Flash Fiction: “The Night Before the Madness”

(February 4, 2013)

The following is a flash fiction submission for a contest hosted by the Loft Literary Center. I was looking for an exercise to keep me busy since, when the semester starts, my creative writing (basically) stops. The mystery genre is worlds removed from my comfort zone but, having thought more about the prompt, I decided to take it in a direction that I hope you enjoy. The entry is due tonight (February 4 @ midnight) so if you have any comments, I’ll be listening until then.

Lit nerds: Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory” of writing played heavily into my thinking and because of that may require two readings. 

Contest Details: March Madness

What if March madness really happened? In 800 words or less, write a story that solves the mystery of how most residents of a town lost their minds in March.

About the Judge

Ellen Hart is the author of 28 mysteries in two different series, and is currently published by St. Martin’s Press, Random House, and Bella Books. She is a three-time Minnesota Book Award winner, a five-time Lambda Literary Award winner, and a founding member of Minnesota Crime Wave.

[More information at https://www.loft.org/about/opportunities/contests/]

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(February 19, 2013)

Dear Joshua,

Thank you so much for taking the time to submit “The Night Before the Madness” to the Loft’s Spring Writing Contest, facilitated by Minnesota Premier Publications! We received nearly 100 entries—many more than we were expecting for our first mystery-focused writing contest. Our panel had a fantastic time reading the talented work of those who submitted. It was difficult selecting finalists, and surely even more difficult for our judge to select a winner.

Ellen Hart has reviewed all of the entries, and yours, unfortunately, was not selected as the contest winner. However, your piece was selected as one of the TOP TWENTY FINALISTS. Congratulations!

The winning piece will be announced next week and published in an upcoming edition of The Journal and Minnesota Good Age.

Please keep an eye out for our future writing contest opportunities. We would love for you to submit again! The Loft is so fortunate to be connected to such a talented group of writers who want to show their work to the world.

Thank you again (and again and again) for participating in our contest. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

Best,
The Loft Literary Center

—————

The Night Before The Madness

Ely was four when he started asking his mother why the town was acting so funny. He did not mind much the knocked over garbage cans and old ladies handing out flowers meant to “keep the dirt away.” He even enjoyed the man who once went door-to-door asking, “Why does the faucet drip-drop and not drop-drip? Or drap, drep, drup, or – sometimes – dryp?”

Ely’s mother, Crystal, knew this day would come and recalled the story her grandfather had once told her. Jennifer, Ely’s older sister, had already heard the story and, sighing, left the room.

“It happened long before you were born, Ely. First, in the streets, there were outbursts and reports of people falling to the ground speaking gibberish. On the corners, others could be found standing perfectly still. Son, really awful things happened.” Crystal had to choose her words carefully – there are some stories you do not tell a child. “It was only happening in our town, but one day it stopped. It took us months to … try to understand what happened.”

“Why did it happen?”

“Nobody knows, Ely. It just … did. We checked the water. We studied the air. We couldn’t find a cause and so we just tried to forget about it. But it happened again the following March. It happens every March – on the minute – but I don’t want you to worry. It doesn’t seem to affect everyone so Daddy and I will be here to keep you safe.”

“What about Chloe?”

Oh, yes, she thought.

The cat.

 

Doing as his mother asked Ely took two cans of soup off the shelf and, into his child-sized cart, placed them. Crystal could not remember if they had enough pasta but grabbed some anyway.

“Crystal! Jennifer! Ely!” Mrs. Garrett, across her face a smile, pushed her cart up. “Waiting until the last minute, huh?”

“You never know what’ll happen and it’s never bad to have too much,” said Crystal.

“Oh, I know, Henry and I still have a basement full from last year.” Mrs. Garrett turned to Ely, “And I hear you’re five now? You’re practically all grown up!”

Ely did not recognize her at first, and when he did his eyes widened. “You aren’t going to try and eat Chloe again, are you?”

“Of course not!” Mrs. Garrett looked to Crystal and blushed. “But be sure to watch over her because you know what they say.”

“Winter showers inspire March howlers?”

“Exactly.”

Crystal loaded a bulk-sized can of mixed vegetables into her cart when her phone went off. It was a text from her husband: “DON’T FORGET THE LOCKS.”

 

Frank’s face lit up, “You’re getting ready for March Madness, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, the wife and kids are out right now. We’re ready for it but you never know what’ll happen. Some folks get really into it.”

“I hear you. I went out and bought a new plasma screen for it – 1,049,088 beautiful pixels to keep me entertained when it comes.”

“Seems a bit wasteful, doesn’t it?”

“The plasma?”

“Yeah.”

“Prepare yourself, Tom, ‘cause when the madness comes I’ll be damned if I have to leave the house for anything.”

“Where do you get the money for this?”

 

He looked at his watch: 11:59pm. His wife had already reinstalled the deadbolts, hasps, and second latch. The worn metal and rusted hinges would not withstand a well-orchestrated attack, but judging by their crookedness Jennifer must have helped. And that is what really matters.

