Slate Run Annual Vol 2: Slate Run Annual
By J.S. McInroy, Edward K. Ryan, Daniel P. Bear and
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About this ebook
Slate Run Publishing presents it's second annual collection of unique and diverse voices drawn exclusively from New York's Capital Region.
Featuring a wide range of genres from women's literature to science fiction and fantasy, Slate Run Annual Vol. 2 is sure to contain something for everyone.
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Slate Run Annual Vol 2 - J.S. McInroy
DEDICATION
Sisyphus
EDITOR’S NOTES
In quest for the inspiration necessary to do justice to the remarkable selections of literature in this compilation, the editor sought glimmers of something from his work on Slate Run Annual Vol. I. As rarely occurs outside of fiction the very first page he accessed chanced to be the dedication of vol. I. For the mute, inglorious Miltons out there....
Thomas Gray! Years ago, as an undergraduate the future editor found himself face to face with one of life’s tragic actualities. We may, each and every one of us, be born with the possibility of greatness as artist, world leader, philosopher..., but the probabilities remain, even now, more than two-hundred-fifty years after the Elegy’s publication, discouraging. As all acknowledge, from atheist to ecstatic believer, we each shall join the dead as the true majority population of the human race. Gray himself is buried in Stoke Pogues, St. Giles Churchyard, the very place his inglorious Miltons are said to lie. Mute or not, famed or anonymous, all end in their own Stoke Pogues.
Slate Run Publishing has adopted Gray’s line as its statement of purpose: To give voice to the mute inglorious Miltons among us. The awareness expressed in the paragraph above, however, necessarily leads one to an overwhelming question. Oh, do not ask....
In many rooms upon multiple continents women and men still come and go as they speak of Michelangelo." But the once-upon-a-human-beings Milton, Michelangelo, Gray and Eliot speak no more neither do they respond to stimuli, breathe or reproduce. All are dead. Hades, Heaven, Nirvanah, Aaru... are the realms of entities other than living humans no matter the familiar biological characteristics we here on earth imagine them to possess. They do not live in any of the recognized scientific senses of that term.
An educated reader may question, "Is not their work their immortality? Do not Paradise Lost, The Sistine Chapel, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and Prufrock yet speak for their creators? The easy answer is
Yes, of course." But a more complex question arises: Do these works...does all art...not speak to the ones appreciating them in the voice of the creator but rather awaken their own voices, give rise to their own questions, speak of the hopes and fears, struggles, strengths and weaknesses of multitudes unknown, undreamt of by the artists at the moment of their creations?
A professor of literature at a small state college once spoke to his class in glowing terms of the Irishman William Butler Yeats. The scholar’s enthusiasm was viral. The class was small, but all six or seven professed love for the poet most would never read again. Such is the nature of love, the nature of human constancy. This one particular student remained true. The line That is no country for old men,
speaks to him — and to Cormac McCarthy as well — in a voice of its own, not that of Yeats, or McCarthy for that matter. For this writer it began a search for something more lasting and valuable than the tenement ocean we poor fish call life.
Two telling excerpts, one from Sailing to Byzantium, the other from its companion piece, Byzantium, tell the tale for this twenty-first century writer as his voice sings the lines written by a man he never knew nor would he have known had they been contemporaries:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress....
Despite this awareness that life, even for the old and fading, demands passion, Yeats’, persona seeks permanence in art, would become, were he offered the opportunity, a golden bird upon a golden bough. The aforementioned professor made much of that bird’s scorning all complexities of mire and blood in Sailing to Byzantium, and Yeats moves beautifully through the stanza:
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
The teacher’s considered opinion was that Yeats championed the immortality or at least semi-permanence of art over the transitory nature of biological life, even that of the artist himself. To a certain extent this analyst finds such to be true, but, as one who internalizes much of what he reads, he is left to wonder relative to his own world-view, is not "An AGONY of trance/An AGONY of flame a vision of Hell? Are not we, the fallen salmon, all caught up in our sensual music, unqualified for and uninterested in schools which but study monuments of their own magnificence, alive? Milton’s Paradise was for God, angels, and dead souls. His Hell for Satin, Beelzebub, and those sinners condemned by their not so loving Father to eternal damnation. Eden a garden of temptation, sin, and fratricide. Byzantium now Istanbul. Gray dead and unknown even to most college graduates. Prufrock never heard the mermaids sing, and The Sistine Chapel ceiling has been restored
in order to halt the flaking away of Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Too gaudy,
some now are wont to say, preferring the centuries-old accumulation of dust, smoke, and grime which dulled the colors originally employed by the master. Such is art. Such are people. Most importantly, such is life.
