A Sticking Feeling

Sometimes I get stuck to things.

I know it’s weird, believe me. I don’t really expect people to even believe me, so I rarely talk about it. When I do tell people, they usually think I mean it in the way it’s meant on those chalky, pastel Valentine’s hearts that say “I’m stuck on you.” I mean it literally though. I really, truly, undeniably do get stuck to things.

Imagine your tongue stuck on a frozen ice tray. It’s kind of like that.

I can feel it whenever it starts to happen. Last week, when I walked out of my apartment I put on my backpack and I immediately felt my skin fuse to the material. I didn’t even have to try to pull it off, I could tell it was stuck. It took well over an hour of concentrated prying to finally get it loose. I’ve had that backpack for eleven years, and it has never done this before. I don’t know, maybe it’s a skin condition.

I can’t just get stuck to anything either. You couldn’t, say, just throw a book at my shoulder and expect it to stick there. I couldn’t just lean up against a parking meter and not be able to move. It’s always something big. Something special.

The problem is usually innocuous, but sometimes it can be so embarrassing. Like this morning. I went to a neighborhood fruit market to pick up some fresh produce. It was all the usual items, apples, pears, a papaya, bananas, an avocado. As I walked toward my street I admired a particularly perfect avocado in my hand. It was smooth and black, and soft enough to leave indentations where my fingers touched its skin. I imagined slicing it. The green and yellow of plant matter, the cool and buttery taste. I thought about it spread across some toast, with cream cheese, some sprouts, and salt and pepper. I opened the plastic bag strapped around my wrist and opened my hand to drop it into the bag, but it didn’t fall. The avocado clung to my palm as though it was glued there. I shook my hand several times and it stayed. I grabbed the avocado with my other hand and began to pull. Not hard enough to damage the beautiful fruit, mind you, but hard enough.

I was standing in the street, shaking my hand violently in a plastic bag, looking intensely frustrated when I looked up and saw Macel. She was watching me. We saw each others’ pupils. She smiled. “What’s wrong?” she asked me. But what could I say? She isn’t a stranger, I see her often on this path, but how do you tell someone that you sometimes stick to things?

“I’m just trying to get something off my hand,” I told her, pulling at the avocado with my hand still inside the bag.

“Can I help?” she asked innocently, walking toward me. There was no avoiding this. She was already looking in the bag.

“I...I...This avocado is stuck to my hand,” I said, and I chuckled a little to show her I wasn’t really angry.

She asked me why it was stuck. Of course. And I looked into her peaceful gaze and told her. I told her all about my problems. Everything from the people who laughed at me in school, to the horrible empty sensation I get when the thing is finally released from my skin.

She laughed softly, and said, “yeah. That happens to me sometimes too.” Her answer rang like church bells in my brain.

She took my hand and rested it in hers. She set another hand on the avocado, pulled it off of my hand, and sat it gently in my plastic bag. “See,” she said, “that wasn’t that hard.” She smiled, and let go of my hand, but my hand didn’t drop back. Our hands were fused together, as fast as Siamese twins.

We’re still stuck together, our hands. We’ve been talking about it all day. And while it isn’t clear to her who is stuck to whom, it is clear to me.

I admit it. I have a sticking problem.

The Intrepid Abel Vanderland

Abel Vanderland is sailing the seas. He leans on his knee on the bow of the ship, shading his eyes with his hand, searching the blue vastness before him. His brow furrows as wind blows his chestnut locks back across his shoulders. A gust catches his neckerchief and it pops like a whip in the wind. He knows his crew is watching him, he can see them out of the corner of his eye.

Abel Vanderland admires his arms. They are well tanned. His veins cast shadows on his taught forearms. His muscles are thick and well defined. He looks at the arms of the other men. They are puny compared to his. He imagines what his arms would look like if they were connected to their torsos. Their knees would buckle and strain from the sheer weight of his arms. They wouldn’t even be able to lift them off the ground.

As a child he often broke eggs between his thumb and forefinger, the long way. The other boys were all held in amazement, and were jealous of his strength. Abel Vanderland broke so many eggs that by the time he was fifteen years of age his thumb and forefinger were the size of a knockwurst and a bratwurst respectively. He can now crush an empty wine bottle in his vice grip (which he does frequently as a spectacle before his incredulous crew).

But now Abel Vanderland is thinking. He is thinking about what he should name the new island. It doesn’t seem like it should be this hard. It is after all the twohundredandeightysomethingth island he has documented. But this one...this one is different.

