4/22 - Bittersweet World
Today I’m not allowed to play out in the yard instead I’m stuck inside looking after Ilya while Ma and Pa go into town to fetch a doctor. I’m just inside stuck wondering how much longer I’ll have to stay sitting next to Ilya in the corner. It’s so boring when all you can do is watch him and do nothing! Whenever we play hide and go seek, he'll never go hide on me, he just stays right where he is in plain sight hoping I won’t find him there. I’m so mad! I left my big red ball outside yesterday; I could be playing with it instead of tossing my eyes around trying to catch Ilya's.
Today Ma’s belly got bigger and even rounder than my ball! She waddles around the kitchen most of the days cooking, back and forth between the box of potatoes and the burner. Sometimes she balances a few loose yams on the baby that is sticking out of her when she can’t handle them all with her own small hands.
Can’t tell how long they’ve been gone for. Half of today maybe… hard to tell time when you can’t see the sun and don’t really know where it is. The sun doesn't make us warm much, Ma says it's since we started living under a tint green sky, one that's nothing like the one my Pa explains to us in the stories he grew up on, he says he loved how the sky was blue back before I was born and how it made the pastures a sweet green and he can't understand this new world he doesn't love the green on top, the brown on the bottom. Its just always been like this way for me and for Ilya too but he's still too young to notice.
And I’ve never told Pa but I think it’s nice the way it is. The sky's speckled all the rainbow colors if you look hard enough. Today, there are pink dots over a grayish streak I can see through the window, it's stretching toward the city. Sometimes it almost looks clear, like you can see through the whole thing, except on the other side it’s nothing so you just keep on seeing through it. I like these days the best.
I’m writing down to myself what I won’t say out loud to my family or anyone else: that I am different than my Pa’s favorite color sky. If he ever found out I’m afraid he’d get drunk at me. He gets drunk at anyone who disagrees with him or ever does anything wrong and I don’t like it when he gets drunk!. I can never tell what makes him get drunk but one minute we’re all babbling on about the Americans and the rocks they live under with their silver teeth, golden teats and our kitchen table, the only piece of furniture we’ve got left to burn next winter, and suddenly it’s tipped over and Pa’s up and drunk again. You can tell by the way he carries on yelling, pointing his thick fingers up in the air to swearing to god and hitting Ma with dinner plates.
After dinner yesterday, he helped Ma pick up the plate pieces hugging and kissing her broken forehead and letting blood trickle down the side of her cheek and reminding us how we’re about to have a miracle. How we gotta keep praying and sending thoughts and praise to god and at bedtime he demanded us go to bed singing me, Ma and Ilya and we couldn't sing just anything either, we had to sing the song Pa'd wrote for us. Our hymn:
“Survive Hell on Earth! Survive Hell on Earth!”
Over and over and over I marched to the sound of my own voice echoing off the wall on the other side of the house and I crawled into bed before I got to waiting for Ilya to stop making choking sounds and hanging his tongue out of his mouth. He was still at the table looking up at the ceiling with his hands stretched straight up, clawing the air, scratching at it with his dirty nails. Pa yelled his name and Ilya didn’t flinch. Pa struck his temple with a broomstick and Ilya slept on the kitchen floor.
*author's note:
Any feedback for the roughest of drafts would be immensely appreciated as I am stabbing at complete and utter darkness in attempts to write this fiction!
I have found few facts to base my characters on, for those of you who are unfamiliar with them, they are based on the members a recently unearthed Russian doomsday cult, who have been trickling out of a rabbit hole after six months straight waiting for the apocalypse.
Since so little has been said about these disappointed Freds and Nancys, I began to make them up from scratch. For now, all persons who have been depicted in this narrative are above ground.
20080425
20080422
Dreams of Heaven
"This one, this easy charge, of all the trees
In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So various, not to tasted that only Tree
Of Knowledge planted by the Tree of Life.
