Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

Onomatopoeia A AM MA AG GA AZ ZIIN NE EO OF FL LIITTEER RA AT TU UR RE EA AN ND DW WH HA AT TN NO OT T S SU UM MM ME ER R2 20 01 10 0

Onomatopoeia Magazine A Magazine of Literature and Whatnot www.OnomatopoeiaMagazine.com

FICTION

POETRY

WHATNOT

2… The Things We Keep

by Liane Kupferberg Carter

11… 1001/1011

by Thomas Reed

5… The Fortune Teller Is On A Break Photo by Christopher Woods

6… Young Man with a Moustache

by Jeffery Ryan Long

12… Death Before Factory

by Anthony Liccione

12… Scent on a Mission

by Margaret Eaton

20… Black Seed by Black Seed and Caseworker Takes Notes Two Poems by Donal Mahoney

17… Darkness and Storm

by Barrie Darke 23… Dwight Goes to Rehab

By Michael Frissore

9… Solve the Equation Art by Todd R. Behrendt 10… Straight From an Agent Nathan Bransford, literary agent as interviewed by Bobby D. Lux 13… O‘ War! War! O‘ Elegant, Heavenly War! Essay by BothEyesShut 21… All the Pretty Horses Photo by Christopher Woods 21… Millicent Borges Accardi‘s

Woman on a Shaky Bridge Reviewed by Jara Jones NOTE FROM THE EDITOR I'll be honest, a part of me feared that Onomatopoeia would be a one-and-done project. Fortunately, I had a bit of luck and good fortune on my side. The SPRING issue found a bit of an audience and I received far more submissions (good ones too!) for the SUMMER issue than expected, so now I have to keep this going because the FALL 2010 issue is already being constructed... at least until a large multinational media conglomerate comes knocking with their million dollar offer for the website.

In actual Onomatopoeia news, Jara Jones has graciously come on board as the Poetry Editor and will begin working on the FALL 2010 issue. I will make one promise that we will have a podcast up and running before the next issue. I will also promise that I will do my best to figure out how to make Onomatopoeia available as a free e-book for you kids with your fancy Kindles and stuff.

That's it for now. See you in September.

Bobby D. Lux Editor-in-Chief Onomatopoeia Magazine

22… Ilie Ruby‘s The Language of Trees Reviewed by Bobby D. Lux 22… A young Midwestern girl looking bored, lace curtains in window light and a silhouette of a flightless bird Art by Todd R. Behrendt

Onomatopoeia Magazine is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December. Visit www.onomatopoeiamagzine.com for information on submissions. All stories, art, poetry, and basically anything that‘s published either for download, online, or print belong to their individual creators.

The contributors retain all rights to their work. For any questions, inquiries, feedback, advertising, or answers to problems of the universe, email onomatopoeiamagazine@hotmail.com.

NOTE: All links within the pages here are active, so click away!

Cover design and layout by Bobby D. Lux

“She opened what she assumed was another closet, and discovered a dressing room she didn't remember. It was full of empty tie racks and barren shoe trees. Then she looked up, into the painted gray eyes of an oddly serious child swinging from a gate.”

The Things We Keep

by Liane Kupferberg Carter

A week after their father Gene's funeral, Barbara and Aggie Harrell and their cousin Emma went to clean out his apartment. Barbara had not been there since a disastrous dinner with her father and his second wife Pauline three years earlier. The building had seemed elegant, but now one of the art deco letters over the awning was missing, and the chandeliered lobby smelled of last week's lamb stew. Barbara had a key that Gene's neighbor, Mrs. Milner, had pressed on her at the funeral. Her eyes had been an ugly red. "I can't go back in there, Ms. Harrell," she'd said, sounding apologetic.

She was the one who had found him.

Barbara arrived first, feeling like a guilty trespasser. The apartment seemed foreign and masculine; no trace of Pauline remained. She opened the window and stood as uncertainly as she had the last time, waiting to be invited to sit. So much furniture to give away. She had no use for it and she doubted that Aggie and her husband Jerry would want anything that they hadn't specifically chosen for the house they were building on the North Shore. Jerry had just installed voice-activated lights in every room. "What if you get laryngitis Barbara had said, but Jerry hadn‘t been amused.

The trick, she thought, was to work quickly, not to think.

She flipped several light switches before she found the hall light, and opened the first closet she saw. The butterscotch Lifesaver smell she had once loved so much still clung to his jackets. The last time she'd been there, the assailing smell of Pauline's perfume had hung everywhere.

Barbara pulled suits from the closet, feeling like a suspicious wife as she emptied the pockets of change and match books and ticket stubs. She'd have to see that the electricity was turned off soon. Stop the mail. The phone service too, she thought, noticing an antique brass telephone on the hall table. As she folded clothes, she remembered the summer she was five, when Gene ran a string from the basement to the garage, and they had talked to each other through two tin cans. Sometimes she would place a finger lightly on the string to feel the vibration of his words. She tried to remember the sound of his voice now, but only heard it dimly, as it was that still summer, whispering metallic promises in her ear. They had started this game after Barbara saw a movie about Alexander Graham Bell, and she liked to imagine that her father was Don Ameche. "Watson, come here, I need you," he would say. "Watson here. I need you," she would answer, and he would run and catch her in his arms. He applauded when she fearlessly climbed ladders, or held back tears after falling into a bee's nest. She had been his first born, much photographed, petted and praised. But slowly, subtly, that had changed. The winter she was twelve, Pegasus had been hit by a car. She had carried him to the side of the road, covered him with a blanket, and called the vet. Her father drove them to the animal hospital, braking and accelerating wildly. The dog had been in bad shape. ―There‘s nothing more I can do,‖ the vet had said. ―I‘m so sorry. Would one of you like to stay with him?‖ Her father had hesitated, and in that moment, Barbara had spoken. ―I‘ll do it,‖ she said, following the vet into a room without any windows. She held 2 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010 Pegasus in her arms, murmuring into his puzzled, cloudy

and in that moment, Barbara had spoken. ―I‘ll do it,‖ she said, following the vet into a room without any windows. She held Pegasus in her arms, murmuring into his puzzled, cloudy eyes. The needle slid between sinewy folds; the dog quivered, then slumped warm and heavy against her chest. ―You are your mother‘s child,‖ her father had said in the car going home, almost as if he were speaking to himself. She‘d kept silent, sensing even then it was a doubleedged compliment. She had seen how he‘d begun to wince at her mother Eleanor's brisk voice. One summer evening months earlier, they had barbecued swordfish and eaten supper on the back patio. ―Can‘t you just leave that grill alone? I said I‘d get to it later,‖ Gene had said, watching Eleanor vigorously vacuuming out ashes. He tipped back on the legs of his chair, staring moodily into the neighboring yard. ―Gene, you‘ll break the chair that way,‖ her mother had said. Her father brought the chair down hard and flung himself out of it. Later that night, after Barbara had dragged the furniture back to the porch, she sat to watch the fireflies make darting pinpoints of cold light, listening vainly for the sound of his returning car.

The doorbell chimed. Aggie was wearing a sleek black silk suit and pearls, looking beautiful and unhappy as only she could, wearing her suffering, thought Barbara, like a prize ribbon. Their cousin Emma stood behind her.

"You'd think Mrs. Milner could have managed to at least wipe up," said Aggie, running a proprietary hand over a bureau top.

"It wasn't her place. If you don't want to clean, why don't you pack up the rest of the clothes?" Barbara said, thrusting an armful of shopping bags at her.

"Aggie told me on the way up that she visited here several times after Pauline left," said Emma a little later, as they opened cartons they'd found piled neatly against the front window.

"Look! Your old school essays." Her legs slid gracefully under her. "Imagine saving these. Okay, how do you spell vicissitude?"

"That's what dictionaries are for."

"You never needed them, though," Emma said. "I'll bet you were a tough act for Aggie to follow in school. She once told me she always felt like Barbara Harrell's underachieving sister."

"I didn't know that," said Barbara. "I always felt like Agatha Harrell's plain one."

"Give it a rest already. Besides, it‘s not even true. You've got character."

"That sounds like something my mother would have said,‖ Barbara said. ―One time when I was thirteen, she took me to buy bras. Not that I needed them. She followed me into the dressing room and watched me try on every damn one.

Afterwards, as we were driving home, I said, 'Mom, I'm ugly.'

You know what she said? 'Don't worry, dear, it's just a

stage.'" Barbara and Emma laughed.

stage.'" Barbara and Emma laughed.

"What's so funny out here?" Aggie said plaintively. She piled bags full of shirts and socks in the hall, and watched them uncertainly. "Haven't you even finished one box yet?

We haven't got all day."

"Is Jerry picking you up?" Barbara said.

"He's playing racquet ball."

Aggie‘s husband had recently joined a trendy new health club popular with masters of the universe types and models.

Barbara wondered how he was managing it all. But he didn't want Aggie to work, and she was flitting between decorating the new house and taking classes in designing what she referred to as ―tablescapes.‖ "Well, anyway, I'm done," Aggie said. Her mouth twitched, and Barbara thought, it was a mistake to let her go into that room alone.

"How about if I make some coffee?" Barbara said. ―We can't remove anything until the appraisal, but why don‘t you make a list of what you‘d like to keep?"

Barbara returned with a tray; Aggie sipped the coffee warily and made a face. "It tastes like mouthwash."

"It's cinnamon blend. Sorry. It's all I could find.‖ "And it's stale," Aggie said accusingly.

"It was probably left over from Pauline. Dad only drank espresso."

"I always thought your father was the most cosmopolitan man I ever met," said Emma. "You know, I even had a little crush on him once."

"I know," said Barbara. "So did most of his students.

Sometimes I think that if he‘d died young, he would never have had to shrink to life size."

"Well, you made that wish come true," said Aggie. "Maybe if you had let Mom take him back, this wouldn't have happened."

"He told you that?" Barbara said. "Oh, Aggie. Do you really believe I would have done that?"

"Dad blamed you," Aggie said.

"Dad always blamed anyone but himself."

"Look!" said Emma, trying to deflect the sisters. She held aloft a thick stack of black and white photos that looked as if they'd been trimmed with pinking shears.

Aggie looked longingly at a picture of herself in the ocean, sitting astride her father's sunburned shoulders. "Remember the cottage in Maine that didn't have any phone or TV? Daddy and I went sailing alone every morning and we dug for clams.

He even found a pearl in an oyster for me. It was the happiest summer of my life."

He must have planted the pearl there, Barbara realized.

He‘d done the same conjuring trick for her once, before Aggie was even born. "Don't you remember the swarms of black flies? There was a crust of them on the outhouse door,‖ Barbara said. ―And no running water inside. We had to take the dishes outside and hose them down. Mom hated every minute there."

"Then she should have made more of an effort."

Barbara sucked in her lips to keep from speaking. She hated it when Aggie criticized Eleanor. What did she know?

After her initial grief at Gene's departure, Eleanor had refused to speak about him. Barbara had often wished she could have siphoned off some of Eleanor's sorrow, taken it and embraced it as her own to spare her mother. After Eleanor's surgery, Barbara had bathed her mother, soothed her,

cooked delicate broths and hearty stews, and nursed her mother as tenderly at the end as Eleanor had once nursed her. Gene had pleaded with Barbara to convince her mother to let him come home, but Eleanor was adamant: she had suffered enough.

"What's this?" Aggie said, studying a photograph of eerie light swirls.

"It looks like an abstract painting," said Emma.

"No," Barbara said softly. "Don‘t you remember? It was the Aurora Borealis." The year Barbara was nine, they had spent Christmas week at their grandmother‘s compound in Vermont. One night, Gene rushed into their room to wake them. They had wrapped quilts around themselves like cocoons, and crept out to the field across the road. Barbara remembered it had been very cold, but clear, the darkest night of the year. Eleanor was waiting for them. Pulsing bands of yellow-white light arched across the sky in luminous fans, as the four of them stood in awed silence. "They call them the Merry Dancers," Gene had whispered. "Aurora Borealis...The Northern Lights."

"He always loved the planetarium," said Aggie.

"I remember how your father always used to point out the constellations to us on summer nights," Emma said. "Such beautiful names. Cassiopeia... Andromeda.... Your mother loved those stories."

"Mom?" said Aggie.

"Oh, sure," Emma said. "She loved those old myths. Old movies too. She once told me that when she was a girl she slept on collar buttons for six months because she thought it would give her dimples like Margaret O'Brien. And that later she used to wash her hair with cherry soda so it would be the color of Rita Hayworth's."

