View All IssuesTanya Archives
June 11, 2005
Tanya: Coulrophobia
"I wonder what cannibal cuisine is like?" I say. "Is there a cannibal cookbook?"
"I'm pretty sure all of the recipes involve fava beans."
"And a nice chianti, yeah," I reply. The comfortable silence returns for a few minutes, as he peruses the headlines and I finish reading the article about the rescued hikers, and their traumatic six days in the mountains. Finally I can't resist any longer. "What did one cannibal say to the other cannibal, when they were eating the clown?"
He looks up and raises an eyebrow.
"Does this taste funny to you?"
"Read your paper, dork."
Permalink Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 12, 2005
Tanya: Piracy
Nearly thirty years had passed since he'd left the Spanish main. Twenty years he'd been a pirate in these waters, and before that, a decade of searching for a killer. But as his predecessor had predicted, he loved every minute of it. The brandy, the gold, the open sea. The swordfights. Mostly the swordfights.
He ordered his men to change their heading and hoist the Jolly Roger. They would check the rumor that the Duke was nearby, an easy target. Then the man once called Inigo climbed back up to the forecastle deck, smiling as he watched the mainland approach.
Permalink • Comments (2) Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 13, 2005
Tanya: Rebirth
She watched from the window as the world was reborn around her. Twenty colors of green where there had only been greys and browns, and now the beginnings of yellows, oranges, and purples. The snow had barely started to melt, but the ice on the lake crackled and moaned as, still ten inches thick, it began to pull away from the banks. Slowly the earth was returning to life before her very eyes.
The friends from home who still mocked her for moving to Fargo, "the tundra," were only the ones who had never been here to see the payoff.
Permalink • Comments (3) Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 14, 2005
Tanya: True evil
He didn't want to see it, he insisted to himself. Yet he was strangely... compelled. Others survived, though admittedly, not all of them had retained their sanity in the aftermath.
In the same way that he could never resist taking a sip from a carton of spoiled milk, just to see how bad it actually was, he couldn't stop now.
It occurred to him that he might see scenes now that would shatter him forever. No matter: he had to know. He googled until he found it, and began the download. The Rosie O'Donnell Honeymoon Video. The horror. The horror.
Permalink • Comments (9) Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 15, 2005
Tanya: Remember?
They called him crazy, but kitschy toys from his childhood were his obsession. He haunted local garage sales and eBay, sometimes traveling long distances to find the treasures he could not live without. Old View Master reels, decoder rings, a working Snoopy Sno-Cone machine, even the Wonder Woman doll with the real earrings.
But the grail had alluded him until today. Exhausted from the transcontinental flight, he now waited with bated breath at Sotheby’s, for the prize to end all prizes.
Today it would be his, whatever the cost. The worst lenticular picture ever found in a Cracker Jack box.
Permalink • Comments (2) Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 16, 2005
Tanya: Reverence
“How could a man become a god?” she had asked him quietly, as Greta was packing the last of his cases for the journey. To his daughter, Nell, the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘god’ still seemed like opposites.
Traveling by elephant through the jungles of central Africa now, so far from his desk job in London, with his retinue of men and strangely-dressed guides, Constable Moore recalled how much easier it had been than even he had expected. A simple gas lamp, a flintlock revolver, and a bad temper, and they were ready to kneel and worship at his feet.
Permalink Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 17, 2005
Tanya: Thirty-Six
She doesn't know exactly how it works, only that it's her job, for now. Punishment for allegedly flirting with some swan down by the river. A swan, I ask you.
Is it cause-and-effect or does the ending simply justify the roll? Snake eyes, the driver dies, but the passenger, currently laying halfway thru the windshield, survives. Double fours, and a politician lives, but his assailant is killed by bodyguards. Scenes flash past as she rolls faster and faster. Finally, a train wreck.
"You'd better refill my cup, Hecatus. This one's going to take a while." And she throws the dice.
Permalink Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 18, 2005
Tanya: Coincidence
She called them twenty-threes. The way you read something new, and then five people mention it in the next two days. The way you think of someone, and suddenly see their name everywhere you look.
She called them that because she used to see the number 23 everywhere. She'd hear it in TV shows and movies all the time, and it was always 23 minutes past when she checked the clock. Then I started seeing it too.
Anyway, I don't remember how it originally came up, but I've always remembered, because it was my 23rd birthday when she told me.
Permalink Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 19, 2005
Tanya: Promises
Her mother's dying wish was that she make peace with the old man, and she was determined to somehow manage it.
So she let him sleep it off, arriving with hot water and a glass of whiskey when she heard him stir. When he woke she would tell him that breakfast was ready -she had worked extra hours at the Johnsons' to afford the eggs- already knowing that his first words would criticize her cooking.
She had adored him once, and willed that feeling to return. But she kept an old baling hook from the barn nearby, just the same.
Permalink Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit
June 20, 2005
Tanya: Patience is a Virtue
Waiting. A mass of bodies, queued to get a single stamp on a single sheet of paper. Knowing that another endless, formless line comes after that. And another. And the stamp is only given if you can prove that your lesson has been learned.
More waiting, more torture. How does one prove that envy is departed, when one envies than man ahead who has received his stamp? How does he abandon anger, when the bureaucracy is enough to make him tear at his own flesh?
So this is purgatory? Had I known, I would've sinned sufficiently to go to hell.
Permalink Bookmark: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit