A Saragun Springs Rerun: The Great Book of Angharad by Michael Bloor

(Introduced by Puck the Squirrel, in the image, a resident of Evergreen Park, Bremerton, WA, USA)

This week it is our pleasure to rerun stories by contributors to our site this past year.

We are going public in January, and, yes, this rerun thing is a naked attempt to fill the days until the new business begins, without first creating new work.

We are all about the TRUTH in the Springs.

But that does not mean a lack of quality. This is a fine work by Mick, and since many more eyes are trained toward the site than before, it, and the items that follow deserve a second go.

This also allows me to break in the link feature, which we hope you will hit now…

The Great Book of Angharad

The Broom Closet by The Drifter

The worst punishment I ever received at that place was being locked in a broom closet, in the dark, for three hours.

The school was Our Shepherd Lutheran Elementary located in a suburb of Detroit. The time was the mid-1970s.

I was in third grade when she locked me in the broom closet.

I say “she” because it was her who did it – my third grade teacher, Ms. Caul, who actually wasn’t that bad most of the time and who I even thought of as a friend some of the time.

But this time we knocked heads.

She wanted me to go up to the front of the class and join the other five kids who were serenading the rest of the class who were sitting at their desks.

She requested that I join the singing, that I head up front and begin to bust out in passionate song, singing hymns to the rest of the class as if I were some sort of transported hymn-singer, which I wasn’t. And far from it.

I was the kind of kid who wasn’t too good at joining, or singing (except when I was alone).

I had been sitting there at my desk looking at the happy hymn singers and thinking how pathetic and sad they were when she requested that I leave the security of my desk, head up front, and join them.

When I said no, she told me again to get out of my desk and march to the front of the room, pronto, buster.

When I said no again, she started walking down the aisle toward me, and she was here (which was there) before I even knew what hit me.

She was hovering over me, helicoptering above me, pointing at the front of the room and demanding that I take my place with the singing group.

I crossed my arms, turned my head away, and said no again.

Now she grabbed me by the arm, yanked me out of the chair, and dragged me to the front of the room.

Then she swung me around and slammed me (accidentally) into the kid at the end of the hymn-singing line.

Next she informed me that I would now be singing, not with the group, but as a soloist.

I had refused to sing in the group and it astonished me that she believed I would now consent to busting out in a solo for these fools.

I set my jaw shut tight, crossed my arms, and stared out at my classmates in their desks, all of whom seemed more horrified than I felt.

She began yelling, telling me to sing.

The truth was, I could not have sung at that point even if it had meant my life.

That was when she yanked me out of the room by the arm and marched me straight down the hall to the broom closet. For some reason, the light switch for the broom closet was on the outside of the little room, in the hall.

She threw the door open and with a great shove she fairly hurled me into the tiny room filled with brooms, mops, buckets, and cleaning supplies.

Then she slammed the door shut tight, locked it from outside, and turned the light off from outside.

I was alone in the broom closet, locked in, in the dark.

Like I said, I was in third grade, so that means I was either 8 or 9 years old.

I state my age as a reason for why I spent my time silently weeping in there, in rage and terror.

I felt like I’d been locked in a dungeon and, indeed, to this day I almost feel like I know what it’s like to be locked in a dungeon because of my refusal to join the singing fools.

Some people enjoy being cheerleaders for the system.

Some people see absolutely nothing wrong with groupthink, following the herd, living the life of a passive approver of the ways things get done around here, no matter how they get done, as long as the group gets what it wants and the majority rule, in a societal system that wants slaves for its great devouring jaws, and not even IT knows why, except that’s the way it goes.

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

The three hours might only have been thirty minutes.

When she let me out, she said, “I’m sorry Dale, but you had it coming to you and I hope you’ve learned your lesson this time.”

Tell Only the Good Parts and Leave the Rest by Leila Allison

(First published in 2015)

It’s three feet farther to hell for people who jump off Torqwamni Bridge. The City of Charleston has recently installed an eighteen-inch extension to the span’s rail. In my opinion, the city has wasted its money. The Torqwamni goes up to a fatal height almost immediately, and at its middle it stands better than ten stories above the churning and hungry Port Washington Narrows. Only Serious People go over that bridge; less than serious types, those who need just a little attention to feel better inside, never go to Torqwamni Bridge to perform on the off-chance that they might fall off. No, I don’t see a foot-and-a-half—in both directions—getting in the way of a well prepared and dedicated serious person.

Such ran through my mind as I drove Gram to yet another doctor’s appointment. At the age of twenty, I was getting awfully familiar with doctors’ clinics and the technologies designed to prevent, for as long as possible, what I had once heard described as an “end of life event.” Nobody speaks frankly about anything at doctors’ clinics after the insurance is settled. In a decrepit and mournful sort of way, visiting any of Gram’s phalanx of medicos was like going to Neverland; but instead of recapturing the spirit of youth, we found Tinkerbell in bifocals and Peter Pan attached to a colostomy bag.

It was a typical Pacific Northwest March morning. The bipolar weather changed its mood every ten minutes or so. Wind driven slaps of rain, hail, and perhaps, locusts, would suddenly stop and give over to sunshine so cheery that I was certain that it had to be up to something. Sure enough, the lovely light soon faltered and the whole evil process began again from the top.

“Reena?” Gram said, not at all sounding like the mindless old woman who had earlier killed a half hour whining like a two-year-old because she couldn’t find the hideous “rose” blouse she that she already had on.

“Hmmm?” At that time I was struggling with the wind as to hold my lane on the bridge.

“Tell me we’re goin to VIP’s for bloody Marys; tell me we’re goin for butts—Tell me anything but Group Death.”

“I thought you were dead,” danced on the tip of my tongue. But as I looked over at Gram, I saw the woman I had known and loved for life. It broke my heart knowing that her soul was still in there; trapped like a miner given up for dead; unrescuable; a flickering flame eating the last of the oxygen.

