Secret Stories

by Dwight Peters

farmhouse where workers slept and ate as an uncountable number of separate tiny parts, making some of the workers sneeze as they had their meals and rested. Months later, when the rain began, I was formed together again in the mud after being blown back outside, and I became a parasite, finding myself in the body of a worker.

  The worker became ill and had to return home, which happened to be far away by the sea. When the worker died, there was a ceremony where the body was put into a small, weatherworn boat and covered with many scraps of wood and burned. I, still in the body of the worker, was burned too, and my ashes brewed with the salted water and became an egg that came ashore and was buried by some children. Eventually, I hatched as a turtle, small and unsure at first—living a long life across oceans.

  Wildman

  I told myself I wouldn’t write about this guy—who called himself the “Wildman” thirty years before—who was the old fashioned university professor—sleeping with students and embracing moist excesses of any available high. An older man now, a man living with his average looking but loving wife and adult son, a family man, he awakes in a hospital from a two-day sleep after taking an overdose of his antidepressants. I drop off a couple of his favorite books for him.

  Hero

  An oil spill in an ocean happens. There is a fire on the water.

  A man on a nearby ship sees the water appearing to be burning. He misunderstands what is happening, thinking the sea and soon the world will cook away.

  After a few quick moments, he finds out what was actually happening. But these few short naive moments hold too much meaning for him. He has already experienced the end of the world. He recreates and re-experiences this in his mind over and again while at sea—seeing the flaming water—trying to understand what the meaning is.

  Back home again, he goes to his favorite place to get sandwiches and sits and begins eating. Halfway through, it occurs to him that he can see the end of the world in his sandwich too.

  This Story Stinks

  Originally written as a response piece to Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions number XLI.

  There is a life-sized, plastic rhino. A prostitute is sitting on its back. One of them has gotten a nose job in the past three years. This is all happening in the middle of a circle arranged for a New Age book club. The book club is reading about horns. At a zoo somewhere there is a Buddhist monk who complains about the smell of shit, and who has never understood the meaning of his practice. A dead Frenchman, with his gourmet nose, smells this same shit and understands his own death, finding compassion. There is an unhappy, young girl named Compassion who dies after trying to change her name. Compassion is so sad, even in death—why? While dead, the girl becomes a woman who also becomes a prostitute who meets a life-sized rhino made of plastic. The prostitute climbs on the back of the rhino, and the rhino melts and dies from the heat between the prostitute’s legs.

  There are two lovers naked in nature. Rolling on the ground together, their sweating bodies, moving over leaves, have leaves stick to them, coating them. The leaves are the leaves of a book not yet written. The couple’s blood writes the words as they move. The book tells of a coming harvest. Everything is ripe now.

  The couple makes love through spring and into summer without ever stopping. The leaves of the book number tens-of-thousands of pages, moving off of their bodies a page at a time when the writing is finished, then binding itself to the other pages. But, as summer comes, the couple shrinks to only a fifth of their original size; they also are unable to move away from the spot where they have been for so long, unable too to separate physically from each other. As winter comes, they are suffering and cry out. When the roots beneath them hear their cries, they grab the couple and the now finished book, pulling the couple and the book into the ground. Soon after, snow comes.

  In the ground, the couple becomes earth and the roots of a single tree absorb their essence from the nutrients in the earth. The book becomes earth too, and the roots of the same tree absorb its essence also. That tree then grows far past the clouds deep into the sky. The tree stops growing and immediately after it hears the sky say, “You smell like shit.” The tree responds, “It is only love and compassion.”

  Music Of Body’s Footsteps

  A man lived a life where many others wanted to kill him. Not because of any wrongdoing that he did—but because of what in this man reminded these others, of something, somewhere within themselves, that provoked a violence—a violence many times unknown to these others.

  One day this man was walking through the city as he often did, and often did at this time with a particular woman. It was not unusual during these pleasant meditative walks for him to be confronted and for violent attacks to be attempted towards him. But it had always been that this man was able to communicate between himself and his attackers a unity within the attackers, himself and all other people that was itself a perception and action of non-violence, disarming the circumstance and finding a practical and affective oneness of communication.

  This day, as many others, went along similarly—walking through the city with the same particular woman—being confronted. On this day, though, he was killed. He made his understanding attempt at communicating, but his body was brutally destroyed by the violence of incapacity.

  The particular woman walked away calmly with a joyful peace of weeping smiles.

  Perceiving Doors

  He grabbed the door after opening it from the inside and somehow broke it off its hinges. Holding onto it for a few steps, he then threw it to the ground outside. As all of this happened, he felt himself become the building, with and without a door. He had always thought that when inside of a building it was an entirely separate space from the outside, but as he walked through the doorway carrying the door he felt differently. His rage diminished with the understanding that there was no such absolute difference.

  An Oak And A Shepherd

  At the old brick high school that has been closed for several years now, she looked at the once richly flowing gated up entrance, up past the fourth floor to the roof of the square building, wishing there was some way to get up there. She leaned against a tree that had been carved into some time ago, a heart with her name within it sliced through the surface of the wood. After considering the history of the heart, she glanced back up towards the old school, noticing that at least half of the windows were boarded up.

  There were ideas in her mind of what a wonderful and fun home she could make out of the building if she could get enough time and things to work with to fix it up the way she liked. As she started to talk herself out of this and walk away, she noticed one of the boarded up windows had what looked like a face cut out of the board. It seemed to be crafted perfectly, with thought and effort, by someone very skilled. Looking intensely at the face, it seemed to be more than something made well—even much more than simply something; it seemed to express emotion—its own emotion. She felt warmness towards it and from it. She paused a moment and thought that perhaps if it could feel that it could also understand. She looked around and saw no people, so she yelled towards it. She told it about what was going on in her life, about her troubles, about her dreams that she felt she couldn’t quite meet, about her feelings of helplessness, about the love she wanted to honestly and intimately share, about her place in the world and what she felt she could do to be a healthy, happy part of it—and then she sighed and again began to walk away.

  She got all the way to the far edge of the building near what used to be the sports field, which became a park when the school closed, and saw that a board on the first floor window was loose, so she pushed it in, being careful as she climbed inside to avoid the nails that had been hammered through the board into the window frame that now pointed straight up. The building was dirty and dangerous, having been squatted in, used as a dump, stripped from inside the walls of valuable wire and miscellaneous parts, looted through everywhere else, generally abused for amusement, then finally neglected. Finding herself within this, afte
r a short walk through the hallways, what was left of the gym and a few classrooms, she turned back.

  As she left, she thought that she heard the face that she had seen talk to her and say that it knew her, and things would be good, and that she was good. And it told her that after she left she should visit in her imagination.

  Everyone Deserves A Little Celebration

 

  Late at night ten-and-a-half years ago, stifled—without joy and wonder—I took the bus for a few hours to a place to see a friend. I sat in the aisle seat, so that when my legs started hurting from being pushed against the seat in front of me, I could turn the leg closest to the aisle into it to rest and have more space for the other—until someone had to walk past to either use the bathroom in the back or to get off at their stop. There were no breaks where anyone got to get off to smoke or eat or anything, so it worked out okay.

  At one of those times where I moved my leg into the aisle, I was in even more pain and discomfort, so I positioned my whole body in that direction along with just the one leg. As I did this, the bus drove though a long brightly lit tunnel; I noticed that the woman sitting on the other