Friday Freebie: Dzanc Books Literary Life-Preserver Package

Congratulations to Lewis Parker*, winner of Terrence Holt's In the Valley of the Kings, last week's Friday Freebie book giveaway.

This week, Quivering Pen readers are in for a real treat.  Dzanc Books is offering up a two-fer package of new releases: The Consequence of Skating by Steven Gillis and Pirate Talk or Mermalade by Terese Svoboda.  No, my friends, you haven't died and gone to Indie Heaven, this is just your reward for making it to another Friday here at the QP.

Here's a description of The Consequence of Skating from the Dzanc website:

Gillis' fourth novel blends politics, drama, ice skating, mountain climbing, the music industry and world affairs--not to mention artificial intelligence and G.O.D.--to create an inimitable tour de force.  Centering on Mickey Greene, an actor who has fallen from grace, the novel follows Mick as he maneuvers through a series of adventures that set him on a course of reconstructing his life in a way he never before imagined.

And here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about Pirate Talk:

Told entirely through dialogue, this quirky tale of period pirate-wannabes makes a jeu d'esprit of the privateer life even as it baldly de-romanticizes it.  Its protagonists, two unnamed brothers (one of whom might not be male), put out to sea from their Nantucket home in 1718 bedazzled by fantasies of gold doubloons and buccaneer booty.  Over the next decade, capture by pirates, shipboard slaughter, maiming and dismemberment, slavery,sodomy, shipwreck on a desert island, and getting stranded in the Arctic all follow in due course.  Svoboda plays these travails mostly for laughs, presenting them as ongoing pratfalls in the brothers' klutzy comedy of errors.  Periodic visits from a mermaid (perhaps their half-sister) and a parrot who steals the scene every time he croaks 'Hanged!' add to the fun.

But, really, I always like to have the books speak for themselves.
 
Here's the Page 99 Test from The Consequence of Skating:

     I wake Sunday, face down, still in my clothes, my neck sore from how I've fallen.  My head throbs as if beaten with broomsticks, I roll over and the cat purrs, sits on my chest, wants to be fed.  I move again and she jumps away.  The light through my window comes uninvited.  I blink, rub my eyes, wait until I can focus then look around.  The bottle I bought on my way back from Dave's lays empty on the floor.  There's a cigarette burn on my sheet, a brown hole I don't remember causing.  I put my finger in the hole as if this will somehow remind me.  It doesn't.  The numbers on my clock are red.  I blink twice more, read the time, count the hours lost between my leaving Dave's and waking.

And here's the Page 69 Test from Pirate Talk or Mermalade:

     Get up now and quit your moaning.  Best we mop the deck with the blood of the others.
     My leg.
     Get up, I say.  I think we're the last.  No one else is looking alive.
     Leg.
     You can move that leg.  You can, I saw you move it when that Moor went after you.
     See his cutlass, how it shines--it shines like a jewel in a jar.
     Move your leg.
     Tomorrow.  See the light on the edge of it?
     I'll move your leg myself then.
     My leg!
     Don't scream.  Give me your kerchief to stop the blood.  And your cutlass.
     Not the one I wrested from three brigands and a captain with just your pigknife held between my teeth?
     Magnificent, you were.  So fierce their eyes didn't blink but you had them shaking.  You slashed and slashed.  I wondered where you found your piracy so quick, it must be in the family.  Now, give me your cutlass.

 
If you'd like a chance at winning copies of both The Consequence of Skating and Pirate Talk, all you have to do is answer this question:

What's the name of the online literary journal launched by Dzanc Books in August 2009?  The answer can be found by clicking HERE.

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Sept. 23, at which time I will place all the correct respondents in a vintage potato-chip tin (which has been certified and approved for use by the North American Gaming Regulators Association**) and draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Sept 24.

 
*Which, oddly, makes me think of this.
**Not really, but my wife did say it was okay to borrow it from her collection of vintage antiques, as long as I put it back when I was done.

A Belated Birthday Card for Agatha Christie

Somehow, I completely overlooked the fact that yesterday was the anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth--and that's a crime.  The Grand Dame of Murder and Mayhem would have been 120 years old and, if she hadn't died in 1976 would no doubt still be tantalizing us with impossible-to-solve puzzles.

A few years ago, I was invited to write a daily blog about Agatha Christie when publishers Black Dog & Leventhal reissued several of her classic mysteries in a set of beautiful new editions.  The following is a mash-up of two of those blog posts, reprinted here as a sort of belated birthday gift to the Queen of Crime...

The statistics are staggering, and perhaps jut a bit unbelievable.  A billion copies in the English language and another billion translated into more than 40 foreign languages.  That’s billion with a “b.”  She is the all-time best-selling author in France, with more than 40 million copies sold in French, versus 22 million for Emile Zola, the nearest contender.

Between 1920 and 1976, Agatha produced a total of 80 novels and short story collections, which included more than 100 short stories.  She also wrote more than a dozen plays like The Mousetrap, the theatrical legend which opened in London on November 25, 1952 and became the longest continuously-running play in history.  And let’s not forget the two volumes of poetry, four books of non-fiction and six romances (which she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott).

According to publishing lore, she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.

Let me repeat that: God, the Bard, then the Queen of Crime.  Few other authors can touch her track record. Stephen King might eventually come close—he’s currently [as of three years ago] at a comparatively meager 300 million in sales; Louis L’Amour is eating trail dust at around 225 million copies.

Agatha’s popularity has earned her a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.  From the get-go, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, she hit upon a successful formula and stuck with it throughout her career.  She pretzel-twisted readers’ minds, but always left them clamoring for more.  She was the Elvis of murder and mayhem, the Michael Jordan of novelists.

This was all very uncomfortable for the shy, reticent English girl who was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Devonshire in 1890.  She reportedly got very squirmy when it came to interviews and making public speeches.  Still, I think she’d be happy to know that her popularity has hardly waned 30 years after her death and 80 years after publication of the book that shot her to fame, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

It’s pretty obvious that the woman loved to write and did so with all the speed and precision of a word-factory.  It wasn’t easy, as she points out through her literary alter ego, mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver, in Cards on the Table.  A young fan tells Mrs. Oliver that “it must be wonderful just to sit down and write off a whole book.”  To which Ariadne replies: “It doesn’t happen exactly like that.  One actually has to think, you know.  And thinking is always a bore.  And you have to plan things.  And then one gets stuck every now and then and you feel you’ll never get out of the mess—but you do!  Writing’s not particularly enjoyable.  It’s hard work like everything else.”

