April 2013
14 posts
1 tag
Both Planter and Hunter starve in their mind, both lack a presence they can’t quite remember…you know. It is essentially the worst power, to forget, but we humans hoodwink ourselves like clockwork. In fact, when the bells ring, when we move forward, we jump headlong into another spell. No wonder we are so tired.
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The Planter is scuffling in his row of food in the Broonvike Adult Retirement Center a block down. There is a break with nature as he pulls out the sinewy kohlrabi from its hatching-soil. There is a break, but he can’t bring himself to feel it. Too hungry. The first bite. Second, calm, calm. His palms, black with soil, reveal nothing.
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But don’t get the wrong idea about her, please. This is a 4.4 Grade Average Point. This is a Runner more fleet than the eyes of any college-scout, a Dancer quicker than any choreography can hold still. This is a formidable Attendance Record. This is an SAT Score waiting to happen. This Hunter is a terrified beautiful thing. She doesn’t know how to kill. She only knows how to deaden. There is a...
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The Hunter ravenously eats. She is on the roof of the high school. The privilege of being a janitor’s daughter. Dark, drooling food. The Hunter never finishes anything she eats, but she eats to kill, so it doesn’t really matter. Mostly meat, but the occasional grapefruit feels good too, spurting its bloodred down the canyon walls of her left arm. Intoxicated with eating, always a predator. A...
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The choice of lunch. The Planter, in the cafeteria. There are so. Many choices. His cheekbones scrape against his face, he is so hungry. There is nothing for him, though. With every choice, he plants a risk. With every dizzying choice. A dizzying risk. It is as though you have to stop moving the kaleidoscope before your eyes to see the picture. But things grow dangerous when there is only one...
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The Girl stops reading as I start listening so fully, so abstractly that I am listening to myself too. Then, we both stop. We know who we are (in love with), and it’s not each other, and it’s not the same person, and it is all in 412, so we go there together. The bell rings. The pearl clicks open.
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I can only see the runes, though. So she reads to me. And for what it’s worth, when she speaks her voice is drinking wine so fresh it only makes the listener drunk.
It’s only until she reaches the end of the first chapter that I realize that she has been reading the Hunter’s annotations too. In her mind, they have been translated as easily as the German. Seamlessly, as I open my mouth to beg her...
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Over the Hunter’s book. Head bent like an altar boy, in repentance for the things I’ve seen, staggered now by what’s in front of me. The smell of poisonous insects in the air. Makes my breath catch. And there she is, walking towards me. A white dress of a Girl. A concerned mouth of a Girl. A dense fabric of a Girl.
She wants me to read to her.
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Dust is picked up on the road, her own dust. Her own backpack. Carefully, the three empty juice boxes are held in her hands with the grace of a mother holding child. Carefully, she flattens each one into a little stiff ledge of a box, and places it in the recycling dumpster like she is mailing a love letter. Like her life depends on it, somewhat, but mostly in a state of enjoyment. One, two,...
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Here’s how the Girl puts herself back in place. First, she stops moving. She stops functioning. There is only the gentle lapping of lungs, the smooth underflow of veiny matter, a tiny frilled discourse between brain and heart. There is only the echoing ruinous silence of the body. That is it, that is only. There is no love left for thought. All of it stays in the system, the tired and aging and...
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The Girl drinks a juice box in the forest behind the foreign language building. Yellow and blue leaves rub all over her skin, press into her pebbly back- the world is moving around and around her. She has three juice boxes today. The Girl doesn’t use the folding straw when she drinks; a canine is enough to puncture the side of the box, and with both hands she feeds herself lunch. The packaged...
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It’s actually “Heidi”, the children’s book. My German’s not so scrappy, and apparently, neither is hers. What makes it a difficult read is the annotations: thick runes scrawled all over the pages, indecipherable to anyone but her. The force of the Hunter’s handwriting is legendary. The book has become a topography map, almost brutally encoded. Cracking open the spine seems like abuse, somehow, but...
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So the Hunter is being played by this subtle character, and she found out about it. So I can see her face now as I think, and it is the innocent beauty of a poisonous butterfly. So I am thinking in real time, the words are in real time, and it’s all happening, all around me. So all is silent. So a trap went wrong. So the Girl turns from the window, and her eyes are wet but she doesn’t know quite...
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Chapter Two
So how will this story go? I will look up from my floor, up, up, a rocket launch of a gaze. My eyes, parted in eyelashes. Will graze the lens of right-now, that thick pair of glasses we all wear in secret that shares with us everything, that somehow knows everything. You see, I live off the grid. Unplugged from any sense of right-now, life is just playing music. Built like a door, I am...
