Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

***
13/13

Masha had only broken into a slight sweat while given birth and had requested nothing for the pain. The delivery room was crystalline white and smelled deliberately of nothing. There was a bed, a silver bedpan, and a washbasin on a lone table with sharp edges. The window was crosshatched by thin lines that led out into the hospital hallway. Lisa and Suzan stood on tippy-toe to try to watch their mother. Their faces showed little amazement, and in truth, they would remember very little of the birth; it was so dull. The doctor merely moved between table and bedside, and on the last trip he held Alphus in his hands. Masha was covered in a sterile green tarp. The girls would remember the thick window, strange because it did not lead outside, and the rolling metal carts that would bear down on them. The carts had two shelves that were covered in metal objects and plastic bags. The people pushing them did not have any definable facial expressions. What was the smell of birth? The baby boy looked withered and fleshy. His skin was covered in fluid carved from his mother’s womb, and his eyes were tightly shut. The doctor spanked him; he needed to hear him wail to know that he was breathing. Alphus didn’t cry, but he breathed nonetheless. A steady, if labored, in and out. They were alone in the delivery room: Masha, Alphus, and the doctor. There was no sound but breathing.

Masha Gibb, her son Alphus, and her two daughters lived in a small town. Masha settled her family there because the wheat had not yet been harvested and shone like Rumpelstiltskin’s gold. It grew up and down hillsides like flaxen waves of a frozen ocean. Masha’s hair was the color of the wheat, and she cropped it short. She was average height but had a slight build and was often mistaken for being younger than she was. Her shoulders were narrow and hard.

She bought a house for cheap, the previous owner having fallen upon hard times – a mortgage, a divorce, no work and less motivation. The bottom half of the house was made of brick and the top was wide paneling, a shade of blue so light it was almost white. Brick stairs led up from the driveway and through a cement arch to a small shaded landing at the front door. Masha let the previous owner, Kevin, stay with them for a while. They had a bad mole problem in the backyard, and Kevin, a man of tan complexion and nasal drawl, would sit on a folding chair and throw back beers; he’d wait, mallet in hand, for a mole to show himself upper-terrestrially. Masha would occasionally find him passed out in the grass, the yard as extensively moled as ever. The underground rodent colony actually made the ground rather soft; so soft that one afternoon it simply swallowed Kevin up. Masha found the yard empty, upon returning from her new job, and Alphus and the girls investigating a sandy human-shaped indent that had formed in the ground. Kevin’s chair was empty and a beer bottle, some liquid still inside, lay on its side by the sandy grave. Masha led them into the house. Lisa cried. The next day Masha set about pouring the yard with concrete.

Alphus had been born on the morning of the shortest day of the year. The day after his eleventh birthday, school was canceled, and the next. The school building stood empty, snow piled almost up to its eaves. There was a road from his house that ran, like a trench, downtown, past the McHenry snow farm, and around one round-about to the vacant plain of snow that was once, presumably, the school parking lot. Alphus remembered how Ms. Kingsly would park in the far corner of the lot and take her naps in her car during lunch.

While the other kids would play together, chase each other and make up rules to their own games, Alphus would sit in the corner of the gravel field outside the school. He would watch the sunlight play through the tree leaves and count as many pebbles as he could without running out of numbers. Sometimes he would watch the other children, watch the way their heads and bodies would move when they ran. During morning recess he would pace the border of the red gravel field, searching the ground with his eyes just like the old neighborly man would sweep the field for metal. Both were looking for treasure of sorts. Alphus found a new rock each day. He’d pick up the one he had chosen and finish pacing his circuit, rubbing the rock through his fingers and turning it over in his palm. He preferred rocks that had been cleft and smoothed on one side. He would put his rock of the day in his pocket and then put it on his shelf in his room once he got home. His favorite rock, a white limestone with pumice-like holes on one side and a smooth basin on the other, was kept on his bedside table. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d rub the smooth side with his thumb and imagine the light dancing through the leaves. The leaves would fan from dark green to a shade that was so bright it was almost yellow but still the deepest pure green he could imagine.

           The snow quickly covered up all the rocks in the red gravel field, and he could no longer pick out his favorites. After a week of snow, Ms. Kingsly, having just woken up, found Alphus tunneling, hands bare and raw, through the snow. When she snatched up his wrist, she found a pebble cupped in his palm. It was so round it may have been tumbled smooth by a glacier or sanded down by ocean waves. Though the glaciers had been melted for centuries, and there wasn’t an ocean for miles.  

-
The End

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

***
12/13

“Raisins,” Lisa said, holding the small pellets in the palm of her hand. She popped one into her mouth. Suzan was scowling next to her, unhappy she had found no treasure herself.

“Oh!” said Kevin, leaning forward in his chair to watch Lisa handle the mole poop.

“Here, Alphus,” Lisa pulled Suzan over to where their brother was sitting.

“Lisa, don’t give those to your little brother,” Kevin said.

“Why?” her face confused with a tint of suspicion.

Lisa told him how they were grapes that had grown wrinkly like old women. She said maybe they used to grow them, right here in the yard, a million years ago. Maybe the dinosaurs put on aprons and baked them into pies or mashed them into jelly.

“That’s why these ones are so hard,” she told Kevin. They were dinosaur raisins. She rolled one over her tongue.

“Is that so? And uh missy, how many of them dinosaur raisins have you had?”

She shrugged.

“They’re delicious. You can have some if you want. They’re all over the yard. I can find more… do you think I could sell them?”

Kevin eyed her face intently. She was busy moving the poop around on her palm. Suzan sneered at her.