The writers in Slate Run Annual Volume II make no claims of immortality. For many this is their first publication. Some of them may violate the sensibilities of those demanding adherence to the demands of someone else’s rules for magnificence, but all are alive. All have heard the mermaids sing. In short, none have been afraid. We all shall pass. These works will pass. The Sistine ceiling will someday crumble and fall. Yeats knew the works of Shelley. Is it possible his monuments of unaging intellect
are ironic counterpoint to Ozymandias? Could Gray simply have been mourning the fate of us all, even Milton?
The writers contained within these covers have spoken. Still speak. Read their words and you will discover something fine has been added to your own inner voice.
THE ORDER OF THINGS
This editor once experienced a moment of epiphany in an undergraduate literature class. The instructor, fresh out of graduate school was so proud of his PhD that he emphasized its unimportance by insisting the class address him by his given name, Richard. Something of an iconoclast, he nonetheless instructed us in the accepted underlying principles of literary analysis in such a fashion that this student remembers some of his ideas almost exactly as he presented them. Relevant to this piece is Richard’s insistence that the Classical Unities were interesting and helpful but for serious seekers after something more than grades, degrees, and reputations, also irrelevant.
Remember,
he said, the Greeks were primarily logical thinkers, Aristotle in particular, who sought to make some sense of the chaos they observed all about them. Reality,
he continued, they knew to be an unintelligible jumble in need of some imposition of rational order. Thus were born, among other illusions, the Unities of Time, Place, and Action. I tell you,
he continued, reality and chaos are synonymous. The Greeks and Western Society up to the present have created continually evolving patterns to explain everything....
On and on he went for fifty minutes until concluding with, Logic, my friends, while an illusion, perhaps even a falsehood of tragic proportions, has its uses. You’ll need the concept for your other studies, perhaps your very lives. As for artistic Unity, try to remember it as the feeling one gets that a certain work, be it literature, drama, music, or painting, has been created within one, single mind, drawn or typed, notated, or directed by a single hand. God, if you will, created the chaos we name the universe. The creator, the true artist, god or man, has freed himself from form, structure, and the obfuscation of logic. That freedom is essential to his truth and thereby to his art.
I subscribe substantially to the mindset Richard presented us, and so as I sought a pattern of organization for the contents of this anthology I chanced upon these memories of an influential teacher and organized the stories without any attempt at logical order or grouping, without organization in any of its forms. A book from which I teach a short story class offers its content in alphabetical order as well as grouping multiple offerings by the same author one after the other in — you must have guessed it — alphabetical order. Basic and both ontologically accurate as well as being ontologically deceptive. I couldn’t venture into such mire. Chaos. Random chance. Reality.
Ergo, I copied each title onto a slip of paper, put the slips into a jar, and had my three-year-old niece pick them out one at a time. Thus was determined the wrinkled order of works you are about to read.
Tommy
J.S. McInroy
J S McInroy is a wholly imaginary person with 999 arms.
