Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review February 2011 Issue

SEAHORSE RODEO FOLK REVIEW

JANUARY 2011

American Bastards is not an acid novel,

although some characters occasionally do take acid. It is not a fairy tale, but it might, at times, seem magical. It is not a science fiction story, despite taking place in another world. The world is Americana and it features a panel of dead rock stars trying to save the world, a booze hound Tom Sawyer, a hitchhiking Uncle Sam heading to Hollywood with stars in his eyes, a love story with a prostitute, fortune tellers, gypsy-punk circus performers, visions of new York City invaded by the restless dead, and a war between Art and Business. American Bastards also deals with a generation challenging more than authority, but the nature of existence. Rising up not in protest marches, but in creativity, they all fell what the not-so-humble narrator knows: that we are the bastard children of the American Dream because it, like so many dead-beat dads, abandoned us at birth.

The debut novel of Trevor Richardson, Editorin-Chief of The Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review, will be released January 2011 by Inkwater Press.

Trevor is already working on a unique method of promoting his novel, believing that the day of reading from a podium in Borders or Barnes and Noble or the local library is dwindling. The book itself is too bizarre, too out there, and too wholly unmarketable in any mainstream sense to ever be promoted by any traditional means. Perhaps the plan is simply the act of a desperate man, or perhaps it is pure contrarian obstinacy on the part of the book’s creator. Whatever the case, the book will be presented to the public in a series of performances featuring writers and artists from the Seahorse Rodeo Folk Revival, along with a broad range of musicians, some short film features, animation, theatrical elements, clowning, circus acts, and more. Dubbed “The Seahorse Rodeo Circus Theatre,” it is the arrival of The Seahorse Rodeo Folk Revival as something more than just an art collective that publishes a fiction magazine.

The book itself, much like Seahorse, is all about expressing the idea that many of America’s ideals and habits are outdated and simply do not apply to the newest batch of grown ups. We don’t care much for our parents’ or grandparent’s ideas of validation or success. The book is a call to action, to do things differently, to take back territory for the creative thinkers wishing to break with tradition. And Seahorse itself is Trevor’s attempt to do more than demand action, it’s him trying to take some himself in order to remain true to his own words.

Check out American Bastards, available on amazon. com, barnesandnoble.com, and powells.com, this February.

SEAHORSE RODEO FOLK REVIEW

Table of Contents

JANUARY 2011

Knots & What Knots?

Robert Montilla..................................4 The Great Growing JP Kemmick..............................................7 Poetry Rebecca Anne Renner...................................13

Poetry Kevin Heaton......................................................14

Golden Balconies I’ve Stood Kevin Luna........................................................................15 Sensorium 7

Isaac Coleman..............................................................17

Memory 2010B Afghan James Mansfield........................................................................39

SEAHORSE RODEO FOLK REVIEW I

Knots & What Knots?

JANUARY 2011

Robert Montilla

s this the beginning? The sun theoretically shines. Jeremy Knot’s esoteric name is Jeremy Knot, but without the rst or last part.Autonym #1: One. He muses under that questionable sun, pondering over the axiom of if if is/isn’t if,

then then is/isn’t then. The following day, Jeremy is charged eight hours of sleep for stepping in man(uer). With heavy eyes, Jeremy retaliates by threatening to change into a banana tree. At once, the chimpanzees appear, but then leave shortly after due to unavailable parking.

The former line is an abstraction and should be ignored.

Truthfully, the only truth is no truth, to the liking of Jeremy, whom likes like like like should be liked. That, that, that, that (four that), Jeremy loses a letter grade. He literally learns to unlearn guratively. He gives bitter nods to the nearby classmates, realizing they have always been cardboard cutouts. One by one, he throws them into a dwindling re, then stirs the kettle for extra credit.

The homeless await with soup bowls so large, they are questionable tubs.

Jeremy hands them towel (but pleural) and a change of clothes. With striped uniforms, they are thrown behind bars, where they are to serve ten years of drink specials.

Autonym #2: English. In is in this line just as English in English is, and this is this is, and is is is is. The (w)all collapses out of (bored)om until the idea of collapsing collapses, forcing disorder to gravitate towards order. In order for Jeremy to (compreh)end this, he must rst exist outside of ction. Nine words (two being invisible): That which is knowable can only be ction. Jeremy solves the puzzle, identifying two as a word, not a quantier.Exercise 3-1: What is Exercise 3-1?

Questions lead to questions about questions, whereas answers lead too many astray. These realizations hit Jeremy like a cold breeze, so he slips into clothes, having been exposed up until now.

What is the euphemism for euphemism?

The unexamined life is to die for. Jeremy tries to catch the two hands in front of him. He catches himself in front himself, and tells himself truths/non-truths.

If up goes down, both up and down go

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down, but if left goes left and left again, left gets left out. Left in charge, Jeremy resumes, but twice in size. Or did everything shrink? That is impossibly possible. Jeremy detonates his lunch box open. In one hand, Jeremy holds a large smallness, and in the other, a heavy lightness. Both taste like a brightly textured sound, but with salt added. Pepper is banned due to sneezing and its association with terrorism.

Caution: The simplest is the most (c) om(plex). To demonstrate, Jeremy ips a coin with determinism on one side and nondeterminism on the other. The chances of landing by chance are the same as being predestined to do so. The closer Jeremy gets to such truths, the closer he gets to the jester whom rides paradox like a unicycle. As a souvenir, Jeremy gets a pie to the face. He presents this at show-and-tell the next morning, impressing the business associates (parentheses). The resulting chart predicts a forty percent drop in chart presentations. Autonym #3: Inanimate.

Later that day, Jeremy chases after his impostor, believing himself to be the real Jeremy. When really, both are i(mpostor)s. Along the way, Jeremy trips and falls into debt, owing apologies to linear context. He assumes that assume means to assume, but he is greatly mistaken, for assuming implies existence, and Jeremy does not exist. Regardless, Jeremy (at)tends an evening party. What happens when the party gets angrily thirsty? (A pun)ch line. Jeremy laughs, having caught all four puns in that joke with his hands tied behind the wall.

A play onwards becomes a play on words. Autonym #4: Letters. The point is sharply blunt, hence trivially non-

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trivial. Jeremy dances on this point, having been coaxed into it. He dives into a see of chaos and (th)oughtless (th)ought.

He is audience and writer simultaneously.

That which can be written is essentially a plagiarism--plagiarism itself being a plagiarism from the dictionary and alphabet.

Having nothing more lose lose (two lose), he hits the tuning fork which has a surface of non-surface. The soundless sound begins the ritual, so he drinks from the baseless cup. The brew of no brew grants him either impossible stairs or a motionless elevator.

The world moves by that elevator with Jeremy inside. He sees the dancing silhouette of a candle not lit. He thinks before he (th)inks, reminding himself of himself de ningdefine. A distant nearness later, he hears a loud whispers (but singular) that motivates him against motivation. Is he awake or not sleeping? Let’s advance backwards. Jeremy steps upright onto his feet that point at the horizon. Are the birds stressing over the apple sauce which represents the future? Jeremy stresses over the future in the future, but never in the present. This line self-references itself.

Having passed the impassable overpass, Jeremy returns to the world of is is is, tucking non-world and non-is under his jester’s hat. He is the every-second stage performer, the laughing belief-juggler, skeptical of the skeptical, and skeptical of the of being used as the true of. He grins at frowns and growns at frins. He agrees to disagree to agree to blu his way into legitimacy. Autonym #5: Itself. Jeremy approaches the completion of his meta- ctional work. He turns o the light and creates heaviness. His words, being heavy, slip o into abstraction.

It’s hard to say what drove Jeanie and me to plant the seeds in our pores. I think for Jeanie it might have been the stories passed down from her grandmother of an earth where things still grew, where we planted seeds that grew into things we could eat or at least admire.

That was all before they had finished the Project, before the powers that be had decided we were all better off without dirt, before they moved the farms to the labs. I didn’t really have an opinion either way.

My mother called Jeanie an old soul. She looked at least five years older than she really was: tangled hair, thick eyebrows, jewelry my grandma might wear, little wrinkles crackling from the corners of her eyes. It’s safe to say she looked wise.

She read my palm the first time we met, told me there was a lot of pain in my past and that my future was flecked with disappointment and indecision and then just traced the lines of my palm up and down, saying nothing, like she was lazily following some river across a map. It was one of the sexier things a girl had ever done for me and helped me forget that just a moment before she had essentially called me a fuck-up.

JP Kemmick

The Great Growing

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Looking back on our time together, I think she was probably just confused. Confused I was someone else.

I’d like to think I never misled her, but I probably did, an innocent half truth here, a white lie there. She was beautiful though. Just really gorgeous in a way that was both retro and futuristic, like some time traveling gypsy.

She never outright professed her love for the old world, but she would get this look in her eyes whenever someone would bring up an idea from the old days, like farming. I thought it was romantic at the time. I thought her ideas were hip with nostalgia.

In early June we climbed to the top of our apartment building and lay down on the hot tarry surface. That morning in bed we had slowly, hypnotically pushed seeds into each other’s bodies. We kept the blinds drawn so the sun creeping through the slats made the room glow and made the searching for each pore that much slower and deliberate. It was a muggy summer morning, our

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hair plastered to our foreheads, the smell of our sweat wrapped in the sheets and hanging in the air. A piece of wallpaper had started to come unglued.

I’m not sure how Jeanie came by those seeds; maybe they were hand me downs from lost generations, buried in the back of some photo album.

Jeanie’s family kept everything.

We had made the process sexy, the leisurely massaging of each seed into our pores, and we had giggled, it tickled. And then we bathed, letting the water soak into our skin, our seeds, until we shriveled up like raisins and climbed the stairs to the rooftop, naked, letting the sun iron out our wrinkles.

Maybe it’s not hard to say why I did it.

Love or the assumption thereof. I don’t know, maybe there was some sense of elementary school science fair nostalgia in there too. I was pretty ambivalent about a lot of

things back then. I thought I was going with the flow, but in hindsight the flow was at best a trickle. Or maybe it was Jeanie’s flow and I was just some drowning shipwrecked sailor she was doing her best to fish out.

If Jeanie had wanted to set fire to the sun I would have done my best to aid her. As it was she wanted to lie naked with me on the roof for a summer and I could think of worse things to do with my time.

Looking back on it all I think we were coming at the summer from entirely different angles.

She never said anything about principles, about some deeper meaning, but I’m pretty sure it was there, whirling around her mind all summer. There had always been a tinge of rebellion to her eyes. Her mother had once told me she thought Jeanie’s persistent squinting was an attempt to crack her almond eyes. Jeanie probably knew I wasn’t the person to share that side with, even if she couldn’t get herself to admit it. At the time I was fairly preoccupied with her naked body, with her coy, trickling laugh. I was also young, simple enough.

For the first week the seeds did nothing, just sat inside us, thinking about the possibilities, about how they thought they’d missed the opportunity a long time ago. Second chances. So Jeanie and I enjoyed ourselves. We pretended to ballroom dance under the summer sun, humming some old classical number, out of tune and interspersed with laughter, our feet black with the soot on the roof. We had daily picnics, lying down on towels with sandwiches on our chests, cold beers nestled between our legs. It was slow, peaceful, good.

I spent an entire day perched near the edge of the roof, watching people below. Our apartment was on a slow street, but the occasional car would hum along, its battery gently buzzing.

I watched a little kid with a bouncy ball spend an hour throwing it off some steps and trying to grab it as it went flying at crazy angles back at him. I bet on a cat fight, lost money on a fat old tabby.

Jeanie occasionally would come and put her arms around me and stare out over the city

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with me, looking at all that metal and pavement, reflecting and sucking up all the sun. She said something at one point about the color green and sounded wistful for some reason, but I can’t remember exactly what it was.

At night when things quieted down a little you could hear the hum of the Conversion Factory, sucking in the CO2 and spewing out oxygen for us. It’s a nice system, efficient.

At first the roots tickled. It was as if some small creature had found its way into my system and its little paws tip-toed under my skin. I told this to Jeanie and she called me adorable and kissed me, two quick short pecks.

