“It’s because I’m a pig isn’t it? … I did not get the nomination for best actress … can you  honestly say I am not Oscar material? … In this male chauvinist, non pig world, did you ever  think I even stood a chance?”  

Miss Piggy to Johnny Carson at the 52nd Annual Academy Awards.¹ 

I should begin with honesty. A very good place to start. I am not a Muppet fanatic. I have not  always adored Miss Piggy as much as I adore her now. I was, for a long time, much more of an  establishment Disney villain queer. A devoted worshipper at the shrines of Cruella De Vil or  Ursula the Sea Witch. That said, I can happily watch a Muppet film with a glass of wine and enjoy a  pleasant giggle. 

Something about Miss Piggy struck me more deeply than the usual queer coded Disney villains. It  could be the wig. It could be the dress. It is probably the karate chops. As a queer man, I am  constitutionally inclined to admire a confident female character who can karate chop a villain with  one hand and cradle her amphibian lover in the other. 

There is something irresistibly special about Miss Piggy. 

Her position in the public eye fascinates me. How could it not. 

Miss Piggy has been a still performing celebrity since her debut in 1974 as Piggy Lee, a parody of  the singer Peggy Lee, in a Jim Henson television special. ² Since then she has done everything. She has starred in multiple feature films including The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The  Fantastic Miss Piggy Show and The Muppets Take Manhattan. She has hosted, guest starred, sung  duets, delivered monologues and stolen scenes with alarming ease. 

Through all of this, Piggy has developed a distinct comedic persona, one that draws heavily from  the work of earlier comedic and dramatic female stars. She is a vessel for those classic feminine  sensibilities, preserving them, exaggerating them and carrying them forward into the present day. In  a strange way, she functions as both archive and performance. 

Miss Piggy does not age. She is, much unlike myself, unvarnished by time. 

Because she does not age, she is spared the usual indignities that accompany celebrity longevity.  There is no physical decline to be commented on, no descent into public cognitive fragility, no late  career unraveling that forces audiences to renegotiate how they feel about her. Unlike so many real  celebrities of the past, she does not become an awful person, nor is she reframed through hindsight  as someone whose opinions now make us wince. 

Stars of her era tend to fall into familiar categories. Some become venerated icons, endlessly  rehabilitated and re-contextualised, like Jane Fonda. Others quietly disappear into the fog of  nostalgia, remembered fondly but vaguely, like your Tallulah Bankhead or Lauren Bacall. Miss  Piggy exists in both spaces at once. 

She is a figure of nostalgia and an active character in the contemporary media landscape. 

She is a kind of immortal Carol Burnett, who fittingly appeared as a guest on The Muppet Show in  1980. 

Because of this, Miss Piggy acts as a bridge to the previous century and to older, conventional ideas  about femininity. She embodies them so fully that she is able to subvert them, twisting tradition into  something that still resonates with modern audiences. Her exaggerated glamour becomes  commentary rather than costume. 

Modern pop stars even echo her influence. Chappell Roan, for example, has been rumoured to  draw inspiration from Miss Piggy’s theatrical silhouettes and unapologetic excess. ³ This makes a strange kind of sense. Piggy understood the power of costume long before the internet turned  fashion into a language of identity. 

I am always interested in who Miss Piggy appears alongside. 

On the original Muppet Show, she sang duets with John Denver, Elton John and Raquel Welch.  Piggy is endlessly adaptable. She bends just enough to fit the guest star of the week without ever  losing herself. Her personality is strong but elastic, capable of surviving any context. 

In the most recent iteration of The Muppet Show, she appears beside Sabrina Carpenter. What is  striking here is that Carpenter subtly adjusts herself to fit Miss Piggy, rather than the other way  around. That alone says a great deal about Piggy’s accumulated cultural weight. By embodying  stereotypes and gleefully undermining them, she has somehow become a modern trendsetter. 

This is not something all boundary breaking celebrities manage. 

Plenty of stars who once seemed radical now feel awkward, dated or outright troubling. Scarlett  Johansson and Diane Keaton (until her death) continue to defend Woody Allen. Nicki Minaj has called herself Trump’s number one fan . Patti Lupone being Patti Lupone . ^{5 6} 

Divas age. They change. Often the media reacts badly to those changes, often unfairly. But Miss  Piggy avoids this entire cycle. At the end of the day, she is literally put back in a box and stored  until she is needed again, perfectly preserved. 

Sabrina Carpenter is an interesting choice, but not an inspired one. The new Muppet Show is  intriguing, yet it ultimately feels like a retreat into familiar territory. If you love The Muppet Show,  you might as well just watch the original. It remains sharper, stranger and more alive than its  successors. 

Miss Piggy’s greatest appeal is her ability to function as a bridge. On the surface, she is just a pig  puppet in a wig and a dress. Beneath that surface is a personality capable of making people feel  seen, affirmed and entertained all at once. 

As an entity, Miss Piggy also works as a quiet teaching tool. For audiences still learning about  pronouns, identity and gender norms, she offers an accessible example. You can point to her and  say, notice how this character refuses to be defined by what society expects of her. That is a deeply  uplifting thing, even when it arrives wrapped in satin gloves and dramatic eyelashes. 

Diva worship is basically my religion, and Miss Piggy absolutely deserves a niche, if not a full altar. 

My favourite historical nugget is Miss Piggy’s 1979 campaign for the leading actress Oscar for her  role in The Muppet Movie. It is what I love most about her. It felt like a genuine expression of  character rather than a corporate publicity stunt. That campaign even produced a wonderfully  absurd exchange between ABC’s Hughes Rudd and Academy President Fay Kanin. 

“To see Miss Piggy is to think of Olivia De Haviland, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid  Bergman, Oscar winners all. So why shouldn’t Piggy have an Oscar?” 

“You know we all do love Miss Piggy,” Kanin replied, “but the rules of the Academy say that  we give awards and nominations to actors and actresses, not to characters, and since Miss  Piggy is a character, we just can’t, we can’t do that.” 

Miss Piggy, of course, would disagree. And she would be right in doing so.

The post The Glamorous, Immortal Nostalgia of Miss Piggy  appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Would it be so bad to admit that this grief is for the childhood dogs I grew up with? I don’t think I will ever truly stop missing them, remembering them, mistaking the scratch of a branch at the window for their smallfooted bodies waiting to come back inside. The idea of a dog being ‘just a dog’ is a foreign concept to me, despite having heard those words time and time again in my life. 

Sweet things — it was only years ago, some hot summer, the sun baking us in the metal of our boat. My family, a few cousins, and me, on a heat wave weekend. The waters were choppy and unforgiving, but T-bone and Minnie had good lake legs. They knew how to move around, how to stand, when to sit, and when to brace themselves. They had always been the best deckhands on the Cobalt, but as the years bore on in those palmetto days, I saw the change. The new slowness, the minor struggle you could only identify when really searching for it. Before the days were over, though, they would have managed to steal a few chips from my mama. If I had known what times would be the last, I would’ve given them a few more. I would’ve laid by them on the brown floor of the boat the whole ride. 

I try to fill these days with reading, much as I do any other time of the year, but in the winter with more of a desperation. I have been digging through Mary Oliver’s Devotions. Containing some of her best work across many of her different publications, there was a poem that stuck with me the most: Her Grave, which hails from her 2013 poetry collection Dog Songs. 

She would come back, dripping thick water, from the green bog. 

She would fall at my feet, she would draw the black skin 

from her gums, in a hideous and wonderful smile — 

and I would rub my hands over her pricked ears and her 

cunning elbows, 

And I would hug the barrel of her body, amazed at the unassuming 

perfect arch of her neck. 

Dog Songs details the canine companions of Oliver’s life, and expresses the profound love and joy they brought her in details that are etched in a sort of nostalgia. Each poem recalls a dog that she can only continue to love in memory or retrospect. In the language of each poem are intimate recollections of not just their habits and personalities, but their features, their bodies, and the things about each of them that brought a familiarity even in their passing. Her Grave is one of the longest and most heartbreaking of the collection, as she remembers fondly the last days of her dog, Luke. 

It took four of us to carry her into the woods. 

We did not think of music, 

but, anyway, it began to rain 

slowly.

Her wolfish, invitational, half-pounce. 

Her great and lordly satisfaction at having chased something. 

My great and lordly satisfaction at her splash 

of happiness as she barged 

through the pitch pines swiping my face with her 

wild, slightly mossy tongue. 

It is through even the smallest of descriptions that she gives us the devoted imagery of Luke, staving away from any kind of apathetic ennui. It makes sense that Oliver would hone in on furry friends when a great majority of her writing is based in the natural world. However, instead of basing us in her usual lakes, mountains, or forests, we find ourselves in the simple places we often are with our pets. Fields, kitchens, bathrooms. For Her Grave, it is in the hardest of these: those last days, and a resting place. 

Does the hummingbird think he himself invented his crimson throat? 

He is wiser than that, I think. 

A dog lives fifteen years, if you’re lucky. 

Do the cranes crying out in the high clouds 

think it is all their own music? 

A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you 

do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the 

trees, or the laws which pertain to them. 

Does the bear wandering in the autumn up the side of the hill 

think all by herself she has imagined the refuge and the refreshment 

of her long slumber? 

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the 

smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know 

almost nothing. 

It was in this section that I had to sit with what Oliver was writing. I didn’t understand why she was referencing these animals and critters, or what they meant. I understood that we did not truly own our dogs, but what did that mean here? 

What I did know is that losing a dog is a special grief. And I think that, with human life, we know it to be a fact that we are all going to be gone somehow, some way. From the first time your parents take you by the shoulders and explain that someone, for some reason, is gone forever. From biology classes, from the nightly news, from the interstate, from cemeteries, and from boating accidents. I forgot, though, that this inevitable fate also applies to dogs. As a child there was no such thing as death because I had just barely begun to live. I had always navigated this life with a good dog at my ankles, barking and squirming happily while I giggled and ran with my arms outstretched — a memory that sprawls as far as the bermuda grass that grows to the edge of the cypress trees.

What I came to understand, after pouring over this poem over and over, is that not only do we not truly own our dogs, but they themselves understand this. We can own them, sure, on paper, or even in relationships that bear strong threads that seem impossible to break, completely inseparable. But they are always going to be part of where they originally came, even as we pamper them, adore them, and hold them close. And, somehow, this realization came as a comfort. 

She roved ahead of me through the fields, yet would come back, or 

wait for me, or be somewhere. 

Now she is buried under the pines. 

Nor will I argue it, or pray for anything but modesty, and 

not to be angry. 

I held a lot of frustration when I lost the second of my two dogs. While the first passed peacefully in sleep, the second was not the same. I walked around for weeks with a pent up anger that was melded together in hot tears. While that anger has cooled and replaced itself with acceptance, this poem put me further into something closer to understanding, rather than just blind affirmation. While it did seem she had been taken from me unfairly, there is somewhere where she runs through the grass, finds no faults in her little body, and is overjoyed just to be somewhere, the two of them together. 

Through the trees there is the sound of the wind, palavering. 

The smell of the pine needles, what is it but a taste 

of the infallible energies? 

How strong was her dark body! 

How apt is her grave place. 

How beautiful is her unshakable sleep. 

Finally, 

the slick mountains of love break 

over us. 

Oliver’s love for Luke, just like my own for my dogs, is coated by the knowledge that there is nothing to be done in loss, even as you wish for a way to change things. A love so impeccable and invincible that even a mountain, tall and daunting, breaks softly at the touch of a pure love like a dog’s love. When they leave us, it is not a loss or a derision — rather, it is a thankfulness, a love that sticks around. You may spend all these years without them after, but they spent all of theirs with you. That, for them, is all they need. They are always to be found in the mountains, in the nature they loved in living, in all the corners they once kept.

The post Mary Oliver’s ‘Her Grave’ and the Bittersweet Joy of Dogs  appeared first on The New Absurdist.

And oh it was hot. Hot like Old Testament Lot, all mad/sad that his wife wanted to watch her friends go to ash. But what the hell was I doing there, then? Same exact thing. Only I didn’t care which one of us got to see the other go, didn’t matter if it was Helen or me. One of us would be cinder and the other salt. Here there was no skin-of-his-teeth, “wasn’t my fault,” Sodomite. And, anyway, Helen and I were not married.

I had been dating this girl who looked like a living Modigliani. The stretched limbs and dead eyes that are – as static modernist art – the pulse of surface beauty. But find someone who looks like this for real and it is not nice to gaze upon. I didn’t even like her for “who she was,” for, whatever that might have entailed, Helen was a creature who infatuated me because of her untranslatable nature, her put-off presence, her lines and planes. After our third date I knew she felt the same way about me. And now we had been seeing each other for three months and we kept meeting up for dates – never breaking them, I mean. Helen needs glasses and never wears them, so in her eyes I come off like one of Francis Bacon’s guilty men: red and pink and then too white, when I laugh I become all mouth, bragging about gums and no good can come out of me. 

I gave up on the window, got out of the car and found my way to my seat in the third row.  Helen’s always late. There is no one else who looks like me. So, I was thinking: if she gets here then no problem. Her eyes will adjust over the seats and she’ll find me. Or she won’t show up and she’ll have beaten me at this. Our relationship was this tight Rock, Paper, Scissors-thing that became evermore steeped in the stress of how used to each other we were getting. It had always been clear in our silence how we would end. One of us would stand the other one up, and this crowning act of negligence – no matter how much we’d spoken to each other on the phone or written postcards, smiled to our families whenever we mentioned who we were seeing, what we did on our evenings out – would end it. And, like I said, we had never broken a date.  

Every Thursday night the In-Joke shows two short local films before the main feature.  As I waited for Helen I watched a carnival movie. Seventeen minutes in and it still looked like there would be no fun, not even that rank howl of the dark carnival time. Although, I did feel the pain of sweaty things: there was a jar of some amniotic-looking fluid sitting atop a rotten workbench, there was a lot of sawdust, and the score was a very drunken sounding harpsichord. 

If the flick didn’t keep flashing the words CARNIVAL, I would have forgotten what I was watching. I was thinking that this was my chance; this was the sheer space I needed to make my exit. Like: Well, I was getting sick just waiting for you to show, these student films are all so painful. Why do you get to be late? This is wrong. I’m out of here, babe. But the picture ended and I let go of my tension as the commercials came on. BUY A SODA, the words so red that you felt thirst; and a child of – I was guessing – eleven holding a chocolate bar to her lips and not smiling, really looking bored, like she didn’t need this chocolate, or like she was so used to eating chocolate that it did nothing for her. I was calm now, not wanting to ever drink a soda or eat a chocolate bar again. And now the second film. A horror movie, a black and white thing called Wrist. Aptly named and well paced. This guy gets off his convenience store job, and on his walk home nearly trips over something sticking out of the ground. He looks down and it is this finger bone. There is a thirty second camera swim around the porous object, and heaven music – synthetic organ and wash out-waves that warmed my neck, made me smile. Cut to the guy trying to dig it up. His fingers rubbing out the soft earth around the bone. We see his wrists working like he’s untying someone that needs clock-stop rescuing. There is no music when he does this, but the pant and gasp of our hero’s determination. Now the hand bones are exposed.  And again: thirty seconds of a camera inspection, that same alcohol soaked cotton balls, then rubbed along the spine-music. He keeps on digging and we go down the wrist bone. Four inches down – the work, so easy – the guy starts to pull at the ossified appendage; handshake grip like his wrists and dead wrist have always been buddies. And he yanks the arm out, too far but the bone won’t stop. How long can this go on? When the guy sees that the single bone has revealed itself to be as long as a short leg, he takes a breather. Then slowly starts the inevitable pull again.  He is cautious now, not panting. In the corner of the screen the sky is changing, the sun is coming up. The screen goes to black. The film is over. I’m glad I saw it, but wish I could forget every moment. 

And this was my cue to leave. If I wanted to be the guy who cut it close but in the end bailed, I had to get up right then before Helen showed. There are never any trailers before the main feature. And I was sitting in the dark. I could hear the breaks in the film, the switch of audio levels. The screen kept flicking bright empty projections of no show. My eyes adjusted to having to seize quick sight and I noticed that Helen was sitting to my left, a seat away from me, looking at the same white surface. She couldn’t have been there for much more than a few minutes. She looked at me then pulled up a large tub of popcorn from her lap to offer me some.  I didn’t want to eat unless the main feature was playing. But when was it going to start? This was uncomfortable. 

We had shown up. Helen and I had kept up our part of the deal, but the movie hadn’t.  And now: not even the courtesy of erratic flickering, just the integrity of projector light unfiltered by any film. The sharp planes of Helen’s face and the pale lip-skin that detailed her pout had never cooperated so tightly before. She opened her mouth to ask me something, but didn’t say a word, and after a moment let it close. 

The screen went to black, then white again. The audio was being messed with. There was a sizzle-hissing noise coming from the speakers that were lined along the theater walls. Helen put her hand in the bucket of popcorn while I, before she could pull it out, cupped my fingers over her knuckle. My palm was growing cold, sweaty; but I left it there, counting to twenty and staring at the white screen, all the while knowing that we were both looking up at that sheet of silence, of bye-bye surrender. I let go of her, then stood up, really thinking that I was going to the concession stand to get a bottled water. I mean totally believing that, so much so that I didn’t even tell Helen what I was getting up for.  

But moving out of the theater and into the lobby I just kept walking. Slow pace-like; zombie sauntering toward final rest or little boy looking for an expensive toy he was warned against losing. I walked out of the cinema and then over to my car. There was a guy standing on a ladder and changing the letters on the marquee. And there was a pink flyer under my windshield wiper. I opened the car door. Water had collected in the driver’s seat. It was not raining, but it had. While I was inside, it had rained. 

The post Rock, Paper, Cinema appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Cole left his desk and stood in the office doorway. “You doing okay, buddy?” he asked.

Imad regarded him with eyes that seemed too big for his face. “I’ve been under the weather,” he replied. “Too much reading. You know how it is.”

“I’m more of an audiobook man myself.” Cole cleared his throat. “Listen, Imad. I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t look so great. Do you want to sit down before you head out? I’ve still got some soda from the graduation party in the minifridge. You’d be doing me a favor if you took one.”

A wan smile surfaced on Imad’s face. He took a step toward the office, but his expression twisted into a grimace as his laptop bag shifted against his side. “Thanks, but I’d better get going,” he muttered.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone? Like a Lyft or something?” Cole offered, but Imad shook his head and slipped through the door to the stairs. 

Cole watched as he left. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the corridor, but he could have sworn he saw a sheen of sweat on Imad’s forehead. It was probably nothing more serious than a summer cold, but Cole wondered what Imad could have read to make his face so pale. 

As he indulged in speculation, Cole’s imagination got the better of him. Miskatonic University was famous for housing a large collection of books once deemed heretical by the large universities in Boston. Even today, books bound in human skin occupied a substantial division of the library archives. What if Imad had gotten sick from contact with one of the books in the special collections?

A story about a forbidden book would make a great podcast episode. The most downloaded episode on Cole’s feed was a story about a cursed doll he’d found on Etsy. Creepy dolls were a dime a dozen, but the pink mildew poking out of this doll’s cracked porcelain scalp was something special. The listing said the seller was local, so Cole sent her a message and requested an in-person viewing of the doll. The seller immediately replied with her address.

When Cole drove over, he found the doll perched on the edge of the rotting concrete porch of an abandoned wastewater plant. It sat in a puddle of something that wasn’t quite liquid. Cole was painfully aware that he’d walked headlong into a prank, but he didn’t touch the doll. He had no interest in mucking about with the neon fungus infesting its hair, but he was more than happy to take a photo. 

Cole invented a lurid story about the doll for his podcast. Sure enough, listeners loved it. He resented the popularity of such obvious clickbait, but it served its purpose. For a time, at least. As was so often the case with online content, interest waned quickly. He needed another hit. Cole fancied himself to be a literary horror specialist, and he used his show to discuss writers like M.R. James and Elizabeth Gaskell alongside twentieth-century film noir. An episode about a cursed book had the potential to draw an audience, and it would be a much better ambassador for the show than a fabricated story about a cursed doll.

When he introduced himself at department parties, Cole didn’t hesitate to tell new acquaintances that he hosted a podcast. He’d even printed a business card on handsome matte black cardstock with his name and website. Most people accepted the card, but very few asked him what he meant when he described his field as “dark academia.” Perhaps they assumed he was complaining about grad school. 

To be fair, Cole had tried his hand at a graduate program, but only briefly, and only at a small department at a state school in Ohio. The college’s fluorescent-lit cinderblock buildings didn’t contribute to a scholarly state of mind, and Cole dropped out after his first semester. He took the opportunity to relocate to Boston, where he found a job writing copy for the alumni magazine of a liberal arts school. 

Far from being the ancient and shadow-blighted city he’d read so much about, Boston was a textbook case of gentrification, especially the neighborhood around the university. After a year of mounting debt with nary a Gothic spire in sight, Cole found a listing for an administrative assistant at the Classics Department of Miskatonic University in Arkham. There wasn’t much charm or prestige out in the Essex County suburbs, but it was hard to deny the lure of cutting his rent in half. 

Cole was interviewed by the department chair, a harassed-looking elderly gentleman in a threadbare blazer. The chair informed Cole that there were no other applicants, and that the position was his if he wanted it. He would be working under the head administrator, a cheerful red-faced woman named Peggy who introduced herself with a wave. The chair didn’t seem overly concerned with how the department was run, and Cole suspected that Peggy had acquired the blush on her cheeks from a liquid lunch. He accepted the job on the spot.

