Short Story by Amy Lane
There’s this house party—huge, like the one from Sixteen Candles, in a mansion with extensive grounds and hedges and fountains and multi-faceted windows staring out on the yard like spider’s eyes, reflecting many pictures of manicured lawns and dark suggestion.
There is a constant stream of figures, old and young, coming and going from cars, old and new. People and shadows and light become a two way current from the house.
Every room of the house is swinging, dancing, pulsing, glowing, exploding with activity.
There are students in the kitchen, discussing literature, crappy escapism, and childhood memories over marijuana brownies and espresso. They are animated, intellectual and verbose—every detail has it’s commentary, every moment is a metaphor. A scrap of their conversation is extraordinary, but stay too long in this room and the head will be agog with abstractions, and all the world turns fuzzy and distant. The students in the discussions come and go, and critical theory shifts and revises with the change of proponents.
There is a stereo blasting the living room and a constant rhythmic shift of bodies dancing. The light strobes, so the faces flash in phases of visceral primitive and extraordinary ecstasy. Young people in scanty lame and tattered jeans ascend to the muscular status of the angels; dancing is the aerobics of the divine. The music pulses through a select but eclectic soundtrack—Journey, Berlin, Def Leppard, Elvis, Beethoven the Beatles, Trane, the sound track from American Beauty—the list is exceedingly long, but everybody has an addition to make. Some of the music is arrhythmic, but nothing stops the celestial psychosis of the dance.
Syncopation, shift, the mood changes, the dancer’s movements liquefy, morph, and mutate. Partner’s change names, bodies, possibilities expand and contract in time to the rhythm and the labored breathing.
This is the party’s sound track, the emotional nexus of all that follows.
Darkened hallways flank the living room, leading to bathrooms and to stairways. The stairways lead to the basement and to the bedroom floor, like any good middle class house in middle America.
There’s a video playing on the wide screen television in the basement. Inappropriate quotes filter through the music to the upstairs bedrooms. Movies and audience are constantly rotating—children watch Disney, Teenagers watch American Pie,weepy matrons watch The English Patient, gracious elders watch Hepburn and Tracy, and crowds of thirty-somethings go absolutely bananas over old John Cusack movies. There is always popcorn, there is always soda, and there is always the faithful in front, wide eyes illuminated by the glow from the magic box along the wall.
No corner of the house is untouched by motion. In the back yard, those too old for the commotion gather to comment on it, and to look indulgently at the young people engaged in the intensity of those at play. Children too young to dance lay stomach down on the bathroom tiles, playing with smuggled toys. Babies whimper in the big upstairs bedroom suckled by indulgent mamas who are there just to hear the music and absorb the pleasant cacophony of voices, film, and company. Anxious fathers touch downy cheeks, smile besottedly at their mates. In the smaller bedrooms, lovers grapple, clothed, naked, legitimate, forbidden, and always aroused beyond bearing, ready to come with each muffled moan and throbbing grunt.
There is an observer.
She sits quietly outside the house, cross legged and contemplative, a full fledged computer in front of her with a surge protector leading to an extension cord at the side of the house. In the palm of her hand she has a highly polymerized stainless steel orb with invisible Velcro on it’s slick, shiny surface. It ‘sproings’ faintly in her palm, waiting for the cast.
AND SHE THROWS!!!
It caromes around the grounds picking up party mood—exhilaration intoxication anxiety… off the sidewalk, through the glimmering throngs crowding in the door and into
The kitchen. In inhales the hashish smoke, nibbles a brownie, bounces through the brains of a few students and mostly gets high of the conversation, post-modernism, feminism, Romantically Gothically Batman ideal… boing, bounce, into the
Dance room… Berlin plays sex! Jump to the 80’s music, grunge to the 90’s, Jeremy Spoke in Class Today, what did Jeremy say? Says Billy Idol. Did Bruce Springsteen have a White Wedding? Vanilla Ice is Coolio, who can hearDangerous Minds from the basement film fest is Sundance playing with Butch? Faithfully we Journey through the woodwinds with Bacch(analian, say the students--She Loves you Yeah Yeah Yeah…)
The Velcro on the ball is thick with accretion, and still it bounces, down the hallway, up the stairs, over the children… Matchbox cars? Cabbage Patch Dolls? Hey—who’s headless Barbie is this?
