dancing moths like sugar cane

After attaching the rusty bicycle wheels she had found, Pince pushed the tank out of the lake. She was taking Able to a concert in a park. 

The sun was already setting as she tried to maneuver them through the woods. The path was a narrow trail of matted leaves, the wheels squeaked over their green, yellow, and brown carpet; catching on small branches. Pince would have to stop from time to time, working out their bark fingers as Able sat in awe of everything around him. He had never seen a sunset or trees from this vantage point before. Once he swam through a petrified forest in a glacial lake but everything looked so different covered in air and pushed about by the wind. Under the water he had felt the trees pushing back at him. Now they arched to the sky; a distant, private chorus of quaking leaves and long shadows.

There were clarinets, pianos, violins, and horns playing all night long on the makeshift stage. A troop of moths flew choreographed dances to the music and the trees weaped their helicopter seeds. Pince was worried about the seeds collecting in Able's tank, becoming a gross soggy mess, so she climbed in and held an umbrella over them.






PS. This is a mess of illustration but Pince's afterlife is not fit for my regular sketchy methods and I'm not sure what I want it to look like yet.

Pince revisits childhood favorites

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

That's the way we get by, the way we get by, the way we get byy-yyyyy

This's the way I get by, the way I get by, the way I get byy-yyyyy

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++++

Pince got back to her secretary job after her long lunch painting legal pad roses. Back at her old desk with hard edges and the computer with the terrible operating system. She’d really envisioned Heaven would be free of these kinds of things. Seriously, the color palette of the start menu alone was unbearable. And her office...shouldn’t Heaven naturally have perfect feng shui?

Her boss asked her to staple something 100 times.

At least stapling was fairly brainless, just keep your fingers out of the way and then you can let your mind wander. Pince began wondering if there might be a place she could travel to that had dark jade colored mountains and pale blue trees.

Her boss asked her to unstaple something 100 times.

It took 45 minutes.

She had nothing left to do but still had two and a half hours left. Pince began throwing the stapler at the wall.

With no one around to see and feeling mildly entertained she started trying to create a design on the wall with staples. It’s harder to aim an open stapler than you might think. But then Pince threw the stapler and it stuck in the wall and she could not pry it out. Defeated, Pince sat down next to the printer and dug in her pocket for chapstick. This wasn’t exactly what she wanted to be doing. Did she even need to be here? What was she earning money for? Nobody had ever made her pay for anything in Heaven. She had just landed this job––literally––and now felt obligated to see it through. Through to what? What did she owe them? They weren’t really doing her any favors. And on top of everything else her chapstick was particularly waxy.

Wax.

Pince looked down at her hand where she held a purple crayon.

You know, there’d been a book she’d read as a kid, Harold and the purple crayon. It was about this bald kid who’d had a purple crayon and anything he drew became real. Or rather, it was about the magic of imagination but that was the point wasn't it? Imagination was magic. It molds reality. 

Pince wrote her resignation letter in purple crayon and then she drew herself a set of wings and snapped them on. She shrugged her right shoulder, and the right wing shrugged and a few tiny shavings of purple wax fell to the floor. She shrugged her left, and the left wing shrugged, too. She lifted her right arm––the right wing didn’t lift. Maybe they operated by thought control?

Flap. Flap. She rose in the air a couple of inches.

Ah, that was it.

Pince drew a battering ram and punched a whole in the office wall, then she climbed through and flew up into the sky, straight to the clouds.

This was delightful, this was perfect; exhilarating––the wind through her hair, across her cheeks, her neck, down to the slight drag pulling at her toes. There needed to be someone else here for this. Able, where’s Able?

There had been a pond near the corn with the black binder crows, could she find him there? Would she be able to find him if she got under water somewhere?