"It's nice to think of her that young," said Barbara. It sounded like something Aggie might have done. As a teenager, Aggie had steamed her face with chamomile, made masks of oatmeal, applied cucumber compresses to her eyelids, pumiced her feet, even slept on her back so her face wouldn't wrinkle. The sisters were so unalike that strangers never believed they were related. Aggie's face was punctuated by dimples--and not from collar buttons--that made pleasing secrets when she smiled. Growing up next to her, Barbara had felt monotonously untextured. There was a world of difference between plain and ugly; sometimes, Barbara had almost longed for ugly. At least it gave definition. Aggie was beautiful, and Barbara had learned early that beauty confers power.

"Speaking of cherry soda..." said Emma.

"I'll see if I can scrape up lunch."

Barbara rummaged in the cupboard. Not much to choose from. Tins of anchovies. Jars of macadamia nuts. She opened a can of salmon, thinking about all the Sundays a long time ago, when Emma and her parents came to visit. Barbara and her father would drive to Lox, Stock and Barrel, where all the fathers waited on line clutching slips of papers with numbers.

When they got home he would slice tiny bagels and line them with dollops of cream cheese and slivers of fish, making sandwiches no larger than his little finger for Barbara and Emma to nibble as they squatted over the comics spread along the floor.

Barbara emptied the refrigerator of sour milk and rustedged lettuce, sliced an onion to add to the plate, but when she reached for a wrinkled tomato, her fingernails slid

cooked delicate broths and hearty stews, and nursed her mother as tenderly at the end as Eleanor had once 3 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010 nursed her. Gene had pleaded with Barbara to

through the soft red skin.

through the soft red skin.

Aggie had set the dining table with lace placemats and had folded linen napkins to look like fluttering birds. It felt oddly festive. Emma picked up a plate. ―What are you going to do with all the kitchen stuff?"

"There‘s very little here,‖ Aggie said. ―He didn‘t take much when he left. He said he needed to make a clean break."

"Breaks are never clean," said Barbara, buttering the toast and crumbling it into little pieces.

"I think he was ashamed,‖ said Aggie.

"Of what?‖ said Barbara. ―That his latest girlfriend wasn't much older than his daughters? Oh, don't look so shocked.

You think Pauline was the only one? Grandma‘s money just made it easier for him."

"Stop," said Emma. "Please stop."

"Who are you to sneer at Grandma's money?" said Aggie.

"What do you think paid for summer vacations? Or school?" she crammed half a sandwich into her mouth.

"All that money doesn't seem to have improved your table manners."

"Enough." Emma slammed her fist against the table; the china clattered. "Don't you realize your parents are gone? All you have is each other."

"We're orphans," said Aggie, beginning to cry.

It sounded so Dickensian, thought Barbara.

After lunch Emma took the bags of clothes to the homeless men's shelter. Aggie stood at the window, pinching buds on a blanched coleus plant. "This was purple when I gave it to him," she said. She twisted off her diamond wedding band and stared at the band of pale skin. "Jerry wants to start a family."

Barbara sat beside her on the window seat and watched her play with her charm bracelet.

"What do you want?" Barbara asked gently.

Aggie shrugged. She would have looked petulant if she weren't so clearly unhappy. "Does it even matter?" she said. She walked to the piano, and lightly touched the keys. "Dad didn't play," she said. "I wonder why he even had a piano."

"Maybe it was for Pauline."

"No," said Aggie. "She wasn't musical."

"Pauline wasn't much of anything," said Barbara. "It wouldn't have killed her to come to the funeral." After Barbara had called Pauline with the news, she'd stayed up all night, unable to write any words she could bring herself to read at the service the next day. Finally, she had chosen a poem. "'And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'" But he hadn't; Barbara was left to rage for him.

She sat at the piano bench, picking out a series of chords. She had loved listening to her mother play. Eleanor had taught herself, and played not very well, but with great feeling. She had often played "Someone to Watch over Me" when Barbara was young. For years, Barbara had thought her mother had written that song, until the day she heard it on the radio. That was after her father had run off with Pauline. Eleanor had never touched the piano again.

Barbara had been 24 when Pauline moved into house next door to her family. A tall, graceless woman, with frizzy brown hair and a helpless air that for reasons Barbara would never

know had appealed to her father. Aggie had been away at school that year. Pauline had asked Gene to fix things about her house, and to thank him had plied him with cool drinks and warm looks. One summer evening at twilight Barbara had gone out to cut Ophelia roses, and across the honeysuckled-scented garden she had caught a glimpse of a bare, tanned shoulder, and on it, her father‘s long, fine fingers. The intimate laughter floated across the stone patio as she snipped creamy pink flowers and dropped them on the warm, damp earth. The scent of roses has sickened her ever since. Friends sent floral arrangements to Gene‘s funeral, but Barbara told the delivery boy to take them to a hospital instead. ―Do for the living, not the dead,‖ Eleanor used to say. After Gene left, he was dead to Eleanor.

"You saw a lot of them here?" Barbara said.

"Not a lot." Aggie looked up; she was examining an ashtray made of glazed clay and pebbles. "I saw him mostly after Pauline left. Remember this?" she held out the misshapen ashtray.

Barbara remembered. She'd made it in day camp, choosing only the palest blue pebbles she could find to match her father‘s eyes. She nodded. "I made that when I was six."

"No you didn't!" Aggie's eyes got round as she shook her head. "I made it. In kindergarten. Dad said so."

Barbara was suddenly very tired. "It's too hot in here," she said, yanking at the window. Soot blew across the sill.

She went to the bathroom to wash her hands, and looked for aspirin. Wedged between the grimy, abandoned tubes of Pauline's cosmetics were more bottles of prescription pills than she cared to count. A frayed negligee hung on a peg behind the door. She sat on the lid of the toilet, and ran her hands over and over her cheeks.

She heard Emma return, and the muffled sounds of conversation. "How could he do this to me?" she heard Aggie say. Barbara rose and stood in the doorway of the bathroom, carefully wiping her hands on a towel. "Aggie," she said slowly, "do you think no one else is grieving?"

"Barbara," Emma said warningly.

"She acts as if she had a private monopoly on him.‖ "You‘re both rubbed raw," Emma said. "Let's just finish and get out."

Everyone was silent.

"I know!" said Aggie. "Before we leave, let‘s each choose just one thing. Something significant."

Aggie always did like romantic gestures, thought Barbara.

She remembered when Aggie was sixteen, and thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world that Lord Byron had kept the cremated heart of his best friend Shelley. "It just refused to burn, Barb," she'd said, her eyes large. "Too much spirit."

Barbara nodded. "Why not?" she said. She returned to the bedroom, and stripped the king size bed. The room looked as impersonal and reassuring as a motel room. Anywhere, U.S.A. No Gideon‘s Bible, though; just Gene's yellowed copy of The Portable Thomas Wolfe.

She opened what she assumed was another closet, and discovered a dressing room she didn't remember. It was full of empty tie racks and barren shoe trees. Then she looked up, into the painted gray eyes of an oddly serious child swinging from a gate. A small watercolor, it had been painted in a burst of friendship one summer in Truro by a fellow

know had appealed to her father. Aggie had been away 4 - Onomatopoeia at school that Magazine year. SUMMER Pauline 2010 had asked Gene to fix things about her house, and to thank him had plied

artist who had seemed quite taken with Gene's older daughter. "But he's your friend, Daddy," Barbara had said. "Why doesn't he paint your picture?" She

artist who had seemed quite taken with Gene's older daughter. "But he's your friend, Daddy," Barbara had said.

"Why doesn't he paint your picture?" She remembered how she had squirmed, the straps of her sun dress scratching her burned skin. Gene had smoothed her hair, tucking it behind her ears.

"You're much prettier than I am," he said, then rubbed his stubbly cheek against hers. "This way you'll always stay my own little girl," he'd said, in a tone infinitely sad.

She turned and took in the bedroom. Where were all his canvases? She knew he'd let go the studio space he'd rented; where could everything be? Had he sold them all? She wondered yet again what he had done that last day.

"Barb?" Emma stood in the doorway.

"Leaving?"

"In a minute. Don't be too hard on your sister. She‘s not like you." ―You know the saying. ‗If you can't be rotten to your family, who can you?‘ Sorry. Poor joke. You're absolutely right." She followed Emma to the foyer.

Aggie was peering into the mirror, meticulously painting on lipstick with a small brush, much the same way she used to work in a water coloring book. Barbara and Emma smiled at each other.

"Thanks for coming," Barbara said to Emma, and hugged

her. "Talk to you later?" Aggie placed her cheek against her sister's.

"Aggie," Barbara said. "Why don't we go up to Vermont for a long weekend? Just us.‖ Aggie hesitated, glanced at Emma, then back at Barbara. "That might be nice," she allowed.

Barbara closed the door, then walked through the apartment, closing windows, turning off the refrigerator and leaving it ajar. The pebble ashtray was gone; let Aggie keep it. She switched off lights, then returned to the dressing room to stand silently. Gently she lifted the watercolor of herself from the wall, leaving a ghostly outline where it had hung, and wrapped it in an old pillowcase.

Finally, at the front door, she turned and reached under the table, pulled the phone cord from the wall, and straightened slowly, cradling the silent receiver against her ear. "Watson," she whispered. "I'm here."

Liane Kupferberg Carter‟s articles and essays have appeared in more than 30 publications, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Parents, Child, McCall‟s, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Skirt, and numerous newspapers and journals. She is a 2009 winner of the Memoir Journal Prize for Memoir in Prose, and a Glimmer Train Finalist in Poetry. Carter is working on a memoir about raising a child with autism. © 2010 Liana Kupferberg, All Rights Reserved

The Fortune Teller Is On A Break by Christopher Woods

© 2010 Christopher Woods, All Rights Reserved

5 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

“He was serious—he did have a serious moustache—but he also had a lot of dreams she liked to hear about, like his dream to build a giant electric brain at the top of Mt. Everest.”

Young Man with a Moustache

by Jeffery Ryan Long

The young man with a moustache worked at the internet café in our town. All of us thought it was rather extraordinary of him, especially in those days, to wear the moustache by itself; no sloppy beard to dwarf it, no sculpted goatee to subtract from its singularity, no exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek sideburns to comically frame it, to suggest he really wasn‘t taking it seriously. No, the moustache lay stark and dark, well groomed over his mouth so naturally it looked as if he‘d been born with it, even though we knew he‘d just grown it the summer before we started our freshman year in college.

You might not think it so extraordinary the young man wore only a moustache when so many others, at least in those days, dared not. That he simply wore a moustache, perhaps, is not so special—but as a moustache it was a magnificent specimen. We later learned he‘d grown it in hopes of appearing ―Lennon-esque,‖ a tribute to the 1967 incarnation of that ubiquitous being, now deceased, whose name and likeness has infiltrated every strata of popular culture. But the young man‘s moustache operated on a higher level, strove for something even more universal, more powerful. We all thought it was, more appropriately, ―Stalin-esque.‖ Unlike Lennon‘s, where two distinct wings were separated by a vague perforation—the groove in the middle of the upper lip— this young man‘s moustache hung like a single piece of thick fabric, per Stalin‘s in the photographs. Mandelstam‘s caterpillar. It was a nearly straight bar over the lips, which spilled into two short ledges at the corners of the mouth.

Whatever Stalin‘s faults as a political leader, or as a human being, the former General Secretary of the Communist Party could maintain a striking moustache. This is what gave the young man an authoritarian presence as he stood at the counter cash register, his lower lip working like a scoop to collect the foam the moustache had gathered from his cappuccino. We all looked up from our keyboards, our coffees having long since gone cold, and fingered our naked upper lips in the reflection of the computer monitors.

People commonly mistook the young man for someone much older than his eighteen or nineteen years. Old women referred to him as ―sir‖ and businessmen coming in for quick espressos would idly make conversation with him about stocks and sports, to which he would reply with the same nervous smile (which came off as a knowing grimace from under the moustache). We heard that his own mother, once the young man‘s moustache had grown firmly in place, had panicked when she‘d glimpsed the ―strange man‖ from the corner of her eye, walking through her house wearing only boxer shorts. And his father, we also heard, now felt uncomfortable when he gave the occasional lecture or piece of advice; he felt he was speaking to his father, instead of the only son sitting to the side of him, slouching on the couch with the TV remote control in his hand, obviously thinking about other things, greater things.

The young man‘s first girlfriend—and I‘m speaking of the girl who was with him when he made the transition from ordinary, clean shaven student to the young man with the

moustache, homo superior—had had similar discomforts and apprehensions. Her first problem, which arose when the young man‘s moustache was grown out, was that her father had had a moustache in his college days. She‘d seen pictures of the dashing fraternity jock, his hair long, a can of American beer in each hand, his tight body tanned by some coastal sun. There were also the playful snapshots, close-ups of his face with the tips of the moustache curled into perfect circles.

