Tag: short story

The Sounding Tree

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes16 Comments

quick submission to Madison-Woods Friday Fictioneers…thankful for a task I can get my mind around!  Please join, newcomers.

tree

As close as he would ever come to stillness, the boy, lying here, slit and dying at the base of this strange tree.  How could he have?  Only one simple task, one clear instruction that might have spared them all.  Any boy could do it, why not he?  Why must he never be capable, never succeed, always fall short?  How he’d run, as the marauders swooped down, how he’d raged through the woods, torn through the brambles toward the sounding tree.  How could he have missed it, faltering here, now, cut from ear to ear, staring at the shofar of alarm, secure in its nook?

Corrosion: Friday Fictioneers August 3

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes16 Comments

Home from vacating for a couple days.  Free-write 100 words prompted by photo as follows (thanks to Friday Fictioneers / Madison Woods instigations/inspirations.  Please join)

The trouble is corrosive.  Is rank.  I do not say what you think I say.  I do not say what you say I say.  I hear you wrong.  Rot.  You love taking pictures of ruins.  I love the effects of rust.  On iron.  On rock.  The meal of erosion is slow.  Don’t yell.  Things erase when we turn our heads.  Eyes such enormous editors.  My ears confuse wind with anger.  What you think is running water is something else.  Is sobbing.  Are tears.  Words are constructed of contexts.  Are hints and withers.  What accrues is corrosive.  Is gentle.  Is fierce.

N Filbert 2012

The Incident

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes24 Comments

buzzard

The Incident

The evidence was stark and slim.

A photograph of akimbo’d limbs against a whitened sky.  A dark bird.

The detectives were at a loss, many losses, and uncertain of how to proceed.

They called in “the expert,” a wizened old crackpot retiree who still seemed to capture things no one else could.

He was sent for and trundled his bulk up the sidewalk later that day, grimacing and cursing his way to the station.

Huffing and grunting, he picked up the picture between leathered forefinger and cracked swollen thumb.  He squinted.

“All I can tell you boys, is that it sho’ ain’t no murder.  A murder involves always  more than the one.”

N Filbert 2012

be sure to join us at Friday Fictioneers – photo prompted flash fiction

Where Am I?

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

Where Am I?

“Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we’re forever meeting people who have watches, very seldom people who have compasses.  We always need to know what time it is (who still knows how to deduce it from the position of the sun?) but we never ask ourselves where we are.  We think we know…”

-Georges Perec-

 

            Feeling displaced, it seemed like the time had come to ask into it.

Judging by the quilted charcoal sky, this must have occurred in the hours between night and day or that malleable period in which what’s bright becomes the dark.

I discovered that I was uncertain as to where, indeed, I was.

 

I cast about, but given the diffuse and myopic atmosphere, my bearings were difficult to draw.

My question just grew longer.

 

Within the nondescript what seek we to describe?

 

My whereabouts.  For even about can provide a circumference of radial lines, fashioned carefully.

It seemed to me that I must have been partway.  Having begun some time ago, though ill-remembered, I must have set out in some direction, making this a point along that plane or trajectory, on the way to the someplace I am going.  But where?  Whereto?  And wherefrom?  (the brain adds wherefore?)

I’m uncertain.

Most people do certain things at certain times, so time must be a deed, I guess.  Needing neither to eat, nor to relieve myself, it must not be too early or late, nor a mealtime.  The dim and the greys, they confuse me.

The ground being solid, but whether a road or a path or a field lying fallow, I could not say.  A fogging has thickened and the chalky gravel pierced with grasses and weeds does not provide location.

The best I can wager is midst.  I appear to be in the midst of things:  of my life, of this land, of my journey and day (or evening) – beyond this it just is not clear.

 

By the look of my hands and my feet – we say “character” – it would seem I am no longer “young.”  Hair has grown dark in places, I have visible veins, and numerous scarrings and wrinkles.  I never expect them to grow and they haven’t for many years, yet they can’t be called webbed with their linings, nor aged.  The skin is tanned and supple, not spotted, the knuckles aren’t gnarly or constricted.  Improvement or beauty I do not anticipate, but it appears I am not quite undone, not decrepit.

