Author: Brad Zellar

I have no one to blame but myself, I know that. I clearly blew what might have been a career-making opportunity.

I’ve been trying all night to take the advice of my boss and look at this whole unfortunate situation as a ‘coachable moment,’ but it’s not easy, and, frankly, it really does make me question what the hell I’m doing with my life.

If nothing else, this whole sorry episode illustrates the importance of never putting off for tomorrow what you can do today, or whatever that old line of horse hooey is.

Here’s what happened, more or less as I can piece it together after the fact: I was hustling out of the house yesterday morning, and running late as usual, when I noticed upwards of several hundred giants gathering in the park across the street from my house. I don’t mean to imply in any way that these were mythical giants, but neither am I being hyperbolic; if my eyes were not mistaken these were all clearly giants as classified by medical science, if, in fact, medical science still even bothers with such classifications for people of uncommon height and proportion.

My elderly neighbor was sweeping her sidewalk as I made my way to the car, and I gestured at the commotion in the park and said, “Any idea what’s going on over there?”

“Looks like a giant convention,” she said, and shrugged. It was a sort of question, really, the way she phrased it; there was a definite suggestion of uncertainty, which was uncharacteristic of this particular woman. I had always found her to be one of these know-it-all speculator types who’d likely never uttered the phrase “I have no idea” in her entire life. In this particular instance, however, based on what I could see with my own eyes, her supposition didn’t seem to be entirely off base.

“The caloric requirements of men of that size are almost impossible to believe,” she said, and then went back to her sweeping.

Here’s where I made my big mistake. I got into my car and drove away from this spectacle that was developing directly across the street from my house. And even as I was driving downtown to work I was thinking about those last words of the old woman, and recalling that a personal experience from my childhood eerily corroborated exactly what she had said to me: My father, I remembered, had once taken me to a local grocery store to see a giant who was on some sort of promotional tour for a brand of bacon.

I could be mistaken; it might have been a breakfast cereal. At any rate, though, there was a giant in the grocery store, and he struck me as a rather socially awkward fellow. He just kind of lurked around behind a table, if I remember correctly, and had a woman who did all the work for him. The woman handed out photos of the giant, on the backs of which were printed a typical day’s menu for such a huge man. My father read this menu to me as we walked across the parking lot to his truck, his voice literally rising with incredulity as he recited the portions of each meal in the giant’s diet. The seemingly ridiculous quantities of food that this giant was alleged to consume each day struck me as questionable, I remember, primarily because the giant in question was such an unnervingly gaunt fellow.

All of these thoughts and memories were swirling around in my head as I drove to work. Once I arrived at the office, though, I went directly to my cubicle and busied myself with the mind-numbing nonsense that occupies such a huge part of my day and my life.

Sometime after lunch my editor stopped by my desk to chat, and I related to him what I had seen that morning, almost, I must admit, as if I were recounting a dream. My boss was understandably full of questions, questions I was in no position to answer. And I could not answer those questions for the very obvious reason that I am a complete failure as a journalist. At a moment when any normal human being –even a dim-witted child– would have been seized with the basic investigative curiosity of a journalist, I had climbed into my car and driven away from the scene.

To his credit, I’m sure, my editor would have none of my ignorance. If, in fact, there was some sort of congress of giants taking place in the city, I was told, it was imperative that we have a reporter on the scene. Pronto.

“We really need to hit the ground running on this thing,” my editor told me. “We must own the giant story. Get your keister back out there right this minute and get to the bottom of this business.”

I went back down the five flights of stairs, got back into my car, and retraced my journey of many hours earlier. By the time I pulled into my block some thirty minutes later I could see immediately that the park was completely empty of giants.

My neighbor was still out in her yard, now messing around with the flowers in her window planter, so I went over to see if she could shed any light on what had transpired earlier.

The woman stared at me like I was out of my mind, and I was seriously afraid for a moment that she was going to tell me that I had imagined the whole thing. Instead she said, “Even more came after you left. Buses full of them, and every one of those fellows was so tall they had to practically bend over when they stepped off the buses. I couldn’t tell you for certain what they were up to, but there seemed to be some deliberation for a bit; then there was some chanting and holding of hands, a softball game, and, finally, a song.”

I asked her if she had noticed any television cameras or newspaper reporters. She had not, she said, but then she wasn’t one for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong.

