truthfront

Category: prose

  • Dance

    When we dance the sky opens up virginal to our mountain of climbing flames and we beat drum skins, we sing primordial chants, reckless, born again and finally alive beneath our celestial cypher. Our bodies painted up reverently with the blood of today’s hunt and the women gyrate hips and shoulders, backs twisted beautifully, arms and legs pierced, braceleted, serpentine, both their bodies and ours primed for bestial contact, the fragrant spell of carnal delight. I am an animal. Mother moon culled us from the Earth or the spirit of the very Earth upon which we dance and now here we are, immersed in her elegant mystery and decay. Can we not live forever, O mother, at least for this one night?

  • Nietzsche at the door

    Nietzsche came to my door the other night. He approached it from the inside, all but drenched in darkness. I asked him, I said, Hey, man. From whence have you come?

    He walked slowly to the kitchen and the dim light there. I could see he was wet with sweat and his eyes were mad. Why, the mountain, of course, he said.

    I watched as he poured himself a glass of water from the tap and drank it.

    Please, I said. Will you show me the way?

    He placed the glass in the sink and turned to me, his eyes shining. He said, But you already know the way.

    Then I laughed, and he laughed.

  • Wasteland

    They roam this sogged landscape through heavy mist burdened with guns and swords and rods, many of them pushing or pulling carts laden with their lives or whatever remains. Some of them ride the backs of bloated horses, the eyes of both man and beast dulled by fatigue and sickness. You hear them before you see them rise up out of the fog like wraiths, clothes wasted and faces caked in mud. And maybe they are wraiths up from some unspeakable depth or maybe you’re the ghost they stare at walking slowly past, gun drawn. Women with long hair carrying alien babies hatched in some far off land and these people have seen hell, their eyes betray giant serpents and beheadings, rivers of blood. You feel guilty and damned just looking at them. A scream from far off and you can’t discern its direction nor its origin. The fog is a spider web on your skin, the ground warm vomit. Gray world without end.

  • Chain letter

     

    I’m writing a letter to you, grown woman, though I know I’ll never send it, I’m writing a letter to you and you’re so far away, you’ve always been so far away, you remind me of my father, just looking at you is like looking at my father, and I often look at you in my mind, I’ve no other option because you’re so far away, you’ve always been far away, and my father’s gone and you’ll soon be gone, too, and do you ever feel like you gain just as much as you lose? Perhaps as you get older you gain less than you lose and when you’re younger you gain far more than you lose, that’s why losing is such a painful revelation to the young, and that’s why I feel as if I gain exactly as much as I lose, for I’m halfway through this life wearing the smiles and scars to prove it, I’m thinking of you, grown woman, wondering how it’s all come to this, me writing you a letter I’ll never send, a letter I wouldn’t even think of sending, communicating with you is so peculiar. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m far away and you’re right where you need to be, I’m the far away one while you’re in the right place, so close to everything. I wouldn’t be surprised, remember when I was a child and you’d come to visit from far away and it was like vacation for me, we used to go to the park together and you told jokes and gave us your paintings but still I felt you were so far away, I never knew you and still don’t, you’re so far away, but despite the distance I still love you and don’t know why, we rarely interact and it’s just like with your mother, my grown grandmother, she’s always been entirely too far away for me to love her, and yet I do, very much, and can’t really say why. I live in a tower of my own inventions and the world continues to roll its odd course despite my protests and I find it heartbreaking that family members so far from one another can love and think of one another and not even know them, not even know why or how or even when the planet will cease its sleepy roll, thunderous vibration and concussive intimidation, this is my life up here in the tower and maybe one day you could visit, we’d have vacation and go to the park, I’d tell you jokes and give you my paintings and things would be like they’ve always been but somehow different, I’d see you as a grown woman instead of the teenager, the young woman I remember from my youth, and you’d listen to me as if I were an adult, independent and healthy, a thinking man in the digital age, we’d talk about my dead father and you could tell me lies about him, tell me lies about him. Meanwhile we’ll have plenty of time to sit and not say any words and grow closer as the days grow longer and the roll slows to a crawl so that soon the sea hisses and rocks and overtakes the land, the sea is all there is, and we’re already making progress up there in your tower of inventions, the airplanes and rockets and e-cards and I’ve never understood your hairy armpits, my mother and my sisters always told me it was strange for a woman to have hair under her arms, but I’m sure you’ll get to that in time, we’ll get to everything in time, I’m certain of it. In the tower we feel the sway of the Earth beneath us, and we’re no longer far away up here with all my books and the memories, do you remember when I was a child I would hate when you came to visit from far away because I had to sleep on the couch, I was displaced and now that we’re up here in my tower of books and memories I can tell you anything, this is how we minimize the distance between us, we shrink the miles from the west to the Midwest, which is where you are, or where you were before and after you’d travel from far away to visit, we’d go to the park and we’d tell each other jokes and we’d make paintings in the wet dirt and as we dug with sticks we’d find trash and once we’d even find bones, old bones from old hands from people our age who dug too long, but we won’t do that because we can’t even dig here, way up here in the tower of the world’s consequence, we’re here and yet so far from one another, and I’m sure you’re out there somewhere not reading this letter I will never send.

