and the temperature hovering near forty below, snow starting to swirl around him. He knew that he must make it across this notorious open stretch quickly. He would not want to be caught here in a strong wind.

       He went as quickly as he could on snowshoes. Christmas Tree Island finally loomed up ahead like a bear in the mist. He approached. He rounded its western tip. Wind blew at him and chilled him through and through. He felt suddenly tired and very cold. He would not have been able to go much longer. The cabin, he knew, lay just ahead. With his last energy he got to the shore below it, called out to warn the dogs and the man inside, and climbed unsteadily up the embankment. He stood by the door and knocked. No answer. No dogs barking. He hit the door with his fist. No one. He felt a surge of panic. What if . . ., he wondered, but then a figure materialized from the woods to his left and stood a distance away looking at him as if unbelieving.

       “Tank you!” the voice said. “Tank you for comink so qvickly! My vife iss dead. She died last night. The new baby iss livink, but she needs food and milk. We must try to get some from Sioux Narrows!”

       I stood there, and then sat down on the porch. He approached and took my hand. “Thank you!” he said again.