Crow Jonah Norlander, Author at X-R-A-Y

CAN’T DIE IN PORTLAND, MAINE by Scott Laudati

February 25, 2022 · Fiction

It was summer everywhere but Portland, Maine. From Brooklyn to Portsmouth road crews sat along I-95 and stared longingly into the finality of their existence. This was it. The winters too cold and the summers too hot. Fall was spoken about with the nostalgia of an old folk song, and spring, of course, ran shorter than a rainy weekend. The crews spent the entirety of these uncomfortable months working on the sides of roads while everyone sped by on their way to somewhere better, or worse. The only time the two groups interacted was when a motorist fell asleep and drove over the short wall of orange cones. “At least we have a job,” one hardhat probably said to the other. And none of them ever walked into traffic; they never even thought about it. But Seal thought about it as he drove past those crews on his way straight north from New York City. In fact, it was all he thought about. Of his existence. Of walking into traffic and freeing himself from the nightmare of being a man.

Seal liked Portland because he never sweat there. It was the beginning of June when he drove by the 7-11 on Congress Street and parked his car behind Longfellow Square. He stopped to play a game of pinball in a laundromat then walked down to Casco Bay. He saw a few crabs running in the muck left behind by a receding tide. He smelled his favorite smell: the chopped bait used in lobster traps—a rotting stink caked into the wooden hulls of lobster boats and imbedded deep beneath the nails of watermen—a stink that grew stronger as their boats headed back to the docks after a day at sea. And he saw his favorite bird: the black backed gull, almost the size of a pelican. Dozens of them gathered and erupted with long calls just as returning lobster boats became visible. The gulls sailed down on the docks with singular focus, arguing for prime spots where a few scraps might get tossed their way.

Yes, Seal liked Portland. He didn’t like kids and their fat parents bumbling around complaining about the price of lobster rolls. Or how they waited in line for hours to try French fries dipped in duck grease. Or how his serenity was continually broken by car horns and idiots screwing up the simple crosswalk directions in ways only tourists can. But all in all, he thought Portland was probably his favorite city.

Seal didn’t know why he cared about having a favorite city. He was 35 and totally broke; a feat he couldn’t quite understand being that his whole previous year had been spent under piers in Brooklyn rebuilding dock pilings. And when he tried, he couldn’t really remember anything from that time. He wanted to. He wanted to explain to everyone the way your hands feel in January when seawater gets under your gloves. The real maddening blind rage your body goes into when you can feel parts of it dying for $22 an hour. He wanted to tell them that quitting was the only sane thing to do in an insane world. But nobody actually cares about anyone else, so he didn’t bother. And he was thinking about that last winter now and it didn’t seem like it had really been him who’d gone through it. What did his mind do while he hit concrete with a hammer 40 hours a week, week after week? He had no idea. He could remember his ex-girlfriends. His priests. The people he’d once called his best friends. The moment when it all stopped being possible and everything just morphed into varying levels of impossible. What was the point? Did he ever really have a chance?

Now 35 years had gone by. A whole lifetime and nothing to show for it.

He stepped into the water of Casco Bay—the freezing water, replenished daily with new freezing water brought down by the Labrador Current from Halifax and beyond. He cursed but he was committed. After all, it was the same familiar cold he’d known on those days floating under the piers that finally brought him to this. The days spent soaking wet, icicles growing off his clothes and weighing him down like his limbs were the branches of an old tree, sailing into the eternal blackness of a pit whose middle saw no light, the sounds of a city above muffled and rounded out into some inaudible animal roar, like he was sailing around the Congo itself, but caught there in the real heart of darkness, seeing no more than the radius of his headlamp, or occasionally when a hose or machine exploded unexpectedly he might get a second to see his surroundings until the fireball or a fountain of sparks arched into the river, plummeting his world back into the unimaginable desert of darkness again.

Yes. He was going to kill himself one way or the other. It’ll be a better world without me, he thought, one less loser consuming the dwindling water supply. He was up to his neck now. Well, here we go. He took one last breath as a commotion began up on a dock—a high New England dock that had to account for the 30-foot swing between tides. He turned to look and saw the same crowd who just before had been ruining his peace with stupid human moments like: “See how fat I look? That’s a terrible picture, take another one!” and their dad or boyfriend grumbled that this wasn’t what they’d spent all year working for, but still, feeling obligated to prove to their friends watching on the internet that their lives were perfect, repositioned themselves for a more professional stance, and hoped somehow that through a filter or maybe God’s love this next picture would suffice, and they wouldn’t have to endure any more berating in front of the other tourists.

But now they all pointed at Seal, screaming, “HELP.”

That was when he saw a dog, thrashing wildly under the dock, being bounced against barnacle covered pier legs and letting out a fading yelp with each hit. Seal hated people, all people, on some days even his own mother, but he loved dogs, all dogs, and he didn’t hesitate a second before swimming madly to the drowning creature.

Blood seeped out of the dog and thickened the surrounding water like a chemical spill. Barnacles worse than serrated knives attacked their bodies and Seal took a good sticking as he caught up to the dog. It was a big pit bull, probably the king of many dog parks, but it submitted immediately into his arms, and paddled the best it could, not just to assist, but because it was a good dog, and it didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, even upon its possible death.

But it did not die. Seal got the dog up onto the beach and saw that the wounds were basically superficial. The dog was exhausted more than anything else, and after a few seconds of heavy panting his tail began to wag like a toy coming back to life. “You’re a good dog,” Seal said, and patted the dog’s stomach to reassure him. It was a beautiful moment. Man and dog lying there under the fading summer sun. Blessed with this Maine shore. A savior and a life saved. Nothing could mean more than this.

A blonde girl with a tattoo above her eyebrow and a shirt that said “PUSSY IS THE POWER” slid down the embankment toward them like a skier with no skis. “Cornwall. Cornwall, my poor doggy,” she said. “Is he ok?”

“He’s ok,” Seal said. “He is what he’s supposed to be—a good dog.”

“I can’t believe you were out in the water already. If you hadn’t been there Cornwall would be dead. You’re a hero. You saved my dog’s life. It’s a miracle.”