The Classics Department was like any other office, equipped with outdated computers and furniture straight from wholesale. The industrial wall-to-wall carpeting bore the stains of years of department parties, and a neglected snake plant struggled valiantly by the lone window. Cole didn’t see much of the professors, and the grad students were an uninspiring bunch interested primarily in gossip. 

Imad was different. As far as Cole could tell, he was the only person who made use of the shared grad student office. He came in every afternoon, and he always stopped by the department office to say hello before disappearing into the small room at the end of the corridor.

Imad told Cole that he was working on his dissertation, a comparison of Near Eastern gnostic texts from the seventh and eighth centuries. He more properly belonged to the Religious Studies department, he’d explained, but it was dissolved the same semester he finished his coursework. Cole didn’t follow his breakdown of the situation, which had something to do with falling enrollments and shrinking budgets, but he understood that Imad had been taken in by the Classics Department as a courtesy. 

Cole asked about the progress of Imad’s work every afternoon, and Imad was always ready with a concise and practical explanation. It didn’t escape Cole’s notice that Imad was blessed with a mellow yet resonant voice that would sound excellent on tape.

Cole gradually developed a casual friendship with Imad over the course of the spring semester, and he came to look forward to Imad’s visits to the office. Once classes ended and the students disappeared from campus, however, Imad started to change. He lost weight, and his cheeks became so hollow that his eyes seemed to bulge from his face. The golden tan of his skin faded to a sickly olive. His beard was patchy and uneven. 

And there was another thing. Imad had begun to smell. The odor that lingered behind him wasn’t unpleasant, but it was odd. The smell reminded Cole of wet asphalt drying in the sun after the rain. Or like an antique doll sitting in a puddle of creosotic slime outside an abandoned water treatment plant in the twilight of rural Ohio. 

Cursed book or not, something was going on, and Cole figured that he owed it to himself to get to the bottom of whatever was troubling Imad. With almost no work over the summer and a boss who only rarely bothered to show up to the office, it’s not as if he had anything else to do. 

There weren’t many students on campus during the summer. Truth be told, there weren’t many students on campus during the school year. Cole was given to understand that Miskatonic’s enrollments had been falling with each successive semester. This didn’t surprise him. The campus was filled with stately old buildings, but none of them had been maintained for years. The gym had been built in the 1970s, and the dorms a decade earlier. It wasn’t the sort of place that attracted students. 

Regardless, Cole was required to be in the office until the end of working hours. He replied to emails in the morning and spent the afternoon in comfortable solitude searching for stories online. 

He’d recently started researching the Theosophical Society Lodge next to campus. The Lodge had supposedly held seances well into the twentieth century, but they apparently stopped on the eve of the Great War. The building now housed a library that served as a stage for public lectures on world religions, some of which had been recorded.  

Cole had just downloaded the most recent lecture when Imad walked into the office. He looked even worse than usual. His face had gone from olive to yellow, and the sheen of grease on his forehead was unmistakable.

Cole swallowed his shock as he greeted Imad. “Hey, so,” he began. “I was reading about modern Gnosticism. Not much to do here over the summer, right? And I was wondering. How would you pronounce, ah, Mandaeism?”

“Mandaeism? You pronounced it correctly. The Arabic is al-Mandāʾiyya, but Mandaeism is fine for general use. Why do you ask?”

“I was fishing for material for my podcast. I read that a lot of Iraqis moved to the suburbs of DC during the early 2000s. Apparently, one community brought lead amulets written in a form of Aramaic that no one at the Smithsonian can read.” 

“I wouldn’t say that no one can read them,” Imad replied. “Even if the ganzibria priests couldn’t transliterate the written text, they’d be able to recite the historiola.”

“The historiola? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that term.”

“A historiola is a short story about a ritual. The act of reading the story functions as a performance of the ritual itself, like a magic spell.”

“How does that work?” Cole asked. 

Imad shrugged. “It’s magic. Who can say how it works? Still, it’s probably for the best that no one at the Smithsonian can read the amulets. You wouldn’t want to pronounce the Aramaic with too much accuracy. If the divine creator brought this world into existence with a word, it stands to reason that another word might open the gates between worlds. That’s a metaphor for the expansiveness of spirituality, of course,” he added with a smile, “but one can never be too careful.”

“Interesting,” Cole said, and it was. The idea that the act of reading could serve as a magic ritual was intriguing. “So what are you translating this afternoon?”

“Well,” Imad started to say, but he winced as he leaned against the waist-high counter separating the office from the faculty mailboxes. It could have been a trick of the light, but something seemed to ripple under his layers of sweaters.

Imad caught the look of concern on Cole’s face. “Sorry,” he said as he turned toward the door. “I might have had too much tea with lunch. I’m going to visit the bathroom and head to my office.”

Cole nodded and returned his eyes to his computer screen, hoping that he’d staged a decent performance of polite interest. He hesitated to cross the line of professional distance with the members of his department. He couldn’t afford to move back to Boston, and he needed this job. Arkham wasn’t the most prosperous suburb, and the only other paying work he’d be likely to find here was at the fulfillment center warehouse by the highway. 

Still, he liked Imad. Professionalism be damned. 

Later that afternoon, he brewed two bags of mint tea in paper cups and carried them down the hall to the graduate student office. When Imad answered the door, Cole was struck by the wet smell that emerged from the room. It was as if something spilled on the carpet and never dried properly. 

“So I was thinking,” he said, “no one is using the department chair’s office over the summer. I was planning to air it out a bit. Care to join me?” 

The chair’s office was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and equipped with the sort of grommeted furniture that populated movies about gentlemen explorers. It smelled like fine paper and old leather, and the sunlight that filtered through the cloudy panes of glass in the mullioned windows was bright but gentle.

 “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what you’re working on?” Cole asked as he sat down. 

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to talk about it,” Imad replied. He sank back in his chair as he took a long sip of tea. “At the moment I’m working on a translation of the Kitab al-Azif. This is a gnostic text that originated somewhere in the vicinity of Yemen in the early eighth century. It was believed to have potent magical properties, and it was translated into several languages over the centuries. 

“Manuscripts of the Azif managed to travel around the world, but they’re remarkably rare. When I was doing research for my MA thesis, I’d see one translation or another cited in various papers, but I could never find the original source. It turns out that the only physical copies in the United States are held by the Miskatonic library, which is why I applied to do my PhD here. 

“I thought it might be interesting to compare the versions to understand how key phrases were translated by different cultures. When I spoke to the head of Special Collections here at our library, she was happy to share a PDF of a tenth-century Arabic manuscript held by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The file isn’t the best quality, to be honest. The manuscript is a copy of a copy of a copy, and the source is badly damaged. I’m doing the best I can with what I have available. 

“I’d like to write a grant to go see the original in person, but I’m not at that stage yet. Maybe next spring? I could use a vacation.” Imad shrugged and took another sip of tea. Cole was relieved to see the color returning to his face. 

“So this Kitab al…”

“Azif. It’s a poetic word that refers to the chirping of nocturnal insects.”

“So this Kitab al-Azif, what’s it about? If that’s the right question.”

“No, that’s a great question. The book holds that there’s a deeper truth to the universe, and the author – we don’t know his true name – tells a remarkably coherent story as he explains what this supposed truth is. He claims that our universe is like the thin film on the surface of a bubble, and he believes that there are all manner of things outside the bubble we can’t see. 

“This isn’t an original idea, but what’s interesting about the Azif is that its author provides a history of our planet long before humans lived here. Most creation myths describe humans as being brought into existence shortly after the universe itself, but the Azif speaks of genesis in terms of cycles. People that weren’t human inhabited the planet before us, and people who aren’t human will live here after us.”

“That sounds kind of Buddhist,” Cole cut in.     

“Exactly! There’s a great deal of Eastern thought incorporated into these ideas. All times exist at once, simultaneously, and in different dimensions. The borders between dimensions can be weakened by magic, supposedly. By the act of reading the Azif, the creatures occupying other dimensions can be invited into our own world.” 

“I’d love to meet them,” Cole remarked. “I wonder what they look like?”

Imad stared at his tea as he shifted the paper cup between his hands. “They’re probably not what you expect. I think we’ve gotten used to the strange creatures that appear in movies. When you finally see the monster on the other side of the door, it becomes familiar, like a type of mascot. We can see horrible things online whenever we want, from deep sea fish to the microorganisms that live inside our bodies, and we’ve learned to love them. But maybe there are things out there that are so alien that we’ll never be able to process them, either intellectually or emotionally.

“Gnosticism seems so natural in the twenty-first century, doesn’t it? Of course there’s a deeper truth to the universe. All we have to do is use science to figure it out. People publish their findings, and what they learn becomes real to us in the form of technological innovation. But the modern Western world didn’t invent science. Other cultures studied the stars and the principles of chemistry and physics long before Aristotle began giving lectures at his Lyceum. So why did gnostic ideas fall out of favor? Why did people stop thinking about the universe as a malleable series of experiential planes? I wonder if perhaps someone saw the monster on the other side of the door and decided that it would be better if the truth remained hidden.”

“Wow. I wish I could have recorded that.”

  Imad looked up from his tea. “What do you mean?”

“That would have been a fantastic interview for my podcast. You have a great voice for audio.”

“Do I?” Imad laughed, but his mirth vanished as his face twisted into a grimace.

Cole frowned. “Listen, Imad. You’re really not looking so great.”

“I’m fine.” As Imad rose to his feet, Cole couldn’t help notice the awkward movement of his body. The way his sweaters bunched around his torso was decidedly odd. Something like a thick strip of cloth hung from the back of the layers of fabric. As Cole watched Imad leave the room, he could have sworn that it twitched.

Cole returned to campus later that evening. He unlocked the department office and sat at his desk without turning on the lights. He considered making a show of checking his email, but the performance would be for no one’s benefit but his own. As long as he was here, he might as well get this over with. 

Cole wanted to tell himself he was sneaking around for Imad’s own good. That was true, to a certain extent, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He’d always regretted not investigating the waterlogged doll, and he promised himself that he wouldn’t pass up an opportunity like that again. Still, as he set off down the dim corridor of faculty offices, he couldn’t help but feel guilty. The grad student office wasn’t a private space, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t violating Imad’s trust. 

There was no strange smell when he opened the office door, just the lingering aroma of bergamot tea. The two cubicles closest to the door were empty. Imad had claimed the cubicle by the window, and he’d dragged a table next to the wall behind his chair. It was covered in library books.

There was nothing unusual on Imad’s desk – a bottle of aspirin, a jumble of cheap pens, and a spare phone charger. He hadn’t pinned any photos to the corkboard cubicle divider, but a collection of thank-you cards from students was propped in a corner. Several manilla folders were stacked on top of each other in the opposite corner, each neatly labeled in Arabic.

