The couple and their child carefully drive through the snow, aware of the slippery road,  a black a red and a blue robin in a rolling cage. The streets are full of people exchanging presents after the holidays, gifts wanted and unwanted, surprises welcome and unwelcome.

When they come to a traffic light they wait until it’s gone red for the pedestrians and the husband waves a woman through, who is in a hurry, giving her his broadest smile. Simultaneously, his wife opens her window and croaks: Dolt! Idiot! Retard! Do you wanna die? Moron!

The child in the back, safely strapped into its egg-shaped seat, frowns. Come on, her father chirps, that was funny.

On August 12, I realised that my asthma was an unwillingness to take life in. That I was alive nevertheless, and remained so, was, for me, one of the many paradoxes of existence, strewn across our path as unsolvable riddles, tough mind candy to chew on. I did not care for His jokes.

On August 13, I had decided to end my life. I instantly knew how I’d do it: I would jump of Jefferson bridge and enjoy the short flight. I calculated that I would fly for 6.34 seconds. In this time span, I wanted to see and experience everything as if for the first time. I was looking forward to the intensity of a prolonged moment of birthlike magic.

On August 14, at 14:45, after an incredibly good Pizza from Joe’s, an otherwise little noteworthy Italian hole in the wall on Grammer St, I let go off the railing and flew towards my death. Earlier, I had sat on these railings for about a minute. Not too long to develop deep fear and not too short, because I did not want to do anything in haste. This was too important.

All the while, though, if I’m honest, I hoped that something or someone would save me.

In fact, I did have my flight, and it was unbelievable. I could not possibly put it into words. You’ll have to go there yourself. The flight was 0.07 seconds longer than I had anticipated due to strong winds that created an updraft, which slowed me down. Those are details.

The interesting thing is that I never hit the surface but found myself instead eyes closed  in a fetal position on my bed at home. I don’t know what happened and I don’t care. I will not, I repeat, I will not do it again. I stopped having asthma attacks, too, and I’m going to get married tomorrow, thank you very much for your good wishes.

“once upon a time, there were two people in deep and serious love with one another and with everything that they hoped they would be.”

i lit a cigarette and sat down to type. but suddenly i couldn’t remember what the keyboard meant. i looked at those small black squares with white symbols on them and they seemed to tell a tale which i could not decipher. i began to teach myself story again.

there was a “w” for “wild“, followed by “e” for “eros“. then, in quick succession “r,t,z,u“, or “rutz“, which clearly indicated sexual stuff gone from awesome to awry. this i found discouraging, and i looked for different messages further down the field of letters (why so many?): “i, o, p, a” for “opia“, which had to mark the entrance of drugs – quite possibly, the lovers turned to drugs to fix whatever had gone wrong between them. i got quickly bored with this game and i worried: what if i could never unlock the secret of letters? was i condemned to have to hire a long-legged secretary (short and stumpy would not do) to take my dictation?

days passed, bed and breakfast blurred into one big burden. i smoked, inhaling longer and longer until i could hold my breath for an entire day. no gods no muses came to my rescue. letters remained locked in a chest which might contain a treasure – or treachery. perhaps the story of love that i had started with was my destiny. so i tried to finish it:

“once upon a time, there were two people in deep and serious love with one another and with everything that they hoped they would be. they spent their days in a haze, waiting for the moment to get to bed, extinguish their cigarettes and look into each other’s eyes searching for that spark that had brought them together in the first place. the man was a writer, the woman was a painter. their foreplay was a mixture of both their talents: he wrote secret stories on her naked body. she sketched her desire on his. when they looked at themselves to admire each other’s work, they met every time as if for the first time, forgot about words and colours, merged their talents in a single movement. miraculously, the movement turned into a bird.

the bird flew up to the ceiling and out of the open window into the world. it settled on a birch next to their house and admired god’s creation. all the beasts noticed its arrival and paid attention. even the lion, their king, looked up from a gazelle who had given itself up to be devoured.

what do you think you’re doing, said the gazelle. i sacrifice myself like an idiot and you don’t even pay attention? – so sorry for that, said the lion – i’ll be eating you in no time, if you just let me satisfy my curiosity. – as you say, my liege, said the gazelle, and ate a grape while waiting for her hour of death. meanwhile, the lion walked over to the bird who had just discovered the power of chant and was singing a song just for fun. the song began: if i was an angel of dust …

that doesn’t make any sense, said the lion, you’re annoying and i don’t even think you’re a real bird. i know my subjects.