“It was just like I told you, though,” she said. “Several times during the morning huge caterer’s trucks pulled up over there at the park, and they were immediately swarmed by the giants. Such big people eat like you can’t believe. It smelled like they were eating barbecue ribs. I suppose you could go over there and see if they left behind any bones.”

You will surely understand why I am now, at 3:30 in the morning, still pacing my dark house and smoking and murmuring to myself, resisting the urge to sit down on the floor and punish myself with the most fearsome scriptural lamentations I can get my hands on.

The truth is a bright and terrible thing in the small hours, and I have no choice but to stare it down as best I can: I have utterly failed at my chosen profession. I could not –and I did not– own the giant story.

Odd shard, the moon.

Last call.

He lugs his iron

head through the

brass-clanging

days.

The dull trash-can

gong of winter, a throbbing

that starts in his

fillings and swells clear up

straining

against the black

cap of his

underskull.

Snow swept, dead silence,

dead Saturday folding

into Sunday morning.

What is fog and what is

what he feels?

Why are you possessed of such

a thirst while others

walk upright and

clean? Drawn to three

a.m., drifting

the dark roads

beyond the last

lights of the

Hy Vee.

The night behind him

a roller coaster,

a teeth breaker,

an empty bag,

a broken broom

stick.

His mother sleeping,

or awake, her head

full of her own

confusion, his broken

promise.

He can’t see her

crouched

in her old robe,

folded hands asking

once more for no’s

overthrow. Respite: her

one boy asleep

in his own bed,

in dreams,

one man sleeping

like all the

others, not

clipped and limping

along the roads

outside of town,

his blood running

with black bulls

and head roaring

with mineral spirits

and automobile primer,

his face

a shimmering mask of

silver from the

bridge of his nose

to his chin.

Not a howling ghost

broken by boots

and broomsticks

and bones,

stripped

of the last sixteen

dollars in his

pockets and bound

with rope.

A trail in the

snow led back

into the darkness

behind an

abandoned

farmhouse.

They dragged him back there by his heels.

There was an old well

there, and they

stuffed him

in the well.

He showed his broken

teeth to the moon,

and it sat calmly

upon his silver mask.

Snow swept,

dead silence,

dead Saturday

folding silently

into Sunday

morning.

This one guy, every couple weeks it’s these amazing places you can’t even believe, mountains and him standing in water or strung up on a cliff and hanging from ropes. He’ll bring in ten or twenty rolls of film at a time, and it’s gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come through the door. You see the whole world, is how my boss put it when he was training me in. This job is a privilege, he’d say. These people are trusting us with their most private moments.

I’ve always been one of those guys who isn’t much for going places –going places, actually, doesn’t bother me; it’s the being there that I have a problem with. But it is interesting for me to see these other places and to imagine, you know, my own versions of the stories these pictures struggle to tell. One time this guy brought in a roll of film and it was nothing but pictures of dead cows –seven dead cows sprawled around in the dirt. There wasn’t a single person in any of the photos, just the dead cows, and somebody had taken pink paint and outlined their bodies in the dirt, just like they’d been murdered in the movies. And of course you get the pictures of women in bathing suits, and people on the toilet –I’ve seen hundreds of those– and occasionally some actual bare breasts, although we’re not supposed to develop anything that’s “too far over the line,” as my boss says. But I have to admit that in five years we’ve never refused to process a single roll of film that I’m aware of.

My own family never took photographs. I don’t think I ever saw a camera in either of my parents’ hands. These people would come around at school to take photos of the students and I remember bringing home a little packet of those every year but I’m not even sure what my mother would do with them. They didn’t go up on the refrigerator like they did at other kids’ houses, I know that much. My mother didn’t put anything on the refrigerator.

I’m sure people would be horrified to think that we look through their photos, but they must know. It’s human nature, my boss says. I think one thing that happens so often is that people will find an old roll of film still in a camera or laying around the house somewhere –in a kitchen drawer or in the glove compartment of their car– and they’ll have completely forgotten what’s on there and curiosity gets the best of them so they bring them in to be developed. They bring them in because they want to know, and I think that’s when you get some surprises.

People always ask, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen looking at all these photos day after day? And, to be honest with you, that’s not an easy question to answer. I’ve seen so many strange and I guess disturbing things mixed in with the birthday parties and the picnics and parades. More than one person with a gun in their mouth. A dead dog laid out on a kitchen table with a flower in its teeth. This one guy we called the Sign Man, who would take photographs of himself holding hand-lettered signs that said things like, “Tammi, I am not a part of your experiment anymore,” or “I am sick and tired of being taken apart with nothing to show for it.” Unsurprisingly, the Sign Man eventually turned in a roll of film with a photo of himself with a gun in his mouth.