Was it a miracle? If he hadn’t decided to kill himself once and for all, about seven hours ago in Brooklyn, he never would’ve driven here, he never would’ve gotten into the cold water, and Cornwall would be a floating snack bar filling the stomach of every crab and seagull in the bay. Was this fate? His life now had meaning. He was a man who’d found his moment. For the first time not marginalized by circumstance and bad luck. I am The Peoples’ Champ, he thought, I am indeed a hero.

Then the girl started sobbing and put her head against Seal’s chest. The pandemic was over but he realized it had been a year since a woman touched him, and he liked it. She pulled her head away and apologized for the wet mess of her face, but she didn’t really sound sorry and he thought she looked pretty good.

“We’re catching an REI Line out of here in an hour and heading back to Asheville,” she said.

“Ohhhh, you’re a gutterpunk.” He pointed at the tattoo on her face. “That makes sense. You don’t smell like a gutterpunk, though.”

“Have you ever done it?”

“No.”

“Come with us.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to! There’s a zoo we’ll pass in New Jersey. They have hyenas and you can feed them popcorn. Have you ever fed popcorn to a hyena?”

“That does sound pretty good. But I was supposed to kill myself. I only stopped to save your dog.”

“Come to the popcorn zoo with me. You can’t kill yourself now. That would be absurd. And I’ll feel responsible.”

She was right. It did seem ridiculous now. Seal’s life had gone from completely meaningless to almost the guarantee that he was going to get laid if he could just hang on a little while longer. I can always kill myself tomorrow, he thought.

They left the beach hand in hand and the dog never strayed more than a foot away. They crossed Munjoy Hill and she lay down in the street in front of the lighthouse and told Seal to take a picture of her from an angle that made the lighthouse look like an erection growing from her crotch. Then they went down to the railyard and sat in the weeds.

“If you can count the bolts in the wheel, it means the train is going slow enough for you to jump on,” she said. “I’ll go first. When I get on, you toss Cornwall up to me, then climb up.”

A freight train that had to be two miles long crawled by. They waited for the engine car to follow a bend out of view and sat silently while the oil cars followed one by one. Eventually the boxcars were up.

“Let’s go,” she said.

She threw her bag into an open boxcar and it disappeared inside. Then she put both of her hands on its floor and hoisted herself up.

“Ok,” she said. “Get ready, Cornwall.”

Seal and Cornwall were slow trotting along with the speed of the train. She laid on her stomach and extended both hands out from the boxcar. Cornwall was pretty seasoned at this and basically jumped up and landed in her arms. Once the dog got situated, she reached her arms out for Seal. He was ready. Suddenly a big jolt jerked the train back and forth and then it started to speed up.

“Hurry,” she said.

Seal started to fall behind. His feet slipped on gravel laid along the side of the tracks and made a full sprint impossible. Do it, he said to himself, you’ve got one shot at this.

He lunged at the open door. Both of his hands slapped the floor next to the girl and her dog, but there was nothing to grip. For a second it looked like he had it but then his hands started to slide and the momentum of gravity pulled his lower half under the train. Then he was on the ground. He saw his legs bounce limply between the bottom of the train and the tracks before they disappeared out the other side. He looked at the open boxcar, growing further away, and her face, her beautiful face decaying into some kind of horror, etched into the last seconds of his memory. And the dog, too. Cornwall’s mouth moved in vicious agony, teeth bared and unforgiving, barking with no sound.

Will the hyenas get enough popcorn tonight? he wondered. Will they go to bed hungry?

Crow Jonah Norlander

DUCK POND by Adam Soldofsky

February 24, 2022 · Comics

…

Crow Jonah Norlander

BUNNY: A TRIPTYCH by Yasmina Din Madden

February 23, 2022 · Fiction

The rabbits come in dozens it seems. Nothing one minute, invasion the next. They crouch in the grass like tiny statues, gray fur flecked with white. Cottontails. Leaf-ears at attention. Waiting. Kits, short for kittens, now called bunnies, as if kitten is not cute enough for the tiniest of these rabbits. Bunny, diminutive of the Scottish bun, a nickname for a pet rabbit. Also, slang for a young, attractive woman. She’s a real bunny. A male rabbit is a buck, a female a doe. Before mating, the buck chases the doe until she turns and boxes at him with her front paws. They crouch and stare at each other. Face off until one or the other leaps into the air. Leap, leap, leap, come together.

No matter how long I sit on the back porch watching, I’ve never seen any of the rabbits mate. Yet there are so many of them, dotting my yard like some kind of Disney movie. Bunnies hop through the grass, nibble and twitch, go still as stone when birds dive bomb the shrubs. My child, who is too sensitive, who moves worms off the sidewalk and carries stink bugs outside, tells me that a doe can produce up to ten litters a year, with up to twelve bunnies in each litter. Sometimes the mother eats her litter if she is too stressed and fearful of predators, or she just eats the runt because it’s going to die anyway. My daughter tells me all of this matter-of-factly, like a little old woman familiar with the cycle of life, rather than the ten-year-old that she is. A phantom elbow or foot punches me from within, the ghost of an ache low in my abdomen.

Giving birth can be painless and it can be full of pain. It can be easy or difficult or anywhere in between. You can give birth in a sterilized hospital room or in a kiddie pool in a living room to the dulcet voice of your doula or midwife. You can give birth in the back of a car, on a bathroom floor, in a field, in an elevator, on the side of the road, in a mall, a forest, a library, an airplane, at prom, or in a Walmart parking lot. The list goes on and on and on. While giving birth you may say or hear the following: birth plan, epidural, fuck, breech, Pitocin, I don’t want this, breathe, I’m sorry, push, no, in distress, crowning, don’t touch me. You may not hear or say any of these things. But at the end you will have a baby or you won’t, and what you feel will depend on which.

