Well, Sir, if I may, where have you been your whole life? Dashing about with nymphomaniacs, no doubt, when you should be catching up on affairs, volunteering in the community, and such. Well, that's all water under the bridge of your nose. Pundits: please, I must be indulged.

I shall be dead soon. Whatever will become of me then? I had so many plans for my little life. Little life, little time, little mind, little left. Big plans. Just as when a little child, fantasies—winning that race, courageously leading a band of reluctant explorers on a voyage into the cellar of that abandoned house—kept me alive in the quiet hours of my bed; I later saw so vividly real expeditions to undiscovered lands, myself receiving his grace in Stockholm, reading my work to my brilliant son, his smile, me bringing him some sliced apple on a plate with honey-laced tea to ease his painful pre-somnial visions. Lost hours dreaming, I see their value now. Yet, in spite of that learning, I dream on, wasting my remaining hours.

I might have dreamed even more, relinquished more control to the waves of time. "Waves of time." No wonder the king never called. And the waves of time roll over me, forcing me this way and that, polishing this beautiful stone, removing its shape and edge, sculpting its unplanned design, making it indistinguishable from the rest only to extinguish it in the end.

To me I am dying, to you I am dead. To you I would probably be dead whether by artificial means or not. Grant me this much, either way we can all feel better about ourselves.

I am not a religious man, so I carry with me none of the Christian fears—and they say I ought to have them. I don't fear the fire, for the fire is hot and in here there's an awful draft. I have not in my life before sought guidance, although a variety of religions have singled me out for rebuke. For a time, the prison chaplain tried to redeem me. Not a bad fellow he was, but neither intelligent. His downfall with me came when he tried to convince me that being dead is not really so bad, but this was just plain silliness since I know that being alive is often a plus, especially in an interview. But he insisted: Nice, he said, like the coast. I have since converted to Onanism and experienced the hand of God—that's a joke, boy, you're supposed to laugh. Don't hold back on my account.

So death it is then and serve it up hot! Bring on the angels and devils, the ghoulies and ghastlies. I live with the sweet knowledge that they will have to clean my drawers when I'm gone. I am diabolical, am I not?

I've been writing this memoir for so long now that you will excuse me if I feel a certain colloquial rapport. You understand, I trust, that I am schooled enough in etiquette not to make potty jokes with any but my closest of friends; but a dead man has no morals, he has no honor, which exists only insomuch as he can defend it. And there, you, sir, have me at a disadvantage. Ah, but a coward's death is no worse than any other's. If I had been employed in the war, I am quite sure I'd have worked the coffee cart. As it was, my sole contribution to the war effort consisted of stockpiling doilies for just that possibility. Incidentally, I will those frayed discs to Mr. Ross, who fancied them. Poor Mr. Ross, I once caught him pocketing one of those frilly things at a party, but hadn't the courage to confront him. Imagine, to be caught lifting a doily. A worse fate than death, and I can say that verily. I can say it verily, warily, and contrarily.

This seems a good opportunity to mention M. Kaicher and Sons Funeral Services on 10th Street to whom I promised an advertisement in exchange for a discount.

So death it is then.

And in light of this death—seeming now an inevitability save for the whims of the bureaucrats who seem more often than not to be using up all their whims at the racetrack—my present circumstances are something of a disappointment. I'd always envisioned a grand death for myself, but not grand in the sense that this will be grand, noble rather, regal, in tune with the Earth and all that jazz. I also supposed I'd be older. I pictured myself running naked through a forest, leaping over fallen trees, munching on hunted and wrestled alligators. But these were just wishes on fishes.

I have not made a fuss about my conditions. Although, among other blunders, someone has forgot to issue me a key and when I pound on the door screaming to make them aware of their mistake, the porters all laugh at me. Think of that! Porters laughing at me; me who has been known to tip upwards of two bits for services rendered. You may mark this, when all is done I shall issue a staunch complaint against the management.

They do keep the sheets clean, I'll give them that; plenty of clean sheets. Why they must change them once a month. They'll put themselves out of business that way. Not that I'm soiling them, mind you, not that I need them cleaned more often, but if we're talking, let's talk. We shan't sweep anything under the rug. I haven't even got a rug. I've got my memories of rugs, though, they can't take those away from me—and don't think they haven't tried.

I've caught on to their whole operation. I'm starting to get the impression that they think I've done something wrong. What with the food they serve and the drafts, this place will be the death of me; and I'm beginning to think they fashioned it that way. They've taken me in under the pretext of being really genial hosts and now have something nasty planned. This reminds me of a similar situation in college concerning a rival fraternal organization, which as I recall, had a particularly nice carpet going for them—the only reason, whatever they say, that they outbid us at rush. We once staged an intricate confidence game to find out the name of their carpet supplier, but were foiled by a spy in our own ranks.

