Donal Mahoney: A Previous Life

It was their wedding night and Priya didn’t want to tell her new husband all about it but Bill kept asking where she had learned to walk like that. Finally she told him it was inherited from a previous life, a life she had lived many years ago in India, not far from Bangalore. She had been a cobra kept in a charmer’s basket.

When the charmer found a customer, usually a Brit or Yank, he would play his flute and Priya would uncoil and rise from the basket. Her hood would swell and she would sway as long as the customer had enough money to keep paying the charmer. She never tried to bite a customer but some of the men weren’t the nicest people in the world. You think they would know better than to tease a cobra.

Being a charmer's cobra was Priya’s job for many years until she finally grew weary of the tiny mice her keeper would feed her so she bit him and he died. His family had Priya decapitated but she was born again later in a small village, this time as a human, a baby girl. After she matured into a young woman, she had a walk, men said, reminiscent of a cobra's sway.

Priya told Bill she had been married many times in India, England and the United States but always to the wrong man. She would give the men time to correct their behavior but none did. As a result of their failure, she bit them with two little fangs inherited from her life as a cobra. They were hidden next to her incisors. Death was almost instantaneous.

No autopsies were ever performed. Death by natural causes was always the ruling. Priya, however, would move to another state or country before marrying again. 

She told Bill she hoped he would be a good husband because she didn’t want to have to move again. She wanted to put down roots and have children. She was curious as to whether they would walk or crawl or maybe do both. But Bill had heard enough. He was already out of bed, had one leg in his tuxedo pants and soon was running down the hall of the 10th floor of the Four Seasons Hotel. He had his rented patent leather shoes in one hand and an umbrella in the other in case he ran into a monsoon.

Roy Dorman: It Could Have Been Anybody

Eleanor liked to tell people
that she knew everybody in town.
She would tell anybody who would listen
that she could never live in a big city.
“You wouldn’t even know
all of the people on your block,”
she would exclaim with a theatrical shudder.

Not everybody liked it
that Eleanor shared information
she had about anybody with everybody.

“Well, if you don’t have anything to hide,
you don’t have anything to worry about,”
she would spout while looking you in the eye.

Tonight, while getting ready for bed,
she was stabbed in the heart
by one of the town’s anybodys
who had been hiding in her closet.

Even as she was dying,
a satisfied sigh escaped her;
she had known her assailant all of his life.
Why just this morning
she had been talking about him
to his pretty wife, Mary.

“I’m glad I had the chance to talk to her
about his foolin’ around
with that hussy, Melissa Baines.”

As to who killed Eleanor?
Everybody in town knew
that almost anybody could have done it.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya: The Story of a Banana Tree

I was two feet tall when I stood surrounded by my brothers and sisters in the backyard of a deserted house. My mother stood huge and protective over all of us. There were mango trees and guava trees spread protectively near us.

In winters I was protected from frost and in summers from the severe sun. Whenever it was unbearably dry, it rained and I soaked in as much water as I could, to keep me alive during the issuing dry months.

One day the doors and windows of the abandoned house opened and we could tell that a family has moved in. There was a young lady and a little girl who stood at the door and gazed and gazed thoughtfully at all of us. We stood huddled together in the middle expectantly.

It was still winter. Two weeks after they arrived, in the middle of a sunny afternoon there came a hoard of men with axes and climbed up the mango trees.

Within a few hours almost all the branches of the mango and guava trees were chopped off. They carried away the logs and brushed aside the evergreen leaves in a huge pile just outside the boundary wall.

They left only the tops of the huge trees green. But it was not enough for us. We were now open to the cold blasts of the winter months.

As winter gave way to spring the ground around us was covered with many saplings of mango, guava, Jamun and many unnamed shrubs. The balsam and canna plants turned up and there were tiny shoots of tomato and brinjal too. It was a thick growth of foliage all around us.

The man of the house surveyed the backyard often. He prodded the small saplings with his big foot with curiosity. From his expression we could tell that he was trying to make up his mind.

Then our downfall began.

They hired a gardener.

The gardener came twice in a week with his sharp spade and large scissors. He began by attacking the bushes with his scissors. Then he trimmed the hedge.

One day, early in the morning, he brought along a friend and a couple of ploughs. The two of them hit the ground with vehemence and within an hour, cleared the ground of all its tender saplings. We stood there shivering with fear, but he spared us and the small litchi tree.

