Issue One Spring 2012
Fly In Hand Issue One
Spring 2012
PREFACE A fly in hand is a marvelous thing. It is no common feat. One must snatch the buzzing insect from its free flight (barring of course the use of a swatter, but we’re uninterested in such a course for this metaphor.) What does motivate us is the elusive fly’s intricacy in detail, its billion eyes, and its tenure as a totem of disgust and irritation. Each small piece in Fly In Hand is pinned in painstaking place for the observant eye and critical disposition to ravish at will. Short though they may be, the works within offer something in return for your time. Whether experimental or familiar, each mote within affronts the reader with its will, polished and pixelated alike. From the convivial to the trivial, from the existential to the essential, these
webs of ideas are overlaid precisely so that their sticky strands tangle and create something new inside of you. What makes FIH different from what you’re used to reading? Perhaps it is the indie aesthetic tempered with clean design. Perhaps it is the unashamed playfulness we try to foster. Or perhaps its just that we’re making it up as we go along, humbly sure that there are other fools out there just like us. It is as Jonathan Swift quipped in his satire Tale of a Tub, “Bombastry and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all.” We certainly hope it is true. And so we soar, your handy editors, Joslyn & Symon
MARGINALIA
Find this space on each page. It is for you to make notes in. Jot out your thoughts and reactions here as they come up. Refer back to them later for an interesting effect.
CONTENTS Fly
5
Joel Gundy
Medical Mistake
6
Shay Maynard
Ashtray Ballet
7
Jared Penner
Hiccups
9
Joslyn Kilborn
New Study 10 Future Aztec Oma’s Bedroom 14 Tynan Rhea Sammy Gets His Fish 15 Uxury Pratts My Neighbour 16 C.Vandermey Profile on an Untested 17 Symon Flaming Thought Experiment Welland was a Champion 18 Joslyn Kilborn Eater Black Dog 20 C.Vandermey Suburban Lawns 22 Andrew T Wayfaring Resolve 23 Uxury Pratts Ode to Foreskin 24 Ryan Coulter Gravity’s Rainbow: The 26 Dave Haslett Movie For the Love of Words 30 Symon Flaming Monks vs. Monkeys 31 Fiddledee Dee Giving Up: As Lived 32 Kailie Ridsdale The Odd Shift Workforce 34 Jared Penner Where to Go 36 Sakeb Kothawala
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fly
Joel Gundy
A quick flip and capture: Can knowledge rest in Faith? Open, squint, find it lost, Tongue tip finds sweetness best.
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MEDICAL MISTAKE Shay Maynard
“Frank, you’re smoking again.” They stood in their kitchen. Frank scoffed and a puff escaped his nostrils. Selma passed her hand in front of her face and curled up her nose. “No. Am not.” The stammering. Shit. No hiding it really. “It’s just cold out. It’s just my breath,” he attempted. Selma, unamused, lifted their daughter from her hamper and the two of them glared across the smoke billowing from Frank’s neckline. “I told you not to take those pills. What did the doctor say? The side effects are ‘unpredictable.’ That’s what the bottle actually says!” Frank took a deep breath and exhaled another cloud. “It’s just temporary. In a few weeks the smoke 8
will be gone, and I’ll be better. And I’ll be so handsome, better than the old Frank. For you! Don’t you want me to look and feel my manly best?” Their daughter coughed and fell hard from her mother’s arms. Selma retrieved her and stood back up, silent in response to Frank’s reasoning. “You know I’ve always felt inhibited by my body.” The smoke was so thick it was hard to see anymore. “I never agreed to this. It’s a goddamn nightmare. You’re killing our daughter.” Selma said. Frank stepped forward sympathetically holding out his arms. His daughter recoiled, eyes fearful and trembling. Selma held fast as Frank oozed toward them like a monster from under a bed.
