The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Finally the green pigs have had enough. Stirred by the patriotic speeches of a number of brave and articulate young green pigs, they swarm through the stinking sties of the degenerates laying their hooves upon and killing all that they can find. Soon every precious mud hole in the land is free of the stench of the pink pigs.

  As early as the next morning young green pigs are composing and performing songs in honor of the triumph of the previous day.

  And crowds of green pigs are gathering, watching and talking about the chickens who defile their precious mud daily with their fowl scratches and excrement.

  JAN. 21

  1793: French king Louis XVI is beheaded.

  Sometimes he thought the world would be a much better place without heads. Heads lied, expelled stale air, and generally thought too much of themselves. Heads lost too much heat in the winter, requiring ugly head apparel. Heads were much too curious, turning so far that neck cramps inevitably developed.

  Heads led the rest of the body into realms of experience where no self-respecting body should be.

  But what were you to do? Someone must have tried other solutions to top the neck.

  A coconut would have been clever. At least coconuts were hard enough.

  Or maybe a cabbage. A cabbage could be unwrapped to reveal a secret.

  A toaster would be nice, especially in the morning. Or a lamp if your wife wanted to read at night.

  Somewhere there were, no doubt, people with televisions atop their necks and their friends wouldn’t notice the difference.

  If Cal could replace his own head with a nest full of baby birds he was taking care of, maybe even Linda would let him back into their home.

  JAN. 22

  1968: “Rowen & Martin’s LaughIn” premiers.

  At the time Cal left his family, Parker had recently discovered punch lines. But Jenny was still struggling with the concept. Parker used to get terribly annoyed when he’d say “Knock Knock,” and she’d reply, “Come in, Parker.”

  Parker: How many daddies does it take to screw in a light bulb?

  Jenny: Daddy doesn’t live here anymore, and I’m scared of the dark.

  JAN. 23

  1992: 47 nations, including the U.S., agree on a global effort to rescue millions of hungry people in the former Soviet Union.

  The thing that Cal missed most about parenting was the physical act of feeding his children. Even poor parents, even bad parents, put food on the table, sometimes passing food from their hands directly into their children’s mouths. In his absence Linda would insist that the kids eat with her.

  So Cal thought that before returning home he should prepare his children by mailing them food. The question, of course, was what kind of food.

  He didn’t want to send them junk: cookies or candy. And he didn’t want to send them anything with extraneous associations, like a fruitcake, or the kind of boxed chocolates a man might send to his sweetheart.

  “Mommy, what is this?” Jenny says, looking at the multi-legged purple insect which has just crawled out of the giant box full of popped corn her father sent her.

  “Oh, that?” Linda says. “That. That is just your father’s regrets.”

  Then she grinds the bug into the polished floorboards with her heel.

  JAN. 24

  1908: Robert Baden-Powell organizes the first Boy Scout troop in England.

  Cal felt guilty about it now, but he’d been relieved when Parker dropped out of the Cub Scout pack. Every week there had been a required parents’ meeting and every week the leaders had harangued about how important it was to do the planned activities with the boys. There were planned activities for each merit badge. There were planned activities for religion, family togetherness, father-son communication, and the importance of good role models. Cal had felt completely out of his league.

  The pack had come together to work on their woodcarving merit badges. Each cub was given a knife with a six-inch blade. The boys broke up into small groups, each group selecting a piece of furniture in the church basement where they met: a chair, a desk, a chalkboard on a tripod, a pew. Collectively they began hacking and chopping away at the selected piece. They sounded like frenzied beavers, or pre-pubescent mad slashers on holiday.

  During the course of this planned activity, individual members of the pack broke away for snacks (cookies, punch, the more sugar fuel the better) and their own, unplanned activities. One cub found a cat and asked aloud if there was such a thing as a taxidermy merit badge. Another found the den mother’s white sack purse, which with selective cuts and magic marker decorations became a severed head the scout presented as a centerpiece for the next Cub Scout banquet.

  After a couple of hours it was time to show the finished results: a carving of a wrecked ship, a carving of a wrecked house, a carving of a devastated forest.

  Parker cowered in the corner as the pack gathered around him for his initiation.

  “Obey the law of the pack!” they chanted, as they transformed into small and fierce bobcats, wolves, and bears. As they drew closer and Parker began to whimper the den mother shouted for order but the pack, one for all and all for one, was far too intent on the night’s good deed.

  JAN. 25

  1915: Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates transcontinental phone service.

  He picked up the phone to dial Time and Temperature. Some days he did this just to hear someone else’s voice. It was computerized now, but he still liked to imagine this older woman who had been with the local company for years, glancing at her watch and gazing out the window before reporting back to him. “Half-past six, Cal, and I do think we have a little rain blowing in. You can smell the smoke from the leaves the volunteer fire department’s burning over behind the high school. Last year those fools let it get away from them and it burned up fifty yards of the football field. My big toe is aching something fierce, so I suspect this one’s going to be a wet one all right.”

  But instead he found himself dialing his home telephone number. He hadn’t planned it– his fingers seemed to pick out the digits of their own accord.