Gram and my late Grandpa Henry had raised me after my mother, their daughter, had abandoned me in my infancy. They were in their late middle-years at the time, and both were hard working sorts who never let the drudgery of their menial jobs get in the way of having fun. This fun included booze. So what? They had loved me and had gone out of their way to see to my happiness.

Not long after Grandpa Henry had died from a mercifully swift heart attack, Gram had suffered the first in a series of small strokes. For five snarly and prideful years, Gram had fought back while keeping her dignity. Even though death had meant to take her one piece at a time, Gram had kept her sense of humor. I remember the morning when Gram had to weigh herself to see if she had accrued fluid due to her failing kidneys. “Christ, I’m getting fat,” she had mumbled through a Winston. Upon seeing that she had lost three pounds, Gram winked and said: “Probably cancer.”

But even the best of us have only so much good dying in our souls. And on the afternoon Gram had to endure another stroke that wouldn’t kill her, by itself, she knew that the game was up. “Reena, honey,” Gram had whispered as the ambulance took its customary route to our house across the street from the Ivy Green Cemetery, “I’m so sorry about this…There’s still time…Time to get the Demerol…”

Dear God, how it used to be: The laughter; the living and dying for the Seattle Mariners; the childlike looking forward to payday; ashtrays which resembled beaver dams; last night loganberry flip glasses left on the “occasional” table; watching Thin Man marathons on TCM over popcorn. Those, and more, yes, were the backdrop of my happy childhood. But, at twenty, the roles of adult and child had been swapped around. This was a poor trade because I couldn’t provide Gram with happy memories; that part of her life was over. Gram wasn’t going to get better because the ravages of time and choice had ensured that there was no level of better for Gram to get back to. Still, within it all, I had learned something of value: The worst universe possible is a godless void in which a sentient chemical accident know as humankind is the sole inhabitant. Yet here, even here, especially here, if an otherwise meaningless being does right by a fellow meaningless being minus the promise of heaven or the threat of hell, as my grandparents had done for me, life has a meaning, and it should be wailed for upon its diminishing, more so than upon its passing.

I had time to think all this because whatever appropriately snarky remark I had shot back at Gram after her “Group Death” comment had landed on a mind that changed even more rapidly than the weather.

“Hmmm?” Gram replied vacantly, very much sounding like the mindless old woman who had whined about the rose blouse.

“Nothing…Nothing at all.”

How I hate doctors’ clinics: decor that is offensive because it is designed to be the opposite; pushcart muzak around only to stave off silence; fellow wranglers tending their charges; Everest College-types behind counters secretly texting their boy friends. But, mostly, its the walkers I hate most. There’s something about a cane that allows its user to retain his or her independence; walkers are cribs on wheels. You can smack someone with your cane if that someone offends you. All you can do in a walker is shuffle forward, head down, as though you now weigh more on Earth than you would on Jupiter.

Sometime during my brief life, civility, actual and feigned, has been, as Gram would’ve said, before the loss of her mind, “shitcanned.” Once upon a time strangers used to speak to other strangers by formal address until they were given permission to do otherwise. Perhaps I’m proof that even a twenty-year-old girl can have a lot of humbugging fogy in her; still, there’s nothing more irritating than have someone unknown to you call you by your first name as though you are a dog or a toddler.

“Has Elizabeth fasted?” The Everest College-type asked me upon check-in.

“How should I know what Elizabeth is up to?” I said cheerfully. “She could be off waxing her tramp-stamp, for all I know. Mrs. Allison, Mrs. Elsbeth Allison has fasted.”

Surprise! My little remark pissed the Everest College-type off something awful. Unless I was horribly mistaken, the evil light that shone through her previously bored expression communicated her desire to watch me starve slowly in a sealed room.

“Have a seat,” the E.C.-type said through clenched teeth. “The nurse will be with you.”

“Why thank you, um, Misty,” I said after I made a big show of reading her name badge. “I’m sure it won’t take too long for that to happen—even though it will give you and I less time together.”

Dante would lose his mind if he could see that humankind hasn’t taken The Inferno as a cautionary tale, but has used it as a blueprint from which to devise smaller hells on Earth.

Call this an overreaction, if you must, but I have spied concentric circles of increasing misery inside every doctors’ clinic I’ve ever been to. The first circle has to be the waiting room; which is guarded (as you already know) disinterested E.C.-types who wear pastel scrubs and too much makeup. The second circle involves a mute tech who points at an old timey scale better suited for weighing livestock than humorous human beings. The Nurse (who is likely the brains of the outfit) inhabits the third circle. Every The Nurse is an intimidating and omniscient person who has learned her (never his) skills from repeated watchings of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and/or Godzilla.

The fourth circle is excruciating. This si where you cool your heels in a cruddy cubicle waiting for the doctor to come talk at you as if you have the IQ of a pineapple. Old Gram (the person whom I knew and loved, not her insufficient doppleganger) used to go to special pains to make herself unendurable for the doctor whenever she felt she had waited too long: “There’s dustbunnies ‘neath that table—Hope y’all wipe better than that.” That sort of unendurable.

I heard muffled chatter, hard by. I imagined the doctor reading (probably for the first time) the results of Gram’s last blood draw (she’d have another on the way out; think circle five). I imagined him being able to give names to each of her few remaining red cells as though they were a box of kittens. I imagined nothing good. Instead, I loaded my mind with unendurable remarks enough for two.

Dr. Zale made his entrance. Though I had been taking Gram to see this particular physician for over a year, I always got the impression that every time Dr. Zale saw Gram was like the first time. To be fair, Gram 2.0 has never been all that memorable. If she and Dr. Zale had known each other a bit longer, as little as three or four months, he would have brought a whip and a chair.