Although her father now went without facial hair, the young man, disconcertingly, reminded her of the times when she was an admiring child and her mother showed her those photographs to prove what a handsome man her husband used to be. The young man‘s moustache brought issues to the surface his first girlfriend didn‘t feel responsible to address yet, at this time in her life, when by all rights she was supposed to interact with boys the complete opposite of her dad.

Then there were the stares the couple drew when walking about town. The men sitting in the reclining chairs in the barbershop once saw them hand in hand on Main Street— when she glanced through the front window she saw them smiling, elbowing and winking at one another. Mothers holding their children by the arms in the candy store would look over the gummy snacks and click their tongues. She heard one of them mutter ―Cradle robber‖ under her breath.

The first girlfriend was indignant. After all, she was older than the young man by a month and a half.

But she stayed with him longer than anyone expected, despite the sly looks and whispered comments. We learned that she had actually liked him. He was serious—he did have a serious moustache—but he also had a lot of dreams she liked to hear about, like his dream to build a giant electric brain at the top of Mt. Everest. This brain would transmit optimistic thoughts telepathically to all the people in the world, in the form of electric waves, thereby sponsoring good feelings among mankind. He believed this giant brain was the key to world peace. Even though she didn‘t quite believe like he believed, she liked that his heart was in the right place.

Unfortunately, it wasn‘t just the two of them in that utopian world, living through fantasies of electric brains and genetically engineered cats with wings, and she knew it. That the world was watching and judging her against the young man with the moustache began to grind away at her affection for him. ―It‘s just—anachronistic,‖ the American Studies instructor said about the moustache one day. Even though neither one of them knew what he meant, they guessed that it wasn‘t wholeheartedly positive.

The end came at Burger Castle. We were there watching the young man and his girlfriend in line from our booth, having just joined our fries into a collective, forming a large enough pool of ketchup from individual packets. The young man stared up to the menu board, serious as always, stroking the moustache deliberately with his thumb and index finger.

When he put his arm around his girlfriend and nestled in close, asking her what she wanted, that‘s when she heard it.

moustache, homo superior—had had similar 6 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010 Her first discomforts and apprehensions. problem, which arose when the young man’s

We knew she heard it because we heard it too, over the frying apple pies and the yelling from the kitchen, the slide of wasted wrappers from

We knew she heard it because we heard it too, over the frying apple pies and the yelling from the kitchen, the slide of wasted wrappers from the trays to the garbage cans, the opening and closing of the entrance and exit doors. ―Lolita,‖ someone said from behind them in line—and although he either didn‘t notice it or pretended not to notice, her head went down, her hair falling into her face.

He maneuvered her to the cash register, they ordered, and he took their tray and went to a table. We couldn‘t hear them anymore; we just saw her standing over the table after he‘d sat down, shaking her head. He looked up at her, puzzled only in his eyes, his mouth open under the moustache we knew she was really talking to. Then she brushed the hair out of her face and walked away, out the door, while he sat hunched over the food wrapped in paper. He must have been so depressed he couldn‘t even finish; the fries were left untouched and the bacon burger only half eaten when he picked up his Coke and left. All of our fries were gone, the ketchup smeared into the paper tray covering, and after we discussed briefly how ―too bad‖ it all was, we threw our garbage away and went back to our houses, all of us a little ashamed.

He became, for all of us, a hero after that—not in the way that Captain America was our hero, but how Tom Thumb or those fat twins on little motorcycles would have been our heroes had they lived in our town. We followed his movements closely, reporting on what we‘d seen him do or say in class. One of us (I swear it wasn‘t me) even made a half-assed attempt to grow a moustache—he hid the early stages of it by covering the lower half of his face with his hand when he sat down, even when he talked, so that whatever he said was unintelligible. We made him pull the hand away and saw the thin patches of incoming hair. We convinced him to shave it before he made a fool of himself.

We knew that even if he grew it for weeks, for months, it would never achieve the majesty of the young man‘s. From what we saw, and I‘ll admit it was still in the early stages, this moustache looked like a stringy affair, not something you‘d want to imprint on a coin. Besides, we could only have one young man with a moustache. ―Did you hear what he said in English today? It made absolutely no sense at all.‖ ―He‘s always a step ahead—that much is for sure.‖ And there was our constant vigilance from our computers at the internet café; we‘d always watch his interactions with other customers. One day, a heavyset woman in a business suit looked through her purse at the cash register. He handed her the hot chocolate she‘d ordered and then began to leaf through his biology textbook. ―I think it‘s great, what you‘re doing,‖ she said, giving him a five dollar bill. ―Oh—thank you.‖ ―I went back to school four years ago, got my MBA. Yeah— whoo!‖ She exclaimed this softly and made a motion with her arms in the air. ―Now I‘m making fifty grand a year. Not bad for a divorcee—formerly housewife, thank you very much—who got her GED.‖ She said this last part conspiratorially, leaning into the cash register.

The young man nodded. ―So when did you decide to go back?‖ ―Go back?‖ We knew he was confused, but a moustache like that would never allow confusion to show on the face.

7 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

―You know, back to school. Were you working, then just up and decided that a higher education was what you really needed? Career, and all that stuff? That‘s sort of how it was for me. And Jamie, my daughter, started getting all the brochures, the letters in the mail, and I just thought ‗why not?‘ I guess got the bug, too. Best thing I could have ever done in my life.‖ ―Yes,‖ the young man said. ―Well, have a good day,‖ the woman said as she took the hot chocolate and turned away. Then we saw her set the drink on an empty table and begin to look through her purse once again. She pulled out a business card and returned to the register. ―Look, here‘s my card,‖ she said, holding it out with two fingers, each fingernail painted a dark shade of maroon that matched her blazer. He took the card and looked at it. ―I don‘t—I don‘t really give it to that many people, but I thought well, if you needed some financial advice—what with your new future and all.‖ She smiled. ―Or, if you just wanted to chat, have some dinner—okay. Bye.‖ She went out the door, came back in when she realized she‘d left the hot chocolate on the table, took it and left again; this while the young man stood at the register still holding the card in front of him with both hands. We all turned from our computers to one another, each of us making silent ―whoahs‖ it would have been ridiculous to see the young man make, because his moustache exacted so particular a temperament. That afternoon, while playing videogames in someone‘s basement, we went through dozens of scenarios, all of them concerning a date and ensuing love affair between the young man and this older, heavyset professional woman.

The aspects of the young man‘s life upon which we most speculated were the times he wasn‘t around, not at school or work. What, for instance, did he do on nights off? The young man didn‘t have any friends; we were certain he‘d probably lost patience with too many others in the past. After his first girlfriend had broken up with him we didn‘t see him around the river, or at the go-kart track, or in the pool hall next to the grocery store. When we did see him, he was always alone, the moustache set and intent, his mind focused only on the unknown mission. One of us said he saw the young man at the stationary store, buying pencils and notebooks. This led to a number of theories: perhaps, after the TV set was turned off and his parents were asleep, the young man retired to his room to write the pamphlets and manifestoes which would inevitably lead him to greatness, a greatness we were proud to recognize so early. The young man was more interesting than our college classes or our own quick romances. He kept us small, and by doing so enlarged our imaginations.

Then we heard the young man was dating someone new.

They‘d been seen at the movie theater, his one hand in hers, the other mechanically moving from the bucket of popcorn to his mouth. She was a high school teacher‘s daughter who, unlike all of us who were merely students still living in our parents‘ homes and having our mothers do our laundry, was working for a living at the bank next to the butcher. We were impressed she worked for a living straight out of high school instead of killing four years before having to work for a living.

Her maturity and her forty-hour a week work schedule seemed to put her and the young man with the equally mature moustache on the same level. We all believed nothing could spoil the relationship.

One Friday night one of us, with the girl he was dating at the time, was in the back seat of his father‘s car at the local make-out point: a wide, uninhabited dead end with the creek just a few yards from the road, the branches of trees hanging over the parked cars. He‘d seen the young man with the moustache pull up and park with his new girlfriend through the window while he was on top of his date, and told us he crawled off of her right after he had removed her bra. ―What are you doing?‖ she‘d said, after he fixed his shirt around his shoulders and slid closer to the backseat window in order to look at the parked car. ―Shh,‖ he said. ―I just want to see what he does.‖ ―What are you, some kind of pervert?‖ ―Look, can we just play the radio a while, or something?‖ he said. ―A guy doesn‘t get an opportunity like this every day.‖ He told us he couldn‘t really see what was happening in the young man‘s car. It was either too dark or the new couple was below the level of the windows. But he said for one second he caught a flash of white skin and he didn‘t even know what body part it was. We were all disappointed he hadn‘t seen more, but we clapped him on the back for the effort. We pictured the young man and his new girlfriend kissing for hours, saying nothing, and when their lips parted we pictured her with a moustache as well—a red one, right under her nose, where the young man‘s moustache had chafed the skin with its rough contact.

A nasty rumor spread round shortly after: the new girlfriend had asked the young man to shave. None of us could believe she had the gall. In recompense, we began a plot to sabotage their relationship but quickly nixed the idea.

It was the young man‘s test, and he wouldn‘t let us down. He wouldn‘t stop defying everyone with his soul-stunning moustache just for a girl. He‘d taken us too far. Nevertheless, we kept closer tabs on him, nervous surveillance with walkietalkies and shotgun mikes to monitor the status of the moustache. Each day over the span of two weeks ended with a sigh-provoking ―All clear—the subject has been spotted and the moustache remains.‖ We eased up a bit, relaxed, began to bowl again and ride our mountain bikes through the woods. One of us, playing videogames online at the internet café, saw the new girlfriend kiss the young man right at his cash register, the moustache falling over their joined lips like a protective blanket. We thought everything would be okay.

Our faith in the young man with the moustache deepened.

After a quick pick up game of basketball at the schoolyard one weekend we decided to go to the internet café for milkshakes—we could get them at a discount because we were students at the college. When we walked in, we all sort of froze into a row in front of the door. Believe it or not, I actually walked back outside to check the name of the establishment; it was the same as it had always been. And there were the same trash cans, the same water thermos and paper cone cups, the same computers, the same menu board, the same posters of coffee beans in outer space, coffee beans swirling around the head of a rooster, the same espresso machine behind the counter. And there was the same young man at the register—except that now he was simply a young man, nothing more. The moustache was gone.

He met our eyes and smiled at us while we stared at him. He looked ten to twenty years younger. The face was common— good looking, maybe, but nothing close to dictatorial. Now he was one of us, hardly even a young man anymore, just another guy.

8 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

another guy.

A few said nothing, just lowered their heads and left. A few picked up magazines from the rack and sat down, not knowing what else to do, frequently looking away from the articles to convince themselves that there he was, with no moustache, and that it was over. Then there were a few of us, myself included, who swallowed hard and went up to the register, who ordered our milkshakes and made small talk with him about exams, about papers to write. It‘s difficult to portray the awkwardness of that exchange—only one whose heart has been that invested, whose dreams have been contained in a single splendid thing, now gone, could understand.

The shock, it seems strange to say, didn‘t last for long. We went back to our computers for email and now we ate muffins that crumbled over the keyboards despite the rules, tipped the guy irregularly, and sometimes even played practical jokes on him, which he didn‘t take so well. In other words, we treated him as we would any other employee at any other establishment: without the deep respect, even awe, we‘d shown him before. I could say we learned, eventually, that we really hadn‘t lost anything. I could say it was like we all had had tails—we were born with them, we lived with tails all our lives and therefore considered them important. Then one morning we woke up without tails and we discovered we never really needed them in the first place, and that life was actually more comfortable without having to drag a tail around. I could say, in shaving his moustache, the young man set us free. And he did, in a way, but into what? Soon we were drinking beers in the back of pickup trucks, parked for hours outside all night diners. Soon we were just barely passing our classes, hung over from Jell-O shots at fraternity house parties. I had to get out of town. I transferred to State University the next year, after working at a car dealership in the summer.

I actually saw him again, a few years later, when I‘d come home to celebrate Thanksgiving with my folks. I‘d heard he‘d gotten a job at the video rental place and had an office in the back. He‘d broken up with his girlfriend long ago. I ran into him at a bar—I offered to buy him a drink and he accepted, but only on the condition that I let him buy me one after. We talked about a few of the classes we‘d taken together at the college, about certain professors and girls whom we‘d both had crushes on. It was pleasant. He was wearing one of those—those chin things, cut very close so that it almost looks like a shadow at the end of your chin. It was a goddamn shame. After a few drinks I almost confessed to him that when he‘d had his moustache, he‘d been the greatest man alive—to me, to all of us.

But then I thought about it and decided to keep my mouth shut. Nobody ever wants to hear those kinds of things.

