Stumble fiction & photography
about
Stumble is an independent art and literary magazine devoted entirely to short
fiction and photography. There’s no particular reason, other than we just love
good stories and photography. We publish four times a year (quarterly-ish), and
accept submissions year-round. Please see our website for complete submission
guidelines: www.stumblemag.com. Can’t find Stumble in your favorite
bookstore? You can always find us at magcloud.com.
Issue Number 2, Summer 2009. Copyright © - Stumble Magazine
No portion of Stumble may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission. Individual copyright of the creative work
within belongs to each author/photographer upon publication.
All questions/comments may be directed to [email protected]
STAFF
Editor & Publisher Nancy Smith
Editors Andrew MonkoAnthony Russo
DesignersSachiko KuwabataNancy Smith
Copy EditorsAndrea Gough Katie Kinney
Lex Parsimoniae: By Jeff Harrison
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contents
Contributors: A little bit about the people who made this
page13
Letter from the Editor: Welcometo the issue
page11
throughoutPhotography: By Matt Kushan
Hello.
Welcome to our summer issue. By now, I hope you’re reveling in the midst of
lazy, sun-drenched days that summer usually brings. I recently moved to San
Francisco, and everyone tells me that we don’t get much of a summer here.
I’m having a hard time believing them, because I’ve been wandering the
streets and getting to know my new home and I’ve seen nothing but sun.
As you make it through that pile of summer reading, I hope you move this issue
up to the top of the stack. We’ve included just one story this time around, and
I’m excited at the chance to publish a longer piece of fiction. Stories that are
deemed ‘too long’ often have a hard time finding a home in literary magazines.
I know there are lots of constraints, like number of pages and the overall size
of the magazine, but this story was so captivating, I figured—why not just let
the piece span the entire issue? As usual, we’ve paired the writing with some
beautiful, intriguing photography. The combination makes for a stellar second
issue, and has reminded me why I truly love putting this little pub together.
Enjoy.
Nancy Smith
Editor & Publisher
welcome
Jeff Harrison is a free-range artist from Seattle who likes to
deconstruct conventional thought and rebuild it from common household
items. Aside from his curious forays into writing stories of arduously-
publishable lengths, he is also a painter, musician and general enthusiast.
His unique blend of surrealistic conceptualism, Gonzo-style storytelling
and philosophical ramblings has won him the acclaim of several of his
friends and even a few other people. His goal as an artist is to make the
audience think, often by leaving the interpretation of the piece open or
intentionally ambiguous. Contact him this way [email protected] to
let him know what you think...
Matt Kushan was born and raised in Euclid, Ohio a suburb of
Cleveland. Currently, Matt lives in New York City and is pursuing a BFA in
photography at the School of Visual Arts. Matt is optimistic and passionate
for photography. He is working on a series about his girlfriend Meredith
that explores the façade of people and their possessions. His work
presents a certain aesthetic that is driven by intuition and curiosity. While
these findings may seem arbitrary they are closely linked to his relationship
with Meredith. Matt Kushan loves his cats Margot and Simon.
contributors
CHAPTER ONE : RUBUS ARMENIACUS
It all started with invasive species. It all started in a narrow gravel alley
in the Seattle springtime. It could have just as easily started on a main street,
like Dexter or Phinney, or on any number of side streets or alleys, but it didn’t.
It started in that quiet suburban springtime alley with those wily little fuckers
reaching across the narrow hardpan road and scratching his truck. It happened
daily now and he had had enough. He could almost see them grow longer and
more menacing by the hour. Something needed to be done.
The idea was simple and thus extremely confusing: Do Good Deeds
(especially while drunk on whiskey—with all of its unnecessary letters—more
on this later). And that was it. Or put even more simply and thus even more
confusingly, the concept was to do something that needed to be done, the
need being suggested by two main things: the comfortable physical movement
of the members of society and the elimination of invasive, non-native plants. A
young man named Groves Hugo felt that the satisfaction of any need must be
considered “good” by definition—though we as humans must be very careful
of what we define as needs, the true scope of needs being meager when
compared to all things in life—and Groves took it upon himself to do something
about this insidious and often overlooked problem.
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Although the concept was straightforward and assertive, it had an
equally sinuous and passive side to it. Ayn Rand be damned, and Ayn Rand be
celebrated. This was no altruistic trick or selfish deed. This action was motivated
by pure Nihilistic Productivism, a philosophical niche that sat somewhere
between Freud’s nose, Mill’s ears, Rand’s eyes, and Nietzsche’s mustache—some
kind of compound syncretism. Those who would call it foolish or contemptible
would be making the mistake of judging its purpose; those who would waste
time judging its purpose would be making the mistake of assuming intention.
To most, the only conclusion that could be drawn was that this idea was crazy,
which is quite an incongruous label to attach to such a reasonable concept.
It was so ridiculous that it made Groves chortle to himself, reflectively,
which is rare for a chortle. He found it funny that for such a simple and golden
concept—and a correspondingly simple action—the structure and texture of society
had made it nearly impossible, or at least highly unfavorable (and sometimes
even illegal) to execute the concept without bringing upon oneself social stigma,
monetary fines, or restraining orders. Had we come to such a point in human history
where performing a good deed for others without asking something in return was
automatically met with suspicion and contempt; was frowned upon; was returned
to the sender by a sterile, latex-gloved hand? Was fear so ingrained in our lives and
minds that the Worst Case Scenario was always expected?
Groves decided to perform a sort of social experiment to find out. The
problem with this concept was that it was not purely conceptual, and the act in
which the concept was manifested had physical consequences that could not
be avoided, even if the act had been a flawless execution of the concept. Also,
there were lots and lots of leaves and branches to deal with.
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CHAPTER TWO : GROVES HUGO
Must have slept with the radio on again, words and music infusing the
subconscious neural chaos, surreptitiously tying words to dreams like kite-
tails, sounds bouncing and drowned in darkness but still floating on waves of
air—sensory manipulation, subliminal reality. He really didn’t know how old he
was anymore, couldn’t have cared less actually. What is age in a dream or life?
Dreams are infinite and timeless and maybe life is just sleepwalking. He wanted
to go back to sleep and continue his dream, but instead, he decided to get up
from the floor, which was his bed these days. Sometimes it is easier to get out of
bed when one’s bed is the floor.