  It rang seven or eight times before someone picked it up. Without thinking much about it, Cal picked up a handkerchief and held it over the speaker.

  “Hello?” It was Jenny, her voice sounding far more grown-up than he remembered.

  What to say? He said the unexpected. “Is your daddy home?”

  A pause on the other end while he held his breath. “Daddy’s gone away, but Momma promised me he’s gonna come back. You wanta talk to her?” Now Jenny sounded younger than she was, maybe three or four.

  Linda would know his voice, however he disguised it. “No, you have such a pretty little voice, I’d rather just talk to you.”

  She giggled. “Thank you.” Then, “You know my daddy?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to. Sometimes I just don’t understand him.”

  “Momma says that.”

  “I bet she does.”

  “Could you tell me a story? My daddy always tells me stories, but when he comes back we won’t have time for all he missed I bet while he was gone.”

  Cal’s breath caught. “You … you could tell me a story, couldn’t you?”

  “Okay. Once upon a time there lived a momma and a daddy and a brother and a sister, but the sister’s name wasn’t Jenny it was somethin’ different. And one day Jenny– I mean, the little girl– got swallowed by the biggest lion but nobody knew. Her daddy didn’t know cause he was gone. Maybe he got swallowed up by the same lion.

  “Anyway, she walked around inside that mean old lion for a long time till she was hungry and she was real scared of the dark so she lit a candle– Daddy wouldn’t let her play with matches but Daddy wasn’t there– and the fire made the lion sick so it spit her out. And even though she was all wet and sticky she was happy cause her daddy was standing there waiting when she got out.

  “The end.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all, Mister Man. And
good night!”

  “Good night, sweetheart.”

  JAN. 26

  1784: Benjamin Franklin says that he would have preferred the turkey, over the eagle, as the symbol of America.

  Ten things I know about turkeys:

  1. They weigh more than is good for them.

  2. They panic easily.

  3. They’re too quick to follow a leader, even when that leader leads them into making a pile of themselves beneath which several of their number will suffocate.

  4. They have only the vaguest sense of individual style.

  5. They’re so stupid they’ll drown themselves by opening their beaks upward to greet the rain that taps for entrance on their skulls.

  6. They attempt grace, and fail utterly.

  7. They hate being left alone and will do anything to avoid it, even if it means living cramped in a cage.

  8. Their dreams of flight far outstrip their abilities.

  9. Like all self-involved creatures, the taste of their flesh will put you to sleep.

  10. Once their offspring reach partial maturity, they have no idea what to do with them.

  JAN. 27

  1832: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), author of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, is born in Cheshire, England.

  Begin at the beginning.

  In the morning Cal thought he saw one of his children, running around the outside of the house, playing in the yard. What were they doing here? Linda must also be around somewhere– they’d found him, and he couldn’t be happier. Then he realized it would have been his children years ago, when they were much younger, only recently having discovered the pleasures of locomotion. The figure had been too small, too awkward on its feet. Cal went out and walked around the house, crouching low to maintain a child’s-eye view. And saw a small figure wearing an outfit Parker used to wear, squirming under a hedge. It was a rabbit, wearing clothes Parker had worn when he was a toddler.

  Curiouser and Curiouser.

  Cal stuck his head beneath the hedge. And saw Parker staring at him. But it was Parker as a rabbit. his nose elongated, the tip of it black, and he had long white whiskers as well.

  “Parker?”

  “I can’t explain myself … because I’m not myself,” his son said. Then he smiled, and Cal could see that his son had the long, razor-sharp teeth of the wronged child, the child abandoned. The boy turned and pulled a struggling mouse out of his shorts pocket, grinned wider, and drew the mouse upwards to his mouth, lips pursed as if for a kiss.

  Then it was snip, snap, and off with its head.

  Parker the rabbit dropped the headless carcass and scurried deeper into brush and undergrowth, into the edge of the surrounding woods. Cal followed, still on hands and knees, until he was face to knee with Jenny, who was much larger than she should have been. She picked him up and hugged him– much too tightly– as if he were one of her dolls.

  “Jenny!”

  “As large as life and twice as natural!” she cried. Then she started tossing him up and down, shouting, “Hush little baby! Hush little baby!”

  Cal heard thunder, then looked up to see Linda, an even larger giant, staring down at him with amusement in her eyes.

  “It would have made a dreadfully ugly child, but it makes rather a handsome pig,” she said.

  He could hear the flap flap flapping overhead of some terrible presence approaching.

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!” Jenny sang.

  And suddenly the claws were around him, carrying him up and away and back into sleep, the claws piercing his ears and then his brain as if to bring him quickened slumber.

  Twas brillig.

  JAN. 28

  1878: the first commercial telephone switchboard goes into operation, in New Haven, Conn.

  Again Cal tried to use the telephone to get back in touch with his abandoned family, but something happened in the connections and interconnections, the switchings and unswitchings, and he was shuttled in and out of the lives and conversations of numerous people he did not know.