As of this printing, Jeffery Ryan Long is in the process of relocating from Hawaii to Italy. He enjoys music and is very new to the works of John Sanford, a writer his friend has begged him to read. Aside from biking, walking is the greatest inspiration behind Jeffery's stories. He has most recently been published in Labyrinth Inhabitant, The Last Man Anthology, and Hawaii Review, and is currently working on a fantasy novel. © 2010 Jeffery Ryan Long, All Rights Reserved

Solve the Equation by Todd R. Behrendt

9 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

Š 2010 Todd R. Behrendt, All Rights Reserved

“…remember that the only way to write a novel is to sit down and write it and keep going even when you would rather be doing anything other than writing.”

Straight From an Agent

Nathan Bransford, Literary Agent, Curtis Brown Ltd. as interviewed by Bobby D. Lux Of all the tremendous resources available to writers on the Internet these days, for my money (of which I have very little, for the record), the most invaluable is the access to daily interactions with literary agents. Nathan Bransford, an agent based out of the San Francisco offices of Curtis Brown Ltd., is perhaps the most accessible of all the literary agents who have embraced an online presence. During any given week, the thousands of visitors to his daily blog, www.nathanbransford.com, are provided with a front row seat to the ins and outs of the publishing world from a perspective and insight that has rarely been available to them before. And if they‘re lucky, Bransford, an author himself, will gladly critique their work for them [HINT: Get there early on Mondays]. If that‘s not enough, he‘ll answer specific questions directly on his forum about all things publishing, querying, and even LOST (Requiescant in pace).

Can you discuss your evolution in becoming a writer/agent/blogger?

When I graduated from college I knew I wanted to work in publishing, and my first job was assistant to the president of Curtis Brown, an incredible agent and mentor. That set me on the long apprenticeship to becoming an agent. When I was beginning to take on clients and starting to build my list at the end of 2006, because it‘s so difficult to get established I wanted to set myself apart from other agents out there by building a web presence and try and help out people who were seeking publication. At that time there were a few blogging agents, but for the most part the industry hadn‘t yet really embraced the Internet and especially social networking. So I started blogging, at first on MySpace (how 2006 was that?) and then over at Blogger.

It‘s been immensely rewarding, and I couldn‘t have imagined at the time the extent to which it would be integral to building my client list.

When I set out to be an agent I honestly never really thought I‘d end up writing – I thought maybe I‘d write a screenplay one day, but eventually I decided to try writing a novel. My first attempt crashed and burned, but I ended up having a new idea that I was excited about and I wrote another novel around the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009. That became JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE COSMIC SPACE KAPOW, and I was fortunate enough to find an agent and publisher. It will come out next year.

As an agent, what do you for look for in a writer? Is this different from what you look for as a reader?

I‘m a generalist both as a reader and an agent, and read just about anything. I‘m drawn to compelling plots, unique voices, and I‘m not a trend follower at all. I‘m always looking for stories that are just brilliantly told regardless of what the market is doing. My essential feeling is that you can‘t start a new trend if you‘re always chasing the ones that are already ―hot.‖ The one main difference is that as an agent I‘m looking for writers who think of themselves as more than just a writer and are willing to go the extra mile with publicity, building an online presence, and doing everything they can to help themselves stand out. As I‘m sure you‘ve heard the publishing industry is going through a period of transition and turmoil, and authors who are willing to embrace the business and publicity end of writing have a better shot at making their work stand out in this competitive landscape than those who think of themselves as just a writer.

10 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

making their work stand out in this competitive landscape than those who think of themselves as just a writer.

What is your favorite part of being a writer? An agent? A blogger?

As a writer, it‘s just so fun to create worlds and put your characters in tricky situations, and when you‘re finished with a novel, no matter what happens with it it‘s something you can look back on and be proud of. It‘s hard work and I‘m not one of those people who always finds writing fun (and I‘ll admit that I‘m a little suspicious of those who do), but there‘s really nothing else like it.

The best part of being an agent is helping make writers‘ dreams come true and seeing a project go from a brief description in a query to something that is sitting on shelves and out there for readers to love. It‘s often a frustrating (and very long) process, but when everything comes together it‘s immensely rewarding.

And my favorite part of blogging is the instant feedback and the dialogue with readers. I‘ve learned an incredible amount from my readers, and I‘m eternally grateful to the people who participate and leave comments and participate in the blogging community.

How does being an agent inform you as a writer? How does being a writer inform you as an agent?

In the course of my job I‘m reading all the time, and since I‘m a hands-on agent I have to think very critically about what is and isn‘t working in a manuscript and be able to articulate that to an author. While it‘s much harder to be self-critical of your own work, it‘s been very helpful to think about structure and why certain elements work and others don‘t and forgetting what I learned in college about approaching books in terms of what they mean and instead every day asking the question, ―Is this good? Will this appeal to readers?‖ And as an agent, being a writer has made me much more sympathetic to just how difficult the process is, how it feels to be an author waiting for news for a really long time and how it can render you temporarily insane. I think it‘s cemented my respect for always trying to help an author achieve their vision.

What's the worst part of being an agent? What's the best?

The worst part is the waiting. The best part is when the wait is over.

Play Nostradamus if you will... Where do you see the publishing industry heading in the next several years?

The publishing industry is currently undergoing a huge amount of turmoil as it moves from a business that depended on its unparalleled ability to get paper books from authors into bookstores to one that is in the content delivery business and where it doesn‘t enjoy any particular distribution advantage. The major publishers historically were able to choose the books that they placed in front of readers, and were really the only game in town if an author wanted to have their work read in large quantities. With the rise of e-books that advantage is going to erode, and there is enormous competition not just from books that are coming on the market outside of regular channels but from other media as well, much of it available for free.

There‘s still no real replacement for the package of services that publishers are able to bring to bear (authors of the future will still need editing, copyediting, design, etc.), but in the challenging short term landscape publishers are probably going to continue to focus on the blockbuster titles and books they think they can break out in a major way. The challenge is that they have to pay top dollar for the hottest commodities, meaning it‘s tough to make money even when something does catch fire.

But e-books are here to stay, and the next five, ten, twenty years are going to be a wild ride for everyone in the content delivery business.

Could you spare some free advice for aspiring novelists?

What to do... and what not to do?

I think the most important thing is to study the craft and business of writing. Writing a novel isn‘t just a matter of sitting down and letting the genius flow, it‘s important to have a sense of how to craft the ups and downs of plot, avoid rookie errors, and think of character arcs and all the rest.

Even if you‘re writing literary fiction: it still needs to have a plot. And when you are finished it‘s not just a matter of sending it out and sitting back as other people take care of the rest – it‘s important to really know the business and to use that information to your advantage.

The other main advice is to remember that the only way to write a novel is to sit down and write it and keep going even when you would rather be doing anything other than writing.

Lots of people write when it‘s fun and stop when it‘s not, and that‘s no way to finish a novel.

Your debut novel, "Jacob Wonderbear and The Cosmic Space Kapow" is set to come out in 2011. Can you give us a preview?

JACOB WONDERBAR is a middle grade novel about three kids who trade a corndog for a spaceship, blast off into space, accidentally break the universe, and have to find their way back home. They visit crazy planets, become frenemies with a space pirate, have wild adventures, and meet the king of the universe.

Do you see yourself continuing to write in the YA genre?

I‘m not sure what the future brings, but I‘m currently writing a sequel to JACOB WONDERBAR, so that‘s my world (or I guess universe) for the near future.

How do you manage to find the time to write, blog, and be an agent?

My hobbies have gradually fallen by the wayside and the 11 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010 Wii is like a Siren I have been successfully resisting for the

an agent?

My hobbies have gradually fallen by the wayside and the Wii is like a Siren I have been successfully resisting for the last several years, but I love agenting, blogging, and writing more than my hobbies, so I‘m happy with the tradeoff.

Finally, why do you hate the Lakers?

Well, my family have been die-hard Sacramento Kings fans from the beginning, and the vile Lakers have always the Kings‘ arch-rivals, especially during the 2002 Western Conference Finals when the referees stole Game 6 from the Kings in utterly blatant fashion AND NO I AM NOT OVER IT A;LSDKJF. Nothing personal though.

For more information on all things Nathan Bransford, look no further than www.nathanbransford.com. You can also find him at www.curtisbrown.com.

Bobby D. Lux is the editor-in-chief of Onomatopoeia Magazine. His fiction and non-fiction has been published here and there, including several stories in FLYMF‟s Greatest Hits.

A sometimes actor and murder mystery dinner theater host, he‟s currently hard at work on that damn novel of his. © 2010 Bobby D. Lux, All Rights Reserved

1001/1011 by Thomas Reed A bug: little long thing, sat on an eyelash.

All about is tremulant: the pudgy hand of a child wipes tears.

She cries, "MOM!", who runs from across the street, not looking, to coddle, kiss, talk sweet things: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, apple pie, lies about who will be there to share.

Bank tellers leave their posts; shops left empty; cars pulling up; all join the crowd: people holding hands, sharing "it-can't-be"s and "oh-my-god"s; threats, worries, consolations; all rise, like bleats in an abattoir, some lambs flossy white, others greyed, each voice lost in the flood of the whole.

A crash; a scream; the lambs are silenced.

All tumbles: dust, rubble, glass, steel, desks turned to splinters.

A final crash, then calm.

Among the ruin, some find books, crushed lunchboxes, smashed "World's Best Dad" mugs.

Unlucky lambs find bodies, or parts of bodies.

Thom Reed is a student who spends most of his time watching old cartoons and sleeping. He'd like to write an existentialist masterpiece someday, but for now he needs to pick a haircut. ©2010 Thomas Reed, All Rights Reserved

“It was a distinct odor, a complex reduction no canned fish could compete with…”

Scent on a Mission

by Margaret Eaton

As he got closer she grilled him. ―Did you get it? Did you get the Joy? ―No my friend, I found no Joy. And the bitch in the clogs was no help.‖ Earlier ―Find the joy my friend.‖ That‘s what he said to me in the Hungarian aisle of Planet Grocery. He was nibbling on a clump of oily fish fresh from a tin. I gave him a quick nod that could have been mistaken for a twitch, then holding my breath I darted away. I rounded an endcap with just enough caution to avoid knocking down a tower of canned coconut milk, headed up the Middle Eastern aisle and exhaled. I spotted what I had come in for: rows and rows of Greek honey. As I reached for a particularly plump jar his pungency announced his return. It was a distinct odor, a complex reduction no canned fish could compete with, it was uniquely human, uniquely American homeless: piss, puss, and sour mash.

I glanced in his direction and instantly regretted it. He had bad feet. Their feet are always bad. Before I could look away he repeated his plea, ―Find the joy.‖ This time with each word his hand moved the fish clump closer to me like a chess piece on an invisible board: find, the, joy. I nodded again, slower than before thinking at least he‘s got a decent message. It‘s not ‗Jesus hates you for killing American babies‘, or ‗God knows what you did last Tuesday.‘ Plus I liked the way he carried himself, he had an almost debonaire quality and remarkably good posture for someone with such bad feet.

I put the honey in my basket and slipped away wondering if I had allowed myself to warm to him because I knew I could file him away to some remote corner of my soul reserved for those I only condescendingly deigned to appreciate for their quirkiness but had no other use for. Or had some part of him seeped into some part of me, on its own, on that scent, on a mission, without any intention of spending any time in any corner.

Later I saw him shuffling with purpose toward a female version of himself hovering in the exit, her face red and raw from her unprotected life, her body a mass of sweaters holding back the door. I checked her feet, they were indeed bad. One had escaped the confinement of its shoe and was wearing a dark sock for which I was grateful. She had a little dog on a rope who was going in and out, in and out, over the line of permission and back again.

Margaret Eaton lives in St. Louis. When she's not dabbling in fiction she helps social change organizations say what they mean, so they can get what they want. She's a contributing editor to Dowser. You can read other stories by Margaret at Opium and Rumble. © 2010 Margaret Eaton, All Rights Reserved

Death Before Factory by Anthony Liccione These factories that surround my house always burning, with three chimneys sticking out of each, lining themselves up like a locomotive, only going nowhere-they keep smoking more clouds to the sky, more toxicity, to a diseased-worn city.

And those inside the belly of the sweat, feeding a broiler that bleats for more coal, more steak and potatoes, around a time clock that speaks in different tongues, and spits out the same repetitive, redundant load of production.

There is only need here never want, want would be asking for new car, a new wife: it is just enough to make a paycheck survive, live until it bounces back in a unpaid whine.

The same count by the hour, the same quota of faces that break their backs and run overworked fingers over the mill, punch press sorting, spraying, capping oiling, typing, tying; the tedious conveyor belt always lashing forward like a snakes tongue.

