The CuisinArt

Once, in a magazine, he’d read that a liberal application of foreplay could compensate for a sub-par sexual performance. Using this as a template, he made his way down to frolic face first in her forested meadow. There he smelled familiar flowers, heard the soar of familiar moans above, and felt at ease. New plan. He would continue these oral acrobatics until she passed out—or at least until her parents came home.

Concerning gravity, what goes up must come down, while concerning foreplay, what goes down must come up. An unbreakable law of sexual thermodynamics, and it had slipped his mind. In time she wrenched his tongue from her nethers, and placed it between her teeth. He knew then that his plan had backfired. Instead of placation, he had achieved titillation, turning a presumed penetration into an inevitability.

The woman wasted little time. She reached across the bed and produced a condom wrapped in orange foil. Lifestyles. Ribbed for Her Pleasure. The man let out a sigh of relief. Good, the ribs will take care of everything.

The man understood the principles of what was to follow. Shaft. Hole. Insert. Remove. Repeat. But three years of rabid porn viewing had muddied his certainty about the particulars. Porn is a world of receded testicles slamming against prolapsed anuses, and 10x zoomed vaginas oozing ejaculate. Porn is a world concerned only with the ends: one that has little time to point out the means.

His penis, an object of unprecedented familiarity, felt suddenly alien and obtrusive. Confused, he started to poke her. Distraught, he poked harder. In a little under 17 seconds he managed to probe her navel, buttocks, and grundle without once making the slightest contact with her labia.

Then it came as a shooting star: sudden, explosive, ultimately fleeting. The nothingness of air gave way to a warm nestling, and even the woman’s face, previously contemplating the mold stains on the ceiling, showed a slight tweak of the eyebrows. But it left sooner than it had come, leaving him yet again to flap his latex sheathed rod in the wind.

It was then that the woman, in a quite literal fashion, took matters into her own hands. He did not mind the ease with which she slipped him inside, but her sudden change of direction left him suspicious.

Moans followed. Not sexy. Monotonous, rehearsed. Like vocal exercises in drama class. He checked her chest for clarification. No flush. No contractions of the vaginal walls, either. Certainly no increase in wetness. In fact, with each passing second he sensed an increasing aridness. Her moans turned to grunts. Her hands flailed, pulling and tugging at whatever she could find.

No, he thought to himself. Something is not right. There’s no way I’m this good. There’s no way I’m even fractionally this good. A woman flopping and floundering perhaps. But a woman writhing?

The revelation came with a swiftness he wished his hips could emulate. She was preparing to fake on him.

A man confronted with unspeakable evil has but two courses: submit and be consumed, or become that very evil in the hopes of destroying it. The man chose the latter. He chose to become what he feared most. He chose to fake his own orgasm.

The desertification of the vagina was almost complete. Time was of the essence. Using what little wetness remained, he built to a steady rhythm. He pulled out only as shallow as he dared, knowing if he slipped out entirely the lips would close forever. In time he began to palpitate his own breathing. Moments before she closed the deal, he pushed himself the full depth of her, closed his eyes, quivered his right leg and held his breath. After a believable three seconds he exhaled an exaggerated breath, fluttered his eyelids, and let a small droplet of saliva splash onto her breasts. He fell atop her, wheezing, snorting, his lips mashed against her collarbone. It was a revolting sight, no doubt. But she could not argue with its authenticity.

“Get off,” she grunted

Not one to upset her further, he pulled out and ran to the bathroom to dispose of the evidence. There he shed a tear of respect for the fallen condom, en route to sexual purgatory, never fulfilling its intended purpose. A face full of denim welcomed him back into the room. He peeled them off to find the woman already dressed, clacking bubbles with her lips, avidly tapping the keys on her cell phone. The man dressed with haste and silence, not quite sure what to say.

She took the initiative.

“Remember the number I gave you when we left the bar,” she asked.

“No,” he answered truthfully

“Good,” she cut.

But a wave of embarrassment did not follow. He felt instead a warm and impregnable numbness. As a somnambulist he left the room, head in clouds, toes dragging across the asphalt. There had been no ejaculation. No pleasure. No ecstasy. The whole experience had more or less resembled a siege on a castle wall. But he was no longer a virgin, because as long as you get it in it still counts, right?

That night he regaled his younger siblings with the mysteries of the fairer sex. He phoned friends, and hinted of a story to tell. A story, unknown to them, that he would embellish and transform at his leisure. No one needed to know every harrowing detail of room 24-17 B. He’d keep certain facts intact—lack of stamina, mismatched experience—for believability’s sake. But the rest was his to do with what he would. Once home, his newfound manhood would glisten and shine amid the drab virginity of his friends. They would flock to him, honor him, admire him, and with a gracious wave of his hand, he would bestow onto them all that he had learned.

In the land the virgin, the man who kind of, sort of, almost had sex is king.

New from Shea, the satyric scribe from San Francisco…
–
This here’s a tale about a virgin.

A virgin who came to Disney to ride the rides, and stayed behind to ride a woman.

There are some who might call him a hero, and others who’d call him a fool, but then again the line between the two has never been but a hair thin.

His story doesn’t get told too much. Common lore favors instead the tale of the virgin woman. Wherein man is cast as the hornet: a savage insect who rends a flower’s virginity with multi-pronged perforation pistil, spewing white-hot trauma inducing poison. The myth is so injurious that unassociated third parties still trouble to craft consistent pollination metaphors.

Yes. His story is less told. But it is replete nonetheless with its own unique mortification.

To frame his story, let us take the aforementioned metaphor, polish it a mite, and turn it on its axis. Viewed like such, we see that long before he became the hornet, man began his sexual journey as the carpenter bee—incommodious, oafish, cumbersome, spending more of his day in congress with the wood surrounding the nest than the nest itself. A life spent fluttering six inches from the bull’s-eye.

Yes, a carpenter bee has wings and a man has a penis but neither is too sure what to do with their given extremity. Still, the man was willing to brave this uncertainty for the opportunity to understand the mysteries of the fairer sex.

