Square Off

Square Off

       by Big Ducat Dougie Duvet

Wilber and Piccadilly squared off over the girl. She officiated. She had started it. They fought in the Pavilion. Outside it was too cold and snowy. She wore a dress with a red cardigan over it. Wilber sported new running shoes of which he felt a bit smug. Pic divested himself of his t-shirt. He always wore t-shirts. They would take one blow each. Then, if they both still stood they'd each take another. And so on until one of them fell. I know this because I am Wilber's attorney. I have here before me the notes I made the day Wilber came to lay the complaint. As plaintive he deserves my support, but in fact I tend to believe Piccadilly's side of the story. 

       Ivy said go, they drew lots, Piccadilly struck first, a great blow on the top of Wilber's head. He fell like a log and never regained consciousness. He claims never to have regained consciousness. When he spoke to me he apologized for his inexactness. I wrote down what he said and read it back to him. He said it was different than that but it would have to do. Piccadilly stands six foot eleven inches and weighs two hundred and eighty-seven pounds. I keep my scale handy in case events require me to make judgments about a client based on his or her weight. Wilber tops the scale at one hundred thirteen pounds seven ounces. He smokes, drinks beer, speaks often of starting an exercise program one day and suffers from a bad cough that he cannot shake. The girl has a very pretty face. At two hundred and forty-three pounds, and six foot four in her stocking feet, she has caused many a man's heart to skip a beat.

        She proposed the fight and then, when Piccadilly had won, she walked over to him and dealt him such a blow to his nose that he fell over backward and lay there unconscious. Now they all live together. They stand a better chance of resolving issues that way. They don't have to wait for a convenient hour to speak but, unemployed all, and living on welfare, may take their jolly time to articulate their reasons and complaints any time of day, day or night.

The Stiffening of Her Legs

The Stiffening of Her Legs

       by Big Dong Reimer

                   an acquaintance of mine
                   became a homosexexual 
                   at the age of thirty and now

                   she is heterosexual again
                   married with a kid.

On the Yangtze River there is a place, apparently, where, when you go there they have to take you in. That's the difference between thought and knowledge. There are two kinds of unconscious, the forgetting kind and the memory kind. The memory kind, with a prodigious capacity for recall, and which can never be done with anything, is sick. The Chinese have a saying about this, too. They say that tanpan is not good for your digestion for it stays there and stays there, knotting things up inside until all you can think about is how to finally stop eating and get anorexic, and thus to control the whole show that way. A normal digestion would avoid tanpan at all costs. See, the anorexic (that entity with the digestive problems) thinks back unslakingly to all it has seen to discover if there or there or there lies its sudden error. It always finds the reason in part at every stop, at every little wayside picnic area, and sleeps nights satisfied that this time it has found the answer.

       Gonzalo loved his king because that individual ruled him and he, a loyal servant, had learned well at his mother's knee. He well knew the folly of an Antonio or Sebastian, talking others into crimes or being talked into it by others. Crime paid one with disreputability and that would never do for one able to imagine all new--clothes, skin, sky, land, mind--just from a dip in a strange sea. Why would it? "All new!" is a fine sentiment and a lovely feature of living to have arrived in one's thought. "Let us kill!" is a dreadful and "You are evil!" sort of thought to have come and to reside there. Gonzalo defended his king from onslaughts, at his bidding he threw books into the leaky bark of one subject being set adrift and unbeknownst to them living now on this very island, he called for the punishment of those guilty, he felt no guilt himself, and he divined the possibility of a brand new world here on this enchanted isle. Yes, we walk into the wilderness with Gonzalo and we do so willingly.

       Wickenham Jones, a singer and a writer of folksongs, performed at the Winnipeg Folk Festival only once. He succeeded greatly, drew many spectators to his workshops, and presented to adoration and applause at the main stage event the second night of the weekend. However, he ate something at the Whales Tails Concession that turned his stomach and his mind and he consequently never returned to Winnipeg, though the artistic director implored and offered him double the seven hundred they typically paid average bands. He'd sat down to eat a whale's tail. He did also just finish a Thai chicken noodle veggie combo before this dessert. And as he sat he noticed two girls holding hands and mooning over each other near him, on the other side behind him of the picnic bench on which he reclined. They laughed in a girly way, touched each other's shoulders and hair, giggled at nothing, and dipped and turned and glanced about with a quotient of secrecy that showed to great affect all the coynesses of which they were capable. They were on public display, after all. He loved this scene. The softness and grace of slight women was never lost on him. It isn't on singers and songwriters. With two of these slim ones gracing each other, how could he help but watch and pray.

