I’ve been tagged before, nominated for blogging awards, and, once, was even handed a Manly Man Award ~I blushed and accepted that golden statue of a platter of chicken wings with as much macho swagger as I could conjure up — I took pointers from Eartha Kitt’n to master that particular walk — & after the award ceremony finished I went home and leapt about with Kipling and Zippy~ and I know I’ll never achieve such heights again no matter how hard I try, but try I must. Here is a photo of Lyda Blue Heron flying away from Zippy

So, both Tonya Cannariato, the swift herder of Huskies, and Dionne Lister, the Tasmanian Speedster, got close enough to tag me with the 7 don’t-break-the-chain Game, and it would be doubly unlucky of me to let time pass and not fulfill the promise of such a showcase-ready event. Here are the rules which I will change slightly:

Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript
Go to line 7
Copy down the next 7 lines as they are (no cheating)
Tag 7 other authors

Since I was tagged twice I will give you 7 lines from my first two books and include the mock-up covers (I am tinkering around with all aspects of the covers to both books) . . . I begin the 7-Tag with my first eBook Sandcastle & Other Stories. This book is a series of ten short stories and will come out at the end of April, 2012. These stories have grown deeper over time and mean a lot to me. The book is dedicated to my parents.

Here are the 7 lines I found on page 77 of Sandcastle and Other Stories from the short story Poseidon Eyes, a tale of a woman who refuses the advances of a certain sea god:

Then a picture forms across the wall and I watch as a younger Melanie, a teenager again, runs along blinding white beach searching for her own mystic entrance to the water. She dances with the edge of the surf, and finally wades in up to her waist. Letting the waves bob her gently back and forth, she coasts along the shore almost out of reach from the undertow. Thinking: come and get me — try to find me, in and out, in and out, bobbing along, belly hovering with surf, rising with the crest, gliding effortlessly, the bubbles dipping and ladling her out farther, passing the line of undertow. Saying: catch me by the ankles and pull me deep where I won’t have to watch anymore, see the world through my Poseidon eyes. She swims out farther with the waves calling her back as they pass in the opposite direction: you must not, you break our rhythm, you will find nothing, pleading with whitecaps, speeding towards the beach to ricochet and journey back with her.

Here is the mock-up cover art for Sandcastle and Other Stories:

You’ll notice a change in pen names here in this post from one book to the next, but Wake Me Up will get the new name change, from G. Justin Bogdanovitch to plain old Justin Bog, once the book comes out in November 2012 (barring any gremlin and goblin Halloween pranks). I love Bogdanovitch — it means ‘gift from God’ or approximately that — but Bog says it all; it’s easy to pronounce, spell, and remember, and, besides, that’s what friends call me, Bog, Boggy, J Bo . . . just don’t call me late for dinner, yuck yuck.

Here are the 7 lines I found on page 7 of Wake Me Up, a tale of a horrific crime and how this crime changes one family in Missoula, Montana:

The namecalling breaks my stare and I get one more look into Ellis’s shadowed face before one of them punches me in the stomach and I huddle over clutching from the blow. All my oxygen disappears and I stumble onto my knees sucking wind, spittle and rain as the second bully hits me with the bat. I see it coming and try to deflect it with my right arm and the bat crushes my elbow and I see brilliant flecks and sparks of light and an overpowering blackness for a split second. The pain is enormous and I struggle to remain aware as the bat passes to someone else. I don’t know who has the weapon now but when I open my eyes I’m on my knees searching for Ellis.

That very morning I watched Ellis as he dressed in gym class. His aloofness brought people to him, his looks being judged on a higher scale — and not just by me; his newness was not off-putting; he made friends at an enviable rate.

Here is the mock-up cover art to Wake Me Up:

Now I must fulfill my end of this 7 game and tag 7 others, and, to quote Dionne: eenie, meenie, minie, moe:

1: Cathy Dreyer (payback hehe)

2: Angela Scott (great to choose from your new book)

3: Charity Parkerson (because the sentences you choose will surely delight)

4: Damien (newbiewriters podcaster supreme will have to dust off that tome and put 7 sentences together)

5: Catharine Bramkamp (the publisher and producer of newbiewriters and one  cool cat with novels to share)

6: Jessica Kristie (the poetry master can share the best lines of wonder)

7: Eden Baylee (who is working on a new book)

Please click on each member of the lucky 7 to visit wondrous blog worlds. Who knows where the gang of 7 will take us next?

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The Brand New Spanking Kipling & Zippy Report: 1st Spring Goose Patrol

Kipling turned six months this month of March and she’s almost half Zippy’s size and all sweet charm with a feisty side. Yes you can see Kipling here after she’s chased the two Canadian geese away from the pond . . . tongue out and in a hurry to catch up to Zippy. In this next shot Kipling is on a 30-foot leash for beginning training, to help give her the notion that she needs to come back to us when her name is called.

The beginning of Spring hit and with that first day came the early morning honk, so distinctive, of the Canadian geese who always arrive filled with spirit. These birds are unafraid of man, dog, or squirrel. They honk and glide closer to see if we are the kind of strange creatures who foolishly feeds them bread. Nope. Not a chance.

After letting Zippy and Kipling loose on shore around the pond I take to the water in the kayak to paddle closer and closer to the geese . . . If I don’t annoy them, they will annoy us by covering the lawns with goose poop which the critters eat and then bad things happen . . .

And the long coat German shepherd pack takes to the pond . . . from here they have to race about a quarter of the way around the pond where the geese will start honking as I get closer to them by kayak. When my presence was close enough they flew up and across to the far side of the pond and then exited. Kipling was so startled she raced away a bit frightened and hid behind a swing before racing for the dock in the first photo. These two came back the next morning with two friends and we made another pass.

The birds honk and the dogs bark and the kayaking is really peaceful

This is a photo from the next morning, and Kipling is on the right here just staring at the four geese.

It’s been a dry Spring but the lake level is high and most summers here we don’t get much rain — even though we are 90 minutes north of Seattle.

Eartha Kitt’n loves to come down to the pond shore whenever she hears us or Zippy and Kipling racing about. She’s best mates to Zippy and she took in all the goose patrol antics from the cottage deck. Purrfectly amused.

I am in the middle of the final stage of publishing my first eBook, Sandcastle and Other Stories, and I hope you’ll stick with me here on the blog for more exciting developments. The book’s cover art is complete and I will be sharing a sneak peak of that when the due date approaches in three to four weeks. To say I am excited about this news is putting things mildly.

 Right before Zippy stepped down from the dock into the front of the kayak. Zippy loves riding in boats.

Eartha Kitt’n watched as Zippy made the front of the kayak sink low since he’s almost 100 pounds. Happy Spring to you all.

In this last photo you can just make out Kipling’s shadow form in the cattails as she follows my kayak’s progress. She’s yipping and bouncing along the entire journey. Zippy sits and is very content to be a guide dog. The pink of the orchard trees is beginning to show.

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When I read a story or a novel and I enter its created world completely — with no outer distractions, and this mobile life we’re all living in tends to distract me even more — I cannot help but wonder at how the author pulled off the greatest trick. A terrific novel is equal to any magic trick. Rachel Ingalls is a top magician. I love rereading her mesmerizing prose. Each story is akin to being in writing class again, discovering how a Master weaves her art. I’ve been reading her stories and short novels since the early 1980s. Her first novel, Theft, won acclaim in 1970, and can be found in Something To Write Home About, gathered alongside other earlier works that I put up there with the best stories of Poe, or any other author who has a darker sensibility woven into the mundane. She writes about normal people going about their business, leading lives of want, need, and a certain immobility who stumble across something that changes them, or leaves them behind.

Stan Binstead and his wife, Millie, reached London early in the morning. They both felt heavy and tired from their flight and were already weighed down by an emotion that made for even greater lassitude–a kind of inertia, intermittently broken by irritable indecisiveness. In the army they call it combat fatigue.
– the first line from Binstead’s Sarfari by Rachel Ingalls. Just makes me want to figure the ins and outs of Stan and Millie.

People ask me “What or who is your favorite _____?” all the time. In the pop culture world, articles about favorite books, movies, music, dance shows, fill up several articles daily. What used to keep watercooler conversations humming before the age of smart phones and DVRs has gone online. You can’t go anywhere, listen to friends during Happy Hours across the country, without the entertainment world’s best and brightest sprouting up, their personal favorites, and you’ll find these same people checking statistics, what the latest box office is, did a movie tank, on their cell phones. I have my own favorites and I love to talk about them. Today, I am recommending one of my all-time favorite authors to you. Rachel Ingalls remains somewhat of a mysterious reclusive artist since every once and again as years pass between her writing projects, a new book, or a collection of stories will finally appear. Again, as if by magic. Each new tale continues to capture my imagination and inspires me anew.

I can’t read enough of the writings of Rachel Ingalls. She was born on May 13 ,1940 in Boston and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After dropping out of high school at 17, Rachel travelled around Europe for two years, auditing classes at Universities in Munich and other great cities. She came back to America and enrolled at Radcliffe College, earning an English degree. In 1964 she emigrated to the United Kingdom and has lived there ever since. Rachel Ingalls won the 1970 Authors’ Club First Novel Award for Theft. Her novel, Mrs. Caliban, was first published in 1982, and her book of short stories, Times Like These, came out in 2005. Ingall’s short story “Last Act: The Madhouse” inspired the story of the character Jean in the 1997 film Chinese Box by Wayne Wang.

I remember when Mrs. Caliban was first published. This novella is a quick read at only 125 pages and despite its short length the British Book Marketing Council would name Mrs. Caliban one of the twenty best novels written by living American writers who had come of age after World War II. Mrs. Caliban is the unforgettable story about a California housewife’s passionate affair with a six-foot-seven creature known as Aquarius the Monsterman, whom she calls Larry. The simplicity of her prose is disarming, and many critics understood just how easy Rachel Ingalls’ made her characterizations and their interactions look. She tells a mysterious and facile story and enriches the plot with what would be a severe absurdity in a less accomplished author’s hands; I fell into a spell while reading, and believed in the core relationship. She does not waste a single word when she writes.

She stopped before she knew she had stopped, and looked, without realizing that she was taking anything in. She was as surprised and shocked as if she had heard an explosion and seen her own shattered legs go flying across the floor. There was a space between him and the place where she was standing; it was like a gap in time. She saw how slowly everything was happening.

– from Mrs. Caliban.

Rachell Ingalls is a master of the short, sharp tales that stick in the mind decades after reading. Again, I compare her stories to Poe’s because they often go straight to the meat of a situation with an ease that belies how complex she has made the plot. I care about all of her characters and I have searched for her short novels and novellas ever since. After Mrs. Caliban came her novel, Binstead’s Safari, a tale of a married couple going through more than just the motions when they travel on safari. Her best writing comes from her shorter works, and I hope you can find her books at used bookstores or buy them from your favorite online book merchant because they are gems. A few Rachel Ingalls’ books that I highly recommend along with the two novels are Be My Guest, Times Like These, and Something to Write Home About.

If you like stories that end with twists that are totally unexpected, you will love all of Rachel Ingalls’ books. Try to find them and let me know what you think.

Until then, I’m almost finished reading the classic historic novel of Sicily titled The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. I tend to read the really great novels of our age very slowly, and the only novel Lampedusa wrote, qualifies as a Classic; I’m taking my time reading this lush work of art. I am also spending my time watching so many great films and I hope to share them with you next.

best always,

Justin

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These three sections were placed in the longer novel that is now completely edited and ready to publish this Fall. That novel, Wake Me Up (click HERE to see an early cover art mock-up) will have an updated cover, probably one of my parents’ paintings once again pointing to the subject of the novel. I have one in mind, and I will be sharing these choices with you later.

Deepika, the visiting writer to Missoula, Montana writes this last section filled with a guilt she refuses to acknowledge, let alone embrace, and her own pregnancy is paramount in her mind. This last part reveals her mindset, that she created Sai as a speakerbox for her own life’s philosophical and family yearnings. This section of Deepika’s story also was the novel’s original conclusion, mirroring a wish for change in the characters’ lives she has witnessed as co-worker, friend, mistress, new mother, daughter, and independent thinker.

A Great Distance (excerpts from)

by

Deepika Webber

Deepika’s Story, Part Three:

This is the day I’ve waited all my life for. Sai can’t help feeling philosophical. It is an end and a beginning. The feelings circle within him, boiling memory into a bitter scar.

Mrs. Plesher and her damn cats—Sai files the story with his editor and closes his desk. Forget her and his irritated editor; he hopes no one close to either of them dies soon, and Shorty’s stooped, shuffling body crosses in front of him, his skin turned to ashy gray — a desiccated Shorty eaten up by too much obeisance to his sibling, and Sai wonders what will happen when, or if, Alice, pops off this mortal coil before him, a puppet too ragged for any second hand shop.

The first emotion Sai felt when the call came telling him about his father’s death was happiness, a spiteful revenging happiness. He said, “Thank you, Gladys,” into the telephone, hung up; a smug twitch of lines passed across his face. He was quite sure his response shocked Gladys, but then again maybe it didn’t. Gladys was his mother’s closest, faithful friend and protector who couldn’t care less about his father’s death, her best friend’s husband’s death, either; maybe Gladys also thought it was logical. The scar stayed hidden deep, but singular razor cuts pried the wound open in time, and wondering about his past made Sai realize that his mother had the exact same damage and had passed it to him at birth.

*****

When people grow old, and think they can’t get much older without drastic changing, there’s always someone who’s changed more, grown older without catastrophe. Sai always thinks a person ages through injury.

*****

When he was young, and ganged up on by Harold, the playground royalty, he thought every punch in the nose would blink a year away; all the blood spattering on the pavement would shave seconds from his life; a fall down the stairs would erase an entire childhood.

