Lack of setting?

Well . . . do you miss it in this 2300-word story???

rewrite of Emperor

When you’re an eight-year-old boy you need to see your father every weekend. When you’re a fifteen-year-old girl less is better. Ina’s dad took the extra energy he would’ve spent on her, turned it into money, and bought her brother stuff. Benji was already spazzed out on Lucky Charms and Saturday morning cartoons, though it was barely ten o’clock, and he was wind milling his arms to rush her towards the place behind his desk. She expected he’d show her another kind of air gun, a Lego colossus, some kind science-is-so-gross-it's-cool snot making machine. Instead, there was a small cage.

Ina could hear her father’s voice mingled with her mother’s in the kitchen around the corner. He hadn’t left yet.

“Remember last Christmas I wanted one so bad and Mom was all freaked out about it? But this one’s even friendly and not prickly at all unless you make him mad and then he does this sneezing, hiccupy thing that’s really weird.”

The cage exuded the odor of earthworms flushed up through cracks in the pavement of golf course holes after a hard rain, then deliberately trampled.

“. .crickets or night crawlers but Dad made me get the chow they sell at the pet store so Mom wouldn’t ‘shit-a-brick’ with his food in the fridge. He actually said it this time ‘shit-a-brick’! Eenie are you listening? Cause I’m trying to teach you what you have to do when we go to six Flags next weekend and you have to keep the cage real clean so Mom doesn’t find out.”

The cage itself had white-coated bars and was as big as the king-size box of soap detergent their mom bought at Price Chopper. It had a teal colored plastic base filled with pale wood shavings, a few of which had filtered out along the side and onto the carpet during Benji and Dad’s smuggling fete fifteen minutes earlier. Next to the cage, on the right side of Benji’s unused homework desk was a perfect pyramid pile of shavings. It looked as carefully arranged as a wedding cake, as discretely ordered and as precarious.

“I don’t think he’ll be a secret for long if you keep him on your desk.” Ina said.
“The desk has wheels, stupid. It’ll go in the closet.”

Ina was finally close enough to really look at Benji’s new pet. She heard the front door shut and her dad’s footsteps down the walk, Benji rushing to his bedroom window and doing that weird send-off wave they always did, fingers in the air ‘hang loose’ or ‘peace out’ or something. Dad had stayed longer than usual. Maybe Anne wasn’t waiting in the car.

Tank, as Benji called him, was almost the size of the snowball chocolate cakes she liked to eat when she felt sorry for herself. They came in a two pack, sheathed in marshmallow and coconut. They were just the kind of thing Mom didn’t allow in the house, just like Lucky Charms and pets.

In middle school they’d had a classroom hedgehog, an unfriendly thing that spent its time curled into a protective ball, tightly hiding its face in its soft, fleshy belly (or what she was left to imagine was softness beneath the prickles). Tank had two, bright, pinprick black eyes and a matching black nose that wiggled on the end of a pink snout. He had little whiskers and two canine teeth, smaller, even, than grains of rice. The teeth pressed down outside his lower jaw, giving his endearing face a laughable sense of menace. His white quills, tipped in brown, where flat against his back.

“You can touch him. He won’t bite.”

The odor Ina noticed earlier intensified. It wasn’t as unpleasant as she’d first thought.

She opened the top of the cage and Tank watched her as if she were a giant aircraft or a shooting star. Ina lowered her hand to him, cupped open, offering a ride. Something was odd about how he rested on her wrist. Ina ran her finger along the sparse fur of his belly, below the spines. He rolled over for her.
“Benji! He doesn’t have back legs!”

“No, they come like, that the pet store people told me--I promise it’s really true.”

She looked closely. There weren’t even any stumps or divots, not a single indication that there had ever been hind legs. Benji could not be right. “That’s crazy”

“Uh-huh. The man at the store said they were insectivores,” Benji said proudly.

“That means he eats bugs. It doesn’t mean he should drag his but around like a mutant.”

