More Than Ever

More than ever, Sandy wanted to put her old life behind her, now that she had married the lawyer she met when she was going through the court case. It had been an horrific ordeal and she would never have made it through without him. Early on he had stopped to offer comfort when he came across her crying outside the courthouse. Their friendship grew so quickly, it was not long before they were engaged. And now she was not only his new wife, but as well, his office manager, thanks to the secretarial course from which she recently graduated.

Squiggles, Lines and Curves

It was called a typewriter, and it was full of fascinating symbols. By then I knew my letters and numbers, but these symbols were all new to me. Still, it was easy to guess what each one meant. There was ^, a straw hat like Granma wore when she gardened. ~ was the ocean. # was a checkerboard. * was the sun. And I knew instantly what > meant, for I was a smart boy, and had just seen Some Like It Hot on TV. “What could be greater than that‽” I wondered. “There’s even a symbol for Marilyn Monroe!”

Greater Thans

Mathematicians’ tastes had been reliable. Monty Python. Escher. Fugues. And when they said “let’s go for coffee”, mathematicians meant it. Sociologists dwelt in the imaginary. Coffee might not happen. Unless they'd bring on the revolution, pleasures were guilty and idiosyncratic. A sociologist of education collected snow domes. A labour researcher collected sneakers. A feminist smoked Sobranies. An interviewing methodologist kept artisanal chocolate in her stationery drawer, behind the Post-Its. A rumpled Frankfurt School theorist admired Vivienne Westwood and shared obscure punk music like the Greater Thans. And the careful scholar of Vietnamese refugees knew far too much about Octopus Paul.

Image: fifa.com

Pound Foolish

I’d been babysitting Robert and his sister for years. “Wanna see all the comics I bought?” he asked. “And I got that glass-cutting thing from TV that lets you make wine bottles into drinking glasses, but it’s pretty hard. And five big boxes of Smarties.”
     “And the chattering teeth?”
     “Yeah! I spread out the Smarties, wound up the teeth, and pushed them around just like the commercial.”
     So, yes, there I was saving my pennies, while this eleven year-old made more working Saturday afternoons in his uncle’s framing shop than I could make in a month’s worth of Saturday nights.

Pound for £

We’ve bought our tickets ready for our August trip. Now begins the prepatory pre-holiday weight loss, a plan that’s becoming increasingly necessary as I move dangerously close to menopause. Christmas, Easter, any extended event involving chocolate is good for at least a thin layer of superfluous chub. Upon arrival we’ll immediately join in with the English beer and Cadbury obsession. Next, we’ll be happy enablers in Dan’s Cornish pasty obsession. Then there’s Beryl’s pies and a boozy Bristol weekend. And this time we’ll go to France, land of the serious butter-eaters. This trip to England may cost me ten pounds.

Pounds

Sandy began talking as soon as the door opened and breezed into the house without letting Joan get a word in edgewise. Wedding plans were coming along great, everything was totally in order. A swatch of cloth was brought out. “This is your dress colour,” Sandy told Joan, “perfect for your complexion! And here’s the pattern, you have to go for measurements the day after tomorrow.” “Aren’t you full of energy!” remarked Joan. “It’s the diet pills,” Sandy told her. “Who knew how perfect they would be to help prepare for the wedding? …and I have lost ten pounds already!”

£

Franc and Mark had been put out to pasture by Kid Euro who (they grumbled) wasn’t such a hot shot. They’d never reconciled to retirement. “I miss the travel,” Mark moaned constantly; he’d once had a yen for Asia. Franc was bored too. He spent his time romancing the ladies, whom Mark dismissed as “silly old gits.” Lira, Peseta, and Drachma were always partying. Word was they’d squandered everything and might have to go back to work. “How come Sterling never had to retire?” Mark asked bitterly. Old £ was still kicking, and clearly would be well past one sixty-five.

Pound notes

The pound notes. It notices, with measured gaze, sugar creaming into butter. Beat in eggs, fold in flour or, for a melt-in-your-mouth sensation, beat room temp liquid ingredients into the dry. It remarks dispassionately how heavy hands thump upon a door. There might be a sharp foot note next, to no avail; followed by a shoulder note, then bars successfully broken by a stave. The pound notes whenever a three-legged dog is scooped up, its eyes searching out the windows of the City van, the wood-on-metal clang of each xylophone being seized, evidence of the licorice-sticky hands of a child.

What the…‽

He had even much liked her, which made it all the more surprising. They had fought as children, competed at school, and only reluctantly joined forces in their second year of college. Maybe it was the late nights in the lab or the long cold walks escorting her back to residence, but nothing had prepared him for this particular revelation. He was like a crash test dummy come suddenly to life only to discover himself already strapped in tight and heading full speed down the track. Wonder and fear condensed to a single moment. A single mark. A bang‽

Photo by Corbis.

!?!?!? حقا

Again the road accident that is Slice TV. I watched until 2 am last night. During that fitful period trying to pack in eight hours of restorative sleep in half the time, it occurred to me how easy it would be to disseminate anti-Western propaganda to the East. I’d gloss over any ontological differences, whip through the Crusades and the Dardanelles dust up like they never happened. I wouldn’t even bring up Salman Rushdie. Instead, I’d plunk my impressionable charges in front of an 84″ plasma screen and subject them to a marathon of The Real Housewives of Orange County.