We watched planes fly overhead for hours at a time, lying naked on the roof, soaking up the sun to feed our submerged seedlings. I watched a Scrubber work its methodical way across the sky, hardly bigger than a dot, keeping us all alive.

Sometimes one of us would let out a little shuddering giggle as a root system explored new territory inside our bodies. We’d be sitting on the edge of the roof or wandering around its periphery and we’d release a short laugh over the city, letting it free to make its own mischief.

We laughed a lot back then at the little things.

A bird shat right on Jeanie’s belly one day and we laughed hard for at least an hour. We were happy and we both thought we could nurture the seeds with our devotion, like we were raising a child. It makes little sense now, but we were young and empowered with an incomprehensible love.

One day Jeanie suddenly stood up and made a mad dash for the stairs and came back a few minutes later with a paint set. She spent the rest of the day painting rainbows and fruits and vegetables on the side of the stairway door entrance. She wasn’t much of an artist, but her rainbows were pretty stellar; her strawberries

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looked like daggers. She shouted something to me about cave paintings, but a street cleaner was humming by down below and I didn’t quite hear her.

When I walked over to inspect her work more closely she told me to lie down and then painted a rainbow across my chest, lifting her brush carefully wherever a seedling had begun to sprout.

Sometime during that first week I watched a colony of ants slowly form and build a mound over a thin snaking crack in the roof. They were resilient little creatures, hauling bits of asphalt and cement in place of the dirt that had long since been covered when the Project swept over the world. In history class they teach that the Project had been a common unifying goal, bringing all the world together under one purpose. It was cleaner, easier. We knocked off a few diseases in the process. Made sense.

I saw what looked liked little bits of glass on the backs of a few ants as they built up their asphalt mound.

In those first weeks we had a lot of sex, rolling around, constantly tumbling under and over each other to avoid contact with the hot roof for too long. The tips of greenery were showing through our skin and we ran our fingers over each others’ bodies, feeling the fuzzy spouts protruding from within.

By the end of the first month we could see the roots meandering through our body like veins underneath our skin, now a dark brown hue from the sun and the roots. It became tougher, more taut as the roots bulged underneath. We could feel the weight. Things got a little more sluggish, our energy was going elsewhere.

Early in the second month I caught a glimpse of reflected light off a neighboring roof. It was an exceptionally hot day and the roots were

feeling heavier than ever under my skin, but I managed to prop myself up with one elbow and squint in the direction of the reflected sun.

I could just make out the figure of a person on the other roof. I slowly realized that the light was reflecting off a camera lens, that we were being photographed.

Within the week there was a media blitz on our roof, all the local stations wanting in on the story. We were cast as renaissance souls by some, backwards-looking outcasts by others.

Nobody went after the love angle.

We just took it in stride, annoyed, but little more, and waited for them to leave. Stories like ours popped up in the paper occasionally with headlines like “MAN GROWS OWN APPLE.” But we weren’t doing it for them, we were doing it for us, for a youthful summer of excess love. At least I’m fairly certain that was the original intent, but we let it gestate, let the seeds grow, long enough for that to change.

By the end of the week all the media had left.

My younger brother, in his early twenties and sporting a suit and tie, stopped by one afternoon to see it for himself, called us freaks and took off, walking fast back towards the staircase, like he was afraid I was going to hit him.

Both Jeanie and I were far along with the growth. It was getting harder to move around and we spent most of the days just lying on the roof. The days seemed longer, we talked less. I had green frilly carrot heads poking their way through my chest hair and a head of purple cabbage sprouting from my belly button. I had a patch of strawberries growing on both thighs, little green things, hard to the touch.

Growing tan under the sun one day, Jeanie asked me if she somehow managed to find a piece of real earth somewhere, the dirt kind, if I would farm it with her. I told her dirt was long gone, that the Project had taken care of

that.

“But what if, hypothetically, the Project had missed a patch somewhere?” she asked.

“I was thinking of getting into business at some point,” I told her. “My dad has some connections at the port.”

She responded with a look that she wouldn’t take away and I glanced down just as she muttered, “Business.” I’m not sure why I felt ashamed; I thought the port was a good deal, solid future, but Jeanie had a way of confusing my senses.

We had a big thunder storm mid-July. I hauled out an old tarp we had brought up just in case and we huddled under it while the storm raged down on top of us. Jeanie thought that maybe we should try to soak up some of the rain for the seeds, but I told her I sure as hell wasn’t going out into that storm. She gave me a look, more disappointed than anything, and threw her side of the tarp off and sat out in the rain.

I lifted a corner of the tarp up and watched the rain pour down her body, her long hair plastered to her back, the water coursing over her breasts and causing the tips of the vegetables to sway against her body. She looked purposeful and also, sexy as all hell.

I woke up one morning and hauled myself up to take a quick walk around the edge of the roof to keep my circulation going. A little breeze rustled the stems and leaves of my body. Walking past the stairway entrance I noticed an addition to Jeanie’s painted rainbows, tomatoes and strawberries. THE NEXT PROJECT was scrawled in shaky handwriting across the top, looking somehow sinister next to the colorful childlike rows of the rainbows. That was the first, and just about the only, tangible sign that our summer was coming to and end; maybe why I allowed myself to feel so surprised when it actually did. Like I had needed concrete facts

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written in a well organized report.

It was a day or two later that it became near impossible to talk. A few of the roots had found their way into my esophagus and conversation became painful. Jeanie was having the same trouble. I did my best to assure her it would be okay. I croaked out the occasional, I love you, and tried to say as much as I could with my eyes, but I’ve never been the best with non-verbal communication. Something about a subtleness I’ve never had. I accepted the pain, convinced myself that it was all part of that imaginary flow I thought I was cultivating, that it would take me where I needed to go.

Jeanie was getting more distant. She returned my croaked loves with a certain sad look in her eyes, that only later did I realize was as much for me as her.

One day I looked to my right and saw a crow not even a foot from my head, just sitting there, staring at me, asking me what the fuck I thought I was doing. They had kept the birds alive with centralized feeding stations, a small caveat to the few who had insisted on the old world ways. It was weird to see a bird so far away from the nearest station. I stared back at the crow, tried to explain that the pain of the roots twisting throughout my body translated to some kind of love, but I couldn’t seem to make it understand. I didn’t understand, how could it? Eventually it hopped to the edge of the roof and jumped off like a suicide.

I looked back over at Jeanie and she was staring straight up into the sky, looking hard at it, concentrating. I raised an arm heavy with onion bulbs and brushed my fingers across her face and whispered, “I love you.” She kept focusing on the blue sky, didn’t say anything back.

Any halfwit could have seen it was coming to an end, but I was lying naked on a rooftop next to a beautiful young woman with carrots

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sprouting from my chest. To say I was not thinking my clearest would be an understatement.

And besides, I’ve never been good at letting love go, have always held onto the wreckage long after the ship has gone down (sometimes after the rescue boats have come and gone).

Two nights later I woke up to the sound of sobbing. Jeanie was sitting up next to me, pulling at the stems and stalks protruding from her body. It was a full moon and bright. The stems protruding from her chest swayed and bristled in the moonlight, giving the whole deal a horror movie vibe, like Jeanie was pulling out the tubes her creator had used to bring her to life.

A small pile of vegetables was piled between her legs, tiny little carrots, a few miniature zucchini. Little dabs of blood showed where she had yanked each carrot from her skin. She was crying.

“Jeanie,” I said. It sounded more like a painful hiss than anything. My vocal cords had nearly surrendered.

“This isn’t what I thought it would be, Michael,” she said. And then quieter, “I don’t know what I thought it was going to be.” Her sobs and her strangled vocal cords mingled to create a sinister rasp. She yanked at another carrot and it popped forth from her sternum with a strange soft pop.

I lifted my hand and put it on her thigh, overgrown with strawberries, but she just kept plucking away and the pile of food kept growing between her legs. I didn’t know what to say.

Within twenty minutes she was vegetation free and she stood up. Little multi-colored flecks fell off her chest and legs. Standing there in the moonlight her body looked so different than it had when we’d begun. It was dark and stretched tight, like she had pulled all her skin against her bones and pinned it there. She looked ancient and beautiful and a little crazy.

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” she said. “It shouldn’t hurt this much.” And then she walked away.

I waited a few days for her to come back, to show up on the rooftop, still naked, and admit that love conquered pain, conquered all.

By the fourth day I wanted her to show up to remind her that it had been her idea, that she had pressed the first seed into my flesh. On the fifth day I pulled the first carrot from my chest suddenly and within half an hour I had added my fresh produce to her small wilted pile. The painted rainbow was still there, flaked and cracked and looking like a perfect chronicle of the summer. My body looked like something that could no longer exist in this world, like something from the days before the Project, when things still twisted their way up from the earth.

The Great Growing was originally published in December of 2010 by The View From Here. http://www.viewfromheremagazine.com/

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Rebecca Anne Renner Submarine Morning

SEAHORSE RODEO

Whale sounds from the kitchen beckon back mocking birds: they wake so early with the mourning. Three A.M.— their shrilling at the moon—we take up flashlights to hunt them from the trees— the jasmine stench is drowning. Morning comes too soon. It presses in like the sea on a submariner’s neck/back/eyelids, glass diving helmet, pipe and all, air tether thin and slack. I’m drinking coffee, tea, and milk to wet my stomach, to spite the guilt.

The mockingbirds so calling, black, were unbenounced to my attack.

Xerox Enchantment The bodies on the rug lie in Tetris formation more rigid that bodies of water, softer than the fragmented hollows of air in ice: both opaqued atmospherically before a touch with breath of life itself or sublimation.

For the first time, the bodies coalesce like IKEA furniture. They call it Ludvig or Expedit to give it all some personal resonance, but they’re still copies of copies, lining our foyers, dressing the windows, conspicuous, ubiquitous: small coffee tables made of lacquered plaster, lamps the shape of men and globes of rice paper, aiding in our mass-production, mass-produced love because this is what we need, are convinced to need, like making love on carbon copies of couches will provide that simultaneous release.

Yet all of it’s distilled to schematics and instructions: insert tab A into slot B, buy another space saver, revel in the solitude of our vast suburban hinterland.

Repeat.

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The Impostor (Antichrist)

Poetry by

Kevin Heaton The Missing Link It’s 3:20 am, and I am listening to the overnight radio program: “Coast To Coast.” A British scientist, apparently of some note, has published a hypothesis attributing 4% of the current Homo Sapien gene pool to the sexual interactions of prehistoric Neanderthal man, and early forms of our modern species.

This is a source of great comfort to me, as it explains away at least 4% of the regressive, fornicating, tailgating, bird-flipping, dull-witted, dimly lit, knuckle-dragging Pleistocene morons that I encounter on the street every day.

Dawning to an age of full illumination.

The new mother suckles a sonthe staffthe shepherd unto lambs unaware, mesmerized, and silent, prostrate before an artificial sunbeam: showbread to deceit; birth of confusion foisted upon multitudes entranced; wandering in the wilderness searching for light hidden under a bushel.

Golden Balconies I’ve Stood “There’s a pizza in the driveway!”

And she watched, knelt below the windowsill, as her parents scrambled for a wallet, hoping to get things together before someone came tapping at the door. It was dark outside. Freshly evening while the man with the box came in long strides towards the house. Pizza is good, she thought to herself. She glanced away and caught sight of the sky; glowing deep blue behind some trees and a short fence.

A funny thing came over her. From last she remembered it had not yet been dark. Nor had the wind been blowing or the moon been high above in the clouds. In fact, from the last she could recall it was a bright day and she had been sitting on the living room floor with some

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Kevin Luna

limp pieces of colored paper. She had looked up and, through the window, seen a large black bird perched over the fence. It had given a surely cock of its head and flown off. Where had the day gone? What had she missed?

As the thing came over her, like goosebumps or something similar to goosebumps, the excitement of pizza began to fade. As her parents got on their hands and knees to look for change under the couch, she took a deep breath and laid on her back, her head slid underneath the long, soiled curtain to the side of the window...

And even now, this memory 20 years gone, she could still muster those first feelings of loss and wonderment. She could still feel the beige carpet and that boxy white room of her American youth.

