Street Level Profile

His eyes don’t miss anything. One of them is turned on the street. The other faces perpetually inward to a private landscape. He’ll tell you about it too, about ten seconds into what seems like it’s going to be a surprisingly banal conversation, he’ll drop it on you. As he tries to communicate this framework of cosmic magic and the compelling forces of art in the minds and hearts of men. He becomes very impassioned, and less and less lucid

The ideas begin to lose the shape of words. He stares, out eye searching you for some understanding while transmitting a photonic ones and zeroes in an invisible stream directly into your brain. He keeps talking while his inner eye combs over the archives of what it’s like to be human.

Portsmouth is a garden, a shangri-la. Manny is an apex scavenger in a polished dumpster world. Words are a fence between him and the rest of the world. Ideas are a moire seen from the highway passing under the overpass; passing mirages visible only at certain speeds.  The dark magic of art can sometimes incite violence. He can make a hundred forms of expression, and out of that number, perhaps one will be so highly prized that men will steal, even kill to possess it.

-G.America

Dreams in the Fishbowl

One night I met the old man who killed himself before I was born. He has been haunting the abandoned house at the end of my road since I was little. Now the house is demolished, but in my dreams it lives on, and he persists yet. He is an alcoholic who speaks in barely distinguishable syllables. I steal some hooch from him while I get to know his family or friends, whoever these weirdos are. We talk about all the changes that have happened around us, but ignore the changes within us. Growing colder, our lights go out. The town shuts down. Our eyes collide with the next great escape from the guidelines of purpose. We have no nervous excuse for the truths we've stopped fighting for and sink blatantly into excess.

He put a bullet into his skull. That's what his kids remember him for. I remember him as a sensation of unrest in a lonely place where the roof and floor caved in and the walls were crushed on four sides by the trunks of overgrown hedges. Memories of dreams aged for decades are the clearest truths of my childhood.

-H.W.Spaulding

The Bear 

The bear was not in a bear place.  There was no reason why I should have been thinking, I’d better slow down, I might hit a bear. I was heading north and had just crossed the river on one of the most expensive and overwrought bridge construction and highway widening projects in the world.  Depending on how many fishermen one asks, or how many poorly written blog posts one consults, the impression is given that, at anywhere from three to five knots, this river is pretty fucking fast. Given that, and the shortsightedness of every highway project ever, this corridor is consistently littered with chaos which easily competes with my own.

Our story takes place at an intersection of man and nature within a three point five mile stretch of turnpike which has been under the scrutiny of post industrial engineers since the 1960’s. In 1966, a mere twenty seven years since the first modern highway bridge at the mouth of little bay had been built, a second two-lane span was constructed to distribute the load.The mingling of aesthetics, between  1934 and 1966,  yet another symptom of chaos, was an alienation of the present. Only the past and the future existed, and in stark contrast.  In 1984, they widened the second one and closed the first one. Checking the state website shows a rough timeline. The study for the most recent changes began in 1990, it was sidelined from 1992-1997 by another large project. In 1997 they resumed the study which would eventually lead to the commencement of construction in 2010. I turned eighteen late in 1995. This one iteration of changes has been in process my entire adult life. Multiple generations of careers have been supported entirely by this beleaguered corridor.

I feel a special connection to the 1934 bridge. It is two crumbing lanes supported by an arch of steel lattices pinned together with plates and rivets(also known as a deck truss bridge with a through truss span). It is a work of art, a community space, and a public nuisance. When they rebuild it, I hope they put a walk up Starbucks there with a patio overlooking the Little Bay. For the last thirty plus years,  it has been the walking bridge, a fishing pier, a vandals reconnoiter, a lounge for the sensitive type of alcoholic who likes to breathe the breeze of the brack funneling down the river and watch the sunset over the water while the buzzing rush hour chainsaw grinds away in the background. I grew up next to this bridge. I’ve watched it grow old like a family pet.

My mother once drove her Buick up onto the high concrete sidewalk, drunk AF. It was 1981 and the police called a wrecker to lift us off our perch, set us down, and send us on our way. I had been napping. The sudden stop woke me and I looked up through the windshield to see some green painted steel lattice and a blue sky. The clouds moved smooth across the glass. Drawn back in our seats as though accelerating, though we were stopped. Mom swore, and though she didn’t look me in the eyes, I could sense her fear. She doesn’t remember any of it. The incident was stamped so vividly on my four year old mind, yet it didn’t even make a scratch on her consciousness at forty-three. We continued to use the bridge for our nightly constitutional walks after it was closed to vehicles, when she would evade my young questions about the nature of the people who sprayed graffiti on the now quiet tarmac of the General Sullivan. They were vandals, drug addicts. She was an artist, and an alcoholic. With an urge to please I assented to this explanation as if it made sense.

The insoluble peninsular points of Newington and Dover pinch the river, which pinches back at the transit flow.  Hopeful that six decades of bridge construction and road work would somehow alter the dynamics of the conflict, we just keep driving slower and slower, even as they widened the road from two to four to six, and eventually eight lanes. A river is a monomaniacal subtraction of soluble resistance. Swollen seasons tear out chunks of real estate, the battle of inertia is usually won by water. A river handles its own growth. The expansion of a highway, being a complex system of asphalt, concrete, and steel, a growth of inorganic addition, requires the interference of man. Multiple decades of a highway whipped like a cord over and over into the ground; land so overworked by construction that it is beaten into a furrow, creates a convenient trough for water. The ground shrank toward late summer and into fall and winter. A shallow pond formed in the northbound lane each time there were significant rain.

I drove home, alone, from a show in Cambridge. On the radio, Blur. A throwback catalog, grand in memory, now sounded like so much ink in a load of laundry. I clung to the one good song I could find, a song covered that night at the show. “You’re So Great” felt immune to the reek of empty irony. As the car crossed into New Hampshire, the rain came down hard and sudden. It rose up into a sound shattering the black night sky as it poured the darkness down around me. The sound of the rain on the windshield was a ball of cellophane crinkled into a microphone over a loudspeaker. I crossed the bridge through atmospheric waves born of sudden gales. It would have been terrifying weather to be exposed to, but I held the position of detached observer in wonder. Distracted, as I deconstructed the ghosts of my own former flight from authenticity, my muscle memory informed the vehicle to slow down to a conservative forty-five miles per hour to cross the puddle which would certainly lay ahead of me. Hitting it once before at sixty-five had been an experience which resonated through my body, a flood of hormones.

I was sober and forty-one when I saw the bear, his soaking wet pelt catapulted across the bow of my SUV. I saw a brown snout, the whites of eyes.

Bears can sprint at thirty-five miles per hour. Knowing this did not diminish his leap from my path at the last fraction of a second, like a cat, over the four foot jersey barrier to my left.

 He had been sighted in the area for some weeks, lost in a bewildering suburban environment. I had been unaware of his plight. Traveling from Boston to the Industrial Revolution Mill district of Somersworth, New Hampshire at two in the morning in a winter monsoon is a feat which since the sixteen hundreds has flipped in ratio along at least one line. Way fewer bears, way more people.  It was a trip that used to require a significant amount of planning and one which would not be attempted during the witching hours.

In my recollection the bear seemed about five hundred pounds and probably would have stood about eight feet tall. I had less than two seconds of visual contact, but his body on forepaws was as long as the width of my late model Ford Explorer, his bulk was clearly visible above the hood as our paths crossed in a proximity ranging from ten to five feet. He was, even at his size, one of the fastest animals I have ever seen. At this, I reflected on the relatively sedentary appearance of bears in film, and how lucky we are as a species that their temperament is pensive and often at worst grumpy. Bears could, if they were of a mind to, kill us all.

