Futurisms' Lazy Lawn Language

The spring-time soil pressed its moisture through the blades of grass and into the fibers of my shirt, its sleeves rolled up to the elbow and long un-tucked about the waist. I tried to stare at the dimming sky and roiling birds returning from their winter-time somewhere. I tried to be with the atmosphere and not wonder what bugs were crawling into my hair or if the grass was staining these new khakis. Christ, I thought, I never wear khakis and now I’m on my back in the grass and it’s getting colder and wetter every second. I pushed my toes through the sod and thanked God for His interminable patience. Patience for things that grow quickly, like grass and patience for things that grow slowly, like me.

Nearly everyone had left by now. The evanescent cloud of mesquite, carnal air had since been blown off by the June-evening breeze. Little sculptures of bones and corn-cobs and silverware wore skirts of paper napkins on dance-floors of paper plates. A sub-note of cigarette smoke cut through the chill and polyphonic voices swatted the days events back and forth. Who had shared glances with whom. What so-and-so said about so-and-so’s new such-and-such. The clatter of plates and the splash of dish water and the understated barks of a dog in search of scraps. Now and then a balloon would lose its tenuous life and the voices would chirp and then cascade in laughter.

This prone posture was really a stratagem and a retaliation. Retaliation for the beautiful decorations and the lovely food and the conspiratorial smiles. She’d spent most of the party perched on her sofa with the terrier, scratching behind its ears and singing quietly along with the records. She would venture up to greet those arriving and bid two-kissed farewells to those parting. She spent only 20 minutes in the sun, in an ancient lawn chair watching young men in straw hats and suspenders play badminton in pale, be-soiled bare-feet. Now I’d swiped a sweating bottle of champagne and two maybe-clean glasses and was not-so-subtly waiting for her to come and see why I was sprawled beneath the elm in her yard.

Three weeks ago, we drove to the beach and I complained about sand and she dipped the edge of her dress in the skim and surf. Her eyes were smokily made up and hollowed me at a glance. Her bracelets clattered pleasantly while she regaled me with tales of galleries and underground music and the ways New York was the center of God’s own universe. I clutched my sandals, realized this day had to end and contemplated hurling myself from the lighthouse. She inspired extremity in all of us and obviously pretended not to notice.

The screen door wheezed and rattled. I craned my head over back to see. The inverse form of her and her dress, all pink and lines and angles, meandered through cluttered tables towards me. She swiped a whithering peony from the last table and planted it behind her ear.

“What is all this?” she inquired, sweeping a hand lazily across her field of view. I just smiled and looked up. She toed her sandals from her feet and descended, cross-legged, to my side. I did my best to pour the glasses of champagne suavely and without looking. I only spilled most of it and she laughed an absent laugh. I reached into the breast pocket of my shirt and found a small yellow note with a bit of glue across one edge. I’d written something in my neatest hand on it. I stuck it to her forehead gently and held out my other fist, closed around two small treasures.

“Can I read it or do I have to walk around like this all day?” she asked, lightly touching the spot it was stuck to above her brows. I nodded and breathed her smell through both nostrils. She plucked the note from her face and I brushed the bangs from her eyes. I opened my other hand and let the sun play off the polished metal rings. The eyes that always stared at you steadily and with casual self-certainty darted for a rare moment. Darted from my hand to the note in her own and back. She pressed her lips to mine.

“It is, isn’t it?”

We just watched the trees sway for a long time. The cigarette smoke would wander between us and the after-party chat would linger at the edge of attention at moments. The dog would scratch at the screen and the champagne would run out. I never did get those grass stains out.

Futurisms' Roadside Revisionism

The three-decade-old leather seats were cracked and discolored with sun-bleached striations. The foam rubber headrest was crumbling where it stood most exposed to rolled-up-window temperatures. I’d sometimes find bits of it in my hair at night, like oversized novelty dandruff. I’d cut out the ceiling upholstery somewhere east of Omaha. Creeping, two–dimensional stalagmites of rust clawed in miniature rusty fingers at the metal panels of the old Volvo wagon. The air conditioning had been fucked since just outside of Gary. The left rear window since the late 90’s. A lurid and half-peeled Jane’s Addiction sticker would sometimes reflect a sharp beam of sun into my eyes at inopportune moments. Mountain-pass switchback roads, mostly.

