The past returns in waves, each shallower and more bitter than the one before it

  Catholic Lady sent me an email this weekend. She claims that she tore apart her room recently looking for a few very short "stories" (her word) that I wrote. They always brighten her day.

  You'd think she'd keep better track of them. In the four years since our gruesome romance lit up and fizzled out like a firecracker shot into a swimming pool, she has claimed to have lost those "stories" no fewer than five times. More than once a year. Every time she asks for them, I oblige, sending a digital copies to her gmail account. Perhaps they're being deleted by some powerful and nefarious third party? Perhaps somebody at Google has it out for me?

  I wish she'd come up with a better pretext for contacting me. Honesty is out, of course -- that seems pathologically to never be an option for her. But the lie is so blatantly bad that it just about flirts with honesty. It wants to be disbelieved.

  I have no satisfying way of processing this for myself. There's something about dealing with somebody who is so pathetically transparent that is at once irritating and disarming.

  When I met her older brother for the first time, he drunkenly told me (and there are quotes here, but you get it -- I don't remember his exact wording): "she's talked about you. Actually, she doesn't shut up about you. She had these weird little story things she was posting on her Facebook? I thought she wrote them. But I guess you did, and she was just posting them."

  Before I broke up with her, I took the trouble to sweep backward through her Facebook post history, right to the point where she had first met me. She'd cribbed tons of things I'd said and things I'd posted on my Facebook (which at the time had somewhat lax security settings), presenting them simply as her own. I didn't really even know who she was at that point. But she knew me.

  I understand that I'm in a uniquely non-threatened position, generally, being a white man whose looks are basically "unremarkable," but that was maybe the first time I remember feeling viscerally unpleasantly creeped out by an admirer.

  But this isn't any kind of good processing either. I'm making it easier for myself to think of her as a bad person when, realistically, she was a very young woman negotiating her affections for somebody in a way that I can certainly find fault with now, but probably pointlessly so.

  After I broke up with her, she changed her Facebook profile to include that god-awful cliche shit, "when you love something, let it go, if it comes back to you, it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was, blah blah blah." It's such a miserably droll, teenage thing, and I was so angry with her at the time already that I just sneered at it, thinking, "you're fucking kidding me, right?" But that's the thing about dealing with somebody so transparent: you really do know when they're lying, and you really do know when they're hurt.

  She'll be in town soon, to visit. She's blonde, now. She wants to meet and catch up. Again. She asks me, when I move, have I thought of moving closer to where she lives now? It's a wonderful place. I'd love it. We should talk more.

  There's no point. There's no point in it at all. You don't want to hurt people, but you end up doing it anyway, as though it were natural and inexorable, like breathing, and then they invite you to do it again and again. I have nothing for her -- I can't undo our shitty cataclysmic relationship; I can't un-be the person who walked away from her (The One person, apparently, which is mind-blowing, because what men do you meet, exactly?). I can't un-be who I was: a wrecked, half-insane zombie of a person, grasping hungrily at the nothing left by my ex-fiance. I can't help her or make her more whole or anything; to the contrary, I am certain, I can only hurt.

  I'm obsessing over this lately, but there's a bit of insanity to the idea of fixing your mistakes. They can't always be fixed. You've got to be able to let them go too.

  Well, OK. Maybe I can take my own advice.

And the Clever

a 30 minute prompt piece. We all did this (we all -- the writer's group -- the 'official' one) as a formal exercise this time. the prompt was "soda pop." I think the ending is a little too confusing, but oh well -- didn't have the time to fix it.

------------

Bison stood next to the box, delicately disrobing a Payday candy bar.  Tyson and Chucks angled him from down the block.

Chucks appraised the circumstances. “Absolutely fucked up.”

“Man wait, man,” Tyson said. “Hold up. Bison’s big, but he ain’t that big.”

“Are you blind? Motherfucker’s five of you.”

Tyson cocked his head to the side, then ran his hand up and down the length of his own torso. “OK he’s big, but he ain’t hard.”

“You ain’t hard.”

“I’m hard.” Tyson bent forward and started rubbing his palms together.

“Yeah, you hard,” Chucks said. “You hard and Bison’s tiny. Got a real cutaneous pair of eyeballs on you.”

