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shrug 03-27-2007 09:22 AM

fragment of "slow reader"
 
This is a small part of the beginning of something I just banged out as a first draft. I am throwing it up now on the off chance someone cares to comment/criticize/call me a loser. So! Inspired by my own bathroom copy of the book in question and reading far too much Borges as of late.

When Jack was growing up the only bathroom in the house had a chromed steel basket hanging on the side of the toilet that only ever contained a single thing: a rather decrepitomnibus edition of The Divine Comedy, its frayed ribbon bookmark moving forward canto by canto, marking the progression of his father's relative continence. Jack never imagined this was unusual until he found a similar basket hanging in his friend Paul's house. He was seven. Paul had turned eight the month before and, though the boys were still only 3 months apart in age had been lording his new number over Jack whenever he could which, with the tact of little boys, proved to be at least once every three minutes. Jack ran the water once he was done washing his hands, and let it run until steam rose form the sink. He looked aside and noticed the basket.
It wasn't chromed. A thin layer of greenish chipped paint covered thin metal bars that seemed like nothing more than bent coat-hangers, formed together into a squat, square insect that hung tenaciously to the side of Paul's toilet. Jack might not have bothered looking closer had he not been so keen on lingering there, safe, for as long as possible; look he did. Inside were three magazines:
"Field And Stream," October 1983
"Field and Stream," June 1979
"Popular Mechanics," the cover so destroyed by moisture he could not find a date.
He dropped them back into the basket and washed his hands again. He declined to stay for dinner that evening, walking the three blocks home in silence, watching the autumn moon rise in the face of the quickly-fading light. He wished he had begged a ride, or worn a jacket.
The cold got to his bladder, and he made a bee-line for the bathroom before he told anyone that he was home. Once there, and done, his eyes rested naturally on the battered Divine Comedy in its shining chromed cage. He had never touched it; though he had never been told not to touch it. Somehow he had lumped it into that category of things that were his father's and only his father's, only to be touched if invited to: his pipe, his watch, the spirits he so rarely drank and the chair so worn in that the only man who could sit in it comfortably was the man himself. But Jack had never seen his father touch the book; the only evidence that he did was the increasingly ragged state of the pages, the cracks in the spine and the slow progression of the bookmark.

Jack slid the volume out gingerly, as if the slightest scrape of book on chrome would bring the entire house down on his head. He laid a hand-towel down on the counter next to the seat and set the book down before carefully opening it.
One the inside of the first page was a faded portrait of the author in profile. Jack looked at this face a long moment before concluding that with the addition of a goatee and horns it would make an excellent portrait of the devil, and his seven year-old brain made him giggle before a stab of guilt strangled it. He leafed through the pages. Canto this, that. A word he didn't know, though he had been told that he was a fine reader for his age. He didn't leaf for long before growing impatient and turning to the bookmarked page. He began reading on the left, his eyes scanning down until they paused arbitrarily. The names made it a struggle, and he had to murmur aloud to himself:

"I saw Thymbraeus, I saw Mars and Pallas,
still armed, as they surrounded Jove, their father,
gazing upon the Giant's scattered limbs.
I saw bewildered Nimrod at the foot
of his great labor; watching him were those
of Shinar who had shared his arrogance.
O Niobe, what tears afflicted me
when, on that path, I saw your effigy
among your slaughtered children, seven and seven!
O Saul, you were portrayed there as one who
had died on his own sword, upon Gilboa,
which never after knew the rain, the dew!
O mad Arachne, I saw you already
half spider, wretched on the ragged remnants
of work that you had wrought to your own hurt!
O Rehoboam, you whose effigy
seems not to menace there, and yet you flee
by chariot, terrified, though none pursues!
It also showed -that pavement of hard stone-
how much Alcmaeon made his mother pay:
the cost of the ill-omened ornament.
It showed the children of Sennacherib
as they assailed their father in the temple,
then left him, dead, behind them as they fled."

Jack didn't think that sounded very comedic at all.
He was uncomfortable as he put the book away, absurdly careful to perfectly match its previous pitch in its basket before he replaced the towel. His discomfort would be felt as punishment, soon enough, for the line he must surely have crossed, and he would not touch the book again for years after he had forgotten why.

Jack was fourteen when he heard about Dante and his Divine Comedy (most of what little focus there was placed, of course, on The Inferno) in the most cursory fashion possible. He was in history class, and the names were lumped in with a half-dozen others he wouldn't remember later for lack of anything to bind his mind to them. But Dante, and the words he barely remembered, read half his brief lifetime ago, sparked an interest and, for the rest of the day, a distraction. The book was still in the bathroom, the ribbon near the end, now, and when he returned home he looked at it for a moment but did not pick it up. When his father came home from work that evening Jack asked him, bluntly and abruptly, why his father's taste in bathroom reading was the way it was.
Well, he was told, I don't read that much.
If the only reading I do is going to be on the can it may as be a classic.

He joked for awhile before turning serious. Jack's grandfather had died when he was an infant, and on that day at age fourteen he learned that The Divine Comedy had been his favorite work, and his father had received his own father's old copy.
It's so hard to get through, Jack. But I feel like I have to finish it for him.
So he left in in the bathroom, read it when he needed to pass the time. The only solution he could find to get past his difficulty with narrative poetry.
Oh Jack had said.
I need to start my homework. Thanks.
Jack would remember this conversation quite vividly seven months later when his father passed away.

lizzle 03-27-2007 10:53 AM

AH! the... near return of the purple fro!... I liked this story, it has potential. I hope the father finished the book, although I have it on good authority that he didn't.

shrug 03-27-2007 02:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lizzle
AH! the... near return of the purple fro!... I liked this story, it has potential. I hope the father finished the book, although I have it on good authority that he didn't.

A thanks for your cursory input from me, your gold-farming device.


(?)

sychobunny 04-25-2007 08:58 PM

decrepit omnibus
Paul had turned eight the month before and, though the boys were still only 3 months apart in age, had been lording his new number over Jack whenever he could which, with the tact of little boys, proved to be at least once every three minutes.
steam rise form
If the only reading I do is going to be on the can it may as well be a classic.
he left it in the bathroom,

Kind of a sad story. At first it was kind of fluffy, but you got to a point in the end.


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