Rejection letters

from Diane Smith
to ryan
date Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:27 PM
subject Re: Grey Sparrow submissions

Dear Ryan,

Loved your writing--not a good fit for Grey Sparrow and please think of us again.

Best,
Diane Smith

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from upstreet
to exadore@gmail.com
date Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:00 PM
subject Your submission to upstreet

Dear Ryan Boyle:

We’re sorry we can’t use "Limits of Oceans and Seas," which you submitted to upstreet number seven. We have received a great deal of work by writers who will not be included in the final selection, but certainly deserve to have their voices heard in other publications.

We wish you all the best with your writing; thank you for giving us the opportunity to read it.

The Editors

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from Hayden's Ferry Review
to exadore@gmail.com
date Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 7:56 PM
subject Your submission to Hayden's Ferry Review


Dear Ryan Boyle:

We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but we will not be publishing your submission, "The Oral History of Impractical Devices." We wish you luck placing your work elsewhere.

Thanks very much for your interest in HFR!

Sincerely,
The Editors

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from editor@barrierislandsreview.com
to exadore@gmail.com
date Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 9:46 AM
subject Your submission to Barrier Islands Review

Dear Ryan,

Thank you for sending us "Limits of Oceans and Seas". We are honored that you considered our publication worthy to receive your writing. We thank you for the opportunity to read your work, but we regret that we must pass on it at this time. After receiving so many equally wonderful submissions, it becomes impossible to print them all. Thus, we must make the painful choice between them.

However, due to the caliber of your submission, we invite you to submit new work next month. We wish you the best of luck in your authorial endeavors, and we hope to hear from you again soon.

Sincerely,
Rebecca Anne Renner
Barrier Islands Review

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from awesome@pankmagazine.com
to exadore@gmail.com
date Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:44 PM
subject Your submission to PANK

Dear Ryan Boyle,

Thank you for sending us "Common Feature of Mammals in Captivity".

Unfortunately, while we very much enjoyed your writing, we didn't feel it was quite right for PANK. While we respectfully ask that you wait at least one month before submitting more work for our consideration, we do encourage you to keep us in mind for future submissions.

Sincerely,
Roxane

"He had discovered that the earth itself was breathing."

Definitely a human being

Kyle Tiller found the bloody remains in a field across the road from his house. Tiller, who was 16, called us breathless on the phone saying he'd heard a loud crash and we should get there immediately because we wouldn't believe what he'd discovered. "I think it's a person," he said.

Isaac Phillips and I rushed over on his moped. Isaac was only 15 but he was already nearly six feet tall and couldn't have weighed more than 130 pounds, his limbs stretched and spindly like mosquito legs. His head was topped with curly red hair and round glasses. His clothes never seemed to fit, pant cuffs always ending before socks began, jean jackets not quite making it to his waist. The moped was no different, and seeing him ride it around town reminded one of an adult on a child's tricycle, all elbows and knees projecting at odd angles.

When we got to Tiller's, we found the body was terribly mutilated, like a piece of fruit someone had given up trying to peel—bruised flesh coming off in sheets, jagged shards of broken bone piercing through uneven holes that slowly leaked their reward. Spreading around the body was a red halo that was melting the light frosting of snow on the ground and staining the soil beneath.

"Well, that's definitely a human being," I said as the three of us looked down at it.

"No shit," said Tiller. "It's wearing a shoe." We could also make out what appeared to be a belt and a pair of pants scattered through the mess. As far as we could tell, the rest of the body was unclothed.

Isaac, standing between us, pulled a small red camera from his pocket. "I've never seen a dead person before," he said. The flash reflected off the white snow around us, painting the body in lurid tones. "Looks like it was beaten by a team of baseball bats."

"Looks like Guernica." I said.

We speculated about what could have happened to him: piranha attack, hit and hit and hit and run, swallowed a cherry bomb, stood under a landing UFO, hit by a bulldozer ... or a steamroller, spontaneous combustion, pop rocks and soda. Tiller, his arms folded across his chest, pronounced with some confidence that it was a drug deal gone wrong, that they met in the woods around here all the time, this guy had probably cut the drugs with rat poison and they had taken their revenge by crushing him under a pile of cinderblocks and dumping the body here.

We heard something crunch in the snow behind us and my heart leapt. I immediately thought about the drug dealers, their teeth gleaming, eyes shadowed, returning to the scene of the crime to dispose of evidence, to dispose of witnesses. We turned to find a cop car pulling up—almost as bad—lights turning but siren silent.

"Aw shit!" said Tiller, waving at Isaac. "Put the fucking camera away. We're caught at the scene of a drug murder."

