Lancelot Schaubert's Blog, page 78

Apple of Sodom

Sam Schramski over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

She had the typical Eastern European glower: a look of someone, as my wife often says, who ate something, which despised her in return. Or perhaps she didn’t, but the windmill of guilt churned inside her belly and spat up the same physiognomy I’ve seen elsewhere around Silesia—someone solving a differential equation, waiting in traffic, or chipping away at lignite coal.

“No, we are not handing out these materials—they are only for activists.”

The café buzzed all around her. Outside, the hints of a pea soup skyline tinged with soot from nearby smelters or just puffs of gunsmoke left over from previous battles settled in. This is Poland; there’s a war around every corner.

A table stacked with advocacy material, ready for the taking but in fact merely for faking, was positioned at the entrance. Most things here are exactly what they appear to be; dig any further and you won’t find much more. Really, that’s not just a mining metaphor. So much has already been dug up, sluiced, and packed into a smelter. Agitprop is useful because it keeps a populace eternally agitated, but it does so at high risk: To exist in perpetual rage carries the risk of binding oneself to a pattern of self-destruction. Seneca recognized this in De Ira: decision-making by anger results in outcomes we’ve come to expect from three-year-olds and politicians who are toddler-like.

A sizeable Polish factory was set behind and in front of the mines populating this corner of the country. Its byproduct remained sloughed off in the grist. It would be a challenge to discern whether there was a sufficient—and therefore necessary—difference between the loud fabricators of energy and their louder fabrications.

Much like the backdrop of a seemingly doomed if-not-godforsaken conference, was the setting for another stage of mortis in the death of environmentalism. Remember when Shellenberger and Nordhaus scribed an essay entitled, well, the “Death of Environmentalism”? It was meant to redirect a flailing green movement, of course. While the authors and many other disenchanted greenies went on to take high-powered corporate positions or seats at think tanks (or both), the piece touched upon key vulnerabilities in the archetypal model of saving the planet delivered to the world from the likes of Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold (and Thoreau and Muir before them). The pastures grew greener, the rivers bluer.

Concepts like “nature” and the “environment” as abstract and separable had been troubling for the left and right, but since those death notes were penned, thinkers on the subject have modified their views of technology, societal response, and nature all at once.

Activism and its continuously writhing incorporate a different set of radicals or nonradicals, often forcing other features to the surface. Maximum impact in the pursuit of evasive ideals is presented as a necessity, and rarely has there been an opportunity to do very little over an extended period as there is now. One is reminded of this fact constantly when analyzing the efforts of previous researchers. An axis has formed, even solidified, between age groups and the latent effects of people who are only marginally involved in activism. Your children, who may have a strong opinion about family separations or gun control or abortion rights are more likely not to volunteer for the causes they hold dear, attend a street protest, or physically converse about the subjects in question—even if they have spent hours posting, trolling, and rendering their online personas into representations of valiant warriors. The stakes at play also include stakeholders who reveal themselves transparently when they are given a hand. They may end up playing into this mold fitfully and under pressure.

So on this rare sun-pecked day in a wide city park in Poland’s dirtiest, or perhaps second-dirtiest city, the coal ash unfurled to reveal an improbable sight: young people pushed to the ground, prostrate before law enforcement, targeted by the aggressions of a 19th Century Silesian cavalry, prepared to crush the skulls of errant hordes of saboteurs—the Silesian Uprisings?

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager with a strident attitude, was approaching the souls around her in defiance. Living with Asperger’s or a spectrum disorder very close to it, Greta, a 13-year-old from Sweden, professed that the nations in attendance were holding the next generation hostage and would pay for it. Dearly. Somehow. She moved on to skewering the potentates and tycoons at the World Economic Forum, where the receptivity to a climate activist’s premonitions was met with the same level of acceptance as a beggar at the backdoor of the servants’ quarters.

She managed to call out the scions of wealth and global capital in the plaintive way only an annoyed, autistic teenager can, even to the point where translator earpieces began to ring inside overheated ears. That is, assuming they were listening and not eating caviar-infused oysters on the half shell. They alone likely cost more than the world population’s average annual groceries. This if not for the presence of other, direr interpretations.

Throughout the circus of the conference, and in the presence of large swaths of the global elite intermixed with the sons and daughters of Polish coal miners, it seemed most plausible the Internet had captured more attention than the occult within the Spodek. Headlines spread throughout the world, Instagram and other social media gurus were pronounced and steadfast in their critiques.

Arguably, the forces of ill being confronted are no different than those climate activists dealt with in the mid-1990s. It was fashionable to be familiar with the greenhouse effect then. We can all remember the early 2000’s when the world witnessed the first wide-scale climate demonstrations, or even as late as 2009 when the Copenhagen Agreement was on the precipice of being signed. It alone would have ensured an almost eucotastrophe to the unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution. What we have remaining is a gaping abyss we may have to fill with nuclear waste.

Global finance is still in a privileged seat, with its ability to either capitalize on carbon dioxide (commodities trading) or risk (insurance) itself. Meanwhile, the majority of governments employ scientific bodies that accept the science undergirding global climate change. Yes, there are those nagging decision makers who dispute the continued existence of the scientific method or echo a fait accompli, which would make most ennui-filled teenagers blush in its hollowness. This in response to what might as well be the End Times if conditions remain unaddressed under real, coordinated international policy frameworks. Relationships between large nongovernmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy, which when younger and leaner were hungry for a fight but are now so exhausted by the mendacity of the world they bent rather than broke. The only path forward is an advancement within the business community at large, which is…problematic after closer review. The big NGOs, or more lovingly the BINGOs, go to lunch together, share high-rise office buildings, and even display logos with similar patterns.

Ah, yes, the café. Muted and generally under-frequented, the dyspeptic Polish teenager at the front door was more than content to shuffle around fetching pamphlets and fliers covered in radiant yellows and neon. The number of international visitors, whether activist, advocate or an odd collection of all of the above, was as amused by their presence as a coal miner is by the mineshaft gangue encircling him. Radicals and the bourgeoisie may not share the same ideals, but they do share the same mode of communication: the Internet. Or, at least they share the use of social media and the assortment of superpowers conferred by it. Bomb throwers and stockbrokers are finally in the room together, separated by strings of bits and bytes.