She flew to the pond and dove in, trying to shout Able’s name with only bubbles coming out. But before when she’d been able to swim for hours with Able underwater, now she could feel the weight of the water pressing on her chest, the water coming in her nose as she tried to breath; the straining of her lungs to get more air. Pince struggled to the surface and floated on her back in the middle of the pond, her wax wings twisted and tangled around her arms.

OK, no Able in this water.

She checked her pocket, found that her purple crayon was still there and held it out in front of her.

What to draw? What did she want?

Rain.

But Pince would not draw rain, she would not mess with the weather. That was a thing for Mother Nature who understood the balance of creation, not for a confused girl.

It didn't matter, though, that she hadn't drawn rain. It rained all the same. She floated in the pond and watched the clouds roll over in grey blankets, felt the first sprinkles and then the build to a steadier stream, felt as the storm continued to cold sheets of water blinding her and still she stayed out in the middle of the pond. She'd been warned of being in water during a storm, it was supposed to be bad, what if there was lightning? But what did lightning matter when she was already dead? What could happen? This rain was so very cold but she didn't want to stop floating, it was always relaxing to be immersed in cool water.

Let it wash everything away.

So very cold.

A hand closed around her ankle and pulled her downward.

Grade a Girl*

On a break from her secretary job, Pince climbed the hill behind her office. She saw a tall cedar tree with a million silver and gold paperclips and keys hanging from its branches. She stuck her granola bar in her back pocket and began to climb.

Up through the limbs, into the smell of closets and boxes of secrets and forgotten memories, each bough rustling and chiming as she pulled herself up. She looked at the forest spreading out before her. The cherry trees had blossoms of carbon copy paper, there were spruce trees of staples, and in the corn field beyond black binder crows were pecking at the stalks with their three ring toes.

"Would you believe they're only ten days old?"

Pince looked around and found a six foot tall squirrel on a branch near her. "Who's only ten days old?"

"Why those crows! They're born full of papers called spreadsheets but they molt them on day three and what a boring mess it makes. Luckily it's good mulch for the roses."

"Oh!" gasped Pince for she now noticed the rows of roses beneath the trees. They were the varying shades of a legal pad, something she found rather mournful.

"Are you a wall or a door?" asked the squirrel.

"What?"

"Are you a wall or a door?"

"I'm neither! I'm...a lady. A human. A human lady."

"That's not helpful. If you were a wall we could build a silver castle and if you were a door we'd at least know to box you up in some of this cedar, but a human lady? What do you do with one of those?"

"Listen, Do you have any paint?"

"Paint!" huffed the squirrel, "I'm trying to learn what to do with you and you ask about paint! I've only got red, I recently moved from a redwood forest to a staple spruce over yonder and I missed the red grain...only, painting it doesn't work. I've ten cans just sitting, collecting dust."

"I know what to do!"

So the squirrel and Pince hauled out the pails of paint into the midst of the rose bushes. Pince pried open a pail with a petrified business envelope Squirrel found.

"We're painting the roses red," sang Pince softly and she giggled. "We're painting the roses red!" she sang out.

"We're painting the roses red!" repeated Squirrel.





*There's a band, The HiFis, I just found which seems for all I can muster to be a largely forgotten Brit pop/psych group from the 60s which released only one LP, Snakes and HiFis. There's a song about "a grade A secretary" but for some reason the title is written just like this: "Grade a Girl," which seems a bit different don't you think? I listen to the song a lot although I'm nothing like the secretary in the song. My job description is to field questions I to which I never know the answer.

a musical review

Pince fell and fell and still she could see nothing definite about her surroundings or where this would end. She started thinking about stories she knew of falling. First there were her nightmares––the particularly vivid one where she'd been floating in an inner-tube on a tiny reservoir on a tiny mountain top. The top had been tiny, not the mountain. The current of the water kept drawing her near to the edge and she knew she would fall, there was no waterfall but she would fall, there it was the drop just inches away from her feet... 


There was the Regina Spektor song, "Hello, I'm Icarus, I'm falling, down down..." 