I imagined the scene had our timing been closer by even half a second. Me, dazed by a deployed airbag, face covered in talcum, bleeding from the impact of my yellow tinted night driving glasses into the bridge of my shattered nose, effectively blind without corrective lenses. The front of the SUV mashed like bananas in a bowl. A suddenly very angry bear, perhaps with a bruised hip, climbing over the crumple zone with murder inhiseyes, peering down through the cracked windshield. He’d have eaten me like tuna from a can, I feel certain. That’s not how it happened though. I went home, stunned by the encounter, and slept in my bed, my house haunted, where that night even the hundred and fifty year old ghost of some jilted lover gave me my space, or was unable to top the shock of a bear crossing the highway. The encounter had prompted a response buried deep in my genes. The hormones released were older than all the bridges crossing the Piscataqua.                -anonymous

Peninsula

 In her fifties, Ginny found she barely slept at all. She had a degree in biology, twenty years experience in retail management, and as a single mother had raised a child, her mind never shut up anymore and most of the time she wasn’t even aware of the places that she went at night, she just knew they weren’t sleep. She got up very early and went for a walk on the beach alone where the rocky sand between her toes reminded her of the ocean shore where she had spent so much of her life. Lake Superior sure was almost indistinguishable at ground level from an ocean. It had waves, and she could not see the other side. The air however, was completely different, a piney acidity rose up from the soil, a sticky clean smell.

The buttery fog burned off around ten am, revealing the earth, a Kalkaska sand topped with kaleidoscopic moraine. The proud stands of white pine ever-greened the canopies of the woods and between the shore and the treeline the ground meadowed with whorled milkweed, short, sparse, growing parchment umbels in their flowering season. Summer’s end of  erupted for a final spasm of barbeques, swimming, and late night games of cribbage. The crowd after labor day thinned, as families settled back into the grind.

Monarchs were sunsets concentrated into paper thin wings. They drank nectar silently from the flowers of the little milkweed while impregnating the plants with their eggs. The mechanics of their flight are only slightly more ambitious than those of the cottony seeds of the plants they live on.  Half drifting, falling, then jerking upwards, being terrible at flight is one of the keenest defenses, an ironic aerobatic fumblefuge. Another good defense, they look like they taste. Nothing with any sense would try to catch and eat something that flies like a seizure and tastes like cardiac arrest.

Ginny walked back up to the house and went into the women’s bathroom to take a shower.  There were two bathrooms, a men’s and a women’s. They were on the first floor and were set up like spas. Tiles covered the floor and walls. There were several shower heads sprouted from the wall in a row. Ginny and Bill had been here for a week; they were alone in this big house, yet every time she went to take a shower the head was turned up and it had blasted her in the face. She had learned to check it before turning it on, but was confused as to how it got turned up every time she left the bathroom. Bill wasn’t doing it. Not only were such pranks beyond his understanding, but she had asked him point blank, “are you showering in the women’s room?” He told her that of course he had not.

The building was constructed in 1905 as a functions camp for Theosophists. In 1929 the group underwent a schism and many properties were shuffled off into the possession of an erstwhile membership who felt they deserved some material compensation for their allegiance to occult concepts, proving once again that human beings seeking spiritual enlightenment can easily be comforted by extravagant real estate holdings.

She swears to herself as she points the showerhead once again at the ground. The water comes out under a good amount of pressure, and it is very hot. Skin jumping awake as she plunges underneath the streams. Eyes closed, dreaming awake of the last twenty years of her life.

She dried off and put her robe on. Ginny sat in an adirondack chair on the porch, overlooking the meadow to the back of the property. She packed a bowl. Vacations were made by sitting around in a robe smoking weed in the common areas of a conveniently empty rental. The little muscles at her temple softened as she held in the first hit. From her seat in the white wicker chair, her eyes caught movement on the steps leading down to the wildflower meadow. A black cat had stopped at the top of the steps where he had been surprised by her presence. His yellow eyes were fixed on her face while a fresh caught monarch butterfly beat its helpless wings against his whiskers, sending fairy dust onto his nose. He held a sneeze off while he judged her. His eyes showed a spooky distrust. Then he sat down at the top step, trapped the insect between his two hooked velvet cushions, and gnawed delicately on the wings. As the butterfly succumbed to the shock, the cat caressed its antennae with his tongue.  The cat looked sleepy from the cardenolides in the wings of the Monarch. Faced with god in the cheshire grin of a grim reaper, the bug saw fields of impossible wildflowers in colors which did not exist, as it raptured off into stillness.

