My Daughter Is One Of These Irrepressibles.

My daughter is one of these irrepressibles.

"I don't care if you taste my spittocks." (We're trading the same wooden flute back and forth so I can teach her "Hanging Tree.") "I just don't want to taste your spittocks."

"Spittle," I correct her, laughing.

"Spittle-waxens," she goes on, not even pausing. "I don't want to taste your spittle-waxens."

Neither do I, Kiddo, but for some reason the Lord God Almighty saw fit to outfit us with plentiful spittle-waxens and only enough money for one F-flute.

INKLINGS CHALLENGE STORY, FIRST ACT

...

She had her own bedroom, small though it was, in the attic of Halfway House, which was a farmhouse. Every room in the house was a bedroom, besides the kitchen, one dining room crowded with an enormous table, and the three bathrooms.

The morning after she was installed there, Regina appeared in the kitchen, pale-faced and embarrassed, to meet her fellow-inmates.

Three persons were there in the kitchen before her. One was a slim, tall, pale man of uncertain age and stooping shoulders, with oddly yellow hair and a slack face. He wore an apron and stood over the stove, painstakingly scrambling eggs in an old frying pan. He dropped the spatula as soon as he saw Regina, and was kicked by another person who stood near him cooking bacon.

This second person frightened Regina as soon as she saw him, for reasons which stood below the articulable. She looked away from his lips, which were like long, fat worms that curled and shivered when he was not speaking. “Girl,” he hissed at her, and his lips went tight and wide.

After a moment, she realized he was meant to be smiling.

She shrugged to lose the impression he made on her, and inched her way over to the sink, where she washed her face. The third person in the kitchen came and stood by her, leaning backward on the sink. “Bathrooms all occupied?” said a hard feminine voice.

Regina nodded. Drying her face with the nearest towel, she looked at the other woman, who turned out to be short and curly-haired. The woman stared at her boldly out of dark eyes. Her hair was unrecognizably colored, and she wore loose denim all over.

Regina was wearing the clothes she had entered prison in, which comprised a dark skirt-suit. There had been reporters when she had gone to prison; no one cared about her now. “The Heiress Murder,” they had called it, although the judge had called it “involuntary manslaughter.”

“What did you do?” The short woman asked. “Or don’t tell me – you’re innocent.”

“Criminal negligence,” Regina said, the answer she’d gotten used to giving. Everyone knew what that meant. It meant that something had happened accidentally, and they had found someone wealthy to blame. Her fortune had gone into trust, and it wouldn’t be hers again until her sentence was finished. Meanwhile, the government was free to borrow from it.

The tall woman snorted. “Not me. I beat my boyfriend to death. He deserved it.” She slurped some coffee, and dropped her plastic cup into the sink. The coffee splashed Regina. “Ever wonder whether we’re living in some vile timeline, not supposed to be here, things were supposed to be a lot better, but some stupid little thing went wrong?”

Regina glanced at her eyes evaluatively, and draped the towel, which was not terribly clean-smelling, over the dish rack. “All the time,” she said.

“Don’t look so shocked,” the woman said dourly. “I read.” She sauntered away, out onto the porch. Regina followed with her eyes, and saw that the porch was fitted as a common room, with poorly-padded wicker furniture. Its shelves and porch furniture were stocked and strewn with outdated books.

“What else is there to do?” Regina murmured; it was a prison saying.

She looked around uncomfortably. Yellow-haired fellow was rubbing the dropped spatula on his filthy shirt, looking at her with big eyes. Worm-lips nodded at her again. “Bacon be ready soon. Ya hungry?”

“Very,” she said. “Is that for all of us? It’s good of you.” Flattery was a survival skill.

“I’m a good guy,” he said, in a way that let her know he wasn’t. She smiled ingratiatingly, and wondered why men and women were so commonly confined together. She decided to follow Short Gal onto the porch and find something to read.

Once she was there, however, she could look only at her surroundings. Out there, beyond the screened porch, all around the house – there was nothing but rolling Wisconsin hills, blue Wisconsin sky, and rowed Wisconsin cornfields. She turned about and saw there was even a little wood far to the south.

“Lord God in Heaven, I’ve been so beauty-starved,” she said. “I’m going for a walk. You coming?”

Short Gal stared up at her from a worn-out Nurse Ames book. “Do you always talk like that?” she asked.

“Yes,” Regina said. “It keeps the men away.”

Short Gal laughed after a moment, and returned to her book. It was always an acceptable answer.

Regina went outside.

There were four other inmates of Halfway House at that time beside the three she met that first morning, and shortly after she arrived, Regina incurred the enmity of all of them except Yellow-hair.

There came a Sunday afternoon when they sat about the dinner table, eating together with the House-mother, a woman who only visited once a week and seemed painfully bored by them and by her job.

