“Nackles” by Donald E. Westlake

Did God create men, or does Man create gods? I don’t know, and if it hadn’t been for my rotten brother-in-law the question would never have come up. My late brother-in-law? Nackles knows.

It all depends, you see, like the chicken and the egg, on which came first. Did God exist before Man first thought of Him, or didn’t He? If not, if Man creates his gods, then it follows that Man must create the devils, too.

Nearly every god, you know, has his corresponding devil. Good and Evil. The polytheistic ancients, prolific in the creation (?) of gods and goddesses, always worked up nearly enough Evil ones to cancel out the Good, but not quite. The Greeks, those incredible supermen, combined Good and Evil in each of their gods. In Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda, being Good is ranged forever against the Evil one, Ahriman. And we ourselves know God and Satan.

But of course it’s entirely possible I have nothing to worry about. It all depends on whether Santa Claus is or is not a god. He certainly seems like a god. Consider: He is omniscient; he knows every action of every child, for good or evil. At least on Christmas Eve he is omnipresent, everywhere at once. He administers justice tempered with mercy. He is superhuman, or at least non-human, though conceived of as having a human shape. He is aided by a corps of assistants who do not have completely human shapes. He rewards Good and punishes Evil. And, most important, he is believed in utterly by several million people, most of them under the age of ten. Is there any qualification for godhood that Santa Claus does not possess?

And even the non-believers give him lip-service. He has surely taken over Christmas; his effigy is everywhere, but where are the manger and the Christ child? Retired rather forlornly to the nave. (Santa’s power is growing, too. Slowly but surely he is usurping Chanukah as well.)

Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption? Secondary gods of earlier times have been stout, but surely Santa Claus is the first fat primary god.

And wherever there is a god, mustn’t there sooner or later be a devil?

Which brings me back to my brother-in-law, who’s to blame for whatever happens now. My brother-in-law Frank is – or was – a very mean and nasty man. Why I ever let him marry my sister I’ll never know. Why Susie wanted to marry him is an even greater mystery. I could just shrug and say Love is Blind, I suppose, but that wouldn’t explain how she fell in love with him in the first place.

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The Turkey Season

“All right. Work your fingers around and get the guts loose. Easy. Easy. Keep your fingers together. Keep the palm inwards. Feel the ribs with the back of your hand. Feel the guts fit into your palm. Feel that? Keep going. Break the strings – as many as you can. Keep going. Feel a hard lump? That’s the gizzard. Feel a soft lump? That’s the heart. O.K.? O.K. Get your fingers around the gizzard. Easy. Start pulling this way. That’s right. That’s right. Start to pull her out.”

--from "The Turkey Season" by Alice Munro

Tell Me Everything

Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge have something in common. They both like to collect stories from “unrecorded lives”. Lucy and Olive know that we’re all surrounded by stories just waiting to be told and they’re anxious to tell them.

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Sweet Vidalia - excerpt

On the first of February, 1964, Eliza Kratke walked home in late afternoon from a neighbor’s and found her husband, Robert, in the driveway beside the Fairlane, the door standing open, his hand on the top frame of it. It was one of his rare weekends off from the railroad. Eliza thought that maybe he was going down to Dinwiddie’s to buy a hose for the Whirlpool or had been there and was just returning. Later she would find that he had not bought a hose, or anything, since there was no package in the car or the garage or any room of the house. Much later it would occur to her to wish she had noticed if the Fairlane had been cold or warm. But what woman would notice a detail like that while her husband of thirty years watched her walking toward him with such an anguished expression on his face?

Eliza knew she was about to hear it, this secret that he’d been on the verge of telling her. For months and months, Robert had been brooding. Not sharing the vivid little happenings from work that formerly had invited her into his day. His abrupt silences collapsed ordinary conversations. Suspense had returned to their life. Eliza disliked suspense. It made her anxious, and being anxious made her angry and impatient. She was a preparer. Holidays, she assigned dishes or accepted her own assignment; vacations, she packed from a penciled list; emerging from Hitchcock movies into the cool of night, she did not feel safely thrilled — she felt wrung out and disheveled. But look at him there — whatever thing Robert needed to say, she would hear now in their driveway, she was sure. Her rib cage contracted violently. The fear housed there slammed upward and spread jangling through her chest. She pulled her wool coat closer and held his gaze, her own inquiring, What could you have to say that I couldn’t stand?