Jared Penner
A
Ashtray Ballet
shtray dancing is a delicate art, refined over hundreds of years, usually through the back streets of shitty cities that nobody really cares to look through, but it is certainly an artful dance, and though it uses old dirty butts as its turning points, the careful dance of ash, barely hanging on still burning to the tip of your cigarette as you try to find some place to finally let it rest, trickles down to the ashtray leaving only the re-
membrance of a brief trail of smoke connecting to a sweet charcoal filter, the reducing embers left to trail and find their final resting place among the many other lost ashes of some god forsaken empty night. Lost dreams and ideas laughed or cried away, all reducing now into the brief flickering of the last ember from tonight’s ashtray ballet.
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10
Hiccups
Joslyn Kilborn
I’ve lost something – my brain or its bravado thought. Left with that twitchy chalice, that toast to ghosts, that well-saturated well. Yet one of us is a vacuum, and sips quick of this indefiniteness, this ambient bliss. I tell myself it’s hard to revolutionize while dancing and it’s hard to drink my wine in a room of fruitless wings. Oh, you lover of the colours of love, you wandering paintless in the clutch of some great brush. Or is that me? Such mysteries, such nothing-as-it-seems are likened to my femininities. Am I to be that which I eat of or that which eats of me? Let us to our forks for I’m as hungry as your eye and I’d love to eat myself. 11
New Study, Front Page National Post: “Sugar is so toxic it should be controlled like alcohol – experts argue that with the success of smoking and liquor regulations it is time to turn our attention to sugar. Proposed age restriction of 17 to buy soda.” Future Aztec
This is not going to be an argument intended to change your thinking. This is not going to be about the pro/antisugar lobby. This is about the problem of our thinking, our minds, and whether we can understand 12
the limits of rational thought. If we can be honest then we must see that with all our political, dietary, and spiritual theory we have been unable to solve the greater issues of what a human needs (though I can tell you the answer is not in sugar regulations or
the lack thereof). It is not simply our institutions that have failed us, or our wise men our leaders. They are not the main issue. The issue is that we must be able to understand the totality of thinking, and in understanding how the process of thinking is limited, we will be able to recognize the real problem, not just in society but also in ourselves. This is not some argument to be evaluated and then accepted or discarded, this is a call to observe our own minds, and in so doing be able to catch the curtain going up and down. Everywhere around us we are faced with a rational society that has reached the limitations of thought. The world is irrational, we know this directly in our weakest moments and no argument is necessary. The rational mind pulls at the irrational world
trying to make it fit – this is not something done far away in the minds of the experts. In our own minds we seek to understand, to limit the impossible amount of details we experience into talking points. By this process of exclusion we construct our experience, which is limited. It is limited because in order for the rational mind to be satisfied it must identify with what is familiar. The rational mind likes association, and so it pays strict attention to the details of the past. Memory is really the accumulation of past experiences into a finite form, it is limited because it is not the living experience. A memory of something is not the original; it is not even a duplicate! It is something else entirely. Yet we constantly search our memories for something we have missed, to apply our new 13
understanding to the present. This is how we condition ourselves to be limited. If we are living with the past we are really living with dead things. Please do not insist that I am being dramatic, all one has to do is look and we can all see that the past was real once, and no longer is. We can use all our energy trying to revive or recreate, to duplicate past experiences. We might tell ourselves we can live no other way. In truth we will not have the ability to face our immediate reality unless we are ready to look at things for the first time, without past judgments and prejudice. It means the immediate experience is not colored by previous thinking. So you see, the rational mind is not interested in what is true right now, in the present. It can admit of no paradox; a paradox points to the 14
existence of the infinite. To the contrary, the rational mind prefers what is finite so that it can deal only in certainties, only in more of what it already knows – which means that it is always limited, always turning to what is familiar in order to control what is new. If thinking has brought us to this point in the human narrative, then it has brought with it all the inherent problems in our system and in our lives. To be clear, I am not saying do away with memory, for memory is indispensable when solving a problem designed for the rational world; without memory I would not be writing this. It is just that now more than ever we need to understand that although thinking has brought us here, through it we can go no further. Many people have been conditioned not to accept this.
