The Mourning Words: Short short story

by Don Schaeffer


http://www.shuttertalk.com/forums/Thread-The-Mourning-Words-Short-short-story?pid=85154#pid85154

Bears in Heckscher Park

Spring Horse

by Ruth Hill

 

 Ruth was raised in upstate New York. She sailed BC for five years, then settled in northern BC. Her writings were selected by The Litchfield Review, Level 4 Press, Ocean Magazine, Hastings International Poetry, Utmost Christian Writers, Lucidity, Georgia Poetry Society's Langston Hughes Award, Tom Howard Poetry, Word Catalyst, MODOC Forum, Senior Poets Laureate, Peace River Anthology, Dancing Poetry, and Arc Poetry. Ruth enjoys email from other writers.

 

I once found a spring,

which I saved, in case
I ever saw a crippled spring horse.

 

I did find a three-legged spring horse,
which I trailered home to fix.

 

I saved a thrown-away mop,

and shaped a new mane and flying tail.

 

I painted its saddle red.

 

Some movers threw it down,

and broke its little plastic leg.

 

On a woodsy walk I found a stump,

and carved it to fit inside the leg.

 

I took the horse off its stand to glue,

and left it outside to dry.

 

Someone saw a horse without a stand,

and threw the horse away.

 

Eventually I gave up finding

a replacement horse.

 

Upon moving to the nursing home,
I found again that little lonely spring.

 

This time its hopefulness eluded me.

 

 

Browns Road Hill

Moshe the Invisible

short story by Don Schaeffer

 

 

The kids gathered in Caroline's family living room for snacks. They lolled around on the rug and chairs. The girls challenged the boys to leg wrestling contests. It was chilly out in the late autumn. There were no leaves on the trees. But the room was warm. It was soaked in joy. It was taken for granted. All who were there, Kathy and Neil, Caroline and Nolan and Pete and unrecognized others invited didn't care about the climate.

When David arrived it was an accident. He rang the bell in ignorance. Caroline answered politely, greeting him. She didn't ask for his invitation.

Neil saw David enter and everyone heard him say, “Oh no.” This was the end of their joy. They all felt the cold from the inside of David's half visible body.

David never took it for granted. It was not granted. Not taking it for granted was David’s transgression.

When Moshe awoke from this dream the world around his bed shimmered in late summer moonlight. Ceres was not in the bed. He was in the guest room bed. He came to that awareness. Moshe had mixed feelings about sleeping alone. Maybe those feelings triggered the dream, maybe recollection.

He couldn't remember how he ended up where he was, tabulated into a household unit, counted along with the true residents of New York. He lived then among the creatures with raised eyes and straight determined walks. Then he met Ceres, a woman not a fantasy and lived as the estranged visions washed away in the years. But he was still only half visible because he couldn't take it for granted. He cooperated in the reality of the town and the country and the world but with obvious reluctance. Since he didn't do so with a whole heart, the world never fully paid him.

   Not speaking up, not saying hello, slipping half-seen in and out of shops and down streets, not knowing how to make his voice call up his visibility. He walked among those who chatter, those in fashion, those with noses pointed straight ahead, with human faces so completely recognizable as to declare themselves universal, flesh solid, uniquely real. They all took this for granted. Moshe did so with reservations. The slight hesitation in his mind, in his fingers, although not really articulate-able, was noticed. Moshe was the ghost of the town. Its walls were hollow, not quite owned by him.

It took Moshe ten years of graduate school to earn his Ph.D. He thought it exceptional considering his poor memory for names.

 

Moshe worked as a TSR. Telephone sales representative was his profession. Not what he planned and worked for. Failure was frightening and refreshing as he came down.

At Re-Tel Corporation International selling telephone donations for minor charities that needed that kind of help he was part of a troop of telephone headset wearers, long evening hours bent over a monitor that spit his script out at him as well as bits of history. Selling was frightening, a flow of human voices giving and not giving, under the hot light of chance. Moshe always thought that chance was the language of God. He tried to measure his regeneracy by his sales, a gambler's preoccupation, watching waves of numbers on display, flowing through the hours and minutes, envy and embarrassment.