the bird didn’t mind. it was made of pure love.  it didn’t care about the animal kingdom, about its unwritten rules (nobody had bothered writing them down)…

in the meantime, the lovers had finished their lovemaking. the bed had gone still and they were breathing noisily and happily. in and out. as they both entered the realm of dreams, the bird dissolved, smiling at the king of the animals. the lion was confused and disturbed. he did not feel like returning to the gazelle in waiting. he did not feel like torturing his wives. he did not feel like playing with his offspring, or running after game, or bathing in the sun and glory of his natural title. the bird seemed to signify the arrival of a new way of thinking that broke the roundelay of eat and be eaten.

in the end, however, after a long period of deliberation, which he carried out as good as any predator, his stomach began to hurt and he went back to his meal.”

© 2009 finnegan flawnt – written under a milk wood tree

Crystalline sentences came out of her mouth. Elianna was an engine, a steam engine of love, and her name meant “God has answered”.

Honey-coated cashews stood next to her bedside table and her lampshade carried long-forgotten symbols that had last been seen during the first crusade. She was of mixed breeding which amounted to no breeding at all. When she thought of her ancestors, all kinds of faces emerged like a weird gallery gone into warp drive.

When she wrote, she waded through faces. She wrote and her writing seemed fertile feces to her. Faces and feces were her fecundity, the source of unfettered fabling.

She was followed by a fox. His snout was sharp and his step was light as gossamer. She liked that the fox never slept. Like her, he was a loner looking out for nobody but himself. He had once had a spouse but the spouse had been killed by a lorry:

The lorry driver came out of his cabin, the lights of the lorry illuminated the street and the fur of the dead fox seemed to glow. The lorry driver held his hips because he thought it funny: a dead fox in the road! There were five little foxes who now came out of the bushes and huddled around their dead mother, nudging her with their puny snouts, whimpering, unscared and unmothered. He thought his son might like a fox for a puppy, and he picked one up and dropped him next to the driver’s seat in a bag wet with smelly sports clothes. The dead fox mother was carried off by a road servicing angel once the truck had gone. She was elevated to fox heaven which is next to the heaven of man but greener and there are no trucks and no roads and no fences, no men but mice and meadows of daisies.

(Note: How used we are to bogey men coming out of the dark to threaten us. It is not fair since most men aren’t swines they are just like you and me, and when their mothers are crushed we children must huddle and push them with our silken noses. And we remember the smell forever.)

Elianna sat at night at her desk with no photograph on it. Nothing reminded her of the past. There were pills in her dresser, red ones to get giddy and blue ones for a walk in the dungeon. And a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World because she loved the Savage in that book and his confusion drawn out over hundreds of pages. The collision of worlds was her metier. Metier was a French word which sounded like a door closing: me-tier. It also contained the English word for an identity and the German word for animal.

Foxes haunted her dreams. Islands full of foxes, truckloads of vixen. Why foxes, she wondered again but there was no answer readily available. There were no guides to explain your dreams away and out of existence.

One could always buy drugs of course as the kids did these days if one could trust the news. But who could. The most reliable source of information was still the own intuition. In Elianna’s case it only failed when it came to men that she fancied. She had a history of falling for losers. Except they didn’t seem to be losers in the first place. Only when she introduced them to her family, where academics and self-made men and uber-mothers abounded, did she realise that she had, quite possibly, once again chosen someone who couldn’t hold a candle to her candour. Do not sell yourself cheaply, her mother crackled. Why even sell myself at all, she said. This is no show and I’m no thing. I can pick and fuck who the hell I want, she said. Don’t you talk to me like to one of your loser friends little missy, her mom said. And her brother said: hear hear. And smirked. He always smirked and he seemed content with that. He never brought anyone home. Oh god, save me from this family, Elianna thought.

But the next time she went out with Tom, Dick or Harry, she looked them in the eye and asked them hard questions, questions untainted by love or lust, questions like: what’re you going to do when you grow up? How many children do you want? Do you play an instrument? Why not the trombone? Which school did you go to? What are your interests in life? And so on. God, some guy said one day — I love ya, I just wanna make love to you, do you really care about this shit? She left, riding out of the place on a high, invisible, white horse like a righteous virgin. And another, his name was Lancelot, said: I’m a writer, doesn’t that say it all? A writer of what, she asked. Of flash fiction, you know, very short pieces that hit you between the eyes before you know it. Who reads that stuff, she asked, somewhat intrigued, because this particular guy made love beautifully, seemed generous, talked well and liked the books and the music she liked. Well, only a few, he said, I’ve only just begun to go out there, he said. She puffed peevishly. That’s not very much, is it. Where do you see this going? He laughed, and his laugh went through and through. I dunno, haven’t thought about it yet, he said. I just love to write, you know. She couldn’t decide if this one was going to be the one.

