And then I remember going to the Bing with my Mom one day for a matinee—she took me every year for my birthday—when I noticed a gang of wormy sentences sitting in the far-left corner of the theater. They were whooping it up, really making noise. The movie was The Legend of Goggles Beaman, about a pair of goggles that is raised in the wild, believes himself to be wild goggles, and then must return to society.
In the middle of the film, though, something went wrong with one of the projectors and the screen went dark. All of a sudden the lights came on. “What the FUCK!” a sentence with long hair yelled at the screen.
“So weird,” I said to my Mom.
“Probably just a problem with the reel,” she said.
“I’m going to go get some more popcorn,” I said, and I walked out to the lobby.
As it happened, I was in line right behind two sentences—they ordered Jujubes and Fun Dip. When the second worm paid, he put his credit card down on the glass case and I snuck a look at the name on the card: “You will be left all alone.”
I went back to the seat and held my popcorn out to my Mom. She looked at the giant bag and smiled. “No thanks,” she said.
Just then the lights lowered and the screen lit up. The worms continued their chatter, but I tried to ignore them—I stuck my hand in the buttery mess and shoveled some popcorn into my mouth.
PRAYER PIANO
Sometimes it seemed like the pages of Appleseed would turn forever. At others, though, you could sort of hear the townspine breaking, smell the glue melting, see pages tear off into the wind.
One day when I was fourteen, my father heard a prayer about a free piano. This sounded meaningful, so my Dad prayed back that yes, he was interested. The prayer prayed back the name of the manufacturer—a name we didn’t recognize. Fine, my Dad prayed back. You have to move it yourself, said the return-prayer, and my Dad prayed that we would. But his truck had the flu, so we needed to borrow one. “Could we ask Joump?” I said.
“Let’s go see the Possum,” my Dad said.
The Possum was, or was not, a possum. Everyone called him one, though, because he was covered in fur. I don’t know if he was really hairy, or if in fact he was a possum with normal hair. One fact about the Possum? I’d never seen him eat anything but energy bars. Also, beer. Do possums eat energy bars?
The Possum had a shed at the edge of Appleseed, out near the Appleseed Library. Someday I’ll sow that story—the story of the Library. That library had secret books, books that I’d never heard anyone talk about or mention in conversation. (Not that people talk about books. But if they did.) Once I opened a page in a book and I saw that all of the words were naked. I’d never seen naked words before! For example.
I was standing at the door, lost on a road in my mind, when the Possum opened it. “!” he said. “Ralph! Come in! I’m cooking—you want something?”
“We’re not hungry,” said my Dad, “but we were hoping that we could ask you for a favor.”
“Anything!” said the Possum.
We drove out to South Appleseed to see the piano. The owner said that she might or might not be home, but that the piano was easy to spot: she prayed it stood in a field about a hundred yards from a big blue house. “Why is it in the field?” my Dad had prayed. “Because,” she prayed, “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
We located the blue house and, a hundred yards away, the piano, vowing like a soldier against a backdrop of flat, electric green. The piano and bench stood all alone in that field, and it looked like they’d been there for some time—the piano was sunk up to its knees in mud. Moss grew over the instrument’s chest, and vines crawled up one shoulder. “It’s a part of the earth,” I said.
“Does it even work?” asked my Dad.
“Only one way to find out,” said the Possum, and he sat down at the bench. My father and I sat down beside him, and the three of us studied the keys.
“We’re here now,” my Dad said to the piano. “So you can play.”
The Possum looked at my father.
My Dad leaned closer. “Do it. Play!” he said louder.
“What are you doing?” said the Possum.
“I’m waiting for it to start playing,” my Dad said.
“It’s not one of those types of pianos,” said the Possum. “Is that the kind you were looking for?”
“I didn’t know there was a difference,” my Dad said.
“There is,” said the Possum. “There are automatic pianos and manual ones. This one’s manual.”
