Silly Goose Press

2008-09-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

Someone once told me that every time a memory is remembered, bits and pieces of the event or the image in your mind begins to fade so that eventually, the memory itself will be nothing more than a blur.

2008-08-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

"...she walked by herself to search for her home. She walked by herself 'til one day a boy caught up to her side. He held out his hand but she shook her head and just smiled, she smiled, she smiled, and, and she said that's very nice, but no thank you I'm doing fine, all alone here doing fine, on my own here. And he looked into her eyes for that lonely part but no, she wasn't lonely, just alone, and as she turned and walked away he wondered maybe I can change that way."

2008-08-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

"Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there."

Story of my life.

2008-08-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

When I was six years old, my mom packed a suitcase for me, the smallest one she could find and the most worn down, filled it with an assortment of sweaters and socks, and took me to the train station in a nearby town, in Colby, Wisconsin. I was born in Colby three days before Christmas in the winter of 1983 in a shack of a home along the side of a wealthy landowners farm. Because my father worked year round, the self-proclaimed philanthropist let our family live there during my mom's pregnancy, but once I was out, so were we. The new year brought more willing men to Colby, younger men, men with lower standards and even lower income requirements. My father didn't last long. Three weeks later, my father shot himself in the head with a .36 caliber revolver on his way home from the market. They found his body in a ditch below the concrete road only two miles from the farm, blood seeping into the bushel of parsley and grain as the snow fell forgivingly over him like a blanket. My mom moved into her great-aunt's house and raised me as best as she could, until one day her exhaustion and her loneliness caught up with her, and the only thing she could do was pack up and leave. Only I was the one who would be leaving.

...I got the idea of this story from a movie, which was based on a book, Wisconsin Death Trip. In the movie, there's this one segment that describes a woman who places her son on a train with a sign around his neck. The woman shortly thereafter disappears and the boy, unaccompanied, travels to wherever the train was going in hopes of finding someone who will claim him. Nobody does. He waits at the train station to no avail and ultimately dies of hunger in the snow. I thought this story was so beautiful in its simplicity. A child left alone to fend for himself when his mother could find no better solution to her own troubles.

2008-08-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

Everyone keeps saying how hot it is today. Maybe the hottest day of the summer even. I'm sitting in my cage of an office, enclosed by shatter proof glass and the hum of the air conditioner, wrapped in a winter sweater and wearing knee high socks. It is cold.

2008-08-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

He left his scarf curled up in a ball on the chair in the corner of my room. The smell of the American Spirits he was smoking the night before clung to the delicate fibers of the worn wool and I squeezed the scarf against my lips, breathing him in for the last time.

2008-08-13T18:23:00.000-07:00

I wish there was a zipper down the notches in my spine so I could unzip myself from the wretchedness within... I hate my insides. I am the diving bell. The air around me presses down with calloused hands against my forehead and squeezes the bridge of my nose. Either a sickness is upon me, mischievously invisible, biding it's time, or the life I've been living has finally caught up with me. I am in a constant state of exhaustion, yet my spirit hollers in excitement and the night attracts my mind.

2008-08-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

I drove up the 101 North towards Santa Cruz for the last time in the summer of 2008, memories resurfacing with the heavy pull of the ocean's tide at my left, regret weighing on me like the shadows cast upon the newly paved highway from the cliffs to my right. I was going home to a strange orchard of a life I had lived for too long and abandoned without a sideways glance.

2008-08-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

I want to adorn my back with goose feathers and throw myself from a seaside cliff.

