★
POP!
★
the song was called
★
Someday the entire Choir will sing that song. But for now...
★
When the euphoria wore off, I felt I was missing something important. As if a joke had been told and the punchline not delivered, or a message had come for me in a language I did not understand. Or, if you’ll allow me (and as a courtesy to Mr. Kerby):
★
A train had pulled in to the platform. I’d stepped on, sat down in a seat, and the train pulled away. Beside me was a very attractive woman. It was my wife. She was looking out the window at the lovely yellow fields that we were passing by. Who was it who spoke? Was it she or was it I? All I remember is: “ .” And then I found myself eye-locked with a Satanic teddy bear—red-eyed and snarling like a rabid werewolf.
★
Jesus, I don’t feel so good, I said.
★
I crawled away, down the hall, to my bedroom, and into my bed thinking I really would be much better off dead.
★
JD was found the next morning by the front door. Asleep on his knees. The crown of his head was pressed up against the door, as if he’d been trying to get away from a cloud of poison gas, and it had overtaken him before he’d been able to figure out how the doorknob worked.
★
Hey.
★
Dude.
★
Get up.
★
Anyway, long story short, we both turned out fine.
★
After dinner Kay, my wife and I left Jeff and Mr. Kerby and drove back down to the border, to return to Kay’s house in Mexico. As we waited in line at the crossing, Kay told us about an elderly neighbor of hers, an old woman, who had woken up one morning, got out of bed and went into the kitchen. She made coffee and watched some television. She went back into the bedroom to see if her husband was expecting breakfast in bed. But he was dead.
I don’t know what she did then. At some point she telephoned her neighbors.
★
They came to her, Kay with them, and said: Oh Honey, Oh Dear, Oh Sweetheart—You Poor Little Thing.
★
His body remained incorrupt for several months, exposed to the devotion of the faithful, ever exhaling a marvelous fragrance. (Cover Feature, Jul/Aug 2001, Messenger of Saint Anthony)
★
Someone made coffee.
★
The neighbors warned her to keep quiet. If those crooked Mexican cops got wind, they’d take possession of the body, empty his pockets, steal his watch, rip out his teeth, melt down the fillings. Sell his parts for scrap.
★
Most importantly, they’d never let her take him back over the border.
★
So that evening, with the help of the neighbors, she dressed him in his favorite suit. Some men carried him to the car, and strapped him into the passenger seat. Someone put a pair of dark sunglasses over his eyes, and a fishing hat on his head, pulling the brim down over his face. (I’m aware that this sounds a lot like the plot of Weekend at Bernie’s but I swear that it’s true!) Good luck! they cried. Drive safe! Go with Christ! Christ be with you!
★
And so she drove to the border with the corpse of her husband in the seat beside her.
★
During an illness, he was ordered to eat meat by a physician, which he had made a vow never to do. A plate containing well-prepared fowl was brought to him. In the presence of several witnesses, he made the sign of the cross over it, and the bird flew away out the window. (Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, Lives of the Saints)
★
She drove past mangy little doggies.
★
Passed mangy little doggies digging through trash piles.
★
Past mangy little doggies digging through trash piles outside of hovels clapboard houses rusted tin shacks and refrigerator boxes, inside of which people were born grew ate drank shat slept woke fucked gave birth and died.
(Following the signs)
★
Following the signs, she maneuvered her car into the Secure Electronic Network for Travelers’ Rapid Inspection lane, and began start-and-stopping toward the border.
Although the air conditioner was on she found herself sweating.
She was sick to her stomach with nerves. She’d never done anything even remotely illegal in her life!
★
Started and stopped until she pulled up to the line, by now trembling uncontrollably. An officer approached her window, looked in, into her eyes, then at the seat beside her. Then he waved for other officers to come running.
She looked over at her husband—and shrieked!
He was slumped forward in his seat, very stiffly, suspended by the safety harness strapped across his chest.
His lips were parted, and his dentures were hanging out of his mouth.
★
On the last day of his life, November 10, 1608, Saint Andrew rose to say Mass. He was eighty-eight years old, and so weak he could scarcely reach the altar. He began the Judica me, Deus, the opening prayer, but fell forward, the victim of apoplexy.
★
The guard waved his arms and others came running.
★
Would you die the death of the just?
★
Laid on a straw mattress, his whole frame was convulsed in agony,
They surrounded the car.
while the ancient fiend, in visible form, advanced as though to seize his soul.
★
There is a certain way and only one, to secure the fulfillment of your wish
★
Then, while the onlookers prayed and wept, he invoked Our Lady, and his Guardian Angel seized the monster and dragged it out of the room.
★
Kay tells me that Jeff has many grand plans. He works on them while lying in his cell during the times the Machine is set to SLEEP.
★
He will buy an old abandoned army hospital in the Aleutian Islands and turn it into a resort. Kay will cook the food for their guests, and entertain them after dinner each night with clog dancing.
★
He’ll start a salvage business, rummaging the watery depths up and down the western coast of Mexico, in search of sunken treasure, wrecked galleons, skeleton keys.
★
He’ll put a hundred thirty seven windmills atop the sides of the Columbia Gorge, to stand sentry above the river that carves apart the Washingtonian and Oregonian states.
