“Yeah, Janice?”
“Can you give me one good reason I shouldn’t call the police?”
Patrick saw the clock burning 3:27 into air that bore a residual cold, “You’re out late.”
“How is that any of your business any longer?” she demanded.
“It isn’t,” he conceded.
Janice remained silent as if expecting an answer he was not prepared to give.
“I just grabbed my things,” Patrick explained, as it had been John who had taken the box, “Had you just…”
“Do not even try to put this on me,” Janice cut him off, “You need to under…”
“Look,” Patrick said, yawning into the phone which he knew infuriated her, “If you need to call the cops call them. I’m going back to sleep. Good night.”
He hung up before she could protest.
The sun, not the police, woke him. He was grateful for this while admitting he was no longer certain of what she might do. This realization felt like jagged stones stuffed in the cushions of the couch upon which he slept. Rolling off his make-shift bed, Patrick showered and dressed with a sense of purpose that had possessed him during the night, displacing dreams. His hair still dripping water, he gathered the scattered cylinders, carefully picking them up by their edges. He replaced them in the drawer of the music box which he then carried out to the truck.
The morning was already uncomfortably hot. Sliding into the cab, the seat drew a chill from his bones that had him feeling brittle. Using the music box as an arm rest, he drove to Janice’s house, pulling into her driveway. There was no chance of her being awake at this hour of a Sunday morning.
Searching the glove compartment, he found a pen and a bill’s payment envelope. On its back he scrawled, “Apologies for last night. John took this by mistake. As I cannot conceive of another…” His large, looping script filled up the paper. Instead of turning it over, he tore the note into small pieces that he allowed to fall like snowflakes.
With just the music box, he cut across the lawn and up the front steps. He moved quickly to outpace indecision. He wound the key and gently placed the box on the landing.
He rang the bell.
He raised the lid.
He leapt from the steps.
Bolting across the grass, he felt the sweep of the forest at his back. Though certain he could discern the crack of thawing ice, he would not stop and turn. He drove off avoiding the rear view mirror.
The first thing Patrick saw as he walked through his door was the green message light blinking like a signal beacon. With trepidation, he dialed to retrieve his voice mail.
Janice sounded sleepy, hesitant, “Patrick…the music box…it was in the basement…I mean, it would not have been fair to you…us…I couldn’t…” then she temporarily steadied herself with anger, “As pissed as I still am with you over everything, I thought, perhaps you should know I don’t…”and a long pause followed as she again lost her way. Finally, as if abandoning a futile search for words, she whispered, “Thank you,” and hung up.
Patrick’s thumb caressed the seven button before pressing the nine.
Hearing, “Message saved,” he placed the receiver back in the charger.
He walked out to the truck to retrieve his trash bags because, eventually, it would rain.
Sending All Your Love—In the Form of BrowniesThrough the Mail
Nicole Kimberling
Equipment: cupcake tin & baking liners, waxed paper, plastic wrap, rigid shipping container, packing material, packing tape, pen, a piece of cardboard big enough for ten cupcake-sized brownies to sit on, oven, timing device, mixing bowl, measuring cups and spoons, cooling rack, a little cash, hands, and at least some love to spare for another.
Time: Approximately three hours total, plus travel time. Actual labor time: 30 minutes.
Step Zero: Read whole recipe.
All the way to the end. No skimming. During the twelve years that I cooked professionally, 50% of all major failures I observed could be attributed to incomplete reading. (The other 50% could be divided into categories labeled: inattention, inebriation, injury, and romantic angst.)
Step One: Acquire Target
Consider which of your friends most needs an infusion of affection into their lives. Once you’ve established your mark, ponder his or her taste. Adventurous? A Classicist? A boozehound? Do you suspect the target is missing some bygone era? Is he or she merely poor and hungry?
Step Two: Choose Additional Flavorings That Will Delight Target
Some suggestions: Mexican Chocolate: cinnamon and vanilla (1 tsp each).
Masala: including a combination of sweet masala spices such as clove, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper equaling approximately 1 ½ tsp total spice mixture. Note: cinnamon should make up about half the total volume, or ¾ tsp.
Spiked Coffee: any sort of whisky (instructions on including liquor, with measurements, follow in Step Five) plus instant coffee or espresso powder (1 tsp dissolved into whisky).
Liqueur Cabinet: Grand Marnier, Amaretto, Tuaca, Frangelico, Brandy, etc.
Mini candy: tiny M&M’s, wee peanut butter cups (available at Trader Joe’s) smashed up Heath bar chips, etc, equaling 1/3 cup.
Cherries Jubilee: dried cherries equaling 1/3 cup, plus brandy.
Step Three: Acquisition
Go buy (or borrow) any equipment or flavorings you don’t already have plus a box of brownie mix—I prefer Ghirardelli Double Chocolate. Virtually all box mixes call for one or two eggs, neutral cooking oil and water as well, so gather accordingly.
