Welcome to penandcape.com
Greetings, Internet Surfer, and welcome to PenandCape.com. But what exactly IS penandcape.com you ask? Well, that’s a long answer. But, since there is still much contention over whether or not Time is infinite, I’ll offer up the short version:
Essentially, PenandCape.com is a blog(ish) place designed to broadcast poetic and/or prose transmissions from the darkest (and sometimes brightest) nether regions of Jason Mott’s mind. But who is Jason Mott? He’s a poet and fiction writer who’s getting more than a little freaked out speaking about himself in the third person. So let’s make a small grammar shift, shall we?
Ready?
Okay, let’s start again:
My name is Jason Mott. (Yes…yes, Igor! That feels much, much better). I’m a writer living in North Carolina and I’m proud to say that I write a great deal of poetry that focuses on superheroes. I’m a fanboy (and proud of it!). Like some of you who may have come across this website, I grew up reading comic books. And, like others of you who may have come across this website, I grew up reading lots of classic literature and poetry.
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Putting Down The Dead (Opening)
Opening from the short story I will be reading at “The Cure for the Common Catastrophe” on September 11 at Jengo’s Playhouse.
Putting Down the Dead
In the beginning, they were known as “The Blithe Sufferers,” on account of the first reported case, Edmund Blithe: a man from Liverpool, England who showed up for work, as healthy and alive as he always had been, on a Monday morning just four days after his own burial. Not long after that however, when the newspapers were just getting used to calling them “The Blithe Sufferers,” someone very famous, very in touch with art and poetry circles, was, in an interview, heard to refer to them as “The Dispossessed.” The name stuck, much to Harold’s dismay. (He hadn’t particularly cared for calling them “The Blithe Sufferers” either. He thought it sounded too Middle Ages, too Spanish Inquisition. Neither had he much cared for calling them “The Resurrectionists” as some southern folks, Baptists mostly, had, for a little while, taken to calling them. “The Resurrectionists” sounded too Christian. Too Good Friday or Easter Sunday. There were just as many Muslims, Buddhists, Shintoists, Atheists and Undecideds coming back from the dead as there were Christians. The whole event was too big, to earth-shakingly impenetrable, to dip it in the butter of any single religion, even Christianity.)
“The Dispossessed,” Harold thought, sitting beneath the eaves of the front porch, watching gray plumes of rain stumble across a flat gray sky. “The Dispossessed” sounded like nobody wanted them, not even the earth, and that wasn’t necessarily true. Many of them were, in fact, very wanted. And, yes, many of them were not wanted—hadn’t there been reports of some of them being attacked outright, beaten to death by mobs of frightened, superstitious people? Hadn’t there been that Chinaman—just over in Bladen County—who’d done nothing other than show up one day, dressed in some World War II uniform, waving his hands and speaking foreign, and before anybody knew what was happening or how it was happening, he was dead, all over again? Harold tried to pull out the details of the story from his memory, but caught only vagaries and half-imaginings. As he thought about the dead Chinaman—he wasn’t a Chinaman, he was Japanese, the uniform, later, torn and blood-stained, told as much; Harold remembered these details suddenly and without warning—he found himself wondering if the dead Japanese man might come back again? Be dispossessed a second time?
Dispossessed.
There was the word again. The word that had become a name. Harold frowned, as if he’d found a teaspoon of cod liver oil in his mouth.
(But didn’t the name fit? At least a little? Hadn’t these people been evicted, banished, put out of possession, dispossessed, by death itself? All of them coughed up, like so much water in the lungs.)
Harold lit a cigarette, quietly, trusting the wind to carry both the sound of the lighter and the smoke of the cigarette off to the south, away from Lucille. There’d be no end to the lecturing if she caught him smoking. She was a strange one, Lucille. She knew good and well that he smoked, but something about smoking overtly sent her a’kilter, as if the act of being a smoker were a grand and complex illusion, and showing the audience how one performed the illusion was confirmation that the illusionist didn’t give two cents about his the craft, about the history, about the passionate and timeless mystique of his art. Unforgiveable.