So near grows death to life, whate’er death is" (Milton, 4:421-425)
The shuffle down the stairs was hasty as to make it to the table by eight, in order to make it to the bus stop by eight twenty-five. A small figure, a child if you like, tumbled into the kitchen. Lucky for him the bus stop was at the end of the driveway. A reach to the cabinet for cereal, and a bowl, the spoon was laid out already by his mum. A newpaper sat untouched at the table, a cascade of milk fell over small rings until it reached the brim.
Simultaneously he shoved the spoon into the bowl with one hand and unfolded the newpaper with the other. Looking to the small print and feeding himself blindly the child began to carefully scan the fragments on the front page. He sits on his feet and rocks forward, pushing the paper from the side of his bowl to right in front of it. Suspending his torso over the cereal bowl, he begins to read:
"Texas Polyamy Raid May Pose Risk" is the first headline on page A1. The word polygamist, the name “Short Creek” and the phrase Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in their uncertainty intrigue the tiny figure. Like a plate techtonic he shifts back to spoon another bite into his gob. Uncertainty begets significance, and the wheels start turning inside his imagination as he begins construct a blueprint for the bridge which will make the world traversable.
They call these children latch-key children, and I am not sure if they still exist. I speak from experience when I describe the small key which attached to a key ring built into an L.L. Bean backpack, the kind every fourth grader had. A child, a key and absent parents render a latch-key kid, and our present subject is just that. He rocks forward again, the next healine finds:
"Two Russian Cult Members 'Died Underground'". Suddenly there was a new space the bridge had to consider, the underground. The article threatened that the end of the world was near. Our latch-key child felt a cold stream rush up his spine. To calm the rapids he decided that this threat was specific to another world, a magical world, Russia. It was not the world he knew that was ending, Russia was ending, the only way in was the underground, and before he could finish reading the article he wondered, who would save them?
In this moment he carelessly dropped the spoon into the bowl, milk splashed across the print. The tiny words on pages A1, A2 and A3 mingled in a murky spot of grey. He imagined the walls and the ceiling of the underground to be paved with murky newsprint, and all of Russia to flooding milk, dripping into the underground. He desperately needed to begin work on a bridge, he needed to fit the fragements together, he needed to answer the questions that begin with why?
He glanced back over the first article and saw that 416 children were removed from the polygamist compound because a 16-year old had called on a cellphone, probably from Russia, in a cry for help. He began to piece it all together. The 16-year old called her friends in Texas to come save her from the end of the world. Since two had died already she called for a herd of children to enter into Russia through the murky underground and rescure her from the end of the world.
After sorting this out our latch-key child looked to the clock and saw that the big hand almost touched the five. He hesitated, then felt confident that he had build a solid bridge between two fragments, and so he closed the newspaper quickly, grabbed his bag and left his cereal bowl half eaten at the table. He rushed out the door and ran up the stairs of the bus and sat in the second seat where he always sat, ready to begin another schoolday, knowing that the fragments of the world did indeed fit together in some way, but that if he were to sort it all out he would have to begin waking up earlier. During the bus ride he daydreamed about the way in which the fragments from the F section of the paper could complete the fragments from the A section of the paper.
The next morning his mum will sit at the same table in the same chair. She will not eat breakfast this morning, she is filled with an emptiness, there are no fragments left on the ground, only ashes, complete separation. She will rock heartbroken over the paper, and will read, "Third Grader Kills Two Classmates".
***This is the fanciful rough draft***
In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So various, not to tasted that only Tree
Of Knowledge planted by the Tree of Life.
So near grows death to life, whate’er death is" (Milton, 4:421-425)
The shuffle down the stairs was hasty as to make it to the table by eight, in order to make it to the bus stop by eight twenty-five. A small figure, a child if you like, tumbled into the kitchen. Lucky for him the bus stop was at the end of the driveway. A reach to the cabinet for cereal, and a bowl, the spoon was laid out already by his mum. A newpaper sat untouched at the table, a cascade of milk fell over small rings until it reached the brim.
