Medium Hero: And Other Stories

By Korby Lenker

-Medium Hero is a collection of short stories culled from Korby Lenker's life on and off the road. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, Korby is clearly in love with the world and has the gift of making readers see things his way.

-Lenker has a diverse following and extensive fan base. He plans to promote his book on his tours and at local events.

-Lenker has a strong social media presence and reach, which he will also use to promote the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781681620596

Korby Lenker

Korby Lenker is a sneaky-good songwriter. And singer. And author. An abbreviated list of Lenker's achievements so far includes: a significant amount of airplay on the legendary Seattle indie rock station KEXP; a BBC 2 interview with Bob Harris, which is only about the highest honor a rootsy singer-songwriter touring the UK can get; opening slots for acts ranging from Willie Nelson to Ray LaMontagne, Nickel Creek, Keith Urban, Susan Tedeschi, and Tristan Prettyman; and wins in the Merlefest folk songwriting contest as well as the Kerrville Folk Festival's elite New Folk songwriting competition. Lenker was raised in Twin Falls Idaho. He is the son of a mortician and attended college in Bellingham, Washington, and there founded the Barbed Wire Cutters, called by SPIN Magazine "The Young Riders of the Bluegrass Revolt." Medium Hero is his first book.

Book preview

MEDIUM HERO

AND OTHER STORIES

MEDIUM HERO

AND OTHER STORIES

Korby Lenker

Turner Publishing Company

424 Church Street • Suite 2240 • Nashville, Tennessee 37219

445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor • New York, New York 10022

www.turnerpublishing.com

Medium Hero and Other Stories

Copyright © 2015 Korby Lenker

All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover image: Korby Lenker

Cover design: Scapati and Maddie Cothren

Book design: Glen Edelstein

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lenker, Korby.

[Short stories. Selections]

Medium hero and other stories / Korby Lenker.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-68162-507-2 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-68162-374-0 (hardback)

I. Title.

PS3612.E536A6 2015

813’.6--dc23

2015030300

Printed in the United States of America

14 15 16 17 18 19 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR REV. BARBARA DAVENPORT

CONTENTS

1. CAT LADY

2. DEAR WILLOW REEDER

3. RAT’S DUDE

4. CATFISH

5. FOR APRIL

6. BIRTHDAY CARDS

7. MEDIUM HERO

8. BULL’S-EYE

9. THIS IS PROBABLY A CLUE OF SOME KIND

10. TWITTER TRANSLATOR

11. PRO WRESTLING

12. HOQUIAM

13. BUS STOP

14. SUGAR CHEST

15. EVERYONE HAS A MIRANDA MOMENT

16. PEEING MY PANTS AT THE HIPSTER COFFEE SHOP

17. HER IMPOSSIBLE HEART

18. MANBOY AND THE MAFIA TABLE

19. BIRD CRUSH

20. THE COOL GREEN HILLS OF EARTH ARE NOT ENOUGH

21. AMPLIFIED DESIRE AND A DIRTY PEACOAT

22. ANGEL’S ENVY

23. NEW YEAR’S DAY AND THE GREAT SNAKE

24. SUPERMAN AND LOIS LANE

25. PAGE OF SWORDS

26. TWO RED RINGS

27. SIMON CICADA

1. CAT LADY

I have been spending too much time alone. Not alone. In the company of a cat. Which is worse.

Men who spend their waking hours walled off in some alley of the Self can at least claim the quiet dignity that accompanies true solitude. Beards may grow long, teeth brown, but a man in isolation has at least a chance at virtue.

I, however, am in love with a fuzzy white kitten, and, in the throes of some austere and worthy crisis of mind and heart, will suddenly scoop the animal up like an adoring mother and whisper into its ear one of ten nicknames I’ve made up. "My sweet Squee. Don’t you ever leave me!" Poking the wet nose with an enthusiastic forefinger. A deep scratch between the shoulder blades. The animal’s cross-eyed smile sending a wave of pleasure through me. Disgusting.

Sometimes these reveries last five minutes or more and find me splaying the helpless creature out on the couch, pushing his long white fur the wrong direction (does he like that?), letting him bite my hand, delighting in the tiny, stinging teeth pressed into the soft flesh of my outstretched palm. Scolding him in the ridiculous high-pitched voice. "No! Who’s a bad kitty?Fooface!"