I have accepted all of this now. Sure, I have been bitter; I have thrown crying fits; I have banged the proverbial tin cup against the bars of my steel door; but no longer the indolent, I—and if that ain't prose, you can kiss my Freddie.

Do I have consolations? Indeed, I do.

In my mind, there is a tiny kiosk of thought residing in my brain on an isolated obelisk of tissue connected to all the rest by a single synapse, coiled. Sometimes it tickles. I reserve there a world of my own creation where I can leap over gators as often as I please. Sadly, I can't get naked as frequently as I would because the fauna tend to blush. I am fortunate in having caught on early: in a few years it's sure to be overrun with tourists.

Before we delve into the sylvan expanse, I feel I ought to caution those quick to draw their theories. I neither offer, nor open for debate, explanations of my little world. Where I might tend to philosophize, I ask that you excuse the ramblings of a doomed man and pass on unnoticed. I do not need the place dirtied up with your filthy ideas.

Now, come, let me show you. Do remove your shoes, I've just had it carpeted with a new blanket of autumn leaves. Prepare yourself. And be nice.

We will step through gently now by closing our eyes. I hope I will do it justice, for this is its first time in the telling.

Let us begin with the woods.

It is a strange woods of misplaced trees each uprooted from its native earth, each one breeded from unlikely seed to serve, a race of mutants, my private need. Mated deliquescent dogwoods and junipers producing a ragged old-man tree of the genus Arborven, with wild, unkempt hair and a bristly, groomed beard. Maples met with their sad sassafras cousins, offering double-samara frowns to accent forlorn leaves. I do not groom them. I do not tend them. Though they are in my garden, they grow wild. I withhold that power of design and am powerless by my reservation. The tending is for Mother Earth and I, with my seed of thought, cuckold Father Sky; he brings the rain somewhat more often for his impotence.

My children are varied and my children are common. Some extraordinary, some mundane. The simple and the special grow old the same. Their accomplishments and talents do not rank their beauty to me, merely their being. The deciduous are ever green and the flowering in bloom. My ash trees never do, my firs never shed. My sweetgum's fruit: a star fish; my basswood's: a bass. I've walnuts and chestnuts and hickories and oaks. The sourgums are sweet. My buttonwoods are cute as. The poplars are not and whine in the wind for that.

My one failed experiment: mating shoe trees with some mint; I've instead purchased an ointment.

Most of this special world was created by me, I believe. Collections of dreams and desires and loves and hates congealed into this beautiful expanse of true life. But there is one life I did not create and he is my world's most valuable treasure and my most personal love. He is a tree and his name is Charleston and he has truly touched my heart—don't tell him that, though, his head is already big enough.

Charleston is my friend. When I scold him, I call him, somewhat formally, Charleston The Tree; but I do not scold him often and he doesn't listen when I do. He is not too tall nor stately, nor too brusque nor bold. He is sparse as twigs go, but strong enough: a common white cedar. In jest, he refers to himself as a thuja accidentalist because he always wanted to be an elm and on that point we wholly agree. Although he is not much to look at among the other trees, he is by far the most individual. He neither alters his manners nor opinions to please my changing dispositions. He occasionally laughs at some of my worse jokes, but that is simple politeness.

I did not create Charleston. He was always there as far as I know. He is his own man—in the sense that a tree can be—and here he is now living and thinking and photosynthesizing and catching up on affairs. Charleston was never one for nymphomaniacs, he goes for much more germinant types.

But you must have the particulars. He is 55 feet tall, give or take, and explains his stunted growth on his Italian ancestry. He is a beautiful conical shape, although with age he has bulked a bit in the belly. He is marvelously asymmetrical. He will not stand to be climbed and does not let the birds nest. His creaking limbs give away an arthritis, for he is old. We are both old men and the women don't come as oft as they used. He tells me he refrains from the ladies because of my allergies and I let him believe that. In parts he is frail: thin twigs, thinning hair, the evidence of his age displayed beneath our feet. See though his bold, strong trunk, the gripping roots holding him upright. Listen to his voice in the wind. This is my Charleston, uninvited gem of my garden. His branches come and go, snap and grow. His weight varies with his diet. His kindness, though, his wisdom, his humor, and his pain are his steadfast and eternal virtues. I do not know where he is from; Perth Amboy, perhaps. He once mentioned that he missed the country fair, but I know that a tree cannot ride a Ferris wheel. Oh, maybe a small tree, in a pot, but not Charleston. I like to think that he is a fugitive. That is romantic. The two of us, fugitives, hiding in a cove from the law of our lands. He lets me believe that, which is good.