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It was evening again. Zipping up her jacket she found herself stopped uneasily on the corner of a damp city street. Where had the day gone? What had she missed? She saw her friend standing nearby, busy with directions to the party. “I think it’s back that way,” he said, looking down at his phone.

“Um...” she began. He looked up from his phone.

“I think I’ll go home now. I suddenly remembered... I have to finish a letter to my brother.”

He laughed and took out his cigarettes. Anyone would have. Laughed. That was why he liked her.

Always feigning angst in this way. What a joke. He lit his smoke and waved her off. “You don’t have a brother.” She brought a hand through her hair and then they were off, back that way.

An hour later she was drinking in a crowded room.

A girl she hardly knew came suddenly from behind.

“I like your glasses,” the girl declared. She invited her to the bathroom to do some cocaine.

Outside the bathroom, they spoke to a boy with curly hair and a half grown mustache.

“I’m agnostic actually.” He leaned back comfortably, against the wall.

“What’s that?” the girl asked. The boy held a beer in his hands. He closed his eyes and smiled while answering.

“You know those goats that stand in trees? Like, on the branches somewhere in Peru... I fuck them.”

Slipping down the hall, she heard his laughter boom throughout the apartment, just muffling the nervous giggle of hers. Had she not heard that joke just a week before? Or was she who’d told it.

What type of pizza had they eaten that night? and where was it from?

“Goatfuckerrr,” she mumbled, rounding the cor-

ner and into a group of people she could at least stand. The problem was, she reasoned with herself, she was too pretty. It was a terrible thing to admit but it was true. Never could she take herself that seriously looking at such a face in the mirror.

How many thoughts were instantly forlorn by her smooth and agreeable features? How many toiling hardships so tenderly unbuttoned?

“You’re such a doll,” her father once told her, “you’ll never really have to worry about anything you know.” He could have said it the night after pizza. Or he could have said it months before. The exact date she could not recall. What she could recall was the moistured smack of his lips as he rolled the words quietly off his tongue, as his face drew nearer upon her bedtime. “They’ll always be someone who wants to take care of you,” as his hand slid along her side, his fingers twirling through the sheets, “and lucky, luckier you.”

“My little girl. My little angel” She was entirely too pretty and she hated everything. Yet, as she formed these thoughts, it dawned on her that she was also laughing much too hard at somebody’s halfhearted joke. Or was she the one who had told it?

But moments like these called for a break. An excuse to excuse herself. And through the crowd of jokes and grins and towards a door and onto the balcony.

Out on the railing she bummed a smoke from a group of skinny boys, hunched over on themselves, tucked away in hooded jackets. “Everything is so boring,” they muttered to themselves. “Everyone and everything. I’ve seen it all before.” And taking a long drag, feeling their hurried glances over boots and long silky hair, she closed her eyes and agreed, through pain they would never understand.

Under the moonlight, over the sea and far far away from home.

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JANUARY 2011

Sensorium 7 Isaac Coleman

I am going to read this story one more time. I’ve read this story seven times now without speculating about the characters’ names. It seems like the plot is more important than their names. None of the characters use each other’s names, and two characters are figments of the imagination of the protagonist. I’m still not sure how this works in fiction, but all the same, I’m going to use names even though the author didn’t provide any.

Leonard is sitting on the corner of a messy bed painting another version of his vision onto a canvas resting on an easel. The painting in progress looks similar to forty-two other canvases scattered and stacked about. Built-in chest-of-drawers line the walls underneath the

windows of the second-story bedroom. Leonard is only wearing blue jeans; a few smudges of green paint cover his arms and tone torso. He is meticulously, frantically, applying tiny strokes of gold to the center of the canvas.

Natalie slowly opens the door and eases her head into the room filled with paintings and dirty clothes. She knocks and speaks simultaneously, “Ready for lunch?” Her voice is nasally and sugary sweet. The noise causes Leonard’s hand to jolt upward across the canvas. A smear of gold strikes through the blue sky.

When I first read this story, there were just generic tags on the dialogue like: says the artist, she says, the administrative assistant says.

This time I want to give more depth to the char-

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acters which is ironic because if ‘the artist’ knew I was reading his story again, not to mention exposing him to who knows how many more people, he would be upset.

So if you’re joining this reading late, you should know that the protagonist is crazy, and there is a trick ending, but it changes with each reading, so I can’t ruin the story beyond telling you that much. And the ending isn’t at the end.

I’m calling the artist Leonard, which isn’t too terribly clever in respect to the fact that when I think of a painter, which is the type of artist Leonard is, the painter that comes to mind is Leonardo DaVinci, so I dropped the “o.”

Before I read the opening scene, where Leonard is now painting, everyone should know that Leonard is crazy. I told you this, but it is more complex than that. Leonard is crazy but thinks himself to be sane and wants to trick the world into thinking he’s crazy. It’s a catch twenty-two; the crazy can’t know they’re crazy.

All that Leonard really wants is to perfect the image he has had in his head since he was a child. The image is a field of rye with a grove of pine trees that taper toward the vanishing point on the horizon in the middle of the canvas; overhead, clouds swirl, and a barbed wire fence acts as an illusory barricade in the foreground.

The catalyst that will push Leonard into seeking refuge in a psychiatric ward is his roommate, which is the first problem in this story. Until today, the roommate, who may also be crazy, who was once just ‘she,’ who is now Natalie, used to leave Leonard alone while he painted.

I’m still not sure what role, besides being Leonard’s roommate, that she plays in his life. It isn’t very important to the plot, but I’m curious.

The author doesn’t say much about her. The way she acts so caring toward Leonard, it’s like she must be dating him, which makes sense, but she hasn’t been dating Leonard very long. In fact, Natalie has only been living with Leonard for about one month. Leonard suspects that Natalie is a homeless drug addict. He picked her up at the bar one night, took her home for a one night stand, and when the next few days passed

and she remained, as though not really there at all, Leonard didn’t say anything. They basically started functioning in the same apartment, sometimes going all day without interacting until the evening when they made sweet gymnastic sex.

This, Leonard excused himself, was a good enough reason to avoid ever really talking to her. He thought that by not talking to her, and only interacting physically with someone, he could have one perfect, meaningful relationship, even if it was ephemeral. And it is ephemeral.

I won’t lie to you. Natalie doesn’t exist.

Well, maybe she did the first night Leonard met her, but she left his apartment a long time ago.

But the author wants you to believe that she is real. At this point, it really doesn’t matter, other than it makes accounting for the gymnastic sex a little awkward, but it could be explained, but there’s no need going into such perverse things.

That story is in a magazine that people read without looking at the words.

Or you can use your imagination if you have to. From now on, realize that Natalie is the result of Leonard’s mind and body overworked.

Yes, that way.

This is a turn off in the fact that this scene is the “and then he woke up” scenario, but I promise you the schematics of this story are structurally sound. It really doesn’t matter if Natalie is real. None of this is of any importance to Leonard’s story. Leonard is a crazy painter, and without an anonymous audience, none of this would matter.

Natalie’s biggest problem is that she started talking to Leonard, who is crazier than a crow flying through a glass city at night, but to his credit, he did realize that the silence wouldn’t last forever. Leonard thinks maybe she is a theater major trying out an existential acting exercise on him.

Leonard is sitting on the corner of a messy bed painting another version of his vision onto a canvas resting on an easel. The painting in progress looks similar to forty-two other canvases scattered and stacked about. Built in

chest-of-drawers line the walls underneath the wall to wall windows on the two exterior sides of the second story, corner bedroom. Leonard is only wearing blue jeans; a few smudges of green paint cover his arms and tone torso. He is meticulously, frantically, applying tiny strokes of gold to the center of the canvas.

Natalie slowly opens the door and eases her head into the room filled with paintings and dirty clothes. She knocks and speaks simultaneously, “Ready for lunch?” Her voice is nasally and sugary sweet. The noise causes Leonard’s hand to jolt upward across the canvas. A smear of gold strikes through the blue sky.

“Dangit.” This doesn’t sound harsh enough. “Do I need to hang a sign on that door that says ‘do not knock’ just to remind you every day?” Leonard does have anger problems, but having anger problems myself, I find his response to the situation justified.

“No,” Natalie responds, probably with indignation. “I’m not stupid. Do you have to be in a pissy mood with me just for trying to make you lunch?”

“No. I don’t want lunch.” Leonard responds calmly, and slowly turns back to his painting. In his mind’s eye, he is already covering the yellow streak with blue, but he is afraid to actually continue. He thinks that this particular painting is closer to matching the very image in his mind than any other version. “I’m really intent on finishing this. I’ll cook for myself when I finish up here. Could you please try and make sure not to disturb me again until I’m done, okay, sweetie?” Leonard speaks without turning around. He thinks this might emphasize how desperately he wants to finish this painting.

“Fine. I was just out here cleaning, you know, and got hungry. I miss you. I thought it would be nice if we took lunch together. Why don’t you take a break and come have lunch with me?”

Natalie’s dialogue really makes Leonard freak out now. He throws his brush against the white wall. The brush leaves a tiny yellow splatter.

I wish he is an abstract painter using a

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thick brush to spread around a large quantity of red; then when he throws the brush, it would seem to mean more with globs of red splattering everywhere—at least, if not red, a large brush, but I just read this how it is written. Poor Leonard is really just a beautiful, misunderstood, stereotypical, artist type who just happens to be crazy. And he has a problem controlling his temper.

“Because I don’t want to. Baloney sandwiches, twenty-five cent potato chips, and Koolaid don’t really interest me right now. Because this-” Leonard gestures to the canvas with both hands, “this is what is important to me. Finishing this painting that inspiration is striking me with, inspiration that I am losing having to have this conversation with you right now, this, this painting is what is important to me right now. I haven’t felt this good about a painting for three months.”

Knowing that one of the characters is a figment of the imagination of the protagonist undermines the power of this scene, but now it won’t feel like a rip-off when the author tells you that Leonard has been hallucinating. The painting that he has been working on looks nothing like what he thinks he sees—the colors are muddled. Leonard walks over the dirty clothes lying on the hardwood floor to pick up his brush.

Leonard really is a good guy. He says, “I’ll by you oysters and a steak dinner with the most expensive bottle of wine I can find when I’m done. Just don’t distract me again until I come out of this room.”

“It’s always about you isn’t it? You have no feelings for me. You think your work is so important, well, I’m important too, damnit. I’m just going to completely quit worrying about you.” This is what Natalie says before she slams the door.

Leonard sits back on the bed corner and runs his thumb nail through the bristles of the brush and has an epiphany. He wonders if Natalie could be a figment of his imagination.

It creates a binary between the different consciousnesses of his mind. One side is telling him

to come out and live and take a break before he truly snaps, while the artistic side is consuming him. Then when these two forces meet, he shouts about oysters and steak.

Remember: The last thing Natalie said

was “I’m going to completely quit worrying about you.”

Leonard runs his thumb nail through the sparse hairs of the paint brush that are clogged with thick yellow paint. Not thick bristles with red paint. “If only you would. If only you would.” To digress again, I must say, I hate it when characters say the same thing twice.

Leonard’s hallucination that is Natalie re-enters the room.

“Are you sure I can’t fix something and bring it in here for you to snack on?”

“Yes. Get out of here.” Leonard rinses his brush in the jar of yellowish water. The yellowish jar is one of an assortment of jars of many colors that rests on a cardboard box next to his easel. Various sized brush handles stick out the tops of all the jars. Leonard picks a fat brush from the blue colored jar. With his thumb and forefinger, he squeezes down on the hairs to remove the water. He is looking down around his feet for his pallet when he hears a vacuum roaring up-and-down the hall.

Of course, there is no vacuum whirring; this is part of Leonard’s hallucinating mind, but right now he is envisioning Natalie pushing the vacuum up-and-

down the long narrow Persian rug in the hallway. Leonard is incensed that Natalie is not only vacuuming a rug outside the door, a rug that doesn’t need vacuumed, but that Natalie is so scatterbrained that she isn’t fixing herself lunch and has now chosen to vacuum with a vacuum that Leonard doesn’t even own. The fact that she is somehow cleaning his house with a vacuum that he doesn’t own infuriates him further.

