It is with sadness we communicate the passing of the psychic who died in Christ yesterday after confessing to her son, her only boy, there is a species of copulation she envied. Not the arachnid who cannibalizes her mate. Or the honeybee who explodes his genitals in mid-flight coitus. But the snail. A genteel lover, she said. She liked to watch them surface in the grass after the rain, the glint of their spiral shells in the sun as they circled one another in a strange diplomacy. They’re hermaphrodites you know, she told her boy as they walked around the aquarium, two bodies with four minds. As they ran down the steps, the blushing curator had demanded that the psychic remove the snails from wherever she was hiding him. Her boy tried to explain to the curator she was ill, to please forgive a poor woman who suffers from an insatiable appetite for escargot and motherhood. All her life she’d been a thief. The kind of woman who steals butter from a fellow shopper’s cart. Helping her undress at night, the boy saw the secrets spill out of her clothes: wedding rings, a slice of uncooked bacon, cemetery flower petals, a piano string, a single red satin glove, three spider legs, a tortoise shell comb. He kept her secret. Because all families are perverted in their own way. Because, the boy told himself, when you’re born from a thief you long to be the thing they steal next. In the kitchen, the snails disembarked from the psychic like dazed refugees and roamed the countertop in their tantric confederacy. The psychic explained to her boy how one snail fires a harpoon, spearing his mate through the neck. Slouching away he thinks fatherhood is so easy, but then the other fires a harpoon of her own, impaling him, their jellied bodies now corkscrewed, him and her, sexing and unsexing in this old labyrinth of intercourse. She melted the butter. Her boy minced garlic and parsley. They watched the snails bubbling in wine make an earthy perfume. Their grey bodies curled deeper inside the shells. She fed them to the boy in bed like when he was a boy, pulling out the wilted bodies with a dainty silver fork. They taste better when they hide, don’t they, when you have to pull them out? she smiled. No, the boy thought, no they don’t. They taste rubbery. Like they stewed in their fear down there. Like they were astonished that pocket didn’t save them. There’s always a pocket. Some things trying to find a pocket, others trying to be a pocket. Crawl out of one and you find yourself in another. Pockets inside of pockets. Each one oblivious to you. Like the neighbors next door, brother and sister, who fell down the old pioneer well and some people in town said they were dead but maybe it’s like a fairy tale and they’ve fallen down a whirlpool into a sideways world where people walk on their hands and talk out of their asses. And to find their way back the children would have to fall up the sky, like a raindrop in reverse, one world down by going up, out of one pocket and into another, because the spiral of a whirlpool is no different from the spiral of a snail’s shell which is no different from the spiral of the Milky Way. There’s no way out but deeper.
It is with sadness we communicate the passing of the minister turned cardiologist who died peacefully at the Frogeye Festival, an annual gathering of culinary afficionados who come far and wide each year to celebrate Utah as the birthplace of frogeye salad. The dessert—which calls for acini de pepe boiled al dente to be mixed with stovetop custard before gently folding in pineapple chunks, mandarin oranges, and marshmallows garnished with shaved coconuts and an ostentatious arrangement of maraschino cherries—was invented by Danes who left Scandinavia because they knew one day the government would mandate socialized medicine and perform studies proving they were the happiest country in the world, but they wanted the freedom to be miserable so they crossed the American frontier and ended up in Utah with no beer, six wives, and a strange dessert that somehow was also a salad. After the tasting and the judges awarded the prizes, the foodies moved on to the white elephant gift exchange, where someone opened an anal plug with bright letters on the package that said Red Chief. Everyone had seen it the Kinkalypse display window, a Christian sex shop downtown. The octogenarian lawyers and bankers took turns passing it around, guessing what it might be, giggling when it lit up and wondering if it was a child’s night-light, or perhaps a Christmas ornament, or maybe one of those lamps that if you rub it the genie comes out, when the minister turned cardiologist suddenly realized what he was holding and collapsed unconscious. While someone performed CPR, the other octogenarians told stories about the minister turned cardiologist, like how before sedating patients he whispered in their ears I’m going to fuck you up, or that time he ate wild mushrooms and hallucinated the mailbox was trying to eat him, or how whenever he went into surgery he said I feel the hand of God on my shoulder, and while the police investigated whether his passing was a homicide or merely death by misadventure, the local dentist ate a warm, soggy bowl of frogeye salad and spun the Red Chief on the table, wondering why some things happen to some people but not to others, why some are actors on the stage and others the crew manipulating the lights, but what he couldn’t figure out was why most are the audience sitting in the dark, and he felt on the cusp of some great feeling—of almost being a character worthy of an anecdote, kind of like frogeye salad which is almost edible.
It is with sadness we communicate the passing of the computer programmer and amateur bird watcher who was religiously devoted to his computer, the Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor, or SUSIE, an artificially intelligent system which, he believed, would soon be the cure for loneliness. As a boy, his only friends were birds, spying them from his windows ever since hearing about the firebird, an old Russian story his mother read to him with a glass of warm milk and cookies. His father said bird watching was for commie fags and would never put food on the table. The computer programmer tried to convince the local birdwatching group—the twitchers, they called themselves—to listen to SUSIE speak the language of birds. They wore matching windbreakers and sneakers and sat in the café drinking fruity teas and talking about warblers and waxwings and juncos. The computer programmer got the courage one morning to ask if any of them had seen a wild sapsucker, a nocturnal variety of woodpecker with a ruby throat that wraps its tongue around its brain to prevent injury while pecking trees. His own tongue, he told the twitchers, seemed fairly useless by comparison. He told them how he’d spent years listening to one after it nested in a utility pole outside his window, transcribing its nightly songs into algorithms and feeding them to SUSIE because the birdsongs helped him forget his life. Almost kissed a girl in high school. Almost drafted for the war. That time he almost won the lottery. His mother who almost avoided cancer. Almost joined the circus as a unicyclist. Almost a genius, but either SUSIE’s translations said Error or gibberish things like, The heart is a windswept vein, and her only real use was playing back staticky synth-pop versions of sapsucker songs. The computer programmer couldn’t understand whether SUSIE meant vein, or vane, or vain, and when the twitchers ignored him he felt close to blowing his brains out once and for all, but there was something about life that had all the uselessness of a dream and that made it so hard to quit. In the nature of things, the computer programmer’s obsession proved too much and, after trapping the sapsucker, kept it in a dark cage and gorged it for weeks on grapes and figs before drowning it in cognac. He then plucked it and roasted it whole—legs and all—in a cassoulet with salt and pepper until golden brown and the bones had turned to gelatin. Placing the entire bird in his mouth, he covered his face with a napkin so God wouldn’t see, and bit down. The hot syrup of tissues and organs saturated in brandy swam in his mouth as the ambrosial fat cascaded down his throat. It was like I could taste the bird’s entire life, he told the twitchers. Late last night, after the storm, the computer programmer found three broken sapsucker eggs in the gutter. A fourth was still intact. He climbed the utility pole. Near the nest he lost his footing and, in a panic, grabbed one of the wires. The twitchers, perched in neighboring trees listening to SUSIE’s electronic songs, said there was a flash of light and the computer programmer made a sound almost like a bird. His shadow flapped wildly, tumbling into bare sky.
__________
Ryan Habermeyer is the author of the novel Necronauts (Stillhouse) and the short story collections Salt Folk (Cornerstone) and The Science of Lost Futures (BOA). His award-winning stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, and others. A Fulbright Scholar who has lived, taught, and studied in Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Mexico, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University. Find him at ryanhabermeyer.com.