Frankie's Challenge

       In the entire nine years that Frankie Tantalus had spent living on Planet Earth, he was facing the most formidable challenge of his career: how to get to California and join the circus. From where he lay inside the aluminum Salvation Army drop-off box in the Kroger's parking lot, he knew there was an array of obstacles in his way. But in spite of circumstances that might seem dire to the guardians of children the world over, Frankie knew he could not turn back. His reputation in the fourth grade was on the line.

       Frankie had faced tough challenges in the past. For one thing, he had made it through an entire year of third grade with Mrs. Thornside as his teacher. That was not an achievement for mere lightweights. Mrs. Thornside was renowned for her stern instruction. It was said that Mrs. Thornside had not smiled in years, some saying as far back as the grim and mournful day Prohibition was repealed. However long it had been, Frankie was certain she had never smiled at him. On several occasions she’d even come close to administering several high-impact blows upon what she called his "hard and empty head." But somehow he had scraped by, and this year he found himself in the fourth grade with a new teacher, Miss Gingrich, who, when she did manage to force a smile, looked as though the effort might shatter her ancient and brittle body into a million shards of Babylonian pottery.

An Old Newsman Takes Stock

Dresser Altmont leaned toward the base of the fountain and glimpsed his reflection in the pool of water. A slight breeze blew across the surface, disturbing his reflected image and filling his nostrils with the faint redolence of stale whiskey. Strange, that, he thought. It was an intimate smell and immediately recalled his childhood and the ghost of his father. The smell was the imprint of his father called back to life. His father’s life was governed by spirits, by alcohol. Dresser’s most intimate memories of being held by his father, being near him in their home, in his bed, kissing his father at night before bedtime, were memories infused by the smell of whiskey. It was emblematic of the man, as much as the fedora hat and breast pocket handkerchief that were his sartorial trademarks. The fleeting moments of his father’s show of affection were mixed with the redolence of whiskey that escaped from his mouth and nostrils. The memory didn’t sadden him. Quite the contrary. The whiskey smell and his father together were a fond mix of impressions, as though one could not exist without the other. And that may have been so. One thing Dresser had never done, and wished he had, was to get drunk with the old man. His father died relatively young, when Dresser was barely out of college. There was so much he didn’t know about the man and never would. A person had to accept and live with so many gaps in his knowledge about others, about the past. And those gaps became gaps in ones self-knowledge. If Dresser could know more about what his father was, perhaps it would have shed some light on the things in himself about which he was still uncertain, even at the advanced age of 77. 

The wind skimmed the surface of the fountain, scattering spray until his picture broke apart and became small fragments of the color of his dark suit, as if he were nothing more than the rumpling of clear film over a large rock at the bottom of the pool, the clay cup of this civic cenotaph to the dead. The traces that he himself would leave behind were nothing more than the aroma of smoke from a cigar, the inks from his presses cured in his clothing or the furniture of his grand home, and whiskey, too, which he was fond of, or a wood fire drenched in the sizzle of fried trout or small mouth bass, the fish oils that must by now be part of his blood. People looked at what was around them, not what came before. The ones who remembered him would remember him reflexively, not intentionally, when they heard the squeak of wheels that might have come from his brougham desk chair, or that wood fire, or the peat smell of malt scotch whiskey. They would not remember him for saving the marsh, or his brand of brash and irreverent journalism that was non-partisan and independent. When his grandchildren were dead, no one would remember him at all, and that’s what it came down to. He felt it was all for naught when looked at like that. And this did not bother him in the least. In fact, it consoled him to think that the less thought about the dead, the more peaceful their repose or extinction, whatever the case might be. His outlook was not Chinese, nor that of the ancient Romans, whose dead seemed to require lots of posthumous attention and pampering. He never used to think this way, like an Epicurean, his life’s essence dissolved into bits of atoms. It pleased him to consider that outcome as a final one.

He was putting himself into a mood, as his wife called it; too pensive and reflective for a man of action, the kind of man who couldn’t afford the paralysis those attitudes inspired. It wasn’t by choice. The world had its own way of setting off the chemicals in each man’s body that exploded in his brain. His brew was different from the next fellow’s. He was not a poet or a philosopher, but from time to time he felt himself sinking into the torpor of their ontological doubts.

The Old Poetess

It was near closing time. A poetry reading had just concluded and people were leaving. Rachel recognized the poet, old Mrs. LeClerc, a woman well into her eighties, whose family had for years run a tannery on the edge of town. Despite the coarse and sanguinary nature of the family business, the woman was a verse stylist of some literary repute. She had gained early notoriety by translating Troubadour chansons and erotic French poetry of the 18^th century, writing at an old walnut secretary in the evenings after long hot days spent inspecting the cured hides of slaughtered cows and sheep. In time, an even darker fame had attached to her. 

Dresser Altmont was fond of telling the story how, many years before Rachel was born, Mrs. LeClerc had murdered Mr. LeClerc, shooting him point blank in the temple while he dozed languorously in the arms of a brawny tannery worker, a man who narrowly escaped the same fate as his moneyed lover. The jury, however, was persuaded by Madame Leclerc’s plea of sustained mental and physical cruelty in the course of a loveless marriage. After her riveting testimony on the witness stand, in which she candidly recounted having been forced to suffer numerous and brutal episodes of sodomitic ignominy at the hands of her leather magnate husband, the jury acquitted her in less than an hour of deliberation. The vindicated widow was said to have celebrated her freedom by installing a suspiciously young and pretty Chinese seamstress in the very bed she once shared with the philandering Mr. LeClerc. 

Now, as the old poetess made her way toward the door, she was partly shrouded in the smoke of a fat cigarette that dangled from her perforated red lips. Through the smoke’s silver haze, the woman’s eyes sparkled a cheerful cerulean blue. She smiled slyly at Rachel and nodded, while a beautiful young man with translucent ears escorted her on his arm and together they stepped out into the cool evening air.

Wayfarer's Night Dream

Lettie bundled her clothes at the base of the elm tree and then walked out to the empty dirt road passing between her house and the Berlin’s. She stood in plain sight of Saree’s house and looked at it with curiosity and desire, wondering how to be included in its warmth and security, with its assuring domestic smells and steadfast daily pattern of living, with all its regularity and mundane comfort. 

Since Lettie had moved in with the Rasmussens, she had been drawn to the Berlins like a turtle to the sea, instinctively, certain that what it contained was necessary for her survival. Now the house was dark and asleep. At peace. Its massive slate roof and towering chimney gratified Lettie. The long and easy porch with its stuffed chairs and wicker tables, its cantilevered roof and railing with gracefully molded stanchions, these were details that seduced her with their suggestion of continuity and protective love. 

And because she longed for these very things, they also struck her as mocking affronts, the painted and polished thorns of cozy luxury that ridiculed her desire for substance. But what was the substance, the stuff, really? Were these the things that might soothe the growling at the pit of her belly, the aching emptiness between her thighs? If she could, she would ingest the very elements, the details and decorous architectural symbols of this family’s settledness, their rootedness, their dug-in permanence in the earth, and twist her own limbs between theirs, folding herself among their bodies, mother and father’s, sisters and father’s, daughters and mother’s, clasped together without beginning or end in one organism of synchronized breath; one organism, whole and warm and beating with life, passing its blood from limb to limb, from one body to the other, a fleshy web of symbiosis and satiated appetites, where one solitary consciousness alone and brittle could be subsumed, ingested by a larger purpose, a teeming honeycomb of life, pulsing with rich variety and interdependence as if the house were itself a life-giving womb.