T.R. Hummer's Blog, page 2

Available Surfaces III: Mrs. Quack and Miss Cuckoo

Lay on, Macduff,/ And damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!" --William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 scene 8

Mrs. Quack sat at her desk in front of the class, striking a classic Quack pose of cynical boredom. From a perspective of many decades on, I realize that she was a relatively unusual specimen: a country cynic. Real cynicism is rare among country people, who generally can't afford the luxury of denial.

But Mrs. Quack had, so to say, come in from the cold. She still lived in the...

Available Surfaces II: The Gravitas of Paper

"Another damned, thick, square book. Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?" --William Henry, First Duke of Gloucester

In the late spring of 2001, the boxes began arriving. Buoyant gentlemen in brown uniforms brought them four afternoons in a row, stacking them on the old wooden porch in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, where I then lived, though I would not be living there for long. Inside the house, other boxes were accruing, because we were preparing to...

Available Surfaces I: Uncle Ernest's Tattoos*

character c.1315, from O.Fr. caractere, from L. character, from Gk. kharakter "engraved mark," from kharassein "to engrave," from kharax "pointed stake." Meaning extended by metaphor to "a defining quality."    

I grew up in a place and time wherein the art of tattooing was virtually unknown—or, to be more accurate, was beyond the pale. A map of local businesses would not have included a tattoo parlor, any more than a list of the local houses of worship (and that would have been a lengthy...

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse

Alexy Titarenko

It was theirs. They stood by the water at dusk, lovers scarred by the violence of their alchemy, transmuting the darkness at the skyline.

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It was not theirs. The boundaries betrayed them. Out of the core of their argument a shape arose, arsenical whirlwind, last word.

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It was no one's. A destroying wave passed through Being, positron to pulsar, invisible, unknown to them as they removed each other's skin.

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It was human. A double knot in the double helix hardwired them not to fate ...

Biography of Eros

Emil Schildt

The witnessing of things in the mind. But what mind? The lovers lay on the bed, handcuffed, saying please, and just for a moment one of them knew.

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Sleeping, one of them moaned. It was the dream of the interpenetration of souls. Death is in everything, crystalline arsenic dissolved in alcohol.

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They wore raptor masks. One used a small flexible whip. Its marks were radiant traces of ichor. Thus the walls of the sanctum were broken.

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They knew it was insanity, and accepted it, but...