There was a painting by Brueghel that seemed to depict the daily life of medieval farmers plowing and merchants going out to sea but if you looked closely you would notice legs flailing up out of the water. It was supposed to be the fallen Icarus. Quotidian irrevocably carrying-on while fancy pants Greek kids who aren't satisfied melt their wax wings and die quietly, unnoticed. Pince began humming I can't get no satisfaction.


Someone had told her to galvanize her wax wings with metal, sun be damned. She had no wax wings now.


This was bound to happen, she thought, bound to happen as I can't seem to stop my curiosity. Curiosity always leads to a fall. The fall.


She had no wax wings now but did she need them? This was heaven, after all. What does one do to fly? She tried flapping her arms, no luck. In Peter Pan they tell you to just believe, which is what a different Peter was supposed to do if he wanted to walk on water. Just believe.


Just believe.


She was not flying.


But ten seconds later she landed. In an office chair, not a very ergonomic one, across a desk from a woman in a dress suit.


"This will do fine, you'll start after lunch," said the business woman.


"What will I start?"


"Being my secretary."


"Oh. OK....How long is lunch?"

driving and striving

After spending an indefinite amount of time in Hades, one morning Pince woke up to the smell of cake and caramelized sugar. She lay there on her soft bed, keeping her eyes closed enjoying the sweetness and warmth. This was just like the smell of angelfood cake. Her mom had always made it in a bundt pan and when the cake would come out there would be the thin layer of cake left Pince would scrape off and eat. Angel food cake had that strange spongey texture, kind of like the bed she was sleeping on.

Wait.

Pince dug her elbow into the bed. It felt...crumby, spongey, slightly sticky.

She opened her eyes. She was surrounded by cake. This could hardly be true, how did she end up in a cake? She may be dead already, but she thought she would've noticed the heat of being baked in an oven.

It was slightly awkward to stand up, as the cake-ground had all give and barely any push-back––worse than a trampoline. After some inspection, Pince was certain that she was in a room made of cake. Or rather, a box made of cake. There were no doors.

Pince laughed. How odd to be inside a box made of angelfood cake! She grabbed a handful  and took a bite. Yes, this was definitely angelfood cake. She took another bite and started jumping up and down, singing, "RELUCTANTLY CROUCHED AT THE STARTING LINE, ENGINES PUMPING AND THUMPING IN TIME, THE GREEN LIGHT FLASHES, THE FLAGS GO UP, CHURNING AND BURNING THEY YEARN FOR THE CUP....HE'S GOING FOR DISTANCE, HE'S GOING FOR SPEED, SHE'S ALL ALONE, IN HER TIME OF––"*

The floor broke beneath her.

"NEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeddd...."

Now she was falling through the air, through nothing, she couldn't see anything distinct, no clouds, no other walls, just light colors fading in and out, pink, blue, purple, green. Sometimes there was a flicker of light like the late afternoon sun shining through leaves. She tried to see where this would end, to see what was beneath her but there was just more nothing.

Nothing and she was still falling. This meant gravity and gravity means there must be something. Something she couldn't see. More things she couldn't see. This was always the way.

Pince began singing again, a new song.

Once I said unto another,
“In thine eye there is a mote;
If thou art a friend, a brother,
Hold, and let me pull it out.”
But I could not see it fairly,
For my sight was very dim.
When I came to search more clearly,
In mine eye there was a beam.

If I love my brother dearer,
And his mote I would erase,
Then the light should shine the clearer,
For the eye’s a tender place.
Others I have oft reproved
For an object like a mote;
Now I wish this beam removed;
Oh, that tears would wash it out!

Charity and love are healing;
These will give the clearest sight;
When I saw my brother’s failing,
I was not exactly right.
Now I’ll take no further trouble;
Jesus’ love is all my theme;
Little motes are but a bubble
When I think upon the beam.**

And she kept falling.