*****

Sai hears young adults moan turning the age of 21, thinking themselves to be at the brink of liver-spotted death. Some of them even talk about how they will resort to early euthanasia if they end up like their parents or the people they see on the news fighting for more benefits. Before 21, they’re happy and complacent. After 21, they realize there are very few special birthdays left to welcome except number fifty and maybe one hundred for those who want to hold on like an astronaut adrift in space running out of oxygen.

Someone once told Sai that in America a person dies every fifteen seconds, a person has a heart attack every forty seconds. A rape occurs every two minutes. A person dies of AIDS every quarter hour. Murder every three minutes. Struck by lightning more than once a day. These people grow and grow older in a very short time — injured lives. In the world—deaths occur every fraction of a second, lights blinking off around the earth like fireflies trapped in a child’s killing jar.

Sai figures his father’s light was sparking along on dim for the longest time. His death was painless, a sudden intensity shooting from heart artery pump, to brain synapse logic response. The only logical response after a bursting heart was death.

At the end of the day, when the call comes, Sai feels happy deep down inside; he knows no one would possibly understand just how happy. The way he should feel. Creation. Destruction. A cycle. That is a lie, not as blatant as Sai usually is, but still a lie. He is being morbid. Gladys would say, “Old habits are hard to drag away.” How can his father’s death cause such conflict?

Now, almost a whole day after getting the call, after mumbling his way through a hateful interview with a woman who loves cats more than people, Sai doesn’t know what to feel. He sits in the sleek black and chrome living room chair his ex couldn’t stand, sips his scotch, and lets the burning smell from a neighbor’s fireplace waft in and out of a cracked window; at least it helps mask the rotting cabbage scent of the kitchen. He’ll have to store this chair with a friend tomorrow on the way to the airport – but his car is stranded, another loose end to tie up and he calls a coworker whose brother owns a car repair shop in Hailey. Yes, I can pick you up. The chair will fit in my brother’s tow truck. Got you covered, Sai. And Sai feels a slim relief. He lived with his family for eighteen years and always with this feeling of being trapped by circumstance.

Sai doesn’t blame his mother. How could he?  But she will have to move to Idaho now, away from the city that’s engulfed her since birth, child of first generation immigrants from a smaller, but still congested, village close to Bombay, take her away from memories that scarred her and made his self-pity rigid with the taste of knowledge.

*****

When Sai was five, after the accident with his mother, her fall, he wasn’t allowed to see her until she returned home. He led a solitary existence. He’d pretend to meditate a lot. They told him all about meditation and being quiet and mindful and to never speak when not spoken to first: meditate. His father still said nothing to him that wasn’t in the form of a directive. Sai knew his father would always have too much to say when Mother got home to listen as his sole audience member.

His father couldn’t cook.

Dull chicken thighs fried in corn oil and the leftovers sitting in a frying pan, wilted lettuce dripping ketchup, Chinese noodles, rice curry, Szechwan string beans, soy paste in white cardboard fold-up boxes littered the table, counter, floor. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, clean anything either. A cultural thing? Gladys and her lesser friend, Edith Wright, would spend two entire days cleaning the house from top to bottom for Sai’s mother when she returned. The house rang with curses on those two days, indistinguishable.

When Sai woke up at seven, quiet for fear of making the door down the hall open, he’d change into flannel and corduroy, blue-stripe Keds. He knew how to tie his own shoes since he was four, with big bow loops. Most of the time the laces knotted horribly.

On his way down the stairs Sai paused where it happened, letting out a deep breath, how his mother held him, how they fell, a moving image flicker. Sometimes a thump came from behind his father’s door as if a whale was breaching. Sai bit his lip, continued to the kitchen, hoped for escape without a yell, whistle, verbal command to “Get the hell upstairs, Mother-Killer.”

The refrigerator door opened to reveal ice-glazed, frosty shelves, wrinkled olives stuck in the corners, goat cheese wet, green, and molding. Sai pushed the door closed, searched the cupboards for peanut butter and Saltines. Pulling a stool over, he stood gazing at the crumbs, old boxes of Maypo, raisins, and rat traps placed near the flour, sugar bags. On the kitchen table next to the coffeepot that leaked was a quarter.

The quarter, newly minted, went in Sai’s pocket while a slight feeling of dread filled up his thoughts. Did he leave the money for his lunch? What were the odds? A hundred to one he left it for his morning paper and coffee at Shirlee’s Lunchbox. What will happen if he finds it missing? Sai shut the kitchen door quietly and it made a whisper. Father’s window above reflected streaking sunlight; the beige curtains were drawn. Sai was an independent kindergartner sneaking out the back door on his way to school—what he would later come to think as the true place for salvation—while his father lay in stasis, as if inebriated, not by alcohol, because he wouldn’t drink during the work week, but swollen up by the unfairness of it all: the wife—an arrangement he’d never forgive his parents for—the child, and their fall down the stairs, how Sai’s father saw the whole thing happen as he walked out of the bathroom and after, the landing window still in pieces with cardboard cutouts over the holes, cracks; Sai wondering, much later, if his father had planned the whole thing.

The morning wind, cooling, crisping surfaces to the freezing point, made the trip to school a wide-eyed one. A leaf, oak, maple, dogwood, cherry, any vine still clinging to the city’s buildings, every blade of grass, keen to a razor’s edge, was sheathed in frost-ice. A blue jay sparkled against a brownstone backdrop. Two teenagers, sideburns long still in a throwback to the fifties, square, oiled, their eyes reflecting granite side streets, cupped matches for cigarettes, pretending they were in the past. Both teenagers knew how the West was won. They spit against buildings, the waste freezing instantly, covered their faces with bandannas to ward off chill, spoke in glances to each other as Sai passed by across the street with his head down.

Sai knew about Jarko and Mick, transplants from Bulgaria, who practiced their own kind of city vandalism to a perfection so sharp that the ease with which they’d terrify was measured by how fast the heartbeat raced, how piercing the cries of the caught were, how loud the slams of windows were as they sauntered by. The forerunners of all the gangs to come, they were their dead idols with a twist: James Deans gone wicked. Sai heard Mick’s voice, “There’s the stupid squib who pushed his mother down the stairs.”

“A buck she croaks,” Jarko replied, “A dead Jeremiah.” They slapped palms.

“Let’s find out why he did it?”

Sai could also hear the drip of water as the sun rose higher. This sound, light skittering across a still pond, mixed with the scraps of kicked stones, the Deans following him. To be a part of the brickwork, to be gaseous floating up away, to be army camouflage in a jungle across the ocean, was what he wished to be. Anywhere but there at that moment in time. Humming stressed tones he glanced quickly behind, saw them closing the distance and they breathed confidence, menace slithering across their features. They laughed sharply. Sai ran. They laughed louder. Sai ran faster.

The place he was running to was unreachable. In his mind he accepted capture and even slowed down a little while a heated vision bubbled, the scene hot enough to distort glass, melt street tar so that the feet would stick and dinosaurs drown: Sai imagined Jarko and Mick with spears, in a corner, when he turned to face them. He screamed, muffled with square constriction. Mick thrust his spear into him. His heart burst. Jarko put his spear through Sai’s legs below the knees. Together they lifted him up above. Screaming. I knew my life would end like this. He was caught.

*****

The Deans whistled, tore Sai’s t-shirt at the shoulder, yanked him into an alley. Newspaper sheets flew freely in the wind, stuck in frozen puddles. Even though the sun was out, the alley remained in shadow. Broken crates stacked up against the left side among dented, graffiti-ridden trash barrels.

“Think the squib’s gonna cry?” Jarko asked Mick.

“Not while I’m around he won’t.” They held Sai between them, blew stale breath into his face.

“Why’d you do it, Puss-N-Boots? Why’d you push your mother down the stairs?” Sai heard the question and thought about tumbling repeatedly down a steep hill, knowing there was no end to it, no drop off. “I think he needs to be pushed down a hole too. Go on a nice trip,” Mick said.

“Let me go,” Sai wailed in a voice low, young, girlish, the words urging their anger up a notch. He kept silent then, stared like an Egyptian statue discovered centuries too late—its perfection rotted away.

“Mick, wanna take him to the hole?” Sai’s eyes widened leaving a ring of white around his brown, icy irises.

The hole . . . images of darkness, depths in hundreds of feet instantly filled Sai’s thoughts. Smaller, a flicker of green flame, curiosity, wound its way in with the danger.

“OK, you’ve had it squib. Say your prayers.”

“He prays to a different God, Jarko.”

“The wrong one, Mickey,” Jarko sneered.

Sai was too small to fight, barely forty-five inches. He supposed he invited foul play. Crooked lifestyles were drawn to his composition. Smiling, even laughing, became impossible. His lips were always turning down at the ends, a perfect pantomime of sadness. Usually it was the elderly who traveled the streets leaning on canes or one another who pointed out his solemnity.

“A boy like you. A boy your age should be happy. What’ve you got to be serious for? When I was a kid I didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Life was more exciting that way. You’re still a child. Make the most of the opportunity before it’s too late. Back then, I had the profound ability to discover, as if I was a celebrated inventor, everything on this earth.” Mr. Arjun Kharbanda loved to make speeches. He stood outside his coin laundry smoking stinking hand-rolled cigarettes, his lips ringed with wrinkles. “I remember when I lost it, kid. When objects were just—plain objects. Curiosity was a thing of the past. The magical shine disappeared; I had learned the difference between right and wrong. You go around, moping, looking like you knew this the moment you were born.”

The yellowing blind was closed at Kharbanda Laundromat. Sai wondered if Mr. Arjun Kharbanda would help him or tell the Deans to teach him a lesson, teach him to appreciate natural curiosity. Jarko and Mick, with Sai in the middle, passed in front of the silent washing machines heading in the opposite direction of the Roosevelt School on Maxwell and First Ave. Sai was held tightly at the shoulders and deep down part of him relished the touch. Fingers dug into his neck and Sai felt the pain and experienced the fear but he liked it and could never ever tell anyone this. His parents never touched him. If he yelled for help they said he would bleed.

On his way to the hole other kids Sai knew passed by, sleep still grasping their limbs. No one noticed the group of three. They slipped away, invisible to all, on towards a block of abandoned buildings. A piece of cement fell to their left, shattering against the cracked pavement. Sai glanced up to the rooftops. Of course, no one was up there. Lonely, spying gargoyles, dirty with soot, crumbling, stared their stony stares, as if they were all-knowing creatures forged with intelligent mockery. All the begging in the world couldn’t make them take flight. They knew what was going to happen. Sai could almost hear them laughing.

The building was made up of crumbling brick, broken windows, falling gutters, and splintering doorways. From within came the low sound of dogs growling, scattered paws on stairwells. Sai thought for a moment he was entering a building that was alive, full of dark, malignant life. The window reflected sunlight pale yellow, streaking orange. If Sai’s face could ask a question it would ask the obvious, and get derisive laughter in reply: “What’re you gonna do to me? Are you gonna hurt me? Please don’t. I’m only five. My arm’s already broken. Please. Please. Please.”

“That word,” his teacher told him, “was magical. Please transforms frowns to smiles, impatience to starlight, will help you reach your destination smoothly. If you say please after every request, you will become a man,” the teacher said, “a man just like your father.” Maybe that was why Sai forgot to say it except under duress and bullying arm-twisting. Like now, but his teacher had lied to him. Etiquette would get him nowhere. Mick punched him in the stomach. He fell to the plaster-covered floor landing on his contused arm. Jarko kicked his legs out from under him.

On the ground in dust, Sai held his stomach with his trembling hands. Even though he knew please wouldn’t work he cried it anyway, tears rolled down his face painting lines, dripped to the floor.

“I told you not to cry, baby. What’s your name?”

“Sai.”

“I think you’re a little con artist. I think you pushed your mother down the stairs. That’s what everyone around here thinks. I think we picked the right squib today, Jarko.”

“If you try conning us you’re dead meat, crybaby.”

Sai cried louder.

“No one’ll hear you down in the hole except the dogs and the rats. Scream all ya want.”

“Why’re you doing this?”

“It’s what ya deserve for trying to kill your mother, squib.”

The floor was pocked with holes. Dotting the far side of the room, close to the boarded up windows, smaller toothy holes sat about like animal burrows. These holes, if stepped in, could twist an ankle with a snap. Newspaper, a rat-bitten red sock, a barbecue grill broken in half, a baby doll carriage, littered the room, covered the smaller pits like camouflage over tiger traps. In the center of the room was the hole Jarko and Mick taunted Sai with and now pulled Sai towards. Sai thought it was the blackest pit he’d ever seen before. He became weightless and his feet skidded on the floor making long tracks of dirt, rat droppings. They brought him to the edge, laughed and threw him into the darkness. He landed half on, half off a crusty mattress. His arms scraped the floor, the cast bursting, and bled droplets out of splinter marks. Above Sai, the Deans said, “See ya round, squib.”

*****

Passed out in the hole Sai dreamt of them coming back to get him. Sai in the darkness. Them in circular light. They reached down, arms like bunched rope, lifted him up and threw him down again, but this time there was no crusty mattress. Spikes, growing from the floor, had taken its place. Points glistened in welcome as he raced towards them. He stuck out his hand and it was punctured cleanly through the palm. His mother appeared at the top, far away, pleading with him, and he saw the shadow come up behind her and then she was falling towards him, landing on him, taking his breath away, the shadow smothering the light.

*****

Sai’s father and Mr. Groverton, a neighborhood policeman, found him four hours later when he didn’t report, show up, for school. They lifted him out of the hole with a harness made of twisted rope. His father joked about leaving him there.

*****

Sai’s parents didn’t know what to do with him from the start. They were pessimists with no self-control. Words, actions, tirades, monologues spewed forth in wicked delusions of order and righteousness and slighted ego. Contractions started a little more than a day before Sai’s arrival. Sabrina, his mother, screaming, “I knew something like this would happen. Of all the people I have to have a child with. Of all the people my parents have to force me to be with.”

