, Author at Post Road Magazine

Six 100-word Memoirs

Paul Doherty

IRISH

From the sunroom off the parlor, now converted to his sickroom, my father would call out as I left the house, “Remember you’re Irish.” I believed his good-bye to be ironic. Unlike his own father, a zealous Fenian, my father was pleased and proud to be American and had no interest in supporting or celebrating Irish causes.

Another of his valedictions was for any family member heading off to Mass. “Remember me to the Reverend Maurice.” Father Maurice O’Connor was pastor at St. James, classmate and close friend of Cardinal O’Connell. My dad thought both men too full of themselves.

WOODWORKER

My father’s hobby was woodworking. I can just barely picture him at his cellar workbench—when I was a child he was a dying man—but several of his wood creations remain—the massive workbench itself, the miniature toolbox he made for me, and the platform, built so that we could share the workbench. For the beach he made a scow and tugboat. That tugboat is a masterpiece—iron keel, dowel smokestack, intricately carved pilothouse and gunwales. He built a second cellar stair railing, low, at just the right height. I suppose that it’s still there in my childhood home.

“MRS. DOHERTY”

My mother called our neighbors by their surnames—Mrs. McCabe, Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Porter. Her life was circumscribed by my father’s long illness, which kept her homebound. Groceries were delivered from the Arlmont Market. When the “Arlmont man” came, he waited in the kitchen until mother had accounted for each ordered item. One year she did venture from the house, enrolling in a Red Cross home-nursing program. Mrs. Riemer told me later that my mother mastered the hospital tuck better than any of the other women. I was not surprised, only delighted that my mother’s extraordinary competence was on display.

IN THE KITCHEN

I was probably seven or eight when I had my tonsils removed by our family physician, Dr. Carl Barstow. The procedure took place in the kitchen of my home.

Why at home? To save hospital costs? A family tradition of home tonsillectomies?

I don’t know. I do have some clear memories of the day. I was placed in a kitchen chair, my folded arms tied to it with towels. Gauze, soaked with anesthetic, ether I suppose, was held beneath my nostrils. All went well. Later that day I walked across to Robbins Farm and watched my friends play tag football.

GLOVE

In 1948 the great Red Sox infielder, Johnny Pesky, conducted a baseball clinic in Arlington. My brother loaned me his Bobby Doerr glove for the occasion. At the clinic, we young infielders gathered around Pesky. He asked to borrow a glove. I held the Bobby Doerr out for him. Pesky fielded ground balls, emphasizing positioning, balance, and footwork. When the clinic ended he handed the glove back to me. “Nice glove, son.” I ran to where my brother had been watching. “Nice glove, son!” He would not have heard that. I was pleased to report Johnny Pesky’s amiable professional judgment.

LITTLE BUILDING

The Little Building, a blocky structure on the corner of Boylston and Tremont, is now an Emerson dorm. But in its heyday between the wars it was Boston’s largest office building. Trips to Boston with my Aunt Molly included a visit to the office of her childhood chum, Nora Hurley. There, in a room cluttered with bolts and scraps of cloth, Nora embroidered—altar cloths, priests’ vestments. But Nora’s eccentric-ities interested me more than her needlework. You could not mention FDR in her presence; you could not convince her that her refrigerator light shut off when the door was closed.

City Kingfisher

By Marina Richie

The belted kingfisher I pursued all summer on a wild stretch of Rattlesnake Creek now perches on a high wire above the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula, Montana.

He’s gone urban this winter. How could he have become such a suave, natty bird who seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word skittish in the environs of crows, pigeons and house sparrows? So many times he eluded me in the labyrinth forests of cottonwood and ponderosa by the cold, clear creek.

The bird I thought I knew belongs four miles upstream from Rattlesnake Creek’s nearby confluence with the Clark Fork River, a place the Salish (Séliš ) people knew as Nɫʔay, translated “Place of the Small Bull Trout.” Not so long ago, the sizzling fragrance of fresh trout cooking on a fire permeated their camps, as they caught, dried and stored fish for the winter ahead.

My kingfisher pays no heed to the rumbling cars rattling across Higgins Bridge, the honking of horns, or the thudding passage of walkers and runners. He likely comes from generations of male kingfishers flying downstream in a seasonal pilgrimage to find the ice-free waters with best fishing on a river then unencumbered by a small city of 70,000.

His mate has flown south and will return by late March or early April to the home nest bank along Rattlesnake Creek. By then, my kingfisher will have flown upstream to guard his prime nesting territory from upstart males.

I come to see him often, finding some patterns in his movements. If not on the wire, he tends to be poised on a cottonwood tree limb, or he’s patrolling his mile-long winter territory from Madison Bridge by the University of Montana downriver to the Orange Street bridge.

On one late sunshine day, he scrunches down on the high wire. His feathers appear fleecy gray without a speck of the typical blue. His crest flurries into a peak with that distinctive two-part divide. From a distance, he looks like a baseball impossibly balanced on the wire. Through binoculars, he’s slimmer and alert, snapping his tiny tail and peering at the ice chunks coasting downstream.

He is predictable only in context of the dynamic river and shifting ice. With below-freezing temperatures, the ice expands from the shore outwards. The wire allows him access to the river’s center, where he dives headfirst at an angle to pluck an escaping trout from black waters.

One day as I watch him on his wire perch, I have the feeling of not being alone. I turn to see an unshaven middle-aged man in a torn jacket standing a few feet away.

“A kingfisher!” I say and point where my bird has flown to the limb of a young cottonwood leaning out over the river close by.

“Yes, a kingfisher!” He nods back and we stand together in silent appreciation of the bird with the tousled crest, head cocked forward and bill pointed downward.

A kingfisher doesn’t stand out like a bald eagle swooping down to nab a duck on the ice, or a great blue heron stalking the shallows with long-legged precision, or the mergansers and goldeneyes rafting the waves. He’s more like the man I met, invisible until you become aware of him.

This kingfisher I watch does not divide urban from the wild. By the river’s edge are red-osier dogwoods and willows among boulders that harbor a broken whiskey bottle or a torn shirt. Beavers gnaw trees. The wilds nudge into the city. The city nudges the wild. I’m always cheering for the wild to win, yet acknowledge that if a kingfisher could vote, he’d endorse the presence of wires over the river that give the ideal view of the fish below.