Let me show you around my world.

Beneath us, beneath our feet, Charleston on your right, there extends a small plateau. Charleston marks the focal point of one end, a fire-pit the other. A slope descends, narrowing into a path that dives into thick woods. A winding ways down, this veers to the left. As we pass, to the right notice a small sign warning "No Birds Allowed" that has been vandalized by a mischievous Phoenix. Presently, we arrive at a river bank, a depository of serene gurgles. Hear the water go splunk. If you lean, you can see the falls spilling off to the left. Cold showers. See the rapids swirling and whirliderling off to the right. Very pleasant foot massages. I don't know where the river goes. Beyond the rapids, it seems to laze into the horizon unchanged. I am not of an exploratory nature and what I already have pleases me. Let us ignore that direction and move on to the falls.

My waterfall is not the grandest, but it is cool still. Moving closer—the water is shallow—you can see it more clearly. I love the trickles of water along the edges of rock, those outcast driblets not chosen to take part in the guttural gush. They are the spurgle and splink to the surge's splunk and glumpk; they are the texture and shade, the harmony. They are the mustard on a nice deli sandwich. The main falls is the meat, a rolling slice of corned beef, traced through with silver streaks of delicious fat.

There is more. The river rolls on. The woods grow out. I do not know what is there and I do not care. Charleston knows, I am sure, but I do not ask him and he does not tell. I am happy here in my cove, known, comfortable, safe, beneath my bright, bright sun.

Look up at that sun. Do you see how it moves and shifts, from east to west, from west to east; up and down and all around, following it's own drunken course? My Phoebus is fond of white lightning and swerves all over the sky. At night, the stars are the same—at least they look somewhat like stars, but I do have some doubts. For one thing, they twinkle too much, some at ridiculously low, slow rates, others obscenely fast. Then, there are no falling stars. Where on a typical night in good terra firma, if the darkness is just the right hue, a neck-upturned viewer with patience to spare would see, in time, at least several few, here I've seen none and I've looked all night long; I've got six hundred wishes I'd like to have spun, but not one star has fallen into my fairyland. Not one. And for stars that move around so much I find that downright odd. I know all stars move, but not like this. I mean, they move. I once saw the constellations rehearsing what I believe was a gimpy performance of King Lear. A stick-figure feline nightly chases a frightened alligator—don't ask me, I've got enough to worry about—past a muddled reenactment of the boxer rebellion. It's either the Boxer rebellion or my ninth birthday party—Mother knew how to throw quite a bash.

When I was young, I would visit my world only now and then, pass through maybe on the way to more virile parts of my dreams. I blame it as the cause of my unusually long stint of bedwetting, which I rarely do nowadays. But with little to dream of late without hope and less reason to stay awake, I've begun to settle down in this wooden cove, sleeping most nights beneath Charleston's cricking boughs; and I am happy in that bounded breadth of brain, that bordered bedrock of possibility. There I am not sad. There the paroxysmal nostalgia which afflicts my person is harmlessly dispersed among needles and cones and beetles and stones living in timeless growth; at once old, at once young, dying only to be born again in some other form. The smallest bit of dirt retains a conscious memory of its prior forms as bird, crooning toad, tortoise shell, some pollen in a boar's sneeze. To the tiniest drop of rain there, I am subordinate. And as that droplet runs down my brow and over my cheek, it caresses me in ruth. Even this minute, as my focus shifts to the small steel door shut tight of my cell, I can feel that caress.

Hmph, funny thing, just a cheap tear imitator, its touch as shallow as a stripteaser's smile.

There is much comfort in being subordinate; so much security and so little shame. I spent years perfecting my superior stature, years pledging the fraternity of celebrity. I shall write what I will, let them stomach what they can! But there I was in private humbly cataloguing each editor's suggestions and executing them. For that, I had only one collection to show and simply because the publisher was an old college friend.

I have learned now about superiority. I would give up every drunken moment of the one grand ball I was permitted to attend, all its beautiful socialites, all that short lived acclaim, for the simplicity of a breeze, of a moment of silence, for a child to call me daddy.

Charleston has taught me these things through his being. I do this now for myself. There is no reward left to be had. I confess my sins and ask only silence. I show my desires and expect no appeasement. My jokes are for us, my laughter is enough. And I let myself believe this which is the most important thing.

That is why I have my world. That is why it exists for me. It is a place of security and humility where the horrors of this, our shared Earth, cannot invade. I also mean to die there.

