Thrice Fiction, volume 2, no. 1 released on December 14, 2020

 Twenty of my short stories appear in this issue of Thrice Fiction, vol. 2, no. 1, released on December 14, 2020 and announced on the Winter Solstice. R.W. Spryszak is the editor. Illustrated by David Simmer II.

http://www.thricefiction.com/?fbclid=IwAR0F1CSYTE83Ha6026vHnuQ74TxPNWEmLkjtISlTm-KwsOavcfDcV1SzTRk

Over Fifty

Althea felt subject to routine inquiries into her character. Was she someone who would hurt children? Was she someone who would hurt the old? Or steal into their coffers? Was she harmless or did she have ill-intent in wanting to help others for so long? It was one thing to offer inconsequential aid once. That was the most valiant form of helping in that it obligated no one to help the helper in exchange. Yet it was another thing to grow to become indispensable to someone without whose infirmities the helper could not exist. People in general had started to call that helpless requiring “codependency,” but to Althea that word did no good, and good had been her sole goal in helping anyone in the first place. She became frustrated to be the only one to last on, the only one willing to go the extra mile. The extra mile turned into the extra ten and twenty miles since no one besides her showed willingness to try. She thought for certain that she helped others out of love, if not for a particular person, as between a man and a woman devoted to each other, then for humankind itself. That sort of spiritual love had started to become defined as “dysfunctional.” Althea was losing her ability to relate to people in any proper way, since her way had become outmoded, and the new way struck her as anti-Christian, and she rejected it. She thought the new way signaled apathy. She had not been very religious in the past but had become more so in her incredulous state of not having allies in loving and offering help and succor. To Althea, the reason to be a human was being dismantled, and lower reasons, such as greed and convenience and selfishness were taking its place. She felt alone.

Then Althea met a sister helper, someone like herself, someone who wanted the good for others and who had endured examination of her motives as codependent and dysfunctional. Emma arranged for Althea to join her in the evening to watch television. They sought nearly in vain to find a program that could appeal to their authentic natures. Then they listened together to audio books. For Althea there was just a ten-minute car ride to Emma's house. They had found each other in arranging to buy and sell a lawn sprinkler in their local weekly newspaper. Once they met and felt the warmth in each other's eyes — different colored eyes — brown and blue that blended instead of hurting or offending — they found a solid place from which to go ahead and to be. For Althea the goal was not so much to talk about issues but to find a steady and reassuring presence in the other. Both women were dependent on forms of government assistance despite being ten years too young not to work and both were governed by the legal demands of maintaining eligibility. Each time one of them had offered to help a family with a loved one, she was met with rebuff and the insistence that she secretly wanted to invade the family's privacy for wealth. So each woman had begun to subside in needing to earn a living and needed only to accept her lack of scope.

“At least they have each other,” prospective families who needed their assistance would say when Althea or Emma, who had decided to move in together to one apartment with four rooms, turned  down their offers of employment. Chiefly, the ladies wanted to protect their government assistance in not agreeing to take caregiver assignments; besides, each realized, especially in each other's company, that she need not care for an unknown family's unwanted family member ever again with all its attendant hardships and that with her new hope and new way of settling things life had started to grow in satisfaction.

