An Undecided Literature

Brent Powers, Editor in Chief
Ted Laurence, Fiction Editor
Nancy Davenport. Poetry Editor





I am delighted to introduce my new Poetry Editor, Nancy Davenport, with three of her poems which I will allow to speak for themselves.


THREE POEMS BY NANCY DAVENPORT




With Thanks to Theodore Roethke
 

I dance with your ghost
to celebrate our lives.
 
Pull you from your chair.
 
Watch your hair change from
grey to black.
 
Dress you in a charcoal three-
piece and tie a Windsor knot.
 
Toast each other with glasses
turned over.
 
Listen to you sing me praises
in your perfect tenor.
 
Feel your hand hold mine
in a strong grip.
 
Finally, I can learn to waltz.
 
I want to dance on your feet.
 
© Nancy P. Davenport  10/1/11
 

 

 
Ode to Pablo

 
birds land on my head
 
peace
calm
gratitude
freedom
revelation
 
they light and fly
 
I wish for
these birds to nest
or to become
part of my head
 
© Nancy P. Davenport  12/5/11

 

 
My Take on Silence
 

to Cid Corman
 
Listen.
Listen carefully.
 
There is so much to hear
 in silence.
 
The sound a blade of grass makes being
 blown over by the wind.
 
There’s often an abundance of wisdom
 to be found in quiet.
 
A tree falling in the forest (with
 nobody to hear it)
 
each pebble of rain on my wood
 roof
 
the sound of the sun touching newly-
 washed windows.
 
Listen to the sound of one bird’s flight.
 
The echo from one piano note.
 
Shh.
Listen.
 
© Nancy P. Davenport  12/6/11
 




New writer, Sandy Valadez offers this little glimpse into the mystery of ordinary things.


THE LOCKED TRUNK

About 15 years ago I acquired from a friend a locked trunk. It belonged to one of her tenants, an elderly man named Mr. Thomas who passed away. It had once traveled, but then had been in storage for many years. In attempting to clean out my garage, I finally took it to a locksmith today to get it opened. Not too much in it- silver baby spoon, some photos, a few yearbooks. How very sad it is to see family and wedding pictures, read the messages in the yearbooks to "a swell fellow," and wonder why there is nobody to want or value these things. I always feel that sadness when I am in an antique store and there on the wall is somebody's wedding picture - how can there not be someone in the family who wanted that?!My old self would have kept these things, maybe out of some kind of respect for old Mr. Thomas, as though he would see this from the afterlife and feel happy. But my current self is putting them in the recycle bin, in my endeavor to clear out and unclutter my home and my life, not only from material objects but from old and musty thoughts that drag me down. I think Mr. Thomas will understand that, and still feel happy.





The Burning Grape gives Juliet Cook a chance to tear her hair, flame, rant and rip some skin off one of our Wonderful New Men of the 21rst in JULIET'S COMPLAINT.


Sending scantily clad photos of me to the wrong kind of men

Fucking dickhead made me question myself, feel a stress/embarrassment fusion, & merge into some sort of needy/worthless slut, wondering what in the heck I was doing sharing such photos with men I have never even met and don't know very well personally. Am I overly attention craving? – overly casual? – overly risky in some downhill ways?

I'm not ashamed of my body and I don’t desire to be overly secretive nor even particularly private; but on the other side of the spectrum, perhaps I have a tendency to share too much. One part of me thinks, if someone gets a photo peek, has sweet/dirty fun and enjoys it, then that's pleasurable AND maybe that makes me feel a tiny tidbit titillated and borderline excited for a few seconds, but then what?

After my tiny tidbit of titillation, I realize I made the asinine accidental error of sharing myself with a fuckwad. Almost as soon as he got some personal photo art of my body based tremors, his personality changed – so that means he had been faking me, pretending to be interested in me in a variety of ways, but as soon as he got a peek of the female flesh he craved and then I wouldn’t automatically send him more, he called me a bitch and an airhead and said all I have to offer is pussy and ass and if I didn’t send him more of that, then he'd make the ones I did send him public.

Would an extra special man I feel strongly about in real life feel LESS special if he found out I had semi-randomly shared pieces of me that perhaps he thought/hoped where just for him to partake of and be treated to? That is the part of the matter that makes me feel troubles and makes me feel most embarrassed about myself. I want to feel special, but not in a semi-random way that makes someone I feel deeply about feel less.

Why do I have such photos of my own body anyway? Is it because part of me doesn't like getting older and wants to have some bodily ephemera before my body parts go farther downhill (is it a good thing I don’t believe in hell)? Is it because my hot main man lives hours away and I don't get to see him/touch him every month and my body craves more attentions? Is non-physical, non-personal attention really going to make me feel much better, more interesting, or more attractive?

I like bodies and I like conversing about sex, but if by some men’s standards that makes me seem like some stupid slutty bitchy airhead with nothing else to offer, then what am I doing? Perhaps I should spend more time masturbating and talking about it inside my own mind – and then affixing it into my own poetry and art - instead of accidentally offering the wrong impression to men who might be faking their poetic interests in me. If there’s one thing I hate, it is fucking fakery.

It’s hard for me to figure out who I should or shouldn’t trust though. I’m not ashamed of my body, sexuality, or sex drive, but I don’t want to give men the wrong impression that conversing about that subject matter involves seeking them out as a real life sex partner, because it doesn’t. It involves me expressing myself – perhaps in an overly dynamic way. Do I talk/write/photograph about mind and bodily based and potentially sexy pieces/parts too much? I like giving pieces of myself to others; sharing parts of myself with others; but do I tend to share sexual tidbits too much with men who might receive/express/react differently to such content than other women do?

Tell me men – what do you creatively desire? If a woman shares her creative bodily based fusions with you, when is she taking it too far and offering you the wrong impression? What would make me turn into a slutty mistake making daughter/sister? What would make me turn into a screwball pussy whore?

Would you rather see nude photos of me than listen to me read my poetry?

If I told you my poetry was a horror porn dream would you roll your eyes?

Maybe my semi ridiculous cravings will never be satisfied. Maybe I should start some serious severing.




The Burning Grape is delighted with the return of Big Buhda, David Biederman, with two more pieces from his continuing Chronicle of Our Family. My brother has always been the best story teller I know. He has a natural capacity for enjoyment that makes him a joy to hoist a few with and hang out with and just listen to him tell it like it is.

Hi Bruhda,

I was living with Aunt Goldie and Uncle Jay at Fort Independence.  Delores and I attended a one room school house with grades 1 thru 8.  I was the only kid in the 6th grade.  All the other kids were Paiute Indians. 
Anyhow I'm getting home from school one day and here's my Uncle Jay with a steer hanging from a tree head first.  Uncle Jay was really agitated.  He says come and help him.  So we proceed to dress out the steer.  It was really cold as it was winter in the Owens Valley.  So Uncle Jay is skinning the steer with a hunting knife while I'm hanging on  the skin while he cuts back and forth slowly letting the skin fall away.  My hands were freezing and I could barely hang on because of the cold.  Finaly got it skinned.  Cut  and pulled the guts out and Uncle Jay finished dressing it out, cutting up steaks, roasts, etc.  He also made sausage that we had for dinner that night.  It was the best sausage I have ever eaten.  Tragicaly he hung the sausage up in the wood shed that night and the dogs got and ate all that was left.

Just last year when I visited Cousin Hallie she asked me if I knew that Uncle Jay rustled that steer.  Of course I hadn't.  She said that was why Cousin Jack wouldn't help him and why he was in such a big hurry. 

I'm just a damn cattle rustler.

Big Brudah




Hi Brudah,

I had two uncles that were very good to me.  As me not being welcome for long anywhere(some problem with my personality I think) I lived with various relatives like our Uncle Clarence and Uncle Jay.  Living with Uncle Clarence was always a lot of fun, he had a very positive up attitude.  Of course living with Uncle Clarence involved living with Aunt Buella also.  She was an absolute tyrant but she made the best pies in the whole wide world.  Jean, my first wife tried and tried to duplicate Aunt Buella's pie crust.  She tried for months and finally boiled it down to where if she put the shortening in the freezer before mixing the crust it turned out really nice and flaky(that little hint is free as all the principals are dead).

This story about Uncle Clarence happened after I was sent home to live with your dad and my mother.  Uncle Clarence worked for the Burbank Produce Company and his job was ordering and picking up the produce at the Central Produce Market in Los Angeles, bringing it back to Burbank, unloading it and then loading deliveries for his route customers.  On Saturdays I was out of school so Uncle Clarence would come by at 4 AM and pick me up to spend the day with him and Burbank Produce.  The Central Market in Los Angeles is one huge place and to a fifteen year old mind boggling.  The central market in the movie Irma la Duce kind of reminded me of it.  Anyhow the place is so damn busy and all kinds of people and nationalities and languages going on, what a scene.  So I would help Uncle Clarence load the truck and then off to Burbank.  We then unload and load for his customers and off to the route.  As we drove Uncle Clarence was talking constantly about all kinds of subjects but mainly women.  He went through a detailed description of the attributes of the main woman at each stop.  Being married to Aunt Buella made it a real thrill when a pretty lady would smile at him.  So happily I would accompany my Uncle Clarence through all of the San Fernando Valley every Saturday even if it did involve getting up before 4 AM.

PS: Uncle Clarence's favorite movie star was John Garfield who very famously expired while making love. After Uncle Clarence passed away Aunt Buella told our mother that she and Uncle Clarence never made love after that. Uncle Clarence sure was health conscious.

Did you ever get to know him?

Big Brudah




The Burning Grape salaciously, passionately, exuberantly welcomes the return of the outrageous Juliet Cook in three poems from her Thirteen Designer Vaginas chapbook.



Designer Vagina

I got sucked into a black hole
of sensation, tied up with pretty pink rib-
bon. I need to find out if I’m tightly bound
or decorated; intact or slaveringly masticated
bonbon. Inside my designer gift box,
am I tied down or am I a good time release
capsule? If he doesn’t deserve the present;
if he’s stuck in his desire for the past, then should I
wish to be unwrapped by someone who is wishing for me?
All these frills and frayed edges don’t come cheap

(#2 Designer V. was previously published in Barn Owl Review)

*

Designer Vagina

Why do I write mutant love letters
to men who don’t even read?

It’s like a botched cosmetic surgery
when all they want is push-up bra love.

