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T M M OOOOO RRRRR PPPPP OOOOO RRRRR EEEEE V V IIIII EEEEE W W
MM MM O O R R P P O O R R E V V I E W W
H M M M O O RRRR PPPP O O RRRR EEE V V I EEE W W W
M M O O R R P O O R R E V V I E WW WW
E M M OOOOO R R P OOOOO R R EEEEE V IIIII EEEEE W W
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Volume #9 September 16th, 2002 Issue #4
Established January, 1994 http://morpo.com/
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Contents for Volume 9, Issue 4
Burnt Offering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Doug Tanoury
Composition in Blue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avik Chanda
Mexican Piggy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karyna McGlynn
D as In Doughnut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Barnett
Havre de Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Barnett
On Fences of Never . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Barnett
Desire Translated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Meyers
Swimming Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Duncan
About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Authors
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Editor + Poetry Editor
Robert Fulkerson The Morpo Staff Kris Fulkerson
robert@morpo.com + kalil@morpo.com
Associate Editor Fiction Editor
Lori Ciulla Abolafia J.D. Rummel
lori@morpo.com rummel@morpo.com
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
_The Morpo Review_. Volume 9, Issue 4. _The Morpo Review_ is published
electronically on a quarterly basis. Reproduction of this magazine is
permitted as long as the magazine is not sold and the entire text of the
issue remains intact. Copyright 2002, The Morpo Review. _The Morpo
Review_ is published in ASCII and World Wide Web formats.
All literary and artistic works are Copyright 2002 by their respective
authors and artists.
ISSN 1532-5784
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Burnt Offering
Doug Tanoury
And it is with great haste
I come to her from the altar
Fresh from the sacrifice of atonement
Still in priestly robes
Splattered with ram's blood
My face smudged with ashes
When my robes fall away
I wear only the smell of olive oil
And incense before her and
She wears only a perfume
As our scents mingle and our
Fragrances intertwine
And our clothes left lying
In heaps on the floor
Are the skins shed by serpents
And the discarded shells of insects
That are cast off when
They take on new forms
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Composition in Blue
Avik Chanda
An open breeziness, as in Miro,
but anamorphosed so that when
seen from an angle, the threads
and microbes dissolve, coagulating
into boats rooted at San Agustin,
their stunted masts meshed against
a liquid Majorca moon rising
between the blue and the blue.
Perfect, you think - and turn around
to where an obscenity greets you,
scrawled above the seats in the
sidewalk, smearing the edge of
the canvas where I would have signed.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Mexican Piggy
Karyna McGlynn
There was that piggy-bank
in that slanted store
in Puerto Vallarta:
fluorescent flowers, ugly,
but it screamed
"Look at me! Look at me!"
It was shaped just like a pig,
a real pink fat pig.
however many pesos,
I didn't have it.
I knew a Spanish girl who ate sugar,
right out of the packets,
right off the table.
She like pure sweetness, concentrated,
the way I like colors.
Well she swallowed that pig
right there in front of God,
the store owner and everyone.
No one said a word.
At dinner she showed up
with the plaster pig in her hands,
and I didn't speak Spanish,
but we sneaked out by the monkey cage,
where I plaited her long black hair with sugar,
so she could suck the sweet ends
long after I'd gone.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
D as In Doughnut
Chris Barnett
She said "doughnut"
In the cutest way
A rusty bike tone
Or a broken heart
Over the phone
She said "doughnut"
And I giggled
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Havre de Heart
Chris Barnett
For something so pure
So eloquent
I'm helpless
Here in my cow outfit
So I sit
In dejected sophistry
A big thud
If you will
Living an interruption
You exist where I do
Not
That is how you complete me
That is why we may never find us
That's why I'll keep my mouth closed
While grazing...
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
On Fences of Never
Chris Barnett
I don't know what to do with my eyes.
....at first you're one in a million of the post-chic, donning what
the magazines tell us... dodging your imaginary Paparazzi....your
lacerating tresses stealing me to a still......every eccentricity
quieted behind corporate digs...the "New Yawk" babe intrepid and
yummy...this is what you are...of course you're just as capable of
pizza chin as any pretty face...
Next, I detect your cataclysmal communication devices that seem to
beep, vibrate, ring, and solve very important problems...I soon
realize you have that hushed kind of sugar found only in the
lonely...the kind that leaves you bitter with subconscious smirks...to
top off such allegations, I realize you were the one by the Chai caf?
off Allen Street...most indeed of my memory you were...the one with
the strawberry sandals...you were telling me to get a job and stop
trying to commune with dead beats and other urban legends...