Come back to me for a moment, to me here in my cell, while we still have some time. I don't know where you are reading this, or when, or if. Perhaps you're a prisoner like myself. Perhaps you are in Spain. Perhaps you are in your nightclothes, hot summer night, dear, bed sheet at your breast, just a hint of skin where the strap, napping, has slipped off your shoulder. Let a dying man imagine his reader a bouncy college girl or under-appreciated homemaker slipping away from a husband's stale embrace. But you have moved, haven't you? You won't be true to me. Some of our pages are yellow from lying open the week you were in love. There's an inexplicable, tawny smudge in the corner where a stained finger turned the page, trapping us both in my moment. There on page 10, as I was just beginning, a cold you had a year ago. On 247, where I mentioned a kiss, a piece of your dearest's hair, entombed. What were you rushing to when you folded over the beginning of Chapter 15 and I receiving my degree? What words, I wonder, passed over that bit of dribble that blurs the heading before it drooled over your painted lip? Each page that you turn and soil, tilling for a fertility I assure you is not there, futily carries you toward our end, an end already caste. The little smudges of yourself interjected along the way, wish as you might, will not vary our course. I am the labyrinthine state.

So stop picking your ears, can't you see you're marking up my book?!

Let us resume.

Reaching out from the center of the fire pit like a veined, masculine hand is a plantain tree: four fingers, little one missing, second stubbed making the third the longest; a right hand, thick thumb on our right, twig nails, dark channels tensing the surface. But it is not a hand, remember, it is just a tree that looks like a hand. I have never seen it bearing fruit.

Into the creviced trunk, I have driven a thick nail on which droops a maniacal mask. The hand holds in its malformed digits a wooden tray, constructed of birch, supported at the sides by the thumb, first, and third fingers, and underneath by the stubbed second which I did not mention curls inward. When I lie in the tray, blanket of bark coiled down and away, we are the picture of a perfect pyre.

Before you get carried away, dear, being burned alive is not my idea of a good time. The death will come before, lounging beneath Charleston's melodic songs of sleep, grass cushioning my cheek, a single blade probing a nostril, curious ant slipping away with a treasured nugget stolen while the dragon dozed and in that nugget the dragon's fire. Aware of the missing item, aware of encroaching death, I climb into my pealing white box with its undulating decorative bark and quietly pass away.

Then, and only then, the fire. But who will light it? Charleston refuses. I opened the question to some of my fellow inmates. Being a diabolical lot, I was provided the details of many Cyranoan schemes, many impractical, most ridiculous, if cohesive. One, however, was ingenious and I must give credit to Arturo for thinking it up and for supplying the mask which is it's key component.

This mask hangs even now on the tree. Two large eyes dominate the whole: glass disks set in rubber moldings. They offer little in the way of peripheral vision. They are severely scratched and stained. Between and below these ruddy, buggy eyes is a large protrusion; a perfect fit for my big nose. The whole is again encased in a rubber molding which then attaches to the face. It is dusty black. Two straps, one around, one over, keep it in place. The nose thingy used to have a hose thingy coming out of it and this is where the necessary modifications took place. Removing the hose, I attached a latex balloon, well worn, nice and loose. Normal breathing easily expands and contracts it. To the inside of the balloon on opposing faces, I applied two chemicals, scraped from a matchbook, and then to one, a fuse.

As long as I am breathing normally, all is well. When respiration stops, the chemicals unite and spark the fuse which brings the beautiful fire to the pit and crackle-crackle-crackle, I'm toast. A later addition, if time permits, might be a eulogizing phonograph cranked by the stream. Charleston will not weep, for our relationship is decidedly deciduous.

Delicious, certainly, but why? Simple: being reduced to the smallest elements of existence, being burned to a thousand bits of separable and scatterable ash is my only hope of remaining alive. I do not want to die. I do not deserve to die. I have not earned this judicated death. But I have my secret world. A world the lawyers and politicians and purported victims kin do not know about, a world where there can be no death, only transformation; a beautiful, but buttered world that slips from my grasp on whim. I cannot stay there to live, but I can stay there to die, if I destroy my current form in the process.

This is all just a guess, but my experiences here lend it credibility. Too many times have I fallen asleep there and awakened here to trust that simple death would be any different. I am not going to risk it. I feel confident that it will work, but not confident enough to test it prematurely, of course. I've tested the apparatus, that works fine, but not the theory. No, there's too much at stake.

There is more that I could show you. Down the river, right at the fork and past my latrine to the stretches of wood beyond, lesser known country, but that might be as uninteresting to you as my excessive mastications. I particularly like to masticate on foreign delicacies. Nice Asian dish, or Swedish with their meatballs. Skip the sausage, serve up the perogies.

You don't want to hear about that.

Onward.