As with the sensibilities of a tragic Russian novel, let alone a Polish one, there were numerous losses without gains at the end of 2018. The train racing toward the cliffside, the finale of this story, was meant as a call for everyone to rid themselves of trouble and the knottiness of global problems. An answer would be the fusion of what political ecologists call the “bionic self.” We are all cyborgs now, as Donna Harraway argued decades ago. We should all be comfortable with our circulatory system flowing with liquid natural gas; our respiratory system with its putrid byproduct. Embracing decay and degradation as a means to embody our own loss is an admirable pursuit.

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leave all valuables

Dylan Benjamin over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

Upon arrival all lips were collected.

You Cannot Enter This Country With Your Lips

They say.

A woman asks why?

They take her child and put it in a cell with

other children faceless nameless lipless kids

why? why?

They take her warm lips

Do Not Ask Why.

In a line the Bodies move to the next room

You Must Give Us Your Twisted Tongues That Slither

They say.

You Must Not Speak Here.

When the tongues are collected, a test begins

Your Tongues Upset Us; Your Accents Upset Us

They say.

Now Say ‘Asylum’.

ah-shiy-um. ah-shiiiy-um, ah-SHIY-um. good, good?

One man is taken

Do Not Say This.

Lastly, an interview in a concrete room

How Can You Come Here? They ask. Uninvited?

They look

Their eyes are on throats.

The pressure is a blocked dam that will not break

A man can’t talk with his hands against the wall.

A gun

pressed against his back.

Do Not Talk Here.

There is no response for the voices have gone.

We Will Keep These Things You Bring To Our Country

They Say.

Until You Leave Here.

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High Standards

Karisa Ham over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

I want the best of life and I’ll not settle for less. I want to sleep on a bed that doesn’t give me back pain, wake up to a fridge with bacon in it. I’d like milk in my coffee. That will help me get to work, where what I’d most like is to toil until I sweat and then see the results resting in my palm, cradled by my life lines and shining. I hope to bring in an income that allows me to wash my sheets with ecofriendly laundry soap. Then I’ll pull on clean socks and crack open a book about mysteries, pages lit by the low light of the fire.

When I have something to cry about, I want to call you, my friend. I’ll call you from the living room and you’ll come even though you were in the middle of washing the dog. You’ll sit by me and give me a wet-dog-shampoo-hug and say, cry.

“My dear girl, you go ahead and cry.”

Then you’ll say, get up, move on, here’s a comb, you really must brush your hair. You’ll hand me my deodorant and we’ll take a walk on cement streets lined with resilient trees. I’ll tell a story to make you laugh because I’m grateful. I’ll smile with you, lips closed, breathing through my nose, looking at the ground, walking forward. You’ll know by my story that I wanted you to laugh because I’m oh so grateful to you.

And when you call me, needing permission to cry, I’ll bring two spoons to go with the chocolate peanut butter ice cream. I’ll sit at your feet and pass the pint up and I’ll turn my face down so your tears don’t get shy and run back into your eyes. I’ll stay with you until we both find the courage again to go into tomorrow.

All I want is for my heart to keep beating. Oxygen being breathed into muscles made for moving. Any number of things could stop it beating – test results, sad songs, steady growing bacteria, a loud bang, taking a drink of hot coffee while watching a comedian, one quick catch of your overly blue eyes. I can’t complain, my heart’s done pretty well so far, keeping blood in constant circulation. It’s only stopped a few times.

Am I crazy to want you to tell me what I’m doing wrong? Can I ask for my bull shit to be called out? Don’t spare my feelings. Don’t be discouraged by my turned back, I’m listening. I’ll keep listening especially if you end it with “I love you.” Like, “Dear, why did you say that? But I love you anyway.”

Don’t stop noticing when I lie. I love your look when I lie, clear and cold and sharp. Would you love me enough to tell me when there’s ketchup on my face? Or the real test – you catch my eye at the moment when it’s filled with judgment and wordless, you see right through me to the blush of shame. You see right through me to the tiny embryo-hidden-me who learns to accept unconditionally.

Yes, you might say my standards for life are high. I want a lot out of it, this living thing. I want to be able to keep houseplants alive. I want to drink cucumber infused water after a hot day. I want to go home and plant things in the ground and trim them with care. I want to look behind me and see better and fuller things and not get on the other side of the bridge and realize that I took what wasn’t mine.

If I could, I would fill my life with your quiet side-ways jokes that make me snort and with letters to my far away friends. In those letters we would realize the value of rough edges and words thrown together like someone packing in a hurry. How if we time the silences right with the noise, we might figure out how to say something. If we say it slightly strange and one of us gets confused, then we’ll cut and paste and insert an emoji and mail the letter again until we’re reading the same page at the same time. We would remember the time we walked around the glass blowing store. How the translucent colors filled all the spaces and the shimmering and tinkling chimes meant something, we weren’t sure what. Until we looked back from where we are now. The picture memory brighter than the moment we’re in, the place where it takes 4 days for a letter to arrive.

I would write a letter to you, too, at least one, that says I’m sorry. I know by my actions it seems like I don’t love you. I do but I don’t do it well. But I’m practicing. Then I would ask for the same present you gave me last month when you knew I needed patience and you gave it to me wrapped in listening and tied with a ribbon that said “Come on, you can do better than that.”

All I really want is to get a letter at the end of a full day. To spend the morning with everyone dear, in a forest on a mountain and we have to share the water bottle and we’re a little lost. But then we find the path again and we make it home in time to grill burgers. The charred smell spreads over our fence to the neighbors and it mingles with the smell of our vigor and we can’t chew for laughing. Then there are waves goodbye and you walk me to the mailbox. You take my hand and say “the brownies were a bit burnt, love.” You put my fingers to your lips, eyes are bright and we carry the stack of letters back to the house where I slide a finger across an envelope and pull one out that smells like cinnamon.

