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Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1

November 17, 2017 By Mindful AI

Spheres Reading Group:
Volume 2

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1

By
  • Cosmos Co-op logo
    Cosmos
 |  November 17, 2017
Feature Image: fdecomite, Eclipses [via Flickr, CC-BY]

https://metapsy.cosmos.media/2017/11/01-Globes-Peter-Sloterdijk-Live-Conversation-1.mp3

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This is the first in series of conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, Volume 2: Globes.

We kick off the second round of our Spheres reading group, with our first conversation on Volume 2: Globes: Macrospherology.

In this session, we catch up and welcome a new member, discuss our plans for the reading and desired outcomes, and exploring the initial sections of the book:

Prologue: Intense Idyll
Introduction: Geometry in the Monstrous
Access: Anthropic Climate

Pages 13–151.

Participants:

Marco V Morelli
Geoffrey Edwards
TJ Williams
John Davis
Heather Fester

Recorded: 11/30/2017

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Filed Under: Books, Hide from home page, Philosophy (Eteolegeme), Society (Multitudes) Tagged With: Globes

Erzulie

February 21, 2021 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 48

Erzulie

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  February 21, 2021
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Erzulie
00:00 / 44 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 44 minutes | Recorded on December 15, 2020

This week’s podcast is about Erzulie, a family of Voodoo loas connected to water, and to the Feminine in its various forms. We look at two of the loas in particular; Erzulie Freda, associated with love and sex, and Erzulie Dantor, a fierce protector figure often associated with the Black Madonna.

Music: Intro adapted from “Secret Door” by Anastasia Vronski, [CC 4.0]

URL: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Anastasia_Vronski/Estrangements_volume_2/09_-_Secret_Door
Comments: http://freemusicarchive.org/
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Copyright: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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Tagged With: afro-caribbean, erzulie, feminine, loa, podcast, spirits, voodoo

Oya

February 7, 2021 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia

Oya

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  February 7, 2021
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Oya
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 42 minutes | Recorded on December 17, 2020

Oya is the powerful Yorùbá Orisha of the winds and tempests. She is considered either the sister of the Orisha of storms Shango, or one of His three wives, with Oshun and Oba. She is a fierce protector of women who uses her machete to clear the dead wood path and make way for the new. We look at her various aspects in this week’s podcast. (Note: There were some sound issues with the original file, you may have to turn this one up slightly…).

Music: Intro and ending music adapted from “Secret Door” by Anastasia Vronski, [CC 4.0]

URL: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Anastasia_Vronski/Estrangements_volume_2/09_-_Secret_Door
Comments: http://freemusicarchive.org/
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Copyright: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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Tagged With: hurricanes, oya, podcst, yoruba

Pomba Gira

January 24, 2021 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 46

Pomba Gira

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  January 24, 2021
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Pomba Gira
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 63 minutes | Recorded on December 9, 2020

This week we look at Pomba Gira, sometimes a single term for a powerful female spirit, at other times the title of a group of spirits. A spirit with many avatars, most notably Maria Molambo (Maria of the Trash), Pomba Gira is a highly sexualized and sometimes dangerous female figure in the Afro-Brazilian rituals of both Umbanda and Quimbanda. We look at her origins in powerful African earth mothers, and her role as a power figure for the oppressed.

Music: Adaptation of “Secret Door” by Anastasia Vronski, [CC 4.0]

URL: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Anastasia_Vronski/Estrangements_volume_2/09_-_Secret_Door
Comments: http://freemusicarchive.org/
Curator:
Copyright: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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Tagged With: afro-brazilian, chthonia, dark, exu, feminine, gira, goddesses, orisha, umbanda

I Take That Back

January 22, 2021 By marythaler

I Take That Back

By
  • Yoav Ben Yosef
 |  January 22, 2021
Feature Image: Horst Frank, Wikimedia Commons

It starts like this, the intercom buzzes. Nick, the reluctant pet cat, is faking obliviousness, turning around, padding over to the kitchen for a snack. His tail, way up in the air, offers me a clear view of his hypoallergenic pink behind—shorthand for open scorn. “Guess I’m getting it then,” I say, pushing back with my own attitude. The box crackles when I press speak, the air holes asthmatically dusty, a vent to the ether—last call I got was around the time of the Big Bang. Then, too, it was for the guy down the hall. “Hello?” I say. I’m kept waiting for a long time. Then a man’s voice comes blasting through, garbled and shockingly loud. I make the suggestion that he back up a step and  try for better enunciation. “YOOOUUPEEEEAAASS,” he roars. He’s got the sorry-we-missed-you note ready at hand, I’m sure of it. I give a quick scan of my shorts and t-shirt for unseemly stains, grab my phone, and put on the first footwear in sight, my bunny slippers, slid up against last night’s Pepsi Zero and Domino’s Pizza box underneath the coffee table. Definitely not the best choice for flying down three grubby flights of stairs at hysterical speed. I skip two steps at a time, my toes curled crow-like to fasten the grip on the soles. What is it about me, I wonder, willing to risk broken bones to avoid the wrath of the man downstairs?

The glass panels of the front door offer him a view of my tumbling dash down the last few steps. I make a bit of a show rushing across the lobby, make it look like his time is valued. He is big-boned, you could say towering, but maybe without the dignity the word usually connotes. Still, there is presence about him. His thick, round, firmly protruding stomach is not unintimidating. It says, I’m here, I’m scowling, and what are you gonna do about it? Close up, his facial skin is enviably smooth, pristine, the cheeks powdered with natural rouge. In addition to a scowl and the brown UPS cap and shirt, he is wearing grease-stained jeans, the little handle of the zipper not quite reaching its socially-expected destination. I find this detail oddly captivating.

“Roni Cohen,” he doesn’t ask but states.

“Present.”

“You’re wearing—what’s that? Baby slippers.” He’s criticizing my apparel? The guy in half uniform? Naturally, he is the owner of a booming voice, the kind that knocks out any member of his sex with him not straining a single muscle.

“Is that a problem?” I ask. “They come in all sizes.”

“Your package is not here.” He’s saying it like it’s something I should have known already.

“Ok?” And so—why are you here? is what I would have asked if my voice was half as commanding as his.

“You need to come along.”

“Along? Along where?”

“All right.” He glances at the slippers. “Better than barefoot.”

“Along with you?” I’m already scuttling after him, down the flagstone path to the street. “Wait! Wait, what?” Without turning around, he raises his hand ear-height, his two fingers tapping forward toward his truck. I obey but I don’t know why. Feels like I’m tied by a leash. I’m reminded once being told by an oracle reader that, in a previous life time, I had been a poodle. A toy poodle, in fact. She said I was karmically destined to meet my owner over and over again until I summoned the courage to cut him off, aggressively. “You will need to unpoodle yourself in order to move on to the next stage,” she said, refusing to elaborate what that might be. She let me pay below her sliding scale.

∞

I still haven’t quite shut the truck door when he starts going. He drives in a state of low-grade road rage, honking, snickering, muttering under his breath, waving half-hearted apologies to drivers while still in the act of cutting them off. Somehow though, with all this going on, he also manages to explain, with surprising clarity, the terms of the delivery (my interjections are quickly struck down, which speeds things up). By the time we get to the BQE, I am still very much bewildered about the metaphysics of the “Offer,” as he refers to it, but as for practicalities, it’s pretty straightforward. It all boils down to a choice. Choice number one, I get $164,656. Somewhere at an undisclosed location (“What do you mean undisclo—?” “I mean undisclosed.”), towards which we are now driving, there’s a check bearing my name. Choice number two. Sadly, my checking account remains on the poor side of  one thousand. At the same time, this is undeniably the more radical option. A permanent resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the next fifteen months! Satisfaction for all concerned. (“I don’t know any Vanessa Redgrave,” the driver snaps).

“So what’s it gonna be?” he says once we’re settled on the fast lane. “Turn around? keep going?”

I spend the next minute in total, horrified silence. Then a piercing sound is heard. Something like a yelp, a shriek. A bleat? A bleat of a sheep possessed. It comes from all the way down in my gut, my mouth simply opening up with the force of it. Something like “Eahhhhhhhhhhhhiii.” The driver turns to me with a mixture of repulsion and suspicion. I cautiously look back. My face–bewildered, panicked. Pleading. Could he please tell me what just happened? That sound. What was it? Is it, like, a symptom, a common symptom he’s seen before in similar situations? Is it decodable? Was it a mutilated “turn,” as in turn around, I choose peace? My basic goodness pushing through the muck of self-interest?

The smirk spreading across his face tells me he’s figured it out. Figured me out.  Basic goodness has nothing do with it. He turns his eyes back to the road. “You’ll need more time,” he says

“I will?” I ask idiotically. “How much time do I have? I can be a bit indecisive.”       

He doesn’t seem to hear the question. Uncharacteristically, he waves in a mini Fiat to merge in front of us. “Dumbass,” he mutters when the guy gives him the thumbs up.

My phone beeps and instinctively I take it out of my pocket. A new Tinder match! I swipe right and quickly put it away.

“This is just so much,” I say. “I mean, isn’t it? You have to agree. It’s not even eight.”

“I don’t see you thinking,” he says. “It’s eight thirty.”

I shrink into the sticky vinyl seat. It makes a squeak that calls attention to my shame.

“ ‘I don’t see you thinking,’ ” I ponder out loud after a minute of silence that took everything out of me. “You just reminded me. That’s what my para used to say, ‘I don’t see you thinking.’ A para, you know, for my ADHD.” Arousing pity: that’s how the impish have managed to survive where the Neanderthal was vanquished. “Also dysthymia, but that wasn’t diagnosed till much later. After the army. You know dysthymia, right? ” The driver is determined not to engage—taking the same approach, come to think of it, as my para’s—ignoring anything I have to say that’s off topic. “Of course in Israel we didn’t call them paras,” I clarify. “It’s a funny word, isn’t it? Para. I mean, I understand why they’re called that. But still. Imagine being called a para. Not that paraprofessional is much better. Maybe even worse.” I chuckle affectedly. “Interestingly, in Hebrew, para would mean a cow, sort of. If you change the emphasis to the second syllable.” How I wish I could stop talking! Run off at the mouth, that’s the phrase.

A strange thought comes, that the only way to stop this pouring of nonsense would be a slap in the face, or a kiss.  I imagine first one and then the other, and now I am almost ready to stop.  “Anyway,” I say. “That’s all neither here nor there. Ok, enough, enough! I’m thinking.”

“Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts,” the driver says, somewhat cryptically. It’s been anywhere from a minute to eternity since my last words were spoken. I’ve done no thinking during this time, only panicking about not thinking, and the fact that I haven’t managed to sit still for one second must have clued him in.

“Hamlet! Isn’t it? You know him? Was that the allusion?” No reaction except a sigh. “Silence, silence, silence. That’s me, not Hamlet. I mean, that’s not me. I guess that’s you. I wish I could be the silent type. Not be so—accommodating. Beholden. You know what I mean? Entertaining, pleasing. ”

 “Nope.”

“Actually it might have been ‘Words, words, words.’ Either way. Maybe you weren’t even making the allusion.”

He doesn’t take the bait. But he does say, “It’s a misconception that thinking leads to right decisions.” That he speaks at all, however negatively, is a relief.  “Never actually been proven.”

“That’s very interesting,” I say. “Turns things upside down, no?” The idea sounds too fatalistic, but I pretend, using a frown, to hold it against the light of reason and see what it yields. Part of me hopes he’s right. “So then, not at all? Like, under any circumstances? Thinking never does anything?” 

“Does something. Drives you in circles. Long as you’re thinking.” He makes a few agitated circles in the air with his finger.

“So then, what? I should just listen to that voice inside, right? Just go with my gut?” Again, he keeps me waiting. “Go with my gut,” I repeat, as if to myself, but really for his benefit, to lure another response.

“Gut,” he says, scoffing. “The hell that means.”

“I don’t know. Maybe intuition?”

“Yeah? And what’s that?” I have to admit, I have no idea . “Stupidity. It’s people following their stupidity.”

My heart starts beating faster. “But then. Well, how do you make a decision? How does anyone make any decision?”

“He shrugs, losing interest in the discussion now that it reached a dead end. No Tuesdays with Morrie for me. Thankfully, his disengagement has a calming effect. I’m no longer being watched or timed. I let my head rest on the back of the seat and roll over to the right, toward the window. The asphalt underneath, reflected in the passenger side mirror, flies backwards, hypnotizing me. There. A little moment of total defeat with some suicidal ideation. Does me a world of good.

Here’s the thing. If I’m at all surprised about this situation, this Offer, it’s by how little surprise I actually do feel, after the initial hysteria, that is. You’d think such a proposition would give pause to anyone but the severely psychotic (who are presumably used to these types of occurrences and probably take them in stride). And it does. It does give me pause. And of course I’m deeply troubled—deeply. Anguished, even. But I’m not nearly as—what’s the word? Incredulous! Not nearly as incredulous as I imagine I should be. And the driver. What about him? Why is he so—so blasé? Not to go around in circles, but shouldn’t my lack of surprise be at least somewhat surprising to him? What is it that I actually do feel? I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Anesthetized.

And speaking of the driver. I have a confession. More like a secret. I do not dare admit it to a soul, least of all my own. I am doing my best to push it away but it is hovering at the top of my head, waiting for this very thought to end before it swoops down into consciousness. Even though I do not know what it is, I know it is indecent, that I do not want it, and that it’s most certainly coming my way. Here it is, coming down. And now I know it: I am more attracted to him, to the driver, than anyone I have ever been attracted to before.

I force my eyes to fix on the tissue box on the dashboard so as not to look at him, but over and over they sneak up to his hand on the steering wheel and the very bottom of his forearm, sparsely covered with dark hair under the very white skin. Has he not been in the sun this summer? Has he not taken off his shirt at the beach? While I ponder these questions my eyes manage to slide up his right thigh. It is thick. The man could stand to lose a few pounds. Which does not stop me from imagining the flesh underneath the jeans and how much of my prize money I’d be willing to give in order to see it. God help me. I force my eyes shut. Time out, eyes. And—as discreetly as humanly possible, I lift my left leg over the right and turn myself forty five degrees angle to face the door. This hides the evidence under my shorts, but the air, regardless, is thick with my desire.

I try to contemplate the situation, but the thinking is all wrapped up in sex.  Viscous, unseemly. Lustful Oslo peace talks. Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat, and between them at the table on the stage, Bill Clinton and a driver, both naked. Not this driver though. Another one. Or actually not a driver at all, a para. My para. My punitive para.  Peace or greed. Virtue and lust. Giving or demanding. I should just open my eyes again, I should open my heart, and say it. Say it now. Turn around. Say it. Peace, peace, peace. Shanty, shanty. Take us back. No check, no check for me. I’m better than that!

My mouth remains infuriatingly unaffected by this very clear command from the brain. An obstinate child. I will deal with you when we get back home, young man, I tell it, I tell the mouth. The joke is amusing enough so that now my mouth is moving. Smiling. We’re friends again, it and I. But we’re no closer to a solution. Think, damn it, think! (My para again, now clothed.) Lack of thinking ahead, that’s been my life-long issue. And probably the reason why I find myself considering the pros and cons of taking a low-low six figure number over sustained peace in the Middle East. All my parents ever wanted for me is to finally stop following my heart with every whimsical, ill-fated artistic vision that “visits” me at night or in the bathtub—Eureka!—and start thinking with my brain. “What thirty-three year old doesn’t have a 401K?” A favorite in my father’s repertoire of punch-to-the-gut comments. It’s delivered with mysterious dependability every fourth Zoom call, always with the same theatrical throwing up of his hands outside the scope of my iPad lens.

 I think I’m being duped here. Duped as in led to believe I need to make a choice. Peace or money. And with a mind all fogged up by sex, at that. But why should I not take a moment? Maybe I should try a little harder to be astonished. Perplexed, dumbfounded. If, for whatever reason, I was chosen from among the billions of people living on earth to face this ridiculous proposal, shouldn’t I consider possible implications to, I don’t know, quantum mechanics? Could this be bigger than the Big Bang? Should Neil deGrasse Tyson be notified? Or is it just a blip?  A cosmic burp. The Universe experiencing some indigestion. I could take the money under the radar, no one being the wiser. But the point is, I’m tired of living this blindfolded existence. I want to be astonished. Like a toddler.

The first thing that comes to mind, of course, when I try to remove the blindfolds, is it’s  a test. In which case, a no-brainer. Peace, go with peace. Peace be with you. Not such an impossible choice after all. If this was a movie, audiences would want me to save my soul by way of saving my people, both sides of the border. They are all my sons, I’d come to see, Jews and Arabs. I should come to see, right here in the truck. I’ve done that play, All My Sons. I was the son, I was Chris. Well, a dialogue from the play. For a stupid class. The teacher kept humiliating us, bitter because she’d made it to Broadway once and never again.  We were all her sons and daughters and she treated us like garbage. Actors should have a heart. I should have a heart. In the movie, this one fateful choice, to go with peace, will end up having cascading effects on my life and character. From the squalor of a Bed-Stuy apartment to redemption. The final shot is of me and my cute Palestinian boyfriend piling up hearty plates for the cheerful line at the soup kitchen we run on donations by AIPAC and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

But then—say it’s the universe—why would it administer a test with such a profoundly obvious answer? Thinking of this dilemma with a glance toward Hercule Poirot or even Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride, the right answer should be the one you least suspect. Why orchestrate the most elaborate production since Isaac’s sacrifice only to deliver a message any one of Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays could easily communicate in a more relatable way? Or Deepak Chopra. Shirley MacLaine. Indeed, Morrie.  No, If some bored deity has descended on Brooklyn, maybe it’s to tell me I should once in my life do as my father has implored me for years now, wise up and start thinking like an adult.

And come to think of it, if the job is in fact routine for the driver, it would mean some version of the Offer was given to many before me. How many O’Connors got rich quick until   they finally found the chump willing to put an end to the Troubles at his own personal expense? To say nothing of the Hundred Year War. Why should I always be the one with the conscience who ends up at the bottom of an ocean of student loans from a graduate school whose best idea of preparing me for the real world was the Meisner technique?

My philosophizing has cost me precious time. Evidently I was so much in my head that something very strange has happened without my noticing. A new driver is now settling behind the wheel. I cannot say why or how come. We are parked at a gas station at the side of a highway that no longer looks like the BQE. I want to say Jersey, maybe Pennsylvania. I really want to say Alabama, except that would be crazy, time-wise. Regardless, there are pale green trees on the other side of it, the highway, looking miserable in the sun. The old driver is currently using a squeegee to wipe the windshield with meticulousness and care that I haven’t seen in him before. He comes closer to the surface before moving on to another smudge and uses a sponge when extra scraping is needed. In his lovemaking, I wonder, is he as attentive as he is now, or inconsiderate, blunt, slapdash as he was all through our drive? I hope for the former, or the latter.  When the glass is perfectly clean, letting in the full brightness of the sun, he gives it a few taps, indicating goodbye. Goodbye to his replacement. At me, he’s casting a short, disappointed glance. The new driver leans over slightly outside the window. “All right, baby,” she says, “you have a blessed day now.” I follow the old driver with vacant eyes as he places the squeegee and mop in a pail by the gas pump and makes his way over to the adjacent Dunkin’ Donuts (how is he supposed to get back to the city?) It may sound melodramatic, hyperbolic. But this is the most heart-wrenching goodbye or non-goodbye of my life. I’m collapsed, unable to move. At death’s door, too weak to knock. And yet as soon as the store door closes behind him, the feeling—it doesn’t go away, it doesn’t subside, it is just gone. Gone without residue. Like it’s never been. Like waking up the morning after a feverish night so healthy that the torture of just a few hours ago is simply unimaginable.

The new driver is about two heads shorter than the old one. She pulls the seat way forward, overshoots the target, backs up, and with a final nudge to the front meets her destination. She then adjusts the brown UPS pants, which are tight on her, clasping the fabric below either side pocket and rocking herself right and left till her thighs have enough room to breathe. There’s a professional air about her, at least in comparison to her predecessor. If nothing else, she’s in full uniform. The name tag says Antoinette.

I realize she hasn’t yet acknowledged my presence. Is it possible she hasn’t noticed me? For a moment I consider if I’m even here. What if the chair I’m sitting on is actually empty? If I introduce myself and she says something in response, that would be reassuring. But I can’t bring myself to speak. For some reason, asking to be noticed would mean losing my last drop of dignity. This whole thing is so embarrassing, my agonizing over this choice no decent human being would give a second thought to. No one has to tell me how terrible this is. How many seconds would John Lennon take? Or Desmond Tutu. Or Jimmy Carter. June Carter. Stop it right this second! Of course, none of the above has struggled with student loans, but that would have been so minor a hurdle. Their spirit, their essence, their nobility—student loans would have been no more than a fly to swat off. Gandhi! Aung San Suu Kyi! Stop it, I said. And the philosophical deliberation on top of it! Such rationalization. So icky. If you’re gonna shoot, shoot, don’t talk. It screams selfishness, indecisiveness, weakness, spinelessness.

Why are we not moving?

The driver is nodding her head, gazing outside her window at nothing in particular. I politely begin to ask if we’re waiting for someone, but she pauses me, as it were, with a little wave of her index finger. It takes me another few moments to realize she’s on the phone. A white AirPod is fitted into her right ear. The nodding is her agreeing with the person on the other end. That person is saying a lot; all Antoinette says is a-ha, yeah and I hear you. At long last, she turns in my direction. “Push that mirror in for me,” she says. Not unkind, more like neutral. I make a series of minor adjustments to the side mirror, following her hand gestures, which are hard to read seeing as most of her attention is still on the conversation. Sometimes her hand moves while she’s not even looking. In the end I get the OK sign pretty much at the same point where we started. At least we’re off.

Other than not paying me a smudge of attention, she seems pretty nice. She’s giving sound advice to whoever is on the phone with her. That person, I slowly gather, is having trouble with a teenage daughter. Someone is vaping (thank god not smoking) and someone is having sex, using protection so bad or badly, you may as well register at Babies ‘R Us, is Antoinette’s take. Making things worse, the boyfriend has a history, a bad one. To make things worse still, the daughter is also cutting. First I think school, then skin—although her attendance is nothing to brag about either. Some thought has been given to sending her to an aunt in Virginia. Antoinette, however, says to hold off. “We’re not there yet,” she says. “We gotta whip some sense into her first. We gotta let her know we mean business.” I find myself so moved by the inclusive pronoun. We, not you: it’s not your problem, it’s our problem, is what she’s saying. We’re in it together. Being so close to someone, really taking on their worries like that. I can’t imagine. I put it in my memory bank. It’s what I do. I listen to how people who care about other people talk, and then I make my best impersonation when empathy is called for (Oh that’s terrible, that’s so terrible! Can I give you a hug? It looks like you need a big hug!).

Listening to this unfolding drama is surprisingly lulling. I almost forget there’s something to think about—what is there to think about? Still, an important plot twist escapes my attention: the driver’s mouth is agape. “Shut the front door!” she says. “The nerve on him.” If only my Oh that’s terribles! could be that earnest, so unencumbered by artifice. I bet I’d be a happy guy. I briefly recommit to close listening, but the conversation, like all soap operas, becomes repetitive and somewhat boring, allowing me to zone out. Here I am again, I realize, following a soap instead of taking care of my own life. Get a life. A hateful phrase.

In childhood, I was perfectly happy living other people’s lives. Speaking of soaps. Days of our Lives. The Bold and the Beautiful. One Life to Live. In my room, I’d put a shirt on my head, which would stand for the big, blow-dried hair of the actresses. Dr. Marlena Evans, with her gallant posture, perfect diction. Her crazy daughter Sammy. Heather Locklear. Joan Collins. Dallas’s ever-florid Sue Ellen. Marlena now makes her dainty way back into my mind. The sharp bones, the wispy voice. If only I could be transported now to the stagnant, windowless living rooms of daytime TV.

I become aware of someone looking at me. The driver. Once she has my attention, she gives me a smirk and a wink. I somehow manage to replay her last sentence for some context. It went something like, “Tell her she ain’t too old for some good whoopin’!” The wink is probably to clarify we’re not talking actual beating. I try to smile back, but something happens. My cheeks are being pulled by some gravitational force in a direction opposite from a smile. My face is collapsing into its center. It feels like horror. I’m still trying to tell her it’s ok, meaning the spanking. Go ahead and spank for all I care. But there is no voice. And if there were, I wouldn’t be saying it’s ok. I’d be saying, Save me! Save me now!

The driver sees something is wrong. She nods, squinting her one eye, as in, hold on one more second. “Ok, hon, I’m gonna let you go now,” she says three or four times until her friend finally hangs up. She looks me over with some detachment, like a seamstress taking measurement with a trained eye. “So what’s it gonna be?” she asks finally, calm as can be, like she wants to know how much to take off the hem. We’re on a dilapidated narrow two-lane road, facing a lowered crossing gate. Two slow-moving trains are coming our way, one on either side. There’s a crossbuck, just in front of us, with mysteriously rotating slats, one with the warning to “Wait!” the other to “Be Patient!” The trains, both of them, seem miles away, their headlights on even though it’s still daytime. The tracks are straight, stretching as far as at least my eye can see. I shake my head in despair. “I’m stuck!” I say, almost tearing up. My voice is an agonized whisper, twenty percent sound, eighty percent breath. “It’s too much.” She keeps her gaze on me. I notice a slight shift in her eyes. Some tiny brightness that wasn’t there before has switched on. An openness. They invite me to watch them carefully. If I really look, they might tell me what I need to know, what I on my own can’t bring to the surface. Maybe that’s why they changed the driver, because she has this special, higher-level skill which difficult cases like mine require. They are large and a little bulgy, her eyes, and the lids are relaxed, blinking slowly, in what I take to be a tinge of patience. Perhaps even some compassion. We both wait to see if, through contact, my eyes could catch the fire in hers. I haven’t had real eye contact in so long, I’ve forgotten how much I dislike it. Still, I force myself to stick with it. Slowly my peripheral vision expands and I am able to see the rising and falling of her chest. Her breath moves with such calm and assuredness, as if observing its own tides. Then I notice that my breathing has aligned with hers. We’re moving together, dare I say, in unison.

