(Sorry for the absence, but I've been working on this guy for a couple months now.  I wanted to let this stew for a while, but I'd like comments and reviews.)


Long before the age of ten, Marvin knew he was supposed to feel awkward about searching through Tiger Beat in the Osco magazine stand, and he did.  As surreptitiously as any chunky ten year old with a right leg shorter than the left could be, he had walked by the rack: first in one direction to announce his presence to the magazines gathered there, and then again in the other with a furtive glance that would have said to all but the most astute observer, "Oh, hi.  I didn't see you there."
    The look was quick, but studied.  Osco was just over a mile from his house and as Marvin clumped down the sidewalk, past the store window reflections of a short boy dressed in husky black jeans and a polyester red shirt and that one special shoe with a sole like a rubber loaf of bread, he had practiced.  Marvin had a mental list of stores he'd pass on the way: Martinelli's Grocery, Industrial Hardware, Mr. Grecko's shoe repair, the barber shop, Rite Round record store.  He had picked a very specific object from each of their shop windows to act as a surrogate.  Since the thing he'd be looking for on the cover of Tiger Beat could appear in any number of forms, Marvin had made some rules for this game. 
    The items he chose would have to be specific enough to be instantly recognizable: it was a real face he was looking for after all.  The problem was, in the way of fan magazines throughout time, that face might show up in some helpful, recognizable context or it might be part of a fuzzy floating head, cut from a stock studio shot by an overworked intern with unsteady hands.  The items he chose would have to be ambiguous enough to represent the endless combinations he would have to deal with.  It occurred to Marvin that the searching part of such an exercise might be good practice for a fireman hunting for a small boy trapped in a collapsing warehouse with nothing but a description of the boy's clothing to guide him.  The dispassionate coolness he needed to maintain seemed useful only if the rescue was going to appear on TV.

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Seriously.  I'm not.  Thanks for your concern though.  I just had some surgery that's knocked me out for a couple weeks.  Once all the pain killers have metabolized I'm sure I'll be back at it again.

(This is a character development background sketch.  It's not really about developing the character himself, but giving him enough background that I can justify his behaviors later on.  Once you read it, let me know if this person sounds interesting or multi-faceted enough to base a novel around.  Anything seem trite here?  Cliched?)

Counselor: So, tell me a little about your childhood.
Reid: Childhood?  What about it?  I mean, in general or what?
C: Whatever you think would be important.
R: Important.  Hmmm.  Well, we moved around a lot.  It didn't give me much of a chance to make friends.  Not, like, I didn't have chances, but…  You know how they say you can go two ways with something like that?  How some kids learn how to make friends easily, learn how to fit in to new groups and that?  I went the other way.  Moving around all the time - it gave everything a sense of impermanence.  Is that a word?  Like…  like you could pull up stakes at any minute and be somewhere else the next day.  It was like a game to my Mom.  She used to say she could have the house packed in three days and have it unpacked again in two.  As if that was something to be proud of.
C: What about your dad?
R: He didn't like it all.  He hated moving.  He was a lot more outgoing than I am, but still, I think he liked that sense of feeling 'rooted' I guess you'd say. 
C: Why did he do it then?  Was this something his career forced on him?
R: On him?  Oh no.  No, it was Mom.  I'm sorry.  Didn't they give you those forms or whatever?  I wrote all this out already.  Whatever.  Never mind.  My mom was the one with the career.  She was a Major in the Army medical corp.  She was the reason we moved around all the time.
C: I see.

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(Exercise info and explanation at the bottom)
 
Okay, so I totally had no idea what was happening the first time, because it was kinda like climbing on the poles 'cept this time I was just sitting there on the swing with my feet in the wood chips or what have you.  I was swinging one way and Mary Grace, she was going the other way, so when we passed each other we would yell out the name of one of the boys in Sister Francine's class because that was our homeroom class just like it was last year 'cept this year we're in the seventh grade and next year we're gonna be seniors, but not, you know, real seniors, but eighth grade seniors, and the year after that we're gonna go to St. Horatio's.  So anyways, every time one of us says the name of a boy that's already been said we get to punch the other one in the arm which we both know is totally not something girls do but she's got a brother and I've got four brothers and they're always punching us in the arm and sometimes it's so hard that Mary Grace comes to school with a bruise on her arm and she tells me it's because her brother punched her too hard when he saw a slug bug first, but when I ask her what color was the slug bug she doesn't know and says "shut up" and I'm pretty sure it's not Mikey that's giving her bruises.  And it's sad and happy all at the same time 'cause when that happens sometimes my daddy goes and talks to her mom and Mary Grace gets to sleep overnight at my house and sometimes it's for a couple two or three days in a row without even having to keep asking every night.

