Month: March 2012

fiction by Jason Edwards

Let’s say you come into the middle of a conversation about fly fishing. And let’s say you don’t know anything about fly fishing. How long before you finally realize that what these two people are amicably chatting about is fly fishing? And let’s be clear, it will be an amicable chat. Can you imagine a conversation about fly fishing steeped in rage? You’re no psychiatrist, but even you could figure out that if two people are shouting at each other with words pulled from the vocabulary of fly fishing, spittle and blood-red cheeks and bulging eyes and stiff fingers poised pointed and poking heaving chests, the real subject at hand isn’t fly fishing. Something deeper, something historic. But don’t get distracted. You sit down in your favorite booth at the diner, the waitress already knows what you’re going to order, but she gives you a menu anyway and wanders off to get you a diet sprite. The only diner in pretty much the whole world that serves diet sprite. And in the booth behind you, two guys.

Let’s say one is called Zdenek Fibich. That’s a coincidence, but one of those coincidences that you don’t know about. In addition to not knowing anything about fly fishing, you know nothing about the famous Czech composer. And neither did this guy’s parents. They’re Czech, sure, emigrated. But Fibich isn’t the most uncommon name for those people, and neither is Zdenek. But you don’t know any of that. And Zed says something about how he really likes what she did with the sinker, with the granulated flecking, green and yellow, makes for a swirly kind of bite. Don’t giggle. Here’s the waitress with your diet sprite. Tell her: cheeseburgers fries. She’s not listening because she already knows.

And the other guy’s called Dave or something. How many Dave’s do you know? Probably thousands. Or, if not thousands, enough who know people who know other Daves until it numbers in the thousands. That’s a lot of freaking Daves! Dave replies something along the lines of her greeber has a nice tug too, and she used real fake ocelot fur for the flange mixer. Not too shabby.

Figured it out yet? What they’re talking about? Fly fishing? The trick is to not think about thinking about it. Rather, let your mind wander. Fish be eating flies. Have been for millions of years, evolved over the course of tens of millions of years to recognize that vibration in the water, jump up, chew on a tasty fly. And along comes man. Evolves over a few million years himself, but over the course of only a few hundred thousand, figures out fish, and over only ten thousand or so, figures out society, and over only a few hundred or so, how to build fake flies and fish with them. Well god damn.

Here’s your cheese burger. Toasted bun, cheap-ass cheese but melted just right, soggy onion soggy pickle. Remove tomato, pepper it and eat it alone. Remove lettuce leaf, roll into a lettuce-leaf roll and dip in mayo, eat alone. Open bun, squirt ketchup on bun, use crinkle-cut french fry to spread ketchup around. Close bun, take bite, take sip of diet sprite, listen to Zed say something about ocelot fur’s probably more expensive than necessary for a worker. A show , maybe, but c’mon. You got to stick those things in the water, eventually.

The book you brought with you? Ignored. What is it. Something by Richard Brautigan, or Percival Everett? You’ve read it before, no big deal, the burger’s delicious, as always, it’s a nice day outside, sort of overcast and drizzly and there’s talk of snow, but a nice day in the sense that after ten million years of evolution you’ve got a cheeseburger and all the fish have got are fake flies.

So now have you figured it out yet? That they’re talking about fly fishing? There was a clue, Zed mentioned water. And then Dave said back something about it’s all for show, really, since if a man needs to eat that bad, he oughta just go to the supermarket anyway.

See? Water, eat, that must mean fish. And those words, sinker, flecking, bite, greeber, tug, flange mixer. They’re all made up words, they’re not the words you would recognize if you knew anything about fly fishing. But since you don’t, those words are as good as any, and you need to focus on other words, like water, and eat.

I’m guessing you’re a pretty smart guy. Yeah, you’re stuck in your ruts, with your diet sprite and your cheeseburger and the way you eat the tomato. I know, I know, no sense in putting ketchup on a burger that’s got a tomato on it, and you like ketchup more than you like tomato. I get it. Listen to me, I’m complimenting you, I’m saying despite these ruts– for good reasons or bad, okay? Calm down– despite these ruts, you’re probably a pretty smart guy. You probably figured out that Zed and Dave were talking about fly fishing pretty darn quick.

