Author: slightlyignorant

slightlyignoranthttps://slightlyignorant.wordpress.com

The Auction

“Shh, it’s happening now. I’ll tell you when to run.”

Corralled into a fenced in patch of ground, the children glanced nervously around, darting their heads down whenever an adult happened to look directly at them. They were beautiful children, flawless except for the dirt that had been artistically smudged onto their faces and under their nails and the mud that clung to the ends of their shorn hair. The decoration was meant to stir the sympathy of the adults surrounding the pen.

“Now?”
“Not yet. Hsst.”

Unfortunately for the children, most of the adults, the potential buyers, were wise to such tricks. Most of them looked for more telling characteristics – the arch of a child’s back, the straightness of their teeth, the shape of the ears, the expression in the brow.

“See the clocktower? That’s where we’re heading.”

The auctioneer got on his platform and began to call loudly for the buyers to choose the numbers they wanted and gather round. The children all had two-digit numbers tattooed – temporarily – on their foreheads and the backs of their hands. The adults took peering looks, barking at this or that child to raise his head or hold out her hands. Then the buyers would nod and head to the auctioneer’s podium.

“When he calls the first number and they open the gate to bring a kid out, that’s when we run. Got it?”
“Uh-huh.”

Watching the auctioneer explain the rules of the auction but not going closer were the adolescents, the sellers. Some of the children in the pen were their siblings, some were their small children. It didn’t matter. They were products and the sellers were professionals. They knew all the tricks. They’d been there once themselves. They watched the kids closely, keeping on eye on their gangs. The auctioneer called out for number 11, and a little boy pulled his thumb out of his mouth immediately and squared his shoulders. He didn’t cry. He looked at his seller and they nodded to one another. He walked towards the gate which was unlocked by a guard. It was a wooden fence, solidly build with spikes carved out of the top of the staves. It only reached about chest-height for an adult but it towered above the children’s heads, and there was barbed wire curling atop the spikes. None of the kids could climb it.

“NOW.”

Two of them ran, ran, fast and hard as they could, and one of them even managed to run past the open gate, but the guard caught her and threw her right into the runner behind her. They fell back into the pen and the gate slammed shut. Their seller came running over and looked at them through the barbed wire with a face far too calm to bode well.

“You just lowered your price for me by two thirds. That means you lose two-thirds of your security clauses in the contract.” She walked away from the two children who still sat on the ground, leaning against each other. She was mad. She also respected the little runts. She’d never had the courage to do what they just tried, not when she was that young. Now? Who knows what she’d do now. She was doing this, wasn’t she?

Earth’s End

The rabbits are soaring in the sky tonight. The owls are prowling below ground. The topsy turvy magic has won out and we are trapped here.
There are stairs going sideways in the air instead of up or down. There are trees growing downwards, their roots thrust in the air like expressive javelins. There is a moon shining in the sky, but it is bright green and the sky itself is red.
Red is for blood. For fear. For the end of the world.

It all started several years ago, but it was so slow that none of us knew what was happening. How could we? How could we predict the changes that were to come? Seven years ago we still thought that rats were mute creatures that had no language like ours, we thought that we were alone in the universe, we thought we were the most intelligent species there is.

Now we know the truth, which is that we don’t know anything. It’s a start, at least. It’s something.

The elders say we need to be patient. That things will sort themselves out. They talk about the second coming of Christ, about the return of the Buddha, about Khali raising an army for us. About the God of the Old Testament throwing fire and spreading brimstone around the forests that have turned on us. They tell us stories at night, by the light of our generator-fed lamps. We listen and eat out of old cans and plastic bags of chips. We rip apart packages of desserts that last forever and discover they are rotting inside. Even the laws of chemistry and physics do not apply anymore.

At the beginning, we remember, we were told that this wasn’t the end of the world. It was an anomaly, so some said. Or a discovery. A momentous occasion. The landing of the first ship on earth was meant to excite us. The television news anchors were spinning it with smiles plastered on their faces. The online journals and newspapers and blogs were split about evenly between Armageddon-fearing moronic pieces of drivel and excited scientists spreading their zeal for knowledge.

Some of us, it is important to say, wanted to remain ignorant. This seems unbelievable to some, or at least it did, it used to. Now people know that ignorance really is bliss. When reality goes nightmarish on you, all you want to do is shut your eyes and go back to sleep. We understand the wisdom of that now.