But no more than thirty seconds pass before she’s had enough of this little exercise. And who knows, it might have all been in my head anyway. She might have just zoned out, pondering the issue with her friend and her daughter. She shakes her head, taking off her phone from the magnetic mount. “Your choice, man,” she says and gives a quick but hearty laugh, amused, I gather, by her abrupt switch from somber to flippant.

We wait quietly. She’s absently scrolling up and down on her phone, I absently watch the trains. They crawl in the exact same pace, teasing us with their arrival, never quite reaching the gate. Both are freights, heavy and clunky, and louder by the minute.  The one closer to us slowly reveals itself as a real Noah’s Ark: cows, sheep, horses, they’re all there, gazing at us from between the slats of their cages. Whether by accident or not, I make my decision just as they come roaring before us.  “I’ll take the money,” I say. “I’m taking it.” The cab of our van is submerged with metallic screeching. A machine from the Industrial Revolution could be slaughtered in the back, it would hardly make a difference, decibel-wise. Even if I wasn’t whispering, practically speaking to myself, my voice would not carry, which gives me a sense of shelter, privacy. I keep repeating different variations of the phrase, eyes to my lap: “I’m taking it, taking, taking. Taking the money.” Slowly, the tempo and volume are rising, as with a drum circle, until I’m finally screaming. “God help me, I’m taking it! I’m taking it! I am taking the money!”

She rolls up her window and motions me to do the same on my side.

“I’m taking—”

“I heard you the first time,” she says. The trains have just passed, and we are sitting in complete silence.

“That’s what my instinct tells me. I mean, it’s fire. Literally, I feel it. Right down here, in my belly.” I point for her to look around my belly button and she obliges with a brief, sidelong glance at  my breathable pink-mesh runner’s shirt. I don’t think she sees any fire there. “You have to follow your gut, no?” My voice is  pleading. “I mean, the other driver, he wasn’t very clear about it. He got me a little confused, actually. I’m sure he didn’t mean to. He seems nice. But I thought maybe you. You seem like you might have a better, I don’t know. Prescience! You know the word? It’s like having—”

 “I know prescience,” she cuts me off. “I don’t have it. But I know it.”

 “Sorry.”          

Something tells me I’m in for some whoopin’. But it doesn’t happen. I don’t think she cares enough to give it to me. Instead she tells me what I want to hear—”Gotta follow your gut”—but it’s said in a flat, uninterested tone. Her eyes are back on her phone now. If our energies were actually aligned for a second there, the second’s gone. The crossing gate creaks upward, and she shifts to drive. Something in her movements emits an air of disdain or disgust, seeping in my direction. Maybe it is the small sum that makes my decision so pathetic in her eyes. Maybe she would respect me more if it was a million. I can’t imagine she has any dog in the Middle East race. My decision will have no effect on her retirement plan. What does she care about this far-away, annoyingly bullheaded part of the globe? Unless of course—she is a good person who cares about world peace. She does not particularly strike me as much of an idealist, but what do I know about idealists and what they look like? Ms. Universe contestants, Angelina Jolie, Mother Teresa. It’s a wide range, appearance-wise.

I fight the urge to ask her if she thinks I’m a weak person. Or worse, a “low life.” Scum of the earth. Could that be me? No one goes about their day thinking they’re scum. It’s more like a label others put on you. But the label can be right. And inside, you probably do know you are, you probably do go about your day thinking you’re scum. And it probably sours everything, every waking moment, if only by a pinch. Even the milk in your breakfast cereal, it tastes two days past best-by. Or the roses your wife or husband gets you for your birthday, somehow smelling just a little rotten, on the border between a bit too sweet and cloyingly deathlike. A scum, a low-life. Or could it be that worrying you are one means you aren’t? I’ve heard something like that before. The scummy don’t care about morality or where they fall on the Bodhisattva/ Hitler scale. Maybe guilt means you’re a good person making bad decisions due to scummy circumstances, past or present. But that, of course, can be an excuse: “Oh, I’m worried I’m scum, so I’m not scum, so I can go on doing scummy things and not have to worry about it—as long as I’m worried about it.” What would my mother have said if I asked her? Scum? My baby? Wash your mouth!

“Is it ok if I soap?” I ask.

“Say what?”

“Smoke, I mean.”

She raises an eyebrow at me signaling some more contempt. “Roll down the window if you do.” I reach into my shorts pocket and as soon as my fingers touch the pack I remember: gum! Nicorettes! Goddamn. Goddamn quitter. Goddamn quitter, Roni. Two months ago I experienced a downgrade. I went down from inhaling to chewing. Health had very little to do with it, though that’s what I told people. In reality I was priced out of cigarette-cigarettes. With the last of my food stamps, I told myself it’s either cigarettes or cereal. And Medicaid covers gum. The one time poverty and physical health agreed to agree. “Dumbass,” I whisper under my breath. Like one bowl of Apple Jacks a day is keeping my doctor away. I make a pitiful smile, showing her the gum. “Forgot I quit.”

“I said,” she says, stretching the word, “roll down the window.” Her hand reaches inside her tattered tummy pouch, and in another moment an elongated, elegant white pack with a calming design of aqua stripes emerges. Virginia Slims! You’ve come a long way, baby! She takes one out for herself and offers me the pack. One cigarette is already pulled out an inch above the rest for me. A gesture of offering. I’m ridiculously moved. An expensive-looking silver box lighter follows. She lights up and hands it over. All necessary paraphernalia is in my possession. Now I am completely safe. And here it is, the lighting of the drug. The sound of the spark wheel, the minor pressure against the pad of my thumb. The dim chafing pain as it rolls over the skin. Sucking in air. The tip of the stick crackles as the paper burns. One puff. That’s all it takes. The spirit is wafting through me, smoky, delicious, ruinous. A religious experience, fake but exquisite. “Holy, Holy, Holy!” is  playing faintly in the background of my mind, a slow, jazzy version. The bathhouse remix. “Jesus, Joseph and Moses,” I hear myself saying in a midst of the cancerous cloud, not bothering to look for the driver’s judging expression.

∞

Next is the Rabbi, by far the most confident and least competent of the drivers so far. He zooms through the winding streets of the town with a frenetic energy of boys in bumping cars. The highway is gone.The roads are cramped between rows of stone houses and stores with cheap wares spilling out of their door fronts. The sidewalks are so narrow that the pedestrians, mostly children carrying balls and elders carrying baskets, must turn their backs sideways against the wall to avoid being run over by our mad vehicle. What town is it? Where. I want to say Eastern Europe. I really want to say the Old City. I could ask the Rabbi, but somehow the question doesn’t seem so pressing. The Rabbi’s drug of choice is Time, the cheap Israeli brand my mom smoked till her penultimate day. He takes unusually long inhales, really sucking the life out of the sticks. Every now and then he measures the progress he’s made by holding them up to his eye. The old cigarette is now being used as the lighter for the new one before getting chucked out the window. He waves his hand in a kind of distracted apology to the old woman whose feet the butt missed by barely an inch. I’m observing his movements with a strange blend of interest and catatonic apathy. I am once, twice, thrice removed from the action, leaning my elbow on the bottom of the frame of the open window. My face is resting on my fist, the skin of my cheek bunched up against my right eye, almost shutting it. I detect an amused grin under the shrub of the Rabbi’s orange beard. For a second I think it’s about me, but no, it’s something on the radio. Someone sounding like Howard Stern is interviewing someone sounding like Howard Stern. The only reason I know neither one is actually Howard Stern is because they are talking about Howard Stern, in negative terms. They both agree he’s now a sellout, but they argue about how much of a sellout. One is more forgiving than the other. The Rabbi giddily bobs in his seat every time a swear word is blipped out.

I suspect this town is where he relieved Antoinette, but it could have been sometime before. The switch is not nearly as clear in my memory as it should be for someone who’s hopefully years away from dementia. It seems forever ago since the intercom buzzed, but the sun is still high up in the sky, indicating noonishness. The van reeks of nicotine despite the open windows. A metal spring is sticking out against my butt. It comes to me that the interior of the cab feels so different because it is different. I suppose I do remember climbing off the UPS truck. Also, it’s not impossible that a while ago I made known my annoyance about being asked to go inside a van that belongs in a junk yard. The seats in the back are folded over and there are four or five cardboard boxes on top, filled with plastic containers. I’m about to demand an explanation from the Rabbi. I will be firm and reject any vague statements he may offer to quiet me down. But then he makes me an offer I can’t refuse. “Reach out back,” he says, “and you got yourself a free lunch. It’s your lucky day, Bubba. No free lunches—except for today. Don’t forget, anyone ever asks you if you ever got a free lunch in your life, you tell them, well, actually, I did. Once, you tell them, one time”—he wags his finger in the air—“and it was Rabbi Menachem who gave it to me. That’s all I ask, that you tell them my name. I’m trying to rebuild my credit, if you know what I mean.” He leans forward over the steering wheel and looks up to the sky to clarify who holds the loan. He seems beyond delighted with this little future scenario he just came up, going up to heaven and settling your credit score with Hashem. Meantime, I’ve already ripped open the plastic wrap and am now plucking off the pointy top piece of the challah sandwich. Inside I get a peek at soggy tuna salad, oxidizing chopped lettuce, and a slice of tomato that seems to have committed suicide by jumping to traffic from the top of a high rise building. What could have gone so wrong in a tomato’s life that it should result to such desperate measures?

“Now let’s see if your hoity-toity sensibilities can stomach it.” He scans me over and belts out a laugh. “Meals on Wheels. That’s what it is! You wouldn’t have guessed, right? I got twenty greedy seniors sitting by their door waiting. I don’t even charge, volunteer basis. Well, I get something. Rabbis need to live, too. But it’s nothing, I promise you. I get something but it’s nothing.” Another roar of laughter. “I like to pun, you’ll soon find out. Especially when I drive. I think of puns all the time. I can’t help it. They just come to me. I wish I was, you know, committing them all to paper. Then possibly, who knows, do something about them. Make a name for myself. It’s a terrible feeling, seeing your own genius go to waste. Literally. By the wayside. You know these days, you have rapping Rabbis. They’re everywhere. You got Spotify? I tell you, I can be the next Matisyahu. You know him? He’s ok. He’s no Tupac. But he’s not bad. But my point is, we’re not just bitter, disgruntled cantors anymore. Not your grandmother’s Rabbis. The next Tupac could come straight out of a yeshiva.” He seems to consider going into another burst of laughter, but then his face turns straight, reflective. Perhaps the script of the yeshiva boy’s path to stardom is running in his mind. I’m hoping for some quiet, to eat my sandwich in peace. The thinness and juicelessness of the dead tomato is surprisingly satisfying. I chew each bite more times than necessary, the Rabbi mercifully giving me my space.

“You’d think there’d be some kind of attrition,” he says after a while, my sandwich finished. “If you catch my drift. My clients, I mean. Half of them are over ninety. You’d expect a shrinking clientele. I think, one day I’ll come and they’ll all be dead—completely dead—but still, right at the door. Holding out their greedy hands. ‘Where’s my meal? Give me my meal. I deserve a meal.’ ” He falls silent again for a few moments, his mind clearly taking a soft turn to another topic, which he then divulges. “I lost my congregation. Don’t ask. They asked me to step down, the synagogue. Now I’m reduced to this.”

I know it’s the wrong moment, but I ask anyway. “Is it ok if I take another?” I show him the crumpled Saran wrap in my hand.

He looks at me with some disappointment, as if I failed to answer a question he didn’t quite ask. “Go ahead,” he says, resigned.

∞

The next hour or so is curiously non-sequitur. Random thoughts come to mind, this time unrelated to the soaps. I get a flashback to my notes for my world history baccalaureate exam, back in Israel: “Churchill—good guy, Chamberlain, pushover!” I think of Caulfield, first name…Holden. Where might he be now? Most likely dead, bones in the ground, after having gotten old. What kind of a world is it, I ask myself, one where Holden Caulfield of all people becomes an old man? Genghis Khan comes up, out of nowhere that I can see. If I’m really honest with myself, I know nothing about him. Once upon a time, I bet he was all people talked about. “Did you hear what Genghis is up to now??” To say nothing of the Vikings. I couldn’t even tell what centuries they roamed the earth. How come I know more about Beyoncé than the Vikings? It’s humiliating. Maybe the front page of the Times should be devoted to things people mustn’t die before learning: “President Lincoln admits clinical depression, says performance won’t suffer. Hear all about it!” What a small life I have. How little will be lost when I’m gone. What would I tell an intelligent cave man from—I don’t know, the cave age?—who time-traveled here for a little reconnaissance? “We now have flying cylinders with wings that take you places. You get a free mini toothbrush if it’s transatlantic!” Imagine what he’d say when he gets back home. “Don’t give up your clubs and axes quite yet, folks. I met a moron.”

My reveries come to an end when I’m bucked off the chair, almost hitting the roof of the van with my head: a rock in our way. We are on a dirt road, leading to a dirt sloped parking lot that’s marked off on one side by a row of pine trees. Not one tree is the same height as the other. I’m reminded of a large family, the kind I’ve always wished for, with children of all ages, posing for a portrait. The Rabbi shifts to park and pulls on the hand break. “You go this way,” he says, pointing beyond the trees. “I wait here. Let’s not take too long, though, yeah? This shouldn’t be too difficult. You get in, you do your thing, you go out. Chit chat, that you can do later.” Chit chat with whom? I want to ask, but he goes on. “Plus, don’t forget. We got mouths waiting to be fed. You don’t want a dead grandma on your conscience.” He says it like a joke, but he doesn’t laugh, he winks. Is this a throw-away comment or a final signal to change my mind? An urgent hint meant to go over the heads of whoever might be listening in on our conversation, but telling me to save my soul? Make the right decision.  Could the Rabbi be more astute than his mannerism and body odor might suggest? Saving my soul. Isn’t it too late for it? Didn’t I leave it—such as it was—by those train tacks? Can I still pull out? Isn’t the deal done, signed somehow on a shrouded contract I never got to see but somehow knew existed? But I don’t ask any of these questions out loud. I only ask if he’s going to wait for me.

“What do you think, I’ll leave you in the middle of nowhere? Just, please, no blabbering. Take the money and run.” I can see he’s hoping for some acknowledgment of this cleverness, which I take small pleasure in denying him.

Beyond the pines is a flower garden, not too small, not too big. Clearly someone has put in a lot of time with the landscaping, someone with an eye for circles. The first circle, the one at the center, is a perfectly symmetrical bed of tulips in all colors under the sun. They’re arranged in small bunches, as in polka dot. A narrow strip of bright green grass is snaking through them. The flower bed is surrounded by a belt of the same grass, where four miniature orange trees are spread out evenly in four corners. Then there’s an outer circle of, I think, graded gravel. If I’m being honest, it’s a gorgeous sight. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful garden. If once in my life I actually did stop and smell the roses, this should be it. It don’t get better than that, buddy boy (that’s how I call myself sometimes). If I was only a little more enlightened, I think, this garden would be all the riches I’d need. Then what would be more important than world peace? As it is, I’m trying to peer under the petals for my money, my nearsighted eyes squinting, the better to cover the distance. If this turns out to be a game of Clue, then forget about it. I don’t do puzzles, can’t. Never solved one in my life. Not the way my mind works. The one escape room I’ve ever been to, I was let out the front door, shamefaced before my niece and nephew. No, if ever I were to get a treasure it must be a gift, a fluke, a miracle, an act of pity, charity. It must be meals on wheels. 

Circles. Something is at the tip of my tongue. I encountered circles before. But when? A dream? A flash from a past life? The rise in my pants reminds me. The first driver. His finger circling the air. Long as you’re thinking, he said. Drives you in circle. Once again I have the outrageous thought of giving up the money for the driver. What is it about him? He’s a man, he’s just a man. I’ve seen so many men before. Maybe I can ask to go back to the Dunkin’ Donuts.

As soon as I spot the bench across the garden, an inner voice tells me it’s there for me. I waddle awkwardly along the parameter of the grass, crossing my palms before my lap, again to cover my embarrassment in that area. The two minutes on the bench help to calm my body and spirits down. Then a whiff of a fruity, maybe citrusy, smell comes my way. Turning around, I see the source moving from behind the trees. A woman with curly, straw-colored hair. Her white high heels make for an unsteady walk through the grass. She’s in her late twenties—make it late thirties—and has a dishonest air about her, strong as her perfume. “Hey there,” she calls out, a bit out of breath, giving me a brief, wobbly wave. “I’m Eve,” she says, having made it to the bench. A twitch in my eye gives my suspicion away. “Not that Eve!” she says with a coquettish laugh. I hesitate whether to get up, but she motions me to stay seated. I shift a little to the right end of the bench to give her room, but she stays standing, giving the upper bodice of her string red dress a slight adjustment. Is this where the check will be coming from, the bra? I’ve seen this in movies. Fortunately, no. She fishes it out of her black leather tote—Zara, if I guess correctly. Then her slim but firmly sculpted arm stretches out to hand it over, taking me by surprise. Instinctively I shoot off of the bench, as if it was a hot gun she just offered me. I quickly back up two or three feet to get some distance between us. She seems to be covering up some dissatisfaction with this new development, the smile on her face stiffening ever so slightly. She thought she had me in her Zara bag, I guess; I thought so, too. Reluctantly her hand withdraws to her chest, but she keeps the face of the check dangling seductively, so I can’t help but stare. It has a washed-out pink background with some white design I can’t attribute to any bank. She continues flapping it between her index and ring finger. Her smile tells me she’s regained her cocky confidence. If it’s a come-hither situation, where I’m supposed to reach out to her breast and snatch the check, I’m giving up,  discussion over. I don’t do puzzles and I don’t do breasts—not that there’s anything wrong with them. But she gets bored with the exercise before I get to think too much about it. Once more she hands it over, now with a tinge of impatience suggesting this time it’s take-it-or-leave it. I reach out and take it. “Better endorse it,” she says, tapping on the front of the paper with a long, artificial red nail. The tote bag is opened again and she digs her arm elbow-deep. Some makeup items almost topple out as she rummages with a chaotic energy. “God damn,” she says. “No pen. Well, whatever. No one ever looks anyway.”

 “Don’t they though?” I ask. The worst thing would be giving in to the Devil and ending up with nothing just because of some technical bureaucratic negligence.

She shrugs. “Do it at the bank, then.” Her lips coil into a coy, taunting smile, and she cocks her face in the direction of the check. “You can look at it, you know.”

And here it is, up close. Black ink, gel-edged by the look of it. $164,555, made out to me, all nine letters of my name spelled in correct order, signed by the so-called Xoxo Corp., LLC. Over the years I’ve had dreams of such sums, lesser sums even, sometimes bigger, but never in this kind of scenario. I was more likely to dream of a part on a Juliana Margulies show that extends from a four episode arc into series regular due to very favorable test audience reviews. Hope springs eternal.

“All right then,” Eve says, sighing, moving some locks of hair against their natural parting so that they fall right back into place. “And so it ends, our brief encounter. An exchange to remember. Two humans, two lives, histories, timelines…birth and death…death and birth…the trees our only witness. Never shall we two meet again but in our sweet dreams and glorious reveries.” I have no idea what she’s talking about. It could be some kind of a mandatory script she has to recite, the kind bank agents read on the phone to seal the deal on a new credit card, the balance of which will haunt you for the rest of your life. She gathers her bag to her hip, beginning to slowly swivel on her heels. It’s then that I realize: I’ve been waiting for her to surprise me in some way. In the back of my head there was an expectation of a final obstacle, a challenge, a last-minute sphinx-like riddle. I didn’t expect Eve to be so easy, no pun intended. All her finesse, her implied in-the-knowness—she seems somehow, I don’t know, underutilized for a simple delivery job. But I suppose it really is a jobless recovery. You take whatever gig you can get. Maybe she writes poetry on the side.

So this is it? Press submit? Transaction complete? No receipt? Rhyming has been a nervous habit since being bullied at seventh grade.

“Stop!” That was me.

Eve freezes. Her tan shoulders squeeze closer together. She cautiously turns to face me with a damn-I-almost-made-it expression on her face. “But I haven’t given my final answer yet! I mean, isn’t there a word or, some…some phrase I have to say before the deal is sealed?”

“Isn’t that a check I see you holding there, sweets?”

I look down at my hand, magically hoping that maybe there is no check, that it disappeared, was never even there to begin with. But of course it’s there. My fingers are holding it so faintly, it’s one air waft away from blowing off. Suddenly a thought comes to mind: if it falls now, if it slips out of my hand, it stays on the ground. I’m not picking it up. This is no joke, it’s a firm decision. When I look up at Eve I immediately see she knows what’s just transpired within me. Something in my face, something new and unfamiliar and strange and even exciting  and even bold must have appeared there. And she recognizes it, understands there is no way to convince me out of this… let’s call it a vow. This is strength, I realize. It’s what strength feels like. Conviction. I’ve seen it in others. I must not let it go unnoticed, now that it has come to me. Paid me a visit. I must never let myself forget that—contrary to common belief—I do too have courage. Now it’s Eve who’s worried. The worry has leapt from my heart to hers. I know that because her eyes narrow unattractively, and the stiff smile is back. We both hold still, waiting. Waiting. A tense moment, right out of Spaghetti Western. But, alas. No wind, no waft. The air is perfectly still, unmolested. And besides, my palm and fingers have gotten all sweaty with fear, and now the thin paper is sticking to them. Fear the demon. Squatting at any church God has just evacuated. Common belief because it’s right: I have no courage.  I despondently look at the check, then lift my eyes again, sheepishly. “Don’t I have to at least sign something?” I ask.

Her shoulders lift in a casual shrug. “We’re informal here.” She hitches up the strap of her purse, ready to turn around, but then in a moment of thoughtfulness—unexpected fondness?—she moves a step closer to me. She doesn’t need to. The battle is over. She’s won. This is outside her job description. “Look,” she says quietly, confidentially, eyes to the ground. “Ask yourself. What did the Middle East ever do for you?”

I almost invoke JFK, but I only nod.

“You take care,” she says, just as her cell rings. Beyoncé ringtone. This time her heels give her no trouble as she saunters up the grass towards one of the garden’s exits, not the one she came from. She takes out her car keys from her bag and jingles them in the air as a final toodle-oo.

∞

“Good enough,” says the Rabbi when I get back to the van. He turns the engine on and the radio begins to play, now thankfully jazz. I’m no aficionado, so it’s strange how certain I am this is “Conversations with Myself.” Bill Evans. The Rabbi lets me be, which is how I want it. I’m exhausted. By the time we turn out of the dirt road, Bill has lulled me to sleep. A dense sleep, packed with sleep nutrients that feed and nourish my poor, aching amygdala and all the other over-worked brain parts whose job it is to produce pain and fright and suffering. At the very center of my brain, though, an almond-sized morsel of cells remains watchful, satisfied, savoring, stable, peaceful, unmolested like the air before. Maybe it’s the sleep of solvency, solvency at last! Solvency and some chump change! All threadbare underwear, be warned: your days are numbered! I shall go shopping.

I don’t open my eyes until the Rabbi’s “Wakey, wakey.” Another gas station.

“Where are we?” I ask. The van smells of human gas. I’m not sure if it’s his or mine, or which one would be worse.

“What’s your bank?” he asks.

“Citi.” I mutter.

 “It’s worse than I thought,” he says, cupping his cheek in performance of distress. “You need me to slap you a little, bubbeleh?”

“Huh?”

“Where in the city?”

“Citibank.”

“Ha! And here I pegged you for some credit union nonsense. Citi’s good.” He merrily taps on his smart phone screen for directions, then we’re off. After a mile or so, he points to a billboard of a man with shiny teeth claiming to be Jersey’s best attorney for people whose children died in the crib. “Jersey!” he says, answering my question with a one minute delay. “That’s where we are. Surprised?” The figure on the bottom of the ad catches my eye. $23,000,000. In retrospect, the devil is a cheapskate.

“I guess,” I say.

“I don’t drive, I slither. Maneuver.” He makes a snake-like movement with his hand. “There’s fast drivers, but all that means is, they know how to step on the peddle. Good for them. Now get them in heavy traffic. They’re stuck. Slithering. It’s in the eye, the anticipating eye. You don’t drive,” he states. “I can tell when someone’s not a driver.”

We’re on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn bridge in just a little over an hour. I get the sense we didn’t make good time, because the Rabbi seems to cover up some embarrassment with irritation. He does seem to hold his own when we arrive at Downtown, and in a few more twisty minutes we’re on Montague, by the courts. He double parks across the street from the blue facade of Citi, telling me he’d be waiting in the van. “Traffic cops smell me from miles,” he explains. “Don’t worry. You’re a nervous guy. I’ll wait till you come outside. Let’s say, give me the thumbs up. No need to cross the street. What’s the point? You’re a busy man, I’m a busy man. Life goes on. We need to look forward, to the future, the horizon. In my case it’s a lecture from Mrs. Kaplan about the dangers of hypoglycemia. In yours? God is big.” He hurries me by demonstrating with his fingers the pulling motion I would need to perform in order to open the door. I take a quick, discrete look inside the van to see if, amid the mess of candy wrappers, empty cigarette boxes, cigarette stubs, Sprite bottles, and used tissues, there is any evidence of the traffic tickets he’s presumably amassed, but there aren’t any that I can see. He overlooks my awkward attempt for a handshake, instead going for a few pats on my shoulder. “God Bless, God bless,” he says, rushing through the convention.

