“Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” L. Carroll

Cupid Painted Blind

Cupid Painted Blind

by | Mar 15, 2025 | Open Prose Mic: 2000 words, Shortstories

Reed was named for his maternal grandfather, which was unfortunate for the significance of his mother’s married name, Todd, and thereby Reed’s last. By the time his mother realized the phonetic articulation of the two together; after pulling Reed’s birth certificate from the file to register him for a social security card so she could apply for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, it was of course too late.

In retrospect, she wished she had traded his first name for his middle, Tiberius, as in James T. Kirk from Star Trek, who she loved intensely enough such that she fell immediately in love with Reed’s father who possessed a similar appearance, and was the first, and last man she ever knew in the biblical sense, and who disappeared not that much longer after the two became one flesh. Where he went, no one could really say. One day, he was there. The next day, he was not. In Reed’s early years, she explained, “Your father was an astronaut, and is exploring a galaxy far far away.” Later, she modified this to, “You’re father was lost in space, battling a ferocious alien species,” and by the time Reed understood that his father was not really an astronaut, she told him the truth during a rerun of “Where No Man has Gone Before,” with William Shatner.

The strategy his mother utilized to soften the harshness of the juxtaposition of Reed’s first and last name was the insertion of the ‘T’ between the first and last name to serve as a phonetic break. Unfortunately, this worked only through the Christmas break of second grade, for on the first day of class, on January 3rd of 1999, the new home room teacher who had just moved from Bismarck to the even more frigid Grand Forks, ND, took roll call.

“Reed Todd,” she called out in a loud voice when Reed’s turn came.

“ReedTodd?” Greg Stark yelled from the back. A brief silence ensued, then, also from the back but on the other side, Caspar Kuchenstien refined further, “ReedTard. Retard.”

The children started laughing, the new instructor horrified at what she had wrought by not inserting the T for Tiberius.

It was at that exact time, with guffaws, chuckles and the sounds of restless hyperactive children that Reed understood with absolute clarity the importance that his mother had assigned to his middle name, and especially the placement of his middle initial, ‘T’ between his first and last.

He further realized that the world was not necessarily a nice or good place, and that to make himself more remarkable than he already was was something best not done, so he did not.

In the years to come, Reed sat towards the front, always on the side, when not specifically assigned a seat, closest to the door. He was always the last one in and first one out, the most cowardly of soldiers on the battlefield, which was a close enough estimation of the public school system. He never volunteered an answer. He never raised his hand, and when he completed tests, he consistently scored 70%, plus or minus five, with enough variance to not arouse any suspicion of the reality that he knew the answer to every question of every test. In short, Reed was so consistently just below average that everyone assumed his name was, unfortunately, apt.

The following year, when his mother asked Reed what he wanted for Christmas, and he said, “a Nintendo,” she winced. “Anything else, sweety?” she asked again, and Reed understood immediately. He smiled and replied, “Ray Bradbury’s complete works would be nice. On Christmas Eve, under the tree, were two gifts for Reed in addition to the fur-lined gloves he had bought for his mother with his paper route money, one larger and not so heavy, one smaller, and quite rectangular and solid. The former proved to actually be a Nintendo. It was from his only uncle, a surgeon in Wisconsin whom he barely ever saw.

Before the week was out, Reed was transfigured. He became the elf-like boy known as Link, collected the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom, and rescued Princess Zelda from Ganon. For the first time in his life, he experienced reward for what he was good at in a world where Reed Todd did not exist. He became a hero in the kingdom of Hyrule. Two days after that, after school, in the library, at the sole desktop PC for public use, he opened the Google search engine, which had been released the previous year, and queried How do computer games work?” That was the day he discovered C++, which was the first computer language he learned. It took him two weeks.

By the time Reed attended St. Mary’s High School five years later, friendless but very smart, if remarkably average, he understood that average wouldn’t be good enough.