Sai’s parents, mainly his father, didn’t speak to him much, directly, but that wasn’t true a lot of the time because they were two very vocal doom smiths. They just didn’t talk around him. When Sai was only a newborn they thought that by speaking in front of such a young receiver of information, they would ruin his mind. Doors were always shut tightly first around him, barriers set to block expression.

Sai wasn’t even four when he realized the moaning would go on forever.

Whenever Sai came home from school two years later, his father would still groan. The blood. “Remember the blood, and why you’re named after a knife.” The story, true, yet melodramatic and dirge-like spun round the house, Sai Kulbhushan Amrashi. They wouldn’t buy Sai a Hershey bar because they thought he’d start to covet sweets and he’d grow fat and lazy in the grass. That his pride would destruct and lead into an alley of evil forces where otherworldly sinners seeking a strict penance for their actions congregated to hatch nihilistic plots. Sai learned this from their many diatribes on ancient languages forgotten by the masses.

Even though their religion was the furthest from Catholicism, really a form of lax Hinduism, they called Sai Sinner when he could comprehend the term. The only reason being, he supposed, was they thought he caused them to feel pain all over—tainting their bodies and minds—without a river to drown in and to wash them clean, untainted. Later on he wondered why they would even let him know he was doing something, anything to them. He wanted human contact so much. All he had to do was sit in the same room in a corner away from them, motionless, speechless. That was enough for them to notice him. “Sinner,” his father said with a laugh, “feeling awful today? Good. That’s how you should feel every second.”

*****

Yet everything has changed. Sai believes he’s not supposed to feel awful now, that he has the power to change his fate. Maybe then his childhood demons could run amok causing destruction and havoc, but he’s banished them to the deepest pit within, now it’s as if his childhood demons grew up alongside him, mutating into adult concerns. Now, his father is dead. Back then, as a child, he wanted to know why his father orchestrated his every action. He didn’t know anything about his father’s past because his mother or her friends never said anything about him—and __ _________ __________ _______________ _ ______________ _________ ____ he aches to know why—was there something in his father’s childhood that made him the wretched man he was? Did his parents abandon him at birth? He’d never thought to ask, and now it’s way too late, and the really sad part is that Sai feels this emptiness of knowledge every time his father appears and disappears.

*****

Everything changed after his mother fell down the stairs, after they told him television would ruin his mind, turn him into something vile and grotesque, after he started going to kindergarten, where he’d have to pretend he knew what the other children were talking about when they mentioned what was on TV the night before. His mother changed for the better.

Sai remembers asking his mother to do one thing—“Put me on your shoulders, Mommy.” His father would’ve said something to him then, about whining and the destructive swords of sloth and wanting, but he was behind the bathroom door, out of sight. It was a demanding statement. The one nice thing she did before her fall was pick Sai up, all forty-five pounds of begging flesh, onto her broad shoulders so that his small head rested on her tangled dark brown hair.

“Who’s been teaching you to mooch, Sai?”

She said this while a shadow dimmed the light in the hallway, and then Sai went on the scariest ride of his life. Going down any flight of stairs, if he’s back, dwelling in his mind, thinking about the past—and when is he not?—affects his heart. It tightens up somehow and his left arm goes numb. All he could see was his body tumbling over his mother’s head, ripping out a handful of her hair with a pudgy fist, and slamming into the radiator at the bottom. His mother, screaming, “Shiva,” in a high-pitched shortened yelp, tumbled over him. He heard a loud crash and the sharp tinkle of broken glass.

When Sai looked up, dazed, he saw how her head had smashed through the window just past the stair landing. He saw the blood. He saw her legs twitching. He saw movement from the top of the stairs, descending. He had two major contusions on his left arm, a broken nose and a gash where his chin had scraped the floor, twelve stitches.

She was in the hospital for two months. When she came back she was nice to Sai and would remain nice, plastic, pliable to him forever after the fall. He sometimes wondered if she knew who he really was. She never yelled at him anymore, only listened to his father shout, “Demon. Boy. You caused this, and I hope you burn in your own created special Hell. I hope you go to the place all sinners burn.” Sai always wanted to remind his father that they don’t believe in Hell, that he didn’t feel awful because he had gained a mother, someone who he thought was closer to his image of the other kids’ mothers, the only person in his life who ever really listened to him and wouldn’t, couldn’t talk back. He had the accident to thank for that.

*****

Sai doesn’t feel awful now, in the present, either. He doesn’t. Resolved. He accepts his future. He has a good job at a mountain resort newspaper, reaching for a promotion to assistant news editor within the year, and maybe, now that his father is dead, he can bring his mother out, support her. Maybe. His body’s still in control but his mind wanders. It’s hard growing optimistic in the world today, in his world before his mother’s fall down the stairs. And he keeps wondering what that world was like. What his mother’s world was really like when he was born and before.

*****

Contractions, contradiction, original pain.

The front right tire blew on the way to the hospital. No spare.

“How close together are those contractions? Don’t want to have your baby in my cab, do we?” Imagine, a moon-faced, unshaven, cigar-smoking, obese cab driver asking Sai’s mother-to-be that question, as he picked her up on the side of the Interstate. His stomach, resting snug against the meter, could’ve been trained to turn it on. Imagine a pregnant, contraction-ridden hitchhiker looking like Broom Hilda with a Hindi accent. This cab driver stopped to pick her up and would live to regret it. From a clean-shaven, showered, healthy intern, the question would be natural. From Moon-face, an assault? Sai imagines it was more the way he screwed up his face, showing grated teeth, many missing, and said, “Those contractions,” as if brimming with concealed laughter, hiding amusement triggered by the worldly womanly pain suffocating his cab. She made him stop the taxi, told her husband to give him money to go call an ambulance; holding her weight with both hands, grimacing as a contraction ripped out from the core. The cab driver sped off. Abominable wretch. Two people boiling with hatred on the highway; one slouching on the guardrail, rat-woven muddy-brown hair weaving over her shoulders as she clutched Sai, the belly; the other covering his pock-marked face with both hands, moaning, oblivious to the bumper-to-bumper lunch-hour traffic moving slowly along. Sai didn’t, and he still doesn’t, know whether his father was moaning about his wife stranded five miles from the nearest hospital or missing his lunch, with his favorite game show, a carnival host blaring false security to the contestants.

*****

Disoriented, Sai entered this world, and will probably leave the same way. Like his mother who was very much alone now and can’t even say her own name because of the accident. He wanted to teach her.

Sai can barely remember learning, teaching himself how to talk; he doesn’t know what his first spoken word was. Since his parents wouldn’t speak much around him, he had to learn from other sources; he was mumbling; humming most of the time, one gigantic two-legged bee bumbling along without a stinger until the authorities forced his parents to enroll him in kindergarten.

The television, a large Zenith monster, black and white, grainy, they always locked in a downstairs room as if they were ashamed of it. His mother had the key. His parents would watch an evening of comedy, bald-headed police drama, variety. Sai would silently unhook the child-resistant wooden, criss-cross gate at the top of the stairs, tiptoe down, skipping the squeaky ninth stair from the bottom and put an ear to what he called in his mind the strange room. Voices came out jumbled through the thick oak doors, securely fastened. He would jumble and work with speech, words, thereafter.

They were right to lock television away from Sai, even after his mother fell. He would never learn anything but how people followed the rule of a secular world and flaunted their abuses of the seven deadly sins and more commandments than anyone could remember come football Sunday. Maybe his father was right. Maybe he was a follower of ego, covetousness, lust, anger, Kali, gluttony, Shiva, envy, and sloth.

*****

After the ambulance came, picking up a woman and a husband, the driver stuffing a ham-and-cheese sandwich on black rye into his gullet as he drove, there was peace for some time. “Turn off that pig-calling siren. If I go deaf, I’ll sue the pants off your fat ass.” The words spit forth from Sai’s father’s lips. With the siren off, they waited in traffic. They would’ve arrived at the hospital faster if they’d walked. It didn’t matter. Sai wouldn’t come out for another twenty hours anyway. By then his mother would be hooked up to IV bags and the doctors would be worried about the baby becoming infected as they get worried about any baby after a full day of labor. Maybe Sai didn’t want to come out. Maybe his parents knew this and resented him for it. Maybe the reason for the whole event was that Sai knew who had conceived him already, he knew the egg intimately; the sperm was a coastal invader. Sai could picture the event: a miracle. Creation. They, the tools, probably hated each other at first glance, but were forced together, glued and bonded, every second fighting the match, but the egg would hatch.

*****

The egg. So small in comparison to, say, the image Sai gets when he thinks of an elephant egg. Growth in what was then such a long time to wait.

Nine months of rushing inside with nothing to do but grow and feel the walls constrict, kicking out.

More than a day’s worth of grief, tears that wouldn’t be quenched. The blood color branched in her eyes as the second day approached, and not one lapse in the contractions, not one idle moment lost to a profusion of blood and membrane, flesh and bone.

The hospital, Mercy First St. Agnes Hospital, gray brick and asphalt, once closed down for eight months in 1985 while its ceilings and walls were cleansed of asbestos, was still potent, invisible to all, soaking into the maternity rooms like some rodent looking for the cancer ward. Asbestos, Evil, which is greater? One can kill a fire. One can start a fire on purpose. Did Sai’s father blame the accident on the evil of the hospital? Gasoline poured into the thick of the woods, the brittle stuff hearty with dry heat and dust. The rodent, hairy, diseased, bleeding freely from cracked sores, crawled around that hospital for over twenty years before its head was caught in a trap, steel slamming down into the meat of the neck, grinding to the bone, bleeding. And his father kept telling him it all came down to the blood. Remember the blood. But at this time the rodent was free, and Sai’s mother didn’t know it. How could she? In 1985, when the story went fifth page editorial in the newspaper, Gladys said his mother was tormented inside even if she couldn’t say so. Gladys said the article hit the chord of life when she read it to Sabrina. “Your baby was born in that asbestos death camp. Maybe that’s why he never visits you.” She said his mother thought cancer with all her heart, what little place was left down deep, hidden in that crevice of thought. Gladys sent Sai Power-Pack-It Vitamins every month for a year with a note saying: “Watch out for the Big C. Your mother didn’t know. She’s sorry.” If Sai had a cold, Gladys thought it was an early symptom of gloomy days to come. Gladys should’ve had children of her own and stopped trying so hard to be Sai’s surrogate mother.

In some way, to a certain degree, Sai wondered if she could be right. He wondered why Gladys stayed by his mother’s side. Such a good neighbor; someone who knows the whole family history; two old women watching time, husbands, and one child pass them by.

*****

All the medical personnel involved with Sai’s mother in that hospital during her vigil, despised, would sell every piece of the soul to Satan to get all one-hundred-sixty-five pounds of sickening human rage out of the maternity ward.

*****

And there it is, the painful truth from an undesirable’s own pen; a recreation of a life he is piecing together.

What no one realized, what not one single person realized was that his mother wanted justice full in the face, twenty-six years of justice, a promissory note with the constitution in small print, footnoted at the bottom, Miss Manners backing the ideal with a response engraved in parentheses after the words: “All men are created equal…”

She wouldn’t let any man into her hospital room. After the way her assigned doctor, male Doctor Rubemann, probed her with green eyes, she thought were drug-clouded eyes, with hands, fingers like Nosferatu’s. She held her abdomen with one hand while the other struck out at Rubemann. She screamed, “Get out. Monster. Leave. Cut those Goddamn fingernails!”

Dr. Cranbisses, with gold-wire glasses perched on her nose, strolled into danger zone Amrashi, clipboard patient record pressed to her breast, surveyed the woman Nurse Ball, Nurse Erler and night Nurse Shetty had nicknamed Patient Patton. “Doctor, we’re warning you, Patient Patton will rip you to shreds if you let her. You’ll be back here in five minutes tops.”

An untidy doctor has dirty hands that touch Sai’s mother’s skin, will touch her, and cut the umbilical cord. The fingernails, painted a dazzling red, matched the smock under white physician frock and hid the dirt of the delivery before her entry into Sabrina Amrashi’s room; Dr. Cranbisses helped birth twins an hour past, blondes both, fuzzy girl as pudgy as an inner tube and lobster boy, now lying peacefully behind partition glass, in pink and blue and the Amrashi woman in white.

*****

It was the black shoes, shiny new in expense, Sai’s mother noticed right away, just thinking of the appearance. Gold, real, undiluted chain on left wrist, circles hanging from each earlobe, a dangle woman come to time the contractions and press all over with a flat powdered palm, fingers wearing diamonds on white gold, a pearl necklace jiggling between soft dress neckline and cleavage.

“How are we feeling today, Mrs. Amrashi?” Not really wanting to know, opinions formed by the nurses’ remarks before entering, niceties because of the money involved. Sai’s mother would let her know as she pushed herself up a little bit on her pillow, the rattrap of her hair cascading in her face.

“I feel like a gigantic menstrual cramp and I wish you were the plug.” Her teeth flashed white, yellow-gray near the gums, and silver in the back. “And how are we feeling today, Doctor? You look like a million bucks of baby money. Is that how you feel too? Like a cash register? What am I? Penny change?” Dr. Cranbisses blushed red and surrendered the room with a jangle of jewelry.

Vehemence coursed through her veins as she waited for the next contraction and the next doctor. A woman wrapped in white, crepe soles stiff lacquered leather on top, crept into the room carrying a new IV bag, gaze averted to a spot above the two piercing black eyes in Sabrina Amrashi’s volatile head.

These eyes gazed restlessly upon the nurse, mirthless and maddening.

“Doesn’t anyone know I’m having a baby?” The nurse remained silent, unhooked the empty IV and positioned, checked the drip of the new one. “Answer me.” Sai’s mother tried to sit up in the bed and winced with the pain. Turning sharply, the nurse scurried from the room as Sabrina pushed a tray table and made it crash into the wall behind her. The nurse, and the maternity unit, heard, “I won’t let you get away with this. Where’s my lawyer?”