The cop said the same thing—"Aw shit"—as he got out of his car and caught sight of a smashed ribcage splayed out like broken keys on a piano. "What the hell happened?"

I watched the planes fly overhead and wished one of them would take me to California.

"A young man dancing, swiveling his hips. He has dark hair, short and slicked up a bit. He wears an unbuttoned band-collared jacket over a shirt with bold black-and-white horizontal stripes. Behind him, on either side, are a pair of barred frames, like prison doors."

Sasha Hathaway, 1

On the morning of September 10, Sasha Hathaway woke up with blood in her mouth.

She was thirteen years and three months old and, even though she lived across the street from me, there was a lot I didn’t know about her. I did not know what she wanted to be when she grew up. I did not know which boy had kissed her at the last church youth party. I did not know what she thought of me or why I couldn’t keep my eyes off her or why she smelled like a vanilla cake all day—even after gym class. Her powers were immense.

Here is what I did know: The boy she kissed was not Billy Costers—who she had a crush on. Her favorite game was Uno and her favorite night was taco night. Her mother had left six months ago, without a goodbye. She said 'my life is over' all the time, whenever something went wrong, whenever she got a C. And I know for certain that when she woke up that morning with her mouth full of blood she didn't realize her life really might be over soon.

"I tasted something funny," she said, wrinkling her nose that morning on the way to school. "Kinda bitter. I thought I was still dreaming. But then I sat up. It spilled out of my mouth all over my pajamas and my sheets."

I wasn’t paying that much attention, I was thinking about her lips, how they seemed like they were made out of cotton and down, the stuff of bonnets and blankets, how they seemed like the softest, most delicate things imaginable, how if I could just find the nerve, just reach out and…

She spit on the sidewalk and wiped her chin with the back of hand.

I’d never seen her do anything so rude and it surprised me. "Totally gross," she said and I nodded at her. "No," she said, seeing my shocked face. She pointed at a wet red stain on the pavement. "Andy, it's still happening."

I spent the day at my desk, staring at her back—thinking about her hair, pulled back behind a headband, still the longest, prettiest hair of anyone in school, like a waterfall of ink spilling from her scalp—while she stared at Billy Costers. She seemed uncomfortable in class all day, holding a napkin to her mouth and taking frequent trips to the bathroom, but she didn’t mention the blood again.

We walked home silently after school. Her dad was waiting for her at the front door when we got home, holding the bloody pajamas in his hand. He had a worried look on his face, under the scruffy beard he started growing after Sasha’s mom left but before he was laid-off from the factory. He mostly sat around the house in plaid shirts and read conspiracy theories on the internet.

“Go home, Andy,” he said to me. He turned to Sasha, clutching the blood-stained cloth in his fist. “Is it woman problems?”

“Oh god,” said Sasha, turning bright red. “My life is over.”

“You can tell me if it is. Maybe it’s time we talking about … you know, birds. Things adults do. We can go to the lady doctor.”

“Andy,” said Sasha, without turning to me. “Go home.”

This would make great flap copy for a novel that has not yet been written: "Little fish spread their wings, pets on hormones, and the modern art detectives."

write a story about failed attempts at utopia. maybe seperate them by age, but link them by theme: the shakers, the 1960s, today.

"we're like those uncharted continents in the sky, clouds passing before the sun. we are vast and unknowable, billowing in many directions at once, capable of either drifting peacefully or exploding into great fits of grey violence. but in the end we are only mist, molecules of water that happen briefly and coincidentally to exist in the same place at the same time—but not forever. we are only mist, capable of being pulled apart, capable of disappearing completely in the face of the wrong gust of wind or the slightest change in pressure. and yes, sometimes we do get to bathe in that bright warm sun but other times, we cover it up completely."

wandering through the night while bodies disintegrate.

"The Great American Memory Hole"

"We all went to bed that night in the same world in which we had woken up."

The Zookeeper's Daughter, 2

June 14, evening.
Edie was knocking on my door. She was dressed in jean shorts and a tight blue shirt that was unbuttoned a little too low. The skin of her chest was empty and soft like the underside of her arms. There was a hint of blush on her, a dash of red blood swirling behind her little cheeks. Eyeliner was driven in a perfect line across her lids but her lipstick was smudged.

“I need meat,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Can I borrow some money?”

"Didn't your parents leave you any?"

"They're not dead yet."

"No, I meant while they're away."

"Yeah but I'm almost out and I need food. A lot of food. I'm really hungry. You wouldn't believe how hungry I am. I could eat a horse, or elk. I could eat an ostrich. I am so hungry right now."

