January 2018

1

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

2

3

Notes from New Delhi

VOLUME: 2 - ISSUE:10 - JANUARY- 2018

Notes from New Delhi : Dibyajyoti Sarma

02

Columns:

Sotto Voce -Indira Parthasarathy

11

Letter from London-John Looker

14

The Wanderer - Andrew Fleck

18

Poetry:

Dilantha Gunawardana 24

Mallika Bhaumik 30

Nabanita Kanungo 33

David R. Cravens

57

Fiction:

Duane L. Herrmann 37

Henry Simpson 49

Daniel Ableev 80

Wrapper Digital art: Krishna Prasad

THE WAGON MAGAZINE

KGE TEAM 4/4, FIRST FLOOR, R.R.FLATS, FIRST STREET, VEDHACHALA NAGAR, KODAMBAKKAM, CHENNAI - 600 024 Phone: +91-9382708030 e-mail: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

Minorities in the mainstream, in cinema Recently, I was asked to design a course on cinema by a friend who works in a fancy private university. Sadly, I won’t be invited to teach the course, because I don’t have a PhD from a foreign university, clear and simple, never mind that I have all the qualifications to be a university teacher — I cleared those bloody exams and wrote those bloody dissertations.

Anyhow, I was kicked about suggesting movies on the themes of minority identity that I have seen and admired. It was a rare opportunity. I hardly get an opportunity to recommend movies (mostly because, for some time now, I have stopped discussing movies in public, since everyone is doing it.)

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

4 So I selected 50 movies I had in my collection and gave the list to my friend. He said this was not enough. He needed to get the course approved by his bosses and for that he needed a concrete proposal, on the goals and relevance of the subject.

So, after much ado, I wrote a course proposal. The following is a short version.

Cinema as a mainstream medium Cinema as a medium of communication can be seen at different levels, serving different purposes. It can be an art form, an entertainment, a social document or a social critique. It can be all of these and at the same time, be a means to something else – a mirror unto our lives.

As a mainstream medium (cinema needs money to be produced. Therefore, it must appeal to the mainstream audience, who will pay at the box office), cinema must, first and foremost, appeal to the mainstream audience. The definition of mainstream varies from society to society, from culture to culture. Broadly, it means representing the prevalent attitudes, values, and practices of a society or group. A cultural construct, when applied to art, mainstream may mean something that is available to the general public, or something that has ties to corporate or commercial entities.

As structuralism teaches us, an idea or a movement cannot be understood fully without taking into account its binary opposite.

Again, post-structuralism tells us that when we talk about structures and binaries, there are no fixed centres. The centres are fluid and binaries can be interchanged.

In this context, to understand the mainstream cinema, we have to understand where and how it places the minority identities.

The mainstream cannot exist without the minority, since it is the minority that accentuates the mainstream. At the same time, it cannot highlight it as well.

A minority is a sociological group that does not constitute a politically dominant voting majority of the total population of a given society. A sociological minority is not necessarily a numerical miThe Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

5 nority — it may include any group that is subnormal with respect to a dominant group in terms of social status, education, employment, wealth and political power.

Dominant minority groups may include the following: Racial or ethnic minorities: They may be migrant, indigenous or landless nomadic communities.

Gender and sexual minorities: An understanding of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people as a minority group or groups has gained prominence in the Western world since the 19th century. The acronym LGBTQAI is currently used to group these identities together. Besides, while in most societies, numbers of men and women are roughly equal, the status of women as a ‘subordinate’ group has led some to equate them with minorities.

Religious minorities: Persons with a faith which is different to that held by the majority.

Age minorities: This includes the elderly, and children.

Disabled minorities: The disability rights movement has contributed to an understanding of disabled people as a minority or a coalition of minorities who are disadvantaged by society, not just as people who are disadvantaged by their impairments.

The question of minority identity comes to the fore when a minority group comes together to demand its rights in civil society, the rights which the mainstream enjoys. The dynamics is that the mainstream always dominates the minority, suppresses the minority voice and at best try to reclaim the minority within the mainstream fold.

This ‘Cinema and Minority Identity’ proposes to discuss in detail how the minority identities are depicted in mainstream cinema, Bollywood, Hollywood, as well as select cinema from around the world. The course proposes to select films related to a particular minority identity and read/ view it in the context of the identity politics. The course proposes to discuss films of three distinct flavours: 1. Films with a ‘negative’ portrayal of the minority identity 2. Films with a positive portrayal of the minority identity, yet seen from a mainstream point of view The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

6 selves.

3. Films from the margin, created by the minorities them-

While seeing the films as texts, the course will discuss the following issues: 1. Representation of minorities in a mainstream narrative, its need and purpose.

2. Limitations and possibilities of representing a minority issue in mainstream narrative 3. What happens when a minority identity decides to take the centre stage and decides to tell its own tale?

The bone of contention here is this: Films as a popular medium propose to represent a homogeneous world, where the dominant taste is the mainstream. Yet, minority identities and minority characters exist in films, even in the sidelines. The question is what they do to the narrative in hand? How do they represent the reality outside the imagined world of the cinema? How does the mainstream appropriate these minority voices?

(Example: In ‘formula’ Hindi films, the hero is pitted against the villain. The amount of evil the villain exudes corresponds to the goodness of the hero. The moral degradation of the vamp highlights the purity of the heroine.)

The films Module One: Racial and ethnic minorities Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Germany, Dir RW Fassbinder):

An old German cleaning woman falls in love and marries a young The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

7 Arab immigrant despite opposition from all quarters.

Sin Nombre (2009, US/Mexico, Dir Cary Fukunaga): A girl from Honduras travels on a freight train for the promised land on American shores.

Dances with Wolves (1990, US, Dir Kevin Costner): A soldier tries to find life among the wondering American Indians days before the reservation.

The Mission (1986, UK, Dir Roland Joffe): A group of Jesuit priests opens a mission in the remote Amazon forests, and lay their lives fighting against slave traders.

Aranyer Din Ratri (1970, India, Dir Satyajit Ray) A group of Kolkata intellectuals travels to the forest among the Adivasis for a picnic.

Schindler’s List (1993, US, Dir Steven Spielberg): A German national does all he can to save his Jewish employees during the Holocaust.

Do the Right Thing (1989, US, Spike Lee): A day in an American suburb and the clash between the black and the white.

Dr Babsaheb Ambedkar (2000, India, Dir Jabbar Patel): The biopic of the champion of the Dalits.

Nowhere in Africa (1989, Germany, Dir Caroline Link): A German-Jewish family travels to Kenya to survive Holocaust.

Trikal (1976, India, Dir Shyam Bengal): The fortunes of a Portuguese family at the time of Goa’s independence.

Medea (Italy, Dir Pier Paolo Passolini): The Greek tragedy of Jason and Medea gets an ethnographic, feminist makeover.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssssss Song (US, Dir Melvin Van Peebles): A black drifter kills a white man and goes on the run.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

8 Module Two: Gender and sexual minority Volver (2006, Spain, Dir Pedro Almodovar): A woman buries her husband and confronts her past Bent (1997, UK, Dir Sean Mathias): A young man in concentration camp learns the importance of identity politics.

Law of Desire (1987, Spain, Dir Pedro Almodovar): A film director gets embroils in a possessive relationship, as he tries to deal with his transsexual brother/sister) Umbartha (1982, India, Dir Jabbar Patel) A woman from a middle class household decides to go working at the risk of losing her marriage.

The Crying Game (1992, UK/Ireland, Dir Neil Jordan): An IRA foot soldier becomes obsessed with the girlfriend of one of his victims to discover that she’s not a girl.

Maati Mai (2005, India, Dir Chitra Palekar): The story of a woman grave digger in rural Maharashtra.

Sita Sings the Blues (2008, US, Dir Nina Paley): The Ramayana from the point of view of Sita, and of a western woman, told with the help of Jazz.

Heaven on Earth (2009, India/Canada, Dir Deepa Mehta) Girish Karnad’s play Nagamandala gets a modern makeover in Canada.

Tamanna (India, Dir Mahesh Bhat): A eunuch adopts a girl child.

Module Three: Religious minority Jait Re Jait (1977, India, Dir Jabbar Patel): The ethnographic tale of the Thakur tribe of Maharashtra.

Of Gods and Men (2010, France, Dir Xavier Beauvois): A group of Christian priests try to survive in Islamic Morocco in the time of revolution.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

9

Diksha (1991, India, Dir Arun Kaul): A Brahmin boy and an untouchable forms an unlikely friendship.

The Valley of the Bees (1968, Czech Republic, Dir Frantisek Vlácil): The dark sides of religious fanaticism in an isolated monastery.

Module Four: Age Minorities Umberto D. (1952, Italy, Dir Vittorio De Sica) A retired old man journeys to find the meaning of life.

Chop Shop (2007, US, Dir Ramin Bahrani): An orphan who lives in a junkyard dream of owning an ice-cream parlour.

Mysterious Skin (2004, US, Dir Gregg Araki) Two victims of child abuse take two very different ways to channelise their traumas.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Spain, Dir Guillermo Del Toro): The line between fact and fiction blurs for a young girl in the last days of Franco’s Spain.

Spirit of the Beehives (1973, Spain, Dir Víctor Erice) A young girl is haunted by the Frankenstein’s monster.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

10 Module Five: Disabled Minority My Left Foot (1989, UK, Dir Jim Sheridan): A man suffering from cerebral palsy learns to paint.

Iqbal (2005, India, Dir Nagesh Kukunoor) A mute, Muslim boy fulfils his dream of being a cricketer.

The Man without a Past (2002, Finland, Dir Aki Kaurismäki): A man is beaten up and cannot remember who he was.

Module Six: Economic Minority The Bicycle Thieves (1948, Italy, Dir Vittorio De Sica): A man tries to make the ends meet in post-war Italy.

Ankur (1974, India, Dir Shyam Benegal): A young man becomes obsessed with the young wife of his disabled retainer.

Scarface (1983, US, Dir Brian De Palma): A Cuban immigrant will do anything to become rich.

Crocodile (1996, Korea, Dir Kim Ki-duk): A homeless man earns his living by stealing from people who kills themselves by jumping of the bridge.

Secondary Texts/Films Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985, US/Argentina, Dir Hector Babenco): A revolutionary and a paedophile share a cell and ideas.

Planet of the Apes (1968, US, Dir Franklin J Schaffner): A dystopia where apes have evolved and rule the human race.

Proteus (2003, South Africa/ Canada, Dir John Greyson): Two convicts in colonial South Africa find love and don’t know what to do with it.

The Ghost & the Darkness (1996, US, Dir Stephen Hopkins): Colonial Africa, white hunter, black servants and Indian railroad workers.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

11 Louis Malle’s Journey to India (1972): The French filmmaker travels the country with a camera.

Strawberry and Chocolate (1994, Cuba, Dir by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Carlos Tabío): Two men, one gay and one straight, form an unlikely friendship in communist Cuba.

A Prophet (2009, France, Dir Jacques Audiard) A young Arab learns about life and crime in prison.

The King and the Clown (South Korea): A tyrant king falls for a woman impersonator of a circus troupe.

Bad Education (Spain, Dir Pedro Almodovar): The consequence of a priest’s behaviour towards two young boys, and how it destroyed several lives.

The Gospel According to St Mathews (Italy, Dir Pier Paolo Pasolini): The story of Jesus Christ told from a Marxist point of view.

The Exterminating Angel (Mexico, Dir Luis Bunuel): Guests of a party cannot leave the house for some inexplicable reasons.

Stalker (Russia, Dir Andrei Tarkovsky): Three men discover the meaning of faith.

The Diving Bell & the Butterfly (2008, France): A paralyzed man uses just his eyes to write a book.

Okay, now the 100-rupee question: Why am I making this public? Simple. The course did not take off. So I figured I will make the list public. Perhaps, someone reading this will pick on the ideas and do something with it. Please feel free.

Dibyajyoti Sarma New Delhi

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

12

SOTTO VOCE INDIRA PARTHASARATHY

Art and commerce are strange bedfellows. And in India during the nineties, there was a sudden awakening. To put India on the world map of wealth and prosperity, we thought that we had to opt for gigantic consumerism that would be possible only as in the rich western nations, especially the US, only if we were to try aping their corporate cultural values and norms.