*****

And maybe the answer laid here because she was very pretty at one time—not the lawyer she only threatened with, but Sai’s mother—striking, her neighbors said. But she had to put up with a father who insisted on being called Vijay Boom. The neighbors grimaced bringing that past to the present, when questioned by Sai, because Vijay Boom hadn’t been around since Sabrina got married, he left her that same day, and none of them could think of anyone who would want to go find out what had happened to him.

Sai’s mother’s childhood passed with Vijay Boom in complete control. She followed the orders of Vijay Boom, and came to worship Vijay Boom because he was all she had; her dear mother was lost, killed, carved, murdered…

In a grocery store, shopping for lamb to make a yellow curry with carrots and soft-boiled potatoes, baby food for Sabrina, Lucky Strikes for Vijay Boom. Then, after casing the store for thirty minutes, came the three men, one woman, each of them grasping a chain, a hunting blade, or a .22, desperate for a quick rush of money. They needed the money so badly, to start a new life, to feel like anyone else proudly walking the streets with a full belly. One of the men wanted something else after seeing the woman near the fruit display, grapefruit piled into a towering pyramid. He grabbed and threw mother’s mother into a neighboring stand of ripening pineapples, spraining her left wrist, popping a kneecap, tore open her blouse, said something about how golden her skin was in a whisper so only she could hear, how that excited him, while the other two men, one woman watched the front, terrified the cashiers. The man cut her cheek with the hunting knife, the serrated edge slicing a thin line from ear to lip as he lay on top of her, pressed his tongue into the blood dribbling from the cut. She spit in his face, yanked her good wrist free and raked his cheek with newly sharpened, cleaned nails, gouging a cleft in his left eye. Aqueous humor spewed out.

A spiking spasm of hot pain, enraged, he closed her eyes with his fists and plunged the blade into her neck, slashed through across the top of her ribs, stood up, kicked a pineapple down to a tomato cart, leaving mother’s mother lying like a fish too far gone to toss back. Was it Sai’s mother’s skin color that attracted the man with the knife? Who coined the term hate crime? In the past a murder was just that: a murder.

Vijay Boom clipped a news photo out of a paper showing the four murderers. The police told him they got what they deserved, one and the same, in the grainy sensationalized newsprint photo. See the blood pooling all around them? He called them The Savages.

The Savages, the three men, one woman took the money, too little to make it too far, but, nevertheless, tried to run very far away.

They all died a little while later, as Vijay Boom’s article stated, in a bar states to the South, holding up Shandy’s in North, Georgia. One Man wore an eye patch made by One Woman. There were two off-duty police officers doing shots of whiskey with a beer wash. When One Woman blasted the bartender, the two cops skidded behind a table overturned, fired at will, putting a dim third eye in One Woman’s forehead, smashing vertebrae in Three Men who were inexperienced in the art of the shoot-out. Eye Patch grabbed a cocktail waitress, and held the hunting knife, cleaned, to her throat, backed out of the bar and was shot in the head by a bruiser boy in blue with off-duty badge still pinned to shirt pocket who was flattened backside next to the entrance of Shandy’s out of sight. The cocktail waitress, shaky and wobbling, said, “You saved my life. Like in the movie shows. I’ll get you a drink.” The bruiser boy in blue cocked his head back, said, “Well that’s what I was comin’ in for, Ma’am,” and sauntered into Shandy’s.

*****

And out of chance with no choice, Sai’s mother went motherless, and in a sense, became her own mother as Vijay Boom came home yelling for his dinner, paced the hallways, raged at Sabrina about traditions and family and what Sabrina came to call The Arrangement. “You’ll marry who your mother wanted you to marry.” Again and again. “Food will be ready as soon as I get one foot into this house. Do I make myself clear, Sabrina?”

Dropped out of school when it was legal so she could better take care of her father, so that he wouldn’t gripe if there was dust on the table, grunge in the carpet, snow mud in the front hall.

The neighbors saw little of Sai’s mother—maybe a flitting shadow passing a sweeper behind a drawn shade—and they whispered about her possible deterioration.

She was smiling.

The neighbors do remember the balloons and the one time they saw her happy, her appearance. Sai’s mother told the neighbors she met her husband that day. Not the man her parents wanted her to marry but the one that would break apart The Arrangement. Balloons, red, pink, white, filled with helium, bought at a carnival, held in one hand tightly, while the other was pulled, enclosed by Vijay Boom’s fist. The carnival, the only event, really the only happy event she went to as a teenager with her father.

She smiled, wearing a green and black plaid skirt, white blouse, wondered about a world so different from hers as her father told her a story about an overweight woman, knees, ankles, elbows hidden by fatty flesh, a young bowling-boy sitting next to her, both squeezed into the ride’s chair, The Scrambler moving to beat the air, clutch wind, the pin screw popping, snapping loudly and the weighty woman and child skidding against pavement, mangled, meshed into the ride-chair grating as they flew, scrambled through the air, landing, crushing into Elephant Ear Caravan with a corrugated metal flesh scream. Vijay Boom said, “D.O.A.” A jumble of arms, seat cushions, legs, safety-brace bar, pavement crush, human and elephant ear dough.

“No rides, Sabrina. Never safe at these two-bit things. Never put them together right. Remember that big lady and her dead son and remember you know better.”

Sabrina watched. It was all she could do, no food: too greasy. “They cook with dirty hands. Look at that french-fryer, hands so filthy they look diseased. He’s passing the plague.” She took in the colors, the people, the fear, a couple embracing before entering the egg-shaped cage of The Whirligig, taking them around, around, upside down, stranded at the top for five seconds, shaking, plunging down again when the attendant thought their screams were loud enough, a magical time for Sabrina that lasted four hours. She went home, cooked supper, shrimp and beans with sour soup, read a picture book, went to her room, forgetting to wash her hair again, gazed at the balloons clinging to the ceiling, thought of the young man, with little pock scars dotting his chin, who sold them to her, the sly, lengthy eye contact as he gave her the strings with one hand, taking the money from Vijay Boom with the other. Blushing, an embarrassed feeling as she was yanked away and told to follow, heed her father, to the bandstand for the tractor pull.

*****

The pull—Sai’s mother daydreamed in black, gray, and red spastic tones, the forceps so long cold reaching diving into her. No one leading them, like a driverless car gliding down the avenue, the steering wheel turning by itself, under invisible heated power, the headless horseman plunging steaming along a mossy forest path on an ebony steed seeking what was foreign in his woods of Sleepy Hollow. The forceps dashing in, then out, testing the flesh and tightening with a knowledgeable click, closing onto the foreign. She screamed, and the forceps tore back, the head of her baby gripped between the tongs, blood dribbling from the hole left where the head was severed from the neck, and she woke up, sharp, when she dreamt the small headless thing crawling its way out in search of what was a part of him for nine months.

They wouldn’t sedate her, or kill the pain until it was really Time, and she was very close. Giving birth. She couldn’t let her mind wander, couldn’t go back to the womb where the baby-thing awaited her, revenge in his tiny heart that pumped blood in a never ending supply, out through the neck, showering like a Roman fountain.

So she took her journal from the bed stand drawer, wrote about the nurses and the doctors, how none of them seemed to care, and just wanted her gone; then opened to the section reserved for her nightmares, and wrote about her dream.

She loved nightmares. Sai’s mother said they were the only ones she could ever remember clearly, and she had many nightmares to fill her notebooks. Sai never said anything in reply because he was too young, and then the accident shut his mother up about everything including her dreams, but now he thought she was right about nightmares. They were the only dreams he could remember when he opened his eyes after sleep. Before the accident, his mother would say, “The other ones fade away almost instantly when you wake up. These stay with you, make you think, appreciate your life no matter how hard it is.” She would make stories out of her favorites, dating back to her childhood years with Vijay Boom; they were bedtime tales. At this point in her life started a series of dreams she called the Bogeyman dreams: I am in a house, painted black, sometimes gray, and every now and then I would dream the same dream in blue. I have a dust rag in my hand, scrubbing the walls, and then I would turn slowly, eyes open, mouth quivering at the sight of the shape, huge and strong and darkness and needle-toothed and lizard-tongued and I would run down the hall and this needle thing would chase me and its feet, or paws, sounded like sponges squishing on the wooden floor and I would scream, loudly, for father to help me, and I would always come to a dead end and wait for the Bogeyman to round the corner and then I would wake up when Vijay Boom burst through the floorboards and pulled me away. And I woke up that very morning and ran away from home. I ran to meet my husband, Naseeruddin Amrashi, who sold balloons to a little girl so long ago and now worked for the city works department in management. He was a hard worker, a hard man, and he loved me and worked just as hard to keep me from my father. I never saw Vijay Boom after my wedding day.

*****

Now Sai guesses it is his turn to pull his mother away, now that he is well into his thirties and can afford, with the promotion at work and what he saved from his San Francisco job and the help his ex gave him, to take care of her. If they were frugal—they can sell the family house; that will help. Would his mother even remember saying goodbye to Gladys?

The call came yesterday, telling Sai his father died when he tripped on a discarded shoe on the landing, tumbled down to the floor, and cracked his head on a chair leg. His heart tightened and burst. Gladys said it was his own shoe, a mud-flecked work boot. Gladys meant that it was his own damn fault.

After the call came Sai goes to sleep and wakes up quickly in the morning as if from a cold shock, but he can’t remember his dreams. His first thoughts concern the funeral service, and whether or not he should attend. He goes to work. Meets the wreck of a woman, Mrs. Plesher, and her brother, Shorty, and all of her saved, mewling cats and files Alice’s real story knowing the woman will haunt him when his piece comes out; Sai is unable to take sides, just gives the facts and lets them sort it out, turns the story into a human interest look-what’s-happening-in-our-valley whine.

Sai will fly away tomorrow morning if the low cloud cover across the valley allows the airplanes to fly.

And now Sai is thinking about how his father treated him, how his father, Naseeruddin Amrashi, kept hating him even more after his mother grew to care for him, even smile a bit, during her permanent convalescence; he also wished his father had an accident when he was the age of six so that he would’ve changed also.

Then again, maybe Sai could’ve done something himself earlier.

Sai is speculating about what his parents went through when he was born, what they went through before he was born, how to replay history without throwing it all away. He realizes he never gets to hear his father’s voice again, explaining to the police how the accident happened, explaining how his ungrateful child forced his mother to carry him down the stairs on her shoulders. Sometime in the future he will realize his father knew too much, too many things he didn’t witness. His father will stare into Sai’s eyes, where they will start to smolder, daring him to say anything to anyone about how his father is caught in a lie. When Sai is a teenager he finally says, “How could you know so much if you were in the bathroom? I thought you didn’t see anything? Did you come out to watch or to push?” These fights Sai always starts inevitably turn vicious. Words battling for finality, and usually his father is the one who turns his back with a dismissive wave of his hand that means believe what you want.

Maybe Sai has to go back, to watch his birth, to see what went wrong instead of hearing about it over and over again. He slumps in his chair and knows he has to stop thinking now because he keeps picturing his father standing next to his mother with him, The Child, on top of her shoulders, short fingers tightly grasping her hair, at the crest of the stairs, the shadow arriving, and a fall transforming all three of them together all at once.

The End

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In A Great Distance, Part 2, Deepika continues to tell the story of her main character, the intrepid reporter, Sai, and Mrs. Plesher, a woman with secrets she freely shares; he’s asked to interview her for the local weekly. Deepika is one of the main characters in my first novel, Wake Me Up (if you have not done so, please read A Great Distance: Part 1 before reading this section by clicking HERE).

A Great Distance (excerpts from)

by

Deepika Webber

Deepika’s Story, Part Two:

“Best to not anger The Main Puss. She’ll rip you a new one without regrets or condolences.”

One of the cat’s claws rips its way through the skin, an imaginary bloom of red in a line, and Sai flashes on a news story about infection and how cat bites and cuts are nothing to be foolish with (and, repeated at the end of the piece) nor are they to be treated cavalierly. A cousin of Sai’s mother, whom he never met, lost the tip of one of her fingers on her right hand from a cat bite that quickly became infected. When Sai was younger and constantly begging for a pet his mother told him all about vicious cat bites to scare the hell out of him. Cats were not Sai’s mother’s favorite animals. She put them up there on a forbidden shelf with rabbits, tricksters who multiply like soap bubbles, animals that move about so easily—charlatans of good will.

Then came Sai’s long ago request for a puppy, any kind, can’t we please, please, please, get a mutt from the pound for gosh sake sake. No, Sai, then you’ll ask for a horse and pony show. And I’ll be the one walking the stupid animal and your father will yell and smack it into a cowering beast of yelps, crap and unstoppable begging and mewling.

His mother and father held dramatic bouts in the family, made sure Sai stayed a mute and malleable stage hand, and that kernel of truth and awareness sat there stunted in his childhood; there was always a reason to say no to Sai. There are no dogs allowed in the theater while we’re on stage. He dutifully accepted this with silence. If he came back later, a day or week or even a whole month later and asked for the same thing Sai learned he’d get it even harder. “Don’t you ever listen to me, us, any adult, without thinking of yourself first?”

Becoming an active listener, letting people tell their stories, how they ebb and flow, their story sometimes twisting around them, prepared him well (gave him a head-tilt to the left — tell me your story, I hear you, Mrs. Plesher, don’t leave anything out, be it poison or fireweed) for being a journalist. Sai grew up thinking this odd way: never speak, listen and learn.

“Mrs. Plesher, can you tell me why you believe your neighbors are singling you out?”

“Because I’ve been here longer than any of them.” Sai hears the sound of an old car engine stuttering up the curved driveway, the engine being turned off and the noise dying out like a wounded animal.

“That’ll be Shorty.”

“Your brother?”

“You have been listening.”

A dour man comes into the kitchen through a side door. He carries two paper grocery bags. His forehead shines out pale and spans the top of his head like a sail before his receding hairline catches up to it. They share the same nose, Mrs. Plesher and Shorty, but the similarity ends there. Shorty has stooped shoulders and graying teeth and a thinness bordering on brittle. His walk, because of his weak condition is a shuffle. And his lips, unlike Mrs. Plesher’s, are not the size of plump froglegs.