If so, then the perspiration rarely showed on the pages of Agatha’s books.  Her plots were intricate, Gordian knots, but her style of delivery was simple and unadorned.  Even the title of her memoirs—An Autobiography—was plain as a bowl of porridge.  She could have called it “The People I’ve Loved and Killed” or “My Bloody Life.”  But, no, simply “An Autobiography.”

She didn’t invent the “locked room mystery,” she only perfected the recipe.  Her path was paved by other writers like the equally-prolific Mary Roberts Rinehart, who published her first book more than 15 years before The Mysterious Affair at Styles and who was the source of the phrase “The butler did it.”  Of course others—including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe and G. K. Chesterton—were also towering influences in the early days of detective fiction.

Was she perfect?  Heavens, no!  I won’t sugar-glaze the fact that a few of the whodunits turn tedious before “the big reveal” and that some of her characters could be stiff and unremarkable (which is why I always appreciated it when she included a brief summary of the characters at the beginning of the book).

Like some of you, I met Agatha for the first time in a library.  Fittingly, the book was The Body in the Library.

It was sex that first caught my eye.  That particular cover of The Body in the Library featured two damsels in distress wearing slinky negligees.  The one on the left was being strangled by an otherwise nice-looking gentleman, the one on the right was posed like a Barbie doll with a come-hither look in her eyes.  Between the two ladies was a large, shadowy half-face of an elderly lady with twinkling eyes and a gentle, appealing demeanor.

Sex, violence, and old ladies.  I was hooked by the cover alone.  I opened the book and started reading.

At the time, I was a shy, shaggy-haired teenager whose voice was still on that cracking border between alto and tenor.  For years, books had been my best (and sometimes only) friends and I was constantly skulking around the library in search of new companions.  This particular library was actually a new-fangled “Media Center” in my freshly-built junior high school.  The fact that in addition to books it had “audio-visual equipment”—slide projectors, cassette tapes and a new thing called a Video Tape Recorder (a huge, clunky predecessor to the VCR)—earned it the uber-cool name of Media Center.  It was located in the center of the school: a large, open circle lined by curved bookshelves—sort of like a paper-and-ink Stonehenge.

The Media Center was new and exciting back in 1974, and so was this writer named Agatha Christie I was holding in my hands.  I’d long been a junkie for juvenile mysteries—I could quote you chapter and verse on Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators and Encyclopedia Brown—but this was something different, something smart and adult.

I sat there after school that autumn day long after the final bell had rung, releasing all the groovier kids back out into the world, and read the first two chapters of The Body in the Library, absorbed by the shocking murder in the charming little English village of St. Mary Mead.

…across the old bearskin hearthrug there was sprawled something new and crude and melodramatic.  The flamboyant figure of a girl…Her thin body was dressed in a backless evening dress of white spangled satin; the face was heavily made up, the powder standing out grotesquely on its blue, swollen surface, the mascara of the lashes lying thickly on the distorted cheeks, the scarlet of the lips looking like a gash.  The fingernails were—

There was a swift, sudden tap on my shoulder.  I jumped half a foot and nearly toppled over the book Stonehenge.

It was the librarian—er, Media Center Coordinator.  “We’re closing up now.  I’m calling it a day.  Are you going to check out that book or not?”

“Y-yes, of course. I guess I lost track of the time.”

He stamped the book, giving me two weeks before I had to return it.  I knew I wouldn’t need that long.  I tucked my new friend Agatha Christie under my arm and raced home.

I finished The Body in the Library that night, then returned to the Media Center the next day and checked out every other Christie mystery the Stonehenge had to offer (sadly, only four other titles).

From that moment, right up to the present day, I have not found another mystery writer who fills me with such awe and anticipation when I reach for her books.  I always learn something from Agatha.  Usually, it’s how absolutely, utterly stupid I am when, twenty pages before the end, I’m convinced I know who done it.  Only to find out that Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple are so incredibly smarter at unknotting the pretzel.

The Writer in Winter

For anyone who follows me on Twitter (@davidabrams1963), my age is not a difficult math problem to solve.  I've already had an over-the-hill birthday, complete with black balloons and winky jokes about Geritol-and-Viagra cocktails.  Apart from some unwanted baggage of 20 pounds and a posture increasingly pulled downward by gravity, I'm cool with my age.

Besides, autumn has always been my favorite season of the year.

As a writer, however, I am very conscious of that ticking sound coming from the clock beside my bed.  I think of my life in calendar terms.  I have approximately 14,642 allotted days in which to finally read Ulysses, earn enough money to take my wife to Paris, and publish a novel.  Not necessarily in that order.

Every morning is a fresh start, every evening is a vague disappointment that I didn't do more with the past 15 hours.  While writers like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates are off producing stories at the rate of horny rabbits, here I sit in my basement office, struggling to eke out another 500 words.  There are times when I think I'll be going on my first book tour wearing adult diapers and using a walker to get around from bookstore to bookstore.

There was a time when I thought my writing career was about to take off.  I could feel the rumble of the rocket engines and see the first signs of the smoke boiling out over the launch pad.  That was the day I got the phone call from my first agent, informing me that Esquire had just purchased one of my short stories.  My heart erupted, my head orbited earth.  I ran home from work, picked up my wife and waltzed her around the room.  "Do you know what this means?" I yelled.  "Do you.  Know.  What this.  Means?"  She caught my infectious laughter, put her hands on my chest, and said, "No, what?"  My eyes widened.  "It means something great is about to happen.  All those years of hard work are about to pay off."

That was in 1998.

Sure, I glowed when the issue hit the newsstands, Nicolas Cage peering at me from the cover.  My story ("Providence") was buried inside the magazine, a men’s perfume ad stuck smack dab in the middle of its pages.  It was one of those thick-papered ads with naked male torsos and a strip of paper you could peel away and rub the trace of perfume all over your wrists.  I hoped people wouldn't be too distracted making themselves smell good to read my story.