I have seen so many babies being born that it is no longer strange. I have seen a hundred families or more standing in front of Mount Rushmore or shaking Mickey Mouse’s hand. Young couples in formal wear, of course, getting ready to go to a dance or get married. Little children crouched next to their beds with folded hands, saying their prayers. People in coffins and carnival rides and tombstones. Christmas trees, obviously, and kids pointing guns at the camera.

People also take a lot of pictures of food, color photos of turkeys and hams. You see everything, really, pretty much anything you could imagine.

Personally, I like the stuff in the margins, the mistakes and unintentional shots that show what goes on outside the world of what people think of as a picture. I like to study the people who are just standing in the background, looking puzzled and unaware. I couldn’t tell you, really, what staring into those pictures makes me feel. Captured, sort of, I guess, the way I feel when I stand far enough outside myself sometimes that I can see how small I am.

It’s sad when people wish, my mother always said. She’d say, You pray that when you get to a ripe old age you can look back and count the number of really sad days on one hand. Maybe that’s why she didn’t like photos around, because they were like reminders of wishes that never quite managed to turn out like you hoped or expected.

Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark, otherwise blank window frames and the gauzy, fluttering filter of curtains), I bucked you across town through the empty streets on my stingray bike.

We were hunched together on my sparkling blue banana seat; I was peddling furiously and you were clinging to the sissy bar. I wished you had been clinging to me, wished you would put your arms around my chest, but it was nice to feel you there behind me all the same, nice to hear your laughter (all the wonderful variations of your wonderful laugh) ringing out over the silent neighborhoods and your voice at my ear and your breath in my hair.

I don’t know, can’t remember, where we were going. We weren’t, though, going to the Dairy Queen, where the moths were in full swirling frenzy around the streetlamps in the parking lot. We were headed, I’m sure, elsewhere.

We had darkness in mind, I think, the place where the futile over-light of that shitty little town gave way suddenly to a great stretch of emptiness, where the pavement turned to gravel, where there were fields rolling away into the distance, and where there was a muddy creek and there were railroad tracks and trains (which sounded, you said, like iron waterfalls, and which I’ve always said sound like something heavy being carried away) crawling off into the night, out into an America we could only then imagine.

But which we did imagine, together, breathlessly, with ridiculous hope and optimism. That place was where we knew we would eventually have to go to make our escape, to complete the process of becoming, to find ourselves even as we lost each other.

That was also the place, the place beyond our close little world whose secrets and sadnesses we felt certain we had already divined, where we would one day, through exactly the sort of occasional miracle this world is still capable of delivering, find each other again.

I am still, every day, my sister, my old friend, stunned by this miracle, still gratefully puzzled by my bounty of blessings entirely undeserved. And now it always seems to be that same magic dusk I remember, and I find myself once again in the position of trying to talk you onto the back of my stingray bike, trying to convince you to ride with me out beyond the false, feeble light of that low town, away from and out from under the people we have allowed ourselves to become; trying to get you to slow down and to listen again to the roaring silence and the moving water and the watch-winding racket of insects throbbing from the ditches, and to lie on your back with me marveling at the stars and the heat lightning trembling down the dark sky across the fields.

I have two options when, as now, the Muse deserts me (and this has so often been the case of late, and over, say, the last dozen years).

Well, actually, I suppose I do have more than two options. I could recognize, for instance, that anyone who uses the phrase “the Muse deserts me,” or even just “the Muse,” deserves his desolation.

I could simply stop.

But I do not like to stop.

Or I could keep going, Muse-less and muddling, which is, of course, the usual routine around here. If there’s one thing I’ve pretty much figured out how to do, it’s how to keep going. I can keep going with the best of them, just so long as we can agree that by ‘keep going’ we really mean ‘keep saying.’

I could also repeat myself, which I’m more than happy to do in a pinch. Sometimes, I swear, I don’t even know I’m doing it. There are words all around me, stuffed in books and in the pockets of jackets and pants, scrawled on index cards, scraps of paper, napkins, ATM receipts, and Post-It notes. There are shelves of black, lined journals that are also full of words, words that stretch back now over a decade. Those books are a loose –very loose– chronicle of my long nights, an inventory of the conscripted words that march across my skull in the wee hours.

