by Sir Arthur Grimble from Chapter 6, "Strange Interlude" of "A Pattern of Islands," London, John Murray, 1952

full part: https://www.trussel.com/kir/porpoise.htm

I came across this while reading Whale Nation by William Heathcote. It’s short, but probably still a bit too long for a reddit post, so the link.

It was common enough in the Gilbert Islands that certain local clans had the I power of porpoise-calling, but it was rather like the Indian rope trick; you never met anyone who had actually witnessed the thing...

Kitiona's own kinsmen in Kuma village, seventeen miles up-lagoon, were the hereditary porpoise-callers of the High Chiefs of Butaritari and Makin-Meang. His first cousin was a leading expert at the game; he could put himself into the right kind of dream on demand. His spirit went out of his body in such a dream; it sought out the porpoise-folk in their home under the western horizon and invited them to a dance, with feasting, in Kuma village. If he spoke the words of the invitation aright (and very few had the secret of them) the porpoise would follow him with cries of joy to the surface...

The hours dragged by and nothing happened. Four o'clock passed. My faith was beginning to sag under the strain when a strangled howl burst from the dreamer's hut. I jumped round to see his cumbrous body come hurtling head first through the torn screens. He sprawled on his face, struggled up, and staggered into the open, a slobber of saliva on his chin. He stood awhile clawing at the air and whining on a queer note like a puppy's.

Then words came gulping out of him:  "Teirakel Teirake! (Arise! Arise!)... They come, they come! . . Our friends from the west... They come! ... Let us go down and greet them."

He started at a lumbering gallop down the beach a man near me yelped and stood pointing; others took up his cry, but I could make out nothing for myself at first in the splintering glare of the sun. When at last I did see them ... they were pretty near... gamboling towards us at a fine clip. When they came to the edge of the blue water by the reef, they slackened speed, spread themselves out and started cruising back and forth in front of our line...

When the water stood only thigh deep, the dreamer flung his arms high and called. Men from either flank came crowding in to surround the visitors, ten or more to each beast. Then, "Lift!" shouted the dreamer, and the ponderous black shapes were half-dragged, half-carried, unresisting, to the lip of the tide. There they settled down, those beautiful, dignified shapes, utterly at peace, while all hell broke loose around them. Men, women and children, leaping and posturing with shrieks that tore the sky, stripped off their garlands and flung them around the still bodies, in a sudden dreadful fury of boastfulness and derision. My mind still shrinks from that last scene--the raving humans, the beasts so triumphantly at rest.

We left them garlanded where they lay and returned to our houses. Later, when the falling tide had stranded them high and dry, men went down with knives to cut them up. There was feasting and dancing in Kuma that night. A chief's portion of the meat was set aside for me. I was expected to have it cured as a diet for my thinness. It was duly salted, but I could not bring myself to eat it. I never did grow fat in the Gilbert Islands.

From the short story Chronology of an Egg, by Peter Tieryas Liu

My mom told me Uncle Stan shoved a thousand Tylenol pills into his pistachio ice cream (his favorite flavor), and fell into eternal sleep.

"Does that mean you have one eternal dream, or millions of different ones?” I asked.

From the novel Black Rock White City, by A.S Patric

They warned children not to fall asleep near the poppy bush. They told them that if they fell asleep near this flower they would never wake up again.

When he heard this story he was so young that he listened with mystified awe, because what he understood wasn't - 'be careful here or you will die' - he understood it as, there's a place you can fall asleep and dream, never wake up, and never stop dreaming.

The Patric quote was previously posted in Shade, alongside one from another great Australian author, Xavier Herbert.

“I got an idea,” she says. “You have a pen and paper?”

I don’t, but we get some from a liquor store. We approach a newspaper box; she pops in a quarter. “Write something,” she commands.

We write about the limits of doubt, the fatigue of joy, how boredom is the culprit of most evils and conspiracies are stupidities justified after the fact. She stuffs the notes into different papers—LA Express with their proffered sex, City Times with local buffoonery.