“How much would you be selling them for?”

“Fifty cents.”

            “I s’pose I could eat fifty-cents worth.” And he fished around his pockets, producing two blackened quarters. Lisa counted him out eight pellets, seven of which she watched him eat. The last one he gave to Suzan. 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 

11/13

Gauss Anne was sitting at Alphus’s kitchen table not drinking the hot chocolate Alphus had put in front of her. It was four in the morning, and it was the most Alphus could do to keep his eyes open. She had made a discovery.

“Call me Copernicus!” she had said.

Alphus stared at her from across the table, his chin on his hand and burgundy robe snuggled around him.

“You know how I’ve been telling you about the snow’s equilibrium point? …Alphus?”

Alphus lurched upright before his chin slid completely off his hand and crashed onto the table.

“The snow should be up around our ears! Well, I mean, it should be up around an elephant’s ears or someone quite as tall as an elephant. Eight meters. Eight meters and 47 centimeters, based on the data that I have extrapolated. And it’s certainly not that since you yourself saw me manage to make it to your front door. It’s got to be going somewhere – I am not willing to throw out all conservation laws on account of this phenomenon! And I believe I know what’s causing the sink –”

Alphus had fallen asleep. This time he had slid backwards in his chair and rested, mouth gaping open. Gauss Anne talked long enough without any encouragement for Alphus to dream.

Alphus dreamt that he was in an attic. He was at the top of a robust set of stairs, at least robust by attic standards. The floor was unfinished blond pine, and there were dead beetles; they lay squished everywhere. Alphus was standing at the top of the staircase and off to the side. A blue vapor was all he could see at the bottom. A group of people, two men and a woman, were grouped at the other side of the attic. Their backs were hunched so much that they looked to be almost crouching. They were carrying black pipes made out of metal or plastic, Alphus couldn’t tell which. They all stared at him and started to creep forward. They were moving in sync with one another: left foot forward and a bounce as if they had springs and right foot forward….

The girl, Jennifer, was folded up behind Alphus, between him and the wall. He knew they were after her. They wanted to capture her and put her into a jar. She had been in a brief case, but she had escaped. She had been on the run until they cornered her up in the attic. He looked down at the girl; in his line of vision his legs looked like tree trunks, tall and sturdy in his black jeans.

“Aller!... Va!” Alphus had taken French in school and it came back to him in his dream. The second time he shouted he remembered to conjugate the verb. He was commanding the people who were trying to get Jennifer; he was pointing for them to go down the stairs.

“Va!” He could feel his anger streaming out of his eyes as he willed them to obey. They seemed not to notice and kept coming towards him. All he wanted was to protect her, to scream at the bad people that they needed to va, to get out. Maybe they didn’t know they were doing a bad thing, or maybe they knew but they needed to be told not to do it. Maybe he could scream at them long enough for Jennifer to escape, to make sure that, if nothing else, the bad people were alone.

“Va!” Alphus yelled and pointed, thrusting his whole arm. “Va!”

“Alphus, that’s not an appropriate response to my discovery.” He had yelled, and Gauss Anne had woken him from his sleep.

“I rushed over here to tell you because you are my friend and I thought you cared about this. That’s exactly what I get for acting on the basis of an assumption instead of fact. Based on your behavioral output you have not been listening and the only thing that I can think to conclude is that you do not care about me or my research!” At this she started to cry.

Alphus was much more awake now than he had been before. He sat at his table across from his friend in silence, as if turned to stone.

“The rigors of scientific life are taxing and could seem selfish to other people in a scientist’s life, but in the long run any form of discovery is for us all, isn’t it? And someone needs to be measuring, making quantitative analysis, so that we know that seven plus five is twelve, though our senses might deceive us. I know that they sometimes do, but I have the audacity to project that mine do not, and I conduct tests in order to get useful results, but for what? For no one to listen to my work, to appreciate my labors…”

            Alphus helped her from the kitchen table and guided her to the front door. He was tired and not sure what to do with someone who spontaneously erupted in such fashion. Gauss Anne’s tirade was starting to fade as she fell short of breath and tears, and she gulped for air more regularly. When they reached the door, he patted her hand reluctantly as if she might burn him, shuffled her out, and closed the door behind her. With her thus muted, he walked back over to his kitchen chair, having judged the bedroom to be too far, and slumped back down into it, asleep, his head on the kitchen table. 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 

10/13

            The hospital had big square tiles on the floor. Alphus was watching the squares. The nurse started talking to Masha. Some tiles were burgundy and the rest were white.

            Masha told Alphus that the hospital was borrowing Suzan for a while. He slept during the ride home.

            “Safety is an illusion.” Masha told Alphus. She sometimes had these flashes of parental guidance.

            “Feeling safe comes from comfort and denial. Comfort comes from denial, too. From lying. I’ve been told to have my keys out before I walk to my car and to not jog by myself or sleep with someone I don’t know very well, as if that would be enough to get through life. They should have told me to go around naked, and start drinking at 3:00, and to take the doors off the hinges. Because glass can break, and locks are only an inconvenience. People in line at the grocery store can say things that make you want to take a shower afterwards. Or a couple of showers. Going to sleep at night is a wildly irresponsible act. You’re right to be afraid of the dark.

“The only thing for it, Alphus, is bravery. Alcohol and bravery. Only if you’re very good at lying to yourself can you count on feeling safe.” 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 

9/13

            “Dead.”

            Gauss Anne was sitting again at Alphus’s small kitchen table. She was on a break from counting snowflakes, and Alphus had told her the story of his first pet and of his sister and of other things he was missing. “Were they making it okay? Are they on their way back?” he wanted to know.

