On an odd little social-group Web site called Flickr,
people can form clusters of acquaintances, and people can write things
called testimonials about their acquaintances.
Most people write testimonials that are the predictable, humorous, gushy,
positive sort. As you might suspect, I didn't.
Recorded here are some of the testimonials I wrote for my acquaintances,
in no particular order.
She had lived on the lake, on that little island in the lake, long enough
to know its moods, long enough to know what it was thinking. And that day,
the lake was vengeful.
In the moments before, in the moments before, Garret had been thinking
of a flicker of time in his childhood, of the warmth of that hill on a
summer day, the greenfliers leaping from the grass, and the distant smell
of bread in the air.
I sat behind him in third grade and drew illustrations of various sporing
plants on the back of his head. I don't think he ever realized it.
The drawer contained a box of paper clips, the tattered remains of a
dime store novel, three small machine parts and the eyes of Laura Mars.
Despite all of their anticipation, the safety deposit box contained
nothing of importance, just a small, weathered notebook, the pages of which
were covered by intricate symbology of no known origin.
Across the Interstate, past the Ikea where she had bought the beige
couch, inside the odiferous green container in the scrubby asphalt lot
behind the 7-11, China found the body of a small dog.
"So this is what he meant."
It was beneath the canopy of trees by the bog - well, not beneath it,
not exactly; let's just say that it was nearby the canopy, the same canopy
under which the body of that infant was discovered the day before; yes,
"nearby"; that is all you need to know now, all that we are willing to
tell you now - that Emily Panders found (or said she found) that egg, that
egg that disturbed everyone who saw it, that egg that came from no hen,
that egg that the priest declared an abomination.
That was how it began.
Inside the bent tin box were three small stone cubes, each perfect,
each made of a hard, green, soapy stone with which she was not familiar.
She picked one of them up, feeling its surprising weight in her hand.
That was how it began.
In his graph, many outlinks, many trivial pursuits, many characters;
his inlinks on the ripe side, trilling, along the shore of the small rivulet
that separated the village from the hunting ground.
He could not sleep that night, that night when the frogs fell silent,
the frogs that had, every other night, trilled louder than the day-parrots,
the frogs that were never seen but always present, that night when no stars
shone, when he could not tell if his eyes were open or shut, when he could
not tell if he existed at all.
That was how it began.
The cylinders were buried beneath a ton of concrete and asphalt, out
in back of the 7-11, the one on the edge of town.
It would be centuries before they were found again. And by then, it
would be too late.
She found them in an old film canister, one so dusty with neglect as
to make her think twice about opening it, but she did, and upon opening
it she found the desiccated bodies of three insects - beetles of some kind
- each a different metallic color.
That was how it began.
He had wandered from his usual path home from school that day, not even
knowing why, down the long hill and through the construction site by the
lake. And, beneath a discarded sheet of corrugated steel, amidst the earthworms
and pillbugs, he found a small, perfectly square piece of blue-shiny metal,
on the surface of which was inscribed a single symbol.
That was how it began.
A tome containing only cryptic drawings of radishes was found beside
a freshly slain marmot.
A jar of fingers sat on the old wooden table, alongside a fork and three
engraved images of root vegetables that never existed.
The awful legacy of unknown monks is etched upon the wings of butterflies.
After several days of climbing, a monk with no toes came upon three
nested birds that did not resemble flutes or fishtraps.
In the very center of the old temple, a machine of unknown purpose had
been constructed from etched butterfly wings and the bones of small children.
A machine on which music can be played, constructed entirely from the
tiny ear bones of season ticket holders.
Strewn about the horizon were small collections of seemingly unrelated
information: a harpsichord, the concept of motion, a neglected idea and,
of course, Hector.
Upon further consideration, Jenny decided not to open the jar, which
contained a large, mottled, clearly organic mass in murky yellow liquid.
On the golden metal ball that sat atop the neglected flagpole was a
small spot of rust. That was how it began.
Removing the foul-smelling brown paper revealed a dark, leather-bound
book of rituals of unknown purpose, the pages of which were made from the
skin of a musician who was paralyzed from birth.
A set of nesting tables was convicted of bigamy.