Dr. Zale, however, remembered me. Not by name, but by sight. It did my heart good to have his confident I Am The Scientist, You Are The Zombie demeanor slink off and get replaced with an “Oh, no, not her again,” expression—which, to be frank, I get a lot of.

He smiled weakly. “How are we, this morning?”

“I suppose that depends on what the test results have to say,” I said.

Dr. Zale shrugged and held his weak smile and went over to where Gram was seated, but he never took his eyes off Yours Truly. “How are you today, Mrs. Allison?” he asked, still looking me in the eye.

For our miserable year or so together, I had been struggling to develop an actual opinion about Dr. Zale. His use of Gram as a prop to deliver sarcasm my way ended the struggle.

Something along the line of “Listen, fuckstick, eyes on to whom you’re speaking,” had entered my mouth like a shell slammed into the chamber of a shotgun. And I would have said it too, if a voice hadn’t called out from below the insurmountable slag that over-topped it.

“It’s three feet further to hell for folks who’d jump off the bridge, Dr. Zale,” Gram said. “On the drive over this mornin’, I noticed that the dumbass city put an extension on the Torqwamni’s rail.”

I could actually feel my eyes dilate, and a weird tingling erupted in both my hands and thighs. I sat down heavily on a nearby stool, and I wondered if I was not too young to suffer a stroke of my own.

Dr. Zale became nonplussed; he had never heard Gram speak before, save for yes and no and general gibberish.

Gram looked at me. Though her pallor remained that of old paper, the lightning blue I had always remembered being in her eyes was fully charged. A wicked, lovely, vicious, warm grin had broken out in her face. “We think a lot alike, don’t we Reena baby?”

“Ye-yes, Gram, we sure do,” I replied. I wanted that moment to last forever. But, already, the befuddled fog again gathered between reality and the survivor.

A True Daily Double by Leila Allison

(Published by Literally Stories UK in 2021)

Gram and I used to watch Jeopardy together almost every weeknight. Our little “must see” TV date began at the dawn of my memory and ended with Gram’s death shortly after my twenty-second birthday; it’s already ten years gone by.

Of course (as Gram still says somewhere in my heart), we weren’t “married to the goddam thing.” Certainly not. When I got older I’d occasionally “get a life,” and If the Mariners or Seahawks were on that night, that’s where the TV would be, Gram and Grandpa Henry both cussing and cheering, she, loopy off loganberry flips, him and his endless cases of Lucky lager stacked in the garage (which he cut with V-8 and tabasco), both spreading cigarette ashes everywhere, all of us pretending not to notice our little terri-poo Figaro filching potato chips straight out of the bag, despite what the vet had said about it.

Seems to me that the best times in life aren’t the planned big moments, like a wedding or a graduation. Those events require a degree of suffering to give them value, and they seldom yield a satisfactory return on the investment. Maybe everything is as good as it gets when everybody’s all happily Chatty-Cathy and offering vacant observations about nothing at the same time and nobody says stupid shit like “let’s appreciate the moment.”

We weren’t sentimental people. Some folks get awkward about happiness; they cream and cherry-top its passing with goo and imprecise adjectives. Seems to me a very hard way to live your life, this–always with the one teary eye on the rearview mirror, this–reaching back and back and back and coming up with hands filled with empty. That was a big saying of Gram’s, hands filled with empty.

Grandpa Henry died when I was seventeen; chip sneak Figaro eventually fell off a little later. Gram never did say anything about the somehow still (albeit much more slowly) dwindling cases of Lucky out in the garage (she disliked the taste of beer), but she approved when I suddenly acquired a taste for V-8. “Glad to see that drinkin’ vegetables makes you good company, Rena.”

Even when I attended the nearby Community College I still got home in time for Jeopardy, four times in five. Sometimes my smart-ass best pal Wren would come by and truly astound Gram with her vast store of stultifyingly unnecessary knowledge–for despite Gram’s profound common sense and street smarts, and despite the fact she watched Jeopardy for something close to a quarter century, she was as rotten at the game as the dimmest celebrity contestant. But, mostly, we watched together, alone; loganberry flips and ashes.

Gram’s first stroke cut down on the ashes; her second eliminated them. Between the second and the whopper third stroke that landed her at the Torqwamni County Convalescent Center (“T-3C”) for keeps, I’d make her flips for her in the kitchen, just adding a splash of wine to the 7-Up at the end, for taste and old time’s sake.

Although her speech wasn’t affected until the third “event” (I noticed that doctors are loath to call strokes by name), some of Gram’s mentality was scrambled by the second stroke and she’d make slightly to wildly off-target statements or ask bizarre questions, which would just hang there and cause her frustration. But I found a way to burn them to nothing the way the atmosphere vaporizes most meteors before they can land and cause harm.

“Rena, I didn’t know Argentina was in Mars.”

“The Brazillians wouldn’t have it any other way, Gram.”

The last three weeks of our long standing Jeopardy date was held at the T3C. Loganberry flips had gone to ashes. So had Gram’s ability to speak. But her mind was still online enough to communicate through her eyes.

Two days before she slipped off into a mercifully short lasting morphine-drip coma, both of us exquisitely aware that she wouldn’t be getting better because there was nothing left of her that could be improved, I finally gave voice to an open secret that had been known to all, and I suspect even to larcenous Figaro, for years and years. But as it was our way, I came up on it from the side.

“Gram,” I said, smiling salaciously, first making eye contact with her, then looking directly at Alex Trebek on the TV mounted above and beyond her bed, and back at her again–doing it twice so she’d get my drift. “Did Grandpa ever suspect the two of you?”

She gazed at me a long time and winked.