Abel Vanderland was the first to note a faint hint of green in the distance. He was the first blue-eyed man to gaze upon that vegetated bough of sand that hung in the vastness of the great Pacific. And it was truly a fruited wonder to behold. Even as the island grew in the horizon, the green hump of that ancient volcano rising up, ever higher, like a green bottle floating upon the waves, Abel Vanderland could feel the intimating radiation pulling at the stern of the Overawe. Leading him, desperate, to its shores.

So before the bosun had hollered ‘ho,’ Abel Vanderland was prepared for what this island held enveloped behind its jade veil of foliage. He would force this island to submit itself, in the name of the Queen.

Thompson’s Island perhaps?, thinks Abel Vanderland. Thompson was a good man, and a good first officer. They had been through so much together, he and Thompson. Through the jungle muck of New Westmark, to the parched sands of Northern Island. Once, in Indonesia Thompson put down a rampaging Javan rhino, just after it had punctured the helmsman through the sternum. It was a comical sight to see the helmsman’s shocked face as he was thrashed about on the beast’s beak, a horn protruding just below his jacket pocket, and Abel Vanderland laughed aloud. But Thompson brought sobriety to the moment. Using his first shot on the helmsman, he put him down civilly, then he cocked and fired another salvo directly into the beast’s brain, dropping it where it stood.

Later the entire crew agreed it was quite a clever shot. And a gentlemanly maneuver too, to maintain the helmsman’s dignity, and end his shameful display in such a fashion. Even Abel Vanderland himself was impressed.

But Thompson had some weaknesses. For one, he let himself be impaled by the head of a native’s poisoned spear tip on this new island. He was therefore the first man to die on the island, and Abel Vanderland was ashamed. Most disgraceful were Thompson’s pleading eyes, which stared up from the blood blackened sand. “I grant your reprisal will be stern my captain,” Thompson had whispered.

Abel Vanderland looked down at the helpless cadaver that was slowly leaking Thompson’s soul. The cadaver began to spasm feebly. “Your failings will be noted in my log,” Abel Vanderland responded. “And yes of course there will be stern reprisals for these simple brutes. They have put a spear through my first man. That means hours of paperwork for me, and a new first mate, which I will have to nominate and train. This all takes hours of time, you see Thompson, hours of time I don‘t have.”

Thompson did not hear this because he was dead.

No, this will never be Thompson’s Island. Besides, he already has a bay named after him. But what to name it? This name must be perfect. This one gravid word must include in it all the glory and honor that suits the Overawe. This single, portentous utterance should subdue the tongues of weaklings, and force them to quiver in fear and awe. This word must be great and greatness together. But what shall it be?



Many men died suppressing the savages on that lonely sand. Thompson’s death inspired an all out war, and the crew was turned to a small inland village. The grass homes were perfect tinder. The simple savages hadn’t even the knowledge to build their homes from the sturdy palm, or channel running water through the encampment for drinking and fire control. The grass huts burnt, and the villagers dropped to the ground in front of the crew’s smoking rifles, with meaty thuds, scarcely putting up a fight.

The crew was quite jovial about dispatching them and made a sort of drinking game of it. Whenever, upon being shot, one of the brutes dropped dead, that was one drink; whenever the brute was wounded without being killed completely, that was two drinks; and if the shot was a miss entirely the crewmate had to skull the bottle and smash it across his teeth.

After less than an hour the village was emptied of its primitive inhabitants, and all the crew was thoroughly intoxicated and relaxed in the razed village, until it was discovered that the devious warriors, the island-men of the tribe returned to the encampment after hearing the gunfire. The warriors, discovering the tottering and guffawing crew of the Overawe hovering above the charred remains of their homes and the carcasses of their families, grew distressed and shot through the necks three men of the Overawe before any had yet drawn their firearms. Only Abel Vanderland reacted. With a shot from his pistol and a hunting dagger thrown, two warriors died. The others scattered, whooping and gibbering, into the bush.

The contemptuous brutes were stealthy and deliberate. They hid in the bush, firing their poisoned arrows at random. But they stood no chance against the well trained and well armed crew. After nearly a full day of fighting the few brown-skinned warriors who remained alive were either captured, or retreated far away, to the slopes of the ancient volcano, the home of their pagan gods.

In all, seven of the crew lay buried in the sand. But the island is claimed. The island’s virginal ground is penetrated by the rigid flag pole, which bares a proudly waving flag. New land for the Empire. The two captured natives sit, broken in the belly of the ship. They will make exemplary specimens for Her Majesty’s collection. And with this island aft, only one thing remains. The name.