Cole opened one of the folders. The paper inside was covered in dark smudges. This must be a copy of the manuscript scan Imad told him about. Cole didn’t know anything about Arabic, but even he could tell how bad the image quality was. It was amazing that Imad could read this at all. Interleaved between the photocopies were pages torn from a yellow legal pad. The loose papers were covered with annotations surrounding a handwritten English translation.

 Cole scanned what Imad had written, but none of it made sense to him. As far as he could tell, this particular passage had something to do with constellations. The next page was a clean photocopy of what must be a Latin translation, and the next was a translation of the Latin into severely antiquated English. Under that was a printed copy of the Wikipedia page about the sky quadrants used by medieval astronomers.

Something seized in Cole’s chest as he flipped through the pages. This was exactly the sort of academic work he once imagined himself doing. A lone scholar sitting at a quiet desk with nothing but paper and a pen as he studied ancient texts, taking careful notes while excavating the meaning of words written in centuries past. There was a certain romance to the idea, and Cole wasn’t at all surprised to find that Imad’s handwriting was as beautiful as his voice.

He picked up the legal pad sitting at the center of the desk and flipped to the last few pages. A word written in capital letters immediately caught his attention: SHOGGOTH. Under it, Imad had written: “What is formless will be given form. The shoggoth will heed the call of its creator, if called in a [dream??] voice speaking its proper name. That which hides in the deathless gap between hours can be retrieved by a shoggoth, grasped within its hands without hands.”

The next page contained a series of vectors that Imad had labeled with numbers and overlaid with pencil sketches of constellations. Cole recognized the Big Dipper of Ursa Major, as well as the three stars of Orion’s Belt, but something about the angles formed by the connected lines felt wrong. Looking at them too closely made his head hurt. 

The next page was a photocopy of an illuminated manuscript written in Latin. Cole didn’t understand Imad’s annotations, many of which were crossed out, but a square yellow sticky note appended to the bottom of the page caught his attention. Almost without being aware of it, he read the note out loud. “The hands without hands, fhtagn ph’nglui.”

As the words left his mouth, the image of the thick pale thread emerging from Imad’s sweaters jumped into Cole’s mind. He was struck by the smell of water. Roiling seas under an endless expanse of sky, stars and constellations without number, pinpricks of light fitting together into an intricate matrix of impossible geometry.

Something unpleasant rose in his throat. He barely made it to the bathroom in time.

Cole couldn’t leave the building quickly enough. He was sick again in the bushes beside the parking lot.

It was only sitting in his car, with the air conditioning blasting in his face, that his nausea dissipated. As he clutched the wheel, Cole chided himself for letting his imagination get the better of him. A cursed book was all well and good, but the notion of a cursed photocopy was absurd. He’d managed to spook himself for no reason. Whatever was going on with Imad had nothing to with star charts or Latin manuscripts. A section of the roof of Whateley Hall had collapsed during the heavy snowfall of the previous winter, and Cole wouldn’t be surprised if it had resulted in extensive water damage to the building. The insulation in the walls was more than likely riddled with mildew.  

Someone should get Imad set up in a different office. That someone, as it happened, was him. He’d bring it up tomorrow, Cole resolved as he backed out of his parking space. Still, he was troubled by the word Imad had written in rough letters at the top of his legal pad. What the hell was a shoggoth? 

Cole woke up the next morning haunted by a lingering sense of shame. What had possessed him to drive back to campus and sneak into Imad’s office? That was creepier than any cursed book could ever be. He needed to talk to Imad. Really talk to him. Maybe even ask him out to dinner.  

Cole washed his hair for the first time in a week and trimmed his beard as it dried. His apartment occupied the top floor of an old Queen Anne house, and the morning sun streamed through the tall windows under the peaked gambrel roof. Songbirds chirped in the branches of the stately ash tree growing beside the house. Cole had been toying with the possibility of moving back to Ohio, but he couldn’t deny that there was a certain charm to summer mornings in New England.

In the department office, he chatted with Peggy as he handled the visa paperwork of an incoming grad student, all the while feeling a sort of secondhand pride that someone would come all the way from abroad to study at Miskatonic. He ate lunch on the outside patio with the two elderly women who ran the office of the Modern Languages department. They showed him photos of their cats on their phones and told him stories about their grandchildren as they enjoyed the sunshine. Afterward, they brushed their teeth together in the women’s bathroom on the second floor, which they agreed was the nicest in Whateley Hall.

 Cole waited for Imad to come to the office. He waited so hard that he couldn’t read Wikipedia, not even the entry about the mysteriously nondescript warehouses used to house banks of internet servers. Everything he saw on social media annoyed him. Eventually he gave up on trying to do anything productive and opened a website that emulated screensavers from the 1990s.

After spending half an hour watching digital fish float through an overbright coral reef, Cole realized that he was being silly. It was a beautiful summer day. There was no need for him to kill time in an empty office while Imad was making himself sick looking at crusty photocopies of wizard nonsense for the sake of a dissertation that no one would ever read. 

Cole’s palms were sweaty as he knocked on the door of the grad student office. What if Imad had noticed that his research notes had been disturbed? 

“Imad?” he called out, but there was no answer. He wiped his hands on his pants before grasping the doorknob. At best, he’d have to apologize to Imad for going through his papers. At worst, he’d have to drive him to the hospital. 

There was another possibility: a void, a vacuum, a tear in the fabric of reality. A window opening onto an oceanic abyss trapped beneath sheets of ice for millennia. A silent city suspended under lightless stars. A multitude of insectile eyes focused on the present moment: a miniscule oasis in the ever-expanding desert of time and space. 

Cole opened the door. The office was empty.

The window was open, and a faint breeze carried the scent of freshly cut grass into the room. A ceramic mug of tea sat on the table next to a laptop with a burnished copper finish. 

Cole closed the door and stepped back into the corridor, where he was greeted by a strange but familiar smell. The odor wasn’t unpleasant, just unusual. It reminded him of the lake shore where his uncles had hosted cookouts when he was a kid. He’d spent most of his summers indoors, reading his way through the local library’s paltry stock of fiction. His isolation made the outings to the lake with his cousins all the sweeter. In truth, Cole loved the smell of water, and he had a good idea of where it was coming from. 

He retraced his steps down the corridor until he arrived at the bathroom by the elevators. With no hesitation whatsoever, he went inside. 

At first, Cole didn’t understand the sight that greeted him. He recognized Imad’s face, but it took a few seconds to process the rest of him. Five fleshy appendages ringed with red patches of irritated skin emerged from Imad’s naked torso. The tentacles were limp but twitched spasmodically. 

Beads of sweat pooled on Imad’s forehead as he stared at Cole in horror, his sweaters clutched in his hands. “Listen, I don’t… I mean, I can explain,” he stammered. 

“You can explain later,” Cole replied, his concern for Imad’s discomfort winning out over his shock. “Just sit tight. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

Cole dashed to the department office, hoping against hope that Imad didn’t flee. He grabbed a can of ginger ale from the office minifridge and rushed back to the bathroom.

He found Imad sitting on the bench by the door. His face was utterly forlorn, and his tentacles waved listlessly in Cole’s direction. 

“Buddy, you’ve got to hydrate,” Cole said, popping the tab on the can of ginger ale.  

Imad accepted the can with a curt nod and drank. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The words of the ritual,” he muttered. “The book was a historiola, but I got the words wrong. I couldn’t read them correctly.”

“Maybe you can get them to send you a better photocopy next time,” Cole replied. “For the time being, you need to take better care of yourself. Your, uh… Tentacles? Can I call them that? Whatever’s going on there. It looks like they’re irritated by your clothing. Peggy has a giant bottle of hand lotion on her desk. I’m sure she won’t mind if you use it.” 

“This doesn’t bother you?” Imad asked.  

“It’s not making you evil or anything, is it?”

“I don’t think so.” Imad’s shoulders sagged. “It’s just a lot to get used to. And sometimes I see things I’m not sure are actually there.”

“What type of things? Anything fun?”

Imad managed a weak grin. “Why? Do you still want to interview me for your podcast?”

“Forget the podcast. But I’d love to talk with you. I’m not busy right now. Do you want to take a walk? Maybe go out for coffee or something?”

Imad’s tentacles perked up at the question. “Are you asking me out?” 

“I… yes. I’m sorry if that’s not appropriate. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” 

“You don’t want to make me uncomfortable.” Imad stared at Cole in disbelief before breaking into laughter. His tentacles undulated with good cheer. 

Cole returned his smile. He’d been worried that something was terribly wrong with Imad, but this wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Imad’s tentacles were kind of cute. Perhaps they would have been more horrific if they’d come directly from a cursed book, but there wasn’t much damage a grainy photocopy could do. Whatever this Kitab al-Azif was, he and Imad could handle it together, preferably after they’d gotten something to eat. And who knows, it might even make a good episode for his podcast. 

The post The Annotated Kitab al-Azif appeared first on The New Absurdist.

But why? 

It’s hard for me to say that old phrase, ‘the kids are alright.’ Especially these days, where it seems that having emotions and showing them somehow equates to being weaker than your peers, or having less resolve to the pains of everyday life. And beyond that; showing positive emotions, like excitement for things to come, or even love. Why is it that we’ve decided that showing love and affection is weakness? 

‘Nonchalance,’ as the word has been assigned to this phenomenon, is something that was popularized by the mass media spread of Tik Tok. Things like this, such as ‘mewing’ or ‘clean girl aesthetic’ (you can name a few, there are thousands) become ingrained in the media that many people, young and old, are consuming. It starts as something weird and needing to be explained, creating curiosity, eventually making itself clear through thousands and thousands of people claiming to subscribe to that concept or idea. 

What’s different about Nonchalance, I think, is that it seems to affect the younger generations a lot more than the older. This is what makes it particularly harmful and even dangerous. The overwhelming damages we were left behind post-pandemic, such as the 25% increase in mental health issues (according to WHO), I believe play a role in the orientation towards the younger folks that exist online. Our world is not the same one we knew before we spent two years away from it, confined to our living rooms, watching as the shift took place. There are some people who say things didn’t change, that this was inevitable and the pandemic only made it seem this way. But the children, the young minds that knew the most important years of life as separation, plastic walls, and distance, those are the ones who would feel it the most. 

The kids, for now, aren’t alright, because what else have they known? There is so much hatred, confusion, and pain, for some it’s easier to push those things to the side, pretend as though they aren’t really there. When was there time to learn how to process the many pieces of everyday life? We were so busy doing everything we could to get the masks off the children, we forgot about the minds that hid behind them. Now, they are scrambling through the brambles of growing older with their only guides being terms that have drifted far from their original meanings, trends that push them further into the patterns of quick dopamine rushes, and coping mechanisms that do more harm than good. On top of all that, the constant horrors that are constantly taking place in our world on a global scale can become overwhelming, and many kids never learned how to regulate those fears and worries. 