Narasimha Rao, the former PM in the nineties conceived the idea of free market-oriented economy and Man Mohan Singh, the then Finance Minister delivered it and it was baptised the Corporate Moguls. And there was this technological boom when every young person became a whizz kid, whose short and long-range vision was money and making more money. Love for Art and aesthetics for their own sake became the casualty. Every aspect of our living became related to the value of money. It was a free-for- all kind of economy The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

13 with buyers and sellers, conditioned by bulls and bears, with very little breathing space for art and culture. Corporate czars took over this business of art. Literature, theatre, cinema and fine arts acquired values determined by their market worth in terms of money. No other critical yardstick as has been handed down to us by our traditional concepts of culture became necessary. In such an unhealthy environment of such cultural confusion and decay, how can one expect the youth of the country to be aware of his past heritage and withstand the onslaught of the contemporary trend.

Look at our cultural institutions like the Sahitya Academy, Sangeet Natak Academy, Lalith Kala Academy, the National School of Drama and the various zonal cultural centres. Though they were established to integrate the various cultural aspects of this great country, the SA,SNA, and LKA, though they are headquartered in the same building they have no correspondence with each other in organising integrated cultural festivals and seminars.

India is a synthetic fabric of many coloured threads with different regional cultural forms with one well-defined fabric of what we know from time immemorial, as ‘Indian’ (and not ‘Hindu’ as the RSS chief would like to have it) as the bottom line of this great concept.

Have these cultural institutions (Sahitya Academy, Sangeet Natak Academy, Lalit Kala Academy and National School of Drama), which have been in existence for several decades succeeded in carrying this message to the youth of this country? They have so far only succeeded in dividing this country further and further into various claustrophobic cultural pockets distanced from each other.

Ramayana and Mahabharata, though they were written in a language which is not the mother tongue of any single community in India, how come these stories became the intrinsic part of the national and cultural psyche of all the regions in this country, and every region in India had adopted the stories befitting its own cultural genius but retaining the spirit and soul of the epics as a whole? There was no Sahitya Academy or National Book Trust at that time to organise translations and conduct seminars, which they are now doing as a ritual, an exercise in futility.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

14 The reason is not far to seek. There was a free interaction between the people of various regions in this country in the form of pilgrimages, temple festivals, cultural and philosophical debates, and music and dance melas, without the interference of a political Government. This was happening till the thirties and forties of the last century. There were individual patrons of art and culture, who promoted a national art consciousness among the various sections of the people transcending the caste and linguistic barriers.

Secondly, the concept of classical and popular art never existed in those days. This division is an imported idea from the West, which, during the period of industrialization.

The rich, having lost the feudatory privileges, created this division to distinguish between elitism and populism. The famous literary critic Leslie Fielder asks, ‘Between elitism and populism, how would you rate Shakespeare? A classical poet or popular poet? The illiterate Elizabethan masses loved him as their ‘darling’. In the same way, we can also ask ‘Was Valmiki or Vyasa or Tulsidas or Kamban’ an elitist or popular poet? The young people of today having surrendered their taste to the worship of Mammon do not ask themselves these questions and have become the children of a bastardized culture.

Each region in India with its distinctive cultural identity must get its due in the context of a pan-Indian vision.

Indira Parthasarathy is the pen name of R.Parthasarathy, a noted Tamil writer and playwright.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

15

Letter from London - 15

from John Looker

An Exhibition Unlike Any Other Some of the items on display are contemporary. The first you see, however, was made by human hands – wait for it! – 40,000 years ago.

I stopped in astonishment. This is a figure, carved from the ivory of a mammoth tusk, 31 centimeters tall, found in a cave in Germany.

It represents neither a human nor an animal but is half lion and half man. How this carving was used by those early humans can only be guessed at, but it was not a toy. It must have had great significance because it would have taken at least 400 hours of work to produce. In the museum’s careful words: “he is the oldest known representation of a being that does not exist in physical form but symbolises ideas about the supernatural.”

This was an exhibition at the British Museum: Living with the gods. The crowds snake their way through several ‘rooms’ with artifacts from every epoch of human development and every continent of the globe. All the major religions of today are represented, as well as beliefs that have long disappeared such as those of the classical Greeks and Romans.

I hesitated before embarking on this Letter. If you have a faith which is profoundly dear to you, might you be uncomfortable at the thought that objects from your own religious practices were on display for anyone to see, and alongside articles from other religions? If other faiths in today’s world are anathema to you, might you be dismayed at their presence here? If so, I would understand.

There has been criticism and I will come to that later. However, this is not an exhibition of comparative religion. The curators have not put beliefs on display. They are looking at us: at the things we do, The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

16 and the objects we use, in the practice of our religious beliefs. In their own words: “By looking at how people believe through everyday objects of faith, this exhibition provides a perspective on what makes believing a vital part of human behaviour.

Seeing how people believe, rather than considering what they believe, suggests that humans might be naturally inclined to believe in transcendent worlds and beings. Stories, objects, images, prayers, meditation and rituals can provide ways for people to cope with anxieties about the world, and help form strong social bonds. This in turn helps to make our lives well-ordered and understandable. “ Such a wide variety of items has been brought together! We are shown an exquisite Muslim qibla in ivory and gold, made in Istanbul in 1582 and used to establish the direction of Mecca for prayer. A colourful Tibetan wall-hanging depicts the Wheel of Life from Buddhism. Equally colourful is a south Indian painting, made around 1400, depicting a scene from the life of Harishchandra in which the pious king bathed in the Ganges at Varanasi. There are religious artifacts from ancient Egypt, from indigenous American peoples, from Africa and the Far East. Among Christian objects one unexpected item is a sheepskin coat, beautifully and richly decorated, made for church-going in Transylvania.

This was not simply an exhibition. It was assembled in conjunction with the British Museum’s former Director, Neil MacGregor, who gave a 15 minute radio talk every weekday for six weeks. In each talk he described one or two of the exhibits, visiting countries of origin and discussing with present-day practitioners and historians The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

17 what we might learn from these items.

In one broadcast he spoke about how people have often made images “to open a gateway to the divine”. He illustrated this with two exhibits. One was a brightly coloured statue of the Hindu goddess Durga, made in clay, just 18 inches high; the other an icon showing the child Jesus in the arms of Mary – this from the Russian Orthodox branch of Christianity. The makers of such images conform strictly to their sacred traditions of representation, not taking artistic initiative.

And, just as images of Durga annually fulfill a major role in communal celebrations, so too Christians praying with the aid of the icon would know that they were part of a timeless community of worshippers.

The exhibition could have been arranged, room by room, in chronological or geographical order, or featuring each faith in turn. Instead, and in keeping with the idea that the real focus was on people, it follows a series of topics. Each tells a story about how humans approach the practice of their religion. Items from different faiths and different epochs are placed side by side. Is this perceptive?

Or superficial?

For example, a statuette of the goddess Artemis of the Ephesians, the divine protectress of that ancient Greek city, is considered in conjunction with one of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico. Another topic considers the practices of faiths that shun images of the divine and emphasize the word: Islamic calligraphy on The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

18 a sixteenth century mosque lamp, for example, is placed near a small silver rod that Jews would use in following the text of the Torah, tracing words on the delicate parchment

without the damaging touch of a finger.

Other topics include festivals, pilgrimage, daily prayer, rites of passage and – as you would expect – death. There is even a section on the anti-religious state doctrines of Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union: a cosmonaut grins down at you from a Soviet poster declaring that he found no god in the heavens.

With each topic we are encouraged to see ourselves, as humans, coming up with comparable practices in very different times and places and across dissimilar religions. The exhibition has its critics however. A reviewer in The Guardian had this to say: “…this show casually throws together artefacts embodying a vast variety of beliefs and asserts that they all share similar meanings.

In reality they have all been stripped of context and history, robbed of specific content. “ On the other hand, a review in The Telegraph was entitled “An exhibition so powerful it makes you cry”. If you would like to investigate, you will find photographs of exhibits on the British Museum website and the talks may be downloaded as BBC podcasts.

John Looker lives with his wife in Surrey, south-east England. His first collection of poetry, The Human Hive, was published in 2015 by Bennison Books and was selected by the Poetry Library for the UK’s national collection. His poems have appeared in print and in online journals, on local radio and in two anthologies: When Time and Space Conspire, an anthology commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Austin International Poetry Festival, and Indra’s Net, an international collection published by Bennison Books in aid of the Book Bus charity. His blog, Poetry from John Looker, is at https://johnstevensjs.wordpress.com The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

19

The Wanderer Andrew Fleck The Hunter and his Quarry

The Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden is best known for his development of the madrigal. Briefly, the madrigal is a ten-line poem whose lines are either six or ten syllables long, although there is no strict rule as to their arrangement. The poems’ relation to the musical form of the madrigal is unclear, but we can see that these relatively short poems lend themselves to intense expressions of emotion. Drummond’s poems are on the gloomy side, bordering on the morose, but often brilliant – as in the case of this unnamed madrigal, written in the second or third decade of the seventeenth century: The world a-hunting is, The prey poor man, the Nimrod fierce is Death; The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

20 His speedy greyhounds are Lust, sickness, envy, care, Strife that ne’er falls amiss, With all those ills which haunt us while we breathe.

Now if by chance we fly Of these the eager chase, Old age with stealing pace Casts up his nets, and there we panting die.

(New Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse, Ed. Alastair Fowler, Oxford, 1992) The poem starts with the image of a hunt.The hunt one must imagine as one of the kind practised by the British upper classes, where the local gentry (or nobility, or sometimes royalty) gather with their horses and hounds and chase a fox or a deer over hill, dale and moor; or hunt down birds with rifle and nets. The hunt was all at once– and, to the extent it persists, still is– an important social event; a leisure activity, the central leisure activity, it sometimes seems, of the British upper classes; and even a sort of pseudo-military muster, a kind of training for men who, in wartime, might fight at each other’s side.

I don’t know whether Drummond participated in such events – he had famously eschewed the court of London to become a man of letters in his hereditary seat in Scotland, though he surely cannot have spent all his time at his study writing – but he would certainly have been familiar with them. James VI and I, the king his father served, was notorious for his interminable hunts, often spending days at a time away from the capital, leaving business to his overworked and under-appreciated secretary of state, Lord Walsingham.

James was fond of stepping bare-foot into the gore of a newly slain deer; a practice his doctors told him would do no end of good to his various ailments.

Life could be great in the early seventeenth century if you were a king, though perhaps not so much fun if you were a deer. As distasteful as the image of a king ankle deep in gore might seem to us, the image at least speaks to the purported intimacy between hunter The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

21 and quarry. Indeed, the image of hunter and hunted often appeared in love poetry. Petrarch, I think,began the association of hunting with wooing, but the most well-known hunting-themed love poem in English is Wyatt’s ‘He whoso lists to hunt,’ in which the hunter demurs from catching his prey when he notices a tag on her neck reading ‘noli mi tangere.’ This is widely believed to mean ‘don’t even think about bedding Anne Boleyn (and try to pretend you haven’t already!) now she’s shacking up with Henry VIII’. Richard Lovelace, a contemporary of Drummond’s, made the hunting/romance analogy even more explicit in his paean to chubby ladies, The Bella Bona Roba’, asking Cupid, Then Love, I beg, when next thou tak’st thy bow, Thy angry shafts, and dost heart-chasing go, Pass rascal deer, strike me the largest doe Other poems in that vein, could, I’m sure, be found. But Drummond’s poem uses a hitherto underexposed aspect of the hunt, one in some ways more in tune with modern perceptions: that is, the persecution of the animal, and, from the creature’s point of view, the horror. Drummond is not some kind of early animal rights activist, mind – the hunt is what I.A. Richards with his useful terminology, would call the “vehicle” of the metaphor, the source of its imagery; the true subject of the poem, what Richards would call the “tenor” is the hardness of life, and the very certainty of death.

Death, in fact is the hunter. Drummond dramatizes, and perhaps dignifies man’s futile struggle with death by evoking a noble, even mythical vision of his hunter. Nimrod is a figure from early in the Old Testament, a great grandson of Noah and a renowned hunter. Greyhounds too were considered the very noblest of dogs, fast, agile, muscular and fiercely protective. There is an enigmatic reference to a divine greyhound in the first canto of Dante’s Inferno: She [the she-wolf] mates with many creatures, and will go on Mating with more until the greyhound comes And tracks her down to make her die in anguish.