            “They’re dead, Alphus.” Gauss Anne told him.

            “I don’t know what you mean.”

            “Dead!”

            She grabbed a spatula and took him over to the radiator where he had an infestation of black beetles. She swung at them.

            “Dead.” She struck several beetles in one go. Some had their exoskeletons fracture completely, and their legs splayed evenly out to the sides. Others, that had only been partially hit, struggled limply, half their bodies pinned to the carpet.

            She kept swinging,

            “Dead.

            “Dead.

            “Dead.”

            This wasn’t all that informative. She tried to explain, “When things die, they don’t come back, Alphus. You lose them. Do you understand me?” She rested and looked up at him. His hands were up around his head, and he trembled.

            “No. I don’t understand.”

            “I guess it’s complicated.”

            “But… I can’t stand it.”

            “You’ll get used to it. Even though you know about death, now, you’ll forget that it happens. Everybody does.”

            “I don’t think so….”

            “Here, would you like a try?” She said, handing him the spatula.

            At first he took it hesitantly and then repositioned his grip more with more purpose. Whack! Hard, he came down on the beetles.

            “Ah!” he screamed, looking shocked at the most recent splatter of beetle guts. “I think you’d better go” he told Gauss Anne. 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 

8/13

            Alphus Gibb kept to himself mostly, and his birds, and his fireplace. He liked to warm himself with tea and hot chocolate. His mother believed that peppermint tea would cure anything, from menstrual cramps to bloody noses, and Alphus had inherited this drinking habit.

            One day, his half-sister Suzan, who lived in the next town over, called his phone. “Hello Alphus,” she said. “This is your sister, Suzan. I was wondering if you’d be interested in a pet frog.” Pet frog! Suzan was a biologist. She had wanted to study the absurdities of life since the operation that had made her Alphus’s “half” sister.

            Suzan was born a conjoined identical twin. She and Lisa were attached at the hip, well, pelvis. One of them facing forward and the other backward. Or both facing forward, from their individual perspectives, and both of their sisters facing back. Masha, their mother, decided that they were okay just like that. “If they can survive, then how is it logical to separate them?” She reasoned. She also figured it would be easier for her this way, only having to keep track of one, besides Alphus, of course.

            The girls were four when Alphus was born. When they were ten, the girls started getting very sick. Lisa looked the worse for it. They were both fatigued and pale. Black splotches started appearing all over their body, and from these splotches hard nubbins started to form. As the weeks passed, these nubbins started becoming all-out horns. Little horns everywhere. After about a year of this, Masha took her children to the doctor.

            The doctor was quite pleased that Alphus’s eyes were completely open after being shut for the first couple years of his life. Now they were sleepy-looking and a darling shade of blue. The doctor was less pleased about the sisters’ horny condition.

            “Now Masha, why didn’t you come to see me sooner?” The doctor asked. Masha looked at him with compassion and tried to help him understand, “Dr. Hootzenhouse, I am under the impression that adversity is the good soil of character. I didn’t want to rob my girls of that. It is only practical to start growing their thick skin early. It helps tremendously in dealing with the world.”

            Doctor Hootzenhouse gave his customary nod of ascent. Still, he said, “And despite all that, I am glad you brought them in. Your girls have a severe case of Raptor Pocks. It’s got their innards in a pickle; the livers, both, are weak. Hearts are palpitating. Lisa’s spleen has run dry. And they’ve developed eczema, which is unrelated. The only cure for this is eggs.”

            “Eggs?” said Masha.

            “Yes, eggs” replied the doctor, “scrambled, poached, in a tortilla, on Sundays, through the holidays, before church and after, over easy, dry, with bacon, with Mr. Benedict, nested, sunny side up, in the rain, hard boiled, omelets, even deviled if you are willing to put in the work. And don’t forget drowsy eggs and brown eggs and eggs put in a stack and ones in your back pack and those cooked on the sidewalk and frozen and pickled and whipped into jelly. And put a little bit of egg in your salads; I find that delicious.”

            “Do they have to be chicken eggs?” said Masha.

            “I think that’s your best bet.”

            When I was a boy I ate four dozen eggs thought Alphus.

            So they ate eggs in all the ways the doctor had suggested. Alphus resented this. His affinity towards things Beauty and the Beast did not extend to the character Gaston. His neck looked like stretched silly putty, the shape of his head was gross, and he did and said nasty things. That his family was embracing Gaston’s eating habits stressed Alphus immensely.

            In not too long, the eggs had helped – the girls shed their horns, leaving sharp things all over the carpet – but their cholesterol went through the roof.

            Lisa eventually complained of a pain in her calf. When that pain got extreme, the family went back to see doctor Hootzenhouse. The doctor predicted a blood clot in her leg, and suggested that they go to the hospital in the next town.

            The town next to what was to become snow country, America was over two hours away. The four, or three, depending on how you look at it, piled into Masha’s economy-sized car. By the time they arrived, the parking lot of the hospital was dark, and it was raining. The lights of the emergency room reflected gold and silver off the puddles. Alphus sat in the front seat of the car; his chest was tight. Everyone had been very quiet. The car had bumped violently as Masha had pulled off the main road.

            “Alright Lisa, Suzan, take off your seatbelt” she said before stopping the car. Masha could be very efficient in times of obvious crisis. Alphus watched his mother rush through the emergency room doors that slid open with a pressurized woosh, her arms around his sisters’ waist. She had left the car door open. The entrance to the hospital was lit up all the way around. It had an aura or halo like it was the subject of some medieval painting. Fluorescent light shone from within and the doors accepted his mother and sisters like gracious sliding jaws. He got out and wandered in after them.