Tom, like everyone else, had set their phone alarms for this moment – and now here it was: March 1st. Joining his wife on the couch he hugged her as crashing came from Ely’s room. Across the street came Frank’s screams and the sound of a million pixels flying out the window and hitting pavement. Try as she might to resist, lying in bed, Mrs. Garrett could only think about the taste of housecat.

But Tom knew Frank overdid it every year. Ely, having stayed up all night watching his clock – his first Madness – within minutes had tired himself out and was fast asleep. Mrs. Garrett concluded that even if forced to eat cat, she would not be able to do so on principle.

“Did Jennifer help you with the locks?”

Her head in his lap, Crystal was falling asleep. “Yeah.”

“I thought she was ‘too grown up’ for March Madness?”

“She wanted to help.”

Tom smiled at the thought – she was so adamant only a few days ago. “Well, honey, it’s late. I need to be up early to put the cat out for Mrs. Garrett.”

“Don’t forget the bag of fake cat hair in the closet,” she yawned.

Lifting her up, he kissed her on the forehead. “I haven’t yet,” he said, carrying her off to bed.

Some things I had to get off my chest while at IAH (Houston Airport)

Trapped in George Bush International Airport, my flight delayed, and uncertain that a connecting flight will be waiting for me in Denver to take me to Minneapolis at a reasonable hour, I am looking into the time abyss. Like a good listener, its eye-contact never breaks and I can feel it looking into me.

Most of my books are in my checked luggage.

I’ve studied madness; but today, theory meets practice.

Most of my books are in my chucked luggage.

I’ve studied madness; but tomorrow, theory meets practice.

Most of my oops are in my changed luggage.

I’ve studied madness.

Outside, cosmic light drips in beats that, deep in my skin, feel slow but, even deeper, in my kidneys, pound dutdut-duuutduuut in ionic meter. I don’t know a damn thing about academic poetry but studying meter sounds interesting until the glimmering, ceramic clouds start screaming in empty languages bordering on the interspecies-like.

And then the intraspecies: Hydrogen atoms, poly-that’s-a-pain, comma response, OH!

And then the infraspecies that’s too far below for me to even acknowledge (but I can’t not since the Kubrick-ean Homo Superior is the MoHo PerSuior and I am Jonah. Or Was. I’m convinced that the Whalerus was Paul – no matter what the rows and rows of black leather seats pantomime.

Pantomine.

Such property fails to recognize property rights. I’ve studied madness. Who even let these seats in here?

Can’t go, fires burn from the rear, from the rear, uhm, quadrilaterals, FOUR LETTER WORD F-R-A-C-K.

Two brief excerpts from Team of Rivals: Turtles and Ambition

After reading about the upcoming film Lincoln, which is being directed by Spielberg and is slated for release on November 9, 2012, I noticed that it is being based on the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. specifically, it will be based on the last few chapters of her book detailing the final weeks of Lincoln’s life. Deciding to go back and read the last 50-some pages of her book that the movie is based on, I came across the following that I want to post here:

During an 18-day trip to visit General Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln and his entourage are Traveling through the countryside, visiting cities. At one point his staff explain to him that he shouldn’t place himself in danger since the last throes of the Civil War would likely put a target on his back – Of course, they weren’t wrong. Visiting Petersburg the day after it’s fall (4/2/1865), Lincoln gave orders for the carriage he was on to be stopped.

[According to the marquis] On a previous visit, Lincoln had noticed a “very tall and beautiful” oak tree that he wanted to examine more closely. “He admired the strength of it’s trunk, the vigorous development od branches,” which reminded him of “the great oaks” in the Western forests. He halted the carriage again when they passed “an old country graveyard” where trees shaded a carpet of spring flowers. Turning to his wife, Lincoln said, “Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me. When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.” On the train rise back to City Point, Lincoln observed a turtle “basking in the warm sunshine on the wayside.” He then asked that the train be stopped so that the turtle could be brought into the car. “The movements of the ungainly little animal seemed to delight him,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled. He and Tad shared “a happy laugh” all the way back to the wharf. (Kearns 722).

The concluding section of the book I found particularly powerful (and was something I could relate to):

“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” the twenty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln had written in his open letter tk the people of Sangamon County during his first bid for public office in the Illinois state legislature. “Whether it is true or not, I can say for one that I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy if their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”
The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declares himself more than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” (Kearns 748).

Reading “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” by Matsuo Basho

I was reading the blog of the New York Times Review of Books and came across a particularly interesting article about author and translator Bill Porter (“Finding Zen and Book Contracts in Beijing“). In it the writer talks about Porter’s growing popularity in China given not only the burgeoning middle class that is able to purchase real books (as compared to bootlegs) but also the novelty of a Zen Buddhist Westerner wandering around interviewing recluses.

One bit that stood out to me was in regards to his next major project:

Someone asked Porter about his next project, one that finally got him a Guggenheim last year, after seven failed applications. Porter explained how he is going to visit twenty locations in China associated with poetry and write about them, linking each to a poem or moment in a poet’s life. To which the questioner clasped his hands in a traditional greeting and said: “Respect.”

