Tag: Fiction

Jackal

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Jackal standing in dry grassland beneath a colorful dusk sky


[Part of a longer story titled “Jump“].

O Partha (Arjuna), happy are the Kshatriyas who gain such a battle that comes of its own accord, opening for them the doors to heaven.) — Chapter 2, Verse 32, Bhagavad Gita

He slept poorly and awoke early in anticipation of the mission that night. Then he threw up several times. It was a familiar dread, pre-jump jitters. Not just performance anxiety, or the fear of death, nor the heavy regret of knowing he placed himself in this extreme, and insane predicament voluntarily, nor the envy he feels at breakfast, seeing the carefree jocularity of the ground crew, and the meteorologists, who would never directly enter battle, let alone fly to the roof of the atmosphere itself, and leap into almost pure, frozen space, a half-assed astronaut, a momentary falling spacewalker, until the double-bag static line finishes unfolding, and holds him in a tug-of-war between the canopy pulling up, and the heavy load of his equipment, pulling down.

And then of course, what follows.

But something else was weighing him down now, and had been for quite some time, slowing his every step, as if he were sinking in sand. And it was preventing the boost of adrenaline he’d soon need.

A few hours prior to rigging up, he was hanging out with his “stick” (his paratrooper team) and they were ribbing each other and shooting the shit. Their last moments of relaxation.

But he could never banter very well. He sat on the floor with his back against a door-jam, enjoying the mild grinding pain of the spine against the edge of the jam.

This was his first serious combat jump, a HAHO deep into enemy territory to take out a relay post, and then bushwack back to safe ground, in what’s called an overland exfiltration. In about an hour, they’d start the elaborate procedures and checks and rechecks that took up the better part of 3 hours, prior and during the flight, which was going to be a long one.

Then they’d ride the canopy for a long way this time, about 30 miles, to a drop zone (DZ) in a narrow clearing in the fairly dense coastal forests and then make their way to their objective.

And only then would the real work begin.

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Jump

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For Walter Cybulski, exceptional poet and humorist bar none

[The Introduction will make this story a little clearer, maybe]

His Father’s Circus

1950s gas station with circus act, spectators, mechanics, and classic cars

As a very young boy, his father ran a gas station. He was a mechanic and always carried a gigantic wrench, that was nearly 3 feet long and twice as heavy.

And when he wasn’t working on cars or trucks or busses or tanks, he would swing his wrench, and throw it high in the air and catch it, like a heavy metal drum major. And people would drive long distances just to have him fill up their tanks with gas, so they could watch him perform. And he would do somersaults out to the tanks and backflips all the way back to his office. And when he wasn’t working on cars or tanks or trucks, and the lines at the gas tanks had thinned, he’d finally close shop for the day and wander into the bar across the street and ham it up with his friends.

And the small boy would tag along, at first attached to his mother’s bosom, then to her hand, and finally alone, behind his dad, just large enough to be hoisted on the bar stool by a rough hand, and then given a little boost, and finally able to climb the bar stool by himself and drink coca-cola dribbled over huge tankards of ice, chewing the ice, absent-mindedly, while his father laughed and whistled and wagered fortunes on how many pushups he could do in an hour, or whether he could withstand a sledge hammer to his stomach.

Once, a dancing bear happened to be in the bar, and challenged his father to an arm-wrestling match, and the bear won two out of three, but never came back to challenge anyone again.

When the boy was 8 years old, he quit school to become a soda jerk, and got a job next door to his father’s garage. And over the years, as the garage business grew, all the other businesses in town grew by proximity, and profits skyrocketed all around. You could hear the sonic boom for miles.

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Introduction to the story “Jump”

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“Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. … The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales…” (Vladimir Nabokov, “Lectures on Literature”, page 2)

First, this is a strange story. It combines tall tale, fairy tale, absurdly narrow-lensed realism, realism itself, surrealism and mysticism (in that order).

Hitching a ride to this story would mean climbing aboard a vehicle with a real Mack Truck cab, 18 oversized cartoon tires and a trailer made of wispy dreams. It might not engender confidence in the driver of this tale.

So, here’s some help in finding an order behind the chaos.

