As the Moon Climbs

For the ripe sun
that sears the cornflower
sky, for the gray cat
on the sidewalk, leg lifted,
pink tongue that washes
its white tufted thigh, for
each tiny petal clustered and hung
like grapes on the pale green
wisteria vine, for the musk
of motor oil burning outside
this walled garden, for the black
bird’s song in the mango tree,
for the shade of the porch,
the breeze, cool water,
ham sandwich with the crusts
carefully removed,
I am on hands and knees,
forehead pressed to bare earth,
I have done nothing, nothing
to deserve this day
or any other,
how many prayers must I say
to atone for this bounty,
bless me father for I have sinned
and sinned and sinned

* * * * *

For CombatWords 9/17/10

Josh wasn’t supposed to replace Jane, he was only supposed to cover her work while she was out of town. Some of the data entry was tedious, but he made a few upgrades to her spreadsheets so he could search and sort faster, and by Tuesday afternoon he had finished tasks that usually took her all week. Unfortunately for her, his boss noticed and started to poke around her computer. He found a bunch of personal pictures, which led to checking her Facebook page, and next thing Josh knew she was getting canned.

Some of the other folks at the office wanted to have a going away party, and it didn’t occur to him that he wouldn’t be invited. It wasn’t really his fault, after all. He showed up at the bar after work to see everyone else having a grand time, including… his girlfriend Petra, sitting in the stool next to Jane.

“Petra, what are you doing here?” Josh asked, just loud enough to be heard above the music.

“What are YOU doing here?” she asked back. Jane turned around and shot him a look that would have wilted flowers, and then frosted them over.

“I came to…” He wasn’t sure. Why had he thought this would be a good idea?

Jane smiled. “As you can see,” she said, slipping an arm around Petra’s waist, “you’ve been replaced. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

* * * * *

Written for Five Minute Fiction Challenge 8/31/10

Amanda and Eydis walked down the hall of the Aletheia Building on the way to their next class. They’d been roommates since freshman year and even though they had different majors, they tried to take at least one elective together every semester. They watched in amusement as new students scrambled to find their classrooms without looking lost. One boy in particular caught Amanda’s eye.

“Check out that fresh meat,” she said. “Rawr.”

Eydis followed her friend’s gaze and stifled a grin. “He’s a little buff for you, isn’t he?”

“Please. He’s got tall, dark and handsome on lockdown and you think I’m going to complain about his muscles?”

“You do usually prefer them thin and brooding…”

Ligossa popped up out of nowhere, as she often did, her wings brushing against Amanda’s arm. “I hear he’s a transfer,” she said. “Scholarship boy. From community college.” Her tone put that on the same level as someone with a horrible, disfiguring disease.

“Smart, too, eh?” Eydis patted her friend on the back. “Guess you’d better pick the wedding venue.”

Amanda rolled her eyes.  “What’s his name, Oss?”

“I think someone said it was Joe.” She ruffled her feathers and sneered. “Have fun slumming it, Mandy.”

“Don’t worry, I will.” She hated snobs who cared more about genealogy than ability. Squeezing Eydis’ arm, she sauntered off toward the boy and flashed him a smile that nearly made him stagger.

“Need help finding your class?” she asked, tucking a strand of curly auburn hair behind her ear. “I’m Amanda.”

“Kojo,” he said with a polite bow. “My friends call me Joe. I believe I have found the room, but I thank you for the kind offer.”

Amanda looked up at the number over the door. “Oh, you’re taking Basic Shapeshifting? So am I! What’s your major?”

She sensed his blush even though his coffee-black skin barely showed it. “Finance. I would have preferred to take something else but my parents are rather old-fashioned.”

“Don’t worry, it will be fun.” Batting her eyelashes, she leaned closer. “You’d be surprised how invigorating it can be to… fully experience different forms.”

Eydis arrived then and Amanda introduced her. “Eydis is majoring in hydrology with a minor in luck. She’s taking the class, too.”

As tall as Joe was, Eydis could almost look him right in his big brown eyes. She decided after a handful of seconds that she liked what she saw and held out an arm for him to grasp.

