Archive for the ‘Trent Walters’ Category
The Living Word
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
In a world full of trillions of otherwise wasted, tasteless words printed on trillions of otherwise wasted, bleached tree pulp–from the papyrus to the pine–this one word is deliciously alive. I won’t tell which. You wouldn’t believe it if it were so easy. It isn’t: the paradoxical architecture of its lettered spine: curved yet straight. But it is easy: more ancient than coelacanths yet more spry… and sly: the way it creeps, it stalls, it crawls and breathes on the sly. It slips, it slides and plays possum when your eye lands upon its black frames in that wintry wasteland of bleach pulp snow–a frozen and fallow ground–waiting for your eye to grow weary and blink so it can exhale and inhale in the space of that eternity. It bides its time. You will turn the page. You will move on. You have dishes to do, garbage to take out. Meanwhile, it has rearranged the neural map of your brain–former dead ends are superhighways, and once indispensable bridges are washed out (you can still take that bridge though you’re liable to baptize yourself and drown in what is clearly now just a chugging, churning muddy wastewater).
As you cinch the trash-bag ends closed, you see the garbage differently. With the bag slung over one shoulder, clinking gently against your back, you half-consciously mutter conjugations of sounds you’d forgotten you knew. Slowly, you roll your tongue over various viable words, tasting their liveliness.
Outside, mercantile semis jostle futilely for pole position, apply their clamorous airbrakes against the crisp, clean silence, pass in their light regalia like toppled Christmas trees trucking above the Interstate 80 viaduct. You gaze up in wonder at stars as you trudge through knee-deep snow that melts and trickles into your bedroom slippers and through the night’s bitter cold that nips at your fingers and toes.
How do you know it lives if it hides in plain sight? It nudges other words, testing their livelihood compared to its, rolling them aside like slow heavy stones to see where they might go, toward places you haven’t heard their torpid frames clink before. One word occupies the snowy space here instead of there, alters the stories less on the page than in your brain–not enough to change the plots or meanings, rendering the books wholly different, but enough to see your garbage differently.
And, otherwise on an other wise tongue, it is all garbage.
My Love for You Would Bust Kneecaps: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Mostly Untrue Story of an Olympian and her Most Devoted Lover (Intimate Moments #769)
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Editor: Any resemblance to this famous public figure is purely coincidental.
Gilly Fahrenheit lived on the other side of the tracks. Tonka Hearty lived in a trailer court. Their forbidden love affair had begun at Camp Marshmellows where they hid from the camp counselors and rolled among the tall weeds behind the latrine.
Tonka could no longer conceal the truth from her mother. Mother, elbows on the formica, stood hunched over a six-inch black and white playing a crucial scene from “One Life to Live.” A damp and musty washcloth dangled from her hand. Tonka tried to wait patiently for a commercial.
“I’m having a baby,” said the TV.
But Tonka’s news was too important. “Mom?”
Her mother tapped her finger to her lips.
“If you loved me,” the TV rumbled, “you’d abort it.”
“And if you loved me,” the TV piped, “you’d divorce that hussy who stepped out on you to have an affair with Rick.”
“If you loved me,” Tonka said, “you’d let me date the boy who lives on the other side of the tracks.”
“If you won’t divorce her,” said the TV with a sob in its throat, “then I’ll have a secret love child, and after the court releases the DNA results, the world will know who the father is!”
“So?” Tonka’s mother glanced at her child, then back at the black-and-white. “It’s all in the same trailer court.”
“It’s not a secret,” said the TV, “if you just told me.”
“You don’t understand!” Tonka slammed out of the trailer and ran flat-footed to the court’s edge where Gilly crouched in the bushes.
“What’d she say about us hunting horny toads by the lake?” Gilly croaked in a whisper.
Tonka wiped her nose, sniffed, and shook her head.
“Geez. Your mom doesn’t let us do anything ‘sides play house and skate at the ice rink.”
“Gilly.” Tonka braced Gilly’s shoulders. “I’m having our secret love child.”
***
A decade later, across the rooftop of a rented Yugo outside the Olympic ice rink, Gilly professed his undying 4e passion with a boot to the hub cap, setting it ringing hollowly. “My love for you would bust hub caps.” Gilly climbed into the left side believing he was still in America.
Buckling herself into the driver’s seat and tossing her ice skates into the back, Tonka thought that, with one life to live, she couldn’t have many Olympics yet to go. “That Kerry Schmancy chick ain’t no better than me. If only she’d…. What did you just say, Gilly?”
“My love…”
“Never mind. I want you to prove your love like Madonna said you should. If you loved me, you’d…”