The Base of Mount Říp

            Jiří worked as an undertaker for pets. He had grown into the job after his father convinced some communist official that there’d be business in burying beloved animals; that official happened to have an ailing pug as well as a nose for capitalism where it could be had in 1980s Czechoslovakia. They couldn’t do this too close to Prague and its manner of cremating the dead. Instead, they laid claim to a northern patch at the base of Mount Říp, where hikers would come with their dogs, eyeball this stumble-on cemetery, and muse.

            Some thirty years later, Jiří was digging grave #13578. While plots ranged from salamander-sized to circus horse, this one was for a Persian cat. Its hearse and little coffin would arrive in an hour, and Jiří still hadn’t finished the headstone inscription. Everything came to a halt, however, when a fetching woman with a three-legged golden retriever approached from the parking area. She introduced herself as Elizabeth, her dog as Ernie, apologized for her shaky Czech, then burst into tears.

            “No, no—is okay,” Jiří read the situation, knowing it was not okay. “My English just so-so, but...”

            She recovered herself and spoke between the languages. She’d just been at the vet, where Ernie was declared untreatable at this stage of cancer, which had already cost him a leg. She couldn’t bear the thought of a lethal injection— would rather have Ernie die in her arms, a pietà of sorts. And then, if possible, buried here.

            “Of course. And then?”

            Elizabeth was taken aback by the question. “And..then, well—I’ll probably go back to Bristol. Sedm let tady stačilo.”

            “Seven years? Not so long.”

            “Not with Ernie here. But forever when he’s gone.”

            She came back a few days later, alone. Ernie was too weak to venture out, she told Jiří, and so his time was nigh. But she still wasn’t sure what to do. They walked reflectively around the grounds, pointing out passing details, including the shapes of the clouds that day. None looked like Ernie, but a cluster floating away from Říp vaguely resembled the British Isles. Serendipitously, they found themselves in the far, upper corner of the cemetery, barren yet of graves. Elizabeth leaned into Jiří. “Can it be here?”

            “Samozřejmě,” he nodded.

            “Maybe he should be nearer to the rest.”

            “As you like.” Jiří blushed at his use of the familiar ’you’, then added, “Ernie makes thirteen thousand, five hundred seventy-nine. Special number for Czechs. Maybe make you stay.”

            Elizabeth lightly punched his arm. “Why is that number so special?”

            “Karel made his bridge then. The year, then ninth July, starting five thirty-one in the morning.”

            “Well, we’re past that peak of summer.”

            “Nevadí. Kind of timeless here.”

            They walked without talking for a while. Elizabeth picked up a stick the size of a shovel handle and poked the ground. Jiří gave her space, but she called him back to ask if this would be suitable. He knelt and brushed the scrub, pulled up a stone jutting out. He looked up to Elizabeth and nodded: the place was ideal. She used the stick, then, to start digging, despite not having a spade. She bid Jiří with her eyes to help her out, not relinquishing the stick but opening up her topmost arm so he could weave his left to grasp below. The depth they made was symbolic, but enough to cultivate a heavenly bed for Ernie, likely in the coming days.

            There were phone calls, each to each, generally updating Ernie. Jiří drove down to Prague to purchase planks of pine for an old-fashioned coffin. Elizabeth understood the selections at site were more ecologically consonant for modern burials, but wanted something that hooked her to heritage. As a girl, she remembered her father constructing a pine box for their old clumber spaniel, and Jiří took note of details, even the carve of a cross that no one had ever asked for in 13,578 burials at Říp. Elizabeth invited Jiří over for dinner, apologizing for the open boxes in various stages of her packing to leave. “It would be fallout from Brexit, anyway. So don’t blame Ernie for this.”

            On the contrary, Jiří showed no blame at all as he sat next to Ernie, stroking the back of his neck. The dog was beyond begging for morsels as they ate ravioli. He didn’t mind the drop of red wine Jiří offered in his palm. “Oslava,” he whispered, “for life well-lived.”

            It was dusk, two days later, when Elizabeth drove into the parking area and opened the trunk. Jiří came running out of the glorified shed he called home. “I would have come down,” he reproached, then gave her a hug she extended a half-minute more. He carried the blanket that covered the corpse and laid it tenderly into the finished coffin. The two of them picked up the ends and trekked to the grave, precisely dug the day before. Jiří brought rope to sling under the box in two places, so that he on one side and Elizabeth on the other could lower it down. They said sacred words, then shoveled the soil over.