They want a spread shot, not an avenging angel snatch
with snazzy tassels atop her misshapen meat curtains.

(#4 Designer V. was previously published in compost)


*

Designer Vagina

They don’t come in glass jars.
They’re hot shot spastic plastic.
It’s chemical. It’s like polyurethane neon green whee.
It’s not scrap metal rattling around a fusty basement.
Nobody wants your canned tomato stained grandma panties.
Shake those dead centipedes right out of your hair.
Lift those legs up & out of that rusty old root cellar.
Press release. Press release. Press release.

(#8 Designer V. was previously published in compost)


Read all Thirteen Designer Vaginas by buying Juliet Cook's new poetry chapbook, published by Hyacinth Girl Press - http://www.etsy.com/shop/myhyacinthgirl?ref=pr_shop_more











The Burning Grape is delighted to present Rebecca J. Lower. Her work for me is marked by an intimate and compassionate view, an unsentimental and often understated, sometimes humorous, presentation of the Case.




Counseling
Rebecca J. Lower


She was five minutes late for her session. Moving quickly down the center's back stairs, she stopped near the counselor's closed office door and heard talking. So, she sat down in the empty waiting area. And waited. The restrooms were in the same hallway. She figured, why not go now just in case?

There was louder talking just as she flushed the toilet, so she hurried out of the restroom without washing her hands. As she'd guessed, the counselor's door was open and the last patient strode past her toward the exit. Her counselor beckoned to her.

"I'm sorry to start out like this, but I'll need to take a call sometime during our fifty minutes." The woman patted a silver and black cellphone on the small table by her left knee. The patient nodded. "I'm sorry. My mother needed to be taken to the hospital, while I was here at work. You understand?"

The patient nodded again. "It happens."

Once, the phone rang, but it was someone else, not the nurse who'd been watching her mother. After the session was over, the counselor told her that she didn't have another patient until the next hour.

"What happened to your mother?"

"She's in her eighties and lives with me. Recently, she's started falling apart. She's had to start taking Cumedin to prevent blood clots. Then, earlier today, my mother's nurse called to check on her and didn't feel comfortable with how she answered her questions. The nurse rushed over to the house, and there was a bloot clot in Mother's leg. When the nurse called to tell me they were headed to the hospital, I talked to Mother for a second. She wasn't very clear. It's got me worried. The nurse said she'd update me in an hour; that was three hours ago."

The patient smiled. "Try to relax in the next hour, if you can. Your mom's with people who can help her. Is there a number you can call instead of waiting?"

"Yes. I'm going to call right now," the counselor said as she waved goodbye, her soft smile tensing into a line.




BIO: Rebecca J. Lower lives outside Cincinnati, OH. She does not live online. Her work has appeared in Gloom Cupboard, Outsider Writers, Zygote in My Coffee and somewhere else she can't remember right now.









The Poetry of Ken Clark shows whimsy and sadness. Here are 4 examples.


(1)

How to Break the Body


Like I was saying, those who trade the couch for bone spurs,
bruises bursting like tossed paint against the skin and muscle

—these are women or men whose feet in sunken sand on
low surf of the Gulf, and bike trails up-down Appalachia or

elsewhere, the last skateboarders left over from the seventies who
still cruise the subdivision alone on Friday nights, tuck-kneed with

a beer in hand while the hot wind whispers keep on going, son—
and the couple on motorcycles that passed by heading south two

days ago having learned the lessons of asphalt over the bland
plastered rooms with a television that sucks a bit of the soul

back into it, pixel by pixie dust one mote at a time. At some point
everybody rests. Sore feet propped up on any old coffee table like

those who gave up the pursuit of salt on the lips and hip, and they
know without knowing how standing still too long & breaks more

than just the machine that flutters—it sinks everything down under
the cushions until nouns get confused with pronouns, until you

forget yourself. The mirror becomes a parlor trick that shows
a caricature of your parents, or worse nothing but the things

you've collected in its reflection. The body a pale hollow bone.

(2)

When We Have No Money


The car whispers to the washing machine
"now is the time to stop working. They're broke

again." And preparations to keep the cupboard
stocked suddenly seem ill-planned as we've ended

up with fourteen cans of tomato paste, no rice
and a month's supply of cane sugar. Our mailman

parks down the street and waits to arrive later
in the afternoon. The mail gets separated into

three piles of junk, bills, and bills for maybe next
month. The phone's ringer gets turned off and

we spend Saturday mornings at the market
accepting each and every sample offered.

This isn't even poor: it's waiting on two nickels
to make dimes. Lower middle class self-employment

and the art of juggling ennui with expectation.
Or the fear of losing what little is left.


(3)

This is Not the House


Where things are kept out
of sight and the floors swept
and mopped daily. Instead
dirty clothes are in every room,
half-empty cups of cocktails play
hide-n-seek with the apostrophe
of love between us—an unknown
quantity of how much it takes
to feed the cavity.

Here things belong to both
of us equally most of the time.
Here, the exception to the rule
means you're angry or I'm upset
and gravity has decided to take
a break. The dishes float in the air
between us. There is angel hair
pasta in the CD collection.

Our underwear and socks
have mixed together and
are making love. See?
A tilt-shift of light when
we go to bed. The shower
is not running, it is weeping.

(4)

Conversation on the Theory of Natural Selection


With no communication skills a lizard with no tail
whispers from the porch railing to me. He says,

Son I've had a near-death coma, chewed once
by a kitten, and went round-n-round one night

while two of us napped on the big rubber tire
of your wife's car. You sat on a lawn chair and

drank canned beer with your feet in that baby
pool that the neighbor kid pissed in while y'all

were at the grocery. See? We notice these things;
like how mosquito and spider fell in love long ago

but are doomed from fucking. And when skeeter
catches the warm up-breeze and pulls itself sticky

into a stringy trap, the kindest act the spider may
do would be to kill him. We call it the long-sleep.

Not a dream or being healthy enough to walk
through walls like a ghost. The lizard arches until

the throat slides forward like a thin fingernail
to catch a moment of sunlight. He continues:

What's more is you're not out here pondering
happiness. You mad the electric is gonna get

cut off and that your car's broken down again.
How's any of that her fault? Go. Go inside where

you live. Hold her hand for an hour. All your life with
opposable thumbs and nothing to do with them?


Bio

Kenneth Clark writes poetry and micro-fiction. He grew up outside of New Orleans, and has resided in southeast Asia, and most of the southeastern United States. His work has appeared in Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), Night Train, and elsewhere. He was a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee, and is the author of two books of poetry: The Collected Histories of Water and more recently, Eggs of American Songbirds. He currently lives fifteen miles from Florida and fifteen miles from Georgia.







Ray Norseworthy gives us an epic of fatness.



Dance Lightly In Springtime
By Ray Norseworthy

Everyone in the neighborhood called her Jo Jo. She had the perfect oval face, graceful neck, lustrous blonde hair, and startling blue eyes of a movie star, and no one who ever saw her would deny that she would have been famous as a singer, an actress, or perhaps just for her breathtaking beauty if the body attached to her head had not weighed over 800 pounds. Her image would have been splashed across the covers of every glamour magazine and gossip rag. Those who saw her for the first time were often heard to remark that it appeared as if her head had been transplanted onto the body of a circus freak. None of the doctors that examined her could ever explain the bizarre phenomenon. Gail Yarborough, who lived three doors down, swore that Jo Jo’s heavenly above-shoulder countenance was a miracle from God, but that always struck next-door neighbor Tulip Anderson as ridiculous. If God had intervened, he would have given her a body to match her beautiful face.

With the exception of her hospital stays, Jo Jo spent ten years of her life sprawled on a ratty and broken-down Early American sofa in her parent’s house. When Jo Jo's parents, the Elkins first moved in, Jo Jo was still called Josephina, and not unlike a thousand other chubby girls her age, except that her face radiated that preternatural–one is tempted to say angelic–beauty. She was giggly and mischievous and she liked to sing as she wandered around the neighborhood, always asking impertinent questions and minding everyone else’s business. She had a talent for getting herself invited into people’s houses for snacks or goodies. Most of the neighbors considered her a likable nuisance, including Tulip, although there were times the pendulum swung closer to nuisance.

Jo Jo and Tulip drew much closer when Jo Jo’s mother, Patty slumped across a check-out counter in Wal-Mart, dead from a burst aneurysm in her brain. One minute Jo Jo was bugging her mother for a bag of M&Ms, the next minute she was a motherless child. She was only sixteen. Since Tulip lived alone and had just recently retired from the Post Office after thirty years, and since Jo Jo’s father, Victor was a sullen, solitary drinker who demonstrated little interest in his daughter, Tulip was happy to be around when Jo Jo needed a guiding hand. Not only was she happy to help, but it gave her a sense of purpose, something she had been searching for since her own daughter, Annabelle, had left home and moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.

Even after her mother’s shocking death, Jo Jo maintained her sweet sass and sunny disposition although if you bothered to look beyond the sunny smile, clouds of melancholy were always on the horizon. By then she was already obese, but still ambulatory and in fact, amazingly light on her feet for a girl weighing well over three hundred pounds. Her mother once told Tulip that when Jo Jo was in grade school she had dreams of being a ballerina, and Tulip remembered seeing her do surprisingly graceful pirouettes on their front lawn, but by the time she waddled into junior high she was forced to realize she would have to exchange that dream for another one. So she took singing and piano lessons and became skilled enough that when she played and sang her mother’s favorite song, Beautiful Dreamer at the funeral, the half-filled church wept in stunned silence for well over a minute, unwilling to defile the air with another sound.

While Jo Jo didn’t dwell on her sorrow, at least in the presence of her visitors, it became obvious to Tulip that she was trying to consume it. By the mid-point of her senior year she could not fit through most of the antique school building’s classroom doors. Climbing steps or stairs was virtually impossible. It was decided by mutual agreement she would finish the year at home. One of her keener disappointments was not being able to go through the graduation ceremony. The best she could do was watch a videotape one of her friends made. At least she was able to see the principal announce her as the salutatorian with special honors in music. Over and over she watched that part of the tape just to hear her name and the mildly enthusiastic applause.

