- •If you were planning to be stranded on a desert island for three months, what would you bring along?
- •It was all Japanese, Germans, Koreans, all with English as a second language, with phrase
- •Inhale.
- •It’s this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips.
- •It’s after dinner when the kid’s guts start to hurt. It’s wax, so he figured maybe it would just melt inside him and he’d piss it out. Now his back hurts. His kidneys. He can’t stand straight.
- •In the end, it’s never what you worry about that gets you.
- •It’s a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.
- •In the dim streetlight, his rhinestone buttons sparkle.
- •It’s because of all this, we brought nothing that could save us.
- •Instead of a smile or frown, a movie fragment of night sky washes across her face.
- •Into the cell phone she says, “I’m en route.” She says, “I can take the three o’clock, but only for a half-hour.” She says good-bye and hangs up.
- •It’s just a matter of time before you contract some incurable toenail fungus under your silk-wrapped French manicure.
- •Inside, it’s just you and Angelique and Lenny.
- •In her high heels, Angelique must be a head taller than him. She smiles, saying, “Lenny . . .”
- •Vermin-proof or not, our Missing Link could rip a bag open with his bare pubic-hairy hands.
- •Itty-bitty.
- •In their last minute alone, just them in the green room, the slick guy asks if he can do our blonde girl another favor.
- •It’s then the floor producer walks in with the old goober.
- •In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take—what you do or say or how you choose to appear—is automatically right the moment you act.
- •It’s then the bag lady looks up and says, “Muffy? Packer?” The wino’s hand still feeling around deep in the front of her stretch pants, she pats the bench beside her and says, “What a nice surprise.”
- •In the newspaper the next week, the kidnapped heiress was found dead.
- •It’s after that Evelyn goes cold turkey. She cancels the newspaper. To replace the television, she buys the glass tank with a lizard that changes color to match any paint scheme.
- •It’s that moment, some people walked away.
- •In the movie–book–t-shirt story, we’d all love Miss Sneezy . . . Her deep courage . . . Her sunny humor.
- •In the viewfinder of his camera, Agent Tattletale rewinds and watches as Lady Baglady tells her story onstage. Telling and retelling it.
- •In his shirt pocket blinks the small red light of a tape recorder taking down every word.
- •In the phone book, when I found him, I was blind with crying, afraid my dog might die. Still, there was his listing: Kenneth Wilcox, d.V.M. A name I loved, somehow. For some reason. My savior.
- •I say, Who does?
- •It’s the kind of joy we felt when Dana Plato, the little girl onDiff’rent Strokes,got arrested, posed naked inPlayboy,and took too many sleeping pills.
- •I tell him, Trust me. Good writing means you take the regular facts and deliver them in a sexy way. Don’t worry about your life story, I tell him, that’s my job.
- •I pour him red wine and just let him talk. I ask him to pause, then act like I’m getting every quote perfect.
- •Instead, you’ll run toward torture. You’ll enjoy pain.
- •It’s after that we couldn’t wash clothes, another plot point for the story that would be our cash cow.
- •In our heads, we’re all jotting down the line:I happen to know a lot about human insides . . .
- •In so many ways, this old man seems younger than any of the volunteers in their thirties or forties. These middle-aged angels a half or a third his age.
- •It’s only normal that, someday, an angel will gush. To the head nurse or an orderly, a volunteer will gush about what a wonderful youthful spirit Mr. Whittier has. How he’s still so full of life.
- •In another year, he’ll be dead of heart disease. Of old age, before he’s twenty.
- •It’s then he’d tell her—he lied. About his age.
- •Into the Earl of Slander’s tape recorder, Comrade Snarky says, “Do you know there’s no hot water?”
- •In the blue velvet lobby, we’ll have nothing for breakfast.
- •It goes round and round, kneading and grinding
- •In his studio, the black flies still circled the same heap of soft apples and limp bananas.
- •Infallible,
- •In two days with a rented camera, they’d used up their lifetime allowance of interest in each other. Neither of them held any mystery.
- •In our version of what happened, every toe or finger, it was eaten by the villains whom no one will believe.
- •If that next bullet has your name on it.
- •If someone wanted a doll right away, she’d offer the old rag dolls.
- •It’s then Cora goes to lunch and buys a razor blade. Two razor blades. Three razor blades. Five.
- •It’s after that, Cora must talk to somebody at the county health clinic.
- •It’s the furnace, running full-blast. The blower pumping hot air into the ducts. The gas burner chugging. The furnace that Mr. Whittier destroyed.
- •Into twin-penciled arches, with, underneath each,
- •It’s the ammonium nitrate their buddy Jenson had ready for them in Florida. Their buddy from the Gulf War. Our Reverend Godless.
