Gunpowder and fuses

The first two words of each line were provided by Dorothy Pendleton as a writing exercise. I recommend it!

I am a cannon at Antietam.
I hear the jagged breaths of soldiers.
I see a lake of blood.
I wish that guns could refuse to fire.
I act as if I'm not to blame for the carnage, but
I feel the cannonballs when they exit me.
I touch everything in front of me with death.
I worry about so many souls leaving this place all at once.
I like to imagine that there is a hereafter.
I am a cannon at Antietam. 

I understand gunpowder and fuses.
I say "Here is your death" with every exhalation.
I dream of this battlefield before the war, all green and hopeful.
I try to believe the ground will absorb all this blood.
I hope the souls of soldiers will forgive me.
I am a cannon at Antietam.

Do I Hear Ten Thousand?

"Don't throw your shitty first drafts on a bonfire, for chrissakes," my sister crackles into my ear via sat phone, ten states away. She lives at some godawful altitude where cell phones don't work. Suddenly, she has decided that my manuscripts might actually be worth something, someday, and she is calling me all in a lather.
This is the sister who last read a composition of mine when I was in fifth grade and nothing since, the sister who once told me that poetry and fiction were for people who couldn't cut it in the real world --  unh-hunh,  that sister -- and now she wants me to box up all the early drafts of my work for posterity.
"We could auction them off at Christie's for a good price, something to leave your family since" and here she can't resist getting in a dig "you never saw fit to grow up and buy any life insurance or investments." 
I cannot begin to list all the ways this conversation can go downhill from here, so I hang up the phone quietly and turn my eyes toward the yard where the fire pit is waiting. I'm old school when it comes to editing. I like to read a draft on paper and cover it in red marks, like stab wounds. These pages eventually end up in my Bonfire of Catharsis, (which is not to be confused with my Shrine of Self Pity.)
With my sister's words still buzzing around in my head like angry deer flies, I carefully build a teepee shape out of tinder.

"Do I hear a hundred, a hundred, a hundred?" my inner auctioneer starts chanting. I move on to stack dry wood the thickness of my wrist as I chant, "Do I hear two, two, two, do I hear three?" and erect a larger teepee of split logs above that, chanting, "a thousand, a thousand for this fine manuscript come a thousand. Two thousand thank you very much to the lady in the back with three thousand for a full short story, am I bid four-four-four.."

I set a match to the kindling and feed in balled up pages, hearing the crackle and pop. Bad first drafts vaporize and drift upward as steam or smoke. Words that were leaden on the page -- all my bad prose and dull plots -- go airborne. It is a kinder fate than the shredder and far less embarassing than having someone bid on them at some future date and read them aloud at a dinner party.

The Good Wife

I just needed a little more time, a moment only, to answer Melek's question. I did not have to make up an answer -- I had that ready. I always had the answer ready because the question was always the same.
I needed the time to compose my face into a mask of perfect submission. He expected me to be submissive.
I turned away from the window and faced him, my eyes downcast and my posture stooped, and whispered, "No, my husband. I do not know the name of the man in the market who bumped into me and said 'Excuse me.' He was nothing. He was a nobody."
I knew what his next accusation would be; by then, I could have recited this tired, familiar script in three languages, in full costume, with an orchestra playing Mahler behind us.
"How did you know he was a nobody if you didn't look at him, eh? Did you raise your eyes and look him in the face? Are you my wife or a whore?"
Cue the kettledrums. Cue the dancing bears. This was where I lowered my head and wailed a protest of innocence to be followed by a walloping slap and a punch to my ribcage.
Soon after, he left to meet his cousins in a cafe. I  removed my head scarf, shawl, sweater, blouse and the precautionary extra padding I kept taped to my ribs, and I slipped into a warm bath. Leisurely, I washed my limbs, my hair, my face. Leisurely, I perfumed myself.
Leisurely, I re-read the note that had been slipped into my sweater pocket that morning: "I breathe and live another day in the hope of seeing you."

Seventeen Men in Waiting

Shirl drove to town on Saturdays to buy supplies, her broken muffler announcing her arrival well ahead of her bent front fender. She clambered down from the old Chevy pickup, her hair pulled back in a loose, graying ponytail and the pocket of her worn, watch-plaid flannel shirt bulging with shopping lists.
None of the locals paid her much attention. She was, to them, a middle aged woman, probably living on a pension. And that was fine with her. She didn't want the men, especially, to get any ideas about visiting her drunk on Saturday nights.

Shirl had bought the Bar-J ranch a few years back, a small house on 90 gently rolling acres with a creek running through. She kept horses, evident by the tack and feed she bought at Jay's General, and pried colorful quartz from the hard pan under a few inches of topsoil.

“Wyoming, now that's where the ratio of men to women is 17 to one -- look it up if you like. I hear it's a good place to go if you're looking for a husband,” Shirl's sister Jeanie had told her.
Shirl wasn't the type to share hugs or confidences, so she kept her yap shut and quietly signed the deed a week before moving west. Jeanie mailed her the hometown paper and pound cakes made with Wisconsin butter, every so often. Shirl sent Jeanie rodeo programs and photos of her new foals.
She “let herself go,” as their mother would have called it, by not dyeing her hair or wearing skirts to town. The last lipstick she'd chunked into the trash had been three years old and dry. Living on her own terms made Shirl happier than she'd ever been, quite frankly, and her only lack — if you could call it that — was having no one to tell that fact to.
She loved waking up because she'd finished sleeping, eating only when she was hungry, going to bed only because she was tired, and buying what she wanted when she wanted. Money was never scarce -- not that it had ever been. Still, no need to flaunt it.
Now and then, she'd drive to Casper, board a plane for Reno, and meet up with an old lover. She related little of her life on the ranch, preferring to encapsulate their pleasure and time together as one might encapsulate time spent watching a particularly good film. The shifting images and sounds inside their hotel room were removed from the outside world.