I understand,right there in my castle in the sky, that it's
you...Natasha Gurdin...Natalie Wood that is....or Wagner or
Walken...it's you and your baby browns and as they start into melted
chocolate chips...I feel I should leave you to yourself...but I harbor
this urge to help, to somehow run with gifting hands, I want to hug
you, cook with you.....but I just pick my nose instead...squawking
claptrap parables about death.....
For 389 shuffling steps...20 feet behind and
following....inconspicuously nosy
through the Lower East 5th arrondissement and I'm suddenly converted
into the kind who over-rationalizes about chance and the supernatural
and the strangely bizarre whilst strangely comforted knowing the
mystical has happened to me...twice...twice my eyes have convinced
themselves of you, Natalie....did you really think you could get away
with it?....fake your own death to come to New York and mosey around
in what looks to be Metallic Teal flip-flops, thinking we're not
always in control of our destiny?
I guess we're not in control or even at the wheel but it feels
real....and my right now is telling me you're in it.... it feels good
to be alive, Natalie....that the quintessence of divine virtue is
inbuilt...that the timeless immediacy of "but it could happen" does
indeed....
Jeepers.
A dangerous place to be...especially at this time of night when
vibrant imagination elbows up with you in that wayward kinda
way....but I find myself following you still in this dark ghoul of an
hour...as is my birthright when it comes to miracles, Ms. Fudgy
Eyes...awh, Natasha, downtown for boots and your prissy button
rouge...step princess step...Natalie of limited range but of heart
tugging amenities...snivel Natalie snivel.... you know you're a
star...but you need space...I understand....just like I am somebody's
Chris Barnett or Kevin Bacon and they're behind me about 5 blocks and
guessing, constructing, imagining my entire life story....I guess
we're all characters...characters for each other's benign
delusions...I'm just not sure if I should share you with the rest of
the world....or if I should tuck you in my dreams.
From behind a fire hydrant, I watch you stop in at the Chinese
butcher, browsing the marinated death of ducks teary-eyed and
carnivorous; a gumball pops out, you arc it to plop in your mouth,
teal tongue soon...and waving to a brash clerk, you leave humming
Sondheim. We go on for blocks, almost whole neighborhoods of cultural
joie de vivre and I see you chew the fat with bag ladies like you were
made of bags and all things pure...next you're kicking a rock in front
of the picture parlor and you seem delighted the rock has kept up with
you all these blocks...they miss you, Natalie. They are begging for
you to re-surface...begging for one... just one more thrill...
At the cigarette shop, you ask the vendor if your husband has come and
he licks his finger and holds it in the breeze...his eyes a quiz away
from certainty.
Ms. Wood...I won't tell a soul that you chew gum cow loud or that I
saw you last night under the streetlights on Stanton, status electric
under an active rain with your definition of suicide...but if you
didn't come back.....you came this close...this close...but I wouldn't
blame you.
I can see it now ...long after the artificial promises made during
heartfelt cocktails... you just slipped but right before that you were
on the railing, finding meaning in your own sailing expedition, and it
felt good to yell, to even the score your way, finally yodeling up
into that expansive nothing for a final lasting meaning....that
metaphysical holiness we crave under the cape of our own
sorrows....the kind of meaning we all lose the gist of until we
finally define ourselves....you just slipped I know.....now it's just
you and Sondheim rolling on like some anonymous parade...while the
holidays and the fireworks and the affairs and the frugality and the
conundrums and the news and the normalcy and the clockwork of an
innocent New Yawk linger around the edges of your smallness.
At 2nd Avenue, your scruples get tied like a pretzel as some chance
bum recognizes you and starts quoting "34th Street". He'll enter a
bar. Everyone will think he is just a mad bum, but what his
beautifully mucky head knows would turn the world upside down...he
will drink until he cannot stand or speak and it will be just before
puke when he ventures to tell the world who he saw, and upon hearing
his zealous discourse the world will pass him off as a drunkard and he
will plead, kick, flail, and stomp like an irate child until he passes
out burped....
Upon waking, all of his recollection blurred and
disenfranchised.....he'll forget he ever saw the real Natalie...and
having realized his head hurts, he will tend to that instead....and
then he'll cry a lot......not because he has forgotten....but because
he cannot remember.
I don't know what to with his eyes....
We all know them when we see them...Natasha....we all want a piece of
them....those with that miracle in their stride...that numinous trait
unexplained behind the eye.....those folk where you just know....it's
something about them...they've "got it" or they've "found out". They
inspire the ordinary to become unordinary...the tame to get a tad
wild....the caved in to resurface....the dead to rise...maybe we're
all like each other in our own ways, maybe... just maybe...we're
everyone in whispered waiting...or maybe we're all just ghosts trying
to get hired.