Their mother called to them. Ina lowered her hand into the cage and Tank ambled off her fingers.


“It’s not a secret; I know what’s up there.” Her mother was in her pink bathrobe that morning; the one Ina had given her two years ago. She’d sewn two appliqués onto the hip pocket that said “Diva Mom,” the start of a still-running joke. They were having coffee and talking about Benji going for a full weekend to the theme park, Ina intimating that his room could use some airing.

“So, if you know, then why are you humoring him?” All week socks and clean jockey shorts just showed up in tidy piles next to the hinge-side of his shut door. The usual cursory nock before their mother pushed in to speak to them gained a pause, like the blank screen before a DVD starts to play. Maybe she really didn’t care, or maybe she was just that depressed. Ina was getting used to having the sounds of CNN coming from her mom’s bedroom all night and into the morning.

“Because I don’t want to interfere.”

Her mom’s fingers were swollen. Ina could see her sprawled hand on the counter as she leaned near the coffee pot, the wedding band she still wore cutting into her finger.

“Besides, if you and Benji take care of it, that’s OK by me. Nice to see you guys in the same room together.”
“You know it’s a hedgehog, right?”
“Your father told me.”
“He told you?”
“We do talk, Ina. We do sometimes, you know.”
“Did he tell you the thing is a cripple? It doesn’t have back legs.”
“The term your father used was ‘a factory second’. He didn’t tell me exactly what the problem was.”

Benji left that Thursday night, his Spiderman duffel bag hanging lopsided off his shoulder as he whispered, “Make sure you feed him two scoops, not just one, move him into the closet when you open the door and make sure Mom doesn’t hear you”

Tank, himself, had not appeared to notice his handicap. Ina continued to be amazed at his affability and how his spines were soft if stroked in the right direction. Still, she’d decided they would go to the vet after fourth hour history class on Friday. Her mom was at work, but Gert could drive her. He was a junior with a Subaru and a fading crush on her. The year before he’d written embarrassing poetry about her “wheat- brown hair” and “azure eyes,” her perfectly average self, but since she’d made it clear that she didn’t like him that way, and since they’d both taken trig with Hopkins, Gert had been eager to prove they could just be friends. Using him wasn’t something she wanted to get used to doing, but this was different.

”He’s a pleasant little fellow,” the jowl-chinned veterinarian said, smiling at Tank. “It’s hard to find that in these hedgies.” For a moment Ina thought he’d said ‘wedgie’ then realized the older man was just as taken with Tank as she was.

”He doesn’t have back legs,” she restated.

“Hmm.” He pushed his thick glasses back up his nose.

They make contacts now, Ina thought.

“Doesn’t seem to bother him any, if that’s the case.”

Ina had Gert take her to a different clinic.

The woman veterinarian with the fawn-colored hair told her “He weighs a wopping 346 grams. That’s pretty big for a pygmy hedgehog!”

Ina lowered her voice. “He doesn’t have back legs.”

”Oh, they’re in there, I’m sure he just tucks them up tight to his body so it’s hard to see.”

Ina tried one more veterinary clinic the following morning when her mom was out. She put Tank in an empty box of frozen beef patties and took the bus. Ina hadn’t made an appointment. It was Saturday. She’d had to wait in the pastel lobby for two hours rereading the same issues of Cat Fancy and Conde Nast Traveler before being dismissed.
”We all have our imperfections if we look hard enough,” the technician said, trying to pull Tank out of the box in the middle of the hospital lobby with barking dogs and mewling plastic carriers. “I’m afraid it’s not an emergency.”

Who were these quack doctors? A pet was missing body parts and no one actually said or did anything about it?

At home, Ina carefully returned Tank to his cage on the desk in Benji’s closet. He slithered along the periphery rediscovering his boundaries. The perfect pile of wood shavings remained frozen, indestructible, giving off that odor she’d first noticed, only now it was less moist, more like a brick of parmesan left in the crisper drawer of the fridge. Brittle, greening.

