by Dave Eggers
She rounded a bend in the trail, and suddenly the forest gave way to scattered shrubbery. She was standing at the top of a gently sloping hill—and at the bottom lay her village, the wigwams bathed in moonlight. She’d made it!
Lips-Like-Sugar uttered an exhausted whoop! of glee and staggered down the hillside toward home. She suddenly felt something strike her back with incredible force, and stared numbly at a bloody spear point protruding through her fine beaded buckskin tunic. She had not made it after all.
The shadowy figure folded her into its arms and disappeared into the darkness. Lips-Like-Sugar’s dying shriek echoed through the forest, and then the woods were silent again.
“Yes, Granddaughter?” the wizened shaman said from behind the half-opened wigwam door. His head peeked through the door; huge dark circles limned his eyes, lines of worry furrowed his brow. He looked as if he had not slept for several days.
Sighing Lamb hid her shock and composed herself. “Grandfather, I am here to ask you a question. These recent murders that have plagued our tribe—are they somehow connected with the recent construction of our Burial Ground? All of these horrible things started happening when our tribe built it.”
The shaman sighed. “Come in,” he said. Once they were inside his cluttered wigwam, the shaman continued. “You are wise beyond your years, Granddaughter. I fear you are right; I have spent the evening consulting the Manidog, and what they have to tell us is terrible and sad. We have built our Indian burial ground ...”
“Yes!? What?!” Sighing Lamb snapped impatiently.
“On top of an ancient Indian burial ground!” the shaman wailed piteously.
Sighing Lamb gasped and clutched her hands to her chest. Outside, a wolf howled. Aaarrrrrooooooooooooo.
When a member of the Squab was laid to rest, his body was washed and dressed in his finest clothing, his hair was braided, and he was taken up in several sheets of birch bark. His favorite valuables—knives, spears, tobacco, jewelry, and the like—were buried with him.
Also buried with him were a spoon, a kettle, and a dish—all of them essential for the four-day journey that the soul of the Squab had to take before it reached its final resting place. On the first day, the soul had to confront a shaking log lying across a stream; he would be able to pass by addressing the log as “Grandfather,” and scattering tobacco in the stream as tribute. Afterward, he would meet his escort to Heaven, Chia’bos, the younger brother of the legendary warrior Wi’ske. Each evening the soul would stop, build a fire, and prepare a meal for himself and Chia’bos, and each evening his surviving relatives would build a fire around his grave in support. At the end of the fourth day, his hair was braided, and Chia’bos and the soul would enter heaven—and the relatives would throw a great feast in celebration of his successful journey.
The victims of the eldritch horror that plagued the Squab had not yet been given this honor. The tribal shaman had judged it unwise to inter them until their inhuman murderer had been defeated, lest it follow them into the afterlife and destroy their souls as well as their bodies.
Sighing Lamb reflected carefully on all this as she gazed upon the Burial Ground of the Squab. “I am sorry, eldritch horror!” she called to the bodies, her voice quavering. “We did not mean to build our Indian burial ground on top of yours! What can we do to make amends?”
“RAAAARRRRRRRRR!!!!!!” howled a shadowy, shaggy figure as it advanced from the bushes toward her.
Sighing Lamb sobbed in terror and fell to the ground. “I am sorry we did this.... I am sorry. Please do not kill me.”
The primitive figure raised his spear and snarled with glee—and uttered a gurgling cry of pain, staggering backward and dropping his spear. “Leave her alone!” Grizzled Fist bellowed, a bloody tomahawk gripped firmly in a white-knuckled hand.
“RARRRRRR!!!!” uttered the ancient Indian, and tackled the burly Indian detective. The two rolled about in the charnel earth of the burial ground. Sighing Lamb shrieked and hid behind a large rock, her eyes squeezed shut and her hands pressed over her ears.
The battle was long and bloody, but Grizzled Fist finally gained the upper hand. He pinned the writhing ancient Indian to the ground and raised his tomahawk. “This is for With-Great-Hair!” he snarled—the tomahawk came down one, two, three times, and the ancient Indian lay still in a bloody heap on the ground.