I've shown you around. I've shown you a map. But all we've done so far is skirt around an entirely different part of the brain. We've sat in the telegraph office a town away and ruffled through the records. A real visit is completely different. Let me be clear. I do mean "visit," for this is no dream or constructed fantasy. You can call me crazy and God knows people have tried—we couldn't convince a jury of that though, if that's consolation—but my fairyland exists. Whether it is part of this world or the next or exists in some minute cell of my fingertip is neither here nor there. I physically go to this place, and you can too.

All I need to do is close my eyes and concentrate inward on a specific place in my head. I have measured the exact spot, which may aid you in your experiments. It is two and one half inches back from my forehead, three inches down from the top, and three inches in from just over my left temple. This places the critical location a bit above and left of the center of my brain. You will need to adjust these measurements to your own skull size. I can generally find it very easily, but sometimes a cold or headache obscures it from the grasp of my concentration.

I can actually feel myself seeping through the cracks and fissures of my brain toward this spot, filtering out along the way unwanted thoughts and desires and fears, leaving them attached to the jags of pink, filtering my soul into clean being. Usually I can control this, but it has happened, and embarrassed me, that if trapped in some boring situation, unexpectedly my focus will shift and pop! I am through—this has been exceedingly useful on exams.

But what of you, my disrobed reader, can you now, dear, find your way through to meet beneath and kiss beneath Charleston's spiny boughs, could I mention that smooch in these pages, you tasting it still while you read? But you won't make it through. You won't find the door, because there is probably something wrong with my brain. I have searched for artifacts of Zenos in my land; so far: nothing to report.

Miss Maisy

Little Miss Maisy, known to be lazy, sat on a daisy and then...

"Yes?"

You naughty person, you.

That was unfair. Miss Maisy never actually sat on a daisy; never intentionally that is, or at least in my presence. Perhaps accidentally, but she never mentioned it if it did happen and certainly would not have derived any pleasure from it.

She was older than I was, only by several weeks, but at the age of seven, that made her somehow more urbane, more cosmopolitan.

She was one of those aristocratic young girls who ran the plantation with an eye for fault. Plantation was what she called it, though we were more Mason than Dixon. Most in our town were masons, far from free, tethered to the pole of industry; Father included. It was often upon a night the call would ring out and Father and his fellows would up from sup and have to repair some fissure in the town hall, or put up a wall, or some such thing. They'd be gone for hours, singing till the morning light—more than not it was the distillery which needed repair—drunk on the work they loved so. We were all poor and happily. For us kiddies especially, it was a matter of pride as to whose belly was most bloated from hunger and honor was won and lost by that distinction.

I was a sensitive child and Maisy saw maturity in that. I wrote her poems and she said they sounded nice. I wooed her with arrow heads, but she was intractable. I made love to her in improvised prose poems. I once thought myself successful. I was already planning her trousseau when she suddenly appeared with elders in tow, they in turn toting shotguns.

Old beyond her age she was, and many of the town's people would comment on her development. "Say, Jed," they'd observe to her father, "that girl of yours, she's got development." Her Pa would wriggle uncomfortably then and reply, "My name ain't Jed." Still that's what they put on the commitment papers. Seemed he thought she was well developed too. But she loved her Pa and compared me to him.

Miss Maisy, sadly, was tied to a train track by a maniacal man dressed in black and I do her an injustice because she was never known to be particularly lazy.

Life was busy then, what with schooling and chores, and time was at a minimum. Winters were cold and long, but summer, that was our time to spend the day whiling away, sitting on a stoop or fence. Miss Maisy was beautiful those hot summer days, sitting on the stoop of our club which was just an old shed which stored the winter's wood, straw hair to her coccyx. Red freckles speckled her chubby upper arm. She had not yet learned to cross her legs and her knees shined in the summer sun with perspiration. If I were with her now, I would ravish her. Then, I hadn't yet learned to even ravish myself. Kissing was by her command. No forward movement by myself could pucker her lips. Some days she was insatiable and we would kiss all day. Others, most, we'd just sit there, Maisy and me, chucking pebbles at the dandelions, bright day glistening first on her cheek, down her knobbed wrist, off the knee, shiny shin, brushing at last her bony ankles before fading into the night.

I'd been in love with her since I was six, but she wanted nothing to do with me. Then, one waning march, I am declared an idiot and love follows in spring. Picture us, two septigenarians, with 268 1/2 luscious days to fawn before she was to be trammeled and trampled by locos.

I can still picture her. I can still detect an ember of her love in my heart. Poor Miss Maisy, her life cut short. I have thought about her often in my life. I have described her to Charleston and he approves.

She sure had a nasty streak to her though.