Many people talked about it. The Juniors spoke frequently. The seniors spoke more. Even the occasional sophomore hinted at an understanding. He wanted in, and Disney seemed as fitting a place as any to gain membership. Look hard enough, the innuendo is there: Mickey; Minnie; phallic train cars penetrating dark, cavernous tunnels.

By day the man trolled the parks; by night he trolled palm-lined walkways of his resort. Orlando was rife with young vixens. Blondes. Brunettes. The occasional redhead. The man would have been happy to cast any as the willing damsel in his tale. But there was one he hoped for above all the rest.

A brunette, with eyes of a deep, snakeskin color, and a porcelain face that reflected a mastery of symmetry. She was the type of woman who made flowers bloom as she passed and wilt in her wake. She bore the figure of an hourglass, and not only in her curves, but in her ability to effect time. She had unrelenting nipples, and wore only that which would highlight such an anatomical curiosity. She was anthropometric perfection, the Sandwoman who dwells only in the wettest of dreams.

With her he always kept it innocent, hanging back to watch her from afar. He’d like to think he did it out of common decency and respect for the chase. Hazard instead it was the flimsy stitching of his bathing suit and a hair trigger erectile response that stayed his course.

Came the day he happened upon a bar. Virginity, they say, loves company, so he ordered a Pina Colada without rum. He nursed it conservatively, and a steady influx of adolescent males soon turned the pair of virgins into a crowd. Perhaps they came to the bar to find women; but perhaps, too, they came unconsciously to avoid them. If so, they picked the appropriate joint. Most of the night the bar remained estrogen free. Until she arrived.

The woman blew in as a wayward ship run aground by an invisible tempest. Her spandex framed camel toe, and halter-top accentuated cleavage had no business in a place of boys dressed by their mothers. She nursed her cigarette in front of a no-smoking sign, and through the puffs the man could see snakeskin eyes, which until that very moment had been but a mirage.

The man felt the sudden pull of his erection. Fate, it seemed, had put him in this very bar. His mother, however, had put him in a pair of triple stitched cargo pants. No hard-on short of an immaculate erection could defy the durability of those seams. And it was a good thing too. Because she was headed his way.

Cut from the impending adolescent flirting and flash forward to room 24-17-B.

Prostrate naked upon pastel sheets, ass angled at 15 degrees, with two fingers reaching behind to explore various curiosities laid the woman. Framed in the doorway, wearing an XL Gap sweatshirt with no pants, double palming a sweaty erection stood the man. A look of confusion etched upon his face as he struggled with both the vision before him and the unsettling fact that his pants lay ruffled 12 feet away yet his sweatshirt remained upon his shoulders.

He always knew his impending sexual performance would be abysmal. He had only hoped that his relationship to the girl in question might lessen the mortification. Given an equally nascent virgin, for example, shared ignorance might have negated inexperience. Or if he were to meet a soul mate, a sense of cosmic destiny and overarching synchronicity would nullify the need for any kind of carnal fulfillment.

But the truth of the matter was that he was a carpenter bee lost in a place carpenter bees have no business being. The jungles of Disney grow thick and arboreal, and the flowers are unforgiving.

He would have to stall…
–
Tune in tomorrow for Part 2…

Nerves, perhaps? Something didn’t feel right. A numbness of sorts had overtaken Meng Yau’s left hand. A stroke? He felt no pain, although when he looked at his fingers, speedily marching around the instrument’s neck, he saw his little pinkie about to fall off. There was no blood. Just the single digit, that tiny one on the end, dangling by a thin strand of skin. Swinging loosely as he continued to play.

This is odd, Meng thought as his pinkie broke apart from his hand entirely and fell to the stage floor in a tailspin.
Why, he wondered, did that just happen? Attempting to answer that question, Meng replayed the evening’s events in his head.

Though the park’s air was cool, all he had felt when this performance began was the hot lights above him, pushing sweat out his pores. The gerontocratic lawn before him, population on blankets and in folding chairs, applauded his entrance. Meng remembered trying to shake away a dizziness in his head as he took his seat, center stage, and readied his instrument.

He thought back to the crowd’s silence as he first poised his then full-fingered hand over the fret board. Eyes squinted out into the distance once more before closing in concentration, Meng raised his bow and placed it above the strings.

How unnecessarily dramatic, he had thought.

With a long stroke, he drew his bow across the hull of the object resting against his body. This first note, low and ominous, carried out across the night, spreading into nearby ears.

And a few notes later, his finger fell off.

Meng was convinced he had done nothing different than any other night’s performance. He pushed up his glasses and smiled outward to where tradition told him the audience lay. Perhaps none of them, he thought, have noticed a thing.

So, mostly blinded by brightness, he decided to forge ahead. To not let his sudden handicap deter his concert. He moved his hand a little faster and stretched his fingers a little farther to compensate for the missing member.

Forward and back, quickening in pace, the spell he was casting mounted in pace and grandeur. The longer it went, the more it took hold of him. He felt the heat dripping down his brow, and in opening his eyes to bat away a salty bead, he happened to glance at his left hand again. Both his ring and middle fingers seemed to have gone completely limp. Lacking any dexterity, all he was able to do was clumsily slide them up and down the instruments neck.

Fear finally took hold of him and he felt his stomach drop. What is happening to me? And as he finished that thought, both of his fingers broke off his hand and freefell to the stage floor, joining the pinkie.

My god, Meng gulped. And then he thought of the audience. Perhaps they will only think of this as a diminuendo.

And the heat from the lights was becoming unbearable. He felt covered in it. Dripping in perspiration. Surely, he thought, I look repulsive.

Breathing heavily, he reached up to wipe at the slime of sweat on his brow, but as he brought his hand down, he found it covered in hair. Wet hair, his own, sticking to his hand.

At this exact moment, his tongue discovered a small, hard object inside his mouth. He spit it into his lap. A molar. Tonguing around, he found a space in his mouth where a tooth used to be. And continuing investigation found the entire lineup to be loosening and ready to dislodge completely.