The dinner was half-eaten and cold; but the three other women were weeping. The four men were shouting. Regina stared at them, holding her hands over her ears, and pressing back in her chair. The House-mother stood against the wall, looking terrified. “Stop it, stop it,” she shrieked. She was just a former inmate herself, hired by the people who owned the property.

How it had happened, Regina was not certain. She had decided to come down to dinner with her hair down. She had put product in it and straightened it, and felt it looked all right. But things started going wrong as soon as they sat down. Regina had felt oddly – so dizzy at one moment; so emotional at the next; and then the Yellow-Haired Fellow was staring at her and saying things that Regina was certain were Short Gal’s thoughts. It got more mixed up from there; and then at some point a barn-cat had leaped in through an open window, jumped on Regina’s shoulders, and started rubbing up against her hair. Her hair had sprung out in a crazy, kinky cloud; and everyone had gone mind-lost.

Regina wanted to flee, but she would be docked a week’s pay if she broke a rule, and one rule was that you couldn’t leave the table without being excused when House-mother was there. She looked at House-mother and tried to say, “Dismiss us!” But it came out of someone else’s mouth.

Someone ran into the room, then – someone Regina saw distinctly, but couldn’t speak to. She was a slim girl with a beauty about her that seemed perfectly ordinary as to arrangement of features, yet somehow bewildered Regina with its rare precision. The girl wasn’t affected by the hubbub at all. She ran up and put something white over Regina’s hair, and then leaned down and whispered, “Keep it bound and covered, or this will go on happening.”

And sure enough, everyone calmed down and became exceedingly grumpy. House-mother excused them and left at speed; and Regina went upstairs and came down again with her enormous red hair braided and wound around her head as usual. She wore over her hair the white cap that girl had given her. She kept trying to say something, and forgetting; but later, on the porch, when evening quieted them all, she managed to ask. “Did anyone else see that girl at dinner?”

“Dinner?” Worm-lips asked. “Don’t talk to me about dinner. And don’t you dare come down with your hair all crazy again.” She had turned him down thrice by then, and he hated her deeply. She sometimes caught him staring at her, just working his jaw and mulling over his hatred. She could almost hear him thinking, “Kill her... no... something worse...”

Everyone else was agreeing. None of them had noticed the girl, but they had all gotten the point that Regina’s hair had somehow caused all the trouble. Regina looked at Yellow-Hair, and saw he was the only one not saying anything. He looked uneasy and sorry and worried. Regina gave him a small smile, and stood. “Bed for me,” she said, and slipped through them, toward the attic. Worm-Lips tried to trip her as she went.

...

There were a few other incidents. Regina said something about Worm-Lips to a new girl, a silly, romantically-minded girl, Moira by name. Warned her, and told her that Worm-Lips had killed a young child by punishing it viciously. That had turned Moira off Worm-Lips, which was good; but Moira had told others, and it had come back to him. And Worm-Lips had screamed at Regina, so white-faced: “Who told you? How did you know? No one ever knew!” Regina hadn’t realized, when she told Moira of it, that it wasn’t common knowledge.

Regina was certain Worm-Lips was going to assault her, but the form that assault took in the event shocked everyone who heard about it, even getting into the newspapers. She woke in the middle of the night feeling drugged, hardly able to move, with a terrible stabbing sensation between her legs. She tried to jerk away. In the dark, people stood over her, and a few held her down. “She’s waking up,” hissed someone; it was Worm-Lips, she knew. “Put the pillow over her face while I finish up. Don’t kill her; I want her to know.” She could not even struggle, but she distinctly heard Yellow-Hair weeping and begging. “No, no, not mine, not mine,” he cried. “It’ll be born stupid. Don’t use mine, please!” Something long, hard, warm, and plastic finally entered her, went much too far in; and she screamed into the pillow and blacked out.

Worm-Lips was sent back to prison. They couldn’t transfer everyone to other houses, although everyone had been involved; so they contented themselves by getting rid of the ringleader. They offered to transfer Regina herself; but she asked about the locations of all the other houses, and when she heard that they were all in the city, she refused.

They also made three appointments to get her an abortion, meaning entirely well; but she refused. The first time, she made an excuse. The second time, she explained that what happened wasn’t the baby’s fault. The third time, she unbound her hair. The action confused the counselor, who was not familiar with the superstition shared by the inmates about Regina’s hair; and nothing unusual had happened – except that at the end of the conversation the counselor assured Regina that she knew exactly how she felt, she completely understood, and of course she couldn’t trample all over her conscience like that. She went away, and no one official bothered Regina about abortion again.

The women inmates mocked her about it for a long time, though. “I guess she loves you after all, Georgie,” Short Gal said to Yellow-Hair after they found out she’d refused the abortion for the third time. “She wants your baby.”

