Mirthless Short Story, Lacking in Mirth, AND BETTER THAN EVER!

REVISED, BITCHES.

An incidental character is called Air. As in, the air around us. The wind that shakes the barley, that sort of air. Its name is Air. But the air won't be personified so don't try to figure out what the character of Air is a metaphor for or how Air is like people because Air is just air, like the wind that shakes the barley, that sort of air. You are always wanting to anthropomorphize my characters. A rock is just a rock until it says or maybe does something to reveal its character. And then that still is not personification. That is just the way that rock is, that rock's personality. The rock character, which is totally hypothetical right now, might say something like, "I hate Air" and you might think the rock is a grumpy character. Maybe a hardened type of character, hating the air for all its erosion and smoothing over and shit. But notice I did not give the rock lips or a trachea or vocal chords or a face, expressionless or not, so this rock is not anthropomorphized and the fact that it hates air has nothing to do with people. It isn't "grumpy" because that is a human state of being. It is just a rock and it just happens to hate Air.

Happenstance healed horseradish, radish.

If I had to make my incidental character called Air more human for you, relate Air to the way people are, I guess I'd say Air was always coming and going as it pleased or that Air was like a two year old with out parents or guardians. An orphaned toddler is Air. An Aids Orphan.

Orphans in literature.

Jenna Bush might write a book about Air and we would feel so bad and privileged and when we wouldn't finish all the food on our plates we'd think of the poor Aids Orphan named Air.

Bereft through death, disappearance, abandonment, desertion by, or separation/loss from, both parents

If I had to, that's how I'd humanize Air for you. Because you can't handle my Air character being just air. Even though you see air all the time, you feel air all the time, you breath air all the time and you pass air out of your ass all the time. You feel better knowing that Air is like an Aids Orphan because it fits in your construct of character. Construct this: my character called Air.

Airily cried, “But the Angelus Bell o'er the Liffey's swell rang out through the foggy dew.”

There, among radishes, a whip-smart fourteen-year-old boy called Air with too-long bangs sat reading. As he read he had to stop and think to himself, “Here’s a nice turn of phrase.” He relished his time reading in the field, the radishes nearby. Nobody could understand this. His mother was under the erroneous impression that she totally got him. She liked to read herself, especially as a girl. But Air knew that the escapist books that his mother sped through were not like his own books. She read books no longer than three hundred pages. He imagined her in a field like he was then, except instead of radishes her field grew berries. Berries that she could pluck by the handful, gather in a basket, and devour quickly along with her books. Air sat in a field that grows radishes, unplucked. They were nothing alike.

Alack, Sinner, we’ve nothing. Empty Stables.

His mother worked out of their home as a transcriptionist for a physician. The physician was an obstetrician. Twice weekly she would go to his office and pick up the small tapes he used to dictate his notes. She would listen and type easily along with the happy, mundane, and uneventful office notes describing a healthy pregnancy and she would worry over the notes dictating sorrows. Despite the sorrows, and not necessarily because of the happier notes, she enjoyed the time spent at her desk with her headphones and her keyboard and the obstetrician’s voice forever under-enunciating through her fingers and onto the screen that brightened the space in front of her face. When he would cough or burp or eat while he dictated she would think she needed a cough drop, or she would say “Excuse You!” or she might feel she too needed a snack. She enjoyed eating berries while she transcribed, dipped in cool whip. It was the manner in which she worked ever since she quit smoking seven years prior to this day. Sometimes it was carrots but that was a cliché. She had gained 13 pounds in the first three months after quitting but just five in the years intervening. When she was a girl her mother rarely had berries in the house. She would often sit looking out the window of the large apartment building she grew up in and wish she lived nearer to nature so that she might gather berries herself and make pies. She also wished often for an easy bake oven. She got that one Christmas and was fairly disappointed. She had an Airedale named Dale who chewed the pink corners of the oven.

The ovens at Dachau, stately.