            Elizabeth, at the car, pulled out her wallet, which Jiří pushed back into her purse. Instead, he announced he had something for her. He ran back to the shed and returned with a puppy he thrust into her protesting arms. She cried at the fresh smell of the creature, licking her face. Clutching it closer with her left hand, she swept her right to slap Jiří square in the cheek. “How could you!?” She trembled an attempt to redress the injury, trading her hand for the puppy’s paw, dabbing it to soothe the hurt man. Their heart rates were racing for different reasons; after a minute, all became calm. “What kind is it, anyway? His fur is kinda…”

            “Rhodesian ridgeback.”

            “Proč tohle?... Why this?”

            Jiří looked up the slope of Říp. “Soft bristles.” He fingertipped the pup’s spine. “Like Bristol.”

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)

Cardigans and Care

            Of the eight or nine scars I have (of dozens I don’t see), the one that serves as touchstone is the tiniest, just outside my left nostril. It happened when I was four or five years old. Mom came back from checking the level of the nearby river, prone to flooding; the tv could have babysat me for those fifteen minutes, but it was off, leaving me to my imagination. I was never bored in northwest Minnesota, and what we had around the house and yard was simple, more alluring than anything on tv. Sure, watching an Apollo rocket blast off was exciting, as neighbors came over and Dad struggled to correct the contrast. But day-to-day programs didn’t mean so much to me.

            Except Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood. And when Mom announced it was starting, I sprang up from the living room carpet and bounced from armchair to sofa to the corner of the coffee table, which caught me by the nose. I can’t remember if it hurt, but the feeling of the flap was gruesome, reflected in my mother’s panicked eyes. She hadn’t yet turned on the tv, so didn’t have to turn it off as she rushed me out the door and into the car to get stitched up at a hospital I no longer remember. Memory only remains on the episode I didn’t see that day.

            I won’t pretend I loved everything Fred Rogers did. His ‘land of make believe’ had voices too contrived, and Mr McFeely’s “speedy delivery” needed to chill out. Chef Brockett was okay, but took time away from Betty Aberlin, a kind of crush, in retrospect. I enjoyed the routines: feeding fish with a couple sprinkles and a check to see that the gouramis were swimming together nicely; the singing of the intro, tossing a shoe from right hand to left, opening the closet for one of his cardigans, all of them knit by his mother. I agreed with his closing remarks—always the same, if phrased uniquely day after day: “you are special and good just the way you are.” Debater I’d become, I could have taken him to task: “what about that bully down the road who might be watching, getting your green light to be himself?” But I didn’t. Mr Rogers talked through difficulties all the time and knew they wouldn’t go away. Knew also they didn’t have to define or trump a given day.

            Because this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the program’s launch, and because documentaries are out about his legacy, I introduced my 12^th grade students to that television neighborhood. Just some clips, articles, links to civil causes and interviews. We’re studying ‘mass communication’ and the myriad manipulations that go with free speech. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to trust, when to bend or bolt, whom to share with, why to even care.

            That was August. In late October, the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, where Fred Rogers lived and worked, witnessed Hitler’s undying evil. The Tree of Life synagogue had open its Edenic doors to anyone who’d come to pray that day, risking anyone who’d alter the agenda and make those prayers cower, wail, surcease. The gunman was anyone you might imagine, and not necessarily that erstwhile bully down the road. More likely someone bullied, cowering, wailing, wanting to surcease.

            The story rarely knows itself. I imagine Fred Rogers scripted every second of his show, demanded in his gentle tone a discipline on set and duty to do things well, consistently…. No, I don’t. I imagine many ad hoc takes, listening to the banter at the coffee urn that was putting to the proof. Kids grow up and have kids; parallel lines blur with distance and blush with the generation gap. Coming of age is hard enough; coming to terms is anybody’s guess.

            I started wearing cardigans in college. They were rather available at thrift shops—grandpas die and leave this type of thread. Student teaching, I could feign a formal look to impress a principal, then shed the sweater when a lesson needed some elbow grease. In Minnesota, you dressed in layers anyway. People might have called me ‘Mr Rogers’, or more often ‘Richie Cunningham’, whom I resembled. Both satisfied, and student teaching opened many doors.

            I sometimes want to close them, retreat into my memories, even those like falling on my nose. I sometimes want to inventory what is there—count the sheep, so to speak. Spend Q-time with familiars. Zip into what my grandma knit. Walk the neighborhood through the dog that walks me. Insulate the tried-and-true of care.

            “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth says, and in another poem, “The Child is father of the Man.” Inversions happen all the time: a tree of life contributes to original, outrageous sin—unthinkable, if we stop to think. And here Fred would often say, especially to adults:

“All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. Ten seconds of silence. I’ll watch the time.”

 Ten seconds to infinity, fleeting and indelible.