Step Four: Read Instructions
Read instructions on dry mix box, then prepare to ignore or augment some, but not all of them.
Step Five: Mix Batter
Preheat oven to temperature indicated on box.
Put liners in cupcake tin.
Dump dry mix into bowl. Note: choose a bowl that will leave a lot of room for stirring, this will save you much vexation. Also, save box for later reference.
Add dry flavorings, such as spices, dry fruit or wee candy.
Stir with fork.
STOP to consider whether or not you are using liquor. If you are not, then continue onto the next instruction. If you are, then look at the box and locate the amount of water required by the mix. Replace some of the water with liquor. If you are using whisky or brandy you can replace nearly all of the water with booze. Just pour the whisky into the appropriate measuring cup, leaving a little room to top it off with water at the end—perhaps a finger’s worth of space. If you are using something thick and powerful like Grand Marnier you’ll want to be more sparing—perhaps 1/3 booze to 2/3 water.
Add egg(s) oil and water (or liquor-water mixture) in amounts indicated on box.
Add vanilla, if using.
With a fork, stir. But not too much. Maybe 40 strokes. Batter should be lumpy and even streaky in places.
Divide batter evenly into 12 lined tins.
Step Six: Bake
Check brownies @ 20 mins. Shake pan, very gently. If you see obvious liquid jiggling in center of brownies, reset timer and try again every 2–3 minutes until the centers of the brownies are basically stable, but not puffy. If the centers are puffy the brownies are overcooked so if 50% of the brownies look dangerously close to puffiness, pull them, even if some brownies still seem liquidy.
Remove from oven and let cool completely still inside the baking tin, but set on a wire rack. This is critical because baked goods like brownies are not completely cooked when they’re removed from the oven. Rather, they continue to cook with residual heat so its important to show compassion and give them a fighting chance at crossing the finish line at room temperature.
Step Seven: Cull and Judgment
Choose ugliest brownie and taste it. Choose second ugliest and give it to a bystander for second opinion. Tragedy can occur during baking, so you should verify positive results.
Step Eight: Pack
Place remaining 10 brownies on ca
rdboard, wrap with waxed paper and tape shut. Wrap that whole package again, tightly, in cling film. Place in shipping container and add packing material to ensure that brownies don’t fly around inside the box. Add note to lucky friend, if desired. Seal and address.
Step Nine: Ship By Method of Choice
Brownies will survive 2 days en route with no ill effect.
Step Ten: Wait for love to return to you.
This usually takes the form of an email. However, you may receive a text, phone call or even a reciprocal gift. But if you receive no reply, don’t be bitter. Love is a thing to be given without expectation of compensation. That said, you can probably cross the unresponsive target off your list of people to make brownies for in the future. You’re not a chump, after all.
Step Eleven: Identify Next Target and Repeat
Four Poems by David Blair
May Day, at the Somerville Community Gardening Center
You give them enough sweet curd,
some little kids denounce
me for witchcraft at Puritan tribunals.
Humorless parents anywhere
in the cells of their regarding,
you don’t tangle with them.
But here one too many
contemporary Morris dancers tips
the scales at the weigh-in
station for Equinox festivities.
Under these beards, our chins are husked.
We come up in rows.
What happens when
one of the brokers
goes to the Renaissance
Fair without Blistex?
Lives change.
Contracts,
transactions, semen and stamen.
The suits shall comb
these hairy feet.
Downtown is far away.
So are all the mower-cropped
fields alongside the harbor
between refineries
and convention center.
We’re landing in springtime,
season of Dante,
Purgatorio, Easter,
the Sun entering Ram.
I was a Morris dancer
but like a vegetable sub
I have grown leaner.
The graveyard has its gardeners, too,
of 19th century granite
softer and goner than slate.
Some people have compassion
so extensive,
you almost always miss it.
The town has black Irish lips
and high friendly dogs and asbestos
tucked into rhododendrons,
my town, Arsonville.
Episode in Kings
With who, where,
when I am, I have
to think this episode
of Kings was actually shot
in video jumpily the way
Whoodini videos
spun out, rooftop threads
in Brooklyn, the Bronx
and Queens.
Mouth, mouth,
mouth, mouth, almighty.
You’re a big mouth,
a big mouth. But not
Solomon. He gives Sheba
all that she asks for.
It is amazing
to make it all up.
Thrones are amazing,
as are happy people
of the palace of pads,
the king himself
wise and well-appointed
and at ease as a duke
in the last act
of a comedy. Graceful
and good-hearted,
he comes to humble
with an ostrich feather
in his dream we will
build on in the suburbs.
Forty years earlier,
his old man is delivering
sheep cheese and good hair,
though scribes swept
the part about his salon
from the desert floor.
1900 Houses around Boston
The unaccountable dead are involved
in your domestic concord and disputes.
Another reveals the hard plastic gnomes
in the garden with the yellow hosta leaves
loped over on them
when you think of the lady whose garden gnomes
they once were. They break a measuring cup.