“I love giving people surprises,” she explains.

From the short story Chronology of an Egg, collected in Watering Heaven, by Peter Tieryas Liu.

I was turned on to this great collection of short stories by Still-Childhood9373's post last week - The Sculptor Buddha. And it reminded me of the discovered information in the original post titled News.

“I want to take a photo of your fingers—or better yet, let me cast them in clay. In exchange, you can have anything you want.”

“Anything I want?”

She nodded.

“Home-cooked meal, friendship for an evening, company to anywhere you want. And if you play your cards right,” she said, “who knows?”

I turned to the photos. There must have been thousands.

“What exactly are you doing with them?”

“I collect the pieces I love and assemble the perfect human,” she answered.

“Why?”

“You ever hear about the Sculptor Buddha?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“He had to sculpt the statue of the perfect woman for the Celestial Palace, and he searched the whole world to find her. But every girl he found had some type of imperfection. So instead of using just one, he took the best elements from the women he admired and put them together. Afterward, he presented it to the emperor of the palace—who fell in love with the statue. But so did his three sons. A war broke out between them to control it.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The head Buddha saw it was causing too much strife on Earth and ordered one of the blind Buddhas to take it away, bury it at the bottom of the sea. The waves who saw the statue tried to get her attention, and that was the start of hurricanes.”

“You trying to recreate this statue?”

“It’s just a story,” she replied, smiling. “But I do find inspiration in perfection—and imperfection. That’s what all great compositions do, right?”

“What?”

“Deify the ordinary.”

From Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu (The Buddha of Many Parts)

my first post here! (hope this wasn't posted before)

From the novel Just Relations, by Rodney Hall.

Well, there was this fellow walkin along the riverbank, see? He come on a lump a string. Simple ordinary string. So he kicked it out a his way. You can understand that. No use to him. But he got his foot caught in a bit of a tangle. And when he pulled at it he found one end led into the river. What does he do but pull on it, gentle fisherman’s touch, you see. Pulled in the wet string till it got a bit heavier and he found the end of the string tied to a piece of wire. You with me? Well this fella said it was a mystery, so he pulled on the wire till he found the end of that tied to a chain. He couldn’t stop now could he? A course he pulled the chain, you’d do the same, and up with the wet chain came the end of a bloody great cable. The cable was as heavy as he was. They pulled at each other, stuck like that and him on the river bank, a toss up whether he’d get it out or it’s pull him in the water.

Pause

Then what? The senator prompted, airing the virtue of patience.

Then nothin a course. That’s it. What more do yer want to be told?

From the novel This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff.

It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.

In Australia the huge columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an athletic young man ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with boomerangs. Of the Bedouins of Eastern Africa it is said that “no whirl-wind ever sweeps across the path without being pursued by a dozen men with drawn creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast.

From The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The aim, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.

From the novel The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje.

These extracts were posted on the sub years ago - Frazer in Reap the Whirlwind, and Ondaatje in a post by akkshaikh in Winds of the World.

He recorded few conversions, and those were usually among women, the feeble, and heathen sick and in transit between this world and another, who accepted the Paradise he offered like children enlisted on an outing to an unfamiliar amusement park. Though one battered old warrior said that he would be converted only on the certainty that he would end up in the lively Hell which Gwyon described: it sounded more the place for a man; and on hearing the bloody qualifications of this zealous candidate (who offered to add his mentor's scalp to his collection as guaranty), the missionary assured him that he would.

From The Recognitions by William Gaddis

There are strange things in the world. Another day, we were camped out there during a storm, and in all the rain and wind something huge passed by. The horses went mad and the tents were blown away. Afterwards we followed a track through the grass, where earth had been scoured bare a hundred yards wide. We followed it for miles, this way and that, and then suddenly there was nothing – it had lifted itself back into the clouds. The soil had been gouged away a foot deep, and polished so that it almost shone. That storm had signed its name in the ground.