I won’t claim a bias case for my own sensitivity. I have always been the kind of person who feels things very deeply — my own emotions, and the emotions of others as well. As a child I always had to be the first of my siblings to get my shots at a doctor appointment, because if I heard their cries from the needles I would be in tears almost instantly. They’d stab my tan skin and send me out to the waiting room. I have always been, and still am, the kind of person to bear all the weight of hurts, pains, loves, joys. I can’t imagine being any other way. Sure, there are times when being this way can feel almost burdensome, worn down by extremities and sorrows that can become consuming in every corner of my life. But, without those feelings, especially those good ones that come with the light parts of being human, I would not have the people in my life that I love so dearly, or the experiences that have made the person I have the opportunity to be. And even if this applies a bias to my argument, it would be unfair to say that there aren’t other people who are just the same, who feel as I feel. 

Who are we as people without feelings and emotions? Every part of being alive is about how we react to the things we see or the things that happen to us. I’ve seen people wanting to blame the kids for wanting to be ‘nonchalant,’ pinning them as soulless or lost. But how would kids know any better when they’ve barely been shown as such? To love, hurt, cry, scream, and laugh is all human, all vital to being. The slow joys of an evening spent with friends, or the prolonged blues of losing something or someone — both are two small parts of a larger whole, one that could never be replaced by nonchalance or dopamine hits that come and go seconds at a time. That is the vital difference between then and now.

So then, the question is: how do we recover from this? What will it take for the pendulum to swing back? 

It has to start small. In the ways that we not only treat the ones who are already pushing it all down, locking away the feelings and shutting off — but all the people around us. There is always time to spend loving, learning, showing, crying, laughing, and there shouldn’t be any shame in those things, no matter how daunting the world around us may be.

The post Vulnerability in the Time of Indifference appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Snow fell quiet in dropped cotton kisses. 

I wear my jacket in class every day. Mr. See’s classroom has one window that looks out on the parking lot below, and he keeps it open at all times, even over the weekend. Though I bet the janitors close it. Maybe he asked them not to. They would listen because everybody loves Mr. See. We shiver in the winter and learned quickly to take our jackets out of our lockers where we had stuffed them to wait out the day. Sometimes it’s kinda nice; fresh air dispersing the spritzes and sprays we swim around in. But it’s also super annoying. 

Snow sheeted the parking lot below the window, each and every car disappearing beneath a layer of icing. But Mr. See says that nature and love are the food of life, so we should embrace them when we have the chance, that we should always keep the window open. It just seems cold to me. 

Last week, Juliet came up to me and asked if I like cars. The skylight above our lockers was completely covered with snow, crystals shimmering over glass. How much pressure can those windows take? Would the frost break through and avalanche me alive? Would she dig through the snow to find me? You like cars too? She had asked. No, not really, but–Maybe I can.

She fixes them up and sells them, which is pretty cool. Maybe I can like cars, I told her. She laughed at that. I can like cars for that, I think. Silver bells. Sometimes my face turns pink. I hope it didn’t then. 

Mr. See said he wanted to tell us all a love story. We groaned–hadn’t Marquez done enough to us for one day? But it wasn’t Marquez’s story. It was Mr. See’s. A story about a different snowy day–before our class ever lost that blue dog’s eyes–and he was driving home early from school. The teachers, he said, they all leave school after we do. I guess we keep trying to hit them with our beat-up, hand-me-down cars on our way out of the parking lot, where we speed home or do doughnuts. He says we try to kill them–not on purpose, I don’t think, but either way, he waits until the coast is clear of all us scary teens. I don’t think I’ve almost hit someone before. I’d probably remember that. On this snowy day, though, he told us, he had to pick his kids up early for a doctor’s appointment, so he left halfway through the day during the group B lunch. My lunch is group A, which means I have to eat a turkey sandwich, curly fries, all washed down with a foil-clad juice packet at 10:30 in the morning, right before running a mile in gym class. It’s all sweat and turkey for the rest of the day, and that’s never seemed all that good to me. No wonder the hallways are rank and rotten. 

No wonder Mr. See lets in the snow. 

The juniors and seniors get to leave school for lunch if they want to, which is okay, but you’ve still got to have a car if you want to go anywhere other than Walmart. If you’re seventeen and have a car, you can get French fries from a McDonald’s down the street instead of the curly ones from the cafeteria down the stairs. I think the fries in the cafeteria are a lot better because they’re actually hot and they’re not soggy from a steaming journey in the passenger’s seat or held fast between some jock’s thighs. But an hour of freedom is worth floppy fries and getting older. I guess. 

That day with the “Eyes of a Blue Dog,” when Mr. See also told us his story, the window was open wide, and the snowflakes fell in marshmallow chunks. All we were thinking about was a snow day, about how much we had earned one. Would Juliet win in a snowball fight? I think she would. Flakes swirled downward. We thought about snow while Mr. See talked about the story, “Eyes of a Blue Dog.” Love and love and love, he said as the flakes layered over the windowsill. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said it, love, and love, I guess. In those trippy, dreamy words. 

I watched the snow swirling.  

In the art classroom, where I took drawing last year, they make a pot of coffee every day. You wander through the hallway, and it’s the normal nasty B.O., Axe body spray, and sticky, choking hormones at every twisting turn, but then you pass by the art room. And bam. Just coffee. Roasty and warm, and you can hear the sizzle and drip from the machine if you get there at the right time. And sometimes my 7:30 Red Bull isn’t good enough to make it to 9:00, let alone 10:00 or 11:00. And my mom told me that I can’t have two or else my heart will explode. That she worries, and I should eat an apple instead, some peanut butter, she says. But I don’t know about that. I usually pop into the writing room, make my way around, grab some coffee, and say hi to my old teachers from before. I think the teachers might be bored because they always wave and chatter when they see me. They ask about my weekend, about movies, and friends. It was boring, I tell them. Last weekend was too.

I wonder what Juliet watched this weekend–maybe YouTube or Batman–did she and her friends go to Joe’s for a burger and fries too? Maybe they hung out in the parking lot to eat in the curative weekend air. Maybe it was boring like mine. 

What does it look like? The two of them asked my class—Mr. Marquez and Mr. See asked us, talking about blue dogs and breaths of falling snow. What does it look like? Love? When it’s walking down the street, or wandering the fluorescent aisles in the grocery store, how about in the school hallway chaos, sweating at the 24-hour gym, driving around town for something interesting to do, in our dreams? 

Yesterday, when Juliet came up to me, she asked where I got the coffee. Hell, yeah. I can talk coffee. That’s what I told her. No problem. It was a white, winter day, and she was wearing a jacket like a skinned Muppet all purple and fuzzy. We stood just outside the front doors of the school, and everyone else swam around us while we talked. I like it when she talks about cars and the snowflakes stick like glitter to her lashes. All cars and snow and cars. What does it look like? They asked. 

I raised my hand because what the hell were they talking about? 

Love, Marquez said, whispering messages in dreams that leak. 

Mr. See nodded, love. 

I don’t know about that. 

When Juliet asked me where I got the coffee, I took her to the art room. This is Juliet, Juliet, these are the old teachers. I see them every day. My weekend was boring, I told them as we walked by. We–me and Juliet together–went over to the coffee pot, which was still dripping and hissing. The cups next to the pot aren’t really big enough, so I showed her how I usually grab one from the cupboard the teachers restock from.

I don’t need to ask, which is cool. 

She hadn’t met my counselor before. I wonder who hers is and if she likes them. I walked her back to the office while we waited for the drip to finish up. I can ask my counselor for stuff that I need, and he might say yes. That’s how I got my new glasses, but I don’t wear those at school. Just for homework and stuff, if I remember. 

This is Juliet, everyone. 

As the snow fell, Mr. See told us about that day. That other snowy day. He was sitting at a red light during B lunch. It’s when most of the juniors and seniors fly free. Big flakes slushed to icy puddles on the asphalt as he waited for green. Then love hit. 

Today, Juliet and I got coffee again, and I showed her where they keep the half-and-half and the sugar, too. They sometimes stash some secret snacks over there. Before class, we talked about coffee and cars, and curly fries. I wonder if I should sit next to her tomorrow. Or if that would be weird. Maybe I should ask Mr. See. 

Mr. See said that when he got hit that day in the snow while he waited for the light to turn green, the first thought he had was about his kids. He’s got two, I think. No. He’s got two, I know. He talks about them in every class at least one time. He said he saw their faces in his mind and heard their voices talking about soccer and cereal. When everything else went black. But he was okay. Only after he opened his eyes, after he was okay, he felt frustration. Felt annoyed, he said. Of car repairs, insurance companies, of being late to the doctor, and having to reschedule. Felt furious, he said. Of the faces of his sons, of his kids waiting, and worried, and wondering where he was. Of the awakened thought. Only a moment between him and his boys. Between never picking them up again. He should’ve waited, he said, just another hour, or should’ve asked his wife to grab them from school instead. But he was too excited to see them, he told us. To hear about soccer and cereal. 

I wonder if my dad would be excited to take me to the doctor. We might talk about coffee. Would he leave work early? In the snow. Talk about curly fries at school. I could ask Mr. See. Maybe the art teachers. What do they think? But it’s kind of boring. 

The insurance card was in Mr. See’s hand, hazards on, and he was closing the door behind him, but he told us, when he squinted through the falling snow, there was no movement in the other car. There was no damage, aside from his own headlight, he noticed after scoping out the scene, waving other drivers past. Lunchtime juniors and seniors. 

The snow makes everything quiet. It’s like a giant blanket smothering everything beneath it. And Mr. See’s head was hurting because he must have hit it in the clash. The flakes fell silent, and even all the cars going by seemed to hush past. No one stopped. They all drove by until there was no one left at that light but Mr. See. And the guy who hit him. 

There was no movement from the car. 

His frustration was rising–his kids would be waiting and worried–he marched over to the driver’s side door. Every window was completely fogged over, the driver invisible. What the hell was this joker doing? Mr. See swears like that sometimes, even in class. He knocked. No answer. 

A whole minute of knocking went by, then shivering, then knocking again. He had his phone open. 9-1-1, ready to go because something was wrong. Maybe he was hurt. Or maybe something else. But it was just a little bump. Just his own headlight. What was going on inside? And the snow was cold and quiet. 

It was enough. 

Mr. See yanked the door open, jumping back to a haul-ass position just in case.

I probably would’ve hit the deck no questions if it was me. Or ran away as fast as I could. Would my dad answer the phone if I called him then? I think he would. 

But Mr. See didn’t need to hit the deck. Or call his dad. 

It was just a kid. 

Probably a senior, sporting a letterman jacket, like the ones all the football players sport daily: red and blue, a design unwearable and embarrassing after high school except by burnt-out bummers or at some kind of reunion. I probably won’t go to those. Will Juliet? 

The angle was almost impossible to make out the letterman’s features. The guy’s left hand still had a death grip on the wheel. His body twisted, extended as far into the passenger side as he could go, clearly holding something below the passenger dash, eyes barely peeping above the wheel. 