Crow Jonah Norlander

DEREK MAINE on film with Rebecca Gransden

February 22, 2022 · Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

The first film I saw in the theater was Flight of the Navigator. We must have arrived late. Or it was unexpectedly full. We had to sit in the very front row. I was very uncomfortable. I was seven or eight. It came out in 1986 so I would have been four but that can’t be true. Anyway, when you are four or seven or eight you are really small. I remember the screen was huge. I couldn’t handle the sensory overload. It felt like the screen was going to swallow me up and take me away on the spaceship. It was a very good movie. I have not seen it since.

I was visited by an apparition the night I watched The Care Bears Movie (1985). This sounds like something I would write in a story, but it’s true instead. My parents did not believe me. They told me to go back to bed. They said, “go back to your room,” or something just like that. They said I was scared from the movie. They said it was because of the movie I was scared and not the apparition. But I don’t remember anything about the movie, and I certainly remember the white mass of light that stood over my bed. That was 35 years ago. What did Daniel Johnston say? “Some things last a long time?”

What films first felt transgressive to you? Do you remember being secretive about any films you watched growing up?

I was downstairs on the couch, alone, and it was late. I pressed rewind a whole lot of times. Let me back up a bit.

I knew why Friday the 13th (1980) made me horny. I wanted to be a teenager at a summer camp having sex on the bottom bunk. You could pause it and pretend. That wasn’t transgressive at all. If anything, it was obedience. I was secretive about watching it (and wearing out the magnetic tape of the VHS) because I did not want my parents to catch me being horny. I think that is good and I hope my son, when he gets there in a couple of years, affords my wife and I the same courtesy.

Oh, but I started to tell you the real answer which is Disclosure (1994) starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. Demi Moore sexually harasses (assaults? rapes?) Michael Douglas in the movie. Spoiler alert or content warning, perhaps. Demi Moore and Michael Douglas used to date & have sex with each other. Michael Douglas is married now. Demi Moore gets hired to be his boss. One night they are working late. She makes a move on him, and he demurs. She gets more aggressive. He gives in, momentarily, and then, while she is giving him a blowjob and he is saying nasty things to her, he recalls he has a family, and he is able to break free from her grip. Well, I’m not interested in the movie on its terms so I won’t summarize further or offer anything resembling an opinion of its internal politics, but it was the sexiest thing I had ever seen, and I felt so naughty over and over every time and I would like to say two things about that:

The idea of desire so overwhelming it upends your life is extremely appealing to me. I don’t mean Demi’s desire. Her desire, in the context of the film, is to set up an encounter that forces Michael Douglas to lose his job. Michael Douglas’s desire for her, and the transgression of that desire, is where I am at. I am someone with big feelings, not always knowing where I am supposed to put them.
1. Sometimes my feelings are inappropriate. I do not act on them. I share them, sometimes, in my art. Sharing them is not a ploy to make my reader complicit. It is a bloodletting, a release, a solemn prayer that I am not alone.
I know now, because I am older and have some life experiences under my belt, that my own desires awakened by the scene were intimately tied to the feeling of transgression itself. It is a naughty thing to be a pre-teen boy downstairs, alone, on the couch, and it is late, and touching the private parts of your body to arouse apleasure. I connected with Michael Douglas’ feelings of wrongdoing, of sin. Bad, bad boys we were.

Are there any films that define your formative years?

Tombstone (1993). I wrote a fictional essay that touches on the ‘why’ and was fortunate enough to have it published by/at Misery Tourism, but it honestly boils down to “I watched it a ton of times, at a certain time of my life,” which feels sort of accidental/incidental. Most of my favorite pieces of art feel that way. A friend gave me Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives as a 30th birthday present. My father liked North Carolina Tarheel basketball. Our tastes and preferences are less like choices and more likely circumstantial or inherited.

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?

I can’t claim much, truthfully. It’s difficult for me to parse out my (non-literary) influences, but film is such a visual medium, and I cannot think visually. You know that exercise they give you, sometimes in therapy, where they ask you to visualize a red cube and then turn it over, so on and so forth? I cannot visualize a red cube. I thought, for a long time, that my memory was leaking out of me faster than I could make new memories, but it was just that I could not, and I cannot, imagine visually. The elements of films that have stuck with me are always lines. Or, more precisely, how it felt and how I was feeling when I saw the film.

Once, for instance, I went to an afternoon showing of Being John Malkovich, with a friend. When we went into the movie it was light outside. The movie messed with my head. I have some fears surrounding consciousness that were tested by the film’s premise. I was feeling sick to my stomach. I did not like thinking of someone else up there steering my thoughts. I have enough trouble controlling them already and back then, sometimes, they’d try to hurt me. When my friend and I walked out of the movie theater it was dark. I felt like I’d lost time. I felt like I was lost in time. I did not like that. We went to a Boston Market next where I had one of my spells. It was an unpleasant feeling. If I need that particular feeling for a character or scene then I can access it, but I cannot picture what John Malkovich looks like.

Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project?

During my mid-to-late-teenage years I lived with a much older man. He had an open-door policy and a couple of guest rooms for young boys to stay with him and he let you smoke in the basement and have full access to his impressive record collection. There was bread and cheese to eat, and usually he would bring home a case of beer and watch us drink it. Some nights he gave us pills and we’d take our shirts off and dance in the living room. If anybody asked, I was eighteen and just didn’t have any ID with me.

He would start asking, usually around midnight, if anyone was up for a massage. That was the only time you could go into his room, if you were up for a massage. I did not ever want a massage and my secret weapon was I can stay up later than everyone else always. So, I waited him out. But as soon as someone did take him up then I would have the television and his video cassettes all to myself. He had a copy of Koyaanisqatsi (1982). The film just blew me right away and I watched it every chance I could get. The house was small, so I turned it up loud and the score was done by Philip Glass and the whole movie was just a series of images illustrating how much we fucked up the environment. There is no dialogue or words, I don’t think. I cannot remember a single image now (no visual memory), but it gave me a feeling of great unease and catastrophe. I have never written about that period of time. I can’t recall anything of interest or particularly literary happening. But I do remember staying up later than everyone else to watch Koyaanisqatsi and being drunk and not understanding the film, but completely digging it.

Do you have any lines of film dialogue you regularly use in your daily life?