The landing, the first one, was relatively innocuous. The ship was empty and we had no visitors, but there was a host of communications. It took a long time for the people at NASA to decipher all of it. The rumor was that they’d actually needed to hire some of the conspiracy theory nuts we used to watch in online videos, because the nuts knew more than the NASA people. They’d studied more about this stuff, they’d trained themselves to spot patterns and connections that real scientists simply didn’t believe in.

Once we’d accepted that changes were coming, when we knew that another ship was coming, that we were going to have to figure out diplomacy with creatures besides humans really fast – that was our golden age. Suddenly humanity bonded together and wars that had been raging for years, even if subliminally, were put aside. Occupations were either accepted by the occupied or abandoned by the occupiers. There was something bigger than all of us happening and if we didn’t adapt to it we would all, collectively, be left behind.

Then, too, there was that idea that is prevalent in every small community – which is, after all, what we’d learned we were. Just a small neighborhood, maybe the equivalent of a block or so of the universe, which was far more orderly than we had always assumed. No, it was our own minds that were in chaos, not the laws of the universe. The idea, though, that became overwhelmingly clear was that we didn’t want to be ashamed of ourselves. We wanted to be able to hold our heads up with pride, to hold ourselves together, not as races or nationalities or peoples, but as one species regardless of our differences. We knew that it was important to bond together.

It was as if we knew that everything was going to go wrong. Almost as if we could feel the crazy mounting up against us, the rules breaking, gravity shifting beneath us, the laws of reality bending. We were right. But bonding didn’t help us at all. Nothing could have. We were, we are, doomed.

Writing in Chaos

I don’t know what chaos is. Do you?
Here is what I do know. I know that digestion is shoddy. I know that my jaw aches from chewing too much gum. I know that my brain is fuzzy with unspoken and unwritten words, bitten back during the daytime’s perennially busy doldrums.
I also know that my sciatica is coming back, as it does in times of great stress. That I’m developing carpal tunnel syndrome or tendinitis – the doctor can’t tell – and that my ergonomic keyboard doesn’t help so much, nor do the exercises.
A new thing I’ve learned is how beautiful 6am is, even when I haven’t had enough sleep. How silence is a virtue and smiling and nodding dumbly are what is occasionally expected of a subordinate. How the ache in my chest that is love or happiness or hormones can’t be given form, though if it could become corporeal, I’m pretty sure it would be a balloon animal of a giraffe.
Here is another thing I know. I know, finally, what the point of my writing is. It is to make people – and that includes me – feel. It is to smash away the numbness and apathy that controls our days, and to give succor in pages of a story or book to the people who, like me, need literature to help them regulate their shoved-away emotions, their hidden away desires, their shameful and painful secrets. Happiness is beautiful, but it is overrated. There are many states of being, and in writing, I want to touch them all. All the hues of that super-spectrum of invisible light.

Staying

We cling together like droplets of water, crawling up or down glass in order to fuse with similar molecules. We isolate ourselves and shut our eyes to what happens outside our safe haven. We are loyal to one another and to no one else.

When we climbed onto rooftops as children, we saw the reason behind our elders’ warnings not to go up there. The view beyond our narrow streets and teetering buildings was grim. If our own children’s expressions are anything like our own were, the world outside our walls has not improved.

When the rare outsider arrives, we celebrate. It is a low-key celebration, nothing like the City Holidays. We pour coffee and bring out the biscuits covered in chocolate, the ones we save for special occasions, and we ask the newcomer questions. We ask about faraway places, the names of which we often mispronounce. R-Kansas, we are told, is actually Ark-n’-Saw. Mehico, the outsider corrects, is Meksico. New York, he says, hasn’t been New for a dozen dozen years. And York, he adds, is not a place you want to know about. Whatever makes a person’s eyes alive dies when he says this, until we ask about Boss-town, and then he smiles and takes out a digigraph of his niece, who was born there, who is beautiful.

We all host the outsiders when they come. We take turns and try not to be greedy. We sometimes wonder whether the newcomers would prefer to settle in one place while they stay here, but the truth is that while we are all eager to talk to the people from outside, we also don’t trust them, not entirely. It is safer to keep them on their toes, keep them moving. We don’t want them getting too comfortable. It is the rare outsider who receives a permit to settle here, and we don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. Not ours, not theirs.

City Holidays are magical. Fireworks are shot into the air and the power stays on all night and we break out the cosmetics and paint our faces as if we were Hollywood stars from the old 2D pictures, with lipstick and eyeshadow and cufflinks to match. We dance in the squares, in big circles, holding hands. We stay up until morning and then get together in big prearranged crews and clean up all the garbage our revelry generated.