But that’s where you fail, see. Sorry, but it’s true. Because, smart as you are, as soon as you figured out that they were taking about fly fishing, even though you don’t know anything about fly fishing, you stopped listening. So, you didn’t learn anything about fly fishing. You and your cheeseburger and your crinkle cut fries. Decent tip for the waitress. Hoodie and walk in the rain back to work. You didn’t learn anything. So much for evolution. If you had been one of those fish, you never would have learned how to bite.

fiction by Jason Edwards

from Diary of a Wolf Man by Paul Lucas:

I am a werewolf. Do you want to me to talk about the change? It hurts. Do you want me to talk about running free in the woods? It’s exhilarating. There’s really nothing more for me to say. Ask a ballerina what it’s like to perform in front of a theater, packed. She’s lithe, she’s supple, she’s graceful, she has dancing in her DNA– but not words. She can’t tell you. And even if she had the right words, you wouldn’t understand. She’s an alien, she’s a one-way mirror. I’m a werewolf. I’m blood and fear, moonlight and rage. I might as well talk about quantum physics.

Or molecular biology. My condition is not natural. I’m the one percent who survives one percent of the time. A werewolf is nothing but the inevitable consequence of metabolism taken to the utmost extreme. The beast hunts its prey, and devours the protein. But it must be living protein. So the beast infects its prey with enzymes that keep it alive. The prey burns through its energy stores, begins converting its own body into more protein. It lives while the beast feeds. Eventually, even magic cannot keep the carcass alive. The beast leaves behind a pile of offal.

Sometimes, but very rarely, the prey escapes before the beast is done eating. But it is infected, and it continues to change. It goes mad. It really is very painful. You don’t know how painful it is, and you will never know. Pain is just a word, and words have no meaning, wrapped in that kind of Hell. Hell is just a word too. Eventually, the body dies, the beautiful complicated interlocking systems broken down, converted to a pile of protein. It’s almost worse, to die like that for nothing. If you’re not even food, what’s the point.

And sometimes, even more rarely, the prey escapes, and it’s only barely infected. The enzyme gets into the blood, into the brain, into the endocrine system. The body burns, hot, and in this early stage, you can never get enough to eat. You have never know such hunger. Naturally, at first, you turn to sweet things, sugary foods. That kick. But it’s just a kick. Just a punt, and you need a catapult. You need a rocket launch. If you’re lucky- actually, if you’re lucky, you starve to death. They find you twisted on your kitchen floor, emaciated and drained, your skin still hot for days.

But if you can get on top of it, if you can stay fed, if you can get that protein, you can survive. That’s what I did. It chased me through a city park, had me, bit me, and ran with me into the middle of the road. We were hit by a car. I woke up in a hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses. They were pumping me full of protein. I got on top of it. I survived.

Why wolf? It’s in our DNA, all animals share DNA, and the enzyme just reprograms you for a little while. It would be elegant if it wasn’t so horrifying. The full moon rises, and ancient strands of valine, threonine, alanine, and glycine, time wearied patterns, respond to the pull and begin to devour you from the inside. You grow, literally grow, like a baby grows into a young adult, but in the space of a few hours instead of a few decades. This is what I mean when I say it hurts.

It’s an efficient process but it consumes unworldly amounts of energy and there’s nothing left to do then but feed. Find something alive and keep it alive until it’s dead and then find something else and do it again. You’re gifted with all the tools to do this: hearing and smell and eyesight and speed and agility and, oh, right, what do you call the opposite of morality?

Because you’re aware, you’re so aware of every single moment. There’s no amnesia. A creature that grows from man to wolf in the time it takes to watch a bad movie has the advantage of certain evolutionary benefits– the man who woke up in his own bed, washed of the night’s blood, was easily naturally selected over the man who woke naked in a field surrounded by slaughter with no memory except yesterday’s growling stomach.

This is why I don’t talk about the change, talk about running in the woods. Those are romantic notions, and ask yourself this the next time you’re tooth-deep in a piece of fried chicken and you forget for a second that you have a job and a family and a cock and a Playstation: what if your entire existence could be defined in that salty bite? What if, when you took that bite, the result wasn’t bloat and shame, grease and fatigue, but instead it meant strength and power and more rage than any one man can justify stifling? Would you, at that moment, answer silly questions about how the fried chicken was coated with flour, why they chose those colors for the paper napkins? No. You would just keep eating. Just keep eating and eating and eating and eating. Until it was all gone.