I won’t lie to you. It has been awhile. Sorry about it.
More and more it occurs to me that this blog is turning into a live/work function. I mean that it’s my news ticker when something personally cool dislodges, rumbles around and finally occurs. Like bringing home a shiny new puppy to love and love and love. Or, winning a beauty pageant. (I have nothing to link to. That one hasn’t happened yet.)
In any event, I’ve been letting my daily crazies and finds and inspirations freakishly fly at my Tumblr blog and long-time followers (if any remain) and new supporters (if any exist) are more than welcome to visit me there. That would be aces.
Now for the news-y stuff!
Those that have made that Tumblr trek already may be familiar, but those that have stayed loyal to this hub, or those that have stumbled across me here only now may not know: I have written a collection of illustrated short stories. Above, as well as throughout this site, you’ll see some of the illustrations that may or may not be included in the book! Ooh, it’s a like a total mystery.
What is not a mystery, though, is that the artwork is all done, fantastically so, by the very large hand of Ian Dingman. He has a gift, and he’s allowed me to mooch off of it and write short stories inspired by his illustrations. You’ll find a few examples, which—again—may or may not be included in the final book, of this charming idea via the glamorous stories section on this here website of the Internet.
The stories have taken on a variety of shapes and sizes and lengths, as well as explored different themes and tones and styles in the telling. But it’s always been about making something inspired, something beautiful and unique. The writing process started a little over a year ago and picked up decidedly more steam just in the last four months. It’s been a labor and a massive confidence game to sit alone and tell myself that I was a worthy enough creator to debut a polished story collection. I still falter.
I set June 1 as my deadline to have the vast majority of writing done. I’m quite proud that next week I will be able to say that I am a very good boy in having done so. There will be bits and bobs that remain, as you shouldn’t really rush creativity, but the building blocks will be set into the ground. June will be a month of editing and tweaking and polishing as you would a pair of old shoes or something impossibly scuffed. Out the other side, blazing into July, the idea is to hold a sharpened stack of paper which can then be transformed just a bit more, morphed if you will, until it’s a stack of paper that you—yes, you!—can hold in your very hands. It’s a lot like magic, and I’m almost there. Ta-dah!
I believe this is the first official announcement here that a book is coming. We don’t have a title yet because we plan to arm wrestle over it later. I did want to announce it though. The quiet and the sound of crickets around here is not for lack of hard work or interest. I’m at this desk almost every day, very much like today, smelling like lemons:
Thanks for stopping by! Thanks, perhaps, also for the support and encouragement and personal interest in my work, or Ian’s work or the mating habits of mammals. And thanks for not sending me hate mail or telling me that I suck. Yeah. Most importantly, thanks for that.
Later on.
Cool! Ian Dingman sent me a new illustration this week.
Hopefully you already know: All of the artwork and illustrations on this site are original works by Ian, and each piece in my stories section has been inspired by one of his paintings. He’s been a great friend to me. I’m honored to continue to work with him and feature his stuff.
Madeline can see the body floating there. Just beneath the velvety surface of the Seine, just beneath, it floats. The shadows of the ancient buildings ink a temporary tattoo of early evening on the lapping waves of the river, on the stone walkway and its stairs that lead to the water’s edge. People are scrambling across the cobbled embankment.
The body is floating in the current, an underwater hummingbird filled with artful stasis. The body is floating in the current and people are scrambling, flocking en masse. Madeline is not. She is frozen. Madeline is frozen, watching the body beneath the water. It is just inches beneath the water. People are now scrambling from the embankment to an elegantly carved stone bridge. People are scrambling! And Madeline cannot move. In the background, the sirens begin their high-low keening. The sirens swirl. The sirens rise and fall, a score for the wave of people who are scrambling, scrambling to save the body. The sirens wail, a score for Madeline, statuesque in the window of her mother’s French boutique.
Underwater, the body is weightless. It floats very near the slick moss of the concrete riverbank. It floats in the chilled slow moving river, and it doesn’t flow anywhere quickly. It simply drifts, drifts in its own kind of peace. It is entirely unaware of the commotion it causes, the commotion that roils the banks of the river.
When the wind blows, when the branches of the riverside trees shift, waning light cuts through the mere inches of murky water that separate the body from air. The light sheds those gallons of water; the light displaces them. The light shows a leg one moment, shimmering and pale. The light displays pure, unblemished skin. The light reveals what is most definitely a girl, her slender pixie feet closest to the surface, her torso pointing down into the furtive depths. She’s floating and flowing and drifting, so slowly, gracefully, her torso pointing down.