Mr. See told us how his heart ran all around like a thumping, metal bassline. He was in the military, I think, so his imagination went off roaming. All of the things someone could be reaching for raced like Hell’s grocery list through his head. What did he have to be ready for? What did he have to do? 

Mr. See tried to visualize the details of his sons’ faces until, with wet, blue eyes, the letterman looked up at him. Tears streaming down his face, his chin quivered like frostbite. He desperately whimpered sorrys, hiccupped pleas of don’t call the cops, don’t call my mom, and what do I do nows. Mr. See went blank. 

The letterman choked how sorry, so, so sorry he was, sir, through macho tears. He couldn’t see the lines on the road because the windshield was all fogged up. Mr. See glanced around at the falling snow and the gray and silent sky, still eyeing the kid’s right hand, which hadn’t moved at all. And he nodded.

What he would give to be back in his own car, he said, driving to the doctor, his kids in the back fighting and playing, screeching, and laughing. He’s going to tell his kids this whole story when they’re older, I bet. Even the part where he nearly peed his pants and booked it when the letterman in the car suddenly straightened from the passenger’s side and aimed the contents of his right hand directly at Mr. See’s face. 

Everything stopped swirling. 

The kid blinked. 

Mr. See’s face must have looked wild, drained, and distorted. 

Then in a tiny mouse voice, the letterman whispered sorry he needed to keep them warm and sorry sorry. The heater was out on the driver’s side. He desperately needed to get back before the end of lunch because the fries he had brought for his girlfriend were getting cold, and she had broken her leg, and she was all alone, and she needed–the letterman’s eyes lagoon blue and overflowing, she loves fries, he choked. Lukewarm and soggy, he had to do his best. Had to make it back to her. He didn’t want her to slip on ice, so he went himself. Didn’t want her to fall and hurt herself, the letterman said, with eyes like a dog, and looked at the sloppy bag of fries in his outstretched hand, which were definitely worse than the ones in the cafeteria. But you pay a price for that taste of freedom. Even if it’s second-hand. I guess I’ll find out when I’m older. He had been holding the fries under the passenger’s side heater as he drove, so they wouldn’t get cold because she really needed a pick-me-up and and sorry sorry sorry. 

His blue eyes welled. 

Mr. See’s pulse steadied–it had been like a marching band going, thumping around his chest, he told us–but his breath calmed, and he nodded at the letterman before returning to his car, one headlight just a little messed up. The light turned green and he drove to pick up his kids. Snowflakes curled.  

That’s love, Mr see said after telling us a story about a gray and snowy day. What is? What is love, we asked? But he just smiled and told us to take out Pablo Neruda. The bell for lunch would ring in twenty-one minutes, and I bet I wasn’t the only one who could smell the fries–waiting for us, warm, crispy spirals in the cafeteria below. Juliet had asked what I was having for lunch. We could sit together, she said as the snow eddied, and I could almost taste those fries, rich and substantial. What was I doing for lunch? Fries. I think, and then I shrugged a little, like the guys in the movies do. How can you tell when something is significant? What was I doing for lunch? Sitting with you. I couldn’t say that, though. But she nodded at me anyway. So maybe we’ll sit together. Maybe she likes fries too. Outside, was a different world now, snow spiraled. Nothing looked like it had when the bus dropped me off in the morning. Now quilted in clear white, and a horizon of fries was twenty-one minutes away. Maybe. 

Mr. See sat on the windowsill, a winter breath from the open window twisting around him, and he held up Neruda. Love, he said. 

I opened my book. 

I don’t know about that.

The post Coffee Love and Curly Fries appeared first on The New Absurdist.

I start this not to suggest that there is anything I feel against this motif. I, too, am a lover of Wendy Cope’s The Orange, or Gary Soto’s Oranges, or even Roisin Kelly’s poem by the same name. My favorite rendition of this is JP Infante’s Yasica, Puerto Plata. 

“When I saw my great-grandmother peel a tangerine with her bare hands while men used knives for oranges, she became god.  I imagined what she could do with the sun.” (excerpt from Yasica, Puerto Plata) 

There is an endearment to writings like these, I think, that a lot of people find. That idea of someone taking you, the orange, in two gentle hands, tearing your skin to find what is truly you, pulpy and tender and hidden away. But why? Where does this come from? Why detach from our human selves and find understanding in citrus? 

Among the many opinionated literary folks of the world, there are some people who are completely exhausted by this idea, even calling it a cliché. Some string it alongside the common writings on pomegranate, a fruit that had come to have symbolism for feminism and love but has since become a sort of indicator for ‘bad,’ ‘performative’ TikTok poetry. The same has begun to happen with figs, after Sylvia Plath’s fig tree concept. 

But I am not here to discuss pomegranates or figs. Rather, I see oranges tumbling down into the same rabbit hole of dilution. 

For one, even as oranges find their way into language and writing time and time again, they can also be found in metaphor and phrases, like in Spanish. The phrase ‘mi media naranja’ or ‘my orange half’ refers to the idea that every person has another half that they are constantly in search of, suggesting a kind of destiny or generational connection that goes far beyond what we see in this one life we see presently. This is often linked back to the Greek myth recorded by Plato in The Symposium, where the idea that every soul is missing its other half is also expressed, claiming that Zeus caused this divide out of the arrogance of humans.

With this origin, I found a sort of poetry alone in the fact that oranges and many citrus fruits are the only fruits to be naturally subdivided, while usually for these orange metaphors the focus is primarily on the peel. You split one open — with a knife, maybe, like JP Infante’s poem — and half the work has been done for you, politely waiting with the segments in their expected places. 

I believe part of our exhaustion with oranges can be found in this. We give them surface level meaning, as surface level as the 3mm vivid, aromatic peel. The irony in this is that part of the symbolism we are always creating with oranges is about seeing things beyond their simplicity, like the orange peel theory; the idea that how or if someone peels an orange for you can indicate affection or care. 

Dare I say this theory has watered down the juice. To stop at the peel is to lose so much of the magic that can be found here! Dig a little deeper into the bright sun of it and find, perhaps, Amy Schmidt’s Abundance, in memory of Mary Oliver. 

“It’s impossible to be lonely 

when you’re zesting an orange. 

Scrape the soft rind once 

and the whole room 

fills with fruit. 

Look around: you have 

more than enough. 

Always have. 

You just didn’t notice 

until now.” 

This poem follows Mary Oliver’s Oranges, which I think also seeks further into the idea. 

“Cut one, the lace of acid 

rushes out, spills over your hands. 

You lick them, manners don’t come into it. 

Orange−the first word you have heard that day−”

(excerpt from Oranges) 

I think what often happens with poetry as it circulates online is a gradual misunderstanding of meanings. This present day loves to take a concept and spin it into one specific thing, keep it contained in a box that doesn’t allow further critical thinking or creativity (like orange peel theory!). We consume things quickly, in small rushes of dopamine that fade as quickly as they come. The same has happened to oranges.

When do the mundane things become beautiful, and vice versa? How does the repetitive nature of our modern day prevent us from being able to enjoy these poetic motifs? Sometimes things must be taken deeper than they are, looked at from a new angle, given new life. What I mean to say is sometimes you can’t garner the meaning from the simplest of explanations or viewpoints. Take a dip into another set of eyes, find the angle. 

To be able to absorb these ideas with a grain of salt — seeing past the misuse and confusion caused by modern day media — is to be able to peel past the skin, find the segments, see what more there is to something mundane.

The post In Defense of Wendy Cope, Gary Soto, Roisin Kelly, etc. appeared first on The New Absurdist.

If he were to look up, he might see his own reflection in the mirrored ceiling of the elevator. An anonymous dark head, an anonymous gray suit. But Virgil is not the type of person to look up. Instead, he tilts his wrist so that the face of his watch blinks on. Six minutes early. Perfectly on schedule. 

Virgil is headed to the third floor. In fact, the elevator will only deliver him to the third floor. What actually lies on the floors above, the land of vision and dental and paid vacation time and conference calls with the CEO, he does not know. And however splendid floors four-through-seven are in reality, Virgil’s imagination is constantly concocting something much, much greater. 

The elevator doors glide open. Already the office is dotted with faces, eyes that twitch up when they hear the mechanical thunk of cogs sliding into place. Across the rat-maze sprawl of cubicles, Jude Esperanza is standing in a cluster of employees, waiting for his turn to speak. Jude, too, looks up when he hears the elevator. Jude’s eyes land on Virgil’s face, and stay there. 

Virgil imagines the office as a slaughterhouse. Meathooks swinging from heavy wrought-iron chains. Bodies pale and doughy, strung up by the ankles. Featureless masses of skin and sinew, strawberry-red muscle and cauliflower-white fat. Nail gun, bone saw, twine. Bodies heavy and ripe for the picking. 

Virgil blinks when he hears the elevator doors start to drift shut. The office is normal again, clean and white. No hooks, no white hanging bodies. He slides his foot forward into the doors’ path. For a second they just hang there, nameless hunks of machinery. Then, a groan as they slide open again. Shaking his head like he is trying to dislodge a stubborn shard of shrapnel, he shoulders his messenger bag and walks to his desk. 

Floor-to-ceiling windows colonize the west wall. Outside, the smoggy sky, easy fodder for habitual daydreamers. Past the asphalt parking lot a smudge of black against the snow, high-rises compete for dominance over the skyline. It is a bitter, brisk day. Comparatively, the inside of the office is sterile and warm, an incubator. 

The sound of a completely superfluous briefcase being slammed on a desk makes Virgil look over. Darcy, sliding her rolling chair over the linoleum, waves. 

All of the cubicles in CronosTech offices are made entirely of glass. It is supposed to symbolize something, Virgil reasons, but he can never quite figure out what. It makes him feel like an object on display. At any rate, Darcy can always see him through their shared wall, and seizes onto any moment of accidental eye contact as an invitation to chat. 

“Hey, you!” she chirps. “How’re you holding up?” Six weeks since the operation, and Darcy is still perpetually interested in Virgil’s health. 

“Fine. You?” 

“Oh, alright. My knee’s been bugging me again.” 

Virgil frowns, an appropriate facsimile of sympathy. “Sorry to hear that.” His hand twitches toward his mouse. Darcy, not finished, inches her chair towards him. “Did you hear,” her voice the stage-whisper of the unrepentant workplace gossiper, “That 

Jude got the implant?” When she says implant she points to her temple, although Virgil knows the implant is located at the back of the skull. 

“Isn’t that confidential?” Fragments of light glint off of Darcy’s round glasses. Virgil feels a headache coming on. 