Groves had no furniture. He wasn’t sure why. Had he ever had furniture?
He didn’t remember. He moved around a lot, perhaps he forgot to take it with
him. He didn’t recall his parents ever having any furniture either and had no idea
where to get any, but did he really need any?
“The real purpose of furniture is to move the horizontal plane of daily
activity up from the ground or wherever gravity wants it,” he mused to himself,
“Furniture is simply a way to temporarily postpone the inevitable victory of
gravity, and I won’t have any part of it.” Groves picked his fights carefully.
Though he had no furniture—or maybe because of it—he still couldn’t
see his bedroom floor. Apparently there was carpet on it. He couldn’t have cared
less. He had his music and books and clothes, piles of old receipts too and a
medium-sized naked troll doll with chronic green hair (Where the hell did that
come from? He never found out…), beer cans and some more books—including
original printings of Beyond Good And Evil and Les Misérables—all strategically,
geometrically placed so that there was no hint of the carpet below. M.C. Escher
would have been impressed. Groves thought, “Maybe this is what New York City
looked like to King Kong and all he wanted to do was to take a piss.”
Or rather, to leave a piss, Groves corrected himself. Nobody—not
even King Kong—actually takes a piss, or takes a crap for that matter. By most
standards that would be disgusting (And what would you do with it?). But there
are always exceptions, such as septic pumpers, but even they eventually leave
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the piss and shit that they’ve taken. Life is riddled with exceptions. Life itself
may be exceptional by virtue of the possibility that it may be an exception to the
universe. Life is math, art, love and timing; health is balance; and the universe is
as incomprehensible to us as we are to it.
Groves Hugo sat there lamenting, cementing his mind to the task
of producing The List. Actually, it was a list by conventional formality only,
sometimes only containing a single item. Lists are said to be important to
certain types of people, Karl Marx made lists, Darwin and DaVinci, too. He
couldn’t have cared less. The only list that mattered to him was his own, because
that “list” contained the reason(s) for getting off the floor each day. Fortunately
for the millions of microorganisms that depended on his body for survival,
pissing was almost always at the top of The List.
It happened again last night, or at least, fuzzy intermittent recollections of
it. Or did he dream it? Waking up still drunk buzzing and thirsty, Groves started
to formulate The List (and dammit if pissing wasn’t right there at the top again).
As he achingly pulled himself up from the floor, he saw Them sitting there at the
foot of his bed, dirty, and for some reason it looked as if there was blood on them.
He examined them closer and concluded that they were simply covered in dirt
and sap in such a consistency as to appear bloody. He looked around the room
for any evidence that it had been a dream, but saw nothing, no thing to support
this possibility. All he knew was that they were there, in his room, at his feet, not
moving, not mocking, just lying there smugly, like the languid and lazy Sunday-
morning flesh of a desperate and regrettable one-night stand, the kind that one
hoped would have been gone before morning. As if they had earned a place
there by virtue of sharing something intimate the night before, all too comfortable
in overstaying their welcome, and all too comfortable with their knowledge.
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He was still wearing the same clothes, shoes and the same heavy
sheepskin coat. Then he reached in his pockets; they were full of leaves that
had been labeled like a deck of cards with a black Sharpie® marker. The Ace
of Diamonds was written on a birch leaf, the five, six, and King of Hearts were
there, too, as was a nine of what looked like a Spade, or a Club, or a Spade; and
there were others. His head rang and he tossed the leaves on his floor next to a
small bronze replica of Rodin’s The Kiss (Where the hell did that come from? He
never found out…).
He would deal with it later.
After Groves left a piss, he wandered, scratching his gut, out his back
door and into that austere springtime Seattle alley to scope it out. Wisely, he
looked both ways. There were branch clippings everywhere, and piles of leaves.
He laughed to himself and thought, “Something is being done.”
Eating peanuts in a bar, the shelly floor, crunchy and tired. “You don’t
find beautiful women in peanut-eating bars on Tuesday mornings,” Groves
generalized to no one in particular. Now, in terms of probability, one doesn’t
really find that many people in bars on weekday mornings, and especially not
in peanut-eating bars, which are a rare breed indeed, making this seemingly
innocuous and generally brainless-sounding generalization appear carefully
calculated. But he wasn’t thinking about probability, he was thinking about tits.
Anyway the bar was empty except for Hank Williams (Senior, of course)
and a couple shriveled-up cowboys watching zombie talk shows and one old
chain-smoking crone playing pull-tabs and the bartender wasn’t even in there
except for an occasional sprint behind the bar to check up, because Tuesdays
were delivery days and the guy was fucking busy. Groves noticed this and
ordered in bulk, a pitcher and four shots—whiskey—told the guy his buddies
were coming to meet him. Of course this was complete bullshit, but he was
trying to get good and drunk so as to forget about the events of the other
night, and he took his tray of drinks and bucket of peanuts back to the darkest
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corner of the bar. He couldn’t help but think of the terror of doing jail time, the
heterosexual nightmare in which one prayed for celibacy. He feared that he
would never be able to talk to a woman again. The thought depressed him.
Women always depressed him.
Groves then thought that if he did happen to see a beautiful girl in the
bar, he would immediately fall in love with her. He would fall in love with her
arms first, that’s the way it always happened. This thought depressed him even
more. Falling in love with the arms of beautiful women always depressed him
even more. Peanut. Beer. Peanut. Whiskey. “But what if…?” Then he thought
of her again and knew instantly that it would never have worked because she
wasn’t the kind of girl that would hang out in a peanut-eating bar on a Tuesday
morning, and she especially wasn’t the kind of girl who would be interested in
a guy that was sitting in a peanut-eating bar waiting for a beautiful girl to come
into the bar and eat peanuts with him. Just then he picked up a triple peanut,
studied it, stopped thinking about tits for a minute and began thinking about
probabilities and felt somewhat better. Just then, a beautiful girl walked in…
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CHAPTER THREE : ADALINE CLEVINGER
It wasn’t her idea to go to the goddamn bar in the first place, especially
on a Tuesday morning. It wasn’t that she didn’t frequent bars that often or
didn’t enjoy them (especially peanut-eating bars with all their quaint allure and
crunchy, tired floors), but it was her day off and she didn’t particularly want to
spend it in a place very similar to the place where she made a dancing ass out of
herself the night before. Her hangover was a tremendous wet belch wrapped in
an asbestos blanket. Besides, it was only eleven in the morning and she couldn’t
imagine touching liquor yet, although her aggravating situation had made a
Bloody Mary sound pretty damn good.