“Dear God!” an American tourist, husky and balding, exclaims to his petite wife. The shutter of his camera clicks. The shutter clicks and clicks.
To be sure, there is a sense of urgency—a thick sense that a clock is being raced. Madeline can feel the adrenaline running through the crush of people. It fills her too. Madeline feels that human emotion, the ache those people must feel. Madeline can feel the shock of the men, their tailored navy blazers thrown to the ground as they skitter along the water’s edge, following the body inch by inch. The sun is falling and it will take a sharp eye to keep the girl from disappearing into darkness. Yes, Madeline knows a form of this feeling, the feeling of wanting so badly to save something, desperately, at all costs. And as soon as she recognizes that feeling as that which these strangers following the girl must feel, as soon as she puts her finger upon that feeling, it is replaced. That distinct feeling is replaced with an overwhelming sense of futility!
The girl has been under too long. The people that are scrambling down to the embankment, the people that are shouting to their friends, the people that are pointing—the tourists with their flashbulbs popping—they are not jumping in the water. And Madeline thinks, with relief, that soon the people will have to realize the body is just a body. Madeline hopes they will stop imagining it a sinking girl. She isn’t named Greta. They won’t call her Rebecca. She is an “it.” It is just a body form. Madeline wants them to realize the girl, whoever she is to them, is no more. Beneath the waves is just this thing. Beneath the waves, this thing falling heels over head through the night, this thing twisting and somersaulting in the current—it is just a thing. Understand: It is not a girl. Madeline wants them to understand.
And yet they all keep following the girl down the Seine.
Madeline wants to tell them all. She does. She wants to rip open the shop door and run down to the water’s edge. She wants to tear down to the water’s edge, screaming bloody awful. She is moments from doing it. She is moments from racing to the water, her long sapphire scarf flying behind her like the streamers of a kite. She would grab that gentleman, the one on his belly now, the one whose ankles his friends are supporting, the one who is on his belly with his arms outstretched, the one who is reaching, reaching for the arm of the dead thing. She would race to that man, her hair wild, her silk dress drenched with wind, and she would pull him back in. She wants to pull him back in, pull him back in and press her small finger to his lips. She would stop him screaming for help. She would silence him, and at that moment she would quiet those sirens, too. It would be still, then. Quiet as the riverbed bottom.
“It’s not a girl,” she would whisper in her best English. “It is not a girl. And none of this matters.”
That’s exactly what she would say. That’s exactly what Madeline wants to say. But she is frozen. She cannot. And then, sudden as a sneeze, she is laughing, hand at her slender side she is laughing. The laugh comes crashing down. Oh, what has she done? She can’t ever tell them. And so, below her, down the embankment in front of her mother’s dress shop, the people will continue their frenzied panic. The people will scream. The sirens will wail. The man, the one on his belly, the one anchored by the strong arms of several American friends, that man may reach the body; he may grab it and pull “the girl” to dry land, pull her to some sort of safety. But Madeline decides she simply cannot tell them.
With a click of her high heels, Madeline finds herself once more. She soothes her dress down to her sides. She calms her alarmed expression, tucks it away. And she steps outside. She locks the shop up tight, noting the stiff orange placard hanging from the shop door, noting the plywood board beneath it that reads Cessons nos activités in cursive purple paint. Madeline frowns at this particular sign. She frowns at the sign and further pushes the commotion from her mind. Her keys jingle. She places them in her purse. And off the stoop, she walks. She walks and her footsteps echo out into the narrow street. She walks away. She walks away and the dress shop, its window display eerily empty of its mannequin model, simply recedes into the night.
Inspired by “In My Sleep, Falling Through The Night,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
Helen and Betty are not asleep in the attic. They are listening to the rain. They are listening to the rushing sound of water and it is keeping them up. They are two little girls, sisters—Helen is six and Betty is eight—and they cannot sleep because of the persistent rushing sound of so much water. It angrily punches the wooden beams, clawing for the insulation underneath. The drops want to shatter like bullets through the roof and shower over the girls’ heads. The water washes down the one window at the far end of the attic and reminds Betty of an advertisement for a frontloading washing machine that she once saw on television. The only thing that’s missing is a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to tumble, in simulation, over and over past the window as well. Betty is eight years old and she doesn’t expect a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to go tumbling past the window in the attic, but maybe. The power is out. It is night and when the lightning flashes, Betty can see that it is just rainwater sloshing against the windowpane; there’s no laundry.