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(Exercise info and explanation at the bottom)
 
My mother never drove a truck.  On the face of it, that doesn't seem terribly unusual, but if you knew my mother, you'd know it seems like something she was destined for.  At one time or another each of her brothers took a stab at professional trucking.  She likes big cars.  She likes heavy cars (this is a woman who had 1,000 pounds of metal welded to the frame of her Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale because she didn't like the way it swayed when passing trucks.)  She hates to cook and she loves to drive.
    There's the matter of kids, but in the tradition of the American sit-com we shall do away with them as a matter of convenience.  They're at summer camp.  No, wait — military school.  She was constantly threatening to send us there anyway.  Her husband is gone: a matter of tragedy and not convenience, but the carefully invested money and generous life insurance checks are more than enough to purchase a handsome Mack truck.  My mother is fond of Mack trucks — not so much as a vehicle, but as a standard by which things of inestimable weight, solidity, or reliability are measured.  Without Mack trucks she'd have nothing with which to compare her beloved Oldsmobile.  Her easy description of it being "built like a… " — would hang there, that icon of shared experience that would describe it as the workhorse of a solitary life dangling just out of reach.

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 (See this for details.  Here's the exercise:

I want you to write about one of two people —or both, if you’re so inclined.

1. One who sees and hears a street musician
2. The street musician.

Don’t at this stage tell me a story. Or create a structure. Or describe where we are. No. What I want you to do is merely describe the person. Not his or her physical appearance, unless it might be relevant to what they are such as blindness, but how they are feeling and why they’re there doing what they’re doing. I want to have a feel for the kind of people they are without your telling me they’re, say, old, grey-haired and miserable or young, troubled and penniless. Show me.

Only write a short (please) paragraph about one (or both) person(s). Don’t worry about how you write it. It can be in note form, if you like. Don’t try and write something polished and perfect in order to impress me. In fact, I most definitely don’t want perfection at this stage.

And here's a personal note.  I'm doing background work for a novel about a suburbanite who turns to busking as an escape from convention and the ordinary in a middle-class town ruled by conformity and uniformity.   I've assigned myself an exercise: write a short story or character study about an encounter with this street musician from three different perspectives and personalities.  As an added challenge, each of the separate characters would interact with the other two in some way.)

The Busker:  He wears a chicken suit.  This is important because it's awkward and difficult.  The suit is difficult but inside it, he feels safe.  It's a shield that deflects the inevitable derision and prevents it from being personal.  It's a suit of armor that hides his identity and makes him feel his place in the community is secure.  It also creates a barrier that keeps his unacceptable but unstoppable joy from leaking into the public.  It's a joy peppered with the tiniest twinge of spite.  The hour or two he spends each day in the suit can be humid or freezing cold, but unlike the other twenty-some hours that make up each day, they are anything but empty and ordinary.  It's an hour or two where he has impact and meaning and value - if only to himself - and none of it is measured in dollars.

Observer #1: The crowd around the busker is an impediment.  It's a leech sucking up valuable resources - his resources - and slows down the egress to his car.  He stands taller, he pushes his sunglasses tight against his face and pulls down his baseball cap: he is apart from the crowd, better than them, literally above them.  He strides, elbows out.  He is important and every action must show it.  Anyone consuming what is his is an obstacle to be overcome, by force if necessary.  He does commission math on today's sale in his head but even as the figure grows, the furrow in his brow deepens: the more that becomes available to him, the more the crowd in front of him becomes his competition in obtaining it.

Observer #2: He doesn't know what to think of this street musician.  Literally.  He's lived here 17 years and never seen anything like this before.  The music draws him in because it's old and he recognizes it.  He's curious, but has no parameters to react within, so he's cautious.  At the same time, the crowd slows his exit and irritates him more than angers: it makes him wonder why The City isn't doing something about it.  Is this some sanctioned event?  It must be.  Surely there's some City ordinance about playing in public like this, dressed  — well — dressed like that.  He's confused and he looks for posters or signs, looks to the crowd, looks at their reactions for how he's supposed to respond to this.  He allows himself a brief, non-committal moment of detached enjoyment before returning to his routine.