Sighing Lamb leaned back wearily against the nearest tree. This was all just too much! Grizzled Fist staggered forward, equally exhausted, and the two embraced. “Don’t worry, little one. It is over now,” he said. “It is over. The Wendigo, or whatever it was, has been laid to rest.”
“No,” said Sighing Lamb softly. “It was no Wendigo.” They turned to the rapidly stiffening corpse. “Just the ghost of one who came before. We must help him rest now.
“We must abandon this place and shun it forever more,” she continued. “For this is not our land. We Indians do not know how to preserve the earth, only destroy it. We need to learn from those who came before us, lest we follow them into oblivion.”
Grizzled Fist smiled softly. “I think you have given us all something to think about. May I take you out for venison, tubers, and berries some time?”
“Yes, I would like that,” Sighing Lamb said, and smiled tiredly. Perhaps something good would come of this after all.
WORDS THAT WOULD MAKE NICE NAMES FOR BABIES, IF IT WEREN’T FOR THEIR UNSUITABLE MEANINGS
Stephany Aulenback
FOR GIRLS
Angina
Calorie
Dyslexia
Feta
Plaice
Reciprocity
Uvula
FOR BOYS
Bench
Caftan
Chyle
Raunch
Rennet
Roily
Torrid
Thwart
Fellatio
REVIEWS OF MY DAYDREAMS
T. G. Gibbon
TITLE: “Hail to President Tom”
WHEN: Without fail, I have gotten this daydream while watching 20/20 or 60 Minutes any time in the last thirteen years.
SYNOPSIS: With epic scope, this forty-three-second fantasy follows me through several grueling political campaigns and concludes with my years as a widely admired and distinguished elder statesman. Retirement suits me, I have to say, and my accomplishments while in office were great and lasting, such as nationalizing industry and education, eliminating poverty, and formulating a powerful foreign policy, all with my winning, if disturbingly flip, personal style. Plus I enjoy JFK-like adoration from female citizens.
EVALUATION: A common premise for the politically aware delusions-of-grandeur set but somewhat redeemed by my no-apologies leftist ways and wickedly snide comments at debates. (America laughed as I destroyed dedicated fascists with just a few well-placed bons mots.) All in all, however, a bit pompous. Do I really expect myself to believe a president with holes in the elbows of his jackets? Do women have to like me in all my daydreams? Grow up, Tom!
´ ´ ´
TITLE: “Tom Under Fire”
WHEN: At home, watching the television, when I get up to go to the bathroom or kitchen.
SYNOPSIS: I’m back in World War I and right in the thick of all that fighting that was so popular then. I run through an elaborate trench system in Flanders. I think it’s Flanders. Looks like Flanders. Could be Picardy. Ends with me getting shot in the face just when my side is on the cusp of victory.
EVALUATION: The mournful tone that springs from its subterranean milieu is punctuated and brought to a transcendent conclusion by the narrator’s death, which hovers between suicide and heroism, in what is at best an ethical gray area. Still, a touching and exciting romp. A boy’s adventure fantasy by way of Sartre, with a touch of martyrdom for spice and tears.
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TITLE: “Welcome Back, Tom”
WHEN: On the bus. Payday.
SYNOPSIS: At some point I go to graduate school and return to
my high school to teach history. In the classroom I deliver enchanting lectures, each predicated on the importance of memorizing names and dates. They eat it up, the students. Later, in my capacity as the most popular dormitory master ever, I lounge around turning the kids on to “free-thinking.” The boys are enchanted by my beautiful wife, and the girls are more than mildly intrigued by my jet-setting lifestyle and effortless self-confidence. Soul-searching third act has me wondering whether to send my son to this school. Will it be too awkward for him to be under his father’s considerable shadow?