The paper cuts, pepper -cheese boxes, assorted mail droppings

The robotic workers.

Tattooed with plastic trees and roaming hungry eyes behind their heads, and on their backs they sleep in a trailer that never forgives them.

They wake to a mirror that never eats with them, only swallows them whole.

waiting for the whistle to change shifts, a pink slip– to slip into a new life.

Anthony lives in Texas with his two children. His poems have appeared in several print and online journals, and he has four collections of poetry books. ©2010 Anthony Liccione, All Rights Reserved

Onomatopoeia Magazine wants you!

Your submissions for the FALL 2010 issue that is.

We want short stories, poems, reviews, interviews, one act plays, novel excerpts, photography, graphic design, humor, skits, and whatever else strikes you (and hopefully us) as interesting.

We‘ll even pay you too! It‘s not going to be much, but it‘ll be something.

Email submissions to (attachments are fine): onomatopoeiamagazine@hotmail.com.

Deadline for FALL 2010 is early-August.

12 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

“What to do for this social sickness? Depose the rich and give their stuff to the poor, á la Robin Hood? That only works in movies.”

O‘ War! War! O‘ Elegant, Heavenly War!

by BothEyesShut

Reason and intelligence lead thoughtful people to reach the same conclusions when those conclusions seem most obvious, and that‘s a shame. We intellectual sorts daily nod and smile at one another, agreeing on many momentous topics of discussion, differing on only the tiniest of distinctions. Too many discussions terminate with these knee-jerk conclusions, really, and one of these universally agreed-upon topics happens to be the matter of war.

War, says the sage scholar, is a base, savage, corrupt, unworthy use of our time and resources. War, he spits, defiles our dignity and pollutes our minds, denounces our integrity and poisons our innocence. War, he decries, is hell.

However, this perspective does not lend itself to a round, fair judgment of martial practices. War is too ancient a human institution to be flippantly dismissed out-of-hand. We owe too much of our bounteous, idyllic lifestyle to war for such a hasty expulsion of it. War is too human to be deemed inhumane.

War, the heart of so much civilization, cannot be immoral, unjust, or depraved. War is not loathsome, nor is it an abomination. War is not iniquity.

War, in fact — is a really, really good time.

altogether except for the kind of car they drive and which households make the most noise. We repeatedly prove ourselves too proud to love, too haughty to give a heartfelt hug when we need it most. Drop a few cluster bombs on the local strip mall, though, and people cling to one another like infant monkeys.

Never mind the block party; Mrs. Dilweed‘s acclaimed potato salad isn‘t going to make any friends. It‘s suppression fire from a machine gun nest at the end of a suburban cul-desac that softens the hardest of hearts. Until cowering in a muddy shell crater with them, one never knows one‘s true brothers and sisters. Camaraderie springs from warmth, and the root word of warmth is war (little known fact). This is why most ordnance produces heat, flame and conflagration, and why even cold bullets, once in merry flight, are called fire.

Don‘t stay out in the cold. Choose warmth. Choose war.

Did you see that buzzbomb clip Ralph as it whizzed by? Bang! Zoom!

What a gas!

II. War Inspires Art ―The object of war is not to [party hard] for your country but to make the other bastard [party hard] for his.‖ – General George S. Patton, Jr. War is not hell. Come now, does this look like hell to you?

I. War Brings People Together ―[The most awesomest party ever] grows out of the barrel of a gun.‖ – Mao Tse-Tung Nothing thrills the soul like a good explosion, except maybe a good explosion with body parts flying out of it.

Rather than blowing people up solo, though, one can make the minutest bang a resounding ka-boom! by inviting one‘s friends and neighbors along. An armed skirmish inspires conviviality, and any reason to hold a shin-dig is a good one.

Many Southern Californians live in apathy of their neighbors, ignorant of their neighbors‘ names, ignorant of their neighbors‘ proclivities, ignorant of their neighbors altogether except for the kind of car they drive and which 13 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

What pastoral oils graced canvases during Earth‘s peaceful centuries? What poetry dripped honeylike from the tongues of minstrels during the Great Pacific Period? What music resounded through the halls of humanity during the Time of Tranquility?

Aha! But there were never any such occasions, of course.

Do not be silly.

All great art is the result of a vicious, mindless, selfconsuming, bullet-tossing, bomb-fumbling world hell-bent on blending hell into every fine thing produced by man. Without the bang of guns, there would be no onomatopœia. Without the need for camouflage, there would be no paint. Without the need for morale, there would be no music, no comedy, no burlesque.

Without war, the Beatles would have been a boy band.

Without war, Hemingway‘s For Whom the Bell Tolls would have been about schoolchildren dismissed for summer. Without war,,

war, Leutze‘s painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, boot at the prow, would have featured that great general having his shoes shined.

No art exists but that which came from the fertile, menstruating womb of war. What possible inspiration could there, otherwise, be? God (big G)? Please. We have a Sistine Chapel already, thank you.

Without war, we'd not have pretty paintings like "2,000-Yard Stare,"

by Tom Lea

III. War Improves the Humans-to-Resources Ratio ―The death of one man is [smart shopping]. The death of millions is a [hot deal].‖ – Josef Stalin, comment to Churchill at Potsdam, 1945 Limited resources! cry the teachers of social studies.

Limited resources! cry the pundits of the mass media.

Limited resources! cry the politicians of every country throughout time. All these persons devoutly believe to have spotted the obvious reason for war, when all along they‘ve had it backwards. War is not a battle over limited resources.

War is the simple solution by which humanity divides limited resources amongst fewer peoples.

What difference does it make if seventy percent of all the oil in the world exists in the Middle East and North Africa, if there are so few people in said world that they couldn‘t possibly consume it all in seventy-seven generations? War isn‘t a contest of tug-o‘-war with natural resources as the prize. War is a game of musical chairs which begins with someone left standing, and ends with everyone seated comfortably.

Every human death brings humanity closer to feeding itself. The practice of warfare puts palatable provisions on everyone‘s plate.

IV. War Spurs Science ―You can‘t say that civilization don‘t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way [that is consistent with the scientific method].‖ - Will Rogers Dehydrated foods, microwave technology, and countless other advances sprang from the American war machine, yet detractors still picket and march and gripe and whine, saying, ―Make love, not war!‖ and, ―Draft beer, not people!‖ as though these pithy proverbs were the pinnacle of wit and political consciousness. These naysayers have conviction — one can tell by the limitless cash they spend on verbose bumper stickers for their hybrid automobiles, verbose little slogans such as, ―Why do people bomb people who bomb people to show that bombing people is wrong?‖ and ―It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to construct a bomber‖ — but their hypocrisy outshines their passion every time they stir water into their Carnation Instant Breakfast (™) or nuke their breakfast burritos for thirty seconds on High.

War motivates our sharpest knives and brightest bulbs to design ever-more-efficient blenders in which to purée people, without which the interminable process of old-fashioned battle would positively bore the soldiers to death. Who wants a war without robotic drone fighter planes firing laser-guided ordnance while threading the needle through phased-array radar sites? Nobody, that‘s who. Night vision goggles with infrared target-acquisition-sharing capability! Electromagnetic silent supersonic Gauss rifles! Nuclear submarines playing hide n‘ seek beneath polar ice caps, with bionic remotecontrolled spy sharks to follow them!

Let‘s face it, war makes a technological wonderland out of an otherwise unremarkable world, and though it may seem somewhat more destructive, we‘d all probably die of boredom without it, anyway.

The hi-tech miracles of war bring delightful conveniences into every home. Every boy and girl will want a civilian version of BigDog under the tree this Christmas!

V. War Brings the Rich and Poor Together ―When the rich wage war, it‘s the poor who [benefit greatly].‖ - Jean-Paul Sartre

Always enough to go around when "around" is less round.

14 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

Of the many struggles plaguing mankind, class warfare remains one of the most deleterious. The working class has always been exploited by people with money and power, and has always outnumbered its rich slave-owners by a ratio too imbalanced to ignore. In 2006, the top one percent of the population of the United States owned more than twenty percent of the wealth. This is the same as if the rich had stolen every single possession from nineteen percent of

population of the United States owned more than twenty percent of the wealth. This is the same as if the rich had stolen every single possession from nineteen percent of American citizens, not to mention everything these unfortunate nineteen percent are currently earning, and everything they will earn until the day they fall over and die — until the statistic changes again, that is.

What to do for this social sickness? Depose the rich and give their stuff to the poor, á la Robin Hood? That only works in movies. Once again we find that war, that old internecine pastime, is the answer.

The problem is not economic disparity. The crisis is that aristocrats are an alarmingly endangered species, their numbers falling faster than those of the black rhino, the giant panda, or the beluga sturgeon. In order to save this grievously assailed caste, the opposing herd must be thinned. What better use for the poor, than war? War is not only useful for inciting art, science, conservation, and brotherly love; it‘s also humanity‘s best method of lessening the huddled masses of impoverished paupers to match the dwindling and endangered populations of aristocrats.

Eat your heart out, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Without war, whatever would we do for philosophy? Where would we find our bathroom reading? Like it or not, the world has war to thank for the musings of Confucius, Gandhi, Lao Tze, Kant, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rest of the simpering peaceniks.

No war, no philosophy.

Socrates preferred the M4A1 for its close spread at medium range.

VII. War Holds Religions Accountable ―An eye for an eye makes the whole world [see eye-to-eye].‖ - Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi

Why not? Ancient Romans coined their money and forged their swords from the same metal, and in the same fire.

VI. War Spurs Philosophy ―We make war that we may live in [wine-induced philosophical contemplation].‖ -Aristotle Humanity once needed to laze in order to store up energy for the hunt. Now that our prey comes to us through drivethru take-out windows, we no longer require such lazing, but shaking the habit has proven too difficult for most of us and as a result, we‘re lazy.

Philosophers are no different, and in fact often constitute the laziest portion of society (armchairs redounding). For this indolence the fault falls but partially on them, however.

Having explained away the meaning of life with eighteen answers to choose from (and this before even touching upon world religions) philosophers peaked rather young, and the resulting malaise keeps them from coming up with new material for our amusement on a regular basis, lazy bastards that they are.

With the threat and promise of war, though, philosophers and thinkers from every corner of the globe clamber over one another to pose their perspectives to the world. War is detestable! say some, and War is inevitable! say others, and War is glorious! say still more, all of them having worked out valid, logical reasoning to support their point of view.

15 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

Perhaps most importantly, war keeps the world‘s major religions on their toes. Any religious leader can jaw non-stop about how one ought to live one‘s life, but when hundreds of weeping mothers pour in on Sunday begging for a divine promise to bring their sons home from war unscathed, even the most wretched charlatan must turn his gaze inward and ask himself, ―Do I really know what the hell I‘m talking about?

Do I really think there‘s an ultimate source of love and wisdom and fairness who could let a war like this happen, simply because people are born imperfect and grow up stupid enough to fire projectiles at each other?‖ Mark 13:7 says that wars must happen. Judaism and Islam have been hurling grenades at one another for centuries.

Hinduism even has a goddess, Kali, dedicated to destruction, and Taoism doesn‘t really care one way or the other. It should surprise no one, therefore, that most of the people recruiting for war, speaking in favor of war, and doing the actual killing practice religion. War benefits religions by holding them accountable, and by accomplishing the following: War eliminates the fighters from religious congregations, leaving only the lovers.

War forces religious leaders to answer in detail the most treacherous, and imperative, mysteries of life.

War allows believers to emphasize their belief in heaven by martyring themselves, an otherwise impossible task in the modern era. ―„There are no atheists in foxholes‟ is not an argument against atheism — it‘s an argument against foxholes,‖ says James Morrow. Indeed, nobody wants a godless heathen in the trenches defending America. What would that say about us here at home?

Warriors of anti-aircraft fire and theosophical debate, may your barbs fly true!

exponentially. Millions of heroic, conscientious warmongers with an earnest desire to kill opt out of parenthood, and thereby hurry the filtration process. In addition to these purposeful patriots, millions eject themselves from the gene pool by enlisting under dubious pretenses also, including (though fortunately not limited to) the overemotional, the desperate, the directionless, the uneducated, the unassuming, the weak-willed, and the easily-convinced. With all these excellent specimens volunteering their progeny for oblivion, homo sapien version 2.0 might just be released millions of years ahead of schedule.

One never knows which genetic mutation will prove most useful to the next line of humans, but one thing is certain: war finds those beneficial mutations quickly — much faster than waiting for rest homes to empty does.

