Love & Darts (9781937316075) Read online

  LOVE & DARTS

  ~

  NATH JONES

  ISBN-13: 978-1-9-37316-06-8

  Copyright 2012 Nath Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  SmashWords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to SmashWords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Previously Published:

  Jones, Nath. "Limbic Resonance: Responses to a Match.com Questionnaire." The Battered Suitcase 3.4 (2011): 40-41. Issuu. Vagabondage Press, 1 Mar. 2011. Web. 29 Dec. 2011. .

  Jones, Nath. "Should: How Mommy Ate Her Soul." PANK Magazine March (2010). PANK Magazine. PANK, 3 May 2010. Web. 29 Dec. 2011. .

  Jones, Nath. "Tandem." From the Edge of the Prairie 8 (2011): 6-13. Print.

  PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Cover design by: Ryan W. Bradley: www.aestheticallydeclined.net

  Interior design by: Gin Y. Havard

  For Amy & Bill,

  most merciful friends

  SPECIAL TRIBUTE

  Karen’s Krew

  Karen's Krew at F.O.E. #2548 -- L to R: Jim ROOSTER Wisely, JOELBACON Haskell, Karen SPECIAL K McAleer, BIG JOE Gembala, & Kayla KATE Reyes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Lucille Fridley * Gin Havard * Jane Friedman * Leah Jones * Anita Jordan * Vanessa Shivla * John Philip Mcgraw * Andrew Zimmerman Jones * Nate Dean *Dariusz Janecki * Chris Howard * Becky Holzman * Erin Gunderson * Tammy Servies * Pepper Burkholder * Xavier Rodriguez * Melanie Callahan Willhite (aka Mrs. Awesomeness) * Mike Moreth * Chris McGovern * Beth Prusiecki * Tom Arnold * Tom Martin * Michele Bultman Tracy * Larisa Parrish * Andres Jimenez * Alan Larson * Jennifer Wohlberg * Maria Kubiak * Erin Boudreaux * Elizabeth Munroz * Josh Sipes * Reginald Gibbons * Sandi Wisenberg * Patrick Somerville * the creative writing faculty at Northwestern University * the Batasses * the Bowlemics * my Facebook family * Pat Bruce * Robert Sowder * Darren Mast * Rick Hall (as well as Sally, Crystal, & Sherrie) * Roger and Judy Beehler * Lila and Jakie Houts * Andrew Groh * Dorothy Jones

  The quality of mercy is not strained,

  It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

  Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

  —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Until They Shine

  Drive

  Character Sketch, 1997

  Smiles

  Bleach & White Towels

  July & the Buff Orpintons

  Conversations in Silence

  Variance

  Portrait of a Wheel Spoke Blur

  Eve

  Angels on Horseback

  Decussation

  Crepe Myrtle & Summer Cicadas

  Jeanie

  Sparrows

  Flag Box

  The Sandwich

  Should: How Mommy Ate Her Soul

  Mi Fantasma Querida

  Holsters in the Guestroom

  Small Town

  Pieta

  Tandem

  Limbic Resonance: Responses to a Match.com Questionnaire

  INTRODUCTION

  There is a full literary spectrum that helps to capture our most human conditions.

  The On Impulse e-Book Series is about exploring the different ways we tell our stories. So I worked with the media of catharsis and technique of deconstruction in The War is Language: 101 Short Works. By contrast, in Love & Darts I'm more interested in the primary narrative elements of craft and in depictions of our assumptive social constructs.

  Catharsis isn't about what’s at stake in a conflict. A reactionary response is often less than engaging. By the time a person is freaking out events have already transpired. The expression is not tempered with reason, with contemplation, with artistry. Reactive outbursts seem evidence of instability and lack of control.

  Fiction’s narrative elements do the work of mitigating mood. Plot helps modulate the rise and fall. Setting orients the reader by creating an experience similar to a guided meditation. Such provision is much different from what amounts to a writer’s screaming at a reader. Characterization helps the self-pity drop away. Why me dissipates while empathy remains.

  Emotive vacillations aren’t received as symphonic contrast. A writer’s attempt to keep the mood consistent helps the reader be less jarred, less shocked, less confused, less defensive. The point of view for catharsis is basically infantile. There can be very little authority. When a writer chooses this perspective he or she must beg the reader’s respect.

  Of course, if you miss the moment, miss the expression of emotion, then that tangibility of living a real life alive in all its changeability is lost.

  Fiction conveys meaning better than does catharsis. Regardless of the intimate access and the visceral presence that catharsis as text provides, people don't want to parse it, they don't have time to become possessed by the writer, and the emotional roller coaster has a deadening effect.

  Our interactions in the digital domain invite expressions of the now. Social media platforms and our twenty-four-hour news cycle create foment and a seeming imperative to keep up. There is a tendency toward catharsis and it should not be denied.

  But by using narrative elements fiction keeps the sense and loses the nonsense.

  We are a diverse culture fragmented by convicted factions. It's interesting to select structural assumptions from different cultural niches and present them together in one collection of stories. In some ways I've done that here. Perhaps the work invites a reader not only to examine the other as an individual but the other as a collective. By representing the rules of the world of polyamory in one story and those of religious monogamy in another the structuralist givens of both communities are set in contrast to the reader’s own.