Tuesday, after Benji was back, Ina got a call from Anne. She took the receiver and tempered her voice to match the way her mom had announced the call to her in the first place. Threadbare. Martyred. Anne cleared her throat and started in about a birthday dinner for her next week when she turned sixteen, just the three of them without Benji. Ina wanted to puke, and waited for Anne to bring up the Mary Kay makeovers again, maybe even impart some secrets about how to leave your blouse unbuttoned to display the lace scalloping on your C-cup bra, but Anne kept the call short.

“Sure,” Ina finally said into the receiver. Her mother was watching her.

Dad came to the door to pick her up for her birthday dinner. Ina wore jeans and a silk blouse, but he dressed up like they were going to the opera. At the seafood place she concentrated on being polite, on answering questions as efficiently as possible, on pretending she actually liked school and lying about going out for the cheerleading squad. That last detail excited Anne. When she stopped asking more pointed questions about cheerleading, realizing they weren’t going anywhere with the subject, she said—so quickly and softly that Ina wasn’t sure if she’d heard correctly—“By the way honey, I got you something, I was going to wait until dessert, but I hope you like these.”

It was a little white jewelry box with a silver bow. It smelled of low tide and things left behind. Ina wondered what kind of gratitude she could muster. Inside the box, sandwiched between tow layers of cotton, dangling from two gold earring studs, were Tank’s missing legs.

Ina threw the box back onto the table and lurched to her feet. “My ears aren’t even pierced!”
She tasted the puke at the back of her mouth: clam chowder, steak, a half-glass of wine. Already the tears were coming.

”Honey! What’s the problem?! Anne picked those out especially when we were in Martha’s Vineyard.”

”What kind of creep . . .” Ina struggled, “Who would ever . . .”

”They’re real mother-of-pearl. There’s a diamond in each one. Honey, honey, what’s wrong?” Her father’s concern echoed.

Ina was sobbing now. “I don’t want them. I just don’t want them, take me home Daddy.”

The lapels of his jacket smelled like the aftershave, the fog of the bathroom from when he was still at home. Wet. With no dead things.

Somehow, Ina ended up in the passenger side of the car, her father slamming the driver’s side door angrily and saying nothing. Anne and the little white box of legs were still inside the restaurant. They were halfway back to the house before he started, “I hope you’re happy. Anne wants to be your friend and I want to be your father but you aren’t helping very much.”

”You don’t need me. You’ve got Benji!”

Her father slammed his hands against the steering wheel, “God fucking, God bless it . . .” Then he began to cry. As if they were on a teeter-totter that had unloaded on one side, Ina straightened. Her eyes stopped watering.

They were at a stoplight when he turned to her, slowly. He looked like he might shatter. Ina had a learner’s permit, and opened her mouth to ask to drive the rest of the way.

”Ina, Benji is your mother’s son.” He looked at her until the light turned green and kept looking, until they both heard the honking of cars around them, cars idling in the fetid air of all that exhaust.

The next morning, while the sun was bright and Benji was still snoring in his PJs, Ina crept towards the closet where Tank was. Her brother must’ve cleaned the cage last night. Both the odor and the pile of shavings were gone. In its place was the small white box, the ribbon still perfectly attached, but empty, from what Ina could feel of its weight when she lifted it. She looked through the cage bars at the curious, familiar face, Tank’s tongue flicked a kernel of hedgehog chow off his nose. Then he turned and ran, on diamond-tipped hind legs.

The "if . . .then" story starter

If a migrant gigolo actually reported himself on the bottom of his tax return then Brenda at the IRS office would spend three hours asking Jeeves on the Internet if this was some kind of mushroom hunter or traveling musician. She would, eventually, file him in with the other now defunct job titles of alchemist, Siamese twin, and weight guesser.

