Emily wrote fiction? What?

Hey guys,

Here's a story I've been fiddling with for awhile. (Part of it was once part of the horrendously confusing prose thing I brought to Scribblers last spring.) I think it's getting close to finished, but I'm not sure. Any suggestions? Specifically, does anyone have ideas for a title?

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“I don’t know what I’m going to wear to the funeral,” I mused irrelevantly.

“I’d recommend wearing clothes,” my brother Calvin said.

“Okay, smartass,” James snapped.

I’ve heard my older brother James cuss one time in my life, and that was the night after Louis Speaker died. I’m not denying that it’s true (Calvin is a smartass), but for Jim to actually come right out and say it was pretty weird. James is one of those guys who takes forever to say anything because he likes for it to come out just right. He also likes to iron his shirt and alphabetize his movies, but that’s not the point. The point is, some families are drawn together by grief (at least that’s what you hear), but that night James cussed at Calvin and then played computer games for a couple of hours. Calvin did the dishes, banging them around like an angry rocker. I closed myself in my room, cried a bit, then had an argument with my long-distance boyfriend over the phone. It was one of those fights that are about everything and nothing all at once.

I’ve lived with my older brother James since our parents died in a car crash when I was ten. Calvin lives with us sometimes when he isn’t in jail. Being the only girl, I’ve usually learned to avoid comments about what I might wear on any given occasion, but that night at dinner I needed to say something so we weren’t all just staring at each other, and that was what I happened to blurt out.

I don’t mean to be flippant, but if you’re looking for some deep meditations on death, stop reading this and go find yourself some Tennyson or C.S. Lewis or one of those guys. I like them both a lot.

We’d known the Speakers a long time. They were friends of my parents. They’d even offered to take me in when Mom and Dad died, but James was adamant that family takes care of family, so I moved in with him instead. He was twenty-one and fresh out of college, so we were pretty broke for awhile. But anyway, the Speakers had kept an eye on me a lot of times, and I’d even dated their son Tim for a little while in high school. It wasn’t a big deal, we both date around a lot and it was bound to happen someday. Nothing came of it, though. But anyway, I knew his family pretty well. There was a group of five or six of us that always hung out at his house on Friday nights after football games, but we’d kinda drifted since we graduated high school. I hadn’t talked to Louis or his wife Jane in probably a year when we got the phone call that Louis was in the hospital, and then a few hours later that he was gone.

So Tim was twenty when Louis died, and I was nineteen. We were all living at home that summer, which was a bad idea on all counts except for our pocketbooks. Gas prices were high that year and none of us could afford utilities in our apartments at our various colleges. We’d all scattered like aimless tumbleweeds after high school. People said we were ambitious, going to fancy-named colleges and majoring in things like International and Political Studies that sounded like they’d change the world, but I at least was never sure how a country girl like me had wound up in the Northeast. People always told me I was smart enough to change the world, but I’m not sure what smarts and changing the world have to do with each other. I’d just finished my freshman year and was in danger of losing my scholarship because I’d been more interested in boys than in classes. So really I was feeling more like a tumbleweed than an academic heavyweight at that point.

But then I went back to school a few weeks later, and I didn’t talk to Jim at all that semester. I should have. I know I should have. But I broke up with the boyfriend du jour I’d been fighting with the day Louis died, and started dating some other loser, and I just didn’t want to think about Tim at all.

I said that I’d dated Tim but it wasn’t a big deal: that’s not true. It was a big deal, at least to me, but that’s why I couldn’t call him that semester. It had been a couple of years but it was still kind of a sore spot for me.

It’s those stupid little things about grief that most college students don’t get that I would have understood if we’d actually been able to talk. Like how the other day I was making biscuits and I wanted to call my mom and find out if I was doing it right. It’s dumb, because my mom didn’t even make her own biscuits. She liked making breakfast for us on Saturdays, but somehow the biscuits never came out right. She’d over-mix them, or put in too much water, or something, I don’t know. One day she messed up the dough so badly she just went to the store and got a can of Pillsbury and baked them before anyone even woke up.

So then my brother James wakes up and smells biscuits and wonders what he’s in for. But he stumbles into the kitchen and they look good … He spreads some jam on one and takes a tentative bite. “Mom, these biscuits are actually GOOD!” he says. I think he was trying to be supportive in his fourteen-year-old boy kind of way, but I don’t think it worked. (This was before he started ironing his shirts, but after he started alphabetizing his movies.) Anyway, after that she decided she’d just as soon buy biscuits as try to make them. She didn’t make biscuits again the rest of her life—which was admittedly just a couple of years, but still.

See? How did I even get off on that tangent? Sometimes I forget that it’s not appropriate dinner-time conversation. I forget, or I don’t care? It’s hard to say, sometimes. Sometimes I guard it jealously, refusing to talk to anyone about it; sometimes I’m dumb and talk about it on dates, as if to warn potential suitors: “Yeah, I’m emotionally damaged property. If you’re still interested in me now that you see that I can’t go on a date without talking about my emotional baggage, that puts you a step ahead of the last guy.”