As the vacuum that only exists in Leonard’s mind subsides, the noises from outside grow louder. These noises do exist. The sounds existed throughout the day; Leonard just found a way to block them out until now. The noises consist of car engines, brakes squealing, children shouting, a couple arguing, and then finally a car alarm is set off.

The car alarm is actually set off by the author of this story when he visits Santa Barbara.

He walks past a purple Dodge Viper that tells him to “step back.” Being commanded to do anything by a car pisses him off, so he kicks it.

This simultaneously happens every time I read this story.

Leonard stares so intently at his work that he becomes lost in it. He hypnotizes himself. In Leonard’s imagination, he gets up and closes the window. The window actually remains open, but Leonard truly believes he got up and closed it.

Outside, it is now ninety degrees and rising, but the air conditioner was left running all night, making for a chilly morning; however, now that Leonard thinks he has closed the window, he believes it is getting cooler.

To refresh himself, he moves the brushes in the green jar to the side and drinks the water. Leonard loads a fat brush up with blue and white and begins covering the long yellow smear.

In Leonard’s mind, he hears what he believes to be the sound of his door opening. He turns to watch Natalie enter, carrying a plate in one hand with a glass of red liquid in the other.

“I went ahead and put mustard on your sandwich. I didn’t think you would mind. I figured everyone likes mustard. What’s a sandwich

without mustard? Whew it’s hot in here.” Natalie sets the plate and glass on the card board box and walks toward the window. Leonard watches as his hallucination opens the window that was never closed.

“I’m sorry, I can’t remember that well. I think my memory must be slipping. Didn’t I tell you not to disturb me again?”

“Well, I just thought-” Natalie tries responding before Leonard cuts her off.

“I thought that I said that I wasn’t hungry yet, that I wanted to be left alone. Do you recall me saying that? I forget.”

“Don’t get upset. I thought a little food would help fuel all that creativity my baby has.”

“I know you’re trying to help. I thank you, but it would be of more help if you stayed out of here until I’m done. Every time you distract me, and just having someone else around is distracting, it takes twice that long to get back in my zone. So if you would, please stop coming in here until I’m done.”

“Alright, honey.” Technically, ‘alright’ should be two words, but it seems appropriate in dialogue as a kind of exclamation. All right?

Alright! All right. The voice of Natalie in Leonard’s head tries soothing his anger. “I didn’t know it was that big of a deal. I just thought it would be better if I brought you lunch, then you wouldn’t have to worry about getting up and fixing something if you got hungry.”

“Thanks.” Leonard thinks he sounds real sarcastic as he says this. “I appreciate it. I’m going to finish painting now. I’m almost done, okay?”

“Okay. I’m going to do some laundry.”

Natalie walks around the room in a flamboyant manner, bobbing up and down picking up an array of t-shirts and blue jeans. Her blonde hair falls around her face each time as she bends over.

“No, you see, you need to get out of here completely, right now.” Leonard doesn’t like to use obscenities. He believes it makes a person sound despicable. I like characters to cuss even though I don’t. “There’s two weeks of laundry in the downstairs bathroom; there’s no need for

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you to be in here. And even if you can actually get the six tons of laundry done that is downstairs before I’m finished, which you won’t, there’s still no need for you to come back in here. Do you understand?”

“Yes, fine, if you want to be in this pigsty, that’s fine with me. Go on ahead. I don’t see how anyone could focus on anything else except this mess. We should-”

“Go!” Leonard’s exclamation should stand alone with just a period behind it. But he really shouts “Go.”

“Fine.” Natalie shouts back.

Leonard hears her slam the door. The sound, that was never made, makes him jump.

Leonard doesn’t usually whistle, but he begins whistling as he returns to painting. I wonder if it would mean more if I told you that he just whistled his own melody or if something would be lost if I don’t say he whistled some famous symphony that makes you draw an allusion to Beethoven’s deafness, or Mozart’s brilliant eccentricities. I wish he was whistling something clever right now, but he’s not. It’s just mediocre whistling. Almost random really.

Just as the tip of his blue brush is about to be pressed against the canvas, there is a knock on the door. “Oops, I’m sorry; I forgot not to knock. This will be just a second.”

Leonard doesn’t turn from the painting.

He continues staring into the vanishing point.

Since Natalie is in his mind, if he realizes this, he could visualize her wherever he wants. But he doesn’t turn around and Natalie doesn’t enter into his sight. He only hallucinates hearing her.

“I was just wondering if you paid the phone bill last month.”

“Yes.” Leonard replies and wishes he could dissolve into the horizon of his painting, but the barbed-wire fence is there to keep him out. “It’s paid.”

“That’s good. I have just been using the phone a lot lately and I haven’t seen a bill show up. I thought that I would help pay the next one.

The next bill should be here in a couple days, won’t it?”

“Probably, go look at the calendar. I really

need to finish this, okay?” Leonard’s calendar is full of receipts paper-clipped to the pages. He always marks the day he sends off his bills, who to and how much. He is diligent in such endeavors.

He keeps each calendar for three years before throwing them away.

“Okay.” Natalie responds.

See I could have just said “she responds,” but now it is more personal, but a name doesn’t make her any more real.

“No more distractions, okay?”

“Okay.” Natalie responds. She exits the room then immediately returns.

“Whaaaaaaat?” Leonard asks. He is on the verge of crying.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m just great. Now leave and don’t bother me again, and I’ll be better. I’m about to freak out. I’m not making any outrageous requests, am I?”

“No, I just needed to ask you one more thing. It’s really important.” At this remark, Leonard turns toward Natalie. He is wearing one of those go-ahead-and-wow-me looks. Anentire-novel-could-be-reduced-to-single-stagnant-moment-with-hyphens, but this, unlike Natalie, is moving toward an objective, the notat-the-end-of-the-words-but-the-end-of-thisstory objective. She did not continue speaking.

“What?” Leonard snaps. “What? What is it? Huh? What’s so important?”

“Do you-I was-uh. I was wondering.

What was it? How, what do you call it? I suddenly can’t think. You know that. Did you uh-” Natalie begins laughing, “I forgot what I was going to ask you.”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s hysterical, now get out of her before I stitch your mouth shut, okay?”

See how much less disrespectful Leonard sounds when he doesn’t add curse words to that sentence? It would have sounded a thousand times worse if he used any vulgarity, which I wish he would have, but if he used the obscenities, Leonard would be getting beaten down by his own hallucination, which would be hysterically contrived.

“You prick,” she scowls. She sounds

more upset than angry. As she turns to walk out the door, Leonard lets out a long breath through his nose. Natalie turns back around, “Oh, I remember now; do you have-”

“No you don’t. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t even talk to me. Go. Get out of here. Turn around and leave this damn room.” Is damn a curse? If it is, it is a minor one.

Leonard is at his limit.

Once upon a time in a workshop, the author of this story was told that, at this point, he needed to have Leonard, who then was simply called ‘the artist,’ get up and lock the door. “The problem is, I don’t imagine the bedroom door having a lock,” the author, who shall remain anonymous, responded.

Then the person critique-slash-criticizing the author’s plot said that ‘the artist’ should at least get up and move the free standing chest of drawers in front of the door. To which the author simply replied, “’the artist’ didn’t think of it, he’s crazy.”

I think that this is a valid answer, but it is too simple. In truth, the problem with the suggestion of moving the chest of drawers in front the door wouldn’t do any good. One, because Natalie doesn’t exist, accept for in Leonard’s mind. If she appeared in the room without moving the chest of drawers, Leonard would have a meltdown discovering that he is actually crazy—possibly sending him out the window which would deter this story from getting to the climax. Also, if Natalie was a real person, and as crazy as she appears to be, she would just push hard enough to eek the door open enough to speak into the room, all of which would be distracting in itself. It is fairly easy to push objects on smooth hardwood. And, if Leonard moved the bed in front of the door, which is the only thing that might keep it from opening, he would be spending his time moving furniture rather than painting, and at this moment in the story, he just wants to return to his painting.

All of this is in vain anyway because Natalie isn’t going to come back to the room.

Hopefully that’s a sigh of relief for you. The way she keeps returning in the beginning of this

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story never ceases to annoy me.

Back to the story at hand.

To which Natalie responds, “Asshole,” and leaves the room.

Leonard gets up from the corner of the bed and walks over to the window. A group of children playing street football are yelling and laughing louder than before. The sounds of kids playing normally wouldn’t set Leonard off, but today he is particularly disturbed. He yells out the window, “Find somewhere else to play. I’m working up here.” This time Leonard actually closes the window. He slams it. “There. Maybe.

Maybe. Maybe, just maybe.” Leonard talks to himself, which is funny to say since Leonard has been talking to himself this whole time, but this time he is full-throttle-consciously talking to himself.

Sweat begins building up on his face again. He looks down at a pair of dirty underwear. He wipes his brow with the back of his forearm and begins applying a massive quantity of blue over the yellow streak.

Leonard wants to be a nice guy. That’s why I like him. That and his artistic ambitions.

I like people with a purpose. It really upsets me to have to know that a nine year old boy named Bobby is about to punt his football through the window Leonard just actually closed. Bobby should have known better than to punt the ball in such a boxed in neighborhood. His kicks always pull hard to the left, but that’s just because he is wearing his red Chuck Taylor’s. One day he will start taking his shoe off to kick and will become a brilliant kicker, but today he is wearing his shoes, and he kicks the ball through Leonard’s window.

This is the story I want to read next, but I shouldn’t say so much about a minor character, but if I read this story again, I would want to remember to pursue Bobby’s story from here next time too. Today, however, this still seems too non-sequitur.

After the football flies through the window, it knocks over Leonard’s easel, causing his brush to smear blue over the green pine trees. When the easel falls over, it knocks his

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cardboard box over. Multi colored jars of water, a glass of Kool-aid, and a stale sandwich on a plate that Leonard brought himself a week ago and forgot to eat splatters all over the floor. He picks up the football and pats it in his hand in traditional quarterback style. “I told you to play somewhere else.” Leonard throws the ball, but his spiral is slightly off, and the ball breaks out another window. Leonard shakes his head ‘whatever.’ The only child left in the vicinity is

Bobby. He is hiding behind a car, and the only reason he remains is because it is his football.

When the ball breaks out another window from the inside, a huge, gap-toothed smile spreads across Bobby’s face as he laughs.

Leonard reconstructs his easel and sets the painting back up; he turns his head to the ceiling and raises his arms. It’s funny. He’s agnostic, but he still blames a higher power for all his problems. I want to tell him that it could have been anyone, but it had to be someone. The minute the author conceived the idea for the plot the characters came with it, and thus, Leonard was born to be Leonard, unless his name gets changed in a later reading. But no matter his name, he is still ‘the artist,’ and each time he will raise his hands to the sky and question. A simple sensorium test might deduce that he is bonkers, but it couldn’t measure how bonkers. However crazy crazy can get isn’t important. It’s just important to the story that Leonard really loses his wits.

This is good because he is starting to realize his real purpose in this story. The sooner he completes the plot arc, the sooner I can read something else.

Enough, it’s time to move forward.

The important thing now is: The screen

behind Leonard’s mind is beginning to flicker between the present skewed-painting, to that of a man sitting in a dark room painting. The image is blurry in his mind, but it will become clearer.

Just as the large tip of the blue brush is about to touch the canvas, the phone rings.

He sits there for a moment waiting for Natalie to answer the phone, but the phone continues ringing. His thoughts flicker to the dark image of the man, alone in a barren room, painting.

As the phone continues ringing, Leonard walks around the room gathering up his art supplies.

He places the supplies in a green canvas bag, and places two blank canvases into a large, brown, portfolio-type bag.

He pauses, and puts his hand to his ear.

The phone rings again. He picks up a oncewhite-now-paint-splattered shirt, and pulls it over his green smudged torso. Ever so calmly, Leonard places the two bags just outside the bedroom door. He slowly walks back in, and begins smashing his paintings into the walls. As he finishes splintering the wood frames against the white walls, he picks up the mutilated painting he spent the entire day working on and throws it out the shattered window. The jumbled mess of canvas and wood hit a jagged piece of glass and knocks it out on its way down. Leonard places the straps of both bags over his shoulders and proceeds down the stairs—careful to only step down in synchronization with each ring.