*Cake The Distance

**Eliza R. Snow Truth reflects upon our senses

crossing guard

In another galaxy, across a perpendicular one, to a galaxy parallel to the one in which you'd find the universe and the planet upon which Pince Nez lived before she died and wandered around heaven for eons upon eons; you would find another girl who was 25 with freckles and large glasses. And this other girl had no name. And she worked at a university as a quasi-secretary for the facilities services office. And she spent her days measuring bathrooms and drawing their floor plans on a computer and taking pictures of construction projects and answering phones even though none of the people actually wanted to talk to her, they wanted to talk to someone who actually knew what was going on. She only knew how to talk in a smiley, calming voice and tell them she would have someone get back to them as quickly as possible.


The nameless girl had been hired for the summer but had unintentionally become indispensable and would have a job until she died.


This is not a repeat of Pince Nez––whom we may return to at some later date as we left her stuck in Hades. While the nameless girl sometimes sees spiders around her office, this narrative does not depend upon one of them killing her.


Her fondest ambition was to save up money to move to a certain coastal city that's famous for it's smelly teen spirit, and to live and work there until she went to grad school. Somewhere. Don't ask her where, it's a weird question. 


OK, perfectly natural, maybe, but all the nameless girl could come up with were unnatural answers.


The nameless girl had a secret. Even though she'd never believed in Santa Claus, she just possibly, probably might believe in Doctor Who.

∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆ part 8 ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆

sometimes it looks like the Man in the Moon is screaming.


Pince was never good at resisting curiosity and so, well aware of what might be ahead, she pushed through the door. The first few steps took them through flame which surprised her.

"Am I in Hell now?"


"No, this is Hades and while in your time the name was frequently interchangeable with Hell, they are not the same. Now in the boat and penny to your lips."


Pince hesitated, "Will he let me leave once I've crossed the river?"


"Sure."


Abel didn't sound convincing. 


"Have you been here before?" she asked.


"No, but Hades and I have been penpals for quite some time."


With this little assurance, she quietly sat next to him on the boat and watched wide-eyed as other people boarded the small ferry. They looked tired or resigned and as Charon began collecting their fares some of them looked as if they barely noticed this wasn't their regular commute to work. When Charon reached Pince and Abel she looked down at his feet. Beneath his Greco-Roman robes he was wearing penny loafers. She gently kissed her penny before she handed it over, Charon bowed his head then walked to the back of the ferry and began to pushed them across with his pole.


The ride was quiet, nobody spoke, there was just the gentle lap of the water against the wooden boards of the ferry. In less than a minute they were at the other side and then she was following Abel across a meadow where they would stop frequently as Abel pointed out the different kinds of flowers and grasses, over the river Lethe, through the woods, and there was the raised dias where they found Hades.


Hades seemed like a normal guy, he offered them pumpernickel toast, and introduced them to Eurydice. He took them on a tour, to the three other rivers, two pools, showed them some particularly amazing stalactites, and then they went back to the meadow for a picnic. Here they discussed music, and to Pince's amazement Hades had vinyl records of early Egyptian music and an extensive collection of Elvis Costello. Because of Pince's enthusiasm, after lunch, Hades showed them his listening room.  The four walls were lined with shelves of records that stretched up for miles and out of sight. Pince stared up wondering how far away the ceiling was.


"You can try to climb but you won't make it to the surface," said Hades coming up behind her. "Here, look, I have The Kinks album you were talking about."


They spent the afternoon thumbing through the shelves, playing B-sides, whole albums, EPs, favorite songs, dancing to particularly catchy tunes. A set of white albums tucked away on a bottom shelf caught Pince's eye. "Who do these belong to?"


"Uhhh..."


Pince looked up and saw that Hades was looking uncomfortable and Eurydice was concentrating very hard on the far distant ceiling.


"We don't listen to those ones, really," said Hades, "just ignore them."


Later, when the others were busy talking, Pince walked over the the white albums and peaked at what the cover said.

