Flowers and Reflections

Flowers and Reflections

All the photos have been taken by Elena.

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light (Aristotle Onassis

I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination (Jimmy Dean)

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence (Vince Lombardi)

We know what we are, but know not what we may be (William Shakespeare)

Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud (Maya Angelou)

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says “I’m possible” (Audrey Hepburn)

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around (Henry David Thoreau)

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself (Octavia E. Butler)

Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you (Walt Whitman)

If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door (Milton Berie)

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us (Joseph Campbell)

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality (Plutarch)

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself (Desiderius Erasmus)

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago (Warren Buffet)

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago (Warren Buffet)

The Last Worders

The Last Worders

By Karen Joy Fowler

Charlotta was asleep in the dining car when the train arrived in San Margais. It was tempting to just leave her behind, and I tried to tell myself this wasn’t a mean thought, but came to me because I, myself this wasn’t a mean thought, but came to me because I, myself, might want to be left like that, just, just for the adventure of it. I might want to wake up hours later and miles away, bewildered and alone. I am always on the lookout for those parts of my life that could be the first scene in a movie. Of course, you could start a movie anywhere, but you wouldn’t; that’s my point. And so this impulse had nothing to do with the way Charlotta had begun to get on my last nerve. That’s my other point. If I thought being ditched would be sort of exciting, then so did Charlotta. We felt the same about everything.

“Charlotta,” I said. “Charlotta. We’re here. » I was on my feet, grabbing my backpack, when the train actually stopped. This threw me into the arms of a boy of about fourteen, wearing a T-shirt from the Three Mountains Soccer Camp. It was nice of him to catch me. I probably wouldn’t have done that when I was fourteen. What’s one tourist more or less? I tried to say some of this to Charlotta when we were on the platform and the train was already puffing fainter and fainter in the distance, winding its way like a great worm up into the Rambles Mountains. The boy hadn’t gotten off with us.

The Last Worders. Photo by Elena

It was raining and we tented our heads with our jackets. “He was probably picking your pocket,” Charotta said. “Do you still have your wallet?” Which made me feel I’d been a fool, but when I put my hand in to check I found, instead of taking something out, he’d put something in. I pulled out an orange piece of paper folded like a fan. When opened, flattened, it was a flier in four languages – German, Japanese, French and English. Open mike, the English part said. And then, Come to the Last Word Café. 100 Ruta de los Esclavos by the river. First drink free. Poetry Slam. To the death.

The rain erased the words even as we read them.

The Monsters of Heaven

The Monsters of Heaven

By Nathan Ballingrud

This is how it happened:

They were taking Dodger for a walk. Toby liked to hold the leash – he was four years old, and gravely occupied with establishing his independence – and more often than not Brian would sort of half-trot behind them, one hand held indecisively aloft should Dodger suddenly decide to break into a run, dragging his boy behind him like a string of tin cans. He probably bit off more profanities during those walks then he ever did changing a tire. He carried, as was their custom on Mondays, a blanket and picnic lunch. He would lie back in the sun while Toby and the dog played, and enjoy not being hunched over an engine block. As some point they would have lunch. Brian believed these afternoons of easy camaraderie would be remembered by them both for years to come. They’d done it a hundred times.

A hundred times.

On that day a kindergarten class arrived shortly after they did. Toby ran up to his father and wrapped his arms around his neck, frightened by the sudden bright surge of humanity; the kids were a loud, brawling tumult, crashing over the swings and money bars in a gabblings surf. Brian pried Toby’s arms free and pointed at them.

“Look, screwball, they’re just kids. See? They’re just like you. Go on and play. Have some fun. »

Monsters of Heaven. Photo by Elena

Dodger galloped out to greet them and was received as a hero, with joyful cries and grasping fingers. Toby observed this gambit for his dog’s affections and at last decided to intervene. He ran toward them, shouting. “That’s my dog! That’s my dog! » Brian watched him go, made eye contact with the teacher and nodded hello. She smiled at him – he remembered thinking she was kind of cute, wondering how old she was – and she returned her attention to her kids, gambling like lunatics all over the park. Brian reclined on the blanket and watched the clouds skim the atmosphere, listened to the sound of children. It was a hot, windless day.

He didn’t realize he had dozed until the kindergarteners had been rounded up and were halfway down the block, taking their noise with them. The playground was empty. “Toby? Hey, Toby? »

Dodger stood out in the middle of the road, his leash spooled at his feet. He watched Brian eagerly, offered a tentative wag.

“Where’s Toby?” he asked the dog, and climbed to his feet. He felt a sudden sickening lurch in his gut. He turned in a quick circle, a half-smile on his face, utterly sure that this was an impossible situation, that children didn’t disappear in broad daylight while their parents were right there. So he was still here. Of course he was still here. Dodger trotted up to him and sat down at his feet, waiting for him to produce the boy, as though he were a hidden tennis ball.

“Toby?”

The park was empty. He jogged after the receding line of kids. “Hey! Is my son with you?” Where’s my son?