I want to believe that a rock could be a jewel and my very believing would make it so. I could be a jewel too, if you can believe it, even though now I’m dull and muddy and my edges are jagged.

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Morta

Brian John Yule over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

Gilded with petrification
Many lifecycles of man & beast anoxic lain
Drainage disinterred
From millennia-locked marshland sump
As story out of sculptor’s block revealed
This field of posts
Marks where a village clung
Encircling lakeshore’s cradling womb
The precious pull of water
These stilted pillars raised
Life from lifegiver’s mortal grasp
That finally would engulf & death preserve
Concentric whisperbreaths of Chronos’ counting
Marking each suncircle’s bloom & lull
The wide, wet, bountied curves
& thin, dry twists of paucity
Through frostcrack & sunspark & moons of dormancy
Sunstolen stretching ticks each anniversary
These necklace rondel tubes of cambium
Between drinking pith & shielding bark pushed out
Ringing the changing tempo

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Holding Myself Back

Ryan McMasters over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

Now that I’m not holding myself back, what else are my hands capable of?

If I ever hate myself, it’s because others taught me.

I know how to feel wrong, but I can barely give a reason.

Justification is for everyone else but me. 

I’m 30 & love myself enough not to starve. I stay active & amidst the soreness, I find relief. 

Acceptance is a type of soreness good friends tell me to breathe through.

Shame & narcissism are strains of the same virus, you know that, right?

They cannot live without attaching to something. They cannot grow without a way of leeching.

If you love yourself too much or not enough, the imbalance can kill you.

My goal is to be mediocre in self-love. We are so afraid of being mediocre in America, though most of us are, but we refuse to accept it. 

How revolutionary it would be to be content at feeling enough.

In public places, I can’t stop moving my feet.
I moved back in with my parents & I feel no shame. I feel safe & I mind my business.

I find a home in my own body & my legs aren’t running anymore; they’re building.

Privacy is of the utmost importance when it comes to reconstruction of identity.

Or maybe reconstruction isn’t the word if my personal identity was never constructed in the first place.

I am a chimera of all my friends’ opinions; I wanna isolate & figure out who I am without the whispering
Or shouting
Or guiding cadence

Silence: my best friend after decades of being the nightmare.

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Did Amazon cancel your pre-order of BELL HAMMERS? Here’s what happened…

Lancelot Schaubert over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

Did your pre-order of BELL HAMMERS on Amazon get cancelled?

Here’s what happened:

Back in January, Amazon committed to handling pre-orders and fulfillment for the October 12, 2020 release of BELL HAMMERS.Many of you pre-ordered from them both in January and now. BELL HAMMERS sold out twice.After learning from many of you that Amazon cancelled your generous pre-orders, I spent many hours on the phone this week seeking answers from them and INGRAM, my publisher.The answer? Amazon refused to help me resolve the pre-order cancellation because they do not hold the Kindle Direct Publishing rights for a paperback version of BELL HAMMERS, despite this being a hardcover and ebook release only.  This is an attempt by Amazon to grab the paperback rights for my book, in order for them to increase their profits.I will not cow to Amazon’s bullying and have discovered that this has been happening frequently to other authors. (more details will follow).

HOW TO ORDER BELL HAMMERS:

If you are interested in supporting bookstores owned by people of color, your local small or rural bookstore AND the USPS — all of whom Amazon has hurt — AND in helping to get the word out about BELL HAMMERS, please click here to let Indie Bound find your nearest bookstore and purchase from them during this pandemic.
 Other ways to purchase: Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Walmart, Powell’s, and wherever else fine hardbacks of BELL HAMMERS are sold.

Amazon ultimately picked the wrong underdog author to pick on, considering the very content of BELL HAMMERS. A more emotional post — and rallying cry — will follow.

For now, thank you for preordering once.

Thank you for preordering a second time: especially those who preordered even more the second time around.

Most importantly — completely apart from BELL HAMMERS — THANK YOU for supporting your local bookstores and the USPS whenever you are able.

Until The End,

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Durmitor

Amy Hardy over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

We’re driving

Sprawling hills

They roll and roll

A tiny street

Twists and turns

But also

Wildflowers

They’re everywhere.

He and I

Blue sky and

Paintbrush clouds

“Ireland,” we call it

We’re somewhere else

Entirely

Somewhere far away

From ourselves

We hold hands

A song plays

(I’ve chosen it)

Makes us ponder.

Our time together

Magnified

He stops to let me

Take pictures

Alone he would never.

He does it for me

We turn a tighter corner

Squirming, afraid

The landscape changes

Mountains, sheep

And narrow cliff drops

Rocks, moss

New scenery

I try to capture it

But it’s hard to

Comprehend

At this moment

We don’t know it.

That,

In two short months

We won’t be anymore

Life will unbind us

Scrape our entangled existence

Apart

Or maybe we do.

And that’s why

We hold on.

Another curve,

More perilous

Than the last

Somehow steeper, too

Pebbles litter the road

Striped mountains

An argyle of

Wind and boulders

I get out of the car

Cold, whipping air

Beauty

So. Much. Beauty

And pain

Our smallness

Our greatness

I hug him

Time can stop

If it wants

We’re happy

For this day

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wandering man

Amelia Reed over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

wandering man

brim is snug sun’s Villain, could have been broader, musing scalp soft naked

pious nose begs Far From Sufficient, clockface hat ticking yesterday’s rhythm

light polluted moon a feral Ribbon

pink silence rewards brittle Exhibition; feet’s crunch to nail wafts sugar scents

into nostril yawns’ forever whorl.

wandering man

heavy scentclad boot musk; with living skin could’ve Gorgon scalp flirted

pushed in, sanguine Embracing Fingertips, touched scythe’s ignorant brethren

solace-found hands married to coarse pocketlint, Song Organ throned in bone

shawl near laced from mothholes; unconditional apology sure as Woman’s Hips.

wandering man

children vanish; leave his eyes saltworn too encumbered, lonely Tracing Backs

Heartfree memory serves when lapping butter from sticky hands but Oh Excuses

slips away wandering man like healthful table scraps, At Least Here he envisages the Anticlimax

Until bridal train paw draws forth reverant plum from autumn’s breast; and coward fog shies away

wandering man

gone

unwatching eggshell children ogling morning fruit’s Eulogy Juices.