All thinking is conditioning, whether agreement or disagreement. Thinking is a movement of memory over time; and therefore thinking is a movement of the past. Our thoughts condition us to the past – which is limited. Therefore our conditioning is always limited. If we know ourselves then we know the entire process of our thinking. We know how our minds have been conditioned by the past according to rational thought. Then we should know that to approach a problem created by thinking means to be able to go beyond rational thought. To do that means to know something that cannot be thought. Everything that can be thought is a process of the past, a movement of memory, and a finite expression. We all intuit something beyond thought, but what it is cannot be said, and thus
cannot be thought. So we ignore it. The topic is refined sugar. Do we continue with the past methods of control and regulation, refusing to accept those limitations that created those systems? Do we believe the alternative is to do nothing? Maybe we can see that what we need is not more regulation, more thinking. Maybe we can find a different sort of technique.
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Oma’s
bedroom Tynan Rhea
On sunny winter days that smell and look like spring, I open the windows and think of my Oma’s bedroom as she pulled back all her sheets to soak-up the smell of warm snow. Then at night when we’d climb into bed, or at mid-day when I wanted to play in the sheets, they’d crinkle and crackle like dried leaves in fall. At first, so cold it was almost torture, but like chocolates from the freezer, the sheets melted over my body. And in those moments, there was nothing else to do, but listen to the constant greedy chirps of baby birds and swallow the orange-yellow glow of the room.
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Sammy Gets his Fish Uxury Pratts
The docks rollicked with the acid bath ocean and the nuclear wind swept Sammy’s hair. The sunset sank in a
jammed like a pipe in the cracked teeth dock boards bared against the dim heavens, jerked with the unex-
cauldron boil-over of purples, greens, and oil slick blues. He felt his days were infinite here. His rod and reel,
pected jigging of life in vacuum. His expression dropped. What had he done right?
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C. Vandermay 18
Profile on an Untested Thought Experiment Symon Flaming
A mother and her daughter stand at a busy corner. The young lass stares up at a tall blazing building as her mother, unaware of the emergency, checks for traffic. The girl is about to say to her mother that the two of them ought to see the museum after the park when lo, a flaming businessman leaps from the window, extinguishing himself with his smash on the cement below. Will the girl: A) Run across the street to check the man’s pulse? B) Wonder whether, being fiction, she has a moral obligation to do anything at all? (In this scenario our heroine merely ponders.) C) Address the ambiguity of untold generations sustaining an indefinite number of unanswerable questions eternally rephrased in increasingly arcane ways? D) Acknowledge the thorn thickets of thoughts and feelings and learn to weave them according to their own wiry will?
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Welland was a Champion Eater
Joslyn Kilborn
I
say was because, as the author of this narrative, I have already calculated its ending. Welland is, at this narrative moment, a Champion Eater. He once devoured 52 hot dogs in 15 minutes, and won a beautiful, bronzed frankfurter with the words ‘Weenie Man’ carved right into its bun. He keeps it on the back of his toilet, where he can contemplate its polished condiments while performing his pre-gurgitating regurgitating. Just now, Welland is in the midst of this wretched ritual. I often tease him in these moments; I believe this practice of his borders on a cheat. So I allow a soft, moist Hello 20
Welland… to drip from my lips and dangle like drool down around him as he kneels in front of the toilet bowl. He pauses, and turns slowly to look up, way up at the ceiling, again wondering if he is a psychic or a maniac. He doesn’t wish to be either. He wishes only to eat and to hear the cheer of a crowd pleading him to eat more, and more. How is our Champion Eater today? I ask. Welland frowns and heaves to his feet, reaches for a towel to wipe the bit of retch still clinging to his chin. Instead of shrouding his enormous body, Welland’s clothes lie like dead fish on the floor next to him. He is quite naked. I try not to look, but –
his bare bottom alarms my eyes with its blush, inflamed from the adult diaper his IBS requires him to wear during competitions. Weeeeelllllannnnnnnnd! I sing to him, more to distract my attention than to draw his to me. Perhaps my singing sounds like yelling, because he puts his hands to his ears and trips backwards over the lip of the tub, wincing as his distressed rump makes a great slapping sound against the cast iron. His face begins to take the color of his bottom and I sense his mouth forming the Fuck You Bitch before the words become a sound. I can feel his heartbeat quickening dangerously as he stumbles dumbly from
the tub and out of the room, returning with a firmly fisted broom. He bellows war and becomes a great, wobbling flesh as his repeated jabs free the ceiling of its plaster. This I don’t feel, for although I created this bathroom and that plastered ceiling, it has no heartbeat to increase in pace like Welland’s. He lets out another loud yell, but halfway through it changes, distorts, twists into a confused yelp. The broom drops to the floor as his knees do, hands clutching at his dusty chest. Just before collapse I call out, You forgot to flush the toilet! but Welland is already pitching, face-first, into the chunk-filled bowl. 21
C.Vandermey
1) “Reg, we must hasten our pace!” 2) “This event of science and magic, my friend / Lasts one night, and one night only!” 3) “Oh I’ve been here before!” / “My sister, in such an awful state” / “Oh dear, another fit?” 4) “Watch this” / “Observation is my middle name!” / “How exciting!” / “Eh dear?” / “Quite exciting, really!” / “Five minutes til the show begins, please take your seat!” / “Dim the lights!” / “Another full house!” / “Please dear!” / “Hysterical!” / “It’s just so horrid” / “So horrid” / It’s only natural!”