It’s not that I really mean to drive guys away. But this is who I am, and I’m not making any apologies for it. I mean, somewhere deep down we’re all pretty screwed up, right? Why not be honest about it? Sometimes I wish guys would tell me about all of their emotional baggage ahead of time, so that we’re spared the terrible realizations a few months down the road.

Anyway, making biscuits still makes me miss my mom. And I wondered if—I don’t know—changing the oil in his car or something made Tim miss his dad. But I never asked.

So Christmas break rolled around, and I hadn’t seen Tim or his mom or anyone since the funeral in August. A few days before Christmas I baked a batch of cookies and wanted to give some to Jim’s mom, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I supposed I could call her up and say, “Hi, Jane, I just thought you might like some cookies, since you don’t have a husband anymore.” But Tim, figuring I’d be in town for the holidays, called me himself. The old gang was going to his house that night, to play cards or watch a movie or whatever it was we always used to do.

Tim gave me an awkward side-hug when I showed up. It was awkward because side-hugs are always awkward, and because he was trying to close the door, and because I was trying to hand him the plate of cookies.

I’d imagined our reunion somewhat differently. There was supposed to be a real, two-armed hug lasting several seconds, which would communicate to him the depths of my sadness at his loss. (The hug was supposed to tell him this because I knew I wouldn’t say it aloud.)

I handed him the cookies.

“Oh. Thanks.” Pause. “People are in the living room watching the game.”

I didn’t know what game he meant. He’d always talked to me about sports, even though we both knew I didn’t know a baseball bat from Count Dracula. Especially since we broke up, and real topics were out of the question. But I walked with him to the living room. Only Jane and Bethany—the late Louis’s sister—were there. I wondered if I was early. Jane sat on the couch and fiddled with her cell phone, talking to Bethany.

“Louis’s number’s still in my phone.” She sighed. “ ‘Lou.’… I almost had Tim delete it once. He was about to, and then I said, ‘No, don’t do it!’ ”

“The number for the phone that’s at my house?” Bethany asked.

“Yeah. Tim said he texted it a few times after I’d had it turned off. ‘I miss you, dad,’ that sort of thing, not like he was ever going to read it. Said it made him feel better. Wouldn’t make me feel better.”

“Me, either.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the Mavericks’ game. I felt like a spectator in one of those dreams where you’re naked in public.

poem

Gideon

It was raining and it was Wednesday, praying,
Where the man stood on the corner coldly
Handing out green New Testaments

They were gold and it wasn't raining
But it was cold where the man stood
Loving in a torn friar's robe

His face was torn, gaunt and gilded
Where the two streets swished with cars,
Cold cars with torn people

Staring grimly into the grim air, praying,
Eyes that sped through pages of green New Testaments
Stacked high along the corner.

It was Wednesday, gaunt and gilded
Where the weathered man stood in the rain
The day was sobbing on the green corner.

-nathan shank-
10/15/08


Thoughts? good, bad?
How is the ending? Is the poem too short?
Does it need more punctuation?
Does "swished" work?
Anything corny?
Title?

The Stable

Hey kids, here's a Christmas poem that's been brewing for a while. It doesn't feel finished to me yet, especially the last half. So let me know what you think it needs -- as well as the usual whether it's intelligible and if there are lines that don't work. (For those who were at Scribblers last night, this is nearly the same thing I read.)

The Stable

The stable stands in floods of chill, dark air,
And it is like a hand that keeps a flame
From drowning in the wind that whines without.
And also, it is like that braying boat
That captain Noah, baffled, plies on silt
(And underneath the silt the hungry fish
Lurch through the broken doorways munching bones).
But in the boat – and in the stable too –
Breath waits to kindle out on the dank world.
And when, wing-tired, the tattered dove finds perch,
Then claws and hooves of squinting animals
Will tramp into the day outside the dark.
The stable, like the boat, will grind to ground
Against a hill and make an altar there,
And from an open door among the bones
The living scramble out and try their eyes.
But now the stable floats in lapping floods;
Its beams withstand the splashing of the night.

J. Benskin, 2008. (v.7)

catching the bouquet

two of the roses’ stems snapped in the toss,
and all of them still had thorns.
but i don’t believe in ritual symbols anyway.

untitled

Sunday wakes up like
A crumpled dollar bill.
It yawns, checks the stocks,
And curls back the covers,
Falling asleep.

-nathan shank-

A question

On NPR this morning, there was an interview with Brian Turner, a poet who published a book of poetry about his time as an infantry soldier in Iraq. The interviewer asked him whether he was still writing about Iraq. He answered:

"I'm actually writing about what I feel is missing back here. I was trying to write poems that were in Iraq, poems that I'd started over there and were never finished, and I found they weren't working. And I realized of course I'm no longer there, so I can't write those poems."

What do you think of that? It seems to fly in the face of, for instance, Wordsworth's ideas about "emotion recollected in tranquility." Do you find that you write more about where you are (either physically or metaphorically), or about where you've been?