The fact that she had to spend her recovery day at a bar made her
especially irritable and she was determined to be rude to everyone she met, but
her brother had called her, shit-faced drunk, and needed a ride home, or at least
somewhere like home. Her brother had not called her for a ride home though
(the ride was her idea); he had called because he needed to talk to her “about
some major shit” that apparently could not wait. She did not see her brother
when she walked in, and the lack of a bartender further upset her.
The few patrons that existed were indifferent to her entrance save one:
a young and in fact not wholly unattractive guy, maybe 25 or so with glorious
Irish green eyes that she had noticed upon her initial glance around the bar.
Upon her second pass, as she was sitting down on a stool and pretending
to look for her brother (she suddenly didn’t care where her brother was),
she caught those eyes quickly shifting away from her and she took this as a
compliment. She had been feeling somewhat unattractive lately, and this small
gesture, this rudimentary physical movement, had caused her disposition to
change considerably and caused her heart rate to escalate and her face to
flush, as it will tend to do when one knows (or assumes) that they have just
become the object of another’s desire.
She was a career woman—married to her career that is—and what some
would call a hopeless romantic (no doubt a result of being raised in captivity),
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although she had not had a serious date in nearly a year, and not had a serious
boyfriend in nearly three. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have had plenty, for she was
certainly pretty enough and a social girl too, with soft shoulders and a delicate,
pillowy figure, and a biting, sarcastic wit that offset her svelte frame. Perhaps her
mordant wit was a bit too unrelenting sometimes, or perhaps she was caught
in a cycle of working more to compensate for her lack of a love-life, yet unable
to pursue a love-life due to her excessive work schedule. Whatever the case,
she had been tough on potential suitors lately and in return had not felt the
reassuring embrace of a good man in years. She frequently told herself that
she didn’t need a good man because she had her work, but just as frequently
she told herself that she didn’t want to be alone when she turned 30. Her 29th
birthday was less than two weeks away…
Russian was the worst. Adaline hated translating Russian to English,
and she hated reading English translations of Russian authors. Nabokov was
sometimes an awkward exception because he wrote so well in both languages,
but Dostoevsky was horrible to her, nearly unreadable in English. And because
she was such a literary fanatic, she often had trouble with her job. Not that she
couldn’t do her job well, she just had a difficult time maintaining her integrity
while trying to explain the intrinsic linguistic inventiveness and symbolic
synesthetic beauty of great Russian writing to a non-Russian, and for the most
part, non-interested audience (“Well you try to do any justice to Pushkin with a
bunch of half-asleep American tourists!”).
Adaline frequently lectured at college campuses in both the U.S.
and Russia in addition to her gig as a tour guide at the Museum of 20th
Century European Literature. She was fluent in English, Russian, German
and could give the common Francophone a run for their money. She knew
bits and pieces of a dozen other languages, and had traveled extensively in
Europe. She was a student of literature, history and philosophy, and acutely
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un-American. Not anti-American—although she didn’t buy into the juvenile
rhetoric of nationalism and pseudo-McCarthyism that reigned throughout her
homeland at the turn of the century—just un-American.
Her mindset, her philosophical outlook on life, her mannerisms and
opinions, her politics, all were borne from a more worldly and vaguely Western
European society. She considered herself a citizen of the world first and foremost,
with a profound respect and understanding of the world’s diverse cultures and
creatures. She was liberally liberal, and so deep was her understanding of the
world that it became esoteric. So worldly was her outlook that she was practically
numb in the practical matters of the world. But this didn’t prevent her from
coming off as the only enlightened person in the United States.
“I’m sorry ma’am, I can’t…”
“Look my brother’s name is in there and he could be in trouble.”
“Sorry, I’m not allowed to disclose that information.”
He had the invisible force-field of bureaucracy protecting him and his zits
and his blank expression. It made Adaline even angrier. Her knuckles slammed
down on the other side of the desk where the moron sat blankly looking back at her.
“Listen you little shit-stain, you better let me look at those files right
now!” She scathed, staring at him until he looked meekly away.
“Ma’am I’m afraid that is confidential information. Your brother will have
to come in and…”
“My brother is shit-faced drunk, he couldn’t even tell you his name,”
she snapped.
“Well I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. You should stop yelling
though…”
“I should come over there and rip your balls off,” is what Adaline said in
Russian as she stormed out of the police station.
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CHAPTER FOUR : ALVIN CLEVINGER
“Clevinger! You got that article done yet? You know that I need that
shit by six a.m. tomorrow, right? This week’s human interest section is fucking
anorexic! What have you been doing all week?”
My editor, Septimus C. Mooney, was always shouting those kinds of
things so that everyone would hear, thinking he was so goddamn clever. He
would always say one of three things to me: either “Clevinger! This week’s
section is like a black hole! And black holes suck!”; or the stupid anorexic one;
or on very rare occasions, “Kid” (he never called you by your name when you
did a good job, he would always find a way to squash you) —“Kid” he’d say,
“this week’s article was like granite! Granite rocks!” What a moron.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get on it. Almost done with the one about that
goddamn hippie living in that tree in Issaquah…needs a title, too. And I got
a good start on the crazy guys that are trying to get that bill into the State
Legislature about officially changing the word ‘saxophone’ to ‘sexophone.’
Uh…and then I gotta finish the one on those, uh, police reports about all the
bushes being cut in the night…some weird shit, man. Hey, you know that it’s
happening right by my house?”
But my editor, Septimus C. Mooney, had already stopped listening and
was halfway down the hallway yelling at somebody else, that asshole. Bulldog
sonuvabitch, always barking at people and swinging his jowls around like they
were pouches full of authority or something. Never listens. What kind of a
name is Septimus anyway…?
I wonder if I should tell him about the police coming to my place the other
day. Would he even care? Or would he flip out and fire my ass? Better just keep
it to myself. It was nothing anyway, but it has sure got me interested in this case.