My father nodded—the Possum would know. Something that is surprising about the Possum? Is that he was actually a very good piano player—a child prodigy. He used to travel the world, playing music that no one else could. You were probably expecting that we brought along the Possum for his truck only, and it’s true that we needed his truck. But we could have asked Uncle Joump; we could have asked one of the Muir Drop Forgers. Of the three of them, the Possum was the only one who knew anything about pianos.
Which is why, sitting there on the bench in the field, I asked him to teach me something. “Can you show me a cord?” I said.
“Chord,” he said. “There’s a silent h.”
“C-hord,” I said.
“It’s been twelve years since I’ve played a note of music,” said the Possum.
I made my face pacific.
The Possum put his paws on three keys and let them rest there. He closed his eyes. I leaned in—I was expecting to hear something amazing.
The Possum pressed down on the keys, but I didn’t hear any notes—what I heard instead was a click, and the sound of the point of view shifting. Then the Possum and the Father and looked at each other. “Where’s the music?” said .
The Possum played another chord and the point of view shifted again: you were confused and disappointed.
“This piano is out of tune, or something,” said the Possum.
Just then a figure came running down the road. She was dressed in chartreuse green spandex and her face was hampden: bright but sad. She cut across the field and ran up to you. “You found the piano,” she said.
Your father stood up. “It’s ours,” he said. “We got here first.”
“I know it,” she said, catching her breath. “I’m the one you prayed to.”
“What’s the story with this thing?” the Possum asked.
“It was my mother’s,” said the spandexer. “But I don’t play.”
“It doesn’t make any sound,” you said.
“Of course it doesn’t,” she said. “I said that in the prayer.”
“You did?” said your father.
“I prayed, it’s a POV Piano—a point-of-view piano.”
“I thought that was the name of the brand,” your father said. “I didn’t know—”
“Watch,” said brightsad, and she pushed a single key on the right side. I heard the clicking sound again.
“Hear that?” she said.
“First person plural,” we said.
“Do you want it, or not?” She pushed another key and the point of view was hers: I didn’t tell them about the stories in these fields, the other instruments beneath the soil. I didn’t tell them that my mother died at this piano. I just wanted to be rid of the damn thing.
Then the Possum joined in. As the spandexer played the point-of-view melody, the Possum (I didn’t care what sound came out of it—I was just so happy to put my paws on the keys again) played the chords.
My Dad stared at the piano. “This isn’t what I envisioned,” he said.
“It is free,” said brightsad.
“I think you should take it,” the Possum told my father. “Just imagine: to be able to see things from another angle whenever you wanted.”
“I really wanted a note-based piano,” my Dad said.
“And you’ll find one,” said the Possum. “But take this one, too! Put it out in the fields! Just in case!”
The Possum was right. This was an interesting object that, at t
he very least, we might be able to trade down the road. My Dad said OK, and the Possum led his truck into the field. When the truck got to the piano, it knelt down and picked up the instrument in its arms. The piano made a terrible pok when it lifted from the earth, and I heard the sound of snapping roots and vines. The truck put the piano in its bed, walked out of the muddy field, and settled on its tires. Then we got into the truck and the Possum pulled onto Highway Five. I turned back and waved at the spandexer, who was standing in the mud.
On the way back to Converse Street, I asked the Possum why he’d stopped playing piano. “Because of a medical condition,” he said.
“What kind of medical condition?” asked my Dad.
“I developed tinnitus,” he said. “Ringing in the ears. For me, it was one single note. A slightly-out-of-tune A.”
“The note was in your mind?” I said.
“Twenty-four-seven.”
“Wow,” I said. “Even as you slept?”
“It didn’t stop for a minute, not for nine years,” he said. “Then I woke up one morning and realized I couldn’t hear the note anymore. Now I can’t hear that note, A, at all.”
“What do you mean?” my Dad said.
“My ears skip the note. I just can’t hear it.”
“And that’s why you don’t play music anymore?” I said.