  • Pandemic

    There are parts of me all over this city. A fingernail chewed and discarded furtively onto the carpet of a Cherry Creek department store. Snot blown into a paper towel now buried in a dumpster somewhere in LoDo. My spit on a sidewalk in the Tech Center, my spit in Boulder Creek, my spit floating upon the surface of the South Platte. Spit in the neighborhood streets of Aurora. My DNA lives bunched upon wasted cigarette butts on Capitol Hill, in Lakewood, in the Highlands. Hairs strewn about the foothills, hairs abandoned and sunk into the Earth somewhere on Colfax. Everywhere on Colfax. Dried piss in a men’s room somewhere in Highland’s Ranch, in Littleton. Eyelashes, dead skin cells in Fort Collins. Fragments of me transferred from money or my credit card and now embedded into cash registers across town, parts of me digitized and spent by others. McAvoy as legitimate trade. Parts of me cluttered upon the flesh and in the mouths of the wandering women of the world, all of whom I had met here or somewhere close-by, women who enchanted and puzzled the younger me, all of them now charted upon their own foreign paths. A tart drop from a nostril now dried and crusted to the bottom of someone else’s shoe, someone else’s pant cuff. Tracking my remains in all directions. McAvoy as pandemic. Somewhere, everywhere, all-where. Random registers of my being ride the wind across the icy plains, they carry their own deranged voices out to the frigid canting West Slope. Microscopic and profuse treasures, wasted and worthless traces. I think about all the parts of me dispersed across the world and I wonder where, truly where, is home.

  • Window to the self

    I crack my window when I write, even in the winter, in the dead of night, the sounds of the city soothe me, the sounds of the city guide me down into my cellar of self reflection, exactly where I need to be in order to examine the shadowed recesses, to peer down into the hidden places where no light nor exposure exists, where things go to remain unobserved. These are the very things I’m trying to discover, secrets, the crawling, slithering forms of the mind, this is where they live and the open window on the wall behind me helps cast light upon those forms to send them scurrying, to upset their patterns of concealment. I don’t know why or how the sounds of the city can bring me such clarity during my ritualized introspections. Wind, insects, vehicles, midnight pedestrians, distant sirens, rain, gunshots, screams, howls, silence, all of it like some cipher upon the door to those sacred inner spaces, allowing my entry.

  • New direction: Staying the course

    In the wake of meeting with my editor and receiving my manuscript back after nearly six months, it occurs to me that Truth Front may once again need a bit of a change.

    My editor, in short, told me her edits are minimal. She heaps praise upon the manuscript, but tells me that, if I want to seek a wide readership, I need to make The Novel Paradox more accessible. In her words, I need to dumb it down.

    Of course I respect and appreciate my editor and am very grateful to her for working on this as a freelance project, unpaid, out of friendship and sheer goodness of spirit and belief in literature. I wouldn’t have chosen anyone else to help guide me into the shark infested waters of the publishing world. We both believe in literature and will protect its sanctity with our lives and this is why I agree with her, I believe there are many parts of the novel that, to use my term, don’t need to be left to such deep interpretation.

    Though I am not necessarily a Realist writer (what exactly is a Realist writer, anyway, and aren’t we all Realist writers, in a way?), I am more or less tethered as a man to the realization that my work is not tailored to a wide audience. I am not writing for the masses (nor anyone, for that matter). The text is deeply interactive with the reader; the reader has to roll up his or her sleeves a bit to fully enjoy the novel.

    I write based upon four principles: 1. Sate the creative energy compelling me to write. 2. Write always, and when unable to write, sneak it, like a fox. 3. Write novels (or essays or whatever I’m writing) that I would enjoy reading, and thus, would exhort my own efforts for. 4. Pay homage to the masters that have laid the foundation beneath this crooked, awkward and beautiful structure that literature has become.