Darcy ignores him. “I mean, I’m not totally certain, but it makes sense, right? I always got the impression that Jude would do anything to get a…competitive edge.” The implant, as it is colloquially known, does not yet have an official name. Still officially in testing, the offer to install it had been cordially extended to select employees at CronosTech. When one really considers it, the name feels like a misnomer. The unassuming little chip does not truly implant something new inside its host, but takes something away. The idea for the implant is this: humans, in modern day, developed countries, no longer have any need for the sensation of hunger. Certain innovators and entrepreneurs, funded and championed by CronosTech, consider hunger an evolutionary excess, as useless as the vestigial tail, and a nuisance. So, they began developing a procedure that could eliminate it. Virgil, of course, eagerly went under the knife. 

When someone is hungry, they are uncomfortable, and therefore less productive. Since the operation, Virgil’s focus has hardened, sharp as the edge of a scythe. He’s at the top of his game. He finishes work quicker. Completes extra tasks. All the while, he feels lighter, buoyant. It’s like a tiny but impossibly heavy rock in his stomach has been extracted. 

Darcy huffs at his lack of reaction to the news. “I just thought you’d like to know.” Jude is the only person on the floor who Virgil considers his direct competitor. He had been promoted to the second floor only a few weeks after Virgil, and was mere days behind in the ascent to the third. And now the (alleged) implant. Virgil has the sinister impression that the man is gaining on him. 

He realizes he’s been staring out the window. A powdery white cloud speared on the spire of a high-rise, a car backing out of a parking space. He turns back to his computer, and gets to work. 

Lunch break still hasn’t stopped feeling strange. Each day watching his coworkers take their meals from the fridge, food smells mingling together: leftover half of a burrito, BLT on sourdough, kimchi fried rice. Sitting around the break-room table, sidelong glances, everyone pretending they don’t know or haven’t guessed. Making small talk: weather, layoffs, weekend plans. The rational part of Virgil knows that he does still need to eat, despite the lack of hunger signals to his brain, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like he’s faking it. 

Today he extracts a deli sandwich from the fridge, ham and cheese, with his name scrawled across the side of the packaging. The break room is curiously empty for the time of day. The coffeemaker burbles diligently in the corner. 

The door swings open as Virgil unwraps his sandwich, background chatter and keyboard clacks seeping in from outside. It’s Jude. 

Partially stooped and awash with the bluish light of the fridge. Jude’s long hand wrapped around a tupperware container. 

The whir of the microwave settles into the otherwise quiet room. Virgil’s sandwich tastes of nothing. Jude is staring intently at the microwave like it contains the answer to an essential question. He is an unreasonably tall man, almost Muppet-esque with his oversized, gangly limbs. The wispy ends of his hair cover the nape of his neck, where the incision scar would be. If it were true. 

The microwave beeps, and Jude sits opposite Virgil. He avoids eye contact in a way which Virgil considers a purposeful slight against him, as he pries off the lid of the tupperware. Steam rises languidly off the liquid within. Who in their right mind brings soup to work? 

“How are the reports coming?” Jude has the low sort of voice that hums in your chest. “Fine.” 

“Anya says she wants them done by Tuesday, did you get that email?” 

“They’ll be done.”

To watch Jude dip his plastic spoon into the soup, blow on it, and bring the spoon to his lips, is almost unbearable. Something about it repulses Virgil. He yearns desperately to avert his eyes. Yet, he does not, and instead watches Jude’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. Something passes in his expression, his mouth tightens and his nose crinkles almost imperceptibly, which Virgil recognizes. His suspicions confirmed: Jude has gotten the implant. 

The loading symbol is an ouroboros, never satisfied. Virgil clicks the mouse impatiently, although he knows that will only slow the machine down more. FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS: functional computers. 

The weekend had passed uneventfully. Virgil spent Friday night watching old sitcom reruns, went grocery shopping on Saturday (shopping expenses lowered since getting the implant; no use splurging on on pricey ingredients when it all tastes the same), and on Sunday called his mother. She chided him for not going to church, and interrogated him about his mental health. She was convinced that the implant was bad for him, and monitored carefully for adverse side effects. Throughout the weekend, the image of Jude bringing the spoon to his lips and swallowing painfully would suddenly appear, unbidden, in his mind, which he stamped down with the vehemence of a cowboy crushing a snake beneath his boot. 

The document loads at last, and Virgil is once again free to insert figures into his spreadsheet: numbers upon numbers. Dollar signs, expenditures, profits, slotted neatly into the green and red checkerboard. Everything in its rightful place. 

There is a tapping on the glass of his cubicle, like a bird pecking at a window. When he looks up, Virgil expects to see Darcy’s owl-eyes peering at him through the fishbowl of her cubicle. Instead, he is met with Jude’s cool dark stare.

“Sorry, it looked like you were in the zone there.” In the zone sounds stilted, almost ironic, coming out of Jude’s mouth. 

“Yeah, well.” Virgil rubs at a sore spot on his neck, which continually reappears despite CronosTech’s patented ergonomic chairs and keyboards. “What’s going on?” “The reports? I’m supposed to pass them onto Anya, and you said on Friday—” “Oh, right.” Virgil had finished them, in what some might consider a frenzy, after his and Jude’s lunch conversation. Then he had promptly forgotten about them. “I just need to print them out. Give me a second.” 

Virgil opens the document, and the ouroboros returns. His mouse hovers over the print button. Jude taps a bony finger against the top of the cubicle. 

Virgil presses PRINT. He rises from his chair at the same time that Jude starts to move towards the printer. 

“I got it—”, “It’s fine—” 

Their voices overlap each other. Eyes track them across the room, their buzz of adrenaline. Virgil and Jude plant themselves on either side of the printer, as it hacks and shudders like a cat coughing up a hairball. Over the plastic hull of the machine, Jude’s jaw is set and his eyes are hard stones. He looks wildly uncomfortable. Is he sweating? The printer spits out a sheet of paper, then another. Something unfamiliar churns in Virgil’s stomach as he watches Jude pull at the collar of his button-up, exposing a narrow strip of collarbone. 

Virgil imagines a butcher’s shop. Dull thud of knife hitting cutting board. Thick strong hands knuckling slabs of meat tender and pliant. Cleaver glinting, silver-toothed smile. Pool of red bleeding pink at the edges as it glugs down the drain. Raw crimson scent that settles at the back of the throat. Intoxicatingly sweet. Virgil takes a deep breath in.

The printer sighs, and the third sheet of paper is released. Virgil darts his hand out and grabs the stack. Jude tries to do the same, too late. His hand jerks out and slams against the printer with a thunk. 

“I’ll take these to Anya myself,” Virgil says coolly. 

When he returns at last to his cubicle, Darcy is, as usual, not working. “Jesus, Virgil, what was that?” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

It is not until he sighs and clicks open the spreadsheet document again, the blue light washing over his face, that he realizes what the strange churning feeling had been. It was hunger.

The hold music is a rendition of one of Beethoven’s concertos, distorted and fuzzy over the phone. Virgil stands under the awning of the bus stop, watching the rain pour. A car rolls by, spraying up a sheet of water. A single bulbous drop lands on the patent leather of Virgil’s shoe. 

Beethoven comes to a stop. A laconic voice on the other end says, “How can I help you?” “Hi, yes, I’m calling to get in contact with Dr. R—?” 

“This is his office. What is this regarding?” 

“He implanted the CronosTech, uh, thing in me, and it’s malfunctioning.” “Are you experiencing any of the following symptoms: swelling, fever, dizziness, fatigue, memory loss, hearing loss,” The voice rattles off. 

“Well, it’s just that I’m hungry again. But it’s not a normal hunger, it’s stronger, it feels… weird. Bad.” Virgil takes a gulping breath. “I’m not myself. I’m thinking strange things.” “So.” The word is heavy, drawn-out. A shuffling of paper, a sigh. “Dr. R—’s earliest appointment slot is in February. We can have you come in then, if it works for you?”

Virgil leans his head against the cold metal of the pole, feeling slightly faint. “Hello?” comes the voice. “Are you still there?” 

“Yes,” Virgil says. “February works fine.” 

The receptionist confirms the details of the appointment, and Virgil resuscitates frozen fingers to add the date to his phone calendar. He is shoving his hands in the pockets of his coat when someone ducks under the awning beside him. 

Jude nods in greeting. Virgil forces his face into a smile. 

“I’ve never seen you take the bus,” Jude says. 

“I normally Uber.” Finances have been tight. 

Jude nods thoughtfully, like Virgil has just provided some keen insight. 

Virgil looks back at the ground. The gutter is congested with slush, gray-brown and sluggish. The churning in his stomach is back. 

“Do you ever feel,” Jude says into the thick silence, “Like you’re being compartmentalized?” 

“What? No.” 

He glances over his shoulder. “In there, I mean. At work.” 

Virgil shrugs. 

“I just…” His eyes are darting around, like he’s hunting for some secret camera or enemy agent. He looks into the headlights of oncoming traffic, pigeons resting on a telephone wire, the shuttered windows of the building across the road, but never at Virgil’s face. “I’ve been feeling claustrophobic, lately. Yesterday I nearly hyperventilated in the elevator. The third floor is so small all of the sudden. It’s like I’m a figure in a spreadsheet, and I’m stuck in my stupid rectangle. And I can’t move, even if I wanted to, until they decide it’s time to slot me into the next compartment. And maybe the next compartment will be a little bigger, but maybe it’ll be just the same as it’s always been.” 

Virgil doesn’t know what to say. He thinks he should defend CronosTech, something about the ingenuity of the company, the beauty and symmetry of it. If Jude doesn’t like being a tiny cog in an immaculate machine, that’s his problem. But the words aren’t coming, they’re stuck somewhere in his small intestine, forming a hard knot. 

“I don’t know,” Jude says. “I just feel like there’s something missing. A hole. Something like that.” 

A distant rumble. The screech of heavy, unoiled machinery. The bus is here. Jude steps towards the bus as the doors swing open. He looks back expectantly. “I’m taking the next one. This one doesn’t go to my place.” Virgil lies. The thought of 

close, humid quarters, of beads of moisture trickling down the windows, of heat and fabric and skin, of Jude’s bobbing Adam’s apple, makes him feel sick. 

The rain does not let up until the next day. Puddles in the office parking lot shimmer iridescent like the hard shells of beetles. The sun pokes reticently out from behind a fat gray cloud. Darcy is humming an infuriatingly cheery tune, breathy and soft. Virgil supposes she’s cheerful because it’s almost 5pm, when they can all pack up and go home. But Virgil will be staying late tonight. 

Anya had pulled him aside to point out a miscalculation in his most recent report. Virgil could only stand there like a chastised child, heat creeping into his face. It is unreasonably time-consuming, to fix all the incorrect dates and numbers that had spawned from the initial miscalculation. His eyes are heavy marbles in his cottony skull. Perhaps, on a brighter day, an automated solution to this problem might have found its way onto the FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS list. 

Jude is pretending their rainy conversation never happened, that he never admitted his secret seditious thoughts. He is smiling widely at everyone, baring his big chemically whitened teeth. 

All the while, the pit in Virgil’s stomach expands and expands. He had eaten his deli sandwich today, for the first time in weeks, ravenously. This did nothing to quench the hunger. It boils and palpitates within him until he is certain it will spill out in a great wave, flooding the office with a tide of want. 

