This Week in Word of the Day / 2-24-13

recant \ri-KANT\, verb:

1. to withdraw or disavow (a statement, opinion, etc.), especially formally; retract.

2. to withdraw or disavow a statement, opinion, etc., especially formally.

“I am not certain this is a good fit,” Satan grumbled as he dug through a paper sack filled with Daemeon’s paperwork. “I mean – I asked for your financial records, birth certificate, and social security card and all I am seeing are twenty year old report cards, parking tickets, and a shocking amount of receipts from Hot Topic and Christie’s Toy Box.”

Daemeon smirked and flicked his long, raven black hair back away from his eyes, though it immediately settled right back into place.

“I am an amoral creature that revels in the darkest delights,” Daemeon muttered with a slight lisp.

“Oh – um – gross,” Satan responded uncomfortably. He sat the bag aside, removed his bifocals and rubbed at his weary eyes.

“Look,” Satan began slowly. “I like your enthusiasm, I really do. I don’t really need creepy white guys in my army. I have plenty. I need accountants and the only reason I approached you is because that’s what you majored in.”

“Money is a construct of an oppressive Anglo-Saxon culture where sin is cornered and caged rather than unleashed to be free …”

“All right, all right, I got it,” Satan sighed. “You are missing the point. I have provisions to account for, I have weapons to track and disseminate, bribes to dole out. If you can’t even track your own personal records, I am going to have recant my offer. I am sorry.”

“But, but,” Daemeon blubbered, tears beginning to smear his thick eyeliner. “I am a child of darkness! I am a prince of man’s dark soul!”

“No,” Satan replied, collecting his briefcase. “You really are not. Good day, sir.”

satrap \SEY-trap\, noun:

1. a subordinate ruler, often a despotic one.

2. a governor of a province under the ancient Persian monarchy.

Ryan was a good kid, despite whatever happened that tragic summer. The Organization received so much scorn following the deaths, and as a satrap governing three neighborhoods in south central Oklahoma City, he was in the epicenter once the media firestorm ignited.

But people forget what it was like before – bullies preying on the weak kids, muggings, abusive stepdads, drug dealers owning the streets. With an educated elite at its head, The Organization was going to change all that, but they were just teenagers that had no idea how desperately the world clung to chaos.

tensile \TEN-suhl\, adjective:

1. capable of being stretched or drawn out; ductile.

2. of or pertaining to tension: tensile strain.

Carrie couldn’t raise her eyes from the steering wheel to the turnoff to her neighborhood. Her foot feathered the brake pedals, her eyes welled with tears, her fingers trembled. “Home” terrified her. Home was an empty bed where she found the corpse of her husband seven months before. Home was three damaged children who still didn’t understand blamed her for their father’s absence. Home was the grandfather, cocooned in a thickening senility. Home was the sister, who ran all the way from LA to Carrie’s front porch to escape the latest abusive prick.

A decent woman waits at least a year to lift the widow’s shroud to look into the eyes of other men. She lasted two months and the guilt tore away at her soul. She retained a 48 hour work week and cared for what amounted to five children. The tensile strain was so great, she longed for the great and terrible snap, just for the finality.

Instead, she drove on to Steve’s house, just a few miles away. He would be home and would make love to her. They would lay in bed for an hour afterward chatting about everything but real life.

And she would be buoyed just enough to survive another day.

umber \UHM-ber\, noun:

1. North England Dialect. shade; shadow.

2. an earth consisting chiefly of a hydrated oxide of iron and some oxide of manganese, used in its natural state as a brown pigment (raw umber) or, after heating, as a reddish-brown pigment (burnt umber).

3. the color of such a pigment; dark dusky brown or dark reddish brown.

4. Ichthyology. the European grayling, Thymallus thymallus.

adjective:

1. of the color umber.

verb:

1. to color with or as if with umber.

It began with a smudge of burnt umber, a color she always detested. She found a tube of burnt umber buried deep in her art case and listlessly smeared it on the canvas. She stared at the messy stroke for over an hour, then, timidly, added more. The smear widened, consuming the white canvas like an infestation. Phone calls rang deep into the night and erupted again in the morning, all unanswered and passing to her voice mail.

Fifteen days fell off the calendar. She emerged once every other day, just to restock groceries and secure more burnt umber and canvases. Throughout her studio were abstract clouds, all a muddy reddish-brown, some with careful black inking that outlined shapes only she could see.

Her father finally busted through the locked front door and found his daughter sleeping on the floor, surrounded by dozens of canvases filled with amorphous oceans of burnt umber.

Days later, resting on the back porch of her parents’ home, she insisted that the spell had nothing to do with the anniversary of her husband’s death.

varia \VAIR-ee-uh\, noun:

miscellaneous items, especially a miscellany of literary works.

She found the book stuffed deep in the discount bin. The dense anthology of varia and throwaway stories was hastily published following Will’s sudden breakthrough success. She slapped down a dollar and took the book home, fairly certain it was a waste of 97 cents and the three cent contribution to take a penny, leave a penny.

Her story began on page 213. A detail by detail account of the death of her child. The sickness, the long battle, the doctor visits, the bitterness, the horror of finding the child lifeless inside his playpen.

The violation was maddening. She tore the pages out, burned them, screamed at the flames and settled into a bottle of wine as the book was left open, brutalized, like the victim of a violent mugging.

Morning came and she laughed off her mania but, all the same, she threw away what was left of the book.

When Will’s latest book tour swept through her town, her curiosity forced her out of the house and across town to the very same bookstore she found the accursed book.

She’d convinced herself it was a fluke, so many stories written by so many writers – surely they overlap with reality from time to time.

Will sealed his fate when he signed her book with his customary personalization: “To the one and only …”.

whipsaw \HWIP-saw\, verb:

1. to subject to two opposing forces at the same time: The real-estate market has been whipsawed by high interest rates and unemployment.

2. to cut with a whipsaw.

3. to win two bets from (a person) at one turn or play, as at faro.

4. (of a trailer, railroad car, etc.) to swing suddenly to the right or left, as in rounding a sharp curve at high speed.

noun:

1. a saw for two persons, as a pitsaw, used to divide timbers lengthwise.

Blood and entrails poured out onto the grass like a spilled vat of spaghetti as the absently discarded whipsaw inadvertently severed the monstrous attacker at his waist. The deformed man with one good eye, scars all across his face and a spiked humpback convulsed violently as his deranged brain sparked desperately to cling to life. The killer bled out in just over a minute, falling into death like an infant drifting to sleep.

“Oh,” Ted breathed out heavily as he and the other seven college students looked down on the brute’s bisected body.

“Oh?” Marybelle asked. “You sound disappointed .”

“No – well – it’s just a little, I don’t know, anti-climactic,” Ted said with a careless shrug. “I mean, he’d only been chasing us for a couple minutes and tripped over nothing and then it’s all over.”

“What would you have preferred?” Cliff (the lone black guy) snapped. “That he butcher all of us?”

“No, of course not,” Ted replied defensively. “But, it did feel like a horror movie there for a second, right? And – it’s not that I wanted any of us dead, it’s just sort of a letdown that it – don’t take this the wrong way – that it didn’t play out more classically. You know what I mean?”

Stunned eyes from all across the group leveled on Ted.

“As the guy that would have died first had it gone ‘classically’, you can go to hell Ted,” Cliff grunted and stormed off to the van.

“Is it really just me? No one else is let down by how this played out?”

Eyes rolled and heads shook. Ted looked away from the would-be serial killer and turned to the woods, walking dejectedly off into the moonlight.

“Hey!” Autumn called as she jogged to catch up. She threw her arm around Ted. “It’s okay, don’t worry about them. They are just shook up. Almost being killed by an inbred mountain man with a flaming jackhammer does that.”

“I guess,” Ted grumbled as he kicked a small rock off the dirt trail. “But the flaming jackhammer was sooo cool and now we will never know what it was supposed to do.”

Autumn frowned softly, putting her hand on Ted’s cheek. He turned away.

“No one ever understands me.”

“I do, Ted,” Autumn said with a gentle smile. “I do.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Ted spit back, knocking her hand off his shoulder and storming back up the path to join the others. “Stupid virgin.”

xeric \ZEER-ik\, adjective:

of, pertaining to, or adapted to a dry environment.

He studied the Joshua Tree, the twisted mass of fibers, tightly packed, squeezing in every drop of rain it absorbed in the vast, empty desert. A sturdy, xeric, and resolute existence. Discomfort granted it strength. It no longer looked to the horizon for reprieve, it simply endured. It needed no other motivation than the obligation of survival.

He would become a Joshua Tree and the pain of isolation would fade. It must.