What a contretemps! Meng thought as he spit a few more teeth into his lap. What more could he do except attempt to keep track of them all?

It wasn’t long before Meng’s mouth was all gums.

He decided to stop playing then.

Rising from his chair, he wiped at his lower lip, which hung weighty on his face. Saliva dribbled out his mouth and down his shirt. He tried to speak but, to his surprise, his jaw had unhinged itself.

What a wicked role Fortuna has given me tonight, he thought. Then his legs gave out and Meng tumbled to the floor. The teeth he had cradled in his shirt spilt across the stage.

As he stared at the lights beaming down at him, he wondered what the audience out there must be thinking of him. All this work, he thought. Six years of college…

But his schooling could not save him from his undoing

Dylan’s Newest. Don’t Worry, you won’t feel so illiterate at the sight of his veritable display of vocabulary this time…
–
- we are transferring power at this time…. Challenger is now running off its three onboard fuel cells…

The bath water splashed. Annoyed, bitter. Approximating her broken state. The letter dampened in her hand, the edges loosening from the water collected on her pruned fingertips. She read it over once again to make sure nothing was left out.

“Sweetie, is that the radio in there I hear?” Her mother pounded the door from the hallway.

“Of course,” she moaned.

“Oh, well… how much longer do you plan to contemplate suicide?”

“For as long as is suitable, mother.”

“Surely an hour and a half in the hot bath is enough.”

“It would be highly inappropriate to rush this decision ,” she spluttered. “And besides, the water is no longer hot.”

“So why do you insist on sitting in that tub with the door locked?”

She hit the water with frustration as the radio commented “…coming up on a go for all sequence start…”

“Even the most superior of minds in history have required seclusion! If there is a morsel of compassion in your withered body you will grant me this lavatory’s occupancy for this one night!”

“But we only have the one in the house and I have been in need of a constitution since you first locked yourself in there.”

“The level of your insensitivity staggers the mind,” she coughed. “When you were bawling over the cancellation of your favorite magazine did I not pat your back and say ‘There there?’ It seems only reasonable to ask the same from you in this, my time of pain. What is wrong with the Reenebeds water closet?”

“Baby, it is nearing midnight. I will not knock on their door at this hour for such a request.”

“Well, surely I can not be blamed for your timidity.”

“It would be uncouth, my dear!”

“And this abominable act you’re putting on isn’t? How ironic!” she sighed violently.

…and we have a go for auto sequence start, Challenger’s onboard computers have primary control of all the vehicle’s critical functions…

“What are you listening to?”

“It is a rebroadcast of the Challenger launch.”

“Oh. Darling,” her mother pleaded. “please unlock this, if only for the reason that when you kill yourself I can then enter and properly mourn your passing.”

“Your mourning would just be a humiliating display of lachrymal clichés. Best to avoid it altogether. You will have to mourn in this exact manner - through the door.”

“Honey, that is absurd. And, if I may say so, I would rather you not follow through with this threat. I rarely understand your actions, and this is no exception.”

The nearby radio announced “…T minus 17 seconds and counting…” and at that moment she furiously spat water against the closed door.

“Did you just spit at me?” Her mother gasped.

“I was planning to spit at the door when the countdown began regardless of whether or not you were on the other side.”

… 8… 7…

And there in the bath, water beneath her, she reached to the lighter on the sinks counter, cued it, and leaned its flame to the letter. The parchment burned. The edges squirreled around to touch the words, which there, on the backside, read mirrored.

This is timeless, she thought.

“Do I smell smoke?” Her mother squealed.

And a few years before this, far away from this Idaho bathtub, a space shuttle exploded.

And the more he thought, the quicker he thought, and the quicker he thought, the sooner he became aware of himself, and the sooner he became aware, the more he thought about his bland outfit, and the more he thought of that, the faster he walked, until he came but a step from colliding into the counter and ball rack behind the lanes. In a sudden and swift move, graceful as his bowling stroke, he slid out of the way, narrowly avoiding the embarrassing scene of spilling water on himself and ruining this moment and his entire month hence.

Approaching the table in front of his lane, he stole one more glance and saw that her eyes remained facing his direction.

He set his cups down, inhaled deeply, but through his nose. He did not want her to see his skittish preparation. He faced her. His cell phone - which lay on the table - rang. He turned, saw his sister’s name on the display screen and nearly collapsed from sickness. He hit the silence key. Avoiding his sister was not a scenario he was unfamiliar with. When he looked up, the woman tilted her head bashfully, and manufactured a coy smile. He felt reinvigorated and set down the phone.

He took a step, only to hear the phone ring, yet again. This time, however, it was his work. And this time, he had to support himself on the table, because he truly thought he might collapse. He promptly silenced it, and without a moment’s hesitation, in a rare feat of spontaneity, walked over to her.

She took notice, and immediately sat at attention, rapidly deciding how she would react to the upcoming exchange. Computing dozens of greeting scenarios and the appropriate response to each at computer-like speed, and each one unique, based on how he would prompt her.

When Eric finally did reach his new destination, he was unable to say anything. He’d thought so much about his phone and summoning the courage to just walk there, what he would do once he arrived eluded him. So he said, “Hi.” And she, shocked at his choice, merely returned with, “Hi.” Ken watched from the front desk, cautiously, unobtrusively, but intently.  Eric bounced lightly and fearfully on the balls of his feet, slid his hands into his pockets, lowered his head, and after a moment, the two could manage to produce little more than a mutually nervous laugh.

She was even more beautiful, to him, at such a short distance: Her modest, yet slender stature, the curve of her hips, the loose fitting knitted sweater, which hung over her nervously contorted fists, and her flowing hair made him weak. He’d forgotten about his parents, and his sister’s call, and his job, and all the choices he’d made, that up until this point, had led him down a most undesirable path. He’d also forgotten how to speak.