Moshe sold for half-legitimate mortgage banks, credit card companies, low legitimacy financial schemes, absurd mail order offers with hidden clauses that had to be read quickly. He sold memberships and subscriptions, contract deals. Ten years of pretense fell to earth and ten years of raw labor of the heart.

Legally, the shift had to end by 9. It was completely night and the late autumn had shifted into cold as the would-be, might-have-been Moshe made his way to the glass bus shelter. He did feel like a citizen tonight, one among many. Those in the shelter, slightly hand-me-down and raw, everyday human products shared a metal bench or stood against the glass looking for buses. The wind managed to get under the plate glass and made him shiver. He feared a mild form of fear because of the shadows around him.

Moshe always saw himself as young, the youngest and most helpless in the room, even with his bald head, his graying sideburns and his old man beard. Apparent seniority and sophistication hid him and he rode around in his face and body like rajah in a tent atop an elephant.

 

On Wednesday evening when Moshe had off, while he waited for the fright of his next shift, he and Ceres went to the nearby casino. They had dinner in the plastic cafeteria, fitted to look like Acapulco, which he would never see in reality. They kept their expenses for gambling down to ten dollars. Each of them sat at a 25 cent slot and watched the flow of spinning fruit and diamonds. Here was Moshe’s hall of prayer. The slot machine was his prayer wheel, the word of God suspended in time directly viewable in wins and losses. He saw the hills and valleys of the hidden holy world.

 

                                                    

Free Life Drawing Class

Ten Minute Sketches

Tiny Bird

A Du Maurier:

by Tom Prime

This is micro fiction by a poet who has been in here with his distinctive style several times. Warning, he is very sad.






Back on the highway, when I’d hitchhiked with Nicole and October ate the last bits of meat left on the bones of summer, the sky was a smoke grey. The smudge of the sky held nothing but charcoal. It smudged out all the sunlight. The wispy quality of autumn clung to our hair and rosy knuckles. I’d wanted to quit smoking a week earlier, and had tried. I’d thrown a package of Drum rolling tobacco disdainfully into a puddle and in the cold wind where transport trucks clattered with angry pistons and the air smelled of diesel, we had watched as the reddish tobacco stuck out haphazardly like a lost toupee. I hadn’t smoked in a week and the dust and the carcinogens were beginning to expunge themselves in my yellowy spit. Our noses ran on annoyingly like late night television. She seemed to me to be my left arm. I had dreamt the night we’d slept in the semi-trailer of a transport truck that a car had torn off her right arm in a midnight accident, leaking like a slit open pomegranate with beads of blood through red and black plaid. A red middle-class pseudo-sports car pulled up. We got used to these new faces. He was as bored and drained by the fat leech of impending winter as we were. He offered me a smoke and I pretended to acquiesce, in hopes of eluding myself. I lit the cigarette with the push in electric lighter. A Du Maurier, I always thought that they tasted the way urine smells after drinking a Colt 45. I smoked it anyway. It was a sickly dizziness that deadened my face with a cadaverous ghostliness. The smoke like a serpent slipped down my throat into my veins and I felt emptied, nothing mattered then. I thought of Nicole as the smoke rose, then I inhaled.

Paperback Novella

My novella, "Samuel" is now available in paperback.



http://www.publishamerica.net/product49276.html

The Python

Not a Bad Way to Begin a Morning

by Guy Kettlehack

Guy Kettelhack is the author and coauthor of numerous nonfiction books. He's currently an artist and a poet. He lives in New York City.

The thing, we think, to do with puzzles
is to nuzzle them affectionately,
wake them up at dawn while nobody

has anything much on – kiss their little lips
and let them know whatever slips
between you will be reconnoitered with

in privacy. Soon whatever you had
thought the point was to pursue will lose
its primacy and be replaced by something

like a clue – gently, without warning,
stretching its accoutrements, and yawning.
Not a bad way to begin a morning.

What I’d Call a ‘Myself’

by Guy Kettlehack

First Person slips off the shelf.
Keeps missing whatever I’d call a ‘myself.’