RECORDINGS OF ORPHEUS FROM FOREVER AGO

part vii?

"And for a time this girl shall not watcheth Dr. Who but instead shall imagineth things from her own brain and impose them on imaginations of others."

(I always save my spare parts, Mr. Mihuta!)


"Abel, why am I here?"


"Question after question after question..."


"Really, why did you bring me here?"


"It was supposed to happen."


"What kind of a––"


"Now we need to go to the bottom of the ocean."


"Do I have to go foot first again?"


"Question after question after question..."


"Abel!"


He smiled, took her hand, and then they were off. He wasn't going any slower this time, so while Pince wasn't being dragged by her foot, she still had little ability to look around her and get more than a split second glance of a school of fish. The speed helped once they were in deeper waters where there were sharks. Once a great white shark spotted them and had opened its mouth to invite them in but they had swooshed by before it was able to chomp its jaw.


"I wonder if I daydreamed about the movie Jaws (1975) so much I turned heaven into attack shark paradise?" thought Pince. "No, if it was my interest in movies that made this heaven Carl Theodore Dreyer and Johannes would live next door to me. Or maybe Ari Folman...or Chris Marker? Why don't I live in a neighborhood of people who worked at NPR or PBS? Where's Mr. Mihuta?!" For the billionth time she tried whistling the theme song to The Art Maker. She only managed lots of bubbles which caused Abel to look over his shoulder and raise his eyebrows. It didn't matter, she'd never been able to get the tune right.


Abel slowed to a stop. Pince couldn't see where they were, the water around them had been steadily growing darker as they got deeper and at this point there was little difference between having her eyes closed or open. Abel placed his hands over her eyes. "You have eyelashes, they tickle."


"Don't you?"


"No, I don't need them underwater."


After a moment he removed his hands and she could see. It was like camping out in the wilderness and having a few lanterns, she could see for several feet around her but the darkness still engulfed them making her feel tiny. They were floating just above the ocean floor where little worms were creeping around. She crouched down by them and watched them inch and nose about.


"Do you know what they're looking for?" Pince asked Abel. 


He sighed and pointed to their left, "We're going over here."


Swimming forward she saw a deep and long canyon materialize underneath her. "Is this the Mariana Trench?" she asked.


"That's in an Earth ocean."


"So where are we?"


"Heaven." He took her hand again and swam down to the bottom of the canyon this time bringing them both to stand on the floor. They walked along the canyon whose peaks disappeared into blackness. Strange neon lichens covered the rocks and the fronds of little red plants swayed around in the gentle current. 


After a while Abel stopped and pointed at the rock face. A door was cut into it which Pince regarded for a long time before turning to Abel, "Where does this door lead?"


"Open it to find out. Oh wait, and take these two pennies."


"Pennies? Oh jeez."

come on baby, light my fire*

Pince found a beautiful garden full of different kinds of grasses and strange plants. Some had triangle shaped flowers that tinkled like tiny chimes when the wind blew or others that were shaped like trees made of glass revealing the process of photosynthesis. And there were small silvery, furry plants that budded close to the ground like a pile of paisley and a cilantro plant so large it drooped overhead like a weeping willow. Narrow paths wound around drawing her into the garden, doubling up on themselves, ending in the middle of fields of swaying wheat. One led her to the foot of a perfectly rectangular and smooth reflection pool. The water was dark and reflected the sky and mountains as perfectly as a photograph. She stared at the glassy surface, so deeply entranced, she didn't react when a ghostly white hand slowly reached out of the water, grabbed her ankle, and then swiftly pulled her in.


Her head hit the rocks along the edge of the pool as she was pulled in and she wondered if it was a serious injury. Are there serious injuries in heaven and can you die once you're already dead? It seemed as though she could hear the muted sounds of a Mexican Polka echoing through the water. Pince was being pulled quickly, foot first, towards the center of the reflection pool, only, it didn't seem like they could still be in the pool anymore, it hadn't been particularly large and she was still being dragged. Judging by the sight of the sun shining through the surface, they couldn't be much deeper than twenty feet. On they went and soon she felt the floor suddenly dropped away beneath her. The vast ocean was now yawning below.