(Dante’s Inferno, Transl. Mark Musa, Penguin, London, 1984) If the she-wolf is a kind of symbol of the terrible vicissitudes The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

22 of life, and the work of the devil in the world, then the greyhound seems to be the work of divine justice that will redeem man’s suffering. For Dante – if you can excuse my stuttering understanding of theology – there was suffering and danger in our fallen world, but there was God and God’s justice too. Another famous Catholic wrote a short epigram using the image of dogs and wolves in a similar way, albeit with a decidedly political bent: Quid bonus est princeps? Canis est custos gregis inde Qui fugat ore lupos. Quid malus? Ipse lupus.

What is a good prince? He is the sheep dog who puts the wolves to flight by his barking. What is a bad one? The wolf itself.

(Thomas More, Trans. Timothy Kendall (1520/1577) Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, Ed. David Norbrook,Penguin, London, 2005) There is much that is interesting about More’s couplet, by the way. More was eventually sent to his death by Henry VIII, for refusing to endorse the King’s break with Rome. This poem, however, was written before the king’s ‘great matter’ turned England’s spiritual life upside down, so it is certainly not a comment on the reformation. Although it could be read as a justification of political or religious violence, it is significant that the sheep dog simply scares the wolves away, he does not attack them. If there is a trace of political commentary in there, More could be reminding a monarch keen on overseas aggression of his prime duty – the protection of England.

Before his supernumerary marriages exhausted his energies and England’s diplomatic resources, Henry’s all-consuming, and horrifically expensive, passion had been the recapture of England’s one-time possessions in France. Ipse lupus, indeed.

I digress. Dante and More both position the dog – the noble greyhound, the staunch sheepdog – as protector against a great enemy, whether that is an infernal or an earthly foe. In Drummond’s poem the roles have switched somewhat. The world is hunting us: his greyhounds, personifications of all the ills that may befall a man, hunt us too. This reflects a deeply pessimistic view of life, part of which is in the temper of the poet himself – Drummond, we have The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

23 established, was not a cheerful poet – but also, perhaps, reflective of a loss of faith in the divine order of the universe, a certainty that had underlain the unchallenged Catholic imagination of Europe before the reformation that separates Dante and More from Drummond.

In fact, for a poet who wrote some very good religious poetry, a man no less of a Christian than Dante or More, Drummond here strikes a note strikingly similar to the pre-Christian pagans, or certain post-Christian poets of a world-weary bent – that is pessimistic, fatalistic, doom-laden.

In in the tranquillity of the airs of Hawthornden Castle, there may have been the tang of something sinister in the air. Midlothian is not so far north of what we now call the Scottish Borders, once known as the Scottish Marches. In its time, with the most northerly counties of England, it was one of the most violent areas in Europe, ravaged by continual cross-border pillaging and clan warfare, often with tacit support from a monarch on either side of the border who wanted to preoccupy the other. There’s a certain romance attached to the memory of the Border Reivers who prowled the marches, but trying to live a settled existence among thieves, murderers, rapists and kidnappers, must surely have made the law-abiding, and the weak, feel like prey at the mercy of forces beyond their control. The Reivers occasionally hunted each other too, invoking the kind of blood feud we might more readily associate with the mountains of Montenegro and Albania. When the real wars came, the Lothians, meanwhile, with their proximity to Edinburgh, were often the scene of the most vicious reprisals of occupying English armies. Drummond’s poem describes universal human experiences, but it seems to have been influenced by the site of its composition. I imagine the folk memory of such events – living memory in some cases – sat deeply in the minds of the people of 1620s Midlothian.

And Drummond was right to imagine that such horror was a permanent aspect of human existence, even if sometimes in abeyance. 1620s Scotland must have seemed peaceful compared to even the recent past: with a Scottish King on the English Throne, ruling over the three kingdoms of his realm, both reiving and Anglo-ScotThe Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

24 tish wars seemed to be a thing bygone days; the religious tumults and persecutions of the reformation seemed too to have passed their worst pitch. But over on the continent, the great powers were locked into the first decade of what would be remembered as the Thirty Years War, one of the nastiest in European History. James I and VI’s prevarication and pacifism had kept his Kingdoms out of the fighting, but thousands of mercenaries from England, Ireland and, most of all, Scotland fought alongside continental troops over the rubble of destroyed German towns. The war was characterised by gruelling, bloody battle tactics – the “push of pike” that crushed or stabbed lines of soldiers to death en masse, and by the return of the routine persecution of civilian populations that had not been seen since Roman times.

That same kind of strife would, twenty years later, cross the North Sea and consume the nations of the British Isles. Drummond would live to see religious fanaticism consume Scotland, an English Army march north, a Scottish army occupy the North of England, a full on civil war across the three kingdoms, the judicial murder of a King, and the subjugation and humiliation of Scotland. For himself, a Royalist and an Episcopalian in Calvanist Scotland that – initially – sided with the king’s enemies he was hounded by those who questioned his religious credentials, and coveted his ancestral lands. He survived to tell the tale, but his vision of man as prey looked truer than ever in the decades following the writing of the poem.

25

POETRY

Dilantha Gunawardana

Weddings in Colombo Like a ‘Nidikumba’, the touch-me-nots, That turn to sleep on touch, Bride and groom, they sleep with each other, The nuptials in church, just a façade, A legitimate institution to making babies.

How out-of-wedlock is an embargo, For making little bundles of joy. No woman Wants to balloon out without gold

Andrew Fleck, who has been a secondary school teacher, proof reader and EFL teacher, among other things, writes on poetry and history at sweettenorbull.com.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

Orbiting the ring finger. Marriage here in Colombo, Is just to get a ticket to making babies.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

26

27

And they go on, on the marriage bed, The well-oiled bodies they are, Practicing the skillful art of making love, Now with a piece of paper backing them,

A Pervert’s World

No longer inside sleazy motel rooms, Or parked cars, only inside a beautiful home.

Orgasms were just those screamers, Those supernovas, of the courtship years.

They go on, the pill, a forgone tradition, And love, just a game of strategy To checkmate an egg, make a hole For a tadpole to squeeze in.

And they huff and puff until A little stream goes down a little grotto.

The love doctor says, An apple a day is good for you, When it is that time of the month.

Ovulation is just plain Humpty Dumpty.

How easy it is to forget everything else When you’re in the baby zone.

The third wheel, the crowd, the triangle, Two people aspire to, and more importantly, The bastard, he or she is not.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

I think of all the perverts in a private bus, The hormone charged teenager, The prowling middle-aged man, And throngs of beautiful women, Whose bottoms, they conglomerate too.

Like those dogs fed by old aunties, That come running, their tails wagging, To taste a bowl of leftover rice, Their tongues frothing in saliva.

How trivialized perversion has become; The dogs, men are, in bitch patrol, A boneless boner that makes, Silent music beneath a zipper, The ticket for a journey from here to there.

The bitch, a woman becomes, to The queasiness of torrential desire.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

28

29

A Three Wheeler (The Tuk Tuk) And some people they empathize, With these mad perverts, that loiter, A wetness like that of the monsoons.

In a bus, a woman moves away, sensing the stranger, Still the crowded bus is a hard turf, To maneuver and squeeze through.

What a pest, a mouse is, inside a crowded bus, In an uncomfortable and unwanted caress.

A woman who is too scared to turn around, Feeling him probing, as he goes on, In his own twisted way, it is love, Just like how “beach” is pronounced “bitch”.

The racket, the noise, of a cacophonous engine, And a small space inside a tuk-tuk, Where most things can happen.

Enough room to hold hands, Or for a lunging kiss, a lesson in French, Or even, first and second base, A touch, a squeeze or a lap dance.

And sometimes, much more.

A reminder that just like under an umbrella Many things do happen, on the back seat Of an auto-rickshaw. How man and woman, Make space-less fittings of their anatomies, How thrilling it is, to be on the back seat, Styling ourselves as dogs always do, The beauty of a ravishing sunset near a beach, Eclipsed by the song of our interfaced bodies.

Corporeal proof that we don’t need A hotel room to be lovers.

Two people making beautiful love,

He calls “love”, “Elaw”, in his broken English, And the bus is his love shack,

Learning, how absolutely dog-friendly, The back seat of a rickshaw is.

A pervert’s world of arousing the dog in him, And the plight of a beautiful woman,

Claustrophilia of flesh, Two faces lighting up like the full moon, And still strangers in physiognomy.

How close we were, the warmth of a rickshaw, A free-ride to the other side, To the afterlife of ecstasy, As we drift to a world of beautiful percussion, How we become balance-freaks

Who wishes so much, She had giant squid eyes on her back.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

30 Letting a machine quake on three wheels, Like an egg about to hatch.

31

Mallika Bhaumik

POETRY

How full of life we are, The shells we come out of, when we make love, In a world that gifts experience, To those who conquer, the coward’s spine, And jump onto a small space, To where dogs become Their own palindromes. Their own Gods.

And love was, just like a tuk-tuk, Barely there in balance, and still a thrilling ride, Through the traffic of a narrow alleyway, A road that you enter and exit, And a screaming engine, Exulting that exact moment, you feel A mammoth whale climbing out of your body.

An obese mammal. A sperm whale.

Dr Dilantha Gunawardana is a molecular biologist who graduated from the University of Melbourne. He moonlights as a poet. His poems have been accepted/published in Forage, American Journal of Poetry, Kitaab, Eastlit and Ravens Perch. He mixes science with poetry, when what matters is the expression of both DNA and words into something serendipitous. Although an Australian citizen, Dilantha is domiciled in Sri Lanka, his country of birth.

He blogs at - https://meandererworld.wordpress.com/ The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

Nurtured There is a distance that waits between you and me, our bed; a rift valley between two sleeping landmasses, between being close and getting estranged, between screaming scars and numb silence.

Someday... far away in time, we, two weary incomplete poems; the grey of dusk smeared on our faces sit on a park bench, among browning leaves.

The slipped away moments keep tugging us, we gather and string them in a pattern that speaks of nurturing; creating wholeness out of fragments in a city of short lived happiness .

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

32

33

Defiance

when you return It might be a summer day when you return.

The red of the April sun spreading, cotton dreams drying on the clothesline, a book of forbidden love ; resting upturned on the bosom

- a thirst to take sip of the fleeting bubbling youth,

as life passes by the narrow lane on a lonely languid noon A wait lulls the open beak of the crow, the wafting smell of ripening mangoes.

There’s a wait too in the parched skin of the green,

A tapestry of woven words covers her, the moss laden bricks of her old house, roots of aswath (peepal) forcing their way through, she too, has outgrown her years.

The toothless gum smiles, she has seen death, betrayal, vice, her blood drained away prematurely during the Naxalbari days, the empty rooms echo the footsteps of time, her eyes fail to see through the cobweb of memories.

Yet, she wears red, yet she is defiant, her every breath is a reminder, she is another Hajar churashir maa.

(Mother of 1084) Inspired by ‘Hajar Churashir Maa’, a story by Mahasweta Devi, on the Naxal movement (a mother whose son’s corpse number was 1084 in the morgue) which won her the Jnanpith Award

there’s a wait ,as the sky slowly darkens.

The night hears the rhythm of the falling rain, a fragile corner of the heart quivers, a fairy tale longs to reach an end.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

Mallika Bhaumik had been a student of literature and has a Master’s degree from the University of calcutta in English Literature. Her writes have been published by Rock Pebbles, Cafe Dissensus, Duanes poetree, Glomag, Narrow Road, Diff Truths and others. She is the author of her poetry book, Echoes,

by Authorspress,which is currently available on Amazon.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

34

POETRY

Nabanita Kanungo

35

Technically, it’s you who are a bisor lāu, if you come to think of it.

In our own pathetic ways, we’d learn the stuff of seasons— I, with three failed street-shows; she, with the way our eyes turned to stone— so one day, we’d stop fidgeting in our traps, breathing whole years to seconds, seconds to nows; gather into a sanctuary inside us, where dreams don’t sneak in disguised, for a sampling, a taste, a quick bite.

Two poems for my mother

That Thing Again And it’s when she’d come to know how seeds are stripped of light, how they grow into an earth which must bite off its tongue not to have to wait for sweetness anymore….

Before the years cured her of hope, mother would warn me not to turn into the proverbial gourd-for-seed, until I corrected that analogy one day to her married, middle-class horror.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

I still suffer an urge to explain to her exactly how bad it is, as though words would help us unlearn the simplicity of this betrayal— organs and glands that foresaw the end of lies but every bone in my body tells me she knows, of course she knows: we are fruits, falling heavy and weightless with what we know and in this we are beautiful and never alone.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

36

Happy Birthday Light unwinds to begin.