In the distance, Eric’s phone rang, yet again, and the echo of that electronic ringtone ran up his spine like a platoon of red ants. She glanced over his shoulder and asked if he should take that. Before he could warmly dismiss it, a pile of energetic youngsters plowed through the door of the alley. Eric and the woman shifted their attention to the unstoppable force heading their way.

They’d both wanted a distraction, but neither of the two they were presented with. “Hey Miss. Donaldson!” Yelled a small boy who led the pack towards the woman. “I should,” “-Right, so should I,” they said. They both knew the moment was gone. The difference? The woman thought it was just this moment, but Eric, he knew it was the only moment.

Back at his lane, he felt a cold sweat, and an uncontrollable shudder of his hands. He picked up the phone to see that in fact his sister had called again. The shudder took control of his entire body. Not externally visible, but internally debilitating. He placed the phone down, though he’d wanted to slam it. He picked up his ball. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. This was still his time; his time to escape, however short it was.

He balanced, approached, and like all the other times: Down, forward, slide, release, and pop up. His back leg kicked up, with the faintest bit of life and charisma as the ball rolled its way down the lane. And after a perfect path, followed by perfect contact, 60 feet away, stood one pin- the 10-pin- in the corner, alone amongst the black behind it.

But, being as rigidly stable and uncompromising in the release of his emotions as he was, he just spun slowly on the heels of his plain white sneakers, grimaced slightly and clenched his fist for no more than a moment before releasing. He repeated the process, and threw a ball, which shot down the lane harder than he normally threw it- the spin, less graceful.

The lane sensed this change, and reacted accordingly. The ball twisted at the last moment, and missed the pin. Missed the spare; missed his chance. His phone rang again. The ball returned; he had nine frames remaining and three games after those frames. He silenced his phone, picked up his ball and placed it in his bag. He wiped the oily grease from his fingers onto his jeans, grabbed his coat with the other hand, and walked out.

He made eye contact with no one as he left. Not Ken and not the children and certainly not the woman. He stepped outside, and was struck with a breath of cool, but piercing wind. He thought about the long hours, the never-ending days, and the years that had rolled by like a ball on it’s way to the pins, only to twist just a bit too much and strike nothing but the black tarp.

He thought about the strikes, the spares, the splits, and the gutters. All those frames, all these games, all this time without memories- where had they gone? But he would remember today. He stood outside the alley, alone in the wind, in his horribly bland and self-loathing outfit: a royal blue collared shirt tucked into a black denim pair of jeans over white sneakers. And back in the alley, in the furthest corner of the furthest lane, stood the 10th pin.

It was 4:45, and Eric had skipped out of work a few minutes early. This wasn’t a problem anymore. He’d spent 10 years in the same office, learning the same people’s tendencies. He knew Susan always had a cigarette at 4:35, and stayed outside, pretending to talk on the phone till 4:50, at which point she would return and start packing her things. He knew all of their vices. He did nothing with them, but use them as a means to avoid them. Ducking out was no longer more difficult than slipping in 10 minutes late from his lunch break. He could probably stretch it to an hour.

He despised the outfit he’d chosen to wear today: a royal blue collared shirt tucked into a black denim pair of jeans over white sneakers. It was such a bland and self-loathing outfit. He despised attention being brought on him. It didn’t even match.

He’d arrived a time in his life where pleasures were a dying breed. Natural selection was taking over, and in the form of banalities and inconveniences. Almost everything was at this point- an inconvenience. There was his sister. He could hardly stomach the bemoaning scene - where she pried for money and support - that was lunch on Wednesdays. He watched the History channel, although he wasn’t particularly interested in it. But he didn’t want to be included. News, sports, celebrity scandal- he wanted nothing to do with it.

He stopped trying to meet women, or more accurately avoided them, as well- turned off to the whole concept of marriage after spending his childhood absorbing the noise of his bickering parents, and most of his young adulthood trying not to hear the shouts from what was once a marriage, turned adversarial co-habitation.

Standing alone, the only sounds in the alley were the gears churning on the ball return. The ball travels down the lane, up the return ramp and back to his hands- Time and time again; too repetitive to remember. Just an image. He lined up his shot, balanced his weight and approached with a smooth, upbeat stride reminiscent of a dance step. Down, forward, slide, release, pop up. His back leg kicked up behind, with the faintest bit of life and charisma, as the ball rolled its way down the lane. It was poetry in motion, but he never thought of it that way. The sport had become his escapist pleasure, but he hardly allowed it to be even that.

The ball glided along the second arrow from the right, rotating forward and diagonally on its axis toward the front pin, just off center and it followed the exact path he’d aimed for. The ball struck the pins just as he had planned, and evaporating in front of the ball was each pin, with the exception of one. He’d thrown a perfect ball and received imperfect results. He stared at the 10th pin, alone in the far corner of the lane. It should have fallen with the others; it should have been a strike.

But, being as rigidly stable and uncompromising in the release of his emotions as he was, he just spun slowly on the heels of his plain white sneakers, grimaced slightly - certainly not enough for anyone who wasn’t watching to take notice of - and waited for the ball to spit itself back out the return and into his hands. The result was almost as he expected. Of course he wouldn’t get the strike. He couldn’t get a break in any other moment of the last 10 years of his life, he thought, why would he get one in bowling? And had he gotten a strike, it was but a mere confirmation of what he knew should of happened. There was no pleasure, either way. If he couldn’t win, he’d at least be satisfying with predicting that he would fail, unfairly. Feeling justified, he picked up the spare and waited for the next frame. He’d already forgotten the last one.

After the game, he approached Ken, the establishment’s owner and only employee. A rigid business man; willing to purchase or spend capital on what the old fashioned and lifeless alley needed: snack machines, electronic dart boards, an updated food stand, but intransigent on spending a cent more than necessary. Before attending to Eric, Ken ordered a woman, who just entered the building that she’d have to throw her bottle of soda out. “We have soda machines, if you’re thirsty.” Eric gazed at the door, knowing kids were to follow this woman, and his own private lane amongst the beautifully desolate alley was moments away from being intruded upon in the crudest of fashions.

