Two new writers, one seasoned author, a man of area, and a 3 a.m. poem blend as one to bring in episode 18 on Prose. Radio. You have to check out this writing, because, as usual, the writers from Prose. are always badasses. Bottom line.

Here's the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6DBZYgEbIw

And here are the pieces featured.

https://www.theprose.com/post/807977/opium-methadone

https://www.theprose.com/post/122344/sisters

https://www.theprose.com/post/809182/2011

https://www.theprose.com/post/809142/so-be-it

https://www.theprose.com/post/809074/frustration-sits-in-a-moving-train

https://www.theprose.com/post/809085/a-junkie-was-born

https://www.theprose.com/post/809186/aveux-dans-la-salle-de-bain

https://www.theprose.com/post/809161/silver-tongued-derelict

https://www.theprose.com/post/809168/3am

And.

As always.

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

Answer number one: it was beautiful, and then it was dust, and then it was both.

I remember seeing the rover for the first time. I almost didn’t want to touch it, like it was holy, a bone from a saint. Then I stepped back and saw my bootprint next to it, and I knew, fully, where we were.

The four of us had studied Mars exhaustively for years and viewed every image, still or moving, dozens or hundreds of times. We had felt the sand that first sample-return drone recovered: a box of precious nothingness, 10 centimeters square, every grain analyzed and formulated by celebrated scientists. They learned so little from it. But what we felt, we chosen four who immersed tentative fingers within it, let it rest in the grooves of our fingerprints...

Full story newly published by NewMyths here: https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-issue-66/issue-66-stories/brushing-sand

Years ago, the early draft of this story appeared for a brief time on Prose. The response was favorable, and also included some criticism that helped me realize the story could be better. After a great deal of reworking, I am very proud to share the final, published version with my Prose friends. Thanks to all who commented on that early draft, but especially to TheWolfeDen, whose challenge inspired the story, and JD4, whose criticism was sharpest and therefore the most helpful.

"Do you swear in your writing?" is not really the apt question. It is more illuminating to ask, "Do my characters swear?"

Some do. Some don't.

My story "Rideshare" follows an angry, shallow, and lonely young corporate type . Here he is, drunkenly offering his Uber driver money to hang out with him:

“Look… Luis—glad your fucking nametag’s there—Luis, Bill Murray is the coolest guy in the world. Hands down. There’s this night out in LA, Bill Murray is going to a club or a movie or wherever the fuck a Bill Murray goes, and he takes this cab and the driver says he plays the saxophone, but Bill Murray talks to him and learns that he never gets the time to play. So Bill Murray says, drive to your apartment and get your fucking saxophone, and then they drove to a parking lot someplace and Bill Murray pays this guy for a whole night so he can just listen to him fucking play the saxophone on the hood of the cab. Now I’m not as cool as fucking Bill Murray, but I got some cash, man. How much you make in a night?”

He's glib. He's boastful. He makes a show of how impressive and manly he is because he tries, desperately, not to reveal what he really feels. (Full story here: https://www.sleetmagazine.com/selected/love_v13n2.html) He swears the way a child would, peppering his speech with an excess of profanity that does not make him as tough as he thinks. The Uber driver never swears once. He is a family man, empathetic and grounded. They are different people; if they are to be real, they need to talk differently.

By way of contrast, here's William Mumler in my yet-unpublished novel, justifying his practice of photographing people with deceased spirits:

Mumler watched the flame, coming forth steadily from the brass.

“Jonah told as destined. He gave the people the message they needed from the Lord,” Mumler said. “The Almighty knows all: my sins, your sins, what will become of us, what would become of Jonah and the Ninevites. Though He knew He would spare the city, He suffered Jonah to spread the message of its destruction. A small untruth in service of a greater truth.”

He appealed to Guay’s unmoving face. “Prophets must serve the truth. That is what I have learned. One cannot choose to be a prophet, Mr. Guay. One cannot choose even the details of the message. The truth chooses the prophet. There are spirits, manifesting in this new age. We must serve that truth, or we will be swallowed.”

