hamtini

[Issue #11: Fire]

Have you noticed that everyone seems to have an opinion about what’s wrong with this country? The list of supposed national grievances is without end. It’s the government! It’s the media! It’s the weather! It’s Labradoodles! I don’t know about you, but whenever I see these blowhards open their mouths, it takes all my energy not to lunge at them and set fire to their heads.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, expressing yourself through fire is a perfectly normal response to the frustrations of everyday life. For example, when a waiter brings you the wrong menu item, most people will complain loudly, stiff the waiter in an act of passive-aggressive indignation, or perhaps just eat the food anyway to avoid making a fuss.

But the only appropriate reaction to this situation is to light a match and allow your food to burst into glorious flame. This unequivocally sends the message that the order has no place on your table. And do the waiters come to you in a hurry! I bet you’ve never had service at that high level of attention before.

Now, I’ve been called many things in my life—a pyro, a pyromaniac, a sufferer of pyromania—but no one has had the wisdom to call me who I truly am: a liberator, a freer of feelings, of the kindling inside you that needs just that one last spark of anger before bursting into a beautiful display of fiery self-expression.

However, this country’s lawmakers take issue with my stance, and this, my friends, is what’s truly wrong with this country. Our so-called “freedom” of expression is a laughable farce if it excludes setting random things on fire.

So I urge everyone reading this not to let society extinguish your urges with its restrictive, flame-retardant rules. Whether it’s a malfunctioning computer, a car that won’t start, or a cat that keeps waking you up at 5 in the morning, a well-placed blaze sets all things right.

Also, staring at fire is fucking amazing.

[Issue 11: Fire]

“Mary-fucking-Frances!”

My roommate Essie’s shaking me awake. I can barely hear her through the ringing in my thick head. My mouth and throat feel dryer than the giant martini I decided to cap my night with. Great idea, that: my tonsils may now be permanently stuck together.

“Okay okay okay,” I mumble as I struggle to open my eyes and prop myself up on my left elbow.

That’s when I see him. The Irish guy, what was his name? My desperate, closing-time hookup is still here and looks like a nervous rat—a very long rat, darting from one glass terrarium wall to another. I can’t remember his name. Killian? Kieran? Whatever.

This is when I notice that I’m naked from the waist down. I’m pretty sure I passed out while getting head, but I’m beyond embarrassment right now.

As a pair of jeans hits my right shoulder, a realization: the ringing’s too loud.

“Jayzus, get dressed!” yells the guy.

Oh shit, the building’s on fire.

* * *

Outside, on Darling Street, the late spring morning starts to overtake the flashing lights. I shiver in a scratchy wool blanket—it smells exactly like a friend’s ski cabin, fireplace and all—and wait for my turn to talk to the cop.

Essie’s crying uncontrollably, and the cop—who I can’t believe still wears a Burt Reynolds mustache—can’t seem to decide whether to comfort her or walk away. She can’t find her cat, adopted four days ago from the local shelter. “What will I put on the flyers?” she manages between sobs. There’s a lot of snot. “He doesn’t even have a name yet!”

Keanan—the cop talked to him first, so I could pretend to remember—is trying to warm me up by standing close behind and rubbing each of my arms simultaneously. “You okay?” he leans down and asks, for only the fifty-fourth time. I try to answer, but when I open my mouth, the clatter of my teeth is louder than the squeak of my voice. Instead I think I wish I were wearing socks.

[Issue 11: Fire]

As soon as I see him I feel warmth spreading through me like I’ve been basking in the sun. He is literally radiant, it’s incredible. If I could, I’d make a life just in the half inch between us. I’d live there, never touching, in the heat of the atomic particles smashing against each other as they come off our bodies. I’d wander endlessly over the soft sands of his skin like a ghost in the desert, a line of long windswept dunes drawing me toward the tangled briar patches tucked away behind his ears and between his legs.

Even after all this time, he still smells like summer flowers, fresh air, salt, campfires. Every day I wake with that scent in my head, and feel the hunger in me. I gave up fighting it long ago. Now my existence is simply a meditation on his perfection, each movement a gesture in the sacred dance of our pairing. I do this because we cannot speak the same language. I must communicate my devotion in silent prayer. Maybe if he knew he would understand that what I have to do, I do as a ritual, worshipping at his altar. Maybe if he knew he wouldn’t cry so.