Sometimes, out of desperation, and out of that frankly terrifying and inexplicable impulse to keep going, I just grab whatever words are at hand and force them to flee through my fingers a second time. In the process they are occasionally transformed, often (well, not often) in surprising ways. Most commonly, in fact, they are entirely unchanged from the day they were born –homely, in other words, and entirely lacking in sense.

When I’m truly strapped for inspiration, though, I turn to Jean Kent’s The Professional Writer’s Phrase Book, an essential tool for any struggling writer. Don’t be daunted by that title; you don’t have to be a pro to use Kent’s book. Even a fledgling scribe will find “thousands of descriptive tags that put pizzazz in any copy.”

It says so right on the book’s cover, and the professional writer who wrote those words wasn’t kidding. I have no idea anymore where the book is (things tend to get lost and buried around here, or it’s entirely possible I loaned it out to a professional writer colleague and never got it back), but I did, once upon a time, jot down some handy examples in a notebook. I’m sure you’ll agree that just about anybody could write a professional-quality story using almost nothing but these phrases and a few simple words of their own.

Take a crack at it and see if I’m not right.

ANGER

time to bring out the heavy artillery

the words were sudden and raw and very angry

feisty as hell

she gave him a most unladylike dustup

the rage in him was a living thing

their eyes traded strings of malevolence

like an awakening giant

if I hold it in any longer, I’ll blow out my teeth

LIMBS

hooked her thumb in her panties and cocked her hip

he swatted her behind

raising the tea cup to his heavily mustached lips

kissed his bunched up fingers…MNYEH!

a moth-wind flutter of her hand

rotates a finger near his temple

HEAD

he twisted a benzedrine inhaler up a hairy nostril

and took a somewhat beery breath of fresh air

she pushed her hair back, the better to glare at him

BODY IN MOTION

all his gestures were outside and violent

grabbing up her gown for the run to the kitchen

she slapped her sleeves to get rid of the crumbs

grasped his tightly rolled umbrella like a sword

she ditted around past all the channels

he sat on the porch and waved away the flies

a body so supple it twanged

he moved like a slug

the slow-spitting and squatting men watched her covetously

standing at the lip of a hole

she walks like a construction worker

he moved with the sure grace of a forest creature

a nudge here, a hip there, and an occasional light shove

left the room like a scolded hound

still beavering away

taking on that ‘Let’s be reasonable’ slouch

BODY MOTIONLESS

a thin old man, frozen on the edge of the fallow fields forever

huddled in the water

standing there with an indolent, tomcat grace

TRADE TAGS

bronzed and beautiful

the massive chest of a body builder

a tropical tan even where it doesn’t show

foundation training in the iron game

highly visible in an alluring bikini

with great stability in the shoulder girdle

BUILDINGS–EXTERIOR

a small, nasty shed with a furtive look

a security system that had everything but a moat filled with alligators

it wasn’t an ordinary building but a home

a suspect motel named El Ranko

the sort of railroad flat you find in the ghettos

INTERIOR

sat at a table about as big as a diaper

a husky oak table

the walls started to sweat

the room smelled of dust, mildew, and old love

rancid grease hung in the air like a wet sheet

CRIME AND FIGHTING

a man doesn’t become an investigator without a capacity for cruelty

a man who didn’t think but let his sinews rumble him to oblivion

his first foray into thrilldom

and then came a moment of atavistic horror

he was covered with blood and vomit

the pain in the testicles streaked up to his stomach

the velvet trap of easy living and hard drugs

the code of the vendetta was absolute

an animal instinct told him all was not well

no gun racks in the pickup truck

he ran like unleashed hell

my goal is to stay out of the morgue drawer

DEPRESSION

in the twilight world of the half alive

restless, seeking

hoping the wind and rain would take away the brooding hurt

he stood in the burning lake of himself, unable to escape

slumped into morose musings

pain and loneliness walked with him in the dark

a life which daily negated all her dreams

FACES–DESCRIPTIONS

the upper-echelon mafioso type

his nose looked like a wedge of cheddar

perspiration on her forehead, like water beads on good butter

a nose that could slice cheese

he looked something like a hawk with mumps

he had a face like a benediction

HAPPINESS

a few crocuses of hope poked through the surface

the feeling of happiness rising wonderfully inside you

beer commercial joviality

when I feel this delicious, I laugh at practically anything, sometimes nothing at all

Enjoy!