Vmbra Wormwood by Leila Allison

(First published by Literally Stories UK, ages ago)

And the name of the star is called Wormwood…

–Revelation 8:11

Pus star Wormwood glowered ceaselessly in the cigarette sky. Although it was only midday,

Wormwood pulled long shadows from the sour crabapple trees, whose fruit not even the crows will eat. Embittered little trees, Scotch broom, feral blackberries and scrub grass are all that grow in the brief ridges and ravines and knolls that serve as the community “backyard” throughout the valley. During wildfire season the broom pods burst and the smoky wind disperses their dusty spore. During wildfire season it’s easy to believe in hell.

At sixteen, Claire has spent her entire life at one of the sturdy white farmhouses so dominant in the valley. Unless you count the people who grow weed under artificial Wormwoods in their attics and basements, there isn’t a single farmer in the valley, yet everybody lives in a farmhouse nonetheless. Local farming began its long dwindle into obsolescence when the interstate arrived in the 1960s; money could be made easier elsewhere then brought home. Times change.

Still, the few hundred residents of the valley and the nearby village are reluctant to let go of the past. This is mainly due to the influence of the Evangelical Christian Church on the citizenry. Currently, Pastor Mentor Trout III guides the flock, as had his father and grandfather before him. Despite his haughty name, the modern day Trout is a slight and bespectacled comb-over of a man married to a silly tanning-booth addict with cornbread colored skin.

Claire’s home is by far the most secluded in the valley. There isn’t a neighbor within a mile in any direction. Her father owns ninety acres of rough, topsy-turvy land that has never been suitable for farming and is unfit for anything other than allowing him to truthfully state “I own ninety acres of land.” Any image sent home by the Mars Rovers resembles any one of several “bald spots” in her father’s land–where not even the Scotch broom can take root. For the record the land had been sold to Claire’s great grandfather by the original Pastor Mentor Trout.

Yet it seems if you must live someplace long enough you will find something special about it, no matter how useless it may be otherwise. Sudden high banks of clay terminating table top-flat stretches of a couple hundred yards or more make Claire’s father’s land an excellent shooting range. That’s Father’s Big Dream: “When I retire I’m gonna sell her for a shooting range.” He used to say that to Mom who in turn gently scoffed at the notion because he had said it just to get her to gently scoff at the notion. Father no longer says anything to Mom because she died eighteen months back from ovarian cancer. And Claire would be a poor substitute for her mother’s part for she has come to hate her father.

Yesterday, Claire exited the farmhouse and walked purposefully under Wormwood carrying a metal briefcase in one hand and a large plaster statue of Jesus Christ in the other. Upon arriving at a spot three-hundred yards behind the house, where, in happier times, she and her father often blasted various objects into smithereens, Claire lay the statue on a stump and walked to a small wood table, about a hundred feet from the stump. She lay the case on the table, turned to face the image of Christ she had purchased online because the Church frowned on anything that smacked of idolatry.

Claire is five-five, blonde and blue-eyed. She used to be a skinny tomboy, but since her mother’s death she has “bloomed” as far as the common standards of sexual attractiveness go; let’s just say she has nothing where nothing is best and plenty where she ought, and let it go at that, save for she’s the kind of girl who turns boys into fools and men into creeps.

Claire has a peculiar voice. It’s somewhat high and small, yet there’s a comely raspy hitch to be found in it. Her voice began to sound that way after a routine tonsillectomy when she was twelve, and has changed little since. Although she speaks the modern tongue in which phrases that could be taken wrong are seemingly vocally italicized–as to lay a distance between the speaker and the potentially objectionable idea spoken–and partakes in the annoying habit of saying “Nice” and “Right” and “Okay” when she should be silently listening, she has not only her own distinct sound, but has also developed her own private idiom to match it.

She smiled at the statue of Christ and began to sing: “‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,’ Know that one, Jesus? My father does. It’s his dumbass pin for everything. Computer, ATM, VISA, library card, and this lockbox. In fact 1492 showed up three times when I placed my order in for you. I suppose there was a chance he would have been here for your delivery, but I knew, we as in you and I knew that wouldn’t happen.” She opened the lid and extracted a .38 Colt snub-nosed revolver, which she set carefully on the table. “There’s no such thing as an unloaded gun,” she said as she walked toward the statue. “You’re not supposed to leave one lying around on a table, either, but I think it will be okay this time.”

Patio chairs have always had a way of migrating to the little shooting range, even when Claire’s tidy mother had been alive. Claire made a half-assed effort to dust one off, shrugged “oh well,” carried it over to the stump and sat down in front of the representation of the Savior.

“Chipped,” she growled upon seeing a ding in the foot of the image. “Guess that what’s sixteen bucks will getcha anymore.”

She looked away and glanced briefly at Wormwood then back at Jesus. “What’s that fucking thing about, Jesus?” Claire asked, pointing at the pus star. “It took over the sun’s job before Mama died and hasn’t gone away since. Only I know the difference. Yet everything that has happened since tells of it.”

“Know what a dum-dum round is, Jesus? I bet the Romans would have used them if they had them. There’s one in the gun on the table. Just one. That leaves five empty chambers. Hollow point bullets are as illegal as marrying your sister in this state…if you had a sister, that is…But we got a dum-dum. And with it you or I will be going away and taking that evil black star with us. Only you or I will be here in a couple of minutes. Wormwood will be finished no matter what.”

Claire rose and strode back to the table. She reached for the weapon but hesitated. “It hardly seems fair to do this before explaining the whole thing to you,” she said, her rasp seemed to have the power to carry throughout the valley. “You see it all began with all that goddam praying that a-hole Trout and his weird looking wife arranged for Mama. The fuckers convinced her that a prayer circle could do more for her than one more round of chemo. Mama was probably already as good as dead at the time, but who’s to say. Not God, sure as fuck not Trout. I don’t recall seeing you comin round, either.”