I’d guess I am “over the hill,” as they say, but still in reach of my prime.  A certain flair or panache, but the style of the action requires more will.  And attention.  Strong, yet not powerful.  Active, not quite agile.  Competent, not convincing.

 

I sit down.  The weeds and the grass are grey-green, grown in tufts.  The gravel is packed and yet dusty.  The stones are not worn but all small.

I trace my palms over the surface.

My legs feel the pain of my back.

I rise up.

I would find it much easier to lean.

I step forth.

 

I smell no particular smells – almost rain, dusty remnants, a particular quality of air, but what?  (From where?)  Neither salted nor briny exactly, I must not be near to the sea.  Not fuelly or floral, musty nor pale, I scratch off city and countryside, forests or plains.  And not fertile.  The air is just as you’d imagine it wherever the sky meets the land – in the absence of obvious effects (are they causes?) – just me.

 

It hasn’t grown lighter, nor darkened.

I breathe.

From the sound of it (silent) and its fullness, my lungs must be doing their job, performing their roles without much complaint.  As also my heart and my brain, liver and plumbworks.  I think I may have heard insects or birds, but the distance so vast I’d fail to call the sense knowledge.  And I mentioned I cannot see far.  These conditions.

 

I’d say it’s uncanny – to find myself here – but that’s exactly what I cannot find.

 

I reach out.

I step forth.

I breathe in.

 

Where am I?

 

If my memory served, as to where I’d last been, such info would greatly assist me.  But the best I remember is “home,” and that has been so many places.

I spread my arms and slowly spin, they cut the air like freedom.  I feel like a ray of light or drop of rain, something passing quickly, staying still.  As if I belonged…

belonged just here…

but where…

…am I?…

 

(How long do I have?)

Character Sketches, cont’d…”The Jealous Husband”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

A Series of Stories of Love, by a Husband

 

Searching for subjects, I began writing the stories of my wife and each of her lovers, as I imagine them, having all dissipated before I was truly “on the scene.”  Still they are here.  Current as histories are.  Not mine (of course), or only when I want it to be.

 

The stories go like this:  with exotic names and muscular bodies; wealth and infectious intellects; and of course style…whatever things I lack I desire…they all possess in spades.  Like spontaneity.  Torture and foreknowledge = learning from the past.  I’m no gardener.

By which I mean to say I lack certain skills possessed by each lover, each “other” – from youth to culture and their quality of independence coupled to vocation (so I tell it).  Spontaneity (I feel like I’ve written that before, being a creature of habit and repetition, of comfort, of fear).

 

The stories play out like this in my head and I’m hoping to inscribe them here – thus trapping them outside, cutting off munitions and supply – exorcising them like literature, something benign and contained.  Easily misplaced, forgotten or overlooked.  A measure of control and indifference – not the “these are flesh of her flesh, she has ridden their bones” instead a collection by Grimm or some sacred treasury – a set of frights and fairy tales to engage as horrid dreams and improbable possibilities.  Child’s play.

 

Which bothers me.  For if I’ve learned anything from writing, it’s the profligacy of error.  The obsessive-compulsive drive to adjust, rearrange, endlessly edit and correct.  And never end.  Stuck in a locking swirl, just so, very like unto a toilet – to revise and submit, revise and submit, then regret.  The opening of doors.  An idea expressed becomes thing, and a thing is let loose in the world (the real one).

 

The stories are like this – embodiments of emotions and fears in an effort to be real, meaning actual, which is usually banal, like she says, but not enshrined.  Words work as predictive preservers.  Untamed and so tangled.  I’m unable to let them go.  Thus they spawn compendiums – thousands upon thousands of hallucinatory nights (in shining armors) – perpetrating my bride, but not against her will, which sets in motion.  Multiplying false realities, now true  (being actual).  Histories – open to view, corroborations or denials, like the facts.

 

So I keep on writing these stories, like this, with the yearn to expunge, to transform doubt into trust by its emptying.  But keep finding it full, to the brim, and still filling.  In the absence of reliable witnesses, (they all being human and involved in the tales – inherently duplicitous), like words.  Serving double purposes, like bridges made for both coming and going, and never knowing which.

