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Lynn
Crawford
Excerpts
Excerpt from Blow,
Section 1
by Lynn Crawford
Imitation trees tower a building, my home, set at the base of Mount Anf.
I lie in it now, cheek to the floor, wadding material, tomato colored, or
the color of near ripe tomato. Something goes on here, not what I love;
I love audience.
My alarm is beeping, I must rise for work. My job, audience; my apparel,
distinct circular patterns (spirals, loops, coils), functioning as pure
decoration and operative equipment. When activated, the bands of plastic
draping my hat rise, recast as one rotating wing, shoot me up to a range
of elevations; from there I hover, watch, scan. The set of coils strapped
to my back, camouflaged as a pack or mod shawl, is a motor responsible for
horizontal movement, hurtling me along a single plane forwards, reversed,
over streets, bridges, houses.
The apparel, designed by Uncle, is gear so lovely, so functional, I could
wear it to dine or shop in a cosmopolitan area, even to wing around the
world, but I stay here near Mount Anf whose bounds are deceptively small;
what they contain is fascinating. My job is audience. I have never snapped
a picture, or even held a camera. Off hours I sleep, eat, attend to sensations
not visual.
Before my birth, Uncle established Mount Anf—an, artificial hill, its surrounding
city—as an organized matrix for probes, trials, experimentation. Now, as
then, it sits in the center of a region of chaos.
My job is audience, but this week I spent more and more time at home, last
week too. I have been overspending time there. Before leaving it today I
drink two strongly boiled cups of imported coffee, eat two much less strongly
boiled imported eggs.
My neighbors, Kip and Hoyle, non-biological siblings, inhabit the most wildly
decorated home in Mount Anf. The couple is well known: Hoyle, Uncle's chief
assistant; Kip, a lead rocker and song writer. They sport a similar, not
identical look: caps, gloves designed by Uncle, fitted jeans and brightly
colored chaotically patterned material also designed by him. Both are bone
thin, bow-legged. Hoyle wears thick, heavy framed glasses (Uncle wears glasses
too, thinner than Hoyle's). Kip and Hoyle's downstairs ceilings, walls,
floors are painted light blue, flecked with pebble and boulder sized darker
blue spots. Furniture—throw pillows, lamps, several small tables, a massive
rectangular table—is yellow. One portion of the ceiling opens up to the
sky for stargazing and ventilation; a strobe—made active by the couple after
dinner, during parties, and when Kip practices rocking—hangs from the other
ceiling portion.
Usually Kip and Hoyle are last on my route, but this evening I am cranky,
and change the pattern by making their home my first stop. Downstairs is
empty, but through an upper-level window I see Kip settled on the floor,
back pressed to the wall, legs spread open. I had forgotten this is his
standard position early weeknights. Glitter dusts his ceiling; a wallpaper
design of alpine skiers, faces turned up toward the sky covers the room's
four walls. To Kip's left, a row of switches embedded in a mound of plastic;
he now presses one switch to start the projector behind him, which plays
a film documenting Hoyle at work. The first shot, a close-up of Hoyle, right
eye pressed to a magnifying glass, drafting her patterns on paper. A second
sequence shows Hoyle ascending the slope of Mount Anf, lugging her cart
of excavation materials. Swarms of plastic (battery operated) insects head
toward her. A backdrop of mountains, rays from a sun that looks hot, fixed,
shining, frame these shots of Hoyle working Mount Anf. The third and last
shots depict Hoyle and Uncle in wide-brimmed hats, and heavy eye make-up
(protection from sun), alternately lunching (high table, shoulders poked
out over china), and discussing Hoyle's findings.
The film is short, four minutes, and possibly new; it is the first I have
seen of it, and I am familiar with Hoyle documentaries. I stay through two
runs with Kip, immobile on the floor, a position he maintains for medical
reasons.
Excerpt from Blow, Section
3
by Lynn Crawford
Resting my chin in my palms, I use the timepiece draped around my neck
to count three, then four minutes pass in silence—word silence; my heart
pounds noisily, and with the urgency of a train, speeding, uninterrupted.