From the novel The White Earth, by Andrew McGahan.

• In a tent near Aïn-Fakroun, a six-year-old Arab girl was incinerated by lightning, by the side of her mother, who was driven mad by it.
• A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
• With a hook a washerwoman of Bougival fished out a parcel: a healthy newborn girl floating downstream.
• Le Verbeau hit Marie Champion right on her breasts, but burned his eye, because acid is not a precision weapon.

From Novels In Three Lines, by Felix Feneon. Summaries of real newspaper stories he was reading in the early 1900s.

He didn't really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn't even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn't want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn't equal to. He didn't want it to have taken his wife from him.

He didn't want to be marched off to another world he couldn't imagine; a little world that couldn't be as big as this one.

Yes it is, said the breezes that passed his ears.

It couldn't contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn't contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.

But it does, said the breezes.

Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.

Oh more, said the Breezes; more, much more.

From Little, Big by John Crowley. RIP.

One morning I got up in a bad temper, sad, tired of idleness, and impelled, it seemed to me, to do something big, a brilliant action; and I opened the window. Alas!

The first person that I saw in the street was a glazier whose piercing and discordant cry came up to me through the heavy and contaminated atmosphere of Paris. It would be utterly impossible for me ever to tell you why I was suddenly seized with a hatred, as sudden as it was despotic, against the poor man.

"Hullo, hullo," I called to him to come up. At the same time I reflected, not without some amusement, that my room being on the sixth story, and the staircase extremely narrow, that the man was bound to find it rather difficult to make the ascent, and to catch in many a place the corners of his merchandise.

At last he appeared. Having examined all his glasses with curiosity, I said to him: "What, you have no colored glasses? - Rose glasses, red glasses, blue glasses, magic glasses, glasses of Paradise! You impudent fellow; you dare to walk about in the poor quarters of the town, and you have not even glasses which make life look beautiful!" And I pushed him vigorously towards the staircase, where he stumbled and swore.

I went to the balcony and seized a little flower-pot; and when the man reappeared in the doorway I let fall my engine of war on the back edge of his shoulder straps, and the shock overthrowing him, he broke beneath his back all his poor walking stock in trade, which uttered the crashing cry of a glass palace split by lightning.

And, drunk with my madness I cried to him furiously: "Let life look beautiful, let life look beautiful!"

Charles Baudelaire

From the novel The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati, 

At that point the ramparts followed the slope of the valley and so formed a complicated staircase of terraces and platforms. Below him, pitch-black against the snow, Drogo saw the various sentries by the light of the moon; their methodical pacing made a creaking noise on the frozen ground.

The nearest of them, on a lower terrace ten yards or so away, feeling the cold less than the others, stood motionless with his shoulders leant against a wall so that it looked as if he were sleeping. But Drogo heard him singing a lament to himself in a low voice.

It was a succession of words, which Drogo could not make out, strung together by a monotonous and unending tune. Speaking, and worse still, singing on duty was severely forbidden. Giovanni should have punished him but instead took pity on him, thinking of the cold and the loneliness of the night. Then he began to descend a short staircase which lead on to the terrace and gave a slight cough to put the soldier on his guard.

The sentinel turned his head and seeing the officer corrected his posture but did not interrupt his lament. Drogo was overcome with rage—did these men think they could make a fool of him? He would give him a taste of something.

The sentry at once remarked Drogo’s threatening attitude and although the formality of giving the password, by an ancient tacit agreement, was not used between soldiers and the guard commander he had an excess of scruple. Raising his rifle he asked with the peculiar accent used in the Fort: “Who goes there? Who goes there?”

Drogo stopped short, thrown off his balance. In the clear light of the moon he could see the soldier’s face perfectly clearly perhaps less than five yards away and the mouth was shut. But the lament had not been interrupted. Where did it come from then, that voice?