Perhaps you need an accountant, her brother suggested (smirk smirk). Figgle off, she said. It was family dinner time: they all sat around the table, including grandma Clara and uncle Geoff who mumbled and it usually was some dirty joke, old as cotton knickers. Grandma didn’t say much at all, she only smiled. Elianna thought perhaps she was demented. Pass the salt, her mother said, and the potatoes too, her father added. Elianna looked like her mother, but with a smaller nose and better, bigger, green eyes like her father. She had brown hair which she had put in a bun. Mother’s fingers were reddish and puffy from doing the dishes before they sat down so that everything would look as if they had gone to a restaurant. Which they could not afford. But both her parents liked to play pretend.

I want to ask you something, Elianna said. Well? Her mother said. You’re always full of advice on whom I should date and stuff. And nobody I ever brought along was good enough for you. So I keep having all these really short relationships, and I’m 41 and I’m fed up with that, I want a man, a keeper. Who exactly did you have in mind? Somebody like dad? She asked. You know, sweetie, her grandma said, and it was the first thing she had said in a decade, almost as long as Elianna could remember, you know what I told your mother when she went out with your father? … Mum, said her mother, I don’t think the child really needs to hear those old stories. Mother giggled nervously but Elianna was dying to hear more. I said, grandma continued undeterred while Elianna’s mother was gripping her fork as if it was a deadly weapon and breathing loudly while her father was digging into a pork loin, happy to have it to himself — I said, grandma started again — and then her face fell and her head dropped straight into the potatoes making an ugly thumping sound. Awww, said Elianna’s mother. But Elianna knew instantly that grandma hadn’t just fainted but that she had died, died before she could pass on invaluable advice to her only granddaughter. Dammit, mother, Elianna cried, I really wanted to hear that. Her brother didn’t smirk then in the middle of gulping and said hold on, shouldn’t we do something for granny? Then everybody got up and they carried the light body of the grandmother over to the divan, her dad called an ambulance but it was in fact too late.

It was good that granny had died with a mouthful of potatoes the way she liked them and the way she had taught her daughter to make them.

Published by metazen on Oct 5, 2009 and reprinted with a personal review as ‘Best of Metazen‘ in January 2010.

I don’t do much travelling anymore. I lost the taste for it after 9/11 I think. Airplane scare me. Instead, I travel in my imagination. It helps when I get input from elsewhere like through the following note, which I found on the floor of a telephone cabin on Broad St, London, not far from the Royal Opera House in the late 1990s, obviously part of a larger story. For some reason, I kept it in an old diary where I recently found it. I don’t know what this means or if it’s true but it certainly is strange and funnily international. Read for yourself. (Transcribed from the handwritten original.)

[...] I must tell you this. At the time, I was a Higher Correspondent for the Times for all of India. India is not what you think – my India is a small, little known country that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990, and because it was so little known even then, even within the vast corridors of the Kremlin, they forgot to introduce it to the international community at the time. The Indians were so shocked that they’d been given their independence (originally they had only asked for annual tickets to the Royal Ballet in Moscow for a selected group of government officials) that they forgot it, too. so that by the time they caught up with the developments, it was too late, the world was interested in different things. Just how unimportant they were considered to be, you will understand if I tell you that the Indians, in an imitative desperate move, offered to host US troops and were turned down cold even though India is conveniently placed half way between Russia and China, the climate is pleasant, the women are beautiful and they have a philharmonic orchestra that plays a very decent tune.

This orchestra plays an important role for what I have to tell you. You see, the Indians were not only little known, they were also naturally really small, about the size of a normal, non-Indian 8 year old. Which is why, when an Indian attended an international political event, they were mostly not taken seriously or had little chance of making themselves heard. Therefore, many of the players of the  National Indian Philharmonic Orchestra were smaller than their instruments.