Heading west, every color outside that $900 stack of Swedish steel burst like the Fourth of the July. It seemed like my life was earth-toned and the entire earth was life-toned. When I’d glance down to pull the water-warped road atlas from my drab shoulder bag on the passenger seat, it’s like the universe would snap from Imax, Blue-ray vivid to sepia-toned nostalgia and back, just with the dip of my gaze. I was wrapped in an ocean of beige-volvo boring, but everything that waited beyond this car was color-fast floral-print wonder. Heading west, I only listened to music that I liked a decade too late. I spent three days cycling through cassettes from bins at the Village Discount on Milwaukee. Alice in Chains. That band with the Bumble-Bee-Girl in their video.

Taped to the driver’s-side pillar was a Polaroid instant with the words “Soon Enuff” swirled in an elegant but exaggerated hand across the white beam at the bottom. The image was dark and yellowed and candle lit. On the back, a stamp and an address and a postal-code. When I was almost there, sitting in insufficient-infrastructure traffic, I’d flick it nervously. When no one answered the door at the apartment at the address on the back, I’d tape it to the door handle and trusted in God and adhesive and fate. But for now, I’d just try to stay awake on highway-hypnotic stretches of American dreams. I’d listen to dead men sing and wonder if their children ever listened to their music. Where do the people who work in those little highway towns really live, anyway?

“I’m sure there’s nothing about you I don’t already understand,” she’d said, leaning away from me against a flat black barroom wall, “and I’m sure you already think I’m wrong.” I laughed and she just stared at me, with something almost not quite unlike a smile on her face. She handed her empty glass to a passing bar-back and wiped her hand on her jeans. She pressed a folded napkin into my left pants pocket.

“It’s okay,” she confided just an inch from my ear, “I don’t like surprises.”

I’d dream about her sometimes. Heroic, absurd dreams about the things she must do between Saturday nights. As alluring and marvelous as the real girl was, the dream-girl was more so. Almost too much. A person I would watch and forget it was me watching. Someone who spiraled through the world, part pretty pin-wheel, part errant table-saw blade careening through a place narrow on either side. I was driving to her as much to demythologize the dreams as I was to reclaim some remembered reality.

I drove through the crushing fauna and the crowd of mountains to the shore. Everything natural looks more natural by the ocean. Anything built looks worn out. The people all feel in between, caught in the preternatural saline air that lends one the gravitas of geology and the malleability of the weather. I took my shoes off and left the car unlocked. I meandered over rough pavement and across the sea wall, eventually settling into the coarse sand with my back to the oceanic wind. Tomorrow I would call someone and find a place to stay. Tonight I’d sleep on the beach and try to let the cold keep me from oversized dreams.

Futurisms' Desecrated Domesticity

The place was a shit-hole. Dry and creaky and caustic in the winter, the stark awful paint would worm away from the walls in straggly strips. The high ceiling wore a skirt of nicotine stains. No two bulbs would stay burning at a time in the rattle-trap fixture eight feet from the rough floor boards. The window frames would swell shut in the summer swelter and lean callously to the left in the winter, welcoming dagger drafts of December chill. In a way, it suited us. Our curb-found furniture and thrift-store decorations gave the place a decrepit uniformity of squalor.

Only the kitchen really received any of our affection, though certainly not because it merited any.

Being in your 20s has the compounded problem that you don’t know what to do, and now you know that neither does anyone else. “When a child first catches adults out,” wrote Steinbeck, “his world falls into panic desolation.” She and I stayed in this place, and (most importantly) stayed in this place together, out of the sheer momentum of the thing. We were too poor to shop at Whole Foods, but too self-conscious not to, even just in front of one another. We were de facto vegetarians and we never ate anything in season, except strawberries and asparagus. The month of June was best and we spoke the least. I had lists and projects. I became a master of the invented errand and could spend whole days traipsing on public transit. She had day-time TV and the joy of stuffing envelopes.