Kip finally keeps a foot inside his slipper, uses it to tap a beat; slow,
insistent. Uncle's right fingers cradle the side of his tumbler, his left
drum its bottom with a rhythm matching Kip's. Hoyle twirls a strand of
hair around her right index finger with a pace doubling theirs. This evening
it is not wound up on her head, as earlier when she knelt, digging Mount
Anf, but flowing over her shoulders.
So Hoyle, finally says Uncle, this is what you excavate for me, stories?
I laugh, pant, pant with laughter. I try to keep it silent; use nearly
all of my strength trying for silence. Kip, Hoyle, and Uncle laugh too:
bending down, straightening up, slapping thighs, palms, foreheads.
I do stay silent, but my panting ruffles Hoyle's papers and everyone's
hair, which no one notes, probably assuming it is the wind, which is now
nearly raging.
For years, Uncle hired teams of excavators: I'd watch them fan out across
Mount Anf's slope, mass treasure hunting, notice them unearth very little.
(Artificial hills contain different but just as interesting information
on agricultural and historical possibilities as natural ones do). Then
Uncle hired Hoyle as their supervisor. Now they work under Hoyle who,
even with disabled vision, operates her crew skillfully, excavating and
recording piles of Mount Anf animal, artificial, mineral riches.
Laughter peters out of Kip, Hoyle and Uncle, now collapsed, arms loosely
draped around one another. To their left, a massive rectangular table
draped in linen: yellow background patterned with different sizes and
shades of blue x's. Three pewter place settings—plate, goblet, tiny but
destructive looking cutlery, especially the fork—are set at the table.
Beneath the cutlery, a napkin with the identical design but reversed color
scheme of the table's linen: blue, dotted with different sizes and shades
of yellow x's.
Kip shuffles into the kitchen, stirs a pot simmering on the stove, ladles
its contents—his stew specialty: lamb, shallots, sherry—into three bowls,
snaps his fingers, signaling Hoyle and Uncle to come get their meal.
Kip's fingers are spider thin and, despite his youth wrinkled, brown,
dry as timber. These wrinkles developed gradually, as did the ripples
at the back of Hoyle's thighs. When I first met Hoyle and Kip all their
skin was pulled tight, like the aluminum skin of a plane. But over the
years, though they are both very thin, their skin has turned somewhat
loose in places, or dimpled. Uncle's facial skin has always been translucent,
like a layer of ice on a lake, yet his hands and neck show deep wrinkling.
At this point my own skin is a soft, flexible covering; inevitably, despite
the protective gear designed by Uncle, it will grow withered by tiredness
and weather.
Around the table, Kip, Hoyle and Uncle sip, chew, chuckle. It is a warm
scene, and happy. Clearly no more will be read from the story, or said
about it. The weather has suddenly calmed. I shoot home because I feel
tired, not because of sadness.
Excerpt
from Blow, Section 6 - Gird's Story
by Lynn Crawford
During the war, Gird
is taken captive, not by an army but a private citizen, named Serno, who
lives with his daughter, Srena, and son-in-law, Dirsh. Dirsh has long
since been off fighting.
Before the war, Dirsh helps with hunting for food,. repairing the home.
But this youth, like other town youths, becomes a soldier. By the time
Gird is captured, imprisoned in the family's basement.
One day, Serno, preparing protection for coming cold weather, drives nails
into wood placed over house and barn windows. Because his eyesight is
feeble, he hammers one into the flesh between his right thumb and lower
forefinger knuckle. He howls, wrings the damaged hand, falls off of his
ladder, smacks into the ground. Later, heavily bandaged, clenching a cane,
he hobbles into Gird's cell: "Soldier," he begins. Gird meets his eyes;
Serno waves the cane near Gird's torso. "Soldier, you could get out of
your cell, help us out with some chores. We'd give you, you know, cleaner
food."
Gird, in a low mood, and disoriented, after the inactivity that accompanies
imprisonment, swells with gratitude at this offer. The first weeks he
doesn't work alone, but with recuperating Serno, following, watching,
barking out orders. In evening, Gird returns to his cell: eats, bathes,
sleeps. He's attended there by Srena: "Soldier," she calls outside of
his cell, signaling a platter of food, or a basin of water. Within a few
months, Serno no longer follows Gird's every move. He is healed enough
to take on light work, and also trusts his prisoner. At this same time,
Srena starts visiting Gird in the night.