For an international correspondent, India was a frustrating work place. I would write these great stories, and the central desk clerks and journalists would change a thing here and there and publish them as if they referred to the larger India that everyone knows, or to one of its states (the smallest of which is still one hundred times larger than my India). Of course I was aware that I was part of a plot deceiving our readers, but since nobody ever complained, we left it at that. You see, there is far too much going on all the time everywhere to even verify small stories from a large country let alone from an unknown country. Especially since my stories did not deal with political scandals or atrocious crimes: India has got only one politician, the Prime Minister, and only one scandal – when the Prime Minister’s unmarried daughter was caught in flagranti with a foreign correspondent (me).

I believe that headquarters were themselves confused about my whereabouts because I regularly received invitations to events in New Delhi or Mumbai or urgent cables to do one thing or another. I left all these unanswered since I considered the lack of information about me unprofessional and insulting. [...]

Billy Monahan came round the bend across from the brothel, when Thomasius von Bornheim appeared, staggering drunk, quoting lines from the book of revelations, but not revealing anything.

“I am a prophet”, von Bornheim cried, “but nobody wants to hear me out!” Billy cringed. He loathed this kind of wallowing but he liked the scene: the dark mass of the cathouse against the bright roof lining of heaven was a stage on which the large and long-faced blond Thomasius von Bornheim, the krautish count, the canvasser of truths, stood like an orphaned wingless angel.

Billy went up to him and said: “Do you need help?”, and von Bornheim said “I’d be delighted, Billy. I even remember your name through the curtain of shame that separates me from the Lord’s business”. Von Bornheim was the town priest and he was in love with Goedyva Laedily who ran the whorehouse. “I am the prophet of doom”, he shouted. “I am the eager Eagle of God, I am his lusty Lion and his ballsy Bull, and”- he almost choked on his own words – “I will not waver.”

Billy said nothing to all this. He was busy working things out in his head, and he liked Thomasius’ beard which was a strong, peppered and salted affair and came almost all the way up to his eyes — he’d never noticed before just how hairy the priest was. “I’ll tell you a secret”, von Bornheim said as they walked on, resting his left arm on Billy’s shoulder, anchored in the boy’s youthful gait, “and you’ll thank me for it”.

“What is it, Father?”, Billy said. He loved secrets. The world was a secret, an umbrella for even greater secrets, and Billy himself felt like one at times, a secret that he could not even spell but he knew it was there and he was bent on getting it out, colored with marks of his own making.

“Awww, women”, von Bornheim said, “women are like water. They run through your hands if you don’t have a vessel”, he said, “A vessel!” he screamed and almost fell as they left the high street cobble stone and stepped on the grassland around the vicarage. “But here’s the thing: i just don’t have a vessel, my hands are empty and horny”.

“I am sorry”, said Billy, and he suddenly knew how he’d paint the priest: standing in the door of the brothel with his shock of hair shooting off in all directions and the hair and the door frame talking to each other like intelligent earthworms, and the same hairy lines pursuing each other in all directions from the house across the sky, and the preacher with his mouth open, so round and so wide that you could see his missing teeth and the small dangling, fleshy hook in the back of his throat.

They had reached the house of the priest, who slumped on his staircase. The sun was setting reluctantly, and the boy stood in front of the cleric who looked like a freckled night jar covering his face with his van. “I just don’t have the vessel.” He groaned. Billy thought it more polite not to let this go uncommented.

“What’d be a good vessel then”, he said, though he wasn’t sure what exactly the priest was going on about: everyone knew that von Bornheim’s heart was cruelly split in two, with the larger half held by Goedyva Laedily who had slept with almost every one in town but who had not made love ever. Billy knew that because Goedyva liked his paintings and had bought one for her private rooms. When he brought it wrapped in bubble foil she had talked of a great arc of love and how she used to draw it as a child and a thousand other things that he could not remember, except one, namely that she, too, loved the priest, had never loved anyone before or since, but considered it uncongenial to approach him just as von Bornheim considered it improper to lay his arms down for Goedyva.

“A vessel like a iron arm to hold her through the storm.”, the count said, “A vessel like a bowl at whose bottom our faces swim licking each other. A vessel like a dress to reveal all that lies bare beneath the skin. A vessel like a bow drawn to send an arrow through bone marrow straight at the eye’s I”. He sobbed.

Billy was trying to follow, but he had got tired and he needed to go home. He had helped the priest which surely was a good thing, so he bid him goodbye and left, his head full of strange thoughts and images, always more images and colors and lines and a few ideas for a later that surely would come. He was a painter now commanding a vessel all his own, its sails filled with delicious wind. The world was a forward place at his boyish beck and call.