"I can make you something if you want. Sandwich? Linguini?"

"That's really nice but a $50 bill would be nicer.”

“And what do I get in return?”

She smiled, leaning on the doorframe. “Anything you want,” she said.

“Your lipstick is smudged,” I said.

“Shit. Where’s the bathroom?” She pushed past me into the house and disappeared around a corner. When she came back out, she lifted her glasses to the crown of her head and batted her eyelashes up at me. Her lipstick was perfect, her shirt was unbuttoned even lower.

“So what do I have to do to get some money?” she said.

“Did you just unbutton the top of your shirt?” I asked.

“No.” She took a step towards me. “I really need that meat,” she said.

“But its unbuttoned,” I said. I took a step back. “I can see your sternum.” She giggled a little in a way that seemed like it was supposed to come off sexy and innocent at the same time, but was just fake instead.

“Are you hitting on me?” she said, taking another slow step.

“Are you not wearing a bra?”

“Of course not.” She touched my arm.

“This is getting weird,” I said.

“You’re telling me.”

I handed her a $50 bill.

June 16, sometime before dawn.
There was a scream in the night, a roar that shook the windows like the breath of some dread monster shuddering down the darkened streets. I looked out the window—trying to catch sight of anything that could have made that paralyzing sound—but the street was blank and empty.

A light blinked on in the Owens house across the street, then turned off just as quickly, leaving the neighborhood suddenly bathed in the wet light from the river of stars above, tributaries twisting through the dark.

I left the house, went out to the street. I wondered if I had heard anything at all, if it had been imagined, a figment fluttering across a dream but I could still remember what it sounded like: low, dense and rising, ringed with fangs and sorrow.

I strained my ears hoping to hear anything, to catch some last echo springing back off the houses. Instead I heard movement in the Owens house. The light blinked on again, casting a soft yellow rectangle across the lawn. I ducked close to the garage. A girl’s shadow passed through the rectangle. I could smell something, something thick and wild, bloody almost. It was coming from the garage.

I checked the side door. It was unlocked. The smell inside the garage was rich and dirty. Dark shapes seemed to swing in the gloom. There was a clatter of chains twisting. I blindly searched for the switch. The light turned on to reveal stacks of meat on a tarp, animal carcasses swinging from hooks over pools of blood, waiting to be butchered. Sides of beef, legs of lamb and of pork, streaked with rich veins of fat. What could have been maybe ostrich, maybe elk. What might have been horse. Waiting to be eaten. A large freezer hummed in the corner.

I left the garage and realized that for the first time I could remember the house was silent. Edie’s laugh spilled softly out of the illuminated window, as if to underline the silence.

Looking for God in the Particles

A thousand physicists working together at the National Accelerator Laboratory, draped in lab coats and standing in a dignified line, reported in Paris on Monday that they had not found the "God particle"—yet. But they are beginning to figure out where It is not.

One by one, the physicists in the line offered places where It is not found: in the dripping rocks of caverns underground, said one; in the visible breath emitting from a warm mouth on a sunless winter day, said another; and It most certainly could not be found on a beach at night watching the reflection of the moon play across on the tips of the waves. The scientists as a group, all 1,000 of them nodding their heads in unison, can confirm that the God particle was completely undetectable from a sidewalk on a hill watching the sun rise.

They can say with 95% certainty that Its mass—in the units preferred by physicists—is not in the range between 158 billion and 175 billion electron volts. They can confirm that the Grand Canyon was untouched by the God particle, the Amazon rainforest barren. And even though it is theorized that the particle created the mass for all these things to exist, It was found in none of them.

Over the last decade physicists working on two separate experiments have combed the debris from a thousand trillion collisions of protons and anti-protons looking for signs of this God particle, the Higgs boson, which is said to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, explained how two classes of particles which now appear to be different—energy and mass—were once one and the same. His theory proposed the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things—a speck so important and precious It has come to be known as the "God particle," the particle that set the universe in motion. This imbuing of mass happened in the moments after the Big Bang, as the universe expanded and cooled, and thus eventually led us to the Big Bands of the 1930s. Yet so far no one has been able to find the Higgs boson in the stream of debris emitted when two particles are smashed together at high speeds, or at the top of a mountain above the clouds on a crisp windless day.

Rumors abounded in recent months that God could be found in the fossil record, in shapes left in ancient rock by trilobites and jellyfish, crocodiles and ferns. That It could be found somewhere deep in the human brain, buried under mountains of grey folds and pulsing with electricity. That It could be found in math or language, in music or in dance. And yet the scientists on this small stage in Paris debunked them all.