I’m pulled to him like a doomed satellite. Trapped in his gravity, I circle him in a long slow spiral, an orgasmic cycle of movement, the scent of stone and metal. I watch his eyes fill with tears, they always betray him, though he stopped crying out many ages ago. I begin, caressing the side of his abdomen with my beak, covering his tortured face with my wing, digging my talons deep into his flesh where his long arm meets his chest. I drag a long chasm under his rib and open his belly like a treasure chest filled with molten ruby hued rivers. I breathe deep and plunge my head in to pull out the finest, darkest jewel. I consume his steaming liver like a priest consuming the flesh of a sacrifice. Piece by piece I tear away and swallow and its heat warms me from the inside.

I wonder if this was how Zeus intended it to be, that I, should find my own torture in the punishment of Prometheus. To love the titan, but to deliver his eternal torment trapped in the form of an eagle. All for daring to love man enough to bring him fire. 

[Issue 11: Fire]

He's standing in the kitchen slicing jalapeños for the burgers. He looks out the window to the yard. He sees that she’s not wearing her ring.

She’s standing by the fire. The men are elsewhere. The kids have pulled them into a touch football game.

She's not wearing her ring, and she's flipping the patties with an intensity he hasn't seen before.

It's that green dress with the flared skirt, the one with the white birds on it. She'd laughed that she was like a Portlandia sketch, and he’d laughed with her, watching that one snaggle tooth he so loved, the one barely screwed into her mouth. Like a lightbulb that needed just one more twist to be bright-white like the rest.

She wasn't showing yet, and not everyone at the party knew. It was only 13 weeks. He could understand. Apparently Jon had been a real asshole about it so far.

In his mind's eye they'd done everything, gone everywhere. Pressed up against the wall of the bar. Over the bar itself, her hair dangling into the well bottles.

It certainly wasn’t his fault, falling for his best friend’s girl. He pulled back the tab of another Modelo, considering. He’d known her first, in college, although her hair had been terrible then. Bleached and loud. She’d been going through a weird bi phase, with a string of rhinestone studs up her right ear. It wasn’t a good look.

Now, though, the 2015 her.

He couldn’t sleep.

She was everywhere he looked, her laughter a burble in his ear when he tossed and turned in bed. On the treadmill, in the lyrics of The National songs he listened to on repeat, like a fucking jerk. In the faces of other women, even, as he watches them reading on the subway, trying to parse her features from theirs.

A glint caught his eye. He looked. A pound of raw meat on the counter, with a paw print scooped out. A Hansel & Gretel trail of crumbs leading away from the lump of beef.

And her engagement ring, sparking in the sun.

Photo: Robyn Lee, Flickr

[Issue 11: Fire]

Chase dropped the stick and sprinted as hard as he possibly could. When he finally stopped, he turned back, and watched a tiny corner of the night explode into day.

A few months back, Chase and Trip left the clan, after an argument with Grog and Thak and the other elders. They never really fit in, anyway -- Chase and Trip’s boat shoes and pastel polo shirts always separated them from the rest of the clan, who preferred moose-hide loincloths and bare feet. While Grog and the elders knew that the best way to spend their days was smashing one rock into another rock, and migrating great distances in search of water, food, and shelter-providing caves not completely filled with bears, Chase and Trip insisted on shiftlessly sitting around, playing X-Box and shotgunning cans of light beer. They refused to hunt, and they sure as shit didn’t gather. No matter how many Three Wise Homo Erectus shots they bought Lucy, she refused to sleep with them, preferring the men in the clan who didn’t shave. They didn’t fit, so when the clan left for yet another migration, they stayed.

But as a panting Chase inched back towards the light, a different kind of light than he had ever seen, a hotter light than he had ever felt, a light that made him put on his Ray-Bans even though it was night, a light he couldn’t look away from, he realized the separation had been worth it. He didn’t yet understand exactly what he had created, and how it would alter the entire world forever, but he knew what it meant for his immediate future: the “Around the Pangea” party would rage all night, and it was going to be fucking great.

[Issue 11: Fire]