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Thoughts and Prayers

Breslin Sand over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

“Tell us what happened two days ago on Monday, April 14th, Mr. Shaw.” I glowered at the hollowed face man sitting at the metal table before me. I could taste the smell on him. It tasted like rotten eggs that had been left in soccer mom’s van in the middle of July. It was a stench of old mud and decaying skin. His breath was so dirty that he didn’t need the cold for it to escape in a fog.

“Listen Mr. Finke and Ms. Truman,” Shaw said with a hard lisp. “I saw nothin. I thought there was something off, but I was wrong.” I watched his bubbled glasses bobble on his nose with every inflection of his voice. He would pause between every word to gnaw at his blistered underbite of a lip and suck back the saliva before it drooled over.

It had been a long few months looking into missing person after missing person with only a rippling mountain of personnel files tall enough to shade me from the harsh fluorescents above to show for our work. I was growing tired and so was my partner, Truman.

“When we asked you two days ago you said you saw everything, what do you mean you didn’t see anything,” Truman asked. She was being coy. She sat across from him with an easy posture that was open and inviting. I was warring with my throbbing temple while leaning against the two-way mirror. If the holed leather jacket and sandals wasn’t any indication that he was crazy, I didn’t know what would.

“Maybe I did see something, but how do I know I can trust you?”

I snorted. Both Truman and Shaw looked to me. Shaw with dumbfounded eyes that were horrifyingly magnified under bushes for eyebrows. Truman’s eyes were ablaze with agitation, I knew she was willing me to combust. How does he know if he can trust us? I thought. Us? We had no idea if Shaw would even be telling the truth, but here we were trying to take him at his word…no matter how much we detested the thought of taking a clinically insane homeless man at his word. After almost a hundred interrogations about the missing people, we had nothing left to go on.

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, I thought. Sherlock Holmes always said it best. Questioning clueless landlords, distraught family members, perpetually late friends, absentminded neighbors, and scorned lovers, always left Truman and I with sour tastes on our tongues. They all had solid alibies and more questions for us than we did them all expressed in wide arrays of agitated emotions. Worst part? We had no serial suspects. The first one or two disappearances were average suspects of the loved ones and close friends, 97 missing persons in three months later led us to believe there was a serial kidnapper making it near impossible to find a solid suspect. Hardly any missing person or group was connected to another which created weak threads we were now pulling out of our asses. Shaw didn’t go to the same Kroger as Mrs. Jones, not to mention he couldn’t remember what he did a week ago, there was no way he was capable of mass abduction.

“Sorry, bad cough,” I said after a second, holding back another laugh. “Please. Continue.” Truman turned back around to face Shaw across the table from her. I leaned the back of my head against the cool glass of the interrogation room trying to convince myself it wasn’t as stuffy as it was.

Truman took a massive breath before responding, “We’re the police, I promise that you can trust us. We only want the best for you.”

Shaw’s head moved like he was trying to paint the words with his thinning hair and glittering dandruff. I bit my tongue to contain my smile and another interruption. The hard stamp of molars into the muscle released a ball pent up anger that had been festering in my chest. This was getting ridiculous and checking my watch every ten seconds wasn’t helping time to speed up. I bit harder. The anger was coming back. The man was full of shit. “They workin for the government and you are workin for the government too, so how do I know that you all are not one of them?”

I watched Truman’s head collapse behind her shoulders. She was fighting hard to not give up on our only lead, or rather our non-lead. She knew as well as I did that most of this couldn’t be true. We had been played just as we were by ex-boyfriend, Alan, who really just wanted his name in the paper and his Xbox back from his girlfriend’s apartment. “If I was one of them, wouldn’t I know who they were?”

“No! No! No! That is exactly what they would say! They would lie to see how much I know.” He slapped his hands on the table, the sound reverberated in my ear drums. The ringing of the metal table crescendo-ed. “Then you all would probe me with your probes again!”

I tilted my head forward and felt its weight. Thrusting my body into an upright position from the wall, I said, “If we promise to not probe you, will you tell us what you know?”

“Yeah, yeah, that works,” Shaw said. “But you gotta pinky promise there’ll be no probes.”

I released the breath I didn’t realize I was holding to look into his puffy face. Shivers ran down my spine just looking at the grimy stub of a pinky finger waiting expectantly for me. Truman had to hide her smile. It was slight, a type of smirk no one but your inner self would pick up on. But after being partners for five years, there was hardly anything we didn’t notice about each other. I stepped up to the table and took his finger in mine. He shook with gusto for several gratuitous seconds. It felt like I was shoving my hand in a can of cooled grease before it solidified. Were there crumbs stuck to my finger?

Shaw smiled a funky yellow smile. “It’s a group called the Populates, you see?” He looked expectantly at our faces. I think he was looking if we knew what he was talking about when we only were focused on the drool bouncing in the corner of his lip. “I got too close before and that was the first probing….” I focused on the fit spewing from Shaw’s animated face. Its trajectory arced out of his mouth and plummeted to the table in disastrous explosions. The sputters that didn’t arc were straight shooters with aim on Truman’s person. She sat there and took it with the only notion of annoyance coming from her slight flinch of her hand beneath a loose watch. Shaw droned on about probing and some serum. I looked up at the square ceiling tiles, I have counted them too many times before that I knew there were six back and seven long with ten thousand speckles throughout. I knew it too well to keep me occupied.