Outside it’s raging hot. But Citibank will be blissfully cool, cool and dry. All I need is to cross the street, which isn’t even very busy. Very few cars for Downtown. Few enough, in fact, that I decide not to look left and right before stepping into traffic. Just go. Why not. See what happens. Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. I feel the heat and jaggedness of the asphalt under my feet. Steady and confident, one step, then another. I am an elephant, I am a horse, I am a turtle, I am a gazelle. There’s some car horns going off, someone yelling Watch where you’re going, man. A woman with a Brooklyn accent says, Unbelievable. Do you see that? Unreal. I’ve never felt so seen and so unseen in my life. I am a wolf. I am a tiger. I am a dancer in the dark. And the passage is over. Here I am, all in one piece, having made it to the other side.

Indeed the bank is cool, but somehow not blissfully so. I feel no relief. Of the two tellers at the counter, I’m hoping for the one on the left, the woman. The man is a sourpuss. He keeps adjusting his glasses for no reason. It’s a tic-like assertion of his professional capacity. Don’t even get close to his so-called boundaries. The client at his window sighs and then sighs again, more heavily, looking pleadingly at the woman teller. He remains defiantly unaware. His small blue eyes are dead set on the computer screen. I do believe he’s speaking to it, chatting and negotiating with the “system,” which is probably how he refers to it during their regular banter. The system is his closest and only friend. His one eyebrow is raised into an almost perfect pyramid. I ask myself, what is all this typing for? What does he have to say? Also, is this fanatically erect posture really necessary? Other than his lips, his rapidly tapping fingers are the only body part that’s moving. They seem like their own independent organism, aggressive, efficient, single-minded, like bacteria. It’s possible that I’ve never been so intimidated by any person, ever in my life. He is poised for revenge, driven by bitterness. At his age he must have expected to be doing something else. Now he is sharing his unhappiness with his captive customers.

Me, I don’t want unhappiness. I don’t know why it keeps harassing me, the way mosquitoes go after certain people more than others. “Mosquitoes like me,” those people always say. I want its opposite, I want happiness. I pray for happiness. I’ve been praying—and right now, if there’s a lane to it, a path, a customer line, then it’s to my left, towards the woman. The woman. She is—I wouldn’t say business casual. From afar, I’d say business domestic, business homey, business mom and pop. Perhaps a holdover from the diner or bakery Citi must have pushed out of the building. She wears an over-sized red flower, charmingly ridiculous, on the lapel of her blue jacket. Her smile is soft and alight. A Kathy Bates type, though not as an insane nurse. I cannot believe my luck when the word “Next” is sounded. Coming from her mouth! Kathy! In my mad rush, my one foot stumbles on the other. I have to reach for her counter to stabilize my step. For the first time since I left home I remember my footwear: of course, the bunnies tripped me! Bunnies like me.

“Welcome to Citibank,” she says politely. “Now, how is your day going so far?” I can tell my breathlessness does not go unnoticed. Neither do the slippers. Her smile now squiggles a little with concern. Her eyebrows too.

“Why, very good, thank you.” I still hold on to the counter. I realize my legs are quivering. She takes some time to consider my composed response, which is quite incongruent with the sight of me. A drop of sweat is slowly sliding down the side of my face, falls off and reaches the credit card key pad, right on top of the number three. We both take a second to observe the evidence. “Hot day outside,” she says. A smoker’s voice. I trust smokers more than non-smokers, though I admit it’s a bias that has no place in my mind. Still, smokers choose solace over longevity. That tells you something. “You look like you need some water, sir.” See? Solace. “Let me get you some water.” She starts rising up from her high swivel chair.

“No!” I order, much more loudly than I meant. A faint wave of shock moves across her face. She sits back down. I have the presence of mind to understand that her quizzical expression means an explanation is in order. But what can I say? That if she leaves her post and makes me wait another second I may drop dead? That fear and heat will melt me? The next words that come out of my mouth, I know, will have a profound effect on the rest of my life. And yet, even as I open it, my mouth, I have no idea what these words should be. “Oh, no,” I begin. “No, no. No. No no no no. No no no. No need.” Despite the repetition, I come off not crazy or threateningly hysterical like before, just a little silly, maybe even charmingly so. That string of nos came out in a florid lilt. Sue Ellen! I knew you were good for something! The tension in the teller’s face begins to diffuse, which I take as an invitation to keep on talking. “Oh, wow. You’re so kind. Truly. What a nice bank it is, Citi. I always say, it was the right decision, bailing you out. What would New York be like without Citi? I mean, really. It’s in the fabric, isn’t it? In the spirit. And all you gracious employees. Where would you have gone to? Western Union? No, no. Absolutely not. Too nice to fail, is what I say.”

Just then another drop of sweat lands on the counter. This one I’m determined to ignore. Ignore it out of existence. Unfortunately Kathy is not on board. She seems strangely rapt. She moves closer to it, closer to the drop, squinting for sharper focus and tilting her head sideways for a better angle. Needless to say, even under more neutral circumstances, this would be very uncomfortable, having my bodily fluid so closely studied by a total stranger.

“You should definitely have some water,” she says. Her tone is not authoritative, but reflective, as in, she considered the matter and came, by way of deduction, to the only possible conclusion. A swivel chair scientist. Like a good dentist, she explains the next few steps. “You stay right where you are. I’m going to hop on to the back. We have a nice little water cooler there. I’ll get you a cup. No, I’ll get you two cups. And I’ll be back in a sec.”

“No, no, no.” A stiffer lilt this time. “Allergies,” I explain. A stupid smile creeps up onto my face.

“Allergies?”

“That’s right. I can’t have it.”

“Can’t have what? Water?”

There. I’ve officially lost my mind. In her mind, also maybe in mine. Lost my mind in my mind.

“Plastic cups,” I say, perhaps saving the day. “Or just—any kind of plastic, really.”

“I see.”

“I do like water,” I add. “I have no problem with water per se.”

There’s a pause. She considers the possibility of letting the issue go. But then with a burst of a new idea she buoys up.

“So. Let’s say a cup was not made of plastic.” No she didn’t. “You’ll be ok?”

Damn her to hell.

“Well, usually,” I concede. “Usually yes. Unless it came in contact with some kind of plastic. So, actually, maybe not. Better safe than sorry.”

Now she takes it as a project. Her face sparkles with passion. “We’ll use my personal mug!” She rises up from her chair triumphantly. “I assure you, it hasn’t touched plastic, not in ages.” It is really very hard not to hate her right now. I take a moment to examine whether I do in fact hate her, but hate is so elusive, isn’t it? I know it no better than I do love. 

In the end, of course, she does triumph. As I’m waiting, a whole nightmare scenario runs through my mind. SWAT team breaking through the front door. Bullhorns, sirens, snipers, tear gas, ballistic shields. Kathy Bates, the real one, bursting in from the back, not with water, but with an RK-16 and a psychopathic nurse’s roar. Surprisingly, I am not anxious. I am awash with acceptance. My body has turned limp, collapsed. The ease and comfort of total defeat. Bring it on. Or don’t bring it. Either way. A cup of water, a spray of bullets, all the same to me. She comes out with the former, a full mug of water: Best Aunt in the World! it declares. I finish it and gratefully ask for another and she laughs and says, “I told you so.”

“She told you so.” The man teller! His face hasn’t left the screen, but he’s got on a smile—still sarcastic, but disarmingly mischievous. Betraying humanity. I want to leap over the partition and give him a hug. I want to tell him, there’s still a chance for you to be happy. You can go back to school. You can become an artist, a farmer, a traveler. You can be whoever you want.

When she finally gets to the business at hand, it takes less than five minutes. Then I hear the phrase every criminal dreams of. “You’re all set, sweetheart.” She leans over toward the bulletproof glass between us as she slides my receipt over the tray. Then, with her hand half-covering her mouth for privacy reasons, she whispers, “God all mighty Jesus!” Mick Jagger lips. She taps the paper with her two long nails. “This kind of money, I’d be sweating too!” Mom and pop.

∞

Nick and I are on our Ashley’s Extra Comfort recliner, getting an electric massage. Since the various upgrades to the apartment, he has shown some signs of, if not intimacy, then qualified, cautious closeness, sometimes even sidling up against my hip—not an invitation for petting, I’ve learned the hard way. The sixty inch flat screen tv before us is tuned in to a solid Murder She Wrote. Guest star Derek Jacobi, the murderer for my money, is an especially welcome treat. But chances of finishing the episode are not in my favor. Nick and I have been at war over the remote (hence, presumably, the closeness) and he has an apparently bottomless skill set when it comes to stealth. For the first few weeks he would wait till my bathroom break to change the channel, but now he’s learned to burrow for the remote, whether it’s between the cushions or behind my back or under my butt, and I guess chew or paw on the button of his choice, leading me to assume we’ve gone to commercial. It’s becoming increasingly possible that he is The Devil. Or perhaps more realistically, The Devil’s emissary to 674 Serf street, apartment 3D. His mandate is to torture the occupant with MSNBC, currently my channel to hell.

Oh, I’ve almost gotten used to the sights of burning tires, black smoke, hurled stones; people tearing into chain link fences, hit with rubber bullets, sprayed with tear gas; eighteen year old children in uniform pretending to be fearless warriors by screaming at men and women old enough to be their grandparents. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes’s dramatic pronunciation of “riot dispersal means” and “Molotov cocktail” by now leave me almost flat. Same for “absolutely no end in sight.” I’m still working on images of corpses moving hand to hand above a wailing, raging crowd.

No, forget the Middle East. It’s the domestic front that does me in. Specifically, anything to do with a certain Secretary of Education, a Ms. Elisabeth (Betsy) Dee DeVos, who sometime between Trump’s second and third terms was apparently abducted by aliens and brutally inserted with a heart right into the dark cavity that used to dominate her chest. Betsy, now affectionately known as Bets and sometimes Bets-Bets, has managed through a “breakneck, sleight-of-the-hand streak of deals” (The New York Times) with House and Senate members to pass the so-called “The Impossible” or “The Beyond” bill, named after the vegan hamburgers. Call it chicanery (The National Review), call it artfulness (Washington Post, the Times, again). Forcing of arms, or above board politics. Perspiration, inspiration. Witchcraft or miracle. Call it what you want, it’s a feat. Fifteen months to wipe off all student loans? Nothing short of a miracle. Or witchcraft. Regardless, people are out on the streets with flowers in their hair. At least on my side of the aisle. But, actually, in Texas too, and—get this—Alaska and Hawaii. Young Idahoans have trouble keeping a straight face at dinner with their uncle. “Betsy gone wild!” (Daily News). “Betsy gone Bernie!” And then a slew of varyingly amusing memes. “Elisabeth gone Warren!” “Betsy’s Heart Beats!” And “This lady rocks!” “We love, love, love you, Betsy!” is the most straightforward and ubiquitous. Here’s the one I came with: “DeVos, DeVos, you bastard, I’m through.” Call it derivative, call it homage.

The tv screen, all sixty inches of it, is filled with the image of Mika Brzezinski, her blue hawk-like eyes following my every movement, trained as the Mona Lisa’s. I get confused for a second, wondering if it’s her, not Derek Jacobi, who’s the real killer. But then Nick indulges in one of his satisfied purrs. Smiling like the Cheshire cat. I don’t bother looking for the remote. That would simply increase his pleasure. I let Mika tell me all about those thousands of college graduates, the so-called “Betsy Pilgrims,” making their way by foot to the Secretary’s yacht on the shore of Lake Erie, where the Secretary herself is known to come out on to the deck and toss flower petals at her tearful, adoring crowd. “Fuck them,” I say. “And fuck you, Betsy. Pardon my language, but fuck you.”

In a minute it becomes unbearable. I stub out my American Spirit into the cold cheese of the leftover Pizza Hut and stumble on to the bedroom, closing the door behind me. Some time passes. During that time something similar to sleep has transpired and now I am being woken out of it. Someone is scratching at the door and meowing. My first thought is a crow, but what would a crow be doing in my apartment?  Upon consideration—Nick? He’s never done either, scratch or meow, certainly not for my company. The intercom is buzzing, too, and it occurs to me that this is already the second or maybe even third buzz and that the previous attempts had something to do with my waking up as well. I open the bedroom door and it is Nick, anxiously trotting in place on his front legs. Absent is the sly, just-under-the-surface contempt. He quickly turns on his paws and heads in leaps and hops toward the front door, stopping to look back to make sure I follow, Lassie-style without the star power. I take my time, slow stride, only partly to annoy him. But then I do get to the box and press speak and say “hello”? Calling back to the ether.

Filed Under: Featured, Story Tagged With: anxiety, choice

Maman Brigitte

January 10, 2021 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 45

Maman Brigitte

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  January 10, 2021
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Maman Brigitte
00:00 / 36 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 36 minutes | Recorded on November 8, 2020

The first podcast of 2021 focuses on the loa Maman Brigitte, a hard drinking, sensual spirit that protects the unrepresented dead, and has a very direct relationship to the Irish goddess (and saint) Brigid.

Music: Adapted from “Secret Door” by Anastasia Vronski, [CC 4.0]

URL: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Anastasia_Vronski/Estrangements_volume_2/09_-_Secret_Door
Comments: http://freemusicarchive.org/
Copyright: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Tagged With: brigid, chthonia, death, haiti, loa, maman, podcast, underworld, voodoo

The Snow Queen

December 27, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 44

The Snow Queen

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  December 27, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
The Snow Queen
00:00 / 43 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 43 minutes | Recorded on October 28, 2020

In this last podcast for 2020, we look at the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the Snow Queen, the very loose basis for the film “Frozen”, and like many fairy tales, loaded with symbolism–in this case, about the struggle for love and connection in a cold, analytical world.

Tagged With: andersen, chthonia, fairy, podcast, queen, winter

The Second

December 16, 2020 By marythaler

The Second

By
  • Isobel Granby
 |  December 16, 2020
Feature Image: Pexels, via Pixabay

I had less than twenty-four hours to talk him out of it. Watching him across the table, I could feel the faith in my ability to do so dwindling. Howe wore an expression of utter implacability that I knew I could never shift. No matter what I said now, there would be no difference to the result. My usual way — knowing exactly the wrong moment to talk.

“You could always — ” I began.

“No, Vance.” And thus, the debate closed.

I glanced up at the hourglass. The reminder that time was running down, running out. Of the contract on the captain’s desk, signed by both participants, legally binding unless proven invalid. The prospect of the agreement to be fulfilled.

Seconds — those appointed to negotiate and if necessary fill in for the principal fighters in duels conducted by pilots of the Polarin Aerial Fleet — were allowed only one kind of interference: to try and talk combatants out of their folly, or to watch as time ran out and they went to their deaths. This was thought to be a way of reducing the number of frivolous challenges. It had had virtually no effect. When people like Howe were given the means to throw themselves into unnecessary mortal peril, they did not hesitate, in my experience, to do so. I maintain that one can’t teach someone a lesson by ensuring that they die, but then, I volunteered for this position, which undermines that point.

I thought of the duelling ground, the expanse of smooth ice behind the auroral engine-chargers. In winter, it would be the deep blue-black of the sky. Auroras shimmering through. Not a bad way to go, I had to admit. Those brilliant dancing lights would blow out the flare of the pistols, the snow would devour the gunpowder.

The subtle shifting of the liquid within the hourglass snapped me out of it. A fine way to go, sure, but there was no need for them to die at all.

∞

But I should back up a little. Why had it started? That was more the question. I still couldn’t satisfy myself as to an answer, at least not one that could explain how it had escalated so fast. I knew that the quarrel between Howe and Brin, his opponent, had existed since their earliest acquaintance, and was apt to resurface on important occasions. The fleet was the main method of communication between the scattered circumpolar settlements, where most of the pilots came from, and was vital to both search and rescue, and to the research conducted by naturalists, cartographers, and other inquisitive sorts in love with needless danger. There was a prestige to being a pilot, but it meant an isolated life, similar to that of a ship at sea, or so I had heard — never having been to sea. In the summer, the stations constituted a continuous thread running through land and sea and ice, connected by air and the faintly visible aurora. In the winter, they were a constellation, distinct and defiant lights in the unceasing darkness, but always existing in relation to each other. We were our own little world, complete with rivalries.

Howe and Brin had joined the fleet around the same time, and their first captain had favoured Brin; our current captain, Flint, did not, and this fuelled the fire of their quarrel. The challenge itself had been issued over a particular instance, an event that clearly had given Howe enough sleepless nights to become reckless. That the cause of the challenge had been in part my own fault was something I was studiously trying to ignore, while I worked on a plan to save him.

I now considered sabotage: I had heard of seconds who did desperate things, who knocked their friends on the head, or drugged them, or tied them up in the holds of ships bound southward. Two arguments dissuaded me from this course. For one thing, Howe would be furious. For another, I would not risk doing him real damage, which would have been inevitable if I knocked him out or any such tactic. If I tried anything, it would have to be along a different tack.

The thought of sending Howe out of harm’s way did tempt me. Although our UltraLights could not fly beyond the auroral belt, there were often ships bound for the south. I’d never been down there, my flights being confined to the communities along the coast, the edge of the tundra, and the ice-floating cities beyond them. I had heard of things I could barely believe, at the edge of our flight range, beyond the tree line. I had heard of great jungles from which steam curled like smoke from a slow fire, the vastness of an ocean that never froze, the blistering deserts where sand glittered and burned. They were probably real, but so far beyond anything I knew that they seemed almost dreamlike, stories that passed from sailors to ports to the furthest reaches of the ice, so that by the time they arrived they were myth. Howe had been as far south as the Seal Isles, on a rare solo flight, one of the southernmost points we could reach, and thus a risky journey. Such far-flung missions were one of the perks of having the captain’s good opinion.

This had come in part because of natural skill; Howe was an excellent pilot and navigator. Much of it came down to luck, as well, and I say that with the utmost respect for Howe’s abilities. He took risks, they worked out. It wasn’t that way for all of us. I had been made cautious by experience, having made miscalculated risks, or mistakes that had resulted in misfortune. (I had once misread my plane’s battery level, and taken it up half-charged — I had learned since then, but the memory still stung.) The balance of poor judgment and ill luck seemed to make little difference to Flint, who believed luck was of a pilot’s own making. I had joined the fleet two years after Howe, and we had flown several missions together, delivering trade goods and relaying messages, or carrying naturalists and diplomats over the pole. Most of the time, the flights were routine, ordinary things, but surprises sometimes befell us — such as the one that had occurred in the summer, the one that had started all this trouble in the first place, though at the time, it had felt like a grand success. It had been a clear, bright blue day, the sun half-blinding anyone who stepped outside without snow goggles. A flurry of snow had erupted from the ground, as of something falling from the sky, far off on the horizon but making the earth and ice shake, and we were the pilots chosen to investigate. As we approached, Howe got on his radio to warn me to stop, come to land. I’d run up to Howe’s plane as it glided to an awkward landing ahead of us, and he jumped out. I’d glanced inside — his equipment was out of alignment, the symptom of some great magnetic disturbance. Our eyes met. He was thinking the same thing.

“So that’s what it was. We should bring a piece back.” Magnetite was valuable to the engineers, fascinating to the naturalists, and rare enough to be in constant demand. Though it was frequently enough found in small deposits and intrusions in the bare rock, pieces of this size were rare. Its arrival in meteorite form was not unheard of, but still, this was noteworthy.

“In which plane? Neither of us brought anything to protect our equipment, we can’t carry the magnetite in our planes.” The great contradiction of magnetite was that despite being one of the main components in our planes, and coveted throughout the fleet for its usefulness and rarity, its raw form had been known to cause massive disruptions to the navigational equipment, which was something that we could not stand to risk. Compasses were our lives, something our captains had told us since the beginning.

“We can use the komatik.” He was already running to the plane and unfolding it, slipping the runners into place. The sled was supposed to be for emergencies, but its sturdiness would hold the magnetite, and it was the only way to transport it safely.

“We’ve no dogs.”

“Well, we can pull it ourselves.” Howe’s stubbornness, when faced with solving a problem, was intense and immovable. I usually supported his plans wholeheartedly, but in this case, I was starting to feel he was taking it a bit far. (I had, at the time, no idea how easy I had it.)

“Pull a komatik? All the way back to the hangar? And, what, leave our planes here?” It was summer, granted, but the ice-field was prone to storms all year, and we were at least two hours’ walk from the base, unburdened.

He nodded, an almost comical full-body motion when his face was all but hidden by the fur ruff of his parka. “The mechanics will have to take a look at my plane, anyway. We’ll just ask them to send someone out.”

“Couldn’t we fly back and send someone out first?” We both knew the answer already. The time saved by doing so would be minimal, of course, and all it would mean was that there might be an easier way of transporting the great misshapen rock. It would be faster to radio back, let them know we were on our way, and set off at once.

I assessed the terrain. It was even, solid ice of a sort that would make the task of pulling a komatik fairly easy. We were well dressed and had rations in our planes, which we could take out and enjoy on our walk. Both of us were undaunted at the prospect of distance, of exertion and cold. There was no reason not to.

“Well,” I found myself saying. “How hard can it be?”

∞

Howe and I had been hailed with three cheers when we returned, by the engineers and naturalists who had been waiting in hopeful suspense since we departed. It seemed that their speculations had grown ever more wild in that span, and that our find had surpassed even the most far-fetched. They were thrilled to have us recount our journey across the ice-field, surprisingly uneventful though it had been, and even more so to take the heavy lump of metal off our hands. We left them chittering excitedly about its extraterrestrial origins, its enormous potential, and grinned at each other over our hot chocolates. How hard can it be? My question had gone unanswered, and we had made it back without incident.

Sometimes an image, irreversibly tied to some subsequent event, takes on a peculiar sweetness, which it wouldn’t have developed if everything hadn’t gone to hell. I could claim that was the case with Howe and me and our hot chocolates, steam curling through an empty mess hall. Just us and our brilliant adventure, the only people in the world.

I could probably blame the magnetite for the duel, now that I think about it; most of what followed was tied to it in one way or another. We had both seen the disdain on Brin’s face as we enjoyed the accolades, but given that jealousy was a constant between him and Howe, I had thought that it would end there. In any case, I was too elated by our success to care.

It was not until winter, when we had long since tired of retelling the story, that the consequences of that jealousy erupted. We were gearing up for a mail run, when the call came in that Brin had flown into bad weather on his way back from one of the western islands, forcing him to land. He’d sent coordinates, and his plane was not badly damaged, but the ice-field was still a dangerous place to be alone in winter. It was one thing to pull a komatik several miles in the light of high summer, but it would be much colder now.

We volunteered to fly the mission at once. Our planes were ready and charged, and Howe sent someone to find our mechanics. Before the runner could return, though, Flint gave us both a grave look. “Fly in, pick him up, get him back here,” she ordered. “Anything more than that, try to fix his plane, and you’re begging for trouble. You both know how to do basic repairs? Good — try not to need them. You can fly without mechanics.” A second’s hesitation, but Flint was right. We knew how to make basic repairs. All we had to do was fly in, pick up a lost pilot, and fly back.

From the start, luck wasn’t with us. The weather was getting worse, with whirlwinds of snow playing about the ice-field beneath us. We lost radio contact only a few hours out, as another squall whipped through, and for a brief second all I saw was Howe’s plane, disappearing into the flurry of white, seemingly devoured by the whirlwind, walls of snow on either side.

In spite of Flint’s order to keep to the charted course no matter what, I left my flight path to search for Howe. One missing pilot was bad enough. What I hadn’t realised was that in turning slightly, I would put myself right in the path of the same snow squall, and in a few moments I was upended by it, floating for what could have been minutes or days in a vortex of cold. I don’t remember much about the rest of it. I should have been terrified. All that registered, really, was that I was in control of everything, except somehow the navigation and steering. It could have carried me into the side of a mountain or out to sea, and the great absurdity of it was that had I carried on along our initial route, the squall would have passed to the south and we would both have continued unharmed, as I learned afterward. In the rush to try and find him, the panic of seeing him disappear behind a wall of snow, I hadn’t seen Howe’s plane dodging swiftly to the side, by sheer luck and good timing avoiding the worst of the storm.

When I emerged from the cloud of snow, into the clear night air, I heard the crackle of the radio returning, and I signalled as quickly as I could to Howe, to the airfield. No answer. My equipment had been knocked about fiercely, and in a rush of returning fear, I tested the steering. It answered, and I breathed a sigh of relief, even as I noted the navigation was still down. I wished we had waited for the mechanics — these repairs were beyond me. I could only try to determine, with malfunctioning equipment and disoriented enough that I was almost bound to miscalculate, how to return to the intended route. There was no sign of Howe, and for a moment  my fears increased — until suddenly I was over a small stretch of open water, and against the black ocean his silver plane showed like the back of a whale. He had come back, had left the flight path in search of me. But the delay of the squall — the detour to find me — the damage to my equipment — meant that we would have to return to the airfield, leaving Brin where he was.

As we landed and disembarked, voices buzzed into my brain like a radio tuning back in. Howe’s voice relaying the details of the failed mission to Flint. Flint reminding him impatiently that she had already sent another pair of pilots out. I couldn’t, or at least I couldn’t seem to speak, though I desperately wanted to explain, to tell her that I had been trying to help. We had been trying to help. It wasn’t enough.