“Shorty, say hello to our intrepid town reporter Mr. Sai ______ Amrashi.”

“Hello.” Shorty takes his own time shuffling over to the counter with the groceries where he unloads a carton of organic milk, a loaf of wheat bread, four large glistening organic heirloom tomatoes of assorted red, maroon, orange color; he crinkles the plastic bag up and pulls a box of Triscuits, a hunk of cheddar cheese, a glass bottle of capers, and a bag of green grapes out of the last grocery sack. Sai watches Mrs. Plesher’s face as Shorty, behind her, shifts about opening cupboards at a crawling pace. The cats give her space as they dart around her chair to begin meowing, rubbing up against Shorty’s brown trousers. He can barely reach down, but he does, patting the three cats hungry enough for extra attention to ask for it.

“Now, shoo,” Shorty says, standing up once more, catching his breath.

“What’s taking you so long? You checked the fruit before you bought it?” Mrs. Plesher twists her upper body in the chair to face Shorty.

“Yes, Alice.”

It is the perfect name. Sai can tell Mrs. Plesher is unhappy her first name has been spoken out loud.

“Every other time Shorty goes to the market he buys bad fruit. Oh it’s not his fault. That market tries to rip everyone off. Best produce in town my dainty foot. You buy it and it turns bad by the time you get it home. I make Shorty take it back too, save every receipt.”

“A neverending cycle,” Shorty adds. “Would you like a tomato and caper sandwich, Mr. Amrashi?”

“Oh. No thank you. I think I have to go soon anyway. I mean this shouldn’t take that long.”

“Dig your own hole, reporter. Shorty. Leave the boy alone and let us finish our business.” Then Alice Plesher swivels her body back __ _____________ and levels a wrinkled, pointer finger right at Sai and says, “And you stay there and ask me everything. No matter how long it takes.”

*****

“When did you and your brothers decide to murder your father?” The first of many questions Sai worked into his mind.

The five children sat in their sheltering fort under a canopy of aspens near the river and the four brothers listened to Alice’s stories. They ran away now every chance they could _____ _ _____________ __________ get _________________ _ _________ ___.

*****

Of course Sai never asks Mrs. Plesher that question. He keeps his grin well hidden. If he wants to shock the scorn out of her face his fantasies wouldn’t be enough to do it.

*****

“You’ll run the farm and mother and father will take care of you until they grow old.”

“They die when they get old.”

“I wish they’d just die now.”

“Don’t let me hear you say that again. Especially around the house.”

“Father always has a cold. He’s sick all the time.”

Curtis interrupted by hitting his brother on the arm and said, “Shorty’s too chicken to say anything.”

“Am not.” Alice understood Shorty’s anger because she and all of them lived in fear.

The wind picked up and blew dried leaves into the enclosure. Alice thought about her life and how she’d soon get away. The schools would support her with a scholarship; she learned everything. She stared at Shorty and Forrest and told the others they had to get back. If they stayed down by the river much longer mother and father would start to worry, but only for a short time before their worry turned to anger.

“We’ve got to get back.”

“Can you tell us the rest of the story tonight?”

“If you promise to take a bath. I hate smelling you dirty from the day and thinking you fooled everyone when you lie about washing up. I hate that even more.”

*****

“Shorty . . . ” Mrs. Plesher’s hectoring has no visible effect on her brother. He’s borne a lifetime of it. “You’re dripping tomato juice and balsamic vinegar all over the floor and I won’t tell you again. Get your sandwich made. Clean up your mess and go eat in the television room.”

“You sound just like mom.”

Mrs. Plesher’s face shows her anger, the planes of her cheeks grow taught and she stares at her brother until he looks away. Shorty grabs a dishrag and wipes up the tomato mess. Then he takes his snack and walks out of the kitchen allowing the door to bang shut in a large arc, cutting off the room, pissing Mrs. Alice Plesher completely off; how can the cats run free with the kitchen door shut—a staggering pet peeve, Sai jots in his notebook, of epic proportion in this house feline.

“All of these cats. How many do you have living in the house?”

“Well I don’t have any dead cats if that’s what you mean. Excuse me,” Mrs. Plesher says, before she stands and walks briskly to the kitchen door to prop it open with a rubber doorstop. She yells out, “Shorty, turn that T.V. down. Now.” She returns to the table and continues, “Shorty is as deaf as most of the white cats in the house, and there are three of them, Ollie, Snow, and Alabaster — all deaf. Where were we?”

“No. I just want the story.” Sai’s tone of voice is weak and Mrs. Plesher isn’t letting him go the easy way.

“How did you end up here?” she asks.

“I wanted to take a break after college so I moved to California to get a job.” Sai doesn’t go into specifics since there’s no need to bring up his ex-partner, Joe, but his face blooms, an expression that lacks curiosity, the unhappiness there similar to the expression on Mrs. Plesher’s face; Sai tries to banish the image and keep everything general and boring and less circular so Alice will get back to her story. Already he’s made up his mind about her cats and her life and the sadness in the house that leaves a scent stronger than any litter box. He doesn’t want to tell this woman how he followed his first and only real love (even in his mind that sounds too simpering), Joe, to California and how they set up a wobbly house of cards that eventually blew down and how he had to get out. Joe, saying that last day, their final late morning, coffee cold in the cups, “You are psychologically stuck. I tried to help you, Sai. When you think back on what we were try to remember that. Who says we can’t be friends?” And Joe stuck out his hand, like a new pal should, not someone Sai had moved across the country from New Jersey to California with. Sai sees himself standing a few feet away, taking a step closer and shaking Joe’s hand. Nothing firm. A handshake that should be so forgettable.

“From California I drove here after another friend told me how beautiful it was here in August. He said the best season to live in Sun Valley is high summer. My friend was right.”

“Unless you’re allergic to sage.” Mrs. Plesher loved — proud now to be contradictory — scolding Sai anew for not caring about allergy sufferers.

*****

The fields turned brown after the fall harvest. To the horizon the earth stayed dull and without hope. The country was seeing red, scared, and their father grew paranoid about the unease, the possibility of seeing communists crossing the fields of Wyoming, told each and everyone to stay vigilant. The brothers got extra shooting practice, and their farm fostered a rumor of being inhospitable to neighbors, the ones you always counted on in farm country so far from the dusty town walls and law and order. All the brothers worried about Alice and when she’d be sent away. The brothers felt every bit trapped there. She kept telling them her made-up stories until they couldn’t get enough and they knew she’d ____________ ____________ _________ ______ __________ _________ __________ ________ _________. Was everything always this complicated? By the time Alice left for college father ____ would _____________________ be ___ _ ____ _________ dead _____ and in the ground three months. A ravaging, smoker’s death. Hacking. He wouldn’t make it through the last summer. Forrest wouldn’t make it either, a farm accident involving a thresher; ______________ so much pain and loss in ___ _ _____________ one family, too much to bear; Forrest wasn’t the brightest monkey in the barrel, a step below Shorty in the brains department, and mother almost stopped the intricate education plans Alice had made; with so much death in one family, all at once, the family had to stick together. Alice preserved the green beans and stewed tomatoes in a large pot, carried and pinned the baskets of laundry on the lines strung between the spindling trees planted as a wind break in a row behind the house. The kitchen remained hot and with the stove working night and day the room never cooled off in the early days of that last summer. Father _____ gone and mother wilted within her bedroom in mourning, days turning into weeks and the end of July close enough to touch.

*****

“You killed them,” Sai asks Mrs. Plesher, who studies him like a bug under a magnifying glass. Every now and then she pulls at her housedress or adjusts the straps of her bra that cut into the skin of her shoulders.

“No one can prove anything anyways,” Alice retorts.

“What do you mean? Then it is true? They said you bury them, against code, in your backyard along the fence line.”

“Who is ‘They’? I know my rights. I can have as many cats as I want and I’m not going to let any of my new snot-nosed neighbors from California come in here and tell me anything different. I’ve been here longer than these hills. You just ask anyone. They say they can smell my cat boxes. Those new neighbors should just watch out if they know what’s good for them.”

“But they’re suing you. All the neighbors are. The subdivision has its bylaws to maintain.”

“Now you’re on their side too? Figures.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When did you move to the valley?”

“Almost a year ago.” Sai closes his notebook and stares at the murderess. The big tomcat nearest the kitchen table licks its front paw, in between keeping a baleful eye on him, ready to pounce at his mistress’s command.

“Not long enough to hold an opinion as far as I can see.”

“There’s no proof, you say.”

“Darn tootin’.”

“I’ve counted at least eight cats since I’ve entered your house.”

“Aren’t you the number runner . . . and I see your mind’s made up, probably was the minute I heard your name; you’re going to take their side and write about all these supposed cats in your smear article?”

*****

“There’s no proof you murdered your father and mother, and Little Forrest too for some unfathomable reason. With a slow acting poison you found laying about the farm you got rid of the people who brought you into this world. Shorty was your accomplice. You were the brains and he followed your orders. Right?”

*****

“Right what you son-of-a-bitch?”

Sai stands up from the table grasping his notebook in a tightened fist. “Listen. I’ll talk to the others who made this decision and write up an article for next week’s paper. I’ll try to remain objective.” Sai lies so effortlessly to this woman; he has no intention of speaking to her neighbors; he has their formal complaint in his briefcase and he doesn’t have more time to waste on the issue. Choose your battles. Fend off. Fend off. Run away before you fall.

“Wipe that smirk off your face. I know what you write.”

Sai is actually pleased that even this monster of a woman has read his stories.

“You wrote that piece-of-shit story about the people who supposedly rigged the duck race. Those were my friends and they did not steal anything. When you say you’re going to quote someone verbatim, how come it’s never verbatim?”

“I’m now aware of your opinion. So, if there’s anything else. I do have to get back.”

Before Mrs. Plesher can call her stoop-shouldered brother into the kitchen to chop Sai into pieces with a ridged tomato-cutting knife, he takes his leave. He is almost down the curved driveway when he hears Mrs. Plesher shout down to him: “Don’t let them take my babies away. You can save them.” To Sai, it’s the first time Mrs. Plesher has sounded almost human.

Sai keeps his back turned to Mrs. Plesher and her cathouse and faces the half-mile walk back to the bus stop. The mountains form a wall around him on this side of Elkhorn and he imagines himself in a different time when there weren’t any of the homes marring the sage and pine landscape. He waits for the lumbering transport bus and Sai doesn’t know what he is going to do with his stalled car when he flies home to take care of his mother. Sanjit’s turn to be abandoned. First, he has flight and, in a slow eventual time, funeral arrangements to make.

Once the bus drops Sai off in Ketchum he walks back to his tiny newspaper office with the glorious window view of the ski mountain and writes up the story. Wasn’t there something he could do for such an unhappy woman? He decides there isn’t much. She, unfortunately, reminds Sai too much of his dead father, and, from the stories he hears, his own mother before she couldn’t help herself anymore. He reads the neighbor’s complaint forms, the legalese he simplifies. Sai places the story with the editor and tells his boss he has a family emergency, and she can’t help venting, puffing up, since she has to make plans for his departure, tells Sai she doesn’t know if she can pay him for too many missed days. Please, Sai says, I won’t be gone that long; he wonders why he has to justify his absence. Isn’t death enough? He doesn’t want to beg for his job, his new job; he did enough of that scratching and tap dancing to procure the position — somehow he stood out amongst the other dozens of worthy candidates with their own outside lives of stress pressing; he was the only one who had a darkened, East Indian tan, the rest sitting in shirt and tie-locks, suitable dresses and suits, exchanged looks, nodded heads, and grasped smart phones with pale white hands. This conversation is just another inconvenient burr in his mind. He flees the office for home. His step is quick, and he wants time to speed up. On his way, he stops at the Liquor Store for a bottle of Balvenie Signature 12 year scotch, his only indulgence left over from his San Francisco days, something Joe introduced him to. Pleased to meet you.

Here is a photo of Roo, one of our old cats, who led a great life of 18 years. Roo is acting the part of Mrs. Plesher’s The Main Puss here, trying to put on a tough face behind the screen windows. Zippy, in the photos accompanying the story excerpts, is playing near the river running through Leavenworth, Washington . . . a stand-in for the Montana river running through Missoula in Wake Me Up, where Deepika sits and writes the interconnected short stories that make up A Great Distance to cope with her own demons. Deepika’s fictional creations drive her to make a choice, and she, like Mrs. Plesher, never looks too deeply at her own past. Is Deepika writing herself into her story? Or is Sai a double for the son in the novel, the son who showed up on her doorstep wanting answers, soaking wet from an October storm, who ran out of her bungalow in a rage. She wants Sai to seek answers and they are coming in the conclusion next week.

Please read the concluding section, A Great Distance: Part 3 — The End by clicking HERE, and thanks for reading, Justin

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The family in the novel lives near a river that runs through Missoula. It becomes clear the father, the mother, and their son, rarely sits on shore at peace. My fictional Deepika is a visiting writer at the University of Montana and she studies this family — her interaction with the Father, and especially the Son — and turns her observations into fiction. Deepika’s collection of interconnected short stories is set in Sun Valley, Idaho, a place Deepika lived for about a year before moving to Montana; this is where she learned how to snowboard and found a quiet place to write her fiction. She writes some of these stories after the main crime and the fallout occur in the timeline of the novel. The main character reads them, hidden from the known physical world, hovering over her shoulder, in ghostly form. Here is the first of three excerpts from Deepika’s collection, titled: A Great Distance. Please enjoy and, if you feel up to it, leave a comment.

A Great Distance (excerpts from)
By
Deepika Webber

Deepika’s Story, Part One:

There is the rotting smell stuck in the walls of the rental apartment Sai stayed in for the winter season. His clothes smell of it and when he opens the refrigerator the rot ratchets up ten degrees. The fridge shakes when Sai slams the door shut. It must be leaking freon.