            Mr Rogers was a lifelong Republican, I’ve heard, and though I’ve never voted for that party, I’ve loved a thousand people who have, and still do. Of course I wish he could have lived another quarter century and comment wisely on current events in this enclave of our universe. It’s fitting, though, that he has passed away, leaving memory, reminders, and a closetful of cardigans.

           

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)

The Leper, Modernized

              “Whaddya mean, I can’t google on your computers?”

            “I’m sorry, sir, but the library discontinued that option years ago. And may I ask you to lower your voice, please.”

            “Can’t you google something for me, then,” Earl begged in the same volume, “so I can see what’s goin’ on?”

            The librarian sighed with some sympathy. “Tell me what you’d like to browse, and probably our data bank has something possible for you to check out.”

            “The Leper Virus,” Earl strained in an indoor voice, “like, from hackers.”

            “Is this a joke?”

            “No. I need some info. Urgently.”

            “May I see your library card, Mr—”

            “Garvey. Earl Garvey. Used to come here a lot before,.. um,” thumbing through the pit of his worn-out wallet, “y’know, before internet.”

            The librarian typed in Earl’s request. “Books are more popular than ever,” she asserted. “And that’s not to say we haven’t kept up with the times. Case in point: your library card,” taking it from Earl and scanning the barcode, “will link you to our tri-state lending network, community events, online—oops…”

            “Oh, no—”

            “It says, Mr— um, I’m supposed to destroy this card and—”

            “Show me the message! What does it say?” Earl forced the flat screen to turn enough for him to read:

Viral user! Confiscate card.

Unplug this device

immediately and contact IT.

“No freakin’ way! That laminated piece of nothin’s out to get me too?”

            “Sir,” the librarian flung the card behind her and fumbled for buttons behind the console, “You need to exit. Now!”

            Earl stared at his gaping wallet, fingering his last thirteen bucks. He took them, trembling, and his driver’s license, but left everything else in the faux leather sheaf, hurling it toward the treacherous library card. “Join your colony, bastards!”

            The mayhem started two days earlier, as Earl was debating with a buddy the birthdate of Dostoevsky: just before Halloween, he had always thought, but what about that Julian/Gregorian calendar hiccup? He clicked Siri on his phone, and instead of her velveteen voice, a graphic of a dismembered clown appeared with a caption, ‘Look, Ma, no hands!’ Then the screen blacked out.

            “Low battery?” his buddy asked at Earl’s consternation.

            “Um, did you just send me…  a halloween meme?”

            Clearly he hadn’t, but that caption rang a bell. “The Leper’s Virus, I think it’s called. I’d google it myself, but, y’know… Can’t be too careful.”

            They were pretty near done with beers and Dostoevsky anyway, and flipping a coaster heads/tails, Earl picked up the tab. He took out his MasterCard and vocalized a decent tip; the bartender rubbed his chin, though, when ‘NOT AUTHORIZED’ showed on the credit card machine.  Earl’s VISA did the same, and by this time, his buddy took out his Discover and let them out of jail.

            “Maybe I should get one of those,” Earl deadpanned.

            “Maybe you should discover what’s eating your accounts. I’m outta here.”

            “Say what? How?” Earl’s queries disappeared into the late October chill.

            The following morning was worse. He opened his laptop—same result, perhaps a millisecond shorter. He eyeballed his PC, usually unused, but decided he’d figure things out from his cubicle at work. The insurance company had recently granted two desktops per employee to ‘free up’ the inevitable split screens; Earl eyed one for business only, the other for, well, whatever came up.

            Both, in turn, shot the same animation while Earl took fretful note: the clown materialized like a cyber beach ball, spinning to size then freezing, except for the fingers, wrists, and elbows that segmented forward from his body, floating a mini-moment before the darkness, and Earl’s sense of doom.

            The ‘help desk’ button on his modular phone had never been pressed. “No time like now,” murmured Earl, and broached with an upbeat, “hey, Barry—how’s it goin’?” Grimly, a voice not Barry’s told him to hang up and stay put. “What? Why?” Earl sputtered into the deafness.

            Within minutes, two techies Earl had never met curled into his cubicle.  “We can’t say much, Mr Garvey,” the taller one said. “You’ve been infected with an IP virus—”

            “This leper thing?”

            “Shut it!” the other almost spit. “Don’t even utter the name. It hasn’t bothered our system before and shant, as far as I’m concerned.”

            The tall one nodded, “as far as we’re concerned. Provisional leave, Mr Garvey—you’ll be contacted via registered mail as to any further action.”

            “But—you can’t be… I mean—help desk, right?”

            “There’s no negotiation. Your digital presence here is a danger to us all.”

            Before slumping home, Earl tried his luck at the bank. The teller didn’t dare swipe his cards—the user name matching some memo to cut them in half and deliver the same blunt message to exit and wait for

            “Registered mail!?”