!?!?!?

“What!?” exclaimed Joan. “I’m getting married,” Sandy repeated, “I want you to be my maid of honour.” “No way!!!!” said Joan. “You don’t want to be my maid of honour!?!?!?” responded Sandy. “Oh, sorry, of course I want to; I just can’t believe you’re getting married! How long have you known the guy!?” The last time she talked to Sandy there was no hint of this. “Only a couple of months, but the two of us are absolutely sure we were meant for each other. I can’t wait for you to meet him.” “Me, neither,” said Joan.

Interrogation Bang Bang We Love You

My father grew up under Nazism, my mother got the best deals on the black market because she cried the saddest. Their notions of age-appropriate were hit-and-miss; their efforts to modulate our reading by placing the loftier stuff on temptingly-higher shelves, convoluted and desultory. I didn’t finish the upper-shelf Genet or de Sade. By 12, I’d torn through the lower-shelf Ian Flemings. Thunderball had a hole in the cover. James Bond got tractioned. Interrogation was torture. That Chitty Chitty Bang Bang sprang from the same pen amazed my mother. Regarding atmosphere, she was rightly interrobanged; plotwise, there was little difference.

Image: 1.bp.blogspot.com

Interrobang, ‽

Consider the interrobang, a composite of the question mark and exclamation point. Was there something wrong with one or the other? Do we really need another punctuation mark!? Surely this signifies the death of nuance and subtlety, our ability to make a point by slight inflection, a measured meter, a calm Churchillian cadence. Weren’t these enough?! I suppose if you text or converse in 140 character bursts there’s no time to think. Maybe you spend a lot of time e-shouting and need a QUICK WAY TO CONVEY YOUR MOOD? BUT DIDN’T WE KNOW HOW TO DO THIS BEFORE THE INTERROBANG!?

50%

The men’s Adidas short, circa 1978, the one with the three side stripes had a little mesh liner known colloquially as a ‘nut catcher’, an ineffectual device as my girlfriends and I discovered one summer evening at Burger King. We’d just assembled over our tiny mountain of fries when we saw them. Methuselah’s testicles teetered half in/half out of his pants like indecisive cuckoos hesitating at the clock door. Couldn’t the more adventurous of the pair sense that it left the warm confines of polyester and had now rolled egg-like onto smooth orange molded plastic? Was it mostly by accident?

The 99% Monty

It didn’t matter that the costume was much too tight or that the hood made it hard to breath. Mrs. Orr was in charge of this production, and she insisted that the full body spandex suit was crucial to her vision of the play. She also insisted it be worn without underpants.
     “Death,” she said, “should not have unsightly panty lines!”
     And so, there stood Death in front of the entire cast, as the costume crew puzzled over this new predicament, the fabric stretched over his bony frame and his private parts splayed across his belly like a percent sign.

%

You could get rich and famous writing these hundred word ditties. You’d have to brand them somehow, give them a proper name, one that suggests intellectual depth, something clever like... like ‘Centimots’. Yes: a prefix and a French word! Then, you’d have to become the leading voice of Centimots, the revolutionary who charts the way, like Hemingway with his sparse, direct style. It’s risky, because Centimots are gimmicky. Novelties, without the novel, like haiku, and no one ever got rich writing haiku. You could try, but my honest gut sense is that – unlike this story – there’s no %age in it.

Percentage

“There’s no percentage in doing that,” said Sandy’s mother, overhearing Joan urging Sandy to go to the police. “You can’t let him get away with it,” insisted Joan. Sandy had awakened in the hotel room to the realization that she had been slipped a mickey. The guy was long gone. “First they have to find him,” commented Sandy’s mother cynically, “and then Sandy gets to have her name smeared around the papers. I have told Sandy many times she can’t go hanging around bars like that, dressed the way she always does; they are going to blame her, not him.”

%, sigil for hashes

In Perl, % is the sigil for hashes. Perl, language of debutantes in long oyster satin gloves. Not spoken, but drawn through the dust keeping vigil in the powder room. The hash function maps each possible key to a unique slot function. If – and only if – one glove slithers off, leaving its debutante behind, that’s a sure tell a one-armed bandit has absconded with it, off to play the slots for double diamonds, one up on the deb. She’s waltzing alone, a glass with three cherries – how uncultured! – in the remaining glove, the other hand behind her back, fingers crossed.

Posted to dVerse Poets.

Iota

Zuzanah slammed the door after her mother insisted, probably for prophylactic reasons, that she take all eight of her siblings with her. She’d never meet up with Petr, what with the boys and the twins and that baby strapped to her chest like a tick. But it didn’t matter. They’d trudged three miles in the rain to catch a bus that never came. And by now the bread was gone, consumed. The nine stood in a descending row like crestfallen matryoshkas. And all of them were empty, except for the littlest, whose heart was so big it filled him up.

Iota

Sandy did not have even an iota of strength to move. She was not sure how much longer she could hold her eyelids up. She wanted to reach over and pick up her drink. She was so thirsty. But it seemed a task so monumental as to be impossible. She looked at the guy sitting across from her. He was staring at her intently. Earlier he had invited himself to sit at her table and they had been enjoying a nice conversation. After she got back from the washroom this feeling of heaviness had hit her like a tidal wave.