Ken turned to Eric, knowing why he was at the desk, and went straight to the bar. He’d always purchased a pitcher of water, for one dollar, as well. The days were getting longer. Each minute dragged. The weeks felt like they would never end, but conversely Eric also felt that so many years had escaped him, and faster than the pins fall upon contact. Eric hadn’t had any contact in some time.

Each day at the alley was beginning to feel that way. The games were long and grueling, and by the end, it felt as if he’d never even started. Ken returned, not with a pitcher, but with two plastic cups of water, and charged Eric nothing. Eric nodded his head and returned to his lane, a cup in each hand. Ken is a rigid businessman.

As he walked, he turned his head toward the door again, which had yet to have rowdy children burst through. He couldn’t stand children. He couldn’t even remember what it was like when he was one. Was he ever one? Rotating his head back towards his destination, he and the woman, who now sat, embittered and thirsty, met stares. He tried to divert his gaze, casually, but something in his neck kept him from turning.

She wasn’t particularly beautiful, plain but pleasant. Her hair, however, was stunning. It was long, rich, and flowed down her neck, around her shoulders, and dangled delicately and deliberately off her back. In the midst of the inauspicious attempt to be inconspicuous, he noticed that she too, was not turning her head, aimlessly staring at the ceiling, or pretending to find something to occupy her attention until Eric had looked away. 

Decidedly more curious, he saw that she unmistakably smiled at him. What was this happening? Could this be one of those real moments that he’d only seen on screen or heard told time and time again by a burdensome colleague? When you avoid people, you rarely see their eyes, or their smiles, or their hair. You see faces, and fabric, all forgotten by the mind as quickly as it was processed and before you realize it, you haven’t seen a person in years. But this time, he saw a woman.

Hello all, here’s the latest submission from Dylan. Enjoy…

–

Quimson’s exotic stories of romance were always a source of great entertainment. He was raised on the classic tales of love. The plays, the poems. The films, novels, and songs. And his life, he liked to think, was a reflection of those mediums.

Versed in all forms, he was able to summon up lines from the great poets, it would seem, without any sort of mental pause. Where others found themselves adrift in a sea of thoughts and feelings they could not explain, Quimson’s speech came across as both effortless and precise. His words came out, not as though he had thought of them, but as if they had sought out his mouth specifically. Like the pipes in his throat were the most divine gateway to speech an utterance could hope for, and so it was there they flocked.

He believed in, and could understand nothing but, great passion.

Among all the attributes he carried, people would first take note of how stout a boy he was, with attire consisting mainly of sweaters and an earflap hat, in which he could be seen regardless of season or setting.

After school, atop an overturned chicken crate, Quimson would spin stories of love’s triumph to a mass of his classmates. Children, held suspended from their televisions and radios by one boy’s histrionic telling of a summer courting, or of two lovers rend by society or wartimes. Stories where hardship is endured and characters discover strength through love. Sometimes the love was reckless, sometimes it was mad, but always it was pure.

Often the children had questions. Often the children were not children at all but young adults much older than Quimson himself.

He would address their concerns calmly and warmly, settling their worries by citing Cummings, Shakespeare, Frost, and Dickinson when appropriate.

But despite all the times he had helped the public deal with the woes of the heart, they would always return with new dilemmas and, frequently, new loves altogether. As much as Quimson tried to mirror his life with the romance in his books and plays, his peers seemed to live a carefree existence filled with shallow, frivolous coquetries.

Quimson was not like them. His heart was devoted to Monique - a girl he spent an all too short spring in the company of many years ago. Their initial paths crossed during a year which, to lovelorn Quimson, isn’t remembered by a number but by the event – “The Spring of Monique.” A daughter of friends who would imbibe with Quimson’s parents, Monique was a thin-armed girl, sleek and slender, who would squat in mud for long stretches of time, as was the tendency at the age. During these play dates arranged by their parents, Quimson was captivated fully and found his eyes lingering on her so long he’d forget his mouth altogether, letting it droop toward his chest. But his Monique showed no signs of noticing.

At the close of the spring, as school let out, Monique was whisked away from Quimson. Her father had been offered a new job and so the family of three moved. To where, Quimson did not know.

For that summer, and all the seasons since, Quimson writhed over her absence. Although brief, he declared his time with Monique to be the buds of a romance destined to follow him throughout the rest of his existence. Once a month he would compose a letter to her, opening it with “Dearest Monique” and then stating his continuing adoration for her before the eventual close - “Truly yours…”

Knowing no address, he would rely on the wings of pigeons, or the waves of a nearby creek to deliver the message to her hands.

Quimson composed the letters as he did all his writings, by candlelight, in cursive, using a feather and ink. For school, sometimes professors would make a dire request for type, in which case Quimson had an old typewriter. It was a gift from his grandmother. A number of the keys had the tendency of sticking, but Quimson strongly believed in believing and modern day “advancements,” he felt, alienated people of this duty. Everything was too easy for everyone and true work, he believed, true passion, true love, was a rare sight nowadays.

This thought had been forming in his mind for some time but it invaded his home in the summer of his thirteenth year, before he was to enter the eighth grade. He was in his room when from down the stairs, through his wall, the voices of his parents found the canal of his ear.

He was working diligently on a paper of little importance, lit by a skinny wax candle, feather tip in hand, when he heard the bitter bellow of the word “divorce.” It had sought him out. It found him, as many other words had, and Quimson began to think – the world may very well be heading in the wrong direction.

He felt then, more then ever, the frustration of everyone around him not taking love seriously.

Quimson was able to rely on the satisfaction of knowing his life was based on a larger, a more grand idea of romance. If his life were to be viewed by a writer, there would be the saga of Monique - two young lovers, separated in their youth. Quimson knew that he would go about his life always thinking of her, and she would go about hers thinking of him, then many years down the road they would reunite under unlikely circumstances with a passionate embrace.