Her blue gaze measured the statue, she smiled and continued. “Mama and Daddy–when he was ‘Daddy’–were so good to me. I remember loving it here…never wanting to go. Then I got tits and a butt after Mama died…I catch him leering at me when he thinks I can’t see him. It’s the kind of look that makes me lock the bathroom door whenever I take a shower.

“He hasn’t done anything much yet–unless you count holding on too long after a hug–back when we did that–and coming up from behind and stroking my hair and ‘accidentally’ brushing his hard on against my butt in the kitchen–no big ticket items–yet. Know how it feels to have your Daddy want to fuck you?” Then she laughed, it was an ironic, cynical laugh that should never come out of a sixteen-year-old’s mouth. “Sorry about that, boss, I guess your old man kinda sorta fucked you over pretty good atop Calvary Hill.

“Here’s another big secret–one which would put me at the center of a fucking prayer circle if it gets out. I’m a virgin–that isn’t the secret, by the way–I don’t like guys, I want girls, the way my father wants me. That’s the killer part. Round here homos are sick in the head and need to be saved.”

For a moment, tears threatened to well in Claire’s eyes. But she pushed that mood aside. “I don’t have anybody to talk to about any of this,” she said, her voice small and lost. “Except Aunt Rae, Mama’s big sister–but she lives in the city and never comes round because she and my father hate each other’s guts. Still, I think she’d understand, ‘All you gotta do is call,’ she has told me on social more than once. She seems to know but is waiting for me to say it…Maybe, maybe not. Maybe wishful thinking.”

Claire reached for the gun, this time without hesitation. She kept it pointed at the ground as she had been taught, years ago when the world was safe and Wormwood but a Biblical metaphor. “Trout was right about one thing, even though he had meant it the wrong way,” she said. “He said that you’ve got to take control of your relationship with you, the Lord. Of course he had meant that in the ass-kissy way people speak to you and God around here. Gotta think good thoughts around Jesus or else, sort of thing.”

Claire fell silent, her head bowed for a long moment. She saw the shadow of an overhead circling crow on the ground. It was a distorted and sickening shadow, as were all caused by Wormwood.

Then with startling clarity the moment arrived. Claire whirled the revolver and fired and vaporized the graven image of Jesus Christ in one motion. The gunshot echoed throughout the valley, and when it died out it was replaced by Claire’s joyous laughter.

“OH!!! OH MY GOD!!! YOU BLEW UP REAL GOOD, JESUS, REAL GOOD!!!” Claire yelled between body shaking spasms of laughter. The “blew up real good” thing was something her father used to say back when things were good. Claire had always assumed that he had got it off one old time TV show or another.

She managed to return the weapon to its case and tucked it in. Then she fell to her knees laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks. Upon composing herself to some degree, she went to the stump and found that the chipped base had somehow remained in place, but nothing else. She imagined that the base must have become airborne and landed where it had been before. Instead of interpreting that as an omen, Claire began to laugh even harder. When she finally gathered herself, she figured that she owed the departed Lord an explanation.

“I had to break up with you, Jesus,” she said. “Sorry I made it sound like we were playing Russian roulette, but I figured I owed you that for all the shit you’ve me through. The dum-dum was in the breech, right where I placed it while in the house. To be fair, I did think about turning it on myself, but I got over that when I realized that the only part of this situation that is my fault is letting it continue without my trying to do anything about it.”

“But maybe you’ll rate a second chance down the line,” she said. “Got me a bus ticket to the city–1492, you know? Aunt Rae, right? If you really are, you’ll know where to find me.”

Nora in Five Acts by Leila Allison

Act One

Nora Lynn Manning was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on 6 December 1941. Her parents, Arlene and Jay, were high school sweethearts who realized too late that they did not like each other all that much. Still, they chose to marry before Arlene began to show. Like so many hideously bad ideas, it was considered the “right thing” to do.

For Americans not named Jay Manning, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one day after Nora’s birth, was an infamous event. But those Americans hadn’t spent the last six months working nights at a gas station and arguing constantly with a perpetually petulant pregnant wife in a crappy apartment near the stockyards by day; the experience exposed a hitherto unknown silver lining in the prospect of going to war. So, Jay took advantage of his family being at the hospital and enlisted in the Army on the 8th. Then he promptly died in a bus crash on his way to Basic Training two days after Christmas (he was the only fatality in the accident). Some people are like that; they simply don’t have the wherewithal to outlast the second paragraph. It’s why God invented bus crashes.

Jay’s death did not weigh heavily on Arlene; oh, it made her sad, but she was grateful that her lack of tears was explained by “shock.” She thought she was enduring it all very well. But a reaction to her lack of a “proper” reaction germinated in her mind. A tremendous guilt took, like cancer. And from the tumor, insistent little voices, barely audible at first, rose in pitch and questioned her humanity.

But before the voices shouted down rational thinking, there was reality and an infant to deal with. Even after her mind turned on her, Arlene had sticktoitiveness. She moved in with her folks and got a Rosie the Riveter type of job. She also took stenography courses in the evening with an eye on earning a living once the war ended and the men returned. Arlene had all kinds of big plans. But in late 1944, she began to do odd things, such as stealing pepper shakers from restaurants. And then you’d catch her behaving like someone persecuted by invisible insects, which is a fair comparison to the swarms of voices that filled her mind. Two months after VJ day Arlene took a dive off Steel Bridge into an empty gulch. Along with some seventy odd pepper shakers was a two word suicide note: “I’m sorry.” They were two more children murdered by doing the right thing.

Not quite four when Arlene died, Nora had only mental snapshots of her mother; all in black and white. But for a few years she had a happy childhood living with her maternal grandparents, Ethel and Tom Anderson. (Her father’s parents, the Mannings, kept their distance; word was they somehow blamed Nora for their son’s death; a sort of sin she had inherited from Arlene. Fortunately for us, they had moved to Kansas and rate no further mention on account of being assholes.)