The new results, combining the data from two separate experiments, narrow the range in which the Higgs, if It exists, must be hiding. Physicists had previously concluded that It must lie somewhere 115 billion and 200 billion electron volts. By comparison, a proton, the anchor of ordinary matter, weighs in at about a billion electron volts. Other previous predications by physicists included that It might lie somewhere between the scales of a fish, or in the air beneath the wings of a falcon, that God could perhaps be found in the darkest, deepest, densest part of the bottom of the bottom of the sea, in a hole somewhere miles below civilization, hidden from the light.

Theories do exist that do not anticipate the God particle at all, described elsewhere as the Higgsless model. Scientists who supposed the Higgsless model explained that perhaps we are free to our own fate, to make our own decisions. Perhaps we are free to indulge our whims and find the embodiment of God, Its very idea, to exist only in ourselves and our desires, to exist in the ecstasy we can generate in our own lives.

But the scientists on the stage in Paris that night refused to believe this existential notion, that we could possibly be alone in this world, unwatched by the Higgs boson or anyone else, unobserved by the heavens. One of them—in the back near the end of the line, outside the illumination of the stage spotlights—chimed up to posit the possible existence of whole families of Higgs bosons, as opposed to a single Higgs particle of the Standard Model—whole families of gods existing together, flocks of angels and cherubs, swarms of demons and imps swimming together in the cosmos, breathing mass into benighted particles. Another scientist mentioned that perhaps there is some kind of Higgs trinity, that perhaps Higgs boson has a son.

Proof of the Higgs boson would provide us with some hope and solace that beauty and unity really do exist—however rare they may seem in our world—at the very foundation of the universe, at the very center and source of all has existed and all that ever will. And so, said the lead scientist downcast, his lab coat drooping nearly to the floor of the stage, the most intensive particle hunt in the history of physics must go on.

She don’t know if she’s got the radio on
Or if those are voices singing in her head
There’s not an object she didn’t try to pawn
Leave the money on the dresser, she said

"Former Libraries"

The Zookeeper's Daughter, 1

Nothing seemed wrong that night. There were snoring lions, tired monkeys, alligators dreaming of being wrestled, even a dozing kangaroo. The tiger enclosure was the same, grasses swaying and trees creaking in the breeze, water still separating the habitat from its high, protective wall, faux-Indian ruins still ready to wow tourists — but the tigers were missing. No one noticed till the morning, when the keepers came for a feeding and found nothing to feed. There were no paw prints or scraps of food, no droppings or tufts of fur. It was as if no tiger had seen the inside of the enclosure, as if no animal had ever been held there at all.

I reported for work that day in my uniform, I had been working the box office for about four months, and the place was in a frenzy before dawn was painted from the sky. People sprinted from one side of the zoo to the other, checking on other animals. They were sweating and breathing heavily but speaking in clipped whispers and curt sentences while the monkeys shrieked from the trees. A search of the zoo turned up nothing, again no tracks, no evidence of tigers existing, let alone escaping. But we were sure the tigers had existed, absolutely sure, we asked every employee and everyone, especially their keepers, remembered tigers. We found stuffed tigers in the giftshop, a clear sign. So we were sure they had existed and we were sure they had been in the zoo yesterday at closing time, and we were sure they were gone.

I was on my way to the box office after checking out the scene when the zoo manager caught me, his face bright red, like a child’s balloon or a ripe cherry tomato. He was holding a rifle under his armpit.

“We need to take care of this fast,” he said.

“I work in the box office.”

“You don’t think I know that? I hired you. I know that.”

“Well, I don’t really have experience,” I looked at the rifle, “you know, hunting tigers. Or even dealing with the animals at all.”

“It’s fine. We need everyone we have on this. We’re organizing a search through the neighborhood. You’re on the second team, heading out from the south entrance.” He shoved the rifle into my hands.

I shook my head. “I can’t shoot animals, I don’t even know how to use a gun,” I said, holding it awkwardly.

“They’re tranquilizer darts. You’ll be fine.”

“What if I get mauled or … eaten?”

His mouth narrowed into a thin line. “Then I’ll just have to hire another ticket taker. We need to take care of this before the reporters show up.”

There’s a certain amount of anxiety that people experience when there’s a zoo in their neighborhood, in their town. There’s a constant worry that something is going to get loose, that an alligator will break out and eat their dog, that a jackal will get loose and eat their baby. Any mention of problems at the zoo winds up in the local papers very quickly.

“We don’t want this to turn into another cougar episode,” he said and grimaced.

