Habeus Corpus

They had their place to party. The parents were going to be gone from Thursday through Monday; another work and play four day. Though they had been planning the moment they found out, the concrete details and official invites were finished Thursday morning at school.  Immediately after school they converged on 1509 Mountain Circle like vultures. They barged into the house like morning workers with umpteen cases of beer and 2 fifths each of vodka and rum. Immediately after entering the kitchen, a foul stench blew them all back and curled their noses. “Oh my god, what the fuck is that smell?” Kyle said, covering his mouth. Kelly ran to the sink and threw up while Levi opened the sliding door to the deck and ran out. Kelly and Kyle bolted after him for the fresh air but not Burns. Maybe it was because it was his house but something came over Burns; he was calm and seemed not as affected by the horrible smell. He lifted up his shirt and pulled it over his mouth, then jabbed his nose up and down in the air with quick succession to get a bead on the root of the smell. It led him to the oven. He slowly bent over and squinted while he looked through the glass door. He let go his shirt and said “What the fuck? What the fuck is that in there?” The others were staring from the deck with their eyes as wide as could be. Burns used his right hand to grab the bottom of his shirt and hold it over his mouth and nose, with his left hand he reached and pulled the oven door down. A blast of stench sent Burns reeling and retreating to the deck. That’s when they all saw it, resting on the silver steel racks.

We had our place to party. Burnsies parents were going to be gone from Thursday through Monday; another work and play four day. Though we had been planning the moment we found out, the concrete details and official invites were finished that Thursday morning at school.  Immediately after school, we converged on 1509 Mountain Circle like vultures. We barged into the house like eager morning workers with umpteen cases of beer and 2 fifths each of vodka and rum. Immediately after entering the kitchen, a foul stench blew us all back and curled our noses. “Oh my god, what the fuck is that smell?” Kyle said, covering his mouth. Kelly ran to the sink and threw up while I opened the sliding door to the deck and ran out. Kelly and Kyle bolted after me for the fresh air but not Burnsie. Maybe it was because it was his house but something came over Burnsie; he was calm and seemed not as affected by the horrible smell. He lifted up his t-shirt and pulled it over his mouth, then jabbed his nose up and down in the air with quick succession to get a bead on the root of the smell. It led him to the oven. He slowly bent over and squinted while he looked through the glass door. He let go his shirt and said “What the fuck? What the fuck is that in there?” We were staring from the deck with our eyes as wide as could be. Burnsie used his right hand to grab the bottom of his shirt and hold it over his mouth and nose, and with his left hand he reached and pulled the oven door down. A blast of stench sent Burns reeling and retreating to the deck. That’s when we all saw it, resting on the silver steel racks.

They were walking, practically skipping home from school, giddy from the last bell. “Do you know about the short cut?” Ronnie said. Tal began to jiggle with excitement. “What shortcut? Are you talking about through Niccolino’s yard? I know that one.” Ronnie seemed to crouch a little and whispered “no, this is a different one, through Sotanath‘s yard, but you have to get through his fence.” Tal stopped jiggling, fear gripping him at the sound of Sotanath. “I don’t know” he said, “maybe we should just go the usual way.” “Oh, c’mon,” Ronnie tested, “I did it last week with Kevin when you were sick, it’s awesome.” Tal didn’t fare well with pressure, especially from Ronnie. He looked around quickly but the word slowly spilled from his mouth, “ok.” Ronnie sprinted toward Elmwood, tightening his backpack as he flew, with Tal chasing after. At the corner of Elmwood and Oakwood they stopped, and set their eyes on the fence. The fence was old and ugly with paint chipping away. It was nothing but tall, wide, grey boards over and over and over. Fearless, Ronnie stormed for it with Tal sloppily soldiering behind. Ronnie immediately began shimmying one of the boards while Tal played the look out. “Here, this is the one,” he said. Ronnie pushed it forward and squeezed himself through the gap. When he did paint chipped away from the fence and on to the ground. Tal watched and did as his friend did. On stepping through the gap Tal noticed something squishy under his feet. Rotten crab Apples. He looked down at the squished apple then up to the branches above. They were under the tree in the back corner of the yard. Ronnie was already peeking out from behind the trunk of the tree; he motioned for Tal to get behind him. He pointed right next to the back porch and whispered, “That is where we have to go.” Instead of bolting off this time Ronnie hesitated. Tal noticed. “What, what is it?” Tal said. “Nothing, I just want to make sure the coast is clear is all.” Tal peeked out over Ronnie’s shoulder at the back porch and he saw it. He went to grab Ronnie but before he could Ronnie was off. “No wait!” Tal blurted. Ronnie stopped in a heartbeat and that is when he saw it too. In the shade of the porch was old man Sotanath sitting in a rocking chair. Both boys froze in front of him. “We’re really sorry” Tal squealed from the apple tree. The old man didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. Just when Tal was about to blast back out through the fence board, Ronnie said “so can we go through or what?” Tal couldn’t believe it, he just wanted to be out of there and get home. He was going to sprint the whole way after this. He looked back from behind the tree to see Ronnie inching closer to the porch. “What are you doing, let’s just go, I want to go home” Tal begged but Ronnie just kept inching closer to old man Sotanath. Tal gripped the apple tree and felt more apples squishing under his feet as Ronnie kept getting closer and closer. Ronnie was practically at the back door when he stopped. He looked back at Tal and Tal could see that Ronnie was shaking. 