INNER THOUGHTS

he took the world by the nose

I still believe happiness can be worked out. I am a fool.

there’s nothing worse than a hero out of work

you could catch it and kill it and pin it down, but then it wasn’t a butterfly anymore

The world was a jungle. Only the strong survived.

Bastard! she whispered behind his back.

yet deep, deep inside he still burned with his love for her

preoccupied with matters of nomenclature

you can’t fall off the floor

love was a weed that flourished in the dark

as bad as being told God dislikes you

PHILOSOPHY

I live in a silent movie

a satisfying influx of Mexicans

not everything was cotton candy

two nice people made for each other

when you walk among women, do not forget your whip

Who knows where terrific things begin?

SMELLS

I smell sneakers

I could smell her light, warm femininity

the lusty odors of earth and cattle

See what I mean? Wow! What you have here are the raw materials to make a writer out of the drabbest, most tongue-tied closet dreamer. And I haven’t even made it to the phrases related to lovemaking (he took a look down her decollete). I’ll buy lunch for the person who can send me a reasonably coherent story –or, what the hell, an entirely incoherent story– that makes judicious use of the largest number of these helpful phrases, and I’ll also post the story for at least twenty-five other people to see! So start beavering away! And send those entries to zellar at rakemag dot com.

There are surfaces you can’t get a look under. You see just a flat line, for instance, or a face, or the horizon, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something beneath or beyond them.

It never means that. There’s something behind or under everything, depths and layers and distance, and it’s a rare thing that’s simple enough, small enough, or that will hold still long enough for you to properly dig around and pin down what’s really under the surface.

Face value truly is the currency of our understanding, and of our trust and our faith. Human depths we infer from art or action or speech or behavior; we take people at their word, choose to believe in their sincerity or in the truth of how they present themselves or the stories they tell about who they are.

We learn all the time to our great disappointment (and disenchantment) how flimsy and unjustified this faith is; we are lied to and betrayed and deceived hundreds of times every day, and yet still we continue to believe and to embrace the idea of depth, and to wrong-headedly confuse this notion, somehow, with virtue, as if depths were not just as often roiling with darkness and ugliness and contradictions and mystery and even evil; as if one of the primary functions of surface and depth were not to conceal.

A wall is a surface, as is a facade, a trap door, a mirror, a mask, a voice.

Most of the time –an overwhelming majority of the time– we are left to wholly imagine what is beneath a surface, and this gives the imagination its incredible freedom, even as it serves as an open invitation to our basest insecurities and fears.

This is what gives our heart its hope, and allows it to dream and to love and to tell stories. And this is also how our heart gets trampled and broken and then put back together, again and again and again.

Do you think it’s easy,

not biting

the one you love?

Try loving someone so much

your mouth is only at home

in the place where your teeth

meet the flesh

of your beloved. Try

not tasting the flesh,

not taking in your mouth

the beloved, not

going all the way.

—Jim Moore, “Teaching the Dog Not to Nip”

1) This, Vesithia LaRue said, is not living. Decidedly. Not. Living.

Ms. LaRue was in the bar of a Chinese restaurant, where she was sitting straight as a pin at a corner table and bathed in an almost infernal red light. Though she was a non-smoker, she had the mannerisms and dramatic demeanor of someone who was smoking cigarette after cigarette.

With her long fingers dangling from impossibly thin wrists she was drawing slow, continuous circles with a pink plastic straw in a drink that was the color of an exotic and idealized lagoon.

Vesithia’s table companions had been reduced to silence by her churlish mood (which was increasingly her prevailing mood). To venture even the most innocuous comment was to invite a withering lash from her acid tongue.

In a story that she often related, Vesithia explained that her name was that of an imaginary flower that had come to her mother, Estelle LaRue, in a dream.

Do not think, Vesithia was now saying, do not dare think for even one moment, that I have been wounded. (Everyone at the table –and, in fact, everyone of Ms. LaRue’s acquaintance– was decidedly of the opinion that Vesithia had, in fact, been badly wounded.)

Although, Vesithia added after a moment, I suppose that boredom, if it becomes terminal, would have to be classified as a type of wound.

Eventually, in timid response to one of the conversation’s earlier tangents (or, more properly, one of the fragments of Ms. LaRue’s halting and ongoing monologue), one of Vesithia’s companions ventured, “I feel certain that the body retains some memory of every encounter it has ever had with human hands.”

