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(still luna)
Shortly thereafter, a patient nun of tired bosom and failing faith
followed. "What's it all about, Elvis?", she asked. "Whyfore doest
thou tomentist me, or whatever?"
Elvis, whose real name was Elliot, looked up wetly.
(the trouble with writing stories over the net is that life can interfere. no one wrote for days. so luna kickstarts things again, the next week)
Days later, still leaning, the Soc class wandered off to lattes and
fraught-with-meaning dalliances. Would-be-Elvis, hyponotized by the
tired bosum of Sister, had forgotten the question, but not the urges
behind it. Sister dismissed him with a rap of the ruler.
Later that night, outside the convent group shower window, a lonely
hounddog sent up a musical lament.
A bucket of cold water answered.
"
(luna in)
Catholic. Talk Catholic. 'I have for you a question.' Jesus."
said the Sister. "I taught community college to reach eager young
minds, not middle aged Elvis nitwits. What is it?"
Would-be-Elvis sighed, leaned back, rearranged the equipment. The
remaining members of Soc 0265, History of the Inquisition, leaned
forward expectantly.
(hal in)
he said, "how now sister mary rose, i knoweth whyfor yer bosom be tired." she looked at him with tired eyes. she took her ruler and brought it down on his knuckles. she said, "may you be forgiven for talking english funny, you...you...you pseudo elvis with testicles." he smiled for the first time in three days, but he didn't know why. he said, "sister mary rose, i have for you a question."
(morgan started this one-- based on a postcard she found)
so he stood there, an over the hill elvis impersonator in a suit so tight his balls protruded and his paunch threatened to burst his fly, and he wondered whether to shop for haloween or go to confession. it had been three weeks and there was that nasty business with peeking in the convent windows again.?? father malarkey had warned him, time and time again, but the sight of sister mary rose's tired bosom shook him to his quick every time.
Empty
(evelyn, concluding our story... for now)
"I believe...that I'm not me. I mean, my mind and my body depend on
each other but where am I in the mix?
"When I say 'I'm hungry' or 'I'm cold' it's not me that's just my
body...
"And when I'm thinking, I try to locate the thinker. I say 'Where is
this I? Is he in my head, in my tongue, in my heart? Thoughts rush at
me rapidly, some are crazy or stupid or obsessive. The thoughts are
like a tv in the next room, I can pay attention to them or not. So the
thinker is not me.
"I believe the very thing that I need is to understand what I am. Who I
am. Where I am. Why I am..."
A wind gust entered the room, rustled the curtains, and moved the kite.
Ansel watched it sway a little and then saw Flo's arms. He stepped
toward her and let her engulf him with a hug. Sweet warmth filled him.
Ansel allowed the last crumbs of the cookie to melt away in his mouth
as he pondered Winslow's question.
"I believe..." he began, then stopped as he noticed Winslow fading
slowly away before his eyes, Cheshire-Cat-like. The kite hung
suspended in the air.
"Good," came Winslow's calm, disembodied voice. "That's an excellent
start."
The writers, yoga positioners, and hash-brown eaters and slingers all
looked at Ansel expectly.
nothing makes sense. not the subways, or the people crowded against you. shadow time-- this is where the part of you that rages against it comes out. speaking in tongues. no on understands. do you know what it means to be always this lonely?
i have people who say they know me.
always we want to know, and not to be known.
this is the time of day between eating and swallowing. cigarettes are a temporary solace, and whiskey pretends our company.
where do we begin to live in this one messy life?
Ansel ate the cookie. It tasted vaguely of hotdogs. This was o.k., because right before biting it, he thought he might be dreaming, and as he couldn't recall ever making use of the sense of taste in dreams, this meant-- perhaps-- that he wasn't. As the cookie made its crumbly way down his throat, he had a series of visions. At this point, he didn't find that odd.
In the first vision, he was 7, making his way in the Big Thicket, an aptly named mosquito-and-snake Club Med in South East Texas. His little sister Clara loped behind him, singing an off-key and off-color version of a Presbyterian hymn. (It wasn't that she was overly satirical, it was that she didn't hear that great, and was making do, word-wise). His mother, thin and shining, was describing the
carnivorous plants one could find in the thicket, and the startling group mind of fire ants, capable of giving a phermonal signal to bite only when a critical mass had found vulnerable flesh, and the vicious and tusked wild boars, escapees from Arcadian farmers many generations before. Ansel was struggling to maintain a swagger of
unconcerned cool, at the same time strategizing how to sacrifice Clara if push came to swinely or entomological shove.
In the second vision, he was-- could it be him?-- old, really old, and sitting at a table, the top of which was engraved in the sort of hieroglyphics that soft wood finds at the hands of very tense writers. At his left sat a sherry glass. To his right, a manuscript.
The third vision flickered only a few seconds. It was a subliminal vision. It involved the slightly cocked hip and very seductive gaze of a hotdog recipient at a beach, then quickly shifted to a total-
body-immersion-feel of a July beach kiss. Ansel struggled to hold onto it, but like everything these times, it shifted into:
a vision of a computer screen. On it bleeped a diagram of Ansel's body, with arrows and tiny symbols pointed to the various insults of the past year. Scrolling across the bottom of the screen was a banner of iridescent letters:
ANSEL. FIND OUT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT. FIND THE VERYTHING YOU NEED.
Ansel blinked. Visions faded. Winslow sat before him. The finished ite in his hands shimmered like waves in sunlight.
"I've heard", Winslow began, "that one is either on the bus. Or off it. Did you have a station in mind?"
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