Just before she reached him, his knees buckled. He caught himself on the door, clung to it, drew almost upright again. Eliza ran the last two steps and seized him around the waist. “There’s a hammer in my back,” he told the top of her head, “and in my front.”

She helped him heave himself into the car. He lurched over toward the passenger door. Eliza was scrambling out to call an ambulance but he shook his head, lifted his hand, thumb up, index finger pointing like a gun toward the Whelans’ house. She clambered in, understanding there would be no discussion and that he was not really pointing at the Whelans’ but beyond, where Maple Street led to Pershing Boulevard and the hospital, only two miles away. He meant they would be there faster than an ambulance could arrive, and as there was pain, they should go now. She grimaced in return, gave a half- shake of her head, put the car in gear.

They often communicated this way, expression and gesture accomplishing an agreement between them. This agreement was modified by her reservations, but the disapproving shake of her head had stated that for the record, and she didn’t protest further. With a flick of a glance over her left shoulder, Eliza tapped the brakes for the corner stop sign, turned right onto Maple, and drove the several residential blocks at forty- five, twenty miles beyond the speed limit. She turned left onto Pershing, a six- lane boulevard. Robert bent restlessly forward, then into the seat back; he could settle in neither position. When she asked him how he was, his answer was a tightening of the lips. She drove with one hand on his thigh, holding him in place.

She slowed for a red light at Ivy. Robert was grunting as he exhaled, eyes narrowed, lips compressed. These small sounds, full of the effort of withstanding, made her unable to wait out the light; she simply couldn’t. Eliza whipped her head to see that the street was clear and drove through the intersection, leaving three lanes of stopped cars behind. Scanning desperately ahead, clutching Robert’s leg, she took Walnut and Oak on yellows at fifty-five. As they reached Spruce, he folded, vomiting onto his feet. Eliza began to murmur, “Hold on, honey, hold on,” and in her sharply increased alarm passed a cement mixer grumbling toward Pine and got to the light just as it changed to red. A driver on the cross street to her right charging into an early green saw her and stood on his screaming brakes. Eliza stamped her brake and flung out an arm to protect Robert; his weight hyperextended her elbow, but she saw she’d clear the intersection if she gassed it, so she did, escaping past the driver’s shocked face. She trailed her hand over Robert’s neck, then grasped his arm; against her sweating palm, his skin was dry and very cold. She made the next two lights on green, tailgating every car in front of her until it surrendered the lane, laying on its horn as she accelerated past.

The police car caught them a block from the hospital. Because she hadn’t looked back, Eliza had been oblivious to the whirling lights, so the bleat of a siren switched to high volume made her jump in the seat and let out the cry she’d been continuously swallowing. She semaphored in the rearview mirror No, no, no without slowing down. Most of her life she’d been afraid of police, from the day she’d seen them wade swinging into a tussle of unemployed men, her father included, at the sawmill gates. It was the transformation that had scared her. The screech of a whistle — and the policemen’s neutral faces contorted into masks of naked, personal ferocity. It would not have occurred to her to stop and ask for the policeman’s assistance; besides, they were almost there. It was what she was begging Robert to believe: Almost there, almost there, hold on, hold on. She swerved to the left lane so she could make the turn ahead into the hospital lot; this abrupt maneuver cut off the police car, and he fell back, on her bumper now, siren blaring angrily. Red light pulsed over Robert, but he did not react to the violent red splashes. Anguish was gone from his face. Robert’s eyes were open now, and he looked almost bemused, as though he were puzzling over some small issue, his fingers hooked into his shirt. The left- turn lane curved ahead of her, traffic steady in the oncoming lanes so that she had to brake. She thought she would nudge out into the traffic anyway, force the cars to let her through.