Hogwash, Vesithia said. Utter fucking hogwash.

If there was one phrase that defined Vesithia LaRue (and in truth there were a great many), it was, “I strongly disagree.”

As strident and forceful as Ms. LaRue could be –and she could be very strident and forceful indeed– she never, ever resorted to outright exclamation, although the temptation to insert exclamation points after her utterances was nonetheless irresistible.

2) Vesithia LaRue had a dog. It was smallish and ordinary-looking, the type of dog of apparent mixed breed that one was likely to encounter at any dog park or animal shelter. So ordinary looking was Ms. LaRue’s dog, in fact, that her mother, Estelle, had once referred to the animal as a “generic sort of dog,” a description that Vesithia pronounced “unpardonable,” and which led to a protracted estrangement between mother and daughter.

Estelle LaRue was now (fairly recently, in fact) dead, but while she had been among the living there had been many such protracted estrangements with her daughter, all of them caused, the older Ms. LaRue would contend, by small misunderstandings.

Vesithia LaRue had a long history of misunderstandings large and small –of misunderstanding others and being herself misunderstood. Many, if not most, of these misunderstandings were the result of her insistence that others abide by her own version of the truth, a version of the truth which might charitably be described as peculiar.

Vesithia would claim, for instance, that her smallish, ordinary-looking dog –which, owing to her characteristic inability to make up her mind, was called either Pronto or Presto– was an African Dancing Dog. This, she asserted, was an extremely rare breed, and had once been on the endangered species list. Vesithia had acquired the dog, she said, on a trip to Nigeria.

Despite the animal’s purported breed, no one could recall ever having seen Pronto (or Presto) dance. Many people, however, had heard the dog bark. What it was apparently lacking in dance skills, Vesithia LaRue’s little dog more than made up for in the noise-making department.

The creature’s incessant barking had, in fact, prompted Ms. LaRue’s eviction from a half dozen different apartments.

3) Vesithia LaRue had been born Vesithia LaRoach, a name that had been for her a torment of longstanding. It was, she would tell her mother from a very early age, insufferable. It was unpardonable, egregious, and an affront to someone of Vesithia’s refined sensitivity.

These words Vesithia had learned from a book called Thirty Days To A Larger Vocabulary, which she had stolen from the library at Blanche Patch Middle School, along with another book called The Golden Keys To Self-Improvement. There was a chapter in this latter book –“If You Don’t Like Yourself, Be Someone Better!”– that Vesithia had revised in her mind to “If You Don’t Like Yourself, Be Someone Different!”

Toward this end –her goal was to be someone entirely different– Vesithia was determined to change her name. Her nickname at Blanche Patch Middle School was “The Roach,” and hearing these words hurled at her every day by cruel schoolmates, Vesithia would tell her mother, had left her permanently, irrevocably scarred.

“But, dear, it is your name,” Estelle LaRoach had told her daughter. “There is not a thing in the world you can do about it.”

Vesithia knew that in this, as in so much else, her mother was mistaken, and the day she turned eighteen years old, with money she had made working at the perfume counter at the Younker’s Department Store, she had applied for a legal name change for both her mother and herself.

The elder Ms. LaRue knew that it was pointless to resist her daughter in any matter on which she had set her mind, and so reluctantly went along with the change. In time, she would eventually admit, she had come to appreciate her new name.

4) In my private moments, Vesithia LaRue would say, I cannot deny that I feel my soul to be an unspeakably forlorn place.

Vesithia was not in the least bit reluctant about making public the many feelings that were incubated in her private moments.

Despite her frequent insistence that she had not been wounded, it was generally assumed by all who knew her that Vesithia LaRue had, in fact, had her heart broken by Roland Thames Trempeleau, a postal carrier and classical music composer whom she had met once upon a time at a Mensa meeting.

Roland Trempeleau, Vesithia was fond of recounting, had wooed and courted her with “elegant zeal and uncommon ardor.” Roland had been a perfect gentleman, and he had been –or so Vesithia would claim– unabashedly smitten with her.

I have been swept off my feet, she would often report in the early days of her tempestuous yet wholly covert courtship with Roland Trempeleau.

