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Issue 12 - November 2008 - Prose
Territories by Christopher Woods
[A young man in a suit.]
I didn’t cry. Neither did anyone else. Not the day Dad left, or even today, at his memorial service. I’ve been thinking about it, why no one showed any emotion. It’s probably because Dad didn’t get a real funeral. You know, bonafide?
No, my Dad was just gone, body and soul. Poof! A flash of light, and he was outa here.
Dad was a church usher for seventeen years. Where did it get him? Overlooked, that’s where. All his work for the old parish didn’t mean jackshit when we moved to the new parish. It had to get to him, I know it did. The day before he went away, I saw him standing in the living room. He was looking out the window. Sad look on his face. Did he know what was about to happen?
Father Gronowski, from the new parish, came to bless our new house that day. He went room by room, dousing everything with holy water. Man, I thought sure he would find my Swedish porno collection, but I got lucky.
When Father Gronowski left, I saw Dad pass him a fifty. A tip, you know. Dad was trying to cover his bases. You never know when things might go apeshit.
They did the next morning. I was in the kitchen eating pancakes. All of a sudden, the room got real cold. I had goose bumps. Mom was all white in the face. “Go check on your father,” she said.
He had gone out to get the paper. But when I got there, he was nowhere. Just his clothes, in a pile on the sidewalk. Shirt, slacks, socks, and his black shoes. [beat] Dad wasn’t big on underwear.
Where the hell was he? I knelt down and touched his things. I got a whiff of his Old Spice. And something really strange. The sidewalk was all slippery. I ran my finger across it. It tasted like bacon grease.
I smelled that grease the rest of the day. When the cops showed up, and that night when the neighbors started bringing casseroles.
Then things got complicated. Mom called Father Quinn from our old parish. Asked him to say the funeral mass for Dad. But he said, call the priest at your new parish. Shit! After all his ushering, they had already written Dad off. Seventeen years for nothing, Mom said.
That’s when Mrs. B, our neighbor, came over. She brought three bean salad. Nasty stuff, let me tell you. Anyway, she said they ran into the same problem trying to get their daughter baptized at the parish where Mrs. B went to grade school. The old parish said no. You moved away, try the new parish. It’s all about territory, Mrs. B said. And she threw up her hands.
You know what Mr. And Mrs. B did? Hell, they took matters into their own hands. Baptized their little girl in the backyard with the garden hose. With two pink flamingoes for witnesses. Mrs. B said parishes shouldn’t be run like franchises. We’re not talking hamburgers and auto parts.
Mom finally got hold of Father Gronowski from the new parish. I’ll bet Dad’s tip was still in his pocket. Here’s the deal. He told my Mom that Dad couldn’t have a mass. No way. People who die from this spontaneous combustion stuff don’t get a proper church send-off. He said this blowing-up business is too exotic for the American Church.
Yeah, heart attack or cancer, that’s the ticket for a mass. Father Gronowski said Dad died like they do in exotic places - Ceylon, Bangladesh. Mom was crying, and she said, “Father, we don’t know exotic. We’ve only been to Hawaii, when we won the parish raffle.”
In the end, we had to settle for a service at the funeral home. Oh, Father Gronowski showed up. He read some prayer I know he swiped from a missionary book. And when all was said and done, Mom tipped him. His pockets are jingling is how I see it.
Mom’s had enough. Me too. From now on, forget parishes. Turf wars. They can go to hell.
Hey, you think we expected this blowing-up stuff? Bacon grease? No way. But we got punished anyway. Be careful. It could happen to you.
Wherever Dad is, I hope he’s not an usher. I hope he’s proud of us. Wherever he is, I hope there’s room for us too.
[BLACKOUT]
Paper Pegasus by Lewis Young
My plan was to travel for a while. At thirty years old I felt my life was empty, and I thought some pseudo-spiritual journey would be the answer, but it wasn’t.
I was abducted in India, but I had not crashed here in a plane. I had not entered illegally. I had no enemies and my country was not at war.