––––––––
What a difference a day makes! Just yesterday two years ago, an exact duplicate of today, the sun shone an autumn gold upon the green of our morning’s October lawn. Lush. Thick and green the grass. Overabundant,
one of Lana’s friends called the flowers of coming winter shouting colors of eternal life at the doomed snows of December. Lana claims the flower of God is the rose. I would say the Chrysanthemum, strong and defiant, here and gone again. Then here again, if we prepare his place in our lives, our gardens. Mums line the north and south foundations of my garage. My place of work. My shelter from the insecurities out beyond our two-lane lane. Candytuft stay green at the back of the house as do the Rocky Mountain Junipers precisely spaced along the border with a neighboring hay field. We have set islets of yearlong color in random pattern not at all random about our two-acre lawn. Tea Roses, Floribunda, and English Rhododendrons, purple, white and yellow, about the house. Edging the concrete drive, every spring a new vision for the coming summer. Between our eastern neighbors and us a sculpted line of Arbor vita. To the west a brush-free woodlot.
Of course there is a pool. Rectangular, eighty feet long by twenty-two wide. Nine feet at its deeper end, three at the shallow. Bordered by stamped concrete — four immaculate feet at far side and ends, a twenty-foot patio reaching to the double sliding glass of our indoor kitchen and dining areas. Lana and I debated a lenai and decided no.
Too obvious. Too Sunshine State for good old cloud ridden New York. The sliders have screens, and we did extend a cedar shaked cover eight feet out for day-long shade as well as protection from the storms of upstate summer. We very much enjoy the pleasure of outdoor living from the comfort of the inside. The girls especially loved it when they were home. They and their friends enjoyed our place, and most — as far as Lana and I knew anyway — of their serious teenage parties unraveled within a hundred feet or so of home. They swam, built huge bonfires out at the western edge, and carried on in privacy while always within sight, sound, and smell of two ostensibly incurious parents. We ran a risk, I know. Teens and young adults are capable of boundless foolishness, and homeowners are always at risk of lawsuits. We felt it was a chance worth taking. Now the parties and fires of that time have passed, and we are perhaps safer but just a bit nostalgic.
Four–thousand square feet of luxury,
best sums up our house. This does not include the basement gymnasium, game room, play area, and full below-grade bath. The two impeccable stories above this and beneath the spacious attic are clad in the finest clay-tone vinyl with just a shade from pure white window trim—triple pane argon infused, these Pella’s. Cherry black shutters with matching front, side, rear, and external cellar entranceways add a touch of what Lana terms dramatic accent.
A grey stone-paved, slate-roofed cloister extends across the drive where Lana parks her Acura and over to my clay sided garage. The house includes three full topside baths and four large bedrooms. My garage has one of each. Most of the dwelling’s accommodations lie unused and unoccupied now that the girls have moved onto their respective adult lives, and I never sleep in the garage, although I do use the commode and shower there quite often. Our kitchen is granite and stainless. Again, mostly unused. We dwell in the midst of a gaggle of exceptional take-out places ranging from fast food to gourmet Italian and, surprisingly enough, Polish, which are all but impossible to resist. Especially now we are but two. The colors are pastels, the floors either hardwood or tile. Even the basement. Most importantly, the place is always clean. And neat. At first Lana preferred to do the housekeeping herself, but with the advent of the children and her own employment by the Troy city school system, she acquiesced in my farming it out to a professional service. One might say without fear of contradiction that we live well.
That day, I stood before my mirror, knees against the vanity, left hand upon the granite, right beneath my jaw worrying the small blemish which had manifested two days previously. I was, at sixty-two, too old for zits. At least, Lana assured me, it in no way looked like skin cancer. No reason to show it to the RNA or whatever they called the woman who did most of his work. Nice enough lady, cute, professional, but still not a doctor. Anyway, my problem was just my sinuses, and a true MD headed the practice. I’d been coughing since April. We thought allergies, but now a bit of red had shown itself. Probably an infection
the nurse suggested, But I’d like an X-ray just to make sure.