VIII. War Destroys Warfarers ―We have to face the fact that either we are going to die together or live together and if we are going to live together then we are going to have to [die together anyway].‖ – Eleanor Roosevelt Having covered all the aforementioned benefits of war, it remains to note that even if war could be disparaged (not bloody likely) enemies of this most honorable practice would have nothing to fear, because war primarily destroys warfarers. Collateral damages aside, and the odd womanand-child combination notwithstanding, most victims of war who die with bullets in their chests die also with guns in their hands.

War, then, is a cancer-eating cancer. Who can fear an innocuous thing like that?

Like Romeo and Juliet, war loves war, and war kills war.

IX. War Expedites Evolution ―Violence is the last refuge of the [guy who should have tried violence sooner].‖ – Isaac Asimov The human race has war to thank for much of its enduring success and happiness, but natural selection continues.

Having developed foresight, as well as a prototypical reasoning faculty, humans owe it to themselves to help speed evolution along, rather than sluggishly floating through stages of development like flotsam on a wave.

Since evolution depends on the deaths of as many wouldbe parents as possible, war hurries genetic development exponentially. Millions of heroic, conscientious warmongers with earnest desire to kill opt out of2010 parenthood, and 16 an - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER thereby hurry the filtration process. In addition to these

Evolution at the speed of boom.

With so much to thank war for, how can we continue to castigate this most-precious of traditions? There‘s so little the world can agree on! And yet, everyone admires the silent nobility of a rusted, burned-out tank half-hidden in tall, green grass. Everybody can appreciate the natural beauty of an antiquated minefield, the subtle majesty of barbed wire silhouetted against the sunrise, its coils spiraling along the horizon like glittering ivy.

Why must we as a civilized people rebel against our most fundamental natures? Let us enjoin our destinies hand-inhand, staring boldly, proudly down the rifled barrels of our mutual obliteration. Let us not come to regard our beatific invasions as clumsy mistakes, but as the measured, artful strokes of a virtuoso violinist crafting a concerto.

There‘s nothing sick or evil about death. Death, so-called, does not even truly exist except as the briefest juncture between shapes of life, a nurturing moment in the infinite infancy of existence. Let us not stay the hand of the reaper, but take up our plows and sow our seeds in preparation for Death‘s gentle harvest.

We did not invent war. We are war.

So stand down the picket signs and snatch up the weaponry, salute the Commander In-Chief and strut stolidly to doom. Our splendor and sublimity await!

With Much Love and Many Rockets, -BothEyesShut BothEyesShut is the author of the popular new weblog, "In a Real World, This Would Be Happening" at botheyesshut.wordpress.com. He was born in Huntington Beach, CA and is currently writing his fifth novel. He lives in Long Beach. © 2010 BothEyesShut, All Rights Reserved

“We lingered in the courtyard, tipping our heads towards the characters we knew. Lady Macbeth had little time for more than a brief greeting, and some fulsome thanks, but we made her eyes glitter with excitement.”

Darkness and Storm

by Barrie Darke

WE WERE LADY Macbeth‘s favourite band. At one time, that was an upstanding thing to be. We shrugged about it, of course, between ourselves and when others were looking on, but it couldn‘t be denied that the Macbeths had a biting glamour to them, in those days. In the main, that was thanks to her. We were called In Core of Nerve, and we were Manchester men.

Large events have their own banners of good luck questing before them. We were in Scotland when her messenger, a whippet of a lad familiar to us even from his silhouette in a tavern door, found us one idle afternoon. We met him with good natured groans and insults to both his paternity and his masculinity, though nothing he hadn‘t heard from us previously. He passed on his Lady‘s request - could we travel to Inverness and play for her, tonight? And not only for her: for the King? And not only play: but be the main attraction?

It was, in fact, one of our few nights off. We were young and excitable, but our music was serious and draining for all of us, though worst for our singer, Dan the Whirler. It was not beyond us to refuse this request, and be respected by her for it, so we sent the messenger outside into the native drizzle while we passed it around. Lance, our drummer, said we should instead play a small concert, perhaps a free one – let Inverness come to us. Jason, our guitarist, said being at the beck and call of warriors and Royalty was not what he thought our music should be about. I said, to fuck with them all. Our nights off were inviolate.

What distinguished Dan the Whirler from other men, I consider, is that he knew more of what it is to live your life unhappy. It was sunk into him deeper than most. Things that old men may feel, with their best behind them, he felt with his best still ahead of him or happening to him now. Every grain of the sandstorm stung him. For that reason, he was able to pinpoint the experiences that would make things mildly worthwhile, that others of us would have missed. He said, ‗Boys, it will be a fine idea to see the centre of things for once. I say, let‘s head over.‘ The messenger was called back in, his King insulted. We laughed at his fallen face, and then ordered him to lead the way.

We are not as morose as our sound and our reputation suggests, and the trek to Inverness was strewn with jokes and pranks on the head of the messenger. Our spirits were skipping at the prospect of playing our music to people who might not ordinarily have heard it, whether they be the saddest serving girl or the King. It had a great uncoiling force in those circumstances.

They knew us at the Macbeths‘ castle, and we were the last to arrive before the King himself, which pleased us mightily. We lingered in the courtyard, tipping our heads towards the characters we knew. Lady Macbeth had little time for more than a brief greeting, and some fulsome thanks, but we made her eyes glitter with excitement.

Dan the Whirler said to her, ‗Is this wisdom, my Lady, we

Manchester men set before the great King of Scotland?’

17 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

Manchester men set before the great King of Scotland?‘ She said, ‗The King will take what‘s offered.‘ She left us smiling. We couldn‘t fail to appreciate a woman with such steel in her.

The other, homegrown musicians were also assembled in the courtyard, and were tight-faced because of their rightful place in the night‘s line-up. It was difficult for us not to laugh, so we did laugh. Some of them we knew, and could parley banter with, although they seemed not to enjoy it as much as they customarily did. There were other bands that we didn‘t know, though they knew of us and believed this was their propitious moment to sweep us to one side. Since we were in a warrior‘s castle, it was correct for me to offer to lop off a few heads, though it didn‘t have to be taken that far.

The King arrived. It was impossible for us not to feign boredom in the eye line of our rivals. The King of Scotland was, to a Manchester man, at the level of a town hall clerk. In fact, he was as impressive as these people usually are – sturdy at first sight and diminishing thereafter. A white beard belongs to the world, after all, and can be sported by anyone.

Lady Macbeth greeted him with a hand, and they exchanged words in their impenetrable accents. Into the castle we followed behind, making sure of course that we were at the head of all the musicians.

We were not introduced to the King, that would come afterwards if he was pleased to do so, but we were brought before his two sons. These were fans – gabbling then tonguetied, staring then darting their eyes away, asking Dan the Whirler about certain lines from the songs (and seeming satisfied when he said he didn‘t know where they came from), and finally taking on the glacial cool that comes from knowing that, whatever else happens to them in their life, they will always have met us.

Then the feast entered the first of its many hours. Serving girls carried platters, their muscles shivering with strain, and the noise level of the Thanes, as I believed they called them, suggested they were instantly intoxicated. Well, life is harder the further north a man gets.

It wasn‘t our habit to drink overmuch before playing, or to mingle with others. Lady Macbeth knew this, and had given us a far off table, where we could sit with our own observations. Not that we passed many words around our table. That form of communication is a waste, compared with what would come.

The lesser bands played their songs to an indifference that seemed to be almost career-ending for them. Their melodies were pleasing only, had nothing eternal captured in them, and their playing was tentative, over-practised, without heat or the threat of collapse. Lance, Jason and myself were automatically disdainful of them, though Dan the Whirler as usual stared off, absorbing some essence from them, as he put it. Occasionally this was useful to him, though we couldn‘t fathom how. And he broke out of it when Lady Macbeth sat with us.

She was an attractive woman, without being pretty. A hard and slightly too long face, and so thin that you had to believe her bones were almost breaking through. Even asleep, we surmised, she would look feverish, and during the act of love she would likely choke a man. Dan the Whirler always used to

and slightly too long face, and so thin that you had to believe her bones were almost breaking through. Even asleep, we surmised, she would look feverish, and during the act of love she would likely choke a man. Dan the Whirler always used to say that the absolute jet black of her hair was gorgeous, but scary in a way that no-one else‘s ever was, as if it would be black even when she was ancient, even when it was still growing in the grave, and don‘t even begin to ask him about her eyes, which were purple if they were anything. For myself, I liked her cheekbones. I liked nothing more than a cruel cheekbone. What made her attractive was the idea that she was unshockable, but you weren‘t, really. ‗I apologise,‘ she said, ‗for taking you away from your night off.‘ We said that was nothing to worry about – no one else but her could‘ve done it. ‗And what form of bad behaviour have you been indulging in on your tour?‘ The smile she gave there was the unshockable one.

We demurred. Our bad behaviour was not widespread, but there was enough of it for us to keep our counsel in good company.

Her smile told us she knew that. ‗The King‘s retinue,‘ she said, ‗will provide opportunities no doubt.‘ We demurred again. We had a form of loyalty to her serving girls. We remembered their names.

Then her voice became tighter. She didn‘t look anything like vulnerable, she wouldn‘t be capable of that on her deathbed, but she did betray a heavy effort when she said, ‗I have one more request of you, gentlemen.‘ ‗And what‘s that?‘ Dan the Whirler asked.

She left a necessary pause. ‗I would like to hear Darkness and Storm,‘ she said.

We all had the power of veto. That was how In Core of Nerve operated - if one of us had an objection, it would carry all before it. That was true in all matters apart from the playing of Darkness and Storm. It was only right that Dan the Whirler made that decision. That said, the song began with me playing a circular riff, and if I didn‘t do that, nothing happened. So I wasn‘t without influence.

He was staring off again, though probably not listening to the music this time. Lady Macbeth took a short dance with the King, to some inoffensive music. People could dance to our music, but not in that way. There was no doubt she knew what she was asking of us – she would have heard of it happening, had she not seen it herself. Perhaps she just wished for a dramatic night, or the most dramatic night. It was a shame it had to be at a cost to us.

I left the hall, returned to the courtyard. There were two friendly dalmations out there who knew me of old and were straining to see me, but I expected my mood would upset them, so I kept apart. I had to hear their pitiful mewling instead.

The sky was, of course, dark and stormy – but this was Scotland, so I saw no omen in that. Some of the serving girls, idle between courses, came out to talk when they saw me, Arabella and Ingrid, but I was able to plead artistic distraction and be kindly left alone.

I tried to make myself feel what he could be feeling. It had to be admitted that he wasn‘t a man to shy away from drama himself, like perhaps many a front man. I conjured the excitement, the risk and fear. I could get some of it, but most of what I got was a homesickness that made me stop all 18 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010 such thoughts before I joined the dogs in weeping. I returned

excitement, the risk and fear. I could get some of it, but most of what I got was a homesickness that made me stop all such thoughts before I joined the dogs in weeping. I returned to the hall, to our table. They were all looking at me.

Dan the Whirler said, ‗Johnny, I‘m happy with playing it. We haven‘t done it for many a show now, we can‘t let it die of neglect. And I can see it will suit the atmosphere of the night, or drag it along with us. It‘s the power of it, Johnny. If you can resist that …‘ ‗If it‘s drama you wish for, Dan the Whirler, we‘ll decide when the moment comes.‘ He laughed a little at that. Lance and Jason looked unhappy, but that was the decision.

A youngster, someone‘s effete son, sang to the King. It may even have been his own composition, so feeble was it.

There were the first of many toasts, lead by the warrior king of the castle, the lucky husband – a very rough hewn man, if that needs to be said. It was the wrong atmosphere for us, but Lady Macbeth had thought of that. They brought the bear out and killed it.

We moved backstage during the worst of that, the howls that hit the head and the roars that shivered the feet. We spoke not a word backstage, and didn‘t even look at each other. Mostly we looked into space, drew pictures in the imagined flying blood. When the agonies reached a peak, a steward came for us. There was no banter with this one.

Lady Macbeth was on stage to introduce us. She did so by saying we were the best band she knew of. We couldn‘t help but feel a little pride when that was said. It got the King smiling indulgently anyway.

We started, as we had ever since we wrote it, with Nothing Wounded Goes Uphill. This has a long instrumental introduction, during which Dan the Whirler stayed back near the drums, readying himself, only whirling occasionally. Then just as the audience were hypnotised, he darted forward to sing. Even people who knew it was coming – even Lady Macbeth – felt a whipcord through them at that. When it finished, we got a bigger cheer than the other bands had after their whole performance.

Our music was primitive in most ways, but so was our skill at playing, so we still needed to keep our heads down, our eyes on our instruments. But it wasn‘t every night that we had a King watching us, even a foreign King. We all flicked looks at him during the next song, Circle Their Names, which was a simple thrasher from our earliest days, when we were called Cave-Born Bastards. We liked to drag them into raucous states early on in the show, and Dan‘s whirling was almost at its most extreme. It might not have been the song to win over the King, but he paid us close attention, and his two sons were clearly delighted with it. We followed it with our slowest song, A Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth.