Six years passed. Six years not knowing my purpose, or the state of the world. Perhaps my country was at war. Perhaps the war had been a secret, or during my travels the war started and I missed the announcement. I guess I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My captors appeared to be Korean soldiers. They all wore full army uniform, with the South Korean flag emblazoned on the shoulder. The Koreans did not speak English. I did not speak Korean, so shouting and pointing was their choice of communication, hand gestures were mine. I was given food and clothes (the clothes were white, loose-fitting t-shirts and trousers), and on the occasions that the Koreans were able to interpret my hand gestures, I received the materials I requested (as long as they were deemed unable to assist in my suicide) – things such as paper and chalk. My own confusion regarding the granting of these particular privileges faded as the years passed.
By the looks of things, my room had been painted white with the best of intentions, but these intentions died thirty years ago. Since then, the walls had become cracked and faded. The sorry excuse for a window consisted of a space in the wall that was home to six wrought iron bars preventing my escape. There was a single bed situated at the far end of the room that was covered by black pillows and black sheets. These were removed by the guards once a week and cleaned. There was a chair and a desk which had nothing on it. There was nothing else.
I had picked up a few basics of origami whilst at school. They had a video that featured a Chinese woman demonstrating the art. I loved watching her construct elaborate animals and objects from a single sheet of paper. I learnt a couple of basics from the video to try and impress my friends and parents – boats, stars and boxes – the simple stuff.
Twenty years later, I had the privilege of being able to refine my skills – or learn new ones – much quicker than someone with responsibilities such as a job or a family to get in the way, being locked in solitary confinement indefinitely. I asked the guards for paper. I began to experiment with different methods of folding, working out the basic techniques of origami. Despite the guards granting me the materials I requested, they would storm into my room each night and take away everything I had made. The first few times, they had set fire to my work in front of me, and after that, I could only assume – due to the smell of burning – that they destroyed the other pieces in a furnace somewhere in the facility. As if to contradict their actions, they would bring me a new stock of paper each morning. It would have been entirely logical of me to believe that the guards were abiding laws written by a schizophrenic.
Within a fortnight of self-taught origami, I had mastered the ‘crane’. By the end of the third week, I had a perfectly acceptable ‘swan’. By the end of the month – an ‘elephant’. The guards began to examine my work – perhaps even admire it – before taking it away to destroy it. This was a minor success for me. I felt I was beginning to get through to them – not only was I not dismayed by their destruction, I was getting better at my art.
The guards would come into the room around seven o’clock in the evening, leaving me about three paperless hours before lights out. Looking past the iron bars of my room’s window, I could see the many constellations of stars in the night sky. Maybe it was a side-effect of spending so much bloody time making paper animals, but for every constellation I recognised, all I could think was “That would make for some good origami.” I scanned the night sky and picked out Pegasus. Pegasus looks a little bit like The Big Dipper, but the other way around. The ‘real’ Pegasus was a winged horse in Greek mythology. The legend tells that the immortal Pegasus was carrying Bellerophon to Mount Olympus in search of Heaven, however Zeus intervened and threw Bellerophon from the back of Pegasus, crippling him. Zeus ended Pegasus’s immortality by granting him both the gift of death and a constellation in the stars.
At least that’s how I remember the story anyway; I think there are a few versions.
The day after I first spotted Pegasus in the night sky, I started work on my paper replica. It was the most intricate work I had attempted so far, taking me eight days before I had managed to even get the legs right. I needed larger paper. The simpler animals were okay on A4 size, but I am by no means a master of the art. The next day I conversed with the guards via large hand gestures that I needed something bigger. They delivered within the hour and I began to work with the ten sheets of A1 size paper they had provided.
I moved my work from the desk to the floor.
The hardest part of Pegasus to perfect were the wings. The wings are the defining feature that sets Pegasus apart as a Greek legend, and not just a Yorkshire horse. It took over a fortnight to perfect them.
Every night they would destroy my work, and every morning I would start again.
At around seven o’clock on a regular Tuesday evening, six years into my captivity, the guards came to destroy my work. They burst into the room with eyes as wide as dinner plates, but there was no trace of the ten sheets of A1 paper they had provided that morning. There was no trace of any failed attempts at Pegasus. There was no trace of any successful attempts. And there was no trace of their prisoner.
A Korean soldier by the name of Hyun-Shik stood in the doorway, scanning the room. Something caught his eye. He walked over to the middle of the room and gently picked up an object from the floor. He turned and held it up for the other guards to see, and he smiled.
He proceeded to march out of the room, taking the single feather to his superior.