I’d heard stories about the cougar almost every day since I was hired. It had escaped last summer and wondered through the town causing a panic, its progress tracked on both the nightly news and a special internet site, cougarwatch.com, set up especially for it but now defunct. It found its way into the mall at one point, sparking an immediately evacuation and causing the news anchors that night to joke about cougars shopping for Prada bags and cruising the food court for young studs. It never attacked anyone, caused no harm except the awful jokes and town-wide anxiety, but they finally shot it from a helicopter in someone’s backyard a full week after it escaped.

“Tigers — plural — tigers are a lot worse than a cougar,” he said. I nodded.

The team I was with combed through the neighborhood on foot, carrying our rifles past driveways and down cul-de-sacs and past strip malls, searching for any sign of tiger tracks. People just waking up to their eggs and OJ weren’t pleased to see us tromping through their backyards, past their in-ground pools, rifles in the air. People rubbed their eyes, did double takes. To those without coffee, we must have looked like dreams that had decided to tag along and follow them into the waking world of flesh, private hallucinations trespassing on their private property. One of them took our pictures with his phone and made a blog post about it which was read by his friends who forward it to their friends, one of whom sent it to somebody at the paper, which was how the story broke and the reporters showed up at the zoo less than an hour after the keepers discovered the animals missing.

Oyster

"That's when I reach for my revolver!" There's a voice screaming in the living room. We look at each other, eyes darting furtively around the room, making sure this is real, each of us is not just hearing voices out of the ether.

"That's when I reach for my revolver! That's when I reach for my revolver!" Its getting louder now. No one moves. I look at the clock. It is 1 in the morning.

"Oyster," Georgie says. "Oyster, I think a homeless man might have just wandered into your house."

"No," I said. "No, I think that's--"

"That's when I reach for my revolver!"

"That's my dad," I say.

"Does he have a gun?" Georgie asks.

I walk into the living room and there he is, sitting on the couch looking like a stranger. My entire life he has worn a beard, big, thick and black, like primeval forests, like some kind of wizard, and now here he is sitting clean-shaven in the living room, his cheeks flushed and dark red like a tomato that's begun to shrivel, wearing headphones and screaming this phrase over and over again. "That's when I reach for my revolver!" His eyes are hazy as he takes the headphones off.

"Sorry, I'm just listening to music. On my iPod." He shouts this still, even without the headphones. He takes off his coat.

"Is that for me?"

"My iPod. Mine. That I bought with my money." He points at me, his finger quivering a little at the end. He pulls it out of his pocket and points to it and then throws it on the ground. "I love music."

I walk back into the kitchen. "He's just my dad. Not a bum. It's my dad."

"Hey everybody," he says, walking in. He doesn't look at us or anything, his eyes wandering over our heads to the window behind us, an open bottle of Jim Beam in his hand. "Did everyone have a happy birthday?" He points at Georgie, hoisting the bottle over his head. "Did you have a happy birthday?"

Georgie looks at me, opening his mouth, not sure what to say.

"What about you?" He points at one of the twins. "I don't even fucking know you, kid." He swings the bottle, spilling a line of whiskey on the floor.

"There's some food, Dad. If you want it." I point to the cupcakes and macaroons on the table.

"No," he said, touching the wall. "I'm just thirsty, just really." He opens the cabinets, starts throwing tubberware on the floor, plastic cups bouncing on the counter. He pulls out the tiniest cup he can find, a teacup barely more than an inch wide. He could hold it in the palm of his hand but he doesn't. He grips the fragile handle between his big index finger and thumb, almost daintily. He tries to pour the Jim Beam into this tiny cup but both hands are shaking and moving in different directions, like two fish in an aquarium swimming circles around each other. Some whiskey dripped in the cup but more splashes into the sink. With his back to us, he holds the cup aloft and pauses for a moment, his shoulders shaking slightly. I can see something, brown liquid, dripping from his elbow, drops dribbling onto the floor and scattering on the countertop as he begins to laugh.

"Dad," I say. "Your elbow is dripping."

His shoulders shake as he keeps laughing, whiskey scattering from his elbow. He drops the tiny teacup into the sink with a clatter but it does not break. "Oh fuck," he says, gasping for breath between laughs. "You wanted an iPod for your birthday. Happy birthday. Everyone has a happy birthday." He grabbed the bottle and stumbled back into the living room. We could hear him in there, examining the furniture and the woodwork of the house, commenting on the craftsmanship and sturdiness of the wood and beams.

"Well, uh," Georgie says. The twins pull out a phone and begin to call their mom. "I should probably get going," he says.