It was during that one that the atmosphere started to come right, and the other musicians watching us had to concede defeat. Often we missed the magic of that song – we only kept it in because when we got it right, it was a highlight.

It should be said here that Jason was our best musician, and that night he added notes to that song that pushed against the subdued melody, things we had never heard him do before, and it remade the whole tune. It gave it a more pained weight, but a beauty that made it all worthwhile – a beauty that made you want the pain, even. It opened up wounds in everyone. Even big Macbeth himself, I noticed, was looking into himself during that one, looked suddenly more dishevelled.

into himself during that one, looked suddenly more dishevelled.

An Elementary Blunder, one of my own favourites, and one I had a lot of input on, came along next. It had slow verses and roused choruses. Not something we claimed to‘ve originated, but we did it peerlessly. No one could build up to a crescendo the way we did, and Dan‘s whirling made the spectacle something that would be talked about for decades. The King‘s sons were bug-eyed and sweating during it, and Lady Macbeth had moved down to the front, red slammed into her cheeks.

Without a pause we went into The Wind, It Is Shrieking, which had a sad but sweet-toothed melody, somehow brought out even more by the aggression we played it with.

There wasn‘t anyone there who could think about anything other than what we were doing, no matter their problems or their obsessions. It didn‘t work that way for us up there, though - our thoughts were eaten up. It was after this song that, if we were going to do it, we did Darkness and Storm.

There need be no mystery about it. Like the majority of men and women, we did things because to miss the chance of doing them would be unbearable. So I started that circular riff, and the whole castle moved about three feet into the air.

Lady Macbeth looked as though she was close to fainting, but I couldn‘t give her much attention. All that had to fall on Dan the Whirler.

We could never pinpoint what it was about that song. It was, for us, a traditional arrangement of verse-chorus, no extended instrumental passages, just a steady build in intensity. Dark flecks came off it, that‘s the best way of describing it. A tower that rose and shook. Dan said once it was like a song that comes through every few hundred years, then is forgotten till it‘s written again - something the world needs and will always have. It was our good fortune that, at that time, we had it. We wondered if it exacted a price from all those others who‘d played it.

It didn‘t happen every time, but it happened enough, and we all knew it would happen that night. Towards the end, Dan whirls as he sings, the words break from the verse and chorus structure, and more of them tumble out, so they have to be sung faster. We all watched him, though we couldn‘t ever be certain it was on its way. We only knew when it arrived. His glare into the crowd becomes a glare through them into Christ knows what, and some of the strain floods from his face. All at once, the whirling is less graceful and not so controlled. Then his legs betray him and he falls. We stop playing, but I‘m not being an artistic person when I say that the song carries on by itself for a few seconds.

We dragged him backstage. He was shaking and we usually took a few bruises from his feet and elbows. He was talking gibberish – Lance used to believe he was saying the lyrics backwards, but that couldn‘t be checked. We laid him down like usual, made sure he didn‘t choke, and hoped it wouldn‘t take him away forever.

We didn‘t allow anyone but us to see him that way, and that had to include Lady Macbeth and her husband when they came rushing through. We tried to thank them for their concern and bundle them back out, but it was difficult. They weren‘t showing any concern.

She crouched down by him. ‗What are they saying to you?‘ she wanted to know. So she was a believer in that idea of it.

19 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

‗What do they want us to know?‘ she said, spitting the words into his shivering face. She looked like she might die from a lack of that information. Even Macbeth, who I wouldn‘t have thought took much interest in that, looked young again as he leaned over Dan‘s body. ‗Please, can you leave us?‘ I said to them. ‗He needs us, no-one else.‘ She was touching him now. ‗They‘ve come tonight for a reason,‘ she said. ‗What are they saying we should do?‘ ‗Fucking get out,‘ I said. ‗Leave us.‘ ‗Be quiet,‘ she snapped, not even looking back at me.

She shook him. I grabbed her arm. She yelled something at me, just a noise, and that got him involved. I hardly saw him move, and then I was breathless against a wall, one of his hands covering most of my chest. His face was still youthful, as though he wasn‘t interested in this necessary piece of violence, it was a simple small step that had to be taken. My head bouncing off the walls.

They let us back in after ten minutes, which was when they left, without a glance at us. Dan was sitting up, wiping his face countless times, trying to do something with his hair, drinking water. He gave us a weak smile, but didn‘t say much. ‗What did those two want to know?‘ I asked him after a while. ‗Easy stuff. If they‘d be happy in the future,‘ he said. ‗Will they?‘ He shrugged. ‗I told them the chances are against it.‘ I was in favour of leaving the castle, leaving the whole primitive country even, but Dan wasn‘t in any rightful condition to travel, especially not through that wild night.

(Later they said that horses had eaten each other that night.)

I thought we should at least seclude ourselves, have no dealings with anyone, but then some of the King‘s retinue came in to see how Dan was, and they brought ale with them.

The serving girls joined us soon after. Our nerves needed to be calmed, they said.

None of it worked for me, though I tried, I tried. Soon I was out in the courtyard, the wind in my face, and the highland creatures making their woeful calls to the clouds. I had women on either side of me, and tankard after tankard was emptied, but all there was in me was that homesickness feeling, rearranging everything in my chest.

Barrie Darke lives in Newcastle in the northeast of England. He has had several plays performed in the UK over the last few years, has recently worked with the BBC, and has seen a handful of his short stories published. He is also trying extremely hard to be a published novelist. He teaches Creative Writing, as much as possible, within a few miles of his home. © 2010 Barrie Darke, All Rights Reserved

Two Poems by Donal Mahoney Black Seed by Black Seed Every day the same people at the same table at the rear of the cafeteria.

The maiden, 35 at least, is gray at the temples, sour at the mouth.

The widow, 55, waves a cigarette like a wand.

Girdled and dyed, she needs no one now; She ministers to a dog and has a new apartment.

The accountant, 65, wants to retire, his years of intemperance tempered by a stroke, his anger at everything suddenly gone. The janitor, 60, explains over and over how over the weekend he snipped from his garden husks of dead sunflowers and drove them out of the city and into the forest and there in a clearing spread the black cakes for chipmunks to strip, black seed by black seed.

I, a young editor, ―with your whole life in front of you,‖ they insist, sit through it all, Monday through Friday, spooning broth, buttering slices of rye, and praying that after pudding again for dessert, the phone on my desk will explode too late with a call I‘ll take anyway, and that after that call, I‘ll rise and take from my sport coat a speech I wrote years ago, a speech I‘ll discard for two lines off the cuff: ―Here‘s two weeks‘ notice.

I have found a new job.‖ ©2010 Donal Mahoney, All Rights Reserved

20 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

Caseworker Takes Notes I was there the day

there trickled down the wall of an old man's room one roach that stopped across a canyon in the plaster till the old man's elevated slipper fell.

The roach absorbed the blow and as though perforated for that purpose dissolved into an archipelago.

The old man looked at me and patiently explained, "Despite my constant smacking of its brethren one roach each day will trickle down that wall and pause and pose as if to say, 'Go ahead and smack me, that's okay.' " To take advantage of the archipelago at hand the old man pointed toward the last palpitating island and once again explained, "Each roach I smack, you see, offers me that same good-bye-one last flicker of antennae."

Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in the U.S. and abroad in a variety of print and online publications. Recently he received word that he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. However, the nomination is for a poem he hopes no one reads in its present state. ©2010 Donal Mahoney, All Rights Reserved

All the Pretty Horses by Christopher Woods

Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Texas. He shares a gallery with his wife Linda at MOONBIRD HILL ARTS - www.moonbirdhill.exposuremanager.com Š2010 Christopher Woods, All Rights Reserved

Reviews Woman on a Shaky Bridge by Millicent Borges Accardi Reviewed by Jara Jones Accardi asserts in the title of one of her poems, "This is What People Do". It's the poetry version of a street busker whipping out the chainsaws and starting to juggle. It's flashy, more than a little cocky, and it draws a crowd.

However, once you've snapped the reader to attention, the poet has got to deliver. And for the most part, Accardi succeeds (specifically with work which effectively combines her skills in economical imagery and clear, gentle repetition). No better example of Accardi's craft can be found than in her ode "For John, For Coltrane", when she writes: "They say he looked ten years older than the music; They say the music used his his body more than love..."

21 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

While there are a few flat notes in her collection, Accardi's Woman on a Shaky Bridge makes good on its promise to document how "anxiety affects attraction", and is recommended for any poet who wants to see how a skilled artist can marry form with a welcome point of view.

Woman on a Shaky Bridge was published by Finishing Line Press - www.finishinglinepress.com.

Jara Jones is the brand spanking new poetry editor for Onomatopoeia Magazine and is the sort of chap who'd stab you in the throat. With a paper clip, and a little determination. Or maybe he'll make you some pancakes.

Hard to say, really. He thinks good poems should be like hand grenades: brutish, violent, and quick. Š2010 Jara Jones, All Rights Reserved

The Language of Trees by Ilie Ruby Reviewed by Bobby D. Lux In her debut novel, The Language of Trees, Ilie Ruby wastes no time grabbing her readers and immersing them into a sense of foreboding hanging in the air like heavy fog. Her narrative is instantly inviting and her characters are as charming as they are wonderfully vulnerable.

Among the many strengths of this work is how Ruby‘s Lake Canandaigua setting leaps off the page as well-defined as you would expect any other character. Ruby, also a poet, knows this setting very well and whether it‘s charting the twenty-four hour lifespan of the Mayfly on the one day a year they inhabit the lake to telling of local myths and legends, she injects the reader with an honest feeling of the region without slipping into melancholy.

Of course, the themes of love lost and discovering a second chance in life have been are among the usual suspect, but Ruby‘s approach to them illustrates a depth in her writing uncommon

not always found in the work of debuting novelists. Ruby places her likable, headstrong, and vulnerable characters within in a haunting (a carefully chosen word) atmosphere where redemption is possible if you‘re ready to find healing.

The result is character-driven page-turner of a novel that‘s eager to be an excellent companion on long summer days.

Ruby proves herself a writer capable of crafting an engaging story of great emotional depth; a writer both eager and wellprepared to stake a claim for herself in the literary world.

The Language of Trees was published by Avon Haper Collins.

You can find more information on Ilie Ruby and her work at her website, www.ilieruby.com.

Bobby D. Lux is the editor-in-chief of Onomatopoeia Magazine. © 2010 Bobby D. Lux, All Rights Reserved

A young Midwestern girl looking bored, lace curtains in window light and a silhouette of a flightless bird by Todd R. Behrendt

Todd R. Behrendt lives in the deep woods of the Adirondacks with his wife. His work has appeared in Burn Magazine, Direct Art, and Interrobang Magazine. He welcomes all comers to www.trbehrendt.com. © 2010 Todd R. Behrendt, All Rights Reserved 22 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

“It was called “The Horrors of Alcohol Abuse,” and was hosted by a man named Will Stevens, who the film said was a big deal comedian, but I had never heard of him.”

Dwight Goes to Rehab

by Michael Frissore

Next thing I knew police were telling me I crashed into something. They said what it was, but I was suddenly distracted by a Gallagher routine going on in my head. ―What was that last part?‖ I asked. ―A building,‖ one of them said. ―I crashed into a building? What was the other part you said?‖ ―It‘s a twelve-story building.‖ ―Okay.‖ ―And you crashed your car into the seventh floor. ―That‘s bad.‖ ―Yeah. No shit, drunkard.‖ I didn‘t remember it happening. I didn‘t remember driving or even the fun drinking part. The police said that people on the seventh floor looking out thought it was a terrorist attack because a.) I was flying, and b.) Both front doors of my car were open, giving the look, from a distance at least, of an airplane.

What they thought happened was that I somehow drove into the freight elevator. This made no sense because I would have been inside the building. Or some building. And there was no evidence of my car exiting a building, only entering. So I baffled law enforcement and everyone else with my flying car.

I didn‘t kill anyone. This – and the pseudo-comical, Evel Knievel-like nature of my crash – were among the reasons I received minimal jail time along with a judge forcing me to go to rehab for thirty days.

Thus, I was forced to attend The Betsy the Cow Clinic. This very prestigious clinic was founded in 1983 by a group of farm animals in Vermont. Farmer Charlie had one hell of a drinking problem himself, the poor man, and, when he got so drunk one night that he beat one of his cows to death, some of his other animals got together and had an intervention for Charlie. It was a touching one, very reminiscent of the famous "Intervention" episode of Party of Five. Three years later the animals built their own facility. At least this is what I was told.