★
And he’s got an idea about a stone that returns life to the dead.
★
And a plan for building bodies for old scientists who’ve been left with only a head.
★
And an electromagnetic road running from the dark side of his eyelids to the bright core of the sun.
★
(And a way to keep young women young.)
★
my robot
Kay is to contact the Japanese concerning capital and the Germans
bring forth
a beginning &
an end
l l
I was completely too tired, Alice calls, 48°
Hey!
★
“Give me my baby. I am going to take him away. He is mine.”
Do you think your hero’s coming back?
Barbara, and others, had…just finished a performance of some kind.
★
the web that shes spinning
lost sense of taste
★
Adam’s rib / Magician’s chest
happened upon the town, ravaging it, and in the turmoil, he was freed from the box and sent airborne
★
What’s he lost down here?
VAZQUEZ: Aida T., 76, of Federal Way, April 8.
by a wave of the hand
he was born
★
hydrogen
composition of a mandala in religious art is meant, as I see it, to encapsulate God by building his universe around him, piece by piece. At the very center, there is often an image
to find your way
★
impression, etc. left by touching
★
was always trying to make time with the young
oh my
he lived
compounds
★
a broken piece
★
the bait
★
that could not be broken.
★
through which worlds occur, come into being
Byrne is just a saint saint saint
nothing will be found
★
but in the meantime, the book must be presented
★
cheer up!
losing himself
trying to reconstruct your face…
Mels legs covered with water blisters, Eloise calls, Nancy & Laura call for me to come over,
You Don’t Have To Believe
Believe me girl..
we’re hanging on just like everyone else...
She stepped away from me and she moved through the fair,
And fondly I watched her go here and go there,
gone
Rebecca and William Woods
of Moses Lake, Wash announce the birth of:
Margaret Woods
Born: , 2005
Weight: 1 lb. 11 oz.
Length: 11 1/2 inches
At Deaconess Medical Center
He understood himself to be irrevokably tied.
old woman
swallow
fly
★
any-
thing is
possible through
re
★
engine
★
erin
★
g
IV
Try as we might to avoid it, we are headed straight for a very big problem:
★
Time is tearing us apart.
★
We go on because there’s no other way to go.
★
But back and forth,
★
In and out,
★
Up and
★
down.
★
Until the strike of twelve and then…
★
end
>BEGIN AGAIN
★
My grandfather was an up & coming lawyer. He drank Irish Whiskey and smoked Lucky Strikes. He laughed and joked and sang and played with his children. But his heart was weak and when my mother was only seven years old his light went out. It was a cool autumn afternoon, and he was found sitting in a chair behind his office desk. He wasn’t quite forty-five.
★
His law partners drove to my grandmother’s house. When she opened the door, their hats were in their hands. I imagine one said: I’m sorry, Helen. Tom’s—
★
She fell
★
This was 1957. She had four children to raise. She sold her expensive clothes and furniture, a diamond ring. And other things. She kept her big home on Capitol Hill for the sake of the children for as long as she could, but eventually all but my mother were off married or in college so she let it go too.
★
like a leaf
★
After her husband died, she got a job at Seattle University, checking books out at the student library. She lived forty-five years in various rent-controlled apartments, a few blocks from that old house she had once loved so “vainly”; from the ceiling rose
★
to the hardwood floor.
★
In her final apartment, each autumn when the leaves fell from the giant maple across the street, it was like a curtain opening…… and all winter long she’d have a view of the top of the Space Needle, its head just poking up over the hill. She loved that view but it was more than she needed.
★
See, she believed in the Saints!
★
Two years before she died, she had an operation in which her right knee was removed and replaced with a metal one. She lay in bed for months, in great pain. A nurse would bring her painkillers on a tray. But she refused to take them.
★
She had a GREAT BIG MEDICINE CABINET, and it was filled to the gills. I lived then in a little studio apartment about a fifteen-minute walk away. I believed in Cause & Effect. I visited often. I stole her pills.
★
But wait!
★
Going up the scaffold, which was so weak that it was ready to fall, he said merrily to Master Lieutenant: “I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself”… he kneeled down, and after his prayers said, turned to the executioner, and with a cheerful countenance spake thus to him: “Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office; my neck is very short; take heed therefore thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty.” (Roper, Life, pp. 102-3.)
★
There’s More!
★
:::::::::::::::A pouring forth—blood gushed out of the neck upon the cement—the sound:
all I can compare it to is the sound a bucketful of dirty water makes when thrown out into the street after washing one’s father’s Aerostar van. The man in orange cried out! And this part I remember very well, because his voice was very quickly mangled by the teeth of the blade as the man in black sawed into his throat, so what came out—and I think the noise came not from his mouth, but from the wound—was the sound of an animal being slaughtered; A high-pitched screeching sound
—no—a wail—
★
a bellowing—
★
no—a neighing—
★
a bleating—
★
the sound a terrified pig would make—
★
Forgive me.
★
There really is no
★
FAC EAS DOMINE DE MORTE TRANSIRE AD VITAM
[lord, make them pass from death to life]
★
>ADEQUATE TRANSITION
★
I shut my eyes
theMystery.doc Page 8