Whether people were inclined or disinclined to believe these reports varied a great deal, but it was nonetheless undeniable that no one who had ever been subjected to Vesithia’s breathless accounts of her affair had ever so much as laid eyes on the man, let alone made his acquaintance. They were, however, told that Roland Trempeleau had a habit that drove Vesithia absolutely wild; whenever he checked his wristwatch, it was said, Roland would jerk his whole body upwards, roll back on his heels, hunch his shoulders dramatically, and then raise his right arm, cocked at an extreme and exaggerated angle, in front of his face.

Vesithia would often provide public demonstrations of this ritual, and it was, she claimed, the sexiest thing she had ever seen.

Alas, Roland Thames Trempeleau, once such a perfect gentleman, had in the end been revealed as just another cad, this after he purportedly abandoned Vesithia for an “internationally renowned cellist with a major American orchestra.”

To reveal any more information than this, Vesithia would insist, would be indiscreet.

There will come a day, mark my words, when every conceivable disappointment will meet in a giant hangar somewhere in Kansas. Every dashed dream and broken heart from all over America will converge there on the edge of some dusty little town to awkwardly mingle and avoid eye contact. Just as in Vegas, in the hangar there will be no natural light and no clocks, and the only way to mark the passage of time will be by the exhaustion in people’s eyes.

Among those who will make the discouraging trek: The man who once upon a time dreamed of becoming an astronaut and grew up instead to become an unhappy insurance adjustor. The woman whose naked body was never seen –let alone touched– by anyone outside a doctor’s office. The failed writer of science fiction novels who lived with his mother until her death and, oafish and sweating, stalked about his old neighborhood in camouflage and, well into middle age, raced remote control cars up and down the sidewalk in front of his house. The jilted lovers, brides left at the alter, and infertile couples. The boy who asked Santa Claus for a Dukes of Hazzard pinball machine and received instead a Slinky, a seemingly small and isolated letdown that nevertheless in time planted the seeds for a lifelong pathology of disenchantment.

Also present: Beauty pageant rejects, disgraced public servants, neglected children, actors that never got a break, persistent writers of ignored doggerel, bitter misanthropes and alcoholics, those for whom an adolescent crisis of faith became crushing and permanent, brooders and pipe smokers, and all manner of neglected or talent-less musicians, artists, and philosophers.

You can be sure the sleepless will be there, standing in zombie pockets at some remove from packs of the pathologically shy, the socially awkward, and the chronically fatigued.

Should you make the pilgrimage you will be joined as well by stalled middle-managers, the perpetually startled, orphans, gimpy quarterbacks, cheerleaders who grew old gracelessly, bankrupts, and scores of broken refugees from Nashville, Hollywood, and New York.

There’ll be quite a crowd, to be sure, and you’re virtually guaranteed to recognize all sorts of old friends, neighbors, and former co-workers, and they’re certain to bitch ceaselessly, provided they haven’t been made entirely mute by their disappointment.

God knows there’ll be plenty to bitch about: It will rain every day, the food will be lousy, and the accommodations will be sadly lacking. Entertainment –for lack of a better word– will be provided by an assortment of some of the worst garage bands, barbershop quartets, choirs, magicians, mimes, ventriloquists, and baton twirlers you’ve ever seen.

As the evening wears on a bullhorn will be passed among the congregation of the disappointed, and each person will be allowed to shout out one sentence or declaration.

It’s interesting, if fruitless, to speculate what those present might make of this brief opportunity to express themselves. How many do you suppose will use their moment in the spotlight to merely blurt terse, general condemnations laced with profanity? How many, however disappointed, will declare some enduring love or eternal regret? You can certainly imagine that there will be a great deal of stammering, and many will simply attempt to articulate some already broken promise, ineffectual apology, or impossible wish. Others, of course, will have nothing to say.

Should you or I find ourselves there in that awkward crowd of the bruised and broken what words would we find to speak to the assembled? What might we say to the better, happier people we –all of us– should have been? And do you suppose there will be even one among us who will have enough small courage or faith remaining to utter some message of hope?

Finally, at some point in the endless night, black and white balloons will be distributed, and on command they will be released to rise slowly up into the distant rafters of the hangar. This gesture will mean different things to different people, and to some it will mean absolutely nothing at all.

I live my life in shrinking orbits,

which move inward from the things of the world.

Perhaps I can never fully silence my heart,

but that will be my attempt.

I am shadow boxing with God, around and around

this small, dark room, and I have been plodding in circles

for a thousand years. And I still don’t know,

still don’t know if, still don’t know what I am.

I was much too far out all my life

and not waving but drowning.