It was a pretty somber place, this clinic. When I arrived all this lights were off and you could hear a pin drop. Well, I could hear a pin drop. Why do people say you when they mean I. That bugs me.

I sat waiting for about a half hour until Gertie, the manager, who looked amazingly like the granny from the Sylvester and Tweety cartoons, showed me to my room. She opened the door and the smell of marijuana was undeniable, but Gertie appeared to not notice. My roommate sat Indian style on one of the beds. His name was Zeus. He was a balding hippy, probably my parents‘ age. He stood 6‘5‖ and, for as long as we roomed together, when we were in our living quarters he wore only tighty whities. ―Hey,‖ I said to him. ―Have you ever been caught with the weed?‖ ―What weed?‖ Zeus said. ―Come on. It so apparently smells like pot in here.‖ ―Listen, narc…‖ ―I‘m a narc. I‘m just curious as to how strict 23not - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010they are around here.‖

―I‘m not a narc. I‘m just curious as to how strict they are around here.‖ ―I don‘t share, man,‖ he said. ―I‘m not asking…‖ I started to say, but changed direction. ―What do you mean you don‘t share? Weed is supposed to be about sharing.‖ ―My supply is scarce.‖ ―Do you sell it at least?‖ ―No, that‘s illegal.‖ ―So is smoking it.‖ ―No way.‖ ―You‘re thinking of sex.‖ ―Hey, you‘re not a fag, are you?‖ ―I am, but I don‘t want to have sex with you.‖ I really didn‘t. ―Why not?‖ ―You‘re not my type.‖ ―What type am I?‖ ―The aging hippy pothead type.‖ ―I‘m not a hippy. Hippies are fags.‖ ―Can you not use that word?‖ ―What word?‖ ―Are.‖ ―I can‘t use are?‖ ―No, fags.‖ ―Why?‖ ―It‘s offensive.‖ ―What about cocksuckers?‖ ―That‘s fine.‖ ―Really?‖ ―No.‖ ―Queers?‖ ―Can we just pretend I‘m straight?‖ ―Whatever, fag.‖ He rolled and lit a joint, not offering it to me. ―Can you believe we‘re in Room 213?‖ he said. ―What‘s wrong with 213?‖ ―That‘s the room number they found all those body parts in Dahmer‘s place, fag.‖ ―Stop calling me fag.‖ ―Sorry.‖ ―You mean Jeffrey Dahmer?‖ ―No, Prince William Dahmer IV of Edinborough.‖ ―You don‘t usually hear sarcasm from hippy potheads.‖ ―I told you I‘m not a hippy.‖ ―I‘m Dwight, by the way.‖ ―You played right field for the Sox.‖ ―No, that‘s Dwight Evans, but I was named after him.‖ ―Ah,‖ he said. ―I‘m Zeus.‖ ―Nice to meet you.‖ ―Can I call you Dewey?‖ ―Sure can.‖ ―Can I call you Dewey who likes man spewey?‖ ―No, you can‘t.‖ Gertie came into our room without knocking and invited us to orientation. For me, it wasn‘t an ―invitation,‖ per se, as it was mandatory. Zeus has been at the clinic for more than thirty days, though he wouldn‘t tell me why. He never missed an orientation.

thirty days, though he wouldn‘t tell me why. He never missed an orientation.

Once we got started there were four of us. There was a midget or dwarf sitting in the back and a man in a suit who looked to be about seventy up front. Gertie turned the lights off and showed us a short film. I started to wonder if she was the only one who worked here.

The film was a real downer as it was all negatives about drugs and alcohol. It was called ―The Horrors of Alcohol Abuse,‖ and was hosted by a man named Will Stevens, who the film said was a big deal comedian, but I had never heard of him. Mr. Stevens began: Do you love beer? Do you wake up every after-noon and have a drink of breakfast?

When a beer ad comes on, do you lick the television screen? Have you been in a trance since I said the word “beer?”

Zeus began throwing pieces of paper at me.

Now, I‟m not anti-drugs and alcohol by any means. In fact, I‟ve got a big vial of crack in my back pocket that I plan on smoking in about two minutes. Ahahahaha-haha!!! Just kidding.

I rolled my eyes and looked over at Zeus. He had produced, from underneath his shirt, a bong he had made out of a Bic pen.

But wherever does all this excessive drinking get you? You shower, put on a pair of drawers, spray Glade under your arms only to find yourself doused with Key-stone and clam dip the second you enter the door.

A woman who wasn‘t Gertie came in and tried to confiscate Zeus‘s bong but received a punch in the stomach for her efforts. ―Dude, that‘s not cool,‖ I said. ―Neither is sucking a man‘s cock,‖ he replied.

You dance the waltzing pissant for a couple of hours, get into a spoon fight or two, pass out, and wake up somewhere across town wearing someone else‟s drawers and feeling like you‟ve been eaten by a wolf and excreted off a cliff.

I tried to help the woman as Zeus kept shouting ―Sit down, faggot.‖ Gertie finally came in and asked what happened. ―He punched her, Gertie,‖ Zeus said. ―I did not, you son of a bitch.‖ The fallen woman started to speak, but Zeus leaped off of his desk like Ricky ―The Dragon‖ Steamboat onto all three of us and said ―The fag pushed me.‖ Some security men came in and grabbed Zeus while medics attended to the woman. Gertie told me to behave myself and watch the rest of the film.

I believe it was John Seldon who said 24 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

“‟Tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess.” Moderation is the key.

And if you decide to transpose it into a higher key, you might as well be singing with the fat lady, „cause it‟s over.

The midget, who, like the old man, had been sitting quietly through the whole incident, applauded at the end of the film.

Gertie entered the room once again and told us to gather up front for a discussion about this important movie. ―I loved the film,‖ the midget said. ―Will Stevens is brilliant.‖ ―Who is he?‖ I asked. ―How should I know?‖ the midget replied. ―He‘s the guy is the film.‖ ―Just seems to me he might have been doing this as community service for something is all I‘m saying,‖ I said.

Gertie then asked us to introduce ourselves. As it turned out, Patrick, the midget, was not a midget at all. He was actually sort of accordionesque due to a skydiving accident. His parachute wouldn‘t open and he landed feet first onto a field. ―So,‖ I said, ―Did dinnerware come out of the chute, like in cartoons? And can you play Frank Yankovic songs?‖ ―I got a song for you,‖ Patrick said. ―It‘s called ‗Taps.‘‖ He lunged at me like a rabid dog. Gertie was quick to pull him off of me and made him stand in the corner. It was now just me and Gerald in the group. Gerald was a former president of a state college who had gone on a bender of his own. He lost his job when news of the incident was printed in the school newspaper. Gertie, to my delight, had printed copies of the story and handed one to me, asking Gerald to read it out loud.

Gerald, tears forming, read: There will be new rules regarding alcohol on campus thanks to student protest and a twoweek drinking spree enjoyed by the president recently.

The college will now be known as Booze University, according to the president, who now wishes to be called “Captain Cognac.”

More and more tears came as he read the first quote.

“College without drinking is like…college without drinking,” the Captain said. “In fact, I‟m drunk right now. I‟m drunker‟n a hootin‟ owl at a turkey shoot.”

While the majority of the campus responded to this news in bacchanalian glee, the Captain‟s plan does have its opponents.

“I believe this is an error of intergalactic proportions,” said a student who was then smashed over the head with a beer bottle.

The Captain let everyone into his office as he prepared to sign the plan into being.

“I‟m gonna bign the sooze bill,” he said.

“Hello, Mr. Elephant. Is the bean dizzy? Get the bean. Wanna sing a song. I have a bootiful songing voice. Jeremiah was a bullfog. Mrs. Hildebordebuben, what‟s your name? Take a memo. All potesters to the will bill be hebedded. Ha, I said hebedded. I meant…Mrs. Hooderhoafen, get me another bucket of scotch. No whammies. No whammies. Stop.”

scotch. No whammies. No whammies. Stop.”

There was a pause as Gerald placed his head in his hands.

As the Captain fell off his feet he scribbled a giant “X” on the floor with a blue crayon and yelled “Party!”

The Captain‟s plan is supported not only by 384 percent (his figure) of students at the college but also by his “new trusty sidekick” Horace. Although many staff members assure us that Horace does not exist and is a figment of the Captain‟s imagination, he issued this written statement: There was another pause so we could each read the ―statement,‖ which read: “craptinn carfo9n is aa genis*/ $crapcarp! I lik cheeeez jjj the quik brow foxxjumpd ooove69” I was very proud of myself for controlling my laughter, but it wasn‘t over. Gerald finally continued reading.

Despite the debate over Horace‟s existence, the Captain‟s approval rating has gone up 93 percent (actual figure). Here are some student comments: “Captain Cognac cares about the state of this institution.”

“This is a big victory for students.”

“Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrr!”

“Lick me. Liiiiick meee.”

The Captain has a vision for this college, and as he looked out of his office window at the campus community, he held his head high and said, “I can drink any student here under the table.”

Then he fell out of the window.

As Gertie patted the Captain on the back, my laughter could no longer be held inside. I was literally on the floor, hysterical. I wondered if Zeus knew about this.

With the orientation over, Patrick asked me if I wanted to play basketball with him. ―Seriously?‖ I said. ―Yeah,‖ he replied. ―What, you think I can‘t shoot hoop because of my condition?‖ ―No, I just thought…‖ ―Let‘s go. I‘ll kick your ass.‖ We went to the gym and played a little one-on-one. Patrick was amazing. He was like a Slinky. He could dunk from the free-throw line and his feet didn‘t leave the ground. He beat me 11-0 and asked if I wanted a rematch. I told him I‘d try to find Zeus and make it a fair two-on-one.

When I got to our room, Zeus was sitting on the floor, staring at a blank television screen and caressing a gigantic bong. I entered to him laughing at nothing in particular and trying to catch what I guessed was a fly, although I never saw it.

"Hey, man," he said, looking up at me. "What are you doing with Heathcliff the cat‘s severed head?"

25 - Onomatopoeia Magazine SUMMER 2010

with Heathcliff the cat‘s severed head?"

"It's a basketball," I said.

"Oh. Hey, come here," he said as I sat on the bed beside him. "You know what?"

"What?" I asked.

"Chicken butt," he answered before laughing hysterically.

"You got me on that one, Zeus," I said, staring at him blankly.

"Listen, listen, man," he whispered. "Shhh...It's in the air."

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"Shhh...It's in the air," he repeated. "Shit's in the air, get it?"

"Ah, brilliant," I shouted over his insane laughter.

"Shit's in the air," he continued. "There, satisfied? Are ya?

Huh? No? I didn't think so."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I shouted. ―I don‘t know.‖ ―Hey, did you hear about Gerald?‖ ―So what‘s with the giant orange?‖ ―Oh, do you want to play some b-ball? You and me against Patrick?‖ ―The midget?‖ Zeus said, laughing again. ―Funny thing about that…‖ "Hey,‖ he said, pointing. ―It's in the sky, man.‖ "Oh, God. I‘m not going through the ‗Shit‘s in the sky‘ bit again, Zeus.‖ "No, really. Look,‖ he said. ―It‘s her.‖ It was Emilie, Princess of Paddington County, named, for some reason, after the adorable Peruvian cartoon bear. She was the only English, vegetarian, lesbian, gothic superhero in the entire state. She had been away for quite some time, and now had returned, and with new tattoos and piercings. This was all according to Zeus.

"Princess Emilie," Zeus said. "You've returned, but wherever have you been?"

"I‘ve been on tour, fighting alien evildoers like Alf and the Great Gazoo. I am your god. You shall not worship any gods but me. And don't eat meat." ‖Yeah, man," Zeus exclaimed.

"I must go now," she said. "Remember, don't get run over, and Jell-O shots next party."

And so, after this ill-conceived farewell, the boys watched as the princess flew into the mid-afternoon sky. So ended another pathetically told story that makes absolutely no sense and was written by a pack of monkeys. Tune in next time when our heroin faces Gene Simmons, Richard Simmons, and novelist Jane Austen in a four-way match of death.

Michael Frissore is the author of a poetry collection called Poetry is Dead (Coatlism Press, 2009). He writes for SlurveMag.com and his work has most recently appeared in Monkey Kettle, Fast Forward Volume 3, The Toucan, and Errant Parent. He also blogs occasionally at michaelfrissore.blogspot.com. Mike grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Oro Valley, Arizona with his wife and son. © 2010 Michael Frissore, All Rights Reserved

Onomatopoeia A AM MA AG GA AZ ZIIN NE EO OF FL LIITTEER RA AT TU UR RE EA AN ND DW WH HA AT TN NO OT T S SU UM MM ME ER R2 20 01 10 0