Contributor: H. C. Turk

- -
During all my time traveling by roadway, I've encountered or feared difficulty in controlling vehicles that never belong to me, for I am a person incapable of such ownership. This journey seems no different, but when last have I failed to arrive?

We have trouble coming in. The front brake, I think, begins dragging. I really have to struggle with the wheel to keep from driving off the road, right into the gutter. But we make it to the parking lot and the members register. Me, I'm just the driver.

Despite the off season, the swimming pool is crowded, because a cult has hired it. Not directly: they leased the auditorium for a day to go swimming. But swimming is never simple with cults. For them, a dunking includes existential cleansing or eternal revelation or drowning infidels. Here, the purpose includes healing of a medical sort, because G is present, and I'm sniffing after her. I could love G if I had to, but I don't. Being submerged does something for sniffing.

Immersion in the pool includes healing, because G is a nurse and she's performing therapy on a young woman by letting her soak. I don't know her problem, but I'm glad I don't have it. Not that I wouldn't like G to push me under then allow me to rise a new patient, but her patient's skin....

After the first soak, G directs her patient out of the pool to a lounge chair in order to check her breathing, pulse, and other internal balances with probes in her abdomen. While this verification proceeds, the young woman's father returns. Still in his trunks, though he's been out for some time and no longer drips, he sneaks back into the pool and reveals only the top half of his face while pretending not to enjoy himself though he is doing so by observing his daughter's healing or existential cleansing.

Consulting with her textbook, G decides that the young woman should return for more therapy. I can understand that, noticing her skin(s). I could never be a doctor.

I'm just the driver, but even I feel the spirit when the father and all the cult members quickly exit the water. It is rather swirly. Since this occurs to G's back, neither she nor her patient notices.

"I think she needs to go back in for a spell," G calls out over her shoulder.

Exasperation immediately strikes the father.

"Not now! Look what she's done to the water!"

After one glance, G changes her mind.

"She needs something."

The young woman doesn't look too bad (too bad) to me, but I'm just the driver. However, I'm aware enough to notice the ditch by the chain link fence along the highway. It's full of water.

G has to consider my suggestion. The father looks very closely. He has an opinion based on peer review, having reviewed his peer.

"I just got back from the hospital," he says, and jangles the keys to the instrument cabinet.

Looking down, G turns one gauge all the way up.

I ask him what he means. He did notice me before. I am the driver.

"The other father, you might have seen him. His son had this brain surgery. They finished and he's sitting with a plastic bag on his head and nothing else is covering his brain. That's to allow more swelling. I'm not a doctor, but I am a dad. That dad gave his son a hand so they could go running along the sidewalk. That movement is just what he needed, the doctors said, and I wouldn't argue with them. Except, except they came running by right here," and he nods to the adjacent hospital and the sidewalk just past the swimming pool (and the ditch). "They're doing swell, in a type of a race, and the kid—he's so strong—is smiling. At least until the father starts leaning toward the ditch and in he goes. He pops right up, but the kid is crying and his bag is leaking. I don't want that to happen to my daughter."

"Sir, no one wants her bag to leak. But why did the other father jump in the ditch?"

"He didn't jump in. He was pulled inside by spirits, so he says."

"For existential cleansing?"

"Maybe. Maybe temporary revelation, but I don't want my daughter in there."

During this explication, G has slipped the girl back into the swimming pool, then listened to the blah blah. But she listened too long, for her peers' mass inhalation informs her of a change in prognosis, though not a leaky bag. Looking to the young woman, all of us can see her skin(s). Obviously she has been in too long, but now she's stuck and G can't extract her. Following a new pull, I dive in and come up beside the young woman. Her father tries, but is leaning toward the ditch while trying to pull himself away and goes nowhere right now.

I pull her out while G reads her like a book. We're looking for the chapter to check her breathing, but her pages stick together. But isn't the binding sighing? That's a good sign. Concerned about acid and yellowing, G probes more deeply into the text.

"Can you believe it?" she says to me. "Her...is still strongest."

Since I'm not a doctor, I don't understand that, but I recognize success. Her father could relax now, but he can't pull himself away from spiritual longings.

For drowning infidels, utilize a cult. But for medicine, stick with science.


- - -
H. C. Turk is a self-taught writer, sound artist, and visual artist living in Florida. His novels have been published by Villard and Tor. His short fiction, sound pieces, and images have appeared on numerous web-sites.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Author: H. C. Turk

Contributor: H. C. Turk

- -
"Working down below is a pain in the wreck," my father complains. "Even though I watch my favorite show there."

We go there to see. His place of employment is a valley, where we arrive in time to eat lunch. Deep but not long, the valley runs north and south; I like the direction: we arrive from the east. Brown grass, crisp but not cutting, snaps beneath our shoes. I did not plan to walk barefoot regardless.

The furnishings for lunch are long picnic tables of good, thick wood, grey from age, a likable maturity. Dad is in fine spirits, despite his initial complaints, even after we seat ourselves at a table that proves so rickety I get seasick. This is not the pain he mentioned. Dad bends to point out the loose nail holes. Let me guess who's been hired to repair them. That acute bending does hurt a person below the skull.

Several other people are also present at this table. It's not the only one. Wind flicks the edge of the tablecloth up until someone weights it down with an ashtray. Dad chats cordially with the other folks, not strangers. Squeezed to my left is a man with straight blond hair below his ears who keeps looking suspiciously toward me because our coifs do not match, I surmise, though my critique of his criticism might not pertain to appearance.

The cut of my jib.

When the food arrives, so does the telly, brought by a woman so dull I can barely focus on her. The small TV seems to be full of water from a well-used swimming pool, green with floating debris. The latter might not be a commercial for flood insurance.

"Why are you here when you're not working?" the male lead of the TV show demands of the brownette. "Wharring again?"

"My buttles don't involve $," she insists. "You have the wrong idea."

After the break, the next scene transpires on the tablecloth.

"Are you preg again?" the male lead demands.

"I am pregnot," she insists.

Regardless of her reply, the male lead sets her on the table and spreads her legs and attains a broken baseball bat that he covers with a feminine napkin and aims at the brownette's cant, her posse.

Even before the climax of the show, the nearby blond man proves his suspiciousness with a formal review, interrupting the drama.

"You ever have a soup with just too many pieces in it? Well, there are just too many rapid changes of event and mise-en-scène whizzing by."

All the while I had been jealous of their style because the action kept coming, tensely. Now I don't know how the commercial ends.


- - -
H. C. Turk is a self-taught writer, sound artist, and visual artist living in Florida. His novels have been published by Villard and Tor. His short fiction, sound pieces, and images have appeared on numerous web-sites.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Author: H. C. Turk

Contributor: H. C. Turk

- -
We view my father's masterpiece hanging in the school museum. The medium is egg on canvas, not egg tempera. No one knows how he did it. He's retired, so he won't say. And I won't describe the imagery, which is only what you see. The same as any great art, the content consists of expressed ideas. Hmm, now we're thinking.

My closest friend, F1 (another educator), only has to look a moment before the condemnation.

"G did the same thing."

G could be my love, if the expression could be found in my lexicon.

"It can't be the same. This is unique."

"So 'same' means plagiarism."

Since this is an opening, G arrives. I haven't been seeing her. The three of us chat. I know exactly how I feel about G, but can't express the idea. If you could only see it.... She admires the painting. I admire her skin: it's so smooth, polished. G explains a bout of dermatitis. Surgeons had to literally scrape away the disease with straight razors. Her skin was left with a burnished yellow tinge.

I've seen the same technique in art school, but not on human substrates. Scrape away the superfluous until the super is revealed.

After G leaves, F1 checks on his allegations, studying her vicinity. There, in a space open to Dad's painting, F1 finds a straight razor dripping viscous yellow fluid. In the crowd, we are jostled, and someone removes the evidence. Though aware of the idea manifested, we didn't see it.

Leaving, F1 and I understand that we have to give bad grades to the audience. Innocent members will suffer, but that's the way of public education when graded on a curve.

Standing along the property's wild ditch where the students will soon gather, I tear off the bad parts of the report cards we made, but the water is too clear. I see them sink yet remain visible. The last one is the thief's. Down the path toward the railroad tracks I see the campus police arrive, seeking evidence. They are enthused at the negative grades floating at their feet. I wonder how long they'll need to understand that they are observing a response, not a cause. Looking down at the visible corners on the bottom, I know I have to go to G.

She's eating with a man I saw at the art opening. Soup. A phallus is floating in her bowl. In her artistry, G makes it appear to be a fat green bean, but here's an art that's only artifice. Perhaps concerned with his eating, the man scrapes his plate.

I wash my hands in ritual preparation for F1's arrival, when he brazenly opens a book directly before G to reveal photographs of her art: overspray tortoise shell combs and shells painted with ducks, the latter an addition to the background that—along with the combs—is a virtual parallel of father's earlier style.

"You can't copyright talent," the man fumes.

F1 wants to look in the fridge, if only because it's locked, but he wasn't invited to eat. He doesn't want to eat. Returning to G, who is effectively stabbing brussels sprouts with a spoon, he turns to the back of the book, revealing those illustrations with the highest grade. The photograph is of G's studio. In the back, not hidden though in black and white, the scene portrays no artist present, only some canvas stretchers and a table with painting knives, plus a straight razor and a yolk-like substance.

G can neither look away nor speak. As F1 slams the book closed and G regards her bean, the man empties his plate, then confronts me with his superficial ideas.

He is no person I could reify. When his concepts intrude, I scrape him, drawing the yellow fluid.


- - -
H. C. Turk is a self-taught writer, sound artist, and visual artist living in Florida. His novels have been published by Villard and Tor. His short fiction, sound pieces, and images have appeared on numerous web-sites.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Author: H. C. Turk