Simultaneously he shoved the spoon into the bowl with one hand and unfolded the newpaper with the other. Looking to the small print and feeding himself blindly the child began to carefully scan the fragments on the front page. He sits on his feet and rocks forward, pushing the paper from the side of his bowl to right in front of it. Suspending his torso over the cereal bowl, he begins to read:
"Texas Polyamy Raid May Pose Risk" is the first headline on page A1. The word polygamist, the name “Short Creek” and the phrase Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in their uncertainty intrigue the tiny figure. Like a plate techtonic he shifts back to spoon another bite into his gob. Uncertainty begets significance, and the wheels start turning inside his imagination as he begins construct a blueprint for the bridge which will make the world traversable.
They call these children latch-key children, and I am not sure if they still exist. I speak from experience when I describe the small key which attached to a key ring built into an L.L. Bean backpack, the kind every fourth grader had. A child, a key and absent parents render a latch-key kid, and our present subject is just that. He rocks forward again, the next healine finds:
"Two Russian Cult Members 'Died Underground'". Suddenly there was a new space the bridge had to consider, the underground. The article threatened that the end of the world was near. Our latch-key child felt a cold stream rush up his spine. To calm the rapids he decided that this threat was specific to another world, a magical world, Russia. It was not the world he knew that was ending, Russia was ending, the only way in was the underground, and before he could finish reading the article he wondered, who would save them?
In this moment he carelessly dropped the spoon into the bowl, milk splashed across the print. The tiny words on pages A1, A2 and A3 mingled in a murky spot of grey. He imagined the walls and the ceiling of the underground to be paved with murky newsprint, and all of Russia to flooding milk, dripping into the underground. He desperately needed to begin work on a bridge, he needed to fit the fragements together, he needed to answer the questions that begin with why?
He glanced back over the first article and saw that 416 children were removed from the polygamist compound because a 16-year old had called on a cellphone, probably from Russia, in a cry for help. He began to piece it all together. The 16-year old called her friends in Texas to come save her from the end of the world. Since two had died already she called for a herd of children to enter into Russia through the murky underground and rescure her from the end of the world.
After sorting this out our latch-key child looked to the clock and saw that the big hand almost touched the five. He hesitated, then felt confident that he had build a solid bridge between two fragments, and so he closed the newspaper quickly, grabbed his bag and left his cereal bowl half eaten at the table. He rushed out the door and ran up the stairs of the bus and sat in the second seat where he always sat, ready to begin another schoolday, knowing that the fragments of the world did indeed fit together in some way, but that if he were to sort it all out he would have to begin waking up earlier. During the bus ride he daydreamed about the way in which the fragments from the F section of the paper could complete the fragments from the A section of the paper.
The next morning his mum will sit at the same table in the same chair. She will not eat breakfast this morning, she is filled with an emptiness, there are no fragments left on the ground, only ashes, complete separation. She will rock heartbroken over the paper, and will read, "Third Grader Kills Two Classmates".
***This is the fanciful rough draft***
Can You Guys Cut This Thing Up For Me?
(Account of a creative writing workshop in Rhode Island)
By Chris Cleave
[STARTS]
[ENDS]
Chris Cleave
Rhode Island and London, April 2008
By Chris Cleave
[STARTS]
“For the most part we have made the beasts of fancy in our own image--far more cruel and bloodthirsty, that is to say, than the actual "lower animals". The dragons of the Western world do evil for evil's sake; the harpy is more terrible than the vulture, and the were-wolf is far more frightful than the wolf. Almost the only beast that kills for the pure joy of killing is Western civilized man, and he has attributed his own peculiar trait to the creatures of his imagination. There are a few exceptions, however, to this rule that our projection of ourselves is lower than the facts of Nature, and the unicorn--noble, chaste, fierce yet beneficent, altruistic though solitary, strangely beautiful--is the clearest exception of all. The unicorn was not conceived in fear. Our early sense of Nature's majesty and mystery is revealed in him. If he came from Ur of the Chaldees, where the moon was a friend to man always contending against the demoniacal sun and the powers of darkness alike, his constant benevolence is more readily understood; but whatever may have been his first local habitation and whatever was his original name, this "airy nothing" was born and bred in the human mind. There are times when one takes hope and comfort in remembering the fact.”