At first, his math teacher, Mr. Houg, thought it simply good fortune that smiled on Reed when he turned in his first test, and perhaps an innate brightness for he had never asked a question in class, simply being a bland presence in the second row, closest to the door. After the second test, he enquired of the English teacher of Reed’s performance in her class and she shared an outcome similar to his own. “How come we didn’t know about this?” he asked her, but she only shrugged, “I have no idea. He came from a public school, for Chrissakes.”

Cindy sat also in the second row, not as close to the door, but close enough to be immediately adjacent to Reed, of which he was acutely and painfully aware, her presence a warmth next to him like a visible aura only he could see. He had loved her since the second grade yet had said nothing other than “Hi,” or “Bye,” or “Have a nice summer,” or “Christmas,” or whatever. He seemed to remember her voice as one of the ones laughing on that long-ago day when he discovered the world was not necessarily a nice or good place.

When Mr. Haug placed his final test on the desk at the end of the term, at the top was the only score he had ever received once beginning high school. 100%, an A. He quickly flipped it over.

“I saw it,” Cindy snickered.

“Oh.”

“They’re all like that,” she said. “You’re a genius.”

Reed didn’t know how to respond because he already knew this. He searched his mind for a response that would both convey his love for her, but at the same time not sound too abnormal. He failed.

“Not bad for ReedTodd,” was all he said.

“Reed T. Todd,” she clarified, reminding him of his mother. “What’s the ‘T’ stand for?”

“Tiberius.”

“Tiberius,” she repeated softly. “I love that name.”

Reed’s heart flipped upside down. It was hard to breathe. He felt as though he’d just completed a forty-yard dash outside during recess, if there had been a recess. His heart pounded ferociously.

“Um…” He searched for an appropriate response and settled on Act 2, scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” Read said. “My love as deep. The more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.”

Cindy laughed, and Reed’s heart sank, but then she reached her hand across the narrow space between them, placed it over his and whispered, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged cupid painted blind.”

The Real Aleph

The Real Aleph

by | Jan 14, 2025 | Fiction

Image Citation: OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com/query: “Draw a visual representation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Aleph,” described as a small iridescent sphere containing everything everywhere and every time all at once.” (My words, other than “small iridescent sphere.”)

It is difficult to describe infinity, much less draw it, and there has long been a desire to give words to things such as heaven or eternity, but always falling short. JLB came the closest, and as far as I know.

It is likely that JLB was inspired Georg Cantor’s use of the Hebrew letter aleph to describe the aleph numbers, which are used to describe the size of infinite sets. The aleph looks approximately close to the mathematical sign for infinity. Cantor thought that contemplation of the absolute infinite was akin to trying to touch God. When I searched for any link between the two, I did not find one, but did find a reference to JLB once saying that The Aleph was inspired by writings of HG Wells. Regardless, here it is, the ineffable Aleph, in JLB’s words:

“Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fay Bentos, aw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there had once been a tree, saw a country house in Adrogue, saw a copy of the first English translation of Pliny (Philemon Hollands’s), saw simultaneous night and day, saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, saw horses with wind-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian Sea at dawn, saw the delicate bones of a hand, saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, saw a Tarot card in a shopwindow in Mirzapur, saw the oblique shadows of ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies, saw all the ants on earth, saw a Persion astrolabe, saw in a desk drawer (and the handwriting, made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters thta Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino, saw a beloved monument in Charcarita, saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo, saw teh circulation of my dark blood, saw teh coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.”

I would note that I manually entered the above from Jorge Luis Borges Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.50th printing, 1998. Pages 283–284. However, there has been a revision, so page numbers likely not accurate.

I would further note that the Aleph was located in the cellar of Carlos Argentino after being instructed to descend the stairs to a couch on the floor, lay down and look back up to the 19th stair.

I love JLB’s short stories. The Aleph is the final story of a collection titled the same of 1949.