I walk them all to the front door. There are a row of trinkets and baubles on the bookshelves that mom had left behind. She had a love of owls, but I was never sure why, and the top of the shelf is covered in them in all different sizes and colors and materials, ceramic, wicker, plastic, blown glass, all standing like a little army, a crowd of immobile owls with a silver crucifix standing behind them all. Dad, now shirtless, grabs one from the shelf and looks it over for a second. The twins stop and watch.

"Did you have a happy birthday?" he asks the owl. He cradles it in his hand as he picks up another. "What about you? Did you have a happy birthday?" He does this with each one, picking them up, looking them over and asking them, a small collection forming in his arms. He turns around to us. "Everyone had a great birthday." He smiles. He picks each owl out again from where it lay cradled in his arms and throws them against the walls, into the bookshelf, onto the couch. "Everybody had a really great birthday. Everybody!" Some shatter, the ceramic pieces scattering over the floor. Others land with a dull sound. "Everybody," he says. When his arms are empty again, he grabs the bottle and turns back to the bookshelf. "This is a good solid bookshelf," he says and starts to climb it. The top of it wobbles dangerously, we can see the sides of it bend and sway, his feet kicking books to the floor, his hands pulling his body weight upwards. The crucifix at the top falls over.

"Dad! Dad you need to come down."

He pulled himself on top and sat there, the shelf moving with his weight.

"Mr. Oster," Georgie said. "I don't think that bookshelf can support you."

"Who built this shelf?" he yelled. "Who built this fucking bookshelf? I did. There's no stronger shelf in the whole world. Its strong. These are my books." He kicked them out of their holes onto the floor, the pages fluttering. "I've read every one of these books." He lays down on top of the shelf.

"Dad, you're going to roll off that. You're going to hurt yourself."

"Why do you think they make it like this? They make so you can lay down, so you can sleep. Why do you think I built this shelf? So I had somewhere I could rest." He grabs the silver crucifix next to him, holds it over his face as though he were examining it intently, thinking it over. He lets it drop to the floor. "Strongest bookshelf in the world," he says, taking a swig from the bottle.

"Come on," I say, grabbing Georgie and the twins and pulling them towards the front door.

"Are you going to be ok?" asks Georgie.

"Probably not," I say. The twins look at me but don't say anything. Georgie opens the door and they step outside.

"Now I know why she left," I say, holding the door open, the cold air drifts into the house behind me.

Georgie claps me on the shoulder. "Happy birthday, Oyster." I close the door behind them and watch from the window as they walk away, their breath turning to silver smog in the air. At my feet is a headless ceramic owl. I turn out the lights, go to my room, and lock the door.

"The Shooting of Songbirds"

“I used to help Borges cross the street when he was blind.” The old man leaned in close to me before I noticed him standing there. His glasses framed his one good guy, the other milky and blank. “Jorge Luis Borges,” his Spanish pronunciation thick with a British accent.

“The writer?”

“Yes. I helped him cross the street.” He sounded like an English colonial in WWI, dignified in the face of death and decay. “Wonderful man, really. Spoke beautifully. I never cared much for his writing though. Myself, I didn’t get it.” He frowned.

“In Argentina?” I said, looking around, trying to see if there was anyone else at this wine and cheese event that wanted to talk to me, anyone that could help me escape the clattering dentures of this English colonial. Who was this guy?

“Yes, I lived there for quite a number of years, lovely country, before I emigrated to the U.S.” He leaned in even closer. “It was for a woman,” he whispered. “You know how it is with Latin women, you simply follow the passion.” He chuckled and leaned back, repeating the phrase ‘Latin women’ to himself.

“Not really. I don’t really know how it is,” I said, shaking my head.

“Well,” he said after an awkward moment of silence. “That’s how it is, my boy. Borges, anyway, he was the head of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, beautiful, lovely building, down the street from my flat. Every day he would try to cross this incredibly busy street, half-blind but still so proud, cars zipping by, to get to the Biblioteca. I would see him from the front windows and the dodger nearly got himself killed. So I started helping him. This, of course, was before he got his secretary who would help him, and before Perón fired him from the Biblioteca Nacional.”

“Evita?” I smiled weakly.

“Oh she was a spicy trollop,” he chuckled and nudge me with his elbow. “Her husband, of course, Juan Perón. He became president in, I believe it was 1946, yes, that seems about right. Borges's offense against Peron was little more than adding his signature to a pro-democracy petition. The poor fool. Peron dismissed Borges from the Biblioteca Nacional and ‘promoted’ him to the position of Buenos Aires poultry inspector.”

“A blind poultry inspector.” No one else was looking in my direction. I was stuck.