It was at the evening watch that the second rescue party returned, with Brin weary but hale, but relief was short-lived. Flint gave him the briefest of explanations before sending him to the mess hall for a hot meal. I was caught between trying to avoid him, and wishing to tell him we had done our best. Too late, I realised, hearing my name from one of the tables.

“ … should be dismissed from the fleet,” Brin was saying. “Never seen the like.”

“Drop it, Brin,” someone cautioned. “Navigational problems happen to everyone.”

“Especially to people who like to play with magnetite,” he growled, but let it go for the moment. I briefly froze. Magnetite was the tool of the saboteur, or so we had been told. It left no trace upon navigational equipment and so could easily be used to get temporarily, deliberately lost, and make it look like an innocent malfunction. It was supposed to be an easy way to get out of flying in particularly bad weather, or in nobler cases, a way to disobey the orders of an incompetent captain, without facing legal consequences afterward. But to desert, especially on such an important flight, would have been an act of absolute cowardice. With effort, I ignored Brin. I left the mess hall to find Howe, who was still alone and shouldn’t have been.

What exactly Flint had told Brin, I did not know. She had barely addressed me or Howe since our return, and I assumed this was because she had more important things to deal with, such as the second pair of rescue pilots returning successfully.

∞

The last thing I wanted to do — apart from confronting Brin, and I’d done a fine job of keeping out of that so far — was talk to Howe about the failed rescue mission. This was partly my own guilt, and partly the knowledge that he was taking it even harder. We each kept to ourselves the next day, and it wasn’t until the day following that anything happened. It was a clear twilit day, all the planes out in the field, engines charging with auroral energy. I was getting ready to set off on a mail run. So far that morning no one had said much about what had happened, nor repeated any rumours, though Brin’s expression could have seared through ice.

I strapped on my snow goggles, the metal of the clasp cold where it brushed my wrist between sleeve and glove. I handed Howe my flight plan in case anything went awry. Then I climbed into the cockpit, wishing I’d given him a severe look before putting the goggles on.

“Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.” He’d never been good at following instructions. I left with a dark feeling in the more sensible part of my mind.

I was, to my displeasure, quite right. I’d come back from the three-hour flight to find him surrounded by a knot of fellow pilots, various degrees of surprise, horror, and indignation on most of their faces. I leapt from my plane and ran to him, aware of all eyes on me. But it wasn’t the place to discuss it. Leading him away by the arm, I whispered, “What did I tell you?”

He shook his head. “There wasn’t another answer for it. Brin wasn’t trying to get under my skin, he picked his moment too well, he was trying to have you dismissed.”

“What?”

“Dereliction of — ”

“The hell with dereliction of duty!” I said, a little too loudly. He jumped. It was then that I saw that this had not been a rash decision, nor a stupid one, even, but an act of desperation and calculated self-defence. Or, rather, friend-defence. It was good of him. I hated that.

“I’m sorry,” Howe said evenly, forcing me to lower my own voice again. “He accused you in front of everybody. Told them he was going straight to Flint. Said you’d kept a bit of magnetite in your pocket and sabotaged your navigational equipment, that we’d brought it back to get out of flying dangerous missions. If no one defended you, you could have been dismissed.”

“Well, I can prove it now. Rescind the challenge. Let me talk to Brin.”

He shook his head. “I can’t. You know it’s not that easy, we’ve signed the contract.”

“Couldn’t you have explained to Flint? Brin wasn’t there, he couldn’t know, he’s just throwing out stupid insults because he’s angry. You could’ve told her all of that.”

There was no way of proving my innocence. I had been alone in the plane. Howe — well, everyone knew that he would be willing to lie for me. If I had failed in my resolve and tried to ditch back to base, putting another pilot’s life at risk, I would have trusted him not to conceal that fact, even for my sake, but I doubted that anyone else would see that. Whether they thought that I had lied to him, or that he was lying for me, made little difference.

“What do you think the captain would do if she knew what happened? We both disobeyed orders, Vance. But that’s not the point — we both tried to complete the mission, and Brin lied about it. You weren’t back yet. I had to make a choice.” You had to make my choice for me, you mean. I left it unsaid, but my anger was growing. He’d made the same decision on the mission. If he had carried on, had gone to collect Brin before looking for me — I stopped myself there, realising that I had done the same. At the time it had seemed reasonable.

It was then that I blurted out the fatal words. “I’ll be your second.” As though it were an inconvenience only. Softening the blow, I added, “Of course.”

“Thank you.” I think he was surprised. No reason to be, but it was always like that with Howe.

With that much at least settled, we made our way wearily to the mess hall, finding a quiet table at which to discuss the details, which in practice meant increasing desperation on my part, resigned silence on his. After an hour’s failed persuasion, I lapsed into silence. I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I didn’t notice that Howe had left, and Brin appeared, until I looked up to find the latter lurking in the doorway. I covered my surprise as best I could, pretending that I had been intending to spring up from the table and knock my bench over. He on the other hand remained irritatingly cool.

“Vance. Good to see you’re talking some sense into him.”

Not how I had expected him to begin. “If you’re here to gloat, you might as well leave. I was just about to.” I went to pick up the bench with as much dignity as I could muster.

“You think I want to fight this duel any more than he does? Don’t be ridiculous. This wasn’t my idea.” He adjusted his sleeve cuffs in a bored way.

“Doesn’t matter whose idea it is. It was a stupid one. But if you’re so keen to call it off, do it. Take back your accusation and we’ll hear no more about it.” It struck me that I had no idea what he thought he would get out of this — vindication, the captain’s favour, or merely the chance to take out his resentment towards Howe in legally acceptable fashion. It had to be the latter: while it had not been his idea, he must have known where his accusation would lead. Still, I could not tell whether he honestly believed we had deliberately failed him. I knew he didn’t think much of me, but accusing Howe of cowardice was like accusing ice of being too hot.

He stayed in the doorway, making no move to either enter or leave, and against my better judgment I felt the need to break the silence. That was Brin, though — he had the uncanny ability to get other people to say more than they intended. If he hadn’t been a pilot, he could have been the more dangerous kind of lawgiver. And so he stayed silent until I blurted out, “If neither of you wants to do this, why not tell Flint you were mistaken?”

He laughed. The least encouraging sound he could have made. “No.” As firm as Howe, but with an edge of mockery to it that set my teeth on edge. “Like I said, I’d rather not have to bother fighting a duel. But I’d have to consider how that would look. Besides, I haven’t mistaken anything.” A conspicuous glance at the hourglass, and he was gone.

I was left alone again. The mess hall, vast as it was, had started to seem suffocatingly small. I stepped outside, and before I quite knew where I was going, I was at the duelling ground, just beyond the bounds of the floe edge. A ridge of broken ice separated it from the airfield, shielding it from view.

Duels on an ice floe. Only we Polarins would think that up. Still, we had done so with style, polishing the duelling ground until it shone with the eerie gleam of ice beneath the winter sky, shimmering with auroras, suspending our steps above a pool of stars.

I wasn’t the one who would be taking my place here tomorrow morning, but I paced the ice as if it were mine to pace, evaluating each step. Midnight. Time was running out. It was in that mood that I sank down to the ice, hoping against hope that no one would see me as I cast myself down to lie on it face-first, like a fool.

No such luck. There was suddenly someone beside me, kneeling, a hand on my back. Then a voice.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Howe. The last person I wanted to see me. The last person I wanted to look at or speak to, unless it were to sway him from this course of action.

“Go away,” I murmured, not looking up.

He stayed where he was.

“I’m quite serious,” I went on. “I cannot stand to think about you. I’m only doing it now because you won’t do what I’m begging you to do and just leave me alone.”

He sat on the pool of stars, as alone as I had ever seen him, staring straight ahead. “I didn’t do this for you.” I twitched a little at his honesty. He went on: “I didn’t want you being dismissed. By rights I should be dismissed. But I wanted to remind him that he cannot rashly accuse — ” He broke off, a sign, in his case, of high emotion. I let him collect his thoughts. “I didn’t want the others to think he could get away with those lies.”

“Lies? Like you said, I disobeyed orders.”

“Not because you wanted to get out of flying. You didn’t go barrelling into a snow squall out of cowardice, you were looking for me. For what it’s worth, it was no worse judgment than mine was — you thought it was for the best.” And yet you feel responsible, I added to myself, for being the reason I did something that stupid.

“But I could’ve talked to Flint.”

“Not before Brin got there. And if Flint believed him, what would’ve happened?”

“There had to be a better bloody way.” His mouth quirked into a smile, and I glared back. “You know what I mean. A better, less bloody way.”

“What would you have done, had it been me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well.” He let out a long, slow breath, and it struck me that he was afraid, just not in the same way that I was, or for the same cause. He was afraid of where this left us, afraid that in these final hours before the duel, I genuinely did hate him. Though I still could not look at him, I said softly, “I’m sorry. I don’t blame you, actually, contrary to all appearances.” He laughed — warm and pleasant sound — and remarked, “I never would have guessed.”

∞

I would like, for the record, to dispel a notion that I fear will follow me to the end of my days. We weren’t best friends because I liked him better than anyone else. Everyone liked him. No, we were close because I knew what he was like, how stubborn and melancholic he could be, how much each flight cost him in stress and worry, his diffidence, his doubts, how unpleasant, in short, he could be at his worst, and how much pleasure he took from small kindnesses, how easily I could make him laugh. And in return, I gave him my nameless worries, my desire to raise my status in the captain’s eyes. It was a partnership of strength to weakness, weakness to strength, as two magnets to each other. That our flights were nearly always successful and prompt, our mechanics happy and our machines well-kept, caused many to attribute our friendship to mutual love of flying. But that casual kind of friendship does not make people do this kind of thing.

What would you have done, had it been me? What else could I do? Ask Brin to apologise? I’d tried to explain myself, and it hadn’t worked. It was my word against that of a more experienced pilot, the one who had been the injured party.

What would I have done? Left the fleet, left Polaris, sought out a new life in the south. There was a whole world beyond the auroral belt, even if, as far as I was aware, nowhere else had people managed to take to the air. I could have become a sailor or a traveller in distant lands. But that would have proven Brin’s lies correct, and besides, what else would I do? I had been a pilot ever since I had told my parents that I did not like to hunt. They had shrugged and told me that they figured as much. I was terrible at it. I’d always had my head in the clouds, and if I wanted the rest of my body to go and join it, that was no great surprise. I had been sent to Flint for training, and she had, ever since, been my captain. I did not know how to be anything else. My UltraLight, green and silver in the sun, was the only accomplishment of which I was proud. I loved my profession, and the land that unfolded beneath my plane’s wings was the only land I had ever known. I could read it intricately, the fissures where the rock cracked, the islands and skerries that filled the straits and bays. It was home. It wasn’t perfect, but it was beautiful.

Lawgiving, my father’s profession, I knew little of. Yet I knew that the contract was legally binding unless the principals backed down or the original challenge was found to be invalid, and I knew that anyone with hunting experience, as Brin had, would be an inconveniently excellent shot. Neither of those facts was likely to get myself or Howe out of this, but they might prove useful in persuading him. Or perhaps, I thought, an idea striking me, persuading someone else entirely.

∞

The snow beyond the windows flashed past, sudden streaks of white against the darkness. I was too hot and too agitated to bother admiring it, but the picture it formed was one I had to appreciate even in my distracted state: an otherworldly gleam, emphasised by the light cast by the windows. From the air, it would be as if nothing existed beyond this little circle. The beating heart at the centre of the storm, though it was not really a storm, just a flurry that would be gone by morning. A three-day blizzard such as we had had the previous winter could end in an unrecognisable landscape, sculpted by the stern winds into peaks and currents and delicate interlacing ridges. I was struck by the urge to memorise it, since if my plan worked, I would have precious little time left here. Before I could take that train of thought any further, I shook my head, trying to snap myself out of it, and knocked on the door.

“Vance. Come in.” Flint never looked up from her early-morning paperwork. I tentatively stepped inside, a little worried that I’d heard wrong, the longer she sat writing without a single sign that she had noticed my presence.

“Captain — ”

“One moment.” Finishing the signature, she looked up. “What is it?”

“Captain, I have to speak to you about the duel.”

“You are Howe’s second, are you not? Any matters to do with the duel ought to be taken up with the principals. My involvement consists solely of drawing up the contract.” Her tone of voice made clear her opinion of the custom.

“I would like to question the legality of that contract.” Imitating my father, and not well.

“It is a straightforward matter,” she replied shortly. “Brin accused an absent pilot of dereliction of duty. Your principal challenged him to retract his statement, which he refused to do. Howe called him out for slander.”

This would be the moment, I knew, to speak my speech, but my mouth was hopelessly dry. I coughed several times before I could even begin. Flint had the effect of making subordinates believe themselves hopelessly outmatched before even starting.

“That would be the trouble,” I said, as confidently as I could. “The facts of the story are true, but the details are mistaken. My plane did break radio contact, causing our rescue mission to be unsuccessful. My navigational equipment was damaged. I must have had some of the magnetite in my pocket by mistake.”

To my surprise, she observed me keenly for some moments before asking, “Are you sure that’s what happened?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“What if it would make no odds as to this contract?”

I had no reply. She rolled up the paper, tapped the desk with it. “I thought not.”

“Legally you are now obliged — ”

“I know full well my legal obligations.” Incredible, really, that the one time my captain had taken notice of me was when she thought I was being phenomenally dense.

“Time is — ”

“I know that too.” A swift, piercing glare. I physically flinched. “If you are sure about this, there is nothing I can do to stop you. But you should know there’s no undoing it.”

“Quite sure.” I didn’t flinch this time. I’m nothing if not stubborn.

“Then. So be it.” She took the contract, crumpled it, put it on the fire. “You’ll stay on the fleet. But you’ll have to be transferred at the earliest opportunity, as an example. It’s a sorry business all round, and should never have been carried this far. Tell Howe and Brin to come to my office as soon as possible. No, tell them immediately.” She paused. “I always figured you’d come to trouble.” As I retreated, I could have sworn I saw her fish in her desk for a light.

And there was Howe, already outside the office, as though he had known.

“What did you do?” Pleasing, that. He now knew how I had felt on hearing of the challenge. Asked the question, though he already knew the answer.

“The duel is off,” I told him. “Legal troubles.”

“What did you do?” I’d never seen him this angry with me before, and it felt so, so satisfying. “I cancelled the duel. Try thanking me, for saving your life.” He was dumbstruck, and I could understand why. He had a rather different understanding of who was saving whom in this situation.

“You can’t … ” You can’t leave. And for the most fleeting second, I had a pang of doubt. I was doing him wrong, leaving like this, leaving his own future uncertain. Leaving him with Brin, and under the cloud of rumour that was bound to build up around this.

“Howe. It’s the only way. I’m not leaving the fleet, I’m being sent to another station, that’s all.”

“You — what?”

“She knew I was lying. But she can’t contradict me — she let me confess full responsibility for my plane’s damages and my absence from the mission, and face the consequences. It’s better than letting you get yourself killed.”

He was silent, either impressed or gobsmacked, didn’t matter which. Then he swept me into a hug, shocking us both.

“I’m going to miss you, Vance.”

“Yeah. You too. Howe — don’t do anything stupid.” I wasn’t sure I could say much more, what with the sudden constriction in my throat. He, on the other hand, kept talking, afraid, for the second time in as many days, of where this left us. I let him continue, though that hardly mattered yet. For that brief moment, once again, we were the only people in the world.

Filed Under: Featured, Story Tagged With: friendship, leadership, loyalty, sf

Skadi

December 13, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 43

Skadi

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  December 13, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Skadi
00:00 / 52 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 52 minutes | Recorded on October 24, 2020

It is December, and for this month I am feature winter themes. Today we talk about Skadi, the Scandanavian jötunn (giantess/ancient goddess, similar to a Titan in Greek mythology), who is the embodiment of winter, and is associated with bowhunting, skiing, and mountains. In this episode we look at Skadi’s thirst for revenge over her father’s murder, and the meaning of her ice-cold nature in the psychology of myth.

Tagged With: bowhunting, chthonia, dark, giant, goddesses, mountains, podcast, scandanavia, skadi, skiing, winter

Taweret

November 29, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 42

Taweret

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  November 29, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Taweret
00:00 / 41 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 41 minutes | Recorded on September 25, 2020

We end the month of November with a look at the Egyptian goddess Taweret, a hippopotamus goddess who was the wife of Set and a ferocious protector of children. Like many dark goddesses, her attributes seemed to change over time, making her more benevolent.

Tagged With: chthonia, egyptian, horus, mother, podcast, protector, set, taweret

A New World (Poems and Photos)

November 25, 2020 By Marco V Morelli

A New World (Poems and Photos)

By
  • Andrea van de Loo
 |  November 25, 2020
Feature Image: California Desert In Bloom, by Andrea van de Loo

Editor’s Note: A print-friendly version of these poems is available for download.

A New World

The land behind your back ends here.
—David Wagner

Going inward
            I see my grey sleek wolf’s belly
moving forward on long legs striding
            free, clear, unassuming
my natural strength carrying me
            into the clear space ahead.

Walking in natural grace
            my path in the wilderness
one amongst many
            solitary but not alone.

Emerging from the ashes of my past
            an inner knowing seems to lead me
to the birthing of a new world.

In this singular place

To each of us you reveal yourself differently,
To the ship as coast line
To the shore as ship.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Here in this singular place, this moment in time
watching the sun rise over the bay
I have a view of the world that is solely mine,
no one else sees the light’s play on the water
from this precise angle.

So each one of us
in those rare moments of attention
beholds and weaves and makes visible
the tapestry of creation,
the garment of our Great Mother.

In the dark folds of the cloth
we hide or sleep,
in its shimmering hues
we dance and awaken.


Silent Snake

A shamanic name I received from an encounter with a rattlesnake, while on a vision quest in the Joshua Tree desert

I am and unfold, Silent Snake,
undulating in my core, quietly
carrying the vibrations of the Great Silence
into the life of my loved ones
in and out of bodies
bringing the unseen gift to all
a quiet presence for those still somewhat lost—
a refuge and a constant
ever changing reflection
of the One Great Love.


Doorstep Delivery

(Inspired by a poem of the same title by Greg Hall)

What was left on my doorstep
Like an abandoned orphan?
Will someone please take care of her
Claim her and take her home?

But no, years later she is still there
Shivering in the cold
Silent and beyond hunger
Her big eyes looking at me darkly
Will I ever pick her up and take her in?

When, finally, it became clear
That no one else would claim her
I picked her up and brought her in.
Making up for decades of neglect
I washed her and dressed her
And combed her hair. I nursed her
And rocked her and soothed her to sleep.
I cooed over her. I named her and
Came to know her as she slowly
Softened and began to trust.

Over time she told me everything.
She learned to cry and rage.
Together we shook our fists
And stomped our feet.

Now she is my happy, funny little girl.
She lives with me and I belong with her.
Hand in hand we walk through life
Sometimes skipping, sometimes stalling
Finding our way into love.


Fragile

So fragile I feel
having coughed all winter
my tissues wilting—
petals of a flower
when its blooming is done
turning slowly translucent
and slack
before gently drifting
without a sound
back to earth.


I am the One I have been looking for

Out of the bustle of the town
I enter the narrow passageway
leading to a stairwell.
Going down, the city noises disappear.
All becomes quiet.
I descend
until I stand before a tall wooden door
with many panels, but no handle.

A word appears on the door : Ave.
My soul bursts into the Ave Maria!
But no,
it is I who is being greeted.
I am welcomed and expected,
I am holy.

With a slight push, the door opens.
I enter a small circular room
with a tall domed ceiling.
On a table in the center
a book lies open.
There I leave my past behind
along with the suffering ones.

Effortlessly, I rise above the city
and up towards the stars
spreading large white wings
luminous.

I am only a slight silhouette
in the totality of being
the same and yet distinct.
I dissolve for a while
as in a silent dream.

Then, I find myself
walking back up the stairs.
I stand at the portal to the city.
I have my form but
my heart is a wide open cosmos
like a window to the infinite.

I am silent.
I know myself.
I will re-enter the world
But not be of it.
I am open and free.

Grace can flow
and Love unfettered.

Filed Under: Featured, Poetry Tagged With: snakes, Sri Aurobindo

Weekend Getaway

November 20, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Weekend Getaway

By
  • Richard Sleboe
 |  November 20, 2020
Feature Image: BUKU New Orleans, Thebukuproject, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The game gives us a satisfaction that life denies us.

—Emanuel Lasker

∞

“Tea or coffee, Sir?”

“Coffee. Black. No sugar.”

I’m on the phone with a market researcher. I try to picture a pretty girl at the other end of the line, but it isn’t working. All I see in my mind’s eye is an army of faceless goons in headsets, hunched over computer terminals in rows and rows of cubicles. I might just as well hang up. I wonder why I don’t. Why do I keep answering the phone at all? Nothing good ever comes of it.

 “Got it, Sir. Are you a cat person or a dog person, Sir?”

“A cat person. I hate dogs.”

“Noted, Sir. And what do you prefer, paperbacks or hardbacks?”

“Except for Snoopy.”

“Excuse me, Sir?”

“I don’t hate Snoopy. He’s cool.”

“I see. Now, paperbacks or hardbacks, Sir?”

“Paperbacks. I like to keep it light. Who needs a hardback?”

“People who read the same book repeatedly, Sir?”

“Are you that kind of reader?”

The researcher clears her throat.

“This survey isn’t about me, Sir. It’s about you.”

“Too bad. I’m not very interesting.”

“Moving on, Sir. Where do you feel most at home? Town or country?”

“Town. Definitely town.”

“Of course. You live in the city, don’t you?”

“Listen, how long is this going to take?”

“Almost done, Sir. Only three questions left to go.”

“Okay. But make it snappy.”

“Sure will. Are you comfortable improvising? Or do you prefer to have a plan?”

“That depends.”

“And on what does it depend, Sir?”

I sense some irritation at the other end of the line.

“On the circumstances.”

“I’ll mark this one as undecided.”

“Meaning what?”

“That you have trouble deciding whether you are an improviser or a planner.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“I’ll leave the question open then.”

“That’s better.”

“Excellent. Chess or poker, Sir?”

“Chess.”

“Chess it is.”

“Who plays poker anyway?”

“I don’t know, Sir. Poker players?”

She sounds bored. I can’t blame her. It’s a dreadful way to make a living.

“Gamblers. That’s who plays poker. Poker is a game of chance.”

“I see, Sir.”

“Now chess, that’s a different story. There is no place for chance in chess.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it, Sir.”  

“You do that. Mark my words. Poker is for gamblers.”

“Final question, Sir. Doctor John or Doctor Alban?“

“What?”

“Doctor John or Doctor Alban, Sir?”

“Who cooked up that questionnaire?”

“I don’t know, Sir. The survey is based on a standard set of questions. The order of the questions is randomized.”

She sounds like she is reading from a popup window.

“What is this survey even for?”

“I can’t tell you that, Sir. The approach we use only works as long as the respondents don’t know what we are trying to find out.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Sir.”

“Who pays for this?”

If you pay, you call the shots. Money is power. That’s a known fact.

“I have no information about that, Sir.”

“Can you check with your supervisor?”

“Sure. Hold on.”

The line goes silent, but only for a second.

“Thank you for holding, Sir. I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to disclose information about our clients, Sir.”

“Did you really check with your supervisor?”

“What makes you think I didn’t, Sir?”

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

“Okay, Sir. Doctor John or Doctor Alban, Sir?”

“Doctor John is an artist. Doctor Alban is a dentist.”

“If you say so, Sir.”

“What’s the next question?”

“This is the last question, Sir.”

I hang up.

I am just about to make some coffee when the phone rings again. I take the call without looking at the number.

“Doctor Alban is a fucking dentist”, I yell into the phone.

“I think you might be on to something, Dan”, the caller says. It’s not the market researcher. This is a male voice. It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.

“Who is this?”

“Leo.”

“Leo?”

“Leo Wienroth.”

Imagine that. I haven’t heard from Leo in ages. We used to be close.

“Is that really you?”

“Define real.”

“It is you.”

“If you say so.”

He laughs. There’s no mistaking that laugh. It really is Leo.

“How did you get this number?”

“It was in the package.”

“What package?”

“For the reunion?”

“Oh, that. I haven’t even looked at that.”

“But you are going.”

“I was planning to, yes.”

“That’s great. It’ll be good to see you.”

“So you’re going too?”

“Yeah. I live near the broad.”

“What broad?”

“The Broad. The reunion venue. Used to be a boxing club. Between St. Peter and Toulouse?”

“You’re still in New Orleans?”

“Back again. I lived in Los Angeles for a while, but I couldn’t handle the people there. And all that sun. It never rains. It gets to you. It got to me at least.”

“I know what you mean. I feels unreal somehow. Like a movie set.”

“I even tried New York.”

“Oh yeah? How come you never looked me up?”

“I don’t know. I wish I had. I’m sorry I didn’t. I guess I was busy.”

“Doing what?”

“I can barely remember. It feels like someone else’s life when I think about it now. All I know is that it wasn’t for me. I never felt at home up there.”

“New York can be a handful.”

“New Orleans too. The poverty. The crime. The corruption. The racism. The hurricanes. The tourists. The roads. Nothing works the way you think it should.”

“I think that’s why I left. Too many unknown variables.”

“No doubt about it. It’s a mess, but it’s my kind of mess.”

“So you’re doing okay?”

“Better than ever. When are you coming?”