When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
and he began to teach them many things.

Gospel, Mk 6:30-34

ONCE upon a time, fairy tales just happened and if you had walked up to an ordinary man or woman of average taste and education inquiring, say, about a character like Cinderella or little Red Riding Hood, people would have told you about them in the unexcited manner in which they talk of what they know for sure even if they don’t – but they can feel the truth of the matter, and they add the necessary detail for a good steaming story, because that’s what we’re all about: making up stories we can believe and inhabit at any age, in any place.

You come out of these encounters with regular folks knowing that Snow White lived just around the corner, and that the Strong Wanja came through town after he defeated the Baba Jaga and before he met with the terrible dragon whom he slayed after a hearty breakfast in the local pub.

One of the lesser known stories, and who knows who told it first, is the story of the War Child, Noëlle. She was a little girl still and she held the entire world in her small hands and she did not even wear a fancy dress nor did she talk much and she did not even know how important she would become for everyone around her. Had she known it, her magic might have evaporated like a splash of water on a hot hot summer day.

When Noëlle was playing as a toddler, her parents, Nebuk and Caliph, saw that she kept to herself and they worried. She was their only child, conceived after much battle with doctors who viewed Nebuk’s cervix with scientific suspicion and took Caliph’s sperm probe (in a small cylinder which made him feel small and impotent though there was no problem on that frontier and he and Nebuk often rolled in the hay, out of love) muttering foreign words with many syllables, which did not sound kind or encouraging. These doctors, it was clear, were not paid nor trained for human compassion but for some service involving manuals and knowledge bases that made your mouth dry with desire for fruit.

Noëlle was quiet allright and kept to herself, but when she was at the playground, all the children tried to play near her. And when their mothers asked them why since Noëlle did not really show any interest in them, only smiled kindly and would not even throw a ball back at them that had dropped in her reach, these children shook their heads. But if said mothers took them away freaked out by the quiet child in the center of their own brood, the children moaned and resisted until the mothers gave up and returned to their grown-up conversations and ground-down concerns.

In school, Noëlle was good in those subjects which required a steady hand and a calm mind, and not so good when a lot of talking and diverse doing was asked from her. She loved history above all though she would not say what she learnt from reading the dusty books in her father’s library. Her favourite was the Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Julius Caesar.

Now she was eight years old and had been allowed to stay up past her usual bed time. Her parents had turned in already, trusting her to get herself to sleep safely. At midnight, Noëlle, who had been restless all day against her habit and inclination, stepped out on the terrace of their city flat and looked up. She found that she wanted to open her hands like a priestess as if to receive a large gift, closed her eyes and felt a pain, not too bad though, and somehow natural and known, grip her heart which was uncommonly large and wide unspoilt.

When she looked at her hands again, they held a pair of old leather sandals, which felt warm to her touch, heavy and light at the same time. She knew that these shoes were the wars of all times: wars remembered and wars forgotten, terrible wars where millions died, and small wars between lunch and dinner. accidental wars with their chance battles which nobody really began and which were ended by exhaustion of all involved, premeditated wars planned by loiterous leaders and carried out by those who sat below the salt. wars that harmed many who did not even know of their reason. heroic wars waged by huge men, combatting to the death. wars that transcended the grave in a grim way. attention-grabbing wars which found their way into the thickest history books. wars fought in trenches filled with helmets wet through from tears. flimsy wars flickering across TV screens as news from a remote reality. flaming wars and wars of the weary. gender wars leading to barren bodies and wounded egos. wars of words, of men and mice, of the sons of light and the daughters of darkness, of high and low, more against less, the wicked against the weak. so many wars, never they stop, thought the girl and at this moment her burden seemed almost too large to carry and she was tempted to throw the battle clogs on the street so that everything might return to normal.

But she knew it wouldn’t do. Once the truth is out, you cannot put it back in its cage, her mother had said, it’s a big bird. The water I bring I will never bring again, the river had murmured. There is no repetition of anything in the world, Noëlle thought. It’s now or not again for a thousand years of yearning, she thought as the city lay still and she could almost hear her father’s light snoring and sense her mother turn him over for lack of a better way.