Nic Cage and I were both casting hopeful glances at our futures.  But they were futures neither of us could accurately chart.  He would go on to make to make some good movies like Adaptation and World Trade Center; but he would also do movies like Next and Knowing and National Treasure (he should have taken a hint from the consonant sound of those titles and said, "N-n-no.").

I would sit by my phone waiting for hyperventilating publishers to call saying they wanted to read more of my stories.  I heard the words "book contract" and "let's do lunch" buzzing in my ear.  I thought, "Today Esquire, tomorrow the world!"

The phone sat silent.  When I picked up the receiver, I heard crickets.

Undaunted, I churned out a few more stories.  I spent four years writing a novel which will probably remain unpublished.  Like Nic Cage, I produced some good stuff, but also a lot of crap.  Gradually, I stopped dreaming and got on with living.  I mowed the lawn, I fed my kids cereal, I folded laundry.  I progressed up the career ladder of the Army.  I went to war.

I'm still waiting for that Something Big to fall from the sky.  At this point, I'll settle for a medium-sized Something.  I've made peace with that fact and have stopped wishing I was the next Sloane Crosley or Jonathan Safran Foer, hot young rockets of literature.  I'm totally cool with growing a long, white Tolstoyan beard.  My stories and I will grow old together; we'll buy matching rocking chairs and spend our afternoons on the front porch.  I'll stay hunched over the keyboard and keep singing that Sinatra song: "The best is yet to come, and won't that be fine?"

All of this is by way of long prologue to tell you about the slideshow over at Huffington Post in which Randy Susan Meyers celebrates 41 Over 40.  After the lash and backlash of The New Yorker's list of "20 Under 40" (of which, yes, I was one of the back-lashers), it's refreshing to see someone spotlighting writers who debuted in the winter of their lives.  Paul Harding (Tinkers), Julia Glass (Three Junes), James A. Michener (Tales of the South Pacific), Henry Miller (Tropic of Capricorn), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), George Eliot (Adam Bede), M.J. Rose (The Reincarnationist) and Richard Adams (Watership Down) were all past the Big 4-0 when their debuts rolled off the printing presses.  Late-bloomers of the world, unite!

The HuffPo article is spurred, in part, by two earlier essays: one in The Guardian where a crotchety Robert McCrum declares "Old people, in general, don't have literary careers;" the other is by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus who says that fiction writers "often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young."

McCrum and Tanenhaus call some convincing witnesses to the stand. Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike were all published, successful novelists well before they had their black-balloon birthdays.  But, with the exception of Fitzgerald, they all continued to write well into their white-hair years, all of them getting better with each new novel.  I'll take Martin Chuzzlewit over The Pickwick Papers any day.

Sure, all those Great Ones had a head start on me, but does that mean I need to fly the flag of surrender as Mr. Tanenhaus suggests?  Why can't I just be the wine which has been seasoning for years in that oak-staved barrel waiting for just the right moment to be poured?  Who says I can't be the next Helen Hooven Santmyer?  Her best-known book, ...And Ladies of the Club, was published when she was 87.

Then again, at that point, she was only four years away from the grave.  Maybe I'd better reconsider that example.

Better I should be like Laura Bell, a Wyoming author who just published her first book, a memoir called Claiming Ground, at age 56.  In an interview, Bell said, “There’s nothing like having a new door open up in your mid-50s.  I’ve always been someone who has been about evolution.”

That's it: I'm not getting older, I'm evolving.  And, hopefully, so is my writing.

A moment in the House of Pancakes

At the International House of Pancakes this morning, while eating hash browns that crunched with the afterglow of cigarettes and sipping water that came from moldy faucets, I sat next to a family of three—a scruffy skater-type with droopy eyes and shaggy haircut, his overweight sister and her husband.  The lady was so fat, so double-wide in the butt, that every time she shifted, the wooden chair creaked and shrieked.  I expected to hear a crack and splinter and a startled “Ooof!” coming from their table any minute.

I read Freedom while I ate, Kindle in one hand, fork in the other, taking care to keep my syrup-hand away from the Kindle.

The family talked, loudly, about the terror they’d experienced while attempting to cross a mountain pass in a blizzard last winter.  “I never been so scared driving in all my life as I was at that moment,” the husband said.

“I was in the back seat sobbing,” the fat lady said.

The guy with dark circles for eyes stared at a point mid-table and said nothing.

My waitress was a chipper, cheery lady in her early thirties.  Blonde hair and Sarah Palin glasses.  She called me “honey” when she refilled my water glass.

At that point, I wanted to order a Diet Coke, but I didn’t because: a) I was almost through with my SmokeHouse Platter; and b) I guessed that they only carried Pepsi.  I hate Pepsi.

The other waitress on shift, a girl in her early twenties, nametag: Amanda, walked by my table and said, “Is that one of them new iPod thingies?”

“It’s a Kindle,” I replied.

“Cool,” she said.  “I think I need to get me one of them.”

“They are cool,” I said.

“Cool,” she said and started to walk away.

“They’re only $139 right now,” I called after her.

“Okay, cool,” she said, already busy with dirty plates at another table.

I returned to Freedom.  Walter Berglund was ranting about overpopulation and the way society was swirling down a just-flushed toilet.  The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.

I coughed my way through the rest of my breakfast, then walked to the register to pay for my nicotine-laced meal.

Behind me, the husband was describing—for the whole restaurant—how he had to sit on the edge of his seat, hunched up over the steering wheel, as he came down the mountain.

“Other cars were passing us going 5 miles per hour,” his large wife said, shifting and creaking.  “We was, like, crawling through the snow.”

“The scaredest I ever been,” the husband agreed.

My waitress, Tonya, rang me up.  “Whatcha reading?” she asked, nodding at my Kindle.

“Freedom,” I said.  “By Jonathan Franzen,” I added superfluously.  I knew she wouldn’t know Franzen from France.

“Oh.  And is that what it’s about?  Freedom?”  She had sort of a Glenn Beck edge to her voice.

“Yes, in a way,” I said, adding, “it’s a novel.”  Again, superfluously.

