Pebbles by Kelly Grotke

He picked up the three pebbles that lay on the desk, cupping them in his hand and rattling them around like dice as he stared out the window. She’d accused him once of caring more about things than people. It was an argument. He thinks of this as he shakes the pebbles. But it wasn’t true, no. Why had it come to be about truth and right and wrong and would you just stop it, stop, stop it now or I’ll….and then you….and in his gut, even here and now, he could still feel the bends and distortions of time that had begun pulling at their words until language itself threatened to unravel, even now and how much later is that than before, he wonders, and have I been gutted. He had cared about things. Not more than people, no, not more than her. But by then there’d been neither time nor will to explain, and in truth he only understood himself much later. Remember this, the things said to him, this will be the future and the good, forever and ever, and we will walk upon the beach and the sun shone bright and warm on your hair and the smell of your skin yes and I touch you and the happiness and let me in, please let me in and now my soul is shaking again like these pebbles from the shore of some distant ocean and everything falls from my hands.

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Pebbles by Kelly Grotke

He picked up the three pebbles that lay on the desk, cupping them in his hand and rattling them around like dice as he stared out the window. She’d accused him once of caring more about things than people. It was an argument. He thinks of this as he shakes the pebbles. But it wasn’t true, no. Why had it come to be about truth and right and wrong and would you just stop it, stop, stop it now or I’ll….and then you….and in his gut, even here and now, he could still feel the bends and distortions of time that had begun pulling at their words until language itself threatened to unravel, even now and how much later is that than before, he wonders, and have I been gutted. He had cared about things. Not more than people, no, not more than her. But by then there’d been neither time nor will to explain, and in truth he only understood himself much later. Remember this, the things said to him, this will be the future and the good, forever and ever, and we will walk upon the beach and the sun shone bright and warm on your hair and the smell of your skin yes and I touch you and the happiness and let me in, please let me in and now my soul is shaking again like these pebbles from the shore of some distant ocean and everything falls from my hands and my tears come like waves.

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In Sidon by Kelly Grotke

In Sidon, there is a mound of ancient debris high as a fifteen-story building, chiefly comprised of broken shells belonging to the family Muricidae. Long ago and far beyond the realm of fact, a dog, possibly even the dog of Hercules himself, was walking along the Mediterranean coast when it happened upon a cluster of these shellfish or shellworms, as they have also been called in earlier times. Whether for hunger or play we shall never know, but the dog bit into this peaceably beached assembly, crackling the creatures’ coverings between its teeth and thereby dying all the pale fur ‘round its muzzle the most sublime and wondrous shade of purple. And so it was that the color later reserved for royalty and priests was first worn by a dog. To make one gram of this precious dye, over ten thousand of these modestly-sized, unambitious sea dwellers had to be sacrificed, which makes of the mound in Sidon a great tomb and memorial to those beings whose color blends so minutely with the fleece that not even all great Neptune’s waves, not even his entire sea, could e’er part them. A true wonder of nature, and an inspiration for human industry. Ernest Renan viewed the mound during his sojourn excavating in the Levant at the behest of Napoleon III. One can imagine him wearing a purple cravate, if not precisely murex-purple, since it was a time of great freedom and equality, with the color available to master and servant alike.

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Sangatsu by Kelly Grotke

You may say a crowd Surges and ebbs like water, But the crowd is gone.

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On The Conscience of Kings by Kelly Grotke

The matching pair of bronze statues, each of a son transfixed in the act of hurling a blade toward the neck of his father, disappeared sometime during the French Revolution. They had adorned opposite sides of a bridge in Ghent, a bridge that no longer exists, but must have once since it left so many names behind. We know Albrecht Dürer walked upon it, in early April 1521. It was a place of execution then, a place where some lives remained forever halted in midstream, but if Dürer reflected on this all too human coincidence between the natural and metaphysical worlds, he left no trace of it; in his diary, he simply notes having seen the twin patricides in passing. There are two stories about the events commemorated by these absent statues. In both, a father and son are condemned to die, though we know nothing of their crime; in both, the king decides that one may be absolved, if only he agrees to serve as executioner of the other. In one version, the father immediately rejects this diabolical bargain, which the son then quickly accepts. As the son heaves the axe toward his father’s neck, the blade turns suddenly upon his own, killing him outright. In the other, the father demands to be sacrificed so that his son might live, but as the son swings the axe to perform the horrible deed, the blade breaks in two. After this miraculous event, both are pardoned. The king’s motivations remain unknown.

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All the Peace and Fraternity of the Free World by Kelly Grotke

It’s a true story, I read it in Life magazine soon after the war, in between the ads. One of the ads was for some new packaging that would keep Mr. Lobster moist and happy all the way from Maine to your table. I suppose I remember that because of the contrast, y’know? All that post-war confidence fizzling up like champagne, champagne and lobsters, that’s what the world was going to be and we were going to lead the charge into some bright new future of peace and prosperity. The story was about a fellow who liked lobster, he liked all the good things money can buy, and he wasn’t middle-class American respectable about it either. Kept a few mistresses, sure. So far so good. Our countries were friends. I dunno. Seems like somebody was getting fucked. I mean, they had laws down there but this guy’s laws were so crazy that you could be put in prison for saying the summer there was awful hot. Defamation, right? So yeah, he’s heard that someone said a few words against him here or there, so he has the guy picked up. Tells his men to have some fun with the poor bastard for a couple of days. And afterwards he has the body dropped off to the family, all wrapped up like some bloody entrails in butcher’s paper. And then he goes to the house. To comfort them.

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Because the first bitter taste of grief is never preparation enough by Kelly Grotke

We stand beside each other and your shoulder brushes against mine like a wing and I remember as it passes how long ago, a monarch butterfly with five legs found me and stayed for two days when I was very small, holding on to my hand as I took it out to feed on the yellow flowers my mother had ringed around the house, flying back again to my waiting outstretched finger for us to go inside, my improbable friend but aren’t all friendships improbable in the wide eternal expanse of time where beginnings and endings are the illusions left us in the wake of passing motion? And how the next day I found him, angled gently upon the carpet, beautiful, still, and departed, that was the first time and no, not again please no, I can’t tell you this, not now and not ever because who would be the butterfly, and who the child? I could obscure the heavens with platitudes, and still want to say more, the game isn’t over, the money’s not gone, I know the winter snow is deep, tempting and petal-soft but spring is coming soon and the music still plays on, you are listening to it now as your face turns to mine with a smile and suddenly, so clearly, you take flight, mute as a butterfly I stand and watch the sounds of it all lift you up and if a soul can take leave of its troubles then you have just now.

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On the Brittle Edge of Understanding by Kelly Grotke

They left that morning before the dew had vanished in the blue summer heat. She’d tied her friend to a fencepost behind the house where the two brothers lived, talking all the while and telling him to be good and promising treats and walks and all manner of good things if he would just please wait there for her return, because cultural knowledge is passed on in elusive little ways after all, and a child’s mind is like a border town in which improbable scenes can and most certainly will take place. She’d skipped yesterday but here they were picking sides again for another day’s war, two tiny generals and we have become their armies, but it was summer and she wasn’t bored yet and besides they’d all been told to be nice to them for living alone with their mother and coming here after some great tragedy that no one would ever explain. So into the woods now, half north, half south and they’d meet in the middle for the ambushes and taking prisoners and sort out who won after the major battles had ended or when they just got tired because no mortal can play even a great game forever. Hiding low in the underbrush, she saw one of the brothers untie the dog and yank him toward the woods, a prisoner. But then the dog broke free and only hours later when he still hadn’t come home did she begin to cry and regret her initial enthusiasm.

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Perspective by Kelly Grotke

He went out the front, turned the corner past the garage and climbed up the slight hill until he reached the bench. A quick dust-off to the planks as he thought, sometimes it’s good just to sit down. A light snow had fallen the night before, gathering in the furrows left behind in the fall from his last run around the lawn with the mower, curving near the empty flower bed and straightening out again moving down the slope. As if he were looking down on some vast cityscape from a far away vantage point. A dry leaf scuttled across the ground at his feet, breaking the silence and his illusion. Funny the things you notice with a little time on your hands. Both parents dead, three divorces, grown kids scattered and busy, and his two sisters had come in over the weekend to keep him company. One working on a divorce of her own, the other’s family would be driving down later that day. And so here they were, at it again, inside the house. Rearranging his furniture. He couldn’t say why, but this was the second time now and the sense of some kind of ritual in the making had finally driven him outdoors, something close yet unknowable was going on in there but you can overthink things so he considered forthcoming bruises and stubbed toes instead. He looked down again upon his cityscape and conjured up its inhabitants, all happy and warm and home for the holidays.

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The Day Could Have Turned Out Otherwise by Kelly Grotke

He’d just missed the bus. Half an hour then for another, according to the screen. His friends were still around the corner at the bar but the weather had turned damp and he didn’t feel like crossing the park again to rejoin them. A slight annoyance at bad timing before the book he’d been carrying around all day finally came out. He’d had a friend, a monk as it happened, who’d always covered his books in plain brown paper. The only person he’d ever known to do such a thing. He could no longer remember why exactly but maybe it was to guard against the temptations of intellectual pride, or perhaps it was a habit acquired in the years before the Index was abolished. Funny, how holding a book in public even now for him recalled an action whose precise justification had long gone astray. “What are you reading?” Without words, he lifted the book from his lap to reveal its spine. “The essay about truth, I liked that one very much, have you read it?” No, he admitted, looking up. “All my possessions are in these bags, isn’t that funny? My books are all gone, but on the other hand I believe your bus is here. Good to see someone reading anyways. ‘Bye then.” And he felt for a moment as if time had suddenly flown down to land on him like some exquisite and untamed bird, but just as quickly it passed and he got on the bus.

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All Evidence to the Contrary by Kelly Grotke

The mind creates reasons, maybe this was one. See if it sticks, see if it can survive the exacting standards of a child dredging the bottom of a pond with a branch. Interesting? Or is it pitched back where it came from and you watch it sink down again to the bottom with all the rest. Because you have to figure it out for yourself, don’t you, and she wouldn’t have listened anyways even if they’d told her back at the house that you will never, ever, not in a million billion years find a pharaoh’s mask hidden in the dark bed of a Midwestern pond. A year or so later it was Indians. They’d gone one day to a high crest above a river and she’d seen the carvings on the rock. She’d find them in the woods someday, she was certain. Because in all that living moving solitary space there must be someone like her, before her, really it was just a matter of time and so out into the world she went, after school and on weekends too when she wasn’t locked in her room reading and sometimes even with friends. Years later she’d married a man because he seemed to be from the world somehow but it turned out his wilderness was much deeper even than her own and she’d shown him all the paths and places and secrets but he told her there was no one there. No, it hadn’t worked out.

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Your Turn by Kelly Grotke

What sort of character am I? A man with a bad haircut and perhaps a bit of dandruff, worn down by life and forever rubbing his bodily particulars against the ill-fitting suit that clings to him like some lifeless shedding skin. Not terribly original, I’m sure. A person so apparently unreceptive to his own existence that the possibilities of doing good have grown as remote from him as those of doing evil. Someone who might even be pitied but for the fact that the sour scent of his presence sets the nerves slightly shivering with repulsion. A living memento mori. How clever of me, how deliciously inward…. But one always has difficulties seeing what is there, I must admit. This is how I imagine myself, for you, since you asked. And I have tried to be honest. The extent to which a self-portrait may yet be a work full of artifice and cunning, you may be in a better position to judge, though I find your curiosity unusual. Not unsettling, mind you, it could never be that. I am what I am, and I am quite suited to my time. And you? Who are you? Your turn, and I am waiting. Because if we take this little exploration to heart, as you seem so to desire, then a certain reciprocal interest need hardly be excused, however much it may simply be a conventional courtesy of what passes these days for satisfactory social intercourse. So I am waiting, still….

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Alchemy by Kelly Grotke

I hadn’t thought about it, until you asked. Late in the year, since it’d already begun to snow. Winter. Dark blue night, coats and coverings and everyone hurrying against the threat of cold, retreating like turtles into their shells. One of those nights, and we’d planned to meet downtown after work. Drinks first in one of those chattery little places near the harbor – don’t ask me which one, they come and go and yet they are always there and that night so were we. So yes, catching up first since it’d been awhile, months maybe, then back out into the streets for some holiday shopping – grandkids, I think. She was like that, always had been – things done alone go lost and disappear, things done together were like tiny anchors thrown down in some raging sea of time. I’m joking. Yes, well, anyways. You know the department store at the end of the boulevard, the one that does the holiday window displays? She was a wicked storyteller, truly wicked. So there she was whispering in my ear as we stood together at the back of the crowd, me grinning and giggling like a child as her words circled round the golden glittering holiday tableaus, warmed by the light of all the base matter emerging beneath. See that one in the center? she said. Smiling now, just as I am smiling. Hard to believe he’s the least favorite by far, but my my, things do change….

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She Took it All Too Hard, You See by Kelly Grotke

She dreamt that night of a silent and predatory force gliding beneath the still dark surface of the narrative, a wayward ripple had reached her for warning and her nerves raced to the shore where she now lay heaving with only seconds left for looking backward as it surfaced and made of all time an eternal horror. And then she awoke. As her breathing calmed, eyes first and then thoughts focused slowly on the contours of her prison cell; how ironic to find an effective antidote to fear in the deadening familiarity produced by years of confinement. A nightmare, then, that’s all, a common thing and she imagined the many scattered characters waking like she was now, all hoping to dispel the author’s morbid panoramas and rescue the story with the first purposive touch of a foot on a floor alongside a bed. Hardly an original state of affairs for any of them, but then again it was an historical novel. Still, it left her in a foul mood. The situation was absurd. First the nightmares, then years of captivity obliquely condensed into a single morning, and throughout it all not one knowing side-conversation or subplot, nothing so much as an abandoned pile of words left in a corner somewhere to play with. “I despise you!” she shouted out truthfully, if not eloquently, into the stale air of her imprisonment. What a troublesome and judgmental character, thought the author. I believe it’s time for another execution.

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Spider by Kelly Grotke

This is where I will build my web, near the light from an open window, and wait for my meal to come.   Amor fati.  A mere spider, not very widely read but I did read once that we are born to catch flies as humans are to be consumed by sorrows, even though it troubles me sometimes that I can see no horizon beyond this truth, the magnitude of it all makes me quiver when it overtakes me, I lose my step and you can imagine the result.  But then I remember that I am nowhere else but here and now, and I continue with my work, leaving the rest up to chance and luck, since whether I feast or starve depends on endless backward-bending causes far beyond my awareness, which is, as I have already admitted, very limited, and also incapable of irony.  It is said that only humans are aware of the past and capable of divining its mysteries, untangling freedom from necessity and, so they say, from themselves in the process, but I am a mere spider, and all my expressive spinning is a mechanical tendency peculiar to my kind, an interpolation in the corner of someone’s window, and if my mistakes along with labor’s endless contingencies deny my work the perfection of pure geometric abstraction after which I so evidently strive,  it is good then to remember that we cannot feed forever on ideals without going hungry.

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Revisitation by Kelly Grotke

I knew he’d come. There, by the doorway, the middle-aged guy, the one with the red jacket over his arm– see? No, he won’t recognize me, I was always behind the camera. Now. He’s going over to that newspaper somebody left behind. Look at him. All this and he still reads newspapers. Watch his hands, tell me what you see, I swear the key to it all is somewhere in those hands.

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched the footage I shot that day. Sometimes I just sit in front of the screen, I just sit there at night, while it plays over and over again. You remember , everybody remembers – he stood beside his son’s coffin, that gesture – right? That hand. Reaching out to touch the coffin, like it was alive and dead at the same time. I know what I saw because everybody goddamn saw it. I don’t care what happened after that, what it became and where it all went. I want to start with the reality here. It’s all about the reality here. I want to start again, from nothing, and then maybe I’ll understand. That’s why, really. That’s all.

There’s history there, see? Look at his hands. Only a few tables away, flesh and blood. What? Just a little longer, I promise, I just have to watch a little longer. Please just stay with me. Just a few more minutes. Then we can go, I promise. When it’s over.

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Living Forever in Bright Olympus by Kelly Grotke

Ah, but they are stubborn, these two. She sat at the river’s edge and began to fold the piece of paper she’d carried down, over and once more and just another time will be enough but no, so again and again until it was as small and silent as it was ever going to be. And then there was nothing more to do.

She threw it into the water.

The mind is such a libertine when it pleases. Were there two? Because it was only one who had written. No, there must be two, certainly two. How else to explain the discord, and then this endless stream of stories.

Not that she read them anymore, now the rituals had begun.

Because the words recalled dark chaos and sometimes even a single one was too much like the sun going down and this confused her sense of time and meaning. Yes, two of them. It had to be. To think otherwise would be to imagine something divided against itself, and that was no longer possible.

She lay back smiling in the grass, fingered the long scar on her thigh, and waited for sleep.

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After the War, Before the Fall by Kelly Grotke

“This family moved to the city after the war, and we’ve hung on like ticks on a dog’s ass ever since,” his father would say. “Someday, one of us is going to explode. You’ll see.”

Maybe that’s what happened. The father’s words became the son’s private epitaph.  Not the pious version carved into stone, spoken by no one and sitting over in that mute field of words at the edge of town.  He hated visiting the cemetery with her, it was like trying to pick out a lie in the universe somewhere and it made his head hurt.

But today was shopping day. Supplies and security, and always, always the long deliberation over which pastry to choose for Sunday breakfast.  You always take the same one, he could have told her.  You always take the cheapest.

The bus was full. His mother took the nearest seat and he settled in behind, backpack full and pushing into the crowd.  So many people, he started to feel awkward and ashamed, he wished he’d worn more clothing but on such a hot day… And so it was that he fixed on his mother’s hands, gripping the metal back of the seat in front, moving, tightening, moving again as if in search of the most enduring surface.

Shelling peas, sweet green summer peas, tension to break the skin and then grace as they fell into the metal bowl.   I can’t wait, I can’t wait any longer, I’ve got to get to the bar.

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The State of Things by Kelly Grotke

“What is interesting today will not be tomorrow.”

“Your statements are like stones thrown into a conversation.”

“Nothing is now proven or disproven by words.  All words are like stones, and conversations are merely the ripples that remain as the stone sinks to the bottom.”

“But over time, the water will fill with stones.”

“When that happens, it will no longer interest us.”

“How can you exist within such abstraction?”

“As the rest of us do, inside our own and the ones we borrow, and if by existence you mean consistency, then that is a small thing mattering only to myself.”

“But what if your abstraction is a lie?”

“It is what it is.  Animals are not true nor flowers false.”

“I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of the situation.”

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Vienna 1929 Kelly Grotke

“It’s a shame,” she said softly, shaking her head. “I can’t make any sense of it, no one can.”  She turned to look out the café window, watching the Saturday street as her companion waited in silence.  “Did you see the front page of the Neue Freie Presse yesterday?” she  continued. “Noble not only by birth but in spirit, it said.  And then all of his accomplishments, his work with children after the war… frankly the tone of the thing left one with the impression that he’d quite sensibly left the sinking ship of Austria by dying when he did. But what can you do.”

“I heard the Reichspost blamed it on gas poisoning – a faulty heating system, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I heard that too, but no.  Elli found them.  Clemens sent her and the maid out for a film over in Leopoldstadt, and by the time they returned, it was over and not even the best doctors in Vienna could do anything to bring them back.  Marie had been ill.  When I visited them last month on Alserstrasse, she mentioned she was having a minor procedure, but maybe there was more to it, I don’t know; we’d been friends for years but she didn’t say.  She looked worried, yes, but not this…and Clemens wasn’t like that, even after the political disappointment.”

Dr. Clemens Peter Freiherr von Pirquet, some twenty years after coining the term ‘allergy,’ committed suicide with his wife by ingesting cyanide on a late winter evening.

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A Man of Means and Importance Cuts into a Piece of Salmon by Kelly Grotke

He lived in the city, and always cut at an angle, but never against the grain. The slightest trace of a wince around the eyes, and it was done.

The obscurity of his compulsions did nothing to diminish his pleasures, secured as they were by the knowledge that even his tiniest actions participated in the general outwitting of fate that was his true purpose. Red meat he’d given up long ago, a personal choice in a personal regimen of care and healthy-mindedness. The lucky have choices, after all, and he could think of no reason for abstaining. He looked down at the fish. “You had your spawning ground, my friend, and this, as you can see, is mine. And who would dare say anything more to either of us about the anonymous structures within which our individual destinies are transcribed?” The dead fish quite sensibly chose to remain silent, in the face of such a cultivated solipsism.

Just then he made another cut, but an almost imperceptible tremor seized hold of his hand, and the knife’s movements were no longer considered, measured and ordered, but unbound, chaotic and frightening. The cultivated noise of the diners shifted and fractured, suggesting meanings he could not comprehend.

He remembered, in the moments before he lost consciousness, what it had been like.

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Untitled by Kelly Grotke

Watery sweet-salt linden sea, I am, I am still, thought the dreamer.  Closed and still my eyes, an eternity below me and above, and so what is the need for eyes at all.

In time her unnerving stillness exerted a gravitational pull on the others, who began their inspections, sideways at first and unobtrusive, increasingly bold because they met without resistance, without any response at all.  A woman, perhaps even a girl, her face was after all obscured by a nearly perfect and symmetrical ring of dyed blonde curls; a line of delicate blue embroidered flowers ran up the side of her jeans. Details, details….young enough then, growing younger by the minute because think otherwise and fear comes racing to the surface more quickly than the inspection warrants even though the impulse for the inspection could not itself be called superficial. Of course in time it is noticed that her hands are pink and old and swollen, but by then it is no longer paradoxical. The woman is stirred by the shoulder.

The dreamer awoke, and the universe was gone, replaced by scenery whose tremendous detail propelled only the animal and specific drive to hide. I am wet, I am falling, she knew, before she hit ground.   My god I am so heavy here, even as my eyes look up I tend toward the ground.

The drunk was taken away, and the bus arrived, full of Saturday girls, perfumed and mascaraed, with Raybans and hopes and hair black as Elvis.

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