Other Moons

by Max Halper

Thus it amounts to the same thing
whether one gets drunk alone
or is the ruler of nations.
— Jean-Paul Sartre

I went to rehab with a guy named Mitch who had swastikas tattooed on his hands and neck. This was in Mississippi, about an hour outside Jackson. Mitch was a meth addict and is dead now, as far as I understand. The swastikas scared me at first, but after months of living with him I stopped seeing them. Mitch was just a guy whose life was as fucked as mine. We used to crack each other up. We even cried together once.

According to a 1984 article in The Journal of Social Psychology,^[i] the single strongest determinant of whether one person will see a UFO is that someone they know has seen a UFO and told them about it. I dated a woman years ago who saw UFOs every time she looked up. I always suspected there was something weird going on between her and her brother.

I found a cow skeleton ensnared in barbed wire at the edge of my family’s property when I was a kid. My friend and I collected the bones and stored them in the abandoned doghouse near the garage. I would check on the bones periodically over the next few years to see if anything about them had changed. I found a ball of baby snakes writhing near the doghouse once and took it as instructions to return the bones to where I’d found them, though I never followed through. Sometimes I think that was a terrible mistake. Mostly I don’t think about it at all.

The legend goes that as he lay bedridden in a sanatorium with tuberculosis, unable to eat or drink, every rattling breath an interminable nightmare, Franz Kafka grasped his doctor’s lapel, pleaded for an overdose of morphine, and said: “Kill me, or else you are a murderer.” Thereafter his throat swelled so tightly he could never speak again, and a week later, in the middle of the night, he died from his illness. Outside, the sky was black save the disc of sunlight gathered on the face of the moon.

Sometimes I feel paralyzed by the conviction that life is pointless and nothing matters. Other times I feel paralyzed by an overwhelming love for people and their ideas. Occasionally these two paralyses overlap. I have a hard time being productive.

I worry that I’ve never really gotten to know anyone. The same way a steak is not the cow, words are not the ideas they purport to signify. I feel like this is a good start.

I’ve been on and off anti-depressants my entire adult life. Right now I’m off, and I feel pretty good. But it’s only a matter of time.

In 2009, in the Alps, nearly thirty cows leapt from a cliff to their deaths over the course of three days. Occasionally, an otherwise healthy penguin will turn away from its colony and waddle alone into the dark, thundering cold to die. I’ve heard of dogs that drown themselves after their masters die or abandon them. A captive dolphin once suffocated itself in front of its trainer after years of forced performance. Some people argue that there are natural explanations for these incidents, but I don’t understand how that would make them something different than what they appear to be.

There’s another version in which Kafka is in his childhood bedroom surrounded by his friends and family. The gathering of friends and family recedes back into the gray corners of the room. Kafka is more belligerent in this version: at one point he seizes his sister by her hair and draws her close to his chapped lips and rasps something that only she can hear and that sends her reeling from the room, never to return. Another main difference is that in this version Kafka ultimately starves to death, the tuberculosis having clenched his throat shut, making it impossible for him to swallow food.

Sometimes I listen to pop music on the radio while I’m driving, to pretend that I’m like everyone else. Occasionally I’ll stop and get a candy bar and a soda. I even voted once, in 2008. In AA they say they can always spot a newcomer because he or she is the best dressed person in the room.

The phenomenon of alien abduction has been largely categorized in academia as a conflation and misconstruction of sleep paralysis and childhood sexual abuse.^[ii] I suppose it’s easier to live in a world in which the monsters have come from faraway than it is to live in a world in which the monsters come from down the street, or from down the hall, or from the paludal swales of our own brains. On the other hand, I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing anything monstrous, or anything that wasn’t abjectly human. If there are monsters, they are entropy and the distance between things.

I’ve spent years cultivating an approach that I call “selective sociopathy.” This allows me to feel what I need to feel and shirk the rest. I know we all do this to some degree. You wouldn’t believe the chain of suffering ignited by putting gas in your car. Or by being born in America. It doesn’t matter how you look at it.

The happiest people I know tend also to be the horniest, and the laziest thinkers. This makes me nervous.

Occasionally I’ll pray for a terrorist attack or a natural disaster to get out of having to do something I don’t want to do. It’s worked a few times.

No one’s ever asked me if I believe in god.

I think I think about Kafka’s death as a piece of writing in and of itself, as if having produced a body of work so grotesquely organic there was no longer a boundary between his language and his bodily operations.

I told Mitch about my Jewish heritage and he didn’t seem to care and he certainly didn’t hate me. He claims he got the swastika tattoos in jail. I asked him once if he’d ever read any Kafka, but I can’t remember his answer. Probably no. I think he would have liked Kafka. They had a similar sense of humor.

I saw a segment of a Japanese prank show where they put a PULL sign on the door of a department store that required pushing, and filmed people as they approached and yanked on this fucking door and yanked and yanked and then gave up and walked away. The whole thing felt like something else. I’m not sure how else to explain what I mean. I think about it all the time.

I used to start drinking in the morning. Towards the end it was not unusual that I would pass out by noon, wake up at four or five, and continue drinking until I passed out again. I used to joke that I was getting two days for the price of one. I also frequently blacked out. I once came out of a blackout at a table in some apartment with four or five men I didn’t know. One of them had a gun in my face. “What do you have to say now?” he asked. I told him I wanted to leave. He allowed me to leave, and I started opening doors, not knowing which one was the exit. Behind one of the doors there were some children on a mattress on the floor doing homework. The men at the table laughed at me. I found my way outside and started walking. I don’t remember getting home, and I can’t remember what any of the men looked like. Nowadays, every time I see a man I don’t recognize, I worry it’s one of the men from the apartment. I wonder what I said to upset him so much. I’ll bet it was pretty funny.

Here’s a joke Mitch told me about a fisherman who, fishing from his boat in a lake, feels a tug on the line and, reeling in the catch, finds an arm on the hook. He sets the arm in the boat’s hull and recasts. Soon after he feels another tug, and finds a second arm, which he sets beside the first. Next comes a leg, and then a second leg, and then a torso, and, finally, a head—all of which he piles in the hull. The parts roll together and fasten to each other, and a tall body sits up and blinks around. Its eyes are black. It opens its mouth, and from the mouth floats a ball, dripping with slime. The ball hovers in the air. The slime drips away to reveal a white orb. The orb thrums. When the fisherman looks into it he sees the entire universe suspended amid a fathomless emptiness, completely alone in the dark. Terrified, he leaps from the boat and swims ashore. He rushes through the woods to the village, caroms up the street, scrambles into his house and collapses against the door. His wife, feeding the baby, looks up. “How was the fishing?” she asks. The fisherman, finally finding his breath, shrugs. “Meh,” he says.

