Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 34

By Small Beer Press

There are no ghostly bumps in the night, no loud noises, no cheap shot surprises to knock you out your seat. Instead: stories and poetry so much excellent poetry! that knock all the dust off your edges, the pencil off your table, the crown off the monarchy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Release date: Aug 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781618731364

Book preview

Colossal

Amanda Marbais

Gerald is a reformed stutterer and droid-porn addict. That doesn’t broach the issue that he is also a colossal squid. His skin has turned to red, porous gelatin and his feet have erupted with a thousand suckers. He’s self-identified, because giving his condition a name provides him navigable expectations.He dealt with childhood epithets. With rage he anticipates new, supposedly clever tags from unseen assailants—Squirty, Red, or possibly Van Tentacles.

His skin generates bioluminescence, and he spends whole Saturdays glowing in his bathtub. He guzzles Dewars from a mug. His friend, Joan, says he smells. He has almost no psychic connection with squid-hood, and when a white baby tentacle buds on his knuckle, he gently plays with it, rocking it back and forth for an hour.

Because he is a fatalist, he is unsurprised. It’s like watching a horror movie and the car breaks down, the serial killer ends up gathering psychotic strength in the closet, or a zombie is not quite dead and wakes up suddenly to kill everyone. His anger induces him to eat a bag of chips and watch the first three and a half minutes of Return to Sextopolis thirty-seven times, when Joan calls and interrupts.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is total bullshit. With the help of Joan, Gerald researches colossal squid. Joan has yellow-framed glasses, parted-curly hair and unfortunately resembles Minnie Driver—an actress he irrationally hates. He and Joan used to work together at an ice cream shop, and now she is employed by an arcade which also gives cheap oil changes and quarter tokens for Astroid. Between her responsibilities as Lift-Manager, she sends him articles. The links are broken and end in polite error messages. This disconnects him from Joan, who clearly has unrealistic expectations about their relationship.

From her e-information, Gerald finds a fact he obsesses over—a bloop will be his communication in his pre-lingual, amniotic state, if he can successfully make it to the sea or a pool or a pond. It is the loudest communication of any sea creature, because it is not dampened by the water’s surface or other sea creatures. It happens under the deepest wave, far too deep for a human. Scientists call it the Train, Whistle, Upsweep, Gregorian Chant.

In his many-windowed, sub-shaped bedroom, Gerald notices a beak tip budding five inches above his penis. It is, as they say, a wakeup call. Masking his teary voice, he calls Joan to go with him for a burrito. Soon a budding of suckers will emerge under his arms, even as a woman beside him comforts a baby with sardines, sugarcane, and a stereopticon. It occurs to him that table-wax would plug the child and be resistant to water. He feels guilty for having this thought.

Colossal squid attack sperm whales, which are sixty-seven feet long and have the largest brain of any animal. A tough match. Of course people in nineteenth century novels got on their knees and prayed ardently to get the hell across an ocean. With his new strength, he should be able to open a beer. His tentacles can no longer do anything as delicate as levering the tiny pop-top on a can, although they are pliable, soft. He presses a limb to the window and peers through the gelatin at the wavering grocery across the street, as Joan reads Vogue and sips frothy Caribou hot chocolate from an inflatable chair.

Gerald resists calling his mother. Joan has promised a crane, but Gerald doubts she can come through. Though she means well, she is not resourceful. When he says this, Joan takes off her sweatshirt, walks outside, and pushes his SUV up the steep hill near his home. He already thinks the bottom of Walhonding County pool will be rubberized and cool. Joan curls her body around Gerald as they lay on his broken bed and both seem to float in the room. When he dreams, the waves lap the edge of a boat, and his rotating hook suctions to a deck. As if tapped into a collective consciousness, someone is trying to sever it, but he feels sure the limb will regenerate itself and have a life of its own.

Joan has come through with a crane. When they prepare to transport him, it is unseasonably hot. His oozing skin collects a paper cup, a teenager’s bra, a broken wiffle bat. Joan stands next to the crane which looks like a giraffe. All he sees is a blur of Joan—Joan at the front walk-up. Joan running. Joan lifting his limbs. Joan un-sticking his suckers. Her flip-flops suck off her tiny feet, and she is covered with crystallized sweat. He is reminded of sixth grade gym, on the day they inflated the parachute. A girl named Lynn puffed out her cheeks, two matching fragile balloons. Her sweat was as pure. His next door neighbor is mowing his lawn, as Gerald hoists himself into the salty wet sling. The neighbor, a man who has broken a restraining order twice, yells something unintelligible, a word that might be spy. Joan caresses Gerald’s skin and softly whispers sings, singing, sung.

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Six Poems by Hazel Crowley

1.

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o muse,

          patron saint of sunken ships,

    give us the freedom to roam

                   the courage to swat away the fakery

             the tools to tear apart the rigging that

holds up the

        too close sky

and, one day,

  fists full of stars,

          we will riot on

2.

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when you said

  our love was your life raft

     our connection was

    like a chemical bond

      that when you saw me

  your heart beat like a drum

         and you heard only love songs

honestly, your quaintness bored me

  I want love like molten lava

     a connection like a jazz band jam session

       someone to say that when they see me

           it is like being shot

    and that, like an owl,

      they hear everything

3.

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my spirit is tall

      unfoiled by dirt,

             she digs without fuss

          like a dairymaid not a dame

      and if/when my heart goes deaf

  she nurses me to hearing

          by lending her long, mighty ears

4.

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sometimes I feel like a doll,

  limbs pasted together

     under the reign of a puppet king

but why bide time in another’s world

          where they tell us q is for quarry

when beyond the stage door

      (who knows?)

    maybe q is for Geronimo!

    and vowels are hundredfold

5.

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would that time recycled itself

        that mold