After she quit going to school she rarely ventured outside. And yet every day, unless she was ill, she fulfilled her self-appointed role as the neighborhood songbird, serenading whichever neighbors were home or out in their yard with her beautiful, lilting soprano, either singing along with one of her cassettes or playing songs she knew on the piano. Naturally, she was more easily heard when the windows were open, but in Indiahoma that is ten months of the year. Five or six years went by in this fashion, with Jo Jo avidly pursuing her musical education with a visiting voice teacher and correspondence courses from Oklahoma University.

Maybe there would have been some hope for Jo Jo if her boyfriend and first and only love, Minnis Gaylord had not mysteriously disappeared when she was in her early twenties. She weighed between five and six hundred pounds then. But after Minnis left town without even a goodbye note or phone call, she gained over two hundred pounds in an astonishingly short amount of time, and broke every piece of furniture in the house that could be sat on (including her piano bench) except for her father’s recliner, which she couldn’t fit in anyway. The last steps Jo Jo ever took on her own were from her broken bed to her broken sofa.

Broken-hearted, Jo Jo went from being an irresistible force of nature to an immovable object. A few days after her permanent move to the sofa, Victor knocked on Tulip’s door and woozily pleaded for help. He reminded Tulip of a beaten dog. "I'll do what I can," she told him.

The next evening she invited the neighbors over for coffee and her famous rum cake. She was surprised to discover that every one of them had reached the same conclusion as her. Even gruff Kev Kinslow pulled off his greasy cap, scratched his head, shrugged his shoulders and said, "Hellfire, we cain't pretend that pore sweet creechur don't exist. I never seed no one sweeter’n her. In a way, she sorta belongs to all of us." Everyone said "amen" as if it were a revival service.

The neighbors of Bois d’arc Street unofficially adopted Jo Jo as naturally as if it were a common practice. It wasn't Jo Jo's charm alone or the innate goodness of her neighbors that made for such unanimous magnanimity. While it was not mentioned out loud, they all knew that Jo Jo would not be long for the world, and thus the shared sacrifices would be just as short-lived.
Even so, the most generous act toward her seemed selfish in return for her smiles and affection. She loved the huge flowered cotton dresses and tie-dyed muumuus (large enough to tent a small circus) that the neighborhood women made her. She treasured her giant ballet slippers that Tulip fashioned for her out of two pair of normal sized ones. Her neighbor across the street, Ned Filbert, who taught art at the local high school, provided her with colored pencils and drawing pads and in time she turned out richly detailed, impressionistic drawings, mostly of ballerinas, likenesses of Cher and Maria Callas, and scenes from movies like Gone With The Wind and To Kill A Mockingbird. Ned declared some of them good enough to sell in an Oklahoma City gallery. If you looked closely you could find her face in every drawing, placed on the body of a ballerina.

Besides her college courses, her restless, lively intelligence required a lot of stimulation. She kept her portable stereo on the large coffee table in front of the sofa, along with her college textbooks, remote controls, the phone, her favorite African Violet, and her drawing pads and pens. Since the coffee table was full, her magazines were spread all around her, on the other cushions, a nearby TV tray, the floor, and the end table: Cosmopolitan, Opera Monthly, Us, The New Yorker, Southern Living, Soap Opera Digest, Weight Watchers, National Geographic, and many others that were brought by visitors. Whether the subject was Fierce Females Of The Monkey World or helicopter photos of Sylvester Stallone’s wedding, she showed the same keen interest. She kept the TV turned on twenty-four hours a day, even when she was studying for an exam. Her guilty pleasure was soap operas, her favorite being Days Of Our Lives, and when she wasn’t watching heaving bosoms and hairy pecs she left it on PBS or one of the cable movie channels.

Obviously, Jo Jo’s appetite for food was as unbounded and uncontrolled as her curiosity, and for those last ten years of sofa confinement she fed it just as compulsively, with a constant gorging of snacks and junk food, an endless parade of Chinese food and pizza deliveries, and whatever her boozy father provided or she could persuade others to bring. The more she ate, the hungrier she seemed to get. Her expansion went unimpeded by modern medicine. The small town doctors could do little except to scold or offer bland encouragement. They told her that her sky high blood pressure, heart arrhythmia, diabetes, bladder, kidney, and gastrointestinal problems, gout, severe sleep apnea, and various other ailments made gastroplasty impossible.
Jo Jo tried to stop killing herself. She suffered through a variety of diets. One time she ate nothing but watermelon and boiled rice for a week. It made her so weak she passed out on the bedpan. The home-care nurse had to call the hospital for help. Tulip didn’t count the orderlies as they marched in Jo Jo's house with the espris de corp of an antiseptic death squad, shaking their heads in disgust.

Jo Jo began to call the sofa her “sinking throne.” Finally, nothing separated her mammoth bottom from the wood floor except for a few inches of flattened steel springs, collapsed wood frame, and ground-to-threadbare fabric. When she shifted weight, the bounce of a cheek would send vibrations through the floor and windows of the house like a small earthquake.
Some of the neighbors offered to replace the sofa (including the exhausted nurses and aides who tended to her health and hygiene every day, as well as the paramedics who had to remove her when her overburdened heart began to fail on a regular basis) but Jo Jo always adamantly refused and would never say why except that it had sentimental value. Even when she was in a lot of pain, before she would allow the two paramedics and six firemen to lift her onto the makeshift gurney (actually two gurneys welded together) she extracted a promise from all concerned that no one violate her private space by tidying up or touching her things, in, on, around, or under the sofa. Of course everyone respected her wishes, even though no one could figure out how sentiment or a sense of privacy could possibly be attached to such an ugly, ruined piece of furniture.
One afternoon over a cup of coffee, while Jo Jo was in the hospital with a severe bladder infection, Ned Filbert voiced his suspicions to Tulip that her odd behavior had something to do with the absconding of her no-account boyfriend, Minnis five years before. “He practically camped out on that sofa with her for two years,” Ned said, telling Tulip what she already knew. “One time I saw her hug him and I swear I lost sight of him. It was like Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Maybe that’s what happened; maybe he’s lost in her flab somewhere.”

Minnis’ departure devastated Jo Jo, but it gladdened many others. Ned figured Minnis had hightailed it out of town one step ahead of the cops, because it was well known he was dealing steroids to the high school football players. It was an oddly acquired avocation, because Minnis was a fidgety diabetic who weighed no more than a hundred and thirty pounds with lead weights in his jean cuffs. As scrawny as he was, he put on a tough act, and he was a felony shy of being a hoodlum. Once when Tulip brought up the subject of Minnis and what he had planned for the future, Jo Jo confided to her that when she met Minnis she was a blushing virgin. She blushed when she told her that, and her rosy cheeks were so bright the room lit up. "I don't know about the future," she said with a giggle, "But Minnis said if he moved somewhere else he would take me with him even if he had to use a forklift."

On her refrigerator she had a poor quality instant photo Minnis took of her on the Ferris wheel at the County Fair (at the highest point of the ride) and you’d swear the blonde pageboy, pearly grin, and sparkling eyes belonged to Doris Day minus the freckles. The first time Jo Jo showed it to her, Tulip couldn’t help but wonder how they got the Ferris wheel to go up in the first place.

Jo Jo met Minnis at the hospital when she had gone in for an unavoidable colostomy. He was being treated for a hernia. When he heard singing, he came across the hall to help Tulip and the nurses sing happy birthday to her. Jo Jo was twenty-three. According to her, it was “love at first laugh.” Minnis was a cornball hick who loved to tickle people, even strangers, with a big guinea feather he wore in his cowboy hat. He tickled Jo Jo’s leg when she was dozing and love came giggling up out of her like a chemical reaction. She thought Minnis bore a slight resemblance to James Dean with Clark Gable’s ears and it helped things along that Minnis liked big, soft, agreeable women. No one knew if it was a fetish or a case of extreme opposites, but the neighbors, or at least, Tulip tried to be glad for her. When he disappeared, the collective sigh of relief brought down a blue norther.

“I don’t have any problem loving myself–at least what’s inside me,” Jo Jo told Tulip one summer day out of the blue. They were watching the TV weatherman give out repeated tornado watches. Outside the windows the sky was dark and full of boiling thunderheads. Tulip wondered if a tornado could lift her. “I just hate the thing,” she said. That's what she called her body. “Wish I could cut it off and just live life as a head.” Picturing it made Tulip chuckle for a second and then she cleared her throat self-consciously. “I don’t think that would be much fun. Instead of size 86 my dress size would be less than zero. I’d lose my 74J boobs, though. I’d have to get implants.”

Sometimes when Tulip knew she was suffering on a new doctor’s torturously unreasonable diet, she said to hell with it and went to MacDonald’s, bringing back a half-dozen quarter pounders with cheese, a couple of fish sandwiches, three fries, three large cokes, and four pies, two apple and two cherry. The person at the drive-through window would sometimes say something about her having a large family. In fact, Tulip had no one at home except for her cats, Louise and Muffin. Bringing Jo Jo food always embarrassed her and she rarely took a bite in front of a visitor, not even Tulip. She would wait, regardless of her hunger, until she was alone. Tulip’s kitchen window had a side view of Jo Jo’s living room (the blinds were always open), and there were times when she saw her violently stuffing food into her delicate mouth. On more than one such occasion she saw her wipe tears from her cheeks.

In her more peaceful, contemplative moments, Jo Jo loved to view the outside world through the oversized picture window that looked out on the shady street. When she opened her eyes in the morning (if the windows were open, sometimes her violent snoring woke Tulip), from her sunken throne she could queenly view the neighborhood’s morning rituals: Ned, out to pick up his morning paper and yell at Scruffy, the Yarborough’s Irish Setter, who delighted in dropping a warm pile in his yard of silky St. Augustine. Gail, who lived next door to Ned, doing her comical fast walk with tiny dumbbells up and down the block to stimulate her quadruple-bypassed heart. Gail’s husband, Matt, leaving for work in his pride and joy, a ’57 Thunderbird convertible. Harley Simon, next door to Jo Jo, singing like Merle Haggard with a sinus infection as he wielded his water hose, leaf blower, or his latest lawn implement while his wife, Ima worked in a flower bed. Tulip, on the other side of her, watering her petunias or cannas, or cleaning the windows, or feeding the mourning doves, chickadees, and bluejays that flocked to her front yard. Or across the street next door to Gail, Kev, when he was home, warming up his rig or dragging out his old Harley Davidson motorcycle to take apart for the thousandth time, accompanied by the awful clamor of that heavy metal music.
In the evening Jo Jo could watch the sun set over the hazy Muddy Boggy River valley, visible between neighbor’s houses and beyond the foreground of the Interstate highway and the Wal-Mart shopping center down the red sandstone hillside—unless Kev had his big rig parked in front of his house. In that case most of the view was taken up with the giant advertisement for Red Ball Freight on the side of his truck.