“I think my flight is around noon on Saturday.”

“Why don’t you come on Friday? We could have a beer. Catch up on old times.”

I have a flash vision of myself in a rocking chair on a balcony on Bourbon Street, watching the barflies buzz by below. Beads of perspiration are running down my back. That’s how warm the night is. I have a can of cold beer in my hand. Beads of condensation are running down the side of the can. That’s how cold the beer is.

“Very tempting.”

“So give in to it.”

“Let me check with the airline and the hotel first.”

“Don’t worry about the hotel. You can stay at my place.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’d be doing me a favor.”

“Alright. I’ll let you know about the flight.”

“Great. See you soon.”

Before the call, I had been of two minds about the trip to New Orleans. I’m not crazy about reunions. And I hate hotels. I stay in hotels all the time for work. But the prospect of spending the weekend at an old friend’s place makes the whole idea more appealing. It’ll do me good to get out of city for a few days. It usually does.

I brew a cup of coffee. I take it to the rooftop. The sky is beautiful, two thirds baby blue and one third puffy clouds. I take a sip of coffee. I light a cigarette. Life is good.

I go back inside. I call the airline. It turns out I have a flexible ticket. Changes are free of charge. I take that as a good sign. It seems the universe wants me in New Orleans on a day ahead of schedule. I forward the rebooking confirmation to Leo. He replies almost instantly. He says he’ll pick me up at the airport. I call the hotel hotline.

“Welcome to the Terminus Group. Please enter your Steady Sleeper number.”

It’s a computerized system, but it works better than most. I enter my number. I know it by heart. As I said, I travel a lot for work, and I stay at a Terminus whenever I can.

“Thank you for calling Terminus, Mr. Thurber. Press one to make a new reservation. Press two to change an existing reservation. Press three to cancel an existing reservation. Press four to speak to an operator.”

I press three.

“There are five reservations associated with your account. New Orleans, Louisiana. Chicago, Illinois. Auburn Hills, Michigan. Tucson, Arizona. San Diego, California. Press one to cancel New Orleans. Press two to cancel Auburn Hills. Press three to cancel Chicago. Press four to cancel Tucson. Press five to cancel San Diego. Press six to return to the main menu.”

I press one.

“Press pound to confirm you want to cancel your reservation for New Orleans, Louisiana.”

I press pound.

“Cancellation for New Orleans, Louisiana, confirmed. Have a nice day.”

As soon as I have hung up, I wonder whether Leo’s offer to stay at his place was for the whole weekend, or just for Friday night. I try to reach him, but the call goes straight to voicemail. I call the hotel hotline again.

“Press one to make a new reservation. Press two to change an existing reservation. Press three to cancel an existing reservation. Press four to speak to an operator.”

I press four.

“Welcome to Terminus, Mr. Thurber. This is Lucy. How can I be of service today?”

I explain the situation to Lucy.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to make a new reservation, Mr. Thurber.”

“That’s what I thought. What’s the rate?”

I listen to the clicking of computer keys.

“650 dollars, Mr. Thurber.”

“For one night?”

“I’m afraid so. Plus applicable tax.”

“That’s more than three times the original rate.”

“Pricing is based on demand, Mr. Thurber.” 

“Can’t you just, like, hit undo on the cancellation?”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Mr. Thurber.”

More clicking of keys.

“Given the circumstances, I’m prepared to grant you a special 30 percent discount, Mr. Thurber. That would bring the rate down to 455 dollars.”

“Including tax?”

“Net. The total come to 498 dollars.”

“Thank you, Lucy. I think I’ll pass.”

“I understand, Mr. Thurber. Have a nice day.”

I know she is following a script, but she sounds like she means it.

“Thank you, Lucy. You too.”

I hang up. I go online to check the prices at other hotels in the area. All the rates are off the charts. It seems the universe wants me at Leo’s place all weekend.

The rest of the week is pretty busy. Work keeps me from thinking about the weekend. I don’t know what to expect anyway. I haven’t been to New Orleans since Katrina, and I don’t think I’ve seen any of the people in my class since I graduated. Maybe that’s a good thing. That way, I’ll be able to approach the weekend with an open mind. When I think I know what’s coming, I tend to miss out on the things that really matter.

The mid-day flight from New York to New Orleans is uneventful. Business travelers in crumpled suits hiding behind copies of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Jocks in shorts and flip flops planning bar crawls. Screaming kids. Bleary-eyed parents. Flight attendants in polyester uniforms. Crammed seats. Stale pretzels. Lukewarm coffee. Lukewarm coke. The pilot keeps making announcements nobody listens to. I wonder who gave him the idea that people care about the cruising altitude, or the speed of the plane, or the route it takes, or what they could see if they had a window seat. I put on my noise-canceling headphones to tune out of the misery, but it doesn’t really work. My MP3 player is no match for plane’s PA system. I spend the rest of the flight worrying about my bag. Somehow, the airline manages to lose my luggage on every other flight. At Louis Armstrong Airport, I’m relieved when I spot my battered black holdall on the carousel. Another good sign. I pick up the bag and step out onto the curb. The heat hits me like a hammer. I take off my jacket. I wipe my brow with my shirt sleeve. A wide-hipped woman pushing a cart piled high with luggage flashes me a smile as white as new snow and as big as a barn door.

“Welcome to New Orleans, honey.”

I touch a finger to my sweaty forehead in salute.

“Thank you, mam. It’s good to be here. Where are you headed?”

“Haiti.”

“Good for you. Bon voyage!”

She nods and pushes her cart towards departures, swaying to a tune she alone can hear. I watch her disappear through the sliding doors. Just as I am about to switch on my phone to check whether Leo has texted me, he pulls up to the curb. He gets out of the car. He’s wearing maroon cowboy boots, a cream suit, a pale pink shirt, and a pair of mirror shades pushed up onto his forehead. His hair is cropped close. Middle age looks good on him. Unlike me, Leo hasn’t put on much weight, but the years have added something else. Something good. A touch of silver on his temples, but that’s not it. A pattern of tiny wrinkles around the corners of his eyes, but that’s not it either. It’s hard to put a finger on it. Maybe it isn’t any one thing. It’s the way he carries himself. He looks like he’s at home in his body. At peace with the world.

We hug. He smells good.

“It’s good to see you”, he says.

“You too. You look great.”

Leo laughs. He takes my bag and puts it in the back seat of the car. It’s the kind of car that has a roof edge, but no roof. Boxy. Practical. An urban buggy.

“Hop in”, he says.

“I never thought I’d see you in this kind of car. I always imagined you in something smaller. British, or Italian. Low on the road. With a stick shift, and wire wheels.”

“I know. I’d trade this thing for a roadster in a heartbeat, but a roadster wouldn’t last a week on these mean streets. We have potholes that eat compact cars for breakfast.”

Leo checks the mirror and pulls away from the curb. He navigates the labyrinth of pedestrian crossings, converging lanes, on-ramps, off-ramps, tunnels, and overpasses with effortless grace. Once we’re on the highway, he pushes the shades down onto his nose, accelerates to 65, and puts the car in cruise control. I notice a low growling sound welling up from the guts of the car.

“Is something wrong with the engine?”

“I don’t think so. It’s a German car. Why?”

“Don’t you hear that noise?”

Leo chuckles. He points to the back seat.

“That’s Maurice.”

I look over my shoulder. A chubby dog is chewing the handle of my holdall.

“That’s an unusual name for a dog.”

“I named him after Merleau-Ponty.”

“Like the wine?”

“Like the philosopher. He looks gentle, but he has very strong opinions.”

“I see”, I say, although I don’t.

We leave the highway just after City Park. We stop at a traffic light. Leo pushes the shades back up onto his forehead and turns his head to look at me.

“You look tired, Dan.”

“It’s been a busy week.”

“I think you work too much.”

“It’s not easy to make ends meet in the city. You know how it is.”

“I do. It’s a rat race, and it never stops. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t like it there. Life moves at a slower pace in New Orleans.”

The traffic light turns green. Leo makes a left. I’ve never been to this part of town. When we were in college, I rarely got out of the Garden District. We drive through quiet, tree-lined streets. There is not much traffic. Buicks. Cadillacs. The odd BMW. Nobody is in a rush. Leo goes with the flow. His driving puts my mind at ease.

“This is a nice neighborhood.”

“I’ve always wanted to move here, but it took me a long time to find the kind of place I was looking for.”

I look up at the sky. The crowns of the trees that line the street on either side meet in the middle, high above our heads, creating a natural canopy. The sunlight filters through the leaves and casts a pattern of living shadows onto the road. When the wind rustles the leaves, the shadows move in sync. It’s a soothing sight. I drift off.

When I wake up, we are driving straight towards a brick wall.

“Watch out”, I yell, but Leo keeps driving undeterred.

Just when I think we are going to crash into the wall, the wall parts like a curtain, and we drive right through it. I turn my head. The wall slides shut behind us.

“What was that?”

“A little trick. I had the gate painted to blend in with the wall.”

“Why do you need a wall at all?”

“To keep the scum out.”

We get to another gate. This time, Leo brings the car to a stop before we reach the gate. He enters a passcode on a keypad and places his right hand on a scanner. I notice he still wears his graduation ring, the one with the Jesuit seal, three letters, IHS, surrounded by stylized rays of light. The second gate slides open. Leo parks the car. The second gate slides shut behind us. We get out of the car. I want to take my bag, but the dog doesn’t look like it’s ready to give it up. Leo notices my hesitation.

“Drop it, Maurice”, Leo says, and the dog does, although reluctantly. It looks at me with a mixture of disgust and contempt. Leo opens the tailgate. The dog scrambles out of the car and trots off into the undergrowth of the magnolia trees that skirt the brick wall that runs around the property. Leo hands me the bag. The handle is well lubricated with the dog’s saliva. I don’t say anything. Dog owners have no sense of humor, at least not when it comes to their dogs. That’s a known fact.

I follow Leo on a paved path that leads up to the house. It’s quite a house. Whatever Leo does for a living, he must be very good at it. Or maybe he won the lottery. He unlocks the door and drops his keys into a ceramic bowl that sits on an antique table in the hallway. He takes off his shades and puts them on the table next to the bowl. 

“I’ll show you to the guest room”, Leo says.

I follow him through a double door, down the hallway, up a staircase, down another hallway, and up another staircase.

“You live here all by yourself?”

Leo doesn’t answer the question. Maybe he hasn’t heard me. He is a few steps ahead of me. He points to a door at the far end of the hallway.

“This is you. Take your time. I’ll be in the big room”, he says.

The guest room is spacious, clean, and cool. It’s decorated in shades of cream and caramel. An old-fashioned ceiling fan with polished wooden blades is whirring above my head. I take off my sweaty clothes to feel the breeze on my body. I take a shower, shave my face, and splash some cologne from a dark green bottle onto my cheeks. It smells of oranges. I put on a white linen shirt, a pair of cotton slacks, and a pair of moccasins. I roll the sleeves of the shirt up to just below my elbows.

I help myself to a glass of water from a pitcher that sits on a small table by the window. I open the window. It has a view of a lush green garden and the bayou that lies beyond. It’s still warm, but not as hot as before. Maybe it’s my system that’s adjusting to the humid heat. Or maybe it’s the shirt. Linen has cooling properties. That’s a known fact. I smoke a cigarette. I’m ready for the weekend to begin.

When I step out into the hallway, I have trouble remembering which way I came.

“Leo?”

There is no answer. I walk down the hallway, down a short flight of stairs, down a hallway, and around a corner. This house is a maze. Just when I am about to go back to my room to call Leo on his cell phone, I hear music playing somewhere downstairs. I follow the music, and that’s how I find the big room. It’s about the size of a basketball court. The ceiling is at least 30 feet high. The walls are a mix of exposed brick and patches of crumbling plaster. Half a dozen arched windows look out onto a little pond and a copse of willow trees.

A colorful assortment of rugs, couches, easy chairs, coffee tables, chests, and floor lamps is scattered across the room. There is plenty of empty space between the islands of furniture. An archipelago of a living room. The pieces don’t really match, but the vibrations are good. Harmonious. Sophisticated and understated at the same time. Not an easy combination to pull off. 

Halfway up the walls, a gallery runs around the perimeter of the room. Upstairs, the walls are lined with bookshelves. A narrow spiral staircase leads up to the gallery from a corner in the open kitchen area. At the far end of the room, there is a vintage stereo setup. A record player. A tube amp. A pair of tall wooden speakers with dark brown fabric front panels. Leo is standing by the stereo, studying a record sleeve.

“You weren’t exaggerating.”

Leo looks up from the record sleeve.

“What do you mean?”

“When you said big room.”

He smiles.

Leo lets his eyes wander from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, from one piece of furniture to the next. It’s almost as if he’s looking at the room for the first time, or with new eyes.

“I suppose you’re right.”

“It’s huge!”

He shrugs and smiles.

“I have a soft spot for space”, he says.

“What’s that music?”

“The Blind Boys of Louisiana. Away From Home. It just came out.”

“I like it.”

“I thought that you might.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard it before.”

Leos keeps smiling.

“It sounds familiar though.”

“I know what you mean. It’s timeless. The group has been around forever. It was established before the war.”

“They must be ancient!”

“I don’t think it’s the same people who started the group. The voices change. The spirit stays.”

“Like the ship in that story.”

“What ship?”

“You know, the one on which they replace all the planks, one by one, until nothing is left of the original ship, and yet it’s still the same ship?”

Leo’s face lights up.

“The ship of Theseus.”

“That’s the one.”

“I think I have a book about it.”

He points up to the library.

“Do you want me to get it?”

“No, that’s okay.”

“How about a glass of champagne then?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t it a little early for liquor?”

“Champagne isn’t liquor. It’s an elixir. It’ll help you get into the right frame of mind for tonight.”

“What’s tonight?”

“You’ll see.”

“You know I don’t like surprises.”

“That why you need a glass of champagne.”

“Alright then.”

Leo puts down the record sleeve and walks over to the kitchen area. He takes two long-stemmed glasses from a shelf above the kitchen counter. He rinses the glasses out with water and polishes them with a white cloth. He opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of champagne. It looks expensive. The label is shaped like a bat. Leo removes the little wire cage and the tinfoil cap. He wraps the white cloth around the neck of the bottle and pops the cork. He pours the champagne.

“To friendship.”

“To friendship.” 

We end up drinking the whole bottle. Leo was right. It was just what I needed. I feel good. A little drowsy perhaps. 

“Now how about a cup of coffee?”

“You read my mind.”

“I just stick to the theory of humors.”

“Humors?”

“Liquids. It’s all about keeping the different liquids in your body in balance.”

“I see”, I say, although I’m not sure I do.

“That’s what life is all about, Dan. Balance.”

“Makes sense. Do you need help with the coffee?”

“I got it. Sit back. Relax.”

I flop down on the couch that faces the kitchen counter. Leo fires up the coffee machine. It’s a gleaming silver dragon, the kind that would look at home in an upscale espresso bar. It emits a hissing sound as it clears the nostrils of its steam spouts. Leo rinses out the water tank and fills it with fresh water. He turns to me.

“Espresso? Cappuccino? Flat white?”

“Espresso. Black. No sugar.”

He smiles and nods, as if I have passed a test. He grinds the beans. The smell of freshly ground coffee wafts over to the couch.

“I love that smell.”

“Me too.”

While he’s waiting for the boiler to heat up, Leo fills two small glasses with water and puts them on a lacquered wooden tray. He moves with efficiency, but without haste. He handles the equipment like a professional barista. Maybe he works in the hospitality industry. I could see him running a cocktail bar, or a fancy restaurant, or a boutique hotel. Watching him go through the motions of making coffee has a soothing effect on me. It’s like watching a play I have seen before. A classic. I know what’s coming, but I can’t get enough of it. The Good Life, by Leo Wienroth. One act. No intermission. I would pay to see it.

“What’s your secret, Leo?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem so serene.”

He laughs.

“Wow. Serene. That’s a big word. I don’t know. As I said, I’m all about balance. I try to balance the bitter with the sweet. The fast with the slow. The high with the low. Action with contemplation. ”

“That’s what I mean. You have it figured out.”

“You give me too much credit, Dan. I get it all from Capablanca.”

“Who is that? A friend of yours?”

Leo smiles. I’m afraid I might have said something stupid, but Leo doesn’t seem to think so, or if he does, he doesn’t let on about it.

“I like to think so”, he says.

Leo draws two shots of espresso. He places the cups on the tray and carries the tray over to the coffee table in front of the couch. Just as he is about to sit down on a wooden stool across from me, his phone buzzes. He takes it from his pocket. He looks at the display. A frown forms on his forehead while he reads the message.

“What is it?”

“An emergency. I have to go. Make yourself at home. I won’t be long.”

“What kind of emergency?”, I ask him, but it’s too late. He has already left the room. I hear the front door slam. A few seconds later, I hear the engine of the car start up. I’m alone. What happened to Southern hospitality? First Leo lures me down here a day early, then he disappears without even telling me where he is going? So be it. I’m sure he has a good reason to leave so suddenly. I’ll make the best of it. I turn my attention to the coffee. It smells irresistible. I never get tired of the smell of coffee. The crema looks serious. I take a sip. It’s very good. Strong as steel. Smooth as silk. Dark as a long-kept secret. I drink Leo’s as well. It would be a shame to let it go to waste, and I don’t think he will be back in time to drink it while it’s still hot. Now that Leo is gone, I feel his presence even more strongly than I did when he was here. I look at the parts, and I see the whole. I look at the set, and I see the plot. I look at the traces, and I see the man. Everything is evidence. The house he lives in. The objects he surrounds himself with. The music he listens to. The coffee he makes. I feel it pulsing through me like a magic potion. What I need now is something sweet. I never put sugar in my coffee, but I like to nibble something sweet on the side. A piece of chocolate. A candy bar. A peanut butter cup. I rummage through Leo’s kitchen cabinets. I find a cookie jar. It’s shaped like a crescent moon. I open it. Strike. It’s filled to the brim with cookies. Like the jar, the cookies are shaped like crescent moons. They smell fantastic. Cinnamon. Lemon. Ginger. Vanilla. A hint of caramel. But there’s something else. Nutmeg? Cardamom? Poppy? I’m not sure. Just as I am about to try one, the dog bursts into the kitchen through a flap in a side door that I hadn’t seen before. It must have smelled the cookies. Dogs have a sixth sense for treats. That’s a known fact. I dash up the spiral staircase, pressing the moon-shaped cookie jar to my chest. The dog barks at me, but it doesn’t follow me upstairs. Dogs don’t like to climb stairs. That’s a known fact. Also, I think this particular dog is too fat to make it up the stairs, even if it set its simple mind to it.

“Who’s the top dog now?”

The dog growls. I ignore it. I settle into an easy chair in a nook between two bookcases. I try one of the cookies. It’s better than good. Half cookie, half gingerbread. Crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside. I eat another one. I start  wandering around the gallery, cookie jar in hand. Downstairs, the dog keeps growling, but I keep ignoring it. I eat cookie after cookie while I scan the shelves of Leo’s library. Leo’s interests seem to be wide and varied. There’s plenty of philosophy. Philosophy was Leo’s major. I tilt my head to read the names on the spines of the books. Lacan. Lachelier. Ladrière. Lagache. Lagneau. Landgrebe. Landsberg. Lautmann. Lavelle. Lefort. Léon-Dufour. Levinas. Lévi-Strauss. Leyvraz. Lichtheim. Locke. Löwith. Lyotard. Locke is the only name that sounds vaguely familiar, but that doesn’t say much. I’m not big on philosophy. I’m not all that well read in general. It’s not that I don’t like books. I just don’t have the time. I go to work to pay for my apartment. I go to the gym to stay in shape. I read the paper to stay up to date. Once in a blue moon, I go to the movies. I don’t really have time for books.

I move from shelf to shelf. Astronomy. Fashion. Film studies. Nautical navigation. Urban planning. A few books on French colonial history and Cajun cooking. Half a shelf on the arts of growing, roasting, blending, and brewing coffee. Short fiction in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. An impressive selection of books on voodoo and black magic. Leo is full of surprises. There is also an entire bookcase on chess. Openings. Endings. Problems. Biographies of famous players of the game. Before I know it, I have eaten all the cookies. I put down the jar. Now what? I could use another espresso, but I don’t think the dog will let me pass. I wouldn’t know how to work the machine anyway.

I pick up a book that’s lying flat on its back on an empty shelf between the voodoo section and the chess section. A slim, cloth-bound volume. It has no jacket, no blurbs, nothing to recommend it but the fact that it’s there. I open it. Dark brown lettering on ivory-colored paper. The Devil’s Gambit, by Adam Schlesinger, PhD, published in 1969 by Loyola University Press. On the first page, there is a dedication: “I love the players. You love the game.” I dive right in. It’s pretty cryptic. I re-read the first paragraph three times and I’m still not sure what the book is about. The doorbell rings. I’m relieved. The bell gives me an excuse to get away from the book. I peer over the banister. The dog is gone. It guess it got bored. I put the book back on the shelf, pick up the empty cookie jar, and make my way down the spiral staircase.

The doorbell rings again. In the windowless hallway that leads from the big room to the front door, I take a passing glance at a mirror to check my face for cookie crumbs. I don’t see any crumbs, but something is off. As I said, I am wearing a white shirt. But the man in the mirror is wearing a black shirt. I turn to face the mirror. The man in the mirror doesn’t move. He just keeps staring. It’s not me. It’s Leo. I drop the cookie jar. It shatters on the hardwood floor. I look at the mirror again. I realize it’s not a mirror at all. It’s a framed headshot of Leo behind a sheet of glass, made to look like a mirror and mounted at eye level. In the picture, he looks older than he does in real life. On the opposite wall of the hallway, there is a headshot of a beautiful Latina in a matching frame. I want to take a closer look at it, but the doorbell keeps ringing. It sounds urgent. I hurry to the front door. A dark shape is visible through the panel of frosted glass that is set into the top half of the door. 

“Who is it?”

“Devil on your doorstep.”

A female voice.

“Funny.”

“I’m not joking.”

“What do you want?”

“Your soul.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Your life.”

I’m intrigued. I open the door. I don’t know what I expected, but I wasn’t expecting this. It’s the neighborhood ninja. A pale-faced girl with spiky black hair, clad in black from head to toe. Black tank top. Tight black pants. Black biker boots. Fingerless gloves. She looks lean and mean. There are two things that worry me about this girl. One thing worries me a little. The other thing worries me a lot.

The thing that worries me a little is the big gun in the holster on her hip. But this is the South. Big guns are the norm here. It might not mean anything. What worries me a lot is the Doberman by her side. Like the girl, the dog looks lean and mean. Its fangs are bared. Drool is dripping from the corners of its muzzle. It doesn’t growl. It doesn’t have to. Dobermans are bred to kill. That’s a known fact.

“Ready?”, the girl asks.

“Ready for what?”

“You’re Leo, right?”

“No. I’m Daniel.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you want?”

“This is not about me. It’s about you. You want to come with me.”

“No, I don’t. Maybe Leo does. But Leo is not here right now.”

“Bullshit.”

“You can come in and wait for him if you want to.”

I don’t know why I say that. I don’t want her to come in.

“I don’t want to come in. You want to come out”, she says.

“What if I don’t?”

“I’ll set Alice on you.”

She points to the Doberman.

“That’s an unusual name for a dog.”

“I named her after my favorite explorer.”

“As in the children’s book?”

“As in the video game. She remembers everything.”

“I see”, I say, although I don’t.

“Enough with the chit chat. Time to go”, she says.

She points to the car that’s parked right where Leo’s car was parked before. A black sedan with blacked-out windows and black rims.

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I like the way you think.”

“Let me get my coat.”

“Nice try. Not happening though.”

I step out, pull the door closed behind me, and follow her to the car. She opens the back door of the car for me, the way cops open car doors for perps in TV shows.

“Watch your head.”

I get into the back seat. She gets into the driver’s seat. The Doberman rides shotgun. The girl starts the engine. The inner gate slides open. My mind is racing. How did she even get onto the property? Does she work for Leo? Or does Leo work for her? Does he owe her money? Is she the scum Leo was talking about? Is she playing a prank on Leo? Or is Leo playing a prank on me? The more I think about it, the more I realize how little I know about Leo’s life. What he does for a living. Who he hangs out with. Where he gets his kicks. Maybe the girl is a prostitute? Has Leo hired her? But why would he bring a prostitute to his house when he knows I will be there? Had he planned a threesome, and the emergency, whatever it is, thwarted the plan? I don’t have enough information. All I have to go on is what the girl has told me, and so far, she hasn’t really told me anything.

We get to the outer gate. Like Leo, the girl doesn’t slow down. The gate slides open. 

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Lucy.”

“Is that your real name?”

“No.”

“What’s your real name?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I just breathe easier when I know who I am dealing with.”

She snorts.

“Your name isn’t Leo either, right?”

“No. My name is Daniel.”

“So I’m not Lucy, and you’re not Leo. Let’s leave it at that.”

She winks at me in the rearview mirror. What does that mean? Is she coming on to me? Is she crazy? She looks a little crazy. Or am I crazy? Maybe this really is a prank, the emergency was just a fib, we’re on our way to a pre-reunion party, and I’ll be the one looking stupid. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Does it matter what I want?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“I’m just making conversation.”

I consider my options. I could try to fight the girl, but I don’t have a weapon. I could try calling for help, but I don’t have my phone, and my guess is that the car is soundproofed. I could try to buy my way out of this, but I don’t have my wallet. Even if I got out, I wouldn’t know where to go. I don’t know Leo’s address, and I don’t have the key. I really don’t have anything. I wouldn’t even make it past the first gate. But I’ll have time to worry about that when I get out of the car. If I get out. I try the window switch, but it’s disabled. When the car stops at a traffic light, I try to open the door, but it’s locked. Of course it’s locked. The girl chuckles.