If you could call it a case. Twelve phone complaints and one semi-related police
report, that’s it. Who knows if the police can or will make a case out of it? But
maybe I can. Maybe I should get out and do some investigative reporting, make
this thing big and juicy. The readers have a right to know…
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Or does this guy—or girl, no, probably not a girl, I don’t think a girl
would—well does this jerk want to get in the papers? Maybe this is the
beginning of something bigger, or some weird fucking cult or something, and
they want the exposure and they’re trying to use me, the media, like some
pawn. I dunno. Or maybe this is a gang thing, or a frat initiation, or Trekkies.
Hell, it could be terrorists for all I know.
It could just be some goddamn sparse-toothed crackhead trying to sell
old rhododendron branches for a hit. I’ve seen worse. But there was something
strange about this goddamn story, some kind of déjà vu or je ne sais quoi or
something, something French and mysterious like that obscure alley in the
ninth arrondissement of Paris—God what was I doing there? Trying to find café
La Nouvelle Athénes? C’mon Alvin, it had been gone for years. Why don’t you
ever ask for help? I don’t get it. But I’m gonna find out what the hell is going on.
Besides, it beats sitting here waiting for Mooney’s fat ass to yell at me again.
That morning after the cops came I called in sick (Mooney was, predictably,
pissed and indifferent, a total tyrant), then found a half-finished bottle of beer
on my floor and finished it. “Alvin, this place is a goddamn mess,” I thought as I
searched for some aspirin. My head was a mess, too. I chased four aspirin with a
healthy chug of whiskey and headed for the shower—sweated through my sheets
last night. Been having some crazy dreams lately, insanely vivid dreams that I can’t
remember in the morning. Man I hate that. I needed to find out what was going
on, needed to find this Midnight Slasher.
First thing I did was swing into the local dive, I knew it would be open
early because it was the World Cup and Alberto was showing all the games,
which were on at like 8 a.m. here in the States. I had the stack of police reports
and I needed to read through them. I got too smashed last night. Couple
beers would help my head anyway.
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CHAPTER FIVE : EDWARD TEACH
Hero or Villain? The Saga of the Midnight Slasher
By Alvin Clevinger
It was a night like any other for the homeless man known around Seattle
as Edward Teach. Nobody knows his real name, but he is instantly recognizable.
The mangy black beard, the gaunt face, the sunken eyes evoke a sense of
terror and long-forgotten treachery. He is a formidable man standing nearly six
and a half feet tall, but his bark is much bigger than his bite. Although he calls
himself Edward Teach for his likeness to the legendary pirate Blackbeard (who
used the moniker “Edward Teach” as one of his aliases), he dislikes any further
comparisons to the swashbuckling rogue of the 18th century.
“Our similarities are only skin deep, man. I mean, that dude was a killer,
but I mainly [call myself Edward Teach] for protection. The streets are tough,
man. I just try to get by out here,” he tells me calmly as we sit beneath the
freeway overpass where he often makes his “home.”
He is a piece of local lore, like Artis the Spoonman and Edward “Tuba
Man” McMichael. And, like these other colorful characters, he is a peaceful
man as well as a musician. A flutist since the age of nine, Teach has made his
way through this world by piping and pandering to passersby since the 1980’s,
oftentimes participating in local parades and lending his musical services at
sporting events, concerts, festivals and fundraisers.
“I try to make people happy, you know, I dance and play songs and
shit, it’s all pretty silly, but I get a kick out of it,” confesses Teach. And he
does tend to make people happy, despite his unkempt appearance and lack
of a traditional home.
But last Sunday morning, Edward Teach was the victim of a most
unfortunate and unusual incident. Sometime after 2 a.m., while Teach was
peacefully sleeping amongst some rhododendrons, he was mysteriously
attacked and suffered the loss of two fingers on his right hand.
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“All I remember man, was waking up hearing a slicing sound in the
bushes, like someone was using some big scissors to chop all the bushes away
to get at me. I thought it was a dream man, it was like swoosh, swoosh, slashing
through the bushes towards me, and I was like ‘Hey man, I’m in here, don’t cut
me up! I ain’t done nothing!’ But they was still cutting the bushes all around me
and then I stuck my hand out at them to try and stop them.”
That was the last thing Teach recalled before the attacker chopped his fingers
off and he blacked out. Teach later awoke to the concerned shouts of neighbors and
the flashing lights of paramedics. The attacker was long gone by then.
A most curious crime, there were no witnesses and no hints as to why
someone would hurt such a peaceful man. Teach has no record, no rap sheet,
and no known enemies. And though Teach was illegally trespassing, it is almost
inconceivable that someone would go out of the way to disable another person
in this fashion. But given the odd circumstances, it appears just as inconceivable
that this crime was premeditated at all.
Perhaps the bigger question is: Why would someone be chopping
rhododendron bushes in the middle of the night?
Over a dozen police reports in the last few months have involved
bushes, trees, and/or shrubberies being cut during the night, and piles of
leaves and branches littering sidewalks, alleys and driveways in the North
Seattle area. So far, nobody has come forward with any information, and the
police have (until now) been reluctant to use valuable resources to further
investigate these incidents. Police Lieutenant Jim Graber had this statement
concerning the police reports:
“To tell you the truth, nearly all of the incidents have taken place on City
property, such as sidewalks and alleys, which are mandated to be kept clear by
the owners of the adjacent property. In fact, the City posts notices telling folks
to keep those thoroughfares clear or face a fine. So there hasn’t been much
legal repercussion other than maybe a littering fine. And unless we catch them
in the act and the perpetrator, assuming that there is a perpetrator, refuses to
cooperate, we can’t even fine them for that. It is not illegal to chop bushes at
night, although it’s a little unusual.”
In actuality, whomever is cutting the bushes may even be helping people
out. Several of the people in the affected neighborhoods have confessed that
they were appreciative of the deed, although they didn’t always appreciate the
piles of excess foliage, and many admit that the thought of someone walking
around wielding pruning shears at night could be a bit creepy.
“Yeah, tell them that they can come and cut my bushes more often, just as
long as they let me know first,” jokes Shelly Neville, a hairstylist and Seattle native.