That day, the gardener and his friend planted selection grass all around us. The owner of the house watered the ground and very soon the grass spread all over the place in a lush green evenness.

The little girl and her mother played around us and took out garden chairs to sit near us.

We were very happy.

But our happiness lasted only for a couple of months. I noticed that the gardener was hostile towards the banana trees in particular. We heard him arguing with the lady that we were untamed plants and we did not allow the grass around us to grow thick. We sucked up all the water and hardened the earth near us.

The lady protested in our favour. She said we were venerable and we would bear fruit one day. So the gardener offered a compromise. He took her permission to remove some of us.

We stood huddled together is utter despair. It was a lonely night with no one to come to our aid. We waited for our doom.

The man of the house surveyed us the next day and pointed towards me. Leave this one, he said and went back into the house.

While I stood panting, the gardener uprooted all my brothers and my aged mother and flung them over the boundary wall, right before my eyes. That day my leaves drooped with sorrow but no one cared.

My leaves. A banana tree has a tender trunk and much of its strength depends on the balance of its leaves. I stood alone, next to a litchi tree which was just a baby. I drank up as much water as I could and shot my leaves in all directions for support.

But the horrible gardener loved the grass he had planted and hated me. Every now and then he chopped off one of my leaves with his sharp spade. Every time he cut off one of my limbs I tottered and swooned.

I was growing taller day by day. It was when I stood eight feet tall that I felt the first pangs of pregnancy. I took more nourishment from the earth. I could not bear more leaves. I leaned a little on the still tender litchi tree. It was the beginning of the rainy season. All my strength was drained in giving birth.

Finally, next to my heart there emerged a large fruit. It contained the grain of a hundred bananas. My entire focus was to give them as much nourishment as possible. My skin grew rough. My arms toughened. My roots spread out. I towered above the guava tree and stood braving the rains.

It was not easy. With no leaves to prepare my food and no shelter from the mango trees, I had to lean more and more on the little litchi tree for support. As my fruits grew bigger, I was bent by their weight.

I cried out to my brothers and sisters in agony when the rains drenched me for nights without reprieve. I pleaded with god to protect me and my fruits from imminent disaster. I prayed for more strength and more nutrition. My entire body ached with the load and everyone in my surroundings could hear the groans of my labour.

Finally, in the last days of fruit-bearing, my feet gave way and I fell during the raging storm in the middle of the night. The members in the house heard a loud thud and lit their lamps. But in the storm no one came to my aid.

I lay there till the next afternoon, when the gardener came. He and the owner cursed me, spat on the ground and hit me with their feet. They said, I was useless. I was unfit for fruit-bearing. I was a burden on the ground.

They cursed and cursed. The gardener gave vent to his pent up anger. He said, it ruined the hedge. It ruined the grass. It spoiled the beauty of the garden. It was wild.

And it hurt me most when he said that my fruits would have never been edible either.

But there I was lying helpless. A neighbour came and advised that I could be made to stand up on crutches. My roots were still alive and they may find ground again if I stood up.

But the vengeful gardener, who loved his grasses more made a wry face and declared: the tree is as good as dead. Let’s uproot it and throw it away.

The lady hurriedly said, maybe we can wait till its fruits grow big enough. But the man shook his head thoughtfully and said, No, the fruits would not be worth the price we’d have to pay. Do as you think fit. The gardener nodded with triumph in his eyes.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya is a poet of long standing. Her first book of poems was published in 1998. Since then she has been widely anthologized. Recently, she has published several short stories and a novel The Road Taken. The novel discusses many features of contemporary life neatly packed in the plot of a love story. Her other novel is titled One Word; an excerpt has been published in Indian Review. Both the novels have been published by Creative Crows Publishers, New Delhi, INDIA. 
Apart from two academic books, titled The Lacanian Author and Twentieth Century European Literature, she has published Fifty Five Poems, Knots and Lofty - to fill up a cultural chasm from Writers Workshop, Kolkata, INDIA.  She is Assistant Professor of English in PG Government College, Chandigarh, INDIA. She lives with her husband and daughter in Chandigar

Donal Mahoney: In the Wake of Technology

Forty years ago, David Germaine had been an editor with a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in a large city. After that, he had worked at many smaller papers in smaller cities because if one wanted to work for a newspaper, one had to go where the work was. And David loved newspapers.