            “Yes, Mr Garvey. We’re sorry, but this is unprecedented. Please—hurry.”

            “No, you hurry in figuring this out! I have monthly print-outs of my balance, six-digits deep!” Earl spun on his heel, knowing he didn’t have such print-outs, but pretty sure he had proof of something legally binding.

            He called his mother, who asked him to skype to see his face. “Ma, I’m in trouble. Can’t skype or anything online. I’m even surprised I can contact you… Ma?... Ma?... Oh, for Christ sake—don’t tell me it’s—damn!”

            He slammed the phone down and surveyed the shadows for some kind of exclamation. An ex-lover? Few and far-between, and he had firewalled smartly for that ‘I love you’ virus. A colleague? A prankster? His younger brother, who never quite forgave him for pushing him into motocross? Popping wheelies, jumping stunts until a final landing ramp near cut him in half. Paralyzed, waist down. Morphed into a video game geek. At least a good one, at that.

            November 2^nd the mail came, though nothing ‘registered’. Inside, Earl was dead, undiscovered. The PC screen was smashed. A postcard with that clown was signed, yet smudged away.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)

Twenty Winks

            ‘Relentless,’ her eyebrows expressed, ‘but not really,’ smiling to put things in perspective. “How’re yours going so far?”

            “Half-way home, that’s all I can say.” I could say plenty more: we had a spare five minutes at the coffee urn, and Sandra never shied from the chance to chat. Yet today—tonight—we were spent. Second Thursday of the new school year, ‘Meet the Teacher’ after barely knowing who these parents’ kids were, setting up the world for them: first assignments, feedback funneled, clubs begun, silent fights and brash banality in the corridors, spilling into rooms. A million admin mandates filling some oblivion. Then random things to keep things real, and music from the spheres that proved a job in education kept the universe in gear, if muted like an oboe in a shopping mall, trying to swim upstream.

            “I think I’ll call in sick tomorrow—shit!” she realized, “That’s only hours away…”

            “Summer fever. Kids bring in effluvia from everywhere. Their parents pay to—”

            “Shhh,” Sandra bumped my ribs. The boss was hankering for coffee and a chance to ask how conferences have gone. Sandra was good at glad-handing and whiling time away, talking shop outside the need to man the shop—her classroom and the parents that showed up tonight.

            I would also have some knocking on my classroom door, so I made for that direction, giving Boss the thumbs-up he’d appreciate.

            But at the staircase I veered toward the elementary wing, to see how Marjorie was doing. She had taught my own kids a million years ago, and thirty years my elder, she would have montessoried me. Since our duties overlapped the second Thursday of each school year, I never had the chance to ‘Meet the Teacher’ who defined most everything I taught. She was Mr Rogers with a wry side, singing songs to children, sometimes about filching food from gardens or running naked through the woods. She had shared a stint with Dr Goodall in the Gombe Stream, way back when, and like that anthropologist, she embraced the creature in us all. She asked me once, “what’s better: growth or growing?” I wondered, so early in a school year, what we answered then, and what we’d answer now. Idea vs process? Achievement vs aptitude? One syllable vs two?

            The mental strain is showing as I see her leaning against the playhouse roof. There are some parents flipping through some picture books and watching a video loop of last year’s kindergarten doing stuff for ‘Culture Week’. Another brushes nylon chords on the guitar Marj used to play a lot, before arthritis made that difficult. She shines her eyes at me as if I’m coming to tag-in, wrestlers we never really had to be. ‘Agonists’, she’d say, ‘toward making kids heroic in their little ways.’ Though she probably hadn’t used such terms with parents in the room tonight.

            “You alright, Marj? Need a coffee break?”

            Still leaning on the playhouse, sotto voce: “Rather catch some twenty winks. Coffee in the evening isn’t good for me.”

            “I could cover for a bit, if you want—”

            “Nah, I’d just as soon get through the hour—that’s all it is by now, correct?”

            “Hour and a quarter, technically. But who’s counting, anyway?”

            “I am. Twenty winks.” She closes her eyes. I stare at the serenity of her barely wrinkled face. “Nineteen.” Still sotto voce, parents unaware, as stocked as the classroom is with stimuli and bits of care. I shut my eyes to try to see her world right now. “Eighteen,” she says in a perfect stretch of time. I whisper that I think the nurse’s cot is free—I sometimes go there for my winks, once or twice a year. Fever’s going around: it’s best to be pre-emptive, get in rest before another busy day tomorrow.

            “I’ll just check for you, before I face my own last hour.”

