Week in Seven Words #394

fantastical
We lean on each other as the train sways. Our feet adjust to accommodate the extra weight of the other person, and I smile to think we're like a four-legged, two-headed creature.

lighter
He's best to be with when he's feeling soft-hearted and full of fun. The years drop from him, and he wants a laugh and good company.

longing
Etta James is calling for a Sunday kind of love through the speakers of his laptop.

long-suffering
She looks fragile in the driver's seat of the SUV and in the pale wash of its interior light. The courage in her comes out in a tired smile.

magnifico
It's the sort of day where the highlight is hearing "Bohemian Rhapsody" at the supermarket. Not a lackluster cover band performing it, but Queen itself.

tablecloth
The lake looks like it's covered in brown oilcloth and dribbles of spilled pea soup.

traits
"Money doesn't change you," he says, "it just shows you who you already are." So if someone turns mean and stingy (or kind and generous) when they acquire money, did they have those tendencies all along?

Week in Seven Words #350

account
Prayers, exuberant songs fill the synagogue. In the back, a woman who has a mental illness is bent over a book on her lap. Occasionally, she says something that sounds like, "But, but, but..."

emboldened
We brainstorm stories, and she becomes less timid with her ideas. She's worried that what she writes will somehow be wrong. The idea of mistakes not even mattering in a draft - that anything can go into a draft - is delightful to her.

grounds
We discuss repentance and how to keep it from becoming self-flagellation. Repentance is oriented to practical action - acknowledgement of the wrong done, and sincere efforts to make amends and to make changes to future behavior. Self-flagellation pushes people into purely emotional territory, where they give themselves up to their own sense of wrongness and get stuck in it.

recess
The front steps are the place to go for downtime. If there's a spare half-hour between meetings, and the sun is out, settle down. The narrow street before you becomes the world for a while. Read, close your eyes, maybe hope for an interruption from someone you like.

retrieval
For a moment, I think it's a real dog, dead or injured and floating in the river. But it's only a stuffed animal. Soon after, a boy comes running with his younger sister following. They find a short, spindly branch by the river bank to haul it in.

serenity
It's a peaceful evening, the clouds stitched to the sky in threads of peach and light blue. The wind carries sea salt on its breath. Leaves are murmuring overhead.

sloganeer
It's tacky to put the names of politicians on a kippah. But he likes to turn himself into a walking ad for his favorites.

Week in Seven Words #272

fixation
"What we lack is TRUTH and COURAGE!" she cries. (Her friend's reply is a low murmur.) "No, NO!" she cuts in. "COURAGE! We have no COURAGE!" (Her friend continues murmuring.) "Nothing can get done without COURAGE!"

girding
Along with packing for the trip, I need to prepare psychologically. I know there will be tension, anger and irrational arguments. Lingering grief too.

nourished
They sit cross-legged on the picnic table beneath the maple and feed each other pizza.

one-sided
It's difficult talking to people who are always so certain. They like to give me a knowing, pitying look, like they've got it all figured out and they're just waiting for me to come around, any minute now, to their way of seeing things.

released
I attach the file, send the email, and hope for an outcome that isn't terrible.

unaccustomed
When he sits by the shelves with his son on his lap and reads from the picture book, he sounds the words carefully. He looks puzzled at the bright children bouncing through the American city from page to page.

well-reasoned
"I don't like losing," he says, as the centerpiece of his argument for why I should lose to him.

Good Short Fiction: Every Angel Is Terrifying and Tiger in the Snow

Collection: Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories
Editor: Ellen Datlow

Title: Every Angel Is Terrifying
Author: John Kessel

Kessel wrote this story as a sequel to Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The title, "Every Angel Is Terrifying," is taken from the "First Duino Elegy" by Rilke.

The main character is the murderer from O'Connor's story, and he moves through this one like a fallen angel bringing devastation to his little corner of the world. He recoils from what's beautiful, maybe because it overwhelms him, and he can't trust it; it could be that he wants to destroy it before it destroys him.

Kessel makes excellent use of details; there's always something jarring and out of place, much like the fugitive himself who remains uneasy in his new life. Here he considers the room he's renting from a lovely landlady, Mrs. Graves (I don't think Kessel could have picked a name that foreshadows this lady's fate more obviously):

The room she rented him was twelve feet by twelve feet, with a single bed, a cherry veneer dresser, a wooden table and chair, a narrow closet, lace curtains on the window, and an old pineapple quilt on the bed. The air smelled sweet. On the wall opposite the bed was a picture in a dime store frame, of an empty rowboat floating in an angry gray ocean, the sky overcast, only a single shaft of sunlight in the distance from a sunset that was not in the picture.

