Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories

by Cookie Mueller

more that it's a point of dignity to poke fun at the terrors, to be able to metabolise whatever life throws at you,

Every day they were different: beehives, barrel curls, air lifts, pixies, flips, French twists, bubbles, doublebubbles. The things I liked best were the way her scalp shone through all the teasing as if her head was a mango and the spit curls pasted down beside her ears with clear fingernail polish. She also had bitten-to-the-quick fingernails. I even liked the warts and nicotine stains on her index and second fingers. On her, all this was heaven.

it was difficult to see the true color of the brown water, difficult also to see the disgusting things unabashedly floating on the surface, things like rusty beer cans, plastic bags, used rubbers, occasional turds. It was very romantic.

There was no moon. The sky was like black cotton batting that enveloped us in a way that felt like walking through clear water in a pool painted black. Very clear and cloudless was the night sky, so it was thick with stars. We even saw clusters of the dust from exploded supernovas deep in space, thousands of light years away.

Why does everybody think I'm so wild? I'm not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.

Artists were commissioned by God, so art was backed up by a divine and formulated spirituality. At the time, God was the highest-paying sponsor. Now that God has been supplanted by things like Coca-Cola and pantyhose, art has found new sponsors with no ideology except sales. Commercial art usually expresses nothing more divine than the product it's advertising.