- •It got so their getups were cutting into the bottom line. But say a word about it and Flint would tell you, “You got to spend it to make it.”
- •In the pockets of his bib overalls.
- •It was lacquered black, waxed and smudged gray with fingerprints.
- •It could run for a month, always ticking. Or it could run for another hour. But the moment it stopped, that would be the moment to look inside.
- •If you’re tall enough, you can see her nipples.
- •It’s all we can do not to drag Mrs. Clark out of her dressing room and force her at knife point to bully and torture us.
- •Voir Dire
- •It was the summer people quit complaining about the price of gasoline. The summer when they stopped bitching about what shows were on television.
- •In the pitch-dark, Sister Vigilante says, it would hit—bam—a bolt of black lightning.
- •It was a bowling ball, the police reported.
- •In times like that, every man is a suspect. Every woman, a potential victim.
- •It’s the soft groan of someone dreaming in her sleep.
- •It’s with this in mind I started my project.
- •It’s an interesting juxtaposition. A fascinating sociopolitical power relationship, being fully clothed and examining a naked person held down, wearing only his high heels and jewelry.
- •It’s the greasy ghost of Comrade Snarky, what we’ll have to smell every time we use the microwave. We’re breathing her spirit. Her sweet buttery stink will haunt us.
- •In the blue velvet lobby, the microwave oven dings once, twice, three times.
- •In the wash of water backed up from the toilet, washed up and stranded on the lobby carpet, you can see fur. Tabby-cat fur. A thin black leather collar. Some pencil-thin bones.
- •I promise to just breathe deep.
- •It’s a marriage.
- •In that future world, the world outside here, the only animals will be the ones in zoos and movies. Anything not human will just be a flavor for dinner: chicken, beef, pork, lamb, or fish.
- •Inside the curtained walls of the emergency room, Mrs. Clark leaned over the chrome rails of her daughter’s bed and said, “Baby, oh, my sweet baby . . . Who did this to you?”
- •In her hospital bed, her skin looked purple with bruises. Her head was shaved bald. The plastic band around her wrist, it said: c. Clark.
- •It’s the prison or the asylum you’ll eventually call home.
- •It’s five-thirty, and the store closes at six.
- •In Claire’s vision, the man’s face comes closer. His two hands reach out, huge, until they wrap the jar in darkness.
- •Instead, Miss America asks, Is this how it will go? Her voice shrill and shaky, a bird’s song. Will this be just one horrible event after another after another after another—until we’re all dead?
- •It’s here that she’d work hard to make the story boring, saying how water heated to 158 degrees Fahrenheit causes a third-degree burn in one second.
- •It screamed, “What did I do?”
- •If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.
- •In the deputy’s headphones, the buzz of flies gives way to the crackle of grubs tunneling forward one bite at a time.
- •In the sheriff deputy’s earphones, the mice munched the beetles. Snakes arrived to swallow the squealing mice. Everything looking to be last in the food chain.
- •It was the voice of Mrs. Clark saying, “I’m sorry, but you should’ve stayed missing. When you came back, you weren’t the same.” She says, “I loved you so much more when you were gone . . .”
- •It’s over dinner, Miss Sneezy blows her nose. She sniffs and coughs and says she really, really needs to tell us a story . . .
- •In white coats, holding test tubes,
- •I didn’t mean to kill you.
- •Instead, I want to know the stuff Shirlee can’t say. The stuff I’ve started to forget—like how does rain feel on your skin? Or stuff I never knew—like how to French-kiss?
- •It was my senior year in high school when people around me started to die. They died the same way my folks had died ten years before.
- •I ask again, about my grandma.
- •It’s when the light comes on, when the mirror in your suite turns into a window, then you can see the camera that’s always there. Always watching. Recording you.
- •In case you’re wondering how I got out . . .
- •In New Keegan, not one of the tombstones had writing you could still read.
- •If we could’ve read the headstones, we’d see how almost the entire town had died in one month. The first cluster of what doctors would call the Keegan virus. Rapid-onset viral brain tumors.
- •I can show him the ropes. Calm him down. Help him adjust to life here at The Orphanage.
- •It’s how we can eat all the shit that happens.
- •If you could not die.
- •If we died in enough pain, cursing old Mr. Whittier, then he begged for us to come back.
- •It takes four. One bodybuilder to screw in the bulb, and three others to watch and say, “Really, dude, you lookhuge!”
- •In the alley’s narrow blue sky, birds soar back and forth. Birds and clouds that aren’t cobwebs. In a blue that isn’t velvet or paint.