Make Poetry

Marvin Bell noted this last week that poetry isn't made by grand subjects or objects, just by the quality of attention the writer pays.

Dog Island

So, I'm house sitting again. But just until August 7. Dogs are funny creatures. Here I am, glued to the computer, and each of these four 60+ pound furry beasts are bracketing me like sleeping bodies of water. Am I really that interesting? The three cats, at least, are less co-dependent (insert discussion, kitchy saying, fridge magnet about each species here.)

I've rediscovered how the Internet, like a marshmallow in the microwave, will expand to fill your day with only air. I'm looking for ways to network with other readers and writers, looking for ways to visually display the books I'm reading, looking for some manuscript exchange. I think that's what I'm looking for. Maybe I'm just wasting time.

Anyway, I'm out here, struggling with my chosen work, struggling with the validity of writing and my inability to simply push back from the table of it. May I introduce the idea, just for a moment, that non-fiction about the most potent subjects is precisely the place where a writer is most likely to dress in costume, wear a mask, hide. If you believe, as I do, that fiction becomes more emotionally autobiographical because the writer is unfettered by journalistic accountability, perhaps you can take the leap, as I have, into believing that you get a "truer" emotional read of the author themselves in fiction than you do in non. Or that is the challenge I'm finding myself up against. I still get angry when people thrill at the idea that a book or movie is "based on a true story" vs. "purely" made-up. How the $%@#!!! do you think anyone knew "to make it up" if they didn't already have the palette balanced on their left hand????
OK. Taking the energy here and using it for other things. I did spend time last night with Micheal Moore's "Stupid White Men" so that could be some of it.

Facing the kaleidoscope

A question for folks--I just got an invitation to join "facebook" from a super-cool writing friend that I would absolutely like to stay in better touch with
see his upcoming anthologized writing "Dark Territories" coming in August/Sept.
http://www.gshw.net/anthologies.html

but does anyone have any pluses and minuses to add about the facebook site? I feel pretty comfy with Blogger at this point, but I'd definitely like to do more "work in progress" exchange with other writers in different areas of the country.

There are millions of these networking things on the web and I get a bit confused and bereft.

writing resume as of 7/31/07

Creative works:

2007 Peggy Shumaker Poetry Prize
---------process-----------
+Foundling, memoir, held by Graywolf Press for long enough for them to figure out it was a peice of crap and I can't spell
+Picasso’s Cat, novel, literary fiction, 500+ rewriting (limbo)
-----------more in process----------

2004 Touchstone Graduate Creative Writing Award for Poetry (Kansas State University) for “Adam’s Rib: Upon the Chimera” published under the name ‘Catherine Beaudreault’, also published on the web at the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine December 2003

2004 Alaska Civil Rights Day Finalist/Presenter, Honorable Mention for “Trinity”

“The Soul Supine” published on the web at the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, December 2003, available at http://info.med.yale.edu/intmed/hummed/yjhm

2003 Anchorage Daily News Writing Contest, Honorable Mention for “How I Used to Love Your Mother”

“Fulcrum” in Alaska Women Speak Vol. XI, Issue 3, Fall 2003

Sigma Tau Delta International Convention 2001 (Corpus Christi, TX) panel presenter in “Original Poetry” and “British Potpourri”

Flash Fiction Winner “Voices” in Inklings, Denver CO. Vol. 3. Issue 1, Spring 1997

“Free Child” in Howlings, Denver CO. Spring/Summer 1997

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Holiday Story Contest winner “Wings” in Heartland Magazine Dec 24, 1995

Technical Articles:

“Feline Leukemia Virus” Veterinary Technician Vol. 24 No.2 February 2003
“Summer Safety [for pets]”Veterinary Technician Vol. 24 No.5 May 2003
“Winter Safety [for pets]”Veterinary Technician November 2003
Alaska Veterinary Technicians’ Association newsletters Spring 2002 - Winter 2004

Soft Peaks

A poem assignment that must contain the words stone, mouth, wheat, lick, couple, field, split, whisker, ripple AND one famous person AND one famous place.