            He waited in the room with the shiny floors until he fell asleep. When he woke, Masha told him that surgeons had cut his sisters apart. A nurse with short hair stared at him with a sad face. Alphus felt strange to have her looking at him like that. The clot in Lisa’s leg had traveled to her heart, and it was the doctors’ opinion that Suzan’s heart could not pump enough blood for both of them. When they had been separated, Lisa had died. As far as Alphus understood, she had just gone away somewhere. He only saw the one half-sister anymore.

            Would Alphus like a pet frog? He had never had a pet before. He wanted his first pet to be perfect. He had considered goldfish, iguanas, puppies, mice, he’d even gone to the store to hold some of them. But he had been unable to make a decision, not knowing which one of them would be perfect.

            “A frog would be nice” Alphus said.

            “Perfect. I’ll have someone bring it over to you.”

            In a few days the messenger arrived. The doorbell rang, and when Alphus answered it, he found a lidded cup sitting on his door mat. He peered into the sip hole to see what was inside.

            Frog?

            Alphus was worried the frog would hop away as soon as he opened the cup. He tipped it in the bottom of his largest Tupperware container, holding his breath. He felt slightly dizzy knowing the next couple of minutes were completely unpredictable, worried that the frog might startle him.

            Alphus tilted the lid off the cup. Nothing came out. He poured the frog out. It slid out on its back – nose then belly then legs. It’s underbelly was grayish pink, stillborn. Alphus did not understand. It lay there like it had no care for the world using its bulbous eyes as a prop.

            Alphus set about making its new home more comfortable. He added some mancala stones for their pretty red and pink colors and some water. He thought that frogs liked water. The frog lay on its back and stretched out its hind legs until all its joints were extended.

            Alphus watched it from morning to night. He wanted to get acquainted with it, wanted to know what it was like. It was his pet, his first pet.

            In a week, Suzan called to check in. When Alphus told her about how it was acting (Well, I think it’s sort of shy…), she told him to let it go in the backyard.

            Alphus could not see the benefit in this. “Alphus,” Suzan explained, “in biology we learn that sometimes after something bad happens, animals stop moving just like your frog. They don’t respond when you talk to them; they won’t eat the food you set out for them. It’s best if you just throw it into the backyard.”

            “It’ll be in a better place” she added.

            Alphus was sorry about this. He wrapped his burgundy robe around him and stepped onto the end of the porch. The yard of snow was spread in front of him. He bent his head over his frog, and it was then that he noticed the smell. It was putrid; he felt like retching. Alphus held on to the container and hurled his frog away. The frog flew, the stiff hind legs tumbling over forelegs over nose, body, belly, eyes. The pretty stones flew too, disappearing into the long-dead raspberry bushes.

            Alphus went inside and cried a little bit. He decided he wanted nothing more to do with biology; Suzan could keep it to herself.

            Outside, the quail cult had its first quaily sacrifice. They pecked the frog’s body with no remorse, and the frog didn’t mind either because it was 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

***  
7/13

            One morning, when Alphus went to feed the quail cult living under the long-dead raspberry bushes, he noticed a shrub where a shrub should not have been. It wasn’t that he had particular rules banning shrubbery from growing in that location; in fact, it was even pleasing to the eye in that it broke the otherwise monotonous snowscape of the backyard. It’s just that it wasn’t there the night before.

            Alphus had to maneuver carefully across his lawn. First, of course, he had to shimmy up the snow that sloped out from under his eaves and then mindfully step onto the fresh powder from the night before. The snow was so old that there wasn’t much chance of his sinking the four or five feet to solid ground, but he was in danger of sticking a foot through the fresh stuff, to where it covered his shin and got in his slippers and so forth. He proceeded as lightly as possible.

            The shrub, upon closer inspection, was not so evergreen as it had looked at first. It did not have needles or branches and instead had a more reptilian sheen. It rose out of the ground in a cylindrical shape that bulged slightly on top. He was puzzled and still more puzzled when it swayed even though there was no wind.

            Suddenly it doubled in size. It now looked more like the back of a person than a shrub, a person in a long green coat. Alphus was relieved; he had no experience in botany.

            The girl stood four feet tall and was dressed in an ankle-length green coat and an orange knit cap with a bombom. She did not turn towards Alphus so he slowly wandered his way around to face her. Her orange bombom flopped backwards as she looked up and started jabbing a pen at the air.

            “Excuse me,” said Alphus as she used an ungloved hand to produce a notebook from inside her jacket and scribble something on it. Her hair was rather stiff and cut in a severe line below her chin. Her bulbous gray eyes did not focus on him as he began to bob his hand in front of her…

            “What!” The girl formerly mistaken for a shrub exclaimed. In her surprise, she sat down hard in the snow. “Who? Who let you in here? I’m sorry, but I should not have to tell you that this space, at least a five-meter radius and a height of ten along the z-axis in cylindrical coordinates, which I would be crazy not to use given the initial conditions, has been set aside for scientific research. Damn apes walking on two legs, escaped from Africa over the Bering land bridge before that sucker got flooded, always stepping in front of a person obviously engaged in productive research, what do you want this time?”

            Alphus shrugged and offered her his hand to help get her out of the snow. She rejected it and scampered up on her own. After she dusted herself off, she jumped again, surprised to see him standing in front of her.