The Exercise from Gardner's Book: Write the paragraph that would appear in a piece of fiction just before the discovery of a body. The purpose of the exercise is to develop the technique of at once attracting the reader to the next paragraph, making him want to skip ahead, and holding him on this paragraph by virtue of its interest.

A Perfectly Good Movie Quotation Goes Wasted

We were driving to the Boston airport from Rhode Island for a 9am flight. Upon arrival in Beantown proper we were met with, dare I say it, wicked traffic. We left Rhode Island circa 5am with a two month old and a two and a half year old in a Hyundai Sante Fe filled to the roof rack with luggage and not a single, but a double stroller. We did not think we would hit stop and go traffic before the ungodly hour of 7am, even in this notoriously bad driving city of chowder heads.

Looking out onto what must have been a mile of stopped cars with time ticking away on a flight check in and security line to rival your favorite roller coaster, with enough onesies, pajamas, and formal wear for a family of four to attend a wedding and 5 day stay in the Keystone State, I uttered “Looks like we picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”

Crickets.

Not my wife, not my toddler, not my brown-eyed brute of a new baby boy so much as chuckled. Not even on the inside.

How did it come to this? Since when does a perfectly timed movie quote from the classic Airplane! fall on deaf ears? Sad times my friends.

Let’s just hope McCroskey and Ted Striker are drowning their sorrows at the Magumba bar in Drambuie. 

Exercise: the long sentence

He asked her if her breasts were real, and with an inner monologue she sighed and mentally stooped because she knew with the utmost certainty that this was clearly an attempt to convey confidence by being provocative and brutally honest but on the inside he was more than likely completely insecure about his looks and value as a human being and wondered deep down in places not hazed and fogged by alcoholic stupor that maybe he lacked the courage to approach any woman while sober so that in the end he could always blame the booze and the slurred speech instead of his freely chosen white-trash-bred, double wide trailer owning, truck that won’t start in the cold, laid off from the mill, tube top loving, beer belly having, dumb dog walking, bad fish tackle possessing  lot; so against her better judgment, a judgment also frequently sacrificed at the altar of booze in the kinds of bars that served drinks like Wild Turkey with Mountain Dew along with fried foods like jalapeno poppers and low-buck bloomin’ onions,  she answered him, with the same kind of disdain and remorse that she had answered so many sloppy drunk, crumb bearded, rough handed men so many times before in bars such as this one in the middle of nowhere with the beat up cars in the parking lot and the country music blaring from the jukebox, weed dealing in the restroom, where it is not a question of will there be a fight at the end of the night but who will get arrested and who will wind up in the Emergency Room with something as small as missing teeth or as serious as internal bleeding, “it doesn’t matter if they are real or fake to someone like you, drunk on a barstool at 7pm with shitty breath, bad teeth, of the ones you still do have which as your luck would have it are mostly in the back, with a liver yellow enough the doctors mistook it for a deformed lemon, trying to make ends meet working at the Kmart and the Jiffy Lube but having  a hard time paying off the trailer, you know the one with all the pork rind crumbs surrounding the piss and shit stained recliner in front of the TV connected to the rabbit ears on top of the leaky roof that covers the propane powered kitchen you never use because you get by on salt, cheese, and slim jims when you aren’t splurging your welfare check on bullets and Jim Beam, oh and also let’s not forget your own man breasts there sitting on top of your Busch Light beer belly like a couple of bean bags duct taped to a beach ball, with a dick limp enough to double for a loosely filled tortilla, the same kind you might get at 3am tonight from the Taco Bell you know and love so much, that will stain the wife beater shirt with taco sauce and cheese , so much so that you will only wear it fishing and to work and nights out on the town, never mind of course the ear and nostril hair you apparently clipped with a dull weed whacker or should I not assume you have a weed whacker because the grounds in your park are taken care of, to the point where you might find a 6 cylinder or a 55 gallon drum of transmission fluid if the weeds were mowed once a summer but why should you care about any of that when my breasts are here for you to wonder about, stare at, and ask me about, with the hope that maybe, just maybe, if I should turn up to be dumb enough, or drunk enough, or alone enough, you might get to see or feel them for yourself in a backseat or a truck bed or maybe even a single mattress on a linoleum floor down at Jimmy’s by the quarry which could lead to maybe even you getting luckier than a hot new scratch off from the gas station and going even further than you did with that mute hair dresser you met at the welfare office because you filled out your paperwork wrong but that probably won’t happen because you just don’t have the gumption to give a shit enough to take care of yourself, let alone my real or fake breasts."

