Scattered Thoughts

Wind in the Reeds

David Sklar

They say he was there when the gods made the world—and he would have offered to help, except that they looked like they had it in hand. So he sat in the absence of reeds and played on the absence of a flute, and where he dawdled those things came to be.

The gods took the credit of course—that’s what gods do: they make things, and tell you to worship, and never worry about where they got the idea. They say, “Aren’t I clever, I made a horse.” And yeah, they made the bones and the muscle, the blood that pumps through the horse’s veins. But that feeling you get when you ride a horse through a meadow in the sun—that comes from him.

And on the sixth day, when the gods had done most of the work, but before they could bicker over what was whose, he played them a lullaby, and they slept through the seventh day.

They take credit for that, too, as if the sabbath were their idea.

And while they slept he danced in the world and played his music there, and the notes of his pipe made the wind beneath the wind, hidden underneath the wind you can hear and feel. If ever you feel a breeze on the hairs of your arms when no wind blows, now you know where it’s from. That’s why he still walks in the world, when the gods cannot.

It’s better this way. The world is unfinished, and good people suffer—sometimes a lot. But if you die in a snowstorm, you die in a snowstorm—you don’t get turned into salt because of somebody else’s squabble over who created squid.

This is why we sing in churches, and why we rest on the seventh day—it may be why we sing and rest at all—because of the man who stole the world when the gods were almost done.

Dead Alice

Gar Lipow

Nobody ever mysteriously disappeared from her restaurant that did not deserve to, she always insisted. Anyway, the police never proved a thing. Dead Alice lived, if that was the right word, in a cloud of rumors-most of them started by her. She was palely pretty; anyone could see that she was 22 at most. Anyone could have seen that for at least 40+ years – since THAT MAN wrote THAT SONG. (One of Dead Alice’s supernatural gifts was the ability to speak in capital letters.)

She denied being the original Alice in the stories. “Dodson would not have known a fact if it had bit him”. Her tone implied this was something she had tested personally.

No one ever saw Dead Alice eat or drink, at least no one who survived. To those rude enough and brave to enough to ask directly, she always replied: “I’m sure you would not wish to pry into intimate details.”

Dead Alice slew monsters. “I won’t tolerate anything in my territory that tries to be scarier than me” she explained.

David Sklar writes in the spaces between the impossible magic of legend, the inscrutable magic of dreams, and the breathtaking everyday magic of the world in which we live. His first novella, Shadow of the Antlered Bird, will be published by Drollerie Press as an e-book in 2008 and as a chapbook in 2009. His work has appeared in various publications, including Wormwood Review, Paterson Literary Review, and upcoming fiction in Space & Time. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, their 2-year-old son, and a retired housecat from Cleveland. Visit his website for more fiction and poetry from David Sklar.

As a long time environmental activist and sometime journalist with a strong technical background, Gar Lipow has spent years immersed in the subject of efficiency and renewable energy. His writing is predominantly non-fiction, but he occasionally “dabbles in drabbles.” Visit his website for more information.

Half Man, Half Ish

Shannon Anthony

She hadn’t planned to keep him a secret. She just didn’t know enough Spanish to explain. Carmen imagined calling the Minister of Economic Development’s Business-English bluff. I found a little merman in your mother’s dog’s dish. Unless this primitively accessorized person is your eldest wife?

Staring at Carmen, the old woman was repeating what sounded like words on a Mexican menu. The Minister paraphrased: “It is simply the fish about which she is so worrying.”

“A fish?” Carmen turned innocent eyes to the woman, a protective hand around the glass that held her merman.

He must’ve come from the pot in which shellfish was being boiled alive in her (or Global Petroleum’s) honor. By falling? Diving? Leaping suicidally? She’d searched in vain for latex gloves, salad tongs, a slotted spoon. Finally she’d just grabbed him by his seaweed-green hair and plopped him into her Pepsi con limón.

“The fish,” said the Minister. “All the fish. And the water birds. Of our ocean. Of your oil drilling.”

“Our oil drilling, Minister,” Carmen said. “That is, ours and yours.” Fish and waterfowl. Yesterday it wouldn’t have gotten to her. Yesterday she’d accepted that humanity couldn’t go green. The world didn’t work that way: We’re just too mean.

But now… “I want to protect you,” she whispered on the flight back to the mainland, though her merman was in a tight-capped bottle of tourist-priced water, like a worm in tequila. “Protect you from…people like me.”

He must’ve spoken the languages of the Mediterranean and Caribbean: Greek and Arabic and Creole and everything Romantic. OK, he wasn’t a man, exactly. But lower limbs are negligible; everybody knows that opposable thumbs are the evolutionary be-all and end-all.

Her hybrid lost his iridescence, and one day she found him floating in his bowl. When she started to cry, he opened his eyes. Gazing past Carmen, he sighed: “Oil.”

Only then she did register the tanker spill on the TV. He’d understood all along. Climate change must’ve made it a matter of English or extinction. “Our ocean!” She cried harder.

Well, we wouldn’t die in her beachfront suite. She scooped him up and opened the door, hoping the oil wasn’t already –

But it was. She retched. Squirting out of her hand, he splashed into the muck. “No!”

But — but –

He was…frolicking. Wallowing in it. And — he wasn’t alone!

“Sweet Jesus,” said a man with a video camera. “Lookit the little maggots.”

They guzzled it all up, and her merman came crawling back. “We need more, Carmen!”

“You eat petroleum?”

“You killed our fish.”

“You like it.”

“We need it.”

Carmen had to laugh. “Sorry pal. That stuff’s expensive.”

The merman shrugged. “You’ll spill more.”

“We’ll see about that.” Carmen winked into the camera, knowing that billions of people were going to see this. Naive little man. He had no idea how the world worked. Humankind can do anything, including go green, if it means that in the process we get to be mean.

Shannon Anthony lives in Minneapolis. She is a submissions editor for the pulp-fiction podcast Well Told Tales. Her stories have appeared in Brink Magazine, Menda City Review, 971 MENU, and Sein und Werden, among other places. More information about her published and forthcoming work can be found at her MySpace page.