Ode To Thorns, Or Edits Rather - PART ONE
Story:
Dot was born staccato. Clipped cry. Abrupt mind. Snare-drum soul. The baby embodiment of a philharmonic conductor’s unproductive cough in the finale of a gaydeathvirus received while bloodswapping on a bed of roses - (thorns can be vindictive little cunts) - the electro-pulse of her infant corpus implied a symphonic underworld trapped behind a freak cork stifling thoughts/melodies she might have yielded under better chromosomal tunings…clipped foreskins of metaphorical genius littered the birthing room and the flooring chortled like Alcatraz ice water at the fugitive shards of truncated neural emissions, and all the while angels wept at Dot’s post-fetal eyes which revealed the biography of a billion unhatched masterpieces.
“She’s got my eyes!†said Dad, a neckfleshy man who wrote limericks bashing Hispanics, whom he described as “taco-niggers invading the Greater Cleveland area.â€
Narrator:
So went the carefully picked over opening of Polk’s new story, and rereading it later his thoughts were of his wife who wouldn’t approve of the word ‘nigger,’ even in irony. He cringed at the baubles of hypermetaphors, show-prose, word play, fearing that it would alienate his wife, ripen her anxiety, and when she’d come to the encapsulated ugliness of “nigger†in the second paragraph she’d be transformed into a porcupine for days, and for what? The piece had no message, no voice. He was a fraud, and the use of ‘nigger’ represented the full extent of his lazy, uninventive determination to wake up the reader at any cost.
The mention of Cleveland, he felt, was another exemplary proof of shortcomings. He’d never been to Cleveland and knew nothing of it. The word evokes in him the mundane, melancholic American city, while he’s not conscious of the reason: the name echoes the middle-class conformity of Leave It To Beaver’s postwar dream family, mixed with the idea of “cleave,†the stubborn act of holding on. Cleveland stays, stubbornly, and he moves onward in search of edits and self-loathing.
Story:
Dot’s repressed brilliance didn’t come from Dad, whose eyes couldn’t recognize the significance of what would later be revered in literary circles as the “aidsmaestro metaphor,†authored above by his own daughter. Hypothetically he’d read the opening strophe as “She was born blah blah blah,†which is why, by default, Dot later dedicated her first opus, “The Hemorrhaging Pig,†(Pushcart Prize, 2014) to Mom, a.k.a Cubic Zirconium Bitch, who died, haggard and friendless, while giving birth to Dot, despite a succinct, bloodless delivery.
Narrator:
Polk was uneasy about this intriguingly tiresome new passage, which introduced a first person, self-referential narrative, specifically, a first-person narrative wherein the narrator refers to herself in third person omniscient. He bristled at the possibility of his own father, a kind, perceptive man, feeling indicted; and Polk’s mom - a true gem, loved by all - the polar opposite of a “cubic zirconium bitch.†He felt somewhat protected from familial exegeses by the contrived narrative layers, which may prove to be refreshing in an avant-garde way.
Polk liked his line about the billion unhatched symphonies. He read this line again and again, and then the line about Dot’s dad’s eyes; and following the trajectory, he observed his description of Dot’s mom’s eyes and beyond, recalling how he had cobbled these sentences and paragraphs in beleaguered joy, anesthetizing an afternoon’s passing. But now he regarded the following lines with sober, self-righteous shame for his younger, naïve indulgences - such wisdom and judgment twelve days after a rough draft can bring! He was distraught, and left the remainder of the draft for two months. The untouched paragraphs consisted of:
Story:
Dot’s mom’s eyes, in photographs, (because Dot would never see Mom’s eyes, since Mom died in childbirth) seem too pure for musical allegories or disquisitions. Yet…her grass-stain-on-denim, bronze-flecked irises brought rosin to the bow of her gaze - a glance that carried the creek-wisdom of floorboards underfoot a future king stepping to the back room of a vintage conservatory to learn the beginnings of a Bach Air from a Welsh exchange student named Aeronwen or Bronwen, both meaning “white, fair, blessed.†Notwithstanding her eyes, Mom was a bipolar bitch, resented locally as the thorny headmistress of the Costume Jewelry Emporium. White and fair - but not blessed, especially the day she died, and any future king imprisoned in the deep lacquer of her irises died with her, which means he was never a future king to begin with.
Mom’s funeral attendees were Dot, Dad and Rita “Chiquita†Rodriguez, a retired female boxer who wandered in by mistake with a male piñata shaped like a pig in a sombrero, netting dad material for future limericks. It was a poor attendance for Mom’s young, fetching corpse (thorns can be so vindictive) so the token Mexican extranjero stayed on to comfort Dad and baby with the staccato cry. “Wa-!†Rita must have been the Aeronwen (or Bronwen) to Dad’s future king, because by chemical decree, Rita became Dad’s new sig. oth., and by default, the pig became Dot’s, some would argue, by metaphorical decree.
A sudden rift grew between Rita and the piñata. Rita, on the one hand, was tolerant of Dad’s disparaging limericks - her combat-stoicism from boxing manifested in the ability to separate the writer from his work, even when it stung. Rita’s piñata, by contrast, demonstrated less tolerance, often waiting silently for months for the perfect public moment to unleash its assault on Dad and his epithets.
One biographer suggests Dot’s ability to “exhale canonical micro-literary criticism†comes from childhood exposure to the piñata’s cruel, unflinching diagnoses of the psycho-emotional deficits behind Dad’s racist tomfoolery, and this author agrees to an extent. Yes, the pig had the eloquence of a rogue professor minus tenure-track inhibitions; moreover Dot and the pig identified with each other, both stuffed with treasures (his edible, Dot’s cerebral) that would only be freed by rending flesh. However, Dot’s ability to convey thoughts freely (or as another biographer puts it “bleed candy for the intrepid decipherers among usâ€) is owed, in large part, to the rough, athletic, Goethe-like boldness of Rita.
By Dot’s fifth birthday, Rita, per Dad’s request, had grown a beard and changed her name to Artemis (runner up was Brandon) to complement the brusk-faced, thick-sweatered swagger she’d adopted after a fortnight in Scotland teaching pugilism to the secular rebellion - an act of chemical loyalty to Dad who had long been a self-appointed “honorary Scotsman.†Back at home, amid the blameless pink hues of Dot’s birthday party, Artemis hummed with post-training-camp bellicosity.
TO BE CONTINUED