Only God knows...and let's pray that's the gospel...either way this
unemployed ghost is taking a seat....my ankles are swollen.
See you around, Natalie...
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Desire Translated
Richard Meyers
I slit little narrow-hipped Hope's abdomen wide open. Though thirty,
she has the figure of a twelve-year-old boy. I tell her months ago to
prepare for a c-section. I want to delivery it naturally, she whines,
her bottom lip quivering. I tell her, Honey, I say, naturally is a
relative term. She cries. I shrug and smile at the husband, lumberjack
type, furry and thick, friendly like a Golden Retriever. We share
smiles that say, Pregnant women, so emotional, what can you do? Randy,
I say to the husband, you need to take care of this one. I pat Hope's
leg compassionately. Smiles all around. Dr. Edwina "Weenie" Monroe is
a doctor with a great bedside manner. Patients love me.
Now I dip my hands through muscle and human muck and pull out a fat
little boy, blessed with such a clear complexion and a mellow
disposition. I'm always pleased that c-sectioned babies are so like an
afternoon nap on a rainy day; they're spared the red-faced,
cone-headed war of a vaginal delivery. I fancy myself akin to the
stoic firemen who rescue unfortunate little boys and girls from
abandoned water wells. I shoot entropy the bird. In short, with my
miniature sword, I make it easier for this plump little boy,
bewildered yet unperturbed, sticky and malleable, to enter from a
world of creation to a world of erosion. Hope stutters groggily,
D-Does he have all his fingers and toes. He's perfect, I answer. The
sweetest music for parents is he's perfect or she's perfect, for a
compliment of the child is a compliment for the parents, saying loudly
and clearly: You, with all your flaws, are good enough to produce a
pretty baby. Their egos want he's perfect or she's perfect, so I give
it to them...when I can, when it's possible.
Hope tearfully says, Thanks, Weenie. I tell all my patients to call me
Weenie. They love my name. I'm so memorable. I'm so personable. Why,
you're welcome, I say, my tone light yet responsible. I glance at a
crying Randy, his scraggly beard sticking out from behind his surgical
mask, a big lug dressed in surgical room garb. Oh, Weenie, he says,
his voice cracking, the proud papa. You're welcome too, I say, giving
him a wink. I'm sewing Hope up, whiting out the red spill, working on
her numb, gaped open tummy with monotony, with expertise, and with a
ho-hum nonchalance that puts the patients at ease. I'm in control and
immersed in the Tao of my job; I'm this woman's gut, the sutures, the
scalpel, the baby's umbilical cord. I'm so Now. Briefly, I allow
myself to remember my first vivid experience with what I thought had
to be the divine, with the experiencing of growing from the inside,
with the ecstasy of life overcoming death, if only for a few seconds.
I walk timidly, lightly, my high arched feet making sucking sounds on
the wet, smooth concrete floor of the Boy's Shower Room at the public
pool. I'm between fifteen and sixteen years old and am here to wait
for Preston and for myself; for, it seems, I am not complete until he
is by my side. My overwhelming desire for my life has caused me,
momentarily to forget about the death I've occasioned. When I close my
eyes, there she is, packed tightly inside my skull, a sort of little
girl hermit crab, creeping out of her compressed home at inopportune
moments: Susan White-cute, second grader, Aryan in looks, constant
lisp (she says Pepthe when meaning Pepsi)-drowns in the pool today. I
am her baby-sitter. She's my responsibility, my neighbor, and my
fault. Susan drowns surrounded by stalactites of preadolescent and
teenaged legs, girls and boys, hundreds of busy toes scraping the
rough concrete floor, crazily going nowhere, hairless butts, nubbin
tits and incubating vulvas, pasty pale penises with robin eggs for
balls, all hanging on pelvises pivoting gracefully and gracelessly to
catch flung Frisbees and tossed tennis balls. These girls and boys
surreptitiously excrete without care zigzagging jets of warm piss,
trailing each of them like a car's frenzied dust disturbed by a
joyride on a gravelly road. Kids. Doritos. Snickers. M&M's wrappers.
Baby Oil. Susan White's dead. Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have
Fun" blares while Preston and I kill her; we stand on her back and
legs, absently lost in each other, while her little lungs fill with
pool water.