There is a time for play and a time for order, and we teach our children to recognize the difference. When the thrice-yearly referendum on the state of our City come along, we show the children how to vote and explain why we choose the things we do and try to present a cheerful face even when the opposite result comes through, because that is what democracy is about, after all.

We remember our first votes, just after our fourteenth birthdays, coupled with our first apprenticeship placements and, for many of us, our first budding romances, kindled in the heat of the ironically called baby steps towards adulthood and the bittersweet flavor of responsibility. Our first votes were sweat-stained affairs. The decision, yae/nae for whichever proposition was our first, felt like a life-and-death one, even though no bullet-fueled weapon was being held to our heads, nor was there a threat to our beings should our vote ultimately be cast on the losing side.

There are rumors of people disappearing occasionally, but what society does not include conspiracy theories? We know our government, though. We are our government. And we aren’t thugs. We occasionally get into scraps when heavy drinking is involved, and of course we have a rotating schedule for guard duty and there are some nights when the more desperate among us attempt theft or assault, but murder is not a common crime. Similarly, kidnapping or “disappearing” criminals or, indeed, those who don’t agree with the more powerful among us – this is not a practice we condone. It is, besides, unnecessary. People know when they are not wanted, but it is more often by their family or their spurning lovers or, more tragically, by their resentful children. If people disappear from our City, it is because they have been active, have “disappeared” themselves, have, in short, left.

When the outsiders leave, though, few of us have the desire to go along with them. We remember our early days of rooftop adventures, and we remember the gray barrenness that lay outside our secure City. We’re safe here, and we’re staying.

Unexpected Royalty

“It was not cute,” my roommate said. “I’m not a screamer or anything, but eugh.”

That was the day the large rat made its entrance into our lives. It was an innocuous enough beginning. Nobody, not even my sturdy, stalwart roommate, likes to be faced with a rat as big as a tennis racket is long when going to the garbage room of the apartment building. Seeing them in the subway, running across the tracks and somehow always avoiding the third rail – that’s cute. But having one sit there and stare at you is an entirely different story.

I’m not the kind of guy who thinks of girls as wusses, but I was pretty surprised when my roommate wouldn’t let the subject of the rat go.

“Seriously, Mal, I’m telling you, it was so big, and it was just staring at me. You don’t understand. It had this look…”

“Yeah, okay, but you wipe the asses of old men all day for a living. How is a rat worse?”

She glared. “That’s not all I do and you know it. Look, I know that it’s not exactly sexy, going into geriatrics, but it’s important, okay, like how would you like it if you were eighty and in the hospital and all the nurses kept talking to you like you were four and–”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re too easy to get, you know.”

She swatted me with the kitchen towel and threatened she wouldn’t share her food. The rat was forgotten at least then.

It was my turn to take the garbage out the next week. I pushed the responsibility off by shoving the yuck in the can down again and again with bits of cardboard from the recycling bin (which also needed clearing). When I couldn’t avoid it anymore, I made myself mouth-breathe, tied the bag, and took it down to the absolutely disgusting garbage room.

There are always flies hovering around it, a dark cloud of them buzzing and flying in geometric shapes, over and over again. One night, when I was really high, I speculated that maybe the shapes they made were runes, spells, and that it was flies that kept the earth twirling and going round the sun. The idea stuck with me, unlike most of my stoned babble, and it made me wary of swatting them.

I pushed the garbage room door open and swung the bag back in an arc so I could toss it all the way in without setting foot inside the room. Before I let the bag loose, though, a fat brown rat caught my eye. The bag swung back down and pendulumed a little in my upraised hand. I didn’t really notice. I suppose I kept my hold on it by sheer instinct.

I was mesmerized. This rat – it was positively majestic. It was the Cleopatra of rats. The Henry VIII of rats. The freaking Freddie Mercury of rats. It had a scar across its left eye and one of its protruding front teeth was chipped. Its grey fur was matted but it looked like a coat bought from the Salvation Army, like a vintage delicacy scrounged from the bargain bin. There should have been a soundtrack of a guitar solo going.

It – I have no idea how you tell rat gender – was also slouched sideways, kind of leaning towards one hip. If it had eyebrows, it would only have been raising one. This rat, this cool as a mofo rat, was basically asking me what the hell did I think I was doing, barging into its domain.