When I am arguing with my wife, “I’m calmer than you are,” (Walter, to the Dude, in The Big Lebowski [1998])
When I am stuck in a social situation I cannot get out of, I mutter to myself “I realized that not only did I not want to answer THAT question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.” (Anthony, to the two girls Dignan invited over to the pool, in Bottlerocket [1996])

Crow Jonah Norlander

EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF MY CAPACITY by Barbara Lock

February 21, 2022 · Fiction

One time I punched a wall that I thought was made of plasterboard but was in fact concrete. Either way, I would have broken my hand. The side of my fist near my pinky crunched up and my girlfriend told me I was a lunatic. Stop it, stop it, she said. Then she covered her face with a shroud, which irritated me to no end.
I wore a white wool sweater in the style of Irish fishermen last year which placed me fifteen years too far in the past, or possibly the future. It’s hard to know. My appearance was very similar to what you see now, which is to say approximately young, though male. I kept my pace steady and would have gotten there in time if I hadn’t fished around in my bag for something to drop.
There are bridges being constructed and deconstructed all the time. I can tell you about Tappan Zee, Sakonnet, Charles, just off the top of my head. The things we think of as static are not just rarely so, but never so.
I am thinking now of a girl in a nightgown with a ruffled hem. She plays in a driveway next to a house lined by lilacs that make the house, for exactly nine days, the most sweet-smelling place in the universe. After that, it smells like Tang and kitty litter.
A woman I once knew used to dislocate her own shoulder to scam drugs from hospitals. One time she roared up to the ambulance bay in an old Town Car, popped her shoulder out, cursed and screamed until they came with a stretcher. What a story she spun for the doctors! Said that she served in the military in Spain, worked the pile after nine-eleven, took care of orphans, the like. The psychiatrist declared her incurable and she was discharged with a parking ticket.
Four bas-relief carved stone ropes flank the bay window of the brownstone where I used to live. The segmented ropes look like worms, or perhaps a certain type of plant, though I couldn’t tell you which one. I’ve had a difficult time recalling plants along with birds, brand names, varieties of cheese. The spiral of the detail runs clockwise up. At the top of the windows, the stone rope gathers into a swirl above a central rosette. The rosette is not a window, but it’s made of glass or some other translucent material and the morning sun lights the face of the rosette such that it radiates like a beacon into the park.
Sometimes I jump from one time and place to another with insufficient preparation. Indeed, this is the rule. The key to enjoying yourself in this situation is to avoid judgment. I can’t be all things to all people, I tell myself. There is a sadness that never goes away. The man knew this, and he followed me, sat beside me, put his arm around me. I’m not who you think I am, I said to the man.
A tree looks like a fistful of dripping wounds.
The flash from the man’s digital camera blew onto my face and collected my skin in a sort of vacuum. I wasn’t removed from the sidewalk. I was still there, and as I expanded and looked out at the little mirrored triangles spreading across the park, up over the moraine boulder and the sycamore trees, the man pulled his camera from his face so I could see his eyes. When he blinked, a thin translucent membrane spread across his corneas, making his irises appear briefly blue, though they were not.
I am remembering the time that my mother threw a party and afterwards I wondered who was in love with her. Someone was in love with her, one of the guests, or perhaps two or three. A situation of passion suspended in the air as a sort of mist, something I could see, but I didn’t know how to pin it down. Situations like this one are happening to me all the time, contemporaneously with each other. It is difficult to know where to land. I still must eat and drink. Basic bodily functions must be exercised.
In the park across the street, shards of a mirror arranged themselves into the shape of a flower, then a bell, then a fountain. The shapes hung over the sky above the playground where toddlers and 6 year-olds hid behind skinny metal poles, covered their eyes with their hands. You must be hungry, said the man. He rubbed his hands on my back. I could eat, I said. The man moved to grab my wrist, but then I was gone.

Crow Jonah Norlander

STICK FIGURES by Sara Solberg

February 18, 2022 · Creative Nonfiction

In an eastern New Mexico desert, amid a forest of mesquite and bluestem grass, overlooking nothing but miles upon miles of iron-pressed, sunbaked earth, sits the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP for short). On the surface, it looks like any other government base: a simple grid of unremarkable squat buildings, the tan color of which bleeds into the surrounding arid landscape. But step into one of the elevators that spend their days bobbing up and down WIPP’s vertical mine shafts, ferrying hard-hatted workers between ground level and the ancient salt bed 2,150 feet below, and it’s a different story.

One of the few deep geological repositories in the world, WIPP’s raison d'être is to store the radioactive waste produced by the US’s nuclear reactors. While the facility is only licensed for 10,000 years, the barrels of waste that get buried there will be harmful to humans much longer than that—250,000 years, to be exact. But with its rising popularity as a cleaner, more reliable, more land-efficient alternative to other forms of energy like fossil fuels and solar, both nuclear power and the often lethal byproducts that come with it seem here to stay.

Storage is one thing. What happens to that storage after we’re gone is another matter entirely.

…

A few months before my mom died, I asked her for a favor.

“I just want Dad to have something he can keep going back to,” I said, feet folded up onto the recliner in Mom’s office nook while I watched her work at her desk. I spent a lot of time like this in those days, trailing behind her around the house like I used to when I was little, desperate to soak in her presence while I still could. “You know. For different occasions and stuff.”

Outside the window her desk faced, a cardinal swooped back and forth across the bronzed orange trees lining the border of our yard.

Her bare brow furrowed beneath the rim of her fleece cap. “Write him cards?” The cancer had spread to Mom’s throat by then, and her voice was rough, her words sounding as though they’d been scoured raw with a steel dish scrubber before being set free.

I rocked back and forth, springs creaking as the chair bobbed in time with my rhythm. “Yeah. And on the envelopes you can put things like ‘open this on our anniversary,’ or ‘open this when you’re having a bad day’ or something. Like on Pinterest.”

Mom, ever allergic to technology, didn’t know what Pinterest was.

“Like a letters to your future self kind of thing. But for Dad.” Trying to prepare for the future was another thing I did a lot of in those days. But how can a person prepare for something that can only be understood in hindsight?