            “Are you applying to be my assistant? Well, here’s something: the flock of quail living in these dormant raspberry bushes,” she said looking somewhere over his left shoulder, “have become practically subterranean; they have tunnels running all along this area. And frankly, someone must be feeding them. They shouldn’t be alive in such a climate, but besides that they are fascinatingly normal. Just fascinating. You can catalogue them and write me up a report.”

            Alphus noticed how efficient the girl was in talking; for how much sound she made, she moved her small mouth hardly at all.

            “Please sir,” she noticed Alphus again, “you are standing in the middle of my research. Can you please move five meters to the left?”

            Alphus did so, approximately, and the girl continued to follow the movements of various snowflakes with her pen and scribble things in her notebook.

            Alphus fed the quail from a distance. He couldn’t tell if he was entranced with his new friend (Is she my friend now?) or just confused. His ears rang a little bit from her shouting. He walked back onto the porch and then inside. It was the first time in his memory that anyone other than himself and the quail had been in his backyard.

            An hour or so later the girl was still there. Alphus put a pot of milk on the stove to simmer. Then he squeezed in the bottle of syrup to make it chocolatey brown. He took his reserve mug out of the cabinet – he only ever used the one since he never had company; he was pleased that in his good forethought, he had bought another just in case – filled it with the steaming liquid, and plopped a daub of light whipped cream on top for effect. He stepped back out onto his porch.

            “I have hot chocolate.” He offered.

            “You again.” The girl said, “Alright, make yourself at home, I suppose. You seem to have already taken the liberty of mentioning chocolate in the middle of my research, so why not disturb me more. But anyway, the data seems to be supporting my hypothesis which is a good sign but I dare say not as interesting as something I had not predicted. Like the cure for cancer – tee hee – in snowflakes. Ha ha ha. You, I suppose, yes, I will take your hot chocolate. Though I doubt very much that the Curies took hot chocolate breaks. No, they worked long into the night until they caught pneumonia, their fingers blistered, and their eyesight went. I suppose I should stay humble and not even consider the possibility that I might ever be ranked among them. It appears there will be no dual Nobel Prize for me – hot chocolate break.”

            She walked up to the porch and followed Alphus inside.

            “What’s your name?” He asked as they sat down at the small kitchen table. He watched her drink.

            “Gauss Anne Worlby,” she said, both hands, a painful shade of red, clasped to her mug. She had to lift her arms up to chest height to get them on the table. She stared into her beverage, watching the bubbles that had collected against the lip slowly pop. She muttered something about surface tension.

            “Doesn’t it bother you?”

Without waiting for him to answer, she continued, “The snow. People seem to forget that non-stop snow for more than twenty years is inexplicable! They accept it, entirely accept it. Just like they’ve done with toasters or with the fact that the immense bulk of this planet does not pull us through the crust and suck us all the way to the core! Doesn’t it bother you? Intrigue you? That the moon doesn’t fall into the ocean and that flowers have five or eight petals but not six or seven? You know that ice floats?”

            “Um,” said Alphus.

            “What’s yours?”

            “What?”

            “Your name, obviously. What’s your name?”

            “Alphus Gibb,” Alphus shrugged.

            He wasn’t sure why he shrugged. He knew that that was definitely his name. He was about to repeat it more confidently and took a breath to speak again as Gauss Anne said,

            “That’s okay. Gibb. It means that at least you may have some relative that went to Cambridge with the rest of them and contributed, even, something to the field of thermodynamics. No, not bad at all. Pleased to meet you, Alphus.”

            Alphus blushed, unsure of what to do with the breath he had just taken.

            “Welp, work to do,” said Gauss Anne and headed to the front door. She had a tendency to shuffle more than walk. She opened the door with a bang and closed it more emphatically. Alphus sighed which was a relief because his head had started to hurt. He continued to sit by himself at the kitchen table thinking nothing. When he was done, he drank the dregs of Gauss Anne Worlby’s hot chocolate. 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 

6/13

            “Let me just talk this out with you: The starfish cycles of birth and death that I have tabulated and the overall population ODE can be modeled by a Fourier series meaning the total number of starfish base on time, t, of course, is loosely based on an exponential function dependent on the initial population, but here’s what interesting: the birth rates that I have recorded can be modeled by a triangle wave, which is where the Fourier comes in. It appears that the number of births per unit time rises until a point, the end of a period, where the rate drops to zero and then eventually rises again. The wave is half rectified, of course. Oh ho! We can’t have a negative birth rate, now can we? No, starfish crawling back into their genetic lineage is not allowed. At least, I’ve yet to see it. Don’t you think it’s fascinating?”

            Alphus gazed into her eyes, or he tried to at least. Gauss Anne was so excited that she kept gesturing very close to his face and tracing invisible numbers and symbols onto the table. When he wasn’t flinching, Alphus made prolonged eye contact with the tops of her eyebrows.

            Gauss Anne Worlby had not let a lack of school get in the way of her education. In fact, school would probably have hindered her learning experience. She had no patience for the distraction of her peers or for the dull hours spent sitting in a classroom. Like Alphus, Gauss Anne was immensely preoccupied, but her interest in animals and rocks stemmed from their potential as subjects of study and not at all as companions. She would not enter their world as a follower waiting to be initiated but as a Bazaov with notebook in hand. She wanted to get at nature’s secrets, and the only relationships she was interested in were ones like the speed of light’s relation to the medium through which it traveled or a movement’s relationship to the electrical impulse coming from the brain. 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

***
5/13

            No one remembers snow country’s real name. The town was once a bustling spittoon of commerce complete with parks and a hopping Slung Your Jug, where tourists could enjoy gas, donuts and company. Residents lived in the real world amidst the stresses of school, finance and relationships. Then it started to snow.