Air never asked his mother about her childhood. He never asked his mother about money, or whether or not she went to college, or what her parents were like before they died, or anything really. His ears perked up on the infrequent occasions that she supplied the odd fact. She didn’t know that he would have liked to hear more. He didn’t know she was waiting for him to ask. That was why she believed with most of her mind that she and her boy were nearly spot-on the same. It was the same reason that he believed they were not. Not even close.

Not even Glen Close.

Air said aloud now, “That truly is a nice turn of phrase; I need to write that down.” At the same time his mother said aloud, “Sensational, that’s not right!” Laughing, she typed out the correct phrase, “Gestational Diabetes.” She often found her typos to be interesting and amusing. “Sensational Diabetes!” She laughed again. She began singing a song as she typed. She often sang songs without realizing, using medical jargon and often mixing the terms up with advertising jingles or Christmas songs. “Eat your Wheaties, Eat your Wheaties, or you’ll come down with Sensational Diabetes…do dee do dee doo, la di da, Sensational, Gestational Diaaaaaabetes! Ah cha chaaaa”

Although it is increasingly popular to call the dance cha-cha, it is really cha-cha-chá.

Air rolled his eyes as he slammed the front door. He didn’t have a pen with him. He’d decided to run home quickly to get something to write with. He was about to take off toward mom’s office but once he heard her singing he couldn’t bear it. It was always the same. Jingle Bells Palsy or Tubaligations at Taco Bell. What a freak. Some mornings when he has slept too hard and has had dreams that woke him up feeling like a different person in a stranger’s home, unable to muster up memories of himself or what day it is or what happened to the world he was just in, he hears the tinny sound of his mother singing “Pop, Pop, Fizz, Fizz, spotting at eight weeks it is, it is,” traveling up the stairs, into his bedroom. This brings the world spinning back round in front of his face and he can remember whether or not he has to go to school or if he can sleep another hour or two.

It takes two to tiptoe, Major Margaret J. "Hot Lips" Houlihan.

When the boy’s mother hears her own singing she is often caught unawares. She believes this happens a few seconds after she begins but often it is a half an hour or even longer later.

Longer Litterbox, Lull, Lull!

When the mother’s boy reads his books in the field among the radishes he often finds a turn of phrase to be interesting and writes it down. When he has no pen, he usually dog-ears the page so that he might return to it later and write out the phrase. What he didn’t realize was that he also always puts the phrase into a familiar melody, usually a T.V. theme song, and sings it over and over again, repeating it until he has written it down in his journal of interesting phrases or sometimes repeating it still, until he has come across another phrase that he finds irresistible. Air was singing such a phrase aloud to himself as he walked up the stairs to his bedroom to retrieve a pen. “I’m pilot-major of a dead fleet,” he sang along to the theme of theme of the X-Files.

Porn Addicts are triple X-philes.

He was making his way through Shogun, James Clavell’s novel of Japan, and while he was reading it he thought at every turn of the page that he might not be able to finish it. He also felt with every turn of the page that he is the only boy his age he knew who would attempt it and this made him feel very superior. Not superior in a bad way though, just better than everyone else his age. Better and smarter and more hardworking.

Saint Hardworking Toikey, chucken.

Air’s mother spent most of her childhood feeling the same way until she met the boy’s father and she realized that there were so many people far better and smarter, faster, leaner, less obvious, cleaner, and with more poise and cunning than she had. She had a child with his father because he made her feel bad about herself. When he died, despite herself, and despite her grief, she began to feel slowly better about herself again. Her son had begun, just prior to this day, in his newly teenaged years, to make her feel worse again.

Finnegan, your tumor is benign again, illoncologically.

They were a dead fleet and they were co-major-pilots. They had quite a few days ahead of them just like this one. Things were predetermined and running downhill.
Maybe I’ll name her Rock. Or Twig. Willow. Will-o’-the-wisp. Clown. A-Wave-Upon-the-Sand.

How do you catch a moonbeam in your hand?