She woke up to a pile of leaves a foot deep on the sidewalk in front of her 56th
Street house. “You know I’d been meaning to get around to it, too, because you
couldn’t really walk on the sidewalk without kind of ducking and going around in
the grass. Just tell them to clean up after themselves next time!”
It seems that dozens of people have benefited from the services of this
nocturnal landscaper, whether they realize it or not. Not only has this person
reclaimed overgrown sidewalks and alleys, but oddly enough they have focused
much of their unique landscaping effort on removing invasive species, especially
the prolific and aggressive Himalayan Blackberry.
“I couldn’t believe it. I came out back here and saw this whole area
cleared out. I thought it was the City who was [cutting the bushes] because they
gave us those notices and about a week later the bushes were cut back. I was
gonna hire somebody, cause I hate dealing with those thorny bastards,” said
Harry Geed, a retired Boeing Engineer who was the recipient of an estimated
two hours worth of free blackberry removal in his alley.
But the tragedy that has befallen Edward Teach may force local
residents to think twice about glorifying the actions of this Midnight Slasher.
If one puts blade and blade together, it appears probable that the person
who disfigured Teach is the same person who has been cutting bushes at
night. It also seems probable that this crime was an accident, although the
police have yet to comment.
“If you ask me I think he’s crazy, going around slicing shit up in the
middle of the night, like he’s some sort of pirate or something,” asserts Teach.
“And what am I supposed to do about my hand? I can’t play no flute now.”
So the question is put to you Seattle: Midnight Slasher—hero or villain?
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CHAPTER SIX : ALVIN CLEVINGER
Septimus C. Mooney snatched the story from my hand before I even
knew that he was standing beside me. I looked up, startled and he shot me a
pointed look that said, “This better be fucking good.” He was one of the only
people I knew that could swear with his eyes. He said nothing as he glanced
it over, merely noting its length and trusting that the content would hold up.
Besides, there was no time to change it; the story went to press tomorrow
morning. I tried to reassure him with an equally pointed look of confidence,
but he scurried off without even looking at me again. He didn’t even know
what it was about, the poor bastard.
“I hope you choke on it,” is what I was thinking as I returned to my desk
to grab my jacket. I don’t know why I thought that, maybe I assumed that he was
going to try and eat it, that fat ass. I needed to go home and get some sleep. I
was tired and hungover. My nerves were shot; my mind was looping and blank.
This story had literally consumed me. I left the office without even grabbing the
pile of papers that had accumulated on my desk the last two or three days. I might
have done things differently if I had read that last police report.
When I got home the cops were there, snooping around my yard with
flashlights even though it was still light outside. Morons. All I wanted to do was
go to bed.
“Can I help you?” I kind of shouted at them.
“You live here? 24601?”
“24601. Yes sir.”
“You Alvin Clevinger?”
“Yeah…”
“Maybe you want to take a ride down to the station with us.”
But it wasn’t advice, it was an order. I hated how cops always did that.
I said “sure whatever,” and locked up my car. I couldn’t believe this shit, man I
did not feel at all like going to the cop shop with those two morons, but I also
wanted to get this over with. “Will you guys leave me alone after this?” is what I
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wanted to yell, but I didn’t say a word the entire ride. All they talked about was
racquetball and some guy named Graber who always cheated or something.
All I could think about was smoking a cigarette until they got to the
station and asked me if I wanted to call my lawyer, but again they were actually
telling me. “Maybe you want to call your lawyer first,” was all they said. I felt
sick. I didn’t have a fucking lawyer, didn’t want one either. I told them not
to worry about the goddamn lawyer and just get it over with. I hadn’t done
anything anyway. The two blinking morons just looked at each other, one
smirked, one sighed. I could hear the blood rushing past my eardrums.
When I got out of there it was getting dark. I had forgotten about how
tired I was and I lit up a smoke and waited for my taxi. “Thanks for the ride you
assholes,” I growled as I lit a smoke. I couldn’t believe what was happening. The
cops actually thought I was the goddamn Midnight Slasher. I told the taxi to
swing by my office so I could grab the police reports off my desk, then I went to
Alberto’s for some whiskey.
I tried to explain everything to my sister, but it came out all wrong. Or
it came out right but when you’re hammered and you try to explain something
you just sound like a friggin idiot, plus it was a ridiculous situation to try and
explain. Adaline never listened to me anyway. Whatever. I didn’t have anybody
else to talk to about it. Thing is, I didn’t really know what was going on either. I
didn’t know what to tell her. She just stared at me with that look of irritation and
disappointment that all older sisters look at their younger brothers with.
I felt like I was in Hell. No, worse, I felt like I was at the Mall. I told her
that I was being charged with assault. I was being charged with assaulting a man
that I would interview later, a man who was breaking the law. I was facing jail
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time. I was facing a fine. I had no alibi. She kept asking me if I did it, why I did it.
I kept saying I don’t know, kept drinking whiskey.
I told her that I was having weird dreams, insane dreams, an insane
loudness in my head. I felt like I was sleepwalking all day, no feelings, no
memory, long blacked out passages of time, the image of me fractured in
my mind and branching out. I kept rambling on about our childhood, kept
asking her if she remembered how weird it was growing up in such a fucked-up
situation, with goddamn hippie parents like ours. Adaline kept getting more and
more upset. “Why didn’t you call a lawyer?” is all she kept asking. I kept saying I
don’t know, kept drinking whiskey.
Adaline was crying now. Goddamn it. Why the hell did she care so
much anyway? She wasn’t even listening to me, I could have told her anything.
“Adie, I...well I don’t know how to tell you this, but I...uh...I killed someone...”
is what I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t...couldn’t. Sort of mumbling now, I told
her I was starting over, breaking out in a new direction. It was one of those
morose drunken confessions that make perfect sense to the drunk and only the
drunk who have given up on everything else at that desperate moment, who is
invested in the half-empty glass but sees the straw as a way out. Small Change
sentiments of twinkling hope reeled in from the chaos, a train emerging from a
dark tunnel, the crumb of truth from the Big Lie.
Mooney hated the article from the start, thought it wasn’t “sexy”
enough, like he knows what’s sexy or not. Sexy?!? What the hell did “sexy” have
to do with the news? That goddamn moron. Well, when he found out about my
“police shenanigans” he hated the story even more. So much that he fired me
immediately, citing my lack of journalistic integrity. Said I was making a mockery
of the paper and all that crap. I lit a smoke right there in the office while I
packed my stuff, Mooney screaming red-face shaking. I didn’t say a word.