The only problem with the Andersons was a consumption pyramid composed almost entirely of lard fried foods, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Raleigh cigarettes (they collected the coupons, which was something that Nora did later as an adult). But they loved her and perhaps the only good times Nora had in life were in their care. But Tom dropped dead from a heart attack at fifty-three when Nora was nine and Ethel suffered a stroke the next summer; it didn’t kill her (she’d beat on for another six years), but disabled her to the degree that she spent the rest of her life in the care of an older sister, who had no room for a child. This resulted in Foster Care because no other relative came forward to claim Nora.

Maybe it is unkind to disparage the institution of Foster Care, after all the next Marilyn Monroe has to come from somewhere. But there was once a time when fostering was how some people augmented their income. They would bring in as many kids as possible and collect cash every month from the state for each one and use as little as possible on the children. Nora spent five and a half years working as a slave on a farm, ostensibly “raised” by the Ollsens (who never had fewer than six Foster kids). “That’s Ollsen with two L’s”–was what Delores Ollsen told everyone, like it was something special. “That’s Cow Cooze, with three O’s” was Nora’s estimation of Mrs Ollsen, a pushy loudmouth who often took her pick of stuff that had been sent to the children. Mr. Ollsen hardly ever spoke and Nora believed (correctly) that he saw no difference between children and livestock.

There are some seriously fucked up kids in foster homes, and the Ollsens sure knew how to pick em. They had one named Royce, who was a year older than Nora. He attacked and raped her when she was thirteen, while she was alone in the barn, feeding the Ollsen’s horse Topper. After it was over, Royce told her to keep her mouth shut, or he’d kill her. That woke something very dark and cold in Nora. She arranged to be alone in the barn again a few days later and made sure Royce saw her enter with Topper’s treat bag. Royce took the bait and the instant he arrived at Topper’s stall she whirled and blasted him in the head with a horseshoe she had stashed in her coveralls. One shot was all Nora needed.

Royce lay there, unconscious, bleeding like hell; she enjoyed seeing that. Although she was slightly disappointed to see Royce still breathing, she figured that maybe some good could come from that down the line. As planned, Nora fled the barn, and after making double-certain no one was around, she dropped the bloody horseshoe down the well. She then made herself feel the filthy shame and pain that being raped had caused so she could whip up some tears to shed when she ran crying into the house and told the Ollsens that Topper had kicked Royce in the head (no way Topper would be in danger; they liked him better than the kids; probably checked to make certain he hadn’t chipped a hoof first).

Upon the conclusion of her perfectly executed plan, Nora ran into the pasture and began to laugh and laugh until she nearly peed. She made certain that she memorized every detail of her victory, the angle of the sun, the breeze in her hair, all of it. Nora knew it was destined to be one of the happiest, most important moments in her life; a definer that would forever separate her from the weak.

Royce didn’t regain consciousness for twelve hours, and he was never quite the same after that. He could still work but he’d acquired a stammer and one side of his face appeared to be lower than the other. Nora didn’t give a shit if he told, but figured he wouldn’t, all things considered. Anyway, he said he couldn’t remember. Maybe so, but he sure gave Nora a wide berth after that. Every now and again at the supper table she’d gaze at him until he finally looked up. She’d smile, wink and mouth “whammo” then spear something off his plate, whether she wanted it or not, because it was his cost for breathing.

Act Two

Nora had common sense, but she was not strongly educated. She could read and write (most of that won while still with the Andersons), but was never allowed much time to do homework (the Ollsens grudgingly sent the kids to school because it was one of the very few foster parent requirements). Nora was able to see herself objectively. She understood that she was pretty and clever enough to do a whole lot better than the Ollsen’s farm, thus she began planning to get away from them and the dusty state of Oklahoma (which had hardly been good to her) long before she reached her majority. Running away was no good without someplace to run to. Marriage, however, would be the quickest ticket.

She found a nice enough, cute enough fella named Joe Hazzard working at the neighbor’s farm. After a few months of one way, insincere yet convincing wooing on her part, Nora eloped with Joe on 7 December 1957, the day after her sixteenth birthday.

At that time sixteen was a legal marrying age, as long as you had permission of your guardian. The Ollsens eagerly gave their blessing because, well, they had become a little afraid of Nora. Although nothing could be proven, they eventually suspected her involvement in the Royce affair. It didn’t seem coincidental that the girl’s confidence and cheerfulness should have grown vastly immediately after the boy’s downfall. Moreover, there was something about Nora that made her uneasy to be around. You couldn’t threaten her with a damn thing because of a queer light in her eyes that dared you to try; and if you dared ask her about anything, she’d just smile and wink, all disturbing like. Always smiling; always winking. Since they weren’t any further evolved than livestock, the Ollsen’s smelled danger on Nora, so they let her go. Besides, Foster kids could be had by the gross.

Nora didn’t love Joe Hazzard because she did not believe in love. But, again, he was cute and nice enough, and provided her with a cool sounding last name. She was not going to be all in for anything for the long haul. Ever since she could remember Nora knew she would die young. The certainty was always with her; it never scared her and in times of pain it was a comfort. Instead of waiting for the other horseshoe to drop, so to speak, Mrs. Nora Hazzard meant to grab as much life as she could.

Nora figured she’d have to put two years into the marriage before she could run away. Age eighteen was a magicland in her mind, tantalizingly out of reach. Until then, history tried to repeat itself; Joe took a job at an all night gas station in Norman, Kansas, where they settled because his car couldn’t go an inch farther; Nora got an assembly line job at a textile plant. But instead of stupidly “catching pregnant” Nora insisted on birth control (later in her brief life she became a firm advocate of the pill, which was not yet available in the late fifties). She gave Joe a “Free Pass” as long as he “suited up.” The last thing she wanted was a permanent connection with anyone, living or unborn.