Observer #3: He's scared.  He's anxious, frightened, completely exhilarated, and fired.  There's a severance check on the way but they may lose the house anyway.  Maybe not lose it, but be forced to sell it.  And he's fine with that.  Beyond fine actually, he's relieved.  His suit and tie suddenly feel like a costume for a long-running play that's just ended.  He steps around the corner and immediately recognizes the busker's tune because it's the question he's been asking himself for months now: "Who are you?".  His heart hammers in his chest because he may not yet know who he is, but he finally knows who he's not, and this failed experiment called "life in suburbia" is it.  The realization makes his heart and legs leap with unrestrainable joy.

(This is a piece I wrote back i n December and have polished up a bit since then.  It was based on a writing group prompt in which we were supposed to develop a story based on a painting in our meeting room.  The painting was a night scene of a stylized tree with dollops of snow on the tips of the branches.)

    Anemone. 
    Anemone. 
    Anemone.
    I can't get the word out of my head, so I cling to its comforting difficulty like a brain teaser or a math puzzle.  At this point, anything's better than the indecipherable blizzard of fear soaked chatter that swirled around before the shelling stopped. 
    Chatter.
    God damnit it's cold.  Not some I-shoulda-worn-a-hat kind of cold, but the kind of cold that turns your toes and fingers black with frostbite.  The kind of cold that turns an inky black night blue.  The kind of cold that makes your teeth chatter and your muscles quake so violently that you don't even bother trying to aim your rifle.  You just point in the general direction you think they're gonna come from and fire, fire, fire.
    There's snow everywhere, and the heat that leaks from my rotted boots melts it into a muddy pool in the bottom of my hole before it freezes again.  I had a buddy once, Bert, from New Jersey.  He fell asleep and woke up with his feet encased in a solid block of ice.  By the time they got him back to the field hospital they had to cut him off above the ankles.  We both think he's the lucky one.
    Anemone.  Anemone.
    There are still some trees standing.  Even the Krauts couldn't take down the entire Ardennes.  When it snowed, it fell heavy and wet, and it rounded the tips of the trees so they reach to the sky like the tentacles of anemones. 
    Anemone. 
    Back home I had a fish tank.  It was kind of a big deal.  I was the only one in Lawrence with a salt water tank.  Butterfly fish, clown fish, a couple of wrasses.  And an anemone.  I built the whole thing myself.  The wooden frame and stand, the filters, the lights in carefully coordinated rows, each on timers to simulate the rising and setting sun.  There was an article in the Lawrence Picayune about it once.  Had my picture in the social column and everything.
    I find myself thinking about that tank at the strangest times.  Sometimes I think that out here, we aren't so much different than the fish in that tank.  The piercing moon in the sky casts our shadows in stark relief, and draws lines back to places where we convince ourselves we're hidden.  We may as well be in a fishbowl for all the good it does.  When the mortar rounds land like a fist in the middle of our tank, or the Panzer shells and machine guns rake our position like a sweeping net, most of us scatter the same way those fish did, banging against the rocks and the glass of the tank, nowhere to go, no way to escape.
    Not everything in the tank would dart for cover at a tap on the glass though.  Even though the tap must have cracked like sniper fire inside that tank, the anemone never moved.  Most people don't even know that anemones can move.  It's true: they do, but when they do, it's slow and purposeful.  Once it reaches a place it thinks is safe, an anemone will stay still and wait, relying on its poisonous barbs to protect it, trusting in the current to bring it what it needs.
    Anemone.  Anemone.  Anemone.
    You say it often enough and it stops making sense.  Anemone, anemone, anemone, anemone, anemone.  You say it fast enough and it trips over your tongue.  Anemone anemone anemone anenome anenome … an enome … an enemy. 
    An enemy.  So many enemies.

    I'm tired.  Someone is telling me stay awake and keep moving, but I don't even recognize the voice as my own anymore.  I can't feel my feet, and the cold is creeping up my legs.  I'm just going to close my eyes for a little bit.

    Before I left I took down my tank.  I sent a letter to that new aquarium in Kansas City, but they didn't want my fish.  Worried about diseases or something like that.  I thought a long time about what to do with them.  I couldn't just flush them down the toilet.  There's a whole lot of biology that makes one fish salt-water and another fresh.  Things like osmosis and exosmosis and diffusion keep its body in harmony with the chaotic chemical balance it's immersed in.  It's complicated, but basically the fish would end up drowning in its own bodily fluids if you threw it in fresh water.  I know they're just fish, but even for a fish that seemed unspeakably cruel.
    I finally decided to scoop them up one at a time in a bowl of their own water, and put them in the ice box.  I figured the cold would sneak up on them.  I figured they'd start swimming slower and slower until they finally just… I don't know. 
    Do fish sleep?