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CHAPTER SEVEN : ADALINE CLEVINGER
“Adie!!” her brother, stumbling, barked out. His face held an expression
of overwhelming astonishment, as if he was truly surprised to see her and was
equally surprised that he did not vomit again when he opened his mouth to
say her name. He did not expect to see her, or he had at least forgotten that he
expected to see her. He belligerently made his way toward her, strategically using
his sense of touch to avoid the lurking dangers that escaped his diminished sense
of sight. Adaline experienced that paradoxical sensation of being simultaneously
relieved and disappointed that the bartender was not present.
Alvin delivered a tremendous huggish thing that resembled the unstable
embrace of a worn-out 15th round heavyweight. Adaline gently but forcefully
shoved him away and squeezed a scornful “Alvin!” through her clenched teeth.
“I’m taking you home right now, you’re a disaster!”
“No, no, I’m fiiine. I really need ta talk to you,” Alvin countered.
“Cannt we just get a drink and talk about it? C’mon. Where’s goddamn
Alberto? I got this round.”
“He’s probably calling the police you asshole”— Alvin’s eyes expanded,
glossy— “Do you know what time it is?” Adaline was scolding him.
“Yeah, time to gedda drink. Whadya want?” But Alvin was distracted now,
speaking slowly, looking around the bar for the police. He had read the latest of
the dozen or so police reports, his name was in them and the police considered
him the prime suspect in the Edward Teach case. If one could call it a case.
“Forget it,” Adaline snapped, “we’re getting out of here right now. We
can talk in the car. Can you make it home without puking in my car?” At this
last comment, Adaline carefully looked around the bar to see if anyone else
was witnessing this scene.
“Hmmmm, well lemme check my planner… nope, looks like I gotta puke
again in a few minutes. Can you hold… hang on, I’ll be back in a minute.” Alvin
staggered off toward the bathroom again, laughing to himself because Adaline,
who prided herself on being multilingual, was completely unaware that he was
quickly and effortlessly becoming fluent in Porcelainese.
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Nobody in the bar seemed to have taken notice of their exchange, and
Adaline was quite thankful, though the only person that she really worried about
was the young man in the corner. She discreetly peeked over her shoulder in
his direction, only to see that he was no longer there. Empty glasses and an
igloo-shaped structure made out of peanut shells sat idly. She was suddenly
despondent, and not so discreetly she panned around the rest of the bar again.
He was nowhere, and although there was no reason for it, her
disappointment persisted. The butterflies that were in her stomach earlier had
regressed, devolved, turned back to caterpillars and she felt a slow, seeping
nausea, like when you fully realize that someday you will die.
(She frequently changed her hairstyle, but so subtly that only a few
people ever noticed. The few who noticed were the lucky ones.)
Adaline read her brother’s article and had immediately decided that
the Midnight Slasher was inherently good. To her, it was not the means that
mattered, but rather the end. But there was still something intangible about this
story, something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She felt that actions
were usually meaningless without a cause, and often meaningless with a cause,
and she even went as far as to propose that meaningless actions could be a
cause unto themselves. At this last point, she grabbed the article again and
reread it. Three times. She was trying to figure out why? The rest of the W’s were
there, even the H, but the last W was eluding her, eluding everyone.
She had never thought much of her brother’s work and usually only read
enough of his articles to get her through their next conversation. She was too
busy being smarter, funnier and better looking than her little brother. But this
one stuck, this one was challenging. Most of his stories were about crazy people
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doing crazy things, meaningless actions with meaningless causes, at least
to everyone except the perpetrators. She understood the idea of subjective
reality. She understood the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. She
understood altruism, objectivism, utilitarianism, anarchism, eco-terrorism. But
she couldn’t quite understand this. She knew she was close, so close that she
couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why would someone be chopping bushes in
the middle of the night?
She decided that a night of drinking and dancing was in order. She
must have done both excessively well, because she didn’t remember making it
home that night. She woke up with blue ink on her breasts, the writing on the
left mirroring the writing on the right, her shoes on her pillow, and the Dead
Sea in her throat. She was getting up to get some water when she saw Alvin’s
article lying on the bedside table, torn out of the weekly, scribbled on with
frantic sloppy notes like locusts.
Just then the phone rang. It was her brother. He was shit-faced drunk.
“I couldn’t help but overhear some of your conversation. You in trouble?”
she heard the voice behind her, spun around on her barstool to see the Young
Man sitting next to her, all shifty eyes and whiskey breath.
“No, no, um, we are, well, I am fine. My brother is just a little, um, drunk,
that’s all,” Adaline was falling backwards now as she tripped over her words.
The Young Man got smaller and finally disappeared as Adaline kept free-falling.
Blackness, and then came the scream, or at least the attempt to scream and
the frustration of nothingness. She was suspended now, trying to speak, still
nothing, but she could hear someone talking, and music, growing louder as she
crawled out the back of the darkness and into her bed.
Must have slept with the radio on again. The DJ’s were sputtering,
spewing not-quite-news and laughing about something about somebody who
they didn’t know nor would they ever know. Adaline pressed every button on the
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radio until it silenced, she lay back down and tried to figure out Why? Why would
her brother do this? Do what? What the hell did he do? Did he do it? Why...?
But now the Why had changed, now it grew, squared itself and
dichotomized, she saw the vicissitudes of the Why as it streaked like windshield
cracks. (Ironically) she saw branches, but these were black branches against
white winter sky, bare trees of the Midwest. Everything now, black and white and
the negative space bled white and the trees glowed black and where was the
Why now? It was as if Rorschach had spilled his inkwell on her thoughts.
Adaline couldn’t understand it—Why? but worse, she couldn’t even
formulate the question. She didn’t even know why to ask why? Unbeknownst
to Adaline, she had already answered the question when she decided that the
Midnight Slasher was inherently good.
After an hour, she gave up. She called her brother, he didn’t answer.
She called his work, he wasn’t there. She called her work, she wasn’t there.
“Shit,” she thought, “I’m supposed to be at work.” She got up and went to
the police station instead.