       Soon, however, he felt terrible pangs in his midriff and thought he would throw up. So as not to make the young waifs think that they were the cause of his indigestion, he hurried to the row of blue plastic toilets where he could jettison his food unseen. He came out when he'd finished and sat down by the fence in the shade to rest. The music from the different stages had grown loud and disturbing to his ear. Near him on the grass two slight girls were wrapped in each other's arms and moving rhythmically together. They seemed oblivious to their surroundings. Their dresses, of pale, sheer material, one lime green, the other lavender, had ridden up their legs in an unseemly way. Wickenham noticed this clearly. He thought about what to do but could and did do nothing. He lit a cigarette and simply watched them, this time not pretending not to. They were close, within a few feet. They never did ask him to desist and lay off. They continued to cavort until one or both of them experienced a transformation on the spot, which made itself plain by the stiffening of her legs and then the slackening of her arms and neck.   

       Wickenham noticed these goings on with disgust and compulsion. When he left the park the next day back to Louisiana where he lived on a farm and grew berries and raised domesticated possums, he not so much vowed that he never would return as he never did so, even when entreated with sincere flattery and forceful request by the artistic director of the event.    

TheTent in the Woods

The Tent in the Woods

     by Gaylord Sedgwick Reimer-Penner


        love is just a game
        and lovers all have names
        that's the part that leaves us feeling free



A young man who felt alien at home snuck out finally into wilderness territory to find a place for himself where society would not negate him. Here, nature provided him with a solid sense of self. Named plants and trees impacted his stay but little. The rivulet beside his tent contributed fresh water. Food came to him via his fish line. Traps and snares set out in fall and winter netted him enough animal for meat and clothing. A town some distance away served as a suitable destination on those awkward occasions when urgency drove him out from his serenity. A hive above a group of poplars in a granite cliff he accessed for honey now and then, smoking the bees into submission first, as he had learned from readings on the subject. Winter proved trying, but the other seasons promised and provided an abundance of delight and solace.
        Wesley Ryan Whitaker had taken to carrying a switchblade to school each day in response to the taunting of fellow students. His mother and father as well as his sisters and brother gave him no end of further grief mixed with no small measure of insult. Friends he had none, acquaintances few. Fed up with this cocktail of bitter medicines, he resolved one day to concoct his own future, put the knife aside, exchange humans for animals and generally reclaim that which had turned against him.
        He studied a map of northern Ontario for some days, imaging the particularities of this or that lake. Some suited his sense of a good name but lay too close to a road or town. Others offered a suitable bay and forest but stood isolate from any such larger bodies of water that might entertain the fancies of an adventurous spirit. Wesley settle on a large body of water accessible by marine craft only, remote, but not to the exclusion of the possibility of exit with a day's effort.
       He left in the Whitaker suburban on a Sunday when all the family slept, traveling in the dark along the Trans Canada highway past Richer, Hadashville, Spruce Siding, East Braintree, Birch River, Falcon Lake, and Kenora, and then turned south onto the #71 where he passed Rushing River, Adam Lake, Granite Lake, Luther Camp, Black River, Musky Lake and White Moose Lake. When he came to Old Woman Lake he parked the truck, launched his canoe and crossed the mile of weedy water to a portage. He did all this in the dark with the aid of a powerful flashlight. He carried his canoe and then his packs, three times altogether, a dark quarter mile into Highwind Lake.
         The night was quiet and fine with a light mist descending, but warm as toast. He arrived at the far end of Highwind and camped, again organizing his activities with the aid of a torch, on a sweeping granite shelf he had known he would find there. Next day, in the dawning light he moved his camp further back from shore so that it would not be visible to any passing stranger on snowmobile, boat or plane. And there he made his home for the next ten years.
       Seven times in that decade he left his home on a trip into Sioux Narrows, paddling over Highwind's six miles of open water, portaging, crossing Old Woman Lake, and then walking the ten miles into town. Here in the bank he exchanged his gold dust for money and then spent a week cavorting in the local pubs as well as taking in the fine dining and entertainment at Sioux Narrows' Pilot's Point. One morning on each of these seven trips would find him once more gratefully returning to his canoe carrying additional groceries and hardware, recrossing Old Woman Lake, rewalking his gear back over the quarter-mile portage, recrossing Highwind's miles of open water, and resettling gratefully into his routines at his tent in the woods.