Where is Preston? He said we'd meet after Saturday Night Live. I feel
like crying: a little girl's response. Where is he? This room echoes
my heavy breathing and my gurgling stomach, upset and empty. I haven't
eaten a thing since we killed her, no supper, nothing, except for a
wintergreen Lifesaver, that's all. My mother shakes her head. She's
worried about me. That poor little girl. What in the hell were the
lifeguards doing? I don't know, I say. I don't know. My mouth and nose
are filled with the smell of chlorine, dampness, and urine. I'm still
wearing my one-piece, navy blue swimsuit. I keep thinking about my
clarinet. Why do I keep thinking about my damned clarinet?
Hey, you say. I look up, startled and excited. I hear the heavy door
to the changing room close. Oh, hey, I say. I've been waiting. I know,
you say. You're still wearing your trunks. Your torso is bare and thin
but taunt, like a willow tree's branch. You're tanned brown; you're
hair is white blond from the hours in the sun. I feel so bad for
Susan, I say, willing dejection in into my voice. Yeah, you answer.
That was bad. Yes, it was, I say. You nod. We both have climbed over
the fence to get back into the pool tonight. This is the fifth time
we've done this. We feel special, separate, ready for the ascension to
play. We are enamored. We are both ripe.
I'll bet your mother about shit, I say. You look at me and smirk. You
wouldn't believe it, you reply. God, she hugged me and hugged me and
I'm like Jesus, Mom. I smile and giggle. I know, I say. I look at your
trunks. I'm absently swinging my feet. We are sitting on one of the
two wooden benches in front of the lockers nobody ever uses. I'm
tilting my head, noticing the gentle outline of your penis in your
trunks. By the yellowed light of the dusk-to-dawn light that has crept
underneath the heavy door leading to the pool, I can see your glans,
Preston, through your trunks, everything, the coronal ridge, how it
curves so slightly to the left, everything: your growing opaque pubic
hair matted to your lower abdomen, so dark a cloud on so light a
canvas, your left ball, squeezed against your thighs lower than your
right ball. She was so worried, you say. I know.
I notice how your nipples are so small and wrinkly. Your broadening
back and shoulders are sunburned and peeling and covered with a small
splay of acne. I stand and walk behind you; you lean forward and hug
your knees, like a pregnant woman preparing to receive an epidural.
You know that I love to peel the dead skin from your back. I start
slowly, picking at you, finding a flapping corner of white skin below
a freckle on your right, wing-like shoulder blade. I dig a fingernail
into you, flicking upward, toward the ceiling; I glance over your
back, noticing the bulge growing in your trunks. You shift your weight
to accommodate the metamorphosing member, still strange to you. You
clear your throat. You're at that age, able to come globs at just a
touch and never lose a bit of hardness. I peel from you, your skin,
thin and delicate, like a butterfly's wing. I'd like to put it in my
mouth. That would be so gross. I'd like to do it. I drop the bit of
the peeled membrane, gray as a dried out condom lying on a sidewalk. I
find another piece of skin, dead, lower on your spine. I push you
forward, exposing the top of your ass, so bare and slick, Preston; I
can see the hint of your crack. I dig a fingernail into you, pressing
hard. Jesus, you say. Oh shut up, I answer, smiling. I flick my
finger, unearthing your lifeless skin like I'm digging for buried
treasure. I grab the skin between thumb and forefinger and start
peeling. I lower to my knees, tugging dead skin with my right hand and
living skin with my left. I've slipped my left hand into your trunks,
encircling your swollen glans with an okay sign. I pull and squeeze
and caress and you gasp in seconds; my hand disappears in white
quicksand. I imagine the slit in your dick undulating, Preston, its
mouth opening and closing in spasms like a feeding baby bird. You're
coming, I say. You just grunt. I can see the muscles at the top of
your ass contracting. I love the word come. I love saying coming to
you, Preston, breathing it hot in your ear, spraying the word onto you
like perfume. Um um, you say. I pull my hand from your trunks and
taste a congealing part of you, Preston. I taste you, your come,
Preston: slick, snotty consistency, salty and sweet, tears of joy from
your cock. I pull the dead skin in one continuous piece up your back,
following your spine to your neck, before it breaks off. You're so
pink, Preston, underneath all the burned brown summer skin, Preston,
you're so pink and new. Jeez, you say, responding like a little boy.
I hear the drip, drip, drip of the showerheads, impotent now, Preston,
but during the day so hard, blasting away the dead skin of so many
boys and girls, their bare butts so cumulous cloud white, so daisy
petal white, their youth chipped away so slowly. The showerheads kill
us, so full of innocence and possibility. They melt boys and girls.
