If All Else Fails by Craig Strete

before the usher can speak and the old man who eats light bulbs meets a little boy named
Peter Renoir in a park. The boy is running to his violin lesson. He is late and his eyes are
blinded by the bright sunlight. The little boy has just been ushered out of a darkened theater by
a dark usher. The little boy is mired in the quicksands of il­lusion and reality.
    The old man is kind
enough to scare the hell out of him. The old man instills in the young boy the awesome fear that
life is not Norma Jean being taken erotically on the carpet between the thirty-fourth and
thirty-fifth rows of seats in a darkened movie theater but is instead an old man in a park who
breaks light bulbs between his teeth and does not laugh as he chews the broken glass and swallows it. This explana­tion of life was
the old man's specialty too.
    The flashback ends
and Semina is making Peter Renoir a drink. The logs in the fireplace burn merrily. Outside, the
snow piles in drifts around their apartment. It is an idyllic setting with soft music moving into
the room from the stereo.
    Semina hands Peter
his drink. Moisture condenses on the outside of the glass and leaves a ring on Peter Renoir's
face. Semina picks up the drink, dabbing at the moisture on the magazine page. She smooths out
the picture and holds it closer to the fire. Peter Renoir's face swells and wrinkles as the water
dries. Semina downs the drink with a satisfied sigh and closes the magazine with an abrupt snap.
She pitches it and the centerfold of Peter Renoir into the fireplace where it begins to
burn.
    Semina saw the
place on your body where they made the fold. She saw the place on your body where they put the
staples.
    She
laughed.
     

A Place To Die On The Photograph Of Your Soul
    I'm going to die
with my feet in the trees. Eating barbed-wire sandwiches. I'm going to live so that all the
people who never had the time to get to know me are unaware that I got to know them. I used to be
sure that I could buy a stairway to the stars and that there were words I could say that opened
all the doors, like something magical you read out of a forgotten book in the dark of night. But
books don't bleed and thoughts are often only misgivings.
    Take Cassie. Rotten
as a playtoy bird. Woman with no eyes and all handed. Makes me wonder if feelings I get are mine
altogether or just boats that float through my mental trees. Am I me or something launched by
somebody else? I wonder; new days seem old—this morning strangely seems like one I had had
before. Am I new and old or young and aging?
    Take Cassie. Litany
of smothered light, makes me won­der. In women, I have lived, been kicked out squealing.
Terrified, I want to fulfill some sort of destiny, be buried someplace else besides in me. Maybe
in you. Maybe in the soil of some other Earth.
    Have you seen
Earth? I mean, really. The funny, sad little molehill towns with names like New York and
Pittsburgh. Rabbit hutches or guppy breeding tanks. Something deranged and artificial, every minute of it. Not anybody's idea of
a vacation. Certainly not mine.
    Take Cassie, we
call her a drug, demeaning her. We call her mother night, apple angry. We pinch her dark trees
and climb her fences. Tie her to the side of dawn; aging, we flame out our hearts, crashing above
the mountain ranges of breasts. Are my feet armored? Have we rested for nothing, aspired to
less?
    I aspire to cut,
what? Perhaps simply to cut. To hack, to spew out mediocrities. Let me die; let no women come my
way. Daylight and dark women. Burn them all. Dark women. What insane thoughts in them? What kind
of ani­mals are they?
    Do they nest? How
often and how sharp the teeth? I have heard many men's questions and all the good answers have
been given long ago. But call it compulsion, call it what you will, no barriers exist until we
trip over them. Some people live so furiously, the barriers run from them. Am I a barrier? I know
I run a lot. But no