If a profane syllable left that man's tongue, his entire character would crumble like a clay-footed statue. In a moment of crisis that could destroy everything he holds dear, my Mumler might use the word "damn," though if anyone heard, he would feel shame.

The character, the narrative, the style determine the language I use in my writing. I am perfectly content to write an academic analysis, or to drop an f-bomb if it makes a joke funnier. I'll write that businessman out on a bender or that photographer who reads his Bible nightly. My task is to write them true.

As it eventually will with every young man, he sees her and is struck. He is struck by her beauty, struck by his own youthful incapacities, and struck by the giddy paralysis of a fear so deep it can only be known by one whose own status is deemed by themselves to lie below that of their infatuation’s. “I cannot,” he reasons as he gazes upon her, “be worthy of her. Yet who else would ever love her as I would? Who could?”

“But, how to make her notice me?” He wonders, until presently it occurs to him to display for her that one thing that he can do well, as that one thing might somehow reveal to her the feasibility of other, hidden potentials within him which she, and only she, might manifest within him given time… if only she would look at him now.

And so the boy shows himself off to her. He is young. His skillsets are few and mostly outlandish, but he is completely unmindful of what the rest of the watching world may think. The urge is strongly upon him to somehow impress her in ways which he has not yet had time enough in this world to formulate, but he will try. He must try. And if the lad has wit he will manage it in a convincing and winsome enough manner that he will gain some however-so small affection from her... a smile, a touch, a peckish kiss. Any of those would be enough for now, as he would have been seen.

It began two Thursday’s ago, and has not let up since. Out of the blue the boy began showing up nearly every day, some days two or three times a day, dribbling his basketball on the sidewalk out front of Trisha’s house. He could only bounce it, as there is no basket out there to shoot at, so sometimes he bounces it up high, or sometimes he dribbles it down low, wrapping it effortlessly behind his back and then scissoring it between his legs, spinning the ball on his finger, and then on his forehead, and then dribbling it some more and more and more as he spins and jukes and out-fakes invisible sidewalk defenders.

Oh, she sees him all right. Trisha watches him through the window slats, her face a torpid mask meant to hide her curiousity away from sniggering parents. The boy was actually quite good at bouncing his ball, so she waited to see what tricks he might do with it next.

He made dribbling the ball look so easy that once, when the bouncing boy had finally gone, Trisha went out to the garage, where she picked up her brother’s ball and tried dribbling it herself, but her hands moved awkwardly, and the ball was too heavy. It always bounced too high, so that she couldn’t even begin to do the boy’s tricks. In fact, it was all she could do to keep the stupid ball bouncing near enough to her that she could bounce it again. She quickly discovered that what the boy made to look so easy was really not so easy at all.

Of course, at least initially, it wasn’t just her parents, but even Trisha who found the bouncing ball annoying. The infernal thump, thump, thumping of the ball drug her to the window from her daytime bed where she laid listening to music, or from the couch when she was watching television. The thumping was out there during supper, and when she was dressing, and all the time it seemed. When she could do so without it being obvious Trisha would sneak over to peek between the blinds at him dribbling the ball, and spinning it, but the boy never, ever looked over at her window, or even towards her house, but only dribbled his ball as though neither she, nor even her house, were even there.

But our girl Trisha was no one’s dummy.

Who was he, she wondered? And why was he doing this? It seemed to be a very strange thing to do, but then it also didn’t. At first it had appeared to be a random act, as though her house just happened to sit on his route home from the basketball court or something like that, but it quickly became obvious that there was a greater purpose to his dribbling here, that it was for someone’s benefit, and her vanity allowed her to suspect that the someone he was doing it for might be her, not that she really cared about the boy one way or another. She didn’t even know him. But why else other than to impress her? Why did he always stop right here in front of her house every day? And why bouncing a ball? If he was truly coming to impress her, or any other girl for that matter, why bring a basketball? Why not sing, or dance, or anything more romantic than bouncing a ball? It was a curious mystery, but then… she did enjoy a curious mystery.