Time still trapped in your body, is a number dancing to a countdown on my fingers.

Have so many of those birds flown away?

Let’s see, if you live to eighty like your mother, I would have about thirteen songs to sing with you, only thirteen….

I keep asking silly how old you’ll be today, my fears hissing under each irritating repeat of the question: we are names for cages, cages within cages, one cage giving in to another, until you know you mustn’t try figuring out which is the bird, which the cage…

Lalon doesn’t peddle solace in the song shrinking in your body today with its terrible aches and weariness; and Boida too, who thought birthdays were like sightings of a light-house from deep-sea; to have passed another year is no small feat in this deadly uncertainty; the near-blind eye most clearly sees the miracle, The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

37 the near-dead hag deserves the best, most chaotic of parties….

Ma, I want to sing you Happy Birthday, simply as it’s meant to be sung but the notes have morphed into wings beating fiercely in Aita’s ninety-three-year-old eyes, the last song dying to be shed from an old tree, a truth I grow more afraid of each year when many happy returns have buried themselves alive in irony…

So with the remaining songs in my 36 year-old cage, your absurd hope that I will go after you, not follow you too soon, I return a speck of your indulgence, gift you your illusion.

I wish you Happy Birthday as happily as the child I should seem to you, though I’m swallowing hard between hugs and kisses and really wishing you a quiet, quick painless exit.

Nabanita Kanungo is from Shillong. Her poems have appeared in Caravan,Planet (The Welsh Internationalist), Prairie Schooner, The Missing Slate, ELSEWHERE LIT, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, Café Dissensus and The Bombay Literary Magazine, among others. Her work has also been anthologised in Ten: The New Indian Poets (Nirala Publications, 2013), Gossamer (Kindle Magazine, 2015) and 40 under 40 (Poetrywala, 2016). A Map of Ruins, her first book of poems, was published by Sahitya Akademi in 2014.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

38

FICTION

Duane L. Herrmann

Jared and Malika bought the house for their own separate reasons. Jared was tired of being cooped up in the apartment and wanted a place to keep his tools and be able to spread them out when he needed them. This place had a sizable garage. He also hoped the house could take Malika’s mind off the baby.

Malika wanted the house because she wanted a “home.” She wanted to walk from the car directly to her front door. She wanted to be able to step out the back door into her very own yard with a garden. She wanted to look out the windows and see her own trees and flowers. She wanted a home where children could play. When she got to that point she would begin to cry.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

39 The house was over a hundred years old and needed work and that was fine with both of them. In fact, that was one of the reasons they both were able to agree on it. They could fix it up to meet their needs. They’d lived in a cramped apartment for so long, the house felt spacious - even while living in just two rooms while they worked on the rest of it.

In the past century the house had been changed here and there. A room had been added to the front, without a basement, though the rest of the house had a basement. This was now the living room. The original living room had been opened to the tiny kitchen and served as the dining area. In the master bedroom a wall had been bumped out to add a closet. Walking around the house, Malika had expected to see a window on that wall, but once inside she discovered why there was not. A large deck had been added to the back which she and Jared now wanted to cover and enclose with screens for a more year-round porch.

Upstairs were three rooms and a central hall. The stairway came up to the hall where a window lit the hall from one side. You could stand up fully there because the roof had been raised with the window on the outside wall. There were bedrooms on each end of the hall. The bedrooms did not have full ceilings because the upstairs was like an attic under the sides of the roof. The walls of the bedrooms came up a few feet before the slanting sides of the ceiling.

On one side of each room was a tiny low closet behind the short wall.

The space in these closets was triangular: the short wall, the floor and the angled roof.

The bathroom was between the two bedrooms and as long as the hall. Opposite the door from the hall was the bathtub. The wall there, under the slanting ceiling, was taller than in the bedrooms.

There was no window. Jared and Malika decided to open that wall, but not all the way. They would open the top half and make a shelf under the slanting roof. Then they would put a skylight in the roof to light up the bathroom. The shelf would also be a place to put plants in pots. It would be an indoor garden! They set to work on their first project.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

40 In the demolition work they found a small bundle of letters.

The paper was yellow and brittle with spidery handwriting. Malika was curious about them and eager to read what they said. Jared was not interested. In fact, he had tossed them in the trash where Malika had found them. She set them aside until one day when she carefully opened them and began to read.

Dearest Rosabel, I had the strangest dream last night and I wish you were here so I could tell you. I don’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t frightening, so it wasn’t a night mare, but it was so real, more real than some things I’ve seen while I was awake. I felt so good during the dream that I felt awful when I woke up and realized it was just a dream. I really didn’t want it to end. Somehow, and I can’t explain it, somehow, I feel certain that it won’t end.

I know this sounds foolish, I so wish you were here, this is so hard to confine these precious feelings to mere words on paper. If you were here I just know you’d understand. Oh, I’m not getting anywhere at all with this!

On the side of a mountain I saw a building that was square with columns, sort of a palazzo around it, the top was tall with tall windows and on top of that was a dome, a golden dome. I’ve never seen such a building in my life, I’m sure. It didn’t look quite continental, or eastern.

It, it wasn’t any style I can name. It wasn’t like any other style I’ve ever seen. It was white, except the lower portion, shaded by the palazzo, that was darker, but not black. It’s so hard to describe and the image is already beginning to fade.

What hasn’t faded is the feeling of joy when I saw it, as if it signaled the beginning of hope; hope for the human race! Now that’s rather silly, I know, but really, that’s how I felt in the dream: this building was bringing hope to the human race, to the entire planet. And there were people going up the mountain to this building - all kinds of people dressed in the most outlandish of costumes. And these people were all colors: red, yellow, black and brown. I couldn’t see any details, of The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

41 course, but I knew they were people from all corners of the earth. How they got there, I haven’t the foggiest idea, but somehow this seemed like a vision of the future and such outlandish things will be possible then.

These people were walking up steps, through gardens, the most beautiful gardens I’ve ever seen, to this building. The whole mountain side appeared to be gardens, lawns and pathways. I can’t imagine where such a place could be. I’ve never heard of gardens on a mountain side.

It didn’t seem to be a very tall mountain, it wasn’t high enough for snow to be on top, nothing like the Alps, but steep, really steep. It was certainly taller than anything here in Kansas.

Oh, Rosabel, if the crops hadn’t failed you could still be here with me!! It is so lonely here without you. No one has bought your farm, Pappa said the bank would hold it as long as possible; he really wants your family back too. How can we build up this country when people continue to leave? The school is nearly empty; they may not open it next fall. I’ve even considered teaching the little ones, there’s only three now, Porter doesn’t count, he’s fifteen now (can you believe it) and working with his pa all day now. Curtis has been making eyes at me, but I’m not ready for that yet!

I’ve got to go now, Pappa’s going to town and if this letter doesn’t go now, it will be several weeks before he goes again. I just had to tell you about the dream; it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

I miss you so much, Sincerely,

You most affectionate cohort,

Irmengard Rumsfielt Dearest Rosabel, You’ll never guess!!! I may have been silly, I don’t know. Do you remember Porter Dunbar? He spilled ink on my second best gingham one day at school. I could tell that he really didn’t mean it, he just wanted to tease me, but it went wrong. I’d had a difficult morning before getting to school, I think it was the time McAlliser’s bull tried to chase me a ways. Anyway, I burst out bawling and that really upset him - the The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

42 whole escapade went wrong for him.

That’s all beside the point now, what I want to say is that we’re married!!!

I’m sure you’re shocked, I’m still surprised. It was rather sudden.

Six months ago I wouldn’t have thought of it, but things change. His pa died, so he’s taking over the farm and there’s no more school to teach, so what else was there for me to do? Now I can help him on the farm, his mother and younger sister, do you remember Elvira? She was so little when you left. We’ve become good friends and we help out Mother Dunbar, it still sounds a little odd to call her that, but I’m getting used to it.

Do you remember that dream I wrote you about last? I’ve had another one. This time there wasn’t a mountain, but a hill with another building on it. This one was somewhat like the other, but different.

It had a dome, but a large one, and the building was circular, but with straight sides. It sounds kind of confusing, I know, but I don’t know how else to describe it.

Anyway, each of the sides had a door and steps leading up to the door. The doors were open and all kinds of people, all colors, dressed in all kinds of outlandish clothes, were going in. They were very polite and calm, no pushing or shoving. They acted like they all knew each other - but how could such different kinds of people be together - and know each other!!?!!

I don’t know what they did inside, or even what the building was. Like the building in the other dream, Sincerely,

You most affectionate cohort,

Irmengard Rumsfielt Rosabel!

My dream, the ones I’ve written you about, I had another one.

This time I, well, in the dream, I went into one of those buildings. Why are the dreams about buildings? I have no idea!! Anyway, the buildings are some kind of church - the people go inside and site quietly and The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

43 pray. I guess they’re praying. Their heads are bowed. I’m sure they were praying, it felt like they were praying and it looked like they were praying.

The building inside was very simple: no statues, no cross - that was odd, no elaborate decorations. But very elegant, I guess you would say. There were different colors on the walls and ceiling, so it did not look dull and boring. No one appeared bored; they all looked content and happy to be there.

That’s an odd thing about these dreams - all the people in them are happy, and all colors together, ALL of them. In every dream, every person has been happy. Maybe that’s why it’s a dream - such a thing can’t happen in real life. I’ve never, in all my life, seen so many people, so happy, as in these dreams.

I’ve seen people happy at parties, and little children happy at play, but not so many adults as this. I wonder what could make them happy so...

Well, it’s just a dream - and anything can happen in a dream!

Mother Dunbar died, now it’s just me and Porter and sister Eliza. The house is really empty without her. She was kind to me as a child and took me in just like a daughter. I still don’t think of the house as being mine yet. Porter teases me about all the changes I can make, but I haven’t seen any reason to change much of anything. And I wouldn’t want Eliza to think I was getting rid of her mother. Things are fine the way they are. When I make a change, I talk it over with Eliza first, to see if she thinks her mother would mind. She likes that and we’ve grown closer together.

Sincerely,

You most affectionate cohort,

Irmengard Rumsfielt Rosabel, We’re going to have a baby!! I wasn’t sure until last week, but I am now. It’s been too long, if you know what I mean. Eliza and I will go through the baby things in the attic to see what I might need. I hope The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

44 there is enough there, we don’t need to spend any more money now than we absolutely need to. This year has been dry again, not as bad yet as the year you left, but the crops are already hurting.

It’s exciting to think of having a baby, but I’m worried that it’s going to be a bad year.

Sincerely,

You most affectionate cohort,

Irmengard Rumsfielt Dearest Rosabel, You would not recognize me now! I can’t do anything but waddle like a duck!! I’m so glad Eliza is here, she has been such a help.

I’ve had another of those dreams, at least it seemed like it, but it was different from the others. There were no buildings or gardens, it was people, but these people were like the people in the other dreams, all colors of people together, so I think it belongs to the other dreams.

Anyway, this was a wonderful dream!

The large group of people had gathered together. They prayed and then a young couple stood up and walked to the center of the group; everyone was facing into a circle. The couple had a baby. They held the baby and talked to the group. I can’t remember now what they said, but it was something about the child growing and becoming a loving and nurturing person. It was so sweet and wonderful, it made me cry. My pillow was wet!!

I felt such love for that child; everyone in the room loved that child. I knew that if ever in that child’s life, he needed help at any time; any of those people would risk their lives for him.

I just KNEW it!! I don’t know how, I just knew it.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, as a mother, to know that you were not alone in raising your son or daughter; that there were lots of other people ready to help you?

Sincerely,

You most affectionate cohort,

Irmengard Rumsfielt The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

45 Dear Rosabel, Little Dysen is so big now. He is beginning to walk and is as proud of himself as he toddles along. He smiles and my heart just melts.

I never knew I could feel such happiness!!

I’ve had another of those dreams, and this time I think it is the last one. The end of it had finality to it that the others didn’t have, oh!

That sounds weird. I don’t know how to explain the feeling. Only time will tell if it is the end.

If it is the last one.... what will life be like without them?

I’ve come to look forward to them and cherish them. Sometimes the beauty and peace of those dreams is all I have to help me make if from one day to the other. The world I see in those dreams is so different from the world I see around me. I don’t know how that dream world has any connection to this real world. On, well...

In this dream there was one man, a specific man, he had a rather old fashioned beard, but it was his clothes that were odd. He wore a sort of robe – almost full length to the ground. It wasn’t oriental, but it wasn’t like a bathrobe either. It was somewhat like a coat – and very simple, yet elegant.