The small tattered AM/FM radio that the girls have beside their mattress came from the dusty space behind their mother’s shoeboxes at the top of the closet. It now sits on the floor keeping them company. Their favorite station, the one with all of the popular music, stopped broadcasting earlier in the day, but they’ve managed to bring up something else, the tinny voice of a woman softly singing. The girls don’t know what this faraway woman is singing, but they can hear her at least. They at least have something to listen to besides the rain. They are not used to sleeping in the attic.
Their mother is somewhere downstairs. Their father is somewhere out in the rain. He’s packing sandbags together somewhere out in this rain, one on top of the other, building a wall of sandbags, one on top of the other.
A strong flash of lightning makes daylight appear in the attic. The light attacks the dark corner where the little girls lay. It exposes old cardboard boxes, a playpen covered in cobwebs, a bookshelf stocked with a cookbooks, old yellowing yellow National Geographics and a pink pair of rollerblades Betty hasn’t used in years. There is a stroller missing a wheel and a box that says MARTIN’S in faded red permanent marker. There is a ragged sheet covering a microwave and a weight bench without weights. The lightning exposes these things in a magical flare before bursting out like a blown light bulb.
“What if it never stops raining?” Helen, still small like a figurine, asks her older sister. The woman on the radio is not singing anymore. Her voice is suddenly lost somewhere in a dark waterfall of quiet static.
Betty thinks for a moment. In the blackness, on the mattress that her mother took from her bed and hauled, wrestling inch by inch, down the hall and up the retractable ladder to the attic, Betty lay thinking. And Betty doesn’t know the answer. She’s been wondering herself: What if it doesn’t stop raining? This has never happened before. What if it is like this forever?
“I think our house might float away, Helen,” Betty says, finally. “You’ve heard of houseboats haven’t you?”
Helen says yes, even though she has never heard of a houseboat. Helen says yes anyway. And then she pictures their house, two stories and tan as an almond, sailing on top of a lake. She pictures it cutting through the water and she imagines her mother, wearing a shiny emerald green one-piece bathing suit, on skis behind the house. She imagines her mother being pulled along behind the house, the water spraying, the water spraying in a mist and her mother laughing, holding onto a cord with one hand and waving with the other.
“Well, our house will be a houseboat if it keeps raining, Helen.”
Betty scoots along the mattress closer to her sister, pulling the nubby blanket up around their shoulders. The rain is flying sideways into the window at the end of the room. It sounds like popcorn popping or lots of gunshots from an old Western movie.
Betty continues: “It could rain that much. Or, it might not. But if it does, one morning we might wake up for school and everything will be floating on the water. All the other houses will be boats too and so it wouldn’t be so bad, Helen.”
“But then why is Daddy piling all of those bags of sand? If we’re just gonna float up on a houseboat, why?”
Betty doesn’t know. She pictures the sandbags her father is out stacking. She envisions each one, imagines how heavy they are, like the lumpy sacks of potatoes that her mother buys from the market to make stew. She thinks of them underwater. What purpose could they serve?
“Um. Well, just think about it. If our house is a boat and we float around during the day, we’ll need to know where to park it again at night, right? That’s what those bags of sand are for. They’ll mark where our house belongs.” This makes sense to Helen. So, Betty continues: “But don’t worry about that anyways. What’s really cool is that I think we’ll look out the window and it’ll be like the pool next door to Grandma’s house. The whole town will be like a beautiful blue swimming pool and I bet Mom would let us dive off the roof and the roof will be like the diving board at the Y and Dad will build us a ladder so that we can climb up the side of the house and get back in.”
Betty isn’t exactly sure that it will be like a swimming pool. She is eight and she doesn’t know. But that sounds possible to her.
“I’m really excited about it,” she says. “How cool will it be to stand on the roof and look down and see our yard underneath the water? We can do races to the fire hydrant and we could swim down through the peach tree. It will be like seaweed.”
The lightning comes again. In the flash, Betty sees, through the fine strands of blond hair covering her sister’s face, that Helen’s eyes are closed. Helen is sleeping. Helen has fallen asleep and Betty decides to hush up. She puts her arm around her sister and snuggles in beside her tiny pajama-clad body. She closes her own eyes. She thinks about which bathing suit she would want to put on in the morning. She pictures herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, the one with the matching tank top, the one that her mother got her last year for the Fourth of July barbecue. Then Betty imagines herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, swimming in circles around the house and doing cannonballs out of her upstairs bedroom window. Betty smiles and soon she too falls asleep, dreaming about a happy new world, a world underwater.
Inspired by “Above Flood Stage,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
The shark attack lasted thirty seconds. Some people saw a fin. Some people did not. Everyone saw the girl. Everyone remembers the girl.