One of the more simplistic questions this story asks is: “What would happen if a paratrooper became “enlightened” (let’s call it that) while falling into a war zone?”

But more completely, it’s the story of a person’s life told in vignettes, and short stories that “jump” from one stage to another, from childhood to deathbed. And each vignette is composed in a style characteristic of the character’s point of view at that moment.

So, for instance, the first one’s in the style of a tall tale, for the boy saw his father as a kind of Giant, as many kids tend to do.

The details of these tellings are nevertheless significant. The events we recall from earlier times are always a little tall in the telling, stretching real experiences into lopsided renderings that might as well be called fairy tales.

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Why “Everything Is Fiction” is Both True and False

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woman in white knitted sweater

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I can imagine that many of the claims I tend to make would annoy historians, among others.

I tend to say that knowledge isn’t a matter of fact or fiction, but of honest or dishonest fiction.

And I tend to say that a conclusion puts an end to learning.

Historians, reporters and police detectives (among others), however, are often diligent in sorting fact FROM fiction, and wouldn’t take kindly to any smudging of those distinctions. They also tend to work towards a conclusive determination of events. They might argue that the question, “did this happen or not?” demands a conclusive answer in order to learn anything substantial. So right away, both of my claims will seem outlandish from their perspectives.

I myself would argue that we need to retain a distinction between fact and fiction if the context (such as law) is premised on this distinction. We have to understand the definitions and frameworks of any foreign language. But I would argue that these linguistic distinctions are themselves fictional inventions. “Fact or fiction” ‘is a fictional way of sorting events.

After all, a fact (under microscopic examination) is by itself a meaningless dot of data in an infinite sea of data points. Facts only begin to make sense when they are strung together in a narrative. In other words, we can’t understand any fact without understanding the context, which is the story that defines the fact. I can’t think of a single fact that isn’t part of an explanatory narrative, like beads on a string.

Creativity is inseparable from the collection of facts. Read More »

Coils and Spirals (story)

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timelapse of water around a whirlpool in a pond

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A while back I discovered a part of town I hadn’t known. This was odd because I live in a small city. We’re surrounded by farmer’s fields, they press upon the city walls. Farms and farms, their fumes invade every spring and summer, heralded by legions of pillaging flies, forcing our retreat block by block, week by week, until we find ourselves by August or September in the last green oasis for hundreds of pesticide-ravaged miles, which is the city park, a tangle of briars and downed trees, a green confusion which is never easy to find, perhaps never even in the same place.

I hesitated to say anything about my discovery for months, because I was afraid that the news would make me and everyone else who grew up here look stupid, misplacing, for god’s sake, an entire neighborhood.

Of course, my aunt ignored the gist of what I told her to resume arguing that we’ve not only lived here all our lives, but for all eternity. She repeated the argument daily, and said she was condemned to repeat it the next day, too. She would say time is a loop of dramas, sitcoms, tragedies, and other forms of farce, one following the other, the same characters, the same punch lines, but you’d need to have a perspective like hers, spanning billions of years, to notice that you’ve played these roles before. The theory alone was good enough to make my aunt feel trapped in a giant hamster wheel, panting for air. That was her preferred state of mind, anyways, favoring the stability of a known horror over any unsuspected risk, no matter how small, which is why the deep silos of her eyes glowed bloodshot red, and why she tirelessly scanned the world for confirmation of her worst fears, so she could blow them out of all proportion, and feel moderately relieved when her worry proved exaggerated.

It was a preemptive claustrophobia that rebounded in a momentary illusion of spaciousness.Read More »

The Problem with Guardian Angels: A Very Short and Steep Comedy

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Madelleine Elizabeth Fitzroy, my client, so to speak, died on May 12th, 2021. The obituary in the Seneca Falls newspaper was thin, but not inaccurate. “Madelleine E. Fitzroy (Sherman) died peacefully in her sleep on May 12th. She was pre-deceased 12 years by her husband Harold Mackinack “Mack” Fitzroy. They had two children, Phillip (Jenner) and Maureen (Johnson), and three grandchildren, Elizabeth, Benjamin and Dwyer. She loved to cook and enjoyed playing cards with her friend.”

That was published this morning, two days since she died.