    Therefore, I believe there is a middle ground I can reach with this thing. I can fill in some gaps, I can utilize the tools of subtlety to perhaps make the text more accessible. But the reader needs to work. That is the beauty of literature, more than any other form of art. I’m not talking about the extreme avant-garde or even highly experimental work. The reader’s interaction with the text is paramount, in my opinion, to realize full enjoyment of the work. The Novel Paradox is a novel about art, about time and madness, but is in many ways just a good-old mystery, and the reader is the investigative apparatus thrust into the middle of it.

    I will not dumb the novel down to gain the widest readership possible. It’s not meant for that. The widest readership possible wouldn’t even finish the synopsis on the back cover before setting the novel back on the shelf. But I can make adjustments so that perhaps more people will read and enjoy the novel, and just maybe, more people will read in general.

    Now I’m not the champion for literature, or reading in general. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working on a new project, which, auspiciously, appears to be another novel-in-the-making, albeit larger (and more accessible) than The Novel Paradox, a new project which tackles the very issue of reading and its importance. But this is another matter for another entry. Because there will be other entries.

    What I’m trying to get at is—with the advent of this new project and with the maintenance and reconfiguration of the former (also current?) project, I’m going to devote less time to the entries of fiction on this page, and more upon the creative process itself, the random musings of an insufferably dedicated writer and reader. A couple of years previous I consciously directed Truth Front toward a fiction-only enterprise, needing that redirection to retain focus on my obsessions, which are writing literature, and the pursuit of knowledge.

    But now I think it’s time to redirect the path again, to deepen the labyrinth, so to speak.

    So for all the loyal readers of Truth Front (I love you, mom!), go ahead and read the recent pieces of short fiction, if you haven’t already (Kansas City, House of Mirrors, et al.), for soon I will abbreviate them from their entirety. And this is a good thing, because it signals that, indeed, a new project is underway.

  • Kansas City

    We were in Kansas City five days when the skies turned.

    Lake Michigan rose up foaming as if from the underworld and it breached the Iowa state line washing out everything in its path, so we knew it was time to head elsewhere. My husband and I packed our twin girls into the van and knowing we wouldn’t ever return we headed west on I-80 out of Iowa City. With everyone else doing the same thing the road was soon clogged and impassible with parked or stalled-out vehicles by the time we arrived in Des Moines.

    There were hundreds of people walking on the highway shoulder. All of them out of the city and into the immense flatlands beneath the open blue sky and we too fell in line, carrying everything we could with us including two sidearms hidden in our waistbands, one for my husband and one for me. The girls were very frightened and on the verge of tears. Now and then I’d see a dead person in a ditch on the side of the road and I’d point in the other direction at nothing in particular and the girls would look over to where I pointed, their eyes straining past the endless fields and out to the circling birds and webs of clouds. A sky so high and neat and endless. I couldn’t tell if either of the girls had already seen the body. Everything was nothing. There were no airplanes in the air and without the roar of traffic the world was eerily quiet.

    We were always thirsty and we often talked with others on the road, exchanging information with the ones that seemed decent and had kids of their own. People told us they’d heard the day after the quake a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania had failed and was contaminating the air. This besides the explosion we all knew about in Washington state. Or where Washington state used to be, now slipped entire into the ocean. Secretly I wondered about the plutonium plants, not to mention the nuke bombs and missiles, wherever they might be. The government wasn’t saying anything but there had to be serious problems. There had to be warheads nestled somewhere deep in the Earth’s mantle, just sitting there where the ground had swallowed them up.

    I asked my husband about it that first night on the road. Our legs were tired beyond belief and our nerves frayed. I missed home. The girls were asleep under the moonlight and with the stars brighter than I’d ever seen them I whispered to him, What would happen if there were nukes buried down in the Earth? What would happen if they went off?

    My husband had fought in Afghanistan and he said that I shouldn’t worry about such things. He said he’d walked through miles and miles of mine fields before and the worst thing you could do was think about the mines.

    The both of us slept badly and the sunshine woke the girls early in the morning. We set off again southbound on US-69 with a thin line of people both in front and behind us, a wasted group of ghosts. I felt as though we were the last wretched souls on Earth, slinking slowly from the damned. Or maybe we were the damned, walking into the mouth of our eternal anguish.

    This is an abbreviated chapter.