Before she could do this, a policeman was shouting from directly behind her window: “Turn off your car!”

Eliza rolled down the window and stabbed her finger toward the hospital. Surely he would understand, surely he’d seen emergencies before: There was the hospital, here was a man with frost in his skin.

“Turn off your car! Throw your keys out the window. Now!”

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From Sweet Vidalia by Lisa Sandlin. 

Holly by Seamus Heaney.

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.


”Holly”, from "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney.

RIP Nikki Giovanni

 “Allowables

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small spider
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened.”


― Nikki Giovanni, Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid

Endlings

A story by Carmen Maria Machado from the new issue of Conjunctions. Machado is the author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties.

I started watching the Warrens’ children because my mother’s dead sister was hanging around, giving everyone a hard time. That was how I met the Warrens: my mother’s letter made its way across town to Ed’s desk. Between her many digressions and charmingly articulated grievances, Ed seemed to have discerned its truth: that we were a family troubled, and in desperate need of assistance.

He arrived with Lorraine on a Tuesday in November, in a silk shirt and a brocade-patterned scarf knotted tightly around his throat, and did the entirety of the house walk-through in his sunglasses. Lorraine recorded our conversations with a thoughtful expression, asking my parents probing questions I wished she were asking me. My mother took to her immediately, clinging to her arm and wailing about the situation. We had been respectable, ordinary people until the comet, she said. Now her dead sister was fiddling with the plumbing, spooking the cat, spoiling the canned goods.

My father followed the parade of us silently. I could, with practice, sense his thoughts about my mother’s emotional excesses, and that of women in general. He was embarrassed. Lorraine patted my mother’s arm and assured her that she believed her. The comet had been rustling up quite a lot of supernatural activity where you least expected it. Major cosmic events did that: lifted old patterns like long-sunk bodies from the swamp that’d swallowed them. Distorted time. Made people and animals and, yes, even ghosts act on their strangest impulses. It was possible, she said, that the dead woman didn’t even know she was dead. My mother sobbed at this news. Lorraine took her to the kitchen and made her tea. My mother asked me to follow them, to the room with the women, but I refused; I loved Lorraine’s perfume but my mother never went anywhere interesting. Instead I followed Ed, and my father, deeper into the house.

When we arrived at the most haunted room—mine, nestled in the northwestern corner—Ed removed his sunglasses and examined the furniture in great detail. He searched for my aunt in drawers and shoeboxes. He uncovered my diary and took in a few pages to understand what it was, but quickly hid it again, to prevent my mother from seeing it. He set up a device to measure the many qualities of the room. He also sat down at my desk and interviewed me about the situation. Had I seen my aunt? he asked. The chair creaked under his weight.

I had. I knew when she would arrive; her presence was preceded by a bitter tang on the air, like a fine perfume that had gone rancid in the heat. And I knew she was in the room because she would set up next to my ear and whisper to me all the ways in which I was awful. (I was prideful and arrogant, smug and self-satisfied, pleased with my own intelligence, certain of what I knew.) She sat there, I said, like a frog on a toadstool, telling me that I was a wretched daughter and worse niece; that my parents’ marriage was sinking like a poorly maintained skiff in moderately difficult weather; that my own insufficiencies were like mice chewing at the boat’s infrastructure, not the cause of the sinking but an undeniable factor in the loss. And then she would throw a fit: hurling my underthings into the air, jerking books off my shelves, shocking me whenever I touched the telephone.

“Your mother didn’t mention any of this,” Ed said.

“Well,” I replied, “she’s also killed the hydrangeas.”

Read more: Literary Hub

Learned by Heart - Emma Donaghue

In 1805, fourteen-year-old biracial Eliza Raine arrives at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York. The illegitimate daughter of an Indian mother and a British father, Eliza was sent to England as a young girl. She has no friends until Lister, a bold and intelligent new student arrives at the school and they become roommates. The book is based on the real romantic relationship that developed between the lesbian diarist known as Gentleman Jack and her boarding school lover Eliza Raine. The well-researched story alternates between their school days and letters written by Raine ten years later, when she was a patient in asylums begging to be reunited with Lister. After finishing the book earlier this year it has been my intention to read more about these two women. Almost a year has passed so I’m finally making a note here as a reminder to do so.