            “—and a quarter,” deadpan, eyes still closed. “Seventeen…”

            There was a phrase she used to use when my kids were in kindergarten—my oldest two, at least, until the school told her to stop: “Every day is a cathedral day.” I thought of that while leaving her and the parents in her room. She didn’t go to church, per se, or follow any doctrine, if  ‘theosophy’ came up discursively. She’d be the first to point out how slaves and others died to make grand monuments to God (or gods of our own making); she cried for countless rapes within the crypts, hypocrisy within the apse. ‘Cathedral days’ could contradict their purpose—often did—so, why should every day be one of those, especially for kids?

            “Because they let the homeless have some warmth. They conjure Bach, Rachmaninov, and, best of all, an apogee for silence. They watch the city go to sleep and wake again, and sometimes toll their bells.” Marjorie would listen for those bells, and your response. She’d acknowledge, “sure, each day is more than that—box of chocolates, winding road, rat race, what you will. I’m sticking with my go-to, though, even if it isn’t in a lesson plan.”

            The nurse, in her understated office, wasn’t busy, naturally—she also looked past-ready to go home. I relayed that Marjorie was taking twenty winks, semi-standing up: “perhaps she could come here to lie down awhile?”

            “Twenty winks?”

            “Probably done by now.”

            “And parents in the room?”

            “Self-occupied. I just thought I’d—”

            “Thanks,” she said, and slowly pushed her weight upright.

            I walked with her until the staircase, second-guessing everything. “Maybe I should go with you.”

            She didn’t turn around. “Up to you. You’ve likely seen her final breaths.”

            “What? How can—”

            She altered not her pace. I clung uncertain to the banister, wanting to go nowhere, except perhaps a cathedral somewhere in the collective conscious.

           

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)

Fractal Memories

            Summer school, sixth grade. Or these four kids’ ticket to seventh grade—sort of my call, the principal said. I wanted clarity: “sort of?”, and the principal just shrugged. He showed me the room we’d have at our disposal, bade a bonne chance, and vanished.

            After listening to the kids’ goals for this imposed opportunity—mainly to see the end of July—I pointed them to the common need for our first couple lessons: fractions. They groaned like buffalos.

            “So, as I remember when I was your age,” I proffered, “fractions come down to pizzas and the people who eat ’em.”

            “You tryin’ to be funny?” asked Emil, bespectacled.

            “Yeah, how un-original,” Bryn informed.

            “Okay—so solve this, then: I got seven people who order five pizzas—how many pieces does each person get?”

            Silent calculation, mostly on my part. “As much as each person wants,” decided Jenny, and when asked to defend, she reasoned, “it’s just pizza; a piece or two does the job.” Sigh.

            I put a couple fractions on the white board—5/7 and 7/5 —and asked which one would be more helpful. As silence shrouded the room, my mind paced a conflicted stage. “Why didn’t I use even numbers?”, on a practical level, and “What would Mr Kholer think right now?”, a loathed-to-loved teacher of my far-away maths. He would chalk more of an equation on the black board, then step back in wonderment: “let us peruse the problem”, as if it materialized not by his own slap-happy hand. Maybe Mr Kohler would chortle at my remedial display, suggesting there wasn’t in fact a problem here: 5/7 and 7/5 are nothing without further variables; maybe that’s what Emil et al were to suss out for themselves, recalling elementary tools like > or <…

            “What kind of pizza?” queried Brent, apparently attached to Jenny’s idea.

            “Why should that matter?”

            “Because,” Emil elbowed in, “if it’s pepperoni, then the pieces have to give everyone that much the same.”

            “What if it’s just cheese,” Bryn ventured. “What’s the fucking difference?”

            “Hey, hey!” I needed to admonish, “no swearing at summer school. This is supposed to be just like sixth grade.”
            “I failed sixth grade. Obviously.”

            “But she’s right,” Jenny opined. “Pizzas are more than toppings.”

            The room disappeared a bit as my penchant for nostalgia journeyed back to college discussions on the dichotomy of ‘essence and accident’, the conundrum by which we call a thing a thing and yet associate that thing with more or less the attributes that deems the thing a thing. Emil, noting my departure, evidently wanted to bring ‘things’ back, taking the liberty to sketch on the board a circle with a outer ring of eight smaller circles and one in the center. “And Tombstone has even more pepperonis—” 

            “We’ll get to each pepperoni in due time,” I adjudicated, “risking the notion that, say, quattro-formaggi is another can of worms…” Bryn stared death at my dead-pan. “In the meantime, Jenny, why not get us back on track: seven people want to divide five pizzas equally. What should we do?”

            “I think it would be easier,” she said, “if five people want to divide seven pizzas. It’s like you could choose more toppings.”