Since the soldier stood there and waited, Giovanni, pondering the strange phenomenon, mechanically gave the password: “Miracle.” “Misery,” replied the sentry and stood at ease again.

There followed an immense silence in which the muttered words and song drifted more loudly than before. At last Drogo understood and a slight shiver ran along his spine. It was water, that was what it was—a distant cascade dashing down the steep sides of the crags. The wind causing the great jet to quiver, the mysterious play of the echoes, the varying sounds of the struck rocks made of it a human voice which spoke and spoke—spoke of our life in words which one was within a hair’s breadth of understanding but never did.

So it was not the soldier who was singing under his breath, not a man sensitive to cold, to punishments and to love, but the hostile mountain. What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that—we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we see that we are completely alone.

The wind blows against the officer’s splendid cloak and the blue shadow on the snow waves, too, like a flag. The sentry stands motionless. The moon moves on and on, slowly but not losing a single moment, impatient for the dawn. In Giovanni Drogo’s breast his heart beats hollowly.

From the novel Just Relations, by Rodney Hall.

I once heard a voice, said Uncle, singing in the middle of the night, it was. Coming from miles away. My dog Bertha gave one bark and then sat down. Unaccountable that. You’d think she was listenin. A man’s voice. It sang as if there was no endin and nothin else to do. Never heard anythin in all my days so beautiful. In the still of the night, he said. Not even Anne’s violin. I was sober too, he added to combat their disbelief. I was sittin up a wide awake as I am now. You don’t believe me. It wasn’t no dream and it wasn’t the radio. It was right here somewhere in our district. Up home I was, and all of a sweat though it was cold night clearin to a touch of frost.

These were originally separate posts 4 years ago, the first by u/Earthsophagus. I always felt they belonged together.

From the novel Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo

There were 300 naked people sprawled in the street. They filled the intersection, lying in haphazard positions, some bodies draped over others, some levelled, flattened, foetal, with children among them. No one was moving, no one's eyes were open. They were a sight to come upon, a city of stunned flesh, the bareness, the bright lights, so many bodies unprotected and hard to credit in a place of ordinary human transit. Of course there was a context. Someone was making a movie.

From the novel Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann.

The first time I saw New York, I lay down on the ground outside Port Authority just so I could see the whole sky. Some guy stepped right over me without even looking down.

July Fourth, by Lucy Corin.

Got there and the ground was covered with bodies. Lay down with everyone and looked at the sky, bracing for the explosions.

(This is the entire short story.)

From the novel Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

At one end of the gondola, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him. Ever since the Chums had rescued Pugnax, then but a pup, it had been his habit to investigate the pages of whatever printed material should find its way on board*,* from theoretical treatments of the aeronautical arts to often less appropriate matter, such as the “dime novels” - though his preference seemed more for sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes of human behavior, which he appeared to find a bit lurid. He had learned with the readiness peculiar to dogs how with the utmost delicacy to turn pages using nose or paws, and anyone observing him thus engaged could not help noting the changing expressions of his face, in particular the uncommonly articulate eyebrows, which contributed to an overall effect of interest, sympathy, and—the conclusion could scarce be avoided—comprehension.

Dogs write memoirs and critique ballet in Good Boy, and are contemplative in Serious Dogs.

The post title is a line from the short story The Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol.

My Destination, by Franz Kafka. Collected in Parables & Paradoxes.

At the gate he stopped me and asked: "Where are you riding to, master?"

"I don't know," I said, "just away from here, just away from here. On and on away from here, only in this way can I reach my goal."

"So you know your goal?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied, "I've just told you: 'Away-from-here,' that is my goal."

From the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

From the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac 'Whee Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.'

'Where we going, man?'

'I don’t know but we gotta go.'

From the novel The Glade Within the Grove, by David Foster

'Come on, let's go. We gotta get started! It'll take us around 12 hours, and I hope to get there before dark.'