“Quite. Borges resigned of course. After the Revolución Libertadora, the military government overthrew Peron and reinstated Borges as head of the Biblioteca Nacional. Borges loved them, sang their praises for anyone to hear in that lovely speaking voice. He actually went so far as to call the generals ‘gentlemen.’”

The old man scoffed, his dead eye peering at the carpet.

“’Gentlemen’, as if he had never of the desaparecidos, as if he had no idea what was happening in the country, as if those motherfuckers weren’t kidnapping thousands of people in the night and kicking them out of bloody airplanes into the ocean, never to be seen or heard from again. It was a terrifying time. ‘Gentlemen’. Disgusting.”

The old man ate a cheese cracker. He continued with his mouth full, dentures seeming to move independently of his jaw.

“By this time the poor bastard was completely blind, could not see a single thing. Politically as well, so I suppose. So he hired that secretary to shepherd him around like some dog, some seeing eye dog. I saw them from my front window for years. Later, at the age of 86, as he was dying, Borges married that poor girl.”

My friend Mindy, who had invited me to the event in the first place, was looking in my direction. I made a motion to her and turned to the old man, “It was nice meeting you, I should probably—”

“He was a lovely speaker though,” he continued, completely ignoring me, tongue scouring his mouth for any remaining cracker crumbs. “Just extraordinary. You could almost forgive him his politics when you felt his words raise the goosepimples down your arms.”

“This has been nice,” I said and started to inch away, slowly.

“Of course he lectured in Spanish but personally he spoke English, whenever I would help him cross the street, he knew I was English so he spoke it to me, and he always spoke with an Irish accent.”

I was still only a few inches away, I tried to wave Mindy over. Maybe she could save me.

“An Argentine with an Irish accent, just beautiful. But his writing? I never much cared for it myself. Didn’t get it.”

the problem is that humans are not machines, emotions are not abstractions.

The Oral History of Impractical Devices, 2

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Walter Andrews

The boy was weird, that's all there was to it. Don't get me wrong, you know, I had a fondness for him, we were flesh and blood and all that. But there was something always off about him. Didn't seem to like his brothers much.

Q. And you didn’t attend the science fair during his fifth grade. Is that correct?

No, I didn't go to the science fair that time — wish I had now. I heard it was quite the spectacle, been telling people the story ever since. We had to live by candle for days afterwards. He was pretty upset, I guess, but I would have gone no questions asked if it was a soccer or baseball game, anything like his brothers. But he never played sports or games with the rest of ‘em.

Q. What did he spend most of his time on?

Once he could read he mostly did that. I don't know where he got all the books from. Either his mother was buying them for him secretly or he was stealing ‘em from the library. Even before that, the kid was a destructive force in my house, you know?

Maybe ‘destructive’ is wrong. I’m trying to be even-handed here, don’t want to come off like some bitter old man in your interview. But he would take things apart — the phone, our old hi-fi, one time the whole goddamn TV. Soon as we turned our backs, something that used to work was suddenly in pieces across the living room. And no, he could never put ‘em back together again. Not the way they had been. After he'd finally rebuilt the TV, the colors were all psychedelic and blurred, the thing only picked up stations from Mexico. His mother was worried. Thought he would electrocute himself one day. Meanwhile, I come home from work and can’t watch anything on the tube except telenovellas. He'd use the parts on something else sometimes. Robots.

Q. What do you mean when you say robots?

Not real robots, they never worked — this was still before the kid could even read. He'd take apart his brother's Gameboy. A few days later we’d see pieces of it taped to a cardboard box filled with circuit boards and wires glued to everything, with a — what do you call, a Lite-Brite? — one of those on top as the head, bulbs all arranged to look like a face. He got savvier. Started putting tape-recorders inside, so it would seem like the thing was talking. But they never did anything and there'd be the missing belt from my old turntable, strapped right to the front.

No wonder he didn't have a lot to do with other kids.

Sometimes it seems like such a strange, hard road. Figuring yourself out, figuring the world out, how you fit into it all, where you come from and where you’re going. Learning who your parents are as real people, who they were before they knew you, deciding if they’re good or bad, if you’re going to be good or bad, and how much you want to be like them. Forming your opinions about things and trying to connect with other human beings, to form and maintain friendships against the alienation and loneliness hiding in every corner, behind every door, under every bed, to find lovers whose bodies feel like the barest breath against your startled cheek. Everything so uncertain, every step so halting. It seems like such a long journey, pushing your way up in the dark through soil to the surface to gasp for air, and then you realize there are hundreds, thousands, billions of others walking that same road at the same time, discovering the same things, making the same decisions or even different better ones, and the road was flattened by millions of feet before yours and will be trod upon by trillions following in your wake, discovering life along the paths you have made and your eyes flutter and you suddenly realize: You were never alone at all and you never will be again.