            Damn straight. I wished the late Mitch Snyder could tag me out at this point. As an advocate for the homeless, he spoke at a grad school symposium and forthrightly challenged us to disenroll and start doing something good for the world, a world which could justly feed itself if more goddamned people had only the heart and will.

            Instead of Mitch, I resigned myself to realpolitik. “Divide five by seven and you’ll get less than one. Fractions, then, are always about dealing with the less-than-one.” I markered above Emil’s poor man’s tombstone: 5/7 <  7/7, which = 1. But the general attention had eloped to the ether: theirs to the fact that mobile phones and WolframAlpha would supply math solutions; mine to the memory of Ms Hallahan, who had a sexy way of teaching reciprocals, flipping fractions like a ballerina.

            “What do you mean?” Bryn invaded. She was totally correct to destroy that recollection, then and there. “Fractions don’t stop at the one.”

            “That’s thoughtful,” I tried to affirm, winging it shamelessly. “If we, for instance, say that five people want equal access to seven pizzas—”

            “You started with the opposite,” snarked Emil, “it was seven people for five pizzas.”

            “So it was. I now know that you—the collective you—are paying attention.” Not entirely true: Brent had fallen asleep, tuckered out after his inchoate participation. The bigger problem was hardly shared: where to go next. Emil’s pizza had nine pugnacious discs to get in the way of carving it clean. Bryn was drumming her fingers and Jenny was looking out the window, thinking perhaps of her own Mitch Snyder. I channeled again Mr Kholer and his procedures for how to peruse. My mind blanked on them, however, preferring instead the procedures of Ms Hallahan. I was doomed never to leave summer school.

            Out of the blue, Jenny divined: “seven divided by five is seven-fifths. That’s more than one.”

            “But one what?” Emil foraged. “Are we talking people or pizzas?”

            “You are on the right track.”

            “What, for asking ‘what’?” Bryn bristled.

            “For questioning the numerator and the denominator. The top number—the thing you start with—divided by the bottom—the parts you end with. Wait—just checking—yes, that’s right.”

            “You’re not really a math teacher, are you,” Bryn deduced.

            I looked out the window. From some brain cavern the term ‘autodidact’ tried to inform my premise and purpose (to get them to be), but my vocal chords wisely demurred. We’d be starting this afternoon The House on Mango Street, and I knew the narrator Esperanza would be better at defining difficult things. For now, I let these fractals know, “we learn from memory.” Then, “will somebody please wake up Brent?”

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)

Dyssed

            Uncle Olaf, party cone on head, was turning ninety-six. Technically, to baby Jeremiah, he was great-great-great, but nobody in the family wanted to use such hyperbole, humble lot they were. “Back in my day,” he graveled to a college-aged relative whose name he’d never remember, “they called me Olie-oldster, even as a whipper-snapper.”

            Since that coed wasn’t listening—ears plugged in and all—the lady to her right jumped in. “Why was that, Uncle Olaf? Because they knew you were going to witness a full century?”

            “What?” he questioned, but knew the question wasn’t interesting.

            “Tina,” the lady nudged the coed, “why not put the phone away…”

            She didn’t, but pulled out one bud as a form of protest. “It’s not a phone, but a ‘life companion’—see?” She pointed to the screen-saving ascription, neither trying to be informative or wry.

            Jeremiah, party cone on head, began to squirm. “I think his diaper’s full,” the lady told the table, a dozen relatives or so (not including life companions).

            Tina was barely defiant: “not my turn.” She might’ve indicated in her mind whose turn it was, yet that would take unnecessary energy, rummaging up out-moded debates.

            George, smoking somewhat at a distance, squirmed as well. “For cryin’ out loud, the kid shits like a, like a…”

            Somebody googled a punch line. “Like a goose.”

            “Yeah. I was going to say a sieve.”

            “What’s that?” no one googled.

            “A sieve wouldn’t make sense,” the lady pointed out, “unless the Pampers had holes in them.”

            “Back in my day,” Olaf shed some light, “babies wore nuthin’ underneath. They learned to use the chamber pot before they’d even walk.”

            “C’mon, Uncle Olaf, Jeremiah’s only two. Give the kid a break.”

            George, who was twice Tina’s age, jammed his cigarette between her drumming fingers—a means for her to stop, which she did not. “Careful, T—you’ll set the tablecloth on fire.”

            “You wish,” she yawned.

            “So, Olaf,” the lady changed the subject, “what’s your birthday wish?”

            “To get laid.”

            “That’s not funny,” the lady glowered at Jeremiah’s cousin, age nine.

            Olaf, whose hearing aid was off-and-on, agreed, “that’s just about right.”

            Rory, at the far end of the table, laughed at something else. His wife, sitting kitty-corner, called him out: “Care to share something, big guy?”

            His screen flickered. “Aw, it’s nothing so interesting. Just.., nah, nothing.”