She loved to cook and enjoyed playing cards with her friend (it should have been plural). Otherwise, that’s about it. I couldn’t have added too much more without delving into private matters. I know so much because I’m her guardian angel, and she was my “better half” as we quip up here sometimes, while waiting.

There wasn’t much else to do but wait, because she didn’t live a very dangerous life. Oh, I had to step in a few times, once when she got stung by bees, and then when she almost choked on a liverwurst sandwich while arguing with her husband. I also steered her away from courting Gene Abbott, although Mack Fitzroy wasn’t much better.

You call us guardian angels but I’m more like her reflection in a higher dimension, so our fates are tied. Tomorrow, on the third day since her bodily death — on what you call “judgement day”, but which we know as True Death — she’ll either rise like a feather or sink like a stone. But up or down my fate is tied to hers.

My job is to convince her to rid herself of all her attachments, because any extra weight will cause a soul to sink, and there are all kinds of rumors about what happens down there.

OK, I’m off to meet Maddy in the “flesh” so to speak. And I’ll write these notes as I go, hovering as it were above myself (and a little to the left), which is a skill reserved for those of us in this dimension, sorry.

There she is, already standing in line, holding the memory of her old suitcase.

Damn it, next to her are 4 or 5 elderly ladies and gents of a similar constitution, all yakkety-yakking away as if they were waiting for a bus to Vegas.

The other guardian angels already look frustrated

“… and so I said to her, ‘you think you’re the only one with troubles like that, I got a son in law who won’t even talk to me until I tap him on the head and say “what’s up, buddy?” and then he only says ‘nothin’’ and goes back to playing with his phone. It wasn’t like this when we were young”

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A Fly Fable (Which Includes the Amoral of the Story)

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Audio Recording of Fly Fable:

Act 1

Eugene yawned. He dreaded another day of banging his head against the glass.

His friend Leslie, however, was eager to get started.

“Yesterday that precocious young fly Skip said he felt the glass in the upper pane softening a little. Let’s get cracking! Today’s the day, I can feel it.”

Eugene stretched his wings and nibbled on sun-dried bacteria. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Most of the flies stuck between the storm window and the regular window were already banging away.

Eugene stretched his wing again.

His world measured approximately 64 inches by 26 inches by 5 inches. The majority of flies were banging on the glass facing the interior of the house, and not on the storm window to the outside. That’s because the curtains in the little shack were usually closed, which made the interior window into a weak mirror reflecting the trees and fields across the road. And that’s where they wanted to go.

And all memory of night, when they had banged away on the storm window facing the dark fields and trees, had by then faded into legend.

“Eugene thinks he can sit there all day and reap the benefits of our hard work!” a fly named Bixby complained, when he saw Eugene slowly crawling his way towards them.

“Yeh, but guys, how many generations of flies have been trying to get out of this window?” Eugene said, looking down again at the piles of corpses on the sill.

“Oh, listen to Mr doom and gloom!” Bixby said. “Legend has it that a fly named Boris flew out this very window and into those yonder trees!” Bixby shifted a wing to point at a shimmering mirage of a tree. “So how’d he do it? Not by moaning, but by banging that’s how.”Read More »

The Oven Mitt: A Comedy About Psychopathy, Guilt, Fascism and Death

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Oven mitt collage element psd

I feel sorry for the left oven mitt because we don’t really need it. Sometimes I wear it when it’s not necessary, just to give it a boost.

This sounds like I’m trying to be cute, but it’s a raw confession. This is no joke: I recently bought a bottle of beet juice because I felt sorry for the bottle. It was like trying to walk past a homeless dog. And I even spoke comforting words to the bottle as it languished in my refrigerator for weeks, before I finally had to throw it out, because it tasted like shit.

It makes me sick to hear how amused I sound by my own antics. But it’s the act of confession that provides some needed respite, and respite always produces a certain giddiness. That’s why priests always thought I was making stuff up in the Confession booth. As a result, I don’t think they gave me sufficient penance. But it’s confusing the way they made us worship a statue, and then believe that a tasteless wafer was the body of Jesus. They encouraged us to blur the line between animate and inanimate just as we were learning in school that nothing is real unless it can be measured, and everything is basically an automaton, including our own biological drives and patterns of thinking.Read More »