Gilead

Gilead

by | Jan 12, 2025 | Fiction

Gilead was not the last book I read. I read it while in recovery from my broken neck, which I am still in–just more recovered. But, because of that, I read it in broken segments, sometimes with days between, which isn’t fair to the story or the author; nonetheless, I didn’t find it a problem as the story seemed to have staying power with me. When I began, the format of a long letter worried me as I thought it might become tiresome, but it did not. As a Catholic, I found the Protestant narrative interesting, as well as the lifestyle of the pastors in that they have, or can have families, which was, in fact, the story.

It was one of those May/September love stories, which some folks might find offputting, but there’s none of “that” going on, and the focus is on platonic love, which is sublime. A thread of nostalgia runs through the entire novel because you know the ending. The old man is going to die and leave his young wife and young son behind, a son who will know him primarily by the letter/journal he is writing. His primary conflict is with a namesake by a close friend (also a pastor) who named his son after the narrator; however, he was a problem child who grew up and is of a similar age to the narrator’s attractive wife. I don’t need to say anymore than that other than the wife is a goodly Christian woman.

The reason I read this book is because it was on the list of 100 best, etc., and I have a penchant for prize-winners. It was beautifully written but still easy to read. I didn’t have any WTF does that mean moments, some moments of Holy Shit that was nice, and it precipitated a few Google searches and I bought “Credo” by Karl Barth, so, in the end, I felt different than I did at the beginning.

Angelsong

Angelsong

by | Dec 29, 2024 | Nonfiction

This memoir finished 1st in the 2023 Hal Prize competition for nonfiction. I’ve thought it would have been published by now, but it has not and as it is my story to tell, I’ll publish it here, now.

There are two reasons to get a PET scan; one, if you have cancer and two, if they think you have cancer. Either way, it’s a serious business. I had never had one before and didn’t know what to expect. Two days into what eventually proved to be a five-day trip I found myself in a three-walled cubicle with an off-white curtain on a metal rod hung across the open end that reminded me of a shower curtain. My cubicle was the center of three which faced three more across a six-foot space that was closed to my left but had a door to my right through which I had come and through, presumably, which I would exit. Four hours earlier I had seen the pulmonologist, two hours earlier had completed my Pulmonary Function Tests, and one hour earlier had visited the lab for what seemed about twenty tubes of blood and a bottle of urine. I was surprised my skin was still relatively pink. I can understand why people come from all over the world to be seen at the Mayo Clinic. Even though I was in the medical profession myself, never would I have guessed that so much could be done in so little time.

Before the RN with the name badge that said Rachel closed the curtain, I saw the man in the cubicle directly opposite. For some reason his shower curtain was still pushed all the way to the side. Maybe he was claustrophobic. Then the door opened, and Rachel came in with another tech who wheeled him out. As he passed in front of me, he turned his head and we exchanged glances, small smiles, each not knowing if the other knew that they knew if they had or had not cancer. He looked to be about sixty, balding, completely grey, thin, didn’t obviously look emaciated, like he had cancer, like a cancer was eating him away; but then, neither did I.

PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography and for it to work for cancer detection you have to be fasting for at least four hours so that your blood sugar is low because the first part of the test involves starting an IV and then transfusing a radioactive glucose. Since you want the tissues to take up glucose, it doesn’t do that as well if you are starting from a fed, high glucose state. The tissues that are metabolically more active, like cancer and inflammation will take up the radioactive glucose more than the “normal” tissues, and this is where the magic happens. The radioactive atom attached to the glucose molecule decays or breaks down and particles are released, one of the particles released is a positron. A positron is the opposite of an electron, which holds a negative charge, and they cannot coexist; when a positron is emitted, it immediately encounters a normal electron and the two annihilate each other, which you might say is like a nuclear explosion except that it is on a sub-atomic scale, the end result being the release of two photons, containing the energy of the electron and positron that are no more, which means light. The PET scanner detects the light from this sub-atomic nuclear reaction, and there is more light in malignant cells than normal cells and this shows up on the PET images; blue-green is not so bad, yellow-orange not so good, and red is very bad.