At one point Mrs. Graves tells him, "Sometimes I wish I could live in the world of goodness. But this world is good enough."

For the fugitive it never is. He ensures it isn't, by choices he's made in the past and by the course he charts in the current story. Even if the rest of the world doesn't see him for what he is, he knows himself, doesn't he? No matter what resolutions he's made since the O'Connor story, he can't sustain faith in himself or understand the faith that others might place in him. Faith can be delusions or platitudes; how can it be trusted? It's relatively easy to destroy this kind of faith, isn't it? Especially when no one really sees him as he moves among them.

From what I remember, he comes across both as an adult in control, making his terrible choices, and as a helpless child knocked around by powerful external forces - for instance, by old murder victims avenging themselves on him. His eyes seek out omens that he thinks might tell him his fate; he's waiting to be led and transformed by something outside of him. Does he want someone to come along and lead him by the hand (or maybe just put an end to him once and for all)? Will he accept a human hand held out to him? Maybe he is waiting for a light or a truth that is more definitive than humanly possible - a light that will either fall on him in sure blessing or expose him harshly and damn him once and for all.

There's a sense of disorientation in the story, where as a reader you sometimes doubt what's real and what isn't; the fugitive is very much apart from everything around him, and he can't handle uncertainty. I liked the general atmosphere of the story and how, similar to O'Connor's story, even mundane details can raise goosebumps.

(And if you're wondering why "Every Angel is Terrifying" showed up in a book of cat stories, all I'll say is that there is a cat, spilling over from O'Connor's story.)

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Title: Tiger in the Snow
Author: Daniel Wynn Barber

This turned out to be a wrenching story. It closes in around you as you read; you slowly realize what's happening, and at that point you can't look away - you need to stare it in the face.

The story begins with Justin, a young boy (two years shy of Junior High), visiting his best friend Steve's house. Usually they have so much fun together but this time he isn't invited to sleep over for the night. He'll have to walk home through the snow.

What he fears isn't walking home on a snowy night, but the thought of a tiger lying in wait for him - a white Siberian tiger that blends in with both the snow and the shadows. He knows it's a ridiculous fear (his father once told him so) but he can't shake it off especially when his quiet neighborhood seems so different in the snow.

But tonight the usually comfortable features seemed alien and warped out of reality under the snow, and finding himself in this strange white landscape, Justin suddenly felt the tiger-fear return. It bobbed up and down within him until he could almost feel the tiger's nearness, so close that the hot jungle breath seemed to huff against his cheek.

The conversation at the end of the story is terrible and gentle. ("Yes... I thought it was you. You've been following me all my life, haven't you?")

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[Edited: 1/2015]

Other recommended stories from this collection include: Coyote Peyote by Carole Nelson Douglas, Puss-Cat by Reggie Oliver, The White Cat by Joyce Carol Oates, Gordon the Self-Made Cat by Peter S. Beagle, and Guardians by George R.R. Martin.

US 3rd Armored Division

On Veterans Day this past week, I searched for some footage of troops and veterans, and found a Vimeo account for the US 3rd Armored Division (which was active from 1941 to 1992); they had posted all kinds of videos, from interviews with veterans to footage from various campaigns across decades.

Here's one that shows General Eisenhower making an inspection of the 3rd Armored Division in February 1944, just a few months before D-Day. During WWII, the 3rd Armored Division came to be known as the "Spearhead Division" (especially under the leadership of Major General Maurice Rose, who was killed in action in March 1945); they made great gains for the Allies in the battle for Europe, and they suffered many deaths and casualties.

Eisenhower inspects 3AD - 1944 from 3AD.com on Vimeo.

And this one takes place at a memorial service in Iraq in 1991 and shows Sgt. Preston Holloway of the 3rd Armored Division singing the National Anthem. Before he begins singing, another soldier shares the following quote: "It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch".

Soldier sings National Anthem from 3AD.com on Vimeo.

Thank you to our veterans for their service across the decades.

"Day is done, gone the sun..."

A photo of Washington Square Park in Philadelphia, the location of the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier: Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness.

We remember and honor the men and women of our military.

Audio of SGM Woody English, U.S. Army Band, playing Taps.

Here's an interesting site on the history of the bugle call, Taps, played at military funerals and memorial events.

And some of the verses often set to the twenty-four notes:

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills,
From the sky.
All is well, safely rest,
God is nigh.


Fades the light; And afar
Goeth day, And the stars
Shineth bright,
Fare thee well; Day has gone,
Night is on.


Thanks and praise, For our days,
'Neath the sun, Neath the stars,
'Neath the sky,
As we go, This we know,
God is nigh.