The slow, falling, steps jar each leg to the hip. His sight flickers from the staircase to that of the man in the dismal room. Leonard is realizing his next biggest purpose. He sees that the man in the dismal room has a small barred off window that overlooks a field of rye with a barbed wire fence and some pine trees. If I took you to this window and let you look in from the outside, you would see that it is Leonard who is the man painting. I don’t need to do this because I’m sure you already assumed that it is Leonard in this dark room.

When Leonard reaches the landing, he turns and stares at Natalie. She is sitting on the couch next to the phone. It is a red phone with push buttons and a tightly wound curly cord at-

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tached from the receiver to the base. The phone is still ringing. Natalie turns her head from the television, and looks at Leonard. “What?” she asks.

The phone cuts off mid ring. When another ring doesn’t come, it seems eerie. Never before has a phone ringed so many times in a row. Somehow the phone company didn’t intercept the ongoing call to inform the imbecile, who happens to be a collection agent, that no one was going to answer. (This is known because the phone was answered in version four).

Without saying a word, Leonard opens the door, and turns to exit. “Where are you going?” Natalie asks.

“Away.”

This is when the screen would stay focused on the open door then fade to black if this was a movie. When I originally received this story, it looked like an engineer’s diagram for a computer chip. That really made my job easier.

The author told me he wanted to see this as a movie someday. He said he was also searching for a screenwriter to adapt it—if I don’t do a good job reading this.

Next, when the scene fades in, the author wants to make sure his director places a camera in a flower bed. The effect would be a time lapse sequence where the front of the screen is focused on a flower closing for the evening while people and cars zoom around in the background. Leonard would approach slowly.

Instead, I will have to use the mind’s eye as a lens through which to view this effect.

Somehow this is symbolic to the story.

After Leonard leaves his apartment, he wanders aimlessly through the lush city of Santa Barbra, California. At dusk he sits on the outside wall of a brick flowerbed. The wall runs along a sidewalk in front of a mortgage company.

The sun drops. The city takes on that blue lull. The cockroaches begin scurrying in zigzagged paths from the lawns, over the sidewalks, and back into the grass. Crickets chirp.

The air is still warm from the concrete and ocean, but the cool, sunless atmosphere perme-

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ates the current temperature. The best description for how the air feels is in the summer when you bring in your jug of fresh sun tea and the liquid is still warm and you pour yourself a glass and add ice cubes and after you let the glass sit for a moment and then take a drink and you can feel the warm and cold strands of liquid run over your tongue. This is how the atmosphere feels on Leonard’s body.

Leonard turns and notices one of several pink flowers on the bush in the planter.

The flower has five petals, and on each petal, two maroon stripes run from the inside to the tip. Leonard stares at the flower so closely that the yellow stamen touches his nose. It’s a large flower. He watches the flower go through the delicate process of closing itself up for the night.

To exercise artistic freewill, the author makes the flower open itself up again before his eyes then close again. I thought this might mess with Leonard, but he’s so crazy and into beauty that he just watches, completely mesmerized.

Since he doesn’t have anything to do until morning, he watches the flower open and close until the sun comes up.

Now the sun is up. It would be for the best if Leonard went to get some breakfast, at least a cup of coffee, but he doesn’t. His life has already been lived. If I would have known that it would take so long to depict a classical plot arc for a novella, and so many attempts, I would have charged more to read this. But from here it’s about to get easier for me.

Coming up shortly, Leonard is going to be narrating his own story to himself, which gets hectic, and I won’t be the force in the story that I have been. Don’t be upset for me though.

I’ll still be with you.

It really isn’t narrating; it’s mostly just a mess of internal and external dialogue getting confused. This is another element that makes the plot. He doesn’t believe anyone is listening to his thoughts, but he’s narrating his thoughts as though someone is listening. Fortunately for him, his poetic thoughts are recorded here in a moment.

I just thought I would let you know this

before Leonard forgets his art supplies on the sidewalk and begins walking. He wants to find a mental institution to commit him. As he begins walking toward the outskirts of town, there is a heavy flow of people walking in the opposite direction. Not one person walks in the same direction. Leonard is still wearing his white, paint splattered shirt. The other people are mostly business people wearing dark suits. This may seem like a coincidence, but it cannot be. This happens in every reading. It must be a difficult thing being a character in a text, particularly a crazy character. They have nothing to attach themselves to.

I have been up front with you since the beginning, so I will continue to do so. While Leonard is busy believing that he is having a conversation with the gate attendant for a mental hospital, which is actually just a phone booth, I must let you know that the author wanted me to trick you. I was half inclined to go along with this, but I don’t want to have to sucker punch you. At the same time, if I don’t sucker punch you, then you will know that this story is a fraud and quit reading. But if I don’t sucker punch you, then I will still have to sucker punch you in some other way—which will probably be cheaper and shoddier. This is all terribly confusing for me. I mean, I have to understand all this; you don’t. Hopefully you won’t realize you’ve been sucker punched. I’ll let you decide.

Here it is: the author wants me to show Leonard walking across some sort of grassy knoll toward a brick building with a white portico. During this scene, Leonard begins an eloquent little speech to no one, internally.

Committed. That was the idea. Not your normal goal at twenty-one, but no one wants to be average. I prefer to think of myself as an all too true, altruistic, articulate artist eccentrically adding to that which has been left unfulfilled, lacking and then leaking the essence of men too preoccupied to be fully consumed, too engrossed with life’s little vices and man’s splendors to ever really find their consummation. This is just my annotation of course. What do I know? I’m just another artist.

I made up my mind that I would take a shortcut

past the long meandering curve winding around all the prodigality my path was spiraling down and jump right into my future fate.

Becoming voluntarily institutionalized isn’t as easy as one thinks; especially if you are trying to go about it without having to flip the bill. Trying to convince a person that you are crazy enough to need locking up is a tough angle to work when you are coherently standing in front of them, arguing that you need mental help, and lots of it.

When Leonard enters the front door of this building, the author wants me to read a sign above the door with the name of some purified water distributing company—a name like Water Drop Off or something more obvious. The author wants me to trick you into believing that Leonard actually walks into a water distributing company that fills those huge jugs of water that are in office buildings all over the world, 32% of which just released a loud bubble, but only 3% of that 32% of water jugs all over the world did the loud bubble actually startle anyone. The majority of that 3% are paralegals in New York City, where it is now 8:54 p.m. and dark.

Here’s the thing: In Leonard’s mind, he believes he is entering a mental hospital, the author wants you to believe it is a purified water distributor’s office, but it is neither of these things, which I am sure you already guessed.

Leonard actually wanders through a vacant lot and into a warehouse that caught fire last week.

The warehouse used to store thousands of novellas that no one would read because of weird plot designs that readers now find blasé.

The fire was started by one of the workers who saw that a large shipment of her novella was going to be stored in this funeral home for stories.

Unable to sell a new story, she had been working in the warehouse for over five years trying to block out the bizarre ideas in her head and write something insipid like working in a warehouse.

She was justly upset before, but finding a bundle of her unread stories stacked sixty feet into the air made her madder than Duchamp in a pissing contest with gravity, so she touched a match to the pyre of her dreams.

Dread the day there is a short story fu-

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neral home. So I especially thank you for allowing me to read this story to you. Now that you know the “conflict” of the story, which is a total fraud, I will continue on with this proto-metafictional story. Now you know the truth. This is like knowing how the magician pulls the rabbit out of the hat and still wanting to act surprised.

I hope that you feel like you have enough invested in this story to want to know how it ends, which you knew to be a trick ending because I told you from the beginning, but I don’t know how I can trick you into being tricked since I already told you, that I wouldn’t, unless something here genuinely is tricky?

To keep going: Leonard, the poor guy who just one draft ago didn’t even have a name, walks into the brick building with a white portico, the building he believes is a psychiatric ward, the building that the author wants me to convince you is actually a water distributing company, which is really a burned down warehouse.

I already feel like I should have just lied to you. You are supposed to believe that Leonard is hallucinating but he realizes on some level that he is hallucinating within a hallucination.

So, independent of the truth, the tension of the story is this: Leonard wants to be locked up so he can spend his days painting, which he wouldn’t be able to do anyway because the staff wouldn’t feel safe allowing him to have a paint brush that is capable of poking out an eye, if the staff rationally existed, but the only thing standing in his way is the administrative assistant, who he fears is trying to test him to see if he is crazy in order to justify seeing the doctor. Now it is really comical that the author wants you to believe the administrative assistant actually works for a water distributing company while she doesn’t exist at all; which, in a moment, you will see that from the dialogue the author provides, I wouldn’t have been able to convince you into thinking that she is real anyway, particularly not after Natalie.

Now that I have popped this over-inflated, un-necessary plot device, I will let the story go: Leonard walks through the open lobby, an

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open room with a dome ceiling, marble floors, and two staircases crawling up the wall on each side. A hallway is seen immediately upon opening the door. He walks down the long corridor, and enters into a small room.

This small room is more like a waiting room situated in front of a bigger room filled with filing cabinets and a purified water dis-

glowing with sun light. The administrative assistant is a middle age woman who is more than a little overweight with shoulder length, brown, wavy hair. Her face is puffy and round; she has gleaming blue eyes.

She actually reminds me of the phlebotomist that injected the author with morphine when he broke his foot. He was carrying his typewriter to the trash because he had just purchased a laptop computer and a printer after dropping out of technical school. It typed up a sheet that said it regretted that he didn’t walk on his hands.

Leonard doesn’t have the knack for tact so he simply jumps on top of the secretary’s desk, which knocks over her hand crafted pen holder. The pen holder is made out of a small, ceramic pot filled with beans designed to hold decorative pens wrapped in twisty-tie material with fake flower heads on top. Leonard shouts, “I’ll freak out right now. Is that what you are trying to do? Drive me to violence? I can get violent if you want me to.”

“Sir. Sir. Calm down.”

Her voice is soothing. It’s a good voice for a person to have who must deal with angry, crazy people, Leonard, who thought he was in a mental hospital, thought. “Don’t lie to me,” he responds out loud, “I hate malevolence. Just tell me where the doctor is.” These aren’t the words I would have chosen for him to use, but Leonard has quite the vernacular. And I think his dialogue sounds forced.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her voice is shaky; I know she is honest about being honest. Leonard hopped backward off the desk and jambs his hands in his jeans’ pockets. “As long as pensing machine. The only thing really separat- you’re being honest.” It really isn’t difficult to act ing these two rooms is the secretary’s desk and crazy, heck, it’s the act of willingly admitting you’re part of a wall that juts out from the hallway. This crazy and having someone believe it that is the hard hallway can be seen from the waiting room. part. Any idiot can answer the doctors’ questions to Down the hall, Leonard can see the trim for sev- make themselves sound sane or not. I’m not crazy; eral doors. At the end, a frosted glass window is I just need to be able to constantly create without

worldly distractions. Maybe that does make me psycho, I don’t know, but I can’t think about that now; I need to keep a good head on my shoulder;, now’s not the time to start second guessing myself.

Thoroughly satisfied that he just proved to the secretary that he is in need of a doctor, Leonard walks over to one of the hard, black, plastic chairs that are shaped in a round curve to fit an over-average sized person’s rump.

Here again I wonder if I should name the administrative assistant. I really don’t want to name her, but perhaps it would be easier to say “Linda” rather than “the administrative assistant.” Maybe I’ll use “Linda,” but as you partake in this story, pretend it just says, “the administrative assistant,” rather than “Linda,” then you will understand why I don’t think I should even bother. Perhaps I should just be thankful that the author is giving me such liberty over his story. I am probably making this story of even less consequence by saying so much, but this is better than a person with voices in his/her head using a computer to write her/his memoirs while lying to the reader to make the story more complicated than it needs to be and then hiring someone to read it who ruins the whole story in the opening paragraph by imposing too much upon the text.

