Herhsel and Marzine

 


Marzinene took the stage with a trance-like gait. The few coughers in the audience settled down, before she plucked the first note on her guitar and remembered her father.

Hershel recently, after 25 years of dutiful service to Western Pacific, had died. He’d become a legend in that time, and it’s still known throughout the Midwest that if it’s quiet enough, and the locusts aren’t in season, you can still hear Herhsel yelling into the night, following the mechanized gallop of 25 tons of roaring steel known as the Thunderbody, coined by Hershel and used by anyone around Abilene, Kansas circa 1935. Hershel was just a boy when he was hired on at Western Pacific; after he was discovered on a westbound train hunkered down at the rear of the caboose, bruised but silent, after chasing the train for 200 yards through the prickly obstacles of Kansas corn.

They kept him on that train, once called Hershel’s train, eventually taking the name Thunderbody, a nickname hurled at it by Herhsel himself, while racing across a Midwestern gorge one night, and his yawp could be heard as far as St. Louis.

On the last night of Thunderbody’s run, on the final stretch of wood and steel known then as the Clark Corridor before she hit the pacific, Hershel was adjusting a wise-ass gas cap on the extended bulge of the rear coal car when he tumbled to his death at the bottom of the Columbia River Gorge, drowning instantly. It was the last time anyone ever heard Hershel call out to the great rail god and it was said that the fish jumped extra high that night and disappeared, for no other fish was ever caught in the 20 mile radius believed to be the spot where Hershel last saw the warm rush of life.

Marzine let the last note ring out, to the occasional implosion of applause in the smoky corridors of the Spartan club. The fern in the corner reflected the house lights, lighting her up like a vaudevillian corpse.

For the past ten years she told her Daddy’s stories, a vague attempt at carrying the torch for this mythical figure whose tales and adventures she could never top.
 She used to hear these tales of braggadocio underneath the rocking of the chair while she lay splayed out painting faces on empty doll heads.

Morning en route to Joffa

If he can pry the sleep of history from his eyes, then maybe he'd spot the dead Arab in his bed. He'd never believe the truth if we told him, that he'd have to make the journey to Joffa on his own, without the help of the hired hand that now lay lifeless on his bed. The stark appearance of tanned skin mixed with the surprisingly dark blood - a crimson meets obsidian motif - if he could allow himself a thought that felt debased with the years of rigorous training he might have received from the infantry if his head didn’t pound with the weight of a dozen dead Arabs.

He wasn’t responsible for his death; he knew that much by looking at the execution-style craftsmanship of the kill. He remembered befriending the man after they had shared a few pipefulls of whatever was in the hukka they passed around last night, after learning of their similar ancestry.

He’d remembered falling asleep with the stars rocking him to sleep as they told the tails of the ancients, that provided a visual accompaniment to the fables the man told between rigorous coughs, readjustments of the man’s lungs.

They only thing he could think of was a setup, it had to be a setup, on this side of the Israeli border it would have looked like a strategic killing, one of a premeditated nature.

He had a lot of explaining to do.

Last Post From This IP Address

It's a crescendo in 3/4 time, the last day of work; the bittersweet tinge of youthful Holiday anticipation. The idea that after you rest tonight, you will never worry about Monday morning, about returning to the same windowless cube to wear out your days and Potential.

A coworker calls and tells me hes had a great date. He tells me about the enrollment into the diversion program. Tells me about how hes going to go back to school and suddenly I’m not worried about him anymore.

As I set up the cube for my replacement, I feel an air of bittersweet justice to the whole affair. I've been relegated to the position of doing other people's dirty work for so long now.

Not that I’m against any manual labor, but in propelling most of my work energy into the future, I’ve let my present work self suffer.

What's been lost is the wave of independence that I now feel. The air of righteous Indignation as I waltz passed co workers, apparently unfazed by this red letter day.

We spoke of lost potential; the way work, especially in the office allows one the opportunity to view the potential of certain workers sapped live from moment to moment fromm the coffee-percolated mornings carrying on through the silent waiting room lunches and sloping downwards through the confectioned afternoons into the faint buzz at the end of our days, looking back on a life spent moving objects backwards and forwards.

I know what the critic inside would say:

"The idea that you are not experiencing this alone is missing in your work. The way you insulate everything is worrisome. It’s as if the chronic narcissism you suffer from inhibits all of your work. We never get the sense of a shared experience throughout any of your ficiton."

Elongating the Subway Metaphor

So many times we forget,
all that has come before us
ran from underneath the subway line of our lives.

It's impossible to articulate the nuanced way of life.
The way it reaches us, the subway, choked up after running into too many deaad ends.

It leaves us bruised and battered in the back of our minds, comes into contact with people who've altered the face of it, yet we've never met them.

And from this vantage point, where the entire system is visible, it's easy to see how things are misunderstood: how stoppage can look like stagnation, how speed can look like progress and how efficiency can resemble madness.