They grow (Greg Farnum)
The ride of the walchyries (Massimo Canetta)
The Alley (Fred Roberts)
THEY GROW by Greg Farnum "Hi, is your dad home?" "Yeah he is, I'll get him." I looked over at the dish drainer, stacked high with newly washed plates, coffee cups, pans, silverware, plastic cups. Plenty of plastic cups. All sizes, all colors, all faded. They said Cleveland Browns. They said Disney's Fort Wilderness and Campground. They said Cookers Bar and Grill. They said Fox News Chicago. They said Enjoy Coca-Cola Classic. "What's goin' on?" said a voice at the other end and laughed. Henry's voice. Conversations with Henry always began with laughter. I asked the same question of him and found that he had put the house back on the market. "I've been going through the closets and the basement trying to weed things out," said Henry. "It's amazing...broken saws, screens for the screen doors that don't fit. Live here as long as we did and you just amass this stuff. Mostly I've been throwing it out. The garbage man is going to hate me. Last two weeks I've had the curb lined with stuff. I haven't even thought of starting on the garage, it's too damned cold." "Yeah," I said, "walls of half empty bottles of poisonous fluids. When we moved from Pinegrove we were lucky. Our neighbors, Liz and Gil, said 'anything that's useable we'll take,' so I just put all that stuff in a big box -- strange grades of motor oil, transmission fluid, wierd cleaning supplies, all that stuff you can't quite remember where you got it from, or if you ever got it at all. You know, maybe it just appeared there. Other people brought it. But who? And when and why? Why did these people bring these things into your garage? That's why people still watch The Twilight Zone." Henry laughed and talked about his taxes. He sounded better than the last time I talked to him. He'd been telling me about the medication his therapist had given him, about how the dose had been wrong. Caused a panic attack. "Thought I was going to die," he'd said. "My tax advisor is a girl I talk to in the bar," he said and laughed. "She works in accounting." He was trying to itemize but it wasn't working. "Any prospective buyers?" "A lot of lookers but no offers yet." He seemed dissapointed but to me it sounded positive. You got lookers you'll get a buyer I thought, but I didn't say anything. I thought back to that year, many years ago, that I'd spent in the real estate business. A second job, on weekends and after I'd finished my shift at the group home. There was a recession on. One of many. Could hardly get people to look let alone buy. Sold one house. My commission almost paid for my board fees for the year. The younger agents like myself would get discouraged. The broker, a big old blond woman, would tell us "work smarter, not harder." She'd tell us weird shit like clip out a picture of that big Cadillac you've always wanted and tape it to the sun visor or your car. She'd tell us to listen to the tapes she was always buying...more weird shit that mixed Christian revivalism with old time boosterism with unadulterated greed, with a kind of hero worship and blind faith that I found frankly scary. She was ahead of her time. "Tess wants to say hello to you," I said. "I'm going to put you on the walkie-talkie -- if it still works." I picked the cordless phone off the top of the microwave and pressed the button. "Hello. Hello?" "Yeah, I'm here," he said. We hadn't had it resting in its little cradle since we moved. The cordless phone seemed to need its little cradle. It recharged it. Torn from its proper and familiar place in the cradle/receptacle on top of the bookcase in our dining room in Michigan the cordless phone looked like what it had always been: a strange, intrusive instrument. Same for the microwave. "Hi," said Tess when I handed her the disembodied phone, "we were thinking about you." Her voice was warm and friendly. Well it should be. She was talking to Henry. Henry was a prince among men. And the closest of friends. And, she had told me, the man she would look to if I died early from smoking, which I had promised to try to give up again, soon. "So you're putting the house up for sale again?" Tess asked. I glanced through the many facets of the Sunday paper, adding a few comments from the sidelines. He had put the house up for sale a couple months ago when Mary had announced she was leaving, again. Then, when we'd seen him on New Year's Eve, he'd told us he'd withdrawn it. "Says here in the Sunday supplement you can get a 16 and 1/2 inch porcelain Betty Boop," I said, loud and long distance, to the cordless phone. "Just what a single guy needs to keep him company," he said as Tess handed the instrument back to me, "I can keep it by my bed. Boop-oop-a-doop." "And it can be yours for only $119." He laughed. We'd watched a lot of Betty Boop when we'd worked together at the group home. I said goodbye and put the cordless thing back in its resting place. "If he's cleaning out the closests then Mary has really left," I said. She had been scheduled to leave on the 16th to open a hot dog stand in Florida with her girlfriend, the man-hating Debbie. "If he sells the house that's good. Mary and the grown children won't have a place to run back to," said Tess. "Yeah, he's done his bit by them. Time he had his own life." "You envy him," she said, accusingly. "No, I don't," I said. "No." THE RIDE OF THE WALCHYRIES by Massimo Canetta The deafening frenzy of Milan was thundering in the distance. He decided to escape it