Supplicant

 I want to make a pot of spaghetti but am pre-empted by a lack of spaghetti sauce.  I really don’t want to go anywhere, really not wanting to wade into the fluorescent lighting, the garish assaultive advertising and brave the lineups to get what I want.  I don’t want to get what I want, but I have to.  I get in the car clumsily and lumber out of the driveway, begrudging set on my mission. On the way past the Catholic Church down the street, I spy a young man, a teenage boy, kneeling on the sidewalk, thin and bent like a bough under a torrent. It's such a hot and humid day and he kneels there in a full pale yellow suit, maybe his Sunday best. Such a lost looking thing. In the rearview mirror, I can see he is not gardening, not stooping for a dime. Hands clasped, head bowed, he is praying. Poor lost thing.

At the Walmart, it’s a foray through the categories, a mathematical foraging through subdivisions of supply and demand.  I find the spaghetti sauce I want in the pasta department, there the rice and couscous is also kept.  The 1-8 item lineup is bovine and as fate would have it, the clerk can’t get the price of a turnip and needs to call for a price check.  There are full cart checkouts that are finished before I pay for my single can. On the way home, the boy is still kneeling in the same place and position, still supplicating under the sun. What could have driven him to kneel out there in the full sunlight on tiled stone?  Is there a point where we fall so far that we can only look up from our knees?

    I think of my mother in her last days. While sick with emphysema, she kept her crucifix under her pillow, out of sight but always close to her thoughts. When we are scared and have lost control, we turn to a great controller, I suppose. When we refuse to abandon hope, yet can’t find solution, we need to turn to magic.  Faced with the impossible, we turn to something we deem to be invincible.  Our faith is only as limitless as our imaginations.  Hope springs eternal.

    The poor boy. He kneels there on the hot concrete. Why hasn’t anyone taken him in? Why hasn’t a priest come out to give him some sanctuary, or at least an audience? It’s quite possible there are no priests there. Maybe the boy doesn’t want to go in. Maybe the recipient of his prayers is not someone inside.  He kneels there alone and unassisted. Why have the gods turned away?  Why do they hide?  Can’t they see this young man’s sincerity? Is he not ardent enough? Should he be quaking? Should he be whirling?  Should he be cutting a lamb’s throat? Should he be cutting out a virgin’s heart? Should he be hurling himself off the top of a mountain?  Should he be speaking in tongues?  Which tongue?  Aramaic? Latin? Yiddish? Sanskrit? There are so many questions in the mystery of God. Whenever there is no answer, that answer is always God.  And God, evidently, never answers...

In all the excitement of writing my novel, I've noticed that I have been woefully inadequate in acknowledging my first labour of love, my short fiction collection "Virtus", for which I am aggressively shopping for a publisher. Above is the proposed cover concept that I've designed, which will hopefully feature this great piece of photo art by T. Lee Kindy of Hard Candy Portraiture. I think it ties in to the concept of the Virtuous Man and all its implications which I explore in the collection. The flame of the candle might represent a halo while the mess of the wax could be the failings and shortcomings of a man's pursuit of virtue, dropping uncomfortably over his head, almost blocking his eyes; all the highs and lows of masculinity.

    And that's basically what the collection is about; the broad range of experience that comes with being male in this society, as a father, as a boy, as a husband, as a teenager dealing with an emerging sexuality, a bounder wrestling through maze of alcoholism or a middle-aged man pondering over the loss of a friend. In it, I try to touch on a variety of gender issues from every hue of the gender spectrum, using original storylines and, hopefully, with a fresh narrative voice each time.

    Most of the stories simply come from conversations I've had with friends both male and female that illustrate the disparity between the genders and the clumsy attempts to bridge those gaps, as well as incidents that had resonated with me, from which an entire storyline would unfold in my mind the moment it came to me. Some were first-drafted years ago while I was still married, and the perspective shows in their point of view, while others are more recent; written in the fortuitous opportunities of free time that the Covid-19 lockdowns have afforded me. I'm grateful for all the experiences that had brought these stories about. Some were negative at the time, but in the end they became ripe fruit to harvest.

    I spent most of last summer revising and editing the stories, with a ruthless edge for purging extraneous words and sentences while expanding on ideas that needed more room to breathe. In the end, I have a strong library of stories that I'm sure will stand up in the market and in readers' minds.

    After all this, I've now decided to focus more on getting this collection to publishers in the hopes that one will pick it up and I can use the momentum to carry on with works in progress. I've already reached out to agents that may help, and have sent out a couple query letters to publishers that I know would be a good match.  Either way, the end result will be publication because I believe in this anthology and am confident it will help advance my intentions to see this and other projects through.

    I have so many ideas in queue for publishing, Virtus, the novel in progress LefTturn, a novella called Back to the Holocene, a chapbook entitled Holophrasis inspired by John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and another short fiction collection I am going to call Second Saturn Return. I have enough work to last me the next ten years, no doubt. Now if someone would just pick up the god damned first one, I can get the ball rolling!

The work never ends! And I LOVE IT!

Thank you all for your support! Hopefully this will be the year I have concrete news to give you!

Beste;

Kees