“I like you. You’re funny.”

“Just let me out, okay? I won’t press charges.”

As soon as I say that, I regret it. The last thing I want to do is put her on the spot, but now I’ve done it. I clearly don’t have enough experience with being hijacked.

“Sit back. Relax. Enjoy the ride.”

We’re on the highway now. Lucy is hard at work at the wheel. Her driving is very different from Leo’s. It involves a lot of swearing, honking the horn, changing lanes, accelerating abruptly, hitting the brakes hard. It looks very athletic. I can see the tendons tightening in her neck and the muscles bulging in her arms. She’s not just driving. She’s fighting. Every other driver is her enemy. But because she’s out of sync with the traffic, I don’t think we’re getting where we’re going any faster than we did if she just went with the flow. Not that I’m in a big rush. I have no idea what’s coming, but I have a feeling I won’t like it. After about twenty minutes, we leave the highway. We keep driving for another ten minutes or so. I don’t know where we are. Out in the sticks. There isn’t much traffic here. The buildings we pass are few and far between. Gas stations, warehouses, motels, and drive-through restaurants. Everything looks grim. But maybe that’s just the light. It’s getting dark. Night falls fast down here, much faster than it does in New York.

Eventually, we pull up to a single-story building that looks like a nightclub. There’s a banner above the entrance. It reads “CCC – One night only.”

“What’s CCC?”

“It’s what you’re here for.”

“But what does it stand for?”

“Chop chess championship.”

“Chop chess?”

She nods.

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Tough luck. You’re a contender.”

“I didn’t sign up for this.”

She shrugs.

“I’m just here to get you to the game.”

She kills the engine. Someone opens the door of the car from outside. The first thing I see is the crescent moon hovering near the horizon. A bald, barrel-chested man in a dark suit steps into the doorframe, blocking out the moon. The man is wearing an earpiece. A black wire snakes down from the earpiece into the gap between his shirt collar and his suit jacket. A bulge in the jacket indicates that he carries a gun as well.

“Welcome to the Black Maria.”

“Black Maria?”

“Yes.”

“And who are you?”

“I am the doctor.”

He doesn’t look like a doctor. He looks more like a bouncer.

“I think there’s been a mistake.”

“I don’t think so. They’re waiting for you.”

He drags me from the back seat. The girl gets out of the car, gun in hand. She puts a leash on the Doberman and yanks it, pulling the dog from the passenger seat. They escort me to a room that looks like a an execution chamber. Three of the four walls are bare. The fourth wall is covered by a heavy curtain. The floor is tiled. In the middle of the floor, there is a square table with two chairs. One of the chairs is taken by a beautiful Latina in a black dress. The table is set with a chessboard. A powerful ceiling lamp casts a circle of bright white light onto the table from above.

The Latina has the white pieces. 

“Sit down”, the man who calls himself the doctor says.

“I don’t want to.”

The pale girl flicks the safety on her gun. I sit down across from the Latina. The pale girl retreats into the shadows, Doberman in tow.

“Open up”, the doctor says to no-one in particular.

The curtain glides open, revealing several rows of stadium seating. But because that part of the room is in the dark, and the ceiling light above the table is so bright, it’s hard to make out how many rows there are, and how many of the seats are taken.

“The rules are simple. Lose a piece, lose a finger. Lose the game, lose your life”, the doctor says. It sounds practiced, as if he has said the same thing many times before.

“But there are sixteen pieces. What if lose more than ten?”, I ask.

“Use your imagination.”

The doctor turns to the audience.

“Place your bets.”

The people in the audience start pressing buttons on small, hand-held devices that look like pocket calculators. I notice that a man in the front row is wearing a ring with a Jesuit seal. The ring looks just like Leo’s. The face of the man is in the dark.

“Leo?”, I ask, but there is no answer.

A display panel springs to life above the audience. It looks like a departure board at an airport or a train station, with a little split flap for every character. When the flaps finally stop rattling, the panel displays about two dozen rows of letters and numbers. All the rows start with the letter W, followed by two numbers.

“You’re new to this, right?”, the Latina whispers.

I nod.

“The letter is for the player they are betting on to win. W is for white. B is for black. The first number is the finger count to checkmate. The second number is the dollar amount they are betting.”

“They all are betting on you to beat me?”

She nods.

I study the panel. The numbers in the first column are depressingly low. The numbers in the second column are dizzyingly high. The averages at the bottom of the panel predict that I will lose five fingers before I lose the game.

“It’s because you’re new”, the Latina says.

“No talking”, the doctor snaps.

The Latina opens the game with the king’s pawn. E2 to E4. Not a very original move. I counter it. She deploys her knights. She’s better than I thought at first. Aggressive. She opens up her back rank almost all the way. I send my bishops after her rooks. She castles with the queenside rook. I set a trap for her queen. Just when I think she is about to walk into it, one of her rooks takes one of my bishops. Just like that.

“Put your left hand on the table”, the doctor says.

“No.”

He grabs my left wrist and pins it to the table. I try to break free, but he’s too strong. He reaches into an inside pocket of his suit jacket, takes out a butterfly knife, flips it open, and cuts off my left pinkie. Just like that.

It doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. The knife must be very sharp. But there’s a lot of blood. There are more blood vessels in a hand than in any other part of the human body. That’s a known fact. Blood keeps gushing from the wound.

I pass out. When I come to, I’m back at Leo’s place, stretched out on the couch. Maurice is licking my left hand. I look at it. There is no blood. My pinkie is still there. I wiggle it. It works just fine. I feel no pain. There’s not even a scar.

I rub my eyes. Leo is sitting on the wooden stool across from me. He looks worried. He points to the cookie jar on the coffee table.

“Did you eat those cookies?”

“I’m not sure. I guess I did.”

“Oh boy. All of them?”

“I think so.”

“That must have been quite a trip.”

“Roger that.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“I don’t know. A little dizzy.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“What was in those cookies?”

“I have no idea.”

“Where did you get them?”

“An organic candy shop. On Magazine. I bought them mostly for the jar. I only ate one of them. I liked the taste, but it didn’t like the effect it had on me.”

“What happened?”

“I fell asleep. I had a dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

“Weird. Blurry. It felt like I was a character in someone else’s dream. Out of control.  A pawn in a game.”

“A game?”

“Yes. Like I was being played. Pushed around on a board by an unseen hand.”

“Sounds scary.”

“It was. Like I was seeing only a tiny fraction of a much bigger picture. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t see it because it was too big, and I was standing too close.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t remember. When I woke up, I was all confused. I had trouble telling what was real from what wasn’t real.”

“How long did that last?”

“Not long. A day. Maybe two. Then everything went back to normal. But I never ate another one of those cookies.”

“Why didn’t you throw them out?”

“I don’t know. I should have. I went back to the shop to ask them about the cookies, but when I got there, the shop was gone.”

“Do you remember what the shop was called?”

“The Black Maria. Why?”

“No reason.”

Soldat jouant aux échecs (soldier playing chess), by Jean Metzinger. David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Chicago

Filed Under: Featured, Fiction (Intensification), Story Tagged With: black maria, chess, cookies, new orleans, reunion, short stories

Sekhmet

November 15, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 41

Sekhmet

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  November 15, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Sekhmet
00:00 / 39 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 39 minutes | Recorded on October 5, 2020

This episode looks at the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, who is considered to be an aspect of the goddess Hathor, and sometimes also the goddess Bast. She is the “eye of Ra”, and represents the destructive wrath of the “noonday sun” that burns up everything around it.

Tagged With: chthonia, dark, egypt, mythology, ra, sekhmet

Medb: A Disappearance and Reappearance (excerpt)

November 13, 2020 By Marco V Morelli

Medb: A Disappearance and Reappearance (excerpt)

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  November 13, 2020
Feature Image: Original artwork from Medb

Excerpted from Medb: a Novella (Chthonia Books, 2020)

Theodora

Almost a year has gone by, and it still doesn’t make any sense.

Dan was gentle and loving, loved jokes and to tell long stories—those who disliked him usually were people who were jealous of him in some way. I heard the stories about his younger days. When things didn’t go well, he would smash things—guitars, amplifiers, walls, doors—whatever was in his path at the moment. He told me he had been an angry person, but with time and some learned anger management techniques, he was much calmer. I wouldn’t have married a violent person—we were together almost fifteen years, and I’d never seen evidence of his temper. His daughter—much older now and living in Germany—also claimed she never saw that side of her father. He loved playing with her, and would tell her long stories before bedtime. It was true that he left their mother to most of her care when he toured (fairly normal for that time), but she was a priority when he was home. 

Dan and his first wife split up because of us. I was introduced to him at a party in Los Angeles, and we hit it off almost instantly. We had so much in common—both of us were hippies at heart, loved organics and being out in nature, raising animals—we got on really well together. He and his wife had been estranged for a long time, and when he asked for my number I was unsure at first whether I should get involved. But he was so sweet, and the tough-guy image he occasionally projected seemed more like a stage act than the real person. It wasn’t long before we were regularly dating, and within a couple of years we were living together. I’m American, he’s English, so we decided it would be a good idea for him to get US citizenship and to get married. He was always so reluctant about marriage; I managed to coax him into tying the knot after ten years together. We had a beautiful farm near a lake in California with chickens and horses, a dog, a cat, and it seemed we were also feeding a host of other wild creatures that came by. 

I used to work as a fashion model, but Dan traveled so much, he always wanted me to travel with him, so I gave up everything just to support his work. He wasn’t making too much new music, just traveling with reunion shows of bands that had made him famous, but he was still making a ton of money. I had never been too keen on working; I had stumbled into the perfect situation, the celebrity husband who would take care of everything. I knew how fortunate I was, and took pains to make sure he didn’t have to focus on mundane domestic things. We would have staff tend to the gardens, the animals, and the house when we were away; when we were home I oversaw more of these things myself. We had a huge pond on our property, and there were many idyllic, lazy mornings sitting outside, listening to the birds, the rustling of the trees…

Then one day something happened. 

We were in the house that morning, finishing up breakfast. Dan would bring in the paper, it always arrived at 6:00 sharp—and he would peruse it before we started our day. We had a morning like that, very ordinary—we did discuss something, I can’t remember what it was, it wasn’t important—and then Dan announced he was going to work on fixing up our fence outside. This was an ongoing project that needed to be finished, and he had volunteered to do it rather than calling in a professional. I remember that I had to do some shopping in the nearby city, so we went about our separate tasks for the day. 

When I came home, Dan was in his studio. I started our dinner, and called for him to come down. I had to call him twice, and when he did finally come—he wore an expression on his face that I’d never seen before. He was sullen and troubled looking. I tried to talk to him about his day, but he only gave me very short answers. He only ate about two bites of his dinner before announcing he was going back to work in his studio, and didn’t want to be disturbed. 

I was a bit taken aback, but I figured he was working on something, and maybe he had some ideas on his mind, something for some new work perhaps. So, I let it be. But this became the norm—he no longer smiled or kissed me, he barely ate, and he spent a lot of time either in his studio or his record room. If he slept with me, he didn’t touch me, and I could feel how tense he was. I tried to talk to him about it, but he would just say he “wanted to be left alone.” Eventually he stopped sleeping with me altogether, hiding out in his studio for the most part. I was completely blindsided by his behavior. 

Then there was the notebook; around this time I would see him outside, or catch sight of him in his room, and he was holding a rather worn-looking spiral-bound notebook with a blue cover. He would have it open and would just be staring at whatever was on the page. If he noticed me around, he’d quickly close the notebook and hold it close to his chest. I really wanted to know what was in it—I assumed it was some kind of diary, though I don’t know why he would just stare at diary pages. However, whenever he ventured out and I dared to try to look for it, I could never find it. 

After another uncomfortable breakfast one morning, I went out to do some errands. I came back about two hours later, and noticed that Dan’s car was gone. I was a bit relieved, to be honest, as I could have a little time to myself in the house without feeling the tension. But as the hours went by and he had not returned, I started to worry. 

Where was he?

It was then that I noticed the envelope on the table in the hallway, where we usually put the mail when it arrived. I hadn’t really paid attention to it earlier; there was no writing on the envelope, but it was sealed. I opened it up, and found a short handwritten note inside:

I’m going away for a couple of weeks. Don’t try to call me. I need to figure things out.
—Dan

That was it—curt, to the point, and told me nothing, except that he’d gone away. Every part of me hurt; I’d been on edge, but not having the source of the tension there made me feel better and worse at the same time. On the one hand, I wanted time of my own to think; on the other, I was grief-stricken, because I had to face the fact that I was losing my husband—to what, I didn’t know. Given his state of mind, I wasn’t sure if I should call the police—maybe he would try to harm himself. I agonized over the note, and finally called my best friend. We did end up calling the police—mainly because I was worried about his mental state. But after reading the note, they said they couldn’t really file a missing persons report; if he didn’t come back in a couple of weeks, they would look into it. In the meantime, they’d keep an eye out, but they couldn’t stop him from getting away from his own house legally. 

I had various friends visit me over the next two weeks. I hardly had time to think; Dan’s manager called, several of his bandmates called—he had turned off his phone, so no one could get through to him. At this point the story had leaked to the media, and everyone wanted to know where he was, what happened. But I had no answers.

All at once, two weeks later, Dan reappeared. He looked better physically, and was calmer. But he was still ice cold to me. He would not tell me where he had been, and did not want to talk about his trip. I told him that the marriage was over—unless he was willing to talk this out or go to therapy, I couldn’t live like this, and I felt if I was going to leave, I deserved an explanation of what was making him so angry. But all he said—very calmly—was, “Yes, I think you are right. That is a good idea. Whatever you need to get moved out, I’ll pay for it.” What about the animals? “I’ll get them all sold to another farm, there are plenty around here. And I’m selling the house and moving back to England.” 

And that was it. Nothing else. No explanation, no attempt to save the marriage. I was confused, angry, heartbroken—ultimately I just threw my wedding ring on the table and walked out. He did not look moved, nor the least bit upset. 

I received the divorce papers from the sheriff. They cited “irreconcilable differences.” I was numb; I don’t even know what that meant. Part of me wanted to fight, but I wanted this whole thing over with. I didn’t want anything from him anymore. We reached a settlement amenable to California divorce law, and he sold the house and moved. 

About a month ago, I learned about Morgan. He claims to have met her after we split up, and claims she saved his life. From what? I still don’t know—all I know is that he married her after knowing her only three months. This really hurt. Was it a rebound marriage? It had to be—there was no way it could last. 

But if he was as charming to her as he had been to me all those years…

It’s over. But I still can’t sleep thinking about it. And I can’t help thinking that the man who left me was not my husband. 

Heath

“Heath! Glad you could make it. Come, let’s get back to the hotel and get a drink.”

It was the first time I’d seen Dan since his last tour. He was just like the old Dan I remembered—jovial, joking around, a twinkle in his eye. But more than that—he seemed very relaxed, and very happy, and he gave off a kind of—I don’t know—perhaps you’d call it an “aura”—of being perfectly centered and calm. 

The concert was amazing—Dan had a great voice, and maintained much of his old range as he got older—but he sounded fifty years younger. He also tested out some new songs, which were amazing. He’d been puttering along playing the oldies for awhile, so this was a welcome surprise to his manager, and to the fans. 

I was really happy for him—but I was also puzzled. It wasn’t that long ago that Theo was hysterical about Dan looking like he was on his deathbed, and then suddenly disappearing for two weeks, before returning to announce he was divorcing her. The two of them had seemed so happy before this. Theo had such a docile and sweet personality; it didn’t seem possible that she could make him so unhappy. 

Dan was beaming as he sat across the table from me, and I couldn’t help but to comment.

“Mate, I’ve got to say, you’re looking extraordinarily well. What’s changed? Was marriage that terrible?”

Dan laughed. “It got to be bad. We had some—differences, and they turned out to be significant ones.”

“But she still says she doesn’t know why you split up.”

“No. No she doesn’t know. And I have no plans to tell her. If you knew my reasons, you’d understand why I’m not telling her.”

“Do you care to share your reasons?”

Dan shook his head. “No, not yet. I’ve only shared them with my new wife.”

“Wait—what did you just say?”

Dan smiled broadly. “ New wife. Her name is Morgan. Yes, I just got remarried and I’ve never been happier. She’s not here tonight, but if you want to meet her, I’ll be home for a bit after this gig.”

“But—wait—who is this woman? When did you meet her? Were you seeing her while you were still married?”

“No! Believe it or not, I wasn’t. I only met her in the last few months.”

“Is she someone I know?”

“No, I don’t think so, unless you’ve read her writings, or followed her YouTube channel. I met her…under strange circumstances. It would take hours to explain. But we ended up communicating by email, then by Skype. After a few weeks of this, I really wanted to see her in person—I had a terrible crush on her, and I wanted to be with her, though I didn’t want to rush things at the same time. Fortunately she was amenable to my staying with her. So, I stayed at her house in New York for a few months. We managed to adapt to our different styles of living—she is so different from me in some ways, but we do have things in common—and finally I realized I had to talk to her about the things that split up myself and Theo. The conversation went much better than I could have hoped—and I realized then that this was the woman I wanted to be with for the rest of my life. So, I asked her to marry me, and she said yes! We got married rather quickly, as I was anxious to move back home, but we had a lot to settle state-side before we could go.”

I was truly perplexed. “I…I can’t believe you married her. It’s so SOON.”

“Oh yes, I’ve been hearing that. I’m surprised at myself, honestly—I’ve never been a fan of marriage. She really isn’t either—but this was—well, it was just right, and we both knew it.”

“I’m glad to hear it—but I’m wondering what this mysterious issue is that broke up you and Theo.” 

“Hmm, well, it’s something that’s been an issue my whole life—I’ve just avoided it. I can’t avoid it any more. It’s part of, of—my vulnerability, I guess. But Morgan has really helped me with it ways I would never have expected. And my life feels totally different—I’ve had happy moments before, but now it’s just like everything has fallen into place.”

“Well, you’ve certainly made me curious.” 

Dan grinned broadly, and toasted me with his whiskey. “Stop by and meet her. I think you’ll have a lot in common.” 

The Reading

Morgan

It came up about ten minutes into our conversation.

Dan and I had been having video chats for a few weeks. He asked a lot of questions about my writing, though I had the impression that he hadn’t really read any of it. He also asked a lot of personal questions. This time we were talking about other interests, and I made a casual reference to reading Tarot cards.

“Do you do that? You do fortune telling?”

I laughed. “I wouldn’t call it that. I’m not looking for tall, dark handsome strangers. I use cards to help people understand what’s going on in their life currently, and that usually shows a path forward as well. To be fair, I mainly read for myself these days.”

“Oh, I see. Could I ask you—would you mind reading for me?”

“Not at all. What do you want to know?”

Dan sat back and looked thoughtful, and a little nervous. He pulled at his fingers restlessly. “Well, I guess—as you know, I’m getting divorced, I kind of…well, I kind of want to know about the stuff around that.”

“By ‘stuff around that,’ do you mean financial and practical stuff, or emotional stuff?”

He considered for a moment. “Emotional stuff I guess. Whatever you get.”
I nodded, pulled the cards down from a shelf, and began to shuffle. 

I started to look at the past events, and for information about his wife. It was a surprising start—the Empress, Strength, Six of Cups reversed, Emperor reversed. 

I looked at him through the camera. “You have a secret.”

His eyes widened. 

I continued. “It’s not something…bad…but you think it is. You had some past trauma connected to it—looks like you were six years old? Something about a confrontation with your father. And it has to do with…a female.”

Dan said nothing, but was visibly trembling.

“Whatever it is, it’s burdened you for a long time. You’re on your guard about it, and secretive. There’s the Hierophant—I feel like you have tried to obey what you think are the rules. But you are not happy. And you have the Wheel of Fortune reversed—it comes up over, and over, and over again…”

Dan’s expression had not changed, but I saw him starting to nod slowly.

“OK, so I think you’ve been confused about what to do—you have Judgment, so you reached a point where you felt you had to solve the issue, to stop repeating this and put it to an end. But you have the Seven of Swords—you did not approach this directly. I get the sense that you never have.”

“No,” he blurted out. “I can’t!”

I looked at him for a moment, waiting to see if he would say more. But he didn’t, so I went on.

“These next cards represent your wife—Queen of Cups, clearly a beautiful compassionate woman, or at least she seemed that way. You have the Five of Swords—not good, that’s someone cutting you off, placing a limit. It could mean jealousy, but I don’t think that applies here. And you have the Fool reversed, so it’s clear that you wanted to take a risk, but you got a clear message that you’d better not.”

Dan stood up and began to pace the room on his end of the video call. 

“Are you OK, Dan?”

He sat down again, “Yes, yes, I’m OK—sorry, it’s just…this is so spot on, it’s making me very emotional.”

I smiled and nodded. “Well, let’s see what else we have. Wow—the Tower, Ten of Swords, and Death—that brought something crashing down. I don’t know why, but I feel like you’ve had some intense experience—intense dreams, perhaps a mental breakdown, perhaps both…still connected to this female, somehow.”

He looked at me pointedly. “Yes. You should know about the dreams.”

I was puzzled. “I should?”

“Yes, you…well, I should stop, and let you finish. Go on.”

“Well, at any rate—the outcome is very good. Another woman shows up here—not the same as the first woman—perhaps a fire sign—but the outcome is the Star and the Ten of Cups. That’s almost a 180 degree turn from the other cards—it signifies hope, happiness, and wishes fulfilled.” Suddenly, I heard a voice loud and clear in my head. I looked at Dan and said, “I don’t often get direct messages, but I have one for you now. What I’m hearing is: You are not wrong. At all. It is everyone else who is wrong.”

Now Dan burst into tears. He sobbed for a few minutes; I felt a little bad, as I could not reach out and hold him. He wiped his eyes with a tissue. “I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to get that way…but…I very much needed to hear that.”

“It’s OK, Dan, it really is.”

“Do…does it say…what the secret is?”

I sat back. “Well…I have a feeling I might know what it is. If it’s what I think it is, then there’s definitely nothing wrong with it at all.”

He now leaned forward, and stared at me seriously. “I want to tell you…and you’re the only person I feel safe telling…but not over a video chat. I need to tell you in person. I need to come see you.”

Morgan 

It’s been almost twenty years, yet here I am. 

I never thought I’d get married again. I was raised to believe that having a husband and a family was a foregone conclusion. All women married and had kids, it was the measure of their success, and a measure of their desirability; those two things went hand in hand. Your value was determined by your desirability as a sex partner, and later as a marriage partner. 

We were raised on the Cinderella idea; Prince Charming would come along, and everything would be perfect. Marriage was the happy ending, the happily ever after, you could coast through life after that.

What bullshit that turned out to be. 

Thankfully my first husband and I never had kids. He was something of a loser, very smart but not motivated to do shit. I worked my ass off, and he still expected me to keep the house, be the perfect lover, and be in love with him all the time. It was early on in our marriage when he let me know what a disappointment I was to him. I was (he told me) supposed to fix all his problems and make him happy, and I was falling down on the job. Initially I swallowed this festering pile of crap, but it didn’t take long for me to disgorge it. If you’re not happy, asshole, it’s your own damn fault. 

Still, we hung in there for some time—I’d wondered if time and maturity would change us, change the situation. It didn’t. So I left him, and I was never happier without someone. I made my own life and career, working in higher ed for many years, and then had some pretty good success with my novel, Dark Fictions. I’ve written other things, not fiction, for certain audiences, but I managed to make a lot of money on social media related to that particular work. Volume two of that series is in the works, and to be published soon. Dark Fictions brought me money I didn’t expect— it’s unusual to make money from publishing these days—and it also brought me my new husband. 

I was checking my Patreon account one day, as I had an email about a large donation from a new subscriber. It was a huge sum of money; I won’t name it here, but it is far from typical for anyone, even a big fan, to donate that amount. I read the name of the donor: Daniel Sampson. I laughed, and thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if it was THAT Daniel Sampson? You know, the singer who’s been around forever? I looked at the geographical info connected to him—he was in Northern California. Hang on a sec—doesn’t Daniel Sampson actually live in Northern CA with his wife? I’d read that in an article about him somewhere. Still, it could have been a coincidence. 

I wrote to Daniel to thank him personally—it’s hard to know what to offer to someone who gives that much money. He wrote back, saying he really liked my book, and wanted to know if we could have a Skype conversation. I had no problem with this; it’s not an intrusion, and I was glad to be able to satisfy my curiosity about whether or not this was “that Daniel Sampson.” And as it turns out—it was. I was a little nervous seeing him there on my computer screen, having this conversation. But he turned out to be very easy to talk to, and we would talk for hours. He made offhand comments here and there that could be characterized as flirtatious. But he told me that he’d just divorced his wife, and I assumed he might be a little lonely out where he was living. I was sure he’d have another girlfriend in no time.
 