It was hard to get a look at whomever or whatever was pulling her. Once she tried to sit up but only succeeded in giving herself whiplash. At least she wasn't having trouble breathing (did she breathe in heaven?) so Pince relaxed and watched the rays of sun flicker through the waves. Once, when she was alive, while riding in a truck with a boy, he'd told her of all the post-apocalyptic fiction he'd been reading. She asked him what he'd do during an apocalypse. 


"Hide in a fall-out shelter with a supply of food and water, of course."


"I'd want to walk around and watch it all happen, watch as everything reached its end." 


Though truthfully, being mortal she had known her overriding instinct would also be self-preservation. This was a benefit of being dead. She could relax and watch as the good, bad, and reality-shattering things happened, letting go of all self-saving worries.


After a time the vastness diminished, the water became more clear and cliff walls loomed high above on either side. Finally, they stopped and the ghostly being who belonged to the hand that had dragged her through many waters swam around to float next to her. They both looked up at the surface, neither of them said anything. Soon a small dark shape, what must be a very small boat, floated over them, red light flashing about it.


"A funeral pyre," whispered Pince.


"Vikings," said the ghostly being.


Pince looked at it, the underwater ghost, but not a ghost. Solid, translucent, hairless. Some kind of man. "So it really happened? They really sent them out to sea like this?"


"I'm not sure."


"Then what is this we're watching?"


"You ask so many questions."


"I have another, who are you?"


"When you ask so many questions, do the answers fill all the little holes inside?"


"Sometimes. Well, no. Never. Some may fill but more open up. Like a sieve letting all this water pass through me."


"I'm Abel."


"Hello, Abel."




*The Doors

Pince Nez spends a strange afternoon in a new reading room

As Pince was walking the forest began to blur, or maybe it was melting, transmogrifying... The branches had long been getting more tangled together, the top of each tree running into the next, soon the branches were in all kinds of knots pressing against each other, next the trunks were side by side so tight they had become a masterful puzzle, the grooves in the barks of different trees fitting so closely you could hardly distinguish. And then she felt swallowed by the woods. 


As her eyes adjusted she saw she was really in a hall, the bark blending into wall paper, the roots becoming parquet flooring. During her mortality Pince would probably have turned back at this point.




No.


Actually, that's not true at all but there's no real way of proving any which-way now that she was dead. And being dead, Pince most assuredly continued down this hallway. It turned sharply to the right and opened into a small room with a bank of windows flooding the room with sunlight. There was a wall with leather bound books and a velvety lime green chair that looked like the one her sister had told her their grandpa had always sat in. Her sister had imitated him one day, showing her how he'd sat and how he'd gesture as he'd talked which was as close as Pince would ever come to the real thing. Her sister had always been telling her about the chairs their grandparents had sat in. 


Pince chose a book and sat down but did not immediately start reading. She stared out the window wall for a long time, at the cherry tree outside. It made her think of baby blue cotton pijamas with an oriental collar and a Mickey Mouse toy castle.


When she finally opened the book she was surprised. 

TMA 298 

The Gleaners & I  

Marge Bjorke

was at the top of the first page. She thumbed through the book and saw that each page was that of a similar college writing assignment. She grabbed another leather volume and another and saw they contained all of her writing assignments from college. Many had underlines and comments from professors scribbled in the margins, some of the handwriting she could still recognize. Every once in a while she'd pause to read a paper and was generally horrified at the poor quality of her writing. Why did anyone ever let her pass? Her ideas weren't even that clever which wasn't entirely shocking as she had matured enough by the time she died to recognize that her thoughts weren't entirely revelatory. Though anyone would have to admit her argument that The Life of Pi and The Catcher in the Rye were telling the same story was rather intriguing. How had she never noticed before the titles rhymed? Perhaps she should start wiling away her hours by writing papers about books with titles that rhyme. It would certainly do to concentrate her efforts on bettering her literary talents. Hadn't she always heard how Thomas Jefferson would wake up early devoting hours a day to writing letters and important documents?


