Three Very Short Essays

These are short essays from my book, What’s the Story?, published, apparentopy, to very few people’s notice ten years ago. The first two appeared in Numero Cinq, a brilliant but alas discontinued online journal ediuted by Douglas Glover, whose posts on Substack, under the rubric Out and Back, also brilliant, are well worth your attention.

Sex and Death

I hesitated, doubtful I really wanted to learn just what that racket could be, mere yards into the woods behind our house. Hilarity seemed to blend with loud despair in that caterwaul, a mix that struck me somehow as expressive, though I couldn’t have said of what.

Uncanny. The word flew into my thoughts unbidden. Once you dig up its roots, of course, it really means nothing more than unknown, yet in common use it often holds some hint of horror.

I longed to go indoors, unhorrified, where fall’s first fire waited in the woodstove. Now that the house had lost its children, I looked forward as well to a romantic, last-of-the-workweek meal with my wife. I wanted to get away from ... what? a windigo? a werewolf? Nothing ordinary, at all events. I couldn’t associate that hullabaloo with any local fauna, which I know  thoroughly.

My flashlight found two forms, not big, not small, the size perhaps of new fawns, but far darker–dark as dark ever was. I saw an eye-gleam, then another, and finally four, each the color of a coal: two porcupines, carnally clinched, hooting and cackling. I still can’t think quite how to describe those squalls.

My childhood hero Frankie Farrell once showed his own eyes’ glint and, laughing meanly, proclaimed he wanted to die at what these beasts were so roughly up to. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, though I recall managing a comradely, pseudo-manly chuckle.  Frankie, twice my age, could knock men out. He could walk on his hands. He could do a back flip from a standstill.

A porcupine, however, is not even good at climbing the trees that make up his diet, so these two looked awkward in their noisy act of sex– or maybe just careful, as in the lame old joke. Indeed, they chattered their teeth and tittered as if their behavior were, exactly, a sort of petty fooling around.

But then they’d hiss like bobcats, or scrabble or bark. Graceless, ugly things. I considered the hours I’d spent over the past summer, pliers in hand, plucking quills from my swift but stupid bird dogs, all yelp and twitch and tremble, their blood flecking our mudroom. So perhaps it was simple rage that drove me now, though surely that’s too simple a description.

When I got a little closer to Frankie’s age, my very first sweetheart and I would chafe and claw at each other’s bodies, as if we meant to do each other harm. Ignorant, near-savage erotics.

I ran to the shed, grabbed a shovel, rushed back, and clubbed that pair of animals dead. It takes some doing to murder creatures with brains the size of warts, but it’s not as though I wanted violence, only peace and calm.

As I quelled one set of noises, however, others rose to mind: the wails of sirens; the deafening whistles of great churning trains; the shrieks of taloned raptors; the clamor of enraged men. I heard them all, uncanny.

Mrs. Ragnetti and the Spider                                                

Still warm this morning, autumn’s chill yet to come. An angler spider, trailing its thread, precisely, like a fishing line, has just caught me, in perfect coincidence with my random recall of la signora Ragnetti. In memory, the woman remains the ogre who terrified me every Thursday afternoon all through a winter. At singing lessons, fist on high, she led me, barely turned tenor, through cheerless versions of Caro mio ben’ and others. My mother had sent me to her. I’ve tasted hell. It is with me now in present tense.

I arrive, cradling my folio of airs, sopped and stained by the smutty snow of this stranger’s land, the asphalt city. The bells of San Cristofero’s drone a torpid portent of the agony ahead. It seems I hear the teacher even before I knock on the door: “How is this? You do not do these things I tell you, so simple. O Dio, che stupido....”

The spider must think he’s found arachnid heaven: that is, if a spider may be said to think. He surely considers me quite a catch, not knowing how I’ve shrunk.  He’s likely drunk with joy, unaware of how in those old sessions, when (cretino! farnullone!) failure seemed its own long season, I was hollowed out to a specter. If the spider tweaked his thread, I’d rise. I’m only air in this nightmare, a whiff of ether.

How can Mrs. Ragnetti, at five feet and perhaps ninety pounds, appear so huge? She wrests the door and impatiently waves me in, clicking her tongue. “So different from my son,” she growls, before I’ve even removed my spattered jacket. She turns to study the son’s photograph on a table. A middle-aged man stares out, face set and stern as her own. She crosses herself, scowls, then sits malignly down. Soon, too soon, her left hand jabs at scales on her piano, the right one clamped in that gnarled fist, as if she held a dagger.

“Piu forte!” she insists. I flinch, as though from actual blows, while we do-re-mi.

“Desastro!” she spits while I grapple up and down those ladders, no matter I know my voice, however timid, finds the pitch of each note exactly: “Do you come to me for making a noise?” Another note, another Latin imprecation. I grow colder, colder– and smaller. Once I’ve returned home, I know my mother will reject any complaints as self-pitying, puling, craven. She’s been assured that la signora is the region’s premiere voice coach. Am I not up to excellence?

Released at last, I cross the street to buy an icy milkshake, laced with malt, scant consolation for all I’ve felt go out of me. It’s an effort directly counter to reason: the treat, rather than numbing me, seems to freeze even harder the fear I’d meant to melt, the poisonous residue of terror, hate.

Once I felt the ruthlessness of la Ragnetti. Now a spider imagines he’ll lift me into his maw.

Jerry, Solitary

Our neighbor is almost ninety, and she’s the one I’m visiting. She’s Jerry’s neighbor too, and he’s the one I’m watching out the window. Fifteen years old, country to the bone, he’s there in the chill shooting baskets, trying to play some inner city black kid. His get-up is ludicrous. Hoodie. Bling. Sagging trousers. The boy’s expression and his moves are meant to suggest both control and indifference: a fluid leap, an easy spin, a follow-through, his hand dropping as smoothly as if he pulled a window blind. 

But why the act?  How would Jerry suspect he was being studied? Surely he imagines his solitude to be absolute.

Out of sight in the barn, his father must stay busy with the milking machines. I hear them drone. Life goes on. Jerry’s mother, I’ve been told, has rented a double-wide trailer down by the bridge. I don’t judge. Back thirty-some years, when I had a son near Jerry’s age myself, I too got divorced. 

You’d think a kid like Jerry would be angry. My boy was. You’d expect him maybe to pound the ball between shots, but his dribble’s lazy, random, and his face looks almost dreamy.  If the rusted rim had a net and I were outside, closer to him, I’d hear swish after swish. He’s accomplished, all right.  It might do him good to play for our small school’s team; and they could use him.

My aged neighbor is, as ever, hard on Jerry’s mother. “Her husband gave his family everything,” she insists, shaking her head, wattles quivering. 

I don’t answer, since I’m not certain if she means to imply disapproval of the wife’s behavior only, or to include some censure of Jerry’s appearance too.  His underpants show above the belt of his fat-legged pants, his head’s clean-shaven, he may picture himself with neck tattoos.

I visit because our neighbor is rheumy, half-deaf, and failing by the month. Life goes on.

How recently it seems the old lady was hale, and the boy a sweet blond baby. And I? Turning into an elderly man is the biggest surprise of my life.

Like any such kid, no doubt Jerry hopes his parents will reconcile.

Darkness settles, only the far mountaintops still bearing light. He can’t know I watch him there as he paces off an NBA three-pointer, 23 feet from the backboard– or in this case the side of the barn, which could stand some tending. It’s late November, the dooryard earth hard as ice. I want to look away. Jerry must realize his long shot won’t go.

It will never go.