Across from their building, Anthony, whose son had served in the war and died in the war, closed his bar “Tabernacle”. He moved about slowly, pulled down the shutters with great care almost as if he was painting the window, not to disturb anybody’s sleep. He was a sweet old man with a weakness for hooch. She whistled and he turned around and waved her hello with his dark hand. What’re y’doing up so late, he whispered but at this hour his voice carried far. Noëlle shook her head – I don’t really know, I need to do something, she replied. Can I do something for you, he said. No, she signalled, and Anthony shuffled off carrying his sadness home in a green bottle.

The girl kneeled, slipped in the leather thongs, turned on her heels twice to the left and twice to the right, and disappeared we don’t know where, to end all wars, forever.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt severely struck by sentimental mood.

“College was especially sweet because of the positive, hopeful atmosphere of a college campus.” (Jerry Kramer)

“The best, distinguished, older professors [...] can begin to untangle themselves from [their] obligations and isolate administrative nonsense to a small number of days. They might even have a single day each week to take care of [...] crap, and then spend the other four thinking big thoughts.” (from: Academic Productivity)

1. PEERS

It was hot. A sweet stench of rotting meat was discernible one day after Professor Grczmczk had died at his desk.

His colleagues knew that something was decomposing but kept quiet. His next door neighbours, Profs Caligari and Wundersam, entered their offices at 7 a.m. and 7:03 a.m. respectively.

Ettore Caligari, a national authority on ancient history, locked his door, let his pants down, logged into his computer and wanked to a 700 A.D. image of a hunky Apollo fornicating a goat.

Prof Wundersam, sweating profusely after a ten mile bicycle ride, stripped naked and walked across the corridor to the restroom, looking like a fifty-five-year old wrinkled Adam. He splashed water in his face, under his armpits and between his legs. He liked the feeling of liquid running down his skin so he did not dry off but walked back to his office wet, leaving puddles on the floor.

At 8:30 a.m. Priscylla Portos, the Dean’s secretary, slipped and fell shortly after entering the hallway, avoiding damage to her head only because she wore a helmet that day. It was emblazoned with the school’s motto: ‘Parturient Montes, Nascetur Ridiculus Mickey’ – mountains will be in labour, and an absurd mouse will be born.

2. PEER PRESSURE

Meanwhile, in the biology lab, Prof Sisyph McMurray was indeed working his way up a mountain: he was shagging his teaching assistant, Nicola Katzinsky, who had been studying under his turgid tutelage for four years already. Each term, Nicola, who was currently spread-eagled on a shabby dissection table between a freshly cut open headless, twitching frog and a book of early medieval fetishism, asked McMurray when she could graduate. And each term, he found another flaccid excuse to postpone her leaving the institution:

“Darling”, she said, “I think I’m ready to leave school”.

“I’ll say when you’re ready, sweetheart”, he said.

They met every other day before class in the biology lab. The slashed squib and the fetish book were necessary for McMurray, 64, to keep it up for more than two minutes.

“There is still so much you can learn from me”, he whispered while massaging her ponderous breasts thinking of melón de pulpa verde dulce.

“Like what”, she groaned and reflected on the professor’s gentle way of lovemaking – shortly before the savage savant pulled out of the race.

Nicola would forever associate frogs and fetishs with fucking, and her future analyst, Morris Goldwater of Brooklyn NY, would get richer during her therapy, while her future husband, the noted Wall Street banker, Gardner Easley Honeywell III, would be surprised at the clever things his wife said all the while on her way to one of those extended massive orgasms that shook the walls of their Fifth Avenue appartement.

All ends well that is well, Nicola thought befuddledly and calmed by a deep inner knowledge of things to come. When her professor had finished but she hadn’t yet, she would have to bring her own bacon home while McMurray fell asleep on top of her.

3. DEALING WITH PEER PRESSURE

At 9 a.m. the classes were filling up and Professor Cricket, Dean of the Law school, arrived in his shoddy clothes. He drove a 1967 Carmanghia which he had named “Carson McCullers”.

When he smelled the rot of the disintegrating corpus, he followed it to Prof Grczmczk’s office, closed the door, opened his briefcase, took a vegetable knife from it and stuck it (smiling) deep between the dead man’s shoulder blades, muttering “abusus non tollit usum”.

Then he left for class with a chapped chortle on his lips, not afraid of murderous clichés, his heart a lonely hunter.

(published in Hobo Pancakes)

From The New York Times, June 26, 2059.