Don't you see, Preston? All the jovial, if slightly self-conscious
white bottoms, all of the pink bodies, so new, smelling like freshly
folded towels, are blasted away, skin cell by skin cell, leaving
resignation and loss. The drip, drip, drip of the showerheads mock us,
Preston; they're snickering like wallflowers at a school dance,
snickering at us because we dance, and they don't. The showerheads
want to kill us, Preston. Your come, Preston, is already drying on my
fingers, leaving a tightening grip where a wet, lapping tongue should
be. Why must we evaporate?
We're quiet. You drip from my hands in time with the dripping
showerheads. Your breathing is strained. You don't know what to do
next. Your first hand job. You'd like to leave: a little boy's
response. Reciprocation does not enter your mind. I close my eyes and
see Susan's bugged out eyes, her swollen face, her limp body, and I
hear the white noise of a hundred kids all screaming, the radio
blaring, set to Cool 101.5-your Superstation. I hear and feel
asphyxiating splashing water from every direction, the older boys
performing jackknifes and cowboys and cannon balls off the high dive,
sporadic whistles from the lifeguards, mothers' chitchat, the arcade
games beeping, crying babies, the Coke and Pepsi machines' constant
drones, airplanes flying, and, louder than anything, more real than
anything, are your whispers in my ears, Preston. Everything you say is
hilarious or enticing or exciting, always inviting. When you whisper
in my ear, I almost faint. All the Harlequin Romances, all the
clich?s, everything-they're all true because of you, Preston.
Among legs and flailing arms and screams and whistles, you kiss my
neck and you brush my lips with your own, Preston. Our first kiss and
it's in the pool. You're trying to trip me, to push me backwards, I'm
laughing, you kiss me again. Suddenly. With you, Preston, everything
is so sudden. You spin away. You don't know what to do next: you try
to dunk me under water: a little boy's response. I tingle all over,
surrendering myself to you forever if you'll take me: a little girl's
response. Legs are kicking us, Preston, scratching us. You're telling
me a joke, whispering in my ear. You are hilarious. You are my
elevator to the clouds. Your breath smells like Sour Onion Potato
Chips and Dr.Pepper. My legs are being attacked by small children's
kicking feet. Crowded. We move deeper, you and I, toward the deep-end.
I must bounce on my toes to keep my head above water. Short little
teenie-weenie, you say. I stick my tongue out. I stare at your Adam's
apple, nesting in you throat, a berry ready to burst. I feel more
damned kicks and scratches around my legs, annoyances, minnow nibbles.
I finally look down and see Susan, limp around my feet, her eyes wide
and absent, her mouth forming an O. My shins are streaked red from her
scratches.
She'd tried to keep up with me.
I hear the lifeguards' panicky whistles.
I'm pushed out of the way. I stand on the concrete, dripping water,
staring at dead Susan White while a lifeguard pumps her tiny chest and
Cindy Lauper's "girls just wanna have fun" fills my ears.
Randy and Hope's little boy, Brice, grips my index finger and with my
thumb I stroke the rest of his tiny hand, pink like a baby rabbit.
With his other hand, Brice alternately grabs his big toe then his
penis. Talk about an eater, one of the nurses says to me, referring to
Brice. I chuckle as the baby sucks my finger; his benign little mouth
searching anxiously for a nipple. What do you see, Brice, through your
blurry eyes, staring back at you? Do you see a person who loves you,
or just the distorted brightness of the overhead fluorescent lights?
He bites so hard, says Hope, hobbling, still very sore from the
incision. She's come to breastfeed. He's hungry, I say. Hope sits in a
chair, uncovers her B cup breasts with her small nipples. After
Brice's mouth finds his mother's left nipple, I swear I can see his
eyes light up in intensity matched only by those odd creatures living
so many miles below the ocean's surface, glowing from within a
phosphorescent brightness that illuminates the pressure and absence of
their world.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Swimming Pool
Chris Duncan
I slit little narrow-hipped Hope's abdomen wide open. Though thirty,
she has the figure of a twelve-year-old boy. I tell her months ago to
prepare for a c-section. I want to delivery it naturally, she whines,
her bottom lip quivering. I tell her, Honey, I say, naturally is a
relative term. She cries. I shrug and smile at the husband, lumberjack
type, furry and thick, friendly like a Golden Retriever. We share
smiles that say, Pregnant women, so emotional, what can you do? Randy,
I say to the husband, you need to take care of this one. I pat Hope's
leg compassionately. Smiles all around. Dr. Edwina "Weenie" Monroe is
a doctor with a great bedside manner. Patients love me.