When I looked outside again, the cardinal was gone.

…

In 1981, the US Department of Energy commissioned a multitalented team of experts (physicists, engineers, environmental scientists, political scientists, sociologists, archeologists and behavioral psychologists, to name a few) in anticipation of the Yucca Mountain geological repository that was to be built. Though plans were ultimately scrapped in favor of the repository in New Mexico, the team—christened the Human Interference Task Force—became founding members in the emerging field of nuclear semiotics. The sole purpose of this field is to answer one thing: How do we stop generations 10,000+ years into the future from unearthing radioactive waste?

Similar to WIPP, it’s a deceptively simple question on the surface that gains immediate complexity with a little digging. Creating a warning message that will be understood by people 10,000 years out is the bare minimum goal of nuclear semioticians. Ideally, such a message would not only last a couple hundred thousand years in addition to that, but could also be deciphered instantaneously—an unmistakable Turn Back Now; Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect $200 that can be understood by any person in any context. But 10,000 years is already double the length of recorded human history. 250,000 years is almost as long as Homo sapiens have existed.

To come up with a clear message that will not only survive in meaning, but in material form—something that will resist the decay of time, that won’t wither like a plant carcass in the searing New Mexican heat, eroded by nature or chipped away by human hands—is almost incogitable.

…

I stopped by Target to find some cards that looked worthy of being the message bearers to my future, widowed dad from his future, deceased wife. The fluorescent lights reflected off the white shelves and white tiles and white ceiling, and it felt like I was the dead one, ascended to a heaven that resembled the gift section of a department store. The Hallmark dogs with their halos and wings only solidified the mirage.

I stood in front of the blank, boxed cards for several minutes, trying to choose from an assortment simultaneously too meager and too diverse. What, I wondered, was the appropriate design for a situation like mine? Colorful circles, bumping up against one another in random patterns like marbles tossed across a floor? Shadows of birds balanced on a wire, twittering quarter and eighth notes that trailed in a wispy string above their heads? The tidy, monochromatic lineup of trees, each a different shade of blue? What design most strongly said, I’m sorry I died? What most said, I was thinking of you then, even if I can’t be there with you now?

I ended up buying two boxes of flower prints: the first a diverse bouquet, the second a wreath of roses and daisies, in the center of which perched a green and yellow, vaguely bohemian sparrow. Its one visible eye, just a small black dot on its turned away face, stared into the distance, perhaps contemplating the wrapping paper a few feet away, or maybe its own two-dimensional existence, frozen on paper until it was either destroyed or disintegrated with age.

Mom loved flowers—loved the wild bouquets I’d sometimes pick for her, loved getting dirt under her fingernails pulling weeds from the garden. Mom loved birds, going as far as to get a few birdwatching guide books so she’d be able to identify the species that tended to hover around the backyard feeders. She loved life.

The cards weren’t enough. They were never going to be enough. But they were better than nothing at all.

…

Numerous solutions to the nuclear semiotics riddle have been proposed since the 1980s, each with their own unique shortcomings. Perhaps the most commonly suggested warning is a simple written message—Rosetta Stones whose multilingual inscriptions can be updated every handful of decades for indefinite millennia. Languages, though, are as alive as the people who use them, ever-changing as they age. It’s only taken six centuries for the English used in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to become unreadable to modern English speakers. Given the infinite unknowns that await humanity, it’s an act of pure faith to believe a message written today will still be translatable 10,000 years out.

Some have suggested using pictograms; Carl Sagan famously insisted the most effective message would be a simple skull and crossbones. But symbols, like language, are ever-evolving. Before it became an omen of death during the Golden Age of Piracy, the skull and crossbones was used by the Knights Templar as a symbol of the Christian rebirth. Today, it’s inseparable from children’s Halloween costumes and Disney movies featuring Johnny Depp.

The next logical step after individual pictograms is a series of them. A narrative. A comic strip depicting a person dying after they’re exposed to the radioactive waste buried below. Stories and stick figures, after all, are two of the few universals that have existed as long as humans have been around. But even then, there’s no guarantee future humans will interpret a comic strip in left to right sequence. Read right to left, it becomes a resurrection story.

Other solutions have included everything from folktales to atomic priesthoods to bioluminescent cats that will glow when they’re within a certain distance of a repository.

And others still have said it’s all a lost cause. Humans have always had a compulsion to excavate. To know. To remember our forgotten histories. Surely, any warning message we leave is just as likely to be seen as an invitation. Why waste our own finite time on earth trying to protect some distant perhaps?

…

Mom bought a small, hinged box from Hobby Lobby to put the cards in—one that resembled a pirate’s treasure chest, complete with an arched top and fake iron plating. It sat in my room for weeks after her funeral, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag to shield it from dust, shoved to the far corner beneath my bed.

As I promised her I’d do, I gave it to my dad once things settled down and the reality of our new lives had started to take shape. There was nothing I could think to say in response to his tears or shaking hands when he reached out to take it—no comforting Hallmark platitudes, no way to boil down the immensity of our loss into something comprehensible.

That’s the paradox of such situations: finding a way to communicate the incommunicable.

I left my parent’s bedroom in silence, quietly closing the door behind me.

…

Many people mistakenly assume WIPP is located where it is because it’s remote. As survivors of disasters like Fukushima can attest, after all, living in the vicinity of radioactive material isn’t an enviable position. In actuality though, the facility owes its placement to one thing, and one thing only: the 2,000 feet of continuous salt below.

The remnant of a sea that evaporated 250 million years ago, the salt bed is an ideal burial ground for nuclear waste for multiple reasons. It’s accessible. It’s malleable, and therefore easy to mine. It’s geologically stable, and impermeable by water.

But above all else, salt is capable of healing. Eventually, 75 years or so after WIPP’s mine is filled to capacity and closed off, left to sit for time immemorial—either remembered or forgotten, as all things are—the salt will collapse around the barrels of waste. It will collapse, and then it will begin to stitch itself together, fractures and fissures filling over the course of a few decades until the barrels have been wholly encapsulated, the surface sealed once more.