“This gentleman walks up to some persons and strikes up a conversation,” Shaw continued. “The persons try to back away when a pink mist appears then they and the itty-bitty man walk and laugh away together. Real strange.” I heard Truman ask about itty-bitty man and being able to describe him to a sketch artist, which was of course a no. I studied the floor. It had just been cleaned. No dust was collected in the corners and I could see the wavering reflection on the sole of my boot’s tip. I felt my weight sag against the rough wall and cemented brick and threw my right leg over my left. My hips complained about the shift but relaxed into the changed. I crossed my arms over my chest and nestled my biceps between my leather shoulder holsters. I could see more of my foot’s reflection now, enough to wiggle my toe in salutations to the rest of myself. I smiled.

“I didn’t think much of it until you both showed up the next day asking questions about the family, but not the man. Ronald told me I should have followed. I hate it when he’s right.”

“Ronald?” I asked. There might be a non-crazy witness after all.

Shaw mentioned a squirrel and I immediately regretted asking.

“He’s always watching me,” he said. “His fluffy tail is only a government allusion for cuteness—actually, where do I file for candy theft? I left a Butterfingers on the bench while sitting with a few guys to find an acorn for Ronald and then turned back and it was gone! Do I file it with you or the front desk?”

Was he talking that a squirrel stole his friend’s food, or his friend was an actual squirrel? I was going with the latter. A beetle popped through the crack in the door from the hallway and stole my attention. It had a shiny black exoskeleton with red dots painting its back, I had never seen one of these beetles until a few months ago and then they were everywhere. I surveyed the one before me. The dots were more vibrant than fresh blood and the dark shell reminded me of the utter darkness I had only felt underground while spelunking. I prayed that it would come my way so I could squish it. I flicked my boot to gain its attention. It saw and hopped up and down. Was it giddy? It scuttled toward the rubber of my shoe, gaining speed as it came. I swore it was trying to tell me something. I swung my right foot out, so it hovered over the beetle. It was no bigger than the ball of my foot. I stepped down gingerly to hear the squish and to not interrupt the investigation. Red ooze ran out from under my boot. I grimaced and the ooze but felt a deep pleasure like finally popping a huge pimple. I fought back my sigh.

“Don’t you know what you’ve done?” a dark voice said. My head jolted up to see Shaw’s eyes locked on my foot. I looked to Truman, she was just as lost as I.

Shaw burst from the table banging his chair against the wall as his deflated balloon of a belly walked to kneel at my feet. A tear bigger than his eyes rolled down his acne scarred face. “Shoo! Shoo!” he said pushing at my shins. He grimaced. I looked down to see the ooze dragging with my boot. “Have you no manners?” he asked. I snapped my mouth shut; I hadn’t realized it was open. Shaw was mumbling apologies to the broken beetle that still twitched. Truman sat still. I didn’t know what to do. It was only a beetle, why did matter if one were to die? It was natural. Big guy squishes little guy, that is all.

“I told you that I would find you after the meeting! Why did you come in here? Why?” Shaw asked the bug. His voice was cracking between each hiccupped inflection.

“It—it was only just a beetle—” I finally said completely flustered. It was only just a beetle. I didn’t understand why it deserved an entire uproar of anger. I thought of the beetle posts I would see on my Facebook. Kids these days made memes out of the simplest of things. These bugs would be smashed into Gatorade bottles and made into rattles. Others created art in respect to the vibrancy of their color. Others would rant about finding them in the shower or on their pillows at night. They were only nuanced nuisances.

“It was only just—” Shaw said in a breathy whisper. His back shook. His voice sunk, “I want him out.” His head thrusted itself onto Truman. “I will not say anything more while this man in the room.”

I wanted to fight back but it wasn’t worth my time over a bug. Shaw had gotten us nowhere and fighting him wouldn’t make the conversation any saner. I sighed and took my leave.

ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ

I had already broken the tip of my pencil by the time Truman came out and a shiny grey smudge now stained the corner of my desk. I hadn’t registered that she was there until I looked up to see her one raised eyebrow and beady eyes looking sore from all the eyerolls she must have performed. I shrugged.

“So, I was looking into that city block surveillance again, the one by that flower shop,” I said breaking the mood. Silence was too heavy for me. It made our reality more real which was too bleak for me to handle. I analyzed the most recent case about the missing family. Happily married parents for the better part of twenty years with two children: a son that was a sophomore in high school and a daughter that was in seventh grade. They were as ordinary as a middle-class suburban family could be. They had gone to surprise dad for a special birthday lunch. It made zero sense why someone would have abducted them. Neither the parents nor the children had any priors, not even a speeding ticket. The parents were on the PTA and ran a carpool system. There was nothing significant enough about the lives they led that deserved them to be uprooted. Why would anyone take them? How could someone be ruthless enough to take all four of them at once?

Truman gave me a look as if I was a fallen puppy just learning to walk. I knew she wasn’t wrong in why she had given it to me, I had already looked for the footage a hundred times before. Three cameras displaying the intersection plus one inside the bodega across the street looking out and somehow, they all miraculously stopped recording for an hour. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. We were used to the in-the-dark calling card by now. Public places with no surveillance or paused footage and people vanishing without a trace. Whole families would dissolve into thin air. It took the first fifty or so people to go missing for the town to start worrying and another thirty for “thought and prayers” with a shared picture to be all over social media with action groups to help prevent the disappearances to now 264 people out of a population of almost twenty-five thousand later and only a handful of people comment toward the missing persons posts.

“But think about it, if we look at nearby cameras for adjacent street corners maybe we can follow the family’s path to see around what time the got within our search zone?” I paused to take a hearty breath. “They we can narrow down the hour and start looking at nearby street corners at opposite ends to find faces around that time span, we can narrow down our search.”

Truman gaped. Even being a detective on these cases her motivation could only go so far. She was giving up like the rest of Seattle. “Adam, that is impossible. You must know that. If we were to comb through hours of footage in the heart of the Central Business District—do you realize how many people pass through? Not to mention people in cars or leaving apartment buildings or workers…that’s hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It would be next to impossible to narrow down.”