It is difficult to submerge oneself with any sincerity into questions involving the trajectory of peaceful relations in the Middle East or the future of literature in a technologically obese society when a prancing kitten decides your pinky might be a mouse and leaps over your laptop to pounce. Somehow an entire paragraph self-deletes. My naughty Littlefat! I hear myself say.

It wasn’t always this way. From the perspective of true, steel-jawed manhood, I am a pale gadfly where once I was a gladiator.

Yes there was a time I was more brave.

A brief and incomplete accounting of my heroic deeds to date:

On the occasion of my twenty-ninth birthday and in the company of three drunk friends, I took hold of an electric fence, on purpose. The force of the shock knocked me backwards into the street and afterward made my hand twitch involuntarily for five minutes.

Three days after Sept 11 in 2001, I hitchhiked from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seattle, Washington, across the tundra and down the Al-Can Highway. Two thousand five hundred miles. It took four days. I carried a can of bear repellant with me. I spent a night in jail for traveling over international lines without a passport.

During college, under the spell of an imagined spiritual crisis, I spent an entire spring break walking alone through a desert in southern Utah with only a gallon of water and six oranges. I slept on the bare earth.

These are the things you do when possessed by an urgent and unclear need to demonstrate your grit to yourself and God and anyone else who would care to watch.

But now, in my gravity-succumbing thirties, I’m all ice cream and kitty cats. What happened?

I decide to reach out to a true friend.

I am a cat lady.

She texts back.

Everyone who knows you saw it coming.

I go for a walk. I reflect. The crisp bronze leaves of fallen autumn rustle under my feet like radio static. The light lays flat in the grey sky, shadowless.

I wonder: is it better to stay soft, to keep to the foothills of life, to watch football on Saturday afternoon eating too many nachos with your sweater-wearing friends? Or is it better to be a wild-eyed, stuttering prophet in scratchy sackcloth?

There was a time I felt like my path led to sackcloth. But then I found out I like beautiful things too much. A worn-in acoustic guitar. A well-wrought sentence cleaved of unnecessaries. A pretty girl.

I walk along a busy street. Cars pass beside me; only half the headlights are on. That twilight hour when not everyone is doing the same thing.

Have I abandoned my true calling? Am I a spiritual fat man? Am I just a random person on planet earth groping his way through make-believe and mystery like everyone else?

Sure, I could live in the desert, but there is no special virtue to eating bugs, especially when a sushi restaurant is in walking distance.

Sushi.

I call my friend Jacob and ask him to join me for dinner. He says yes. I keep walking.

Over California rolls and pints of Sapporo, I catch him up. The cat thing. The former glory of unreflective masculinity. I ask him what he thinks.

Dude, you’re probably gay, he offers. I mean, you dress great.

I cast a quick glance down. Denim jacket, antique white cotton button-down, plaid madras bow tie, matching leather belt and shoes. Fair enough.

I can see why you might say that, and, well, I don’t want to sound defensive, but I don’t like dudes.

Have you tried ’em?

What do you mean?

Jacob shrugs. I didn’t think I liked sushi. Then I tried it. He pushes a section of rainbow roll into his mouth. I love sushi!

I weigh his words and stir wasabi into the soy sauce. I made out with a dude once. I didn’t like it.

What didn’t you like about it?

Uh, everything. Whiskers. Gross. He was a dude. Dudes are disgusting. I like girls. They’re soft and they smell nice and they’re delicate. Who wouldn’t like a girl?

I don’t know man. I’m not the gay one. He looks at me and smiles and eats the whole pile of pickled ginger off his plate in one bite.

I let Jacob pay for dinner. We shake hands. He walks back to his car and says over his shoulder, You’re fine. It’s okay to like cats.

Mark Twain loved cats! I shout back.

I stand on the sidewalk in my denim finery and consider his words. It’s not the cat, I finally say to no one. I turn and start walking back home.

The sidewalk I’m on follows a road that bends evasively around a college campus. As I walk, a handsome twenty-something with a short black haircut steps from the front door of a Thai restaurant, a pretty honey-blonde girl right behind him. They fall in step in front of me. For awhile they walk side by side. Then suddenly the fingers of the boy’s right hand make the smallest reaching motion, and all at once they are holding hands, in the not-quite-all-the-way style of familiar lovers. A casual intersection of hearts and fingers.