            When the snow came, Alphus was in fifth grade. He was a quiet boy, intent on finding a special rock each day and stowing it in his pocket. The snow was a light dandruff at first then increased to splotches – like insects dead upon windshields: round and unique, appearing in random patterns, and inconvenient when present in swarms.

            On his birthday, the students were let home early. The snow fell in big web-like chunks. The ground melted the first flakes, but since then no one has seen it. Roofs broke in, and tree limbs sagged. The snow crept up to cover half of bottom-story windows, and let children to jump safely from tall decks and low roofs. The snow built up for about a week, and then, though it continued to fall from the sky, the level on the ground stayed the same.

            School was canceled the day after Alphus’s birthday and the day, the week, and all the years after that. Business’s closed one after another. Only people who lived in their offices and who invested a large amount of their identity in their careers continued to work. Things became rather sedentary. Alphus did not finish elementary school.

            In the mornings, as was his habit, when Alphus donned his robe and fed his quail companions or if he happened to take a walk to see his mother, Alphus would behold his next-door neighbor. Behold: the man had a tan round belly and a hairy chest. This was apparent because he would stand on his driveway in only his lime-green swim trunks and fireman boots and grill himself a bratwurst before noon each day. Alphus tried to avoid his neighbor. The lime-green shade of the swim trunks was unsightly.

            To keep this up, the neighbor would wrestle his truck through the snow over to the food warehouse, and he’d buy the largest pack of bratwursts available. Alphus had seen these packs – dogs wrapped tightly in plastic like spongy teeth or a fleshy anemone. It hurt him psychologically.

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 

4/13

            Alphus Gibb had heard somewhere that books were a window into the world. He had read few books, lest he be a peeping-Tom, and he wasn’t sure he was entitled to windows. But then, of course, there was Belle with her library! Her nose always in a book, and there was the way she was reading her own story without suspecting it.

            Alphus wanted to be like Belle, kind and lovely. Her library had windows, with little square panes like eyelids, from floor to ceiling. Alphus thought this gave credence to books being windows, at least to books being sometimes next to windows.

            There was one bookstore in snow country, America. The sidewalks were an aged and fuming shade of gray, clear of snow close to the buildings where it was forced back by the old awnings hung above storefronts. The sign in front read simply, “Used Books.” The diner across the street was the shape of a milk bottle. Through the window, red stools sat on the counters, upside down like stiff spiders in surrender.

            An elderly gentleman greeted Alphus as he entered Used Books. Alphus scuffled his feet and surveyed the room; it was stuffed from floor to ceiling with shelves of books. Alphus felt like he was breathing books or that the room was an artery pumping books from a deep dark heart of paper and binding glue and viscous ink, viral and worming, ink that oozed its way across pressed leather surfaces, infecting pages and scarring them with hieroglyphs.

            This is the way into the world? Alphus wondered.

            The gentleman behind the counter wore a pressed white shirt and a scholarly mustache. “Please, let me know if I can be of any service.” He said to Alphus. Another man sat opposite the counter in a folding chair. The cramped conditions coupled with this man’s unpleasant fatness made it so that Alphus couldn’t avoid squirming against his knees in order to get past him. His jeans were stained with black and connected to black suspenders atop a faded T-shirt.

            Alphus wandered through the stacks. Jannika Durby… Ross Troikin… Fisher Knox… Alphus recognized none of the authors. Although, he figured he should have: each had about a bookshelf and a half dedicated to holding his or her works alone.

            “—I’ve seen enough in my lifetime.”

            “But did you hear me? That’s some twisted shit.” Alphus could barely hear the men in the front talking to each other.

            “At this point, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Nothing’s really new anymore.”

            “Yeah but -- --the poses and lighting –”

            “Of course, you know some of the best photographers in the world –”

            “I ended up talking those two girls who were in here the other day -- -- Anyway, I’ve got some for you to look at.”

            Alphus continued into the next room to keep himself from eavesdropping. This room was as clogged with books as the first. A deer-like woman sat crumpled on the ground amidst a skirmish of books. Her eyes were deep-set, her limbs were slender, and there were gray patches of wear on her tennis shoes. She would put a book on the bottom shelf, take it off, reconsider, put it back, and then slide a great chunk of them over. She did not look at Alphus. Looking at her made him tremble. She had one long braid that ran down the middle of her back. Between moving books she would tap her fingers on the wooden shelf, rapidly. As she tapped, Alphus’s body shook; his calves and fingers twitched; his vision became gray around the edges, like she was sliding away from him down a long blurry tunnel.

            Cold air burst into the shop as a large woman bustled her way in. Alphus returned to the front room feeling guilty for watching the shelving girl from high above her. The woman greeted the two shop men warmly. She was the picture of average – brown hair, a bit more girth than what’s healthy, and dressed in a neutral-colored rain coat.

            The deer girl mumbled something as she tapped Alphus to get out of her way. The gentleman introduced her to the newcomer as she approached.

            “Oh, this is the Jennifer you’ve been telling me about!” Said the woman.

            “No, we have lots of Jennifers.”

            Alphus smiled feeling directionless and uncomfortable.

            “In fact, this looks like a man who likes his Jennifers.” The gentleman said motioning to Alphus.

            “Let me help show you around. There’s a map on the wall for the cupboards of books. This room is for serials, the next is for authors with only one or two books, and the back room is our open jerkoff room. Back through that metal door.”

