WORDWRIGHTS #23-#24 • Summer 2001 • Selections
BACK
LICENSE
They never tell you about Hamlet’s good days.
Or the days when nothing much was going on in Verona.
Or when Stephen Dedaelus ate six donuts for breakfast
late in October while waiting for a bus.
You never hear about the time David Copperfield wet his pants
or that day someone in the inferno found a twenty dollar bill
and took everyone out to the movies.
Silenced, the clang of casseroles on a stovetop
before the Venetian plague. And hours of deep throated hacking
passed a yawning Hugo, when his gypsy had the flu
when the wheelbarrow was just hauling some dirt around
and the chickens were a dingy yellow from the clay.
Sometimes even Medea got stuck in line behind the loud guy.
The illicit mundane.
Lurking in the back alleys of literature,
shooting up liquid boredom, screwing around with
disinterest and passivity. Dealing in apathy,
busted with an ounce of crystal bland.
We’re here. And it’s quiet. We keep it on the low down.
E.V. NOECHEL
PARDY'S VALLEY
Potions are like most things, once you start making a potion you have to go right on through. No stopping. My Aunt Pardy fell on her mess of trouble for going too slow. I always kept scarce under the table when she was working on a big potion. I had my dolly and stayed out of sight in case Pardy slipped her senses and found me too handy.
This time most of her ingredients, including the tongue, were in the pot when she added the catfish. As that old willow peeked over the side, Pardy looked back at the fish and said, “I know you’re fixin’ to trouble yourself out of that pot. I won’t have it.” That fish spoke to her just like a lawyer.
“Mam, you’re making a terrible mistake. I don’t think you realize, in boiling me, what you’ve got. I may look like a perfectly good catfish for boiling, but you’ll truly be sorry.”
With the tongue in the potion, Pardy’s fish was talking. But she didn’t add the heart in right away, and you just can’t wait like that between ingredients. The brains was already in too, but Pardy put the heart she was holding in her hands into a pie plate on the table so she could hear what the fish had to say.
“First, you must know something about where I’m from. My parents didn’t live in the mountains where you probably do your fishing. They spawned far downstream where there’s toxic contamination below the Jepford plant. I am, in fact, deadly, loaded with poisons. You may as well serve me with chilled Clorox.”
Pardy did look at the wet, red heart on the table. She knew she should keep going with the potion. But she couldn’t help wondering a question, “How you know from yer folks that yer aig were filt wit pollution? Catfish don’t know chemicals an they don’t learn they youngins.”
“How thoughtful of you to show interest in the family practices of my species. If you’ll reduce the flame under this pot, I’ll clear that up. You’ve recently brought a life into this world?”
Story concluded in WordWrights #23-#24
PRESCOTT H. BULLARD
TRAIN SONG
William Burroughs and Lewis Carroll on a train, playing jazz—white rabbit pops out of the bell of the tenor sax and shoots a glass of whiskey off Alice’s head. Alice, having forethought, as well as skittish reflexes after all those size-altering drugs, bends her knees slightly, as if to curtsey to the Queen in that deck of playing cards with girls on the back (Tom Waits is dealing Crazy Eights) and the bullet slams right through the whiskey glass, sending shards of pale brown booze, Wild Turkey feathers all over the empty seats at the back of the car. Alice is wearing a pale blue dress and long white gloves; she shakes the shrapnel from her hair and does three chin-ups on the rail of the overhead luggage rack. A little boy is up there sleeping, a nine-year-old Hindu boy to be precise. She could turn him into a rabbit hole but not wanting to leave him here for the plundering, she covers him instead with a beach towel (she knows where it is), long white towel with a map of the United States in pastel colors—how many colors? Four, five? The cartographer has been drinking; Macedonia is clearly labeled but the southwest all smudges together in one long block of salmon pink marked “Indian Country.”
Alice tucks the boy in, takes off his glasses and eats them in small careful bites, doesn’t change size but feels windows opening in various parts of her body. She looks at Burroughs, who’s holding the gun now; she looks at the White Rabbit who still has one large hind foot stuck in the bell of the saxophone; Lewis Carroll is still blowing a sad note between sips of laudanum. Using the new glass eye in her left collarbone to watch for an opening, she knocks the gun out of Bill’s hand, it goes off on impact—sorry Hindu boy! —but no—the bullet was hurtling upward toward the luggage rack but behold! it gets caught halfway through the Queen of Hearts that Tom Waits (for no man) is holding in his perfect straight flush, Royal flush ace-high now bleeding a cold two-dimensional trickle out of the central Queen. The girl on the back is fortunately unscathed; the card was upside-down and the bullet passed right between her legs.
Story concluded in WordWrights #23-#24
DOROTHY J. HICKSON