“A novel.  Hmm.”  She acted as if I’d just asked if they had chicken satay on the menu there at IHOP.  “Now, ‘novels’...what exactly are those?  Are they—”

“They’re fiction,” I said.  Now I could see her face struggling to remember the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.

The husband was still holding forth about their blizzardy descent from Terror Mountain.  His wife’s chair was begging for mercy because now she, too, was into telling the story, her butt cheeks bouncing each time she injected an exciting detail, like how she gripped the armrest so hard she broke a nail.  The husband and wife were talking to themselves, however.  The brother with the droopy eyes wasn’t listening.  He was watching me at the register, waiting to see what I’d say to Tonya.

I wanted to reach out, pat her hand, and reassure her with something like, “Don’t worry, lots of people get the two confused.  Even my wife has a hard time with it.  She always tells me the ‘non-’ part of ‘non-fiction’ makes it sound like it’s not true.”  I would have gone on with a mini diatribe about how writers like James Frey, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer blurred boundaries between genres and, for better or worse, planted flags in new territories.  I might have even delivered a sermon on why I thought The Executioner’s Song was the greatest untrue book I’d ever read.  But then I looked up and realized that the sparkle in her eyes was not one of amusement or enjoyment, but was instead the glitter of fright.  She’d gotten herself in the deep end of a conversation with a sharp-dressed man who carried around one of those iPod thingies Amanda had been telling her about and now how could she go about extracting herself from this conversation and somehow still earn herself a decent $4 tip?

“I-I like non-fiction,” she softly stammered.  “Things that are true.  You read any good books like that lately?”

I thought for a minute.  “I liked Rosanne Cash’s memoir a lot.  She’s as good a writer as she is a singer.”

“Well,” she swiped my credit card and tore off my receipt with a brisk snap, “I don’t read much.”  (There it was.  The slam of the door.)  “Last book I read was in high school.”

By the tone of her voice, it sounded like it had been The Sun Also Rises and she’d hated every page of it.

I stopped short of telling her I read books like she served pancakes.  She seemed like a nice lady; I didn’t want to frighten her by boasting I currently have 6,375 books in my basement.  I certainly wasn’t about to tell her that I was that most inscrutable of creatures, a novelist.  Some things are better left unsaid.

She had her life, I had mine.  We were just two pleasantries passing on the sidewalk of life.

I signed the credit-card slip, adding a more-than-generous tip, lied about how much I’d enjoyed the breakfast, then left the restaurant, the gulf cracking and widening between us as I walked out the door.

Cake, Dog, Death--Four Days in Iraq

Looking back through the journal I kept during my deployment to Iraq, I came across these four entries--four days which were pretty typical of the 345 I spent over there.  The events of the Sept. 14 entry forms the basis of what is currently the opening scene of Fobbit.

September 11, 2005:  In a small, grim echo of the events from four years ago, my day starts off with the news of a KIA.  I can’t even remember the circumstances now—this death has melted and blended in with the rest of the KIAs which flow through our office nearly every day.  Yet, somehow it hurts more to be starting my Sept. 11th with a death.

At one point, I need to go in to the CIC (the command and control center of the headquarters) to get more information on an incident.  I mount the stairs and walk across the middle level of the amphitheater-like room to talk to the battle major who sits at his triptych of computer screens, monitoring calls and logging in Significant Activities (this is where they’re written and posted to the classified web server).  As I wait for him to get off the phone, I look around the room at all the other desks.  Officers are sitting around reading paperback novels, playing computer solitaire, or watching streaming video of the latest college football game.  On the three large screens at the front of the room, the camera feeds from the blimps over Baghdad zoom in on the traffic moving through the narrow streets.  The cameras restlessly pan back and forth, watching for “suspicious behavior” while, at their desks, the officers turn another page in their Tom Clancy novels.

When I go to lunch, I stop at the dessert table.  The cooks have baked a large sheet cake in commemoration of Sept. 11th.  Over top of the chocolate-and-yellow cake layers, the frosting is thick and runny.  A fireman with “FDNY” on his helmet looks out at me earnestly from the frosting—his lips are a garish red and his eyes bulge, as if he’d been drawn by an amateur who took too much pride in his talents.  The cake is more than half gone when the cheery Filipino baker cuts my slice.  I imagine the other half of the cake had the World Trade Center towers with little blossoms of smoke curling from their mid-sections.  When I take the cake back to my room and start to eat it, I have to put it down after only two or three bites.  It’s too sweet and cloying—not at all what a 9/11 cake should be.  At the very least, there should be dark, bitter chocolate on this cake.

At least at the end of the day, there’s a little bit of comic relief when I read this Sig Act: “An Iraqi Army Soldier was hit in the helmet by one round of sniper fire.  Wasn’t hurt.  Only has a headache.”


September 12, 2005:  I hear about some hardcore battalion commander with too much time and money on his hands who had a bunch of patches made at his own expense.  They looked just like Ranger tabs, but read “Fobbit.”  He also had some that had “REMF” and “POAG” (other derogatory terms for us Fobbits).  They looked just like the real thing and he went around handing them out—with no small measure of amused derision, I imagine—to admin guys he came across in his travels.


September 13:  I saw a wild dog while I was running around the lake this morning.  I rounded the bend and there he was, this mangy coyote-like dog trotting alongside me for about 20 feet, his sharp, knife-like muzzle pointed in my direction.  He and I stared at each other for a few seconds before he veered off into the tall reeds bordering the road.  The look he gave me seemed to be one of irritation--like I was the intruder, the interloper.  I cut my run short and headed back to the safety of my fellow American soldiers.


September 14, 2005:  We started feeling the first explosions around 8 a.m., just after the morning briefing started.  As always, when the percussion rippled through the air, nudging us slightly in our chests and making our hearts skip half a beat, we collectively said, “Whoa,” but kept on with our work.  When the second Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device detonation came about 15 minutes later, we paused a little longer, looking at each other as if to say, “Well, here we go again.”  But along about the third one, then the fourth one on its heels, we knew this wasn’t just another ordinary day.  It was like the feeling we had on Sept. 11th when we watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center and we knew this was no “accident.”

From the next cubicle over, I heard one officer say to another: “Man, it’s a VBIED day in Baghdad today!”