'But I thought you didn't know where this place is.'

'I don't. But I hope to get there before dark.'

From the novel The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss.

For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.

Spellcaster, From Jez Burrows's Dictionary Stories. Created entirely form dictionary example sentences for the words in italics.

I never believed in love spells or magic until I met this spellcaster. With a deft motion of his nimble fingers, he materialised a taxi out of nowhere, conjured up a most delicious homemade stew, and transformed a bare stage into an enchanted forest. We got engaged on my twenty-sixth birthday, disappeared in the twinkling of an eye, and bought a place on the lake. A magician and his glam assistant in domestic felicity.

More magic in Hey Rocky, Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out Of My Hat.

The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea. The river mouth at Moss Landing was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water. Once, fifty miles down the valley, my father bored a well. The drill came up first with topsoil and then with gravel and then with white sea sand full of shells and even pieces of whalebone. There were twenty feet of sand and then black earth again, and even a piece of redwood, that imperishable wood that does not rot. Before the inland sea the valley must have been a forest. And those things had happened right under our feet. And it seemed to me sometimes at night that I could feel both the sea and the redwood forest before it.

From the novel East of Eden, by John Steinbeck's. Originally shared as a comment in the post And then the earth moved.

Ovibus, or musk-ox: an animal, half-lamb and half-bullock. Its natural habitat is that snowbound Arctic or Russian plain that is commonly known as a "tundra". Its skin, which turns soft if you pound it, has a sharp and piquantly liquorish flavour. To catch hold of such an animal, you must fix upon what you think is a propitious occasion, lying flat out as it runs towards you and pouncing on it just as its front hoof looms up in front of you, monstrous and intimidating.

As soon as you put your hands on its throat, surrounding it, it looks up at you, starts lowing and, in its turn, squats along by you and actually nods off.

At which point you will find that its body, with its aroma of acacia, alfa, alfilaria, onion, oxalis, origanum, upas and union, is oddly soft to your touch.

From A Void, by Georges Perec

From the novel True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

Taking Aaron Sherritt for a scout we journeyed to the shepherd's hut up on the Bogong High Plains. The walls was papered with words and pictures from THE ILLUSTRATED AUSTRALIAN NEWS. They was tattered like old skin and very yellow often gnawed on by the mice.

It were during them winter storms we begun studying the paper on the walls. My Lorna Doone was long ago ruined in the Murray so there were not a great deal else to read but the news of 18 yr. before. The previous incumbent must of been a Yankee. Every page he pasted were about their Civil War. I were often disappointed to find the outcome of a battle eaten by a mouse.

From The Crumbs of One Man's Year, by Dylan Thomas

I was walking and thinking that I was walking, and for August it was not such a cold day. And then I saw, drifting along the water, a piece of paper, and I thought: Something wonderful may be written on this paper. I was alone on the gooseberry earth, or alone for two green miles, and a message drifted towards me on that tabby-coloured water that ran through the middle of the cow-patched, mooing fields. It was a message from multitudinous nowhere to my solitary self. I put out my stick and caught the piece of paper and held it close to the river-bank. It was a page tom from a very old periodical. That I could see. I leant over and read, through water, the message on the rippling page. I made out, with difficulty, only one sentence: it commemorated the fact that, over a hundred years ago, a man in Worcester had, for a bet, eaten, at one sitting, fifty-two pounds of plums.

The Thomas piece was posted years ago as part of News.

In spite of everything, we decided to make an effort and go out anyway. I watched Magdalena examining herself in her dressing-table mirror, with a jar of vanishing cream in her hand, ready to erase her face, perhaps completely. Suddenly I had the terrifying feeling that when she cleaned her face with that wad of cotton dipped in cream, the only thing left would be a white, fetal, egg-shaped structure, just like Sylvia's. I stretched out on the bed, flipping the pages of Jung, while Magdalena put herself together. I thought about having to read Herman Hesse again, at this age, which was what the whole world was doing: the idea prostrated me. I watched Magdalena out of the corner of my eye, my heart pounding with fear and hope, waiting to see what was going to emerge from that mass of cream that she was now removing with another wad of cotton . . . she had even pinned a white towel bib-like around her neck, as if to collect all the particles of the object that was about to disintegrate.