Abel Vanderland thinks of the radiant face of his queen. When the tall sails of the Overawe peak above the horizon, and the first sea wife waves her kerchief, there will be parades assembled. They will be waiting for Abel Vanderland, lined up behind the port plank, with the finest wines, and a carriage with a crested driver perched above white horses. The women will sigh as Abel Vanderland steps down the plank. He imagines their sighs giving way to moans.

“It’s so simple!” shouts Abel Vanderland suddenly, and he exclaims aloud, “Queensland! I shall name it Queensland, in the name of her Majesty the Queen!”

His crew watches his exclamation, but can not hear him through the wind and the sea. It appears he is shouting madness at the silvery blue expanse before them. Some of the men imagine he is cursing the natives for what they did to Thompson, some of the men try not to think of anything, lest they disrespect their captain, even in their thoughts.

Abel Vanderland turns from the bow and walks purposefully toward his cabin to write in his journal. The island is a tiny dot on the horizon behind the ship now, an emerald on a sapphire sea. Abel Vanderland is returning home.

Global Worming (or Bell Minor Associated Dieback)

“Tink, Tink” go the birds in the trees. “Tink, Tink.” It is as if the trees were filled with people clinking spoons against wine glasses. There are no other bird noises in the bush, save the occasional startling crack of the whipbird.

These birds, the bell minors, are farmers. They wake up with the sunrise every morning to begin their toil amongst the treetops, where their crops thrive. They call to one another constantly throughout the day, tinking in the language of tiny iridescent green birds.

This eucalypt grove they occupy serves as their farm. It is filled with delicious psyllids, tiny insects that grow plentiful in the eucalypti’s aromatic resin. They are the bellbird‘s chief source of food. You can see them there at all times, sitting, comfortably full, all along the eucalypt grove, tinking.

Other birds entering the grove will be bombarded, and forced out. In this way the psyllids are raised, protected, and harvested. And as the crop becomes more plentiful, and the birds grow healthier and better able to protect their land, the eucalypt grove quickly dies. Diseased by a pestilence, raised by an intelligent bird.

And as you enter the grove, and the all encompassing noise of their tinking pervades you, you look up at them, resting aloft on their eucalypts. Their green feathers are set apart from the green of the canopy only by their shimmering reflection of the sunlight that illuminates them. And you watch as the sunlight filters downward through the canopy, downward from a pale sky, which grows ever more deathly pale as it slowly fills with carbon.

This is what changes

Isn’t it funny how one thing can have a completely obvious meaning, but if you change where that one thing happens, its meaning completely changes? Like for example, if a little girl is sleeping in bed, that’s kind of cute. But when that bed is in a hospital, it becomes depressing. Or, if an old man is laughing with his old wife in a restaurant, and you watch them from across the room, it makes you feel good about life. Like, you know you’ll be old someday, but maybe you’ll have a friend like that, and it won’t be so bad to be old. But if that same old man is laughing with his old wife in the alley outside a bar, and he’s alone, you try not to look him in the eyes, and you doubletime it past.

Or, just for instance, if your girlfriend is masturbating alone in her room, that’s pretty sexy. But if she’s doing it in her room while another man is sitting there watching her, it makes you so angry and sad that your soul breaks into a hundred thousand shards of glass that stick into the inside of your rib cage. And when your friend tells you that it happened, you want to hit him in the face because you don’t believe him, and you wonder why the fuck he would ever lie about that. But when he insists that it’s true, because he knows it for an absolute fact, and he thinks you should know what kind of girl you’re in love with, you can’t make any kind of expression on your face. You can’t make any expression, not surprise, or hurt, or even a nonchalant laugh, because if you made any expression at all, you would either start sobbing, or you would go into an unstoppable rage. So the only thing you can do is leave, and drive back to your house, and walk inside, and start punching the furniture. Of course, you aren’t punching the coffee table to break it, you’re punching it to break your fist. And just as you’re about to put your hand through the glass, you realize that ripping a foot long gash that runs from the knuckle of your middle finger, to half-way down your forearm is probably going to hurt, but it could never hurt as horribly or in quite the same way as the tiny shards of glass that are working their way through your guts and into your heart.

But sometimes, just because you change where something happens, it could never change what that thing means to you. Because whether the person you love fucks someone else in Boston, or Australia, or in the eighteenth century, or a hundred years from now, you would still be laying on this paper covered mattress of the emergency room, your blood stained clothes in a biohazard bag in the corner, and a heart full of glass, which no number of stitches will ever sew shut.