“Yeah, we’ve got a whole fuckload of ’em.”

By the end of the day, our Sig Acts chart was riddled with more than a dozen VBIEDs—14 in all, matching the previous record (in case you’re keeping a scorecard) set back on April 29.  It was a deadly day for civilians (more than 140 dead), but our U.S. soldiers only took it on the chin with three or four wounded.  It was a carefully crafted, coordinated attack on the part of the terrorists.  They’d been squeezed out of Tal Afar, so they returned to Baghdad to show us the stuff they were made of.

Not all of the attacks were successful, however.  At least one suicide driver failed miserably. Here’s how I described it in a press release (which we never sent out):

          In Eastern Baghdad, at about 10 a.m. today, a homicide bomber crashed his explosives-laden vehicle into a coalition tank and survived.  The driver’s right leg was pinned under the dash of the damaged vehicle.  Coalition forces, working in concert with Iraqi Police, cordoned off the area around the vehicle to ensure the safety of civilian bystanders.  The vehicle was inspected by a camera-equipped Explosive Ordnance Disposal robot and it was determined that the vehicle contained explosives. The driver was observed drinking water and told an Iraqi Police officer that he was from Syria and that his (terrorist) group had launched numerous vehicle bomb attacks today and that other attacks would follow.  The driver said he was here to kill Americans.

          It was considered unsafe for soldiers to approach the vehicle while the terrorist was still capable of detonating his explosives.  To reduce the threat, the EOD robot placed an explosive charge (water charge) beneath the vehicle to blow the munitions out of the rear seat and render the vehicle safe.  The water charge was detonated.  The driver survived the blast.  The EOD robot investigated the vehicle again and found the water charge did not successfully render the vehicle safe; explosives were still present.

          An EOD specialist approached the vehicle in his protective suit and found a grenade within reach of the driver and a landmine near his foot.  When the EOD specialist went to remove the grenade the driver began to move.  The EOD specialist moved away from the vehicle as the intent of the driver was unknown.

          The EOD robot was again called into action and approached the driver.  The bomber became agitated when the EOD robot attempted to pull him to safety, preventing his removal from the vehicle.  It was determined the driver still wanted to blow up his vehicle to cause casualties.

          As the driver was still considered a threat, it would have been an unacceptable risk to have soldiers approach the vehicle.  The driver was engaged with small-arms fire and was killed.

          EOD investigated the car and discovered the driver’s foot was indeed still placed on top of a mine and he could have detonated it if soldiers or civilians had approached.

          At 2:30 p.m., EOD technicians completed removing all ordnance from the vehicle, which included three propane tanks, two 152-millimeter artillery shells, several anti-tank mines and a grenade.  Iraqi Police then assumed control of the scene.

When I asked Lieutenant Colonel W______ about this, he said, “You know who killed him, right?”

“No.”

“Battalion commander.”

“Really?”

“The order came down to ‘terminate the threat’ and the commander was the one to carry it out.  He wanted to take responsibility for it, he didn’t want any of his soldiers to have to deal with that.  I mean, what’s he gonna do?  Turn to one of his privates and say, ‘You there!  Shoot that bastard in the head!’?  So, he did what he knew he had to do.”

Standards and Discipline in a Combat Zone (an excerpt)

Here's another section from the novel (Fobbit) on which I've been working this week.  This is fiction--combat-zone satire--but it's not too far off the mark of what I saw during my eleven months in Iraq.  (P.S. Don't try e-mailing CSM Tupplewhite; there is no such person)

To: DIV NCO Leadership Group
From: marvin.tupplewhite@us.army.mil
Subject: Notes from Command Sergeant Major Tupplewhite

Fellow NCOs,

As discussed at this morning’s weekly CSM meeting, we—the CG and I—have certain expectations of our enlisted Shamrock Division when deployed to a combat zone and, to date, those expectations have not been fully met, let alone exceeded.  I already ripped you guys a new one at this morning’s meeting, so I won’t thrash you again here.  Not my purpose or intent.  This is simply what I already gave you, but this time in written format.  Here we go:

1. Uniform Standards.  This topic is brought up repeatedly and was addressed by the Commanding General during the morning update today.  I’m just reiterating.  Uniform standards are not being enforced by our leaders and are clearly visibly lacking in the soldiers we see walking around this FOB.  And not just here, mind you.  The majority of soldiers I observe in my visits all around Iraq display multiple violations of AR 670-1 and governing uniform policies.
     Just a few examples off the top of my head:
          a)  Sleeves Down. The standard for uniforms sleeves is down.  There is nothing from any reg in Sham Div that authorizes the wear of the uniform with sleeves up, so where the soldiers are getting this idea from I don’t know.  Sure it’s hot out there.  Deal with it.
          b)  Eyewear.  Unauthorized eyewear is clearly defined in AR 670-1.  It says, and I quote: “Conservative prescription and nonprescription sunglasses are authorized for wear when in a garrison environment…Soldiers may not wear lenses with extreme or trendy colors, which include, but are not limited to, red, yellow, blue, purple, bright green, or orange.  Lens colors must be traditional gray, brown, or dark green shades.”  I don’t want to see one more pair of hippie-flower-child, John-Lennon-style glasses. I will personally rip them off the soldier’s face and stomp them to death in the dirt beneath my boot.
          c) Do-Rags.  Completely unacceptable.  Nowhere in AR 670-1 does it authorize the use and wear of bandanas tied, pirate-fashion, to the soldier’s skull.  The Kevlar helmet has undergone extensive testing and meets exacting design standards to fully soak up whatever sweat our soldiers emit.  From now on, I’m calling these Don’t-Rags.  Nuff said.
     Soldiers will continue to disobey orders and ignore uniform standards simply because first sergeants (or any sergeants for that matter) and company commanders choose to make them up as they go along.  Or is it that you’re just purposely choosing not to fulfill your contract not just with America but with the sons and daughters of our great country?  Look in the mirror and ask yourself:  Do I really truly achieve high levels of professionalism each and every day, or am I just happy “doing my own thing”?  Are you a “Toe-the-Liner”?  Which is it, Sergeant?  Will you choose Rigorous Discipline or Sloppy Standards?