He was walking and talking to people, they were dimmer in the dream, so I knew he was the important part of the dream. Not only was he brighter and more distinct than the other people, and he was the focus of their attention, but he seemed to radiate a sense of power and calm. He was very serene, as if he was supremely confident that all in the universe was in order and nothing was going wrong. Even when things are unpleasant, or downright awful - it’s all part of God’s plan and we don’t need to fret or despair over it, but do what we can to help other people as much as possible.

He was a wonderful person and I could tell that the people in the dream with him were changed by their connection to him. He was religious, sort of, but in a way that wasn’t removed from real life. He was not distant from the world, nor disdainful of it, like lots of preachers I’ve seen, but actively engaged in the conditions of life. It was inspiring just to see him walk.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

46 I don’t know who he was. I’ve never seen him, or anyone like him, but I know he’s a real person - of that I am absolutely convinced.

And he lived in the Holy Land, I’m sure of that too. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. You know how in dreams you just “know” things?

There was nothing in the dream to indicate what his name might be, but the word “glory” comes to mind. I don’t understand, but the dream world is different from this world. Could his name be “Glory?” It seems absurd to me, but who knows?

Here is the weirdest part: the dream seemed to have a connection to an article I read in Everybody’s a while back. It was a winter issue about 1912. The article was about a man who lived in the Holy Land. He was some kind of holy man, but one who is very practical. I don’t remember much about the story now. I don’t subscribe, I read it at Lucinda’s and she was reading it from someone. He taught a kind of religion that doesn’t act like a religion. For instance, they don’t have ministers or preaching.

There was a drawing of him and he looked very peaceful and wise. I want to learn more about him, whoever he is.

Sincerely,

You most affectionate cohort,

Irmengard Rumsfielt Darling Rosa, I don’t know how to say this - my heart is breaking. I’ve spent the last weeks crying. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again. How can I be?

My precious baby, sweet and wonderful Dysen, brave as he was, has passed on. He expired in my arms not understanding any of it. He tried to wipe the tears from my eyes, then sighed so peacefully and was gone!!! It breaks my heart. I just can’t go on.

Sincerely,

You most affectionate cohort,

Irmengard Rumsfielt *** The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

47 Malika gasped. She’d never imagined this. She had become so caught up in the letters that she felt Irmengard had been writing to her. Her heart went out to this mother who had also had a child die. Dysen must have been older than her baby. Kierra was only six weeks old. He had so many physical complications, the doctors where amazed he had lived that long. That didn’t help her heart any.

Little Kierra was her pride and joy – and now she was gone.

The memory of holding her lifeless little body swept over Malika and she began to sob.

She cried for a few minutes grieving over her baby girl then her eyes glanced at the first words of the next letter. They surprised her and she resumed reading to see what had happened.

Dearest Rosa, God is Most Merciful! I don’t know how it could have happened, but the Glory Man, I don’t know what else to call him, came to me in a dream again last night. He said he is taking care of my precious baby.

He said my little Dysen would not have been able to grow in this world, so God was merciful and let him come home early. Then he seemed to draw open a curtain in the air, though there was no curtain, and I saw my sweet boy playing, running and laughing with other little boys. He was so happy. He never had a playmate here and I could never spend as much time to play with him as he wanted.

It was so wonderful to see him again, alive and so happy. His laughter, I can still hear it. I’ll cherish that vision always. God is Merciful! I can sleep nights now. I still cry, but through my tears I can see him play.

And the Glory Man, around his head, on his head, he was wearing a sort of hat-turban, I don’t know what to call it, anyway – there were letters of light, very bright: B - A - H – A. I don’t know what that means. Is it a word? His name? I don’t know, I don’t know how to find out. Oh, well. I must close.

Sincerely,

Affectionately, Irmi *** The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

48 Malika thoughtfully opened the next paper wondering about those four letters: B – A – H - A. What did they mean? That was certainly mysterious. Maybe she could find out on the internet.

Then her eyes went to the words on the page.

Dear Rosa, I have good news and bad news. I’m going to have another baby.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but I remember little Dysen playing in the dream and I feel it’s all right to have another baby. I’ve begun to show a little, so I don’t go out any more, but who has time?

We have to move. The crops have failed again and the bank is taking over the farm. We can’t pay the mortgage or the notes on the equipment. Porter tried to delay them, and he was successful more than once, but the new owner of the bank would not give us any more time. We’re not sure where we’ll end up. I’ll write as soon as I can.

I couldn’t bear to leave my baby here in that lonely cemetery, but thanks to the Glory Man, I know my little boy is not really in that grave. He is somewhere else, in a far better place. My precious darling is playing with his new friends in some other world and he is happy.

That is all that matters to me now. I’ll write as soon as I can.

Sincerely,

Irmi *** That was the last of the letters.

Malika sat stunned. In just the few minutes she had been reading them, she had grown close to Irmengard, and was even a little jealous of Rosa being her friend.

She leaned back and pondered over them. What happened to Irmengard Rumsfielt, the bereaved young mother who wrote them?

Why were there no more letters? And where was little Dysen buried?

Which cemetery? Where did they live? There was no return address.

And no dates. They were written a long time ago, but for Malika it had all happened just yesterday.

She put the letters aside and went outside to walk in the yard, The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

49 her yard, her flowers, her trees. She was comforted by the dream.

She was sure her little Kierra was also in that other world and playing with other children. She would never have been able to do that here, Malika was sure. The doctors had said, even if she lived, she would always have been severely handicapped physically. Being in that other place was much, much better. Malika closed her eyes and envisioned her there.

She knew things would be okay now. She was sure Kierra was in a better place. And, the next baby would be fine. She hadn’t told Jared yet, she had wanted to be sure. Now, she was. But, what did those four letters mean: B – A – H - A?

Duane L. Herrmann is a fifth generation Kansan, several branches of his family have been on the North American continent since before the American revolution, with one Native branch even longer than that. He writes from, and about, all these perspectives.

His full-length collections of poetry are: Prairies of Possibilities, Ichnographical: 173, and Praise the King of Glory. His poetry has received the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship, inclusion in American Poets of the 1990s, the Map of Kansas Literature and the Kansas Poets Trail (Wichita, KS) and other awards. Other writing has received the Ferguson Kansas History Book and Writer’s Matrix awards. His work has been published in more than a dozen countries in four languages in print and online. These accomplishments are remarkable considering his traumatic childhood embellished by dyslexia, ADD and PTSD The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

50

FICTION

She got home in late afternoon. The front door was open and Roman was sitting outside on a chair with a bottle of beer. As she approached, she heard loud music coming from inside the house.

She walked up to Roman. “Why aren’t you doing your job?”

Roman’s eyes grew wide. “Mrs. Hove said it was okay, Lily. Told me to chill out, have a beer. They’re partying in the library, Mrs. Hove and the other Mrs. Hove, you know, the cousin, whatever.”

She took the beer from his hand. “Get back inside, secure the door, and do your job. You’re security here. If you ever let down your guard again, I’ll fire you.”

Roman jumped to his feet, confused. She entered, he followed, shut the door, assumed his usual place in the alcove.

As Lily walked toward the music, Mrs. Steele appeared in the hallway. “I had to open the wine cellar, Lily. Mrs. Hove’s guest, she threatened my job if I kept it locked. I didn’t know what else to do.

Please don’t fire me.”

Lily touched her hand. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Steele. Try to keep Mrs. Hove and her guest happy. We’ll ride out the storm.”

“Thank you, Lily. Tell me when it stops raining.”

In the west end library and former bar, the two Mrs. Hoves were The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

51 sitting together on a couch with Old Fashioned glasses. An open bottle of gin and bucket of ice were on a table.

Lily went to the stereo and switched it off.

Daphne shot her a look of hatred; Vergie smiled, head lolling, wobbly, eyes vague.

“What’s going on?” Lily said.

Daphne said, “We’re having a party, Miss Lily. We always do when I arrive.”

“Vergie’s in recovery, Daphne. She’s forbidden to drink alcohol. I can see she’s drunk, and you’re the cause. You’re interfering with her recovery.”

Vergie said, “One drink won’t hurt me, love.” Slow speech, slurred words.

Daphne said, “A few drinks are fine. I know, I read an article on the subject. So-called alcoholics can drink in moderation if they choose. When it gets out of control, they go to rehab. That’s why rehabs exist.”

“Have you two had anything to eat today?”

“Do olives count?”

“Vergie, I want you to stop this right now. I’ll have Mrs. Steele make you something to eat and then I want you to go to bed.”

Vergie waved her hand. “I’ll eat at the club, love. Come along with us if you like. We’ll meet all my friends, gossip, listen to the music, maybe dance, have a good time. I haven’t had a good time in ages, only shit and misery.”

Daphne laughed. “Shit and misery’s right.” She glared at Lily.

“Leave it alone, Missy. Don’t be such a crotchety old control freak.

Join the party or go do your knitting in the kitchen with the help.”

Vergie handed Daphne her glass. Daphne dropped in ice cubes, filled it to the top with gin, handed it back. The two Mrs. Hoves clinked their glasses in toast, then raised them to Lily.

“Come along to the club, love,” Vergie said.

“I’m sorry, Vergie. I have work to do. Roman will chauffeur you to the club, wait for you, and bring you safely home.” # The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

52 Next morning, 10 a.m., Lily found Vergie in the kitchenette eating a light breakfast. Puffy face and bags under the eyes, she radiated hangover.

“Good morning,” Lily said. She sat and poured herself a mug of coffee.

Vergie glanced at her, poked at a slice of honeydew. “I apologize for the way I acted yesterday.” She slowly raised a bit of green melon to her mouth, lowered it, then tried a second time. “Say something, Lily.”

“Daphne’s not good for you, dearheart.”

Vergie took a sip of coffee, grimaced. “This tastes spectacularly bad. You said the cook was an artist.”

“The coffee’s fine, Vergie. Your taste is simply off.” She paused.

“So, how was the party?”

“What party? Did I go to a party? Why don’t I remember?”

“It’s that old blackout magic.”

“Someone should write a song.”

“Where is she?”

“She borrowed the Mercedes, went somewhere, I’m not clear on where, I think to visit an old boyfriend, won’t be back till late tonight.

Sorry about the car. I know you’ve been using it.”

“I can use my own if I need to go somewhere. Does she have many boyfriends?”

“Must be thousands, all over the world, possibly even in Antarctica and Greenland by the stories she tells.”

“Well, of course. She is such a delightful and charming person, beneath the rude behavior and superficial appearance, I mean.”

Vergie smiled. “You two don’t . . . you don’t exactly . . .”

“Oil and water? Cyanide and human life? Good versus evil?”

“She’s my cousin, Lily, my only one, and my only living relative, unless, God forbid, I adopt the Roach family of trailer trash bumpkins.”

“What else?”

“She says . . . she says you’ve taken control of my life, you’re a fortune hunter, you lack sophistication and education, you’re the wrong The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

53 class, not our kind of people. I think she said other things, but I don’t remember what they were, they’ll come to me eventually.”

Lily laughed. “Don’t bother to tell me if they do. I get the gist.

Most is probably true, but not the fortune hunter part.”

“Don’t worry, love. But having her—an outsider—view our relationship made me ask myself, what are you doing here? You already have a career, so why complicate your life with me?”

“Because you’re my friend, and I want to help you, and . . . I love you.”

Vergie took her hand, their eyes met. “Yes, m’love.” She looked away. “I mentioned changing the will. She doesn’t think it necessary, you’re only after my money.”

“Nonsense. All I want is for you to set up a foundation to enhance the Hove family reputation. She can cancel it if she inherits.

All this talking, what your cousin thinks or suspects or whatever makes me uncomfortable. She’s a difficult person, insecure and suspicious by nature. When I met her yesterday, she immediately treated me as a rival, not a friend who was looking out for you. I don’t think I’m being overprotective. If you do, perhaps I should get out of your life altogether. If you want me to leave, I’ll forget all the verbal commitments you’ve made and the employment contract. It’s up to you.

Do you want me to leave?”

“No, of course no. Stay. Let’s work things out.”

“Stay, and watch you kill yourself as she looks on and tells you to ignore my advice?”

“Step in if you think I’m losing it. Please don’t leave me, Lily. She won’t be here forever. If it gets bad, move to the carriage house and stay until she goes back to Italy or wherever.”

“I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me, dearheart.”