Soft Peaks

Paris in the spring
with her red stone mouth and wheat-colored purse dogs
her arch, thrust and lick of hips at
the camera,
a couple of parents, a sister, a field of men
She was good. Back then, she was good.
Because it takes so long to raise something
to that kind of airy veneration, first to split
white from yolk in a clean, clean cold bowl
enter the flung-elbowed whisker and ripple froth beater
switch arms, switch arms while over my shoulder
Paris whispers
"Be a real woman," she says. You've got the angle all wrong.

Prose "poem" assignment (or public service announcement)

My ex-husband used to tell the story, about a snow machine whose treads kicked one out, laced in ice, flat as a drum-skin. At thirteen, I found a skull in the woods, avocado-shaped, teeth pricking from the maxilla, tiny canines loose in their sockets. A Jiffy Lube employee came in with a case of Quaker-State that turned out to be an oil-soaked shorthair found inside a Dodge pickup. Again: a half dozen in a cardboard beer box, a drunk man put a tabby on the grill, a woman called because her rottweiler just ate a litter of five. Stepped on. Run over. Thrown. Drowned. I am handed a uterus filled with sausages, tiny twirling bodies, they purple in their nest. I throw out the organ. 3.5 million each year. 42 million pounds that tax dollars pay to burn because we can't eat them, the American sacred cow. The idea is to make the commodity precious. We make it precious either by the quality of its suffering, or by creating scarcity.
Show me the miracle.

Thank You, Andy Warhol

(and thank you, Marvin Bell, for the assignment)

TOMATO PUREE (WATER, TOMATO PASTE), HIGH FRUCTOSE
CORN SYRUP, WHEAT FLOUR, SALT, SPICE EXTRACT,

VITAMIN C (ASCORBIC ACID), CITRIC ACID
WHOLESOME AND DELICIOUS You’ll love serving delicious,

Wholesome Campbell’s Tomato Soup‚ to your whole family.
Add the little extras they love to a hot, delicious

Bowl of Campbell’s Tomato Soup‚. Campbell’s Tomato Soup‚
Serves up a taste your whole family will love.

It’s a simple way to warm up mealtime for your family—any time.
Caution: Metal edges are sharp.

Recommend use by date on can end.
Promptly refrigerate any unused soup in separate container

Serv. Size one-half-cup condensed soup servings about two-point-five
Calories ninety Fat Cal. zero g Total Fat zero g Sat. Fat zero g

Trans fat zero g Cholest.zero mg Sodium seven-hundred-and-ten mg
Total Carb. Twenty g Fiber 1 g Sugars 12 g Protein 2 g


assignment: 15-20 lines based on three common objects (I cheated and used only one)

Overdue? Or the relief of silence on this blog???

recently reading/read: Creatures of Empire (about livestock in colonial England and race politics), Lying in Weight: the hidden epidemic of mid-life eating disorders, re-reading lots and lots of things including Pollan's "Second Nature" and Morrison's "Bluest Eye"

I can't fully account for my Internet reticence lately. It's even taken me a week or two to respond to interesting personal e-mails. Busy--yeah, that's it. Sure. Like I've never been before . . .
Still, I think the massive re-visioning of "the Africa Book" into a memoir now called "Foundling" has taken up a lot of psychic flow. Or, that's the thing I'm most comfortable blaming. And being sick with respiratory crud, doing some temp work in North Pole, and seeing a "dermatologist" for the second teenager-hood of my skin. (I think this has something to do with my nine lives.)

Things have been busy enough that I went out to Calypso farm and told them I couldn't come around for three weeks. . . and they just got two new Shetland ewe lambs with little waggly tails!