“Here comes that little poke I told you about.” I could tell she’d been doing it all day every day for a long time before I even felt the needle, how she went from the flat yellow tourniquet around my upper arm, to the alcohol swab brushed over my antecubital fossa, to the needle poised above the theoretical median cubital vein in my arm in about five seconds. I couldn’t see vein, so I knew should couldn’t as well. I said that I was fine, that I was used to it by now. She was so fast I didn’t have time to tell her to aim for the mole that I know is right above the vein because that’s what they used when I used to donate plasma twice a week in college at $20 per.

Rachel taped the IV up and plugged me into the radioactive glucose on the IV pole sticking up from the bottom corner of the gurney. It looked like water to me, in its clear plastic bag with blue lettering and a big red stop sign that I suppose meant to make sure you’re giving it to the right person.

“Looks pretty innocuous,” I said to Rachel.

She let her hand rest on the top of mine and gave me a little squeeze, like we were shaking hands backwards or something. “It’s a good test, Dr. M. I gather you know how it works?”

“I do indeed, just never had one before.”

“It will give useful information for your doctors, as you know.” She smiled and for some reason I felt better. “Now, remember, Dr. M, just lie back and relax, no reading, no cell phones, there’s no TV in here so obviously that’s not an issue. We have to wait an hour for the transfusion to work.”—she looked at a crucifix hanging on the wall to my right, it was opposite a clock symmetrically positioned on the wall to my left— “Just…be still,” she said, like she was Jesus on the storm-tossed sea of Galilee trying to bring me peace, and I was…still. Strange. I had a brief vision of her walking on water in a storm-tossed sea, the wind whipping her wet hair across her face, scrubs soaked through, name badge fluttering in the currents of air like a wounded bird.

“Thank you, Rachel,” I said.

My stillness and peace left shortly after Rachel. Do you know the last time, other than before sleep, that I was alone with my thoughts, trying to be still; no music, no book, no kindle, no paper, no computer/phone/tablet/movie screen/TV, no news, no talking, no nothing? Yeah. I don’t know either.

At first, I started with Hail Mary’s, which I do at night before sleeping after my usual partial rosary, from the crucifix to the little medal connecting the junction of the strand of beads, which has two big beads on either side of three small beads, which means The Apostles Creed/crucifix, an Our Father/big bead, three Hail Mary’s/little beads and a Glory Be/big bead; only then do I do more decades, if I need to. I rarely get past three, counting them off on one hand with folded fingers, five down, then straightening my fingers, not necessarily in order just to mix things up, five up. Then, with palm flat against the bedsheet, two Our Father’s, then repeat.

I got bored after a couple of decades and so I said some Act of Contrition’s in case something bad happened, like if I had a heart attack or something because I heard somewhere once that if you say an act of contrition before you die you can go to heaven even if you have a mortal sin on your soul. My act of contrition is not a standard one because it’s not like the one in the missalette. It’s one that I remembered when I was like ten-years-old, or less, but I’ve been saying it ever since, and the last time I said it in front of Father at confession, he didn’t say anything, so I inferred that it was still proper. Next up was Shakespeare. I can’t say I ever really understood it or enjoyed it immensely, but I memorized a ton of it and still, to this day remember it, so it took me another ten minutes to work through Mark Antoony’s monologue from Julius Caesar, you know the one, Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…Then Hamlet’s To be or not to be, that is the question, and later in the play, or maybe before, Hamlet’s speaking to Rosencrantz, the paragon of animals and quintessence of dust…then I heard another man from behind the curtain opposite in the cubicle to the left. The tech, not Rachel, another one, was asking him what the PET scan was for, and he said that he had bladder cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes but that he had been enrolled in a clinical study and the doctors wanted to see if the tumor burden had shrunk, wanted to see if it was working. Bladder cancer is difficult if it escapes the bladder. It’s something that can’t be cut out then. It’s up to the medicines. His voice wavered and in it I could hear the fear I felt, and I didn’t even know if I had cancer yet. In the cubicle to my right, I heard Rachel with someone, but I couldn’t hear through the wall what she or the patient was saying. I remembered seeing one other person in the waiting room when I left and figured it must be him: another man, with a tracheostomy, Asian, younger than me, obviously throat cancer. When my name was called, we looked at each other and nodded, understanding our common connection from across the universe of humanity.