5) Ladies and Gents! / What you are about to see combines fact and fiction, everything. / Science and the Spirit World / bend to the will of my electric tools! / Quiet now.” 6) “Watch me / unleash / A GHOST!” 7) “Oh my good god” / “An extremely large dog!” / “Do run away!” / “Damnation! She’s fainted” / “My poor sister!” / “Such chaos” / “They seem frightened”
Suburban Lawns: Part One
Andrew T
formed in 1973 and broke up in 1983, 5 years after I was born.
recorded Suburban Lawns (album), “Gidget Goes To Hell” (single) and Baby (EP).
are often compared to Talking Heads, Devo, and The Feelies.
feel like yours when you’re losing your edge.
Suburban Lawns: Part Two As soon as it’s finished, hate it. Don’t burn it, delete it, or cover it up. Hate it. Leave it. Make something better. We write and create and record and share, and the best – the best – that we can hope for is that someone will like it many years after we’ve stopped. ... Goddamn that bites as I read it back :( 24
Wayfaring Resolve Uxury Pratts
You are watching someone listening to their watch tick. You are watching someone listen to their watch tick. You are watching someone list to their watch tick. You are watching someone listen to their watch tick. You are watching someone listen to their watch tick. You are watching someone listen to their watch tick. You are watching someone listening to their watch tick. Finally, he gets up and strides around the room, relieved he won’t be late for work after all. On his bike now, his head feels a little funny but it’s probably pretty normal after all. Down the boulevard, past the docks and parks, and the night watch getting off shift, he’s a quick pedaller but you can keep up. He’s at the bank, withdrawing cash… How much is that? How long have you been following him? I thought you knew him? It’s all feeling a little funny to you, but after all, the lights have all been green. It just seems too far to give up now.
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ode to foreskin Ryan Coulter
“Give it back!” I cried, though only inside, my lips yet unable to speak. What monster could lift such a fleshy gift from a person so little and meek? Now I walk through this world, meat always unfurled, a question mark haunting my would. “What am I missing from this thing that I’m pissing?” Dear God! I’ve been fucking harpooned! “Love your whole body, no matter how shoddy!” The lessons I learned in my youth are all thrown asunder by my parents’ blunder; Their actions now belie their truth.
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Cut or uncut That door has been shut, whether I like it or not. Thrown in the trash is the tip of my gash, left to do no more than rot. “Wear a helmet to bike!” Ma, go take a hike. Tell that to my penis instead. We’re an ironic sort, we men, now cut short with no skin left to cover our head. So, if you have a son, please, don’t get it done. Don’t slice him for shallow reasons. Just teach him to shout, unchanged blunge sticking out, “Foreskin is always in season!”