Shirl wondered why no one had ever told her how delicious a solitary life could be. Her entire upbringing, all the advice she'd heard in college, had aimed her like a dart to the bull's-eye called marriage, as if pairing up was the only natural state there was.
"A shame, really" she mused. "All those 17 men out there, just waiting for me. Probably a few of them are lookers, too." She laughed, and for just an instant wished there was someone around she could tell that to.

Mobiles

Your stories are marvels of precision.

Like Calder’s mobiles, they move in perfect balance on the slightest updraft. 

How do you put it all together with beginning, middle, end, the rising action and firm-handed resolution (just like they taught in school)?

My stories are ramshackle; they lurch along in old sweaters with holes and missing buttons, drinking from mismatched cups and saucers.
They mutter; yours crow.

Mine hide behind dark glasses and long bangs while yours step out into the glare of flashbulbs, square their shoulders and accept the Big Prize with the Foreign-Sounding Name never before given to Anyone So Young.

 There is no use to rallying around me and saying things like, "the short story is much harder to pull off than the novel" or buying me rounds at the pub with shoulder pounding good cheer and "buck up old gal" bravado. The agent -- the one who emailed me from New York City with a query -- said he wants a novel.

"Short fiction is all I've got," I said.

"You have to write a novel," he said, as if I could just pull something from my ass, like some sous chef whipping up a Hollandaise on short notice.

I've been despondent ever since.

I'd like to tour the world of mobiles. I'd like to go from Gdansk to County Clair, Majorca to Mount Airy. Wherever there are mobiles in haylofts or museums, I will be there, studying their lazy drift.

Out of my travels a book will come. No one will be able to hold it for long. It will raise the reader's sight line, inflate his hollow spaces  and up he will drift to take his place beside the birds of Calder -- as light as balsa, as integral as the dna we share.

Better Boys, Early Girls

While I work in the garden, I think about Marlon Brando playing an elderly Vito Corleone lumbering through the tomato vines on a summer afternoon. He is playing a game with his grandson, and the simple staked tomatoes -- a holdover from his roots in Sicily -- come crashing down when the huge man falls to his death.
Nothing signifies summer as perfectly as home grown tomatoes swelling and turning pink from green and red from pink as June turns into July.
On a hot afternoon, your hands soak up the tomato attar when you touch the vines, when you move among the cages and stakes to find that one, perfect fruit for your supper sandwich. 
In the cool of the evening, you slice and salt it, then lay each slice just so on soft white bread slathered in cold mayonnaise.
Best of all is eating the sandwich outside, barefoot on the porch overlooking the garden, so that you can sing the praises of Better Boys and Early Girls -- and heirloom brandywines, don't forget -- between long, slow swallows.

Laces

Rosarious slouches into the lab, no book, laces perilously undone, earbuds blasting Dr. Dre. "ROSARIOUS," I signal, waving my hand to break through his wall of sound, "GADGETS OFF IN THE LAB!"

Inglorious student with glorious shoes, he is a prince among his peers.  I see those shoes and the status they confer, and I know what they cost.

They cost him his books for the semester, is what they cost.

"You paid twelve hundred dollars for a pair of shoes?" I gasped when he first told me. But when I bent closer to look, I saw art and architecture. The shoes were engineered. They were built with materials NASA  astronauts wore on Apollo missions.

Rosarious' face was a mixture of pride and shame because he had not yet reached a comfort point with money. He had not yet learned that, if you buy what you desire, then you have to harden yourself to the price tag.
You decide to be happy or guilty -- quick, what'll it be?
"Hey, hey, they's a lot worse 'n these," he protested. "Hey! Google it! They make summa them Jordans with diamonds sewn on 'em, cost fifty grand!"
                          

You know what? I do not judge him. Long ago I decided not to invest in opinions about the students, saving my energy, instead, for the work itself.

They are not used to such a minimalist approach. They are accustomed to the adults in their world martyring and sacrificing for them, scolding or shaming them, sometimes seducing them, sometimes breaking promises to them.

I offer them only the clear, cool water of grammar, the vigorous workout of my Great American Comma Clinic (a one-hour aerobic review of the comma and semicolon designed, my friends, to change your lives), and a dispassionate explanation of Chicago Manual of Style.

When Rosarious was offered his athletic scholarship, (which does not cover books) an uncle in Nigeria sent him a jacket made from antelope skins. The family has hoop dreams for him, but thousands of parents have the same dreams for their tall sons with elbows calloused by jabbing other boys in a lifelong quest for possession of the ball.

I walk along the line of computer stations, checking for facebookers and shoe shoppers whom I tap lightly on the shoulder as a reminder they are here to work.

I stop behind Rosarious and his sleek Kudu jacket, and he smiles at my reflection in the screen. His smile is sly and a little ugly. It asks, “How can I game you? What's the angle, here?”

“Tie your shoelaces,” I say. “If they are tied, your shoes cannot be stolen off your feet with one hard swipe. You must not be from the city or you would have known that.”