I knew she was right. We already had our top tech guy try weeks ago for a missing woman and there was nothing. “There can’t just be nothing!” I said. Other officers stopped to stare at us, I hadn’t realized how loud I had gotten. The only sound was the sputtering of the copy machine. “There can’t just be nothing,” I said at almost a whisper with my bravado punctured. “If we take the description Shaw gave us and apply it to this past disappearances and cross check it with others like it, we might be able to find something.”

“Shaw led us nowhere and you know it. He is a homeless man on the street who thinks government conspiracies about mysterious population-control groups and bugs are somehow connected. You can’t believe a word he says.”

“But maybe we don’t need to take him at his word,” I responded. “Maybe we can just follow his movements through his eyes. That way we don’t need him as a witness. If we track Shaw’s movements maybe, we can pinpoint an exact time that the abduction may have occurred. The man he mentions—if there even is a man—could have blocking out the cameras for himself and the family, not a crazy homeless man…”

I let my voice trail off when Truman had the same look plastered on her face when she saw that Shaw was our star witness. I gnawed on my lip and tasted the sweet taste of iron warm the inside of my mouth. Shaw was a kook, that much didn’t need to be stated. I looked down at the further research I had done on Shaw prior to the interview. “Shaw graduated from Princeton with a master’s in environmental studies and a doctorate in Theoretical Science, right?” I said after almost an hour of silence. “After graduation, he was in Argentina for a study on bugs and went mysteriously missing…”

Truman laughed. “He popped several days later in the woods dazed, with no recollection of what had happened to him. He initially said it was the men who built the pyramids now he says it was the government, when in reality, it was just a nasty car crash. I read the report too. Whoever he was before doesn’t matter because who he is now, is no longer that same man.”

I watched another two beetles dart across the floor. These things were everywhere we looked.

“I guess the beetles are the government’s doing as well,” Truman said with a laugh. I looked to see that her slight figure watching them. “After you left, Shaw was telling me the government releases indigenous species into the environment when one species begins to become over populated. Once the population goes back down, they kill off the indigenous species, I guess they haven’t found a way to kill these beetles yet.”

These bugs gained internet attention throughout the city like a Greek fire never to be put out, but these people…these missing people—this missing family—only received thoughts and prayers with the occasional share when the moment was convenient. How could they be so careless? People were disappearing. People with loved ones that could be getting murdered and nobody seemed to care. Not even the police. The past year filled with these occurrences and all everyone seemed to care about were beetles. The beetles ended up on the news frequently, but only when a popular business man go missing did the journalists bat an eye. The cases the public demanded to be solved based off someone’s popularity or fame were the cases I got to last. The average people that most would forget were just as important, if not more in my mind.

“I don’t think anyone wants to kill them, that’s the thing,” I said. I hated how idolized they were becoming. “I’m fairly sure I am one of the few actively trying to squish the pests.”

“No, they probably don’t want to,” Truman chuckled. I knew what she already thought. She loved thing things for their beauty and hated the slime. She would rather one stay alive, so she didn’t have to worry about what comes out and the clean-up. She always reminded me how a bug’s best friend is karma. You kill them and they still get the last laugh. “Hey, I really want to find these people too. You know that. I love this city and I swore to protect it, but I feel like we search for half a needle in citywide haystack. It just can’t be done. I’m not saying we shouldn’t keep looking, but we don’t have any solid leads. I’m getting a soda. Want anything?”

I shook my head no and listened to the dulled footsteps of her leaving. Maybe she was right. Maybe this was a lost cause I just couldn’t give up. But Truman wasn’t the one listening to the calls all morning asking if we had any leads on sons and nieces and husbands and moms. That was me. I was the one picking up the phone to voices drowning in tears as they babbled about the what they might have for new information like their daughter had been trying a new yoga place recently in the city. Or that their friend stopped saying as many positive aspects of his day, maybe he was being threatened and couldn’t tell anyone and was hoping someone would pick up on it. I told them I would look into it. “Promise me that you’ll find them,” the callers would plead. “I’ll do my best,” was always my response. Some would scream that it wasn’t good enough. At this point, they were most likely right.

I felt our small precinct caving in on me, but I didn’t dare move. I had to solve this case. I felt my breathing slide in and out with perfection, so why did it feel so labored? I heard the pleading cries from the phone ringing in my head. I was about to explode. Was I going to explode? I think I’m about to explode. I’m burning up, was that normal? I should alert everyone around so when my timer goes off they are out of the blast radius. How did I let a bomb get inside of me? Can I feel the bomb? I can’t feel anything. Wait, I can wiggle my toes. But that feels off, what did it used to feel like? Wow I am never going to solve this case. At least when I blow up people will say I tried my best and no longer how much of a failure at being a detective I am. After today, this case would become just another cold case that nobody gave second thought too. My record was now tarnished from al of these cold cases. I couldn’t let another one become just that. I couldn’t let a family vanish without a trance or reason and have an entire city forget about them too.

“I got you a coke.” I looked up to see Truman beaming down. Following her outreached arm, I saw an icy red can. “You were spinning in your chair looking all bummed and stuff so I thought I would try and cheer you up.”

I willed myself to speak. “Thanks,” I said taking the can. It sounded distant and unfamiliar.

“Of course!” Truman threw herself into her desk chair and tore open a candy bar. “You’ve been so stressed recently,” she said with her mouth full. “I’ve seen your apartment and you are one pinned yarn string away from losing it. We will find these people, I promise. But you won’t if you kill yourself in the process.”

I sighed. Truman was probably right. She was always right. Her cool demeanor was what let us to solve a majority of our cases. She would be nonchalant and figure out the big picture while I would be caught up in the little picture, that’s what made us a great team. She could guess the culprit within a day of the case while I would find the smallest clues to nail them in the end.

“I think we should go back to that flower shop,” I said. I sucked out the remaining blood from the inside of my lip while waiting for her answer.