I had a therapist who had a Rothko print on the wall in his office. I’m not sure if the implication was to strive toward the quiet compartmentalization of Rothko’s art, or to strive away from the crass over-simplification of Rothko’s art. I suggested, half joking, that he consider replacing it with one of those inspirational panda posters. As is my experience with most therapists, he was too forgiving of my deflective impulse to philosophize generally about life, and often indulged in that impulse with me so that I rarely if ever spoke about myself. Plus he was very expensive.

Sometimes I’ll do this thing when I see a pretty girl where I’ll imagine starting a conversation and asking her out and her saying yes and so going to dinner and hitting it off and we start dating and we fall in love and we move in together and we get married and we have a kid and name her Lily and things are good and we have another kid and name him Jack or Soren or something and we go on vacation to the Caribbean and then return home and carry on with our lives and over time things start to get boring and we start to fight a bit and it’s tiring and then there’s some infidelity and we get separated but we miss each other so we try again but it’s stressful for the kids and so we get divorced and it’s relatively amicable and she starts dating a friend of mine and I pretend to be fine with it though in truth I’m lonely and the kids are grown up and eventually I meet a woman but she’s much younger than me and me and my ex have a long conversation about how dating one of my grad students is not good for me and I agree and end the inappropriate relationship and focus on my work and the years pass and my ex remarries and moves to the Berkshires and I get sick and die somewhat too young on account of the years of drugs and alcohol and all the smoking and she attends my funeral with her husband, who’s the headmaster of a private school or something, and then they return to the bed and breakfast they’re staying at while in town for the funeral and they have brunch and she basically never thinks about me again unless one of the kids brings me up which is rarely because I was always distant and difficult and they feel freer without me in their lives.

Kafka actually published The Metamorphosis during his lifetime, despite popular misconceptions. Before printing, he was approached by his publishers with some cover design options they’d had drawn up, all of which showed a monstrous insect strewn on a bed. Kafka was aghast, and demanded that under no circumstances should they portray the insect; it was precisely the insect’s ambiguity, the shifting and often contradictory descriptions, that drove the novella’s subtext. To portray the insect would harden its image in readers’ minds, and hobble the profound power of the text to manifest uncertainty. His publishers of course nodded and rolled their eyes, then proceeded to print the book with an insect on its cover. I prefer the version where Kafka dies in his bedroom. This feels both less likely and yet more organic.

The world rarely moves for me the way I want it to. I understand this is just THE world and not MY world and that some people feel this stuckness—feel everything I feel—even more profoundly than I do. This does not make it easier. In fact it makes me jealous, which makes it worse.

One of my first sponsors taught me about “radical empathy” as a strategy through which to alleviate some of the “chronic uniqueness” that addicts tend to suffer from. It turns out it has other applications, especially insofar as stoking creativity. If you don’t feel bad for everyone, then you can’t be a good artist. I like to start building all my characters from the same critical conjecture that some day they are going to shit their pants and die, just like everybody else. And that no one asked to be born as far as I know.

It’s not unusual in cattle mutilation cases to find a notable absence of footprints within the proximity of the carcass—including even those of the mutilated animal itself. Another common factor is the absence of blood, as well as certain organs including genitals and rectum. The predominant explanation for cattle mutilation—which has been reported on six continents—is natural predation. Some believe it is the work of cults or lone psychopaths. Of course there is the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I’ll also note that I recognize there’s a stark incongruence between “radical empathy” and “selective sociopathy,” and while both are personal tenets both are also outclassed by my central tenet: ambivalence.

It’s weird that the word “fiction” is the genesis for the word “nonfiction” whereas “nonfiction” refers to the truth and “fiction” to a lie. It feels like it should be the other way around. Though there is something more living about fiction, something less rigid and more full of blood. Something that needs to eat and drink to survive. Something that dies in different ways. In regards to Kafka, Susan Sontag wrote that “…the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.”^[iii] It’s bizarre to me that he didn’t kill himself.

There are lengthy memory gaps from my early twenties, due to the drinking. I’ve patched these in as best I can with a combination of other peoples’ testimonies and a little imagination. When I was in the psych ward from DTs after trying to cut my own throat with a steak knife, hallucinating gruesome visions of gore and fiery cataclysm, I became convinced that I had succeeded, that I was dead, and that I was in hell. This despite my carefully curated atheism. Even now with years of sobriety and less suicidal ideation I still sometimes wonder.

They say that in every carton of milk is the milk from over a thousand cows. This is the world. The only people who say they’re glad they botched their suicides are the ones around to talk about it. I enjoy a splash of milk in my coffee, and a glass of milk with my cookies. I’ll bet there’s someone alive right now who will live forever.

I had a dream in which Mitch led me into the woods off the shoulder of a cracked road. There was sky then no sky and damp outcrops pullulating with what I suspect was poison ivy and through which Mitch led me directly and hands of raggy fungus upgroping from the plinths of the oaks and beeches and pines and sinews of web draped expressly at face-level and too-authentic birdsong and Mitch’s deodorant in his path which hemmed west and down along a swollen gulch and a trellis of rotting logs and a cape of ferns thrumming in occasional stains of sunlight. Something all very sad about it. I was short of breath and didn’t own the right shoes, dusting at my mouth and ears and slipping up a knurl in the ground on which Mitch stopped and gestured down at the bed of a swale enclosed in corridors of rigid white birches, everything crackling and dripping as I grinded a heel in the balding grass of the knurl and tried to understand what it was he wanted me to see.

^[i] Zimmer, Troy A. “Social Psychological Correlates of Possible UFO Sightings.” The Journal of Social Psychology, 123(2), 199-206, 1984.

^[ii] McNally, Richard J. and Susan A. Clancy. “Sleep Paralysis, Sexual Abuse, and Space Alien Abduction,” Transcultural Psychiatry, Harvard University Press, 2005.