I figure the extreme change in character would help convince her to convince the doctor to come see me with urgency; that I really am a person in need of a special room where I can be safe from other people and other people can be safe from me. A place where I can focus on one thing and one thing only, all the while inadvertently saving the world. They’ll encourage me to paint to help keep me from freaking out.

Not only is Leonard really starting to lose it at this point, but he is also narcissistic.

Leonard has a unique brain disease. Each side of his brain is genius independent of the other side. The problem is that both sides are forced into the same skull, and there isn’t room enough for both halves. Imagine the most brilliant creative half a mind and the most brilliant analytical half a mind in the world coming together to argue. This is what Leonard suffers from, and

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not even the most genius psychologist in the world can help him.

I asked the author what he thought happens to Leonard, who was then just ‘the artist.’ He said he didn’t care. His response makes me feel horrible. It’s not like an abandoned character can just extend the text on its own. Even if you aren’t a static character, your life suddenly becomes extremely stagnant. The best thing you can wish for is death. So the next time a character that you like dies, don’t feel sad for him/her/ it. Death is the best place for any character, and for the love of bullion cubes don’t let them get dehydrated into a Hollywood actor. But while Leonard is narcissistic, when he is done with this story, someone is going to find him a new world where he sells all of his imperfect paintings for so much money that he purchases the world. But that’s going to be another problem for after this story is read.

Leonard picks up a magazine from the stand next to his chair. He stares at the clock on the wall while holding the prominent science magazine. Every ten seconds he turns the page.

He is exaggerating looking at the clock and not at the magazine as he flips the pages to emphasize to the administrative assistant, Linda, that he needs mental help. Linda is still staring at Leonard. She looks to Leonard as though she has never seen a crazy person, which should be true since the author wants me to trick you into believing that Linda, who doesn’t exist to begin with, is actually a secretary for the purified water distribution company called Water Drop Off.

Now here’s something I can work with.

Leonard stares at a picture of a human embryo.

“You believe in cloning, don’t you?” Leonard turns the magazine cover, which is actually the remnants of a charred noveu novel, toward Linda.

“I suppose they can do anything these days.”

“Oh, not just these days, they’ve been doing it for a while, thanks to our friends.

They’re just now starting to let us know about it.

Actually, we’re all clones from a superior race.”

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“Really?” Linda began picking up the beans one at a time and placing them in the pot. I imagine that the reason why the author doesn’t have her do anything at this point is because she is terrified. And she isn’t real.

She speaks to humor me, I like that. She’s good at dealing with what she has to deal with.

“That’s interesting.” Linda continues.

“Yes, the only reason I know so much is because I’m a hybrid. I was carefully selected to be a master painter and a genius of cosmic energies. Would you like to see some of my paintings?” Where is it? Where did I put it? The one I had painted to mock the existence of the human race. (A painting Leonard never painted). One I had painted intentionally poorly to test them, to see if they could grasp what I really wanted to show them, see if they could handle true beauty. Here it is. The one done with all that overwhelming, unnecessary green. Let’s see what she thinks about this abstract garbage.

In Leonard’s mind, he thumbs through his canvas bag; the bag that he left sitting on the sidewalk next to the wall where he watched the flower opening and closing all night. He held up his hands to show the secretary a painting that wasn’t there.

“Oh, that’s interesting.” Linda looks like she is filled with disbelief. Yes, let her be filled with disbelief. It doesn’t matter.

What is interesting about it? It was recklessly made to show you and the rest of your naïve kind that you have no taste. You honestly think I would let you see the good stuff? Not after that remark.

Interesting? Hah. “Yes, what really makes this piece interesting is that I used various carcasses I found on the highway for paintbrushes. See, this swirl around the edge here was done using the tail from an all black cat. Not too unlucky, huh? Most the rest of it was done using various bird bodies; they just get so flat after a while.

The tedious aspects were performed using catalpa beans believe it or not. I guess I should name this piece Recycled Road Kill. I’m sure you know what it’s like being a poor arteeest, huh?” I’m sure she appreciates the way I said ‘artist.’

“Well, I know what it’s like to be poor.

What is ‘not too unlucky,’ though? The cat or the painting? I don’t understand what you mean.” What is ironic is that Linda believes Leonard to be some theater major performing some existential exercise to fulfill a class requirement. And she is waiting for one of the drivers to come into the office and kick the kid out. That guy would either be named Dan or Larry, but that guy doesn’t show up.

“Interesting. Interesting. Interesting questions you ask. They really are interesting.”

Hopefully after using the word ‘interesting’ redundantly she’ll get a feeling for how stupid she is. “Do we ever sense sorrow, or just fall flat, flattered, dashed with green, screened, sent screaming chasing our tails, that that cat should be used past its own queer, primitive emotions? Fluttering down to the symbolism of cynicism I throw mockingly in the arrogant direction taste dictates. Unable to even falter past perversities contained, canned and contaminated thirteen shades of growing grass falling on lawns as if it were melting?” Now would be a good time to start slapping myself frantically with the magazine.

The poor secretary looks mystified. Maybe if I flail about slapping myself that will help to snap her out of it. That look on her face is driving me crazy.

If you could see Leonard slapping himself in the face the way I do, you would laugh so hard. No matter what, you can’t fake slapping yourself repeatedly in the face with a book.

Leonard gets so carried away with his own masochism that he falls to the floor and continues slapping himself all over his body with what he believes is a magazine. Incidentally, this instigates a response from Linda, “Sir. Sir. Sir.” Linda rises from her chair.

“Yes?” Leonard stops as abruptly as he began. This is where Linda tries gaining credibility as a character.

“I’ve humored you as long as I can.

You’re going to have to go.”

“But, but, but…” But is the most exquisite word to use in order to buy time to think of something more clever to say all the while sounding like you know what you are about to say. I’ll

walk around the room touching things. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. The paintings. The paintings, this I can see. Which doesn’t exist, but Leonard runs his fingers over the smooth wooden frames regardless of its existence. The plant. Yes, the plant as

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life would have it. Free coursing chaotic essence of indifference. How gently you sit, stridently glorified. Misted ideas of casualness as you drain your free resources, turning them into your own. Leonard rubs one of the fat, greenish yellow, heart shaped, leaves dangling from a hanging pot. “I told you when I arrived here, I need help. I see these certain shades that should not be, then in splendid fury I fuse them with subliminally soft sounds that the light makes as it dances across the iris of my mind. But, but, but…”

Leonard scratches, more like claws, at his head. He claws trying to soothe some cerebral itch. I can’t blow it now: I just have to get locked up.

She seems calmed down.

I need to be locked up, the only place in this system I can have what I need.

Food, shelter, bed, a view, a place to paint most of all, and everyone knows there are plenty of drugs if I choose to want them and lots of quiet time. I just want to freely paint.

The tap on the shoulder from Linda snaps Leonard out of it.

The tap is him walking backward into a piece of rebar. The figment of Linda is holding an aspirin—palm up.

“Here, maybe this will help you.”

And thus it begins.

Leonard picks up the aspirin with his thumb

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and forefinger. “Thank you.” When Linda turns, Leonard places the pill in the pot hanging from the ceiling. She’s not going to get me that easily, not yet. I still need a clear head to get fully committed. I’m sure that one little pill probably detours the rest of the suckers. That one little pill happens to be a corroded bolt that was left in the ashes of the warehouse. “None of this is your problem, I know. I’m sorry; I’m sorry; I’m sorry. Like I said, if I could just see the doctor...You see, he, we, the doctor, I, uh, we, if the doctor, I could just, all this pain in my head.” Leonard begins hugging himself and turns to look out a window that isn’t there. It feels cold in here. The view here is strange, very strange. I grew up here. I know this town. I swear the mental health hospital use to face toward the ocean. Why can’t I remember? This bugs me.

“I’m so confused. Where did it all go?

We lulled past the desert in our narcoleptic dreams of dreary misery. Trying to surpass the dry pains of physical existence in a non-substantial world counteracted by the weight of profitable progress; we mass produced our demise in a consuming nightmare of social technological frequencies disrupted by metaphors, miscalculations, and this malignant malnourished magisterial society of malfeasance. I’m trapped amongst a bunch of enviable invalids.” While Leonard falls to his knees and begins crying, I wanted to comment that he sure is poetic in a nonsensical, Marxist, narcissistic, loquacious kind of way.

“Sir, you’re obviously in a lot of pain.”

Her voice still sounds sympathetic even over her irritability. This is good.

Linda began to lift the receiver of the phone, but when Leonard jumped to his feet, she quickly released. “What are you doing?” She better not be calling the cops, oh God, the last thing I need involved with is the cops. I came here to get away from having to deal with life’s unpleasantries.

What the hell is she doing?

Leonard is superfluously paranoid of police.

“I was just a – never mind. It’s not important. If it’s going to upset you-”

“You were, weren’t you? Geez! You heard me, didn’t you?”

I hope that you realize that this whole story is a complete, convoluted mess; I realize now that no matter how many times I read this it is going to be a mess. When I get to the end this time, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Like I said, you’ll still see the original end to the story.

Leonard is entirely insane, but now he is beginning to freak out even more. Oh no, don’t think, don’t think don’t think, don’t think- He thought Linda might be listening to his thoughts.

“Sir, what are you talking about? I don’t think I understand.”

Leonard put his hands on her desk and is bending over, glaring in her face. Don’t think don’t think don’t think don’t think don’t think don’t think- “Now you’re mocking me, eh?”

Don’t think don’t think don’t think don’t think.

Leonard snatches the phone. The secretary seizes the phone. Leonard yanks the phone off the desk and out of Linda’s hands. Leonard stumbles backward across the room.

At this point, neither character realizes that the plastic clip attachment that locks in the phone just ripped off the cord. The phone is now useless. Leonard doesn’t know this; he slams the phone down. Well, if the phone existed, which it does on two and a half levels, this is what happens to it, but it doesn’t exist; Leonard just grabbed a charred up copy of a book in the warehouse and swung it against an “I” beam.

The aforementioned act causes Linda to start shrieking and crying. Well, technically she might be having a sudden outburst of her own.

Maybe the thought that she never loved her dead father might have just hit her at this moment. This is highly improbable. One, because when someone jerks a phone out of your hands and smashes it, a normal human response to this is to shriek and cry; and second, I am well informed of all the ins and outs of this story, as I have almost read this eight times now, and Linda does indeed scream because of the phone getting ripped out of her hands and slammed to the ground. Linda actually loves her father very much; her father is still alive and well in

Phoenix. I only mention this to let you know that I do know all about this story, but I need to hide some of my knowledge from you because I could just tell a story like: a man was born on earth, he lived his life there, and then he died there—in between, he had complications, but it would be more fun to read if I filled it in with details like he is a crazy artist, and the thought of him dying prematurely never enters your mind, even though death is inevitable, and the best thing for a character—especially if you have the misfortune of being a character in a slice of life story, in which the main character would never die anyway.

“What are you doing here?” Linda asks.

“What do you want from me? I don’t know what you want.”

“I don’t want anything from you. I want to see the doctor; that’s what I’m doing here.”

How many times do I have to tell you? “Did you hear that? Huh?” Leonard is starting to lose the faculty to decipher between his internal and external dialogue at this point. Plus he is hearing something in a part of his mind that I’m not even sure if he can hear, but he is looking for it anyway.

“There’s no doctor here,” Linda soothes.

“That’s what I was doing on the phone; I was calling you a doctor. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Well isn’t that what I wanted you to do in the first place? And to think I believed you.” I can’t believe I even showed her my otiose painting.

I do love the way Leonard speaks. I need a dictionary just to keep up with him. Too bad he’s crazy; who uses a word like ‘otiose’ these days? He’s becoming more megalomaniacal by the moment.

“Now I don’t believe you. I know you were trying to have me jailed. Well forget that. I’ll come out worse than when I went in.

Besides, think of the universe. What will happen when they won’t let me paint for a month straight? All I’m asking for is one simple freedom. I just want to talk to the doctor; he’ll see.