Eventually the cat lost interest in his prey. It was glued to the porch boards, a black and orange shattered lump, an impression of a butterfly. Bill should be up by now. She got up and walked inside. She looked up across the hall as a figure ascended the stairway. “Aren’t you even gonna say good morning?” The man froze in mid step, his leading foot hanging between the second and third step from the top of the first flight. Ginny felt the cold of deep space. Her tingletips fingered as if she were feeling the screen of an old television set. The sound of a static scramble in her ears.  His back was to her. It wasn’t Bill. She could only see him from the shoulders down, his head was obscured inside the stairwell, white t-shirt, black dungarees, yellow work boots. He paused for just a moment, and then without turning around, continued on his way up the stairs where he disappeared with a slight flutter into the tapestry hanging across the landing.

Her body moved after him without her consent. She pulled the tapestry aside at the landing. Sunlight from the octagonal window lit up her searching blue eyes, her hands curled into fists. There was no one there. She turned at the landing and looked to the top, where another tapestry was pulled across the opening. If I get pushed down the stairs and break my neck, they’re gonna blame Bill. She lifted the curtain from the bottom, looking for those boots. Nothing was there. She saw the hallway in almost its entirety, empty.

She pulled aside the curtain to the bedroom where she and Bill slept. He looked up and said good morning.

Were you just downstairs?

 I’ve been here the whole time. I heard noises in the bedroom next door, was that you? As he spoke, a sound like a chair being dragged across the floor came from the room next door.

“Who’s here?”, He asked

-anonymous

Aliane

In the hole in the wall bar a mile from their house, Boris and Aliane drink scotches and margaritas poured by a young, pretty bartender with an undergrad degree and her whole life ahead of her. The lighting is diffused. The music is loud enough that they can pretend to listen to it if they feel like a distraction. Nobody comes to this bar. That’s why they like it, of course. The neighbors all take Uber downtown to exciting places with intriguing names and inscrutable menus. Fuck those people, having them over for parties is bad enough. No one comes to the Round Up. This shit-hole is famous as a trainwreck of cliche plastic bar pastiche, classic rock played from a radio station, and being mostly empty except for the elderly and some sad looking waterlogged patrons of the hotel next to it. Boris and Aliane sit astride maroon leather barstools, a television set gazes silently into their eyes with a blue sterile light. In between them, on the bar, rests a plate of chicken fingers. Boris pulls a Panko encrusted digit from the plate. He dips it halfway up the shank in a bright orange buffalo sauce, then bites almost the entire thing off at once. As he chews, he covers his mouth and says, “d’you hear about Clausmans?”

“Mmm, yeah, that’s fucked up.”

“I didn’t think they had it in them.”

“Huh?”

“They seem so fucking boring.”

“Oh yeah, he’s got the depth of a right wing news anchor, but I always thought he was hiding something.”

“And her? She’s never said a word at any of the parties we’ve seen them at.”

“Well, she did more than talk to that landscaper’s boy.”

“Yeah, ain’t nobody seen him for about two weeks.”

“Really, you think something..happened?”

“Who knows?”

“Mmm.”

On the screen above the dull crystalline rainbow of liquor bottles, a rebroadcast of the nightly news talking heads and ticker reels, a spinning mesmer current, gave way through a fade and cut to an advertisement for a happy life. Aliane read the side effects as they flashed across the bottom of the screen in subliminal font. Common side effects include: nausea, diarrhea, blue balls, disappearing cunt. Rare side effects, though much less common, have been observed to include: slashing the throat of your landscaper’s helper because he fucked your wife, discovering that your entire life is a lie, eating Cheerios at three in the morning on a Monday even though you know you’ve got to put that smile on. That’s why you took the God damned pill in the first place. She shook her head quickly, as if an insect had landed on her nose.

“I wouldn’t kill your lover dear. I might cut off your dick, but, I’m not gonna kill someone.”

“Right, of course.”

“I mean it.” She bats her lashes provocatively.

“Who should my lover be then?”

“How about her?” Aliane tips her head towards the bartender.”

“Sure, why not?”

“Hey Sam! Come over here for a second. I wanna know if you’ll fuck my husband.”