I looked at my watch, amazed that they let me keep it, given the mental stimulation of watching the second hand go around and around. The big hand and little hand said 9:30. A glooming peace the morning with it brings; The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head. The last line of Romeo and Juliet slipped through my mind, a streamer of thought that bubbled up, unbidden. The sun? Was the sun out now? Did the sun show its head today? Suddenly, it seemed important, a harbinger, but I was in the middle of a brick and stone edifice, deep in the basement in the places where they keep things like PET scanners and big magnets. I didn’t remember seeing the sun this morning, but it was early. Twenty minutes passed. Was that all? Still forty minutes to go? I started to feel claustrophobic, deep in the basement, in a small room, even if one end closed off only by a thin white curtain. I remembered my MRI scan, the knocking noise, the smell of laundered sheets and alcohol swabs and the small metal tube barely fitting around my shoulders, and I disappeared into it, nothing but a not so big metal tube about the size of a coffin. It was hard to breathe. Then I thought I should probably think of something else because maybe I was breaking one of the rules by watching the stupid TV in my head so I started singing to myself the Beatles song Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…and that helped. I started to relax. To be still.

I heard the door open and someone saying “…over here on the right.” I saw a younger woman, pushing a small child in a wheelchair past the narrow gap between my curtains, then their curtains opened and closed. I couldn’t figure out why the space between my curtains didn’t line up with that of the cubicle across the hall because they were directly opposite, but they didn’t.  I wasn’t sure if I should even be looking as if that might count as thought and effort that might mess up my glucose metabolism.

A young voice asked, “What’s a PET scan do?” I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.

“It’s a very special test that lets the doctors see inside your body. It’s like X-ray vision—”

“Like Superman?”

“Yes. Something like that, and like Superman, your doctors can use that information to help make you better.”

“Oh.”

I had a vision of a small boy in my head. I had no idea if it was him or not, but I could see a thin boy with large brown eyes in a face so pale, with skin so thin it was almost translucent, revealing delicate blue vessels underneath. He wore a stocking cap because his head was bald from chemotherapy and was always cold. I knew what was next. I heard the little boy start to sniffle, then cry as the IV entered his skin, and then a woman’s voice talking to him, a low soothing voice, saying words only he could hear.

“It’s okay, Darrell, we’re all done.” I heard the tourniquet snap free, a final shuddering sob, the woman’s there, there sweety; then, “I’ll stop back and check on you and your mommy in a little bit. Your job now is to just lay back and try to be quiet, like it’s nap time at school.” The curtain hung with metal loops on a metal rod opened and closed, footsteps from soft-soled shoes moved left to right, the door to the right closed with a final soft click; then a total silence, like waking up in the middle of the night alone in a strange place.

“Am I going to Heaven, Mommy?” His voice was clear and distinct, with no attempt to whisper, like they were the only ones in the room.

“Not yet, precious.” Her voice was more quiet, soft, and surprisingly strong. I could feel the tears forming in my eyes and that pressure in my chest reaching up into the base of my throat I feel when I feel like I have to cry but don’t want to because I didn’t want anyone to hear or see because it seems like something they shouldn’t, like it wasn’t proper. How she could be so calm when I could barely keep myself together?

“Will I see Papa when I do go there?