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Gravity’s Rainbow: the
movie Dave Haslett
I
t begins with a stream of grown men, mostly, making their way down a quiet middle-American street or looking longingly through a chain-link fence, all wearing baseball gloves that they punch or mold, barely able to contain their excitement before the big game. Then there’s the national anthem, everyone in the stands standing, hats over hearts, the jumbotron behind them, pixelated stars and stripes flapping at first, then the singer’s image, a eunuch pop star and sex-symbol, out of sync with the fans in front of the screen, though; he’s delayed a little because of the distance the sound has to travel, synchronicity a casualty of the masses. The subsequent reveal is that is it’s a Little League game, the World Series in fact, USA versus Japan, played in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, every year since the end of the sequel to the Great War, a celebration of prosperity and victory and innocence. The film is set in the seventies but made in the early twenty-first century, with the pretense of being broadcast by NBC, its logo periodically unfanning in the corner of the screen. Slothrop Jr. is sitting in the very bottom row of the bleachers, only occasionally looking up from what appears to be a boxscore 28
he’s meticulously filling in. And just before the first at bat he takes the girl he’s with by the wrist and pulls her through a crowd to an exact position he double-checks against what isn’t a boxscore at all but a map and notes and equations; Slothrop, desperate to catch a foul ball, was marking the catcher’s and third-base coach’s signals, plotting the likeliest outcome of left versus lefty. His girl, dressed in a long, striped skirt and sweater with his letterman’s jacket over it and holding an untouched ballpark Frank, is East Indian, or so, a mail-order bride he received just that week but had already called off the pre-arranged marriage because they’d sent a pregnant woman instead of a virgin. He’d tried sending her back but the post office kept insisting that her return address didn’t exist, that her home country, “West Pakistan”, had been mislabeled or erased from the map entirely. She wore the jacket to cover her stomach and the sweater because in those first jet-lagged days she’d kept asking Slothrop for “Cashmere” over and over. Unfortunately, the foul ball doesn’t land where Slothrop planted himself but instead precisely where he’d come from. So he grimaces and scribbles and recalculates and drags his girl off again, only to have the next foul ball land where he’d just been once more. And this happens again and again, and there’s actually only one batter for the entire movie, a sixteen year-old from Hiroshima with a fake birth certificate, hitting an endless stream of foul balls into the stands. As Slothrop and his girl snake through the bleachers after each hit, they’re watched by plain-clothes agents who confer with their gloves over their mouths, side-by-side 29
but staring straight ahead. They speak of a new kind of threat, of nukes not launched but misplaced, of an attack not from above but below the bleachers, of dirty bombs before the term’s been coined, of being blown into next or last week. They share their degrees of (mis)understanding of the theory of relativity, try to explain long angular slices of spacetime in terms of light from the rising sun’s extended journey through the atmosphere and the brilliant colours it creates, before such knowledge (or lip-service to it) is blue collar. They say that no one really knew what happens when a nuke goes off, what the effect of all that energy (or mass?) is. Or maybe it’s just a big fucking explosion. They aren’t sure; they’re just following orders. They also share intelligence on Slothrop’s father, a little more concrete but not much: he’d claimed to be a bombardier on the plane that dropped one of Fat Man or Little Boy, claimed even that he’d ridden it down Strangelove-style, before it was popular. Except that he’d washed out and returned home only a few weeks after he’d left, a twitchy and haggard deserter that the MPs hadn’t bothered to pick up. And so Slothrop and his girl are eventually running from the foul balls, spooked by the escalating nearness of the misses, finally tossing aside the glove and hotdog and catching their breath under the bleachers, where shared fear and huddling turn to heavy petting, and instead of last rites it’s a reading from Corinthians, and they consummate their love.
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31
For the Love of Words Symon Flaming
Do not be wastrel in your ways though wastry language give you pleasure. doting ompaholos of being, original, spare, strange. Words, words, words. Words only fit for certain places, certain cases; I am. He. She. Words of wan veneer, words in boredom, words we’ve heard. But outside these as kingfishers catch fire, the singing smithereens speak in keys beyond G. The void inverse fills empty faith with words. Take to that new mountain that abyss inside out to stand at the great root peak to listen, to see, to feel the speech At the vantage of death At the pinnacle of life. 32
33 Fiddledee Dee
Giving Up: As Lived Kailie Ridsdale
I work with a company that maps out the cognitive, emotive, visceral, and behavioural states that make up a human experience. Mapping out these phenomenological states of patterned responses creates access to doing something with them. It is different to have a brain that has patterns, than to be had by your own brain’s responses. I am a woman. I have a brain. My brain has patterns. Giving Up is one of them. Where are my words. I can’t speak. I should know this. My head is empty. What are the right words. My head is empty. I will sputter and spit. They will think I’m dumb. Fuck.