I wonder what scars will remain.

Crow Jonah Norlander

PORTRAIT OF A FLORIST IN THE DESERT IN PARTS by Dylan Smith

February 16, 2022 · Fiction

My van broke down on a mountain north of Marfa, so I had it towed back to Santa Fe where a mechanic named Ever repairs transmissions.

I talk to Ever every day. Every time Ever answers I have to explain to him it’s me—the kid with the tagged-up van.

My sister lives with an unemployed florist in this complex in the desert. The florist offered to pick me up from Ever’s; to drive me ever deeper into this desert to visit with my sister.

What a guy. In my portrait of the florist, he will be sitting at my sister’s table in Tucson listening, laughing whenever I call to talk to Ever.

I like this florist a lot.

And I like Ever, too.

Searching for meaning in emergency rooms, my sister holds strange hours.

So I wait for Ever with this florist, mostly, and with his troubled, golden dog called Glove.

The florist’s benefits are due to end soon and so, with discipline, he enters the desert every day at dawn in search of original arrangements.

Soon he will be just like everyone else, he says. Desperate for health care and for groceries, and for meaningful work.

While the florist is away I am to be ever mindful of Glove who—from trauma—is triggered by threats to resources, like water.

This afternoon the florist returned and set his hat sadly on its living room hook.

He found no new flowers, he said, then he revealed the vertebrae of something large and grave as a gift for Glove.

Ever called today to ease me.

My transmission is in honest hands, he said.

I ought to trust him and his team, and his archive of parts.

In my portrait of the florist, Glove will press against the apartment walls, lean and lithe while my sister sleeps.

This complex is nestled in the shadows of isolate mountains of rock.

It’s got a saltwater pool and tennis courts; rock gardens and a dog park.

To express his sympathies on my very first night, the florist exposed the engine of his used Toyota Sequoia.

Inside was the starter he recently replaced, and new ignition coils enveloped new spark plugs someplace deeply within.

Despite its notable name, though, I found the Toyota to be plainly—even dispiritingly–shaped.

We’d been drinking green-bottled beers as my sister slept, and everything in the lot was bluely-lit and glistening from lights embedded in the saltwater pool.

I chose to confess how careless I am about cars.

Which is why my van is always breaking down; why I’m so often islanded like this in the desert.

As if to agree, the florist gestured into his engine’s function with a flashlight in his teeth.

In my portrait of the florist, the wide brim of his gardening hat will wave like water in the pool light.

A Georgia O’Keefe print hangs beside the florist’s hat hook in the living room.

He rolls an evening cigarette, then lights it beneath a mesquite tree in the dog park.

Mesquite trees exude a black sap that sticks and stinks, he says.

Through the branches, the florist points toward storm clouds forming on the mountain.

The storm’s shadows gather and purple like wet stains in the cliffs. This happens every evening here.

We rely on monsoon season moisture to fight summer fires, the florist explains. After a rain, though, dips in the desert render most roads impassable.

Glove digs for bones about the mesquite tree roots in the dog park. Holes the florist calls his fountains, they fill with flood waters in the rock gardens too.

The florist says his favorite O’Keefe motif is quickly becoming bones, not flowers.

In my portrait of the florist, a blue landscape of holes in bones will hold him like water in the blue desert distance.

While playing a little tennis, the florist and I swap stories about my sister.

The florist’s first story is about how, last Ash Wednesday, my sister had come home with a cross thumbed to her chest.

She scrubbed at the cross with a soapy sponge usually used for vases, the florist says.

Nurses and surgeons can’t remove their scrub caps, she explained. Still, though, she fasted; and she requested a makeshift sermon from the emergency room priest.

Glove has gnawed little tooth-holes into the taped-up handles of our racquets.

According to the florist, the sea-glass colored tennis courts are to glow in the dark if ever our evening matches go uninterrupted by rain.

I tell him about the sculptural stillness with which my sister used to sit for portraits.

About how, as children, we lived for a while with Norm, our uncle, who was both a painter and a priest.

In my portrait of the florist, he will have knelt tenderly before an altar of mirrors and bones and flowers; but the temple pews will be otherwise empty, and there will be no priest.

The florist pays for equine therapy on Sundays, which is therapy in a barn with a horse.

His therapist’s horse is a white Paint named Paul.

Like a kind of language, Paul presses his neck brand against the florist’s chest.

In the florist’s portrayal of Paul, the horse is rendered faintly red in the barn’s reflected light.

Don’t look back, the therapist suggests. Gather yourself center, then press forward—press against whatever is forming next.

Ever called today, but I missed it.

The voicemail he left is very muffled.

Mysterious faults in the fittings, he said. The worst trouble he’s had with a transmission ever.

In my portrait of the florist, his hands will be gloved on Sundays to protect his dog bite scars from the sun.

Emergencies flood the desert floor like water.

My sister is rarely home and when she is, she sleeps.

Ever is never in either. Whenever I call to check, someone new answers.

The florist is sitting poolside with his breakfast.

We take our meals outside so as not to trigger Glove.

I tell the florist about how my van was pure white once; about how, in New York, artists took to tagging it.

How the first tag read H O L Y in thick black paint. Or how the second was smears of something permanent and red, or how the third read W A S T E in thick black paint and how the fourth read S E R V I C E U R G E N T in blue—which remains my favorite of the tags.

The florist had lived in the city too.

He remembers an old man named Leonard who had lived, then died inside his building.

The florist had loved to watch Leonard paint.

His paintings were like music, the florist says. Or like horses. Or mountains.

Leonard’s death taught the florist that words are only elegy to what they signify.

Flowers, he says, are more direct than words.

And bones are ever more direct than flowers.