Maybe she should just devote hours a day to writing letters.

part iv, or in other words, intravenous

because you'll wish you were sedated while reading more of my fiction/autobiography


BLESSED ARE YE WHO ENDURE THESE EXERCISES IN ABSURDITY


Heaven was hard to pin down. Pince spent a lot of time kayaking by herself, sometimes right down the middle of rivers and lakes, but other times near the shoreline, finding interesting spots to dock and hike up the mountainside learning what plants and vistas could be found there. It was another way to enjoy her time in between meeting lots of people who were lovely but not anybody she could consider a close friend. Once she was able to spend an afternoon with her cousin. He asked her how she spent her free time, by reading? Yes, a lot of reading, she said. Her kayak was her traveling library, a different book every day in the front cubby.


She only spent the afternoon with her cousin because she hadn't quite figured out the way and spirit of heaven. It was a lot like earth but was nothing like it. She was still herself with all her strengths and weaknesses which seemed to limit her ability to function in heaven. This meant she was having trouble spending time with people she already knew and cared about. Pince would find a dear friend and would immediately start drifting away as if space was expanding between them pushing them apart.


So this evening she was kayaking on a lake up in the mountains when she saw something kind of funny. It was a grey fin sticking above the water. She knew there were trout and bull fish in the lake, she'd been living in a house boat eating fresh trout twice a week for three months. But this was a large fin, sticking straight up and heading towards her.


Keep in mind that this is a freshwater lake. It was formed by a sudden something or other happening which left an ice cold, clear lake with a petrified forest floor. So Pince could see as the fin got closer that it was attached to a shark the size of ten men. This seemed impossible. She tucked her oar in, rubbed her eyes, looked again and there, five feet and closing in was a shark. BAM! it rammed her feeble kayak. BAM! it rammed again. Pince didn't like the way this was going, she had to do something. Maybe the shark liked to read, she tossed her bookmark aside and read aloud, "GIVE ME TRUTHS, FOR I AM WEARY OF THE SURFACES!!!" BAM the shark rammed again. Maybe the shark didn't like Emerson but there were other poets in the book so she threw it at the shark. BAM!


She offered her dried cherries but that only seemed to upset the shark more. In desperation she picked up her bookmark which looked like this:

and with a quick jab gave the shark a paper cut. Wounded, he swam home but called over his shoulder, "I'LL BE BACK FOR YOU!"


Pince went home and watched Jaws.

part iii of heaven/not heaven (i have a crush on science)

At the corner mart when the friendly cashier asked what her name was, she told him Pince Nez. Then she walked to the top of a grassy hill, watched the sun set, dusk fall, then cool velvety night. And then she stood up, reached at the air above her and grabbed hold. The air didn't necessarily feel like a ladder or anything solid but she could climb it. She climbed, leaving behind the cicadas and crickets, then the moths, then the sight of roads and trees. After several hours she finally reached them: the stars. Climbing through a constellation was perhaps the best thing that could ever happen to a person, surpassed only by sitting in air, watching the death of one star and the birth of another. Thousands of years she sat there and it didn't matter because this was Heaven.

well...I just keep going.

She wondered what kind of spider it was. It had a brown furry body and long, thin brown legs. Or were they iridescent? After one of these brown or shimmery rainbow legs had pushed aside the shower curtain she'd had just enough time to register two things: it wasn't a black widow or a brown recluse and at least it was smaller than a pine tree unlike the nightmare she had had when she was four.


Now Marge reflected, if it wasn't one of those two spiders, it probably hadn't been poisonous. So it must have been its size and the corresponding strength of its pincers that killed her. She wondered if she'd been eaten or just pinced.