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Apprehension. Anxiety. Pensiveness. Disappointment at apprehension. Remorse at anxiety. Irritation at pensiveness. Anger. Pity.
Increasing heart rate. Tight chest. Muscle weakness. Body shaking. Posture collapses. Pressure behind eyes.
“I don’t know.” Gaze focuses down. Shrug shoulders. Force a smile. Withdraw.
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The Odd
shift Workforce Jared Penner
The everyday man needs to eat Needs his great tasting reward To a cubicle keyboard day It’s time to flip that dough That’s where we come in The odd shift workforce Not from 9-5 but 5-late Sweating to make a 20 dollar plate And when he is fed He goes home to his bed While we stay, praying for peace And quietly we clean all the grease
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Wrapped, Enrapt
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Where to go Sakeb Kothawala
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Everyday was an adventure when I was a boy. The world was endless and beyond limitations. The see-saw gave a thrill of free fall and the playground was a battle-field of freeze-tag. Adventure was a daily undertaking, and boredom was to be fought off with foam swords. Then came university applications, midterms, exams, job applications, business cards and performance reviews. Now boredom borns a darkness, engulfing. And adventure seems a trophy to be kept in a case coveted. To be discussed by the water cooler. To be imagined and day-dreamed. How does one keep this boredom at bay? Surrender stability and become a nomad? Or opt for stability and connect-the-dots adventure? There is safety with some paths, paved; some are less travelled. I will take the dirt path.
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CONTRIBUTORS Future Aztec will be. Ryan Coulter loves bodies and the people inside them. He is also into other things. Fiddledee Dee is a collaborative effort of some of the best minds in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Symon Flaming is an English Literature graduate, musician, artist, and out of work. Joel Gundy, an English Grad student at UW, enjoys long naps on the beach, feigning work, and drinking coffee. He currently lives in a single-room apartment with Frank, his pet bearded dragon, but finds his living arrangements “much nicer than prison.” Dave Haslett is a Waterloo native who makes a living piggybacking as a complainant in various torts. He currently resides in South Korea, where he will be undergoing a controversial penis enlargement procedure. Joslyn Kilborn is an old woman trapped in a young lady’s body, which makes dating convenient. She enjoys blankets and hiking boots. Sakeb Kothawala is a master of numbers and a seeker of adventures. In his free time he likes to write and run. As a traveller he always has his handy notebook in his backpack. Always looking for the next nomadic escapade, Sakeb aspires to be a travelling hobo.
Shay Maynard is a lumberjack and single father. On weekends he leads a course at his community centre on how to bribe the police with general pocket junk. Jared Penner Quiet woods, a frog jumps and lands in an empty puddle, silence, Jared Penner is alive. Uxury Pratts is a great name. Kailie Ridsdale lives in Toronto, where she spends her days eating vegetables, making sad people happy, and looking as smart as she is. Tynan Rhea is a Canadian haus frau who likes to spend her days in the kitchen making strudle, and nights fighting crime in the streets of Kitchener, once named Berlin. Andrew T is raising some really good points while writing zines and sharing podcasts (giveuponline.tumblr.com). C.Vandermey is a lover of Science/ Fiction and woman of Mystery.
Cover by C.Vandermey Uncredited illustrations by Symon Flaming. Photography by Joslyn Kilborn.
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SUBMIT!
Fly In Hand is always dumpster diving for neat scraps. Send us your quirky words, pictures, poems, comix, random fancies, or non-fiction. If it’s short (less than 1000 words) and demands attention, we’ll be sure to find a place for it in our next prosaic mosaic. flyinhandmag@gmail.com flyinhand.wordpress.com The materials in this collection are made available for use in research, teaching and private study. Texts and images from this collection may not be used for any commercial purpose without permission from the contributors.