^[iii] Sontag, Susan. “On Style.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, 1966.

Max Halper’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southampton Review, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere. He lives in upstate New York.

Spring Break at the DMV

by Dalton Day

For Mathias

Author’s Notes

The transitions between each scene can be as smooth or as opposite-of-smooth as possible. Lighting can be used to indicate the end / beginning of a scene, or the actors can just start the next scene without any break at all.

“//” denotes a line that is interrupted by the one following it.

Italicized text is not verbalized.

Characters

A1, A2, A3: Three friends who are about to go on Spring Break. Though they are college-aged, they should be played by actors in their late 20s. They are going to be friends forever. This isn’t a nostalgic play, though. Because nostalgia is poisonous and honestly?? It’s like, an inch (at most) from being pure, unfiltered sadness. Nobody needs that. With that being said, I miss you, terribly.

DMV EMPLOYEE: They are just doing their job.

DOG: What dog?!

SOMEONE ELSE: You don’t know them. I wouldn’t worry about it.

SCENE 1 (Or, Prologue)

A dog’s bark is heard.

SCENE 2

A1, A2, & A3 walk onstage, wearing typical beach clothes. A spotlight follows them. They get used to this, but they don’t notice it. They resist it. Perhaps they try to go in separate directions, outside of the diameter of the spotlight. If this happens, three smaller spotlights should appear, one on each of them. But, eventually, they should reconvene at the end of this, in one spotlight, center-stage.

SCENE 3

A1: I can’t believe we have to come here.

A2: Come where?

A3: There’s nothing I can’t believe.

Someone should laugh who isn’t A1, A2, or A3. The play stops here unless someone laughs, ok?

SCENE 4

DMV EMPLOYEE appears onstage.

A1: Well we’re here now, so let’s make the best of it.

A2: Whatever you say, boss.

A3: Boss?

SCENE 5

A1, A2, & A3 approach DMV EMPLOYEE. They wait to be greeted, but they aren’t.

A1: Good morning.

A2: Good afternoon.

A3: [with fondness] I hope we stay friends forever.

SCENE 6

No lights. A smooth jazz track plays. It should be waiting room music. As the song continues, though, a little more…umph…is added to the mix. Then the sound of someone coming into the sound booth & saying Woah woah woah, that’s not right. Here, play this. Nothing plays.

SCENE 7

DMV EMPLOYEE

Take a number.

The number 24 is projected on a screen.

A1: 24 it is!

A2: That’s not that long of a wait.

A3: This conversation is horrible.

SCENE 8

A1, A2, & A3 are sitting on the floor downstage. DMV EMPLOYEE is still there. DMV EMPLOYEE can be walking around the stage, miming typical office tasks, or they can eat their lunch, or they can pull out a trumpet & play a sorrowful tune. Yeah, that one, eventually.

A1: I was reading the other day about memory.

How memories aren’t stored in a system in the brain,

that memories ARE the system in the brain.

A2: Oh, so it’s like, not a window in a room,

but like, the room itself?

A3: I’m going to remember this moment,

right here,

for as long as I can.

Lights fade as trumpet song comes to an end.

SCENE 9

A1, A2, & A3 are in a different room. There is a window, suspended in air.

A1: We should go to the beach for spring break.

A2: Hell yeah! Sand, sun, &…& uh….

A3: Salt!

All cheer.

SCENE 10

A dog’s bark is heard, again.

SCENE 11

Back at the DMV. The number 25 is projected on the wall.

A1: Wait a minute. Weren’t we 24? They never called it!

A2: Oh man, we’re never gonna get out of here.

A3: I think, when I look back at my life,

I’m going to be happy.

Pause.

Smiling. I hope.

SOMEONE ELSE walks onstage, & approaches DMV EMPLOYEE.

SOMEONE ELSE

Number 25! I’m number 25 right here!

DMV EMPLOYEE: Well, hello again! It’s a pleasure to see your face! Let’s get you what you need so you can be on your way! I hope the wait wasn’t too bad.

SOMEONE ELSE

Wait? What wait?

Both laugh, & exit.

SCENE 12

A3’s voice is heard but not seen.

A3: Isn’t it weird? The way people enter your life?

Seriously!

Like, you meet people,

& then, next thing you know,

you’ve known them for a year or two & it’s just…

impossible to track how they got here.

How close you are to them.

How you’ve shared such a small amount of your life with them,

& yet it’s…I dunno.

Don’t laugh!

It’s weird!

& like, how there’s no way you’re going to go back to a life without them.

You just…

You can’t even picture it.

Try it.

Try to picture it.

SCENE 13

Only A2 & A3 are onstage. A couple beats before the dialogue starts.

A2: Laughing. Oh my god!

A3: Laughing. I can’t believe you just said that!

SCENE 14

Is that—is that a dog?! There’s a dog walking around the audience. What kind is it? Oh it doesn’t matter, it’s a dog! The dog is probably gonna walk around & sniff a little bit. Probably no accidents. Maybe the dog will go on stage. If that happens, follow it with a spotlight. If it lies down, keep the spotlight on it, but maybe dim it? This will be the remaining length of the play. What a great ending! But probably the dog will wander off-stage, & then the next scene can start. Dang! What a great dog!

SCENE 15

A2: Yeah, we’ve been here AT LEAST that long, if not longer.

A3: If not longer.

SCENE 16

A2: Why don’t you go up there & see where we are in line.

A3: Couldn’t hurt.

A2 & A3 turn towards DMV employee, but neither get up. A beat.

DMV EMPLOYEE: You should be next.

Should.

A2 & A3 turn back to where they were. A beat.

A2: What did they say?

A3: Where are we?

SCENE 17

A2: (thinking) Hmm…lie down on the beach

& just listen to the waves crash.

I could do that for hours.

A3: You could do THAT for hours?

SCENE 18

A2: Y’all hungry?

A3: (clearly to audience) Y’all hungry?

A beat.

Me neither.

SCENE 19

A2 alone on stage. They are walking around, clearly bored. Eventually they go to the edge of the stage, dangling their legs off the side.

A2: I remember very well the first time I saw the ocean.

I was scared.

I couldn’t swim well.

& there I was, face to face with so much…muchness.

Whoever I was with told me not to be afraid.

But I was.