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CHAPTER EIGHT : GROVES HUGO
Groves’ own yard was as untrimmed as a 1970’s centerfold. But unlike the
cunnilingually-uninviting stylistic whim of the 70’s playmate, he had a functional
purpose for keeping it that way. Untrimmed bushes aroused less. Less attention,
less suspicion. The neighbors wouldn’t even believe that he owned a pair of
pruning shears, much less used them.
Groves sat on his back steps and smoked and proudly observed his
complete lack of yard maintenance. It was dusk now; the sunset was already on
its way to Hawaii. The dank sky looked like wolf fur. He pulled a handful of old
leaves out of his pocket, was trying to remember where the hell they came from.
A tame northern wind crept through his yard and rustled his leaves as the sky
soaked up ink. He tossed them aside and went inside to get ready.
He had a bad feeling about the night, but he drank his way through
that feeling and into a euphoric buzz; it came with an invincibility clause. He
gathered his things: one flask of whiskey, 14 cigarettes, three wristbands, three
cans of beer, one beer cozy on a shoestring necklace with a beer in it, one
pair of pruning shears, one black Sharpie® marker, a picture of a manatee
superimposed over the Hindenburg, a newspaper clipping with the names of
the contributing writers, music and headphones and some leather gloves with
cashmere lining. He put it all in a heavy sheepskin jacket and left.
Interlude
or
This is what happens when you are Midnight Slashing
At this point, you are still getting situated: putting your gloves on, finding
the right music (the right music is critical), leaving a piss, retying your shoes,
changing the music, shit did you leave the stove on? and now you need a drink.
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That first drink of whiskey is like doing laundry by hand, unpleasant yet
satisfying. But it’s a starting point, which is important. Now you’re ready and you
begin walking. Primarily because you are wearing headphones and you are in
a quiet residential neighborhood, you hear only the music—there is no other
sound—and this feeling of only the music and the whiskey wrapping around you
like a blanket; you are warm. There is a serenity and a sense of invulnerability that
grow from this warmth and from this music. And then you begin noticing things.
The first thing you notice is how absurd life is. This is accomplished by
the realization that you don’t notice how absurd life is most of your life. Stimuli,
multitudinous and consistent, keep your mind busy processing a million simple
bits of information per second that are necessary to function in this absurd
notion of civilization and society and obligation which is “life.” When you are
outside of it, and looking at it from outside yourself, you begin to see the
fallacies, the smoke-screens, the false-alarms, the pretentious conventions. It’s
like being backstage on a film set. And it’s a little addicting.
And you are part of it. You play the games, too, however poorly or
well. You suffer, you celebrate, you give and take, you wear masks and you
perpetuate it. You are ignorant and life is absurd. But this is not cynicism; this is
awareness, and this is also an important part of life.
The second thing you notice is how significant life is. This is
accomplished by achieving the first thing and then realizing that you are part
of it (and as a logical extension of that realization—that life is more than just
you, unless of course you believe that one creates their own reality and “life”
is the projection of that reality from one’s own mind… which is possible).
The natural consequence of these realizations is an acute appreciation for
everything. Good and bad and other such vague categorical judgments are
irrelevant, because at this stage there is just the overwhelming satisfaction of
knowing that all these things exist and that it is incredible that they exist at all.
A spoon and a beehive and a war all have the same level of significance—think
of the processes that created them.
You begin to have an inexplicable urge to meditate, to really meditate, for
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probably the first time in your life. You think about how simple life was when you
were a kid, and how that idea is inversely proportional to the idea you had as a kid
that life was so simple for adults, and you think of how things change while not
really changing at all.
This all happens in about a minute or so, and you haven’t even started
Slashing yet. Slashing is a special thing, like seeing just the bottom of a girl’s
breasts beneath her shirt, or finding a healthy dose of belly-button lint (Where
the hell did that come from?). But for all of the portentous preparation, there
is really no sound method for selecting the area to be slashed. Oh, there are
plenty of systems one could use. There are systems of priority and systems of
randomness, systems of revenge and systems of helping thy neighbor, systems
that are biased against certain species and systems that are indifferent to
all—systems that look good drawn on paper or leaves—but the most commonly
used is a system based on proximity and least exposure. You are, after all, drunk
and in public and wielding pruning shears in the middle of the night.
Which brings us to the whiskey. With all of its unnecessary letters. Or are
they unnecessary? Wisky. Whiskey. It doesn’t seem right without all of them. Can
something be unnecessary and necessary at the same time?
Whiskey can. Religion, philosophy, sex, art, war, coffee, cell phones.
In some way, everything can be simultaneously unnecessary and necessary. It
would appear to be a contradiction in terms: an unnecessary necessity. It is a
negation by definition, but we as humans must be careful what we define as
needs, and needs for what? We exist in a contradiction of terms. Absurdity.
Reason. Awareness. Reality. We are the blank, confused space of oxymora.
Now, all of this realization business will make you thirsty, so out comes
the flask. It is important to remember to hydrate when you are drunk. But that
has nothing to do with anything right now. Right now, you need a drink. It is
important to be drunk right now. This is Nihilistic Productivism. It is not
important that you get drunk to cut bushes, but it is important that bushes
get cut when you are drunk. Getting drunk should be done for other reasons
or no reason at all. Cutting bushes should be done for getting drunk. Good
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deeds should be done. Do Good Deeds. Especially while drunk on whiskey.
With all of its unnecessary letters.
Whiskey viscously burning your throat, your head cleared, now you are
ready to decide which bushes to cut.
How do you know which bushes to cut? Simple. There is a confusing set
of constantly changing criteria. Now you are probably thinking: “Doesn’t that
favor favoritism?” The answer is, of course, no. This is Nihilistic Productivism.
This is therapy. Slashing fills a void, a void which only you know, but you know
that everyone has one. There is no right or wrong way to slash. All that matters
is that you are doing a good deed while you are drunk. You could be causing
a million kinds of trouble right now. You probably won’t remember what you
did anyway. Why not do something helpful? It might get you laid. Or it might
subconsciously alter your behavior in the sober world toward a more benevolent
default setting. Which might also get you laid.