We ate dinner at the table in the backyard. The lobster carcasses, sucked clean and spent, lay lifeless in a football pile-up on a kick-wheel ceramic platter. The natural bug spray was worthless. We batted mosquitos away from our faces like so many bothersome details, swatted at them on our sweaty legs. The basil was in bloom. Soft, dimpled raspberries sat wet in bowls. The Maine nights were cool, so we pitched a tent fireside. I spilled the bourbon in the grass and couldn’t remember the words to the songs I love. But the days were hot and still, the air heavy as wet laundry. We traveled from one body of water to another. He carried me on his back into a still green creek in the woods to a tiny island of stones. We stepped out of our clothes, and I waded waist-deep into the water. Another day, sticky as a fly strip. He pointed the way from the passenger seat, and we pulled off the main road to a town suspended in time, unmoving as an insect in amber. We sat on a sun-bleached slab of driftwood, slipped out of clothes again, and tip-toed across the uneven stones pressing into the soft arches of our feet, down to the lapping edge, then into the cold water, ragged rocks underfoot. The day was bright, and we bobbed underwater like corks. I tilted myself back, held on the water’s surface like a hammock. The bay was filled with moored sailboats, and then suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing: At the sun on my face, the cold water stinging my eyes, salty in my mouth; at the wind, spirited as a pony; at the man who stood naked nearby, as tall and stately as a heron. We waded back to the shore and I said thank you thank you thank you, that was such a good idea, and he shooed it away, of course. The seat belts clicked, our hair wet in the windows-down wind. He said let’s go for ice cream, and we did.

This bedroom had a hopeful air. His bedspread was dark red, with neat hospital corners and a sort of Courtyard-by-Marriott feel.

It was not of a piece with the rest of the house, where children had made their mark in every corner: raw macaroni in the corners of the kitchen; a Star Wars lego set; a sign-in sheet on the girl’s bedroom door. (He had laughed when he told her that neither he nor his sons signed in, and she had made a mental note that when she finally met the girl, who was 12, she would definitely sign in. Sign-in sheets were serious business.) 

Yes, this bed was very neatly made indeed. It had certain expectations. It is the sixth date, this bed said. Shit is gonna happen now.

“Carve out some space next to you. It doesn’t have to feel like loneliness.”

Her therapist’s words. It was a little annoying to have such a hot therapist. She had two kids—three and five—yet she was always wearing something lovely and gray in a size 4, from Banana Republic. Always dressed like she had a real office to go to, not just dealing with neurotic 35-year-olds in bourgeois Brooklyn Heights.

She always shut off the overhead light, and shut the curtain so she couldn’t be seen, at therapy. How mortifying to be talking about feelings and crying while across the courtyard some asshole neighbor in a wifebeater watched her and ate Golden Grahams. 

Carve out some space. It was helpful advice. She’d pictured The Future Man’s vague outline, like a scene in CSI Miami. The shape of the body on the ground.

It was a big bed—king-size?—and she noted happily that everything he owned was to the right. Alarm clock; water glass; glasses. He slept on the left. A relief.

Light on or off, he asked, rolling down her tights, turning her on her side. 

Lights on.

She woke up at 4, as the radiator howled. The brownstone had one triple-pane window, over which he’d placed no curtains. They framed the trees and moon like a Japanese screen. 

Gil could never be alone. No matter how hard he tried, people—or the evidence of them—followed him everywhere.

In an empty room, he could smell body odor and perfume; spot the depression in the cushion where the most recent visitor had sat. In an empty street, he navigated around the fresh expectorations of passersby. On and around doorknobs, he could see oily fingerprints, smudged by movement. He imagined all of the microscopic flakes of skin—casually sloughed off by everyday friction or scraped off by nervous fingernails—covering every inch of the landscape, every upholstered surface.

Gil knew that he was surrounded by pieces of other humans, so it seemed that there was very little space between him and them. The potential for contamination repulsed him.

He thought he’d succeeded in Saran-wrapping his life. In the three years since he’d moved into his one-bedroom flat, no one had entered it but him. And for good reason: it had taken long enough, and a great deal of rented equipment, to make it worthy of his things.

The ringing phone that morning was an ear-piercing alarm. A phone call was never good news, and as soon as Gil heard it, he knew he was about to get the air knocked out of him.

The landlord had gotten right to the point: “We got bedbugs in the building. That hippie college boy that just moved in musta brought ’em home from Thailand or the frickin’ ashah-ram or some shit,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell he’s on about half the time. Or why he thinks I give a goddamn ding-a-ling.” Ralph always spoke this way to Gil, even though the garrulous chatter was in no way reciprocated.

Now, to prevent an invasion from the tiniest of Trojan horses—these vermin with bellies full of the blood of others—his sanctuary would be violated. He imagined all the pairs of work boots that would track in the fragments of others. Soon his empty apartment would be overcrowded, and Gil already felt the suffocation setting in.

I tense my body, and hold my breath, as if by doing so my skin would retreat a few inches. Tiny black holes forming within my ribcage, spiraled galaxy knots in my back, my heart and stomach shrinking, all to make more space on the outside of me. A sisyphean attempt to make space for chests, backs, arms, elbows, hands, hair, coats, handbags, briefcases, backpacks, umbrellas, packages, carriages, tablets, phones, devices. Wishing I could pull my ears into my head to make space for voices. Squeezing my eyes shut to make space for all the faces, as my lungs are invaded by eight million exhalations.