Winter was the loneliest time for her. There were fewer visitors and the neighborhood was deprived of her voice. Sometimes Tulip played cards with her and Victor. She slept a lot. But for the rest of the year, the glory of each day was when she played her opera cassettes and sang along. To try to cheer her up after Minnis' disappearance, Tulip bought her a small electric piano that could be moved within her reach, but she seldom played it. She wore out her former teacher’s old cassettes and then joined an opera club where she received thirteen cassettes for the price of one. She knew many of the great operas by heart, and could even sing them in Italian. Maria Callas singing arias from La Boheme was her favorite. And she preferred women singers like Maria, and Leontyne Price, Beverly Sills, Anna Moffo, Birgit Nilsson, Jan Peerce, Marilyn Horne, Lily Pons. She did have a soft spot for Richard Tucker.

“How can you not like Pavarotti?” Tulip asked her one day, about a year before her death.

“He seems too happy,” she said. “Too pleased with himself, but with a twinge of guilt on his face. Like the Cheshire cat with a canary feather stuck to the corner of his mouth. He’s a lightweight.”

Smiling at her unintended irony, Tulip simply nodded. Being a lightweight was an indictment in Jo Jo’s book when it came to performing. There were few who possessed the necessary gravitas. Maria was tops. Jo Jo loved movie musicals, too. Her favorite was Oklahoma. Her favorite scene was when Curly and Jud sing “Pore Jud Is Daid.” She insisted that Jud Fry was misunderstood and that Curly had a mean streak.

“I don’t get it,” Tulip said to her one day after they watched the movie on videotape. “Jud burned people’s barns. He was the personification of black-hearted villainy.”

“He could have been saved if someone had just paid attention to him,” Jo Jo said. “That’s what causes most of the meanness in the world: neglect.”

Jo Jo did a double-take when she saw Tulip blinking away tears.

“Tulip, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, dear,” Tulip said. “Just in one of those moods today.”

She winced. “Is it...I mean, does it have anything to do with your daughter?”

Tulip was ashamed to tell her that seven years ago when her lovely, talented Annabelle died of a heroin overdose in Los Angeles, her body ravaged and weighing only 97 pounds, what she had really died from was neglect. Tulip called it “tough love” when she cut her off after she quit college and moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Annabelle practiced reciprocal tough love by neglecting herself to death.

Tulip shook her head and composed herself. “I’m okay now, hon.”

Jo Jo knew what it meant to be neglected, too, even though Tulip paid her as much attention as she could, and most of the neighbors came around in a kind of instinctive rotation. But at the end of the day (literally), the neighbors were just her neighbors. They had their own lives to lead. The aids and nurses that came every day were usually genial and polite, but not the kind of company to satisfy Jo Jo’s curiosity and need for conversation. She was starved for real companionship, but she never complained, not even about her neglectful father.

Victor collected disability checks because he had been badly wounded in Vietnam, but Fred Simon, who lived on the other side of Tulip, said the main reason Victor went out to the workshop in the garage every day (where the dust on the saws had been undisturbed for years), shut the door behind him and guzzled whiskey was because he had lost faith in the human race after Jo Jo’s mother died. Until that day he had been a true believer, Fred said. Victor thought prayer and positive thinking and constant reinforcement and discipline and love and forbearance and trust and hope and ceaseless optimism and a bristling gung ho attitude of never-say-die, never-give-up would overcome all obstacles: his gimpy leg and fondness for booze, Patty’s poor health and chain smoking, his daughter’s detestable urges to eat and eat and eat.

But no amount of optimism or positive attitude ever made any difference. After Patty expired on that check-out counter in Wal-Mart, Victor spent the rest of his days soaked with booze and rebuking God for taking his wife away from him, as if his complaining could persuade the almighty to bring her back to life. Fred joked privately to Tulip that he was tempted to tell Victor not to waste his time, God doesn't give refunds.

Tulip constantly reminded Victor that he had a daughter who desperately needed his support. But the poor, disillusioned man never listened to anyone except Jack Daniels, and on August 13, 1985, the day Ronald Reagan proclaimed it Polish American Heritage Month, he gave up what was left of his ghost, and Jo Jo was physically alone in the house for the first time in her life. While the funeral home was embalming Victor, women from the neighborhood and local churches came over to cook and clean (except for Jo Jo’s place on the sofa). Tulip supervised with a steely eye. With the aid of four husky male nurses they managed to dress Jo Jo in a long, black tunic. A too-chatty beautician named Lois piled Jo Jo’s wispy blonde hair high on her head. Nancy Snodgrass, who lived on the corner, sprayed her with fancy perfume. May Filbert gave her a bouquet of mixed Asiatic lilies to hold and there were other floral arrangements around the vase of ashes when it was brought over. Jo Jo looked so lovely Tulip went back to her house and got her camera. Without telling Jo Jo how she was framing the shots, she took several from the neck up, only two that showed her whole body.

Preacher Bob held a brief service in the living room (mainly talking about her father’s modest war record like he was the second coming of Audie Murphy) and then Tulip and the others finished the day’s sad business at the local cemetery where Victor was buried next to his beloved wife. Jo Jo, of course, had to stay behind, but some of the clucking church women kept her company.
After the hurried burial on the hot and cloudy summer day, the Filberts dropped Tulip off and she went next door to check on Jo Jo. She was sitting in the dim light alone with the colorful lilies strewn in the floor around her feet.

Tulip switched on a lamp. “What are you doing?” she asked Jo Jo, realizing instantly how stupid a question it was, but it was the kind of question people ask when they don’t know what else to say.

At first Jo Jo didn’t answer, though she lifted her eyes and smiled at her. Finally she said, “I shooed those chatty gals out of here. They were getting on my nerves. To tell you the truth, Tulip, I’ve been trying to figure out what I was going to do with myself. My nearest kin lives in Missouri and they don’t even know me. None of them bothered to come to the funeral.”

“There’s plenty of time for that,” Tulip said. “You just need to…” She drew a blank. “You need to...I mean, there’s plenty of time. Know what I mean?”

“I guess,” she said. “You’ve been awfully kind. All of you…my neighbors. Y’all seem like my real family somehow. Even grumpy Kev Kinslow. He brought me two cases of Slimfast. I feel so guilty being such a burden.”

“Helping you is not a burden, it’s fun,” Tulip said.

Jo Jo closed her eyes and began to sing. Her eyelids and impossibly slender throat fluttered in unison as her husky trill rose from deep within and kept climbing octaves until she sounded to Tulip’s untrained ear very much like the great Maria herself. Unlike when the slightest bodily exertion caused her to wheeze and huff, whenever Jo Jo sang there was never a hint of a struggle for breath. It was as if the magic of her beauty above the neck extended to her voice, which at times seemed to emanate from somewhere else, almost as if she were lip synching. Tulip had no idea what she was singing in Italian, but there was so much sorrow and oddly enough, joy in every note, she could translate with her heart and when Jo Jo stopped, both of them had tears in their eyes.
“Beautiful! Tulip said. "Magnificent!"

The mailman delivering the mail shouted, “Amen!”

Jo Jo beamed. “I wrote this one myself. The music is a little derivative, I know, but the lyrics are autobiographical,” she said, beaming like a true diva.

When Tulip asked her what they meant, Jo Jo just shrugged and said, “Oh, just the usual clichés. I’m no Sondheim, that’s for sure.”

Tulip picked up the tossed flowers and then bent down to hug her. Her whole body shook and as Tulip kissed her wet cheek she could almost hear Jo Jo’s heart struggling to beat beneath the oppressive waves of fat.

“Oh, Tulip, I miss Minnis so much,” she sobbed. “I know it’s wrong to say that on the day of my daddy’s funeral, but I can’t help it. He's the only man I ever got a chance to love.”

“That’s okay,” Tulip said, patting her shoulder, knowing exactly how she felt. It had been seventeen years since Jim had abandoned her and eleven year old Annabelle and moved to Seattle to marry a woman he met at an electronics trade show in Las Vegas. Time had stood still for the last seven, frozen by the phone call from the Los Angeles police notifying her of Annabelle’s death. Before those two events, dreams were easy to come by.

Tulip laid the flowers on the arm of the sofa. “You can’t help the way you feel. Anyway, your poor father died a long time ago, really. They just had to wait to bury him.”

“This house is paid for. I guess I can stay here for a while longer. Maybe I can have that operation if my health improves."

“I hope so, Jo Jo. Do you need anything? I can spend the night.”

“I’m okay, Tulip. That Prager girl is supposed to come by with some movies. But would you mind emptying my bag? The nurse’s aid is running late and I’ve been drinking too much coke.”

Tulip didn’t mind. While she was in the bathroom she felt the house shudder. When she got back to the living room Jo Jo was holding a large feather in her hand.

“Remember this?”

As Tulip replaced her bag she admitted that she didn’t.

“It belonged to Minnis. He used to tickle me when we made love. You’re the only person in the world I can talk to about this, Tulip.” She had a surprising twinkle in her eye.

“That’s okay,” Tulip said. Jo Jo knew Tulip was more open-minded than most of the locals. “But I have to admit it’s hard for me to think of him in a good light. It was a terrible thing he did to you. Leaving you high and dry without so much as a kiss my foot.”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” Jo Jo said. She stared up at Tulip, her surrogate mother.

Tulip stood there with her arms folded, her heels aching in the ridiculous pumps she’d dug out of the closet to wear, her eyes still burning from Ned’s cigar. She could tell Jo Jo wanted to talk, so she sat down at the opposite end of the ratty old sofa.
“Can you keep a secret, Tulip?”

Tulip nodded and quietly released a sigh.

“I killed him. I killed Minnis.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Tulip’s heart fluttered and she instinctively looked around to make sure no one else was there.

“It was an accident. We were making love here on the sofa. Right here where I’ve sat for all these years.”

Tulip put up a hand. “Jo Jo, I don’t know if you should be telling me this…”

“Too late now, don’t you think?”

Tulip shrugged. Her heart sank like Jo Jo's sofa.