- From "Lore of the Unicorn" by Odell Shepard, 1930
Shannon says, I mean I’ve studied these things, and the thing you learn is, you don’t ever pick the date. Right? I mean you can tell your followers the world is going to end, you just shouldn’t ever name the actual day it’s going to end on. Cause then they can hold you to it.
And she sits there holding the rest of us with this very calm expression she has, a look in her eyes like someone sounding a brass bell on a grey New England morning, and everyone nods because what she spoke, frankly, has a ring of the absolute truth to it. You never pick the date.
By way of an aside, Shannon tells the group that she works weekends in a café called The Butcher Shop or The Abattoir or The Slaughterhouse – I forget exactly which – but some name that makes it possible at a stretch for a guy in a lumberjack shirt to walk into the place early one morning with seventy pounds of bleeding deer slung over his shoulder and ask, Can you guys cut this thing up for me?
And although the establishment is absolutely a café – with the panini bread stacked in big wicker baskets behind the counter, and the pickles and the cold cuts all laid out in white ceramic dishes ready for use, and the little tipping tin beside the cash register with the handwritten sign taped to it saying THANK YOU – although this place could not to any lesser extent resemble a one-stop carcass shop, Shannon decides to ask her manager if it might be possible to accommodate the gentleman’s request.
I guess she does this out of kindness. With those calm eyes she looks at the guy and she perceives that the guy knows, the second he sets foot inside that oddly misnamed café, that he’s come to the wrong place. But his question was already half-formed on his lips when he saw the café’s sign and pulled in. He’d been rehearsing it behind the wheel of his pick-up while the dawn broke and he drove back from the woods into the city of Providence. Trying to get the shake out of his voice; trying to get the question to sound nonchalant. Like this wasn’t the first time he’d tracked and killed a deer. Like he didn’t have a moment of regret as the light faded from the animal’s eyes. Like he wasn’t sad and pale with sleep deprivation; like he did this every day; like he knew exactly what the hell to suddenly do with a warm, bleeding body that weighed the same as his ten-year-old boy. Hey, can you guys cut this thing up for me? And even now it’s a sandwich shop, the guy can’t help blurting out his question.
And Shannon relays the question to her manager – even though she knows her manager is going to stare back at her for a full minute with an expression approaching pity – and she does it so as to not make the man in the lumberjack shirt feel like he’s all alone. To share the feeling that someone else – even someone else who actually works in the café, for goodness sakes – might allow in her own mind too some possible ambiguity concerning the place’s function; some ambiguity that was not immediately dispelled by the rows of gherkins and the salad onions glistening in their jars. In these situations human solidarity is important, and someday you hope some other human will return the favor. Because you never know the day when you’ll walk into the wrong shop yourself. You never pick the date.
Can you guys cut this thing up for me? Today we’re assembled for a creative writing workshop, so the thing is every human story and we’re going to need to slice and dice it somehow. How we started this was to find ourselves some news articles. Free choice. We went out into the wilds of the news media and we bagged ourselves one each and we walked into this class with seventy pounds of story.
I already mentioned Shannon. Shannon puts the same care into her story selection that she gives to making sandwiches at the café. She is calm and methodical and she takes pride in the small things. Her news story is called The Replaceable You. It’s about all of the body parts you can swap out of homo sapiens and still have a human being. The article doesn’t mention how to save human face, but I would imagine that voluntarily asking one’s café manager whether the establishment can eviscerate and butcher a wild deer – I imagine that would count.
Then there’s Stephanie. She looks at all the stories in the paper and none of them does quite what she’s looking for and so she’s unafraid to bring in a pictorial piece instead, a charity advertisement from the back of the paper, and she is absolutely right because the piece is mesmerizing. There are six kids with cleft palates, smiling, or making whatever that unpronounceable expression is that can only be made with a three-cornered mouth. And the headline is haunting: Each Of These Kids Needs Someone Who Cares Enough To Send $250 Once.