Fatuous day: a mild, gray Sunday in March. Church days, boring days. The town met in our minuscule chapel and listened to the sermons of our preacher, Reverend Konigsberg, who was unusually fond of the Pentateuch. People doubted his credentials when he first appeared in town, but when confronted he would shout "Damn you to hell! To hell! And to hell, even!" which would shut them up quick enough, they being a god-fearing people and not wanting to go to hell. Prior, we had had a quiet and dull, but upright preacher, name of Beale, but you knew his days were numbered when he started hinting to the congregation that perhaps there wasn't as much masonry going on over at the old distillery as some people thought. So he was out.

Reverend Konigsberg was an odd sort. I recall he wore an unusual habit consisting of a vested suit and a funny looking square hat. Some joked that he had mistakenly thrown out his real hat and wore instead the hat box in penance. He wore a long black beard and some unusually curly sideburns. His one true fault was that when reading from the New Testament, he always read the part of Jesus in a funny voice. Aside from a few women who complained of peculiar dreams, this was generally overlooked.

So, church day, Sunday, the Reverend doing his schtick, the choir hymning our own town hymn, ushers collecting money for a new watch—the Reverend's had broken on the driving range—, and then town business.

I never minded the sermon and genuinely enjoyed the hymn, the singing of which involved an intricate dance where we would all lock arms in a circle and alternately kick our legs inward, each person if they wished taking a solo in the center, and concluded with a marvelous display of footwork by the Reverend himself; but town business bored me, especially that day. Something or other about men whose wives had become suddenly with child though they hadn't had relations for years. Others complained their recently born sons looked nothing like them as they had unusually large noses and were all named Allen. Discussions and arguments broke out and the Reverend tried to moderate, the dear soul. He'd only been in town for just less than a year but had earned already their trust.

Amid charges of witchcraft and annunciation, my eyes found Miss Maisy, who was slipping out the side door. I followed.

I found her taking a pee in the brush and unabashedly watched. She didn't seem to mind. When she'd finished she asked me for a handkerchief. Requests from Miss Maisy were not to be refused. I did, however, decline its return. She casually flung it aside and walked some distance around the chapel to the rear. I began to follow her when a swarthy looking man whom I did not recognize stopped me with a broad hand.

"What do you do, young man, when a lady drops her kerchief?" he scolded. I retrieved the damp thing and put it in my pocket. "Now, return it to yonder yenta," he instructed and propelled me with a boot.

Maisy was sitting on the steps of the chapel picking at an ear. I stood looking at her in semi-profile. I offered her a piece of candy—I have always been a gentleman; cold-blooded killer, indeed!—which she refused, before indulging myself. Through the timber walls and uneven pine door of the chapel, a loud murmuring punctuated by an occasional "Ave Maria!" rustled the air and the brook answered some way down and hidden.

Maisy spoke as if suddenly noticing my presence. "Oh, hello, Mr. Phyrr. I thought you'd gone. What do you think of all this funny business going on?" I chewed my candy. "I think it could just as well be you fathering all those children so much as the devil." I dug in my pocket interminably and proffered a found chipped arrowhead. She took it cordially. "I'm just kidding, you know, about you fathering all those children." She had what I considered then a wicked sense of humor. I chortled to not spoil her joke.

"Miss Maisy," I managed to garble over mounting sugar clouds, "will you marry me?"

"You know perfectly well, Mr. Phyrr, that I am to marry a great prince someday." I told her that I might be a prince for all she knew. She said I wasn't smart enough to be a prince. I said I was and some blue ooze dribbled over my lip—which I'd forgotten was the calculated gimmick of the candy I'd been gnawing upon.

Miss Maisy rose, convinced I thought by my argument and requested a momentary absence, quickly granted. I planned to repeat my proposal of marriage upon her return and expected a perfunctoral acceptance. All was suddenly silent, the world filled only with my thumping heart and slurping tongue. I was sweating, nervous for her return, excited at the prospect of our union. Those other boys, those foolish, sophomoric boys, who thought it was fun to smoosh dung into my hair—there was a lot of dung hanging about in those days; I wonder where it's all got to now?—would reel at the thought of my privy access to that noble dame. It was this sort of eloquence and romance that always got me into trouble. In a town where Jed was more a common name than not, elocution was not an asset. A generation later, Allen would surpass the vulgar Jed in dominance and test scores rise; and I was still to be suffering at the hands of an under-educated and uninformed public.

Miss Maisy returned, peeping her pretty face around the corner, timidly checking if I had remained. "Miss Maisy," I spoke my formal vow, "in light of your sudden enchantment—I had noticed, how could any man not?—I would like to repeat my proposal of marriage. Will you be my wife?" She smirked a sly, devilish smirk in place of the puckering expectation I'd foretasted.