            Jennifer made her way past the two of them, also squirming against the fat man’s knees. She was very thin, tiny, Alphus thought. She looked like he could fold her in on herself until she fit in the palm of his hand. Or maybe she’d be altogether nothing.

            The fat man in the suspenders stood up and refilled the coffee maker. Its glass was stained a semi-transparent brown. It looked like it had been run out before its time, stained by the heat and neglect of half-filled pots not cleaned out until the next morning.

            Alphus left the shop. He was not so charmed by windows. 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 

3/13

            Few people worked in snow country, America. Few worked because the snow started a long time ago. The day after Alphus turned eleven there was a snow day, and no one had to go to school or work. The same thing happened the day after that and every day since. If anyone needed work to be done, they hired someone from the next town over. It snowed there too, but only when it was seasonally appropriate.

            Snow country was a snow-locked snow-infested snow-clad snow country. And in the next town over, Alphus’s sister was heavy with child. The prepostery! The nerve! Alphus thought upon his discovery of the human reproductive system. It was too messy and otherworldly, and who had the right, really, to come crawling out of anyone else?

            Once, when Alphus was eating an apple, he did not stop at the delicious sticky rubbing-alcohol cool flesh of the fruit, but continued to eat through the pale and sour core until the stem was all that was left.

            Oh no. He thought. He imagined the accidentally consumed seeds germinating and enlarging in his stomach. A sapling would start growing out of the top of his head; a pond with tiny goldfish would form beside it. In the spring, with its first blossom, people would come have picnics under it. In the desolation of night, couples would make love.

            One night, he had a dream that his stomach was ballooning as if he had gorged for days or as if a person from another dimension was trying to use his intestines as a portal into this world. He grew and grew in pain, his skin not sufficiently elastic. He struggled to a mirror. Through the hole of his gaping belly button he saw the hard shiny green of a granny smith apple. (This perplexed him as he had swallowed the seeds of a red delicious.) You can imagine his dismay when he saw his sister in a similar condition.

            How could the world be so deviant, he wondered. And to my sister!

            “I have a baby growing inside of me, Alphus.” Suzan had told him. “A little person.”

            Alphus imagined the cramped up little person supposedly inhabiting the skin of his sister. Something comprised of mostly limbs with gigantic elbows and knees. Two protruding eyes sat atop one of the bony stake-like arms. A parasite, an intruder.

            Life inside of life, Alphus thought. How disgusting. 

Alphus

This is part of serialized short story. I posted the beginning on 11.03.2012, and if you click on the label, “The Adventure of Alphus Gibb,” you can see all the available pieces together. I’ll be posting new segments on Sundays. I hope you like it.

*** 
2/13

            Gauss Anne Worlby shuffled her moccasin-clad feet down Alphus’s front path. She led him by the hand; she had to wrench her arm up and behind her because she was so much shorter than him.

            “Alphus,” Gauss Anne was saying, “the level of snow provides a very perplexing problem. I’ve been studying the rate of snowfall, and it has at least definitely existed. The rates themselves, though, have varied enough to give me difficulty in nailing down a good predicting average, but they have definitely been both non-zero and positive. That may not seem like much, Alphus, but this is science!”

            Alphus may or may not have been listening.

            “There hasn’t been a day of sunshine or one above freezing in 23 years. The divergence of the snow rate is non-zero meaning that, somehow, there is a sink. The snow does not appear to be conserved. But it has to be conserved! There are other forces at work, Alphus!”

            She’s holding my hand? Alphus thought. He fell through many parts of the snow that Gauss Anne could slide across. His body lurched forward every once in a while where the toe of his boot dug into the snow and his shin hit the side of the new hole.

            “Batsmitan Desert Mud Frogs survive long periods of drought by burrowing deep underground and hibernating. When the rains come, all of a sudden the ponds are full of frogs like they appeared ex nihilo. I am beginning to believe that something like that is happening here. Perhaps some long dormant animal is reemerging from the time when there were glaciers and plenty of ice. This animal must live under the snow, feeding on the frozen moisture. Something must be consuming the snow or else it would be thirty feet above our heads.”

            “Where are we going, Gauss Anne?”

            “The amazing thing is that these snow-eaters must do so at the exact same rate that the snow falls. As I said earlier, my tests show that the snowfall rate varies dramatically from one snowflake per square meter per second on average to about fifty. How is it possible that the consumption rates, the number of individuals, and the birth and death rates all combine to produce a drainage of snow exactly equal to what’s being added? Never before have I observed an animal so keenly aware of its environment. So keenly aware…. It’s almost as if their behavior has some predictive qualities. I am afraid it’s rather unprecedented in science and because I am without even preliminary findings, I’m sticking my neck out, here, just saying this – but the possibility is just too tantalizing to resist! What would Dr. Livingstone think? Perhaps, Alphus. Perhaps, the animal birth and death rates, their snow intake, and their number determine the snow fall rather than being dictated by it.”

            They had walked to the end of Alphus’s path and down the street half way to the corner. Then Gauss Anne let go of his hand and took off as fast as her short legs could carry her. Her hair stayed perfectly still as it always did even though she was shuffling at top speed.

            Alphus stood in the road, once again at a loss upon Gauss Anne’s departure. When she had stormed through the front door and grasped his hand to take him outside, he did not even have time to grab his burgundy robe. He stood shivering in his white T-shirt, blue sweat pants and boots. His tummy bulged over his waistband, and the taut skin on his bald head looked severely out of place – foreign and abandoned – being so exposed and so cold. Alphus held one of his arms in the other.

            I don’t know if I ever want to see her again, he thought. Why does she do stuff like this?