Then Nora’s stars shone kindly, if only in the sky just once. Grandma Anderson passed when Nora was seventeen. A registered letter from an insurance company contained a check for five thousand dollars. Somehow the loot had passed through many hands that would have snatched it, but there it was. All hers. Nora was dumbfounded and grateful that the mailman hadn’t come when Joe was home. A new plan was hatched; Nora was extremely quick to adapt.

A few days later Joe came home and found that Nora had left him a goodbye letter, a thousand dollar passbook account in his name and her wedding ring. The letter was nearly as terse as her mother’s suicide note, but the message was clear: “It’s been a hoot, hon–but forever is an awful long time to spend together.” Joe knew that this day would come and didn’t look too hard for his wife. Besides, he too had found her a tad uneasy to be around.

Nora recalled the advice some dead guy gave people about heading west and figured it was as good a plan as any. After spending five hundred dollars on a solid used car and twenty on a necklace with a horseshoe charm on it that she just had to have, Nora headed west in a rambling Route 66 sort of way.

Act Three

Nora fell in love for the only time in her life in 1960, at Charleston, Washington. She had run out of west to explore due to the Pacific Ocean getting in the way. She tried Canada, but they wanted to know too much about her, so she turned south at the border and headed toward the Puget Sound that she had found to be like an enchanted fairyland, compared to Oklahoma.

Anyway, the state of Washington was a good enough place to stop; the car was used up and she was down to her last fifty bucks– earned from picking fruit in Oregon. Nora didn’t know if she was still married to Joe or not–she neither took action nor was served because she was pretty tough to find–so, she figured she probably was. But it came in handy when she wanted it to. When folks got too nosey Nora told them her husband got killed in a bus wreck in Bum-fucked Egypt while serving in the Army. But few people got nosey with Nora, because of the uneasiness she could create at will.

She sold the car to a junk dealer for twenty five bucks, took a room in a converted great house that had fallen on hard times and won a job working at a hardware store all in one day. She met a young woman who worked at the store and who also lived downstairs in the same building. A fellow sinner, one just as capable of creating unease: her name was Kaaren.

“Why two a’s?” Nora asked, thinking about Mrs. Ollsen, while they were seated in the nearby White Pig tavern. Neither were of drinking age, but pretty young women always attracted male customers, so any pretty gal who looked close enough to twenty-one was welcome.

Kaaren smiled and struck a match on the bar top. She lit a cigarette and leaned close and whispered, “Cos I fucking say so–wanna make something of it?” Then she playfully reached out and tapped the horseshoe charm on Nora’s necklace. “This means something, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Sure it does–you wear it everyday. Nobody wears the same nothing necklace everyday unless she’s a nun.” Kaaren was raised a ward of the Catholic church and openly shared her opinions on the subject of nuns.

And for the first time, Nora told the Royce story. No tears, all laughter. She never once considered telling Joe, but she knew that Kaaren would understand. She knew that there would be that right person to tell it to someday. Someone who’d understand with humor and a singular insolence that you find only in the one right person for you.

“Good thing Mr. Ed wasn’t there–the fucker would have ratted–”

The bartender brought two glasses of wine that they hadn’t ordered.

“What’s this about, Earl?”

“Guys at the second table–like you don’t know…Sure’d be nice if you’d hit the goddamn ashtray once in a while.”

Kaaren stood, raised her glass to the guys and whinnied like a horse. Then without looking away Kaaren poured her wine into the bar towel bucket, much to Earl’s annoyance.

Nora laughed and followed suit. Yes, she thought, I told the right person.

Act Four

We have arrived at the part of Nora’s story that some of you will not like much. But we should hope that there will be people who won’t like what happens to us, after the good parts have been told, when our stories reach the mandatory “The End.”

Nothing much happened to Nora after discovering love, except for a life that contained more humor than pain. How does one properly convey the passage of fourteen years with words? Which symbols does one use to make the connection? Imagine seeing snow for the first time at twenty-one. Think about five hour laughter filled all-night conversations at formica tables in avocado kitchens. Imagine speeding across the sky when it was still possible to live forever and plenty of time to hold onto foolish dreams that you know will fall apart upon touch. Maybe those images are good enough to know the second half of Nora’s story.

Then came the day when something inside her—something that perhaps wanted to avoid the shabby years of analysis and regret–threw a switch that released bad, hungry cells, which multiplied swiftly and created something that was too late to do anything about when the doctor finally let the light in.

Act Five

The fact that death comes for everyone is the only thing fair about it. When death comes suddenly from a poor decision on the freeway, it can be viewed as merciful; when it lingers in white hospital halls, indifferent to the task, then death is an unfair, lazy, cruel bastard. A life may be lived low, but death shouldn’t slouch. Nor does it compare with a cat. A cat follows her nature, death has choices.

And so it was for Nora, who lay dying of uterine cancer at thirty-three. She figured that death had to be a guy. She named him Roy.

“Roy’s coming tonight,” Nora said to Kaaren. It had been hours since she had last spoken. But Kaaren knew she’d come back because saying “No” to an enema shouldn’t be a person’s last words.

“Hi there,” Kaaren said.

“How am I looking?”

“Like Peter Cushing.”

Nora smiled. That’s what she loved about Kaaren. “Fuck you.”

Those were her last words; much better, poetic, thought Kaaren.

After it was over, Kaaren fastened the horseshoe necklace around her friend’s neck. Nora had given it to her when Roy became a sure thing.

“I can’t keep this. Show God your medal.”

December in Saragun Springs

The hall has been rented, the orchestra engaged and the booby traps have been set, hidden and forgotten.

Next month Saragun Springs becomes another publishing site, but it will not be just another publishing site due to the remarkably productive cases of mental imbalances that direct the run of the place. It is run by myself and Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar (often DWB and/or “The Drifter.”)