“Of course, you’ll see Papa when you go there, sweety, and you’ll see me—” Her voice broke, a fracture in the calm, but then she continued in an even softer, lower voice, almost a whisper but not quite and I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and then I heard it.

A woman humming. It had to be his mother. It sounded like it was coming from right across from me, but then I was less certain. Was it from the room to the right of the little boy that I thought was empty? No, it was a women’s voice. It had to be her.

The melody was a classical hymn that everyone knows, but I couldn’t say the name at the time, and I still can’t remember exactly what it was other than it was perfect. It was absolutely beautiful, and somehow, without even realizing it, I couldn’t say exactly when, the humming transitioned to words of comfort and solace, in a lullaby of love that I’m sure I’ve heard before but couldn’t name, a song of songs for her child so that he might cast off all the fear and trepidation and pain, for at least some small measure of time, that the entirety of his illness had entailed to that point.

At first, it didn’t feel right that I should be eavesdropping on such an intimate exchange of love, but then I realized that although she was singing to her son, although her entire focus was on him alone, the center of her world, her love within, for him, was universal, meant for all. She was the embodiment of love, and I remembered that verse from the bible, God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him, or in this case, her. And I knew she was singing to her child, and I knew she was singing to me, and she was singing to the man with bladder cancer to my left, and to the person in the cubicle next to me that I heard Rachel talking to through the wall because a love like that cannot be contained. It was/is transcendent of time and place.

Her compassion and love were palpable, a physical presence in that large room of six cubicles sharing a narrow common space. She sang for I don’t know how long, her voice raised, clear and penetrating like an aria you’d expect to hear on an ornate stage in a far away place, from a beautiful lady in an exotic costume singing the music of the genius of men, inspired by God to write down what was in their heads. It’s like time ceased to pass, call it eternity if just for a moment, and when my curtain opened for me to be taken to my scan, I was unaware that she had stopped.  I turned my head to hide the tears in my eyes, and as the gurney was pushed out of the room, through the small space between curtains I saw a little boy with a purple Minnesota Vikings knit cap. I could see his mother’s hand holding his, but I didn’t see her. As I passed by the last cubicle next to the door, I saw that it was empty, the gurney freshly made, and although I didn’t see it, a crucifix on the wall, opposite the clock on the other. Be still, I told myself, but I couldn’t. I straightened my head, not caring about the tears running down my face or my own shuddering breaths as I was wheeled down the hall, for I had heard the sound an angel makes.

Aleph

Aleph

by | Dec 28, 2024 | Fiction

I’ve read at least a a couple of Paulo’s books before, including the Alchemist but for some reason never realized they were translations. Paulo’s Aleph seems to be directly inspired by his fellow countryman, Jorge Luis Borges, which I’ve also read and which Paulo references. Coelho’s novel (I think I’ll call it that) reads like an autobiography but the spirituality and theme of prior lives and reincarnation do lend the air of fiction to those not inclined to believe such things. I take it that Paulo is Catholic as he threw down the marker specific to them alone–Transubstantiation although that could also mean Eastern Orthodox but he’s from Brazil.

It’s a love story between an older man and a young woman who were in love in a prior life, 500 years earlier, and there remains unfinished business. I liked the way they were brought together, and the relationship that developed over the course of the story, which was that of a journey across Russia. I found myself laughing often and looking things up, like Lake Baikal and the Spanish Inquisition. I like reading prose that places you in the story, and it’s like you’re not really reading, but you are. Sometimes, writing is so gorgeous that you have to stop and read it over because it’s so awesome, or you’re not sure you read it right the first time or it seems just out of reach of comprehension but worth the effort (or you’re too stupid to get it the first time) and so you realize that, yes, you are reading. This wasn’t like that, so I suppose that puts this more in the commercial fiction genre, but it’s better than that. I liked it and read it all in one day, finishing before midnight. Well done, Paulo.