She’d tell me these stories, relaying the plight of conjoined twins from Maury or the slutty nine year old from Tyra and I’d tuck a thumb in my book and stare at her blankly. I’d start in on the liberals or the conservatives or the rich or the poor, and she’d paint silently. Thursdays, we’d crunch through sour, unripe fruit and listen to our neighbors argue in some phlegmatic and eastern European language. For six weeks, I had an untreated sinus infection so bad that I’d leave wads of blood-streaked tissue around the place, like little Technicolor Rorschach tests.

Only the sex made sense. It was our sweaty, vigorous fort against the barbarian invasion of boredom and inaction. The bed was never less than a wild thicket of cheap cotton sheets and scattered pillows. If I came home and she was doing some household chore in an unlikely outfit, we wouldn’t even greet each other first. I’d stumbled backward onto the uneven sofa more than once, two soapy handprints bleeding through the back of my t-shirt. After the afterward scavenger hunt for shirts and socks, I’d always realize I’d forgotten to drop something in the mail. Or to get some important ingredient for dinner. Sometimes I wouldn’t leave, but she would lock herself in the bathroom and cry, naked against the long unwashed tile.

And an hour later, her thumb would tuck into my waistband and her free hand would make a greasy climb through my hair while I tried in vain to make the hallway door not scrape against the floorboards twisting towards the ceiling, like eternally separated lovers craning to kiss from distant afterlives.

Futurism Loses Its Way

She never could stand the cold without the snow. A sparkling, virginal blanket of white on the streets and the lawns and the windowsills excused a host of meteorological sins. The padded quiet of a world sound-proofed in snow was hushed and womblike and she felt like nothing could harm her. If the sun was deceptively shining, however, and the ground was dry, the frigid wind felt like the sting of a slap from God’s own disdaining hand. No scarf or glove or coat could take the cold from her mind or heart. It’s as though winter would take up residence in her and the weather only confirmed her suspicions.

Mostly, she stayed indoors breathing the stale dry air of radiators and cigarettes. She refused to eat the food that wasn’t in the cupboards. When leaves were colorful and off their branches, she’d salvaged a tiny child’s school desk from a dumpster and it had found a home beside her bed. The zeros of her alarm clock blinked red off the branches of a small plant breathing its last backwards CO2 breaths in a strawberry basket on the tiny seat. In the middle of the night, the rattle of her ringing cell-phone would shock her awake, trembling against the industrial metal. A single pulse of buzz-saw silence would plead from a foot left of her case-less pillow. She knew it was him. She told herself she probably didn’t care.

Every third day she’d get all dolled up to go out. She’d try not to scrape her cornea with her eye-liner pencil. She’d try not to burn her neck with the straightener. She’d try not to nick her chalky ankles with the razor. The cutest tights with the prettiest dress with the least comfortable shoes, but she’d rarely make it off the landing. She’d fall asleep in her Sunday-best, a stepped-on paper crane on the couch. A used up Kleenex of indifference. She liked the light of the television, but not the sound. She liked the heat of the coffee, but not the taste. She remembered sleeping, but not how. She never listened to the music he’d pretended to like anymore.

She’d done her best to be kind and maybe that wasn’t too impressive. He’d just stood there, letting the rain pour across him. He didn’t ask for the explanations she’d told herself just below the music all night. He’d dragged her there, to the middle of the road and wrapped his hand around her hand. He said something she didn’t hear about the rain and Hollywood movies. She just stared at his worn out converse and wondered where her air had got to. When it finally spilled out, he nodded and flipped up his collar, like he’d only just noticed the weather. She didn’t remember walking home.

The empty sky still refused to snow and the sun was impotent to quell the stark winter. She won’t get dressed today. She didn’t know last night’s rasp of cell-phone sadness was the last he’d ever try.

The Boy The King Loved (Pt. 3.5)

The King looked at the man oddly and said,"Your son will come under my care and schooling, but he must come today. If you cannot part with him immediately, I fear you will lose your conviction in the days to come and snatch him from his tutors in my considerable libraries."

"Of course," the former monk replied, bowing deeply to the King. "Let me fetch him from chopping the firewood and he will be your ward. My wife and I will be comforted and cared for by the knowing that our boy is beloved by the King."

"I have no doubt, for you seem to be a man of strong character, firm will and mirthful spirit. It is on my honor that your boy will come to greatness behind my walls." The king said, touching the sleeve of the humble mathematician.