In my portrait of the florist, he will find meaning as night watchman of a botanical garden in the desert and, rooted and mirrored in the arrangements there—which is all an arrangement ever is, he has said, is a mirroring and rooting—these words will flower with meaning within him forever.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CAROUSEL BAR / DOWN IN HOLY CROSS by Autumn Holladay

February 14, 2022 · Fiction

Carousel Bar

I miss 99-cent margaritas served at the old strip from 6:00 a.m. to noon. I’d sit and sip and watch the sex workers rest on slot machine stools after their shift. Most tourists weren’t around at that hour—just the cleaners and the junkies and the loners, and I thought they were my kind of people. The bartender invited me to shower with her after her shift. I believed there was no better way to spend my last day in Vegas.

Her name was Holly. She wore a leather corset and when she took it off, tattoos took its place. I wore a pencil skirt and a silky blouse and when she took them off, my skin was bare. I was 21. I think she was 40. All we did was bathe. She told me she missed her daughter. I asked what happened to her. She pretended not to hear and washed my hair.

Dear guy from Boston, remember when you took me to dinner at the Bellagio because you wanted to fuck me at the Circus Circus? You said Hunter S. Thompson was your favorite writer. But the room was mine and I didn’t invite you in.

I was more interested in the old people blowing their retirement and the people getting married upstairs and the whole place reeking of cigarettes and Lysol and where the fuck was the carousel bar?

I saw you on the news. I thought being an anchorman suited you: you loved to talk and I loved to turn you off. Click. What was your line then? I have a girlfriend but don’t worry, you leaned in, I’m a bad boyfriend. It seemed like a line a boy inherits from his father.

I have a friend who worked at the Circus Circus. Her name is Megan. She was there when I was there, but I didn’t know her then. Megan has stories about dusty brothels and sandstorms and pole dancers and 3:00 a.m. cigarettes and missing her dad. She can’t tell them anymore though. Megan lost her head. She was hit by a car walking home one day. The car didn’t stop.

Megan isn’t dead. I am with her now as she looks out the hospital window.

“Megan,” I say, “do you remember the carousel bar? How people came from all over to see it and sometimes it was there and sometimes it was gone and sometimes they swore they sat at it even when it was closed?”

She smiles and her head doesn't nod and her head doesn't shake and today we can pretend.

Down in Holy Cross

There is only one sunset in New Orleans. To get to it, you drive down Robertson to cross over the canal by Poland. And maybe you laugh because the street before the bridge is Kentucky and the one after is Tennessee. But before you discover this, you’re stuck on the ramp, waiting for the bridge to come down.

You wait, your car slanted up on the ramp as you watch the bridge rise up and up and hear the ship’s horn calling below. If this was your first time, maybe you’d feel impatient. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes for that bridge to come down. But you’re thankful you have a car. You think of all the people who died trying to cross here, either on foot or bike. Then you laugh because the people in the van in front of you get out and start dancing, their music blasting, and it all seems so ridiculous. The horn blows again. The ship makes it through. The bridge lowers. The people rush back into their car. You go up and up then down, but not too fast because you have to make a right at the first light. And you do.

You drive slowly. There are a lot of potholes and kids running around. When you reach the motherload of potholes, the one larger than the street itself, you let the car sink in and out and make another right. It’s funny driving in New Orleans. All of the bumps and stops make it feel like you're riding in a carriage. You go on and on down the road, all slow and careful, until you see a big green hill that leads to the levee.

You continue down Sister Street and you see the ramp for the St. Claude Bridge, but you are crossing underneath it. The road narrows quite a bit and you go real slow this time because it's dark under there and you never know who’s waiting.

Maybe you think of the time last May when you rushed to roll up your windows. A swarm of termites waited for you. There are no termites now. You make it through and up ahead is a big yellow school bus that has sat there since you moved down and probably will always be there. You laugh about the first time you saw it. You were supposed to meet her here and thought her friends were living in it, but really she wanted you to meet her at the house just behind it.

A turn on Burgundy and you’re almost there. You drive up to the gravel patch, by the old baseball field, and think of the time it was just a hole, spitting out water until it flooded the entire street. The Great Burgundy River you waded through. Broken branches and garbage rubbed against your thighs as you waded to the gray double shotgun on your right. You park your car on the sidewalk because it is the safest place to park, but you don’t get out just yet. You sit and stare at the house.

Its ugly gray steps that lead to the torn-up, mustard chair on the porch. And you just stare at it. This is where it all started and ended. You don’t think that, but feel it. You try not to think about it at all. But it comes anyway. Her body. The couch. Cold. Alone. Gone. Never again.

You get out of the car, but you don’t go to the door. You don’t know the people who live there anymore.

Instead, you turn back down the street and walk slowly by the house on the corner because you’ve always admired their garden and today their amaryllis is in bloom. It is a delight to see the bright orange flower pop out from the evergreens. Then you're at the wooden fence and the German Shepherd that always barks, barks, and you go on and cross the street to the parking lot.

Needles and weeds are scattered along the pavement. You follow the little pathway under the live oak tree and you’re in front of the old Holy Cross School. You don’t go inside. You've been inside before. Instead you walk around it through the field along Deslonde Street. The grass is tall, but not too tall, yet. And you go on, slowly, because there are holes mixed in and then you are at the bottom of the levee and you walk up it amongst the yellow flowers and then when you look up again, there is the Mississippi.

There is a swing set on the tower of the levee marker now. Two boys stand there with a long walking stick and point out across the water. They drop their stick and start swinging and you walk past them to the purple rock and sit.

Seagulls fly across the gray and violet sky and ducks swim below. You watch the seagulls land on the water, chasing the ducks out of their fishing spot. You see the boats go by, creating waves across the water, and wonder how the birds manage to fight the current. Then you watch the sun sink below the towers of the CBD where it glows an orange halo around the old Naval base at the End of the World. It is hard to see with the light glittering across the waves, but you keep your eyes open and wonder about the gray sky with the big orange crack running through it.

This is the only sunset in New Orleans.

Before it gets too dark, you get up to walk along the levee. You walk because you know it is there and right now you want to see it, and there it is— the little rock with the words “Be Brave” spray painted black across it. And when you look up again, all that is left are the city lights.