But not yet.

It’s a pleasure to present Part Deux of Shea’s harrowing tale of time travel…

As we have touched briefly upon its potential, let us pause for a moment to reflect upon Time. There are those who say Time is like casting a stone into a pond and watching the ripples circle outward. Sometimes this is the case. But mostly, Time is like a handful of pebbles strewn across a lake, with each pebble creating its own tiny ripple. The ripples scatter, directionless. Sometimes they flow into one another; sometimes they ebb into nothingness.

One pebble is a woman.

There is nothing special about her as far as appearances go. She looks as any plain faced, 20 something, might look in 1970’s Pondicherry—familiar.

Each day at 3 o’clock she would pass a small, family owned-café in the northwest section of town. Each day there would sit a man reading a book in the corner. The man was Indian, but with a foreign quality about him, and not particularly just that he was from another country, but like he was from an entirely different kind of place. At the same time he felt so familiar. It was almost as if he were pleading to tell her a story: a story that by some peculiar design featured only her.

Still, their days were spent in silence. Try as she would to engage his attention, he never once looked up from his book.

The man is another pebble. The man is Manoj Vindalu.

Though he departed from Dunville with a plan, Manoj arrived in 1970 Pondicherry without the faintest idea of how to execute it. He hadn’t a clue where to find M Knight’s future mother. Worse yet, he had no idea when the time of conception was, and could not be sure that, even if he found her, the genetic miracle of life was not already stewing within her uterus.

Manoj decided that his first plan of action would be to use the time machine as a sort of research device to uncover the moment when the two lovers first met. It should have taken months (or years depending on how you look at it) and yet he stumbled almost instantly upon a street corner where they shared their first kiss. Upon further investigation, he was fortunate enough to overhear them discussing the details of the day they first met. He went back in time again and followed her to the meeting. He found it at a small, family owned café in the northwest section of town.

Finding two specific souls in the bottomless abyss of time? Learning further the exact date of their meeting? Why Manoj never thought to reflect upon this wave of good luck is uncertain. Though it is often the tragedy of the unwise to mistake fate for fortune, as he would soon come to understand.

After ascertaining the details of their meeting, he traveled innumerably to the past of M Knight’s future mother. He made periodic appearances throughout her life, positioning himself in places where their eyes would meet, sometimes only for an instant. His eyes would become a motif that defined her life. His eyes would be the dream she unconsciously sought in her waking hours. He would become her perpetual déjà vu. Once he was certain that his eyes would never be forgotten, he traveled to the small, family owned-café in the northwest section of town. There he waited three weeks, each day feeling her gaze hot upon his neck.

Then came the day of the fated meeting. Everything played out as normal: M Knight’s future mother was on track to meet her one-time future husband. But, at the precise moment when the eyes of her one-time future husband looked forward, hers instinctively looked right—to Manoj in the café. And there, for the first time in three weeks, she met his eyes. They were the eyes of her dreams. They were eyes that reflected her past. They were eyes that had seen time. And with no greater passing than any of the other innumerable, shifting bodies, her one-time future husband continued on his way, unaware as she that their shared future had been struck from existence with the swiftness of a single quill stroke.

Manoj offered her a seat, though he could scarcely understand why. He had already averted fate. His task was finished. He had assured that M. Knight could not possibly be conceived. He had thwarted their meeting, and in a city of millions, no one gets a second chance at something like that. Perhaps it was the intoxicating power of his success, or the sweet aroma of coconut milk that swam from her pores, but he found himself wishing to pursue his advances further. He had bested his rival. Now he would taste the spoils.

Manoj never had much skill with women. But he wouldn’t need any for this. The consequences of his meddling with her past had ensured that she would never want for another as long as she lived. On a tattered, single mattress, within the walls of a small inn, they engaged in carnal congress with a passion that can only be exhibited by lovers who have seen time, and returned to write its designs upon one another in their sweat.

Later, Manoj rose in the moonlight and stared at the woman whose womb now lay dormant. He paused for a moment of reflection. He was 8,000 miles and 40 years from the only life that he knew. What was he in the future but a cranky, middle-aged video store clerk, with a now-complete vendetta against a prominent Hollywood director? In the now he was a time traveler. He was a man with knowledge of the future. Knowledge he could use to make him a very rich man. And so he fled without so much as a fare-thee well, pawned the device, and booked passage to America.

Manoj could not see the grand lake of Time. If he could he would have seen that the many ripples caused by the pebbles he had strewn were slowly merging into one. And though many interesting things happened to Manoj in America, nothing of true merit occurred until nine years later. He was on a stroll through Fairmount Park when he bumped into his Indian mistress of nine years past. It was awkward. But it was nothing compared to what he felt when she introduced a small child, scarcely older than eight: the product of their quieted lust.

How does a penguin know her child? How does a bird known the passage south only just being born? Is it in the blood? Is it in the genes? Or is it in the eyes? Manoj met the frightened gaze and he saw familiar eyes—eyes that had seen time. And when the revelation came, it did not come like surf upon a beach, but like waves upon sharp rocks.

There, in a park in Philadelphia, were the eyes of the man who would go on to create the greatest atrocities known to modern cinema. The very man Manoj had set out to destroy so long ago had been born from the fruits of his own lust. Was it always destined to be like this? We do not know. All we know is that Time is pebbles strewn across a lake. And no matter how many ripples circle outward in untold directions, they all settle in the end.

Manoj fled. He felt the hands of madness begin to claw at him, and he knew it was only a matter of time before they would pull him asunder. Unless…

Unless Milo! If Milo knew the truth perhaps he could avert such an undeserved fate. But how would he contact a man 30 years in the future? Something came to him, an idea he had seen in Back to the Future Part II. He would send a letter to Milo. He would recount every vivid detail of his journey. Milo would learn from his mistakes and then, only then, could he save Manoj.
He ran to the nearest pharmacy and bought paper, envelops, a pen, and Sitcky’s Quick Bonding Glue: guaranteed to last 30 years. He scribbled furiously, penning letters barely more legible than Sanskrit. He closed the letter and applied a glob of glue to the back. He ran to the nearest mailbox, opened it, and glued it beneath the lid. With any luck the envelope would survive the 30 advertised years before falling in the appropriate time period. It was a long shot. All he could do was wait.