But it was beautiful.

& I knew that I would remember everything about that moment until (trails off)

However old I was.

However many people were there.

How long it would take me to finally work up the courage to walk towards—

A beat

To walk towards—

A beat

Uh—

A beat, A2 looks clearly stumped, before smiling.

A2: It was beautiful.

SCENE 20

The number 24 is projected on the wall for a moment, before malfunctioning. A technical error should show on the screen. Someone (not Someone else) walks onstage. They look up at the screen, reading the error, & then hit the wall (if they can’t hit the wall for some reason, a clap will do). The error screen disappears, & is replaced with a looped video of the sky. A few clouds, a bird or two. Nothing except sky should be seen in the video. Whoever walked onstage, exits.

SCENE 21

Sky still projected. A1, A2, & A3 walk onstage. They spread out, A1 stage left, A2 upstage center, & A3 stage right.

A1: Ok, so remember. Each person says one word at a time, making a story. & there’s no going back, no redos, & you only have three seconds to come up with your word. Ready?

A2: Yep.

A3: Alright.

A beat.

A1: There-

A2: Once-

A3: Was-

A1: A-

A2: Day-

A3: That-

A1: Seemed-

A2: To-

A3: Last-

A1 pauses.

A2: 1-

A3: 2-

SCENE 22

Has anybody seen that dog?

SCENE 23

A2: Yeah, me too. I’m sick of waiting around. It’s not worth it.

A3: We should be next.

SCENE 24

A3’s voice is heard.

A3: There’s got to be a simpler way to do this.

Like, an extra hand.

Every time you have to say goodbye,

like, a real goodbye,

like, you are leaving my life,

you grow an extra hand.

Simple, right?

A beat.

Though, I guess—

A beat.

Sometimes you’d just grow a hand out of nowhere,

& that’s how you’d find out you’ve said goodbye.

That’d suck.

Especially if it was the first time.

A beat.

& I guess eventually, you’d have more hands

than people to say goodbye to.

A beat.

How many hands does someone need?

To say goodbye?

This many?

A beat.

I’m waving.

A beat.

Can you see me?

A beat.

I’m standing right here.

Waving.

A beat.

Either a knocking sound or a clapping sound should happen, whichever one was used to fix the error screen earlier.

SCENE 25

A3 & DMV EMPLOYEE onstage.

A3: Oh, come on. It hasn’t been that bad.

SCENE 26

A3: & hey, at least none of us had to be here alone.

SCENE 27

A1 walks onstage. They do so hesitantly, looking around a lot, as if to make sure they are alone. When they reach center stage, their face dramatically goes from cautious to thoughtful. They sigh.

A1: Know who I miss?

SCENE 28

DMV EMPLOYEE alone onstage. They pull out their trumpet again & start to play. No sound is coming out though. They examine the instrument, & try again. Nothing. They are visibly straining to make sound come out of the instrument. They finally stop trying before looking past the audience, using their hand to see in the darkness. They gesture toward their trumpet, shaking it & shrugging their shoulders. A voice says from the sound booth: “Yeah, we’re working on it. Sorry about that.” DMV EMPLOYEE nods, puts their trumpet away.

DMV EMPLOYEE: I don’t mind waiting.

SCENE 29

A1, A2, A3 on stage with DMV EMPLOYEE: A1: I think I’m going to head out.

A2: Yeah, me too—//

A3: //–Wait.

SCENE 30

A1, A2, A3 onstage with DMV EMPLOYEE. A1 & A2 don’t move or interact. DMV EMPLOYEE moves as they please.

A3: I need a second.

I need to remember as much as I can.

A beat.

This is like those horses.

Looks to DMV EMPLOYEE for recognition, gets none.

Those horses. From World War II.

Nothing.

In World War II, a bunch of horses ran into a lake because they were scared & then–.

A beat.

Shwwwoooooop.

The lake froze solid.

With the horses inside.

A beat.

I mean.

It’s probably just a legend.

A beat.

But.

This is like that.

(looks to DMV EMPLOYEE) Don’t you think?

DMV EMPLOYEE: I think—

The projection quickly goes through a series of numbers. Is “24” in there? I think I saw it. Is this over? I don’t want it to be. It can’t be. Not yet. Not yet. It lands on the loop on the sky.

It’s time for my break.

SCENE 31

A3 sits perfectly still while a lot of people walk through the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE is on their break, so will not be in this scene. This should appear fast, the people not spending much time onstage, a few seconds at most. Feel free to just use audio of a lot of steps & human voices, if a lot of people cannot be found.

SCENE 32

A3 sits onstage. DMV EMPLOYEE Returns.

A3: Ok.

I’m with y’all.

Let’s get out of here.

A3 starts to get up.

SCENE 33

Who is your best friend? Have they always been your best friend? How many best friends have there been before them? Who do you miss? Can you tell them? Will you?

SCENE 34

I miss you.

SCENE 35

A1, A2, A3 enter the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE greets them.

A1: Hello! 

A2: Hi!

A3: Hey! 

DMV EMPLOYEE: My thoughts exactly! Right this way!

They all exit.

SCENE 36

A1, A2, A3 enter the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE greets them.

A1: Hello!

A2: Hi!

A3: Hey! 

DMV EMPLOYEE: My thoughts exactly! Right this way!

They all exit.

SCENE 37

A1, A2, A3 enter the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE greets them.

A1: Hello! 

A2: Hi!

A3: Hey! 

DMV EMPLOYEE: My thoughts exactly! Right this way!

They all exit.

SCENE 38

A3 enters the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE isn’t there.

A3: Do you mind if we sit here for a little while?

A beat.

Thanks.

SCENE 39

The video of the loop of the sky plays. This time, though, there is sound. Seagulls, & the sound of ocean waves. Other sounds typical of a day at the beach. This continues through the end of the play.

SCENE 40

Video continues. Lights up. End of play.

Here

by Jason Namey

Pickle likes his ex-wife’s house because when he steps out for a night piss the Tallahassee streetlights light and shape the plants like clay dogs.

He coughs into his elbow and curls down on the couch, pulling the sheet up to his wet armpits. It’s patterned Winnie the Pooh and must have been around since his daughter was a child. His hands come up dusty. Did nobody wash it for him?

Whenever he’s really working to fall asleep, he’ll smack his lips. Maybe he saw that in a movie once.