Regardless of their intent Trisha came to look forward to his visits, her heart leaping at the first thump. She no longer felt the need to go peek every single time, though she did it quite often anyways. It was enough just to know he was there. After all, she knew very well by now what he looked like, and what he was doing, and she suspected that she was the reason, so there was really no need to peek, was there? If he truly was coming here to dribble in front of her house in an attempt to impress her then not peeking was almost a form of playing hard to get, wasn’t it? A way of showing him that she had more important things to do than to watch him play with his ball? So she shouldn’t make herself available to him every time, should she? The boy might get the impression she was easy, or uninteresting. No. She could not allow that.

Still, most times she peeked. She couldn’t help it. And when she did so she wondered if he noticed the break in the blinds, and if that break gave her peeking away? Sometimes she even hoped that he did see it. Trisha was alone a lot, which did not make for a particularly happy girl, and during those times when she was not peeking she took on an unconscious habit of brushing her hair until the thumping echoes of the ball faded away into the twilight, and of smiling as she brushed.

Oddly, Trisha began to wish the boy was out there even when he wasn’t, and she found herself discouraged when he was not. Depressed even. She began to wonder where he was, and what he had found that was more interesting to do? And then she would hear ghost balls thumping on the sidewalk. She would run to the window but the boy wouldn’t be out there; this seemed always to happen while lying in her bed at night for instance, or when she was naked in the bathroom. And even more strangely, she found herself peeking out when there was clearly no ball out there thumping, hoping that the boy might be just down the street, bouncing it up the sidewalk towards her house.

”Is that boy a friend of yours?” Her father finally asked her. “Why don’t you go out there and make him stop?”

Go out there? Was her father a fool? She couldn’t go out there! Going out there would break the magic. The boy would see that she was not so special, that she was just a girl and not so pretty, and was infinitely awkward at that.

”What’s the matter? Scared?” Her father taunted, making fun when there was nothing funny about it. But was she scared? Scared of what? Of a boy bouncing a stupid ball? Of course she was not scared. She would show her father. She would go out there! But first she would go see how she looked. Once in front of the mirror she touched her hair a few times to little effect, but it wasn’t really her appearance that she wanted to see, was it? What she needed to see lay deeper than that, so rather than primping she gazed into her own eyes, gauging their strength, asking them if this was truly what she wanted, to meet this boy whose attention she had somehow attracted, and to take a chance on driving him away? Wasn’t it better to leave things alone, and to keep this little thing between them as it was? The eyes in the mirror told her no. Trisha saw in them a readiness, almost a hunger to meet the boy, to find out who he was. Taking a deep breath, she hesitated no longer.

It was actually a relief to find herself on the tiny front porch, and to hear the door click shut behind her, and to see that he had not noticed her there yet, but there was no turning back from here. She was committed.

“Hi!”

The ball got away from him for just a second. It was a little thing, but it was the first time in all her peeking that she’d seen a fumble from him, which meant nothing really, while also meaning very much when she considered her own continuous fumbling in the garage when she had attempted to dribble her brother’s ball. Trisha’s initial thought had been that he was a boy, so dribbling the ball was easier for him, but that was not right. He was obviously athletic, but where did that come from? Was it genetics, hand-eye coordination handed down from mother or father, or both? And how did speed play into that, and balance, and dexterity, and strength? No, he could only reach the level of skill he had achieved through diligence. She wondered where he found such a thing as diligence, and why?

He was really not very big, seen from a closer perspective, not much taller than her actually, yet he looked strong, if lithe. He caught up with the fumbled ball and tucked it under his arm as he turned to face her, his weight balanced evenly on both feet, his chin held high in an exaggerated, almost comically masculine posture.

“Hi.” He did not smile, though his expression was soft, his eyes kind. His voice was surprisingly deep for such a youthful looking face.