 

Life is like this, which is why I write these stories, in this way, feebly uncertain and wildly provoked.  If it didn’t go down like I say, how was it really, then?  Oh I see!  So the stories keep changing, suited to their purposes!  Revision, submit; revision, submit; then regrets.

 

If more persons knew, would the truths wriggle out like perspectives?  My idea in writing these tales – make something concrete to chisel and sculpt.  Together, perhaps.  As a team, like this, retelling the stories according to need – like lying – so we’ll never be sure.  And then I’m also causing effects.  This is what happens in writing these stories, the truth, with all of its possible endings.

 

I digress.  The stories are like that – my wife and her loves – digressions, diversions and facts.  I’ll get to their bottoms and be done with them all!  (I hope, if they don’t get to her bottom first!).  My stories of anger and loving, my stories of panic and lack.

Friday Fictioneers – July 6, 2012

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes23 Comments

landscape

I labor steady, slowly, surely.  Block after block, hewn from my ruin.  This hapless task at hand.  Construct a habitation of words.  I use whatever I come by, wherever I happen to be.  With an eye for the concrete and a feeling for sky.  I’m a weedy terrain, dried up from AA and a searing of spurn.  No smoke, no rain.  I’ve been looking for signs or instructions:  there are none.  Or far too many.  So I set out simply to make.  A noun, a verb, an adjective; pasting with participles and pronouns.  Tedious, thankless, alone.  I build, it crumbles.  It cracks, I evolve.  Not much of a shelter, but it holds.  And remains, opening up to the night.

Thanks for Madison Woods et.al. and the continuous production of prompts for this weekly challenge and exercise: Friday Fictioneers

The Underlying Theory

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

The Underlying Theory

What we found on his desk was a drawing.  A very lightly penciled sketch of a woman from stomach to throat, as if seen from above to the side, one arm flung out in the viewer’s direction and her breasts provocatively displayed.  Underneath were the words “underlying theory.”

Our work was to plunder his study.  An author, famed for fiction and poems and writings on art, had died suddenly, and his wife had contacted us to go through his things, evaluate its worth and preserve for posterity.  There were boxes of manuscript pages, notebooks and loose-leaf, letters and typescripts, recipe cards full of quotations.  The library was extensive, each book filled with scribbles and markings, a signifying system of importance and reference for use in his various projects.  His mind was displayed like a trail left in woods.  Here the path to food, here the one to water, here the building nest, here the safety hideout.  It overwhelmed us.

I had written numerous critical studies on this man and reviewed professionally most of his books.  He’d written extensively in philosophy and aesthetics, with compendiums of writings on particular artists and particular works.  He’d produced over a dozen literary novels and twenty or more books of poetry.  He was prolific and known for the depth and acumen of his thought, the cavalier ways he used language, and the breadth of his interests and knowledge.  No one knew he made visual art.  None would have tagged him “erotic.”

I wondered what this drawing might “mean.”  What did it refer to?  Was it drawn from a picture?  An image from memory?  Was the subject herself the underlying theory, or was it something about representation?  Desire?  And what theories did this mean to evoke or give rise to?  His wife did not recognize the sketch – not the body, nor an artist her husband might have copied – and it was interestingly tucked beneath blank open sheets, at the middle of the desk – the ones always ready when he came to compose.  It was worn, wrinkled, as if indeed, it underlay everything inscribed above it and served as inspiration or focus, an impetus to his work.

I’ll note that the form seems composed, not a doodle.  It appears to be representative.  No one knows of him having a model or lover, in fact no other drawings exist from his hand.  Perhaps he had need of a form to describe, an image to imagine, some desire to propel.  The figure is finely proportioned, both busty and lithe, fleshy yet thin and shaped like the currents of rivers.

I’m not certain what draws me to this.  In an office literally stuffed with fine books and odd trinkets, paraphernalia of printing, and stacks of diaries and drafts.  Among paintings and stones and figurines of the Buddha, historical writing utensils, family photos and legal documents dating throughout his life.  There is so much to uncover and know.  But “underlying theory”?  That grabs me.