That gets us talking about children, and Astrid has come up with a winner; one of those stories you could tell a dozen ways up and make it darker every time. A bunch of third-graders in Georgia conspires to kill their teacher with a paperweight and a steak knife and some tape and a pair of handcuffs and I forget what else. I mean, that’s quite enough already. The thing is, each of the kids is assigned to bring in one item, like a macabre show-and-tell, and their roles fit perfectly together into a textbook execution. It’s the opposite of the lone gunman: single target, incorporated assassin. The teacher has unjustly scolded one of the student body, and so in an expression of human solidarity as admirable in its own way as asking your boss about butchering a deer, the kids are going to tie up their teacher and concuss her with the paperweight and then stab her to death with the steak knife. It’s nothing if not systematic. There is absolutely no way the teacher is walking away from this. She’s staying after class. The kids have even delegated one of their number to be the cleaner. The plan is inch-perfect and it’s only through treachery that they are rumbled. And the kicker is that this is a special class: these young team players are supposed to have learning difficulties. When doomsday dawns the meek shall rise up and inherit the earth. Their teacher would have driven into school, blissfully aware today was not like every other day. Nobody picks the date.
Next there is Jenna, and you don’t argue with Jenna, or at least I don’t because she’s too smart. I brought in a story of my own earlier this week, a novel I wrote three years ago, and I guess I basically arrived with it slung over my shoulder asking if anyone could cut it up for me, and Jenna took a good look at it and said, sure, and handed it back to me in neat Ziploc bags all ready for the freezer. I believe this is known as literary criticism. It was a pretty damned professional job, if you ask me, and it’s a famously elusive novel so I wonder how she went about it. Tied it down and laid into it with a paperweight and steak knives, maybe. And Jenna’s article is about a doomsday cult of 25 adults and four children who’ve barricaded themselves in a cave near the Volga river. Following Astrid’s lead we start talking about the children and what’s going on in their minds, down there in the dark. It’s not looking great for them, in all honesty. Their leader is Pyotr Kuznetsov, and he says the world will end in May, and he does not appear to have left instructions regarding why it will be helpful to be twenty feet underground at that time. Kuznetsov is described in the article as a professional engineer, and described by Shannon as a total amateur cultist because, as she says, you never pick the date.
You could say this group is drawn to the extremes. Sarah has brought in a cult story too. And it’s a great choice, this one; another of those stories you could tell and re-tell, and she goes through it with fine skill, picking up on all the angles that make it come alive as a story. The hand-sewn, ankle-length dresses. The hair tied up in braids. And best of all, the name of the ranch: Yearning for Zion. We guess they’re not referring to a much-longed-for summer vacation in the Zion National Park in Utah (famous for its soaring granite towers), although the article doesn’t specify. 401 children have been forcibly removed from a compound occupied by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a place where bearded men can go to practice polygamy with minors (a chapter of Jesus’ own example that the gospels have inexplicably missed).
To this place we have chosen to bring the stories of children accelerating towards doomsday. These are the precise extremes: the start of life and the end of all life. We are slicing and dicing in between. The details count. The third graders’ paperweight was seized by police – it was engraved with a unicorn. A single bright glass unicorn: there is something untamable in this story. And on the other hand the Police Chief was called Tony Tanner. You couldn’t make that up. Again these extremes: from the ultra-esoteric to the comically banal. Absolute human transgression, and Anthony H Tanner. Cleft narratives and dark palates.
Now Mary says something amazing. She says she felt certain when she was a kid that all of the stories in the newspaper were somehow connected; that they were all fragments of one single narrative that fitted together and collectively made sense if you only knew the sacred trick of reading it. Then the whole story would reveal itself; everything would become whole. She says, when she was a kid, she was certain that the adults knew how to hold it all together.
She smiles and this is a high point and a watershed and now all of us are six years old again and we look at each other around the table and we laugh and just for this moment there is a single story that rings in this place like a brass bell, before the chime fades away and our narratives must deconverge and run multiplicitous to their extremities, ever downwards into the catacombs at world’s end, but always loud and always clear and always with this one bright sound dissolved in them.