2. Acts of Indiscipline.  We are all senior leaders and we should be farther ahead in some cases than we are.  The division has settled down into steady-state operations and that’s our focus now (combat ops).  It is our duty to ensure Soldiers fully understand standards of conduct.  And yet, every day the CG and I receive reports from staff leadership indicating otherwise.
     Let me give you a little example, a little tidbit which came to our attention during a staff briefing just yesterday.  This is what G-2 briefed, and I quote: “Good morning, sir.  Yesterday at zero-nine-hundred hours, adjacent to Baghdad International Airport, we discovered an abandoned shed which we have since dubbed ‘The Love Shack.’  Inside, we found several blankets, used condoms and empty beer cans.  We placed the shed under observation for the remainder of the day and at twenty-one-hundred hours last night, our efforts paid off when we caught a Special Forces sergeant first class and a specialist—one male, one female—entering the shack with backpacks.  Upon search and seizure, we discovered those knapsacks contained blankets, pillows, candles and one paperback book [The Greatest Love Sonnets of Shakespeare], but no other contraband.  We took both individuals into custody.”
     I don’t know about you, but I call that “sufficient evidence indicating intent to violate General Order Number Two.”  Especially that Shakespeare book.  I mean, who in the good goddamn would carry around something like that if it wasn’t for policy-violating behavior?
     I won’t say anything more on this subject except this (and, ladies please pardon my bluntness):  Tell your goddamn soldiers to keep their peckers in their pants.

3. Negligent Discharges.  The Shamrock Division has had an average of one negligent discharge per day ever since we rolled into town.  This epidemic of sloppy inattention is entirely unacceptable.  The latest incident involved a lieutenant teaching one of his soldiers how to load an M-249 machine gun…here in our Life Support Area.  The lieutenant apparently thought he had the weapon on half-cock, but it turned out it was on full-cock and, in the process of teaching the soldier what to do, the gun fired.  The round went into a nearby trailer and landed on the floor without hurting anybody.  Well, guess who that trailer belonged to?  That’s right, Sergeants: yours truly.  I am now taking that near-death round and am making a necklace out of it.  I will wear it every day for the rest of my days here in theater as way of reminding us of our higher calling as NCOs to rise above sloppy indiscipline.  That lieutenant’s just lucky he’s a lieutenant, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
     I’m one of the lucky ones.  Since January, we’ve had 14 fatalities due to negligent discharges.  I’ll bet those 14 individuals are now wishing their fellow soldiers had thought to check whether or not that selector switch was on SAFE.

4. Alcohol Abuse.  I cannot believe I’m even having to type those words while deployed to a combat zone, but the sad fact is that we have a problem with illegal consumption here in Sham Div.  The evidence speaks for itself.
     Not too long ago, word reached my ears that a certain battalion commander ordered an inspection of his companies’ milvans, connexes and quadcons because he suspected they were harboring alcohol.  This was prompted by the fact that one of his soldiers—a staff sergeant for God’s sake!—had showed up for guard duty inebriated to the gills.  They traced the trail of booze back to his humvee where they found empty vodka bottles rattling around in the back.  The NCO (a disgrace to our chevrons, in my opinion) later confessed he’d been getting the liquor from one of the civilian contractors (trust me, that individual has since been fired and is on his way back to the United States where just punishment will be meted out).  Upon further investigation, the battalion commander discovered that the NCO (I can hardly bear to call him that) had been storing the alcohol in his connex.  He’d even gone so far as to build a false wall in the connex and hide the booze behind it.
     This is a sad state of affairs, indeed.  We are here in Iraq to fight the evil of terrorism, not the demon of alcohol.  I understand that some of our soldiers may have been struggling with addictions even before we left Fort Stewart and that by being over here in the desert, the word “dry” takes on a whole other meaning for them.  But you know as well as I do, the Army has programs in place to deal with these sorts of things and that’s where your soldiers should be if they’re having problems—in counseling, not wasting all their energies building false walls in their connexes.
     I am not so naive to believe this sort of thing isn’t regularly happening on my watch.  I suspect this sort of Prohibition-style bootlegging could very well be rampant in the Shamrock Division and that there are a fair number of private speakeasies set up in connexes all around the FOB.  If you personally know of such a thing or—GOD FORBID—are the owner/operator of such a speakeasy, then I suggest you come forward with all the facts before it is too late.  Once we find out your dirty little secret, you will not—I promise you—WILL NOT like the consequences.

As always:

Cheers and Blessings,
CSM Tupplewhite

Friday Freebie: "In the Valley of the Kings" by Terrence Holt

Congratulations to Andrew Beck, winner of Rick Bass' Nashville Chrome, last week's Friday Freebie book giveaway.

This week's Friday Freebie is a new paperback copy of Terrence Holt's short story collection In the Valley of the Kings.  I haven't had the chance to dip into any of the stories yet, but--just from skimming a few of the opening lines--they appear to be unlike anything else on my bookshelf.

Here's what the publisher has to say on its website:

In the Valley of the Kings marks the extraordinary debut of Terrence Holt, who fifteen years ago abandoned a promising writing career to practice medicine.  Moved by his patients’ valor in the face of death, seeking to comprehend the mysteries revealed at their bedside, Holt has taken up fiction again.  He emerges now with this astonishing collection of one novella and seven short stories that explore the farthest reaches of the imagination in a style that recalls the nineteenth-century American masters.   Holt leaps across genres and millennia, from small-town America to deep space, daring his readers to journey with him into realms as mysterious as they are unforgettable.  The opening story, “‘Ο Λογοσ,” is a chilling account of the last days of the human race, as the hospitalization of a little girl in a New England town heralds a terrifying plague, transmitted not by a microbe but by a single word.  The final story, “Apocalypse,” returns to small-town New England and another vision of the end, in an intimate account of how a couple struggles to live and love under the shadow of the Earth’s approaching doom.  In between, these stories range from outer space, where—in “Charybdis”—an astronaut alone on a doomed NASA mission comes to terms with his fate, to the Egyptian desert of the title novella, where an archaeologist seeks a fabulous tomb that holds the secret of immortality.  Painting with lurid colors and finely crafted prose, Holt offers his readers haunting visions of the reefs and abysses of the human imagination.  In the Valley of the Kings redefines the art of the story, throwing aside the rules in search of the enduring truths that ultimately make stories worth reading.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of In the Valley of the Kings, all you have to do is answer this question:

Name the three 19th-century writers compared to Holt in the Library Journal's review.  The answer can be found by clicking HERE and scrolling down to "Endorsements and Reviews."

