Weekend

By Eric Suhem

Wild porcupines chewed on my right eyeball, and then scurried purposefully across the green kitchen tile, hoping for an opportune spot under the large grey chandelier, helpfully installed by the Chandelier Support Team, a fellowship of like-minded ceiling-light enthusiasts. Below the chandelier we occupied the hardwood floor, sucking on varnished wood grain, dozing, or otherwise horizontal for reasons known only to us. We don’t know why the strange bird flew through the window, pecked busily at our eyes, and brought its odd ways with eggs of mystery into our apartment. We found a blue egg near the ash tray in the living room, a red egg located near the clothes hamper in the hall closet, and a green egg suspended near the garbage disposal. I decided that I had to leave the eggs alone and proceed out of the apartment until the eggs could be exterminated by a professional removal team wearing white space suits, wielding flamethrowers and large industrial vacuums with impressive capabilities. Leaving the apartment, I chose to follow the moss in the hallway, leading outside. I crawled along the moss towards the beach, where I could be more in touch with the eels, jellyfish, and strange one-celled creatures of our ancestry. When I reached the water, I boarded a faded green rowboat, grabbed both its oars, and rowed out into the water. In the middle of the bay, I had an epiphany that I should try to use my left hand more in general activities (I’m right-handed), to get more of a feeling of newness, discovery, refreshment, hope, and aliveness. I dropped the right oar, clutched the left oar, and rowed in circles for hours, not proceeding forward. I’m not sure what kind of lesson this taught me, or if it was a lesson at all. Instead of using the right oar to get back to shore I decided to activate the small outboard motor that had been helpfully placed in a small compartment of the boat by an unknown entity. I reflected on the implications that this reliance on technology had, and I decided that I envied the lizard that had crawled up from the bottom of the boat and was chewing on my left eyeball. Soon I was back in my air-conditioned, yet heated apartment, cooking omelets consisting of the colored eggs that still remained, and weaving aerated pillows with a passion that I had never felt before. I wasn’t sure whether my new-found passion for weaving aerated pillows would lead to an internet-based business, beholden to the tenets of cyber commerce, but I was willing to cast my lot with this wave of economic promise.  At my computer, I decided to play Angry Birds instead. I got through a number of levels, but was frustrated by Level 4, as it had too many slabs of wood and ice. I decided to examine the motivations of the Angry Birds and saw purple voluptuous caterpillars lounge about on straw mats demanding more nourishment. “We’re living the extreme lifestyle!” declared one of the caterpillars, a straw in its little mouth, ingesting industrial nectar. “Why not?” asked another, multitasking, feeding spoons of sugar and sand to the illiterate walking wounded. The birds of longing fluttered down to the straw mats and admired the ethos of the purple voluptuous caterpillars. “Upon what intellectual theory have you based your way of living?” asked one of the birds, an egret wearing a tasteful suede overcoat. “We follow the ways of the impala,” said the caterpillars quickly, looking up at a clay impala replica at the top of the hill, sunlight shining flatly off of its kiln-baked surface. “What are the ways of the impala?” asked one of the birds, a parrot, way too quickly. The caterpillars looked at the bird suspiciously and went silent. The other birds looked at the parrot with disdain. “We have been longing for this knowledge and you had to compromise our position. Do you know how many weeks of planning and preparation went into this operation?” As the parrot’s eyes were pecked out by the Angry Birds, I entered the kitchen, seeing purple voluptuous caterpillars crawling over the ‘Puree’ button on the blender, and I decided that I wanted to make dinner for a number of neighbors and cats in the apartment complex. The cats were more interested in my culinary efforts, and I decided that I would reward them with a basket full of slippers made out of mice (the toes of the slippers being especially tasty).  I then slept a few more hours, and now I’m back to work on Monday, doing whatever it is that I do.

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Bio: Eric Suhem lives in California and enjoys the qualities of his vegetable juicer.