One key difference is the Springs remains a real dimesion in the creative universe. There is a Pygmy Goat named Daisy Kloverleaf who is as real as a person gets on this side of the veil. There are over two hundred various residents of the realm, and each one of us thjnks it is a high and fine idea to share space with writers and artists looking for new places to show their works, which all begins next month on Monday, 5 January.

The set up is rather free form and other than the Weekly Drifter every Sunday whatever happens will do just that. Mainly, items that will be selected will run daily and since that isn’t too hard to present, we are all for it.

There are cynics who feel that such an announcement has all the depth of introducing an individual snowflake during a blizzard. True, but there are also occasions when the universe can be improved by the silence of cynics. “Shut the fuck up” can be expressed in infinite ways, which are dictated by the patience of the advisor.

Today we once again present the Submission Guidelines as written by Dale. We aim to keep the site simple, but that should not be associated in any way with a lack of effort or caring on our part.

This current month will contain odds and ends with reruns of works presented throughout the year. It will all get new enough, anon.

Life is a draw up the play in the dirt sort of thing. It keeps the fear up and the energy flows. Such is the path we shall trod. Things will get gloss on them as time goes by, but I hope we never get slick.

Leila

The Submissions Guidelines For Saragun Springs

The Drifter Presents: Joan Crawford at Midnight; or, Overacting vs Overreacting

(all images provided by The Drifter)

F. Scott Fitzgerald called Joan Crawford the quintessential flapper (which, for Fitzgerald, meant the quintessential literary woman) because she combined two qualities into one.

She had a desperate-hearted love of life, or a love of life that was tinged with desperation, and she had it more intensely than anyone else.

He also disparaged her acting abilities. He said it was nearly impossible to write for her. (He was a screenwriter who usually didn’t even receive writing credits.) It was nearly impossible to write for her because of the tendency she had to overact, he claimed.

But there’s a very fine line between overacting, on the stage or screen, and over-re-acting, which happens in life.

To me, when I watch it now, much of Joan’s overacting on screen seems like nothing more than the OVERREACTING that certain people are all-too-capable of when they find themselves in emotionally charged situations.

Joan overacts on screen because she overreacted in life half the time.

She did both because she was an artist. And artists are people whose moods sometimes, or even most of the time, get the better of them.

Because it comes with the territory.

Art is about emotion, moods, atmospheres, feelings (as well as thoughts and ideas but here we’re focusing on mood).

Joan Crawford had a genius-level intellect on many levels.

And one thing she understood far better than most people was the ways people’s moods get the better of them.

And she understood this even as her own moods would get the better of her.

All of this comes out very clearly when you watch her, with close attention, on the screen.

It’s best to do it in a partially darkened room when you’re wide awake in the middle of the night with good creative energy but not creating anything, just absorbing more for later.

Try to find your own sweet spot regarding medications that can keep you buzzing while not taking you over the edge.

Breathe the midnight deeply, relax, and be very alive.

It’s best to focus on some of the movies she made during the 1950s.

For me, this decade is Joan’s high point.

Before that, she hadn’t fully matured. After that, she started to become a bit of a parody of herself. (There are exceptions in her work in either direction in time.)

It doesn’t have to be a great movie (in technical terms). All it needs to do is have the great Joan Crawford in it.

Watch the way her face moves.

The beautiful way her face moves and never stops moving.

And what it shows. (And she knows it.)

Joan Crawford understands (all too well) when people are playing her (or trying to).

She’s always willing to give other people a chance to be their best selves (but watches very closely when they veer off the track – because she’s been hurt before).

She knows that the world is made up of people who need one another but also can’t live together (or not peacefully).

She can read the reactions to what she says as deeply as if she were reading a book (which she also did much of during her life).

She knows that more sadness is up around the next bend.

But she also communicates the Dickinsonian fact that hope springs eternally.

She knows that humans are beautiful and ugly by turns, and that being ugly inside is much more important (in the wrong way) than being beautiful on the outside.

And she knows that outer beauty is what Jesus called “the light of the body.”

This exists for those can see it. It is an inner radiation that travels outward even when the subject (its source) is unaware that it’s doing so.

It’s the reason Joan was just as beautiful at 70 as she was at 20, even though she chain-smoked and chain-drank for most of her years.

Seven (or Fourteen) Reasons Why Bob Dylan is a Writer for Our Time by Dr. Dale Williams, aka The Drifter

When the dust settles, one man, at least, will still be standing.

He might only stand five feet seven inches in his socks (Eminem is, and Kerouac was, five-eight, a precursor and an heir), but Alexander Pope, one of the dozen or so greatest English poets of all time, was four feet six inches tall. (Pope died in 1744 at the age of 56.)

And Bob Dylan has more than a little of Pope’s verbal resources, great heart, wild intelligence, deep soul, artistic energy. If “Eloisa to Abelard,” by Pope, doesn’t break your heart and make you want to go on living, nothing will.

The Drifter has compiled seven reasons why, with their flipsides, Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel Prize. The reasons are brief and they are meant for quick reading in a busy world; but they are also meant to be pondered upon and thought about more later for any and all who are interested. (And meant to be USED.)

ONE: He both does, and does not, care what he looks like, and he looks like it.

TWO: He has done a lot of drugs but hasn’t done so many drugs that he isn’t still going strong at 84. The life of the artist, any artist, is a balancing act.

THREE: He puts out material at a relentless pace as if this were the most important thing in the world, and then does little to promote it.

FOUR: His “style” of life and work are ancient and modern.

FIVE: His work can exist “on the page” or in the air.

SIX: He does, and does not, care/s about “quality.”

SEVEN: He goes out into the world – while wearing disguises.

(Afterthought: Those last two should be hung out with like zen koans…)