“Excellent. I feel better now, getting all this off my chest. We had a good talk, Lily, and I’m absolutely positive things will improve. No more drinks for this girl. I’ll finish up here, take a hot bath, and then let’s go the health club and work the evil out of me. Tonight we’ll watch an old movie on TV, stay sober, and tomorrow morning the three of us will breakfast together and you and Daphne will work out The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

54 your differences and become great friends.” She raised her eyebrows.

“Think positive, what I always say.” # Next morning, she met with Vergie and Daphne at 8 a.m. on the veranda behind the house. Their breakfast table overlooked the oak forest, swimming pool, and pool house. It was set with fine china, silver, and glassware, and stocked with enough fruits, juices, champagne, croissants, and varied egg concoctions with bacon and meat side dishes to serve a dozen guests.

Daphne poured champagne all around, then sat back, watching Lily and Vergie make their food and drink choices. They made friendly smalltalk for a while, the atmosphere among them less tense than before.

Lily said, “I won’t be able to go with you to the health club this morning, Vergie. I have a business appointment in town and it may keep me busy after lunch.”

“What appointment?” Vergie said.

“Business, dearheart. Never mind the boring details.”

“I need my car.”

“Take the Mercedes. I’ll drive my own car. Why don’t you and Daphne both go to the health club?”

“I hate exercise,” Daphne said. “All that jumping up and down and running around, getting worked up, hyperventilating, stressing the heart and body. People die exerting themselves.” She took out a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter.

Lily stared at the lighter, identical to the one she had taken from Tony the night she watched him drown. “My, Daphne, I didn’t know you smoked those things.”

“They’re mentholated and filter-tipped, perfectly harmless. I get them from a man in London. Doctors prescribe them.”

Lily laughed. “I doubt it.”

Daphne smiled. “Try one, you’ll like it.”

“She’s too young to smoke,” Vergie said. “Don’t get her started on your foul habits.”

“Foul habits are great fun, Vee. I believe in live fast, die young.”

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

55

“It’s getting late, don’t you think?”

Lily said, “Vergie, you must go to the health club. Ignore Daphne’s bad behavior and think of your health and welfare. You’ve got over the booze and pills, I hope, and now it’s time to get into shape.”

Daphne stared at her. “You’re in wonderful shape, Lily. You must have good genes.”

“I work hard at it, Daphne. It’s nurture not nature. I come from poor, old country stock.”

Daphne said, “Vee, I do believe your friend is mocking us.”

Lily said, “Vergie, are you going to the health club or not?”

Vergie lifted a champagne flute, slowly sipped, savoring it. “I’m thinking.”

Daphne said, “Don’t push her, Lily. She’s an adult, free to make her own choices.” She refilled Vergie’s flute.

Vergie said, “Thank you, Cousin Daphne. I’ll go. Lily knows what’s good for me. I think you should come with me. God knows, we both need it.”

“Oh, my,” Daphne said. “What are you two, born again Christians? I need proper, dissolute company, not temperance crusaders.”

Vergie touched Lily’s hand, leaned close, “I believe we’re finally getting to her, Lily. Next week, we’ll take her to the revival.”

Daphne lit another cigarette. “Speaking of dissolute company, whatever happened to the idiot you were married to, Tony whatsisname?”

“Roach, Dee,” Vergie said, “not whatsisname.”

“Good name for the fellow. He was a hunk, I’ll admit, but he was shifty. I know the type. I’m absolutely sure he stole my Dunhill.

I found him in my bedroom one day, going through my drawers.”

Lily laughed, “It must’ve been valuable, if you kept it in your drawers.”

“Tony wouldn’t steal from you,” Vergie said. “I gave him everything he needed. You probably lost it somewhere yourself. You think money all the time, but you’re careless with things, always misplacing them, and men, always divorcing them.”

“I was only divorced twice. The other was an annulment. The The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

56 annulment was cheaper. If I ever marry again, it’ll be to another Papist.”

Lily said, “Did you convert when you married?”

“I tried, couldn’t master all the mumbo jumbo. They do have impressive cathedrals, lovely music, and the vestments are colorful but, you know, they’re all sissies and pedophiles. Speaking of religion, did you hold a funeral for whatsisname?”

“Do you like funerals, Daphne?”

“They’re good for my asthma, give the tear ducts and plumbing a workout.”

Vergie said, “We’re too busy, no funeral.”

“Where’s the body then? I hope not in an ice chest downstairs.”

“Lily had him cremated.”

Lily said, “It was Vergie’s idea.”

Vergie looked at her, puzzled. “Where’s the ashes, love?”

Daphne laughed. “You don’t know where your husband’s ashes are? Oh, my, and you chide me for losing husbands.”

“Well,” Vergie said, “I can’t be expected to keep track of everything around here. It’s a big household with many distractions and guests who come and go and . . .”

Lily laughed. “That’s what you hired me for, dearheart. As to the disposition of the late Mr. Roach, he’s in an urn, out in the garage. I thought it was appropriate, considering how he loved his expensive sports cars.”

Vergie said, “I approve, at least for the time being. I only wish he could have loved me as much as an Alfa Romeo.”

Daphne perked up. “What kind of Alfa?”

“I don’t know,” Vergie said. “It’s an old one, a red convertible.”

Lily said, “It’s a 1964 Giulietta Spider.”

Daphne said, “Let me have it, Vee. I had one when I was living in Italy.”

“Of course, Dee. No one’s using it. It’s sitting out there in the garage gathering dust.”

Lily fumed. Vergie had already forgotten offering the Alfa to her.

The thought of Daphne driving her pristine little car almost made The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

57 her sick.

“It hasn’t been driven in ages,” Lily said. “You should have someone qualified check it out before driving it.”

Daphne said, “Don’t worry, sweetie. I know Alfas. I drove all over Europe in one. I’ll try it out this afternoon.” She called the maid over and handed her a silver flask. “Fill this up with Booth’s and bring it back to me.”

Vergie said, “Don’t drink and drive, Dee.” “Why, because it’s unsafe?”

“No, because of what happens if you get caught. I did one time, so embarrassing, my name in the paper, all the snide gossip and looks people gave me. It took forever to live down.”

“Life’s short, Vee. I say, live and let live.”

They all laughed. # Lily thought the peacemaking breakfast had been fun. She had seen another side of Daphne, almost liked her. She was clever, often funny, even self-effacing. Knowing her better, it would be painful to lose her, but not for long.

Henry Simpson is the author of several novels, two short story collections, many book reviews, and occasional pieces in literary journals. His most recent novel is Golden Girl (Newgame, 2017).

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

58

FICTION Daniel Ableev

A very sick dream with a hat turned towards me and said: “I’ll have you recruited in no time.” - (Ag Nom, Nong) My colleagues were able to extract a number of symbols or characters from your recordings,” said the xenolinguist. “Could you elaborate?”

“Uel was used to solving crimes that nobody else could. He was an animal when it came to logical thinking – he could think himself into trans-waves. His latest assignment involved a massive case of ambiguity, concerning not only the perpetrator, who could or could not be X, but also the crime itself, that could or could not be Y. On the one hand, a piece of footage indicated that a young woman had been killed while visiting her grandmother’s grave, on the other hand no such indication was available from the point of view of the woman, who may or may not have been brutally murdered at a cemetery. Death had occurred and great suffering had been inflicted. Or had it? Other perspectives, however, allowed a radically different logical approach to the dilemma at hand. Uel had to involve an old NOR-matrix in order to get a grip on this constellation.

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

59 Other, far more precarious dichotomies were further complicating the situation Uel had deftly navigated himself into. The State Bank of Illinois was missing a considerable amount of gold. The police didn’t have the slightest idea how to retrieve the lost metal. A different voice, however, claimed that no gold had been stolen from the vault, for the simple reason that there was no such thing as a State Bank of Illinois to begin with. Uel was now getting somewhere, slowly, unsurely. Whereas his teeth were getting somewhere else.”

“So your predominant school of thought is something you call Golemism. Can you tell me more about how golemes play into your perception?”

“A beautiful woman called Anrim was seen as a ghostly reflection in the window of a shop where one could purchase theatrics. Uel followed Anrim’s reflection; it felt natural, grand, dazzling. Uel was in love with Anrim, which was not the name of the woman, but rather of the reflection that depicted a woman in a window. Uel tried to assess his precise feelings towards the female reflection and realized that there were none.

Obviously Uel was missing something essential. How else was it possible that infringement took place in a firm that had gone legit so many years ago? Uel conducted several deep interviews with the employees as well as the department manager. Nobody was able to give any revealing information concerning the aforementioned felony. Reality was becoming a mad whore that was about to bring in the pimp.

There was also trick meat involved. Uel thought he wouldn’t be able to get it done; the meat was feeding his dilemmas. Silently, Uel stared into the possibility of overlapping worlds.

Over the years, he had gotten used to his neighbor, an ongoing man named Niwin who thought he could do things. One day he flew deep into the skies and never returned. There was another man, Karl.

Karl could move things from A to B by taking a mental picture of B and renaming it A in his mind: Suddenly the desired object would travel from A to A (= B) instantaneously. Uel got to know yet another man whose name is of no significance. He was able to make everything third. He had a third arm, came in third, he would tell Uel The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

60 things always for the third time. When he woke up, he would have his third-person hallucination, which usually involved a fifth father with phenomenal legs.”

“The past being a function, or rather an amputation, of the future and present – how did it affect you personally, your ways? Apparently your whole perception is tightly linked to the Golemist origins, as is your pronunciation, which features what we’ve come to call golemic elasticity. Even your sudden hyper-movements turn out to be an ex-goleme in itself.”

“On the way to the morgue/church, Uel saw a father/yagg with his daughter. ‘Daddy/TPW,’ said the girl. ‘What is it, dear?’ answered the man/yagg. ‘Daddy/TPW, I swear I won’t let a single rain drop fly by me without recognizing its full superstring vibrato!’ What a wonderful, wonderful child, Uel thought. The numbers on his face let him smile an internal smile and the numbers in his eyes let him shed an eternal tear. Uel knew that his biceps would not be able to lift really heavy weights if it continued to be just another string of symbols, morphemes or pheromones. For he realized the sadness of the simple fact that the little girl couldn’t keep her promise, couldn’t keep anything at all.

There was a man in the church/morgue who was equipped with seven legs and a secondary head called caputtino. That man wasn’t breathing, his two heads weren’t moving. There was a red dot protruding from an ear-like opening on his left side. Uel explored the man’s body, its various features and featurettes. There was some sadness coming out of that eye-like hole on the front side of the second, smaller head. Although no signs of life were detectable, Uel wasn’t able to deduce this man’s death. There was a definitive dilemma involved, the basic nature of which couldn’t be explained in the usual terms of logical exclusion. On the one hand, there were many indications of a brutal, relentless murder that had taken place right there. On the other hand, murder involved somebody or at least something becoming dead, which didn’t seem to be true. It would be an exaggeration to state that anything that Uel was observing at the moment was obvious, which wasn’t the case at all. However, probability was an important aspect of The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

61 the man’s current state of affairs. Uel went into a mode of hyper-close strangeological exploration, which enabled him to draw incredibly precise conclusions from the superstring echoes that were reverberating inside the ribspace continuum. By applying his masterful organs of zooming in and listening to each of the two dead (?) heads and each of the seven members of the man’s body, as well as to the red dot, Uel started immediately collecting valuable, first-grade information leading him to a small belief system, which has to remain unnamed due to its provisional nature. This auxiliary belief system was based on the premise that every part of the man’s dead (?) body was connected to the possibility of death as well as to the possibility of immortality. The connective tissue – Uel was beginning to fall in love with it – was not as precious to Uel as his power to ag nom, nong things. He deepened his explorations into the dualities of things, applied psychopathics as diverse as the funnymen in his head circus, as perverse as the skepticism that he had led to clinical perfection. The body beside him started to jerk. There were breathing sounds, microscopic murmurings of sorts, bad teeth leading nowhere. This is when Uel produced a small, elegant quantum hammer which had a fine reverb to it. He used to work most of his cases with this subtle tool, dissolving nasty dichotomies by hitting the right molecules at the right angle. By striking the head and the eyes of the body that was still sort of break-dancing on its death bed, Uel established a solid status quo: The body finally embraced the concept of death and faded to black. Uel was sweating, his heart expiring like a nervous sun. His brain continued to rotate, maintaining levitation inside his skull.”

“But what about abstract things, like … due? Or names?”