“Minnis had this weird thing he liked me to do. Apparently there are a lot of guys who like it. Oh, god, this is so embarrassing!” She struggled to take a deep breath. “He liked for me to sit on his face and sort of smother him. I know it sounds ridiculous but something about it made him happy. I mean, real happy, if you know what I mean.”

Tulip’s face felt paralyzed, as if shot full of Novocain. She was trying not to visualize what she’d just heard.

“I guess he suffocated, Tulip. He must have passed out and then he suffocated.”

“Lordy, lordy, lordy,” Tulip said, shaking her head slowly from side to side. She felt nauseated. “But what did you do with him?”

“Daddy and I dragged him out the back door and into his shop. All I know is Daddy said he dug a hole and buried him.

"In his shop?'

"Out back of it in Mama's little garden spot. Instead of a garden, Daddy planted those Euonymus shrubs that got so big. I don't want to think about it, but I heard his power saw going for an hour or more. I had to put tissue in my ears to keep from hearing it. When Daddy came in he had blood all over him and he said if anything happened to him, not to let anybody go out there."

"So Minnis is buried there?"

She nodded her head. "I kept some of Minnis' stuff here under the sofa. Including this.” She twirled the feather in her hand. “And this.” She plucked something from under a magazine.

It was a wallet. She handed it to Tulip. Inside was a driver’s license. Behind the filmy plastic the cretinous smirk of Minnis Gaylord stared back at her.

“I guess I kept it in case I ever wanted to confess. I’ve also got his watch, class ring, and knife. Look, his money is still in his wallet. Forty-three dollars.”

Tulip didn’t know what to say so she didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t know I was going to confess to you. You don’t hate me, do you, Tulip?”

“Of course not, Jo Jo. Why would I, it was a...(she started to say a freak accident) it was just an accident! Oh, my God! I’m in shock. This is very strange. It’s so hard to believe. I mean, I believe you.”

“I would have told the police, but Daddy said they'd probably lock me up and throw away the key! And Tulip, I guess I was easy to persuade, because the idea of everyone knowing what happened was more than I could bear. I felt like a murderer. I never thought I’d tell anyone, not even you. I feel bad about Minnis’ family, but they had disowned him anyway. Except for the football team, I’m probably the only person that missed him.”

Tulip put her hand up to her forehead. It felt clammy. “But why tell me this now, after all these years?”

Jo Jo patted Tulip’s leg with her hand that was as thick as two bibles. “I had to tell someone the truth. I’ve been thinking of Minnis a lot lately. Guilt, I suppose. And if anything should happen to me and someone else finds his stuff, no one would know what to think.” She shrugged. “That’s why I was thinking, if you don’t mind, could you get rid of his things for me, all but the feather? You can have the money.”

"No, no, you keep the money.” Tulip took it out of the wallet and handed it to her. Jo Jo took it with a sigh and stuck it down in her ballet shoe.

“Just get rid of that stuff somewhere where no one will find it accidentally. Don’t want any dumpster divers to find it.”
“Okay, Jo Jo.” Tulip gave her what she hoped was an understanding smile. “I'm sorry if I acted...well, you know; this kind of knocked me for a loop.”

“It's okay; I don't blame you."

"Jo Jo, I'll say this much: you have no reason to feel so guilty. You didn't kill him–at least not intentionally. If you did anything wrong, it was in not reporting it to the police. Victor should have known better."

"I panicked. And Daddy was drunk and got all paranoid. He convinced me not to go to the cops. Not that I'm blaming him. I knew it was my responsibility since I was the one who sat on him."

Tulip sighed. "It was a long time ago, Jo Jo. Just put it in a little bitty box in the back of your mind and don't ever open it."
"I think it’s time I had a new sofa, Tulip, don’t you?”

Tulip nodded and her smile thawed and expanded. Yes, it was definitely time.

Jo Jo was only able to enjoy her new sofa (at her insistence she paid for it herself from her father’s insurance money) for the next seven months. A few days after her thirtieth birthday Jo Jo made her last public appearance. She waved to several of the gathered neighbors as the six paramedics lifted her into the ambulance. She couldn’t speak with the oxygen mask on, but Tulip could see in her widened blue eyes that she was afraid. Tulip squeezed her hand and blew her a kiss.

Jo Jo died later that day from a massive heart attack. All of her other organs had already shut down, smothered to death, Doctor Keller said. Almost everyone from the neighborhood came by the hospital, and two days later, every single person on the cul de sac attended her funeral. Following her wishes, she was cremated along with Minnis’ feather and her ashes were scattered in the back yard under the shrubs where Minnis' body lay. She left Tulip all of her cassette recordings, including the ones she recorded of herself, as well as her writings and drawings. Tulip cherished these things almost as much as if they were her own child’s. On one of her cassettes was the gorgeous aria Jo Jo sang acappella to her on the day she confessed to killing Minnis. She left the handwritten Italian lyrics and their translation taped to the cassette.

Il mio corpo è quello di un scherzo di natura,
(My body is that of a freak,)
Ma il cuore che batte all'interno di me
(but the heart that beats inside me)
è il cuore di una ragazza sola
(is the heart of a lonely girl,)
che ha perso la sua madre, poi il suo amore,
(who lost her mother, then her lover,)
ed allora perso anche se stessa.
(and then lost herself.)
La mia vita, temo, sara' breve.
(My life, I fear, will be brief.)
Ho avuto molto risate
(I have had as many laughs)
come i sospiri o lacrime.
(as sighs or teardrops.)
Ma non sono stato fatto per questo mondo,
(But I was not made for this world,)
né qualsiasi altro a che possa dire.
(nor any other that I can tell).
Mangio e mangio e mangio. A casa, da sola.
(I eat and I eat and I eat. At home, alone.)
Non posso muovermi, non posso neppure alzarmi in piedi .
(I cannot move, I cannot even stand up.)
Ma desidero ballare, desidero correre;
(But I want to dance, I want to run,)
Desidero camminare fuori e guardare le nuvole.
(I want to walk outside and watch the clouds.)
Invece, sono prigioniera della carne.
(Instead, I am a prisoner of my flesh.)
cantare è un dolce incantesimo;
(Singing is sweet enchantment.)
Posso cantare di amore, di primavera,
(I can sing of love, of springtime,)
canti dei sogni e delle speranze,
(sing of dreams and hopes.)
dimentico questo corpo per un momento
(Forget this body for a moment)
e ballo leggermente nell'aria.
(And dance lightly in the air.)










Here is another offering from L'Andreacchi which showcases her unblushing romanticism at its best. This story first appeared in the Literateur Magazine


Don Juan of Seviile

By Grace Andreacchi



He was the most beautiful old man I have ever seen. They say the face of vice is ugly, but he was himself the living proof that it need not always be so. I cannot tell you his precise age - he must have been three hundred years old at the time we met, but one's first impression was of a man not much over sixty. There was a vigour in his cold eye, a statuesque immobility about his person that belied his real age. On closer acquaintance one became aware of the thin, porcelain skin, the bloodless condition of the lips and hands, tinged with the pale violet blue of northern skies. He was still very upright, with a good figure, a little above the middle height, broad in the chest and narrow at the hips under a grey jerkin; his white hair was long and abundant, tied with a black ribbon. The eyebrows, too, were black, startlingly so given the dreadful whiteness of his complexion - they spread like the antennae of some fine-lined black insect, lightly coated with the pale pink dust of scented face powder. The voice, when he spoke, scarcely rose above a whisper; one sat closer, inclined one's head in an effort to catch that which sounded as if from far away, as the echoes of thunder that roll upon the mountains, tremendous in themselves but dim to us who are far down upon the plain. In this distant thunder one heard, nonetheless, a nameless sweetness, an ineffable charm that spoke volumes of poetry - in the ordinary pleasantries one seemed to hear other words sounding like musical ghosts behind those actually spoken, words such as ‘moonlight’, ‘love’, ‘embrace’ and so on.

          I had come to him on a most delicate mission - an elderly aunt, a sister of my grandmother, lay dying in a Venetian convent. Once the name of Caterina Mazzarò had been renowned from Vienna to London, and south to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. For over thirty years she had played the part of prima donna assoluta in the great opera houses of Europe. The King of Bavaria had proposed marriage to her; the young Duke of Devonshire had sent ten thousand roses to the theatre at Covent Garden to mark her reappearance there after an absence of three years; it was said that the old Empress of Austria, when she lay confined to bed by her last illness, had wept because she could not go to hear la Mazzarò, and that the diva had heard of it and had left the theatre precipitately just as the audience were taking their places, to appear at the bedside of the dying sovereign and sing whatever it might please Her to command. When my aunt’s voice began to die she sold her jewels and went into the convent. The Holy Sisters of the Child Jesus were not held to a very strict observance of the monastic ideal; I had visited her on numerous occasions throughout my childhood. From my earliest years she had shown a certain partiality for me, and in the end she sent for me and entrusted me with a letter which I was to deliver to the legendary Don Juan Tenorio of Seville. I was twenty years old and had just completed my studies in Germany. You may imagine how my vanity was flattered to be distinguished in such a manner by my marvellous aunt. My sorrow at her coming death, in which, at any rate, I did not readily believe, for no man at twenty believes in the reality of death, life is too much with him, blowing about his head like a noisy gale, so that he fails to hear the imminent silence of death (that will only be heard when the first fury of the gale has somewhat abated; later it grows to such proportions as to drown all sounds and furies in its own white silence) - my sorrow, I say, such as it existed, was mitigated by the thought of a journey to Spain, a country I had never seen, and of an encounter with the man whom my aunt's distinction and death had thrust upon me.

          I took the route over land, for I had some business of my own to attend to in Austria. At Paris I received word of my aunt's death. I pushed on towards Spain with renewed purpose, harbouring, I think, some unspoken fear that any additional delay might bring upon me a visit from the dead. Thus I managed to cross the Pyrenees with the tramontana, just as autumn swept down upon the countryside like a wave of gold and the great white sleep of summer gave an audible sigh and rendered up its spirit.

          In Seville I made inquiries of the Governor and determined that the Cavalier Don Juan Tenorio had retired to his country estate which lay another half day's journey outside the town. I rode across deserted countryside, through a grey mist of olive groves whose leaves drank gratefully of the light, silvery rain. The castle stood alone, a smudge of gold on a hillside. It was larger than I had expected, and much of it lay in ruins. One tower had fallen completely, its bleached bones open to the sky, but three others still held their heads high. On every side the olive trees had gathered like ballet girls in serried ranks, their fingertips poised above their lacy skirts.