The Tenth Muse

The Tenth Muse

William Browning Spencer

I needed the money, but that wasn’t my sole motivation for flying the next morning from my home in Austin, via a disorienting stopover in Dallas, to Kansas City, renting a car, and aiming that car east on 152. I was curious about what Morton Sky had to say, and, in truth, I couldn’t resist this opportunity to contemplate my past through the patina of accrued wisdom and regret. I’d always intended to return to Empire to see if it made any more sense now then it had when I was ten. This was my chance. The aging, almost irrelevant Morton Sky and his overly venerated relic of a novel would serve as the catalyst for deeper philosophical concerns.

And I’d write about my father and mother, remarkable people, volatile people. My father was, for a while, famous himself, having written a collection of poetry, Imploding, that captured the spirit of the late sixties with such passion and anarchic wit that it sold several hundred thousand copies, an extraordinary feat for a book of poetry, an unheard of feat for a book of poetry that was rigorously metrical and assumed an educated, literary background on the part of its readers.

My father wrote Imploding when we were living in Durham, where he taught literature courses at Duke University.

The Tenth Muse. Photo by Elena

I remember the students, ragged and exotic to my child’s eyes, who sat at his feet while he declaimed, waving his arms, standing on a coffee table. My father knew everything and could grab, from the air, any secret a book had ever held, and dead author’s words, any thought the mind of man had formulated in the face of the terror and beauty of the world. My father was the spokesman for all that was important. I couldn’t have articulated that when I was a kid, but I knew it is what I thought, because I still think it, reflexively, and it requires an effort of willed objectively to think otherwise.

My mother is a more elusive shape in my mind, because she is still alive, and I am older.

When we moved to Empire and rented the house near to Morton Sky, Marshall Harrison was the celebrity author, and Morton Sky was an odd, morose man tending to his dying grandmother who had been ill for years and who expired a month after our arrival.

If I could portray my father in juxtaposition to Sky, I might have something quite powerful, something worthy of a book.

The Drowned Life

The Drowned Life

By Jeffrey Ford

Hatch floated down the long empty avenues of Drowned Town, a shabby, but quiet city in a lime green sea. Every so often, he’d pass one of the citizens, bloated and blue, in various stages of decomposition, and say, “Hi”. Two gentlemen in suits swept by but didn’t return his greeting. A Drowned mother and child, bulging eyes dissolving in trails of tiny bubbles, dressed in little more than rags, didn’t acknowledge him. One old woman stopped, though, and said, “Hello”.

“I’m new here,” told her.

“The less you think about it the better,” she said and drifted on her way.

Hatch tried to remember where he was going. He was sure there was a reason that he was in town, but it eluded him. “He started looking up and down the streets for a pay phone. After three blocks without luck, he saw a man heading toward him. The fellow wore a business suit and an overcoat torn to shreds, a black hat with a bullet hole in it, a closed umbrella hooked on a skeletal wrist. Hatch waited for the man to draw near, but as the fellow stepped into the street to cross to the next block, a swift gleaming vision flew from behind a building and with a sudden clang of steel teeth meeting took him in its jaws. Financial Ruin was hungry and loose in Drowned Town. Hatch cowered backward, breast stroking to a nearby dumpster to hide, but the shark was already gone with its catch.

On the next block up, he found a bar that was open. He didn’t see a name on it, but there were people inside, the door was ajar, and there was the muffled sound of music. The place was cramped and narrowed the further back you went, ending in a corner. Wood paneling, mirror behind the bottles, spinning seats, low lighting and three deadbeats – two on one side of the bar and one on the other.

The drowned life. Photo by Elena

“Got a pay phone?” asked Hatch.

All three men looked at him. The two customers smiled at each other. The bartender with a red bow tie, wiped his rotted nose on a handkerchief, and then slowly lifted an arm to point. “Go down to the grocery store. They got a pay phone at the deli counter.”

Hatch had missed it when the old lady spoke to him, but he realized now that he heard the bartender’s voice in his head, now with his ears. The old man moved his mouth, but all that came out were vague farts of words flattened by water pressure. He sat down on one of the bar stools.

“Give me something dry,” he said to the bartender. He knew he had to compose himself, get his thoughts together.

The bartender shook his head, scratched a spot of coral growth on his scalp, and opened his mouth to let a minnow out. ”I could make you a Jenny Diver… pink or blue?”

“No, Sal, make him one of those things with the dirt bomb in it… they’re the driest,” said the closer customer. The short man turned his flat face and stretched a grin like a soggy old doll with swirling hair. Behind the clear lenses of his eyes, shadows moved, something swimming through his head.

“You mean a Dry Reach. That’s one dusty drink,” said the other customer, a very pale, skeletal old man in a brimmed hat and dark glasses.” Remember the day I got stupid on those? Your asshole’ll make hell seem like a backyard barbecue if you drink too many of them, my friend.”

“I’ll try one,” said Hatch.