I’m not sure if it was a deliberate reference to Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (~1694), but it was the first thing to come to my mind. Having only read passages, which is a point of shame since it is only about 46 pages), I have had the pleasure of spending the evening reading it (translated from the Japanese by Nobuyuki Yuasa) and thought I would offer some thoughts on it. The excitement of Basho’s

Days and months are travellers [sic] of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their loves traveling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind — filled with a strong desire to wander (97, from the 1966 Penguin edition).

As he rests for the winter as soon as “the spring mist begun to rise over the field” that he wishes to return to the road.

The gods seemed to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner, so that it was impossible for me to stay idle at home (97).

Thus unable to resist the yearning of his heart he sets out for a three thousand mile journey that will take him across Japan, visiting shrines and sights that constitute the political, historical and artistic culture of the land. Along the way he converses with other poets, writes and leaves to the wind his own haikus. Given translation some are obviously better than others. Studying the isolated hermitage of one of his teachers, Basho observes that “Even the woodpeckers/ Have left it untouched,/ This tiny cottage/ In a summer grove” (104). Elsewhere, studying a chestnut tree, he writes, “The chestnut by the eaves/ In magnificent bloom/ passes unnoticed/ By the men of this world” (108).”

Perhaps my favorite passage is when Basho comes upon the ruins of the Fujiwara family’s home (“Mount Kinkei alone retained it’s original shape”), a family that was responsible for – centuries earlier – a supposed golden age of the north.

[M]any a feat of chivalrous valor was repeated here during the short span of the three generations, but both the actors and the deeds have long been dead and passed into oblivion. When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.

A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors

At this point the poem “Ozymandias” comes to mind – while we may laugh at the arrogance of a king overstating his legacy, what else are we to do but weep when History brings even the best to shambles?

In many ways The Narrow Road to the Deep North is not just a travel diary detailing the personal growth of an individual, but as a major classical Japanese text it is about the growth of a culture, what it cherished and how it viewed itself. Holistically, Basho’s most popular work seeks to discover how these narratives – both then and now – are inevitably intertwined.

In other words, it’s On the Road long before there was ever Kerouac.

It’s really not that expensive to eat healthy

A friend of mine posted the following on Facebook, and even though it shouldn’t be too shocking it does serve as a reminder of the choices we have when it comes to planning our diet.

Now, the McDonald’s option factors in neither the health care costs for the individual nor for society as a whole, but that’s splitting hairs.

After reading this infographic I thought I would go ahead and try it myself, so I went out and bought the basics for stir fry (broccoli, red peppers, carrots, yellow onions, mushrooms, and a couple pounds of chicken). While I’m ashamed to admit that I purchased all of these things at the Little Falls Wal-Mart, which may throw off the calculations a bit, it came to ~$16.60.

Given the leftovers I now have, I’d say it wasn’t a bad deal. Sure, in terms of opportunity cost I’ve given up ~3 4-piece chicken strip baskets with a side of flamethrower sauce from Dairy Queen … but …

What was my point again?

“The Paper Menagerie”, winner of the Nebula Award.

Recently the 2011 Nebula Awards were announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which was only brought to my attention because a Doctor Who episode written by Neil Gaiman won the Bradbury Award. While sifting through some of the winners to get a feel for what constitutes some of the top Sci-Fi lit. out there, I decided to read some of the stories. One that I found particularly interesting was a short story titled “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu (published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction March/April 2011).

If you have the time, I would encourage you to check it out. It’s about a young boy named Jack whose mother, a Chinese woman who speaks little to no English, has a gift where she can blow life into her origami. Playing with pet tigers, sharks and other animals, as Jack grows up he starts to compare his home life with that of his peers and in doing so becomes ashamed of his mother’s background. Upset, embarrassed even, he goes so far as to demand that she speak only English in front of him. She acquiesces, but the damage has been done.

Although the ending may not come as much of a surprise to the reader, “The Paper Menagerie” reminds us to be more thoughtful of our behavior, more considerate of how we understand and interact with our loved ones.

Take the time to read it.

“I love it so much I read the book every year” – Yeah? Well, I read stuff on the internet a lot.

I’ve always been impressed with those individuals who, when talking of their favorite novels, say something to the effect of, “I love it so much I read it every year.” While there are certainly some books that I look forward to reading again (if only because it has been so long that some of the details escape me), I just don’t have the time. I have trouble enough reading new material that were I to sit down, balance academia, politics and my copies of Brave New World, Fight Club, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I’d find myself in a perpetual loop of literary finitude. So, those few things that I do re-read frequently often are not that long (short stories, articles, novellas, etc.), are not always of the highest quality, etc. etc.

Regardless, I love them and always enjoy sharing them with everyone who doesn’t ask.

One such article is from 27b/6 titled “Missing Missy” (you may already be familiar with it since it’s fairly popular). The reason why it has come to mind is because the author, David Thorne, has recently published another book “I’ll Go Home Then, It’s Warm and Has Chairs: The Unpublished Emails” (Before looking it up, read this article about an argument Thorne had with Penguin Publishing regarding his copyright infringement of their logo for the cover of his book).

Honestly, no matter how many times I read “Missing Missy” I can’t control my giggling.

Genius.