  “So I told I didn’t think we should be dating anymore, and he started calling me a bitch and a whore and a slut, and why does it always happen this way, I tell him, that men and women can’t be friends when there’s no romance involved?”

  click

  “I don’t ask for much, Harold, but you never told me you loved me, not once in thirteen years, and I just don’t understand how that could be. It’s not normal, is it?”

  “Well, you married me.”

  “I did. I loved you.”

  “Then you must have known what you were getting into. Give me a break, Gladys!”

  “But not even once! I married you even though you didn’t tell me you loved me even once! What’s the matter with you? But worse, what’s the matter with me that I would marry you anyway? And the worst thing is, a lot of women do that, Harold. What’s wrong with the human race?”

  click

  “Hello?”

  “Linda? Linda, this is Cal.”

  “There’s no Linda here.”

  “I’m sorry, I– “

  “But you can talk to me. I haven’t talked to a soul all day. Cal, Cal’s your name?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry– “

  “Oh, don’t hang up. I’ve got a dead husband and two dead children and theirs are the only voices I’ve heard all weekend. Say something, Cal. Anything. Just read the newspaper to me over the phone if that’s all you can do– “

  click

  “Hello? Are you there? Hello?”

  Someone was on the other end, he could tell. But they would not speak. Nor would they hang up. Or perhaps it was just some machine in the bowels of the phone system. But it listened well, humming an understanding electronic hum, as Cal told the story of how he had abandoned his family, how he would try to fix it, how lives and human paths of communication became so easily disconnected, shuffled, charged with static and distortion, until finally all the lines were down.

  JAN. 29

  1820: Britain’s King George III dies insane at Windsor Castle.

  1845: Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven is published.

  1963: poet Robert Frost dies in Boston.

  Cal and Linda had had a neighbor who died after a long, debilitating illness. They’d never known many of the details, but they’d heard that mental illness had been one of the side effects.

  The man had once been a famous author, or so Cal had heard. Although he didn’t know how famous. Fame was relative. At least Cal had seen the man’s name a few times on covers in bookstores. It embarrassed him now that he’d never gotten around to buying, much less reading, any of those books.

  That last year Cal had run into the author several times, and the man had seemed a little crazier each time. He had seemed almost obsessed with words, especially the words that were now lost to him.

  “I once had the perfect description for the kind of day it is today. Blue sky and all. It was only thirty or forty words, and they were perfection. I wrote that description down– appropriately enough– in a little blue notebook. And then promptly lost the notebook. It was as if I’d lost the feeling, the perception itself, you know? As a result I never felt quite the same way about such a day again.

  “Poe created his own emotions, you know? He didn’t feel the particular despairs he was prone to until he had first written them down. ‘Nevermore.’ That word alone summons despair, don’t you think? ‘My soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore.’ If you think crazy thoughts, then you become a crazy man. Makes a lot of sense, don’t you think? Me, I’m trying to think as sanely as possible.

  “Frost wasn’t a very good father, or so I have read. I did not know the man personally, unless my intimate knowledge of his poetry counts for something. ‘I have been one acquainted with the night,’ and all that. I understand that– I could say the same of myself. But it would be a shame if Frost was a bad father. Poets should be very good fathers, don’t y
ou think? They have their fingers on the origins of words, they know them intimately. They know how language begins; they understand the impulse behind the first urges to speak. So they should be more than adequate caretakers for the early years of a life. ‘Whose woods these are I think I know.’ No doubt they were owned by the king, for the king is the owner of all the woods. It is a matter of tradition.

  “I am a king, you know, the king of all you see. I’ve kept it hidden over the years, a well-kept secret I’m sure you’ll agree, I had to, you see, for no really loves the king. They may fear him they may even respect him but no one really loves him not even his wife. But at the end of one’s life your secrets simply weigh too much and it’s best to release them. Being king has its advantages certainly– you get to make up all the words the ones in your kingdom use because you own them, you see, but your children won’t love you since children naturally hate a monarch and besides, it’s lonely at the top.”

  JAN. 30

  1933: “The Lone Ranger” debuts on radio.

  Sometimes the depth to which he had betrayed Linda took his breath away, jarring him from a deep sleep. In the shadows of his bedroom he thought he could see his own eyes floating, a shadowy mask surrounding them, changing them forever.

  Linda had always feared secrets more than anything else. “When I found out who my father really was,” she told Cal one time, “I was shocked. He was nothing like what he’d always presented himself to be. That had only been his mask, his secret identity. I never even knew the man.”

  Now, Cal was sure, she must be thinking that he, too, had lied to her all those years. How could he make her understand that the Lone Ranger’s secret identity was sometimes a surprise even to the Lone Ranger himself?

  JAN. 31

  1872: western novelist Zane Grey is born in Zanesville, Ohio.

  He was a man with a gun.

  He rode tall in the saddle.

  He had eighty-three notches in the handle.

  It looked as if the beavers had gotten to it.

  All the men feared and respected him.

  He was silent and strong and showed no fear.

  In various towns he had thirty-two children he had neither seen, nor loved, nor applauded when they took their first steps.