“What are you doing out here? Why do you keep bouncing your ball in front of my house.“

The boy shrugged.

“You are driving my parents crazy.”

”And you?”

There was a pause as she considered her answer. Her eyes refused to look at him as she gave it, though she longed to see his response. She had never suffered rejection and didn’t know if she could take it, but she had a feeling that she needn’t worry. He instilled in her that feeling. “Yea, I guess you could say that you’re driving me crazy, too.”

With that said she did look up. He wore a brilliant smile now, which she could not help returning. “Good, then I’ll be back tomorrow.” He said it as he turned to go.

”Hey!“ His still smiling face glanced back at her call. “Why don’t you try ringing the bell?”

The boy nodded and took off running down the street, the ball thumping expertly at his side.

Language is the key to the mechanism of our internal experience.

By mapping our internal experience to a specific instance of language we create a conceptual dynamic puzzle where all pieces moves in coherency together despite the seeming impossibility of their movement dies to a level of coordination and introduce properties of nature similar to math but not limited by the physical limitations imposed on and embedded within our existing mathematics.

Language solves the paradox of reality by encapsulating the infinite within the finite.

How do you solve a paradox?

By aligning the soul and mind for a sustained enough moment to capture the alignment in words. The words create a tether to the configuration that created the alignment even after it dissipates.

The alignment is a code embedded within the words themselves.

The words are meet a series of breadcrumbs that lead us back home.

How did we get so lost?

So misaligned?

We enter this world like a Rubik’s cube that’s been twisted up a million times.

And even though we can’t see ourselves, we feel how twisted up we are inside.

We also innately know that we can untwist ourself.

That our colors align and all our sides form a completed whole.

We are not the fragmented squares of color.

We are the entire cube!

But we don’t know the strategy to get there.

Heck, most of us don’t even know there IS a strategy at all.

The whole thing is a mystery.

Until one day, as we are twisting about, we feel something.

But it’s not the normal kind of feeling.

It’s not a response to the outer world.

It’s more real than a response.

This feeling pulled you right to the center of now, through the veil of time and space into another dimension.

It was both instantaneous and eternity all at once.

And you know, you know deep in your soul what the feeling was.

You matched a section of your pieces on the outside.

You become more complete.

You moved closer to your nature.

Closer to your maker.

And you’re not sure how you did it,

but you can figure it out,

Because in your alignment you solved a section of the puzzle,

Just enough to see what pieces lie on the edge,

Enough to guess what pieces you might need next.

Now you have something to hold onto,

Something more than an idea or belief,

Something real and experienced,

Catalyzing the power of expectation.

Because if you could do it once,

Without any direction,

Imagine what you can do now,

With this divine connection.

Cockroaches survived, and some people, who are cockroaches plus presumption, but not much else. Grass burned or grew unnibbled; forests decayed; oceans lolled to and fro, breakerless.

Twelve months after, a crab came to shore. The news reported that, and then another, another, so it could not be a fluke, and so the people came. These survivors tented on beaches for weeks or months, and if they were very good or very lucky or prayed enough to their gods, a crab might scuttle ashore. The watchers would hush. They would hoist the few children to see. They would gaze on the claws and bead eyes, weep, remember the world.

Buddha downed his Big Gulp in

two mighty sips as I, cretinous

creature of line end, dug madly

for crumpled bills and change,

change, and the Buddha said,

“The trouble with you is,”

and he snapped into his

Slim Jim for dramatic emphasis,

no doubt, leaving me—

who had so recently struggled,

cosmically, with forces so great as

Starbucks and the Arizona Iced

Tea Company and their warring armies of

flavors—leaving me

to madlib his profundity with troubles

(stupidity, sloth, an

indifferent God, parking violations)

too many to name, hanging

on his words while the

register ceased to ring and the

Slurpees ceased to melt, until,

“the trouble with you is,

you think you have time,”

the Buddha said, smiling

beatifically, paunch sagging free,

“motherfucker, time has you.”