Crow Jonah Norlander

A RIOT OF THE HUMAN HEART by Jillian Luft

February 11, 2022 · Creative Nonfiction

Boston is burning itself over a baseball game. Outside of Fenway, the local evening news zooms in on a few torched sedans. Undercarriages in flames like hibachi grills. White boy ruddy faces rejoicing. Game 4 of the 2003 ACLS. A Red Sox victory.

I care about baseball because I love you. I want to wake you up to celebrate Johnny Damon and Pedro Martinez and all those other shaggy-haired rascals hellbent on breaking the curse. Once you view the game highlights, I want you to bang me against the TV, so my bare ass kisses static. I want you to tell me it’s all okay, that it’s only the oysters like you said—no, slurred—before you passed out with puke on your tongue.

Boston ties with the Yankees for the series. So, they revel and pelt the pavements with their empties. Some brawl in bars while others lay waste to their beloved hometown with spray paint and gasoline and alcohol-impaired decision-making. At first, I don't understand why their response to winning is as if they’d lost. Then I think about all the times I lucked out when I thought myself doomed. Hope, victory, delusion—whatever you want to call it— can feel like you’ve managed to cage death. Like you have to edge closer and reach through those bars to truly know what you’re up against. Like you can only make sense of your good fortune by testing it.

I watch you in your clammy, fucked-up sleep. You’ve been this way for hours. Still and corpse-like. You don’t stir, but you sweat. God, do you sweat. You’ve got that after-vomit sheen, skin the color of a dead tooth. You’re still wearing your good clothes but we’re not going anywhere.

In my new lacy underthings, I slump against the bed frame. I glimpse my wan face in the mirror and behold a pouty, bare-breasted child. I contemplate the ways my skin folds when I cry, the way my eyes retreat into my babyfat cheeks but leave wet traces. The way I look when I’m alone: pathetic but honest.

The celebration-cum-riot continues. Drunken, gap-toothed bros too close to the camera. Mouths like clogged drains. I wonder if I could spy the mayhem outside our hotel window, but I’ve no idea where Fenway is. I’ve seen so little of this city since we arrived this morning. Just a raw bar kiosk in Quincy Market, the inside of a Victoria’s Secret, a basement Mexican restaurant in Faneuil Hall, and a shitload of Dunkin’ Donuts. If I didn’t know about Paul Revere and the cobblestones, I’d think there’s no rich history here. Except for sports, of course.

The truth is I don’t need history. I’m happy to be lulled—no, fooled— by the present, the way our bodies find ways to collide from moment to moment, the way your hands and mouth and dick quiet my fears, make me forget about everything else but us.

It feels like grief when you’re lost to me like this. I worry you’ll wake up and forget—no, remember—what we’ve done. You’ll see it differently and then you won’t see me at all.

You blame the oysters, but I ate them too. It’s not bad seafood and it’s more than the booze or the drugs—though they certainly play their part. It’s that you haven’t seen your boys in months now, that you are reminded of your youngest when we landed at Logan because it’s his namesake. It’s the foggy realization that even in these clandestine and anonymous spaces where no one knows our sordid origin story, the odds of this working out don’t change. Wherever we go, there we are—totally tragic and out of control. The havoc our passion creates is literally making you sick, but you’ll never admit it.

This trip is intended as an escape. A respite from the harsh demands of your wife’s lawyer, the real repercussions of our workplace romance, the tenuous nature of our cohabitation. Sober truths await us in Florida, bitter and anti-climactic like the Ecstasy comedown we recently shared at your best friend’s wedding.

I hoped for an evening of memorable romance, some sort of affirmation that the hardship, the wild impulses, the inevitable hurt, the inadvertent destruction, the sheer and total dysfunction of it all is worth it. I hoped, at the very least, you’d take me to Cheer’s.

But I refuse to wallow. This is our vacation, goddammit. We’re in Boston and we’re in love. I grab the stationery off the nightstand, uncap the pen with my teeth. I lay on my stomach like a homesick camper, my head resting at your feet. While I stare at your stubbly mask of a face, I pen you a love letter. You’re my destiny and I find a dozen eloquent—no, florid and insincere ways— to tell you so. I write about everything but tonight except to say that when you’re sleeping you look pure, except to say I know forever and it’s you.

Eventually you wake up and reach for me, chapped lips forming excuses. I silence you with my girlish grin, gift you the notepad with mute anticipation. When you read my words, you cry just enough to seem genuine. Your voice is sturdy and weighted with promises far too heavy to keep. You say I love you like it’s an instant replay. You chant my many pet names until I nearly forget who I am. This is the way I like it best: to be lost in your perception of me; to place faith in mutual fantasy; to root for us, the underdogs, whose love will win out if they continue to ignore the rest.

When we return to Florida, your wife finds my letter in your glove compartment. I thought you’d be more discreet, more appreciative of this private—no, performative—testimony. She rips it to shreds; makes you promise I’m gone. And you do but then you don’t. Until you do.

I realize now what I’ve lost, you say. You tell me I need to find another place to live, another person to love. And I wonder who’s really lost what when I whisper, okay, while clenching a throw pillow that probably once belonged to her. And that night, as I thrash and wail in our big white bed, lost in all that I’m losing, calling out to you on the couch, pleading for you to come and hold me, the back of you sighing my name with pity and indifference, I still think I can turn this around. I’ve done it before. Like that night in Boston. I can assure us that what we have is kismet, record-breaking chemistry, a riot of the human heart that can’t be contained. I refuse to let all the rapture—no, destruction—be for nothing.

Everything hinges on Game 7 of the ACLS: a trip to the World Series, the reversal of a curse, a city’s restored belief in themselves. Part of me—no, nearly all of me—thinks you’ll come back if the Red Sox pull this off. At Yankee Stadium, a tired yet determined Martinez remains on the mound long after he should. His manager checks in with him but decides not to pull him out. And when Wakefield closes in the 11th inning and Aaron Boone nails a home run, it’s not the result of some sinister voodoo. If the fans were honest with themselves, they’d admit it was the way the game was played.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CRAPPY JOB FAMILY by Michael Seymour Blake

February 10, 2022 · Comics

…

Crow Jonah Norlander

« Previous 1…30 313233 34…49 Next »