Now I dip my hands through muscle and human muck and pull out a fat
little boy, blessed with such a clear complexion and a mellow
disposition. I'm always pleased that c-sectioned babies are so like an
afternoon nap on a rainy day; they're spared the red-faced,
cone-headed war of a vaginal delivery. I fancy myself akin to the
stoic firemen who rescue unfortunate little boys and girls from
abandoned water wells. I shoot entropy the bird. In short, with my
miniature sword, I make it easier for this plump little boy,
bewildered yet unperturbed, sticky and malleable, to enter from a
world of creation to a world of erosion. Hope stutters groggily,
D-Does he have all his fingers and toes. He's perfect, I answer. The
sweetest music for parents is he's perfect or she's perfect, for a
compliment of the child is a compliment for the parents, saying loudly
and clearly: You, with all your flaws, are good enough to produce a
pretty baby. Their egos want he's perfect or she's perfect, so I give
it to them...when I can, when it's possible.
Hope tearfully says, Thanks, Weenie. I tell all my patients to call me
Weenie. They love my name. I'm so memorable. I'm so personable. Why,
you're welcome, I say, my tone light yet responsible. I glance at a
crying Randy, his scraggly beard sticking out from behind his surgical
mask, a big lug dressed in surgical room garb. Oh, Weenie, he says,
his voice cracking, the proud papa. You're welcome too, I say, giving
him a wink. I'm sewing Hope up, whiting out the red spill, working on
her numb, gaped open tummy with monotony, with expertise, and with a
ho-hum nonchalance that puts the patients at ease. I'm in control and
immersed in the Tao of my job; I'm this woman's gut, the sutures, the
scalpel, the baby's umbilical cord. I'm so Now. Briefly, I allow
myself to remember my first vivid experience with what I thought had
to be the divine, with the experiencing of growing from the inside,
with the ecstasy of life overcoming death, if only for a few seconds.
I walk timidly, lightly, my high arched feet making sucking sounds on
the wet, smooth concrete floor of the Boy's Shower Room at the public
pool. I'm between fifteen and sixteen years old and am here to wait
for Preston and for myself; for, it seems, I am not complete until he
is by my side. My overwhelming desire for my life has caused me,
momentarily to forget about the death I've occasioned. When I close my
eyes, there she is, packed tightly inside my skull, a sort of little
girl hermit crab, creeping out of her compressed home at inopportune
moments: Susan White-cute, second grader, Aryan in looks, constant
lisp (she says Pepthe when meaning Pepsi)-drowns in the pool today. I
am her baby-sitter. She's my responsibility, my neighbor, and my
fault. Susan drowns surrounded by stalactites of preadolescent and
teenaged legs, girls and boys, hundreds of busy toes scraping the
rough concrete floor, crazily going nowhere, hairless butts, nubbin
tits and incubating vulvas, pasty pale penises with robin eggs for
balls, all hanging on pelvises pivoting gracefully and gracelessly to
catch flung Frisbees and tossed tennis balls. These girls and boys
surreptitiously excrete without care zigzagging jets of warm piss,
trailing each of them like a car's frenzied dust disturbed by a
joyride on a gravelly road. Kids. Doritos. Snickers. M&M's wrappers.
Baby Oil. Susan White's dead. Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have
Fun" blares while Preston and I kill her; we stand on her back and
legs, absently lost in each other, while her little lungs fill with
pool water.
Where is Preston? He said we'd meet after Saturday Night Live. I feel
like crying: a little girl's response. Where is he? This room echoes
my heavy breathing and my gurgling stomach, upset and empty. I haven't
eaten a thing since we killed her, no supper, nothing, except for a
wintergreen Lifesaver, that's all. My mother shakes her head. She's
worried about me. That poor little girl. What in the hell were the
lifeguards doing? I don't know, I say. I don't know. My mouth and nose
are filled with the smell of chlorine, dampness, and urine. I'm still
wearing my one-piece, navy blue swimsuit. I keep thinking about my
clarinet. Why do I keep thinking about my damned clarinet?
Hey, you say. I look up, startled and excited. I hear the heavy door
to the changing room close. Oh, hey, I say. I've been waiting. I know,
you say. You're still wearing your trunks. Your torso is bare and thin
but taunt, like a willow tree's branch. You're tanned brown; you're
hair is white blond from the hours in the sun. I feel so bad for
Susan, I say, willing dejection in into my voice. Yeah, you answer.
That was bad. Yes, it was, I say. You nod. We both have climbed over
the fence to get back into the pool tonight. This is the fifth time
we've done this. We feel special, separate, ready for the ascension to
play. We are enamored. We are both ripe.