“Adam,” she said. I could hear the annoyance she was fighting to restrain. Her annoyance levels peaked on difficult cases when I wouldn’t let small details matter, now when small details were all we had without a big picture to chase, she didn’t want to deal with my antics any longer. I felt bad for pushing her, but these people needed more than thoughts and prayers. “We’ve gone back to so many crime scenes for these cases. We know what we’re going to find.” Nothing. We were going to find nothing. But god damn it why couldn’t she see how many people were missing? Why didn’t she care? I willed her to care. She released a sad, quaking breath. That sounded like she cared, right? Sad is an emotion for this scenario. “I think it’s time you were removed from this case.”

“What did you say?” I couldn’t have heard that correctly.

“I spoke with Captain Sheenan and he agreed. I was just praying it didn’t come to that.”

“That’s ludicrous,” I said. I could feel the heat of my anger flood my temples. “It’s absolutely absurd!”

“Its just—you’ve gotten to be obsessed. You don’t sleep or eat. All you ever talk about is the cases. Most of the city has already moved on. Listen, I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules…”

“But I’m the only one that seems to care! Don’t you care at all!”

Truman’s eyes grew wider than quarters and her mouth seemed big enough to swallow them whole. I knew she wanted to say she was trying but it wasn’t worth it. She knew I would never believe that her effort would ever be enough to solve this case. I stood, kicking my chair back and flung my stapler across the room while yelling, “No, you don’t care. I know you don’t care.” The stapler meaninglessly doinked against the bricked wall and clattered to the floor. People were staring again. Everyone was frozen still, even the copier froze to watch me. Truman stood to protest but I yelled her back into her seat. “This is bullshit! I work my ass off, and I am the one kicked off the case. Me? Not you who half-asses everything while I do the grunt work. No!” I threw the can of Coke, splashing it all over her and the floor in its path to the wall. “No, this isn’t right. How can I be the only one that has pissed off? How can I be the only one that seems to care about these people and what is happening?”

“Detective Finke, that is enough!” Captain Sheenan said. “You’re dismissed until further notice.”

ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ

I should have gone home. I should have taken a breather and gone home. I should have calmed down and gone back over the case files that sat in my muddled apartment. I went to a bar. I drank. And drank. And drank. Light beers for a failure. I had nothing else to live for without being a detective, why not drink myself under the table? I switched to scotch. But maybe I was too drunk because it looked like a beetle was hopping up and down trying for my attention while another was pushing peanut shells together. No wonder these blasted things were so popular. They met the side of my fist. This case had been my life. I just wanted to do some good. I had done all of the work and overtime. I was the one who cared. Not Truman. Not Captain Sheenan. Me! Me. I cared. I should have been the one to kick others off, not the other way around. I took my glass of scotch down in one gulp. It was a blessing in disguise, I convinced myself. Now I had all of the time in the world to do what I really wanted to do.

I went back to the flower shop. I stumbled over parking meters and trash cans, but I made it back to the scene of the crime. People were starting to come home work. They for some reason walked further around me when I tried to question them. Several stopped to say their brief pity elevator pitches about the poor families and loved ones, nothing genuine. I yelled. They ran. This was happening in their own backyard and no one was trying to find out why.

I crushed three beetles.

There was nothing here, Truman was right. There were no new cameras. Workers still said they saw nothing out of the ordinary. Businessmen lunching at the time were not paying close enough attention to ever notice. How could there be nothing. I wracked my spinning head. What did Shaw say again? Did he say that he was dizzy? What about colors? Maybe that they were all blurring together. Why did I not care about what he had to say? Everyone else doesn’t care, why am I being scorned for not caring just this one time? Because I didn’t care, I lost a lead. Not only that, I lost my case. But Truman doesn’t care about anything and she looks like a saint. The man’s best friend was a squirrel and he slept on the street corner a block away by the Panera’s for Christ’s sake.

“Fancy seeing you back here, Mr. Finke.”

I turned to see Shaw smiling a toothy grin. Was he still upset about earlier? I couldn’t tell. Some dumbfounded sound escaped through my lips and I cursed inwardly. The man hated me. I knew I should ask him more questions about his whereabouts on Monday, but my brain was too fuzzy to cooperate.

“Looking for more clues?” he said.

My eyes darted around to the three gooey green stains that were lined together on the pavement not two sidewalk squares behind him. I tried to block his vision by leaning heavily on a big blue mailbox. It was slippery, I hoped Shaw didn’t catch my stumbling. “Uhh,” I said. “As a matter of fact…I am…have you seen anything suspicious since we spoke earlier?”

“I have not,” he said. Someone bumped into him in passed, they grunted an apology and I watched Shaw grimace. He doughy body coiled and constricted all muscles as if he were about to pounce, then released them as quickly as they had tightened. He looked to me and smiled again. “Don’t you just hate this busy street corners?” he said. His smile growing. “The roads jammed with cars and the sidewalks are packed like sardines. It’s a wonder how people get anywhere.”

“It’s rush hour, what do you expect,” I said through a burp. Shaw was spinning in my eyes.

Shaw clung to his nose. “Boy howdy, your breath smells terrible, Mr. Finke. If you’re on duty we can’t have you smelling like cheap beer, now can we?”

“Yeah…I guess not.” There was something off about Shaw, but I couldn’t tell what. I didn’t care what, I just wanted to care about him this time. With extra concentration and slurred diction, I managed to say, “You’re right. I smell like a bar. I’m just going to walk down the block to pick up some mints and a water.”

“No worries, Mr. Finke, have some of my breath spray! Just open wide!”

His smile was as intoxicating as I was intoxicated. I opened my mouth to allow the pink mist to encapsulate my tongue in a bubblegum haze. The mist crawled around my mouth and slithered its way into the pores of my skin and nuzzled under my eyelids and in my hair. No one looked up from their phones to notice anything more than two people sharing breath spray. I coughed. Shaw sprayed again. Was everyone just that apathetic? Or were they so self-centered that they don’t notice anything going on? My head felt light, but it wasn’t bobbling like it should have been. It was screwed on too tight. I was direct and sharp, yet I wasn’t focusing on anything. I could barely see. I heard Shaw’s gentle voice like it was a lullaby. The crowd around us blurred so that only Shaw was focused. Had anyone taken notice, it probably looked like a friend helping out a drunk friend in need rather than me screaming for help.