“The curator of the famous WUN gallery reported a crime – one of the most expensive paintings from the current exhibition had been stolen. At least it wasn’t there anymore, at least not where the curator expected it to be. As it turned out, the curator’s mood was swinging like the 20s, thus promoting theft and robbery.

Uel was more than willing to go over dead bodies in order to find one that wasn’t dead yet, but when he talked to the curator of the internationally renowned gallery, he couldn’t help but notice that the cuThe Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

62 rator’s voice wasn’t originating from his (or its) mouth, which wasn’t moving. The curator’s lips were taking baby steps towards opening and closing, but without noticeable results. The talking was obviously done by something in the background. Uel, psychopathically skeptical by nature, zoomed in on the curator of the internationally renowned WUN gallery, especially his (or its) head, and realized that he had been talking to a mirror the whole time. Once again, a case could be solved simply by applying the Rule Of Four.

Uel moved on, but not without checking his agenda first. The next item was a young girl that had gone missing. Her parents, John and Jeanne Buras, were literally dying from pain of not-knowing. First, there was the not-knowing of the current location of their beautiful child who was not only missing, but also heavily missed by its caring parents. Secondly, nobody knew who had abducted their daughter and why. Once again, Uel’s main rule for investigative work of any kind came in handy, thus providing him with the most important not-knowing of all: Were Joanne and John Buras actually parents, or was their daughter, as they called the entity supposedly most precious to them, in fact nothing more than a delusion created by the need for dramatic narrative? Uel’s skepticism kicked in the doors of perception and revealed the young couple as a piece of melting ice in a glass of ginger lemonade. This moment of goleme-ex-vagina was accompanied by the apparition of a gnarly monstrosity with five teeth and unreal thin legs. It had a small third rudimentary leg between the two normal ones, thus subtly parodying the concept of genitalia.

Only two houses farther, a horrible manslaughter had occurred, and Uel was called in for deconstruction purposes. A convoy of Dadaistically modified vehicles was to make sure that Uel arrived safely at the crime scene. The primary challenge was to find out whether the term ‘crime scene’ was adequate at all. Firstly, a crime was needed. No crime could be detected. Secondly, an appropriate location was needed. No location could be detected.

Uel watched the kidnapped girl die in the arms of the dealer with a heart of platinum. He used to know the guy from so many transactions gone awry. Uel’s red hands were consumed by the histrionic The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

63 particles that were flowing from the past into the future and viscera versa, exchanging quantum vibratos, bleeding nicely into one huge goleme called existence. He remembered the pathetic words spoken by his grand master Ag Nom, Nong, imagined how his misdirected teeth were melting through the time-flesh continuum, rendering everything and everyone nonsense. The noses of so many innocents stolen right in front of their faces, the irregularity of verbs had also made a lasting impression on Uel’s estranged ‘mind.’ He kept, however, doing what he was best at – and resumed those cognitive biases most needed when solving a crime.

A mole named Garry the Shifter was found guilty of trying to have certain activities. Uel was the first detective to arrive at Garry’s luxurious home, where lots of technological breakthroughs had been made possible due to the fact that Garry the Shifter was a supernatural when it came to tight anuses. But what exactly had he perpetrated? Uel was welcomed into the house by a meandering robotic arm that was fixed to the fourth wall. The arm was capable of gentle gestures and grand schemes, combining both into an experience that made Uel disappear and reappear ultra-loyal: Thus he realized that Garry the Shifter was a brilliant, benevolent soul who could not harm a fly’s anus, and that his technological adventurism was giving future generations astounding birth jobs that were paradigm-shifting beatific. Garry’s private army of goleme-like sticks, of which he was very fondly, listened to each and every word of their creator, granting him every possible wish instantly.

There were not enough words to describe the non-existence of crimes that certain forces were trying to attach to Garry’s micro biotic nano-organism.

When Uel was in school, he used to play poker with all of his friends and teachers, admirers as well as haters. It was quite baffling how he was able to read his opponent’s mind, nobody could fool Uel, no poker face was enough to bluff him, it was breathtaking. Everyone was trying their best to deny Uel’s psychological genius, but Uel was winning every single poker game, again and again and again. Even if nobody was playing. He had crystal nerve endings and could talk anybody into thinking that a poker game was on when in reality there The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

64 was no poker game at all. People around Uel started to question the definition of their worlds. There was no distinction between poker and non-poker, people started forgetting what the relevant properties of poker were. They were laughing and singing and yelling possible and impossible things, all of them resulting in poker games sprouting out of sleeves like mushrooms out of the ordinary. Weird whispers were getting more and more rebellious, poker was the new thing apparently. Long after Uel had become a PI, his friends and teachers were still playing those old poker games – without teeth, mouths, eyes, heads, lungs, bluffing – endless poker sessions to the nth degree.

Uel had problems with his red hands again; it was something of a miracle that he still could control them. For it is a known fact that red tends to block messenger proteins and enables friendly fire among neurinos.”

“Please tell me more about your most influential manipulator Ag Nom, Nong. What was his approach to Golemism in particular and to de-structuralist processes in general?”

“Uel fell suddenly asleep. He wasn’t part of anything as of now. His glasses were falling, everything was involved in a downward movement. But Uel wasn’t part of this anymore. Crimes of all sizes and colors were happening around him, children were being kidnapped, cats decapitated, innocent bystanders tortured by members of special trocar units gone rogue. So many bad buildings (riddlings) were trying to get under Uel, to become Uel, but Uel just wasn’t part of them. He missed all his messages, he ignored all the questions and riddles that had attached themselves to the different instances. When Uel finally awoke, there was nothing to be taken care of, not a single unsolved case, nothing mysterious had remained. Everything was now clear to everybody, and everybody was clearly innocent. And that’s how Uel knew that no crime had ever happened before. But as soon as he regained consciousness, the crime rate rocketed into the heavens: Havoc God, hay wired to do certain things …

Uel was on his way to a crime scene that needed immediate evaluation. A lot of hearsay, disgusting things about a man beyond the Bruising Woods … Immediately after that Uel got very tired and deThe Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

65 cided to take a long walk. He had a lot on his contemplate and needed time to think, to reassess. His stroll took him one step beyond the Bruising Woods where he found guilt to be just another fruit hanging from trees. His eyes were wider than ever before, yet all he saw was ripe, lush, juicy guilt. But where are the crimes, sins and vices that go along with all this guilt, he asked himself. Not one wrongdoing was to be found, not one woman assaulted, not one elder-goo bludgeoned …

Uel was pretty much exhausted, yet he somehow mobilized his very last power sources and followed the trail of guilt that had been left by the animals around him. Like swines they were, swines of brutal death and depravity, disguised as motorics of infinity. Uel thought of Ag Nom, Nong and his mischievous, diverse teachings. Golemes, he used to tell his students, can glide with you into the guilt’s den, and right in the middle of it you’ll find your personal happiness. Uel’s left eye was slowly closing now, he could see only half of the picture. He began to understand that he was the one, he had always been the only one to commit one last crime to end all crimes.”

“Once you had realized there was no difference between connotation and denotation, you were able to develop physical golemes.”

“As of now, Uel was moving boldly into the heart of immorality.

In his wake he recruited thousands of golemes. Uel did the only thing he could do in a situation like this: He made a huge goleme out of everything he knew and respected, hated, adored, abhorred … ‘When you look at this, you go straight to Japany,’ he was told once. But Uel’s golemes stayed right where he was. His dad didn’t have the informational capacity, his mom was always saying that all is good the way it is. It was quite unnerving, really.

Uel kept improving his malignant creation, putting into it all his powers of good and evil, heaven and hell. Tons of nucleotides went into his accumulation of all sin and greatness, weakness of character, bravado, crazado. Soon, enough golemes would be ready to substitute the whole existence with homogenous chowder. The machine equations seemed to check out nicely, this was going to become the most brutal event in history …”

“So the number of syllables you use in a certain context has diThe Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

66 rectly to do with the golemic density?”

“After some days of hard work, Uel rested and saw that his slave had become a master in its own right, fathering more and more slaves that would go on to become masters in their own right. Billions of trillions of layers of races, tribes, civilizations and subcultures. The cuteness of the world was gone, now there was the endless reign of Ag Nom, Nong. His manipulations kept guiding Uel through the mystic twists of European penal systems. Punishment came to all, for all are to be punished. There is so much punishment in this world, so many crystalline visions of penalty for sins far beyond …

Uel had many friends, one of them was Leg, his partner in crime.

Uel had received his latest call a few minutes ago, it was about a crime that didn’t commit. The event needed to be evaluated and analyzed immediately as well as profoundly, but Uel felt that he wasn’t up to it on his own, so he called for help. Leg was punctual as always. He had his ‘solutroika’ with him, consisting of a stick, a little motor and a slimy dot. He was capable of combining those three elements in ways everyone else would consider unimaginable or uncanny. The tension he created between the aforementioned objects was key to understanding how they functioned. This particular case was approached by Leg in such a way that the slimy dot had to be put inside the motor which Leg then mounted onto the stick. As the motor started running, a girl appeared out of the stick’s head and stated, besides the obvious facts, two or three less obvious ones. For example: They were trying to reenact World War IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII, but ended up with something completely different. Quick, the cops are underway. Uel thanked Leg for his support which had always been as effective and fast as today. The ghastly girl disappeared and the motor-cum-stick fell apart. Leg was already leaving, but Uel realized that he still didn’t have the slightest idea what the crime in question was all about. Were there deaths involved? Decontamination? Extortion? Contortion? Conviction? Infliction? Leg stopped, turned around and promptly built a new object: By pulling the slimy dot onto a string and around the stick in a mirror-like manner, one of the motor’s apertures came in direct contact with the ‘en-slimed one.’ Somehow the rotation properties of the motor can be The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

67 altered by slime, which was now spiraling around the stick, rendering it a tri-tech magic wand. Leg asked Uel to think aloud, and as Uel began to communicate his thoughts on many different subjects as diverse as jurisdiction, art, hauntology, etc., he realized that footnotes were forming out of thin air like strings of mold and landed in a condensed state on the floor. They seemed to be commenting on Uel’s thought processes, thus realizing his full crime-solving capacity. Interestingly enough, a thought about the advantages of hormonal dysfunction led to a footnote that said: Therefore this crime must be full of adrenal… and a random vision of monks finding their wholesomeness on an odious, far-away planet, in a galaxy yet unknown, was accompanied by this footnote: Cf. Jacob & Clyde, Siamese double-murder cases, p.

166. It didn’t take long to attach another big fat thank you to his helpy friend. When Uel felt that the case was slowly closing, he produced another of those helpful, translucent footnotes: 20 % of the whole population is supposed to be intelligent, but I know only 2 intelligent people: Uel & Leg. Uel wanted to ask Leg once again to help him out, to decipher this message – but Leg was gone. He had been gone since the day a chew-chew amputated Uel clean below his waist, taking not only Leg with him. The case remained unresolved. There must have been twin mutants involved, obviously, who had killed each other off one by one, or at least somebody who looked like he could be killed. But there was nothing there, the crime scene was a huge, tall, impossible, hanging from the goleme tree as it acted out every degenerate piece of software that had been installed there by Uel and his deceptoids.

There was an incident in the theater the other day. Hes had come to help Uel out with a complicated case he had been working on his entire life. They were witnessing a very bad play about jugglers, written by a juggler, and it was pretty obvious that they weren’t the only ones who felt utter boredom and even disgust due to the play’s uncountable structural and poetic weaknesses. Hes and Uel, on the other hand, had been poets for a long time, and not without success. Secretly, they had already begun rewriting the play as it went on and on and got more ridiculous and unbearable with every passing minute. Their poetic tandem, however, had gifted them with brilliant lyrical fruits of fancy The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

68 wisdom. Their poems included When Do You Go Forever? and How Would You Told You. They used to tour the greatest cities on the planet and were awarded many prizes for best tandem poetry. But then Uel became enamored with his very first investigative job which led him far away from Hes. The estranged duo tried to hold their friendship together, but Uel’s new passion, cracking complex cases wide open (like the one with the non-living guum that had all of a sudden landed in the backyard of a gay couple, who later turned out to be detectives themselves), was doing their relationship no good. Years passed by.