And through the room with the mamas… She barfed down my nightgown, didn’t you darling, and I was so worried, how many ultrasounds did you have with your first, my boobs are bigger than torpedoes, Christ how much can he eat? have you avoided Barney yet, no, and we’re afraid of the Teletubbies also, I’ll take more maternity leave next time I’m pregnant…
Which opens neatly to the rooms where lovers grope and pant. It rolls off their backs, picks up their sweat and their smells and their whispered obscenities, coating them with a layer of meaning from the mamas and kabwoing…
Through the back yard for some calm reflection over cheap beer and pretzels, yeah, before the smog laws that car’d go 120 easy, my father’s funeral was nice but I told my kids they’d better cremate me naked, you know I couldn’t dance even when I was twenty, I won’t start now… then SPLANG!!!
Down to the basement for a few play it again, Sam’s, Snakes, why did it have to be snakes, Oklahoma Oklahoma Oklahoma’s and the occasional Faster, must go faster…up through a bathroom then
SMASH
Through a mirror with the woman’s face reflected in startlement, outlined in rainbows of broken glass, then
CRASH Through a window and into her waiting palm.
She turns it around in her hand. The images are warped by the balls parabolic curve, and she enjoys that too. Her breath comes softly, and she feels what the ball has brought to her. (cold tile under soft tummies, beloved suckling on a swollen breast, sweet touch in tumbling gyration, the blood-dripping pain of shattered glass…) Listens to it (songs that move you, quotes that define you, whispers in the dark). Smells it (vodka, popcorn, oil, clean toilets, and sweat). Tastes it (brownies, beer, and breast milk, forbidden skin). Sees it… all of it. (napping babies, playing children, dancing youth, groping lovers, loving parents, elders in the throes of remembrance). All of it. All of it is hers, captured on the smooth and shiny invisible Velcro of the super-techno-magic-polymerized stainless steel ball.
She balances it on her forehead, between her eyes, looks at it crossways, and peels it’s layers with her brain. While the ball is still there, balancing, tottering, dangerously unstable, liable to go careening through the house at any moment, she puts her fingers lightly on the keyboard.
Smiles.
Types: Short Story, by Amy Lane.
There is a constant stream of figures, old and young, coming and going from cars, old and new. People and shadows and light become a two way current from the house.
Every room of the house is swinging, dancing, pulsing, glowing, exploding with activity.
There are students in the kitchen, discussing literature, crappy escapism, and childhood memories over marijuana brownies and espresso. They are animated, intellectual and verbose—every detail has it’s commentary, every moment is a metaphor. A scrap of their conversation is extraordinary, but stay too long in this room and the head will be agog with abstractions, and all the world turns fuzzy and distant. The students in the discussions come and go, and critical theory shifts and revises with the change of proponents.
There is a stereo blasting the living room and a constant rhythmic shift of bodies dancing. The light strobes, so the faces flash in phases of visceral primitive and extraordinary ecstasy. Young people in scanty lame and tattered jeans ascend to the muscular status of the angels; dancing is the aerobics of the divine. The music pulses through a select but eclectic soundtrack—Journey, Berlin, Def Leppard, Elvis, Beethoven the Beatles, Trane, the sound track from American Beauty—the list is exceedingly long, but everybody has an addition to make. Some of the music is arrhythmic, but nothing stops the celestial psychosis of the dance.
Syncopation, shift, the mood changes, the dancer’s movements liquefy, morph, and mutate. Partner’s change names, bodies, possibilities expand and contract in time to the rhythm and the labored breathing.
This is the party’s sound track, the emotional nexus of all that follows.
Darkened hallways flank the living room, leading to bathrooms and to stairways. The stairways lead to the basement and to the bedroom floor, like any good middle class house in middle America.
There’s a video playing on the wide screen television in the basement. Inappropriate quotes filter through the music to the upstairs bedrooms. Movies and audience are constantly rotating—children watch Disney, Teenagers watch American Pie,weepy matrons watch The English Patient, gracious elders watch Hepburn and Tracy, and crowds of thirty-somethings go absolutely bananas over old John Cusack movies. There is always popcorn, there is always soda, and there is always the faithful in front, wide eyes illuminated by the glow from the magic box along the wall.