“Come on, we don’t want to be late.” Amanda tucked her arm into Joe’s and steered him toward the door.

“And what are you majoring in?” Joe asked.

Joe smelled absolutely divine, like a mix of coffee, lemon and cayenne pepper. “I’m still undeclared,” she lied. For some reason, these young sweet things always tensed up when they found out she was studying to be a love goddess. And did she ever love to study.

Charles glared at Regan. “After all we’ve been through, I’m not giving up. Not when we were finally going to start our new life with each other.”

Regan furrowed her brow. “But it’s over. Julia won’t be there tomorrow to meet you. There’s nothing you can do.”

“You never wanted me to be with her!” Charles screamed, face red. “You couldn’t stand that I picked her over you!”

“I didn’t…” A tear slipped down Regan’s cheek. It was true. She’d always loved Charles. It killed her that he didn’t love her back. “That isn’t fair,” she said. “I helped you from the beginning. Every crazy plan, I followed. Everything you asked, I did. All so I could watch you end up with someone else!”

Their eyes met and Regan looked away. Charles’ anger bled out of him. He collapsed in a chair and they sat in silence.

“I can’t believe she’s dead,” he murmured. “Now we’ll never be together.”

Regan squared her jaw. “I don’t know about that.”

She made sure they were buried in the same cemetery. It’s what Charles would have wanted.

Brandon Sanderson recently wrote a piece with the lofty title “Postmodernism in Fantasy” that makes some interesting points. He claims (as far as I can tell, feel free to comment) that virtually all fantasy after Tolkien is in some sense postmodern. Or perhaps he means that all fantasy written after the fantasy that was written as a reaction to Tolkien is postmodern.

His main criterion for what makes a fantasy novel postmodern appears to be how much it subverts or breaks away from the body of work that is primarily imitative of Tolkien. He explains that previous attempts at postmodernism typically yielded unsatisfying results because they were only modifying particular tropes or modestly tweaking expectations; they were either still too similar to the source material to appeal to people seeking originality, or they resorted to twists that undermined the genre rather than expanding its scope. His example:

“Well, it starts out like every other ‘farmboy saves the world’ fantasy novel. You know, the plucky sidekick rogue, the gang of unlikely woodsmen who go on a quest to find the magic sword. But it’s not going to end like that. I’m going to twist it about, make it my own! At the three-quarter mark, the book becomes something else entirely, and I’ll play off all those expectations! The reader will realize it’s not just another Tolkienesque fantasy. It’s something new and original.”

This book idea, he claims, fails because it will alienate readers who enjoy the beginning and therefore feel betrayed by the twist at the end, as well as readers who are immediately bored by the beginning’s lack of originality. He says it’s a fine line between subverting established tropes in an entertaining way, while conforming to those very tropes because readers expect and desire them.

The success of the books was in hitting the right balance for the right people; those like myself who love the old epics, and like some resonance with them—but who also want something new in their storytelling. That careful blend of the familiar and the strange, mixed up and served to people who have tastes like my own.

But, as Jeff VanderMeer points out, postmodernism is not reducible to some cosmic scales with convention on one side and originality on the other. Even the definition of postmodernism on Wikipedia states, “Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance…” It has many elements but not necessarily all at once, and even those elements are up for debate. I like the way he sums up his argument:

Perhaps the most important point in all of this (and this now has nothing to do with anything Sanderson said in his post) is that writers don’t choose the way they view the world–that’s inherent in their psyche. When you view the world a certain way, you may gravitate toward certain approaches and techniques–with digressions because no one is all one thing–but it’s not a cynical matter of deciding to be experimental or deciding to be postmodern rather than a modernist, for example.

My humble opinions: It’s one thing to know your genre–modern marketing requires it of any writer. It’s also wise to know what has come before in order to avoid excessive repetition and inadvertently retread well-worn ground. But as far as classifying your work beyond that? Leave it to the literary critics. If you’re choosing your themes and techniques to deliberately conform to some nebulous, decentralized, disorganized and ill-defined literary movement, I submit that perhaps your priorities are skewed.