You can listen to the interview online -- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92771250
He reads a couple of the poems from the book. I especially like the second one, "What Every Soldier Should Know."

Guardian of the Black Garden

Here's something I just thought up today and wrote, tell me what ya think. It's still very much in working stages and this is all I have so I don't really know what's gonna happen in it.

Guardian of the Black Garden

In the beginning the Great One created two gardens, the Garden of Light and the Garden of Night. In the Garden of Light were placed the animals of the world, the ones that all know and Man. In the Garden of Night were placed all the creatures of shadows, those considered evil and perverse. In each Garden there was a Guardian was set to keep track of the creatures placed within and keep out all who would trespass. Not long after the creation of the world and the Gardens came what most call the Fall of Man, though the Guardian’s simply know it as the Corruption. Man abandoned the Garden of Light and the animals scattered over the face of Gaiya. The Guardian was sent to roam aimlessly through the world and the Garden of Night fell into myth just like the Garden of Light, and as the years passed the Garden simply became known as, The Black Garden.

Mission

The Guardian of the Black Garden walked slowly along, the obsidian glass that made up the path crunched and cracked under his black leather boots. He held his pitch night cloak close about him, his hood up, in a small attempt to stave off the cold of the night, though the cold bothered him little, things such as the weather and it’s variations could do practically nothing to him, still he wished it were warmer. He glanced briefly at the flowers to his left, the Starlight Roses. They were his favorites, if he had to choose. The elegant play of shining white stars upon silent black petals always brought a smile to his face. On any other night he would have stopped to admire the roses but this night was special, it was different. This night was when things would finally begin to change.
The Guardian had grown weary and tired of what the world had become. Ever since the Corruption there had been nothing but death and destruction orchestrated by men. Though he could care less about the world at large, his duty was simply to watch over the Black Garden, but recently things had changed, a threat had appeared bent on the destruction of the world and especially the Black Garden. He’d seen what had happened to the Garden of Light and would not let it happen to his Garden.
It didn’t take him long to reach the Black Sorra tree that stood at the center of the Garden. It towered above all the other trees, despite that it stood upon a hill. Its bark was the deepest brown and it’s leaves, like almost all the other flora, were as black as the perpetual night that covered the Garden. The crunch of the rocks ceased as the path ended and he proceeded on, his footsteps now as silent as death upon the deep green of the grass. Off in the distance a nightingale sang it’s beautiful song as the clouds parted revealing the full moon, it’s white light washing down illuminating the Black Garden, it wasn’t enough to banish the dark, not even the sun could accomplish such a feet, but it made it seem more cheery.
He stopped a few feet from the wide trunk of the tree and looked up into the branches calling out in a hushed voice. “Come down Shyla, I’m in need of your assistance.”
The leaves rustled and a dark shape decended landing nimbly to kneel before the Guardian. “What is thy bidding, oh great Guardian?” The figure asked in a voice of feminine silk.
“The time has come to do something about man and his destructive ways. The threat to the Garden of Night grows with every passing day, I’m afraid a fear I have had for some time has come true, the Guardian of the Garden of Light has betrayed us.” His voice was filled with sadness for his former friend and fellow Guardian. It had been the hardest thing in the world to see the Guardian cast away from his duty and out into the world.
The figure stood its hands curling into claws and it’s eyes blazing red. “Speak and I shall find him and destroy him.” Shyla’s voice was now granite hard.
The Guardian sighed. “If only it were that simple Shyla. You would never be a match for him; I’m hesitant to say that I could even defeat him. He was always the stronger. And besides, if it were a simply matter of destroying him then I would have set off with the Eclipse Guard and done so, I’m afraid things are more dire than that. He’s gathered the former members of the Daylight Shield and has set the Kingdom of Dawn to conquering the world and to come and destroy us. He’s gathered many powerful allies that once dwelled within his Garden and many others that have come about.” His head fell and his hands clenched beneath his cloak. “We have a war coming our way.”
“What would you have me do my Lord?” Shyla bowed, it’s hair touching the ground.
“I want you and Wolv to go out and find someone. My old friend is looking for him as well but we must find him first.” The Guardian turned his head and let out a high-pitched musical whistle. Within a few moments a giant wolf, twice the size of The Guardian, came lopping up to them. It loomed over them in what could have been interpreted as a threatening manner, but that image was dispelled as it laid down it’s head tilted down and eyes closed as if in a bow towards the Guardian.
Thy Bidding? The thought entered the Guardian’s head.
“The both of you are to go and find the one that can call upon the Twilight Defenders.”
The two others looked up in surprise. “The Twilight Defenders? Sir, are you so sure that we cannot handle this on our own?” Shyla asked.
“I would say that we could fight on our own, but too much would be lost. Too much would be destroyed of our world and man’s. No, we must gain all the help that we can and that means gaining the aid of the Twilight and not letting my friend get a hold of them first.”
Shyla and Wolv’s heads bowed again as they awaited their instructions.