No corner of the house is untouched by motion. In the back yard, those too old for the commotion gather to comment on it, and to look indulgently at the young people engaged in the intensity of those at play. Children too young to dance lay stomach down on the bathroom tiles, playing with smuggled toys. Babies whimper in the big upstairs bedroom suckled by indulgent mamas who are there just to hear the music and absorb the pleasant cacophony of voices, film, and company. Anxious fathers touch downy cheeks, smile besottedly at their mates. In the smaller bedrooms, lovers grapple, clothed, naked, legitimate, forbidden, and always aroused beyond bearing, ready to come with each muffled moan and throbbing grunt.
There is an observer.
She sits quietly outside the house, cross legged and contemplative, a full fledged computer in front of her with a surge protector leading to an extension cord at the side of the house. In the palm of her hand she has a highly polymerized stainless steel orb with invisible Velcro on it’s slick, shiny surface. It ‘sproings’ faintly in her palm, waiting for the cast.
AND SHE THROWS!!!
It caromes around the grounds picking up party mood—exhilaration intoxication anxiety… off the sidewalk, through the glimmering throngs crowding in the door and into
The kitchen. In inhales the hashish smoke, nibbles a brownie, bounces through the brains of a few students and mostly gets high of the conversation, post-modernism, feminism, Romantically Gothically Batman ideal… boing, bounce, into the
Dance room… Berlin plays sex! Jump to the 80’s music, grunge to the 90’s, Jeremy Spoke in Class Today, what did Jeremy say? Says Billy Idol. Did Bruce Springsteen have a White Wedding? Vanilla Ice is Coolio, who can hearDangerous Minds from the basement film fest is Sundance playing with Butch? Faithfully we Journey through the woodwinds with Bacch(analian, say the students--She Loves you Yeah Yeah Yeah…)
The Velcro on the ball is thick with accretion, and still it bounces, down the hallway, up the stairs, over the children… Matchbox cars? Cabbage Patch Dolls? Hey—who’s headless Barbie is this?
And through the room with the mamas… She barfed down my nightgown, didn’t you darling, and I was so worried, how many ultrasounds did you have with your first, my boobs are bigger than torpedoes, Christ how much can he eat? have you avoided Barney yet, no, and we’re afraid of the Teletubbies also, I’ll take more maternity leave next time I’m pregnant…
Which opens neatly to the rooms where lovers grope and pant. It rolls off their backs, picks up their sweat and their smells and their whispered obscenities, coating them with a layer of meaning from the mamas and kabwoing…
Through the back yard for some calm reflection over cheap beer and pretzels, yeah, before the smog laws that car’d go 120 easy, my father’s funeral was nice but I told my kids they’d better cremate me naked, you know I couldn’t dance even when I was twenty, I won’t start now… then SPLANG!!!
Down to the basement for a few play it again, Sam’s, Snakes, why did it have to be snakes, Oklahoma Oklahoma Oklahoma’s and the occasional Faster, must go faster…up through a bathroom then
SMASH
Through a mirror with the woman’s face reflected in startlement, outlined in rainbows of broken glass, then
CRASH Through a window and into her waiting palm.
She turns it around in her hand. The images are warped by the balls parabolic curve, and she enjoys that too. Her breath comes softly, and she feels what the ball has brought to her. (cold tile under soft tummies, beloved suckling on a swollen breast, sweet touch in tumbling gyration, the blood-dripping pain of shattered glass…) Listens to it (songs that move you, quotes that define you, whispers in the dark). Smells it (vodka, popcorn, oil, clean toilets, and sweat). Tastes it (brownies, beer, and breast milk, forbidden skin). Sees it… all of it. (napping babies, playing children, dancing youth, groping lovers, loving parents, elders in the throes of remembrance). All of it. All of it is hers, captured on the smooth and shiny invisible Velcro of the super-techno-magic-polymerized stainless steel ball.
She balances it on her forehead, between her eyes, looks at it crossways, and peels it’s layers with her brain. While the ball is still there, balancing, tottering, dangerously unstable, liable to go careening through the house at any moment, she puts her fingers lightly on the keyboard.
Smiles.
Types: Short Story, by Amy Lane.