The Barn Exercise - Take Drei

From John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers:

“Consider the following as a possible exercise in description: Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing.”

There was a path worn to the barn. Down to brown dirt with almost perfectly careened grass edges; worn over thousands if not millions of footsteps from the house to the barn. The barn became a tree house of sorts to the kids. They could play games there and run around and use the ladder to the loft and they told secrets to each other.  Dishes could still be done without worry and the baseball game could still be heard on the radio whilst keeping an ear out for a “mommy” or “daddy.” And they sure did call that barn their own, to the point where the barn was off limits to mom and dad. “You have the house, we have the barn,” was said more than a few times when barn hay was touched by a grown-up’s shoe. From their first steps to their teens, they found new ways to grow up in the barn. Suzie’s first  try on a bike was racing from the open red doors, silvery handlebar tassels whipping in the wind, smile as wide as a Cheshire cat with that ole lone front tooth making her seem crazy as ever. She wrecked not twenty feet from the barn but she was back up in a flash ready to try again. She also had her first kiss in that barn. She told the tale years later at her rehearsal dinner, held in the barn of course. It was a beautiful dinner with fried chicken piled to the loft, mounds of Cole slaw and potato salad, cheap beer and wine in old metal coolers, and fingers sticky from watermelon capped the dinner. She was marrying a good man, that same man that kissed her for the first time in the barn. While this memory was nice, there was no getting around the truth. The barn may have protected them once but now it seemed to hold the truth, tight inside the oak beams, behind the huge double doors, down in the hay and under the tool table where they once hid during hide and seek, it sat. Maybe if they had not spent so much time out there? Maybe mistakes were made, in the barn and elsewhere. The barn wasn’t going to bring anybody back, not now, not ever; it was only going to remind. Reminding was pain now. Memories are nice when new ones are going to be made but they are the devil the past is all there is. The past is all there is that sits in that barn now. Who could go in there now? Maybe strangers could. Who could even look at that barn now? From the kitchen window it was watched though. And on the same day the truth shoved aside a life for oil, the sun burned hot orange on that barn.

Where was the flag going to go? The one they folded up and presented. The barn seemed the right place but who could go in there now? That barn was where the time was spent, the cars fixed, the girls kissed, the beers drank, the guns cleaned and the deer skinned but who could go in there now?

The Barn Exercise - Take 2

From John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers:

“Consider the following as a possible exercise in description: Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing.”

The barn and the memories it contained were not enough. Images of violence and ending flooded in. Flowing tears obscured the view of the barn into an impressionistic painting. Life, and with it cessation, both seemed that way now –blurred without definition, mingling into other material, nothing exactly beginning and nothing exactly ending. But the barn came back into focus, again rearing its ugly head and its beautiful memories that only reminded that no more memories would be made in the barn. A vicious cycle made only more vicious by being unavoidable. Not looking at the barn meant avoiding the barn which meant it was there to avoid. If it was there, they were there. Together. Learning and teaching about the tractor, learning and teaching how to clean the guns and skin the dear, finding the 9/16 socket over and over again, fixing the leaks in the roof, learning and teaching about learning and teaching. Together. Deny the barn, deny the information you received, deny the truth…but then did those things happen in the barn. Are they beautiful if… Weren’t they strong men? Weren’t they strong in the barn? Didn’t they work hard and have muscles? Didn’t they talk about strength and toughness in the barn? Didn’t they develop strong hands and callous fingers working in the barn, living and working like men? Together? But wasn’t one of the many lessons about this truth? This truth that now permeated the barn? This truth that stared back like a mirror from the barn that stood motionless…motionless like the heart that once beat…with strength, with fervor…and with what was surely kissing Cindy Farmer after a birthday party in the barn. Was her heart still beating? Why? What allowed her heart to be beating? They were both alive in that barn when they kissed. They were both in their youth and ready to grow older. They both talked about the future in that barn. But god dammit the future stopped arriving today for one of them. And that barn out there, that fucking barn is a reminder; a reminder of a heart not beating and of the other hearts that remain beating without just deserts. Without just deserts. A lifeless structure incites, reminds, regardless of red paint and white trim, regardless of an inanimate tractor and inanimate tools, regardless of a leaky roof fixed together, or a fifth of whiskey hid from mom. Regardless of one beating, heavy heart, staring though sobbed tears at a barn that has its red doors open, the most important door is now closed.