He sits up then lays back down just to sit up again in clean rotation till the sun starts to rattle against the trees. He wants to watch TV but scares about waking everyone, decides to just watch it on mute but can’t crack the remote. The screen won’t flash no matter which button he presses how many times.

He leans back and lets his eyes trace the roof like it were a maze to solve. He tries not to stare at that stain, the one shaped like pimpled lungs.

Today, his daughter is coming to visit. He just wants it to go well enough for her to not be like the rest and forget him already.

Like his landlord who forgot who he was and changed the locks.

Like his old neighbors who forgot who he was and wouldn’t let him borrow some cash.

Like his buddy Mike who said, “Sorry friend-o, I don’t have room for guests right now.”

***

A few hours later, Sand and Bill come down. They fry up pancakes from a box and top them with blackberry jam. Pickle eats just a bite, two. He can’t tell if he’s not hungry or just nervous about seeing her.

“Did you sleep okay?” Sand asks.

“Sorry we have nothing more comfortable,” Bill says. “Why don’t we go by Walmart later, buy you a blowup?”

“Maybe he likes the couch,” Sand says. “Sometimes there is nothing more comfortable than a couch.”

“What if he finds himself a young lady?” Bill turns to Pickle and winks. “Sorority Row is just a few miles thataway.”

Sand giggles and whispers something to Bill. Pickle tries to let out a polite laugh but it falls into a coughing fit. He wipes phlegm on the cushion without thinking.

Pickle leans forward and uses the coffee table to push himself up. The empty dishes on top chatter against each other. After finding his balance, he goes over to his bag and pulls a pack of cigarettes.

Sand and Bill watch him struggle the sliding door open.

He sits on the concrete bench and looks back at his reflection in the glass door, distorted amid a collage of waist-high smears as if rubbed off a dog’s nose.

Tapping his empty breast pocket, he realizes he can’t find his lighter. He scans the patio, cluttered with the same old bullshit: lawn chairs messed with mildewed rags, a shovel rusting against the house, cans of bug spray capped neon orange—shining among the muck. A small tin bowl rung with mold. A grill caked with ash, or is that dirt? Hanging from it, a utility lighter.

“Bingo,” Pickle says, reaching.

In the morninglight the plants look like plain old plants. It’s hard to tell quite how they shape the way they do at night: clay dogs frozen as if while running. The long grass droops back over itself like rows of barbed wire fence. Pickle fantasizes about cutting it. He can’t remember when he last sweated.

A kiddie pool sits pushed up against a tree, dirt gathered in its mouth and mixed with stale rain. A squirrel, perched on top, jerks its head around.

“Fuck you, squirrel,” he says, then slaps at the mosquitos tickling his neck.

***

When Pickle gets back inside, Sand and Bill are heading upstairs to get ready for work.

“Try not to sit on the couch when you’ve just finished smoking,” Bill says.

“Don’t listen to him,” Sand says.

“Don’t listen to me,” Bill says.

Pickle wants to show he can respect even their pettiest wishes. But he feels suddenly flint-kneed and lightheaded so he just nods and starts to say “Sorry,” but hears their door shut so instead he says it to himself. He can’t find his water cup on the coffee table.

After a short commotion of drawers and hair dryers, they come back down. Sand says, “I talked to Cyn yesterday. She’ll be by around noon. Tell her to call me.”

“Noon,” Pickle says. “We’ll see.”

“Don’t start,” Sand says. “Ask her about school, her major. I think you’ll be proud.”

As they turn to leave, Bill motions to the fridge, “There is salami if you get hungry. Help yourself to whatever except—” Sand glares at him. “Whatever.”

“Could I get some water?” Pickle asks, holding his hand out.

“Sure, help yourself,” Bill says as he opens the front door.

“I’ll meet you in the car,” Sand says.

“Aye, aye.” Bill goes outside and, a second later, starts the engine.

Sand walks over and sits next to Pickle. “Hey,” she says.

Pickle tries to put on a small smile.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

“There’s a first time for everything.” He stares at his feet.

“You’re brave,” she says.

“What have I ever done that were so brave?”

She squeezes his hand and looks away.

“We’re all brave,” she says.

“I’d rather be a coward,” Pickle says.

“Well, maybe you’re that, too.”

“I don’t know if death is the end,” he says. “But I sure hope it is.”

After a minute, she looks over with the mood of her face changed entire.

“You don’t know what all you’ve costed us,” she says, moving her hand back to her lap.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he says.

“Wouldn’t it be just like you to have nothing but a ‘what the hell’ to show for it all.” She stands up.

“It’s me,” he says. “Pickle.”

“What are you doing here?”

Here. The word hits him like an empty vessel.

“I’m not Here,” he says. “I’m Pickle. Don’t you remember me?”

“Here as in here.”

He feels thrown into a play with no script. He searches her with his eyes.

“Here,” she stomps her foot and points to the ground. “Right here.”

“Huh?” Pickle says.

Bill honks the car horn twice: a long one followed by a short almost apology.

“You’re something,” she says and walks outside before he can respond.

He sees his blurred reflection in the TV screen and wonders if he would remember himself either. If he weren’t himself, that is.

The clock shows only 8:30.

He wishes he had asked her about the remote.

8:31

8:32.

It’s truly amazing, he thinks, how much time there is in a day. If a person only had one or two days to live, that wouldn’t be much less than a lifetime.

Without meaning to, he falls asleep.

***

A knock rings out.

“Come in,” Pickle gasps, startled awake. But the knocking continues. His eyes confuse around the room. The hearing-aid makes it hard to tell where sounds come from and now he can’t seem to find the front door. It doesn’t help that, having just woken up, everything appears a blur poured out.

After surveying what feels like a different room each time his eyes make a pass, he squints the light gold of a door handle. He can’t tell if it’s locked, but Cyn must have a key.

“Come in,” he shouts, robbing breath from his lungs. Door and lock collide then collide again. The knocking resumes.

Dammit, Pickle thinks, pushing off the couch and rocking forward to not so much stand as fall upward. He uses first the countertop then the wall to steady himself as he makes his way.

Now don’t get annoyed already, Pickle tells himself.

He reaches over and unlocks the door.

