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Joseph Grammer, Author

The stories of author Joe Grammer.

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Glory Days

More people press in close for the hole. Jim Daily was the first to find it, just off I-10 in Glendale. Nothing but desert for miles, and then this little oasis right here. He went again on his way back from LA, and the relief was just as great as the first time. How many things can you say that about?

Jim told Danger Mike, his friend and fellow trucker, and Danger Mike had gone way out of his way (and his employer’s wallet) to see the Eighth Wonder, or I guess to experience it, since half the fun was you don’t see anything. He left the restroom exultant.

Then Fadden happened on an online forum full of dangermike77’s all-caps exultations, and he became a devoted acolyte. He brought his cousin, his uncle Leif, and his best friend Doogy. They all took turns—twice—and became very difficult to reach by phone.

A member of the press got wind of this “small-circumference Shangri-La” and wrote several rejected articles on the topic, establishing credibility through multiple physical confirmations of the so-called “Layman’s Lourdes”, although he exceeded the 400 word count on every submission, mostly due to his lengthy and impassioned (and ultimately futile, he would say) descriptions of the intensity of the feelings involved and the magnitude of the relief and joy that occurred post-miracle.

 

 

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Comfort

For a moment the sun shielded Uono from the spattered limbs of his companions. His skin creaked with relief.

Gnats swarmed over the Kawago paddies, a thousand kilometers away, waiting to be snagged in broken bowls. Upon the dirt streets beyond the marsh Uono trembled before elders, chased his sons with a cattail, trained glares on the village punks. His wife murmured a haiku from their youth as they curled in bed, relishing the sweetness of rain-damp moss through the window.

The light passed. A man hobbled toward him with a gory katana. A crow shit between them into the valley where screams rolled through the fog. The two men quick-stepped, whirling, hissing through noses.

Yatsumara stabbed between the armored slats under Uono’s lung. The younger man dropped to one knee and growled at his clumsiness. The older man drove the sword in deeper.

“You are a crippled horse’s cunt.”

“And I shall personally ensure that your wife is raped by drunk macaques from Tadame. When I reach your village I will tie your children to stakes and take them apart with dull hatchets from a distance of ten meters. Then I will force your inevitably hunchbacked mother to—”

Hm. Nausea puddled in his stomach. His hand, without bothering to consult him, released its katana.

“What is this?”

Uono’s laughter uncorked the fear in Yatsumara’s heart. Pine trees and standard-bearers shook in the distance.

“Our archers are the most skilled in Edo, you monkey’s sponge. Every day they stick fat bastards like you through the center of your eye, and after nothing but plum wine and roots.”

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A Squid for Mr. Calaway

My therapist says love goes beyond mere sensual pleasure, but she doesn’t eat baby squid from Vogliano’s with butter and garlic every Wednesday. If she did she’d drop her doctorate in the trash.

“So this food is the only thing you feel you love?”

“Is that weird? I mean, it makes me happy.”

“It’s natural to love what, or who, makes you happy.”

“No who for me, please.”

She nods without moving any part of her face.

“You prefer to be alone.”

“Prefer? I don’t know what I prefer. A fried cephalopod with crunchy tentacles.”

She leans back in her chair, steeples her fingers. Her eyes are a tenth the size of a giant squid’s.

“Other people—family, friends. How do you feel about them?”

I test Dr. Lane’s comfort with silence. When I’ve run out the clock she says, “Enjoy your dinner, Mr. Calaway.”

I want to explain that it’s more than a meal—it’s a marine bonanza. But instead I hustle my way to 2nd Ave, avoiding the blight of Bellevue Hospital, and choose my companions for the evening.

“Prego, un chilo di calamari.”

Nailed the accent. The old woman wraps two-point-two comforting pounds in a plastic sack.

“Grazie a Dio!”

“Eh?”

“Non, non importa.”

Into the dusk with my mollusks.

 

 

 

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Burned

“Winter’s Night” by Boris Pasternak. Essence of perfect love in eight stanzas.

Candles always call to mind that poem, that poet in his windswept territory of death and trainyards. His heart shuddering to a stop as a nation’s blind terror shakes him with stained hands. This is Dr. Zhivago I’m talking about. Omar Sharif toiling through ruined mansions of snow, looking agonized.

I spy a woman five floors below and she reminds me of Lara, lost forever to her lover and to all who watch her grace a page. Just kidding—she and Yurochka live happily ever after.

“You’re drunk.”

I think it’s her telling me so, little lost Lara, but it’s just me speaking to an empty room.

An armchair glares balefully from a shadowed corner. It is probably because I called him a useless communist when I tripped over him this morning when I was drunk, or is it still morning?

I open a beer. “To my poor, wasted youth.”

A Pushkin quote to start the day.

Clink.

Shupppppp.

I’ve always liked Stella Artois—I try to cultivate appreciation for beautiful things.

On the floor, fragments of a cut-glass serving bowl toss sun around my feet. My shoes are in different quadrants of the room, and I stare at the wall through my Stella’s lens of bottle-green, which is an official Russian color. Butilochni. We define the world by what’s around us, I suppose.

 

 

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