He’ll be moving into a better rental apartment when he returns; he’s not leaving Sun Valley, Idaho for good (he loves the thin air and the sun shining on below-zero days, the free mornings spent snowboarding, hanging outside Seattle Ridge Lodge on top of Baldy eavesdropping on vacationers and locals whose job seems to be skiing every single day with their Season Pass showing like a badge on a Sneetch). The current rental apartment he lives in is a horror and there won’t be anyone to take his place after he moves out for at least three months because the landlord is a bastard and a peeping Tom with a nosy complaint complex. So, when Sai’s estranged father died and memories slivered into his mind, drawn up from icy martini-fueled depths, rage isn’t too far behind. He views this family crisis as a break, a chance to move into something nicer, bring his mother out and take care of her. She needs someone to do this and he’s her only son.

I can’t stand this place. Sai shudders. I wake up this way every morning. I wake up asking: Why? When I’m older the question will change to: How?

He’ll find a more convenient rental in Warm Springs, with more amenities; he has several options, friends from the paper who will help him out until he lands a caretaking job, housesitter position, can save up rent, live out of a suitcase if his mother doesn’t want to leave Gladys.

Sai is assigned to write a news bitch-n-moan article about a woman who takes in stray animals, more than the housing code in her part of the valley allows. She lives in Elkhorn and is a widow. Widowhood probably suits her and her obsession with the animal world. Sai imagines the woman telling him she’s a healer as she serves him green tea steeped too long and bad molasses cookies. Death turns a lot of people into true believers, turns some into drunks or thieving liars; for some, the very few, it is an awakening after a long life of servitude and endless roadblocks, self-imposed or not. The woman with the thirteen cats seeks a new age.

A small town believes it is different in all ways from the largest city and superior because of the difference, but Sai knows better. Everyone has the potential to become fucked up, big or small. Sai hasn’t even started to pack his bags. A farce, really: how can he be about to leave? Just tying up all the loose strings.

Sai can’t say this enough. In his mind leaving is a mantra repeating by habit.

After the snow melts in April he’ll be looking for something, someone new, maybe even a roommate beyond his mother; the rents are so high in the Sun Valley resort town it is hard to find affordable housing, which is an oxymoron. The high rent is all he keeps dwelling on.

I’ll save some money for a rainy day, Sai tells himself once more. Why can’t I get this out of my head? It’ll rain on my father’s grave.

The woman with the cat complex is named Mrs. Alice Plesher, but she doesn’t reveal her first name to him and Sai only finds out by accident, later. Mrs. Plesher calls the paper and is put through to Sai. He has no idea why although he could guess the new guy gets all of the personal drudgery assignments until proven worthy. Alice speaks very slowly as if hardened by age and she has a rasp. Sai pictures her in a long house dress from the fifties, pink and white stripes fading with age—a smock of beige over the dress, a multitude of cats clinging to the fabric like stick-ons.

“I want to speak to a real reporter.”

“I am a real reporter, Miss…”

“Mrs…Mrs. Plesher. I was married thirty-two years when my husband died.”

Sai wants to tell the dotty he got his job the same way—death the great equalizer and the beginning and ending of all stories. Even though his partner, Joe, hasn’t died at all, just grew apart, bored, left Sai for a younger version without a lifetime of accumulated baggage; the end result being a final bonfire spark shower lighting a path for Sai’s escape to the high desert atmosphere of a ski resort town, a place he can’t help but view as another temporary safe house.

“Mrs. Plesher my name is Sai Amrashi.”

“What kind of a name is Ashrami?”

“Amrashi.”

“Whatever. You’re not supposed to correct your elders. Just answer the question Mr. Amrashi.”

“I’m not sure.” Who is this woman? Sai wonders. He’s supposed to find out so he keeps this question to himself and lances his interior thoughts with sarcasm.

“Indian or real Native American Indian?”

“Indian,” Sai replies, stifling the need to say, the fake kind.

“I need to tell someone about those people trying to kick me out of my home. I’ve lived here more than twenty years. They can’t just do that without a fight and I’m fighting them with everything I’ve got and they still keep bothering me.”

“That sounds horrible to me. Why don’t you give me directions and I’ll come out and take your story.”

“It’s not a story.”

“I mean interview you. I’ll ask you all kinds of questions and see if there’s something the paper can use. Stories like this take a lot of background work. I have to approach both parties to see what is happening.” Mrs. Plesher isn’t digesting what Sai says and he knows she isn’t but he can’t help himself. He thinks about his father dead on the stairwell and Gladys finding him there and cursing the man, maybe even spitting on his corpse as it chills and stiffens in front of her in final repose.

“You come see me now.”

“I’m free in two hours. Would that be possible?”

“Just don’t send anyone who’s allergic to cats. Last time I had to stand out in the cold. A woman my age.” She says the last as royal queen outraged by the unscrupulous creeping closer to her kingdom.

Last time? Sai wonders what the hell she’s talking about and can only imagine ruin and damnation and personal letters to the editor spewing vitriolic injustice. Happens all the time in every local paper in the world. The letters to the editor are all complaints and bitterness. Someone passes someone on the right so a local writes in about the degeneration in driving of everyone who has come to visit or put down roots from another locale. If you’re from California, forget it, you’ll never be a local and everyone will detest the sight of your black bruiser SUV. One word of advice: you better change your license plates as soon as possible. The latest gripes are about the new hospital cutbacks, the lowering of the speed limit on the highway, the pettiness of the city council and the mayor and the battle to put up a grand hotel blocking the view of the ski mountain from Main Street, the amount of time it takes to get to town from Hailey (now up to 45 minutes on a snow day), and everyone knows skiing takes precedence in a mountain town, how people with dogs are so inconsiderate about picking up their dog shit, and how to say it in a letter so they come across as the saintliest of gadflies. Judge not the people who may help you when you slip on the ice outside the post office…one day. And, Sai thinks, it’s an election year to boot and the bulk of the letters to the editor denouncing the process, the unfairness, the hatred, all makes Sai want to scream. He doesn’t know if he’ll vote, sometimes he tells the most spiteful campaigner for either presidential candidate he refuses to vote because it’s his right, just to watch the wheels come off the bus. He likes to sit and listen to the debate. It’s an American right to vote. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sai hangs up on Mrs. Plesher after she winds up and then down and he really finally decides to delay telling his editor-in-chief he needs to fly home to wrap up his father’s estate until later in the day. I just got the news last night, he ponders this, and I can’t believe I still feel like coming into the office: true avoidance issues. I’m the only son, the only child, and the one who this task falls to. When you hate someone so much there isn’t anything you can do about it but try not to expend any energy on that person, become indifferent. Time doesn’t heal wounds—new age bullshit.

*****

Sai arrived in Ketchum nine months ago. He wanted to live in a mountain town, learn how to snowboard, maybe find some peace, escape from the fiasco he made in Northern California, and write the great American novel. Sai’s thoughts: If Hemingway could do it here drunk off his ass why can’t I? Pipedreams. Was Hemingway always a drunk like me? No, but Sai imagines Hemingway as a bit light in the loafers, playing for Sai’s team, which always makes Sai laugh; after all, The Old Man and the Sea did have a home in Key West and loved Fire Island way too much.

*****

Sai____________middle___________life. There is still so much rage. He doesn’t want to think about it anymore and he’s been hiding it so well everyone at the paper thinks of him as the sweetest guy in the world. Most of his coworkers want to set Sai up with someone. Sai lets it be known he is definitely not interested, but most keep trying anyway. Then he, with great humility, tells these people he is gay and that still doesn’t stop the most persistent of them. “I know a great guy for you. Gay. Nice. Lives alone, poor thing, in an old hunting cabin. Blah. Blah. Blah.” And Sai wonders about these potential boyfriends who escape to the wilderness of Idaho. Sai escapes a past life, a past partnership; why would he want to get involved anew? This mountain town isn’t kind to single straight people so you know the pickings are slim if you happen to be gay and single ____ desperation a light and visible sheen ___________________________________________ ________hook up on the internet, turn yourself into a sexy Indian cowboy with your own sexy website, get lots of hits, or take the long drive to Boise if you need to get your rocks off.

The editor isn’t in her office and Sai puts off telling her about his dead father for another day, but he knows he can’t wait too much longer. Sai just doesn’t want to discuss his past or his fucked-up family with anyone right off the street, to someone he barely knows or respects.

*****

Joe would always tell Sai he doesn’t let anyone ever get close enough to really get to know—for the thousandth time. Does that make sense? Joe always pouts after ripping Sai a new one. You can be so insensitive, Sai, he’ll say and then stalk off. Two hours later he’s back insisting, insulting, and cajoling Sai to go see his analyst; he’ll pay of course, for someone to listen to Sai’s problems, because all the problems in their relationship are Sai’s fault, and then they’ll go out to dinner with friends and pretend none of what they fume about ever took place. Maybe dancing at the bar will follow, smiles all around and lots of Cosmopolitans, too many for anyone but the newly sober to keep track of. When Joe and Sai return home to Joe’s apartment — Sai moved in when Joe wanted Sai to be his permanent boyfriend — he’ll give Sai the silent treatment the second the front door bangs shut. Off to the bedroom Joe steams without a word, a simmering brood, now miffed by something else Sai has done or said or witnessed, some odd segue way of Sai’s after one of Joe’s friends was telling a long drawn-out story about his vacation in Palm Springs, a big who-ha; Joe aching and pissy because Sai acts incapable of doing anything about his standoffishness.

*****

Inside his black Jeep Wrangler Sai feels safe even though it is the size of a shoebox and the door wings back and forth because the doorstop mechanism has been broken since Sai bought it used from a shifty woman who wouldn’t look him in the eye. He needed the car and it was cheap and the woman said it had good karma (instantly thinking she wasn’t being racist by saying karma in front of a real-to-goodness Indian who thought of himself as a lapsed Hindu); the Jeep never left her stranded. There’s only 76 thousand miles on it and it’s been a good car to go to Tahoe in. Back and forth from Larkspur. Never a problem, she says stridently. Look me in the eye when you lie to me so effortlessly, Sai imagined saying. But he bought the car and believed its pedigree and named it Sanjit after one of his father’s ancient brothers who still exists somewhere in a nursing home in Massachusetts. Sai and Sanjit in trouble, on the road again.

Sanjit starts right up but quickly sputters out with a sigh. Sai rubs his hands together and curses himself for giving Sanjit too much gas. Sai is famous for having a lead foot, one of the many arguments Joe picks, picked, with him; Joe always insisted he drive. The car will not start and Sai bangs his hands on the steering wheel. When he’s really mad Sanjit becomes a car again, just a rusty piece of junk. Sai can picture Joe laughing at him, his mouth naturally curving downward into a laughing frown. And Sai’s father is there in flashback spitting tobacco juice at Uncle Sanjit’s feet the last time they spoke. Harsh words quickly flew and made it impossible to return to sender, yelled them with a relish so ulcer-intensive it made Sai hide in his room for hours. Uncle Sanjit wasn’t doing anything to me, Sai said, later. Sai cried. He treated me like an equal. And the assumption, now that he was an adult, really pissed him off, pissed him off that he never saw Uncle Sanjit again because his father thought his own brother was doing something despicable to Sai—the two of you alone—Dad, all the lights were on bright, after a revisionist: in a dark room together—sitting on the bed together—and Sai wasn’t even old enough to understand what his father was raving about. Later—No, he never touched me. Father. No. What are you talking about and mother so far gone at this point, forever silenced by her fall, Sai believed she cast no shadow.

Life is a bit of a magic act and Sai feels the lingering effects of his escape. His Goddamn car will not start and he made a promise to the old bat Plesher he’d be at her house in less than an hour. He stumbles out of Sanjit and grabs his shoulder pack. There’s a free bus system in the valley but he has to ask directions to the closest station and when the next bus will be by to take him to Elkhorn. He ends up getting on the wrong bus to Sun Valley and is forced to get out near the Sun Valley Lodge where he waits for a different bus to take him on the circuitous route from Sun Valley back into town where the driver tells Sai he has to get out and stand at the bus stop on the other side of the street where the bus to Elkhorn will be by in twenty minutes. By this time Sai is already fifteen minutes late and he can picture Mrs. Plesher’s lips screwed up tight as she counts cats to pass the time, a snarl issuing from between her too-plump-they-can’t-possibly-be-real lips. The first thing she’ll say is: No one makes me wait. Sai has his fair share of doors slammed in his face.

The right bus drops Sai off in Elkhorn, as close to Mrs. Plesher’s road as possible, which means half a mile away. Everything out in the real West means longer, bigger, brighter, better, cleaner, a wider horizon. Sai curses The West and the way the developers have continued to hack up this pristine valley and put homes designed by romper room’s space-age division all over the hills with no care, the hubris of man. Sai isn’t against the homes being put up exactly, but, aesthetically, most of the homes are butt-ugly and make him wince as he walks by them on his way to Timber Frame Road.

Because of the street name Sai makes the right turn and expects to see lovely homes of timber frame construction but again he feels jarred by stucco homes the color of pencil lead with gables going one way and not matching the roofline of the guesthouse stuck on top of the garage which is also 2,000 square feet. There is always way too much room in these houses for one family and all their extended family to descend upon them in the high ski season. A pack of legal and illegal immigrants and migrant workers clean the homes weekly and mow the Midas-size lawns and feel lucky to be living in the valley where, for housecleaning, they can easily charge twenty-five dollars an hour, laugh about their employers all the way back to Hailey and Bellevue in the part of the valley where all the workers live. Let them take enough of everything to go around for everyone. The people at the coffee shops discuss their housekeepers as if they are indentured servants without families and problems of their own in voices filling with dismay overly worried about breakage and theft and how hard it is to find good help these days, and boy does it cost them an arm and a leg. One woman with hair platinum and blinding says she hates paying for the privilege of living here in Sun Valley and then stands up from the table intent on taking her purebred dogs to the groomer who charges 85 dollars per dog, an up charge if the dog is really, really dirty. But turns back to her friend, sits, and says, in a voice shrill with indignation: Can you believe that C.E.O. moving here and putting up that 30,000 square foot concrete and glass monstrosity on top of that hill? Did you hear about that? Her friend says, Or that one celebrity who thinks he can peep into private windows whenever he wants, who totally disregards the No Trespassing signs—as if they don’t apply to him? Or the comedian with Saddam’s forehead who thinks he’s too much the Star to even say hello or thank you or anything polite to the people he passes every day in this small town—he won’t last long; it’s hard to be a Republican in this Democratic town anyway; I hear he wears the most ridiculous safety helmet when he goes ice skating. And the rich, ah, their full time job is managing the help and most are so bitter about the cost of everything they take it out on the help in many small ways, mostly by appropriating a tone of voice never suitable in polite company and only slightly understandable when reprimanding a dog caught piddling on the carpet.