Maybe if I just fold and fold and fold into myself I will become two dimensional like the boot printed papers on the floor. Nothing remarkable will be done with the space I’ve left because there will always be another person to fill it, like spheres of lipids on the surface of water. I wonder how many people just fold out of existence in this place, without notice, blowing like papers in the wind.

And so I think of stars and how when stars die they expand; consuming all of the chests, backs, arms, elbows, hands, hair, coats, handbags, briefcases, backpacks, umbrellas, packages, carriages, tablets, phones, devices, voices, faces, exhalations, lipids, papers, planets, satellites, comets and the whole of everything. Expelling fiery emissions into the infinite universe in a devastating and glorious gasp of proof, that here, once, was life, was a star. Within me, and the black holes forming within my ribcage, and the spiraled galaxy knots in my back, and in my burning heart and my shrinking stomach, are the particles of stars which in a completely disorienting and unlikely series of events, traveled across the infinite universe and were a countless number of other things, but right now they are me, and I am the proof that here, once, is life, is a star.

So I expand.

Can’t get that sci-fi novel you’re writing off the ground? Is it weighed down in too many charts, statistics, words, and pages? Then just upgrade your prose with some well-placed innuendo! Your geeky little textbook will strip itself into a jaw-dropping bombshell of a bestseller that editors will drool over. If that doesn’t compute, here are some examples showing how easy it is to spice up your next sci-fi adventure.

Before:

Chris was on his way to the planet Jupiter. He was going to dock at the space station and perform a dangerous spacewalk, but he knew his years of training would protect him from the perils of space.

 After:

Christina was on her way to the seductive planet of Jupiter. She was going to dock at the space station and perform a dangerous spacewalk, but she knew a bunch of hot firefighters-turned-astronauts were going to do it for her. Oh, and space is perilous or something.

*** 

Before:

“It seems the energy leak is coming from this reactor,” Dr. West said. “I’ll have five minutes to go inside and deactivate it before the entire Moon base is destroyed.”

“But you could die out there!” his assistant Barbara exclaimed. “Let me come with you.”

“It’s too dangerous for you, Barbara,” West cautioned. “You’d be much safer here.”

After:

“It seems the energy leak is coming from this reactor,” Dr. West said. “I’ll have five minutes to get inside and deactivate it before the entire Moon base is destroyed.”

“But the reactor has a sex swing!” his assistant Barbara exclaimed. “Let me come with you.”

“It’s too sexy for you, Barbara,” West cautioned. “You’d be much safer here. Also, for God’s sake, please put your clothes back on.”

***

Before:

AlphaBot X-2000 lowered its head to get a closer look at the organism writhing on the ground. It was an uncategorized species, certainly, but what kind? Carbon-based? Silicon-based? X-2000’s data processers whirred with excitement. Not only was this a discovery of a new life form, but potentially that of a new kind of life altogether!

After:

AlphaBot X-2000 lowered its head.

It was Lenny’s first summer at camp, and she hated it. Most of the other kids had been coming to Camp Ossipee for years, but this was her first time. Her parents had just separated, and her mom said she “needed some space.”

So here she was, poor fourteen-year-old Lenny: brace-faced, chunky, unathletic, completely in denial about her budding boobs—and sharing a room with six other campers, none of whom were remotely acquainted with the virtue known as modesty. At any given moment, there was a half-naked girl lounging around. It was so embarrassing, thought Lenny. But then, everything was embarrassing to a girl like Lenny, who was used to silence and order and being left alone.

And then Matty happened. She didn’t even like him at first, truth be told. He was loud and brash—exactly the type of person Lenny would go out of her way to avoid, but with the added terror of being a boy.

They were in arts and crafts, and the instructor had gone into the kiln room to investigate a shattered pot. The class got rowdier the longer the patchouli-scented lady was gone, so when Lenny heard tittering behind her, she didn’t dare turn around. What if they were laughing at her? She continued to fuss over her vase, trying to imagine the bubbles and flares that the heat would create in the paint overnight. Maybe a beautiful handmade gift would cheer up her mom.

She felt something against her knee and looked down. Then she froze.

“May I shine your shoes, miss?”

It wasn’t just the nasally falsetto that knocked Lenny for a loop. Matty had folded himself up like a pretzel, legs behind his ears, and was scooting all over the room on his butt. He bugged out his eyes and set his bottom teeth in a pug’s exaggerated underbite as he looked up at her, reveling in his compromised position.