Instead of his daughter, he opens it to a man his own age, wearing a loose smock with a cross patterned breast. The man holds out his arms as if to say: Ta-da.

“May I come in?”

“No,” Pickle says, caught off guard.

“Are you Peter?” the man asks.

“Do I know you?”

“Sand and Bill invited me.”

“People call me Pickle.”

“May I come in?” the man says.

“No,” Pickle says.

“Pickle,” he says. “I won’t be long.”

“I’m expecting my daughter,” Pickle says. “Fact, I thought you were her.”

The man peels out a watch. “Not till noon. It’s only ten. May I come in?”

“How many times you gonna ask?”

“That was the last time,” the man says.

Pickle steps back. “I’m holding you to the few minutes.” He tries to walk confidently but only makes it a few feet before leaning hard against the counter.

The man stops behind him.

“Have a seat,” Pickle motions to the couch. The man walks around and sits on the near cushion, but scoots when Pickle nearly falls in his lap.

“Do you know why I’m here?” the man asks.

The word carries a familiar unfamiliarity. Pickle takes a guess. “Is that some sort of parable? The Priest and the Here?”

“First, let me say you’re very lucky. You have a beautiful, kind family.”

“You say that like you’re the one who figured it out,” Pickle says.

“No, no,” the man says. “I just think it’s important to remember what all we have. How lucky we are. How lucky we have been.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” Pickle says. “You planning to come with me?”

“In some form,” the man says. “In some fashion.”

“Only one fashion I know of,” Pickle says.

“Would you like to pray with me?” the man asks.

“No,” Pickle says.

The man nods and looks around the room. “That’s a fine TV. I have the same one, actually. Why don’t we sit, and watch something?” He picks up the remote. “Would you like to sit and quietly enjoy some television with me? Yes, then, after a bit, if there is anything you want to talk about, anything you want to confess or beg absolution for, just start. I’ll be listening, even if it doesn’t seem like I am.”

“They let you have a TV?”

“College football,” the man says. “I can’t live without it.”

“Do you look away when they show the cheerleaders?”

The man laughs. “Maybe we could do your confession now?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Pickle says, coughing.

The man sighs and abruptly leans forward. “Well, then I guess I should get going. Bird feathers and water, Pickle.”

“What?”

10:01

“Those are the only two things you can legally throw from the window of your car.”

With that, he stands and leaves.

10:02

10:03

I should have asked him about the remote, Pickle thinks. He decides to again try figuring it out himself but now he can’t find the damn thing anywhere.

He taps the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket and closes his eyes, soon back asleep.

***

Near one o’clock his daughter comes but not alone. She knocks on the door as it opens, like a mother who doesn’t want to catch her son touching himself.

Pickle snaps awake. He had only been half-asleep: still aware of his body but enjoying pulses of strange imagery.

The first thing he thinks is, Fuck, I want a cigarette.

The second thing he thinks is, Say hello to your daughter, asshole.

He can’t believe how beautiful she’s become. Short, yes, but too smart to be a model anyway. Not brilliant, perhaps, but possessed by a certain intuitiveness. He wonders how she did in high school. Was she class president? Valedictorian? Prom Queen? No, likely not. But who decided those things matter?

“Cynthia,” he says and pushes everything through his legs to stand, but his body doesn’t do more than resettle on the couch. “Introduce me to your friend.”

“This is Pat,” she says. “Pat, say hi.”

“Hi,” Pat says.

“Hi,” Cynthia says.

Pickle tries again and partly rises but not far past still slumped with one hand on the couch’s arm.

They don’t come more than a few steps inside. Cynthia kicks something small and rubbery down the hall. A dog toy, perhaps.

“Pat’s a musician,” Cynthia says.

“Musical student,” Pat says, blushing.

“A musician,” Pickle says. “Marvelous.”

“It is marvelous,” Cynthia says.

“I’m really not that good,” Pat says, blushing even more.

“And what are you studying, dear?” Pickle says.

“I’m studying History,” she beams.

“No,” Pickle says. “No, that’s not right.”

“Huh?”

“History,” he says. “No, I don’t like that at all.”

“Now sir,” Pat says, stepping forward and holding a palm out like Pickle is some beggar they saw on the street. “I know we just met, but I’m set to take offense. With all due respect, you don’t know a damn thing about your daughter.”

“You’ll never be a musician if you keep defending people,” Pickle says, coughing into his elbow. This makes Pat back up and quiet, as though he can’t handle any challenge to his identity.

Pickle wishes he could be nicer to his daughter, but it’s like every time she does or says anything he’s learning new ways to be disappointed. New areas of disappointment he didn’t even know existed.

Cynthia turns to Pat, “I told you he would get like this.”

“You did. You told me.”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“You did. I said you did.”

“Like what?” Pickle says, feeling like he just walked into the middle of a conversation. “It’s me, Cyn. Don’t you remember me?”

“Like why are you even here?” Cynthia says. “You’re too good to die in a hospital? Or at your apartment?”

“Why do people keep saying that?” he says, near pleading. “Doesn’t anyone remember me? I’m not Here. I’m Pickle, your dad.”

“This isn’t your home!” she screams. “Mom and Bill have been through enough already.”

“Enough?” Pickle says.

“Perfect,” Cynthia says. “We’re gone.”

“Call your mother,” Pickle says. Feeling proud for having completed that small task.

“It was nice meeting you, sir,” Pat says.

“Fuck you, Pat,” Pickle says. He takes out his cigarettes and pulls the utility lighter from his jeans. Cynthia turns back at him.

“Smoke more cigarettes,” she says. “Never stop smoking.”

She slams the door. It was too late from the moment she walked in, Pickle thinks. She never had a chance of remembering me. But he had remembered to tell her to call her mother. You couldn’t take that away from him. He could imagine the conversation now: Mother, some man in your house told me to call you. The kindness of strangers, she would say from across the wire, shaking her head. Where would we be without it?

But a musician! he thinks. What a marvelous profession. What had Pickle studied again? Thirty years ago in his undergraduate days? History? He thinks it might have been History.

History, yes, it had been History.

But History had been different back then, of course. More interesting things had happened back when he studied. Now there is nothing interesting that has happened.

He lights his cigarette and leans his head back. Call your mother. He congratulates himself for the job well done.