“How could I?” he said.
He meant it as a rhetorical question. In my mind, though, I thought: Aren’t there are a lot of other notes? Bs and Gs and Xs and Zs?
“There are,” said the Possum, “but you can’t play a melody if you’re missing notes in the phrase.”
“Wait a second,” my Dad said. Had he just heard ’s thought?
“Of course I heard it,” said the Possum. Then he looked over at me. “Oh, fuck,” I said to Ralph. I pulled the truck over, and the Possum looked back at the piano, leaning to one side of the bed.
“I think I know what’s happening,” I told the Possum.
“Me, too,” I told Ralph and .
“What?” said .
“We must have screwed up the point of view when we disconnected the piano from the land,” I said.
“Fuck me,” you said. You knew we shouldn’t have agreed to help Ralph. Something awful always comes of it. “So what’s this?” he said.
“This is all points of view,” you all said.
It was; we could feel the sudden pressure of new narrators—of your point of view, and your point of view, and the passing tree’s point of view, and every morsel of roadside sand’s point of view. But there wasn’t anything we, I, or they could do except get home, plant the piano, and see if rerooting it would help. And that’s what they—we; he, he, and he—did. We/they made it back to Appleseed and I/the Possum drove the truck out into the worryfields and instructed my/his truck to drop the piano into the soil.
I dropped the piano where they told me to.
So this is my new home, I thought.
By then it was dark, so I went back to my shed, and we went into the house. We ate quickly and then lay down in our beds. The force from all those points of view was tremendous for us. The only way we could sleep was to believe that this would change—that the story, the switching POVs, the pressure, would soon be over. Make it stop, we prayed. We sent out those prayers, but they went unanswered.
STARK’S EARLIEST
I thought my Mom would grow to love Sentence, but she didn’t. I found it cool that “I am.” was always changing—to “I am older,” and then “I am seeing,” then “I am hearing,” and “I am hearing new things,” but my Mom didn’t appreciate it. If the sentence pooped or peed in the house (which happened hardly ever—“I am.” was basically housebroken), she lost her shit. “Look at this!” she’d shout at me, pointing at the droppings of language. “Whose letter turds are these?” As if there was any question.
When Sentence tried to befriend my Mom, that only made her angrier. I remember seeing “I am aware that time is passing” trying to curl up next to my Mom while she was reading on the gold couch one day. My Mom pushed the sentence off. “No!” she told him, and Sentence whimpered and recoiled.
“You don’t have to be mean to him,” I said.
My Mom went back to reading.
A few weeks later, I came home from school and I couldn’t find Sentence—I walked all over the house looking for him. Then I went out to the gym, where my Mom was levitating. “Have you seen ‘I am.’?” I asked her.
“Nope,” she said.
I went outside and then back into the house. Suddenly I heard a very quiet repetitive sound: scuff scuff scuff. Something was scratching. I followed the sound to the pantry door. When I opened it I saw “I am.” standing there in the dark, his “I” ’s wide and panicked.
My Mom came in from the garage a few minutes later. “Sentence was locked in the pantry,” I told her. “In the dark!”
“Really?” she said.
“Did you do this?” I asked.
“Oh, honey—of course not,” she said.
“He was probably scratching for hours!”
“I honestly had no idea he was in there. Or else I would have let him out!”
“I think you put him in there on purpose because you hate him so much,” I said.
“I don’t hate anyone, ,” she said. “Just because I recognize the risks of—”
“That’s such bullcrap!” I said.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“You hate everyone!” I shouted.
My Mom pointed her finger at me. “I’ll be gone someday, —”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“—and then you’ll wish you were nicer to me.”
Shortly after that, two clauses got in a fight in the margin across the street. This would happen every once in a while—you’d hear the wild, high squeal and pitter-patter of language chasing language through trees. That day, I ran outside just in time to see the clauses scamper across Converse and tussle on the treebelt, ripping up the page right in front of our house.