And she sits there holding the rest of us with this very calm expression she has, a look in her eyes like someone sounding a brass bell on a grey New England morning, and everyone nods because what she spoke, frankly, has a ring of the absolute truth to it. You never pick the date.
By way of an aside, Shannon tells the group that she works weekends in a café called The Butcher Shop or The Abattoir or The Slaughterhouse – I forget exactly which – but some name that makes it possible at a stretch for a guy in a lumberjack shirt to walk into the place early one morning with seventy pounds of bleeding deer slung over his shoulder and ask, Can you guys cut this thing up for me?
And although the establishment is absolutely a café – with the panini bread stacked in big wicker baskets behind the counter, and the pickles and the cold cuts all laid out in white ceramic dishes ready for use, and the little tipping tin beside the cash register with the handwritten sign taped to it saying THANK YOU – although this place could not to any lesser extent resemble a one-stop carcass shop, Shannon decides to ask her manager if it might be possible to accommodate the gentleman’s request.
I guess she does this out of kindness. With those calm eyes she looks at the guy and she perceives that the guy knows, the second he sets foot inside that oddly misnamed café, that he’s come to the wrong place. But his question was already half-formed on his lips when he saw the café’s sign and pulled in. He’d been rehearsing it behind the wheel of his pick-up while the dawn broke and he drove back from the woods into the city of Providence. Trying to get the shake out of his voice; trying to get the question to sound nonchalant. Like this wasn’t the first time he’d tracked and killed a deer. Like he didn’t have a moment of regret as the light faded from the animal’s eyes. Like he wasn’t sad and pale with sleep deprivation; like he did this every day; like he knew exactly what the hell to suddenly do with a warm, bleeding body that weighed the same as his ten-year-old boy. Hey, can you guys cut this thing up for me? And even now it’s a sandwich shop, the guy can’t help blurting out his question.
And Shannon relays the question to her manager – even though she knows her manager is going to stare back at her for a full minute with an expression approaching pity – and she does it so as to not make the man in the lumberjack shirt feel like he’s all alone. To share the feeling that someone else – even someone else who actually works in the café, for goodness sakes – might allow in her own mind too some possible ambiguity concerning the place’s function; some ambiguity that was not immediately dispelled by the rows of gherkins and the salad onions glistening in their jars. In these situations human solidarity is important, and someday you hope some other human will return the favor. Because you never know the day when you’ll walk into the wrong shop yourself. You never pick the date.
Can you guys cut this thing up for me? Today we’re assembled for a creative writing workshop, so the thing is every human story and we’re going to need to slice and dice it somehow. How we started this was to find ourselves some news articles. Free choice. We went out into the wilds of the news media and we bagged ourselves one each and we walked into this class with seventy pounds of story.
I already mentioned Shannon. Shannon puts the same care into her story selection that she gives to making sandwiches at the café. She is calm and methodical and she takes pride in the small things. Her news story is called The Replaceable You. It’s about all of the body parts you can swap out of homo sapiens and still have a human being. The article doesn’t mention how to save human face, but I would imagine that voluntarily asking one’s café manager whether the establishment can eviscerate and butcher a wild deer – I imagine that would count.
Then there’s Stephanie. She looks at all the stories in the paper and none of them does quite what she’s looking for and so she’s unafraid to bring in a pictorial piece instead, a charity advertisement from the back of the paper, and she is absolutely right because the piece is mesmerizing. There are six kids with cleft palates, smiling, or making whatever that unpronounceable expression is that can only be made with a three-cornered mouth. And the headline is haunting: Each Of These Kids Needs Someone Who Cares Enough To Send $250 Once.