“Man, I don’t even know what containious means.” Tyson started to pace back and forth, never drawing his eyes away from Bison down the block. “Fuck it. I’m going in.”

Chucks stood fixed in place and watched Tyson strut the block. “I’ll call a ambulance,” he shouted. “And a fuckin coroner.” He gripped the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. From behind, he heard somebody hum a few famous bars of the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Chucks pivoted on his heel.

“If it ain’t Bridgeclub,” he said.

Bridgeclub sauntered up in a neat vest and dress-shirt combo, touching his finger to his nose and smiling. “Recognize the song?” he asked.

“Nice shoes,” Chucks observed.

“I ask again. Recognize the song?”

“Yeah, I know it. Wester music. Like Semitey Sam in the desert.”

“Like Yosemite Sam in the desert,” Bridgeclub confirmed, tipping his glasses. “Ennio Morricone. The American icon of Italian birth.”

“What the fuck? They teach you this shit in Eggland?”

Bridgeclub declined to respond. “How’s Tyson?”

“He’s about to die.”

“Ah. L'Estasi dell’Oro,” Bridgeclub lamented.

“Man, fuck your language. You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago.”

“True.” He tugged his shirt sleeves. “I have a plan now, though.”

Bridgeclub sauntered down the block, stopping by a cooler. He eyed Tyson, who was dancing idiotically around Bison, looking for an angle or a moment that would not come. The box glittered like the setting sun. Bridgeclub opened the cooler, removed two sodas, and began shaking both violently as he continued sauntering toward Tyson.

Chucks, after some cool hesitation, ran after him. They both reached Tyson at about the same time.

Bridgeclub held out the two sodas. “Pop, gentlemen?”

Neither Bison nor Tyson immediately accepted. Instead, they glared at him in confusion. “Pop?” Bison croaked. “What the fuck is pop?”

Chucks caught his breath and explained, “man, he means soda. Shit’s soda. That’s Bridgeclub. He from Eggland. Everything he say sound like fuckin Romeo and Juliard.”

Tyson and Bison emitted understanding “aahhs,” then accepted their sodas. And, opening both tabs in unison, they quickly found themselves drenched in a heedless spray of phosphoric acid, sugar, caramel color, and ‘natural flavoring.’

“Shit!” shouted Bison.

“God, fuck!” shouted Tyson.

Chucks stumbled backward, patting himself desperately. “That shit’s just soda!” he yelled, as though to convince himself.

Bridgeclub cleared his throat and produced a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, ugly,” he said to Bison. Bison grabbed the handkerchief and said “what the fuck you call me?”

“Bison,” he said. “I called you Bison.”

Bison wiped his eyes and then gave Bridgeclub a cold stare. “Weren’t you standing over there before?” He said.

“Would you like a towel?” Bridgeclub said. “I’ll get you a towel.”

And without further objection, Bridgeclub sauntered off down the block, whistling a familiar theme to himself. After he turned the corner, he came upon a local grocery, whereupon he stepped inside, picked out a cheap red towel, and purchased it with some of the money he’d just earned.

the consolations of philosophy have got nothing on a clean razor

  Days ago; weeks, maybe, but who cares: Kelly, squinting, moved her open palm until it was hovering just-so against my jawline, and when I asked why, she explained: "I'm trying to figure out what you're going to look like without a beard."

  This is a young woman for whom looks are, by her admission (and the bald fact of whom she is dating (pun intended)), barely compelling. But she was at least momentarily intrigued. If I had to guess, that makes her the 2nd most-interested person in how the arrangement of hair on my head and face looks, generally.

  No, I take that back. Third. Second place goes to my mother, whose displeasure with my hair is publicized in brief dismissive missives every crop cycle or so.

  Still, the gold medal for "time spent mulling over the famine of hair on Rob's skull" goes to me, Rob. What was barely a tumescent curiosity in high school -- when I first noticed my hairline receding -- has flourished into an Akira-esque suppurating concern about how much happier and more fulfilled I'd be if only I had the proud coiffure of a Yale dog.

  Vanity is inescapable, I conclude. That, or I'm not even trying to escape it.