As computers took over the newspaper business, reporters still wrote but often it was some new software that “edited” their copy, checking for spelling and grammatical mistakes but not always with accuracy. At some papers not yet fully transitioned to computers, human editors were still needed. More and more, however, as the software continued to improve, editors in cities, towns and villages grew fewer in number. And mistakes in newspapers became greater in number. 

David is now retired and living on a small farm, "far from the madding crowd," as the title of a novel by Thomas Hardy once put it. He was surprised, then, when he received an email from a publisher whose books he had arranged reviews for over the years at different papers. Once again, the publisher was seeking publicity for a new book. This time, he wanted to know if David could get in touch with some of his old friends at that Pulitzer Prize-winning paper to see if someone would review his book and generate some potentially profitable publicity. As with newspapers, book publishers, those still in the business, exist to make a profit. 

David thought about how long ago he had worked at that paper and he wondered about the people he knew there. He hadn’t heard from any of them in years. So he turned to the Internet to see if he could find some of them. What he found made his response to the book publisher easy to write in some respects but not so easy in others. 

“Mark, I’m afraid the book editor I worked with at that paper has been dead for years. In fact, an Internet search indicates the movie critic, television critic, features editor and Sunday magazine editor are dead as well. 

"The editor-in-chief, however, is still alive. I made a few phone calls and found that he is on a respirator in a nursing home in New York and will move into hospice soon. He always hired the best young people he could find and then worked them to death until they left for a better or lesser position. He was a brilliant editor but a miserable human being. Still, I’m sorry to see him go.

“I thought maybe the paper’s gossip columnist could help but he’s passed away too. He was hit by a truck while crossing an intersection. It’s true he ruined many a reputation and was mourned by few. There was no funeral according to the news item I found. His wife had him cremated. But he’s still thought of by many as the best gossip columnist ever to work that vile beat.

"Everyone else on that paper, I suspect, is dead as well or at best retired. Except for me out here in the country and the editor-in-chief on the respirator, I don’t know of another survivor from that staff. It’s still amazing how many Pulitzers they won.

"For some reason, I’m still in pretty good health, free of stents and joint replacements, perhaps because I quit drinking and smoking in 1959. That was the day I married a woman who bore five children in a little more than six years. She’s dead now too. She had a stroke in the kitchen making waffles two days into her retirement. She never got up. I saw her arm move on the floor but she was dead by the time the paramedics arrived. It’s just me in this big farmhouse now but I’m pretty good with a microwave. How did we live without microwaves in the old days, another miracle of technology?

“Although I’d love to help with the book, you can see I’m not currently in the swim of things at any paper. And as you know, it’s not a good time for newspapers. Many of them have died and others are on a respirator. People get their news on the Internet now or on television although some folks buy a paper just to read the funnies, obits and sports scores.

“If anyone I worked with back then is still in that newsroom, I’m afraid it’s because co-workers haven’t caught the stench yet or found the dust.

"I wish you the best with the book. In the attachment you sent, I can see that it underscores the role euthanasia now plays in end-of-life care. In the newspaper industry, there’s no need for euthanasia. Papers are dying regularly as a result of technology while the lives of people are sometimes saved by it. Even though I subscribe to the one newspaper still published in our area, I go online first thing in the morning to check the obituaries and sports scores. But I never did read the funnies.”

John Pursch: Miss Rhoda Dendrite

“I feel a tarantula of sartorial toroidal backplane
Beauregardial conclave contamination girth-wide
propeller notions crawlin’ up muh backside
et this very momentous hocked-up caisson,”
mumbled Roto Stellar Plebeian Monocle Head,
the Second Pearl of Dirty Sandwich Skylight
Seashore Pasture-Blaster Quotient Filth,
alias Forthright Frankfurter the Unknown Goblet-Spewin’
Canned Testicle Tumbler From Bicuspid Salad Slouch Control.

“Whale, my simian approximation ova
hand-crampin’ crampon stew stoolie pageant
runner-up from East Side lechery’s societal embargo,”
began his sun-kissed sidekick,
Miss Rhoda Dendrite Hand-Tendon Calling Saucepan
Deliciosa en Triplicate per Furry Hound Ferocity
(told separately to flashy underarm decortication
mist enforcers from healthy huffing sway
hosiery haunts clear acrostic the floozy’s
frozen Hindlegian Hannibal Quartet
of Quicksand Island Onset Sheen).