Mrs. Plesher’s sprawling ranch-style house comes into view up on Sai’s left. Again, it is also gray but not stucco, just faded cedar siding to give it a real faux Western feel. Her landscaping, just the sage fields and a few pine trees, remains nonexistent for her having lived in the house over a decade and Sai realizes she doesn’t want to block her view of the ski mountain or the perpetual White Cloud Mountains to the north. Sage dots the hills behind the house in waves and patterns broken by the strip-mining veins racing to the peaks thousands of feet higher than the homes.

Besides her inflated lips, the next physical detail Sai notices about Mrs. Plesher is her stern figure. She carries herself in a formally rigid manner, with her arms crossing across a flat landscape of chest the majority of the time. Her shirt is such a plain cornflower blue it could’ve come off of a pharmacist’s back. She’s happy, Sai deduces. Her seriousness is her way of showing this. At one moment in her history with but a glare she stops the boys from laughing and making fun as she walks by.

*****

Her parents grew up in Wyoming on a horse ranch. When Mrs. Plesher was a young girl following in her mother’s footsteps, a dart of a shadow behind the quickness of adult strides, she could measure up because she learned to take control of every situation. Her mother, a firm disciplinarian, would not cotton to frivolous acts or phrases.

“You can be a silly nitwit, Alice. Don’t let me catch you playing with the hem of your dresses anymore. You wear them to church and you sit beside your brothers and act like a lady.”

“I’m not.”

“A lady does not backtalk her mother either.”

“I’m not playing with my dress.”

And the slap would spring into Alice’s field of vision quick as a pinball bumper. And Alice learned to be her mother’s plaything. She was the oldest and only daughter of five children and her mother always told her she had to set an example. If her four brothers acted up and destroyed the carpet in the back hallway with their muddy pig shoes it was her job to make sure her mother never found out. And she’d yell at her brothers, Lionel, Shorty, Curtis and Forrest in that order until they got used to it and would do whatever she wanted. Alice wouldn’t fight or slap her brothers; her words would cut into them.

It was a hard life in Wyoming in the forties and fifties with few neighbors to speak of near Laramie but far enough away to make every childhood trip to the town seem like a special event. Alice would help her mother with the baking and the feeding of the chickens and the egg collecting and the other chores too easy for anyone else to do, but her mother always wanted her to have a mind sharp and brilliant and sent her to the school with a warning for her to learn her lessons. Always unspoken was the OR ELSE. Alice’s studies would prepare her for a life beyond the farm. When her mother said this to her the first time, she was only ten years old. You’re old enough to know there are few ways for a woman to find something of her own to hold onto.

Alice studied and memorized and learned how to manipulate the teachers and her mother helped her.

“You’re going to be respectable one day, a teacher perhaps, someone a sterling gentleman will fall for like a stone down a well,” said her mother with her flat tone. The heaviness in her mother’s voice Alice learned never to forge barriers against. At first Alice thought her mother just wanted to get rid of her. She was competition after all. Her father doted on her in many small ways, never overtly, never so that the other children would make a cry of bitterness but he did. Alice read to him at night after she read stories to the boys and helped put them to bed. She’d get books from the school teachers on loan: Steinbeck, The Bronte sisters, and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, one after another, the stories coming out of Alice’s tight, serious lips. Her mother would sit listening while she knitted or mended the socks, sewed back buttons, and patched holes in the family’s laundry. Soon, Steinbeck would grow too racy and Alice read them in secret; his stories about wanton women in the West of the past didn’t smooth anything at the farm, biblical parable or not. Her father loved the true stories about the land and Hemingway filled the bill and Alice’s brothers even liked them too, but not as much as they liked Zane Grey Westerns or the space operas from the pulps at the drugstore.

The life of Alice Plesher was planned out from the beginning days on the farm as if God had inhabited her mother’s flesh on one of His bad days and a tiny part clung to her when He had to go put a crack in a dam somewhere across the world to teach the people caught in the flood a lesson about sticking together, helping your neighbor, in hard times. You did what you were told. The family didn’t go to church often. Alice always wondered why and imagined her parents balking at religion the same way they dug into the sand when anyone tried to tell them what to do or how to live.

A girl had few escapes on the horse farm. Alice would follow her brothers around when they were goofing off, finished with their chores and school and trying to get away. They all ran to the woods bordering the river to escape. Her brothers weren’t stupid either. So many times the five of them would get to the bank of the river where they piled up broken branches and logs into a shelter and after an afternoon building and supporting the fort they’d collapse under the makeshift roof sweaty and smelling of rot and dirt and molding leaves. They all felt the weight of their parents and they’d talk about it when even the youngest, Forrest, the sunniest of the children, could be trusted to never repeat what was said to their parents.

“I’m going to California when I get old enough,” Shorty said.

“You don’t even know the right direction to start such a journey,” Alice replied.

“You’d help me then. Just like in that Eden book. I’d wander the world.”

Alice swatted Shorty because they both knew he was the only one she read that book to. This was the early fifties when all the children except Forrest were about to be teenagers and so much of the world outside their farm seemed like a fantasy world, someplace like Oz or the wicked forest where Ichabod Crane met his fate. The boys only saw the good though and could never believe people had to face true evil. “I’d get myself whipped from here to Laramie if I helped you run away. Besides, you’re the one Dad counts on to run the farm.”

“I’ll run the place if he doesn’t want it,” Lionel said without any hesitation. They all knew Lionel had his eye on the place. He wanted to follow his father everywhere. Make him proud. Always did what he was told. Alice called Lionel a simpleton whenever his back was turned.

“You know Dad wants all of you to run it.”

“Why not you?” Curtis asked. Lionel pushed Curtis and he fell backwards and raised himself off the bed of leaves with a sneer.

“I’m still only a girl and Mom has other plans for me.”

“You’re lucky.”

*****

Sai greets Mrs. Plesher with a wry smile and an outstretched hand, which she refuses and fades back into her home with her arms crossed. Her hair is cut short and cradles her forehead closely as if formed by a bathing cap, and then he realizes she’s wearing a wig and has a hard time not staring at her hair from that point on. When Sai follows her into the front entryway the dimness of the lighting strains his eyesight.

“You’re not here to do anything but take my story. I have a lot to tell you about my neighbors, my lovely backbiting, son-of-a-bitching neighbors and I don’t have time to do anything else. I’ve made coffee if you want some.”

Sai shakes his head no while saying, “No thank you. Let’s get started.”

He can’t help but notice the cat smell as Mrs. Plesher leads him into the kitchen, a small galley-sized room facing the sunrise with the end of the galley made into a breakfast nook with windows—a bright room in the morning. The cats laze on the ledge, but seem ready for action at the slightest provocation; they watch the sparrows and the magpies bounce around the feeders Mrs. Plesher has installed like temptresses on the other side of the glass. Most of the cats are black or solid white, but there is one large tabby and a calico who sit like bookends on the floor eating food out of two of the six red plastic bowls spread out in front of a row of Formica kitchen cabinets.

“So,” Sai starts, “are all of your cats indoor cats or do you let them go out?”

“How long have you been a reporter?” Mrs. Plesher asks with the faintest hint of condescension.

“About three years off and on. My background is in English with a minor in Journalism. A town this small could afford to hire the best.”

She catches Sai’s sarcasm but asks another question with the same tone of voice. To get through the next hour Sai knows this interview will take all of the skills he has acquired while growing up with the parents he somehow got stuck with. Maybe he can cut it short and write nothing. Go back to the editor and reveal Alice’s wacky scheme to create an army of cats so one day she can lay siege to the hills, burying her neighbors in cat-box smells and scratched antiques.

“Where are you living?”

“Warm Springs. In a rental condo.”

“So they pay you well.”

“It’s just a hobby. I’ve been fortunate enough to be raised as someone who has learned how to save every penny.”

“Which means you learned how to be cheap too,” Mrs. Plesher snorts, and maybe with a slight approval, snorts are hard to define sometimes, could’ve been derision.

She is interviewing Sai.

“Cheap is a state of mind. I prefer the word frugal.”

“Don’t get smart with me.” Sai has____________________ ___a vision of Mrs. Plesher taking a whack at him with one of the many kitchen knives hanging magnetically against the wall. “I’ve got far too many smug neighbors as it is to deal with someone else who’s trying to get the truth to tell the whole world.”

Sai has dealt with a regular kaleidoscope variety of manic people in his life. He can spot them in a hurry with enough time to sidestep the clinging compulsions fueling the paranoia. It is not fun. And he knows his sense of humor is too much for Mrs. Plesher; not many people appreciate good sarcasm anyway. But he will not underestimate her either; he knows she is sharper than most of the people who sat next to him during composition class at the only community college in New Jersey he could afford.

“Okay. Why don’t you start at the beginning and take me through the events you spoke about on the telephone from the past to the present.”

“Chronological is the way you want me to tell my story.”

“I think the simpler the better. News writing is usually right to the point.”

“Don’t patronize me you little shit.”

Sai_____________________feels__________ ________________ __________goosed. He stands abruptly clutching his notebook. He doesn’t let anyone speak to him in such a manner not even if Mrs. Plesher is mildly entertaining in a falling from a tall bridge fashion.

“Oh sit down.”

“You cannot,” Sai says and repeats, “You cannot speak to me like you just did nor in that tone of voice. I think it would be best if I got somebody else to take down your grievance.”

“I said sit down.” Mrs. Plesher blocks the small exit and the way her fists grind into her hipbones Sai just wants her to back up. He also wants to take a photograph of her just like that, arms akimbo. She reminds him of his own mother’s mother: old and too mangy to put out to pasture quietly.

*****

“I’m not lucky,” Alice said to Curtis with a grave smile.

“Yes you are. You’re the only one of us who will get off the farm and see the world.”

“I’ll let you visit all the time.” Around the fort they’d hung blankets too ratty to be missed by mother or father, but just perfect for the privacy of their meeting place.

Lionel looked sullen and Alice could tell he was withdrawing. “Lionel will take care of you. I’ll give that job to him when I leave. I’m sick of wearing that crown anyway.”

“Lionel will get a crown?” asked Forrest, who from the tone of his voice was kind of miffed he wouldn’t be getting one either.

“There’s no crown you goofball,” and Curtis smacked Forrest on the back of his head. She’d seen her mother do that a thousand times to all of the boys and they’d seen mother smack the back of her head too. Once so hard and by surprise she’d lost her baby tooth when it slammed against the rim of her cereal bowl. There wasn’t a scratch of money for the tooth fairy anyway; she scolded Alice not to expect it either; I’ll never understand the things you do to wind everyone in this family up.

*****

“I was the eldest of five. Did I tell you that?” Mrs. Plesher asks as she folds a cloth cocktail napkin and lays it in front of her. Sai keeps his seat and doesn’t mind listening as she runs through her past. Stories fill his head and Sai makes most of them up anyway. It is good to get new ones and the tone of voice Mrs. Plesher uses, honestly, puts him on edge; he’s heard it all his life; hackles up.

“Blood splattered all over the table. When Shorty brings it up he always says I filled that cereal bowl to the rim. My mother really had a great swing. But who knew about tennis then? The__________rich maybe . . . a different time a different planet perhaps. _____________________________ __________________________smile and tell me everything will be okay. The happiest day of my life? Do you want to know what that day was like? I remember it because I got away. There was the train out of Laramie and I had one new dress and a lot of hand-me-downs from my mother even though I had to take them in a lot, without complaint.”

One of the cats, a Maine coon with a head the size of a grapefruit starts scratching Sai’s pant leg. He kicks it away without actually kicking it.

“Best to not anger The Main Puss. She’ll rip you a new one without regret, and don’t expect a condolence letter from me.”

Continue reading A Great Distance: Part 2 — The Middle by clicking HERE.

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Zippy is sittin’ on the dock of the bay . . . patrolling for Canadian Geese who fly into the pond every spring. And Spring has come early as the first squadron of geese have landed. They go about their business as couples, egging each other on, trying to find the right place in the cattails to settle in and “crap” up the place.

I can’t blame the geese; the pond makes for a private playground. Zippy barks at them constantly and they give it right back in loud honking tirades and swim off, scorn in every stretch of their curved necks, their swift path through the water irritating Zippy all the more. Now, Zippy is teaching Kipling how to race around the pond and not allow the geese to take to land. The messy birds eventually get tired of the game and fly away to roost in many of the other lakes in the area.

Now that the Oscars are over and The Artist has won Best Picture of 2011, I wanted to point out some other great films that you may have overlooked. They are available on DVD or through your rental sites. As the Academy Awards make clear: films that get the title of Classics bestowed on them are a rarity. It’s hard to fill the ten best films of the year nominations, and this year there were only nine competing. I didn’t think The Artist or Hugo deserved the highest honor. No sour grapes though. They both won awards because they were about filmmaking, Old Hollywood, the legends of Hollywood, glamour, glitz, and played to the academy voters. Hugo didn’t have a true beating heart within its spectacle, a beautiful decorated egg that remains hollow, and as slow-moving as a train running out of coal. I loved The Artist, don’t get me wrong; it was inventive and had true joy and sorrow in the tale, but it also stayed detached, and at a distance, and kept me from completely falling for its silent spell. I felt the same disconnect with the voting bloc of the academy as I did back when Brokeback Mountain, an important, naturalistic film about love, loss, secrets, and longing, lost to Crash, a movie that starred almost all the stars of the age, and had a narrative that manipulated the characters into action (a form of glad handing). Can’t change it though and time passes, but what films will you watch again? Certainly not Crash, Hugo or The Artist (well, maybe this last one just to see what all the fuss was about).