“Portrait of My Mother Studying for Her Citizenship Exam”

She sits on the corner of her bed, head tilted to one side. Licks the tip of

her thumb and flips through the thick booklet, trying to remember where

we left off. Two weeks ago, the mint-colored Bronco parked in the neigh-

bor’s driveway. The youngest one left in handcuffs and they haven’t heard

from her since. My mother sighs, “Pobre de México, tan lejos de Dios y

tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.” I am ten. And so far away from God, I

feel. Angelo and I take turns teaching her, tracking English like dirt into

our home. The only savior they tell us we need. If only it could be that

simple and true. To build her a life out of mud and syllables, of saliva,

colonies, and state capitals, treaties and phrases coined during a long-ago

war, written in a textbook-pretty cursive. Give me liberty or give me death,

she repeats. Even the birds’ names she has to learn. And after all those eve-

nings, rehearsing and memorizing the mythology of it, no one could pre-

pare her for the early morning raid, the strip searches at the border, the child

who gets deported. If you ask me, it’s hard to believe in God, especially

when years later she’s still forced to dodge slurs and bullets from a white

man who aims a gun at her in the supermarket. Give me liberty or give me

death. But for now, she’ll settle at the corner of her bed, skimming through

lines and sentences, narrowing her eyes as her fingers move to the follow-

ing page, mouthing out words, unfolding a wrinkled map she smooths open

with her hands, pausing before using her index finger to trace the dotted

lines. She pores over these texts for hours and hours. Focused. Determined.

Always pensive and gentle. Careful but intentional, like when combing for

ticks on the head of her firstborn son.

A poem by Eduardo Martínez-Leyva

From the Collection “Cowboy Park”

via Literary Hub

Two Girls Singing - Iain Crichton Smith

Published in Deer on the High Hills: selected poems by Iain Crichton Smith, edited by John Greening (Carcanet, 2021)

Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen

More here

Leo Tolstoy’s Final Days

In November, 1910,  Russian author Leo Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia.  His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, left his wife, his comfortable estate, and his wealth, then traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to spend the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut.

Haruki Murakami’s Writing Routine

(Duck Soup)

An excerpt from Richard Flanagan’s ‘Question 7”

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 has won 2024’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction  but he has rejected the £50,000 prize until the fund reduces its fossil fuel investments.  Here is an excerpt from the book, in which Flanagan visits the spot where his father was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp:

1.

In the winter of 2012, against my better judgement and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing—much as I said they were—and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned. It was very cold, a bitter day, and an iron sky threw a foreboding cast on the Inland Sea beneath which my father had once worked in a coal mine as a slave laborer.

Nothing remained.

Though I had no wish to be bothered with it, I was taken to a local museum where a very helpful woman found numerous photographs documenting a detailed history of the coal mine from the early twen- tieth century—its growth, its processes, its Japanese workers.

There was no photograph of slave laborers.

The woman was kind and, as they say, a fount of knowledge about local history. She had never heard of slave laborers working at the Ohama coal mine. It was as if it had never happened, as if no one had ever been beaten or killed or made to stand naked in the snow until they died. I remember the woman’s tolerant smile: a smile of pity for me thinking there had ever been slave laborers at the Ohama coal mine.

 

2.

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.

But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.

But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.

And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.

 

3.

At 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, said “Bomb away!,” and forty-three seconds later 60,000 people died while eighty miles to the south my father, a near-naked slave laborer in his fourth year of captivity as a prisoner of war, continued with his grueling work pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels that ran under the Inland Sea.