Darcy says goodbye as soon as the clock strikes five, power-walking to the door with the tenacity of someone with a hot date. Virgil lacks the energy even to roll his eyes. By the time he inserts the last corrected figure onto the document, the sky outside is the color of wet charcoal. The date of his appointment with Dr. R— could not seem farther away. The printer whirrs and spits. Infernal machine, always complaining. The office is nearly deserted; the motion operated lights over every cubicle but his own have long shut off. His own, and one other, on the other side of the room. Through layer after layer of distorted glass, he can just barely make out the figure sitting behind the desk. 

Virgil takes the papers from the printer, warm like a hand, and tries to ignore the pounding that now thrums in his skull. He is ready to double over from the hunger. He lays the corrected reports down on Anya’s desk, hoping that the speedy correction might win back her favor. 

When he looks up, Jude is there. He’s breathing heavily; Virgil can almost imagine he feels the breath on his own cheek, goosebumping his skin.

The look on Virgil’s face might have registered as surprise in Jude’s mind, because he says, “Sorry to startle you.” 

When Virgil doesn’t reply, he adds, “Burning the midnight oil, you know.” “Me…too.” Virgil manages. 

“But I’m done now.” 

“Me too.” 

Virgil drags his eyes up from the floor, up Jude’s improbably tall frame. For the first time he looks, really looks, into Jude’s eyes. Inkwell black. In those eyes Virgil sees reflected the same hunger that dwells rabid and desperate in his own stomach. The wave inside him crests, foams over. 

Virgil stares. Jude stares back. 

Then, two snarling beasts, they are upon each other. A passerby glancing idly at the scene might have seen a pair of lovers, but lovers do not generally tear each other’s throats. Virgil’s teeth sink into Jude’s neck. Jude drags his nails down Virgil’s back. Blood, hot and sweet, rushes into Virgil’s mouth. The taste of iron and sweat. Jude clutches Virgil’s head, knots his bloody fingers into his hair. His face pressed to Jude’s neck, Virgil swallows to keep from choking. Jude clamps his teeth into Virgil’s shoulder, tearing away a soft chunk of flesh. 

The two dedicated CronosTech employees, locked in their embrace, crash into the nearest cubicle, which shatters into a kaleidoscope of broken glass. There is no time for efficiency, shrewdness, precision. Their work is simple. Simple as the food chain. Simple as carnivorousness. 

It is as if Virgil has been eating gravel all his life, and now he finally has tasted food. Hearty, lush, instinctual. Meanwhile, Jude writhes against him. His teeth ribbon Virgil’s flesh.

Virgil’s shoulder burns, ache laces through him, but the taste is so magnificent he does not care. He will gladly take hunger if it means such bliss.

The post Saturn Devouring His Son appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Written Transcript

Last month, at a “die in” organized by local high schoolers against the Genocide in Gaza.

I’m sitting on the curb and all these 15 year olds are lying in the street in front of me. They start reading a  list of those killed over the PA.

I find I can’t stop thinking about the kids at my work at an afterschool– Their absolute aliveness.

—–

Sweet moments. Friendship. Terror. Beads spilled on the floor.

Head down on the table sobbing it’s time to stop playing video games.

Running as fast as you can.

—–

I can’t stop thinking about the joy, agony, and work of childhood.

The work!

Pretending over and over again that I know any of the rules.

Trying to convince either one of us that right and wrong exists.

That it matters!

—–

And not being able to provide that for a child:

That you will be safe,

That I will be here,

That no mistake is irreparable.

—–

As an adult, I’ve spent so many

Days watching all of it in the kids

I’ve worked with.

—–

The times you’re selfish.

The times you’re kind.

Cleaning up and starting over again and again.

Childhood is to be alive.

Childhood is incredibly difficult.

——-

The world that revolves around you 

And your best friend and the bracelet

Business you made isn’t a lesser one.

It isn’t a half-existence.

At least in my experience, childhood was overflowing, vibrant, and terrifying.

Learning the world and learning yourself is Perilous even under the best

CIRCUMSTANCES.

——

I can’t stop thinking about how real kids are. There’s so much focus on “What will you be when you grow up?” But here you are, a real, complete, and amazing person.

—-

Here you are, you’re an eye staring at the sun. The world is fast and big and often uncaring.

—–

I can’t stop thinking about your realness.

Your name as a name on that list.

Over and over.

The names on that list as you.

Real and perfect and in a rush and wanting the world to come.

The post On Working With Kids appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Lora Lee broke up with the ocean. The news talked about it for as long as they talk about any celebrity drama, so about one afternoon. They mentioned that Lora Lee moved to Amsterdam, and she’s a poet and you know what they say about poets (this is the part where the reader is supposed to nod wisely and try to remember any prejudices about poets). Misspelled her hometown’s name three times in three different articles. 

What the news didn’t say is that Lora Lee wears perfectly ironed shirts and cuts the crusts off her toast. That she hasn’t written for over a month but she sings to the flower pots on her window in the evening. When singing she positions herself so that the flowers and her and the view out of the window fit into a perfect perspective, silhouettes in gold, portrait of an artist in the city of art. Lora Lee has long fingers and smiles with only the corners of her lips. 

Lora has dated lakes, a small, warm-water sea. She wrote poems in the curls of their beaches and they whispered pleasantries in waves, cradled her in mirrored sunsets. They phased in and out of love in soft watercolor touches. It was different, with the ocean. 

They met on a ferry. Lora has a plan for what she’ll do if she finds out the world will end in ten minutes but never had a spare tire, so adventure, so raincoat and rubber boots but no umbrella, face to the rain. The rain is also the ocean (many things are). The ocean ran down Lora’s face with the professional intimacy of a make-up artist, asked her the traveler’s questions: where are you going? Where are you from? Lora’s voice flowed with stories. Somewhere between an evening in Paris two years ago and the pigeon she met in the park this morning Lora invited the ocean to her friend’s gallery opening – Sunsets In Porcelain is perfectly exquisite, I do hope the critics do it justice. They wandered the streets, Lora in her raincoat and the ocean in her sunlit rain, glimpses in puddles and storefront screens. Lora Lee showed her cafes and antique shops, strung in and out of conversations, made every street lamp into a stage and passerby into protagonist. The ocean held most of everything and Lora Lee held the ocean and everything fit. 

They broke up in a year. Lora Lee was sitting on the waves, not quite walking on water but letting it hold her with its being. Lora read her poems from memory. In them the ocean was a field, a desert, lovely beast with stomach full of sun. In her poems the ocean was a woman with a gentle smile and never spoke of anything but love. 

I don’t think I ever felt like this before. 

Like what? 

Small. There is so much of me that never fits in your poems. 

Quaint. Surely nothing important? 

The ocean ran her heavy waves along the bones of ships, bloated corpses centerpieces in the ballet school of scavengers. Took stock of trash islands, strange squirming life, jagged edges and soft, lush rot blooming in her shallows.

I don’t really know. I don’t think you could love any of it. 

Lora lies in bed in her beautiful apartment and runs months through her fingers. Waterside walks, quiet evenings, breakfasts in bed. Carefully curated secrets. Her face smiling back at her from the water. Love story with no beats missed. Roll credits, roll credits, never mind what happens next. 

Lora Lee volunteers at the lost and found, tries to let things be simply things. The young person looking for their phone and the phone the lost and found received a few hours ago do not match in tak, she recommends another lost and found, doesn’t know how the story ends. The lipstick-kiss sealed letter sits and sits and is mostly dust. Every once in a while a person with ink stains on their fingers or lovestruck look walks in, keys and keys and ticket, the letter sits. No address. No narrative. 

On her way to the lost and found Lora greets the bushes, the storefronts, the sidewalk puddle. It’s usually there, shaped by the pavement, sky-colored and oil-painted. No words, small wave, small wave back. 

There’s a name on the outside of the letter and Lora checks the phonebook, not quite sure what she’s looking for. Finds addresses. Anette on Tidorestraat, on Makassarstraat, on Boniplein. Anette by the park and Anette with a full view of the docks, ships and ships and life. Maybe the letter was to go by ship, by train, France to Denmark or the other way around or something else entirely. Maybe the Anette in question is registered as Levi or Antoine or any other ghost. Maybe this story has no ending at all: Lora Lee, dear Lora Lee, is it so against your being to leave anything unfinished? 

The Anette on Tidorestraat cannot speak for long, fatigue lining her face, children noises. Her apartment smells of cats and pasta and looks like it was intended to be something else. She is not looking for letters and she has enough of love. It began to rain between Makassarstraat – sorry, she moved out a few months ago, moved in with her partner, I think, – and Boniplein. It fits, Lora tells herself, the third act rain, of course there would be rain and music and running for the last door, warm orange to contrast the storm, violin music swirling in anxious notes. Rule of threes and third acts. 

A woman answers on the second knock. Smiles with only her lips, interrupts Lora a few sentences in. People are speaking in the living room in hushed voices and her eyes are brimmed with red and she sounds as tired as she looks. 

I’m sorry. I am not expecting any letters. There must have been a misunderstanding. Have a good day. 

The door shuts and Lora stands in the rain and doesn’t notice how the letter is soaked through, the trace of someone’s lips mixing with the ink mixing with the water, one recipient short of a kiss. 

She walks back to the lost and found, keeps her head down, hides from the rain in her jacket. People hurry past and there’s a child stomping through every puddle with all the joy a human heart can hold and she doesn’t take note, doesn’t make it into a poem. The rain feels nothing but wet and cold. 

The lost and found is closed for the day and Lora sits on the steps and nothing, nothing. The world goes on and she has no plot. 

Hi, says the puddle, rippling with rain, a thousand faces per second. Tough day? Lora opens her mouth, closes it. Nods. Lets the silence stretch beyond comfort. 

There’s an absence sitting beside her in the shape of an ocean and there’s an absence in the shape of her, too, and she can’t think of anything to say that would cover it. 

Yeah, she says, three breaths and a few selves later. Something like it. 

The puddle gurgles in sympathy and it’s a little bit the ocean – many things are – but not enough to remember any lasting hurt, any long-lived wisdom. All it has to give is a little understanding, and Lora gives some back. 

It rains and rains and she and the puddle talk about nothing – rubber-booted kids, the underbellies of umbrellas, the world cast in the shadow of leaves floating on your surface, poems, published and not, hometowns with names so forgettable they get misspelled thrice and so you feel inclined to pick a name that really rolls off the tongue. 

When the rain tires out of itself Lora goes home, the letter doesn’t. Maybe once it dries some bird takes the fallapart paper and shapes it into something like home, maybe its never-recipient lives so much she hardly missed out on any love, who am I to know? 

Lora Lee’s learning how to live and she’d rather not fit herself into any more stories. Enough to say she carries an umbrella with her from time to time.

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