That gets us talking about children, and Astrid has come up with a winner; one of those stories you could tell a dozen ways up and make it darker every time. A bunch of third-graders in Georgia conspires to kill their teacher with a paperweight and a steak knife and some tape and a pair of handcuffs and I forget what else. I mean, that’s quite enough already. The thing is, each of the kids is assigned to bring in one item, like a macabre show-and-tell, and their roles fit perfectly together into a textbook execution. It’s the opposite of the lone gunman: single target, incorporated assassin. The teacher has unjustly scolded one of the student body, and so in an expression of human solidarity as admirable in its own way as asking your boss about butchering a deer, the kids are going to tie up their teacher and concuss her with the paperweight and then stab her to death with the steak knife. It’s nothing if not systematic. There is absolutely no way the teacher is walking away from this. She’s staying after class. The kids have even delegated one of their number to be the cleaner. The plan is inch-perfect and it’s only through treachery that they are rumbled. And the kicker is that this is a special class: these young team players are supposed to have learning difficulties. When doomsday dawns the meek shall rise up and inherit the earth. Their teacher would have driven into school, blissfully aware today was not like every other day. Nobody picks the date.
Next there is Jenna, and you don’t argue with Jenna, or at least I don’t because she’s too smart. I brought in a story of my own earlier this week, a novel I wrote three years ago, and I guess I basically arrived with it slung over my shoulder asking if anyone could cut it up for me, and Jenna took a good look at it and said, sure, and handed it back to me in neat Ziploc bags all ready for the freezer. I believe this is known as literary criticism. It was a pretty damned professional job, if you ask me, and it’s a famously elusive novel so I wonder how she went about it. Tied it down and laid into it with a paperweight and steak knives, maybe. And Jenna’s article is about a doomsday cult of 25 adults and four children who’ve barricaded themselves in a cave near the Volga river. Following Astrid’s lead we start talking about the children and what’s going on in their minds, down there in the dark. It’s not looking great for them, in all honesty. Their leader is Pyotr Kuznetsov, and he says the world will end in May, and he does not appear to have left instructions regarding why it will be helpful to be twenty feet underground at that time. Kuznetsov is described in the article as a professional engineer, and described by Shannon as a total amateur cultist because, as she says, you never pick the date.
You could say this group is drawn to the extremes. Sarah has brought in a cult story too. And it’s a great choice, this one; another of those stories you could tell and re-tell, and she goes through it with fine skill, picking up on all the angles that make it come alive as a story. The hand-sewn, ankle-length dresses. The hair tied up in braids. And best of all, the name of the ranch: Yearning for Zion. We guess they’re not referring to a much-longed-for summer vacation in the Zion National Park in Utah (famous for its soaring granite towers), although the article doesn’t specify. 401 children have been forcibly removed from a compound occupied by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a place where bearded men can go to practice polygamy with minors (a chapter of Jesus’ own example that the gospels have inexplicably missed).
To this place we have chosen to bring the stories of children accelerating towards doomsday. These are the precise extremes: the start of life and the end of all life. We are slicing and dicing in between. The details count. The third graders’ paperweight was seized by police – it was engraved with a unicorn. A single bright glass unicorn: there is something untamable in this story. And on the other hand the Police Chief was called Tony Tanner. You couldn’t make that up. Again these extremes: from the ultra-esoteric to the comically banal. Absolute human transgression, and Anthony H Tanner. Cleft narratives and dark palates.
Now Mary says something amazing. She says she felt certain when she was a kid that all of the stories in the newspaper were somehow connected; that they were all fragments of one single narrative that fitted together and collectively made sense if you only knew the sacred trick of reading it. Then the whole story would reveal itself; everything would become whole. She says, when she was a kid, she was certain that the adults knew how to hold it all together.
She smiles and this is a high point and a watershed and now all of us are six years old again and we look at each other around the table and we laugh and just for this moment there is a single story that rings in this place like a brass bell, before the chime fades away and our narratives must deconverge and run multiplicitous to their extremities, ever downwards into the catacombs at world’s end, but always loud and always clear and always with this one bright sound dissolved in them.
[ENDS]
Chris Cleave
Rhode Island and London, April 2008
The weapons of choice
Just found the photos that go with Astrid's news article about the Georgia third-graders.
Check out the unicorn on the paperweight. Oh, the symbolism...
Check out the unicorn on the paperweight. Oh, the symbolism...
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