by listening with his headphones to the Ride of the Walchyries. His eyes were half open. He wished that the music could become the light of his life. He dreamed that, by enchantment, each of his actions, each of his thoughts were accompanied by it. He checked the time: it was late. He switched the stereo off, he took the headphones away, and he noticed with astonishment that the music didn't stop. It went on, more and more imposing. He turned in the direction of the stereo that however was switched off. How was it possible that he was still listening to the music? He covered his ears. The music raged. What he had desired had came true: the music was inside himself. Each of his actions, each of his thoughts would become impregnated of notes. He tasted that moment. Which action would have been worthy of it? He felt the music arise in his veins the energy of a warrior. His head began to spin. Now the music was very loud. He tried to talk but he didn't hear the words. He shouted loudly, but he didn't hear a thing. He began to feel breathless. He run out to the balcony. The volume increased. He held his head between his hands. He looked down and his body shuddered in a spasm of dizziness. He breathed deeply. Music kept on in a dreadful crescendo. Suddenly he understood which action would have been worthy of such accompaniment. He mounted the windowsill and with a sudden spring he threw himself into the void. The music was in rythm with the motion. It was a perfect direction. The symphony reached the climax. Everything, also the finale stayed in perfect tuning. Marvellous! THE ALLEY By Fred Roberts Hundreds of people passed the alley each hour. It was inconspicuous. A blind alley. Surrounded and formed by windowless buildings, no one could say for sure that it was there at all. Maybe it wasn't even on the maps, or only then when the right person had looked. No one suspected that the city was alive and searched for its sustenance here. Sometimes it was a man whom the sweet voice lured, calling to him silently, sometimes it was a woman or child. If it was a virgin the city fed more energetically than otherwise. The chosen one always heard exactly the voice he wanted to hear, exactly the words. The city lurked until it became hungry and sensed the footsteps of the person driven by the passions which matched the hunger. It sensed the footsteps of each of the countless thousands who walked its streets. The footsteps of the people were unique, as finger prints are. They bore witness to hatred, love, alienation - resignation, excitement, disinterest: the complete spectrum of human emotions and abysses not even to be seen in the eyes of the human beings. Such footsteps echoed now at the edge of the city. Yes, the city was endless, overpowering to him. His senses blunted, stopped reacting to the teeming activity around him and through which he moved: without a goal or pulled somewhere? He passed people and on each side people passed him. He was completely alone with his thoughts. Never had he perceived himself deeper than now; his heartbeats - his footsteps directed by the flow of his hopes, dreams, the past and the future. He became aware of his love, his hate, that which he had experienced and that which he hoped for. Never had he lived, never had he cut loose with no care for tomorrow. His life had become a predictable chain of days. But now he felt himself standing before a fabulous threshold: where would he be in one year? In five years? In the next ten? He saw the gate of life shimmering to one side and heard a soft voice weaving into his thoughts: "Won't you venture to live? Won't you live out with me the most intimate exchange?" Wide awake in his numbed condition he turned and saw clearly the open alley which no one else around him could see as they flowed in every other direction up and down the street, trapped in their own thoughts. He saw the alley and a light glowing like fate, shining out of some unknown corner. "What you are searching for, I can find in you..." breathed the voice at him. As if in a trance, he walked into the alley, pulled towards the light. The constellation of people, which he fell away from, simultaneously met and parted forever as he pushed deeper into the opening. The voice whispered: "Your soul, my soul shall melt together..." His heart beat expectantly and his breath steamed as his being dissolved in the heartbeats of the city. And then the light glowed blinding as the midday sun in the city's dark night. The city became the background as his soul, like a crashing comet, painted for one small instant thousands of scenes with an illuminating tint, matching an orgastic height of feeling, he - one with the living spirit of the city: in a small bar the visitors lost themselves in each other and in the wild music of the band; in a disco the dancing many fused in an overflowing wave of movement; on a street, in the frenzy of noise and lights, the city-goers felt themselves swept along in a flood of life; and elsewhere, on top of the highest house of the city, a full moon shone through thin wisps of cloud as an eternal wind caressed the faces of those standing there, gripping them with an exciting continuity of past, present and future. And so the city flared in an ultimate fire of passions, until consuming its victim to an empty husk which fell to dust and scattered into every corner of the city. The next morning everything was quiet. Everyone, everything slept from exhaustion. The city would wait for the hunger to come again.