2008-08-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

The woman I've been sharing my room with for the past week asks me when the last time I cried was and I really can't remember. She doesn't believe me. She tells me I cry in my sleep. She tells me I toss and turn and tangle myself in the sheets until I give up. Her name is Rose Marker, the daughter of the proud Dr. Marker who now walks with his shameful eyes on the ground. Rose has scratches on the insides of her arms and along the back of her neck and around her kneecaps, but her fingernails are dull, so they don't break skin. She says the berries she's been picking in the yard during our daily walks through the grounds make her itch. We're eating breakfast and I almost spit up my milk. "You eat the berries in the yard?" I ask, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand.
"Don't you?"
"Those have to be poisonous, Rose, you should stop doing that." I tell her. "And stop scratching, you'll only make it worse. Who knows how dirty your fingernails are." Rose folds her fingers around themselves and hides her fists beneath the breakfast table.
"They're not dirty," she says. "And the berries aren't poisonous. They're mulberries."
"Don't make things up, Rose," I say bitterly.
"They are!"
Rose is fifteen years old. Before we shared a room, she spent three weeks at Hemerston, two months at Briar, and almost fifteen months at Royal Hills before they found a bag of shrooms in her left shoe and relinquished their responsibilities. She smokes a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes everyday and wears thick designer sunglasses inside until someone yells at her. I don't mind the sunglasses. When she wears them, I pretend she's invisible and if she speaks to me while in her guise, I ignore her. She's beginning to think it's a game we play. She offers me cigarettes sometimes, which I take but don't finish. I've been here for nearly seven months. My lungs aren't used to the amount of nicotine in an unfiltered cigarette. They're more comfortable breathing the stale air of our sterile ward.

...we'll see where this goes.

2008-07-22T17:18:00.001-07:00

I'm feeling rather handsome today. I blame the handsome man who slept in my bed last night. He breathed through his mouth and whispered soliloquies on the back of my neck. I told him to leave when I woke up, but he stayed until noon and I didn't mind.

My left tricep feels loose lately. I'm convinced my bones are preparing for a vacation from the tight, oppressive skin that keeps them in place.

I read a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger's final days by some reporter who got carried away with reinventing the truth. When I started reading it, I found the style and tone very inconsistent. The voice gets lost amidst the untraditional punctuation. But this one sentence stood out like a drop of blood in the deep blue sea.

"A quad of Hannah Montana, scared and swollen-eyed, her helpless hands dahlia-red and tied up in a cat's cradle."

I think it's the dahlia-red image. Reminds me of death.

A woman from another department is in my office talking to the design manager. She's wearing white jeans and a white top and white flip flops. Half of her stomach is showing and her hip bones stick out like the railings at the deep end of a pool. She reminds me of a heroine addict, though I've never seen one of those in person. I try not to stare at her and she senses my judgmental eyes and does not stay.

2008-07-15T00:22:00.000-07:00

Shadows (tentatively titled)

A girl sits at a piano bench with her back hunched, her arms bent at a ninety degree angle against her body, fingers stretched around her skinny thighs, her feet tilted awkwardly outward. “Sit properly please,” says her mother politely from the kitchen where she watches from behind. The girl straightens her back and her feet, adjusting her posture without moving her hands, her fingers almost methodically immobile. “Thank you,” her mother says. The girl stares blankly at the pages before her, at the half notes and the crescendos and the flats. She swallows, the only movement in her body. “Begin please,” says her mother softly. Only the ticking of the clock above her on the mantelpiece breaks the deafening silence. The girl clenches her jaw at the sound of her mother’s soft, kind words of instruction, struggling back a morning’s worth of tears, as if with those very words, her love of music, of playing music, diminished like the notes on the page of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. “Begin please,” her mother beckons, more firmly the second time. The girl blinks and her eyes slowly water. She lifts her right hand for the first time since sitting down and sets the timer on two hours. She then lifts her left hand, turns the tempo to adagio, and, without moving her head, brings her two hands to the center of the scale and brushes her fingertips against the cool, smooth surface of the ivory keyboard. She stretches her delicate fingers into their shadows, pressing on them with just enough pressure to feel them move but not make a sound, and squeezes the black keys, lifting them up with her knuckles. “Maureen,” her mother says, tapping on the doorframe that leads to the living room where she monitors her daughter, “please begin. You’ve missed five minutes already.” The girl lifts her fingers from the keys and they fall. “Reset the timer please.”

“Yes, Mother.”