Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
One About What’s Her Name, Used to Stop By in Autumn
Monday, September 29th, 2008
She used to come by every year, in the autumn, never arriving before the change of leaves or after the first snow. We forgot about her the rest of the year; there was always the matter of getting enough to eat, you see. These days my granddaughter Jodie, who works at that flashy company down the road, what’s it called–Innovocor or something, they all have names like Roman gods don’t they?–Jodie just takes her car and brings us home bags of food. I don’t complain, nor Russell neither.
Let Jodie and the rest of the grandkids roll their eyes, I still say they should hope the old times don’t come again. They haven’t lived in a time when gardens weren’t recreational.
Can’t remember her name. Demi maybe. Or Marta. When the nights would draw in, we’d remember her. You’d be sitting on the stoop, carving your jack o’lantern with the kitchen knife you weren’t supposed to use, listening to your mother taking names in vain in the pantry while she tried to figure how to get you through the winter.
The leaves would kick up, a gust of yellow and orange and red down by the road, and she’d be walking along like she had plans, one hand on the fence rail. Some years she had red hair and overalls, other years black hair in those dreadlocks, and a face sweet as milky coffee.
She’d step onto the porch. “For your mother,” she’d say, and there would be two or three big split willow baskets by the door, bags of flour, sugar, potatoes, oats, cracked corn, butter already churned, everything needed, even shot for the Winchester. “And for you to share with your sisters,” she’d add, and hand you a new tin bucket for the well full of apples and gingerbread, maybe even chocolate.
Our neighbors’ boy Carl, who grew up to be Jodie’s boyfriend’s grandfather, he didn’t share one year. You’d better believe we always shared after we heard what happened: weevils in the flour, potatoes sprouting in January, back roof of their chicken shed falling in and foxes to follow, and gingerbread that tasted like potash. Demi never said a thing when she came by next, just gave him the baskets and the buckets just the same. My theory is she saw he learned his lesson.
A Short History of the Supreme Democratically Elected Tyrant
Friday, September 19th, 2008
After his inauguration as Supreme Democratically Elected Tyrant, Walter Fishwrap began to enact the first of his visionary reforms in the tiny country of Beetroot. First, he outlawed fog and artificial banana flavor, while at the same time increasing government funding for other types of weather and for the artificial flavors of mango, watermelon, blueberry, and cheese.
He followed these triumphs with the now famous Tax Reform Act of 2012, which, in addition to other improvements to the Brobdignagian behemoth that is the Beetroot Internal Revenue Code, reduced the national tax form to a single sheet. Detractors complain that he did this by making the text so small that Beetroot’s one magnifying glass producer quintupled its income overnight, and special Accredited Tax Form Readers leaped into business around the country.
But what of the man himself? His biographer calls him “a mystery ‘Fishwrapped’ inside an enigma.” His neighbors say that he was a quiet man, kept to himself mostly. “Never would have guessed him for the type to put on red tights and a silly hat and issue proclamations from his back step,” says Mrs. Emmeline Harper, who shared a fence with him for thirty years. “Guess we know what all them tiny building and railroads back by the apple tree was for.”
— From A History of Backyard Megalomaniacs, by Marcus ‘Aurelius’ Boomer, Ph. D.