The Ravine

A hunting she will go,
A hunting she will go,
Hi, ho, the derry oh, a hunting she will go.

1.

I woke up at six o’clock on Saturday and decided I would hunt.  I pulled on my jeans, T-shirt and old brown shoes.  My father had worn thick leather boots.  I folded my hair under my red hunting hat and stuffed some peanuts and an apple into my coat pocket.  The 56 bus took me over the Golden Gate Bridge, and when I saw some woods I got out. 

We've got a new video for Benjamin Wachs' story "A Concise History of the Heavens," originally performed at Action Fiction! by Andie Grace. 

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An aversion to Viennese music, the type she heard in her youth at the great amusement park by the dying green river, where all the swallows nested nearly on top of one another under a bridge and scared her with their dense blackness. Why it was the pipes of the organ that frightened her more she was unsure; perhaps the brash and hollow sound of the low notes felt oddly like wind in a desert though she had never been to a desert– or cold touching her skin at night as she changed positions in her child’s narrow bed.

I was nearly pregnant – with child by a hair’s breadth. I remember it vividly. It nearly happened in Paris. Had my boyfriend been French, he would have used the past subjunctive to describe the event: I could have been pregnant. He couldn’t. He was Spanish. I suppose he still is. In any case, it’s not altogether accurate. I should have said: “J’ai failli tomber enceinte,” meaning I should have “fallen” pregnant, as if it were the outcome of some fated flip-a-coin. Luckily, the coin didn’t drop at all. It merely levitated until completely corroded by the damp Parisian air.

Lorraine arrived at the beach.  She had come to the end of Denman Street.  In the distance, the violence of the dying sun had left the waterline covered in purple scratches.  The soil and grass around her had the earthy smell of beets.  Lorraine passed the first Izakayan restaurant to check out the second one.  The first one seemed better.  It had soft electric blue light, and sharp black shadows along the walls.  Lorraine waited at the bar, observing the people around her.

She had had vodka today.

It was nearing dusk last Tuesday when I signed the lease on my new apartment.

They were sitting in the Subaru on the side of the road and it was snowing. If you looked at the parents you could see that both of them had teeth that were crooked, and all of their children did as well.

What will we do?

I’ll go in and straighten them myself with a pair of pliers, said the husband. I’ll straighten them.

Oh, Mel,” she said.

“Well, we have to get his teeth straightened.”

He is lazy. He can do the work.

LAZY IS NOT A REAL THING. LAZY IS FALSE.

LAZY IS A FALSE CATEGORY. IT IS LIKE: BAD. INSUFFICIENT.

I once knew a pro-domme who had all her prospective clients call an untraceable number that got forwarded to her business cell so that she could talk with them before agreeing to meet in person.

“I can tell,” she said, “instantly, from their opening words and the sound of their voice, whether this is someone I should do business with.”

“Oh, come on,” I told her.  “That’s not possible.”

The trouble is, see, we keep losing all our poets to those there woods.  The nymphs and the dryads, they can’t get enough of them.  They tease them and torment them and sing to them, until it makes them mad with want, and well, that’s when they go.  Sort of like sirens, I guess.

It took 10 years and 1.5 billion Euros to set up a fully simulated brain in a next generation supercomputer in Brussels – and that wouldn’t have been possible without over a billion in research funding from the American government and countless research grants from private institutions.