"Neither have I any doubt of your promise," tumbled from the man, now evidently startled by the King's touch. "May your servant go and fetch the boy?"

"Go, but do not have him pack any of his things. All he needs will be provided," the King finished, thinking, " If it were not so cold on this autumn day, I would have him come to us in his tunic alone, without even sandals. But the frost hardens the soil and the boy will become ill if I indulge myself in such overt ritual."

The boy was fetched. Hugging his mother and father about the neck, he swore to give his best for the service of the Kingdom and the honor of their family. Then, as he passed through the meager garden and back woods of his parent's land, he snatched the hatchet from a stump where the wood was chopped. It's blade was rusted in spots and the handle was wrapped only in a rough twine older than he was. He folded it into a piece of bed-cloth he carried his daily lunch of cheese, rough country bread and an apple in most days. Tucking his only momento of childhood labor under his arm, he trotted off for the courts of the king.

The boy was surprised how little he already missed the way things had been and how terribly light his being felt about him.

The Boy The King Loved (Pt. 3)

The Origins of the Beloved Boy
Under safer times, the King had taken to meeting with groups of merchants, trades-people and farmers. They would bring complaints sometimes, but more often mere suggestions for how things might go more smoothly between king and subject. Some of these were naïve in the way that only peasants sure of their craft and little else can be naïve. A few were quite insightful and were acted upon swiftly. An arrangement, for example, allowing for tribute proportionate to surplus kept the kingdom’s granaries full and the farmers un-harassed during lean years. It furthermore made the king a powerful (though well liked) benefactor of surrounding hamlets and villages in such times. The surrounding peasants and a few of his own more grateful subjects took to calling him “King Joseph” for a time, though that was a reference to Jacob’s biblical son and not the King’s true name.
The peasant source of this fine policy was not at all a farmer, incidentally. The man had been a monk at one point, though few people of the city knew this. Now he worked only a little, as he was almost blind, presumably from copying manuscripts in the near-dark. His work carried no theme or purpose. Just this or that to augment the money his tall, slender wife made as a mid-wife. They had neither wealth nor prestige, and so his place at a meeting with the king had been come-upon very much by accident.
A shepherd, whose fence he had helped mend, was impressed by his considerable skill with mathematics, though the man lacked sight with which to write down complicated procedures. The man performed them in his head, as it were. The shepherd, aware of the pending discussion with the monarch, invited the modest, blind mathematician. It was his formula that, in the end, would be implemented to assure a just proportionality of tribute from fat years to lean. Everyone at the meeting remarked at the simultaneous genius and practical accessibility of the formula. Those men of lesser character among them went away saying to themselves, “why, I could have thought of such a thing! If only I had!”
The King, grateful for such a practical solution to this problem, offered to the former monk any service he required, within reason. Was there some quandary or trouble haunting the man or his kin? Was there a debt in need of payment? Some definite but serious issue in need of solving? The sightless man spoke as soon as the King had offered.
“My son is clever, but in need of schooling. He knows some letters already, though he lacks my facility with maths,” he said without any evident shyness at acknowledging his talent with numbers. “In my home, his talent will be squandered. He only chops wood and stokes the fire while his mother and I labor as well. On quiet nights I try to teach him some, but it wil come to nothing, I am sure. The court has men of letters who could tutor him, of this I am sure. Would the King value his learning and take him into his heart and home?” He continued with a chuckle “and indeed, into the Kings considerable library?”

The Boy The King Loved (Pt. 2)

