Scrivner

When the men from the hospital came to get her, they found that she had barricaded herself with books.  They weren’t informed she could read, nor that she could construct a turret tower with the deconstructionists.   

Lolita, Sons and Lovers, and Mrs. Dalloway guarded the moat, while The Old Man and the Sea waited at the ramparts.  The War of the Worlds looking down upon them from the castle keep, where she waved the cover of Crime and Punishment with a mocking grin. 

Although the men had all brought Great Expectations, they found there was no room for Dickens here.

She said, “I wanted more than this for a vacation.  I was expecting room service, fine dining, sleeping until noon, reading in bed, shopping excursions in chic stores, the arts, museums, galleries, dancing, staying up until two in the morning, skinny dipping, drinking wine with friends, good conversation, reflection, quiet afternoons and tall margueritas, seafood on skewers, violins, guitars in the park, magazines about world events and heated discussions that result, nectarines for breakfast, flowers in my hair, twirly skirts, and French kissing.  That’s not too much to ask for.”

He asked, “Who were you planning to take on vacation?”

In 1982, Sunday morning cartoons were never the same as the Saturday ones.  There was a sense of creeping, of trying harder to be quiet, of that sweaty type of peace that comes tiptoeing on its sticky feet about 6.30 a.m.  There was no “after these messages, we’ll be right back” ditties, no School-House Rock, no brown owl guessing how many licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop. 

Sunday cartoons were rounded – without essence, gratuitous violence, or puddy-tats.  Characters whose mouths didn’t quite fit the words they were saying.  The rest of Sunday followed pretty much the same way.

            Paul was doubled over puffing heavily out of both his nose and mouth.

            “You are not in the active stage of labour, Paul,” Dr.Gonsalez replied with her normal low-key, matter-of-fact voice.  “I think you are afraid of discussing your mother and are regressing.”

            Paul only huffed like a s choo-choo train, his eyes bulging, then alternatively shut into slits.  He shook his head, moaned, and rocked.

            There was a small silence filled only by Paul’s imagined labour contractions.  “Are you feeling pain in your lower back?” Dr. Gonsalez asked.

            Paul nodded vigourously.

            “Perhaps you should eat more fiber,” she sighed.

Filling up the general space

and naming all the rocks,

Mnemosyne

is only delaying

the inevitable;

that we all are the jigsaw,

or just

you and me,

because when a dog barks

and a weed is pulled

and you’re calling my name

all at once – together-

they blend into a new creation,

like mating cats and rabbits,

or selective DNA.  It’s different

every each time,

this combination of flesh, voice,

empathy, circumstance that

it becomes the higher evolution, it’s the tower

of
Babel,

or maybe just the Supreme Being

taking a load off and sitting on the stoop

to smoke.

            “You’re too easy,” she said.  “Stop it.  Be more difficult.  Scream, yell, make bodily noises at inopportune times.”

            “What is an opportune time for a bodily noise?” he asked.

            “You know, in private.  Like that saying ‘if a tree falls in a forest’?”

            “So I should fart and burp in the forest?  We live in a condo,” he said.

            “You know what I mean.  Don’t act smart,” she said and punched him in the arm.

            “I’m not acting,” he replied.

            “Har har.”

            “No, really.  Brilliance comes naturally to me,” he said.

            “Shut up already.”

            He did.  See,  he thought.  Easy.

She determines systems, not so she can impose herself on them but find a place within where she’ll fit without notice.  Her findings:

• Dog walkers seem embarrassed carrying a plastic bag of poop but love their dogs.
• People tend to mow their grass around 11 a.m weekdays but weekends when they claim they prefer to sleep in, they begin at around 8 a.m.  (cross-reference this with line-ups at Tim Horton’s drive-thru).
• It’s rare that motorists will flip someone the bird if they’re a pedestrian, but if they’re in a car then it’s okay. (related: steel and alienation).

She did everything without protection: weeding, mowing, raking, planting, fertilizing, weeding some more.  No hat, no gloves, and she scorned sunscreen saying it was ‘for hippie-sissies’ whatever that meant.  Her freckles stood out against her ruddy skin like buck shot and the lines around eyes were so deep that one felt they needed a rappelling system to traverse them.

Around two o’clock, she often stood with her hands on her hips surveying her wide swath of grass.  If she was in a good mood, she would tell you her only joke, “Why is a farmer the pillar of her community?” 

R-r-r-roar! and the lawnmower rips to life, blut-blutting out any chance of getting some more Melville read outside this morning.  Soon enough only some bare vestiges of reddish-tinged radicchio-like leaves.  No trace of cheerful yellow remains.  On the air wafts the poisonus smell of Kill-ex, Weed-ex, Slaughter-ex, enlisted biological warfare joins the ranks of the gas-powered push tanks and the bazookas with fish line whips.

I hear the mewing of the dandelion heads inside the canvas bags.  I hear it in my sleep.  Each fall, relief comes by the way of an innocent blanket.  Until then those carcasses haunt me.

The work came back dripping with red marks like it had met a werewolf along the way.  He looked it over with a curious eye and couldn’t ascertain what he might have done differently. 

His spelling, though atrocious, was a phonetic representation of the true meaning of the word in question.  Everyone sees an exclamation mark at the end of pogo stik! even if it is in the middle of a sentence. To him, indentations were doors and his essay was a house.  There was Only One way in and One way Out.  Each window a capital O. For light.