Medicaid

On the topic of Medicare, and in particular for those of you who straightened out the difference between Medicare and Medicaid less than a week ago, I have several things to say. I entered upon Medicare near the age of 35 . I was determined retroactively, due to the paucity of my earnings, to have been eligible starting in 1994. Those considered disabled by Social Security wait three years to achieve Medicare. I bet you didn't know that, did you? There is no short-term disability, dating back to the 1990s. ADA came in with George Herbert Walker Bush. Bill Clinton came in soon after Herbert Walker's first term. To my count GHWB had launched four wars in four years. Bonus points to anyone who remembers all four. One was Panama (Manuel Noriega). Sadly, Navy Seals were not deployed during Gulf War I. Let's imagine for a moment a non-deployed Navy Seal in a one-bedroom apartment in CA with his wife. Now it is bringing Mitt Romney's night of defeat to mind. How is men's lust and preparation for war related to government health insurance? There are, thinking of our certain, hard won (dead people, pincushions in HMOs, tattered scholars) changes in Medicare that will surely take place. No one spying on my page commented on my disabled five-day a week Medicare schedule. It is excessive to the point that an old boyfriend claimed greater health than mine. The only thing said to be wrong with me is the untested illness of bipolar. One can sink without dying. Bipolar cannot kill one, as hard for me to remember as that is, what I later called coronary to the forehead. Neurologists are turning feminist and becoming Buddhist. I guess Jesus suffered enduring consequences. He was not an atheist. He invented not being an atheist. Pray to spark reform of medical insurance for all Americans, not one, not two, not twenty-seven, but all 330 million of us. We demand good (basic) general health. We reject administrative costs that run higher than health costs do. Up by your bootstraps, Americans, basics. Now.

Bunker

Bunker

Dressed as an English professor on Halloween
I escape the red devil and run downtown.
I go to the Art Car hangar
I dance, I swing my golden brown briefcase
I see the sculptor Mike Scranton
We ride to his compound
I dance nudely before a fan big enough
to agitate the sea of air
in the room with its boxing ring.
The bathroom has cold tap water
Red paint runs the walls
I stay.
In the morning, I drive home.
The phone rings at 9 a.m. on the digit.
Michael says, "We need to talk
about what happened last night."
"What?" I say.
He says, "The host of the party
said you bit his nose, and it drew blood."
I said, "He grabbed my pussy."

Sorry to have missed you

I made the board this time, as I call the two-week recommended list. I feel like writing something better than it then. Yet thanks to those who fav'd and commented. All men so far, but F'naut today is often that way as have been several other kinds of online locations, and that is ... life. And/or it is part of planning and unlike paid venues or the next President or moving-picture windows and other formats. "That woman" someone with a fake-seeming last name called Hillary Clinton on Facebook today, but I am quoting it a little inaccurately, using quotation marks by way of paraphrasing disparately placed rather than adjacent words he used to refer to her. I began to type a reply and deleted it without sending it. It said something like, "Would you write, 'how could she trust him? That man is lying if his lips are moving.' No, too ...  Southern town." And for me, too much member-of-my-sex risk that might be taken as partisan squabbling, so I erased it and let his thingy float downstream. Later I saw that a Republican Party departmental up-and-comer, a woman, had reported to a press group, "The Republican Party will not lie to you." Then I came to Fictionaut from Facebook where to care is a human option and where option for me is not a Stock Market term though I have heard of it!

I'll go with Ackley's mention of 7. as a specific location to resume improving this writing. 7. in a real list of the first seven jobs I held would have been 2. except that I got started in thinking of first having coins of my own instead.

Within a week, I self-mined to make a statement, "Make the penny great again!" Stamps are not a job for me yet in my family there is a documented lifelong postal service stamp collection from Wisconsin. I watched off and on as my mother evaluated it using certified catalogs. Mixed in the box that had been transferred from small metal, perhaps silver, built-in wall drawers were rationing coupons, as I noticed. So, not unaccountably yet still surprisingly, as I happened to spot her doing once, my mother was stashing locally-manufactured coffee beans in the front hall closet. That was in '99, the year she retired as director of a two-person social service agency originally supported by churches then by churches and synagogues that she visited annually in offering a fund raising plea to those congregations that resulted in mountains of canned food and by most standards micro financing. She retired in a carefully planned and organized and thorough way, thorough except in one way, psychologically, and so I learned that no one ceases to earn income easily. I mostly lost access to earned income at 34 following a rigorous cross-country training as long as a medical doctor's. Her temporary fritz passed, thanks to my steady presence as the family's first junior member on medical assistance and the only one to have mastered a study of narrative chronology. Mastered is correct. Mastery in self-help sociopsychopathology refers to a woman's ill-ridden attempts to socialize with men after childhood. The short story also touches on my mother’s and my twelve-year adult-child tax law relationship, though without going into that tax law. I felt ashamed, as my parents' daughter and once-helpful citizen, that any department of revenue could let Adult Child enter tax code rather than a term meaning two generations. Adult Child is from chem-dep!