Hundreds of unsolved cases and poetry recitals later Hes and Uel accidently met at a restaurant that both of them had never visited before. They immediately realized how they had missed each other this whole time and how badly they needed to be together again, to catch up, to plan strange lyrical undertakings, to be an integral part of the avant-garde underground that had been building up for some time now. They didn’t have to lead secret lives anymore, they didn’t need to hide their poetic properties and tandem ambitions. The only thing they needed right now was each other. And that’s how they ended up in that little off-off-theater, semi-enjoying a dreadful play about two jugglers who were romantically involved and made a very successful, internationally renowned juggling tandem, getting huge gigs in major cities all over the world, living their dream lives of independence, art and juggling. But then one of them, Leo, decided to turn his (and consequently their) life upside down by completely changing the course of action. Juggling didn’t do it for him anymore, so he invested his full attention and energy into the one thing nobody thought possible: mugging. Then the curtain fell. End of act I. Uel was eager to get the hell out of this masterful fail of a play and suggested to Hes that they should start working on their tandem again immediately. But Hes was skeptical. Her mood dropped in a second, she was a veritable witch now, treating Uel unfairly, letting him feel responsible for everything bad that had ever happened to her or to the world in general. ‘Beat it!,’ she yelled at him. Uel was perplexed. Everything had been going so well again, and then this brutal change of mind. He felt betrayed, like the juggler in the play. Then he identified with Leo’s mugging ambiThe Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

69 tions and ran off behind the curtain.”

“You told me earlier that Ag Nom, Nong had conceived a ‘kaleidoscopic halo’ to derange reality?”

“There was a very important visitation by Leg coming up, so Uel got himself ready. Leg came within an hour and brought with him a present so tender and sweet, Uel was moved to the bottom of his heart.

It was a so-called ponderolus-tomato, Leg explained: ‘This tomato, my friend, is the best you have ever tasted or will ever taste. I’m not promising too much, my friend, rather too little, so do me a favor, corroborate the beauty ov ids taste!’ Uel was slowly becoming suspicious of the phrase my friend, which was utterly atypical of Leg. Was he trying to tell him something in a roundabout way? There was a great-looking tomato in Leg’s hand alright, but was it really all about its supposedly unbelievable tastiness? Uel moved his hand slowly towards the tomato and took it. He bit into it, causing juice to squirt and re-squirt. The tomato tasted like name. O’Neill-ish. A miraculous non-taste that had been created by some deity to divert our attention from the creepy facts of existence. Leg was watching Uel as he was analyzing the epic quality of the vegetable, devouring it at a rapidly growing pace. A caustic grin started to replace Leg’s face, which was slowly rotting away while the grin was usurping the most relevant parts of it. Uel stopped eating and looked at the tomato in his hands – he was eating his own heart. Leg was standing there like a beast-god soldier, his grin had almost entirely consumed Uel’s sphere of perception by now. This could not be Leg – and it was not.”

“And yet English remains a foreign tongue to you, as it is the case for me with Murango or yTyt, which I was privileged enough to study in great detail.”

“It was almost too late when Uel realized that he had never been to a country show before. But he was lucky enough to get the last seat available in the Great Hall of Boom where Gme had a completely soldout gig. Gme’s style was all about facetick, an original kind of facial magic. He would start his program by telling the audience: ‘Yes, that’s how I look, for real.’ Then he would go on and suck his nose out, stick it in his left ear and pull its tip out of the right one. This stunt was always The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

70 a killer, or focus, as Gme liked to refer to his most seminal stage lunatics. Gme had gotten a scholarship with Dingoman, the great Austrian magician and entertainer. He had been artist in residence at the UKM, AFkdfkF, and KWN. Gme’s career was just starting to rise toward the heavens when suddenly implausibility hit: About 10 minutes into the set, Gme was pulling his own leg and taking it to the next level, when Uel realized that his hands and face belonged to an old crabman. He immediately left his seat and went to the men’s room to take a good look at his hands and face: both were gone. What had started out as a typical old-crabman’s-hands-and-face syndrome had evolved in less than one minute into a hands-and-face-gone syndrome. In the meantime, Gme was focusing on his mouth, which was filling up to the brim with members from the audience. Uel was suffering from the disappearance that was more disturbing than imagined. Meanwhile, Gme was playing a game of chess with his hair. The audience went nuts, literally. As Gme began his beloved nutcrack checkmate routine, Uel was losing the last and most important parts of his name, thus becoming ueless. Maimwhile, Gme had recruited a young man from the audience to be his existential noseboy. The man rose from the stage and shrank visibly, while levitating towards Gme’s face. After some flying around, the man-nose landed on Gme’s nasal receptacle like a fly on a sniper’s rifle. The audience was dying a slow, awesome death. But there’s no showmanship without knowhowmanship, so Uel needed to know how the fuck he could survive with only 0,0000004% of his original body mass intact. Slowly but surely, Gme’s extraordinary performance came to an end, which mangled Uel back into consciousness.

He left the men’s room as a fully developed male organism. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself between two toes of a goleme he had built when nothing else would make sense.”

“But what exactly is the difference between Golemism and Plastilism?”

“Uel set out to recover from his loss. Over the last years he had lost so much, but most of it was not really important. Except for that one thing that really was. A beautiful woman that he had made for himself out of flotsam and jetsam. He knew how illegal such a drastic The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

71 measure was, but what was he supposed to do against that feeling of cataclysmic desolation? He just had to do it. So he went out of his way to find the right materials for his little side project. He was still doing his detective work, he still read a lot about Plastilism. But he also gathered wood and old clothes and shoes and stockings for the fine girl that had yet to appear in his arms and in his heart. Day and night Uel was working relentlessly. He was now, however, not only protecting the law, but also breaking it in twenty different places.

Uel was alone, sitting on the train home. His mother had left when he was very young, and now he would see her for the first time.

Uel’s mom. What was her name again? He didn’t know. He did know that his mother had left them, Uel and his father, when Uel was just an unborn paroxysm. She had left them for money, for fame. For good.

What was her name again?

He got on the train which was a speed vehicle. From the last to the last and from huge to the latest, the brochure said. And then Uel and his mom would go on and redirect the Forest of Tremendous. Then it would follow the road up until the nane of Zoz, down to the market, reacting with some random noise, up until his mother would await him at platform number … what was her name again? Uel’s mother, she must have known. But what was it again, this sound of redemption, a morality play of sorts, that obligation towards the grey area between two orphaned brains. Uel’s mom must have been an orphan herself.

So she thought she might give her son the knowledge that had been given to her. Uel’s mother has never had a proper name, obviously.

She called out to herself in the mirror, and the mirror responded in an alien language which had to be translated by a highly specialized device called RAILGUN. Every time she called out her name into the mirror’s void, it would feed back negatives, making motherly stuff appear.

RAILGUN communicated with the mirror’s time-lapsed organs in a number of voice-overs. Then it transported different micro-phonetic packages into its stem. Connecting razor-sharp blades with sys-mantic appliance, RAILGUN’s constant clicking sent the mirror back into his mother’s womb, the womb without a name. Uel was sitting in his train and rolling towards his mother and her nameless mirror. An accuThe Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

72 mulation of brain tissue had started in his left vest pocket, and when the conductor came to check his ticket, Uel produced a shiny nothing.

What was the name again? The conductor watched closely, begetting more and more scepticism as the thread from Uel’s pocket grew longer and thicker. After a minute, the conductor started to migrate into a vortex of moral obligations and decadence, rediscovering his love for tunnelling. The eponymous syndrome got unveiled, re-activating the ethics commission in the mirror again, the RAILGUN pounding away on the weird womb. When Uel reached his destiny, he was nothing but a whisper in a cosmic ear …

Uel’s get-together with the stars had been a very successful enterprise. They taught him how to read between the lines, any lines: As of now, Uel was their greatest student. When night came in, Uel stood between the darkness and watched the skies in anxious anticipation of the … Now he knew for sure that Ag Nom, Nong was one of them, the most remote of all. Uel watched closely the celestial morality plays evolve further and further from the truth, enveloping Uel’s infinitudes into the Book of Cosmos. There it was, the constellation of Golemism, fighting the never-ending battle between good and evil, two sides of a coin called Ag Nom, Nong. So that’s how he could be so wise, see so much more than Uel, whose eyes started to give out more and more often, until one day no starlight was reaching Uel’s soul. His teeth started to crumble under the weight of Ag Nom, Nong’s stellar pages, making Uel a kind of bookmark. Suddenly, something very important hit Uel like utter blindness is hit by all the light of the universe condensed into one perfect beam: There was no meaning whatsoever to the stars and their monstrous doings. Ag Nom, Nong had played him once again, made Uel run into this cruel trap of immensity – but there was just the projection of visions of shadows of replicas of shadows of movements of glitches of … Uel closed the Book of Cosmos once and for all, and regained his eye sight. A new power source came into being that night, and Uel felt secure between the darkness, confident as never before …

When Semyon Afigeev was 11, he jumped from a high place.

He didn’t die, but landed on the cover of a very important magazine instead. He was able to lead a fulfilling existence on the cover, when The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

73 two years later he suddenly found himself once again in a high place.

He didn’t think twice and jumped again. And for the second time he landed on the cover of a magazine: Most Wanted Criminals Monthly, through which Uel was browsing just now, as he needed to stay informed in all criminal matters, naturally. When he closed the magazine, he realized that the cover had changed since he first opened it.

Uel didn’t know Semyon, but his intellect told him that this might be just the kind of case he needed in order to rescue his faltering career.

He thought fast and sharp, combining and shuffling all the facts and myths and theories he knew about faces, magazine covers and transformative occurrences. When he was done thinking, he had solved the puzzle: he was looking for a teenager born in Benzokolodsk. He had to find Semyon as soon as possible. But this is where Uel’s thinking was flawed: His detectors didn’t get him to the conclusion that he wasn’t holding just an unusually highly resolved photograph in his hands, but actually the missing boy himself. It would be too complicated to explain the details of how Uel arrived at his mistake, it must suffice to mention that he started looking in all the wrong places while at the same time forgetting more and more about the magazine and its exceptionally vivid cover shot. Once he had misplaced this issue, doom rose above Uel’s head and his case, which as of now had become impossible to solve. But Uel was unaware of it all. Instead he kept searching in foster homes, in children’s hospitals and video stores. But Semyon Afigeev wasn’t to be found, although his name was no secret anymore.

Uel’s almost brilliant mind worked day and night, racing through the motions of hell called cognition. In the meantime, Semyon celebrated his 16th birthday by finding himself for the third time in a high place.

He felt like a superhero, and he probably was just that – but he knew that flight (or super-strength, or even a subtly developed ability to levitate two millimeters above the ground) was not his power. He looked at the sky, he embraced the horizons and all of its poetic and pragmatic implications, and jumped for the last time in his short, wonderous life.

This time, Semyon landed on the front page of a book, its title saying something like The Complete Failes of Uel, With an Introduction and Annotation by Ag Nom, Nonge.”

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018

74 “So the mentality of nothingness is starting to outsmart superstrings, but it is obviously Time itself, with its so-called past and present and future, that is nothing but a huge, archaic goleme in deep slumber from which it could awaken any moment. Anything can function as a goleme trying to remove a piece of scripture from its palate just by having one of his maggots look at it. But what is reality other than a whirlpool of cascading maggot eyes watching us, producing pile after pile of observations and tiny maneuvers. Is that why you continue sending parts of yourself embedded in metaphoresy?”

“When Uel came back from his 40,000-year-long slumber, finding himself in the midst of debris, there seemed to be nothing there but: TUeT. Once he had known respect, now there was: TUeT. Once he had experienced love’s life, ritual’s thoughts, burden’s murders, drink’s machetes and case’s thefts, now there was: TUeT. Once he had felt grateful, staggered, heightened, besmirched, revitalized – but now there was nothing but: TUeT. How was it possible to remain in a coma or any other kind of unconscious state for so long? How had he managed to arrive where he was now? That maximum security camp fed into the bestialities of living hell just like that. A maximum security camp called GOLEMISM. Apparently, he had used his goleme’s eyes as a pillow and his goleme’s lips as a cover, so he could sleep through 700,001 civil wars, 40,001 catastrophes and 101 visitations from all over the universe. Stars had built retirement homes out of average fathers of two and their intrinsic dualities. But dualities were now just this: TUeT.”

Daniel Ableev, *1981, is a certified strangeologist and Selectronix engineer from Bonn, Germany; co-editor of “DIE NOVELLE – Zeitschrift für Experimentelles”; ∞ publications in German & English, print & online (“Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti”, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Big Book of Science Fiction”, “Alu” etc.).

The Wagon Magazine - January - 2018