            He trudged back across the lawn and through the door that stood open. He had not realized that he could be so easily taken from his home and exposed to the cold. Gauss Anne had such a flora-like appearance that it seemed to Alphus that he was vulnerable even to the trees. 

Alphus

I'm in the process of applying to an MFA program in creative writing. For this, I've been putting together a portfolio - going back and editing my stories from the past couple years. Here's the beginning of a longer piece I'm working on. It's going to be called "The Adventures of Alphus Gibb" or something like that. Let me know about any edits/thoughts/comments that you have.

Update: I'll be posting new segments on Sundays. Click on the label to see all the available ones together.
***
1/13

Alphus Gibb lived by himself in a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a porch, a kitchen, and an antique fireplace. When it was snowing, and it was always snowing, Alphus would put on his thick burgundy robe with fur-lined hood and cuffs, and walk off the back porch into the snow to feed the birds. He liked to pretend that he was Belle from Beauty and the Beast, his favorite movie. He’d imagine that a fearsome, hairy but sweet monster was gazing down at him, seeing his goodness and generosity to the light and happy creatures and wondering how he would ever get the beast to fall in love with him to break the spell and turn his kitchen appliances back into people.

            Alphus lived to feed the birds. He liked best to watch them run; they’d slim down their feathers and straighten upright. The birds were quail, a whole cult of them, living in the long-dead raspberry bushes. The old raspberry stems had become a wooden lattice, hard and strong as any thatched Elizabethan roof or Indian longhouse. Here the birds communed. Scampering in and out, they’d always hit their head feather, the feathers bobbing and shrugging. Alphus thought they looked like arrows saying, “You can find me here.” He thought about getting one for himself, but he’d never be accepted into the quail cult, he thought. They were too impressive. From time to time they decided to take great flights into the air, up to seven or eight feet! No, he’d stay on the outside, feeding them, pretending to be Belle.

            Alphus spent a lot of time with his mother. His mother spent most of her time being in love with Jonny Kruszymkortcha, a Jewish Pole, or a Polish Jew, or a Jewish Polish person, living in snow country America, who told everyone the news. Eleven at night, five in the morning, he was on Masha’s flat screen, HD, really big television. He’d sit behind his wide desk like a peppy particularly consequential bartender. And did I mention he was handsome? At least to Masha. She used to have a smaller TV. It was more normal, and it sat in its corner of the room, more or less unimposing, humming always to commercials and sitcoms and the odd storm warning. Then Masha, and perhaps Jonny himself, thought it was time for the next step in their relationship. So now she owned the Mongotron300 – 87 inches and she loved every one of them. She used to tell Alphus how she was in love.

            “What does that mean?” He’d ask her.

            Being in love was being fixated on someone. Being interested in them, spending all your time watching them. Saying romantic things and layering regular conversations with the erotic. That’s what Masha would tell him, and she’d say how much it hurt sometimes. The person you’re in love with can inflict pain with just a twitch of an eyebrow. A small sigh in your company can tell you he might secretly be thinking about something else, about someone else.

            “Sometimes when Jonny looks away from the teleprompt I just break into tears! I could kill him during those times!”

            Ah yes, that was what being in love was all about.

            Alphus thought about being in love, but so far he had experienced none of the symptoms. Alphus was not in love with Jonny Kruszymkortcha. His eyebrow antics had never given Alphus so much as the hiccups.

            As much as Masha was for being in love she was, in no way, shape or form, in any year, ever, in support of marriage. “Do not get married, Alphus.” She would say. “Can you imagine what would have happened if I had married your father?” Alphus could not imagine. Not about that.

            Masha figured marriage was too risky – fifty percent of marriages ended in divorce, and the people who stayed married died. Divorce or death were not good options; it wasn’t logical to get married. And Masha thought that if your actions weren’t logical then you deserved whatever consequences you got. Hence, in her mind, married people deserved to die. In fact, Masha rejoiced in the rising divorce rate; it was driving the death-rate down. Alphus hated when she talked about marriage.

            It was snowing, like always, and Alphus was outside in his robe feeding the birds and thinking about Belle. He wondered if Belle got married. If she did, he wondered if the birds got hungry and froze after she died. Poor Belle. Poor quails.

            He looked up from these musings to see the snow falling more heavily, in big chunks. A gust of wind kicked the tops of the dunes into a white sheet. Alphus had to shield his eyes. When he lowered his arm, his white fur cuffs even whiter for the snow, he saw the most amazing sight that his eyes had yet beheld. A bird, two or three times the size of the quail, was standing to the side of the yard. Its feathers were bright shades of gold, red and purple. Its tail dusted the ground with grace.

            Alphus was interested. Alphus was fixated. Alphus felt that if the lovely bird so much as battered an eye in the wrong way, he would be in great pain. Alphus had read on the Internet how pheasants exhibited strong sexual dimorphism; he thought that sounded great. For that’s what this bird was, a pheasant. Alphus was in love.

            He noticed how the quails paid it very little attention. How could they just scuttle around like that when Dionysus herself was among them! The pheasant was the only thing in his world; he felt no cold, no hunger, no pangs of regret for past wrongs, no fear for the future. He was only aware of the pheasant, the great bird of bold colors.

            He thought to himself, a very honest thought that would only be appropriate in the presence of his great love. He took that thought and decided to hide it deep in his heart, so deep that his mother could not even find it if she looked. And Alphus did not know; someday she might be inclined to look. In a small dear voice, hard like a pebble cupped in the palm of his hand, in view of the pheasant of his affection, he thought: Someday, I would like to get married.  

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