Necessary Heat

Jane Vanderbosch told me before Pastor Santo hid in flames then perished that I was spiritual and hid my strength. Liz was blue-eyed, naturally frizzy-blond, honey-tanned in summer. One day, a pleasant semblance took accord. It was Liz and somehow John Lennon around her face, at her piano, her fingers tiptoeing middle C, ebony to ivory, like goldhips. What is writing, Rick B.? You appear in your photo to be more handsome than your first brother. Sudden memory: ”Question mark? Curly cock. Exclamation! Stiff prick.” Eric deserves a position in this/our native country. Next I’ll suggest he go home to Oakland—a call for imaginative conduct—no mere white man living near here in the Middle West, west of Milwaukee. Mne Sota Makoce. The Land of the Dakota. Poet Anonymous lives in America—harped miscegenation, once, to Dr. Poetry, Ph.D., whose master’s pay was unrelated and horrid. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory fired the word, too, in Black Women Writers, the first I’d heard it—shuffleboard puck down center aisle, seminar table, into the net of the door. Hockey was my favorite sport, early. Trailing my father’s walking lesson, he conducted me in hand, north along Williston Road to the Ice Arena behind our City Hall. During the game, I rose in the stands, with all-out alarum, in favor of my future high school team. Liz startled, egyptically—then resumed. Not a soul or spirit could have predicted it, my enthusiasm. Hover-seeing, the hockey cheerleader jump-split it.

This story appears at Fictionaut.  First composition, February 14, 2013, revised off and on since, as is my present practice with stories I have written this year sur les amis.  Original version(s) may be available to those interested.  Latest revision, October 30, 2014.

My mother has shared, with enthusiasm, the plot of a non-fiction account of the Church's view of curiosity before and during the Renaissance in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in nonfiction. ~AMB

Flash Mob 2013 entry: http://flashmob2013.wordpress.com/