Against all odds, the plan worked. The letter fell a little more than a week or so after the day Manoj had first begun his journey through time. It fell among similar parcels, differentiated only by the tawny coloring it had accumulated over the years. It was retrieved by the mailman and delivered to the home of the intended recipient. And yet, not all went according to plan.

Manoj had peeked so far into his own past that he had forgotten entirely about the future—more specifically, Milo’s future. He and Manoj may have shared drastically different geography, but they still inhabited the same timeline.

So on that fateful day as the credits began to roll and Manoj activated the device, Milo had turned right to offer him some popcorn. As he extended a handful, he saw Manoj disappear into nothingness. Milo screamed inconsolably. He made such a ruckus that he was arrested. He continued to scream all the way to the police department. He screamed past his holding cell and into the office of a psychiatric evaluator. He screamed at every turn in the brief, albeit windy, road that led him to be confined within The Montgomery County Psychiatric Hospital. Perhaps he screamed out of horror from seeing his friend vanish. Perhaps because he could not stomach the fact that time travel was nothing more elaborate than the liberal application of glue to circuitry.

The incident aroused the attention of many. Bad popcorn some said. Too much pornography said others. It also attracted the attention of a 40 something movie director with a strong affinity for such mysteries. The man spent his evenings trolling various newspapers in search of critics who reviewed his movies favorably. He never found any. But what he did find while browsing through a supermarket tabloid he had purchased in the hopes of finding a favorable review, was a story about an individual who claimed his best friend disappeared into thin air during a recent screening of The Happening. He decided it was a story worth investigating.

So he went to the man’s home and talked to his mother. She told him her son had been committed and was not allowed visitors for the first 50 days. When the man inquired further about the incident she left the room. She returned with a tawny colored envelope. The envelope had arrived a week after the incident. It was addressed from the man who Milo claimed disappeared. Stranger yet was that no one had seen that man since. She had kept the letter out of fear. She gave it to the man at her doorstep for the same reason.

He bid farewell and hailed a taxi. In the backseat he opened the letter and read its contents. He became entranced in a story that both explored and transcended Time. It was a Greek tragedy; it was an exploration in science fiction. Its protagonist was raw. He even saw the potential for a subplot of redemption in the rewrite. As the cab pulled into his driveway, he produced a twenty for the driver and a cell phone for himself. Dialing a number he dialed once a year, he heard a voice click on the other end; and he spoke.

“Hello Mike, its me, M Knight. I’ve just had the best idea for my next film.”

So comes to rest another tragic tale about a man who thought himself the better of Time. But Time is not a foe to be conquered, or a trial to be endured. Time is pebbles strewn across a lake. And whether Time really is a thing, an abstraction, or a cosmic seamstress weaving tapestries of fate by celestial candlelight, one thing is certain: it sure can spin a good yarn.

We’ve got contributor #2, folks. The leather-foot, scatterbrained, and immensely clever- Shea O’Neill. He is single, bearded, and author of the kerouacian (care-OH-whack-ee-n) blog ‘Northwest Excursion.’

Below is part one of his quirky time travel saga. Enjoy:

It did not surprise Milo Stampton, repudiated best friend of Manoj Vindalu, when Manoj burst into his apartment one Friday afternoon with a solution to the “M Knight problem.” Nor did it confound his sensibilities that the “solution” appeared to be a shoebox, wherein wires and circuits co-mingled in a pool of Elmer’s Glue. It fazed him little when Manoj called the box a time machine; less when he explained the mechanics: it would encapsulate him within a pan-dimensional, time-neutral bubble, allowing him to transport instantaneously while time continued as normal outside. His plan was easily deducible: use the machine to fast-forward to the twist endings in M. Knight’s movies.

Considering Manoj’s zealotry, single mindedness, and weekend propensity for glue huffing, it all made perfect sense. Except for the fact that Manoj, an often solitary man, invited Milo to the device’s inauguration. This was truly surprising.

They traveled together to the movie theatre, though Milo, admittedly, went only to ridicule. At the concession stand Milo bought a large tub of popcorn. Manoj refused concessions, reminding Milo that “he won’t need snacks where he’s going.” They filed into their seats, nodding or sneering accordingly throughout the previews. The credits silenced the crowd. Taking his cue, Manoj closed his eyes and activated the device.

He awoke to find himself staring once again at the opening credits. Defeated, he tossed the device among fallen popcorn kernels and half chewed bubblegum. It appeared Milo had been right all along and that one cannot deconstruct the mysteries of time travel using wires and glue. Perhaps next time he would use rubber cement instead. He turned to congratulate Milo. In his place he found an older gentlemen, ashen white, waving his hands and stuttering “G-G-Ghost.”

It would be far too convenient to construe the man’s outburst as just another “senior moment.” The man is, or rather was—as these events would surely precipitate a downfall in his sanity—a rather competent and upstanding citizen. But what other conclusion could he possibly draw? He had, after all, been minding his own businesses, palming a rather ambitious handful of popcorn, when an Indian man appeared out of the Ether and plopped into the seat beside him.

While hovering beyond the earth in his pan-dimensional, time neutral bubble, Manoj forgot the fact that the Earth would continue to turn on its normal 24-hour rotation, spinning at an impressive 800 mph below. And so, two hours later, the geographic location from which he had originated was no longer the geographic location in which he re-emerged. He resurfaced two hours West in a small midwestern town called Dunville. The true miracle was that he had somehow managed to reappear inside another movie theatre showing the same film he had attempted to avert two hours and 1,600 miles earlier.

Manoj fled the escalating awkwardness in search of a bus station. Nearing the depot he heard a whisper from an adjacent alleyway. Curiosity piqued, he slinked into the darkness. There he found a man cloaked in black.