- •In the alley, Mr. Whittier’s voice shouts from closer and closer, for them to stop.
- •It doesn’t matter who we were as people, not to old Mr. Whittier.
In our heads, we’re all jotting down the line:I happen to know a lot about human insides . . .
And nothing more happens. More nothing happens.
Until the rest of us unfold our legs and slap the dust from our clothes. We head for the auditorium, our fingers crossed we’ll hear Mr. Whittier’s last words.
Erosion
A Poem About Mr. Whittier
“The same mistakes we made as cavemen,” says Mr. Whittier, “we still make.”
So maybe we’re supposed to fight and hate and torture each other . . .
Mr. Whittier rolls his wheelchair to the edge of the stage,
with his spotted hands, his bald head.
The folds of his slack face seem to hang
from his too-big eyes, his cloudy, watery-gray eyes.
The ring looped through one of his nostrils, the earphones of his CD player looped around the wrinkles and folds of his beef-jerky neck.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a black-and-white movie fragment:
Mr. Whittier’s head is wallpapered with newsreel armies marching.
His mouth and eyes lost in the shadow boots and bayonets that worm across his cheeks.
He says, “Maybe suffering and misery is the point of life.”
Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory.
Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks:
A rolling drum filled with water and sand.
Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock,
some raw material or a natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore.
And all conflict and pain is just the abrasive that rubs us,
polishes our souls, refines us,
teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.
Then consider that you’ve chosen to jump in, again and again,
knowing this suffering is your entire reason for coming to earth.
Mr. Whittier, his teeth crowded too many in his narrow jawbone,
his dead-tumbleweed eyebrows, Mr. Whittier’s bat-wing ears spread wide
with the shadow armies marching across,
he says,
“The only alternative is, we’re all just eternally stupid.”
We fight wars. We fight for peace. We fight hunger. We love to fight.
We fight and fight and fight, with our guns or mouths or money.
And the planet is never one lick better than it was before us.
Leaning forward, both his hands clawed on the arms of his wheelchair,
as the newsreel armies march over his face, those moving tattoos
of their machine guns and tanks and artillery,
Mr. Whittier says: “Maybe we’re living the exact way we’re meant to live.”
Maybe our factory planet is processing our souls . . . just fine.
Dog Years
A Story by Brandon Whittier
These angels, they see themselves being. These agents of mercy.
Put together so much more nice than God had planned, with their rich husbands and good genetics and orthodontia and dermatology. These stay-at-home mothers with teenaged kids in school. At-home, but not homemakers. Not housewives.
Educated, sure, but not too smart.
They have help for all the rough work. Hired experts. They use the wrong scouring powder, and their granite countertops or limestone tile is worthless. The wrong fertilizer, and their landscaping gets burned. The wrong color paint, and all their careful effort, their investment, suffers. With the kids in school, and God at his office, the angels have all day to kill.
So here they are. Volunteers.
Where they can’t screw up anything too important. Pushing the library cart around a retirement center. Between yoga and their book group. Hanging the Halloween decorations at an old-folks’ home. Any old-age hospice, you’ll find them, these angels of boredom.
These angels with their flat-soled shoes handmade in Italy. Their good intentions and art-history degrees and long afternoons to kill until the kids get home from soccer or ballet after school. These angels, pretty in their flower-print sundresses, their clean hair tied back. And smiling. Smiling. Every time you sneak a look.
With a nice word to say for every patient. A comment about what a nice collection of get-well cards you’ve arranged on the dresser. What nice African violets you grow in pots on your windowsill.
Mr. Whittier loves these angel women.
Always, for Mr. Whittier, the spotted, bald old man at the end of the hall, they say: What nice black-light, butt-rock concert posters he has taped above his bed. What a colorful skateboard he has propped beside the door.
Old Mr. Whittier, bug-eyed dwarf Mr. Whittier, he asks, “What’s shaking, ladies?”
And the angels, they laugh.
At this old man who still plays at being so young. It’s so sweet, his being so young at heart.
Sweet, goofy Mr. Whittier with his Internet surfing and snowboarder magazines. His CDs of hip-hop music. A brimmed cap, turned around backward on his head. Just like a high-school kid.
An ancient version of their own teenagers in school. They can’t not flirt back. They can’t not like him a little, with his spotted, backward-capped head between earphones, listening to head-banger rock so loud it leaks out.
Mr. Whittier in the hallway, parked in his wheelchair with one hand open, palm-up, he says, “Gimme five . . .”
And all the volunteer ladies slap his hand as they walk past.
Yes, please. That’s how the angels want to turn ninety years old: Still with-it. Still hip to new trends. Not fossilized, the way they feel now . . .