“She doesn’t want to kill it,” he said unhappily. “That’s not the same thing.”

“You’re an idiot,” Short Gal said fiercely. She had been the one holding the pillow over Regina’s face, and it made her sick with guilt and fear to remember it. Regina knew this as surely as she knew that Short Gal’s hair was growing out mud-brown.

Regina turned to Yellow-hair. "I don't want to kill him, but I also want him. Not because he's yours; because he's mine."

He was so miserably ashamed he couldn't look at her, but she heard him whispering, "He. He's mine."

Now Regina was four months pregnant and beginning to show; and everyone left her alone with the instinct to protect the young and their mothers which nearly all persons feel, however corrupt. That didn’t stop them all from hating her, however. The women hated her for her beauty, she had discovered; though in her own eyes she was no longer beautiful; not since she had seen the strangely ordinary and bewilderingly lovely girl at that awful dinner. (She kept trying to wonder how she had left, which way she had gone. Had she seen it?) The men hated her for not wanting them, not even a little bit. And they all hated her for being someone they had wronged, and who made them feel guilty by never stooping to an angry word about it. From the very first morning after the assault, Regina had quietly ignored everyone in the house. If they tried to force themselves on her attention, she would uncover her hair and begin to unbind it, and they would turn scared and find business elsewhere.

Oh, she was brave before them all, the ones who had sinned against her! But alone in her room, she pitied and loathed herself in turn; begged God for comfort, and felt it at one moment, and missed it the next. What had she begun to believe about her hair? That it made her special? What nonsense; she had lived with her hair all her life, and nothing like that dinner had happened before. It was the girl, she decided. The girl must have been hanging around. She was the special one; she was the beautiful one. Regina was simply a destroyed woman with a smudged brick for a face and three times as much hair as anyone had a right to.

...

It was midnight, and Regina was climbing out a window. It was cold, but she was well-bundled. A sense of excitement suffused her as she thought about the adventure before her, and she felt the baby move responsively inside. The baby seemed intelligent, and she frequently met him in dreams and shared her heart with him. She held out hope that he would not be born deficient, as poor Yellow-Hair feared. The man was still at Halfway House, but he avoided her out of very deep shame. She wished they would transfer him somewhere for people like him, for both their sakes.

She walked on the grass, to avoid making any noise. It was a brilliantly dark night, the sky crystalline and starry, the air cold but not too dry. She was wrapped up against the cold , but as she walked she unfolded a double-wide white fleece scarf her mother had sent her just that day. It was so beautiful and warm! And it smelled faintly of incense; her mother had perhaps worn it to Church. She carefully wrapped it around her neck and head, and then stopped short. Besides the sensation of warmth it gave her which was very welcome, the scarf gave her an utterly startling sensation of aloneness – of protection – which she had never experienced in her life. She breathed in and out in bliss and found it took no effort at all to keep her mind on good thoughts. She began moving again, heading for the garage where she kept, under a tarp, an old bicycle she’d repaired.

...

Halfway House lay at the north end of a short, overgrown road. Trees leaned over the road from either side, turning it into a cathedral’s center aisle. At the south end lay an abandoned homestead. Between the two, on the east side of the road, there was a Wild Wood of goodish size. Regina usually felt quite sick with fear when she rode past the wood; but tonight she felt not a hint of it. She didn’t even notice when she’d gotten past the wood, and soon she arrived at the homestead. She rode her bike down the overgrown drive, past the empty house with curtains still in the windows, and right up to the enormous barn. Its walls were structurally sound, but the roof had gaping holes in it. Regina found the barn’s hayloft the ideal camping-out spot. It had shelter enough for safety, but allowed her to watch the sky. She would lie there, drinking beauty for an hour, perhaps singing to herself or offering the beautiful prayers of her communion.

The Northern Lights were due to be visible tonight, the newspaper said. She had seen them last night as well, from her attic window; but tonight was the big show, and she would get a wider view.

She brought her bike inside, turning quickly to look at the empty house when she thought she saw a light inside; finding nothing there but a star that shone through two successive windows on opposite walls.

In the hayloft, she climbed up onto a platform above the floor, by way of a built-in ladder, moved the canvass that protected it from bird droppings, and swept the platform with a little broom she kept there. Very few wild animals would climb the ladder; she was safe. She made several trips, bringing her supplies and sleeping bag. Once she was up for good, she started a little cannister fire, which she would put out once the light-show started. She heated some chocolate, set up her bedroll, and read some Albert Payson Terhune with her flashlight. She changed positions, feeling the baby might be a bit squashed.

Turning off the light a few minutes later, she checked the sky, and found the northern lights flickering palely green and blue.

Fire turned down, she sat holding the chocolate in her thermos, with gloved hands. She gazed and drank; set her vessel aside; and gazed some more. She pulled out her little wooden open-hole flute after a while, and played. It all seemed so good; it was, perhaps, God’s way of making up for all the other things.