As I’ve mentioned before, this author was a reader of depth.  Fiction, philosophy, poetry, science; criticism, essays and cultural studies.  There are tall shelves of monographs of particular artists, but nothing gives hint to this sketch.  I am struck by this rendering – baffled by image and text.  An erotic drawing is always of interest, all other concerns of this man are abstract.  It beggars the biographers “who/what/when/where” yet the text writ along the arch of her back stirs me in a different direction.  “Underlying theory.”  What the hell?  What’s it for?

A theory is made for a function, something “underlying” proposes a cause.  This drawing, these words must explain something, but what?

Is it cosmic?  Like what drives human vocation is desire?  Or epistemological?  Ethical?  Aesthetical?  Metaphorical for apprehension of form?  I can only guess at this point but am open to ideas – I’d love to find some consensus for the book I’m contracted to write.

I ask you – how would you piece this together?  I’ll share a scan of the drawing and request that you submit your hypotheses below as comments.  I thank you so much for your thoughts.

Sincerely –

Friday Fictioneers: “The Brambles”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes10 Comments

Another failure…I nearly doubled the word count ’cause he wouldn’t shut up.  Probably shoulda aborted it, but here it is:

raspberry

The Brambles

He was painting a picture for us.  “Now this takes significant time to develop,” he said, “but I promise it’ll be worth the wait.”  “The fruits, they aren’t easy pickings, but if you’re willing to work it, I mean really get in there and give it a go – you’ll find ‘em, and they,” he assured us, “even these beautiful berries, nuggets, sweet bloody fleshes can seem prickly and tart at the first – it’s kind of an ‘acquired taste’ as they say – from years and years of this trying/acquiring and trying/acquiring – but those tiny pert jewels, held deep ‘round the heart of its center, those phenomenal pearls of good juice, as they finally give way and pop open,” he said, “that rush!  That momentary flood of powerful delight, that untangleable blend of most delicate morsel and sun-bittered time, that salting of aging and ripeness – it’s a wonder!”  “You’ve just got to get to them and find them, one after one and by one, have persistence!” he admonished, “far along, deep within, there’s always this unbelievable cluster of most amazing, unique and mouthwatering reward – yes, it seems tiny and ephemeral and difficult to grow or achieve, but it’s worth it!” he encouraged us, “the dedication of labor and time, constant tending and pruning pursuit; the right balance of trimming and rest, nourishment and fallow…”

Why he’d referred to our marriage as “the Brambles.”

N Filbert 2012

Please join us in these weekly forays!

Friday Fictioneers

Scribbling chapters that do not belong…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

1.  “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)

 

And sometimes I do, wake up.  St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity.  But that is catching too, and refracts.  “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on.  Crystal lances.  Thoughts refracting.  The occasional conviction.  (Which we call certitude).

The margins within margins, windows in reflection.

Every image being an entrance through which we exit.  From.

 

I call this “letting actually resonate.”  This being, activity, thinging we do.

If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum.  What is: portal and Black hole every now.  With.

Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.

 

I’ll never know what it is “to write.”  If only because it questions.  Every word.  In.

I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive.  “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.

 

Gravity enforcing force, to fly.

I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change?  Or even move?  On.

 

A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one.  Word.  Split with a twin.  Comparison as congenital doubling.  Of difference.  Equals such same.

 

We look toward what can be seen.  Compromised and concealed by a frame.  Otherwise unseen.  Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility.  Dialetheia.

We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all.  With.

 

If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them.  They’re either too large or too small.  I’ll have to wait.  I’m unable.  Nothing living waits.  Patience is pretense, pretend.  Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing.  Loss is implicit.

 

 

Recently Recovered

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

Another story I found from a number of years back…still has some oomph I hope….

A Series of Stories about Love

 The first thing that comes to mind is all the breathless tugging.  At clothes, at skin, in her mouth.  The way you squeeze into it, the wiggle and dance, and then you drown.

She told me of her life-dreaming last night, lying in bed.  How she just knew, she really knew, at fifteen or sixteen, her skin first licked by flames, all her dizzy hopes, her victimized newness, those first irisy smelling blooms in her flesh, that she would always love in such a way that men would eat at her, chew her to blood and spit her out.