            “Why do you call him ‘big guy’ when he’s, you know, not?”

            “Okay,” Olaf’s daughter called from the archway, “who’s ready for cake?”

            “Does it have walnuts?”

            “No. It’s gluten-free.”

            “That doesn’t mean it’s free from allergens.”

            “Since when are you allergic to nuts?”

            “I’m not. Just don’t like ’em.”

            “We’ll all take some cake, Helga,” the lady next to Tina declared. “In honor of all efforts made to bring us here—five generations, from Olaf to Jerry—”

            “He’s Jeremiah! How many times must…”

            “Oh, I didn’t know you were listening,” the lady went on. “All efforts to appreciate what’s distinct and in synch, if you will, about our extended family.”

            “NSYNC was my favorite group growing up,” Rory said.

            “I always thought you were gay,” quipped the nine-year-old’s older brother.

            “What?” Rory looked up. “You lookin’ for a fight?”

            “Why would you pick a fight with a kid, Rory? Especially about being gay.”

            The table went silent for a while. Helga had retreated for the cake; Rory drained his wine glass and pulled a new bottle from the cardboard box nearby his chair. The brothers scampered off for better things to irritate, and Tina, finishing up the cigarette, went to check on George. Olaf seemed intent to snooze, this party not his cup of tea at all. The lady slid over to tickle his nape, her way of making sure the day would give even a hint of a laugh.

            “Makes no difference,” Olaf mumbled, “by my age, it’s all waiting for Godot.”

            “For what?”

            “Makes no difference,” he repeated. “Ever try to tickle yourself? It’s impossible, they say.”

            “Oh, I don’t know. People amuse themselves all the time. Probably too much the case. What frightens me is when they frown at all the fun they have.”

            “Are they frowning today? Bored to be here, I bet.”

            Rory’s wife stood up to tilt the new bottle of wine. “Here, Olaf, you need to pick up your spirits,” filling half his dixie cup.

            Olaf nodded some thanks and brought it shakily to his lips. He was doing fine—sipping from experience—until Helga yelped as she fell into the room. The cat she tripped over hissed and jumped onto the table, causing everyone but Olaf to take cover. Helga’s face landed squarely in the cake, acting as an airbag, but the candles flared at the lure of her hairspray. Rory’s wife had the presence of mind to douse what she could with the wine, and her husband got the clue to lend some sort of hand. Helga herself did the most to prevent the fire from spreading, rolling her head like a spindle into the mush of the cake.

            The boys came racing in and almost blew up laughing. “Kids, you march back from where you came!” the lady ordered, “and don’t return until you’ve learned something!” The older one shrugged in agreement and the younger one mimicked, leaving their unsolicited school marm to bend down to the mess and declare, on behalf on no one else, “I’m so sorry, Helga.” The cat recoiled at her voice and used the occasion to dash into the kitchen and its unguarded victuals.

            Olaf, meanwhile, gently passed away. It hadn’t been as bad a day as he’d imagine, somewhere in his Beckett-governed mind. The cake, it seemed, was banana cream, and though his daughter was anything but mean, he had had enough of that inside joke, playing Krapp for all those years and necessarily, for an audience of sometimes ten, eating like a chimpanzee. He wouldn’t have to do that anymore, presuming afterlife more functional.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)

Transgression

                  “Oh, Tomas, aren’t you asleep by now?” my wife, prepping tomorrow’s snacks for backpacks, spoke slowly to this twelve-year old, a guest from France on a week of foreign-exchange. He’d come downstairs from the bedroom of our son Ben, who was away this week for a school trip of his own.

                  “I’m ahngry,” Tom said.

                  “Really? About what?”

                  “I’m ahngry,” he repeated.

                  Katerina looked at me for help. By coincidence, I was angrily keyboarding with the fickle wi-fi and my off-hours need to fill out online documents. “Honey, maybe you can take this. Tom is…”

                  “Ahngry,” he turned to me with raised eyebrows.

                  “Hmm. Was there something, Tom, that…um, happened? Today? This… jour?” I also raised my eyebrows like an empathetic emoji.

                  “Un moment,” Tom scampered to the stairwell and called to the other foreign exchange guest. “Hugo, quel est le mot pour ‘affamé’?”

                  Hugo, from the darkness, set him straight: “ahngry.”

                  Tom followed that with something, but Hugo stayed mute, as if suddenly asleep. With slightly more a skip in his step, Tom came back to the kitchen to announce: “I’m ahngry!”

                  “I’m sorry,” Katerina told him. “Maybe… you can call home? Mama? in France? I’m mama here—but your mama, I mean…or—” She was evidently having second thoughts about spreading Tom’s mysterious rage across the continent.