The first sign that things were about to change was the stampede. A distant thunder seemed to spring up, though the sky was clear. Slowly, Regina pulled herself from her beauty-drunk trance and looked about. The thunder came swiftly closer. It was beneath her. She lay flat on her stomach and leaned over the edge of the platform. A torrent of white deer was stampeding through the barn – entering at one end, and exiting at the other. She had never seen so much as a picture of white deer, and was almost certain they were not native to Wisconsin. She watched, stupefied. And then, too, she could almost have sworn that someone was riding the very first deer; but she could not be sure, and of course that was impossible anyhow.

After they were gone beyond the barn and off into the distance, she lay staring, feeling electricity move through her body again and again.

Then the wind began. It started as an eerie mimicry of the flute she had been playing earlier, carried back to her on a far, whining wind, as if the echo had gotten lost and was only now finding its way back. Again electrified, she stood up and leaned on a post, listening hard. It was fading; she would lose it. Swiftly she unwound the scarf, tearing it away from her head and ears. She held it tightly in her hand; tilted her head to listen.

The whining wind, or breathy flute sound, started up again quite close. Suddenly it was in her face, blowing harder than any wind she’d ever known. She couldn’t breathe. She turned, trying to get free of it; but it kept in her face like an annoying little brother.

She knelt down and grabbed her things, meaning to go right home with whatever she could carry in one climb. But the wind, incredibly, forced her upright again. Her scarf was whipping around in one hand; her flute was screaming in her other.

The strangest thing was the way the wind pushed at her hair, back and forth, as if it had fingers.

Regina was suddenly possessed of the oddest belief – a conviction that the wind wanted her to unbind her hair. She uttered the Holy Name; the wind paused and then pushed at her hair harder. She almost laughed, it had so much personality.

Regina shoved her scarf and flute into the front of her coat. Then she began tearing the pins from her hair. “Stop, you’re not helping,” she told the wind.

It stopped; and that thrilled her worse than anything. She kept unpinning, and took out the bands as well. There was dead silence in the barn, and she stood there terrified and excited.

“Well?” she asked. And then lightning came – a ball of it, rolling about the barn for a moment, and then leaving. Regina reached up and felt her hair, trying to understand why it seemed to be pulling at her scalp, and found it was standing all about her head in a ball.

“Oh, my dear Lord,” she gasped, knowing that Something was Happening, but not knowing how she ought to feel about it.

The next moment she felt something seize her by the hair and lift her off the ground. It ought to have ripped her hair right out of her head, but Regina felt energy pulsing through every strand of hair, pushing back, equalizing the force. Whatever sort of thing had her, there was no doubt her hair was conductive to its energy.

She was flying through the air; she was above the barn. She was staring down at the overgrown road. The movement had paused. She looked around; realized she was high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. She decided not to try and look behind or above her; she was terrified at the thought of seeing who or what had her. God had her, whatever else did.

Then the world seemed to go suddenly flat. She was moving at an incredible speed, over the road, straight toward Halfway House. All about her, the Northern Lights danced.

And then in a moment they went out, and she was lying in front of the farmhouse in the grass, on a sweet-smelling, summery night, looking up at a cloudy sky that was just beginning to release a warm rain. She lay there heaving and looking at the sky and wishing she could cry.

The baby inside turned over sleepily and stretched a bit. Stumbling to her feet, Regina went around to her window, climbed back in, and stumbled into her bed. The blankets and sheets and pillows were gone; so she fell asleep in her coat, and slept deeply.

I think pleasure is best understood as a sign of something else, not an end in itself.

Assuming one takes pleasure in good things (which would be the definition of "normalcy") then pleasure would be the delicious moral flavor that comes with the nourishing steak of substantial goodness.

Perhaps the most devastating perversion of pleasure happens when we allow someone we love to hurt us. The pain comes to be desired, even while it anguishes, because we have been forced to incorrectly associate it with love.

No one is more vulnerable to this distortion than children who are told by their parents that, "I'm hurting you for your own good, because I love you."

Unless it is women whose lovers grieve them in bed.

The Ball, 1880, James Tissot

HOW TO MAKE POEMS

If hollow logs are dormant drums;

whining winds, fantasial flutes;

Deep in dreaming wells of words,

Music mulls; song springs.

Draw it, drink, till speaking sings.

Basic Language Etiquette

If you wouldn't call someone an "it," you shouldn't call someone a "they."

Attributing sex to an individual is giving him the dignity of not being a mere thing.

Only inanimate things are entirely unsexed and ungendered.

I am not an inanimate thing. I am a woman. I am a woman by birthright. And I don't have to tell you what pronouns to use when referring to me, because you already know.