My mother heard the commotion from her gym and stormed out through the garage door. “Oh, Christ!” she said.
By then the sentences were gone.
“What the hell happened to the lawn?”
Neither the Reader nor I said anything.
“Did you do this?” Mom asked the Reader.
“Me?” you said. “No.”
“?” said my Mother.
“We were just standing here,” I said.
“Don’t lie, ,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said. “It was two sentences fighting across the street.”
“Piece of crap,” she said. I don’t know if she was talking to the sentences or to me.
My Mom was changing—being replaced by a sadder, more angry version of herself. She stopped eating—eating anything, I mean. She grew resentful about work and my Dad’s minimal meaning, and impatient with all the junk my sister kept around the house and with my perpetual lateness. One time? She was supposed to pick me up from school, and I was a few minutes late as usual. When I went out to the circle and looked for her car, I saw the Cloudy Fart driving away down Grassy Gutter. I waved my hands and ran down the sidewalk shouting. And I know she saw me—I saw her eyes in the rearview mirror. But she turned down Williams and drove away, and I had to walk home in the snowy cold.
My mom wasn’t the only one souring, though. About three months after I found “I am.” in fact, the happiness taps in our home faltered and sputtered and ran dry. My sister noticed it first, when she turned on the happiness faucet in the backyard—to wash a dead icebox that she’d found at the flea market—and the faucet coughed and spit. As a landlord, my Dad knew a lot about happiness—where the shutoffs were, how to check the gauges, how to increase the feed. When he read the meter, though, he saw that the supply was low.
“Well?” said my Mom from the top of the stairs.
My Dad checked the expansion tank. When he shook it, you could h
ear a pinging inside.
“There’s air in the tank,” he said.
“Ralph?” hollered my Mom.
“It’s empty!” my Dad called up.
“I’m calling the DPWC,” my Mom said.
The Public Works Cones confirmed it: our whole neighborhood was out of happiness. There was a problem with a conversion facility on Tanglewood, they said, and they didn’t know when it’d be up and running again. For the time being, the Cones said, we all needed to make do with little or no happiness.
As soon as my Mom hung up the phone, my Dad got into his truck and drove to the store for some bottled joy. He returned empty-handed an hour later, though. “You should have seen the lines,” he said.
We were downtrodden—just plain sad—all that week. My father ignored calls from tenants and spent the afternoons drinking hard cider on the porch. My sister gave up on the icebox she was trying to restore and just put it out on the curb. Me, I was so sluggish I couldn’t do anything—not even read or walk “I am.” He started peeing on the rug in the corner of the living room and no one even said anything about it.
My mother handled the sadness differently: she spent most of the weekend in her home gym. This was right around the time when my Mom became fascinated with the Mothers—the highly trained, heavily armed militia group that lived in Nests perched in high trees, flew in formation above Appleseed, and descended at the first sign of trouble. All of a sudden, the Mothers were all my Mom talked about—how heroic and brave they were, how thankful the town should be for their protection.
Reader: Protection from what?
From intruders of any kind: thoughts sent from other towns to confuse us, meaning-scammers, traveling rust or decay, dangerous words or sentences, etceteras, et cetera. If they picked up a threat or imbalance in some history or exposition, they’d take the long, difficult flight back through the years to the page where that imbalance appeared. According to my Mom, the Mothers would revise right there on the spot: change a word, a sentence, a whole paragraph, even, if they needed to.
My father scoffed at all this. He didn’t dispute the Mothers’ presence—you could often see them, plain as ink, floating over the pages in their flightskirts and goggles—but he thought their reputation was exaggerated. Their brochures boasted of training in aikido, thought-stopping, judo, size-changing, and karate—they bragged about victories in secret wars, saving Appleseed from near-coups and future infestations, changing the histories of disease and oppression. My Dad had his doubts. “No one is that strong or that tough,” I heard him tell my Mom once.
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