Today, life twinkles onward, inch by inch. In 2014 when I turned 52, advantage plan insurance included me as a senior citizen. That means that since 1994, 1996, or 1999, I have enjoyed one year almost certain of being an adult American voter who enjoys the benefit of Medicare. Almost, except that my home city nearly ensured there would be too little time to vote absentee despite my planning, thus marring it. That was 2008, the year I spent in New York, a low one for finance, the worst since 1929, yet a strong one for me, to be roving on sturdy feet again, several times a week, back among urbane pedestrians.

Sorry to have missed you

To Kill a Mockingbird or: Flannery O'Connor

This subject—Flannery O'Connor's world and work—has changed over time, not only for me. I read her along the way, early during college (not in college, since she is an American, and in college, An American is Hard to Find). Then I read more recently among 100 titles recommended as required reading for all men in _Esquire_ only one written by a woman: Flannery O'Connor's short stories. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" needs a good classroom teacher to alert the student reader who may without her believe that O'Connor believes that the Misfit is a good man. I suppose some may believe that the happenstance that brings the characters together near the end indicates something deserved about lapsed religion, since O'Connor herself is seen as religious. I have always believed the story is not titled cautiously enough for her likely audience, since it is too subtle and therefore too mature. The title refers to the absence of good men by heritage or in society, and for a genetic reason one must flip back in time to before the era given in the story. There are signs that the man taking his family on vacation is trying to be in a family leadership role for his wife, mother, and children. I read O'Connor's _Mystery and Manners_ with a sense of awe (outside class, and yet in some way led from inside fiction workshop by a Northern Catholic Graduate Woman Writer awaiting her turn to teach Southern Literary Tradition that didn't arrive until she was ten years into Theory). I revisited the book after immersing myself for years in lay religion, and I decided it is okay yet not awe-inspiring as it was. Awe-inspiring is Harper Lee's children's classic _To Kill a Mockingbird_ that I am in the midst of rereading this month after seeing an adaptation of it on The Guthrie stage. The Guthrie play features what at first I believed was the greatest performance by a child actor I had ever seen. Later I decided it is the best stage performance I have seen by any actor. The girl who plays Scout—Jean Louise Finch—is Isadora Swann. Near the end of the play Scout finishes our thoughts when she tells the audience, "Now we know almost everything, and we aren't even grown up yet." I profoundly hope (and would like to expect) that the world as we call it will never let down or leave behind or strand or delay or cause to lag this brilliant young actor. The boy who played Dill was also sharply inspired. The book is even greater, however, and there are all the details, delivered in the split point of view (not schizoid) of the woman-within-a-child and child-within-a-woman narrator who grows out of the writer. It is that book that has finally caused me to believe that literature is always for children. Literature is our ally and hears our snores. "Parker's Back" is not included in _A Good Man is Hard to Find_, so, sadly _Esquire_ readers may never find it or place blame for it on the publishing industry. It is findable in Norton. My favorite O'Connor story is called "Temple of the Holy Ghost," and I liked another one best about a grandfather who travels with his grandson on a journey to Atlanta. I can't remember without looking how that one is called. The others are old-school familiar, grim, startling, and somehow necessary. Is it true that O'Connor's body was frail? I wonder ... she might have been narrowly brawny or sinewy or muscled like a free range turkey who spent its life running the yard, unlike the cooped plump ones that go to Butterballs.