Harold finished his cigarette uncaught and un-lectured. The rain had finished falling in plumes. It had decided on a flat, even disposition. It came down like television static. Until only the trees, the dense hedge of pines down at the southern leg of the property, sticking up straight as feathers, only they proved that the sky, eventually, did end. From inside the house, oblivious to the rain, came the sounds of a very young boy and a very old woman chasing one another. First the thump, thump, thump of the boy, light as even. Sometimes the sound receded. Sometimes it came closer, towards the screen door and the porch where Harold sat. After the sound of the boy was the sound of the woman. Slower. More deliberate. Painfully uneven sometimes. As if her body were unable to decide upon the speed and trajectory of her individual feet. She moved like a cast-iron stove, Harold thought, come to life and sent for groceries. It was only a matter of time, if she kept this up, before she fell. Then what?
Harold considered another cigarette and, on a whim, decided against it. He sat some more, sat harder, like thinking harder, taking in the sight of the rain, listening to his seventy-something wife chase behind his seven-year-old son, Jacob, one of the Dispossessed.
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The Identity of Betty Rubble
Another installment from the Betty & Wilma series. This one serves as a followup to the previous piece. Hope you enjoy!
-J
__________________
The Identity of Betty Rubble
The robberies so far had been calculated risks and calculated successes. A dozen small miracles or feats of fate had transpired to get Wilma and Betty and Fred and Barney away cleanly each time—clean being a relative term. There were descriptions of them in a few newspapers and a little expose had run on television back in Bedrock, calling them the “Bedrock Bandits.” And now that they were four robberies deep maybe a few bastions of law and order here and there were beginning to catch wind of their spree, but the media, somehow, still seemed in the dark. Or maybe they just had bigger fish to fry. Dinosaurs were disappearing by the herdful of late and there seemed to be more theories than assholes and, thankfully, the assholes were good at taking up airtime and keeping little things like small town bank robberies to themselves.
Dive deeper…
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New Wilma & Betty Story (Trailer)
Here’s the “trailer” from the latest Wilma & Betty story (which I’ll be reading at Jengo’s Playhouse this Saturday night–May, 29th; 814 Princess Street @ 7:00pm). A little something to wet your palette.
Come out. Bring Friends. Hear the rest of the story.
-JM
“The Identity of Betty Rubble”
(opening)
There were banks a plenty in Rock Vegas but there were the casinos too. So Wilma was working on a strategy for taking her fair share of the Vegas limelight and the Vegas coin while Betty tried to look up an old acquaintance and Fred and Barney went about the business of developing healthy gambling addictions. See, Betty and Wilma had been here once before. A few years back, back when they first came to see that they didn’t owe their lives anything and, ultimately, every day was only a matter of what they wanted it to be. They’d come out here to Vegas and drank too much whiskey and maybe rode the white horse one time too many and spent too much time dancing with the men their husbands would never be and, now, sometimes, those memories came back to them.
Wilma was good enough about ignoring what this city was telling her. Her plate was full with thoughts on how to get into the Bellagirock vault and make off with a few million. But Betty, being better on the gun than on the planning table, Betty had nothing to do but remember Dive deeper…
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Wilma & Betty: Episode IV
Wilma & Betty IV: Betty and Yesterday
By
Jason Mott
On the table between them, a half-empty glass of wine filled the space.
“God!” Betty exclaimed, smiling. “I just can’t believe how long it’s been.”
It had been decades since Betty last saw the woman now sitting across from her at the small, circular table in the window of Black Jurassic Java & Spirits. When Betty last saw the woman, she was not a woman at all. She was a girl, a dark-skinned Cro-Magnon girl—young and brown and glib.
“I’ve been living in New Pebble Beach,” the woman said. “I still love the sun.”
“It shows,” Betty replied.
The woman extended a thick, sienna hand and raised the glass of wine to her lips. She drank it slowly, in timid sips, as though each would be her last.
“And what have you been up to?” the woman asked. “That little gray stone on your finger tells me that, somewhere out there lost in a storm of mail, there’s an invitation with my name on it.”
Betty laughed. It was a light, sparkling laugh. It arched her back.
“I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. You disappeared after that summer, remember? It was your parents, right? They picked up and moved to Morocco. That’s what my mother told me anyhow.”
“It was something like that,” Dive deeper…
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