September 2012
4 posts
1 tag
The Girl’s story was thirty words long: she was born, and reborn, and reborn, and reborn, and every day she was reborn, and she was also extremely good at science so she was enrolled in room 412.
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A boy was at the fire behind her, his head bent over the Bunsen burner. She looked at him for a moment, wondering if he was sad like usual. Then she looked at another person in her science classroom, a girl with light hair so beautiful that it was dark. Many boys thought about this particular student, so sometimes she cut all her hair off, but it always grew back more beautiful than before. Like...
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Desk nine was empty. The Girl was alone at the window, blissful at the window, touching the panes with her soft hand. She admired how the sunlight made a jewel out of her body. She admired how her white dress fell apart in such a light.
She became a little frightened when her eyes met her mirror-image. The Girl didn’t believe in her own reflection.
After all, who could be in two places at...
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He struck up a Bunsen burner and waited for the next move. The lab could wait. All of it could wait. The people in the room in front of him breathed in and out. Veins blued and blushed. Eyes opened and closed. It was only a matter of time before one of them would see something in a new way. Reflexively, this person would check themselves. That’s what humans do. When, for once, a man is shocked...
August 2012
3 posts
1 tag
The Planter had caught on fast- follow the directions, and you won’t be burned by the knowledge they hold. Knock the book off the table. Open the window. No, more to the left. Clear the way. Arrange the darkness, then get out of the way. Get out. The risk was planted, the trap struck, its seed rippling across the air. Get. Out. Now.
He himself had never taken a risk. How could blind impulse...
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By tinkering with a situation, he could make anything happen.
Anything at all.
His hands shook when he thought about it, so he kept them clenched up in fists. Latched under desks. Stuffed in pockets. It was only when the Planter was superbly, flawlessly alone that he let them shiver openly. He would sometimes try to comfort them, but he didn’t know how.
If the Planter thought too long about the...
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From his seat at desk six, the Planter saw how it would happen next..
She with black eyes and cornflower hair. Stops. Where’s her blue book?
“Excuse me, is this yours? It was on the floor” says he with two creases in his brow. They look at each other. Ordinary people. And then it hits.
The open window, the slants of light, the billowing, grainy darkness of an empty classroom…the scene is...
July 2012
3 posts
1 tag
But I couldn’t forget. Without a word, without even a glance, she had pinned me. Back broken on my seat, gaze broken on the floor. Dumbly, I had been cored like an apple by the wordless world of the Hunter. Under the dry florescent lights of classroom 412 my body cried out for sleep, cried in its oblivion for any less painful oblivion. The Hunter had pinned me, but she hadn’t finished me; I could...
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Left unattended, her body slipped into circles of neglect. She would come to school with an inkblot on her brow, a charred fingertip, one pearl button missing. Unkempt, her powers intensified. I marveled at the ways that the Hunter claimed me as she herself unraveled, for her caustic enchantments suggested all death and life and my eyes blistered the carpet as I willed myself to forget, to forget...
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Science works backwards. It’s said that atomic bonds crystallize because of a decrease in temperature, but I know that it is the other way around. Things grow cold because they have crystallized. Take people, for instance.
Men crystallize to protect themselves from judgment; eyes harden into shells, bodies cave into cages. Sidewalks harden the earth we walk on, grades harden the papers we...
June 2012
4 posts
1 tag
The reason why the Hunter conquered us so easily was because that was what she was made to do. Nature had given her a staggering sensuality, a body that was tuned perfectly to the most primal need: the need to be touched. Down to her bones, she coursed with desire. This need was animalistic, evolving within her, a catalyst that battled her until she was, at last, forced to face it.
To her, all...
1 tag
chapter one
No one was sane in classroom 412. I knew because no one was looking at the Hunter. Any healthy person in the same room as the Hunter would not be capable of looking at anything else. This is a physical certainty.
I’m not saying that she was beautiful. Here is what I am trying to say.
Her radius was roughly five miles. That’s about as big as the town we all lived in.
People five miles away from...
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In the spring of that year, I learned that a second world existed in room 412. It was possible that it had always been there. This world was at most a vague inclination of something, and at least a vague inclination of nothing. Things had been happening in the room all year, things that had stemmed from this second world. A spell had been cast over us. It was marvelous. I believe that there was...
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prologue
The people in the room looked alike. Their hands were grey and brittle, eyes delicately wasted, back teeth ground to little chips. All heads were bent over in the scrutiny of minute experiments. If I listened closely, I could hear their jaws make clenching noises. I had never seen anything like it before. No one in the room was older than seventeen. Classroom 412 was where they kept the stellar...