There was squeak, the only squeak I’ve ever heard that had a smoker’s rasp to it, and I could swear the intonation was the same as “get the hell out of here,” as spoken by any impatient bartender getting rid of a shoeless customer.

I took the garbage next door and tossed it in their garbage room.

When I got back upstairs, I asked my roommate if she’d thrown the garbage in there with the rat last week.

“What rat?”

“Oh come on. You know which rat.”

“…you’ve seen it?”

“Have I. Have I!”

“So you know,” she breathed.

“Why did you pretend to be disgusted by it?”

“What else could I do? Tell you that the King of All Rats is presiding over our very garbage room? You’d have told me I was insane.”

“I guess. But now I understand. I get it. We have royalty here.”

“Yes. And you know what makes us. Courtiers.”

That- that was just the beginning of our involvement with the rat.

Irene, Social Media Queen

It’s a funny thing about electric kettles. Irene always forgets about them. She clicks it on again and again, leaves the kitchen, and forgets to come back. The kettle is so quiet, boiling away, and by the time it shuts itself off with a little hiss, she’s already back at her desk, her head sucked back into the world of social media, her eyes glued to the screen and her neck craned forward in the way the doctor told her was bad.

Women like Irene don’t really exist. Women in their sixties aren’t suppose to understand blogging, tweeting, tumbling. They’re supposed to be scandalized by Reddit. Scared of Facebook. Simple emails are all they can do. Except women like Irene, who do exist, sort of, on the periphery of reality.

Irene smokes a pack a day. Still. She doesn’t have lung cancer. Yet. She measures things this way. What is she still doing, what hasn’t happened yet. She puts things into columns in her head, dividing the good habits from the bad, the desired future events from the ones to be avoided.

On her fourth smoking break of the day, Irene talks to the young assistants. They’re eager, tattooed, rainbow-haired. One of the boys – Irene can’t think of him as a man, even though he’s in his twenties – has grown his hair into an afro. Irene can tell he takes care of it. She admires him. Her granddaughters are all straightening their hair or keeping it short. She knows that she could grow her hair out too, but it would be such an awful lot of effort to dye the gray away. It isn’t worth the time.

She’s forgotten about the coffee she was trying to make again. A bottle of ice tea is what she needs. The kind with the wacky flavors that marketers invented to make the drinks seem trendy and healthy, which means the same thing, even though they’re infused with so much sugar they don’t taste like tea anymore. Irene loves them.

It’s always been this way. Irene loves everything and everybody that isn’t good for her.

“I saw you in the paper!” the cashier at the deli across the street says to Irene as she rings up her bottle of tea and the bag of pseudo-homemade chocolate chip cookies that Irene picked out on a whim and a sweet tooth. The cashier is shorter than Irene by a foot and has braces. She’s wrapped in a white smock that hides her pregnant belly. Irene feels sorry for her and knows she shouldn’t. People must look at Irene and feel sorry for her too, she knows, and she would resent it if they ever expressed it. Not that they would. After she’d punched that man on the train for touching her hair once, when it was longer and she was younger, she seemed to project a new air of fearlessness, of don’t-approach-me-don’t-talk-to-me. A street savvy she wishes other women would adopt.

“Yup. That’s me,” Irene says.

“You’re cool, abuela,” the cashier grins as she hands Irene her change.

“Yo no soy tu abuela,” Irene says. She doesn’t wait for the girl’s response. She leaves the deli and has one of the cookies on her way back up to the office. The man in the suit in the elevator stares at her, digging around in the crinkly plastic cookie-bag. She proffers it. “Want one?”

Nobody knew her age where it mattered, not until the stupid profile. Irene can’t get the word out of her mind. Abuela. She shouldn’t have been so rude to the girl. It was meant to be a compliment, an endearment. Irene had chatted to the girl before about her grandkids, congratulated the girl on her pregnancy. She was pretty sure she’d even joked about how since her own kids only want to see her when she can watch their children and fulfill her role as grandmother. Maybe that’s why the girl said it. Maybe it was all Irene’s fault.

She’d gotten nine hundred and twelve new followers on Twitter in the last twenty-four hours alone. Her Tumblr inbox was getting ridiculous. The profile had gone viral online. “Sixty-three, Irene, Social Media Queen.” It shouldn’t have come as a shock, but it had. She, who understood so much about what made people tick, what words drew people in, still knew that it was a crap shoot, what would get really popular and what wouldn’t. She didn’t expect to become a sensation on par with some minor walrus videos that got pretty big.