José Donoso, Sacred Families: Three Novellas

From An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira

Imagine a brilliant police detective summarizing his investigations for the husband of the victim, the widower. Thanks to his subtle deductions he has been able to ‘reconstruct’ how the murder was committed; he does not know the identity of the murderer, but he has managed to work out everything else with an almost magical precision, as if he had seen it happen.

And his interlocutor, the widower, who is, in fact, the murderer, has to admit that the detective is a genius, because it really did happen exactly as he says; yet at the same time, although of course he actually saw it happen and is the only living eyewitness as well as the culprit, he cannot match what happened with what the policeman is telling him, not because there are errors, large or small, in the account, or details out of place, but because the match is inconceivable, there is such an abyss between one story and the other, or between a story and the lack of a story, between the lived experience and the reconstruction - even when the reconstruction has been executed to perfection - that widower simply cannot see a relation between them; which leads him to conclude that he is innocent, that he did not kill his wife

From the collection Outside Stories, by Eliot Weinberger.

He walked into the police station and told them he could no longer live with his guilty conscience: Ten years ago he had murdered an old woman in the course of a robbery.

The woman was a passer-by on a street he’d forgotten. The police searched their files and came up with an unsolved case from around that time. Charged, he protested his innocence: the details were entirely different. Yes, he was a murderer, but not that murderer. He was standing trial for the wrong crime.

The Weinberger piece was originally part of Crimes Against Nomanity.

Fydor's Bears

Fydor was a small man and he hunted bears. He knew everything there was to know about them: by the shape and size of a footprint read the age, weight, and speed of an animal; he knew their seasons of amorous encounters and the wild gardens they haunted for honey. And the bears knew Fydor: his tics, his tenacity, and his peculiar smell—rancid as old fat forgotten at the bottom of a can.

Still, Fydor was the more cunning. By the roots of windblown trees he dug deep traps and made them secret beneath weavings of bracken and leaves. Many times in the passing of the year would a bear sink with a nauseating thud to be stung by Fydor’s arrows, enfevered with sleep, and hauled off to one of the many stout cages he kept in a cellar called home.

Fydor hated his bears yet could not live without them. Their intimate habits, their torments and hungers excited him, sickened him, obsessed him. He thrived in the stench of their fur, their urine, and their tears.

And in time the bears became obsessed with Fydor. Locked into their cages like flies in amber, they turned to him—for he was the only thing they could turn to. They watched him, memorized his habits: the way he shuffled across the littered floors, or held a pan of water beneath a tap. In time the bears knew Fydor better than a woman knows her man after sharing a half century of boredom and bed. And as alchemists fool with foul matter changing colors and structures, the bears—woolly and immense—entered into Fydor’s dreams, and changed Fydor.

Night after night they lumbered down the narrow passages of Fydor’s mind to browse its rag stalls, its cut-rate china shops, leaving droppings, making drafts, causing sunset changes. They brought burdens of flowers, of fire; as at a shrine, they drugged the air.

And vines grew inside Fydor’s mind, and halls of green shadow; lean hills, red earth, and places of perpetual picnic. Fydor’s skull—barren before—sprouted grass. His dim, fly-ridden eyes grew luminous. Bears were now coursing through his blood, inhabiting his heart, his liver, his testicles. His nerves writhed bears. His skin crawled bears. His bowels groaned: Bears! His cock yearned: Bears! He ate, slept, dreamed, fucked, and defecated bears until waking in a frenzy of longing, his eyes wild and circling the room like bears on bicycles, he ran to them, his pants bulging with longing and with keys. Fingers trembling, he found the locks and set them free to lumber off into the night.