It had rained unceasingly for longer than anyone in the meadow remembered,
and all of their hands had grown old and wrinkled.
Beneath the embroidered pillow, Maria found three twigs, arranged in
a triangular fashion and bound together with hair - with what appeared
to be human hair.
Beside the road that ran raggedly down from the village to the pit,
Elise discovered an egg. That was how it began.
She had never been to the other side of the river, never seen the hovels
in which the others lived, never heard their cries in the night. Not until
the stranger arrived.
An oily lumpfish stared back at him from the mirror. How the lumpfish
got there, he would never know.
A bevy of snail, wrapped in duct tape and left in an aluminum pot in
the lower kitchen cupboards.
As she stepped off, she wondered, briefly, if it was the right thing
to do, her breath catching in her throat. And then there was nothing, nothing
but the night air and the familiar sound of traffic.
Opening her hand revealed three tiny seeds, black specks on her palm.
Her eyes advised caution; her voice was a whisper. "Lengroot, Plurp. They
say it grows in your dreams."
What would the life purpose of a button be if not for the buttonhole?
Three teeth on the doorstep. And a lock of hair. She considered this
find as she heated her porridge that morning. Perhaps it was the child
Toby. Or the cat.
There was something odd about the taste of the carrots, he thought.
Caramel, perhaps? Clove? Or fennel? No, no, not quite that either.
Ah yes, he thought, smiling, in the moments before. Almonds. It must
be almonds.
Miami. Miami. The voice kept repeating it. That surprised Dennis, as
the voice had never mentioned it before. But now it was insistent. Miami.
It was beneath the canopy of trees by the bog - well, not beneath it,
not exactly; let's just say that it was nearby the canopy, the same canopy
under which the body of that infant was discovered the day before; yes,
"nearby"; that is all you need to know right now, all that we are willing
to tell you now - that Emily Panders found (or said she found) that egg,
that egg that disturbed everyone who saw it, that egg that came from no
hen, that egg that the priest declared an abomination.
That was how it began.
I drew the image of a jaybird in magic marker on the small of her back,
not knowing who she was. And, ever since, I will follow women on the street
and wonder if she is not the one, or if it had washed off.
A man with large, tallow legs stood in the market square, beside a cart
piled high with squash and soft potatoes, and clapped his hands, directly
in front of his mottled face, once each minute. It was not clear that he
knew I was there.
A crossing out of words. A denial. A forgetting. A belief that it had
never happened.
The taxi cab stopped, but no one got in.
How obscure!
Three glass jars sat on the rough plywood shelf. The first contained
three eggs of undetermined origin, preserved in vinegar and brine. The
second contained three small green crystals covered in a thick, furry mold.
Of the third we will not speak.
Three marble cylinders, about the size of his foot, were arranged in
a sinister pattern.
It appeared to be a simple geometry textbook. Simple, that is, until
you saw that it was written entirely in Aramaic.
Nothing was left but a fingerprint on the glass and, somewhere in the
other room, the dim smell of woodsmoke.
Violet upon a black background, his thoughts wandered dangerously, unevenly,
into the past. When he looked up, the woman he hoped to recognize was someone
else.
She taught three finches to sing harmony, then went out in search of
a tone-deaf cat.
It was a shadow box, just a shadow box. A scrap of linen, a blue marble,
sand glued to torn paper, a pushpin, four postage stamps showing the Duomo
Firenze.
Ellen wept.
He had, at length, fallen asleep in the sand, his chest grasping painfully
for air, his lungs liquid, and he had slept, though frenetically, and dreamed
vividly about writing the alphabet, over and over.
When he awoke, the sand around his body was covered with intricate symbols,
which he did not recognize.
It was a caution, standing there so proud and tall, soaking up the last
few licks of afternoon sun. Time was they never woulda put such a thing
here, not here, but now they did, these last few months. We wasn't sure
what to make of it, Julie and me. A good thing, we figured. Progress, probably.
But it was unnerving, kinda, not knowing, you know, what it was <i>thinking</i>.
Inside his corset, Sanders found three curious items: a yellowed page
on which arcane symbols were inscribed in an unsteady hand, a glass vial
containing an oily liquid, and a small silver key.