Then the world will understand: Mom, the landlord, Mrs. Allison, my class, Natalie, all of

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them. You hear me? All of them will understand. All of them, you hear me? I’ll set them free.” Maybe you were mocking me all along. Too humoring, you’ve seen a lot of nut jobs in here.

Should I show you the real paintings? “Huh?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.

I don’t know.”

“Good answer. You haven’t quite achieved the right answer yet, but you are getting closer.” I want to show you who believes. You must see the correct painting, that which will set us free. It will come to be known, rejoiced, the simplicity of intimacy intricately woven to subdue all subversions from equality, blatantly pointing out Unitarian structure. It is an almost overloaded carousel of light, blinding the dark side of man in an acquiescing entourage of ideal scenes being played out by humanoid structures. “I’m sure you will find it interesting to say the least.”

Linda blots her eyes with a balled up tissue. “I’m sure.” See, this sounds so phony.

Leonard turns to grab another painting from his bag that isn’t there. If there is one thing that could be said for certain about this insanity it is this: The bag that Leonard left on the sidewalk was found by another fictional character from another book. The character’s name is Horse Badorties, and he comes from The Fan Man, written by Henry Kotzwinkle.

When he finds the blank canvas, he says, “Cool man, now this is art, man.” He is en route to his number three pad where he will flop the painting down on a pile of to-go containers filled with rotting bits of low-mien. After he throws the canvas down, he won’t remember he has it in his house until three days from now, at which point he will be walking through his number three pad, eating chili out of a can, when he will step his foot through the center of the canvas.

When he looks down to see where the ripping sound came from, a spoonful of chili will fall and splatter on the painting. He will step out of the middle of the painting and pick it up and say, “Wow, man. Now this is art with a Horse Badorties twist, man.”

How the heck did this happen? Leonard holds up the painting that isn’t there. He sees a

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hole ripped through the painting that isn’t there.

“Don’t blame her. She’s already teetering on the edge of hysteria.”

“What’s going on? What’s the matter?”

This is where Leonard completely switches his internal dialogue with his external dialogue. This isn’t going to be as hard to follow as I previously believed it would be. I’m not going to italicize his external dialogue or anything stupid like that. It’s just for some reason what he would normally say out loud to Linda he is speaking in his mind while his thoughts are verbalized. I will only tag the next few lines so you follow. What am I saying? If I read this again, I will just scrap this paragraph. I mean if I can’t trust my reader, then whom can I trust? None of this nonsense makes sense unless it’s read.

Only you can pass judgment on this. I trust you. It’s no wonder I live on the freeways in L.A. with a sign that says: WILL READ FOR MONEY. I should have known that any decent reader wouldn’t end up living on the freeway.

What kind of story did I expect to get? It’s no wonder I’m stuck with this classical plot arc piece of crap story where the main character is so crazy no one believes a damn thing. Don’t get me started on what a cheap-shot, crack-pot… the author is.

“The poor thing cannot help but ask.

How sweet?” Leonard says this out loud, but to him, he just said this in his mind. Then he thinks he says this, but thinks: Nothing. Nothing, it’s not a big deal; it wasn’t like I put any real creative genius in this piece. It just upsets me that I had to gather up all those carcasses and spend time making something like this.

Leonard sets the painting that doesn’t exist back down on top of his canvas bag that isn’t there and slowly walks towards Linda, who isn’t there, but is more so there than the paintings.

He stops in the middle of the cramped lobby and begins think-speaking. “Now let’s not play the blame game. She’s already upset enough. It’s not her fault you can’t control yourself better. It is a shame, though, I didn’t spend that time creating something sublime, but then again, here it would sit, torn. Without it I wouldn’t have

known now what I now know about her.”

This looks a little weird on the page, but the secretary responds to this comment, but because the mind works at a rate that is really off the time scale, Leonard thinks he says this thought in a flash before she responds. He thinks he says, I can’t believe I tore this painting.

Did you notice me do that during one of my little outbursts? Oh, well, could I get another cup of water? I think I’ll paint. That will fix everything.

It will help me to relax. No more wasting time or energy on foolishness until the doctor gets here.

“Excuse me?” I wish Linda said something better than that, but she doesn’t. I want to ameliorate her response so it is more cleverly fitting to both of Leonard’s dialogues, but it isn’t up to me to altercate what these characters have to say to one another.

Get me a cup of water. “Today would be nice.” Leonard begins unpacking his art supplies from the bag that isn’t there.

“What? What? I don’t understand.”

Water! Water! Water! What don’t you understand? I just need a cup of water so I can paint. I think the exclamation marks work well here.

“Shish. Just when I start seeing the dim little light between her ears, and then splat.” Leonard slaps his hands together. “She falls flat. Smack, crack, she’s dense as a brick.”

“What are you going off about now?

How crazy are you?”

What are you going off about now? How crazy are you? “Is she onto me? Maybe it’s a test, but why is she testing me? Unless she’s been the doctor all along, but if she’s been the doctor all along, then this whole thing is working because any other person would have seen I am actually sane and kicked me out by now.” How crazy are you? I just asked for a cup of water so I can paint and you just sit there.

“Sir, this is a purified water outlet. You need to either decide if you are going to make a purchase or leave before my boss gets back and sees what you’ve made of his office. He’s not as patient as I am.”

Linda must have been expecting this guy to be back any minute. If I was her, I would

have run out of the office screaming by now.

But she just keeps picking up the beans one at a time. What makes this so bizarre is that I know enough people who wouldn’t do a damn thing in this situation. They would sit there picking up the beans and raking in the hours. As a matter of fact, I wish someone would come in and mess with me at my job, but this is my job, but I don’t get paid by the hour.

I think if I read this story again I’m going to change some things. The author can go to hell. As a matter of fact, the next time I read this story, I’m not even going to read this story. I’ll read something about a secret love affair between two Japanese girls and when their families find out, they’ll commit hara-kiri without the knowledge that the other one is doing the exact same thing. If there can be an exact, proto-opposite, modern version of Romeo and Juliet that would be my proffering.

“All I wanted is water, and now I’m being threatened with it.

I don’t get it.” If this really is a water outlet, all I need right now is one cup, you do sell it by the cup, don’t you? If you could get it for me now, that would be really helpful. You know how it is, no, well, of course not. You see, inspiration is hitting me right now and it is vital that I get

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my cup of water. Leonard props his elbows on his folded legs and uses his hands to hold his head up.

“Here.” Linda says and extends a clear plastic cup of water in front of Leonard’s face. “ At last, her voice has gained a sense of irritation.” Thank you. “Finally, I only asked ten times.” Leonard sets the cup on the ground in front of him and swishes the end of the brush,

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he isn’t actually holding, around in the water while Linda swipes one of the blue and white brochures from the floor—one of the brochures that were stacked on her desk before Leonard jumped on it from off the floor.

“Here, look.” Linda waves the brochure in front of Leonard’s head bent toward the ground. “Look at this, I’m not kidding. Look at this.” Leonard doesn’t bother to lift his head. He begins moving his hand around above the floor.

In his mind, he is working on his painting.

I wish you could see this version of his painting. Sure, it doesn’t exist anymore than the canvass itself, but this one truly is superb. Oddly enough, he isn’t painting the painting he’s been trying to perfect all his life. Linda puts the brochure so close to Leonard’s face that it almost touches his nose. “Look. You see, sir, we really are just a water distribution company. I don’t know why you think this is a doctor’s office. Let me plug my phone back in, and I will call you a cab and make sure you get to where you want to go today. No hard feelings, huh? I’ll pretend none of this ever happened.”

“You will, will you? You’re going to make sure I get to freely paint all day long, as long as I want, distraction free, without any worries?” No, thanks. I’ll just sit here and paint until the doctor returns. That sounds so familiar, the way everyone closes their eyes hoping I’ll go away. And don’t plug your phone back in. I don’t trust you. “She must be the doctor. She’s trying to convince me this isn’t the doctor’s office. This is some sort of test. I’m onto their conniving little ways.” Leonard motions with his hand as though he is squeezing a tube of paint. Linda picks up the phone and examines the broken wire. “What the hell does she think she’s doing?” I thought I told you not to bother?

“I-I-I-I-I-I-I I was just going to get a hold of the doctor for you, that’s all.”

“I keep trying to tell her I hate malevolence, but nooooooo. No one likes a nice guy.”

Who did you just call? You just called the police didn’t you? Didn’t you? Just to spite me. Just to spite me because I told you that was the one place I didn’t want to go. Maybe I should have come in

here begging for jail; then I would have received a doctor.

“Don’t worry, I want to help.”

Leonard stands and rushes towards Linda and takes her down by the throat. His grip tightens. Why do you hate me? Why are you doing this to me? Is this some sort of test? “I’m really going crazy now. Is this what she wanted? It sure makes me feel better. Wait a minute, she can’t be the doctor.” Leonard lets go but remains on her chest. (Actually he held down a metal bar and was covered in soot). He looks around the room, amazed, as if he just solved a quadratic equation for the first time. Maybe I should read this again and let that brush splatter against the wall with red paint in its bristles.

Linda coughs and rubs her throat. “You sure catch on quick, whacko.”

“If she was a doctor she would have been intrigued to see what kind of neurosis dribbled out of my mind through my brush onto the canvas.” Sorry about that. You just got me worked up about the whole phone thing. Just don’t call anyone else and we’ll be fine. “I can’t believe I lost it like that.” Leonard smoothes Linda’s black blouse down for her and stands up and offers her his hand. Linda takes his hand, and he pulls her up. “This is good though; this is good, she’ll be sure to encourage the doctor to lock me up right away. She’ll probably go rushing right into his arms and tell him what a loon I am.”

Leonard continues making imaginary brush strokes. Linda returns to her desk and starts twirling a white pen on the knuckle of her thumb. Leonard hears a distant knocking. It is actually a cop popping the siren of the police car.

In version three of this story, I became the cop and rescued Leonard and it lead to my demise, taking a sniper bullet to the head— swimming from the coast of California to Japan to find the story about the lesbian couple. So, I guess this is the end of the story, even though the words continue. The author won’t allow me to become one of the characters in the story I’m reading. He receives a memo from NASA in the future, threatening him not to let me do it—ex-

plaining about black holes and alternate dimensions and mysterious disappearances. Besides, if I save Leonard, that would mean I would have to become a character in this story, and I still have other stories I want to read before I get trapped in my own.

Well, this is it: The cop pops the siren a couple times for good show. Initially, the cops are called because someone reported seeing Leonard trespassing in the recently burned down warehouse. That, and obviously he is talking to himself, which scares the mother of two young boys who like to play in the neighborhood. The cop pops the siren a couple more times for them; they’re still at that magical age where a cop is neat to see. It makes Leonard believe he is hearing a knocking in another part of the building.

“What kind of administrative assistant is she? She doesn’t even answer the door.” Aren’t you going to get that?

“Answer what?” Linda asks.

The door, don’t you hear the door?

This gets weird again. Now Linda, who is part of Leonard’s hallucination, begins answering Leonard’s thoughts, which was Leonard’s fear before he switched his verbal dialogue with his internal dialogue. “What are you talking about? I don’t hear anything.”

What is it? “The knocking is driving me crazy. Make it stop, make it stop.” Right now, the cop, who I became in version three, is just watching Leonard from the car. It’s funny watching Leonard freak out.

With the cop’s arrival, Linda realizes that she doesn’t exist, thus becoming ubiquitous to the text. She decides to make one last jab at Leonard, but fails anyway. “Maybe that’s your precious doctor you’ve been waiting for.”

“It better be.” I’ve waited long enough.

“Besides, my master piece is finished now, I’m prepared.” This is where the cop walks up tapping his yellow clicker pen against his metal clip board, pushing the spring top in and out nervously. Through Leonard’s eyes he sees a man in a white lab coat.

“Are you okay?” the cop is obligated to

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ask. And I’m not giving the cop a name even if I read this a thousand times.

Oh, thank you thank you doctor, it’s been so long. “I was wondering how long it would be before I got to see the doctor around here.”

“I’m not a doctor, son, but I’m here now. I’ll help you.”