A Longing for Life

I met him the night of Ned's memorial service at Life Touch where Ned worked. It was Thursday, July 25, 2013. After Amy offered to bring our mom home, I went with Anne to a happy hour for Ned at the Greek place that moved to Eden Prairie from 394, Santorini’s. Mark Kelly's two children, Bridgett and Jack, were celebrating their graduations from Normandale and Minnetonka High School that evening. I must have had more movement in me then, more than two years ago, than I do now, because I went from getting laid in a hotel room with a newcomer dream man, to Ned's memorial the next day, to the Kelly graduation party at Jake O'Connor's last. I felt and continued to feel knocked over by the shock, but I could go somewhere in a way that almost since then I almost cannot. I shared a heartfelt, unexpected talk with Lori's mom about Jim Toonen's heart attack when we were in grade school, in '72 or so. That was the first time someone I knew died. The family asked us, some of Lori's young friends, to attend the funeral at Lakewood Cemetery. For Judy, gathered in the hospital waiting room with Jim's family members, not knowing what would happen to her husband, if he would live following his heart attack running for a plane in Chicago (they must have flown him still alive to Minneapolis), the pain turned her into a lady faking hospitality, as if she were giving a tea party. She said she kept asking everyone how they were doing, as if offering to pour them tea. There was no tea. Her husband died at 32. I thanked her for telling me as a woman. Then I moved to the bar to get a beer. An extremely pretty girl turned up to say something to Lori. It was someone Lori knew, a sixth grader wearing make-up, whose dad was also there somewhere at the party. Lori said she wanted me to meet him. David. His daughter lost her mother to suicide at nine. We have gone to dinner twice since then and shared dinner at their house.

Day of Rest

http://fictionaut.com/forums/general/threads/3392

Pomegranate juice thief walks home

http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/title

Tony Sanders

Immolation Row by Tony Sanders

May 2, 1957 to February 11, 2015

Der·ri·ère

Having a lover was allowed while I lived at my mother's house.

On Wellbutrin I Only Dreamed of Sex,
illustration by Daniel Harris
in Country Without a Name,stories by Ann Bogle
forthcoming from Veery Imprints

Sketch of the new direction
of the second full-length
book of my short stories.

Kipling at Night



Gourds & pumpkins from MN Landscape Arboretum Apple House

Stoop in autumn

Neglected foods in service of beauty

Walk in to white chairs

Fall in the Garden



Purple Turtlehead with bee: Chelone obliqua var. speciosa

Last rose of 2014 in Florence Bogle's Minnetonka garden






Ann Bogle's Fiction Fundraiser

Ann Bogle's Fiction Fundraiser

Not-Atheist

1. A person's own religiosity is not the same as their general membership in any religion. (Opinion)

 

2. My childhood membership in religion is generally grouped as Mainline Liberal Christian Protestant.

 

3. I have experienced atheism as a rather unwelcome visitation that was not foisted on me by atheists, who had never attempted to rid me of belief in God, though I had known atheists. An atheist would have failed at it, had one of them tried. Then the idea of choice would have been inherent. The atheism I underwent I did not choose. It was foisted on me by my exclusion in a spiritually-oriented group I belonged to. It mounted to my feeling not welcome—unprecedented for me—to participate in community prayer and possibly in public worship in any form. My exclusion was very unpleasant while it lasted. I felt forced to wear a helmet of stone. The imaginary helmet weighed like stone and covered that part of my forehead known in Hinduism as my god’s eye. I referred to my ordeal as “involuntary atheism,” and once, my brother expected me to try to describe it. Privately-educated Catholics ignored my having a brother. Syncretic Catholic Linda criticized my trip to see him in California in 2009. I incorrectly thought why. My life and inheritance remain unopposed to theirs. I attributed my discontinued belief to cult damage. I lived as a spiritual exile over more than seven, perhaps ten years. I took refuge in rereading the poetry of two American masters. One, a member Transcendentalist, seemed during my black-out maturity heartbreakingly expired in spirit, though in poetry she has no better. I read there God in His jealousy had withdrawn her worship. Later, I felt restored to my belief pattern of "agnostic.” My restoration did not greet me as a “miracle.” I just felt like myself again. I survived killers’ predictions. One of the would-be killers compares to Job’s Wife in the Bible, as Frank Kermode describes Her line in an essay. Instead of dying—as programmers obedient to Cynthia Macdonald and Catholic Sandy tried to order it, contrary to our link to what may be a common God—I became restored to beliefs that were mine before I met them, aimless, silly programmers. I remembered my sense, without its initial joy, that travel is the wandering Voltaire inscribed. Joy is not a belief, all-y’all father-fuck'ng, no-account no-writes.