And Fydor followed them. With a gruff expression of joy half human, half brute, followed his makers into the forest. Another beast among beasts; perhaps less agile, less ferocious perhaps. . . .

What Happened in the New Country

We complained to the city officials about the smell. They said that we had made the smell ourselves and that therefore they could not do anything about it.

I took an airplane to the new country. The president met me at the airport. He rode on the back of a large black beetle, and his police, driving small motorized toilets, flanked him. All week we visited the factories. There were seven hundred thousand running night and day. The hum was deafening. The president had some cold beef fat brought up. We used this to plug up our ears. The workers in these factories wore electrified helmets. They were soldered to their heads. When a worker needed food he was given an electric shock, and when he asked for sleep he was recharged electrically. The helmets were yellow and resembled beehives. They seemed to have been made of gold. When the workers died, they were melted down in a centralized factory called by code the diminishing zone, and poured into little tins like butter, and labeled. Later I managed to read one of these labels. It read LITTLE BLACK SAMBO'S BEST. That night at the president's house we ate pancakes. They tasted strange, and the president explained that they had been kept frozen for many centuries in gigantic aluminum freezers. However, he added that the butter was fresh and that I myself had seen it being made.

The morning before I was scheduled to leave, two strangers in uniform came to my room as I slept. They sewed me to the mattress and painfully erased my face. When they were finished they cut me free and sent me home on the bus. The trip home took me over three hundred hours and was considerably more expensive than I had been led to expect. My wife refuses to believe this story and insists that my face remains just as it was before.

Theft

He took my head while I was sleeping. He kept it in vinegar for three days. Then he boiled it down and put it in an oversized eggcup. When he peeled it he was surprised to find that it still bled. Grinding his teeth, he set it to boil once more. An hour later he tested it with a meat fork. Satisfied that my head was done, he set it in a bowl and cracked it open with a silver mallet. Inside he found a thriving colony of red ants. Furious, he spat into my face and doused the skull with insecticide. Then he threw my head into the river and if a certain fisherman had not presented it to the proper authorities, I should never have found it again.

-- Rikki Ducornet. Collected in the Complete Butcher's Tales (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994)

Nathaniel, who has failed as a writer, decides to commit suicide. He loads his revolver, places it at his side on his desk, and starts to write his letter of farewell. The letter lengthens, brightens, breathes, lives. It is the Masterpiece, the yearned-for Masterpiece! In order to publish it, Nathaniel does not commit suicide.

*

“Rejoice! Your wish has been granted! You will write the best stories in the world. However, no one will read them.”

*

The man empties his revolver into his terrible enemy. Five shots. Yet he squeezes the trigger one time more. On hearing the click of the empty weapon, he feels helpless. Now, alone with the corpse, he is afraid.

*

They were unable to explain either the chemistry or the theology of his halo. Meanwhile that human beast went strolling about the jail yard, displaying the beautiful halo on his head.

*

I bathed, shaved, and dressed; I looked at myself in the mirror. “Let’s go!” I said to my agoraphobia, and together we went out to take a walk in the park.

*

In a dividing wall between two old houses in Babylon, there was a hole. During the last few weeks, the hole had taken on the shape of a mouth, the shape of an ear; after that certain night it started to take on the shape of an eye. Now the hole looks out from side to side: “Aren’t they going to come? Won’t they come tonight either?” it asks. And it listens for the slightest sounds, with the hope of hearing the silent steps of the lovers. A useless wait. Time passes and the hole, which will never learn about Pyramus and Thisbe, slowly fills with cobwebs.

the Prisoner

When they shoved Luis Augusto Bianqui into a cell it took him a few days to discover that he was able to dissolve into air, escape like a breath through the transom, reassume his bodily form on the other side, go about in the streets, and live his life as usual. There was one inconvenience: each time that a guard came along to inspect his cell, Bianqui, wherever he was, had to drop everything, return in a flash, and resume his image as a prisoner. A matter of conscience! If the jailors were forgetful, Bianqui’s freedom became real. He studied the timetable of the guards’ rounds in order to walk around the city only during hours more or less safe, without fear of interruption. He would spend a whole night out. Even so, in the jail they were accustomed to making unexpected inspections. More than once he had felt the pull from his cell and had had to dissolve while in the arms of a woman. Very unsatisfactory. Little by little, he began to renounce his power to evaporate; finally, in the end, he stayed in jail.