  I tried to write a story about a psychopath ("a" story) who decides, bit by bit, to remove all the hair on his body. It was motivated by a little sympathy on my part, which is typically the case, although I try to steer away from that kind of thing as hard as I can. I felt it was also an opportunity to try to mock my own real-life experience with shaving my head for the first time.

  It didn't really 'work,' though. I think I realized that the head-shaving event had some emotional weight for me, and that it would therefore be good fruit for ridicule, but it just wasn't ripe yet. I'm too close to it, still, I guess.

  I guess.

  I shaved my head again last night. Kelly wasn't prophetic, just attentive; I've been threatening to do this for months. All it took was Mme. C saying "I SHAVED MY HEAD" to give me the ol' peer pressure I needed. And it was done sober, with an electric razor, quickly and shoddily enough that I woke to find I'd missed a few spots, making for an epiphanic experience that falls somewhere between "hearing Teri Gross tell a sad story on NPR" and "waiting in the lobby of a dentist's office."

  So it was nothing like that first time. I think I knew that it wouldn't be, too. I think that in my fictional retelling of the first time I shaved my head, I tried to sexualize it, talking about the razor kissing the bare curves of my virgin scalp or something. There's something to that, but I think that's also the only way I know how to write insanity in a sensory way: take something within my own experience and inflate it beyond reason. It is also, I think, the more fun and titillating way to engage with sex and sexuality (other than actually, like, having sex): by being playful enough with it to discover it hiding out in contexts where it seems not to ordinarily belong.

  Philip K Dick, whose "Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?" I finished a few weeks ago, apparently burst out of his little writer's shack one day (after presumably too many uses of amphetamine to fuel his mania) and had the religious experience of seeing a military gas mask hovering in the air. It became an obsessive vision for him, I'm told. I don't know that I can match that kind of genuine insanity without merely imitating it.

  The first time I shaved my head was about three years ago. I was in graduate school, living in "2 bedroom equivalent" apartment carved out what a deity might provide if asked to demonstrate a boulder made of cheap wood and tile. These were the days I spent mostly bleary and growling, with nights spent mostly downing Seagrams 7 'whiskey' (no, Mme C, I did not treat my hangovers with McDonalds, but instead with grumpiness). It was about a year after splitting with my ex-fiance, rebounding for several months with an intoxicating half-French thing, and then rebounding again with the genuine French article. I was in the full rosy blush of frustrated, impatient, insecure anguish. And I was drunk, and probably singing.

  So I took to the bathroom with my whole bottle of Seagrams (I wish I were kidding here) and proclaimed something, I'm sure, before starting to carve away at my head with an electric razor. But the electric razor I had at the time was a cheap gift meant for trimming beards. It did a poor job.

  Concerned, but undeterred, I jumped into the shower, lathered my head, and 'bic'd it. And I kept the full beard. Which looked, I will tell you now, really terrible. I took a photo last night of the general effect; it's... Southern, in its "charms:"

  And I wore that look for months!

  Anyway, I don't know why I wrote this. I think I thought that exploring the topic of why I shaved my head would help me to understand why I shaved my head, or at least why it matters to me, but it's done none of that.

  At the very least, I hope it can function as some kind of commiseration for Mme. C. Even if the hairy particulars are rather distinct.

Manic Monday

*** the internet here is terrible, but I got enough juice out of it to post this bit of 30-minute flash fiction I wrote this evening. I had the song "Manic Monday" stuck in my head, so that's the prompt. I'm sorry for the ginormous font. Copy/pasting is very confusing in blogger, and on a mac.

----

Day 8

Another Manic Monday has come and gone. Teresa is dead.

Valentino found her this morning crumpled like a bloody napkin at the bottom of the ravine. He says he found her on one of his morning walks. He says he likes to take morning walks by crystal blue Italian stream. His word to God, he says.

I biked the blue and red trail to the stream, and there was Valentino, still standing there, no Teresa in sight.

“Teresa?” I asked, catching my breath.

“Gone.”

I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “Hospital?”

“Coroner.”

Then I biked a pale road to the coroner, thinking of Valentino’s lips.