Time Magazine's Campus Rape Issue

Time Magazine's May 26, 2014, Vol. 183, No. 20, 2014.

 

I feel tired of throwing that issue of Time across the room. RAPE: The Crisis in Higher Education by Eliza Gray. I have planned since first rejecting Gray's understanding of a system to write a critique of her sense of playtime as she records it in Time. The roundup of opinions called The Debate: How should college campuses handle sexual assault? is worth reading and is fair. Gray's feature article is a religious editorial that I feel required by Foucault to critique.

 

Gray defends the city of Missoula, the campus of the University of Montana, and its young men on campus, except six per cent of them as determined by social screening of their attitudes on campuses elsewhere. Gray's real call-out is of campus victims who equal 20% of campus women.

 

I believe Gray's target victims were softened prior to college attendance, in high school, or before high school. Their armors against War were not smelted by college, and indemnity ensued. She faults women's heavy drinking for the surge in campus crime. She faults a devil who appears on one of his shoulders, who encourages him—is he of the six per cent of intent sex abusers on campus or of the majority who are good at heart?—to have sex with a girl who has passed out. An angel suddenly appears on the man's other shoulder that persuades him to let the drunk girl sleep uninterrupted, perhaps to snore or even to drool a little.

 

In real life, rape occurs to the sober. Rape is the exchanging of a first name on the first rape night out. Rape is a consequence of color. Rape is off-campus. Rape is slightly daft, slightly smart. It is a campus amenity.

 

These days, penetration that is unwelcome, however slight, defines it.

 

Repeat victims are most aware of it. Victims are liberals and were trained early against racism. They duck reporting grievances on campus or off campus in their fear that to report crime is racist, even though they may realize that not to report crime is illegal. Reliable statistics, as staggering in number as they are, including statistics about falsely-reported crime, are on David Duke's website. Eliza Gray's perpetrators are good guys who heeded the devil on their shoulder that single night when the strange, snoring, passed-out, drooling drunk girl spread herself haphazardly lengthwise and became a willing corpse to their or the rare bad guy's one-time necrophiliac sensibilities. That night leads, unfortunately, without exception, to her extinction and curtails her furtherance in life. That is as Eliza Gray would have it in her optimism for college as a wonderful, sexy head start in life. The wicked silence in the victims had better come forward and leak, pronounce itself in time for closing date Time, lest the other eighty per cent of campus women should have to admit to knowing them. Victims, according to Gray, are not activists but are uncooperative girls earmarked for sacrifice who live in dishonest hiding.

Dreams from the Station in Gargoyle 60

Elizabeth Karlin, M.D.