“Now I really know he’s testing me, now’s my chance.” Doctor, doctor, I keep having this problem: Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are unquenchably thirsty and you cannot find water anywhere? Then you walk into a room and “Everyone is drinking big tall glasses if icy cold, purified water.” You drink and drink and drink.

“Luckily your glass seems to keep filling itself up.”

You keep drinking, it tastes so good. The taste of life.

Then you wake up and find that you are even thirstier than in your dream. “Then you realize the bottle of water you always keep full” next to your bed just for these moments is empty. “Unfortunately you’re also too lazy” to want to get up in the middle of the night “just for a drink of water.”

“Okay, okay there buddy. Just what are you trying to tell me here? We’re going to get you some help. Just hold on a second.” The cop presses a button on the walky-talky on his shoulder and reports his location and situation.

It’s okay, here, “I’ll show you.” I can’t tell you. “I’ll show you.” I’ll show you. Leonard bends over the blackened concrete and lifts up his imaginary painting. It is the most perfectly painted picture anyone has never seen. Leonard painted a brain in a jar in the desert, flawlessly. Unfortunately, it isn’t real, and he has been so bothered by the outside world that he forgot the painting he was trying to perfect. “He’ll understand.” You get it don’t you? Do you see? “Do you see?”

“See what? I don’t get it. What are you trying to show me?”

Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it perfect? It can be like this forever. Do you see? Do you understand? This is the solution. At this instance, Leonard realizes that he has been in an abandoned, burned down machine shop talking to figments of his imagination. “It really can be this simple, just give me a chance, there’s more, I promise, you’ll see. You’ll see. You do see the simplicity don’t you? This

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obvious truth I confide in you from the celestial clouds.” Leonard raises his arms to the sky, a deflating effect under a charred roof. “Soon it will rain down peace, washing away all this unsanitary physical distraction. The essence of light will reign supreme.” Leonard shouts this last part. Sometimes I wonder if this character is a prophet or a maniac.

“Yes,” the cop says, “I see it. Why don’t you come with me? I’m going to take you to get some help, okay there buddy?”

“It worked; at last, at last, it worked. I can hardly wait.”

As the character is written, the cop forcefully grabs Leonard and leads him back to the cop car. Leonard struggles to turn around, but the cop keeps pushing him forward. Wait wait wait wait wait. Leonard coughs and speaks in a whisper as though regaining his voice. “Wait, my art supplies.” Leonard turns and extends his arm in vain. Through his eyes: art supplies on the lobby floor turn into art supplies on the sooty warehouse floor that dissolve into the sooty floor. The last image is a picture etched in the dirt.

This cannot be the end of Leonard’s story. There’s too much uncertainty, too much left undone. That is why in the last version of this story I became the character of the cop after my obligation to read the story was completed.

I took Leonard to my mother’s house, which turned into a saga of its own and ruined the story because it is not logical that the cop would drive Leonard to my mother’s house without my interference. And I ended up getting shot in the back of the head, which I think is un-necessary.

But this time, someone like you, sees Leonard on his/her way home from work. The person is driving a white Honda Accord. The person may be you in a future reading of this story—now that you know what must happen.

Cornelius Bassett stood on the bridge, felt alive as the rain soaked down his forehead, his neck, his damp toes. Almost anaethetised, his right cheek told him go go go. The pink battleship, hero of so many campaigns, it moved too, three hoots, two flags he couldn’t decipher.

Five great gray boxes, kilometres of air conditioning ducts,

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Memory 2010B Afghan James Manfield

waste disposal chutes, and the happy groan of fifty-six baggage reclaim belts, all turned golden, then bright white, as Anderson dropped his bag on the tiled floor, and waited, the crumpled piece of A4 in his hand. It still smelt of cordite.

Irma Gibbs, short hair like a pampered hound, craned her neck and felt – excited! Do they realise the true purpose of our descent? Each atom of aluminium, iron, carbon and copper they all join me. Our total understanding is

close, spat out like the overexplained ending to yet another nine inch Hollywood movie. I want to eat my seat back.

Bassett steps down onto American soil and forgets the journey, his bag so heavy, but no time for emotion just yet. Hints of violet in her eye shadow that expand across the dappled hills the lashes are trees, burnt once again in the simulated thermonuclear conflict so even the steel melts. When she

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cries...

When will it all disssolve? The borders so jagged, a sheet of torn paper that we try and impose order upon. Throw out your card indexes, manilla, buff, beige dreams of pinked out maps and postcolonial ease. No whiskey breakfasts.

STOP! Yet again we fight.

The dust, the boredom, the canvas ceilings, my own experience of the war is not interesting. I gave a lecture and no one believed me. Why should I stuff it full of greasy anecdotes, make it interesting, pretend I was having a good time?

Anderson is still paranoid. His fingers dance as if upon a trigger, he sees nothing but that devious light brown and the dots appear like venomous intruders and another one gone to Bassett.

Six concrete memorials her finest work she didn’t say much to dear Cornelius, he eyed her turquoise tights matching nail varnish and the dull periodical so many spelling mistakes.

As the plane lands all of his thoughts dissolve into a huge puddle glistening like oil on water and reality burns. Each poppy head destroyed, each Flanders grave that is slowly eroded, iron oxide on the king’s medal, so sadly.

2100 they are all dead, nothing left. In the plane graveyard the Boeing 737 is a relic now, a warped tourist attraction and they dream of a world without flight, without war. Julia Bassett finds a map in her attic and sees the pink regions at the heart of Asia.

The marble sculptures embrace each other, the cream shadows in a passionate embrace this particular reality turns to snowflake-shaped leaves and it gets colder and then we dance. Irma’s coffin is so delightful, the 21st century renaissance for our last Prime Minister.

Tragedy grips us but there is fight in our veins, these sinews curled we raise

the flag again and a thousand citizens in Sunderland cheer, the workers of the Barrow-in-Furness shipyards gather around the uranium monument. The dark streets behind Charing Cross station are illuminated by the pyre! How could we celebrate otherwise the next death? I draw green lime lines on her face and we dance until dusk, exhausted and then we collapse, a bundle of limbs, have we missed our flight, our trip to the red zone, place of imminent death and hero’s welcome those burly men they’ve never felt anything but hate and he dies there for our ________.

A million miles, each CAPITAL CITY on the messageboard, alive ready to throb for each visitor – tourist, pilgrim, businessman, warrior. The flight to Kabul is empty no holiday resorts cheap cocktails European flesh yet. Anderson dreams of a cruise ship permanently encalmed in the main bazaar, its drinks cabinet raided by Parsees many weeks before, the white-suited consul can do nothing, can effect nothing.

The war enters its twelfth year and there is no fanfare, no triumphal arch for the emperor he skulks. Meanwhile Irma draws compulsively; Nixon crucified, jowls pecked by ebony ravens, the blood evaporates so quickly in the 40 degree shimmering quincridone red heat.

Shall we play another game? A lemonade gin, yellow teeth embalmed by the attack of the floss and she smiles, crosses her legs, auburn lipstick a matter of life and death as she pulls on the body armour and laughs how her breasts expand.

Anderson sees her visit as IRRELEVANT at best – a swirling sand sculpture perfected by the helicopter blades funnelled by the intense tribal rivalry and she agrees of course something must be done. But Secretary of State who can forget the abandoned limbs, the unmanned Predator drones the science fiction that you are creating.

Orange and blue on the cereal box and

the dying landscape as Private Julia Bassett pulls close the iron door and it is over. The ninety-nine year conflict is over. She sighs and vanishes a lilac mist the last remnant of the Bassett atoms in the Kandahar suburbs.

A wailing, no call to prayer here in Doncaster, yet the funeral of Anderson provokes no fury, no tear spurting widows, no children too young to understand; but only the gothic teenager he holds her hand, the son she loves so much.

Final call for flight 6219 to Berlin. [Repeat]. A bustling, wheels and feet together aim for the same bank of polyester seats. Sixty heads queue and Irma is impatient the low headache, the unfaithful guilt that wears her like an ulcer. She smells her wrist and yes cheese and onion crisps for breakfast.

The sea is yellow-green, tinged by the kelp, fronds ablaze in the third cycle of their lives, they join the plankton and feel better beneath the coral bones.

Bassett pauses, stubs out his French cigarette, calls to the sand and sings along to the death of his own personal blood-red democracy.

Irma, what is the point of it all? He grimaces as she wipes away the dried blood and smiles. There is no point. But we’ll carry on, won’t we?

He feels better, no explanation but like a river freshly diverted by geological calamity, he is excited and tells Irma. She smiles and holds his hand.

Did you ever like Anderson? A decent guy, he liked a few drinks, yeah but a family man.

It all blurs into the national news - the local news story - the same female presenter who is glum-faced it’s her profession she wishes she was a nightclub dancer. Anderson is dead.

The tide retreats, black sky fills in the gaps, a thunderstorm is what Bassett (Julia) imagines. Such joy! The rains will fall, my own rapture. The end is

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now! She turns and sees the massive aeroplane dropping fast, ablaze, orange flickering. No screams yet.

Red lines as Anderson waits for his flight to Kabul. Silly jokes, pornography exchanged, nervous laughter at the new hair cuts, old weapons, real deaths ahead of him. We die waiting for the king, for the country.

Haunted rectangles, chocolate blocks, she stirs and the duty-free section is there but she spins the bottles glaring at her, swoons is this some END to the suffering, the body bags. Ignited by vodka samples, Bassett intervenes rosefaced and remembers the sweaty man she hit in a Glasgow nightclub so many years ago.

Rich memories, Anderson descends, black lights, Heathrow aflame in Madonna’s clutch, the crystals explode, the war ends. PEACE at last.

Irma sighs and asks the Secretary of State if it really over. A cascade of confetti; every piece blue or yellow falls and the waves continue to lap outside Kabul, the mountains groan under the artillery fire and it starts again but the Prime Minister’s spokesman says that it is IMPORTANT that we’re involved. Flames twist the white metal amongst the burgundy marble veins of Anderson’s grave.

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Greetings, Revivalists, It is now February, the downhill slide into springtime has begun and the days in Portland have already grown longer. A lot of things are, and will be changing for Seahorse this year. We delayed our January issue in order to arrange a “Best of 2010” issue of the Review and are releasing January’s issue for February. We are also currently in the process of upgrading our website, so don’t be too alarmed if things don’t get updated right away or if one morning you come to your computer, punch in our web address and suddenly find yourself staring at a new layout with all the lights and dials of a state-of-the-art machine.

Ideas swarm in like an out of control cloud of angry African bees from one of those madefor-TV movies in the early nineties where the victims are found with little bee corpses in their throats or honey oozes out of the walls like horror flick blood. It’s been just like that. We plan to launch a vast undertaking and are currently working on the financing. The project will be a combination of social networking, peer reviews, art uploads and more. Seahorse has always wanted all of you, all of us, to be able to succeed without having to rely on corporate interests, media scoundrels or debt collectors. Seahorse wants the art to stay in your hands, as well as the fruit of your labors. We believe the only thing you need in order to make it is a community.

In the interest of building more community we will launch a site which will allow you to upload works of art, writing and poetry, music, video and more. From there, it will be reviewed, ranked, and critiqued for improvement by your fellow artists. It will be a fully transparent forum where editors and writers, artists and critics alike will share opinions and work side-byside to improve the work and see it published. For Seahorse’s part, our editors will get into this workshop and offer notes, thoughts, and comments for all to see. We believe that the tyrannical procedures of old publishers and editors slashing work from a corporate office and blindly rejecting with little more than a form letter should be put behind us. Seahorse will tell you why something doesn’t work, why we are passing on something or accepting it, and we will work with you, other artists, and our own team to make the work ready to be put into print.

The services offered by this site will be available to other magazines, publishers, agents and more. But it will be offered by Seahorse and so, hopefully, this will let you know that it will remain honorable. In point of fact, it is our hope that we can get other members of the publishing world to come down off of their high-backed leather chairs and work side by side with each of you. That’s the idea anyway.

Watch out for the changes. Keep in touch. Ask questions. Hold us accountable. And, above all, help us to make 2011 a year full of innovations in art and publishing.

Pistols and Parliaments, The Seahorse Rodeo Folk Revival Team