On the Sting of Heat

Tragedy struck the broad side of my head yesterday afternoon, wasp-shaped and highly agitated. I make note of it here, only because it was the most memorable of several insults heaped upon the injurious temperature that climbed earlier that morning to 105 degrees and hovered there until well after sunset, when it dropped a blissful two degrees. And, because it’s possibly the most excitement I’ve experienced in a nearly a month.

          Everything being more susceptible to malfunction in heat of this extreme, I wasn’t all too surprised when the dust collection system servicing the shop I’ve been working at on the side, a miserable place no third-world sweat-shopper would set foot in, much less abide, went on the fritz.

          As I’m the only one concerned enough about the health of his lungs to make sure the dust collector is operable and switched on, I took it upon myself to go out to the little detached metal shed housing the unit and attempt to right whatever the heat had wronged.

          The shed is about five by ten, small enough I suppose I should be grateful that the entire brood didn’t swarm my gourd the moment I opened the door. I saw it, a child's paper fist hanging by a thread of spittle in the eaves just above the plate, near a hole in the wall opposite from where I stood. The wasps were of a brown and smallish variety I generally don’t worry about. They seemed complacent enough. So I ventured in.

          The wasps (waspers as the Southerners say) showed me little concern as I fooled with wires, breakers and reset buttons. Little concern, that is, until finally when the machine grudgingly kicked on.

          Again, I suppose I should be grateful only one lone gun was sent out to reprimand me. And I suppose too, I should be grateful that my eyeglasses thwarted the little bastard’s preferred attack on the soft and hairless tissue immediately surrounding the beast’s eyeball, forcing a strike upon my right temple instead.

          I have no idea why the sound of the dust collector that these silly insects reside with daily kicking on would piss them off. But it did. And no, I’m not grateful in the least that only one wasp stung me. One is too many. It hurt like hell. My eyeball is swollen and itchy, despite the deflected sting. And damn is it ever hot.  

Mag 119

Anna had always imagined her father planting the marble table and quartered bench seats atop the hilltop like a flag.

          “I claim this summit in the name of Tumbledore!” he would warn the surrounding coppice in her vision, scotch and water held over his heart.

          Tucking her flaxen hair behind her ears, a habit Anna had picked up abroad, which absolutely appalled her mother, she sat on the tended lawn besded the table drawing her skirt (worn this visit for her mother’s sake), modestly into the arch of her bare summer legs.

          Martins swooped and tittered in the fading June light, boomerang silhouettes that seemed spit from the darkening woods, piled like black thunderheads beyond her parent’s home. It was her parent’s home. Her's for a while, maybe, but had she had the option, Anna would have chosen something less sensible, less austere. Something built of wood, rather than cold, cut limestone. Something with fish scale shingles, tiny windows that peeked in to mysteriously wasteful spaces, and a single chimney, rather than the six atop her parent’s leveled roof, dormant now as winter trees.

          She would have looked up one day, too, trudging back through knee-deep snow, perhaps from a barn where she had just carried buckets of warm water to fussing livestock. Looked up and seen above the snow-clad eaves and glistening shingles, a curl of smoke rising languid from that sole flue. She would have stopped. Tears would have filled her eyes. For in that glance, she would have felt her mother’s every warm embrace, heard the husky voice of her father reading her safely to sleep, cherished that single gift, handcrafted for her birthday; a thousand such things that make, as they say, a house a home. Had she the option.

Mag 118, 'Yellow Clown'

When the jaundice set in, really set in—when the whites of his eyes turned off the color of acrid urine—Richard decided it best to cancel his June birthdays.

          He hated to. Not so much because of the money, but rather, five of the parties he had booked for June were new customers, in Bellwood, an upper-crust neighborhood he had been trying to get work in for years.

          He couldn't risk it though. There would be too many mommy hens in and out of those Bellwood coops. If he showed up looking even the slightest bit like a drunk, or as if he might be harboring some infectious disease, word would spread. Mommies are tough as hell on a clown and they network like nobody's business.

          Innocent as it was, Richard couldn't risk the truth of a lodged gallstone either. Clowns of late, carry the same stigma as drywall hangers and bricklayers. Hint at any problems, in or around the liver and you hint at an addiction, a recently completed twelve-step program. A death in the family, Richard decided, would be best. Nothing drawn out and cancerous, a grandmother perhaps, endeared and living out of State, who passed quietly in her sleep of natural causes, after a long and healthy ninety-three years.

          Richard polished his story. He wasn't much of a talker, but one by one, he informed the five young Bellwood mothers of his loss. He thanked each for their sympathies and left the phone number of a trusted replacement act, his understudy, Morton.

          Morton was a good kid. A bit young to be clowning, in Richard’s opinion, but he had the gift: that Chaplinesque ability to captivate, to utilize the moment. Richard often felt his heart swell with pride, working with the boy. He was amazing, with both the kids and the mothers, trusted and catered to. Better still, his record was squeaky clean (Richard had checked), rare these days for a twenty-four year old.   

          The parties cancelled, Richard closed his phone and laid it on the counter. He stood there a moment studying his left hand, tinged yellow in the creases of its knuckles, around the fingertips and in that soft sort of webbing between. His face, he already knew, was the color of a legal pad. Richard laughed, remembering how at first he had thought the discoloration had been from eating too many carrots. He had heard of such a thing, toenails turning orange. A sharp pain suddenly bit into his lower back. Richard winced. The stones, or stone, whatever the case may be, was moving.

          Richard went to lay on the couch. From what his doctor had told him, this was going to be an ordeal. He had been given medication for pain, told to call an ambulance, if necessary. Pain, Richard thought, he could endure. He had been stuffed into cars no bigger than a hat box, shot from a canon. Surely he could pass a gallstone.

          Just don't let anyone find out.

          Richard fluffed the pillow beneath his head, considered looking for the remote, then closed his eyes instead to get some rest.

          Morton had him covered. Morton was a good kid. Everything would be fine. Just fine. The show would go on.

          Of course it would. The show always goes on. What a stupid thing to say.    

And the Number One Reason...

...for not taking eggs directly from your gathering bucket,

and cracking them  into the frying is...

Idiots of a feather, flock together... no?

 

Mag 115

They came too late with their promises.
I had already been ruined,
poached relentlessly,
lathered in Breck—the golden formula.
‘You have to keep your eyes closed, honey,’ mother would say,
‘Tight!’
But what frog’s-ass face upended could dispel Hell’s own brine?

No more tears they promised.
But suds were suds by then,
and you wonder why I flinch, tubside.

Bits from 'Sarah Abigail'

There are Geniuses who have bud sporadically along one particular branch of the Brightly family tree. They’ve always been men, and would be easy to spot, thumbing through a Brightly Family photo album—if there was a Brightly Family photo album, which there isn’t. They are the ones who look most like idiots.