We all continue this way—lovers and witness—for a hundred or so feet, until the couple reaches their car.

The car chirps, the hands separate, and the girl walks alone to the passenger side. The boy lifts the latch on the driver’s door and slides inside. The passenger door slams shut, the lights come on, and just as I walk past, the car pulls out into the street and disappears.

I consider one of my more recent romances.

The bullet points: young girl, fair-faced, overtly indifferent to my presence one way or another, but with a certain whispered affection that came in unlikely moments like a surprise. For whatever reason, this is the kind of girl I like, and like her I did. I read to her aloud from my favorite books. I rubbed her feet. I made her breakfast. I wrote a song for her.

What happened? I started to be myself is what happened. Too excitable, too many opinions, too much thinking about everything, just too much. She didn’t care for the sum total.

The phone in my pocket vibrates. I pull it out and look at the screen. My true friend. It says:

Put down the cat I am calling you.

As I’m reading the text the phone rings and I answer it. I say: Another thing that makes me mad. Dudes don’t open doors anymore. Bad manners everywhere.

It’s worse than that, comes the sharpened voice, I hear they stopped teaching cursive in elementary school.

Hilarious. Take me seriously or I’m hanging up.

Honey. It’s impossible to take you seriously. You wear a bow tie and I bet at this moment your belt matches your shoes. Am I right?

I don’t say anything.

Also you like cats. Who likes cats?

Lonely people.

Barf. Everyone is lonely. Write us a song.

I’m going to write a song about good manners.

Do it. God knows we need you to show us the way. You’re our last hope, Obi-Wan.

Why are you in such a good mood?

You know why? I’m talking to you, loverboy. Look, she says, I can tell you’re having one of your flights of fancy. You’ve probably been walking around your neighborhood for the last hour looking at leaves and thinking about whichever girl it is you’re currently hung up on. Somewhere along the way, something caught your eye – some small detail – and you’ve spun it like a pizza dough into some universal truth about the nature of being alive in the twenty-first century. No doubt you’re feeling depressed, misunderstood, etc. How close am I?

I kick at some leaves. Why again did you call?

To cheer you up! It’s not like your goddamn cat’s gonna do that.

I push my hand through my hair. It’s not working.

Of course it’s working. You love this. Someone reached out and scooped your furry ass up and is scratching you under your ugly chin. Messed up as it is, this is the way you like to be loved. I swear I can hear you purring through the phone.

You are annoying and I do not like you.

Stick it, she says. My kids are yelling at me. I’ll talk to you later.

She hangs up.

I round the last corner to my house. Night is in full bloom. Darkness leans on my street like an old man. I walk up to my house and pause. A warm yellow light spills out of the two front windows into the yard. In the rightmost frame, the unmistakable silhouette of my cat stands in the sill.

2. DEAR WILLOW REEDER

You were My Old Piano teacher, and now you are dead. You were killed yesterday in a car crash in my hometown of Twin Falls, Idaho. My dad called and left a message saying Happy Easter, and oh your piano teacher died. I called him back and found out it happened at about 3PM, mountain time. You pulled out in front of a small pickup, which then slammed into your driver’s side door and lifted your Camry three feet into the air and hefted it far into the sagebrush. Relaying this, my dad wondered aloud if you’re another reason why people in their eighties maybe shouldn’t drive.

Wherever there is death there is irony, dear Willow, and in that respect you did not disappoint. For one, you were killed coming home from a mortuary. You had just finished playing the organ at someone else’s funeral, rubbing the foot pedals with your spindly legs and stocking feet. I think it’s strange and merciful and a little funny you didn’t know your life was about to come to a violent end. The Dirge You Play Just Might Be Your Own, is a song title I just thought of.

The other irony, the sad one, is that you were newly married, and, in my dad’s words, as giddy as a young girl. I remember your first husband Fran as a kindly old man with a white duster mustache who smoked cigarettes under the carport while I played scales. Fran died, and a year ago you re-married and were happy with your new man. You knew true love twice. But it’s a sad thing when love is cut short, and even if you and yours were old, your love was not. You were eighty-two and yet you managed to work a little tragedy into your closing act. So of course I am proud of you for this.

I have some things to say to you, Willow. I have kept them to myself for almost ten years, but now that you are dead I think