I was right—he eventually did have another girlfriend: me. While I don’t think I’m unattractive, I don’t see myself as the typical rock star girlfriend; perhaps I am unfair, but the lot of them seem to have blonde hair, emaciated bodies, big smiles, and vacant eyes. They are what I call “accessory spouses”—they act as decoration to their illustrious spouse, and that’s their role. I assure you that I would have extreme difficulty trying to fit this role; even if they found me attractive, I am not anyone’s accessory, and I’m not there to smile and giggle. I can step aside when they need to be the center of attention, but I’m not playing a secondary role in anyone’s life. If those are the terms, I’d rather pass. I didn’t understand his attraction to me at the time, and I was skeptical. On the other hand, I remember a colleague once saying about our change in managers—“when you get sick of A, you tend to make a one-eighty degree turn and choose B.” Maybe that was happening here in his relationships. (Of course, that was before I knew about the notebook…)

Not to digress, but it’s probably worth mentioning that I’ve practiced magic for years. Most people don’t know what that is; their association with magic generally comes from folktales or children’s books, the “Harry Potter” variety of wizardry. That is pure fiction. Real magic is a bit more mysterious; it involves a deeper knowledge of the workings of the world, and more akin to science in its goals—at least some varieties. It makes one realize that there is more than meets the eye in our world. I have always been fond of Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious; he looked at the mythical side of life, and proposed the idea of archetypes, autonomous (and numinous) constructs that are projected from the collective unconscious when they are prompted by disruptions in our conscious life. When they are projected—or constellated, as they say—we are not in control of our own actions. It has been theorized that “spirits” are also a kind of constellated unconscious content—but the practitioner always has to wonder if experiences in magical experimentation are these very constellations—or if the spirits are real in and of themselves. Or both. It is easy to assume they are projections if you don’t have actual experience. I allude to this somewhat in my novel, and weirdly, it’s this very thing that drew Daniel to me. Daniel himself has no knowledge of magic, or any real interest in it. But without knowing it (exactly), he knew I could solve certain problems for him—ones that required more than normal intervention. He had a lot of questions about “spirits.” And the question of “what is real” was more relevant here than either of us realized. 

Anyway, we had been talking for about a month when his intentions became clear. He had asked me about my workplace, wanted my home address, my work address. I sent a photo of my business card, and my personal info card. The next thing I know, I had flowers appear for me at my office. I asked him about it during our next Skype session. 

“I hope you got a delivery today?”

“Yes I did, thank you! Are you trying to tell me something?”

He smiled, and I could see him blush even with the poor lighting in the video. “Well, I guess I should just admit it, I have a terrible crush on you. I…I’m moving soon, I’m hoping…well, that we can spend some time together, that I can be with you in person. But I don’t want to be pushy.”

Long story short, I let him come stay at my house—he stayed for two months, and it was probably after about six weeks that he popped the question. I have rarely been treated to anything labeled “romantic” in my life, even in my relationships, so he went all out, whisking me away for a weekend at a country estate at a gorgeous B&B that had every amenity—fireplace, Jacuzzi, antique furnishings, canopy bed, lavish room service. He took me for an expensive dinner nearby, and got on his knees to ask me to marry him. It was surreal, and I found that I couldn’t say no. When I posted about our engagement to social media, it felt like another fiction story I was making up. But it was real. 

Why did I marry him? People couldn’t believe it; we hardly knew each other. Both of us took some time before getting married; Daniel waited almost ten years to marry his last wife. We both rushed into this one. Part of it was practical; neither of us are getting any younger, and Daniel needed to move back to the UK. I couldn’t go with him if we weren’t in some kind of legal partnership. Some people thought it had to do with money, but that’s just rubbish. I could never marry anyone for money, and I had enough of my own to live comfortably. 

Ultimately, what made up both of our minds was the notebook.

You see, Daniel carried around this rather tattered spiral-bound notebook that had things pasted inside, and some writings. He is very secretive about the contents; I think I may be the only living person outside of himself who has seen what is in it. Anyone who saw it wouldn’t know what to make of it; it requires some explanation, and for three hours one evening, Daniel explained it to me. He was nervous about doing so; he had never received a favorable response when he made even a general reference to its contents. Everything exploded when he had a series of dreams that told him his notebook was—well, not just a notebook. Its contents only touched on the bigger issue, a symptom of the one that overwhelmed him, and that actually threatened his life and his livelihood.

But I did understand once I had the whole picture. He realized I understood, and this had a healing effect on him. And thus we came to be married and live in Cheshire. He fixed up a house that was on family property he inherited, and we moved in—myself, Daniel …

and a woman called Medb. 

Filed Under: Featured, Fiction (Intensification), Story Tagged With: divorce, gender roles, magic, marriage, occult, weird

Review: Medb, by Brigid Burke

November 13, 2020 By marythaler

Review: Medb, by Brigid Burke

By
  • Mary Thaler
 |  November 13, 2020
Feature Image: Artwork from Medb

Medb is a novel that draws the reader incrementally toward the mysteries of the human psyche, on its way touching on gender roles, the power of the occult, and the pathologization of difference. It’s a winding, inward journey that begins, fittingly, at the periphery of the story. In the first chapter, we hear the voice of Theodora as she tries to discover why her husband Dan, a musical celebrity, has ended their marriage. Not only did Dan leave her without explanation, he also re-married almost immediately. Theodora is determined to understand why her world has fallen apart, but when she tracks the newlyweds from the U.S. to England, she is frightened and put off by an encounter with Medb, who ostensibly works as a house-keeper for Dan and his new wife Morgan. Theodora becomes convinced that Medb exercises some supernatural power over Dan.

In following the mystery of Medb’s identity, the novel isn’t organized chronologically, but as successive accounts of the same events, related by different characters. Thus, the narrative drive comes less from action than from a gradual, but satisfying unveiling of one secret after another. Whether you’re able to guess the twist that is revealed a little past the halfway mark will probably depend on what experiences and expectations you bring as a reader to this novel. For myself, I was taken completely off guard, and completely delighted. The secret was simple, yet earth-shattering; it explained everything that had been bewildering up to that point, while at the same time opening new and unexplored possibilities.

This is a book that thrusts the reader continually back upon their assumptions. Theodora, who seems like an appealing and kind-hearted character, turns out to be less benign than she seems. At the heart of the story lies the idea that, not only is there no single perspective on the events being described, but that such a singular perspective doesn’t necessarily exist even within a given character. Because of this, the concept of voice emerges as supremely important, underscored by the novel occasionally using different typography for different characters. This typography, as well as collage artwork scattered throughout its pages, add a visual pleasure to the reading experience.

Another aspect that makes Medb unique is the way it treats the occult. Dan’s new wife, Morgan, is a tarot reader, and divination of various forms—dreams, numerology, and scrying—crops up throughout the book. It is, however, never used to sensationalize. I would even argue that the presence of occult elements does not move this novel into the fantastic or speculative genres. What’s being depicted is a practical occult, used by the characters in the service of learning something about our human nature. At one point, while Theodora is speculating about Medb’s malefic influence, another one of Dan’s friends admits to using divination, including tarot and runes, in his own attempt to understand Dan’s behaviour. The tone conveys that these practices are no big deal. For a reader who is a non-practitioner, Medb offers a compelling and pragmatic view of the ways such rituals can deepen our understanding of the world and of each other.

At just over 200 pages with illustrations, Medb isn’t a long book, but within this space it rewards the reader nuanced view of the path toward self-acceptance, one that is both fresh and wise.

Read the first chapter of Medb.

Filed Under: Books, Featured, Reviews

Studium Spiritus Sancti

November 2, 2020 By Brigid Burke

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Studium Spiritus Sancti

By
  • Annie Blake
 |  November 2, 2020
Feature Image: Nature Sol Woman [CC]
LnRiLWJ1dHRvbltkYXRhLXRvb2xzZXQtYmxvY2tzLWJ1dHRvbj0iM2U5MjFiNWUzOTdiMzcxNzc1ZjdmYzg4MWNmN2VkZWEiXSAudGItYnV0dG9uX19saW5rIHsgYmFja2dyb3VuZC1jb2xvcjogcmdiYSggMjA3LCA0NiwgNDYsIDEgKTtjb2xvcjogcmdiYSggMjU1LCAyNTUsIDI1NSwgMSApO2NvbG9yOiByZ2JhKCAyNTUsIDI1NSwgMjU1LCAxICk7IH0gLnRiLWJ1dHRvbltkYXRhLXRvb2xzZXQtYmxvY2tzLWJ1dHRvbj0iM2U5MjFiNWUzOTdiMzcxNzc1ZjdmYzg4MWNmN2VkZWEiXSAudGItYnV0dG9uX19pY29uIHsgZm9udC1mYW1pbHk6IGRhc2hpY29uczsgfSA=

Editor’s Note: What follows is a single poem from Annie Blake’s Studium Spiritus Sancti. Scroll down for a link to a printable PDF of the entire work.

Schizophrenogenic

but i often underestimate my husband / 
for he pointed out that i actually said schizophrigid / 
i had a kitchen dresser which contained crockery i never used / over-
solicitude is display mothering / for the women who set out 
their family’s clothes is not serving hot food on plates / 
for my mother would always shake me awake and ask me if 
she thought she should see the doctor / so i thought sex was rape 
and miscarriage meant the same thing / so i feared 
my father more than the devil / and i grew up and showed no 
trouble casting the last stone / so to recover the heart / i unturned 
every single stone and built a grotto / swirled myself around 
like a chocolate mousse / ripples and waves / a tip which leaks 
like a tap / waterfall lush / milky watering in concrete crevices until 
the shore joined in / so while children play / their toes watered 
and sprout oaks from the ground / 
Click here to view full PDF

Filed Under: Featured, Poetry

Morrigan

October 30, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 40

Morrigan

By
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  • Brigid Burke
 |  October 30, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Morrigan
00:00 / 74 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 74 minutes | Recorded on September 14, 2020

Happy Samhain! This year’s Samhain/Halloween episode is about the Morrigan, the Irish goddess of war, fate, and sovereignty. Last year I interviewed Aepril Schaile about the Morrigan; this year it’s just me, talking about all of the aspects of the Morrigan, and a little about my new book coming soon, “The Morrigan Timelines”.

Tagged With: badb, chthonia, goddess, ireland, macha, morrigan, nemain, podcast, samhain, war

Repeaters of the String

October 28, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Repeaters of the String

By
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  • James Geddis
 |  October 28, 2020
Feature Image: Ghost Hands [no attribution]

It always starts with you in your bedroom. Crumpled tissues litter the floor, cup rings stain the bedside, and the bundle of socks and week-old clothes taunts you from the spot you always throw them: just short of the laundry basket. As you sit at the foot of your bed, you remember that yesterday you promised yourself and the world that you would clean this mess. You have the time now, but you will make time later. This is far too important, too urgent. Just like you promise every yesterday, you will clean the room tomorrow.  

You make these promises because the world isn’t there to see you break them. When everybody left, they took the world with them; to the office, to the grocers, to the garage to get that crinkled wheel cap checked; everywhere but your room.

Even still, you always keep your door closed. As a precaution, you even prop it shut with your chair, cursing at the door with frantic breath for not having a lock. Of course, you could easily fit it with one now, but your time is valuable, so you make another promise.

They will be back, but you don’t know when, only that they won’t bother knocking when they do. They will barge in like always, with the world rolling at their feet and a hundred dull stories to kick it through the threshold. There’s always less time than you think there is. You begin to dread the sound of scraping keys.

A breeze sneaks in through your open window. It’s mild, but just strong enough to make tumble weeds out of your tissues. Approaching the glass, you look past your reflection and out over the street. A man and a woman are each walking their dogs. You see them pass each other every day, and when they do, they move like opposite ends of a compass. Dogs are magnets to one another, you say to yourself, while tangled leads and heavy panting overshadow every human command to stop. It all ceases when you shut the window, even the tissues stop rolling. You need the stillness. This doesn’t work unless your mind is alone.

Once again you sit on the edge of your bed, your laptop in front of you. As you pull it closer with legs apart, the screen glows with your favourite website. Adverts for miracle creams and free wisdom trail down its edges, but experience has taught you to ignore them. Your focus lies in front, on that centralised point in the now. Now is when you are alone, when you have nowhere to be, when promises to the world no longer apply. Nobody knows what happens now except you. This is your own personal history.

You document with unflinching eyes that dilate as they adjust to the screen’s light. As they bloom, you notice the room around you going darker, its life wilting from your periphery. Colours cry like rain on a painting. The flowers in the wallpaper haven’t been watered in years, and the muffled winds outside linger with their begging behind frosted glass. It is as though the world craves your eyes: desperate, jealous for just one morsel of a glance. But this only confirms what you already know. The world is too dull for you. It lacks the imagination that only shines through liquid crystal.

It is like a meditation. You fantasise on porcelain milk until it erupts from your palms in a spring of white. You glaze yourself in the stuff—on your shoulders, arms and hips—desperate to feel its smoothness, but a drip on your thigh is enough to send you in ripples, reminding you just how delicate your skin is. Where the waves meet, you splash in a fit of twitches that will only become ever more frequent: an irreversible chain reaction, creating friction.

Somehow, you have to expel this heat. Already it digs in the spaces between atoms. You imagine a wedge forcing them apart, your future years scattering into vapour. Before panic dissolves you, a thought tells you to breathe. In and out, it says. Give your throbbing body a tempo to ripple with. In: the chest expands. Out: the toes curl back. In: the muscles clench. Out: the cheeks deflate. In: the body filled. Out: the soul let go.

With the help of the rhythm you retain your shape, not that you will look down to check. By now you have forgotten all about your body. To you it is nothing but a jumble of senses, with a distant metronome holding them back of your mind. What matters now lies in front.

The glow that once bled like a fog through the edges of the screen now pulls itself inwards at your narrowed stare. With your engrossed loyalty comes a heightened perception, giving solidity to the new reality. You discover love in the perfection of four sides. Geometry becomes faith, and admiring it is an epiphany that splits your mind in a duality of sensations.  

There is a downward feeling, a forbidden devotion to gravity’s lure. It turns feathers into sinking stone and makes doubt a diving board to conviction. Below lies a weakness without shame. The other feeling takes you high, high beyond the criticisms of worldly noise. Its gift is pleasure, offered in a crown of icicles that melt upwards. Your mind sloshes back and forth between these notions, till every beat, every revolution, fills you with the fear of spilling. You worry that the feeling will tear you apart, that it will rip something in you too innocent to cherish in tatters. When it finally does, the slit is cave-sized. It becomes an opening for the creature within: a thought of tendrils and maggot dreams.

Boils of grey ooze; its smell is like digested sweat. The air—so thick you can grab it—is strong enough to pry your jaw, forcing you to consume it in gulps. When the fragrance curls in the back of your throat, you feel guilty. To you, the taste is almost sweet.

You cling to the sheets as something large tries to wriggle out from under the bed. Every jolt of the mattress is a meter of cockroach skin and tentacles that coils in and out of itself onto the carpet. The pores in its flesh make you think of beehives and spider’s eggs. They resemble something you once saw in a nature documentary: a toad that carries its spawn in the holes of its back. You itch with shivering hairs when the word trypophobia enters your mind.

The nest of tapeworms gropes around your room, tearing petals from the walls and swallowing your tissues and socks through parasitic teeth. This always infuriates you, because the creature is never just aimless in its writhing. It wants to remind you that this is still your bedroom, you are still light years from the new reality promised inside the screen, and that you are still in your body. The realisation is more disgusting than the creature itself. It gnaws like termites in the bones.

At the same time, the creature strokes itself with its free tentacles, lathering its hide with the pus, spit and secretions of its warts. The tufts of black hairs in its folds shine with a glossy finish. Every move beneath the sounds of sliding meat is made with sensual patience. You find the whole display tragically familiar, and the creature knows it, snorting hysterically through the phlegm clogging its snout.

It quickens its dance with every piece of your room it engulfs—folds of fat trembling at your essence—until finally the meditation erupts in a fountain of translucent slime. Droplets pepper your face and although you try to scrub them off with the sheets, you still feel their warmth. Disgusted and patronised by its favour, you wonder if your skin really is smooth like milk, and not just smooth like a maggot’s back.

You think of escaping. You could if you’re quick; bolt for the door while the creature still deflates with its own ecstasy. Springing from the bed, you’re like a ninja as you kick away the chair and lunge for the doorknob. Every time you’ve tried to escape, a looming shadow traps you, and every time, your fingers stop inches from the door. Coils writhe above your head as you slowly turn back; you’re foolish to think it had forgotten you. A piggish shriek scrapes in your ears, loud and stubborn. You know what it means. It’s telling you to get back on the bed, and you obey with trembling knees.

It joins you on the mattress, its feelers reaching as high as the ceiling to shelter your puny frame. This thing has always been bigger than you. Since you were little it has lived in your periphery, watching you change. At first you thought it was the world, and perhaps it is. Perhaps the hunger was unbearable, and now it can’t help but swallow you whole. It has developed a craving for your essence. It wants to nourish on your sweat and suckle the fluids from your eyes. The obsession reminds you of your own body, that in truth, it has always been a thing to be devoured.

A limb pushes you onto your back and begins the full body search. Erupted warts lap against your skin, but you wrestle the urge to flinch into a foetal position. The creature screams when you don’t keep still, you’ve learnt that the hard way.

Four more limbs fasten you to the bed. They wrap around your ankles and wrists with asphyxiating pressure. You’re now trapped with its throbbing trunk of a body eager to slides up against you. In your mind, you feel parts of yourself slipping away. Your tears are wiped and replaced with drool. Your lungs crumble then fill with steam. Your cries are drowned in growls of pleasure. Every transformation is fuelled by the voice of the creature. It tells you that hunger is the perfect disease.

And so, you accept your fate in that sea of limbs. Deeper and deeper it weighs you down with the truth of your own unquenchable hunger. You are truly starving, for air, for light, for feeling. You accept the cost of your naive meditations. It surrounds you now, the price is self-harming. It is the tapeworm eating itself, the hunger consuming you.

And yet something shines through the gaps; not a glow exactly, but a feeling that cleaves through the forbidden worms. It calls to you, replenishing the mind with resolve. Curiosity is like a seed in the soul that lifts you when it sprouts. Minutes fizzle into a daydream, and the you in your body trickles and becomes the you in your soul. It is a severing. The higher you float, the more your superficial skin peels away with gravity. You don’t even look down to watch it sink, to watch it decompose in blotches of filth. Not all sensations can be felt in the flesh, and so you abandon it. You are left translucent and floating, enamoured by questions. Is it death? Truth? Something more profound? They are what carry you upward, promising with all their sincerity that something awaits you at the surface.

When you emerge, you find the surface has vanished. You are drifting in perpetual space, without worms or rippling skin to insulate you with worry. Though you no longer have eyes, your sight has never been more vivid. At last you can see what has always been there, the thing you have sought after all this time. It unfurls in every direction, in row upon row of faceless figures. These are the repeaters, and they too have been watching you.

This is the part you always forget.

At first you feel vulnerable at what they know. They have seen you at your highs and lows, in your attractions and repulsions, your meditations and confusions. And yet the sight of you makes them vibrate with excitement. You want to greet them back, but without a body or a face, you do the only thing you know how. Watching the repeaters, you realise that each holds a piece of string in their fingers. They play with it in a cat’s cradle of increasing complexity. The shapes that unfurl are like notes to an instrument, changing and folding and reforming by the second. Time moves so fast that it seems as though the string is shaping itself. Every modulation is an unconscious notion; decoded, defined with flexing precision. These images are overwhelmingly intense. They transport you in a wave tunnel of inspiration, washing over all the false idols of perfection that were ever conceived in the gaze of your mind’s eye, until finally there is no doubt, no wavering conviction in your being, that what you are experiencing is the definition of beauty.

In that moment, part of you wishes you still had a body; cheeks that could run with tears and hands to catch them with. But the string will never let you cry, because it wants more than just your attention. The string has spiritual intelligence. You are here to learn its message: to remember and repeat. And so you continue to watch these shapes, these objects of meaning condensed by the string. You devote yourself to the impossible love that grows from every transformation. You call it “heaven”, you call it “truth”, but you know it’s something more profound. It is something that never ends, for every new shape is a revelation to the last—each contorting, each morphing in continuous self-improvement—to convey the unspeakable in ways louder than earthly words. The failures of your reasoning are revealed in the stretching of string. The fractal essence of your life is embodied by the folding of string. The inoculation of the world’s misgivings is designed by the changing of string. Singing string, living string, a meditation… of the string.

You open your eyes. You are in your bedroom. The floor is still covered in used tissue and your old clothes haven’t moved since you last time you looked their way. You take short breaths. By remaining still, you hope to preserve the last moments of your experience, the last shape you saw. It fades beyond a second. You sigh of course, but not in defeat. Though there is sadness in never remembering, there is always redemption in the act of repeating.

Perhaps you will try again tomorrow, starting as always with a promise.

Filed Under: Featured, Story

The Father Spirit

October 26, 2020 By Marco V Morelli

The Father Spirit

By
  • James Falconer
 |  October 26, 2020
Feature Image: Kai C. Schwarzer, "Krieg. Stell' Dir vor, er wäre hier" [via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

I walk casually through the kitchen, preparing a cup of tea, as my gaze is drawn to two photographs placed side by side. I am struck by the resemblance between my young son and deceased father. Who placed these pictures this way? Was it myself, and now have forgotten? Was it once a deliberate act? It is affecting, to say the least. They both stare into the camera, or rather through the camera, into me, and across time. That which animates is plainly present, especially in their eyes. Those of my father sparkle with presence, while those of my son seem eerily distant. Frozen now, looking upon these images, I am struck by the magnitude of what a life is, its majesty and grace. An old man, a young child, life begot by life, with myself the link between.

My son here is just departing that time of childhood marked by big mind, the unacculturated and pre-individuated condition that we are born into wherein the luminous quality of all phenomena is as yet unabstracted into conceptual detachment. We experience life directly, in all its largeness. But we cannot survive that way, not without the loving care of adults to guide and sustain us. So we learn, but this learning is a slip into forgetting. In labelling the chair and assigning its function by which it supports us, we come to concretize this reality, that is relative to perception and definition, as a singular truth. As we grow, we become absorbed in small preoccupations. How does my hair look? Do they like me? This is all okay, because this too is survival, in the social sphere that has become so tantamount in the modern age. We become culturally enmeshed, but eventually it is necessary to free ourselves from entrapment within these identifications. Do I think of myself as a rebellious outsider, or as a high-achieving businessman? Leather jackets and blue blazers are both essentially the same, though they signify differences, in that they are social memes enacted by persons, as first identified by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 publication The Selfish Gene. We do not truly enact these memes, but are enacted by them. We are like empty vessels filled up by culture, and what comprises that culture is memes, units of cultural information, pieces of identity. We identify as that content, the particles of our social-psychological selves, imprinted bits of self, but are instead the blank structure. We are the vessels. Various streams of Buddhist wisdom present this slightly differently, as they tell us that we are not the images reflected in the mirror, but the mirror itself, pure and unvarnished.

It seems, we are something still not fully understood. Perhaps no thing can be understood by another thing, but only altogether. In relative experience truth shifts with perspective. So life is a series of pretending, pretending to be what appears, a star soccer player, a drug addict, rather than what those features appear in. Even the label human being is not expansive enough. These are not who we truly are, for as they cease, we remain. Who we are is something greater: post-individuated. I see this in these pictures of my father and my son. I see their souls, if I can be indulged to call them that. The experience is beautiful, transcendent and beyond expression. But it is also banal, there in so everyday a thing as photos on a fridge.

My dad always liked to say that we should love the man, as we do the child. This is too true, as we are all children, and all too unforgiving toward those who most need help, just because we feel that their circumstances are their responsibility alone, as if all weren’t interdependent. This is one of the great curses of our age, but it is the age in which we live, and that we can only seek to remedy. It is this long view of time that these images connect me to. I see the ancient woven through grandfather and grandson, as it must also be woven through me, and I am awestruck. It cannot be conveyed.

Filed Under: Featured, Longform/Essays, Noetics (Mind/Spirit) Tagged With: family, fatherhood, identity, time

Universal Eggs Benedict

October 21, 2020 By Geoffrey Edwards

Universal Eggs Benedict

By
  • Geoffrey Edwards
 |  October 21, 2020
Feature Image: source : geralt on pixabay.com

Ingredients: 2 eggs (poached), hollandaise sauce (egg yolk, butter, lemons), English muffin, bacon slices, and something extra to enlarge the whole.

Eggs, when you really think about them, are bizarro. Little pockets of pre-embryonic fluid. If you were a universe struggling to be born, would you choose to arrive in the form of an egg, like Hiranyagarbha? And do we not do the unpardonable, when we consume them? Treat universes as consumables, excise from them their spiritual essence and make them mundane?

Of course, eating can be viewed as an act of reuniting with the larger self. We are what we eat. So consuming universes could make us larger, return the vastness to our interior spaces where it belongs. Which is right, then — are they ordinary or mythic? Can we have our eggs, and eat them, too? 

Now that we are onto the subject of universes, how would one go about poaching one? Who would crack the egg, and drop in the moist insides, and into what boiling liquid? Are we gods, midwives, or merely cooks?

And what of the sauce? The egg yolk, which holds it together, unctuous and consistent. So different from a heavy roux, for example, where the fat, and the flour, does the thickening. The butter, so necessary to bind in the lemon juice, engendering stability. Giving the sauce its tartness in the midst of such creamy richness. Touch it, and it clings to your fingertip. A universe of opposites, in just the right blend – life-in-the-making. Notoriously temperamental to make, though. The conditions have to be just right. What does this tell us about universes? Are their turbulent beginnings the necessary mixing? And is the temperature just right? They say that if our universe had been made only slightly differently, it might not have supported life at all. 

Let us put these questions aside for a moment, clearing space on our kitchen counter for the benedictines. Just a name, you say? Mr. Benedict, perhaps, or is it Commodore? So why not the monks, the Benedictine Order? Gratuitous association, or fortuitous? Is not a universe a certain kind of ordering? And like the Benedictines, are not real universes also aggregates of autonomous collectives, not single entities? They may be ordered, but they defy simple rule-making efforts. Following recipes is an art, not a science.