The Gardener

By Eric Suhem

When the gardener fell out of the womb, he immediately found fault with the quality of the fluorescent lighting in the delivery room, focusing an accusatory eye at the buzzing, faulty wiring of the lighting’s circuitry. Those present at his birth could also sense that the gardener was not impressed by the quality of the fruit in the bowl next to his mother’s bedside, and was disdainful of the magazine selection on a nearby table. In his early years, the gardener would encounter poison oak, poison ivy, various thorns, a vine that nearly strangled him, and an aggressive Venus flytrap that chewed off his left thumb, all formative experiences.

Years later, the gardener seethed in his truck as it trolled the neighborhood. Forests aflame, orchids strangled, daisies tortured minutely and mercilessly with barbed tweezers. All of these images flowed through the gardener’s mind, putting a temporary smile on his face as he read the current issue of ‘Gardening Today’, his eyes half-focused on the road. The gardener was indignant about an article extolling the virtues of fertilizing and nurturing orchids. In response, he would send a missive, opining that all vegetation should be incinerated, and seeds should be dug up and crushed in special vises.

The gardener’s truck, filled with hoes, rakes, clippers, fertilizers, a mower, and other gardening tools, pulled up at the curb. The gardener disembarked quickly from the truck and began clawing feverishly at the dirt in the front yard, adjacent to the sidewalk. A woman emerged from the yard’s house, and stalked toward the burrowing gardener. She had been disciplining her home decoration team, whose recommendations she did not find harmonious. ”Put the coffee table over there! Don’t cross me, I can break you!” she screamed at the cowering furniture arranger, amidst her peacefully designed tranquil environment of chirping birds and soft wind chimes. She returned her attention to the gardener. 

“Hello, can I help you?” she offered, ready to call the police.

“No, thank you,” said the gardener, momentarily stopping the digging to hold up his bleeding hands, his eyes filled with contentment.

“Let me help you,” the woman said, jumping in to help the gardener dig down further. The woman was impressed by the gardener and his industriousness. She asked the gardener for his business card, which he duly threw at her in a hostile manner, oddly much to her approval.

Weeks later, the woman looked out upon the lawn of her ranch-house, disturbed by the blood-colored weeds that were invading the grass. She found the gardener’s card and called the number. The gardener answered, and hissed that he could arrive in 15 minutes to assess the situation.

Upon arriving, the gardener’s instant diagnosis was that the lawn should be set on fire. He poured gasoline on the grass and attempted to light a match, but the matchbook was soggy, as the gardener had been previously toiling under a wayward Rain Bird sprinkler. “Hurry, light it!” urged the woman, her clammy hand grasping the gardener’s clammier wrist. After a number of attempts, he was finally able to stir a flame, throwing a match onto the lawn, incinerating a blaze. The woman and the gardener stood face to face, turned on by the dark snakes and mites in each other’s eyes, their lips soon locked as they groped together in a passionate embrace, flames leaping around them on the suburban grass. The lawn’s timer sprinkler turned on too late.

The new owner of the woman’s ranch-house planted a thriving vegetable garden where the charred remains of the gardener and the woman had been found months earlier. The owner arranged the adjacent lawn furniture in a harmonious way. He was puzzled though, by the disappearance of some of his vegetables, not noticing the withered hand periodically emerging from the garden dirt, pulling the vegetables underground.

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 Bio:  Eric Suhem lives in California and enjoys the qualities of his vegetable juicer. He can be found in the orange hallway (www.orangehallway.com)

Mannequins

By Eric Suhem

George walked along the rainy sidewalk and looked through the window of the department store, seeing today’s modern fashions strewn on the white floor of the display area. A colorful beach ball rolled playfully amidst a male mannequin mounting a female mannequin missionary-style in what seemed to be a tropical beach setting. “Damn mannequins,” grumbled George. “They get more action than I do.”

George had separated from his wife Janice two weeks earlier after discovering that she was having an affair with her ski instructor Rolf. In fact, at that precise moment, Janice and Rolf, like the mannequins, were having sex on a beach. Over the next few weeks, George’s jealousy of the mannequins escalated, and their sexual positions became more sophisticated and elaborate in the department store window. One evening, the mannequin scene was a groping orgy in a winter chalet setting, advertising snow-wear, while on another continent Janice and Rolf skied in the Swiss Alps, looking forward to a big night of sexual gymnastics in the ski lodge.

George became obsessed, seeing Janice and Rolf in the mannequins’ plastic limbs. He got a maintenance job at the department store, in order to monitor more closely the actions of the two plastic figures, which he started to call Ms. Lacquer and Mr. Acrylic. In his green-eyed seething, George began to see the mannequins everywhere. As he replaced some fluorescent lighting in the administration department, he noticed Ms. Lacquer sitting at a desk, typing and answering the phone, while Mr. Acrylic sorted memos nearby. With twisted logic, George deducted that a cartridge audio tape had been implanted in each of the mannequins’ plastic throats, enabling voice greetings and requests for information, in a reliable loop. He also noticed that helpful rollers had been applied to the mannequins’ feet, providing mobility. As Ms. Lacquer’s right index finger mechanically tapped the keyboard, her right wrist occasionally slipped off of her arm and fell to the neutral gray nylon carpeting below. Mr. Acrylic would quickly roll to her side and re-attach Ms. Lacquer’s wrist, winking his plastic eye and applying a dab of glue, as a jealous George looked on, enraged by Mr. Acrylic’s gallantry.

In George’s eyes, the relationship between Ms. Lacquer and Mr. Acrylic escalated rapidly. At the park on a Sunday afternoon he spied on the mannequins at play. From behind a bush, his binoculars focused on their roller skating date, which involved collisions and periodic dismemberment.

The following day in the department store break room, George was stirring non-dairy creamer into his coffee when Ms. Lacquer and Mr. Acrylic rolled in. With a boldness she’d never felt before, Ms. Lacquer ventured throatily to Mr. Acrylic, through the voice of the cassette tape embedded in her throat, “Am I making you hard?” while brushing gently his firm plastic exterior. Mr. Acrylic seemed to be momentarily taken aback, but quickly recovered, the tape cassette in his throat intoning suavely, “Why yes Madam, I am of plastic and varnished enamel.”

George watched Mr. Acrylic send a series of love notes to Ms. Lacquer in the office. The notes were romantically written by Mr. Acrylic on a typewriter from the 1960’s. Strangely, each ringing sound of the typewriter’s ‘Return’ mechanism sent the just-typed, wet-inked letters and numbers into the air as a cloud, wafting down the hall. The cloud of typewritten characters settled onto a blank sheet of paper on Ms. Lacquer’s desk. She would typically put the piece of paper into an envelope and read it later, away from prying eyes, but this morning she read it immediately. Soon she appeared at Mr. Acrylic’s desk, as he was starting to type another love note, a small cloud already beginning to form over the typewriter. “I am sorry, Mr. Acrylic,” voiced the cassette tape embedded in Ms. Lacquer’s throat, but I cannot marry you, and I can’t even tell you why.” With that, she unscrewed her wrist, with the engagement-ringed finger attached, and placed it on a stunned Mr. Acrylic’s desk. She then turned and moved back down the hallway. The cloud over the typewriter obscured Mr. Acrylic’s vision as he watched her roll through the mist, out of his life, forever an enigma.

The next day, George was walking to work, looked in the department store window, and saw Mr. Acrylic & Ms. Lacquer, back together again (!), and mocking him while donning colorful spring-sale togs. Apparently they were rekindling their romance. George’s jealousy and rage toward the mannequins had not diminished. Screaming wildly, George crashed through the department store window, and began tearing apart Mr. Acrylic, piece by piece.

Janice declined Rolf’s request to marry, enigmatically providing no explanation. She was realizing what a mistake the affair had been, and resolved to go back to George. This was until she passed by the department store window and saw George sitting in a pile of freshly dismembered plastic limbs, screaming and babbling incoherently.

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Bio: Eric Suhem lives in California and enjoys the qualities of his vegetable juicer. He is in the orange hallway (www.orangehallway.com)

Couples and Bees

By Eric Suhem

Roy was on the golf course committing atrocities. Roy and the other players in his foursome were all wearing Bermuda shorts, slamming golf clubs into the heads of unsuspecting rodents found in the underbrush. Nearby, there were figures in Black Death costumes putting their golf balls into the ball-washing machines and pumping furiously, their Titleists acquiring a new-found glow. “We

have an ancient historical precedence and imperative!” declared Mavis, leaning back in the seat of the golf cart, chewing unsalted saltines, a big black tattered book propped up on the scorecard clamp. “From Chapter 79385,” continued Mavis urgently, “’Roam freely, conquer the earth, and strike down the rats and hornets!’” “I like the cut of your jib, and the angle of your gait, Mavis,” said Roy, bringing a 3-iron down on the head of a snowy egret, approving of her twisted interpretation. After an hour, Roy and Mavis maneuvered their golf cart off the course and onto the sidewalks of the nearby suburban neighborhood, thinking of their in-laws Bill & Harriet and Edna & Edward frequently, looking for pets to subdue. A bee took notice of their activities.

The mist was rising over the tundra as Bill and Harriet flipped through the TV listings. They thought of their in-laws Roy and Mavis infrequently as they sat on the two matching Barca-loungers in the barren frozen wasteland, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. “Where is my cummerbund?” muttered Bill intensely. At this point, the bees flew up out of the ground, and lined up, staring at Bill and Harriet confrontationally, hands on hips, or legs on thorax. “We demand to know why you are invading our lands and have soiled our landscape with your man-made garbage!” yelled Beatrice, who had appointed herself spokesbee, despite much contrary opinion among the group. “I’m late for the dance, I’ve just been trying to get to the dance all this life, that’s all I’ve been trying to do. Right now I’m looking for my cummerbund!” Bill said defensively. “We will lead you to it,” said the bees as they gathered together in a deafening, menacing, buzzing roar, swirling around Bill and Harriet. “No, no please don’t sting us to death!” yelled the two Homo sapiens. The bees said quietly, “No, we wouldn’t do that,” and instead each of the bees gave Bill and Harriet a light, gentle, pleasurable kiss, sending them into dreamy ecstasy.

“Edna, don your tennis smock now! We must frolic, but it will be frolicking with a purpose!” cried Edward jauntily. Edna looked up from her knitting, wondering what was up. “Have you gone off your meds, Edward? The chicken croquettes and fruit salad must be prepared by midnight! What kind of cook are you?” Edward had been charged with preparing hors d’ouevres at the Von Goffstead estate. “Again Edna, I am not a cook, I am a food technician!” Edna eyed her knitting needle, which started to resemble a bee stinger, raising her eyebrow to yell, “But a technician gone haywire!” And Edward retorted, “Edna, with a playful jab!” He returned to the kitchen and announced, as mini-explosions emanated from the stove pot, soup flying onto the wall, “The seasonings are having a lively battle over which one will dominate the taste of the soup!” This was a couple of days after what Edward had called ‘a vigorous session of sautéing,’ in which a kitchen fire burnt the east wing of the house to the ground. He continued, “Edna, we must play tennis soon, it is urgent!” Edna had dreamt of the trees and earth, the water and fire, the air streaming through her free soul. She turned to Edward, saying, as bees entered through the ventilation, flooding the room, “I’m sorry, Edward, but I cannot be held in by the boundary lines of the tennis court!” And with that, Edna threw down her knitting, clutching a tennis racquet with a small, quickly-evolving beehive at the end, and marched into the nearby meadow and forest. Edward returned to his work in the kitchen, poured gasoline into a frying pan, and then retreated into Van Goffstead’s study, reading Chaucer, babbling about the end of the world.

Roy drove the golf cart over a bump in the sidewalk, swerving to avoid a swarm of bees. He and Mavis tumbled out and bumped their heads on a potted plant. Rising dizzied from this incident, they ran to the nearby hardware center to begin a career selling lawn-care appliances and jars of fruit-flavored honey door-to-door, on the a.m. shift, happily enduring the wrath of awakened neighbors, and of vacuum cleaner salesmen in boxy suits, complaining with clenched fists that this was ‘their turf’, as sweat poured from their brows in the morning heat. Roy and Mavis were now insistent about lawn clippers, but were not clubbing wildlife with 3-woods. Wherever they went, a few bees followed.

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BIO: Eric Suhem lives in California and enjoys the qualities of his vegetable juicer. He can be found in the orange hallway (www.orangehallway.com)