  Crafting stories based upon cultural givens yields a relatable understanding of what's real, whether or not a reader’s critical thinking can dissect the structural underpinning/overlay. The use of such consensual structures added to plot, setting, characterization, tone, conflict, and point of view combine to create a vivid reading experience.

  Studying the storytelling impulse reveals how many constructs exist within literature itself. Catharsis does not seem worthwhile. So beyond using catharsis as a medium I attempted deconstruction (and even destruction of narrative) in The War is Language. The writing style in 2000 Deciduous Trees perhaps aligns with careless crafts of escape: paper snowflakes made from newspaper. Love & Darts explores the rudiments of structuralism that a writer may choose to apply to an inhabited scene. And my hope is that in How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken I may be able to find that sweet spot between politicized philosophies—a place where the writer’s work allows for a reader’s catharsis, which is likely the best proof we have that any book is a good one.

  2/24/2012

  UNTIL THEY SHINE

  They denied sharing sweet laughter. Romance wasn’t the point. After one thirty in the morning, she took him inside, down a shotgun hallway, into the living room, and left him there. In a way he was an enemy
loved. This oil rig welder who’d been all over the world stood half turning back to see where she’d gone and half looking around to see where he was in this needs-some-more-wall-art silence. It was the beginning of the one hour before he found his way into her smile.

  She did not know him, though.

  There are those long-faithful loves properly absent in the world, old minefield loves, where two safe souls waltz around each other in the well-patrolled confines of a security setting—picking conversations to have about logistics, relying on favorites, looking at comfort food photos on 4x6 cards, giving annual gifts meaning nothing to the rest of the world. But there are also extreme momentary loves, ready to be smashed and forgotten, or, more often, intimately eaten alive.

  She didn’t really invite him. And he didn’t exactly say he’d come. But there he was at her place without the music that probably should have been playing. Not long. The girl he found under a night-lit skylight came back with ginger vodka drinks, an unnecessary seduction. And so these two were socially imperative like that for an hour before the start-gate release of their mutual moving on. One of them giggled. The other, respectfully, pretended it hadn’t just happened. She straddled him, leaned forward, kissed him, kissed his neck. He lifted her up, turned her around, pulled her back down onto his lap and pressed his hand into everything he didn’t think was exactly perfect.

  An hour and forty-five minutes ago the bartender’s finger hovered over the button that controlled the totalizer system. She’d accidentally—well, so what if it were staged?—elbowed the oil rig man in the ribs. But hard enough to force a conversation at an Irish pub when she got bored with the practiced words of student lawyers. God. She tired of those lofty boys’ aspirations, their talk of how it all should be—how it would all have to be—and so she turned on their convictions, gravitated toward this other man in jeans and an undisclosed smile.

  This guy wasn’t so sure of how things should be—would all have to be—or at least he didn’t say. He just reached one hand out to her hip, put his fingers down into her waistband, bent his arm so she stepped forward between his knees while he put his other hand around her back, pulled her in even closer and said, “Hi.” She said, “Not really.” So he didn’t ask any more questions. He’d been practicing his story and told her he tied oil rigs to the ocean floor with heat enough to weld what’s desired to what’s real. She didn’t understand. It was his job to dive over oil under the sea and join steel to steel two hundred feet down in the black.

  He made promises easily like a man who never took physics in high school. But not to her. There was no point. She didn’t want or expect any of that. So he didn’t bother. He just laughed for the girl he found in the bar, broad telling of his eight weeks with the winter ocean’s twenty-five-foot swells, how those furious, feminine seas could very likely scour him off with their daily washing. “You get pretty knocked around. Gotta be tethered or you’re gone.”

  She pretended not to notice or care.

  He showed her, demonstrated the harness that held him and mimed the length that tied him to the rig. He told her about being sealed skin to soul by that North Sea’s frigid wanting. A man of faith—two hundred feet down in the black. Just a man, a steel-making man, on the water all winter, robbing the layered sea floor. So what? Why should she be impressed? That woman—young woman—was not the North Sea, not the water, not anything to tether himself to. She was the way he used to be: quiet, nostalgic, and true. But now he’s less easily baited. He’s heavenly-ride-the-rode-down-bluebell and Honduras blends whiskey, too.

  New Orleans, a port city, still rocks and sways with him as he shows her the ashes of the Irish owner behind the bar, asks about her travels, her school, her under-the-water-pressured lubrication, asks—with final kindness—if she’d like a beer. Laughing hard, with his hands on this small out-of-town girl (refusing to be scoured off) she says yes. It is the only answer. Two hundred feet of foregone conclusion wrap him desultorily without words and yet, she drifts free—when anyone knows oil is best suited for floating. Like you, she’s been told that babies will wake her in the morning part of the night. Funny how people will pay to let you borrow their children for a while. But there is nothing to babysit underneath the sea. That man lives in relief, opposite, pressured from all sides by our foundations: oil, steel, the ocean floor. So she knows in the morning she will wake up and ask him to leave. Sometimes—never when she waits—her mind reels hapless in possibility.