          We sat in an upper room, before a good fire, but it did not seem to warm him, he had always the same bloodless white face. He gave me to drink of a strong wine, nearly black, such as they make in that country, and I could see it take its course down his translucent throat, whence it vanished into the aperture of his lace collar. There was a simplicity about his manner that put me at once at my ease, although I had arrived trembling with excitement and an odd kind of fear. I explained my mission; I placed the letter, which I had carried all the journey from Venice next my heart, on the little marble table between us. My explanation he received in silence; the letter he took up and examined without opening, then replaced it on the table. It was written on ivory-coloured paper, and sealed with dark red wax; the blob of wax had the appearance of a fallen petal that had happened to affix itself to the letter. My aunt had always been possessed of this singular artistry in little things. The arms of the Order of the Child Jesus were clearly visible in the wax: a bear upon a field of stars, a reminder of St. Ursula Bonifacio, the founder of the Order.

          ‘Does she expect an answer?’ he said. His eyes were very dark, without any light in them at all, as if cut from some black, heavy stuff such as velvet or lead.

          ‘No, indeed. I'm afraid - she is already dead.’

          ‘When?’ I gave him the date and circumstances of my aunt's death as well as I was able. He listened closely, his eyes on my face, then there was a settling, not quite a sigh, about his whole person, and a little smile teased at the corners of his bloodless lips. ‘So... Caterina Mazzarò is no more,’ he mused. ‘She thought of me in the end, did she? Oh - witch, witch, charming little witch!’ With a quick movement of his hand he tossed the letter, which I had been at such pains to guard, into the fire. Without thinking what I was about, I sprang to my feet and attempted to draw it out, to the accompaniment of his ribald laughter. Too late! It was quite burnt.

          ‘But don't you want to know what it says?’ I asked desperately. I certainly did.

          ‘I know quite well what it says. She asks me to forgive her.’

          ‘For... breaking your heart?’ I hazarded, breathlessly. I felt I was on the verge of a great romance, that I was about to hear a tale that would point the way to love in all its disreputable glory. Again he laughed.

          ‘You are her nephew?’ he said.

          ‘Great-nephew.’

          ‘No matter. You have just the same simplicity of soul - un coeur simple. Listen to me, young devil. People will tell you it is men such as I who lead others to perdition. Completely untrue! It is the simple souls like that witch, your aunt, who are responsible for most of the trouble in this world, and ten parts out of ten of damnation in the next. Let them once get hold of an idea and they never let it go. You suppose I was in love with your aunt? What nonsense! I don't fall in love with beautiful witches like that - I take them whole, like bonbons - so!’ He lifted an invisible dainty to his lips and appeared to swallow it in one bite, followed by a loud smack as he kissed the air. ‘Did you never wonder what Caterina, of all people, was doing in the convent - this coeur simple, this prima donna assoluta? Why did she not retire to her palazzo to collect emeralds and handsome young men?’ I had often wondered, but hadn't the faintest idea. The black feelers of his eyebrows rose upon their white field in a comical dance of inquiry. ‘Sister Caterina,’ he said, giving the first word more derisive emphasis than I would have believed possible. ‘Where is she now, the good sister, the holy sister? God is not so easily fooled as all that,’ he said.

          ‘But what had she done?’ I said, uneasy in my mind. I was beginning to be sorry I had ever come on this pointless journey. The letter had been destroyed unread, my adored aunt held up to ridicule - I was afraid to hear more but unable to resist the temptation to ask.

          ‘What had she done?’ he echoed. ‘With her jealous tricks, her evil spite - she drove away the only creature worthy of love I have ever known.
 
          ‘I had been in Venice some time, pursuing a life of pleasure. I was no longer in the first energetic flush of youth; on the contrary, while I retained a sufficiency of good looks and physical power to attract women, in secret I was often tired, and nearly always bored, even to the point of contemplating my own end with a certain morbid satisfaction. I had reached the age when a man discovers his inability to prolong the pleasures of the senses, not so much by virtue of the body's weary reluctance, as by a deadly satiety in the soul. There is a sameness, a numbing idea of endless repetition that, once the greedy appetite of youth is past, gives rise to a terrible nausea. One turns, then, to ever more diverse pleasures in the effort to experience once more that fierce desire, and the delight in its achievement, that alone give moral fervour to life. I turned to women ever younger, to children, girls or boys, it was the same - moments of agonized pleasure, close to madness, in the fear and anguish of these children, quickly replaced by the old satiety. I had recourse to the violent pleasures of the homo-erotic, but these I found to be ultimately uninteresting, for in another man one finds, as in a mirror, all that one hates most in one's self, and out of this hatred arises a homicidal lust - and this too palls.

          ‘Caterina was my mistress at the time. I was attracted to her by her art and intelligence, her culture as well as her beauty. Among the hundreds of singers, musici, actresses, acrobats, charlatans and clowns who found employment in Venice, she was in the front rank. She was young then, perhaps twenty-six or seven, with a pale white skin and a long, strong throat like a column of marble. She had been the mistress of two dukes and a cardinal when I took her away from all of them. Also her lady's maid, a pretty little thing from the Abruzzi, the two downstairs maids, the little girl who brought us butter and eggs from the country, a fine young laundress as strong as a horse, and of course the baker's wife as well. No harem is complete without la Fornarina. I suppose it is the flour that keeps their skin so very white. You are wondering how I kept them all happy. Ah, but that would be telling...

          Caterina's taste was legendary. It was she who began the vogue for bathing in red wine, which she would then invite her numerous admirers to drink. She set the style in everything from the acciaccatura she tossed with a little roll of the head, delightful to see, to mode of dress - she was the first to appear in public with her breasts swathed in nothing but black point de Venise. She served pearls among the oysters at her suppers, and raw meat to those whose manners she found too rough. She kept a little dwarf, a black Spaniard as talented as he was ugly, who accompanied her on the mandolin. In the evenings she sang after supper for a crowd of young men. She would tease and torment the dwarf, box his ears and pull his thick hair until the tears streamed from his eyes, declaring the while to the company that she was certain he was less than a human creature, and had no real feelings such as our own. Then, in compensation, she would take the dwarf on her lap and allow him to fondle those lace-encrusted breasts, even to lavish kisses upon her, pressing his thick, ugly lips to her throat and face, for she delighted in contrasts - it was one of the marks of her genius. Before an audience, be it at the theatre or in the salon, she knew the value of ugliness and knew how to make use of it to point out her own beauty. I have said that she was intelligent, and it was in this taste for contrasts that her intelligence most showed itself. She had an imagination for juxtaposition that continued to surprise me - and, you see, I was very much in need of surprise. I did not realise how far that imagination would take her, although I should have done, the signs were perfectly clear.

          ‘For already her star was no longer the brightest in the firmament. There was a new soprano in Venice that winter, a young castrato who went by the name of Farinelli. He was not yet the great figure he was to become, but it was immediately apparent that he would soon eclipse every other singer in both virtuosity and pathetic power. I had seen him on the stage several times: he was a slender, good-looking boy, very fair, with dark, expressive eyes. His stage manner was not good - he stood as still as a statue while he sang, but once he began there was no resisting the beauty of that voice. He might have sung upside down and in his nightclothes and it would not have made the slightest difference. He was said to be simple and unaffected, of an upright and virtuous character. He was of good family, and his unnatural condition was said to be owing to a childhood accident. Perhaps in this case for once it was true. Most lies eventually turn out to be true. That he was modest was later borne out by his remarkable career at the court of Spain. He left Venice suddenly, before his engagement had run its course. It was whispered that someone had tried to poison him.

          ‘It was during the Carnival, at a masked ball given by the Princess of Santa Croce, the same who was the mistress of Cardinal Mazzini. Caterina went as a beggar boy, in a pair of blue silken breeches she smeared with dirt from the hearth; her white calves were bare, and on her feet were blue silk slippers ripped open at the toes and adorned with diamond buckles. Her chemise was trimmed in rich Valenciennes lace, slashed into tatters that fluttered most becomingly about her arms and breast. Her face was artfully smudged with dirt under the eyes and upon one soft white cheek. She carried a plate of ruby-coloured glass for alms, which she took care to crack first. In this state of sumptuous misery she went among the guests, begging alms and bowing low whenever she received anything. Soon the plate was full of gold and silver coins, trinkets, and strass diamonds. I myself was in a domino, for I am never effective in any role but my own. As usual, I was bored - the music seemed to me a horrible din, I felt no inclination for dancing; despite the dainty offerings I found I was neither hungry nor thirsty. The déguisements, aside from Caterina's coup de theâtre, were mostly obvious and uninteresting. I stepped out onto the balcony for a breath of air.

          ‘The great canal lay glistening in the moonlight, lurid where lit by the torches of passing gondolas. Behind the tall, thin windows of the palaces, the lights of the carnival were burning. I could hear the drunken voices of revellers going by in the dark, the water lapping incessantly at the quay, the grey chumble of rats under the pilings, the brittle tinkle-tankle of a clavichord within the house. The night air was damp, thick, like a soft, wet cloth laid over the face - it smelled of wood smoke and the cold, dead smell that rises from the bottom of the sea.

          ‘While I stood thus in solitary contemplation, a gondola of luxurious appurtenances drew up just below. I saw a footman in red livery and gold lace step out, then give his hand to a lady. She was dressed all in white - white dress, white fur mantle, and a white mask trimmed with ostrich feathers. Her form was tall and very slender, and she moved with a pale languor that, appearing out of the moonlight and water as she did, suggested a nymph or spirit. I felt an odd frisson, an unaccustomed excitement took hold of me. In a moment she had vanished inside the house. I went in to join the revelry, determined to find her out.