The coroner was a fat, bespectacled, punctual type, hovering around a square array of nine cold steel tables. Each table was draped with a body, and each body was draped with a white cloth. The coroner hovered around the tables like a busy gardener, pouring illumination from his fat heavy flashlight, brushing at the dead flesh with a gloved green thumb, sniffing deeply and sighing now and again.

I wheeled my bike toward him.

“Teresa?” I asked, catching my breath.

His spectacles were perfectly obscure. “You’re late,” he spat.

“Late?”

“She’s gone.” His lips curled and wiggled like electrified grubs.

“Gone where?”

“Gone away.”

“Where away?”

“Get out,” he screamed, and he hurled a spade at my head.

I biked the empty road home. I knew it by heart.

When I got to my apartment, Valentino was already there.

“Valentino?” I asked, catching my breath.

“Crazy day,” he responded, sipping from a mug. “Coffee?”

“How did you get in here?”

He scoffed. “That can’t be the most important question of the day. Coffee?”

“Sure, coffee.”

He handed me his coffee, then wandered slowly around behind me, pulled his arms around my shoulders and gently unbuckled my bicycle helmet. “Can’t be too careful these days,” he said, turning the helmet around in his palm. His breath was warm against my cheek.

“No…”

“What day is it?”

I turned around to face him. “Monday.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“No wonder,” he said, and then he pulled me in to kiss me. I turned my cheek.

Valentino let me go and groaned. 

I put down the coffee. “It’s not–”

“It’s not Sunday,” he answered.

“Sunday’s my fun day.”

“I know.”

Valentino stared at the grimy mint green kitchen floor tile until the light from the window slid down and out of his eyes. The whole time I sat and waited for him to move, or speak. I hadn’t gone into work — there was no point on these Mondays, these Manic Mondays, seemingly every day now, arriving in dread succession. Their relentless march seemed only natural, undesirable to be sure, but some consequence of the design of our lives, something we’d grow accustomed to, something we deserved, something we must prefer to the certain chaos of uncivilized life.

At least I have a paycheck, I thought.

“I’d never seen a dead body before,” Valentino finally said, smiling.

“I still haven’t.”

Valentino began laughing.

“Let’s go down,” he said, and he turned away to the door. I jolted and dropped my coffee mug.

“What?”

Valentino didn’t listen. He opened the door and headed out into the hall, stomping down the corridor to the stairwell, then down the stairwell, one floor after another, me tripping in pursuit. “Valentino? What?” I was brushing wet cold coffee off the front of my pants as I went.

Suddenly he turned around, stopping me, and said, “you know what I mean.”

At the bottom of the stairwell, he opened a trap door.

“Let’s go down.”

“I have to go to work,” I said.

“No you don’t.”

“I have to make my bed.”

“Let’s go down,” he repeated. He grabbed my arm, and I yanked it back. Then he grabbed my waist and pulled me toward him. He spoke in a bedroom voice. “Let’s go down,” he said.

I kicked him and stumbled away. He gave me one last look, and then unceremoniously, he went down. The trap door closed after him.

Day 9

 I dreamt of kissing Valentino by that stream. But the dream ended too soon; my alarm went off, and it was Monday.

—–

Location: Kentucky

Prompt: Manic Monday

On the Death of Fred Phelps

I feel vaguely obligated to preface this by recognizing a few blog-related points -- the first, that I've been steadfastly declining to post here, which I'll blithely bullshit sell as the product of some sort of artistic reticence, or something like that. The second point is one informed by my previous attempts at blogging, which, outside of an adolescent deadjournal (adolescent here used with all its grimy subtexts), have been consistently irreverent: I'm no good at writing about my life. Maybe it's something to do with how there's no darker mirror than one's mundane habits lain bare, or the skeletal tally of all our yesterdays or some other stupid crap. Or maybe I'm just feverishly guarded, or who knows. I will admit to being a little impressed and, if I can say so without offending, surprised at how openly and securely Mme. C blogs about the personal particulars of her days. I wouldn't, for better or worse.

The third is that I'm drunk, which may be a necessary condition for me to actually sit down and blog without stopping myself every five feet. So if you read this and find yourself wondering why it feels as though I'm typing this while steering a bumper car down a waterfall, you no longer need to wonder why.

The fourth is that I'll be touching on something political/ideological, and I have a bad habit of forming strong opinions and striking a coarse tone in writing about them. For which I apologize in advance, if you choose to read on, hoping that I won't actually gravely offend.

Fred Phelps died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know. In case you don't recognize the name, either because you don't read the news or don't find much joy in cataloguing horrible things, Fred Phelps was, for most of his infamy, the presumed patriarch of the Westboro Baptist Church, one of our nation's leading wretched hives of scum and villainy. These are the bizarre ur-perverted Christians (of whom there are apparently only forty or so, made to seem more numerous by their media coverage) who stand on rainy days and hoist rainbow placards which read, for example, GOD HATES FAGS, or THANK GOD FOR 9/11. If there is a God, I doubt even (s)he understands where the WBC is coming from.

Still, they've caused a big stir over the past, say, twenty years. One of their more widely-reviled habits is picketing funerals. For example, they famously picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepherd, a 21-year-old kid who was beaten to death in 1998 because he was gay.

Incidentally, did you know that it wouldn't be for another eleven years that the federal government would respond by expanding hate-crime law to include crimes against sexuality and gender identity? Obama signed that bill in 2009. Five years ago.

Anyway, imagine a gang of lunatics assailing your loved one's funeral with signs telling you that God hates them and is sending them to Hell. There's the WBC.

I'm glad Fred Phelps is dead. Not only that, I'm glad he was put in hospice, and I'm happy to simply imagine that he did not issue any DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) orders, as most people don't, and therefore received the best of modern medical life-sustaining techniques, in all their invasive, rib-breaking, throat choking, brain damaging splendor. 

I'm very happy about this, and in a kind of opposition to pronouncements like the following, which I copy from a friend's feed but leave otherwise anonymous:

"I want to hate [Fred Phelps] for perverting the Love of our God into something awful. I want to bring him back from the dead so I can beat him up. But God taught us to find strength in forgiveness and love, not to turn to our hate. Fred Phelps taught people to hate. And I refuse to be like Fred Phelps. I hope he can find repentance and forgiveness. Plus, if he can, so can we all."

As kind and progressive as such an idea sounds, and as accepting as I am of it as a way for any individual to process Fred's deadness -- if any processing is required -- I have no patience for it as a prescription. I've seen enough people express joy and relief at Fred's death only to be stoppered by somebody sidling up and saying "you should not find joy in any death" that I want to write down some expression of response: "shut up. Don't tell people not to celebrate when something that kills them dies."

I do this a little uncomfortably, because like I said: I don't entirely want to say that it's wrong to simply forgive and move on if that's how one best processes things. But I do think it's a problematic tack, and that the summary above strikes me as childishly naive and skimpy on the devilish details.

Fred Phelps did not simply teach people to hate. Learning to hate is endemic, and is just as much a part of being human as learning to love, or lust, or eat food that isn't poisonous. And I add that last item playfully, but I don't think it's unrelated -- hatred is how we understand, viscerally, the deleterious things in life. We hate corruption, we hate disease, we hate threats toward children; nobody much bothers to argue that we shouldn't hate those things, except by defining 'hatred' as a kind of exclusively corrosive and pointless style of 'dislike,' which is to me a very silly definition. And, crucially, although we hate those things, we also commonly fail to properly identify them, and thus end up hating things we shouldn't hate or accepting things we should reject violently.

Phelps's sin was not in teaching his followers to hate, as though he were a Sith Lord in a spacefaring fairy tale, but rather in teaching them to condemn the things that most of us want to protect: the weak, the vulnerable, the innocent, and the honored. And if I make the affair seem more subjective by describing it thus, then good: morality is not objective, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. 

So really I think that most people do not hate Phelps because he hated other people, but rather because he hated people that we love, did so unapologetically, and made a spectacle of it.

The question of how to respond to his death, then, is both personal and political. If forgiveness is one's personal coping method, then fine -- but why demand that others forgive Phelps as well? I probably shouldn't get as messy as asking what forgiveness even means, practically, but I do think it's a generally-accepted truism that 'forgiveness is for the forgiver.' 

The crude fact is that it would be terribly easy for me, a young man who by birthright has never had to suffer bigotry from any quarter, to 'forgive' the trespasses of venomous demagogue and vulgar showman. Yes, I forgive you, although you barely had anything to do with me personally. I wash my hands of whatever unpleasant feelings the news of you might have offered me, and I'm done. 

Is it that easy for everyone? It isn't just forgiveness that's for the forgiver. When you're talking about the dead, everything is for the living. And when you're talking about a man whose life work was one of abuse and oppression, forgiveness isn't merely distancing, it's regressive. It ignores the poison.

Phelps spent his life insisting that the LGBT community, among others, were scum, were damned, were undeserving, and in doing so he perpetuated and strengthened a wider cultural and systemic bigotry that didn't need the help. He should be repudiated in death -- by our own moral commandment (and we require nothing more), he deserves it. He deserves to have his own funeral picketed, to have free and unthreatened people whom he hated dance on his grave; he deserves to have his name dragged through the mud again and again until it cannot possibly be cleaned. 

And not because of the man. The man is dead. We can't hurt him. But because the idea of Phelps, and everything he promoted, is outrageously toxic, and nobody should forget that.

--

OK. In other news:

  I'm taking the last week of March to go on a road trip with the lady. The plan is to careen down to Myrtle Beach by way of Kentucky. I'm terribly excited to not go to work for a whole week.

  That's about it. That's maybe all the talk about my life that I can muster for now. It's also almost 1:30 and i'm exhausted and need to work tomorrow. I'm probably not even writing in complete sentences anymore. This probably isn't English. I'm probably dead.

X-Files episodes in my "watch later" queue

"Dogged" (1999, 42 min)
Scully's faith in science is put to the test when her microwave mysteriously stops working. Mulder follows a stray dog that reminds him of his sister.

"Samovar" (1998, 42 min)
Assistant Director Skinner refuses to be called by anything other than his full title. Mulder suspects that he has been hijacked by the spirit of the fabled Baba Yaga.

"Chip's Challenge" (1994, 42 min)
A sentient desktop computer takes over a PC Richards & Son. Scully can't win a game of Solitaire.

"Bobby's World" (1996, 42 min)
Scully's faith in science is called into question when a young boy uses psychic powers to offer narration to the lives of everybody living in a small town.

"Tammany" (2000, 42 min)
Mulder and Scully go on special assignment to Chicago, where ghost gangsters are terrorizing a local zoo. Scully's sister's ghost complicates matters.

"Electrolux" (2000, 42 min)
A traveling home appliance salesman comes to Mulder complaining of a sentient vacuum. Scully is vocal about her boredom.

"Pins and Needles" (1998, 38 min)
In this X-Files clip show, Mulder's leg falls asleep and he fondly recalls his favorite cases while he waits for it to wake up again.

"Plaster" (2001, 42 min)
Scully's faith in science is pressed to its limits when a French chemical disaster seems to support Lavoisier's discredited nomenclatorial suggestions regarding acids. Skinner decries the jurisdictional restrictions of the FBI.

Excerpts from: Dudley Dursley and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry lurched onto his haunches and scrambled to the base of the giant’s slick black boots. “I’m Harry, sir! I’m here! Harry Potter!”

The giant lowered his radiator-sized paws and grabbed young Dudley. Harry barely dodged the giant’s fingers as they wrapped like toupee’d pythons around Dudley’s bulbous frame. The giant plucked Dudley and then held him aloft, inches from the ceiling, smiling agape at him, his Olympian beard billowing madly in the draft from the broken door.         “And here’s Dudley!” He belched. Dudley smelled carrots and tobacco.

Harry was caterwauling, undeterred. “I’m Harry, sir!” He wrapped himself, kitten-like, around the scratching post that was the giant’s thick leathery pant leg. “Harry Potter!” A quick kick sent Harry tumbling into a pile of dusty crates and spare nails.

“Name’s Haghh,” the giant announced, interrupted by a tinny blast from Uncle Vernon’s pencil-dick rifle. Haghh grabbed the barrel of the rifle with his teeth, of which there were too many, and in which Uncle Vernon could see the grimy reflection of his own pathetic misguided life, and in one predictably tremendous bite, Haghh snapped the barrel in half. He then kicked Uncle Vernon as well, but the Uncle simply rolled like a boulder for a few feet, then rocked gently to a dumb stillness.

“Name’s Hagrid,” Haghh corrected.

“I’m Harry Potter!” Harry screamed, pulling a nail out of his thigh.

“Yer filthy, Harry,” Hagrid commented. Then he turned back to Dudley, who was still wriggling over the ground, jaw hanging, like a fattened fabled Mandrake. “And you! Dudders! Yer a wizard, Dudley!”

Dudley puked a little.

“Squeezing you too hard there, am I?” Hagrid offered.

“No!” Harry Potter shouted from the corner shadows, ejecting black dust into the air. “I’m the wizard! I’m Harry Paaughh,” he continued, piercing his bare foot on another stray nail. Uncle Vernon, enraged at the interruption, hoisted his now sawed-off pea shooter and trained it at Harry’s dusty quivering silhouette.

“Vernon!” Hagrid yelled. He kicked Uncle Vernon again. “The rat boy isn’t worth your bullets.”

Harry yanked the nail out of his foot and wagged it at Hagrid, brandishing it like a bloody iron wand, whispering desperate made-up spells. Dudley gazed at Harry’s fidgeting form and, as though possessed of an ancient power, said, “Defenestrum Verminus.” Harry was immediately lifted and ejected out the window of the hut by some rude mystical telekinesis.

Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia applauded politely and nodded their approval.

• * *

Harry leapt through the snow like a black rabbit, seething at every frozen touch to his accumulated wounds. He knew he had to be stealthy in his approach, but despite his general incompetence, the task was easy enough: Hagrid was a tremendous and bombastic thing, a mark that made its own cover. With Dudley wrapped cocoon-like in Hagrid’s vast amorphous beard, the giant was now stomping unhindered through the snow by the moonlit shore, his many legs shooting down as pistons and retracting with machinated precision, his hideous rows of too-many teeth, yellow and black from soot and cigars, chomping the snowy fog to shreds. “To Swine Wart with us!” Hagrid roared in multitudinous cacophony. “To Swine Wart! To Swine Wart! To Swine Wart!”

It struck Harry as remarkable that Hagrid would not fly, perhaps on a broom stick, but then some intelligence pierced his indefatigable stupidity, and he remembered that only witches are said to fly on broomsticks. “Like in Macbeth,” he quipped to himself.

Sensing that his time was running short, Harry bounded to the rear of the terrible giant and wedged himself into a gap in one of those many black boots. There he saw fit to rest until Hagrid had delivered them all to the wonderful plane of the wizards. But Harry’s rest was short-lived: he soon found himself choked by arctic seawater, plunged in and out of the ocean through which the Hagrid was now simply walking. 

• * *

“Another round?” asked Marty the bartender. The sole patron was a dingy septuagenarian thing, a once-crooner draped in brown and yellow sweaters and coats. 

“It’s so cold,” the old man moaned, sliding his empty glass back across the bar.

Marty dunked the glass into a tub of soapy water and produced another, filling it with the same thin yellow dribble that had been spitting from the tap all night. “Heater will be fixed soon,” he said.

“It’s too cold.”

“It’s a cold winter.”

“You should get a heater.”

“Heater’s getting fixed,” Marty said. He adjusted the sign that was a new fixture to the bar, then glided over to the front window, cloth draped over his shoulder, to check the duplicate signs he had posted outside. All but one of them said the same thing: NO WIZARDS ALLOWED.

The one new sign that did not say this was affixed to the back wall, nailed to the fresh brick: “DO NOT TOUCH THIS WALL.”

“Bloody wizards,” Marty muttered.

Back at the bar, the old thing was clumsily spilling beer on his pants. Marty stared at him and quietly lamented the loss of his old regulars.

Suddenly, a winking shot across the horizon, and a distant guttural roar rolled slowly over the waves. Marty buckled at the knees, whipped back around to the window, put his palm to the icy glass. “No,” he whispered.

The roar was real, though, and the figure producing it approached with impossible haste through the violent surf.