  But this time she will not let it.

  Even under the North Sea’s mighty pressured weight, he’ll disrespect her repression, override her compression. He’ll steel-make and can rise up—with a flame down deep—drilling oil for freighters to drink. So neither of the two of them takes bars and beer for granted. They say nothing and let their eyes work. In her mind she explores his deep sea diving welds and lets him come up through it all covered in oil. And for him she goes down into everything, into the sea changed, thinking of him there, two hundred feet down in the black.

  “We can walk to my place from here.” She will never admit to being a power-monger, a tyrant, but his telling her no is unacceptable.

  They’re at her front door again—right before she held his hand and led him down that shotgun hallway to begin their awkward-fondling preliminary hour of what would be their fifteen-minute forever. And they both see it on the porch: everything that will happen in an hour. There’s no power of attorney. A simple consent is all that’s necessary for his body, riding an eddy current and sloshing over some forgotten bank, to be never so golden-gilt or at all, so easy does the wick go free.

  They’re inside the apartment. Her eyes flick quickly, realizing what a mess she’s about to bring him into but he sees nothing. She knows everything that’s not good enough. Not him. Not the door. Not the scented amber candle on the speaker, the one she’s about to ask if he’d like for her to light. Not the belts and bras hanging from their hooks in her bathroom that she should have put away. Not the dracaena growing tall in the window. Not the catcher’s mitt on the floor. Not the rumpled clothes burying a red rocking chair. Not the TV stand where the pepper grinder’s left forgotten. Not the unopened stack of mail shifting, losing its balance on the desk. Not the beach hats rarely worn or her grandmother’s heirloom painting where a tugboat forever pulls a man on a barge over silk-rippling waters. Her eyes flick on, wishful-cleaning as they go.

  They have to get through this hour to get to the well of not wanting more. Neither of them is dutiful. They just wait it out. Hoping one will go for the other as soon as possible. His gaze is upon her and then—because she seems so nervous—he takes it off her again and plants both eyes upon the man in the painting who is standing on the barge with his back to the painter. He doesn’t admit a knowledge of art but wonders what it is to feel a ruddy perennially burning sun through that sweaty, dingy oil-canvas t-shirt and half-dry pair of pants. What kind of forever would it be to stand on the stillness of a moving barge that’s being towed by a tugboat through a painting? Why paint a person backwards like that with one arm up, untired, waving to someone else hidden in the trees on the far side of the river? He doesn’t care and his eyes are upon her again.

  Somehow the hour passes. Twenty minutes in, she takes the vodka and ginger glasses to the sink and finds three cans of beer in her crisper. She shouts a question from the kitchen. He says not to worry about it. He’s got a condom.

  Forty minutes in she’s less nervous and notices him looking at the painting again, says, “Do you think he’s leaving or just arrived? Waving like that?”

  Fifty minutes in, he smiles to her and, again, for the last time, it’s already happened right there before everything. With nine minutes left he puts his hand on her thigh. At five he takes her to the floor. He is a river between them with that eddying-dentist’s-drill way of going on carving away the soft easy places to rush through. And finally he falls on her, kissing on and on without malice.

  She didn’t ever ask what music he like
s. Didn’t figure she’d want to listen to it for that hour, sitting together, quiet on a blue corduroy couch with two threadbare cushions and a pristine third. She didn’t even bother to turn on the TV.

  For those dredged minutes of putting off passion, she stared at all her electronics and was igneous. Stillness left of heat and motion. Her silent mouth echoed with gunshots and doom in that cavity fortified by a perimeter of teeth. But they didn’t need to talk. If some hinged midnight swung open and crashed complex over the minds of any willing listeners begotten of forgotten mothers, could there have been a resurrection? No. The hour goes by and the clothes get lost with everything else that’s not good enough. They’re finally sweating naked without having to get through undoing anything. His nature, with one foot on the floor, two hands against the wall and his common ground inside her own, seems all the more damned. As if fright and courage were not twins, as if breath were not divided by passion held, and as if bright harnessed lives did night sing.

  But yes, worth everything, his shoulders rub her harder-to-reach, harder-to-understand solid ways of loving until they shine, polished wet and recede, giving out and arriving, filling some flood plain, some untouched me-part of both-them, some world so often dry, now saturated and ready for continual living. Under that patient fury; his waterway; his easy-to-abandon God.

  DRIVE

  At eleven o’clock that morning she asked me to take her for a drive.

  I held her too tightly walking out of the restaurant and back to the car, I remember that. So I guess I sort of knew. But not really. Not like she did.

  She knew.

  I know she knew.

  My Grandma Charlottie was sweet, skinny, sinewy, white, sleeves-rolled-up, slow-walking, tobacco-spit-sprayed pants—I don’t even know how that happened—and a kind of full-upper-body head-turn that’s hard to believe. God damn. She was tiny. But sometimes she’d look at you like she was about to haul off and whack you with a remote control before she’d smile and walk away like nothing ever happened.