The East-Facing Window
The east-facing window, through which the sun had once rose and which was now hidden behind the weight of misplaced tapestry, portrayed an ancient tale of courage. So it was told, a mild local blacksmith had fashioned a great sword. The sword was told to be larger than any man could wield in battle unless he were quite a giant. The man, an heirless widower, crafted it for many years, but only after his paid work was finished and no other matter commanded his attention. Indeed, its manufacture took many years. No one within the gates knew what purpose lay in the construction of such an instrument. Some suggested it was ceremonial, a gift to the King in the place of an heir to continue tribute to the monarch. Indeed, the local man was said to be quite noble in his disposition and loyal in his character. And, indeed, such a ceremonial act from a poor man with no family might have seemed a fitting final labor.
In the autumn of his final year, the quiet tradesman dragged his giant’s sword into the city’s field, at that time left for its Sabbatical rest. In the rolled dirt and browning grass he parked the sled that carried his over-built weapon. He stood over the field and his sword for a day and a night. On the dawn of the second day, a particularly clear chill fell upon the land. Every surface glittered with an infinity of jeweled dew, frozen into frost. The colors of the fall-turned trees refracted each a thousand times and the tall city gates shimmered an iron shimmer. The cloak of our simple worker was itself stiff with ice and his well-kempt beard too. Everything lay frozen, both in matter and in time.
Our simple worker crouched as slowly as anyone had seen his already deft form move. His leather-gloved hands wrapped around the immense handle of the weapon at his feet, one at the lowest point and the other at the top-most. With a groan that shook the ice from every surface, the field suddenly cleaved and coughed up a rich and foul earth which met and intermingled the falling frost. The air was, for that moment, like breathing diamonds from coal.
From beneath the ruptured earth, a hulking form of mud and stone rose up. Its teeth of granite ringed its gaping maw that snatched open fiercely and its eyeless skull lurched forth from the fruitless soil. Simultaneously, a whirling fan of steel shirked its sheeth of crystal frost and lept from its sled. The meager blacksmith’s cloak exploded from his back into a doubled halo of shattered ice as he swung his mighty creation. It’s profound blade cracked through the lower jaw of the earthen nemesis, showering splintered stone across the view. It’s green-black life-blood poured from this wound a stench across the open earth
A rumble escaped the living soil and the steel-worker’s blade hung for a moment in the air upon its second pass. Half of its full length crashed into the crown of the lurking monster and lodged there mightily. The earth sunk beneath the feet of the blacksmith, but he relinquished his creation not. The soil quivered a moment and then fell away all together, swallowing first his blade and then, with it, the swords creator. Only his cloak remained and the sled.
Or so it was told. Indeed, so it was memorialized in colored glass and lead behind a time-dulled tapestry portraying some battle or another.

The Boy The King Loved

and now a story. It's a bit of a medieval fantasy, which is peculiar from me, since I usually don't like to read or write that kind of thing. I'll post it here in installments. We'll see if it ever gets finished.
There was a boy beloved by the King. Indeed, beloved so much the more because he was not the King’s own kin. The child was not much of a boy, but kind enough that one noticed so almost straight away. He was at turns talkative to a fault or taciturn without explanation. He was sturdily built but carried himself as though he fancied himself less imposing in stature. He would sometimes be scolded by his tutor for crossing his legs knee-over-knee.
“A man rests an ankle crosswise his opposing knee, son. Let no one mistake you for an effeminate,” the tutor would chide. Yet when safe from the reach of his tutor's swat, the boy would fold his right leg over left, tucking his elbows into his sides and folding his hands atop his doubled knees. His shoulders would slouch and he would glance up to whomever he was speaking with a steady gaze that hinted at gentleness. Or perhaps some unnamed and latent guilt felt at some existential culpability. It was this amalgamation of guilt and gentleness the King loved most.
The Kingdom in that time was dangerous, over run with shameless men who scoffed at the law. They harmed the weak and fled the authority of the monarchy, living in tents outside the city walls. The King would often sit quietly in the darkness. His solemn eyes glimmering with some small, mysterious hope his creased forehead did not betray. He would eat only salted meats and country breads. He would drink only the most meager portion of wine diluted immensely with water. Clear nights when the moon was out, the King would take the air on the parapet. The King seemed to swell beneath the moon. So much more so did he shrink back from the sun’s direct glare.
Huge, ancient, and heavy tapestries were hung across the glorious and likewise-ancient stained glass of the King’s court. The walls, where they had previously hung, stood bare. The special awkwardness resulting of the misplaced tapestries took on a tremulous menace as the vague twilight shadows crept across the space as hours lulled by in silence. The jester would yawn. The cup-bearer would sip drunkenly from the King’s chalice in some shadowed doorway. The Queen, perpetually pursued by a draft, would recline near her husband. Her lap would bear a fine quilt. The quilt would rest atop many knit blankets nesting about her knees, like a doll reclining among scarves. The knit blankets were of the kind the Queen remembered from her youth.