“Aliane! What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you drunk?”

“Why? I’d fuck her Boris. She’s cute. Can’t let Clausmans have all the fun.”

Sam approaches the gutter across from them, leans over the well, intercepting blue rays from the television as they halo around her bedenimed hips. “Hey Boris.” She straightens up and leans her shoulders back, pushing her pussy against the spout of a fifth of Titos. She pulls her shirt up above her navel, exposing a soft smooth stomach, like a magazine photo shopped to clear skin perfection. “Fuck me Boris. Fuck my cunt and come in my mouth. I want you to make me forget my own name. Smell my finger Boris.”

“What? Excuse me?” Boris, startled, looks at the bartender expectantly.

“I said, do you want some more chicken fingers Boris?” Aliane looks at Sam, then Boris. “Are you still hungry babe?” She puts her hand on Boris leg. She feels his erection and her eyes twinkle. She licks her lips and smiles. “Sam, I think we’re gonna take the check please.” -anonymous

Face to the Sun

Up early on Sunday to do my laundry, both loads in the agitating washers by 5 30 am.  The bill changers call me to a guaranteed draw, making slot machines seem feeble and senile as the rows of snow capped skulls in the clutches of the promise of forever. Earlier, when I was leaving the house, as I backed out my back door of my apartment, which opens outward into a tiny foyer,  something stopped me as the door came up against unusual resistance. Laundry basket in arms I gave a small curse and pushed backward again, harder this time.  I managed to squeeze out and turn my head enough to see that there were indeed things blocking my way, and one very sad looking roommate, slumped over his knees in his chest, naked from the waist down, sitting in a puddle.  Gently I say, "good morning Chris, how are you?"

"oh, I'm good," he responds.

I put down the laundry basket, careful to avoid the edges of the puddle which I assume to be bodily.  "you locked out last night?" I ask as my eyes, moving around, light upon his house keys in the corner of the cold entryway, next to his crumpled trousers.

"yeah, probably," he says.

He won't look up at me. I ensure the door is unlocked behind me. "do you want some help getting up?"  he reaches for the doorknobs closest to his line of sight, which are the downstairs neighbors. I tell him,  "you live in this one buddy." I hold the door for him until he reaches out and holds the correct handle. "looks like you need a good night's sleep," I say, "you're gonna be alright."  I clap him lightly on the shoulder. "I'm just going around the corner to the laundromat, just so you know, if you need me for anything."

I pick up the laundry basket and walk to my truck.  In leaving I see him begin to gather himself and his things.  I knew he was having a hard time. Truth, I'm surprised he made it eleven months on willpower and psychiatric medication alone.

I do my laundry, which is where this story started. While it cycles I'm writing and thinking.  The secret to forever is to live in today. Old snowcaps with cavernous unblinking eyes haven't learned it. Maybe they're stoned on the rhythm of icons spinning on wheels, always about to line up. Maybe they're adopting new sitcom families, having scripted dinners alone, talking up a storm in silence, shaming their children for running away forty years ago, to become the next generation of has-beens. If I can only have today, maybe I'll never go so far into my own receding memory as to forget how to feel human.

Could be the secret to life eternal is to die young, as I have done. Having tasted the breach in between this world and nothing, I do not much long for its emptiness. The facade of story book death is a grim mask over the truth.  I've rotted walking bones, oozed life into the sewers of this fair city. Crumpled hearts of paper as they turned to white ash to warm a corpse. Some of us only come so far back from the brink, where a cold blackness, not so much vast as final, calls our names. seduces us to wanton fraud of spirit.

Humans all heed the call.  Some all at once, going for broke, rush down a chasm, others, finding stairs and a torch, descend till the flame burns out. Lost, few look up to see the sky, and wonder, if salvation there be. My friends, I descended but a fair ways without a light, so my eyes adjusted to the dark well, as best they could, until the acrid foul air, all over I did burn in my skin. I looked up and saw the greatest lantern of all, high above. All is beauty, all is love. I turned and was swept upward all at once. Though it seemed I descended for decades, I was lifted in an instant. Just by turning my face to the sun.  -anonymous