EVALUATION: A pastoral piece with enough Goodbye, Mr. Chips to carry it along for a while. But several important questions are left unanswered: Will institutional life make me conservative? And what happens when my wife and I get old and less attractive to the kids? Will my charisma diminish? Will they even want me as a dormitory master? Satisfying on the surface, but does not hold up under scrutiny. Isn’t it just a death-in-life-meets-perpetual-adolescence scenario? Also bears uncomfortable similarities to the “distinguished former statesman” sequence of the above presidential fantasy.
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NEXT TIME: Reviews of “Tom’s Suicide” and “Tom, the Celebrity of Some Renown.”
INSOMNIACS! I BRING WORDS OF HOPE AND WISDOM
Jason Roeder
GREETINGS, SLEEPLESS!
I just wanted to let you know how revitalized I’m feeling after yet another successful night’s rest. Didn’t quite grab eight hours if you deduct my trip to the bathroom and my having to reposition the cat that one time, but in each case you’ll be pleased to hear that I was able to resume my sleep almost immediately. (My dreams spliced together seamlessly, I might add.) There’s nothing extraordinary about what I did, of course—any normal person could pull it off—but boy, did it feel good!
Now, I want to help you, if you’ll let me. My first recommendation is that you turn the clock toward the wall. This way, you can end the torment of those molten numbers hovering in the darkness as you fail to sleep. It’s absolutely critical, however, that you not stay awake wondering if your mental tally of elapsed hours and minutes matches that of the clock’s display. I bet you could exhaust a whole night doing that.
You also might want to consider visualization. Come up with a mental task intended to draw your attention away from the effort of nodding off, thereby allowing your automatic sleep mechanisms to engage. You can imagine something dull, like a sequence of numbers, or project yourself into a more engrossing scenario: “I am the Super Bowl MVP”; “I am Malcolm X”; “I am the Hamburglar.” Of course you’ll need to be wary of the fact that the gnawing, self-conscious awareness of visualizing can get in the way of actually engaging in said visualization.
But maybe you don’t even need my advice. Perhaps you can use the late hours to work on your novel, your quilt, or your Battle of Shiloh diorama—anything to distract you from the fact that recent studies showed that people who went without sleep for nineteen hours scored significantly lower on reflex tests than people with a blood-alcohol level of .08. (That’s the legal standard for intoxication in many states.) And whether you’ve just poured calamine lotion in your cereal or stitched up Mr. Clark after his cesarean section, I implore you not to dwell on the reams of research attesting to how sleep deprivation impairs memory and judgment and is even correlated to a significantly shortened life span. Likewise, while you’re waiting outside an elementary school for a random kindergarten teacher to pistol-whip, keep in mind that a good night’s sleep, which you’re incapable of, dramatically improves mood. I should stop here. You probably want to jump into a shower that you won’t be able to feel against your insensate zombie flesh and get out into a world of people and objects that will all seem fatally distant and unreal.
Besides, I have a productive day ahead of me.
THE TEN WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME, AS REVIEWED BY EZRA POUND OVER ITALIAN RADIO
Greg Purcell
Bambi
Filth.
Casablanca
This movie is filth.
Cat People
A race may civilize itself by language, not film. Cat People is filth.
Gentleman Jim
To the Animals who made this usurious film: god damn you.
The Magnificent Ambersons
This movie is indistinguishable from the filth-rustlings of swine in a sty.
The Man Who Came to Dinner
May you choke on it, bacilli.
Yankee Doodle Dandy
I sort of liked James Cagney’s filthy Irish energy in this one.
The Palm Beach Story
Bless: The Italian Dolcestilnovisti, the “sweet new style” current in the time of the papish Guelphs and the imperial Ghibellines. One will particularly take heed of its foremost practitioner, Guido Cavalcanti.
Blast: Preston Sturges and the Jewish moneylenders who helped him to make this film.
Now, Voyager
Two boils for the director’s infected liver.
This Gun for Hire
This film reeks of syphilis. Filth.
GROUP MOBILIZATION AS A DESPERATE CRY FOR HELP
Christopher Monks
HELLO!
You are invited to take part in a flash mob, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people for ten minutes or less, in the front yard of my ex-girlfriend Deborah’s house, tomorrow at 6:13 p.m. Please tell anybody else who you think might be interested in joining us.