Second might do,
through its sneaky ambiguous usage of ‘you.’

‘One’ has a sort of a Jamesian tone,
but it sits rather too much aloofly alone.

Personal pronouns keep missing the bus:
they only report what purports to be ‘us.’

So I tried to look ‘I’ in the eye.
I drew what I saw in the mirror. Oh my.

Something looks back from the page.
Quiet, polite – but in covert outrage.

Wet Flagstone

"Samuel" a post adolescent novella

I've enlarged my post adolescent novella, "Samuel." It's in press at Amazon-Kindle. I hope to have it out in paperback shortly.

smile with narrow evil eyes

by Tom Prime
resident post-beat poet



I do feel better- tag the tarred
esoteric goulash- bitter monkey onions

Hero sham there in the tallow candle wax
among the dust
each feathered crocus
onomatopoeia
so many empty hopes in

dreams of large, veiny branches

not positive
or unhappy
just pain painted white

here in the shame belly
a dignified toad eye smile receptacle

against all the natural laws
physics like icicle chains
in eskimo politically correct lobotomy rainbow

- smile with narrow evil eyes

A Child’s First Vision of Death

by Tom Prime

A "short story"　

　

We grew up on an asphalt black mouthed hill with a tongue filled with white people's families. I don’t remember when the forest fell but I imagined it to be once populated with the greatness of violent sacrilegious natives combing its gnarled and blackened earthen stomach. I imagined where we rushed about among the sparse etchings of ravaged limbs, a free world, existing symbiotic with every color of dirt and moss and rainbow through dewdrop. We crafted crude, innocuous idols of death's wizened finger. Bow and arrows and bombs of old paint and gasoline, ours was a world of hidden wars, forts of plywood and wings of cardboard refusing to extol our battle against the clenched fists of science with flight- the arching womb of innocence. A long plastic intestinal drainage pipe ran down our muscular eye of reality into the earth beneath the suburbs, dense with the power and authority of a world separate from our own. Curry smelling immigrants separate, disconnected, impossible to understand but forgotten quickly with parental cautionary reproof- the dangerous world of escaping adversity. The run off of British Columbian grey skies seeped like long strands of dirty black and greasy hair down the monumental adolescent hill- half a kilometer. My brother and I lacking maturity and physical understanding looked down the black snake mouth and thought as thin and wispy and as careless as the shifting winds. Climbing into the coiling rubber walls among the sludge and evaporating rainwater we looked into the great eye of death and turned away.

Watching the Dog

I kinda got killed by a dragon

by Tom Prime

Tom has appeared here before. He is a latter day beat poet, brimming with energy, searching for regeneracy, self-defense, and self-destruction. This is one of his shorter works.




Don't you bleed ever so quietly? Much to my
dismay I kinda got killed by a dragon. It is as
much a confusing dismal world as round faced
sponge colored toads- I swallowed and fire extinguisher
eyes released hot steam sauna rock water. I tadpoled
in missionary mourning- glued into gelatin bodies- hear
the kerosene stove hissing like a misanthropic raccoon
in heat of rusty tear nail drops.


I kinda got killed by a dragon-

Magic Neighborhood

Girl at Picnic Table

Captive Monkeys

by Lee Crowell

The poet drove a commuter bus between NJ and NYC for 14 years. In 1991 he shifted into a corporate sales career in communications. In 2002 Lee opened a small restaurant, Dale's Cafe, (named after my wife) in Bartonsville PA in the Poconos. He has been married to Dale Ann (Derby) since 1983. They have seven children. His eighth grandchild is due February, 2012.



Captive monkeys jack off in daylight,
indifferent to anyone watching.
Captive monkeys toss feces out of boredom.
They give furry-faced stares,
mirrors of our predicaments
jaded from jungle undelivered.

Some captive monkeys have imagination.
They sit their bald asses on platforms.
With keypads, remotes and dexterity
they simulate wildness into their zoological digs.
They elevate the playing with shit into a game of war.
The act of jacking off becomes an art of ritual.

We sense a new fierceness in their eyes.