Lenny gasped and ran to the bathroom, where she cried at the realization that she’d just fallen in love. Because what else could she do?

Berlin is a city built on a river.  The Spree weaves through the center of everything, past the Norman Foster-ized Bundestag and the new presidential palace.  A cruise shows these up close, and also reveals the bullet scars in the Baroque buildings left from the fighting at the end of the Second World War.  The river was for a time a part of the Berlin Wall.

About a 90 minute drive from Berlin is the Spreewald, where the Spree lazes through a flat, forested area.  Although tourism is the main living for the area it isn’t especially popular with non-Germans other than the few who know that in Goodnight Lenin the mother’s favorite treat was a Spreewald pickle.  German reunification was the start of cripplingly high unemployment in the area, however it did mean that the Spreewald became a UNESCO biosphere reserve. 

One entry point to the Spreewald is Lubben, an old Prussian town not yet scrubbed of the Red Army memorials and boxy concrete construction from Communist times.  Given that the Polish border isn’t far away, it doesn’t come as a surprise that more than 80 percent of the town had been destroyed in the fierce fighting at the end of the Second World War. Only a few fragments of the medieval past remain. Men in wifebeaters lean out the windows of their apartments, smoking and watching the streets.

In the natural beauty of the park the freight of the past and the burden of the future simply fall away.  Paddling a kayak in Berlin’s river but in the midst of wilderness is a meditation, punctuated only occasionally by a canal lock that brings a group of boats either up or down into the next section of the park. 

Among the small number of houseboats along the river, a few have an imbiss, a little snack stand, at water level.  It is hard to describe what it feels like to paddle down the Spree with a hot pretzel, a sausage and a beer, except to say that sometimes life can be perfect.

This guy seems like another knucklehead. 

Not much better than Tim, Ted, Ned, Fred, what the devil was the fruitcake's name before this one? I have no idea.

He’s still talking. What the hell is there to talk about? He could talk about why he didn’t manage to shave before coming to dinner. That would not have passed muster in his family, one of the girls bringing home some guy for the Sunday roast and him having stubble. He would have been thrown out in the snow. Asked to take a walk. Or maybe not, but this is where his head was going, which was not a good sign. 

His first daughter. When she was little he doted on her like crazy. He was in Vietnam when she arrived, so he had some catching up to do. First, he squashed a cockroach at the mother-in-law’s house in Long Island. Even at six months old the kid looked impressed. Eventually she started calling for him, not just for mommy, when she had trouble. He remembers the Central Park Zoo, buying her a pretzel the size of her head. God it seems ages ago. 

What is he talking about now? San Francisco? The hippies? Like I would care, fella. They protested me when I left and trust me, I wasn’t so happy about going, either. Jesus Christ now we’re on to his favorite type of food this guy could talk a dog off a meat wagon. 

At least the food is good. Deb stepped up. The steak is perfectly medium-rare for once and I don’t understand why he hasn’t touched it and my god is that bastard reaching for a slice of well-done? 

Everyone’s looking at me. I must have sighed aloud. Awkward. The meathead is talking again, what does he want? Salt? SALT? This dinner is perfect. 

“You don’t need salt. It’s bad for you.” 

He went back to chewing on his steak, eyeing the table like a feral dog. 

They would be his only words that first Sunday supper. His future son-in-law would never salt his food again. 

This is the one about the women on the ledge between two cars of the L train.  They were on something, obviously, maybe only drinks, but dressed nicely, NYU students, so it seemed.  Deep in Brooklyn, the L train does not move in a straight line.  It jerks.  One direction, then the other.  They were out there, in the dark, singing, hollering, syllables lost in screeching train racket.  One danced, the one with her back to the subway door, and she would duck low toward the ledge she was standing on, so that from my vantage it appeared momentarily she’d fallen.  The other held the safety bars on either side of her, long hair frenzied over her face, and she looked toward the car and at her friend, but also at me, over her friend’s shoulder, as I stood inside the 9 pm-on-a-Friday crowd, leaning against the window in the door.  I decided she was an actress, they both were, and that this is what an actor did for thrills, standing in front of a crowd that was no crowd, projecting into a screeching void songs committed to heart and looking back into the crowded car you’d vacated to search for yourself reflected in the face of a boy inside and how much concern did he have, how much excitement, how much anger, and whether any of this was real, you must have wondered, y nada y nada y pues nada, OK, although he’ll probably remember that moment better than you, a swiftness to your step as you reentered the well-lit car and slipped out the door at the next stop but not without pausing in front of the boy and wavering a moment on your feet, to see if he would say something, would he say something?