Hobby Lobby

Praise to Civil Liberties News, publication of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. I am scheduled to volunteer at the ACLU-MN booth at the Minnesota State Fair this year and am looking forward to it. Nevertheless, I feel out of the loop re: Hobby Lobby, a craft store chain. I read in an interfaith newsletter that Hobby Lobby had fired a woman worker who had requested unpaid leave when she was four months pregnant. That case was described by the interfaith newsletter as Hobby Lobby's religious hypocrisy. In general, I have had the question: Are employers required to pay for the birth of newborns? Birth is much more expensive than any form of birth control. In my days as a low-paid employee, $5/hour when minimum was about $3.50 and $18K/year, one job offer I received in the publishing industry in New York, two single-owner business employers informed me that their insurance premiums were $2K per year higher if they employed fertile women than premiums they paid for men. I wish the debated subject could focus on condoms, in frankness. Condoms are instantly reversible as birth control; they prevent the potential spread of sexually-transmissible infections; and they are mutually consensual. Users of condoms are aware that no conception has taken place. In human rights, a man and a woman may marry and bring forth a family. It is a civil right in the U.S. but not a human right (as far as I know) to raise a child singly without the knowledge of the other parent, the father in natural circumstances or either parent in clinical circumstances. I see Ruth Bader Ginsburg's photo floating the Internet. One wonders if she is actually agreeing to be represented in venues such as Salon or if her photo is merely in use as a symbol of "women's right to choose." Women's right to choose is rather bogus. Choice, as I think of it, has turned out to be suitable as the brand name of a dog food. Women disallowed to have children may be more like pets. Roe v. Wade means that the doctor decides and it seems unrelated to abortion's legality; it has been a form of gag order for women, who it is presumed have zero interest in bringing forth children. To me, belonging is a better basis for understanding how a natural family comes about: Two people meet and feel belonging, and a child takes place. Under the Affordable Care Act, must companies finance child birth, that is very expensive and may involve surgery and hospital stays? Is contraception merely a cheap way out of comprehensive reproductive health care? Is it truly the case that women are disinterested in becoming mothers? Is it truly the case that employers welcome women employees' opportunity to have children? Should the costs of child birth only be attached to the mother's health insurance policy with her employer? Please submit your ideas.

Job Needed

Hi, Carolyn Holbrook. I guess you just poked me. Thanks. Sorry for being so lame. There is no excuse for it. I limp because it's comfortable to limp. My ex-cat, Francis, started to limp one day. I brought him in. He liked Doctor Jim, notable since as a smart man cat, he avoided men, except two, not other people's favorites, and dogs. At the vet, Fran leaped from the table without sign of a limp. Dr. Jim said that if Fran was still limping by Friday, he'd test him for diabetes. I told that to Franny at home, who had returned to limping in the hall, apparently for effect. Then, following a separate warning, since he wouldn't let me brush him fully, Fran removed the mat he had let form near his anus and deposited it at the door of my and my dad's former office. It might have made me look bad at the vet that he had grown, that I had let him grow what I had termed rasta balls. I saved the mat after Fran expertly removed it with his teeth, that my sister, visiting, verified was gross to hear described when I showed it to her. In the end, Franny lasted outside each day almost sixteen years without bodily injury. He hunted. He left the house in the morning in Minnetonka as if he were a fire fighter and returned at noon to eat cat food, even after slaying and eating half a junior rabbit. He never gave up cat food or his dish of water in the kitchen. Lizards in Texas, beheadings, bitter tasting, probably, so he didn't swallow them. He walked -- then and then -- the edge of the property as if he had read the deed. He was a Himalayan/tabby mix from upstate New York, gray long hair. Here is the point of my correspondence: I have enjoyed three paid teaching days in Minnesota, since my return in 1996. All three paid days were fielded through S.A.S.E., all three at Patrick Henry. I loved it there. I hope never to become certified to teach. I'd go in again, especially to Saturday morning detention. The kids were so responsive to my creative writing lesson that morning. Did the proctor tell you, as she told me, the kids had never liked a lesson as much as they had liked that lesson. Please get me a job! Is there a way? I'd hoped to be in St. Paul tonight for Mankwe's performance. Stan Kusunoki invited me. I lost time today, so I feel welfare-lost in outer space again. It's $1.33/hour for a 24-hour day that covers medical co-pays and insurance only. The last therapist, a nice one at JFCS, said I'd be unable to hold a job. I have signed up for a job fitness test in Minneapolis in August. Minnesota Workforce Center offers the test but has been otherwise uncivil. -- If you go this evening, please give everyone my regards. ~AMB