                  “No, no. Is fine. Okay.” Tom waved a pre-teen reassurance of some sort. He nodded a confused ‘Merci’ and backed his way out of the kitchen to go upstairs again.

                  “Odd.” Katerina waited to hear the bedroom door close. “What do you think of that?”

                  “He’ll get over it. You know these trips aren’t everybody’s fancy.” I grabbed a yogurt from the fridge as the internet stalled.

                  Minutes later, Tom bounded down with a new announcement: “feud!”

                  “With whom?” Katerina referreed, “Hugo?”

                  “No, Hugo okay. Please, feud.”

                  Katerina and I tried to read our minds, let alone his. “Let’s wake up Emma”—our daughter, who’d likely know what to do.

                  Tom waited patiently as I went up for Emma, who was wide awake and messaging friends about our French guests and theirs. “Em, you should be sleeping by now—yeah, yeah, yeah—but while you’re awake… Tom seems to be upset about something. Do you have a clue?”

                  “About what?” she was still messaging.

                  “About Tom. He’s downstairs—come talk to him, S’il vous plaît.”

                  “Dad, I don’t know French. I’ll be useless.”

                  “The whole point of this foreign exchange is to apply what you’ve been studying. How are you going to do next month, at Tom’s house?”

                  “I’ll be at Hugo’s. And his English is better.”

                  “Just come on down. Troubleshoot, for goodness sake.”

                  As we went downstairs, I thought she should be aware of his request for a feud. “He’s a rugby player, Dad. He can break my nose with a shoulder shrug.”

                  “Now, now, he’s been a perfect gentleman these past two days.” But that said, it got me thinking.

                  Emma giggled at Tom’s gesticulations, his “I’m really ahngry”, his own, machismo-challenged giggles. The dog chimed in with barks to quiet down, it’s past curfew! Eventually, we had to fetch elder brother Joey to translate the conundrum. He had taken four years of French in school.

                  “He says he’s angry,” he concluded.

                  “But why?” his mother pleaded, “what did we do?”

                  “Pourquoi?” Joey garbled.

                  Tom clenched his stomach. “He’s gonna barf,” Emma warned, to which her guest started giggling again.

                  Hugo came down to investigate his compatriot’s plight. While reticent, he read the situation instantly and felt a need to circle us together for a coming-to-terms. “Tom ahngry,” he started, and we nodded that we got that. “Me, no.” So, we knew we had an isolated situation. A lone wolf? Giggles surceased. “Vous”—shake of the head—“You… avoir—has?—feud. C’est une transgression de ne pas donner. Yes?”

                  “Erm… Joey?”

                  “‘Avoir’ means ‘have’,” he said, reaching for his phone to check even that.

                  My wife made a moue. “I heard ‘transgression’. Is that what you said, Hugo?”

                  “Oui, but… un peu.”

                  “That doesn’t sound good,” Em whispered. “What’s ‘transgression’, anyway?”

                  “No, no, sorry,” Hugo tried to clarify, sticking his index finger almost to his uvula.

                  “Now he’s gonna barf,” Joey offered. “This is like some sort of cult ritual, perhaps—”

                  “There’s no cults in France,” my wife was pretty sure.

                  “Ahngry!” Tom reiterated, pointing at Hugo’s charade. “He too ahngry.”

                  “Ahh!” I finally figured it out. “They’ve been having a feud upstairs over some transgression—crossing a line, stepping on toes, snarfing the other guy’s Snickers bar, unaware—”

                  “Yes! Yes—Snickers!” Tom exuded. Hugo removed his encaved finger, satisfied his job was done.

                  “Good—progress comes with talking things out,” I continued. “So maybe, I don’t know: Joe, would you mind taking the living room couch so Tom can sleep in your room? Kinda to let cooler heads prevail.”

                  “Prévaloir,” Hugo added, “avec Snickers!”

                  Emma was impressed. “Gosh, it’s like those guys in Les Misérables—‘Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men?’”

                  “So, sing it!” I goaded, and set the key with burlesque baritone: “‘Do you hear the people sing?’ C’mon, ‘Singing the song—”

                  “Dad!” Em was mortified. Hugo clapped some approval. Tom pretended to be shot at the barricade, or else went into some rugby roll.

                  Joe, meanwhile, announced how stupid this was and led the boys upstairs to sleep in different rooms, then came back down with a blanket to claim the couch. “They were confused, but…”

                  Katerina came out of the pantry and asked Emma to trade her mobile phone for a macaroon—among the goodies the boys had given two days ago as house gifts. Em demurred but understood her need to be away from the glowing device. “Don’t want to make a transgression,” she twirled.

                  Quick study, I smiled.

                 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)