“On this day 50 years ago, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, suffered a serious heart failure in his Los Angeles home. After an immediate successful resuscitation by attending paramedics, the body of the singer & performer who had moved the entire world, was transferred to his estate Neverland Ranch and encase there in a hyperbaric crystal glass chamber, dressed in his red-black jacket created for Thriller.

Jackson, who is attached to an artificial life-support system specifically designed for him, is still alive & well but in a deep coma. A group of reporters could convince themselves earlier in the week that he looks exactly like he looked on the day of his collapse half a century ago.

Medical authorities who received a full briefing cannot not explain this fact. Professor Heath Bubbles, an expert on cryomedicine from the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., said that there was a chance that the continued love of hundreds of millions of music lovers around the globe might have had the effect of preserving Jackson’s health against all odds. He speculated:

Why should the world not have been able to keep Michael Jackson both alive and blooming as a result of the joy he spread with his music? I don’t think our technology has as much to do with it as Jackson’s soul.

Prof Bubbles added that Federal authorities were currently devising a series of experiments with comatose patients who were much-loved members of their families and their community to see if the Michael-Jackson -effect might extend these people’s lives and the state they’re in.

Whatever the scientific cause for the miraculous preservation of Michael Jackson, the singer’s family – led by his surviving sister, 92-year old Janet Jackson, who still performed only five years ago to wide acclaim in a duet with Madonna (at age 100 only a fortnight younger than Michael Jackson) on London’s Wembley stadium stage, both scantily clad – will celebrate his centennial birthday at Neverland Valley Ranch, Santa Barbara, on August 29th this year, and the world is likely to attend to honour the man and his music.”

© 2009 finnegan flawnt as a tribute to Michael Jackson

- don’t you want to say good-bye, said the riding teacher to the little girl who had wandered off to follow a donkey whose behind was swaying back and forth in an interesting manner of swaying. the little girl did not hear her. her uncle who stood next to the teacher, shrugged and smiled an embarrassed smile. he was, however, not unhappy to be able to engage the young woman in conversation. he’d see where it would go. probably nowhere. the woman was tall and slender & had jumped to the riding patch straight from her permanent place on the cover of cosmopolitan. he carried a paunch as his most prized possession, had hardly any hair left except at the temples & was anxiously holding eye contact, careful not to let on that he thought her breasts beleaguering & more absorbing than any discussion on childrearing could ever be.

- you are really lovely with the kids, he said. he wanted to say ‘it’s been a long time since i touched breasts as firm as yours’ but of course he didn’t do it. i never do say what i really want to say, he mused, considering whether to drop into an extended period of self-inflicted depression, but his good sense won & he nodded instead, not knowing what the young woman had answered if anything. how do others keep talking while making decisions on what to talk about or how, he wondered. oddly enough, a billboard with the line ‘pathetic loser on the rampage’ written on it in flashing letters was dangerously hovering over the scene.

at exactly this moment, something unforeseen happened. the code run to sustain the simulation contained an error in a subroutine. the program entered this subroutine because the man was so stricken & sullen & oscillated back and forth between not one but several mental avenues, some of which were: self-pity, self-disclosure, panic, self-loathing, and blowing himself up down and above in order to overcome a shyness that was his birth right and his gift, which, however, he looked down upon as upon an eczema.

this error in the subroutine had never been entered before. it did not cause the entire program to stop (or else the world as we know it would have ended). instead, the man, the woman & the patch of grass on which they stood were cut off from the rest of the universe existing inside god’s head.

suddenly, the man felt an incredible lightness of heart, and the woman felt it, too. without knowing what he did, he hugged her and she hugged him back. they stood like this for a long time, eyes closed, oblivious to the fact that, besides the patch of grass and themselves, there was nothing left of anything.

when auto-debugging was finished, the program rewrote itself correcting the mistake. bitrows were aligned and lose ends were tied back to the public stream.

- what are you doing, the woman cried & noticed that she was holding this strange balding man as if her life depended on it. he withdrew, blushing stammering something & staggered a few steps away from her, grabbing a pillar of the fence to steady himself.

- i don’t know what happened, but something has changed, didn’t you feel it, he said, unsure, mumbling. this was exactly like one of those headfucks he gave himself all the time, except it had felt real. he had not just lost it, she had hugged him back, he knew as much. she knew it too & kept her mouth shut & tightened her fist around the leash of the horse which had dangled lifelessly from her wrist a moment ago.
-  i better not keep amy higgins waiting, she muttered.

he shook his head as if to fend off a fly and nodded.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt