_ I said that I did not wish to be imprisoned but Dearest Leader misinterprets the remark, for moments later I am being shackled into leg irons and marched through the mud-strewn paths that connect our villages.  Police officers driving ox-drawn carts yell at me to Run Run Run!!!, speed apparently being a measure of good police work, yet it difficult to run when shackled in leg irons (can they not see?) and every hundred meters I tumble to the ground, slowing our progress.  The wheels of their carts rut the road, making it yet harder to stagger to my feet to re-commence my Run Run Run!!!  

Along the way, villagers gather behind wire fences.  Sweat glistens from their sun-browned foreheads.  They are good people, my countrymen, subsisting on salted radishes and the hope that their infertile rice paddies may once again provide bountiful harvests.  Despite Dearest Leader’s dearest wish, diabolical Yankee imperialists have cursed the fertility of our lands.  My arrest is meant to serve as an example to these villagers of what can happen when one blatantly questions the agricultural manure-spread ratios advocated by Dearest Leader, for it is a well-established fact that Dearest Leader is a master agronomist who nightly scours crop yield production charts in search for better ways to feed our people.  Firewood has been scarce in recent years, so the good people scythe tall grasses and the spent remains of corn stalks, things that when dried can be burnt for heat.

When I arrive at Penitentiary, Dearest Leader asks the pleasure of my company.  Or that is how the request has been interpreted for me by guards, who flail my behind with flashlights in what they say is necessary inspection for lice.  Dearest Leader, they say, requires that all admitted in his company be vermin-free.  The guards take to the inspection in a particularly vigorous way.  With each swat of my behind, they chortle, speculating aloud about my manure yield potential.

“Is he lice-free?” Dearest Leader asks.

“Yes,” the guards respond.  “We have beaten him senseless.”

Ha!  I think.  Though I lay in a brutalized hump from the egregious inspection, I am not senseless.

Dearest Leader pours himself a cup of ginseng tea from an earthenware pot.  He is smaller, frailer, than the image on his official portrait, which must have been commissioned many many years ago, but like in the posters and murals that adorn public buildings, he wears a simple brown tunic, his thinning black hair appearing as a bush-like mass atop his head.  His hands shake with age.  For reasons I cannot understand, he has taken a personal interest in my alleged treachery.  Steam rises from the cup when he puts it to his lips.

The Penitentiary lies in the shadow of Mt. Paetku, the sacred mountain where Dearest Leader’s father, Great Leader, first organized The People’s Revolutionary Army in 1939 with the purpose of expelling Japanese occupiers from our land.  Though the mountain was covered with snow, azalea bushes spontaneously bloomed in Great Leader’s presence, Nature’s sign that Great Leader’s cause was just.  The Japanese armies were successfully routed.  Azaleas have become the national flower, a plant treasured throughout the peninsula. 

“Do you wish to be a patriot?” Dearest Leader asks.

I am confused.  Patriots are those who willingly rat out a brother’s minor offense so they can reap a kilogram of octopus meat.  I am brotherless, an only child with no living family members to forsake to achieve patriothood.

“Answer,” the guards say.  With a mighty walloping of their flashlights, they deliver one last inspection for lice, and in the woozy moments that follow, I affirm my patriotic desire. 

“Good,” Dearest Leader says, which makes me happy for it is impossible to know how many of my countrymen he has sentenced to live out their lives in work camps because of their unwillingness to be patriotic.  “You shall be an azalea.”

My heart leaps with joy.  If I could bounce to my feet, I would kiss Dearest Leader’s cheeks.  To be an azalea is to be of some great national importance, yet I am dumbfounded: somehow the guards have misinterpreted the command.  Dearest Leader departs, taking with him the earthenware pot.  One of the guards kicks me.  The other takes out his flashlight and commences to re-inspect me for lice.

“Let’s corn stalk him,” the guard with the flashlight says. 

I fear they have misheard.  “I am not a corn stalk, but an azalea!”

But soon they are dragging me to the Penitentiary furnaces, misapprehending Dearest Leader’s will for me to be a national treasure. 

_The new issue of REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters arrived in my mailbox on the day after Thanksgiving.  I had been looking forward to that issue for purely selfish reasons: a story of mine was included in it.  Most of my published stories fall within the Absurdist camp, but for the past year I’ve tried to throw myself at traditional realism—partly for the challenge of seeing whether I can pull off a “realist” story, but also because I’ve really become conscious of the limitations inherent in Absurdist aesthetics.

The REAL issue arrived with a kind note from the magazine’s outgoing editor, Christine Butterworth-McDermott, saying that my story was one of her favorites from her seven-year editorial tenure. 

Needless to say, this made my post-Thanksgiving weekend.

“You Okay?” is not only my most realistic published story, but also the most nakedly autobiographical.  Our first son had a latching problem.  Nothing messes with the one’s emotions more than the birth of a child.  Though we had worked with a lactation consultant at the hospital where Stephen was born, we were not able to get him to nurse naturally.  Eventually we rented a breast pump.  I’d feed Stephen from a bottle while Alison, my wife, sat beside me, pumping.  We were working together to care for our son, just not in the way we had imagined.

On the first night home from the hospital, I raised Stephen to my shoulder and burped him.  I was new to fatherhood and, fearing that I might harm him with too hard a pat, my attempts to burp him were woefully pathetic.  Somehow though, they worked.  His burps were loud, tremendous eruptions that filled the air with the scent of the milk he had drunk. 

For a baby, Stephen’s neck muscles were remarkably well-developed.  After burping, he lifted his head off my shoulder.  I still remember how warm he felt.  He brushed his cheek against the side of my neck, his skin soft and smooth and feeling of life.

Then, as I wrote in my story:

All of a sudden, a surge like electricity burst through me.  Something warm and wet had clamped onto my earlobe, so startling me that it took a moment to figure its source.  Stephen had raised his head off my shoulder and latched himself to my ear, plying my earlobe between his tongue and the soft roof of his mouth… Stephen’s lips remained on my ear.  Even when I turned to face [Alison], he hung on.  I tried to explain, but what Stephen was doing tickled, causing me to laugh.  It really was the nicest sensation, those lips at work on my earlobe.

As nice as he felt, I felt immediate guilt, for I imagined the sensation of Stephen’s lips was what Alison desperately wanted to feel for herself.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t figure any real way of making this story work outside traditional realism—mind you, I’ve written plenty of Absurd baby stories!—so I was tremendously thrilled last week to learn that Ms. Butterworth-McDermott had also nominated the story for a Pushcart Prize. 

Thank you, Christine!

In Other News: I’ve got a new piece up at The Nervous Breakdown, called “Rockstars: Lenny Dykstra and Dan Herman.”   Though it’s only a few thousand words long, it took me several drafts and several weeks to write, but I think it kinda works.  Check it out and tell me what you think!

Dykstra, the former New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies star, has been a bit of an obsession for me.  I’ve written about him before on this blog, and will likely do so again soon.  His over-the-top personality fascinates me.  Not that I’d ever want to personally meet the guy, for he really does seem to ooze bile into every life he touches, but he’s a good gawk if you’re careful to maintain a safe distance.

What else?  We spent most of Friday and Saturday in Roanoke doing fun stuff, including attending the Friday’s “A Dickens of a Christmas” festival at Market Square, a Saturday screening of “Der Golem” (1920) at the Taubman Museum of Art (with live musical accompaniment that our children loved!) and Katherine Devine’s Grandin Village studio party. 

More than anything though, I’ve had a lot of good feedback recently on my work, which makes me hopeful that more good things might soon be heading this way soon.