Want

By Zawi

A toddler will unsteadily wander about, picking up random objects. This acquisitive trait regularly results in attempts at items too heavy and too numerous. Walking, an act still in development, becomes overburdened. Inevitably things are dropped, sometimes hurting toes, or worse. Do we ever outgrow this impulse to acquire beyond our capabilities?

Zawi's Want is a fictional series of American tragedies, a collection of short stories based upon cities in which the author has formerly lived. Provocative and laced with comic relief, volume one includes four locales:

El Paso -- journey with a young family carving a life into the American southwest, encountering medical and militaristic influences, a sequence of suffering interspersed with fleeting love and hope.

Pittsburgh -- meet Katie, an adolescent trying to find her way through a maze of parental and societal tangles. Tragedy awakens her artistic expressions. A satire on 1980's middle-class America.

Chicago -- feel the pain, frustrations and communal love radiating from an inner-city Chicago project. Matriarchal Mary guides her flock, using a community garden as a physical and metaphorical foundation, providing resistance and shelter versus chronic and relentless adversity. The drama of community activism versus gentrification unfolds.

Orlando -- CEO Rich Demeanor uses George Orwell's 1984 as a guidebook. A satire on corporate and political dystopia. Written in 2006, it heavily foreshadows the revelations of government NSA spying made through Edward Snowden seven years later.

Herein lies an artifact of counterculture, four threads woven into the emerging tapestry of 21st century literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Space Option
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780989678933

Zawi

Ms. Zawi has resided in southwest Florida since 2010. She collaborates with contemporary artists throughout North America in a variety of formats, including musical, visual and textual. Writing since childhood, Zawi has explored the reaches of poetry, short-stories, and theater. With a voice trained in Italian opera, a body shaped by competitive butterfly swimming, and a cultural sensitivity moulded by Chicago punk cerca 1990, Austin slackerism cerca 1995, Brooklyn grime from 1998, Appalachian springs in 2003, down to Oaxacan uprising of 2006, Zawi's work contains such an array of seasonings. Born in El Paso, Texas, Zawi moved approximately every third year with her older brother and military parents. Her semi-nomadic lifestyle has given her a multitude of perspectives which have coalesced into a unique and expressionistic world-view.

Book preview

W A N T

v o l u m e   o n e

by Zawi

four short stories:

El Paso

Pittsburgh

Chicago

Orlando

WANT_justcolors_sm.jpg

S P A C E O P T I O N

Bonita Springs

W A N T

volume one

by Zawi

four short stories:

El Paso

Pittsburgh

Chicago

Orlando

© 2015 Space Option, LLC

edited by Gordon Borsa

foreword, cover image

and e-book layout by Gordon Borsa

published by Space Option

ISBN: 978-0-9896789-3-3

first edition published online

through Din Den Laboratories

© 2007 Kimberly Zawislak

Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, governments or governmental agencies, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. If you consider any of the material as a personal affront or offense, you’re simply taking this too seriously, not to mention erroneously.

SpaceOption.jpgWANT_justcolors_sm.jpg

F o r e w o r d

A toddler will unsteadily wander about, picking up random objects. This acquisitive trait regularly results in attempts at items too heavy and too numerous. Walking, an act still in development, becomes overburdened. Inevitably things are dropped, sometimes hurting toes, or worse. Do we ever outgrow this impulse to acquire beyond our capabilities ?

Want, as a general concept, is open to interpretation. In Buddhism — want, desire and attachment are the roots of suffering. Want projects one into the future, or into the past, thus rendering the present less than present. Contrastingly, in Napoleon Hill’s influential 1937 self-help tome, Think and Grow Rich, a philosophy that significantly shaped, or at least exemplified 20th century capitalism and America as leader in that movement, want and desire are the keys to realizing goals of self-fulfillment, material and otherwise. Many currently point out that the chickens of that methodology are coming home to roost in the form of environmental and societal degradation. Others would contend that its message and transmission of human empowerment has led civilization into an avalanche of marvels.

Paradoxically, Buddhism espouses that want for, or perhaps, that acting towards, the liberation from suffering of all sentient beings is the starting point in spiritual development. Christianity proclaims that greed is a vice, a cardinal sin. Most faiths warn against or forbid excessive material neediness. In this age, where in American culture hoarding is epidemic, the secular world literally smothers the spiritual.

Taking a middle road means determining how close want is to greed. Is there a distinct dividing line? An objective difference? Or are they relative concepts depending upon perspective? They are upon the same spectrum. Want can slip and easily slide into greed, addiction, lechery, coveting, material gluttony. These attachments lead to defensive positioning, eventually maliciousness, violence and misery. However, how could we even survive as a species without elements of want flowering? Is not Darwin confirmed? Whoever, or whatever, wants more will therefore pass along its genetic code, or cultural legacy, and continue the vine of its life.