Slashing is a matter of efficiency. It’s about using your otherwise wasted
time and energy doing something that needs to be done, and doing it during
time that you didn’t even realize you had. It’s like being productive while you
sleep. It’s almost like having 27 hours in a day. It’s almost patriotic.
And if you want to ascend to the next level of slashing prowess, to
maximize that efficiency and that patriotism, you can focus your already
salvaged and beneficial energy on eliminating invasive species. It is not even
important that you know why you should target invasive species. What is
important is that if you do understand why, that you do something about it.
Invasive species don’t care why. All they know is that what they do needs to
be done, and they do it. Plants understand Nihilistic Productivism in its purist
essence, and they don’t even drink whiskey.
End of Interlude
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He was working his way down a side street when he came to a small
parking lot behind a building, some kind of dry cleaners or something. A
little foreign car was sitting there minding its own business, molested by
the dreaded Rubus Armeniacus. Groves turned his head and spat forcefully,
and in his head he heard the obligatory “pa-ting” of overdubbed Spaghetti-
Western spittoon-scene fame. Never taking his eyes off the enemy, he slowly,
assertively approached the sinewy bastards. Clint Eastwood would have been
impressed, or at least amused. He was halfway done when he heard a loud
sharp voice behind him.
It was not the first time someone had seen him in action. Groves
always just acted casually, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and solicited
a hearty greeting. “Half of life is acting like you know what you’re doing,” he
remembered from the A-Team. Most folks just reciprocated the greeting and
moved on, but some of them were equally inebriated, which yielded curious
receptiveness or confused indifference. This guy was different; he was just
getting off work and this was his little foreign car.
He was not a pushover. Groves tried to calmly explain, but this guy
wasn’t buying it. “You no touch my car, I’m carring the poreece,” the guy kept
squealing. Groves wanted to slap him, but he kept his cool. He pulled his pack
of smokes out and the newspaper clipping.
“Here. Look, this is me, Alvin Clevinger. I’m a writer for _____. See?
That’s me, here take this,” Groves handed the guy the paper clipping. “‘Car the
poreece’ if you want. I’m just trying to help. Honestly, if there’s any scratches on
your shitty little car then call this number here.”
“I’m carring the poreece, you reave now!” the guy was waving the
paper in his face, but Groves couldn’t have cared less, turned, lit a smoke and
walked away with his hands in his pockets. “What a moron,” he mumbled, then
pulled out, and off of, his flask. As the Good Burn slowly singed his innards, he
simultaneously slowly realized that he didn’t know where he was. Wandering
the streets in geographical ignorance, no consideration of time, streetlights like
a million tiny suns casting 600 nanometers of amber tint on the still life before
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him, the street looked like a movie set dipped in urine, no wonder nobody was
around. This was isolation, this was the gift that Bukowski talked about, this is
where a person could be alone with the Gods, where a person could feel alive
and dead at the same time.
But that little guy with the little foreign car did call the police and file
a complaint. Trespassing he said. And trying to break into his car. He gave a
rough and fairly inaccurate description of the guy to the police, but they wrote
it up and filed it in with a few other reports that had to do with bushes being cut
in the night. This was their first complaint that included any description of the
perpetrator, and also a name: Alvin Clevinger. Lt. Graber told some of his finest
morons to check into it, pay a visit to this Mr. Clevinger.
Groves didn’t really remember the end of that night. He made it home
before dawn though and fell asleep in his clothes. He had already forgotten
about the incident with the guy and his little foreign car. He was thinking
about tits again. Also, he was trying to formulate a new method for keeping
track of the places he needed to “work on.” The leaf method was simply no
good. Until now Groves had been taking a single leaf from the foliage that
he wanted to return to and assigning it importance, which was represented
by card values. Aces were the most critical, twos the least. He didn’t really
know what the suits were supposed to mean, couldn’t have cared less actually.
Problem was, he would wake up with a pocket full of leaves and have no
way to remember where they came from. It may have been one of the worst
planned systems ever thought of. Ever.
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Groves fell asleep without formulating a new plan. He dreamed hard that
night, his mind and body still working on the problem, and woke up soaking wet
at 4 a.m. He always woke up soaking wet; maybe his sweat glands were drunk,
too. He took off the wet clothes and fell asleep naked, returned to his dreams
where he again failed to solve his leaf problem. Or his tits problem.
He woke up in a cloud, still drunk, must have slept with his contacts in
again, couldn’t see, couldn’t remember the night before. The record was still
spinning, nothing but a stable skipping hiss could be heard. His saliva was like
tar. He found an old bottle of beer and finished it. He set the bottle down on
something metal, clinked and fell over. Groves looked over and saw them sitting
there, in his room, not moving, not mocking, just laying there smugly like a one-
night stand that one hoped would have been gone by the morning. Their metal
blades looked bloody, but upon closer investigation Groves concluded that they
were simply covered in sap and dirt in such a consistency as to appear bloody,
and he got up, off of the floor, to leave a piss.
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CHAPTER NINE : RUBUS ARMENIACUS
The Himalayan Blackberry is one of the most aggressive, narcissistic plants
out there. Deceptively attractive and consistently manipulative, it gladly offers its
sweet mature ovaries to any who might spread its durable seed, and it does so in
exchange for the freedom to kill. Its berries act as a kind of State’s Evidence. While
a man walks away dumbly satisfied with its tangy juices on his lips, the Himalayan
Blackberry plots its next perfidious move. No pain can compare to the pain of a
man who falls wholly and helplessly into the thorny throes of the blackberry bush,
his indulgent body riddled with the stigmata of tiny sharp scratches and punctures,
flesh ripped like fighting a million angry wet housecats. That prick, that sting, that
itch, that bane, that ripper of new coat sleeves.
The Himalayan Blackberry is a noxious opportunist, the nomadic
bastard of the rose family. It is persistent, pernicious, pestilent. It grows nearly
everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, from the snowline to the shoreline,
in vacant city lots and deep dark forests, through the walls of your house and
over your helpless fences, it grows in sand, silt and clay, soils acidic or alkaline. It
costs humans millions of dollars each year to try and stop its incessant genocidal
march. It takes no prisoners along the way. It has an adventitious advantage in
the game of survival and reproduction. Its cause is the cause of reproduction. To
the Himalayan Blackberry bush, it is not the means that matter, but rather it is
the end.
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