          ‘We danced the minuet together. She was an exceedingly fine dancer, moving with a lithe grace and agility that were modified by a majestic carriage. She must be some great lady of the stage, I thought, and I racked my brains in an effort to determine who she might be, but among the many actresses, singers, ballerinas, and cocottes of Venice I knew of none so tall, straight, and slender, with so white a skin and such long-fingered, tapering hands. For a while I entertained the suspicion that she might be en travesti, but I soon had to abandon this as an impossibility. I have much experience in such things, and she had not the feel of a man - I don't know how else to put it. When one takes the hand of a woman there is an instantaneous movement of the spirit, felt as a sudden quickening in the flesh. Never had I felt it so strongly - at once I was on tiptoe with desire. Yet she had not the scent of a woman about her. She was colder, somehow, her hands were chill despite the hellish heat of the ballroom; she hadn't the warm feline stink that rises from the cracks and crevices of female flesh. Still less did she smell like a man. Her odour was glacial and serene, like the white lilies that bloom at Eastertide and are called after Our Lady, madonna lilies. Her voice, too, could never have belonged to boy or man. It was rich and sweet, with a pure, ringing tone such that I understood at once how a blind man too may fall in love. I was certain she must be some famous singer, but all the musicians in the city were intimately known to me. A visitor, then.

          ‘Soon I had her alone on that same balcony above the glittering canal. I lavished kisses upon her hands, as cool to my burning lips as a white sorbet. I took her in my arms and kissed her mouth; she was curiously acquiescent, bereft of the usual feminine tricks, the delicate writhings and raillery that constitute a woman's strength. She received my ardent kiss with - curiosity is the only word for it. As for me, this mouth, which has feasted on every delicacy in the catalogue of saints and sinners, which has gorged itself on rosy lips as on stuffed partridges; this same mouth, which remembers still a mother's kiss, a drink of pure water, the holy Eucharist; which has defiled itself with blood, excrement, tears and which I had thought completely versed in all the possibilities appertaining to a small, nerve-ridden cavity by means of which we speak, sing, pray, spit, suck, whistle, lie, abjure, swear, betray, wheedle, coax, shout, lick, bite, or even kiss - this organ was merely astonished.

          ‘It was something new, this. I was eager, very eager, her mouth opened easily, perhaps, as I have said, too easily, to my command, for a woman will always put up a fight, if only for the pleasure of surrender. My tongue was arid, thirsty – and I was surprised by a deep-sounding resonance there. I once had occasion to examine a violin from the hand of the great Stradivarius, and, as I took the shining creature in my hands and let my fingers play over the light and dark surfaces of the wood, I experienced that same sensation - of a limitless beauty sounding somewhere just out of reach.

                    “So that's how you do it!” she said to herself. And then to me, “You are Don Juan Tenorio of Seville, are you not?”

                   
“At your service, Signorina. But I'm afraid you have the advantage of me there. Won't you please remove your mask? Your voice is so lovely - and it seems somehow familiar to me. I'm sure if I were to just get a glimpse of you...”

                    “Not tonight,” she said. “It's quite impossible.”

                    “But when am I to see you again?”

                    “Do you really wish to see me again?”

                    “Desperately.”

                    “Then be at the Café Florian every morning at six.”

                    “Every morning?”

                    “I won't be there the first morning, nor yet the second, but perhaps on the third or fourth if the weather is fine.”

                    “Come with me now,” I said, pressing her close, lavishing kisses on her beautiful throat.

                    “What you wish is quite impossible,’ she said, with an air of perfect tranquillity. Armed for the habitual struggle, I was unprepared for this, and before I knew what was happening she slipped from my grasp and vanished into the crowd.

          ‘I was there the next morning well before the appointed hour. There was no one but an old priest, probably a spy for the Inquisition, and a very young man who sat reading a newspaper. It was still dark - the stars were glittering over the domes of San Marco. Slowly the rosy light of day crept from its bed in the sea ever higher into the sky. The last of the night's revellers went by in the piazza, their voices and footsteps swallowed up by the great crescendo of morning light. I waited thus for an hour and then returned home in an evil temper. This scene was repeated in all its particulars on the second day. On the third day I had no sooner taken my seat than the young man with the newspaper approached me and, inclining his head respectfully, addressed me in a high, clear voice which I recognized instantly as that of my companion at the ball.

                    “I see I shall have to introduce myself after all,’ he said. ‘I am Farinelli.”









Here is a bit of memoir from my brother, David Biederman, one of the best story tellers I have known.


The Razor Strap

By David Biederman

Hi Brudah,

We were all getting cleaned up to go somewhere. I was dressed first so I decided to go out to the vacant lot to see what was going on. Well I walked right into the middle of about 6 guys having a dirt clod fight. I took a few muddy shots and then decided to get out of it and head home. When my Mom saw me she really flipped out. She was about 6 months pregnant with you and really didn't want to be bothered with me. So she drags me into the bathroom where Tap kept his RAZOR STRAP. He shaved with a straight razor and sharpened it with that handy strap. He used to let me watch him shave and I really thought he was going to slit his throat some day. Anyhow back to the RAZOR STRAP. Mom proceeded to beat the hell out of me with it. And then I started laughing and Mom flailed all the harder until she broke a finger nail and then started crying. That was the last time.

Your,
Big Brudah








The Brilliant Carol Novack, editor of Maddhatters, offers this mad hatfull of pain.


Demonica
By Carol Novack


Monica's my name. Don't think of that Monica, though. My game plan has nothing to do with sucking up to "great men" to imbibe their power and flatter myself they care for me. I live in the underground; reside in the virtual dreams of great men aspirants, the ones who equate sex with power. The wives, with their fallen breasts, the ones with the breasts that droop to their heels one year and rise to their chins the next, well, they owe me. Their men will never be great. I suck the embryonic power out of them. The women are as relieved as my corporate clients.

There's a great man aspirant now, chatting with the receptionist Very large he is, taking up all the pixels on my screen. Well done makeup, green-grey eyes, dark hair with silver temples, Romanesque nose, the eyes the right melange of cool and warm, a hint of erotic charisma, aspiring CEO type, number 666, sent from Hallyburton's HR office; our favorite client, Hallyburton.

Number 666 saunters into my plushly appointed office, back straight, arm extended, prepared to shake virtual hands. What, are you kidding? You don't shake hands with haute hookers. Hah! There's a tidbit of martini blubber round his middle, but I can tell he's been frequenting the tanning salons and I'm past such trifles as blubber. Double chins make me swoon. This number's sort of cute, predictably so, but bearable, without pig features; looks as if he's prodding 40, wears wedding band. A slight hint of reflective melancholia in his emotional aroma . . . ah, it's nearly intoxicating, along with the plump lower lip, implying sensuality.

"Take off your shirt and let me see what you have," I say, "Ducky duck, you're a fine example of the species, you obviously work out 7 days a week and I love those assertive nipples – just the right shade too. So what's wrong with Mitzy? Ah, but you're not here to discuss her now, are you, darlin, so remove your pants."

Great man aspirants are always obedient. It never fails. At least the first few times, they do whatever I tell them to do. After four or five sessions with smartass me, they want Shirley or Lulu, aficionados of Harlequin romance novels. The men panic after my recitals of deviant literature. Sooner or later, I'll quote Barthelme, Parker, Gaitskill, Borges, Ballard or Burroughs. Depends on my mood. Never Rand, Mailer, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, that's for sure.

The man looks puzzled, then vaguely frightened. I want to swallow him.

"So spread your legs, my darling dove," I coo. "Lie down on the virtual red rug there, costly Turkish rug, imported, tasteful, elegant. I never let janitors lie down on it, not to worry."

He lies down, spreads his legs, a comforting sign of early surrender. I gaze at the painstakingly molded thighs and the pulsing worm between them, as the hungry little creature gains in stature. I can see the great man in the making and I know he wants me to take the worm in my hot red mouth. I don't.

I stand above him, my legs straddling his body. He begs me: "Let me see them."

"What?" I ask, innocently, "What is it you'd like to see, my dovey dove?"

"I want to touch them. They are so big, like mountains I want to climb with my tongue and fingers; like modest Everests, they are. I am but a poor climber, disarmed," he tells me. Sure.

"You are but a cliché of a man," I respond, with feigned fatigue, as I stroke my precious cavern through the mesh steel miniskirt I wear to work. Fucking irritating uniform they make me wear and these idiot phony nails, violet this week.

"Plead with me and recite a poem. Perhaps then . . ." I add.

He recites that Wordsworth poem about daffodils.

"You're going to have to do better than that."

So he tries T.S. Elliot; switches to Ezra Pound when I yawn vociferously. Then attempts the obvious: Shakespeare, some sickening sonnet or other.

I yawn again, without restraint. "I don't want to see your godlike face, with the chin dent, or hear you quote poetry I've heard before, so many times. You have no imagination, I say, only that expressive writhing creature you want me to consume. Lie on your back, so I can play with it, perhaps . . . as I wish."

He reverses himself. I gaze at the brown mounds of his buttocks, as he waits. He waits to be touched some way or other, even if it pains him, he must be touched.

He turns his head to look at me when he hears the sound of the chains.

"Don't look at me, not now. Maybe later, if you're good." You should know what happened to Orpheus. You did go to Yale now, did you not?

I check the rule book. I always forget the routine, though I actually know it by heart; I do not own it, simply play it. I'm supposed to undress loudly, with obscene moans, but slowly, and I'm supposed to slap him when he gives in to the impulse to see what I'm doing. I'm advised to anoint my skin with aromatic oils, telling him precisely what I'm doing. Then, when he can no longer bear the suspense, I'm to tell him he qualifies for a second mortgage at extremely low rates. After that, I'm to tickle his cock with a feather pen.

Yes, I know it's tacky, but it's only a script. Once in awhile, I don't follow it, like now. The man is crying; I don't know why. He is sobbing without restraint. There is nothing to take from him. There is nothing I can do but wrap myself around him like a birthday gift.

originally published in Cellar Door Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2 - Winter 2005




Here we have the amazing Kristin Fouquet (you've seen her stunning photographs and short fiction at Full of Crow and elsewhere on the web) in a very sexy look at child bearing.




Furtive Noon
by
Kristin Fouquet

Being thirty-nine weeks pregnant, Marie shouldn’t have been on the ladder in her daughter’s room. Not wanting to wait the six hours until Stuart returned, she gripped each rung with bare toes then rested her belly on the top. She searched the overhead storage space above the closet. Rummaging through a cardboard box of mostly pink infant clothes, she found it: the baby monitor.

Feeling the metal grooves press into her bare soles, she slowly descended the ladder sideways. Holding on with one hand, she used the other to simultaneously carry both components of the monitor while supporting her underbelly. Once safely on the floor, she glanced over her shoulder. Stuart could deal with the ladder.