Bet before she could even squirm out
an altered whirl of ordinary concocted syllables,
why thet thar Second Pearl of Hamwich
he chest bolloxed his fat yap clean open
and opined at tweed the spice of soundly
graven adversarial traduction:

“Queued a lewd lead-in
if I does spay so meshelf,
heaven fur such a wobbly
wand wieldin’ beautician has yerself
from lonely isthmus carrion kits
in deepest pie land tractor ruts,
whad bean owned and solid sold
so mangy times to turd party semblances
of actuarial merchant magazine salesmen
on chunky vomit junkets from Nude Hexagain
stakeout border parole confabulation trysts.”

Rhoda tugged her happy popcorn tourney t-shirt,
courtesy of curtseyed biplane miscreants
in leering Cheerio outfits
(wad with skirts clear up to their
so-balled navel engagements
in entrecotes fer fuzzy vestibular henchmen
wrench socket routines gone crampy
this dime-droppin’ time o’ the slippery old
toothless mouth of Trenchfoot March);

well, she dud indeed shabbily grab
the hopalong copper tune’s itsy bitsy flashpoint’s
iterative gerrymandered periscope ground
to say her hairpiece afore randy ole Rotating Frankfurter
could fart up another blast o’ heated peanut heresy,
but wad weed this adhering gushy preamble
tokin’ up so much oven smoke,
well I just overwrote her familial diatribe
strayed into its own redaction mythos byproduct!

Wade, wade, canoe ya nose that jest wooden be fair,
Ferris, or even felicitous, of antsy heft sway
descending author (latter loan spittle bowl me)
so here comes Rhoda ‘round the human cartwheel
of fortunate imbibement circumstellar
Punic brothel wax retardant
smothering bottle hamster tongue…

and hair’s wad she had to slay:

“Firstly, lemme tank hallow the tropes who fought
so bravely at the Battle of Scuttlebutt Bridge last night;
heavenly swan o’ ewe deserves a metallic udder
of condemnation and savory mystical
counterparts to clover fer your assets
in the hairy after partisan heifer warfare
(known farcically and wide-eyed as the
Glorious Cavalcade of Ascending Doughboy Holes).”

Here she paused to truncate
each and heavy ivory-collared short arm,
wad amounted to over a thousand headless corsets
and bloomin’ corsages of anything but bloodless
strumpet soup tureens, wet with spurtin’ sallow pustules
flowin’ ground the cock crow’s towering sin fer nose guards,
cantaloupes, and miraculously whipped
shaving crematoria vacuums.

Ceremony thus completed,
she canned her retinue and curried comely on:
“Snow whar wuz I? Whoa yeah: puddin’ that
Goblet-Spewin’ Testicular Tumbleweed
name o’ Roto Frankfurter the Second
Pearl of Sandy Hamwich
in his proverbial placemat burial clown!
Howitzer coulda hand one sever forget-me-snot
wince they gut such a juicy target inner sleight o’
ninety-nine tracer bullet bonanza blunt?”

At this admittedly long-drawn
and quarterly bastardized sled ride
of a sledgehammered lead-in,
Frankfurter couldn’t help but blanche,
quail, crap his boots, ooze the rankest
postprandial demitasse of heavyweight insipidity
known to mangy breasts from hair
to Chatty Mandarin Duplicity’s Two-Bitten
and Distraught Conquered District
(Flea to Bituminous Cuckoldry).

Bet croppin’ his hairline
black to the stunned saga
wooden-a-shaved him from
the compounding garter-foundling
(nod to menschen fondling)
tat war crumblin’ his whey.

And so good Rhoda,
Miss Dendritic Overshoe herself,
in truly dewy dime-droppin’
drag-crazin’ beer-quakin’ frenzy,
filially delivered whad can homely be culled the cure de crass,
mire than sham biologically loppin’ luft the swollen head,
green-sleevin’ that pure solid Frankfurter
oozin’ moustache mustard, mumbly-Peggity moutardant
sand feathered featurettes of sighing gland solipsism
from pier to shinnying wharf rat riot gear
in cheesy cold townhome Cleaverland,
bakin’ the eyeballs clean outa Cistern Butter Frack-along’s
snowy grifter populace entrainment camps,
‘cross burbled wire in wizened tertiary sailor nuts,
flossed to geese retainer continental scum tracts
and foul-weird thrivers on repast immortality
deduction fruit encampment drool.


John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in many literary journals. A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available in paperback at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. His pi-related experimental lit-rap video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc. He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.