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Sept. 16, at which time I will place all the correct respondents in a vintage potato-chip tin (which has been certified and approved for use by the North American Gaming Regulators Association*) and draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Sept 17.
 
*Not really, but my wife did say it was okay to borrow it from her collection of vintage antiques, as long as I put it back when I was done.

The Really, Really Great Gatsby

For all the weight it's carried around over the years, it's a relatively thin novel.  Less than 200 pages in most paperback versions, it is nonetheless obese with style and panache and highly-charged conflict and morality and all the other ingredients that put one novel on a pedestal above all others.  As the years pass, our recollection of The Great Gatsby grows heavier and heavier, until finally we think of it in such general terms (Wealth and Decadence!  Jazz Age!  Robert Redford!) that we sometimes forget the specifics--at the sentence- and paragraph-level--that made F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel one of the thickest pillars holding up our American literary mansion.

Or maybe you were one of those who thought Gatsby sucked.  Over the years, perhaps you've only grown more and more bitter toward the English teacher who made you write a particularly wretched term paper which, if memory serves, had something to do with the symbolism of green lights and fog.  Maybe you thought Daisy Buchanan was as limp as a wet tissue and Jay Gatsby was an insufferable bore.  That's cool.  Different strokes for different folks.  I, for one, can't fathom all the fuss over The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

On the other hand, if you were one of those who got completely absorbed in the West Egg society--such fabulous lawn parties! such a tragic love affair!--you might want to check out Sonya Chung's re-appreciation of "the impeccably wrought" novel at The Millions.

I especially like how Chung spotlights Fitzgerald's talent at the lowest level of the sentence.  She cites one as an example of the book's luminosity:  Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires.  Leafing back through the early pages of the novel, I find this one: And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.  There's something about those "great bursts of leaves" which really appeals to my writer's sensibility.  As Chung observes: "Describing why a sentence is beautiful is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like.  For me, Fitzgerald’s sentences are somehow both profoundly weighted and soaring, confident in their matter-of-factness and indulgent in their romanticism."

I feel the same way about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom which, if you'll indulge me the word, is epic in its scope and telling.  Not only does Franzen paint a portrait of our post-post-post Jazz Age society in smart, broad strokes, he is equally spot-on at the sentence level.  Here are just a few of my favorites which I've highlighted so far on my Kindle:

Eliza was exactly half pretty.  Her head started out gorgeous on top and got steadily worse-looking the lower down you looked.  She had wonderfully thick and curly brown hair and amazing huge eyes, and then a cute enough little button nose, but then around her mouth her face got smooshed up and miniature in a disturbing sort of preemie way, and she had very little chin.

....there are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning: it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.  The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals.  Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness.

I suppose, in a gun-to-head situation, if I had to name one thing that keeps drawing me back to fiction, it would be the music found in sentences, the clever jangly juxtaposition of words that might otherwise seem at odds to each other, the surprising "leaf-bursts" of details which make me see (and hear and taste and feel) the world anew.  That's what brings me back to novels.  You can take all your clever plots and quirky characters and deep ponderous thought, but if there's not excitement at the lowest linguistic level, then my eyes will glaze over and I'll struggle to get all the way to the final page.  This is why I love Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, John Irving, and--good Lord, yes!--Flannery O'Connor.  They flicker and burn in nearly every sentence.  As does Franzen.  As did Fitzgerald.

Proof of The Great Gatsby's enduring appeal can be found in the news that the American Reportory Theater is staging an innovative production called Gatz.  Here's the theater's synopsis:

One morning in the low-rent office of a mysterious small business, an employee finds a copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter of his desk.  He starts to read it out loud, and doesn’t stop.   At first his coworkers hardly notice.  But after a series of strange coincidences, it’s no longer clear whether he’s reading the book or the book is doing something to him.

In its glowing review, The New York Times called Gatz "one of the most exciting and improbable accomplishments in theater in recent years" and said that "the relationship between what is read and its context keeps shifting, with the real world finally giving way entirely to the fictive one."  In the course of the play, the main character reads every word of the novel with no text added and none removed.  As a result, Gatz is more than six hours long.  Audience members get a merciful one-hour meal break midway through the production.  There's no word on whether or not the actors are supplied with throat lozenges.

Soup and Salad: Ray Bradbury, Steve Almond, Give Me a Break, The Totally Hip Book Reviewer

On today's menu:

1.  Congratulations to Lisa Peet, winner of last week's Hump Day Giveaway.  Lisa will soon be enjoying a copy of Rosanne Cash's Composed.  Don't forget: there's still time to enter this week's Friday Freebie.  Rick Bass' Nashville Chrome is up for grabs.

2.  Ted Gioia has written an appreciation of Ray Bradbury on the occasion of the master scribe's 90th birthday.

Bradbury never writes down to his reader, and when forced to choose between thrills and chills, on the one hand, and poetic imagery and philosophical musings on the other, he always takes the high road. It is all too telling that the most impassioned chapter in Something Wicked This Way Comes takes place in a library, and focuses on a lengthy digression on human history and the nature of good and evil.  I suspect that, if this book were a first novel arriving in a publishing house today, the editor would have slashed away at this interlude, reducing it from ten pages to two paragraphs.  But the “non-commercial” elements of Bradbury’s work (and there are many of them) represent, to my mind, the most essential part of Bradbury’s greatness: namely, his willingness to break all the rules, and make every story—whether about Mars or witches or just tennis shoes—into a personal statement, something no other author would have written, or could have written.

Gioia reminds me that I need to read more Bradbury.  We all need more Bradbury in our daily lives.  Not by small coincidence, I was at a flea market this weekend and bought a copy of Now and Forever.  Sadly, it appears to be unread.  I hope to amend that soon.