I’ve been taken with three older films. All are crime dramas, and each is a foreign film. Most of the films I have loved the past few years have been made outside the USA. The Millennium Trilogy from Sweden did the books justice, and made a star of the actress, Noomi Rapace, who played the original girl with the dragon tattoo brilliantly. Where was her nomination for Best Actress last year? Why wait to nominate Rooney Mara this year and not nominate and equally reward the harrowing portrayal by Rapace? This wondering being only my humble opinion, here are some incredible films to savor:

Animal Kingdom is a stunning crime film from Australia and the oily mother is a true screen villain, played by Jacki Weaver. She did get an Oscar nomination, and was the underdog to win, but that would’ve been really something to see.

The Square is a film noir movie and is also from Australia. I hadn’t heard of it but I’m glad it was recommended to me. It has the requisite dread for the situation the sketchy characters find themselves embroiled in. I was hooked.

And finally, rent it tonight, soon, The Secret in Their Eyes; put it in your queue at Netflix. This film from Argentina won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and I’d never heard of it before its big win. It was worth the wait, and I’ll watch it again just to watch the intricate narrative unfold again. It centers on a crime, a cold case from the past and how longing for people drives action. It has a deep and romantic, hidden center.

I’m at home right now putting the finishing touches on my first eBook for Amazon: Sandcastle and Other Stories, and also finishing the last long draft of my first psychological novel, Wake Me Up, to catch small edits so that I can submit it later this summer for your reading pleasure. There’s never enough time and Zippy and Kipling want to play fetch after they chase all the geese away.

Best to you and yours always, and happy viewing and reading,

Justin

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In Rachel Thompson’s own words: I’m a chick who writes stuff that makes you laugh. My book A Walk In The Snark hit #1 on the Kindle Motherhood list this past September (do you think they know I talk about sex? Shhh.). It’s since hit about oh, SEVEN more times. #woot! I’ve been nominated for Funniest Blog, Best Humor Writer & Redhead Who Makes A Killer Dirty Martini (okay, I made the last one up, but it’s true. Honest.).

If you listen to Rachel Thompson, and delve into what moves her, you’ll find a person who encourages deep and thoughtful discourse (and, yes, sometimes while speaking to Rachel, I do roll on the floor laughing with Kipling and Zippy, my two long coat German shepherds). Rachel is at her best while discovering what is honest and raw, and her writing life will show you this, as well.

Rachel encouraged me to write without constraint and to finally share a bit more about what reveals my own character. Today is the day I began to write about my life in a way that makes sense. How I arrived at the place I sit writing to you is a similar journey so many other people have taken. I grew up suspect of people who shared intimate details of their life too freely; I was never one of those people, or so I thought, until now. I kept introspection on a shelf where only I could reach it, and I tended to live my life only looking at the present. I wanted my self-observations and reporting of innermost thoughts to be a private infinity loop. I took a pair of scissors to that old mode of thinking and cut that loop to talk about a childhood, the way I would keep all people at a distance, girls, bullies, family members, men, women, and friends. I did not allow anyone into my sphere, and I believed this was the only good way for me to cope. Having said this, and after you read my guest post please know this: I didn’t write about a terrible childhood. I had an average, happy, middle class upbringing in the Midwest. My parents were wonderful, and tried to raise five kids under the age of six, including two sets of twins, the best way they knew how: hard work and discipline. I can’t change my past, and wouldn’t if I could; besides, I have no regrets.

If you want to find out why Kipling is channeling her inner ringbearer, Frodo, read my 1st guest post: Why Boys Run: One Intimate Answer (click the title). Please feel free to leave comments  – I am always of a curious mind and love to hear what you think.

Rachel Thompson also runs a phenomenal Social Media Business for those who need that extra special push to get their business to rise in stature across the Social Media spectrum. Her tips on how to increase your Social Media traffic are worth their weight in chocolate and vodka alone. You can Follow Rachel on Twitter @RachelintheOC and now Follow her new media business @BadRedheadMedia.

Rachel’s two eBooks are available for sale at Amazon.com, and you can hit the titles here below to purchase them. I highly recommend them. Sit back, read, and laugh.

The Mancode: Exposed by Rachel Thompson

A Walk in the Snark by Rachel Thompson

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Islewood Farm is magical in the winter, and the pond is home to many different types of ducks all year round. Zippy and his pupil, Kipling, patrol the grounds but remain gentle and social dogs with even temperaments. Still, if I didn’t know Zippy and came across him, I wouldn’t want to make him suspicious. He is a regal, zen-like animal who loves to be chased more than to chase. One of the photos below captures this: the look of pure cartoonish joy on Zippy’s features as Kipling chases him around.

Since there is no snow this Valentine’s Day I went back to an older year where Zippy romped about on this Holiday alone. Zippy’s racing through a Winter snow across the meadow. It’s supposed to get colder here in a week or two, and maybe snow again before Spring returns.

The meadow looks like this now and the trees do have the faintest bud growth. I am not a huge celebratory Valentine’s Day romantic. I love spending a quality day with my mate walking the dogs and listening to the sounds around us as we startle birds, otters, the occasional deer, and once a pesky beaver we named Justin Beaver (click here to see that annoyingly cute photo).

Kipling is now 5 months old. She is almost half Zippy’s size, and will be there in another month. Zippy continues to teach her the ropes, pulling fallen tree limbs out of the canals is a serious job for them, and Zippy is a powerful swimmer and we can’t wait to teach Kipling how to swim this summer.

Around Islewood Farm we have a couple blue herons who always spend most of the colder months with us. We’ve named the first one Lyda Blue Heron, and the second one, Sasha Blue Heron, in honor of my terrific nieces. When we went for a walk yesterday Kipling and Zippy played and roughhoused next to one of the back canals. In Summer, a canopy swing makes this point one of the most peaceful on the farm, and also a top reading spot. Yesterday, while filming a short video of the mutts, Lyda Blue Heron flew by, squawking away. Zippy knows to spot her in the sky as she flies from tree to tree and he then goes on full alert mode, wonders what direction to start running after Lyda Blue Heron. Kipling chases after Zippy and doesn’t quite understand the concept of ‘the heron’, but has a merry time. I am so happy to share this short, short video with you.

This video is better in the smaller size on the blog so that the picture doesn’t stutter, although it does work on Full Screen. Apologies . . . the sound quality is wanting, but if you are able to turn up the volume all the way you will just make out the sound of Lyda Blue Heron’s cry. When Zippy hears it you’ll notice he becomes still, assessing her flight direction. Yes, that is me in blue jeans trying to stay out of dog and video path LOL. The song snippet comes courtesy of the Once More With Feeling Soundtrack to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s musical episode. Tara sings the song Under Your Spell to Willow with a bit of scandalous wordplay.

Next up on a writer’s life blog is a surprise book/film recommendation. This is one instance where both entertainment mediums are perfect. I will fill you in more, and maybe you can guess: This book was published after the death of the author, to great acclaim, becoming the most beloved book of this country — the author never knew the fame and the book was rejected by publishers time and again. The film is considered to be a classic as well, and there are two different versions of this movie on DVD. Please make your guess below in the Comments.

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I heard The Roots for the first time in the nineties, after they had a few albums out, and I love to travel back to that time by replaying their strong messages of struggle and perseverance. Their song Water is on permanent rotation. The Roots is not only a hip hop band; they weave jazz and neo soul flourishes into their music, and this coloration makes for a dynamic listening experience over the course of their 13 albums. Undun is their latest, and, like Phrenology, it is a masterpiece, a concept album centered around the life of a fictional character, Redmond Stephens. How much of this character is autobiographical is part of the work — worth puzzling out — and strengthens the message because it is a haunting one. Not everyone can make it out of darkness; the tantalizing dreams of success hit all of us in some form or another on billboards, watching friends and rivals riding down the street in fancy cars, passing strangers who dress to flaunt unfathomable success — and this is a universal feeling The Roots explore. How do we end up choosing a path in life that will cause us grievous harm, a path that is shining and leading us astray from the very first cogent moment, blaring out that a better life might not be possible for everyone.

When someone says: Don’t do that, or else . . . how often do we listen? You’re up against a wall and end up thinking there isn’t an alternative option to the life you are leading — this is the message of Undun. The lyrics are powerful, stirring; the music, including five instrumental jazz and classical-based pieces, is meditational, melodic, superbly understated but present, and shadows the main character who contemplates everything with a sharp eye and a heavy wisdom. I listen and listen and listen to Undun and fall into a world that is real . . . I don’t want it to be real, and that’s the heartbreak.

The Roots is an American hip hop/neo soul band formed in 1987 by Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They are influenced by jazz music and take an iconoclastic approach to hip hop.

On March 2, 2009, The Roots became the house band on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Undun begins with a short instrumental, Dun, a tone, a piercing tone, steady. An ephemeral echo then enters, insinuating itself and slowly extinguishes the blank-television-screen tone with warmth.

Sleep begins, and a languorous tick-tock beat awakens; an emotional softness, a tenderness, a wistful simmering bitterness, singing:

like when autumn leaves fall
down from the trees
there goes my honey bee
i’ve lost a lot of sleep to dreams
and i do not miss them yet
i wouldn’t wish them on the worst of enemies
let them burn, go from here
like when autumn leaves

Undun is an album that takes you into one man’s world. His dreams haunt him. His life, he believes, points to failure, his family will forget him, and the battles he’s faced are mostly unresolved. In Sleep this man wonders what so many people wonder: how he went from a man to a memory. Something everyone contemplates becomes a powerful lament.

Make My (feat. Big K.R.I.T. & Dice Raw) grows out of this darker depth and offers a joyful beat even though the man we’re listening to is trying to explain why he’s feeling such simmering unease. A world where it’s hard to dream, to justify good dreams. And when these dreams come true and the business takes over: how to remain true.

The heat of the day, the long robe of muerte
That soul is in the atmosphere like airplay
If there’s a Heaven I can’t find the stairway

The beginning tone reappears at the end of this song before One Time (feat. Phonte & Dice Raw) opens with a resigned vocal, someone trying to win over himself, not beat himself up as much as the world around him does. And he has to do this one time, he realizes he must play the game even if it’s an ugly game in an ugly world in order to make the noise inside your belly stop.

The fifth song in this cycle, Kool On (feat. Greg Porn & Truck North), brings a groove to the life of the man, who is pretending to live the good life. The chorus is catchy and melodic: Come get your kool on . . . Stars are made to shine.

Fuck a genie and three wishes
I just want a bottle, a place to write my novel . . .
Let’s toast to better days a beautiful mind and a flow that never age

The vocals weave and drift, the separate voices interacting throughout the album. My favorite track is Kool On, because the tone of all the singers has that bravado, but the doubt in the vocal tone is ever present.

The OtherSide (feat. Bilal Oliver & Greg Porn)
Originally called “The Jump” follows Kool On and the band shifts back to the musical landscape of Sleep and Make My . . . the groove slowing into contemplative mode once more . . . the way a mind works, shifting from one subject to another, this one bursting out with what someone thinks he should be doing with his precious time.

We’re all on a journey
Down the hall of memories
Don’t worry bout what you ain’t got
Leave with a little bit of dignity
Never loved what I had
Always felt like I deserved more
But when I
Make it to the other side
Make it to the other side
That’s when we’ll settle up the score

Stomp (feat. Greg Porn) starts with a shout . . . Someone with a bullhorn cajoling the men in this situation to fight, don’t take it anymore, rise up, and he’s trying to convince the man to join him before the incredible song Lighthouse (feat. Dice Raw) drives the message of Stomp home: Before the dark abyss I’m gon’ hit you wit dis. Wake up! The loves of your life may not be there to help you anymore . . . the parting of ways may not have been your fault but that’s the end result. No one will be there to mourn you.

And no one’s in the lighthouse
You’re face down in the ocean
And no one’s in the lighthouse
And it seems like you just screamed

I Remember is a track with a snapping backbeat and a list of all the places in the man’s past, the landscape of graffiti, train tracks, hopelessness, wondering if he’ll ever get out, and the song implores the man to never forget. We remember the ugliness of life more than anything pleasing.

Tip the Scale (feat. Dice Raw) and the man hangs on a scale, a precipice of defeat . . . Heads or Tails . . . when we sometimes don’t learn from our mistakes. But the man has got to live his life his own way even if there are:

Only two ways out
Digging tunnels or digging graves out

The last four songs are all instrumental, The Redford Suite, ending like the album began, setting a mood for contemplation.

Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou)
Possibility (2nd Movement) the wistful tonal qualities of the solo piano and strings adds a short reprieve before entering
Will to Power (3rd Movement), a jazz-based musical fugue of disjointed notes and
Finality (4th Movement) where the strings return to take listeners to a dark final note.

The current members of The Roots are Black Thought (MC), Questlove (drums), Kamal (keyboard), Frank Knuckles (percussion) (also a former Protégé of Questlove), and Cap’n Kirk (guitar). Recently, they have toured with sousaphonist Damon “Tuba Gooding Jr.” Bryson and Game Theory producer and current bassist Owen Biddle. For their performances on Jimmy Fallon, James Poyser contributes additional keyboards.

The band announced on August 25, 2011 that Owen had left the band and would be replaced by Mark Kelley.

Most members have worked with PETA to promote compassion for animals and the vegetarian lifestyle.

I hope you find Undun as startling and brilliant as I do every single time you listen to it. I’m on the lookout for some really great music for 2012 so if you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

Justin

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