She wobbled to the nursery. Regarding the cool blue hue and nautical theme, she let out a peaceful sigh while rubbing her belly. Cautiously, she lowered herself to the floor then searched on all fours for the outlet. Finding it, she plugged in the transmitter and placed it atop the nightstand. With a deep breath, she hoisted herself upright. After turning the monitor on, she cranked up the sailboat mobile above the crib. The first few notes of Christopher Cross’ song “Sailing” began to play as she left the nursery.

In the kitchen, she rested the receiver on the countertop. Flipping the switch, the green light appeared, confirming the batteries were still charged. The tinny notes of the instrumental came in loud and clear as she gazed out the window over the sink.

“Cock.”

She distinctly heard the word “cock.” A male voice came through the receiver. An intermittent static obscured the entire sentence, but she definitely heard: “my cock” “hard.” Marie gasped. A woman’s voice came over: “my mouth will suck” “drink your come.”

She quickly carried the receiver back to the nursery and searched the room. Through the window over the nightstand, she could see her next-door neighbor behind a lace curtain. With only a few feet between the houses, Marie could see Lauren Simon talking on her cordless phone, naked. Marie’s jaw dropped. Whispering, “Lauren,” she noticed the long, phallic antenna of her neighbor’s phone. Marie moved away from the window and flipped both components of the monitor into the “off” position. With one hand over her mouth, she watched the three sailboats circle the air over the crib.

*

Marie twisted a strand of her long auburn hair as she tried to explain the problem to the man on the other side of the phone.

“It’s over five years old,” she said.

He asked, “What model do you have?”

“It’s the Guardian Angel Deluxe, model number GAD23.”

He let out a small laugh. “Wow, that’s an old 900 megahertz analog model. Apparently, your neighbor has an equally old analog cordless phone.”

She asked, “So, what do I do?”

“If you buy one of our newer digital monitors, you wouldn’t have this problem.”

*

The transmitter and receiver sat coupled together on the nightstand. Both little green lights glowed like a pair of eyes. The receiver emitted only a low fog-like sound. Marie was on her knees tying the little strings of the crib bumper to the thin slats. She flipped her wrist, revealing the time on her watch- nearly noon. Her heart raced with anticipation as dampness saturated the crotch of her cotton panties.

As the static and voices entered the room, she dropped the little blue strings and closed her eyes. “lick that cunt” “tight, wet cunt” “oh yes” “baby.”

Marie reached under her maternity gown. Below her protruding stomach, she felt under the elastic band of her bikini-cut cotton panties. Her vulva was engorged. Pressing her middle finger to her clitoris, her orgasm was instantaneous.

*

Marie read 11:55 a.m. on her watch as she fingered the phone’s curlicue cord. Her mother’s voice was enthusiastic.

“I bought the most adorable blue seersucker suit for him. It even came with a little bow tie. Size 6-9 months. Perfect for Easter.”

Glancing at her wrist, Marie’s heart raced. 11:58.

Her mother continued, “I think you’re going to love it. Oh, and Aunt Alice is opening up a saving’s account for him.”

12 noon. Marie felt a gush of wetness between her legs. “Mother darling, could I call you back in a little while? I’m tired.”

“Oh my Marie, I’ve been rambling on. I’m so sorry, dear. Rest. Take care of our little man.”

Supporting her belly, she shuffled quickly on slippers to the nursery.

One hand fumbled under the band of her panties as the other turned on the receiver, just in time to hear, “fuck you until” “drop.” Marie came.

*

Marie studied her full nude body in the mirror. Stuart cupped a breast.

He said, “It’s so heavy.”

His hand lowered to her round belly. “I’ll be so happy when he’s out of you and we can have sex again.”

Giving him a suggestive smile, she reached around and touched his crotch. 

“The doctor said it’s safe. I know we’ve never done it before, but what do you think about talking dirty?”

Stuart took his hand off her belly and removed hers from his crotch. “We’ll wait to be safe. I find dirty talk contrived and distasteful. Why would we need it?”

Her smile faded. “I’m not sure.”

*

Marie used a blade of the scissors to cut through the thick, transparent packing tape. She lifted the digital monitor from the cardboard box. The glossy cover showed a sleeping baby and a self-assured mother. Placing it on the nightstand in the nursery, she smiled as the transmission came through from the old monitor. Between the usual static, she heard: “bend over,” “grab that ass,” “fucking,” “behind.”

Marie’s nipples hardened against the soft beige cotton of her maternity brassiere. Grabbing the crib railing with her left hand, she used her right to pleasure herself. Feeling her orgasm coming, her eyelids fluttered- focusing in and out on the sailboat mobile. Moaning, she closed her eyes, imagining little triangles on the inside of her lids.

Her eyes shot open suddenly.

Panting, Marie rushed to the master bedroom and stuffed both components of the analog monitor into the bottom drawer of the dresser, covering it with sweaters. Frantically, she reached for the phone and pressed the familiar numbers.

“Stuart Bowen,” he answered.

Through heavy breaths, she said, “Baby, it’s time.”

***








The Burning Grape presents Juliet Cook in a poem that makes strange.



a sweet tart duck with head lobbed off

by juliet cook

silver grommets melted down my wings;
heavy gullets dripped me. a kinky snake hole
fangulation crumbled. hard water drops
from my brocade guts. i need a new mouth
to suck from these strange tornado feathers.

scissor shock glitters me.
i don’t want to be flaccid
or placid or plastic coated.

writhe me up & down; bite mark me.
drizzle fest me with frenzied kiss dips.
electrify and quench me with warm lips,
heaving hips, guttural shark swim through
my netting; teach me new chews, swallows, sweets.











The Burning Grape welcomes Grace Andreacchi via Angelic Messenger.



DAYS OF GRACE



The days of grace are coming

The days of sorrow cannot last

Already on the horizon

great galleons, treasure-laden

are driving golden clouds before the mast



Already the sky is a new colour

never once seen by man

The wind from the west blows sweeter

Ruffles your hair with a loving hand



The birds have fallen silent

listening for what is about to be

At night the stars are falling

like handfuls of quiet confetti into the sea



Now is the time to watch

Take a deep breath

Take my hand

The days of sorrow are nearly ended

The days of grace are at hand







The Burning Grape welcomes Tammy Kitchen, a writer of dark brilliance, a pearl in formation.



Smoke

by

Tammy Kitchen

Everyone knows cigarettes kill. Before they kill, they make you sick. Asthma, emphysema, lung cancer. You start smoking and pretty soon you’re in the hospital with a tube down your throat and a morphine drip sticking out of your arm. Maybe not so bad once you get the drugs. Like the high you get the first time you hit a cigarette, only it lasts a lot longer. The rest of your life, even.

So you go to the store and you pick up your smokes for five bucks a pack. You try to light up as soon as you walk out the door, but the wheel of your Bic blisters your thumb because it takes six tries to get the damn thing to flame and finally the smoke circles your head and clings to your hair and the people around you scrunch their faces at the stink of it. What do you care? You just smile at them with your coffee and nicotine rotted teeth as they veer and look the other way. If you could get close enough, you might even breathe on them, see if they choke. Ah, they don’t matter. You’ve got plans they could never dream. You’re going to be big one day just like that Bill Gates guy, only it’s going to be for something way better than computers. You just know it.

That stringy-haired girl just moved in down the hall from your apartment. You watch her through the peephole in your door, her ass swinging in pink shorts. She always drops her keys when she pulls her door shut and she never bends her knees when she picks them up. You grin and your breath is hot on your fingers and you think she knows you’re watching and that’s why she drops her keys. You wait until she goes into the stairway. You pop a mint and grab your cap, the knitted one with the ear flaps that your mum made for you last Christmas. It’s too warm, it feels like your hair’s going to catch fire, but you need it for the plan.

You imagine you’ll brush up against her in the street and she’ll ask you about your hat because it’s odd and it’s summer and you’ll tell her your mum knitted it for you and you always wear it when you take her out to dinner once a week. The girl will giggle and tell you her name and it’ll be Sally or Lucy or maybe Francesca. You’ll say you forgot Mum’s new bridge tourney starts tonight and you’ll invite the girl to take Mum’s place at dinner and you know what happens next.

So you follow her down the stairs and out to the sidewalk and she almost gets lost in the crowd, but you find her again because she drops her purse and has to stop to pick it up. Her cheeks are still up in the air when you pass by and your hand brushes her hip just as she begins to stand and she almost loses her balance, but not quite. You wish she had because if you had caught her, rescued her from falling and managed to get a little squeeze in for good measure, you could have skipped dinner all together.

As it happens, she doesn’t fall and you don’t catch her, but you do bow a little and apologize. You take off your cap and wring it in your hands to show your sincerity and embarrassment, but she doesn’t say anything. She just turns her face from you and walks away. You follow. She walks faster and you reach for her arm. She pulls away and runs into a café.

You want to yell into the window, run your fist into it, follow her inside, but instead you round the corner into the alley and wait. You put your hat back on because you’re tired of holding it and you lean against the wall and smoke a cigarette, then two. You’re about to light a third when you think maybe she went the other way, but just then she comes by and her eyes are puffy and red and she’s moving fast. She’s looking around, but she doesn’t see you until you grab her and she drops her purse again. You pull her into the alley and cover her face with your hand because she’s wheezing like your mother does in her bed, in her new room at the hospital, with tubes sticking out of her arms, on morphine and grinning in her sleep.

The girl’s head bangs against the brick wall and you press yourself into her. Your fingers squeeze hard on her arm and your face is close to hers, close enough for her to choke on your breath. You open your lips, but not your teeth and

-bitch, cunt, whore-

you want to bite her nose, sticking up in the air all obscene, but you don’t. Instead, you rub your fingers together with her hair between them. It’s coarse and sticky, not soft,

-slut-

she wears too much hairspray and it smells so bad you gag. The lighter comes out of your pocket, in your hand, and this time it flames on the first try. Still pressing close, her eyes bulging now, and the stink of her hair, you hold the lighter close to it. You breathe in the sulfur and close your eyes and your thumb burns from the hot metal, but still you hold the lighter to her hair. She whimpers and jerks against you. You pin her tighter against the wall and you think you might run out of lighter fluid, but then her hair catches. She screams through your fingers on her face and you lean your head in closer to smell the sulfur, but you forget about your hat. The ear flaps touch the fire and you scream, too, and jerk back and fall on the ground and think about living on morphine.