I'll bet your mother about shit, I say. You look at me and smirk. You
wouldn't believe it, you reply. God, she hugged me and hugged me and
I'm like Jesus, Mom. I smile and giggle. I know, I say. I look at your
trunks. I'm absently swinging my feet. We are sitting on one of the
two wooden benches in front of the lockers nobody ever uses. I'm
tilting my head, noticing the gentle outline of your penis in your
trunks. By the yellowed light of the dusk-to-dawn light that has crept
underneath the heavy door leading to the pool, I can see your glans,
Preston, through your trunks, everything, the coronal ridge, how it
curves so slightly to the left, everything: your growing opaque pubic
hair matted to your lower abdomen, so dark a cloud on so light a
canvas, your left ball, squeezed against your thighs lower than your
right ball. She was so worried, you say. I know.
I notice how your nipples are so small and wrinkly. Your broadening
back and shoulders are sunburned and peeling and covered with a small
splay of acne. I stand and walk behind you; you lean forward and hug
your knees, like a pregnant woman preparing to receive an epidural.
You know that I love to peel the dead skin from your back. I start
slowly, picking at you, finding a flapping corner of white skin below
a freckle on your right, wing-like shoulder blade. I dig a fingernail
into you, flicking upward, toward the ceiling; I glance over your
back, noticing the bulge growing in your trunks. You shift your weight
to accommodate the metamorphosing member, still strange to you. You
clear your throat. You're at that age, able to come globs at just a
touch and never lose a bit of hardness. I peel from you, your skin,
thin and delicate, like a butterfly's wing. I'd like to put it in my
mouth. That would be so gross. I'd like to do it. I drop the bit of
the peeled membrane, gray as a dried out condom lying on a sidewalk. I
find another piece of skin, dead, lower on your spine. I push you
forward, exposing the top of your ass, so bare and slick, Preston; I
can see the hint of your crack. I dig a fingernail into you, pressing
hard. Jesus, you say. Oh shut up, I answer, smiling. I flick my
finger, unearthing your lifeless skin like I'm digging for buried
treasure. I grab the skin between thumb and forefinger and start
peeling. I lower to my knees, tugging dead skin with my right hand and
living skin with my left. I've slipped my left hand into your trunks,
encircling your swollen glans with an okay sign. I pull and squeeze
and caress and you gasp in seconds; my hand disappears in white
quicksand. I imagine the slit in your dick undulating, Preston, its
mouth opening and closing in spasms like a feeding baby bird. You're
coming, I say. You just grunt. I can see the muscles at the top of
your ass contracting. I love the word come. I love saying coming to
you, Preston, breathing it hot in your ear, spraying the word onto you
like perfume. Um um, you say. I pull my hand from your trunks and
taste a congealing part of you, Preston. I taste you, your come,
Preston: slick, snotty consistency, salty and sweet, tears of joy from
your cock. I pull the dead skin in one continuous piece up your back,
following your spine to your neck, before it breaks off. You're so
pink, Preston, underneath all the burned brown summer skin, Preston,
you're so pink and new. Jeez, you say, responding like a little boy.
I hear the drip, drip, drip of the showerheads, impotent now, Preston,
but during the day so hard, blasting away the dead skin of so many
boys and girls, their bare butts so cumulous cloud white, so daisy
petal white, their youth chipped away so slowly. The showerheads kill
us, so full of innocence and possibility. They melt boys and girls.
Don't you see, Preston? All the jovial, if slightly self-conscious
white bottoms, all of the pink bodies, so new, smelling like freshly
folded towels, are blasted away, skin cell by skin cell, leaving
resignation and loss. The drip, drip, drip of the showerheads mock us,
Preston; they're snickering like wallflowers at a school dance,
snickering at us because we dance, and they don't. The showerheads
want to kill us, Preston. Your come, Preston, is already drying on my
fingers, leaving a tightening grip where a wet, lapping tongue should
be. Why must we evaporate?
We're quiet. You drip from my hands in time with the dripping
showerheads. Your breathing is strained. You don't know what to do
next. Your first hand job. You'd like to leave: a little boy's
response. Reciprocation does not enter your mind. I close my eyes and
see Susan's bugged out eyes, her swollen face, her limp body, and I
hear the white noise of a hundred kids all screaming, the radio
blaring, set to Cool 101.5-your Superstation. I hear and feel
asphyxiating splashing water from every direction, the older boys
performing jackknifes and cowboys and cannon balls off the high dive,
sporadic whistles from the lifeguards, mothers' chitchat, the arcade
games beeping, crying babies, the Coke and Pepsi machines' constant
drones, airplanes flying, and, louder than anything, more real than
anything, are your whispers in my ears, Preston. Everything you say is
hilarious or enticing or exciting, always inviting. When you whisper
in my ear, I almost faint. All the Harlequin Romances, all the
clich?s, everything-they're all true because of you, Preston.