Then Marge thought about changing her name to Pince Nez.


She was extraordinarily curious about what kind of spider it was but wasn't sure what or who or how to ask. On earth she avoided googling anything about spiders because there were always horrible pictures that made her want to vomit.


No, no. She wouldn't ask. This may be Heaven but so far it didn't seem that safe of a place. Although the baker did give her a loaf of sourdough bread and directed her to the kitchen of a dairy farmer up the street who gave her some fresh churned butter and some milk.


She was wandering around now, looking into shops and offices, asking people about what they did, trying to figure out what she would try to learn how to do next. A man from an insurance office took her out to lunch but she never touched the food because she was concerned about some things.
"If this is Heaven, what do people need insurance for?" Marge asked him.
"In case something happens."
"Like what?"
"In case they get sick and can't work."
"Wait, people get sick here? Every folk song I have ever song has told me that this is the place where there is no sickness. Do people really get sick in heaven?"
"You liked to sing folk songs? Is that what you do?"
"Is there a fire department?"
"Yes."
"Is there a mortician's?"
"Don't be silly."
"Is there a wax museum?"
"I said don't be silly."
"Why can't I be silly? Is that not allowed in Heaven?"
"Well..."
"Is there public broadcasting?"
"Yes."
"Is there junk mail?"
"Yes."
"Are there dinosaurs?"
"Not in these parts. I don't know about anywhere else."
"But there could be?"
"I don't know."
"You have no idea?"
"No."
"I seem to keep finding the worst people to talk to."


silence.


"I'm sorry, that was terrible of me."


silence.


"Well, my master gardener class is about to start...uhh...thanks for lunch...sorry...really..."

abs herd.

I have this idea for a film. 
It starts out with this girl who's been housesitting for week. She spends an evening skyping with a friend and when she gets off, she goes into the bathroom. As she's sitting on the toilet, the shower curtain is pushed aside by a giant spider who snatches her in his pinchers and snaps her in half. So she's dead. She wakes up in this white cloudy place, where everyone is dressed in white and super busy. Someone with a clipboard comes and finds her and says, "Welcome to Heaven, Marge. We're so glad you got here now, we really need you to make a documentary about this thing."
"This isn't Heaven," she says, "this is Hell!"
"Oh, haha, no no. This is Heaven. Now, see, we'd like it to be 20-30 minutes and could you see about getting it on these three different heavenly airwaves?...Where are you going?"
"Somewhere else," she's wandering away,"I'm not a filmmaker!"
She's gotten a few blocks and is looking through the window of a bakery she's found when Mr. Clipboard has caught up with her.
"Now, Marge. We have it down here that you studied documentary in college, it's in the book that's written by angels, are you going to tell us the angels got that wrong?"
"They didn't get anything wrong, I did study it in college. But I don't like it, I don't want to do it anymore. I gave it my last shot. You're not doing me a favor by giving me this opportunity. I tried it, many times, and every time, it just felt horrible."
"So what do you do?"
"I don't know. I'd like to try something new. What do you have I can try?"
"If you don't have a better idea shouldn't you stick to doing documentary? You just need some practice."
"No. How about I try eating some of Heaven's sourdough bread? You've got butter, right?"
"Now is not the time, Miss Bjork! Really!"
"I was right, this is not Heaven."
"This is most upsetting."
"Yup."


They stand around.


"Well," Marge breaks the silence,"I'm going in," indicating the bakery.
"But you've got no money!"
"This is not Heaven."
"You've got to earn it!"
"I QUIT! What have I just been doing? Sure I died at 25 but shouldn't that merit at least a slice of sourdough? What if I left off the butter?"
"You've got to work here to take part in the economic system––"
"Yeah, I'm just going in. That baker has got to be better company than you."


Movie ends with Marge stepping into the bakery with a smile on her face.