"the directory of future saints"

you were leaning on a fence post
i wish you'd look that way forever
further from the moon
distant stars like telescopes
waiting for the sun to rise

"At Midnight, All the Doctors Scream"

"The Dreaming Machine"

The Oral History of Impractical Devices, 1

Read part 2

Samantha Waters

The machine took up half the room, and seemed to throb with energy—a whirl of motion and sound held together by wires, gears, shivering tubes, and pistons. The sound of it was unreal, like an automobile factory inside a submarine, but still I could just barely hear its creator shouting over the din: “This machine will end world suffering.” He was 10 years old.

It was the fifth grade science fair where I first met Percy Andrews. The auditorium was just stuffed full of this machine, I wasn’t even sure how they got it in the door, there was hardly any room for the rest of the presentations. It just sat there, hulking, and seemed to shiver with rage that anything else was even included.

Q. And what exactly was it? What did it do?

It was a, uh, perpetual energy machine if I remember right. The idea—well, Percy’s idea—was that this machine would generate more energy than it would consume, that the results would increase exponentially. A little bit of electricity was needed to get the thing moving but after that, it fed, or was supposed to, off the power it generated itself, forever.

It wound up blowing a hole in the power grid instead. The whole town was blacked out for nearly two days while they tried to fix the damage. One of the gears blew off and almost decapitated a teacher. You should have seen her face; she wasn’t even mad or scared, just kind of confused and awestruck.

Q. So who wound up winning that science fair, in the end?

Oh, I won. My hydroponic tomatoes won the science fair. My mom was quite pleased but Percy had already left, his parents weren’t even there I guess, and he just fled the embarrassment of failing. There was a canal behind the school with a small bridge over it, behind the transformers and past the hedges and the fence, entirely hidden but only a few feet from the school grounds—it was a place where kids used to fight or kiss after class without worrying about getting in trouble. I found Percy sitting there in the darkness of the blackout, his body small and trembling like some kind of baby animal. His legs hung over the railing of the bridge. I couldn’t tell if he was weeping or not, it was too dark—but I still remember watching him and thinking about his tears, how they might be falling into the canal and mixing with the water. How I could grow tomatoes from them, he was so beautiful.

It was the last thing he ever built. Until recently.

constantly sitting at the edge of prophecy.

no one is home in the cities of the future.

"It’s as if you and your mate began coitus as yourselves and finished as identical twins."

... infinitely various, seeming to obey no law save that of beauty, was used sometimes for small monuments and temples, such as the Tower of the Winds, ...

thousands of people work millions of hours producing nothing.

Suburban Minotaur, 2

See part 1

“You’re not the only one who’s seen the minotaur now,” he whispered.

I glanced at Patti from the corner of my eye as Todd leaned in closer. She inched back slightly.

“I’ve seen him too,” he said even lower, the sweat trickling down his temple.

“Me three!” said Carol, walking up behind him. “He works with us.”

“He works with you? How is that possible?” I said.

“Remember your kid talking saying he had a horn reduction for the office? It’s true,” he said.

“It’s true,” Carol nodded.

I cleared my throat. “So I take it you two—?”

“Are having an affair,” said Carol.

“—work together?”

“Not so fucking loud, Carol! Jesus, my wife is right over there,” Todd hissed, grabbing her arm.

“Oh yeah, that too. We work together too. We do,” she said, pulling her arm free. "At Intertrend, a marketing company in the city. With the minotaur. I’m a copywriter and Todd here is an accountant.”

“And we’re fucking,” Todd leaned in and whispered, nodding. Patti forced a smile.

and your bones feel like mallets
pounding out a rhythm on your skin
stretched tight over the head of a drum
and you press your hand to the glass
and the blood fills your lungs
and your heart pumps the light
that spills out through your eyes
and you see the buildings swing by in sync
blurred on the edges, swaying, dancing in time
to the rhythm of your life

populism is popular with the ruling class.

there is fire at the bottom of the ocean.

who gets rich when nothing changes?

write a story in which no one speaks because no one can: a decade of silence.

there are more slaves today than at any point in human history.

write a short series of minor stories that directly interogate the reader about their own meaning and/or interpretation. kind of a 'choose your own adventure' of literary subjectivity, but the story does not continue on the page after the direction question to the reader, but rather continues in the mind of the reader based on the individual assumptions/ideas/interpretations provoked by those questions.

how then should we live?

i've seen it wrong so many times, i don't know which way is right.

i wonder if the moon realizes its effect on the sea.