Among legs and flailing arms and screams and whistles, you kiss my
neck and you brush my lips with your own, Preston. Our first kiss and
it's in the pool. You're trying to trip me, to push me backwards, I'm
laughing, you kiss me again. Suddenly. With you, Preston, everything
is so sudden. You spin away. You don't know what to do next: you try
to dunk me under water: a little boy's response. I tingle all over,
surrendering myself to you forever if you'll take me: a little girl's
response. Legs are kicking us, Preston, scratching us. You're telling
me a joke, whispering in my ear. You are hilarious. You are my
elevator to the clouds. Your breath smells like Sour Onion Potato
Chips and Dr.Pepper. My legs are being attacked by small children's
kicking feet. Crowded. We move deeper, you and I, toward the deep-end.
I must bounce on my toes to keep my head above water. Short little
teenie-weenie, you say. I stick my tongue out. I stare at your Adam's
apple, nesting in you throat, a berry ready to burst. I feel more
damned kicks and scratches around my legs, annoyances, minnow nibbles.
I finally look down and see Susan, limp around my feet, her eyes wide
and absent, her mouth forming an O. My shins are streaked red from her
scratches.
She'd tried to keep up with me.
I hear the lifeguards' panicky whistles.
I'm pushed out of the way. I stand on the concrete, dripping water,
staring at dead Susan White while a lifeguard pumps her tiny chest and
Cindy Lauper's "girls just wanna have fun" fills my ears.
Randy and Hope's little boy, Brice, grips my index finger and with my
thumb I stroke the rest of his tiny hand, pink like a baby rabbit.
With his other hand, Brice alternately grabs his big toe then his
penis. Talk about an eater, one of the nurses says to me, referring to
Brice. I chuckle as the baby sucks my finger; his benign little mouth
searching anxiously for a nipple. What do you see, Brice, through your
blurry eyes, staring back at you? Do you see a person who loves you,
or just the distorted brightness of the overhead fluorescent lights?
He bites so hard, says Hope, hobbling, still very sore from the
incision. She's come to breastfeed. He's hungry, I say. Hope sits in a
chair, uncovers her B cup breasts with her small nipples. After
Brice's mouth finds his mother's left nipple, I swear I can see his
eyes light up in intensity matched only by those odd creatures living
so many miles below the ocean's surface, glowing from within a
phosphorescent brightness that illuminates the pressure and absence of
their world.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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About the Authors
** Avik Chanda [ avik_chanda@hotmail.com ]
Avik Chanda is a management consultant and freelance writer with
several articles, art reviews, and short stories published in Indian
dailies.
** Chris Duncan [ cduncan204@aol.com ]
Chris Duncan is 29 years old and lives with his wife and 2 year old
daughter in southwest Virginia. He will be entering an MFA program in
creative writing next year. His most recent publishing credit is a
short story which appeared in the Spring 2002 edition of Intertext.
** Richard Meyers [ richmeyers88@aol.com ]
Richard Meyers was active in the Berkeley, California, Civil Rights
and the free speech movement of the early sixties. He went to India to
serve in the Peace Corps for two years after which he continued in
India, Central and South East Asia for another four years working as a
teacher of English.
Later in Europe and the United States he helped develop Alternative
and Co-Operative communities. Participating in many aspects of
spiritual community organizing, he contributed to a number of works in
Journalism, Film and Fiction Publications.
His short stories have been published in Moondance: Song and Story,
Kenagain, Web del Sol, InPosse Review, Spinnings and SFSalvo. He has
published two volumes of his collected poetry, The Journey's Loom and
Striptease of the Soul through Gondarva Press. His poetry has appeared
in numerous journals and anthologies.
His other works include the novels The Journey That Never Was Made,
Alms For Oblivion, Under Indian Skies and A Maze for Infidels.
Prolific in all genres, his short stories, essays and plays include
Rivers of Babylon, Dark Rituals and Last Train to Simla.
Currently he teaches English at City College of San Francisco.
** Doug Tanoury [ dtanoury@comcast.net ]
Doug Tanoury is primarily a poet of the internet with the majority
never leaving electronic form. His verse can be read at electronic
magazines and journals across the world.
Doug credits his 7th grade poetry anthology from Sister Debra's
English class as exerting the greatest influence on his work:
Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle And Other Modern Verse
(Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c)1966 by Scott
Foresman & Company). He still keeps a copy of it at his writing desk.
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