Twenty-Thirteen

by Josh Koubek

Josh is an occasional poet as well as a gourmet cook and bike rider.


I never used to believe in numerology.
Then I wrecked my
motorcycle and I lost
my job.
But when I met
you I knew I was
right all along.

Skyscraper City

by Marc Schaeffer quoting his daughter, Hannah

Marc is my son and Hannah my first granddaughter (age 5).

Hannah and I walked to her school today (half an hour or so). She sang for the first 20 minutes -- a song about how when she lived in "Sky Scraper City" (a place she often talks about as her second country) she was a grown up, grew old and died.. and then someone came.. and picked her up.. and.. placed her in her Mother's belly. That she was "reborn". (Her words). Gave me shivers.. it was a beautiful song.

Klingon Medicine

by Joshua Koubek

 

 



korjax

magok

 

Josh is a dyed in the wool Trekie who owns a tv remote in the shape of a phaser. His fascination with future science is demonstrated in this short piece.

 

When a Klingon warrior is seriously wounded in battle, say a vital organ has been compromised, a special piece of armor is applied over the wound. It's called a korjax. Depending on the nature of the wound and its location, the soretek, a Klingon healer will select the appropriate korjax to treat the wound.

The korjax is more than just armor. It is a functional medical device which has been inoculated with eggs and larva of the magok. The magok are similar to gok, the live worms eaten at traditional Klingon victory feasts. While the gok are harvested from the viscera of slain enemies, the magok act as tiny surgeons, eating away dead tissue and secreting an antiseptic mucus. What's more, after the the larva feed they emerge from the wound, at which time they are consumed by the ailing warrior.

The magok provide not only sustenance but also contain psychotropic and anesthetic compounds assisting the warriors journey to recovery.

A Southern Town

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. Tom is a magic, mystical free spirit. His writing reflects that.

I grew up in a southern town. My cat meows at the bathroom door. He meows and he meows but I won’t let him through, because he wants to eat the paint that’s chipping off the wall. The paint is chipping off the wall, because I shower in hot water and the hot water seeps into the skin of the walls. There’s no internal fan in my apartment. I have a portable one, but it isn’t plugged in. I use it in the summer, when the days are too hot and the air eats at your skin like old age or hydrochloric acid.

 

I grew up in the south of the city of Detroit and the air was molten lava, maybe that’s just what I wanted it to be. I’ve seen some terrible things. I’ve done bad things. I’ve seen the end of the world in the eyes of hopeless people drifting off to sleep in their little dune buggies in space; their little dune buggies that ran away from the molten lava faces. I guess I pre-ambled a bit; it was only because of my inherent negativity. I wish that I could be more uplifting, like a carnival wheel that keeps on spinning, spinning on through the effervescent night.

I killed a small fortune of aliens from mars. No I am not, as some would call, crazy. I am an overweight butterfly, floating across the great expanse of the ocean. The ocean is wild like the butterfly but it is inherently capricious like a power hungry lover, drifting in the mire of discontent. I want to guarantee to everyone that the product that I am selling is worth buying.

I collected the words from the thoughts from the migrations of the birds from the supercilious men with their political smirks. I told them what to think. I made it clear to them that I was a diversion. I would help them run away from who they were, by being me. I was the mess that coagulated like too much fat from a cheeseburger, or the way my cat licks water loudly and my refrigerators hums like an overweight maid with haemorrhoids.

   

The Guest: A Story

http://www.shuttertalk.com/forums/attachment.php?aid=1324

Everything is Fine: A short-short story (in process)

Generally nice, feeling he was, thinking he was a negotiator who could obtain any reasonable agreement and could find any likeable compromise, Joseph really didn't know who he was. His true identity, how he was actually seen in the world, was kept a secret from him.

Joseph lived a very quiet life. He slept alone, awoke in fuzzy fantasies which stretched out from his dreams. The day was loaded with rituals and appetites. The knife edges of give and take rarely penetrated even the outside of the outer armor boundary layers.

Joseph thought about how he cleans everything up, as if he were not there. Everything spent on Joseph, he would pay back,. He would drink little and take only one plate, cleaned after each meal with water that would have flowed anyway. He was a healthy being, demanding nothing of the future. When I say goodbye, Joseph thought. I will not leave a residue, nothing added or taken. All my body products will be returned to the earth. The products of my brain are stored in atoms easily reprogrammed or written on paper which melts in the rain.

 Joseph couldn't speak in the fog. It lubricated space, stuffing space. Voices couldn't vibrate this air. Doorbells couldn't ring. The telephone sat uselessly with all it's gay little red lights un-winking. Joseph felt the containment of his space. He was free but so cold. Freedom was cold, all his pathways were trod in the snow.

Joseph dared to wish for winter to be over. Even though he didn't want to wish away any precious hours. It's just that in the spring he could walk. His vision could stretch itself over human-populated streets and he could hope for sound.

Far away were the warm warrens where voices were breathed, breath intermingled with breath, friendliness continuously tested, results instantaneously fed back, voices made sense or no sense, but the real acts of living and dying took place. Joseph knew the people there. He had been there to see them although he was not one of them for many years.  He couldn't remember when.

They have big cheeks. They want to stuff as many pleasures into the years as their cheeks can hold. They spend hours in the malls and streets laughing, their eyes sitting in that strange dark background that comes from paint and their hair delicate and clean, caught and moved by every breeze. They often keep their mouths open letting everybody see their pure pink tongues. So much fun, they are immersed in funny things and baubles. The groups of friends who know everybody, assume success and never get turned away. Forever, they will buy things that make no sense and sip the manufactured pleasure of seeing everyone notice. They will live forever. They will pack to the brightest avenues forever.