Broken, ill, body and will near the end, knowing only that when in a few months the winter cold returned he could no longer endure and would die, he was unaware that he was now going to live. As my father made his way along the bleak mine tunnel only very occasionally punctuated with dim electric light bulbs a fellow Tasmanian POW remarked that it looked like his hometown of Penguin on a Friday night.

 

4.

At the mine-head entrance, where my father and his fellow slave laborers once ran the gauntlet of guards who beat them as they passed, there now stood a love hotel. There was no memorial, no sign, no evidence, in other words, that whatever had once happened had ever happened. There was some neon signage. There was a business that catered for quick opportunistic sex in tiny rooms that allowed for sexual release and deliberately little else.

What remained, or rather what existed, was only the oblivion of pleasure in another’s arms—the same oblivion that simultaneously prefigures and denies death. As if the need to forget is as strong as the need to remember. Perhaps stronger.

And after oblivion? We return to the stories we call our memories, perplexed, strangers to the ongoing invention that is our life.

 

5..

Next to me that bitter day there stood an elderly Japanese man, Mr. Sato. He was tiny and frail, neatly dressed in a sports blazer and dress pants too long in the cuff from where, I assumed, he had shrunk with the passing of years. His hands were covered in thin white cotton gloves, and when he pointed out some long-vanished feature of the camp and mine below, all I saw was a loose thread dangling from the glove’s cuff. I don’t remember his shoes. Mr. Sato’s head came to my chest.

He lived and cared for a daughter who, I was told by the translator, was very disabled. Mr. Sato had once been a guard at Ohama Camp. He showed me where the barracks had been, the farm up the hill, the mine head downhill, closer to the sea.

In front of us, to my embarrassment and unspoken anger, were a TV crew and several photographers from local newspapers. I had gone through a series of contacts to be at the mine head, and somehow the local council had become involved. Without my knowledge they had asked the media along. The TV crew and newspaper journalists wanted one thing: Mr. Sato and I embracing, an image of forgiveness, of understanding, of time healing.

That would be, I knew, a lie. It wasn’t for me to forgive.

Does time heal? Time does not always heal. Time scars. Mr. Sato’s gloved hand was raised, pointing, the cold world below bisected by an unravelling thread.

 

6.

Earlier that day I had met local, elderly villagers who had been children during the war. I had not wanted to meet them. I felt—how can I put this?—ashamed. My shame was perhaps that my return might be misunderstood as vengeance or anger.

But I didn’t know what my return was. They had been children and I had not then existed. I felt, in short, unequal to them and their lives. Maybe I was ashamed, somehow, of being my father’s son presuming that his and their history might also be mine. I worried I might be seen as an unwelcome ghost, a specter looking over the scene of an unsolved crime in which I was implicated. But the ghost of whom?—the murdered, the murderer or the witness, or all three?

Because it was an arrangement made by others I didn’t know how to cancel it without causing offense. The elderly villagers were friendly, warm people.

When telling their tales of the wartime privations they had endured as the children of the rural poor, they recalled the dissonance between what the adult world said and what as children they saw, and a childish irreverence took hold of those old voices and weathered faces. They remembered when the POWs had disembarked in late 1944, how the devils they had been taught to fear for so long were no more than pitiful, near-naked skeletons.

As well as the cruelty of the Japanese guards, my father had spoken of the kindness of the Japanese miners, some of whom may have been these elderly villagers’ fathers, who would share their meagre food with the starving POWs.

Read more:  LiteraryHub

Quite A Day

Dear Diary:

It was 1945. We wanted to be married. I was 19. I saw a picture of a bride in a wedding gown. I wanted to do that.

We had one week. He was on furlough. His father’s office had phones. We used them to invite guests. We were married with 100 family and friends and a fancy dinner at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue.

He was in uniform. I was in a bridal gown that a salesperson had grabbed from someone else’s future order.

It was Aug. 12, 1945. The wedding festivities were winding down when the ballroom doors burst open. People crowded in, shouting, crying, laughing, whispering: The war was over.

The band started playing again. Drinks were on the house. People were kissing and hugging. Some were praying.

The war was over.

New York Times gift link