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Poem of the Week (11/28/2010)
“Tonight I Can Write…”
by Pablo Neruda
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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
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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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The Return of the Infamous Wilma & Betty
Next weekend (January 30th) I’ll once again be co-hosting the next installment of “The Cure for the Common Reading” with my good friend Justin Edge. Last time, I posted the opening section of my piece for folks to preview and everyone seemed to enjoy that. So here we go again!
This time (in honor of my good friend Bill Shipman) I’ll be offering up another installment of the infamous “Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty” series. This time the girls are armed and, therefore, even more dangerous than usual!
But you gotta come out to Jengo’s (814 Princess Street) at 7:00 on Saturday to find out how the girls got to this point and, more importantly, what happens next! 
The Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty:
Episode X: How It Does or Does Not End
It was 4:59 on a Friday afternoon and outside the 1st National Bank of Bedrock the sky was gray. A steady, dreary rain was falling. The two women just did make it through the front door of the bank as the clock struck 5 pm. The security guard pulled the door shut behind them and closed the lock home.
He was a young, broad-shouldered boy. Reminiscent of a young Dennis Quaidstone.
To be sure, he was a handsome boy. A handsome boy that might some day ripen into a handsome man—if his life was long enough and hard enough and he made just enough bad decisions.
“You ladies got lucky,” the young guard said, smiling a perfect smile.
Betty grinned, looking both guilty and disingenuous.
Wilma sighed. “Yes,” she said. “We did get lucky.” She smiled her apology. “I wish I could say the same for you.”
Then she pulled out her pistol and shot the young guard just above the knee.
He crumpled with a scream.
“Here we go,” Wilma said.
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Poster design by Subpar Design
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