3.  At The Rumpus, Steve Almond beautifully explains how the recent sad events at the Virginia Quarterly Review ripple outward to all of us.  If you don't know what happened at VQR, don't worry, Steve will explain it all to you in "33 loosely jointed parts."  Be sure to take time to read the smart, well-reasoned comments section (my own notwithstanding) for even more elucidation on the writer-editor relationship and the current state of publishing.

4.  At Storytellers Unplugged, author Richard Dansky explains why it's not heresy for writers to "take a break."

Even if writing is your day job, that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to take the occasional break.  Steelworkers get days off.  So do sysadmins.  So do short order cooks, pediatric nurses, and blackjack dealers.  Why?  So they can rest, recharge, and come back and do their job well after they’ve had a chance to get away from it for a bit.  There’s nothing about writing that’s so sacred, holy or unique that this notion doesn’t hold true for us scribbly types

That's all fine and dandy, but my problem lately is that I've been breaking more than writing.  Time to get back on the clock!  Just let me finish this cheese danish first, okay?

5.  Meanwhile, in a lonely little workshop in New Haven, "the oldest typewriter repairman" is going about his work cleaning keys and adjusting ribbons.  Money quote in the interview (conducted by someone who seems to have been born in the Age of PC): "I don’t even know what a computer is. I’ve heard about them a lot, but I don’t own one, and I don’t want one to own me. Typewriters you can own. I think a computer owns you."

6.  And, for dessert, I serve you up a slice of Ron Charles, "The Totally Hip Book Reviewer."  Humor has always been a great way to criticize books (see: Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper), and although I was initially put off by Charles' frenetic pace of his first Totally Hip Book Review, I really dug his groove with this one on Freedom.  The sepia flashback is snort-milk-through-your-nose funny.

6-1/2.  Okay, here's one more--an after-dinner mint for those of you in need of some grammar/punctuation/sign-police humor.  I snapped this with my camera phone yesterday outside a restaurant in Wallace, Idaho.  Clearly, they have some hard-drinking children there.

Friday Freebie: "Nashville Chrome" by Rick Bass

Congratulations to Peter Armstrong, winner of Frederick Reuss' A Geography of Secrets, last week's Friday Freebie book giveaway.

This week's Friday Freebie is a new release I'm very much looking forward to reading.  Rick Bass has long been a favorite of mine.  Not only is he one of our best living short story writers, he lives in Montana (Montanans automatically get 15 bonus points before I even start reading their books).  I first fell in love with his work back in college when I was assigned Oil Notes and The Deer Pasture.  The writing in those two non-fiction books was so clear and beautiful and lay on the page with such an easy grace, that I quickly moved on to his fiction: The Watch, The Hermit's Story, The Lives of Rocks, and nearly everything else.  In a review of The Hermit's Story, I once wrote:

The best ones in the collection -- "The Hermit's Story," "Swans" and "Two Deer" -- are mini-masterpieces of sight, sound and smell. In most of the stories, man and creation converge in metaphor, delivered with the lightest of touches. Something as simple as a bird disoriented after being roused from a winter hibernation is transformed into a symbol for the grace-seeking human race. Bass knows we live in a crucial, complicated time, poised between completely encasing the earth in concrete and steel and actively fighting to protect the last verdant acres.

Conservation and preservation of our vanishing Western spaces dominate the pages of every Bass book.  As I wrote, "Rick Bass' shirts smell like woodsmoke."

So, imagine my surprise when I received an advance copy of his latest novel and found that it was about the rise and fall of a family of country-western singers in the Elvis Presley era.  Nashville Chrome has a great, candy-colored cover and earned a glowing review from Publishers Weekly: "the narrative has a pitch-perfect chorus of longing and regret, with an undertone that connects and heals."

And yet...and yet...I thought, "Where were the bugling elk, the wind-soughing pines, the crystalline trout streams?"  This, apparently, was not my granddaddy's Rick Bass.  Despite my shock and awe, I still think Nashville Chrome will turn out to be a winner.  I have faith in Rick Bass' pen.

If you'd like to be singing the praises (hopefully) of Nashville Chrome, then I suggest you enter this week's book giveaway without delay by answering this question:

What is the colorful last name of the singing family at the heart of the novel?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. The contest closes at midnight on Sept. 9, at which time I will place all the correct respondents in a hat and draw the winning name.  I'll announce the winner on Sept 10.

Welcome to the Un-War

Two days ago, President Obama called an official, albeit symbolic, end to the war in Iraq.  September 1 marked the beginning of what military officials are calling Operation New Dawn.

Inspired by George Packer's essay in The New Yorker, "A Date That Will Live in Oblivion," I tried boiling my thoughts on the matter down to the level of poetry.

This is what came out during a short blizzard of writing yesterday.


Welcome to the Un-War
                                                 Sept. 1, 2010

It’s the dawn of a new day, soldier.
Get your head
in the right place.
Pull your shit together,
smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em
then
unlock and unload,
unsling arms,
and unlace those boots
(the ones with the
unavoidable unscrubbable
spots the size of dimes
that came that day from Sgt. Bingham
and his new non-arm).

We’re heading out,
zero-dark-thirty,
into the revised Iraq
where sugar bullets
are fired from cotton-candy guns,
and all those hajji frowns
are just smiles turned upside down.

We’ll roll out the gate
backwards
and walk patrol
one foot behind the other.
We’ll step over IEDs
that implode
and marvel as Bingham’s arm
cartwheels down from the sky and—
ho-ly shit!
—claps back onto his body.
We’ll wave at snipers
who snap their rifles in half
and call it quits.
We’ll whistle at the girls
who discard suicide vests
now suddenly yesterday’s fashion.
Their breasts, freed from all that
martyr armament,
will bounce a little
as they skip away in their still-black robes.
We’ll un-scan our sector,
take back the lollipops and soccer balls,
and cut the zip ties from wrists
that vow—honest, Mister!—to do us
no more harm.

Blood will suck back into bodies,
mortars will un-crater,
smoke will un-billow down
to the un-blooming spark,
and sheep will sing Aab-aab!,
their bells tinkling
in the twilight of our time here.

Everywhere we go, a nation
of bitter-eyed people will stare, unblinking,
at our footprints when they vanish,
one by one, from the sand.
As if we were never here.