It didn’t happen this way.  She bought a blender.

And every time, at just the right (or very wrong) time, she stuffed them in, ground them to pulpy bits, and poured them down the drain.  This is my wife we’re talking about.

The blender is out.  The blender sits on the counter.  It’s been four years.

First the sun rises.  Everything warms, your legs glow into coals.  Arms flush with melanin, forehead beading sweat.  Her ears are red.  Your mouth gasps and gulps at the air of the others language.  Someone lights your fuse.  The booster rocket burns away.  A holocaust of flames.

She’s never stayed friendly with a man for so long she says.  She makes a list of what’s necessary to her life.  Your name is not included.  I wonder if the blender is still working.  The right very wrong time is past.  We are nowhere.

I consume alcohol like fields do liquid in drought.  I smoke like an oil field already spent.  I caress and fondle a fuzzy June-bug in my palm.  With my lips.  I tossle my son’s hair.  I cry.  I love everything one way.  Addiction.  Obsession.  My love is a jet turbine (I say), a swallowing vortex, a whale.  My love is neuroses.  You’ve got the wrong each other, the weather says.

First there are nine kinds of electricity.  One for each of the senses.  And they all get plugged in at once.  Except mine were never unplugged.  Rain-powered, blood-powered, keeps going and going and…

I would not have your name tattooed on my body, she says.  Only permanent things, she says.  Like zodiac.  Like turtles.  Like signs for god.

Everything hurts, but we knew that already.

This is my wife we’re talking about.

I have a lazy eye.  It wanders about and falls asleep at random.  Its dreams are split away from the rest of my body.  I blow lightly on the spiders.  I stroke her calf.  I read a line of words down a page and get inappropriately, inexplicably charged.  Most things turn me on.  The turbine has only one speed.  It’s what makes the planets move.  It hurls the moon’s stones.  It fills stars.

The glance of fingertips on arm while walking one night: first strawberry in the mouth.

Strips of fresh mango: her first song.

She will not be overcome.  She fiddles with the blender’s buttons.

We have made children together…

I love mountains.  The sight, smell, rocks of them.  High, cold streams.  I love temperate woods.  The tall soft spike of giant firs.  The drape and droop of their large limbs.  And mermaids.  Salt on liquid skin.  I suffer from addictions.  Rituals.  Habits.  Gas for the turbine.  Sight.

Shoulder.  Tattoo’d calf.  Waistline.  Ankle.

Knuckles on a hand.  Hair over neck, down between shoulder-blades.  Belly buttons.  Crotch.  Wrist.  Veins at the back of the thigh.

Fuel for the turbine.  Touch.  Smell.  Thinking.  Dreaming.

I hear the blender in the kitchen grinding frozen fruit and yogurt.  Bones.  Blood.  I shiver.

“I could not be intimate with you if I didn’t care,” she says.  “It’s 50/50 my like and dislike, my hope and depression.  I want to be in love again, but not out of love again, so I stay.”

(This is my wife we’re talking about.)

“But you should be loved like an engine too,” she says.

Just let the engine run, baby, I say.

Love for a woman is systemic.  Like cancer.

The blender is like chemotherapy.  No one really knows how much it destroys.

Love will destroy you, she implies.

Like alcohol.  Like war.  Like fire.

Maybe we shouldn’t own guns.

But that first day at the range.  The charge of the buckling of your shoulder.  The loudness of the rifle’s shout.  Those sudden bursts.  The sheer power and speed.  You fire, again and again.  You conceal it in your hand.  They live and fill your pockets.

We possess many weapons.

A person is an armory.

She is a turtle mostly, she says.  She carries it all on her back, she says.  She can retract at any time.  Be saved from the flow of hot wind, the battering of sound, and the flood of all at once, if she needs to, she says.

The turbine spins (it’s the size of government buildings), it blows, rages, floods.

We draw letters in the mud.  It dries, cakes, molders.

We set these things in concrete stamps.

We yell permanence.

(The blender is whirring in the kitchen).  Even rock will ground down.

“I have the sense that the meaning of things will never be sorted out,” the poet says.

There is no hope.