The record player starts up. It’s freaky.
The dead are great surveillance.
Did you think
my mom would check up on me at school?
And the good news is that no matter
what they were before, the dead are socialists.
All these thoughts and travesties seem to float
above my head as if yellow locust leaves
the size of fingernails flew upwards
and could just be there somehow
borne on magic jets of my paranoia.
Stupidity Poem
I am not a golden superhero,
but my boot is a superhero.
The Sale of Midsummer
Joan Aiken
The van, which was labeled Modway Television, chugged up a long, steep hill, slipped thankfully into top gear, and ran down through fringes of beechwood bordering a small star-shaped valley which lay sunk in the top of the downs. Presently the trees ended and sunny curves of cowslip-studded grass began; ahead, clustered elms half revealed a few grey stone roofs.
“This ought to be it,” Andrew said, looking at his map. “There’s a village green; that’d be the best place to leave the van. I’ll take the mike and you bring the camera, Tod, and we’ll wander.”
“What shall I do?” asked Bill, the van driver.
“Find the pub and get their recipe for cowslip wine. It’s a speciality of the place.”
“That’ll suit me fine.”
Among the elms grouped in pairs through the village there were also lime trees, and the scent of lime blossom plus cowslip meadow was almost overpowering. The village drowsed in it; a solitary dog barked, a cuckoo called, nobody was about in the street or on the green.
“Quiet sort of place,” Bill said, mopping his forehead. He parked the van on the grass verge and walked off towards the inn, the Fan-tailed Pheasant, pausing incredulously to stare at the sign. It depicted a pheasant with a most improbable tail, two feathers curved like a pair of washing-tongs.
Andrew picked up his microphone and looked about for material. A rhythmic thudding drew his eyes in the direction of a low wall. Beyond it lay a paddock shaded by walnut trees where a girl in shirt and jeans was schooling a pony. When the two men approached a wicket gate in the wall and stood by it, the rider trotted towards them inquiringly.
“Very photogenic,” murmured Tod as his camera whirred. The girl was black-haired and her grey eyes seemed to reflect all the light from the sky; she was rather pale and had a long, graceful neck.
“Can I do something for you gentlemen?” she asked, dismounting from her pony.
“Excuse our troubling you—is this Midsummer Village?” Andrew asked.
“Certainly. Where else could it be?”
“You live here?”
“All my life, of course.”
“Do you know that the village is up for sale, that the Trust which owns it is obliged to raise money by selling off this parcel of land?”
“Of course. Everybody in the village knows.”
“And that the highest bid has come from Carrock, the millionaire, who has announced his intention, if he gets it, of turning it into a garden city?”
“Yes?” Her luminous eyes turned each of her responses to a question.
“Are you at all perturbed about this?” Andrew asked, slightly impatient at her lack of reaction.
“Perturbed.” She turned the word over in her mind. “If I were at all perturbed,” she said at last, “it would be for the man—Carrock. He is trying to buy a dream. He is bound to be disappointed.”
Her pony tossed its head and snorted. She dropped the reins on
its neck and let it go free.
“Of course you are familiar with the legend of Midsummer Village—that it is so beautiful it exists for only three days each year?”
“You were lucky in picking your day to come here, weren’t you?” she said, and smiled slightly. He heard a little grunt of satisfaction, or anguish, from Tod with the camera.
“There must be some tale in the village to account for this belief,” Andrew said. “Can you tell us?”
She leaned against the wall twirling a walnut leaf.
“Certainly. It originated in the eighteenth century when Morpurgo, the Poet Laureate, came to live here. He had been a fine poet, but by the time he became Laureate he was an old man. He slept all the year round and woke only for three days in the summer to compose an ode for the queen’s birthday and earn his tun of wine. He had been crossed in love—in his youth he wanted to marry a beautiful girl called Laura who was so devoted to her twin brother that she had sworn she would never take a husband. Some say Morpurgo slept all year to forget his unappeasable grief. He was struck by lightning one summer day in his garden and died in his sleep.”
“Did he never marry?”
“Oh yes, he married,” the girl said rather scornfully. “He married a woman called Edith, a farmer’s daughter thirty years younger than himself. As she had a smattering of witchcraft—nearly everyone knew a bit about it in those days—the tale goes that she put a spell on the whole place, that it should come alive only for three days every summer while Morpurgo was awake, writing his poem.”
“Sleeping Beauty stuff,” Tod muttered.
“And that is the legend of Midsummer Village?”
“That’s the legend,” the girl said, twirling her leaf. Then she threw it aside and clucked to the pony, which came to her willingly.
“Well, thank you very much,” Andrew said, and they left her to her schooling, though both men looked back at her several times.
“Now who?” said Tod.
“Here’s an old boy; looks like the squire.”
An elderly man, upright, tall, and grey-headed, was approaching them.
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