But Joseph knew how he was forever making nightmares out of the grit in the deepest basement bedroom of his heart. Even when he wanted to make fun, the fun he created made nightmares.
Joseph rolled out of bed. His room crowded with books but not books worthy of respect, junk books picked up at crumbled used book stores and thrift bargains from church basements. He rarely read books.

He made his way through corridors of  piles organized around his stuffed chairs. Piles became shrines in powder and cobweb. Joseph remembered the symbollism and made subtle but appropriate genuflections as he passed them.

Then he reached the exit. Joseph wore worn khaki pants and a thin jacket over a dark brown t-shirt. He reached over to a hook on the wall and pulled off a gray padded winter coat, slipped it on, opened the heavy door and went outside. The ground was speckled with dry snow. The wind came in blasts which threw the snow up over his face in waves.

Joseph was a gray man with an unkempt look. No one ever sampled his breath but nobody trusted it. Everyone wondered about his nights. Everyone imagined his bed was tossed and marked with dark bands. But even Joseph, who sleeps alone and eats alone and whose speech is unpracticed, even Joseph, in private, constructed wistful images of love.

Joseph made his way to the nearby Zellers Cafe. He had no friends there but the waitresses were sympathetic. This was about the only social life he needed. A word of recognition coupled with comfort food for an hour satisfied something very basic.

Joseph  was a regular at houses of social prostitution. He found them in many nearby businesses. He could enjoy them not tainted with the nuisance of immorality.  Many people made their living that way. In fact, there was a time, Joseph would admit that he would look for things to photocopy just so he could spend time with the engaging staff at the nearby stationary store.
  
Joseph was relieved when he left home. He needed to get away from the house where he spent so much of his life. The house was haunted by persons who were still living. Alone crouched under the couch, bounced against the damaged doors. Joseph kept heairng the voices of accidents.

He returned to the house just before noon, sat on the chair up against the kitchen table. He cried.

African Violet at Last

Review of Four Stories and Their Poems

 by David Fraser

 

In Four Stories and Their Poems, Don Schaeffer depicts three characters, Jacob, Morely and Moshe, who are searching through the remnants of their lives and their ideas. Jacob in the story, “When Marcie Died”, is attempting to define death. He knows of death, since in a lifetime it has been all around him, but he doesn’t know it in terms of his perception and his identity. Like all of us, once we know death, it’s too late to communicate it to anyone.

There is a sense of loneliness in his characters in each story. Jacob feels the need for people to join together, to be voices together, to have eyes to witness and share together. We see Jacob’s trapped existence, living with cats who are oblivious, who live their own lives in and around him as he goes about the routine of rising, brushing his aging teeth, and taking a daily shower. He is “a strange non-participating man, speaking an odd idiosyncratic language” and as an aged man, he becomes a person without a voice where “the routes to sunshine are cut off because he speaks.”

The poems between the stories thematically enhance the mood and message of each preceding story.

“small and selfish/. . ./I sit and wait/not knowing what to do.”

–        “The Creaking”

 

“When you refuse and disagree,/the light of the world/diminishes . . .”   

                         – “Social Media”

 

In the story, “Two Dreams” we find a sense of alienation with the character, Moshe. He is “half visible” shuffling “among creatures with raised eyes and straight determined looks.”  He is a ghost “not speaking up, not saying hello,” and “not knowing how to make his voice call up his visibility.” Moshe “never felt a hero in his own house” because of a career “marred by personal flaws.” He walks among shadows and he, himself is a shadow in a hollow world from which he has withdrawn.

The poems echo the alienation and the coldness of the world around him.

 

“They had dinner in the plastic cafeteria,

fitted to look like Acapulco,

which they would never see”

 

- “Wednesday Night Out”

 

and

 

“He cooperated with less than a whole heart,

half visible because

he couldn’t  take it for granted.

So the world never fully paid him.”

 

-          “Moshe”

 

 

Morely, a character in “The Complete Introvert”, likes to roll his eyes inside himself much to the annoyance of his wife, Jodi. The world he sees is full of tunnels; tunnels connecting buildings, connecting the natural world through its root system, tunnels inside his body, tunnels through his mother’s house, and through the air which are the passageways of escape.

In the poem “Quantum Foam” passageways or tunnels are the archetypal entrance ways and exits for birth and death.

In a sense the musings of Morely, the introvert, touch on metaphoric imagery. With tunnels we can’t help thinking of worm holes through space and time, liminal spaces and thresholds that go beyond the mundane existence of eating supper and doing dishes.

In the final story, “The Inverse Performer”, Moshe Goldberg rents an old theatre for three nights and pays each audience member a hundred dollars to listen, or if not listen, be present so he can affirm his existence with the dramatic presentation of his ideas. There is a fourth wall, that wall that separates the audience from the actor and the play that is not broken in this contrived scenario. The audience is a vague presence in the dark, separated from a mostly darkened stage and separated from the artist who is on the stage philosophizing metaphysically about existence and the great questions of life. The set-up for the three nights is as if quantum theory gets discussed by the right brain and the results are surreal as in a Samuel Beckett play.

Each story stands on its own, but each also layers on the others ii its tone of sadness and alienation, and the poems structurally bind the prose together in their concise glue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unexpected Flower

"Between":short short story

http://www.shuttertalk.com/forums/Thread-Between-Short-short-story