Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
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Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize
Support Independent Bookstores
Noah Blaustein, from June #19...
Jacob White, from This Woman Wreathed in Bees...
Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons, Sex...
W.D Wetherell, from Bastards, Loners and Saints...
In between shellfish I let my platypus suckle
my pinky, cradling him so as not to break an egg,
so as not to touch the poisonous spurs
on the heels of his hind legs & get stung
further into a coma. In the realm of celestial
jokes, June gloom is a one liner, but the gods
in the corner of that billion year old bar
still cackle over the platypus. “Get this,”
one of them says, “how 'bout a spoon-billed,
beaver-tailed, web-footed, electromagnetically
sensitive mud-digging egg-laying mammal
whose spurs scientists will think
are for sexual combat.” I have never
engaged in sexual combat, an all out war
with spur & shield & fur in a mud burrow,
but I empathize with the jokes of minor gods.
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Orgil tapped the paper with his finger. “Says here, Becky, your mama was living in the Bahamas .”
Becky stood with her hands in her pockets, watching a family of ducks come down the canal. The Bahamas —so that was where her mother had been these years. Not so far really, just off the tip of Florida . Her throat went sharp. Orgil looked up at her as he might look up at a light he had just replaced with the wrong-wattage bulb. “Shoot, Orgil,” she said. “I knowed all that.”
Orgil ignored the lie, threw a fish up to Charlie. “Woman, you need a house in the Bahamas like a hole in the head.” He had stopped using we ever since he got back from Korea and began sleeping in a separate bed. He handed back the document.
She'd shoved it in her nightgown pocket, said, “Hell with you, old man.”
“Back at you, Beaky”—what he called her on account of her arched, thin nose, an English nose, the only thing her mama had left her, until now.
But she was already untying the bow eye of Orgil's green skiff, letting it slide backward into the water.
“Where you think you're headed?”
Becky had held the bow to the dock. Without Orgil's weight on the other end, the boat's nose bobbed impatiently under her feet. She eased herself in slow. Nearly crawling, she managed to get over to the seat Orgil usually occupied by the throttle. “Give that Evinrude a yank, Goujon .”
“What for? You heading to the Bahamas ? Better let me run to the garage, get you a couple more cans of gas.”
“I'm going to check the traps.”
“And sink my boat out in East Bay ? Too much chop out there by now, you'll get swamped. They empty, anyhow. Checked them this morning.” But, if only to be quit of her, he'd put his bare foot to the gunwale, yanked the motor chord, then kicked the boat out.
Becky idled down the canal, that flint-burn still in her throat. Instead of steering clear of the family of ducks, she held her course and watched the family disperse. Cut off from their mother, three baby ducks paddled away from the right side of the boat, trying to fly but unable.
Becky had never been out in the three-mile-wide East Bay alone, and soon as she left the canal and that salt splash began spitting at her and her curlers started coming loose, she knew she would turn back. Her old body was too light to part these sharp-pitched waves. Besides, back at the house was her boy, locked up in a bedroom trying to get sober, and he would need breakfast soon. The image of her striking out—now, all of a sudden, at sixty-five—well, it was ridiculous. Pensacola would never let her leave, would see to it she died here sure as she was born here. As she rode back through the canal, she fingered that paper in her robe pocket like some expired coupon for the life she could've had.
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Here is my head—a river full of stars.
The darkness of the river courses in my veins,
the fire of stars only chimera of desire
that is no more. I am caught between
what was and what is—my body connected
to the earth only by my love for our son, by a thread
of friendships. I cannot imagine a way to love
another man. My head is a river full of stars.
My eyes reflect a light of what was. I walk
where the wind blows through the buttercup
and hemlock, the rain falls, it flows over me.
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Literary bastardry has taken several forms over the years. There's the Hemingway model, the boyish rowdiness that eventually turns mean, or the boyish rowdiness that eventually, as in Fitzgerald's case, turns pathetic. There's a kind of nutty, absent-minded professor kind of nastiness, with James Joyce being the most prominent example. Bad to your family? Robert Frost comes to mind, with all those filial suicides. There's political bigotry—think of Ezra Pound or Louise Ferdinand Celine. Mean old rotten drunkenness? Sinclair Lewis. Lechery? H. G. Wells. All around bitchiness, a propensity for lying? Lillian Hellerman. Sloppy drunkenness? Dylan Thomas. Mary McCarthy adored vendettas. Somerset Maugham thrived on cattiness and intrigue. D. H. Lawrence was a pretty murky character, always going around talking about “blood.” (Robert Graves sums up Lawrence thusly: “He lived an anguished, bathetic life, and had a huge, anguished, bathetic following.”) Jack London liked espousing socialist causes on one hand, living like a robber baron on the other. Poe, of course, was not a nice man for a hundred reasons—his drunkenness was of the vitriolic sort. Samuel Johnson was acerbic at the best of times. Dostoyevsky was a compulsive gambler and Tolstoy cheated on his wife.
I'd extend this list to include contemporary authors, but who to put there? Writers are bastards in private now, not in public—there are simply too many political bastards to entertain us, or show business bastards, or rock star bastards, so literary bastards are very small potatoes indeed. Even the novelist I mentioned earlier, the famous child abuser. “Nice career move,” a cynical friend said, hearing of his suicide, seeing the national play the story received. But compared to the real bastards from literary history, this puny modern kind hardly registers.
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