dispatches from the ledge

Dispatches from the Ledge

Six Sixes by Joseph Grant

sixsentences.blogspot.com 2


CONTENTS

Cutting Remarks …… 5

I’m Not Ernest Hemingway …… 7

On Writing …… 9

Out of Africa, Into the Mall …… 10

The Portrait Artist …… 12

Winter …… 14

About the Author …… 16


Cutting Remarks The first time Danielle cut herself was to keep a binding oath to the secret she was about to be told by her best friend Ashley and Ashley’s cousins one Fourth of July. With a Boy Scout knife taken by Ashley from her brother’s bureau while he was downstairs with everyone else at the party, the girls stole away to the secretive damp, dark cold of the garage and in their solemn ceremony, told their innermost secrets and quickly pricked each other’s fingertip and while the other girls squealed at the pain and sight of blood, Danielle was amazed at what a release it seemed to be. While the other girls revealed adolescent crushes on Timmy or Brad or actually kissing a boy, Danielle brazenly revealed that she, at the tender age of 13, was not only no longer a virgin, but the one who had taken it from her was a family member, but approaching footsteps precluded her from revealing any further information and their cabal


scattered. Far too much for immature minds to handle, Ashley broke their oath of blood when the boy she had kissed began paying more attention to Danielle and spread the secret around that her soon-to-be-ex-best friend was a slut and would give it up to anyone, even her own Dad, she said, just to be extra mean. As other girls shunned her and wrote nasty things on her locker and in the Girl’s Room, even worse things were being scribbled on the wall in the Boy’s Lavatory; Danielle recalled how good it felt to cut herself that very first time and thus began a lifetime of self-mutilation and confusing sex too easily with love that would leave at morning’s first light. With scars on her arms and legs that told a lifetime of hurt, none ever told more of a story than the first tiny scar on her index finger nor the true reason she was no longer a virgin; Ashley’s own father.


I’m Not Ernest Hemingway It can’t be happening, he thought, but it surely was. The Key West bartender asked him what he did for a living and he told the guy that he wrote, but somehow the guy misconstrued it or had not exactly been Harvard-educated for he snapped You must be that guy…..Hemingway! Initially, he thought the guy was being a prick or just joking but the more people came in, the more the bartender told them Hemingway was at the bar and when they believed him, it all began to get too surreal. Uneasy with drinks being bought, autographs requested, which he signed I’m not Ernest Hemingway and patrons asking how come he wasn’t home today when they took the tour of his house at 907 Whitehead Street, it became too much for him. As he left, he heard the bartender ask Hey Hemingway, where’re you goin’; he answered he was late for a shotgun lobotomy. What the hell, he wondered, didn’t anyone read anymore?


On Writing On early mornings to late afternoons, he would chase away the sun by writing at his favorite café or coffeehouse (depending on what one preferred) and observe the world come in or walk by. Secrets of the world could be dropped upon the doorstep, along with those of politics, religion and commerce if one chose to listen to the conversations instead of write. Knowing full well it was rude to eavesdrop (even though there were hardly any eaves in the café), he instead concentrated on the conversations from within. It was when he could listen carefully that the stories would go well and practically write themselves. If he chose to listen to other conversations around him, the stories would not come and he would be in danger of a day wasted. The strangest part was when everyone had gone back to work and he was alone in the shadowy corner against the brick wall of the café that he could write best about the world outside.


Out of Africa, Into the Mall Killed during a safari would make a hell of a better obituary than being bludgeoned to death by a drunken white guy in a faux African-themed restaurant with a head swollen more from alcoholism than encephalitis. A restaurant replete with ersatz leopard print bar seats in front of a foam-rubber pachyderm that would announce the time by loudly trumpeting from its phallus-like trunk rising and falling every half-hour or the antique-looking, but brand new travel posters bought not on spec at some dusty rural outpost of a marketplace but online in a dry corporate boardroom. The trouble is that no one travels any more and this sense of exotically getting away at the local air-conditioned mall in Savannah, rather than being a real live savannah is as much effort people put into travel any longer. The world would be a hell of a lot better of a place if everyone left their living rooms and traveled and met


other people, rather than just watch their travel channels and root for annual CNN wars as if they were viewing the latest action movie. Death comes in many ways, in many faces but not here, amigo, Hemingway would never have been caught dead in a place like this, I think, as the guy at the bar keeps swinging at me but he’s too drunk to connect and finally knocks himself out and falls to the floor. All this because I said his football team sucked.


The Portrait Artist Although he had left the war, the war had not left him and as he painted the landscapes that kept him preoccupied to the point of sanity, the war would always find him, no matter how well or indifferently he chose to hide within his art. The backdrops and subject matter in his paintings always bore a haunted quality; the ghostly and shadowy bone china faces could not mask the nightmares that had visited him in the landscapes of Afghanistan and Iraq. Painting had always been an escape, a place where he could leave the real world behind and zone out and meditate within the framework of his inner peace. Now his inner peace was being compromised within the hues of his own private Edvard Munch self-portrait. His agent, aware that insanity was potentially good for an artist’s bottom line, played up this angle to such an elaborate extent, his client’s work was virtually unsalable and his reputation ruined. Upon


learning this ploy, he killed his worthless agent in a fit of rage and later on, luridly detailed at the murder trial how he used his agent’s blood within his canvases that his work became highly collectible among the more macabre and gothic musicians and he stayed out of prison by ironically, pleading guilt by insanity.


Winter Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly. But no one has told the bumble bee this, so it keeps on flying. The same was true with Justin Howard, who, having endured another year without love, drunkenly drove his car into a tree and when that failed to bring about the desired effect, slashed his wrists with the shards of a bottle he emptied and smashed against that tree and decided if bleeding out would not kill him, then the fall from the train tressel ahead just might be the literal ticket out. Winter had the worst way of bringing out the blues in him, but for some reason, this year had been far worse than any other. In much the same way the bumblebee is clueless, the fall from the bridge only served to sober him up as did the shock of the frigid water seemed to be electrified as it engulfed his flailing body and clotted his slit wrists until there was barely a trickle as he shivered on the icy riverbank. Dejectedly, he trudged


home in the snow, suicidal inclination dissipating in much the same way the warm vapor of his breath fogged afore him and then vanished, but the loneliness would always be there.


About the Author

Joseph Grant, a 6S All-Star, has been published in numerous literary reviews and e-zines, such as Byline, New Authors Journal, Howling Moon Press, Hack Writers, New Online Review, Indite Circle and Cerebral Catalyst.

dispatches from the ledge

Documents

ernest hemingway

time danielle

girls room

best friend ashley

boys lavatory danielle

oath of blood

virgin ashleys

exbest friend