Irene put her tea in the kitchen fridge to get it colder and clicked the kettle on.

New Publication!

My story is in the newest issue of the online art and writing zine, The Artist Catalogue. Check it out!

http://www.theartistcatalogue.com/

Watched

I’ve never known what constitutes a garden. It’s something cultivated. Something that needs pruning and sheering . Weeding and seeding and watering. I have always been under the impression that gardens need care but not constant supervision. That they’re planted for the enjoyment of people. Like the rose gardens that some really fancy hotels have. Or for practical use, like a vegetable garden. The kind of thing that hippies live off of.

I was surprised when Nora told me she was moving into her garden.

I hadn’t visited her yet. She’d moved upstate to somewhere with cheap houses and high taxes. The kind of loose collection of residencies that is called a village and that is nestled inside something called a township which is then part of a county. I’m pretty sure we don’t have hamlets in the US. I think that’s just an English thing. But if Nora could have moved to a hamlet, she would have.

She’d hated living in the city. Four years for college, then seven years for her MA and PhD. Until she gave up on her dissertation and moved away. I never understood it. How she could she abandon all that work. Seven years. All those hours in the library. All those late nights agonizing over data. She’d jumped up and down after year five, when the department agreed to fund her for two more years. That’s how much promise they saw in her.
Anyway, I hadn’t heard from Nora in a good six months, since she’d moved away in November. In May, while I was loading up the dishwasher that I’d finally started using, I got this call from her. Her voice was the same. Distracted. I asked her how she was, and she said she was moving out of her house for the summer.

“Coming back to the city, huh? Knew you couldn’t keep away.”

“No,” she said. I can never tell if she knows I’m making a dig at her or not. Probably not. But maybe. She did leave, after all. “No, not at all. I’m just moving outside. The garden needs watching.”

“Why does it need watching? Are your eyeballs going to make it grow faster?” I stood over the hot sink, and my face was still sweaty, and Nora sounded like she’d always sounded, like she was looking for a piece of paper to jot something down on.

“Yes, basically.”

“What, so you have a quantum garden?”

Her laughter had always been kind of horsey, at odds with her small teeth and wide jawline that betrayed nothing equine. She was more cat than anything. She started and stopped things abruptly.When she laughed, like she did then, it was a short neighing sequence followed by sudden silence.

She asked me how I was. I wanted to stop talking about her, so I said, “I’m using the dishwasher now. But you’ve ruined me, I’m still washing the dishes before putting them in there.”

Nora had always been very anti-dishwasher. She sounded less certain now. “Well,” she said. “That’s good. You always wanted to use it.”

I wasn’t going to ask her why she’d called. She would tell me or she wouldn’t, and if she didn’t, I’d be able to invent my own – better – reason.

We Sheltered

Bomb shelters aren’t romantic.
As children, we cowered under our desks, hands stuffed tightly to our mouths to keep ourselves from giggling. The teacher, struggling to stay in her high heeled shoes, would hide under her big table just like us. We worried about the brown-bag lunches in our desks, and how we would get to them if we had to stay crouched for a long time. We worried about our bladders, which only made the urge to go worse. But we were ultimately thrilled every time the duck-and-cover drill came along. We felt important. We were Americans, and we were worthy of being saved. We also got to miss ten minutes of New Math, another plus.
When we grew up and had children of our own, we told them the stories of that old-school naivete. They laughed at us, at our time, at the hair we had in the crumbling photographs we never bothered putting in photo albums. We felt less important. We tried to make our children feel more so. We put their photos in albums, until Facebook came along and they did it themselves.

We remember our fathers digging bomb shelters in the back yard. We remember asking him if he was trying to dig to China, and the way he picked us up and swung us up to his shoulders and told us it was the damn foreigners he was trying to get away from. We sat on his shoulders on the 4th of July too, and felt that much closer to the fireworks exploding above us in the sky. Our dogs would hide during the explosions. They understood better than we did that things that go boom in the sky are to be feared, not welcomed with gleeful applause.

Our children fear things more intelligently than we do. We were brave. We wanted to change the world, get out the vote, stop the war. We had more ideals than fears. Our children roll their eyes at us and tell us we don’t understand, our privacy is at risk, the government is listening in on us, it’s a George Orwell nightmare. We remember 1984 being so far away, we tell our children. We remember believing a desk could protect us from the atom bomb. We remember trusting.