As in Shakespearian tradition, perhaps the answer lies in a well-cultivated garden. Want occurs by nature; behaviour modification and meditation can at least shape the hedges of desire. (Or are they jungles, requiring a machete?) The questions beg: Who are the landscapers, therefore? Ourselves? Others? Who even wants to be so? Are we even free to choose? Moreover, what do we want as individuals? As communities? As nations? As species? What are the ramifications of our want? The possible futures are innumerable. Where do we go from here?

Zawi’s Want, volume one was written in 2005-2006 after the author had resettled in southern Mexico with her family, having left New York and American life. It was originally published online through Din Den Laboratories, as a Din Den Volume. Now in its second edition, as an electronic book published through Space Option, its themes, pointedly of privacy and government surveillance, reveal themselves as eerily prescient and firmly representative of contemporary America. Much of the counterculture articulated herein has since become mainstream.

Want encapsulates a state of mind and the zeitgeist of a generation thrown overboard. Fortunately, Zawi is an accomplished swimmer and in the course of her rhythmic breathing, she has generously offered us the mental life-lines of the following short stories.

-Gordon M Borsa, July 2015, Bonita Springs, FL, USA

WANT_justcolors_sm.jpg

E l  P a s o

The little red military hospital was familiar to the young couple whose first child, a boy named Brett, was born there just two years earlier. The second and decidedly last child, at least in the father’s mind, was the purpose of their current visit. Because the first labor was a mere two hours, the father, a military recruiter and certified nurse who had worked in Vietnam, had decided to keep a birthing kit in the trunk of the car. They feared the second child might not wait for the hospital, which was an hour drive from their home .

They did make it to the hospital because they left as soon as the first contraction came. The father, who was prepared to catch his own baby in the car, was not allowed to attend the birth because of the orthodox policy at the hospital that viewed fathers as impediments. Instead, the expecting dad sat in the hall like a civilian even though he had had much experience with what was on the other side of the wide, swinging double doors.

Military rule of the time also required that the names of the boy or girl be taken before the birth of the child. It was the father’s job to recall them, which was at best a distraction, giving him something to do when strict doctors did not allow them to accompany their partners.

The secretary approached in her perfectly ironed skirt and bright white-polished shoes. She even wore one of those cute little white pinned-on hats that resembled starched serviettes at an expensive dinner. Having discussed the names in the car ride to the hospital with his wife, the father was surprised to find his mind had gone completely blank. When the secretary was but a foot in front of him he looked up with an empty stare. She smiled and asked for the name for the girl. The name snapped into attention. The secretary became the sergeant and he the recruit as he answered confidently, Kimberly.

And for a boy?

He stammered in confusion as only his son’s name, Brett, came forth. He struggled for recall and then was silent in thought. It did not arrive. The sounds of his wife behind the door took him away from the secretary and into the imaginary field of his brain. When he focused back on the secretary he voiced his loss. I don’t remember the name we chose for a boy.

She looked down at him and then to her bright white paper where the blank line called out as a reminder that her task was incomplete. I’ll just put Kimberly down for the boy name, too. You can change it later, if you need to.

Another sound from his wife pulled him from the words of the secretary and back to wondering what was going on behind the blocked doors. The names seemed trivial. He agreed blankly, still focused on his wife and her sounds as the secretary scribbled, handed him the clipboard, pointed to a big X she had made on the paper and said, Signature, please.

He signed without much attention to his finger movements as he kept his eyes fixed on the doors. It could not have looked much like his name as he registered the sudden awkward silence from the room where he yearned to be, and handed back the pen and clipboard. The sound of flesh smacking flesh made him stand up as the visual of a large hand hitting his newly born child arrived in his mind. The image was wiped away by the cry of a baby, which filled him with relief and desire simultaneously. It was all he could do to keep himself from busting through the doors to the delivery room.

The doctor popped out in a rush, turned towards the father who was now standing up in front of his seat and said, It’s a boy. Congratulations. Then, he was gone, white coating flipping out behind him as he rounded the corner. The still-swinging door was the father’s next focus as he assumed it was now okay for him to enter. He went to his wife who was holding their new baby in her arms. His wife looked pale and drugged.

How was it? he asked when he got to her side.

They gave me the epidural too low and just numbed my legs. I’m glad though, I actually was able to feel our baby being born and it was magnificent. She sighed with a glowing motherly satisfaction. No epidural next time.

Next time?

In that uncomfortable moment, the subject was turned to the new little boy in the mother’s arms. So this is Kimberly?! the father asked/stated, broaching the subject of his flummoxed memory.

What? You didn’t...

I did forget the boy name; but we can change it, the father admitted sheepishly.

As the mother prepared to breastfeed her baby, the nurse working off to the