That was how it began.
He spent the next three years dreaming. Not fantasizing, but dreaming,
fast asleep, there in the small alcove behind the sanctuary, his bodily
needs catered to by the furtive figures in hooded cloaks.
Sinewy, entwining her in her fate, inextricably entangling her in his
life, in his desires, her dreams rolled over her fears in dark streams.
It was last Fall when he first noticed the pattern that the leaves made
on the quad, when he first realized what it meant.
She collected small, round stones, picked them up whenever she found
them, if they were round enough, that is, and the right size. Not just
any stone would do. Not at this point, not when there was hardly any room
to move in her apartment because of them.
She decided to cut off all of her hair and knit it into tunics for hairless
cats.
There was a sadness in her, a longing, a sense of absence that he could
not capture, no matter how he tried, in his arrangements of postage stamps
and baby's teeth.
He sat there by the window, eating pizza and speaking softly to no one.
As I walked behind him, I thought, for a moment anyway, that he was speaking
Aramaic.
She canceled her subscription to Time magazine as soon as she realized
that she could get all her news by reading coins.
He drew three obscure symbols in the wet ground, looking around furtively.
Then he stood, scuffing them out with his heel, his eyes wide as he ran,
stumbling, down the hill.
It was an effort, that last breath.
In the cellar of the old church, caked with age and decay, was a large,
stone trap door that had not been opened in centuries.
Screaming. Grinding. Choking. Wetness. Blindness. Horror.
She was twenty-three before she realized that people had unique identities.
It came as quite a shock and now, still, at twenty-seven, she had not entirely
absorbed the implications to her own experience of the world.
Sitting, waiting for his life to defragment, for his enthusiasm to reboot,
for someone to do routine maintenance on everything that he knew to be
true. No telling how long this would take.
The three of them were inseperable, the two girls and the boy. They
went everywhere together. They wandered the wet meadows together, when
they could. They ate together; they slept together.
But tomorrow, Nurse Neimi said, was the operation.
The machine watched. Fascinated. It had never seen anything like that
before. The novelty index was unusually high. So it transfered significant
resources from protein folding to both capture and analyze scenes of them,
of both of them, as they participated in that very unusual activity.
They caught her attention, those three green orbs that drifted slowly
across the sky that day, just after the indicident with the sparrows, just
after the elders had declared her thoughts to be abomination.
It was not, she decided, a prospicious sign.
The photograph, the one in the wooden frame with the broken glass, the
one of a rutted road that tapers off into a moist wood, was not remarkable,
except perhaps in its implications.
He was not certain what had motivated him to actually bake those birds
into a pie. It might have been something as simple as a desire to turn
all folklore into cuisine. He wasn't sure.
It sat cooly beneath the waning moon, that smooth, round stone, waiting.
How ironic that no one would ever know.
She stared at the screen, through the jitter and haze, unbelieving.
From the place where the camera stood, now tilting noticably to the right,
from there to the horizon on all sides, she could see nothing but an irregular
mosaic of grey, of mottled grey things that resembled small vases, or tufts
of straw. Emily rubbed her eyes, blinked, looked again, and reached, her
hand shaking, for the phone.
A woman with dusty eyes baked long loaves of crusty bread made from
the ground bones of wicked children.
As the water receded, the sea birds came, hunger in their unblinking
eyes, to dine.
Why the others could not see the signs had always been a puzzle to Victor.
The sparrows, the crenulations in the lilies - the portents were obvious.
There would be an appearance, tonight, probably, or tomorrow night. The
frail and sensitive would awaken, screaming.
It was always that way.
She wore her hair combed down over her face, over her chin, and it reached
nearly down to the nape of her neck. When asked why, she would only raise
her hand, palm out, until the questioner relented in puzzlement or fear.
In the dim parking lot behind the Wal-Mart, she found a Hallmark card,
the cover of which contained a picture of a rose, but the rose was scratched
and grimey from who-know-how-many months of cars and rain. The buttery
poem on the inside was followed by just a few handwritten words and a signature.
She stood there for a moment, holding it, trying to figure out to whom
to return it, or if it had already found its home.