Heroes

A hand touched him from behind. He was afraid to turn around for fear that, in looking over his shoulder, he would see at his back, vengeful, a Past that was calling him. Oedipus departed, deep in thought, and continued on the road to Thebes.

*

Some of the sailors that were returning from their long voyages were accustomed to visiting Sinbad, the paralytic. Sinbad would close his eyes and tell them adventures from his own inner voyages. In order to make them more believable, he would attribute them to Odysseus. “I’ll wager,” thought Sinbad when he was alone, “that he never left his house either.”

*

After the last birds died, the cage took off from the patio and began to fly toward heaven. “It is coming to us to ask for forgiveness,” thought the angels, unaware.

*

The cat Aknatun still conserved the memory of having been a man and, thanks to this, was able to get along with Cleopatra, who, in turn, recalled, also vaguely, her preexistence as a cat.

*

“I,” said one ghost to another, upon meeting in the attic of a very old big house, “am different from you: I have never died. I started by pretending to be a ghost, and look what happened.”

*

Other amnesiacs forget their name, their profession, their family. Samuel forgot that, being a man, he was unable to fly. He leaped up to pluck a fig, continued rising up through the air, and was lost in a cloud.

*

Nobody knew how the statues passed the word through the parks, museums, temples, and palaces of the most remote cities, but the strike was general. All of them, at the same time, dropped whatever they were carrying: mantles, weapons, even children—and undressed. Those who had always been in the nude were shocked at this sudden immodesty.

-- Enrique Anderson-Imbert [Translated by Carleton Vail and Pamela Edwards-Mondragón,]. Selected from Woven on the Loom of Time: STORIES (University of Texass Press, 1990).

Our children are larger than us. They carry us about on their huge backs like packsacks, you on the boy, I on the girl. Riding them through the city streets in search of playmates it’s evident that other parents are being carried about in a similar way; some are even slung on their children’s hips like bags of groceries, some ride anxiously on fat shoulders. Then we are set down in designated areas for drink and conversation, dozens of parents gathered together for worried viewing of the park across the way; the children are playing their fearsome games there with baseballs the size of pumpkins, and bats sturdy enough to support a house. Grandparents, no bigger than dolls, sit amongst us nodding quietly to one another: Ah, the wisdom of the world!

At night it’s back to the hotel room. You and I in a corner of the room sharing a single mattress on the floor. The children each with a king-sized bed arranged before the TV set where they watch game shows and eat peanuts—the shells rising in mountains from the floor. The room growing smaller by the minute. The children growing larger and larger.

During the night the room heats up like an incubator. But the children don’t notice. They sleep with massive fists thrust in their pink gaping mouths. When our daughter laughs and tosses in her sleep her roundness bruises the hotel walls. At three A.M. our son cries out in a man’s voice: Barricade the door, the troops are coming! His size twelve feet flailing against the hotel quilt.

We, on the floor, sweat and lose moisture, shrivel a little more, dry out. Our lotions of little help. Our lovemaking of little help. We keep reducing in volume. Peanut shells spill onto our mattress. On the way to the bathroom we wade through a clutter of pop cans and pizza cartons, track shoes, comics.

Regarding these sleeping giants, we realize it’s too late not to have had them. The die has been cast. Inexplicably, our pride in them remains.

-- M A C Farrant. Collected in Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Fiction (Talonbooks, 2009)