It was then that I saw behind her the shotguns. The congregation was surrounding me with the Reverend at their helm. "There, gentlemen, is your fornicator!" There were cries of "devil," "spirit," and "sprite from the deepest regions of hell who has come to defile woman's womb!" This last a bit over the top in the crowd's estimation and told so, but support for both factions and eventual concession that while not representing the general consensus in tone, supporting the principal on which they all stood.

They grabbed me and bound me and dragged me off to Tartary pond, named for Old Farmer Tartary, a strange hermit—and no farmer—who once inhabited the dim foothills where it was situated. Although town records show no witch trials, ever, there was already situated high above the pond, which depth had never been reported, a dunking chair and lever. They chained me to it.

I saw Mother in the swarm, sobbing, Father consoling her "gently upon the buttocks." Maisy was not present. The congregation was screaming for blood. "Blood!" they screamed, "Blood, blood." "Blood!" again, "Blood, blood." And "Blood!" rolled off the hills. And "Blood!" rippled the water.

"There will be no blood!" The Reverend announced to silence them.

The lynchers capitulated. "Water!" they screamed, "Water, water." They were a metrically limited bunch. And "Water!" rolled off the hills and all the rest. I peed my pants.

"You see how the devil defiles even himself?" The Reverend asked. They saw. To me, "Boy, do you renounce the devil, his works, his fornications?" I did. "See how he lies?" They did. "Shall we cleanse him?" There was no dissent. "I say, shall we cleanse him?" They did not understand, hadn't he heard them? Again, resounding accord. There was a reverent silence as they prayed, penetrated only by Mother's steady sobs; and then, my love, the cleansing began. There was a long yawning creak as one of the men pulled the release lever. Swoosh, a whoosh of wind in my hair, and as the crowd anticipated a cool spray from my splash, only a thud.

The depth of Tartary pond, turns out, might have been easily reported after all at only two feet. Oh, the disappointment they felt. Here their lovely lynching had been ruined by poor cartography. Some had already begun to set up picnics. I was relieved. Their enthusiasm had clearly been deflated. I would be freed and not drowned after all.

"There's a pond over at Jed's measured down to 30 feet!"

Who said that? What fool! Always one in a crowd.

Hurrah! And they were off, their day's fun saved, but no one had specified which Jed and they kept me bound, seated, and half-sunk in the pond for the hour it took everyone to return after finding 1) Their chosen Jed's pond unattended, or 2) That their chosen Jed had no pond.

"It's over at Jedediah Severs's and he's got a dunking platform already set up!" What luck.

They took me there and began anew. "'Do you repent?' and the rest and then down, down, down and I was submerged. I held my breath. Mother, I thought, would be doubly upset now. She didn't let me go near water as she was "afeared" of pirates.

They pulled me up almost immediately and asked me again to renounce the devil. And then down into the water once more. Why won't they wait for an answer? Then up, then down three times, and the last the longest. When they brought me up finally they might very well have stopped. I could see some in the crowd beginning to wonder what they were about and to reconsider the morality of dunking over and over again a seven year old boy, but bright eyes that I was, I decided to renounce the devil and all his minions before they even ask this time, feeling I was sure to convince them. However, in my bewildered state, I shouted out, "I announce the devil and all his minions! I announce the devil" I didn't even realize my error and kept on shouting. They did not take kindly to my proclamation.

Reverend Konigsberg was in his glory. "Young man, your admission of guilt brings you closer to redemption." Perhaps, I thought, this will work out well after all. "But we are going to send you closer to hell!" Uh oh.

I was plunged into the water this time with amazing force. The mechanism itself splintered and broke as I hit the surface. Down I went, far this time, deep, half-believing I might actually go through to hell. That deep water was dark. I fell as if floating downward, spinning around, losing my orientation. I was freed from my bonds by the force of impact. I swam and spun, a fish licked my nose. When it wriggled away, there was light and pop, I was through.

Hell was apparently a beautiful wooded glen. I was being carried quickly along by a river. I gasped for air, precious breath. I was saved, alive. The comfort of this revelation lasted exactly 30 seconds. For I was moving at locomotive speed toward a wild rapids. But worry not. Those rapids will not be my end. Moisten not your brow for this misadventure, dear soul, sweat tender soul. How could they be—minor juts and stones—when looming not a furlong past, a waterfall waits to smash my bones? Me! Me, who'd never tasted scones; who'd never tasted ice-cream cones; who hadn't paid back all his loans—I owed a dime to Victor Jones—I could go on like this if I had my rhyming dictionary—me, who'd yet to kiss Miss Maisy.

A Small Clarification

It must not, my dear, it must not, your Grace; it must not, my dear Grace, be assumed that because I am pining for the loss of my sweet, seven-year old Miss Maisy that I in any way harbor perverse thoughts about little girls, or that I in any way obsessed over her throughout my life. Quite the opposite. I have had plenty of grown-up girls to keep me company. I don't want any stains on my record that weren't put there by me.