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. We’ll meet outside the Crazy Pizza around the corner from Deborah’s place. Be there by 6 p.m. Please be respectful of Crazy Pizza’s employees and patrons, and refrain from ordering pizza or Crazy Cinnaballs.
2. At exactly 6:05 p.m. I will pass out slips of paper with general instructions and poster boards. One-third of the poster boards will read “I will never stop lovin’ you, Deborah”; one-third will read “Why do you insist on ruining my life?”; and one-third will read “Please don’t throw out my comic book collection.”
3. Once the instructions and poster boards have been passed out, I will organize the group. All of the guys who are better looking than me will be sent to the back and will be required to wear sad clown masks. If I find that a better-looking-than-me guy in a sad clown mask is still better-looking than me I will ask him to leave. This may seem a little paranoid, but you don’t know Deborah like I know Deborah. All of the just-as-good-looking-as-me guys will be placed in the middle of the line, and the guys who I think are uglier than me will get to be in the front. Women can choose to be wherever they want.
4. At 6:10 p.m. we will walk over in a silent and orderly fashion to Deborah’s place. Really hot-looking women are encouraged to walk with me, hold my hand, and act like I’m their new boyfriend.
5. We will arrive at Deborah’s at 6:13 p.m. sharp. Please arrange yourself in Deborah’s front yard in the same order you were in while walking over. Depending on the size of the mob, some of the better-looking-than-me guys in sad clown masks may have to stand on the sidewalk. Please don’t complain about it if this is necessary. Be tough.
6. Once we are organized in our appropriate places, everyone should take a moment to notice the rhododendron bush in Deborah’s yard. I bought that for her in celebration of our three-month anniversary. I planted it for her, too. While the bush won’t be in bloom, please believe me when I tell you that its flowers are only eclipsed in beauty by Deborah’s magnificent emerald green eyes.
7. We will then stand quietly in Deborah’s front yard for five minutes or until Deborah comes out of her house. If any bystander should happen by and ask you what is going on, politely answer, “I’m a fan of doughnuts, and this is the home of the Doughnut Queen.”
8. If after five minutes Deborah hasn’t come out of her house, I will ring her doorbell. As soon as Deborah opens her door, those people with the “I will never stop lovin’ you, Deborah” posters should stoically raise them above their heads. Everybody else will begin singing the Peter Gabriel song “In Yo
ur Eyes.” Be sure to really sell the tune. No mumbling.
9. My bet is that Deborah will be embarrassed at first. She’ll blush and smile and not know what to say. At 6:19 lower the signs and stop singing. It’s then when I’ll ask her to take me back. However, I’m sure that Deborah, being Deborah, will break my heart yet again. When she does, those holding the “Why do you insist on ruining my life?” posters will raise them up. Everyone else will then sing “Love Bites” by Def Leppard. If you want to try to hum the guitar solo part feel free.
10. This will no doubt make Deborah upset, and her ugly side will soon be on display for all to see. Don’t be afraid; just stand your ground and continue singing. She’ll probably say means things like, “He still owes me $927.00 for back rent,” or “He tried to French kiss my sister,” but pay her no mind. I’m not even attracted to her sister. Honest.
11. Any better-looking-than-me guy in a sad clown mask that tries to take advantage of the situation by offering to console Deborah will be asked to leave.
12. As Deborah’s calling the police, those holding the “Please don’t throw out my comic book collection” posters will raise them up. Everybody else will sing “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.”
13. At 6:23 p.m. or when we hear the sirens, whichever comes first, we will disperse in an orderly manner. I may stick around for a bit, but don’t bother waiting for me; I’ll be curled up and crying by the rhododendron bush. I feel it is something I just need to do. So go on. I’ll be all right.
Thanks! I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. It’ll be great. Things are really starting to look up for me. I can feel it. In the slight chance Deborah is not home when we get to her front yard we will return to Crazy Pizza, get something to eat, and try again later.