“Looking for some time?” the man asked.

Manoj, confused and still distraught over his failed experiment, decided to inquire further into what the man meant by time. Most likely he was some black market clock salesman. Though Manoj clung to hope that just maybe he was selling some thyme, which would go nicely with the stew Manoj planned to cook later that evening.

“Time,” the man repeated. “The Great Journey. Miss Scary Plane. The Relevancy Factor. The STC. Time Travel.”

“You mean to tell me,” Manoj replied skeptically, “that you are peddling time travel in the back alley of a small midwestern town? How do I know this is not a hoax?”

“You’ll just have to trust me the same way you trusted Marty Coopersmith to sell you an official early release copy of Cloverfield, instead of some cheap bootleg,” he answered, checking over each shoulder for whatever authorities might police against illegal time dealing.

Manoj then concluded that no stranger could possibly know such personal information unless they had traveled back in time to obtain it.

And so perhaps it was the curious name drop. Or perhaps it is because a bootleg time travel device turned out to be much cheaper than a bus ticket back to Philadelphia. But Manoj decided to make a deal.

“So where will you be going, forward or backward?” the man asked, opening his coat to reveal a colorful assortment of trinkets and mechanical devices, all of which hummed at a deep and unsettling frequency. Manoj’s instincts told him to say forward, but he caught his tongue. Why continue to go forward when there would always be another movie theatre just beyond the horizon? Why run a race he could not win? Why not just go back to the beginning and rig the race in his favor?

He would travel backward to the curry swept bazaars of 1970’s Pondicherry, India. He would find the parents of M Knight. He would thwart their love. And once and for all he would avert the ill-fated conception of the man responsible for cinematic holocaust.

“I’ll take an order of the past,” Manoj said, smiling wryly. “And make it to go.” End Part I.

First off are a few graphs from an article from our fair, unbiased, and objective news source, The Huffington Post- with unfair and biased color commentary from me:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

The Bushmen will soon have successfully
blamed everything that happened when they were
in office on Clinton and all the repercussions of those
problems on Obama. I did the same thing with my
brother and  sister throughout my childhood. It
worked like a charm and I was the only child to receive
care packages my freshman year in College.

Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.
Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Yes. We’re going to win it the same way we’ve won the wars
on drugs, abortion, corruption in business, and political scandal.
And we need your help.

Now, for a bedtime story…

Edgar had always been alone. His first memory was waking up from a midday nap, prying his shuddering and heavy eyes open, lifting his head from the pillow on his bed and seeing no one there to welcome him back from slumber. He rubbed his eyes with his palms, adjusted himself to the light and walked, precariously, through the house in search for his mother. Edgar never knew, nor would he ever know, that at that time, his mother was in the garage having extramarital intercourse in her station wagon.

Edgar was four years old at this time, and lived with constant separation anxiety. His mother, Evelyn, birthed Edgar unintentionally. While she had no plans to today, or any other day, 15 years from now she would, in a fit of anger, tell Edgar he was a mistake. Edgar, after admittedly only a moments search for his mother, began to cry. Evelyn could not hear his cries. After a painstaking hour of trying to get him to sleep, she felt vindicated in engaging in this act unfettered, and her moans were a manifestation of that, more than the pleasure she received from her male suitor.

Unsure of what to do, Edgar did what most children would do, he sat on the couch, clutched at a pillow and wept. First loudly and hysterically with the hope that salvation was a mere earshot away, and then weakly, as if the way an injured and helpless dog cries after breaking a bone. In the garage, Evelyn relished in the moment of having responsibilities for no one: not for her burdensome and austere husband and not for her sensitive and fragile son.

After some time, a crow perched itself on the branch of a naked tree, just outside the window from where Edgar sat. It was not the first time Edgar had seen this type of bird, with its gleaming black feathers and penetrating eyes, but he was always accustomed to them flying. And now here it was, sitting next to him, with but a partition of glass separating the two. Edgar stared hopefully at the bird.  He tapped on the window gently. The bird reacted and turned his head, with a subtle and curious tilt to see who or what it was making the noise.

Edgar, with tears dried to his crimson cheeks began to cool down. He waved at the bird and the bird nodded slightly yet unmistakably in return. He felt safe, almost instantly. The two sat for nearly fifteen minutes together before Edgar’s mother slipped in through the garage door. When he saw her, he didn’t feel the comfort he normally did, but fear that this was a woman who left him and may leave him again. Evelyn was mortified that Edgar sat that there, within earshot of her screams. She was worried about herself first, and in some capacity, Edgar new this: her hair in disarray, her button down blouse flung over her shoulder, and her shoes in one hand. The unknown scared Edgar and the prospect of the known scared Evelyn.

After adoring reassurance of her love and devotion, a pleasant movie put on and a surprise snack made for his enjoyment, Edgar felt a bit better, but in a way that was unnatural- It wasn’t the way he felt when the crow nodded and sat with him, in silence, and in company.

For the ensuing years, Edgar often encountered this crow in times of isolation. It would return, and perch outside the window, and the two would sit together as Edgar grew old enough to stay home alone, and as Evelyn felt comfortable leaving the house to pursue her interests. They sat while Edgar watched movies, while he read, and while he planned out his future. What was always constant, was the mutual recognition the two had and that the crow, in some capacity, knew he provided solace to Edgar, and perhaps Edgar to him.

And on the eve that he left for college, three months and seventeen days after Evelyn told Edgar that he was a mistake, he went outside in the yard and waited. He waited for an hour until the crow finally flew down. He didn’t perch on his shoulder, or come and eat off his hand, but he went back to the tree he’d always sat on, and stared at Edgar. Edgar knew, at that moment, that he would never return home again. And, content with that, he also knew that the crow would find him again, and sit outside his window.

Finally:

Here is a great video on crows that you may find can be a great answer to some of the problems facing US Foreign Relations/National Security.

-stockton