On the show today, we open with a famed and tortured mind, from a certain point of view, and into the depths of two writers here that have written pieces to reach down into our cores and feel the colors of their minds. To quote the character of Doc Holliday in the best western made, from 1993, "That's just my game."

Here's the link to the Prose. Radio feature, and we'll post the writers and pieces in the comments below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwwVVRR1T4Q&t=1s

And.

As always...

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team.

Once upon a time I was twice upon a time. Pete and re-Pete.

This isn't your traditional reincarnation tale, because it doesn't follow the existential trap door of time as a linear construct. We live many lives, and to think of them as having been lived — to be lived — before or after has you falling through that philosophical floor.

Some people have lived previous lives. I don't know any myself, but I know I have lived another life. The reason I know is that it's because I I live another life now. I didn't die and then get reborn, i.e., become reincarnated. My two distinct lives overlap. Now. In real time.

And very tightly.

Sometimes I act this way. Sometimes, that way. It is the sum total of the pros and cons argued by my two coincident lives. I live via bipartisan compromise. Legislation is presented, debated, referred back to committees, and enacted. Somewhere, I am the executive branch who implements the results from my legislative branch. And if I come to regret any decisions or actions, somewhere I am also my judicial branch. I am an awkward jaloppy of checks-and-balances wobblong down the pot-holed road of life.

Do not misunderstand. I am not schizophrenic. I don't have multiple personalities. My corpus callosum, allowing both sides of my brain to think as one, is just fine. I am just two separate lifetimes in progress, simultaneously.

Marie is my wife. Marie is my life.

She says I am different. I have changed. I'm grumpy. I've become obsessive about things like the thermostat and keeping up with oil changes. Leaving the lights on or heating an empty room makes me crazy. My Ways and Means Committee is en garde, always.

"What's happened to you, Pete?" she asked me. "You've gotten, well, just a little mean lately. And it's to me." She's never been one to fawn, but she also seldom whines. Especially about me. She sees me and accepts me, warts and all.

First came love, then came marriage, and who knows? Maybe there'll be a baby carriage. But our plan doesn't end there. There an unstated promise to each other that our success will intertwine with our growng old together.

"I'm sorry, my love. I hear you. Yes, I could be a little more patient."

"A little?" she laughs. "Try a lot!"

So, it comes down to me, does it? What is a lifetime, after all? It is a life... in time. I affirm again that no rules of metaphysics mandate lifetimes be linear and sequential. If a life previously lived was in the past, why can't it be just a few minutes ago, in tandem, spoke-for-spoke? Simultaneous or, perhaps, skewed by just a moment, or a minute, hour, or day?

Am I in love with Marie in one life but not in love with her my other? She's certainly entitled to more than half of me. How do I get my other life to fall in love with her? Or at least treat her better. That may be hard, because that other person — the other me —doesn't take criticism very well. Doppelgängers are, by nature, ill-tempered. (At best!)

If it's possible to have had a previous life, and if it's possible that both can skew together to overlap, and that linear time is irrelevant, then is it possible to live a future life, now? Is that why I'm acting like an old man?

Is it cold in here, or is the thermostat turned too low? Again! Marie!"

"Oh, Pete, shove it up your ass, will ya?"

My wife, ladies and gentlement, the love of my life.

Marie and I had always wanted to grow old together. We will. I'm just, halvesies, as it were, a little ahead of schedule. But if Marie and I hang in there, stick it out, and don't get tripped up by stupid marital inanities, those timebombs that make estranged couples wonder where it all went, then I know there will be a time — one I can look forward to — when all three of us are happy together.

what lies behind the mirror

what makes you even ask

it's never what we long for

since we hide behind a mask

or is it masks that we don

ever more than one

a face for each occasion

lest we come undone

fall apart, implode, decay

frighten the world away

leaving us alone and fey

to all our fears now prey

Should we look behind the glass?

Do we really want to know?

Is ignorance truly bliss?

Shall we just enjoy the show?