"Soldier," he hears a voice whisper, jostling him out of deep sleep, opening
his eyes up to Srena; night-dressed, medallion hanging from a leather
strand draped around her neck. "Soldier," she repeats, letting herself
into his cell, bringing his finger tips to her moist inner thighs. #34Soldier,
soldier" she chants, stroking his cheekbones, his shoulders.
When she leaves, Gird dozes, replays Srena, is overcome at once with deep
pleasure, and an unsettling tug. He replays Srena: smell, hair, skin‹something
in her skin‹waist, shoulders, sides of the buttocks, soft and bumpy at
once, an uneasy combination of textures.
Srena pads downstairs the next night, and the night after that; each union
brings longer periods of controlled excitement.
Neither discuss her marks, until Dirsh returns home for his weekend pass.
Gird stays in his basement-cell during this period, but the night Dirsh
leaves, Srena pads downstairs, enters Gird's arms as if she's in some
frenzied heat. Gird feels himself turn clammy: these lips covering his,
are just fresh from covering that husband's. But this disgust is replaced
by a more horrible one when he sees and feels the fresh bumps on her waist,
shoulders, sides of the buttocks. Gird nails her with a stare; she wrinkles
her forehead, says she must tell him some things about her husband.
"It isn't that he doesn't love me...he's very weak...nights with Dirsh
are damaged; he is damage. But when he leaves I don't believe we were
ever together. So I document; carve myself, with little marks."
That night, Srena rocks Gird into sleep. The next night she repeats her
story, adding on, then the next adding on again. Soon she doesn't stop
talking about the life she shared with Dirsh, reciting scenes in the same
and in different orders, "It isn't that he doesn't love me," she always
begins. And she stresses Dirsh's frailty: "Dirsh's home is the battlefield.
Elsewhere he is thread. You and I are constructed of much more solid material."
Loathing, whose degree and intensity are unfamiliar, bubbles up in Gird's
stomach. Several months after Dirsh leaves, Srena is visibly with child;
everyone, including her father Serno, thinks she made this child together
with her solid, soldier husband, home for that weekend, before speeding
back to war. Srena and Gird know that the child cannot belong to Dirsh,
who doesn't perform reproductive penetration.
The new life becomes the hub of Srena's attention, shifting it off of
her husband; the embraces with Gird again return to periods that are long,
extended; Gird strokes Srena's belly, she imagines their child; Gird details
plans to track Dirsh down, and to destroy him. He plans how he will tell
this to Srena, whose compassion for that husband is fixed. He plans how
he someday will tell her. He never tells her. Srena dies in childbirth.
Dirsh disappears in battle. For nearly a year, Serno and Gird live together,
care for the baby boy Serno names, in honor of who he thinks is his dead
father, Dirsh. The war subsides, Serno dies with a last request: Gird
must take the baby, head home to Munn with him, care for him. Which Gird
does, after renaming his son Kip.
Excerpt from Solow,
Co-Piloting
by Lynn Crawford
In a forest on a
pond is a boat. A mountainside city brims with erections, vegetation.
Moonbeams color the oarsman stopped on its bottom. It is night, frigid.
A brook flows through the forest. Amid straight-ceilinged constructions,
amid timber, rises a spired building, a residence. At a point on the brook
is a gorge. A captain lives in this residence. Foliage loads the gorge,
molds it into the form of a booth, of a throne. Her living-room is ivory,
expansive; galactic bodies spin outside its window. On the floor of the
woods are stones, soil; it is a floor that looks to be throbbing. Inside
this suite, a ditch. Solid, uniform counts; not short, not delirious.
Iron cribs, girdling nautical equipment, encircle it. The oarsman abandons
his oars his boat the pond for shore. Mid-ditch the captain reclines,
stiffens into her furniture. On shore woods tower; oaks hold shocking
proportions. She's visualizing portions of her sailors: padding wrists,
tiny thighs, lips rimmed with saliva. The oarsman continues along throbbing
ground; a violence is lodged in his throat--a lodged violence, or object.
In her grip a tiller. He roves his tongue along the bones of his mouth,
bows it into his airhole. It fingers tonic, it is weighted with direction.
The movement provokes him, or conceivably is aroused by resonation.
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