Bonnie and Barbara are twins, born just thirty seconds apart and identical in a carbon copy way. When Barbara picks up the beige receiver of the telephone in the hallway, people often say, “Well hello, Bonnie!” When Bonnie raises her hand in geometry, sure of the answer, her teacher smiles expectantly and calls out, “Barbara, do you want to solve the equation?” Walking side by side down the street, Bonnie and Barbara appear as if a polished mirror, like those in the changing room at Sears and Roebuck, were hanging between them.
And yes, twins grow up; twins grow up and they grow apart, but at sixteen years apiece, thirty-two years combined, Bonnie and Barbara are remarkably matched. Today they are swimming fast, clean breaststrokes parallel to one another, beyond the breakers. Orange buoys bob beside them, drop-off markers tipping and tumbling in their wake, slick with salt water and radiant with abundant sunshine.
Children on shore carry red pails full of ocean water, red pails full of sand. Bonnie and Barbara’s mother, bent over a cooler, is pouring lemonade into a tumbler the color of the sky. The sour liquid makes the ice cubes crack. Casey Dubois, last year’s senior high prom queen, is on her boyfriend’s shoulders in waist-deep water. Her blousy black and white two-piece flaps in the July air. Waves are hitting him square in the chest. Other sunbathers are splashing. Everyone else is splashing, splashing. And just then Bonnie and Barbara are sailing past. Bonnie and Barbara are identical fishes swimming past, and then—in the space and span of one single gasp of salted ocean air—the sync of their strokes suddenly snaps out of place. At once, Barbara is trailing.
Barbara is trailing Bonnie in the blue-green water. Barbara is just a stroke behind. Both girls are competitive swimmers yet people have called Bonnie a dolphin. It’s just a nickname, but it bothers her twin. It bothers Barbara just a little and it makes Bonnie blush. Bonnie’s fair cheeks turn pink when they compliment her form, saying, “Oh Bonnie, we’re not sure if you’re a teenager or a dolphin.” People don’t comment on Barbara looking like any sort of porpoise. People haven’t commented on Barbara’s swimming at all. Barbara can sing, though. She sang a tune by the Supremes at a talent show recently. The crowd gave her a standing ovation. It wasn’t just her parents standing, either—it was the whole audience. The whole audience was standing, standing and clapping. Someone asked, “Oh Barbara, where’d you get such soul?” And Barbara’s fair cheeks were just a shade pinker than usual.
Ten seconds. Every white, sun-bleached lounge chair is emptied by the commotion. Everyone is rushing toward the water, toward the bubbles, the gurgling, the arms and the wild screams. The empty chairs, left behind, are wooden, slatted and covered in abandoned towels. The towels are blue; the towels are fuchsia, teal, red, purple and green. From above, from the sky, the beach looks like a gumball machine. Every single body on that sandy white sand beach is ankle deep in ocean water, breath caught in their throats, salty air burning on stuck tongues. People are not sure what they are seeing, hearing. Not yet. The sunbathers and the swimmers, interrupting the blue-white-blue-green color of the ocean waves, wear swimsuits in the same color assortment as the towels on the empty chairs, and they also look like gumballs in a gumball machine. They look like chewy, sugary things.
Twenty seconds. People see a girl. People see one girl. Then, people see another girl. Or, the same girl? The water erupts: Silver, sunlight, glints of white, splashes of red, crimson. What is that? Casey Dubois is on shore. She is counting the seconds in her mind, her hand over her mouth. She isn’t aware that she’s counting or that the counting has turned the corner, now, becoming a countdown. She’s just counting: Nine, eight, seven, six… Pale arms are reaching for the sky…five, four…a foot breaks through a wave…three, two, one… Bonnie and Barbara’s heads appear on the surface, one no longer wearing a black bathing cap. The heads bob toward shore, one slowly towing the other.
“Not Bonnie!” screams the twins’ mother.
“Was it Barbara?” someone asks.
These questions and comments ripple across the sand.
The shark attack lasted thirty seconds. Five minutes after it began, two girls sprawled, eyes closed, on land amongst the crowd. Their mother and Casey Dubois and strangers in rainbow colors hovered over them, frozen, unsure. And Bonnie and Barbara—whichever was which—tried simply and desperately to steady their breath, to breathe in sync once more. A small, wide-eyed boy stepped out of the crowd, closer, only to have his mother pull him back into the mass, yank him away while trying not to look herself.
A siren’s wail drifted in then, stirring the stillness, rousing the gathering anew. But the identical girls only lay close on the sand, unmoving and identical still, but for the one that now seeped life, a part missing, a part removed in an instant, one hot summer day on Long Island.
Inspired by “Long Island, Summer, 1964,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