Miss Maisy was a lovely little girl who had a hard young life. She was devious, sure. She was mean-spirited, yes, but she was a child and would most likely have outgrown these things if she hadn't been so brutally disposed of. They say her father did it. He was wretched and might have, I suppose, been the murderer. He did proclaim his innocence until he killed himself in a sanitarium. I never believed he was guilty. That doesn't mean I liked him, far from it, but I don't believe he killed her. You see, I have seen Miss Maisy's killer. It doesn't matter. He is free from prosecution so far as I know and probably living the life of Riley. Riley forfeited his life in a card game some years ago and it has been passed around pell-mell ever since. Thoreau borrowed it once, but found the taxes too burdensome.

I have seen this man in my dreams. You and I will see him together in a moment. I think you've already begun to share my dream images, bringing us one step closer to bed.

This glen, this river, this place that I've found myself in now, we must not mistake for my true fairyland. The things we will see happen there could not exist in my paradise. I think this event is most likely the dream-like state of true death: the brain's fantastical imaginings as my young lungs were deprived of air. It is possible that these images may have provided the foundation of my creation, but were not, I don't think, in the proper sense, its birth. But memories are such whispery things, sneaking up on you, masked or misrepresented by the heap of experience since. An experience eludes interpretation until it becomes a memory, and a memory recounted is doubly infected by you.

Of course, I was just a little boy when all of this happened and dreams are just dreams. "Dreams then of dreams dissolve impious faith, but what sleep may perchance upon waking?" that, written on the wall over my toilet. The last man to stay in this cell was a poet. He was put to death because he refused to kill his wife. It was more complicated than that really. The short version of a long story is that he was the hangman and his wife had been sentenced to hang and he refused to do it. A little bit longer version explains how he rescued his wife from the noose in a blazing gun battle. Some versions have Jesse James helping out, others, Butch Cassidy who is rumored to not have died in Bolivia. Where all accounts agree is that in any case he was an ill-tempered fellow, his wife was disloyal, and two prison guards were killed in the melee. I have it from a good source that he almost successfully escaped by forging a letter of reprieve from the governor. He was foiled, however, when one of the guards, who held a degree in philology—this to the credit of the state's advanced education program—, noticed in the letter one of the poet's idiosyncratic turns of speech involving an unusual misuse of the phrase "ham and eggs."

All this must seem very strange to your Majesty, who rules a land where death is not a weapon of the state, but venereal disease. That is to say, death is the weapon of venereal disease, not that venereal disease is the weapon of the state, at least officially; but this the Right Honorable Sovereign already knows.

Dear Miss Maisy, sweet malignancy of my early love life and now occasional memory of isolated pre-adolescence. I charge you to find me anyone, anywhere, who denies themselves the memory of their first kiss. Yes, find them and tell them to meet me in the corridor at midnight with some dynamite.

A Man In Black

An orange sun surveyed the edge of the woods. It's searching rays bounced off the reeds of grass and fields of flowers, butterflies and dragonflies flitting atop, which yawned with the river beyond my sight. I was racing toward the rapids. The sniggering rocks waited ahead like schoolyard bullies who disliked sensitive boys. I resolved myself to death like a man and prepared to greet it with a courageous cry of war (a casual observer might have mistaken the sound I made for a pitiful whelp, but I assure you it was a courageous war cry). But bold warriors and unique talents and lost little boys all apparently share the same providence of luck. Ahead, I saw a long tree limb reach down from the bank and touch the water. I crashed into it and it seemed to cradle me. The water rushed past, but I remained entangled in the branch's needles. I was satisfied now that I would not be drowned, but had to giggle at the thought of the poor soul who would find, years from now, my fleshless skeleton still dangling from that limb in the river.

I did not have to wait long. From deep in the forest, a bright light approached. Brighter and brighter it grew and with it came a sound as of a rolling thunder. I believed it was an angel—I had died after all—a heavenly creature riding to welcome a weary wanderer. Wings it had as it sat and flew upon its steed, great silver wings that shone bright in the dying sunlight. It was clothed in a silver garment that redoubled the reflected light of it's wings to a blinding intensity. On it's head sat perched a many colored bird and this might have been actually carrying rider, and horse, and even the Earth, it moved so effortlessly. It came closer and the fowl transfigured into a horrible dragon, whose face masked rider's face, whose claws gripped rider's head and whose tail—indeed capped in an array of feathers—trailed back and down to touch the ground.

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Fairyland

Miss Maisy

A Small Clarification

A Man In Black