I'm in two weeks of 9-4pm writing classes as part of the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival and, despite having been "off farm" for a while now, this is the free-write I did with the single prompt she gave us :DIRT.

weird poet-thingDirt
an angry word
anglo-saxon hard and toothy spit at the end.
Soil--the mattress covertop of foam.
Dirt, an abused adjective, wrong-time description speaking munch-less un-composted and fetid half decay.
Soil, from which the springing heifers grow
fetus deep rumens and abomasum
graze down to a certain
and then move
move so the manure lands, bending plant heads and rye grass, timothy and maybe vetch.
Dirt forlorn and hard under foot, soil the slither of tongue on palate ending with the rivulet curl of 'l'
vermiculture tea in amber crusted river wanderings.
Dirt, the ugliness named of everything we stand on, the stuff of life, start of bread, the turning of leftover and trodden into cakes of visible plotting.

Non-fiction:
I'll say it starts with the Dirt for no other reason than to redeem that word in the way (but not the measure) we redeem "cunt" by printing a bumper sticker that says "cunt power," by calling our Euro-American friends "whitey" and "biscuit," black "nigger" and "coon."
Dirt. They don't call it dirt science at the Ag colleges. Soil science. Layers and layers of centuries gone to mineral and ash, compositions that reduce to abbreviations with plus signs and floating numbers of electrons in the upper right. Microscope it, test it, and find its darker, unnamed cousin makes the world go round.

On the job front:
It truly looks like I will be UA staff through the Interior-Aleutians Campus in the College of rural and community development by the beginning of September. If the paperwork doesn't get caught somewhere, or other poisonous snakes don't jump out into the road (we don't have any in Alaska --but you never know with this global warming bit!) I will be teaching some classes in the "Healthy Animals, healthy communities" program . . .a certificate program with grand future plans but still very wet behind the ears. My wage is very good and there should be health insurance. It won't be a "done deal" until late August, but again, looking good. Lots and lots and even more "lots" of intra-Alaskan

Until then,vet clinic work sporadically in North Pole, at the ER, finishing this new mss, spending several hours EVERY day trying to keep up with the ripening raspberries(!!!, trying to take part in the livestock component of the fair and taking up spinning wool and sewing fur skin hats and gloves(have 4 fox pelts and one mink).

Taken from "Chemical and Engineering News"

When hooked up to an electroencephalograph machine--an instrument that records the electrical activity of the brain--Jell-O demonstrates movement virtually identical to the brain waves of a healthy adult man or woman.

Updates in grocery list format

1. The local meat market hasn't been selling Alaskan proteins to the general public for a few months now, so we drove to the Delta meat and sausage company and stocked up a cooler of local ground beef, elk, yak, ham, bacon and buffalo.

2. Volunteering at Calypso Farm once weekly is becoming more and more fun, especially with the little kid tour groups (as young as 4 years!). I'm learning a lot more about horticulture, learning new words and gardening concepts, as well as enjoying getting outside and away from my computer projects. Alexander accompanied me last week and is SUPER eager to go back. His enthusiasm is infectious. I am lucky to know him.

3. I'm accompanying The Bergman Boys to Fort Yukon for a few days at the end of the week. Karl grew up there and Alexander's grandparents are still there. I'm definitely looking forward to exploring new territory and hangin' with the guys.

4. July is nuts for me. I'm doing some temp work in North Pole, some house sitting, some "on call" or the ER clinic, and two full weeks of writing workshops with the Fairbanks Summer Arts Fest.

5. WRITING is going well. The new version of "Mother Africa" is HUGELY improved!!! More cohesive, "wholistic" and polished. I have several places to send it when it is done on July 12. It never quite feels like I'm going fast enough. I have a few other projects rattling around, but I'll spare you.

6. I'm continuing to look forward to substitute teaching in the fall. Employment through UAF with their rural-Alaskan-focused vet tech program looks even more promising than I wrote in the last missive ( the funding for the position came in . . .) but with all things University I've found it wise to wait until the last opera singer has left the stage, or however the idiom goes.