It had been two weeks. If anything serious had shown up, they would have called. I’m going to be damn glad to finally get rid of this cough and phlegmy throat. Maybe I’ll have her take a look at my back while I’m there. Old age, leave me alone! I’m not ready for the retirement village just yet. There’s all kinds of things they can do these days. Aleve works just fine. Maybe I’d best just keep my trap shut
THIS DAY, AGAIN I stand before my mirror preparing for another appointment. A new practice for an old wound, but one well healed. Lana is the only reason I continue these visits. They’re routine enough, some blood work, periodic x-rays, and general physical assessment. I have no complications of any kind. But, I do it for her even if does cause me a minor bit of agita. I hum a catchy tune from one of Lana’s favorite artists. Sinead, I think. I do not want what I haven’t got. Water and wine, a bluebird of happiness I presume. Another cliché, but life sure as hell is good. Life is, at times at least, absolutely wonderful. Soul-satisfying.
Yard and house. Hair, face, and physique. Lana. My children. My cars. These are the foundations of my life. Without them I am nothing. With them perfection is achievable.
To that end I visit Delia my stylist weekly. Usually Thursday afternoon before her daughter returns from wherever the offspring of single mothers spend their days. She charges twenty dollars for a basic trim. I tip her ten. Small price to pay for her artistry practiced upon the creation I recognize as myself. My hair, once the black of my Sicilian mother’s, now needs subtle coloring. That costs more. Well worth the price. No roots show. Never. Now someday I’ll let it go white. But not yet. Maybe when I hit seventy.
I shave each morning. Apply lotions and softeners, conditioners and exfoliators as Lana suggests. I stopped smoking too. Six plus years ago. Nothing ages the skin like cigarettes. Raises hell with the teeth too. I was in time. My teeth are bright, and my skin is smooth, my cheeks full as in my youth, my throat firm. No freaking wattles. I’ll have surgery or at least go the Botox route should there be the slightest hint of them. Of late a problem has arisen with my skin though. Once a devotee of sun lamps and then tanning booths for my father’s Slavic pallor, I have become fearful of melanoma and have been reduced to sprays and artificial colorants. I will not have cancer. But the best of the alternatives to tanning scream Artificial! I am beginning to freckle. There must be something. There has to be. Lana is on alert. I rest my hopes in her capable hands. She has friends. The internet.
Twenty push-ups, ten pull-ups every day. Two miles at an eleven-minute pace two days a week. I must admit to having slowed a bit since two years ago, but considering everything, I’m going pretty great. I’d been much faster until the thing got me. I keep on keeping on though. Thanks partly to Aleve and One A Day twice a day. Again Lana. Thank you my inamorata, my soul’s eternal mate. Sixty-four and so much more. All because of you.
AH, MY LANA, child of the wilderness beyond our northern wall. Passionate Pict of ancient lineage, you have brought sweet passion to my obsessive order as I have calmed the chaos of your unbridled heart. And yet, I remain principally a man of structure and rational relationship while your wild hair and eyes could still inspire a poet to write of pleasures from another time and place than ever have been yours.
The first time we made love was at her insistence. I would have dwelt within the depths of her eyes, lost myself in the blood-framed invitation of her smile. Could have wrapped her thick black hair about my wrist and climbed to the ecstatic moon upon imagination. She would have none of that. It took her three months, but one afternoon in my apartment she issued an ultimatum. Do me,
she demanded. Or I’m history.
I did.
I swear that somewhere on my back hide just beneath the surface of my snow-pale skin the tracks of her nails. To this day my lips taste the blood she drew from them. My soul leaps for joy. And it did not end. Sicilian Slav that I am, despite my cautious and precise nature, I can even now respond to her most urgent demands. In fact, just this morning before we showered, before she brushed her teeth.... You know. She’s showering now. Obviously, my obsessive cleanliness drove me to do so first. She did not mind. She loves lying about and wallowing in our emissions. How do opposites attract so? Thank you, God, that we do.
Her phone buzzes on her dresser. It’s our daughter Moira, the dark and tan Sicilian one. I let it go to voicemail. She’ll be wanting her mother for one or another female thing. Lana will fill me in if needed. Moira is our eldest. She should have been called Angelica and Angelica, Moira. That one is the image of my paternal grandmother in her younger days. Pale skin, blond hair and a face so Russian it would have seemed subversive in the fifties. Not that I remember that time. But my father did. World War II US