“Wassat,” the old man said. “Did you say something?”

“Get out,” Marty said. “Leave. Get out now.” He dashed over to the bar and leapt over it, slapping his washcloth against the cheap wood.

“What’s you talking about? Slime warts?”

Marty’s head popped up from behind the bar. “Get out!” He yelled, and as he stood, he lifted a cricket bat over his shoulder.

  The old man tottered hastily over to the front door, spilling his beer all the way there, and then tumbled out into the cold. It was too late, however. A terrible iron Hagrid arm crashed into the man’s chest, crushing it utterly, sweeping the man like flimsy detritus into the alcoholic gutter. The Hagrid’s eyes shone like lighthouse beacons. “To Swine Warts!” it announced. “To Swine Warts!”

This door was again victim to Hagrid’s divine purpose. It burst from its hinges and shattered into a hundred dull splinters like flying arrows against the bartender’s militant charge. “It’s a load-bearing wall!” Marty screamed. He leapt with the passion and fury of a mother lion and struck with the expertise of a master cricketer, but Hagrid hardly noticed. Instead, Marty’s terrified form was thrown into the relentless maw, all teeth chomping in turn, and the poor man was finally consumed, each bone crushed in measured sequence, the whole broken body sliding like taffy down Hagrid’s oily throat.

“To Swine Wart,” Hagrid insisted, and when he reached the back wall, he slammed his forehead into it. The bricks pulverized instantly, and when the red dust settled, they proceeded gently to a hidden train station.

“That man died because I am a powerful wizard,” Dudley thought, and he was absolutely correct.

• * *

Dudley Dursley loitered on the thin pale station planks, tugging at his earlobe with his plump little fingers. Long ropey curls of Hagrid’s beard still stuck to his clothes and skin. Just moments before, he had listened to Hagrid while the giant magically shrank his frame: “Dudley!” -- and already his voice was squeaking and narrowing, sliding from oboe to flute -- “You have to run straight and pass unimpeded through the pillar to station 3 and 3/4 and 15/4 and 15/24,” which translated roughly to 6 and 6/4, plus 15/24, Dudley thought, straining his meager resources. Thereto simplified: 6 and 51/24, or 8 and 3/24, or 8 and 1/8. Was that right? A bamboo grove of pillars surrounded him. This pillar read: 64/8 and an eighth. A nearby pillar read 7/45, and another read 129/16 and half an eighth. Wait.

Where had Hagrid gone? Disappeared too thin, evaporated into squelching smoke and rosemary. Why couldn’t Dudley, greatest of all the wizards, do that too?

Meanwhile, the slick invertebrate Harry “urchin” Potter scrunched up behind pillar “e and i,” praying not to be noticed. Things had gotten dicey there for a moment; he hadn’t anticipated that Hagrid would reacquire his human form, or that he would shrink rapidly into nothingness, threatening the non-shrinking Harry with suffocation (or worse) between leather and leg. Gasping, agog, the sooty Potter prayed to what he hoped were wizard Gods that the Dudley would not discover him. “On Esther, on Dopple, on Winchcrack and Mottle,” he whispered hurriedly.

And Dudley was too distracted with his fruitless calculations. 

“Everyone down! Criminals beware!” The sounds of militant booties and swinging little pistols tickled from behind the pulverized brick wall. Nutters, thought Dudley. It’s the Feds! I’d better cheese it!

It wasn’t the Feds though. Britain has no such force. Still, the threat of beetle-black bullets clanking around Dudley’s bloated head was too much harassment to handle; he inhaled sharply, locomoted his little legs, and bull-rushed the pillar marked “Station 6 and 6/6.”

And in a rubbery flash, he was wasn’t.

Harry smacked his wet head and whipped his wiry round glasses off. “I’d better follow him,” he said in his best approximation of actual human English. Then he, too, pursued the path that Dudley had just disappeared through, but before he could reach it, he was shot twice by the Feds.

“We’re not the Feds!” A faux-burly waif with a trying mustache yawped. “Freeze!”

One bullet struck Harry in the chest, another in the calf. He stumbled, gasping, to the pillar, and in a frankly more rubbery and less impressive flash, he too vanished.