Ah, but any kind of cooking kills the life within. Eggs Benedict is therefore a stillborn universe. Perhaps a good thing, if we remember the warning in Yeats. No Second Coming required. After all, we want the centre to hold, at least for a while! Although the muffin helps when the egg finally falls apart; it soaks up the runny fluid. And let us not forget the bacon strips! More murdered selves. Oh la la! Life and death all in one little sandwich. But so delicious!

We just need to scrape around in the bottom of the grocery delivery box for that extra ingredient. Eggs, lemons, butter — a bit soft but it should still serve. English muffins, in their plastic wrapping. Bacon strips, still frozen. Where is it? Better to find it by feel. Ah, finally. One medium-sized universe, still moist to the touch, waiting to be born.

Filed Under: Microdoses

Gasp

October 19, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Gasp

By
  • Gale Acuff
 |  October 19, 2020
Feature Image: Say yr prayers... [www/public]
 
In Sunday School today I saw Jesus move on the cross behind Miss Hooker's desk. He opened one eye and looked at me or somebody else in the class but no one seemed to notice, I alone gasped like they do in the comic books and Miss Hooker stopped her story of Him and the loaves and the fishes and feeding the multitudes, which was a miracle, and asked me, Gale, are you alright--you look as if you'd seen a ghost, and I said, Yes ma'am, I'm okay, I'm sorry, but didn't dare look again at Jesus because I was afraid I'd scream and I'm ten years old and growing so I'm a big boy now, in three years I'll be a teenager and then it's all downhill from there, Father says, and I'm not sure if he's kidding but he's a plumber so he should know, all that tin-and-lead solder and other people's bathrooms. And after class Miss Hooker called me back so I went up to her in her red chair, which matches her air, and her eyes like the green of the grass after it's just been cut, I should know, I cut ours at home and not with a Toro but an old-fashioned rotary, we're not rich, not even middle class, probably not even lower-, but we're not quite poor and our yard's not big and when I cut it you can't tell the weeds from the grass and that's kind of like cheating but it's not a sin real sin gets you Hell and that means fire, and forever, and I don't play with matches, either, except when Mother lets me light her Salems, the match-head smells like sulfur after I blow it out, it's a little like Hell smells, I guess, it's the smell of sin and it's tempting but too much of it is death. There's probably a lesson in that. What happened, Miss Hooker asked--she meant my shock--so I said, Well, please turn around and take a look at Jesus there and tell me what you see. I was looking at my shoes and God may be everywhere but He's not nailed to my Thom McAns, not even if they're my only good pair, which they are, I only wear them Sundays and twice to funerals. So Miss Hooker turned and looked, I knew because I felt the wind of her turning and again when she turned back, and she said I see the Son of God, Who shed His blood so that we can all have eternal life if we believe. I said, Yes ma'am, and turned myself to leave but then she asked, What do you see? and I said, I can't look again but I thought I saw Him open one eye and look at me, and Miss Hooker said, Well, maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you or you fell asleep for a moment and dreamed it or maybe you had a vision. I said, Thank you ma'am, that narrows it down some, but I've got to get home for lunch and it's a mile's walk, you know, and she said, Yes, you may go now and Jesus loves you and I said, Yes ma'am, and when I was almost through the door I turned around again and looked at Miss Hooker, she's so beautiful, all those freckles, no wonder Jesus wept.

Filed Under: Featured, Poetry

Narasimhi

October 18, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 39

Narasimhi

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  October 18, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Narasimhi
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 48 minutes | Recorded on August 24, 2020

In our last podcast on the Ashta Matrikas, we look at Narasimhi, the fierce lion-headed matrika that is the Shakti of Narasimha, another fierce avatar of Vishnu. Not to be tampered with lightly, she is also known as Pratyangira, the destroyer of black magic.

Tagged With: chthonia, goddess, lion, matrika, narasimha, narasimhi, pratyangira, shakti, vishnu

Synaptic Tides

October 14, 2020 By marythaler

Synaptic Tides

By
  • Marjorie Kaye
 |  October 14, 2020
Feature Image: "Life Above, on a Pond", Gouache on Panel, 11" x 14", 2020

Artist’s Statement

My work utilizes structure as a vehicle for energetic movement.  The work is boldly color-saturated and organic.  Forms point upward or sideways from a centrifugal base, hunting and seeking.  Tides of observation and transmission approach and recede, leaving visual patterns in their wake.  Ancient symbols make their way across pathways of energy, co-existing with forms of nature; earth, sky and all types of elemental forms are born of essential vibration.

The paintings and sculptures are done in gouache, and start as a need to work as if untying a complicated and seemingly impossible knot.  The work starts from automatic drawing, releasing form and shape from movement.  The forms are immediately organic, swirling and undulating from one end of the surface from the other.   The contour of a shaped panel is interconnected with the contained elements’ movement and energy, seeming to press the edge into the irregular shape.  The shaped edge becomes not only the binding force of the surface, but also a means for the direction of the formed elements.  Some of the pieces are built up in sculptural ziggurats, with forms making their way through depths and valleys.  Some reflect the night sky in contrast between objects and their relation to space. In addition to the resulting surface tension, the work has become more lyrical, sprinkled with recognizable imagery.  Vines, galaxies, probes, suns, microbial animals and plants divide the surface and define the space.

I have taken to observing a pastoral view in a pastoral setting – one in which branches and boughs are superimposed on one another, creating a depth of field that continues forever.  I watch the light move slowly over the trees, birds alighting, squirrels running up and down tree trunks.  I watch in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening, and the light comes through the trees in a rhythm of predictability as in great ruins or in Stonehenge.  I notice the wind lightly blowing through the boughs and see that my painting surfaces, both sculptural and flat, are similar undulations of this motion.  Forces of energy in the natural world create an ever-changing panorama of unfolding.

Being close to the ocean, observation reveals the existence of differentiated flora and fauna swimming, crawling and hiding.  I immediately recognized the shapes and energies of them as akin to the shapes that have been coming to me in my latest paintings continuously.  Discovering Ernst Haeckel’s “Art Forms in Nature” brought the realization, as an artist friend so perfectly said, “All this time I thought I was an abstractionist.  Turns out I’ve always been a realist”.  The multitude of forms present in nature, and those of the mind’s eye are travelling from the same place and arriving to the same destination, addressing the puzzles present within consciousness and the reflection in what appears through the senses.  Both inward and outward are the mechanics of duality, vibrating between intention and those of magnetism.  Existing are drifting pockets of chance, coming together in an ocean of predetermination.  My work unites these planes of energy.

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: Visual Art

Writing Flash Fiction

October 12, 2020 By Geoffrey Edwards

Writing Off the Deep End Episode 36

Writing Flash Fiction

By
Metapsychosis
 |  October 12, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Writing Flash Fiction
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Hosts Geoffrey Edwards and Mary Thaler talks about the challenges of writing really short fiction, called “flash fiction”. What choices need to be made to get a coherent story in around 500 words? What kind of writing is required?

Tagged With: challenges of writing short, summer workshop on flash fiction, writing short fiction

Interview with L.P. Kindred

October 12, 2020 By Geoffrey Edwards

Writing Off the Deep End Episode 35

Interview with L.P. Kindred

By
Metapsychosis
 |  October 12, 2020
Feature Image:
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Interview with L.P. Kindred
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Download file | Play in new window | Recorded on September 27, 2020

Hosts Mary Thaler and Geoffrey Edwards interview a writer of fantasy and speculative fiction from the LA area, who has published short fiction and is at work on a novel. L.P. began his professional life as a singer and songwriter, which gives his fiction a unique color. His work has been published in, among other venues, FIYAH, an online magazine dedicated to writers of color (http://www.fiyahlitmag.com). One of his stories was also read by Levar Burton on his channel (https://omny.fm/shows/levar-burton-re…). L.P. is also running a workshop this fall at Clarion West (http://www.clarionwest.org/workshops/…). His social media handles are @lpkindred (Instagram) and @LPKindred (Twitter).

Tagged With: queer fiction, science fiction, second career writing, speculative fiction, urban fantasy, writers of color

Four Poems

October 12, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Four Poems

By
  • Patrick DeCarlos
 |  October 12, 2020
Feature Image: Abstract Artwork 1229 by Anthony Ross [Public Domain]

The Day of the Weigh-In
For Emile Griffith
 
When fighters meet they’re starving.
The scale sits middle stage as totem
And their entourages rally on both sides
The trainers and hype men, hangers-ons
And neglected wives
Draped in towels like priests, or flashing 
Endorsements, energy drinks, and chaliced style
Or stiletto nails and fake tits.
Lost in them, on two respective sides of the stage
The shrunken fighters, cheeks sunken and eyes
Gibbous as praying mantis, like a god kept captive
By some sick forest cult 
That provides sacrifice seasonally, 
Never satiating their needs for fluid, 
For meat, trapping them in the arboreal 
Closet like a winter coat. 
Down to their underwear
As carnival spectacle or slave auction 
They display their fallow bodies 
Their bulging cocks, their torsos sinewy
And tight as twisted rope.
 
             And then, the stare down
 
                   eye-to-eye 
                           disassociated
              sneaking peripheral glances   of muscle 
       or collar bone       how the neck
               meets the chest
                      or a brown eye
                             becomes hazel 
                      when gazed into long enough
               like a crystal ball foretelling of lovers meeting
 
 
  
Recovery
 
Wife’s out.  Home alone.
My rest limbers, a stretch
With pops and cracks.
I adjust a coffee mug on the nightstand without drinking.
I survey the home, turning a faucet
Or checking for mail crumpled by the door.  The breath
Of motors and rolling tires on roadways can sound
Like a slow and oily stream, but it’s a hollow
And constant pulse I can forget unless I listen for it,
Like my heartbeat.
I doubt I notice every plane that flies overhead, rattling
The windows.  The refrigerator downstairs clatters with ice.
 
A desire can be an infestation slithering out of electrical sockets
In great heaps slopping onto the floor,
Or warmth dripping down a throat
With a sting fresh on the lips.
A year sober and I am still cask
In an oak body, aging but not quite distilled.
I notice how quiet things can be when I’m alone
And then suddenly just as loud.
My prayers like orderlies shuffle from room to room
Taking vitals.  That’s right, try to relax as I take your blood pressure.
Good, now breathe for me.
 
  
Visitations
 
Could I be a mystic with an apartment
Instead of a desert
Locking the cell door
Within myself and meeting You?
Who (or what) visits me
When the creaking wood floors upstairs
Crack demonic?  I always feel them
The moment they enter the room.
And I struggle back to my breath
Like a teacher instructed
When a shadow haunts a hallway,
Or I whisper Hail Mary’s
Or invite Michael into the room,
Hoping for his heat on my cheek.
Why do all my meditations
Invite the darkness?
Is this why we’re to lock the door
Because it’s only You and I within me?
A vision of St. Lucia,
Candles wreathed around her forehead
Guide her through the dark.
She delivers food in the catacombs of myself
Where all the dead things still linger.
I eat and know it’s the three of us within me.
 
I open my eyes and the demons are behind the dunes
Howling for tomorrow.
 
 
Florida Prophecy
 
The swamp will crack asphalt
In one seismic moment Vesuvius
Splintering roads, gushing rotten
Earth as muddy magma, swallowing iguana
 
Bloated on hibiscus and bougainvillea
And sprout sawgrass necromantic
With a swaying zombie walk straight
For our storm proofed, shuttered homes.
 
The conch-horned wail of mermaidens
Screaming through their gills will return
And Ponce De León will sit crow’s nest
In wreckage, cursing the fountain of youth.
 
Floridians know this day will come
Like an uprising against alien invaders.  
That marshy scientist may just concoct murder
With cough or spore and the survivors will retreat
To the smoke stacked planets we’ve already wrecked.
 

Filed Under: Featured, Poetry

The Spiritual Barber

October 7, 2020 By Geoffrey Edwards

The Spiritual Barber

By
  • João Cerqueira
 |  October 7, 2020
Feature Image:

The Spiritual Barber had opened his salon a year earlier and it had been an instant success. Open Mondays to Saturdays, it attracted an ever-growing number of customers, who thought nothing of waiting several hours until it was their turn to be served. Men, young and old and from all walks of life, would pay over fifty euros for the barber to help them resolve their personal problems while cutting their hair or shaving them. Each session would last just as long as was needed for the customer to leave the salon feeling at peace with himself and pleased with his new appearance. The session over, once they had looked at themselves in the mirror, what they saw there was a new man. They left their problems, together with the scattered clippings of their hair, behind them on the salon floor and their worries mixed with the remnants of the shaving cream in the bowl in which the barber washed his razor. Only rarely did a customer leave without the feeling that his anguish had been brushed away. People came to call him The Spiritual Barber.

Where he originally came from was something of a mystery. It was said by some that he was a psychology graduate or that he had a master’s degree in philosophy, or even that he had once been a priest but had been unfrocked because of his heterodox ideas. His critics would claim that he only parroted what he had picked up from self-help books or wisdom he had imbibed from the writings of Paulo Coelho. There was even a rumor that he was mad and had once beheaded a man.

Only one certificate hung on the salon wall that said: Coiffeur et Barbier de Paris.

A number of amateurs in the trade had tried to copy him, but they had quickly been obliged to close. Other barbers had not managed to cheer up customers who felt depressed, while psychologists couldn’t handle the scissors.

The Spiritual Barber saw off all competitors.

An official from Health and Safety once came to check up on his salon. But, after a detailed inspection of the premises and some questions concerning his method of work, he ended up by accepting an invitation to have his hair cut. And it was not long before he too was unburdening his soul and thereafter became a regular customer.

The salon was decorated with pictures by contemporary painters. There was a library of works of world literature, an aquarium with tropical fish, vases of flowers and classical music in the background. The single chair was covered with natural leather, the scissors were of silver and the stainless steel razors were imported from Japan.

One day a middle-aged man entered the salon asking for a shave. The Spiritual Barber invites him to sit down, places a towel round his neck and begins to lather his face with aloe vera shaving cream.

“Well, Sir. And what brings you here today?”

The man fidgets in the chair and clears his throat, but does not reply. Accustomed to difficult cases the Spiritual Barber gets on with his work in the hope that his customer will relax. The Japanese razor begins to glide slowly from ear to chin, and the blade’s shiny edge becomes obscured under a layer of foam.

“I’m sixty years old and feel old and frail. I don’t talk to anyone and get no pleasure out of anything. My life has no meaning.”

Once he knows what is chiefly distressing his customers, the Spiritual Barber will start trying to smooth away their troubles with his skillful manipulation of the razor.

“All human beings who have not yet died will soon become old and frail. And yet the young are not necessarily the happiest of us. There are ninety-year-olds who have an intense desire to live and young lads of eighteen who suffer from depression. Age is no determinant of happiness and …”

The customer interrupts him.

“What you say may be true, but how can I accept going on living in this absurd world? It’s the 21st century, we’ve been to the moon, we send robots to Mars, we clone living beings, but we humans go on killing each other and letting other humans die of hunger, enslaving them …”

“You and I are not responsible for that.”

“We are complicit. We look on while the word suffers, and we do nothing.”

“And what do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know. Something …”

“You could protest, join marches, write letters to the powers that be.”

“And do you think that will get anywhere? Is that going to change the world?

“That’s how some of mankind’s greatest victories have begun. Protest and passive resistance can work wonders.”

“Do you think that famine in Africa, terrorism or the Israel-Palestine conflict will come to an end if I take to the streets shouting slogans or send an email to some political leader?  Do you suppose that warlords or drug-traffickers will listen to me, when the Pope, the Dalai Lama and the UN spend all their time appealing for peace and respect for human rights and no one pays any attention?”

“At least you will have done your duty as a citizen.”

“So that I can then sleep soundly while the killing goes on, is that what you mean?”

“But why should you carry the problems of humanity on your shoulders?”

“I’ve already told you that we are all morally responsible, you too. Anyway, you tell me what contribution you have made so far to help the world’s unfortunates?”

The Spiritual Barber leaves off shaving for a few moments, lifts the blade of his razor and eyes his customer’s carotid artery.

“I talk with people who need help.”

“And earn money thereby.”

“It’s my profession.”

“A profession which feeds on other people’s suffering.”

The Spiritual Barber applies more aloe vera cream to his customer’s face. From the speakers comes the sound of Maria Callas singing Schubert’s Ave Maria. One of the tropical fishes is blowing air bubbles.

“No one is obliged to come to my salon, I suppose.”

“And where would you want me to go? Do you think I would have allowed a psychiatrist to shave me?”

“You probably wouldn’t be satisfied with the result.”

“That’s true, have you seen the sloppy look of those guys?”

“Of course. Some of them are my customers.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Right. But let’s get back to what’s troubling you …”

“I’ve already told you. And it seems to me that after all you have no special solution to offer me. Am I right?”

“Do you take me for God?”

“There’s no need to be ironic. Just admit it. You can’t help me.”

“Would you allow me to ask you a question, then?”

“Go ahead. As long as it doesn’t distract you when you’re tidying up my sideburns.”

“If you were God, what would you do to make it a better world?”

“That’s an absurd question and just proves you’re incapable of helping me.”

“Are you afraid of giving me a proper answer?”

“What do you mean by that? Are you trying to get me muddled?”

“I’d first like an answer, if you don’t mind.”

“As you know very well, believers will say that the existence of evil results from man’s misuse of the free will granted by God. In saying that, they are letting God off the hook. Atheists wouldn’t waste their time arguing such nonsense.”

“But you are capable of going further than believers and reflecting on the problem without the prejudices of the atheists, aren’t you?”

The man is silent again. A bead of perspiration appears on his forehead.

The Spiritual Barber dips the razor-blade into the bowl and washes it in the water, so that it comes out shiny again.

“You realize, don’t you, that perhaps not even God, whatever idea you may have of Him, can change human nature. He has already tried it with flood and fire. But after a while everything remains the same.”

“Are you trying to make jokes at my expense? Is suffering a comedy, as far as you’re concerned?”

“I’m only trying to show you that there are certain things that no one can change, and all we can do is to accept the world as it is. A comedy and a tragedy.”

“Accept the world as it is, along with all the violence and misery?”

“Yes, because we live in the best of all possible worlds.”

“The best of all possible worlds? All right then. Imagine someone places a bomb in your salon. Assuming you survive, would you accept what has happened calmly, because it’s just all part of human nature?”

“I’ve taken out all risks insurance.”

“Keep your sarcasm for another customer. Nevertheless, what you have just said proves I’m right. Even the lucky ones feel they’re living under a continuous threat. And what are those without all risks insurance meant to do? Who protects them?”

“Do you intend going to hell to see if you can put out the fire? The most certain thing is that you also burn yourself.”

“There are people who go to war zones as volunteers, who help victims of natural disasters, who confront the Ebola virus…”

“So why don’t you go too, to help the destitute? In the end you might find redemption for what you say is your moral responsibility.”

“Now don’t be cynical. You’re well aware that I’m too old and haven’t got the strength.”

“In that case, there’s no need to feel guilty about it. To give a helping hand to complete strangers is admirable, but very few are capable of doing it.”

The man begins to raise his voice.

“And that is what suits you in the end: for no one to do anything for others. So that there are always unhappy people to come to your salon and be cheated.”

The Spiritual Barber understands at last that the customer has brought his own well sharpened razor with him and begins to wonder if he’s a frustrated fellow-barber.”

“After all, what you’re looking for is something more than redemption …”

The man punches the arm of the chair.

“You feel you’ve been unmasked, don’t you?”

The Spiritual Barber again stops for a moment and takes a deep breath, while the fish in the aquarium begin to stir. Unseen by the customer, he swallows a pill.

“Would you like to take the brush and razor and shave me?”

“I’m already cutting you down to size.”

The man bursts into a laugh, then launches into a tirade.

“You weren’t expecting someone to tell you that you’re a fraud and that you don’t succeed in helping anyone, were you? You didn’t think that one day someone like me would come to your salon and put you in your place. Well, that day has arrived. And I’ll tell you something else: you may even be right. The world can’t be changed. Human nature is irremediable. Not even God can do anything for us. There can be no redemption. So why should we care, in the end? And this is precisely why your salon serves no purpose whatsoever. Close this dump!”

The man looks triumphantly at the Spiritual Barber, as if he had taken his scalp.

The latter puts down his razor and holds a mirror to the left and right of the customer for him to check that his sideburns are of equal length.

The man seems satisfied with the work. He smiles.

For the time being the ills of the world were left floating in the bowl in which the razor was washed.

Filed Under: Featured, Story

Lucy the Nun With the Green Socks

October 5, 2020 By marythaler

Lucy the Nun With the Green Socks

By
  • Susan Evans
 |  October 5, 2020
Feature Image: Public Domain

Lucy the nun with the green socks
saw me hugging the oak tree
that summer I
hibernated in Spartanburg. She
didn’t really see me. She
was close to blind. I
felt lost in that wood,
less than the tiny insects
humming in my ear.

Rilke says we have to believe we matter,
the tree, blind Lucy, me. We
must believe the universe
hasn’t forgotten us. Take
heart, he says. The
form of a bear, eyes
like burning coals, may
come knocking under a white moon
to alert us to something
awaiting that will rock us
to our core and send us
running down a just-what-
we-dreamed-of path. The
least likely thing may happen
at any moment. A
white bear may lay his paw
on our arm guiding us
on a journey, blowing open
our world like a window. We
must believe that this bear
under starry sky and low moon,
when wind rustles through the pine,
may rattle our door lock,
summoning us if we listen.

Years later, I toss clean socks in a basket,
reminding me of Sister Lucy and her green socks,
when outside my door, the sound of knocking
stops my musing. A
guttural voice urges, “I heard your call. The
door swings wide open. Walk
blindly like Nun Lucy,
climb on my back; we
go to the woods.” I
open the door carefully
and a bear, white coat
glittered with snowflakes,
growls, “What holds you back? Get
your things and move!” Tremendous
courage and abandon comes
with letting go, but the music
of the night wind, the snow like a milky ocean,
the sky, stained dark as wine, compels me.

Life could become wildly different. Am
I ready? Hoping for a little blind luck,
willing—no matter the cost—
knowing nothing will happen if I don’t, I
tug on my snow boots,
climb aboard and he springs for the wood,
mist and snow swirling so fast I cannot see ahead. I
gasp for breath; only the raging in my heart
gives me strength
to hold onto that thick white fur.

We reach a frozen river
and the bear plunges in,
penetrating the icy heart of the river. I
lose my grip, flounder near the shore. Rumi
says dive in and swim hard
towards the fur drifting with the current. It
floats by so dive in, grab with both hands. Accepting
the gamble, the risk of reaching
through ice, I thrash for dead center. Rumi
Promises the bear will ride me home.
Breaking apart in the icy river, I
taste the water and rise up fully awake. Alive
as the bear, I tackle it, fighting for its gift. The
bear dissolves, the living river,
the ice, the impassable forest.
The raging in my heart, the
bear in my heart, I carry home.

Filed Under: Featured, Poetry

Anatolian Dreams

October 5, 2020 By marythaler

Anatolian Dreams

By
  • Diana Thoresen
 |  October 5, 2020
Feature Image: Roberto Strafella

“Go and catch a falling star.”
(John Donne)

St Barbara, a poor white gloved icy ingénue,
Has long been a dusty piece of Black Forest wood

That grew out of the ashes of Sibylline books
The black stone is gone from the Palatine
Only infinitesimal phantasmagoria of the sea

Dwells deep within the grave mound of the soul
While carrying a torch clothed with the sun

Nikola Tesla still feeds a pigeon every day —
It’s an aperiodic dolphin atavism

Awakened by an unknown lyre
It drinks virtue from a moon beam

Only Saturn, the awakener of lavender hope,

Silently watches the humble pigeon
From the depths of our star fed earth

Filed Under: Featured, Poetry

Varahi

October 4, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 38

Varahi

By
  • Brigid Burke
 |  October 4, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Varahi
00:00 / 60 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 60 minutes | Recorded on August 18, 2020

This week we talk about the Matrika Varahi, the Shakti of Varaha, the boar-headed avatar of Vishnu, and a ratridevata (night goddess) associated with left-hand Tantric practices. She is sometimes called Yami, and considered to be the consort of Yama, the god of death. We look at the complexity of her symbolism, with a boar head (a polluted animal) riding on a buffalo (symbol of Yama), and fighting with a discus (chakra/wheel of time and death).

Tagged With: chthonia, goddess, hinduism, matrika, podcast, shakti, tantra, varaha, varahi, vishnu

Vaishnavi

September 20, 2020 By Brigid Burke

Chthonia Episode 37

Vaishnavi

By
Metapsychosis
 |  September 20, 2020
Feature Image:
Metapsychosis
Vaishnavi
00:00 / 47 minutes
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 47 minutes | Recorded on July 21, 2020

The matrika Vaishnavi is the shakti of Vishnu’s avatar, Vaishnava, in which Vishnu takes the form of a boar and rescues the Earth Mother when she is plunged into the primordial waters. Her weapon is the discus or chakra, showing her connection to the cycle of time. This podcast looks at the multiple aspects of this feminine aspect of Vishnu’s power.

Tagged With: chthonia, dark, feminine, garuda, goddess, hinduism, matrika, shakti, tantra, vaishnava, vishnu

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Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Cooperative, a creative co-op for people with "visionary tendencies." Learn more at Cosmos.coop »

Unless otherwise noted, all rights are reserved by the individual authors. Other website content is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)