He was raised by an osprey that was oblivious, perhaps through genetic
defect or mere happenstance, of the unusal size of her offspring, or of
his lack of feathers.
There wasn't much left of her. Just the discolored photo of an unidentified
child and a bad taste in his mouth.
He was drunk. That was the excuse he used. Not terrified, not twitching
and shivering after thirteen sleepless nights in a row, not holding his
arms in front of his face to ward off the dreams (they must be dreams!)
of dark forests, their own arms wrapped around each other and his own,
grasping, writhing, themselves without sleep.
Drunk, he told everyone, that night, the night he went out in the howling
rain and, with a chain saw, stopped the dreams forever.
The limes had grown large that year, grotesquely so, and the boring
bees kept him awake at night as they grew ever nearer.
He stood on one leg, his foot planted firmly in the air, holding the
world up with both hands.
The stones listened intently to the man with beautiful hands. They particularly
enjoyed the stories of the Biltmore Hat company.
It wasn't until he moved to California that he started seeing the messages
in the graffiti, but it was the very next August that he started obeying
them.
Mara was outraged at the guard, the squat, doughy-faced guard who told
her that taking photographs of the relics was forbidden. She put her camera
into her pack, her lips taught but, when the guard meandered into a safer
room, she snuck it out and took the pictures that were later missing from
the police lockup when the coroner requested them.
The freshly typed report was of another immigrant in Sharjah that had
been found dead in a toilet with his throat slashed. It was the third one
that night. The desk sargent yawned, and beckoned for another cup of sweet
tea and a pistachio pastry.
The gods came to her one afternoon in September. "We are here to reveal
to you the purpose of your life," said the fat one, a golden radiance streaming
from his eyes. "We need you to take pictures of automobiles," said the
slender one, in woodwind tones. "Preferably luxury automobiles."
"No, really," said the fat one.
It was not the photograph of the eye that was so disturbing, though
it was unusual to find such a large, extreme close-up of a human eye as
the only artistic work in a small, brightly painted bedroom. No, it was
not the photograph, not the eye. No. It was what was reflected in
the eye.
He tried to capture time, a moment, an instant, the second hand stopped,
a glance at the ancient city through sepia eyes, a shard of consciousness
split off from the others. He stood there, staring at it, his brow creased
in frustration; the frame held only objects.
She was one of those people who could be anyone, or no one, whose manner
or appearance would not draw your attention, or perhaps would actively
deflect it. She was a null, a cipher, a void, a vacuum that the social
universe yearned to fill with the bland and ordinary.
The faded blue Chevy had sat, crumpled and decaying, in that dry field
for the better part of half a century, playing birthing center to stray
cats and marmots and attracting no particular attention from anyone.
But that was before Jimmy and me opened the trunk.
He found it, at last, that cloudless July day in a yard sale in rural
Connecticut. To anyone else, it would have seemed a copy of a Herb Alpert
album, its cover showing a young woman dressed in whipped cream and the
scratched vinyl record inside some now-ancient pop music. But he knew better.
Knew better as he purchased it for twenty-five cents from the old woman
in the hippie dress. He knew, and verified immediately upon returning to
his hotel room, that this was what he had been waiting for, searching for,
his whole life. This would would answer all of his questions - these were
the messages from the Others.
Now the secrets were his, and he smiled upon thinking it, for twenty-five
cents.
The small grey stone was lost amidst the rubble at the side of the stream,
miles deep into the leafless forest
Or was it? Could it have been placed here by someone, by something,
for purposes that we cannot imagine? Were the random scuffs on its surface
meaningless, or was their meaning merely hidden? And, if it had some unimaginable
purpose, some hidden meaning, what would happen if it was left there, by
the side of that stream, to carry out its dreadful destiny?
At first she thought it was just another jellyfish, tossed up by the
seemingly gentle sea. She almost passed it by, walking distractedly along
the smooth rocks. But something made her stop. Stop, and turn.
The old man took his bones to the doctor, saying, "I cannot sleep at
night, nor walk in the sun, for my bones ache." The doctor considered this
for several long minutes in silence. At length, he took the bones from
the old man and bade him to return home.