I coughed. “What did you spray me with?”

Shaw only chuckled. Beckoning me to follow him, I did without restraint. I couldn’t see anything, how was I able to follow? Was I smiling? Where was I? Was I putting my arm around him? Was he escorting me into a van? Why wasn’t I stopping any of this? Why wasn’t someone else stopping any of this? Why didn’t I want to stop any of this? I could hear other people and sounds in the background, but Shaw’s was the only one crisp enough to latch on to. I tried to scream. I heard myself giggle instead. I tried to fight. I felt myself relaxing into a leather seat instead. What was happening? Then it all went black.

ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ

I wish this was the first time I woke up on a table naked. At least the last time I had a gorgeous woman next to me who was also naked and not rotten eggs Shaw cackling over me. Why did people still cackle? I thrashed. My body came down hard against the cool metal. It clung to my warm body and bit into my goosebumps as if it were mocking the fact that it had put them there. My wrists and ankles were sore from the leather restraints. My fingers and toes swirled in swelling pain. Shaw merely cackled more. He was enjoying me fight. He enjoyed my struggle, my anger. He enjoyed my helplessness.

“Don’t worry, these won’t be tight for too much longer,” he said. His sharp nails sent shivers up my spine. They weren’t as greasy as I remembered. He wasn’t as greasy as I remembered.

“Did you drug me?”

“I only made you more…willing to follow to the right path. I spray the mist into your mouth, it mixes with saliva and comes out with carbon dioxide you more easily persuadable.”

“What do you want? Who are you?” I asked. I stretched the leather and it went nowhere. I looked around the room and I didn’t recognize anything. It was a lab of some sorts; I had seen enough movies to know that much. Everything was looked sickly in the dying lights that swung above. It took what was supposed to be pristine and casted ominous shadows onto their surfaces.

“I am one of many,” he cooed. “We are the ones to save the world through selective processing.” Shaw was having fun with this. It was a sport to him. He had a secret and I had to beg to know it. I had to get out of here, wherever here was. I had to find a phone or a car or just something to get to Truman. She had to be warned. The whole city had to know.

“What do you mean selective process?” I asked. From what I could tell no one else was in the room with us but that didn’t mean there weren’t more people in the building. Maybe there were some of the missing people. If I could only just get to a phone. I could tell them that I had done it. I had found where they are disappearing to.

“Silly, Adam,” Shaw said. “Tsk tsk, I thought you were one of the best detectives in the city. That’s why you’ve been on this case? Or were at least.” He began to cackle once more.

“Just tell me what you want and we can work it out okay? If I talk to a judge, I’m sure I can get you a lesser sentence for saving an officer and turning yourself in.” I knew I was lying. He knew I was lying. I tried anyways. I felt sweat roll down my wrist. How long had I been out? What day was it? Why was I just now wondering that?

“Oh sweet, naïve boy. The work I am doing is greater than yours and you’ll soon see that.”

“What work are you doing?” What if I flipped the table? I slid to the left and threw my body to the right. The table jostled. I tried again. There was a pop in my shoulder.

“Oh, it’s simple, really,” Shaw said ignoring my efforts. “You see it every day. Our population has become too much, and it must be dealt with. One city at a time. We have over populated. Our world is dying, you can see that, right?” I flopped around. He continued without acknowledgement. “If we eliminate a majority of the population, saving only the elite. Those who do nothing to advance their own communities do not deserve to be in them. There is no room for just average in the future, you see that, right? We can flourish more than ever before. Think of all the good we can do with fewer people? Think of no longer being a sardine on a sidewalk.”

I stopped my fighting to process what he had said. This bastard couldn’t be serious. I took my time to respond. “So, you’re killing innocent people who are not right by your standards.”

“Oh, heavens no! We aren’t murders! How dare you say that! We are a peaceful group. I care for my children. If they die, it is by the sinful hands of others.”

“What are you talking about? Why are you telling me all of this? I talked to you earlier about this.” What was I not getting? He was a scientist that went crazy. How did he end up here? How was he doing this. Shaw stepped closer to me. There was a syringe in his now gloved hands. Why had I not noticed him putting on gloves. I attempted to break free. My shoulder howled in pain, but I ignored it. He was coming closer. The liquid in the syringe was the color of Granny Smith apple. There was a weight on my chest. I stole a look to see what it was and there was nothing there. How could there be nothing there? I was suffocating. A hot tear sizzled down my burning temple. I screamed and no one responded. Shaw grabbed my arm and the rubber in his gloves held it steady. I fought. He pricked. The liquid slid its way into my system.

Shaw chuckled to himself. “Because it doesn’t matter if you know.”

ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ ᴥᴥᴥᴥ

A few days later, Truman sat at her desk trying to find something that she and Adam may have missed, but it was difficult to concentrate. Adam hadn’t returned any of her calls. She was going to head to his apartment when she got over with his favorite wings to try and cheer him up. She felt bad for what happened, but it had to be done. It was for his own good, she reassured herself. Not only was Adam on her mind, but her eyes kept following this pesky beetle that just couldn’t seem to settle down. It would climb her desk and bounce up and down. It would scamper through the case files and onto Adam’s desk and back again. She tried to shoo it and it came back. Even putting it outside was futile. There was nothing she could do. She tried putting it in her lunch Tupperware, her thermos, it darted out of the way each time. She was getting angry. Only when she saw that it had its back to her, did she squish it.

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Oedipus Goes into Exile

Gad Kaynar over at The Showbear Family Circus - Lancelot Schaubert's and Tara Schaubert's liberal arts circus. said ::

The frenzied doves are pecking at the eyes of the morning
Knocking over the dishes given as provisions for his trip
To Colonus.
The door closes behind him like the eye of a dying cyclops.
He muddles along in a warm puddle of sunny gonorrhea
And to find his road of no return he
Scatters the pebbles of the doves’ cadavers
Trampled by his sandals
Which he cannot see

translated by Natalie Feinstein

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