After a few shallow inhales, he drifts off. The cigarette tumbles from his lips and lands on the sheet and, before long, it is aflame. Pickle lies stoic as a self-immolating monk, skin melting like yogurt in the sun.

***

The devil wakes him with a pat on the shoulder.

Pickle looks over. The devil has a large, open ledger on his lap and bifocals near fallen off his nose. “Hey, I know you,” Pickle says. To his right, a dog sits licking itself.

The devil tilts the book toward Pickle and motions with a pen. “Does that look like an ‘R’ or a ‘P’ to you?”

Pickle coughs into his elbow, but nothing comes up. Just dry coughing. “It’s awfully burning in here,” he says.

Here… Here. Here. Here.

How did everyone forget such a simple word?

Smoke curtains upward around the couch, leaving the two of them in a sort of well.

“Do you know how to work this thing?” Pickle asks, reaching through the smoke for the remote. He gropes around the coffee table, knocking his cup over before finding it. “I want to watch Jeopardy.”

The TV isn’t visible through the smoke, but Trebek always reads the answers out loud.

“If you hit the little red button, it’ll record it.”

“The which button?”

“Give it here.”

Pickle hands him the remote and the devil breaks it over his knee.

“That wasn’t mine, I hope you know.”

“I think I would have done it either way.”

“Fuck you, devil,” Pickle says.

The devil laughs.

“What’s your favorite movie?” Pickle asks.

“Apocalypse Now,” the devil says.

“That’s a good one,” Pickle says. “Good choice.”

The devil beams.

“Want to hear a joke?” the devil says.

“Sure,” Pickle says.

“Let me get a cigarette,” the devil says.

“Don’t take the lucky one.” Pickle hands him the pack.

The devil sticks one partway up his nose. “What am I?” he asks.

“I give,” Pickle says.

“An elephant about to face the firing squad.”

“Oh.”

“What caused 9/11?”

“What?”

“I was flying to LA and forgot to turn my phone on airplane mode.”

Pickle stares at him.

The dog licks itself.

“I’m outta here,” the devil says and scurries over the couch. Pickle hears him open the window and climb out.

The smoke around Pickle doesn’t get any closer or farther away, it just stays a constant stream, the fire sounding chirps and rattles. He tries to stand and walk around a bit, stretch his legs, but his lower torso is stuck to the couch, melted to it. Flesh spun between fibers.

Dammit, Pickle thinks. I really want to scratch my ass.

So what now?

He wishes he could see a clock.

Bored, he taps his palms on his knees like: ho-hum. But then he does it again and again until he finds the beat of some song he invents as he goes along. After he finds a pattern in his hands, he begins to whistle, only able to scale a few bars before coughing. He keeps tapping until he finds his breath and starts to whistle again, erupting quickly into another coughing fit. But he doesn’t stop tapping his knees. He whistles again: same result.

But, he slowly starts to realize, the coughing is part of the song, too. He plays it up, extending it past what’s natural.

So, on, Pickle decides, to continue, in this fashion, until somebody asks him to stop, which, he knows, no one ever will.

Fun with Peter

by George Choundas

12/03/05 Peter is born.

03/15/09 Peter and I walk to the playground down the street and hop onto the swings. We bore quickly of rote pendulum motion. We invent Battleswing, a martial-themed game that awards a point each time a player—er, warrior—succeeds in touching his foot against the opponent swinging alongside him, so long as foot contact is made with the other’s legs above the knees (lower legs are too accessible and gut the game of challenge) or with the front or back of his trunk. Safety is paramount: contact with head, neck, or arms is prohibited; holding on with both hands is mandatory.

I learn three things. First, at the playground that day, I learn that three-year-olds lack the neural pathways to distinguish between foot contact and kicking. Second, in bed the next morning, I discover a sullen bruise at the center of my lower back, the very place where birthing mothers sometimes experience bruising from epidurals. Mothers pay with their bodies through parturition, it seems, and fathers after.

Third, at the same playground six months later, it dawns on me—as multiple mothers shoot aren’t-we-setting-a-bad-example looks in my direction—that if safety were really paramount, there would be no such thing as Battleswing.

02/10/10 It snows eight inches. I shovel, Peter plays. Once I finish, we drift onto the front lawn. It is a mattress of snow. I point at two trees, ask Peter if he remembers using them once as a soccer goal (he does), and propose I curl up like a ball and he try to kick me through the snowfield into the goal. He likes this idea; it involves kicking and/or foot contact. I like this idea; it involves the madcap spontaneity that commercials for credit cards and cruise lines suggest middle-aged suburbanite fathers should be exhibiting more often. Peter scores two goals. It is great fun. Until he kicks me in the penis. It gets dark suddenly, for reasons having nothing to do with the sun.

10/11/13 It’s Friday before Columbus Day Weekend. Peter has the day off from school, so I take a vacation day myself. We put on shorts and bring his bicycle and my waveboard to the playground and play Cops & Robbers. As I chase him, tottering atop what is essentially a two-wheeled skateboard, Peter turns his bicycle into me rather than away from me, and at speed. I have two choices and one moment to make them:

(1) bail from the waveboard and get out of the way to minimize the impact but thereby run the risk that he catches his front tire on my abandoned waveboard and catapults over the handlebars, or

(2) stand my ground and absorb the impact by grabbing those handlebars.

I choose the latter, because I am a father. But immediately I realize I have overlooked the downside risk of this second option, which in fact materializes now: the bicycle’s underworks barge into my right leg, the chain wheel bites into the shin, and the serrated metal leaves a wound that gapes wide under a grinning flap of flesh.

I probably need stitches. I tape the thing instead. I tell Peter I’ll bear the scar forever as a reminder of the time he ran his father over. “You mean the first time I ran my father over,” he says.

Is this idle smartassery? Or is it a threat? I don’t know. But I have recorded it here, for public dissemination, in case the latter and I cannot give witness.

The scar—I still have it—is the shape of a letter J. Part of me sees it on its side and imagines it is a graph showing the necessarily dwindling number of memories I’ll make with my son over time. (Look, here’s where he leaves for college. And that point there—that’s where he gets the job in Guangzhou.)

More often I see it upright. More often I decide it stands for joy.

Today Peter is twelve. He can lift his mother and carry her through the house. His forearms are thicker than mine.

I still give him options, sure, every weekend. Lately they are limited to Xbox or chess.