Hi.
a kite containing a haiku
a boat with a short story written upon its sides:
Will you won't you look at her? She relaxes at the helm with cup of copy. Sea spray salters her senses as she sips success. Such certainty reassures the crew and passengers alike.
The sun has almost set and it is time to embark upon tonight's journey. But here's the key: nobody knows where they are going. Not even the captain; they will set off in whatever direction suits her fancy at the moment. The most important task she has is to resist planning, so that it is a truly spontaneous journey.
That is, after all, what the guests paid for. Dearly. They paid hundreds, even thousands for this experience. It was very exclusive.
These journeys only occur once per year, although there have been thoughts of making them more frequent due to demand, and that is an attractive possibility because the operators of the journeys/venture could double their profit. But at the present time, the buzz generated by this exclusivity is far more satisfying than money.
There would come a time when they would expand, and it would be at the perfect moment. The clients and owners were very happy with the current arrangement.
Just as the sun touched the horizon, the steward tapped a small wooden mallet on a slender metal chime. The guests looked up from their small dishes of light green vegetables. The steward held his right hand over his sternum, elbow lifted, and then opened his arm in a smooth arc, pointing toward the sunset with his gloved hand.
"It's time, " he said.
The guests sat up a little higher, straightening their backs and smiling at one another in happy anticipation.
A silky translucent screen unfurled from the ceiling at the head of the long table where they all sat. An image was projected onto the back of it. It was the head and shoulders of the captain in her cabin, lit from behind so that her face was in shadow and her hair was a halo, shimmeringly transmitted through the cloth. She spoke:
"It is time, and you are in the place to hear that there was a story that walked a line so fine that, unbalanced, it fell off. By the time it landed, it had become a poem. This poem:
I stumbled over your nouns,
but what really tripped me up
Was the cost of your phrasing.
Therefore, it is necessary to
tell you this story:
A person lived in a tiny room, and shared a bathroom at the end of a hallway lined with the doors of others who lived in similarly small quarters. One foggy morning she found a dime in the bathroom and thought she ought to return it to the person who lost it. She began knocking on the other doors along the hallway. There was no answer at the first three doors, but an old woman opened the fourth. 'Yes?' she said.
'I have found a coin in the bathroom,' said the one who found it.
'It's mine,' said the old woman.
'Can you describe it?'
'It's a quarter.'
'Wrong. It doesn't belong to you. Sorry and TOO BAD.'
'Bitch!' The old woman slammed her door closed.
The finder of the dime decided to keep the coin, thinking that finding its owner wasn't worth the trouble. She turned to walk to the end of the hallway where her room was, and appreciated that it was close to the bathroom. She felt fortunate because of that, and also because she had found 10 cents.
She went into her room and poured a can of beans into a pan to warm on her hot plate. She made coffee and decided to drink it from a tin cup like the cowboys did on TV. She cracked an egg into the hot pot of beans and stirred it, waiting and watching as the bits of white and yellow egg coagulated into little strips. When they were all solid, she opened an individually wrapped slice of american cheese and placed it on top. The cheese slice was just as shiny without its cellophane wrapper as it had been with it.
She watched it for a minute to see it melt, but became impatient and turned away to pull out a desk drawer and set her cutting board upon it. She spread a cloth napkin on the board, and set a place for herself: plate, knife, fork, and spoon. She took a sip of coffee, opened a can of evaporated milk and lightened her coffee with it. Another sip. Surveyed her place setting and felt well set up. Spooned the eggs, beans and now-melted american cheese onto her plate. She did this carefully with a large, flat spoon, so that she did not tear or separate the yellow sheet of cheese. She sat on her desk chair, rotating it sideways to her meal setting. She was quite pleased and felt she had done very well for herself.
After she had eaten, cleaned the dishes and put away the cutting board table top, she went toward her closet to get her shoes. It was at this point that she saw the corner of a slip of paper sticking under her door. She picked it up and saw that it said this:
Seize the time before
it is past wine
Beyond prime
like a vinegary
whine
Grab the moment
even if it's the midst
of foment
Lest you should
fall into the hissing
listlessness of
What-might-have-been
torment
Shine your spine
stay in line
and you'll do
fine.
'What!?' She said. She read it out loud. She stamped into the hallway, flopping her bedroom slippers loudly, and shouted the poem as she walked from one end of the hall to the other. Three times over she yelled out the poem.
'SHIT
!' she said. 'How do I get out of this?'
She ripped up the slip of paper with the poem on it and ran to the end of the hall. She rolled up the long rug that lined the hallway. As she did so, she saw that the following lines were written on the underside of the rug:
I will never stumble
over your nouns again.
Your phrasing no
longer impacts my
resources
Therefore, there
will be no story, only this haiku:
the pine needles fan
glad branches hold pollen buds
bunched small at the ends"
The screen went dark. The guests waited. After a couple of minutes, one of them looked at another guest and raised her eyebrow. After another minute, another guest said, "Ahem. Are we going somewhere? Shouldn't we be leaving?"
The other guests looked uncomfortable. After a few silent moments, one of them said, "Has anyone here ever gone on one of these trips before?" and another said, "Yeah, is this what's supposed to happen, I mean, does it always take this long before we depart?"
One guest had been on one of these journeys before, but he sat quietly. He did not tell the others that usually they take off before the sun has sunk fully into the water. He just didn't care. He was happy to be there.
They all sat for five minutes more. Finally one of the guests called for the steward, who came out. As he came out the captain walked out the side door of her cabin, slid a plank over to the dock, walked it to the dock and away.
Only the guest who'd been on these journeys before saw her leave. He said nothing.
The other guests regaled the steward with questions, and he became increasingly stressed.
Finally, the steward said, "Thank you all for coming. That is the journey that the captain had chosen for you this evening. Congratulations. Good night." He went and instructed the crew to extend the gangplank to the dock, and bid the guests Good Evening as they left.
©2010 Claire R. Bain all rights reserved
